Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

I’ve never liked the word liberal applied in the way it is today.

The word itself has a noble heritage.

It meant being for freedom generally and opposed to despotism and dictatorship by church or state.

Our Founding Fathers were considered liberals in a classical sense.

They wanted free speech, free elections, free enterprise, free formation of community, and so on, and wanted government restricted in its power.

That meaning of the word—which has translations in every language—lasted mostly until the Great War.

Many of the most liberal intellectuals and venues threw themselves into that conflagration with great enthusiasm. Matters got worse during the New Deal when even more “liberals” threw their weight behind industrial planning and corporatism.

Emerging out of World War II, there was nothing much remaining to the term. It had been completely co-opted by its enemies.

That presented genuine liberals with a problem. They needed a new term. Russell Kirk suggested conservative, which was odd because that term recalls monarchies of old, Tory traditionalists, and blood-and-soil revanchism.

Not everyone liked that term. The former and thoroughly reformed communist Max Eastman suggested “liberal conservative” or “conservative liberal,” all of which was too confusing. Then he finally proposed “new liberalism,” which didn’t quite catch on.

The writer Dean Russell in 1956 suggested reviving the word libertarian, which rather stuck for some people.

My mentor Murray Rothbard liked it but turned against it later in life. It became too barren of granular content to provide moorings in a political storm.

Indeed, these days, reading the libertarians is like attending a concert of a promised piano concerto, only to hear the pianist play scales and some arpeggios on stage. There’s just not a lot of depth or understanding there.

Meanwhile, I’m surrounded by people who call themselves “former liberals.”

From what I gather from that designation, it refers to a legacy bias on one side versus the other.

They weren’t fans of the Cold War and really didn’t like the War on Terror.

They still champion civil liberties but gagged at woke ideology and especially the transgender agenda.

“Liberalism” became way too ill-liberal for them to stomach.

It was the COVID experience that really shattered them.

All their friends in media, academia, and the corporate world went nuts. They were demanding that everyone lock themselves indoors, make the working class deliver food, cover the faces of children, close schools, censor speech, and then let medical workers inject the entire population with an untested substance of uncertain origin.

There was nothing liberal about any of that. So my liberal friends felt a great sense of alienation. It was not just that their communities abandoned their values. They began to wonder if their whole ideological outlook was wrong.

Maybe government won’t save us from corporatism after all. Maybe the media is not really a check on power. Maybe all these people are working together to create a machinery of oppression that is targeting not just the middle class but the working class too. If that is so, it is surely not new. Maybe this has been going on for a long time and no one knew it.

It did not help that the heroes of liberalism seemed to cave completely. Even Noam Chomsky called for the arrest and jailing of people who refused the wrongly named vaccine, even those with natural immunity. There was never a more principled liberal than Chomsky. Something is very wrong here.

As a result, many of these people feel homeless both intellectually and politically. They are warmer to Trump than they ever thought they would be but not uncritical. They still browse their old media venues with interest but often it turns to disgust. They dread faculty parties and social occasions because the prattle about the pathology of various -isms they once accepted as doctrine now sounds barren and performative.

They have become, in popular parlance, red-pilled. It’s a funny phrase drawn from the movie “The Matrix.” A guy is offered a blue pill to proceed in ignorance, or a red pill to see the world anew, replete with fakes and fiat.

I was speaking with a person the other day who referred to a friend of mine as having been red-pilled on some subject. It made me laugh because, so far as I know, the person in question pretty much held far-left views all his life. He even travelled with Sandinistas in the late 1980s—hardly a conservative in any sense. Today, he is hoping the Trump administration will save the nation from his former tribe.

My point is this. We live in very unusual times when the terms left and right have become enormously scrambled. I depart from the views of many when I say that we don’t really need a new term. Terms are always subject to mischaracterization and capture, as we see with the word liberal (and the word conservative actually).

What we need instead is open minds, the courage to look at facts and reality, and the willingness to say in public what we believe to be true. We can do all that without carrying the baggage of legacy ideologies. There is nothing wrong with reading grand treatises attempting to parse all this out and create taxonomies of belief. Burrowing in and becoming a preacher of them is another matter.

These times offer all of us tremendous opportunities. We know who the dissidents are from woke ideology, from Covidianism, from NPRism, from the matrix of mainstream media. Their legacy commitments are all over the map. We can encounter and learn from each other. This is what I find most intellectually stimulating. I’m thrilled to figure out the contours of the public mind today and in the past and excited to explore all these realms with my newfound friends.

Still, my heart also breaks for those people who thought that they had found their tribe until it turned out that their tribe is dominated by crazy people. It’s a bit like losing a beloved pet or even a spouse. The comforts of familiarity have been taken away and we are left to fend for ourselves.

Now no thoughtful person is in a position to outsource his worldview to any leader or institution. Perhaps that is a good thing.

Another major blow has hit Cuba as its economy gets decimated by US-led sanctions, and as Trump’s embargo of vital Venezuelan oil for the island continues rolling downhill (Mexico had quickly followed suit by halting its oil to Cuba as well).

Amid the fuel shortage which has caused mass disruptions and flight stoppages at the main hub José Martí international Airport, two of Russia’s largest airlines have announced the suspension of flights to Cuba.

Russian aviation file image

Moscow has already declared operations to evacuate all Russian tourists and citizens who wish to leave, and so outbound-only flights to bring them home have been authorized.

Rossiya, part of the Aeroflot group, and Severny Veter (Nordwind), are impacted – and the outbound-only evacuation flights have been authorized to begin Thursday.

The airlines said they are being forced to redirect flight routes in the region “due to challenges with refueling in Cuba.”

This follows on the heels of flagship carrier Air Canada being one of the first major international airlines to suspend flights. Canada currently has no economic sanctions against Cuba, and trades with the island-nation, having maintained diplomatic relations going all the way back to 1959.

While Americans have by and large been absent from the Caribbean nation, also given no direct flights from the US, Cuba has long been a favored tropical vacation destination for Canadians. 

Earlier this month international reports said Cuba was merely days from running out of fuel, and widescale power outages across various districts of the country have only worsened. 

“The last known delivery came via a tanker from Mexico in early January, but Mexico halted exports amid US pressure,” The Guardian notes. “At the same time, crude flows from Venezuela have dried up after a US operation in January that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro, cutting off support from Cuba’s most trusted energy supplier.”

Havana’s lone primary international airport has seen drastic developments such as the following:

In recent hours, a video has gone viral on social media showing dozens of tourists disembarking from a plane on the tarmac in Moscow after their flight to Cuba was aborted just before takeoff.

The testimonies collected by the Russian outlet Mash on Telegram indicate that passengers on flight SU6849 had almost taken off when, “at the last moment, when the engines were already running, the pilot announced that there was no fuel in Havana,” forcing the flight to be canceled at the last minute.

The below scene was captured days ago…

A herd of Russian savages had to disembark their flight to Cuba at the last minute, after the beleagured Russian-allied nation stated that there is no longer any jet fuel in the country. pic.twitter.com/LknL3kSA1s

— Jay in Kyiv (@JayinKyiv) February 9, 2026

The Kremlin meanwhile says it is exploring ways to get urgent humanitarian assistance to the Cuban people, as the economic situation and national infrastructure spirals.

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that “the stranglehold imposed by the United States is already causing a lot of difficulties for Cuba” and this has resulted in the two allies discussing “possible ways to resolve these problems or at least provide all possible assistance.”

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Trump administration can move forward with ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants from Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua, a U.S. appeals court ruled Monday.

Illegal immigrants from Nicaragua, Ecuador and other nationalities at a door on the border wall waiting to be picked up by the U.S. Border Patrol in El Paso, Texas, on Jan. 4, 2023. Paul Ratje/Reuters

It was a unanimous decision by a three-judge panel, ruling to temporarily lift a previous federal judge’s ruling that blocked the termination of the status for immigrants of the three countries and accused the federal government of possibly being racially motivated in its actions.

There are nearly 89,000 immigrants from Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua who have been granted temporary status to live in the United States.

“TPS was never designed to be permanent, yet previous administrations have used it as a de facto amnesty program for decades,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a Feb. 9 post on X.

U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson in California blocked Noem’s attempt to end TPS for nationals of the three countries in December, citing comments about immigrants from the Homeland Security secretary and President Donald Trump as her reasoning.

The judge also said the Trump administration did not consider the conditions of the nations that might prevent immigrants from returning.

The Ninth U.S. Court of Appeals in California on Monday paused Thompson’s ruling for the duration of the appeal, stating the federal government could likely prove there are legitimate reasons to terminate Nepali, Honduran, and Nicaraguan protection.

“A win for the rule of law and vindication for the U.S. Constitution. Under the previous administration, Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats into our nation,” Noem said.

In contrast to the previous federal judge ruling to block the terminations, the appeals court found the federal government could likely prove that Noem did consider the conditions of Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua before ending the roughly 89,000 immigrants’ protected status.

The TPS statute allows the secretary of Homeland Security to declare a foreign state for protected status when “nationals of that state cannot return there safely due to armed conflict, natural disaster, or other ‘extraordinary and temporary conditions,’” the appeals court wrote Monday.

TPS holders are eligible for work and protection from deportation while their home country remains designated. The Homeland Security secretary can periodically review conditions in a foreign nation and decide whether a protected status allowing stay in the United States is still warranted for its citizens. If conditions aren’t met, Noem has the authority to terminate the TPS by giving notice in the Federal Register, a daily journal for the U.S. government.

“Given the improved situation in each of these countries [Nepal, Honduras, Nicaragua], we are wisely concluding what was intended to be a temporary designation,” Noem said on X.

Nepal came under TPS designation after a devastating 2015 earthquake, killing nearly 9,000 people across multiple countries, including Nepal.

Honduras and Nicaragua received their designation after Hurricane Mitch in 1999, resulting in at least 10,000 deaths in Central America.

The appeals court’s decision is a big win for the Trump administration as it continues immigration law enforcement in cities across America.

The federal government has also tried to end TPS for an estimated 300,000 Haitian nationals living in the United States. A federal judge ruled last week that the termination for nationals of the Caribbean nation violated federal law.

The Trump administration is appealing the case.

Reuters contributed to this report.