Here’s the latest on the brutal muzzling of free speech in America:

A new Cato Institute/​YouGov national survey of 2,000 Americans finds that 62% of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive. This is up from 2017 when 58% agreed with this statement.

That’s an increase of . . . 4 percent! Clearly George Floyd and the forces of political correctness have wreaked havoc on American culture.

On a more serious note, polls like this would be a lot more useful if they tried to dive into what people are afraid to say. If it’s something like “Black people are lazy” then I’d say the increase to 62 percent means that Americans are increasingly wary of expressing racist ideas in public, and that’s a good thing. On the other hand, if it’s something like “Class-based affirmative action is a good idea” then we might have a real problem. So which is it?

This is a picture of my mother’s cherry tomato crop this year. She’s been having trouble with her tomatoes, but these are all volunteers. They just popped up on their own and she left them alone. And look at them! Perfect and juicy and delicious. Which just goes to show that sometimes laziness is rewarded.

The president of the United States is deploying federal troops in order to gin up violence that he thinks will help his reelection.

Am I missing anything important here?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 21. Sweden can’t quite seem to get below one death per million. The US is continuing its inexorable upward trajectory. It’s gonna be a long summer.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Bryan Smith/ZUMA

Ghislaine Maxwell is the alleged accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, the alleged billionaire sex trafficker who allegedly died by suicide in jail last year. Maxwell herself is now in jail charged with conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, transportation and conspiracy to transport minors with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity, and two counts of perjury. In other words, being the “madam” for Epstein’s sex ring. So what does Donald Trump think of Maxwell?

Trump to Ghislaine Maxwell, accused of helping Epstein molest children: “I wish her well.” pic.twitter.com/aI3aOtkfJ6

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) July 21, 2020

This seems inexplicable. Why would Trump “wish her well” on national TV?

Answer: because he can’t help himself. One of Trump’s iron personal laws is that if you are nice to him, he is nice to you. If you attack him, he attacks you. It’s the transactional deal he makes with everyone in the world. In Maxwell’s case, she has been nice to Trump and has never attacked him, so Trump has no choice but to be nice in return. It’s practically built into his DNA. It’s really as simple as that. Political considerations just don’t enter into it.

This picture was taken a couple of years ago on a trip to Big Bear. The ski runs there are converted into mountain bike runs in the summer, and apparently these two guys are swapping tales of their last ride.

Former FBI Director James Comey writes today that while it might be legal for federal agents to invade Portland, it’s also really stupid. After spelling out exactly how stupid it is, he asks a question:

So it’s dumb and self-defeating on many levels for the feds to engage the way they have in Portland. No sensible law enforcement leader would approach it this way. Which begs a question: Is televised conflict the goal?

What is there to say except “duh”? Of course that’s the goal. This whole thing is purely a campaign contrivance. Trump is trying to run on the idea that our (Democratic) cities are in flames and only a (Republican) president can save them. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough violence to keep that notion alive, so he decided to manufacture some.

Of course, it’s turning out to bite him in the ass thanks to the genuinely brilliant strategy of the “Portland moms.” The video that most people are seeing shows a bunch of scary-looking Trump thugs on the one hand and crowds of middle-class moms singing lullabyes on the other (skip to 1:18 in the video below):

Trump is now threatening to send federal agents into Chicago, but if the folks in Chicago are smart enough to adopt the same strategy, Trump is going to get nothing for his efforts.

Joe Biden plans to announce today a new caregiving program, part three of his four-part “Build Back Better” plan:

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s plan includes measures to expand care for children, the elderly and the disabled. Some of the boldest proposals — such as providing free universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds and creating tax credits to help pay for child care — come as the needs of parents struggling to balance caring for their children while working have been thrown into sharp relief by the COVID-19 pandemic and as many schools are opting against in-person instruction in the fall.

….Biden would pay for ongoing costs in the overall package in part by rolling back some of President Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and by raising taxes on the wealthy. The cost of the expanded caregiving — $775 billion over a decade — would be paid by rolling back tax loopholes on real estate investors with incomes over $400,000 and making the wealthy pay all the taxes they owe, according to the campaign. A senior Biden campaign advisor said the efforts to make sure the wealthy comply with tax laws alone could raise “hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Making the wealthy “pay all the taxes they owe” is usually similar to “waste, fraud, and abuse” in the annals of smoke and mirrors, but these days I’m willing to think more highly of it. Republicans have diligently cut back on IRS enforcement of the rich for so many years that there really is some low-hanging fruit to be had simply by beefing up the auditing of high-income taxpayers:

Larry Summers estimates that simply by returning to the state of affairs in 2011, the IRS could raise an additional $50 billion per year from the rich. Tighten things even further and perhaps that could go as high as $75 or $100 billion.

I read a lot about how “COVID-19 is changing everything,” and I’m skeptical of most of it. Once we get a handle on the virus, I suspect that we will almost all go back to our old habits. Still, there are clearly some things that COVID-19 has shined a very bright spotlight on, and childcare is one of them. It’s been a problem for a long time, but COVID-19 has made it a problem for a lot more people—and, crucially, that includes middle-class suburbanites, not just the poor. Biden’s plan is a good chance to see if people are more willing to support a national caregiving plan after a year of living with the virus and having their kids home from school.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 20. Argentina is showing worrisomely persistent growth. The United States is continuing to grow very slowly.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

The EU has finally agreed on a financial rescue plan that involves rich countries raising money to help out poor countries:

Leaders ultimately agreed on a €750 billion recovery plan. Of that, €390 billion will be offered in grants and the rest will come in the form of loans. That is down from €500 billion recently proposed by Brussels.

Don’t get too excited yet, though. The real fireworks are yet to come as this deal starts going through the approval process at the national level. Some countries will approve it quickly but there are bound to be a few holdouts—and it seems likely that at least one of the holdouts will take things to the very last second and then either approve or disapprove by a tiny margin. That’s the EU for you.