“Bill de Blasio appeared on NewsNation on June 2 and was asked to comment on Spencer Pratt’s campaign. De Blasio smugly described Pratt’s ads as ‘inappropriate’ and wondered, ‘Who is behind them?’ If de Blasio hadn’t actively participated in the decline of New York City during his disastrous eight years as its mayor, his arrogance might just be dismissed as unwarranted and clueless. But de Blasio is part of a machine that profits from urban decline. Behind his arrogance is a grasping, cynical hypocrite delighted that the machine on the West Coast is as potent as the one that elevated his own mayoral tenure and now supports Zohran Mamdani. And so way out west, the machine has struck again.” (06/10/26)
“While teaching and conducting research can be wonderful experiences, working conditions in higher education have become increasingly horrible. In the United States, massive state disinvestment coinciding with 50 years of neoliberalism has resulted in both soaring tuition costs for students and large-scale budget cuts to universities. As a result, faculty teaching loads have increased while wages have stagnated. Meanwhile, university administrators across the country have replaced full-time and permanent faculty with insecure, part-time positions, and rarely replaced faculty who retired or moved. Whereas in the 1970s, more than half of U.S. faculty were tenured or on the tenure-track, today that figure stands at just over one quarter. Students suffer because their professors have far less availability and are far more stressed. Faculty are forced to hustle, often taking on additional jobs, and are left with less time for teaching and research, thereby undermining the mission of universities.” (06/09/26)
“Whatever one’s opinion on President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that carried him to office, it’s impossible to deny that they have transformed the United States. The simple description of what’s driving that change, says senior defense analyst Brynn Tannehill, is ‘fascism.’ But as she elaborates, three psychological concepts are underpinning that autocratic impulse: social dominance orientation, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and Bonhoeffer’s Theory of Stupidity.” (06/09/26)
“Researchers of President Kennedy’s assassination have long been familiar with an FBI memorandum dated Nov. 29, 1963, referring to ‘Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.’ … the CIA faced a barrage of questions concerning Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush’s history with the Agency. The Republican National Convention, at which Bush (nicknamed ‘Poppy’) would receive his party’s nomination for president, was less than a month away. Having once served as a U.S. congressman and ambassador to the United Nations, Bush had also briefly held the directorship of the CIA. Had the GOP nominee concealed not only a longer professional affiliation with the Agency but a link to the murder of a Democratic predecessor 25 years earlier as well? Now, a witness from the night of Nov. 23, 1963, also mentioned in the FBI memorandum, has contacted the Mary Ferrell Foundation (MFF) to try to lend clarity to the mystery with a signed statement.” (06/09/26)
“‘This event would never have happened with the Militarily Top Secret Ballroom currently under construction at the White House,’ US president Donald Trump claimed the day after an armed would-be assassin attempted to charge through a security barricade at the Washington Hilton. ‘“It cannot be built fast enough!’ US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) agreed: ‘America has a problem. That problem is, it is very difficult to have a bunch of important people in the same place unless it is really, really secure.’ … Trump clearly didn’t believe his own claims concerning presidential security, or he wouldn’t have decided to catch 40 winks in front of thousands of angry basketball fans.” (06/09/26)
“Not since the notorious 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) provided for indefinite detention of American citizens, has the annual funding bill been as misused as this year. Embedded in the bill is an insult to every American who values our national sovereignty. The NDAA’s Section 224, the ‘United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative,’ would ‘integrate’ the Israeli military with our own, fusing technology, production, intelligence-sharing, and more. … It is hard to think of a more ‘America last’ position than handing the keys to the Pentagon (and our intelligence community) to a foreign country.” (06/09/26)
“For those of us who like to think literacy is a form of liberation, there’s a troubling counterpoint: Mein Kampf. Adolf Hitler wasn’t interested in people thinking for themselves; he insisted they think like him. Propaganda, he recognized, is an assault on reflection: avoid abstraction, parrot slogans, abandon objectivity, and scapegoat your enemies. In forms like Mein Kampf, books contributed to the poison. But for the German theologian and anti-Nazi conspirator Dietrich Bonhoeffer, they could also serve as an antidote.” (06/09/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Ely Valentino Binet Batista
“There are two types of human beings in this world: those who wait for someone to tell them what to do, and those who build structures that force the world to move at their rhythm. Modern state-monopolized education is engineered exclusively for the former. The contemporary school system operates as a direct administrative descendant of the nineteenth-century Prussian factory model.” (06/09/26)
“The famed historian Gordon S. Wood died on Sunday, struck by a car in a parking lot at the age of 92. He was his generation’s foremost scholar of the American Revolution and the early Republic, and for decades he pressed a single argument with alacrity. The argument was this: the American Revolution was the most radical event in American history, and the men who made it neither intended nor controlled the radicalism they unleashed.” (06/09/26)
“This week, the nation watched as California grappled again with the ordinarily straightforward task of counting votes in an election. While large states such as Florida declare election winners within 24 hours, California may take up to two weeks to count all the votes. Even Los Angeles cannot count its votes in the time of large states despite giving the Clerk an annual budget of $336 million and a $448,179 a year salary with the help of 1,100 budgeted positions. In most states, voters would be outraged by the incompetence, waste and inefficiency. However, in the Golden State, voters shrug, as if they can demand no more from their elected officials than subpar performance. Call it the Politics of Low Expectations, and California is the model for the nation.” (06/09/26)
