“If you’ve ever been to a concert or sporting event, you’ve probably dealt with Ticketmaster. And if you have, you’ve probably overpaid. Ticketmaster is the closest thing the live events industry has to a monopoly. It controls the ticketing market at most major American venues and has used that power to squeeze fans with higher prices and limit competition, ultimately making live entertainment more expensive for everyone. That is why recent legal action against Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, was so encouraging. A jury ruled in April that it is an operating illegal monopoly. Remedies will follow; the question is when. Fans should not have to skip seeing their favorite band, team, or performer because a monopolistic corporation has found another way to extract money from them.” (06/06/26)
“Before Trump, we were also a nation almost universally regarded as essential: Nations believed that they needed access to U.S. banks to do business, access to U.S. markets to prosper, access to U.S. weapons to defend themselves. But by breaking decades’ worth of international agreements — not to mention threatening allies and betraying Ukraine — Trump quickly forfeited the world’s trust. By failing so spectacularly against Iran, a far weaker military power, Trump has dispelled much of the world’s fear. And now the fact that the world is managing economically despite Trump’s tariffs, while Ukraine is surviving despite Trump’s attempt to cut it off at the knees, has revealed that we are much less essential than everyone assumed.” (06/05/26)
“I don’t know if anyone but me noticed, but digital media died last month. In mid-May, a media mogul named Byron Allen bought a majority stake in BuzzFeed, which has been culturally invisible and financially struggling since shutting down its news division in 2023 and pivoting to AI content. Just weeks later, Vox Media, a collection of brands including New York Magazine, sold its more valuable properties to Lupa Systems CEO James Murdoch, the younger son of Rupert Murdoch. Companies like Vice and Vox were hailed as the future of media in the 2010s, standard-bearers of a new generation of youth-focused, internet-savvy publications that would take over from the New York Times and CNN.” (06/05/26)
“Until recently, American politics operated on a simple premise: Aspiring politicians must suck up to party bosses, run for local office, earn supporters, master policy details and only then earn a shot at higher office. That model has collapsed. Today’s rising stars take a different escalator — television, social media, podcasts, activism, entertainment or the internet — that goes straight to the top.
Their chief currency is not institutional support but the attention economy. Which helps explain why Los Angeles now finds itself facing the possibility that Spencer Pratt could make a mayoral runoff.” (06/05/26)
“When an American businessman defends the large fortunes made — that is, earned — in the marketplace, it’s something to celebrate. Jeff Bezos, the creator and head of Amazon.com, did just that in a recent wide-ranging interview on CNBC’s Squawk Pod with host Andrew Ross Sorkin on May 20, 2026. While his remarks on political philosophy did not go far enough in defending the morality of money-making, they went farther than anything we have heard from a businessman in quite some time, if ever. In this age of rampant anti-rich bigotry — when prominent politicians, darlings of much of the old and new media, say that should not exist — Bezos’s remarks are refreshing indeed.” (06/05/26)
“In 2016, the conservative writer Michael Anton made a galvanizing case for Donald Trump in his famous essay ‘The Flight 93 Election,’ arguing that the stakes in the presidential contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton were existential. His contention that a Clinton win would cement Democratic electoral dominance forever — such that Republicans needed to charge the cockpit or die — was implausible at the time, and seems more so in retrospect. If Hillary had won in 2016, in all likelihood she would have been gone in 2020, washed away by the pandemic just like Trump was. This time, though, really might be different. Democrats are now seriously contemplating measures that wouldn’t have occurred to Hillary Clinton circa 2016. Endorsing some version of Supreme Court packing (or ‘court reform’ as Democrats insist on calling it) is becoming orthodoxy among mainstream Democrats.” (06/05/26)
“‘Police warn families of Tiananmen crackdown dead not to visit graves on 37th anniversary,’ reads the headline of yesterday’s story in New York’s Newsday. How rude of those families! How dare they show such utter disregard for the right of the Chinese Communist Party to ‘grind you up and crush your bones!’ Or to have your ‘heads bashed bloody,’ as CCP top Pooh Bear Xi Jinping has more recently been fond of saying. Especially after all the trouble Xi and Chinese authorities have gone to easing all this unnecessary tension by facilitating a thoughtful and therapeutic four-decade ‘campaign to erase what happened from public memory.'” (06/05/26)
Source: National Priorities Project
by Hanna Homestead
“Our country’s massive weapons budget has directly enabled the US-Israeli led war on Iran that has caused thousands of deaths and is exacerbating the nation’s affordability crisis. Even if the war on Iran ends soon, it will have cost somewhere in the range of $50 billion to $72 billion, or more. The US weapons and war budget already exceeds $1 trillion, and President Donald Trump and his cronies want even more. Trump’s Pentagon budget request for FY 2027 includes $95 billion to buy more bombs and missiles, and specifically to restock munitions used in the US-Israel war of aggression on Iran and those fueling ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine and Lebanon. The administration plans to continue to arm Israel, which the Trump National Defense Strategy identifies as ‘a model ally’ that the United States has ‘an opportunity now to further empower’. ” (06/06/26)
“The most consequential weakness of philosopher and journalist Kathleen Stock’s new polemic against assisted dying is its failure to engage with the empirical record.” (06/05/26)
