“Regular readers may note that I am rather deeply haunted by a paragraph written almost exactly a decade ago by the late, great Angelo Codevilla. It was, perhaps, his most important warning to us, and it remains one of the few political predictions ever made that keeps me awake at night. In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, after watching the way the entire ruling class had mobilized to deride Donald Trump and to ensure his defeat, Codevilla penned an essay titled After the Republic, in which he forewarned: We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation.” (07/13/26)
“Despite regularly denouncing the rising socialist menace, President Trump has been pursuing a policy arguably just as, if not more, dangerous to liberty and prosperity as anything proposed by Zohran Mamdani or Bernie Sanders: using government funds to purchase partial ownership of private companies. The Trump administration has obtained ownership interests of approximately 27 billion dollars in 30 companies since January of 2025. While President Trump and his defenders claim making these ‘investments’ will benefit the American people, the truth is this policy will harm most Americans.” (07/13/26)
“He alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to stop Donald Trump, especially after January 6. He chose not to. That’s what we must remember today.” (07/13/26)
“Daymon Johnson has been fighting to speak freely. A professor at Bakersfield College, a community college in California, Johnson has for years been bucking a mandate that he parrot the state’s ‘DEI’ and ‘anti-racist’ ideology — well, DEIA now: ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ — lest he face disciplinary action or receive the boot. Community colleges, remember, are creations of the state, and Professor Johnson was being forced, by state directive, to mouth specific bureaucratic verbiage as if he were a mere functionary under a central planning board. … this imperfect ruling paves the way for further vindications.” (07/13/26)
“I spend my days reading growth curves. A pension fund’s unfunded liability, a private equity fund’s internal rate of return, a hedge fund’s drawdown. You learn to read a line on a chart the way a doctor reads one on a different kind of monitor. Most political organizations produce a flat line for decades, a small bump around an election, then flat again. The Democratic Socialists of America just produced a line that would get flagged in any diligence memo I’ve written in 30 years. An organization with 6,000 members in 2015 crossed 100,000 in February 2026, and by this July had passed the old high-water mark for American socialism: the roughly 113,000 members the Socialist Party of America claimed at its 1912 peak under Eugene Debs. DSA now calls itself, correctly, the largest socialist organization in American history.” (07/13/26)
“There is a small alcove at the back of most chemist shops these days, usually curtained off, where a pharmacist jabs your arm with a flu vaccine or a Covid booster while you sit with your sleeve rolled up. It is, in its modest way, one of the great quiet successes of British healthcare over the last decade. Nobody voted for it, nobody legislated it into being with a grand ten-year plan, and yet it works. It exists because Boots and Superdrug and the local independents worked out that people would pay a small sum for convenience, speed, and the absence of a three-week wait. I propose that we should extend this principle, and put a doctor in there as well.” (07/13/26)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“Everyone’s talking about how progressive Democrat Graham Platner has been forced to drop out of his Senate race following allegations of sexual assault. Personally I never paid attention to Platner’s campaign, because I long ago stopped taking Democrats seriously. The first clue that Platner was a shitty person wasn’t his military service or his Blackwater stint or his tattoo or the sexual assault stuff, it was that he ran for high office in the US government under one of America’s two mainstream parties. That’s damning in and of itself. I said this on Twitter today and some DSA guy told me the best way to make changes in US politics is to work within the Democratic Party to elect left-wing candidates and advance progressive agendas.” (07/10/26)
“President Trump told his followers he would ‘drain the swamp.’ Instead, he became the biggest swamp monster ever. He has obliterated the line between public service and personal enrichment. Trump’s recent financial disclosures revealed that he made $2.2 billion in the year since he returned to office. That is a breathtaking figure. It is more than 20 times the annual budget of the city of Ithaca, N.Y., where I served as mayor for 10 years. In other words, Trump raked in, on average, more than $6 million a day, seven days a week.” (07/13/26)
“What’s the best thing about wokeness? Simple: Holding people in the past to universal moral standards. History is packed with mass murder, slavery, and other atrocities, often committed by famous beloved figures like Columbus and the American Founding Fathers. When confronted with these harsh realities, most thinkers try to weasel out with a variation on, ‘It was a very different time.’ The woke, on the other hand, want to not only teach kids about mass murder and slavery, but tear down the statues of mass murderers and slavers. Which is the rational position. … Sadly, wokeness aggressively refuses to universalize its own universalism. If we should hold people in the past to universal moral standards, we should also hold people in the present to universal moral standards, not credulously accept lame, lawyerly excuses like, ‘In their culture, this is normal’ or ‘Given their life story, we mustn’t blame them.'” (07/13/26)
