The Social World

Category: Politics

  • Trump brothers go mining

    Trump brothers go mining

    After a day where the very alive President Trump bombed a Venezuelan drugs boat, moved Space Force headquarters out of Colorado because that state has mail-in voting, declared he was sending federal troops into Chicago and claimed that AI generated a video of someone throwing a plastic bag of construction debris out of the window of the White House, it became clear that the real action was going on outside the White House walls, with Trump’s very rich sons.

    As Cockburn reported yesterday in The Spectator, the Trump Brothers, Don Jr, Eric, and the true genius behind the operations, Barron, had somehow amassed $5 billion in paper wealth thanks to savvy investments, based in no way on shady insider information, in WLFI, the family’s nascent cryptocurrency venture. But not content with breaking the crypto bank, the Trump Brothers are set to become the bank itself. On Wednesday, American Bitcoin, a Trump-run mining and accumulation business, listed on the NASDAQ. Eric and Don. Jr., along with shareholders, own 98 percent of American bitcoin, which has amassed nearly 2500 of the coins. That’s upwards of $250 million in value right there.

    “We’ve become the obvious name in crypto,” Eric Trump told The Wall Street Journal. “American Bitcoin is going to be the greatest treasury company ever built.”

    The Trump Family is cornering the Bitcoin market. They insist this is in no way a conflict of interest even though Donald Trump is the most powerful man in the world. It’s causing the heads of middle-class “ethics watchdogs” to explode, even as the Trump Brothers splash around in a vault of virtual money like a couple of slick-haired, bearded Scrooge McDucks.
    The investing and memecoining is one thing, but this American Bitcoin play brings the flex to a whole new level. More than 90 percent of the possibly available Bitcoins already exist. That means that miners are looking to algorithmically strike it rich in an increasingly narrow lode. After prospectors have been grinding it of their knapsacks for decades, in come these archetypal city slickers with their deep pockets, determined to blow up entire mountains.

    Cockburn doesn’t think Bitcoin was ever cool, exactly, but it represented an alternative to a sclerotic, elitist financial system to which government stopgaps and deeply-entrenched interest barred entry. It harnessed technology to create new wealth, and a new generation of barons (not Barrons), the biggest revolution in global finance since the Spindletop oil gusher burst out of the ground in Beaumont, Texas in 1901.

    Now here come the Trumps, flush with Winklevii money, toting their rifles, fur coats draped across their shoulders, bursting into the Bitcoin saloon and demanding the finest whiskey. It’s brazen, it’s annoying and it’s doomed to succeed. They’re like the Roy brothers from Succession, only not tragic. The Trump boys will be sitting on their piles of digital cash, trying to figure out which one daddy loves best, while the rest of us are down here balancing our checkbooks, trying to figure out how to prevent AI from taking our jobs. Happy listing day to them.

  • Father Ted and Havel’s Greengrocer

    A softer version of totalitarianism has been gnawing its way through the British body politic like a cancer for many years now. With the Graham Linehan (creator of the classic sitcom Father Ted) arrest at London’s Heathrow Airport this week, it seems to have metastasized into something entirely malignant. If Linehan’s arrest isn’t a bright red line for Britain, what on earth would be?

    A decade ago, living in the US at the dawn of the Great Awokening, I began hearing from older people who had fled to America from the Soviet bloc, seeking freedom. They were telling me that the things they were starting to see in their adopted country reminded them of what they had left behind. 

    They spoke of people having to watch their words for fear that they would step on an invisible land mine, and put their jobs and businesses at risk. They talked about the abandonment of classical liberal values, and the adoption of “social justice” norms that judged people based on group identity. They witnessed ideological mobs intimidating people into silence, and institutional elites changing language to fit a utopian leftist paradigm.

    I found this hard to grasp at first. If this was totalitarianism, where were the gulags? Where was Big Brother? This was precisely the problem, I came to understand. The fact that relative to life in the Soviet bloc, the West remained free and prosperous helped conceal the totalitarian threat. That, and the fact that this new ideology presented itself in largely therapeutic terms: as a program not only for achieving social justice, but of easing the burden of groups suffering the pain of marginalization.

    Yet the more conversations I had with these people, the more I experienced their anger at the inability of Americans to comprehend what was happening. Said one professor in the Midwest, “I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated.”

    Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift even further back in time: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.

    “I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”

    My conceptual breakthrough happened when I realized that growing up during the Cold War, I had come to imagine totalitarianism according to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, the emerging therapeutic totalitarianism in the West today is far more like Aldous Huxley’s model in Brave New World. The outcome is the same: the gradual erosion of liberty and individuality, and the seizing of power by ideological fanatics who asserted the power to alter reality. By the time the book I wrote about this phenomenon, Live Not By Lies, was published in 2020, wokeness had conquered US institutions, and one could be sent to the unemployment line for refusing, say, to agree that men could be women. 

    For all the madness that ensued, no American had to fear arrest for stating anti-woke opinions, because we have a constitutional right to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. This is why the fate of Graham Linehan, like the fate of so many lesser known UK dissidents from the ruling ideology, could not happen in America. But it can happen in Britain, and is happening. The spectacle of English patriots being taken into custody for flying the Union Jack, on grounds that it might cause distress to foreigners, many of whom came into the country illegally, reveals the absolute state of the tyranny now reigning in once-free Britain.

    Yet if the Soviet bloc emigres reveal to us the truth of what was and is overtaking the West, those who stayed behind tell us how to resist and overcome it. In researching Live Not By Lies – the title is taken from a Solzhenitsyn communique to his Soviet followers, on the eve of his exile – I traveled through the former communist lands to ask ex-dissidents for their advice.

    The core lesson: you must be willing to suffer for the sake of the truth. Those in power count on a population cowed by fear. Nearly everyone is willing to live under the yoke of ideological lies, because they are understandably afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t. Those brave souls who dare to tell the truth, and who are willing to suffer for it, hold the key to society’s liberation.

    Czech dissident leader Vaclav Havel explained why in his famous Parable of the Greengrocer, from his 1977 book-length essay, The Power Of The Powerless. Imagine, he said, a simple greengrocer in a communist city, in whose shop window hangs a sign saying, “Workers Of The World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe it, nor do any of the other shopkeepers who display the same sign. They do it out of fearful conformity.

    One day, the shopkeeper decides he won’t lie anymore. He removes the sign. What happens next? He is arrested. The state confiscates his business. He must endure punishment, including loss of privileges, and becoming a social pariah to his former friends. He pays a significant price.

    But what does he gain? For one, he gains self-respect, for having defending his own integrity. For another, he demonstrates to society that it is possible to live in truth, provided you are willing to suffer for it. If enough people within that oppressed society take courage from his example, and accept the challenge of suffering for truth, then eventually the entire system built on lies will crumble.

    Solzhenitsyn said something similar in his 1974 “Live Not By Lies” message. It is not possible to go to Red Square and shout, “Down with communism!” he said. But that does not mean ordinary people are without means of resistance. He recommended practical everyday means of refusing to cooperate with the official lies. 

    “Our way must be: never knowingly support lies!” he wrote. You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe, but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, the writer said, then our response must be: “Let their rule hold not through me!”

    Graham Linehan is a comedian and actor, but he is also Havel’s Greengrocer. So is J.K. Rowling – and though it must be conceded that it’s easier to live not by lies if you are sitting on a mountain of cash from book sales, she has nevertheless become a total pariah to many of her peers and admirers, because she would not bow her head to the misogynistic lies of gender ideology.

    The British people are being put through an extraordinary test now by their government, their media, and all the institutions of the ruling class. They are being forced to endure humiliation, criminality, displacement, and the virtual expropriation of their land, with its ancient liberties, by an ideologically captured ruling class. 

    Earlier this year, I was in London for a screening of the documentary film series Angel Studios made from Live Not By Lies. I had seen the film many times before, but watching it in the British capital, it struck me how many of the people in the documentary are British people, talking about actual existing tyranny in Britain today. 

    They are people like Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, the Christian pro-life campaigner shown on camera being arrested for praying inside her head near an abortion clinic. Vaughan-Spruce is also Havel’s Greengrocer – a brave person who possessed enough self-respect and love of truth to suffer arrest, multiple times, for thoughtcrime.

    The older men and women of Eastern Europe know what the British are suffering. The fact that British totalitarianism is softer than its Soviet antecedent makes it no less totalitarian in spirit. A former Soviet citizen now living in America told me what is coming for us if we don’t derail the totalitarian train now.

    “You will not be able to predict what will be held against you tomorrow,” she warned. “You have no idea what completely normal thing you do today, or say today, will be used against you to destroy you. This is what people in the Soviet Union saw. We know how this works.”

    Then as now, there remains only one sure antidote to it: ordinary citizens realizing that enough is enough, and at personal risk to themselves, choosing to live not by lies. This is the hope that Solzhenitsyn offered to his people in 1974 – and the challenge.

  • Trump’s strike on the Venezuelan ‘narco terrorists’

    President Trump has authorized what he called a “kinetic strike” from a US warship that destroyed a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela bound for the US, killing 11 so called “narco terrorists” aboard.

    The action by a US naval task force in international waters in the southern Caribbean is the first since the President threatened armed intervention against narcotics smuggling by Venezuela’s drugs cartels in January. Trump said that the attack was aimed at members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua drugs cartel which the US branded a terrorist organization in February, and which it claims is controlled by Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime.

    The US Department of Justice has called Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro “the world’s No. 1 narco terrorist” and has put up a $50 million reward for information leading to his arrest on drugs trafficking charges.

    For his part, Maduro has vowed vengeance on any “empire setting foot on the sacred soil of Venezuela” – and called out his paramilitary Bolivar militia to guard the country’s borders. Thousands of Venezuelans queued at the weekend to register their membership in the force. Maduro has denied any links with the Tren de Aragua cartel, claiming that the gang was completely destroyed in a prison battle in 2023.

    Coincidentally or not, the Tren de Aragua gang’s rise coincided with the coming to power of Nicolas Maduro. Founded in 2014, the cartel spread across the Americas, ironically aided by the flight of millions of Venezuelans escaping the social and economic misery created by the Maduro regime.

    The cartel was founded by a gangster called Hector Guerrero Flores, known as Nino Guerrero. He and other leaders of the gang were jailed in Venezuela’s Tocoron prison, which became the cartel’s de facto headquarters under the gang’s control.

    Maduro’s security forces stormed the jail in 2023 and claimed that they had destroyed the cartel, but their power continued to grow, and US cities were flooded with fentanyl and other drugs trafficked by the organization.

    In March, President  Trump invoked the 18th-century Enemy Aliens Act, a wartime measure, and ordered the deportation of cartel members living in the U.S.  He compared the cartel to Al-Quaeda and other foreign terrorist groups. After some deportations were delayed by “lawfare” in US courts, Trump’s missile strike against the drugs boat represents the opening of a new front in the campaign against the flood of drugs originating in Venezuela.

    The US war against drug dealing Latin American dictators has a long history. In 1989/90 President George Bush senior ordered Operation Just Cause against Panama, a full scale invasion of the Central American state designed to extradite the country’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega, to face trial on drugs trafficking charges. Although Noriega had worked as a CIA agent of influence and had helped the US backed Contras fight the left-wing Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, this did not save him from deportation to the US and a 17-year stint in a Florida jail. He later served a jail sentence in France for money laundering and died in Panama of a brain tumor in 2017.

    Trump briefed reporters at a news conference in the White House Oval Office on Tuesday that he had ordered the strike to prevent the narcotics reaching the US. “…an awful lot of drugs on that boat,” he added. Later the President wrote on TruthSocial that the strike should “serve notice on anyone even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE.” A video posted by the President on the platform showed the boat exploding.

    Tension between the US and the poverty stricken socialist ruled state has ratcheted up in recent days after Trump sent a naval task force of seven warships and a nuclear powered submarine towards the Venezuelan coast. 

    Tuesday’s strike is the first time that the Trump administration has taken armed action against a Hispanic neighbor, and will revive memories of US interventions under previous administrations against states deemed to be harming American interests like Cuba, Panama and Grenada.

    The Maduro regime is now almost certain to take action against the US in revenge for the strike, though what form such action will take is not yet clear. The Venezuelan President, a former bus driver, was re-elected to office a year ago in a poll widely condemned by observers as rigged. Maduro is likely to try to revive his flagging popularity by appealing to Venezuelan patriotism and traditional Hispanic anti-Yankee nationalism.

    Since Maduro succeeded the charismatic Hugo Chavez in 2013, around eight million desperate people – an estimated one third of the entire Venezuelan population – have fled the country to escape rampant hyperinflation, widespread unemployment, and shortages of food and basic goods. Many of the refugees reached the US under the Biden administration, and Trump has been deporting those living in America illegally.

    Venezuela has enormous oil deposits which have been mismanaged by Maduro’s far-left government. Instead, the regime has derived much of its illicit income from the illegal trade in drugs which has been wreaking crime and chaos in America’s cities, and which Trump has pledged to halt. Now the President has acted on this pledge.

  • Don’t hold your breath for a Chinese-led world order

    Today’s vast military parade in Beijing is the climax of three days of political theatre orchestrated by President Xi Jinping, with supporting roles played by those pantomime villains Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. The smirking North Korean and Russian dictators joined Xi to witness the People’s Liberation Army’s goose-stepping soldiers and shiny weaponry rumbling through Tiananmen Square. “Today, humanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum,”  Xi told the crowd of some 50,000 carefully selected spectators (which roughly matched the number of soldiers). He said the Chinese people “firmly stand on the right side of history.”

    Xi warned that China was “unstoppable” and is “never intimidated by bullies” before climbing on the back of an open-top car to inspect what seemed like miles of hardware lining Chang’an Avenue, warplanes flying overhead. China’s military expansion and modernization is racing ahead at a rate rarely seen in peacetime, and today’s show, reckoned to be China’s largest-ever military parade, was a showcase of some of the results, designed to throw the gauntlet down to the West.

    Western military attaches will no doubt be doing their own forensic inspections of Xi’s new kit, which included sea drones and multiple missile systems, among them intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to reach the United States. It also included cruise missiles and an array of anti-ship missiles, dubbed “carrier killers,” whose purpose is to deter American involvement in a war over Taiwan.

    It was the first time Xi, Putin and Kim had met together publicly, and in many ways it was a clarifying moment to witness as they walked shoulder to shoulder, the three protagonists of the Ukraine war. Putin, its architect; Kim, who is providing weapons and soldiers; and Xi, who is underwriting the whole enterprise through his economic support for Moscow.

    The parade, which lasted around 90 minutes, was supposed to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender and the end of the Second World War. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party played only a marginal role in defeating Japan, with its rivals, the nationalist Kuomintang, doing most of the fighting. Mao Zedong cynically calculated that Japan would weaken his opponents, who could then be more easily defeated in the Chinese civil war. Mao would later confess that the communists would never have won without the Japanese invasion, going so far as thanking Japan’s prime minister Kakuei Tanaka for his “help” in defeating the nationalists, according to a memoir by Mao’s personal physician.

    Even the stars of today’s show – Xi, Putin and Kim – have deep mutual suspicions

    In the run-up to the parade, a propaganda blitz has attempted to portray the victory over Japan as a “people’s war of resistance” against Japan, whipping up a frenzy of nationalist sentiment, which has resulted in Tokyo expressing concern for the safety of its nationals in China. Last month, a Japanese women and her child were attacked in a subway station in Suzhou, one of a growing list of violent anti-Japanese incidents, which included the stabbing to death of a 10-year-old Japanese boy near a Japanese school in the same city.

    The 26 world leaders who attended the parade were mostly a familiar line-up of authoritarian faces, though they included Serbia’s Russia-friendly president Alexandar Vucic and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. Sharp-eyed Australians also spotted Daniel Andrews, a former Labor premier of Victoria, standing sheepishly at the back of a family photograph, with Xi, Putin and Kim to the fore. This is causing a storm down under.

    Today’s parade follows a meeting in Tianjin of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a usually dozy talking shop, whose members include Russia, China and countries of central and south Asia. Xi used the platform to make his most audacious bid so far for world leadership. He criticized “bullying” and gave a woolly vision of a new China-centric world order to challenge the United States. The most significant images of the event were those of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister cozying up to Putin and Xi.

    Some commentators have been quick to proclaim this week’s theatre as a seminal moment, of Donald Trump’s comeuppance, and Xi’s new world order becoming a reality. Not so fast. Wily and transactional leaders of the “global south,” while hardly enamored of Trump, are not about to ditch the American “hegemon” in favor of a Chinese one. Modi feels bruised and intimidated by his treatment by Trump but is sending a message to Washington, playing a game. His suspicions of China, with whom India fought a brief border war just five years ago, run deep and won’t be salved by Xi’s empty words at Tianjin. The SCO itself is riven with divisions; the former Soviet States of central Asia, each with big Russian-speaking populations, are deeply uneasy about Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

    Even the stars of today’s show – Xi, Putin and Kim – have deep mutual suspicions. Putin was very much the supplicant in Beijing, bringing a host of officials with him from the oil, gas and arms industries, and even the governor of Russia’s central bank. All an expression of just how dependent he has become on Chinese support. Russia was quick to announce new deals on a much-delayed gas pipeline; China said little, since much of the detail, notably the price of the gas, has yet to be worked out.

    It’s fair to speculate as to whether Xi felt any unease today about the loyalty of the troops he was inspecting, having purged a swath of top military leaders in recent months – including the top echelons of the Rocket Force, which oversees those shiny new missiles. Today’s display, and Xi’s fiery words, certainly invoked visions of 1930s Germany, but it would be premature to proclaim the start of the new world order that China’s leader so craves.

  • As an American Anglophile, I can’t defend Britain

    For much of my career, beginning as a foreign adviser to the U.S. Congress, I have proudly stood as one of America’s strongest advocates for Britain. 

    I have defended her history, her institutions and her role as the original home of liberty. 

    I have championed the UK in forums throughout the US and in publications across the globe, reminding audiences that our shared values of liberty and democracy, bequeathed by our mother, England, form the bedrock of transatlantic strength. 

    Today, for the first time, I find Britain indefensible. The affection and historical respect remains. The confidence is gone.  

    Britain now prosecutes her own citizens not for violence or treason but for words. Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a tweet in the wake of the Southport tragedy; she served ten. 

    Her crime was expression, harsh perhaps but still speech. Graham Linehan, the award‑winning creator of Father Ted, was arrested at Heathrow by armed officers with guns for online comments defending women’s spaces. Arrested, by police carrying weapons, for his opinions. 

    This is the country that once gave the world John Stuart Mill.  

    Such cases expose what Britain has become: a two‑tier system of justice. Those branded far‑right, nationalist or “Islamophobic” are prosecuted with zeal. Those spreading incendiary rhetoric from Islamist or minority factions are met with indulgence. The 2024 riots exposed the imbalance in plain sight. Swift punishment for those the state distrusts. Hesitation and leniency for those it fears. Law as weapon, not protection.  

    This has not happened by accident. Britain’s institutions have been captured. Its police, judiciary and permanent bureaucracy answer less to the people than to a class of activists embedded at the top. 

    Leading them is a man who knows the law not as a shield for the people but as a sword for ideology: Keir Starmer. Starmer did not merely elevate activist lawyers to high office. He is one. He has built his career knowing how to bend legal frameworks into blunt instruments. Now in Downing Street he deploys those instruments against the liberties Britain once bequeathed the world.  

    A particularly chilling example lies in the push to enshrine a definition of “Islamophobia.” What is presented as tolerance is in practice a new blasphemy law, criminalizing criticism of religion and culture whenever it offends official sensitivities. The land that abolished the Star Chamber is now flirting with prosecuting thought crimes.  

    The suspicion of national pride runs just as deep. During the 2024 riots, Starmer cautioned against using the St George’s Cross or the Union Jack “divisively.” To ordinary Britons these flags are symbols of unity and heritage. To their government they are red flags of extremism. 

    Meanwhile, foreign flags fly freely across London without question. The message is unmistakable: pride in your own country is suspect. Allegiance to any other is acceptable.  

    Immigration policy tells the same story. Labour boasts of progress, yet more than 32,000 asylum seekers remain in taxpayer‑funded hotels at a cost of £2.1 billion a year. Whole communities are expected to accept disruption without complaint, and if they speak out they are branded intolerant. Concerns about security or cohesion are brushed aside as if no decent Briton could possibly hold them.  

    From abroad the shift is impossible to ignore. Elon Musk has called Britain’s censorship Soviet‑style. JD Vance has condemned its crackdown on speech. The US State Department now lists Britain as a country presenting significant risks to free expression. I never imagined America would place Britain alongside nations that treat liberty as a nuisance. That day has come.  

    For those of us who have long defended Britain, it is heartbreaking. This is the country whose strong institutions enabled America’s own rise and whose commitment to liberty inspired ours. Yet under its current leadership Britain has stumbled into repression, constraint and fear, where ordinary citizens look over their shoulders before speaking.  

    And still there is a chance for recovery. A counter‑movement exists. Figures such as Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick, Ben Habib and the Reform UK party speak plainly about borders, free speech and sovereignty. They refuse to accept that patriotism is extremism or that questioning official orthodoxy is hate. For this they are demonized by the governing elite, but for this they are listened to by ordinary citizens who have had enough and are reasserting their national pride as manifested in the tidal wave of Union and St. George flags that have flooded cities throughout the UK through efforts such as Operation Raise the Colors. 

    Britain must decide. It can continue down its present course, where speech is policed, justice is politicised and Starmer’s legal class governs not on behalf of the nation but against it. Or it can remember its own inheritance, trusting its people and restoring freedom as the organizing principle of national life.  

    The world does not need a Britain that jails her patriots. It needs the Britain that once taught us all to be free.

  • For Trump and Ilhan, Washington pays

    For Trump and Ilhan, Washington pays

    How does Ilhan Omar make her money? How does the Trump family make its money? Is money real? What is reality? These are the questions Cockburn is asking himself after this weekend’s financial news.

    First, let’s fly over Minnesota. Founding “Squad” member Omar, the Washington Free Beacon reported yesterday, is currently worth more than $30 million, despite telling the press earlier this year that it’s “categorically false” that she’s a millionaire. If by false, you mean “true,” then yes.

    The Free Beacon obtained Omar’s latest financial disclosure, which indicated that she and her husband, shifty “former political consultant” Tim Mynett, are worth somewhere between $6 million and $30 million – a wide range. Their holding companies are a winery with the annoying avant-garde name of eStCru and a venture firm Rose Lake Capital, which, as late as 2023, “were saddled with lawsuits from investors claiming they defrauded them out of millions of dollars.”

    Omar’s relationship with Mynett began in 2020, when they were both married to other people. Her campaign paid his political consulting firm nearly $3 million to position her as the people’s champion. Once the press and public caught on to that grift, it ended, and Mynett instead began operating an e-winery. It also appears that Omar’s empire is based on investors in African development and the cannabis industry, all of whom are suing or have sued her husband. Nothing to see here.

    Meanwhile, in Trumpland, America’s First Family has somehow “notched as much as $5 billion in paper wealth,” according to the Wall Street Journal, after World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the family’s flagship crypto venture, launched yesterday. Trump’s three sons are the founders of World Liberty, and Trump is a “Co-Founder Emeritus.” I mean it’s no eStCru winery, but Cockburn, who himself possesses substantial but hard-to-access crypto holdings, suspects that WLFI could collapse as quickly as the Trump Taj Mahal. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, about the launch of WLFI, “neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.” Sure, Jan.

    On our radar

    RUDY DON’T FAIL Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has been discharged from hospital after he was injured in a car accident over the weekend.

    CHI-RAQ President Trump posted “CHICAGO IS THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD!” on his Truth Social this morning. “Pritzker needs help badly, he just doesn’t know it yet,” he wrote earlier.

    JERRY, JERRY, JERRY… Congressman Jerry Nadler, who led two Trump impeachment efforts, will retire next year.

    Pax standards

    Senator John Cornyn may give off mild RINO vibes, but he is, as Cockburn’s sources deep in the heart of Texas tell him, the Senate version of a stablecoin: providing mild, unexciting returns on investment for his loyal Republican investors and voters. Trading that in for scandal magnet Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s posing a difficult challenge to Cornyn in the primary, would be crazy.

    Fortunately Cornyn, whose campaigns are usually as exciting as meatless chili, is fighting back. A Cornyn-affiliated PAC has launched “Ken Stoppers,” a tipline for citizens to report Paxton’s abuses of power. These include owning rental properties that he may have used for mortgage fraud, using an alias to cover up a years-long affair, and filching a $1,000 Montblanc pen during one of his many court appearances. The Ken Stoppers website doesn’t even mention that Paxton’s wife is divorcing him for “Biblical reasons.” Paxton may be pushing the Ten Commandments in Texas schools, but that could be because he’s broken at least nine of them. “Texas Deserves Better,” the Ken Stoppers website says, which is always true, but in the case of Ken Paxton as US senator, it’s desperately, urgently true.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

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

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

    Rep. Ilhan Omar once dismissed suggestions she was a millionaire as “ridiculous.” That was only a few months ago. Now, according to her latest congressional financial disclosure, Omar and her husband report assets valued between $6 million and $30 million. That’s not just millionaire territory – it’s potentially the top one percent.

    The jump is staggering. Businesses tied to Omar’s husband, including a California winery and a venture capital firm, went from reporting thousands in value one year to millions the next. Rose Lake Capital, his firm, is now valued at up to $25 million. For a couple that not long ago claimed to be weighed down by student loans, it’s an astonishing turn of fortune.

    But the real story here isn’t Omar’s wealth. It’s what her success reveals about the left’s hypocrisy when it comes to capitalism. Democrats spend years railing against the system, insisting the American dream is a sham, that ordinary people are locked out of financial security and that only government can protect them. Yet when they benefit from the system themselves, suddenly the rules look pretty fair.

    Omar is not the first. We’ve seen this movie before. Bernie Sanders railed against millionaires until he became one. Then the villain suddenly became “billionaires.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez built her brand on rejecting capitalism, all while selling “Tax the Rich” merchandise online. Liberals tell Americans the game is rigged, but their own lifestyles tell a different story: capitalism works just fine when you know how to use it.

    And here’s the irony: the very financial habits the left sneers at are the same ones that built Omar’s fortune. Owning businesses. Securing investment. Growing equity. Reaping the rewards of risk. These aren’t sinister schemes – they’re the building blocks of wealth creation in a free market.

    The problem is, Democrats can’t celebrate this success without shattering their narrative. If they admit capitalism rewards smart financial choices, then their argument for bigger government collapses. So instead, they downplay their wealth, deny the obvious and keep repeating the myth that ordinary Americans can’t get ahead.

    But that myth is getting harder to sell. Millions of Americans already know the truth. They contribute to their 401(k)s year after year. They buy homes and watch equity rise. They start side businesses. They invest in stocks, gold, or real estate. These people aren’t greedy – they’re responsible. They’re doing the same thing Omar did, just without the Washington influence and venture capital firm.

    Capitalism doesn’t guarantee wealth, but it gives people the tools to build it. And contrary to the left’s rhetoric, those tools aren’t limited to the elite. A worker who puts 20 percent of his paycheck into retirement for 30 years will retire a millionaire. A young family that buys a modest home and holds onto it through decades of appreciation will likely end up with a sizable nest egg. Millions of Americans have quietly proven this true.

    So why won’t Democrats admit it? Because it would undermine the culture of grievance politics they depend on. If ordinary people believe they can build wealth through discipline and wise choices, then the left’s message of dependency loses its power. Their political survival depends on convincing Americans that the deck is so stacked against them that self-reliance is futile.

    That’s why Omar’s financial disclosure is more than a tabloid headline. It’s a cultural moment. Here is one of the loudest critics of capitalism, now sitting on the kind of wealth that capitalism makes possible. Her story doesn’t prove the system is rigged. It proves the system works.

    None of this means Omar is corrupt for building wealth. On the contrary, her success is what we should want for more Americans. Saving, investing and entrepreneurship are positive, not shameful. But it does mean her rhetoric – and the broader leftist narrative – is hollow. You can’t attack capitalism on Monday and cash its rewards on Tuesday without looking like a hypocrite.

    At some point, Democrats will have to decide: do they truly believe capitalism is irredeemable, or do they secretly recognize its power but prefer to keep voters in the dark? Omar’s sudden millionaire status suggests the latter.

    The truth is, capitalism encourages something good: responsibility. It rewards those who plan ahead, take risks and steward their money wisely. That’s not exploitation – it’s empowerment. Instead of shaming capitalism, Democrats should celebrate it. They should stop pretending financial success is only possible for the privileged few, when their own lives prove otherwise.

    Omar’s disclosure is a reminder that even the loudest critics of capitalism rely on it. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate hypocrisy of the modern left.

  • I was arrested for insulting the trans mob

    I was arrested for insulting the trans mob

    Something odd happened before I even boarded the flight in Arizona. When I handed over my passport at the gate, the official told me I didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, probably wearing unconvincing make-up and his sister/wife’s/mum’s underwear, had made a phone call.

    The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two – five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where pedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilized five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for these tweets (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up):

    …and then, a follow up to that one:

    When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists.”

    The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.

    “Kind” because the officers saw how upset I was – when they began reading me my rights, the red mist descended and I came close to becoming one of those police body-cam videos where you can’t believe the perp isn’t just doing what he’s told – and they treated me gently after that. They even arranged for a van to meet me on the tarmac so I didn’t have to be perp-walked through the airport like a terrorist. Small mercies.

    At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to a concave mirror that was presumably there to make you reflect on your life choices.

    By some miracle – probably because I hadn’t slept on the flight – I managed to doze off. After the premier economy seat in which I’d just spent ten hours, it was actually a relief to stretch out. That passed the time, though I kept waking up wondering if it was all actually happening.

    Later, during the interview itself, the tone shifted. The officer conducting it asked about each of the terrible tweets in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like… oh, I dunno – crime? I explained that the “punch” tweet was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women’s spaces are abusers and they need to be challenged every time. The “punch in the bollocks” bit was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence. (Not one of my best as one of the female officers said, “We’re not that small”).

    He mentioned “trans people.” I asked him what he meant by the phrase. “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.” I said: “Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.” He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language. The damage Stonewall has done to the UK police force will take years to mend.

    Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 – stroke territory. The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life. So I was escorted to A&E, where I write this now after spending about eight hours under observation.

    The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel it may also have been a contributing factor that I have now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, persistent harassment campaign because I refuse to believe that lesbians have cocks.

    The police themselves, for the most part, were consistently decent throughout this farce. Some were even Father Ted fans. Thank God the Catholic Church never had with the police the special relationship granted to trans activists. The male officers were mostly polite but clearly nonplussed by the politics of it all – just doing their jobs, however insane those jobs had become. The female officers seemed more tuned in to what was actually happening. One mentioned the Sandie Peggie case in a certain way, and I realized I was among friends, even if they couldn’t admit it.

    I looked at the single bail condition: I am not to go on Twitter. That’s it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes – just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I’m the UK, and a demand I face a further interview in October.

    The civility of individual officers doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of what happened. I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online – all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers.

    To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.

  • Why Putin is so chipper in China

    The often dour Vladimir Putin is looking very cheery in China, which has just hosted the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Tianjin to the north, and is preparing for a grand parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Beijing tomorrow.

    While Xi Jinping is clearly the man of the hour, Vladimir Putin seems to be having a good trip, too. Even as his Alaska summit saw him getting the literal red carpet treatment from Donald Trump, this is a chance to underline the degree to which Western efforts to isolate him really just mean that most European leaders are giving him hard stares. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, whose country continues to buy Russian oil despite punitive US sanctions, hopped into his (Russian-made) Aurus limousine for what ended up being an almost hour-long one-to-one chat. Putin has also had meetings with other leaders, from Turkey’s Erdogan and Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, to Vietnamese prime minister Phạm Minh Chính.

    Beijing is clearly pitching the SCO as the basis for an alternative global order, one in contrast to an existing one that the Chinese (and, frankly, many others in the Global South, or what Putin has taken to calling the World Majority) regard as built by the West to protect the West’s interests. The corollary, of course, is that the new system would be for Beijing’s convenience, but at present Putin doesn’t seem to have a problem with that.

    This is actually an issue on which there is a growing behind the scenes debate within the Russian elite. For Putin and his septuagenarian circle of cronies, all that really matters is winning (whatever that may mean) in Ukraine, and whatever compromises need to be made to that end are worth it. After all, Putin’s historical legacy, political credibility and perhaps even survival are all at stake. For the next political generation, the 50- and 60-somethings waiting, sometimes a little impatiently for their time in the sun, and whose horizons extend rather further, the danger that Russia will have already become a vassal of China’s by the time they take power is a worrying one. For now, though, Putin doesn’t want to hear it. China is necessary for his war, and that’s that.

    Xi Jinping is clearly the man of the hour, Vladimir Putin seems to be having a good trip, too

    Besides, events like the SCO summit allow him to hold forth on his usual concerns to a largely supportive audience. In his address, Putin pleased Xi by arguing that “the SCO could take a leading role in forming a fairer system of global governance. A system that would replace the obsolete Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models, would take into account the interests of a wide range of countries, that would be truly balanced. It would not allow attempts by some states to ensure their security at the expense of the security of others.”

    Except, a cynic might note, for Ukraine. However, this war was also the fault of those pernicious Westerners: “the crisis arose not as a result of Russia’s attack, but as a result of the coup d’etat in Ukraine, which was provoked by the West. And then by attempts to suppress the resistance of those regions in Ukraine that did not support this coup. The second reason for the crisis is the West’s constant attempts to draw Ukraine into Nato, which poses a direct threat to Russia’s security.”

    Putting aside the precise characterization of the 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” which did, in fairness, topple a corrupt but democratically elected president, and the mischaracterization of Ukraine’s relationship with Nato – it was always Kyiv beating on the door, with the Western alliance prevaricating – this is a line which works especially well at such gatherings for two reasons. Firstly, it allows Putin to flatter his hosts and peers, expressing his appreciation their efforts to address what he calls the “root causes” of the crisis (and which Kyiv would describe as its rights as a sovereign nation). Secondly, it speaks to a powerful current of not so much anti-Western feeling (though there is much of that, exacerbated by Trump’s tariff extravaganza) as growing self-confidence in the rest of the world.

    There was, after all, a prevailing sense that the future is theirs in a bloc which accounts for more than half of the world’s population and about a third of its GDP, with an average economic growth last year exceeding 5 percent. 

    For Putin, faced with the daily evidence of the mounting problems facing Russia, it makes sense to be in a club where Russia still matters, where the mood is optimistic, and where most agree – or at least are not there and then going to disagree – with what he has to say.

  • Why Graham Linehan’s arrest is a turning point

    Why Graham Linehan’s arrest is a turning point

    The hoo-ha in Britain over free speech being trampled on has always seemed exaggerated. I earn my living through voicing my opinions, and not once have I ever felt unable to say exactly what I think – especially when that’s controversial or offends large numbers of people.

    I am, of course, well aware that some people have had a very different experience – such as the comedy writer Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, who has robustly pointed out that biology means that men who identify as women are, nonetheless, still men. For that, his career was effectively ended in an industry that has long been in thrall to trans and other ideologies.

    But I have bridled at some of the supposed examples of free speech being destroyed. I am not one of those, for example, who believes Lucy Connolly is some sort of hero. Her social media post in the wake of the Southport murders last summer saying that hotels with asylum seekers should be set on fire was, to my mind, not merely revolting but incitement. Had it been merely revolting – something with which most decent people were horrified by – then that would be something for which she should have been taken to task, but not by the criminal justice system. Her post crossed a line, however.

    But there are moments when the penny drops and you realize you are wrong. Today has provided one of those moments. When Linehan returned from the United States yesterday, where he moved to be able to work, he was promptly arrested at Heathrow by five armed police officers. What alleged crime must he have been suspected of to be met by a show of such force? Murder? Terrorism? Armed robbery?

    None of those. He was arrested, he says in a Substack he posted earlier today, because of three tweets he had posted.

    Linehan’s tweets are nothing like Lucy Connolly’s. They are merely expressions of his view of trans ideology, albeit strongly worded, in his (entirely legitimate) style. In one, he posted a picture of what seems be a trans rights demonstration, with his caption: “A photo you can smell.” Another reads: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F— em.” And the third says: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

    You might not like his tone. You might find his attitude confrontational. Trans people will doubtless find the posts offensive. So what? There is no law against giving offense.

    Except that appears no longer to be true. The Metropolitan Police has confirmed that Linehan was held “in relation to posts on X.” “The man in his 50s was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence,” a spokesman said.

    Criminality is evolving every day in this sphere. Increasingly, giving offense is being taken by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service as prima facie evidence of criminality. The other side of this coin is that taking offense is seen as legitimate grounds for a complaint. Presumably someone made a complaint to the police over these tweets – unless, and this is not beyond the realms of possibility, the police have officers who spend their days trawling the internet looking for posts that offend what they consider to be good taste. Is that really a good use of police time?

    Trust in the police is at an all-time low. In October 2024, 52 percent of adults told YouGov that they had no confidence in the police to tackle crime, compared to 39 percent in October 2019. What the police don’t now do – tackle crime – is just one aspect of the collapse in trust. Allied to that is what the police do now do – such as arresting people over social media posts which merely give offense to someone. It’s of a piece with what is seen on the regular hate marches, where they stand and watch when there are calls for the murder of Jews (such as the widespread “globalize the intifada”), but only spring into action when a counter-demonstrator turns up, saying that they are likely to provoke a breach of the peace.

    What we are seeing is the congruence of two dangerous developments. First, is the idea that giving offense is something which should be banned. The government’s current move towards adopting a definition of Islamophobia is part of this, and has rightly been labelled by Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Muslim anti-prejudice group TellMAMA, as introducing a blasphemy law by the back door. Similarly, the onward march of the trans ideologues may have been stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of “woman,” but the ideology has already taken hold of many institutions and spaces.

    Which leads to the second development – the police’s capture by this and other “woke” ideologies. Linehan describes how in his police interview a police officer mentioned trans people: “I asked him what he meant by the phrase. ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’ I said: ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.”

    This is the nub of it. The police, supposed guardians of the law, have become players in the activists’ capture of the institutions. It is not that they are no longer concerned with crime, but that they are redefining what crime is. It is terrible that Linehan should have had to go through this. But if it wakes more of us up to what is happening in Britain, his arrest will have served our country well.