Source: Washington Post
by Ramesh Ponnuru

“Of course Donald Trump is being persecuted. That’s not to say that he is innocent of all charges, or to deny that the prosecutors — and the millions of Americans rooting for them — are partly motivated by their conviction that he is a serial lawbreaker. But he wouldn’t be facing all of these charges all at once if he were not a serious contender for president. … Trump isn’t just playing the victim. He is a victim of unfair, law-bending prosecution. When we think about political persecution, however, we typically have in mind someone who has done nothing wrong but challenge the powerful. That’s not the picture here: In each of these cases, Trump’s underlying conduct is indefensible. That fact helps to explain the widespread support for the legal campaign against Trump. His efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, especially, were despicable.” (04/23/24)

https://archive.is/m2IoF

Source: Public Substack
by Michael Shellenberger

“X owner Elon Musk should be thrown in prison, said a senator in Australia yesterday, because he refuses to delete a video of a recent stabbing from X globally. ‘Whatever Elon Musk is on,’ said Senator Jacqui Lambie, ‘it’s disgusting behavior. Quite frankly, the bloke should be jailed.’ But what’s truly disgusting behavior is calling for the incarceration of someone for refusing to censor the entire global Internet on behalf of a single nation. It is not the right of any nation to decide what should be on the Internet around the world. ‘No president, prime minister, or judge,’ responded Musk on X, ‘has authority over all of Earth!’ He’s right.” (04/23/24)

https://public.substack.com/p/cia-recruit-is-pursuing-global-internet

Source: The Atlantic
by Adam Serwer

“Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint. On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as ‘the nascent pogroms at Columbia.’ Last week, Cotton posted on X, ‘I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.’ He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters. This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton, who enjoys issuing calls for violence that linger on the edge of plausible deniability when it comes to which groups, exactly, are appropriate targets for lethal force.” (04/24/24)

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/columbia-national-guard-tom-cotton/678163/

Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone

“All the frenzied shrieking about pro-Palestine protests at universities these last few days makes it clear that our civilization is so twisted and insane that it sees protesting a genocide as far worse than committing one. Which is about as backwards as any society could possibly be. Seriously, try to imagine a crazier, more upside-down civilization than one which gets more angry at people protesting genocidal atrocities than it does at people committing them. A civilization where people wear their pants on their head and walk backwards all day? That would be less crazy. A civilization where the dogs own the people and the children go to work while the parents go to school? That would be less crazy. It’s as wrong as you can possibly get anything in this world. It’s actually hard to imagine how anyone could get anything more wrong.” (04/24/24)

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/04/25/in-this-dystopia-opposing-a-genocide-is-considered-worse-than-committing-one/

Source: Adam Smith Institute
by Tim Worstall

“If government spending has risen by 6% of GDP — which is a lot, even a lorra lots — then what is this story about austerity?” (04/24/24)

https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/what-austerity

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Jake Werner

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to travel to Beijing this week in the latest round of high-level diplomacy between the U.S. and China. Since the U.S.-China relationship hit new lows in late 2022 and early 2023 — thanks to incidents like then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and a Chinese spy balloon’s visit to U.S. airspace — both sides have made a welcome effort to slow the slide toward crisis and conflict. … As the State Department signals that no new positive initiatives are on the agenda for Blinken’s visit, U.S.–China diplomacy increasingly seems devoted to talks for the sake of talks, without any ambition to make progress on the deep and powerful underlying forces driving both sides toward confrontation.” (04/24/24)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/antony-blinken-china-visit/