Operation Absolute Resolve, Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, was a brilliantly executed coup. The audacious raid did not undermine international law, as many European and Democratic politicians have said. But it did expose the weakness and pomposity of the world’s multilateral bodies. Maduro traded oil for loans with China while helping Moscow
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
The White House Christmas party really was beautiful this year. A very special festive night with beautiful friends and family. Don Jr. and Bettina got engaged at Camp David just before it and the party wasn’t supposed to be a celebration for them – but Donald decided to announce it to the world. I was
It required an incredible amount of sophistication to achieve the desired result in Caracas: a dictator detained and transported alive. The mission had been planned and mapped out for months, worked and reworked at the behest of the Commander-in-Chief. No American casualties would be tolerated. Special Forces had been circling and at the ready for
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
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
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
Has any public figure of recent memory ever admitted to feeling shame for anything they have said or done? As a moral term “shame” appears to have disappeared almost entirely from normal discourse (bar the self-satisfied “fat-shaming”). That tells us much about ourselves. Aristotle discusses the term in some depth. He does not see it
The Kids Are All Right was a 2010 movie that attempted to reassure audiences that the teenage children of a lesbian couple are psychologically just fine. The movie is largely forgotten but the title has lingered, often as a springboard for observers who say that today’s kids are not, in fact, all right. The diagnoses
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
I suspect that Somalis around the country – especially, but not exclusively, in Minneapolis – wish about now that they had spent more time studying the wit and wisdom of Gertrude Stein. Stein, had she lived in our own day, might well have become commissioner of New York City’s Fire Department. She had the one
In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it, Jesus Christ stands alongside Imam Mahdi, a prophesied messianic figure who many Muslims believe will appear with Christ during the End Times to restore peace and justice to the world. There is only one Venezuelan
The ongoing revelations about the rich and famous who rubbed shoulders with Jeffrey Epstein are receiving extensive coverage in France. Print and broadcast media have pored over the details of the deceased sex offender and the famous names contained in the Epstein files, from princes to presidents to pop stars. There is a French connection
The socialist left was on parade in the final innings of 2025. The long cold shadow cast by “The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act,” a ballot initiative in California to be voted on in November, has led tech billionaires to take flight out of the state and land in the zero-income-tax paradises of Texas and Florida.
For many years now we have all been agonizing over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlor game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Microplastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped
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
I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolás Maduro and she replied: “I don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?” This is the problem with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I
Donald Trump calls Dan Driscoll the “drone guy.” The 39-year-old Secretary of the Army – also a “total killer” with a “nice, beautiful face,” according to Trump – is on a mission to modernize the US military and firmly believes that drones are “the future of warfare.” The former Army Ranger, Yale Law School student
My father went into the kitchen for a cookie, then disappeared into his home office for a phone call. He was arranging a surprise for my mother – hired waitstaff for Christmas Eve dinner, one of the biggest our family would have hosted. Then he died. It took 15 seconds. We found him within minutes.
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
In the early hours of Saturday, January 3, Caracas went dark. Power failed across much of the city as strikes and cyber-attacks disabled critical systems. What followed was not a conventional invasion, but one of the most audacious special forces operations in modern history. Within hours, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, had been
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.
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
