Think More: Monday, June 22, 2026
Belfast burns and Starmer falls, the Fauci files surface, tax-exempt terror finance, ActBlue stonewalls Congress, a public souring on AI, the economy voters feel, and the republic at 250.
Lead · When the State Stops Governing
The Real Lesson of Belfast
A Sudanese asylum seeker stands charged with the near-fatal stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie, and Belfast answered with days of fire. Writing in Lyceum, retired ICE officer Scott Mechkowski argues the riots exposed a crisis of public trust rather than causing it. When a government will not enforce its borders, citizens conclude the law is optional and stop waiting. Deportation, he contends, is the lawful alternative.
When the State Stops Governing
Starmer Resigns, and the Managerial Project Collapses
Keir Starmer has resigned, edged out after Andy Burnham’s by-election win in Makerfield. In spiked, Brendan O’Neill reads the fall of the man who won on 33.7% of the vote as the failure of technocracy: a premiership devoted to lowering the public temperature, met by Southport, Belfast, and a citizenry that refused to be sedated.
Populism Can’t Cure the Death of Social Trust
Chris Bray | Tell Me How This Ends
Responding to Eugyppius on populism’s limits, Tell Me How This Ends author Chris Bray argues the deepest injury is cultural rather than economic. What people mourn is the high-trust society: the bike on the porch, the motel key on the late-arrivals board. Voting, he warns, might fix a quarter of a wound that politics made.
Fauci and the Willing Press
Declassified Documents Renew Scrutiny of Fauci’s Wuhan Denials
Steven Richards | Just the News
On her final day as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents that, Just the News reports, include a 2016 video of EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak describing colleagues in China manipulating coronavirus spike proteins. Gabbard alleges Fauci misled Congress about gain-of-function funding, a charge he denies. U.S. agencies still reach no consensus on Covid-19’s origins.
Why the Fauci Revelations Met Mainstream Silence
A New York Post opinion column argues the same outlets that once dismissed the lab-leak theory ignored Gabbard’s release entirely, while Fauci, 85, keeps his Georgetown post and a Biden pardon dated to 2014. Senator Rand Paul wants that autopen-signed pardon challenged in court. The column treats the institutional protection as the deeper story.
Walter Kirn Wants the Story of the Media’s Covid Turn
Novelist Walter Kirn poses the question the Fauci files keep dodging: during Covid, why did the press act as cheerleaders rather than skeptics, and how was that transformation engineered? Tired of hearing only about Fauci, Kirn suggests the machinery of media orchestration is the part still waiting for its own declassification.
Follow the Money
A Virginia Charity With Hamas-Praising Roots Keeps Its Tax Exemption
Just the News reports that Dompet Dhuafa USA, registered in Richmond, retains tax-exempt status despite its Indonesian parent calling Hamas “freedom fighters” after October 7. The U.S. affiliate later partnered with Merciful Hands, a Gaza charity Treasury sanctioned in January as a Hamas front. Rep. Jim Jordan has flagged USAID money flowing to anti-Netanyahu groups.
House Republicans Threaten ActBlue With Contempt Over Withheld Files
House Judiciary Committee | judiciary.house.gov
Three House chairmen, Jim Jordan, James Comer, and Bryan Steil, warn ActBlue CEO Wallace-Jones that the platform faces contempt for shielding hundreds of subpoenaed documents under privilege claims. Among them: a resignation letter and a whistleblower message The New York Times quoted but ActBlue never produced. At issue: alleged foreign donations and misstatements to Congress.
The Public’s Verdict
Americans Are Using AI More and Liking It Less
A new Pew Research survey finds only 16% of Americans believe AI will benefit society, even as 49% use chatbots and a quarter use them daily, up from 33% in 2024. Futurism notes the gap is widest among Gen Z, the heaviest users and the most skeptical. Adoption, it turns out, has not bought affection.
What a Pew survey says about America and AI
16%
believe AI helps society
49%
now use AI chatbots
40%
expect a negative impact
Voters Keep Naming the Economy, Unprompted
Scott Rasmussen | Napolitan News Service
Asked in their own words, 34% of registered voters call the economy the nation’s most important problem in Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service survey. Worry over foreign policy, Iran, and war has cooled to a combined 15%, down 16 points since April. The economy unites the parties even where their second concerns diverge.
The Schoolhouse and the Republic
American University Quietly Shelves Its DEI Bias Team
Campus Reform reports that American University has quietly dissolved its Community Action and Response Team, the bias-reporting body that never opened an office. The retreat followed the departure of its diversity vice president, though the school still lists the team online. American had pledged more than $120 million to inclusion efforts under a 2018 plan.
Why “Critical Thinking” Can’t Carry a College Education
Stuart N. Brotman | The American Mind
In The American Mind, Stuart Brotman argues that “critical thinking,” higher education’s favorite credential, has become a reactive filter that any chatbot can mimic. What machines cannot do is disciplined inquiry: sitting with primary sources, submitting to peer review, building knowledge over months. The founders, he notes, wanted informed citizens, not merely skeptical ones.
John Quincy Adams Knew What July 4 Was For
Christopher Flannery | Claremont Review of Books
As the republic nears its 250th birthday, Christopher Flannery revisits John Quincy Adams’s Fourth of July orations in the Claremont Review of Books. Adams treated the Declaration as the “ark of your covenant,” the only legitimate foundation of government. Flannery doubts any politician or comms team, half now leaning on AI, could say as much.
