Screencap of Twitter/X video. Soros-backed Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner is not particularly fond of arresting and prosecuting actual criminals, but he’s a real tough guy when it comes…

Buffalo head coach Sean McDermott looks on during a playoff game against the Jacksonville Jaguars at EverBank Stadium in Jacksonville, Fla., on Jan. 11, 2026. Megan Briggs/Getty ImagesThe Buffalo Bills…

Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vazquez gives a press conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on May 21, 2020. Carlos Giusti/AP PhotoPresident Donald Trump has pardoned former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced,…

European nations have dispatched a joint military contingent to Greenland, with 33 personnel arriving on January 15, in what officials describe as a deterrent move amid renewed concerns over former President…

Politics The Week That Perished: January 17, 2026 Rapist policemen, Venezuelan housing, public toilets, and more news of the world. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images) TRUNCHEON MEAT As part of an ongoing UK DEI drive, London’s Metropolitan Police decided to increase the diversity of their ranks by one simple expedient—deliberately hiring a black pedophile. Cliff Mitchell had previously been overlooked for recruitment after being accused of raping a child, something which, traditionally, police officers are not really supposed to do. But then, in 2020, George Floyd died and all that somehow changed, allowing Cliff to thereby use his newfound DEI position as a cop to continue abusing and kidnapping his victims, one of whom was a child under 13. When news of the above obscenity emerged this week, it caused quite a stir online. Always highly concerned with women’s rights, Britain’s left-wing Labour Party government responded in the most logical fashion they knew—not by banning DEI schemes designed to help disadvantaged black rapists handcuff privileged white women to their bedposts, but by disingenuously attempting to get X banned to avoid outraged normal folk freely discussing such matters. One alleged feature of Grok, an AI add-on feature for Elon Musk’s X, is that it allows canny hackers to trick it into “nudifying” photographs of any random female fed into it, including ones young enough to appeal to Officer Cliff Mitchell’s own proven tastes. Certainly, it proved possible to “digitally undress” unwitting girls down to their imaginary bikinis via Grok—just like users have with other easily available AI apps like ChatGPT and Google Gemini. In a feigned response, the UK Government thus threatened to ban X altogether—but, strangely, not ChatGPT or Google Go-Ogle.  As X in the UK is a hotbed of unfiltered anti-migrant sentiment, Musk raged that Labour’s threat was merely a lying excuse to censor online free speech about DEI-enabled scum like Mitchell. “Why is the UK Government so fascist?” Elon asked, implying they were a bunch of Nazis, a label which was, of course, wholly inaccurate—the Nazis were white supremacists, not white subservients.  To prove they definitely weren’t Nazis, Labour next banned the suspiciously blonde and blue-eyed Dutch anti-Islam commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek from future entry to the country after she tweeted the following in Musk’s support:    Keir Starmer wants to crack down on X under the pretense of ‘women’s safety’, whilst he’s the one allowing the ongoing rape and killing of British girls by migrant rape-gangs. Evil, despicable man. In solidarity with Eva-Supposedly-Braun, President Trump’s free speech czar, Sarah Rogers, promptly compared Starmer’s UK not to Hitler’s Germany, but Putin’s Russia. Sarah should know; she’s the czar, after all. To be fair, the AI-powered bikinification of non-consenting ladies online is a genuine problem with apps like Grok. But also a problem were the colossal double-standards of certain particular ladies who began volubly complaining about it to back Sir Keir up, notably British TV presenter Maya Jama – a model who continually promotes herself by posting salacious photos and videos wearing tiny bikinis online for all to see.  So, just to get things straight, Maya was worried that someone might artificially re-edit genuine photos of her pouting into a camera semi-naked into fake ones of her pouting into a camera semi-naked? Maybe her real fear was that someone might as Grok to tell her to put some clothes on for once: “Hey, Grok, stitch Maya Jama into a yashmak!” (Or at least into a scold’s bridle.) Under Keir Starmer’s supine Islamophilic rule, it’s only going to be a matter of time anyway. SOCIAL(IZED) HOUSING  When someone compares a Western nation like Great Britain or the USA to a totalitarian dictatorship abroad like Nazi Germany or Putin’s Russia, it’s usually intended as a disapproving insult – but not to Zohran Mamdani’s Marxist cosplay chums in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who this week cheered Mamdani’s aspirations to imitate the Venezuelan government’s wrong-headed housing schemes in New York.  Outraged by President Donald Trump’s New Year kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro from his compound in Caracas (not for Cliff Mitchellesque purposes, but purely for legitimate geopolitical reasons), DSA commissars held a special “Hands Off Venezuela!” videocall, praising the incredible affordability of homes in the Bolivarian People’s Republic. This is true. Apartments in cities like Caracas are indeed dirt-cheap. But why are they so affordable?  Two main reasons, really: 1) They are complete hovels, not even having basic amenities like running water or actual panes in the windows, and 2) Many do not actually exist anywhere other than on lying pieces of paper, corrupt Commie officials having pocketed the intended government construction cash before running away laughing.   North Carolina DSA leader Tristan Bavol-Marques certainly found himself impressed by Venezuelan housing stock, however, recalling a previous state-supervised DSA trip to the country, where he marveled that homes were “sold at cost”—that cost presumably being $0, as most were not actually there at all.  Still, $0 is a highly affordable sum, even for a Venezuelan. In fact, it’s the one possible amount where the Venezuelan bolivar still has complete parity with the US dollar.       ROOM TO RANT Another DSA-linked leftist with a severe housing complex is Mamdani’s chosen new NYC tenants’ rights supremo Cea Weaver, who has gone on record as believing private property ownership, specifically of a home, is a “weapon of white supremacy.” She also dislikes gentrification of previous slum areas, obviously thinking the non-white poor should go on living there in filth forever, just so she can moon around pretending to feel sorry over them. So as not to be accused of being a hypocrite, where does Weaver herself live? As befits her name, in a small, rented, wicker basket? No, in a private apartment in Crown Heights—one of the most gentrified areas in all New York. When reporters lurked outside her front steps to confront her with this fact, Cea broke down into tears, ran straight back inside and locked the door: one of the very many advantages of owning a home of one’s own.  Worse, it also turned out Weaver’s mother—a university professor named Celia Applegate—inhabits a $1.6 million luxury home in Nashville, one of the most intensely gentrified cities in all America. By Weaver’s own loony logic, this must mean her mom is the biggest Nazi on planet Earth, the skirted Himmler of the real estate world? There is some highly suggestive evidence this might indeed be so: Frau Professor Apfel-Gatter is a teacher of German Studies at Vanderbilt University.  Another privileged New York Democrat who sickeningly owns his own luxury property is Steven Spielberg, who has been outed as having enjoyed a clandestine meeting with Mamdani at his Central West Park apartment following the new mayor’s election victory. Details of precisely what the pair discussed have remained a secret, but it is believed Spielberg may have been seeking potential script-ideas for a new movie about people being forced to endure inhumane, overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions at the behest of evil extremist politicians, called Schindler’s Housing List.  Like the original Schindler’s List, it will go on and on forever, and by the time most applicants finally reach the top of it, they will probably all be dead.     KIM IL-DUNG With characteristic twisted priorities, Mamdani has decided his number one plan (and number two plan) for making up for the fact the plumbing doesn’t work in so much slum-like New York public housing is not to get Cea Weaver to do anything so vulgar as actually fix any of it, but to micturate $4 million up a wall on ranks upon ranks of bright, shiny, new public toilets all across the Big Crapple instead. For a true revolutionary socialist, even defecation must become collective.  Yet there is a deep and enigmatic mystery about the Mayor’s latest announcement. He claims said public conveniences will somehow be “self-cleaning”. How so? The only possible answer can lie within another socialist worker’s paradise: North Korea. Every January at about this time, the Hermit Kingdom’s chubby dictator Kim Jong-Un demands that every last man, woman, and child participate in a compulsory countrywide “poo harvest” by having regime apparatchiks collect their stored dung up and spread it all over fields due to a national shortage of genuine chemical fertilizer. Alongside higher crop-yields, Kim also desires higher crap-yields, regularly imposing impossibly large quotas upon his people. Each adult is required to save and bag up 500kg of feces for gathering, when the average annual amount produced by the typical adult is only 145kg; Kim, being himself is so well-fed, may have unrealistic standards. The result of these impossible demands is predictable: terrified North Koreans, desperate not to end up in one of Kim’s gulags for failing to comply, buy surplus stools from others with galloping diarrhea on the black (or brown) market, or else steal stockpiles en masse from unguarded public toilets. Hence, the solution to the puzzling question as to how Mamdani is going to render his NYC toilets self-cleaning from filth is obvious: become a “sanctuary city” for North Koreans, and wait for their reshittances back to the DPRK to flush the problem away.   WALZING OVER THE CLIFF Similar Third World–style governmental dysfunction is marching rapidly right across the West. Things are getting so bad the United Arab Emirates has now announced restrictions on its citizens studying at UK universities, lest they become radicalized by all the mad Arabs living there—which once would have been a bit like banning them from British beaches lest they gain too much of a taste for sand.  Still, you can see what the Emiratis mean; just look at how badly the Democrat Tim Walz has gone native in Minnesota after spending so much time around all those shipped-in Somalis he loves so much. In a new speech, Walz has crudely promised to spend his last remaining time in office as governor by treating Republican opponents in the following fashion: “Expect for the next 11 months for me to ride you like you’ve never been ridden.”  DEI for black rapists; homelessness as a public policy choice; censorship as “public safety.” How much worse can things get over here? Start bagging up your turds: those fields won’t fertilize themselves. The post The Week That Perished: January 17, 2026 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Inside the White House’s New Press Reality In Leavitt’s briefing room, loyalty and flattery often outweigh tough questions. Riley Gaines had just debuted as a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture’s new milk-mustache ad campaign when she made her first appearance in the White House press briefing room Thursday afternoon. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was overjoyed to see the former collegiate swimmer–turned–conservative commentator in attendance and, after addressing the escalating protests in Minneapolis, directed the first question of the day to her. “I’m surprised it took us a year to get you here but I’m very happy to see you,” Leavitt said before personally promoting Gaines’ new podcast. “So, thank you, and you brought a beautiful baby and husband too, so thank you so much for joining and why don’t you kick us off.”  As Gaines’s husband Barker wrestled with the pair’s 3-month-old baby Margot, who was wrapped in a bulletproof blanket due to “death threats,” the former swimmer immediately began reciprocal praise of Leavitt: “First and foremost, congratulations to you, being a girl mom will change your life in the best way possible,” gushed Gaines. In Trump’s new press corps, flattery increasingly comes before real journalism.  Amid a packed news cycle—the seizure of another oil tanker in the Caribbean, another night of volatile protests in Minneapolis, and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado arriving at the Capitol—the first question of the day landed elsewhere. It concerned transgender athletes, an issue being currently weighed by the Supreme Court. Leavitt couldn’t have been happier with the line of questioning, as was evident by her blissful reaction to Gaines, responding in a tone that sounded closer to that of a third-grade teacher praising a student for getting the correct answer. The happy-go-lucky exchange stood in stark contrast to what was to come when Leavitt was forced to field a tough question from a real reporter only a few moments later.  Niall Stanage, a White House columnist for the Hill with decades of experience across major outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, drew criticism from Leavitt after he challenged the Trump administration’s characterization of the death of the 37-year-old Renee Good, an American citizen and mother of three, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross during a confrontation in Minneapolis last week. “Earlier, you were just defending ICE agents generally,” Stanage began. “And earlier on, Secretary Noem spoke to the media and she said, among other things, that they are doing ‘everything correctly.’ Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year. A hundred seventy U.S. citizens were detained by ICE, and Renee Good was shot in the head and killed by an ICE agent. How does that equate to them doing ‘everything correctly’?”  “Why was Renee Good unfortunately and tragically killed?” Leavitt snapped back at Stanage.  “Because an ICE agent acted recklessly and killed her unjustifiably,” replied Stanage.  “Oh OK, so you’re a biased reporter with a left-wing opinion,” replied Leavitt.  “What do you want me to do?” asked Stanage incredulously.  “Yeah, because you’re a left-wing hack, you’re not a reporter, you’re posing in this room as a journalist, and it’s so clear by the premise of your question,” Leavitt said. “And you, and the people in the media who have such biases but fake like you’re a journalist, you shouldn’t even be sitting in that seat. But you’re pretending like you’re a journalist… and the question that you just raised and your answer proves your bias.”  In the aftermath of the exchange, the White House X account was celebratory. “Leavitt DESTROYS a ‘Left-Wing Hack’” read the caption above video of the pair’s back and forth. And though a cursory scan of Stanage’s X account does show a left-of-center (but hardly militant progressive) bias, and though his description of the ICE-involved shooting was adversarial, his question was not unreasonable. The many visual angles provided of Good’s death have left ample room for questioning of ICE’s actions, especially when the result is a dead American, regardless of her openly anti-Trump politics.  Leavitt’s aggressive tenor on Thursday tracked perfectly with the second Trump administration’s general tone regarding the long-tenured journalists who have covered the ins and outs of Washington DC and its presidents in the 21st century. Podcasters and influencers who speak glowingly of Trump and his allies are received as heralded heroes while anyone who dares question the merits of any of Trump’s admittedly singular policies are met with stern gazes and animated anger.  Leavitt’s fiery encounter with Stanage came on the same day that Pentagon officials announced they would assume editorial control of the long-independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes, citing a desire to curb what they called “woke distractions.” In a post on X, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the department would “modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that siphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members.” Part of curbing “woke distractions” now includes a pledge of allegiance to Trump as new applicants are being asked how their coverage would distinctly advance the agenda of the Trump administration.  The decision to promote right-wing commentators, influencers, and podcasters who reliably amplify the Trump administration has been consistent since Leavitt took ownership of the James S. Brady Briefing Room in January of 2025. More than 30 “new media” outlets, most outwardly and proudly right-wing in nature, have rotated through the briefing room in the year since Trump took office. (Somewhat inscrutably, The American Conservative, which is almost a quarter-century old, was invited to a press briefing as a “new media” outlet.) And though to some degree it can fairly and accurately be argued that the American press has shifted increasingly leftward in its coverage since the Second World War, especially on social and cultural issues, the blowback against journalists who dare question the policy positions of the second Trump administration raises questions about what exactly the point of the exercise is.  In a Trump era that claims to prize merit and accountability, the administration has adopted a press strategy that rewards loyalty over rigor and access over expertise. Experience is no longer a credential; it is a liability if it produces questions the administration would rather not answer. The result is a briefing room where affirmation is mistaken for fairness and scrutiny is dismissed as sabotage. Anyone who values a free press should be concerned not only about how this administration treats reporters today, but about the precedent it sets for administrations to follow. The post Inside the White House’s New Press Reality appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs Is Trump Winning Bigly on the World Stage? The death of U.S. primacy has been greatly exaggerated. The “unipolar moment” is over, and rising challengers now prevent American primacy. Facing this new reality, Washington must kick the habit of military intervention and practice a foreign policy of pure restraint. President Donald Trump’s bellicosity abroad isn’t realpolitik but machtpolitik, defined by a love for violence and vengeance and power for its own sake. Or so we are told. Or rather, so you are told—by me! Well, I haven’t made the point about machtpolitik, but I have advocated restraint. And I’ve done so on grounds that America’s military interventions don’t seem to go very well, and that its global primacy looks unsustainable as China and Russia enter the arena of great power politics and as middle powers, on the margins, exert their might.  But one year into Trump 2.0, that assessment should be reconsidered.  Indeed, for all the voguish talk of “America’s relative decline,” a strong case can be made that Trump is reasserting U.S. primacy on the world stage. Robert O’Brien, a former Trump national security advisor, told me that Trump’s “peace through strength” foreign policy involves “targeted ops against bad actors” and the “relentless pursuit of American military and economic strength.” O’Brien says this hard-nosed foreign policy has protected the homeland and deterred adversaries.  I’ve come to believe that antiwar, pro-restraint conservatives should reflect with an open mind on the kind of views expressed by O’Brien, if only to refine their own arguments. To see why, consider recent geopolitical happenings. The lesser members of the anti-Western “axis of autocracies” aren’t doing too well, you may have noticed. Venezuela’s socialist strongman, Nicolas Maduro, recently got snatched during a U.S. raid that apparently featured a nosebleed-inducing sonic superweapon. The new acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, has been inclined to play ball with the White House to avoid her predecessor’s fate.  In the Middle East, the government of Iran seems weaker than it has in a long time. The country has been rocked by mass protests, sparked by poor economic conditions that Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions have worsened. Its nuclear program, a source of prestige and leverage, was set back last June by a U.S. attack. Trump is again considering an attack on Iran but evidently has yet to see a proposed strike package that passes the risk-reward calculus. How about the big dogs, then? Russia has shown itself to be not a rising but a revanchist great power, and one that overestimated the extent of its sphere of influence. After four years of full-scale attritional war and a million casualties, Vladimir Putin’s forces still haven’t fully captured the pro-Russian provinces in eastern Ukraine. Had Trump “walked away” from Ukraine early last year, as some antiwar conservatives advised, Russia likely would have overrun the country, wrecking if not subduing a buffer state between itself and the West. Of course, the biggest challenger to America is China, its only peer competitor. The Middle Kingdom is in better shape than Russia, though its decades-long stupendous economic growth hit a roadblock during the Covid pandemic and still hasn’t fully recovered. The U.S. cannot dominate China in Asia any longer, but in the view of the geopolitical analyst John Hulsman, that’s not Trump’s goal anyway. “Trump wants the U.S. to be chairman of the board” of great powers, Hulsman told me, not to remain an uncontested global hegemon. Relative to Trump’s first term, the president has modulated his hostile rhetoric against China and maintained communication with its leader Xi Jinping. After Joe Biden on four occasions pledged to fight China over Taiwan if needed, Trump has restored strategic ambiguity, the longstanding U.S. policy of not revealing whether Washington would defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion. Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) says the U.S. aims to deny Chinese aggression but drops the Biden administration’s focus on advancing human rights and democracy, which Beijing views as interference in its domestic affairs. At the same time, Trump has taken tough actions to contain China within its neighborhood and limit its force projection abroad. He’s turning Taiwan into a very prickly porcupine, announcing last month the sale of $11 billion in munitions needed to deter Beijing, the largest-ever arms package for the island nation. And while the NSS tactfully didn’t name China in the section on defending the Western Hemisphere—referring instead to “non-Hemispheric competitors”—the capture of Maduro uprooted an aspirational Chinese client from America’s backyard. In addition to these geopolitical developments, macroeconomic figures also suggest the U.S. has arrested its decline relative to other great powers. Twenty years ago, its share of global GDP was falling, the U.S. trailed Europe by that metric, and China was catching up rapidly. But since then, Europe’s economy has stagnated as America’s took the lead. And in Covid’s wake, the U.S. has widened the gap with China.  The U.S. economy has heated up in Trump’s second term; the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projects an impressive 5.3 percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2025. Meanwhile, the trade deficit plummeted to the lowest levels since 2009, suggesting Trump’s tariffs have rebalanced global trade without accelerating inflation or, evidently, slowing America’s GDP growth. That will help diversify the economy, which already boasts serious competitive advantages: The U.S. has been a net energy exporter since 2019—thanks in part to Trump’s “drill baby drill” approach—even as it has taken the lead in the newest cutting-edge technology, artificial intelligence. Evidently, Americans have good reason to be optimistic, yet few will celebrate these developments. Liberals despise Trump and are loath to concede that his brash and seemingly haphazard approach to governance yields positive results. Antiwar conservatives are fed up with Trump’s many military interventions. Conversely, regime-change-supporting neoconservatives are dissatisfied with the limited character of those interventions. And relative to previous military campaigns in the Middle East and Latin America, Trump’s actions are indeed restrained, though not enough for the purist restrainers, said Daniel McCarthy, a board member of The American Conservative, in an email. Of course, downsides do exist. As political commentator Fareed Zakaria has observed, Trump’s norm-eroding belligerence is turning America into a country that other nations fear, not admire, raising risks of historic allies balancing against Washington. The best example is Trump’s threat to take over Greenland, which is owned by Denmark, one of America’s most reliable NATO partners. European diplomats I talk to are freaked out by this fixation, and Trump should find ways to work with Denmark and Europe to achieve U.S. interests in Greenland, rather than jeopardizing the Western alliance. Moreover, the full ramifications of Trump’s military interventions have yet to be seen. Venezuela could go sideways fast if Rodriguez loses the trust of other elites and the resulting power vacuum is filled by paramilitary groups. And the Maduro sting is hardly a reliable paradigm of American power; replicating its success in countries that aren’t total basket cases seems nigh impossible. And while Trump’s one-night bombing raid in Iran degraded Tehran’s nuclear capabilities without significant apparent costs, the administration is now mulling further, much riskier strikes to overthrow the regime. To this columnist, that seems a likely disastrous course of action that doesn’t serve American interests. The U.S. has an interest in preventing Iran from building the bomb, not turning it into a chaotic failed state. Political, not just geopolitical, risks abound. Poll numbers indicate Americans don’t support Trump’s intervention in Venezuela or his energetic foreign policy generally. And the utter dominance of foreign policy issues in Trump’s second term has created the impression of skewed priorities. Still, foreign policy is of vital importance. Great power politics is a very ugly business, and Trump the businessman may be navigating it better than many restrainers realize. The post Is Trump Winning Bigly on the World Stage? appeared first on The American Conservative.

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