Source: The Volokh Conspiracy
by Jacob Mchangama & Jeff Kosseff

“While governments around the world have imposed speech restrictions to fight misinformation and hate speech, they also have attempted to curb free speech for a less controversial reason: protecting children. But many of these restrictions stem from vague, unspecified, or speculative harms and corral wide swaths of speech that do not harm children. Censoring speech in the name of protecting children is not a terribly new phenomenon, especially in authoritarian countries. In 2012, for instance, Russia’s parliament passed a law allowing the country’s media censorship agency to unilaterally blacklist websites and take them offline, without any court approval. The lawmakers’ justification was protecting children from online harm, but civil liberties groups correctly predicted that the government would use these powers to curb far more speech. In recent years, such efforts have moved beyond authoritarian countries and taken hold in Western democracies.” (05/06/26)

https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/06/restricting-speech-by-purportedly-protecting-children/

Source: Common Dreams
by Jeffrey C Isaac

“On May 6, 1866, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago today, Thaddeus Stevens, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and the leading Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, rose to introduce the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution on the floor of the. Stevens, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was also co-chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction set up by Congress, in late 1865, to promote a radical Reconstruction, a program advanced over the consistent objections of President Andrew Johnson. … The Amendment passed in the House on June 13, by a vote of 138 in favor and 36 opposed, having passed in the Senate five days earlier, on June 8, by a vote of 33 in favor and 11 opposed. In other words, roughly a quarter of US Representatives and Senators, serving in houses of Congress that did not include representatives from the seceded Confederate states, voted against the amendment.” (05/06/26)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/history-of-14th-amendment

Source: Foreign Policy
by Will Walldorf

“Is the U.S.-Iran conflict becoming a forever war? At first glance, it doesn’t look that way. Rising oil and gas prices, growing congressional pressure around the War Powers Resolution, and scant public support are putting pressure on U.S. President Donald Trump to end the conflict soon. But if history is any guide, there’s a real chance the war continues to drag on. Why? Because a few core elements that have turned past conflicts into forever wars are present in this one, too. Those three components are high resolve by the weak, erosion of cost-benefit thinking by the strong, and weak institutional constraints to warfighting on at least one side. Combined, they mean resisting the expansion of the Iran conflict into a forever war won’t be easy.” (05/06/26)

https://archive.is/jWiWc

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger

“In the midst of massive death and destruction inflicted by the U.S. government in Iran, Venezuela, the Caribbean, and here economically in the United States — and, before that, in Iraq and Afghanistan — and, before that, in Vietnam and Korea, it is easy to forget that the U.S. government is still inflicting economic destruction here at home with its immigration police state. There are, of course, countless horror stories of human suffering that the Trump administration has inflicted on people with its ruthless and brutal immigration police state, especially with ICE and Border Patrol raids, masked kidnappings, squalid detention centers, and forced deportations.” (05/06/26)

https://www.fff.org/2026/05/06/the-immigration-police-states-infliction-of-harm/

Source: Libertarian Institute
by Ted Snider

“Trump’s team is crafting a narrative that provides them with an off ramp to a war they have lost that tells the story of a war they have won. The U.S. had no legal reason for its war on Iran, and what publicly stated reasons they had were forever shifting. But there seem to have been four key goals: 1. Regime change. 2. Removing Iran’s ballistic missile program. 3. Severing Iran from its forward deterrent network, or proxies. 4. Zero enrichment of uranium. … The rest is fiction: a narrative fiction crafted by Trump’s team to give them a way to tell an angry and betrayed public that they won the war when none of the goals – and all of the nightmares — have been achieved.” (05/06/26)

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/trumps-self-serving-narrative-crashes-against-the-reality-of-war/

Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob

“‘It is in my memory banks,’ Eric Peters wrote last month, referencing an android on an old Star Trek episode, ‘the long-ago time when GM was a car company.’ Yes, in the “long-ago” they ‘made an almost infinite variety of vehicles to suit almost any need and budget, all of them designed and engineered to free their owners. Some were utilitarian. Others were beautiful. Some were arrogant. None were parenting. They were made by adults who respected other adults. What became of that GM?’ The answer? Government.” (05/06/26)

https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/05/05/killer-cars-for-your-safety/