This point seems important to recognize in Rhode Island, where local journalists mainstream people who openly call for the end of all prisons.  Here’s Arthur MacWaters:

Of course, even Macwaters’s chart doesn’t tell a clear story, but we can say that under some circumstances locking up criminals can just about eliminate some crimes.  The fact that there are well-funded organizations pushing for something crazy like elimination of all prisons ought to make us (especially journalists) wonder what more there is to the story.

To be fair, Frédéric Dimanche’s piece in the Providence Business News is appropriately placed in the commentary section, but it’s not like he’s a local professor who wanted to publish in the local business press.  He’s a Canadian professor syndicated by mainstream sources.  In other words, the PBN editors deliberately selected this piece for publication.

That being the case, I have to wonder why.

Personally, I find the op-ed instructive, because it exposes so many of the standard postures of foreign intellectuals that our domestic mainstream finds so alluring.  Primarily, that posture insists the United States is at its best when weak and foreigners’ hypocrisy is ignored.

Ostensibly, Dimanche is warning Americans that policies of the Trump administration are making tourists, especially skittish Canadians, reluctant to vacation here.  This, he says, is already costing billions of dollars in visitor spending and may put a damper on any boost the country would experience for hosting the soccer World Cup.  In isolation, I agree it would be preferable to avoid these outcomes, but nothing happens in isolation.  Everything is a tradeoff.

So what is Dimanche suggesting the United States should trade for the good will of Canadian tourists?

• Open borders
• Trade deficits
• A less-valuable dollar

Dimanche complains that the Trump administration has made noises about reviewing visitors’ social media profiles, but he doesn’t explore the reason or, for that matter, how the proposed policy would differ from the Orwellian changes in other countries, like Great Britain.  He also doesn’t investigate the tourists’ side of the equation.  Maybe Canadian tourism is falling so dramatically because that country’s own policies are impoverishing its people.

It’d be interesting to know how Canada-U.S. tourism compares with Canada-anywhere tourism, as well as tourism to and within Canada.  You’d think these would be a key datapoint for an academic studying tourism to disclose in a syndicated column meddling in the politics of another country.

I agree almost entirely with Patricia, here:

My one adjustment would be to specify that our local media isn’t biased only against Republicans.  They’re biased against Rhode Islanders.  Journalists’ first concern, whether out of self-interest or ideological sympathy, is the Democrat Party.

With this expanded view, we can see a broader pattern.  The Party does things that repeatedly and manifestly hurt Rhode Island families and never pays a consequence in large part because the media runs interference to obscure the Party’s role and to maintain a fear of alternatives.

With Morgan’s topic, the Trump administration is doing something that helps Rhode Islanders, and the media is ignoring it.  On a much wider scale, wherever Rhode Islanders’ interests diverge from the Party’s, the media sides with the Party.

It’s like the teacher unions.  When the students’ interests happen to coincide with the teachers (especially with budgets), the union backs the students.  When those interests diverge, the students can be an obstacle.

In a very superficial way, this sort of rhetoric from Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders (VT) may be appealing:

We shouldn’t be naive about AI and automation — they’re going to disrupt our economy hugely — but when Sanders goes on to detail the menial and entry-level jobs that will be hit first, he exposes a problematic starting point.  Adjustment difficulties notwithstanding, reducing the need for human beings to do menial work is progress.

We should still find ways for people to have that experience and resist the urge to live and work always with clean hands, so to speak.  We must also rethink our application of policy to economics to better understand and respond to the changes.  But the focus on a count of jobs misses the point.

When I was young, we were all terrified of nuclear war and the dangers of nuclear technology — so much so that we almost completely wrote off its potential benefits, especially for energy.  AI has a similarly existential risk, but it also has incredible benefits.  We shouldn’t make the same mistake we made back then, when the regressive Bernie Sanderses of the world won the day.

One gets the sense that what they most fear is autonomy, and until they can figure out how to harness the incredible power of technology to ensure their own power (as in China), they want everybody to stop in place.  If that makes us suffer, so much the better, because then we’ll be vulnerable to their revolutionary propaganda.

Because it is simply so masterful, I wanted to share Haviv Rettig Gur responding to an antagonistic heckler explaining the Israeli point of view.

For all those who asked, here is a clip of @havivrettiggur responding to masked protesters interrupting his lecture at Haverford College on February 1, 2026. Enjoy and learn. https://t.co/CArmYt6ATU pic.twitter.com/Bw6jEl1YxQ

— Rachel Gur (@RachelGur) February 9, 2026

It’s a perfect mix of respect and dismissiveness, humor and seriousness, as well as confident authority.  As a process guy and a practitioner, when I see such performances, I wonder how much of it is prepared and practiced and how much is simply improvisational talent.  Probably it’s a mix mainly involving comfort with the subject matter and some regularly used phrases or runs, like a jazz musician who plays in runs, not necessarily choosing every note as he goes.

As a prior caveat, I should be clear that I’m not familiar with all the players and their motivations, but when I see a video like this — in which an identified scientist states plainly that facts about the climate were misrepresented — I can’t help but wonder how many people even know this is a debate:

Keeping people from knowing there’s even a debate is central to most progressive initiatives, because the public would not approve of most of what they want to do if there were any doubt or any alternatives.

If you’ve only come across RI Department of Transportation Director Peter Alviti’s resignation letter through the news and social media, it might be easy to miss the fact that this wasn’t some letter he sent to the governor and a few reporters.  It’s posted on RIDOT’s website under News & Press Releases.

That’s important because the letter is unseemly in a thuggish way:

To be clear, I was not fired, nor was I asked to resign. This decision has nothing to do with the Washington Bridge. As I’ve stated before, that project is on autopilot—I’ve put everything in place, and the contractor I selected will continue to build it as they have successfully done for the past 100 years. My retirement from DOT is a decision made solely by my wife and me. Rest assured, I will be paying close attention between now and August to everything that is said publicly about this. If anyone lies or misrepresents the facts for personal gain, they will hear from me—forcefully.

Put aside the very important question of whether Rhode Islanders want this major project to be “on autopilot.”  (I do not.)  What’s striking is the overt threat from a public official on government letterhead posted through official channels, not a personal blog.

When I first heard of the document, I assumed it was a letter from Alviti to Governor McKee, about which the governor could do very little.  This is an official document, and the governor has authority over that.

He’s a union puppet, so he won’t do anything, but McKee should take whatever steps are available to him to censure his RIDOT director.  He should also instruct that this ridiculous missive be taken down and replaced with a statement that more appropriately reflects the tone and respectability of the state government.

Of course, it’s possible that under Daniel “Hang Up on Them” McKee, this is genuinely reflective of the tone and respectability of state government.

Either through subsidy or regulatory pressure, government encourages purchases that align with some fashionable social policy.  Businesses spring up to take advantage of the sudden market where there was not one before, and then the businesses go bankrupt.  Maine State Representative Laurel Libby, a Republican, highlights the expanding costs in the case of Maine’s electric school buses:

Maine taxpayers are now footing the bill for “mitigation strategies” and “disposal plans” for buses that were SUPPOSED to save money and “help the environment.” The state even hired a Vermont consulting firm to provide “one-on-one support” to districts… MORE taxpayer dollars spent cleaning up a mess created by the Biden administration!

This isn’t just about buses. It’s deja vu. Politicians roll out expensive, ideological experiments without thinking through the consequences. When they fail, Mainers are left holding the bag. (Think, solar subsidies!)

A worthwhile exercise for Republican staffers and (oh, I don know) journalists in Maine would be to investigate what connections there might have been between local, state, and federal politicians and the companies that wound up benefitting.  One reason we keep seeing such things happen is that nobody in office ever pays a price.

By “a price,” I don’t mean some small increase in the difficulty of getting reelected.  I mean a tangible financial or reputational price for setting taxpayers up for failure.

The battle of Rhode Islanders who own waterfront property and agents of the state who want to assert authority over that property continues:

I’m not sure I believe him, here:

Senate Majority Leader Frank Ciccone III says he will soon file legislation to protect Rhode Islanders from the examples of unconstitutional conduct by federal immigration officers making headlines in other states.

“Look at what’s taking place across the country, we don’t want that to happen here,” Ciccone said in an interview Friday. “We don’t want somebody just picking someone up without a warrant.”

As illustrated by the fact that Ciccone’s legislative superior, Senate President Valarie Lawson, is also the president of one of the state’s two teacher unions, which is perhaps the most radical and powerful activist group in the state, I’m inclined to suspect Rhode Island’s Democrats would love to bring the chaos and unrest we’re seeing in other Democrat-run states to Rhode Island.

Left-wing riots would give them additional political leverage, give them opportunities to force state and federal taxpayers to fund union employees for the clean-up and repair, and give them excuses to crack down on the speech and rights of their opposition.

At absolute best, Ciccone is merely pandering.  Look how quickly he filed his legislation, even admitting in the article he’s ignorant of the facts of the Alex Pretti shooting.  Moreover, the legislation is useless.  A state statute “requiring [ICE] agents to conduct their duties in full compliance with the United States Constitution” is redundant on its face.

Whatever Ciccone’s level of cynicism, Rhode Islanders must see through these performances as the scams they are.  If state officials really wanted to ensure ICE conducted itself properly and all citizens’ Constitutional rights were protected, they’d be working with the agency, not resuming the poses of the southern Democrats who started a Civil War.

I’ve continued to see Democrats and mainstream journalists point to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal as if everybody simply knows it’s a huge liability for President Donald Trump.  Because I don’t require purity in politics, only the most practical and lesser of the available evils, I’m not greatly invested either way, but there’s reason to (further) discount the credibility of anybody who’s still expecting Epstein to bit Trump:

Naturally, those who’ve been using the name, Epstein, as a running barb against the President will simply flip back to ignoring the story once it’s clear it’s only going to undermine their entire social class.  Once again, even if it comes back to include Donald Trump, the aristocrat who’s bringing down the corrupt aristocracy is preferable to those who would continue to bolster it and cover up its crimes.

For that reason, I think perhaps I’ve paid too little attention to the story.  Here’s a clip of Bill Maher quoting self-help gurus who buddied up to Epstein and enjoyed dipping into his perverse lifestyle.  These are the people who presume to tell us how to live and for whom to vote.  Indeed, I agree with the first reply, from Klay Thompson, to the post with the video:

I don’t think they appreciate the amount of resentment that this builds within a society, when it knows its elites have committed such crimes and it is going completely unchecked.

As with all the political scandals of the last 20 years, somebody has to pay a consequence.  For me, it’s no longer enough to stop the bad behavior.  It has to be rooted out.  We have to recover our capacity to be disgusted by it.

Why is “the argument that the state should… simply spend less… unrealistic?”  The editorial goes on to emphasize that it’s a “gubernatorial election year,” implying that lower spending is politically “unrealistic,” but the editors’ point isn’t clear.

The headline is “Can we grow jobs with a wealth tax?”  The state’s leading publication focused on business should be willing to make that a sentence: “We can’t grow jobs with a wealth tax.”

I realize everybody with a position to defend in this state wants to stay on the good side of progressives and to remain sympathetic to the political challenges of less-progressive Democrats, but at some point, you’ve got to take a stand.

Attempts at “gender reassignment” of minors were always and obviously going to go the way of every medical and scientific example of “what were we thinking?”  Anybody still defending it should be considered for psychological evaluation, and anybody who previously defended it should, at a minimum refrain and be restrained from opining on any matters of public interest that take the slightest bit of discernment.

This award should have been much higher, and we should see many, many more:

We can hope that these lawsuits come to Rhode Island, as Nicole does, but I also hope they go much farther.  Teachers and school systems that facilitated “transitioning” should find themselves subject to lawsuits, particularly where the lied to parents.  Regulators, including in the Department of Education, who facilitated the madness should also face consequence, as should legislators who’ve supported “shield laws” to protect providers of this obviously barbarous practice.

This poll result from RI News Today’s X account makes for an interesting study:

Personally, I’d tend to answer “is a journalist,” mainly because I think there’s a low bar for that designation.  The large majority who answered “not a journalist,” however, are probably closer to the mark of the question that’s actually being asked.

The framing of the question — which Lemon and his supporters have encouraged — conflates the propriety of his action with his status as a journalist, but it’s a non sequitur.  Whether or not he is a journalist is irrelevant to the question of whether he’s authorized to enter onto private property in coordination with an activist group and disrupt (arguably “terrorize” fits, here) religious services.

Two important considerations haven’t been considered in the public debate about the incident.  The first comes from Lemon.  If he were a journalist and genuinely saw himself as acting as one, he’d take a very different stance; something like:  “I thought this was an important story to capture, so I knowingly took the risk that I’d be violating the law in the process, and I’ll accept the consequences if that turns out to have been the case.”

The second important consideration is for the journalistic community.  If its members wish to continue being seen as holding a special place in our representative democracy as investigators and tellers of truth, then they should be more concerned than anybody with defining and maintaining boundaries.  Journalism professors should be on the talking head shows debating whether Lemon crossed a line and explaining what he could have and should have done to make his role clearer.  Instead, from the little I’ve seen, we get histrionics about how it is unacceptable to imagine there might be a line to cross.

Neither of these considerations has gotten any airing because Lemon and his community of self-credentialed journalists want to maintain the illusion that they hold some special place so they can continue doing activism under the cloak of journalism.

It’s difficult to believe this is a news article and not a mildly implausible TV comedy pitch:

A Woonsocket lawmaker is once again attempting to give pet owners a telehealth option for their pet rather than first taking the animal to a veterinarian.

It is the second time this bill is before lawmakers. Rhode Island law prohibits initial telehealth visits prior to the animal first having an in-person visit with a licensed veterinarian, but allows the option after an in-person visit. The bill died in committee last year.

They’re pets.  As long as their owners aren’t treating them in such a way as to make them a public health or safety hazard, why should any approach to medical care be “controversial” from a legal perspective?

Of course, if we putting common sense aside, the answer is obvious.  The American Veterinary Medical Association is working to block telehealth because it’s not in the financial interests of its members, so they’re using government to increase the value of their services.  It’s simply rent seeking.

Gathering news from a multitude of sources, I may have lost my understanding of what the “typical” person is aware of, but I suspect this isn’t on the list:

It’s telling what mainstream sources, especially here in New England, think is and isn’t news.  This is why conservatives tend necessarily to be much better informed.  We can’t help but hear what the other side is talking about, because the other side controls the public messaging.

This is also why Democrats around here seem so cartoonish.  To them, there can be no other explanation than “Gestapo!” for what’s happening in Minnesota.  Republicans can remain fully aware of, and even disagree with, the Trump administration’s approach to immigration enforcement (although I do not disagree with it), but we also see the context of Democrats’ being shoulder deep in theft from the American taxpayer through political and welfare laundering.  The Antifa insurgency, then, exists for us in a rich context of overlapping policy, politics, and crime.

Silence on this story is a scandal in its own right.  If journalists were even a fraction of the truth-seekers they claim to be, they’d have a ready-made drama with more angles than they’ve got cub reporters to take on.  But they don’t like the conclusions to which the story leads, and so they’ll ignore it, thrusting their industry into decline and their readers into ignorance and dragging our country into a new Dark Age.

Candidate for lieutenant governor, John Loughlin, asks a question of the sort Rhode Islanders should ask more often as they go about their lives:

One of the cumulative conclusions from my years of watching Rhode Island policy and politics is that the powers who be in the state very rarely ask themselves questions in the form, “Why would X want to do Y in Rhode Island?”  The question they find important enough to consider is usually more like, “Given that X wants to do Y in Rhode Island, how can I force them to do or fund Z?”

The most important word in that typical question is “given.”  None of it is given, and eventually it won’t be.  That is why the state’s focus has increasingly turned to forcing rather than attracting.

Erick Erickson puts this well:

Nicole Solas has noted a curious inconsistency in reporting about a grant that Rhode Island’s leading teacher union says it gave to the state Department of Health:

Nicole emphasizes the difference in reporting, but I think by far the bigger story is the fact of the grant at all.  Why would a labor union organized to represent teachers and some healthcare workers be giving money to the Department of Health?  That seems a bit off.

In a reply to her own post, Nicole wonders whether the grant is connected with a joint task force RIDOH established with NEARI “to mobilize members to advocate against federal policies that harm public health and our members.”  So now, you’ve got the union giving money to a state department (i.e., the “management” that sits on the other side of the negotiating table from “labor”) to engage in implicitly partisan political activism.

A healthy polity would see this violation of boundaries from a mile off, but Rhode Island barely notices it.

Benjamin Schettler offers his first-person perspective on an anti-ICE rally:

I was surrounded by a mob of leftists.

In less than 60 seconds of walking up to some protesters and asking them “why are you here?”

I was surrounded and harassed.

It was like a real-life zombie movie. A mob of mindless humans all on the attack. For years the left claimed… pic.twitter.com/5ehOWH0QmU

— Benjamin Schettler (@BenSchettler) February 1, 2026

From this perspective, you see it for what it is:  The non-radical entering the crowd gives them a focal point for what is otherwise empty emotion.  The enemy is fictional, so anybody who isn’t entirely in line with them gets to play the role.

Nicole Solas gives a case in point:

I was hopeful when Peter Neronha first took office, but his open government division quickly wiped that hope away.  This is why I’m extremely skeptical of calls for a new inspector general’s office, by the way.

At least if they’re not progressives, citizens seeking enforcement of open meetings and access to public records law will find the AG’s office to be another obstacle to overcome, not a fellow advocate for good government.  It’s just the way it is.