Source: The Daily Economy
by Nikolai G Wenzel
“Left and right increasingly compete over how to wield government power rather than whether to limit it. Stephanie Slade’s ‘Fusionism’ asks whether liberty and restraint still have a constituency.” (08/18/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/where-have-all-the-conservatives-gone/
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Wanjiru Njoya
“Eighteenth century liberalism rejected the notion of ‘a select class of privileged persons’ who had special rights and freedoms. The fundamental purpose of equality under the law was to ensure that no group is granted rights solely by virtue of membership, rights that remain unavailable to those outside it. But what now passes for classical liberalism does not reflect the same principle. Much of what people now call classical liberalism comes from the progressive egalitarianism of the 1960s. A key principle in modern ‘classical liberalism’ is the notion of ‘equal opportunities’ that did not exist in the eighteenth century.” (08/18/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/equality-law-not-privilege-group-membership
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Love and cherish our world. That’s the secret to remaining both (A) deeply happy and (B) well-informed about the dystopian abuses of the empire. You don’t have to choose. You can have both. I sometimes get called a Debbie Downer for my nonstop writing about all the evils that are being inflicted upon our world by powerful people every day, but readers who meet me or listen to my podcasts have often expressed surprise at how upbeat and cheerful I am in real life. They see me focusing on extremely dark subject matter day after day and expressing rage and revulsion at the horrors we are witnessing, so they expect me to show up as some kind of dour, jaded misanthrope. But the truth is I am a very happy person.” (08/18/26)
Source: The Dispatch
by Ross Harrison
“Wars don’t just end. They get interpreted, reinterpreted, and turned into strategic doctrine. That is what happened after the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, a conflict that saw the United States back Tehran’s Iraqi adversaries. The war taught Tehran three lessons it never unlearned: that Washington wants the Islamic Republic gone, that Iran stands essentially alone in the world, and that it cannot survive a direct, overt fight with the U.S. and Israel. In other words, it can only prevail through an indirect, ambiguous confrontation. … Now Iran has fought two more wars, in 2025 and 2026, and it is drawing new lessons on top of the old ones. Washington should pay close attention to what those lessons are, because they will shape Iranian strategy for years to come.” (08/18/26)
https://thedispatch.com/article/iran-regime-change-khamenei-washington/
Source: American Greatness
by Victor Davis Hanson
“Israel dominates the daily news in this 2026 midterm election year—almost always in a boring, fatiguing, negative light. Tens of thousands of innocents may be slaughtered, ethnically cleansed, butchered, and tortured by the world’s dictators, yet an overwhelming and obsessive abhorrence is reserved for tiny, democratic Israel. Such perverse asymmetry is strange, since, at least privately, most Americans would concede that of the 18 Middle Eastern nations, only Israel is a genuine consensual democracy.” [editor’s note: Well, except for the political parties that are banned, and except for the millions who live under Israeli rule, but don’t get to vote in Israeli elections. You know, little stuff like that – TLK] (08/18/26)
Source: Law & Liberty
by Frederick M Hess
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s wholly reasonable to see the possibilities of technology in schools. After all, pencils, paper, calculators, whiteboards, and buses are all technologies, too. Finding a way to make sensible use of new tools is part and parcel of every profession. But every healthy impulse can easily be corrupted by schlock-peddling vendors, ed school fixations, quick-fix reformers, and assorted grifters. This is education’s evergreen problem, and we now see the result: a flood of dubious ed tech that washed over teachers ill-equipped to navigate the tide. Students were distracted, and teachers were left at sea, even as the wave of Chromebooks, tablets, and learning management systems helped normalize screens at home and in school.” (08/18/26)
Source: Common Dreams
by Alison Schultz & Bemnet Agata
“One of the stranger features of the modern economy is that we no longer disagree about what a multinational corporation is—until the conversation turns to tax. Investors value Apple as a single global business. Consumers experience it as a single company. Its executives manage it as an integrated enterprise, allocating capital, research, production, and marketing across continents according to commercial strategy rather than national borders. Nobody seriously believes that Apple’s subsidiaries are independent businesses negotiating with one another as though they were unrelated companies. They are constituent parts of a single commercial enterprise. Yet this is precisely the legal fiction upon which the international corporate tax system was built—and continues to rest.” (08/18/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corporate-tax-legal-fiction
Source: spiked
by Brendan O’Neill
“It is a testament to the moralism of the eco-doom movement that there has been so much focus on shaming ‘deniers’. Practical matters – like, I don’t know, making the case for the mass rollout of aircon – play second fiddle to the pillorying of heretics. The argument seems to be that these wicked doubters have landed us in the inferno of a neverending summer, just as their witchy forebears gave us crop failure and icy winters. I see it differently. To me, the punishing impact of the heatwaves is less the handiwork of ‘deniers’ than a byproduct of the moral circus of eco-alarmism itself.” (08/18/26)
Source: Mother Jones
by Russ Choma
“His Oman resort sits just miles from the strait where he’s promising to send in the US military.” (08/18/26)
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/trumps-bombing-threats-have-a-golf-course-problem/
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“As monthly payments quadruple and defaults surge, Washington’s trillion-dollar higher-ed bubble proves politicians can’t fix the crisis they created.” (08/18/26)
https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/the-student-debt-trap-why-government