By Anthony B Kim ~

Russia’s war on Ukraine makes the effort known as the Three Seas Initiative “even more urgent,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a recent speech via video to a related summit meeting in Riga, Latvia.

The urgency is not only for the initiative’s member nations and partners, Blinken said during his June 24 remarks, but for its focus areas of energy, transportation, and digital communications.

Crosscutting regional challenges and a lackluster commitment from Washington keep progress with the Three Seas Initiative far slower and smaller than hoped. Pictured: Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks at a press conference at the Federal Foreign Office in Berlin on June 24, the same day he addressed a Three Seas Initiative summit by video in Latvia. (Photo: Mika Savolainen-Pool/Getty Images)

Indeed, the issue of making the Three Seas Initiative, launched in 2015, more practically operational has gained…

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

By Matt Philbin ~

There’s a new right-wing bogeyman out there. He’s not all that different from previous reactionary monsters and, if you look closely, he’s not much different from the progressives who are wetting themselves over him.

The terror du jour is Christian Nationalism, and Time Magazine has a fascinating primer on the subject by an academic named Andrew Whitehead.

“Christian nationalism,” Whitehead says, “refers to an ideology that asserts all civic life in the U.S. should be organized according to a particularly conservative and ethnocentric expression of Christianity.” But really, it turns out Christian Nationalism is shorthand for traits Whitehead doesn’t like:

• Strict moral traditionalism focused on sustaining social hierarchies.
• Comfort with authoritarian control—exercised by the “right” people—that includes the threat and use of violence.
• A desire for strict ethno-racial boundaries around who is a “true” American, where non-white and non-natural born citizens are viewed as unworthy…