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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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I know you mean the American ABC, but I would like to submit this from the Australian ABC as some of the most naked and patronising propaganda I've ever seen.

I think Trump is disastrous, but on the fourth of July you should probably not publish the Declaration of Independence annotated with "by the way, Republicans are evil" after every paragraph.

I think Trump is disastrous, but on the fourth of July you should probably not publish the Declaration of Independence annotated with "by the way, Republicans are evil" after every paragraph.

That's fine to do as a foreigner, as long as you understand you're declaring yourself an enemy. That one seems extremely bad; they start by bitching about separation of church and state which simply isn't in the Declaration. They go on to bitch about slavery vs consent of the governed (a point, and one that Jefferson would agree with), but then add irrelevancies about ballot access, wealth gaps, and sentencing disparities. It doesn't get better from there; using the veto is not the same as the king refusing assent, as refusing assent was an absolute power whereas vetos can be overridden. And to hostilely annotate the Declaration but fail to do anything with this grievance:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

is to expose yourself as a totalitarian. Hello, regulatory state!

I think I'm mostly just annoyed by this sort of thing because the ABC is publicly funded - it's a federal agency and is in theory supposed to be politically neutral. Now, it isn't, and everybody knows it isn't, but even so I think it is unusually brazen of them to publish a piece, not marked as opinion or analysis, that firmly takes the view that the Trump administration is the enemy and opposed to the founding principles of the United States.