Source: Quillette
by Corey Walker
“Online audiences have become increasingly radicalised by predatory algorithms pushing conspiratorial, schizophrenic narratives and content creators are rewarded for feeding into them.” (10/28/25)
Source: TomDispatch
by Rebecca Gordon
“I first heard the expression ‘strategic incompetence’ in El Salvador in December 1993. Along with my partner and two friends, I’d been recruited to do some electoral training there. We were working with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, a coalition of leftist parties that had led a long-running guerrilla war against a series of U.S.-backed autocratic governments. I’d visited El Salvador once before, during the 1989 elections, when armed troops were overseeing the voting. I remembered watching as people deposited their ballots into transparent plastic bags, their choices clearly visible to the world — and to the soldiers. (Not exactly what you’d call a ‘free and fair’ election.) A new round of national elections was scheduled for early 1994, and, for the first time, instead of boycotting it, the FMLN was running its own candidates.” (10/28/25)
https://tomdispatch.com/trump-is-bad-at-running-the-country/
Source: The Jolly Libertarian
by Marco den Ouden
“In 1951 an extraordinary book was published. Its author was a relatively unknown man who worked on the waterfront of San Francisco as a longshoreman. He had reportedly gone blind at the age of seven and recovered his sight at age fifteen. Fearful of losing his sight again, he became a voracious reader. In fact, he became an autodidact, a self-taught man reading on a wide variety of topics. …. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements was published in March 1951. The book that would make Eric Hoffer famous. A reclusive man who lived modestly, Hoffer continued to work as a longshoreman, reading and writing in his spare time. And he became known as the Longshoreman Philosopher.” (10/28/25)
https://jollylibertarian.blogspot.com/2025/10/who-are-true-believers.html
Source: Town Hall
by Stephen Moore
“Politicians in Washington have the shortest memories. Maybe that’s why they so seldom learn from their sometimes catastrophic mistakes. It was less than 20 years ago that the U.S. economy was flattened by the mortgage and banking crisis. Anyone remember? The experts said that the odds were tiny that the housing market could crash; that the federal housing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would never need a bailout; that mortgage-backed securities were as good as gold. Then they crashed overnight spectacularly and devastatingly. Banks made riskier and riskier housing loans to subprime borrowers — and the government covered the bets with essentially 100% loan guarantees. … One reason depositors and investors were paying no attention to the big banks’ high-risk lending strategy is that everything was guaranteed.” (10/28/25)
https://townhall.com/columnists/stephenmoore/2025/10/28/deposit-insurance-for-billionaires-n2665549
Source: EconLog
by Jon Murphy
“Shortly after the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs were announced back in April, Janet Bufton wrote an excellent post about whether or not Adam Smith would approve of those so-called ‘reciprocal’ tariffs. I also riffed off her post here. In both cases, we argued these tariffs were not compliant with Smith’s argument and thus he would not have approved of them. Six months later, we have four pieces of good evidence that U.S. tariffs would not have met with Smith’s approval.” (10/28/25)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/adam-smith-would-not-approve-the-evidence
Source: Beat the Press
by Dean Baker
“It’s understandable that Trump’s team likes to pretend that his random ramblings and angry acts of revenge are all part of some grand strategy, but why would anyone not on his payroll play along with this obvious absurdity? To anyone paying attention, it should be pretty clear that Donald Trump is clueless about the economy. Just to take an obvious example to make the point: Trump has repeatedly promised to lower drug prices by 800, 900, or even 1,500%. As he rightly says, no one thought it was possible. It wouldn’t be a big deal that he got confused once or twice and forgot that you can’t lower prices by more than 100%, unless you envision drug companies paying people to use their drugs. But Trump has done this repeatedly, over many months.” (10/28/25)
https://cepr.net/publications/trumponomics-the-economics-of-crazy/
Source: Law & Liberty
by Nathan Smith
“Economists have an old habit of assuming that people are strictly selfish and rational, maximizing their ‘utility.’ In theory, everyone is ‘Max U,’ as Deirdre McCloskey mockingly puts it. The assumption can be useful — people often do act selfishly, and belief in market efficiency sometimes clarifies moral choices — but it is false as a generalization. Virtue and capitalism need each other, and have long quietly collaborated to improve the human condition. That truth is kept quiet, ironically, by economists themselves. They understand capitalism better than most, and generally defend it, but Max U is a moral blind spot that causes them to underrate capitalism ethically, and teach others to do so. With friends like these, capitalism hardly needs enemies.” (10/28/25)
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison
“The death toll from the president’s murder spree has now risen to 57 with the latest attacks …. The illegal attacks are coming faster now as the spree approaches the end of its second month. First there were a few strikes spread out over weeks, and now there are several attacks each week and sometimes multiple strikes in one day. There have now been at least thirteen U.S. military strikes on civilians at sea. The administration shows no sign of slowing the pace of the senseless killing.” (10/28/25)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/the-presidents-murder-spree-claims
Source: Niskanen Center
by Gerasimos Tsourapas
“In early September 2025, United States immigration authorities carried out the largest workplace enforcement action in the history of the Department of Homeland Security. At a Hyundai–LG electric vehicle battery plant in Savannah, Georgia, agents detained nearly 500 workers. More than 300 were South Korean nationals employed by subcontractors or on temporary business visas. Images of handcuffed workers being led to buses circulated widely, prompting Seoul to dispatch diplomats and announce a charter plane to bring its citizens home. … For Washington, the operation was presented as the routine application of immigration law. For Seoul, it was a national crisis that required emergency diplomacy.” (10/28/25)
https://www.niskanencenter.org/when-trumps-immigration-raids-become-foreign-policy
Source: Fox News
by Corey Brooks
“‘Pastor, have you ever read Thomas Sowell on this high school?’ Elaine asked me as we stood outside Paul Laurence Dunbar High School — or Dunbar, for short — in Northwest Washington, D.C. I told her that was why I made a point of making Dunbar a stop on my Walk Across America to revive merit and the American Dream. I had asked her, a mother of two kids in the school, what it was like, and her verdict was sadly negative. ‘Sowell said Dunbar was an example of excellence back in the day. What happened?’ From 1870 to 1955, this all-Black public school drew ambitious families from across the country — parents relocating just to enroll their kids for the best shot at life. Sowell described these families as ‘aspirational,’ meaning they sought to overcome any obstacles.” (10/28/25)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/i-walk-across-america-thomas-sowells-warning-still-echoes-today