Source: Property and Environment Research Center
by Drew Bennett, Travis Brammer, Jerod Merkle, Kurt Smith, Shawn Regan, Temple Stoellinger, Arthur Middleton, Kristin Barker, Jacob Hochard, Patrick Lendrum, Erin Welty, Craig Benjamin, & Brian Yablonski
“Virtual fencing technology holds the potential to modernize and transform livestock management, with significant but still underexplored biodiversity conservation applications. The technology uses Global Positioning System-enabled collars on livestock and software-defined boundaries to provide a virtual alternative to traditional physical fencing, creating opportunities to remove or reduce physical fences.” (04/22/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Carolyn Iodice
“A new bill under consideration in California is facing criticism for censoring speech about immigration. Elon Musk has claimed the bill would ‘make investigating fraud illegal.’ One opponent has dubbed it the ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act,’ named after the YouTuber known for filming alleged fraud at child care centers in Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota. But its sponsor says the bill simply protects immigrant organizations from threats of violence. So which is it? The bill, AB 2624, does two things. First, it allows people who’ve faced threats or violence for providing or receiving immigration services to join California’s ‘Safe at Home’ program, which allows people to keep their residential address out of state records. Second — and this is the part we’re focusing on — it limits what regular people are allowed to post online about immigrants and the people who help them.” (04/22/26)
“Are We Still at War? I’m going to say no, not really, although the ultimate resolution is still to be determined. Donald Trump blinked again on Tuesday, announcing an indefinite extension of the cease-fire until the Iranians ‘can come up with a unified proposal’. Unnamed advisers came out later and told go-to regurgitator Barak Ravid that the open-ended cease-fire isn’t open-ended, but I don’t know who they think they’re convincing. Trump is not going to risk further damage to his rapidly deteriorating political position by greenlighting a full-scale attack. He’s had several opportunities to do so and demurred. That’s of course better than the alternative. But instead, we have an ‘end’ to the indiscriminate bombing part of the war that keeps all the economic consequences intact.” (04/23/26)
“We’ve written a lot at the Show-Me Institute lately about A–F letter grades for public schools. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) will soon begin assigning these grades to all schools and districts under an executive order from Governor Kehoe. Legislation to codify the order may follow, depending on how the 2026 session unfolds. A central component of these letter grades is student growth. Growth measures how much students learn over the course of a year, based on state assessments. … I’ve studied academic growth extensively and believe it is the most accurate indicator of school effectiveness we have. No other measure comes close.” (04/22/26)
“In policy debates, some see state action as the obvious solution; others say the same about civil society and/or markets. But listen closely, and you’ll often find that everyone’s gone negative: They have lots of bad things to say about the other side, and not much in favor of their own. That’s the ‘pretty pig’ problem: We can all see the downsides — many of them quite real — with one system, and so we conclude, a bit too quickly, that the other one must be better. As I’ve noted before, that approach leads to disagreement without engagement, as the advocates on both sides ignore the problems of their own preferred system: The state I can imagine is clearly a good solution to the real world commercial system I’m immersed in, but that state doesn’t exist, and its powers are not stable or reliable.” [editor’s note: Nietzsche offered a neat, concise, and true “theory of the state” … “Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.” – TLK] (04/22/26)
Source: Rutherford Institute
by John & Nisha Whitehead
“The Trump administration has spent months demonizing immigrants — detaining them, deporting them, tearing apart families, and casting them as threats to national security. And yet, when it comes time to fill the ranks of its endless wars, those same individuals—green card holders, refugees, asylum seekers, even undocumented men—suddenly become expendable assets. Too dangerous to belong. Not too dangerous to die. Increasingly, the same could be said of all of us. We are all being viewed as potential threats by the government. … While the government is making it easier for Americans to be conscripted and killed in war, it is simultaneously working to make it harder for us to have any say in the decisions that send our young men and women to war in the first place.” (04/22/26)
“Taxation is theft. People are free to disagree because everyone is free to be wrong. You might debate what kind of theft it is; whether extortion, a ransom, or an armed robbery, but it’s theft. We used to know it. The story of Robin Hood has morphed into a socialist fairy tale of someone who ‘robbed from the rich and gave to the poor,’ but originally, he was a hero who recovered stolen property from tax collectors and returned it to their victims. Government and other socialists don’t want this story told, for obvious reasons. If you are taking someone’s property — their money — under threat, when they’d rather keep it to use as they see fit, you are a thief.” (04/22/26)
“Much about our current political era feels unprecedented, especially the sense that the government is targeting people for their political beliefs. In December, President Trump’s Department of Justice ordered the FBI to drastically escalate surveillance of leftist groups. News has also broken that the Biden administration collected data, without a warrant, on Republican senators’ phone calls as part of Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of Jan. 6, taking advantage of inadequate legal protections for data privacy. Republicans and Democrats alike routinely express concern about ‘lawfare,’ the use of unjustified investigations and prosecutions to harass whichever party is out of power. Americans hoping for a deescalation of lawfare should seek to recover the forgotten legacy of the Constitution’s Framers: the safeguards those patriots who knew what it was to be hunted designed for times like these.” (04/22/26)
“Millions of Americans were willing to ignore Trump’s destructive personality and growing authoritarianism when they thought his policies would make them rich. In the end, those policies did little more than pick their pockets while enriching Trump’s inner circle of family and friends. The voters who elected him are left to pick up the pieces of their derailed lives as they come to terms with the fact that they were the rubes all along. It’s no wonder his biggest supporters feel duped. … MAGA voters have long believed in taking Trump ‘seriously but not literally.’ This is just another way of saying Trump might lie to other people to advance his own interests, but he would never lie to the supporters who power his political movement. At least some of those faithful Trump supporters are finally ready to admit that they’ve been conned, and there’s no way back to believing the fairy tale.” (04/22/26)
“The United States was built on a distrust of concentrated power. It is this fundamental distrust of big government that shaped federalism, defined the separation of powers, and limited each branch to a distinct role. During periods of rapid social change, however, governmental restraint weakens. Reform movements (whether in civil rights, economic regulation, or cultural policy) have not only produced legislation but also expanded judicial authority. Social progressivism brings courts to no longer just interpret the law but also reshape it. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 addressed a clear injustice. It prohibited discrimination in employment and public accommodations based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Congress enacted the law through the democratic process, responding to a national failure to enforce equal protection. While many conservatives criticize the Act’s expansion of federal authority, it came through elected representatives.” (04/22/26)
