“A firestorm erupted last week when the British professor and commentator Eric Kaufmann made a bold claim: Identifying as transgender is ‘in free fall among the young.’ … last week I analyzed data from the nationally representative Household Pulse survey, which asked directly about transgender identity. … The Household Pulse data showed a decline in trans identification among 18- to 22-year-olds in 2024, but I was cautious about drawing conclusions from it as the decline appeared only in a limited time period …. Then, over the weekend, I found it—a nationally representative survey that asked the same question about transgender identification from 2021 to 2024. It also asked separately about identifying as nonbinary. The data are from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), fielded each year by YouGov and administered by Tufts University. They show that identifying as transgender really is in free fall among the young in the United States.” (10/22/25)
“Israel’s Supreme Court on Thursday pushed back the hearing of a petition filed by an organisation representing international media outlets in Israel and the Palestinian territories, demanding independent access for journalists to Gaza. Since the Gaza war began in October 2023, Israeli authorities have prevented foreign journalists from entering the devastated territory, taking only a handful of reporters inside on tightly controlled visits alongside its troops. … While Israel has prevented foreign reporters from entering Gaza, its forces have killed more than 210 Palestinian journalists in the territory, Antoine Bernard, RSF’s director for advocacy and assistance, said on Tuesday.” (10/23/25)
“Nicotine pouches — small, smokeless packets tucked under the lip — deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. They eliminate the tar, carbon monoxide, and carcinogens that make cigarettes so deadly. The logic of harm reduction couldn’t be clearer: if smokers can get nicotine without smoke, millions of lives could be saved. Sweden has already proven the point. Through widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches, the country has cut daily smoking to about 5 percent, the lowest rate in Europe. Lung-cancer deaths are less than half the continental average. This ‘Swedish Experience’ shows that when adults are given safer options, they switch voluntarily — no prohibition required. In the United States, however, the FDA’s tobacco division has turned this logic on its head.” (10/23/25)
“U.S. President Donald Trump has frequently talked about taking over Greenland and Canada, but it’s unclear if he was actually serious about it. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, U.S. leaders from the Founding Fathers onward cultivated a myth of a limitless frontier—the idea that constant expansion could solve internal problems. But limitlessness feels less possible today than it did two centuries ago. What does that then mean for Trump’s ‘America First’ model?” (10/22/25)
“Social media giant Reddit has launched a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Perplexity, alleging that it illegally scraped user posts to train its AI model, marking the latest data-rights clash between content owners and the AI industry. The complaint filed in New York federal court on Wednesday also named three defendants, which Reddit says helped Perplexity collect its data: Lithuanian data scraper Oxylabs, ‘former Russian botnet’ AWMProxy, and Texas startup SerpApi. Reddit alleged that the three smaller entities were able to extract its copyrighted content ‘by masking their identities, hiding their locations and disguising their web scrapers as regular people.'” (10/23/25)
“Tucker Carlson Speaks at Turning Point, Prompting Cheers and Controversy; More Evidence of Israeli Atrocities Amid Fragile Ceasefire; Tommy Robinson Submits to Re-Education in Israel.” (10/22/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“According to an article on the leftist website commondreams.org, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a self-labeled socialist, is being applauded for his defense of a $30 minimum wage. The Big Apple’s minimum wage is currently at $16.50. What? How in the world can anyone be applauding someone who wants a minimum wage of only $30 per hour? Why isn’t Mamdani instead proposing a minimum wage of $100 per hour? As a member of the New York State Assembly, he himself receives $142,000 year. Why does he settle for $30 for workers?” (10/23/25)
Source: The Peaceful Revolutionist
by David S D’Amato
“Revisiting founding-era figures like Alexander Hamilton makes it clear that today’s language around the relationship between the state and capital is deeply confused to the point of being backwards. In the early U.S., state power and capital accumulation were co-constitutive and mutually-dependent, never opposed as phenomena in theory or practice. Our current deeply problematic language, which often pretends that the state reins in big business, is among the most laughable and ahistorical features of our discourse. During the early republic, the champions of big business were those of big government and vice versa, and federal power was shored up very explicitly to favor commercial elites.” (10/22/25)
