“It must have seemed like a huge week for the fossil fuel industry: as the Wall Street Journal put it yesterday (and you could sense the headline writer’s glee), ‘The fossil fuel industry gets its revenge on green activists. The oil-and-gas industry is landing blow after blow against climate activists. The Trump administration has cranked out approvals of major projects to ship liquefied natural gas from the Gulf Coast and killed a host of climate-related initiatives. Meanwhile, Texas billionaire Kelcy Warren has won a nearly $700 million verdict against Greenpeace that could spell the end of the group’s U.S. presence. Hell, the Trump administration is trying to resurrect coal, and in what’s doubtless considered a back-slapping prank around the West Wing it just named a fracking executive to run the Department of Energy’s renewables office.” (03/22/25)
Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson
“Over the past week, Trump has lost almost all of the court cases against him, and the first wave of injunctions and temporary restraining orders has come in. It remains to be seen which way Trump will ultimately go on compliance. So far, compliance with court orders has actually been uneven, not monolithically defiant. Kraus, the DOGE Treasury liaison, complied with removing non-employees from payment system access, and Elez apparently hasn’t been rehired despite Musk’s claims. It’s a safe bet that defiance will result in another order of magnitude surge in the size of the crowds, and a similar surge in demands that Congress do their damned job. Meanwhile, the internal strains on the Trump administration are mounting.” (03/22/25)
“Climate crusaders, those sanctimonious shepherds of the earth, are trading their pious protests for outright carnage as attacks against Tesla vehicles ripple across the country — an orgy of liberal cannibalism that’s as predictable as a vegan toting along his own tofu to a barbecue. But setting EVs on fire isn’t the only banner of hypocrisy unfurled lately by eco-warriors — whose extremist ideologies increasingly collide with the real world to reveal their ironic outcomes. This month, officials in the Brazilian city of Belém paved over tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest and wetland to build a four-lane, eight-mile-long highway necessary to accommodate the roughly 50,000 climate activists who will descend on the city in November for the UN’s COP30 climate summit.” (03/22/25)
“How can the rule of law be preserved? One necessary condition has been universally recognized by the classical liberal tradition and the economic analysis of institutions: the independence and irremovability of judges. Up to some supreme court, a judicial ruling or order can be appealed, but until then, one judge can stop the wheels of the armed and powerful state. (See Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power.) This is a crucial requirement, notwithstanding a White House deputy press secretary proclaiming that ‘rogue judges are subverting the will of the American people.'” (03/21/25)
“Since returning to office, President Donald Trump has aggressively moved to shrink the federal government. His administration has frozen federal grants, issued executive orders aligned with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and, most prominently, created what he calls the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. DOGE has been billed as a cost-cutting initiative, although the actual amount of money being saved remains unclear. To lead DOGE, Trump appointed Elon Musk, a megadonor whose companies hold federal contracts worth billions. Musk has already moved forward with major cuts, including sweeping workforce reductions, the curtailment of government operations, and purges of entire agencies. Thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs. While certainly dramatic, these actions reflect a longer trend of privatizing government. Indeed, my sociological research shows that the government has steadily withdrawn from economic production for decades, outsourcing many responsibilities to the private sector.” (03/22/25)
Source: The American Conservative
by Ted Galen Carpenter
“Occasionally, the prediction of a quick victory at the start of a war turns out to be true, as it did for the United States in the 1898 Spanish American War and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Far more often, though, a predicted ‘cakewalk’ turns into a multi-year human meat grinder. Even if subsequent events do not produce a bloodbath on a scale as monstrous as the Civil War and World War I, the fighting frequently becomes a prolonged, futile, and counterproductive mission. America’s military interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan all fall into that category. There are multiple reasons to conclude that a war against Iran would be the opposite of a ‘cakewalk.'” (03/21/25)
“Many are the liberal pundits who’ve expressed surprise and confusion that right populists have proven, well, popular with ordinary folk. How is it that billionaires who cut taxes for the rich like Donald Trump, or former commodity traders like Nigel Farage, have been able to stand as men of the people? Shouldn’t the working classes of the world want to unite precisely to expropriate the hell out of these types? The easy answer is to chalk it up to simple manipulation: by Russia, by social media, by right-wing propaganda, or some kind of false consciousness. But the easy answer is in fact not really an answer. Understanding the appeal of right-wing populism means diving deeper into its intellectual and political origins.” (03/21/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“The Trump administration’s intentional violation of an order of a federal judge to not deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador and the Justice Department’s refusal to provide answers to questions posed by that judge about circumstances surrounding those deportations does not revolve around whether a person loves or hates Donald Trump. The issue also does not revolve around whether someone loves or hates the federal judge, James Boasberg. Instead, the issue is simply this: What type of governmental system does a person who wants to be free want for the United States?” (03/21/25)
“The terror attacks on Tesla are despicable, of course, but they can hardly be called surprising. And they should be roundly condemned by both political parties, and indeed, all Americans. But as Robby Starbuck so rightly wrote, ‘Democrats could condemn terror attacks on Tesla with a simple statement released by the party, and elected Democrats could release individual statements about it but they haven’t done so.’ Why? Starbuck continues: ‘Any decent person would but they REFUSE [his emphasis]. This tells me that they want this domestic terror’ (X post, 3/19/25). Starbuck briefly notes one reason: ‘Any decent person would.’ ‘Decent people’ immediately eliminates most Leftists. They are not decent people.'” (03/22/25)
“‘Government’ and ‘efficiency’ should never appear in the same sentence, a truth that I frequently reiterate to my students. The reason is that the public sector is institutionally incapable of functioning cost-effectively. Unlike the private sector, the government does not face a profit-and-loss bottom line that incentivizes allocating the scarce resources under its control to their highest-valued uses. Politicians and bureaucrats, by and large, cannot capture any personal benefits, nor do they bear any personal costs for their budgetary profligacy and unsound policymaking because they spend other people’s (the taxpayers’) money rather than their own.” (03/21/25)
