Source: The Eternally Radical Idea
by Greg Lukianoff
“I am not a social media utopian. As regular ERI readers and FIRE supporters will know, I co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind with social psychologist Jon Haidt. In that book, we argued that overprotection was making young people more anxious, fragile, and less prepared for adult life. I also happen to think that the phone-based childhood has been a bad bargain for many kids, and that phones should be out of schools entirely. But that does not mean governments should build a national identity-checking system for the internet, give government a foot in the door for controlling artificial intelligence, or create broad new liabilities that pressure platforms to suppress lawful expression in the name of protecting minors.” (06/15/26)
“The New York Times posted a long editorial last week to make the case against choosing Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence. That was not a difficult case to make, but it didn’t question whether we should even have an Office of National Intelligence. The answer to that particular issue requires an understanding of why the intelligence failure of 9/11 took place and why the many investigations of the failure came up with the wrong answers.” (06/16/26)
The Trump administration is boasting about pending plans to conclude its war with Iran, having achieved none of the original objectives laid out by President Donald Trump. … If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.” (06/15/26)
“ITt’s a curious time to be watching the far right. In days gone by, the far-right milieu produced intellectuals of the caliber of Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger. These intense critics of liberalism argued that the inauthentic nullity brought about by liberal metaphysics could only end in civilizational collapse. By contrast, the best that today’s far-right provocateurs seem to be able to muster is tirelessly repeating how casting black and gay people in Disney remakes can only end in civilizational collapse. Historically, the far right has been described as the ideological playground of the ‘lesser intelligentsia.’ Today’s far right seems determined to prove that their standards can be lower still—or even that their standards can be broken faster than they can be lowered.” (06/16/26)
“I have been talking for years now about the death of cable, which has functionally arrived even if the cable networks don’t quite know it yet. The Pew Research Center estimates that cable and satellite TV households were down to only 36 percent of the population in 2025; that number was 85 percent just a decade earlier. Among viewers under 30, cable subscriptions are at 16 percent of households. Streaming represents nearly half of all viewing among all age groups. Cable is a dying medium, and it’s a matter of time before it’s no longer cost-efficient to maintain cable systems, and they are shut down. Charter Communications is trying to grow its way to survival with the acquisition of Cox, but even the biggest cable companies can’t outrun reality forever.” (06/16/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“A California law requiring venture capital firms to report the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the companies they fund is being challenged in federal court, the California Globe reports. Attorneys for the Colorado-based 1517 Fund contend that the law is unconstitutional. Californians can make a case that the measure also violates the spirit of a state law the people approved in 1996.” (06/15/26)
“The attack on Iran that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched in February has disrupted the global economy, sending oil prices spiking, while utterly failing in its stated objective of regime change. Voters widely, and accurately, view the war as an unmitigated disaster. … Trump launched a foolish and unnecessary war, which the United States has lost decisively. The war proves the US and Israel have limited ability to restrain Iran. So the only alternative is negotiation.” (06/15/26)
“Before 9/11, no one in law enforcement was permitted access to data obtained outside the restraints imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Those restraints prohibit searches and seizures — in the modern parlance, surveillance and data acquisition — without a search warrant issued by a judge based on probable cause of crime, sworn to under oath. And the warrant itself must specifically describe the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. Since 9/11, the wall between surveillance and law enforcement has collapsed even though the feds still maintain that the Fourth Amendment only regulates law enforcement and not surveillance. This wild proposition is defied by the plain language of the amendment, which protects all persons from all government, and by the history of the colonists dealing with British government agents executing general warrants issued by a secret court in London.” (06/15/26)
Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Caleb O Brown & Jeffrey A Singer
“If reports are correct that Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary resigned under pressure from the White House to approve flavored nicotine vaping products, the episode says a great deal about the state of American tobacco policy. Cigarettes remain legal, ubiquitous, and extraordinarily deadly. Yet smoke-free alternatives that may help adults move away from combustible tobacco continue to trigger political panic out of proportion to the actual public health trade-offs involved. There is something deeply unserious about how Washington talks about nicotine. Cigarettes, the most dangerous products in the category, remain widely available. Smoke-free alternatives, however, are often treated as if their very existence is beyond the pale.” (06/15/26)
