Following a trial at the ferry port in Holyhead, where passengers enter the UK from the Republic of Ireland, LFR will now be deployed more widely. Cameras in public places and transport hubs will seek to identify visa-overstayers, as well as those already due for removal — or who were removed once, and are trying to return.

But on 5 November, the relevant Home Office documents had mysteriously vanished, leaving only a “410 Gone” message. A new page on LFR in Immigration Enforcement provides almost no information, just a couple of links — one to the Holyhead trial deployment data (three arrests in nine days), and the other to standard operating procedures.

Instead, the Home Office was keen to promote its new legal framework for using LFR in law enforcement, to be included in the Police Reform Bill. Taking into account the results of a large public consultation, the UK Government is finally making laws to control the use of AI camera systems that turn everybody’s face into an ID card. The Policing Minister promises that, in future, an independent regulator will oversee use of LFR and other biometric technology by law enforcement, to ensure that it is used proportionately and lawfully.

Nothing in this new framework would rule out using the technology to identify anyone wanted by Immigration Enforcement (IE). Indeed, an industry explainer written in early October spells out how the new Home Office IE policy will apply rules to ensure proportionate and lawful use of LFR.

Meanwhile, travelers through major UK airports are being told to look forward to passport-free travel. Soon, even putting your passport into an e-gate will be unnecessary, as the same cameras that currently match your physical face to the mugshot on your travel document will go straight to the biometric passport database.

Like the redundant road tax discs and parking permits that no longer sit on a driver’s windscreen because the traffic warden can put their vehicle registration straight into a computer, the paper passport will be a quaint relic of the pre-digital era. The entire passport database will be accessible directly for matching with your weary, post-flight features, a boon for convenience and a nightmare for cybersecurity.

It seems obvious that the Live Facial Recognition technology which enables paperless entry points can also be used for checking our faces against watchlists of criminals and recidivist deportees. Many will ask why it’s taken so long, given the vagueness of official records about who is in the country, and when they arrived.

Why, then, is the Home Office suddenly so coy about its plans to apply the same technology within, not just at, our borders? Could it be that the new, long-overdue legal framework governing the use of LFR on the public is primarily “designed to improve public confidence”? That confidence could be undermined by reports of its use in immigration enforcement.

Expanding its use beyond dangerous criminals and vulnerable runaways to include people who entered Britain on a student visa and took a cash-in-hand job rather than returning home does raise questions of proportionality. Many immigration breaches are civil, not criminal. If the threshold is set that low, could I be spotted by a camera and hauled off the street for non-payment of a parking fine, or letting my dog foul the sidewalk, or simply breaching a Respect Order forbidding me to feed the birds?

Perhaps the Home Office is right to rethink “we will have cameras everywhere to recognize irregular immigrants” as a selling point for ever-expanding surveillance.

“I was wrong, and it was a complete wipeout — an absolute shellacking for the Republicans,” Farage later acknowledged, as the scale of the defeat quickly became clear. “I believed that [Elon] Musk’s big money and the tech they’d applied and get-out-the-vote would stem the flow of the losses.”

For the British Right, distancing itself from America’s aging President is all the more tempting now that he is politically wounded. Trump has never been particularly popular in the UK, and Farage’s American political allegiances have always struck British voters as an expression of eccentricity rather than conviction — the equivalent of wearing an electric-blue suit to deliver a conference speech. It is theater, not ideology.

But this theater has brought tangible rewards. MAGA has given Farage status, powerful connections and access to wealthy political allies. Reform has secured considerable financial backing from these circles, most notably from longstanding Brexit donor Christopher Harborne, who has also bankrolled several of Farage’s trips to meet Trump. But if there’s one mistake Reform cannot stop making, it’s importing MAGA politics wholesale and expecting it to work at home.

As it stands, Farage is vulnerable to a political pincer movement. On one side sits Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, offering the perpetually angry online Right a more uncompromising alternative. Encouraged by Musk, Lowe has cultivated a constituency for whom even Reform’s half-hearted gestures towards respectability represent capitulation. Demands for mass deportations and still greater confrontation offer a challenge to Farage’s radical credentials.

On the other side are Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives. The party is quietly benefiting from a friendly press and a sense of institutional familiarity, offering voters the comfort of a recognizably British conservatism. It does not require them to take an interest in the latest unedifying public spat between American billionaires. And the strategy may be starting to pay off: the latest YouGov poll puts the Conservatives ahead of Reform, while Restore Britain is eating into Farage’s vote share.

Farage’s dilemma is clear. Move towards Lowe’s position, cosying up to an increasingly faltering and uncertain American Right, and Reform risks narrowing its appeal. Move towards Badenoch, and voters might reasonably ask why they shouldn’t simply vote Conservative.

The problem is compounded by the political culture Reform has borrowed from MAGA. Movements organized around personal loyalty are prone to instability, and a movement that prides itself on independent, anti-establishment thinking can easily become dependent on the judgment of one man. Trump’s midterm defeat illustrates the consequences.

None of this guarantees Reform’s decline. Its coffers are full and public dissatisfaction with the Government remains widespread. But the midterms pose a more difficult question than whether Reform should distance itself from the second half of the Trump presidency. Caught between a party offering conventional conservatism and another promising full-fat populism, we arrive at the same conclusion as ever: Farage must explain what Reform itself is actually for. That’s assuming, of course, he can decide for himself.

Take Columbia University, where I attend college and which was chief among Dhillon’s higher-education targets. Of course, there were very real instances of vitriol directed against Zionist and Jewish students. Yet Dhillon chose neither to solely punish the worst offenders nor to reaffirm the university’s commitment to universal anti-discrimination principles. Instead, the Trump administration’s endgame was to leverage civil-rights machinery to bully the university into advancing its agenda and marginalizing anyone who disagreed.

In March 2025, the administration suspended $400 million in funding to Columbia over its alleged failure to combat anti-Jewish civil-rights violations. By July that year, following the threat of losing over $1 billion in funding and multiple high-profile student detainments by ICE, the university agreed to settle, paying a total of $221 million and agreeing to various conditions. Columbia adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s controversial definition of antisemitism, which critics argue conflates condemnation of Israel and Zionism with “antisemitic” animus. The university also announced partnerships with organizations which carry a pro-Israel ideological bias, such as the Anti-Defamation League, to provide “a deeper education on antisemitism” beyond existing anti-discrimination training. Finally, Columbia also pledged to review its Middle Eastern studies program, strengthening focus on Israel specifically.

Before embarking on this effort, Dhillon had, in classic progressive-speak, criticized her ideological opponents on college campuses as “ill-informed, they’re poorly educated. They have no good parental guidance at home.”

She was undoubtedly a key player in the Trump administration’s pro-Israel crusade. In September 2025, with the Columbia settlement finalized and in effect, and negotiations ongoing with other institutions such as Harvard, Dhillon attended the Israeli-American Council (IAC) gala. There, she boasted that her efforts had resulted in ​​“accountability for the bad behavior of a lot of people”. Yet she went beyond punishing activist overreach and sought to establish glaring double standards that would make support for Israel the favored position in higher education.

The IAC, in a statement to the Jerusalem Post, also confirmed that Dhillon was leading the Trump administration’s initiatives not only in funding freezes but also in the attempted deportation of pro-Palestinian activists on college campuses. (It’s not clear how she would have jurisdiction over the latter, and these students actually aren’t guilty of any crime.) Video interviews from her office show a massive IAC plaque in the background.

Dhillon wasn’t the only one doing “woke” for Zionists. Her comrade in that effort, Leo Terrell, chairs the Justice Department’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. Last month, a Harvard Crimson investigation alleged that he had harassed his Jewish interns. It seemed going after universities was more important than actually respecting Jews.

As the Republican Party will likely be taking a more Israel-skeptical direction to match its base’s position, there is increasingly little room for the likes of Dhillon. She may be remembered as one of the last people in the GOP who did absolutely everything to stop the inevitable tide. But progressive-style weaponization and lawfare could not stop it. Whatever happens, we’ll probably be hearing about antisemitism on college campuses far less.

“By projecting the image of Europe acting in an uncoordinated manner, we’re doing nothing but serving the interests of those who want this war to continue,” Meloni wrote. Her criticisms come in the wake of a messy cluster of European attempts to contribute to Ukraine talks. These include French, German and British participation in discussions between the US and Ukraine in Miami, a meeting of European states in Oslo, and a phone call with Vladimir Putin held by Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre late last month.

With the US set to mediate talks between Ukraine and Russia in Abu Dhabi next week, Meloni rightly fears that the EU — which bears the financial brunt of supporting the war, and which arguably has a much greater stake in Kyiv’s future security than the US — risks being “condemned to irrelevance”. She called for “a decision to be made once and for all as to who sits at the negotiating table representing the EU, and with what mandate”.

Meloni is, in typical fashion, stating an obvious truth that much of the EU doesn’t want to face. The bloc is, rather pathetically, insisting on a “seat at the table” — but nobody knows which of its many representatives speak for its interests. The same can’t be said for the other key players: Ukraine, the US, Russia and China all have powerful leaders bearing individual responsibility for their sweeping decisions. The EU, by way of contrast, is the very definition of “rule by committee”.

Yet even agreeing to a negotiator won’t solve this problem. Many favor nominating a national leader, or group of leaders; Stubb and Støre have been mentioned, as have Czech President Petr Pavel and Meloni herself. Yet with voters across the bloc struggling to see eye to eye on so many fundamental issues, including the Ukraine war, the elevation of a national leader to hold EU-wide authority becomes problematic. A Vox supporter in Spain or a Die Linke voter in Germany may well ask why their interests should be represented by the president of a country they have never visited.

This brings us to the elephant in the room. The two most relevant leaders of the EU machinery, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, can both claim an EU-wide mandate, even if it’s a flimsy one, having been approved by the elected European Parliament. Speaking bluntly, one might ask whether representing the EU in such matters is not the whole point of Kallas’s job.

Yet Kallas has painted herself into a corner on Ukraine with her famous hawkishness, having repeatedly made statements to the effect that Russia cannot be allowed to gain anything at all from its invasion, and that any compromise with the aggressor is unacceptable. Von der Leyen has taken a similar stance; for both, refusal to engage with Putin except from a position of dominance has become axiomatic. As Pavel himself pointed out last month, the Russian President “doesn’t want to talk to Ursula von der Leyen, he doesn’t talk to Kaja Kallas”.

António Costa is seen as a “more honest broker” by EU diplomats, but he appears timidly reluctant to take up the authority that some wish to thrust upon him. Now these EU leaders, by turns too reticent or too inflexible, have left the bloc’s very seat at the table in doubt.

Slate — which is still around, albeit in a much-diminished form — arrived a year later. For online readers in the late-Nineties and 2000s, the two sites were where the essay lived, before the pop-ups and the paywalls arrived. Salon showcased writing by the likes of Jake Tapper, Andrew Sullivan, Dave Eggers and Camille Paglia. It also ran the story that kickstarted my freelance career — a confession about managing an Abercrombie & Fitch store that went viral in 2014.

It’s a sad fall for the publication. Salon went public on the Nasdaq in June 1999 at a valuation of $107 million, yet never turned a profit. By 2005, the company had accumulated $83.6 million in losses and its stock traded for five cents. Talbot admitted that Salon was “more tabloid-like” than it had been at launch. After changes to the Facebook algorithm cut Salon’s revenue by over a third and its traffic by 23% in a single year, the two owners of Snopes bought the site for $5 million in 2019. In 2023, they sold it to a Malta-based company whose other properties included CCN.com and Cryptomaniaks. Thursday’s closure put 19 full-time employees and a handful of contractors out of work.

By the time my Abercrombie confession ran in its virtual pages, Salon was largely a clickbait operation, but it still had enough clout for the article to receive widespread pick-up in other outlets. Few sites now provide unknown writers with such opportunities, and several publications which fulfilled this aim are already gone. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer in 2021 and then closed two years later. Jezebel shut down shortly afterwards. Vice, valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, stopped publishing on vice.com in February 2024.

There is still some cause for optimism, at least among publications with more focused remits and dedicated readerships. Substack reports over five million paid subscriptions. More than 50 of its publications clear $1 million a year (my own isn’t one of them). The Onion, under well-funded new ownership, has rediscovered some of its biting humor from the early-Nineties and publishes a monthly print edition that ships to 50 countries.

Rich patrons and paying readers have shown a willingness to subsidize the copy they care about but, at the end of its long run, Salon had access to neither category of funder. Because there’s no longer any money to be made from general-interest magazines, it’s unlikely that anything similar will ever take its place.

Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo, who yesterday announced his retirement from international football at the age of 41, is different. No player, representing any country, has ever won more caps or scored more international goals than his 234 and 146, but he never would have reached those heights had he been a realist. In any other era he would have been clear of any rival, but Ronaldo’s cross to bear is that he will always be seen as the second-greatest footballer of the 21st century. Despite his prodigious talent, he consistently gave the impression of fighting against the odds to stay at the summit of the game, whereas Lionel Messi’s skill and longevity seemed effortless, as if he had been anointed.

Ronaldo has increasingly become a figure of fun, and his international retirement was long overdue — the belated punchline of a shaggy dog story. He had become a liability for Portugal in recent tournaments, a statuesque presence in a game now defined by youthful intensity. Like Muhammad Ali being outclassed by younger men in his final fights, it was not a dignified end.

Last month, Ronaldo essentially threw a hissy fit when new coach Jorge Jesus chose not to bring him on from the substitutes’ bench for the national team. The five-time Ballon d’Or winner walked out and issued a 2,000-word statement — an untrammeled emotional download of petty slights and insults to which he felt had been subjected. Social media compared it to Rachel’s excruciating 18-page (“front and back”) letter to Ross on Friends.

Ronaldo did score three goals in five games at this summer’s World Cup, but even then managed to look like a static spare part in a team of talented young players, which ultimately disappointed by exiting in the last 16. The memes were merciless, one featuring a hapless old man plaintively and uselessly trying to help younger, stronger colleagues load a lorry.

Nowadays Ronaldo plays his club football in Saudi Arabia in front of sparse crowds, the equivalent of Elvis Presley’s Las Vegas residency, as he devolves into a parody of what he once was. Even at the end he was outshone by Messi, who retired from international football in August with the nation imploring him to stay. Ronaldo, meanwhile, has left in a huff.

His greatest moments took place at club level for Real Madrid, where he won four of his five Champions League trophies. And yet his most satisfying moment may have come in a game in which he limped off injured after 25 minutes.

It was the Euro 2016 final against France in Paris. With Ronaldo gone, Portugal’s hopes seemed to vanish. And yet, deep into extra time, with Ronaldo supplanting the coach on the sidelines and urging his teammates on, Portugal won. It was the country’s first major trophy. On Thursday, the man who for most of his career had looked like an individualist trapped in a team sport wrote: “I spent my life working to become the best player in the world. Today I realize that my greatest victory was the honor of representing the best county in the world.”

When Andy Murray spent the last years of his career limping through Grand Slams, he was furious at a BBC journalist’s suggestion that he was tainting his legacy. In truth, though, it is uncomfortable watching the greats become mortal. It offends our sense of human hierarchy.

And yet legacy eventually wins out. Ronaldo may have opted to rage against the dying of the light, but in time the current memories of a narcissistic prima donna will surely fade. Then, the true greatness of the player will be appreciated again.

As part of an ITV documentary aired on Thursday evening, Nowak’s family said they believe they were “manipulated in their darkest hours” by Hampshire Police, as well as by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), which oversees complaints made against officers. Badenoch told ITV News that “I’m not in a position to have full confidence in the IOPC. There are lots of good people who work in the IOPC, but I have heard enough complaints from families like the Novaks […] and even the police themselves to know that something is not working quite right.”

The Conservative leader’s comments are in contrast to the position adopted by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who stated earlier this week that she had “full confidence” in the IOPC and that the watchdog “does good work every day”. The Labour minister added: “They’re the people we turn to when things have gone wrong within policing.” According to Badenoch, “the IOPC does a lot of good work, but I’m not in a place to say that there have not been failings, and so I can’t give that full confidence.”

On Thursday, Digwa’s minimum sentence was increased from 21 years to 25 years after he appealed against the term, labeling it “manifestly excessive”. In December 2025, he stabbed Nowak five times with a dagger he claimed he carried as part of his Sikh faith. When Hampshire Police officers arrived at the scene, bodycam footage revealed, they handcuffed the dying teenager as Digwa falsely told them that Nowak had racially abused him. When Nowak said he had been stabbed, one attending officer replied: “I don’t think you have, mate.” He died shortly afterwards. In July, the IOPC announced that it was investigating two officers involved in the response for “gross misconduct”.

During her ITV interview, Badenoch argued for changing the law around weapons with religious associations, such as the blade used to murder Nowak. “Protecting religious freedoms means one particular thing,” she said. “There is no freedom to murder in any religion, and I think that we need to bring some common sense into this.” She added: “I don’t think using a religious object should allow you to have a lesser sentence. If somebody hurts you with a wooden crucifix, they shouldn’t get a lighter sentence.”

Digwa’s mother Kiran Kaur was jailed for three years in July for removing the murder weapon from the crime scene. After Kaur abandoned an appeal against her sentence shortly before yesterday’s hearing, Badenoch said that “I would not want to be seeing that lady coming out after serving what I believe is just a third of her sentence. That is too short.” The Tory leader continued: “[Kaur] knew what her son did. She concealed a weapon. She was rightly sentenced for it. She should serve her full sentence.” Posting on social media on Thursday evening, the Tory leader also argued that “Henry’s murderer deserves the maximum sentence he can get.”

Xavier Becerra, a decades-long Democratic Party machine politician, comfortably defeated his feisty GOP opponent Steve Hilton in the race to replace Gavin Newsom as governor. Hilton, a onetime adviser to Britain’s former prime minister David Cameron, ran an underfunded campaign that never really took off. Thanks in part to timely gerrymandering, the Republicans now control just three of the state’s 52 congressional seats, with only five races yet to be called.

Californians’ stubborn backing of an establishment that continues to fail is certainly odd. The number of billionaires has soared since 2022, yet the state continues to see some of the nation’s highest poverty rates and a growing gap between the middle class and wealthy elites. Voters in California also worry about the high cost of living, particularly housing and weak job growth. Somehow, however, Democrats don’t take the blame for any of this, despite the fact that their green energy push has been a key driver of rising costs.

Nothing, it seems, can dent the Democrats’ dominance in the Golden State. It matters little that half of Americans believe California is in decline, or that an equal proportion of Republicans nationally consider it effectively a foreign country. Unfortunately, this election failed to incite any serious debate about those issues.

It’s a similar story in Los Angeles. Despite the city’s deserted downtown high-rises and a general sense of disorder, a GOP candidate could not even make the run-off. Now, the “moderate” Karen Bass is set to lose to democratic socialist Nithya Raman. For all the dissatisfaction with the direction of the city, voters look likely to respond by moving further to the Left rather than entertaining an alternative from the Right. The notable exception was the rejection of Proposition 40, a ballot measure proposing a one-time 5% wealth tax on residents with a net worth exceeding $1 billion.

Anti-Trump feeling, after all, remains the dominant sentiment across California. The President’s policies — notably on immigration — alienated the state’s key Latino bloc, which makes up 40% of residents. Migration flows have also tended to drive middle-income families, the historic base of the California GOP, away. That has been reinforced by the relocation of corporate investment and headquarters outside the state.

One thing is clear from these midterms: residents of blue states such as California have an enormous capacity for pain. In a poll taken earlier this year, roughly half of Massachusetts residents said they had considered leaving the state. Similarly, one-third of New York residents say they plan to leave within the next five years, while four in 10 Californians have considered doing the same. Yet in all three states, Democrats continue to enjoy considerable electoral support. The prospect of a declining quality of life, it seems, is not enough to persuade voters to change political allegiance.

It seems that no degree of progressive failure can have a negative impact on politicians in states like California. The future, if there is one, for the state’s GOP will require separation from Trump and his policies, and crucially running dynamic candidates — particularly from Asian and Latino backgrounds — who emphasize everyday issues. But for now, Trump has made California Democrats seem much saner than might otherwise be the case. That is another part of his dismal legacy — a tragedy for residents of deep-blue states and the nation as a whole.

The fact that he got away with it for so long speaks volumes about his sense of impunity. Many sexual predators hide their behavior from family and friends, but Brand reveled in playing the libertine. On stage, he boasted about his preferred age range being “from 16 to death”, telling women in the audience they could probably have sex with him. And he used his celebrity to create a culture in which other people were roped in to enable his predatory behavior.

A former personal assistant described how she was expected to collect phone numbers from female fans. Her recollection that “everyone normalized and dismissed his behavior” goes to the heart of why it’s so hard to bring sexual predators to account in Britain. Rape prosecution rates are low and convictions even lower, not least because of widespread suspicion of women who say they have been assaulted.

No one, witnessing Brand boast about his gargantuan sexual appetite, should have seen anything but a series of enormous red flags. Yet the more outrageously he behaved, the more he was lionized. The New Statesman even invited him to guest-edit the magazine. It included an “essay” by Brand, treating a notoriously sleazy comedian as though he were a noted intellectual.

That was in 2013, five years after a series of scandals that should have ended his career for good. In 2008, Brand “joked” on BBC Radio 2 about exposing himself to a woman who worked in the same building in Los Angeles. It was a public admission of indecent exposure, yet Brand clearly believed he would face no consequences. He was right.

Later that year, also on Radio 2, he and Jonathan Ross made a series of prank calls to the elderly actor Andrew Sachs. When Sachs did not pick up the phone, they left lewd messages on his answering machine, boasting about Brand having sex with his granddaughter. Thousands of people complained, Brand was sacked, two senior BBC figures resigned and the corporation was fined £150,000 by Ofcom.

Inexplicably, however, his career prospered. “As his profile grew, so too did his sense of entitlement,” Detective Superintendent Andy Furphy said after the rape case. Now, as Brand faces a long prison sentence, all the people who excused and indulged him for so many years should reflect on their own part in his career of pitiless predation.

The comedian told them what he was, time after time, and they chose not to believe him. And it was women, lacking his fame and status, who paid the price.

If he were elected president, Philippe said he would re-negotiate the Le Touquet Treaty on bilateral cooperation between the two countries, and would insist that the UK covers the full cost of the policing operation. If Britain failed to get its house in order and shut down the pull factors, then he would rip up the agreements and — it was implied — turn a blind eye to the crossings.

At the outset, it is hard to find fault with Philippe’s analysis, harshly delivered though it was. Coming from a politician of the liberal center-right, it really puts the enormity of the agreement signed between Nigel Farage and Jordan Bardella in September into perspective — not to mention the huge political gamble the gesture represented for the Rassemblement National. The agreement, signed on stage at Reform UK’s party conference, commits Britain to ending the pull factors as soon as Farage’s party takes power; simultaneously, British vessels would be able to return intercepted migrant boats to French ports. Together, the two measures would overturn the incentive structure of migrants and people smugglers and, it is hoped, put an end to the crossings for good.

While the Farage-Bardella agreement was hailed as a huge breakthrough in Britain, many in France were astonished that the RN wasn’t planning to extract far steeper concessions from the UK. Surely, they would at least want to see some evidence of Farage’s new government delivering its agenda, shutting down the asylum system and getting the wheels up on the first deportation flights? That is what Philippe is now suggesting, and he comes from a political tradition that was previously considered far more conciliatory and open to cooperation than Marine Le Pen’s party.

Many of Farage’s British opponents will hope that it is Philippe, or someone like him, whose vision prevails, lest it give Reform UK too easy a run at solving the crisis. After all, the RN’s offer was not extended to other British parties. But despite his tough talk, Philippe’s approach does not represent a departure from the status quo, or offer a pathway out of the crisis. French center-right politicians, like their British counterparts, have been making tough-sounding statements about the illegal migration crisis for years now, usually framing it as a failure of enforcement and blaming the other side for the problem.

Philippe served as PM under Macron in an administration that promised radicalism yet only oversaw more proceduralism and decline. His muscular rhetoric is a well-honed exercise in signaling against the Left, and an overture toward those wavering Right-wing voters who remain nervous about the RN. There may be just enough of the latter to push a candidate such as Philippe into second place, and the subsequent run-off ballot in which he would then pivot to liberal voters as he faced off against Le Pen. If he won that contest, it would represent a victory for the status quo. And there is no sign that his approach on migration would then be anything other than the status quo.

The truth is that for center-right politicians on either side of the Channel, the illegal migration story over many years has been something of a political boon, allowing them to point fingers across the water. The distinction between the mainstream center-right and center-left on immigration is largely one of tone, but until recently that has been the only differentiation offered to voters. Liberal conservatives had little incentive in making the problem go away, which is why it hasn’t. But Philippe’s comments may finally represent a twilight of center-right posturing on the issue.

Vance’s diagnosis is largely correct. Poll after poll reinforces his point about the political damage inflicted by the Iran war and its impact on the cost of living. Inflation and gas prices spiked as a direct consequence of the conflict, and the famously anti-interventionist Vance is wise to point this out.

But there are other lessons for Republicans, too. For instance, exit polls suggest corruption was high on voters’ list of concerns. They also point to a backlash against maximalist positions on data centers and artificial intelligence, both of which the Trump administration has embraced enthusiastically. A Republican in 2028 will likely need to carve out a path between the GOP establishment and Donald Trump’s version of MAGA, now that it appears his coalition is fractured and his personal brand is unpopular at best and toxic at worst.

This helps explain why Florida Governor Ron DeSantis moved to distance himself from the Trump administration ahead of election day, taking aim at its positions on the war, Big Tech and corruption. Having quietly carved out a critical position on several of these issues over recent months, DeSantis took the gamble of going public with a series of scathing criticisms. The timing was deliberate. In a victory lap on Wednesday, he slammed Republicans for voting against the release of the Epstein files and failing to ban congressional stock trading.

DeSantis is reading the tea leaves correctly. But the danger is that establishment Republicans will interpret the defeat as a mandate to resurrect the pre-Trump party, whose own brand of politics had become deeply unpopular. Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley was already making precisely this argument on NBC News as the results came in. “The biggest lesson is that when Republicans stay close to our policies of economic freedom, lower taxes, and smaller government, we win,” she argued. “We need to return to that, stop the distractions, and get back to work for the American people.”

That may sound appealing to establishment conservatives, but it’s obviously code for giving up on tariffs — which had stabilized ahead of the Iran war — and comes from someone with deep ties to the crony capitalist military-industrial complex who supports more intervention abroad. That’s not the way, either.

After 10 years of Trump, most analysts understand that Haley and her ilk are not on track to recapture the imagination of Republican voters. On the other hand, Vance and other members of the administration will inevitably be saddled with the baggage of MAGA — not just the war, but also the corruption. GOP hopefuls should be thinking hard about anti-monopoly policies and rhetoric that Democrats used to their success. They should draw a clear red line on anti-human, oligarchic AI accelerationism. They should be talking about immigration as a labor issue and culture-war questions as class questions, to the extent they even devote oxygen to “woke” issues in a bad economy at all.

Unfortunately, Trump has spent his second term saddling MAGA’s once-potent “drain the swamp” brand with some spectacularly swampy behavior of its own. In the process, he has set fire to the very coalition that made his political project so successful. The challenge for the next generation of Republicans is to find a path between the party establishment and MAGA without inheriting the latter’s political baggage. That will be easier said than done. MAGA remains the dominant strain of Republican populism, making it difficult for anyone closely associated with the movement to escape its liabilities. That includes the Vice President.

And then came James Talarico, the fresh-faced 37-year-old seminarian who last night defeated Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the race for the Senate. This is the first time a Democrat from the state has won a seat in the US Senate since 1988. And it wasn’t even close: Paxton lost by 12 percentage points, winning 43% of the vote to Talarico’s 55%.

Both houses of Congress turning blue mean that Donald Trump will find his every move challenged by legislators. There will be hearings, bills, vetoes, and general chaos for the last two years of his administration.

But the more profound question concerns what this means for Texas, considering that Talarico’s victory was just the tip of the iceberg. Democrat Gina Hinojosa also unseated Governor Greg Abbott, and Democrats swept the statewide offices after failing to win any for 32 years. The Supreme Court of Texas went from a 9-0 Republican supermajority to a 5-4 Republican/Democrat split. At the time of writing, it looks as though the Texas House will also come under Democratic control. Only the Texas Senate remains in Republican hands, and in the words of State Senator Charles Schwertner: “Texas stands as long as the Texas Senate Republican caucus holds the line. We will.”

Was it the Iran war? The cost of living? School vouchers? Data centers? Immigration enforcement? Demographic change? All of the above? Latinos, who leaned towards Trump two years ago, swung back to the Democrats. But there can also be no doubt that the Republicans ran a spectacularly terrible candidate in Paxton, pithily described by Bill Maher as a “malfeasant fuck”. His decision to run against the incumbent John Cornyn excited the base, who regarded the sitting senator as a Republican in name only. But Cornyn polled much better against Talarico, and he had the added benefit of never having been impeached by his own party, or reported to the FBI by his own employees. Nor had he ever offered a pedophile a plea deal that involved one day in jail.

Paxton responded by declaring Talarico “too weird for Texas” and endlessly airing footage in which the earnest boy preacher talked about six genders and other Left-wing bugbears. Talarico, however, coupled his attacks with a relentless focus on fighting corruption and the cost of living. When he gets to Congress, he will no doubt revert to his actual beliefs and vote like the progressive Democrat he is, but it will be another six years before he has to face the voters again.

Of course, it was only two years ago that Democrats were unceremoniously kicked out of office themselves. We live in a time of extraordinary volatility. The Democratic Party is not especially popular itself and today’s Democrats are very different from the party that last held power in Texas. But Texas has changed, too. Whether or not this is an enduring generational shift remains to be seen, but the era of near-total Republican dominance is over. Texas has turned blue — for now.

Statutory regulation is long overdue. As things stand, neither “counselor” nor “psychotherapist” is a legally protected title in the UK. Anyone can adopt either label, put a brass plate on their door, and begin seeing clients without the training that lay people might reasonably assume it requires. There are professional registers, ethical codes and complaints procedures, but participation in these systems is voluntary — meaning the most reckless cowboy practitioner can choose to remain outside the system altogether.

Countless individuals have suffered at the hands of unqualified and malicious practitioners operating within this system. I have been a psychotherapist for over 20 years, and I cannot count the number of examples of unethical, immoral and downright criminal conduct I have heard about over that time. Ella Janneh, for example, sought help from therapist Michael Lousada for difficulties arising from childhood sexual abuse. In 2024, a High Court judge found that Lousada had raped and sexually assaulted her during a session.

There is one clear culprit for this historic disaster for the Republicans: Trump himself. According to exit poll surveys, a plurality of voters (43%) said one reason for their vote was to “express opposition to Donald Trump”, and a whopping 96% of these voters supported Democrats for Congress. Additionally, nearly three-quarters of voters (74%) said the war in Iran was either a “crucial or major factor” in their vote, and they broke for Democrats 63% to 35%. What’s more, 62% said they disapproved of Trump’s job performance, including 53% who strongly disapproved.

It will likely be weeks before all the final votes are tallied, but the breadth and depth of the losses for Republicans should force a real reckoning over the party’s dependence on Trump. For starters, the coalition he assembled to win in 2024 was apparently far more fragile than most people realized. For example, after making strong gains with racial minorities — especially Hispanics — and young men two years ago, early results suggest both groups have swung back toward Democrats.

Trump also famously attracted a certain subset of voters who were “low-propensity”, or who don’t vote as frequently and have often only turned out when he was on the ballot. The weak reliability of these voters is on full display now. And as Republicans have increasingly relied on support from them, Democrats have done the opposite, bringing in people who pay a lot of attention to politics and are much more likely to vote. Though we will have to wait a while for more data to know with certainty who showed up this year, there are early signs that turnout among Democratic voters was much higher than it was among Republicans.

But perhaps a bigger worry is that Trump’s second term may have done lasting damage to the GOP brand among important constituencies. The Leftward swing among Hispanic voters suggests some level of backlash to the administration’s overly aggressive immigration enforcement, which has often disproportionately targeted Latinos, including many US citizens. And after promising to fix the country’s economy and bring costs down, the President’s erratic tariff regime and war in the Middle East may have hurt the Republicans’ credibility with voters moving forward.

No one can predict with certainty what all this portends for the 2028 presidential election, but Republicans face real problems as they look ahead to a post-Trump world. The question before them now may simply be how much longer they’re willing to allow Trump to be an albatross around their necks.

Trump’s power has arguably never been weaker. He is now responsible for one of the worst midterm performances for either party in the modern era. His approval rating is near its lowest point on record — a data point that carries a little more weight in light of the polls’ resounding success this cycle. A healthy party might look at this picture and decide that for the sake of its long-term viability, it may be wise to increasingly crowd him out. Yet Trump still enjoys fairly high support among Republican voters, which could make such a move very risky.

This is perhaps the biggest decision Republicans have to make regarding their future, and — as these elections have shown — that future is approaching much more quickly than they may realize.

That, in a nutshell, is the premise of John Lewis’s latest Christmas advert. Kristin Scott Thomas’s character, Gloria, is driven along Oxford Street in a rickshaw, in search of a present for her two spoiled and unruly grandchildren. She is accompanied by “Pickles”, a wooden toy dog that talks like a taxi driver and tells her to “Lighten up!”

Of course, this is all implausible. A rickshaw on pedestrianized Oxford Street? And one that plays Rolling Stones covers, instead of, say, Despacito or one of Pitbull’s lesser works? No chance.

Gloria’s grandchildren are equally implausible. Instead of being brain-rotted by screens, they’re unruly in the old-fashioned sense. They trample over grandma’s sofas, despoil her vinyl collection, and shred her coloring books. But how to save these children? Discipline? The naughty step? No! What they need is an expensive Christmas present — not the £30 cash that she had, initially, stuffed into their Christmas cards. Instead, she embarks on a merry shopping spree, gathering the materials to transform a playroom into something resembling an Ottoman brothel.

So what is this ad trying to tell us? Ever since John Lewis’s Christmas adverts blundered into national life in 2007, they have marked the beginning of the “festive period” by seeking to resolve one of the preceding year’s dominant trends. Each advert presents a sort of deadened version of contemporary discourse. So, in the heady days of 2021, a black child met a white female alien in a forest and introduced her to “Christmas”. And, in 2025, a raver-turned-centrist-Dad dragged his son out of the Manosphere by introducing him to Nineties dance music. And, this year, that “theme” appears to be the inability of Zoomers and Boomers to connect with one another — each misunderstanding the other from within their respective silos.

Really, though, it’s a sort of corporate prelude to the King’s Speech, albeit accompanied by a famous singer stripping a much-loved classic of its former verve: in this case, it’s Sam Fender banalizing You Can’t Always Get What You Want. But these grandchildren can get what they want: a little bit of cash; a small, annual danegeld, paid out of the Boomer Hoard. Thus, on opening their cards, the two children do the customary tap-and-shake — only, to their horror, there’s nothing there. Instead, they’re led to the new playroom, where they delightedly dance with their grandmother who looks overjoyed. “This Christmas,” we’re told, “give the gift of giving”: a rather heavy-handed attempt by the retail giant to dress up a sales pitch as a festive appeal to generosity, and coax cash-strapped Britons back into the shops.

The ad promotes the company’s usual message: spend more time with your family, and more on John Lewis products. And nearly 20 years since it first launched, the British public still hasn’t realized what this is: a hollow corporate exercise in virtue-signaling, designed to get you to buy its products.

At the moment, many peptides (referring to a molecule made up of a short chain of amino acids) are still fringe treatments. Some, most notably insulin, have a long history within mainstream medical care, while others — such as GLP weight loss medications — are novel blockbuster drugs developed by major pharmaceutical companies. In online vernacular, however, peptides usually refer to gray-market products that are purchased from shady overseas sellers and self-administered with guidance from Reddit or TikTok rather than a medical professional.

The new guidance from HHS has not legalized peptides, but it has listed six specific molecules that it will allow domestic manufacturers to make without fear of prosecution. Although advocates, including the online influencer Clavicular, tout peptides for their supposed skin-enhancing and muscle-building properties, the six covered by the order are comparatively unremarkable. They are intended to promote wound healing, improve cognitive function, regulate blood sugar and enhance sleep. The HHS has concluded that the risks associated with contamination, poor manufacturing standards and unsupervised administration may outweigh those posed by the substances themselves.

As an HHS spokesperson explained to CNN, Kennedy’s decision does not reclassify the molecules as officially approved treatments, but instead aims to create a safer, more transparent system for their use. This includes rules about ingredient purity and traceability, as well as the involvement of a prescribing doctor.

The department is taking the right approach here. Though peptides are a niche product sold to a sliver of the populace, they are a foreshock of a seismic shift in drug development, which will require a new regulatory approach. The bloated, sclerotic system by which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) usually classifies drugs attempts to balance safety, efficacy and individual choice. Historically, however, it has prioritized safety above all else, making the approval process both lengthy and expensive.

This approach is feasible so long as drug development remains something that only specialized companies can undertake. But as discovery accelerates, and the efficacy and cost of not just peptides but all classes of drugs improve, the existing regulatory framework will struggle to keep pace. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are making aggressive moves into drug development, and the result will be a glut of promising new molecules, far more than the current system can handle. The biggest labs may keep their findings embargoed, but enterprising individuals with a more cavalier attitude toward risk could use AI models to develop similar compounds and make them available for purchase.

And if many of these new drugs do work — as is likely to be the case — the public will demand a system that does not take years to grind out each individual approval. The regulatory system will have to allow physicians to prescribe novel treatments backed by provisional evidence, while still working to identify those that prove to be truly dangerous. With this future in view, Secretary Kennedy’s move to update the regulation of peptides looks entirely reasonable. By moving them from the world of DIY medicine to within the medical system, he is setting a template applicable not only to peptides but to the innumerable bespoke drugs that will soon become commonplace.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that the plans have progressed further than previously thought. The idea of a resumption of Nord Stream was mooted during the discussions between US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff with Kirill Dmitriev, an economic adviser and envoy to Vladimir Putin. It appears to be the one big idea. The plan is reportedly to sell the gas via US intermediaries to circumvent European sanctions. This aspect is particularly ironic. It has echoes of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern setting up a fake political foundation to circumvent US sanctions against the Nord Stream operator. The WSJ reports that this could provide a lucrative opportunity for American investors. Indeed it would.

The diplomatic idea behind this move is to get Vladimir Putin to agree to end his war. We should not expect European leaders to jump at this idea with joy. The European Union (EU) has passed an act to phase out all Russian gas imports by next year, a move that is not realistic. Yet the WSJ writes that Trump administration officials are expecting European resistance to be “less rigid than meets the eye”. This may well be true, given the low gas stocks in Europe this winter, the dire fiscal consequences of the war for European governments, and the fall in public support for continuing aid to Ukraine. In Germany, where total support for Ukraine has now reached €100 billion since the start of the war, a poll undertaken by the Bertelsmann Foundation tells us that support for Ukrainian EU membership has dropped from 61% in March 2022, to 41% now. As for military aid, the country is evenly split between more aid, less aid, and maintaining the status quo.

Ukraine has, meanwhile, become the single most important policy issue for the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The party is preparing for a summit with representatives of the US and Russia, set to be held in Abu Dhabi next year. The subject of the conversation will be the future of the Nord Stream pipeline and economic co-operation with Russia. As the US and Russia are already moving strongly in that direction, the AfD is now putting its weight behind this initiative, hoping to capitalize in the important state elections that will take place in Germany in April next year.

The calculation by the US that Europe’s resistance will soften is not entirely unreasonable. The battlefield frontier is largely frozen. The Russians have not been able to sustain their progress towards the capture of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the large remaining urban centers in the non-Russian-occupied part of the Donbas region. But the chances of a Ukrainian pushback do not look promising either. Russia has stepped up its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, most recently on petrol stations. Currently, there are no prospects of the EU getting its hands on the Russian assets held in Belgium though it cannot be ruled out that another attempt might be made. The appetite in Europe for another loan to Ukraine is low. This combination of depleting gas supplies, fiscal constraints, elections in many European countries, and strong political pressure from the US, might indeed soften the European position on Russian gas. This does not mean a policy U-turn is imminent. But, at the same time, the US calculation is not irrational either.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the Eurointelligence newsletter.

Instead, Blake claimed that government guidance had curtailed trans-identified people’s access to public life, healthcare and workplace toilets, and produced the usual shroud-waving statistics about suicide. He recalled an evening out with friends: “They were frightened about going to the toilet — each time that someone went to the toilet, it was a question mark. That’s not the way anybody should be expected to live.”

The uncertainty his friends describe is, in large part, the consequence of Stonewall’s own campaigning. Under chief executives Ruth Hunt and then Nancy Kelley, the charity promoted gender self-identification as best practice for employers. It broadened “trans” to include cross-dressers, championed male “lesbians” such as the bearded psychotherapist Alex Drummond, and redefined “lesbian” and “gay” as same-gender rather than same-sex attraction. Kelley even likened lesbians’ sexual boundaries to “sexual racism”. All the while, Stonewall drew millions in public funding, enjoyed support across government and collected fees from roughly 850 employers.

Blake’s friends may resent being directed to facilities designated for their sex. But the Supreme Court did not invent those sex-based provisions. It clarified that “sex” in the Equality Act refers to biological sex, following years in which Stonewall encouraged employers to substitute gender identity for the protected characteristic of sex.

As Akua Reindorf KC observed in 2021, Stonewall’s advice had stated the law as it “would prefer it to be, rather than the law as it is”. The strategy was to use internal policies to impose social change ahead of legal change. But thanks to the efforts of campaigners, Reform of the Gender Recognition Act never came to pass. That may make some people angry and distressed, but they should direct their anger at the organisation that overpromised and misled them.

Blake now says: “we need to be able to have discussion, but we do have to find ways to do that without heat.” He could start by owning the damage his organisation did, and apologizing to the people it smeared.

Anyone who has followed these issues closely will know we are long past handwringing. We are beyond the clichés of “less heat, more light” and the nonsensical platitudes about “toxicity from both sides”. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people who refuse to believe in pronouns, and who know that as young people they could easily have found themselves on the medical pathway to a trans identity, will not be placated by another appeal to civility. We are angry, and we have good reason to be.

Over the past decade Stonewall has metastasized into a biology-denying cult with an all-access pass to government, shedding credibility and goodwill along the way. Blake cannot rebuild trust with the people his organisation defamed while it clings to the fiction of the “male-bodied lesbian” and refuses to own the damage it has done.

A charity that refuses to admit past mistakes cannot help but fail, though a more charismatic chief might have delayed its decline. Instead, Blake’s wet appeal for civility will only make his critics cheer louder when Stonewall finally whimpers out.

Haidt is a prominent supporter of social media bans for children under 16, and his book Anxious Generation was influential in convincing governments across the world to implement the policy. Clearly, such anti-tech advocacy is threatening for Meta. Internal company meeting notes released in a court filing show Meta researchers appearing to brainstorm how they could discredit Haidt in the eyes of the media, the public, and academia. In them, Curtiss Cobb, the company’s current vice president of central research, appears to ask: “How do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt? Can’t co-opt them, so how do we enrage them?”

Some in the academic community have been rightfully outraged by the company’s actions. Statistician Andrew Gelman, whom Meta apparently considered recruiting to write a “takedown” of Haidt, called the revelation “absolutely horrible — we’re talking about some of the richest and most powerful people in the world conspiring to interfere with the open processes of science, journalism, and the law.”

The powerful people he mentions weren’t Meta’s executive leadership, but — like Cobb —members of one of its research teams. At the time of the discussions, Cobb was Meta’s vice president of research for monetization, public affairs, and demography and survey science. He holds a Stanford sociology PhD and has published research on sampling bias in marketing data and surveys. Two other apparent participants in the discussions, “Bryce” and “Lauren”, also appear to have been sociology PhDs and worked on the same Meta team. This wasn’t some Silicon Valley tech clique. It was practically an academic conference.

Why were these social scientists attempting to manipulate their own community and attack one of their own? Careerist self-interest is an obvious explanation, but Haidt’s peculiar academic standing may also have played a role.

Haidt is something of a black sheep among professors. He co-founded Heterodox Academy in 2015 to combat the lack of political diversity in academia, which in practice translated to a lack of Right-leaning perspectives. This, in many academics’ eyes, was enough to discredit him. How Fascism Works author Jason Stanley has declared that “‘Viewpoint Diversity’ is simply a dog-whistle for right wing ideological take-over.” He has also accused Haidt of spreading propaganda that helped elect Donald Trump.

Reactions to the story have been revealing. Many academics were unwilling to criticize Meta without trashing Haidt in the process. Psychologist Alexander Crenshaw and epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz both took shots at him, with Crenshaw effectively treating Haidt and Meta as morally equivalent and labeling him a “fake scientist”. Psychologist Candice Odgers, a longtime critic of Haidt, argued that his “repeated suggestions that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains” are not supported by science. When she faced accusations that her criticism may have been funded by Meta, she emphasized that this was false, while offering no corresponding criticism of the company’s actions.

Haidt’s research can and should be subject to honest criticism. Plotting to orchestrate attacks on an academic figure who threatens your company’s interests, however, is not honest criticism.

The documents don’t establish that Cobb and his colleagues were personally motivated by political hostility toward Haidt. Discrediting a researcher who wants to ban your company’s product is reason enough. But it’s worth asking whether they saw Haidt as a particularly acceptable target because of his standing within academia.

When Cobb asked, “Can’t co-opt them, so how do we enrage them?”, he wasn’t looking for scholars who already disagreed with Haidt. These social scientists were contemplating how to turn their own academic community against him, appealing to existing disagreements and resentments. If I were as hyperbolic as Stanley, I might declare that “social media ban skepticism is simply a dog-whistle for tech corporation profiteering.” I won’t, because the evidence doesn’t justify that leap. But there’s something distastefully ugly about professional social scientists plotting to exploit their own community for corporate ends. There was more than enough hostility toward Haidt. Meta’s social scientists just thought they could put it to work.

Pennsylvania is home to America’s highest number of competitive congressional races, with nearly $100 million spent so far, in regions and counties that fueled the state’s years-long realignment. It was older voters, who in their younger days had opted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 or Bill Clinton in 1992, who drove the Obama-Trump-Biden-Trump shift. Just four years ago, as the Philadelphia Inquirer found, party switchers had a median age in the mid-50s. In 2024, three of the four Republican congressional candidates were 50-percenters who were carried by Trump’s statewide comeback amid inflation and disdain for the Biden-Harris footnote.

Against this backdrop, with Pennsylvania’s over-65 population continuing to grow and the state ranking last in registered 18-year-olds, three groups of Boomers could decide the outcome of these congressional races.

There are the vintage Trump voters, who backed him when he descended the escalator in 2015. They live in the cities and boroughs long shaped by extractive industries and built by European immigrants, which have since experienced rapid demographic change, the disappearance of mid-sized manufacturers and the unraveling of social cohesion. They were drawn to Trump’s promise of economic populism at home and restraint abroad. A decade later, living on fixed incomes, they feel the cost of his administration’s war in Iran every time they open a household bill. Disillusionment, if not outright betrayal, could keep them from the polls.

Then there are the MAGA loyalists who — emboldened by Covid-era policies, outraged by wokeness, and fearful of the Democrats’ Leftward turn — view the Republican Party as their protector, however imperfect, just as their parents voted for the Democrats despite their own conservatism. Scattered between working-class regions and exurbia, they’re Facebook shut-ins, granting absolution to Trump in their pixelated torpor even as they diverge on policy.

In this cycle, both groups could be outnumbered by the unaffiliated or Republican-turned-Democratic voters in the state’s vast suburbs. They’re well-to-do people living in places such as Harrisburg’s West and East Shores and Greater Philadelphia’s central Bucks County. Under the “No Kings” banner, they view Trump as dangerously corrupt and undemocratic, and will opt for moderate or even progressive Democrats to extinguish whatever is left of the GOP in suburban Pennsylvania.

As it happens, the Boomers of these four congressional districts are in eastern Pennsylvania, which has experienced more change over the past decade than the rest of the state. In the south-central region’s 10th district, massive healthcare systems have proliferated, drawing an eds-and-meds voting base — and a growing South Asian population — that has flipped longtime Republican communities such as Hershey and Hampden Township.

In the 8th district, meanwhile, New York-born Dominicans — a voting bloc that shifted red in 2024 — comprise the majority of former coal region cities and towns. And in the Lehigh Valley-centered 7th district, manufacturers and logistics companies invest billions in a population-rich metro region that has become an extension of New York. Just south is Bucks County’s 1st district, once a suburban bastion of Catholic Philadelphia natives but now a transient hub of New York commuters who keep flipping local offices long held by the GOP.

This dramatic post-2016 transformation — a post-realignment reality — has partly led Democrats to outspend Republicans. Tuesday’s outcome could prove reminiscent of the 1990 midterms, when turnout was low, voters punished Republicans over not abiding by the “no tax” pledge, and the late Democratic governor Bob Casey only lost one county. It could also be a replay of 2006, when Republicans were wiped out by Bush-era anger over the Iraq War and GOP corruption scandals. Many Democratic voters that year later turned to Trump.

Either way, Governor Josh Shapiro, who is set to win handily on Tuesday, is hoping to win all four congressional seats, keep the state House, and return the state Senate to Democratic control for the first time since 1993. But as he eyes his own presidential prospects, the Governor — and whoever emerges victorious in his party — must reckon with the electoral map these races will leave behind. This race may be the last hurrah for the Boomers. It is Pennsylvania’s Millennials and Zoomers, a heterodox cross-section of voters who loathe both political parties, who will shape the state’s electoral future from 2028.

As ever, the interests of the victim and the system may not fully align. The Nowak case, for police watchers, raises many uncomfortable issues that, in the honored Whitehall tradition, may be kicked into the long grass of multiple overlapping reviews, investigations and committee hearings. Firstly, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has announced an independent review into the case. Led by the Conservative former lord chancellor Alex Chalk, the report will be published in two phases. The first will concentrate on “missed opportunities” around information the state had on Henry’s murderer, Vickrum Digwa, and how it was managed. This will also include consultation with the Sikh community. The second part of the review will conclude after the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has completed its investigation into the Hampshire officers who attended the scene.

Chalk’s appointment is smart politics. Not only does it appear non-partisan to appoint a Conservative, but many issues salient to police ineptitude are attributable to the governments in which Chalk served. Mahmood has, in effect, asked him to criticise his own side. Will Chalk go there, or stick to other, less contentious issues? The former lord chancellor has assured the BBC he would consider whether “old-fashioned incompetence” was behind police failure, or a “sort of reticence” from institutions to intervene sooner “based upon a misplaced sense of cultural sensitivity”. Yet this raises the question of whether his review will turn on preventative measures rather than a police culture that may have contributed to a less old-fashioned incompetence, that inspired by Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies.

Then there’s the ongoing IOPC investigation, which has also insisted it would examine procedures turning on cultural attitudes. However, it’s likely IOPC report will concentrate on the training, conduct and experience of the officers at the scene of Nowak’s murder. Their testimony on their attitudes due to DEI training will be crucial, as long as the right questions are asked by suitably shrewd investigators. Will the IOPC be able to provide them? After all, the watchdog is enthusiastically signed up to precisely the same regime and culture as the forces it investigates. In short, skeptics might wonder if the Chalk review will ultimately turn on matters ancillary to the real meat and potatoes of Nowak’s treatment at the scene of his murder. Did Hampshire Police, due to politically modish DEI policies, create an environment in which officers felt unable to properly question Digwa’s initial account, or even consider doing so? Why did they choose to handcuff Nowak as he lay dying?

Should institutional issues be found to be a significant factor — and, for the avoidance of any doubt, I suspect they were — then the suspects fall beyond a crime scene on a winter’s night in Southampton. They encompass an entire generation of politicians, Home Office mandarins and senior officers. Will they deploy their traditional shield wall of inquiries and reviews, hoping the Nowaks will be satisfied by a few hapless constables thrown under buses? It’s doubtful, but Whitehall will trundle on. After all, a public inquiry ten years from now will find any guilty parties comfortably ensconced in the Lords and the after-dinner speaking circuit. There’s a good chance the Nowaks are fully aware of this. And I doubt they will be satisfied.

After months of being stonewalled by Poland’s populist President Karol Nawrocki, who has refused to swear in any of his appointments to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal, pro-Europe Prime Minister Donald Tusk finally took the gloves off on Friday night. Several judges his government had appointed to the tribunal, who had been approved by parliament but never officially sworn in by Nawrocki, collectively suspended the court’s populist-backed president, triggering protests by supporters of the anti-Tusk opposition.

Riot police sealed off the court building, but were unable to stop Nawrocki himself from forcing his way through shortly after he cancelled a diplomatic trip and turned his plane around in midair to return to Warsaw amid the escalating crisis. Tusk, however, has refused to back down, stating in an evening address that “there can be no compromise” on reforming the long-politicized tribunal, claiming that Nawrocki and the opposition were acting out of “greed, stupidity or treason”.

The dramatic events in the Polish capital might seem at first like a strictly local affair. But while it is indeed the culmination of a decades-long domestic feud between the two leading hegemons of Polish politics, Tusk’s Civic Coalition (KO) and the Law and Justice Party (PiS) that backs Nawrocki, it has rung alarm bells across the European Right. Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, and Viktor Orbán all chimed in to condemn the actions of Tusk’s government. This is in large part because they see the showdown in Warsaw as a sign that Brussels and its allies across the continent are poised to bring the hammer down on them, and forcefully at that.

Since Friday’s events, the European Commission has essentially sided with Tusk, stating that Poland’s parliament, not Nawrocki, has the ultimate right to approve new judges for the tribunal. This has prompted an uproar from conservatives in the European Parliament. The battle lines appear set, then, for a new phase in the confrontation between the EU establishment and Right-leaning populists, not just in Poland but across the continent.

The impact of Tusk’s moves this weekend will of course be most immediate in Poland, where the affair has further inflamed a polarized voting public ahead of pivotal parliamentary elections next year. This polarization has long sat at the very heart of modern Poland’s political travails, and is what made the Constitutional Tribunal so politically compromised in the first place.

Shortly after winning power in 2015, PiS argued that Poland’s judiciary had been inadequately cleansed of communist influence after 1989, and so appointed to the court judges who openly supported the party. Even after Tusk’s KO came to power in 2023 on promises of returning the rule of law to Poland, its efforts to reform the court were stymied by two successive PiS-backed presidents. This led to political gridlock and the emergence of two parallel judicial systems — one backed by the ruling government, and one backed by PiS and its opposition allies.

Regardless of Tusk’s intent, the optics of his move has opened a Pandora’s box that will give the fractured Polish Right ample motivation to mount a united front against KO in the 2027 elections. Already, former PM Mateusz Morawiecki has said the situation is a “powder keg” waiting to explode; and in the context of recent extremist plots to assassinate Tusk and members of his cabinet, such an explosion could prove very violent indeed.

As populists face setbacks across Europe, the unfolding drama in Poland may be exactly what they need to regain their momentum and, if necessary, justify strong-arm tactics of their own. But whatever happens next in Warsaw and other power centers in the EU, what’s clear is that a Rubicon has been crossed. The coming chaos in European politics will make the last decade look like child’s play.

Today, centrist congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost the Democratic Senate primary for the state to Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed his Republican opponent Mike Rogers. Stevens had endorsed El-Sayed after the primary and was slated to appear in a campaign function alongside him on Sunday. Yet in a statement posted online on Friday, she demanded that he disown the content of a controversial PAC ad linking the high price of groceries to US support for Israel’s military, alongside an array of other requests. Her fiancé, Jason Turkish, announced his support for Rogers earlier in the week, and Stevens has now followed.

Before her endorsement of Rogers, El-Sayed chastised Stevens for “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago”, accusing her over the weekend of undermining his campaign. Other Democratic figures, who really just want to win the midterms, are dumbfounded by the dust-up. Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, who had assiduously tried to broker the unity event, admitted: “This isn’t working.” Mallory McMorrow, who also ran in the Democratic primary, said on CNN: “I have no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing. This is a moment where we have to recognize the stakes.”

Some of Stevens’s qualms are understandable. The ad in question is sponsored by Cenk Uygur, the founder of The Young Turks news program and incidentally the uncle of ultra-popular streamer Hasan Piker. It really is remarkably tasteless. A man in a supermarket is buying groceries for his kids, and his partner tells him that he has to put the eggs back. “We have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians,” she tells him. The two go on to complain about US foreign aid paying for Israel’s universal healthcare.

While El-Sayed distanced himself from the ad, it still connects to some of the major talking points of his campaign. “I don’t pay my taxes thinking: man, I can’t wait for Israel to get another tank,” he said in July. During the primary, some of his campaign rallies featured Piker, who has called Orthodox Jews “inbred”, referred to Israel as “Jewish Isis”, and described Hamas as “a thousand times better” than Israel.

El-Sayed has been far more temperate. But, in a March video statement following a terror attack against a synagogue in West Bloomfield in Michigan, he moved the conversation back to Israel, saying of the attacker’s motivations that “hurt people hurt people”. In April he characterized the Israeli government as being as evil as Hamas. And in July he said: “I don’t believe in ethno-states and I don’t believe that our country is responsible to sustain ethno-states.”

What makes this complicated is that El-Sayed would seem, in many ways, to be the ideal candidate for a new generation of Democrats. He is a Rhodes Scholar and former college athlete, a doctor who worked as an epidemiologist overseeing tough public-health challenges in Detroit and Wayne County. After his college commencement address, Bill Clinton encouraged him to pursue a career in politics. He is well-spoken and has that “Senate sheen” to him.

The issue clearly goes beyond El-Sayed. In his case, he could have been more aggressive in distancing himself from campaign surrogates but, simply put, Democrats are not ready for the civil war that seems to be breaking out in the party over Israel. There is something poignant about Stevens — such a team player that she organized an event for Joe Biden on the morning of 21 July 2024 and, when he dropped out that day, held an event for Kamala Harris in the evening — suddenly forgetting about party discipline. “I am the weirdest loser in this country,” she acknowledged on CNN. But that’s what internecine conflict looks like.

Democrats still have enough of a tailwind that they may be able to withstand this explosive split. El-Sayed is several points ahead of Rogers. A new coalition arrangement in Israel may result in less aggressive policy than occurred under the latest Netanyahu administration, which may in turn dial down the anti-Israel rhetoric on Israel among American Leftists. But, unless something drastically changes, Democrats are going to keep hitting the same iceberg — and, as likely as not, at the worst possible time.

Normally, speculating on whether someone’s private life makes them appropriate for an important job is a one-way route to an HR complaint. But when such specific requirements are offered, questions naturally follow. Should she be single? Can her family come too? It smacks of a Hollywood idealization of Italian rural life and domesticity, projected onto the hire.

You will be familiar with the fetishization of an Italian mamma or nonna. Picture a weathered older woman, sitting outside her orto (kitchen garden) on an upturned crate, shaving puntarelle (chicory) into ice water. Throw in a toothless village baker, the wizened hands of a pastaia (pasta maker), and you have the perfect B-roll for a romantic film set in Tuscany.

Increasingly, we judge cucina povera (peasant cuisine) by the identity of its maker, rather than the food itself. Authenticity is an ingredient that somehow gets stewed in the pot with the tomatoes and garlic. But there’s something rather unpleasant about this romantic attachment to other people’s poverty.

Food historian Rachel Laudan, in her 2001 essay A Plea for Culinary Modernism, refers to “Culinary Luddites” who turn their nose up at supermarket bread, frozen food and modern agriculture. Her mother described the “grinding, chopping, and cooking” as “servitude” to a household of eight to 10 people, every day of the year.

Laudan recalls Italian peasants suffering terrible illnesses from monotonous diets, and a Mexican friend chastised by foreign tourists for serving Italian food. “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?” she complained. We’ve also forgotten how enthusiastically our grandmothers embraced canned goods and food processors, precisely because they made life easier. By treating modernity as cultural vandalism, Laudan warns, “we are reducing the options of others.”

Anthony Bourdain helped popularize this obsession, making a career of discovering obscure restaurants and weathered cooks. Later, reflecting on his own contribution, he told Eater that authenticity was “an increasingly meaningless term” involving “an aspect of I-know-and-you-don’t”. Discovery becomes a badge of superiority. Access to the right grandmother, village or family recipe signifies the status of the diner. Good food and good company take a back seat to smugness.

Such snobbery also produces increasingly rigid rules about what constitutes authentic food. Take carbonara, whose silky eggs can easily become scrambled. Adding cream is now treated as culinary heresy, despite Gualtiero Marchesi, the father of modern Italian cuisine, including it in his 1989 recipe. Some of the earliest recipes even contained Gruyère, garlic and pancetta, all of which are now considered unacceptable. When I opened a restaurant whose menu included carbonara made with cream, a man called us from Italy to tell us to “close-a your fucking-e ristorante”.

Of course there’s nothing wrong with traditional cooking, or a 65-year-old Italian woman choosing to move to France to run Clooney’s restaurant. But one suspects she’s being hired to perform a role, to play the Italian mamma for paying customers and satisfy their appetite for authenticity. Is she there to be a talented and respected chef, or to be a curiosity, wheeled out for the customers?

Ironically, Porter recognizes the tension in Clooney’s expectations. Discussing the village of Cotignac where the restaurant will be, he declared that they “don’t want too many tourists” and that “it needs to keep authenticity.” Naturally, he said this while promoting a celebrity restaurant to a national newspaper.

Perhaps this vision of authenticity is the greatest luxury of all. The wealthy can retreat to their second or third homes in the countryside, surrounded by residents whose lives seem untouched by modernity. Multi-millionaires can admire these people’s traditions, celebrate their hardships and the dignity of their manual labor, and congratulate themselves on discovering a more honest way of life. And they can do all this without lifting anything heavier than a fork.

Yet if there’s one thing more toxic than some of the online material aimed at young men, it’s our panic about it. While social media poses a new challenge to parents and teachers in the battle for who shapes and molds our children, malign influences on young people’s moral compass are nothing new. In the past, porn magazines, television, video games and even novels were held up by an older generation as corrupting influences on young people’s sense of right and wrong. The internet might have upped the ante when it comes to how much young people are exposed to, but the story itself is an old one.

What has changed is that, unlike previous generations which had a strong sense of social norms and adult authority, we are now very nervous about socializing young people. Explaining to a teenage boy why the crap he’s watching online is both nasty and delusional isn’t rocket science, but we seem to lack the confidence to make that argument. Instead of assuring young men that if they try the Andrew Tate routine with real, flesh-and-blood women, they’ll get laughed out of town, we tell them that they’re actually victims of what the Lancet authors call “a diffuse commercial ecosystem”. This feeds the very persecution complex on which manosphere figures capitalize.

These influencers claim that feminism has victimized men, and that real men need to reclaim masculinity. While their version of masculinity is frequently a macho parody demanding sandwiches and sex, their analysis of what’s happened with the moral panic about “toxic masculinity” is uncomfortably astute. Contemporary identity politics, particularly in the world of feminism with #MeToo and panics about rape culture, has created a dynamic in which young men are portrayed as animals and young women as damsels in distress. In this context, a young man telling you on YouTube that you’re not a monster — or perhaps that you are but you should be proud of it instead of ashamed — would be tempting. Andrew Tate and co. didn’t fall out of the sky: we created them.

Perhaps the most egregious aspect of this pathologization of the manosphere into a public-health medical condition requiring NHS intervention is the idea that the solution to sexist views is to ban them. Speaking to the Guardian, co-author of the Lancet report Professor Kent Buse argued that “public health has a tested toolkit for commercial harms and we should use it.” Sneering at libertarian arguments against bans on alcohol and cigarettes, he said to “expect the playbook that served tobacco so well: blame the individual, and call regulation an attack on freedom.”

But freedom, and a defense of agency, is the very thing that can steer boys away from brain rot online. Young men need good masculine role models but also, crucially, to be treated as free agents. For too long, we’ve told boys that their job in life is to control and suppress their animalistic urges, that they must avoid all material which might feed the monster within lest it burst out and start groping girls at the school disco. Young men — like young women — have all the capabilities of being reasonable, rational and thoughtful. They are not necessarily hostage to YouTube or lost to internet misogyny or brainwashed by porn. If we want to combat the manosphere, we should start treating men more seriously.

Meanwhile, the new “Authoritarian Collaboration Index” by Action for Democracy analyzed “transnational collaboration events” between “authoritarian regimes” and “authoritarian-leaning” parties globally. Examples include the agreement on small boats signed this September by Reform UK and France’s National Rally, the AfD’s overtures to Vladimir Putin’s Russia for future energy cooperation, and deepening alliances between Russia and North Korea.

The notion of a global Right-wing authoritarian network posited by these surveys has become a key part of Left-wing storytelling. A Guardian article, for example, last week linked votes taking place in Brazil, Serbia, Israel and the US as a “cluster of four pivotal elections”. The piece added: “In each contest, pro-democracy parties are in close races with current or aspiring autocrats.”

Is it true, then, that the nationalist Right is uniting in a global web of conspiracy? The answer is no, and the most revealing thing about these surveys is not their results but the assumptions behind them.

It is patently absurd for the “Authoritarian Collaboration Index” to lump together Reform and the RN with dictatorships in Russia, North Korea and the Middle East under a single theme. The “Authoritarian Populism Index” performs a similar sleight of hand and, as a result, some of its more detailed findings are truly bizarre. The Czech Republic, where I live, is apparently the joint most authoritarian-populist country in Europe, with three “authoritarian” parties in power. Readers will be relieved to know that Britain is among the very least authoritarian nations in Europe, although this state of felicity is, the authors note, threatened by the rise of Reform.

In reality, all this deeply unserious generalizing is illustrative not of a global Right-wing network, but of the opposite: inherent limitations on Right-wing international collaboration. Unlike the socialist movements of the 20th century or the centrist international establishment of today, Right-wing nationalist parties do not share a belief in a universally applicable system of government, and their fragmentary beliefs and interests make attempts at collaboration problematic.

Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungarian elections this year was a case in point. Attempting to construct a global nationalist conservative movement was key to Orbán’s foreign policy, and all his allies — Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and JD Vance, among others — weighed in behind him prior to the election. Yet he still lost, and it even seemed like some of those heavy-handed interventions hurt his campaign rather than helped it.

In truth, Orbán’s dream of a global nationalist Right had already been destroyed by two factors: Trump’s second term in the White House, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. European voters have fallen out of love with MAGA and Right-wing parties do not want to be seen courting Trump’s favor, any more than they want to be perceived as being on good terms with Putin.

Even within Europe, there is no ideological consistency out of which a cross-border Right-wing nationalist movement could be born. The AfD’s brand of nationalist politics contains elements — especially relating to German remembrance for the Second World War and the Holocaust — that would outrage nationalists in the UK. The Reform-RN small boats pact, meanwhile, was an unconvincing attempt to mask conflicting national interests under the flimsy pretense of international ideological unity.

As they decouple from the US on the one hand and Russia on the other, many European nationalists are realizing — unlike Orbán — that the illusory comforts of a global support network detract from their focus on the nation. The Right-wing authoritarian web highlighted by these surveys is a chimera, but that won’t stop the Left talking about it.

This gave luminaries such as Barack Obama cause to suggest the probe is flimsy. But Omar’s personal history is still odd, and on Thursday even a prominent Minnesota Democrat broke with her. In response to a New York Times report noting that the current investigation is related to a claim the congresswoman once married her brother, Joe Radinovich wrote on X: “Democrats should understand that the allegation is almost certainly true — whatever conclusion they draw from that point could vary — and her denials calling it a right-wing, Islamophobic or racist conspiracy are almost certainly not.”

Radinovich previously worked as Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey’s chief of staff and served in the state legislature as a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. His axe to grind, according to Fox News, might be involvement in two primary campaigns that lost to Omar, although those experiences would also give him some insight into how serious the claims are given the opposition research that goes into these elections.

The marriage case sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory, so much so that it’s likely helped Omar convince the Left she’s totally innocent. But the basic fact pattern is this: Omar is an observant Muslim who married the father of her children Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi in an Islamic ceremony, then married Ahmed Elmi who later applied for a green card in a ceremony officiated by a Christian “minister” named Wilecia Harris. Elmi, alleged to be Omar’s brother, received a conditional green card. When he applied to make this permanent, the government asked for more information “due to concerns over the validity of his marriage”, according to the Washington Post. Elmi then withdrew the application.

Consider also that Elmi now refers to himself as a “gay man”, or that one day after Omar’s daughter was born, he posted a picture with a baby that read: “Nieces, fresh out the vagina!” Consider that Omar bore a child with Hirsi while married to Elmi, and filed joint tax returns with Hirsi during the Elmi marriage too. Consider that within months of Omar and Elmi marrying, Hirsi claimed to live at the same address on a business filing.

The Left-leaning Minnesota Star-Tribune dedicated considerable resources to this story and finally reported that “the search of records could neither conclusively confirm nor rebut the allegation that [Elmi] is Omar’s sibling.” Then there’s the detail that the Obama administration apparently investigated the marriage and “found some evidence that it was fraudulent”, but dropped the probe because of the statute of limitations, according to this week’s New York Times report.

That isn’t even to dig into other questions that have been raised about Omar’s integrity, such as changing her birthdate in official records to a year that would legitimize naturalization through her father, or her husband’s embattled venture capital firm receiving a cash infusion from a foreign billionaire, or the amended financial filings she had to file this year. There are other, less clear-cut points that could be raised, but it all adds up to a rather murky picture at best.

Not having a birth certificate after fleeing a war-torn country such as Somalia is normal. Americans not following foreign naming conventions is normal. Venture capital is a crazy industry, and Omar has a lot of bitter enemies. None of this means the Trump administration is acting in good faith. None of this means the American people care nearly as much about this story as the conservative media does. None of it even means Omar is in legal jeopardy over the marriage. It does, however, suggest that honest observers can admit the marriage to Elmi is an inexplicable and glaring red flag.

The current moment of populist rage is mostly aimed at Republicans. As sick as people are of political lawfare, they also aren’t in the mood to see a politician who did something wrong and lied about it get let off the hook. Democrats should be very wary of accepting Omar’s claims about her marriage as statements of fact, because the record strongly suggests she’s not being honest this time.

This is the Netflix instant documentary, or “instadoc”, released on Thursday about the “Cornell Seven” scandal. It’s entitled Jane Doe v. Cornell and yet, far from at least attempting to give a balanced treatment to this complex story, the 35-minute production makes it clear from the very beginning which side it’s on.

The film hinges on commentary from individuals who essentially all agree with one another about the case: Dasser and Daily Sun senior editor Cereese Qusba, two other Cornell students (one a former fraternity president and the other a sexual assault victim per Title IX proceedings), Doe’s attorney Thomas Giuffra, victims’ advocate Amanda Walsh, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul.

Qusba advertises the Daily Sun’s editorial and financial independence from Cornell University as allowing it “to report completely honestly and be a very open source of information for students”. Yet there are serious questions about the paper’s conduct.

Consider the manner in which the editorial board broke the “Cornell Seven” story. On 21 September, the newspaper published an editorial, titled “Cornell Won’t, We Will”, arguing that “Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force.” The publication also named the seven men who had allegedly raped Doe, warning them: “We know who you are.”

One might expect this sort of rhetoric from campus activists or an individual op-ed. But from the editorial board of an Ivy League campus’s main paper, in the process of breaking a story? The Netflix documentary fails to mention this charged language, which was perhaps most responsible for jumpstarting the “I am Jane Doe” posting frenzy.

At various points, the production shows montages of individuals questioning the Daily Sun’s narrative on the men’s alleged guilt and the university’s role in facilitating them. Yet the video clips of the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Megyn Kelly are seemingly included to portray these commentators in a negative light, with the latter shown saying that Doe is “probably thrilled to be so admired”. Kelly has since claimed that the film is “deceptively edited”.

In the documentary, Hochul recounts that her first reaction to hearing about the case was: “How disgusting. Not again, not again.” Earlier this month, the New York Governor tweeted that “choosing to have a drink is not consent, and it’s never a license for sexual assault.” Yet there is no New York law that says choosing to have a drink is consenting to sex; and as civil-liberties attorney Jenin Younes has pointed out in UnHerd, Hochul’s efforts to rewrite state rape legislation “would put sexual partners in an impossible position and all but guarantee life-ruining allegations of rape against people who do no wrong”.

Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten had initially determined that “Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual,” but reopened the case on 28 September following the media attention. That was not enough for Hochul, who announced that she’d “lost faith” in the DA and appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor on the case. James had previously affirmed Doe’s allegations in a Facebook post, though her and Hochul’s willingness to effectively prejudge the case is not brought up in the Netflix documentary — or, at least, not as a bad thing.

Then there’s the appeal to emotion. One Cornell student is shown crying over the fact that the university’s Title IX verdict supposedly didn’t punish her assailant enough, though the details of the assault are not specified. A former fraternity president laments “a lack of accountability and education” in Greek life, and says that “we all stand with Jane Doe,” while acknowledging that there have been threats made against members of other frats who have done nothing wrong.

Netflix’s Jane Doe v. Cornell finishes with a scene in the Daily Sun offices, as Dasser and Qusba open cards from supporters. “This is so many different people. They’re, like, all Jane Does.” It’s a fitting conclusion for a documentary whose tone leans more into activism than investigation.

The stolen funds were denominated in several different cryptocurrencies. More than half the amount comprised stablecoins — tokens that have their value pegged to a fiat currency, most often the dollar. Stablecoins are effectively digital proxies for the dollar that are issued by private companies. The largest of these companies is Tether, whose token is USDT. Designed and programmed by their issuers, stablecoins afford that issuer a great deal of oversight. Tether and other implicated stablecoin companies have already frozen the stolen funds over which they have control, amounting to around $2.7 billion. The rest of the loot is denominated in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum which, having no centralized issuer, are much harder to freeze or claw back.

It is notable that the only directly state-associated actors in this whole episode are the thieves themselves. Law enforcement agencies are and will continue to be involved in the case, but this huge financial crime has taken place almost entirely in the realm of private corporations. Billions of dollars worth of privately-issued money have been stolen from a privately owned custodian, traced by private investigators, and much of it rendered useless from a privately-owned central point of control.

The technological and economic underpinnings of cryptocurrency are still not widely understood by the layperson, but it has come a long way from its obscure, cypherpunk origins. The barriers to entry have been dropping rapidly and the technology is now incorporated behind the scenes in popular applications such as Polymarket, the blockchain-based prediction market that doesn’t require its users to be familiar with crypto. Payment giants including Visa and Mastercard are building infrastructure to use stablecoins, while Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino has previously boasted of the company being “the stronghold for US dollar hegemony”.

Ardoino can make such a bold claim because, since the passage of the GENIUS act in 2025, stablecoins have been steadily working their way into the mainstream monetary architecture of the dollar. The act required US-based stablecoin companies to back their issuance with assets including treasuries, making them a serious strut to the giant edifice of American debt. Tether and Circle, the two largest US dollar stablecoin issuers, currently hold more US treasuries than South Korea or Germany.

Understand it or not, crypto is money now; but it is money that is issued, custodied, traced and burned by corporations. This represents a complete inversion of the founding ethos of cryptocurrency, which was conceived specifically to eliminate the need for trusted intermediaries when transferring value. Instead, it has created a new class of extraordinarily powerful intermediaries — ones which may be regulated, but which ultimately obey the basic corporate imperative of profit.

Half of the money stolen by the Binance hackers remains at their disposal because it is denominated in Bitcoin and other tokens that are specifically designed to function with no overarching point of control. At first glance this might appear to be a weakness, as it has resulted in the attackers keeping hold of ill-gotten gains. But the vulnerability came from them being kept on Binance, a centralized entity. Had those funds been stored on offline wallets held by their owners, they would not have been exposed to the hack. Within seasoned crypto circles, “not your keys, not your coins” is an article of faith. If you give up custody, you risk giving up ownership.

Binance has announced that no users will be left out of pocket by the theft. But when the dust settles it will still be the companies, not the state, overseeing the next generation of money.

And so Vaughan had to apologize before the House — on pain, one assumes, of further disciplinary action. He also could not say anything about the investigation while it was ongoing. Parliamentary privilege ought to protect all manner of speech; but here, in the chamber, his speech was coerced.

What grievous offenses demanded this ritual humiliation of a sitting MP? Vaughan had to apologize for hugging a member of staff without asking her first. He was sorry for once taking a phone out of her hands. He was sorry for — perish the thought — twice abruptly terminating a phone call. In the words of the Commissioner, now confirmed by the Independent Experts Panel: “ending a phone call abruptly without sufficient cause or a later explanation can reasonably be considered to be insulting behavior.”

Vaughan fought the Blob, and the Blob won. Now he is a sad puddle of a man. You can see the thought flicker behind his eyes: “Why did I bother?” Why would anybody commit themselves to public service, if this is what awaits them? It would have been better to remain a silk at the bar, on a much higher salary: at least there one’s indignities can be suffered in private.

It is now well known that HR is among Britain’s biggest growth industries. Because people in a ballooning sector have to justify their jobs somehow, there has been a concomitant increase in talk of “workplace bullying”. Complaints are often masked under this term, which seems to cover all sorts of general unpleasantness. It’s a word that still has strong connotations of the schoolyard. A Google Ngram search suggests that “school bullying” took off as a cause for concern in the Eighties; “workplace bullying” had to wait until the late Nineties, and has skyrocketed in recent years.

This sort of policing of ordinary interpersonal behavior is bad enough in other lines of work. But in the context of Parliament, it is a genuine constitutional scandal. The “watchdogs” are on the loose, and they are out of control. They even brought down a deputy prime minister in Dominic Raab. Everyone knew he was irritable and surly; he might even be an arsehole. But among the cases of “bullying” upheld against him in 2023 was his description of a subordinate’s work as “useless” and “woeful”. Well, what is one to do if a subordinate’s work is “useless” and “woeful”?

Politics is a serious, high-stakes business. Parliament should not be a primary school, where every criticism has to be couched in language like “it would have been even better if…”. It shows contempt to the public to waylay their representatives with months, even years, of Kafkaesque “procedure”. They have more important things to be doing.

These shadowy, unelected bodies have the power to extinguish an electoral mandate at the stroke of a hand. The politicians themselves — they only have themselves to blame — have handed over an important instrument of sovereignty to a faceless, labyrinthine bureaucracy. An MP channels the will of the people, and it is to the people alone, not the shadow courts, to whom they ought to answer. They tap their power from a hallowed source. Past parliamentarians understood this, and jealously guarded their independence. They fought wars for this principle, beheading and deposing those kings who dared tread on their rights. It is a pity that today’s crop can’t show the same resolve.