Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Nick Cleveland-Stout
“Between 2015 and 2018, the United States supplied Saudi Arabia with tens of millions of dollars worth of jet fuel in support for the kingdom’s bombing campaign in Yemen. Seven years later, the Saudis refuse to repay most of their debt. And they are being rewarded for it.” (04/04/25)
Source: New York Post
by Steven W Mosher
“The unclassified report from US spy agencies is only seven pages long. But it surely struck fear into the hearts of China’s Communist overlords when Tulsi Gabbard released it last month. It was supposed to. The report from Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence is entitled ‘Wealth and Corrupt Activities of the Leadership of the Chinese Communist Party’. It highlights the defining characteristic of Chinese Communism: The corruption of party officials at all levels of government. And it starts at the very top, singling out Chinese leader Xi Jinping himself. ‘Xi’s siblings, nieces, and nephews held assets worth over $1 billion in business investments and real estate,’ the report notes, going on to suggest that the Chinese premier’s immediate family is managing these holdings on his behalf.” (04/05/25)
https://nypost.com/2025/04/05/opinion/why-the-feds-are-eyeing-chinas-grifter-oligarchs/
Source: The Daily Economy
by Walter Donway
“If we’re seeking breakthroughs and innovation in biomedicine, why are we funding the same bureaucratic institutions?” (04/04/25)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/nih-the-47-billion-sacred-cow-is-scared/
Source: Yascha Mounk
by Yascha Mounk
“The college essay is a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests. The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they’ve faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.” (04/04/25)
https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/the-college-essay-is-everything-thats
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“In less than one month, the 80th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s death may be celebrated — unless President Javier Milei’s formal disclosure of the Argentine ‘ratline’ shows what a lot of people believe: that Hitler didn’t kill himself in that bunker. Ratlines are what the human smuggling routes of Nazis out of falling Germany in 1945 were called. And yes, Argentina was the chief receiver of Nazis. This is known. Confirmed. Not controversial. But did the South American country accept Nazis higher up than Dr. Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann? Well, the FBI was searching for Hitler in South America for decades, into the 1960s.” (04/04/225)
Source: In These Times
by Jessica Halliday Hardie & Ajantha Subramanian
“Near the end of March, Gary Wilder, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, sent an email about his decision to decline attending a conference at Columbia University, explaining he was doing so because Columbia is ’actively colluding with the U.S. government’s project to destroy higher education and criminalize dissent.’ ‘A boycott is one of the few instruments available to the academic community through which to censure Columbia,’ Wilder wrote to many of those involved in the gathering. Wilder is one of more than 1,800 academics and 50 organizations who have joined a quickly expanding boycott of Columbia, which has been at the center of U.S. state and political repression surrounding activism for Palestinian liberation.” (04/04/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/columbia-boycott-faculty-khalil-trump-ice
Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Snider
“Ukraine has blamed the U.S. for its failure, pointing to a failure to keep its promise of whatever they need for as long as they need it. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky may have meant his Ukraine Victory Plan to allow him to claim that he has begged the U.S. to keep its promise to no avail. They had broken their promise and abandoned him, leaving no choice but to concede defeat and turn to negotiations. The Times article flips the script: the U.S. did everything they could do, but the Ukrainians wouldn’t listen. That is why the war was lost, and now we have no choice but to force negotiations.” (04/04/25)
Source: Reason
by Veronique de Rugy
“If you don’t believe that Liberation Day is bad news for the overwhelming majority of us, first remember that U.S. consumers are, as always, the ones who pay U.S. tariffs. Whatever the Trump team collects from foreign imports will be shifted back to us in the form of higher prices. Then there is the fact that the administration is already preparing for economic damage control with emergency aid for U.S. farmers. The need for such aid is a tacit admission that the president’s trade policy — marketed as a tool to strengthen America — will trigger retaliations from our trading partners that will hurt many American producers, including farmers who export this country’s agricultural bounty to help feed the world. And to paper over this destructive policy, the administration will blow another gaping hole in the federal budget with bailout money to compensate the victims. How do I know? We’ve been here before.” (04/03/25)
https://reason.com/2025/04/03/liberation-day-tariffs-will-liberate-people-from-their-income/
Source: Garrison Center
by Joel Schlosberg
“[T]he administration’s very heavy-handedness might make Americans think twice about what they think they know about their history. On April 2, New York Times contributor David W. Blight insisted that what Trump dubs a ‘revisionist’ approach is necessary to ‘maintain relevance,’ and that ‘many Americans … actually prefer complexity to patriotic straitjackets.’ The newspaper wasn’t always so charitable to the revisionists.” (04/03/25)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“With the United States functionally at war for more than two decades — against terrorism, against drugs, against invisible viruses, and against geopolitical rivals — the presidency has accrued a staggering array of emergency powers. These powers, initially intended for rare and exceptional circumstances, have become permanent features of executive governance. As recent presidents — Bill Clinton, W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Trump again — have each pushed the boundaries of executive authority, a troubling pattern has emerged. What one party celebrates as strong leadership under ‘their guy’ becomes an established and dangerous precedent when the other side takes the reins. No one who favors liberty and limited government should be cheering this on, but as shall be shown the trend toward increasing executive power goes back over a century.” (04/03/25)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-imperial-presidency-long-predates-donald-trump