Christ wanted love to be called his single commandment. This we owe to all men. Nobody is excepted.
Bartolomé de las Casas, In Defense of the Indians (1548), p. 39, as translated by Stafford Poole (Northern Illinois University Press: 1992).
On July 31, 1703, Daniel Defoe — who would later become famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe and other literary works — was placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel. The sedition pertained to a satirical pamphlet he had published, “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church.” The mob pelted him with flowers.
On the same date in 1912, Milton Friedman was born. Friedman became one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, and one of the most effective advocates of free markets, as well. His books include Capitalism and Freedom and two famous collaborations, A Monetary History of the United States (with Anna Schwartz) and Free to Choose (with his wife, Rose Director Friedman).
“No, the government’s not taking your stove,” CNET said in January 2024.
What were we all worried about?
Tightening regulations, that’s what.
Absent a Trump administration, we would have witnessed a long series of ever-stricter regulations — always ratcheting up — to save us from the horrors of gas stoves.
Though we have been reprieved from many anti-energy Biden administration initiatives, a gas-stove ban may yet be coming to a state near you.
Do you live in New York State? Well, your anti-gas-stove politicians want to ban installation of new gas connections. You need a connection to the gas to get the gas into the stove.
It’s being litigated right now. An Empire State regulation forbidding new gas infrastructure will take effect next January unless a court challenge succeeds. Even though it’s all just a conspiracy theory. . . .
Judge Glenn Suddaby is giving plaintiffs, who argue that the impending regulation imposes arbitrary hardships, time to submit new arguments. Then, if he’s not persuaded, he’ll dismiss their challenge.
Unfortunately, the facts being promoted in New York State aren’t enough by themselves to motivate this judge to make a rational ruling.
No, government isn’t going to take your stove. But politicians and activists do seek to force you to give up your stove in the future. For want of fuel. Or because they’ve added sin taxes on the fuel or the stoves. Or both.
Or something else.
That’s how the progressive regulatory agenda works.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Do you guys know that saying, ‘Don’t go to the grocery store on an empty stomach’? Because you end up buying too much. That’s the same for us except it’s — it goes a little different, the saying — ‘Don’t go to the bulk food store if you’ve ever had a communist dictator.’” Because you buy too much.
Andrea Jin, stand-up comic, complaining about her grandparents’ apparent need for “34 bags of rice at home,” from her special “Grandma’s Girl.”
July 30, 1419, the First Defenestration of Prague: Jan Želivský, a Hussite priest at the church of the Virgin Mary of the Snows, led his congregation on a procession through the streets of Prague to the New Town Hall, on Charles Square. While they were marching, a stone was thrown at Želivský from the window of the town hall. The mob, enraged, stormed the hall. Once inside, the group threw the judge, the burgomaster, and some thirteen members of the town council out of the window and into the street, where they were killed by the fall or dispatched by the mob.
King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, upon hearing this news, was so stunned, the legend goes, that he died soon after.
On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convened for the first time in Jamestown, Virginia. On the same date in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon issued the “Declaration of the People of Virginia,” beginning Bacon’s Rebellion against the rule of Governor William Berkeley.
On this date in 1863, representatives of the United States and tribal leaders (including the Shoshone’s Chief Pocatello) signed the Treaty of Box Elder.
July 30 birthdays include Henry Ford (1863), Gen. Smedley Butler (1881), C. Northcote Parkinson (1909), and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947).
Vanuatuans celebrate Independence Day on July 30.
The U.S. State Department revoked their visa privileges, preventing them from entering the United States. The general policy had been introduced May 28, when Secretary of State Rubio announced that it would apply to “foreign officials and [other] persons . . . complicit in censoring Americans.”
By then a UK police commissioner, Mark Rowley, had threatened to “come after” Americans who violate UK “hate speech” laws.
The Trump administration “will hold accountable foreign nationals who are responsible for censorship of protected expression in the United States,” Rubio says.
“Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s political witch hunt against Jair Bolsonaro created a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans.”
Bolsonaro, a former president of Brazil, is on trial for allegedly seeking to overturn the country’s 2022 presidential election. He has been prohibited from posting on social media or communicating with others under investigation.
One on this no-contact order is his own son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, currently living in the U.S.
Having ordered social media platforms Rumble and X(-Twitter) to censor opposition figures, Justice Moraes acted to block both services from operating in Brazil when the platforms disobeyed him.
“Free speech,” said X’s Elon Musk, “is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes.”
It’s a wonderful thing to have our government once again defending democratic free speech — from its enemies foreign and domestic.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
Aldous Huxley, “Religion and Time,” Vedanta for the Western World (1945), Christopher Isherwood, editor.
King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci on July 29, 1900. After shooting the monarch multiple times, Breschi was wrestled to the ground and almost lynched. Upon his arrest, he said “I did not kill Umberto. I have killed the King. I killed a principle.” This did not prove immediately true, for Umberto’s 31-year-old son, Victor Emmanuel III, succeeded his father to the throne. What Bresci spawned was the terrorist craze of anarchists trying to kill heads of state and captains of industry, itself a kind of self-defeating principle, since the peoples of the world turned decidedly against the anarchists.
The agency’s Richmond Field Office “tracked the priest’s movements and coordinated with several other FBI offices and a foreign law enforcement agency to gather intelligence on the clergyman and his priestly organization,” Lynch summarizes.
This is all based on a new House Judiciary Committee report entitled “How the Biden-Wray FBI Manufactured a False Narrative of Catholic Americans as Violent Extremists.” *
“The FBI attempted to violate the priest-penitent privilege,” the report continues, “on the faulty reasoning that the Richmond subject under investigation seeking spiritual guidance had not been baptized or completed catechism.”
You may be asking yourself, is the FBI out of its mind?
Certainly, out of this hemisphere. Consider that FBI agents have also extended their reach way beyond U.S. borders to focus on wrongthink elsewhere.
According to investigative journalist David Ágape, “the FBI has helped Brazil censor its citizens,” working with the Soros’ Open Society Foundation to promote censorship in Brazil and a secret judicial police force targeting “people deemed to be spreading false information.”
Was the FBI nurturing censorship in foreign lands to later re-import them here?
From its beginning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has had trouble staying within constitutional limits. I guess we should not be shocked that it doesn’t obey jurisdictional limits, either.
Hopefully, Director Kash Patel will rein in the agency. It won’t be easy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* According to the committee, “The report reveals that contrary to testimony from former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Christopher Wray, the 2023 Richmond memorandum that derisively labeled traditional Catholics as ‘racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists’ was not an isolated incident. Under the new leadership of Director Kash Patel, the FBI has cooperated considerably with the Committee’s subpoena, and has produced over 1,300 pages of additional documents related to the Richmond memorandum that the Biden-Wray FBI did not disclose.”
Note: You can also mouse-over the asterisk in the main text to see the footnote.
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It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions.
Thomas Jefferson, in 1808, from Memoirs, Correspondence and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States (1829), p.112.