Author: nick

Yellow Vest protest in Belfort, France on December 1, 2018. Photo: Thomas Bresson. CC BY 4.0 In June 2019, a group of Yellow Vests, the diverse protest movement that broke out a year earlier, and their families set to work constructing a cabin on a holiday Saints Day. It was a Thursday, a welcome break during the working week, which many Parisians converted into a long weekend. The nondescript barren wasteland upon which the Yellow Vests chose to build was almost a metaphor for the deindustrialization in the brownfield sites so prevalent in the northern banlieues. Immense tractor trailers, their…

Mark Fuhrman, the only man convicted of a felony in the O.J. Simpson trial, died this week of throat cancer at age 74. He was also a crucial player in my book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From The Seventies to Obama, for his part in the case that inadvertently gave us a 15-year intermission from perpetual race-mongering. That Xanadu could last only as long as most Americans still had a piercing recollection of the nearly universal jubilation of black people when O.J. was acquitted. From that point on, the race card simply stopped working, like a subway card that won’t open…

Massie’s out: Yesterday, voters in Kentucky made their choice. Ed Gallrein, who is backed by President Donald Trump, defeated longtime representative Thomas Massie, who always skewed pretty darn libertarian. Unfortunately, it was nowhere near a close call; Gallrein won by a huge margin. The age breakdown is fascinating: KY-04 GOP Primary: Results by Age Group 🟣 Age 17-25: Massie +25🟣 Age 26-35: Massie +56🟣 Age 36-45: Massie +38🟣 Age 46-55: Massie +17——🔴 Age 56-65: Gallrein +18🔴 Age 66-75: Gallrein +35🔴 Age 76+: Gallrein +33@QuantusInsights | 5/11-12 | 908 LV https://t.co/H7juBRgxXr pic.twitter.com/pjcRguiF4a — InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) May 13, 2026 Tons of money—$32 million,…

Opposition to data centers is all the rage among populists of all stripes. On the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) has proposed a national moratorium on new data center construction; on the right, Tucker Carlson describes them as “dystopian” and “devouring American energy and jobs.” In recent days, X has become flooded with images of pristine American forests, plains, beaches, and lakes alongside captions warning that no data center is worth losing this. (The images are often AI-generated, and many of the accounts sharing them are foreign.) Data center panic is fueled by concerns about electricity and water usage. Many…

Israel has relaunched and rebranded Act.IL, an online campaign originally designed by Israeli intelligence officials at the Ministry of Strategic Affairs to harass and intimidate American critics of Israel. Such operations are generally referred to as “troll farming,” though the forces behind Act.IL use softer, more highfalutin language. Rebranded as RiseApp, the program is operated by Israel’s Reichman University (IDC Herzliya) and, according to the project’s website, aims to mobilize Act.IL’s existing database of more than 40,000 pro-Israel online operatives to counter what it describes as “antisemitism” and “misinformation.” The Reichman University website describes RiseApp as delivering “fact-checked, expert-led responses”…

The crowd that had gathered to attend the political funeral of Rep. Thomas Massie wasn’t ready to admit defeat.  “2028!” shouted the overwhelmingly young group that had turned out on a very hot Tuesday night in Kentucky to watch the man who built his career on defiance wave the white flag. Massie hit all the usual notes, from ending forever wars to vanquishing the accelerating national debt. And he casually smiled while joking about conceding to his primary challenger, Ed Gallrein, by phone call earlier in the evening: “I would have come out sooner but I had to call my…

Trump's China Pragmatism Is Welcome Source link

Resolving wars has proven more difficult than anticipated. Source link

NA On May 8, the US Court of International Trade ruled that Donald Trump’s massive new Section 122 tariffs are illegal, in cases brought by the Liberty Justice Center (on behalf of two small businesses) and 24 state governments, led by Oregon. Today, the CIT rejected the Trump Administration’s motion to stay the injunction blocking further collection of the tariffs until the litigation over the case is done. This is a potentially very significant ruling. Last year, in the case challenging Trump’s IEEPA tariffs, LJC and I secured an injunction against them from the CIT, but that injunction was then…

Critics of the May 2026 summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), widely condemned the outcome as being long on pomp and ceremony but short on meaningful substantive results.  They noted that most of the agreements reached, especially on trade and other economic issues, were either preliminary or relatively minor.  There was a virtual consensus among the opinion-shaping elites that Trump had secured no major concessions on either his commercial or his security objectives. In other words, the outcome of the summit was rather bland and boring.  That criticism may be true,…