Source: Quillette
by John Lloyd
“The new European commitment to defence and Russia’s unshakeable wish to control Ukraine have revived an awareness that war is something with which comfortable and relatively wealthy states may still have to live.” (03/27/25)
Source: The Bulwark
by Will Saletan
“Donald Trump has a simple word that sums up his foreign policy. The word is ‘cards.’ Trump believes that might makes right. He admires aggressors and dictators. He despises victims like Ukraine, ‘shithole’ countries like Haiti, and peaceful neighbors like Canada. But ‘cards’ captures the larger dynamics of Trump’s worldview. In a card game, you can help or hurt other players by choosing which cards to play. In previous European conflicts, American presidents played our nation’s cards to defeat or contain aggressors. Trump plays America’s cards for the opposite purpose: to exploit the weak.” (03/27/25)
Source: Independent Institute
by Randall G Holcombe
“Those who have political power determine the rules and enforce them on the masses. Without rule of law, rules are subject to change, depending on the preferences of the politically powerful. Without rule of law, the rules constraining the masses do not apply to the powerful. One criticism sometimes leveled against term limits is that it takes time to learn how to do the job and that by term-limiting people out of office, citizens lose the benefit of the institutional knowledge the officeholders have accumulated. This argument has several shortcomings. The most significant problem with that argument is that the institutional knowledge officeholders acquire includes ways to use their power to evade the legal constraints designed to prevent the abuse of that power.” (03/26/25)
https://blog.independent.org/2025/03/26/term-limits-and-rule-of-law
Source: Town Hall
by Derek Hunter
“The weaponization of government was probably the hallmark of the administration of Joe Biden. OK, the weaponization of government and senile, incoherent ramblings were the hallmarks. While the senile ramblings are gone, the infrastructure of that weaponization remains fully entrenched in agencies across the federal government. President Donald Trump needs to remove any and everyone involved in the effort to not only use the power of government against him for political purposes, but against any American. Weaponization of government is more than just filing bogus charges or creating new laws under which prosecutions can happen, it involves government creating flaming hoops through which Americans have to jump to open or expand a business, or simply do business with the government itself.” (03/27/25)
Source: Reason
by Matthew Petti
“Respect for government secrecy is apparently a virtue — which would make intrepid reporting a vice. Could the Pentagon Papers have been reported today? How about the secret National Security Agency mass surveillance programs leaked by Edward Snowden? Many mainstream journalists made it clear this week that they would avoid exposing such scandals, or only do so in order to push the government to be more careful with its secrets. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein quipped in his newsletter that those reporters are acting as ‘self-appointed counterintelligence officers’ and shirking their ‘duty to their client, the public.’ They’re also acting against their own self-interest.” (03/26/25)
https://reason.com/2025/03/26/its-not-journalists-job-to-protect-government-secrets/
Source: Consent Factory, Inc.
by CJ Hopkins
“The War on Whatever is not meant to be won.
It is meant to be continuous, which it is. Like the never-ending war in Orwell’s 1984, it is waged by the empire against its own subjects, but not only to keep the structure of society intact, also, in our case, to transform society into a neo-totalitarian global-capitalist dystopia. Are you not familiar with the War on Whatever? Well, OK, you remember the War on Terror. … Of course you do. Who could forget that? Remember when the National Security Agency had no choice but to set up a covert ‘Terrorist Surveillance Program’ to spy on Americans, or else ‘the terrorists would have won?’ Or how about the TSA’s ‘anti-terror’ crotch searches, which are still in effect after over twenty years?” (03/26/25)
Source: The UnPopulist
by Walter Olson
“A new presidential memo is meant to instill fear in any firm that dares to represent his political adversaries.” (03/26/25)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/trump-is-going-after-the-independence
Source: In These Times
by Jehad Abusalim
“When Israel was established in the Nakba of 1948, it was built on top of 78% of historic Palestine, destroying more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages and forcefully displacing more than 750,000 people. But one small strip of land remained beyond the Israeli conquest. It was just a fraction of what had been taken by Zionist militias, but this small territory of 140 square miles — the Gaza Strip — would emerge not only as a site of resistance to Zionism, but as a force that would challenge colonialism, imperialism and apartheid both globally and locally. It is, as Palestinian storyteller Mahmoud Darwish would write in the poem ‘Silence for Gaza,’ translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon, equal to ‘the history of an entire homeland, because it is more ugly, impoverished, miserable and vicious in the eyes of enemies.'” (03/26/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/palestine-israel-genocide-resistance-zionism
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“The 9/11 attacks provided the U.S. government with one of the greatest opportunities in U.S. history to destroy the freedom of the American people. Declaring a ‘war on terrorism,’ federal officials seized upon the crisis to exercise omnipotent powers, purportedly to keep the nation ‘safe’ from the terrorists who were supposedly hell-bent on coming to get us. In the process, the war-on-terrorism racket became as effective in destroying liberty as the war-on-communism racket had done throughout the Cold War. With the war on terrorism, U.S. officials don’t have to bother complying with constitutional restraints and the restrictions in the Bill of Rights.” (03/26/25)
https://www.fff.org/2025/03/26/tesla-and-terrorism-nonsense/
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Gary Chartier
“In a court filing supporting the decision to deport [Mahmoud Khalil], the administration maintained that his ‘presence or activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.’ Obviously, this can’t mean that he was physically impeding the formulation or implementation of foreign policy. He threatened, if he did, to bring about ‘serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States’ because what he did had the potential to change people’s minds. He was targeted because of the anticipated impact of his actual (and potential) expressive activity. … Rubio and other defenders of the administration’s position might argue for the legitimacy of Khalil’s deportation by arguing that, as a non-citizen, he’s not protected by the First Amendment. But the Constitution’s language makes no reference to citizens.” (03/26/25)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-first-amendment-protects-mahmoud-khalil