Source: Underthrow
by Max Borders
“If we think of it as a particular kind of ecosystem, the West has cultural, institutional, and ideological features that have made it successful, but also easy to exploit. In other words, invasive ideological species (IIS) don’t care a jot about those institutions, but will use them to take power.” (11/17/25)
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/invasive-ideological-species
Source: The American Prospect
by Gillian Brockell
“In a memo to staff on October 30, Avelo Airlines’ head of flight operations Scott Hall painted a rosy, if defensive, picture of the company’s future. Avelo’s financial strategy was working, he said. The company had a big contract from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to do charter deportation flights … Sure, shutting down their entire West Coast operation looked bad, but it was good, actually, a long-planned move toward efficiency that had nothing to do with the ‘outrage mob’ boycotting Avelo for its association with ICE. … The truth is much more bleak: Avelo’s ICE flights appear to be a fiasco, defined by the poor planning, cruel treatment, and serious safety lapses endemic to ‘ICE Air,’ the network of charter carriers and military planes that transport shackled migrants to detention facilities and out of the country.” (11/17/25)
https://prospect.org/2025/11/17/ice-airs-sloppy-dangerous-deportation-flights/
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob
“Transparency is usually a good thing. But so is privacy. And so, too, are limits on government power.
Which bring me to the Epstein files — or, more accurately, those files bring me here. …. The public has a right to know! But does it?” (11/17/25)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2025/11/17/transparency-weaponized/
Source: The American Conservative
by Peter Van Buren
“Jon Stewart joked Trump ‘already has the merch,’ referring to a red ‘Trump 2028’ cap. Steve Bannon keeps teasing ‘a plan’ to keep Trump in office. The Russian dissident and former chess champion Garry Kasparov warns of democracy’s demise. It’s a perfect storm of satire, conspiracy, and clickbait, but none of it adds up to a third term for Donald Trump. … Who knows what goes through Trump’s mind when he thinks of 2028, but we do know there is no way he is going to run for a third term. Three things make a genuine third-term bid for Trump impossible: the 22nd Amendment, the extraordinary difficulty of changing that amendment, and the legal implausibility of proposed way-out-there workaround schemes.” (11/17/25)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-third-trump-term-is-an-impossibility/
Source: The Atlantic
by Gilad Edelman
“Conservatives have been complaining about media bias for decades, but Republican officials were long averse to interfering with the decisions of private companies. Then came the second Trump administration, and its willingness to wage cultural warfare in more intrusive ways. [FCC chair Michael] Carr’s role in that effort is not to tell networks what to air and whom to fire. It’s to get to the point where he doesn’t have to.” (11/17/25)
Source: New York Post
by Miranda Devine
“We are all owed a better explanation from the FBI and Secret Service about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump 16 months ago at a campaign rally in Butler, PA. The president himself remains unsatisfied with the answers he’s been given about the circumstances leading to 20-year-old Thomas Crooks climbing on a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle and firing eight times at Trump, narrowly missing his head but hitting his ear. Crooks was shot dead by a Secret Service sniper, but not before he killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore, 50, and seriously wounded David Dutch, 58, and James Copenhaver, 75, who were sitting in the bleachers behind Trump. There is something very wrong with the official story and that invites conspiracy theories. The president demanded answers months ago. A man was murdered. What is going on?” (11/17/25)
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Douglas Carswell
“The future for our state looks bright. In just the past five years, Mississippi has seen more economic growth than in the entire 15 years before that combined. We’re on track to phase out the state income tax entirely, allowing families to keep more of what they earn. Mississippi has attracted a surge of new investment, and for the first time in years, our workforce participation rate is finally heading in the right direction. Zoom out, and the picture gets even better. Contrary to the endless gloom from the pundits, the American economy has consistently outperformed expectations for decades. Since the late 1990s, the US has delivered strong, steady growth that few forecasters saw coming. But there is one dark cloud on all our horizons that we cannot forever ignore: US national debt.” (11/16/25)
Source: Persuasion
by Jamie Paul
“By virtually any measure, trans activism has failed in the United States. It has proven itself a decisively losing electoral issue, been repudiated by the Supreme Court, lost the culture war, alienated a majority of society, and caused public opinion to turn against trans people. Trans activism ignited a trans backlash — one whose flames now threaten to consume LGBT rights more broadly. As a result, many political moderates are now quietly backing away from trans issues. Nobody wants to be burned again. But trans activism was only a losing issue because it was pursued by extremist bullies within the framework of a radical and authoritarian far-left ideology.” (11/16/25)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-manifesto-for-liberal-trans-activism
Source: exile in happy valley
by Nicky Reid
“Well, Satan died last week, or at least so I’m told. Speaking personally, I won’t sleep easier until I see a body because that neocon fossil should have died centuries ago. I can’t help but to feel like the final girl in some cheesy 80s slasher flick, waiting for one last jump-scare after the killer was shot 84 times, set on fire and dropped from a skyscraper. Dick Cheney was the killer, literally and figuratively, and I’ll believe that monster has finally left us when I see his open casket lowered into an active volcano.” (11/16/25)
https://exileinhappyvalley.blogspot.com/2025/11/cheney-died-only-dick-who-deserved.html
Source: In These Times
by Alberto Toscano
“Ahead of this November’s Cop30 climate summit, to be held in Belém, Brazil — the gateway to the Amazon River — United Nations Secretary General António Guterres delivered a stark statement: ‘Let’s recognize our failure. The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5 degrees [Celsius] in the next few years. And that going above 1.5 degrees has devastating consequences.’ Guterres’s remarks came just as Hurricane Melissa was making landfall in Jamaica as one of the most powerful Atlantic basin storms in recorded history. And it came after a year of other grim milestones: the devastating wildfires that struck Los Angeles in January and Canada in May, lethal flash floods from Argentina to Texas and heatwaves in India and Pakistan that brought temperatures up to 49 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit), leading to crop failures.” (11/17/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/climate-change-cop30-the-long-heat-book-interview-fossil-fuels