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We Hold Truths

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Jim Palmer: What are we born with?

Unpacking the myth of human nature

Distinguished evolutionist Michael Ghiselin asked, “What does evolution teach us about human nature?” His answer: “It teaches us that human nature is a superstition.”
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The way we perceive human nature today is still influenced by assumptions from the Medieval Christian world view (human nature as fallen, depraved, and flawed) and the Age of Enlightenment (human nature as inherently good and capable of continuous improvement through reason and education). Consequently, much of humanity behaves according to these assumptions, and both pessimistic and optimistic view of human nature has its problems.

Human beings are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative, and most destructive of all animals.
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In my mind, Eve is the hero in the story. God said don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She did. The world often makes its greatest advances by disobedient people who break the rules. Oscar Wilde wrote, “Disobedience is man’s original virtue.” Except it was a woman and it was Eve. She was the was first rule-breaker, and we should honor her for this.
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Rebecca Solnit: Immigrants: A Love Letter

It has never been easy to be an immigrant to the United States – for most economic, linguistic, and cultural barriers make life here a struggle, even if they were escaping a worse life elsewhere. The utterly evil bill that just squeaked through in Congress, among other harms, aims to make many immigrants’ lives go from difficult to terrifying nightmare. It gives ICE a truly outrageous amount of money, and we’ve already seen ICE turn since January into a faceless, unaccountable Gestapo grabbing workers, nursing mothers, sick children off the streets, out of their cars, from their homes, indifferent to what their legal status is, sometimes sweeping up citizens in their frenzy, sending the captives to domestic concentration camps or to gulags overseas or deporting them to countries they’ve never visited or left decades ago. Many people are simply disappearing, their friends, family, employers, coworkers simply unable to find out where they’ve been taken. Thousands have been directly impacted; tens of millions are indirectly impacted as they find themselves living in fear of these fates, and it is ravaging both mental health and the ability to continue to participate in everyday life and earn a living. Many are, with good reason, afraid to leave their homes.
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There’s a racist/white supremacist fantasy that only a certain kind of white and descended from Europeans who got here in the seventeenth-to-early-twentieth centuries is a real American – a descendant of immigrants, but the right kind at the right time (until recently, Protestant was part of the criterion; Jews and Catholics were outsiders to these nativists). One idea driving the claims Joe Biden wasn’t legitimately elected in 2020 was that he was elected by city people and by women and Black and brown people, including naturalized immigrants and their children, while Trump got the majority of the white Protestant rural, suburban, and male vote, and some of the latter regarded themselves as “real Americans” and the rest of us as not so.
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We need to defend immigrants but also value them and respect their contributions, and we need a we in which there is no them, a we that does not divide us, a we as big as this country. And maybe we have it already: we the people. That opening line of the Constitution,does not break down by immigration status, race, gender or other criteria (though obviously it was a deeply discriminatory society, but this rhetoric transcended it for at least a few lines). The other great founding document, the Declaration of Independence begins with the we of its signatories, the we who hold these truths, but it is a proclamation that all people “are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” That’s a we worth reclaiming and defending.
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Jennifer Rubin: Check out the Declaration’s list of grievances

It’s time to recapture our freedoms.
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WSJ: U.S. Firms Cut Jobs for First Time in Two Years, ADP Report Shows

American employers shed 33,000 staff last month, a new report showed, in an unexpectedly weak readout on U.S. labor-market health.

• The ADP data undershot consensus expectations for job growth of 100,0000 positions in June, according to economists polled by The Wall Street Journal.
• It was the first pullback since March 2023.
• There were notable job losses in professional and business services, and education and health services, but gains in leisure and hospitality, and in manufacturing.
• “Though layoffs continue to be rare, a hesitancy to hire and a reluctance to replace departing workers led to job losses last month. Still, the slowdown in hiring has yet to disrupt pay growth,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.
• Figures for May were revised down, to an increase of 29,000 positions, from an earlier 37,000.

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Vanity Fair: The Godfather Presidency: How Donald Trump’s Governing Style Mimics the Mob

Forget the comparisons to fascists and autocrats. The most accurate model for understanding the transactional tough guy in the White House is the politically connected underbelly of 1970s and ’80s New York real estate.
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It was amid this disruption that Raskin got a glimpse of how the new regime was going to work. The tutelage came from a Republican colleague whose name Raskin was protecting and who likewise had been worried, he confided to Raskin, until rescue had come. Raskin’s impersonation went like this: “We’ve got this guy ‘Joe’ who’s been in the forestry service as a firefighter for nearly two decades, and he’s a loyal Republican. He’s always supported me, and he just got sacked. He had some promotion and was in the probationary period.” This was also the case, said Raskin, for “hundreds of people that I represent.” The Republican legislator reached the White House—something few Democrats are able to do—and asked for help. “Their answer was, ‘Here’s the phone number of the guy you need to talk to in Musk’s office.’ ” Start to finish—legislators reduced to supplicants; sources whose names weren’t being revealed—the episode was appalling to Raskin, who saw the partisan cronyism as an assault on the professional civil service and the rule of law.
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Sarah Jones: After Trump’s Economy Shrank More Than Expected, Karoline Leavitt Gaslights the Country

Karoline Leavitt announced that the Trump economy is “booming!” when just four days ago, red flags were raised about the Trump economy contracting even worse than expected.

The job of Donald Trump’s press secretary might not seem like an easy one, but when you really consider what it takes, it’s very easy. One must simply be willing to lie about any and everything at every moment.
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And so on Monday, Karoline Leavitt announced with the confidence of a seasoned liar, that the Trump economy is “booming!” when just four days ago, red flags were raised about the Trump economy contracting even worse than expected, with the first GDP drop in three years being a sharper and worse decline than expected.
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NY Times: G.O.P. Bill Adds Surprise Tax That Could Cripple Wind and Solar Power

Wind and solar companies were already bracing for Congress to end federal subsidies. But the Senate bill goes even further and penalizes those industries.
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But the latest version of the Senate bill would go much further. It would impose a steep penalty on all new wind and solar farms that come online after 2027 — even if they didn’t receive federal subsidies — unless they follow complicated and potentially unworkable requirements to disentangle their supply chains from China. Since China dominates global supply chains, that measure could affect a large number of companies.
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Renewable energy companies say that they have been shifting away from Chinese components and toward using domestically made parts, but that the new restrictions are so opaque it could be tough for many businesses to prove they are in compliance.
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Bill Nelson: In the Quest to Shrink NASA, Trump Forgets National Security

Mr. Nelson, a former Democratic senator from Florida, was the administrator of NASA from 2021 to 2025
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The Trump administration’s proposal to cut NASA to the bone — including a nearly 50 percent reduction in science funding — jeopardizes the country’s pursuit of discovery and undermines capabilities that are essential in an era when rivals are advancing in terrestrial and extraterrestrial arenas. Far from a bold vision for American leadership, the administration has presented Congress with a blueprint for falling catastrophically behind on space exploration just as China and other nations are surging ahead.
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But this isn’t just about the race to shape humanity’s future as a multiplanetary species. It’s about threats that are already here, as we witnessed over a year ago at Langley. In places like Ukraine and the Middle East, we’re witnessing the dawn of autonomous drone strikes as a new paradigm of war — launched from hidden compartments, capable of punching through even the most sophisticated air defenses. Against this backdrop are reports of Chinese-owned companies purchasing farmland near U.S. military bases — at least 350,000 acres in 27 states — raising urgent questions about espionage and threats not just to military installations, but also critical systems like energy grids. A strong civilian space program doesn’t just advance technologies needed to detect these threats, but also helps ensure supremacy over the skies and in orbit.
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SCOTUSblog: Supreme Court sides with Trump administration on nationwide injunctions in birthright citizenship case

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The Trump administration will also likely continue to be barred from enforcing the order – which will not go into effect for 30 days – against the individual pregnant plaintiffs who had challenged it. But the court’s opinion, by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, left open the prospect of additional litigation in the lower courts about how much more the injunctions should be narrowed, as well as the possibility of class action litigation to challenge the order on behalf of groups of plaintiffs who were not part of the litigation before the court but would be affected by the order.
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in an opinion that she read from the bench – a signal of her strong disagreement with the majority’s ruling. She stated that the majority had ruled that, “absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief. That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.”
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a separate dissent in which she contended that the majority’s “decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.”
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