“If you were watching any of the voter-on-the-street interviews Tuesday, you might have been surprised to hear how many Americans are deeply disturbed, furious even, about Donald Trump’s bulldozing of the White House to make way for a garish $330M donor-paid ballroom. It may not be the most egregious offense of the Trump regime (which has kidnapped people off the streets, sent them to foreign hell holes, and cut off SNAP benefits, among other outrages). It is not even the worst case of corruption, given the estimated $5B or so in wealth Trump and his family have hauled in from (among other sources) foreign buyers of crypto. But the ballroom is the most visible, easily explained, and visually disgusting evidence of Trump’s destruction of our democracy and the public’s ownership of our institutions.” (11/06/25)
“In recent years, there has been growing concern with right-wing attacks on liberalism broadly conceived. A ‘post-liberal’ movement came into being, spearheaded by Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed. While post-liberalism as an organized intellectual movement seems to have petered out, its ethos has lived on and appears to be growing more and more popular among young people who not only question liberalism in the abstract but are alienated from the concrete institutions and ideas that make up our liberal society and see little value in them. … A powerful symbol of this rejection is the embrace among some right-wing populists of the National Socialist political theorist Carl Schmitt and his concept of the ‘friend-enemy distinction.'” (11/06/25)
“The election was like watching a professional football team beat the hell out of a pee-wee team, then throw a parade for itself like they’d just won the Super Bowl. The results were not really in doubt – there were chances and hope, but hope isn’t a strategy and does not impact reality all that much. Democrats won because these were elections in Democratic states and cities; it’s really that simple. But a deeper takeaway exists beyond the obvious results: a lot of Democrats absolutely freaking hate you and are happy to see you die. That might be a little hyperbole, but not much.” (11/06/25)
“Peter Thiel recently gave a lecture on the End Times, described as ‘portraying the Antichrist as a technocratic leader exploiting fears of catastrophe to impose global control.’ Thiel suggested that maybe the Antichrist would use worries about global warming, or inequality, or AI safety, to frighten people into accepting some kind of evil surveillance state. His moral was that we need to stop living in fear of people’s scare stories. But isn’t the idea that if we try to regulate things, it will summon the literal Antichrist and plunge the world into eternal darkness, kind of a scare story? Isn’t Thiel using this scare story to frighten people into accepting the, uh, evil surveillance state he’s enabling?” (11/06/25)
“Food stamp failures have mobilized thousands of individuals and businesses to provide meals for the hungry. Why are we tasking the feds with this anyway?” (11/06/25)
Source: The Atlantic
by Missy Ryan, Vivian Salama, Michael Scherer, & Nancy A Youssef
“With a U.S. armada floating off Venezuela’s shores, Maduro now faces the choice of whether to stay and suffer the potential consequences or to flee. And the United States faces the prospect that Trump, who has criticized America’s past ‘forever wars’ and spent much of this year focused on ending major foreign conflicts, might be about to start one in his own backyard. Since his first term as president, Trump has considered Venezuela a problem: a close ally of Communist Cuba run by a leftist demagogue with support from Russia and China in a hemisphere dominated by the United States.” (11/06/25)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Israel is still blocking humanitarian groups from delivering the aid necessary to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. In an article titled ‘Not enough tents, food reaching Gaza as winter comes, aid agencies say,’ Reuters reports that ‘Far too little aid is reaching Gaza nearly four weeks after a ceasefire’ due to Israeli restrictions preventing aid trucks from getting to their destinations, and that according to an OSHA report last week ‘a tenth of children screened in Gaza were still acutely malnourished.’ A report from the UK’s Channel 4 News shows warehouses full of food that aid groups say isn’t being allowed into Gaza nearly as rapidly as needed. … Haaretz reports that ‘Israel has implemented a new procedure requiring all humanitarian organizations operating in Gaza and the West Bank to reapply for official approval, with many denied, despite the relative calm in Gaza following the cease-fire.'” (11/06/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Connor Vasile
“Zohran Mamdani is now New York City’s first Democratic Socialist Mayor-elect, and with him comes a slew of initiatives marketed as making the Big Apple more affordable, safer, and more equitable. While this sounds good in theory (as political promises often do), Mamdani’s champagne socialism will only push rich New Yorkers away from the city, and leave the middle and working classes to foot the bill.” (11/06/25)
“In politics, migrations rarely happen all at once. They start quietly — one or two members of a herd moving toward safer ground while the rest pretend not to notice. But once the wind really changes, the movement becomes unmistakable. I believe that a migration has begun within the Republican Party. The first signs are visible. A few Republican members of Congress — some of them proud standard-bearers of the MAGA movement — have begun to distance themselves from President Donald Trump. … Republicans running in midterm races are going to face a choice. They can cling, as many Democrats did in 2024, to an economic message that ignores reality. Or they can begin the slow, necessary work of reclaiming the party of free markets and global engagement. The Republicans most likely to lead this migration are those senators not on the ballot in 2026. They have time, insulation and perhaps a touch of perspective.” (11/06/25)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“Nonintervention is not isolationism; it is wisdom born of bitter experience. The notion that American military might can resolve Nigeria’s deep-seated religious and ethnic strife ignores the region’s complexities and invites catastrophe. To understand why, we must first unpack Nigeria’s fractured landscape — a mosaic of peoples, faiths, and histories that no external force can redraw without spilling rivers of blood. From there, the annals of past ‘humanitarian’ interventions reveal a grim pattern: promises of salvation masking bids for regime change, yielding chaos that endures for generations.” (11/06/25)
