“The conservative-populist movement that Trump summoned has dominated the American right for a decade, but when he leaves office three years hence, either something new will take its place or a period of incoherence will commence. Right-wingers in recent years have propounded several alternatives: Catholic ‘integralism,’ which seems unable to garner much support in our secular, erstwhile Protestant nation; ‘post-liberalism,’ an empty signifier and mere negation; white nationalism, a dead end; CEO-style monarchism, which Trumpism has in effect only further delegitimized (hence the ‘No Kings’ protests); and so on. This essay proposes and adumbrates a different ideology, which I believe could not only glue together a winning coalition but also guide responsible governance: right-liberalism.” (04/20/26)
Source: Grist
by Rebecca Egan McCarthy & Kate Yoder
“The future looked dire for renewable energy in the United States last spring. Republicans in Congress started gutting the Inflation Reduction Act, forcing its generous tax credits for wind and solar into an early retirement. The Interior Department then rolled out a series of byzantine regulations aimed at restricting clean energy on federal land. Some feared those regulations would curb wind and solar development on private land, too. Although these restrictions do seem to have hindered the wind industry, there are some signs that its fortunes are changing. But a year later, solar continues to boom.” (04/20/26)
“For nearly a century, mainstream American cinema has regurgitated, devoured, and re-regurgitated the same foaming popcorn mythology in which it is presented as basic common sense that America is always the good guy and that every foreigner with a funny accent who stands in his way is a totally otherized human bowling pin who exists for the sole purpose of being obliterated again and again and again in a voluptuous bacchanalia of endless machine gun barrages and bottomless stacks of bloodless corpses. Your average American is raised on a steady diet of this schlock with a side of paint-by-the-numbers public school history teachers who can turn any warzone into a beige labyrinth of names and dates to memorize for next week’s ludoviko scantron test.” (04/19/26)
“Last week, in Nebraska, Noemi Guzman tried to kidnap a 3-year-old from Walmart. Horrific bodycam footage from the police shows her holding a knife over the boy, slashing him, before cops shot her dead. Two years prior, a judge let Guzman off for a raft of felony charges, including arson and assault, by reason of insanity. One of the most horrific crimes this decade happened last August, when, on Charlotte North Carolina’s transit system, a mentally ill man named Decarlos Brown allegedly stabbed to death Iryna Zarutska, a complete stranger and Ukrainian refugee. Brown suffers from schizophrenia, yet was let go for previous crimes. His mother said she tried to get him involuntarily committed but was refused.” (04/19/26)
“New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is pushing for ‘$30 in ’30,’ to raise the city’s minimum from $17 today to $30/hour by the end of the decade. Supporters applaud lawmakers granting struggling workers a ‘living wage.’ The logic seems clear: Wage hikes boost incomes, making life more affordable. But although increases to the minimum wage help those lucky enough to keep their jobs, hours and benefits, they hurt many more.” (04/19/26)
“In late March, I sat in the gallery of the Supreme Court for the first time in my life. Throughout my 30 years of grassroots anti-poverty work, I’ve joined countless protests and vigils outside the Court. In 2018, I was even arrested and held in detention for praying on its palatial steps. Now, I was seated with a clear view of the nine justices of the nation’s highest court. I was there as a guest of immigrant rights lawyers, as their team made oral arguments in Noem v. Al Otro Lado, the most significant case on the right to asylum in decades. In February, the Kairos Center (the organization I direct) authored an interfaith amicus brief on that very case, alongside 31 denominations and organizations representing faith traditions practiced by billions worldwide. Those groups… joined together to declare that our societal obligation to provide for persecuted outsiders is a universally shared moral principle.” (04/20/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“My previous post provided an example of the use of past legal systems in understanding our present legal system: the logic of feud law applied to high tech patent litigation. There are others, some of which suggest changes we might want to make to our system, ideas we could steal.” (04/19/26)
“Are America’s top scientists being kidnapped or disappeared by a foreign adversary? Right-wing media are abuzz with speculation that 11 different individuals working on issues related to secret technology or the investigation of extraterrestrial life have been picked off one by one: murdered, kidnapped, disappeared. The stuff of The X-Files, in short: ‘The truth is out there,’ but shadowy forces don’t want you to know. After working its way through the conservative press and the online Right, this narrative got a major boost last week, when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the administration was looking into the matter. … Fortunately, this entire narrative appears to be, to put it gently, complete nonsense.” (04/19/26)
“Luis Hernandez, then 35, woke to a gray, hazy sky on Feb. 17, 2024. He opted for a warm sweater and cargo pants with pockets just big enough to hold his spare canister of oxygen, but he hoped he wouldn’t need it. It would be a big day out for him and his friends — the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, Calif., was hosting a special Pokemon Go event where some of the rarest Pokemon could be found. When the group arrived, they headed straight to the belly of the bowl, blanketed with bright green turf. Hernandez settled into a rhythm: Walk 50 feet. Pause for 30 minutes. Catch some Pokemon. Walk another 50 feet. Pause another 30 minutes. Catch some Pokemon. Walk another 50 feet. Pause another 30 minutes. When he started gasping for air, he sat down — on a chair if he was lucky, the turf if he was not.” (04/20/26)
