Politics

"When someone is cruel or acts like a bully, you don’t stoop to their level. No, our motto is: 'When they go low, we go high.'" – Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention in 2016  "Shut up you ugly fuck." – The Democratic party’s official Twitter handle, replying to Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff for policy, on May 27, 2026.  The most disturbing thing about that Democratic response to Stephen Miller is how unshocking it is. We’ve become inured to foul language, even from our political leaders and their social media channels. In our post-literate society, as words lose their power, swearing has become an idle form of punctuation. Donald Trump used to do most of his swearing in private.

In an age full of nepobaby second-generation politicians posing as "outsiders," new Green Party MSP "Q Manivannan" is the real thing. Indeed, the St. Andrew’s postgraduate is so much of an outsider that he doesn’t even hold British citizenship or permanent residency, and is unable to take up paid employment as a condition of his student visa. "Q" was allowed to stand for office last month because the Scottish government – the Wuhan Lab of terrible ideas in UK politics – recently changed the rules allowing foreigners with only limited leave to remain to compete in elections. Although Manivannan faced a probe into his visa, the powers-that-be ruled that being a politician wasn’t a real job.

The New York Knicks clinched an NBA championship spot Monday – and President Trump shared his excitement over his home team’s progress and his hopes to attend an NBA Finals game during today's cabinet meeting “Boy, what a team. They win all their games," Trump said. "They really, they have some great players. I think I will be going to one of their games.” He also congratulated Knicks owner Jim Dolan, who he counts as a longtime friend. https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/2059684404973236616 Trump has been a Knicks fan for years, with recently surfaced photos showing him sitting courtside back in 1991. If his plans work out, he will be the first sitting US president to attend an NBA Finals game.

This spring, many Angelenos have reported a strange, wild wind blowing down through the brushy canyons and over the sunbaked asphalt plains and across the urine-soaked beach parking lots of Los Angeles.  There is a whiff of something new wafting into your Tesla sun roof at red lights, and for once it isn't the choking smell of weed or the belching exhaust from junkie-filled RVs idling in alleys. It is hope. And its name is Spencer Pratt. His momentum is real and it's spectacular.

For the Pentagon, Nigeria is firmly on the list of countries where terror has run amok. In 2025 and again in January and May this year, the US Air Force bombed rebel camps in the north in an effort to halt a spree of murders and abductions that has left thousands dead or missing. US bombings earlier this week killed Islamic State’s second in command, Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, but the insurgency shows no sign of slowing; 17 trainees died recently in an attack on the army’s special forces academy and the conflict has spread to nearby Mali. In Nigeria, keeping the peace is a challenge. Since independence from Britain in 1960, there have been six coups and a civil war.

The long war in Ukraine has morphed into a new and decisive phase, one that could lead to Ukraine’s upset victory over its much larger, more aggressive neighbor. The global consequences of Russia’s loss – and Vladimir Putin’s humiliation – would be enormous. What is this new phase? Is there really evidence the tide has turned in Ukraine’s favor? To sort out the answers and understand what’s new about the war’s current phase, we need to do a brief tour of the three phases that preceded it. The first phase began well over a decade ago, in February 2014, when Barack Obama was president. Ukraine fatefully signaled it wanted much stronger ties with Europe and the United States, not Russia, at the very moment US deterrence was weak.