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Steven Beschloss: Do You Support the Global Expansion of Democracy?

A Saturday Prompt

In less than a month, it will be 2026, the 250th anniversary year of our nation’s founding and the beginning of an extraordinary democratic experiment. Given the anti-democratic regime controlling our White House, it’s going to be quite a year filled with cognitive dissonance.

That became even more obvious with the release yesterday of the 33-page “National Security Strategy,” which seeks to set out the foreign policy agenda and guiding principles of this second Trump term. In this brief prompt, I won’t explore the document in detail, but note some of the overarching worldview, including its hostility to “the trajectory” of Europe and its assertion that the European continent is facing “civilizational erasure” because of the flow of immigrants and the failures of its leaders.

It goes on to suggest the revival of Europe’s “former greatness” means supporting nationalism and far-right “patriotic” European parties, which would include, for example, Alternative for Germany (AfD), an extremist neo-Nazi party.
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Lisa Needham: A war criminal without a war

It’s just murder.
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It’s tempting to say that Hegseth is a war criminal committing an ongoing series of war crimes, with the killing of survivors being especially horrific. But as George Will — not exactly a liberal anti-war type — put it, he “seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.”
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CNN: Survivors clinging to capsized boat didn’t radio for backup, admiral overseeing double-tap strike tells lawmakers

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Reuters: Video shows final, confused moments of survivors of US boat strike in Caribbean, say sources

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They were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the U.S. military was weighing whether to finish them off.

“The video follows them for about an hour as they tried to flip the boat back over. They couldn’t do it,” one source said.

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – December 4, 2025

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel,… killed by the United States.”
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Brian Allen: Trump Hit With $310 Million Lawsuit Alleging “Epstein-Identical” Trafficking Network

A new lawsuit has landed in the American political bloodstream with the force of a seismic shock. It accuses Donald Trump of participating in a trafficking enterprise that plaintiffs describe as “identical in every material respect to the Epstein operation” (Doe v. Trump et al., 2025). The suit also names Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and several organizations connected to them.
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Jennifer Rubin: The ‘buck stops’ nowhere

President Harry S. Truman had a sign on his desk that read “The buck stops here.” President Carter actually borrowed Truman’s sign. President Barack Obama said “The buck stops with me” after a failed terrorist attack. President Joe Biden said the same about the messy end of the war in Afghanistan. But in Donald Trump’s regime, bucks never get near the Oval Office. If you listen to the MAGA cult, neither Trump nor any regime official is responsible, accountable, or to blame for anything.

The killing of one national guardsman and severe wounding of another in D.C. was a tragedy and an outrage. The killer, of course, should be punished to the full extent of the law. But to ignore Trump’s egregious decision-making that brought us to this point of reckless political violence is to invite further tragedies and condone grievous incompetence.

No matter how furiously Trump and his minions try to spin the narrative, Biden cannot be blamed for this one. Trump’s crew granted asylum to the suspected killer this April. Most importantly, Trump and MAGA governors who comply with the president’s whims and who send national guardsmen around the country willy-nilly for tasks they are not trained to perform are responsible for their safety. The guardsmen who were attacked should never have been there.
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Rebecca Solnit: Solidarity Stitches Us Together: Today, World AIDS Day, Is Also the 70th Anniversary of Rosa Park’s Historic Protest

… Seventy years ago today in Montgomery, Alabama, a Black civil rights activist and seamstress famously refused to yield her seat on the bus, which got her arrested, which got the town’s Black community organizing, which got a young minister there named Martin Luther King involved in political activism in a whole new way, which begat the Civil Rights Movement, which didn’t just change the United States but forged essential tools for rights and justice movements all over the world ever since. …
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Joyce Vance: The Moment to Pick a Side Has Come

“You must refuse illegal orders.” That’s what was said in the video made by six Democratic members of Congress. Trump accused them of seditious behavior. The FBI launched an investigation.

Then, on Black Friday, the Washington Post ran with an exclusive story about the September 2, 2025, attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, the first of a series of attacks that have involved strikes on at least 23 boats to date. The Post reported that in advance of the strike, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”

That’s what the special operations commander overseeing the attack did. After the initial hit, live drone feed showed two survivors clinging to the wreckage. The commander “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions … The two men were blown apart in the water.” …
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Morgaan Sinclair, Ph.D.: Venezuela: It’s the Oil, Folks. Like it was with Trump Wanting Canada.

Venezuela has 10x more oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. They’ll be wanting a piece, too.
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Dispatch: The 19th-Century Influencer Who Invented Thanksgiving

How Sarah Josepha Hale used fashion, fiction, and sheer persistence to give America its beloved holiday.
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By the time Lincoln read her letter in September 1863, the country was exhausted. Gettysburg had ended two months earlier with unimaginable casualties. Families were fractured, states were bitterly divided, and the very idea of a United States felt fragile. Hale’s proposal arrived not as a domestic nicety but as a cultural intervention—a way to call a bleeding nation to the same table, if only for a day. In a world where families were split by battle lines, the image of a shared feast—of turkey, pies, and a moment of gratitude—offered unity where politics could not.

In October 1863, Lincoln issued a proclamation establishing a national day of Thanksgiving. Lincoln’s own language echoed Hale’s persuasive vision: He called the nation to give thanks “with one heart and one voice,” inviting citizens in every corner of the Union—including those “at sea” and “sojourning in foreign lands”—to pause together. He urged Americans not only to offer gratitude but also to “commend to [God’s] tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers” in the war, and to implore divine help “to heal the wounds of the nation.” In the middle of brutal civil strife, Lincoln took up Hale’s idea that gratitude to God and for each other could be a form of national repair.
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James Eagle: The US lags badly on emissions trading coverage

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Germany and Austria now cover more than 75% of their emissions under trading systems. South Korea is above 50% and China has passed 40% with a national market that continues to expand. Even the wider EU average sits at 33%. These systems matter because they put a real price on pollution and create incentives for cleaner technology which is why so many countries treat them as the backbone of their climate strategy.

The United States by contrast covers only 7% of its emissions. That is not due to a lack of innovation or economic capacity. It reflects decades of political division inconsistent federal action and a heavy reliance on state level policies. The result is a fragmented system that does not match the scale of the challenge or the ambition seen elsewhere.
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