June 19th
Mark David
June 19th
1) Fewer Americans Believe in the American Dream Than Ever Before. But Look at Who Still Does.
Turns out the people who believe in it most are the ones we've spent the last year trying to keep out. By Adam Kinzinger
In a few weeks, this country will mark its 250th birthday. Flags will go up. Fireworks will light the sky. Politicians will give speeches about American greatness. And somewhere underneath all of that, a new poll describes a nation that is losing faith in our own foundational promise.
The numbers are striking. Fewer than half of Americans, just 46 percent, now believe that everyone in this country has the opportunity to achieve the American Dream. Among adults under 30, that number falls to 22 percent. A third of the public says the Dream once held true but no longer does. On the eve of our 250th anniversary, the idea that has bound us in hope is struggling to hold the country’s belief.
But before we accept that as a verdict, I think we need to ask a harder question. Do we even know what the American Dream is anymore?
2) "Shut Up," Joe Rogan
I've spent enough years behind a microphone to know the difference between entertainment and a sales pitch dressed up as entertainment, and I know which one this was. Rogan does, too... Thom Hartmann Jun 19, 2026 Hartman Report Com
It takes a particular kind of hubris to stand on the South Lawn of the White House, on a sitting president’s 80th birthday, calling the fights for a cage match that the president personally dreamed up, hosted, sat ringside for, and bought stock in, and then go on your podcast a day later and tell the rest of the country that anybody who noticed the politics of it all should just:
But that’s what Joe Rogan said this week, complaining that “so many people are trying to make it a partisan thing” and pleading with everybody to just please settle down and stop. It would be funny if it weren’t such a perfect little distillation of how the whole GOP con works.
3) Juneteenth’s real meaning is written on the plates of smoked meats, potato salad and watermelon by Bobby J. Smith II Associate Professor of African American Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign THE CONVERSATION June 19th
Visiting Comanche Crossing on Juneteenth felt like freedom,” my father said as we pulled into Booker T. Washington Park, the site near what used to be known as the historic Comanche Crossing on Lake Mexia in Texas. “Listen, Bobby, this place would be full of Black folks cooking, dancing, and playing music. It was a big festival with fireworks and a party.”
It had been more than six decades since my father had visited the park in the summer of 1965. But he sounded like a little kid again as he breathlessly recounted all the food: “We would have barbecue ribs, chicken, brisket, blood sausage, raccoon, armadillo, fried chicken, potato salad, beans and yellow meat watermelon, and we had to have that Big Red Soda – you know it was created in Waco, right? – banana pudding, peach cobbler, pecan pie, white coconut cake, German chocolate cake, berry cobblers, pies and homemade ice cream.”
4) Trump tells The Axios Show there are "no limits" to his power after Iran war
5) The Quiet House A day in the White House, 2030. by Rick Wilson Lincoln Square June 19th
The first thing you notice, walking into the West Wing on a June day in 2030, is how quiet it is.
Not the quiet of paranoia and Dear Leader guerrilla warfare that defined the kill-or-be-killed of the prior Administration’s intramural warfare.
6) The Juneteenth Truth About Trump: We need to hold him accountable for this, too by Robert Reich Jun 19, 2026
In December 2025, Trump axed today’s holiday — Juneteenth, the official celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation — from the free admission days at the more than 100 national parks across America. He also axed Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a free admission day. Instead, he substituted his own birthday, June 14, as a free admission day. There you have it: the venal combination of Trump’s white supremacy and his malignant narcissism.
7) June 18, 2026 Heather Cox Richardson Jun 19, 2026 LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN
Overnight, Ukraine launched its biggest attack on Moscow, the capital of Russia, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine’s waves of drone strikes on a major Moscow oil refinery have shrouded the city in flames and black smoke. Last week, Russia struck one of Ukraine’s most important religious and cultural landmarks, the thousand-year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. The ancient monastery, with its churches and bell towers, is a UNESCO World Heritage site, described by the United Nations agency as a “masterpiece of Ukrainian art.”
Russia denied responsibility for the strike. After the Moscow strikes, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky released a video saying: “If Ukraine burns, your Moscow will burn too.”
In the U.S., President Donald J. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are trying hard to sell the administration’s memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran, which Trump signed yesterday at the Palace of Versailles in a scene that recalled Germany’s surrender after World War I. Trump is posting in all caps on social media that the deal is a triumph and that those who disagree with it “are either jealous, bad people, or stupid.”