#neocon-talks

#neocon-talks

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo.

Jefferson's words on equality are often seen as self-evident, yet they fail to encompass enslaved individuals, women, and other marginalized groups, revealing a significant contradiction.

Hegseth's distinguishing characteristic on Fox was his fervent support for American service members who had been accused of war crimes, recalled Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters.

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental. Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn't just a design choice: it's a cultural signal.

Indeed, regional "divisions" - others might say "alarm" or "outrage" - had intensified during the fall of 2025 following the US's massive military build-up in the Caribbean, its air strikes against alleged drug boats - resulting in scores of extrajudicial killings - and the threats of a US attack on Venezuela.

And just like that we are no longer a nation divided by left and right, we are now a nation divided be those who want to fight wars for Israel and those who just want peace and to be able to afford their bills and health insurance.

Three of the four things that gave Trump a foothold, in my opinion, were failures in this century (the fourth is the legacy of slavery and the organized political violence that replaced it). The other three, though, are the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and social media. (COVID was the final catalyst, I think; having moved during the height of COVID, I can't express how much worse the US dealt with it than much of the EU.)

Buckley's campaign was successful in re-energizing the conservative base. As Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus commented to The American Conservative, '[TAC Co-Founder] Pat Buchanan told me that after Goldwater's defeat in 1964 and before Nixon's victory in 1968, "Bill Buckley was all we had. He was the biggest guy."'

On this week's episode of The David Frum Show, David opens with his reflections on the recent shootings in Minneapolis. He argues that these killings, alongside ICE's warrantless home raids and mistaken detentions, and the reports of deaths in custody, are not isolated abuses but signs of a rapidly deepening crisis in American democracy, one in which basic rights and due process are applied unevenly and increasingly contested.

The Department of Homeland Security's Facebook account recently posted a recruiting notice for ICE under the banner "WE'LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN"-the title of a white-nationalist anthem by the Pine Tree Riots ("By blood or sweat, we'll get there yet"). The Department of Labor recently posted a video montage referencing American battle scenes under the tagline "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American"-a slogan close to the Nazi-era Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.

Speaking from the SpaceX headquarters in South Texas on Monday, Secretary of Defense, sorry, War (and gargantuan stain on our patriotic conscience) Pete Hegseth announced Grok will join Google's Gemini to be a part of the Pentagon's new internal AI platform (GenAI.mil) later this month. "Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department," he said. (Here's a fine example of this "leading model" in action.) "AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we're going to make sure that it's there."

"It is not the critic who counts," President Theodore Roosevelt once said. "The credit belongs to the man who is in the arena." The Heritage Foundation has been in the arena for many years, fighting many battles, so it's no surprise that it has attracted many critics as well. And while Heritage cannot claim perfection, this much is certain: We have stayed true to our mission despite the critics;

The readings in my last series led me to see the genuine hatred conservatives have for what they call variously liberal hegemony, liberal ideology, left-wing ideology, and other names. David Brooks, newly ensconced at Yale and The Atlantic, is just sure it was liberals who caused Trump's wins, with their snotty "knowledge", and "refined tastes". I mocked this nonsense, but apparently Brooks was serious about the super bad feelings his people have about such things.