Liberal Forum

The federal government had promised JJ a $200,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America. In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment. It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future, but, JJ explained to his friend, President Donald Trump had frozen the money. 


“Good,” the man said, grinning. “Too much spending here and there. I’m okay with a little hurt.” 

JJ took a breath. “It needed to be done,” JJ said, softly, because he was also a Republican who, like nearly every farmer he knew, thought the country wasted too much money. 

“But not all of it,” JJ said, because he rejected the notion that his grant was a waste.

 “I guess,” JJ said, because he didn’t want to argue.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investig ... -migrants/
 

A federal appeals court panel on Wednesday refused the Justice Department’s effort to put itself on the hook for an $83.3 million defamation award advice columnist E. Jean Carroll won at trial from President Trump.


https://thehill.com/regulation/court-ba ... al-denied/




make a case........squeeeeeeeak!

A $200,000 government grant to cover the salary of an Illegal Alien farm hand for 2 years..................  
 

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... -s-undoing

Populism draws its strength from a stark dichotomy between the people and the powerful. The people are the embodiments of all and every virtue, the elites of all and every vice. The most important qualification for populist leaders is that they should, in their hearts, be “of the people” even if they happen to be billionaires. Asked by a foreign journalist the meaning of “White trash,” Donald Trump replied. “They’re people like me, only they’re poor.” 


Yet something odd is happening in Populist World as populism matures: The movement is both attracting and generating elites. That is, people who have first-rate academic credentials from elite universities, who prefer books to wrestling and sushi to McDonald’s, and who want to use popular anger to achieve often esoteric ends: the return of the rule of virtue or the rollback of the secular state. Welcome to the age of aristo-populism.

https://youtu.be/_NzLs-xSss0?si=NyXKiGAv4bvRnjcl
 
 

The phrase “aristo-populism” was coined by Patrick Deneen, a professor of political theory at the University of Notre Dame, in his 2023 book Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future. Deneen believes that liberal elites are destroying society from within and that the only way to counter their influence, and save the Republic, is to produce conservative elites, trained in high culture and dedicated to restoring traditional values.....



Laura Field, the author of Furious Minds: The Making of the Maga New Right, identifies three groups of MAGA intellectuals other than the Claremonsters, all of whom share Strauss’s passion for an intellectual aristocracy, but who take their conservative beliefs still further. The post-liberals believe that America’s founders were too influenced by Enlightenment ideas about individual rights. They want to refound the country based on more traditional beliefs. Deneen, the leader of this group, argues that this will require using “Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends.” The integralists want to lower the barrier between church and state. Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School and leading advocate of the “unitary executive,” argues that “the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself.”

ibid....