Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“Perhaps fearful of abandonment, or of being treated as a mere ‘bargaining chip’ in negotiations with Beijing, Taiwan has worked diligently to ingratiate itself with President Donald Trump’s inner circle. Just last month, Taipei hired Checkmate Government Relations, a firm whose founder, Ches McDowell, enjoys close ties to Donald Trump Jr. and access to the president himself. The six-month contract is worth roughly $300,000. The move follows Taiwan’s 2025 decision to retain Ballard Partners, another well-connected Washington firm led by prominent Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard. Yet Taiwan’s influence operation is hardly confined to one party.” (06/15/26)
“Many people have compared our current era to the Gilded Age. But that analogy is deeply unfair to the Gilded Age. Like the robber barons of yore, today’s oligarchs are immensely wealthy — even wealthier, relative to the economy as a whole, than their predecessors. And extreme wealth corrupts our democracy. But the corruption is deeper and more destructive now than it was then: The mitigating factors that once put some brakes on the harm done by excessive wealth concentration are now mostly gone.” (06/15/26)
“When a resurfaced clip of Joe Biden’s 1989 speech went viral in December 2025, it created an awkward moment for Democrats attacking President Donald Trump’s military campaign against alleged drug boats. In that speech, delivered as the official Democratic Party response to President George H.W. Bush’s address on the crack cocaine epidemic, then-Senator Biden declared with unmistakable clarity what he wanted the United States to do. … That 1989 rhetoric now reads like a blueprint for exactly what the Trump administration has done since September 2025, when U.S. forces began destroying vessels that the Pentagon claims are operated by cartel-linked organizations—starting in the Caribbean off Venezuela and expanding to the eastern Pacific in October.” (06/15/26)
“The following is a statement released in response to news of an interim agreement between the US and Iran for a ceasefire in the war started by the US and Israel on February 28, 2026. With news of a ceasefire agreement to end the disastrous and unnecessary US-Israeli war on Iran, the tragic failure of Donald Trump’s Iran policy has now played out exactly as anti-war critics warned it would. Trump said that his war on Iran would be quick, decisive and force the regime to totally capitulate or collapse. We warned it would become a quagmire that would fail to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program, ignite a regional conflict that could threaten the global economy, further strengthen the Iranian regime’s hold on power and cost thousands of lives — including American servicemembers. We were right.” (06/15/26)
“For centuries, some of the most prominent advocates of socialism have spent their lives condemning the accumulation of wealth while privately amassing fortunes of their own. In many cases, they have even used revolutionary rhetoric as a vehicle to gain power and extract wealth from productive sectors of society. From Karl Marx to Vladimir Lenin, from Fidel Castro to Hugo Chávez, many of these figures denounced private wealth and entrepreneurship, despite the fact that few, if any, lived according to the austere principles they publicly promoted. Instead, many enjoyed lives marked by privilege, luxury, and the very economic advantages they claimed to despise. This pattern is not confined to communist regimes. In the United States, self-described socialists have often criticized wealth accumulation — until they themselves became wealthy.” (06/15/26)
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey
“I think we all believe in secure elections that protect every eligible citizen’s vote. Florida has made some practical changes. Some people call these changes voter suppression, while others say they render our elections safer. In April, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the Florida SAVE Act. This law requires people registering to vote to prove their citizenship using REAL ID data. It also updates ID rules for in-person voting, requiring paper ballots to maintain a clear record, and increases penalties for violations, including those involving foreign interference.” (06/15/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Thiago VS Coelho
“Civilization does not usually fail because every participant is stupid, vicious, or indifferent. It fails because people are placed inside systems where the locally-prudent action sustains a globally-absurd result. ‘Moloch’ is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s name for these impersonal traps: arrangements in which nearly everyone would prefer a better world, but no individual can safely move there alone. The broad failures fall into three recurring types. First, the decisionmaker is not the beneficiary. A regulator, hospital administrator, licensing board, journal editor, or politician makes a rule whose costs are borne mainly by others. Second, there is asymmetric information. Someone knows the relevant fact, but cannot credibly transmit it through the institutional fog. Third, society is stuck in an inferior equilibrium: everyone responds rationally to the incentives in front of him, while the system as a whole remains inferior to another possible arrangement.” (06/15/26)
“If you touch one of the Democrats’ sacred cow nonprofits, they’ll start whining about how you’re attacking ‘civil society.’ But what if the sacred cow Democrats want to defend is actually a violent bull — one of the worst forces undermining civil society in America today? Democrats and their allies portray criticism of the Southern Poverty Law Center as a threat to civil society. That’s rather ironic. You see, the SPLC is an engine of the very fear and suspicion that are driving Americans apart. Conservatives increasingly fear that our opponents don’t just disagree, but actively despise us. The SPLC doesn’t just publish papers explaining why it thinks conservatives are wrong. No, this organization — which gained its reputation by suing the Ku Klux Klan into bankruptcy — puts its political opponents on a ‘hate map’ alongside Klan chapters, a map the SPLC says reveals the ‘infrastructure upholding white supremacy.'” (06/14/26)
“In my past two columns, I made the case for the Democratic Party to take the lead in pushing for Trump’s Impeachment. The majority of people favor firing Trump and the massive number of blatant, impeachable acts by the lawless, corrupt, violent, unstable, dangerous Tyrant Trump increases by the day. If it helps the passive Democratic Party leadership, constitutional law specialists agree that were the Founding Fathers (who signed the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution against would-be monarchs) here today, not one would oppose Impeachment.” (06/15/26)
