Politics Archives

Thursday

September 4, 2025

Why Trump should impose a trans gun ban

As President Trump’s Department of Justice deliberates over a gun ban on transgender people, we must stop and reflect on the environment we have created for our children and ask whether we are truly protecting them. Whenever tragedy strikes, progressives rush to the microphones to declare that the problem is “guns.” They insist that if only we banned this weapon or restricted that accessory, shootings would stop. They blame inanimate objects instead of focusing on the people who actually pull the trigger. The recent shootings in Nashville (2023) and Minneapolis (2025) should force us to confront uncomfortable truths – not about firearms, but about what is happening inside our culture and what our leaders are pushing on the next generation.

Gage Klipper

RFK Jr. triggers Vax War Two

Throughout COVID, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ aggressive leadership made Florida the national model for resisting vaccine tyranny. But Vax War Two is coming, and the state seems to have chosen the inevitably losing side. Florida now aims to eliminate vaccine mandates altogether, including those long required for children to attend school like the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. If the move goes through, Florida would become the first state in the nation to do so. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said of the mandates Wednesday in a press conference alongside DeSantis. “Who am I as a government – or as anyone else – as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body?

Neal Pollack

After Rosie O’Donnell, the Americans Trump should strip of citizenship

As he often does when things get a little hot in the kitchen, President Trump went after Rosie O’Donnell again yesterday. "We are giving serious thought to taking away Rosie O'Donnell's Citizenship," he wrote on Truth Social. O’Donnell, he said, is "not a Great American," layering that on top of what he said in July, that Rosie is "not in the best interests of our great country." I don’t think anyone other than her closest associates would argue that Rosie O’Donnell is “Great,” but she is, technically, an “American.” If the Trump Administration wants to revoke citizenship for every mediocre celebrity who criticizes the President, well, then, Hollywood is going to have to do some fast outsourcing. Let’s think about who else is on the chopping block.

Roger Kimball

Poland’s Nawrocki heralds a more mature populism

Yesterday, September 3, President Trump welcomed Karol Nawrocki, the newly inaugurated president of Poland to the White House. It was a stirring occasion, replete with a surprise military fly-over of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets flying in “missing man” formation to honor Major Maciej “Slab” Krakowian, the Polish pilot who died in a crash in Radom, Poland, last Thursday. Nawrocki, who narrowly won the presidency in June, is often described as “the Polish Trump.” It’s an accurate epithet. Nawrocki is as much a “Poland First” president as Trump is an “America First” president. The 42-year-old historian (Nawrocki holds a PhD in history) supports a list of policy initiatives that could have come right out of the MAGA playbook.

Charles Lipson

The death throes of free speech in Britain – and its opponents

Free speech, the very bedrock of constitutional democracy, is writhing on its deathbed in England. It will take a mass movement to restore its vitality. Fortunately, one can see that movement emerging among a once-free people, tired of government suppression. The dire state of British liberties was outlined Wednesday in Congressional testimony by British MP, Nigel Farage, who testified before the US House Judiciary Committee. He was backed by the committee’s Republican members and attacked, alas, by Democrats.

Nigel Jones

Will Trump cripple Brazil if Jair Bolsonaro is found guilty?

The trial of Brazil’s former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro on charges of plotting a coup to topple the current President Lula da Silva is entering its final stages.Bolsonaro, 70, and seven co- defendants are accused of conspiring to oust Lula, the veteran left-winger who narrowly beat him in the 2022 Presidential election. The Supreme Court in Brasilia will consider its verdict this week. If – as expected – the court convicts Bolsonaro, the ailing ex-President is looking at a lengthy jail sentence, and may die in prison as a result. Bolsonaro has been in poor health since he was stabbed in the abdomen in an assassination attempt while campaigning during his successful bid for the presidency in 2018.

Wednesday

September 3, 2025

David Sypher Jr.

Cynthia Nixon and the battle for Broadway

When Representative Jerry Nadler announced his retirement this week, Democrats in New York instantly began preparing for a political drama worthy of its stage. Nadler’s district – the 12th, which covers the Upper West and Upper East Sides, Midtown, Times Square and the United Nations – is the geographic heart of Manhattan. It’s also one of the safest Democratic seats in the country. Whoever wins the primary will not only control a powerful perch in Congress, but also inherit a stage in the very center of America’s media capital.That’s the problem. In New York’s 12th, politics isn’t about solving problems. It’s about performance.For decades, Nadler played the part of Manhattan’s liberal lion.

Cockburn

Trump brothers go mining

After a day where the very alive President Trump bombed a Venezuelan drugs boat, moved Space Force headquarters out of Colorado because that state has mail-in voting, declared he was sending federal troops into Chicago and claimed that AI generated a video of someone throwing a plastic bag of construction debris out of the window of the White House, it became clear that the real action was going on outside the White House walls, with Trump’s very rich sons. As Cockburn reported yesterday in The Spectator, the Trump Brothers, Don Jr, Eric, and the true genius behind the operations, Barron, had somehow amassed $5 billion in paper wealth thanks to savvy investments, based in no way on shady insider information, in WLFI, the family’s nascent cryptocurrency venture.

Nigel Jones

Trump’s strike on the Venezuelan ‘narco terrorists’

President Trump has authorized what he called a "kinetic strike" from a US warship that destroyed a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela bound for the US, killing 11 so called "narco terrorists" aboard. The action by a US naval task force in international waters in the southern Caribbean is the first since the President threatened armed intervention against narcotics smuggling by Venezuela’s drugs cartels in January. Trump said that the attack was aimed at members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua drugs cartel which the US branded a terrorist organization in February, and which it claims is controlled by Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime. The US Department of Justice has called Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro "the world’s No.

Tuesday

September 2, 2025

Cockburn

For Trump and Ilhan, Washington pays

How does Ilhan Omar make her money? How does the Trump family make its money? Is money real? What is reality? These are the questions Cockburn is asking himself after this weekend’s financial news. First, let’s fly over Minnesota. Founding “Squad” member Omar, the Washington Free Beacon reported yesterday, is currently worth more than $30 million, despite telling the press earlier this year that it’s “categorically false” that she’s a millionaire. If by false, you mean “true,” then yes. The Free Beacon obtained Omar’s latest financial disclosure, which indicated that she and her husband, shifty “former political consultant” Tim Mynett, are worth somewhere between $6 million and $30 million – a wide range.

David Sypher Jr.

Ilhan Omar’s $30 million disclosure exposes left’s hypocrisy

Rep. Ilhan Omar once dismissed suggestions she was a millionaire as “ridiculous.” That was only a few months ago. Now, according to her latest congressional financial disclosure, Omar and her husband report assets valued between $6 million and $30 million. That’s not just millionaire territory – it’s potentially the top one percent. The jump is staggering. Businesses tied to Omar’s husband, including a California winery and a venture capital firm, went from reporting thousands in value one year to millions the next. Rose Lake Capital, his firm, is now valued at up to $25 million. For a couple that not long ago claimed to be weighed down by student loans, it’s an astonishing turn of fortune. But the real story here isn’t Omar’s wealth.

Peter Wood

The dangerous rise of ‘Chinese Bezique’

In one of Joseph Conrad's early stories he mentions an old seaman who delighted in a card game he called "Chinese Bezique." Captain Lingard considered the game as "a remarkable product of Chinese genius – a race for which he had an unaccountable liking and admiration." This passage somehow popped into mind as I read the New York Times expose, "How China Influences Elections in America's Biggest City." The article has nothing to do with card games – or Borneo, where Conrad's novel is set-but it exemplifies the same odd combination of admiration and disdain. The four authors of the Times' article are clearly impressed with the elaborate efforts of the Chinese consulate in New York City to recruit the City's Chinese social clubs into instruments of Beijing's foreign policy.

Alessandro Arduino

Ukraine’s own Wagner Group

As peace in Ukraine seems still far and the conflict is witnessing a new escalation of violence, a new breed of private military companies is already emerging, ready for a post-conflict Ukraine. Rooted in a draft legislation “On International Defense Companies” proposed on April 2024, the Ukrainian government aims to channel combat-seasoned veterans into regulated, transparent security firms rather than leave them adrift or, worse, turn them into mercenaries for hire in distant conflicts from the Sahel to the DRC.

Monday

September 1, 2025

Neal Pollack

Wishing Trump dead only makes him stronger

Maybe you heard that Donald Trump died over the weekend. First, the internet began to buzz over some bruising on the President’s hand during an executive-order signing ceremony. Then people started noticing that no one saw Trump on Friday, and that he didn’t have any events scheduled over the weekend. J.D. Vance gave an interview with USA Today in which he said, “if, God forbid, there's a terrible tragedy, I can't think of better on-the-job training than what I've gotten over the last 200 days.” Trump has become so ubiquitous in our lives that there was only one conclusion to reach from his temporary semi-absence: He is dead. A TikTok video making that claim got 600,000 likes. There were tens of thousands of Twitter posts on the topic, almost trying to will it into reality.

Sunday

August 31, 2025

Neeraja Deshpande

Boomer hate has gone too far

Charles Murray, whose work on race and IQ has made him something of a darling of the online right, found himself out of favor with his fan base when he posted on X that a young married couple – each making $15 an hour and working 48-hour weeks – can afford a baby and a place to live. The reaction was furious. “Charles Murray is a good man,” wrote Zarathustra, a popular dissident right-wing poster. “Sadly, however, he’s also a Boomer. Which by necessity, means his bumper sticker talking points on political economy are comically out of touch garbage, and read like a moldy Reagan Youth pamphlet from 1982.” Murray’s post broke X containment and made it to the subreddit r/BoomersBeingFools.

Ani Chkhikvadze

Europe is a paper tiger

“The purpose of NATO,” Lord Hastings Ismay, the alliance’s first secretary general, once quipped, was “to keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” That formula defined Europe’s security for decades, and it worked because US power anchored the alliance. But as President Donald Trump’s administration demands its European allies carry their share of the burden, shows little appetite for sending troops to Europe and worries more about the Southeast Asian theater, Europeans are being forced to confront their lack of political will for their own security, underinvestment in defense and dwindling public appetite to fight for their country.

Nigel Jones

Mexico seethes over cartels, ‘gringos’ and migrants

Mexico has been rocked by massive popular protests as the Hispanic world’s largest nation seethes with a fizzing cocktail of grievances ranging from the fate of 130,000 people who have ‘disappeared’ in the country’s drug wars, to discontent over the ‘gentrification’ of Mexico City in a bid to attract tourists. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in the streets of the country’s major cities on Saturday, many carrying portraits of loved ones who have vanished since 2007 when the then President Felipe Calderon launched a "war on drugs" to combat the narcotics cartels who increasingly dominated the nation of 130 million people.

Saturday

August 30, 2025

John Hasson

The students bullied into being woke

If, as Shakespeare observed, “all the world is a stage, and all its men and women merely players,” no place is that truer than the modern American university. In the first study of its kind, 88 percent of Northwestern and University of Michigan students admitted they “have pretended to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse to succeed socially or academically.” While the phenomenon of college students pretending to be more liberal than they actually are to make life easier for them as they attend these hotbeds of radicalism is not surprising, the true scale of it is. But how have we got here? If you’re looking for a single explanation, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The modern college environment is a perfect storm of several factors working together.

Chad Hagan

Stop the Medicaid ambulance grift

With Congress back in their districts for the August recess, GOP members will undoubtedly be bragging to their base about the Medicaid abuses they stopped by passing President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. These reforms include enrollment reductions and new work requirements for enrollees. However, many Members are hoping that no one calls them out for failing to address an intergovernmental transfer grift. This little-known accounting trick has turned this basic entitlement program into a bloated scam that enriches public agencies while squeezing out private providers. In theory, many of the services Medicaid covers, such as emergency ambulance rides, officially known as Ground Emergency Medical Transport (GEMT), should be straightforward.

Friday

August 29, 2025

Mike Coté

US ‘covert ops’ in Greenland

A crack has developed in the NATO alliance, but surprisingly it has nothing to do with Ukraine. On Wednesday, the Danish foreign minister summoned the American envoy to answer for allegations that US citizens were carrying out covert influence operations in Greenland. According to reports, the men were seeking to incept a Greenlandic liberation movement meant to “pave the way for a US takeover” of the world’s largest island. They compiled lists of potential secessionist recruits who would support becoming part of the United States, going so far as to cultivate contacts during repeat visits to Greenland. Research was also done into those on the island who may fervently oppose such an alteration of the status quo, a far less routine action.