Source: Chasing Liberty
by Jeff Charles
“President Trump’s new executive order is a dream for corrupt police officers and a nightmare for liberty.” (05/01/25)
https://www.libertychasers.com/p/trumps-latest-move-just-made-it-easier
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Gerardine Hoogland
“When I ran as a candidate in Australia’s federal election in 2022 for the United Australia Party, I was one of four freedom candidates vying in my electorate of Lilley. One day on pre-poll, I approached a journalist from one of our major newspapers to ask why we were being ignored by the press …. His response was to cast his arm widely over the throng of people lining up on a very wet and wild day to say that we were irrelevant, and that what all those people out there were interested in was only ‘red’ and ‘blue.’ After explaining to him why I was standing up for our freedoms and challenged him to tell me why the people didn’t have the right to hear our messages, he told me: ‘Freedom is a non-word.'” (04/30/25)
Source: The American Prospect
by Daniel Boguslaw
“One day after President Trump’s inauguration, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove sent a memorandum to the Department of Justice activating a much-maligned network of spies that civil liberties advocates have pilloried for the grave threat it poses to basic constitutional rights. Bove directed the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security, as well as state and local governments, ‘to assist in the execution of President Trump’s immigration-related initiatives’. This series of interconnected task forces, expanded in the wake of 9/11, seeds local and state law enforcement with the powers (and paranoia) of federal agencies. The directive also ordered multiple federal agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; U.S. Marshals Service; and the Bureau of Prisons to ‘review their files for identifying information and/or biometric data relating to non-citizens located illegally in the United States’.” (05/01/25)
https://prospect.org/civil-rights/2025-05-01-policing-cities-fbi-joint-terrorism-task-force/
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Education
by Robert Corn-Revere
“Fans of the old Superman comics no doubt remember Bizarro World, the cuboid planet where everything is backward. Denizens of this parallel world are distorted replicas of their Earth-based counterparts, and they live by a Bizarro Code which dictates that being good or doing the right thing is a crime. Apparently, the phenomenon is not confined to fiction. Ever since Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day appointment of Brendan Carr to chair the Federal Communications Commission, the agency that licenses broadcast stations has become a Bizarro World version of its former incarnation. And there is some reason to suspect Carr himself has somehow been replaced by his Bizarro doppelganger.” (05/01/25)
https://www.thefire.org/news/brendan-carrs-bizarro-world-fcc
Source: Semafor
by David Weigel & Kadia Goba
“During Trump’s first term, there was a multi-million dollar ‘Need to Impeach’ campaign, organized by mega-donor Tom Steyer, that built a list [Tom] Steyer would end up using for a failed presidential bid. Trump’s second term has sparked a grassroots ‘Citizens’ Impeachment,’ run by a former Hill staffer with a Google spreadsheet, and a ‘Mayday Movement’ that will begin protesting on the Mall this weekend for ‘however long it takes’ to remove Trump. Elected Democrats accept the premise that Trump deserves impeachment. They have also learned that impeachment does not remove presidents whose own party will stick with him.” (04/30/25)
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/30/2025/democrats-are-all-but-done-with-trump-impeachment-talk
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“Conflicts within the Libertarian Party over the last few years between supporters and opponents of the Mises Caucus echo disagreements almost twenty years ago over Ron Paul, disagreements among libertarians set off by the discovery and publicizing of passages from his old newsletters. Both conflicts involve culture clash within the libertarian movement between different sorts of libertarians. Loosely speaking, the clash can be described as between people who see non-PC speech as a virtue and those who see it as a fault, between people who approve of offending liberal and progressive sensibilities (‘liberal’ in the modern American sense of the term) and those who share enough of those sensibilities to prefer not to offend them. The former group see the latter as wimps, the latter the former as boors.” (04/30/25)
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/wimps-boors-and-philosophers-a7e
Source: hypertext
by Steven Teles, David Dagan, & Matthew Meyers
“The idea of abundance is everywhere. Prominent new books by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Marc Dunkelman, and Yoni Applebaum bemoan the artificial scarcity created by sclerotic institutions and explore paths out. New York Times columnist David Brooks has declared an era of abundance to already be sweeping through the intellectual world …. The challenge now for abundance advocates is to turn intellectual ferment into durable power. Much of this work will be political — building alliances of supportive interests, injecting abundance themes into elections, and forging legislative coalitions. But as the movement well knows, in America, victories in the arena of politics are tentative until they are confirmed in the arena of law.” (05/01/25)
https://hypertext.niskanencenter.org/p/building-a-law-of-abundance
Source: Niskanen Center
by Ann Lewis
“Every government technology leader knows a story about a project that accidentally wasted a billion dollars. The details vary, but the arc is familiar. A critical system needs modernization. To reflect the urgency, Congress and OMB allocate a large budget and assign it — along with a modernization mandate — to an agency. The agency appoints a team, often composed of well-meaning but non-technical program managers, contracting specialists, and analysts, who are often focused on many simultaneous projects. … Years pass, the vendor bills the agency for hundreds of millions of dollars, and the agency continues to pay — because Congress and OMB already decided this problem was worth hundreds of millions. But as time passes and milestones accumulate, it becomes harder to say what ‘done’ looks like. Eventually, often under pressure from OMB or Congress, the agency asks to see progress.” (04/30/25)
https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-to-save-a-billion-dollars
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison
“The use of starvation as a weapon is a war crime. It is a crime that that the Israeli government has been committing from the start. Referring to the current blockade as a ‘two-month siege’ is technically accurate but misleading. Prior to the brief ceasefire at the start of this year, the Israeli government had been severely impeding the delivery of aid throughout the conflict. The Biden administration knew this, but chose to ignore it and kept sending weapons in violation of U.S. law anyway. The current blockade is an intensification of the starvation policy that has been in place all along. Continued U.S. support for the war while the Israeli government deliberately starves the population is despicable and indefensible.” (04/30/25)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/israels-deliberate-starvation-of
Source: RealClearPolitics
by Froma Harrop
“Most remarkable about the recent Canadian election is that patriotism rather than raw economic interest propelled voters to resist Donald Trump. Canadians rejected the MAGA-fied Conservative Party, despite an economy suffering from anemic growth and high housing costs, all pinned on Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. Trump’s devastating tariff war would have sent a submissive electorate toward appeasement. The opposite happened. The Liberals, headed by Mark Carney, overcame a recent 20-point-plus deficit in the polls to score a narrow win. … Here lie lessons for Democrats. The path to defanging Trump is not to convert other Americans to their ideology, whatever that may be. It is to get people who normally vote another way to unite in saving their country from a dangerously erratic leadership. The midterms will be the first big opportunity for that.” (05/01/25)