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Here is the Heritage Take on the top issues today. Please reply to this email to arrange an interview.
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- Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in a remarkable 352-65 vote. If signed into law, this legislation would force TikTok to sever its ties to the Chinese Communist Party through a ByteDance divestiture.
- The Chinese Communist Party is entrenched within TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and poses an obvious national security threat to the American users of the digital platform. This surveillance and data exploitation threat from a hostile foreign power that de facto controls the app should make it clear to lawmakers that TikTok should be immediately divested from the CCP or cease operations in the United States.
- Despite some narratives, this bill only applies to companies that are controlled by four foreign adversary governments: China, Iran, North Korea, or Russia – all countries that pose grave national security threats to the United States and are listed in statute, thus requiring Congressional action to modify.
- The bill does nothing to target or restrict content in a way that implicates the First Amendment. It instead focuses on the platform’s conduct via its ownership by a hostile foreign adversary.
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- The leading world medical organization devoted to “transgender health care” is citing a technical glitch after guidance urging invasive interventions for child gender dysphoria disappeared from its website.
- The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Files confirm what informed critics have known for years: WPATH officials know that their “standards of care” guidelines promote experimental interventions that aren’t based on a systematic review of the evidence.
- WPATH’s guidelines, despite their lack of basis in the evidence, have influenced many leading medical organizations who advocate gender transition medicine for minors. This includes the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. WPATH has, in turn, used the support of such medical organizations to bolster its own credibility. In reality, these organizations are engaged in a form of circular “credential laundering.
- WPATH is and always has been a lobbying and activist organization, not a medical/scientific organization. Their guidelines are ideological talking points and little more.
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- Much of the U.S. has been squeezed for months, mostly by inflation. Since January 2021, the consumer price index, or CPI, has risen a cumulative 18%. Yet that measure obscures more than it reveals.
- Jason Trennert, founder of the brokerage and financial advisory firm Strategas, recently highlighted an alternative way to survey inflation: the Common Man CPI. Rather than focus on an unnecessarily large basket of goods, this tool exclusively measures price increases for necessities such as food, energy, clothing, and shelter.
- Between 2020 and 2024, the Common Man CPI has shown worse inflation in nearly every month than the official CPI.
- That helps explain why so many Americans are dissatisfied with the economy today: Prices for the things they’re actually buying have risen—and continue to—considerably faster than common metrics report.
- This also means that real inflation-adjusted earnings have fallen more than the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s official 4.2% decline since January 2021.
- If the White House wants to understand why the public isn’t getting on board with the president’s program, it’s because they’re looking at and living with different economic realities.
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