David Inserra In a ruling issued on April 17, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued a decision that could unravel the very viability of social media company business models. The technical, inside‐​baseball nature of the case involving advertising and data privacy means it has flown under the radar but nonetheless presents a dangerous precedent that uniquely targets American tech companies.  So first, what is going on in this case? In the EU, the sprawling General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) places many demands on companies in how they manage the data of us ..read more

Michael Chapman Uri Berliner, a 25‐​year‐​long journalist at National Public Radio (NPR), recently resigned from his job after being suspended because he wrote about the entrenched left‐​wing/​woke mindset at NPR, calling it a “progressive silo.” Berliner’s tell‐​all confirms what media critics have long known, and reveals why taxpayer funding of the news media is not a good idea.  It would not matter whether NPR was liberally biased or conservatively biased. The bottom line is that if politicians (bureaucrats) control the funding of the news, then the news likely will be polit ..read more

Paul Best Merry Oaks Baptist Church in Chatham County, North Carolina, near the site of a new VinFast factory. North Carolina officials announced a long sought‐​after victory in early 2022: VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle startup, will invest $4 billion to build a 2,000-acre automotive factory in Chatham County, creating 7,500 jobs for the community as it helps to restore the state to its former industrial glory. But skepticism grew about the plan as more details were released. The state intends to use eminent domain to purchase and then demolish over two dozen home ..read more

David Inserra In recent weeks, a simmering conflict over the censorial practices of the Brazilian courts erupted into open conflict. Reporting from various sources shows how government forces— most notably Supreme Court Justice and President of the Superior Electoral Court Alexandre de Moraes—investigated, secretly censored, and arrested Brazilians accused of spreading “fake news” and “anti‐​democratic” misinformation, often with little due process. Social media companies were silenced and punished if they resisted. In response, X, formerly Twitter, declared that it would not comply with ..read more

John Mueller Impelled by an overwhelming desire to hunt down those who were responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States launched military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where it toppled regimes that had little or nothing to do with 9/11 and devolved into extended counterinsurgency wars that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 times as many people as perished on 9/11. There has been a tendency to see these exercises as misguided elements of a coherent plan to establish a “liberal world order” or to apply “liberal hegemony ..read more

Patrick G. Eddington Just shy of one year ago, the public learned that an FBI agent had conducted a query of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702 database for information on 19,000 American donors to a congressional campaign, among other episodes of 702 database query misconduct. The revelations, contained in a partially declassified Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion, received massive media coverage and condemnation from House and Senate members across the political spectrum. The facts about these domestic surveillance abuses were no ..read more

Johan Norberg Today is Earth Day, an important moment to reflect on our broader responsibilities to the world. How are we really treating the planet and each other? Very well, thank you. At least relative to every other period in history and compared to less free societies. I make this case in a new Cato video based on my book The Capitalist Manifesto. Despite all the horrors of the world, this is the era in history when we have been most successful in increasing human opportunity. In the past 20 years, global extreme poverty was reduced by more than 130,000 people every day a ..read more

Walter Olson I’ve got a new piece in the Unpopulist debunking claims that have lately made the rounds that noncitizens vote in large numbers in federal elections even though it is unlawful in every state for them to do so. I cite audits of the topic undertaken in states like Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina; an extensive 2017 survey of election administrators asking about problems observed in their jurisdictions; the general failure of both law enforcement and private watchdog groups to turn up more than incidental numbers of such voters; the failure of statistical tests of voting pat ..read more

Marc Joffe Tiffany Henyard, mayor of Dalton, Illionis. (Screenshot, vodolton​.org) The drama unfolding in Dolton, Illinois may seem irrelevant to those of us who are not among the 20,621 residents of the village immediately south of Chicago. But the controversy around Dolton’s self‐​styled “super mayor” Tiffany Henyard offers lessons about local government accountability that resonate nationwide. The problems in Dolton are more likely to occur in states that have an excessive number of governments and poor oversight. But Dolton’s story also illustrates the potential for citizen journalists an ..read more

Daniel Raisbeck Colombian President Gustavo Petro. In June of 2022, a slight majority of Colombian voters elected Gustavo Petro as president. To say that they ignored numerous warning signs would be an understatement. Petro began his public life in the late 1970’s as a member of the M‑19, the bloodthirsty urban guerrilla group that—among its many acts of terrorism— stormed the Ministry of Justice in November of 1985, held its magistrates and hundreds of employees as hostages, and ultimately caused the violent death of 111 people. In 1994, a mere two years after the M‑19’s final ..read more