Source: USA Today
by Michael Warren

“How much do we really understand about how Donald Trump operates behind the scenes? The former president’s ongoing criminal trial may give us new insight into how he and the people around him deal with political crises in the moment − in this case, during the final months of the 2016 election. Even before Trump’s descent down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, he had for decades been a tabloid mainstay who became a household name as much for his business and personal dramas as his successes. So much of Trump’s activity is public, narrated in real time by Trump himself to give us a warped account of what is going on as we’re learning about it.” (04/29/24)

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/04/29/trump-trial-hush-money-stormy-daniels-election-scheme/73466666007/

Source: Townhall
by Kurt Schlichter

“Good gosh, could the conservasissies be any conservasissier? That’s a rhetorical question because the answer is obvious. Yes. Yes, they can, and they do on a regular basis. Last week, we were treated to the glorious tableau of Texas cops of all the colors of the ethnic rainbow grabbing and manhandling scumbag Hamas-lovers off the lawn at the University of Texas. This should have been a time of celebration for us normal people. This should have been a time of joy. Instead, we got these conservative weenies upset that Greg Abbott was arresting people for exercising what they (wrongly) claim is their right to free speech. Guys, if you want to know why we lose, there you go. This is how we lose.” (04/29/24)

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2024/04/29/conservatives-need-to-man-up-and-play-by-the-new-rules-n2638370

Source: Center for a Stateless Society
by Kevin Carson

“The ‘best available option’ argument is typical of the right-libertarian tendency to avoid any consideration of structural power differentials or background violence, or otherwise look even one micron beneath the immediate situation, in determining whether a given interaction is ‘voluntary.’ It deliberately neglects, in particular, questions like why child labor or sweatshops happen to be the ‘best available alternative,’ who set the range of available alternatives, and whether sweatshop employers might be involved in the power structure that determines the range of alternatives. It fails to ask why workers were willing to work in English textile mills 200 years ago, and why the wages were the highest available. If we take a look at actual economic history, we find that workers in the Industrial Revolution were willing to work long hours for low pay in factories because they’d been forcibly deprived of other options — by employers.” (04/29/24)

https://c4ss.org/content/59570

Source: The Nation
by John Feffer

“Trump and those backing him hope to disable enough of the political infrastructure to create the space for non-state actors to do his work for him.” (04/29/24)

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/haiti-trump-election-gangs/

Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Mustafa Ekin Turan

“If you have been using the internet for longer than a couple of years, you might have noticed that it used to be much ‘freer.’ What freer means in this context is that there was less censorship and less stringent rules regarding copyright violations on social media websites such as YouTube and Facebook (and consequently a wider array of content), search engines used to often show results from smaller websites, there were less ‘fact-checkers,’ and there were (for better or for worse) less stringent guidelines for acceptable conduct. … This article will argue that changes in European Union regulations regarding online platforms played an important role in shaping the structure of the internet to the way it is today and that further changes in EU policy that will be even more detrimental to freedom on the internet may be on the horizon.” (04/29/24)

https://mises.org/mises-wire/how-eu-law-has-made-internet-less-free-everyone-else