Source: Underthrow
by Max Borders

“William Tecumseh Sherman said, ‘War is hell.’ And he was right, though I can’t remember if he said that before or after torching everything he could on his march to the sea. Of the latest military adventure, enlightened commenters sit in their easy chairs and slap cheap bumper-sticker assessments on the Web for all the world to see. They baptize themselves in their own rectitude, having neither dodged a bullet in Fallujah nor watched a buddy’s legs get blown off by a roadside IED. Nor have they had to live a life of conformity forced by zealots pretending to believe in a religion they never converted to. They never had to be beaten and raped for showing their hair, or singing an ancient song, or dancing an ancient dance.” (03/09/26)

https://underthrow.substack.com/p/there-is-no-truth-in-this

Source: Our Future
by Sulma Arias

“I’m a practical person. Ideas matter, but they only come to life when we put them into practice. So if you haven’t heard from me recently, it’s because I’ve been out there, around the country, putting the Organizing Revival into practice on the ground with People’s Action organizers and our growing family of allies. And I’ve been cooking! Yes, I mean that literally. As I’ve met with different people, we’ve been making chiles rellenos, one of my most cherished dishes! Cooking and eating together has become an important part of these strategic gatherings, as we commit to move forward together into an uncertain landscape that holds dark but certain challenges. I’ll share more about this, and my recipe, in a bit. But first, I want to talk about the moment we’re in. I recently wrote an article in Convergence Magazine that I hope you’ve seen.” (03/09/26)

https://ourfuture.org/20260308/what-we-do-tells-us-who-we-are

Source: Reason
by Matt Welch

“In October 2025, the Trump administration slammed the door shut to the world’s most miserable, slashing the annual cap of refugee intake by 94 percent, to an all-time low of 7,500. Even the COVID-19 years of 2020–2021 averaged more, at 11,600, than this cap would allow. In the year that Reagan left office, the U.S. brought in more than 107,000 refugees. America is choking off demand for refugees at a time when the planet has been jacking up supply.” (for publication 04/26)

https://reason.com/2026/03/09/closing-the-door-to-new-americans/

Source: The American Conservative
by Ben Sixsmith

“A long-running theme in the right-wing critique of progressive politics in the 2010s was mockery of its reliance on fantasy fiction. Left-leaning commentators appeared to have been trapped within the reference points of the novels of their childhood. Harry Potter was especially prominent in left-wing arguments. … we critics of ‘social justice’ activism found this discourse entertaining. We mocked its Manichaean vision of the world, in which everyone was either a goodie or a baddie. We made fun of its at least implicit reliance on magic. ‘Read another book’ was a popular jibe. This was more than legitimate. Still, as the American-Israeli war against Iran continues, I can’t help feeling that some people on the right were laughing without thinking. Now, some right-wing figures seem to be viewing the world through the lens of childish fiction. Prowar rhetoric is seething with cheap comparisons to popular culture.” (03/09/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-childrens-iran-war/

Source: New York Post
by Steven F Hayward

“The primary obligation of any government, the Declaration of Independence tells us in its famous second paragraph, is the ‘safety and happiness’ of its citizens. The necessity of securing safety is obvious (except to progressive politicians in big blue cities, who are often diffident about crime and disorder), but it is thought something of a novelty of the Declaration to set out ‘the pursuit of happiness’ as one of the central ‘inalienable rights’, along with life and liberty. It is well established that Thomas Jefferson and his collaborators in writing the Declaration (John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston) followed the language and logic of John Locke’s ‘Second Treatise of Government’. But Locke and other social-contract theorists of the era typically spoke of the inalienable natural rights to ‘life, liberty and property’, or ‘life, liberty and estate.’?” (03/08/26)

https://nypost.com/2026/03/08/us-news/the-pursuit-of-happiness-remains-a-novel-moment-in-us-history/