Source: Reason
by Emma Camp

“As the decline in religious attendance has slowed, the past few years have also seen a clear rise in the status of religion. It’s becoming more and more socially acceptable to be religious in elite intellectual spaces — something that could have a real impact on how religion is perceived by everyone else. This is a big change from the past few decades, in which internet ‘new atheism’ effectively framed religion, Christianity in particular, as fundamentally anti-intellectual and subtly low-class. … Today, one can belong to the ideas-making class — an aspiring public intellectual or artist — and still be religious, so long as one steers clear of evangelical kitsch.” (08/06/25)

https://reason.com/2025/08/06/how-the-elite-changed-its-mind-on-christianity/

Source: Town Hall
by Byron York

“You’ve seen reports about the unpopularity of the Democratic Party these days — stories with headlines like ‘Democrats Get Lowest Rating From Voters in 35 Years’. It’s true: Large numbers of voters disapprove of the party and, even though they don’t love Republicans either, trust the GOP more to handle many basic issues. On the other hand, some elements of the Democratic Party are filled with passionate intensity. We’re seeing two examples of that now. The first is in Texas. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session of the legislature this summer to deal with the question of redistricting, which is, of course, always a contentious topic. … Rather than deal with a defeat on redistricting, which would result in more Republican congressional seats, Democrats in the Texas House decided to flee the state to block a vote.” (08/06/25)

https://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2025/08/06/columnistsbyronyork20250805on-the-democratic-protests-in-texas-and-nebraska-n2661456

Source: The Realist Review
by Steven Starr

“Russia has announced that it will no longer adhere to the terms of the INF Treaty, which Trump, at the urging of his neoconservative National Security Adviser John Bolton, withdrew from in 2019. Russia will now answer any Western deployment of missiles — including land, sea, and air systems — with a tit-for-tat deployments. This includes the deployment of medium range nuclear-armed missiles in Europe.” (08/06/25)

https://therealistreview.substack.com/p/russia-exits-inf-arms-race-looms

Source: Common Dreams
by Ann Wright

“As this is the commemoration of horrific deaths and wounding of hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago in 1945, as an American citizen, I offer my profound apologies to the families of those killed in Japan — Japanese, Koreans, and other nationalities including the U.S. prisoners of war who were there. And to Marshallese and U.S. ‘downwinders’ who suffered from U.S. testing of atomic and nuclear weapons, for the criminal actions of my government in using these weapons of mass destruction. I also apologize to the Vietnamese delegation at the conference for the U.S. dropping millions of gallons of Agent Orange and leaving tons of unexploded ordnance in Vietnam. The knowledge that the horrific weapons would be used to kill and maim innocent civilians as a strategy to end the war was brutal, reckless, and without any sense of humanity.” (08/06/25)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/nuclear-free-world

Source: The Daily Economy
by Julian Adorney

“Censorship is a tool that the powerful use to keep the little guy down. And in a republic in which power regularly changes hands, any new censoring tools that we give to our political allies will invariably be wielded by our political opponents. As [Greg] Lukianoff writes: ‘A good intellectual exercise before passing a new law is to consider how your worst enemy would use that law — and thinking about that is even more important when imagining restrictions on free speech.'” (08/06/25)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-war-on-words-is-essential-reading-for-our-political-moment/