“Americans have been fed a comforting fairy tale about Islamic terrorism. Radical jihadists attack the West simply because they despise freedom, democracy, and the American way of life. This narrative flatters domestic audiences while conveniently obscuring a far more troubling reality. For decades, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel have armed, financed, tolerated, and tapped into Sunni Islamist extremists as geopolitical tools to destabilize rivals. The evidence spans multiple theaters and rests on declassified documents, congressional investigations, and credible investigative journalism.” (05/26/26)
“The founder of Marxism once wrote movingly about faith and virtue before taking what his own father feared might be a ‘Faustian’ turn toward revolution and resentment.” (05/26/26)
“Public Safety Canada, an agency responsible for safety, security, emergency preparedness and this kind of thing, recently urged Canadians to protect themselves when using public Wi-Fi by also using a VPN. ‘Using a VPN protects your data,’ the agency said. True. Unless — unless others in the government succeed in requiring VPN companies to uniformly sabotage the privacy of their customers. The mechanism for crippling VPNs? That would be the pending legislation to force VPN providers to retain personal data which users expect them not to retain, in this way killing these companies’ very reason for being as well as Canadian Internet users’ reasons to employ these companies.” (05/26/26)
“For Trump, it wasn’t enough that even the most violent received unconditional pardons. No, now he proposes to enrich them with taxpayer funds. Those deserving of punishment get rewarded. The victimizer becomes the victim. The criminal becomes the patriot.” (05/26/26)
“It was his last show and it was the only episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert I’ve ever watched. Yes, I’d seen clips, but I had honestly never watched a full episode ever. I never actually watched an episode of The Colbert Report either, or The Daily Show for that matter. Watching liberals pretend to be honest brokers on the news of the day never appealed to me. But Colbert’s last show did, mostly because I wanted to see one fresh before it was too late and I figured he and his ample staff would bring their A-game. Boy, was I wrong.” (05/26/26)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“My usual explanation for why I call myself a libertarian instead of a liberal is that after the enemies of liberalism stole its name we needed a new one. In a recent Substack post, however, Matthew Yglesias writes that: ‘while some classical liberals have called the Republican Party home, liberalism has largely been a Democratic Party project.’ His view is that ‘liberals’ in the modern American sense, classical liberals and libertarians are all liberals in the same sense. Is he right?” (05/25/26)
“Rebuilding state capacity is not just about saving money or improving efficiency. It is about reclaiming our collective sovereignty.” [editor’s note: Individual sovereignty is the only real sovereignty – TLK] (05/26/26)
“[O]ne way of looking at an audience is ‘anyone who experiences the art.’ This expansive view is, I think, is a vital and true way of defining audience. It’s important to hold the expansive idea of audience in mind, and to be open to it. Another way to think about audience is to say it is the community with whom the artist is in conversation. In this sense, audience moves closer to the artistic intent. It’s not that the art is closed to anyone else; it’s that it is entering an already-existing conversation and speaking into it, and so it exists within that specific conversation in a specific way. Which version of audience is true? I think both are true.” (05/25/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
“One problem with raising expectations, as a government such as Javier Milei’s did in Argentina, is that when things don’t look as bright as one would like, people begin to lose faith in the ideas. Much emphasis was placed at the beginning on the superiority of the libertarian ideas the president professes, and they were proclaimed with such forceful, aggressive assertiveness that, even though he himself made clear it would take time and sacrifices to clean up the disaster he inherited, people became convinced of the inevitability of progress. Such faith inevitably carried with it high expectations and impatience. Now, almost two and a half years into his administration, many Argentines are losing sight of the legacy of so many years of failed policies he had to confront when he came into office and beginning to associate what is happening today … with the present administration rather than past ones.” (05/25/26)
