Who is Usha Vance?
Freddy Gray is joined by Sarah Beth Spraggins to discuss her piece on Usha Vance, the wife of JD Vance who could be in line to be the next First Lady.
Politics
Read about the latest political news, views and analysis
The treatment of Henry Nowak’s killer was all about race
"How can you say they’re not racist?" a young Asian woman shouted from the public gallery. Vickrum Digwa had just been led down to the cells to serve a life sentence and an elderly man in a turban was calling his lawyer "a fucking bean head." The tatty pinewood interior of the courtroom in Southampton, England, was descending, once again, into allegations of racism. Vickrum Digwa will serve at least 21 years in prison for the murder of Henry Nowak. Last December, Digwa repeatedly stabbed the 18-year-old student with a ceremonial Sikh dagger. He then filmed Henry as he bled out, goading him. When police arrived, Digwa claimed that Henry had been racially abusive and had knocked his turban off.
Canada is misremembering the Komagata Maru incident
Another day, another act of national self-abasement from the Canadian government. On May 23, it was all about the Komagata Maru incident, "a moment where Canada failed to uphold our values, with horrific consequences," according to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Pierre Poilievre chimed in, calling it "a dark and shameful chapter in our history and a painful injustice." The official version is as follows: on May 23, 1914, 376 passengers of the SS Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver, hoping for a better life. But because of racist Canadian immigration policy, most were denied entry. They waited for two months in the harbor with limited access to food, water and medical care, but were eventually forced to leave.
How the US is taking on Mexico’s narco-politicians
Soberanía is non-negotiable. That’s what Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum repeats time and again, at her mañaneras, at speeches, at rallies, on television and in person. She says it, her government says it, her political party says it, her apparatus says it. The agents of the United States of America must never, ever set foot on Mexican soil in any operational capacity. The sovereignty of the nation comes first – even before the security of the nation, even before the nation’s own capacity to police itself, even before the safety and lives of its own citizens. As Sheinbaum herself has noted, the first American intervención in Mexico cost the country half its territory.
Today
Has America been hacking the phones of Kremlin officials?
In 2014, Vladimir Putin notoriously described the internet as originally a "special project of the CIA" that "is still developing as such." He is also averse to mobile phones, not using or owning one himself and banning them from his offices. These two concerns have come together in today’s announcement by the Federal Security Service (FSB) that it had uncovered a massive "multi-level operation" to hack the smartphones of Russian officials. The FSB’s official announcement states that: Using the technical capabilities of large international IT corporations and mobile communications, representatives of foreign intelligence agencies carried out the covert, unauthorized collection of various types of information from the devices of cyberattack targets.
Yesterday
Meet Alex Bruesewitz, Trump’s Gen Z celebrity whisperer
Alex Bruesewitz is the President’s celebrity whisperer. He has brought the likes of YouTube personality Jake Paul and rapper Nicki Minaj into the MAGA fold. He is also the director of a social media empire with 50 million followers, which includes such X accounts as @TrumpWarRoom and @TeamTrump. Bruesewitz is an influencer, both online and in the corridors of the White House. A sense of loyalty to Donald Trump is what motivates him. It started when Bruesewitz was a teenager in Wisconsin. In 2015, he posted a picture of the Trump Tower in Chicago, saying the sign would look good over the White House. Trump retweeted him. So began his life as an online crusader for MAGA.
Ukraine’s Jehovah’s Witnesses are refusing to go to war
Prison guards led Vitalii Kryschenko to an inhospitable, cramped cell. Inside, the prisoners were curious. They watched with great interest as Kryschenko found his allotted place. A small, gentle man with a nervous expression, he wasn’t a typical criminal but a Jehovah’s Witness. Kryschenko was jailed by Ukrainian authorities for refusing to go to war; taking up arms is forbidden by his religion. He was now going to share his days with the very worst of Ukrainian society. This would include thieves, those guilty of assault or worse. "I was living with murderers, people jailed for life," he said. "It was terrifying. On my first night, I asked myself how I would survive in these conditions. All the same, I continued my daily prayers and read the Bible.
Should Europe mediate Russia-Ukraine talks?
The worst job in the world is to try negotiating with President Vladimir Putin to end the war in Ukraine to everyone’s satisfaction. Yet European leaders want to do just that. Frustrated by the failure of the Trump administration to negotiate anything of value with Putin, Europe is scurrying around looking for the ideal candidate to confront the Russian leader across the table and bash out a peace deal. It’s a fantasy world, of course. If Putin obstructed Trump, his old sparring partner, and never remotely got close to a deal with the Americans, why would he consider sitting down with some European leader, or ex-leader, to bring the four-year war to an end?
Sunday
The uncomfortable truth about Trump’s Anti-Weaponization Fund
President Trump has faced relentless, extraordinary efforts to destroy him outside of heretofore normal political combat. The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago over alleged mishandling of classified materials despite its own agents' doubts about probable cause. Officials in Colorado, Maine and Illinois sought to remove him from the 2024 ballot using a Civil War-era constitutional clause, before the Supreme Court unanimously reversed them. Trump’s infamous mugshot is the result of Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis booking him on a racketeering indictment that subsequently collapsed. And a civil case brought by writer E.
Saturday
‘Being a Labour mayor in Manchester is playing politics on easy mode’: Is Andy Burnham up to the job of PM?
When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won 4-1. The politicians’ solitary goal came from a late penalty. When the referee pointed to the spot, the center-forward stepped up, elbowing well-known politicians such as Ed Balls, David Miliband and Sadiq Khan out of the way in his bid for glory. There was a notable absence that day. “Keir [Starmer] had been due to play, but he didn’t turn up,” a witness recalls. “If he had been there, he’d probably have grabbed the ball and there might have been a tussle.” Instead, Andy Burnham said: “This is mine,” and calmly slotted it into the corner. “It was a perfect penalty,” says the witness.
Friday
Get ready for the rudest midterms ever
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.
Trump has Iran over a barrel
When is a ceasefire not a ceasefire? When the person declaring it is Donald Trump. Opinions differ about the wisdom of the President’s activities with respect to Iran. Some observers tell us he is playing four-dimensional chess. Some say it more like checkers with no kings. What, after all, is he up to? The commentariat proffers several conflicting narratives. The one common thread is the certainty with which these opinions are uttered. Trump is an idiot. Trump is a genius. For those who say that he has thrown in the towel – that Iran has “won” – I’d offer two observations.
How warfare became welfare
As tensions with Iran once again push the US toward the possibility of further involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts, a novel brand of anti-interventionism has swept American politics. After two decades of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both the populist right and progressive left have grown more willing to question the assumptions underpinning American military engagement abroad. Politicians as ideologically diverse as Thomas Massie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now openly criticize interventionist foreign policy, while public fatigue with the post-9/11 wars has become increasingly visible across the political spectrum. Yet even as Americans tire of foreign interventions, cuts to the defense budget are politically untouchable. Wars end, defense spending does not.
Henry Nowak and the evil of ‘anti-racism’
Henry Nowak was 18, and at the end of his first term at Southampton University in England when he was murdered. Around 11:30 p.m. on December 3 last year, Henry was walking back from a night out with his college football team. He hadn’t drunk heavily – during the trial we heard that he was below the drink driving limit. On the way home Henry encountered Vickrum Digwa, the 23-year-old Sikh man who would murder him. Given the seriousness with which our police take racism, of course their response to this was to handcuff Henry Digwa was carrying two blades, an eight-inch "shastar" openly displayed, and a smaller "kirpan" around his neck and under clothing.
Don’t bet on a blue wave
There are several reasons to think we won’t see a blue wave in this year’s midterm elections. A basic one is that the Democratic party simply isn’t very popular. In late May, Donald Trump’s approval ratings in the RealClear polling aggregate stood around 40 percent, which sounds bad. Yet Trump is more popular than his party – approval of the Republican brand was in the vicinity of 38 percent. And the Democrats’ ratings were even worse – standing, or one might say wilting, at about 36 percent. Those figures are not to be confused with “generic ballot” polling, which asks voters which party they would prefer in the forthcoming election. Democrats have lately enjoyed a lead of some seven points over the GOP in that category.
Woke isn’t dead. It’s just getting started
“Woke is officially DEAD,” Donald Trump announced last summer. That has been a common refrain since the 2024 election: the anti-western, anti-white, pro-transgender ideology is over. The excesses of left-wing radicalism have been rejected. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. We’re all still living under the yoke of woke. Just look at Chicago. Over the Memorial Day weekend, 38 people were injured by gunfire and two were shot dead. Five police officers were hurt when a car drove into a crowd amid widespread disorder. This happened in a city where the Democratic mayor, Brandon Johnson, promised to defund the police.
Thursday
The Pope’s AI intervention shames our politicians
I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I am on my knees giving thanks to the Pope. He has produced the most powerful political document of the year, taking on the greatest challenge of our times. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, deals with the changes which will be wrought to all our lives by artificial intelligence in the months and years ahead. AI will transform our economies and societies massively and irrevocably; it will change what it means to be human; it may even mark the end of humanity itself. If it takes the Pope to alert us to this revolution then perhaps the Reformation wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Superintelligence: will AI extinguish humanity? With Nate Soares
42 min listen
Freddy is joined by Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, to discuss the risks posed to humanity by AI. Warning that sufficiently intelligent AI may stop following human instructions entirely, Soares tells Freddy what, if anything, could keep AI from spiraling out of control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Will the Supreme Court allow a ‘creed’ to kill America?
Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch’s tour to tout his new children’s book about the Declaration of Independence should have been uneventful. But then Gorsuch decided to talk about what America is. On Fox News, with the New York Times and in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Gorsuch kept staking out his view on what makes America special: America has no religion, no race, no people at all really, but instead a singular majestic idea. “We’re a creedal nation, right,” Gorsuch told the Times. “I mean, we don’t share a religion, we don’t share a race, we share an idea, OK? And that idea has to be passed down generation to generation through history, as we discussed.
What is ‘Q Manivannan’ doing in British politics?
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.
Wednesday
Trump or Hochul: who knows ball?
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.
France’s migration crisis will outlast Emmanuel Macron
France has maxed out on migrants. It’s a message that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has been pushing for years, but it’s one now endorsed by the government’s Justice Minister. In an interview with a newspaper at the weekend, Gérald Darmanin declared that the Republic has "reached the limits of our capacities for integration and assimilation." Darmanin believes that a three-year suspension of legal immigration is the answer, and in particular he wants a crackdown on the policy of family reunification. Introduced in 1976, the policy allowed migrants – mainly from North Africa – who came to France to work to also bring their family. "We must put an end to immigration as it exists today," said Darmanin.
The drone delusion
In March, Russia suffered 35,000 casualties in the war in Ukraine. It’s estimated 33,600 of those, an extraordinary 96 percent, were caused by drones. Attacks by drones equipped with bombs, machine guns and even flamethrowers are now responsible for most of the casualties on both sides of the conflict. Therein lies a potential trap for militaries across the globe. It would be a catastrophic mistake to believe that victory can be bought cheaply and quickly with a single technology. The great lesson of Ukraine is that armies are punished for relying too heavily on one strategy. President Putin made precisely that mistake. He believed Russian vast tank regiments and precision artillery would bring Ukraine to its knees.
The future belongs to Hunter Biden
As a human type Hunter Biden is familiar enough. Like George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy, he is a wayward member of a political dynasty with a strange knack for slaloming his way out of trouble. Before the internet it was much easier for such figures to go about their business. It is hard to see how the goings-on at Chappaquiddick could be covered up now, in the age of X and camera phones. It was Hunter’s misfortune to be born too late. Dynasties are self-interested and adopt ideas based on the needs of the moment. The Habsburgs placed themselves at the head of the Counter-Reformation, and the Bushes, who were once liberal Republicans of the Nelson Rockefeller mold, later became the spokesmen of the evangelical revival. Hunter Biden is now going along in a similar vein.
