“If you don’t like Musk, you can and should avoid buying/using the products and services he offers: Not just Tesla’s vehicles, but social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and Internet Service Provider Starlink. You might also do what you can (very little, I’m sorry to say) to oppose his corporate welfare take via government contracts for SpaceX, tax credits for purchases of Tesla vehicles, etc. What you shouldn’t do, because it’s both wrong and stupid, is vandalize or destroy any of the more than 4 million Tesla vehicles currently on the road worldwide.” (04/01/25)
“The term, coined by writer Rob Henderson, describes a set of ideas that he believes confer status on elites while imposing costs on everyone else. In his accounting, these include: academic elites advocate prison abolition while living in low-crime neighborhoods; Silicon Valley billionaires declare that college is a scam, ignoring the elite-education connections that got them their first venture capital meetings; and urban intellectuals claim homeownership is overrated — right up until they buy a brownstone in Brooklyn. While this critique is more often levied against progressives, luxury beliefs are fascinatingly transpartisan. Like ‘virtue signaling’ before it, the term is often used too loosely, simply indicating a set of beliefs with which the speaker disagrees and would like to associate with a villainous or hypocritical overdog. But what if luxury beliefs — frivolous, far-fetched, and sometimes downright wrong — actually serve a useful function?” (04/01/25)
“Before Trump’s re-election in November 2024, progressive commentators often advocated higher US tariffs to achieve three overlapping goals: improve jobs and wages for workers; boost the manufacturing sector; and reduce US trade deficits. A few populist commentators on the right voiced the same agenda. But President Trump’s chaotic tariff proposals since his inauguration far exceed the prescriptions of policy advocates outside the president’s inner circle. With that context in mind, it’s worth summarizing what tariff advocates say, now that Trump’s agenda dominates the headlines.” (04/01/25)
“A health food store owner is cryogenically frozen and revived two centuries later. To his surprise, he learns that the steak, cream pies, and hot fudge he once avoided as unhealthy have turned out to be anything but. The film, of course, is Woody Allen’s 1973 ‘Sleeper,’ and his cinematic send-up highlights a serious problem that has long haunted biomedical science and especially nutrition research — namely, that a surprising number of conclusions are based on very thin evidence, and many are not only unreliable but flat-out false.” (04/01/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“It’s clear that Trump’s State Department spokeswoman has been instructed to respond to any and all questions about Israeli atrocities in Gaza by blaming everything on Hamas, without even pretending to care whether the allegations are true. For some background, Israel has just been caught perpetrating an atrocity so monstrous and so abundantly well-evidenced that even the mainstream western press have felt obligated to report on it. Outlets like the Guardian and the BBC are covering the story of how 15 medical workers for the Red Cross, Civil Defense, and the UN were apparently handcuffed and executed one by one by Israeli forces in Rafah before being buried in a mass grave. According to Palestinian Civil Defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal, they were each shot more than 20 times.” (04/01/25)
Source: Erick Erickson Show
by Eric-Woods Erickson
“The only way for Donald Trump to serve a third term is to amend the Constitution, which would take two-thirds of each House of Congress or a Constitutional Convention with two-thirds of the states, followed by approval of three-fourths of the states. While the critics on MSNBC, those convinced Donald Trump is a tyrant, and other Trump haters are talking about a possible third term, they are not talking about the Signal app controversy, errors in deportations, tariffs, or any story that could actually damage Donald Trump. … Donald Trump knows exactly what he is doing by floating an impossible plan for a third term — he’s gotten everyone distracted from those things he’d prefer not to talk about.” (04/01/25)
“When the Iranian regime disqualifies candidates, everyone who doesn’t believe in the Islamic Republic’s propaganda knows that they are doing it for self-interested reasons, that they are stifling the people and trying to keep them down, that they are behaving anti-democratically. It avails them nothing to explain that they are just following the law. Why then should similar behavior work for Romania, where the courts have been making a habit lately of rejecting far-right political candidates as ineligible for office? The fact that so many of their supporters viewed the cases against Călin Georgescu and Diana Șoșoacă — and against Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and potentially Le Pen — similarly to how we liberals view Iran’s behavior is merely a demonstration of how many people do not believe in the integrity of the law in Romania, America, Israel or France.” (04/01/25)
“The second administration of President Donald J. Trump has already started working its special magic across the Washington, D.C. capital region. Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have fired tens of thousands of federal workers, with more to come. Those who have lost their jobs include people who find housing and other support for veterans struggling with mental illness. They include civil servants who maintained safeguards to prevent our nuclear weapons from becoming dirty bombs. They include healthcare researchers developing treatments for cancer and other killer diseases; workers who ensured that low-income, homeless, and rural students were able to get an education; agricultural researchers who opened up international markets to American farmers; and too many others to mention here. My neighborhood, located on farmland about 40 miles outside Washington, D.C., is among those wracked by this administration’s shakeup of the government workforce.” (04/01/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“Immediately after the recent initial release of records, the mainstream press declared that there were no ‘smoking guns,’ as in the nature of an official confession to the assassination. But that’s a patently ridiculous assertion. Assassination researchers were always certain that the secrecy was not intended to hide a confession. Don’t forget, after all, that these are all records that the national-security establishment knowingly delivered to the National Archives in the 1990s, where they were then kept secret. What are the chances they would have delivered a confession to the National Archives? … it was standard practice within the national-security establishment to never put any reference to a covert state-sponsored assassination into writing. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, that policy would have been especially followed in the state-sponsored assassination of a U.S. president.” (04/01/25)
“In this age of rage, it is common for people to become the very thing that they despise in others, jettisoning their most cherished values to strike out at those they hate. Since the election, Democrats have shown that very self-destructive quality of rage in adopting anti-immigrant, anti-free speech, anti-labor, and even anti-environmental positions to get at Donald Trump or his supporters. It consumes every part of a person. It is addictive, and it is contagious. What these rage addicts will not admit, however, is that they like it; they need it. That was evident this week in New York, where democratic legislators are again moving to weaponize state laws for political purposes — just like they did with Trump. This time, they are targeting Elon Musk, whose dealerships, charging stations, and customers have been hit by political violence from the left.” (04/01/25)
