The Social World

Category: Politics

  • When Piers Morgan met Nick Fuentes

    When Piers Morgan met Nick Fuentes

    Russell Crowe’s new film is about trying to suss out hidden fans of Hitler, but what happens when the person being questioned makes no attempt to hide? Toward the end of Piers Morgan’s live interview with Nick Fuentes last night, Morgan, in what seemed like a pre-prepared line, accused his guest of trying to “come across as a moderate” — just ten minutes after Fuentes called the old Bohemian corporal “very fucking cool.” 

    To that line, Morgan told Fuentes that “I think [Hitler] is very fucking a monster.”

    Yet Fuentes burst out laughing in reply: “And that’s a clip! ‘I think he’s very fucking a monster?’ Do you hear yourself? Can we all grow up?”

    The interview, which Morgan kept insisting was “not an ambush,” was very much a case of an old world meeting the new; a liberal tabloid operator meeting the wild and uncontrollable brain of a very right-wing internet live-streamer. Because it was a live stream, Fuentes naturally had the upper hand. But since it’s already been viewed millions of times, they both win, according to the laws of digital media. What connects the tabloid universe and the internet age is a desperate need for attention.  

    The two-hour show consisted mostly of Morgan playing clips from Nick Fuentes’s daily podcast and then asking the 27-year old Chicagoan to own up to them. These included, among other things, calls to avoid black people in everyday life, jibes about the Final Solution and various ungallant remarks about women. Each time Fuentes would happily assent to these. This carried on for some time, yet Piers never really thought to shift from this prosecutorial mode. After nearly two hours, Piers claimed that “we’re getting somewhere” in that he had gotten Fuentes to admit his racialist, misogynistic and Judeo-skeptical views. This is a little like reading Mein Kampf and crowing that Hitler had inadvertently shown his “true colors.” “You are the embodiment of misogyny” said Piers at one point; Fuentes naturally took that as a compliment. 

    Piers Morgan’s panels on his show are often a madhouse of various Mao-enthusiasts, Islamists, obscurantist clerics, anti-Semites and Alan Dershowitz. Yet  throughout this interview with Fuentes, he feigned bafflement that anyone could hold such views. 

    The encounter was intriguing in another way. As a tabloid hack and editor, Piers Morgan made his career on the fringes of acceptable conduct and opinion. In 2023 the UK High Court said that there was “no doubt” that Piers had known about his staff’s practice of hacking into the phones of prominent people. What we saw here was one demagogic medium passing the torch to another – with live streamers like Fuentes now becoming the go-to source for smut, gossip and provocation. Piers Morgan tried to use the old Fleet Street toolkit against this upstart, including that classic tabloid tactic of trying to out him as a homosexual. 

    Piers, in a sort of homage to analog television, also played a pre-recorded message from the old Rupert Murdoch colleague and Tory peer Lord Finkelstein, who asked, given that the Hitler had killed much of the Finkelstein family, whether Fuentes was “on team Hitler or team Mum,” partly in order to plug his book Hitler, Stalin,  Mum and Dad. “I don’t care,” said Fuentes. 

    Morgan wondered aloud whether Fuentes was simply hamming up his views for money or as an elaborate joke. The real shock for him is that it’s neither. 

  • The Trump-Kennedy Center?

    The Trump-Kennedy Center?

    “I have a good memory, so I can remember things, which is very fortunate,” a tuxedo-clad President Trump said on the red carpet before hosting the Kennedy Center Honors. “But just, I wanted to just be myself. You have to be yourself.”

    To open the show, Trump stood behind the presidential lectern and invoked the name of Johnny Carson, who, he said, was a master improviser like him. Trump hadn’t prepared much. He didn’t need to. “This is the first time a president of the United States has ever hosted the event. I don’t know why.”

    It’s actually kind of an interesting question. Ronald Reagan, of course, would have made an excellent Kennedy Center honors host. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enjoyed a stage and an audience in their primetime years, and George W. Bush could have smirked his way through some one-liners and artist introductions. Other presidents would have been awful: imagine Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush trying to host an awards show. We all know Joe Biden couldn’t have done the job. “They tried to get Biden to do this four years in a row,” Trump said on Sunday night. “I would have watched.”

    But for Trump, who, more than anyone ever, loves being president, hosting a show like this is his final form. He appeared on stage three times: at the beginning, at the end and before the intermission. The show also included segments, taped from the White House, where Trump introduced the individual honorees. “This is fantastic, isn’t it?” Trump said after the intermission. “It is just so incredible… This is the greatest evening in the history of the Kennedy Center. Not even a contest. There has never been anything like it. The show is already getting rave reviews. I guarantee you the fake news will say he was horrible as an emcee.”

    The fake news has said no such thing yet, but that’s partly because only a handful of fake news reporters were present on Sunday night. The actual ceremony will air on CBS and Paramount+ on December 23. This broadcast will ruin the Christmases of the types of people who like to warn us on social media that democracy is in danger.

    Trump referred to the building as the “Trump-Kennedy Center,” and, after an awkward response to that comment, said, “I’m sorry. This is terribly embarrassing.”

    “Well, we’re really having a good time tonight,” he continued. “So many people I know in this audience. Some good. Some bad. Some I truly love and respect. Some I just hate.”

    By now, we all know the somewhat odd list of honorees by heart: Sylvester Stallone, Michael Crawford, George Strait, Gloria Gaynor and KISS. Anyone who had “President Donald Trump honors KISS at the Kennedy Center” on their bingo card 40 years ago would have gotten a one-way ticket to Bellevue. But here we are.

    America is back, Trump said, invoking the name of a disco queen whose biggest hit came 45 years ago. “Stallone said it strongly in the movie. It’s all about winning, if you move forward that’s how winning is done. The winners are exactly what these great legends are about. They also know how to go through hell.” The honorees, he said, are “giants” in their genres. “Many of you are horrible, miserable people but you never give up.”

    The show closed with Cheap Trick performing a cover of KISS’s “Rock and Roll All Nite” that had the audience on its feet, and Trump, presumably, doing the Trump Dance. “They probably don’t like me very much,” Trump said. “But we don’t care. We want bigness. We don’t care if they like Trump or not.”

  • Is Prince Harry about to spend a lot more time in Britain?

    Is Prince Harry about to spend a lot more time in Britain?

    For lovers of self-destructive hubris – a quality that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex surely possess in spades – the saga of Prince Harry’s security is surely the gift that keeps on giving. His attempts to obtain British taxpayer-funded armed protection whenever he brings his family back to the UK have been expressed with much fervor and repetitiveness. And now, in this season of miracles, it looks as if he might have got his wish after all. 

    It seemed certain, after various expensive and amusingly humiliating courtroom defeats, that Harry’s desire to hire members of the London Metropolitan Police as his private security detail whenever he is back in the country of his birth would be denied. He even railed against the UK government’s successful attempts to thwart his desires as a “good old-fashioned establishment stitch-up,” blustering: “The other side have won in keeping me unsafe. I can’t see a world in which I will be bringing my wife and children back at this point.”

    Those of us who are not losing sleep at the prospect of the star of With Love, Meghan once again bringing her special brand of joy to the United Kingdom were not, perhaps, beside themselves at this prospect. 

    Yet there has now been an unexpected volte-face, courtesy of Britain’s Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood and the Home Office. RAVEC, the Royal and VIP Executive Committee, has ordered that its risk management board be prepared to reassess Harry’s threat level for the first time since February 2020. This is not a suggestion that the prince poses his own danger to the country, but instead that he is considered a public individual who deserves police protection at the highest level, in the same vein as the King or the Prime Minister. And if the decision is upheld, once again the British taxpayer will be on the hook for police protection for the Sussex clan whenever they are in the UK.

    It should be noted that the final decision will not be made until next month, and that Ravec might still decide to maintain the status quo: cue weeping and gnashing of teeth if so. However, the fact that there has been a reassessment of this nature after a protracted and expensive court fight, which Harry repeatedly lost, must be seen as a surprisingly non-pyrrhic victory for the Duke of Sussex. It is also a suggestion that he was justified in the fuss that he has so consistently made. 

    Still, even if he is granted this belated Christmas wish, it is uncertain as to whether or not the Sussexes will be frequent visitors in the UK once again. This is despite the sentimental protestations that the King would like to see his grandchildren once again. Meghan has not set foot in London since Elizabeth II’s funeral in September 2022, and it is doubtful that she has any pressing urge to do so. Her husband’s largely successful solo trip in September – only slightly overshadowed by the eventual leaks of his rapprochement with his semi-estranged father – demonstrated that he is perfectly capable of conducting a quasi-royal visit home by himself and being well received in the process.

    Many might think that the current situation works well for all concerned, then, and would question the necessity of an expensive, time-consuming climbdown by Ravec. But in a year of consistently dreadful tidings for the royal family, the knowledge that 2026 might yet see a comeback by the cadet branch – with commensurate focus on the ongoing estrangement between Harry and his elder brother – is yet another reason for the Firm not to be cheerful.

  • What are Ukrainian children doing in North Korea?

    What are Ukrainian children doing in North Korea?

    The regime of North Korea has continued to exploit the war in Ukraine to spread its propaganda. This week we learned that Ukrainian children, abducted by Russia, are being sent to an infamous North Korean summer camp. The children have reportedly been taught to “destroy Japanese imperialists” and heard from North Korean soldiers who destroyed the USS Pueblo, a spy ship captured and sank by North Korea in 1968. 

    This Ukrainian children have been at the Songdowon International Children’s Camp, located near the port city of Wonsan on the country’s east coast. Well known as a popular tourist hotspot for North Korean elites, Wonsan has recently gained infamy for the newly-opened Wonsan-Kalma tourist resort, which has been not-so-affectionately nicknamed “North Korea’s Benidorm.” Wonsan, too, has a significant place in North Korean history. It was where Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un spent much of his childhood. 

    The children’s camp is hardly a new creation. Established in 1960 amid the backdrop of the Cold War, the camp became one additional facet of North Korean cultural diplomacy, as Pyongyang sought to develop ties with communist and communist-friendly countries. Whether from North Korea’s Cold War patrons of Russia and China or communist-sympathizing states further afield, such as Laos, Tanzania and even Syria, children would be sent to the camp to engage in a range of activities, including cooking, swimming, rock climbing, or marathon running. For the North Korean regime, the goal was simple: spread the virtues of socialism, North Korea-style, and become friends with like-minded states.

    When the Cold War ended, the camp did not shut its doors. It continued to host around 400 children annually, and expanded its capacity to 1,200 following renovations in 2014. The camp of today includes a water park, private beach, and even a football pitch. In recent years, Songdowon has seen visitors not just from Russia and China, but also Vietnam, Mongolia and Mexico. There is no access to the internet. 

    The North Korean regime also forbids sustained interaction between foreign visitors and their North Korean campmates. After all, the Kim regime must ensure that the spread of outside information – even from so-called communist-friendly countries – is curtailed. The camp is subsided by the North Korean Socialist Patriotic Youth League, the country’s main youth organization, which also sends young North Koreans to the venue. For Pyongyang, any possibility to expound its anti-American and anti-Japanese worldview is an opportunity worth taking, even if the audience may be barely adults.   

    Although little is known about the Ukrainian abductees sent to North Korea, cooperation between Pyongyang and Moscow in areas beyond security looks to continue to grow, especially as peace in Ukraine looks evermore elusive. North Korea and Russia signed a mutual defense pact in June 2024, but these renewed ties were not limited to the domain of security. It was no coincidence that only a week after the ink was dry, Grigory Gurov, head of the Russian Federal Agency for Youth Affairs, announced that around 250 Russian children, mainly from the Russian Far East, would visit Songdowon, making them one of the first groups to visit the camp following North Korea’s draconian three-year border closure, owing to coronavirus, in January 2021. 

    Russia and North Korea are yet to respond to the reports that Ukrainian abductees are being sent to Songdowon. Pyongyang will probably just say the children were participating in a cultural exchange – helping out an ally. We need only go back to February this year when Russia’s ambassador to North Korea, Alexander Matsegora, announced that how “hundreds of wounded [Russian] soldiers” fighting against Ukraine were being treated in North Korean hospitals, epitomizing the “brotherly attitude” between the two Cold War allies.

  • Yes, Europe’s civilization is being erased

    Yes, Europe’s civilization is being erased

    Last week the Trump administration expressed its fear that Europe faces “civilizational erasure.” Its concern was articulated in a 33-page National Security Strategy that outlined Donald Trump’s world view and how America will respond economically and militarily.

    The sentence that caused the most reaction on the other side of the pond was the assertion that, if current trends continue, Europe will be “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” Those trends are mass immigration and what conservative French commentators call the “Islamification” of Europe. If Europe doesn’t address these trends, the Trump administration predicts the continent’s “civilizational erasure.”

    Germany’s Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul issued a tetchy response to the Security Strategy report, claiming his country does not need “outside advice.” Is he sure about that? Last year the chief of police in Berlin, Barbara Slowik, warned Jews and gays to hide their identity in the city’s “Arab neighborhoods.” In France, Jews have been leaving the country in large numbers: 60,000 between 2000 and 2020, which is more than ten percent of the French Jewish community. Since 2023, acts of anti-Semitism have soared by 300 percent, including the burning of synagogues and the beatings of rabbis.

    The “civilizational erasure” is also to a large extent self-inflicted, and it is particularly noticeable at this time of year. One of the most famous Christmas markets in Paris is in La Défense, which this year is offering Halal meat in its festive delicacies. For the left, this is celebrating diversity. They take a different view, however, about those right-run towns which have the cheek to display a nativity scene in their town hall. In these cases such overt signs of Christianity are a breach of France’s laïcité or secularism.

    Similarly, the left in France support the wearing of Islamic garments, such as the hijab or the full-length abaya, as liberating. Those who object on the grounds of laïcité are labeled “Islamophobic.”

    Arguably, nothing symbolizes the “Islamification” of Europe more than the hijab. In Iran young women risk their lives for the right not to wear one. In western Europe it is almost de rigueur. The hijab is becoming more and more popular among young French Muslims: in 2003, just 16 percent of under-25s wore the Islamic headscarf, a figure that today is 45 percent. Last week one police force in England proudly displayed its new “quick-release” hijab for female officers.

    For the moment, British people can still question the wisdom of allowing its police officers to wear hijabs, but the Labour government is expected to soon introduce new “Islamophobia” laws that will criminalize criticism of Islam.

    In Brussels, a Muslim city councilor recently declared that Belgians who object to women wearing the hijab should go and live somewhere else. The same city last week unveiled its traditional nativity scene in its historic market square. There is a difference this year: the Holy family have no faces and it’s been suggested this is not to offend followers of Islam where it is not permitted to show the faces of the prophets. Fifty-two percent of Brussels’ schoolchildren are Muslim, 15 percent more than in London.

    The two main drivers of Europe’s Islamification are mass immigration and the Muslim Brotherhood, the nebulous Islamist organization that President Trump intends to ban. One of Europe’s leading experts on the Muslim Brotherhood is the French academic Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, who requires police protection as a result of her research. She explained in a 2023 book that “their goal isn’t to adapt Islam to Europe but to adapt Europe to Islam.” To adapt to Islam, Europe must first erase its own civilization. Which it is doing.

  • Why shouldn’t Trump deport Prince Harry?

    There are many things Americans admire about Britain – Shakespeare, Churchill and parliamentary democracy (on a good day). Above all, we admire the monarchy: that ancient, faintly miraculous institution which maintains its dignity even as the rest of the West dissolves into hashtag-fueled hysteria. What we do not admire, however, is being used as a backdrop for Prince Harry’s increasingly frantic attempts to remain relevant.

    No, I do not actually wish for President Trump to deport Harry to the Tower of London – although the image is, I confess, delicious, and might conceivably enjoy rare cross-party support on both sides of the Atlantic. But a man can dream and, if the Duke insists on turning America into the rehearsal studio for his political neuroses, one can’t help wandering into the realm of fantasy.

    Harry swaggered on to the set of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show this week in order to offer up a glib little jab at President Donald J. Trump. “I heard you elected a king,” he quipped, wearing the self-satisfied smirk of a man convinced he has coined something Wildean.

    Except the joke collapsed, quite magnificently. He was booed – by a New York liberal audience. Achieving that requires an almost athletic level of misjudgment. It is the political equivalent of being asked to leave a vegan café for excessive piety.

    All this, mind you, while his father-in-law lies seriously ill in a Filipino hospital. Any ordinary son-in-law might have managed a momentary display of concern. Harry, by contrast, is on American television performing sketches and mocking the president of the country he now depends upon for wealth, status and the perpetuation of his Californian cosplay of aristocratic grievance. It is tone-deafness elevated to an aesthetic.

    More to the point, it places his family – his real one, in Britain – in an excruciating position. The late Queen Elizabeth II set the gold standard for royal political neutrality. She neither dabbled nor sniped. She certainly did not ascend late-night sofas to titter about the occupant of the Oval Office. Her sense of duty was immaculate. It is a quality conspicuously absent in her grandson, who seems determined to turn the Crown into a cudgel and his title into a bargaining chip. At some stage, the King will have to contemplate the question of forfeiture.

    Harry appears to forget a crucial fact: he is a guest in America. Not a commentator, not a philosopher-king and certainly not a comedian, though often unintentionally, a clown. A guest with a visa, no less – a visa whose continued viability depends on the goodwill of the administration he has chosen to mock. This would be reckless for anyone. For a man who publicly boasted of drug use – something that can, in the United States, complicate one’s immigration status – it is spectacularly ill-judged.

    There was a time when Harry possessed a certain rakish charm. That time has long since expired. We inhabit the Prince-for-Hire epoch: the mercenary phase in which every grievance becomes a monetizable asset, every podcast an opportunity for therapeutic rambling and every public appearance a means of flogging the brand formerly known as His Royal Highness.

    Meanwhile, back in Britain, William and Catherine – the future of the institution Harry claims still to revere – carry out their duties with unshowy grace, greeting visiting dignitaries with the kind of quiet professionalism the Crown used to be known for. The contrast is blinding. They are the monarchy’s promise. Harry, its cautionary tale.

    If an international competition existed for sustained public embarrassment, Harry would not merely win – he would secure permanent ownership of the trophy.

    And here is the part that rankles for many Americans: when Harry sneers at Trump, he is not simply mocking the man. He is sneering at the tens of millions who voted for him. One may disapprove of that electorate, but any foreign national who chooses to live among them should at least feign respect for their democratic choices.

    America deserves better house-guests. Britain deserves better representatives. And the British monarchy deserves better than to be hauled, repeatedly, into Harry’s Californian melodrama. To insult the host nation’s president while monetizing one’s royal status is, to put it kindly, unbecoming. Consequences – real ones – are overdue, just as they were for his uncle.

    The Palace must, at some point, draw a line. The monarchy survives because it is apolitical, dignified and – crucially – seen to be both. Harry’s perpetual cringe-fest corrodes these principles. If he refuses to stop, his titles must be reconsidered.

    President Trump has so far dismissed various campaigns to revoke Harry’s visa. But he’s never been shy about tidying up America’s guest list. And if he decides, in the years ahead, to remove Harry, he might be surprised by the popularity of such a move.

  • Milo Yiannopoulos holds forth on the origins of homosexuality 

    Milo Yiannopoulos holds forth on the origins of homosexuality 

    Are we becoming “faggotized?” According to Milo Yiannopoulos “everything has gone gay” – food, music, fashion, showbiz and – significantly – politics. On a new installment of The Tucker Carlson Show the former Breitbart journalist and Kanye West consigliere set out his general theory of male homosexuality. 

    Male gayness is not something you were born with, argued Milo, but is instead a “set of behaviors” caused by something misfiring about a man’s relationship with masculinity at an early age. For this devouring mothers or “nebbish fathers” are usually to blame; indeed, much of the rest of a male gay’s life can be seen as an elaborate attempt to get revenge on the parental figure who failed them. He claimed that most gay men hate women because they hated their overbearing mothers, leading to, inter alia, the state of the fashion industry and “the intolerable ugliness of the catwalk.” 

    The ideology of neoconservatism is another epiphenomenon of this, Milo argued – hinting that for several prominent politicians foreign adventurism is a way to compensate for the powerlessness they felt at an early age. Figures such as former VP Mike Pence were at the very least “spiritually gay.” Who knows – but there certainly is an odd overrepresentation of gay men on the American right which no one has quite yet accounted for.  

    Milo relayed all this in his usual raffish way. His eyes were permanently squinted throughout, giving him the air of a wizened sage. He now claims to be living celibate as part of a years-long effort to overcome homosexuality. Over a T-shirt patterned with pictures of his face was a gold crucifix necklace. 

    Unsurprisingly for The Tucker Carlson Show the supernatural soon entered into things. Milo described being so overcome with desire after being sat next to a football player on a flight that he had to make for the bathroom for some quick onanism. “Sounds like a demon,” observed Tucker. Milo agreed, quickly christening it “Gorgoroth the Semen Demon.”

    Tucker certainly seemed to think he was speaking to a sort of Mephistopheles. “There’s no question in my mind you’re telling the truth,” he would often say, warily. At one point he furrowed his brow, “if you want to weaken a society to the point of collapse–” he began, “Faggotize it” finished Milo.

  • Halle Berry vs. Erika Kirk

    Halle Berry vs. Erika Kirk

    Journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook summit, sponsored by the New York Times, made a lot of news yesterday, though it felt more like 1975 than 2025, particularly when it came to “women’s issues”. We were one degree of separation from participants arguing over galleys of Ms. Magazine or getting into shouting matches with Norman Mailer.

    In the role of Phyllis Schlafly, the beautiful right-wing career woman leading a charge for a return to traditional values, was Erika Kirk, CEO of Turning Point USA and recent widow of Charlie Kirk. She claimed it was “ironic” that women in New York City had voted for Zohran Mamdani, given that many of them are childless but voiced support for his promise to provide free childcare for children under six years old. Kirk said that women were using government as a “replacement” for marriage and family.

    This was somewhat ironic in itself because Erika Kirk didn’t marry Charlie until she was 32, with an already successful career and a full life – and is now a major public figure, studying for a PhD. Also, there’s the fact that women might have voted for Mamdani because their other choices were Andrew Cuomo and Curtis Sliwa, neither of whom have a lot of curb appeal to young female voters. Regardless, the right looked at the comments and continued to consider Erika Kirk a hero of the revolution, and the left looked at them and continued to consider her some sort of sinister she-devil, so the needle didn’t actually move.

    More surprising was the appearance of actress Halle Berry, in a new role as some sort of hybrid version of Gloria Steinem and Shirley Chisholm. Berry ripped into California Governor and potential 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom for not supporting a Menopause Care Equity Act in California. “With the way he’s overlooked women, half the population, by devaluing us in midlife, he probably should not be the next president,” Berry said. She said that menopause and perimenopause are staggering health problems that affect the entire national economy, causing one of six women to leave the workforce. If men “had a medical condition that disrupted their sleep, brain function and sex life, we’d be calling that a health crisis on par with Covid, and the whole world would shut down.”

    “I need every woman in this country to fight with me,” Berry said. “But the truth is, the fight isn’t just for us women. We need men too. We need all of the leaders, every single one of you in this room – this fight needs you.”

    Newsom himself appeared at the DealBook summit, but spent his headline-making moment by claiming that if Hakeem Jeffries somehow doesn’t become Speaker of the House just over a year from now, the United States will descend into permanent autocracy – with show elections like the ones in Russia. Newsom urged the people in the crowd, most of whom were Democrats, to wake up from their stupor and elect Democrats, the only way to save America. This seemed like a bit of an exaggeration, a reach, and a fear tactic, Gavin Newsom specialties, given that he has his own authoritarian tendencies.

    Halle Berry couldn’t have been too pleased, as Newsom didn’t once mention menopause, though he did decry the bill earlier this year as too expensive. Governor Newsom, Bella Abzug and Germaine Greer would like to have a word with you. Even Erika Kirk might like to have a word. And Halle Berry isn’t going to cede ground. She said, “At this stage of my life, I have zero fucks left to give.”

  • The desperation of the ‘Seditious Six’

    The desperation of the ‘Seditious Six’

    Two weeks ago, six US lawmakers, all military or intelligence veterans, released a cryptic YouTube video where they spoke directly to American service members. They were Senators Mark Kelly (Arizona) and Elissa Slotkin (Michigan), and Representatives Jason Crow (Colorado), Chris Deluzio (Pennsylvania), Chrissy Houlahan (Pennsylvania) and Maggie Goodlander (New Hampshire) “Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home,” one of them said. “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” said another. “You must refuse illegal orders,” said a third. “No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”

    The video seemed to come out of nowhere and took anyone who was paying attention by surprise. What “illegal orders” were they talking about? Regardless, President Trump didn’t like it. On social media, he declared that the six lawmakers were traitors who should be “arrested” and “put on trial.” He called the video “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR … punishable by DEATH.”

    After Trump threw oil on this kitchen fire, the White House had to walk things back a bit. The press office said that Trump didn’t mean it literally, but that the lawmakers had “conspired … to defy the president’s lawful orders.” The fallout since has been minor. Most people agree that what the lawmakers did isn’t sedition, since all they said was that troops should only follow legal orders, which is true. Regardless, the Department of Defense has launched an investigation into Kelly, one of the “Seditious Six” and a retired Navy captain, citing “serious allegations of misconduct.”

    In recent days, the heat around the Seditious Six has died down, but that video hasn’t left my head. It was so weird and so out of place. What in the world were they talking about? One possibility is the presence of the National Guard in Washington D.C. In November 2025 Slotkin introduced the No Troops In Our Streets act, and said on a Sunday talk show that the military “should always remain apolitical and should never be used as a domestic police force.” Then an Afghan National shot down two Guardspeople unprovoked, so suddenly Slotkin was on the very wrong side of history.

    Another possibility is the shooting down of Venezuelan drug boats, and, in particular, the “second shot” on one of the boats that currently has Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in the media and Congressional crosshairs. But while the drug-boat attacks did seem to come out of left field, they’re not particularly inconsistent with the Administration’s policy of aggressive action toward drug cartels, so it hardly seems to constitute “illegal orders.”

    Some more paranoid commentators on the pro-Trump right are saying that the Seditious Six are trying to foment a “color revolution,” a mass protest movement aimed at overturning a government or forcing mass political change. Threatened governments use this term derogatively toward protesters, indicating that the impetus behind the revolution comes from foreign entities or politically-motivated NGOs. In other words, the Seditious Six are a thinly-disguised branch of No Kings, Inc.

    There may be some truth behind the conspiracy theories, but it’s also true that this particular color revolution isn’t particularly colorful. Trump’s D.C. National Guard deployment and drug-boat attacks have their loud detractors, but are actually quite popular with the majority. Trump and his Administration enjoy broad support in the new “no fatty” Armed Forces, which seems more willing than ever to carry out the wishes of the Commander in Chief. Anyone who thinks that there’s a platoon of Manchurian Soldiers out there ready to carry out the whispered wishes of Elissa Slotkin, Mark Kelly and Maggie Goodlander is just being a nutter. The troops are listening to Trump and Hegseth and their generals, not Representative Jason Crow.

    In reality, the Seditious Six’s audience isn’t actually the US military, but what remains of the anti-Trump “Resistance.” It’s a video to be played on loop in the social-media feeds of the likes Rick Wilson and Randi Weingarten, and for the millions of permanently terrified Heather Cox Richardson readers. It’s an MSNBC special report.

    The US military isn’t behaving any more illegally than it ever does, and Trump’s usage of it isn’t unusual. As the Trump era enters its fourth quarter up 24-0 with the ball and all of its timeouts, the Resistance’s plays are getting loopier and riskier. That very odd video from a couple of weeks ago may not have been seditious. But it was certainly desperate.

  • Donald Trump’s affordability blues

    Donald Trump’s affordability blues

    So President Donald Trump may have dozed off during his cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Who could blame him? Listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio drone on about Russia would prompt souls less hardy than Trump to catch some shuteye. 

    What should be keeping Trump awake, or at least uneasy, is the shaky state of the American economy. The federal government may not be releasing much data about the economy, but the payroll processing company ADP is reporting that private employers cut 32,000 jobs last month. The losses were heavily concentrated among small employers who have been slammed by Trump’s capricious tariff policy. The only positive sign has been in the data center industry, where investments in AI have been fueling stock market gains. A recent Fox News poll indicated that 76 percent of voters view the economy negatively and that twice as many blame Trump as Biden. 

    When he’s not hosting foreign dignitaries or playing golf or discussing the architectural plans for his ornate new ballroom or anathematizing media organizations with a “Hall of Shame” on the White House website, Trump has been grasping at whatever straws he can to try and prop up the economy. On Tuesday, Trump mused about appointing his economic advisor Kevin Hassett as Federal Reserve chairman in the expectation that he will push for radically lower interest rates – a move that might briefly juice the economy but would also send inflation soaring. 

    On Wednesday, he took a fresh swipe at former president Joe Biden’s Green New Deal policies by rolling back fuel standards, a measure that the American Petroleum Institute has been advocating. That may benefit Ford and GM in the short term but exacerbates their dependence on gasoline cars that are being phased out abroad. Add in the tariffs that Trump is imposing and American industry could become increasingly unable to compete abroad. 

    A sign of the vexation that businesses are feeling towards Trump came with retail giant Costco’s announcement this past Friday that it intends to sue the administration over its tariffs. For the most part, big business has tried to placate rather than confront Trump. No longer. Bumble Bee Foods and Ray-Bans, among others, are already suing Trump. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court appears likely to rule that Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional.  

    Nothing could boost the economy more than a sweeping verdict that abolishes them. But the administration remains fixated with Herbert Hoover economics – retaining tariffs, whenever and wherever possible. If the Supreme Court rules against it, then “we can recreate the exact tariff structure with [sections] 301, with 232, with 122,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in an interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit.  

    Trump himself has been touting a $2,000 tariff dividend that would be paid to Americans. But Fortune notes that the math doesn’t add up. It would cost roughly twice as much as the tariffs have raised to disburse a dividend. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the dividend check would cost $600 billion a year – or $6 trillion over a period of 10 years. 

    Trump, a serial bankrupt, is not unaccustomed to financial obstacles. But his struggles with the economy are starting to tax his skills at political prestidigitation. As prices go up and jobs go down, Trump has made it clear that he doesn’t like what people are saying. “They just say the word,” he said during his cabinet meeting. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it – affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.” They still can’t.