Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: exile in happy valley
by Nicky Reid

“Mainstream shitlib hagiographers will tell you that FDR delivered us from the Fritz Langian sweatshops of the Gilded Ages on a silver platter. Don’t fucking believe it. The eight-hour workday and the five-day workweek are the bruised fruit of wildcatting anarchists and communists with guns, and the New Deal declawed them by federalizing the whole goddamn operation and turning thriving workplace democracies into corporate boards with labyrinthine bureaucracies and CEOs pulling down six figures without ever having to break a sweat.” (05/03/26)

https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/05/a-few-words-on-may-day-from-radical.html

Source: The Atlantic
by Adam Kirsch

“Americans have a long history of being hurried into war on false pretexts. The ‘yellow press’ encouraged a war fever in 1898 by blaming the sinking of the USS Maine on the Spanish, even though the Navy’s own expert said it was caused by an accidental explosion. The George W. Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein had connections to the 9/11 attacks and was building weapons of mass destruction, neither of which turned out to be true. But with the Iran war, as in so many other ways, Donald Trump has broken new ground. He is the first president to start a war without even bothering to lie to the public, because he simply didn’t care what the public thought.” (05/03/26)

https://archive.is/KCFf4

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Renaud Beauchard

“When things turned dystopian in March 2020, I was in the middle of a big life change which ultimately led me to create a business coaching families to grow their own chemical-free food. After a decade of international development consulting scouring the African continent to make Africans’ lives more connected to the global economy, and incidentally also more precarious, I had already been slowly seeking an escape route from the abstract world inhabited by the professional managerial class. Covid didn’t create my rupture with this world. It confirmed it.” (05/03/26)

https://brownstone.org/articles/how-covid-transformed-me-into-a-gardener-and-business-owner/

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
by Will Bunch

“From friendly grand juries to Jim Crow voting maps, the former Confederacy looks to save Trump’s autocratic ambitions.” (05/03/26)

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/trump-comey-prosecution-southern-grand-juries-20260503.html