“Language is constantly evolving, and Donald Trump is a restless innovator. Three weeks ago, The Bulwark published a glossary of terms he had redefined in his war with Iran. The list included imminent, obliterate, and unconditional surrender. Since then, he has added more words and phrases to his lexicon. Here are some of the most creative.” (04/03/26)
“A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s admissions data collection for public universities in 17 states, delivering a major blow to his crackdown on the use of race in college admissions. The administration significantly expanded the scope of admissions information colleges must submit to the federal government after Trump issued an August memo directing the Education Department to do so. The move is a key part of a Trump administration effort to probe whether schools are discriminating against applicants based on race. But a group of Democratic attorneys general from 17 states sued in early March to block the data collection.” (04/04/26)
“Isonomia Quarterly readers have likely asked the following question: Why are Hayekian ideas so unpopular? Equality under the law and global federalism — two of Hayek’s most cogent ideals — are consequential from numerous perspectives and justified by many strong arguments. A dozen phrases pass through the mind — ‘The best arguments persuade,’ ‘The truth will out,’ ‘Survival of the fittest beliefs,’ ‘Truth emerges from the marketplace of ideas’ — to accost reality. Unfortunately, society is not a truth table, where the input of truth entails the output of further truths. Truth tables are constructs of logic, and reality is not beholden to the results of formal logic and its apparatuses.” (04/03/26)
“The President’s address to the nation was a tone-deaf sales pitch for more war, delivered on the first night of Passover. Civilian and military casualties are mounting across the region. Lives are being extinguished while triumphalist and violent rhetoric is offered as justification. War is being escalated in the name of peace, a contradiction that demands moral clarity, not political acceptance. Each life lost carries equal value. No nation’s suffering is expendable. No people exist as collateral.” (04/03/26)
“US federal agents have arrested the niece and grandniece of the late Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani after the Trump administration’s top diplomat, Marco Rubio, revoked their lawful permanent resident status, officials said on Saturday. ‘Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter are now in the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement,’ or ICE, the state department said in a statement. In his own statement on social media, Rubio, the US secretary of state, confirmed that the mother-daughter pair are ‘pending removal’ from the US, a development that came after the US and Israeli militaries began waging war on Iran in late February, in part citing an Iranian history of terrorism sponsorship.” (04/04/26)
“Since the founding generation, there has been a consistent and rational fear that the office of president was too powerful to be constrained by democratic institutions.” (04/03/26)
