Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Tech plutocrats are the high-budget expression of the ‘everyone is twelve now’ theory. You wanna go to Mars? Of course you do, you’re twelve. You think you can merge your consciousness with machinery and unlock the key to immortality? Hell yeah my twelve year-old homie. You’re gonna invent an Artificial Superintelligence God who will solve all our problems? Bless your twelve year-old heart. Their visions for the future of humanity are never particularly wise or intelligent. It’s just a bunch of drugged-up rich guys using their vast fortunes to chart a course for our species that would sound totally awesome to the average preadolescent boy.” (09/26/26)
“As Hannah Hartley writes this month for the Rumi Forum’s Center for Faith Identity & Globalization, ‘Christianity is not growing among Gen Z in any meaningful aggregate sense. It is consolidating, becoming smaller in total membership, more male, more politically conservative, and more legible as a vehicle for political identity.’ The clickbait mirage of religious revival has obscured these very real trends for years, forestalling a more relevant and important conversation about the role Christianity plays in American politics and culture. And that conversation is worth having for several reasons, not least of which is that it underscores the deep ambivalence and ambiguity of Jesus as a figure in our cultural history.” (09/25/26)
“‘Daddy’s back,’ is what Florida gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds proudly said in January 2025. Which is why removing the president’s picture from the Donalds gubernatorial campaign website, as he reportedly did earlier this month, won’t remove the smell of Trumpism. Not mentioning the president’s name in television ads or suddenly being against the war in Iran that Trump started — which is what Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers is attempting to do in Michigan — will not get Trump’s thiols off of his skin. Nor will deleting the phrase ‘Trump-endorsed candidate’ from your social media bio …. those men were endorsed by the president. Each of them knew what he smelled like. Each of them agreed to smell like him … when it was politically advantageous. Now they can’t get the Trump stink off of them fast enough no matter how many times they lather, rinse and repeat.” (09/25/26)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Jake Scott
“In Manila, on Tuesday, September 22, the European Union and the Philippines agreed on the substance of a free trade agreement, one that revealed the shape of Europe’s strategy in Southeast Asia. The deal, giving Philippine exporters permanent preferential access to the EU market of roughly 450 million consumers, follows agreements already in force with Singapore and Vietnam, an Indonesian pact awaiting approval, and Thai talks entering what Bangkok hopes to be their final round. Together, these agreements tie the EU, already the third-largest trading partner for the ASEAN bloc, and its largest source of foreign direct investment (FDI), into several of the largest economies in the region—but not the bloc as a whole. The EU is building its Southeast Asian relationship nation by nation, undermining the prospects of a bloc-to-bloc agreement that both sides still profess to want.” (09/25/26)
“American farmers rely on imports for many of their most critical inputs—fertilizer, chemicals, machinery—and rely on exports to large overseas markets such as China for a big part of their profits, and, as such, conducting a series of trade wars fought with tariffs is just about the worst possible economic policy for them as a group. Naturally, American farmers and farming communities keep voting roughly two-to-one for trade wars—a vote for Donald Trump, the guy who insists that ‘trade wars are good and easy to win,’ is a vote for trade wars. Farmers voted for trade wars, and trade wars they got. And—surprise!—agriculture is in something like a full-blown recession, with farm incomes projected to decline by a whopping 5.5 percent in real terms this year. Farm bankruptcies are up 46 percent since 2024, and some 15,000 farming operations went dark last year.” (09/25/26)
“Racism plagues American health care: reverse racism. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division just brought another case against a top medical school for blatant discrimination against white and Asian applicants: Blacks applying to the University of California at San Francisco’s med school get admitted at almost 13 times the rate of similarly qualified white applicants. Black and Hispanic students the school admitted from 2023 to ’25 averaged lower test scores and undergraduate grades than the average white and Asian applicant the school rejected. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon’s letter blasting UCSF follows similar ones to UCLA, UCSD and Yale; virtually every other US med school is likely as bad, but she’s building the evidence before she strikes. The University of Pennsylvania offers a path for students at eight other colleges to enter medical school without taking the MCAT at all — and five of the eight are historically black colleges.” (09/26/26)
“Did you know that the U.S. government has an agency called the ‘Office of Remigration’? In case you’re unfamiliar with the term ‘remigration,’ it’s typically used by white nationalists to describe the mass expulsion of nonwhite immigrants, done in the quest to ethnically cleanse ‘Western’ countries. It’s mostly a European term, but Trump himself employed the phrase ‘reverse migration’ last year, mainstreaming ‘remigration’ on the American right—and true to its name, the office now helps facilitate mass removals in some very dark and sordid ways. So let’s lay down a marker: If Democrats take over the House and/or the Senate, they should make it their business next year to ensure that this agency faces truly withering scrutiny. As many Americans as possible should know what their government is doing in their name.” (09/25/26)
“America’s government has become a masterclass in deliberate, costly failure. You can order dinner, hail a car, transfer money across the country, trash a pundit, praise a friend, and run a business from your phone in seconds. The private sector figured this out years ago. Yet the second you deal with your own government, you step into a dysfunctional time machine: endless paperwork, overloaded websites that crash, multi-hour hold times, lines that stretch for blocks, and approvals that crawl at the speed of 1985. … The private sector rebuilds itself constantly. Yet government clings to legacy processes written for a slower century. Why? Because broken systems protect power.” (09/25/26)
“Changing polling places always occurs, every election year, and the biggest changes in this regard have been in the eight states (and D.C.) that have established mail-in only voting. Talk about a change of polling places! And then there is the purging of voter rolls of non-citizen, non-resident, and non-existent voters! Who could complain about that? Only unserious people. Like Democrats. Like Kamala Harris. And those who seek to game elections.” (09/25/26)
