The earthquakes in Venezuela were a natural disaster, but corruption is the fault line that turned them into a man-made catastrophe. With thousands dead and tens of thousands missing, it is now tragically clear that Delcy Rodriguez is not the answer for a still failing Venezuela. If Venezuela is to be rebuilt — physically, economically, and politically — it must be as a democracy. As decades of bribes and kickbacks filled the pockets of Hugo Chavez, Nicolás Maduro, and their cronies, corruption was simultaneously being built into the substandard buildings these earthquakes destroyed. Construction contracts went to whoever paid the largest bribe, not to whoever would build to code. Shoddy materials were used in housing developments built on unstable ground in known high-risk areas. When the earthquake hit on June 24, many of the 58,000 destroyed buildings were already hollowed out by decades of graft. That corruption did not end with the Trump administration’s arrest of Maduro. Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s former vice president, has kept most of the corrupt officials from the Maduro era in place. Many of these holdovers have known ties to cartels and terror groups that are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, illegal gold mining, and drugs. Instead of developing government capacity over the last six months, officials filled their offshore bank accounts. The earthquake made the failures of the Rodriguez administration painfully clear, with the government largely absent, ineffective, standing idly by, or actively interfering with relief efforts. Six of the senior officials leading the earthquake response are currently sanctioned for corruption, money laundering, drug trafficking, and repression. Diosdado Cabello — Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace and the target of a $25 million U.S. bounty for cocaine trafficking and selling rocket launchers to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — stood next to the Venezuelan president as she addressed the nation about the earthquake response plan. Rodriguez encouraged Cabello to continue “working and inspecting” incoming humanitarian supplies. The next day, Cabello was caught on video blocking the truck of American rescue workers and interfering with their delivery of aid. Rodriguez appointed Governor Rafael Lacava to her reconstruction commission, despite U.S. sanctions against him for “blocking the delivery of critical humanitarian aid” at the same time he funneled corrupt proceeds to secret accounts in Switzerland and Andorra. Rodriguez’s brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez, will be leading a commission to build camps and housing for the displaced, despite U.S. sanctions for helping Maduro “solidify his hold on the military and the government while the Venezuelan people suffer.” Even the runways meant to deliver relief suffered from both the earthquake and corruption. U.S. military personnel needed to repair damaged runways at Caracas’ main airport before relief flights could land, while between 2006 and 2015, Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht paid $98 million in bribes to Venezuelan officials to, among other things, overhaul the airport and its runways — a project that was never completed. This is not a government capable of rebuilding Venezuela, and the people know it. When Rodriguez visited a neighborhood at the center of the disaster, the residents chanted, “Get out! Get out!” Trump’s popularity in the country is plummeting as well, with 90% of Venezuelans disapproving of his support for the current government. The United States still has major interests in the country, first and foremost, the interest in helping people suffering from a traumatic event. The U.S. has pledged $300 million in disaster relief, but without major changes and strong oversight, those funds will inevitably be stolen by corrupt officials as displaced Venezuelans are left out in the cold. Such corruption risks fueling a renewed migration crisis. And surging migration will, in turn, benefit human trafficking cartels, like Tren de Aragua, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization that formed a core rationale for overthrowing Maduro. Cartels and terror groups given protection by corrupt officials in Venezuela could bleed over borders, undermining critical political transformations that are taking place in Colombia and Peru, or impact substantial U.S. investments in neighboring Guyana. Even cold calculations of profit must recognize the wasted private sector opportunities if this government remains in power. This is not a country that is currently capable of attracting significant U.S. investment or acting as a regional ally. America’s leverage to force a change of government, however, is limited. In the wake of major operations in Venezuela and Iran and with midterm elections looming, a return of substantial military pressure is unlikely. Fortunately, corruption itself provides another pathway. As corrupt Venezuelan officials demand bribes from visiting U.S. investors, businesses, or government counterparts, they bring themselves under the criminal jurisdiction of U.S. courts. The Foreign Extortion Prevention Act, enacted in 2024, provides for sentences of up to 15 years for bribery demands of U.S. persons by foreign officials. Using the gavel instead of the gunship, the Trump administration might have the legal ammunition to incentivize the regime to establish a short timetable for a fair and free election. It is time for the U.S. to listen to the chants of the people and deliver what this moment demands: democracy, freedom, and a path for Venezuelans to determine their own future. *** Josh Birenbaum is deputy director of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Carrie Filipetti is the Executive Director of the Vandenberg Coalition and the former Deputy Special Representative for Venezuela at the U.S. Department of State.

Recently obtained video shows disgraced Maine Democrat Graham Platner doing chores around his home after suspending his campaign for the U.S. Senate. Platner announced the end of his tumultuous campaign late Wednesday evening after a series of scandals — ranging from his Nazi-themed tattoo and raunchy social media posts to allegations of troubling behavior, sexual assault, and even rape. By Thursday morning, he was back to doing work around the house. WATCH: New video obtained by Fox News shows Graham Platner’s first public appearance since suspending his Senate campaign in Maine. Platner was spotted briefly leaving his house days after a new wave of sexual assault allegations, including a rape accusation, became public. The Maine… pic.twitter.com/fz1jEvcwJp — Fox News (@FoxNews) July 9, 2026 Platner’s decision to bow out gives his party just days to replace him on the ballot ahead of the November general election — and early reports suggested that Platner conditioned his exit on being allowed to exert some control over who could ultimately take his place as the nominee. After ex-girlfriend Jenny Racicot accused him of rape in interviews with Politico and CNN, the Maine Democrat immediately began hemorrhaging what support he had left. Platner held out until Wednesday before ultimately leaving the race as endorsements, support, and funding began to evaporate. Platner responded with an 11-minute video denying the allegations and blaming everyone but himself for the drama and scandals that were constant fixtures in his race. “We believe that for the movement to continue, [the candidate] can’t be me,” Platner said. “And for that reason, we are suspending campaign operations … I have faced some very serious allegations, and I just want to make it clear, this is all false. The things that have been claimed did not happen. It’s not real.”

Despite claims that he never pushed to defund the police, leftist darling Abdul El-Sayed once said that “we do need to defund the police” and argued that funds used for law enforcement should go to public libraries instead.  El-Sayed, running for the Democratic Senate nomination in Michigan, argues that he “never, never, called for defunding” the police. That claim contrasts with anti-police positions he took during the summer of 2020 as riots broke out over the death of convicted felon George Floyd in Minneapolis.  “I believe that we do need to defund the police in so far as defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets, and investing more in the means of educating and empowering engaging communities, with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty that we’ve allowed systematic racism to allow a fester in too many communities,” El-Sayed said in a June 23, 2020 MichMash Politics interview first flagged by CNN.  That comment came after he suggested that he generally did not use the term “defund the police” but advocated for the policies pushed by the movement.  “Rather than investing in a force of people who respond with guns and put people in jails, what if we were to take on systematic poverty by investing in the means of uprooting that poverty itself?” he said. “What if we were to invest in social services? If we were to invest in public schools? What if we were to invest in public libraries?” El-Sayed is facing off against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) in the competitive Democratic primary race to replace outgoing Senator Gary Peters. The winner of the primary will likely go on to run against Republican Mike Rogers. Facing scrutiny over his previous police rhetoric, El-Sayed is now trying to distance himself from the defund the police movement. That contradicts what he told MichMash back in June 2020.  “I want a refund on the taxpayer dollars that I pay to police who use that to buy war material, to wage war in our streets, and I want to refund public health and public libraries and public schools,” El-Sayed said.  Later in the same interview, he argued that people imprisoned are the real victims of crime because of “over-policing” and failure to combat poverty.  “The fact of the matter is every single person winds up in jail, or worse, dead, at the hands of a police officer, has been failed by our system, either directly because of our over-policing, or indirectly because we have failed to invest in the things that uproot poverty in communities across the country,” he said. The Daily Wire reached out to El-Sayed, the former public health director for Detroit, to explain his stance on defunding the police.  “Abdul worked closely with law enforcement as Director of Health, Human, and Veterans services for Wayne County. As hands-on experience always allows, his perspective has become more nuanced,” campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told The Daily Wire. “One simple word has never been enough to fully explain the reforms we need for a challenge as complex as our criminal legal system.” Richner added that El-Sayed believes “we need to improve law enforcement recruitment, retention, and retirement funding so that law enforcement officers come from the communities they serve.” El-Sayed also supports “community violence intervention” policies and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, Richner said. The act would weaken legal protections for police officers.  That response was similar to the comment given to CNN for an article highlighting El-Sayed’s history of anti-police rhetoric. The outlet noted that El-Sayed had deleted at least a dozen posts pushing defund the police policies.  “Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about,” he wrote in one post from June 2020 that he later deleted.  El-Sayed, who claims that Floyd was the victim of an “assassination” and was “lynched,” suggested during a seminar hosted by the University of Michigan that police officers should not be armed.  “So we have to ask ourselves, do police departments really need tanks and weapons of war and the material that’s coming back as hand-me-downs from the military abroad? Do police really need to use guns? Do we need as much of a police force?” he asked.  He added that the “defund the police” movement was about getting the government to move away from “racist ideologies” that led police to “invest in war material” for law enforcement. During his time pushing anti-police rhetoric, El-Sayed was heavily involved in a group called Michigan United which compared police officers to “slave catchers” and helped organize a protest that turned into a riot, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Not quite 2,300 years ago, but more like 17 years ago, the story goes, the executives of Barnes & Noble asked their engineers to build a device that could hold every book ever printed. The company, which had spent a century filling oak shelves one store at a time, envisioned a library small enough to slip into a coat pocket yet vast enough to safeguard the sum total of a reader’s collection. These files were stored on a bank of humming servers in New Jersey, a kind of reliquary modeled after the chain’s old flagship store on Fifth Avenue. A scanned first edition of “Moby-Dick” was said to be among the holdings. Much of the Kindle reader panic has been done away with. But at one time, there was an outcry that the bookstore would die. That the sites of learning and information would soon be done away with. That public libraries would deteriorate, and children would ask their mothers on the street what these dilapidated, weather-worn buildings of old were. Maintaining the collection of books in your own library was an enormous expense, they said. Humidity, mice, and insects will slowly eat away at your books. Might as well just copy all your books onto an e-reader and burn all the rest of your paper books. Eventually, the challenges of running a bookstore became greater than the will to preserve it, and all bookstores and libraries on Earth disappeared. Except that’s not what happened. Twenty years later, I am writing this in my own little personal library, with physical copies of books on my bookshelf and some lovely new independent and small bookstores in my area that I frequent — including some Barnes & Noble stores as well — the very epicenter of the e-reader epidemic. This is what the last reading-is-dying panic looked like, and it was wrong too. And so Rose Horowitch is standing on the street corner with a cardboard sign that reads: “The End of Reading Is Here.” Yet another reading-is-dying panic essay. And I can’t help but roll my eyes and walk by. Because the Atlantic is saying the end of reading is near, but I am seeing the exact opposite. It just takes some looking. I run a number of book-related YouTube channels, so it’s possible I am just insulated and living in my own little world where I don’t see the light of day and don’t think there’s a problem with reading. I actually see it as flourishing. I see people wanting to talk about books more often than they did when I was growing up. I see more people interested in book clubs and book analysis than ever before because of the decline in reading. It’s just going to take a bit of time for the rest of the world to catch up. I know this might sound strange, but as fewer and fewer people read, it will become increasingly important to read. This is human nature. And the one thing, besides wisdom and patience, that Horowitch lacks is the ability to understand: that it is precisely the human spirit to do things that are unpopular. This is why I got off Facebook during my Junior year. Because my mom joined it. When dating apps became all the rage among millennials, Gen A went completely off them. Vinyl has posted 19 straight years of growth and crossed $1 billion in U.S. revenue in 2025, in the middle of the streaming era, not despite a lag in it. Half of new vinyl buyers are 18-34. Flip phones and “dumbphones” are having a real moment, too, among the exact generation that grew up with a smartphone in hand: brick-phone purchases among 18- 24-year-olds jumped 148% from 2021 to 2024, and #BringBackFlipPhones has 59.8 million views on TikTok. Film and instant photography are back in a generation that has a professional camera in every pocket: Gen Z instant-camera use is up 45%, and 2024 was called “film’s best year in decades” by industry press. The social platforms themselves aren’t immune. Horowitch writes that people don’t know how to read and are replacing books with social media and endless scrolling. But 52% of Gen Z tried to quit social media in 2025, versus 33% of the general population, with mental health cited as the top reason. CNBC has dubbed the whole cluster (flip phones, vinyl, logging off) a “quiet revolution.” And this is the thing with revolutions. They are invisible at first. The French Revolution didn’t begin with people yelling on street corners to join the movement. They didn’t publish articles in the papers. It was a growing dissatisfaction with the way things were and a pressing on to a better way for these people (not sure the guillotine was the better way, but I digress). I have always found that when sensationalism exists, there are people on the sidelines just waiting. There are people biding their time and just reading in spite of the numbers. When the very same people who are addicted to scrolling social media finally get off the diet of junk food, they’ll need to replace it with something good. And the replacement will be the rise of books. Mark my words: in a few months to years, you will see new articles popping up about book clubs’ resurgence, the rise of the classics, and how Gen Z just cannot stop reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” or “Anna Karenina.” Let’s not just sit back and romanticize the past and be Luddites. We praise the kinds of writers like Dumas and Dickens and Dostoevsky, but they were writing serialized content and were paid by the word. Yes, sentences are getting shorter, not because our attention spans are dropping, but because writers are getting better. This is the kind of crucible that will make writers crack their knuckles and learn how to capture an audience even better. Their writing will sharpen because their competition isn’t just other novels, but now it’s the world of social media. Writing is still a relatively young form of storytelling. We have had thousands of years to master verbal storytelling, but writing is much different. The last few hundred years have been some of the only times when the mass audience has had access to write stories. And so we’re learning. And I don’t think I would commend anyone in a writing class to consistently write the long sentences of a Dickens. He is a brilliant storyteller, no doubt, and a brilliant writer, but some of his sentences are lackluster and just laborious. And he made it so because he wanted to get more money. The same thing with Dumas. Although I am reading that now and I adore it, there are some things in there that just don’t need to be there and distract from the story. I am a purist and don’t love abridged versions of anything, but abridged versions are there for a reason: they’re likely better-written stories. This is kind of like “The Lord of the Rings” extended edition. I love it much more than the theatrical cut, but the theatrical cut is objectively a better-paced story and a much better film. So maybe I’m not as insulated as I am worried. The work that I am doing and what I am seeing with the reading world counters the idea that Americans cannot swallow words and sentences…that they are losing the ability to think deeply about works of literature. The majority of my audience across my channels is under 35. And about 20% of them are between 13 and 24. And all I do on this channel is analyze literature and think deeply about books that I love, like The Lord of the Rings. The older a child gets, the less likely they are to read. And this was true of me as well. I didn’t really read all that much until a passionate English teacher put “To Kill a Mockingbird” in my hands. And I fell in love with a good story. And then I read more and more because I found that while reading, I felt better. It was a break from everything else, and it felt like it nourished my mind. And that isn’t going away. As reading disappears, it will start becoming cool again, and you’ll see new generations start to read and consume books and become better writers and craft more brilliant stories. Reading panics happen all the time. And so let Rose Horowitch keep her sign up on the corner. The panic will run its course, the way it always does — the paperback, the television, the Nook, and now this. Because when the dust settles, and the feeds have moved on to whatever comes after doomscrolling, I already know where I’ll be: in my comfy chair, sipping tea, working through my half-destroyed copy of “The Return of the King” for the 17th time, enjoying one of the greatest stories ever told. The rest of the world will catch up soon. *** Jonathan Minnema is the founder of First Timers (https://youtube.com/@firsttimereaders) and was previously the managing editor of Fathom Magazine. 

President Donald Trump said it would be “very hard” for Democrats to replace Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner as he faces calls to drop out after being accused of rape.  “So he won the primary,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One while traveling back from a NATO summit in Turkey. “It’s very hard for them to do.” Platner suspended his campaign on Wednesday after a former girlfriend named Jenny Racicot accused Platner of entering her home without permission while heavily intoxicated in 2021 and sexually assaulting her. Platner has denied the allegations.  “It’s really a question of whether or not you believe the woman. A lot of people say big falsehoods,” Trump said. “He’s in a bind, he’s in a bind. But should they be able to do it? Well, I guess he’s going to lose. I’d imagine he’s going to lose.” Trump also questioned why Platner did not face more pressure last month after another one of his former girlfriends came forward to the New York Times and alleged that Platner treated her abusively, both physically and emotionally. That accuser, Lyndsey Fifield, was active in conservative politics.  “It’s very interesting when the Republican woman came out with the same charge, nobody believed her, when this woman came out, everybody believed her,” Trump said.  Fifield alleged that Platner once twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door shut, telling her to stay there until she was “calm.” Fifield said she eventually fell asleep and left the next morning. She later accused the Times of watering down its story highlighting her experience dating Platner.  Platner continued to deny all accusations of physical abuse in his announcement suspending his campaign.  “I have faced some very serious allegations, and I just want to make it clear, this is all false,” he added. “The things that have been claimed did not happen. It’s not real.” Maine Democrats have already set in motion the process to replace Platner on the ballot before the July 13 deadline. They are expected to hold a nominating convention in the coming days. In recent days, Platner and the Democratic Party have traded shots about how the replacement process would work.  “We will announce the full timeline, details for how the nomination process will move forward, information about how to participate, and requirements for candidates soon,” the party said. “We will keep the public informed throughout the process — transparency is of the utmost importance.”