“‘How proud are you to be an American?’ a new NBC News poll asked. ‘At the turn of the century, three quarters of Americans were ‘extremely’ or ‘very proud,’’ Steve Kornacki explained to Meet the Press host Kristen Welker yesterday. ‘That number’s fallen to 56 percent.’ It is a sizable drop, leading Kornacki to inquire, ‘What’s behind this?’ before supplying an answer: ‘it’s partisan.’ Boy, is it. Fully 90 percent of Republicans are ‘extremely’ or ‘very proud’ to be Americans, with just a mere 3 percent ‘only a little’ or ‘not at all’ proud. Compare that to Democrats, less than a third (29%) of whom are ‘extremely’ or ‘very proud’ to be Americans with a whopping 36 percent ‘only a little’ or ‘not at all’ proud.” (06/16/26)
“Anthropic stunned the AI world on Friday by announcing it was revoking access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, the powerful new models it released just three days earlier. The government, Anthropic said, had ‘issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States.’ Because Anthropic doesn’t have a way to limit access to Americans, this amounted to a de facto ban on the technology.” (06/15/26)
“Over the past few weeks, the redistricting battles have revealed something important about the state of American politics: Republican voters are not recoiling from a fight. They are running toward it. Fights that the old Republican establishment would have treated as too aggressive, risky, or impolite have instead unleashed grassroots energy across the country. Why? Because Republican voters are starving for political courage. Republican voters have seen what courage looks like in their states. They want to see it in Washington. For too long, Republican politics was defined by caution masquerading as wisdom. Voters sent Republicans to Washington to stop the left, only to watch too many of them obsess over decorum, consultant-approved messaging, and the approval of people who despised them anyway. Meanwhile, the country they loved was slipping away …” (06/15/26)
Source: The Eternally Radical Idea
by Greg Lukianoff
“I am not a social media utopian. As regular ERI readers and FIRE supporters will know, I co-authored The Coddling of the American Mind with social psychologist Jon Haidt. In that book, we argued that overprotection was making young people more anxious, fragile, and less prepared for adult life. I also happen to think that the phone-based childhood has been a bad bargain for many kids, and that phones should be out of schools entirely. But that does not mean governments should build a national identity-checking system for the internet, give government a foot in the door for controlling artificial intelligence, or create broad new liabilities that pressure platforms to suppress lawful expression in the name of protecting minors.” (06/15/26)
“The New York Times posted a long editorial last week to make the case against choosing Bill Pulte as the acting director of national intelligence. That was not a difficult case to make, but it didn’t question whether we should even have an Office of National Intelligence. The answer to that particular issue requires an understanding of why the intelligence failure of 9/11 took place and why the many investigations of the failure came up with the wrong answers.” (06/16/26)
The Trump administration is boasting about pending plans to conclude its war with Iran, having achieved none of the original objectives laid out by President Donald Trump. … If the deal is signed on this week, it will mark a return to the status quo antebellum when the Strait of Hormuz was open and no nuclear deal with Iran was in place. Aside from killing top regime leaders, thousands of civilians — including more than 150, most of them children, on a strike on an elementary school — and damaging almost 149,000 civilian infrastructures, the United States has functionally achieved nothing. The same regime is in power and it maintains missile capabilities, still has a navy, and still supports regional proxies.” (06/15/26)
“ITt’s a curious time to be watching the far right. In days gone by, the far-right milieu produced intellectuals of the caliber of Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger. These intense critics of liberalism argued that the inauthentic nullity brought about by liberal metaphysics could only end in civilizational collapse. By contrast, the best that today’s far-right provocateurs seem to be able to muster is tirelessly repeating how casting black and gay people in Disney remakes can only end in civilizational collapse. Historically, the far right has been described as the ideological playground of the ‘lesser intelligentsia.’ Today’s far right seems determined to prove that their standards can be lower still—or even that their standards can be broken faster than they can be lowered.” (06/16/26)
“I have been talking for years now about the death of cable, which has functionally arrived even if the cable networks don’t quite know it yet. The Pew Research Center estimates that cable and satellite TV households were down to only 36 percent of the population in 2025; that number was 85 percent just a decade earlier. Among viewers under 30, cable subscriptions are at 16 percent of households. Streaming represents nearly half of all viewing among all age groups. Cable is a dying medium, and it’s a matter of time before it’s no longer cost-efficient to maintain cable systems, and they are shut down. Charter Communications is trying to grow its way to survival with the acquisition of Cox, but even the biggest cable companies can’t outrun reality forever.” (06/16/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by K Lloyd Billingsley
“A California law requiring venture capital firms to report the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the companies they fund is being challenged in federal court, the California Globe reports. Attorneys for the Colorado-based 1517 Fund contend that the law is unconstitutional. Californians can make a case that the measure also violates the spirit of a state law the people approved in 1996.” (06/15/26)
