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JOHN KIRIAKOU—As a progressive American voter, and a truly independent one at that, I’m not optimistic about the next four years. Abortion is of primary importance to me. So are the environment, workers’ rights, health care and education. I support easier immigration and an easier and quicker path to citizenship. Donald Trump will likely destroy all of that.

With that said, I believe that there are two areas where Trump is right.  One is his support for a less interventionist foreign policy. The other is criminal justice reform. Trump issued a lot of pardons when he was president. He issued a lot of commutations. And he worked to do something about the sentencing disparities between white people convicted of crimes compared to people of color. At least there was that.

MARGARET KIMBERLEY—In the end, it is the Neocons who usually win in this and other administrations. It is unlikely they had to do very much convincing to Biden, who as Barack Obama’s vice president was in charge of the policy which used Ukraine to counter Russia. The 2014 coup against Ukraine’s elected president and the subsequent sabotaging of the Minsk I and Minsk II agreements all led to the current moment. In 2022 Ukraine baited the Russians by attacking the Donbas and daring them to leave that region unprotected after years of provocations and many civilian deaths.

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MARK GRUENBERG—Ben Hurley, an Australian who left Falun Gong after a dozen years as a member, reported four years ago that even then—three years after his initial blog about it—he got reports from once-scared members.

“The stories express a mix of excitement and terror,” Hurley wrote on the Religion and Ethics website after the Australian Broadcasting Corp. ran its own exposé of Falun Gong. “Excitement that they can now listen to pop music, or eat sashimi, or have a beer, or have sex, or take up a hobby, or hang out with non-believers—without feeling filthy and unworthy.

“And lingering terror as they face up to their living god, and attempt to banish him from their minds and out of their lives.”

That living god is Falun Gong’s founder, Li Hongzhi. “A number of people labored over the decision to contact me before finally plucking up the courage because they believed that Li could read their minds,” Hurley wrote.

EDITOR—Israel Genocide Tracker is an X account created in May that scans social media and gathers data on Israeli soldiers from previous posts they had published boasting about their actions in Gaza. It then creates a profile for each soldier, including personal information such as their name, age, family origin, and army unit. According to TRT, which cited Israel’s Channel 12 News, multiple soldiers have expressed concerns over the account. “I’m afraid they could Google my name and find it there,” one soldier told Channel 12.