Category: Politics

  • You Can’t Violate the Constitution and Then Hide Behind It

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    There’s a dangerous sleight of hand happening in public discourse: people violate the Constitution, trample the rights of others, and when consequences follow, they suddenly cloak themselves in constitutional language and call it “protest.” That isn’t principled dissent. It’s bad faith.The Constitution is not a prop. It’s a contract. And contracts don’t work if one…

  • On Wishing Power To the Persians

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    I’m not a foreign policy expert, and I don’t pretend to have answers here. I’m very aware that situations like this are complex, and that well-intentioned ideas can have unintended consequences. What follows isn’t a proposal so much as a set of thoughts I’m still turning over.Watching what’s happening in Iran has been unsettling. From…

  • Hindsight, Tribalism, and the Refusal to Deal With Reality

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    Every time a federal enforcement shooting happens, the same pattern emerges: facts secondary, certainty instant, outrage filling the vacuum before investigations begin. Within hours, the story is fixed: enforcement is illegitimate, resistance is innocent, and context is optional.The recent immigration incidents aren’t notable for simplicity — they’re notable for how quickly the public abandons reality…

  • Power Is, Was, And Will Always Be the Rule

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    Every time a major power acts decisively, someone warns that “a dangerous precedent has been set.” That assumes history was ever governed by precedent rather than permission. It wasn’t. States have always done what they could get away with. What changes is only who notices.What feels destabilizing today is the recognition of a truth we…

  • Knee-Jerk Empathy Leads to More Victims, Or why “doing something” isn’t the same as doing something useful

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    In the wake of tragedy, familiar arguments rush back into the headlines. Recent shootings—both abroad and at home—have once again reignited the gun control debate, accompanied by alarming statistics and emotionally charged claims. That reaction is understandable. Grief demands answers. But urgency is not clarity, and too often this debate relies on misleading definitions and…

  • Democracy Isn’t Dying—It Was Designed to Decay

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    In 2016, something broke in me—not emotionally, but philosophically. It wasn’t just the candidates. It was what they represented. On one side, a career politician who embodied every manipulative, transactional instinct of the political class. On the other, a billionaire game show host playing populist messiah. Presented with this absurd binary, I assumed this had…

  • Let’s get one thing straight: socialism has worked before. Once. In a war camp with spears.

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    “He trained his fellow-citizens to have neither the wish nor the ability to live for themselves.” —Plutarch, on the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus Socialism Worked Once—in Sparta. And Y’all Aren’t Man Enough to Be Spartans Sparta was the original communist wet dream—no private wealth, no individual luxury, shared property, mandated equality, state-raised children, and universal military…

  • When Rhetoric Turns to Bloodshed

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    Today’s shooting at the ICE facility in Dallas hit me hard. A guy opened fire from a rooftop, killed one detainee, and left two others critically wounded before turning the gun on himself. They found a bullet etched with “ANTI-ICE,” signaling the whole thing was political. This isn’t some isolated stunt. Earlier this year, an…

  • When Words Get Violence, Don’t Be Surprised if Violence Begets Violence

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    “A man was murdered over his ideas. If that doesn’t appall you, we may be too far apart politically to ever reconcile.” I normally post weekly, but the reactions online to the Charlie Kirk shooting demanded more than silence. In my last piece, I addressed those celebrating his death. Today, I want to focus on…