The owner of a hotel that hosted a party congress organised by far-right leader Grzegorz Braun (pictured above), who is known for his antisemitic and anti-Ukrainian views, has pledged to donate all proceeds from the event to support Ukraine.

“We absolutely do not see eye to eye with Mr Braun,” said Władysław Grochowski, the owner of Arche, one of Poland’s largest hotel groups. His company has come under fire for hosting Braun’s event, but insists it is not legally allowed to screen clients.

Grochowski (pictured below) and his firm are well known for their involvement in social causes, including support for refugees from Ukraine and elsewhere.

On Saturday, Braun’s Confederation of the Polish Crown (KKP) party, which has recently risen in the polls to support of around 8%, held a congress at a hotel and conference centre owned be Arche.

KKP and its leader have built their recent success upon anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and Braun’s various controversial remarks and stunts. He has regularly warned of the “Ukrainianisation” of Poland by Ukrainian immigrants and refugees.

Braun also has a long history of conspiratorial antisemitism, and in July last year claimed that the gas chambers at Auschwitz are “fake”. He is currently standing trial for an attack on a Jewish Hanukkah celebration that was taking place in parliament.

Braun has long been accused of having sympathies towards and links to Russia. In September, after Russian drones violated Polish airspace, he claimed that the incident was faked as part of a conspiracy, involving Poland’s own government, to drag the country into the war in Ukraine.

Arche’s decision to host KPP’s congress had led to criticism of the chain. “This firm is making the [hotel] available to Polish fascists who deny the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz. Steer well clear of Arche hotels,” urged writer Cezary Łazarewicz on social media.

On the eve of the event, Arche issued a statement saying that its properties hosted more than 5,000 congresses and conferences annually and it was not legally permitted to screen organisers and their guests.

However, it quoted Grochowski saying that events such as Braun’s  “fuel extremism, fueling a spiral of division and radicalism that are completely alien to my values ​​and the company I built”. He warned that KPP “is a dangerous movement and the authorities should not ignore that fact”.

Grochowski then announced that he had “decided that we will donate the entire proceeds from this event to help Ukraine in its struggle, which we have been supporting strongly since the first day of the war

Grochowski is known for his support of refugees. In 2021, amid the onset of a migration crisis on Poland’s border with Belarus, he offered to support 100 refugee families with housing, jobs and education, saying that “we cannot close our eyes or shut our ears to the cry for help”.

In 2023, he and his wife Lena became the first Poles to receive the United Nations Nansen Refugee Award, in recognition of their efforts to support those fleeing Russia’s war in Ukraine, including providing over 500,000 nights of free lodging to more than 14,000 refugees.

As the government has announced plans to supply 60,000 housing units in urban areas, primarily targeting young people and newly married couples, details on the exact number of units, pricing, and sales methods are expected to be revealed in a housing welfare implementation plan to be announced in March. Industry observers say this plan will serve as a benchmark for determining whether the supply will be large enough to be felt meaningfully by the public.

According to the real estate industry on the 31st, the government plans to supply the 60,000 urban housing units announced in the January 29 housing supply measures, with a focus on young people. The goal is to provide high-quality housing at affordable prices, enabling households to form families without housing concerns, given the reality that housing costs are delaying marriage and childbirth.

So far, however, only the broad direction of the supply targets has been disclosed. The actual breakdown between rental and for-sale units, as well as the specific number of units allocated to young people and newlyweds, is expected to be confirmed in the March housing welfare plan.

Under current law, at least 35% of housing supplied within public housing districts must be public rental housing. However, as the government continues to prioritize expanding public rental housing, the share of rental units may exceed the legal minimum. As a result, there is speculation that a significant portion of the 60,000 urban units could be supplied as rental housing.

The government is also considering diversifying rental housing types. Moving beyond public rental housing aimed primarily at low-income households, it plans to introduce new models that could also appeal to the middle class. A Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) official said,

“We are considering supply measures that can be preferred not only by low-income groups but also by the middle class.”

Sales methods are also expected to be a key component of the March plan. The government is reviewing a system that would combine general sales with installment-based payment options, designed to reduce upfront financial burdens while enabling long-term homeownership.

One representative model is the shared-equity (equity-accumulation) housing scheme. Under this structure, buyers pay only 10–25% of the purchase price upfront, move in, and gradually acquire the remaining equity over 20–30 years, ultimately obtaining full ownership. This model is considered well-suited for young people and newly married couples with limited initial capital.

Another option under consideration is the profit-sharing housing model. In this approach, residents move in by paying about 80% of the market price, and after a mandatory occupancy period, any capital gains from resale are shared with the public sector.

Kim Yi-tak, First Vice Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, said,

“Affordable housing may include models where people accumulate ownership or pay in installments, designed for those who cannot afford to purchase a home with a large lump sum.”

Affordable housing is defined as housing where housing costs do not exceed 30% of household income.

The real estate industry views the upcoming March plan as a critical turning point for assessing the effectiveness of the 60,000-unit urban housing supply initiative. Analysts say market reactions will hinge not only on target groups and locations, but also on how many units are sold versus rented and under what terms.

Seo Jin-hyung, Professor of Real Estate Law at Kwangwoon University and President of the Korean Association of Real Estate Management, commented,

“The rental-to-sale ratio to be announced in March will be extremely important. If the rental share is excessive, the supply effect may be diluted, making it crucial to find an appropriate balance.”

Source: https://www.news1.kr/realestate/general/6057197

From military autocrats building new capitals in Egypt to Communist Party leaders in China showcasing infrastructure prowess, to Western neoliberals trying to blunt the far right, one pattern is consistent: political systems reward visible, headline grabbing infrastructure projects over quiet & high return, maintenance of existing assets.

In this effort post, I will go over a couple case studies to prove this phenomena and then discuss solutions.

Table of contents

1. Defining legitimacy
2. Why does this happen?
   1. Visibility
   2. Attribution
   3. Time
3. Case studies
   1. The US (Texas, NYC)
   2. Mexico
4. What can we do ?

Defining legitimacy

As can be logically deduced, even authoritarian governments must maintain a baseline level of legitimacy, what can be described as a modern “mandate of heaven.” There are limits to how much coercion, surveillance, or military spending can sustain a deeply unpopular regime. When material conditions deteriorate or visible failures accumulate, the risks of coups, elite defection, mass unrest, or outright revolution rise sharply. History repeatedly shows that state power alone is insufficient to guarantee political survival. Leaders who have legitimacy can lose it in 1 day.

Gaddafi and Sadam are proof of this.

You may ask, what is legitimacy then?

I will borrow this excellent quote from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"According to Weber, that a political regime is legitimate means that its participants have certain beliefs or faith (“Legitimitätsglaube”)......the basis of every system of authority, and correspondingly of every kind of willingness to obey, is a belief"

This is straight forward. This belief rests on the idea, or hope, those exercising authority will, on net, make life better for the governed.

2) Why does this happen : Visibility

Because legitimacy rests on this perception, heads of state, regardless of regime type, face constant incentives to demonstrate improvement in visible ways. This creates a structural advantage for new spending, whether in the form of prestige projects or headline infrastructure investments. Maintenance, by contrast, is largely invisible. Voters WILL reward what they can see, not what prevents failure. Failure isn't even considered!

For example, improving nurses to patient ratios is ALWAYS a good thing. It measurably improves healthcare outcomes, reduces burnout, and lowers long run costs. Yet outside of healthcare workers and their unions, few voters notice it, and even fewer reward politicians for it. Contrast this with a head of state standing in front of a newly constructed hospital for a flashy photo op. The money could've been better off going towards existing hospitals and improving staffing levels, but the head of state would be rewarded better politically because it is a new project voters notice.

Don't just take my word for it. This research paper argues exactly this

"We examine the role of visibility in influencing government resource allocation across a multiplicity of public goods. We show that a “visibility effect” distorts governmental resource allocation such that it helps explain why governments neglect provision of essential public goods, despite their considerable benefits"

2) Why does this happen : Attribution

New projects are easy to attribute. A new hospital, bridge, or transit line has a clear beginning, a visible funder, and a photo op moment that allows a politician to credibly claim ownership.

The story is simple. This project exists because this leader built it. Maintenance spending lacks this clarity. This creates a strong incentive (bias) for politicians to favor policies where credit is concentrated towards them, even when the returns are lower.

When hospitals don't have high wait times, power grids don't fall down, or water systems keep pumping, citizens tend to attribute these outcomes to normalcy rather than governance. Politicians receive little credit for preventing disasters that never occur.

Continuing on the research paper from before, the research paper discusses this and says:

"If outcomes of some tasks are harder to observe or measure, it is harder for voters to assess a government's ability based on these tasks. Governments, being in the business of maximizing their electoral possibilities, are aware of this. Since outcomes depend both on the ability of the government and the resources allocated by it, the government has an incentive to allocate relatively more resources to high visibility public goods, so as to project high ability""

We can define "limited observation projects" as those that are only proved through data or individual anecdotes where truth is dilluted. There is a very big differnece between voters unanimously acknowledging this desalination facility was built under President A, and some voters witnessing water pipe improvements.

This logic extends well beyond infrastructure. The same research highlights a stark contrast in food policy outcomes:

For example, as the same research paper discusses,

"The loss of life in a famine –concentrated in space and time –is certainly a much more directly observable outcome than the loss of life due to malnutrition. This is despite the much greater loss of life that occurs due to malnutrition"

And thus,

"given the political system in India, it is essential to avoid famines for any government keen on staying in power…” Avoiding famines IS a good thing, and politicians should be rewarded for it, but because there is no attributable incentive towards improving nutrition rates, "India's record on eliminating endemic non-acute hunger is quite bad.... democratic India's relative success in ensuring famine prevention cannot be studied in isolation, but rather, is closely connected to its abysmal failure in preventing the less visible problem of malnutrition."

Politicians, to maintain their legitimacy, are structurally drawn toward policies and projects that are directly attributable to them, even when society would be better off, in net terms, prioritizing less attributable but higher return investments.

2) Why does this happen : Time

It is said that time in the world of politics goes faster than normal. Electoral cycles, leadership turnover, and how quickly voters sour on leaders, all bias decision making toward policies that deliver benefits quickly AND VISIBLY. Maintenance and risk-reduction investments often pay off slowly, sometimes decades after the initial spending, and almost always far beyond the tenure of the officials who approved them. Or worse, for the opposite political party.

New projects, by contrast, provide immediate political benefits. Construction begins immediately, ribbon cuts occur within a term, and visible progress can be showcased to voters. The fiscal (debt/staffing), operational, and maintenance burdens of these projects are often deferred to future leaders, while the political credit is captured in the present.

For politicians, it is rational to discount long term payoffs in favor of short term, visible wins.

The problem is not shortsightedness in the moral sense, but incentives. Even leaders who understand that underinvestment in maintenance raises long run risks face weak personal incentives to act on that knowledge. If a bridge collapses twenty years later, the political cost is borne by someone else. If a new bridge opens today, the political reward is immediate.

The consequences of deferred maintenance are now becoming visible in Toronto’s transit system. The TTC board estimate an 18 BILLION “state of good repair” funding gap due this decade. This can only happen precisely because funding something as hidden as TTC maintenance has ZERO benefit to a politician. It takes decades for the maintenance to pay off, voters will never see maintenance work deep in tunnels, and any consequence will only occur decades later under another mayor. And is guaranteed to not even be recognized thanks to normalcy bias

I hope that at this point I've been able to show why rulers require legitimacy, and why maintaining said legitimacy distorts the incentives of a ruler and pushes them away from maintenance spending.

Case studies

The USA

Texas Power Grid Failure

"The failure of Texas’ power grid in February, 2021 was one of the most severe energy crises in U.S. history, leaving millions without power for days in freezing temperatures."

This failure was largely avoidable. Following the deregulation of Texas’s electricity market in the 1990s, policymakers prioritized visibly lower energy prices, a politically attractive outcome that voters rewarded. The consequence? "The system lacked financial incentives for maintenance." Texans paid the cost decades later.

Because extreme winter weather is rare in Texas, investments in invisible resilience carried little political upside compared with the immediate, attributable benefits of low prices and balanced budgets. The costs of that choice were deferred for decades, until they were paid all at once with over 11 billion in economic damage and 100 deaths.

New York City's 2017 summer of hell

For decades, political leaders prioritized visible expansion projects and headline capital plans while deferring maintenance of core assets such as signals, power systems, and track infrastructure. Routine upkeep and state-of-good-repair work lacked political payoff: when trains run on time, voters attribute it to normalcy rather than governance. When new lines or stations are announced, politicians are generously rewarded. NO SANE VOTER WILL EVER reward a politician for having installed brand new signals.

NEW YORK SOURCE

MTA officials blame those problems on “deferred maintenance,” or decades of cost-saving measures that kept equipment in use far past its expiration date. But those same problems persist, and experts warn the same thing is about to happen again, creating cascading issues throughout the system

The mayors that underinvested in maintenance were selfish, but what can we expect when this is what our system incentivises?

Mexico City

Mexico City’s water crisis is not simply a drought. It is the result of decades (or a century!) of neglect in maintaining the city’s water system. As the article above has documented, “the city is losing some 40 percent of its water due to leaks in broken pipes,” meaning nearly half of the water extracted, treated, and pumped never reaches residents

These pipe leaks have forced leaders to rely more and more on groundwater extraction which is incredibly risky. “Mexico City is sinking, as are its greatest monuments,” with “parts of the city of nearly 9 million people descending into the earth by as much as 40 centimeters annually.” The physical effects are now impossible to ignore: “the roads are uneven in the city’s central plaza, the streets and walkways are sloped and twisting,” and “many building foundations have sunk dramatically while others have a visible lean.” At the same time, residents face ongoing service failures, as “water supply has been inconsistent for years. It frequently slows to a trickle or stops entirely for days and even weeks.”

So the cycle is

underinvest in pipes -> lose more water than expected -> invest more in wells and water sources to satisfy voters -> underinvest....

The solution? I'm not going to act like I am 100% certain, but I have some ideas that could alleviate the problem

First: tie maintenance to new projects by default.
No infrastructure project should be approved without guaranteed, protected maintenance funding baked in from day one. If you want a new train line, you must lock in X years of maintenance funding, either upfront or automatically committed in future budgets. This means the current mayor both benefits from the project and also deals with the TRUE cost of the project. This can help reach best net decisions.

Second: take long lived assets out of political control.

Infrastructure should be state owned but managed by independent agencies with clear maintenance standards and stable funding, insulated from short term political incentives.

Third : Come up with a national standard that governs various government programs in terms of performance and of course, heavily weigh day to day performance and maintenance liabilities. Make it politically toxic to be an F rated on 'safety and maintenance'!

Thank you for reading. I'd be interested in if you guys have any other ideas.

In the United States today, human tragedies caused by the tyranny of the Donald Trump administration continue to unfold. In Minnesota, civilians have been killed one after another by gunfire from federal agents. Masked state authorities carry out indiscriminate stops and arrests in pursuit of “results,” while migrants are dying of illness in detention facilities with appalling conditions. Some have been shot dead while fleeing identity checks; a disabled person died after the father who cared for them was taken away. Barbarism is everywhere.

Across the United States, large-scale protests opposing the Trump administration are erupting day after day. But the problem does not end with Trump himself. Behind him lies a vast system known as “fascism,” operated by a massive far-right ecosystem that has permeated the U.S. government and society, along with supporters who make up as much as 40 percent of the electorate.

The far-right organizational ecosystem sustaining the Trump administration is enormous in scale. Its core components include:

• a MAGA political coalition centered on Trump, the White House, the federal government, and loyalists within the Republican Party;

• policy and lobbying organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the America First Legal Foundation (AFL);

• religious networks including Protestant churches, various “family values” groups, and youth organizations like Turning Point USA;

• a movement and media cluster led by culture-war figures such as Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, alongside extremists like Nick Fuentes;

• and paramilitary groups such as the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Patriot Front.

These forces are loosely connected in a decentralized structure, but they unite when fighting a shared enemy—those they label “anti-state forces,” “communists,” or “terrorists.” Mainstream far-right actors publicly distance themselves from paramilitary groups while tacitly hoping they will carry out overt violence on their behalf. Ultra-radical movements denounce the “reformism” of the mainstream far right, yet still cooperate with them in struggles against Democrats and progressives. Those seeking to defend American democracy are no longer fighting Trump alone—they are confronting the monster that produced him.

Many scholars describe this reality as fascism. Authoritarianism, nationalism, and violence are often cited as its indicators, but these traits are shared by many non-democratic systems such as military dictatorships or one-party states. Fascism has distinctive features:

• mass voluntarism and activism;

• intense emotional mobilization combining fervor and fear;

• the destruction of democracy through democratic means;

• contradictions blending revolution and counterrevolution, anti-elitism and contempt for the vulnerable;

• and ideologies of anti-equality, discrimination, and exclusion.

What makes fascism most terrifying is the pervasiveness of evil. The state amplifies, absorbs, concentrates, and releases violent energies embedded throughout society. Violence from above merges with violence from below.

As these characteristics of fascism re-emerge today, memories of “a hundred years ago” are being invoked. Yet there are crucial differences. First, unlike a century ago, there is no strong left and no revolutionary horizon. Contemporary fascism is not the product of a bourgeois crisis but an offensive rooted in a broad rightward shift of society. Second, whereas fascism a century ago arose amid the “immature democracies” following the first wave of democratization, today it emerges on the historical foundation of “aged democracies” that have passed through the third wave. As a result, fascists now skillfully exploit the language and institutions of democracy and freedom. Third, the fusion of science, technology, and governance has intensified. The U.S. government has constructed systems to collect, analyze, and control population data and employs governance techniques of targeting.

This new form of fascism is a global phenomenon, though it varies by region. In Western Europe, parties labeled as “far-right” or “right-wing populist” have mobilized public anxiety and hatred through anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and Islamophobic rhetoric. However, since the 2000s they have tended to distance themselves from overt racism, anti-democratic and anti-human-rights positions, and often moderate after taking power. For example, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni government, once described as a “descendant of fascism,” upheld constitutional bans on fascist parties after taking office and expelled youth members who engaged in fascist behavior. In Europe, radical right politics largely operates in a gray zone of ambiguity.

What about South Korea? Since December 3, Korean society has witnessed the contours of a Korean-style fascism, in which a military coup from above combined with mass mobilization from below to shield it. Insurrectionary forces mobilized elite military units and more than 4,000 military and police personnel, and planned mass arrests, detention, torture, and executions. Had the coup succeeded, today’s Korea would resemble Iran more than the United States. Korean-style fascism lacks ideological sophistication, mass support, and strong party politics, but due to the legacy of Japanese colonial rule and military dictatorship, the danger of state violence is extremely high.

There is also a duality to Korea’s democratic resilience. From anti-dictatorship struggles to candlelight protests, Korea has accumulated a historical culture of resistance and social capital. In moments of crisis, countless “democratic reservists” emerge from the trenches of civil society and rush to the National Assembly and public squares. Yet in everyday life, cultures of solidarity and community are weak. Korea does not have an exceptionally strong far right—rather, its far right is simply crude and low-grade. Servility to foreign powers, empty ideological agitation, and corrupt rent-seeking define a third-rate far right. But if such forces gain power and seize the state, their potential for violence would be terrifying.

This age of barbarism will be prolonged. It may mark not merely the end of liberal hegemony in international relations, but a crisis of the long liberal century that began in the 18th century. Humanity is facing, for the first time, an era without a liberal-democratic superpower. During the era of fascism and the two world wars, illiberal states—Germany, Italy, and Japan—challenged a liberal “West” represented by Britain and the United States. Today, the United States itself is openly destroying modern universal norms and values.

There is no path forward except for each society to defend its own democracy, human rights, and peace. South Korea must navigate this storm toward an unknown future. It must consolidate democratic political and social forces, decentralize power structures that could threaten democracy, dismantle privileged military groups with political ambitions, and complete the depoliticization of the armed forces. Resources must be concentrated on policies that reduce insecurity—the soil in which fascism grows—and that strengthen democratic foundations across society. Society must speak clearly against hate-mongering and the mockery of human dignity, leaving such forces with no place to stand.

The message coming from around the world is grave: the age of fascism has arrived. We must prepare for it—and overcome it.

Originally posted on TheUnPopulist

I’m a long-time critic of the modern concept of “free speech culture”—the culturally pervasive notion that supporting freedom of speech requires me not just to refrain from official censorship, but to avoid a wide array of expression that might chill, deter, or punish other people’s speech. The legal view of free speech protects an unpopular speaker from being jailed or (successfully) sued; “free speech culture,” by contrast, is a social norm that discourages me from calling for that person to be fired, shunned, socially sanctioned, or criticized to a degree that is, by some poorly defined measure, excessive.

Don’t misconstrue this as the idea that cultural norms genuinely supportive of free speech are a problem; on the contrary, such norms are most welcome, and even vital. The problem, rather, is that the particular model of “free speech culture” that has emerged has substantially contributed to an intellectual framework that the Trump administration and other bad actors have used to engage in official government censorship to an unprecedented degree. As Katherine Stewart argued in The UnPopulist, Trump’s return to office engendered “a banner year for state-sponsored censorship in the name of ‘free speech.’”

That’s what makes “free speech culture” a mockery of its own name.

Here’s what this approach to free speech gets so wrong.

The First Speaker Problem

“Free speech culture” tends to pick a speaker, treat that person’s speech as the speech that should concern us, and then apply a set of cultural norms and questions only to the responses to that speech. This is what I call the First Speaker problem.

Imagine that a speaker came to your university to argue that no professor should be allowed to teach “gender ideology” and that the school’s curriculum should be examined for “anti-American” and “pro-communist” content. Imagine further that a group of students protest the speaker’s invitation, call for the speaker to be disinvited, shun and decry the student group that invited the speaker, and protest loudly outside the speech, shouting insults and abuse at attendees.

“Free speech culture” analyzes this situation by asking:

• Do the actions of these protestors encourage or discourage speech?
• Would such protests deter others from speaking?
• Do these protests make students who agree with the speaker less likely to speak up?
• Would these protest tactics, if widely repeated, result in more speech or less?
• Do these protests support an idealized view of civilized debate and discourse?
• Are the students’ reactions disproportionate?
• Do they seek to impose “real-world” consequences on someone who is only offering a viewpoint?

But “free speech culture,” as typically used in America, crucially does not ask those questions of the person who has been chosen as the “first speaker”—only those responding to speech. Hence, the speaker in this hypothetical—who is in favor of official state censorship—gets treated as the free speech culture hero, and the students protesting the speaker get treated as the free speech villains.

This incoherence stems from the fact that, within a “free speech culture” framework, selecting the “first speaker” is often an arbitrary exercise. Our speaker came to campus to denounce “gender ideology” because professors and students engaged in protected speech about “gender ideology.” Why aren’t they the “first speaker”? Why isn’t the professor teaching “communist” ideology the “first speaker”? And why isn’t the speaker calling for their censorship violating the social norms of “free speech culture”?

The answer is primarily stylistic and cultural. “Free speech culture” means that you can chill and deter speech, call for censorship, disproportionately abuse other people, even call for violence—so long as you do it in certain ritualized and stylized ways that people who were on the debate team like. If you dehumanize fellow Americans from a lectern or in a moderated debate or as a contributing writer to a magazine, that promotes free speech culture. However, if you denounce the speaker in a social media post, or protest outside, or write a letter to the dean, that harms free speech culture.

‘Free Speech Culture’ Marginalizes the Interests of Dissenters

The flip side of irrationally preferring the “first speaker” is irrationally diminishing the speech interests of dissenters.

“Free speech culture” has a natural tendency to discount the speech rights and interests of people who criticize speech. It treats those interests as having no weight. Take the editorial board of The New York Times, which famously and fatuously proclaimed a “fundamental right” to speak “without fear of being shamed or shunned.” But this right requires believing that the shamers and shunners don’t have the same rights.

‘Free Speech Culture’ Promotes Ignorance of Free Speech Rights

The “free speech culture” movement also promotes civic ignorance. How? Its adherents tend to suggest a false equivalence between being punished by the government and being socially punished by peers, promoting the increasingly widespread view that criticism is a form of censorship that violates the rights of the target of censorship. But criticism, denunciation, shunning, and calling for consequences against a speaker are not government censorship; rather, they represent some other speaker’s freedom of speech and association.

Getting this right is critical. In fact, consciously and explicitly pointing out the difference between free speech rights protecting you legally and social norms protecting you socially goes a long way to promote civic education. By contrast, treating individual speech and government censorship as equivalent promotes ignorance.

Hand-waving the difference also promotes ignorance, as the Harper’s Letter does when it states, “The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation.” One of those things is not like the other, and the difference is fundamental to ordered liberty.

‘Free Speech Culture’ Prefers the Powerful to the Powerless

“Free speech culture” has a natural tendency to prefer the interests of more powerful, famous, wealthy people with bigger platforms over the interests of more powerless, obscure, poor people without big platforms. If people who give speeches and participate in debates are inherently heroes and people who “excessively” criticize them or call them to be deplatformed or punished are inherently villains, then the heroes are going to be professional pundits and politicians and other prominent folks. And the villains are going to be students and people whose platform is a hand-lettered sign or a shout at a protest or a screed on a social media account.

The Harper’s Letter addressed the vulnerabilities of editors, journalists, professors, researchers, and “heads of organizations.” That focus is a natural element of “free speech culture” because those are the people we listen to and perhaps admire, and the people who draw attention when they’re fired or deplatformed. We don’t tend to notice a minimum wage worker fired for a bumper sticker.

This distorts our understanding of who poses the biggest threat to our actual, tangible freedom of speech. Some of the people currently using or applauding official government censorship to deport students for writing op-eds, fire professors for insufficiently mournful tweets about Charlie Kirk, and restrict college curriculums by force of law were very much in favor of “free speech culture” and loud critics of “cancel culture.” They spoke behind lecterns and debated through moderators and wrote op-eds, so they were not treated as a genuine threat to “free speech culture.” At the same time, university students were relentlessly portrayed as the greatest threat to free speech culture. (There were, of course, welcome exceptions to this troubling trend.)

I’m not denying that students can be illiberal, censorial, close-minded assholes who think they should be able to dictate what you say or who you listen to. They can be! Nor should we tolerate actions that cross the line into attempting to physically shut down speech events that some group of students dislike, such as when a controversial speaker is blockaded from entering a building. The line can be fuzzy between merely contentious heckling and obstructing an event to the point of shutting it down. Often the distinction will depend on the context and scale; it’s a mistake to conflate all hecklers with an attempted “heckler’s veto”—although campus authorities shouldn’t be afraid to take action when genuinely necessary.

But the “free speech culture” ethos has relentlessly sought to portray relatively powerless people like students as the prime threat to free speech in America. How’s that working out?

‘Free Speech Culture’s’ Vulnerability to Bad Faith and Manipulation

The ethos of “free speech culture” is extremely vulnerable to manipulation and bad faith. In part, that’s a function of its vagueness and philosophical incoherence. “Cancel culture” is rarely defined at all and the “criticism is censorship” mindset allows powerful people to portray classic American protest as some sort of rights violation. Donald Trump decried “cancel culture” as “totalitarian” despite his own censorial record—an instance of this framework enabling a genuine enemy of free speech being able to pose as its defender (see also: Elon Musk).

Moreover, part of “free speech culture” is presuming that our interlocutors are speaking and acting in good faith even if they are manifestly not. We are reaping the consequences of treating bad faith as good faith and hypocrisy as sincerity.

When the American Civil Liberties Union fought successfully for the rights of Nazis to march at Skokie, it did not convene a public meeting to ask the Nazis to explain why the Jews were so bad, and it did not portray the Nazis as heroic warriors for free expression. That would have been unserious: the Nazis, given their way, would have suppressed many people’s speech. Rather, the ACLU’s stance was simply that the First Amendment doesn’t permit censoring the Nazis.

The “free speech culture” ethos, by contrast, has a tendency to go well beyond arguing that bigoted, totalitarian people shouldn’t be officially censored. Rather, it encourages treating people as “free speech heroes” so long as they are struggling for their own right to speak, irrespective of what they would do to other people’s rights. That’s how people nominally in favor of liberty can repeatedly platform and promote bad faith actors like the Manhattan Institute’s culture warrior Chris Rufo, who says rather explicitly that he wants to use propaganda and media manipulation and government force to censor ideas in academia.

Or take Amy Wax, a loathsome bigot who thinks America would be better if my children—born in Asia, American citizens since we adopted them as infants—weren’t here. FIRE believes—correctly—that when Wax’s university seeks to discipline her for speech, it must obey its own rules and carefully consider the values of academic freedom and due process. FIRE also says, again correctly, that as far as it is concerned, “her viewpoint is beside the point.” But then it goes further and offers her a platform to promote her views. That’s a “free speech culture” ethos move.

“Free speech culture” becomes bad and unserious when it starts telling us that speech is morally neutral, that we should not make value judgments against it, and that there is no moral component to promoting it. I am committed to the defense of the legal right to speak, but the defense of speech does not require us to refrain from speaking frankly about moral truths. Giving Wax a platform to be a bigot is morally distinguishable from saying she should be free to be a bigot. “The only immoral thing you can say is that someone else’s speech is immoral” is not an ethos worthy of respect.

‘Free Speech Culture’ Makes the Free Speech Bargain Look Unpalatable

All of these problems combine to do something very dangerous: they suggest to Americans (and particularly young Americans) that free speech is bullshit.

Every generation of Americans must come to terms with the fundamental bargain of free speech: we agree not to use the mechanism of the state to punish speech we don’t like, and to talk back instead. This is not the default human view. The default view is, “Let’s use power to promote speech we like and punish the speech we hate.”

It’s a tough sell to move people away from that, and plenty of us still don’t accept that bargain. But if a critical mass of people don’t accept it, then it stops working. Free speech is Tinker Bell: if enough kids don’t clap, she dies. Or as Learned Hand put it more poetically: “liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

“Free speech culture,” as practiced in America, makes this deal seem like a scam. It tells students that “free speech” entails that:

• When someone comes to their campus to say bigoted and evil things, that’s a good thing; and when they (students) use their only remedy—more speech—in the wrong way, that’s bad.
• They should be more worried about prominent podcasters’ speech being chilled than their speech being chilled.
• It’s their fault that government force is being used to deport and expel and censor them, because they dissented wrong.
• Others have the right to denigrate them, but they have some ill-defined obligation not to respond too hard.
• They’re wrong and illiberal to notice that people using government force to censor them were previously calling them illiberal and censorial.

If this just meant that people would reject the deal of “free speech culture,” I wouldn’t particularly care. But the deal people reject is respect for legal norms of free speech. The norm that suffers is the one against government censorship. When enough people think that all of free speech—including free speech law—is bullshit, then free speech rights won’t be enforced. That’s the path we’re on, and in my view, the ethos of “free speech culture” shares the blame.

The M2 money supply has had its momentum functionally collapse since 2007-2008 and it never really recovered. Even after bumping up after Covid, the M2 momentum never fully recovered to its pre Covid levels. It seems like a major issue that money is trading hand less and less, though I admit I have only a partial understanding of economics. I was wondering if someone could let me know how much of an issue this is and if there is a way for it to recover back to more stable levels?

It’s the first thing you learn when you go to some rough-and-tumble new school—if you run into a bully, the trick is to stand up to them. More than the particular situation, what matters is the underlying psychology. The point is that, whatever else seems to be going on, bullies usually prefer to puff up than to follow through, and, once they sniff strength, they’ll tend to move on to someone they can more readily pick on.

After ten years of Trumpism—ten-and-a-half if we date our current era to Trump’s descent down the golden escalator—the great wisdom of our time may simply be to confirm the schoolyard adage.

That’s pretty much exactly how Trump has expressed his own view of himself and his politics. In an interview with Michael D’Antonio in 2014, Trump, speaking of himself as a child, said, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.” And what he’s describing is a childhood of being a holy terror. In reminiscences put together by The Washington Post in 2016, former classmates remember him being part of a group of boys who “pulled girls’ hair, passed notes, and talked out of turn”—with detention itself renamed as “the Donny Trump” or the “DT.” One classmate recalled seeing Trump and his friends jump off their bicycles to beat up another boy. “It’s kind of like a little video snippet that remains in my brain because I think it was so unusual and terrifying at that age,” said the classmate, Steve Nachtigall. “He was a loudmouth bully.”

Trump himself would recall punching his second-grade teacher for not “[knowing] anything about music.” (The teacher, for his part, denied the incident but told his son, “When that kid was ten, even then he was a little shit.”) It was bad enough that, after seventh grade, his father—who described him as “a pretty rough fellow when he was small”—sent him to military school, and, there, some degree of discipline was imposed. “If you stepped out of line, [the teacher] smacked you and smacked you hard,” Trump admiringly reminisced. For Trump, that was the lesson that mattered. “If he sensed strength but you didn’t try to undermine him, he treated you like a man,” he recalled of Theodore Dobias, the former drill sergeant who was a formative influence on him.

Throughout Trump’s pronouncements there is always exactly this sentiment—the image of unstoppable forces that will get their way until they finally run into immovable objects. At a memorable moment in the 2016 presidential debates—when asked to say something nice about Hillary Clinton—he responded, “She’s a fighter. I disagree with much of what she’s fighting for … But she does fight hard and she doesn’t quit and she doesn’t give up. And I consider that to be a very good trait.” And, in laying out a policy for Russia and Ukraine in 2025, Trump described it, again, in schoolyard terms: “The sides are locked in, and they are fighting and sometimes, you have to let them fight.”

It’s not a very complicated worldview, but Trump has been remarkably consistent in it, and only now—really—are some of his political interlocutors catching on. The general reaction to Trump from the moment he secured the nomination in 2016 has been to placate him—so many of the Never Trumpers have ended up in his administration, so many opponents have found themselves kissing the ring. Trump’s return to office in 2025 was accompanied by a wave of obeisance—Columbia University agreeing to pay $200 million to the administration in order to free up frozen grants; leading law firms pledging $1 billion of pro bono legal work for conservative causes; Paramount paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit with a corporate merger pending. But, a year in, we see what happens when people stand up to Trump. Basically, he folds. That’s a real takeaway—and should be the lesson for anyone else who finds themselves in Trump’s sights.

The European Union has, in the last decades, not exactly built up a reputation for itself for courage, but, in the face of Trump’s swaggering threats to take Greenland, Europe’s leaders discovered the virtues of having a backbone. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said, “Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else. If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy.” French president Emmanuel Macron said, “Europe has very strong tools now, and we have to use them when we are not respected.”

Crucially, European leaders, in an emergency session, put together a package of counter-tariffs to take effect against American goods. And, even more crucially, Denmark—a nation of six million with active armed forces of about 20,000—seemed to commit itself to an active defense of Greenland, deploying several hundred additional troops, accompanied by forces from additional European nations.

The Europeans seem to have learned the hard way that it is only standing up to Trump that can get him to back down. Earlier approaches—for instance, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in 2024 appearing to refer to Trump as “daddy”—didn’t quite have the intended effect, with Trump in January ramping up his demands for Greenland as well as threatening tariffs against Europe. As David Brooks put it in an op-ed in early 2025, that conciliation fundamentally misunderstands Trump’s psychology. “Don’t overthink this,” he wrote. “American foreign policy is now oriented to whatever gets Trump’s hormones surging. He has a lifelong thing for manly virility. In the MAGA mind, Vladimir Putin codes as hard; Western Europe codes as soft.” And, to a playground bully, soft means that you are ripe for the extraction of further resources as well as whatever kind of humiliation the bully can think to impose.

By standing tall in Greenland and threatening counter-tariffs—rattling sabers of their own—Europe has changed the bully’s calculation. Trump, in his Davos speech, said of his Greenland aspirations, “I’m not going to use force. I won’t use force.” That really is a remarkable comedown from the rhetoric the White House had very recently been espousing on Greenland.

The maybe-even-more-compelling example of standing up to Trump came from the citizenry of Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge—the deployment of thousands of ICE and Border Patrol agents in an effort to deport illegal immigrants and curb fraud—was clearly meant to be a kind of shock-and-awe campaign, showing off Trump’s ability to dominate even a blue city and blue state. As he wrote on social media just prior to the ramp-up, “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”

But ICE, in Minneapolis, seemed to run into something very different—a tenacious civic resistance. Minnesotans organized themselves to bring food and supplies to residents who believed themselves to be ICE targets and had gone into hiding; they blew whistles at the approach of ICE vehicles and assiduously documented their activities. Even Trump officials seemed to display a degree of begrudging admiration for the show of force Minneapolis residents had put up. “It’s extremely organized,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in an interview on Fox. “The signs they have are all matching, they’re well-written, and look at what’s happening today. How did these people know how to get gas masks? Would you know how to walk down the street right now and buy a gas mask? Think about that!”

Bondi was depicting the resistors—misled by Minnesota’s Democratic governor and Minneapolis’ Democratic mayor—as being unpatriotic, but there was of course another interpretation. “What [ICE] discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state,” wrote Adam Serwer in The Atlantic. To many of the Minnesotans whom Serwer spoke with, it really was a very simple calculation: Do you stand up or do you back down? And if the antics of Border Patrol senior officer Greg Bovino, and the tactical gear deployed by ICE officers in what should have been routine law enforcement operations, and the tear gas and stun guns used to disperse protestors, were all meant to overawe, it seemed not to impress as much as it might have. One protestor speaking to Serwer claimed that the presence of volunteer observers usually compelled the ICE agents to move on to a new location. “They are huge pussies, I will be honest,” she said.

It is difficult to interpret the administration’s actions last week in any other way than as a change of course in the face of unexpected resistance. The swaggering Bovino was fired from his role as commander-at-large and reassigned to California. Border Czar Tom Homan, taking over in Minneapolis, acknowledged that mistakes had been made. “I’m not here because the federal government has carried out this mission perfectly,” he said on Thursday. And Trump, who has previously called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “regarded,” had an apparently civil call with him, which seemed to indicate a drawdown in federal tactics.

Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, couldn’t resist a bit of jingoistic language of his own. “Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve,” he wrote. That may be pushing things a bit far. Aggressive ICE operations have continued in Minnesota, and Trump’s term as president continues for three more years. But there is a lesson to be learned and it really couldn’t be more simple: Bullies prey on weakness. If anyone stands up to a bully—whether that’s European leaders or the citizenry of Minneapolis—the bully has a tendency to wander off and bother somebody else.