“Disney-owned ABC late-night show host Jimmy Kimmel did not apologize for offending much of the nation when he returned to his show after a one-week suspension. So much for the left-wing narrative that President Donald Trump ripped up the First Amendment and tossed Kimmel off the air. The controversy began the Monday after Charlie Kirk’s assassination by a Trump- and Kirk-hating left-winger. Kimmel, however, said, ‘The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything to they can to score political points from it.’ In Kimmel’s returning monologue, he was not just unapologetic, he was defiant. He flat-out denied any intention ‘to blame any specific group’ for Kirk’s assassination. Kimmel said, ‘It was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man.'” (09/25/25)
“I spent the past decade watching conservatives complain about ‘cancel culture’ and government attacks on free speech. And then, last week, I watched them enact these very things on a grander scale: Social media mobs hounding random nobodies out of their jobs; the government pushing companies to censor speech. … This weapons-grade hypocrisy was the work of a small number of conservatives, but it was supported online by many more. If anyone called out the hypocrisy, conservatives responded that this was different: This was celebrating murder. Or they pointed toward progressive social media and said, ‘You want to see hypocrisy? Try looking over there.’ … However silly progressives look, at least they are now pointed in the right direction, while conservatives are headed in the wrong one.” (09/24/25)
“One Tuesday night in July 2023, Ron Luessen got contacted by a late-shift worker on the support team for Elcon, a construction firm in the Pacific Northwest. Luessen, an equipment manager, was off the clock, but he was the main point of contact, and the worker was puzzled. ‘We’re supposed to be working tonight, and this place is closed,’ Luessen recalled the message. ‘What do you want us to do?’ There wasn’t any reason for the building to be closed. Elcon was steadily busy, recently picking up business in Billings, Montana, beyond its base of operations in Seattle. The company had even just updated the kitchens. But the next day, around 120 Elcon employees got the official word: Don’t come in. After 42 years building bridges, highways, rail lines, airports, and basic infrastructure Americans use every day, Elcon was history.” (09/24/25)
Source: David Friedman’s Substack
by David Friedman
“It starts, like the argument on the other side, with the belief that it is on the whole better for people to believe what is true. The question is what mechanism gets you there. To put it differently, what mechanism for filtering speech does the best job of letting truth through while blocking falsehood? The ideal mechanism would be an omniscient censor committed to truth, someone who always knows whether a statement is true or false and only blocks the false ones, but we don’t have any of those.” (09/24/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ryan McMaken
“One of the most memorable passages in the memoir of the escaped slave Frederick Douglass is where he describes how one group of slaves would argue with another group of slaves over whose master was richer or stronger. Exhibiting a mixture of Stockholm syndrome with delusions of grandeur, these slaves, according to Douglass, ‘seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves.’ … Americans think themselves quite privileged to be dominated and exploited by the current American ruling oligarchy. Why? It is often because these victims of the regime judge their masters to be less awful than some other masters. But, not content with concluding one set of overlords to be merely less bad than another, these willing serfs then go a step further and attribute to their masters great virtue and kindness.” (09/24/25)
“Contrary to popular myth, women do not, as a rule, marry and then divorce men for material gain. Because women are not, as a rule, very stupid. You see, marriage benefits men more than women, on average. Finances are among the reasons this is true. Women don’t marry and then divorce for money because the average woman ends up poorer after divorce. … This is important context as Marjorie Taylor Greene is once again calling for a ‘national divorce.’ As is often the case with her, I’m not sure exactly what she’s proposing. But let’s assume she wants to see ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states become separate countries. If so, she should know that the blue states would be the husband and the red states would be the wife in this political split.” (09/24/25)
“Progressives today are mourning the fleeting (six-day) martyrdom of Jimmy Kimmel, archetype of today’s late-night sometime-comedians, all-the-time-propagandists. And some progressives, noticing how big government can throw its weight around by working levers of coercion, are perhaps having an epiphany: Actual conservatives sensibly warn that government has too much weight and too many levers. Perhaps progressives should have been more troubled when the Biden administration was throwing its weight around, using regulatory threats from the White House and federal agencies to pressure social media companies to censor what that administration called ‘covid misinformation.'” (09/24/25)
“One of the main reasons I can’t be conservative or liberal — Right or Left, Republican or Democrat — is that all of them trust government to some degree. I don’t trust it because I can’t. They trust government with different issues; their specific degree of trust depends on which political party holds the most offices this week. I trust government with nothing — based on its actions, not its promises, and its perpetual failure to fulfill the bare minimum justification for government throughout history. Each political faction also has areas where they doubt government, but I distrust it entirely — especially in critical matters like life, death, ethics, or natural rights. Handing those to government was a mistake.” (09/24/25)
“If there are still historians in 100 years time, and if some of them still know Latin, then they may see Trump’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly as a key symbolic moment in the latest round of Translatio Imperii: the process whereby imperial rule and legitimacy passes from one state to another. In the present era, that means how global leadership, and the leading role in defining global norms, passes from the United States to China. … Generally in history, the Translatio Imperii has been accompanied and driven by great military catastrophes. With luck, this time that will not be necessary. If the Chinese leadership is sensible, after listening to Trump’s speech they will sit back, have some tea, continue quietly with their existing policies and watch the United States destroy its own empire.” (09/24/25)
“A decade ago this month, Germany opened its borders to more than 1 million migrants, mainly Syrians, as well as Afghans and Iraqis. Many were fleeing brutal civil wars. At the time, Chancellor Angela Merkel declared, ‘Wir schaffen das!’ (We can manage this!), and the challenging task of integrating refugees began. But the country’s welcome mat soon wore thin. And that was even before the unexpected flow of another 1.25 million refugees from Ukraine after Russia’s 2022 invasion. Now, like much of Europe, Germany is tightening border controls, turning away many migrants, encouraging many to return home, and deporting those in the country illegally or with criminal records. German politics has been upended by the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. (09/23/25)
