Americans

When a country like Armenia sends a film out into the world, it’s not just art. It’s a way to preserve memory, to reach a scattered diaspora. Each film offers the world stories that might otherwise be forgotten. So when President Trump proposes a 100% tariff on all films “produced in foreign lands,” the damage isn’t limited to foreign competitors or outsourcing studios. It threatens to shut out small nations like Armenia, for whom cinema is a lifeline.

The proposal hasn’t taken effect — yet. But July 9 marked a turning point in Trump’s broader tariff agenda, with a deadline for reimposing sweeping trade penalties on countries deemed “unfair.” While the situation for films remains unclear, the proposal alone has done damage and continues to haunt the industry. The tariff idea arises from the worldview that treats international exchange as a threat — and cultural expression as just another import to tax.

Take “Amerikatsi” (2022), the extraordinary recent movie by Emmy-winning actor and director Michael A. Goorjian. Inspired by his grandfather’s escape from the Armenian genocide — smuggled across the ocean in a crate — the project is not just a movie; it’s a universal story rooted in the Armenian experience, made possible by international collaboration and driven by a deep personal mission. Goorjian filmed it in Armenia with local crews, including people who, months later, would find themselves on the front lines of war. One was killed. Others were injured. Still, they sent him videos from the trenches saying all they wanted was to return to the set. That is the spirit a tariff like this would crush.

Armenia is a democracy in a dangerous neighborhood. Its history is riddled with trauma — genocide, war, occupation — and its present is haunted by threats from neighboring authoritarian regimes. But even as bombs fall and borders close, its people create. Films like “Aurora’s Sunrise” (2022) and “Should the Wind Drop” (2020) carry voices across oceans, turning pain into poetry, history into cinema. These films don’t rely on wide releases. They depend on arthouses, festivals, streamers and distributors with the courage and curiosity to take a chance. A 100% tariff would devastate that.

Indeed, the ripple effects of such a tariff would upend the entire global film ecosystem. Modern cinema is inherently international: A Georgian director might work with a French editor, an American actor and a German financier.

So sure, many American films use crew and facilities in Canada. But international co-productions are a growing cornerstone of the global film industry, particularly in Europe. Belgium produces up to 72% of its films in partnership with foreign nations, often France. Other notable co-production leaders include Luxembourg (45% with France), Slovakia (38% with Czechia) and Switzerland (31% with France). These partnerships are often driven by shared language, which is why the U.S. is also frequently involved in co-productions with Britain as well as Canada. Israel too has leaned into this model, using agreements with countries such as France, Germany and Canada to gain access to international audiences and funding mechanisms.

The U.S. government cannot unmake this system and should not try to do so. To penalize “foreign-made” films is to punish Americans too — artists, producers and distributors who thrive on collaboration. You can’t build a wall around storytelling.

Supporters of the tariff argue it protects American workers. But Hollywood is already one of the most globalized industries on Earth, and the idea that it suffers from too many foreign films is absurd. If anything, it suffers from too few. The result of this policy won’t be a thriving domestic market — but a quieter, flatter, more parochial one. A landscape where the next “Amerikatsi” never gets seen, where a generation of Armenian American youth never discovers their history through a movie screen.

If America still wants to lead in the 21st century — not just militarily and economically but morally — it should lead through culture and avoid isolation.

Stories like “Amerikatsi” remind us why that matters. A film that begins with a boy smuggled in a crate across the ocean ends with a message of joy and resilience. That’s not just Armenian history — it’s American history too. It cannot be separated. Unless we want that kind of storytelling priced out of our cinemas (and off our streaming platforms), we must keep the doors open.

For America to turn its back on stories like these would be a betrayal of everything film can be. And it would impoverish American society too. That way lies not greatness but provinciality.

Alexis Alexanian is a New York City-based film producer, consultant and educator whose credits include “A League of Their Own” and “Pieces of April.” She is a past president of New York Women in Film & Television and sits on the board of BAFTA North America.

Few initiatives of the Trump administration more seriously undermine our understanding of the nation’s past than Executive Order 14023 from March 27, which promises “to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments.”

The order directs the Interior secretary to cleanse all National Park Service sites of any signage that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” and instead “emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.” The Park Service staff was also instructed to purge gift shops of books that could be construed as critical of any American. In a similar vein, the Smithsonian Institution was ordered to remove “improper ideology” from its properties to assure they reflected “American greatness.”

Unwilling to depend on park personnel to enforce the patriotism mandate, the Trump administration is enlisting park visitors to report potentially offending displays and ranger talks that present an insufficiently sanitized account of American history. On June 9, acting National Park Service director Jessica Bowron instructed regional directors to “post signage that will encourage public feedback via QR code and other methods that are viable” concerning anything they encounter at a park site that they believe denigrates the nation’s history. (It is worth noting that when queried about the QR code directive, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum claimed to know nothing of the mandate, although he signed it on May 20.) How will the Trump administration respond if a visitor uses one of the mandatory QR codes to file a complaint?

And that is just the beginning. The Trump administration has also made clear it would like to eliminate entire sites that are not “National Parks, in the traditionally understood sense.” That means targeting those features that lack the grandeur of Yosemite and the Grand Tetons: smaller parks, sites and memorials, many of which honor women and minorities. Generally lacking soaring redwoods or massive gorges, these sites — many in urban areas where President Trump’s revisionist history has not caught on — would seem to describe places in California such as César Chavez National Monument outside Bakersfield, Manzanar National Historic Site and Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond.

Trump and his ahistorical myrmidons — he just mused that the Civil War ended in 1869 — regularly display an abysmal ignorance of basic American history. In their view, such federal (and presumably state) sites should present only a simplistic view of our complex 249-year history, one that virtually ignores the contributions and struggles of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Even before we see how many “tips” the Park Service’s invitation elicits from visitors eager to rat on rangers, the wording of the executive order itself is chilling. Any signage or lecture that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living” — and who is to say what constitutes disparagement? — must be replaced with rhetoric that emphasizes “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people.” Needless to say, the many sites that tell the stories of civil rights and anti-slavery struggles, the Civil War, the role of immigrants, the battles for labor rights and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people are going to have a challenging time ensuring they in no way offend those willing to acknowledge only uninterrupted “greatness” of the American story. Sometimes our greatness has been manifested by our progress toward a more perfect union — and that story cannot be told without mentioning imperfections.

One need not have a PhD in history to appreciate the dire threat presented by these efforts to replace historical scholarship with uncritical flag-waving. Historians have an obligation to challenge myth, to uncover obscured stories, to give voice to those who were unable to fully participate in earlier eras of the American story because of their race, ethnicity, gender or viewpoints. That is why our government has protected sites including Ellis Island (which President Lyndon B. Johnson added to Statue of Liberty National Monument), Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument and Stonewall National Monument (both recognized by President Obama). Trump’s Orwellian orders seek to undo a half-century of scholarship that revealed a far more complex and nuanced history than the simplified versions taught to generations of schoolchildren.

Fortunately, professional historians have not been cowed like many university leaders, law firms and others who have shamefully capitulated to Trump’s assault on free speech and intellectual integrity. A March statement from more than 40 historical societies condemned recent efforts to “purge words, phrases, and content that some officials deem suspect on ideological grounds [and] to distort, manipulate, and erase significant parts of the historical record.”

The national parks consistently rate as one of the most popular features of American government. Neither their rangers nor their exhibits should be intimidated into parroting a sanitized and distorted version of the nation’s past. As the historians declared, “We can neither deny what happened nor invent things that did not happen.” Americans should use those QR codes to send a clear message rejecting efforts to manipulate our history to suit an extremist ideological and political agenda.

John Lawrence is a visiting professor at the University of California’s Washington Center and a former staff director of the House Committee on Natural Resources.

Save yourself the bother and just get ticked off now: A new poll shows that most people will be unhappy regardless of how the U.S. Supreme Court rules in its much-anticipated decision on the nation’s sweeping healthcare law.

The survey by the Pew Research Center found that regardless of whether the law is upheld, struck down or kept intact except for its “individual mandate,” fewer than half those asked would be happy with the outcome.

Not surprisingly, the poll found opinions split along partisan lines: most Democrats would be pleased if the law, President Obama’s signature domestic achievement, is allowed to stand. Most Republicans would be happy if the law is nullified.

The most closely watched group, political independents, tilted against the healthcare act. Half said they would be happy if the law was overturned, while 35% would be happy to see it upheld.

The justices issued their latest set of decisions Monday morning and the healthcare ruling was not among them. There is a chance the opinion, arguably the most consequential of the current Supreme Court term, will be issued on Thursday. Most court watchers, however, expect the decision to come sometime next week.

Overall, by a 48% to 43% margin, most of those surveyed continued to oppose the healthcare bill, though most do not have a particularly good understanding of its provisions. Only 18% said they understood the law very well, while just about half said they understood it somewhat. Nearly a third said they didn’t understand it too well or not well at all.

One explanation for the opposition could be the barrage of negative advertising surrounding the legislation. As earlier noted, critics of the law have outspent supporters more than 3 to 1 in paid TV advertising.

The Pew survey was conducted nationally June 7-17 among 2,013 adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

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WASHINGTON — Just months after President Trump returned to office amid a wave of anti-immigration sentiment, the share of U.S. adults saying immigration is a “good thing” for the country has jumped substantially — including among Republicans, according to new Gallup polling.

About 8 in 10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, an increase from 64% a year ago and a high point in the nearly 25-year trend. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now, down from 32% last year.

During Democratic President Joe Biden’s term in office, negative views of immigration had increased markedly, reaching a high point in the months before Trump, a Republican, took office. The new Gallup data suggests U.S. adults are returning to more pro-immigrant views that could complicate Trump’s push for sweeping deportations and other anti-immigration policies. The poll shows decreasing support for the type of mass deportations Trump has championed since before he was elected.

Since taking office, Trump has called on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to do all in its power to deliver “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.” His administration has also pushed to limit access to federal benefits for immigrants who lack legal status, sought to revoke the citizenship of immigrants who commit crimes and is working to end birthright citizenship for children born to those without legal status or who are in the country temporarily.

In general, Americans’ views of immigration policies have shifted dramatically in the last year, the Gallup polling shows — including among Republicans, who have become much more content with immigration levels since Trump took office but who have also grown more supportive of pathways to citizenship for people in the country illegally.

The broader trend also shows that public opinion is generally much more favorable to immigrants than it was decades ago.

The vast majority of U.S. adults say immigration is good

Americans’ more positive view on immigration is driven primarily by a shift among Republicans and independents.

About two-thirds of Republicans now say immigrants are “a good thing” for the country, up from 39% last year. And independents moved from about two-thirds last year to 80% this year.

Democrats have maintained their overwhelmingly positive view of immigration in the last few years.

The share of Americans who want immigration decreased has dropped significantly

In the time since Trump took office, Republicans have become more satisfied with the level of immigration in the country.

The share of Americans who want immigration “decreased” in the United States dropped from 55% to 30%. While fewer Americans now want to decrease the number of people who come to the U.S. from other countries, more want immigration levels kept the same than want higher immigration levels. About 4 in 10 say immigration should be kept at its current level, and only 26% say immigration should be increased.

The poll suggests Republicans’ sharp anti-immigrant views highlighted before November’s election — which helped return Trump to the White House — have largely faded. The share of Republicans saying immigration should be decreased dropped from a high of 88% to 48% in the last year. Close to 4 in 10 Republicans now say immigration levels should remain the same, and only about 1 in 10 would like an increase.

Much of that Republican movement probably comes from support for the Trump administration’s stringent immigration enforcement, but there are also signs in the Gallup polling that Republicans have become more supportive of pathways to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally and more likely to see benefits from immigration that could be at odds with the Trump administration’s priorities.

More Americans back a pathway to citizenship

Most Americans favor allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time, the poll shows.

Almost 9 in 10 U.S. adults, 85%, favor a pathway to citizenship for immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, and nearly as many say they favor a path to citizenship for all immigrants in the country illegally as long as they meet certain requirements.

That increased support for pathways to citizenship largely comes from Republicans, about 6 in 10 of whom now support that, up from 46% last year. Support was already very high among independents and Democrats.

Support for deporting immigrants in the country illegally has also decreased across the board, but less significantly. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults now favor deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, down from about half a year ago.

Sanders writes for the Associated Press.

“I’m going to give you everything you want,” President Trump told disaster-stricken residents and local officials. “I’m going to give you more than any president would have ever given you.”

That was in January, in Los Angeles, in the wake of the catastrophic Palisades and Eaton fires. If Trump could express such magnanimity in California, typically the blue-state butt of his partisan jabs and threats, imagine what he’ll tell red-state Texans on Friday when he visits the flood-ravaged Hill Country, where the usually easy-going Guadalupe River turned mass killer on the Fourth of July.

He’s sure to promise that the federal government will spare no expense. (Note: California is still waiting.) But words are cheap, especially for the truth-challenged Trump. Even as the president, playing Daddy Warbucks, promises money in the moment, he must be held to account for his administration’s continued mindless axing of federal funds and government-wide expertise (a process greenlighted on Tuesday by the ever-accommodating Supreme Court) — and not least in gutting essential agencies that forecast weather, warn of storms and then help Americans recover from disasters.

Trump isn’t to blame for the deaths and destruction in Texas. But raising questions about the effect of his, and the now-disfavored Elon Musk’s, reckless rampage through government offices isn’t “depraved and despicable,” as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt fulminated on Monday. It’s merely holding the government to account, which is, to be sure, a foreign concept to a president accustomed to impunity. (Leavitt’s protestations are particularly rich considering that Trump falsely blamed then-President Biden after Hurricane Helene during last year’s campaign, and initially suggested on Sunday that the Texas tragedy was somehow a “Biden set-up.”)

For a decade now, Trump has exploited Americans’ disdain of government, even when he’s at the head of it. But Americans don’t like government until they need it, and they expect it to keep them safe in the meantime. Because Trump is taking Musk’s chainsaw to federal agencies, with the acquiescence of Congress’ Republican majorities, he should be on the defensive from here on out for every emergency, crisis and tragedy that might have been prevented or at least mitigated by federal action.

Most of Trump’s proposed and attempted cuts have yet to take effect. Some — say, cutbacks in public health and scientific research programs — might not be fully felt for years. Yet even if administration reductions, eliminations and layoffs aren’t culpable this time, in this tragedy, what about the next? Because there will be a next time.

Consider: Climate change is demonstrably turbocharging the number and intensity of severe storms, yet Trump’s budget calls for closing the National Severe Storms Laboratory, which has pioneered forecasting technology for years.

It’s way past time to ignore the familiar post-catastrophe mantra that people inappropriately politicize calamity by raising questions, proposing remedies and, yes, laying blame: Only thoughts and prayers allowed. We’ve heard it in recent days not only from the likes of Leavitt, but also from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his fellow Republican, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who inserted further cuts to weather forecasting funds as part of the One Big Ugly Bill that Trump signed into law on the Fourth, as Texans dealt with the flood nightmare.

The victims deserve more. We all do.

For months since Trump took office and began his slashing spree on Day 1 with his executive orders, critics and experts have predicted that his actions could boomerang, in particular when it comes to weather-related threats, such as the hurricane season underway.

Just to cite one example: Back in April, Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, the senior Democrat on the House committee that oversees the National Weather Service, complained (presciently?), “Chaotic and illegal firings, coercions to resign, reductions in force, and a general obsession with destroying the morale of dedicated public servants have left the National Weather Service’s work force so strained they cannot carry out their duties as they once did.”

So when we have a natural disaster like that in Texas, where survivors lament inadequate warnings, why should Lofgren or anyone else keep quiet and just think and pray? It’s political, but it’s proper as well that Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York asked for an investigation of whether staffing shortfalls at the weather service contributed to the Texas flood’s death toll. A Republican, Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, cited Texas’ plight at a Senate hearing on Wednesday to complain that Trump’s federal hiring freeze has also left his state and others short of meteorologists, and without 24/7 coverage when tornadoes ripped through Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas in May.

Early evidence and anecdotes suggest that federal forecasters did their job in warning Texans of flooding hours in advance. But years of penny-pinching and antitax zeal at the local and state levels, especially, meant that the region — known as “flash flood alley” — had no system in place to adequately transmit the warnings to rural residents in the dead of night.

Yet the feds — Trump mainly — still have much to answer for. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, was among the earliest targets of his misnamed Department of Government Efficiency. Trump said he wants to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency completely.

Months before the storm, a union official representing staff of the weather service, Tom Fahy, told the New York Times that its offices nationwide were “struggling to maintain operations” amid what the agency acknowledged as “severe shortages” of meteorologists and other employees. After the storm, Fahy said that vacancies at the two offices overseeing the Texas Hill Country were roughly double what they were when Trump took office. The longtime “warning coordination meteorologist” for the Hill Country in April announced that he was “sad” to prematurely end his career amid the administration cutbacks and early-retirement offers.

A local media outlet lamented the man’s departure: “The importance of experience” in the job he’d held “cannot be understated.” Abbott is being defensive, as he should be. “Who’s to blame?” the three-term governor snapped at a reporter on Tuesday. “That’s the word choice of losers.” Expect more such vituperation when the Guv greets his friend, the president, on Friday — from both men — should anyone suggest they bear any blame.

Losers? If the word fits…

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Happy Birthday, America!

Today, you turn 249 and, honestly, you don’t look a day over 248. (Ha ha.)

Seriously, it’s perfectly understandable why there’s more gray on your scalp and deeper worry lines on your face. This last year has been challenging, to say the least.

A convicted felon and adjudicated sex abuser was elected president — history made! — and ever since has worked tirelessly and diligently to establish himself as the nation’s first monarch, and a fabulously remunerated one at that.

Federal troops are occupying the nation’s second-largest city, over the objection of the state’s leaders, as masked agents scoop people off the streets of Southern California for the temerity of venturing out with brown skin and an accent.

Our social safety net is being shredded, the country is pulling back from its international leadership in the arts and science, and we’ve squandered our global standing as a beacon of hope and compassion.

But that’s not all.

Political violence is becoming about as familiar and normalized as schoolyard shootings. In roughly the last 12 months we’ve witnessed two attempts on Trump’s life and the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband.

Medicaid, the program that serves millions of the needy, elderly and disabled, is on the chopping block. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which helps Americans weather the worst times after natural disaster, has been drastically depleted just as we’re heading into the fire and hurricane seasons.

As for the loyal opposition, Democrats are in bad odor with voters and even many of their own partisans after Joe Biden’s handlers gaslighted the public on the frailty and declining faculties of the octogenarian president.

Only after a cataclysmically bad debate performance, which revealed his infirmities for all to see, did Biden grudgingly stand aside in favor of his anointed successor, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Once more, Democrats are wandering the wilderness, wearing a familiar groove in their desolate pathway as they debate — again — whether to veer left or hug the center.

That’s quite the catalog.

But no one ever said this representative democracy thing was going to be easy, or endlessly uplifting.

America, you’re a big, boisterous nation of more than 342 million people, with all sorts of competing impulses and interests, and no end of certitude to go around.

In our last presidential election, we split nearly evenly, with Trump squeaking past Harris in the popular vote 49.8% to 48.3%. It was one of the narrowest margins of victory in the last century, though you wouldn’t know it from Trump’s radical actions and the servility of the Republican-run Congress.

But our differences go even deeper than the now-familiar gulf between red and blue America.

In a recently completed deep dive on the state of our democracy, researchers at UC Berkeley found an almost even divide over how to measure our political system’s success.

Slightly more than half of those surveyed said a successful democracy is one that’s adaptable and has the capacity for change, while nearly half said success stems from adherence to long-standing principles.

With that kind of stark disagreement on such a fundamental question, is it any wonder we struggle to find consensus on so much else?

But, heck, if it’s any consolation on this star-spangled holiday, the country has been through worse. Much worse. And you, America, have not only survived but also in many ways grown stronger by facing down your flaws and overcoming some knee-buckling challenges.

Slavery. Civil war. Racist exclusionary laws. Two worldwide conflicts. Depression. Financial crises. And too many deadly natural disasters — floods, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes — to possibly count.

Your treatment of some Americans, it should be said, hasn’t always been fair and just.

People are despairing over the Supreme Court and its deference to the president. But it’s worth noting that earlier court majorities held that Black Americans — “beings of an inferior order,” in the words of the notorious Dred Scott decision — could be denied citizenship, that racial segregation was constitutional and that compulsory sterilization based on eugenics was perfectly legal.

That sordid history won’t necessarily make anyone feel better about the current state of affairs, nor should it. But it does give some perspective.

All of that said, today’s a day to celebrate the good things and the bright, shining place you aspire to be, with liberty and justice for all. So, chin up, America! Have another slice of birthday cake, and don’t worry about the calories — you really do look terrific for 249!

Meantime, it’s up to us, your citizens, to keep working toward that more perfect union. Whatever ails you, America, the remedy resides with we the people and the power we hold, particularly at the ballot box. Unhappy with the wrecking crew that’s chain-sawing federal programs and allowing Trump to blowtorch the Constitution and rule of law? Vote ‘em out, starting with the 2026 midterm election.

Don’t give up hope or the belief that, as dark and difficult as things seem right now, better days lie ahead.

That abiding faith is what makes America great.

It’s the 249th birthday of the United States. And as Americans begin to prepare for our nation’s grand semiquincentennial celebration next year, it is worth reengaging with the document whose enactment marks our national birthday: the Declaration of Independence.

The declaration is sometimes championed by right-libertarians and left-liberals alike as a paean to individualism and a refutation of communitarianism of any kind. As one X user put it on Thursday: “The 4th of July represents the triumph of American individualism over the tribalistic collectivism of Europe.”

But this is anything but the case.

We will turn to lead draftsman Thomas Jefferson’s famous words about “self-evident” truths in a moment. But first consider the majority of the text of the declaration: a stirring enumeration of specific grievances by the American colonists against the British crown. In the declaration’s own words: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.”

One might read these words in a vacuum and conclude that the declaration indeed commenced a revolution in the true sense of the term: a seismic act of rebellion, however noble or righteous, to overthrow the established political order. And true enough, that may well have been the subjective intention of Jefferson, a political liberal and devotee of the European Enlightenment.

But the declaration also attracted many other signers. And some of those signers, such as the more conservative John Adams, took a more favorable view of the incipient America’s inherited traditions and customs. These men thought that King George III had vitiated their rights as Englishmen under the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights that passed Parliament the following year.

It is for this reason that Edmund Burke, the famed conservative British statesman best known for his strident opposition to the French Revolution, was known to be sympathetic to the colonists’ cause. As my Edmund Burke Foundation colleague Ofir Haivry argued in a 2020 American Affairs essay, it is likely that these more conservative declaration signers, such as Adams, shared Burke’s own view that “the Americans had an established national character and political culture”; and “the Americans in 1776 rebelled in an attempt to defend and restore these traditions.”

The American founding is complex; the founders themselves were intellectually heterodox. But suffice it to say the founding was not a simplistic renouncement of the “tribalistic collectivism” of Britain. There is of course some truth to those who would emphasize the revolutionary nature of the minutemen and soldiers of George Washington’s Continental Army. But a more historically sound overall conception is that 1776 commenced a process to restore and improve upon the colonists’ inherited political order. The final result was the U.S. Constitution of 1787.

Let’s next consider the most famous line of the declaration: the proclamation that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We ought to take this claim at face value: Many of the declaration’s signers did hold such genuine, moral human equality to be self-evident.

But is such a claim self-evident to everyone — at all times, in all places and within all cultures?

The obvious answer is that it is not. Genuine, moral human equality is certainly not self-evident to Taliban-supporting Islamic extremist goat herders in Afghanistan. It has not been self-evident to any number of sub-Saharan African warlords of recent decades. Nor is it self-evident to the atheists of the Chinese Communist Party politburo, who brutally oppress non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities such as the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang.

Rather, the only reason that Jefferson — and Locke in England a century prior — could confidently assert such moral “self-evidence” is because they were living and thinking within a certain overarching milieu. And that milieu is Western civilization’s biblical inheritance — and, specifically, the world-transforming claim in Genesis 1:27, toward the very beginning of the Bible, that “God created man in His image; in the image of God He created him.”

It is very difficult — perhaps impossible — to see how the declaration of 1776, the 14th Amendment of 1868, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or any other American moral ode to or legal codification of equality, would have been possible absent the strong biblical undergird that has characterized our nation since the colonial era.

Political and biblical inheritance are thus far more responsible for the modern-day United States than revolution, liberal rationalism or hyper-individualism.

Adams famously said that Independence Day “ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Indeed, each year we should all celebrate this great nation we are blessed to call home. But let’s also not mistake what it is we are actually celebrating.

Josh Hammer’s latest book is “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.” This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer

ST. LOUIS — Diego Luna scored twice in the first 15 minutes, and the United States hung on to beat Guatemala 2-1 on Wednesday night to reach its first CONCACAF Gold Cup final since 2021.

Luna put the U.S. ahead with a left-footed shot in the fourth minute, then scored with his right in the 15th for his third goal in two games.

Olger Escobar, an 18-year who was born in Lynn, Mass., cut inside and slid a shot from inside the area between Matt Freese and the far post in the 80th minute for his second goal of the tournament. Freese parried José Morales’ shot toward the far post in the second minute of stoppage time.

The U.S. plays defending champion Mexico or Honduras for the title Sunday at Houston, the Americans’ last competitive match before their World Cup opener next June. El Tri has won nine Gold Cups, the U.S. seven and Canada one.

The 16th-ranked Americans advanced to the Gold Cup final for the 13th time. All five losses in finals have been to Mexico.

No. 106 Guatemala, which has never reached the final, outshot the U.S. 13-1 in the last 30 minutes of the first half.

Luna got his first goal after Alex Freeman crossed for Malik Tillman. He touched the ball to Luca de la Torre, whose shot was stopped by goalkeeper Kenderson Navarro. Luna reacted quickly and switched the ball from his right foot to his left, then shot over Navarro’s outstretched right hand.

Eleven minutes later, Luna received a cross-field pass from Tillman about 40 yards out, dribbled in, got by defender José Carlos Pinto with a stepover and put the ball inside the near post from the edge of the penalty area.

Guatemala’s starters included a pair of former U.S. players: 29-year-old forward Rubio Rubin made seven appearances for the Americans from 2014-18 before switching in 2022 and 28-year-old defender Aaron Herrera made one in 2021 and then changed in 2023.

Rubin put the ball past Freese in the 29th minute, but the goal was disallowed for offside. Freese made a kick save on Rubin in the 34th.

June 27 (UPI) — Just under a quarter of those surveyed worry they or someone they know in the United States could be deported, according to a new poll published Friday.

The Pew Research Center poll found 23% of American adults worried about the issue, up from 19% during the firm’s last survey in March.

That fear of deportation is stronger among immigrants polled rather than people born in the United States.

The survey found 43% of adult immigrants are worried about deportations, up from 33% in the March poll, while 34% of U.S.-born citizens feel the same way, an increase from 17% three months ago. American citizens polled in that category have at least one parent who is a first-generation immigrant to the United state.

The Washington, D.C.-based non-profit research center conducted the survey between June 2 and 8.

Overall, more people who identified as Democrats (32%), both U.S. citizens and immigrants were worried about someone they know being deported than Republicans (8%), according to the poll.

Fears about deportations have been stoked since President Donald Trump in March gave the green light to large-scale raids and detentions carried out by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it will allow the Trump administration to deport convicted criminals to “third countries,” even without a connection to that nation.

Among racial and ethnic groups, more Latino respondents to the survey were worried about being affected by deportation than any other group.

Around half (47%) of those surveyed expressed concerns about themselves, a close friend or a family member being deported. The figure is up from 42% in March.

English-speaking Asian adults (29%) and Black adults (26%) were the next largest groups of people with the same concern.

Six US nationals were taken into custody in South Korea near a restricted border area with North Korea.

South Korean authorities have detained six United States citizens who were attempting to send an estimated 1,300 plastic bottles filled with rice, US dollar bills and Bibles to North Korea by sea, according to news reports.

The US suspects were apprehended in the early hours of Friday morning after they were caught trying to release the bottles into the sea from Gwanghwa island, near a restricted front-line border area with North Korea, South Korea’s official Yonhap news agency reports.

The six were taken into custody after a coastal military unit guarding the area reported them to the police. The area in question is restricted to the public after being designated a danger zone in November due to its proximity to the north.

Activists floating plastic bottles or flying balloons across South Korea’s border with the north have long caused tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

An administrative order banning the launch of anti-Pyongyang propaganda towards the north is already in effect for the area, according to Yonhap.

On June 14, police detained an activist for allegedly flying balloons towards North Korea from Gwanghwa Island.

Two South Korean police officers confirmed the detentions of the six with The Associated Press news agency but gave no further details.

In 2023, South Korea’s Constitutional Court struck down a 2020 law that criminalised the sending of leaflets and other items to North Korea, calling it an excessive restriction on free speech.

But since taking office in early June, the new liberal government of President Lee Jae-myung is pushing to crack down on such civilian campaigns with other safety-related laws to avoid a flare-up in tensions with North Korea and promote the safety of front-line South Korean residents.

Lee took office with a promise to restart long-dormant talks with North Korea and establish peace on the Korean Peninsula. His government has halted front-line anti-Pyongyang propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts, and similar North Korean broadcasts have not been heard in South Korean front-line towns since then.

It remains unclear if North Korea will respond to Lee’s conciliatory gesture after it pledged last year to sever relations with South Korea and abandon the goal of peaceful Korean reunification.

Official talks between the Koreas have been stalled since 2019, when the US-led diplomacy on North Korean denuclearisation derailed.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday the Trump administration may deport criminal migrants to South Sudan or Libya even if those countries are deemed too dangerous for visitors.

By a 6-3 vote, the conservative majority set aside the rulings of a Boston-based judge who said the detained men deserved a “meaningful opportunity” to object to being sent to a strange country where they may be tortured or abused.

The court issued an unsigned order with no explanation.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a 19-page dissent and was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the Government took the opposite approach,” she said. “I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.”

Last month, the government put eight criminal migrants on a military plane bound for South Sudan.

“All of these aliens had committed heinous crimes in the United States, including murder, arson, armed robbery, kidnapping, sexual assault of a mentally handicapped woman, child rape, and more,” Trump’s Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer told the court. They also had a “final order of removal” from an immigration judge.

But U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy in Boston said the flight may have defied an earlier order because the men were not given a reasonable chance to object. He said the Convention Against Torture gives people protection against being sent to a country where they may be tortured or killed.

He noted the U.S. State Department had warned Americans: “Do not travel to South Sudan due to crime, kidnapping and armed conflict.”

Sauer said this case was different from others involving deportations because it dealt with the “worst of the worst” among immigrants in the country without authorization. He said these immigrants were given due process of law because they were convicted of crimes and were given a “final order of removal.”

However, their native country was unwilling to take them.

“Many aliens most deserving of removal are often the hardest to remove,” he told the court. “As a result, criminal aliens are often allowed to stay in the United States for years on end, victimizing law-abiding Americans in the meantime.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the plane landed at a military base in Djibouti.

In April, Murphy said “this presents a simple question: before the United States forcibly sends someone to a country other than their country of origin, must that person be told where they are going and be given a chance to tell the United States that they might be killed if sent there?”

He said the plaintiffs were “seeking a limited and measured remedy … the minimum that comports with due process.”

June 23 (UPI) — The U.S. Embassy in Qatar issued a security alert Monday urging American citizens to shelter in place due to the conflict between Israel and Iran.

“Out of an abundance of caution we recommend American citizens shelter in place until further notice,” the embassy said in a security alert.

The alert did not offer more related details, but the U.S. State Department put out a security alert Sunday that warned that there’s “potential for demonstrations against U.S. citizens and interests abroad.”

“The Department of State advises U.S. citizens worldwide to exercise increased caution,” it continued.

Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs put out a press release Monday that “indicated that the advisory issued by a number of embassies to their citizens to take precautions or avoid certain locations in the State of Qatar are part of the general policies followed by a number of countries regarding travel advisories and security updates for their citizens around the world, and do not necessarily reflect the existence of specific threats.”

Qatar’s Advisor to the Prime Minister and Minister and Spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Dr. Majed bin Mohammed Al Ansari noted in a statement to the press that “the security situation in the country is stable, and that the relevant authorities are closely monitoring the situation and are ready to take all necessary measures to ensure the safety of citizens, residents, and visitors, and that they will keep the public informed of any developments that require alerts or action, emphasizing the need to obtain information from official sources.”

As for any Americans attempting to exit Iran, the State Department announced Monday that as Iranian airspace has been closed due to “hostilities with Israel,” any U.S. citizens looking to leave “should depart by land to Azerbaijan, Armenia, or [Turkey],” but only if they feel it can be done safely.

The State Department has also begun organizing departure flights from Israel, and Americans can leave through Jordan via land crossings.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security put out a statement Sunday that warns of “a heightened threat environment in the United States,” which can mean cyber-attacks are likely.

“The likelihood of violent extremists in the homeland independently mobilizing to violence in response to the conflict would likely increase if Iranian leadership issued a religious ruling calling for retaliatory violence against targets in the Homeland,” it said.

“Multiple recent homeland terrorist attacks have been motivated by anti-Semitic or anti-Israel sentiment, and the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict could contribute to US-based individuals plotting additional attacks.”

After nearly two years of stark divisions over the war in Gaza and support for Israel, Democrats remain at odds over policy toward Iran after the U.S. strikes early Sunday.

Progressives demanded unified opposition before President Trump announced U.S. strikes against Tehran’s nuclear program, but party leaders were treading more cautiously.

U.S. leaders of all stripes have found common ground for two decades on the position that Iran could not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon. The longtime U.S. foe has supported groups that have killed Americans across the Mideast and threatened to destroy Israel. But Trump’s announcement Saturday that the U.S. had struck three nuclear sites could become the Democratic Party’s latest schism, just as it was sharply dividing Trump’s isolationist “Make America Great Again” base from more hawkish conservatives.

Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, noted that in January, Trump suggested the U.S. could “measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars that we end, and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”

“Today, against his own words, the president sent bombers into Iran,” Martin said in a statement. “Americans overwhelmingly do not want to go to war. Americans do not want to risk the safety of our troops abroad.”

Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, said the U.S. entering the war in Iran “does not make America more secure.”

“This bombing was an act of war that risks retaliation by the Iranian regime,” Welch said in a statement.

While progressives in the lead-up to the military action had staked out clear opposition to Trump’s potential intervention, the party leadership played the safer ground of insisting on a role for Congress before any use of force.

Martin’s statement took a similar tack, saying, “Americans do not want a president who bypasses our constitution and pulls us towards war without Congressional approval. Donald Trump needs to bring his case to Congress immediately.”

Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine called Trump’s actions “horrible judgment” and said he’d “push for all senators to vote on whether they are for this third idiotic Middle East war.”

Many prominent Democrats with 2028 presidential aspirations had been silent on the Israel-Iran war, even before Trump’s announcement — underscoring how politically tricky the issue can be for the party.

“They are sort of hedging their bets,” said Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of State who served under President Obama and is now a strategist on foreign policy. “The beasts of the Democratic Party’s constituencies right now are so hostile to Israel’s war in Gaza that it’s really difficult to come out looking like one would corroborate an unauthorized war that supports Israel without blowback.”

Progressives

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Fremont) had called Trump’s consideration of an attack “a defining moment for our party.” Khanna had introduced legislation with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) that called on the Republican president to “terminate” the use of U.S. armed forces against Iran unless “explicitly authorized” by a declaration of war from Congress.

Khanna used Trump’s campaign arguments of putting American interests first when the congressman spoke to Theo Von, a comedian who has been supportive of the president and is popular among Trump supporters, particularly young men.

“That’s going to cost this country a lot of money that should be being spent here at home,” said Khanna, who is said to be among the many Democrats considering seeking the presidential nomination in 2028.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who twice sought the Democratic presidential nomination, had pointed to Trump’s stated goal during his inaugural speech of being known as “a peacemaker and a unifier.”

“Supporting Netanyahu’s war against Iran would be a catastrophic mistake,” Sanders said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sanders reintroduced legislation prohibiting the use of federal money for force against Iran, insisted that U.S. military intervention would be unwise and illegal and accused Israel of striking unprovoked. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York signed on to a similar bill from Sanders in 2020, but so far was holding off this time.

Some believed the party should stake out a clear antiwar stance.

“The leaders of the Democratic Party need to step up and loudly oppose war with Iran and demand a vote in Congress,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide, on X.

Mainstream Democrats

The staunch support from the Democratic administration of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for Israel’s war against Hamas loomed over the party’s White House ticket in 2024, even with the criticism of Israel’s handling of the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. Trump exploited the divisions to make inroads with Arab American voters and Orthodox Jews on his way back to the White House.

Today, the Israel-Iran war is the latest test for a party struggling to repair its coalition before next year’s midterm elections and the quick-to-follow kickoff to the 2028 presidential race. The party will look to bridge the divide between an activist base that is skeptical of foreign interventions and already critical of U.S. support for Israel and more traditional Democrats and independents who make up a sizable, if not always vocal, voting bloc.

In a statement after Israel’s first strikes on Iran, Schumer said Israel has a right to defend itself and “the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security and defense must be ironclad as they prepare for Iran’s response.”

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) said that “the U.S. must continue to stand with Israel, as it has for decades, at this dangerous moment.”

Other Democrats have condemned Israel’s strikes and accused Netanyahu of sabotaging nuclear talks with Iran. They are reminding the public that Trump withdrew in 2018 from a multinational nuclear agreement that limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions negotiated during the Obama administration.

“Trump created the problem,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) posted on X.

What voters think

A Pearson Institute/Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from September 2024 found that about half of Democrats said the U.S. was being “too supportive” of Israel and about 4 in 10 said its level of support was “about right.” Democrats were more likely than independents and Republicans to say the Israeli government had “a lot” of responsibility for the continuation of the war between Israel and Hamas.

About 6 in 10 Democrats and half of Republicans said they felt Iran was an adversary with whom the U.S. was in conflict.

Gomez Licon and Beaumont write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Linley Sanders, Will Weissert and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report

This past week Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump spoke at a rally. Trump’s speech seemed familiar: Disparage Los Angeles (“trash heap”). Criticize Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass (“incompetent, and they paid troublemakers, agitators and insurrectionists”). Restate grievances about the 2020 election (“rigged and stolen”). Chide the crowd to support the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (“You better push your favorite congressmen”).

But this speech was different from his others. The location was Ft. Bragg in North Carolina — and the audience was mostly soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, the “All Americans.” Internal unit communications revealed soldiers at the rally were screened based on political leanings and physical appearance. “If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration,” the guidance advised, “and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out.”

So what followed was to be expected. A sea of young soldiers in uniform — selected for their preference for the president — cheering and clapping for partisan commentary. This obviously violates Defense Department regulations. Heck, it’s even spelled out in a handy Pentagon FAQ:

Q. Can I ever wear my uniform when I attend political events?

A. No; military members must refrain from participating in political activity while in military uniform in accordance with both DoDD 1344.10 and DoDI 1344.01. This prohibition applies to all Armed Forces members.

But what happened during Trump’s appearance at the Army base is worse than breaking regs. The commander in chief forced an important unit to choose sides. He broke the All Americans in two. In essence, his statement to the troops there was: “Those who like me and my politics, come to my rally. The rest of you — beat it.” (Maybe we should start calling them the “Some Americans.”)

Imagine what it was like the day after. The soldiers who chose not to attend wondered how their next rating would go. Some lieutenant from California worried if his commander now has a problem with where he’s from — and is checking whether he was at the rally. Maybe it’s better if he wasn’t, and he instead chose to abide by Defense regulations?

No matter which way you lean, that speech injected partisan acid into the 82nd Airborne. And it will drip down and corrode from the stars at the top to the lowest-ranking private.

Militaries require extraordinary cohesion to function in combat. For those of us who’ve chosen this profession, one thing is burned into our brains from that very first day our hair’s shorn off: We’re all we’ve got. There’s nobody else. When you are hundreds and thousands of miles away from everyone else you’ve ever known, and you’re there for weeks and months and a year, you realize just how important the person next to you is, regardless of where they’ve come from, who their parents are, or whether their community votes red or blue.

Fighting units are like five separate fingers that form a fist. Partisan acid burns and weakens our fist.

Then there are the indirect effects. This speech damaged the military’s standing with a large swath of America. The image of soldiers cheering the partisan applause lines of a commander in chief who just sent thousands of troops to Los Angeles over the state’s objections? Not a good look.

These optics risk ruining the military’s trust with roughly half of America. The military is the last remaining federal institution that a majority of Americans trust “a great deal.” But it’s been slipping since the last Trump administration and may fall under 50%. Yet the military requires firm trust to fund and fill critical needs.

That’s important because not everyone wants to serve in the military. Many would prefer not to think about the expected self-sacrifice, or the daily discomforts of military discipline. Moreover, not everyone is even able to serve in the military. Roughly three-quarters of young Americans can’t qualify.

What if someone who would have been the next Mike Mullen — Los Angeles native, Navy admiral and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs — gets turned off by this rally and opts against the Naval Academy?

Then zoom out a little. What if much of California takes offense at this speech, not to mention at the soldiers and Marines so recently forced upon the local and state governments?

California hosts more active-duty troops than any other state — by a wide margin. It’s also the biggest donor state in the country, contributing $83 billion more to the federal government than it receives. The bases and other strategic locations up and down the Pacific Coast are beyond value. California is America’s strong right arm.

To sever California’s support for the military is simply unthinkable. It just can’t happen. We’ve got to fix this.

The first fix is simple. Hold troops to the accepted standards. Hegseth’s most recent book argued that the Defense Department has “an integrity and accountability problem.” Here’s the secretary’s chance to show America he stands for standards.

But we know mistakes happen, and this could become a powerful teachable moment: When the commander in chief orders troops to such an event, the only acceptable demeanor is the stone cold silence the generals and admirals of the Joint Chiefs display at the State of the Union, regardless of their politics and regardless of what the president is saying. Just a few years ago, two Marines in a similarly awful situation did just this right thing.

A further fix calls for more individuals to act: The roughly 7,500 retired generals and admirals in America need to speak up. The military profession’s nonpartisan ethic is at a breaking point. They know the old military saying: When you spot something substandard, and you fail to correct it, then you’ve just set a new standard.

The reason many of these retired senior officers often don’t speak out is their fear that defending neutrality risks having a political impact. Yet their continued silence carries a grave institutional effect — the slow-motion suicide of the profession that gave them their stars.

The president mentioned Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in his speech, and it’s too bad his speechwriter didn’t include a certain anecdote that would’ve fit the occasion. When the Civil War was over and terms were being agreed upon at Appomattox Court House, Lee noticed Col. Ely Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca man serving on Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s staff. Lee quipped, “I am glad to see one real American here.”

To which Parker replied, “We are all Americans.” Since that very moment, we’ve been one country and one Army, All Americans, indivisible and inseparable from society.

If only we can keep it.

ML Cavanaugh is the author of the forthcoming book “Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before.” @MLCavanaugh

In his ongoing war on “woke,” President Trump has instructed the National Park Service to scrub any language he would deem negative, unpatriotic or smacking of “improper partisan ideology” from signs and presentations visitors encounter at national parks and historic sites.

Instead, his administration has ordered the national parks and hundreds of other monuments and museums supervised by the Department of the Interior to ensure that all of their signage reminds Americans of our “extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”

Those marching orders, which went into effect late last week, have left Trump opponents and free speech advocates gasping in disbelief, wondering how park employees are supposed to put a sunny spin on monuments acknowledging slavery and Jim Crow laws. And how they’ll square the story of Japanese Americans shipped off to incarceration camps during World War II with an “unmatched record of advancing liberty.”

At Manzanar National Historic Site, a dusty encampment in the high desert of eastern California, one of 10 camps where more than 120,000 Japanese American civilians were imprisoned during the early 1940s, employees put up a required notice describing the changes last week.

Like all such notices across the country, it includes a QR code visitors can use to report any signs they see that are “negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes”.

An identical sign is up at the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Kern County, a tribute to the struggle to ensure better wages and safer working conditions for immigrant farm laborers. Such signs are going up across the sprawling system, which includes Fort Sumter National Monument, where Confederates fired the first shots of the Civil War; Ford’s Theater National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Park.

So, nothing negative about John Wilkes Booth or James Earl Ray?

In response to an email requesting comment, a National Park Service spokesperson did not address questions about specific parks or monuments, saying only that changes would be made “where appropriate.”

The whole thing is “flabbergasting,” said Dennis Arguelles, Southern California director for the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Assn. “These stories may not be flattering to American heritage, but they’re an integral part of our history.

“If we lose these stories, then we’re in danger of repeating some of these mistakes,” Arguelles said.

Trump titled his March 27 executive order requiring federal sign writers to look on the bright side “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” He specifically instructed the Interior Department to scrutinize any signs put up since January 2020 — the beginning of the Biden administration — for language that perpetuates “a false reconstruction” of American history.

Trump called out signs that “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

He specifically cited the National Historical Park in Philadelphia and the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., as bowing to what he described as the previous administration’s zeal to cast “our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”

His solution? Order federal employees and historians to rewrite the “revisionist” history with language that exudes patriotism.

“It all seems pretty Orwellian,” said Kimbrough Moore, a rock climber and Yosemite National Park guide book author. After news of the impending changes began circulating in park circles, he posted on Instagram a sign he saw in the toilet at the Porcupine Flat campground in the middle of the park.

Across from the ubiquitous sign in all park bathrooms that says, “Please DO NOT put trash in toilets, it is extremely difficult to remove,” someone added a placard that reads, “Please DO NOT put trash in the White House. It is extremely difficult to remove.”

Predictably, the post went viral, proving what would-be censors have known for centuries: Policing language is a messy business and can be hard to control in a free society.

“Even the pooper can be a venue for resistance,” Moore wrote.

June 19 (UPI) — The U.S. government and a Florida agency are working to arrange evacuation flights and cruise ship departures for Americans who want to leave Israel.

That includes participants in Birthright Israel, which is a free, 10-day heritage trip to Israel offered to young Jewish adults between the ages of 18-26.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said Wednesday his embassy is working to get Americans out of Israel.

“Urgent notice! American citizens wanting to leave Israel-US Embassy in Israel @usembassyjlm is working on evacuation flights & cruise ship departures,” Huckabee wrote on his personal X account and later reposted on official accounts. “You must enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP). You will be alerted w/ updates.”

The State Department later said that it has “no announcement about assisting private U.S. citizens to depart at this time.”

The situation is complicated by the closure of Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv. Jordan’s airports are open for commercial flights after being shut on Friday and Saturday.

On Tuesday, Americans participating in Birthright Israel boarded buses and sailed on the Crown Iris, a luxury Israeli cruise ship operated by Mano Maritime, to Cyprus. After the 13-hour voyage, they were flown to Tampa, Fla., on four jets chartered by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

In October 2023, DeSantis’ office flew nearly 700 Americans from Israel to Florida after Hamas attacked the Middle Eastern country.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management wrote on Facebook Sunday that it is “actively coordinating efforts to assist Americans seeking evacuation from the hostile situation in Israel.”

Sierra Dean, a spokesperson for the governor, said stranded Americans can fill out an emergency evacuation form from Grey Bull Rescue, a Tampa nonprofit that helps rescue citizens in conflict zones. Project Dynamo, a nonprofit also in Tampa, has teams on the ground in Israel and Jordan to assist.

Birthright Israel, a nonprofit, said it will pay for all its participants’ transportation costs.

When the airstrikes began, Birthright had about 2,800 young adult participants in Israel with 20,000 planning to go there this summer. Trips were canceled after the Israel-Hamas war, but were resumed in January 2023.

“Today we witnessed the true spirit of Birthright Israel – not only as an educational journey, but as a global family committed to the safety and well-being of every participant,” the organization’s CEO, Gidi Mark, said in a statement to The Times of Israel.

“This was a complex and emotional operation, carried out under immense pressure, and we are proud to have brought 1,500 young adults safely to Cyprus. Our team continues to work around the clock to secure solutions for the remaining participants still in Israel.”

Birthright participants were instructed to keep the voyage a secret by their group leaders.

“We’ve spent the last week going to bomb shelters every single night and barely getting any sleep,” Cantor Josh Goldberg told WPEC-TV. “So at least we all got to sleep on the boat.”

About 1,300 Birthright participants were still in Israel.

Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to wage war on illegal immigration the likes of which the United States has never seen. His first big campaign — launched against Los Angeles and its surrounding communities, of course — has proceeded with predictably disastrous results.

Parts of Southern California are under occupation by the National Guard and Marines, as Trump and his allies try to paint the protests against deportations as an insurrection fueled by Mexican “invaders”. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeal will listen today to administration lawyers argue that deploying the National Guard over the objections of a sitting governor is constitutional.

On social media Sunday, Trump cawed that he has “directed my entire Administration” to concentrate on identifying and removing as many illegal immigrants as possible as quickly as possible. He vowed especially to crack down on sanctuary cities across the country to supposedly “reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.” (His Restoration-era capitalization, not mine).

Yet in the president’s social media blathering last week came something shocking: an admission that deportations don’t really work.

On June 12, Trump wrote that farmers, hoteliers and people in the leisure industry “have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”

Ya think?

For decades, study after study across the political spectrum have shown that illegal immigrants not only don’t take jobs away from native-born U.S. citizens or depress their wages, but that removing them usually makes the economy worse.

There’s the liberal-leaning American Immigration Council, which predicted last year that a decadelong campaign to achieve Trump’s goal of booting 1 million illegal immigrants a year would shave off at least 4.2% from the U.S. gross domestic product. That number is on par with the Great Recession of 2008.

There’s the 618-page tome released in 2017 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and overseen by 14 professors. It concluded that “immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S.” and also noted that “the rate of unemployment for native workers decline” with “larger immigration flows.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected last year that the surge in migration during the Biden administration would at first depress wages of native-born workers and legal immigrants but eventually help them increase over a decade.

Center for Immigration Studies director of research Steven Camarota — a man whose whole public persona is arguing that too much immigration of any kind is detrimental to the U.S. — claimed in prepared remarks before Congress last year that his group had “good evidence that immigration reduces wages and employment for some U.S.-born workers.” But he also admitted that parsing out how illegal immigration impacts the job market “is difficult.”

A 2024 survey by the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire examined previous research into three infamous removals of legal and illegal immigrants from the U.S. workforce: the repatriation during the Great Depression of at least half a million people of Mexican descent, the 1964 end of the bracero program, and the removal of nearly half a million illegal immigrants during the Obama administration. The survey concluded that “deportation policies have not benefited U.S.- born residents.”

Meanwhile, a 2024 Brookings Institute paper found that three of the five professions with the highest number of illegal immigrants were in the hospitality, agricultural and restaurant industry and that U.S. citizens don’t work in those fields at the rate undocumented people do.

No wonder that later in the day after Trump’s social media about-face, the New York Times reported that a memo went out to ICE regional leaders urging them to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”

So why pursue mass deportations at all if there’s mucho evidence that they negatively effect American-born workers, a group Trump claims he wants to restore to greatness?

There’s really only one explanation: terror.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks with the media outside the White House.

(Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)

Trump’s main adviser on all things immigration is Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has long advocated for a scorched-earth campaign and dressed down ICE agents just last month for not nabbing and deporting people faster, damn the cost.

The Santa Monica native absorbed this apocalyptic vision from conservative activists in California, who cast the fight against illegal immigration while he was growing up in the 1990s and 2000s not just in economic terms but cultural ones. Xenophobia has always colored this nation’s past crackdowns on immigration legal and not, but the Golden State became a noxious cauldron whose anti-immigrant fumes have infested Americans in a way not seen in a century.

That’s what makes Trump’s campaign so dangerous. His seeming softening against farmers, restaurateurs and hoteliers shows that he knows the country can’t weather the disruptions that deportations cause to important sectors of our economy. If he just took a dollars-and-cents approach to illegal immigration and stopped the language about “Migrant Invasion” destroying big cities, Trump wouldn’t get such righteous pushback from so many.

But that’s not who he is. He inveighs the way he does because he wants undocumented people and the people who care for them to live in fear, to see him as a potentate who can deport people or leave them alone at his mercy and whim.

The historical precedent that Trump wants la migra to follow is Operation Wetback, an Eisenhower administration program the immigration authorities claimed back then deported 1.3 million illegal immigrants in 1954 alone and improved the economic conditions of Americans. Then and now, authorities said people without papers were ruining it for citizens, were causing too much crime and that our southern border was out of control.

The only book-length study of the campaign remains Juan Ramón García’s 1980 “Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954.” The professor went through newspaper clippings, congressional testimony and government reports to paint a picture of a government hell-bent on splashy headlines to scare Mexican migrants into returning to their homeland and deterring others from making the trek to el Norte.

Garcia found that government officials had exaggerated their claims because “they realized that the more impressive the figures, the better congressional response might be to requests for increased budgetary support.”

A 1954 photograph of undocumented Mexican workers (identified as “wetbacks” in a handwritten notation on the negative) awaiting deportation by U.S. authorities to Mexico.

(Los Angeles Times)

Operation Wetback didn’t usher in a new era of American worker prosperity but rather emboldened employers to exploit legal immigrants and citizens who filled in the jobs that illegal immigrants once occupied, Garcia found. It also “helped to strengthen feelings of alienation from U.S. society and to cause further mistrust of the government” for Mexican Americans. You’re seeing that play out right now, as young Latinos wave the flags of Mexico and other Latin American countries and U.S. citizens are being detained by la migra.

Most damningly, the book concluded that Operation Wetback didn’t stop illegal immigration at all — a fact borne out by the fact that here we are arguing about the subject 71 years later. The mass deportations were just a “stopgap measure, doomed to go the way of most stopgap measures,” Garcia wrote, because this country can never quit “the seemingly insatiable appetite for cheap labor” that it’s always had.

Someone tell that to Trump so he stops this madness once and for all.

More than one-fifth of news consumers surveyed engaged with podcaster Joe Rogan, Reuters Institute says.

Social media and video platforms have eclipsed traditional media as news sources in the United States for the first time, a report has found.

Fifth-four percent of surveyed Americans used platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok for news during the previous week, up from 27 percent in 2013, the report by the Reuters Institute showed on Tuesday.

Only 50 percent relied on TV, while 48 percent looked at news websites or apps, according to the 2025 Digital News Report.

Young people drove the shift, with 54 percent of Americans aged 18-24 and half of those aged 25-34 choosing social media and video platforms as their “main” source of news.

The move towards social media was strongest in the US and Brazil, where 34 percent and 35 percent of respondents, respectively, described it as their “main” source of news, followed by the United Kingdom, France, Denmark and Japan.

Individual online influencers, most of them right-leaning, are also reaching large numbers of news consumers, the report found.

More than one-fifth of US respondents said they had seen podcaster Joe Rogan discuss the news during the week following US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, while 12-14 percent encountered Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro, according to the report.

The report also found that the so-called “Trump bump” experienced by news platforms in 2016 has not carried over into his second presidency, with only social media and video platforms seeing their audiences rise.

Across nearly 50 countries surveyed, four in 10 respondents said they trusted most news “most of the time,” a figure that has been stable for the past three years, according to the report.

Trust was highest in Nigeria, where 68 percent expressed confidence, followed by Finland, Kenya, Denmark, South Africa and Thailand.

Respondents in Greece and Hungary had the least trust, with just 22 percent believing the news, followed by those in Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania.

Nic Newman, the report’s author, said the declining influence of traditional media has been a boon for politicians, who are “increasingly able to bypass traditional journalism in favour of friendly partisan media, ‘personalities’, and ‘influencers’ who often get special access but rarely ask difficult questions”.

“These trends are increasingly pronounced in the United States under Donald Trump, as well as parts of Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, but are moving more slowly elsewhere, especially where news brands maintain a strong connection with audiences,” Newman said in an overview of the report.

“In countries where press freedom is under threat, alternative ecosystems also offer opportunities, at their best, to bring fresh perspectives and challenge repressive governments,” Newman said.

“But at the same time, these changes may be contributing to rising political polarisation and a coarsening debate online.”