Source: Quillette
by Tomislav Kardum
“Populist rhetoric is exceptionally effective for pursuing and gaining power, but it provides no program for the complexities of actual governance.” (02/17/26)
https://quillette.com/2026/02/17/populisms-self-defeating-trap-trump-europe-dostoevsky/
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“People should be free to talk to each other about whatever they want as long as they’re not thereby conspiring to rob and murder and so forth. They should even be able to give advice. Including legal advice. New York State disagrees. The Institute for Justice is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to let the non-lawyer volunteers of a company called Upsolve keep giving advice to people facing lawsuits to collect debt.” (02/17/26)
Source: Gideon’s Substack
by Noah Millman
“Could the Arab parties be the key to transforming Israeli politics?” (02/17/26)
https://gideons.substack.com/p/the-stone-rejected-by-the-builders
Source: Washington Monthly
by Robert J Shapiro
“The late scholar of mass movements, charismatic leaders, and government violence foreshadowed the president’s rise and the MAGA movement in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Recent polling proves her prescience.” (02/17/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/02/17/hannah-arendt-understood-donald-trump/
Source: Pierre Lemieux
by Pierre Lemieux
“Consider the case of the businesses begging for protective tariffs to compensate for other tariffs imposed on them by the same government.” (02/16/26)
https://pierrelemieux.substack.com/p/is-protectionism-for-national-security
Source: New York Post
by Andrew Arthur
“President Joe Biden not only allowed 6 million to 10 million illegal [sic] aliens to walk across the border during his term, he also granted a ‘quiet amnesty’ to nearly 1 million. We’re only learning this now, as the Department of Justice revealed Biden officials improperly ‘terminated,’ ‘dismissed’ or ‘closed’ that many cases before the nation’s immigration tribunals. The tool for this deception was the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (‘EOIR’, pronounced like Winnie the Pooh’s sad donkey friend), which oversees deportation cases. Under Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the Biden administration used EOIR to manipulate removal hearings, tanking pending cases in the name of ‘prosecutorial discretion.'” (02/16/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/02/16/opinion/bidens-quiet-amnesty-for-nearly-1-million-illegal-immigrants/
Source: CounterPunch
by Laura Flanders
“There’s a reason we talk more about power than individual people. Take Jeffrey Epstein. The man is dead, but the power problem lives on. The files not only revealed a whole lot of individual predators, but also an entire ecosystem of money, and power, and abuse, and protection by bankers, and billionaires, and politicians, and protectors, many of whom continue to wield enormous power at the very height of our society today. Put that creepy picture next to another, one of a sprawling network of secretive detention centers and camps where tens of thousands of people, including women and girls, are hidden away in far off places and moved from camp to camp and state to state and cage to cage without documents or phones or anyone to hear their calls. We do not come to this moment uninformed.” (02/17/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/17/the-trafficking-never-stopped/
Source: The UnPopulist
by Andrew Koppelman
“Hierarchical structures within religion are largely acceptable to liberalism so long as they are based on consent rather than coercion. Hierarchy must be justified, but consent suffices to justify. Shifting our focus from theory to practice, American law has never questioned the right of the Catholic Church to confine the priesthood to males, or to impose on the priesthood difficult demands such as celibacy, or to condemn as immoral homosexual sex and contraception. Liberals often harshly denounce and stigmatize these ideas, putting painful social pressure on those who hold them, but the postliberals claim more than this: outright coercion and censorship. Liberals believe in free speech, even for ideas we don’t like.” (02/16/26)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/the-unbearable-intellectual-lightness
Source: Show-Me Institute
by Susan Pendergrass
“A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal lays out what has been on the minds of many (or at least mine) for some time. The traditional education establishment that was in charge of all things K-12 in the last century is crumbling. In the last decade, millions of children have exited their assigned public schools in exchange for a scholarship that is a fraction of what was spent on them by the education blob. It is becoming clear — parents want to be able to choose from a range of options when it comes to the education of their children.” (02/16/26)
https://showmeinstitute.org/article/education/teachers-unions-get-desperate/
Source: Glenn Greenwald
by Glenn Greenwald
“One of the towering questions hovering over the Epstein saga was whether the illicit sexual activities of the world’s most powerful people were used as blackmail by Epstein or by intelligence agencies with whom (or for whom) he worked. The Trump administration now insists that no such blackmail occurred. … There are still many files that remain heavily and inexplicably redacted. But, from the files that have been made public, we know one thing for certain. One of Epstein’s two key benefactors — the hedge fund billionaire Leon Black, who paid Epstein at least $158 million from 2012 through 2017 — was aggressively blackmailed over his sexual conduct. ” (02/16/26)
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-epstein-files-the-blackmail-of