“I’m sorry, folks. I really, truly wish I could be an optimist. I wish I could write positive articles, telling us that America’s golden days are yet to come, that a bright and shining tomorrow awaits our nation, and the reasons are A, B, C, X, Y, Z. I sincerely wish I could do that. But I’m a historian, and as much as that, a student of the Bible. I have degrees in both subjects, have taught both for literally half a century, and have written thousands of articles in each field. I confess, such tends to make me cynical. But maybe, just maybe, America’s best days do still lie ahead of her; I’m a historian, not a prophet. Yet, to be perfectly honest with you, I don’t have a lot of hope, and history is the reason why.” (06/06/26)
“The next time you sign a mortgage, finance a car, or open a credit-card statement and wonder why the number keeps creeping upward, here is your answer: you are paying a tax that no one in Washington had the nerve to call a tax. Here is how the bill reaches you: the bond market — the millions of investors who lend the federal government its money — is getting nervous about lending to a government this deep in the red. When they get nervous, they demand higher interest, and the yield on the 10-year Treasury note climbs. That single number quietly sets what you pay on your mortgage, your auto loan, and your credit card. You never saw a ballot. You never got a vote. But the borrowing gets charged to your account all the same.” (06/05/26)
“The corporate press has a new obsession, the so-called K-shaped economy. This metaphor is meant to describe a system in which one group of people, represented by the top, inclining line of the K, watches their fortunes rise as the other group’s fortunes fall. The idea is that Americans who are already doing well financially are doing better, while conditions worsen for those already struggling to make ends meet. The problem is that when we use this letter K shorthand, we lose almost all of the information that’s important to analyzing the broader problem, and we therefore help an extremely concentrated ruling class hide the truth of what has happened.” (06/05/26)
“The International Energy Agency has made its May report free to download, and the news is not good for the second and third quarters of this year, i.e. April-September. The IEA hopes things will look up in the fourth quarter, but premises that expectation on an early end to the US conflict with Iran and a reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. At the moment (June 5, 2026), there does not seem much movement on that front, and in fact the US and Iran are not only skirmishing with one another but Iran is making good its threat to hurt US allies like Bahrain and Kuwait every time the US hurts Iran. One was killed and dozens injured in Kuwait on Wednesday by Iranian Shahed drone barrages that also damaged the airport. Kuwait Airlines shut down briefly but is now flying from a different terminal; it is the only carrier flying from Kuwait.” (06/05/26)
“If Zohran Mamdani intended to come across as an Ayn Rand villain when he pledged to ‘“replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,’ he succeeded. Unfortunately, socialism continues to appeal to young people on the left, as both parties jettison free market principles. If there is one author who has inspired young people to think differently about these big ideas, it is Ayn Rand, who is remembered as the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. While the philosophical system she created, Objectivism, remains at the fringe of culture and academia, her moral defence of capitalism has inspired figures such as former Speaker Paul Ryan and former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. Yet one of her lesser-known books, We the Living, deserves more attention than it gets.” (06/05/26)
“Man, Nietzsche wrote, is ‘the unfinished animal.’ He meant that nature goes only so far in shaping human beings. We become who we are through the distinctively human capacity to produce and understand speech. That’s why Aristotle called us the animal that possesses logos, whose meanings include everything from word to speech, thought to reason, order to logic, proportion to account. This extraordinary semantic richness tries to capture the manifold articulate intelligence that makes us human — an intelligence that, in the first instance, answers to the nature and shape of things as they present themselves to our minds. But today, logos — and therefore our humanity — is under intellectual, political, technological attack. It’s not that people have stopped talking. Rather, the difference between speech and what Aristotle called ‘voice’ (phōnē) — the verbal expression not of reason, thought, and judgment, but emotion — is rapidly being effaced.” (06/05/26)
“Private property enables individuals to pursue happiness through their own free choices. It also shields our individual and institutional projects from arbitrary power.” (06/05/26)
“The Covid lockdowns may not have been remotely effective, but at least they harmed millions of people and created long-lasting negative impacts that we’re still dealing with today. That’s the conclusion of a massive new body of research into the nonsensical policies promoted by the public health ‘expert’ class, promoted by their media partners, and enacted by incompetent, cowardly politicians.” (06/05/26)
“Before George Floyd, before Michael Brown, there was Trayvon Martin. Back in 2012, the 17-year-old was shot and killed during a struggle with another young man in a Florida gated community. The tragedy that day was discussed in the national media and eventually adjudicated in a court of law. When the trial was over, President Barack Obama said, ‘When Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son.’ In December, an 18-year-old college student was stabbed by another young man in Southampton, England. The victim’s name was Henry Nowak. The American press ignored the story. The British press and politicians largely did too. Like Obama, I thought, this could have been my son.” (06/06/26)
“Of course, Weiss understands perfectly well the moment we’re in. She knows she wasn’t put in charge of CBS News because of her skeptical nature or keen journalistic eye. She was put in charge because she has shown that she can leverage a carefully crafted image as an iconoclast and teller of truths to launder MAGA propaganda so that it’s more palatable to centrists. She was put in charge because the Ellisons need Trump’s blessing for their mega merger – and if ever there was a favor tailor-made to win Trump’s approval, it’s kneecapping a major news network and toppling one of the last remaining pillars of broadcast journalism in the process. Weiss has positioned herself and her publications as bold disruptors, then leveraged that image to legitimize some of Trump’s worst rhetoric and policies. And few issues better demonstrate that pattern than immigration.” (06/05/26)
