Category: Opinion

Source: Law & Liberty
by Joshua T Katz

“Campus free speech sees little improvement in FIRE’s annual report.” (10/08/26)

https://lawliberty.org/some-college-grades-need-to-go-up/

Source: Persuasion
by James Bosworth

“Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, finished first in Sunday’s presidential election with 47 percent of the vote. He beat incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known universally as Lula—on 45 percent, while his right-wing Partido Liberal (PL) also dominated the votes for both houses of Congress. Brazilians will now head for a runoff election between the two men on October 25. Despite being a country where citizens say they are angry at the status quo and want change, Brazil just voted in favor of… rerunning essentially the same political fight it saw in both 2018 and 2022. The country’s politics, in other words, is stagnant.” (10/07/26)

https://www.persuasion.community/p/in-brazil-absolutely-nothing-changes

Source: Liberal Currents
by Holly Berkley Fletcher

“As the midterms approach, there has been much focus on how to break the Trump coalition. But one bloc is either written off as hopeless or folded into other categories, when it has long deserved its own strategy and approach. Without the support of white evangelicals, Donald Trump would have never become president and certainly would not have dominated our politics for a decade. And MAGA will never be defeated until liberals approach white evangelicals with a strategy focused on their distinctive characteristics.” (10/08/26)

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/you-cant-run-from-christian-nationalism/

Source: Expression
by Matthew Harwood

“A local school board in Minnesota has taken censorship to absurd heights. During the public comment period at Foley Public School Board meetings, concerned citizens are forbidden from saying not only the names of school staff and officials but even their titles. These revelations come from Blake and Katy DeMarais, concerned parents of a disabled and nonverbal special education student in the district. Over the summer, the parents complained that the district was failing to provide educational services to their son, only to be censored in a public meeting. … the Foley school board trampled on the DeMaraises’ First Amendment rights. When a school board opens a meeting to public comment, it can’t censor its constituents for criticizing school staff, much less simply naming them or mentioning their titles.” (10/07/26)

https://expression.fire.org/p/these-minnesota-parents-were-censored

Source: Informed Comment
by Alex Poppe

“As the midterms draw near, I’ve been thinking about the role art plays in catalyzing political change. On September 12, the documentary film NAZA, which interrogates the systems used by the Israel government to target and calculate Palestinian civilian casualities in Gaza, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival after receiving a 25-minute standing ovation.” (10/08/26)

https://www.juancole.com/2026/10/palestine-third-democratic.html

Source: Show-Me Institute
by Avery Frank

“Private electricity grids, also known as consumer-regulated electricity (CRE), are a free-market policy idea that allows private entities to meet the demand of new large-load users like data centers entirely off the ratepayer-supported grid. Private electricity grids can benefit average ratepayers, developers, and government institutions like the Missouri Public Service Commission (MPSC) by shifting some of the risk and need for new electricity onto private investors, while also giving those investors the benefit of reduced regulation and quicker speed to operation. This has been an idea I have been beating the drum on for a long time. But recently, private electricity grids have started to be used in practice.” (10/07/26)

https://showmeinstitute.org/article/economy/private-electricity-grids-meeting-the-data-center-moment/

Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead

“Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government. But what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force wasn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector? What if Trump, with the backing of a self-serving industry eager to automate government, is instead helping to build a government that no longer needs as many human beings to operate it? Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are disappearing from the government payroll at the same time that Washington is racing to automate the work they once performed with artificial intelligence. … What we are watching unfold is the construction of a government that requires fewer human beings to carry out its will, fewer human beings to question its orders, and fewer human beings to stand in the way when efficiency collides with legality, morality or constitutional restraint.” (10/07/26)

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/ai_authoritarianism_a_government_without_constitutional_brakes

Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Richard M Ebeling

“Americans celebrate the 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. They hail being a free people. They thank veterans and active military personnel for their service in keeping America free. But are we any more free in terms of the pervasive presence of government oversight, control, regulation, and planning of virtually every corner of everyday life than those Germans thought of themselves as free in the 1930s? Yes, we are not a dictatorship, but if both major political parties advocate and insist upon the same political paternalism, with the only difference being the forms and extent of it, how far is it, in fact, from living in a one-party state?” (10/07/26)

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/they-thought-they-were-free-are-we/

Source: Foreign Policy
by Anjali Dayal

“U.S. President Donald Trump stood in front of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22 and made two explicit threats. He threatened to use military force in Latin America in service of U.S. interests, and he threatened annihilation for both the Iranian government and the Iranian people. The actions he proposed contravene both the international laws prohibiting war and the international humanitarian law that protects civilians in conflict. … the laws of war, themselves part of U.S. law, prohibit indiscriminate threats against a civilian population. Accordingly, Trump’s public deliberations about who to invade and who to annihilate were themselves crimes, committed in full view of thousands of diplomats and heads of state. … Many in the United States and around the world are desperate to see Trump and his top advisors held accountable for all this lawlessness but are at a loss for how to do so.” (10/07/26)

https://archive.is/omjwb

Source: Semafor
by David Weigel

“Democrats are feeling very good about next month’s elections, and the jockeying is already underway about which faction made it happen. Progressives hope to power a Democratic victory in the House that sees them pick up more seats — and influence — in the next Congress. When ‘abundance’ critics went after the movement, they were trying to win the argument then as well as the argument of the future. They saw a coalition of techies and liberals who were trying to prevent what they wanted: A move to the left and away from deep-pocketed donors. They view ‘abundists’ taking credit for Mamdani’s victory as opportunists trying to deny democratic socialists a major governing success. But the non-socialists have made a modicum of impact, even if ‘abundance’ has faded from Democrats’ lexicon.” (10/07/26)

https://www.semafor.com/article/10/07/2026/is-abundance-really-dead