“This weekend, what began as a protest in Los Angeles turned into violence. Not debate. Not a peaceful assembly. Violence. As you watch the scenes unfold on television, it feels like something that should be happening in Iran or Afghanistan — not in Los Angeles. Downtown mobs clashed with federal officers outside the Metropolitan Detention Center. Protesters were seen throwing water bottles, bottles, rocks, debris and other objects at federal and assisting law enforcement officers. A dumpster was moved into the street and set on fire outside the federal facility. The image was unmistakable: street chaos aimed directly at the seat of federal authority in the center of America’s second-largest city. This is happening yesterday and today — not in some unstable foreign capital. It is happening in Los Angeles, on streets where families work, live and commute.” (01/31/25)
“These killings are not random excesses or rogue acts. They are calculated performances of power, intended simultaneously to shock the public into paralysis and to provoke mass resistance that can then be cited as justification for escalating repression. The regime’s logic is brutally circular: protest is met with violence, violence generates outrage, outrage is labeled insurrection, and insurrection becomes the pretext for extinguishing democracy at gunpoint. State-sanctioned violence is thus framed as the only means of restoring ‘order,’ even as it becomes the mechanism through which democratic life is suffocated.” (01/30/26)
“Rent is a premium to avoid risk and preserve mobility. Landlords don’t just collect checks: they absorb the financial volatility of homeownership.” (01/30/26)
“The century-old moral panics and persecutions by Anthony Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice are echoed today by cancellation campaigns from the moralistic Left and Right.” (01/30/26)
“Donald Trump has a public relations problem: The agents he unleashed to round up illegal immigrants have been attacking and killing American citizens. The backlash is so bad that Trump had to sideline Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol’s former ‘commander-at-large.’ Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, might be next. Clearly, the administration needs new faces to defend its thuggery. Perhaps it should consider the rich talent pool available in a country with a like-minded government: Iran.” (01/30/26)
“Past conservatives devoted enormous energy to downplaying America’s history of brutal imperial expansion. But in the second Trump administration, the New Right is doing something different: it’s openly celebrating and seeking to revive it.” (01/30/26)
“Stephen Miller’s ascent to the shadow presidency began like so much other poison in the very immediate aftermath of 10/7, with a post nine days after the terror attacks from the official X account of the Trump campaign introducing a long list of bullet points under the title ‘Trump Plan to Keep Jihadists and Their Sympathizers Out of America.’ The campaign promised it would immediately revoke student visas from campus protesters born outside the country, ‘proactively send ICE to pro-jihadist demonstrations’ to arrest them, ‘aggressively deport resident aliens with jihadist sympathies,’ use a then-obscure law called the Alien Enemies Act to jump-start said deportations, and ‘implement strong ideological screening for all immigrants to the United States’ that would automatically disqualify anyone suspected of harboring ‘sympathy for jihadists, Hamas or Hamas ideology.'” (01/31/25)
“Donald Trump, JD Vance and other MAGA luminaries often proclaim that the grave danger facing the West is ‘civilizational erasure,’ which they claim is happening in Europe: Through its dangerously misguided approach toward identity and immigration, Europe is destroying the West’s distinctive legacy.
But the West’s defining character has not been tribal or religious solidarity — that describes most of the world. The West’s precious, almost unique, achievement has been the limitation of state power.” (01/30/26)
