Ron Steslow 🌻

Host @PoliticologyPod. Lincoln Project cofounder. Ex-Republican strategist. Thinking about civil liberties in the Information Age. #Bitcoin. 🏳️‍🌈🇺🇸

[Preston Byrne @prestonjbyrne]

Americans are not merely "accusing" Europe of imposing its laws beyond its borders.

Europe *is* imposing its censorship laws beyond its borders. This is an established fact. I've seen these letters and forwarded them to Congress.

Here's one such letter.

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

Every sign at this refinery in Ireland is in russian. The official website is a .RU domain.

There’s no reason to hide it because local politicians are openly doing it for them.

[Anton Gerashchenko @Gerashchenko_en]

Kyiv. Covered in smoke after the Russian attacks.

Kyiv stands and will stand.

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

"You are not likely to see Henry Nowak’s words stenciled on a mural. No corporation will change its logo. The same establishment that made a few words immortal when spoken by a black man in Minneapolis has met the same words, spoken by a white boy dying on a British street, with what can only be described as a determined, institutional silence. That silence is not neutral. It is a statement. It tells you exactly whose suffering the system has decided counts, and whose does not."

[Niall Ferguson @nfergus]

"The system taught [the police], in effect, that an allegation of racism is a trump card that overrides normal investigative procedure, normal medical common sense, and normal human judgement. That system was built with the best of intentions, by people who genuinely wanted to address real injustices. And it has produced a policing culture in which a killer can stab a teenager five times, claim to be the victim of racism, and the police won’t ask questions, until it’s too late."

[CBS News @CBSNews]

Seven properties, a Mercedes G-Wagon, sneakers worn by Kobe Bryant and a Mickey Mantle rookie card worth $1.5 million. All of these things were bought with taxpayer money.

Paul Randall pleaded guilty in one of the largest Medicaid fraud schemes in the California history – diverting more than $270 million in tax dollars.

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

Susan Collins:
1) Voted to convict Trump of impeachment
2) Voted against Amy Coney Barrett & Pete Hegseth
3) Backed limits on Trump's military power
4) Wants to nuke his "Anti-Weaponization Fund"

And more. If *she* is your evil right-wing extremist, words do not mean anything.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

When all you care about is controlling the senate, you get this kind of logic. Who cares if the D is ... checks notes ... bad at making decisions. And on the right side, who cares if the R (Paxton) is among the most corrupt candidates in decades?

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

The EU age verification app is presented as “completely anonymous”. But the risk is that member states (the countries are supposed to create their own versions of the open-source EU app) use it to introduce identity verification that makes it impossible to post anonymously on social media.

The idea behind “completely anonymous” is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.

This means that the EU could decide at any time that ZKP may no longer be used, and in one stroke the app would fall back to its default mode, meaning that every post on social media carries an ID tag. By that point, an infrastructure will already have been rolled out; people will have gotten used to it, and it will be harder to roll it back.

More details on https://t.co/wTVKHMS1zg

[Nick Anthony @EconWithNick]

Authoritarians are using CBDCs—programmable money that can be turned off in an instant. They are amassing vast networks of surveillance. And they are investing more money in control than ever.

A powerful warning at the @OsloFF.

[Sarah Isgur @whignewtons]

Also Susan Collins is the existential threat? She voted to impeach Trump! This is like when R’s tried to argue that Joe Manchin was the problem. We should want people from the other party willing to negotiate and compromise.

[Eric Burlison @EricBurlison]

Whistleblowers told us the Pentagon and defense contractors have been hiding sensitive UAP materials in private networks to dodge congressional oversight.

My letter to MITRE puts them on notice: preserve your records, produce the documents, and if classified materials exist, brief my committee.

This isn't going away. We're just getting started.

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

The answer to the question of what’s the long-term plan here, is that there is no long-term plan here.

[Peter Savodnik @petersavodnik]

The remarkable thing about this is how widespread it is. It happens on campus, online, at work, at dinner parties and potluck dinners and school drop-off and school pick-up and on and on. All of these unhappy interactions amount to the same surreality, the same lie: We have no problem with Jews, just Zionists.

If one protests, if one says, This is the same distinction that Jews have been asked to make over the many centuries -- we have no problem with your Jewishness, just this core part of it -- one is inevitably met with the unthinking, "Genocide!" There's no point in getting into that debate, because it is now religion among so-called progressives. One has to embrace the belief that the Jews are guilty of the worst of all possible crimes, and if you do not believe it, if you do not declare your support vociferously and unequivocally, you'll be excommunicated from polite society. Ghettoized.

The contemporary "left" is simply reenacting the hatreds, the myopias, the violence, of all the antisemites who came before. It imagines itself, arrogantly, ignorantly, transcending the past. It is, in fact, a slave to it.

[Leman Walters @LemanWalters]

What a superb ad, wow

[Jesse Michels @AlchemyAmerican]

Just interviewed former Brazilian Defense Minister and current Presidential candidate Aldo Rebelo. He’s had access to the highest levels of classified state secrets. And he told me Colares and Varginha (UFO crash involving non-human beings) happened. The U.S. better catch up…

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

The next time this admin lectures our European allies for falling short of our shared free speech values, I’d like them to explain this crap. https://t.co/y7iCPfsW7f

[Peter Van Valkenburgh @valkenburgh]

Around $3 Trillion dollars were laundered through banks in 2025 and they want you to believe that a bill in Congress that clearly applies AML/BSA obligations to crypto exchanges is somehow the problem. Literally nonsense.

[Billy Binion @billybinion]

This story is nauseating. A man stabbed a teenager. Police then handcuffed the *teenager*—as he was dying—because the man claimed the kid had been racist. A horrific example of what can happen when you treat speech like actual violence.

[Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo]

As someone who was a budget hawk fifteen years ago, I would gently suggest that the case for freaking out about the deficit back then was that this was where we were going to end up.