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Latin America Milei Dances in Tel Aviv, but Faces Trouble at Home Argentina’s president is facing headwinds from an ongoing crypto scandal and economic stagnation. President Javier Milei is navigating troubled waters this year. The eccentric Argentine’s presidency got off to a strong start after pulling the country out of an inflationary spiral in 2024; since then, he has seen his approval ratings drop significantly, as a series of corruption scandals involving him and his closest associates in government have eroded his image as a populist reformer and crusader against the corrupt political class. The biggest scandal reverberating in Argentine politics currently is an older one: Cryptogate is back, and this time Milei is directly implicated. Early last year, Milei made headlines by promoting a new cryptocurrency, $LIBRA, on his official X account, promising that the project would be “dedicated to the growth of the Argentine economy, funding small businesses and Argentine entrepreneurship.” It was, of course, a scam—in less than an hour, the founders pulled the rug, and thousands of investors who had put money into the cryptocurrency on the strength of Milei’s endorsement, lost everything. Several hours later, Milei deleted the tweet, but the damage was done. It seemed obvious that Milei had used his post and prominence to at the very least defraud the public for the benefit of his friends, and rumors circulated that the president was in on the take. Hayden Davis, the founder of Kelsier Ventures, the company that created $LIBRA, boasted that “I send $$ to [Milei’s] sister and he signs whatever I say and does whatever I want.” Milei denied allegations that he was meaningfully involved with Davis or the crypto project as a whole, asserting that he had been misinformed and thought that he was just promoting a private initiative that would be useful to Argentines. That defense was already undermined by a social media post Milei had made in January, in which he posed with Davis and wrote that Davis had “advised me about the impact and applications of blockchain technology in the country.” It was shortly thereafter discovered that Davis had paid Milei to record a video for his online cryptocurrency academy, leaving no doubt that the two had established business relations. But the biggest fish of the $LIBRA scandal so far was caught last month, after prosecutors subpoenaed the smartphone of Mauricio Novelli, the CEO of Tech Forum (a cryptocurrency conference) and the middleman between Milei and Davis. Novelli apparently had ambitions to set himself up in the lucrative business of selling access to the president, primarily to companies involved in the cryptocurrency sector. Novelli drew up a set of contracts for Davis and Kelsier Ventures; the services outlined ranged from a private meeting with Milei to a promise that the president would appoint Davis his advisor for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology and allow him to policy in the sector. In return, Davis and his associates agreed to send Milei $5 million. Milei’s signature is not on the contracts Novelli drew up for Davis, and his precise level of involvement in Novelli’s scheme in this particular case remains unknown. But it is on at least one other document Novelli probably drew up for the president. In addition to employing Milei as an instructor at Novelli’s own cryptocurrency academy, N&W Professional Traders, Novelli appears to have been the instrument in negotiating the details for a letter of intent establishing a relationship between Milei and Cube Exchange, a cryptocurrency company. Multiple drafts of the preliminary agreement were found on Novelli’s phone, laying out that the company would establish a credit union in Argentina to facilitate the purchase and use of cryptocurrency in the country, as well as found a “Milei Institute.” In return, the president promised that Cube Exchange would receive tax benefits, regulatory carveouts, and direct access to Argentina’s central bank and financial regulatory agencies. Cube Exchange confirmed that Milei signed this preliminary agreement in August of 2024, and it appears that Novelli and his associates netted $150,000 in fees from the exchange. These revelations have rendered Milei’s response to the $LIBRA scandal entirely incredible. Milei has obviously been extensively involved in an essentially predatory network of cryptocurrency influencers and speculators, and probably made a neat profit from such arrangements. This is at the very least an abuse of his trust as a public figure and potentially of his office as president of Argentina. Combined with ongoing investigations into a corruption scandal at Argentina’s pension benefits agency, and the chainsaw-waving populist’s accusations against la casta take on the odor of hypocrisy. The polling confirms that the public has taken a dim view of such affairs as well. Milei’s approval ratings have fallen significantly. For most of his presidency, his net approval ratings hovered in the mid to high 40s; in March, they fell to 37 percent. His net approval rating has cratered in the past year, going from -2 percent to -24 percent. Not all of this has to do with political scandals, of course. While Milei managed to prevent Argentina from falling into hyperinflation, he has struggled—as every Argentine president this century has—to wrangle the country’s economy, which has been disastrously mismanaged for decades. Growth during his presidency has been largely mediocre: The economy contracted 1.3 percent in 2024, grew 4.4 percent in 2025, and is expected to reach 3 percent in 2026, disappointing rates for a developing economy on the mend. Milei and his allies have made a number of important structural reforms—slashing regulations, lifting the country’s suffocating capital controls, simplifying taxation, and balancing the national budget—but voters have grown impatient and are beginning to demand better results. Worse still, Milei has struggled to bring the country’s consistently high monthly inflation rate down to something comparable to the inflation rate of developed economies. Argentine monthly inflation bottomed out at 1.5 percent in May of 2025—the best in many years—but it has slowly been creeping up in the months since. Last month, it reached its highest rate in a year, 3.4 percent, in no small part due to the fuel shock caused by the United States’ and Israel’s decision to go to war in Iran. The shock may not be Milei’s fault, and every country is struggling with elevated prices from inflation, but he has not been engaged in mitigating the effects either. As one of the staunchest pro-Israel politicians on the planet (he previously considered converting to orthodox Judaism), Milei has been an active supporter of the war, regardless of its impacts on the domestic economy. Indeed, Milei made a trip to Israel last week, where he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor and even did a song-and-dance number during the country’s Independence Day festivities.  “I support totally and completely the actions of the United States and Israel,” he told the Spanish periodical El Debate. “If you stand with Israel, you stand with Judeo-Christian values and with that you stand with capitalism.” That message may resonate within Tel Aviv and the Oval Office in Washington, but it does not appear to be particularly endearing to Argentines, who are being stuck with the bill. The post Milei Dances in Tel Aviv, but Faces Trouble at Home appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Is China Using Iran as a Proxy Against the U.S.? Beijing looks like the biggest winner of America’s latest Mideast blunder. (Photo by Yan Yan/Xinhua via Getty Images) Leaders of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have cleverly exploited U.S. policy blunders throughout the international system for at least the past three decades to enhance Beijing’s influence and erode Washington’s. The Trump administration’s mishandling of relations with Iran affords China a new opportunity, and it may prove to be the most significant one yet. Indeed, the question arises whether Xi Jinping’s government is moving beyond passively taking advantage of chronic U.S. ineptitude in the Muslim world and is now actively using Iran and its Shia allies as proxies to create major strategic and economic headaches for the United States. There are indications that the answer is yes.  Granted, Beijing’s apparent strategy is not yet as blatant as NATO’s exploitation of Ukraine as a military proxy to harass and weaken Russia. Washington and its European allies have poured more than $200 billion in financial assistance to Ukraine since Moscow, in February 2022, launched a war that continues today. In late April 2026, the European Union signed off on a new $105 billion “loan” to Kiev. The United States and other alliance members also continue to shower Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated and lethal weapons. Perhaps most crucially, the NATO powers have provided intelligence information (including targeting data for attacks) to Ukrainian forces. However, while PRC’s tilt toward Iran is not nearly as blatant and massive, it’s not trivial either. Until recently, Beijing’s assistance to Iran had seemed to be relatively reactive and indirect, rather than proactive and high-profile. Indeed, Beijing has absorbed some valuable lessons and derived significant benefits from simply observing Tehran’s war effort. That point is especially true in the areas of military hardware and military strategy. For example, PRC experts have learned that Iran’s relatively low cost, low tech 358 missile is adept at taking out important U.S. military assets, each worth millions of dollars. Indeed, the estimated cost of the 358 is one-tenth that of comparable conventional air defense munitions. The PRC has worked to shape the international diplomatic environment to benefit Tehran and disadvantage Washington. For example, Xi’s government not only has offered to play a role as mediator to dampen the fighting, but it has also pressed its close ally Pakistan to lead mediation efforts. At first glance, such a move might not seem to be pro-Iranian, since Pakistan is a prominent Sunni power, and the longstanding Sunni–Shia split in Islam would limit any diplomatic benefits to Tehran. However, the long-term impact of a Pakistani–Chinese mediation role in the Iran war would be to strengthen Beijing’s presence and influence throughout the region. Indeed, Beijing is positioning itself to be a world leader in calling for restraint and peace. That benign reputation is seen globally in sharp contrast to Washington’s growing image as a disruptive, coercive, and destabilizing power. Iran is a larger and more capable adversary than Washington has faced in its previous regime-change wars, increasing the risk to the United States that the fighting may not end quickly and America’s image will continue to deteriorate. Washington and its client, Israel, have already generated significantly greater opposition from major neutral powers and even many U.S. allies than has occurred before. PRC leaders pointedly declined President Trump’s request to join the U.S. campaign to blockade Iran’s ports. As the blockade began, the head of China’s navy stated that Chinese civilian cargo ships would continue to traverse the Strait of Hormuz, irrespective of the U.S. Navy’s presence there. Instead of opposing Iran, Chinese ships have received quiet authorization from Tehran to transit the strait, possibly in exchange for modest fees. That approach amounts to a de facto policy of undermining Washington’s blockade and pursuing a mutually beneficial relationship with Iran with respect to commerce through the strait.  Beijing’s relationship with Iran is more nuanced and complex than one between patron and client. It appears to be getting closer, though, and Chinese leaders now seem willing to escalate their support for Tehran, including military aid. Tom Tugendhat, a member of the British parliament and a distinguished fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute in the United States, observes that China, according to multiple reports, has provided Iran with satellite imagery, components and intelligence needed to attack infrastructure and shipping as well as U.S. targets in Gulf countries. Each part of the logistics chain has helped Iran destroy refineries and docks and even kill civilians. If those reports of extensive Chinese involvement are true, the PRC’s posture would indeed begin to resemble NATO’s role in Ukraine. Such lethal assistance to Tehran also would make Washington’s latest military crusade become even more perilous than it is now. Even without going that far, Beijing’s covert assistance to Iran can exacerbate the U.S. military’s woes in the Strait of Hormuz, elsewhere in the Persian Gulf, and throughout the Middle East. Tehran’s attacks on Washington’s longtime Arab allies have created serious turmoil, even if the PRC is officially sitting on the sidelines. China has been a strategic, diplomatic, and economic beneficiary of the previous U.S. wars in the Muslim world. PRC leaders likely had to shake their heads in disbelief when the United States wasted trillions of dollars, sacrificed thousands of American lives, and made millions of new enemies among Islamic populations by waging its military crusades in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. With the war against Iran, the Trump administration is making the same blunder as its predecessors—and China is again poised to be the main beneficiary. And this time, Beijing doesn’t seem satisfied to sit back and passively enjoy its geostrategic good fortune. The post Is China Using Iran as a Proxy Against the U.S.? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Takimag The Greatest Threat Is the Solution Griping about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner security misses the point. TakiMag (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images) The main question I have about Donald Trump’s latest attempted assassin, Cole Tomas Allen—a teacher, naturally—is: I wonder whether he was a fair grader to Trump supporters? One question I don’t have is whether some new security protocol could stop random nuts from doing insane things in a country of 340 million people. Every journalist who was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner seems to be writing pieces saying, first, that they were at the dinner; second, they really, really were at the dinner—that was them sitting next to the energy secretary!—and third, that they noticed the lax security at the time. Do not blame Democrats and the media for activating unstable personalities with their nonstop hysterical denunciations of President Donald Trump, provably a member of the Waffen SS! To mention just a few of the lovely sobriquets they’ve given the president: fascist (former Vice President Kamala Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), Trump’s first White House chief of staff John Kelly, Trump’s first Joint Chiefs chairman, Mark Milley—“fascist to the core”—MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, NPR, etc.); Nazi (Hillary Clinton, the former President Joe Biden, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Tim Walz, MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, the Guardian, etc.); racist (Biden, Harris, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY); former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Reps. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Jasmine Crockett (D-TX), Yvette Clarke (D-NY), Frederica Wilson (D-FL), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Don Lemon, Rachel Maddow—“openly racist president”—the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, the New York Times’ David Leonhardt; the New Yorker’s John Cassidy, CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, etc.). And so on. Just tighten up security around the man they describe as a mortal threat to humanity. Noticeably, none of the proposed security measures would have stopped Allen.  The Atlantic’s Shane Harris wrote that over “the many years I have been a guest”—the rest of the piece is just filler—“I can’t recall anyone giving my invitation more than a passing glance.” Similarly, the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue complained that, “the man on the door outside only took a cursory look at my ticket from what must have been six feet away.” A closer examination of the tickets might have kept out striving, second-rate journalists hoping to sneak into the posh event, but wouldn’t have stopped Allen, who was staying at the hotel. Harris also noted that “no one has asked to see my identification.” No one even asked for my embossed business cards which I had printed at Smythson of Bond Street. That wouldn’t have stopped Allen, either. He had an ID, and he didn’t have a record. (Which is actually pretty impressive, considering that, according to liberals, black people don’t know how to get IDs.) Attendees did have to walk through magnetometers, which Allen could not do, principally because he was carrying a 12-gauge pump-action Mossberg shotgun, a .38 semiautomatic pistol, and three knives. Rest assured, Secret Service agents may have trouble with roofs, but they are trained to look for men sprinting past them with small arsenals. Everyone keeps citing the assessment of the aspiring assassin himself, who griped: “This level of incompetence is insane.” I’m not sure Allen has the best judgment, but that “level of incompetence” was enough to put him on the ground in shackles, half a football field away from the president. Allen never even made it to the same floor as the ballroom where the dinner was being held. And if he had, Secret Service agents were manning the ballroom doors to prevent anyone from entering after the president had arrived. Even if Allen had magically floated past the agents, the doors and other obstacles in his way, maybe he could have taken out a few lobbyists in the back of the room, and that would have been traumatic for the country. Who would represent Lockheed Martin? There’s a better chance of Washington’s elite being shot or knifed walking to the Hilton. Even factoring in all the psychos who keep trying to kill Trump (with the active encouragement of Democrats), everyone in that room is less likely to be killed by a crazed gunman than to die from a heart attack, a car accident, a fall, a mugging, an allergic reaction, an overdose or a suicide. But because Saturday night’s freakishly rare event was so dramatic, lawmakers will inevitably try to “do something” that will end up making things much, much worse. To take one example, off the top of my head, responding to the 9/11 terrorist attack, we got the DMV ladies at the airport—or as the Times promised us, a “highly trained federal force.” In tests, TSA screeners don’t catch 90 percent of weapons. But on the upside, the whole pointless exercise eats up about 300 million hours of American travelers’ time each year, or the equivalent of 428 full human lives. Over the past 25 years of this horror, that amounts to more than three times as many Americans as died on 9/11. Air travel has become so unpleasant that millions of Americans prefer to drive—a method of transportation that is 190 times more likely to kill them than flying. Many consider that a fair trade-off. Ending TSA would save more American lives than the Iran War ever could. And rather than costing $230 billion, it would save us $15 billion. (We’d also free up more security guards to work Carnival cruise lines.) One nervous WHCD attendee later wrote of his experience: “The worst-case scenario I could imagine was a handful of heavily armed gunmen rampaging through the ballroom.” Is that what we have to guard against? We’ll have to return to the Covid-19 lockdowns, and then we’ll all die of heart attacks from fear of armed gunmen bursting into our homes. A better idea is to accept the fact that no new regulation can prevent bad things from ever happening, and the best we can do is lock up criminals, not allow other countries’ criminals to immigrate here, and ask Democrats to drop the Tourette’s syndrome whenever they talk about Trump. COPYRIGHT 2026 ANN COULTERDISTRIBUTED BY IMPOLITE DEBATES The post The Greatest Threat Is the Solution appeared first on The American Conservative.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court handed down a decision on a Louisiana racial gerrymandering case that much of the country has been waiting on for more than a year. And the decision it handed down couldn’t have been a surprise to anyone following the current Court’s decisions of late. The case? Louisiana v. Callais, which carries with it an interesting story with a familiar lesson: pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Ever since a successful federal lawsuit in the 1990s, when Louisiana had eight congressional districts, the state has had just one majority-black district in its congressional map. That number went from 7-1 to 6-1 to 5-1 as Louisiana’s population stagnated from the 1990s to the 2000s through the 2010s. But after the 2020 census, when the state’s population rang in at just about one-third black and the state legislature passed a 5-1 congressional map (that being five white Republicans and one black Democrat; it’s exceptionally rare and becoming rarer that a white Democrat can get elected to just about anything not just in Louisiana but anywhere in the Deep South), the NAACP and a collection of like-minded partisan Democrats ran into court alleging that a 5-1 map in a state with a population that is one-third black is a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Section 2 is the part of that law which essentially establishes affirmative action for black Democrat politicians. As interpreted going back decades, it established the idea that racial minorities should be made into majorities where possible within things like congressional districts so that members of those minority groups could win elections. This has not produced particularly outstanding results. And by that I mean the results it has produced have names. Like Hank Johnson, Sheila Jackson Lee, Frederica Wilson, Bennie Thompson, Maxine Waters, Dollar Bill Jefferson, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, Al Green, Cori Bush, and lots of others. The Congressional Black Caucus has been the repository of crooks, dopes, communists, and reprobates on a scale unmatched by any other, for the express reason that the districts producing the Star Wars cantina-scene cast of characters that make up that caucus are protected. Most people are not fans of this plan. Most people aren’t fans of gerrymandering, period, and racial gerrymandering is the most odious kind. And yet, racial gerrymandering was the expressed demand of the NAACP in their lawsuit after Louisiana drew its 5-1 map in 2022. They found an Obama-appointed federal judge in the Middle District of Louisiana named Shelley Dick and brought their case to her, hitting paydirt as they did so. Dick, drawing on a Supreme Court case in Alabama that held that a 6-1 map drawn by that state’s legislature (with a black population of about 28 percent, much of it centered in Birmingham and in a corridor between Montgomery and Mobile) was too aggressive to pass muster, ruled Louisiana’s 5-1 map violated Section 2. And the Fifth Circuit, not recognizing the differences between the demographics of Louisiana and Alabama, didn’t overturn Dick’s ruling. Under pressure from the courts, Louisiana’s legislature, in a special session in early 2024, passed a 4-2 map that contains an utterly absurd 6th District — it snakes from Baton Rouge, in the southeastern part of the state, to Shreveport in the northwest. Cleo Fields, who ironically was the congressman from the old Eighth District that was a racially gerrymandered Rorschach test of a district the courts threw out in the 1990s, got himself elected in the newly black 6th District. Then along came Bert Callais and several of his friends, who sued the state in the Western District of Louisiana claiming their 14th Amendment Equal Protection rights were being violated by a racially-gerrymandered district map. Callais won at the district court level; the case had bubbled up ever since. Last year it was heard at the Supreme Court. But it wasn’t decided — Callais was originally argued on 14th Amendment grounds and not on the question of whether Section 2 needed to be thrown out. That question was called back for a rehearing last fall, and then the Court, somewhat suspiciously, sat on the case until Wednesday. Rumor has it that Elena Kagan delayed writing her dissent for several months in order to cause a Purcell problem for Louisiana and other Southern states who would redistrict their congressional maps if unfettered by the old interpretation of Section 2. Purcell being a Supreme Court doctrine that court cases decided too close to elections can’t be allowed to interfere with those elections — the effect of which, in this case, being that while Fields’ gerrymandered district is going away, conventional wisdom suggests he could end up with two more years in Congress because candidates have already qualified and the primary elections are already well underway using the current illegal map. By 2028, the Louisiana legislature will have passed a new 5-1 map, if not a 6-0 map, and Fields will go back to his day job as a “lawyer.” Kagan, according to Mollie Hemingway’s new book about Samuel Alito, has pulled this sort of stunt before. She pulled it after someone — we don’t know who, though we can guess — had leaked the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs case, which put the conservative justices in physical danger from the crazies among the pro-abortion crowd, and Kagan held her dissent in that case even after being asked to hurry up. Elena Kagan is a nasty piece of work, so you’ll know. Perhaps too smart by half. Wednesday afternoon, word had it in Louisiana that lawyers for the plaintiffs were going to seek an injunction against the map, forcing a judicial resolution of the issue, based on the Supreme Court calling it illegal. Should that effort include references to Kagan’s deliberate bad-faith dilatory tactics, there might not be enough popcorn in America to satisfy the spike in demand. I haven’t seen polling on Callais, but it’s my guess that most Americans are fine with the reasoning of the Court’s 6-3 majority that drawing districts solely on racial lines, especially when those districts look like a “snake,” as Chief Justice John Roberts called Fields’ LA-6, is an illegitimate way to do business. But the Court has long held that pure, naked politics isn’t illegitimate in mapmaking of this sort. And that’s a good thing for Democrats in states like Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Maryland, and California, where they’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to disenfranchise their Republican voters. Now it’s a good thing for states like Texas and Florida, which are moving to create very, very advantageous maps reflecting the political power of the GOP majority at both the ballot box and in the state legislature. Other Southern states will almost certainly follow suit by 2028, Louisiana being one of them. And the Democrats are absolutely melting down over this development. For example, here’s Angie Nixon, a Florida state representative very unhappy about that state’s House of Representatives holding a lopsided vote in favor of a new congressional map that will flip four Democrat seats to the GOP this fall: