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The new Republican Congress has an agenda: revenge. Because it is who they are, they are going after the president’s son. Richard Painter, the law professor and former White House ethic lawyer tweets, “News flash: Hunter Biden is not president, does not work for the U.S. government, and does not appear to have any influence on the U.S. government.” No matter. The GOP’s idea of doing the people’s work is to distract attention from their own moral turpitude and to exact retribution for Democrats’ efforts to hold Trump accountable for malfeasance in office. They mean to get under Uncle Joe Biden’s skin by attacking his son (The Guardian, emphasis mine): “The right wing is licking its chops at the chance to go after him,” said Joshua Kendall, author of First Dads: Parenting and Politics from George Washington to Barack Obama. “The level of venom is going to be over the top and really, really dirty. The Republicans’ rhetoric might get so heated that it detracts from some of the actual behaviour.” Republicans have been waiting a long time for this moment.

News overlooked on Friday This news was largely obscured Friday by the Republicans’ Speaker follies: The special counsel investigating Donald Trump could decide whether to file criminal charges against him in just weeks after amassing a trove of new state documents concerning pressure to overturn the 2020 election, sources have told Bloomberg. Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of Justice Department prosecutors are currently poring over new emails, letters and other records from battleground states. “You can tell that it’s moving quickly,” Brian Kidd, a former federal prosecutor who served under Smith at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg. Officials in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico and Nevada confirmed to Bloomberg that they have complied with grand jury subpoenas from Smith’s office. The material turned over by Nevada and reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that Trump representatives baselessly accused the state’s local officials of allowing election “fraud and abuse” soon after Trump lost the vote to Joe Biden. “Moving quickly” is good.

In my latest article I look at the growing evidence that the US strategy in Ukraine may be aimed not only at weakening Russia — but Germany as well. While last week I looked at the UK’s mini-budget hysteria, and why the the government’s plan wasn’t attacked because of the tax cuts (which were bad) but because …

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I’ve got a new piece up at Compact about the shocking facts that recent lawsuits and FOIAs are bringing to light about the extent of the collaboration between the US government and Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to police so-called disinformation. What’s apparent is that the aim of this strategy wasn’t to …

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I’ve written an article about the Bank of England’s recent interest rate hike — which follows similar hikes by other major central banks, most notably the Federal Reserve. In it, I argue that the hikes have nothing to do with bringing down inflation, for the simple fact that the latter has nothing do with excess demand …

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In my latest column for UnHerd, I look at how Biden is escalating tensions with China — not only by taking a hard-line approach to Taiwan but also, and perhaps even more importantly, by launching an all-out economic war on the Asian giant, by introducing a vast array of restrictions on the sale of semiconductor chips to …

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As new authentication and surveillance technologies, such as vaccine passports and track-and-trace apps, were rolled out during the pandemic, civil rights organisations and activists raised the question of mission creep — that is, the likelihood of governments clinging on to these technologies and using them for unanticipated ends, heralding a new era of normalised state …

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Western media have covered the recent anti-lockdown protests in China extensively, unanimous in their condemnation of the government’s extreme measures and their praise of the protesters’ “collective bravery” and “remarkable expression of defiance”; many Western leaders have reacted similarly. This is a jaw-dropping reversal. Those same outlets, along with the entire Western scientific and political …

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I’ve written about the increasingly popular theory of degrowth communism. Its message is simple: capitalism’s drive for profit is destroying the planet and only “degrowth communism” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth. Humans need to find a “new way of living”, and that means replacing capitalism. However, there are serious …

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I’ve published a few pieces since my last update. The latest one is about the “Qatargate” scandal that has engulfed the European Parliament. In it, I explain that the scandal, far from being an isolated case, is an epiphenomenon of a much deeper and more widespread malaise, involving not just the European Parliament but all EU institutions. …

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