The Social World

Tag: Elon Musk

  • Trump’s cabinet is a liberal’s nightmare

    Trump’s cabinet is a liberal’s nightmare

    “Some people will correct me. They love to correct me. Even though I’m right about everything,” President Trump was saying, but no one was about to correct the President at this December cabinet meeting, the last in a series of extremely long such affairs that TV has carried this year. At this point, YouTube might as well set up a 24-hour livestream from inside the White House, like the sorts of stunts that were popular at the dawn of the personal video era. Trump is always with us, and talking at us.

    Before the roundtable of cabinet members listing their accomplishments and kissing the boss’s butt, Trump talked for nearly 30 minutes. Some highlights: “affordability” is a “fake narrative that Democrats talk about”; Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is “incompetent,” a “real dope” and “a stubborn ox who probably doesn’t like your President, your favorite President”; prices have come down substantially for “the fat drug for fat people”, and, stop the presses, “at some point in the not-so-distant future you’re not going to have income tax to pay.”

    And lest someone test Donald Trump’s mental acuity, he put all doubt to rest by saying, “I sit here and do four news conferences a day and answer questions from very intelligent lunatics, you people. I’ll let you know when there’s something wrong with me. There will be some day. It happens to all of us. I think I’m sharper now than I was 25 years ago. I took a cognitive test. I asked “is it hard?” Biden didn’t have a news conference for eight months and you said he was fine. I went one day without doing a news conference and you all went back and wrote “what’s wrong with the President?” I read in the New York Times, ‘Is Trump sharp?’ Trump is sharp. They’re not sharp.”

    The cabinet meeting was a liberal’s nightmare, with all their villains taking turns speaking. War Secretary Pete Hegseth used the word “lethality” several times, saying, “We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting terrorists at the bottom of the ocean.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick extolled the virtues of the tariff regime, while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that people were no longer wearing pajamas and slippers on airplanes, to which Trump said, “We’re saving our country. I don’t want to be braggadocious. Our country was down and it was never coming back.”

    Attorney General Pam Bondi said her department was keeping men out of women’s sports, fighting DEI, antifa and sanctuary cities, and helping free J-6 rioters from prison. Over in Homeland Security, Kristi Noem said Joe Biden “used this department to flood the country with terrorists. It’s our job to get them out. We’re going to send more home for the holidays, to make sure they can spend the holidays with their families.” Meanwhile, the head of the Small Business Administration invited everyone to join her in daily Bible study, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said “the Green New Scam is dead.” RFK Jr. said the Trump administration is defeating “the mercantile interests of Big Pharma and the medical-industrial complex” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this was “the most transformational year in American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War.”

    That all took more than an hour, after which Trump said, “I hope it wasn’t too long but it was very concise.” Then came everyone’s favorite segment, Q&A. An early question was about Elon Musk, whose hyperactivity was often a focus of the early-year cabinet meetings, before Trump tossed DoGE into the dustbin of history. A reporter asked if Trump and Musk were still friends. Trump said, sort of, he guesses. “We had one problem, I didn’t want everyone to have an electric car. And he makes electric cars.”

    Of the attacks on Venezuelan boats, Trump said, “I want those boats taken out, and if we have to we’ll attack on land as well, just like we attacked on sea.” That was sort of ominous, and Hegseth added that even though he didn’t witness the “second strike” on a boat that’s creating controversy and congressional investigations, he hardly apologized for the action. He said, “We will eliminate that threat, and we’re proud to do it… these white bales are not Christmas gifts from Santa.”

    “This is what’s called the fog of war,” Hegseth said, even though, technically, we’re not at war. “This is what you the press don’t see. You sit in your air conditioned offices or on Capitol Hill… while we’re doing dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people.”

    The gathering ended with Trump talking about Minnesota welfare fraud to benefit Somali terrorist groups, which had him incensed, as it does all right-thinking people. “When I see what’s happening in Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes, I don’t know how many lakes, they got a lotta lakes, it makes me mad. Our country’s at a tipping point. We could go bad. We could go one way or another. We’re going to go bad if we keep taking garbage into our country… if they come from hell and they complain and they do nothing but bitch, we don’t want ‘em in our country.”

    Around the room, people pounded the table at that piece of closing rhetoric. The President had spoken on behalf of the American people. Trump, leading the greatest cabinet the world has ever seen from “the most transparent administration in history,” was very sharp indeed.

  • DoGE has had its day

    DoGE has had its day

    DoGE has been DoGE’d. The once fearsome government efficiency office has been shut down eight months before its contract officially ends in July 2026. What was supposed to be an organization that exploded traditional ways of running the federal government has turned into a damp squib. 

    It was established by President Trump on the first day of his second term in office. Headed by Tesla chief Elon Musk and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (who resigned early on to run for Ohio governor), it struck the kind of fear into government bureaucrats that a visit from the Red Guards might instill during Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Musk’s minions rampaged through government offices, whether it was the US Institute of Peace or the Wilson Center. The idea was that the bastions of the liberal establishment would not simply be purged but permanently abolished. 

    Now, as Reuters reports, the efficiency office has been disbanded. “That doesn’t exist” as a “centralized entity” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said. Hasta la vista, in other words. After Musk torched, or appeared to torch, his relationship with Trump in May, DoGE began to sputter. The Trump administration is trying to put the best face possible on its dissolution. On social media Kupor declared, “”DoGE may not have centralized leadership under @USDS,” Kupor said, referring to the United States Digital Service, which was reorganized into DoGE. “But, the principles of DoGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.”  

    Yeah, right. The truth is that a government-wide freeze on hiring is over and the federal deficit has reached a record $38 trillion in the past month. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will add over $3 trillion to the deficit and that the deficit for fiscal year 2025 will run $1.8 trillion. The only mitigating factor has been a de facto tax hike by Trump who has imposed punitive tariffs. 

    If the debt remains, so does the insalubrious legacy of DoGE. One is the agencies that it either denuded or shuttered during its brief but chaotic existence. Take the Kennan Institute, which was formerly housed in the Wilson Center on the Washington Mall. I recently visited its new headquarters on K Street – a one-room office. The institute will make a comeback, but demolishing the Wilson Center was symbolic of DoGE’s march of folly through Washington. 

    Another inadvertent legacy of DoGE is actually diametrically opposed to its mandate – the expansion of big government in the form of National Guard troops stationed in a variety of American cities. When DoGE staffer Edward “Big Balls” Corisine was attacked by ten juveniles near DC’s Dupont Circle in early August, Trump responded by stationing the National Guard in Washington and other cities. But this initiative, too, appears to be ebbing as Trump refrains from sending in troops to New York City and a federal judge blocks his deployment of the National Guard in Washington. 

    As he focuses on becoming the world’s first trillionaire, Musk, who attended the White House dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, appears to have put the entire episode in the rearview mirror. Once upon a time he called himself the president’s “first buddy.” Then came the feud with Trump. Now the reconciliation? 

  • The global cottage industry gaming America’s culture wars

    The global cottage industry gaming America’s culture wars

    It is the 9/11 of the blue ticks, the Hindenburg of the grifters, the dotcom bubble of the slop-peddlers.

    The influencer industry has been left reeling by a new function on X which allows readers to see the location from which any given account is operating. The latest update makes it possible to establish when and where an X account was set up and whether it has changed its name since then.

    A sensible measure, you might think, but not if X is where you make your living and do so by inserting yourself into other countries’ internal politics. There are no firm figures on how many earn a crust this way but even the most cursory glance through the Hellsite Formerly Known as Twitter will tell you the number isn’t insignificant.

    It’s near impossible to scroll down the “For You” stream without spotting an account with US flags in the profile and header pics and a litany of posts, images and especially videos highlighting the worst of US political, cultural and racial divisions. Yet while this is posed as the output of Americans frustrated by one thing or another, it is sometimes – perhaps often – the work of foreigners who do not live in the United States, never have, have no connection to the country whatsoever, but who have figured out a way to make bank off the need of very online Americans for validation of their pre-existing attitudes.

    This is the result of Elon Musk allowing users to monetize their accounts via a premium subscription. Flipping the blue tick from an imprimatur of an account’s authenticity to a marker of someone on the make ought to have been sufficient warning for users, but on social media as in commerce the emptor seldom heeds the caveat.

    And now everyone can see just how many of those blue ticks aren’t what they seem.

    You’ve got to admire their entrepreneurial pluck. It’s all too easy to sit back and coast at your nine-to-five, but these guys have identified a gap in the market and created a whole new industry serving up rageslop to Westoid midwits who can be roused to anger about anything – race, gender, Jews, chemtrails, White House refurbishment – other than the civilization crumbling around them.

    Farming culture-war engagement is a slog, especially when you work to build an audience for one grievance then events (or impressions data) require you to pivot to another one. It’s more effort than reward in most advanced economies but in poorer climes pandering to prejudices and pathologies can bring in a nice chunk of change. First World problems pay Third World mortgages.

    And is there really all that much harm done?

    If you’ve been following @Zoomer_Rhodesian, who claims to be a twenty-something e-girl from Galveston, for her “Is it them again, Yogi?” memes and her keen interest in Waffle House CCTV footage, does it matter that the account is actually the work of Manjeet, a Gen-X father of eight from Ghaziabad?

    If you’re in the market for a desperate Gazan whose only son is shot dead by the IDF every few weeks, and someone in Romania is happy to play that role for engagement, what have you to complain about? You created a market and the market responded accordingly. Service sought, service rendered, cash collected.

    The follower of such an account is being deceived, of course, but only in the same sense that the subscriber to OnlyFans is deceived when his favorite camgirl confesses with a moan that he gets her so hot.

    Where phony accounts can be a source of harm is when their fictions are amplified without verification by the mainstream media. The greatest risk of this comes with accounts which purport to document issues journalists care most about, from a perspective journalists most strongly agree with, in parts of the world where access for journalists is restricted or financially prohibitive. Which is a long-winded way of saying “Palestine.”

    Even here, though, the substantive harm is not done by the Indonesian random inventing ever more lurid stories about Israeli villainy but by the journalist who fails to do that most basic of diligences: check your sources.

    The origin update isn’t all downsides, though. If you’ve ever been unjustly accused of being a foreign influence op, Elon’s latest innovation brings sweet vindication. I should know from my own X account. Contrary to what I’m sometimes told, I don’t tweet from an air-conditioned basement suite at the Mossad headquarters – more’s the pity – but from across the pond in good old Blighty. Look, I have the certificate to prove it.

    This, however, raises another possibility: that accounts flagged as American or otherwise Western will now become very valuable, valuable enough for Westerners to make a fast buck of our own flogging our log-in details to Indian influencers and Ghanaian grifters. Finally, globalization is working in our favor again.

  • Among the lords of tech

    Among the lords of tech

    “What’s missing?” the tech titan Peter Thiel asks me, over lunch on the hummingbird-infested patio of his house in the Hollywood Hills. He gestures at Los Angeles, laid out in the haze below us. “Cranes!” he explains. Thiel has argued for years that America has done most of its innovation in digital “bits” instead of physical “atoms” because bureaucracy, regulation and environmentalism have got in the way of the latter. While software has exploded, transport and infrastructure have stagnated. But over the next few days in Austin, Texas, and around San Francisco Bay, I see evidence this is changing. Traveling with the upbeat co-founders of the Rational Optimist Society, Stephen McBride and Dan Steinhart, we seek out companies that are inventing everything from cheaper supersonic jet engines to intelligent prosthetic arms for amputees. The founders, in mandatory black T-shirts, speak excitedly about the new opportunity to innovate in real things, thanks mainly to two factors: ChatGPT and Elon Musk.

    Take Atom Bodies, the prosthetic-arm firm. Its founder started three digital companies before creating robotic arms with 26 degrees of freedom in their fingers, hoping one day to make them capable of learning to interpret the wearers’ wishes. To his astonishment, large language models made this possible almost immediately. It now takes just five minutes for an amputee to teach the arm which nerve signals in his or her stump indicate a mental attempt to move a particular digit in a phantom limb.

    In Austin we visit the Boring Company, one of Musk’s lower-profile ventures. In just 18 months it built several miles of car tunnels beneath the gigantic Las Vegas convention center, with three “stations” where you can catch a Tesla taxi. It did so at a fraction of the usual cost by automating, streamlining and rethinking the way boring machines work. The tunnels already carry 35,000 passengers a day with an average wait time of ten seconds. Soon the entire city will be networked this way. Then I catch my first driverless Waymo robo-taxi. I find it takes about ten seconds to get used to trusting the non-driver as it weaves in and out of traffic at just the right speed; it is not even especially polite, bullying another driver who tries to cut in. Later that day a Waymo runs over a cat in San Francisco, to the horror (and secret delight) of Luddites who create a shrine of flowers in its memory.

    Swing a cat out here and you hit a legend. The 86-year-old tech visionary Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase “personal computer,” lives with his entrepreneur wife Ryan Phelan by a tidal creek north of the Golden Gate bridge. Two dozen of us gather to pick their olive harvest. What’s your biggest claim to fame, I ask Jennifer Saffo on the drive back to San Francisco. Her husband, the futurologist Paul Saffo, replies: “She coined the name for Microsoft Excel.”

    Up a dusty track by the Pacific Ocean we find Zipline, a drone company delivering everything from takeout in Dallas to swine semen in Rwanda. A self-steering droid descends on a fishing line from a drone hovering quietly 300ft above and scoops a package into its belly before being reeled back into the drone. Software simulation makes this hardware safe and efficient: bits to atoms again. So far, Zipline drones have flown 120 million miles, or five times the distance to the moon, without a serious accident.

    News breaks that James Watson has died. As well as discovering the secret of life in 1953, he broke new literary ground with his 1968 book The Double Helix, in which he paints himself as the villain: the original title was the intentionally ironic “Honest Jim.” When I wrote Francis Crick’s biography, Watson shared private correspondence about their brief but bitter feud over the book. “Some of this does not present you in a good light,” I said. “I don’t care,” he replied: “The truth is what matters.”

    Over dinner in San Francisco with a bunch of absurdly young entrepreneurs who are doing everything from drug design to deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, I ask them what they are worried about. China, most of them reply. It’s racing ahead in biotech, rapidly catching up in AI and showing no sign of slowing down, despite the increasing autocracy of its leader. Nobody mentions climate change. When I ask Thiel the same question, he says enviro-Marxism has kept the young off the housing ladder, giving them no stake in the future.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Elon *does* have friends… in high places

    Where are you going, Elon? Where have you been?

    The 87-year-old novelist Joyce Carol Oates unleashed her X account to excoriate the app’s owner Elon Musk this weekend. “So curious that such a wealthy man never posts anything that indicates that he enjoys or is even aware of what virtually everyone appreciates – scenes from nature, pet dog or cat, praise for a movie, music, a book (but doubt that he reads); pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died… In fact he seems totally uneducated, uncultured. The poorest persons on Twitter may have access to more beauty & meaning in life than the ‘most wealthy person in the world.’”

    OK, Joyce. Or maybe Elon (who definitely reads, just not soggy literary fiction), is occupied with his many companies, sending driverless cars to space, and doesn’t have time to enjoy the fall foliage in Connecticut or root root root for the home team. 

    Besides, he does have friends. The Wall Street Journal today reports on Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin. At one point, “Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.” Very touching. Cockburn is sure if Putin’s dog died, Elon would send him a condolence Signal, too. 

    On our radar

    VETERANS DAY President Trump participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery this morning to mark Veterans Day.

    GRAN STANDING President Gustavo Petro of Colombia has been talking up “Gran Colombia” – a 19th-century state consisting of his country, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama – as the US ratchets up its naval presence in the region.

    TEARS OF UNFATHOMABLE SADNESS South Park’s creators justified their show’s recent Trump-bashing streak in a New York Times interview. “It’s not that we got all political,” Trey Parker said. “It’s that politics became pop culture.”

    Should Dulles become the Donald J. Trump International Airport?

    Whenever Cockburn gets gloomy with the state of the world, he thinks about the arrivals gate at Dulles Airport. No matter how bereft he is, he tells himself, it could be worse – he could be packed like a sardine inside one of those claustrophobic Star Wars-esque people-transporters after touching down from a distant land. The main terminal itself is arguably the high point of architect Eero Saarinen’s career – but the airport’s means of moving arriving passengers toward it is decidedly outdated. Washington was offered a timely reminder of this yesterday, when one of the mobile lounges crashed into the dock it was supposed to be parked at. Eighteen people were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. President Trump is currently fixated on rebuilding things in DC – the football stadium, the East Wing – and naming them after him. There is a strong case for adding a Dulles revamp to the list.

    The accident is just the latest of America’s aviation woes, after FAA cuts led to thousands of canceled and delayed flights. Even as the House prepares to end the shutdown, the chaos is expected to continue. “It will take time, and there will be residual effects for days,” said an Airlines for America spokesperson. Who’s ready to take the train for Thanksgiving?

    I ain’t no follow-back girl

    Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico follows several porn stars, escorts and OnlyFans models on Instagram, including Giselle Palmer, the “Honky Tonk Angel,” according to an Axios story this weekend. Rather than owning up to a calculated attempt to tap into the “gooner” caucus, Talarico’s spokesman J.T. Ennis said the campaign “follows back and engages with supporters who have large followings and does not investigate their backgrounds. James has never subscribed to OnlyFans or an escort service.” 

    Ennis also said, “While James was unaware of how these women make money, he does not judge them for it and will not play into an effort to smear them for clickbait articles. That’s exactly what his Christian faith calls him to do.” Love thy porn star as thyself. 

    No one would care were Talarico an ordinary man following OnlyFans models on Instagram. Cockburn finds this curious only because of Talarico’s gee-whiz Mr. Smith Goes To Washington political persona. He has cultivated a decent amount of hype in the Lone Star State through his pastor-esque addresses. More pertinently: who tipped off Axios to this follow-back indiscretion? Was it the bland former football player Colin Allred, whom Talarico is rapidly swamping in the Democratic primary? Or are his Republican rivals, such as the perpetually mid Senator John Cornyn and the disreputable Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (whose wife recently filed to divorce him for “Biblical reasons”) starting to feel the heat from his rising star? Regardless, liberal Democrats, who feign moral outrage every time a Republican even thinks about a woman’s breasts, seem willing to go to the rack for their new Texas golden boy. If Talarico’s campaign somehow falters, he can always start an OnlyFans.

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

  • Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

    Bill Gates and the rightward shift of the billionaires

    To his fellow high priests of the church of climate change, Bill Gates has just committed the ultimate heresy. He has told us that we are not all going to die from scorching temperatures, despite in the past having said “we are setting ourselves up for a humanitarian and geopolitical disaster.” In a new essay posted on his personal website, he has attacked the “doomsday view” that “in a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization.” He writes: “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences… it will not lead to humanity’s demise.”

    His rejection of catastrophism is no small matter. Next week, the world’s great and good will board their private jets and head off to the Brazilian city of Belém for COP30, an annual shindig that is very much based on the premise that the world is coming to an end unless we take drastic action. According to UN Secretary General António Guterres last month, climate change has pushed humanity “to the brink” – a variation on last year, when he told us we were at “breaking point.” Spewing out the superlatives has been an annual ritual since even before Al Gore told us in 2006 that we had ten years left to save the planet. The only variation is exactly how long we have left before we seal our fate, ranging from eight years (then-Prince Charles in 2009), to five years (the WWF in 2007 and again in 2024), three years (former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres in 2017) or two years (current UN climate chief Simon Stiell in 2024.) 

    As every doomsayer has discovered throughout history, it is one thing to gain attention with your grim prophecies before the hour at which you say they will happen, but it becomes a little harder once those dates have passed and we are all still living and breathing. Gates, for one, has realized that the hyperbole is starting to lose its effect. Anyone who wants to retain public attention on the issue will have to acknowledge that actually, no, we are not all going to die from climate change. Most won’t even notice.

    What the doom-mongers ever thought they would achieve was always puzzling. Telling people that they are all going to die is hardly the greatest way of motivating them. Set impossible deadlines for human societies to eliminate their greenhouse-gas emissions and you encourage them into apathy more than anything. You plant the idea in people’s heads: why not enjoy our last few years and go out in style? Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we fry!

    Of course, many young people indoctrinated into the doomsday cult by their teachers and professors had just the opposite response. More than half of all zoomers and millennials report that so-called eco-anxiety distresses their mental health; 52 percent of them say the looming threat of climate change makes them less likely to have children. Maybe this is why Generation Z is so antisocial – no time to party when you’ve gotta save the planet! Will Gates and his jet-set peers apologize for creating a generation of childless neurotics? Probably not. Better just to bury your reversal in a bland memo.

    Note the timing of Gates’s newfound wisdom. Since President Donald Trump was re-elected, it’s become politically and financially inconvenient to be so green and gloomy. “Drill, baby, drill,” commands the President, and poof goes corporate America’s insistence that we all must buy overpriced, dumb-looking electric vehicles.

    President Trump has said his favorite architectural style is that of Louis XIV – think gold, grand, a bit gaudy. Hence his gilded plans for the White House’s new ballroom. Like that French monarch, nicknamed the Sun King, Trump has the nation’s oligarchs revolving around him. None dare stray too far from his light, as the President has no qualms about picking winners and losers among the titans of industry. Musk, Zuck, Altman and Bezos figured this out quickly, and soon after the election began making journeys to Trump’s palace of Mar-a-Lago to pay tribute.

    Gates is a late entry to this popularity contest, and we’re not likely to see him riding shotgun in a golf cart with the President around the links. But his defection from the progressive orthodoxy bodes well: other billionaires will surely follow, and the ruling class may finally begin to respond to Americans’ needs rather than what that class thinks those needs should be.

    But it’s not just Trump who should be thanked for the billionaire red shift: New York’s incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani deserves some share of the gratitude as well. No city has more billionaires or millionaires than New York. As Heather Mac Donald explains in our cover story, that economic boon may not survive Mamdani’s reign. Mayor Mamdani is committed to making the rich “pay their fair share,” whatever that means, and to fighting the 1 percent. There’s a word for this: extortion. Fortunately for the city’s many business leaders, plenty of low-tax, red-state promised lands across the country will welcome their exodus.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • ‘Trump isn’t easy’: Piers Morgan on his friends – and foes

    ‘Trump isn’t easy’: Piers Morgan on his friends – and foes

    When I meet Piers Morgan, he warns me he’s glued to the “moment in history” happening on his TV screens that morning. He is watching Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages as part of the peace deal negotiated by his old friend Donald Trump.

    The two have known each other for 17 years, first meeting when Morgan appeared in – and won – Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. He tells me that Trump’s final words to him on the show were: “Piers, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re almost certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the Celebrity Apprentice.”

    Eight years later, when Trump won the 2016 presidential election, Morgan sent him a card saying: “Well, Donald, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the President of the United States.”

    It hasn’t always been such plain sailing between the two. Morgan recalls a time when Nigel Farage attempted to sabotage a planned interview by furnishing Trump with a dossier of every negative column Morgan had written about him, including the statement that he should be “barred from ever running for president again.” The interview was salvaged only when Morgan mentioned that he wanted to ask about Trump’s recent hole-in-one on the golf course.

    “Trump as a friend isn’t easy,” Morgan muses. “He can be incendiary, his rhetoric pisses people off, he can be very shoot-from-the-hip.” But in spite of all this, he’s not surprised that Trump may be the man to secure peace in the Middle East. “[Is there] anyone else who could get an agreement from Middle Eastern countries to end this war now?” he asks. “I don’t think there is.”

    Morgan says the two talk constantly. The morning after British Prime Minister Keir Starmer handed Trump the invitation for his second state visit, for example, the President phoned the former Daily Mirror editor, unable to decide between Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle for the state dinner. “You’ve got to go for the castle – looks better,” Morgan advised. When Trump rang the morning after the banquet, he reported that he loved it. “He’s a sucker for pomp and pageantry,” Morgan says. And just the other day, Morgan tells me, Trump called him to let him know: “Piers, you’re looking good on the TV.”

    The self-confessed “rampant egomaniac” who used to party with the stars as the Sun’s showbiz reporter isn’t one to shy away from criticizing those he considers to be friends. Despite regularly texting Starmer to discuss Arsenal Football Club, he doesn’t think the Prime Minister is doing a good job. “Domestically,” he says, Starmer has “been a failure so far.” Perhaps this is why Starmer won’t sit down with him for an interview. He had said he would do so after Morgan gave him “an unwanted lecture on how to run the country” at a party, but so far he’s not made good on his promise to appear on the YouTube show Piers Morgan Uncensored.

    “If you’re going to run the country you better be able to deal with an interview with me,” Morgan says. “He’s a bit like Boris Johnson when he ran into that fridge on Good Morning Britain.” Scared, in other words.

    On the subject of former prime minister Boris Johnson, he’s pretty damning: “Beneath the buffoon exterior may lie an actual buffoon.” And he doesn’t stop there: “Until he learns to comb his hair, I’m not interested.” What does he reckon about the current Tory leader? “Reports of her political death may have been exaggerated.”

    He’s less kind about Nigel Farage, the leader of the Reform party, predicting that with “his current economic policies” Reform won’t win the next general election. “He has momentum but how you pay for things matters.”

    It’s the Green party leader Zack Polanski who bothers him most, however. The two got into a spat on his program earlier this month and Morgan tells me now: “He’s just not impressive at all. You cannot be prime minister of Great Britain if you think women have penises. It’s a red line.”

    Polanski embodies the “woke” culture Morgan loathes. His latest book, Woke Is Dead: How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness, was published this month. He’s returned to the theme in print five years after writing Wake Up about the war on free speech. “They [the left] ignored me and got more insane – and then suffered electorally.”

    So is he pleased that the Democrats were punished at the ballot box for adopting “woke” causes? No, Morgan says: “I’m a centrist… Socially, I’m pretty liberal.” But for now, “they’ve demeaned the American justice system” in their attempts to block Trump. “They got him for shuffling a bit of paper over and alleging a one-night stand with a porn star… [It’s] trivial and ridiculous.”

    And while he might be right that the Democrats got a beating for hitching themselves “to an ideology most Americans rejected… Trump’s re-election was a repudiation of it,” has woke been abandoned in quite the same way this side of the pond? After all, Green party membership in the UK has now surged past that of the Conservative party. “It still pops up like weeds, and we need to root it out when it does,” he says. “This is an important moment to draw a line and lay groundwork so it doesn’t come back.” That’s what the book’s about. We need, he tells me, an “industrial woke weedkiller” ready for when it next rears its head.

    For Morgan, it seems personal: he appears to genuinely care about the victims of cancel culture. The plight of “teachers, nurses, professors” who have lost their jobs plagues him. “They should get medals,” he says. He reserves deep sympathy for J.K. Rowling because of the abuse targeted at her for her views on single-sex spaces, despite conceding that they “don’t get on personally.” (She once described him as a “fact-free, amoral, bigotry-apologizing celebrity toady.” In return he called her “superior, dismissive and arrogant.”)

    Perhaps his sympathy for her comes about because of the abuse he has received himself. After the “Meghan Markle saga,” which saw him storm off Good Morning Britain after criticizing the duchess, “they came for me and targeted my kids,” he says. His son received a death threat on Instagram, but after months of investigation the police said they couldn’t find the identity behind the anonymous accounts.

    Has this experience shaped how he views Elon Musk and his running of X? Musk, Morgan says, has joined Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer in dodging him for an interview – so far, the tech mogul has canceled twice. Could this be owing to the famous feud between Musk and Morgan’s pal Trump? He’s dismissive of that idea and thinks Musk and Trump could make up at some stage. They met at Charlie Kirk’s memorial recently and may do business together again – though Morgan doesn’t think “that relationship will ever be quite the same again.”

    Were he to sit down with Musk, the subject of anonymous accounts might form part of the interview. While he praises the fact-checking of X’s AI chatbot Grok, Morgan is damning about the types of accounts that threatened his son: “Death threats aren’t free speech.” He’s also unhappy about the accounts that go too far: “Kanye West should be banned for anti-Semitic hate; Alex Jones, too, for the Sandy Hook lies [that the massacre was faked].”

    How would the man who played a not insignificant role in killing woke culture like to be remembered? “That I didn’t die wondering.” For him, his most important legacy is his children: “They still want to hang out with me in adulthood – that’s a success.” And he still wants to hang out with them. On two conditions, though: that they stay loyal to Arsenal, and never, ever go on the reality television show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

  • Why you need Big Balls

    Why you need Big Balls

    Big nicknames come with big responsibilities. And the owner of one of the mightiest monikers – Big Balls – feels the weight of his own obligations keenly.

    In a rare interview, Edward Coristine spoke about how his family fled to America from Russia after his grandfather was executed for spying for the US. Valery Martynov was a KGB officer who was recruited by the FBI in the early 1980s. He passed Soviet secrets to his American handlers until he was exposed by Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, two of the most notorious traitors in US history. 

    Recalled to Moscow under false pretenses, Martynov was arrested and executed in 1987. His widow and children eventually sought refuge in America.

    Coristine, now Big Balls, says he was inspired by the same patriotic call to action as his grandfather, who “died so that I could come here and live in this free country.”

    “I feel this great responsibility to serve my country,” Coristine added. For him, his role at DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency), where both he and his nickname came to public prominence, was a way to repay the country that took his family in.

    “When I started seeing these problems that we’ve got as a government, this $37 trillion national debt and counting… I was like ‘This is insane, is there any way I can help solve this?’”

    Coristine, still only 19-years-old, has already lived several lives. Elon Musk’s presence has been unmistakable in his early years. Briefly, he interned at Neuralink – Musk’s brain-implant company – and launched his own LLC called TESLA.SEXY that dabbled in web domains and AI bots. 

    As the teenage tech prodigy mastered the tech world, Musk juggled a half-dozen projects that were not enough to satisfy him. His Ayn Randian revulsion to public spending led him to the one institution inept enough to merit his time: the federal government. And with his pal Donald Trump headed back to the White House, his DOGE meme dream was set to become reality.

    DOGE featured a team of young, brilliant tech geeks. Coristine was singled out by Musk himself for a job in the big leagues – and nothing in his world was the same again.

    The media seized on him early. Journalists scoured his online trail and discovered TESLA.SEXY, mocking its Russian-registered domains as proof of malintent. They dug into his Neuralink internship, highlighting that he was fired after allegedly leaking internal documents. Coristine denies these accusations. 

    When they discovered he had, for a joke, once called himself Big Balls on his LinkedIn profile, they sensed blood. They published profiles that called him a “concerning” addition to Musk’s team who potentially posed a national security threat. For them, Big Balls was an easy foil: young, reckless, inexperienced, a symbol of what they saw as Musk’s arrogance in reshaping government with MAGA youth.

    Still a teenager, Big Balls held a senior advisory role in DOGE, where he gained direct access to federal systems like the General Services Administration and the National Finance Center, and served as a senior adviser to the Departments of State and Homeland Security. He pushed career bureaucrats to justify their jobs, oversaw plans to close smaller agency offices, and supported the rollout of AI tools to replace clerical work.

    He racked up more accomplishments than career staffers twice his age, apparently, all before being old enough to buy a beer after work.

    Then came the night that made him a martyr.

    It happened during the dim hours of August 3rd in Logan Circle – one of Washington’s busier neighborhoods. 

    According to police, ten young punks closed in on Coristine’s car, surrounding it like a pack of wolves. Coristine got his girlfriend into the car to protect her. He then turned to face the attackers head on, who descended on him in a flurry of blows. Officers on patrol caught the chaos as it unfolded, managing to stop two suspects while the rest vanished into the streets. 

    He was left battered and bloodied, but still standing. Big Balls had earned his nickname.

    News of the attack traveled quickly – and ignited an unprecedented federal response. Within days, President Donald Trump announced that federal forces would be deployed to Washington to address rising crime. His critics decried the move as authoritarian. Supporters called it overdue. Either way, Big Balls’ bravery was the catalyst for the nationalization of DC’s police force and the swarm of National Guard troops now patrolling the nation’s capital. 

    The city went nearly two weeks without a single reported homicide, and over 1,000 criminals have since been arrested. 

    For Big Balls’ critics, diminishing him has been easier than grappling with what he represents. He, like many others, walked out of the US Government when Elon Musk left DOGE. Love him or hate him, Musk has revolutionized modern technology and is idolized by the next generation’s innovators. His ambitious, and often controversial, expedition into government auditing hit a nerve with the elite who rely on a tsunami of taxpayer funds to keep their cups overflowing. 

    As for Big Balls, the name remains, and perhaps that is fitting. He now lives larger than life in the MAGA memory – the kindle which sparked a military mobilization to restore order in the nation’s capital.

  • America pays tribute to Charlie Kirk

    America pays tribute to Charlie Kirk

    In an exhilarating, often exhausting and unprecedented moment in American history, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in an Arizona football stadium on Sunday afternoon to honor slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Attendees included dozens of members of Congress, half the Cabinet, President Trump, Vice-President Vance and the former shadow President, Elon Musk.

    They remembered Kirk as a husband, a father, a friend, a true believer in the American way, a devotee of freedom of speech and civil discourse, a lover of classical Greek and Roman philosophy, and, perhaps most significantly, a warrior for the Christian God, belief in whom animated Kirk’s every utterance and every action.

    Kirk’s memorial, or, as many speakers, including Vance, called it, “revival,” was perhaps the most Christian event in American history to take place outside a church setting. Devotional music augmented every minute of the proceedings, with many members of the passionate crowd singing along. In one of the most stunning and beautiful moments of grace in memory, Kirk’s widow, Erika, fought back tears as she said that Kirk wanted “to save young men, just like the one who took his life. I forgive him, I forgive him because it’s what Christ did and it’s what Charlie would do.”

    Erika Kirk’s redemptive words and composure, somewhat muted a few minutes later when President Trump implied he would seek the federal death penalty for Charlie Kirk’s accused killer Tyler Robinson, stood in direct contrast to the cruel, graceless left-wing celebrations that occurred online in the days after Kirk’s death.

    The revival proceedings included a predictably unhinged, vengeful rant by Trump advisor Stephen Miller, a rambling address by Tucker Carlson, combative MAGA thumping from the extremely online Jack Posobiec, and classy remarks from Tulsi Gabbard and a clearly grieving Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. As always, though, President Trump’s appearance, which came at nearly the five-hour mark of a very long ceremony, was the highlight.

    Trump appeared on stage surrounded by sparklers as an aged Lee Greenwood, facing him like a lover in a duet, crooned “I’m Proud To Be An American.” The President, never one to stay entirely on message, talked about sending federal troops into Chicago, about declaring war on Antifa, and called Jimmy Kimmel an “anchor with no talent and low ratings.” He also reiterated that he was going to be awarding Kirk a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom and called the assassination “an assault on our most sacred God-given liberties and God-given rights. The gun was pointed at him but the bullet was aimed at all of us…The assassin failed in this quest because Charlie’s message has not been silenced, and now is bigger and better and stronger than ever before.”

    It was a vintage Trump performance with something for everyone, unless you are a “radical left lunatic.” On political violence and freedom of speech, he had this to say: “No side has a monopoly on disturbed or misguided people, but there’s one part of our political community which believes they have a monopoly on truth…If speech is violence, then some are bound to conclude that violence is justified to stop speech.”

    When it came to religion, Trump said, “We have to bring back religion to America because without borders, law and order and religion you really don’t have a country anymore.” But though Trump invoked God a number of times, and expressed admiration for the Christian faith of the Kirk family, his presentation was not overtly religious. In fact, at one point he said Kirk “did not hate his opponents, he wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagree with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want what’s best for them. I’m sorry, I am sorry Erika.” That was very non-Christian of Trump, but you cannot say the same thing for the Kirk revival as a whole.

    It’s one thing if Charlie Kirk’s pastor, coworkers, friends, widow, or Benny Johnson say things like “Charlie looked at politics as an onramp to Jesus” or “Charlie was a prophet…not the fortunetelling kind, but the Biblical kind.” It’s another when the Secretary of State publicly preaches the Gospel truth about Christ’s resurrection in an event broadcast to countless millions around the world, as Marco Rubio did. JD Vance called Kirk a “martyr for the Christian faith”, as did many other speakers. He said, “The assassin expected us to have a funeral but instead we have had a revival in the celebration of Charlie Kirk and his Lord Jesus Christ.”

    Vance also said, “Charlie brought the truth that Jesus Christ was the King of Kings and all things flowed from that,” while also calling Kirk a lover of history, defender of the West, and the foremost practitioner of the Socratic method. “I have talked more about Jesus Christ the past two weeks than I have my entire time in public life,” Vance said.

    He’s not the only one. This is the most Christian moment in America that I can recall, and I’ve been alive since the Nixon Presidency. On the one hand, Charlie Kirk was a devoted Christian, and is obviously a hugely influential figure in modern American political history; you can’t ignore the reality. And when you look at the shining, optimistic faces in the arena, or at the many spontaneous prayer gatherings that have sprung up since his murder, it’s far preferable to the bitter, angry, mendacious violent woke race Communism or whatever it is that modern progressives are offering. Kirk offered a message of faith, family, patriotism, and love, and a soul-sick nation, thirsty for optimism, responded.

    On the other hand, some of us will never accept Jesus Christ as our personal savior. I’m Jewish, so that’s right out for me, and there are other religious and non-religious people who sit in the same kettle. Not every spiritual journey ends with “He Is Risen.”

    The Kirk assassination is going to have deep reverberations throughout American history for a generation, and possibly beyond. I just hope that free and open dialogue and turning the other cheek end up being part of those reverberations.

  • The Facebook police come calling

    The Facebook police come calling

    In the United States, despite an attorney general who appears unclear on the concept, we enjoy the freest speech laws of anywhere in the world. Not so in the UK, where police casually drop by to harass citizens about their Internet activity. They visited the wrong cottage this summer, as we see in a video released this week by the UK’s “Free Speech Union”. The Thames Valley Police paid a visit to the home of “an American cancer patient and Trump supporter,” who wasn’t having it.

    “You can come in,” she said, “but you’d better have a damn good reason for being here.”

    They did not.

    “I’ll have Elon Musk on you so quick your feet won’t touch,” she said, in a statement that may have carried more weight in June than it does today.

    The officer, who seemed to have no idea he’d bumbled into a Key and Peele sketch, sat on an orange blanket and said, “Something that we believe you’ve written on Facebook has upset someone.”

    “You’re here because somebody got upset?” she said. “Is it against the law? Am I being arrested?”

    “You’re not being arrested.”

    “Then what are you doing here?”

    The officer said he wanted her to make an apology to the person she’d offended.

    “I’m not apologizing to anybody,” she said. “I can tell you that.”

    Well then, said Officer Friendly, perhaps you can come in for an interview. This “allegation,” he said, has been reported to the police.

    “So what?” the woman said. “Are there no houses that have been burgled lately? No rapes? No murders?”

    “Yeah, that’s all going on as well.”

    “Well then why aren’t you out there investigating those?”

    “Because I’ve got to investigate everything that’s reported.”

    “You’re not investigating houses being burgled?”

    “No,” the officer said. “That’s not my job today.”

    His job was to be the thought police. That didn’t make our heroine very happy.

    “Do you know how many houses in this neighborhood have been broken into?” she said.

    “I don’t look after this neighborhood,” he said.

    “No, of course you don’t. Unless there’s a tweet. Then you do… you should not be doing this. I’m a cancer patient. You can see that because I’m bald.”

    We should point out that the video is from the woman’s point of view, so we don’t see that she’s bald.

    “Well, I didn’t know that before I came,” the officer said. “But it still doesn’t say anything. You still can’t break the law. If you don’t break the law, nothing happens.”

    Some laws are meant to be broken, she implied, and we agree. In fact, some laws shouldn’t be laws at all.

    “The public knows what you guys are doing,” she said. “We know what’s going on in this country.”

    Thank you, random Internet lady with cancer. All the people in my feed today – and there are hundreds of them – fulminating about the free-speech violation of Jimmy Kimmel, one of the wealthiest and most prominent voices on the American stage, should take a peek at this case, and hundreds like them, taking place in a country that truly doesn’t support free speech.

    As the Free Speech Union points out, the Thames Valley Police is guarding President Trump as he makes his UK rounds this week. Wouldn’t Trump like to know what the cops are up to on their regular rounds? As long as Donald Trump is visiting the British Isles, he should consider staging a bloodless coup to free UK citizens from the busybody free-speech police, who literally knock on doors and tell sick ladies to stop making mean tweets.