War, Spyware, and the Pendulum Swing: What This Week Tells Us About Power
This week gave us a lot to sit with. The US-Iran war entered its seventh week and produced a shaky two-week ceasefire. ICE confirmed it uses commercial spyware to break into encrypted phones. And special elections in Wisconsin and Georgia showed Democrats outperforming their 2024 margins by wide margins. Three stories. One running thread: what happens when the tools of government grow faster than the consent of the governed.
The Iran Ceasefire and the Cost of War Without Debate
On Wednesday, President Trump announced a two-week pause in strikes against Iran. Days earlier, he had warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if no deal was reached. American airmen were shot down over Iranian airspace. Gas prices crept toward record highs as the Strait of Hormuz stayed choked. Pakistan called on Trump to extend his deadline. Tucker Carlson, not exactly a dissenter by instinct, told officials to tell the president “no” if asked to strike civilian targets.
The ceasefire is welcome. But let’s be honest about what got us here.
No declaration of war passed Congress. No serious public debate preceded the first strikes six weeks ago. A president decided, and a war began. That pattern should unsettle anyone who cares about consent, regardless of where they stand on Iran’s government or its nuclear program.
This is not a partisan point. Wars launched without debate tend to outlast their stated goals. They create feedback cycles of retaliation, economic disruption, and grief that no one voted for. The costs spread across millions of people who had no say in the decision. The Strait of Hormuz closure alone pushed airline bag fees up across three major carriers this week. Small toy shops are paying double what they paid a year ago for imports, now squeezed by both tariffs and fuel costs. Ordinary people absorb those costs quietly.
The Lovatarian view is not pacifism at any price. It is the belief that war represents the complete collapse of the principles that make peace possible. When communication fails, when consent is absent, when coercion becomes the first tool rather than the last, you get missiles over Tehran and missing airmen and toy stores raising prices on $25 toys to $45.
The ceasefire buys two weeks. What it cannot buy is the culture of restraint, accountability, and honest dialogue that might prevent the next war from starting. That culture does not come from elections. It comes from the choices individuals make every day about how they engage with people they disagree with, and whether they demand that their leaders do the same.
ICE’s Spyware and the Slow Erosion of Private Life
While the Iran ceasefire dominated headlines, a quieter story deserved more attention. ICE confirmed this week that it uses commercial spyware capable of hacking into encrypted phones. The agency’s top official acknowledged in a letter to Congress that the tool targets fentanyl traffickers. The justification is real. Fentanyl kills people. No one disputes that.
But the logic of “we use powerful tools against bad people” has a long record of expanding well past its original targets. Spyware that can intercept encrypted messages does not come with a guarantee that it will only ever touch the phones of drug traffickers. Encrypted communication is the backbone of attorney-client privilege, source protection for journalists, private medical conversations, and the ordinary confidentiality most people assume exists in their digital lives.
The Lovatarian worry here is not primarily about any one administration. It is about the tool itself. Once a government agency acquires a capability and demonstrates its usefulness, that capability rarely disappears. It gets normalized. Then it gets expanded. Then it becomes a background feature of how the state operates, with no feedback loop to the people most affected by it.
Voluntary privacy tools, end-to-end encryption, open-source communication platforms, and legal challenges from civil society organizations represent the non-governmental response. They are slower and less satisfying than a legislative ban. But they are real, they are available today, and they do not require winning a single election. Supporting them, financially and through daily use, is a concrete act that does not depend on which party controls the House.
The fentanyl crisis is real and demands a response. But a response built on secret surveillance of encrypted communications trades one kind of harm for another. And the second kind is harder to see coming.
The Pendulum, the 51 Percent, and What Neither Side Is Telling You
Wisconsin elected a liberal justice to its state supreme court Tuesday, expanding the majority for the liberal bloc. In Georgia, a Trump-endorsed Republican held a deep-red seat. Democrats have now outperformed their 2024 margins in special election after special election since Trump took office. Political analysts are already mapping paths to a Democratic House majority in November.
Here is what this pattern actually tells us, stripped of the triumphalism and the doom.
It tells us that electoral politics is a pendulum. The party in power tends to generate the energy for its own opposition. That is the system working as designed. The 51-versus-49 structure of democratic elections means every governing coalition contains the seeds of the next backlash. Democrats win Wisconsin and feel hope. Republicans point to Georgia and feel confirmation. Both sides raise money. Both sides sharpen their messaging. The cycle repeats.
This is not cynicism. Elections matter. Courts matter. The Wisconsin result will shape real decisions about real people’s lives. The Georgia result will affect real legislation. None of that is trivial.
But the pendulum does not break the underlying dynamic. Political solutions depend on winning majorities, and winning majorities requires building coalitions through messages designed to draw sharp lines between “us” and “them.” The more intense the political environment, the more divisive those messages become. And the more divisive those messages become, the harder it gets to build the everyday culture of tolerance and mutual respect that makes coercion less necessary in the first place.
The person most excited about Wisconsin this week is already thinking about November. The person most relieved by Georgia is already thinking about November too. Both of them are outsourcing their hopes to an institution that runs on conflict.
The alternative is not disengagement. It is choosing, deliberately and repeatedly, to invest energy in the voluntary structures of civic life, the local organizations, the honest conversations, the communities built on consent rather than electoral victory, that exist outside the pendulum’s arc. Those structures do not show up in polling averages. But they shape the culture that elections eventually have to answer to.
This was a heavy week. War, surveillance, and electoral maneuvering all moved at once. The common thread in all three stories is the question of who holds power, how they got it, and whether the people affected by their decisions had any real say.
That question does not resolve itself through the next election cycle. It resolves, slowly and imperfectly, through the daily choices of people who decide to communicate rather than coerce, to build rather than capture, and to treat their neighbors as partners in a shared life rather than obstacles to a political goal.
That is the work. It does not make headlines. But it is the only work that lasts.
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