The Patriot Post® · Tuesday Short Cuts

Insight: “The power to determine the quantity of money… is too important, too pervasive, to be exercised by a few people, however public-spirited, if there is any feasible alternative. There is no need for such arbitrary power… Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes — excusable or not — can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic — this is the key political argument against an independent central bank.” —Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Observations: “The Squad shares an all-encompassing woke mindset that collapses individuals and events into a reductive binary of oppressor and oppressed. When the Squad looks at Israel and Hamas, it cannot see anything other than Critical Race Theory. And so this emboldened left draws disgustingly false equivalences between American racial minorities and Palestinians.” —Matthew Continetti

Editorial exegesis: “That this particular coronavirus showed up seemingly out of nowhere, perfectly suited to attack humans, would be quite the mystery if it hadn’t first popped up in a city with two virology institutes that were studying bat coronaviruses. … China in general has a history of research leaks resulting in infections, and the State Department issued warnings about these specific experiments and the lack of trained personnel involved as early as 2017. … In short, China has a lot of explaining to do — as does the Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Newsweek reports put millions into Wuhan coronavirus research.” —New York Post

For the record: “The origin of the virus is just we’ve got these two possible scenarios. But if you look at all the evidence and ask yourself, ‘Well, which scenario explains all these facts better on present evidence?’ it seems, to me at least, that the lab-escape hypothesis explains it a lot better. But it’s a sort of complicated conclusion to arrive at. And I can only assume … that the media was blindsided — they didn’t do the work that was necessary.” —former New York Times science editor Nicholas Wade

Food for thought: “Put aside all of the other evidence and use your common sense. Isn’t it a remarkable coincidence that the virus happened to originate next to the Chinese lab that tests coronaviruses?” —Senator Tom Cotton

Re: The Left: “What [Democrats] are doing is shifting the [illegal immigration] burden to the states. And once they do that, they’re making every state a border state — every town a border town.” —Senator Marsha Blackburn

Moving the goal posts: “Democrats promised to fight for families who are struggling. The idea that we would go back on those promises to give Mitch McConnell a veto over our whole agenda is just fundamentally wrong. We have to get rid of the filibuster.” —Senator Elizabeth Warren

Race bait I: “This is clearly not a system that can be reformed, and I just — what can we do to stop this? Because it feels like it’s just time to burn it down, you know? … They’re attacking our voting rights. They’re attacking our lives and livelihoods. They’re killing us if they’re not over-criminalizing us and putting us in jail. As a longtime organizer, what is it that we do? Because I have to say, as a people, for my people, I am up for the most radical of things to make sure that we live.” —MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross

Race bait II: “I mean what I say. [The Tim Tebow NFL signing] is white privilege. There’s no way to eradicate white privilege without white individuals giving up some of their privilege.” —sports commentator Stephen A. Smith

Grand delusions: “The modern American university is a right-wing institution. The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education, and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.” —UMass Amherst assistant professor Asheesh Kapur Siddique

And last… “The AP shared office space with Hamas and the media covered up the Wuhan lab leak. The media actively works against American interests.” —Lisa Boothe