Source: The Chris Hedges Report
by Chris Hedges
“Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza is a mirage, a conjuring trick in which peace is unilaterally declared as Israel seizes more Palestinian land and brings the genocide to its grim conclusion.” (08/10/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by Bill Kauffman
“Fox World is all a-twitter because a handful of members or fellow travelers of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) are about to be elected to the U.S. Congress and various state legislatures. They’re ‘godless communists,’ according to President Trump, and what with inflation, an insane war, and Trump family grift, we’ll be hearing about commies all election season. Michael ‘The Other America’ Harrington, founder of DSA, was about as threatening as the Mills Brothers. The current DSA candidates seem, at first glance, as off-putting as your typical hectoring grad-school wokester, but I can’t get too worked up over them. After all, New York City once sent a real communist to Congress—and his example complicates the Sean Hannity narrative.” (08/10/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/you-want-a-real-commie/
Source: The Erick Erickson Show
by Erick-Woods Erickson
“This is the fundamental weakness of populism. It possesses no governing philosophy, only a disposition. It moves from one grievance to the next, and each time it acts to remedy a single complaint, it creates others that must later be remedied in turn. It resolves that cheap imports are destroying jobs, so it taxes the imports, and then expresses surprise when the toaster, the washing machine, and the burrito all cost more. It demands that the government make housing affordable while defending the guarantees that made housing unaffordable. It insists at once on lower prices and greater intervention, and those two aims cannot be reconciled.” (08/10/26)
https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/populism-is-emotion-without-governing
Source: The Price of Liberty
by Nathan Barton
“Is it reasonable to say that libertarians, and even lovers of liberty who are rational, free-market, anarchists, believe that members of a community do have some public duties? Even while we recognize that people have a God-given right to reject those duties, just as they have the right to stupidly refuse to accept responsibility for their actions?” (08/09/26)
https://thepriceofliberty.org/2026/08/09/public-presence-public-duty/
Source: American Greatness
by Stephen Soukup
“Yesterday in these pages, the inimitable Roger Kimball recounted the tall tale of Jason Arday, the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge. As Kimball noted, Arday has been shown over the last few weeks to be more than just your average modern academic charlatan. With every passing day, it appears more and more that he’s a full-throated fabulist in the contemporary sense, which is to say that he made up almost everything about his life and public persona and plagiarized the rest. All his lies and deceptions were, however, uttered in the service of a larger purpose: to undermine the establishment and force its members to reckon with their hatreds and prejudices. Arday overcame more obstacles and barriers than the average man could ever even imagine, and therefore his struggle must be admired and applauded, while his ‘scholarship’ is celebrated.” (08/10/26)
https://amgreatness.com/2026/08/10/jason-arday-barack-obama-and-the-making-of-myths/
Source: Liberal Currents
by Jessica Pishko
“The ‘constitutional sheriffs’ movement relies on the notion that ‘men of action’ can and should determine how the Constitution is interpreted.” (08/10/26)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/liberty-valance-goes-to-washington/
Source: The Realist Review
by Val Aksilenko
“Artificial intelligence may be among the most valuable gifts the Creator has given humanity. It can help us understand languages, cure diseases, reduce exhausting labor, overcome ignorance, anticipate disasters, restore nature, expose deception, and help hostile peoples understand one another. But perhaps every great gift is also a test. … The peril is not that artificial intelligence will suddenly become malevolent in a human-like sense. The greatest peril is that it will become obedient to human enmity — that we will embed our accumulated fear, hatred, falsehoods, and ambitions within an intelligence that is more powerful and faster than ourselves.” (08/09/26)
https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/the-choice-civilization-or-ai
Source: Big Head Press
by Scott Bieser
Cartoon. (08/10/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Medical drugs have large fixed costs, the costs of research, development and testing, low marginal cost, the cost of making one more pill. If the company sells the drug at marginal cost everyone to whom it is worth at least the cost of producing the pill gets it but the company never covers the fixed cost; if it keeps doing that it goes out of business. If it sells the drug at a price enough above marginal cost to pay back the initial expenditure many people who value the pill above the cost of producing it do not get it. The solution is price discrimination, selling the drug at a high price to customers who are willing to pay it, at a low price to customers who are not. In practice this usually means selling the drug at a high price in rich countries and a low price in poor countries.” (08/09/26)
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/drugs-for-poor-countries
Source: The Bulwark
by Lauren Egan
“This Tuesday’s gubernatorial primaryt in Wisconsin may seem like the latest chapter of an internecine fight among Democrats over the philosophical direction of the party. And it is that. But there’s much more on the line as well: The fallout from the Wisconsin election could extend nationally, by making it possible for Trump-allied Republicans to screw with the presidential election results in ways they tried, but failed, to do in 2020. On the line is the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s decade-and-a-half-long effort to claw its way back to a unified state government, as well as the opportunity to add more safe Democratic House seats to the next congressional map. Beyond that, however, is another hugely consequential prize: the capacity to ensure that the state’s 2028 presidential election results will be properly certified.” (08/09/26)