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In yet more proof that even broken clocks are right twice a day, a number of GOP lawmakers, operatives, and pundits have come out against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to livestream the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. The general consensus—even among Republicans—is that broadcasting a firing squad execution isn’t just morally wrong, but it also plays into the hands of…

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Peter Thiel says evil is “maybe kind of good.” Curtis Yarvin says Hitler was a genius. And the mainstream press has barely asked their intern, JD Vance, about either.

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JD Vance’s Gurus Celebrate Evil

Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin aren’t doing Vice President JD Vance any favors as the 2028 presidential election looms. The duo—both mentors to Vance—appear to be having a contest to see who can be more outrageous and shocking in public.

Thiel, who has embarked on a new career as the world’s premier Antichrist enthusiast, ignited a firestorm of controversy last month by praising the virtues of evil. During an interview in his native Germany, the Palantir billionaire said being evil is … “maybe kind of good.”

“So I'm going to get in trouble for what I'm about to say, but I think we moralize...way too much,” said Thiel in an interview with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of media giant Axel Springer SE. “And there's always a question I like to ask: what is the antonym of good? The moral antonym is evil; the functional antonym is bad. A Ferrari is an ‘evil’ car because it doesn’t get many miles per gallon. A Trabi is a ‘bad’ car—it works, it's less good than a golf cart, you know, the former East German car.”

“And so, if you're evil, you're at least competent,” said Thiel. “And if you’re evil, you’re not bad, and therefore you’re actually maybe kind of good, because you’re at least getting something done.”

Thiel offered a clarification: “I think it’s better to be good than evil, I want to be very clear.”

By this point, however, he had already equated good with evil, as long as you get things done. Clips of his comment went viral around the globe, sparking mockery, outrage, and concern.

Not to be outdone, Yarvin took to Twitter this week to wonder aloud whether AI might “solve the Jewish problem.” A few days earlier, he evoked Hitler in a rant focused on how Europe should deal with immigrants. This echoed a comment from late 2025, when Yarvin complimented Hitler.

Yarvin “has questioned the mainstream historical consensus on World War II history and described Hitler's military actions as self-defense, and he has repeatedly praised the Nazi dictator's leadership,” reported Raw Story.

“Germany got Hitler because there were too many subjects about which only Hitler spoke the truth,” Yarvin posted in December 2025. “This made a lot of Germans regard Hitler as an infallible genius. Hitler was a genius—all serious historians agree. He was not infallible.”

Yarvin, a professional edgelord, specializes in flamboyant provocations, as does Thiel. Their public outbursts could complicate Vance’s 2028 presidential run. Thiel essentially created Vance, using his money and influence to turn an unknown law student named James David Hamel into a venture capitalist, a Catholic, a Trump supporter and politician named JD Vance. In 2021, Vance cited Yarvin—a fascist blogger and fellow Thiel beneficiary—as an influence on his political thinking.

In Berlin, where Thiel received the 2026 Axel Springer Award, CEO Döpfner asked about his relationship with Vance.

 “You were an early supporter of JD Vance, you worked with him, you basically saw something in him that other people didn't see then,” said Döpfner. “Can you describe what it was and why you supported him?”

Thiel responded:

I’m always hesitant to overrate my role in these things. I probably always have a very soft spot for smart people, so I thought he was thoughtful, open-minded, charismatic. And he was working for one of the venture funds I had helped start called Mithril, and then wanted to write this book on the side, and I encouraged him to do that—it became this bestseller in 2016. And I helped him out financially when he ran for Senate in 2022. But I think I’m always hesitant to answer this question because I think it just detracts from his achievement in many ways.

But Vance’s main achievement was attracting Thiel as his benefactor, since Thiel bankrolled and guided his entire career. (Thiel has also invested heavily in Döpfner’s son, Moritz, known as “the German JD Vance.” A German magazine reported last year that Thiel invested $50 million in a venture capital fund started by the younger Döpfner.)

In the interview, Thiel also expressed doubt about the future of the Republican Party. He complained that the Trump administration was “staffed by not very smart” people and said he wished Trump had “appointed more competent people.” (Translation: The Trump administration isn’t being evil enough?)

Thiel, who recently bought a mansion in Argentina, also worried that American voters are “exhausted” by the Republican Party and that the country will undergo a major shift.

“We are going to get this disruption, and there’s a risk that the U.S. will shift very far to the left,” he said. “That’s the real disruption we’re going to get.”

That’s bad news for Vance. His own creator says Trump’s Republicans have “exhausted” the American people. As vice president, Vance will inherit the Trump regime’s nightmarish legacy and historically dismal poll numbers.

So far, the political media establishment has mysteriously avoided pressing Vance on his ties to Thiel and Yarvin or the unhinged things they say in public—even as some Democrats are required to answer for every remark by leftist podcaster Hasan Piker.

But Vance’s immunity is unlikely to survive a presidential campaign where Republicans and Democrats alike will have every incentive to expose and exploit those ties. And one can only imagine how Thiel and Yarvin will escalate their respective Antichrist and Hitler meltdowns between now and November 2028.

Peter Thiel Takes Antichrist World Tour to Nashville

Thiel is currently delivering his Antichrist sermons in Nashville, Tennessee. On Monday, he delivered the second of four planned weekly lectures.

I bought a ticket to attend, but it was canceled without explanation the night before his first lecture. Nonetheless, I have been able to obtain full recordings of his supposedly secret talks. For the most part, he’s saying what he already said in previous lectures.

Still, it is very kinky and strange for a billionaire with Thiel’s power and influence to force hundreds of people to listen to his hours-long rantings about the Antichrist in select venues all over the world. He seems to be confessing something.

While his long-winded ideas do not deserve serious intellectual consideration, they provide a window into the existential and apocalyptic psychology of Silicon Valley billionaires in the Year of our Lord 2026.

As such, I will soon be headed to Nashville to investigate. Details below:

October 16: Nerd Reich LIVE

Now that the book is finished, I’m going to add more regular live chats for our 1,095 paid subscribers.

Mark your calendars for 12 p.m. (Pacific) on Friday, October 16. We’ll do a live Zoom chat with amazing special guests and answer your questions.

If you’re a paid subscriber, please click here to RSVP.

Not a paid subscriber? It’s a great time to join us!

Senate candidate Ken Paxton took nearly 1,000 business trips during his tenure as Texas Attorney General, costing taxpayers millions of dollars along the way. Only one in six of them actually had to do with work.

A new report from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune shows that Paxton has taken almost 1,000 trips out of state since 2015, accompanied by Texas police each time at a cost of $3.3 million to his constituents. His security detail alone cost $24,000 a month, while his predecessor Greg Abbott’s cost $7,400 a month. Of those 1,000 trips, research only linked 138 of them to actual business. In fact, Paxton didn’t even record them as such.

Paxton took 53 trips to Florida, 24 trips to Utah—where his family trust owns properties—and 19 trips out of the country, all on the taxpayer’s dime. Paxton did not offer any specific explanation for his lack of business records for the trips.

“Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas,” said his office in a statement. “Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.”

Beyond being a blatant misuse of public funds, especially given how many trips he took to his properties, this is a sign that Paxton cares more about his political office and its perks than he does about his actual constituents, who are paying for those perks.

“If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” former National Association of Attorneys General executive director Chris Toth told ProPublica. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.”

Paxton has been followed by crises of his own making for the entirety of his time as attorney general, as well as his candidacy for Senate. From his indictment and suspension, to his alleged affair and subsequent divorce, and then his controversial, leak-filled Senate campaign, the GOP couldn’t have chosen a weaker candidate to field against James Talarico in Texas to defend their Senate majority.

With a bit of luck, this midterm election could finally break what we might call the Myth of Multiracial MAGA. That pervasive notion held that Trump’s 2024 gains with Latinos heralded the birth of a new multiethnic working-class coalition anchored around right wing populist ideas. In the ultimate humiliation for liberals, that included immigration restrictionism.

A fresh blow to this notion came this week with an NBC poll finding Trump’s approval with Latinos sinking to 27 percent, and Democrats leading among them in the generic matchup by 59-35. But such polls capture only half the story. The other factor to consider? Latino turnout.

A new analysis by the Democratic data firm TargetSmart—which we obtained before its release—demonstrates something striking: As of right now, the Latino share of the early vote is dramatically outpacing where it was at the equivalent moment in both 2022 and 2024.

Here’s the truly wild finding: The raw number of early Latino votes is outpacing the raw total of them at the same point in 2024. That’s a surprise, because 2024 was a presidential year, when voter turnout is traditionally much higher, especially among nonwhites. Yet more Latinos have voted as of now—in this midterm—than at this point in the last presidential cycle.

TargetSmart’s analysis looked at the 229 counties across the country that are currently reporting early votes, mostly concentrated in states like Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Virgina, New Jersey, and Florida.

Here’s the first key finding on vote share:

As you can see, as of October 8, Latinos comprise nearly 8 percent of the early vote in those 229 counties, substantially higher than the percentages in 2022 and 2024, per TargetSmart’s analysis. Those gains amount to big numbers, as the second key finding on raw vote totals shows:

That graphic is remarkable. As of October 8, according to the analysis, nearly 112,000 Latinos have voted, versus the approximately 106,000 who cast votes by the same time in the presidential year of 2024.

“While it’s still early, it’s incredibly unusual to see any group outperform presidential turnout at this point in the cycle,” Tom Bonier, a senior adviser at TargetSmart, told me. “Latino turnout tends to drop more in midterms. So seeing this early surge suggests we’ll potentially see historic levels of Latino engagement.”

What’s driving all this? The economy is likely the primary driver: The NBC poll found 74 percent of Latinos nationally disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. Latinos prefer Democrats to Republicans on the issue by 21 points—a huge turnaround from 2024, when Trump narrowly led Kamala Harris among Latinos on it.

But immigration also looms large. NBC finds 69 percent of Latinos disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration and 58 percent disapprove on border security. Even the Republican pollster who helps conduct NBC’s poll says the issue is a big factor driving Latinos to Democrats.

Indeed, TargetSmart’s analysis also finds that many counties with the largest spikes in Latino turnout are also ones subjected to high-profile ICE activity. “Communities that have been directly impacted by ICE actions are generally seeing the largest increases in turnout,” Bonier said.

Here is a big caveat: We’re at the outset of early voting, so we’ll know more when early-vote tallies arrive from states like Texas, California, and New York and Pennsylvania, which will shed light on the Texas Senate races and many House races concentrated in those states.

Nick Ahamed, managing director of Equis Research, also cautions against reading too much into the early vote because we can’t be certain how it’ll break down. But Equis research finds that Latinos comprise more than 10 percent of eligible voters in 20 competitive House districts and more than 20 percent in a dozen of those districts. Given the NBC poll showing Democrats with a 24-point lead among them, Latinos could heavily influence the outcome.

“If Democrats regain Latino support at levels we’re seeing in the polling, we expect Democrats to win in many of those 20 districts,” Ahamed told me. He noted that Equis research also shows Trump’s handling of costs and immigration are key drivers of Latino interest in voting.

MAGA as a movement probably has plenty of staying power even if the midterms are a disaster for Trump. But nonetheless, all this could matter a great deal for 2028. Even with Democrats winning Congressional power, Trump will still have his ICE army at his command. While one hopes ICE will be partly constrained by Democrats in Congress, it’ll still have a huge pile of money and lots of heavy weaponry. And Trump will still control immigration policy.

Yes, Latinos constitute a swingy constituency and Democrats can’t take them for granted in 2028 even if they win big this fall. But it’s hard to see JD Vance recapturing many of them as long as they continue getting brutalized by Trump’s economy and deportation paramilitary. This Latino move back to Democrats, if it becomes a full-scale shift, may deal a blow to MAGA long past the midterms.

Trump and MAGA have pulled off some astounding political sleight-of-hand. They have openly advertised that their ideological goal is ethnic cleansing, recruiting ICE agents and saturating official government communications with explicit white-nationalist appeals. Yet they also succeeded for a time in selling this agenda to Latinos as purely about law enforcement and public safety. This straddle was critical to sustaining notions of MAGA as a multiracial movement.

But Trump’s catastrophic economic failures and violent anti-immigrant horrors have rendered that balancing act impossible to sustain. We can’t be certain all this is driving the Latino early-voting surge, but it sure looks plausible. If this early trend holds—and if Latinos help deliver a resounding Democratic victory—that chart on raw vote totals will have captured what may be the beginning of the end.

This is the stuff of nightmares. ⁠As reported by NPR and ⁠The Washington Post, a foreign influence operation used artificial intelligence to generate propaganda and publish it across American media platforms, including right here at Daily Kos. The result from the made-up persona was three stories/diaries published in the community. The operation evaded our existing automated safeguards…

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This week, Donald Trump approved the military’s first execution by firing squad since 1945. The Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced, will livestream it.

The execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who opened fire on dozens of people at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center in Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, is now scheduled for December 3. Hasan, at the time an active-duty major in the Army, was shot in the back by police during the massacre and now, paralyzed from the waist down, uses a wheelchair. When Hegseth spoke about the execution livestream with far-right streamer Jack Posobiec on Thursday, he hardly seemed able to contain his excitement.

“They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context.”

“He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth said. The execution, as Hegseth envisions it, would be first and foremost a mass spectacle. “We’re going to make sure people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he said.

That is to say, Pete Hegseth wants to make a snuff film.

Jim Craig, a veteran Mississippi death penalty lawyer, spoke with me in April, after Trump announced his plan to bring back the federal firing squad. The obscenity of the violence, Craig said, is the whole idea.

This proposal by the Trump Justice Department is characterized by their attraction to brutality. It’s characterized by their affection for causing visible harm to people. You see it in their foreign policy. You see it in their policing. The firing squad is very physical and visceral in the damage that it does to the person being executed. That’s why they like it. We should not mince words about this. It has nothing to do with the Eighth Amendment. It has nothing to do with the supply of drugs, or anything else. They like it because it’s the same kind of video game brutality that they like in every other context of this administration’s barbarism.

A firing squad execution, when the executioners aim well, “essentially vaporizes” a person’s heart, Craig explained. When they don’t, the victim bleeds out and dies slowly.

The last time the US military executed a man by firing squad was in 1945—it was called “musketry” at the time.

“Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was win,” Hegseth said. “Which was, understand when the enemy attacks you, you stand your ground.”

Hasan’s killing would be the United States’ first livestreamed execution. The closest equivalent in recent memory, by anything approaching a state, is the graphic series of public execution tapes that galvanized the world against ISIS in 2014; before that, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya telecast an execution at a basketball stadium in 1984.

But it would hardly be Hegseth’s first encounter with disseminating death on video. Over the past year, the military has released at least 46 different clips of US attacks on noncombatant vessels—the extrajudicial slaughter of people on alleged “drug boats,” including at least one “double-tap” strike on clinging survivors—in the Caribbean Sea. Sometimes, the clips are posted on their own, in grainy gray and green. Other times, the official White House X account posts footage of human death interspersed with video-game and Hollywood action film footage.

In their interview, Posobiec asked Hegseth whether Hasan had any final requests.

“Don’t care,” Hegseth said. “See him on December 3.”

Last year, Rep. Mike Collins, a second-term Georgia Republican who is challenging Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff this fall, posted a meme that appears to have gone largely unnoticed.

On the left was a photo of Donald Trump in the Oval Office, pointing to someone just out of the frame. The photo was accompanied by a quote from the president: “Can you turn the lights down? I want to show you something.” Next to it Collins had attached an image and a snippet of dialogue from the 2006 film Blood Diamond. It comes just after Leonardo DiCaprio’s grizzled mercenary tells an American journalist, played by Jennifer Connelly, he’s from “Rhodesia.” 

“We say Zimbabwe now, don’t we?” Connelly says.

“Do we?” DiCaprio responds.

The reference—a one-off post with no accompanying context or follow-up—might have gone over the heads of most of Collins’ constituents. But the implications were obvious to plenty on the online right. A poster with the handle “X Wigger” responded: “We are all Rhodesia now.” Another user replied to Collins with a faded photo of three shirtless Rhodesian soldiers, and the words, “PATRIOTS IN CONTROL.” 

“[W]e’ve got a sitting congressman rhodesia-posting now boys,” wrote a staffer at the right-wing outlet The Blaze. “[I]ncredible things are happening.”

Collins, who did not respond to a request for comment, has been dogged by his close associations with white nationalists, including a Nazi-posting son-in-law who lives next door. But he is far from alone in expressing his affinity for Rhodesia. The now-defunct white supremacist state in southern Africa is having a moment on the right. Bo French, the Republican nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, wrote last year that “We need to be Rhodesia.” The Washington Post reported in September that a now-former campaign staffer for Ohio Republican Sen. Jon Husted created a Spotify playlist devoted to songs about the country. Donald Trump Jr. is peddling Rhodesian lifestyle apparel. Some of Silicon Valley’s leading lights are Rhodesia-posting, too.

There was a time not so long ago when public support for Rhodesia was “morally untenable,” as the New York Times put it in a 2018 story about a resurgence in interest among “white supremacists.” Although their governments differed in their particulars, Rhodesia was, then and now, closely linked in the popular imagination with apartheid South Africa—two white-minority nations that violently resisted Black self-determination on the continent. But the former British colony had found “new life” on the far right, the Times reported. Before murdering nine Black parishioners at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, Dylann Roof posted his manifesto at a website called “The Last Rhodesian.” In a photo he posted on the site, he wore a jacket with the apartheid-era South African flag over his right breast; the Rhodesian flag—green and white, with two antelopes in the middle—was right below it. (Roof was himself following in the footsteps of an earlier white supremacist gunman. James Earl Ray attempted to flee to Rhodesia after assassinating Martin Luther Luther King Jr.)

“[W]e’ve got a sitting congressman rhodesia-posting now boys,” wrote a staffer at the right-wing outlet The Blaze. “[I]ncredible things are happening.”

You don’t have to spelunk in the darker recesses of the web to find Rhodesia-posting today. Collins isn’t even the only battleground candidate who’s dabbled in it. Brandon Herrera, the Republican nominee in a competitive House district in West Texas, filmed himself doing what he called “Rhodesian LARP” in a 2023 episode of his YouTube firearms show, as part of a series in which he fires off historical weapons. (Herrera has previously been criticized for goose-stepping to a prominent Nazi song during an episode on German guns, which he has defended as satirical and “funny as hell.”) For his Rhodesia video, previously reported on by the Texas Observer during his unsuccessful 2024 campaign, Herrera dressed in Rhodesian camouflage and shot a “based” Rhodesian light automatic rifle while reciting dialogue from Blood Diamond with his buddies. Later, he appeared back at his studio in front of a large Rhodesian flag—an emblem that the Anti-Defamation League has classified as a “hate symbol.” 

A white South African, joined the Rhodesian Army voluntarily patrols a ‘protected village’ at Camp Seven, located six miles south of Mount Darwin in Northern Rhodesia. Keystone Press Agency/Zuma

Herrera, who did not respond to a request for comment, told his viewers he didn’t want to get into politics, but went on to describe the Rhodesian Bush War—the bloody, decade-and-a-half long conflict between the white government’s soldiers and Black guerilla forces—as “basically a civil war between the Dutch people of that area and the locals and/or communists.” (He acknowledged in the YouTube comments that they were, in fact, British, not Dutch.) 

“Pretty much no matter what kind of take you have on that, someone will hate you for it,” he said of the conflict. “But, long story short: The side that was sympathetic with communism won, and now Zimbabwe doesn’t have food. Shocker.”

Cade Lamb, the son of Arizona Republican congressional candidate Mark Lamb and himself the founder of a border vigilante organization called the Sonoran Asset Group, promoted his father’s 2024 campaign for US Senate on Instagram by sharing a T-shirt design that featured the slogan, “BE A MAN AMONG MEN” in big red letters. It bore an uncanny resemblance to a recruiting poster for the Rhodesian army—one the ADL has said is used by “[w]hite supremacists, as well as some others, generally on the far right.” The Lamb campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

“BE A MAN AMONG MEN” is a frequent reference point for Rhodesia fans. For $12 you can even buy a version of the poster that features Kyle Rittenhouse in the place of a Rhodesian soldier. The Department of Homeland Security, which has mined extremely niche far-right iconography frequently during Trump’s second term, appeared to get in on the act last year, posting a recruiting announcement for Immigration and Customs Enforcement featuring the tagline, “BE A PATRIOT AMONG PATRIOTS.”

DHS did not deny the connection when I reached out for comment on the provenance of the slogan.

“Western men have always been asked to stand between their homes and the forces that would overrun them,” an anonymous “DHS SPOX” responded in an email. “The people who find that sentence unforgivable are usually not the people standing the post. DHS will not outsource its vocabulary to communist activists who cannot distinguish a sovereign people from a hotel. We will not pretend that ‘Western civilization’ is a slur.”

“Comparing recruitment efforts aimed at filling critical public safety roles to extremist rhetoric is not only absurd, but it also dangerously undermines the mission and sacrifices of federal officers,” the spokesperson continued. They suggested that “[t]hese types of smears are contributing to our officers facing coordinated campaigns of violence against them.”

A Rhodesian soldier questioning villagers near the border of Botswana in September 1977. This image was one in a set of three photos that were awarded the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography.J. Ross Baughman/AP/Wikimedia

Footage from Rhodesia slots comfortably into the ambience of the contemporary right—slightly faded and surprisingly emo, eliciting feelings of nostalgia in an audience too young to have experienced the thing they’re reminiscing about. Seeing the writing on the wall, Rhodesia briefly rejoined Britain before holding open elections and re-emerging as the independent nation of Zimbabwe in 1980. But the Rhodesia-pilled speak of a country that spent most of its 15-year existence slowly losing a war as a sort of lost Eden, whose fall presaged the ongoing twilight of the West—a cautionary tale, to put a finer point on it, about the suicidal danger of choosing equality over merit. According to the Post, the 25-year-old Husted staffer who made the Rhodesian playlist described himself as “homesick for a place that no longer exists.” 

The pro-Trump website American Greatness published an essay this year titled “We Are All Rhodesians Now,” arguing that “as the nations of Europe and the Anglosphere grapple with their own crises of identity, demographic replacement, and institutional decay, the Rhodesian experience has moved from the periphery to the center of conservative analysis.” Conservative commentator Jack Posobiec included a chapter on Rhodesia in his 2024 book, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). “[W]hen the unhumans come, they leave their victims without property, liberty, and life,” Posobiec wrote of the progression from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. The book was praised by JD Vance.

That American conservatives would see themselves in the Rhodesian cause is fitting, says Elizabeth Schmidt, an emerita professor of history at Loyola University Maryland, because white governments in southern Africa drew inspiration from American conservatives. “Rhodesian whites modeled their discriminatory segregationist policies on those of apartheid South Africa. South Africa was modeling itself on us. And now we’ve come full circle,” she said.

The conservative style of the 1970s and ‘80s is popular among the sorts of twentysomething right-wingers most actively sharing this stuff online. DHS’ propaganda arm has deliberately echoed the 1978 white-supremacist book, Which Way Western Man? Another recent recruiting post—“Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?”—was accompanied by a vintage advertisement for a 1982 Ford Club Van. Rhodesia-core photos feature young white men in short shorts and headbands, often shirtless, toting long guns while holding the line against the enemy lurking in the bush. The vibe is half frat house, half Rambo.

Eland armored car and Polish-built T-55LD tank of the Rhodesian Armored Corps parked at Inkomo Barracks in 1979.Image courtesy of former 1RAR 2nd Lieutenant John Wynne Hopkins/Wikimedia

It’s aesthetic. But it’s also literally an aesthetic. As Herrera’s YouTube video demonstrated, the Rhodesian army’s distinctive brushstroke-patterned camouflage attire is easy enough to get these days. For $149.99 you can even buy “Rhodie camo” flip-flops from Field Ethos, the outdoorsman lifestyle magazine and brand c0-founded and published by Donald Trump Jr. The president’s son himself has promoted the company’s Rhodesian-style “gin” shirt, which Field Ethos calls “our toast to this legendary pattern and the men of the RLI,” or Rhodesian Light Infantry—an all-white unit. Field Ethos published an essay on the clothing’s namesake, observing that “The white European farmers of Rhodesia were of a rare stock.” 

After a writer at Slate drew attention to the company’s interest in Rhodesia, the company addressed the subject in a 2023 note titled “Racist…camouflage?”

“We’ve printed exactly one article on Rhodesian homestead defense, but we do sell several apparel items in Rhodesian Brushstroke camo. Our company is neither fixated nor ‘right wing,’” CEO and co-founder, Jason Vincent, wrote. Far from “a sign of racist ideology,” the camo was “a very cool retro pattern that is so basic in design that it looks simple and vintage from a mile away. The colors are warm. The brushstrokes are haphazard. The vibe is casual.” In fact, he wrote, Rhodesia was an unlikely story of racial harmony, because—notwithstanding Black Africans’ lack of power and agency in the government itself, and their conspicuous absence from nostalgic memes—half its soldiers were Black.

But the current Rhodesian moment may be best encapsulated by the owner of the forum on which so much of the frenzy of Rhodesia-posting happens. As Elon Musk’s criticism of the current South African government intensified in recent years, you could find users speculating about when the defense contractor, Republican megadonor, and world’s richest man would finally start talking about its former neighbor to the north. One Rhodesia-centric account even posted a poll asking followers if it would happen; 91 percent of respondents said “yes.” 

They didn’t have to wait very long. Musk has shared or discussed posts about Rhodesia at least four times this year. His comments—like most of his posts—have generally come in the form of short replies to other people’s thoughts about the country. But more so than Collins’ meme or Don Jr.’s shirts, his posts lay bare the significance of the southern African nation to the modern right.

One 2026 post—which Musk replied to with a simple “yes”—included a photo of shirtless white Rhodesian soldiers and warned that the “anarchotyranny, expropriation, and race communism that destroyed Rhodesia and South Africa are the same things they are bringing to America and the rest of the Occident to turn us into the Global Favela.”

Musk responded to another post last January, which credited colonialism with bringing “normal clothes” to Africa and framed Rhodesia as a “litmus test”—a choice between a society “that discriminates on the basis of human capability” and a society built on “the doctrine of equality.” False morality had destroyed a “paradise,” according to the original poster. Below it was a photo of the Rhodesian prime minister, Ian Smith, staring off into the distance, and the words, “I tried to save you.”

“Envy drives so much of human behavior,” Musk wrote.

Two days later, in January, he responded to yet another piece of Rhodesia-core. “High civilization existed for a brief flicker of a moment in Rhodesia, a few decades where the primordial darkness of the Stone Age was vanquished,” the original poster wrote. “But then it returned, in the name of equality, and Zimbabwe is once again a ruin.” It included a meme—a series of before-and-after images of Rhodesia and South Africa—with a watermark for the website, “NoWhiteGuilt.org.”

“We can take things back the right direction here,” the Palantir co-founder and Trump-allied podcaster Joe Lonsdale responded. About six hours after that, Musk shared the original post to his 246 million followers with a warning for the present from the Rhodesian past.

“Unfortunately, this is where America is headed,” he said.

Katie Miller, the wife of American deportation czar Stephen Miller, has reignited the convivial traditions of Washington’s elite by throwing grandiose bashes at the military base where her family abruptly moved. But there’s a searing reason why the MAGA couple sticks to hosting at home: They’re not welcome anywhere else in town.

A tell-all published Thursday by Vanity Fair revealed the glitz and glam of Miller’s over-the-top parties, which have at times included donkeys, food trucks, hibachi chefs, a mechanical bull, and dozens of famed guests. 

It’s not uncommon to find nearly all of the presidential Cabinet in attendance, either. Frequent partygoers include the Rubios, the Hegseths, the Burgums, as well as FBI Director Kash Patel and his fiancée, Alexis Wilkins. The high-flying guest list has sparked jokes that the Trump administration might need a “designated survivor” to outlast Miller’s soirees, according to one regular attendee who spoke with Vanity Fair.

But whereas the Capitol wives of old would throw bipartisan get-togethers to bridge the divides of Washington politics, the Millers appear to be hiding from their detractors. Sequestered at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall—where they moved to escape the protests plaguing them in their old neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia—the Millers have found a way to revel and play away from public ire.

“They need to do something to blow off steam because they’re not welcome in public,” another party guest told the magazine. “They can’t go to any venue without being assaulted. They have to do this stuff in Camelot.”

But accepting an invitation from Katie Miller doesn’t necessarily imply a fondness for the couple. At least one longtime Trump ally told Vanity Fair that Stephen Miller’s despotic reputation is a part of the calculation.  

“I’ll say I love her publicly, but the truth is I can’t fucking stand her,” the ally said. “But if she asks you to go on the podcast, or come over for dinner, you say yes, because Stephen Miller is the second-most powerful person in the world.”

In multiple debates that aired on Thursday night, Democratic Senate candidates criticized and outright shamed their Republican rivals for their personal behavior and ongoing support of President Donald Trump’s unpopular agenda. These exchanges happened in key races that will determine the makeup of the Senate after the midterm election, and could help lead to a Democratic majority empowered…

Source

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Thursday shooting of an unarmed man on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s words rather than the agent’s actions.

“I wanna push back on a couple things. The Mayor yesterday did a press conference.…He said that ICE ‘has killed more of our neighbors than they claim to have saved.’ That’s a direct quote from the Mayor last night,” Mullin said with anger in his voice. “Just for a record here: Right now ICE has in detention 258 illegals that are wanted for murder charges just in New York alone.… [the mayor’s] words are dangerous, and incite hostility. It doesn’t help.”

Mullin points to Mamdani’s view on ICE—which the vast majority of Americans share—as harmful rather than the violent actions of ICE itself. On Thursday, ICE shot and wounded 28-year-old Dominican man Oscar Belgal in the neck while he was driving with a 5-year-old child in the backseat in New York City’s Marble Hill, discharging seven rounds at Belgal. ICE claims he “weaponized” his car against them after they boxed him in. Mamdani unsuccessfully negotiated for Belgal’s release.

According to Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Belgal was rushed by plainclothed ICE officers with their guns already drawn.

“They wore construction vests and masks that concealed their faces. There was no reasonable way to identify them as ICE agents,” Mamdani said.

Mullin’s comments were not well received.

“His words are dangerous and incite hostility—says the man in charge of the masked, armed, thugs violating Constitutional rights, and attacking and killing people in the streets,” Executive Director of the Campaign for New York Health Melanie D’Arrigo wrote on X.

At least 40 people have been shot by ICE since the start of Trump’s second term, with 11 of those being fatal.

Nothing Mullin or anyone from DHS leadership says should be taken seriously. Whatever statistics Mullin spouts are easily outweighed by the images Americans have seen of masked, disguised federal agents roaming their streets, terrorizing and killing their neighbors. ICE agents dressed in construction gear ambushing a man and firing at him seven times with a child in the car in the middle of the day is absurd, and Mullin has no real justification for it—leading him to deflect to Mamdani.

“Russia,” Steven Seagal declared, not long ago, “is not interested in conquering the world. We’re not interested in conquering anybody. We’re just interested in protecting our borders and our people.” 

Seagal, the American-born actor and ardent supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin, often appears at Russian political events, like a parade with an ultranationalist biker gang last year celebrating Putin’s reelection. In this case, though, he wasn’t exactly speaking to the home team; instead, he’d taken the stage at the International Festival of Youth, a lavish event that organizers claimed brought 10,000 young people aged 14-35 from 190 countries to Yekaterinburg, the country’s fourth largest city. Attendees at this September’s event, many of whom were given free round-trip tickets by organizers, were greeted with elaborate museum-style displays, a music-conducting robot, dance performances, workshops, musical numbers by people in traditional cultural dress, panels, lectures, competitions, and free conference swag. 

“Here, borders are blurred,” the event’s website declares, “and cultures and professional communities come together to work towards a common goal—to make the world a better place.” The political element isn’t subtle: the event was sponsored by some of Russia’s biggest state-owned companies, including nuclear energy giant Rosatom and the financial institution Sberbank; the festival’s “information partners” include state news agency TASS and state TV channel RT.  Nor is there any question where the most prominent speakers stand politically: In his speech, Seagal declared that Putin is his “biggest hero,” drawing applause. This year’s talks included an appearance by Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s foreign affairs minister, who then headed to the United Nations to defend Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, which he characterized as “our struggle for truth and justice.” 

Youth festivals in Russia and the former Soviet Union have a long geopolitical history and a clear purview: to persuade the outside world, especially young people therein, that the country is modern, forward-thinking, and peace-loving—a center for global cooperation, and innovation. The 1957 World Youth Festival of Youth and Students, for instance, took place during a Khrushchev-era thaw in the Cold War, as the Soviet Union hoped to present a more welcoming face to the world. There was also, as author and historian Rustam Alexander wrote recently, a heavy element of image management at work, and a hope that the festival would salvage the USSR’s international reputation the year after it had deployed military force to crush an attempted uprising in Budapest. 

“Apparently, there are plenty of young people who do not care.”

“To make sure that foreign guests did not encounter aspects of Soviet life they were not supposed to,” Alexander wrote, “the government tried to keep them within their national delegations, bused them from one event to another and filled their days with official activities.” This, he adds, did not work: “Foreign visitors began moving around Moscow more freely, visiting stores and restaurants, wandering into courtyards and private homes, and striking up conversations with people they met along the way.” Soviet and international visitors also evidently found time to canoodle romantically, Alexander writes; a subsequent festival in 1985 was much more restrictive.

But presenting Russia as the world’s meeting ground has become increasingly difficult as the country has become more isolated globally given its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, its state-sanctioned murder of dissidents and other regime opponents at home and abroad, the kidnapping of American citizens to use as bargaining chips in prisoner swaps, documented electoral interference in the U.S. and other countries like Armenia, and the repressive domestic control of its citizens.

At this year’s IFY, of course, none of that was discussed—although the event did feature a panel about finding “truth online” in an age of “viral content.” While a video of the panel hasn’t yet been put online, the keynote presenter is revealing enough: it was Artem Zhoga, a military officer who participated in the invasion of Ukraine and is increasingly part of the country’s power structure, including working as a co-chair during Putin’s reelection campaign. Zhoga focused on two “typical manipulation techniques—deepfakes and quoting words out of context,” according to a post on the festival’s website, “and recommended always seeking the full recording of a speech.”

Zhoga is also quoted in the post as saying that the festival itself “is a tool against fakes,” claiming that “interaction among around 10,000 participants from different parts of Russia and the world creates a natural fact-checking mechanism.”

“When you see information about some region—you’ll ask your friend: did this really happen? You have more friends, more sources,” Zhoga is quoted.

The event’s international attendees—people who do appear to be in their teens, 20s, and 30s, and who came from countries including Nigeria, India, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil, Senegal, and China—have made endless social media content proclaiming how open and welcoming Russia is. “I met a different Russia than the media talks about,” declared a Nigerian attendee named John Ogba in a rhapsodic essay on his personal website about the event. “To me, Russia is an experience that stays with you and never leaves. I suspect that it is that way by design.” Other attendees made videos showing off the merch they’d gotten from the festival—T-shirts, lanyards, key chains, stickers, and stuffed animals of Cheburashka, a beloved Soviet-era bear-like creature. There were also a remarkable number of dance videos, with people like a Colombian students’ association showing themselves shuffling across the expo floor. 

This mountain of content has been reshared on an Instagram fan page, even though Instagram is officially banned in Russia under a law declaring Meta, its parent company, an extremist organization. According to the Russian independent news site Meduza, international attendees were able to get online because they were granted unrestricted internet access, while domestic attendees were not. Meduza quoted a statement from Sergey Kiriyenko, a senior Putin administration official, explaining that “foreign guests received unrestricted internet access so they could promote the festival to audiences in other countries.” 

“It’s good when Russians talk about Russia,” Kiriyenko added. “But there’s much more trust when people in those countries hear about Russia from their own peers. That changes the attitudes of the friends they share it with and their followers.”

According to Olena Nikolayenko, a Fordham professor of political science who has studied youth political participation in Eastern Europe, Putin is keeping up “the Soviet-era tradition of using this youth festival as a tool for state propaganda.” She pointed out that crowds were filmed singing and dancing to the song “Matushka Zemlya,” which was dubbed the “unofficial anthem” of the festival. The song, first released eight years ago, has became immensely popular in Russia over the last few years as a patriotic anthem among supporters of the Ukrainian invasion. (“For me it’s Holy Russia,” the refrain goes, “for others just a thorn.”)

“Foreigners who voluntarily visit contemporary Russia and participate in state-sponsored events de facto condone Russian foreign policy,” Nikolayenko added. “Apparently, there are plenty of young people who do not care about Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and the war crimes committed by Russians.” 

President Donald Trump is still going after Federal Reserve Commissioner Lisa Cook.

In a presidential memo Wednesday, Trump announced that he’d set up a committee to oversee an investigation into whether Cook had made false statements in connection to one or more mortgage agreements.

“As President, it is my job to ensure the laws are faithfully executed, including by firing subordinates who cannot be trusted to tell the truth and follow the law,” he wrote.

Of course, Cook isn’t really Trump’s subordinate. In June, the Supreme Court blocked Cook’s removal, finding that the government had not afforded her due process. The ruling temporarily preserved the Federal Reserve’s independence.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump from trying to oust Cook. In August, White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino informed her that the Trump administration was once again “considering” removing her from her position.

It’s been more than a year since Trump first claimed that Cook—the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve board—had committed mortgage fraud by having two primary residences. Cook refused to step down and sued, stating that “President Trump purported to fire me ‘for cause’ when no cause exists under the law, and he has no authority to do so.”

Notably, Trump’s own mortgage agreements appear to match the same criteria his Department of Justice has used to go after Cook, as well as Trump’s other perceived enemies, former Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump said the new committee will meet next month to “consider the evidence and allegations against Governor Cook.” Cook has not been charged with any crime.

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Inside Washington

Why Kansas might do the unthinkable and vote blue

A perfect storm could be brewing in Kansas to elect a Democratic senator for the first time since 1932. Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton’s skills as a candidate, experts say, combined with uniquely bad conditions for the state’s farmers, could be the right ingredients for an upset. The problem is numbers: Registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats in the state almost two to one.

“If there was ever a chance to elect a Democratic senator, this is it,” said Dan Glickman, who served as agriculture secretary under President Bill Clinton and represented Kansas’s 4th congressional district in the House for 18 years. A large part of that is because of Hamilton’s biography. As pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, he leads the largest Methodist congregation in the country, consisting of 24,000 members. Hamilton estimates that some 9,000 of those are Republicans, 9,000 are Democrats, and between 6,000 and 7,000 are independents.

“Being a pastor of a massive church, you have to be a pretty darn good politician to keep your job,” Glickman said. “There’s probably more attention on the pastor than there is on the governor or the senator.”

Recent polls have shown a shockingly close race. Some, like a YouGov poll conducted at the end of September, found Hamilton up three points against his competitor, incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall. An obstetrician-gynecologist, Marshall has held the seat since 2021. He recently came under fire when The New York Times reported that he had sued more than 700 patients who carried unpaid bills, and 81 of those patients were arrested. When the Times asked about the arrests, Marshall’s campaign said that judges issue warrants, not doctors.

Marshall, who is endorsed by Trump, is also struggling under the weight of the president’s expensive tariff policies and the war in Iran. Trump is deeply unpopular even in red Kansas, where he is 15 points underwater. Democrats are betting some conservative farmers, as a result, could stay home, and some might even vote blue, giving Hamilton an opening to unseat Marshall.

“A lot of times, farmers tend to keep their politics close to their chest,” said Nick Levendofsky, executive director of the Kansas Farmers Union. “But I am hearing a lot of rumblings all across not just the state of Kansas but across the country.” Levendofsky joined 250 farmers from all around the U.S. for the National Farmers Union legislative fly-in to Washington, D.C., in September. “You could feel the tension when we went to USDA, when we went into these meetings with members of Congress.”

With the fall harvest season underway, the increased costs of diesel and fertilizer caused by the Iran war are now hitting extra hard. Harvesting equipment requires diesel. And in the next few weeks, Kansas farmers who grow winter wheat will begin planting, requiring more diesel and fertilizer. “It’s a double whammy,” Levendofsky said. Diesel price hikes are likely to add an extra $20,000 to $30,000 to a grain farmer’s expenses this year, estimated Gregory Ibendahl, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University. Farmers, who are price takers, have no way to pass that expense on and will simply have to eat the extra cost.

That doesn’t necessarily mean farmers will turn on Marshall, Ibendahl cautioned. “The administration is very good about having extra ad hoc payments beyond the typical Farm Bill payments,” he explained, which can help farmers make ends meet. Marshall may very well benefit by association with President Donald Trump in the eyes of farmers receiving those funds. 

But meanwhile, Kansas ranchers are deeply frustrated by Trump’s policies on beef imports. In 2025, Trump announced a plan to bring Argentine beef into the country to lower grocery prices. In late August, Trump announced a plan to ease tariffs on beef imports through the election, drawing the ire of Kansas cattle ranchers. “The answer to increasing prices in grocery stores isn’t selling out American farmers and ranchers to buy votes in November,” Glenn Brunkow, president of the Kansas Farm Bureau, told the Kansas Reflector at the time. Both Marshall and Hamilton criticized Trump’s decision.

Now Hamilton is traveling across the state, including through its more red, agriculture-heavy counties, trying to connect with the kinds of voters who haven’t elected a Democratic senator in nearly a century. “We haven’t elected Democratic senators in a long time,” Glickman said, “but there’s no reason that can’t happen this time.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The drip-drip-drip of leaks from Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s remarks at a private fundraiser continues. This time, The Texas Tribune reports that Paxton, when asked about the federal deficit, said legislators will need to make “some reasonable cuts to mandatory spending.” Mandatory spending, the Tribune’s Kayla Guo notes, is made up largely of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while in the most recent fiscal year, “much of the rest covered aid to lower-income families, such as food benefits and unemployment insurance, and a mix of retirement and disability benefits for federal workers and veterans.” Paxton didn’t elaborate on which programs he’d axe, at least in the clip that was shared with the Tribune. 

James Talarico’s team quickly posted the news to X on Thursday, saying, “Ken Paxton plans to cut Social Security and Medicare. He’s telling seniors to ‘suck it up’ while he owns 15 homes and increases his net worth up to $27 million.” Paxton, meanwhile, has reacted to the news by affirming his support for Social Security and saying that “the fake news keeps spinning the same cherry-picked audio to mislead Texans and take my words out of context. I have never said I would take away entitlements from those who deserve or earned them.” (Note, however, the suggestive wording at the end of that sentence.)

Elsewhere:

• Millions are under hurricane warning as Isaias approaches the Gulf Coast on Friday. This has been an unusually mild hurricane season so far—which has been a very good thing, because both disaster preparedness and weather forecasting are in an unusually chaotic state following two years of budget cuts and unusual leadership decisions under the Trump administration. Republican Governors Kay Ivey of Alabama and Ron DeSantis of Florida have already declared a state of emergency in select counties, and Governor Brian Kemp has declared an emergency for the state of Georgia.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

At Policy Matters Ohio, George Boas argues against the recently implemented 90-day gas tax suspension, saying it’s “misguided in at least three critical ways: It will have only a small, temporary impact on gas prices; it drains the budget at a time when schools, childcare, and healthcare are already badly underfunded or facing massive federal cuts; and it fails to address the root of the problem.” Better proposals, he adds, would include “targeted property-tax relief for Ohioans who need it most,” “strong consumer protections and data-center regulations to keep Ohioans from bearing an unfair share of rising electricity costs,” affordable childcare, pro-worker legislation, and more. 

Data for Progress released a new survey that found 67 percent of voters “say they support the U.S. having a refugee program”—a number that jumps to 90 percent for people who personally know a refugee. The survey also found widespread opposition to recent immigration enforcement actions.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: Road salt

Maine’s Senate race has given the nation no end of agita, but it finally delivered a moment worthy of the outsize attention when Susan Collins, bragging that she’d convinced Trump to stand down on his plans to put a tariff on road salt, was hit by this rejoinder from her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson: “We can’t eat road salt.” Jackson is no paragon of charisma, so we hesitate to call it a zinger. But the humble de-icing material conjured the kind of relatable, of-the-moment idea that usually eludes the grasp of an inanimate object. Could it be a game-changer? Elections have hinged on dumber things, that’s for sure.

Bad Week: Kimberly Guilfoyle

From the moment a pair of wayward Canary Island mastiffs thrust her into the public consciousness, no one could have imagined the story arc of U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle—the onetime paramour of Gavin Newsom turned “Mar-a-Lago face” cautionary tale. Now we’re left to wonder: Does her story end here? This week, a trove of private leaks revealed that she’d been attempting to do some Trump administration favor-trading in return for a $100,000 donation straight to her Amex card to pay a bill. It raises a host of questions: What could she have blown that kind of money on? How much of that was spent on the latest pan-Hellenic couture from Zeus+Dione? And most importantly, who hates her enough to leak this stuff? If you’re that person, contact us on Signal.

—Jason Linkins

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

How many U.S. states allow death by firing squad? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

The midterms are looking uglier for Republicans each day, with states and districts that President Donald Trump won in a landslide in 2024 now showing Democrats in the lead with just 24 days until Election Day. Polls from a range of geographic regions show across-the-board frustration and anger toward Trump over his war in Iran, which has destroyed the economy. “Polls aren’t looking good…

Source

Republican Representative Mike Collins cannot seem to rise above his staffers’ Nazi reputations.

The Georgia representative practically drowned under reports of his team’s ties to extremism during the state’s first debate against Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff Thursday, unable to bat away the various white supremacist connections within his orbit.

“Mike Collins has brought dishonor to our state through his personal bigotry and his widely documented ties to white nationalists,” Ossoff said in his opening remarks.

At least four of Collins’s former staffers and aides have been accused of extremist affiliations. They include Collins’s former chief of staff Kip Talley, former digital director William Paul (the son of Kentucky Senator Rand Paul), and a former intern, Preston Parra (who has frequently shared Ku Klux Klan and Nazi images to his personal social media account, including an image of himself clad in the white supremacist groups’ hooded uniform).

“You hired half the Third Reich to staff your office,” Ossoff remarked at one point.

But the hate bled even closer to home: CNN revealed in July that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, was a white supremacist influencer that had shared vitriolic, extremist messaging across the internet.

Collins, however, could not seem to confront the allegation head on without blaming his Democratic opponent.

“That’s my family. The craziness that Jon Ossoff has been spewing out there—I actually had a person put in jail this weekend, because he not only wanted to kill my son-in-law but he wanted to kill me,” Collins said when asked directly about his son-in-law’s social media activity. “I’ve condemned racism, antisemitism, hate. I don’t care where the source is, and I tell him that, too. It’s wrong.”

Collins then falsely equivalated his son-in-law’s hateful messaging to Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed and left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, complaining that Ossoff had not condemned either.

Ossoff’s response: “Imagine running for the U.S. Senate while neo-Nazi propaganda is disseminated to an audience of millions from your home. That’s Mike Collins.”

The Democratic incumbent also railed against Collins’s own track record, recalling when Collins “cheered on” a group of young men that harassed a Black woman at the University of Mississippi with monkey sounds, and that Collins himself had “amplified neo-Nazi propaganda.”

“If John Lewis were marching today,” Ossoff said, “Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.

13 minutes agoWalter EinenkelDaily Kos interviews Texas Democrat working to take back the HouseYou can read more from DK’s Alix Breeden’s interview with Katy Padilla Stout here.Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 17 minutes agoWalter EinenkelJon Ossoff doesn’t hold back on Pete Hegseth@Acyn Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 22 minutes agoWalter Einenkel“The city…

Source

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement  agent at the scene who opened fire into a vehicle with a five-year-old child Thursday has an alleged history of making violent arrests.

In a violent incident Thursday afternoon, plainclothes federal immigration agents fired at least seven rounds into a car in Marble Hill, a residential neighborhood of New York City. Inside the vehicle sat Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old Bronx resident and a five-year-old boy, believed to be his son, Gothamist reported. Belgal was shot in the neck and hospitalized, and the child was reportedly unharmed.

Wired identified Brendan Cuni as one of the ICE officers present during the incident. Photographs from the scene showed Cuni in the aftermath of the shooting, wearing a high-visibility yellow construction vest, and carrying an AR-15–style rifle. He was disguised as a construction worker, and was in no way identifiable as a federal agent.

Cuni has been named in multiple lawsuits alleging violent arrests in New York City and beyond, Wired reported. Last October, a Bronx man claimed that Cuni tripped him hard enough to crack a tooth, and used a Taser on him six times while he was already handcuffed on the ground. In November, Cuni was involved in an arrest in Queens where ICE agents reportedly tackled and shocked a man with a Taser. In December, Cuni was deployed in Minneapolis as part of Operation Metro Surge. Activists allege that he was among officers who forced a pregnant woman to the ground, though this was not confirmed by Wired. During his stint in the Midwest, prosecutors charged a man with assaulting Cuni, but a judge found there was “weak” evidence, and no other agents could corroborate Cuni’s story. In at least three separate cases, judges have found issues with Cuni’s statements or arrest paperwork.

Protesters gathered outside of the local hospital where Belgal was taken. “Don’t forget, don’t forgive, Brendan Cuni shot a kid!” they chanted, according to a video shared on X by The Intercept’s Noah Horowitz.

At a press conference Thursday night, Democratic Representative Adriano Espaillat said that he’d attempted to visit Belgal in the hospital but had been blocked by federal agents. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that ICE had taken Belgal into custody, and that his discussions with President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to have him released had been “unsuccessful.”

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Belgal had a previous criminal conviction, multiple prior arrests, and ties to a violent gang.

Barbarism surrounds us. ICE thugs have once again shot a man, firing at least five shots while he was in his car with his five-year-old son in New York City. Our incompetent and offensive “secretary of war” announces that the United States of America is going to livestream the execution by firing squad of a mass killer. Public executions are against international law. Amnesty International reports that in 2025, there were 17 public executions in the world. Eleven were in Iran, and six in Afghanistan. Great.

At least America is now fully starting to recognize what a moral cesspool Donald Trump and his cronies have made of this country. A new poll out from Pew has Trump’s approval at 30 percent and his disapproval at a stunning 68 percent. Can he get into the 20s before November 3? It sure seems that way. Does he really think, as The Atlantic reported this week, that bombing Iran before the election will help his numbers? He’s really so delusional as to believe that escalating a deeply unpopular war would lead to people rallying around the flag?

Against all this, most Democratic elected officials still haven’t found the right words to encapsulate all this corruption and rot. One Democrat, though, continues to stand out above all the others. If you haven’t yet seen some of the clips of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s evisceration of his GOP challenger in last night’s debate, you need to watch them. The guy is a virtuoso—Bernstein with a baton, Jordan with a basketball.

The imperishable line that will be remembered, I think, for a long, long time, came when Ossoff said of Representative Mike Collins and his white supremacist and far-far-right ties: “It’s not just that you’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office,” but you’re supporting policies that are “robbing your constituents to pay your donors.” Then came another killer, which is also so good that it would be the takeaway line for most debaters: “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”

That’s how you do it, folks. And make no mistake: It took some guts for Ossoff to decide to make his central attack on Collins his racism. There’s no guarantee, even in 2026, that a liberal Jewish Democrat could make that stick against a Republican in the state of Georgia. But Ossoff has pressed the point of Collins’s bigotry relentlessly. This is not someone who consulted polls and focus groups and listened to consultants telling him to keep the focus on Collins’s position on prescription drug prices. This is someone who asked himself, What is my opponent’s core moral flaw? and who went right at it with both barrels.

He’s almost certainly going to win, and possibly by a lot. And in doing so, in making his opponent’s bigotry his central line of attack, he’s doing something too many Democrats are gun-shy about doing these days: He took aim right at the heart of MAGA-ism, and he’s doing it without qualification or equivocation. And that’s why so many Democrats are so impressed by him.

As I wrote of Ossoff back in August, after his delicious barb about “Natalie” (Harp, the Trumpy amanuensis): “He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral.” He did that last night, but he also did even more. Saying “half the Third Reich” is, among other things, really funny. It’s wildly hyperbolic, of course, but that too is the point.

It’s the kind of rhetoric the right has been using against Democrats for many years now. Back in 2004, I recall the right-wing Club for Growth launching a broadside against Howard Dean saying that he should “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” No Democrat would ever have said then that George W. Bush should “take his tax-cutting, government-hating, beer-swilling, brisket-eating, pickup truck–driving, Branson-loving right-wing freak show back to Texas where it belongs” anymore than any Democratic president would have suggested—twice in one week—that maybe Iran should bomb Birmingham or Tulsa.

That just wouldn’t work in reverse, for reasons having to do with which Americans the media deems to be “real.” But what does work, when Trump’s at 30 percent in the polls and more than half the nation is disgusted with him, is doing what Ossoff is doing: making moral cases against Republicans’ very obvious and offensive moral failings.

He says he has no interest in running for president. Who knows. And of course if he does run, we’ll have to take stock of his positions on a busload of issues. But liberals can be too focused on positions, and on candidates, especially presidential candidates, passing a range of litmus tests. Ossoff is from Georgia, not Massachusetts, so he has to be careful about some stuff. He may not check some boxes. But his rhetoric suggests that there’s a potential unchained Ossoff somewhere in there just waiting to burst out, an Ossoff who might be willing to take more aggressive positions while seeking national office. For now, while he’s not the front-runner in the 2028 polls or the betting markets, he is for my money the person most likely to catch fire and be satisfactory to enough progressives and enough moderates to bring the party together after what will probably be another fractious primary.

In the meantime, let’s just appreciate what he did last night. Democrats, we need more of that.

The New York Times visited Republican country in Western Michigan, where it found a bucketload of disaffected conservatives. It’s part of what political prognosticator Charlie Cook has dubbed “the red undertow,” the notion that voters aren’t voting for Democrats this year but rather are punishing Republicans—either by voting against them or by merely tuning out and skipping the election.

Source

Navi Pillay, the winner of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, took an immediate shot at President Trump after she learned she had won the award Friday.

The former South African judge and United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner gave an impromptu speech at Nuremberg Court in Germany, where she was attending an academic and legal conference after she received the news.

“Thank you very much. If you clap a little bit more I may share this prize with Trump,” she said. The room erupted in laughter.

Trump has been practically begging for a Nobel Peace Prize for years, especially since it was awarded to then-President Barack Obama in 2009. Last year, he phoned Norway’s Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg “out of the blue” to ask about the possibility of acquiring the prize, using tariffs as a cover for their discussion.

“Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS,” Trump said in another message to Norway Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Last October, Trump told the press “They gave it to Obama for absolutely destroying our country” during an Oval Office meeting with Finnish President Alexander Stubb. “My election was much more important.”

This year, Trump has pretended to stop caring about the award altogether, although that may change when he gets wind of Pillay’s comments.

“Just to be at this venue… Your applause means a great deal to me. You don’t want to receive an award, prize, or anything, unless the public agrees that you deserve this. So that’s how I appreciate your applause today,” Pillay said in her remarks. “Being a lawyer and a judge, I still want to verify [this announcement]. I think it’s very appropriate that I’m with friends and colleagues, all of whom support human rights. The last thing I did [was] the delivery of the report on Gaza naming what’s happening there as genocide.”

Amazing moment. Navi Pillay has received the Nobel Peace Prize ! https://t.co/HL3r1PJzLO We are at the Nuremberg Court; I cannot think of a stronger symbol for her Nobel prize. We are all so thrilled! This is her first reactions upon hearing the news: https://t.co/Crbj6XdiyQ

— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) October 9, 2026