Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Washington Monthly
by Roger Kerson

“The 20th-century auto titan was all in on antisemitism, until falling car sales forced his hand. Now Tesla is tanking, X is in turmoil, and its South African-born mogul is doubling down.” (07/31/25)

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/07/31/hate-speech/

Source: The Dispatch
by Ilya Somin

“The Trump administration has attempted to make sweeping use of emergency powers in the areas of immigration, trade, and domestic use of the military. In each case, President Donald Trump has tried to use powers legally reserved for extreme exigencies — invasion, war, grave threats to national security — to address essentially normal political challenges. … In litigation over all three of its major invocations of emergency powers — immigration, tariffs, and domestic use of the military — the administration has also invoked the ‘political questions’ doctrine, which holds that some issues are off limits to the judiciary, because they have been left to the political process. The Supreme Court’s precedent here is an often incoherent mess. But there is no general principle holding that invocations of emergency powers are exempt from judicial scrutiny.” (07/31/25)

https://thedispatch.com/article/not-everything-is-an-emergency/

Source: Persuasion
by Yascha Mounk

“The history of the world will be split into a pre-AI and a post-AI era. Too many people are still in denial.” (07/31/25)

https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-peculiar-persistence-of-the-ai

Source: CounterPunch
by Miles Whitney

“Trump’s executive order regarding sex and gender identifies ‘gender ideology’ as an existential threat to America …. Notably, the executive order did not directly identify transgender people, or others who do not fit into Trump’s tidy definition of two immutable sexes determined at conception, themselves as threats. Most likely because the regime denies that such people exist. At best, as reflected in the language of another charming executive order, such a person is simply deluded, a liar, a believer in a demonstrably false idea or group of ideas, someone who lacks honor. What the regime says it is trying to erase is an idea.” (07/31/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/31/transgender-citizens-the-non-existent-existential-threat-to-america/

Source: EconLog
by Jon Murphy

Let’s … say we want to create a new city: Murphopolis. Murphopolis will be somewhere in the vast Arizona desert. Some 46,000 people journey to the middle of that desert and, among the spiders, scorpions, and blazing heat, start building a town. In 2025, the benefits of a sewer system are well-known. In the construction of this city, eminent domain is not necessary: property contracts can be written to incorporate the necessary easements and connections. … Moving to the more general problem of government, many advocates for government actions simply point to the action being used in the past to solve some problem and then conclude that the same action is appropriate. But the time and conditions of the current problem are not the same as in the past.” (07/31/25)

https://www.econlib.org/eminent-domain-and-the-problem-of-government