In Commonplace, Nicholas Phillips takes on the new trope that import tariffs serve the interests of the “deep state” that populists want to dismantle. It’s the opposite, Phillips argues: the current regime of “free” trade (in fact, heavily rules-bound and highly unequal) has been concocted main by unelected officials and little-known bureaucratic agencies – the deep state’s very pillars. They are now terrified by a democratically elected, pro-tariff President and are grasping for ways to avoid losing control.

Racial Quotas by Algorithm
Allum Bokhari, writing in The American Conservative, illuminates a Colorado state bill claiming to create “a shield against ‘algorithmic discrimination’” that would force AI companies to generate outputs based on government-imposed racial, and other identity-based, quotas. As with past variants of reverse discrimination, asserts Bokhari, Colorado’s AI bill amounts to thinly disguised leftist ideology aimed at institutionalizing the very harm it claims to ameliorate.


