Source: Common Dreams
by Roger D Harris & John Perry
“Donald Trump’s second term has precipitated a tsunami of criticism from Democrats over his foreign policy. Yet when it comes to Washington’s efforts to dominate Latin America and the Caribbean, the substantive dispute (if there is any substance remaining, once stripped of partisan bickering) is less about ends than means. Beneath the rhetoric of inter-party conflict lies a broad bipartisan consensus in favor of promoting US hemispheric hegemony and crushing governments that resist it, with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua at the forefront. While Democrats frequently portray Trump as reckless, they generally accept the underlying premises of economic coercion, political intervention, and regime-change pressure. Their objections mainly focus on the execution of policy rather than its legitimacy. Under Democratic administrations, the US forged and institutionalized what may be its most effective instrument of hegemony.” (06/18/26)
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Joseph Solis-Mullen
“In recent years, critics on both sides of the aisle have taken aim at the longstanding policy of strategic ambiguity toward Taiwan. They argue that Washington should abandon ambiguity and embrace ‘strategic clarity,’ explicitly pledging to fight China over Taiwan. Others, such as Hoover Institute Fellow Eyck Freymann, have offered more sophisticated sounding alternatives like ‘structured ambiguity,’ attempting to codify precisely what America would and would not do in various contingencies, particularly involving gray zone activities. But abandoning a long-established policy that, whatever its faults, has prevented a major war between great powers for over half a century, in favor of a new policy, would be a serious mistake.” (06/18/26)
“In 1917, three children in Fatima, Portugal claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. They promised she would perform a miracle on a certain day in October. Nearly 100,000 pilgrims arrived, hoping to see whatever happened, and nearly all report that the sun turned pale, changed color, and spun around. Many other writers have investigated the children and their visions, but I was fixated on this sun miracle. … One of the first things I found was that there were many other sun miracles – at least ten! – similar to Fatima.” (06/18/26)
“‘I’m the boss,’ President Trump joked when he arrived a bit late to a meeting with G7 leaders in France Wednesday. He is. That’s what his detractors forget. America is ‘the boss’ again, the colossus. Iran doesn’t bully us. Israel doesn’t instruct us. Europe can sneer at Donald Trump all it likes, but it’s a supplicant. China respects us. Canada bows. Trump understands power, and it rests easy on his shoulders. He joked about it at the G7 in his relaxed American fashion, and European leaders now get it. They laughed along, but they understood. By the time he had emerged from a glittering dinner at Versailles to fly home, he had signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Iran that has the great and the good worked up into a symphony of hysterical catastrophizing.” [editor’s note: It’s sometimes hard to discern what percentages of Devine’s brain are “clueless” vs. “crazy,” but the total of other percentages is zero – TLK] (06/17/26)
“Why do families need school choice? The answer is straightforward — a single, zip-code-assigned school cannot possibly be everything to every child. And when a school fails a student, that student needs a lifeline. A recent iteration of EdChoice’s long-running Public Opinion Tracker survey shows that roughly one in four parents indicate that they have had to switch their children’s school at some point. When you dig into why these families are switching, the reasons are straightforward. Parents pull their children out of schools because of unfortunate, everyday problems that directly impact a child’s well-being and future.” (06/17/26)
Source: The UnPopulist
by Andy Craig & Shikha Dalmia
“Trump’s authoritarian assault has decimated our institutions that ‘kitchen table’ issues won’t fix.” [editor’s note: The analogy to post-Civil-War “Reconstruction” sucks. The first time around, its whole point was to rebuild a bad former system minus only one bad feature (slavery), and the emergence of Jim Crow afterward marked even that subtraction at least partly a failure. Trying to “reconstruct” a crappy pre-Trump politics is a terrible idea, and the only good thing about it is that it won’t work either – TLK] (06/17/26)
“Through her detailed reporting on lynching after the Civil War, Wells did more than most to demonstrate the power of using one’s voice in the pursuit of truth and justice.” (06/17/26)
