“‘These are the times that try men’s souls’ So wrote Thomas Paine 250 years ago about a long, dark winter when the young nation’s fortunes looked so bleak that many feared it might yet arrive stillborn. Now, the eldest and most celebrated liberal democracy on Earth finds herself again contemplating the grave. Even far on the exurban outskirts of our nation’s capital, a capital now home to the world’s most militarized algae plume, the steady drumbeat of failure wafts out from its source like a relentless, festering wind. It’s enough to make anyone despair.” (10/16/26)
“Tyranny of the majority is obviously a problem distinctive to democracy. The same goes for rational voter ignorance, which arises from the perverse incentive structure of individual voters, who have only an infinitesimally small chance of influencing electoral outcomes. And, while illiberal forces can and do seize power under authoritarian systems, the pathways democracies (usually involving the electoral process) create for them are distinctive.” (10/17/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“People are manipulated into believing the story that Israel’s existence must be preserved at all cost because of this religious belief or that political ideology. People are manipulated into believing the story that western elections are real and that voting in the two-party system is the only path toward beneficial policies. People are manipulated into believing the story that capitalism is the best possible system, and that socialism always fails (organically, all by itself) because its tenets go against human nature. People are manipulated into believing the story that the US-led liberal world order, while perhaps flawed, is still our best shot at a just and stable world. People are manipulated into believing the story that the mass media are telling us the truth about our society and the world, and that everything works pretty much the way we were taught in school.” (10/18/26)
Source: The American Conservative
by W James Antle III
“In the last consumer price index report before the midterm elections, inflation was up to 3.7 percent. It’s still a far cry from the 9.1 percent peak under former President Joe Biden, but that offers little comfort to vulnerable congressional Republicans. President Donald Trump’s job approval rating on the economy sits at just 33.8 percent in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. … It is against this backdrop that Republicans will be defending their narrow congressional majorities. And while the polls in some of the most competitive Senate races look iffy, the national electoral environment is indisputably bad for the GOP. These dire conditions have arisen as a result of Trump’s own choices. The biggest driver of the most recent inflation is a spike in energy prices caused by the Iran war.” (10/17/26)
“With Democrats poised to regain much of their Washington muscle, it’s ever more urgent to notice how they abused that power so recently. Consider Wednesday’s blockbuster report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency outlining how nine big banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, used purely political criteria to deny services to perfectly lawful consumers — when getting ‘debanked’ is often a financial death sentence. And the debankers regularly relied on the hatemongering-for-profit Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority for who to ban. This was no small abuse: The OCC investigation covered more than 100,000 consumer complaints and 50,000 internal bank documents. A JPMorgan payment platform booted merchants with ‘MAGA’ and ‘America First’ in their profiles — and another for working with a group whose ‘crime’ was that a member accurately described the Black Lives Matter movement as Marxist.” (10/17/26)
“Late on the night of September 30, with the Senate about to leave town for a month, a bipartisan group of senators asked their colleagues to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) by unanimous consent. A single objection from Senator Rand Paul that thwarted the bill. For now. KOSA ostensibly aims to protect children by making platforms legally responsible for harms to minors. This sounds like something nobody could oppose, but it is a Trojan horse. If politicians really wanted to protect children, they would push for devices built specifically for kids and ask nothing of adults. Instead, KOSA is a step towards forcing everyone on the internet to verify their real identity, until we can’t read a digital book, watch a YouTube video, or chat with a friend without first proving exactly who we are.” (10/16/26)
“I happen to live in a state where MAGA enthusiasms are relatively subdued, and where Republicans skew toward old-school conservatism rather than Q-Anon crazy. The old Prescott Bush world of Connecticut. The state’s senators and the representative of my congressional district do an ‘admirable enough’ job representing my interests and advocating for good causes, giving me just enough to complain about, but not too much. Given the times we live in, and with the midterms looming large, I rather wish I could cast a ballot in a state that where my vote might make a bigger difference; a state where senators and congressional representatives have gotten away with far too much, often for far too long. Mind you, I don’t want to live in such a place, I just want to vote there.” (10/17/26)
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
“When a congressman tried to stop her from recording a press conference, student journalist Cat Murphy stood her ground. The congressman, U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, mistakenly claimed that Maryland’s all-party consent law allowed him to ask Murphy to turn off her cameras, even going so far as to ask the police to intervene, but the law didn’t actually apply in that context. Murphy knew this and asserted her First Amendment right to continue documenting the event. … The interaction between Harris and Murphy occurred during a public press gaggle, in which a public official invited reporters to ask questions and multiple cameras were plainly recording. As a result, this conversation is not the type Maryland’s recording law was meant to protect, and Murphy was right to stand her ground.” (10/16/26)
Source: The Bleeding Heart Libertarian
by Matt Zwolinski
“The idea that the just price is the market price isn’t new. The medieval Scholastics held a version of it. But the tradition never had a good account of why the market price should carry moral weight, and once economists showed that prices are set by impersonal supply and demand, the whole idea of a ‘just price’ came to look like a confusion. My paper tries to take the dynamic character of markets seriously, and to make it the cornerstone of a new theory of the just price. In essence, my claim is that the competitive market process, when it is operating, confers a presumption of justice on the prices it produces.” (10/16/26)
“The midterm elections are now less than three weeks away—and I think we’ve seen more than enough to conclude that, short of a systemic polling error on a scale surpassing anything we have seen before, Republicans are going to get their asses kicked. … Assuming that’s how things play out and the Democrats take control of both houses of Congress, what will that mean for the short- and medium-term future of the country? The short answer, I’m afraid, is not much. The political fact of our time is that ours is a populist era.” (10/16/26)
