Source: Liberal Currents
by Joseph Stieb
“The restraint movement’s attachment to Trump has compromised its ability to offer a credible alternative to American foreign policy orthodoxy.” (07/30/25)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/how-the-restraint-movement-lost-its-way/
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Jeffrey A Tucker
“The Covid era cut through traditional ideological paradigms like knives on tissue. Nothing behaved as we might have expected. The civil libertarians were nowhere in sight. The courts did not work. Big business and media fully cooperated. The major religions caved. The national security state thrived, while both parties let it all happen. The population was mercilessly propagandized and pillaged with no resistance from the commanding heights. … The state did not save us from large corporations and the top layers in commercial society did not save us from the state. They worked together to strangle the liberty of everyone else.” (07/30/25)
https://brownstone.org/articles/freedom-in-a-post-covid-world/
Source: The Crucial Years
by Bill Mckibben
“When I was a cub reporter at the New Yorker in the early 1980s, New York City was actually a somewhat seedy and dangerous (if fascinating) place (sort of fitting the image currently assigned it by MAGA ideologues who have ignored its almost complete makeover into a remarkably safe enclave). In those days, anyone wandering the Times Square neighborhood where I worked could count on seeing a three-card monte game on every block, with fast-talking card sharps hustling the tourists. It wasn’t very sophisticated, but it must have worked because they were out there every day. The grift playing out this week in the federal government around climate is no more complicated, but it too relies on speed and distraction.” (07/31/25)
Source: The Daily Beast
by Chris Cillizza
“Two things appear to be true about the ongoing controversy over Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s reluctance to release all the files related to the case: 1. Donald Trump will survive this, as he has survived so many other scandals, controversies and gaffes over the past decade. 2. This story has reached critical velocity — and isn’t going anywhere.” (07/30/25)
Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison
“The famine in Gaza is entirely man-made. Like other atrocity famines, it is the result of deliberate policy choices. The Israeli government has been deliberately starving the people of Gaza for the better part of two years. As more than 100 aid groups said in a joint statement, ‘the Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza.’ Since the start of the war in October 2023, the Israeli government has been inflicting collective punishment on the civilian population by using starvation as a weapon, devastating Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, and destroying the health care system.” (07/30/25)
https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/the-man-made-atrocity-famine-in-gaza
Source: Niskanen Center
by Cassandra Zimmer
“In June, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced she would end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti, removing legal protections from more than 500,000 Haitian nationals living in the United States. Earlier this year, she rescinded TPS for over 348,000 Venezuelans and 55,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans. With Cameroon and Nepal already terminated, more than one million TPS holders are now poised to lose lawful status in 2025 …. Many TPS holders work in America’s most labor-starved sectors, including construction, home healthcare, food processing, hospitality, and agriculture. Employers who have long relied on TPS workers will be forced to terminate experienced staff while scrambling to hire replacements in an exceptionally tight labor market. … There may be a solution to capitalize on these workers’ talents and ensure they can work and thrive in safe communities — unfortunately for the U.S. economy, those communities are abroad.” (07/30/25)
Source: The American Prospect
by James Baratta
“If Donald Trump’s goal is to strain the immigration system to such a point that it merely serves as an avenue for the fast-tracking of deportations, he is certainly making headway. The barriers have been piling up: ending bond hearings for undocumented immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally, kidnapping people at their immigration court hearings and places of work, entrapping new arrivals who fail to register with the government, and imposing significant penalties on those who do not comply with removal orders. In an added twist, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which unlocks unprecedented levels of funding for immigration enforcement and border security, creates a fiscal minefield of onerous processing fees and penalties. Most of these fees are new and cannot be waived, and the goal is not necessarily to mitigate the government’s giant budget deficit, but to price migrants out of entering or staying in the country, even legally.” (07/31/25)
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-07-31-inflation-comes-to-immigration/
Source: Reason
by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
“Every week, new laments from or about Gen Z seem to go viral, spewing desperate and desolate pronunciations about technology. The doom is pushed by some actual members of Gen Z and even more by the press and pundits eager to fret over kids these days and to moralize about technology. And the big idea undergirding it seems to be that young people are absolutely powerless to resist being lonely, degraded zombies — phone always in hand, unable to connect with fellow human beings, addicted to the dopamine hits they attain from social media likes and content slop. But who are we helping by shilling the Doomed Zoomer narrative? It’s certainly not young people who are being served by it.” (07/30/25)
https://reason.com/2025/07/30/gen-z-isnt-powerless-against-technology/
Source: Wired
by Jake Lahut
“It’s been pretty clear for quite some time: Trumpworld loves crypto. Almost everywhere you look in the second Trump administration, there’s a crypto connection. The president, most notably, has his own memecoin, and his two eldest sons, Eric and Don Jr., are involved in a variety of crypto ventures, including World Liberty Financial and its stablecoin. Despite cryptocurrency being immensely profitable for the Trump family and vice versa, though, cracks are beginning to emerge in a key alliance that helped bring the president back to power. The dustup around stablecoin and market structure legislation could be the first preview of more fissures to come.” (07/30/25)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Peter J Wallison
“The [US Supreme] Court’s reading of the Framers’ intentions suggests that the Framers wanted the president, acting unilaterally, to use his presidential powers as though he were a tribune of the people, not just as the official responsible for enforcing or executing the laws. But this idea cannot be found in the accounts of how the Constitutional Convention created the presidency. … compared to Congress, the president still had only the authority to execute the laws, to be the commander in chief in wartime, and to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed.’ Congress itself had eighteen specific powers, such as laying taxes, coining and borrowing money, declaring war, and raising and supporting armies.” (07/30/25)