“Members of the Los Angeles City Council would like a word or two — to ban. Last July, the council adopted a motion to prohibit two terms — a racial epithet and a slur against women — during the legally required public comment periods of their meetings. … you may loathe the words in question and never use them yourself. You may share the council’s desire to make public comment more civil and appropriate. You may believe Harris-Dawson and the other council members’ hearts are in the right place. But make no mistake: The council is effectively claiming the authority to ban any words it decides are inappropriate or offensive in the future.” (08/01/26)
“There is an important lawsuit being litigated in the Southern District of New York over the limits of free speech and academic freedom for faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Professor Tim Bakken, West Point’s longest-serving civilian law professor, is challenging new Trump Administration regulations that allegedly constitute unconstitutional prior restraints on academic publications and limit academic freedom and free speech. Professor Bakken has been a public critic of West Point’s leadership in public writing, including a report concerning alleged wrongdoing by senior West Point military officers. He is also the author of a book entitled The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military. The class action was filed on behalf of more than 100 civilian faculty members against West Point and several academy leaders, specifically challenging two policies issued in 2025.” (08/01/26)
“Complaining about the two-party system may be the last genuinely bipartisan activity in American life. It gets said at dinner tables and on cable panels, a beat before someone announces that what this country really needs is a third party. A new survey from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, fielded through YouGov in late June, confirms Americans overwhelmingly dislike our political system. But what it also found is that familiarity with possible reform options remains low. The survey suggests a way forward for negotiating this information gap and implementing reforms.” (07/31/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“There’s a creepy tweet going around by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recommending that parents feed their kids’ interests and schedules into ChatGPT so it can generate a daily custom-made bot podcast to listen to on their morning drive to school. Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch posted the viral reply, ‘What if you just talked to your children?’ Which is a crazy thing to have to say. But here we are. They’re trying to make us worse. These billionaire generative AI corporations reap profits by making us worse human beings. They want us to become less human. Less connected. Less creative. Less capable. Less wise. Less intelligent. They want to atrophy our ability to speak, write, research, relate, draw, make music, and cultivate intimate connections with the most important people in our lives, and then sell those things back to us at the hands of some chatbot.” (08/01/26)
“Federalization leads medicine down a very bad path toward bureaucracy and away from competitive markets, which are the best hope to deliver quality at reasonable cost. Remember Covid? Remember President Ronald Reagan’s famous comment, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’?’ Bureaucrats helped us good and hard with Covid; now they want to help with women’s health. They make no pretense of ‘helping’ men good and hard, of course. To men, the program offers a medical segregation that is as medically unfair as it would be to medically segregate blacks along racial lines. Clearly, medical differences between women and men sometimes require totally different hands-on care; but medical differences, like breast cancer rates, is not what is being discussed. Political and economic power is under discussion.” (08/01/26)
“Consider a hypothetical tenant in Phoenix, Arizona, asking an AI assistant whether allowing five-story mixed-use apartments near a light-rail stop would make housing cheaper before she writes to her city council member. The answer cites the City of Phoenix Planning and Development Department, notes displacement, and summarizes the mayor’s affordability set-aside. Nothing feels coercive. The tenant remains free to disagree. Yet a practical risk is already present. The AI has chosen which sources to retrieve, which follow-up questions to encourage, which frame feels neutral—and which serious alternatives will take extra effort to find. By the time she reaches the public meeting, the tenant may have concluded that the boundaries of the argument are settled.” (07/31/26)
“As we move toward the end of the Trump era, we need to reckon with the changes his administration has wrought in the American system of government. The most significant is the enormous concentration of power, not just in the executive branch as a whole, but in the office of the president. Any successor administration, Republican or Democratic, will inherit these powers, and will have to decide how it wants to define the limits of executive authority in the future.” (07/31/26)
“The city commission of Emporia, Kansas, has endured countless hours of public criticism. What it could not endure was a few seconds of clapping. At its July 22 meeting, citizens contested a proposed data center, briefly applauding between public comments as one speaker left the microphone and another approached. Commissioners sometimes ignored the applause and other times warned the audience to stop. But their warnings soon expanded to cover even more muted reactions like finger-snapping and a woman in the back of the room silently waving her hands. When high school physics teacher Lux Claridge clapped five times for a speaker, a commissioner told officers to remove the next person who clapped. But instead of waiting for another round of applause, officers immediately ordered Claridge to leave.” (07/31/26)
“I’ve spent 30 years as a fiduciary, which mostly means telling people why they can’t do the thing they want to do. When a trustee wants to make a distribution the trust document doesn’t authorize, there are two honest answers. Amend the document, or don’t make the distribution. What you don’t do is rewrite the beneficiary definition until the distribution qualifies, book it, and hope nobody opens the file for 20 years. About 14 states took the third option on college tuition. Somebody finally opened the file. On July 24, Judge David Dugan of the Southern District of Illinois struck down the state’s in-state tuition rules, its RISE Act, and its DREAM Act as unconstitutional for illegal [sic] aliens. A day earlier, the Justice Department sued Colorado, the 14th such case. Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Nebraska have already surrendered; suits are pending against a dozen more, including California and Virginia.” (08/01/26)
“There are many ways to measure the health of a country. One way is growth of gross domestic product. Another is economic productivity. But there’s a less conventional measure worth watching: Do the world’s most talented and ambitious people want to immigrate here? Throughout most of America’s history, the answer has been an emphatic yes. Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists and strivers from around the world have chosen the United States because they believed they could build something, discover something or start a business while making a better life in this country. We should worry about the day when that is no longer true. Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems determined to make that day arrive sooner rather than later.” (07/31/26)
