“Is it just me, or does it seem like Pope Leo XIV won’t stop talking about religion? He’s all ‘the Gospel says this’ and ‘Jesus taught us that’ – dude, we get it, you’re head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. But does that really make you an expert? As our Catholic Vice President JD Vance, who has a book coming out on his conversion to Catholicism, said, ‘I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.’ Exactly. Vance has been a Catholic since 2019, the year Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, so I’d take his warning seriously, Pope. He’s seven years deep into the Catholic faith – you don’t wanna mess with him. He’s part of the new Catholicism, the one that’s afraid to say ‘transubstantiation’ because it sounds woke and has ‘trans’ in it.” (04/15/26)
“Turkish police have ordered the arrest of scores of people accused of either praising or spreading fake news about the country’s recent school shootings online. At least nine people died in a school shooting in the southern province of Kahramanmaras on Wednesday, and on Tuesday, a former student opened fire at a high school in the southeastern district of Siverek, injuring 16.” (04/16/26)
“Orbán’s loss doesn’t mean the authoritarian impulse is spent in Hungary or anywhere else. Magyar is a former Fidesz insider, and the system Orbán built doesn’t disappear the morning after an election. Brussels and the new Magyar government shouldn’t underestimate the resistance of the Orbán system and its entrenched members across government institutions. The Kremlin loses an important ally inside the EU. Ukraine may finally see Hungary’s veto on EU support lifted. These are real consequences worth acknowledging. All this said, the lesson here isn’t really about Hungary. It’s about what happens when a population finally gets tired of being told the looting is governance and the propaganda is journalism.” (04/15/26)
“Every country, from the best to the worst, has a ruling party that can (and does) try some undemocratic things, but is too afraid to try others. Democracy versus dictatorship is a spectrum, not a binary choice. … But some of the people demanding that Orban critics apologize don’t seem to just be mincing words. They seem to be implicitly denying the spectrum concept of democratic backsliding at all, arguing that if it’s possible to lose an election, past concerns must have been misplaced and retroactively embarrassing for the concern-holder.” (04/15/26)
“President Trump’s second term has been nothing if not a laundry list of broken promises. But few Americans have suffered more from Trump’s deceptions than the nation’s struggling farmers. … Trump captured 62 percent of the rural vote in 2024, 4 points better than his performance in 2020, based largely on promises to lavish prosperity (and federal money) on small farms on the verge of collapse. Like so many Trump promises, the help never arrived.” (04/15/26)
“The California Supreme Court has disbarred John Eastman, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, over his involvement in the so-called fake electors scheme to overturn the 2020 election. The state’s high court ruled Wednesday that Eastman, 65, is disbarred from practicing law in California and must pay a $5,000 sanction to the State Bar of California Client Security Fund, a discretionary fund that reimburses clients for financial losses caused by dishonest conduct or theft by their lawyers. Eastman is considered one of the main architects of the plan to replace legitimate electors of President Joe Biden with fakes supporting Trump in several battleground states, including Georgia where he was charged in the scheme.” (04/16/26)
“Elie Wiesel is often credited with the observation that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Indifference is clearly not morally neutral. To respond with indifference when love and concern are due is a sign that something has gone wrong — whether it’s a voluntary fault and thus immoral, or something involuntary and inculpable. But indifference in such cases is never something to praise or, worse, advocate for. Yet that is just what Vance consistently does. He is not alone in this. A growing current on the right has explicitly reframed indifference as a virtue — denouncing empathy toward immigrants, refugees, and foreign peoples as ‘suicidal,’ manipulative, or simply naive.” (04/15/26)
