When the jury voted to acquit Daniel Penny yesterday morning, we can be pretty sure that their verdict came as a pretty big shock to Alvin Bragg, Dafna Yoran, and the rest of the Manhattan DA’s office. That’s because on Friday — just a few days ago — the jury announced that it couldn’t come to a unanimous verdict on Count 1, which is manslaughter. That meant that at least one juror was committed to voting “guilty” on the most serious charge. Nothing could change that juror’s mind, supposedly. Logically speaking, that meant there was no conceivable way that the jury would ever vote unanimously to acquit Daniel Penny on Count 2, which was criminally negligent homicide. After all, Count 2 was a “lesser-included” charge. It’s not possible that Penny could have committed manslaughter, without also being criminally negligent as well. So if at least one juror was sure that Penny committed manslaughter, then of course, that juror would also be sure that Penny was criminally negligent. That’s the logic that prosecutors were using on Friday, when they petitioned the judge to dismiss Count 1, and send the jury back to consider Count 2 by itself. It was unconstitutional and unethical, and they did it because they didn’t think it was possible that an acquittal would result. They didn’t imagine that their scheme would backfire spectacularly, because a juror (or multiple jurors) would change their mind from “guilty” to “not guilty.” But that’s what happened on Monday. We don’t know why that happened. It could be that the juror who was in favor of convicting Penny realized, after the stunt that prosecutors pulled on Friday, that Penny was being railroaded. Or maybe the juror was bored and wanted to go home. The end result was that a jury of 12 people — mostly consisting of women, in one of the most Left-wing cities in the entire country — just voted to acquit Daniel Penny. They totally and unequivocally rejected the lie that BLM and the media had been pushing for more than a year. For their part, BLM doesn’t appear to be deterred by this development. Here for example is Chivona Newsome, the co-founder of “Black Lives Matter of Greater New York.” She went off on a predictable anti-white tirade after the verdict. Watch: There’s one line that really stands out amid that sea of overt race hatred, which was this one: “There is no one coming to save black people.” And that part is obviously true. There is no one “coming to save” black people. There’s also no one coming to save anyone, because people are responsible for themselves. That’s how life works. Black people need to save themselves and take care of themselves and their own communities. Same for people of all other races. That’s what it means to be an adult in a free country. Although, in this case, Jordan Neely was given taxpayer-funded housing and healthcare at a treatment facility in the Bronx after he admitted to punching a 67-year-old woman. Prosecutors set him up there, instead of throwing him in prison. He abandoned the facility in less than two weeks, and shortly afterwards, began harassing people on Daniel Penny’s train. So in this particular instance, people did try to “save” a black person. And he thanked the community for its efforts by threatening to kill them all. But as we all know, preaching the virtues of personal responsibility isn’t the best way to secure handouts in the grievance industry. So instead of doing that, Chivona Newsome decides to attack the jury. She basically says they’re all white supremacists. But the racial argument doesn’t even come close to making sense here, because the jury wasn’t all-white, as she admits. There was a black person, an Asian person, and a Middle Eastern person on the jury. There was also a guy wearing a COVID mask the entire time, and somehow, the prosecutors couldn’t even convince him to convict Daniel Penny. So if white supremacy is to blame here, it’s a very strange, multi-racial kind of white supremacy. WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show For his part, washed up, former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan did his best to contribute to that same narrative. He wrote: Imagine, just imagine, if Jordan Neely had been white and Daniel Penny was black. Imagine what some of the folks defending Penny today would be saying. Just imagine. Well, it turns out we don’t have to “imagine” this scenario. As an editor for Reduxx pointed out, last year — just a day before Daniel Penny was indicted — a black man named Jordan Williams stabbed a violent homeless man to death on a Brooklyn train. The homeless man punched William’s girlfriend and threatened other passengers before Williams eliminated the threat. It’s a very similar situation to the Daniel Penny case. But there was no need for anyone on the Right to rally behind Jordan Williams, because he was never indicted. The DA didn’t pursue political charges in a transparent attempt to ruin his life. They reserve that kind of treatment for white defendants like Daniel Penny. Of course, Mehdi Hasan doesn’t care about any of this. Neither does Jordan Williams. He recently called for the jury to convict Daniel Penny of manslaughter. He also claimed that Penny had attacked, “random people for no reason.” Just to reiterate: a guy who did the exact same thing as Daniel Penny publicly called for Daniel Penny to be prosecuted and convicted. And he said that, obviously, because Penny is white. These people are just blindly repeating the narrative to agitate as many people as possible, because historically, that’s all they’ve had to do. That has been BLM’s strategy for the past decade or so. They’d recite some form of lazy, anti-white race hatred based on lies, and then the mobs would start rioting. But this time around, that’s not happening. There have been no riots in New York over this verdict, and it doesn’t look like there will be any. There were some protests last night, but they were, by historical standards, very small and subdued. One might even say “low energy.” You get the sense that yesterday morning, BLM activists knew they weren’t going to get a particularly fiery response from the mob. So Hawk Newsome — the brother of Chivona Newsome and the other co-founder of Black Lives Matter Greater New York — had to come out and explicitly call for “vigilantes” to rise up. This is a bit like watching a movie and the director’s worried that you won’t get the subtext, so they just come right out and tell you what they’re trying to get you to do. And it’s just as embarrassing here. Watch: As uninspiring and desperate as all of this is, it’s important to keep in mind that this ordeal isn’t over for Daniel Penny. He’s been acquitted of criminal charges, but Jordan Neely’s family is still suing him for negligence. They’re doing everything they can to bankrupt him.  To that end, yesterday, Neely’s father appeared in public in an attempt to garner some sympathy for his case. Watch: Neely’s father implores the crowd to do something about this alleged injustice that his family has supposedly endured. That’s an interesting way of phrasing it. As Neely’s father, he could have done something about it by raising his son, rather than abandoning him for his whole childhood — only to surface when he stands to make millions of dollars. Somehow Neely’s father never gets around to explaining why he only cares about his son now that he’s dead. Even calling him Neely’s father at all is vastly overstating the case. He’s more like a glorified sperm donor. At this point, it’s not really necessary to go any further. The BLM activists have discredited themselves to such a degree that Manhattan juries don’t believe a word they say. Every side of the political spectrum understands that BLM is fundamentally an anti-human, anti-civilization and anti-white movement, and pretty much everyone is now roundly rejecting it. That’s why Daniel Penny was just acquitted. It’s why there are no riots. At the same time, just because the BLM era is ending, that doesn’t mean everyone’s on board with the rule of law, and a stable, properly ordered society. In fact, the opposite is true. The aftermath of the assassination of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, makes that very clear. When I talked about the killing last week, I explained why ghouls on the Left — like Taylor Lorenz and Columbia University professors — were celebrating Thompson’s murder, while mourning the death of Neely. In their worldview, Brian Thompson deserves to die because he’s white, rich, and powerful. But Jordan Neely, as a black career criminal, should be celebrated as a hero. This is an ideology that reveres the least productive members of society, while calling for the public executions of men who are actually earning a living and providing for their families. It’s an anti-white, anti-human ideology, and it must be rejected. In response to my monologue, many people wrote in with negative responses in the comments on YouTube. Apparently, someone at Newsweek noticed this, and they wrote a whole article about it. It was a slow “news week,” I guess. And there are some comical paragraphs in this Newsweek article, too — which is what you’d expect from an article that’s devoted to a YouTube comments section. For example, here’s one paragraph:  Commentators like Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh are being told by their supporters that they’ve got it wrong when it comes to Thompson’s murder. … At least three users expressed to Walsh that even though they agree with a lot of his opinions, he was ‘dead wrong on this one.’ Yes, “at least three users expressed to Walsh” that I was “dead wrong on this one.” At least three users. Not a maximum of three. A minimum of three. The actual number of people who disagreed with me could be even higher than that. Newsweek is still looking into the matter. But I’ll save them the trouble.  Indeed, there were slightly more than three comments that were critical. Here’s one of them, which Newsweek quoted. This is pretty representative of the overall response:  The fact that [M]att is trying to paint this as a left wing issue, when there’s clearly bipartisan celebrations going on, just goes to show how out of touch celebrities are, whether on the right or left, with regular everyday ordinary people. So the contention is that I’m wrong to rail against Leftists for celebrating the public execution of a CEO, because in fact, people all over the political spectrum are celebrating the execution. And supposedly “regular, ordinary” people on the Right disagree with me. Let me address this as directly as I can. As I said yesterday on X, if you are a conservative expressing any sympathy with leftists who are celebrating the murder of a businessman by some mentally deranged loser, then you are not a conservative at all. We stand for law, justice, and a stable, properly ordered society. Leftists want the opposite of all of that, which is why murder and mayhem in the street fills these sickos with orgasmic glee. If you’re on the right and you find yourself even slightly siding with a crazy wench like Taylor Lorenz on this issue (or any issue), it should tell you something very troubling about yourself. It tells the rest of us something too. Again, that’s not to say that UnitedHealthCare is blameless. It’s not to say that healthcare in this country can’t be improved. I made all of that clear on Friday. At the same time, the fact remains that UnitedHealthcare doesn’t have particularly large profit margins, and they exist in a competitive marketplace with many other big insurance companies — all of which compete to cover claims without green-lighting every single expense that doctors want to charge. It’s not the ideal process, but it has to occur under our current system, or else healthcare costs will go even higher, the insurance companies will go bankrupt, and then no one will be able to get coverage. This is our alternative to a far more dysfunctional state-run system like Canada’s, which now regularly murders its own patients to avoid having to pay for their care. So any problems with healthcare access and coverage in this country — and there are obviously problems — can’t be boiled down to this one company. It’s a larger issue that isn’t addressed by killing the CEO of this company, or of any other company. But the important point is that, even if shooting Brian Thompson in the back would make UnitedHealthcare somehow operate more efficiently and ethically, it would still be a great moral evil to kill him. If anything distinguishes the Right from the Left, it’s principles like this. We don’t settle policy debates like Bolsheviks. Once you start down this path, then very quickly, civilization collapses. That’s why the Left is so thrilled about Brian Thompson’s execution. It’s why Taylor Lorenz is now giving television interviews where she says she’s giddy after the murder of a father and husband. Watch: Again, if you see any common purpose with this person — if you sympathize with this obvious psychopath — then you have a problem. It doesn’t matter if you call yourself “Right” or “Left.” And by the way, if you’re on the Right and you find yourself nodding along with this psychopath while she expressed “joy” in first degree murder, please realize that Taylor Lorenz also feels the same way about you personally. She also thinks that it would be okay, even joyful, to murder you. That’s the person you’re finding common cause with. Someone who wants you dead.  This is a matter of basic principle. The most basic. We are conservatives. We want to conserve, at the most fundamental level, civilization itself. Violent crime in the streets degrades and destroys civilization, which is why we oppose it. One of the comments I received, for example, was about how I should, “read the room.” In other words, when the mob is bloodthirsty, I should join in — or at least not take issue with them. But it’s precisely when the mob is bloodthirsty that you need people to step up and say the truth. I don’t need to read the room to find out if I’m still opposed to first degree murder. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about the man suspected of killing Brian Thompson, 26-year-old Ivy league graduate Luigi Mangione. The alleged assassin was arrested yesterday at a McDonald’s, and within just a few hours, we had access to all of his social media profiles, his GoodReads profile, and speeches he gave in high school. Meanwhile, several people that Luigi interacted with recently — including his friends and various social media personalities — have come forward to describe their conversations with him. It’s worth pointing out that we never got anywhere near this level of information about Thomas Crooks, who somehow evaded the Secret Service and very nearly assassinated Donald Trump live on national television. Thomas Crooks may as well be a ghost. But Luigi Mangione is all over the place. MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+ From what we know, Luigi comes from a very wealthy family in Maryland. His late grandfather has a real-estate empire that includes prominent country clubs and hotels, and he went to a high school that costs north of $40,000 a year. Luigi also appears to be psychologically disturbed, not that anyone should be surprised by that. He apparently dropped off the face of the Earth a few months ago, ignoring friends who were publicly asking where he was.  In other words, there’s a very real possibility that Luigi Mangione — who had no clear direction in life — had access to more money than the CEO he gunned down in the street. He certainly came from a much wealthier family than Brian Thompson did. Thompson’s father was a grain elevator worker. He went to the University of Iowa and started his career as an accountant, before working his way up at UnitedHealthCare over the course of more than 20 years. And he was on his way to work at 6:40 a.m. when a mentally ill trust fund baby decided to murder him in the street. Apparently this trust-fund baby decided that murder was preferable to paying his bills. This is the Left’s new hero. This is the kind of violent scumbag they’re aligned with. They’re on the side of Jordan Neely and Luigi Mangione because they’re driven by a barely-concealed desire to destroy the foundation of this country, which is the rule of law. That’s the common thread here. Either the rule of law applies to everyone — of all financial backgrounds, of all professions, of all races — or it doesn’t exist at all. It’s now clear that the Left would prefer that we abandon the rule of law, in order to accelerate the end of the United States. But for our part, conservatives are not Bolsheviks. We are the only bulwark against these arsonists of civilization. We stand for what’s morally right, regardless of what the mob demands. And the morally correct position here, obviously, is that Brian Thompson’s murder was evil. It shouldn’t be celebrated in any way. You can either conserve basic moral principles like that, or you conserve nothing at all.

Cincinnati Bengals star QB Joe Burrow has become the latest athlete to have his home broken into while he was on a road trip with his team. The Hamilton County’s Sheriff’s Office confirmed to WLWT that Burrow’s $7.5 million Ohio home was burglarized and ransacked during Cincinnati’s 27-20 win over the Cowboys in Texas on Monday. The outlet reported that a 911 call came in from a woman whose daughter was staying at the QB’s home, saying, “Someone is trying to break into the house right now.” Joe Burrow’s Ohio Home Reportedly Burglarized During ‘Monday Night Football’ | Click to read more ? https://t.co/V550rvgEFN — TMZ (@TMZ) December 10, 2024 “My daughter is there. This is Joe Burrow’s house,” the mom added. “She is staying there. He’s at the football game. She’s wondering what she should do, if she should be hiding, or if she should go outside. She said someone was in the house.” A second 911 call came from the person staying at Burrow’s house, saying, “Someone broke into my house. It’s like completely messed up.” CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE The NFL recently issued a security alert to players and teams following two separate burglaries of the homes of Kansas City Chiefs players Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce. In a memo obtained by the Associated Press, the league said homes of professional athletes have become “increasingly targeted for burglaries by organized and skilled groups.” The memo labeled the transnational crime rings “well-organized, sophisticated,” and urged the players to safeguard valuables and avoid publicly sharing check-ins on social media or any information about their homes and any luxury items they might own, NBC News noted. Officials noted that the homes are specifically being targeted when players are at their games. Mahomes’ home was burglarized on Sunday, October 6, the day before the team’s victory on Monday Night Football against the New Orleans Saints, the outlet noted. On the day of the game, the home belonging to Kelce was broken into while the team was playing against the Saints. At the time, TMZ reported that $20,000 in cash was stolen and a back door was damaged. A South American crime ring is expected to be the culprit in at least the Chiefs burglaries, the New York Post reported. At the time of this report, Burrow or the Bengals have yet to comment on the burglary.

Despite the traumatic ordeal Daniel Penny has endured at the hands of Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the U.S. Marine veteran says he has no regrets about stepping in to help save others on the New York City subway. Penny was acquitted on Monday of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Jordan Neely, a troubled man with mental health issues and a lengthy rap sheet who allegedly threatened people on the F Train. “I’m not a confrontational person,” Penny told Fox News co-host Jeanine Pirro, a former district attorney. “This type of thing is very uncomfortable — all this attention and limelight is very uncomfortable, and I would prefer without it. I don’t want any type of attention or praise, and I still don’t.” However, Penny said he knew he had to step in to help protect others on the subway after Neely’s alleged threats. “The guilt I would have felt if someone did get hurt, if he [Neely] did do what he was threatening to do, I would never be able to live with myself,” the 26-year-old explained. “I’ll take a million court appearances and people calling me names and people hating me just to keep one of those people from getting hurt or killed.” Penny also told Pirro that there were politics involved in the case, alluding to DA Alvin Bragg. Notably, Bragg filed charges against Penny 10 days after the incident, seemingly in response to racial protests on the subway. Many viewed the indictment as a political move, and offered financial support and prayers for Penny. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE WATCH: JUST IN: Daniel Penny says he has zero regrets, says he couldn’t live with the guilt if someone was hurt on the subway by Jordan Neely. Penny is an even better person than I thought. The Marine said he would do a million court appearances if it meant saving someone on the… pic.twitter.com/swNcYWXGpN — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 10, 2024 Penny is not in the clear yet. Last week, Neely’s father, Andre Zachery, filed a civil lawsuit at the New York Supreme Court accusing Penny of assault, battery, and causing his son’s death through “negligence, carelessness and recklessness.” The suit does not specify any specific amount of money. Alternatively, Arizona Rep. Eli Crane (R) is planning to introduce a resolution to give Penny the Congressional Gold Medal for his actions on the subway protecting fellow riders. Related: Attorney Speaks Out, Patrons Celebrate Daniel Penny At NYC Bar After Acquittal

'Our amplification ecosystem is the mainstream media and Hollywood'

'The single largest transfer of money to criminal groups in our history'

'I'm really over this nonsense'

'Provided no documents'

President-elect Donald Trump made mass deportations a pillar of his winning campaign platform. Trump and Tom Homan—the former acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who Trump tapped to be his border czar—say they will prioritize the deportations of criminal illegal aliens.   Whether all of the estimated more than 10 million illegal aliens who entered the country under the Biden-Harris administration are deported or not is ultimately up to the incoming Trump administration, says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.   But when mass deportations begin, “the media will do everything they can to find a heartbreaking story,” Cruz told The Daily Signal after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill discussing mass deportations, adding, “there are a lot of tragic stories. One thing the media never covers are these tragedies that are produced by these open borders.”   A mother who is all too familiar with the tragedies of the open-border crisis shared her story before Cruz and the other senators on the Judiciary Committee during Tuesday’s hearing.   In the summer of 2023, Patty Morin received a phone call that her daughter’s body had been found. At the time, Morin only knew that her daughter Rachel, 37 and the mother of five, was dead, but she soon learned the details of Rachel’s death.   “I was told that she was beaten so badly that her body was blanketed in bruises, that she was strangled, that she was raped, and that she was stuffed into a drainpipe,” Morin told the senators.   My Daughter Was Raped, Strangled, and Stuffed Into a Drainpipe by an Illegal Alien—Mother Recounts Daughter’s Violent Death in Front of U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee pic.twitter.com/yF9DUpApRw— The Daily Signal (@DailySignal) December 10, 2024 After a lengthy investigation, authorities arrested Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, an illegal alien from El Salvador, on charges of rape and murder in the death of Rachel Morin.   “We need to close our borders. We need to protect American families. We need to protect our women and children, which are the most vulnerable in this country,” Patty Morin said.   “I think that you should put American citizens first,” Morin told the senators. “We are the ones that pay your paycheck. We are the ones that pay taxes.”   It is not Americans alone who have suffered because of the current administration’s border policies, according to Cruz.   “Incredible abuse of migrants” has taken place because of the border crisis, the Texas lawmaker said.   “Every day, illegal immigrants are killed,” he said. “They are raped. They are brutalized. When you go down to the southern border, and you look in the eyes of a little girl, a little boy who has been brutalized by human traffickers, it is haunting, and the media doesn’t tell that story.”   In August, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported that it doesn’t know the location or status of more than 300,000 migrant children. Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, some 32,000 illegal alien minors did not appear for their immigration court hearing, and an additional 291,000 were never given an immigration court date at all.  Nearly 5,000 unaccompanied migrant children were encountered at the southern border in December 2020, the last full month of Trump’s first term. By July 2021, Customs and Border Protection reported nearly 19,000 encounters with unaccompanied migrant children for the month.    According to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, 81% of unaccompanied alien children are between the ages of 13 and 18. The average age of a trafficking victim in the U.S. is between 12 and 15, according to Anti-Trafficking International.     The criminal cartels have exploited a loophole in U.S. law that has allowed unaccompanied alien children from any country except Mexico and Canada to be paroled into the country. A bill known as HR 2 would have closed this loophole. The House passed HR 2 in May 2023, but the Democrat-controlled Senate never took it up.   Even with Republicans set to take control of the Senate in January, Cruz, who authored the Senate version of HR 2, says, “Democrats are not going to pass HR 2. Every Democrat has voted against it, and every Democrat continues to support these open borders.”   “The good news,” according to Cruz, “is the vast majority of the damage that has been done the last four years in open borders was done through unilateral executive action, which means it can be undone through unilateral executive action.”   Cruz added that Congress is going to act and will take up “a budget reconciliation bill that is going to provide the funding to secure the border.”  Stopping the flow of illegal immigration begins by answering the questions, “What happens when someone’s apprehended?” Cruz said. “And if the answer is that they’re put on a plane and sent back to the country they came from, the numbers plummet, and if the answer is they’re released and allowed to stay in this country, the numbers skyrocket.”   Trump will be sworn into office on Jan. 20, and Cruz predicts that “we will see the numbers plummet in January and February of next year.”   The post When Deportations Start, Expect ‘Heartbreaking’ Stories From Corporate Media, Sen. Cruz Warns  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The voters have spoken—they are ready for change. Tired of government overspending, overregulation, and excessive economic intervention, the American people seek real economic reform. Consumers have grown weary of paying the price for overreaching government policies and now hope for meaningful, impactful change.  An immediate priority for the Trump administration should be appointing a new chair to the Federal Trade Commission. Under the current Biden administration and FTC Chair Lina Khan, the agency has continually overstepped its bounds, aggressively intervening in the economy beyond its legal jurisdiction. In response, the American people are now seeking to reassert free market principles and reduce government overreach.  While it’s true that Sen. JD Vance, President Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick, has expressed support for many of the actions taken by Khan, it’s worth taking a closer look at the commission’s record under her leadership to assess the costs versus the benefits of the agency’s actions.  Since assuming her role in 2021, Khan has spearheaded an ambitious agenda aimed at challenging mergers, launching wide-ranging investigations, and openly calling for a fundamental rewriting of the nation’s competition laws. Her mission has been fueled by a craven power grab, using the FTC as a personal battering ram to advance her own ideological crusade rather than objectively upholding the rule of law. Disregarding the principles of due process and the agency’s intended nonpartisan role, her actions have introduced legal and procedural ambiguity that risks damaging innovation and consumer wellbeing.  Evidence shows that the FTC under Khan hasn’t truly been effective in achieving tangible outcomes, with some high-profile cases and initiatives stalling or facing setbacks in the courts. This includes cases against Microsoft’s Activision acquisition, Meta’s purchase of Within, and Illumina’s acquisition of Grail, just to name a few.  The recent House Oversight Committee report on the FTC paints an even more concerning picture of Khan’s leadership. According to the report, Khan has “sidelined career FTC staff, collapsed their morale, triggered an exodus of critical employees, and destroyed career staff’s confidence in the honesty and integrity of Commission leadership.” This suggests that Khan has not only abused her power, but also undermined the credibility and integrity of the FTC itself. The damning findings from this report alone warrant removing Khan from her position as chairwoman.  The report also found that Khan has been undermining due process, the rule of law, and ethical standards in pursuit of her ideological agenda at the FTC. It states that Khan has orchestrated sweeping changes to the FTC’s rulemaking practices and policies, enabling the commission to overstep its legally recognized boundaries at the expense of consumers, regulated businesses, and the general public.  This excessive exercise of authority is evident in her rulemaking against so-called “junk fees.” While some minor add-on fees that accompany various consumer purchases may seem unfair on the surface, they can provide customers with more flexible pricing options tailored to their individual needs. Imposing a universal ban would be an overreaction, ignoring the legitimate business reasons for certain fees, such as covering administrative costs, offsetting risks, or offering optional services.  Ironically tens of billions of dollars of “junk fees” are yearly costs passed on to consumers from government mandates themselves, so a sweeping, blanket prohibition against these fees won’t help consumers but actually harm them further by reducing choice, increasing prices, and limiting access to valuable products and services. Regulators should take a more measured, industry-specific approach that balances consumer protection with the need for businesses to remain viable and innovative.  The airline industry showcases the benefits of back-end fees, such as baggage, seat selection, and change/cancellation fees, which give flyers more control over their travel experience by allowing them to pay only for the services they need. Instead of enforcing a rigid ticket pricing structure, these à la carte fees enable budget-conscious passengers to avoid unnecessary add-ons. While “junk fees” often face criticism, it’s important to recognize that in certain situations, they can enhance consumer choice and flexibility. This makes them a practical tool rather than an unjust burden on travelers.  The FTC has lost its way, prioritizing misguided initiatives that risk undermining the very economic competitiveness that has long fueled America’s prosperity. Rather than focusing on its traditional role of addressing demonstrable market abuses, the agency has instead sought to reshape the economy according to Khan’s own ideological preferences. This overreach into areas outside the FTC’s purview threatens to stifle the dynamic innovation and healthy competition essential to a thriving, free-market system. By pursuing novel legal theories and interventionist policies, the FTC risks disrupting the delicate balance that allows businesses to invest, grow, and deliver value to consumers. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post The Misguided Agenda of Biden’s Overreaching Federal Trade Commission Chair appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FEMA: Depends What Your Definition of 'Tent' Is