There are nits that I’d pick with this new column by the Wall Street Journal‘s Gerard Baker, but he here hits an important nail squarely on its head:
The far left and its mainstream Democratic enablers want us to abandon all efforts at immigration enforcement. But their efforts to undermine the process are nothing compared with the public unease that is being generated by the methods ICE is using. The images of platoons of armed, masked men, seemingly equipped for street warfare, descending on parking lots and shopping malls; the spectacle of grandmothers and children being seized by agents; the reports of U.S. citizens being detained — all repel most decent Americans.
Now that these activities and the protests they have engendered have resulted in multiple deaths, the administration and its allies are further undermining trust by their public response to the incidents.
Calling the two protesters killed in Minneapolis “domestic terrorists” is an insult to the intelligence. Whether or not they were responsible for their own deaths, as in law they might have been, the implication that their killing should be treated as some sort of condign execution is simply loathsome. Lying about what we all can actually see on our screens adds injury to the insult. While no one can say with confidence exactly what unfolded in Minneapolis on the basis of cellphone video, we can be confident that the description offered by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was mostly fiction. If the words of our top government officials can be so easily disproved by the evidence of our own eyes, faith in the policy is destroyed.
Worst of all, by instantly defending and even praising every act by an immigration officer, however dubious, the administration is actively enabling escalation. Such instant exoneration increases the likelihood that worse will happen next time. The message from the administration that every one of these officers hears after these episodes: Whatever you do, whatever the circumstances, we will support you and denounce anyone you harmed as an enemy of the state. Officers may not have “absolute immunity” in law, but the government is encouraging them to act with absolute impunity.
The Editors of The Free Press decry what they describe as “Kristi Noem’s reckless lies.” A slice:
It’s true that [Alex] Pretti had a 9mm handgun on his person. But he did not brandish his weapon. Less than a second after a federal officer discovered the gun, another officer fired the first of at least 10 shots into Pretti, according to a detailed analysis of the incident from The Wall Street Journal. What’s more, Pretti was already on the ground and surrounded by agents when he was shot.
The Journal’s reporting was based on videos posted to social media. Anyone with an internet connection and a few minutes could see that the federal agents in Minneapolis had fired at a man already prone and on the ground. Indeed, the aggression against Pretti began as he placed himself between them and a fellow protester who had been violently pushed to the ground by another agent.
All of this demands—at the very least—an investigation. The facts may, in the end, prove to be more complicated. But the facts as they are known now are at odds with the Trump administration’s version of events. “This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” read a post from the Department for Homeland Security’s official account on X. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller actually claimed on X that “an assassin tried to murder federal agents.” Assassin? Pretti was a nurse with a concealed carry permit. He was exercising his Second Amendment rights. There is no evidence he was trying to kill federal officers; he was pinned down at the time of his killing.
This has been a pattern for the Trump administration. After the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on January 7, Noem gave an account of the incident soon contradicted by video footage and called Good a “domestic terrorist,” despite zero evidence that she fit that description. And surprise, surprise, Noem is now saying that Pretti is also a “domestic terrorist,” because he brought a gun and ammunition to a protest.
This is a bizarre argument for anyone in a Republican administration to make. The GOP is supposed to be the party that defends the Second Amendment, which enshrines the rights of Americans to bear arms.
Eric Boehm is correct: “Democrats plan to block DHS funding after Minnesota killing. Republicans should join them.”
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal reports relevant numbers regard the ICE crackdowns. A slice:
Syracuse professor Austin Kocher, who tracks official ICE data, finds that between Sept. 21, 2025, and Jan. 7, 2026, single-day ICE detentions increased 11,296. But only 902 of those were convicted criminals, 2,273 had pending criminal charges and 8,121 were other immigrant violators. ICE arrests have been trending upward since January 2025, but criminal arrests have plateaued.
All of which means that the Trump Administration’s rhetoric about deporting criminals doesn’t match its current much broader policy of mass deportation. As ICE agents target businesses, schools and homes, scenes of arrest involving mothers, children and long-time U.S. residents become more common. This explains why immigration enforcement is becoming a political liability for Republicans.
Ending migrant chaos at the border was necessary after the Biden Administration. But White House aide Stephen Miller’s undisciplined mass deportation and zero-immigration policy is building distrust, and the White House pitch that public safety justifies its enforcement is losing credibility.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa sings the praises of María Corina Machado. Two slices:
As is well known, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s freedom movement. Her merits? She has fought the Chavista dictatorship ever since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999 and started dismantling the country’s institutions. At first, she did so through an NGO focused on monitoring electoral processes, then through political participation. Rather than go into exile, this woman, who comes from a well-known family and was trained as an industrial engineer, chose to risk everything for the pursuit of liberty.
She was beaten up, harassed, kidnapped, prosecuted in Chavez’s and Nicolás Maduro’s (his equally despicable successor) kangaroo courts, barred from leaving the country, and prevented from seeing her children—who had to settle abroad, graduate, launch their own careers, get married and have children—and was disqualified from holding public office—first by being expelled from the National Assembly and subsequently by being prevented from participating in any election. Because she was a woman, because she was uncompromising, and because she had classical liberal convictions, she was poo-pooed even by the opposition, who did not take her seriously. Gradually, at an ant-like pace, she earned the respect of the voters. A quarter of a century later, she became a widely admired national figure and her country’s only hope.
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This is the heroic woman who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025—a symbol of her people’s endurance in the face of one of the most tragic stories of the 21st century. She said it belonged to the Venezuelan people and promised to bring the medal to them.
Until Trump stepped in—and practically forced her to “share” it with him, as she did recently during her visit to the White House. Forget that the Nobel Prize cannot be transferred or shared, as the Norwegian Nobel Committee recently said. What kind of leader would take away from a woman like Machado and the Venezuelan people the Nobel Prize? The Donald Trump kind.
The U.S. president has held a gun to Machado’s head since the day she got it by using all sorts of tactics—diminishing her role, ignoring her, then insulting her, and finally leaving her out of the transition process underway in Venezuela under the leadership of the entire Chavista apparatus except Maduro, who was captured and transferred to a U.S. prison. A man who presides over a $1 trillion military budget, controls more than three thousand nuclear warheads, has declared himself the ruler of Venezuela and the owner of its oil, and has twelve warships and the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group in the Caribbean, put Machado in an impossible position. Either she “shared” the prize with him, or she and the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans who see her as the country’s true leader would be indefinitely bypassed until such time as Trump decides that elections should be held with other “more palatable” candidates.
Meanwhile, she swallowed her pride, kept her eyes on the endgame, cajoled him, and played into his ego by “sharing” the Nobel Prize with him despite criticism from many Venezuelans and others, in the hope that by massaging the U.S. president’s vanity, she would achieve her lifelong pursuit—the liberation of the Venezuelan people. Because, in the end, these small humiliations are nothing compared to the ones she has suffered in Venezuela for the cause of freedom.
Suzanne Clark counsels us Americans to regain our confidence in free markets. Here’s her conclusion:
It’s easy to underestimate what small increases in annual growth rates can accomplish. According to an analysis by the organization I lead, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, if sustained over the next 50 years, 3 percent annual growth would triple living standards, increase per capita GDP from $69,000 today to nearly $250,000 and boost average household income from $150,000 to more than $528,000 annually.
America faces many challenges, from the cost of living to the rapidly changing nature of work, but the greatest risk is this: in trying to fix what is broken, breaking what already works.
And there is much that works in the U.S. economy. The nation’s capital markets are the strongest in the world. Global talent continues to choose America. It leads the world in cutting-edge innovation, and many of the most complicated products are domestically made. Household net worth is at a record high. Consumers have more choices, more conveniences and more leisure than ever before. Diseases have life-changing treatments and lifesaving cures, thanks in large part to American innovation.
Free enterprise is not flawless, but it remains the most effective system for generating opportunity, innovation and prosperity — and for improving itself over time. If America in 1976 had chosen state control over free markets, the decline of the preceding years would have accelerated. There’s no telling what the country, and the world, would look like today, but it would almost certainly be poorer, less dynamic and less free.
Richard Ebeling reveals “the delusions and dangers of the new mercantilism.” Three slices:
With autocratic caprice, arrogance, crudeness, and rudeness, Trump has assumed the powers of a near absolute monarch to decide when, why, and against whom he will arbitrarily raise and lower and raise again tariffs on the importation of goods into the United States from all the other countries on the planet. Like the French king Louis XIV (1638–1715), who is reputed to have said, “I am the State,” Trump acts as if his mere word, changeable on a nearly daily basis, is the law of the land under the rationale of “national security.” He uses this term with such elastic generality and ambiguity that the importation of the most trivial, everyday consumer item can be declared a threat to the political and economic wellbeing and “greatness” of America, resulting in prohibitive import taxes being imposed on it.
But it is not only Donald Trump who sees America’s future dependent upon government management and direction of the economic affairs of the United States vis-a-vie the rest of the world. Many of those who, no doubt, find the president repugnant for a variety of reasons, also desire and rationalize the essentiality of government oversight and direction of America’s trade relations with other countries.
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[Left-leaning Harvard economist Dani] Rodrik seems to believe that because government policies can influence the direction and form of investments and production activities, this somehow disproves the logic and essential nature and workings of the free market. It would be difficult to find any free-market economist over the last 250 years who denied the impact of government policy in bringing about economic outcomes different than if the market had been left unrestrained to determine the best use of resources, given consumer demands and the market-based opportunity costs of applying the scarce means of production in one direction rather than another.
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We are confronted with the necessity to compare, weigh, and choose between the advantages of different jobs and places to work and the relative incomes we might earn from accepting one instead of some other. In other words, we each engage in trade-offs between our dual roles as consumers and producers. The crucial question is, should each of us make these decisions for ourselves and our families, or should such neomercantilists as Dani Rodrik take this out of our hands and decide these things for us, when the values and trade-offs they wish to impose on everyone may be very different from how each individual sees such things?
Both the national and global marketplace bring changes that modify the locations where things might be most cost-efficiently produced. The economic world of today is noticeably different than that of, say, 200 years ago. Our world is different than in the past precisely because over the last two centuries, many countries, including the United States, moved away from the heavily intervening hand of the government that prevailed under the older mercantilism.
If those mercantilist controls, regulations, restrictions, and prohibitions had remained more or less in place for the last 200 years, many if not most of the comforts, conveniences, and “necessities” of modern everyday life might never have come into existence. It would have been stifled and repressed due to central planners and social engineers asserting that they know best how we should live and where we should work and with what methods of production. Economic progress would have been restrained to what the mercantilist planners considered good and desirable.
Samuel Gregg reviews Philip Pilkington’s The Collapse of Global Liberalism. Three slices:
Like most postliberal commentators, Pilkington identifies some real problems in Western societies. He notes, for example, the degree to which doomsday environmentalism has, until recently, successfully stigmatized even the mildest criticism of draconian climate change policies. Likewise, the dysfunctional effects of easy money policies upon the economy underscored by Pilkington are real. However, blaming these and other evils on a hegemonic liberalism is a stretch, not least because such a liberalism does not exist.
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It is true that the number of manufacturing jobs has declined in countries like America since the 1970s. Manufacturing as a proportion of developed economies’ output has also fallen. Yet, as has been pointed out ad nauseam to proponents of the deindustrialization thesis, neither of those things means that an economy has deindustrialized or that manufacturing output has fallen. It simply means that the service sector and service sector jobs have grown, and that technology (as Pilkington concedes) has replaced many manufacturing jobs. That adds up to a different economy from that of, say, 1950s America or 1890s Britain, but hardly one that has deindustrialized.
Social and cultural problems likewise loom large throughout Pilkington’s description of the wreckage purportedly left by liberalism. He highlights pervasive drug use, for example, as symptomatic of liberalism’s capacity to drain people’s lives of meaning. But individuals have been destroying their lives by foolishly ingesting vast quantities of stimulants of one form or another for centuries, and long before anyone used words like “liberal” or “liberalism.” I doubt, for instance, that the rampant alcoholism that marked Czarist Russia for centuries had much to do with liberalism.
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These observations underscore the deeper problem with postliberalism. It is riddled with unconvincing accounts of the history of ideas, dubious economic arguments, suspect cause-and-effect claims, and tendencies to ignore or demagogue anyone who questions the postliberal agenda’s underlying coherence. These features also cripple postliberals’ capacity to accurately diagnose—let alone resolve—the very real social, cultural, and economic challenges we face. Indeed, they further accelerate the decline that postliberals lament. Postliberalism, it turns out, is not a solution. It is, in fact, part of our problem.
The other requisites for inclusivity are free markets and free minds. To bring something new into the world, people must be allowed to experiment with and exchange new theories, arguments, goods and services. Every major technological innovation is an ‘act of rebellion against conventional wisdom and vested interests’, 
A fundamental advantage of the separation of powers is that it institutionalizes specialized decisionmaking and thereby allows Americans to enjoy all of the advantages of distinct exercises of judgment, will, and force. A breakdown in the distinctions among the three powers was a fundamental part of what traditionally was understood as arbitrary or irrational decisionmaking. From this point of view, specialized decisionmaking is valuable for avoiding a type of arbitrary governance – a type encouraged by the administrative consolidation of powers.
Law is, of course, neither an unalterable fact of nature, nor a product of intellectual design, but the result of a process of evolution in which a system of rules developed in constant interaction with a changing order of human actions which is distinct from it.
The Industrial Revolution came about when entrepreneurs and engineers gained the freedom, knowledge and inspiration to innovate and improve, and this was not dependent on colonial capital. Unlike some earlier interpretations, it was not a big push of investment that got industry going. Usually businesses started with small sums scraped together from relatives and acquaintances, and then the main source of funding was self-finance – entrepreneurs ploughed their profits back into the business. 
