“There have been two parts to the political world’s reaction to the American operation that deposed and captured Nicolas Maduro. The first part was to marvel at what Brit Hume called ‘the extraordinary level of skill, technology and daring’ on the part of American forces and leadership. Hume noted that the U.S. performance, when considered alongside the flawless attack on Iran’s nuclear program, sent to the world ‘precisely the opposite signal from that sent by the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan’. The second reaction emerged after President Donald Trump’s press conference announcing the action. ‘We’re going to run [Venezuela] until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,’ Trump said. ‘So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.'” (01/07/25)
“Venezuela is well rid of Nicolás Maduro, a corrupt, oppressive, and illegitimate leader who presided over that country’s continuing decline after succeeding Hugo Chávez in 2013. And judging from what happened after the 1989 invasion of Panama, when U.S. forces nabbed a similarly odious strongman who likewise faced a federal drug indictment, the courts will not stand in the way of Maduro’s prosecution. The ‘law enforcement’ rationale for Saturday’s attack on Venezuela is nevertheless both implausible and troubling. It offers an open-ended license for any president who wants to excise Congress from decisions about the use of military force, accelerating a trend that threatens to nullify its constitutional war powers.” (01/07/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, you know that NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani has just appointed Cea Weaver to lead his new tenant protection office. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Weaver is the architect of New York’s aggressive ‘cancel rent’ movements. And it’s her past comments that are currently setting the internet on fire. In resurfaced posts, Weaver labeled private property — and specifically homeownership — as a ‘tool of white supremacy.’ She has since pulled her X account. As an American, I find her perspective not just radical, but dangerously racist and seriously flawed.” (01/07/26)
“The private lives of political leaders have long been fair game for opponents and investigative reporters – and, increasingly, amateur internet sleuths and online provocateurs. When the high-profile individuals are female, whether leaders themselves or their wives or partners, studies show that the scrutiny tends to be harsher and more speculative. ‘The scandalization and personalization of news is profitable,’ observed the Character Assassination and Reputation Politics Research Lab, a joint initiative between an American and a Dutch university. However, this trend not only ‘diminish[es] the public standing or credibility of the politician, but … also divert[s] attention from substantive policy discussions.’ Progressively powerful internet-enabled searching and sharing amplifies both facts and fictions, honest persuasion as well as embedded prejudices. This week, as the Monitor reports, a Paris court convicted 10 individuals of ‘degrading, insulting, and malicious’ cyberharassment of French first lady Brigitte Macron.” (01/06/25)
“W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (where AIER is now headquartered), in 1868. Today, this towering figure of the early civil rights movement is remembered as a groundbreaking sociologist, Pan-African socialist, and near-mythical hero to the intellectual left. … But there was once a W.E.B. Du Bois who was radical mainly in the scientific sense. Before drifting into the study of history and sociology, he was an economics student at Harvard. The marginal revolution had just remade the dismal science into a more mathematical and literally ‘edgy’ subject. And Du Bois made original contributions that leveraged insights from the free-market Austrian school and anticipated later developments in neoclassical economic thought, as Daniel Kuehn explains in a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.” (01/07/26)
“Before Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) became the first casualty of the burgeoning Minnesota day care fraud scandal, he was supposed to be the reason white men and working-class white people more generally might vote Democratic. Walz, who abandoned his gubernatorial reelection bid on Monday, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024. He was billed as a dad’s dad, an affable football coach, a fixer of trucks who was not afraid to get his hands dirty under the hood. Instead, Walz was judged by many voters to be as ‘weird’ as he claimed Vice President JD Vance — then a freshman Ohio senator and junior partner on the 2024 Republican ticket — was. He, or at least his aides, bungled a basic football metaphor.” (01/07/25)
“A party run by people dumb and insular enough to nominate Kamala Harris is also a party dumb and insular enough to mistakenly believe that the way to connect with the rural voters who have rallied to the banner of Donald Trump is to push out an older dad type in a blaze orange vest and have him point a 12-gauge at some tasty birds. … To the extent that [Tim] Walz’s gun-toting made an impression at all, it was a poor one: Gun-rights voters did not seem him as a potential champion but as the worst thing you can be in those circles: a ‘Fudd,’ meaning an out-of-touch dork who believes that the Second Amendment is about hunting, as though the Founding Fathers took the time to write a hobby into the Bill of Rights.” (01/07/26)
“After a series of strikes in the last few days, and more than two decades of attempted coups (in 2002, 2019, and 2020), warfare, sanctions, and a ‘Maximum Pressure Campaign’, the United States has just toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro and his wife are standing trial for ‘narco-terrorism’ charges, a cover to extend the War on Terror without congressional authorization, in New York, with members of his security team, along with several civilians, dead. Far-right hardliner María Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition who has longstanding ties to the White House and even went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast to justify a coup based on oil wealth, was expected to be put in power. She promised to implement a vision of deep privatization under ‘Popular Capitalism’, modeled on Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.” (01/07/25)
Source: Law & Liberty
by David D Corey & Dominic MM Saunders
“In ‘Contemporary Muses,’ Henry T. Edmondson III is gently critical of those who defend the value of pop music on political grounds. Political protest may be a mainstay of pop music, but ‘it would be disappointing,’ he writes, ‘if America’s … cultural commentators were unable to see past the politics.’ Instead, Edmondson proposes to defend (certain) pop music as something that approaches philosophy: ‘Some pop songs explore deep themes of moral philosophy’ or ‘meditate thoughtfully on the human condition.’ Edmondson’s approach bears fruit as he catalogues lyrics that echo major themes of Western moral philosophy. One might wonder, however, whether defending pop music as philosophy is much different from defending it as political protest.” (01/07/26)
“Trump’s war against Venezuela is just the latest manifestation of his abuse of presidential power. In the last 11 months, he has flouted domestic law by firing tens of thousands of federal employees without cause, firing 17 inspectors general, firing the head of the Office of Special Counsel and the director of the Office of Government Ethics, directing the Justice Department to prosecute his political opponents and tearing down the East Wing of the White House. … Trump also violated the War Powers Act of 1973, which limits a president’s ability to send troops into armed conflict without congressional approval. Like the rest of us, members of Congress only learned about the invasion of Venezuela and Maduro’s seizure after it happened. So what’s Congress going to do about it? Absolutely nothing, of course! And that’s the most disturbing news of all.” (01/07/26)
