“There is a difference between leverage and lunacy. To wit: asking the world’s most elite and secretive special operations force to brainstorm ways to ‘attack’ an island three times the size of Texas populated by roughly 56,000 people, most of whom already host and love American troops, is lunacy. Yet here we are. President Trump has reportedly tasked the U.S. military with providing ‘options’ regarding Greenland — specifically requesting that the Joint Special Operations Command develop potential military scenarios. The implication — left vague but unmistakable — is that where diplomacy, money, and basic common sense have failed, force might somehow accomplish Trump’s longstanding fixation on acquiring the world’s largest island from Denmark, a NATO ally. If true, Trump’s request doesn’t merely reflect a misunderstanding of geopolitics.” (01/14/26)
“My theory is this: Sometime over the holidays, someone got to Donald Trump and told him he would lose the midterm elections badly if he did not offer something to the public to deal with affordability concerns. The traditional policy playbook for such things on the conservative side would either do nothing or make things actively worse. So this search for an affordability agenda has led Trump into the waiting arms of progressive populism, sort of. The result has been … strange. Over the past couple of weeks, Trump has called for banning corporate investors from purchasing homes. He has directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities to lower mortgage interest rates. He has insisted on a one-year cap on credit card interest rates to 10 percent, and endorsed a bipartisan bill to inject competition into credit card markets to reduce excessive swipe fees merchants pay.” (01/15/25)
“Facts mattered to the man who told us ‘facts don’t matter.’ Ideas, principles, arguments — these mattered, too. Which is probably what I will remember most about Scott Adams, who died yesterday.” (01/14/26)
“I’ve previously discussed surprising results around tolerance for hypothetical controversial speakers, which we assess by asking whether students would allow those speakers on campus, including the fact that men are substantially more tolerant — so much so, in fact, that men are often more tolerant of their political enemies than women are of their own allies. These results have left me wondering what, if anything, can be done to make people more tolerant. One possible answer is education. One would hope, for instance, that studying philosophy teaches people to engage in open debate and meet ideas they disagree with using rational argument rather than censorship. But is that true? That question isn’t easy to definitively answer using our data, but one way to approach an answer is by looking at which majors have students who are unusually tolerant.” (01/14/26)
“Whatever debilitating brain parasite burrowed into the gray matter of American politics over the last decade-plus has resulted in some astonishing transformations. One of the biggest has been the reshaping of the once nominally pro-capitalist Republican party into a populist party hostile to free markets. Under President Donald Trump, the GOP increasingly favors the whims of the president and his cronies over the results of voluntary interactions among millions of buyers, producers, and sellers. Most recently, we see this in the form of Trump’s announced intentions to ban some real estate investors from purchasing single-family homes and his proposed cap on credit card interest rates. … as many points of disagreement spark fiery clashes, economics isn’t really a point of contention between the dominant factions of the two main parties. Trump’s Republicans agree with the ‘opposition’ progressive Democrats that the government should be running the economy.” (01/14/26)
“Trying to solve crime with authoritarian government, more laws, and stricter enforcement is like trying to keep someone healthy by stuffing them in a coffin and burying them alive. Yet, this is the first move politicians make when they see a problem. Turning to government and its laws is a sign your society has failed, and the unfortunate fact is that this only causes more crime in the long run. As the Chinese philosopher Laozi pointed out over 2,000 years ago, ‘The more numerous the laws, the more thieves and robbers there will be.’ … Whoever said it, it’s true. It has always been true, and it remains so today. Only, can we finally admit it’s not ‘corruption,’ but government working exactly as designed?” (01/14/26)
“The home of the Chicago-style hot dog does not have a single food cart licensed to sell hot dogs on city sidewalks, according to a Chicago Policy Center analysis of city data. It sounds unbelievable. But it’s true. This de facto ban speaks to a political structure and culture that still prioritizes who you know, rather than how well you serve customers. For decades, Chicago did not allow food carts of any kind. Brick-and-mortar restaurant interests lobbied city bureaucrats to keep street vendors from legally operating. Meanwhile, vendors were still out selling sliced fruit, tamales and other street food illicitly across the city. … After community pressure, the city created a new license for food carts in 2015. … But nearly a decade later, there are just 14 licensed food carts of any kind in Chicago. Compare that with New York, home to 7,000 licensed food cart vendors.” (01/14/26)
“I don’t know that I’m 100 percent ready to agree with Leighton Woodhouse that ‘the hysterical pussy hats were right,’ but I am very much convinced that the anti-federalists were, and that that fact ultimately is more consequential. One of the arguments put forward to excuse or minimize the aggression — and the brutality — of ICE’s campaign in Minneapolis is that federal agents cannot rely on the cooperation of state and local authorities …. So (goes this argument) rather than ask the local police to intervene when, e.g., protesters partly block a street or otherwise inconvenience federal agents, ICE agents really have no choice but to take aggressive action on their own, and that such action is justified by its necessity. Like so much of what one hears from apologists for Donald Trump and his administration, this is a fundamentally un-American point of view, one that misunderstands the nature of our constitutional order.” (01/14/26)
“[T]he United States, long the world’s leading industrial power, has become dependent on the goodwill of a strategic rival for materials central to its economy and its defense. That dependence did not arise because rare earth minerals are scarce. They are not. Nor did it arise because China alone possesses the technical capacity to mine or refine them. It arose from a long chain of economic and political decisions — made largely in free societies — that concentrated production in a country willing to accept costs others would not. Understanding how that happened is essential to understanding why China’s apparent monopoly is far less ‘coercive,’ and far less durable, than it looks.” (01/14/26)
“There’s a deeper, darker truth lurking beneath the Somali-dominated [sic], multi-billion-dollar Minnesota welfare fraud schemes that have commanded the attention of federal authorities and stoked nationwide outrage. And it may explain in part why for weeks, Democrats and regime media have been gaslighting the country, casting critics as bigots, and shooting the messengers who sent the long-neglected story viral — and why, now, state and local leaders are trying to turn Minneapolis into a powder keg. These dodges and diversions distract from the fact that the fraud is a feature of what we might call The Blue Model of government. Fueled by the welfare state and increasingly open borders [sic], it is at core about political patronage, profiteering, and plunder. Democrats’ survival depends upon a political-business model of vote-buying via legal and illicit wealth redistribution. Suppressing the Minnesota story is critical.” (01/14/25)
