“A better name for the current Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) might be Women’s Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), given the growing performance-art violence that is now endemic in the league. Prior to the 2024 arrival of then-22-year-old Iowa superstar Caitlin Clark, very few people watched the WNBA. Team franchises were worth less than $20 million. The league ran chronic deficits and was subsidized by the men’s professional basketball league, the National Basketball Association (NBA). An unspoken subtext of the WNBA was that the owners and coaches were left-wing and made little effort to hide their political biases. Despite talk of diversity, the league was (and remains) about 83 percent nonwhite and about 70 percent black. Some media outlets have suggested that about 50 percent of the players are lesbians. By Clark’s third year, her level of play had revolutionized the WNBA – or rather, saved it from financial collapse and cultural obscurity.” (08/27/26)
“What is missing from the conversation about 2020—Trumpism, Woke 1, the origins of coronavirus, and so on—is real accountability. Accountability was the missing ingredient in Woke 1, where the priority in approaching alleged wrongthinkers was always cancellation; punishment rather than rehabilitation—if, in fact, the accused had even done anything wrong. So I am not out to cancel AOC, though I agree with her on vanishingly little. Her electoral career is for voters to decide. What I would like from the congresswoman is accountability; not for her to simply disown her bad ideas but to seriously interrogate what made those ideas bad. The same can be said for Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has been the target of a Republican-led witch hunt for the better part of a decade, but is also a deeply flawed leader.” (08/26/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“What began publicly as Donald Trump’s lavish, taxpayer-funded vision of a gilded White House ballroom is now being justified by the administration—in and out of court—as a matter of national security. To President Trump, it seems, a ballroom by any other name is a bunker. … hundreds of workers have been laboring around the clock, 20 hours a day, seven days a week, to push the project forward as quickly as possible. The message seems clear: get far enough along, fast enough, and it becomes that much harder for Congress, the courts or some future administration to undo what has already been built. There is a lesson in that, and it speaks to much more than a ballroom or a bunker.” (08/26/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
“Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, soccer’s worldwide governing body, is a good example of what happens when one person concentrates too much power. Don’t get me wrong. He can rightly boast some important achievements, both financially (for instance, the recent World Cup produced a record-breaking $12 billion (roughly) in revenue for FIFA) and in terms of finishing the job of breaking Europe’s stranglehold on the sport that others had begun in the 1970s …. But he is perceived as having turned FIFA into a one-man show (and I am not talking about Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo) and as a power structure run like a political machine, where everything seems organized with one end in sight: to keep Infantino at the top.” (08/26/26)
“‘Evil is turned into Good, and Good into Evil’ … Written almost 300 years ago, Thomas Gordon warned us about political parties being little more than cults that promise to protect your country – while really killing it. It was so prophetic that it sounds like it was written today.” (08/26/26)
“Dear friends and colleagues, The United States and Israel launched a war of aggression against Iran in February of this year. For six months, US missiles and bombs have fallen upon civilian and military targets inside the country. Hospitals, schools, energy facilities, and neighbourhoods have been struck. The 168 schoolgirls killed in Minab have become the terrible symbol of this war. Iranians have been forced to live under the constant expectation of another attack, while Iranian families outside the country endure the peculiar agony of watching the destruction from afar. This follows on three years of Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has been carried out due to the relentless military support of the United States.” (08/27/26)
“America’s national debt hit $40 trillion last week. That number certainly feels like something worth panicking over—the mind balks at all the zeros. But although the debt has been in the trillions for decades, not everyone has considered it a problem. One camp of economists has been warning about the perils of high debt for years: Budget hawks predicted that if the country kept spending and didn’t raise taxes enough to keep pace, the resulting fiscal crisis could be devastating. But others—the doves—have brushed it off. … We’re nowhere near a complete failure of the Treasury market, and yet, over the past couple of years, some economists who were once more dovish have switched teams.” (08/26/26)
