“An atheist has just written one of my favorite books on religion in recent memory. As a committed Christian, I see nothing unsettling about that — not when the book, Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes, treats its main subjects, American Christianity and its connection to liberal democracy, with such great intellectual care. Rauch and I don’t share a religion, though we do share an allegiance—a devotion, even—to a particular political configuration: liberalism. Rauch’s thesis is that the American project has always relied on the presence of vibrant forms of both Christianity and liberalism as a precondition for its flourishing, and that for a long time now, Christianity has not been upholding its end of the arrangement.” (03/17/25)
“As autocrats go, Donald Trump is in a class by himself. Every other autocrat in living memory used brutal techniques to destroy his opposition, but also built a strong state for the sake of military power or economic development. Trump, by contrast, seems determined to destroy government per se, even those parts of it that made America great. Though he is particularly focused on destroying liberal habitats such as universities and blue states and cities, Trump wants to annihilate the state in general. This is not because he is a principled libertarian. On the contrary, to the extent that he wants the state to survive at all, he wants to bend it to his personal will, civil liberties be damned. Unfortunately for the U.S. economy, science thrives on free inquiry.” (03/18/25)
“After spending most of the 2024 campaign blaming Democrats for inflation and insisting that tariffs don’t increase prices, Donald Trump and his allies have a new economic message: High prices are good. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, recently admitted to the Economic Club of New York that inflation-weary Americans could see a ‘one-time price adjustment’ from Trump’s tariffs, but he quickly added that ‘access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.’ Representative Mark Alford of Missouri told CNN, ‘We all have a role to play in this to rightsize our government, and if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again.'” (03/17/25)
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Jacob G Hornberger
“We already know that Congress is not interfering with Trump’s executive decree-laws, especially when it comes to raising taxes on the American people in form of tariffs, not to mention the destruction of their natural, God-given right of freedom of trade. But the assumption has always been that Trump and his minions would comply with orders of the federal judiciary, which is how our constitutional system works. If Trump has now decided that he, not the judiciary, is the final decider of the constitutionality of his actions, then what other obstacles are there to his complete dictatorship?” (03/17/25)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Robert Corn-Revere
“The Federal Communications Commission is conducting an unseemly and unconstitutional spectacle, ostensibly to determine whether CBS violated its policy against ‘news distortion’ by editing a ’60 Minutes’ interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Its real purpose is to exercise raw partisan power. The FCC already knows CBS did not violate any rules and merely engaged in everyday journalism. … But judging the merits of the ‘news distortion’ allegation was never the point. The FCC staff already dismissed the complaint — filed by a partisan activist group — as fatally defective back in January. …But one of Brendan Carr’s first acts as the new FCC chair in Donald Trump’s administration was to reinstate the complaint and call for public comments. Asking members of the public to ‘vote’ on how they feel about a news organization’s editorial policies or whether they think the network violated FCC rules is both pointless and constitutionally infirm.” (03/17/25)
“One of President Donald Trump’s most popular reforms is his executive order abolishing federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) dictates and their efforts to ‘socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.’ Trump’s order outraged progressives and sparked a torrent of legal challenges. Can Trump end a half century of federal tyrannizing of private employment policies?” (03/17/25)
“In 2012, Gerard Comeau loaded his car with beer (and whiskey and liquor) in Quebec and headed home to New Brunswick, where the booze costs more. Five years later, he was at the Supreme Court. The reason is that he’d brought back more beer than was allowed under provincial liquor laws, unwittingly running afoul of interprovincial trade barriers. Compared to tariffs, interprovincial trade barriers might seem like small fry. But as developed countries look to diversify trade relationships, non-tariff barriers such as those affecting Canadian provinces will loom large.” (03/17/25)
“Elon Musk is way out of his lane in cheering a bid to impeach federal Judge James Boasberg, who’s put a temporary hold on deportation flights of illegal [sic] migrant gangbangers. We like the idea of the flights: The brutes of Tren de Aragua and MS-13 have had it too easy for far too long, and current efforts to get tough are a necessary correction to Biden-era denial. President Trump’s executive orders declaring multiple gangs to be terrorist outfits are rooted in the gangs’ tactics and goals: They’re utterly vicious in their attempts to take turf inside our country, from Long Island to Colorado and beyond. Simply deporting them hasn’t proved enough — multiple members have slipped back in multiple times, and while Trump has stopped the mass illegal [sic] border-jumping of the Biden years, the gangs have the resources and sophistication to keep getting their people through.” (03/16/25)
“Some tentatively hoped that even with Trump at the helm, MAGA’s diagnosis of voters’ discontent — which Democrats still couldn’t get a handle on — was at least broadly accurate enough to lead to some positive changes. At this point in the administration’s tenure, however, such hope recedes and a grimmer reality appears. Its most unsettling feature is not Trump being Trump — his rashness, instability, and torching of norms are all playing out as promised — but the fact that a movement built on decrying the existential threat of leftist activism expects us to believe that unchecked activism from its own side will somehow produce different results. In other words, countering the excesses of the left with the same excesses on the right dooms those on the political right to repeat, rather than correct, the follies of their opponents.” (03/17/25)
