What Caught My Eye forFebruary 19 - 25 (#5)

Whatever happened to the party of free speech? What’s even more messed up is you know he’s going to use this to extract some kind of bribe to get the administration to approve the Netflix-Warner Brothers deal…assuming the Trump administration don’t outright put their foot on the scale forcing a sale to Ellison and Paramount.

It’s awful what this administration are doing to honorable people who want to serve their country. Trans rights are human rights.

Isn’t this the same kind of forced or coerced speech that the GOP railed about during Biden’s term in office?

We’re building concentration camps, and too many people are okay with it. This is horrifying.

The reality of the concentration camps that are planned for Social Circle or Tremont, Pa. — in a site that used to move cheap consumer goods for the now-bankrupt Big Lots — is that they are much more likely to breed disease and human misery than to alleviate them.

It is impossible to overstate the gift of security, wealth, opportunity, and sheer innovation that these six foundational pillars of the US policy achieved for both the world beyond and Americans at home. To be clear, America’s eight-decade reign atop the world order was hardly without great human cost—felt most acutely by those on the far edges of the Cold War, from Vietnam and Cambodia to Africa and Latin America. But scratch at almost any titanic achievement of humanity across the last 80 years in human history and you’ll see the traces of America’s six foundational policies, from the astounding achievements in human health and well-being to the decline of world poverty to the very invention of the internet. Pick almost any measure of business success and I can show you how that six-part recipe applied. To choose just one: All four of the world’s $4 trillion companies—Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple—saw immigrants or their children play a key role in their success.

And yet systematically over the last year—in ways that Putin or Xi couldn’t have dreamed we would do to ourselves—Donald Trump has undermined all six pillars. In recent weeks specifically, he has done lasting and irreparable damage to the rule of law, global alliances, and the independence of US monetary policy.

We are doing this to ourselves to satisfy the imperialistic, authoritarian goals of a man who’s only goal is enriching himself and his closest friends.