Source: Law & Liberty
by Michael Lucchese

“The American Right seems intent on proving John Stuart Mill’s infamous remark that ‘conservatives are the stupid party.’ Not only is the populist movement in Washington foundering because of infighting and general boorishness, its intellectual equivalent in the so-called ‘postliberal’ movement also seems to be descending into anger and what Lionel Trilling once called ‘irritable mental gestures.’ Neither force seems to be the engine of cultural renewal that they promised to be. John Wilsey’s new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, offers a beautiful alternative: a vision to which conservatives might genuinely aspire.” (08/18/25)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/the-gentlemanly-heart-of-american-liberty/

Source: The American Prospect
by Harold Meyerson

“OK, who’s the dangerous radical pushing the state to take over private enterprise here? Who’s aping the Chinese Communist policy of having the government own or control major business entities? Zohran Mamdani? He’s called for more consumer-friendly regulation of some New York City markets (rental housing in particular), and proposed setting up a handful of city-run grocery stores, but he hasn’t advocated seizing big corporations or banks, though New York is lousy with them. On the other hand, there’s Donald Trump. His approval of Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel was conditioned on giving the government a golden share through which the government (that is, Trump) could control the company’s policies and conduct. His decision to let chipmakers Nvidia and AMD sell their H20 chips to China … was conditioned on their having to pay our government 15 percent of the revenues they made from those sales.” (08/18/25)

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-08-18-when-letat-cest-trump-us-goes-in-for-state-capitalism/

Source: Washington Monthly
by Robert J Shapiro

“Last week, Donald Trump claimed the authority to deploy the country’s military to the streets of Washington, D.C. to help fight crime. Yet, hard data show it’s not about crime in the nation’s capital. Instead, the evidence points to other, more troubling reasons and aspirations, especially the president’s personal sense of entitlement to power, MAGA’s approach to partisan politics, and an implied threat to public opposition to his exercise of power in the future.” (08/18/25)

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/08/18/the-lies-behind-trumps-d-c-troop-surge/

Source: Antiwar.com
by Ted Snider

“By Donald Trump’s transactional criterion, NATO has been a costly failure that needs fixing or needs to be cut lose. Europe has failed to pay the price and has left the U.S. with the financial and military burden of defending Europe. The war in Ukraine has proven the point. But that was never the point of NATO. The point of NATO was never economic nor transactional. The point of NATO was, in large part, to keep Europe militarily coordinated with, dependent on and subordinate to the United States. The point wasn’t to extricate the U.S. from Europe, it was, as Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO explained, precisely ‘to keep the Americans in Europe, while keeping the Russians out.’ By that criterion, NATO has been a massive success. The Ukraine war has proven that point too.” (08/18/25)

https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2025/08/17/europe-reveals-itself-as-ridiculous-in-ukraine/

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Annelle Sheline

“Ignoring Israel’s abuses and erasing crimes wholesale has made this exercise a joke. But it is it any worse than what the Biden admin was doing?” (08/18/25)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/state-department-human-rights/