“Matt Walsh says that ‘one of the worst ecological disasters in American history is currently unfolding. A river of sewage is flowing into the Potomac. When you dig into this story, and who is responsible for it, you start to see why the media doesn’t want to talk about it.’ He’s not wrong, the disaster began January 19th but we’ve heard little about it. On his podcast, No. 1736; Mr. Walsh goes all into a ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ explanation. … In between retches, ask the question: Why would there be a general incompetence rising in public utilities now? Is it race as such? Of course not. Is it DEI putting race over competence? Maybe in part. But the general trend for a long time has been to put more and more domains of everyday life under direct government control.” (02/20/26)
“In the 1930s, apologists for Joseph Stalin’s use of terror and engineered famine to produce socialism, complacently said, ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’ George Orwell’s acid reply: ‘Where’s the omelet?’ Mendicant Marxism, dependent for decades on Soviet subsidies, then on Venezuelan oil from the Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro regimes, is discredited everywhere outside Western universities’ humanities departments. … On Jan. 29, President Trump declared Cuba ‘an unusual and extraordinary threat.’ This absurd finding enables a U.S.-enforced oil embargo that might tip Cuba into, at best, social entropy. Then what? Cuba’s internal-security apparatus has reduced society to a dust of individuals. There is no latent capacity for organic democratic expression, as Solidarity became in Poland in the 1980s, when, suddenly, a third of the nation joined it.” (02/20/26)
“No one really knows what goes on inside the mind of President Donald Trump. But judging by the significant, ongoing U.S. military buildup in the Middle East, one can make an informed guess: He thinks a big war with Iran is a good idea. If that’s the case, he’s wrong — dangerously so — and he needs a dose of realism. This administration already claims to be guided by a ‘flexible realism’ in foreign policy. But no variant of realism, however flexible, recommends a U.S. war on the Islamic Republic at this juncture.” (02/20/26)
Source: In These Times
by Rebecca Burns & Sarah Lazare
“First, she started checking for suspicious cars each day before leaving the house for work. Then, she began skipping work whenever she saw Facebook posts about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents nearby. By the end of December, she wasn’t working at all. And since the first week of January, Anain, who declined to use her last name, has barely left the home she shares with her spouse and two young daughters in South Minneapolis, the neighborhood where she’s lived for more than 20 years. To pay their rent, Anain and her spouse have had to dip into their savings. With neither of them working, ’we don’t know how long we’ll be able to keep going,’ she says in Spanish. For immigrant families like Anain’s, the crisis in Minnesota is far from over.” (02/19/26)
“An aerial attack on Iran will not be like the 12-day assault last June against Iran’s nuclear facilities and state and security facilities. Then Iran calibrated its response with symbolic strikes on Al Udeid air base in Qatar in the hopes that it would not lead to a wider, protracted conflict. If an aerial assault is launched, Iran will have nothing to lose. It will understand that appeasing its adversaries is impossible. Iran is not Iraq. Iran is not Afghanistan. Iran is not Lebanon. Iran is not Libya. Iran is not Syria. Iran is not Yemen. Iran is the seventeenth largest country in the world, with a land mass equivalent to the size of Western Europe. It has a population of almost 90 million — 10 times greater than Israel — and its military resources, as well as alliances with China and Russia, make it a formidable opponent.” (02/20/26)
“While President Trump is busy working through his checklist for sabotaging the midterm elections, Republicans are already concocting the political equivalent of a shady insurance policy …. I’ll save you some time and explain that the drubbing Republicans are about to endure won’t be the result of Trump or his policies. Instead, it will be because the midterm elections were rigged for the Democrats. Or at least these claims are the GOP spin that’s already in progress. The predicate is being laid. … To prevent this, Republicans have invented a MacGuffin: the SAVE America Act — a plot device Republicans have introduced primarily to drive the story forward. That’s not to say the legislation would be meaningless. … But in light of recent events — say, Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results — any effort by Trump to nationalize or otherwise meddle in our election process should be met with immediate alarm.” (02/20/26)
“This morning, the Court held that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not authorize a president to impose tariffs. Because obviously. … Whether we’re talking about the Trade Expansion Act, the Trade Act, or some other delegated tariff authority, Congress has always been clear about the intent. This is a fact, and, as Roberts would explain, ‘IEEPA contains no reference to tariffs or duties.’ Nor did the administration offer any law ‘in which Congress used the word ‘regulate’ to authorize taxation.'” (02/20/26)
“Sanctuary cities and states have been a major focus of political conflict in the second Trump administration, perhaps even more than in the first. These jurisdictions refuse or severely limit assistance to federal efforts to detain and deport suspected illegal immigrants. Most only provide such assistance in cases involving undocumented migrants who have committed serious crimes. Regardless of the politics, the 10th Amendment protects sanctuary jurisdictions from compulsion by the federal government. And their policies are also well justified on moral and pragmatic grounds. This is particularly true at a time when many federal immigration enforcement efforts are cruel and illegal.” (02/19/26)
“The premise of socialism is ‘worker control of the means of production,’ and the gig economy is far and away the most successful experiment in human history when it comes to achieving that. Gig workers own their tools. Gig workers set their own hours. Gig workers choose who they work for, where they work, and what kind of work they do. Gig workers even set their own salaries by accepting the individual tasks that meet their pay requirements and rejecting those that don’t. Mamdani and friends hate that worker control with a passion. To them, worker happiness and welfare only matter to the extent that they can claim credit for, and gain power from, that happiness and welfare. … if anyone, anywhere, somehow manages to make a living without Mamdani’s permission, why, that’s ‘exploitation.'” (02/19/26)
