“Last week, Democrats came to Chicago to erect a cenotaph to their past. In the words of Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, they did not come to praise Obama as much as to bury him. They did so because they had already buried the party that nominated him twice. In Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory, he received the votes of 17 percent of conservatives. Just twelve years later, in 2024, Kamala Harris received nine percent of conservative voters. And of that nine percent, a good many were undoubtedly not voting for Harris but were ‘never Trumpers’ voting against Donald Trump. The point is: Obama once had a significant appeal to conservatives. That no longer holds for Democrats. The reason is that Democrats are not what they once were, or at least the moderates they were able to successfully pose as being..” (06/27/26)
“The first space is home. It is where our domestic identity lives. Family, rest, intimacy, and routine. The second space is work. It is where we contribute, produce, and create value. The third space exists in between. It is the neutral, shared place where people gather informally, without obligation or performance. Historically, these were cafés, churches, town squares, barber shops, libraries, local diners, pubs, and markets. Places where you could show up, be recognized, and belong without needing to achieve or prove anything.” (06/26/26)
“Historical illiteracy has become a real problem in our time. The downsides of this have become rather glaring lately, as for instance in Tucker Carlson’s 2024 interview with Daryl Cooper, whom Carlson called ‘the most honest popular historian in the United States.’ Cooper claimed that Americans’ understanding of WWII was deeply flawed and that the true villain was Winston Churchill. The fact that some young Americans found this message sympathetic is very troubling and speaks volumes about our failure to educate the young about history. I regularly tell my students that reading history is their best defense against disinformation.” (06/26/26)
Source: The American Prospect
by Naomi Bethune & Ryan Cooper
“Thursday was a decision day at the Supreme Court, and the American people got to enjoy the familiar experience of waiting on tenterhooks yet again to see which rights were going to be deleted this time. The answer was residency rights for hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants. The most important of Thursday’s decisions was also the worst one: Mullin v. Doe, which overturned a lower-court order barring the Trump regime from removing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of nonwhite refugees. For months now, Haitian and Syrian recipients of the TPS program have been in limbo, with their legal status being held up by fragile pauses in lower-court rulings.” [editor’s note: shrewd commentary or whining nonsense? You be the judge – SAT] (06/26/26)
“A few years ago, court packing was a fringe idea with no realistic prospects. President Biden’s commission on Supreme Court reform pointedly declined to endorse adding seats, and no realistic vote count could reach 51 in the Senate—not only for expansion itself, but for nuking the legislative filibuster to bring it to a vote at all. That is no longer the case.” (06/26/26)
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Joshua Mawhorter
“It is not uncommon for people to conflate victory and liberty with centralization and inflation. Even in the case of the American Revolution—which was relatively decentralized—many at the time, and others since, argued that monetary inflation, standing armies and a state-centric approach to war, consolidation under a centralized national government, direct taxation, and central banking were all necessary to achieve victory and independence. The not-too-subtle implication is that liberty depends on big government.” (06/26/26)
