“In recent years the American right’s been inverting phrases taken from the left, taking something that meant well and turning them into cliches. Triggered. Woke. Social justice warrior. Critical race theory. They use these as a shorthand to mock and belittle, while also reducing the left to something separate and less than. At the same time, these phrases are often ill-defined: what is woke, exactly? One may as well ask who leads the oft-cited but hard to find antifa organization. Once one starts looking at how they use these phrases to delegitimize the left, one sees the pattern all over the place: gender ideology, fake news, and perhaps most nefarious of all, cultural Marxism.” (07/01/26)
“Should taxpayers be required to subsidize unions’ lobbying for more taxpayer subsidies? Three states say ‘no, spend our money on students.'” (07/01/26)
“Speaking Sunday night at the Trump Kennedy Center, where he was receiving the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, Bill Maher offered an excellent bit of advice for politicians who do not wish to be mocked: ‘Stop being funny.’ It is a simple thing, and a not-so-simple thing. When politicians are being ridiculous, Maher said, ‘I put them in jokes—jokes that work.’ Jokes that work is the key thing. It is axiomatic in comedy that the way to kill a joke is to explain it, but it is worth thinking about why and how Maher’s jokes, and other jokes about politicians, work. If politicians are to stop being funny, then they will need to answer the question: When are politicians funny? … Naked dishonesty in politicians is funny. So is incompetence. So is howling demagoguery. Quiet, unshowy competence is not very funny.” (07/01/26)
“When Congress passed the Sherman Act in 1890, John Sherman told the Senate, ‘If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life’. The act intended to keep concentrated private power from becoming a sovereign authority unto itself. It lasted five years before the Supreme Court took it apart. In United States v. E.C. Knight (1895), the Court held that manufacturing was not commerce and therefore lay beyond the reach of federal antitrust law. The case concerned the American Sugar Refining Company, which by acquisition controlled more than 90 percent of the nation’s sugar refining capacity. The Court drew its commerce line precisely where the largest industrial concentration in the country sat, and the trust walked free.” (07/01/26)
“The February 2026 Iran war cannot be understood as an isolated event; but rather the outcome of over four decades of coordinated American and Israeli efforts to contain and topple the Islamic Republic. Similarly, Iran’s ability to withstand the military onslaught and emerge victorious must also be situated within that historical context. After weeks of U.S-Israeli bombardment, Iran has shown not only that it has been able to withstand an assault by the world’s strongest militaries, but that it could successfully exact substantial military, geopolitical and economic costs on its adversaries. Despite suffering significant damage, and the martyrdom of senior military commanders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the state survived. Tehran’s ability to maintain institutional continuity and operational resilience despite intense pressures could ultimately reshape the geopolitical landscape of West Asia.” (07/01/26)
“Former US national security advisor John Bolton and President Donald J. Trump share traits neither probably knew they had. The latter, for one, is far more war-mongering than he let on to American voters, evidenced by his recently failed, disastrous foray into attacking Iran. Bolton, on the other hand, has been a consistent war addict …. That other commonly shared trait between the two is a rather sketchy approach to handling classified documents.” (07/01/26)
“The UK’s landmark Tobacco and Vapes Act, which became law in April this year (and has since been buried by a typically, and very modern, frenetic news cycle), was hailed as a triumph for public health. By permanently phasing out the legal sale of cigarettes to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, it promises to create the world’s first ‘smoke-free generation’. It’s difficult (though not impossible) to object to this from a medical perspective. … But it’s important to look beyond the medical perspective to what this legislation represents. It is, perhaps, the clearest expression yet of the creeping sanitisation of Britain that has been underway over the past two to three decades.” (07/01/26)
“Critics of the growing plant-based meat business say that unless a burger began with a heartbeat, it has no right to be called ‘meat.’ … More than a century ago, another incumbent industry tried to defend its turf by insisting that a new technology could imitate nature but never deserve nature’s name. The product was ice. America’s lucrative natural ice industry was being disrupted by a cheaper, cleaner, more reliable competitor: manufactured ice, or as its detractors insisted it be called, artificial ice. The incumbent industry fought back with a message that sounds remarkably familiar today: the new thing was an imitation, an artificial product masquerading as nature’s own.” (06/30/26)
“This should have been an easy case for the Supreme Court. When the Constitution was penned in 1787, the founders followed English law and determined that everyone born in the country was deemed a citizen. This was followed until the Supreme Court’s tragic 1857 decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford, which held that enslaved individuals were property of their owners and that they were not U.S. citizens, even if they had been born in the country. The first sentence of the first section of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, was meant to expressly and unquestionably overrule this decision.” (06/30/26)
