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In the unforgiving arena of American politics, few patterns are as reliable as the midterm election bloodbath for the party holding the White House. And this year Democrats are trying to capitalize on the midterm curse by fielding 150 candidates from medical and scientific backgrounds. All have entered the fray since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services and are putting his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) on the ballot. In particular, his vaccine reform program. Yet, a major driver of the rise of MAHA can be directly attributed to the Biden administration's disastrous handling of Covid, when Democrats in power contorted science to fit political imperatives.

Earlier this month, when Tucker Carlson was in Jordan interviewing Levantine Christians, the US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called out the pundit with whom he’s been engaged in a public online feud for some time: “Instead of talking ABOUT me, why don’t you come talk TO me? You seem to be generating a lot of heat about the Middle East. Why be afraid of the light?”  That, we can now see, was a bad mistake on Huckabee’s part. Carlson took up the offer, and, after some rather fraught back-and-forth about his travel arrangements, interviewed Huckabee at the private terminal at Ben Gurion Airport a few miles outside Tel Aviv.

For someone who believes that “no one is illegal on stolen land,” it’s a surprise that Billie Eilish’s legal team may have blocked my entry to the US. My plan was to test her theory of land ownership, which she stated at the Grammys to great applause, and take over her LA mansion with the help of Native Americans. But, sadly, I was turned back at the border last weekend – my sacred and inalienable right to freedom of movement curtailed by border guards who were, I suspect, briefed about my arrival by Eilish’s team. I’m an Australian political activist, more usually focused on exposing the influence of the Chinese government in Australia. But I made an exception after Eilish made her ludicrous statement at the Grammys.

The government is consulting on the merits of banning children under the age of 16 from social media and looks prized to do so. As with many such digital abstinence movements, politicians who advocate for this change are influenced by The Anxious Generation, a book of pop psychology written by Jonathan Haidt, which claims that social media has worsened young people’s mental health. Far from ‘drowning in evidence’, real researchers – not pop psychologists – are scouring a great desert looking for puddles Proponents of such bans tell us there is an overwhelming scientific consensus behind them, usually citing Haidt’s book.