Trump shares Melania Trump's letter to Putin
The first lady writes "it is time" to protect children and future generations worldwide.
"Every child shares the same quiet dreams in their heart, whether born randomly into a nation's rustic countryside or a magnificent city-center. They dream of love, possibility, and safety from danger," Melania Trump's letter begins.
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The first lady states that all children are born innocent, regardless of their nationality, political views or beliefs.
"A simple yet profound concept, Mr. Putin, as I am sure you agree, is that each generation's descendants begin their lives with a purity -- an innocence which stands above geography, government, and ideology," she said.
"In today's world, some children are forced to carry a quiet laughter, untouched by the darkness around them -- a silent defiance against the forces that can potentially claim their future," she continued.
The first lady tells the Russian president that protecting children "will do more than serve Russia alone" and "will serve humanity itself."
"Such a bold idea transcends all human division, and you, Mr. Putin, are fit to implement this vision with a stroke of the pen today," she concludes.
"It is time," she signs off.
The physical letter was first obtained by Fox News Digital.
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Vox
3 minutes ago
- Vox
How conservatives help their young thinkers — and why liberals don't
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Attendees look on during Turning Point USA's Culture War event at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, on October 29, 2019. Megan Jelinger/AFP via Getty Images Last week, two young liberals asked for help finding a job in the ideas industry. And I didn't have a great answer. It made sense that they were asking: We were at a conference for liberals, dedicated to building a version of the doctrine that works in the 21st century. They were interested in studying ideas professionally, and I was there to moderate a panel about political philosophy. Yet I found myself struggling to give good advice. Sure, they could try for an internship at a liberal publication or think tank, but those are fiercely competitive and don't pay much. They could apply for a PhD program, but teaching jobs were scarce even before President Donald Trump took a hammer to American academia. What's really missing are programs of a specific kind — ones that help college students and recent grads engage with Big Ideas and connect with Important People. If my young acquaintances were right-wing, I might have told them to apply for National Review's Buckley and Rhodes journalism fellowships — multiyear paid opportunities to write for a national audience straight out of college. For a lesser commitment, they could have tried for the Claremont Institute's Publius Fellowship — a three-week program where you receive $1,500, a $700 travel stipend, free housing, paid meals, and an opportunity to study with some of the most influential (and radical) figures of the Trump era. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Those are two examples of numerous well-funded programs explicitly designed to usher as many bright young people into the institutional conservative world as possible. If you're an ambitious young college grad, and anywhere on the spectrum from libertarian to hardcore Trumpist, you've got tons of options to get into the ideas game. My young acquaintances really wanted a liberal version of such a thing. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to exist. Where there should be a talent pipeline from universities to liberal public intellectualism, there is a giant sucking sound instead. And, increasingly, it's giving the right a leg up in winning the future. The right's winning formula for training youth It is true, as conservatives have long alleged, that America's intellectual institutions are pretty left-leaning places. They often overstate the case — professors are more likely to be Elizabeth Warren Dems than 'globalize the intifada' socialist revolutionaries — but data confirms that liberals outnumber conservatives in academia and the media by pretty significant margins. This is, of course, not at all new. One of the founding texts of the postwar conservative movement, William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, is all about how academia is full of socialists who are chipping away at the eternal truths of capitalism and Christianity. Buckley founded National Review as an antidote to what he saw as the liberal tilt of the mainstream American press. The legacy of Buckley-style thinking is the rise of a conservative ideas industry. A young person nowadays could attend college at right-wing Hillsdale, build their law school life around membership in the Federalist Society, and then get a job writing right-wing papers for the Heritage Foundation — all while getting their news from Fox News and Mark Levin's radio show. As part of these pipeline programs, older right-wingers get to know young up-and-comers as people, and thus develop a personal stake in their success. At the same time, the right also invested in the kinds of 'pipeline' programs our young liberals are desperate for. These aren't designed to replace traditional education or media institutions, but rather to identify young people interested in ideas and expose them to the right-wing alternatives. These work, in large part, by being intellectually exciting. 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Hochman, who was raised in a liberal household and moved to the right in college, describes how the movement's fellowship programs brought him in direct and meaningful contact with conservatism's leading lights. 'All of a sudden, you're at dinner with people you've looked up to for years, staying up until 1 am drinking wine with them and asking them questions and getting to talk to them. And they're taking you seriously,' Hochman says. As part of these pipeline programs, older right-wingers get to know young up-and-comers as people, and thus develop a personal stake in their success. When you stay up late drinking with someone, talking about shared ideas, you come to care about them in a way you don't if they sent you a cold email. When they come looking for help getting a job writing about conservative ideas, you'll work that much harder to place them in one. And the right has built its institutions to ensure that such positions are available. Right-wing publications and think tanks are much more open to debating big-picture questions — say, what kind of a nation is America? — than their left-wing peers (more on that in a second). Claremont, for example, was founded by students of conservative political philosopher Harry Jaffa, and it shows in the kind of work they put out (even when it strikes me as substantively ridiculous). Liberals are suffering from success There is no parallel culture in American liberalism — a function, in part, of liberalism's longtime intellectual dominance. There wasn't much of a need for liberal donors to create programs to cultivate liberal thought, as people interested could simply go get a PhD or an entry-level reporting job. However, these institutions were not avowedly liberal in character. They styled themselves as politically neutral, focused more on quality research and reporting, than as contributing to a particular ideological cause. This means that while liberals in such fields were in left-leaning environments, many were trained to see themselves primarily as professionals working a craft. So while there are plenty of internships available to young liberals, they're mostly focused on professional training (or coffee-fetching) rather than staying up late swapping ideas with big names. More broadly, the liberal professional approach also produced a kind of intellectual siloing. If you were a young liberal interested in political philosophy, odds are that you end up going to a PhD program and pursuing a career in academia. If you're interested in policy, odds are that you ended up studying a set of applied skills (like law or economics) that prepared you for very specific policy discussions in your area of expertise. But the conservative intellectual model bridges the philosophy-policy gap. It trains young people in the big-picture ideas, like conservative visions of political morality and religion, and teaches them to connect those things to everyday policy discussions. You aren't learning about abstract ideas or concrete policy, but rather learning a comprehensive worldview that treats policy issues as downstream of specific values. You are, in short, learning an ideology. Liberalism has plenty of brilliant theorists who work at a largely abstract level, and policy wonks who work on the most applied issues. But in the middle area of ideology, one bridging the gap between principle and policy, they've basically ceded the field to conservatism. The pipeline problem for young people is a symptom of the movement's blind spot: liberals, as a collective, don't care to cultivate a youth ideological cadre. This might not have been a problem in the past — and maybe even a benefit. Ideological thinking tends to produce rigidity, an unwillingness to adjust one's policy thinking based on new evidence. The right's longtime insistence that tax cuts can reduce deficits, or addiction to proposing military solutions to foreign policy problems, are two examples of curdled ideology. But we're at a moment where liberalism is in a particular kind of crisis: under threat from new ideologies that challenge not specific liberal policy ideas, but the basic premises of a liberal political system. Liberals need a new and compelling vision: one that explains why our ideas are not merely a defense of an unpopular status quo, but a broader politics that can be used to address cardinal problems of the 21st century. At this moment, liberals lack the personnel to articulate such a vision — while the right's radical thinkers, at places like Claremont, seize the field.
San Francisco Chronicle
4 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
As hurricane season collides with immigration agenda, fears increase for those without legal status
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That's why we have to have a plan.' ___
Fast Company
4 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Newsom and Cuomo are using social media to try and replicate Mamdani's appeal. They're missing the point
According to Sun Tzu, in order to know your enemy, you must become your enemy. Some politicians might be taking that advice a little too literally, though. Zohran Mamdani's notably deft use of social media helped lead his well-run mayoral primary campaign to victory in June—and it may have inspired some recent pivots from other politicos. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo is now taking a kitchen-sink approach to replicating his mayoral opponent's social media magic, while California Governor Gavin Newsom has taken to mimicking Donald Trump in an ongoing performance art piece on one of his X accounts. Neither seems to have a broader strategy beyond capturing attention. Memes and mimicking online Fresh off of copying Mamdani's distinct video style upon reentering the mayoral race as an Independent, Cuomo is now trying to flex his own social media fluency, with memes and a reply-heavy X account. In between the rash of posts attacking his opponent, Cuomo has been interacting with many of his followers and posting the occasional clunky meme from The Office. Apparently, this is just the beginning. Jason Levin, whose bio claims he builds 'software for meme marketing and memetic warfare,' took credit for Cuomo's memefication on Monday. In a thread posted to X, he recounted how his first meme for Cuomo hit 5.1 million views on the platform, with a triumphant tone more befitting someone who has just received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. 'We are entering a golden age of meme'fied politics,' he wrote in one entry in the thread, urging his followers to take up arms (read: memes), and help 'save NYC.' Meanwhile, Governor Newsom also seems to believe we have 'entered a golden age of meme'fied politics.' Since the beginning of August, he has been taking a punchier approach on X, with the occasional clunky meme from The Office. The effort peaked last week, though, when Newsom began an elaborate trolling campaign against Trump, in which his tweets favor the president's all-caps, nickname-forward, syntactically challenged, self-worshipful style. In an effort to show he's willing to stand up to Trump—or, let's be real, more likely in an effort to lay further groundwork for his inevitable 2028 presidential bid—Newsom is acting on social media as though he were a Good Terminator sent back in time to stop the Bad one. Whether these efforts have had any meaningful impact on Trump is debatable, but what is beyond dispute is that this social media strategy has earned Newsom loads of attention. Cuomo trolls desperately for votes The attention a politician generates with memes or trolling, however, is not necessarily relevant if they don't match it with something more interesting to say. Social media fluency, after all, is not political fairy dust. In 2025, we're well past the point where a politician using memes, in and of itself, suggests youthful savviness. Michael Bloomberg went all in on the best memes money can buy in the 2020 election, and failed to move the needle one iota. A decade into Trump's political era, everyone has already been to this circus and seen these clowns. What they want instead are leaders. Throughout his campaign, Mamdani used social media to highlight key issues around the central theme of affordability, reveal his personality, and showcase transparency. His various accounts built off the organizing prowess of his ground game to make his progressive ideas more widely palatable and to give them moral heft. His posts were generally earnest and informative, and slyly packaged in smart experiments like his daylong walk across the entirety of Manhattan. Now that he has won the primary, his social media has an earned sense of triumphalism—as in a recent video filmed backstage at a Wu-Tang concert at Madison Square Garden —along with a whole lot of smoke for his opponent, Cuomo. If Mamdani has gotten a major boost from his social media usage—and he undoubtedly has—it's because it seems like a natural extension of the candidate himself. All that Cuomo is doing with his flailing efforts at being epic on social media (something Elon Musk has proved is no pathway to popularity) is reveal his desperation for capturing attention. That thirstiness leaves room in his tent for Trump supporters, like his new meme contributor, along with Trump himself, whose support Cuomo is actively, openly courting (despite him being less popular among conservative voters than both Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa and Mamdani). Posting—shockingly—is not politics As for Newsom, the best that can be said of his new social media trolling persona is that it's drawing attention to the hypocrisy of Trump's supporters in the media. Those anchors on Fox News who find Newsom's schtick 'childish' and 'unbecoming of a leader,' for instance, should indeed have to answer for why they don't attribute those traits to the guy Newsom is imitating. But the problem is that all this trolling is just empty calories. Newsom's Bizarro Trump act is an attention-getting spectacle. It's a one-note comedy routine, not a form of leadership. He could keep this up every day for the next three years and it would never make more of a material impact than his recent pledge to redraw the district maps in California, in order to match a gerrymandering effort underway in Texas. (It's worth noting that this issue is what initially kicked off Newsom's ongoing Trump impersonation.)
