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Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Western public has been sold the story of a Ukrainian front united in its unwavering commitment to a total military victory over Russia. Over the past few weeks, however, this narrative has started to crumble. Despite the failure of Ukraine’s Nato-backed counteroffensive, which is now universally accepted, Zelensky continues to …

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I’ve written for UnHerd about the legacy of Jacques Delors, the former President of the European Commission who passed away on Wednesday. Delors is often eulogised as the “founding father of modern Europe” — as if that were a good thing. A more apt description would be “founding father of the techno-authoritarian and anti-democratic juggernaut that is the …

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I’ve written for UnHerd about the 25th anniversary of the euro — and how the latter should be understood first and foremost as a political project aimed at consolidating elite power and advancing a neoliberal agenda. Thus, even though, 25 years on, the euro has failed miserably by virtually all economic metrics, it would be a mistake to …

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If you don’t know, you don’t care From Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance, A Warning: One morning before Christmas, I was working out with a friend who I adore, and workout with regularly. She’s young, smart, and a recent college graduate. In the middle of our session, my phone started going off incessantly and I finally picked it up. It was, of course, breaking news. That day, it was about the Giuliani bankruptcy. I apologized to her for taking the call. I got off quickly and told her, by way of explanation, “Rudy Giuliani just filed for bankruptcy.” “Who’s Rudy Giuliani?” she asked. Vance realizes that her friend born after 9/11 has no idea that Giuliani was once “America’s Mayor.” And has no reason to know. I decided to get a gut check from my 21-year-old. “Do you know who Rudy Giuliani is?” I asked. He rolled his eyes. Of course he does. He reminded me he’s my son. But then, he schooled me on how it works for his generation. College kids, or most of them, don’t watch TV news or read newspapers. They get it from their social media feeds. Intellectually I know this.

Hamlet never imagined this It’s long seemed as if this country is suffering a severe case of mass insanity. The truth is out there. It is more than QAnon, but please see that obligatory nonsense at the bottom later. The occasion for revisiting societal mental breakdown is a couple of headlines this morning. This will take a moment. Texas doctors do not need to perform emergency abortions, court rules (Washington Post) A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a long-standing national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House’s strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. The federal law “does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded, faulting the Biden administration’s interpretation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA. The law “does not govern the practice of medicine,” the court added.

It’s not because he thinks he’s losing The new year is off to a strong start with two weeks to go to the first primaries, more debates for second place in the offing and legal filings dropping in the Trump cases day and night. And we’re only three days in. I hope everyone got themselves a good rest over the holidays because there’s going to be no time to catch your breath between now and election day next November. The games have officially begun. The Republicans primaries look to be gelling exactly as predicted. The weak and tepid Trump opposition hasn’t been able to get any real traction despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. The race for second place is between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former S. Carolina Gov. It’s clear that Trump is still the leader of the party and, as predicted, will almost certainly get the nomination. There have been a number of articles in recent days taking a look at his campaign. The Washington Post published a long piece about how he “reignited his base and took control of the Republican primary” which ends up concluding that he never really lost the base in the first place.

Oh, I hope so … The Daily Beast noted this about that Jack Smith filing during the holidays arguing against allowing Trump to have immunity: As Special Counsel Jack Smith makes the case that former President Donald Trump shouldn’t have vast immunity to commit crimes, Smith has compiled a very curious list of theoretical misdeeds that seem to telegraph potential bombshells at his upcoming D.C. trial. Accepting a bribe, ordering an FBI director to fake evidence against a political foe, ordering the military to murder critics, and even selling nuclear secrets to a foreign enemy—these are the particular and peculiar crimes that prosecutors say Trump could get away with if he succeeds in arguing that presidential immunity gives him king-like powers to do as he pleases from the White House. Again, theoretically, of course. “In each of these scenarios, the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy,” prosecutors wrote to appellate judges on Saturday.

Secretary Mayorkas will be impeached Marjorie Taylor Greene has been pushing for this from the moment Mayorkas was confirmed. It’s her personal crusade and they are all afraid of her so it is happening: House Republicans will forge ahead with steps to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas over his handling of the border crisis, a GOP source tells CNN. In a statement provided to CNN, a committee spokesperson said “the House Committee on Homeland Security has conducted a comprehensive investigation into Secretary Mayorkas’ handling of, and role in, the unprecedented crisis at the Southwest border” for nearly a year. “Following the bipartisan vote in the House to refer articles of impeachment against the secretary to our Committee, we will be conducting hearings and taking up those articles in the coming weeks,” the statement said. The announcement of the impeachment proceedings comes as immigration is shaping up to be a top issue in the 2024 presidential election, with Republicans slamming President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

Politico interviewed Christopher Rufo the new propaganda monister of fascist America. He’s very proud of himself for taking out a Black woman president of Harvard. What a coup. Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired. The following has been edited for clarity and concision. How much credit do you think you deserve for Gay’s resignation? I’ve learned that it never hurts to take the credit because sometimes people don’t give it to you. But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me, Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors.

And it is awesome Perlstein will be writing his for the American Prospect. You can subscribe to it here and I highly recommend you do it. I don’t think that he or the folks at the American Prospect will mind if I reproduce this first introductory column in its entirety. It’s just so good. (I’ll follow the rules in the future, I promise.) You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media As a historian who also writes about the present, there are certain well-worn grooves in the way elections get written about by pundits and political journalists from which I instinctively recoil. The obsession with polling, for one. Polls have value when approached with due humility, though you wonder how politicians and the public managed to make do without them before their modern invention in the 1930s. But given how often pollsters blow their most confident—and consequential—calls, their work is as likely to be of use to historians as object lessons in hubris as for the objective data they mean to provide.