Score 1 for New York Times Publisher AG Sulzberger and the First Amendment.

U.S. Withdraws Subpoenas Issued to New York Times Journalists

A federal judge raised questions about the government’s handling of the subpoenas, which The Times called an attempt to intimidate the free press.

Election Fraud Done Right: Putin’s Model

Meduza

Putin addresses the 23rd Party Congress of Edinoy Rossii in the TsSKA Arena in Moscow, June 28, 2026. Photo: Yurii Kochetkov/RIA Novosti

Scott: Donald Trump sees in Putin’s Russia a model for so many things—autocratic rule, suppression of political opponents, waging war for “lethality, not legality,” having a healthy symbiotic relationship with oligarchs and the dark overlords of the fossil fuels industry… and now he can study up close how an autocrat manages elections.

One of the old functions of Soviet intelligence, considerably enhanced by Putin when he assumed the helm of the FSB successor institution, was management of elections. It was critical that elections in Russia appear to be proper in order to provide legitimacy to the regime. But it was also important to manage the outcomes with precision. Similarly, it was essential to undermine elections in genuinely democratic states: this served to destroy the faith of the people in their democratic institutions and to bolster the cynicism of Russians—see, these states have elections that are just as corrupt as our own. Everybody does it. The documents Trump released following his last address to the nation include detailed discussion of how the Russian operations ran (and collect evidence that Trump and senior members of his election team actively and knowingly participated in Russian operations because they benefitted Trump).

How are these arrangements carried out?

At one stage in my career, while I served as counselor to the president of a mid-sized francophone African nation, the Russian ambassador, who enjoyed an excellent relationship, introduced a team to pitch a plan for elections management. I didn’t attend the briefing, but learned in some detail about it right afterwards. The Russians (who were led by GRU officers) had the technical means to produce whatever outcome the president desired in the coming elections, but they cautioned that the results needed to be plausible. They advised heavy presidential campaigning in specific electoral districts that had gone to the opposition in past votes. They would “flip” these districts to show inroads in precisely these districts, giving the president and his party a healthy, plausible, but not greedy majority. I recalled all this on reading this report in Meduza about Putin’s new electoral management plans.

Russia’s Presidential Administration announced in March 2026 that it expected United Russia, the country’s ruling party, to win 55% of the vote in September’s elections, with 50% turnout, according to a public statement.

Meduza’s sources in regional administrations, however, cited a different target: 60% of the vote, with 55% turnout. In June, media outlets loyal to the Russian authorities reported that the Presidential Administration had lowered its expectations for United Russia to as much as 50%, with turnout unchanged. A Meduza source close to the Presidential Administration warned the figure could drop further.

That’s exactly what happened in mid-July. Several officials and United Russia members from the Central, Northwestern, and Far Eastern federal districts, along with a source close to the Presidential Administration, told Meduza the Presidential Administration had lowered the KPI again for a number of regions.

The Kremlin now wants the ruling party to win at least 45% of the vote, down from 50%. The turnout target of 50% remains unchanged. “We’re the middle of the pack,” says an official who oversees the elections in one of the aforementioned federal districts, describing his region. “At first, our minimum KPI for United Russia was 55%, then it dropped to 50%. Now we’re aiming for 45%.”

This is the way. Trump’s SAVE America act is an effort at sweeping centralized federal election management, designed to control who is able to vote and thus to ensure a completely, and precisely, predictable result in Trump’s favor. There’s nothing odd about this. It goes on in democracies all around the world. In democracies that have all the institutions and outward appearance of democracies, but aren’t actually democracies. The German word for this, coined by the sociologist Max Weber at the turn of the century, is Scheindemokratie.

American Democracy In Intensive Care

The Guardian

Charles: Last Thursday most of the media (THKR included) was focused on the president’s televised hallucinations in the evening, about the election he definitely lost in 2020, and the nonexistent noncitizens he said were voting in droves.

But UCLA medical professor Robert B Shpiner wrote convincingly in The Guardian that the big Washington news happened eight hours earlier at the State Department.

The representatives of 60 nations were summoned to the Harry S. Truman building to hear Marco Rubio declare that the counterterrorism architecture of the free world, built to fight jihadist mass murder, must now be redirected at the domestic left. Rubio said the new transnational enemy was defined by hatred of the west, “a revolt of the worst against the best.”

But Rubio was just the warm up pitcher for the spit balls thrown by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who explicitly echoed the words and the cadences of the Nazis–the same people who exterminated many of his relatives.

Miller began by repurposing one of the best-known Nazi tropes–the idea that you can identify your enemies by the way they look. Miller said:

Antifa demonstrators are “all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerisms. Their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred”, and he asked why there is “not one normal-looking person among them.” He said that when the leftist protests that his rights are being violated, those appeals “must fall on deaf ears”. He urged the assembled governments to be “completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilization” And he described the work already under way in six verbs: “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute”.

Miller called “leftwing political terrorism” a “fatal cancer of civilization.”

The UCLA professor has been practicing medicine for four decades. He continued, “Cancer is my vocabulary, not his.”

And I know what happened the last time a government borrowed it. The Nazi state’s central perversion was the medicalization of killing: the enemy as tumor, as bacillus, the nation as patient, extermination as cure.

Robert Jay Lifton called it the biomedical vision. It recruited my profession first, and my profession answered willingly. When a government describes citizens as a cancer, it has written the first line of a treatment plan. On Thursday, the plan was read aloud, from a state department podium, in six verbs.”

One disclosure belongs in the chart. My family left Russia in 1917. My relatives left Germany in 1933. In both generations, leaving was called excessive; staying was the reasonable position. But an alarm that was right both times it sounded is not overcaution. On Thursday, it sounded a third time.

The morning’s remarks, the ones that declared a class of Americans a cancer and read enmity on their bodies, drew the attention of an ordinary news cycle: straight coverage in the mainstream, horror at the margins, and in a portion of the press, open applause. I have watched teams run to the dramatic patient while the quiet one, the one not crying out, exsanguinates behind a curtain. The most dangerous words spoken in Washington on Thursday were not spoken in primetime. They were spoken before lunch, to more than 60 countries. The official transcript records the applause.

The decedent is survived by the federal courts, still open. By 50 secretaries of state, still certifying. By a general election, still on the calendar, 108 days out. And by an electorate that has not yet been asked the only question that matters, which is whether it will accept a count its president has pre-declared corrupt, counted among citizens its government has pre-declared malignant.

In 40 years of intensive care, I have pronounced death many times. The criteria are strict because the declaration is irreversible, and so we are taught to be certain before we speak. I have also, more than once, seen a rhythm return after the room had gone quiet, when someone refused to stop compressions on schedule. This notice is filed in the knowledge that pronouncements can be premature. It is filed in the fear that this one is not.

H/t: Clara Bingham

War with the Tech Bros I: The EU Strikes Back

Financial Times

Scott: The EU has now imposed its long anticipated near €1 bn fine on Google for systematic violation of EU law governing the corrupt manipulation of cyberspace. The award has to do with commercialization of logarithms so as to steer subscribers unwittingly into the hands of Google and its commercial partners.

But the tech bros have a strategy for fighting back, and it is, essentially corruption. At its essence is the pact the tech bros struck with Trump when they flipped to support his return to the White House in 2024. The core of this bargain was that Trump would ratchet down regulatory oversight of their projects domestically, rolling back enforcement efforts already underway, and would go to bat aggressively against foreign enforcement and oversight efforts, particularly the EU, which the tech bros see as a nemesis largely beyond their influence and reach.

The Google fine presents a prime test of the pact. In the coming days, we can expect Trump to attack the EU through various voices and with various theories. None of them will in any way address the essence of the EU findings, because the tech bros have no plausible response to them… and because the EU is protecting consumers, and doing things that help US consumers as much as those in Europe. So we will be flooded with nonsense about “free speech” and anti-American prejudices, tariffs will be threatened and imposed and other retaliatory measures will be announced. Stand by for the signature Trump blow back.

The European Commission has fined Google a total of €890mn for breaching the bloc’s digital rule book, while threatening to impose daily fines if the search engine company does not abide by its rules.

Brussels on Thursday said Google gave preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotel, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in its search engine.

It also said Google prevented app developers from freely communicating and promoting offers and concluding contracts with users in distribution channels of their choice, including third-party app stores. The company was fined €460mn for the search breach and €430mn for the steering issues, and will have 60 days to propose solutions or face potential periodic fines. The new action against Google comes after antitrust regulators fined the company more than €8bn between 2017 and 2019.

“This is serious enforcement,” said EU competition chief Teresa Ribera. “It is quite a strong message to Google.”

War with the Tech Bros II: Space Data Centers Draw Unwelcome Attention

The Guardian

Scott: The tech bros approach to Data Centers is pretty simple—you pursue them using a special vehicle that disguises your control over the project; you quickly and quietly cut a deal with local government authorities (preferably in Texas or some other ruby red state) under which local consumers are forced to subsidize your use of power, water and other resources; you fund a large PR campaign claiming that your project is good for the earth, society and will cure erectile dysfunction. James Talarico recently offered a pretty trenchant discussion of the whole approach and the problems it raised—which of course got negligible attention from the corporate media, now largely in the hands of the tech bros.

Now the space cadet tech bros, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are getting unwanted attention from analysts examining their plans for space data centers. The Guardian reports.

Space datacenters proposed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and others would release staggering levels of pollution that would probably alter the Earth’s atmosphere and be “catastrophic” for the planet, space industry experts and environmental groups warn in a new petition demanding a review of their impacts.

Tech companies have collectively proposed millions of “orbital datacenters” and are pressing forward with plans, which require Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval. Among other issues, pollution from satellites and rockets burning up upon re-entry appears to be accumulating in the stratosphere at alarming levels. The spacecraft release black soot, rare metals, aluminum oxides and other pollutants with unknown effects.

Some scientists fear the pollution could destroy the ozone layer, potentially expose some people to higher levels of ultraviolet radiation, or help further destabilize the planet during the climate crisis. The pollution could also end up back on Earth, and millions of satellites would create a major source of light pollution.

The petition submitted to the FCC calls for a pause on new licenses for space data center projects, arguing that the plans “violate federal law”.

The datacenter companies “describe their plans in grandiose, civilization-changing terms”, the petition states. “But these same proponents have refused to embrace any inquiry into the impacts of their self-claimed epochal technology on the environment, science, economy, or other values.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Northrop Grumman’s Mission Robotic Vehicle and three Mission Extension Pods spacecraft lifts off from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on 21 July. Photograph: Jennifer Briggs/Zuma Press Wire/Shutterstock

The petition was filed by the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (Peer) non-profit, the Earthjustice legal non-profit, and the DarkSky International non-profit, which works to protect the sky from light pollution.

War with the Tech Bros III: Elon Musk Does a Victory Lap—That’s One More British Government Down

The Times

Elon Musk chats with Rishi Sunak at an AI Safety Summit in 2023. Photo: Tolga Akmen/EPA

Scott: As readers of the Epstein files learned, Elon Musk has a passionate hobby which he has pursued with many of his Epstein confrères like Steve Bannon, Peter Thiel and Peter Mandelson—toppling British governments—Tory or Labour, doesn’t matter. He has pursued this in collaboration with local English rabblerousers, Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson most prominently.

And his favorite vehicle is racially tinged hysteria and incitement to riot, for which he uses his X.com platform. Now we learn that he hasn’t visited the UK… not since English prosecutors started studying his potential criminal liability for incitement of riots in the summer of 2025 and recently in the arson pogroms in Belfast, in which his words and his social media platform played a central role.

Elon Musk has said there will be a “reckoning” in the UK but admitted he has not been to the country for “a few years”.

When questioned in an interview about previous comments that the UK was heading for a “civil war” due to the rising Muslim population, the founder of SpaceX and the boss of Tesla said: “If you have a large and growing, rapidly growing, group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to western beliefs, at some point there will be a reckoning.”

Musk, who became the world’s first trillionaire after the float of SpaceX in the US last month, said he had been to the UK “literally a hundred times”. Asked when the last time was, he said: “It’s literally a few years ago.”

Asked why he was motivated to make such pronouncements, Musk said: “My partner is half-Indian and I have four children with her. One of them was named after a famous Indian physicist. So I would say I’m not racist.” Strider, one of Musk and Shivon Zilis’s twin sons, has the middle name Sekhar in tribute to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a Nobel laureate.

No one can reasonably state that Elon is a racist or an anti-Semite. Why the very name “Elon” itself is Hebrew. But Elon does believe fervently in the inherent supremacy of the white race; it’s part of his South African upbringing.

The Large Magellanic Cloud

Image Credit & Copyright: Monica Mesa

Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)

Explanation: Have you ever seen another galaxy with your own eyes? The featured image shows the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the closest neighbors of our Milky Way. If you are anywhere south of latitude 20° N (but the further south, the better), you can see it with the unaided eye if you go to a dark sky location, away from big cities and light polution. It is a dwarf irregular galaxy about 163,000 light-years away, and a member of our Local Group of galaxies. Despite being small, with a total mass approximately equivalent to 10% - 20% of the mass of the Milky Way, the LMC is very actively forming stars. This is likely due in part to the gravitational push and pull of tides caused by the Milky Way on the LMC. Some astronomers have predicted that it will collide with the Milky Way in in about 2 billion years.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Le Lit

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

1894, approximately.

Oil on cardboard, mounted on wood, 21.1” x 27.6”

In the 1890’s Toulous-Lautrec often lived in Paris brothels, for weeks or months.

New York Times

Bruce MacKinnon, Halifax Chronicle Herald

Scott: Trump launched a massive war of choice in the Gulf in the end of February in order to assure, as he said, that Iran would never have a nuclear weapon (after assuring Americans the prior summer that his strikes on Iran had “obliterated” the country’s nuclear capacity). So how to interpret Trump’s decision, overriding long-standing US national security analysis, to give Saudi Arabia a 1-2-3 agreement that includes the transfer of technology needed to enrich Uranium? The analysis I am hearing out of the region is consistent: Trump recognizes that he has failed in his efforts to stop Iran from developing a bomb. So he has shifted to a pro-nuclear proliferation policy that will now, within a matter of years, raise the number of nuclear powers on the Gulf littoral to two (Iran and Saudi Arabia), and in the broader region to six (India, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia). It is hard to imagine that other nations in the region with the obvious wherewithal—Egypt, the Emirates and Turkey, for instance—will refrain from doing so as well.

Let us now revisit the Doomsday clock. Trump is making the risk of a nuclear incident—an exchange in anger, or simply a “mistake”— in this terrorism-beset region exponentially more probable. And why?

At the end of the day, the Saudi decision to lavish billions on Donald Trump and his son-in-law is being rewarded. This bargain is not simply foolish from the perspective of peace and security, it is fundamentally corrupt. We must not lose sight of that fact.

Saudi Arabia signed a long-sought deal to obtain American nuclear technology on Wednesday, deepening its ties with the United States at a time of war and uncertainty across the Middle East.

The civilian nuclear deal, which would allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium on its soil, represents a triumph for the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. He has been trying to seal such an agreement for more than five years, pushing against opposition from American officials and experts who have raised concerns that the Persian Gulf nation could use the technology to pursue a nuclear weapon, spurring a new Middle East arms race.

The deal is also a signal that the Saudi leadership still views their alliance with the United States as essential and is eager to deepen American involvement in their country despite tensions stoked by the U.S. war with Iran. The joint U.S.-Israel war on Iran spurred a series of Iranian attacks on Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf countries, which host American military installations.

Nuclear reactors can take more than 10 years to build, and the deal could lock the kingdom into using American nuclear technology for decades to come, strengthening U.S.-Saudi security ties as well as commercial ones.

Note how NYT runs this “analysis” using all the talking points the White House gave them, ignoring the long-standing prior policy against the transfer of Uranium enrichment technologies into the region, and ignoring the financial underpinnings of Trump’s special relationship with the Crown Prince. This is some analysis.

Is There Any Limit To How Many Things Donald Trump Can Destroy?

New York Times

Charles: Yesterday afternoon Trump was promising a new surge of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, in exchange for a series of huge payments to his family (See Scott above.) Yesterday morning, the front page of The New York Times provided an excellent summary of the havoc he is creating everywhere else.

All above the fold were these stories, from left to right:

Red Sea Strait Is Newest Risk For Global Oil

Migrant Policy Creating Crisis for Elder Care

US Abandoning Fuel Efficiency As Prices Surge

Everything Trump and his minions touch turns to dust.

Mamdani on Netanyahu: The Mayor Gets the Law Right

Scott: Media reporting about Mayor Mamdani’s statement on arresting Benjamin Netanyahu is consistent in its flabby misunderstanding of international criminal law and mischaracterization of the proceedings before the International Criminal Court. But Mamdani’s statement is precise and correct: (1) Benjamin Netanyahu is an indicted war criminal; (2) the United States is not a party to the ICC, and thus is not obligated to arrest Netanyahu and render him to The Hague for trial; (3) nevertheless, the United States has the right if it wishes to arrest him and render him to justice, and indeed, the US has rendered prior indicted war criminals in just this manner; (4) Trump has announced that he will not do this; (5) hence, until the US Government changes its view, law enforcement authorities in New York City cannot arrest Netanyahu when he arrives to address the UN General Assembly in September. These points are simple and not really controversial, yet you can scour major American media to find any paper or broadcaster who reports them accurately. They routinely talk about “head of state immunity” and diplomatic immunity for visits to the UN in New York. But neither of these presumed immunities exist for indicted war criminals.

Read more

Financial Times

Scott: Trump secured his electoral victory in 2024 with the support of America’s farm belt. But eighteen months into Trump’s second term, it is clear that Trump’s trade policies, and particularly his capricious imposition of tariffs against major US trading partners, have destroyed the leading position that America has enjoyed since the end of World War II as a purveyor of agricultural goods. But this has produced remarkably little appreciation in the American Great Plains, where few seem to understand the direct causal connections in play. In a feature essay, the Financial Times studies how Trump’s trade policy has affected the once privileged position of American agriculture around the world.

After more than a century the US is on the verge of losing its place as the world’s leading agricultural exporter.

Last year, the US exported $171bn of agricultural goods according to the Department of Agriculture, just $2bn more than the export total claimed by Brazil, which many analysts say has benefited from trade disruption set in train by President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

With US exports falling and Brazil’s rising — they increased 6 per cent in the first half of this year to hit a new record of $87bn — 2026 could prove the year in which America loses its agricultural ascendancy.

Brazil is already the world’s largest producer of soyabeans, beef and poultry and has also displaced the US as the top exporter of cotton, partly because of China switching purchases from one to the other.

This transfer of power is not only reshaping the agricultural sector in each country, with altered supply chains and investment patterns, it also has wider social and political repercussions.

America remains capable of producing extraordinary harvests but, increasingly on larger farms, for weaker returns and with greater dependence on government support. In Brazil, the growth of farming has created boom towns and transport and infrastructure bottlenecks, while fuelling environmental concerns.

US farmers may soon have to contend with being number two. “We’re no longer the world supplier of soyabeans; we’re the residual supplier of soyabeans,” Goodhue says. “[Customers] come here when Brazil runs out or Brazil has a problem . . . instead of the other way around.”

When China Looked Elsewhere, Brazil Gained the Upper Hand

Over the course of the 20th century, the US turned its fertile land, mechanised farms and dense network of elevators, railways, barges and ports into a tool of global trade dominance.

The system allowed the US to produce more grain than it could consume and move the surplus cheaply overseas.

China became the customer that made that system pay. As its population grew wealthier and ate more meat, the country’s livestock industry required enormous quantities of soya meal.

American farmers planted more beans and invested in machinery, storage and export terminals on the assumption that Chinese purchases would continue to rise.

That relationship fractured in 2018, when Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods. Beijing retaliated against products grown in states that had helped elect him, and purchases of American soyabeans collapsed.

“At a whim, our trade agreements are being altered, and all that hard work that has gone to build these relationships, to work in good faith, to try to work through problems, can be erased overnight,” says Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union…

The political consequences are harder to measure in Iowa, a Republican-leaning state that plays a pivotal early role in the presidential nomination process.

Most farmers in Iowa supported Trump. They are also not necessarily opposed to tariffs. Lehman says many would accept a period of pain if it were part of a clear strategy to challenge unfair competition and build better markets. But he says that in Trump’s second term “we’re in a much worse situation on trade issues.” According to Johnson, many farmers initially assumed Trump’s disruption would eventually produce something better.

“Well, they must have done it for a reason,” she recalls people saying. “But the horizon keeps coming, and we are not seeing a lot of hope,” she added. “I don’t think politically you want farmers’ hope to dwindle in the Midwest.”

How SCOTUS Has Cratered Democracy Itself

Charles: Slate’s invaluable Mark Joseph Stern highlights a scathing assessment of the conservative majority on the US Supreme from Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins: how “One Judge Has the Guts to Put the Horror of This Supreme Court Term in Context.”

Eddins has often described the “horrors and treachery” of the six Republican Supreme Court Justices. But his latest opinion overturning a conviction based on false forensic evidence is particularly valuable because it “weaves together various threads from this term (and those preceding it) to show the entire web of ultrapartisan judicial policymaking in which the nation is now ensnared. This larger project can disappear from view when the court inundates us with so many radical rulings at once that they do not register as parts of a single scheme…State judiciaries harbor considerable authority to expand individual liberties and democratic guarantees beyond what SCOTUS requires. Far too many shrink from the task. Hawaii’s will not.”

Eddins was especially powerful about SCOTUS’s evisceration of civil rights laws and its catastrophic expansion of presidential power.

Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Edins

The Hawaii Constitution “takes no instruction” from “hubristic originalists” who are “driven by agenda and intent on swiping power that belongs to the people.” A Supreme Court “that systematically dismantles democratic safeguards, steamrolls constitutional liberties, and tramples human dignitydoes not chart the course for the Hawaiʻi Constitution.

What this court has done to constitutional rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law explains why Hawaiʻi’s Constitution takes no instruction from it..

The Hawaiʻi judiciary takes “no guidance on the meaning of due process from a court that gutted due process protections in Dobbs” by erasing a “generations-long constitutional right, stripping autonomy from half the population, and empowering states to force birth.” It “does not import that results-driven approach to due process. We follow principles, not agendas.” And so it “does not anchor Hawaiʻi’s due process rights to the federal floor. Especially one that keeps sinking

But “the Supreme Court’s imperious ideology,” Eddins continued, “does not stop at due process. The same jurisprudence has cratered democracy itself,” a process that accelerated over the term that just ended. Its “judicial demolition” of the Voting Rights Act culminated in Louisiana v. Callais, which “buried what remained of the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. Pretend law for a real statute.” The supermajority “then ditched its own thirty-two day default for releasing decisions and hustled out its judgment mid-primary, a favor granted over objection only twice in twenty-five years.” Just weeks later, “on its shadow docket, the court tossed an eleven-day trial record built on fifty-one witnesses, 790 exhibits, 2,600 pages of testimony, and a 270-page opinion by a three-judge court.” In the process, “it resurrected a tainted congressional map the three-judge factfinders found deliberately entrenched racial bias against Black voters.”

The Roberts court “sees only white. It refuses to acknowledge who the Equal Protection Clause was written to protect. The freed people, their descendants, and all others denied equal citizenship. It turns its back on what is in plain sight. The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was.

The court calls the Constitution colorblind while engineering the dilution of Black votes, the unraveling of hard-fought civil rights remedies, and the erasure of Black history. That is not blindness. That is white sight, by design. A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind. It is whatever the court needs it to be. A way to advance its partisan project.

This damage to democracy extends beyond the Voting Rights Act.” In upholding Donald Trump’s mass expulsion of Haitian immigrants, the court looked at “naked racism” and saw “none of it.” In gutting a federal religious liberty law, the court “forged the Spending Clause to reduce some of Congress’s greatest legislative achievements.” Days later, in Trump v. Slaughter, it used “a cherry-picked slice of history” to let Trump “fire at will” executive officials who are shielded from removal: “a century of settled practice recast as a mistake, competent governance sacrificed to the partisan cause.” Then, in the birthright citizenship case, “fair-weather textualists—living constitution originalists, really—deserted the text and our nation’s history the moment it promised citizenship, one vote from writing that right out of the Constitution.

Scott Horton With NPR’s Ian Masters on the FBI’s Village Idiot: Kash Patel

FBI Director Kash Patel will be going to Moscow in October just ahead of the elections as a guest of Putin’s FSB, the murderous the successor to the KGB. Listen here to THKR’s very own Scott Horton discussing with Ian Masters Russia’s penetration of U.S. industry, science and hi tech innovation as Trump’s buddies Putin and Xi provide Iran with targeting information to strike our military and intelligence assets in the Gulf killing U.S. service members.

Biden Knowingly Enabled Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank, and His Key Advisors Think He Could Have Stopped It

The New Yorker

Photograph by Saher Alghorra / NYT

Scott: As the World Court genocide case against Israel grinds on, a major question relates to the potential liability of Israel’s enablers, and particularly the United States, in the event of a verdict against Israel. Today prosecutors have been handed a very powerful piece of evidence to use against the US in the form of a fascinating New Yorker article by David Kirkpatrick exploring the reactions and thoughts of senior advisors to Joe Biden as the Israeli operations in Gaza and the West Bank unfolded. The key points that emerge: (1) recognition that US arms and assistance were indispensable to performance of the Israeli operations; (2) recognition that Israel was looking at mass population displacement as a policy objective and pursuing specific techniques to achieve it (such as destruction of water supplies, residential buildings, public buildings and repeated demands that people move out of target areas); (3) acceptance that the US could have intervened to stop move of this conduct which constitutes ethnic cleansing or genocide, and opted not to do so. Eliciting all this information and presenting it in such a cogent form is the hallmark of superlative journalism, and it’s what Kirkpatrick is known for.

On March 5, 2024, five months into the war in Gaza, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, sent a confidential letter to President Joe Biden. Under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross holds a unique responsibility to counsel states about avoiding war crimes. In the letter, which I obtained from a former United States official, Spoljaric reminded Biden that the organization had condemned the “horrific” October 7th massacre of Israelis by Hamas, and remained “relentless” in pressing the group to release the hostages it had taken. But she was now appealing to Biden “with profound alarm” because Israel, which had been pummelling Gaza with heavy munitions since October, was ignoring the Red Cross as never before. “The way the hostilities are being conducted by Israel is incompatible” with the laws of armed conflict, she wrote, “particularly the obligations to protect civilians and distinguish between military targets and civilians or civilian infrastructure, to ensure dignified treatment of detainees and the dead, to protect medical installations and personnel, and to provide and enable access of humanitarian aid.”

Allowing the Red Cross to visit detainees during a war or an occupation is one of the brightest lines established by the Geneva Conventions. Yet, after October 7th, Israel, for perhaps the first time in its history, fully blocked the organization’s access to Palestinian detainees from Gaza and the West Bank, putting it in the company of pariah states such as North Korea and Eritrea; even the warring factions in Yemen allowed Red Cross visits. Spoljaric noted that humanitarian groups and journalists had reported a “massive surge” in the number of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. At least a thousand had been released back into Gaza, and many of them gave accounts of torture, even though the Israeli military had concluded that they were not Hamas fighters. The Times reported that one released detainee, a law student named Fadi Bakr, described being beaten so severely that his genitals turned blue and blood still appeared in his urine weeks later. He said that Israeli guards had played music so loudly that one of his ears bled. (An Israeli military spokesman told the Times that the captors followed “Israeli and international law” and played music at a “low volume,” to prevent detainees from coördinating.) But the Red Cross couldn’t address such allegations: Spoljaric said that Israel had suspended all “legal-operational dialogue.”

To try to influence Hamas to release hostages, Spoljaric had appealed to Qatar and other patrons of the group; she now implored Biden to “bring about an immediate change” in Israel’s conduct. An appendix to the letter cited U.S. laws and Administration policies that prohibited the transferring of weapons likely to be used in war crimes, and Spoljaric urged Biden to withhold weapons “that should not be used in densely populated areas, in light of their devastating humanitarian impacts.” She warned Biden that failing to “uphold minimum standards of humanity” would be a “moral defeat” that “future generations are unlikely to forgive us for failing to avert…”

The Biden Administration’s staunch public backing of Israel during the Gaza war had created what Philip Gordon, the national-security adviser to Vice-President Kamala Harris, described to me as a “moral hazard”—it had invited the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to expand the battle into a regional one. Even though Biden and his advisers privately told Netanyahu many times not to provoke Iran, the Israelis repeatedly blindsided the Americans by doing exactly that: a January, 2024, strike on Damascus killed five senior Iranian military advisers; an April, 2024, strike on an Iranian diplomatic mission in Syria killed more than a dozen; a July, 2024, strike in Tehran assassinated a top Hamas political leader; a September, 2024, operation in Lebanon detonated explosives planted in thousands of walkie-talkies and pagers carried by Hezbollah fighters; a subsequent air strike killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

The Israelis gave U.S. officials no meaningful warning in advance of these attacks, and, in what a former White House official called a “humiliation” of Biden, Netanyahu ordered the Nasrallah assassination just two days after the U.S., France, and several other allies called for Israel and Hezbollah to observe a three-week ceasefire. Yet the White House never publicly criticized Israel for acting unilaterally—and each time one of these actions triggered a clash the U.S. felt compelled to defend Israel. In April and October of 2024, the U.S. helped fend off Iranian counterstrikes so effectively that Israel suffered little harm. After the second round, Biden sent Israel about a hundred U.S. service members and a missile-defense system.

Some Biden advisers privately lamented the fact that U.S. protection was unintentionally encouraging Netanyahu’s brinkmanship. Gordon told me, “We could advise them very firmly—and Biden did that with Bibi repeatedly—‘Goddammit, take the win and don’t drag us into a further war.’ But the Israelis knew we were going to defend them.” Lloyd Austin, Biden’s Secretary of Defense, reportedly likened Netanyahu to a gambler “playing with house money…”

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s former national-security adviser, told me that Biden and his advisers had often privately debated ways to restrain Israel. Inside the Oval Office, Sullivan said, “we repeatedly raised and discussed options for withholding weapons,” but, excluding the suspension of one shipment of bombs, “the President always deferred on that decision, because we kept thinking that we were close to getting a deal” for a hostage release and a ceasefire. Sullivan said, “When you look back at it in the cold light of day, the trap in that kind of thinking is easier to recognize.” He added, “I will say straightforwardly—we should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.”

Details of Criminal Charges Against the Tate Brothers Released: Will Trump Block Their Extradition?

The Times

Andrew and Tristan Tate during a court appearance in Romania in 2024. JD Vance and US diplomats intervened to secure the Tates’ release from custody in Romania on Trump’s authority.

Scott: The Crown Prosecution Service is seeking to extradite the Tate brothers, who are firmly established as insiders of the Trump family entourage, on charges of rape, sexual trafficking and assault. They received bizarrely friendly treatment from the US Marshal’s Service, which allowed Andrew Tate to hand off his smartphone so it would not be seized. And now the question hovering over their case is a simple one: will Trump intervene to stop their extradition? They are after all not accused of anything that Trump hasn’t himself credibly been accused of doing.

The Tate brothers choked women to the point of unconsciousness before raping them, prosecutors in Britain allege in newly released court documents.

According to federal court complaints unsealed in the US on Monday night, Andrew Tate placed one woman in chokeholds until she passed out, then raped her, during an alleged attack at her home in 2015.

Another woman alleged she had consensual sex with Andrew Tate in 2014 after meeting on a dating app. During a later encounter, he visited her home in Manchester and choked her during intercourse.

The unsealed complaint against Tristan Tate alleged that he choked, beat and raped a woman between 2012 and 2013. She told the authorities that he regularly choked her to unconsciousness and whipped her with a belt on multiple occasions.

The brothers, who deny all allegations against them, appeared in court in Miami on Monday as they prepared to contest their extradition to the UK.

Trump seeks to block Ed Miliband’s appointment as foreign secretary

The Independent

Scott: Donald Trump has reacted with furor at Andy Burnham’s selection of Ed Miliband to be the new British foreign secretary.

The White House is “deeply concerned” about Ed Miliband’s appointment as foreign secretary, with a warning that Donald Trump has not forgotten scathing remarks the former Labour leader has made about him in the past.

New prime minister Andy Burnham has been cautioned that Mr Miliband has some “serious diplomatic repair to undertake” in the US, after his promotion to the role on Monday sparked anger from the Trump administration.

The former energy secretary has previously clashed with Mr Trump over net zero and his attitudes to democracy and in 2016 he described the president as “a racist, misogynistic, self-confessed groper”.

French Parliament Adopts an Internet Ban for Juveniles of 15 and Younger

Le Monde

Scott: In a move fiercely contested by the tech bros, the French parliament has now adopted legislation designed to keep adolescents of 15 and younger off social media accounts. The move was propelled by a decision by Elon Musk to flood his social media platform X with AI-generated child pornography, and enjoyed broad support across the political spectrum.

Members of Parliament and senators have finally managed to reach an agreement. On Tuesday, July 21, both chambers approved the proposed law banning social media for those under 15 years old—by 243 votes in favor to 2 against in the Senate, then by 279 votes in favor and 81 against in the National Assembly. The timeline is tight, as the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, who has been heavily involved in this issue, wants the measure to take effect as early as the start of the school year in September. “France is leading the way in Europe by being the first country to establish a digital age of majority to better protect our children online,” said the Minister for Digital Affairs, Anne Le Hénanff, before the senators shortly before their vote.

The lawmakers returned to a version of the text close to the one originally drafted by Marne MP Laure Miller (Renaissance) and adopted by the National Assembly in January. Senators had amended it by advocating the creation of a list of social media platforms deemed “harmful” to teenagers, which would be prohibited to them, while other platforms would remain accessible with parental consent. This version, adopted in March, was then reviewed by the European Commission, which requested that it be revised to fully comply with European law.

Psyche Approaches Mars

This composite of images taken by NASA’s Psyche mission shows the crescent of Mars growing as the spacecraft approached the planet for a gravity assist from May 2 to May 15, 2026. Because Psyche approached Mars from a high phase angle, the planet appeared as a thin crescent in the days running up to the close approach, lit by sunlight reflecting off its surface.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

This composite photo released on July 17, 2026, shows the crescent of Mars growing as NASA’s Psyche spacecraft approached the planet for a gravity assist.

Psyche flew by Mars on May 15, 2026, using the planet’s gravity to gain speed and slightly tilt its trajectory. The flyby also gave the team an opportunity to prep for the science they will be conducting when they reach the metal-rich asteroid Psyche in 2029.

Watch a timelapse of the encounter.

Your Online Moment of Zen

The Beatles’s film Help! is often derided as an inferior successor to the epic A Hard Day’s Night. But it still had a superb soundtrack. It was the first pop LP I ever bought from the record store on Gloucester Road in Kensington when I was a student at the American School In London. Best Beatles trivia: the movie’s original title was “Eight Arms to Hold You,’ until John Lennon penned what became its title song.

You’re Going to Lose That Girl was one of those tunes I played over and over again on my Garrard Lab 80 turntable.

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TIME

Scott: Now for a modest subscription fee, you, too, can have advance access to all the moves Trump is playing on the global commodities and domestic stock markets… enabling you to play the markets just like the Big Boys around Trump!

From announcements of U.S. military action to threats of tariffs on other nations, Donald Trump’s Truth Social has been a repository of market-moving statements—mostly from him—since the social media site’s launch in 2022. Now the U.S. President is courting more controversy by selling access to some of those posts in “milliseconds.”

Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company of the microblogging platform, announced Thursday plans to launch “Truth API,” a data feed that provides what it calls the “fastest” real-time access to posts “from the highest-ranking Truth Social accounts.”

A company spokesperson told Reuters the paid-for, licensed data service will deliver posts from Truth Social’s 10 most influential accounts to customers significantly faster than the usual push notification. President Trump has 12.9 million followers on his Truth Social account and is the platform’s highest-profile user. The accounts of his sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, and the White House, similarly have millions of followers.

While the company has not publicly disclosed details about the service—including cost and exact posting latency—its revenues stand to benefit the Trump family, with the President himself owning about 41% of the publicly traded Trump Media through a revocable trust.

Companies and organizations generally offer application programming interfaces (APIs) for swift and reliable information transfer. Agencies across the U.S. government, like the Treasury Department and the Labor Department, share large financial and economic data through APIs.

But with Truth API, Wall Street trading firms and other institutions will have faster access to Truth Social posts, which could immediately influence how they trade and could maximize their profits.

How CNN and CNBC Fuel the Gambling Frenzy

Public Notice and Popular Information

Charles: America’s gambling craze is completely out of control, now that every single cell phone has been turned into a slot machine. Aaron Rupar and Judd Legum describe how CNBC and CNN are fuelling this catastrophe by collaborating with Kalshi, one of the two leading prediction markets.

In their story How Kalshi Infects The News. Rupar and Legum do a deep dive into the landmark deals both networks signed at the end of last year to promote Kalshi. Since then CNBC and CNN have promoted Kalshi assiduously–while disclosing their connections to it intermittently.

New York Times columnist and Squawk Box anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin has participated in the nearly-nonstop promotion of Kalshi–without always disclosing CNBC’s financial relationship with it.

Both networks run stories promoting Kalshi while neglecting its main competitor, Polymarket. So the deal is corrupting their news gathering as well.

Since December CNBC has published 58 articles that do little more than advertise the existence of a Kalshi market related to a news event. The headlines include “Traders predict Michael Jackson hits top Spotify after biopic,” “Kalshi traders don’t see Hormuz traffic normal until July,” and “Traders say Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt will advance to runoff in high-profile LA mayoral race.” (Pratt did not advance.)

Since April, CNBC has employed a dedicated reporter to produce these articles. CNBC also maintains a page on its website featuring Kalshi prediction markets selected by CNBC editors, along with its web coverage.

Some of CNBC’s reporting about Kalshi includes the disclosure, “CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes customer acquisition and a minority investment.” This means CNBC is paid every time it can convert a viewer to a Kalshi user. As an investor, the network also benefits if Kalshi’s overall valuation increases. CNBC is also paid directly by Kalshi for using its data, according to The Wrap.

In at least 22 cases, however, CNBC has written about Kalshi and not disclosed its financial conflict. In recent weeks CNBC has more frequently failed to include its Kalshi disclosure, including two pieces on June 10, one each on June 11, June 15, June 16, and June 23, three pieces on June 26, and one each on July 1, and July 2.

On air, where CNBC promotes Kalshi nearly every day, disclosure is also spotty.

On June 26, during a Squawk Box interview with California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton, host Andrew Ross Sorkin brought up the fact that Kalshi gives Hilton a 9.5% chance of winning the election. Producers then cut to a Kalshi graphic depicting those odds while a Kalshi QR code was displayed on the screen. The hosts never acknowledged CNBC’s financial relationship with Kalshi during the segment.

Similarly, during a news rundown on June 23, CNBC correspondent Contessa Brewer claimed that “prediction markets are hot, hot, hot” and mentioned that in recent days Kalshi and Polymarket “handled billions of dollars in trading volume” without disclosing CNBC’s business relationship with Kalshi.

CNBC’s Fast Money and Squawk Box each recently hosted Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour for extended soft-focus interviews. On June 24, for example, Squawk Box host Joe Kernen gave Mansour an open mic to portray Kalshi as a “pro-regulation company” that has kept its hands clean as “our competitors” have been mired in insider trading scandals.

While the interview did include the standard CNBC disclosure, Kernen did not ask Mansour about Kalshi’s recent insider trading scandals. Earlier that month, NPR reported former Congressman George Santos was under Department of Justice investigation for allegedly being involved with insider trading on Kalshi. Other high-profile incidents of insider trading on Kalshi involved political candidates and a MrBeast editor.

Over at CNN Kalishi has been featured in a segment called “The Odds” at least 115 times in 2026.

Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, frequently suggests that Kalshi predictions are more accurate than other sources. While polling relies on volunteers, Enten repeatedly reminds CNN viewers that prediction markets are driven by people who “put their money where their mouth is.”

On January 7, Enten highlighted that, in six days, the odds on Kalshi that the United States would buy part of Greenland by the end of Trump’s first term increased from 12% to 36%. Enten said this was proof that “the people putting their money where their mouth is” are “absolutely taking this seriously.”

“Whoa… way up there now to 36%,” Enten exclaimed. “A tripling in less than a week. My goodness gracious.”

Enten and his co-host, John Berman, then discussed that another Kalshi market at the time showed a 43% chance that Trump would acquire part of Greenland by any means, including militarily. Berman described it as “a pretty high chance” and said that 43% odds on a Kalshi market meant “a lot of people made bets.” Enten agreed, calling it a “very high chance.”

Berman didn’t say how many people made bets because he does not know and that information is not disclosed by Kalshi. Politics markets represent just 4% of all trading on Kalshi, according to a May 2026 Pew Research study — a fact never mentioned on air. (Sports accounts for 80% of Kalshi trading volume.)

Enten and Berman promoted the 43% chance of Trump acquiring part of Greenland as reflective of people “putting their money where their mouth is.” But an analysis of Kalshi’s own data shows the price increased from 30% to 39% between January 3-5, 2026, on just $24,000 worth of “yes” trades. The market was so thin that, on January 4, the “yes” odds briefly spiked to 60%.

During most segments of “The Odds,” a special ticker scrolls across the bottom of the screen promoting Kalshi markets on a wide variety of topics.

According to reporting in The Wrap and The New Yorker, Kalshi pays for CNN to promote its data. The deal is exclusive, meaning that CNN cannot report on Polymarket odds, even though Polymarket has a much more robust market on political topics. These segments conclude with the tag, “The Odds, brought to you by Kalshi prediction market.”

That boilerplate language makes it sound like Kalshi is a typical advertiser, when its relationship with CNN is more extensive. Kalshi regularly clips and promotes CNN’s “The Odds” segments on X, but excludes CNN’s “brought to you by” tagline.

A Kalhi spokesman told reporters Rupar and Legum “we’ve always been open about our news partnerships, as have our news partners.” Kalshi, CNN, and CNBC have not disclosed the financial terms of their partnership. Asked for clarity, Kalshi said its deal with CNN involves “featuring our odds on Harry Enten’s show, along with other mentions across their programming” and its deal with CNBC involves “integration across their platforms.”

H/t Laura Fisher Kaiser

How Gambling Has Destroyed America

Charles: Enter those words on Google and here is what the AI summary spits back at you:

Financial Ruin and Debt

• Surging Debt: The ease of tapping a screen has led to a spike in auto loan delinquencies, bankruptcies, and maxed-out credit cards.

• Wealth Transfer: Unlike a traditional financial investment where value is created, gambling is a “zero-sum” game. The majority of gamblers lose their money, transferring wealth from working-class households to massive betting corporations. [1, 2, 3]

Public Health and Social Breakdown

• Addiction Epidemic: The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that up to 20 million Americans have or are at risk of developing a serious gambling problem. [1]

• Spillover Harm: The addiction rarely affects only the gambler. Studies show it spills over into families, leading to a rise in domestic violence, child neglect, and divorce. [1, 2]

• Mental Health Risks: The financial shame and stress of mounting debt contribute to a higher risk of severe depression and suicide. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The Corruption of Sports

• Predatory Marketing: Aggressive advertising bombards fans, normalizing gambling as a casual part of daily life and targeting vulnerable, low-income communities. [1, 2]

• Loss of Integrity: Fans increasingly suspect the outcomes of games, leading to widespread skepticism about whether players, referees, and coaches are throwing matches for betting payouts. [1]

• Harassment of Athletes: Frustrated gamblers often resort to online and in-person abuse, threatening athletes and their families over lost bets. [1]

Lack of Support

• Infrastructure Gap: While the government spends billions of dollars treating drug and alcohol addiction, resources and rehab options for problem gamblers remain drastically underfunded and scarce. [1]

Our New Gigantomachia, or, The War with the Tech Bros

Der Spiegel

Scott: For the ancient Greeks, the twilight conflict that hovered over humankind included the γιγαντομαχία or struggle with the giants, the ill-defined superhumans who struggled with humans and gods for supremacy on earth. In our day, journalists focused on conflicts the old way—war between hostile powers, political struggles, labor struggles, and commercial conflicts. But the real struggle that hides behind everything in our world today and somehow escapes being chronicled is the struggle of the tech bros for global suzerainty. This they propose to achieve largely through unseen means: capture of state institutions, bribery of political leaders, or even the establishment of a quasi religious cult… not to mention of course, AI. Now Spiegel offers a calendar of tech bros events that otherwise have escaped attention.

Darth Vader number one this week appears to be Elon Musk and his AI epicenter in Memphis. According to Reuters, Musk’s company xAI (or is that his kid’s name?) is running 59 unauthorized natural-gas powered turbines at the Colossus 2 site – a facility with the stated aim of developing future versions of the Grok chatbot, which has already distinguished itself by generating non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes, producing anti-Semitic content and being a general AI A-hole. (When I asked Grok to fix that run-on sentence, it replied: “Do it yourself you prick!”)

But tech-bros in general appear to be under fire in the US and Europe, in large part because of the unholy alliance with US President Donald Trump that many of them have decided is the most direct path to yet more riches and power. Seriously, have YOU tried feeding a family on just a billion dollars?!

DER SPIEGEL’s Michael Sauga notes in his column this week that the trend of growing ire with oligarchs is a rare example of a socio-political trend reaching the US from Europe rather than the other way around.

“Hungary, Serbia, Albania: In many fragile democracies of the former Warsaw Pact countries, it is not parliaments that call the shots, but influential networks of political wire-pullers and oligarchs who fatten themselves on their countries’ posts, market positions and perks. These networks are under pressure in many places. In Hungary, the EU cut off funding to Orbán’s system of cronyism and thereby contributed significantly to its downfall. In countries such as Serbia and Albania, popular protest movements are turning not only against the governments in power but against the corrupt system itself. The activists have recognized that as long as politics and business remain chained together in a relationship of mutual advantage-taking, no functioning democracy can develop.”

Opposition is futile.

Read more

The New York Times

Charles: Last week’s fact-free speech by the president about the 2020 election didn’t get much traction: not even Sean Hannity could muster much enthusiasm for it in his instant analysis on Thursday night.

Times reporters Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Nick Corasaniti and Dustin Volz did a fine job of focussing on the most disturbing aspect of the president’s address. It proved that he has so thoroughly corrupted the Federal government that its major intelligence and law enforcement components are now happy to sign on to the wildest conspiracy theories imaginable:

Major agencies such as the Justice Department, the F.B.I., the Homeland Security Department and the U.S. Postal Service have taken steps to revive his false claims about the 2020 election and try to assert federal control over state-run elections.

Things only got worse the next day when Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened to send local election officials to jail if they refused to comply with the Trump administration’s wholly unconstitutional efforts to change election policies “while reiterating many of President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the security of American elections.”

The Times added:

The secretary’s remarks follow an increasingly vocal effort by the Trump administration to use the power and pulpit of government to bolster the president’s long-held false claims about elections. Mr. Trump’s speech on Thursday, coupled with Mr. Mullin’s pledge to continue pressing those false claims, was a significant escalation of such rhetoric and risked creating additional chaos and doubt for election administrators and voters alike as the midterms draw near.

Times White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote what at first looked like a promising piece of analysis, quoting a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission high up in his story who compared Trump to Captain Ahab in Moby Dick.

But then, as he so often does, Baker succumbed to the fool’s errand of treating an insane president as someone who might actually have a rational reason for peddling his absurd conspiracy theory.. The only way Baker could do that was to quote the head of an almost entirely fact-free news network:

“The president passionately believes he was wronged in the 2020 election,” said Christopher Ruddy, his friend and chief executive of Newsmax Media, “and I think he is motivated for two reasons, to get vindication and to prevent future election irregularities.”

The fastest way to get to the heart of the matter was to read the always sensible Michael Tomasky in The New Republic. The president’s speech was

just an embarrassing moment for the United States of America. When has a president ever done anything like that—commandeered the bully pulpit to spread poisonous half-truths and lies? Presidents often lie about this or that particular thing. But no one has ever pressed an obviously bogus case like that. Even the throwaway lines were poisonous lies (“We had transgender for everybody” before he returned to the White House). So it’s unlikely that most Americans are taking it very seriously.

Tomasky guessed that the speech was more about the 2020 election than it was about this fall’s midterms. But he still recognized its dangers for the future:

Plenty of dangers lurk for the republic, despite his motivation being mainly retroactive, by the way. The sycophant he wants to install as attorney general, who referred to himself as Trump’s lawyer at his nomination hearing this week, has proven himself more than capable of filing charges against anyone Trump wants him to indict. And the sycophant he wants to install as director of national intelligence, who at his hearing this week couldn’t bring himself to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, will presumably gather intel on anyone Trump tells him to look into. So we have every reason on earth to fear that if Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton are confirmed in their respective positions, they’ll take a torch to the Constitution in an attempt to give Trump his vindication...

In sum: Trump’s motivation may be retroactive, but for the Republican Party and the right-wing media machine, the speech’s greatest utility is proactive. Either way, we’re left with the grim reality that a steaming pile of lies that nearly everyone knows to be lies could end up exerting a chilling influence over the administration of justice in this country and our electoral process.

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The Apotheosis of Nigel Farage

The Sunday Times

The Nerve

Scott: It’s been a terrible week for Nigel Farage. He was caught in an apoplectic meltdown, screaming obscenities at an editor of The Times, after that newspaper, the bastion of the Tory right which until recently had always treated him with kid gloves, ran another series of disclosures about Farage’s sugar daddy and his penchant for crime. Polling shows Farage at his lowest level in two decades. And oddsmakers suddenly speculate that Count Binface has a nontrivial chance of ousting him from his Clacton constituency in the coming by-election. What’s a pouty demagogue to do? The Times reports that there was a pattern in his funding through ‘Posh George’ Cottrell, elite money laundering advisor to drug lords, that involved money coming from an unknown source and then being cycled through a couple of accounts before landing with Reform UK.

The convicted criminal who funded Nigel Farage opened an account with an obscure overseas payments company days before it was used to channel an “unexplained” £500,000 donation to Reform UK.

George Cottrell became a client of Oneify, a little-known Australian firm that moves crypto and traditional currency across borders, in late May 2024.

Within a fortnight, Oneify was used as a conduit for donations whose ultimate source could not be traced by the National Crime Agency (NCA).

An initial £1 million was deposited into Britain Means Business, a UK company owned by Richard Tice, who was then leading Reform.

Tice says that Fiona Cottrell, George’s mother, made the donation. However, it is unknown whether the money originated from George Cottrell’s own newly opened Oneify account.

But what’s very clear at this point is that the actual source of the information is a connection of Cottrell’s who really doesn’t want to be known. And Farage isn’t talking about any of this.

Meanwhile at The Nerve, Carole Cadwalladr puts Farage’s predicament in broader spectrum. Since most of these scandalous facts have been humming along just beneath the surface for years, why has it taken so long for the public to learn about them? The once chummy, now toxic rapport between Farage and The Times tells the story:

Why now? That’s one of the questions I keep on being asked. Why are Nigel Farage’s finances suddenly under scrutiny with a rightwing Murdoch-owned newspaper leading the charge?

It’s a good question, and one that has many answers, but the short one is: Brexit. For years, investigating Farage was off-limits to Britain’s rightwing print media because “challenging” Brexit was off limits. That included reporting on the money behind it.

I don’t want to be the one to break this to Mr Murdoch, but this is the same story I’ve been reporting on for a decade. It’s the same cast of characters. The same dark money. The story currently across Britain’s front pages isn’t just about Farage and Reform: it’s Brexit too.

That’s not me trying to reopen a culture war; it’s simply the facts. Two weeks ago, the Sunday Times published a scoop: that Farage had failed to declare donations from George Cottrell, a convicted money launderer. In doing so, it thrust a new character on to the national stage.

Only George Cottrell isn’t a new character. He has operated at the highest levels of UK politics, in plain sight, for more than a decade. And that includes playing a central role in the Brexit campaign. During this time, he’s been completely ignored by most of the UK’s political journalism establishment.

Because this is how UK political journalism works.

There’s much more to come. The financing of Nigel Farage and Reform UK is largely in the form of crypto, almost entirely involves foreign sources, including a list of people with murky backgrounds and ties to foreign intelligence services. Many of them are involved in dodgy aviation fuel contracts, moving fuel out of Russia. And a key point in the money trails leads straight to Albuquerque, New Mexico. But more on this later.

Why Trump World Prefers Real Men and Real Women, With Reality Defined by Drugs and Cosmetic Surgery

Financial Times

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

Scott: Pete Hegseth, fresh from intervening to block the promotion to command positions of a slew of women, Blacks and Hispanics, has announced mandatory testosterone tests for uniformed personnel—a predicate step to dispensing testosterone supplements. The development has focused attention on MAGA’s obsession with sex and sexual identity, including its favorite question—“what defines a woman”—and its current hate theme, the idea that trans people use public restrooms (in the recent platform of the Texas GOP, this issue surpassed the economy, inflation and the war in Iran as easily the essential issue).

The Trump administration has denounced puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors as “chemical mutilation”. This week, it made clear it has no such qualms about injecting US soldiers with testosterone.

Liberal lawmakers and military veterans seized on that contradiction when defence secretary Pete Hegseth announced that US service members aged 30 and older found to have low “T” levels would be offered testosterone replacement therapy (TRT).

“Pete Hegseth comes out in favour of gender-affirming care,” Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, wrote on X.

Hegseth’s detractors have portrayed the TRT initiative as a perfect illustration of the Maga movement’s fixation with virility and bodily optimisation, and its belief that gender expression should be firmly binary.

Cultural critics have long noted the Trump world’s penchant for muscular, ready-for-primetime men and glamorous, hyper-feminine women with unmistakable cosmetic enhancements.

They have ridiculed “Mar-a-Lago Face”, a look synonymous with fillers, Botox and ultra-white veneers. In their view, Hegseth’s championing of “high-T” warriors is the latest manifestation of the Maga aesthetic.

“It’s gender as performance,” said Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at UCLA. “It’s completely cartoonish.”

The Trump Administration is SO Gay

The Advocate

Charles: It was an out-lesbian Congresswoman who spoke the whole truth about the real meaning of Pete Hegseth’s new policy on testosterone.

Vermont Democrat Becca Balint told MeidasTouch chief Washington correspondent Scott MacFarlane

“I think [this] is indicative of the fact that there are so many people in this administration that have some weird, intense, homoerotic feelings towards men while also being incredibly homophobic,” Balint said, adding that administration officials engage in “hate mongering” and “fear mongering” about LGBTQ+ people.

She compared Hegseth’s “rugged macho man” persona to the hypermasculine figures drawn by gay erotic artist Tom of Finland.

“I don’t think the homoeroticism is the weird part,” she said. “The weird part is that they pretend that that’s not what it’s about.”

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Since he first entered the White House, Donald Trump has given American journalists a challenge unlike any other: a President who has told many more lies than all of of his 44 predecessors put together.

This is not hyperbole.

On the last day before the 2020 election, which occupied so much of last night’s speech, The Washington Post counted “503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.”

For all of his first term, the grand total certified by the Post was 30,573–averaging about 21 a day.

His performance has been numbing. But last night his devotion to the Big Lie was on display like never before, as he heaped one absurd and uncheckable allegation on top of another.

It will take many days to unravel his sewer feed of lies.

As The Guardian wisely pointed out, “Readers should be aware that no one has yet had time to independently examine these documents, making real-time fact-checking of the president’s claims impossible – which might be the point of presenting this avalanche of information all at once, as the president makes hyperbolic claims that it proves all of his lies about the 2020 election.

Except for their Sinclair owned affiliates ABC, NBC, and even CNN–soon to be engulfed by the Ellison megalopolis–all refused to broadcast the president’s speech live.

CBS confirmed its status as a Trump propaganda outlet by running it. But even at CBS Tony Dokoupil preceded the address by telling viewers, “Honestly, much of what the president has said on this topic is false.”

There was exactly one checkable allegation that was tyhpical of the whole speech: “a Department of Homeland Security review of state voter rolls identified 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in federal elections.”

The Heritage Foundation–the author of the venal Project 2025–begs to differ.

It found 99 cases of suspected noncitizen voting, going back to the year 2000.

RIP, US State Department

Financial Times

Scott: Since the end of World War II, the US Department of State has maintained its position as the globe’s premier organ of diplomatic practice, for better (and on occasion for worse) the standard setter in international relations. Under Trump 1.0 its role was puzzling principally because its ability to speak with the force and authority of the president was unclear. Under Trump 2.0, it has been dramatically hollowed out as a political leader sits at its helm who is uncertain of his role within the regime overall, but focused, like all the Trump entourage, on retaining the personal favor of Trump in hopes perhaps of succeeding him. Most career diplomatic posts remain unfilled, and ambassadorial appointees are uniformly either political hacks or people who purchased their positions for ready cash. Most understand that their mission is to draw the favor of the White House by threatening US annexation of the country to which they are sent or picking fights with local politicians who say something critical of Trump.

A DOS Middle East diplomat I knew in the field described to me a series of visits that Jared Kushner paid to Saudi Arabia. Kushner was emphatic that he wanted no support from the embassy, no note-taker in the form of a junior foreign service officer, no translator. He wanted to meet with senior Saudi officials including the Crown Prince on his own. “It was as if something was going on that would embarrass him if exposed.” And subsequently, of course, it became evident that the urgent matters on which he was consulting with the Saudi Crown Prince prominently included a $2 billion investment in Affinity Partners, Kushner’s investment fund and principal source of income (which, it turns out, has not made any actual investments). America under Trump is the world’s premier kleptocracy, and all levers of government, including diplomacy, are used for rent-seeking by Trump and his inner circle. Understanding this, it is evident why a professional diplomatic service is undesirable, indeed something to be viewed in an adversarial way. Which is why the venerable US Department of State is no more.

As the official face and sometimes swaggering enforcer of America’s position in the world, the state department is accustomed to extraordinary respect abroad. Since the end of the cold war, US ambassadors and envoys have often dominated their hosts with the authority of imperial satraps.

But 18 months into Trump’s second term the department is not just sidelined; it appears under siege.

Abandoning the precedent of the past 60 years, Trump has brushed aside the foreign service officers who have typically run at least two-thirds of embassies. Of the 101 nominations for ambassadorships in his second term, just nine were career diplomats.

All this is against the backdrop of swingeing cuts to the department, whose workforce has shrunk by more than 3,000, over 20 per cent, since Trump resumed office.

Administration officials present the shake-up as an overdue reform of a bureaucratic and out-of-touch arm of government. State has, they say, become obstructive, losing sight of its purpose to help achieve America’s national security objectives.

Diplomats warn of a crude politicisation and a purge of experts in an “America First” culture that scorns regional expertise.

All the while, traditional US allies bemoan the loss of the steadying voice of the state department from day-to-day global diplomacy — even as deals crafted by relative ingenues fail to take root.

“We are looking at the most damaging crisis in the 102-year history of the foreign service,” says Nick Burns, who served 31 years in the US foreign service, most recently as ambassador to China until Trump resumed office last year.

Weakening American power?

State department veterans are aghast. Their alarm is not just over the loss of jobs and standing, but over what they see as a weakening of America’s authority through the loss of institutional knowledge and a pivot from diplomacy.

“Things are quite bad,” says Bill Burns, who served in the US foreign service for 32 years including as ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state before heading the CIA under President Joe Biden.

“You need that kind of apolitical career expertise to be able to compete with, in this case, Iranian negotiators, who I know from personal experience are deeply versed in the issues,” adds Burns, who was involved in several Iran negotiations himself. “The same is true if we ever get to a point of serious negotiation on Russia and Ukraine.”

Yael Lempert, a 27-year veteran of the department, who was fired as ambassador to Jordan on the first day of Trump’s second term, is blunter. “We were outplayed,” she says. “The Iranians are experienced negotiators and they brought teams of experts with them who knew these issues inside and out. The US did not, and so unilaterally put our side at a disadvantage.”

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New York Bar Association

Charles: In a blistering 3300 word letter to the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the New York Bar Association has enumerated every way that Todd Blanche lacks the “integrity, professionalism and independence” necessary to be Attorney General of the United States.

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The Times

Iranian forces launching missiles from unknown location earlier today. Source: IRIB/Reuters

Scott: One of Iran’s chief complaints about negotiating with Trump is irrationality, unpredictability and inconsistency—it’s hard to understand what he wants, he articulates his object unclearly, and he’s prone to change his negotiating position frequently without explanation. These factors do indeed make it very difficult to negotiate. And Trump’s conduct in the last hours provides an excellent demonstration of the Iranian premise. Three times in the last 24 hours, Trump has dramatically changed his position on what he expects to achieve in the Strait of Hormuz, as today he steps back from all of his demands from yesterday. In the midst of all of this, observers around the world continue to puzzle over the beginner’s mistakes the American team keeps making, and ask how talks of this sort can be conducted without professional diplomats, lawyers and atomic scientists? But in their absence, what has happened is perhaps not so surprising.

• President Trump has suspended the 20 per cent fee on ships through the Strait of Hormuz but would be replaced by investments into the US

• The US has struck port cities after a wave of strikes on Iran for a third night, its state agency said, while Tehran continued its attacks on Gulf countries

• An Indian seafarer was killed and several injured after two tankers were hit by Iran in the Strait of Hormuz, the UAE said. India’s foreign ministry protested against the strikes

• President Trump sent Congress a formal notification that hostilities against Iran resumed last week

• The president vowed to hit Iran “very hard” on Tuesday, identifying specific targets that would be hit and when, despite claiming a new deal was still “possible”

Trump’s stewardship of the Iran war is highly personalized, prone to exaggeration, with objectives rarely made clear or transparent either to US leaders, allies or to Iran. In consequence, the likelihood that this war is going to end anytime soon is drawing ever more remote.

Trump Corruption Watch

Uday’s and Qusay’s Excellent Adventure to

The Heart of the Military-Industrial Complex

The Washington Post

Charles: To anyone still wondering why the top Trump administration budget priority of 2026 is to increase the size of an already bloated Defense budget by a staggering 50 percent, a new blockbuster investigation by The Washington Post may provide the answer.

This week Post reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin, Andrew Ba Tran, Luis Melgarand Peter Jamison have produced the latest example of why–even in its deeply diminished state–the Post remains an indispensable player in the Washington journalism scene.

In the latest episode of the never-ending saga of the most successful crime family in American history, the Post’s 3,500 takeout revealed that Eric and Donald Trump Jr. have invested in more than a dozen defense firms seeking business from the Pentagon and federal agencies. The companies have collectively generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options. Some are on shortlists of preapproved contractors that can bid exclusively on up to nearly $200 billion in future work.

Eric and his father on the South Lawn of the White House.

Some highlights of the Post story:

• The Trump sons are part of investment groups that have poured money into established government contractors, such as SpaceX and Anduril, as well as lesser-known start-ups aspiring to build a new generation of nimble, tech-forward weaponry — from drones to humanoid robots that can either mow a lawn or use deadly force. Most of the firms are in the defense industry, but some focus on products not meant for the battlefield: One company is partnering with the luxury fashion label Prada to design spacesuits, and another is trying to build quantum computers.

• Together, SpaceX and Anduril account for 97 percent of the direct government cash in The Post’s tally and 42 percent of the guaranteed future contract options. Excluding those behemoths from the analysis, 13 other start-ups tied to the Trump brothers still have captured nearly $1.8 billion in long-term federal commitments and $103 million in direct cash under the Trump administration after the brothers invested.

• Trump Jr. is invested in defense tech and in companies seeking Pentagon business through 1789 Capital, a venture firm dedicated to what its partners have called “patriotic capitalism.” 1789 has invested in 11 of the 15 defense, robotics and AI companies that have Pentagon business, according to the Post analysis.

• Eric Trump’s primary dealmaker is American Ventures, a branch of a boutique investment bank called Dominari Holdings. Located in Trump Tower in New York, Dominari has become a key firm for the sons’ cryptocurrency, mining and defense deals, according to public records and statements by Dominari.

• The brothers have invested in or advised at least four drone makers — all of which have been awarded government business during the second Trump administration, according to the Post analysis. Two of those did business with the government before the Trump brothers invested.

• At an investment conference last year, Trump Jr. described his involvement in Defense Department decisions, saying he “helped craft some of [the department’s] messaging.” On his podcast, he said that in assisting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with personnel decisions, he was looking for candidates who wanted to spend more money on drones.

• In addition to their holdings in marquee defense tech firms, the Trump brothers have also invested in smaller defense start-ups that are ascending within the Pentagon.

• Evans, the Unusual Machines CEO, said that when he was introduced to Trump Jr. in 2024, after Dominari had taken his company public, it wasn’t at all clear that Trump would become president. But as the head of a little-known drone company, Evans said he was happy when Dominari CEO Kyle Wool encouraged Trump Jr. to invest. The Trump scion’s celebrity and public views on topics such as bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. were an appealing way to drive attention and find retail investors “that would really believe in what we did,” he said.

• “Donald Trump Jr. had a very strong on-shoring, made-in-America audience and brand,” Evans said. “He just had this really strong audience.”

• When Trump Jr. announced he was becoming an investor and adviser to the company within days of his father’s election, the company’s stock price doubled. The following year, the Army placed a $12.8 million order for drone component purchases, and the Trump administration banned imports of new Chinese drones, helping the entire market. Evans has said the company is now in talks for a fast-tracked loan with the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.

The Iran War and the War Powers Resolution

Brookings Institution

The coffin of Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on July 9, 2026, in Mashhad, Iran. Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

Scott: You can scour American media today for any coherent discussion of the War Powers Resolution and the legality of US military operations in the Gulf and over Iran. What you will find is simply “Trump says the clock has now been reset with a new notification Trump has sent to Congress.” But this is nonsense. The facts are these: Trump launched the Iran War on February 28, 2026. Sixty days later, on April 29, 2026, the interim authorization expired. Since that time Congress has not voted any further authorization, meaning that all military action (other than that needed to defend US military from attacks or to support a withdrawal from the theater of operations) is unlawful. Major US media appear too timid to report on or observe any of this.

You can read a recapitulation of what appears to be the administration position as of the end of May, and what’s obviously wrong with it, in this discussion panel summary from the Brookings here.

Trump Corruption Watch (2)

Trump Paid $2 Million by South Korean Company Facing Trade Investigation

New York Times

Scott: A modern kleptocrat instinctively uses all the levers of government as tools for rent seeking from those who interact with government, whether they are seeking contracts, concessions, the right to do business, or relief from regulatory enforcement or criminal inquiries. Trump has proven himself the most voracious kleptocrat of modern history, and his dealings are increasingly audacious as time passes. As we see in this NYT report.

The lead investor in a South Korean aluminum company that has challenged Commerce Department penalties on certain exports from South Korea to the United States made a $2 million payment last year to President Trump’s holding company.

The payment by the parent company, Base Group, was revealed for the first time in Mr. Trump’s annual financial disclosure form released in late June.

The document offered only a cryptic explanation for the payment, stating that it was part of a “letter of intent” and a “nonrefundable development fee.” In statements to The New York Times, the company and the Trump family said the payment relates to a still-unannounced golf course project.

Base Group has spent nearly a decade courting the Trump family, exclusively selling Trump-branded wine in South Korea and, more recently, hosting Mr. Trump’s son Eric at its Seoul headquarters.

The topic at the February gathering, according to a company executive: ways to increase trade between South Korea and the United States.

The efforts by Base Group to build ties with Mr. Trump and his family come as its corporate affiliate, Korea Aluminium, has curbed exports to the United States after the Commerce Department concluded that a group of South Korean companies circumvented trade duties on Chinese-made aluminum.

Justice In America

ABC News

Charles: Writer E. Jean Carroll, who sued President Donald Trump over claims of sexual abuse and defamation, has received $5.62 million from a civil judgment paid by Trump.

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The Guardian

Charles Kaiser: If there is any hope of restoring the rule of law in America when the Trump crime family is finally evicted from the government, the lawyers who were their co conspirators must all be stripped of their law licenses.

In one of the most powerful decisions of the year, Federal District Court Judge Kathleen Willi…

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What history tells us about Trump’s self-enrichment

Financial Times

Scott: Trump’s own 2025 financial disclosures make clear beyond doubt that Trump is the premier kleptocrat of his age. His use of public office to enrich himself far surpasses his nearest rivals, like Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Mobutu Sese Seko. In the FT weekend essay, Princeton professors JC de Swaan and Harold James survey modern history to examine what effects such corruption can have on a previously democratic society and how a resilient democracy responds to it after its disclosure. They do not get into the familiar Roman approach, the passage of a lex damnatio memoriæ, which simply declared all the wealth acquired by the kleptocrat and his family forfeit to the state… which might make the most sense for America today.

Still the most common problem that a kleptocrat presents to a country is the obvious one: the accumulation of ever more wealth and power becomes his reason for being, and the pursuit of the nation’s interests both domestically and on the international stage take a second seat to this. And this we now see in abundance with Trump.

In American history, Trump is a singular figure in many respects. The US tradition has long held its officials to a standard of probity — the self-denying servant of the republic, from George Washington’s resignation of his military commission to Jimmy Carter’s recusal from his peanut business.

Many presidents left office worse off financially than when they entered. Washington set the tone by initially refusing a salary. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison both depleted their own capital to fund state dinners and receptions, Jefferson leaving office in debt. By the mid-20th century, Harry Truman’s near-destitute status in retirement impelled Dwight Eisenhower to create the presidential pension…

The Trump experience has an odd precursor in British history — one that profoundly shaped the thinking of the American republic. Britain had been wracked by the South Sea Bubble, which burst in 1720. The South Sea Company was a political enterprise, a Tory initiative to rival the Whig innovation of the Bank of England, built on bribing parliamentarians with stock. After the collapse its directors were prosecuted and expropriated. The historian Edward Gibbon, grandson of one of them, complained bitterly about his family’s pauperisation.

The South Sea collapse discredited Tory corruption, but what then emerged was a Whig alternative. Robert Walpole built his reputation by warning against the bubble; after the collapse he protected the monarch, George I, and developed a proposal to restructure the company and consolidate government debt. He became Britain’s first de facto prime minister and developed an extensive patronage system alongside a programme of massive self-enrichment.

His family prospered with him: his brother handled money for overseas British military and diplomats; two sons held Exchequer posts. His stately home at Houghton, Norfolk, was crammed with European masterpieces. He covered himself in satin and piled on diamond decorations. He gave spectacular banquets. Walpole defended himself by asserting that corruption was the natural state. In one of his greatest parliamentary performances, when successfully blocking a demand for more frequent elections, he simply noted that “There may be some bribery and corruption in the nation; I am afraid there will always be some.”

His critics — Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay — accused him of debasing public service by amplifying its capacity for personal enrichment. Pope observed that “Nothing is sacred now but villainy.” His political enemy Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, deployed satires depicting a man with a “purse of gold” appearing at Westminster Hall.

Still Walpole’s self-enrichment was at most $200 million in modern money, a tiny fraction of Trump’s…

Will Trump’s corruption become a decisive electoral issue? No easy linkage with living standards can be made at this stage. A questionable gift of a jet from Qatar may influence US treatment of that country, but will not measurably affect American voters’ daily lives. The full impact from freewheeling crypto regulation may not surface for years.

Yet the issue is rising as a priority concern — Navigator Research, a Democratic-aligned pollster, now tracks it as nearly tied with inflation and the cost of living as the top issue across 67 battleground districts. In midterm campaigns, Democrats are converging on a message that ties the affordability issue to alleged presidential corruption. Rahm Emanuel, a prospective 2028 presidential candidate, has described the topic as a “gem” for Democrats to mine. Several Senate candidates have made it a major theme, including Jon Ossoff in Georgia and James Talarico in Texas.

If a financial bubble collapses, then Trump would be as deflated as the stock market. But if the exuberance continues, it will drive prices higher. If inflation persists, the disparity between most Americans’ dwindling purchasing power and the extraordinary wealth being generated by the Trump family and its connected partners is bound to loom larger — a message that could well resonate by election day.

Lindsey Olin Graham 1955-2026:

He Came and He Went?

Charles: The best of Facebook on this very special occasion:

Malcolm Farley

He offered us a paradigm on how sociopathic power deforms a weak personality.

Dick Brass

The Ernst Röhm Society issues its most profound condolences at the passing of our friend and honored colleague Senator Lyndsey Graham

The Senator’s Final Visit to Disney World

From Harper’s Magazine:

21 Grahams

From descriptions of Donald Trump, stated between 2015 and 2018

By Lindsey Graham

A race-baiting, xenophobic bigot

The Islamic State’s “man of the year”

The death of the GOP’s relationship with Hispanic voters

A death blow to the GOP’s relationship with women

The world’s biggest jackass

A wrecking ball

A salesman of fear

A politician whose ideas are gibberish

A politician who is incapable of representing a mattress company

A poor representation of a Republican

A president who is unfit for office

A president who sometimes crosses the line

A Twitter user whose tweets are sometimes beneath the office of the presidency

A man who has a blind spot

A thoughtful person

A good person

A strong person

A golfer with an accurate drive and an athletic swing

A president doing a great job

The best hope in decades for peace

A potential recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize

In Venezuela, Trump hones a new form of post-Capitalist Imperialism

New York Times

Scott: The Romans had the office of Proconsul. The Medes and the Persians had the Satrap. The Spanish and British empires had Viceroys. Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler had the Reichsstatthalter. Trump has the Rubio. Each of these describes an arrangement for the administration of a province newly annexed to the Empire, through a personal representative of the Leader under circumstances assuming some continuing self-administration through local government. In an outstanding investigative report, NYT has taken a deep dive into the arrangements that Trump has quietly put into place in Venezuela, with no public discussion or legislative preparation or oversight.

The most alarming thing about the Rubio satrapy has to do with the movement of money. Trump has taken Venezuela’s oil wealth, funneled it through still unknown channels, and passed a pittance of it back to the Venezuelan clique that runs the country in arrangements that look identical to those made by a mob boss who has moved in on a new territory and subordinated its boss to his syndicate.

The constitutional conflict that underlies the modern history of the Anglo-Saxon world relates to the primacy of the legislature in the raising of funds, their lawful appropriation and use. The MAGA Congress under Mike Johnson and John Thune is unlike any of its historical predecessors in its total indifference to its historical rights and prerogatives and its pavlovian subservience to Trump. Here we see Trump doing an end run around the congressional power of the purse and of appropriation, as Congress looks the other way, unwilling to assert itself in any way.

Mr. Rubio could be the next leader of Venezuela, Mr. Trump suggested. And while the president’s aides say he was joking — and that he frequently teases Mr. Rubio about an overseas assignment — the fact is that Mr. Rubio does not need to move to Caracas.

He already runs Venezuela from Washington.

In the six months since U.S. forces blew open Mr. Maduro’s bedroom door and snatched him in the dead of night, Mr. Rubio has become the de facto viceroy of Venezuela, holding sway over a sovereign nation in a way that no American official has since L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in 2003 to run U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Mr. Rubio now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and people close to both governments in Washington and Caracas, who provided details about his involvement in steering the country’s policies. Many spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private interactions and internal discussions.

While he has not visited Venezuela in person since the U.S. took over, the secretary of state is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations, keeping in close contact with Delcy Rodríguez, who was Mr. Maduro’s vice president and now leads her country on an acting basis, with the imprimatur of the United States. The two exchange messages in Spanish on WhatsApp, trading gossip, birthday greetings and selfies.

Despite the banter, the relationship between Mr. Rubio and Ms. Rodríguez is far from a partnership. It is a manifestation of Trump-era American power, in which the winner takes all regardless of sovereignty and international law…

The U.S. Treasury receives the revenue from most of Venezuela’s exports, then disburses it to Venezuela through the country’s banking system, a relationship akin to parents handing out allowances to children. Mr. Rubio and his team set the conditions on what that money can be spent on, and by whom.

This system has allowed Mr. Rubio to stop Venezuela’s most egregious corruption schemes. And it brings some benefits to the Venezuelan government, which uses the effective protection of the U.S. Treasury to receive revenues without being hounded by the numerous creditors seeking repayment of billions in unpaid debt.

But the arrangement has also given Mr. Rubio immense leverage over Ms. Rodríguez, who depends on the money to pay workers and prop up the national currency.

He also oversees the application of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, deciding who gets to do business in the country and how. He has worked to reshape the oil sector and boosted the access of U.S. companies. For her part, Ms. Rodríguez runs important government appointments by him, such as the minister of defense…

Washington’s grip on Venezuela’s economy extends beyond the oil revenues. Mr. Rubio’s team drafts the licenses that provide companies who want to do business in Venezuela with exemptions from sanctions. Mr. Rubio has warned Ms. Rodríguez’s government to abstain from business with U.S. adversaries. Following Mr. Maduro’s downfall, for example, Venezuela’s state oil company has quietly taken over the operations of the oil projects that it co-owns with Russia’s state-run Rosneft. Rosneft did not respond to request for comment.

The Trump administration has also successfully pressured Ms. Rodríguez to turn over Venezuelans who have crossed the Justice Department. At the behest of the United States, Ms. Rodríguez’s government in February detained Alex Saab, the billionaire friend and business partner of Mr. Maduro, and approved his extradition to the United States, after stripping him of his Venezuelan passport.

Another Under-the-Radar Unitary Executive Catastrophe

Charles: The New Yorker’s indispensable Elizabeth Kolbert describes the latest planned destruction of the Federal budget process by Russell Vought, architect of Project 2025, director of the Office of Management and Budget and one of the most vicious and effective members of the Trump administration.

Russell Vought

Every Democrat in the Senate has signed a letter describing it as a “new cudgel” to “advance Trump’s partisan agenda and punish political rivals.” The legal website Lexology said, “The stakes could not be higher.”

Previously controlled by civil servants and peer review panels, the proposal would shift the power over all discretionary federal spending to political appointees of the president.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington said the new policy would “turn the entire federal government into this one big slush fund to reward those aligned with the Administration and punish everyone else.”

Among the proposed rules’ many provisions is one that would prohibit federal money from being used to support collaborations between researchers in the United States and their colleagues in many other countries. “By this guidance, America would not be allowed to be included in the International Space Station,” Colette Delawalla, who founded and heads the group Stand Up for Science, said in an interview. “The same goes for every type of weather monitoring and pandemic monitoring.”

Last year, the Administration terminated or froze nearly eight thousand research grants. Federal judges have ordered many of them to be reinstated; still, roughly a third, totalling some 1.4 billion dollars, have yet to be released, and may be gone for good.

The O.M.B. is aiming to finalize the new regulations by October 1st. …It’s no accident that Vought wants the proposal enacted before the midterms; this would allow the Administration to continue to terrorize grant recipients even if Democrats gain control of Congress a free nd start to exercise real oversight.

H/t Michael Finnegan

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Süddeutsche Zeitung

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and US President Donald Trump at the NATO Summit in Ankara

Scott: Before he was president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was his country’s best known comedian, playing the role of President of Ukraine in Sluga Narodu, Servant of the People, a smash hit comedy now on Netflix. His skills as a comedian were shining brightly throughout the NATO summit, but particularly in a farcical sitdown with Trump in which the delusional US president introduced him as “President Putin” and offered a stream of meandering and generally incoherent remarks. Süddeutsche Zeitung saw the meeting as the center point of the whole NATO summit, and a demonstration of how the NATO leaders now laugh along with grandpa Trump, while giving him the romper room treatment.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy smiles even when Trump calls him “President Putin.” The Ukrainian president managed to secure a crucial promise from the US president at the NATO summit in Ankara.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy smiles. He smiles past all the errors, the verbal slips, and the incoherent sentences of his counterpart. He smiles when Donald Trump addresses him as “President Putin”—twice—and when he refers to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan.”

There is a good reason for Zelenskyy’s friendly demeanor. Amidst all the blunders, Trump drops a sentence that the Ukrainian president is more eager to hear than anything else at that moment: “We will grant you a license to manufacture Patriots,” Trump said during a press briefing with Zelenskyy at the conclusion of the NATO summit in Ankara. “That’s really cool, isn’t it? That way, you can’t complain that we aren’t giving you enough of them.”

Zelenskyy smiles. He had repeatedly asked for this license. After all, only the high-performance Patriot interceptor system allows Ukraine to fend off the ballistic missiles Russia fires at the country— including at civilian targets.

Ukraine has, however, managed to solve other problems in recent months: it has stabilized the situation at the front and is currently inflicting heavier losses on Russian forces than Vladimir Putin can recruit men for his army. Using medium-range drones, Kyiv is destroying Russian logistics behind the front lines, while the Crimean Peninsula—crucial to the Russian military—is being isolated bit by bit. Furthermore, Ukraine is using long-range drones and cruise missiles to inflict devastating damage on Russia’s oil infrastructure. Donald Trump has taken note of these successes and, in recent weeks, has adopted a much friendlier tone toward Zelenskyy. It is well known that the US President does not like to be on the losing side.

However, the Ukrainians have yet to find a solution to counter Russia’s ballistic missile attacks. This was brutally demonstrated by two waves of attacks on July 2 and 6, which claimed the lives of more than 50 people in the Ukrainian capital and the surrounding area. Zelenskyy stated that the “inadequate supply of interceptor missiles” to Ukraine had contributed to these heavy losses, making Patriot missiles a “top priority” for the country at present.

While the vast majority of drones can be reliably intercepted, Ukraine failed to shoot down even a single one of the 29 Russian ballistic missiles launched on July 6. This suggests that stocks of the modern PAC-3 Patriot interceptor missiles are nearly exhausted. Only these missiles are capable of reliably shooting down ballistic missiles, which are difficult to counter due to their high speed.

And one last thing. “Are you willing to go to Moscow,” asked Trump. “I don’t know. I think it’s very dangerous. Lots of Ukrainian drones flying around,” responded Zelenskyy, not breaking character.

A Bump In the Road For Paramount-Warner Bros?

Reuters

Charles: A long-rumored antitrust lawsuit to prevent Paramount from devouring Warner Bros could be filed as early as next week by attorneys general from California and New York among other states, according to Reuters.

Because Larry and David Ellison own Paramount and they have spent tens of millions of dollars supporting Donald Trump, approval of the merger by the Justice Department was always a foregone conclusion.

But if the states find a sympathetic Federal judge they could substantially delay the Paramount-Warner Bros deal, and possibly even kill it.

The most successful recent state antitrust suit was filed by thirteen attorneys general to prevent the merger of Nexstar and Tegna. The suit was combined with another one filed by DirecTV and it has already delayed the merger for many months. California Attorney General Rob Bonta is one of the leading plaintiffs in this case and the expected suit against Paramount. Yesterday a trial date for Nexstar was announced for July 2027, which probably means that merger will be delayed for at least another year.

Budding media titan David Ellison

Reuters explained that a similar delay for the Ellisons could be very costly:

If the deal is delayed because of a court challenge, costs could ‌mount for ⁠Paramount, which is already expected to carry around $80 billion in debt after the transaction closes.

Ellison has agreed to pay Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders a 25-cent-per-share “ticking fee,” amounting to about $650 million in cash each quarter, if the deal does not close before October.

Oil Giants Mutter ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’

Financial Times

One of the largest oil supply disruptions in history was triggered by the Iran war, and it has allowed the fossil fuel giants to reap unprecedented windfall profits. Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP

Scott: For the fossil fuels industry, Donald Trump has been a gift from God. He appointed their lobbyists to top cabinet and regulatory positions, freed them from the burdens of regulatory oversight, made already-assessed fines simply disappear, granted them huge state subventions, and is doing all he can possibly do to suppress their renewable energy competition. And beyond all of this, Trump launched a massive war in the Gulf. It may look menacing from the industry’s perspective, but it also means inflated oil prices and profits the likes of which Big Oil has never seen before. But can this be too much of a good thing? Elections are approaching, and the price of gasoline at the pump is threatening to be a politically devastating issue for the GOP. Which has Trump thinking about price fixing.

America’s Big Oil groups are set to post record profits stemming from Donald Trump’s Iran war, setting them on a collision course with the US president, who has accused companies of price gouging at the pump.

ExxonMobil and Chevron are expected to announce second-quarter net income of $15bn and $9.7bn, respectively, later this month — more than three times the previous quarter — as high crude, diesel and jet fuel prices trigger a wartime windfall.

American refiner Marathon is expected to join the supermajors in posting its highest profits since 2022, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine helped set off a global inflationary spiral, according to forecasts compiled by FactSet. Valero, another refiner, is also in line to report a bumper quarter.

The Big Oil profit gusher would spark a reaction in Washington, where Trump has already accused companies of profiteering just months ahead of the US’s midterm elections, said analysts.

“Investors will see returns, governments will see red,” said Kevin Book at ClearView Energy Partners. “The administration is clearly eager for some sort of fuel price relief ahead of the election but the industry did not cause prices to rise, the war did.”

The average US petrol price is up almost a quarter compared to a year ago, to $3.8 per gallon, while diesel is 30 per cent higher at $4.8 per gallon, according to motoring group AAA.

Trump last month ordered a Department of Justice probe into energy companies over price gouging, a tactic that was also employed by then- president Joe Biden when prices surged after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Gasoline Retailers must get ​their Prices down, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on his Truth ​Social platform. “If Retailers don’t do this, big problems lie ​ahead!”...

Months of higher petrol prices have been painful for Americans — and a growing threat to Trump’s Republicans as they fight to keep control of both chambers of the US Congress. The fuel inflation has reverberated through the US economy as rising transportation costs drive up prices for everything from plane tickets to groceries.

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Financial Times

Scott: Nothing more perfectly exemplifies the tech bro attitude towards government and the markets than Peter Andreas Thiel’s Palantir. German-born and South Africa-raised, Thiel describes himself as a “libertarian,” but his libertarianism supposes huge, all-encompassing, highly authoritarian government in which he sits in the driver’s seat (though not to be viewed by the public, of course. His public facing avatar is JD Vance.) Palantir was built to realize this model. Its development was fueled at every stage along the way by taxpayer subventions, and it has a one-client model: the government (or more broadly, governments). It reinforces and develops this relationship the old-fashioned way, through influence peddling with the rich and powerful, and most significantly, through those who walk the corridors of power and whisper in the ear of decision-makers, and whose influence can be purchased for ready cash.

Peter Thiel is a platinum-card member of the Epstein class, as became apparent when disclosure of the DOJ Epstein files showed a broader public exactly how he goes about extending the Palantir government-client portfolio. In Britain, Lord Peter Mandelson, his Epstein colleague, played the central role, identifying the key points of weakness in the government decision-making process.

In a sweeping exposé charting Palantir from its origins to its current aspirations, the FT asks the right questions. Thiel believes his services and his political machinations will make him the indispensable partner, and potentially the master, of the government apparatus. And his dealings with Trump and elevation of JD Vance to the White House are the hallmarks of this strategy. But may such rapid success not also be planting the seeds of its own catastrophic failure? Can Palantir survive a bright, steady light that exposes its assorted hand puppets and techniques, its seedy business practices, and the palette of sordid and corrupt services it offers clients from Minneapolis, to Gaza and the Gulf?

The week after a US immigration enforcement officer killed an American mother of three on the streets of Minneapolis in January, Palantir’s head of “strategic engagement” posted on social media a slickly produced, AI-generated video set to a music track called “Clubbed to Death”.

In a series of flash frames, it featured the logo of the company — whose data intelligence platforms are used by the Trump administration to detain and deport migrants — in the midst of a cultist circle, alongside images of the grim reaper, a blood-soaked crucifix, all-seeing eyes and the mysterious slogan “Recon is watching you”.

Some Palantir staff, already concerned about their employer’s enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump’s policies and its defence of Israel’s war in Gaza, were appalled. “The company had an absolute internal meltdown,” recalls one former employee, who watched the dispute erupt on an internal messaging platform. “You had people being like: ‘My customer is a children’s hospital — how am I supposed to explain this to them?’”

The video was taken down within days. But the episode encapsulated the deepening disquiet within the ranks of the $330bn company, which has become, if protests and political outrage are any measure, one of the most controversial tech groups in the world…

But while Palantir was becoming one of the biggest corporate winners of the Trump era, its success was increasingly inseparable from the controversial policies enabled by its technology, such as tracking undocumented migrants and drone warfare. As recently as 2020 the company “purposefully” declined to work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation arm over the risk of disproportionate enforcement. That guardrail was now gone.

Even during the Biden administration, insiders including the head of Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team, Courtney Bowman, warned about the risks of appearing ever more political. Executives later cautioned that Karp’s 2025 book The Technological Republic, which accused American allies of “self-righteousness”, would complicate its growth strategy in Europe and deepen the company’s dependency on the US.

Palantir and those associated with it increasingly picked a side in the culture wars and intervened more directly in politics. Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder turned Maga mega-donor who hosts fundraisers for vice-president JD Vance, called for the return of public hangings and suggested the company was founded to fight “commies”.

Karp publicly embraced the “disruption” caused by Doge, telling investors on an earnings call that “some people are going to get their heads cut off” due to the initiative. Shyam Sankar, the company’s chief technology officer, and architect of the forward-deployed engineer model, joined the US Army reserves and praised Trump as “a founder who can . . . lead us to a new golden age”. (Sankar was also given oversight of Palantir’s US government business.)

A comprehensive summary of the FT Palantir exposé can be viewed in this short documentary, released by the FT this morning.

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Trump Corruption Watch

Five Hundred Days of Plunder

Chris Murphy

Charles: Last month Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy took the Senate floor for half an hour to deliver a superb summary of the innumerable high crimes and misdemeanors committed during the first 18 months of the second Trump presidency:

Over the last year and a half, our president, Donald Trump, has turned the White House into a 24/7 corruption operation. This is a national crisis, and we should start acting like it. The president’s goal is to engage in so much corruption, so much self-enrichment, to hand out so many favors to his friends, his family, and his political allies, that it just becomes the pitter patter of rain. It’s normal. It’s constant. It’s neverending. Trump’s bet is that if there is a new story of corruption, of self-dealing every few days, that the press will stop covering it, or the public will just stop paying attention.

This moment is exceptional. It’s a one of one moment, and if it becomes normal, if people stop being outraged at what he is doing to enrich himself, then I fear there is no going back. The White House will just become a place to get rich.

So, I think it’s time to pull back and see the full picture - to not view this as just one isolated scandal after another, every single one popping up each week or every few days, but to understand the full scope of the illegality.”

Most of the mainstream press immediately proved Murphy’s point about corruption fatigue by completely ignoring his speech.

Here are a few of the bigger scandals he enumerated, any of which would have easily destroyed any of Trump’s predecessors.

Senator Chris Murphy

• On April 7th, 2025, the current acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, issues a memo ordering the termination of several Biden-era DOJ investigations into crypto companies. Now, here’s the problem: the then Deputy Attorney General is a major investor in crypto companies, and he works for a president who is a major player in the crypto industry, but DOJ just drops these investigations, signals that the Department of Justice is no longer going to hold crypto companies accountable, but Blanche owns major investments in crypto stocks. The president is one of the biggest players in the industry. Blanche doesn’t actually stop there. He eliminates the entire enforcement team at DOJ dedicated to rooting out crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes. This is a crypto investor, who works for a President who owns crypto companies, shutting down the unit at DOJ that holds this industry accountable.

• On May 27, Donald Trump pardons a man called Paul Walczak. This is a really bad guy. He stole millions of dollars from the nurses and healthcare aides at the nursing home he owned and he used the cash he stole from his employees to buy a $2 million yacht. He got convicted. He went to jail for fraud. BUT…his mother paid $1 million to buy a face to face meeting with Trump, and 3 weeks after that paid audience, her son was given a full and unconditional pardon that went SO FAR as to relieve him of any duty to repay the $4.4 million he stole from his employees.

• Stephen Miller is more than just the architect of the administration’s hardline immigration policies: He has a personal financial stake in them. For instance, Miller owns up to $250,000 in Palantir stock, and just a month before Miller’s holdings became public, ICE announced that it was awarding a $30 MILLION contract to…you guessed it…Palantir! To provide “real time” surveillance information to ICE officers.

And you’ll be shocked to hear this. There was no competitive bidding process for that contract.

• This may be the most corrupt thing that Trump is doing. He and his family own a crypto company that issues several crypto coins. There’s no disclosure on who is buying those coins. The president promotes them, invites people to official events to purchase the coin. On September 18th, though, we come to find out that Trump made $57 million selling crypto tokens to entities associated with the regimes in North Korea, Iran, and Russia - extraordinary investments being made by entities that are tied in with North Korea, Iran, and Russia into Trump’s crypto companies. It begs the question as we are currently debating an Iran deal that basically exists on Iran’s terms, why was there a flood of money from Iranian regime-backed entities into the Trump crypto companies? Why were they putting that investment in? What did they expect to get from the president? We’ve never, ever before had this exist. We’ve never had a backdoor mechanism by which foreign governments could just shovel money into the pocket of the president. It exists because of the Trumps, Trump’s memecoin and his stablecoin.

• Trump closes the books on a criminal F.B.I. inquiry into one of his key advisors – Tom Homan. This is his border czar. The FBI had caught Tom Homan red handed engaging in naked corruption - undercover agents had handed him 50,000 dollars in cash in a bag and he agreed to give them government contracts. This was on video! This is the border czar getting a bag of cash, in exchange for contracts, on video.

But the administration, on September 20 [23], just makes the investigation go away because that kind of bribery, that kind of naked graft, is ok in this White House

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Business Insider

Charles: Business Insider has provided the best summary of everything that is wrong about America right now by listing the net worths of ten billionaires spending the most to defeat the most sensible ballot measure of 2026, Proposition 40, better known as the California Billionaire text. Written by two law professors and an economist, who were inspired by data proving billionaires pay a lower tax rate than middle class families, it would impose a onetime tax of 5% on every Californian’s wealth in excess of $1 billion.

Not including their real estate.

Since $1 billion is easily ten times the amount any single human should be allowed to accumulate, the goals of the proposition could hardly be more modest. But the reaction of the billionaires to the possibility of losing 5 percent of their wealth is genuinely out of this world.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, worth $82 billion, has already spent an eye-popping $81 million to defeat the ballot measure. He and the other billionaires listed by Business Insider are worth at least $423 billion.

And there are 203 other California billionaires who didn’t even make Business Insider’s list.

Sergey Brin

So far eleven billionaires have invested $131 million to defeat the measure at the ballot box

That is more than flour times the $31 million raised on the other side by the bill’s sponsor SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (UHW)

Last spring the union collected 1.6 million signatures in support of the tax, nearly double the 874,641 required to qualify for the November ballot.

Naturally faux-populist Governor Gavin Newsom is a strong opponent of the measure. One day after it qualified for the state ballot the SEIU said it would abandon the 5% wealth tax if Newsom would support a very modest 2% levy passed by the state legislature.

Newsom quickly rejected that compromise.

The SEIU thinks the measure could raise as much as $100 billion for health care programs, food assistance and public education.

Rather than writing so many big checks, the billionaires might do more for their longevity by studying the Reign of Terror in France at the end of the 18th Century.

That’s when more than 1200 aristocrats preoccupied with their bank balances got the chance to personally lubricate French guillotines.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Charles:THKR constantly bemoans the carnage caused by the absolute power of money in our time. My brother David Kaiser points out that Balzac was preoccupied with the same problem in his last great novel, La Cousine Bette, one hundred and ninety years ago:

Honoré de Balzac in 1848

“This is the law of society. The confessor, the judge, and lawyer would be helpless if the spirit of the state did not tame the human spirit. . .We, [doctors], we have the pleasure of a successful cure, just as you have the joy of saving a family from horrible hunger, misery and poverty by finding it work; but what solace is there for the judge, the police commissioner or the lawyer, who spend their lives searching among the most heinous conspiracies of ambition, that social monster that knows the pain of failure but never feels repentance?”

“Whence comes this great evil?” asked the baroness.

“From the lack of religion,” he replied, “and from the rule of finance, which is nothing but pure egotism. Money in other times was not everything, one recognized other things of greater value. There was nobility, talent, and service to the state; but today the law makes money a universal standard of value and the basis of political power! Certain magistrates are no long eligible for it, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would not be eligible! The endless division of inheritances forces everyone to think only of himself from the age of twenty onwards. And the need to make one’s fortune leads easily to depraved schemes, because the religious spirit is lacking in France, despite the efforts of those working for a Catholic restoration. That is the opinion of all those who, like me, see into the bowels of society.”

The Farage Gambit: Resign, Seek His Seat Again in By-Election

The Times

Nigel Farage makes momentous announcement about his political future

Scott: For years, Nigel Farage has been the Teflon man of British politics. Corruption allegations that would have brought down your run-of-the-mill Tory or Labour politician bounce off Farage without obvious harm. And in part this is for the reasons that Hannah Arendt put forth in her study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): voters who support fascist or similar authoritarian political movements are heavily motivated by hate targeting groups they see as “other,” dreams of a glorious past that never actually existed, and have a very cynical view of modern democratic politics. They’re sure (without any evidence) that the moderate politicians who govern them are all extremely corrupt and motivated by personal greed and avarice. Hence allegations that their own political leaders are corrupt are viewed as a matter of indifference, or even, as Arendt notes, as a sign of how clever they are, understanding how to milk the system.

Facing a torrent of revelations about the sources of funds that he and his party subsist off, and lacking any meaningful push back, Farage has picked an interesting distraction technique. He will resign, and then stand again in the by-election for his solidly Reform constituency of Clacton. He expects of course to be re-elected, and indeed the Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour have already called the move a “sham” and said they will not field candidates. And he will argue on the basis of the vote that whatever wrongs he might have done have been approved by the voters. Audacious. If successful, it will be another body blow to British democratic norms.

Nigel Farage said: “I thought about it hard, and I’ve decided today, I will resign as a member of parliament for Clacton-on-Sea, thereby forcing a by-election”.

He said: “I’ve decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions.

“This will be a people versus the establishment by-election. It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment to frankly tell them where to go, and that is why I will be putting my name forward to stand in this by-election.”

He said: “I will fight to win. I will fight to continue the political revolution that Reform has started, and I would say this to you, the voters of Clacton: if I win, you win, because if I lose, they win, and we will never, with the two old parties, get the type of fundamental change that we need to fix broken Britain.”

Nigel Farage’s decision to resign will not change the fact that the standards investigation into him can go ahead.

Parliamentary rules say that if a person ceases to be an MP the standards commissioner “will suspend their investigation until the member is re-elected”, meaning if Farage returns to the Commons it would restart. He could then face sanctions and even potentially a second by-election.

The commissioner can also continue the investigation and make conclusions over whether he broke the rules even if Farage loses, although in that scenario sanctions would not apply.

Knowledge is Power

Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.

I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.

Try getting the news you need from Charles and me for two weeks.

Get 14 day free trial

Le Pen’s Embezzlement Conviction is Affirmed on Appeal, But the Way is Cleared for Her Run for President Next Year

Le Monde

Marine Le Pen exits the hearing room at the Paris Court of Appeals as a decision is handed down affirming her embezzlement conviction, but granting her the right to seek to be president just the same.

Scott: A plurality of American voters tapped Donald Trump to be president notwithstanding a series of fraud judgments against him, including 34 felony convictions and an adjudication that he had raped a woman (now upheld on appeal to the Supreme Court). And now a senior appellate court in France has defied expectations by holding that French voters will be entitled to make Marine Le Pen, a convicted embezzler of public funds, their president next year if they should choose to do so.

Marine Le Pen’s conviction of embezzlement was upheld on Tuesday, July 7, in the appeals trial over her party’s misuse of European Union funds intended for parliamentary assistants. She was sentenced to three years in prison, including two suspended and one to be served at home with an electronic bracelet, a 45-month ban on standing in elections, including 30 months suspended, and a fine of €100,000.The ruling marks the culmination of the Rassemblement National’s fraught relationship with the justice system since Le Pen took over the party from her father in 2011. Beyond this case, the past 15 years have seen a series of judicial investigations involving either the party or its leader. While the RN leadership has consistently accused the justice system of being weaponized for political purposes, the cases have led to several convictions and serious charges.

UPDATE: On Tuesday evening in Paris, Le Pen announced her candidacy for the French presidency next year and her intention to seek a further appeal of her embezzlement conviction.

Arriving at NATO Summit, Trump Announces His Admiration of Fellow Kleptocrats and Contempt for Democracies

Wall Street Journal

Trump deplanes in Ankara from his newly refurbished Qatari luxury liner, a personal gift to him, as Turkish Padișah Recep Tayyip Erdoğan waits on the tarmac below. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP

Scott: In the lead up to the NATO Ankara summit, we learned that Peter Hegseth planned to set the tone by announcing a massive draw down of US forces from European NATO bases, but White House staff and Marco Rubio, concerned about how Republican NATO supporters would react to this, put the kibosh on this initiative. But Trump has arrived with an array of bouquets and brickbats. Bouquets for Turkish leader Erdogan, who sits only one ped below Trump in the FT’s line up of living kleptocrats, and whose brutal imprisonment of democratic opponents fills Trump with inspiration—agreement for sales of a fleet of F-35s, notwithstanding the objection of Benjamin Netanyahu. Brickbats for Denmark for being obnoxiously successful as a wealthy, happy democracy, which refuses Trump’s demand that it gift to him the island of Greenland… insisting instead that this was a decision for the Greenlanders. NATO will surely survive Trump’s summitry, because it will be so incompetent, but he’s assuredly found a way to confuse things and make the NATO institutions weaker. That is why Europe, the UK and Canada are busily forging a NATO minus Trump in the background.

America’s allies are rushing to find workarounds and replacements for the bombers, warships and other forces the U.S. recently told other NATO members they could no longer rely on in a crisis.

But filling all the holes left by the American pullback—including midair refuelers that are in short supply and long-range strategic bombers that only the U.S. has—is proving challenging for the military alliance and risks leaving its European members, in particular, exposed to rising threats from Russia.

European leaders are set to take up the problem at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s planned annual summit in Ankara, Turkey, this week, where allied leaders will strive to maintain a veneer of unity despite divisions over the U.S. war with Iran and the Pentagon’s determination to shift assets to the Pacific.

“Do more, faster, together—we don’t have the luxury of time,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told the summit in his opening speech Tuesday. “We need capabilities now to make sure we are ready.”

Moscow is pouring almost half of its national budget into its war machine, he added, and NATO must turbocharge its trans-Atlantic defense-industrial base in response.

“Europeans are already backfilling what the U.S. cannot any longer promise,” the secretary-general said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal ahead of the summit.

Trump and the FIFA Debacle

Financial Times

Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino, twins separated at birth? Photo: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post

Scott: The North American World Cup was conceived as an opportunity to showcase the ability of the three North American powers to work collectively to put on a good show. But for Trump that, of course, was a terrible idea. Canada needed to be his 51st state and Mexico was just a source of disease, drugs and nasty brownskinned people. The World Cup thus quickly morphed into a symbol of something else, something very Trumpian: namely the ability of Trump, through mob-style coercion, to achieve whatever he liked. Ed Luce recounts the latest chapter from this tale of moral hazard.

Call it the anti-Midas touch. Donald Trump loves gold. Yet so much of what he handles, from reflecting pools to US alliances, seems to turn into something else. His latest foray was into the Fifa World Cup. A tournament that was proving an unexpected success went sour after Trump called Fifa, which then overturned the one-game ban on America’s star player, Folarin Balogun. The US lost 4-1 to Belgium in any case.

Compared with his ceaseless drive to multiply his family’s wealth, and acts of war or peace, Trump’s Fifa intervention might qualify as a footnote. It is a fair bet, however, that it was among his most noticed actions on the global street.

Footballers are accustomed to debatable calls by referees. The last time a red card was overturned in a World Cup because of pressure from on high was in Chile in 1962, years before the birth of Fifa’s current president, Gianni Infantino. Trump is the first leader since Benito Mussolini in 1934 to intervene publicly in his team’s favour (then-fascist Italy was host and won the cup).

Global opinion has also taken note of Infantino, who is Trump’s world sports doppelgänger. An advocacy group has launched a class-action-style complaint against Fifa for breaking its own rules on staying politically neutral. The Swiss-Italian Fifa president turned up to Trump’s inauguration, rented offices in the New York Trump Tower, awarded him the first Fifa Peace Prize — having lobbied fruitlessly for Trump to win the Nobel — and has been involved with Trump’s Board of Peace. No other sports figure was invited. Infantino appeared at that body’s first meeting in a red Maga hat.

Their most prominent shared quality is a preference for autocrats and bad relations with more law-based societies. Just as Trump prefers dealing with family-run nations, especially in the Gulf, Infantino runs in similar circles. Trump was given a $400mn Boeing plane by Qatar. Infantino flies around the world on a plane supplied by the sheikhdom…

Trump has badly damaged US soft power. But to the rest of the world, this outrage is business as usual. America has always done what it can and smaller nations have suffered what they must.

NGC 6188: Dragons of Ara

Image Credit & Copyright: Rod Prazeres

Explanation: Where can you find dragons fighting in the night sky? In the southern constellation of the Altar: Ara. The dragons are, of course, actually made of suggestively shaped gas and dust. The celestial home of the mythological battling beasts is cataloged as NGC 6188 and located about 4,000 light years away near the edge of a large molecular cloud. Massive, young stars of the embedded Ara OB1 association were formed there only a few million years ago, sculpting the dark shapes and powering the nebular glow with stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation. Joining NGC 6188 on this cosmic canvas, visible toward the lower right, is unusual emission nebula NGC 6164, also created by one of the region’s massive stars. This impressively wide field picture, captured from Queensland, Australia, spans over 2 degrees (four full Moons).

Your Moment of Online Zen

The Ballad of Easy Rider

Easy Rider was produced by Peter Fonda, directed by Dennis Hopper and written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern.

It cost $400,000 to film plus $1 million for the rights for the soundtrack.

It grossed $60 million worldwide and changed the trajectory of the film business in the 1970’s.

It opened in New York City on July 14, 1969.

Its final scene and final song were the first and most prescient elegies for the ‘60’s.

But we didn’t know that then.

Fonda wanted Dylan to write its theme song, a fact I learned for the first time last night. Dylan said no, but then he scribbled this on a napkin:

“The river flows, it flows to the sea/Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be/Flow, river, flow.”

“Give this to [Roger] McGuinn,” said Dylan. He’ll know what to do with it.”

And Roger did.

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When Dylan saw a private screening of Easy Rider and realised that he had been credited as co-writer of the film’s theme song, he telephoned McGuinn and demanded that his name be removed from both the film’s closing credits and all subsequent releases of the song.^[3

Le Monde

Scott: A sense of “last days” is settling in surrounding Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, a taste of desperation. And nothing describes it better than the bizarre relationship that has emerged between Putin and Russia’s First Channel, reports Le Monde.

Between denial of reality, a desire for revenge and carefully crafted messaging, the Russian president has tried to position himself as the master of the game. But after more than four years of war in Ukraine, these old tricks inherited from the Soviet past are showing their limitations, and he is losing credibility.

Like other dictators before him, Vladimir Putin has his own television news programs. Every evening, after the 8 pm broadcast, teams from the official channel Rossiya 1 stay at their workplace and re-edit the news segments to deliver a carefully filtered version, stripped of any news likely to displease the Russian president.

This system was described by Dmitri Skorobutov, former editor-in-chief of the channel’s nightly news broadcast who has been living in exile in Europe since 2020, in an interview in June to The Moscow Times, an opposition media outlet in exile. Introduced in 2011, at the time of the major Russian protests against electoral fraud, the practice intensified after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to the point that Putin is now said to be “completely cut off from the reality on the front lines,” according to Skorobutov.

Isolated in this curated information bubble, the Russian president continually claims that his army is advancing “every day in all directions” in Ukraine. On June 4, he boasted about the capture of “around 2,440 square kilometers” – a figure clearly disconnected from reality. Russian forces lost ground in May, for the second month in a row, according to analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, an American think tank. Even the regime’s most zealous supporters acknowledge that it is unlikely Moscow will manage to break through the lines. “An indefinite war of attrition is not in Russia’s interest,” wrote Dmitri Trenin

London Mayor Condemns Transphobic Activisits at London Pride

Pink News

Charles: London Mayor Sadiq Khan condemned radical feminist transphobic activists who forced their way into the front of the march for London Pride last weekend. Carrying signs reading “Transactivism Erases Lesbians” and “Lesbian Not Queer,” the protesters enraged thousands behind them by distributing anti-trans leaflets.

A spokesman for Mayor Khan wisely condemned the transphobes in a statement to Pink News:

Pride is about celebrating difference and London’s amazing LGBT+ community.

It’s about showing those around the world that in our great city you can be free to be whatever you want to be and love whoever you want to love.

The vast majority of those present at today’s march respected and embraced that and the Mayor condemns the tiny minority who did not.

Transphobia is never acceptable.

Amen.

Electric and plug-in hybrid car sales overtake petrol-only motors

The Times

Workers at the production base complex of BYD, the Chinese carmaker, in Camacari, Brazil. Xinhua News Service.

Scott: In the UK and across Europe, the sales of EV and plug-in hybrid vehicles have surpassed sales of internal combustion engines, as the United States, under the control of the fossil fuels industry, remains the last redoubt of gasoline-powered cars. The arrival of a new generation of technologically sophisticated EVs out of China, selling at roughly half the cost of comparable Teslas, is expected to further eclipse gasoline car sales in the next decade.

Sales of electric and plug-in hybrid cars have overtaken registrations of petrol-only motors as more motorists embrace the decarbonisation agenda.

In the other major car-buying trend of the year, the big three Chinese exporters selling vehicles across all fuel types are now accounting for one in seven of all new cars sold.

After a spring and early summer of record-high petrol pump prices, and in an emerging era of falling electric car prices in an ever-more competitive marketplace, sales of zero-emission electric vehicles rose 35% to nearly 63,950, accounting for 30% of the market.

In addition, June’s sales of plug-in hybrids, which can primarily run in battery electric mode but with a back-up petrol engine, were up 25% year-on-year at 26,702, a market share of 12.5%.

Meanwhile, petrol car sales fell to 84,541, dropping below a 40%t market share to a low of 39.7%.

Irish Resort Leaves Peter Thiel Homeless

Irish Times

Charles: Just five weeks before Peter Thiel’s Dialog was scheduled to bring together a motley crew of tech bros, NATO officers, Trump officials and at least one New York Times Columnist at a posh Irish Resort, the Powerscourt Hotel and Spa cancelled its contract and declared the would-be celebrants personas non grata.

Last week I wrote about Thiel’s odd confabs and his new obsession with antichrists, which is the term he favors for anyone interested in any guardrails for AI. The Irish Times neatly summarized the reasons his latest meeting had aroused the opposition of sensible Irish activists:

Thiel was a cofounder of payments group PayPal and Palantir, a defence contractor known for mass surveillance and criticised heavily for its “strategic partnership” with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in its assault on Gaza.

A leaked schedule for the “retreat” hosted by Dialog, an invitation-only group cofounded 20 years ago by Thiel and entrepreneur Auren Hoffman, featured discussions on topics including preparations for a third world war, battlefield technologies, nuclear energy and cult-building.

Europeans are so much more sensible about oligarchical risks to society than Americans.

Powerscourt Hotel Resort and Spa is owned by MHL Hotel Collection, a tenant of the Powerscourt Estate, which said it was delighted by news of the cancellation.

“Following a period of great concern for Powerscourt Estate…we are relieved and pleased to announce the Dialog event planned for August at the Powerscourt Hotel has been cancelled,” the estate said.

Peter Thiel

Pro-Palestine groups had mounted a “Drop Dialogue” campaign to get the conference cancelled because of Palantir’s links to the Israeli Defense Forces. A spokeswoman for the protesters called the cancellation “a victory for all people of conscience who mobilised against it, and shows that direct action works”.

Today’s climate extremes shock even scientists

Bloomberg

Scott: Much of the US just sweltered through the July 4 holiday weekend as an intense heat dome bore down, putting strain on power grids and prompting the cancellation of many events. In Europe, punishing temperatures are set to return days after a deadly heat wave pushed thermometers as high as 43.8ºC (111ºF) in France.

A troubling pattern has emerged in this summer’s heat: Not only has it broken records, it’s done so often by margins far above the previous all-time highs. Yet all this accords perfectly with the projections of climate scientists who warn about life-altering and lethal changes in temperature and weather patterns.

These heat jumps are part of a larger shift. Sea levels are rising and polar ice is melting faster than before, while new records for daily rainfall are being set at a rapid clip. The pace of global warming itself has quickened in recent years. Today’s climate can “seem like an unexpected step change” from that of a few years ago, said atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. El Niño weather systems exacerbate the heating brought about by greenhouse gas pollution. Some models suggest the current El Niño could push warming briefly as high as 2ºC. And “it is possible for a single month to surpass this threshold,” said Sarah Kapnick, global head of climate advisory at JPMorgan Chase & Co. The world is currently at 1.4ªC above pre-industrial levels.

Knowledge is Power

Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.

I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.

Try getting the news you need from Charles and me for two weeks.

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The Candyman comes

WWJ950 News

Scott: In the Trump One White House, amphetamines were handed out like candy. It was necessary to keep people happy and alert, apparently. This flows from the recently released Inspector General’s report. The doctor responsible, a Naval officer, got demoted and booted from the service as a result; he was nicknamed “the Candyman.” But not to worry, he was elected to Congress for the GOP from a district in north Texas, and Trump, upon returning to office, restored his rank and benefits, and thanked him for his dispensary services, claiming he was the victim of “woke” medical personnel.

“White House Medical Unit medical providers offered prescription and over‑the‑counter medications to all White House staff members,” the report stated. “Additionally, the White House Medical Unit provided pharmaceutical support for travelers on White House official travel. This includes the dispensing of controlled substances, such as Ambien and Provigil, without verifying the patient’s identity.”

One witness explained to investigators that the drugs were often divided up and packed into plastic baggies, especially before any big overseas trip.

“So we would normally make these packets of Ambien and Provigil, and a lot of times they’d be in like five tablets in a zip‑lock bag. And so traditionally, too, we would hand these out,” the witness said, per the report. “But a lot of times the senior staff would come by or their staff representatives... would come by the residence clinic to pick it up. And it was very much a, ‘Hey, I’m here to pick this up for Ms. X.’ And the expectation was we just go ahead and pass it out.”

Another witness said drugs were given to at least one White House official as a “parting gift.”

“Dr. [X] asked if I could hook up this person with some Provigil as a parting gift for leaving the White House. And at the time, the corpsmen and the medics... it was okay for us to dispense Provigil and Ambien without having a provider present,” the witness said. “I’m not sure if it was okay as far as, like, what’s medically allowed. But in the unit, it was authorized for us to do that kind of stuff.”

Additionally, the report found the White House Medical Unit:

• Provided a wide range of health care and pharmaceutical services to ineligible White House staff in violation of federal law and regulation

• Dispensed prescription medications, including controlled substances, to ineligible White House staff

• Did not follow guidelines for verifying patient eligibility

• Ineffectively used taxpayer funds by obtaining brand‑name medications instead of generic equivalents; this increased the risk for the diversion of controlled substances by not accounting for them appropriately

• Improperly disposed of controlled and non-controlled medications

Dueling Bands over the Atacama Desert

Image Credit & Copyright: Julien Looten

Explanation: What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The less commonly seen band, on the right, is zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent. It was discovered only in this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. The featured image was captured about a year ago from the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Watching The Wheels

Written by John Lennon

Performed By Willie Nelson and his sons Lucas and Micha

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We are #1

At 250 Years, America Is Transformed from a Beacon of Democracy into the World’s Premier Kleptocracy

Financial Times

Scott: As the world’s oldest continuous democracy, the United States has long served a beacon for nations striving to obtain democracy around the world. But on its 250th birthday, the Financial Times finds that another label fits more aptly: kleptocracy. Indeed, FT lines up Trump’s voracious skill at using his office to acquire wealth for himself and members of his family up against the best known kleptocrats of our time and finds that, in less than a year, Trump has blown them all out of the water. This remarkable transformation demonstrates several other things: (1) the total failure of congressional investigation and oversight, as Congress becomes increasingly an irrelevant ornament; (2) the collapse of anti-corruption rule enforcement by the Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission and a host of other regulatory and enforcement agencies; and (3) as European political scientists are particularly quick to note, the failure of the Supreme Court to play its fundamental role as gatekeeper blocking overreach by an authoritarian executive. What the US has come most to resemble is not one of its developed peer states, but an impoverished third-world dictatorship in which higher state office is viewed principally as the key to rent seeking and wealth accumulation.

President Donald Trump flew to Medora, North Dakota, this week to dedicate the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. It was notable for being his first trip aboard the new $400mn Boeing 747 gifted to him by the Emir of Qatar.

Trump flew out on the same day it was disclosed he had earned more than $2.2bn since his return to the White House, a windfall without precedent in US presidential history and one that has raised more troubling questions about conflicts of interest in his administration.

The size of the earnings — largely from crypto ventures — is inviting comparisons that might have seemed outlandish even a year ago. Some political scientists are beginning to see parallels between Trump’s behaviour and those of foreign strongmen in Africa and Asia notorious for their self-enrichment in office.

Nic Cheeseman, an Africa expert at the University of Birmingham, said Trump’s way of governing had echoes of the “patrimonial” system in parts of Africa, where the ruler treats the state as an extension of his personal household.

“It’s typically associated with blurring the line between public office and private wealth,” he said. To Cheeseman, Trump’s $1bn earnings from cryptocurrencies and the Qatari jet exemplify that.

Some also see echoes of Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a close ally of Trump’s who has faced persistent allegations that he, his family and his political network benefited financially from his more than two decades in office — claims that he has consistently denied.

Howard Eissenstat, a history professor at St Lawrence University in New York and an expert on Turkish politics, said that in many ways, Trump had surpassed Erdoğan.

“There’s a ‘greed is good’ vibe in the Trump administration and that is not how Erdoğan does business,” he said. In Trump’s desire to accumulate wealth, he said, “things are bigger and more brazen and more obvious in a way that’s stunning”. The Turkish president “is a lot more cautious”

Because Not Enough Crazy People Already Own Automatic Weapons in America

New York Times

Charles: Since it’s been twenty-four hours since you’ve read anything new about how Donald Trump is destroying the United States…

The Trump administration is scrapping more than three dozen firearms regulations, abandoning a crackdown on illegal sales, restoring gun rights to some people with mental illness and loosening oversight of private weapons transactions.

Having already decimated the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives by reassigning hundreds of its officers to immigration duties, the Trump administration has now announced drastic new measures to sharply increase the chances of more mass shootings in America. After all, only 214 people have been killed and 897 people have been wounded in 214 shootings during the first six months of 2026.

• The more than three dozen rules the administration wants to eliminate would raise the legal threshold for revoking a dealer’s license; extend gun rights to buyers who had faced restrictions because of mental illness or inability to manage their own finances; and end extra scrutiny of stabilizing braces, gun accessories that have been used in mass shootings to lethal effect.

• The administration is now targeting gun regulations that Democrats have passed at the state and local levels. It has challenged bans on semiautomatic rifles in Colorado, the District of Columbia and Virginia. On Wednesday, it sued California for its restrictions on the sale of Glock and Glock-style handguns, and Virginia for limits on the sale of semiautomatic rifles, hours after both laws went into effect.

  ---

  A Million ‘Investors’ Lost $3.8 Billion on Trump Crypto Coin

New York Times

Scott: Of the $1.26 billion that Trump took in through dealings with crypto and meme coins, $636 million came from sales of the Trump memecoin. The New York Times ploughs through the financial disclosures of the issuer to find out just how “investors” in the memecoin did. Of course these investors fall into several categories. One are people who are generally not acquainted with the market or the nature of the memecoin as an investment device, nor the risks associated with it. Another group fully understand that purchasing this memecoin is little different from making a payment to Trump, for which some concession or benefit can quietly be solicited… always in a manner designed to avoid troublesome quid pro quo difficulties.

An up-to-date tally of Trump followers turned crypto investors is in. And for them, the overall results are remarkably bad.

Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion.

The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025.

The odds were always in his favor. Mr. Trump profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down. He collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin…

The memecoin was only one of several crypto ventures that reeled in profits for Mr. Trump and his allies. Mr. Trump’s total profits from World Liberty reached $799 million last year, according to his financial disclosure, including hundreds of millions from the United Arab Emirates, which secretly moved in early 2025 to buy nearly half the company. A Trump business entity also collected a 75 percent cut of sales of $WLFI, after the deduction of certain expenses, guaranteeing that Mr. Trump would profit, even if the coin’s price ultimately crashed.

The HKR Look Back:

The White Line That Transformed America

Charles: When my uncle Jerry Kaiser was teaching me to drive sixty years ago on the roads of Westport, Connecticut he told me to focus my eyes on the white line at the right edge of the pavement to avoid the high beams of cars coming in the opposite direction.

He mentioned that the line was the clever invention of a man from Connecticut.

From that moment until today I never heard another word about that man until The Wall Street Journal identified him last week as John V. N. Dorr.

The director of the bureau of the Connecticut Bureau of highways immediately rejected Dorr’s idea.

The next time he suggested it, he wrote to the Westport Town Crier newspaper in 1953 and offered to pay for “a demonstration test of a few miles.”

That was right around the time my uncle moved his family to Westport.

This time, Dorr got a more welcoming response.

“Dr. Dorr’s suggestion,” the paper wrote in an editorial, “is a dandy.”

Before long, Connecticut was testing his dandy idea on a few miles of the Merritt Parkway between Greenwich and Stamford. The study found that Dorr’s line nudged cars away from the center line, into the middle of their lanes, and narrowed the speed gap between day and night. In other words, the study found scientific evidence that a single line could dramatically alter human behavior.

When he began his campaign, the agency overseeing the safety of America’s roads specifically warned against edge lines, fearing they would confuse drivers. This meant he was lobbying states to spend money on something that authorities said they didn’t need—and something they dismissed as too expensive. The cost was $50 per mile per line, which government officials considered a waste of $50. Dorr considered it a bargain.

“Paint,” wrote the New York Daily Mirror, “is cheaper than blood.”

In less than a decade, Dorr’s line was so popular that people wondered how they ever lived without it.

“The public is demanding it,” a Bureau of Public Roads official declared in 1958. “Everywhere drivers are saying: ‘This is the finest thing we’ve ever seen.’”

As soon as they saw it, they couldn’t unsee it. Before he died in 1962, Dorr watched his idea stretch across the country, around the world—and all the way to his front door.

One morning, he stepped outside and there it was: a Connecticut highway department truck, painting a line down the side of the road.

Nigel Farage secretly funded by convicted criminal

The Times

Scott: Nigel Farage, it turns out, lives a very comfortable life, largely on the basis of the largesse of his close friends. Problem is, we have difficulty figuring out who those friends are. One of the most reliable has been Roskomnadzor, the Russian ministry of propaganda, the owner operator of RT, which paid Farage handsomely through various guises. Another is a series of shadowy not-for-profits based in Belgium suspected of being under Russian control. Then there’s a shadowy Thai crypto billionaire who made his money in dodgy fuel contracts, who gave Nigel a cool £5 million. And a stream of bankrupt companies who have given Farage and his Reform UK lots of money that they apparently don’t have. And now Rupert Murdoch’s Times unloads another bombshell about Farage’s main pillar of support, a convicted fraudster who spent time in US federal prisons, and who has plenty of ties to Trump and his entourage as well. It has all the makings of a parliamentary inquiry.

At 6.36pm on June 16, a black-tinted Range Rover crept down an empty backstreet a short walk from Buckingham Palace. The driver parked directly opposite a Georgian townhouse, the back door positioned so the passenger could take the shortest walk possible to get inside.

The first person to leave the vehicle was a former Royal Marines commando who began working as Nigel Farage’s bodyguard after the general election.

He opened the door for the VIP in the back seat. Out stepped not Farage — the Reform UK leader was headed north for the Makerfield by-election — but a convicted criminal and crypto-gambler holding a fat wad of cash.

His name is George Swinfen Cottrell, otherwise known as “Posh George”. A babyfaced British aristocrat and former US federal inmate, he has no official role in Reform UK — but has been Farage’s closest adviser for more than a decade and travels with him in Westminster and around the country. The pair’s lives are so intertwined Cottrell uses the ex-soldier for his own protection, having quietly paid for Farage’s security for a number of years…

Secrecy follows Cottrell, 32, who has made an art of being difficult to pin down. He was once labelled “deceptive” by a judge for legally changing his name from “Cottrell” to “Cotrel”. Today he flies on private jets and makes bank transfers under the alias “George Co” and is a key player in a crypto gambling company owned via a complex offshore structure whose ownership is invisible to the public.

Yet his relationship with Farage, whom he calls “Daddy”, has been most opaque. It is so important to the Reform leader that lying in one of Cottrell’s homes is a copy of Farage’s maiden speech as an MP, the culmination of repeated attempts to enter the Commons over three decades. The Clacton MP signed it by hand as a tribute to his friend’s support, writing: “Thank you for everything! Nigel Farage”.

Listen to the full podcast series Posh George: The Criminal Behind Farage.

Israeli Start-Up Seeks to Block Solar Radiation in a Radical Climate Experiment

Ha’aretz

Stardust’s particles. According to the company, each particle is “a million times more effective than greenhouse gases.”

Scott: Can science offer a simple fix to global warming? One thing’s clear: the force of solar radiation beating down on earth is not increasing. It’s been measured. The forces producing the heating are largely man-made are trapped in the atmosphere. An Israeli start says it has a solution, but it has plenty of critics who are skeptical of a quick fix of this sort and who argue that the fix may only intensify the problem.

A small company based in Nes Tziona, in central Israel, believes it has another way. Its ambition is nothing less than to dial Earth’s temperature back to pre-industrial levels through advanced climate engineering. To do that, the company has developed a particle that, if dispersed in the stratosphere in quantities of millions of tons, would reflect most of the incoming solar radiation that hits them back into space – much like a tiny mirror.

The technology is groundbreaking. The promise is enormous. And so are the risks.

If artificial intelligence seems like humanity taking one step too far in its quest to play God, Stardust Solutions pushes the idea even further. On paper, its proposal sounds almost insane. Yet behind it stands a team of respected scientists. The company has already raised $75 million, making it by far the world’s most successful solar geoengineering startup. Investors include the Canadian-Israeli venture capital fund Awz Ventures, whose founders and advisers include former senior officials from Israeli intelligence, the Mossad, Shin Bet security service, and their counterparts at the CIA, FBI and MI5.

The latest Israeli attempt to reshape the world is not on a disputed stretch of land in the Middle East but in the Earth’s atmosphere itself. Depending on whom you ask, the project could help save humanity or push it closer to catastrophe. It is already attracting global attention.

About a month ago, the company published eight papers online describing the project for the first time, generating intense interest. Interview requests have poured into its offices in Nes Tziona from major newspapers and television networks across the world, from Australia and East Asia to North America. Haaretz is the first Israeli media outlet to visit the company’s laboratories for an open, if not always easy to follow, conversation with its three founders.

Saturn’s Iapetus: Painted Moon

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, JPL, SSI, Cassini Imaging Team

Explanation: What has happened to Saturn’s moon Iapetus? Vast sections of this strange world are dark as coal, while others are as bright as snow. To help better understand this unusually tinted moon, in 2007 NASA directed the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting Saturn to swoop within 2,000 kilometers. Pictured here, from about 75,000 kilometers out, is the hemisphere of Iapetus that is always trailing. A large impact crater seen in the south spans 500 kilometers and appears superposed on an older crater of similar size. The dark material is seen increasingly coating the easternmost part of Iapetus, darkening craters and highlands alike. A leading hypothesis is that the dark material is mostly a form of carbon-rich soil leftover from when relatively warm but dirty ice sublimates. An initial coating of this dark material may have been effectively painted on by the accretion of meteor-liberated debris from other moons.

Your Online Moment of Zen

Percy’s Song

By Bob Dylan

Written and recorded in October 1963 for Bob Dylan’s third album The T imes They Are A-Changin’, but it never made it on to that record.

According to the official Dylan website, Dylan performed the song at Carnegie Hall on October 26, 1963.

That was his first and last public performance of the song.

The first time most people heard it was in 1967 when Joan Baez performed her magical version in Don’t Look Back, while Dylan typed away at his next masterpiece.

It did not appear on an official Dylan album until Biograph came out on November 7, 1985–six days before I interviewed the great man at the old Ritz Carlton on Central Park South.

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It is one of my 37 all-time Dylan favorites.

Donald Trump made up to $1.4bn in stock purchases in 2025

Financial Times

Scott: Considering the number of trades Trump executed in his first year as president, it’s hard to understand how he had time to do anything else. Analysis will take some time, but the indications are clear that a large portion of these trades (like Axon, whi…

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Charles: Sheldon Whitehouse is the junior Senator from Rhode Island, the state’s former U.S. Attorney, its former Attorney General, and the son and grandson of career American diplomats. He is also one of the smartest and most relentless opponents of the mob family that currently occupies the White House.

American billionaires hav…

Read more

Wall Street Journal

Scott: Most media outlets have gone with a headline stating that SCOTUS has rebuffed Trump’s birthright citizenship order, but the real news from this morning’s decision is that four of the nine justices believe that the express words of the Fourteenth Amendment must be disregarded, because it doesn’t comport with their view of a eugenically and racially edited America with fewer dark-skinned people. In other words, they want a do-over of the Supreme Court. This demonstrates that the Opus Dei core of the Supreme Court is not in the least conservative, nor does it care one whit about the Constitution and its original meaning. To the contrary, on the eve of the country’s 250th anniversary, it is dedicated to a falangist or fascist make-over of the American project.

Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Trump’s attempt to curtail birthright citizenship, a rejection of his most aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration.

The decision rebuffs Trump’s bid to upend the deep-rooted understanding that virtually everyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen. That understanding, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, was enshrined in the Constitution in 1868.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

Six justices—three conservatives and three liberals—ruled against Trump, though only five did so on constitutional grounds. The court’s three most conservative justices dissented.

The case challenged an executive order that Trump issued on the first day of his second term. It declared that future children born in the U.S. wouldn’t be considered citizens if their parents were living in the country illegally or were visiting the country on temporary visas.

The executive order never took effect. It was quickly blocked by multiple lower courts because it appeared to conflict with the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

What did the WSJ reporter and his editors miss? It’s a classic case of a nonexpert reading a stack of opinions and not discerning what they actually said. The majority here is really 5–4. Because one of the concurring justices, Brett Kavanaugh (known to his contemporaries as “Bart”), says that Trump’s order does not violate the Fourteenth Amendment, merely a federal statute. He says Congress could change the statute to effectuate Trump’s order in the future. And in a tweet, Trump has instantly seized on Kavanaugh’s opinion and requested the change that Kavanaugh suggests. But significantly, only five justices really think the North won the Civil War.

Trump Corruption Watch

Slumming It At $2.2 Billion A Year

The New York Times

Charles: Donald Trump boasts that he gives away his $400,000 official presidential salary. The New York Times explains why he can afford that.

In the first year of his second term in office, he pulled in at least $2.2 billion. That’s almost four times what he made in the year before he re-entered the White House.

That haul included $1.4 billion from his family’s crypto businesses. Once upon a time Trump slammed the industry as a haven for drug dealers and scammers and “a disaster waiting to happen.” But as Times reporters Ben Protess, Andrea Fuller and David Yaffe-Bellany pointed out, he has dramatically changed his point of view, now that he is not only “ a major crypto industry operator, but also its top policymaker.”

Famously the Trump’s sold an investment firm tied to the government of the U.A.E. a 49 percent stake in World Liberty for $500 million. As always in Trump world, you get what you pay for: soon after the transaction the Emiratis overcame the concerns of national security officials to get access to scarce computer chips that power artificial intelligence. Those chips quickly made their way to China including advanced AI chips from Nvidia (such as H100s) for Chinese military aerospace applications, such as PL-15 and PL-17 missile systems.

Beauty Queen Describes How Trump’s Threats Followed His Sexual Assault

Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

The Daily Beast

Scott: One of the more than two dozen cases involving Trump’s sexual assaults against women involves a Swiss beauty pageant winner, Beatrice Keul. As the Supreme Court was upholding Trump’s first rape adjudication by sustaining a monetary damages award for E Jean Carroll, Keul was busy telling her story to The Daily Beast.

A former beauty queen who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her claims the president threatened her afterward, warning that “bad things can happen if you speak out,” she has revealed in an exclusive interview with PunchUp.

Beatrice Keul, 55, a former Miss Switzerland and Miss Europe contestant, told the Daily Beast’s new Substack publication that she has faced repeated threats to her safety since going public over the alleged 1993 assault, but refuses to back down. “I stood up to the American president to save lives,” she told PunchUp. “This is my truth, and I will not be silenced.”

Keul first came forward in October 2024, alleging that Trump—then 47, while she was a 23-year-old banking executive and part-time model—lured her to his Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant in New York. She says an aide then asked her to join the property developer for a “private meeting” before he allegedly groped her in a suite at the Plaza Hotel.

Note the location: physically adjacent to the Bergdorf-Goodman store where Trump raped E Jean Carroll, as a Manhattan jury determined.

Read more

The New York Times

Scott: European scholars of democratic decay and the rise of authoritarianism have consistently singled out the United States in the second Trump administration as the modern democracy experiencing the steepest and most rapid deterioration of all imperiled democracies in the world. Why? It seems to boil down to this: in other states, the judiciary and the supreme or constitutional court always seem to exercise as a brake on assaults on democratic order—in every country save one, the United States. There the Supreme Court is expressing unprecedented enthusiasm for authoritarian rule, giving the president powers he never before wielded, and subordinating hitherto independent regulators to his control in a manner resembling the German Gleichschaltung of the 1930s. Today, SCOTUS overturned the rule in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 decision by an arch-conservative court, that upheld Congress’ right to impose severe limitations on the president’s ability to remove from office regulatory officers who had been confirmed by Congress. Generations of law students learned that this decision was intended by a bulwark against partisan hackery to insure that key regulators acted with a measure of independence, and that a newly arrived president could not willy-nilly oust all the confirmed regulatory appointees of his predecessor.

But whereas the Supreme Court of 1935 was genuinely conservative, SCOTUS today is not conservative in the least. Conservatism embraces a notion of restraint on the powers of the executive. And today’s SCOTUS believes in robust and unchecked exercise of presidential power—provided that the president is a Republican (their view is radically different if another party is in power). In the presidential immunity decision, they imported the medieval European legal norms of arcana imperii into US constitutional doctrine. And today they have imported something equally alien, the Führerprinzip, and its notion that all government actors are no more than extensions of the Leader and his will. A well-known legal principle, and very much the opposite of the view of the Founding Fathers. As July 4th approaches for the 250th time, it serves to remind us that our democracy is withering from within and SCOTUS is a leading agent of decline.

In a major expansion of presidential authority, the Supreme Court cleared the way on Monday for President Trump to fire independent government regulators despite federal laws meant to protect their jobs. But the justices carved out an exception for the Federal Reserve, preventing the president from immediately removing Lisa D. Cook from the powerful central bank.

The court’s 6-to-3 ruling to broadly allow the firings, with the three liberal justices dissenting, represented a significant shift in power from Congress to the president, and could drastically change the federal government’s structure by giving the president more control over independent agencies.

Krugman: We Have To Disempower SCOTUS

Charles: Paul Krugman identifies the Supreme Court decision Scott describes above as an existential threat to America’s future. Imagine a world in which all

decisions are made by political appointees who are loyalists to the president, who basically do whatever the president wants, whatever the people around the president want…

Well, this cannot go on. This is a clear argument that says we have to one way or another disempower the Supreme Court. I don’t know enough to tell you what is the best route to do that but court packing or something else is going to have to happen. Because this has been the clearest signal yet that we have six people (there are three who are not part of it, but we have six people) who are fundamentally hostile to democracy, fundamentally hostile to the modern world and determined to put the catastrophically bad leader that we currently have sitting in the White House in charge of everything, which is a nightmare scenario on every level.

Paul Krugman

I have been advocating for more Justices for the Court since 2019. The fact that it didn’t work for FDR during the New Deal is not an argument for never doing it again. The size of the Court can be expanded by a simple statute. No constitutional amendment is required. This court’s proven hostility to democracy means a new majority is necessary to preserve the republic.

As Pete Buttigieg said earlier this month at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition convention, “It’s time to think big.” The likely presidential contender in 2028 favors an expansion of the court to 15 justices.

The Horton-Kaiser Report Is Independent, Different From Other US Media.

Scott: On the issue of the journalist and the journalist’s responsibility, I’m really quite struck by something that Pope Leo said. That the moral, ethical and professional responsibility of journalists is not to be regurgitating the views of people in power—like political figures and wealthy corporate interests that control commercial media—but to be an independent voice.

To assess carefully whether the things that are claimed as facts really are facts, and to discover what the facts are.

Charles: Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the so-called War on Terror. The New York Times news department never called torture torture. They always called it ‘enhanced interrogation.’

We both thought it was a terrible thing.

Subscribe to The Horton-Kaiser Report for a review of the day’s latest news from US and foreign media, free for two weeks.

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Antifa Reemerges in Germany… as a Voice for Conservatives

Der Spiegel

Knock, knock: We’re from Antifa and we’d like to have a chat: Antifa activists going door-to-door in Erfurt, opposing the AfD

Scott: In the mind of Todd Blanche, Antifa is a group of black-clad anarchists who use pranks and mayhem to oppose Trump and attempt to thwart his will. For historians and as the FBI itself noted, however, Antifa is a movement led by German Catholics who opposed the Nazis and later merged into Germany’s main conservative party, the Christian-Democratic Union. What do these two Antifas have to do with one another? Opposition to fascism. But now Antifa is back in Germany, launching a door-to-door campaign to expose the fascist roots and proclivities of the Neo Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). But who do they support? That’s less clear, but often enough it’s the conservatives.

Some 70 activists are out this weekend talking to Erfurt residents about the upcoming federal party convention to be held in the city by the right-wing extremist party Alternative for Germany (AfD). On the first weekend of July, the party will be gathering at the city’s convention center. Officials in Thuringia, the eastern state where Erfurt is located, are preparing what they say will be one of the largest police deployments since German reunification.

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Wired

Charles: Peter Thiel is back in the headlines because Wired Magazine published new details about one of his many scary networking organizations, Dialog, which he founded twenty years ago with data entrepreneur Auren Hoffman.

Last year Dialog was briefly in the news after Axios reported that what had “quietly become one of th…

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