Summer is nearly here and a hard-left Los Angeles city councilmember has proposed something that the people have surely been yearning for: banning backyard barbecues. Yes, really. Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who is also running for mayor, introduced a motion on Wednesday to ban backyard barbecues during certain high fire danger days in the city, the California Post reported. The motion was blocked by Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who told the California Post, “the last thing Angelenos need is a ban on hosting a carne asada in their own backyard.” Rodriguez added that the law would have been entirely disconnected from how people live. “We’re not checking the weather for red flag conditions before planning a backyard barbecue,” Rodriguez said. “This is what families do. Birthday parties. Carne asadas. Family gatherings. A lot of people barbecue.” No kidding. That’s common sense. But not to the left-wing busybody overlords who foist these niggling and obnoxious regulations on society while ignoring the massive consequences of their own policies. And that’s what is so outrageous here in a move that is deeply illustrative of leftist governance. First, let’s get one thing out of the way. The infamous Palisades Fire that raged out of control and devastated countless homes in Los Angeles didn’t happen because of a barbecue or “climate change.” It was allegedly started by a left-wing agitator who wanted to be a kleptomaniac version of Luigi Mangioni. Jonathan Rinderknecht, the 20-year-old Uber driver charged with setting the fire was reportedly motivated by his hatred of the “rich.” Then the fire raged out of control because of the LA government’s incompetence. Southern California isn’t otherwise facing a scourge of fires caused by backyard barbecues. In fact, as National Review pointed out, not a single big fire can be attributed to the recent big blazes that have rocked the state. Most have been caused by lightning strikes, downed power lines, and arson. They’ve raged out of control often because of poor forest and water management. But there is another huge cause of fires that LA simply refuses to address. A far larger problem than barbecues is the fires ignited in the countless homeless encampments that dot the city of Los Angeles and other cities. The LA Fire Department has noted that this is a huge and growing problem that seriously taxes city resources. According to ABC 7 Eyewitness News, a records request for “Homeless or Encampment Related” fires turned up a staggering 75,000 incidents since 2020. “The numbers fluctuate month-to-month, but the trend is unmistakable,” ABC 7 reported. “In 2020, LAFD logged 7,165 homeless-related fires. From January through mid-December 2025, that number climbed to 16,982, an average of 46 fires every day in the city of Los Angeles. Most of these fires are small and quickly extinguished, but some spread with devastating consequences.” Despite this obvious problem, the city refuses to remove the encampments. They insist the issue is housing. Yet despite their programs to increase housing for the homeless, the fire problem increases. In fact, going by this data, the number of incidents more than doubled in five years. Here’s what one homeowner said of a nearby homeless encampment to ABC 7 in that investigative piece: “I spoke to LAPD to kick them out and they did nothing, and my house burned, and my dogs are dead.” That fire was caused by homeless squatters allegedly setting fire to a house next door. According to the New York Post, “the police said the squatters couldn’t be arrested without any criminal record.” Keep in mind that the problem caused by these homeless encampments extends well beyond the deadly fires. The entire emergency response system bends to the consequences. The New York Post noted that the sheer volume of calls to the homeless encampments is causing slower response times. “One fire station in south Los Angeles, for example, responded to 78 fires all due to one encampment beneath Harbor Freeway on King Boulevard,” the Post reported. “Ambulances had to be sent for each of those calls.” If the response of city leaders was merely to fiddle as LA burned, that would be bad enough. But it wasn’t. Instead, they insist on doing nothing, then taking away the liberties of normal, law-abiding people. This phenomenon is sometimes called “anarcho-tyranny,” and I think the word is apt. Behaviors leftists approve of are given free reign, everything else is tightly (and often ruthlessly) regulated. These policies defy common sense, but they define left-wing governance. For the cause of social justice we must all suffer and pay the price. I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to keep my barbecue and the Spirit of ’76.

Young people now blame capitalism for poverty, racism, high prices, even climate change.  They listen to people like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who says, “Capitalism … is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost. That is not a redeemable system.” Give me a break. Yes, capitalism is often ugly. It brings out greed in some, exacerbates wealth differences, creates pollution (creating an actual need for government regulation, which capitalism funds) and leaves some people behind. But nothing else works! Nothing else makes life better for most people, including the poor! “Capitalism is moral, precisely because success comes from meeting the needs and wants of others,” says Steve Forbes of Forbes magazine. “Higher standard of living comes from trading, buying and selling with one another. Everybody gets something from a transaction.” Everybody, because capitalism, unlike socialism, and most of government, is voluntary. Transactions happen only if both sides believe they won. It’s why there’s often an odd double “thank you” moment when we buy something—both buyer and seller say, “Thank you.” Why? Because the seller wants my money more than his product. I want his product more than the money I paid. Otherwise, the trade wouldn’t happen. Millions of such voluntary transactions create wealth. That’s capitalism. The ignorant think rich people take from poor people. As the popular YouTube channel Secular Talk puts it, “Jeff Bezos … his wealth is making a lot of people poor … because we have a finite amount of money.” Wrong! There is not a finite amount of money. That silly idea is the essential fallacy in attacks on capitalism. Because capitalism is voluntary, it creates wealth. For thousands of years, everyone but the nobility was poor. Then, when some countries tried capitalism, wealth skyrocketed. When people are allowed to buy and sell things freely, everyone is better off. Socialists don’t get that. AOC insists: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion.” But no billionaire showed up at my door demanding I give them money. Under capitalism, they can only get rich by offering people something we think is better than what we bought before. Yes, Amazon’s founder is now absurdly rich, but consumers didn’t lose. Jeff Bezos got rich by inventing a way for us to shop efficiently and pay less. And as Forbes points out, most billionaires weren’t born rich. “What’s amazing about these individuals, they’re from the most unlikely backgrounds, and [they invented] things you don’t plan for.” Margaret Rudkin, a housewife in Connecticut, noticed that bread worsened her son’s asthma. She experimented with different recipes, came up with modern whole wheat bread and grew her business into the company we now know as Pepperidge Farm. “What planner would have planned that?” laughs Forbes in my new video. He uses the term “planner” because socialists claim government dictates will make our economy work better than letting individuals making our own choices. They’re wrong. The failure of socialism everywhere should have taught us that! But no. Politicians still think they can do better. “Capitalism has let a lot of people down,” says likely presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Maybe, but capitalism also lifted more people out of poverty, created more opportunities and improved more lives than any other system. Economist Thomas Sowell said, “I don’t ask, ‘What is the cause of poverty?’ Everybody is born poor and ignorant. The question is, what factors allow some groups to get from that position?” “Sowell put it well,” concludes Forbes. “What is the difference between people today and people in the Stone Age? Difference is—we know more. That’s how you get a higher standard of living, from experiments in the marketplace, the laboratory, always trying to find new things. That’s why planning doesn’t work, because if we already knew it, we’d already be doing it!” Only capitalism allows the experiments that create better lives. COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

After revelations about former special counsel Jack Smith’s use of nondisclosure orders to monitor lawmakers’ data without notifying them in his Arctic Frost investigation, some on Capitol Hill are calling for surveillance reform. As part of his Arctic Frost investigation of President Donald Trump and Republicans’ actions after the 2020 election, Smith sought the records of multiple Republican lawmakers. In doing so, Smith requested—and was granted—nondisclosure orders blocking cell providers from informing the lawmakers of the surveillance. The NDO Fairness Act essentially raises the bar for the government when requesting an order from a court, requiring that the court explain how providing notice to the individual being surveilled would result in endangering individuals or jeopardizing a case. The bill has made some progress in the House, having been advanced by voice vote in the House Judiciary Committee.  House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, reiterated his backing for the bill in a statement. “Jack Smith and partisan Arctic Frost investigators abused nondisclosure orders to secretly seize data from members of Congress,” Jordan told The Daily Signal. “The NDO Fairness Act takes a critical step to rein in this surveillance overreach,” he added. “It forces the government to justify how long the order can last and makes sure those affected are notified.” The vote in the committee was bipartisan, as the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., endorsed the bill, calling it “reasonable” and “bipartisan.” Recently, some in the Senate have been calling for NDO reform. On April 21, the Senate held a hearing on Arctic Frost in which Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., called for reform. “Many have argued those NDOs likely violated existing federal law,” she said. “The fact that at least one telecom provider, AT&T, refused to comply with that subpoena, and the Smith team didn’t push back, is evidence that they probably knew that their requests were illegal in the first place.” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, is an advocate of the bill in the Senate, which he introduced alongside Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del. “Bad actors in the United States government have covered up politically motivated domestic spying through abusing nondisclosure orders, preventing phone and tech companies from telling law-abiding Americans that they were being spied upon,” he told The Daily Signal. Lee continued, “The NDO Fairness Act establishes safeguards to your personal data and makes it more difficult for the deep state to hide its domestic surveillance activities.” Related Posts‘Why Is It Taking So Long?’ Senate Health Chair Urges Immediate FDA Action on Abortion PillThe Food and Drug Administration should “immediately” restore in-person dispensing requirements for the abortion pill, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told The Daily Signal. The senator cited safety concerns in pressing the administration to act. “You don’t have to have a review to know that if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, she’s gonna have a…Congress to Probe CAIRWhile it remains unclear whether the Council on American‑Islamic Relations will testify, a House Judiciary subcommittee is set to hold a hearing Tuesday examining how CAIR and similar organizations are promoting Sharia law and other efforts lawmakers say are “incompatible with Western civilization” in the United States. “Sharia law has no place in the United…DOJ Files Complaint Against DC Disciplinary Panel, Citing BiasThe Justice Department is suing District of Columbia Bar officials for disciplinary actions against former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. The DOJ complaint references information first published by The Daily Signal in an opinion piece by Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, specifically pertaining to ideological social media posts by D.C….

Among the $308.37 billion in goods that the United States imported from China in 2025, the No. 1 category was described by the Census Bureau as “cell phones and other household goods.” Americans last year purchased $39,246,893,116 worth of these items manufactured in that communist regime. Not surprisingly, Tim Cook, the chief executive officer of Apple, is one of the corporate executives who joined President Donald Trump on his latest trip to China. As The New York Times reported last June, “an estimated 80 percent of iPhones are still made in China. Apple’s business is still so dependent on China that the tech giant can’t operate without it.” Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg also joined Trump on his trip to China. “China is considering a deal for about 500 of the 737 Max jets,” Bloomberg reported. Another top executive who joined Trump on his trip to China is Dina Powell McCormick, the president of Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “China on Monday blocked U.S. tech giant Meta’s acquisition of the artificial intelligence startup Manus, in an unexpected move to reverse a deal that apparently aroused Beijing’s concerns about the transfer of advanced technology,” The Associated Press reported on April 27. Yet another CEO on the China trip with Trump is Mastercard’s Michael Miebach. “Mastercard today announced a collaboration between Mastercard Move, its money movement platform, and Bank of Shanghai (BoS) to enable seamless, bi-directional payment flows between China and global markets,” said a press release Mastercard published on March 12. “‘With this collaboration, we’re extending our multi-rail capabilities across cards, digital wallets and bank accounts to give banks and payment service providers across the world a single, trusted platform to send funds to China,'” the release quoted Mastercard’s global head of transfer solutions as saying. Sending money to China has become a sad feature of the American economy. In just the last 10 years (2016-25), according to Census Bureau data, the United States has purchased $4.205 trillion in imports from China. At the same time, China has purchased only $1.299 trillion in imports from the United States. The result is a cumulative 10-year trade deficit of $2.906 trillion. After the $39,246,893,116 worth of “cell phones and other household goods” that Americans imported from Communist China in 2025 came “electric apparatus” ($21,306,822,050); “toys, games, and sporting goods” ($19,363,103,443); “apparel, textiles, nonwool or cotton” ($13,966,192,283); “other parts and accessories of vehicles” ($11,715,964,462); “computer accessories” ($11,659,017,578); “industrial machines” ($10,741,628,802); “household appliances” ($10,401,576,154); “telecommunications equipment” ($9,965,181,940); and “computers” ($9,715,440,762). The day before he departed for China, Trump posted a message about the trip on Truth Social. “I am very much looking forward to my trip to China, an amazing Country, with a Leader, President Xi, respected by all,” Trump said. But Trump’s own administration has issued reports condemning the actions of Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping’s regime. On Dec. 14, 2022, then-Sen. Marco Rubio testified before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom about China’s egregious violations of that freedom. “The Chinese Communist Party has been attacking religious freedom since its founding a century ago,” Rubio said. “Oppression is frankly in its DNA.” “Today,” Rubio said, “Beijing’s assault is more violent and systematic than ever. In Xinjiang, it has even amounted to genocide. Party agents are also targeting ethnic Chinese believers here in in the United States because they believe faith undermines the legitimacy of the Communist Party. This is a threat to American national security and basic human rights. We must do everything we can to counter this.” Last August, as this column has noted before, Rubio’s State Department repeated these claims in its human rights report on China. It cited China for “(g)enocide and crimes against humanity,” “serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom,” “restrictions on religious freedom,” “coerced abortions and forced sterilizations,” and “trafficking in persons including forced labor.” In March, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom called on the U.S. government to redesignate “China as a ‘country of particular concern,’ or CPC, for engaging in systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom.” “In 2025,” said the report, “China perpetuated particularly severe violations of religious freedom. Chinese authorities sought to exert complete control over religion through an extensive web of laws, regulations, and policies that do not conform to international human rights standards.” “Authorities continued to pursue the state’s coercive ‘sinicization of religion’ policy, which seeks to integrate the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) political ideology into every aspect of religious life and forcibly assimilate ethnic minorities, including through co-opting or prohibiting their unique religious traditions and destroying or modifying their houses of worship,” said the report. Xi is not respected by all and should be respected by no one. Nor should his regime be allowed to make trillions of dollars from trade with the United States. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

To mark the conclusion of National Police Week, the National Republican Senatorial Committee launched a new digital ad targeting Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, accusing him of supporting what it calls a “pro-crime” agenda. The ad argues that President Donald Trump and Senate Republicans have worked to counter policies the NRSC says Ossoff backs, including sanctuary jurisdictions, the elimination of cash bail, and the rollback of mandatory minimum criminal penalties, which contribute to his pro-crime stance. Among the issues highlighted is Ossoff’s position on the Laken Riley Act, legislation Congress passed after University of Georgia student Laken Riley was killed during a morning jog in Athens, Georgia. The law requires the detention and deportation of illegal immigrants who have committed prior crimes in the United States. According to the NRSC, Ossoff initially opposed the bill before later changing his position. The ad also claims Ossoff has supported efforts to reduce law enforcement resources, backed the release of criminals from prison, defended prosecutors Republicans describe as soft on crime, and supported ending mandatory minimum criminal punishments.  “Jon Ossoff wants to protect criminal illegals like Laken Riley’s killer from deportation and hamstring law enforcement’s ability to keep Georgians safe,” NRSC regional press secretary Nick Puglia said in a statement. “Ossoff puts criminal illegals first in D.C. and Georgians’ safety last back home.” The ad further credits Republicans with reducing violent crime through policies such as stricter immigration enforcement, increased law enforcement and national security spending, and National Guard deployments. “Thanks to Republicans, violent crime is at all‑time lows, and American communities are safer,” the ad states. The NRSC points to a Department of Homeland Security report released last June that found violent crime declined after the Trump administration implemented stricter immigration enforcement beginning in January 2025. DHS reported that between January and June 2025, gun assaults fell 21%, aggravated assaults declined 10%, sexual assaults dropped 10%, and carjackings decreased 24% compared with the same period the previous year. “Seventy percent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests are of illegal aliens who have been convicted or charged with a crime,” then-Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin said at the time. “These arrests and deportations of criminal illegal aliens are having a real impact on public safety.” The ad warns that the NRSC says such gains could be reversed if Ossoff wins reelection. “But Jon Ossoff wants to turn back the clock and bring back Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer’s pro‑crime agenda that vilifies law enforcement, denies them crucial resources, and prioritizes dangerous illegal immigrants,” the ad continues. “America can’t afford another Democrat crime wave,” it concludes. “Reject Jon Ossoff, and stop the anti‑police agenda.”