Source: Gideon’s Substack
by Noah Millman

“There’s nothing weird or exceptional about an organization making a catastrophic mistake and hiring a liar and a fraud, nor is there anything surprising about such failures being in part due to poor or nonexistent vetting. These kinds of people’s particular skill is inspiring extreme credulousness, and then manipulating people to maintain that credulousness in the face of mountains of disconfirming evidence. They might make use of ideological or identity-based affinity to manipulate you—Bernie Madoff famously defrauded numerous Jewish organizations by playing on precisely those kinds of sentiments—but if that’s not an option they’ll use something else. It’s not a unique feature of politics or academia, nor of left-wing spaces. I mean, look who’s president. The unavoidable moment of reckoning for most organizations, though, comes when it becomes clear that their own mission is being damaged.” (08/06/26)

https://gideons.substack.com/p/confidence-men-are-everywhere

Source: Reason
by Damon Root

“On June 8, 1789, James Madison announced the batch of proposed constitutional amendments that would eventually become enshrined as the Bill of Rights. One of Madison’s would-be amendments, however, did not make the final cut, as it failed in the Senate after passing the House of Representatives. Here is what that lost Madisonian amendment to the Constitution would have said: ‘No state shall violate the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases.’ Put differently, Madison wanted several parts of the Bill of Rights to apply equally against the federal government and the states. Why? ‘Because it must be admitted, on all hands,’ Madison said, ‘that the state governments are as liable to attack these invaluable privileges as the general [national] government is, and therefore ought to be as cautiously guarded against.'” (08/06/26)

https://reason.com/2026/08/06/why-james-madison-wanted-greater-limits-on-states-rights/

Source: Town Hall
by Derek Hunter

“Only 25 years after the September 11 attacks on the United States, a major political party has fallen in with people who view that attack as deserved and the attackers as righteous. If it were parody, no one would accept it because good parody is based in truth and the truth is this fall of the Democratic Party is not believable. Sure, they’ve expressed sympathies for enemies of the United States before, but always for political advantage only; now they appear to mean it or are so afraid of it they won’t say anything to the contrary. Democrats have gone from being wrong to being an existential threat to the country. I have not seen a single Democrat candidate for office this election cycle praise the United States or even say anything that could be perceived as positive about it. Seriously, have you?” (08/06/26)

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2026/08/06/time-for-the-few-remaining-sensible-democrats-to-put-up-or-shut-up-n2680766

Source: The Daily Economy
by Jeffery L Degner

“Rio 2016, like many ambitious projects, combined political cronyism and weak market discipline. Ordinary Brazilians are still paying the bill.” (08/06/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/what-the-olympics-really-cost-rios-10-year-legacy-of-debt-and-destruction/