“responsible political movements are embarrassed by hypocrisy, but MAGA displays it as a loyalty test. Vice President J.D. Vance berated the Brits for detaining people over social media posts, then called on Americans to report people to their employers for negative posts about Charlie Kirk. And Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to crack down on “hate speech,” even though Republicans have long viewed such laws as speech controls.
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The clearest image is one of masked ICE agents emerging from unmarked cars, roughing up suspected illegal immigrants—and then “disappearing” them to an unknown location.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” That’s how George Orwell put it, but it doesn’t have to be forever if more Americans start caring about their constitutional birthright.
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author Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) got it right: “The recent federal operations in California have created an environment of profound terror, with officers—or people who claim to be officers—wearing what are essentially ski masks, not identifying themselves, grabbing people, putting them in unmarked cars, and disappearing them. If we want the public to trust law enforcement, we cannot allow them to behave like secret police in an authoritarian state.”
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Practically speaking, there is no reason for law-enforcement agents to conceal their identities, wear face masks, and grab people off the street without identifying themselves. How is an ordinary person supposed to know whether their abductor is a legit government agent or kidnappers from a drug cartel? In the former, fighting back will land you in the morgue—in the latter, not fighting back will do so.
Trump supporters claim the masks protect agents from doxing, but that’s just an after-the-fact excuse. This shouldn’t be news to conservatives, but the Constitution is meant to protect ordinary people from their government rather than the other way around. The first concern is to protect our liberties, not to ensure that armed agents have an easier time of it. Doxing is illegal and should be punished, but that’s no excuse to green-light police-state tactics.
“The general public does not distinguish between federal agents and local law enforcement,” said my R Street Institute colleague Jillian Snider in a CNN interview. “So when federal agents go into local jurisdictions wearing masks and not making their identities known, that hinders the operations of local law enforcement because then that community fails to trust the local law enforcement that are trying to keep them safe.”
Then again, perhaps that’s MAGA’s point: to intimidate Americans into submission via a high-profile show of force. We should be shocked by this, but the right response is disgust rather than awe.”
“A coalition of investors from Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake has agreed to buy TikTok and run an American version of the company, separate from ByteDance’s ownership.
“The deal is aimed at helping TikTok comply with a federal law, which banned the app in the United States in January out of concern that Beijing could use it to gain access to Americans’ sensitive data or to spread propaganda,” reports The New York Times. President Donald Trump “has delayed enforcement of the ban repeatedly. The Thursday order gives negotiators until mid-January to finalize the deal.”
MGX is technically not American; it’s an investment firm that was established by the government of Abu Dhabi in 2024. Emiratis tend to have very strong ties with China.
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it’s not clear that part-Emirati owners will be all that much better, or that the Trump administration’s frequent insistence on meddling in private business affairs sets a good precedent.”
Tea partiers give Trump a higher proportion of their support than do non-tea party Republicans, but Trump has always had a significant amount of support from both. The tea party as a movement motivated by debt and government spending was a myth. Someone truly angry about debt and spending does not support Trump.
“When conservatives reject constitutional limits on executive power and foment civil conflict, what exactly are they conserving?
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“There was a time when the American right was conservative: appreciative of inherited wisdom, skeptical of rationalism, wary of excessive government power, and against radical change.
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The New Right is not interested in defending these distinctively American ideals. Drawing instead on collectivist, nationalist, and even monarchist traditions from continental Europe, this New Right seeks to wield the tools of government to advance its own social, cultural, and religious priorities. For years, the New Right, by its own admission, has rejected the tenets of classical liberalism, including individual liberty, mutual toleration, and limited government.