“In 1949, Justice Robert Jackson warned that ‘doctrinaire logic’ by the Supreme Court would ‘convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.’ In that case, Terminiello v. Chicago, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Arthur Terminiello. Terminiello was a suspended Catholic priest and a rabid antisemite who was convicted of violating a Chicago ordinance against ‘breach of peace.’ … Ironically, Jackson’s warning to the majority in Terminiello has proved prescient, as the Roberts Court has interpreted the Constitution to enshrine vast, indeed royal, prerogatives into Article II. As a result, the Court has aggrandized its own power as well as that of the president. And the end result is that it is Article II, rather than the Bill of Rights, that has become a suicide pact.” (04/30/25)
“April 30th marks the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War’s end when Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The war was a terrible experience for the United States, but even more so for the people of Vietnam and much of the rest of Southeast Asia. Estimates are that up to 3 million Vietnamese perished, as well many many thousands of Cambodians and Laotians. Fifty-eight thousand American died, and a trillion American tax dollars were wasted. Many of us who were there are still trying to understand and come to grips with it. Based on years of study, here is what I think people still get wrong about the war.” (04/30/25)
“Nina Jankowicz is back. During the Biden administration, Jankowicz, scourge of ‘disinformation,’ lost her perch as head of an incipient Disinformation Governance Board. People learned that the Board existed; were aghast; got it closed. If only government censorship were always so easy to kill. Now this nag, with no prospect of getting a job muzzling people she disagrees with from the Trump administration, is making a nuisance of herself internationally.” (04/30/25)
“Like any sovereign nation, Iran has a right to defend itself. Nuclear weapons are a security guarantee that Iran has not sought. Unlike Israel and the United States, it has not threatened nor bombed, invaded or occupied its neighbors. However, after Israeli air strikes in April and October 2024 and continued U.S. threats, Iran has had no choice but to debate and reevaluate its long-held nuclear doctrine which regards weapons of mass destruction against Islam. In a civilized conflict-free world, there would be no need for weapons, nuclear or otherwise. Unfortunately for some countries, like Iran, possessing nuclear weapons may become a necessary tool for survival. For others, like the United States and Israel, the ghastly weapons are used as cudgels to bully countries into submission.” (04/30/25)
“How Trump’s administration has misgoverned in its first 100 days, with his most destructive abuses arising from his rejection of core libertarian principles about trade policy and immigration, the movement of goods and people across arbitrary government barriers, demonstrates why trying to supposedly balance those ferociously anti-libertarian tendencies with his acceptably libertarian ones (a stated commitment to shrinking size and cost of government, through Elon Musk’s efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency, have delivered less than promised, are rife with reporting errors, and seem to be aimed not at making government any more sensible or useful so much as scoring institutional points against the administration’s perceived leftist enemies) leads to accepting near complete collapse of any meaningful distinctions between the U.S. government and the worst economically interventionist and authoritarian tyrannies.” (04/29/25)
“Any discussion of the opening days of Donald Trump’s presidency must start at the key date — last Nov. 5, when he rose from the political dead to seize his second term in the White House. His comeback victory was decisive as he swept all seven battleground states on the way to piling up 312 electoral votes, winning the popular vote and leading the GOP to control of Congress. But first he had to survive two assassination attempts, with one in Pennsylvania a miraculous near miss, and overcome an onslaught of Democratic prosecutions and civil suits designed to defeat and imprison him. All those cases, the first ever brought against a former president, were necessary, Americans were assured by Dems and their media mouthpieces, to protect democracy. The Big Lie — that the weaponization of the courts was anything other than a partisan power play — seems like ages ago.” (04/29/25)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by staff
“FIRE has filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief in support of Rümeysa Öztürk in her lawsuit against the Trump administration. FIRE argues that the U.S. government is unlawfully detaining Öztürk for protected speech and reviving the authoritarian spirit of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the process. The brief’s summary of argument follows.” (04/29/25)
“More than a year before he took office, Donald Trump vowed, not once, but twice, that if he were to be elected to a second term as president, he would be a dictator ‘on day one.’ He insisted he would be a dictator only on day one — but what dictator has ever seized power only for one day and then immediately relinquished it? As Trump concludes his first 100 days in office today, the record makes clear what he really intended: Centralize all power in his person, overturning the checks and balances of the American system of government and replacing them with a dictatorship.” (04/29/25)
“Can I really derive any deep lesson about the human condition from truisms about Social Desirability Bias? Strangely, yes. To repeat, the lessons of Social Desirability Bias are twofold. First: When you spend your own time and money, actions speak louder than words. Second, when you spend other people’s time and money, words speak louder than actions. Now consider: If everyone spends only their own time and their own money, what do we call it? Among other things, ‘the free market.’ What about when people spend other people’s time and money? Among other things, ‘government.'” (04/29/25)
“Two milestones converged this week that seem important in the moment but in retrospect will be minor blips historically: yesterday’s reaching of the first hundred days of Donald Trump’s second term, and today’s announcement of first-quarter gross domestic product showing the economy contracted by 0.3 percent on an annualized basis. The former is just a news hook to overlay ‘what it all means’ stories that are as light as air. The second covers the period before the April 2 Liberation Day, though it was influenced by it. The reason the economy contracted is that imports, in the calculation of GDP, take away from economic growth, and companies bulked up imports in anticipation of tariffs. That’s more of a noisy statistical quirk than a recession setting in.” (04/30/25)
