“For many years, I found my ideological and professional home at the Heritage Foundation. I first joined the organization in 1986 as a policy analyst and departed it in 2021, ending my 35-year tenure there as executive vice president. My years at Heritage taught me many things about how a think tank should — and perhaps equally importantly, should not — operate.” (11/24/25)
“Between the Trump-Putin meeting in Anchorage Alaska and the proposed Trump-Putin meeting in Budapest, the diplomatic track that the U.S. and Russia were on seemed to die. In October, Trump and Putin had a ‘very productive’ two hour phone call that led to a phone call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov that was to lay the groundwork for a meeting between Trump and Putin in Budapest. But, by the time Rubio had hung up the phone, the Budapest meeting was off. … But then hints emerged that restarting talks may not be impossible.” (11/24/25)
“The data nerds among us were happy to finally get their September jobs report fix, even though these data are somewhat stale now. However, we still learned a few things about the state of the economy. Before saying what we learned, it’s worth a few words on what we didn’t learn but people are saying anyway. First and foremost, this was not a strong report in any real-world sense of the term. To be clear, the 119,000 jobs reported for the month was stronger than most analysts had expected, including me. But this hardly implies robust job growth. We averaged 170,000 jobs a month in 2024, so now we’re supposed to be celebrating a report showing job growth that is 70 percent of last year’s average?” (11/24/25)
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Christopher Mott
“In foreign policy discourse, the phrase ‘the national interest’ gets used with an almost ubiquitous frequency, which could lead one to assume it is a strongly defined and absolute term. Most debates, particularly around changing course in diplomatic strategy or advocating for or against some kind of economic or military intervention, invoke the phrase as justification for their recommended path forward. But what is the national interest, really?” (11/24/25)
“In the past few months, the Trump administration has intensified its assault on political dissent. The September 25 release of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, titled ‘Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,’ capitalized upon the shooting death of Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk and marked an alarming escalation in the regime’s suppression of political dissent in the name of national security. The NSPM-7 memorandum casts a wide net by identifying a wide swath of previously protected criticisms of American policy, capitalism, Christian nationalism, and fascism as potential threats to US security. This language reveals the government’s effort to construct a political category of terrorism so broad that it can encompass nearly any form of progressive or left-aligned civil society work.” (11/24/25)
“The Trump administration’s lying-to-Congress case against former FBI director James Comey is a comedy of legal errors that could move offstage soon. But it has highlighted the plain fact that American life and America itself are now being shaped — in terrible, even tragic ways — by people who really did mislead and outright lie to Congress under oath. Let’s start at the top. Not just once but twice, Donald Trump put his hand on a Bible and swore to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.’ He’s been violating that oath, and lying nonstop in all conceivable venues, ever since. Right below Trump on the organizational chart is the problem wreaking daily havoc on the country: that so many of these havoc perpetrators were less than forthright when they were trying to get their jobs.” (11/24/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by David Brady, Jr.
“Raimondo spent much of his time polemicizing on the latest intervention abroad, but, in 2011, he wrote two articles ‘Why Governments Make War’ and ‘Looking at the Big Picture’ wherein he articulates his theory of libertarian realism. He juxtaposes his theory with traditional realism, that emphasizes the supposed interests of broad states, liberalism, which promises perpetual peace in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, and Marxism, which sees all conflicts as products of the capitalist class structure. Libertarian realism looks to domestic political pressures and influences to inform it on the reason why a state’s foreign policy looks the way it does. If Nobel Prize winner James Buchanan characterized his public choice theory as ‘politics without romance,’ then Raimondo’s realism is international relations without romance.” (11/23/25)
“So, Marjorie Taylor Greene is resigning. I’ll admit, I wouldn’t have seen this coming. But when I read her announcement, it made sense to me. Here are some thoughts: Greene was an ardent MAGA figure. She was with Trump from the beginning. Yet, when she didn’t follow the agenda 100%, she was cast aside. This shows us that, for many, loyalty to Trump is still more important than principles – even if it involves transparency as the world’s most notorious sex trafficker.” (11/23/25)
