Protect and Serve Whom?

Two Texas police encounters raise a larger question than either incident alone. When those entrusted with authority begin thinking like administrators rather than constitutional guardians, whom does government truly protect?

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The State is Not a Moral Parent

When societies become fearful, they naturally look to government for stability. But when the state evolves from protecting liberty to assuming responsibility for every social problem, it risks becoming something it was never intended to be: a moral parent. This essay traces the ideas that shaped that transformation and offers a framework for recognizing it today.

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Political Economy, Socialism, and the Myth of Sharing

Savings jar with growing green sprout

For too many Americans, socialism and communism are no longer associated with central planning, coercion, or economic depression. They have been successfully marketed as moral impulses of fairness, compassion, and sharing. A kinder alternative to the harshness of markets. What is lost in this framing is that these systems are not about generosity between people,…

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Social Media is a Foreign Policy Problem Now

Businessman interacting with a digital social media interface.

For years, diplomats and analysts treated social media as a sideshow: a noisy but ultimately secondary arena where people shared cat videos and occasionally overreacted to headlines. Meanwhile, authoritarian states, extremist movements, and a cottage industry of influence consultants treated it for what it has become—a central battle space in global politics where narratives are…

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The Great University Unmasking

Four diverse students wearing face masks, holding books and folders.

For decades, Western universities sold themselves as the custodians of Enlightenment values: reason, open inquiry, and the pursuit of truth unburdened by dogma. The sales pitch worked; governments wrote checks, parents emptied savings, and students took on ruinous debt for a chance to be formed in these elite institutions. Then, under the pressure of a…

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Climate Policy Without Adult Supervision

Protesters holding signs and a globe model advocating for climate action.

Climate change is a serious problem being addressed, in many capitals, with unserious politics. On one side, you have apocalypse entrepreneurs whose business model depends on permanent crisis, every storm, fire, or heatwave repackaged as final proof that we are “out of time.” On the other, you have professional deniers who’ve built a cottage industry…

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The West’s New Isolationism: Comfort Masquerading as Principle

Person standing with arms outstretched between large walls at sunset.

In the 1990s, Western foreign policy elites convinced themselves that history had effectively been tamed. Dictators would liberalize once they had McDonald’s and broadband; expansionist wars were relics of black-and-white newsreels. The “end of history” cliché was mocked, even as it quietly shaped the worldview of the people running things. Now that revisionist powers are…

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The Politics of Exhaustion

Tired woman sitting at desk with laptop and coffee.

One of the most revealing phrases in contemporary politics is also one of the simplest: “I’m tired.” You hear it from voters interviewed outside polling stations, from protestors at the end of long marches, from pundits lamenting “polarization,” and from politicians insisting they are “exhausted by war,” “drained by division,” or “fatigued” by obligations abroad.…

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When Borders Don’t Match Nations

Barbed wire fence along a snowy path in black and white.

On a map, borders look clean. A crisp line separates one color from another; a label signifies a “country.” But anyone who has spent time in the fault lines of global politics knows how deceptive that clarity can be. Many of the world’s most persistent conflicts stem from a simple, stubborn fact: the borders states…

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