The Democrats’ consolidation of left-wing liberalism is one piece of a broader backlash to Trumpism that shows up in the polling data right now. Another notable finding this week is from a new CNN/SSRS survey that found that about one-quarter of the public holds an unfavorable view of both parties. These are the so-called “double haters.” This group prefers Democrats on the 2025 generic ballot by 31 points.

This is a big deal for two reasons. First, that’s a massive shift; Double haters broke for Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. Now they’re swinging hard the other way.

Like Franklin’s polling, the CNN report also finds that Democrats’ gains are driven largely by opposition to the GOP, not enthusiasm for Democrats themselves. When asked what they dislike about Democrats, 22% of double haters called the party “do-nothing” and 11% said they aren’t standing up enough to Trump and the GOP, while 10% said they’re too liberal.

In addition to that, Schirmer says the previous ownership had run a strategy where they would buy relatively costly players to try to challenge for the league. They also found Lille had a high number of fees still to pay on transfers.

“If you run a football club, your ideal world is that you have more receivables than payables (on transfers),” Schirmer says. “But what we saw in 2020 was a huge number of payables for all these expensive players they had brought. So you had external debts and you had payables. And then to round up the picture, you had a significant salary bill. It just wasn’t sustainable.” […]

Lille’s new owners also set about revamping the club’s academy, one that has produced Eden Hazard, Benjamin Pavard and Yohan Cabaye. In the years before their takeover, very few players had graduated from the academy to the first team.

Schirmer says it was key to their vision as it helped forge a strong identity, developing players who had an attachment to the club and city, as well as a production line of talent.

She says the academy at the club’s Domaine de Luchin training centre, 20 miles east of Lille and close to the Belgian border, is home to players from the age of 15. Lille have around 70 children there, with 35 living on site and attending the private school.

In the younger age groups, there are around 50 children — from under-eights to under-11s — who train at partner clubs. For the under-11s to under-15s, also around 50 children, Lille work with a public school that offers a sports focus. The children go to school there while training with the club. They have the same set-up for the girls’ teams.

Luke Bell and his father Mike have done it again. Their new solar-powered drone – running on sunlight and almost nothing else – just claimed an unofficial endurance record for electric multirotors, flying for 5 hours, 2 minutes, and 21 seconds before Luke simply got tired and landed it.

Foreigners make a lot of lazy assumptions about Chile, but the stereotype of a country set on a hard right-wing path by a brutal dictator who brought prosperity along with repression is a partial truth at best. The truth is much more interesting. Per capita GDP grew only about 40 percent during Pinochet’s entire 17-year rule, and that includes two devastating recessions in 1975 and 1982. Chile’s real push into middle-income status came with democracy: GDP per capita (in constant 2010 dollars) more than doubled from around $6,400 in 1990 to over $14,000 by 2018, and poverty plummeted from 45 percent in 1987 to just 20 percent by 2000.

Chile’s development success story is the story of deepening consensus around institutions built on fundamentally sound liberal principles.

As important as saving Chile from Communism and institution capitalism were, Pinochet’s crowning act was returning to democracy once the threats were gone.

The Turner Twins’ trajectory into the world of high-stakes exploration wasn’t born from a childhood obsession with Everest; it spawned from a near-tragedy.

At age 17, just prior to their 18th birthday, Hugo dove into the sea and hit a sandbank. He fractured his C7 vertebra. In a week where eight other people were admitted to the same hospital with similar injuries, Hugo was the only one to walk out. The proximity to permanent paralysis was a profound wake-up call.

“We had a midlife crisis at 17,” Ross explains. “Life got put in perspective.”

They needed to live and test their limits. They started by rowing the Atlantic to raise funds for Spinal Research, a UK-based charity they’ve worked with for years. But the real epiphany came on a London tube train years later, reading about the centenary of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. They looked at the grayed photos of men in tweed on the ice and wondered: How did they survive?

They realized they possessed the ultimate scientific tool: a perfect control subject and a perfect variable. If they went on an expedition, and Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas, any difference in performance—be it core temperature, calorie burn, or cognitive function—could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.

The “time travel” experiments were born.

A series of federal prosecutions against immigration-enforcement protesters in Los Angeles has encountered setbacks in court, with some cases ending in acquittals or dismissals and others drawing scrutiny over the government’s evidence and the circumstances of the arrests. […]

Reporting from the Los Angeles Times described one of the most serious courtroom setbacks: a federal judge’s criticism of prosecutors after late disclosure of evidence in the Escobar-Gutierrez case, followed by a reported dismissal with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be brought again. During the proceedings, U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr. told prosecutors, “You’ve got to be ready for prime time and you’re not,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

In arguing for dismissal, a federal public defender echoed that criticism, describing the episode as “amateur hour at the U.S. attorney’s office,” also according to the Los Angeles Times.

These thoughts were brought to me powerfully by one of my favourite songs — “The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash. It’s a remarkable song, with a remarkable backstory. Released only a year before his death, in 2002 when Cash was an old man, it was the fruit of an improbable musical resurrection. After years in the musical wilderness, music producer Rick Rubin, known for his work with rappers and heavy metal bands, formed an improbable partnership with Cash, who produced much of his best work in the twilight of his life and career. Rubin, a secular Jew with an eclectic spirituality, got on remarkably well with the evangelically Christian Cash, and the pair would “take communion” together every day, with Cash describing the eucharist over the phone to Rubin.

The song itself is suffused with the words of Job, Acts and Revelation, but its origins, strangely, were in a vision. Cash dreamed that he was in Buckingham Palace, where he met Queen Elizabeth, who turned and said to him “Johnny Cash, you’re a thorn tree in a whirlwind”.

Cash is a late flowering of a very old tradition: the popular musical and religious imagination of the English-speaking peoples, and it’s nowhere more evident than in that song. From “terror in each sip and in each sup”, to “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”, the poetry of the King James Bible vibrates through his music. At once sinister and joyful, sublime and homespun, it’s a song about the end of the world and it is impossible not to feel a chill as Cash sings of “measured hundredweight and penny pound/When the man comes around”.

I love it because it is a 21st century song plugged directly into the crackling electricity of the soul of English religiosity.

I grew up in the era of the Pittsburgh Steelers dynasty of the seventies, when Coach Chuck Noll, Quarterback Terry Bradshaw, Franco Harris, and the Steel Curtain Defence led by Mean Joe Greene ruled the roost. They were the American equivalent of Liverpool FC during those same decades—the Liverpool of Shankly and Paisley, of Keegan and Dalglish, Rush and Souness.

Now here is the surprising thing: for all my travels throughout England, my love for Premier League football was discovered not in a Liverpool pub or a London stadium, but in a sports bar in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, a faithful congregation of Liverpool supporters gathered to cheer their team at unholy hours, watching matches beamed across the Atlantic. The brethren took me in and patiently explained the intricacies of the game: the positions and responsibilities of the goalkeeper, the defence, the midfield, and the attack (and yes, a striker and a forward can be the same thing, but do not assume they always are). They taught me it is called a pitch, not a field; a match, not a game; a kit, not a uniform. They reviewed the laws of the game and the endless complexity of tactics—a lifetime’s study, I am discovering.

Mary Antin was one such person, and her story merits reflection. After leaving czarist Russia as a teenager, Antin came to America, which she later characterized as “The Promised Land,” a new Jerusalem, thereby recalling the sensibility and vision of the founding Puritans. She wrote of her “faith in America” as a “healing ointment.” She claimed that “I am the youngest of America’s children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage.” She writes, “Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future.”

Ours, too, is the shining future, even if it doesn’t seem so bright right now. Ride with us and we will do our best to help you hold on to your belief in the American project.

Antin is a representative figure of the historic Jewish passion for reopening and renewing the American story; freedom from the violence of the pogroms of her childhood was an important part of her adopted country’s great promise. Such freedom is a core part of the American idea, and it has a natural symbolic connection to the Passover narrative of liberation.

The best part of Passover is always when a kid or guest realizes how American it is.

Colorado’s 2019 “Minor Conversion Therapy Law” defined “conversion therapy” as “attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” It banned treatments, including talk therapy or counseling, that could help minors resolve their gender dysphoria and align their identity with their biological sex.

These laws have been sold by conflating coercive practices with helping gender-confused children—many of whom will have been deliberately confused by LGBTQ public school curricula—become comfortable with their own bodies. Colorado’s law essentially sought to lock children into the path toward “transition”—a staggering Orwellian irony, since “transition” is itself just another form of “conversion.” This is precisely why LGBTQ activists shifted from using the phrase “gender transition” to “gender-affirming therapy”: to enable them to claim that there was not actually a “conversion” from one gender to another being perpetrated.

Thus, according to LGBTQ activists and their political allies, to oppose the attempt to convert someone from one gender to another through social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex change surgeries is “conversion therapy.” In order to clear up any confusion that this inversion might cause, Colorado’s law specifically listed an exception to its “conversion therapy” ban: “Assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.” A child could be counseled into gender transition, but it was illegal to counsel a child out of gender transition.

Key conservative justices raised doubts about the constitutionality of the president’s executive order that would end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign visitors.

When a lawyer for the Trump administration suggested that the realities of modern migration required a new assessment of whether the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who is seen as a key vote, retorted: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

Given that Thomas and Alito are ideologues, not conservatives, 7-2 may be the most likely result.

The legal website Just Security maintains a “litigation tracker,” chronicling all the lawsuits filed against the second Trump Administration. On Wednesday morning, that tally stood at a hefty seven hundred and thirty-four, with cases ranging from the President’s immigration policies to his dismantling of disfavored agencies to his effort to punish law firms to his ban on transgender athletes in women’s sports. Each of these is important in its own way, but none more so than the challenge taken up on Wednesday by the Supreme Court, to the legality of Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Issued in the first hours of his first day back in office, the order is Donald Trump’s bid to abolish the long-standing rule that, with narrow exceptions, citizenship attaches automatically to those born on U.S. soil. By executive fiat, Trump would eliminate the guarantee of birthright citizenship for children whose parents are in the country without legal authorization or on a temporary basis—a position once considered so fringe that he shied away from it during his first term. His edict contravenes the language of the Constitution, the high court’s own rulings, legislation passed by Congress, and the consistent practice of previous Presidents. As Trump himself seems to recognize, it is difficult to imagine that the Supreme Court—even this Supreme Court, with its conservative super-majority—will let this order stand, and the tenor of the two-hour-plus oral argument seemed to bear that out. If the questions from the conservative Justices offer a reliable guide to their thinking, the mystery is not so much whether Trump will lose but how resoundingly.

“Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for justices from across the ideological spectrum. “But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

Two of the court’s liberal justices — Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — sided with the majority. […]

A lawyer for Mrs. Chiles, Jim Campbell of the Alliance Defending Freedom, called the decision a significant win for free speech and common sense.

“States cannot silence voluntary conversations that help young people seeking to grow comfortable with their bodies,” he said in a statement.

In her court filings, Mrs. Chiles said she was not seeking to “cure” clients of same-sex attractions or to “change” their sexual orientation, but rather to help patients with their own stated goals, which sometimes include “seeking to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions.”

But Hungary is hardly a democracy at all. It’s an autocratic, kleptocratic mafia state, where all the levers of power are controlled behind the scenes by a single man. Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán has rewritten the constitution and amended it fifteen times, changed the electoral laws to give his party structural advantages, captured the top layer of the judiciary, occupied the chief prosecutor’s office to protect his cronies and prosecute his enemies, weaponized the tax authority, commandeered the media, installed spy software on the phones of journalists and opposition figures, harassed and restricted the rights of NGOs, revoked the rights of religious communities unwilling to collaborate with his regime, forced the country’s most prestigious university to move to Austria, harassed opposition political parties, denied them resources and spied on them illegally, nationalized and reprivatized banks and businesses to reshape and dominate the economy, steered his country into an alliance with Russia, Hungary’s historic enemy, and enriched his family and friends beyond their wildest dreams.

Given these overwhelming structural advantages, many observers of Hungary—myself included—had concluded that Orbán could never be removed from office through democratic means; that the end of his regime would come through crisis and collapse. The fact that Orbán is not only likely to lose a national election but could easily get creamed is nothing short of utterly amazing.

His kryptonite has proven to be Péter Magyar. A former Fidesz insider, Magyar understands the regime he is fighting against and has proven remarkably adept at anticipating and countering its tactics. Bestowed with seemingly superhuman levels of energy, he has barnstormed the country since he burst on the scene suddenly two years ago, demonstrating that with enough conviction, determination, and will, persuasion is possible even in a soft autocratic regime. And unlike the liberal opposition he replaced, Magyar understands the importance of national symbols and patriotism. This has allowed him to steal Fidesz’s nationalist brand and highlight the regime’s enormous hypocrisy and betrayal of the country.

Those socially conscious Europeans, whatever fiscal messes they have created for themselves, have had no qualms about taxing their whole populations. The primary vehicle is sales taxation, in the form of value-added taxes, which accumulate along a product’s value chain and are ultimately paid by the consumer. VATs extract roughly 9 percent to 10 percent of middle-class incomes across the euro zone and can result in middle-income citizens paying for nearly half of all VAT revenue. Every country in the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development except the United States has one.

When the promises of Social Security and Medicare can no longer be kept, millions of Americans will have to be reintroduced to the reality that the lunch is never free.

That’s a major reason the US, frequent misrepresentations to the contrary, has the most progressive tax system among the most developed countries. Here, the top 10 percent pay about 70 percent of US income taxes, and more than half the total US taxes even when payroll taxes are included. The dreaded 1 percent pick up more than a quarter of the entire federal tab.

The tax-to-income ratio is the highest anywhere, and the reason that glib calls to simply tax the rich more can’t come close to solving the country’s biggest domestic (and, increasingly, a national security) problem.

Make it transparent and adjust it to cover expenditures.

For postliberals and postmodern progressives, the fatal flaw in conception and the baleful defect in implementation spring from liberalism’s abandonment of the good life. Liberalism’s focus on freedom and toleration, they say, betrays at best a deplorable indifference to citizens’ well-being, spiritual and material. To counter liberalism’s concentration on the formalities of rights, institutions, and laws, postliberals envisage a government that unabashedly molds citizens’ souls. To correct liberalism’s acceptance in the name of liberty of social and economic inequalities, postmodern progressives want the state to aggressively regulate commerce and industry, redistribute wealth, and allocate benefits and burdens based on group membership. Neither postliberals nor postmodern progressives give much attention to the bleak historical record attesting to government’s woeful lack of competence to care for souls and to centrally plan social and economic life.

Postliberals and postmodern progressives wrongly suppose that by its very nature a limited government devoted to securing political and economic freedom must demote moral and intellectual virtue, subvert community, and repudiate faith. The American founders saw matters differently. For them, a government that safeguards individual rights keeps cultivation of the virtues, care of the soul, and religious obligation where they belong – in the hands of individuals, families, houses of worship, and civil society’s myriad voluntary associations.

Neither Left nor Right can accept that Man is Fallen. They believe putting them in control would perfect us.

Yet “liberty”, in the sense of political freedom or a civil right, emerged in the crucible of the 17th century battles between king and parliament. The late Larry Siedentop showed that medieval canon lawyers had already developed the prerequisites of liberalism: the apotheosis of the individual (“Renaissance man”), equality before the law and representative government.

Wooldridge singles out Erasmus, Hobbes and Montesquieu as key figures in the transition to liberalism as a coherent political philosophy. One might hazard the view that Erasmus teaches us to beware of polarisation and intolerance, Hobbes to enforce our implicit contract with the sovereign against both anarchy and tyranny, whilst Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers guards against the usurpation of the state by an overmighty executive branch, or what Lord Hailsham called “elective dictatorship”.

…that distinguishes the liberal from the Left/Right.

The electric trucking company New Energy Transport is claiming the Australian first after organising the delivery of a bulk load of Who Gives A Crap toilet paper from Sydney to Canberra, using an electric prime mover and then a fleet of electric last mile delivery trucks to get the merchandise to the final destination.

According to NET’s Daniel Bleakley the energy costs from the 460 kilometres covered by the Chinese-made Windrose prime mover and the last mile delivery vehicles supplied by logistics group ANC last week were 85 per cent below the cost of a diesel truck.

And it was faster, too. The Windrose electric prime mover (which has a 700 kWh battery) covered the trip from Sydney to Canberra in a single charge. And because it can maintain speed up steep hills – unlike diesel trucks – it completed the trip 25 minutes faster than a diesel truck.