Politics Archives

Friday

January 9, 2026

2026 is the year of the Somali benefits scandal

All it took was one video from a 23-year-old YouTuber named Nick Shirley to end the 20-year political run of Minnesota’s Tim Walz. Shirley brought his camera to Minneapolis in search of childcare center fraud in a video seen by over a 100 million viewers worldwide – and appeared to find plenty. But, if you thought (or had hoped) that you’ve heard the last from the multi-billion-dollar Minnesota welfare fraud scandals, think again – the issue will remain in the national spotlight throughout 2026. The most prominent date is November 3 – Election Day. Gov. Walz himself, the 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, will not be on the ballot, as he

Christopher Caldwell

What is anti-Semitic?

New York’s new mayor is woke. The Ugandan-born Muslim leftist Zohran Mamdani imperils the city as we know it, some people grumble. In a recent letter to supporters, Republican Representative Nancy Mace warned that Mamdani was “a man who’s bringing SHARIA LAW to America.” Of course, Sharia and woke are not the same thing. Mamdani’s program, brimming with paeans to trans and gay rights, might not thrill a Wahhabi cleric. Still, he has brought a Middle Eastern flavor, and not in the good sense. During the campaign Mamdani promised to arrest Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu should he decide to visit the United Nations. That hair-raising prospect would expose Mamdani to

Paul Wood

America’s new war on drugs will be tough to win

On New Year’s Eve a few years ago, I was in Medellín, Colombia, the city that gave its name to one of the world’s most notorious drugs cartels. Our taxi driver offered us some cocaine to fuel the party we were heading to: $10 for a gram; $15 for the “luxury” product. Our group decided to splash out and get a gram of the really good stuff. I’d tried coke a couple of times in London. It was like snorting drain cleaner. Whoosh… I found that half a line of Medellín’s best was enough to keep you going until sunrise. But the next day it was difficult to be within

Owen Matthews

Maduro’s capture is mixed news for the Kremlin

For the Kremlin, the US’s snatching of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is a humiliation with a silver lining. True, little more than a year after the precipitous fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Russia has been shown to be completely hopeless when it comes to keeping its allies in power. In Caracas, US airborne forces breezed past Russian-supplied S-300 air defense systems, which were part of a $20 billion package of maybe not-so-great Russian military equipment that Moscow sold the Venezuelans. The Kremlin has lost a strategic bridgehead in South America which it could, potentially, have used to disrupt and challenge Washington’s regional hegemony – if Moscow weren’t so committed financially

Neal Pollack

Alice Marie Johnson and clemency in the Trump era

Late in his first term, Donald Trump pardoned a Memphis woman named Alice Marie Johnson, who was serving life in prison without parole. While in prison, Johnson was a more than exemplary inmate, becoming a certified hospice worker for the dying, writing plays and acting as a spiritual leader and mentor to her fellow female prisoners. Alice Marie Johnson is a voice for people, especially women, who are in jail for the wrong reasons After her release, Johnson published a book called After Life: My Journey from Incarceration to Freedom and became a public advocate for clemency. In February last year, Trump named her the US’s first-ever “pardon czar,” an

Tom Slater

Britain’s X crackdown is no joke

The internet suddenly went down in Iran last night, as courageous Iranians continued to rise up against the Ayatollah. The UK government was apparently inspired. Not by the rebels, whose plight the Prime Minister has remained remarkably quiet about – but by the mullahs’ digital crackdown. Call me a conspiracy loon, but I dare say Labour’s ire for X isn’t simply about the site’s supposedly insufficient safeguarding policies Britain’s Labour party has issued its most serious threat yet to social-media giant X – whose owner, Elon Musk, has become this rudderless government’s go-to bogeyman. The platform could be banned in Britain, Downing Street sources let it be known, if it

Charlie Gammell

Unrest is spreading across Iran

“If they shut down the internet, you know it’s serious,” said a well-informed observer of Iran to me yesterday morning. The internet blackout came yesterday afternoon – along with over a million Iranians marching in streets across the country. Strikes are continuing in bazaars and the cries for the end of the Islamic Republic are becoming more brazen. A video was sent to me before the blackout from Iran’s upscale northern suburbs, home to the sons and daughters of the regime elites, in which the cries of “death to the dictator” could be heard loud and clear. “We are excited,” was the caption to the video. And this morning there

James Tidmarsh

France’s bistros are dying

Emmanuel Macron says France’s traditional bistros should be granted Unesco world heritage status. Speaking at the Élysée this week, the French president vowed to help save the country’s traditional cafes. “This is a fight that we want to take on, because our cafés and bistros aren’t just selling croissants, baguettes and traditional products – they’re also on the front lines of preserving French craftsmanship and know-how,” Macron told a group of French bakers at the annual Epiphany cake ceremony. France doesn’t need to list its bistros. It needs to decide whether it still wants them Macron is right about what the bistro represents. For generations, it has been a shared meeting

Mani Basharzad

The end is drawing near for Iran's mullahs

As a wave of protests swept across Iran last night, the internet was completely shut down. I have no idea what is happening to my friends, my family, or anyone else. My best friend Champ was at the demonstration. I desperately hope he is safe. Iran is a nation wanting its soul back. Protesters burn the Islamic Republic flag and replace it with Iran’s real flag Overnight, there were protests throughout Iran. From Qom and Mashhad, the most religious cities, to Rasht and Anzali, the most secular, people took to the streets. In Tehran, there were protests in the poorest parts to the richest parts of the city. I couldn’t believe

Thursday

January 8, 2026

Jenna Stocker

What’s the matter with Minnesota?

Just when you thought Minnesota had hit rock bottom, the state achieves a new level of chaos. Once again it is the epicenter of a self-serving, destructive “revolution” at the behest of an incompetent, unhinged and rancorous city and state leadership, helmed by Governor Tim Walz. According to local reports, “A 37-year-old woman was fatally shot by a federal agent on Wednesday, January 7, in south Minneapolis during an immigration enforcement operation. The shooting happened around 9:30 a.m. in the area of East 34th Street and Portland Avenue. The woman, later identified as Renee Nicole Good, died at the hospital.” In a press conference following the incident, Governor Walz threatened

Neal Pollack

RFK Jr.’s health rules: eat, drink and be merry!

The USDA and Department of Health and Human Services has issued a new food pyramid, and it’s simultaneously great and appalling. On extreme upside, the Trump administration, run by someone who enjoys a quarter pounder with cheese for lunch, recommends a diet rich in protein, vegetables and fruits, while demonizing sugars, processed foods, and empty carbohydrates. On the other hand, it indicates that saturated fats are good for us. The pyramid features a thick juicy steak at the top of the pyramid, next to a roasted chicken, an enormous broccoli floret, a chunk of Emmental, a meatloaf and a packet of frozen peas. The next level down is avocado, olive

Sean Thomas

AI porn will spawn a nation of addicts

If there is one safe prediction we can make about 2026, it is this: public debate and global news will be dominated by artificial intelligence and the anxieties that surround it. And near the top of that swelling list of worries will be “AI porn” – the fateful collision between ever more accomplished image-making machines and humanity’s eternal appetite for audiovisual sexual stimulation. The year has barely begun and already two loud tsunami sirens have sounded. The first is the latest Grok incident. For the uninitiated, Grok is Elon Musk’s AI, conceived a couple of years ago in a fit of pique after Musk’s spectacular falling-out with OpenAI. Despite its

Jennifer Bilek

The gender hydra is about technology, not ideology

I hope this is the year people fighting the gender hydra, with its proliferation of harms across society, finally recognize that this is not a culture war. It is a war against a rapidly expanding industry built on the deconstruction of sex and, like any profitable industry, it will continue growing until it is stopped. Calling it a medical scandal, misogyny, or social contagion will not create a sustainable resistance unless people understand it as an industry. At the heart of the matter is the fact that industries in capitalist systems must expand to survive. And once they do, once a market forms, they’re near-impossible to erase. They begin to

Kris Newby

How ticks became bioweapons

On December 18 last year, Donald Trump signed into law an order to “review and report on biological weapons experiments on and in relation to ticks [and] tick-borne diseases.” The investigation is long overdue but even so, the facts it uncovers will come as a shock to many. A growing body of evidence shows that during the Cold War ticks were tinkered with and used as delivery mechanisms for biological warfare agents. And these weaponized ticks may have been released both intentionally and unintentionally on an unsuspecting public by the US military. Ticks and the diseases they transmit (such as Lyme) pose a growing threat to Americans, the military and

Jacob Heilbrunn

Will Trump back down in Minnesota?

So much for Minnesota nice, the phrase that Midwesterners like to use to describe their calm dispositions. Three gunshots – fired pointblank in the gelid snows of Minneapolis by a federal immigration officer at Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old white woman and American citizen – have plunged the North Star State into renewed political turmoil. The fatal shooting took place only a few blocks from where George Floyd was killed in May 2020. In responding to the tragedy, President Trump proceeded on his favorite premise: the best defense is a good offense. On social media, he declared that the need for the imposition of law and order by ICE was paramount: “The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who

Daniel McCarthy

The plot against J.D. Vance

The Republican establishment is on the verge of extinction. Donald Trump’s first term wasn’t enough to kill it off: Trump came into office in 2017 with establishment figures such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan leading the party in Congress, and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence, had been chosen for that role as a reassurance to the old guard. Trump made some efforts to staff his administration with outsiders, but the likes of Steve Bannon or the ill-fated Rex Tillerson were heavily outnumbered by Republicans who would have been just as happy – or a great deal happier – to serve in another Bush administration. This time, though, things are

Ross Clark

What Trump should learn from the British empire

One remarkable thing about Donald Trump’s adventure in Venezuela is just how old-fashioned it is. It is a world away from George W. Bush’s neoconservative efforts at nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is little attempt to justify the arrest of Nicolás Maduro in terms of the human rights of Venezuelan citizens. Little attention appears to have been paid as to how the country will now be governed. Nor have we heard much more about the drugs crimes of Maduro, other than the admission that he perhaps isn’t, after all, quite the lynchpin of an international criminal racket (for all his other offenses against his own people). With the seizure

Wednesday

January 7, 2026

Cockburn

Kai is the queen of Generation Alpha Trumps

Americans hate to love, or love to hate, the country’s First Family, the Trumps, a melodramatic cast of characters that makes the Ewings, the Carringtons, the Bridgertons or the Roys seem small by comparison. But a gee-whiz protagonist for everyone has emerged in the persona of Kai Trump, the President’s granddaughter and the eldest daughter of Donald Trump Jr. Kai, 18, stands out among the Generation Alpha Trumps. Barron, the President’s son, is a dark crypto prince who seems to have adopted his mother’s reclusive profile. The rest of the Trump babies have yet to receive their media debuts. But Kai is everywhere. This week, she appeared on Logan Paul’s

Peter Mandelson

Peter Mandelson: Trump’s lessons for Europe

Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve. It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolás Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t. Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this

Freddy Gray

Immigration is foreign policy now

Invade the world, invite the world. That pithy phrase was invented in the 2000s by Steve Sailer, the right-wing writer, to mock the then bipartisan consensus which supported George W. Bush’s war on terror abroad while pushing open borders at home. Or, as Sailer also put it: “Bomb them over there and indulge them over here.” Back then, such analysis was generally dismissed as the preserve of white supremacist cranks. Now, it’s fair to say that Sailerite thinking animates the spirit of the second Donald Trump administration. Disrupt the world, deport the world. That’s the order of the day. Since America’s stunning attack on Venezuela last weekend, almost everybody has