On June 5, 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, started its ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper. It had been announced earlier, in the May 8th issue of the paper.
“Hegseth throws down gauntlet to China” was how Newsweek headlined its story on the Defense Secretary’s “assertive policy address” at Asia’s “premier defense summit.”
“We will stand with you and work alongside you to deter Chinese aggression,” the Secretary pledged to Asian allies. Moreover, he declared that, as a first step, “the Department of Defense is prioritizing forward-postured, combat credible forces in the Western Pacific to deter by denial along the first and second island chains.”
“Hegseth described Chinese coercion and aggression against Taiwan and the South China Sea more clearly than any prior U.S. defense secretary,” offered Bonnie Glaser, managing director, of the German Marshall Fund’s Indo-Pacific Program.
Today is June Fourth, 36 years to the day that the People’s Liberation Army rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square, firing on and killing students and other peaceful protesters. Had the George H.W. Bush administration delivered a stronger message to China back then, maybe Hegseth wouldn’t be required to restate President Trump’s insistence that China not be allowed “to invade Taiwan on his watch.”
Or talk openly of doing “what the Department of Defense does best — fight and win — decisively.”
“[B]arely a month after the bloodshed in Tiananmen Square,” Ted Galen Carpenter wrote five years ago, “the White House dispatched National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft on a secret trip to Beijing to mend ties. That visit followed an impassioned personal letter that Bush sent to Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping” in which the president “came perilously close to kowtowing to a brutal, autocratic regime.”
Contributing to the clear and present danger we face today.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts.
Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895).
On June 4, 1989, student protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were brutally suppressed by the People’s Liberation Army.
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They shouldn’t “issue or threaten arrest warrants on U.S. citizens or U.S. residents for social media posts on American platforms while physically present on U.S. soil. . . . [Or] demand that American tech platforms . . . engage in censorship activity that reaches beyond their authority and into the United States. We will not tolerate encroachments upon American sovereignty, especially when such encroachments undermine the exercise of our fundamental right to free speech.”
The policy is the least the U.S. can do to combat despots of even “friendly” countries who target speech in the U.S. or demand that U.S. firms abet local repression.
It would also be reasonable to tie trade agreements to willingness to abstain from censoring U.S. speech and bullying U.S. companies that protect speech and privacy. But a White House report on a recent agreement with the UK says nothing about these matters.
American companies have sometimes withdrawn from foreign markets or offered truncated products rather than cooperate with censorship or surveillance. When Britain demanded a global back door to iPhone encryption, Apple removed an encryption feature from iPhones for users in the UK. Better than rendering the feature useless everywhere in the world.
But it would be better still if a country like the United Kingdom simply agreed to leave us alone. Pretend we’re allies and so forth; pretend that they, too, think freedom is a good thing.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.
Titus Livius (c. 59 BC – 17 AD), Ab urbe condita (History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, 1960), Introduction.
On June 3, 1959, Singapore adopted a constitution.
Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg accused him of manipulating data “in the service of politicized science.” Instead of answering the criticism, Mann treated it as actionably defamatory.
In 2012, Mann launched a lawsuit against Simberg (of the Competitive Enterprise) and Steyn (then writing for National Review).
National Review observes that the criticism which offended Mann “was obviously protected by the First Amendment,” so that his suit should have been scuttled immediately.
Instead, judges antagonistic to free speech when they find the speech uncongenial enabled Mann’s litigation to trundle on for years.
The story gets complicated, as touched upon a few months ago. In 2021, the tide seemed to be turning in favor of Steyn and Simberg, with a court issuing a favorable summary judgment. But in January 2024, a jury found Steyn and Simberg liable for defamation. The awards? Steyn was ordered to pay $1 in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages, Simberg to pay $1 in compensatory damages and $1,000 in punitive damages.
That insane $1 million amount was later reduced to $5,000.
Now it is Mann taking the hit, with rulings that he must pay about a million bucks in legal fees to CEI and Rand Simberg ($477,350) and National Review ($530,820).
National Review urges Michael Mann to finally relinquish his authoritarian quest lest he lose even more.
Will he? It would be irrational to continue, but it was irrational at the start.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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I think a bill can be big or it can be beautiful. But I don’t know if it can be both.
Elon Musk, referring to Donald Trump’s ballyhooed “Big Beautiful Bill,” to CBS Sunday Morning, aired June 1, 2025.
On June 2, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.