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Damn Right the First Amendment Is a Weapon

Commentary by , July 6, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. News That Is Less Than True You may have seen the Internet light up over an Associated Press story that seems like a nightmare of Trumpian nativism gone wild: “Some immigrant US Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship […]

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The Robots Are Taking Over, and They Want to Know If You Want Fries with That

Commentary by , June 26, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Petty Pull Peddlers I took a couple of the items from my last “Five Things You Need to Read Today” edition and expanded them into standalone articles. I didn’t bother to send them out to the Tracinski Letter mailing list because they are substantial duplications of […]

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The High Road of Hope and Prosperity

Commentary by , June 20, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Did Monticello Just Evict Thomas Jefferson? Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, has just completed a restoration of the house’s outbuildings and slave quarters. The way the New York Times describes it, this is being used as an excuse to evict Jefferson from his own house. The […]

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The Thatcher Line

Commentary by , June 15, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Thatcher Line It is totally in keeping with the tone of the current political debate that the news that is actually most important is the least discussed. Here is what’s really important: we’re careening headlong past the Thatcher Line, the point at which the government runs […]

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“Why Can’t We Hate?”

Commentary by , June 11, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Geopolitics of Resentment Donald Trump’s so-called “populism” is a euphemism for a politics that is primarily about venting your resentment, sticking a finger in somebody’s eye without really caring about any other consequences. Consider Trump’s handling of the latest G-7 Summit, which is supposed to be […]

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IT-Backed Authoritarianism

Commentary by , June 8, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. “IT-Backed Authoritarianism” If you want to know where Google’s social-engineering aspirations are headed, you don’t need to look to the future. Look to China’s “social credit system,” a merger of Western-style financial credit scores with a more nebulous and politicized measure of a citizen’s orderliness—and political loyalty. […]

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The Spies Who Came Back to the Cold

Commentary by , June 2, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Right to Try The best part of the Trump administration, underneath the overhanging existential dread, is the push for deregulation. A lot of this has been done through executive action, which is of limited value because it can be undone by the next president (something Barack […]

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Generic Democratic Candidate

Commentary by , May 28, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Gods of the Copybook Headings In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: […]

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Weaponized Classical Music

Commentary by , May 21, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. I’m Sorry, Dave, I’m Afraid I Can’t Let You Do That A while back, I warned that big Silicon Valley companies like Google depend on an implicit social contract in which we agree to let them have access to a bunch of our data, but with the […]

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Workingmen and Reformers

Commentary by , May 10, 2018

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Fighting the Last Election The Republican Party just got through a difficult party primary day in which there were several local candidates who seemed like they might win by adopting a Trumpian style, but who had severe weaknesses as general election candidates. The chief of these was […]

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