On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history. The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet. Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention. He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette. He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents. A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.

⚠️ A major escalation in the DOJ’s attack on voting ahead of the midterm elections took place this week. The FBI raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a pro-democracy organization that helps register voters. Ohio is expected to be a key swing state in the upcoming elections. bit.ly/4eFpoaQ

Everyone knows Dunkirk. 338,000 men rescued from the beaches, the "miracle" that saved Britain. Almost nobody knows what happened 8 days later, 100 miles down the coast. This story was buried for years, and once you hear it you will understand why. While Dunkirk was being evacuated, the 51st Highland Division was deliberately kept in France. Churchill wanted to prove to the French that Britain would not abandon them. So 10,000 Scotsmen kept fighting along the Somme while everyone else went home. They fought well. Too well to retreat in time. By June 10, Rommel's 7th Panzer Division, moving so fast the Germans called it the Ghost Division, had cut them off from every port. The Highlanders fell back to a tiny fishing town called Saint-Valery-en-Caux, with cliffs at their backs and the Royal Navy on the way. A second Dunkirk. That was the plan. Operation Cycle, ships waiting offshore. Then the fog rolled in. The ships could not reach the beaches in the dark and mist. And by morning, Rommel had artillery on the cliffs above the town, firing down on anything that floated. Men climbed down cliff faces on ropes made of rifle slings trying to reach boats. Some fell. The rescue never came. On June 12, 1940, Major General Victor Fortune surrendered the 51st Highland Division to Rommel. There is a famous photo of the two men standing together, Rommel grinning, Fortune staring into the distance like he is somewhere else. 10,000 men marched east into 5 years of captivity. In parts of the Highlands, nearly every family knew someone in the bag. They called it the lost division, and for decades many Scots quietly believed they had been sacrificed. Two details worth knowing. Fortune was offered better treatment as a general. He refused privileges and stayed with his men for the entire war, organizing care for the sick and keeping discipline in the camps. He was knighted from a hospital bed after liberation. And in September 1944, the rebuilt 51st Highland Division was given one specific assignment, at the request of its commander. They liberated Saint-Valery-en-Caux. The pipers played in the same square where their brothers had surrendered four years earlier. Dunkirk got the movie. These men got the long war. Worth remembering them today.

2023: record high 11,862 hate crimes. 2024: second highest ever. Anti-Black hate crimes - largest single category both years. The administration's response was to cut 70 percent of DOJ Civil Rights Division attorneys. The trend line does not require interpretation. Full piece - link in bio.

Last month, solar power generated 12.8% of electricity in the U.S. while coal was responsible for 12.2%. It’s the first time in history that solar accounted for more energy than coal. 🔋 abcnews.com/US/solar-generat…

There is a clear appetite among rank-and-file Democrats for a more centrist approach to cultural issues and still almost nobody positioning to fill that lane in 2028. nytimes.com/2026/05/22/upsho…

OTD in 1864: 100,000 men vanished overnight, and the greatest general of the age had no idea where they went. This might be the most underrated move of the Civil War. Context: Grant had just spent ten days locked in trench warfare at Cold Harbor, Virginia, after a frontal assault on June 3 that cost him thousands of men in under an hour. He admitted it was the worst mistake of his career. The armies were so close that soldiers could not lift their heads above the dirt in daylight. Everyone, including Lee, expected Grant to do what every Union commander before him did after a bloody repulse: retreat north and regroup. Instead, on the night of June 12, Grant did something audacious. He pulled the entire Army of the Potomac out of trenches that were in some places only yards from Confederate lines. No bugles, no fires, wheels muffled. By morning the Union trenches were empty and Lee's scouts found nothing but abandoned earthworks. The army marched south, away from Richmond, which made no sense to Confederate observers. Then Union engineers did something almost nobody thought possible: they threw a pontoon bridge across the James River, roughly 2,100 feet of it, over water up to 85 feet deep with a four-foot tidal swing. They built it in about eight hours. It was one of the longest floating bridges in military history. For three full days Lee was effectively blind, unsure whether Grant was north or south of the James. By the time the picture cleared, Grant's army was across the river attacking Petersburg, the rail hub that fed Richmond. The siege that followed lasted nine months and ended with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Everyone remembers Cold Harbor as Grant's worst day. Almost nobody remembers that one week later he pulled off the maneuver that won the war.

Applebaum: What binds Russia, China, Iran and North Korea is not religion or ideology. China is communist, Russia nationalist, Iran theocratic. What binds them is fear of liberal language: rights, rule of law, separation of powers and independent courts. 1/

The conflict over DEI is real, with well-intentioned people opposing it on constitutional grounds. But Pete Hegseth is not one of them. He’s repeatedly shown he’s a racist pure and simple, in addition to being a preening incompetent.

The most important American document you were never taught in school was adopted on June 12, 1776. Three weeks before the Declaration of Independence, Virginia adopted the Declaration of Rights, written by a man most people can't name: George Mason. Read the opening line: "All men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights." Sound familiar? Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia at that exact moment, and he borrowed heavily from it. Then it happened again. When James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights in 1789, he used Mason's document as his blueprint. Freedom of the press, religious liberty, no cruel and unusual punishment, jury trials. Mason had all of it first. The document even crossed the ocean. Lafayette leaned on it when drafting France's Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. And here's the kicker: Mason later refused to sign the Constitution. Why? It had no bill of rights and didn't end the slave trade. He died politically isolated for it. Then the country added the Bill of Rights, proving him right. One Virginia farmer wrote the rough draft of American freedom, influenced two revolutions, and got almost zero credit. 250 years ago today. Raise a glass to George Mason.

Bari Weiss became CBS News editor-in-chief last fall under Paramount Skydance's new ownership. Her first significant editorial act: pulling a completed 60 Minutes segment on migrants held in El Salvador's CECOT prison hours before it was set to air. Then she installed Nick Bilton - a technology journalist - as the new executive producer of 60 Minutes, replacing Tanya Simon. Correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega were also fired in the leadership overhaul. Scott Pelley - 51 Emmy Awards, 37 years at CBS, former Evening News anchor - confronted Bilton at his first all-staff meeting. He said Weiss was "murdering the show" and questioned Bilton's qualifications. He was fired the next day "for cause." Pelley's statement: "The collapse of values at the top has become untenable. The leadership of 60 Minutes is no longer recognizable." Lesley Stahl called it the hardest chapter of her career. The sequence matters here. The pulled segment came first. A completed story about Trump administration policy - pulled by a new editor-in-chief answerable to new corporate ownership - before it reached viewers. Then the management purge. Then the firing of the journalist who named it publicly. 60 Minutes has broken more consequential stories over 58 years than almost any other program in American broadcast history. What Weiss is building in its place is not yet clear. What she has already dismantled is.

We have a crisis of leadership and to be fair, it's an indictment of both parties. Three structural problems created this mess. 1. Tightened Duopoly. Ross Perot got 19.9% of the vote in 1992 and scared the daylights out of both parties. So they quietly collapsed the system around third parties. 2. Gerrymandering. Local authorities draw the congressional districts. If they like you, your house is in. If they don't, your house gets cut out. Are we in a real democracy if the politicians are picking the voters? I thought it was supposed to work the other way around. 3. Citizens United. Justice Scalia said if you have money you have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts on political candidates. The PAC era was born. Since that decision the legislative agenda has skewed toward big pharma, big food, and tax cuts for the rich and politicians don't care because the structural rigging keeps them in office regardless. That's the system. Both parties built it. Both parties benefit from it.

Musk became Donald Trump's #1 political donor, assumed a high-profile role early in his administration, and in that role inflicted incredible harm on some of the most vulnerable people in the world while failing to achieve any of his stated goals. slowboring.com/p/yes-doge-fa…

It turns out that if you gut CBS news, gut 60 Minutes, promise to gut CNN, cancel Colbert, get $29B in Saudi, Qatari & UAE money, and hold a weird lavish banquet for the President and acting AG in a federal building… you can get your illegal merger approved by the DOJ.

The billionaire donors supporting Susan Collins have a net worth of $888 billion, or nearly nine times Maine’s entire economic output in 2025. None are Maine residents. buff.ly/5l7W0XH

To everyone so eager to cancel someone for a tattoo they got at age 22, a drunk text, a selfie they took in the middle of a mental health crisis: Show us your laptop. Show us your iCloud. Open your entire digital life to your worst enemy. No context. No filter. No explanation. You won’t. You won’t because you know what I know. Any one of us, frozen at our worst moment, photographed in our lowest hour, looks like a monster. Looks like a stranger. Looks like someone who deserves to be cast out. That is not who we are. My mom and baby sister were killed in a car accident when I was just a kid. Cancer took my brother Beau, my best friend and my rock. I battled alcoholism. I battled addiction. I chose the coward’s way out more times than I can count. For years I believed the defining chapters of my life were written by tragedy, loss, and shame. I no longer believe that. Pain can shape us. Loss can humble us. Failures can leave scars that never fully fade. But none of them have the authority to define us. And it sure as hell ain’t the critic that counts. That authority belongs to us alone-the person in the arena. Every setback presents a choice. Play the victim, or cut the bullshit and take ownership for who we become next. Life does not determine our character. It reveals it. Again and again we are asked the same question. When shit happens, what next? We are not defined by what happened to us. We are not defined by the worst photo, the worst text, the worst tattoo, the worst night. We are defined by the person we choose to become. And by the courage to choose that person, every single day. So before you reach for the gavel - show us your laptop. You won’t. The whole world saw mine. And I am still here. Still becoming. Still choosing. Still standing. That is the only definition that matters.

#BREAKING: Carol Leonnig: “…what we were hearing last night…was that the Ohio Organizing Collaborative…one of its offices in Cleveland was targeted and raided by FBI agents yesterday. In addition to that, what we learned was that a series of FBI agents were fanning out across the state…to interview people and approach them at their homes, who had worked as volunteers registering voters, or as canvassers for the collaborative, and those interviews, if you can call them that, were conducted often WITHOUT warrants…So FBI agents were essentially just going into people’s homes and saying we’d like to ask you a few questions, which is NOT how the FBI normally investigates these kinds of matters…their great concern is that this is part of a larger Trump administration effort to basically target swing states and to target pro democracy organizations who might register Democratic voters, or help them register to vote, and question and sow distrust in those swing states in the integrity of the elections.” 😳

One of Russia's greatest successes in contemporary times has been its ability to accelerate polarization within the United States through a "post-trutherism" approach. If you don't like the political facts that have been presented to you by the "establishment," experts, or the media, that's okay, because Russia has created an alternative disinformation echo chamber that fits your specific narrative. We see this in how Russia has targeted both the far left and far right within alternative media spaces. It has been an opportunistic/soft power wager that seems to have worked out increasingly well for the Kremlin, given how a plethora of US officials can't seem to quite parroting Kremlin talking points.

Pundit class seems determined to be confused about Dem voters wanting moderation on the culture wars while pursuing aggressive populist economic change. The 40% who approve of “socialism” are really talking about the European social democracies, which are hybrids of capitalism with high taxation and high levels of social services. Perhaps a noble goal, but most Americans don’t want to be Denmark, and Dems will struggle to win on this platform. But if they change the emphasis from redistribution to ending the power and corruption of the billionaire class while instead building real economic opportunity and support for working Americans (including social services but concentrating on giving the means to “get ahead,” pursue the American dream), they would win overwhelming majorities.

The DOJ just gave approval to Paramount — owned by the billionaire Trump allies Larry and David Ellison — to buy Warner Bros Discovery. Trump is advancing his scheme to control the media in broad daylight. State AGs must step in and block this deal.