Remembering the Man, Chuck Norris
Source: Law & Liberty
by Titus Techera
“The late actor was an example of principled, courageous manliness that our elites have forgotten how to celebrate.” (03/27/26)
Category: Opinion
The unreligious religiosity of Christian identity politics
Source: Washington Post
by Matthew Schmitz
“Far from being a sign of resurgent faith, Christian identity politics is a symptom of religious decline. As one observer has noted, the fact that Americans are growing more secular and less religiously literate has made religion more salient as a marker of political difference, even as invocations of it become less informed.” (03/27/26)
Tax Subsidies Are a Mistake We Can’t Seem to Learn From
Source: Show-Me Institute
by David Stokes
“A bad idea doesn’t get better with age. Bad ideas aren’t wine, jeans, or your high school memories. The tax subsidies for the Post-Dispatch building redevelopment in downtown St. Louis were a bad idea back in 2019 when the development was proposed, and they are a bad idea now. Using tax subsidies for economic development rarely benefits the public. Instead, it lowers the risk and increases the returns for private investors.” (03/27/26)
Fecklessly Fining 4chan
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“You host a website. Users can say whatever they want on this site. Next thing you know, a UK regulatory agency is sending you, an American organization based in the United States, a letter announcing a trillion-dollar fine for failure to comply with UK censorship demands. How much do you panic? If you’re 4chan, not much.” (03/27/26)
How the Republican Party Forgot It Was Conservative
Source: The American Prospect
by Paul Starr
“The main theme in much writing on contemporary politics is how ideologically polarized Democrats and Republicans have become. But the truly consequential change is that Republicans have broken with their own past. Under Donald Trump, the party hasn’t just reversed its positions on specific policies. It has routinely betrayed basic tenets of the conservative philosophy that Republicans have long claimed was the bedrock of their party. No one is shocked by Trump’s betrayals. What is more surprising is that most Republicans haven’t seemed to care. I’ve been thinking about the Republican betrayal of the party’s own tradition because of a comment about my work by Glenn Loury, the conservative Black economist. When I was on The Glenn Show in December, he criticized my new book American Contradiction because of my ‘apparent disregard for the positive contributions of conservative thought and policy to American life.'” (03/27/26)
https://prospect.org/2026/03/27/apr-2026-magazine-how-republican-party-forgot-it-was-conservative/
The Innovation Trap
Source: Quillette
by Carlton Bell
“The central risk of AI is not that machines will become malevolent. It is that human incentive structures, amplified by scalable technology, outrun our ability to govern them.” (03/27/26)
https://quillette.com/2026/03/27/the-innovation-trap-ai-technology-progress-risk/
To End the Iran War, Trump Must Divorce Israel
Source: The American Conservative
by Andrew Day
“As analysts have emphasized, Tehran ‘gets a vote’ as to when this war ends, and it doesn’t plan to stop until the U.S. and Israel learn that attacking Iran comes with high costs and shouldn’t be repeated in the future. The U.S., unable to hammer out an agreement, has been hammering Iran to coerce it to the negotiating table. … The Trump administration misunderstands the nature of the problem. To end the war, it needs to get tough not with America’s adversary, but with its cobelligerent: Israel.” (03/27/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/to-end-the-iran-war-trump-must-divorce-israel/
A California Jury Tries to Repeal the 21st Century
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“MySpace kicked off an era in which nearly two out of three humans on the planet use social media platforms to connect with others, share opinions and content, and, yes, sometimes scroll obsessively through everything on offer. You or I may or may not like social media. You or I may or may not use social media. And, even though it’s pretty much the unique distinguishing development of the 21st century (everything else, including perpetual war, is just variation on eternal themes), you and I don’t HAVE to use social media. Nor was K.G.M. forced to use social media. But on March 25, a California jury awarded her $6 million in ‘damages’ — half ‘compensatory’ and half punitive — from Google (which owns YouTube) and Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram), because she allegedly suffers from anxiety and depression and blames social media for those problems.” (03/26/26)
The New Forever War in Iran Keeps the Dog Wagging
Source: Reason
by Katherine Mangu-Ward
“Here’s a good rule of thumb, both for understanding foreign policy and also for life in general: When someone offers a bunch of rapid-fire and mutually irreconcilable justifications for a controversial decision, they’re not telling you the whole story. William Shakespeare might have invoked letting slip the dogs of war to describe the unleashing of violence, but these days we just ‘wag the dog.’ Popularized by Our American Cousin — the play being performed at Ford’s Theatre when President Abraham Lincoln was shot — the phrase took on an explicitly political meaning after the ripped-from-the-headlines 1997 film Wag the Dog. In that otherwise pretty awful movie, a fabricated military conflict was used to distract voters from a presidential sex scandal. Since then, the term has become shorthand for the idea that leaders sometimes use military action to divert attention from problems at home.” (03/26/26)
In Iran, Russia Pays America Back for Aiding Ukraine
Source: The American Conservative
by Doug Bandow
“American officials and commentators are outraged that Moscow would stoop so low, helping another country to — cue manifold expressions of fury and outrage — kill U.S. military personnel. (Some have also claimed that Russia provided intelligence to the Yemeni Houthis targeting Western merchantmen and American warships in the Red Sea, and, less credibly, paid the Taliban to kill Americans in Afghanistan.) Such critics of Moscow are like Captain Renault, who famously discovered gambling occurring at Rick’s Café Américain in the movie Casablanca. Shocking! Shut the establishment! Those demanding action offer few helpful suggestions, preferring, for instance, to call on the administration to ‘respond with clarity and resolve.’ Meaning what, precisely? Perhaps provide financial and military support to Moscow’s adversary, even planning the latter’s battlefield operations. Oh, wait! That is what Washington has been doing for years.” (03/26/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/in-iran-russia-pays-america-back-for-aiding-ukraine/