Source: The American Prospect
by Dylan Gyauch-Lewis
“With right-wing courts tearing up American democracy, the Strait of Hormuz blocked for two months and counting, and the price of oil heading toward $150 per barrel, the centrist political think tank Third Way is laser-focused on the most important political issue in the country: the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Specifically, they are incensed that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been campaigning with Piker. The attacks center on Piker’s anti-Israel positions and what Third Way characterizes as antisemitism. Third Way’s president Jonathan Cowan began the campaign with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, and the group sent a questionnaire to El-Sayed asking for specific, enumerated instances of agreement and disagreement with Piker. One could imagine a good-faith debate about whether Piker has crossed the line on occasion. He spends hours a day streaming, and that profession tends to select for people with inflammatory positions.” (05/12/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Phillip W Magness
“Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s In Covid’s Wake amply documents the consequences of pandemic-era policy and its destructive implications for public health.” (05/11/26)
Source: Chris’s Substack
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
“[O]ne implication of [Matt] Zwolinski’s work is that there is no single, coherent libertarian project to speak of, that libertarianism is a Big Tent, which includes many, sometimes conflicting projects offering substantially different interpretations of the world and starkly different proposals on how to identify and resolve the social problems they encounter. How adjacent these proposals are to libertarianism is a key issue here because when the definition or even description of a term becomes so fluid that it encompasses virtually everything, it ultimately signifies nothing. This isn’t about asking those in libertarian and adjacent spaces to hand in their club cards. It’s a question of how ‘adjacency’ can morph into ideological complicity and outright support for the very power structures that most libertarians have sought to dismantle.” (05/11/26)
“Social Desirability Bias aside, ‘Low-skilled workers are terrible’ is absolute lunacy. Most obviously, we’d starve without low-skilled workers, because they grow almost all of our food. The vast majority of construction and infrastructure workers lack college degrees, and without them, we’d be living in tents. If we’re lucky, because tents are made by low-skilled workers, too. … if the economy had to lose either Jeff Bezos or his driver, we’d be better off with Bezos. But the economy is, fortunately, not a Trolley Problem. We almost never choose between Bezos and his driver, or between any high-skilled worker and any low-skilled worker.” (05/11/26)
“The president curtly rejected another Iranian proposal yesterday: ‘President Trump on Sunday rejected the latest offer from Iran to end the war with the United States, declaring that it was ‘TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE.” As many observers now acknowledge, the U.S. has lost the war. Trump cannot bring himself to accept that he is responsible for that defeat. He appears to have believed that he could win a great victory over Iran in a matter of days, and he can’t cope with the reality of his monumental failure. … the U.S. should jump at the chance to extricate itself from the mess it has created before the damage to the global economy gets far worse. It may not exactly be a return to the status quo ante, but that option isn’t available. This is probably as good of an offer as the U.S. is likely to get.” (05/11/26)
“If Enlightenment thinkers and Hayek are correct, then the government’s projection of power intended to achieve order will crowd out and potentially destroy emergent orders. In this case, what are presumed to be the means of bringing about order are actually a source of disorder. In addition, the association of order with top-down state control creates a false sense of overconfidence in technocratic solutions, encouraging more, rather than less, government intervention. Failures are not viewed as issues with the abuse of human reason, but rather as failures to plan well enough. … Liberal empires do not stay liberal.” (05/11/26)
“The United States has long operated under a seductive strategic fantasy. Remove the leader of an adversary organization, whether a drug cartel, a terrorist group, or a sovereign state, and that organization will collapse, enabling American interests to fill the resulting vacuum. However, decades of academic literature, hard empirical data from Mexico’s drug war, and the lived consequences of America’s post 9/11 targeted killing campaigns all tell a damning story many in the DC ruling class refuse to acknowledge. Decapitation strategies are, at best, tactically satisfying and strategically hollow. At worst, they escalate violence, radicalize successors, and produce precisely the instability they were designed to prevent. The ongoing U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran represents the most ambitious test of this doctrine in history. The results so far are deeply troubling.” (05/11/26)
“The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizens the right to petition their government. Petitioning government is part of our DNA. We benefited from British institutions of direct democracy that can be traced back to the Magna Carta. In the New England colonies direct democracy was the foundation for government, citizens could petition their government in town meetings and annual election ballots. At the national level, petitioning Congress peaked in the 19th century but has declined since then. In the 19th century disenfranchised citizens, including women before suffrage, free blacks, and indigenous peoples were able to petition the federal government to address issues and enact reforms that Congress was unwilling to initiate. The decline in direct democracy over the past century is due to several factors.” (05/11/26)
“When U.S. President Donald Trump reentered office last year, European leaders felt that familiar sense of dread. And indeed, Trump launched back into his first-term habit of harping on Europe for everything from defense spending to trade imbalances. Vice President J.D. Vance turned the knife even deeper with a speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, blaming Europe for its own demise for things such as government impingement upon free speech and uncontrolled immigration. European leaders, for their part, initially responded to these provocations with a familiar mix of panic, unease, and warnings that the trans-Atlantic relationship was doomed. But Trump’s latest threats against European countries — in response to their refusal to go all in on Washington’s war with Iran — don’t seem to be eliciting the same response from the continent as before.” (05/11/26)
