Weekly Roundup: October 12–18, 2026

The weekly roundup of what we’ve done at Liberal Currents is bookended by hard looks at libertarianism and fascism.

Articles:

• “Public Execution,” Gareth Watkins: Acts of violence are a sacrament in the fascist civic religion. The new fascist man must be posted into being.
• “China According to China,” Guillaume A. W. Attia: The Pax Sinica to which Xi Jinping aspires will be no imperialism-free paradise, but a world made safe for autocracy and domestic terror.
• “Checks and Balances Will Not Save Us,” Steven L. Taylor: A Democratically controlled Congress will have some tools to deploy, but not as many as some may hope.
• “Better Win a District: Arkansas’s Second,” Alan Elrod: There have been many near-misses at dislodging Rep. French Hill ever since the state hard-shifted from blue to red in 2010.
• “A Hard Look at Libertarianism,” Janet Bufton: Quinn Slobodian's 2025 book provides the starting point of a more thorough post-mortem.

Podcasts:

• “Ilhan Omar vs. Regime Politics” (Neon Liberalism #95, with Adam Gurri): The DHS raid on Ilhan Omar's residence is continuous with Donald Trump's birther politics.
• “Sexual Violence on Campus and the Universities That Enable It” (Half the Answer #109, with Nicole Bedera): Institutions of higher education regularly prevent survivors from accessing justice.
• “Libertarianism Captured by Racism” (Liberal Currents Live #11): Was it inevitable that bigotry would become so dominant within libertarianism, or could it all have gone differently?
• “Graft the Likes of Which the World Has Never Seen Before” (Half the Answer #108, with Zach Everson): Donald Trump made more than two billion dollars in the first year of his second term.

Editors’ Notes:

• “Fellas, Is It Gay to Be James Talarico?”: They need us to hate each other.
• “What Can Congress Do?”: Threading the needle on resistance messaging.
• “Taking Ideology Seriously”: The power of the ideological environment should not be underestimated.

Videos and shorts:

• “A Bigger Danger Than Dictators”: Adam Gurri asks why ordinary people often turn against freedom.
• “The Worst SCOTUS Decision”: Mike Sacks doesn’t even have to say its name, which says it all.
• “The Audience Wrecked the Media, Not the Other Way Around”: Adam Gurri uncovers the cause of Trump's rise to power.
• “The Illusion of Consent”: For the new right, when a man is accused of rape, he is first and foremost a victim of feminism. Alan Elrod tries to help us understand.
• “Keeping the Old Neighborhood Thriving Requires Change”: Sonja Trauss explains what happens when you haven’t been to that bar in ten years.
• “What Winning Texas Would Mean”: Ryan Geddie and Jesse Dollemore suggest that, for Democrats, it may feel like anything is possible.
• “Wartime Air Defense Is Complicated”: And very expensive, as Samantha Hancox-Li explains.

Selections from The Reconstruction Papers:

• Chapter 14: “Four Principles for Comprehensive Higher Education Reform,” by Brendan Cantwell.
• Chapter 15: “To Rebuild Democracy in the Hearts of Americans, We Need a New National Service Initiative,” by Alan Elrod.

Get the complete audio of The Reconstruction Papers now or subscribe to our public podcast feed on Spotify, on Apple, on Amazon, and elsewhere via its RSS feed.

Riptides:

• “An All-Out Assault on Citizenship”: Voter rolls, non-public execution, white nationalist violence, and TERF Island, sinking lower (Friday, October 16).
• “Openly Selling Out America’s Interests”: Russia, Starlink, Greenland, Iran, Ilhan Omar, and Katie Zacharia (Thursday, October 15).
• “Donald Trump Posted Videos of Animals Mauling People”: Truth Social, pardons for sale, Ken Corruption, and retaliation (Wednesday, October 14).
• “Attacking the Enemy Within, Aiding the Outside Enemy”: Ilhan Omar, Russia, RFK Jr., Elon Musk, Ken Paxton, and Susan Collins’s super-stupid PAC (Tuesday, October 13).

Sign up here to get Riptides—a liberal look at the news, four days a week—by email.

Some of what we’re reading elsewhere:

• Michael I. Jordan, on the propagation of absurd AI fears: “I strongly believe that it’s bad for society, and especially young people, for such thoughts, unaccompanied by any serious real-world analysis, to become a dominant form of discourse of the era.”
• John Ganz, on what’s at stake in the Omar case: “This move strikes at some of the most elementary assumptions of a free and republican government, principles so basic that we scarcely imagined they would need defending: that political opposition is legitimate, that the executive cannot determine the composition of the legislature, and that citizenship is not a privilege held at the pleasure of those in power.”
• Kate Shaw, in the New York Times, says to impose term limits, binding ethics rules, and shadow-docket restrictions on the Supreme Court, and to increase the number of its justices: “This list is just a start.”