“The Right keeps waiting for the Weather Underground to shoot at President Trump. Not literally, not the specific organization — Bill Ayers is a comfortably retired professor in his 80s — but the type: the black-masked antifa supersoldier; the DSA chapter secretary with a tote bag full of Marx, oat milk, and bolt cutters; the blue-haired radical with a ‘Fuck ICE’ bicep tattoo; the leader of a trans gun club called ‘Trigger Warning.’ But we keep getting a very different type of would-be assassin: not the antifa militant from central casting, nor even the Proud Boy thug — but the deranged centrist. … ‘Centrist terrorism’ is, of course, not a serious analytical category. Yet neither, in these cases, is the bogeyman trumpeted on the Right as ‘radical leftist terrorism.'” (04/28/26)
“‘Debate’ almost never corresponds to mappable arguments. The simplest ‘solve debate’ proposal is the argument map. Some technology helps people decompose arguments into premises and conclusions, then lets skeptics point out where the premises are wrong, or where the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise. But almost no real argument works that way. Even in the best-case scenario, where an argument almost works that way, it doesn’t really work that way. Suppose you’re having an argument about COVID lockdowns. Someone says ‘lockdowns hurt the economy.’ Now you’re stuck in a giant fight about whether that claim is true (answer: compared to the counterfactual, certain kinds of lockdown measures hurt certain economic indicators in certain situations). But even if it is true, so what? What conclusion can you draw from that premise?” (04/28/26)
“German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said that America is being ‘humiliated’ by Iran: ‘The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skillful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result,’ he said. The only issue with this argument is that Donald Trump is such an erratic lunatic that arguably no real negotiation has ever taken place and may not actually be possible. Principally what Trump has done is post random nonsense online. Among Tuesday’s posts was one in which he claimed that ‘Iran has just informed us that they are in a ‘State of Collapse.’ They want us to ‘Open the Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible.’ This did not happen. It is what it is, and it’s not going to get better so long as Trump remains president.” (04/29/26)
“Last weekend my Institute for Peace and Prosperity hosted another conference here on the Texas Gulf Coast. Not only did we have a full house attending the conference – which is in a way the most important thing – but in this era of profound disappointment and disillusionment, we struck a note of optimism thankfully due to our wonderful line-up of speakers. The main topic of the conference, titled ‘War is Back on the Menu,’ was of course the disastrous decision by the Trump Administration to launch an unprovoked war against Iran – both last June and again on February 28th.” (04/28/26)
“‘Gun control’ had chance after chance after chance to prove it could thwart Allen’s plans. And. It. Didn’t. Whoa … violent criminals don’t obey ‘gun control’ laws and private venue gun rules any more than they obey other kinds of laws and rules? Whodathunkit? It’s not that the laws and rules aren’t adequately enforced. The only way to reliably prevent Allen from traveling from LA to DC with guns would have been to force him to travel on foot and buck naked … after which he’d have almost certainly been able to buy a gun on the street if he wanted one.” (04/28/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Wanjiru Njoya
“Supreme Court rulings are significant not only for their decision on who wins, but also for their reasoning. A victory for common sense may sometimes be pyrrhic if it benefits the party who wins the dispute but relies on reasoning that erodes individual liberty in the longer term. In that context, while the outcome in the recent case of Chiles v. Salazar, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (decided March 31, 2026) was welcomed, the emphasis it placed on ‘viewpoint discrimination’ is unfortunate. It is one more step down the road to conceptualizing free speech as an application of the non-discrimination principle, rather than as an emanation of individual liberty.” (04/28/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Wendy McElroy
“When an entire country is called racist, the accusation has at least two parts: one, racism is built into the foundational structure or institutions of the nation, and, two, it is a defining belief of the population.” (04/28/26)
“The Republican Party’s victory lap over no tax on tips and no tax on overtime rings hollow, considering persistent public frustration with the cost of living. It doesn’t help that Trump’s tariff war and the war in Iran are further fueling rising prices. And voter frustration isn’t just about recent price changes. It’s also about the lasting damage from the inflation surge of 2021–2022, which pushed the overall price level permanently higher. There’s one cure, however, that Washington continues to miss. Inflation is increasingly driven by unsustainable budget policy, and politicians on both sides of the aisle keep pouring gasoline on the fiscal fire.” (04/28/26)
“Predicting Donald Trump’s political demise has typically been a fool’s errand. Some of my smartest friends have declared his definitive fall from grace again and again, only to be proven wrong each and every time. … And yet, I have come to the tentative conclusion that this time may, finally, be different. For the past decade, Trump has dominated American politics like no other president in living memory; now, signs of that era coming to a close are suddenly multiplying. It is, as Saturday’s appalling assassination attempt on the president reminds us, impossible to see around the next historical corner. But it sure seems as though Trump’s hold over the country is finally slipping. This, to misquote Winston Churchill, no longer feels like the end of the beginning; it may be the beginning of the end.” (04/28/26)
“One mark of a maturing democracy is a high proportion of independent voters, unbeholden to organized factions and attuned to unifying a civic community on shared hopes. In the Middle East, such sentiments have risen in recent years, from Iraq to Lebanon and perhaps soon in a newly liberated Syria. But in Gaza? After two years of devastating war? On Saturday, in an election held for the first time anywhere in Gaza in nearly two decades, voters showed a surprising degree of autonomy from the two major Palestinian parties. Balloting was held in only one city, Deir al-Balah, with more than 70,000 people, due to every other city in Gaza being flattened during fighting after the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. And voting was only for 15 seats in the municipal council.” (04/27/26)
