Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, & Noel Sims
“On September 23, Adelita Grijalva won a special election to represent Arizona in the House of Representatives in a landslide, collecting 69% of the vote. Forty-three days later, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R) has not sworn in Grijalva. Johnson’s obstruction has prevented Grijalva from providing the decisive signature on a discharge petition that would force a House vote on the public release of the Epstein files. The failure to swear in Grijalva is unprecedented. A Popular Information analysis of the 59 other House special elections since 2015 reveals that the average time between winning an election and being sworn in is less than 11 days. Since Johnson became Speaker in October 2023, special election winners have been sworn in, on average, about seven days after the election. The current 43-day delay is already eight days longer than the previous record.” (11/05/25)
“Having read and written extensively about the suffering of the Chinese people under Mao, I was horrified and alarmed to listen to this short take by an Oberlin College student shortly after the Charlie Kirk assassination. The student is an unapologetic Mao-inspired revolutionary who is for more ‘political assassinations’ and anti-free speech for ‘reactionaries,’ and ‘capitalists.’ She wants ‘some people’ to ‘be afraid to express their opinion in public.’ In a college course, she was taught ‘how violent revolution liberated millions of people and liberated women’ in Mao’s China. Her views are extreme, but she is not alone.” (11/05/25)
“Donald Trump hates Antifa. He hates late-night TV hosts, Democratic-controlled cities, and anyone who has ever challenged him in court. As of October, he officially hates the Nobel committee for not giving him a peace prize, despite his efforts to strong-arm its members into voting for him. The president has gone after everyone he thinks has ever done him wrong. But there is a Venn diagram to his vendettas, an overlap in his circle of obsessions. Map out his attacks, subtracting the purely personal and the primarily partisan, and you’ll see that they converge on a profound disgust for the liberal international order.” (11/05/25)
“When I first started teaching, David Henderson gave me some advice: to be open about who I am regarding my economic philosophy. At the beginning of class (and several other times throughout), I mention that I am a classical liberal — a free-market economist who argues that individuals rather than governments are best suited to deal with complex social relationships and problems. I don’t rule out government intervention completely, but I make a strong presumption of liberty that must be overcome before government intervention is justified. Law exists to enhance liberty, not restrict it. That is some of the best teaching advice I have gotten.” (11/05/25)
“The Supreme Court heard arguments for nearly three hours on President Trump’s authority to overhaul the tariff system of the United States through an emergency statute. Trump decided at the last minute not to show up to the hearing, and it’s a good thing he did, because he would have wanted to change the channel. Most of the conservative justices seemed pretty skeptical of the argument that the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA), which allows a president in an emergency ‘to regulate importation and exportation,’ confers worldwide, unlimited tariff authority that could raise as much as $4 trillion over a decade, per the government’s brief. Solicitor General D. John Sauer characterized these as ‘regulatory tariffs’ and not taxes, designed to change consumer behavior by buying domestically and as leverage on other countries for purposes of negotiation. The justices weren’t totally buying that.” (11/05/25)
“Former U.S. vice president Richard ‘Dick’ Cheney died on 3 November 2025 at age 84; his family said he had suffered from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Best known for steering national security policy after the 9/11 attacks, he became the dominant force behind a ‘war on terror’ that unleashed torture, preventive war and mass surveillance. Amnesty International has described him as one of the principal architects of a program that amounted to torture, while the Brown University Costs of War project attributes more than 900,000 deaths and trillions of dollars in spending to the post‑9/11 wars he championed. Cheney’s legacy is one of unprecedented destruction and the erosion of civil liberties.” (11/05/25)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Laurent Hynes
“Mainstream financial academia regularly seeks to impress upon investors the supposed pointlessness of any entrepreneurial effort on their part, under the guise of cost efficiency and risk reduction. Besides misleading empirical evidence, the core argument used to justify the selection of highly passive and diversified financial products is the neoclassical efficient market hypothesis (EMH). Yet the EMH has suffered continual reputational blows, and the Austrian School’s causal-realism is well suited to disassemble it as another example of neoclassical physics envy.” (11/05/25)
“Imagine it’s a bright and pleasant Sunday morning. You walk through the doors of your church and are greeted by familiar faces, friendly handshakes, and warm coffee. The service is an uplifting refuge from a challenging week full of difficulties at home and at work. … Everyone in your church gets in their cars and looks at their phones before driving away to find each and every one of you was the target of a digital propaganda campaign; you go from spiritual transcendence to the sobering realization that you are a datapoint of a geofencing effort. The casualty of a foreign information war. This is the collision between one of the oldest domains of the human experience, religion, and one of its newest, cyberspace.” (11/05/25)
“Mamdani’s win, obviously, isn’t a victory for every Democrat. Cuomo’s desperate campaign — almost certainly his last — tried to knit together a coalition of Republicans, independents, and Democrats worried that a socialist mayor would wreck their city and their party. You can expect more centrist Democrats (who are most of them) to point at the margins in Virginia and New Jersey and say that the candidates who won big in swing states truly show what they stand for. But every Democrat got something out of Tuesday night. They’ve had a year of special election overperformances, followed by hand-wringing about how unpopular and leaderless their party is.” (11/04/25)