If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
People Worldwide More Satisfied With Their Freedom in Life: More than four in five adults globally are satisfied with freedom to choose what to do with their lives (Benedict Vigers, Gallup)
Globally, more people are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives than were satisfied two decades ago, with gains driven largely by countries where those satisfied with this freedom were once in the minority.
Erdogan and Putin, the End of an Unlikely Partnership (Gonul Tol, 6/07/26, NY Times)
Ukraine has already been capitalizing on the Iran war by cultivating closer military ties with Gulf states. When Iran attacked neighboring countries with Shahed-136 kamikazes, the same drones that Russia has used in Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky quickly sought to leverage Ukraine’s experience, dispatching air defense teams to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Turkey, which has strong military ties with the Gulf, sees Ukraine’s growing role as a complement to Ankara’s relationships that will allow it to expand what it’s offering. For Russia, which has spent years developing closer economic and security ties with Gulf monarchies, the shift is yet another setback. [….]It’s clear that Ankara is no longer balancing between Moscow and NATO and is tilting the field against Mr. Putin. Russia’s decline has given Turkey, after a decade of deference to Moscow, the freedom to pursue its interests. Ukraine is the beneficiary.
Why the West Needs the American Founding: The Founding shows that the West’s deepest traditions can be reconciled and made to sustain a free society. (Samuel Gregg, June 1, 2026, American Spectator)
What unites parts of the American left and segments of the American right is skepticism about the American Founding. Many on the left seem unable to think about the Founding, save in terms of race and class. Some American conservative commentators regard the Founding as part of the broader eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement that, in their view, is directly responsible for many of America’s contemporary woes.
These pressures, however, make it more urgent than ever for those who care about Western civilization, and who want to save it from being buried under a wave of bureaucracy, technocracy, quasi-authoritarianism, and endless professions of guilt, to remind both elite and popular audiences of the power of the American Founding to serve as a model for what that civilization is ultimately about.
By “the Founding,” I mean not only specific documents like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, or even some of the powerful personalities of the period. These are all important reference points and will surely remain so. Instead, I have primarily in mind the specific combination of ideas that animated the period in which there was an effort to establish a republican form of government that upheld and promoted certain principles which have deep roots in the broader and deeper cultural patrimony of the West. If this admixture of ideas can be maintained and even magnified in the United States, I think we can have some confidence in its ability to animate other parts of the West.
What, then, is the nature of this set of ideas that characterized the Founding? Broadly speaking, it amounts to a mixture of the thought of Greece and Rome, the religions of Judaism and Christianity, the heritage of England and its institutional expressions of liberty, and the various Enlightenment movements that assumed prominence in the eighteenth century. In America’s case, we are really referring to the “moderate Enlightenment” associated with minds like Adam Smith and Montesquieu. All these things came together to different degrees and in varying ways to shape the principles and emphases of the American Revolution and the constitutional framework that, in fits and starts, gradually formed in the revolution’s wake.
John Adams and the Structures of Liberty (Aaron Walayat, 6/01/26, Public Discourse)
Despite his advocacy for American independence, Adams remained an admirer of British constitutionalism, and the structures he recommended appear to mirror features of the British model. John Adams’s relationship with the British constitution has led to several different assessments from various commentators, including from his own contemporaries.
The recommendations that Adams made in Thoughts should be familiar to us. Adams recommended a bicameral legislature, with an executive who could exercise a veto power over the legislature as a check. He also recommended annual elections as a way to maintain popular participation. Adams contrasted this with his recommendations for an independent judiciary, consisting of learned jurists rather than laymen, who should receive lifetime appointments and have their salaries set by law. These basic structures remain influential and resemble the current model of government of the U.S. and many state constitutions.
Additionally, though Thoughts was not written specifically to debunk or critique Common Sense, it is apparent that Adams was wary of Paine’s influence. In fact, Adams devotes an entire section to criticizing unicameralism, arguing that unicameral legislatures are prone to individual vices, avarice, ambition, and a lack of expertise to exercise executive or judicial powers. He was concerned that such a system would create self-serving laws.
The Democrats’ Big Decision: Black Representation or More Blue Seats? (Clyde McGrady, June 4, 2026, NY Times)
But the next act in the drama over Black representation will be driven in part by Democratic leaders, some of them Black, who face a difficult decision. Do they preserve the majority-Black, overwhelmingly Democratic districts in blue states like New York, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey? Or do they maximize Democratic representation in the House by diluting urban districts dominated by Black voters and expanding their boundaries into the suburbs. Doing the latter would allow them to target Republican House members in those states.
Those new districts would remain Democratic, though less so, but they may no longer be majority-Black. So Black voters could lose power in two ways — by losing the number of districts they dominate and by losing the number of Black voices in Congress.
Did President Obama only speak for Black Americans?
REVIEW: of Allen Buchanan, Political Tribalism: How It Hijacks Our Minds and Diminishes Our Humanity (Alexander Motchoulski, 2026.06.2, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)
Morally, tribalistic ideologies impede individuals’ moral reasoning primarily by representing politics as a zero-sum struggle of life and death on which one’s existence and identity depend (52-53). By representing politics as a condition of high-stakes group conflict, such ideologies are supposed to motivate transgression of what would otherwise be seen as moral norms in one’s behavior toward those that one views as Other.
Cognitively, tribalistic ideologies undermine our ability to reason about and with persons perceived as Other because such ideologies represent the other in terms of rigid stereotypes which obscure differences among persons falling within that category (36-37), impede one’s ability to take the perspective of persons deemed Other (45-47), and impede uptake of testimony from persons regarded as Other (80-81). Tribalistic ideologies’ effects on our moral reasoning compound with those cognitive effects, transforming what should be truth-seeking discourse into interactions aimed at defensive scorekeeping against opposition criticism (rather than fair consideration of and response to such criticism) and exercises in signaling one’s group affiliation and sorting one’s interactions to take place with one’s group (62-5).
Tribalism, then, is that way of thinking and feeling, of seeing and desiring and reacting, that is the driving force behind the antagonism observed in contemporary politics.
Anti-Woke, or Just Wounded? A Typology of Two Types of Anti-Woke Intellectuals (Scott Barry Kaufman, June 1, 2026, Skeptic)
When we hear “narcissism,” we picture the grandiose type: the swaggering, self-promoting, attention-hungry performer. But in a study with Joshua Miller, W. Keith Campbell, and Brandon Weiss, my colleagues and I mapped how narcissism actually breaks apart into different faces. There’s grandiose narcissism: antagonistic, dominant, status-seeking. And there’s vulnerable narcissism: neurotic, hypersensitive, easily wounded, perpetually aggrieved, convinced the world has failed to grant the recognition it owes. The antagonism is the thread the two share.
Both feed the second anti-woke intellectual, but in different ways. Grandiose narcissism builds the brand: the crusader who discovers that being The Person Who Fights This Thing brings a following, a revenue stream, a standing ovation, and who needs the enemy to stay enormous because the enemy is now load-bearing for the self. Vulnerable narcissismsupplies the wound: the person who was genuinely humiliated—fired, mobbed, exiled, betrayed—and for whom the critique is no longer about the world at all but about settling a score that never closes. A real injury becomes a permanent organizing principle. The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.
And when this goes collective, it gets its own engine. The work of Agnieszka Golec de Zavala on collective narcissism describes groups built around the belief that we are exceptional, that we are not sufficiently recognized, and shows that such groups reliably turn hostile toward whoever they cast as the threat to the in-group’s image. An anti-woke movement organized around shared grievance, rather than shared inquiry, will behave exactly this way: ever-vigilant, ever-aggrieved, retaliating against perceived insults to its own greatness. The truth-seeking recedes; the score-settling takes over.
That’s the distinction I’d draw, and I’d put it as a question anyone in this fight can ask themselves: Am I doing this to make society better, or to repair a narcissistic injury? The two can look identical from the outside. They have very different effects on the world.
And here is the part I find mega-ironic: the second camp talks, almost without exception, from a place of pure victim mindset. The very thing they are most likely to mock in their opponents (the grievance gang, the victimhood culture, the perpetual woundedness group, the “everyone is out to get us” cohort) is the thing they have most thoroughly become. Their accusation becomes a mirror of themselves.
This is the root of the Right’s obsession with manliness: they lack iot.
Thanks largely to robots, Ukraine is now talking about winning, not just surviving: Uncrewed and autonomous systems—and the willingness to adapt to them—have neutered Russian advantages. (Patrick Tucker | June 2, 2026, Defense One)
A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory.
This isn’t yet captured in headlines—for example, about last weekend’s barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine—but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted.
Several long-term trends have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, and the core reason is its fierce focus on AI and robotics.
In the crucible of war, Ukraine has developed drones and ground robots that can hold territory—even take it back.
Waiting in Darkness: The U.S. fuel blockade against Cuba (Joy Gordon, April 27, 2026, Commonweal)
Violence is easily recognized when it takes the form of bullets or bombs. The causality is indisputable, the human impact immediately visible. But economic violence works very differently. Deprivation does not kill or maim directly. Rather, it creates the conditions that bring suffering and hardship. When these are severe, infant and child mortality rates increase, illnesses and injuries are more likely to be fatal, and life expectancy decreases. We know that sanctions may have all those results. Unilateral sanctions, which the United States has imposed on numerous countries and thousands of individuals, have a massive impact on mortality, causing more than five hundred thousand deaths every year.
Folks don’t care to acknowledge that W ended the Iraq War, rather than starting it. Regime change makes ending sanctions acceptable.
Taiwan’s more relaxed than most of us about Trumpian deal-making (Bill Emmott, May 31, 2026, Asia Times)
So it is worth asking why Taiwan itself seems comparatively relaxed about the potential implications of the Trump-Xi summits. This may help us separate the noise that inevitably surrounds these summits from the true strategic signals that both sides are conveying.
One reason why Taiwan is less concerned than others is a simple one: it has had to learn to live with its geopolitically anomalous status for nearly 80 years now. If it got nervous every time the Chinese and American leaders talked, even ones like Xi and Trump, it would soon have a nervous breakdown.
Moreover, while certainly the People’s Republic of China has become vastly stronger in economic, military and political terms, especially over the past two decades, so has Taiwan. The Taiwanese know that they could not defeat China in a head-on conflict but they also know that they are strong enough to impose huge costs and pose high risks for China.Ukraine’s success in resisting Russia’s invasion since February 2022 serves as an inspiration for Taiwan but most of all as a warning to China.
What matters to Taiwan is that it can keep on strengthening its defenses sufficiently to help deter an invasion.
Taiwan actually could win a head on conflict.