Source: The UnPopulist
by Vladimir Kara-Murza

“As Putin was clearly building an authoritarian state, silencing the media, rigging elections, persecuting his opponents, Western leaders continued with business as usual. American presidents of both parties looked into Putin’s soul and pushed reset buttons. European leaders rolled out royal red carpets, signed lucrative deals, launched new gas pipelines all the while, I suppose, hoping to maintain some sort of a modus operandi with Mr. Putin in the international arena, at the price of ignoring and enabling his abuses inside of Russia — an immoral policy, if there ever was one. But also, a very impractical one. Because one other clear lesson from Russian history is that internal repression and external aggression are always two sides of one coin — because a government that tramples on the rights of its own people will never respect the borders of its neighbors.” (08/18/25)

https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/appeasing-an-aggressor-never-leads

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Rindala Alajaji & Jason Kelley

“HB0043 is a ‘bounty’ law that deputizes any resident with a child to file civil lawsuits against websites they believe are in violation, effectively turning anyone into a potential content cop. There is no central agency, no regulatory oversight, and no clear standard. Instead, the law invites parents in Wyoming to take enforcement for the entire state — every resident, and everyone else’s children — into their own hands by suing websites that contain a single example of objectionable content. … This is a textbook example of a ‘heckler’s veto,’ where a single person can unilaterally decide what content the public is allowed to access.” (08/18/25)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/08/book-bans-internet-bans-wyoming-lets-parents-control-whole-states-access-internet

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Josh Stylman

“The infrastructure is now visible to those willing to see it. The systematic replacement of natural systems with artificial ones has reached into every domain — money, food, health, education, information. What began as isolated changes has revealed itself as a coordinated operation: the complete substitution of reality with decree, ownership with access, competence with credentials. … As more people realize everything is bullshit and start looking for genuine answers, something interesting happens: many of the solutions are found in the past. Not because we should abandon technology or retreat from modernity, but because we discarded methods and attitudes toward life, humanity, and time itself that actually worked.” (08/18/25)

https://brownstone.org/articles/from-fiat-everything-to-real-everything/

Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen

“The Trump administration’s war on reality will make it meaningfully difficult to understand the health of the economy in the coming months. If data is either not being collected or is no longer reliable, now that Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as punishment for weak jobs numbers, it’s hard not to succumb to bias or motivated reasoning, on either side of the political divide. So before we get murkier radio signals, we need to assess the numbers we have now, to inform the trends for the future. Most of this picture is mixed and influenced by a bunch of different factors. But we can say one thing definitively: Hiring has been relatively dormant since Trump took the oath of office.” (08/19/25)

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-19-what-us-economy-really-looks-like/