Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Chait

“In rejecting yesterday a redistricting plan backed by President Donald Trump, Indiana’s Republican-controlled senate did not merely deny Republicans two new U.S. House seats in next year’s midterm elections. They also engaged in a mass revolt against the president. … The significance of Indiana’s noncompliance lies not in the specifics of what was refused — attempts to gerrymander electoral maps are hardly unprecedented, even though a mid-decade battle violates norms — but in the act of refusal itself. Trump’s authoritarian project relies on the cultlike hold he has over his party. Republicans have come to understand that the cost of defying Trump is the death of their political career. … What politician is willing to sacrifice their career or their family’s safety for a single act of defiance Yet the spines of Indiana Republicans stiffened where so many others snapped.” (12/12/25)

https://archive.is/z1Rhg

Source: Common Dreams
by Angel Gomez

“As the USS Gerald R. Ford — the largest aircraft carrier afloat — casts its shadow along the Venezuelan coast, the United States must confront an uncomfortable question: What national interest is being protected by threatening a country that poses no military, territorial, or existential danger to the American republic? The answer, made clear by an array of respected American scholars, former officials, and ex-military insiders, has nothing to do with security. Instead, it arises from a familiar mixture of ideology, geopolitical control, and the old reflex of imperial overreach. This is not defense. This is theater — one part provocation, one part political opportunism, and no part necessity. Among the clearest voices cutting through the rhetoric is professor John Mearsheimer, perhaps the most prominent American realist in international relations. He does not mince words: Venezuela is not a threat to the United States.” (12/13/25)

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/against-intervention-venezuela

Source: Law & Liberty
by Gary Saul Morson

“A newly translated volume in Solzhenitsyn’s Red Wheel series illustrates how revolutionaries seized control of Russia.” (12/12/25)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/why-lenin-won/

Source: spiked
by Tom Slater

“How do you solve a problem like Nick Fuentes, the racist dateless wonder whose stratospheric online rise has tickled the Zoomer right, horrified the Boomer sensibles and – until now – left the rest of our news feeds blissfully unmolested? Once a fringe figure on the American right, this neo-fascist gnome has now become an unignorable topic in The Discourse. … Perhaps the barmiest claim made about Fuentes is that he is the next stage of the populist revolt – a take that serves to both flatter his ego and vindicate the fever dreams of the anti-populist set. … Nick Fuentes is only a clownish mirror image of everything that Americans have been rebelling against.” (12/23/25)

https://archive.is/Dd68U

Source: CounterPunch
by John G Russell

“Like the country he ‘leads,’ Donald J. Trump lives in a state of perpetual denial. Trump and his enablers like to present him as a hands-on president, a man at the top of his game, whether it’s on the golf course, in the Oval Office, or at televised cabinet briefings where sycophants pucker up and lather him with praise. … Yet when asked about the strike on boats in the Caribbean, Trump, the master of denial, ‘knows nothing.’ The pardon of former Honduran president and convicted cocaine kingpin Juan Orlando Hernández? ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.'” (12/12/25)

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/12/sgt-trump-the-art-of-implausible-deniability/