“There is an irony to the undying Jeffrey Epstein scandal: It may never be more than an annoyance for President Trump, who knew Epstein well, but it could topple British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who never met the sex-offender financier. Starmer has a 71 percent disapproval rating and leads the least popular British government since World War II. The reasons for the Labour Party leader’s deepening plight are moral, because decency and shame still matter in British politics. But they are also institutional. An American president is less democratically accountable than the British prime minister, because partisanship has disabled the checks that the Founders placed on the chief executive.” (02/08/26)
“Trumpism is a movement [Lionel] Trilling would still recognize as one that expresses itself ‘only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.’ Memes and AI slop, in current parlance. Or in mass deportations and state-sanctioned street violence and murder. If those ‘gestures’ appear garbled, it is because the ‘the high priests of MAGA ideology,’ Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, are not driven not by coherent ideas. What drives them is visceral rage at cultural change that fails to center men as base as themselves. And by the congenital insecurity of Donald Trump himself.” (02/08/26)
‘More than 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosopher Plato predicted ICE’s tactics. He knew, even then, that the character of a certain type of man or woman was corrupt and that anonymity would enable brutality. In short, he knew that ICE agents would want to wear masks not to protect themselves from danger, but rather to enable their immoral conduct. Plato’s prescient understanding of ICE agents arose during a discussion of the parable of the ring of Gyges. The debate occurred during Socrates’s inquiry into human virtue, recounted in Plato’s Republic.” (02/08/26)
“As details about President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace and its plans for the reconstruction of Gaza trickle out, two things become increasingly clear: Palestinians have barely, if at all, been consulted in these plans; and the people in Trump’s orbit stand to benefit from the project the most. The U.N. Security Council approved the Board of Peace as a mechanism for implementing Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Israel and Gaza back in November, though its mandate now appears much broader. The BoP itself consists of high-level representatives from Gulf nations, Israel, Serbia, Albania, and Argentina, among others, with Trump himself as the chair and ultimate decision-maker. Absent from the Board of Peace are representatives from almost every EU country except Bulgaria and Hungary, and anyone representing Palestine.” (02/09/25)
“Donald Trump has chosen Kevin Warsh, a harsh critic of the Federal Reserve who has called for ‘breaking some heads,’ as the next Fed chair. Last week I wrote about what the Fed is and what it does. Today I’ll talk about the Fed’s policy record, with emphasis on the criticisms offered by Warsh and others.” (02/08/26)
“The harsh reality is that denuclearizing North Korea has become unrealistic. Pyongyang is known to already possess at least 50—possibly over a hundred—nuclear warheads and enough fissile material to build many more, while rapidly enhancing missile capabilities to credibly threaten nuclear use against South Korea, Japan, and even the American mainland. Meanwhile, the threshold of North Korean nuclear use has also gone down. Pyongyang’s nuclear doctrine has become markedly more aggressive in recent years, declaring possible preemptive use to deter perceived imminent threats on the horizon against the regime. In the event of a crisis on the Korean Peninsula, one can only hope that the North Korean leadership will exercise rational judgment to avoid nuclear escalation.” (02/08/26)
“Moral panic — defined on Wikipedia as ‘a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society’ — has become our chief political currency. It’s in the driver’s seat. It has the wheel. And it manifests as a form of puritanism, also conveniently defined by Mencken: ‘The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’ We can’t have that! Something must be done! There oughtta be a law! And the laws always come down less to prohibition than to permission.” (02/08/26)
“Whether one thinks protesting in the streets of Minneapolis is a wise action or not, it remains the case that Americans have a right to vigorously protest the actions of the state, and not fear being killed for it. In fact, it was Justice Douglas’s opinion that ‘the right to speak freely and to promote diversity of ideas and programs,’ is ‘one of the chief distinctions that sets us apart from totalitarian regimes.’ To believe, whether implicitly or explicitly, that public protests are only justified when complainants protest quietly, or when the government deems the protests appropriate, or when the victims are lionized by the administration and its backers, is to give far too much credit to the state.” (02/07/26)
“For my entire adult life, I’ve listened to self-described ‘constitutional’ conservatives strut around like God’s gift to the nation’s conscience, as they lecture everyone on the importance of upholding the original intent of America’s founding document. They’ve been oddly silent as Donald Trump’s administration directly assaults the Constitution. He’s not the first one to do it, but he is doing so more brazenly than others. Even if some ‘whataboutism’ is appropriate, wouldn’t it be more consistent for conservatives to criticize these assaults just as they criticized previous assaults under Joe Biden and Barack Obama? Cheering — or remaining silent — as ICE agents arrest those who photograph them (First Amendment), carry out warrantless searches (Fourth Amendment), and ignore the directives of governors (10th Amendment) is the definition of hypocrisy.” (02/06/26)
“The recent expansion of the drug war into military action underscores a deeper problem: a longstanding policy with costs that are concrete, immense and well documented, while its benefits remain vague and modest.” (02/06/26)
