Source: Liberal Currents
by WBF
“Social media has been a boon to autocratic regimes and their allied movements in democracies.” (09/28/26)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/social-media-has-not-brought-liberation/
Source: The American Conservative
by Joseph Addington
“Delcy Rodriguez, acting president of Venezuela, is preparing to put herself out of a job. In an address to the United Nations General Assembly this week, Rodriguez declared that Venezuela is getting ready for a return to democracy. ‘I want to make this very clear at this General Assembly: There will be elections in Venezuela,’ said Rodriguez Wednesday. ‘Venezuela has initiated a process of democratic transformation for its rebirth, an orderly, institutional, and verifiable process.’ Exactly when that orderly process will produce an election is not yet clear, although a rough plan is beginning to take shape.” (09/28/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/democracy-is-coming-to-venezuela-eventually/
Source: Law & Liberty
by Mark Pulliam
“Justice Clarence Thomas’s brand of originalism is ‘going further,’ and he is now on track to set the Supreme Court’s longevity record.” [editor’s note: Sure, but how early in his tenure did that “brand of originalism” start getting tainted by the bribes he’s since been caught taking? – TLK] (09/28/26)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/clarence-thomas-a-profile-in-courage/
Source: exile in happy valley
by Nicky Reid
“Your average American is trapped, suffocating beneath the weight of a decaying civilization defined by the totally manufactured standards of an empire that only exists on television now. Your average American is bored, terrified, overworked, underpaid, overstimulated, heavily medicated and hopelessly in debt. Your average American is fucked; surrounded on all sides by forever wars, climate catastrophe, economic stagnation and constant adds disguised as softcore child pornography … So, then why the fuck shouldn’t they go fucking crazy? I was raped into a lifetime of traumagenic disassociation by rabid papists as a preschooler and even I feel bad for the beige plight of the average American. The current prevailing definition of mental illness is essentially making a violent break from mainstream reality but in 2026, mainstream reality itself is violently broken.” (09/27/26)
https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2026/09/if-western-civilization-is-sickness.html
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen
“There are two kinds of elections happening this November, one of them quite strange. The natural focus has been on whether Democrats can win back the House and Senate. That’s the one that matters for the direction of the country. But thanks to California’s primary system, which advances the top two candidates to the general election, eight U.S. House races feature two Democrats taking on one another. Some feature incumbents with nothing more than token opposition, but several follow the main storylines from primary season: whether incumbents have grown too old and disconnected from their constituents to get another term, whether left-wing challengers can usher in a new generation of leadership, and whether big money will dictate voter decisions.” (09/28/26)
Source: The Price of Liberty
by Nathan Barton
“Woke enemies of liberty have a lot of things these days that they want to get rid of. … The Second Amendment of course, is most prominent of the targets on their firing range. For decades, we’ve seen more and more conflict over the right to keep and bear arms. … But we know that the First Amendment is also one of targets of these enemies of liberty.” (09/27/26)
https://thepriceofliberty.org/2026/09/27/it-isnt-just-the-second-amendment-that-is-targeted/
Source: Independent Institute
by Brady Leonard
“If you listen to pundits, the cause of both the President and his party’s electoral struggles is the war in Iran. The war is deeply unpopular, 61% of voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict. Fuel prices have exploded since the beginning of the war and Iran’s predictable moves to control or at least disrupt shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The price of gasoline has risen nearly 50% since February and diesel is up a whopping 75%. Bombs make headlines, and there are constituencies on both the far-left and far-right who have a particular obsession with the state of Israel, making conflict in the Middle East an easy scapegoat, but this misses the root cause of the Right’s current woes.” (09/25/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/09/25/tariffs-less-popular-iran/
Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“As Thomas Sowell wrote in 2013, ‘sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.’ Government perceives, or even creates a problem. In this case, the US government created the problem of high fuel prices with its war on Iran. Government intervenes in markets to ‘solve’ the problem. But that intervention creates new, different problems — usually while failing to solve the previous problems. And those new problems are addressed with yet more interventions. At every point in that never-ending loop, things get generally worse than they were before the latest intervention, and even in specific areas it’s usually hard to discern any improvement.” (09/27/26)
Source: Expression
by Matthew Harwood
“Activists who commit crimes should be punished. But they shouldn’t be prosecuted as terrorists.” (09/26/26)
https://expression.fire.org/p/civil-terrorism-is-a-dangerous-category
Source: Washington Post
by George F Will
“Undeterred by the axiom that there can be indecent exposure of the mind as well as the body, the Democratic Socialists of America candidly announce their agenda. Religious ‘integralists’ should be similarly explicit. DSAers want to scrap the Constitution in order to facilitate confiscating wealth, private property and other impediments to government-enforced equality and social perfection. Christian integralists, who are disproportionately Catholic, are devout and determined to make the nation more so. They would enliven politics if they would specify the measures they advocate to (as they mistakenly say) return America to being a ‘Christian nation.’ Integralists want to integrate spiritual and temporal (government) power, subordinating the latter to the former.” (09/25/26)