Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Michael Dioguardi

“In modern political debate, rising costs of living are usually blamed on markets. Housing is ‘unaffordable.’ Healthcare is ‘broken.’ Education is ‘too expensive.’ The proposed remedy is almost always the same: more public spending, more intervention, more emergency programs funded by government credit. But what if the affordability crisis is not a failure of markets at all? What if it is the predictable outcome of how modern governments finance themselves? From an Austrian perspective, the affordability crisis is best understood as a monetary and institutional phenomenon. Since the early 1970s, governments like the United States have operated under a system of discretionary sovereign credit, where spending is no longer meaningfully constrained by taxation or savings.” (01/12/26)

https://mises.org/power-market/sovereign-credit-affordability-and-crisis-ratchet

Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Chait

“Trump is alienating anti-system voters because he now controls the system. His appeal lay in his opposition to established power, but now that he has it, he is flexing it gleefully. He is the warmonger, the censor, the face of the Epstein cover-up. It is hard to remain an outsider while holding the world’s most powerful job. But Trump seems not to have anticipated this, in part because he had far less trouble maintaining his anti-establishment identity in his first term. He managed this because that term consisted mainly of failures. … Trump is no longer making this complaint about the established forces working against him, because he has solved this problem. His presidency is filled with loyalists. He has largely overcome any reluctance that officials might have had in carrying out his most unethical or illegal demands. He can’t present himself as anti-system, because he has become the system.” (01/12/26)

https://archive.is/J8CDj

Source: The Chris Hedges Report
by Chris Hedges

“I have seen the masked goons who terrorize our streets before. … I know these goons. I have been a prisoner in their jails and spent hours in their interrogation rooms. I have been beaten by them. I have been deported, and in several cases banned, from their countries. I know what is coming. Terror is the engine that empowers dictatorships. It eliminates dissidents. It silences critics. It dismantles the law. It creates a society of timid and frightened collaborators, those who look away when people are snatched off streets or gunned down, those who inform to save themselves, those who retreat into their tiny rabbit holes, pulling down the blinds, desperately praying to be left in peace. Terror works.” (01/11/26)

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-machinery-of-terror

Source: New York Post
by Melanie Phillips

“As the Iranian uprising continues to escalate, it’s been reported that hundreds of protesters have been killed by the regime’s security forces. The internet, phone signals and lighting have been cut, and it’s feared the killings are intensifying behind the blackout. Yet the Iranian people have increasingly poured onto the streets to confront the regime’s murder and torture squads. There’s never been such a mass display of raw courage in the teeth of such vicious repression. If the regime does fall, this will be a seismic event, reshaping the region and world politics. The insurrection might be the most consequential global event so far this century. Yet from Western liberals, there’s been little more than pursed lips. There have been no demonstrations in support of the embattled protesters.” (01/11/25)

https://nypost.com/2026/01/11/opinion/iranian-protesters-are-showing-courage-in-the-face-of-tyranny-but-israel-obsessed-liberals-dont-seem-to-care/

Source: spiked
by Tim Black

“On 3 January, US special forces removed Venezuela’s president and brutal despot Nicolás Maduro from power. A few hours later, at a hastily arranged press conference, US president Donald Trump seemed even more pleased with himself than usual. Perhaps his excitement explains the Freudian slip. ‘I watched last night one of the most precise attacks on sovereignty,’ he said, before quickly correcting himself – ‘I mean, it was an attack for justice.’ But the truth was out. … But Trump’s legion loathers among our political and cultural elites are not seeing the Venezuela intervention as an attack on national sovereignty. No, they’re casting it above all as an attack on the so-called rules-based order itself.” (01/11/26)

https://archive.is/9fTcH

Source: Quillette
by John Aziz

“Zohran Mamdani wants to institute ‘collectivist’ governance, but NYC already has a collectivist problem—a coordinated veto system that blocks development and progress.” (01/12/26)

https://quillette.com/2026/01/12/the-warmth-of-collectivism-mamdani-nyc/