TLP Weekend Edition (December 13-14, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

Sunday marks five years of TLP newsletters and 12 years of Gordie adventures. (Author photo)

📰 “What Is The Liberal Patriot?,” TLP’s first post, December 14, 2020. Five years ago this Sunday, TLP launched on Substack with a basic overview of its mission and principles:

The Liberal Patriot seeks to establish an intellectual hub for renewing liberal values in America and reshaping the political conversation on the center-left around the ideas necessary for national economic development and international policies that advance American interests. Too much of modern political discourse revolves around unsolvable cultural divisions between people rather than common objectives that advance the well-being of all people. What sets liberal democracy apart from other ideologies and systems of government is a focus on the common good and dignity of all people, a commitment to pluralism, and a rejection of reductionist tribal thinking that drives Americans apart through endless culture wars.

The Liberal Patriot will therefore provide an alternative to existing ideologies and programs on offer from both the right and left: the dead-end gridlock produced by right-wing populism, democratic socialism, and multicultural identity politics, as well as the growing authoritarian waves sweeping the globe.

This framework has guided us for more than 1300 newsletters and serves as the foundation for our “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-America” approach to politics. Thanks for reading, subscribing, and sharing posts all these years!

🇺🇸 “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration,” by Christopher Flavelle. Immigration is a topic TLP has covered extensively—specifically, how the Biden administration’s stumbles became a political liability for Democrats and helped propel Trump back to the White House. Now, The New York Times is out with a thorough report on the inner machinations of the former president’s team as they debated how to handle the surge in border crossings at the start of his term. Through interviews with over 30 former administration officials, the report paints a damning picture of a team that didn’t seem to take the problem seriously until it was too late.

Anger over illegal migration helped return Mr. Trump to the presidency, and he has enacted even more aggressive policies than those Mr. Biden first campaigned against. Mr. Trump has drawn outrage from Democrats by sending masked agents to target immigrants, often aided by National Guard soldiers.

But a New York Times examination of Mr. Biden’s record found that he and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster, and eased what became a potent issue for Mr. Trump as he sought to return to the White House and justify the aggressive tactics roiling American cities today.

Former Biden administration officials told The Times that Mr. Biden and his circle of close confidants—including Ron Klain, who was chief of staff during the president’s first two years, Mike Donilon, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn—made two crucial errors.

First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration—believing that stronger enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters, and also that a border surge would not be an important issue to most voters. Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters, including Latinos, citing immigration as a reason for supporting Mr. Trump in 2024.

🪐 Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, by Jon Szwed. The title of John Szwed’s terrific biography of the great Sun Ra says it all. He claimed to be from Saturn and on a mission to transform the world through his Arkestra’s incredible music. Not many truly deserve the adjective “unique,” but surely Ra qualified.

[Ra] recorded over 200 albums with his Arkestra, which, dressed in Egypto-space costumes, played everything from boogie-woogie and swing to fusion and free jazz. John Szwed’s Space is the Place is the definitive biography of this musical polymath, who was one of the twentieth century’s greatest avant-garde artists and intellectuals. Charting the whole of Sun Ra’s life and career, Szwed outlines how after years in Chicago as a blues and swing band pianist, Sun Ra set out in the 1950s to impart his views about the galaxy, black people, and spiritual matters by performing music with the Arkestra that was as vital and innovative as it was mercurial and confounding. Szwed’s readers—whether they are just discovering Sun Ra or are among the legion of poets, artists, intellectuals, and musicians who consider him a spiritual godfather—will find that, indeed, space is the place.

Szwed’s book will take you on a journey—though you may not actually reach Saturn to hang out with Ra and his alien friends.

🎞️ The Boy and the Heron, by Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. We visited the Ghibli Museum in suburban Tokyo last year and were blown away by how these movies are actually produced. The latest film showcases all the artistry and lush animation of its master creator and his talented crew:

The Boy and the Heron is an encapsulation of Miyazaki’s life and career. Rather than creating a character whose journey closely follows his life, Miyazaki projects himself, his thoughts and his experiences onto several characters, illustrating different stages of his life and the conflicting ideas and philosophies he holds. The semi-autobiographical film follows Mahito, a young boy growing up in early 1940s wartime Japan. Right at the beginning of the story, Mahito loses his mother to a fire in a hospital caused by a bomb. As he runs through the burning city towards the hospital, the animation style is distinctly different from the rest of the film, taking on a disorienting and chaotic quality that reflects Mahito’s desperation and seems new and unique among Miyazaki’s animations. This scene is personal to Miyazaki, whose earliest childhood memories are of bombed, burning cities, according to IndieWire.

🎶 Cold Sea, by Oisin Leech. A lovely record from last year that sounds exactly like the place it was created (or, as you might imagine it to sound):

Cold Sea creates a strong sense of Irish place. It was recorded over four or five days in a cottage in Donegal overlooking the Atlantic, which makes it sound a bit like The Atlantic Sessions, and many of the songs evoke Donegal. Malin’s Gales is about Malin Head, Ireland’s most northerly point; the cottage overlooked Trawbeaga Bay; Maritime Tales is an instrumental with the Irish shipping forecast interlaced as a found sound (taped from the radio, apparently).