Russia’s Siberia and America’s Alaska seem almost to touch, with the tips of the Chukotka and Seward Peninsulas only 55 miles apart across the Bering Strait.

The scene of the planned Aug. 15 meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin — the U.S. state of Alaska — has played an outsized role in Russian propaganda and mythology.

The choice of Alaska for the summit has re-ignited imperialist narratives, with Kremlin propagandists emphasizing again that the peninsula used to be a Russian territory.

Some imperialist Russians have perceived the sale of Russian Alaska to the U.S. in 1867 as treason or a tragic mistake, while others have dismissed the transaction as illegal.

For years, Russian propagandists and officials have been obsessed with Alaska and called for returning it to Moscow. In their mindset, it is part of the mythology where Alaska, Finland, Poland, and Ukraine are "historical Russian lands" that were unfairly separated from the homeland.

Is the US Supreme Court about to disenfranchise black Americans and other racial minority voters?

You would think so, given the hysterical hyperbole found in the progressive press. “The Supreme Court Prepares to End Voting Rights As We Know Them,” shrieks the headline in the Left-wing journal Mother Jones.

Is the Republican majority on the Supreme Court really about to strike down or eviscerate the Voting Rights Act of 1965? Will the Court legalize the outlawed methods used by Southern segregationists to deny the right to vote to black Americans, like literacy tests and poll taxes?

Of course not. The occasion of these alarms is the willingness of the Court to consider a Louisiana case – Louisiana v Callais -- involving the use of race by state legislatures in drawing congressional districts.

What is at issue is the question of whether the half-century-old practice of racial gerrymandering – drawing congressional districts in such a way as to elect representatives of a particular race to the House of Representatives – is compatible with the Voting Rights Act or the US constitution.

Russian officials are sounding increasingly alarmed and even paranoid in their public statements about the future of their country. Most notably, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed in September of last year that Western governments have assembled a coalition of at least fifty countries in order to dismember Russia.

What may appear to be political paranoia or an attempt to mobilize citizens behind the regime is not necessarily based on imagined enemies. It reveals the official realization that numerous negative trends are converging on Russia and that the current regime, and even the state itself, may be running out of time.

Three overarching fears preoccupy Russian officialdom: losing the war, economic collapse, and state fracture. The prospect of all three simultaneously occurring soon looms on the horizon.

The Democrat Party is in political free fall. Their approval ratings are sinking, their coalition is cracking, and the message they once rode to power no longer works. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found 63% of Americans now view the party unfavorably — the worst numbers the poll has recorded in three decades.

This wasn’t sudden. Democrats saw their decline coming — and instead of changing course, they rigged the system to survive it.

After the 2020 census, Democrat-run states didn’t redraw their maps — they obliterated them. Republican districts were axed. Competitive seats were split. What replaced them were Democrat fortresses, designed to shield the party from the voters they’d lost.

And they did all of it with a straight face — insisting it was about “equity” and “representation.” It was a con. They used woke buzzwords to rubber-stamp power grabs. They redrew the lines while lecturing the rest of the country about democracy.

No state exposes that hypocrisy more than Illinois.  So blatant that Stephen Colbert ridiculed its governor on national television for it.

Britain’s Labor government is in trouble: Its program of massive third-world immigration from places like Pakistan and Somalia is wildly, overwhelmingly unpopular.

But that’s not the real problem.

The real problem is that despite the best efforts of Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his leftist captive media, Britons themselves have discovered just how unpopular it is.

You might think that’s absurd — if mass immigration is unpopular, how can everyone not know it?  Everyone doesn’t know it because the government has been policing speech about immigration.

You see, Britain has no First Amendment, an inviolate right to free speech.  Result?  Any criticism of open borders, lax enforcement or — worst of all — immigrant crime has been punished as “racist” and “hate speech” by the Starmer regime. It’s “Islamophobic,” you see.

What in the world happened to these beautiful girls who so grotesquely uglified themselves on purpose? These four are examples of so many more. 

We’ve all heard Aesop’s story since we were kids:

“Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked, “Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don’t need any sour grapes.” — Aesop, ca. 600 BC.

The Fox and the Sour Grapes is one of the oldest fables in Western culture: When we can’t have something, we often devalue the object of our desire to lessen our sense of loss.

That fable reminds me of Democrat women, so many of whom have embraced a self-imposed ugliness and hatred for the family. It’s likely that they’ve done so because they live in a world where husbands and family are impossible. Sour, ugly grapes are the only option.