“Piers Morgan, in a February podcast, accused his guest, ‘trans activist’ Blossom Brown, of ‘race-baiting.’ Brown replied, ‘Black women cannot be racist to white women.’ Brown then added this inability to be racist to white women extended to Morgan: ‘How am I racist to you? I’m Black. I can’t be racist to you.’ Brown also accused Morgan of lacking ‘the intellectual capacity to understand’ this position. Ryan Clark is a black ESPN host.” (05/29/25)
“A major assertion by the Trump Administration is that tariffs are paid for by foreigners. And, indeed, under very specific circumstances, a tariff may be paid in part or in whole by a foreign producer: * if the importing country is a monopsony (or has significant market power), * if the exporting country has price power, and * if there is no foreign retaliation,
then a sufficiently small tariff could induce the exporting country to lower prices in order to retain market share. … At least on paper, the US seems to fit the description. We are one of the largest countries in international trade. … So, at least in theory, there should be some part of a US tariff that is eaten by the foreign producer. At yet, that is not the case in reality.” (05/29/25)
“Last Thursday, May 22, a coalition named Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza kicked off a 40-day fast outside the United Nations in Manhattan in protest against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Military veterans and allies pledged to fast for 40 days on only 250 calories per day, the amount recently reported as what the residents of Gaza are enduring. The fasters are demanding: Full humanitarian aid to Gaza under U.N. authority, and No more U.S. weapons to Israel. Seven people are fasting from May 22 to June 30 outside the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where they are present from 9:30 am to 3:00 pm, Mondays to Fridays. Many others are fasting around the U.S. and beyond for as many days as they can. The fast is organized by Veterans For Peace along with over 40 cosponsoring organizations.” (05/29/25)
“The verbal tic of President Donald Trump that has always most fascinated me is his predilection for the word ‘beautiful.’ North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ‘wrote me beautiful letters and we fell in love.’ On the cover of Time magazine, Kamala Harris looked ‘like the most beautiful actress ever to live’ (this quickly devolved into an anti-compliment). On Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order titled ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.’ Golf courses are beautiful, but so are White House telephones, farming, fighter jets, notes from the Chinese president, chocolate cake, the Supreme Court, Harambe the gorilla and Christians. Do you know who doesn’t need 30 dolls? ‘A beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old.’ Is this a vocabulary deficit? A real estate developer buzzword, such as ‘spacious’ or ‘walk-in pantry?'” (05/29/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Why was the mainstream press so eager to accept the official findings of the Warren Commission, no matter how ludicrous they were (e.g., the infamous ‘magic-bullet theory’), rather than assign fierce and competent investigative reporters to ferret out the truth behind the assassination? My answer: Fear. After all, why have big, powerful law firms capitulated to President Trump’s demands? Why have enormous universities done the same? In my opinion, the reason is fear. They know that with the overwhelming power of the presidency, Trump has the ability to do very bad things to them. … The mainstream press back in 1963 knew that Lyndon Johnson, who automatically became president on the death of JFK, was a vicious man, one who would not hesitate to use the overwhelming power of the presidency and the federal government to smash anyone he wanted, including any national news media outlet.” (05/29/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by William L Anderson
“While Austrian economists from Ludwig von Mises to Henry Hazlitt to Murray Rothbard have dealt with the various fallacies that John Maynard Keynes laid out in The General Theory and other works — and they are legion — only Rothbard chose to deal with the philosophical/moral aspects of Keynes’s viewpoints in Keynes, the Man, and he finds that these viewpoints indeed influenced his economic thinking.” (05/29/25)
“Colorful career criminal Willie Sutton once may (or may not) have been asked why he robbed banks. ‘Because that is where the money is,’ he supposedly replied. A similar principle may explain the first foreign trip of President Donald J. Trump’s second term, which was not to a traditional U.S. ally in Europe. Rather, he set off to visit the capitals of the Gulf hydrocarbon potentates Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In royal palaces there, he feasted and was offered hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in American companies and opportunities for the Trump Organization, too. … Strikingly missing, however, was a side trip to Israel or any evident consultations with the extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, Israel was frozen out and blindsided by Trump’s pronouncements.” (05/29/25)
“Immigration laws are restrictions on what citizens are allowed to do. From high-profile workplace raids to audits and digital surveillance, employers, whether citizens or not, face intense scrutiny and potential disruption from immigration authorities. Nor are businesses and business owners the only people who have to worry, or indeed the ones who should be the most worried. … Trump is certainly trying to take things further than they have been taken before, especially in attempting to throw habeas corpus out the door entirely. But the basic logic was always there. Immigration enforcement has long terrorized communities of citizens and permanent residents in order to find the handful of undocumented immigrants they were authorized to deport.” (05/29/25)
“The movie The Big Short — dramatizing the reckless behavior in the banking and mortgage industries that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis — captures much of Wall Street’s misconduct but overlooks a central player in the collapse: the federal government, specifically through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These two government-created and government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) encouraged lenders to issue risky home loans by effectively making taxpayers cosign the mortgages. … After the bubble inevitably burst, Fannie and Freddie were placed under conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The conservatorship imposed rules aimed at preventing future taxpayer-funded bailouts and protecting the economy from government-fueled market distortions. Now President Donald Trump’s appointee to lead that agency, Bill Pulte, is considering ending this conservatorship without addressing the core structural flaw that fueled the problem in the first place: implicit government guarantees backing all Fannie and Freddie mortgages.” (05/29/25)
“Among its many innovations, The New Yorker turned the humble biographical sketch into ‘The Reporter at Large,’ arresting prose that revealed what little-known people do and why their work matters. … In Who Is Government?, Michael Lewis assembles a roster of celebrated authors to write profiles shining a light on obscure federal employees — advancing a simple thesis that these unsung officials are the backbone of America. At a time when President Donald Trump is determined to shrink the federal workforce, investigating how these officials work and the worth of what they do is a potentially valuable project. Unfortunately, while all but one of the profiles are informative and elegantly etched, the book contributes little to a fair assessment of the government employees’ overall performance.” (05/29/25)
