“Within hours of federal immigration agents killing a 26-year-old man named Joan Sebastian Guerrero, in Biddeford, Maine, hundreds protested in the streets of the small town demanding answers. Just days earlier, ICE agents shot and killed a 52-year-old man named Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Houston, Texas, also sparking protest. Although seemingly disparate — one in a small town in the nation’s whitest state, and the other in a large, cosmopolitan city in one of the most populous states — the two killings have a common throughline: both are the result of an officially-sanctioned imperative to hunt down and hurt people who Donald Trump’s administration and the Republican Party have deemed enemies. … But most Americans aren’t falling for it. From Maine to Texas, Wisconsin to California, North Carolina to Minnesota, communities are organizing and fighting back against the most well-funded police institution in history.” (07/16/26)
“Every July 4th, Americans light fireworks, wave flags, and sing songs. This year, we do all of that and more: the nation turns 250, a milestone grand enough to demand something beyond the usual celebrations. So here is a question worth sitting with this weekend: What holds us together? Not what should hold us together in theory, but what actually does. What shared inheritance, what common story, what sense of mutual obligation binds 340 million people into something we can still honestly call one nation? Our national motto offers a clue, and a challenge.” (07/16/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Joe Tabor
“Illinois lawmakers finally passed legislation to become the last state in the country to comply with a three-year-old US Supreme Court ruling. State law allows the government to take an entire property for unpaid property taxes, even when they’re much less than the value of the property. House Bill 4537 brings the state into compliance with the 2023 high court decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County, which ruled that in taking property, state governments must give owners the value that exceeds the amount owed in taxes.” (07/16/26)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“[M]any Americans still cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that this ruthless, brutal, and remorseless killing machine turned its guns inwards on November 22, 1963, on the streets of Dallas. They especially do not want to acknowledge the fraudulent autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body shortly after they murdered him.” (07/16/26)
“Entire categories of federal spending shouldn’t exist.
Now, it would be easy to eliminate budget deficits and to begin to make big and regular dents in the national debt, were it not for one teensy-weensy problem. Just hand me the budget (in electronic form, please) and a red pencil and I’ll hack away at the billions and billions. And trillions. If that would take too long, I’d enlist a team of like-minded spending cutters to help. We’d be doing something like what the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, tried to do early in the second Trump administration. DOGE didn’t go or wasn’t allowed to go anywhere near far enough, though.” (07/16/26)
“cclaimed British filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s (The Dark Knight, Oppenheimer) newest film, The Odyssey, opens this week in the United States. But controversy has already surrounded Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s 2,700-year-old epic poem about Odysseus’s 10-year struggle to return home after the Achaian victory in the decade-long Trojan War. Some of the film’s actresses have suggested that Nolan is offering a more feminist—and long-overdue—take on the ancient poem. Actress Lupita Nyong’o, in particular, has criticized Homer’s purported sexism. Perhaps her misreading of Homer stems from her admission that, despite receiving degrees from elite Hampshire College and Yale, the 42-year-old actress had never even read the Odyssey until she was cast in the minor dual roles of Helen and her sister Clytemnestra.” (07/16/26)
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The United States was the land of the free. Limited government. Checks and balances. Separation of powers. The Bill of Rights. But America has instead become a managed society. Its government dominates the lives of its people. How did it go wrong? Lots of bad steps helped to transform the American republic into a managerial state. Here are eleven of the moments that sent the ship off course.” (07/16/26)
“The norms governing scholarship now often serve to protect a rigid orthodoxy on certain politically charged issues—with ideological tests substituted for proper academic standards.” (07/16/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Sarah McLaughlin
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing on teen social media bans. The bans are everywhere, and more are coming. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that the EU will seek some form of a youth social media ban across Europe. … Over in Australia, the landmark under-16 ban has been missing the mark. It simply has not worked to keep kids off of social media. So officials are doubling down.” (07/16/26)
“While it is unfortunate that the federal budget is off the rails, it is hard to get too worked up about this program when (a) it is a drop in the bucket compared to our broader fiscal problems, and (b) so much of our debt-financed spending benefits older Americans. If we’re going to keep borrowing, why not direct at least a small share toward expanding opportunities for children?” (07/16/26)
