Think More: Friday, June, 19, 2026
Obama's monument, Mamdani's insurgency, the Russia record, Gabbard's Fauci files, California's voter rolls, motherhood and the Founding, Britain's reckoning, and more.
Lead · After Hope and Change
Obama’s Tower Rises as His Politics Recedes
The Barack Obama Presidential Center opens in Chicago this Juneteenth, and the early notices are unkind. Writing in UnHerd, Ryan Zickgraf reads the 225-foot windowless tower as a mausoleum for Obamaism: a politics of symbolism over structure, now outlived by events. Tellingly, the campus houses no presidential archive, making it the first such library since FDR’s without one.
After Hope and Change
Mamdani Targets New York’s Democratic Incumbents
Steven Richards | Just the News
New York’s socialist mayor wants more than City Hall. Zohran Mamdani has endorsed three DSA-aligned challengers to sitting House Democrats, among them Brad Lander against Representative Dan Goldman, where one Emerson poll put Lander ahead by 34 points. Hakeem Jeffries, needing those seats for a House majority, must now spend defending them.
The Burden of Proof
The Times Revisits Russia, and Misses Again
Ashe Short & John Solomon | Just the News
A new New York Times piece on Section 702 asserts that President Trump had no evidence his 2016 campaign was surveilled. Ashe Short and John Solomon catalog what the record holds: a guilty plea from FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith for doctoring a FISA email, an inspector general’s 17 cited inaccuracies, and a $1.25 million settlement paid to Carter Page.
Gabbard Leaves the DNI With a Salvo at Fauci
On her final day as director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard released documents she says show Anthony Fauci funded risky Wuhan research, steered intelligence toward a natural-origin finding, and lied to Congress in 2024. Fauci has long denied wrongdoing, and the allegations remain contested and substantially unverified; the House Oversight Committee is expected to review them.
Commerce Pulls the Plug on a Frontier AI Model
Writing in The Spectator, Geoffrey Cain examines a Commerce Department order that forced Anthropic to suspend foreign access to its Claude Fable and Mythos models under the 2018 Export Control Reform Act. Cain, no dove on China, argues the order stretched export law past its limits, treating allies in London and Tokyo like adversaries. Anthropic disputes the government’s evidence.
The Golden State Ledger
California as the Blueprint Democrats Want Everywhere
Cleta Mitchell | The Federalist
Election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, writing in The Federalist, contrasts California’s system with her Election Integrity Network’s new Model Election Laws Handbook. She faults automatic registration, no-excuse mail voting, and ballot harvesting, citing a Public Interest Legal Foundation review that found tens of thousands of flawed registrations. Marc Elias has attacked the handbook; Mitchell calls authentication the remedy.
California Hunts the Taxpayers Who Flee It
Victoria Taft’s West Coast roundup in PJ Media notes how California polices departed taxpayers, down to which cell towers their calls ping, with more than 30 steps required to satisfy the Franchise Tax Board that a resident has truly left. She contrasts that zeal with looser voter-roll maintenance, now the subject of an FBI inquiry on Skid Row.
Public Interest Legal Foundation’s 2025 review of California’s voter rolls
94,500
Deceased registrants
57,700
Registered in another state
7,700
Fictitious birthdates
What Makes a People
Motherhood as the Republic’s First Classroom
In a Lyceum guest essay, Moms for Liberty’s Tina Descovich makes the case that self-government begins at home. Liberty requires virtue, she argues, and virtue is first taught by mothers, citing George Washington’s tribute to his own. The founders trusted ordinary citizens; that trust rests on the character formed in families long before any classroom.
Recovering the Declaration’s “One People”
Casey Wheatland | The American Mind
As the semiquincentennial nears, Casey Wheatland argues in The American Mind that the Declaration’s “one people” rested on more than a creed. Drawing on John Jay’s Federalist 2, he holds that shared language, religion, custom, and principle bound the founding generation, and that recovering that inheritance, not abstract universalism alone, is the work of America’s 250th year.
The Wider West
Hirsi Ali Faults Feminism’s Silence on Britain’s Abuse Scandal
Ayaan Hirsi Ali | The Free Press
A new inquiry into Britain’s grooming-gang scandal, led by Rupert Lowe of the Restore Britain party, landed Tuesday. Writing in The Free Press, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was interviewed for it, argues that mainstream feminism met the abuse of vulnerable girls with euphemism rather than outrage, fearing the charge of cultural insensitivity. Elon Musk’s posts helped force the reckoning.
Peru’s Knife-Edge Runoff and the Latin American Right
Mark Nuckols, writing from Peru in Townhall, casts Keiko Fujimori’s law-and-order campaign as the next chapter in Latin America’s rightward turn, alongside Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador. The race is closer than his headline suggests: the June 7 runoff against leftist Roberto Sanchez remains a statistical tie, with the count still unresolved weeks on.
