Source: Liberal Currents
by Guillaume AW Attia

“MAGA’s campaign of government censorship and repression is an assault on fundamental free speech values.” (01/13/26)

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/cancel-culture-goes-maga/

Source: Macroeconomic Policy News
by David Beckworth

“The FOMC brought quantitative tightening (QT) to an end at its December 2025 meeting. In doing so, it reaffirmed something that has become increasingly clear over the past decade: the structural size of the Fed’s balance sheet keeps ratcheting higher after each round of QE. It all feels a bit like déjà vu. As Bill Nelson noted, the Fed now believes it needs roughly $3 trillion in reserve balances to operate its floor system, implying a minimum securities portfolio of about $6 1/2 trillion once currency in circulation and the Treasury General Account are taken into account. What stands out is not just the size of that number, but its direction.” (01/13/26)

https://macroeconomicpolicynexus.substack.com/p/deja-vu-at-the-federal-reserve

Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander

“Isn’t ‘may you get exactly what you asked for’ one of those ancient Chinese curses? Since we last spoke, prediction markets have gone to the moon, rising from millions to billions in monthly volume. … Degenerate gambling is bad. Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn’t really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome! Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data.” (01/13/26)

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-the-monkeys-paw-curls

Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen

“Last month, former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton and four other officials with European nongovernmental organizations were barred from entering the U.S., in what was described as retaliation for ‘censorship’ of U.S. tech platforms in Europe. In reality, it was the latest in a campaign to force the EU to withdraw two regulatory laws, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, that U.S. tech firms don’t like. The laws require tech companies to take down illegal content on their platforms, restrict the transfer of user data to multiple platforms run by the same companies, refrain from ‘steering’ users toward their own products, and allow for fair competition in app stores and interoperable social media sites. The travel ban was only the latest in the Trump administration’s special pleading for Big Tech, using threatened tariffs and leverage in trade deals to try to force changes to the EU’s sovereign laws.” (01/13/25)

https://prospect.org/2026/01/13/trump-big-tech-tax-cuts-deregulation-europe-digital-networks-act/

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Ahmed Ibrahim

“The relatively small Somali community in the U.S., estimated at 260,000, has lately been receiving national attention thanks to a massive fraud scandal in Minnesota and the resulting vitriol directed at them by President Trump. Trump’s targeting of Somalis long preceded the current allegations of fraud, going back to his first presidential campaign in 2016. A central theme of Trump’s anti-Somali rancor is that they come from a war-torn country without an effective centralized state, which in Trump’s reasoning speaks to their quality as a people, and therefore, their ability to contribute to American society. It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that Somalia’s state collapse and political instability is as much a result of imperial interventions, including from the U.S., as anything else.” (01/13/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/somali-people-in-the-us/