“Why should a student on a J-1 visa be treated differently from a coder on an H-1B, or a tourist on a B-2, or a man fleeing violence with no papers at all? These distinctions are as artificial as the lines on a map. Yet they are enforced with a level of fervor otherwise reserved for violent crime. As this issue went to press, total bans on travel from 12 countries and heavy restrictions on seven more were abruptly announced. The result is predictable: lost potential, ruined plans, stranded lovers, wasted talent. Restrictions on the free movement of people are not just economic blunders (though they are that too); they are acts of cultural vandalism and personal cruelty. This obsession with control bleeds back into travel itself. You can feel it at the airport, in the endless security lines and biometric scans.” (for publication 08/25)
“We’re going to set up a system. We’re going to make you pay for that system. We’re going to force you to put your kids into that system unless you can ALSO afford to pay for an alternative system. But then we’re going to allow a heckler’s veto on anything in that system that anyone with the money and friends to get a case before the Supreme Court may happen to dislike. Because the thing they dislike, THAT’s the problem. No, the system is the problem. The right to direct the upbringing of one’s children entails the obligation to bear the costs of bringing up one’s children. The system itself violates parents’ rights to direct the upbringing of their children AND forces them to bear the costs of that violation, making them less able to afford the costs of whatever upbringing they might prefer.” (07/01/25)
“On Friday, the Supreme Court clobbered perhaps America’s most aggressive and intolerant LGBTQ+ school indoctrination program. By a vote of 6 to 3 in the case of Mahmoud v.Taylor, the court upheld parents’ right to exempt their children from biased sex and gender lessons that violated their religious values. The court’s ruling is a bitter reminder that public education is the most expensive ‘gift’ that most Americans will ever receive. … The Supreme Court made the right call in upholding parents’ right to opt-out their kids. But how did government schools ever become so arrogant as to claim a right to determine what each child thought about personal, moral, and religious issues? The power of government schools remains a dire threat to parents, children, and to the future of liberty.” [editor’s note: SCOTUS didn’t strike a blow against indoctrination; it just weighed in on the PARTICULAR CONTENT of that indoctrination. Only separation of school and state accomplishes the former – TLK] (06/30/25)
“President Trump’s economists, and sometimes Trump himself, often remind me of the late TV celebrity Art Linkletter, who used to have a segment on his television variety show called ‘Kids Say the Darndest Things.’ Linkletter would ask children questions, and some of their responses were inadvertently hilarious, which shocked Linkletter and made his audience laugh. That’s increasingly what we’re seeing from some of Trump’s economists when they try to defend the president’s tariff and trade policies. Take, for example, Stephen Miran, the head of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers. The Harvard-trained economist recently tried to explain to Politico reporter Victoria Guida why the president’s tariff policies could result in little or no price increases for U.S. consumers and businesses.” (07/01/25)
“Am I a citizen? Right now, the answer is pretty simple: yes. I am adopted, though I was born in North Carolina. I assume both of my birth parents were citizens, and know that my adoptive parents are citizens. But my adoption was closed, which, as I’ll explain, means I have severely limited means of accessing information about my biological family or details about my birth. With the Supreme Court ruling against universal injunctions and the Trump administration’s signal that they see it as a green light to pursue their agenda, including further attacks on citizenship rights, the answer to my question now seems somewhat less clear. … Domestic and international adoptees face different considerations, but both have reason to be concerned about their status if the Trump administration continues its assault on the definition and regulation of citizenship.” (07/01/25)
“Zohran Mamdani isn’t a socialist in name only; he’d truly love to turn New York into a ‘socialist utopia’ — first, by doing away with billionaires. As he put it Sunday: ‘I don’t think that we should have billionaires.’ Let’s be clear here: Most billionaires earned their wealth by providing goods and services that enough other people wanted so much that they freely paid that much for them. The world is enormously better off with PCs and iPhones, thanks to billionaire Steve Jobs and Apple. Yes, the odd Alexander Soros may just be spending inherited wealth, but Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk et al have enriched humanity far more than themselves. Mamdani may be confused by guilt over his own inherited privilege, or perhaps he figures he makes up for it by crusading for ‘equality.'” (06/30/25)
“[T]he leftist that is currently running for mayor of New York views people in the 1% and the 98% percentile (of income or wealth) as occupying the same class, at least regarding ‘us versus them’ battles with the top 1%. A homeless person living in a back alley in the Bronx is united with an elegant lady living in a condo in New York’s Upper East Side in their battle for ‘economic justice?’ Sorry, I’m not buying that argument. In the old days, Marxists thought of class in terms of the capitalists, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Even that was far too simple, but at least it had a certain logic. Lumping together the 1% and the 98% into one group makes no sense at all. Is this just harmless rhetoric? I don’t think so.” (07/01/25)
“Much has been written in recent days about the war of words between Supreme Court justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown-Jackson in the opinions handed down in Trump v. Casa, Inc., the case involving an injunction issued in a case challenging birthright citizenship. But as I pointed out in a Post on X Friday morning, Barrett’s decision was written on behalf of herself and the five other justices in the majority. The fact that Barrett was assigned this opinion by the chief judge (the chief judge decides who writes the opinion when he votes with the majority) is a signal that the other five justices turned her loose on Jackson.” (07/01/25)
“At the peak of Peterson’s fame in the late 2010s he seemed to be waging (often very successfully) a sort of one-man crusade against the complacent orthodoxies of liberal culture. He spoke for traditions ranging back to Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, the greats of psychology — and well beyond that. … it often felt that in him, and him alone, a sensibility survived that married secular humanism with deep faith — and that was wholly untouched by political correctness or wokeism or (Peterson’s particular bête noire) the reigning neo-Marxism of the academy. … Then, I suppose you know what happened. I am not a doctor, and I don’t know whether eight days in a medically-induced coma to treat benzodiazepine withdrawal is likely to have a detrimental effect on your cognitive state, but I don’t think I’m in a minority in suggesting that Peterson’s state of mind in the era after his return from collapse has never been the same.” (07/01/25)
