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Category: Politics

White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted

White House report brands Smithsonian leadership as radical activists who can’t be trusted

The Associated Press reports: A White House report brands the leadership of the Smithsonian Institution, especially at the National Museum of American History, as radical activists who cannot be trusted, indicating that President Donald Trump may be preparing to install his own team. The report released late on Independence Day by the White House Domestic Policy Council comes in the midst of Trump’s aggressive campaign to overhaul some of Washington’s most sacred cultural and historic institutions. Trump in March revealed…

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‘Trump is cultural heroin,’ J.D. Vance once warned

‘Trump is cultural heroin,’ J.D. Vance once warned

Yesterday, Peter Wehner wrote: Ten years ago today, in the middle of the presidential campaign, an essay in The Atlantic set out to explain the appeal of Donald Trump. Its author traced that appeal to the social decline and cultural trauma he had known firsthand, in an impoverished childhood. The author, J. D. Vance, had only days earlier published Hillbilly Elegy, which went on to sell roughly 3 million copies and made him, almost overnight, the country’s designated interpreter of…

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Nearly a million investors lost a total of $3.8 billion on Trump’s crappy crypto coin

Nearly a million investors lost a total of $3.8 billion on Trump’s crappy crypto coin

The New York Times reports: An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad. Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion. The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a…

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One sleazy president called another to intervene on behalf of a classy goalscorer

One sleazy president called another to intervene on behalf of a classy goalscorer

The New York Times reports: President Trump called Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, on Wednesday and asked him to review the suspension of the United States’ top goal scorer in the World Cup, Folarin Balogun, after he was given a red card in the team’s match that night against Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to three people familiar with the conversation. On Sunday, FIFA reversed the suspension, announcing that Mr. Balogun would be eligible to play Monday against Belgium. The…

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Mamdani rebukes Trumpism with pro-immigrant speech for America’s 250th birthday

Mamdani rebukes Trumpism with pro-immigrant speech for America’s 250th birthday

The Guardian reports: New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, exalted the city’s legacy of immigrants on Friday in a historically laden, ideological counterpoint to a US semiquincentennial address that was expected later in the day from Donald Trump – who has sought to deport immigrants en masse throughout his second presidency. Speaking from behind a desk at New York’s city hall that belonged to the US’s first president, George Washington, and which itself is a century older than the Resolute desk…

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Kleptocracy is Trump’s most lucrative business venture

Kleptocracy is Trump’s most lucrative business venture

Timothy Noah writes: Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered…

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The children Elon Musk denies killing, have names and had lives cut short by the destruction of USAID

The children Elon Musk denies killing, have names and had lives cut short by the destruction of USAID

Nicholas Kristof writes: Elon Musk is newly minted as humanity’s first trillionaire, but the world’s richest man seems grumpy. And he definitely is not a fan of mine. “Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he announced on social media this week. I got on his nerves for pushing back at his claims that his demolition of the United States Agency for International Development last year did not cost lives. The fracas began after Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said…

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Technofascist Peter Thiel warns: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’

Technofascist Peter Thiel warns: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’

CNN reports: Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel delivered a series of provocative warnings and predictions about the future of artificial intelligence and the West on Tuesday, accusing Pope Leo XIV of inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” by calling for AI regulation. In his remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, he also warned of a “democratic-socialist takeover” of the United States’ Democratic Party. Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, was an early supporter of President Donald…

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Gasoline shortages in wartime Russia evoke memories of the Soviet Union

Gasoline shortages in wartime Russia evoke memories of the Soviet Union

The New York Times reports: Alyona Sadovnikova first experienced gasoline shortages in mid-June, when she pulled into a station and was told it was only serving customers who had ration coupons. “I was horrified: Are we in the Soviet Union now where you had to get coupons to buy sausage?” she said in a telephone interview. Just a few days later, Ms. Sadovnikova found herself waiting 18 hours to fill up in the city of Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, almost…

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Pluralism is a moral commitment: a virtue that we each have a responsibility to cultivate

Pluralism is a moral commitment: a virtue that we each have a responsibility to cultivate

Traditional dancers perform in front of the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth, celebrating the Buddhist festival of Esala Perahera, in Kandy, Sri Lanka, on Aug. 8, 2025. Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images By Eranda Jayawickreme, Wake Forest University I grew up in Sri Lanka. Much of my adolescence was spent in Kandy, a city built around a lake, set amid the lush tea plantations of the hill country. Its northern shore houses the Temple of the Tooth, one of…

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The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous

The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous

Media Matters for America reports: Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China. The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify…

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The many ways Trump is trying to tip the scales for the midterms

The many ways Trump is trying to tip the scales for the midterms

The New York Times reports: President Trump is trying to use the levers of the federal government, along with personal influence over state and local lawmakers, to reshape the rules governing the 2026 midterms and future elections in extraordinary ways. Many of these efforts have been blocked by courts, stymied by the Constitution or stopped in Congress. But the relentless assault by the president on the electoral process — both administratively and rhetorically — is likely to sow doubt and…

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‘The old politics are gone’: Steve Bannon on the democratic socialist wave

‘The old politics are gone’: Steve Bannon on the democratic socialist wave

Politico reports: Steve Bannon isn’t gloating about being right about politics’ ongoing transformation. He’s worried Republicans haven’t figured out how to respond. Last fall, the former White House chief strategist told POLITICO that Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win should be “flashing red lights” for the right, a warning Republicans flirted with and then waved off as mostly a New York story. Even after three Mamdani-backed candidates won Democratic primaries in the city last week, the argument still held: New York is…

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Israelis plotted to kill Iran’s top negotiators and derail peace talks, U.S. officials believe

Israelis plotted to kill Iran’s top negotiators and derail peace talks, U.S. officials believe

The New York Times reports: U.S. officials believed that Israel might have been plotting to kill Iran’s top negotiators while Washington was engaged with Tehran in delicate talks this spring to reach an interim peace deal, according to current and former American officials. Killing senior Iranian leaders had been part of Israel’s strategy from the start of the war. But American concerns about the targeting of two particular Iranian officials — Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf,…

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How Trump cheated the American people out of the nation’s 250th birthday

How Trump cheated the American people out of the nation’s 250th birthday

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump staged a hostile takeover of the US’s 250th anniversary celebration to enrich political allies, harvest voter data and promote Christian nationalist ideology, according to a congressional investigation released on Thursday. The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF). The document…

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Democratic socialists ride wave of momentum in primaries from New York to Colorado

Democratic socialists ride wave of momentum in primaries from New York to Colorado

The Guardian reports: Inside a Brooklyn industrial garage turned underground event venue, local leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America urged hundreds of mostly young people last month to avoid complacency. Sure, New York City had a socialist representative in the US Congress, and just elected a socialist mayor. But they had so much more to do. “If we only elect Zohran, we only elect AOC, our project will have been a failure,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the city’s DSA…

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