Category Cryptocurrency

Did you know that by 2050, a quarter of the planet’s population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all.

Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she’s currently the CEO (and founder) of SkinIsSkin, which sells a series of skin and lip products sourced in Africa.

Wade is also the author of the new memoir and manifesto, The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied To about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing. She claims the solution to Africa’s problems lies with what her mentor, the late economist George Ayittey, called “the cheetah generation,” young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, “conscious capitalism,” charter cities, and how cryptocurrencies are helping people like her build the Africa—and the world—they want.

Did you know that by 2050, fully a quarter of the planet’s population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all.

Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she’s currently the CEO (and founder) of SkinIsSkin, which sells a series of skin and lip products sourced in Africa.

Wade is also the author of the new memoir and manifesto, The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied To about African Poverty—and What That Means for Human Flourishing. The solution to Africa’s problems lie with what her mentor, the late economist George Ayittey, called “the cheetah generation,” young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, “conscious capitalism,” charter cities, and how cryptocurrencies are helping people like her build the Africa—and the world—they want. 

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

Did you know that by 2050, fully a quarter of the planet’s population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all.

Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network, a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she’s currently the CEO (and founder) of SkinIsSkin, which sells a series of skin and lip products sourced in Africa.

Wade is also the author of the new memoir and manifesto, The Heart of a Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied To about African Poverty—and What That Means for Human Flourishing. The solution to Africa’s problems lie with what her mentor, the late economist George Ayittey, called “the cheetah generation,” young Africans who embrace free markets, individualism, human rights, and transparency in government.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie sat down with Wade to discuss her book, “conscious capitalism,” charter cities, and how cryptocurrencies are helping people like her build the Africa—and the world—they want. 

• Video Editor: Adam Czarnecki
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

In this year’s first episode of The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman and Katherine Mangu-Ward welcome special guests Elizabeth Nolan Brown and Zach Weissmueller to make predictions for 2024 and take one last look at 2023.

02:31—2024 predictions

20:08—Lessons from 2023

32:05—Assorted resolutions

36:32—Weekly Listener Question

43:22—State officials attempt to remove Donald Trump from the ballot.

46:24—This week’s cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

“The Year of Bad Vibes,” by Liz Wolfe

“Prediction: 2024 Will See Deadly Political Violence in the Streets,” by Matt Welch

“Was Biden’s Social Media Meddling Illegal?” by Zach Weissmueller

“Florida Gov. Scott Rejects Federal Funding for Flawed Orlando to Tampa High-Speed Rail Plan,” by Robert Poole

Just Asking Questions podcast

“Milei Brings His Chainsaw to Argentina’s Regulatory State,” by Katarina Hall

“1972: The Year That Made 2018 Seem Sane,” by Brian Doherty

“Jeb Bush: What He Thinks of Trump, Biden, DeSantis, and ‘Florida Man,'” by Nick Gillespie

“Who Decides Whether Trump Can Run, and What Sort of Evidence Suffices?” by Jacob Sullum

Send your questions to [email protected]. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today’s sponsor:

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Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.

Music: “Angeline,” by The Brothers Steve

Behind the scenes of a traditional bathhouse in Brooklyn, something extraordinary is taking place: The pools, heated to 104 degrees, are not warmed by conventional means but by computers mining for bitcoin.

A profit-seeking drive for energy efficiency has caused bitcoin miners to pop up in unexpected places, such as Jason Goodman’s New York bathhouse, where the cost of heating his pools is about the same as it was before he plugged in the bitcoin miners, but now with the bonus of earning bitcoin.

Goodman credits traditional bathhouses for helping him through a tough time when he first moved to New York City. He started Bathhouse in 2019 because he wanted to re-create the life-changing experiences he underwent for the “hardcore sauna-heads, for those who are trying to optimize their performance, longevity, and overall health.” 

And then he had a cutting-edge idea of how to make it better.

“It kind of clicked in my mind,” Goodman adds. “Bitcoin mining is really important. Bitcoin mining produces heat as a byproduct. I buy energy to create heat. That’s interesting.” 

Instead of cooling the mining computers with fans, Goodman submerges them in a specially engineered fluid that doesn’t conduct electric current but, instead, absorbs the heat that the computers produce. A heat exchanger then transfers it into hot water that moves directly into the pools. “I was able to make hot water very easily,” Goodman explains. 

Bitcoin mining wasn’t designed for heating hot tubs. It was designed to facilitate a new type of digital money with a supply that no single entity can alter or control. A central bank cannot create new ones—they can only be mined by computers scattered around the world running the bitcoin protocol, and there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. These computers compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle that the protocol makes just hard enough to ensure it’s solved roughly every 10 minutes. Solve the puzzle, unlock a block of transactions to be validated and added to the blockchain, and earn bitcoin. 

The more computing power someone has, the better their chances of earning bitcoin. But more computing power means using more energy. 

“Bitcoin miners are in a relentless, unquenchable search across the globe for the cheapest possible energy,” explains Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and author of Check Your Financial Privilege.

“Be energy neutral and earn bitcoin. That was what we wanted to prove to ourselves,” Goodman tells Reason. “A dream scenario would be that every hotel, every major residential building, every major office building starts converting their boiler system or their heating system or their hot water system over to a system…like we’re using and have a massively distributed hard-to-control mining network.”

For bitcoiners, keeping the process distributed and hard to control is the whole point. As Caitlin Long, founder of bitcoin-focused Custodia Bank, explains, the main purpose of bitcoin is to have an honest ledger where people can store value that cannot be manipulated.

Bitcoin mining ties the world’s first decentralized digital currency to the physical world. But bitcoin remains borderless, seeking to exploit inefficiency wherever it can, whether that’s a Brooklyn bathhouse, an unmarked warehouse in Venezuela, or the small rural town of Washington, Georgia. 

Mayor Bill DeGolian of Washington welcomed CleanSpark, one of America’s largest bitcoin miners, to his town because it allowed the miner to buy energy at a bulk discount. 

“They’re buying a lot of power from the city. And that’s what helps the city…with what we’re selling to CleanSpark, the amount of power they buy per month from us is more than all of our other commercial and residential customers combined,” DeGolian said. 

At its Norcross operation, an 87,000-square-foot facility on the outskirts of Atlanta, CleanSpark is using the same immersion cooling technique that Goodman uses in his bathhouse to cool 4,300 bitcoin miners. The technique allows the company to spend less money to power the A.C. needed to cool the giant rooms where they keep the computers.

“We’re removing that environmental factor where ambient temperature goes up and down and we constantly fight the environmental curve,” Bradley Audiss, senior director of operations at CleanSpark in Norcross, tells Reason. “Immersion is very much a flat line as compared to air cooled that has the fluctuations which are primarily tied to hot temperatures.”

For some, bitcoin is the real Green New Deal. According to Gladstein, bitcoin subsidizes renewable energy because “the projects are made profitable by the ability to monetize that energy right away….So rather than monetizing [public] debt [by printing money], we can have the market kind of power this process.”

But critics still consider the energy that is going to mining to be a complete waste. Some countries have banned bitcoin mining, and the Biden administration wants to tax it heavily. Even Goodman felt the backlash when he announced he was heating the bathhouse with bitcoin mining. 

 Bitcoiners say the ability of miners to sponge up and then release energy at a moment’s notice makes the grid more reliable, which is why utilities partner with them. Take Texas bitcoin miner Marshall Long. His mining company’s partnership with Texas’ grid manager helped avert a summer blackout.

“What makes miners particularly good is because I’m not only a large user, I’m a granular user. So I don’t have to turn off my entire load at once,” Long said. “I can just turn off one miner or 200 miners or 2,000 miners in order to respond to certain things that are going on in the grid throughout the day.”

“We’re starting to see with…bulletproof scientific evidence that…bitcoin miners are actually helping and not hurting,” Long added. 

Miners aren’t shutting down during peak hours out of altruism but because of market incentives. CleanSpark, for example, monitors energy prices on a minute-by-minute basis and shuts down the moment its operation starts to become unprofitable, freeing up power for the rest of the grid. 

Even in places like Venezuela, where bitcoin mining boomed thanks to the government subsidizing energy to near-zero cost, bitcoin is forcing energy innovation. Miners are taking responsibility for fixing power lines that the government fails to maintain. 

“We take care of the electrical infrastructure so that it is not damaged,” explained a major Venezuelan bitcoin miner who fled to Miami and asked to remain anonymous. “For example, if we see that we have a voltage problem or an electrical factor in the area that affects us and can affect the community or the area where we are, we will try to improve it as much as possible, because if we do not improve it, our miners will not work well.” 

Bitcoin is too decentralized and too enriching for even the most powerful governments to stop at this point. The choice America faces isn’t whether to allow mining to exist or not, but whether to welcome it here in a vibrant market economy where it can bootstrap new energy sources and its byproducts can create economic value.

• Editor: Danielle Thompson
• Camera: Jim Epstein
• Graphics: Isaac Reese
• Graphics: Adani Samat
• Camera: Eric Hernandez
• Camera: Richard Sanborn

This is the audio version of The Reason Livestream, which takes place every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

“At its core, money is a ledger,” writes investment analyst Lyn Alden in her new book Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better. 

And if money is a ledger, she says, the most important question to consider is, “Who controls the ledger?”

Zach Weissmueller spoke with Alden about her book, which is a true tour de force that lays out the history of money from its inception to present, takes you deep into the dueling schools of thought around money’s fundamental properties, offers a macro analysis of today’s global monetary and fiscal situation, and charts a path forward for transitioning the world to better, more sound money in the future. If you care about any of this—and really, who doesn’t care about money?—this one is a must-read.

A showdown is brewing between the Republican-led House of Representatives and the Biden administration over how to pay for a military aid package to Israel.

On Thursday night, the House passed a $14.3 billion package that would redirect funding from the IRS—which, recall, got an $80 billion boost as part of the poorly-named Inflation Reduction Act in 2022—to assist Israel. The White House issued a statement earlier in the week promising that President Joe Biden would veto such a bill, and Democrats in the Senate have called the idea “dead on arrival.”

Biden has called for a $105 billion package that would send money to Ukraine and Taiwan in addition to Israel. A bipartisan cohort of senators would prefer a package that doesn’t include the IRS cuts, according to The New York Times.

That, of course, amounts to a promise to borrow more money to fund those military efforts at a time when the United States is running annual budget deficits of nearly $2 trillion. However, even the House plan might add to the deficit. As The Washington Post points out, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says raiding the IRS to pay for aid to Israel will ultimately add to the deficit in the long run by reducing future revenue collections by about $26 billion. (An additional wrinkle: Those projections showing how effectively the IRS will use its infusion of new cash to pursue tax cheats are historically quite fraught.)

“We’re trying to get back to the principle of fiscal responsibility here,” new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) told reporters, Politico reports. “And that was the easiest and largest pile of money that’s sitting there for us to be able to pay for this immediate obligation.”

Twelve Democrats voted in favor of the bill, while a pair of Republicans—Reps. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R–Ga.), both outspoken critics of providing foreign military aid—voted against it.

Meanwhile, in Gaza: The Israeli military has surrounded Gaza City, according to an Israeli military spokesperson who told Al Jazeera on Thursday that “a ceasefire is not on the table at all.” In a statement on Thursday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “the height of the battle” against Hamas had arrived.

As the military incursion into Gaza escalates, Israel is facing stronger criticism from some foreign leaders even outside the Middle East. Ireland’s Prime Minister, Leo Varadkar, said Friday that Israel has the right to defend itself and to go after Hamas, but added that “what I’m seeing unfolding at the moment isn’t just self-defense. It looks, resembles something more approaching revenge,” Reuters reported.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken headed to Israel on Thursday, where he plans to meet with Netanyahu as well as critics of Israel’s invasion, like Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, who has accused Israeli forces of committing war crimes by targeting civilians in Gaza. Before boarding a plane on Thursday, Blinken told reporters he would push for “humanitarian pauses” in the bombing campaign to allow civilians remaining in Gaza City to escape.

Hamas’ leaders, meanwhile, are promising more attacks targeting Israeli civilians. And so the cycle of madness continues.

Great article from @reason‘s, @bonniekristian:

“To say that [revenge is justified] is to take a step toward moral madness, toward a cycle of escalation and chaos, not justice, mercy, or any other good. But it is to say that violence, by its nature, tends to spread. Once loose,…

— Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 2, 2023

Pumped and dumped: Sam Bankman-Fried, aka “SBF,” the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and once a leading proponent of so-called “effective altruism,” was found guilty Thursday on seven charges of fraud and conspiracy, capping a weeks-long trial that included the spectacle of SBF taking the stand in an attempt to defend himself. It didn’t work out.

“Bankman-Fried was better at calculating odds than an ordinary person, but he still miscalculated a lot—including, I think, on the odds that he might go to jail,” writes The Washington Post‘s Megan McArdle. “Most important, he miscalculated the risk that he might be miscalculating.”

Bankman-Fried is scheduled to be sentenced in March. His convictions carry the possibility of 110 years in jail. In a statement, his attorneys promised to appeal the jury’s decision.

Scenes from Culpeper: 

Few people outside of Culpeper County, Virginia, where I live, are likely paying attention to the wild campaign for sheriff that has unfolded here in recent months and will culminate next Tuesday.

The incumbent, Sheriff Scott Jenkins, is seeking re-election despite having been indicted—boy, doesn’t that sound familiar—on 16 federal bribery charges stemming from what prosecutors say was a cash-for-badges scheme. Under Virginia law, sheriffs are allowed to appoint a number of auxiliary deputies, who get access to the same tactical gear and firearms that the full-time deputies do.

Jenkins is accused of accepting $72,500 from at least eight people whom he later appointed as deputies, including at least two FBI informants. Whoops! A subsequent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Culpeper Star-Exponent newspaper revealed that Jenkins’ department conducts little oversight or record-keeping regarding the auxiliary deputies’ access to firearms and other taxpayer-funded equipment—like the Culpeper County-owned rifle that turned up in a car accident in Dallas, Texas, in July.

Jenkins pleaded not guilty to those charges and will stand trial in May. In the meantime, the local Republican Party declined to nominate the three-term incumbent for this year’s election—which might come as a surprise given how other branches of the GOP are handling similar situations on the national stage. Jenkins is opposed by Republican Joe Watson and another independent, Culpeper deputy police chief Tim Chilton, who has vowed to increase transparency both by requiring the sheriff’s office to use body cams (as the police department already does) and instituting bookkeeping reforms to prevent a similar scandal in the future.

QUICK HITS

• The U.S. economy added 150,000 jobs in October, down from about 336,000 in September, according to data released Friday morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The unemployment rate ticked upward to 3.9 percent, the highest mark since January 2022 but hardly a worrying sign.

Hiring slowed in October. Watch “biz” going forward

Healthcare +58,000
Gov’t +51,000 –>big surge (+26k) in public education
Construction +23,000
Social aid +19,000
Hospitality +19,000
Biz +15,000
Retail +700

Manufacturing -35,000 (-33k from strike)
Warehouse -11,000
IT -9,000

— Heather Long (@byHeatherLong) November 3, 2023

• The first of five former Memphis police officers indicted in connection to the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols pleaded guilty in federal court to two felony charges. As part of the plea deal, Desmond Mills Jr. will cooperate with prosecutors trying to pin state-level murder charges on some of the other officers involved in the incident.

• An Ohio ballot question that could establish a state constitutional right to an abortion is confusing some voters.

• A proposal being widely described as being a huge cut to Amtrak’s funding is actually anything but that, as Reason‘s Christian Britschgi explains.

• “No Labels is perilous to our democracy,” says former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) because, at this point, apparently everything is.

“At its core, money is a ledger,” writes investment analyst Lyn Alden in her new book Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better. 

And if money is a ledger, the most important question to consider, she says, is “who controls the ledger?”

Join Zach Weissmueller this Thursday at 1 p.m. ET on Reason‘s YouTube channel for a conversation with Alden about her book, the history of money, the way that central banking has distorted the economy and U.S. foreign policy, and her proposed path forward for transitioning the world to better, more sound money in the future. 

From Monday’s opinion by Judge T. Kent Wetherell, II (N.D. Fla.) in Coin Center v. Yellen (for a similar decision, see this August post about Van Loon v. Dep’t of Treasury):

Plaintiffs argue that [the government’s restriction on the use of] Tornado Cash [a mechanism for further anonymizing cryptocurrency transactions] violated the First Amendment because it chilled Plaintiffs’ protected rights of association by blocking a financial privacy tool they relied on to make donations to organizations and causes and it was not narrowly tailored to achieve its aims. Defendants responds that the First Amendment was not implicated by OFAC’s designation of Tornado Cash and, and even if it was, the designation satisfies the requisite level of scrutiny.

Plaintiffs do not cite any authority supporting the existence of a First Amendment right to use a particular service or type of currency to make donations for charitable or other purposes. The freedom of association cases cited by Plaintiffs are distinguishable because those cases involve government action that compelled private associations to disclose their major donors or members. See Americans for Prosperity Found. v. Bonta (2021); Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Comm. (1963). Here, the designation of Tornado Cash did not compel private associations to disclose anything about their donors or members.

The Court did not overlook Plaintiffs’ reliance on Meyer v. Grant (1988), for the proposition that the government violates the First Amendment when it “restricts access to the most effective, fundamental, and perhaps economical avenue of political discourse.” However, that case does not help Plaintiffs here for two reasons.

First, Meyer is a free speech case that dealt with the chilling consequences that a ban on paying the circulators of initiative petitions would have on disseminating “political discourse.” Here, Plaintiffs have raised a freedom of association claim, not a free speech claim.

Second, the designation of Tornado Cash does not preclude Plaintiffs (or anyone else) from spending money or donating money for political ends, nor does it preclude organizations from accepting anonymous donations. The fact that Tornado Cash may be Plaintiffs’ preferred way of maintaining their financial privacy does not mean that it is the only way for them to do so. Indeed, it is noteworthy that one of the plaintiffs stated in his declaration that Tornado Cash is used “in his regular rotation of privacy tools,” which implies that there are other privacy tools that are available to Plaintiffs.

Accordingly, for the reasons stated above, the Court finds that the designation of Tornado Cash did not implicate Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights. {Based on this conclusion, the Court need not consider what level of scrutiny applies to the designation of Tornado Cash or whether the designation would withstand that level of scrutiny.}

Here’s more on the legal backstory:

The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) authorizes the President to declare national emergencies “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary [foreign] threat … to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Pursuant to that authority, the President declared national emergencies with respect to malicious foreign cyber-enabled activities, and North Korea’s pursuit of its nuclear missile program.

After a national emergency is declared, the IEEPA authorizes the President to “regulate … or prohibit … any use [of], transfer [of], … dealing in, … or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest.” Pursuant to that authority, the President blocked all property and interests in property of any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury to have materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for foreign malicious cyber-enabled activities that threaten the national security, foreign policy, or economic health or financial stability of the United States and the North Korean government.

The Secretary of the Treasury delegated the authority granted by Executive Orders 13694 and 13722 to the Director of the Office of Financial Assets Control (OFAC).

On November 8, 2022, OFAC designated “Tornado Cash” as a Specially Designated National or Blocked Person. The effect of the designation is that “unless licensed or otherwise authorized by [OFAC], (1) all real, personal, and any other property and interests in property of [Tornado Cash] … are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn or otherwise dealt in, and (2) any transaction or dealing … in property or interests in property of [Tornado Cash] is prohibited.”

The designation described Tornado Cash as

an entity with an organizational structure that consists of: (1) its founders—Alexey Pertsev, Roman Semenov, and Roman Storm—and other associated developers, who together launched the Tornado Cash mixing service, developed new Tornado Cash mixing service features, created the Tornado Cash Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), and actively promote the platform’s popularity in an attempt to increase its user base; and (2) the Tornado Cash DAO, which is responsible for voting on and implementing those new features created by the developers.

The designation listed 91 Internet addresses that were affiliated with Tornado Cash, including the addresses for the “smart contracts” that Plaintiffs refer to as the “core software tool” of the Tornado Cash service….

Cryptocurrency is a virtual currency that can be used for payment or investment purposes…. Tornado Cash is a cryptocurrency “mixing service” that was founded by two Russians (Alexey Pertsev and Roman Semenov), Roman Storm, and other associated developers…. The Tornado Cash service uses smart contracts—which are essentially computer software created by its developers …. The smart contracts allow Ethereum users to deposit ETH [Ethereum coins] into a “pool” where it is mixed with other users’ deposits and then withdrawn at a time of the user’s choosing. The more users that have deposited ETH into the pool the more difficult it is to connect the withdrawal with a particular deposit, which thereby provides a degree of anonymity to the user’s transaction that is not available on the public ledger….

Tornado Cash transactions can be (and 84% are) executed with the aid of third-party “relayers.” The use of a relayer makes it even harder to identify the parties to the transaction, but transactions can be completed without a relayer….

The court also upheld the government’s actions against various other claims by Coin Center.

The government defendants are represented by Christine L. Coogle and Christopher Robert Healy of the Justice Department.

Rising death toll: Overnight, the number of deaths in Israel and Gaza rose to roughly 2,200, following Hamas’ surprise attack on southern Israel this past weekend that resulted in the massacre of civilians. In addition, more than 150 foreign nationals who had been traveling or living in Israel are dead or missing.

This includes at least 40 Americans (20 dead, more than 20 missing), 29 Thais (18 dead, 11 missing), 17 missing or dead Brits, 10 missing or dead Nepalese, 22 missing or dead Argentines, 17 missing or dead French, two missing or dead Ukrainians, three missing or dead Austrians, and four missing or dead Canadians. Several Germans, French, Argentines, and Americans have been taken hostage but exact numbers are hard to come by.

In the weeds: More information has come out about how Hamas carried out this past weekend’s attack, which caught Israeli forces off guard. On Saturday, Hamas “appeared to destroy communications towers close to the Gaza border key to Israel’s defense,” reports The New York Times.

Israel is now being hit from all sides. While this has all been happening on the southern front, the northern front also erupted: yesterday, missiles were launched from Syria and Lebanon. Hamas and Hezbollah have taken responsibility. Missiles were intercepted by the Iron Dome, Israel’s air defense system.

Israel has responded by bombing Hezbollah, and is continuing to bomb the Gaza Strip. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant says a ground offensive will be launched in Gaza, and authorities there say a “humanitarian crisis” is imminent, as the power plant reportedly ran out of fuel around 2 p.m. local time, several hours ago. Doctors Without Borders has said that Al-Shifa, the main hospital in Gaza, only has about three days’ worth of fuel, and that antibiotics, surgical equipment, and other supplies are close to being exhausted.

At least 250,000 Gazans have been displaced. Israeli forces have started warning whole neighborhoods—not just individual buildings—when an attack is coming, and entire sections of Gaza City have been razed.

American chaos: Not only do we currently have no speaker of the House, but we also do not have an ambassador to Israel. President Joe Biden’s nominee, Jack Lew, must be hastily pushed through the Senate confirmation process, which will most likely happen next week.

Lew, who served under President Bill Clinton as the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), developed “the memorandum of understanding at OMB on multiyear funding for Israel and worked to sustain it during the Obama administration.” And, per an unnamed White House official, he also “worked to provide ‘crucial funding’ for Israeli missile defense systems to protect citizens from attacks,” per NBC News. “The American ambassador to NATO said on Tuesday that U.S. military assistance to Israel after the weekend attacks by Hamas assailants would not come at Ukraine’s expense,” reports The New York Times. (Instead, it will come at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.)

American insanity: Black Lives Matter’s Chicago affiliate used Hamas paragliders—the ones who slaughtered 260-plus teens and young adults at a music festival—in their poster art expressing that they “stand with Palestine.” Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter proclaims that “when a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.” 

These groups are grafting their understanding of domestic race relations and colonizer/colonized narratives onto Israel and Palestine, which simply does not work. Celebrating the murderous paragliders of Hamas—a terrorist group that keeps Gazans entrenched in deep poverty, by the way—isn’t the same as communicating opposition to the state of Israel. There are no easy answers here, but it is actually quite easy to avoid using barbaric killers as your graphic design motif.

“When a political group is dogmatic to the extreme, there is no limit to the horrors they will condone and justify for their cause—no ability to depart from those they consider on their team, no matter what it is their teammates are doing: kidnapping children, killing kids in front of their parents, massacring hundreds at a concert, whatever,” writes Tim Urban on Twitter. 

Scenes from New York: 

The folksy “hi y’all” and the candy corn and the “spooky” lettering, it’s really all too insane, you’d think it was a parody:

The elected student president of the NYU Law School Bar Association just sent out a message refusing to condemn Hamas’s mass slaughter and effectively cheerleading it. pic.twitter.com/mtn3ZUP4Li

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) October 10, 2023

The person seemingly responsible for sending out this statement ended up getting their big law job offer from Winston & Strawn LLP revoked. I tend to oppose cancel culture wherever it strikes (but support the rights of private employers to decide who they want to hire and fire), so my rough take is that law firms should probably vet people more aggressively during the hiring process if they’re sensitive to campus-activist drivel. But there’s also a question of whether a junior hire’s thoughts on Hamas have any bearing on their ability to do their job well; we ostensibly work with plenty of people who believe wrong or immoral things but have the good sense to keep them quiet in a professional environment.

Nor was this person a public figure whose words would have any sort of lasting impact or great influence—instead, these public statements from college students, DSA groups, and BLM come together to form a tour d’horizon of where the far left is going, and how simplistic American race relations narratives fall embarrassingly short. (A related cancel culture take—this one on the porn star Mia Khalifa—here, from Reason‘s Robby Soave.)

QUICK HITS

• “The founder of the anti-trafficking group OUR has been sued by several accusers, who say he used their faith and visions from a psychic to sexually coerce them,” reports Vice‘s Anna Merlan.
• Wearing a scarlet letter—as Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) did, in reference to criticism she received for her vote to oust the speaker of the House—doesn’t really make sense.
• Did Rep. George Santos (R–N.Y.) commit credit card fraud?
• Twitter has been full of profoundly insane takes from Extremely Online leftists. Oliver Traldi’s tweet nicely sums it up:

not much surprises me but i’ve been taken aback by the almost literal bullet-biting of “if a Native American wanted to murder me i would just have to say ‘well played’ and die” people have been doing on here

— Oliver Traldi (@olivertraldi) October 9, 2023

• More than 4,000 autoworkers at three General Motors plants in Canada went on strike yesterday, citing issues with pay and benefits in contract negotiations. More than 9,000 GM workers are currently on strike in the U.S. over similar negotiation disputes.
• “Within the first 15 minutes of her testimony, Ms. Ellison repeatedly blamed Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, for crimes that led to FTX’s implosion,” reports The New York Times.
• Incredible account of a 62-year-old grandfather who fought off Hamas, rescuing a bunch of people—including his own family, who was in hiding.
• In Ohio, pro-lifers and pro-choicers are anxiously watching the fate of an abortion referendum, which could be a “bellwether for 2024,” says Politico. (For more on Ohio’s referendum, see Elizabeth Nolan Brown’s coverage here. For more on abortion and libertarianism, go here.)
• A sailor in the U.S. Navy was “arrested on national security charges pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring with a Chinese intelligence officer and receiving a bribe,” Axios reports.