Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jennifer Sey
“[N]early everyone was complicit. Politicians, media, educators — they all went along with the hysteria. Now, they want to sweep it under the rug, pretending it never happened. Everyone failed. But we cannot forget.” (03/17/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-reckoning-we-owe-generation-covid/
Source: Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman
“Or, why America is on its own.” (03/17/26)
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/slavery-tariffs-and-the-dire-strait
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Jake Werner
“Now that things haven’t gone quite as planned, watch Washington hawks dial it up more, this time against China.” (03/17/26)
Source: Roads Go Ever On
by Bekah Graham
“One morning last week, I got myself a coffee and turned on the newly released Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Into the Manosphere. For those who aren’t already well aware of the manosphere or the red pill/MGTOW movements, Theroux provides an informative primer and helpful context, especially for parents who want to prevent their young boys (and, less likely though still possible, young girls) from falling into these dangerous communities. Yet for the more chronically online, the documentary doesn’t reveal much that is new.” (03/17/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“On Monday, the monopolization trial against Live Nation picked up where it left off a week earlier, with Jay Marciano, CEO of AEG Entertainment, the nation’s second-largest live concert promoter, under direct questioning. But there was a different lawyer in the lead plaintiff’s chair: Jeffrey Kessler, a superstar private litigator who successfully prosecuted cases against NASCAR and the NCAA, was seated in place of David Dahlquist, the Justice Department’s lead trial attorney. The reason for the swap is that DOJ settled their claims against Live Nation on March 9, and pressured many of the 39 states (and the District of Columbia) in the case, particularly the Republican ones, to go along with them. But in the end, only seven states did so …. The other 32 … failed to come to agreement after forced settlement talks from the judge.” (03/17/26)
Source: CounterPunch
by Binoy Kampmark
“The big drain on military resources has begun. A war apparently already won (and not), against an adversary supposedly without means to fight back, its air force and navy destroyed, its missile capabilities blunted, is now drawing the clumsy colossus of American power into the Middle East with embarrassing effect. The Middle East, where US President Donald Trump promised the ‘forever wars’ would end, promises an end to his beginning.” (03/17/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/17/the-growing-problems-of-operation-epic-fury/
Source: The Daily Economy
by John Phelan
“High-skilled workers tend to strengthen government budgets, while low-skilled immigration can add fiscal pressure. The composition of immigration matters as much as the number.” (03/17/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/can-immigration-address-americas-fiscal-nightmare-it-depends/
Source: Reason
by Damon Root
“The First Amendment states that the government ‘shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.’ But one prominent conservative [sic] judge, whose name has been mentioned as a potential nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, thinks that protection against government censorship may not apply to noncitizens in the United States. Is the judge right?” (for publication 04/26)
https://reason.com/2026/03/17/yes-the-first-amendment-protects-noncitizens/
Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Tim Worstall
“Facebook, the online social network, has more than 2 billion global users. Because those users do not pay for the service, its benefits are hard to measure. We report the results of a series of three non-hypothetical auction experiments where winners are paid to deactivate their Facebook accounts for up to one year. Though the populations sampled and the auction design differ across the experiments, we consistently find the average Facebook user would require more than $1000 to deactivate their account for one year. OK, so the value users gain from Facebook is $1k a year, there are 2 billion of them, that’s two thousand billion, or $2 trillion in value a year. Of which Zucks has 10%, that $200 billion. Pretty good deal for us, really. But that’s not right, not at all. For Zucks’ money is a one off capital sum, the consumer benefit is an annual one.” (03/17/26)
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/entrepreneurial-capitalism-the-greatest-deal-in-all-of-history
Source: The Price of Liberty
by Nathan Barton
“Today, we are bombarded with claims that the lands of the Fifty States (i.e., the United States) are ‘stolen lands.’ And demands that the only option is to give the ‘LandBack.’ (An organization based in South Dakota, demanding that the Black Hills be returned to the ‘Great Sioux Nation’ (a/k/a the Seven Council Fires, consisting of the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota people.) … Obviously, as lovers of liberty, we understand that going around stealing people’s land is a heinous act …. But we detect just a few problems with the proposed solution of returning hundreds of millions of acres of land to the descendants (and presumably heirs) of millions of people who owned that land from 400 to 150 or so years ago. And forcing more millions of people who live on that land (and think they own it) to go someplace else – where back where they came from or somewhere else.” (03/16/26)
https://thepriceofliberty.org/2026/03/16/history-immigration-and-the-blame-game/