Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Ever since the 1960s, when conservatives became convinced that the procedural protections in the Bill of Rights were nothing more than constitutional “technicalities” designed to let guilty people go free, conservatives have shown a deep hatred for civil liberties. The conservative antipathy toward civil liberties is now manifesting itself in President Trump’s war on illegal immigration. One of the best examples of this phenomenon involve the Venezuelan immigrants that Trump officials have renditioned to El Salvador pursuant to an agreement that Trump entered into with Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele.” (04/24/25)
“It seems remarkable that seemingly antisemitic protests by undergraduates, such as those at my own university of Northwestern, could threaten the biomedical research funding of its medical school. But the structure of civil rights laws as applied to universities has long allowed the federal government to cut off funding to the entire university based on the wrongful actions of particular units or departments. Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. ” (04/24/25)
“It was typical of Joe Biden’s presidency that, when faced with a difficult problem, he would take the cynical approach of finding a scapegoat to blame while making a promise he never intended to keep. His response to the housing affordability crisis last year was a textbook case: Blame ‘rent-gouging’ landlords and greedy realtors, make the false promise that his administration would build 2 million new homes via more deficit spending, and hope nobody asks questions — a safe bet, considering the incurious media that surrounded him. ‘Folks are tired of being played for suckers and I’m tired of letting them be played for suckers,’ Biden said in a campaign speech hammering his scapegoats last year. Having promised to lower housing costs during his State of the Union address earlier in the spring, Biden’s fiery rhetoric showed he had not the faintest idea of how to solve the problem.” (04/23/25)
“Recently, I took a trip down memory lane, to examine some columns I wrote about the U.S.-China relationship at the beginning of the first Trump administration. Two in particular stuck out for me: one on how the United States should not spend significant financial or military resources to compete with China for influence in the developing world, but should focus on our own capacities, and a second one about how Trump’s laziness and incompetence might make it possible for America to avoid war with China, because we’d wind up surrendering supremacy without fighting. … The second Trump administration has vastly exceeded the first in its incompetence and also, despite the blizzard of executive actions, on the laziness front …. Does that mean my 2017 take is also even more true than ever?” (04/24/25)
“As the world experiences significant geopolitical changes, political blocs like the European Union have a unique opportunity to chart a new path. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the European Union and its twenty-seven member states have delivered nearly $155 billion in financial, military, humanitarian, and refugee assistance to Ukraine. Of that aid sent to Ukraine, the combined military support from the EU and its member states is estimated at €49.6 billion ($53 billion). This represented a transatlantic initiative to draw Russia into a protracted conflict in Ukraine through proxy warfare. However, this Western-backed proxy war appears to have fallen short, as Russia continues to make incremental gains on the battlefield and now seems positioned to preside over a de facto east-west partition of the country.” (04/24/25)
Source: TomDispatch
by Mattea Kramer & Sean Fogler
“The United States has been in the throes of a mental health and overdose crisis so severe it has spanned five presidential administrations and been classified as an official state of emergency in three of them. No one knows exactly how this emergency will play out during the current Trumpian cocktail of uncertainty, fear, and cuts to social services, but charts of the recent turbulence of the stock market suggest a relevant visual: imagine the nervous systems of millions of already struggling Americans, along with millions more who are being pushed to the limits of what they can handle, all experiencing deep emotional crashes, briefly recovering, only to collapse again into new lows.” (04/24/25)
“I support investments in domestic manufacturing. From a negotiation standpoint, it seems unwise to completely depend on foreign trade for strategic and necessary goods, especially when the US government could probably create and maintain the ability to manufacture them domestically for a reasonable price. Then again, you’d think the US government could create and maintain rail lines for a reasonable price. But it can’t. More importantly, industrial policy isn’t the same thing as ‘reshoring.’ I don’t know how many bottom-half men the US can profitably employ. After all, most economists agree that automation reduced US manufacturing employment far more than outsourcing. If the GOP were really doing either smart industrial policy or ‘reshoring,’ you’d think this would be the first thing they’d estimate.” (04/24/25)
“A graduate school colleague told me that her subfield of linguistics was more valid as science than the subfield some other students were working in. Her metric was that the findings in her subfield were more counterintuitive, as opposed to applying terminology to things we basically know are true already. I didn’t like it. My work was commonly (mis-)associated with the kind she was dissing. … However, her valuation of the counterintuitive was also correct. I have carried her lesson with me since. It’s important to describe things and to give them careful labels. But the real magic is figuring out workings of the world that we would not have expected. Motion is matter’s default state rather than stasis. English, Polish, Persian, and Hindi began as the same grandfather language. Tomatoes are fruits. Betty Boop was originally a dog.” (04/24/25)
