Few birthday gifts top the Statue of Liberty, which France commissioned for the centennial of American independence. As the United States approaches its semiquincentennial on July 4th, foreign nations are once again preparing gestures of their own. Those gestures come as tariffs, the war in Iran, and general uncertainty about President Donald Trump’s foreign policy […]
Zohran Mamdani blasted Elon Musk, ICE and oligarchs in a fiery America 250 speech flanked by naturalized citizens ahead of July 4 weekend.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave a speech sitting behind the George Washington desk at City Hall on Friday morning to mark America's 250th birthday.
Right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel is accusing Pope Leo XIV of doing the work of the Chinese Communist Party with his criticisms of artificial intelligence.According to a Thursday report from CNN, Thiel told the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Tuesday that the pope was inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” when he released a 42,000-word encyclical that called for strict regulation of AI, a technology that the pontiff said heightens the “risk of dehumanization” throughout the world.Thiel argued that this sort of thinking was dangerous, CNN reported, because it could result in the US losing the “race” to build more advanced AI to China. Because of this, Thiel continued, the pope is essentially “working for the Chinese communists” by trying to tap the brakes on AI development.Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, has long decried AI critics in harsh terms. Over the last year, he has been delivering a series of lectures in which he has said that opponents of AI development are working as agents for the Antichrist.Journalist Christopher Hale, who writes the Letters From Leo newsletter, noted on Friday that Thiel in the past has even speculated that Pope Leo could be “a manifestation of the Antichrist.”Thiel has said that he instructed Vice President JD Vance, a longtime political ally who received major funding from the tech billionaire for his 2022 Senate campaign, to ignore the pope’s moral guidance despite influencing Vance to convert to Catholicism, Hale added.“Thiel seeded the vice president’s Catholic faith,” Hale wrote, “and he now tells wealthy festival audiences that the leader of that faith works for a communist government.”In addition to his attacks on the pope, Thiel also warned about “a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” pointing to recent victories in New York and Colorado of candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America.Thiel said that this “takeover” would doom the US, arguing that “when the Democratic Party goes, this country is over,” according to CNN.The New York Times reported in May that Thiel has grown so concerned about the political situation in the US that he’s created a “foothold” for himself in Argentina, which is currently being governed by ideologically likeminded libertarian President Javier Milei.“Thiel, who has a history of collecting backup countries as he hedges his bets against the United States, is considering making Argentina another Plan B,” the Times reported. “Born in Germany and raised in the United States, he received citizenship in New Zealand in 2011, and applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.”
Good morning, my fellow Americans. Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York Harbor long before the name New York had ever been spoken; Lenape dugouts crossed these currents. It was on these waters, tall masts crested the horizon, captained by explorers like Verrazzano and Hudson, after […]
America's 250th birthday is nothing like its bicentennial
People across the country are preparing to celebrate America’s 250th birthday this weekend — a process that has been made more challenging as event organizers scramble to deal with the extreme heat. President Trump is headed to South Dakota late on Friday, where he’s expected to make remarks at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial and…
Against a backdrop of sweeping rollbacks of civil rights and deteriorating relations with allies, many are feeling cynicalAs the United States prepares to mark its 250th anniversary on 4 July, the country faces a turbulent moment under the Donald Trump administration.The anniversary coincides with sweeping rollbacks of civil rights, deteriorating relations with traditional allies and growing domestic opposition to the administration’s handling of immigration and free speech. Against this backdrop, many Americans say they feel increasingly cynical about the country’s future. Continue reading...
President Donald Trump has struggled to get decent turnout at his celebration of America’s 250th birthday, which has focused on promoting Trump himself rather than American history. Between that and his increasingly desperate efforts to stop Democrats from voting in the upcoming midterm elections, many political experts believe Trump and the Republican Party could be headed toward a political wipeout.According to one of the most respected political analysts in America, Trump could actually help himself politically through the United States’ semiquincentennial — but he is squandering that opportunity.“There was perhaps a world in which President Trump might have used the looming semiquincentennial to bolster his, and his party’s, fortunes for the fall,” wrote Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ nonpartisan polling and elections newsletter Sabato’s Crystal Ball, in an in-depth analysis on Thursday. “Or at least tried to, perhaps by presenting himself as something other than a hard partisan figure.”Kondik contrasted Trump with another Republican politician, President Gerald Ford, who served in office during America’s bicentennial celebration in 1976. Unlike Trump’s polarizing approach, which emphasized promoting himself and bashing Democrats, Ford focused on a nonpartisan approach that was proactively positive about American history and the nation’s future. This was “exemplified by a campaign song, ‘I’m Feeling Good About America.’ (That’s also the name of our Center for Politics documentary about the 1976 campaign, free to watch on YouTube). Ford still lost [to Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter], but it ended up being a very close election,” much closer than experts had predicted during the bicentennial celebrations that summer.“It may be that Republicans find a way to dig out of their current political hole, but a sunny, optimistic president rallying the country over the course of a happy, celebratory summer doesn’t seem to be in the cards,” Kondik explained. “This president cannot even countenance helping his party achieve an easy win, as he has both denigrated and thus far declined to sign a bipartisan housing bill, a matter of national concern in an election whose major theme is ‘affordability.’”He added that “events marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence have turned into yet another partisan event, with the president apparently planning to hold what amounts to a campaign rally on the Fourth itself. The World Cup, hosted partially by the United States, has excited international visitors and provided that rarest of all things on social media: organically heartwarming content. But that’s not really a story that involves the president.”Kondik clarified that, while Trump has not helped himself politically, it does not seem that he has hurt himself either. Yet with an approval rating stubbornly stuck in the 30s, “if Democrats actually win the Senate this year—they’re still underdogs to do so—Trump’s numbers being worse than they were in 2018 [during his last midterm elections] would likely be a big explanation why.”Because polls sample different groups of voters, Kondik predicted that Trump’s numbers may fluctuate a little between now and Election Day, but that the safest bet is that they will remain where they are unless he makes drastic changes in his behavior.“As is often the case with modern presidential approval ratings, expecting little-to-no change is a better bet than expecting big change,” Kondik wrote. “Particularly as the president doesn’t change much himself.”Speaking exclusively to AlterNet about his article, Kondik elaborated on the differences between Ford and Trump in terms of celebrating a big American birthday.“It is to some degree an apples to oranges comparison, because Ford was on the ballot and Trump is not, and the country was also a lot different,” Kondik told AlterNet. “But I do think in the midst of a trying decade, Ford's positive messaging helped cut through the negativity and capitalized on good feelings about the bicentennial. But there were many other reasons Ford came back, including uncertainty about whether Carter was up to the task of being president.”When asked if Trump’s explicitly partisan approach to celebrating America’s 250th birthday will be remembered as a missed political opportunity for him, Kondik said that “if Trump is as weak as he is now or weaker at the time of the election, and Republicans have a poor showing (losing the House and losing the Senate or at least losing one or more races in red states), it'll be easy to point to Trump's standing as a driving force in those results.”He added, “If that does happen, there will have been many missed opportunities for Trump, and perhaps how he handled the Fourth would be one of those (although in all likelihood other things would have been more important, like the decision to attack Iran and the subsequent impact on gas prices...