Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog
by Aaron Ross Powell

“Let a thousand mutually suspicious communities bloom.” (05/13/26)

https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/3mlqxgn3hzk2i

Source: The UnPopulist
by Mohammed Nosseir

“The Western right’s smearing of the entire religion and the left’s romanticization of it are both misguided.” (05/13/26)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/political-islam-is-rank-populism

Source: Law & Liberty
by Jeffrey Bilbro

“Whenever a new technology comes down the pike, some people identify themselves as agents who can benefit from it, and others see themselves as victims who will be harmed by it. Agents get excited about how AI will enable them to get work done more easily and quickly. They can generate code, whip out targeted ad campaigns, analyze data, cheat on quizzes, respond to customer inquiries, or eliminate military targets. Victims fear that AI will empower the systems that already constrain or oppress them. They will suffer from software bugs or security vulnerabilities, be inundated with AI slop, get surveilled by governments and corporations, have their relationships infected by mistrust, get lost in labyrinthine bureaucracies, or be eliminated (perhaps erroneously) by an autonomous drone. This distinction helps make sense of the wildly varying responses to AI technologies: Agents generate utopian hype narratives while victims succumb to doomer fears.” (05/13/26)

https://lawliberty.org/forum/the-decline-and-fall-of-human-agency/

Source: Liberalism.org
by Radley Balko

“At the state and local level, police officers (and government employees in general) are protected from lawsuits by a policy called qualified immunity. The policy isn’t in the Constitution, nor was it ever enacted by Congress. It’s a legal fiction that the U.S. Supreme Court invented from whole cloth. In fact, qualified immunity’s very existence cuts against the clear intent of the Fourteenth Amendment. … We commonly hear that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ — you can’t defend yourself from criminal charges by claiming that you didn’t know that what you did was illegal. Qualified immunity not only provides an excuse for law enforcement officers when they violate someone’s constitutional rights, it’s an incentive for police agencies to keep their officers ignorant of how courts expect officers to treat members of the public.” (04/13/26)

https://www.liberalism.org/p/federal-courts-local-wrongs-how-qualified-immunity-gave-us-lawless-law-enforcement

Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal

“People find many reasons to reject liberty. Fear. Envy. Ignorance. Tradition. In fact, there are probably as many reasons to reject liberty as there are people on this planet. Those whose careers depend on violating liberty will use any excuse they are handed. If they use envy, they can impose socialism and raise taxes on the rich. They can make people believe they have a ‘right’ to things that others must work to provide them. It can never be your right to enslave others! Using ignorance, political criminals lie and hope that too few notice to do anything about it. It’s how we get things like ‘assault weapon’ rules, carbon credits, and the war on (some) drugs. They also combine ignorance with envy, so those cheated in the brain department will demand to be coddled to dumb down society so that no one feels stupid.” (05/13/26)

https://www.easternnewmexiconews.com/story/2026/05/13/voices/opinion-no-good-reason-to-reject-liberty/233414.html

Source: CounterPunch
by John Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

“Call it what it is: a heist. The corruption, cronyism, and self-dealing that now define the American government—under Donald Trump in particular—amount to a slow-motion stick-up carried out in broad daylight. But here’s the trick: it’s a heist hidden behind spectacle. The Trump administration is flooding the stage with noise so ‘we the people’ don’t notice what’s happening behind the curtain. We’re being manipulated into watching the wrong thing. The distractions are part of the plan to rob us blind. You don’t have to look far to see how the con works. Nowhere is the hustle more obvious than in how the presidency itself is being used.” (05/13/26)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/13/the-trump-hustle-distraction-deception-and-the-heist-of-the-american-economy/