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At a fundraiser in early January, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo outright admitted to donors that he wasn’t the most inspiring candidate. “I am not enough of a motor—uh, a motivator—as a governor candidate to get them off the couch,” the Republican said on a recording obtained by the Nevada Independent. “We have a couple ballot […]

“Cartels of terrorists across our hemisphere, enabled by adversaries, created and profited from chaos,” remarked Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth at the Americas Counter Cartel Conference in early March. “What creates chaos? No leadership creates chaos.” The Christian nationalist crusader, whose Pentagon is in constant upheaval, was referring to the Biden administration—but his words are a much more apt description of his department, and of the Trump administration broadly. The president and his acolytes claim that they’re cracking down on terrorists, but even in the best cases, their efforts have proved costly and ineffective; in the worst, they’ve actually benefited terrorists, helping them swell their ranks and even enriching them.The boat strikes that Hegseth has boasted about are a prime example of the former. “Under President Trump for the first time in history, the Department of War is on the offense against narco-terrorists,” he said at the conference. Putting aside the ethical implications of killing at least 185 people without trials, even when they’re clearly surrendering, and the damage such attacks do to our moral standing in the world, the strikes have also proven rather ineffective. While there’s evidence that certain drug routes from Venezuela have been shut down, the cartels have simply shifted to new routes and other methods of export, moving cocaine through cargo ships in multiple ports across Latin America. As Alex Papadovassilakis wrote for InSight Crime, “Concealment within legitimate cargo remains the main method for reaching consumer markets in the United States, Europe, and beyond, with traffickers routing loads through ports in countries like the Dominican Republic.” Papadovassilakis also noted that even people in “go-fast boats” who are actually transporting drugs are likely not direct members of the cartels but instead local fishermen and merchants doing one-off deals. Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of U.S. Southern Command, essentially acknowledged the limited reach of the murderous strikes when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, saying that, going forward, “boat strikes will be one of the main tools, and probably not the most effective.” It seems the U.S. military’s removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who is now facing narco-terrorism charges in the U.S., has also been ineffective. Because Trump’s gambit didn’t topple the government—leaving key figures like Venezuela’s corrupt interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, in power, “the country’s broader criminal ecosystem remains largely intact,” Papadovassilakis reported. Yet our ineffectiveness has not been cheap, as the military raid and ongoing boat strikes have cost at least $4.7 billion, according to a joint analysis by the progressive Institute for Policy Studies and Brown University’s Costs of War project. Meanwhile, a recent New York Times exposé revealed that we’re inadvertently supporting major drug cartels in Colombia by purchasing gold from mines they control, despite declaring the end products that move through our mints to be “100% American.” It’s a practice that preceded the Trump administration, but of which it seemed blithely unaware, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent telling the Times he’ll investigate it. There’s no indication that this will in any way affect the release of the 250th-anniversary commemorative gold coin featuring Trump’s phony tough-guy stare.The fight against drug cartels has been further hampered by Trump’s pardon policies. At the request of Roger Stone, himself a recipient of a Trump pardon, the president pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who’d been sentenced to 45 years in U.S. prison for his role in a massive drug conspiracy. Hernández helped cartels smuggle 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. in exchange for millions in bribes, but Trump claims it was just a Biden setup. Trump may even be angling to install Hernández back in power, according to a bombshell report published by Canal Red and Hondurasgate. Fulfilling a campaign promise he’d made to secure Libertarian votes, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, whose Silk Road site acted as a trading post for narcotics. Ulbricht had been sentenced to two life terms, plus forty years, and was suspected of involvement in five murders. Trump also pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder convicted of failing to stop money laundering on the site, which was thought to be used by Russian gangsters and Hamas.The administration’s efforts in Africa have perhaps been even more heinous and counterproductive, worsened by massive cuts to aid that have killed many and destabilized regions. Trump ordered a strike on Nigeria back in December, claiming it was necessary to combat a Christian genocide that right-wing conspiracy theorists wrongfully claim is occurring there. If a genocide were occurring, of course, a single strike would hardly suffice to halt it. As it is, the strike seems to have galvanized the terrorist group Boko Haram and its offshoot, the Islamic State West African Province, both of which are believed to be coordinating attacks against the Nigerian government. In response, the U.S. has ordered all nonessential staff out of our embassy in Abuja.The Trump administration’s actions in Somalia, on the other hand, have been much more consistent and much deadlier. While presidents have ordered strikes against the unstable African state since the 1990s, under Trump they’ve drastically increased, leading to hundreds or perhaps thousands of deaths (it’s hard to tell exactly, since U.S. African Command conveniently stopped reporting the numbers a year ago). Undoubtedly, both ISIS and Al Shabab maintain a significant presence in Somalia, but West Africa has become the new hotbed of jihadist activity, and yet—with the single Nigeria strike as the one exception—the U.S. has done nothing to combat the rise of terrorist groups there. Why, then, have we carried out so many operations in Somalia? Well, as former Secretary of State for African Affairs Tibor Nagy Jr. told Vox’s Joshua Keating, “It seems like it’s on autopilot. It’s easier to keep doing something because there’s the institutional bureaucracy in place to keep supporting it.” In other words, it’s administrative laziness. Trump relaxed the rules for U.S. African Command to act independently and has since been uninvolved. We keep hitting Somalia because we have more resources there than in the Sahel region of West Africa, where terrorists are congregating.Just across the Gulf of Aden from Somalia, in Yemen, the U.S. has been incompetently battling the Houthis. Despite Trump telling the terrorist group in March 2025 that their “time is up,” it quickly became evident that the hundreds of millions we were spending on airstrikes had accomplished virtually nothing. Two months later, Trump claimed the group had “capitulated” by agreeing to a ceasefire. But today, the Houthis are as powerful as ever. In fact, they’re using our withdrawal from the area as evidence of their strength. “By portraying themselves as the only force resisting foreign powers—the U.S. and Israel—the Houthis strengthened their internal support, increased recruitment, and reinforced their image as Yemen’s primary defenders,” reported the Stimson Center. They’ve also slowed traffic through the Bab El-Mandeb Strait by well over 50 percent, limiting petroleum exports in the region.The Houthis’ ally, Iran, may have taken that as its cue when it closed the Strait of Hormuz, causing a massive oil shortage and impelling the U.S. administration to release $14 billion of Iranian oil from sanctions, thus providing plenty of funding for more state-sponsored terrorism. Humiliated before the world, Trump called for a ceasefire—one that has now been stretched indefinitely—even as he and Hegseth repeatedly claimed that their objectives have been met and that the U.S. has won. Iran’s theocratic regime, in contrast, has only become more hard-line. While the U.S. continues to flounder abroad, terrorist attacks at home have gone largely unnoticed by the White House, and Trump’s completely unqualified “counterterrorism czar,” the campaign hack Sebastian Gorka, has no plan to combat them. The administration even reassigned terrorism specialists to immigration cases, only to call many of them back to their old roles after hostilities began with Iran. At the same time, Trump has distracted from genuine threats with fictitious accusations about the “radical left terrorists.” It fits a pattern: Fail, point fingers, and never, under any circumstances, take a good long look in the mirror.

Get ready with me while we talk about Ashley St. Clair.Ashley St. Clair is a gonzo MAGA influencer turned gonzo ex-MAGA influencer who is also known for having mothered a child with Elon Musk in 2023. She is a college student. She is 27.For the last few months, St. Clair has been posting to TikTok about her escape or exile from the MAGA carnies. She sums it up this way: “I became a cringe MAGA influencer for 8 years before I found my brain.” Now she is ready to “talk about my experience within this machine of MAGA” and “speak about the inside of a system that nobody else is.” Though she makes serious reference to having renounced her previous creed and making earnest amends, St. Clair is mostly conducting her multipart exposé with Catskills-style comedy. She’s well suited to it, as she resembles a young Fran Drescher, and has something of Drescher’s manner, manicures, and nasality. In this costume, St. Clair delivers MAGA lore and tea to an increasingly intrigued audience. You might call this a redemption tour, except that her shtick is that she’s way, way beyond redemption. And lately she’s been drawing viewers in with the four words that have become a favorite opener on the app: “Get ready with me.” To her following, this curtain-raiser signals that St. Clair will put on a millefeuille of makeup in a sublimely expert way, transforming herself from girlish smart aleck to indomitable broad, all while dishing about the women of Mar-a-Lago, the right-wing media group Arsenal, “the rack on Kristi Noem’s husband,” the “Stop the Steal” hoax, the former North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn, Benny Johnson, Alex Jones, and how MAGA influence campaigns work. Why is this at all compelling? I think it comes through in the makeup application itself, as this exhausted and broken-hearted young woman, who has both engineered suffering and suffered herself, self-consciously masks her extreme fragility with extreme bravado. St. Clair is clearly experiencing a form of how-did-I-get-here despair that mirrors the nation’s. In one video (now unfindable) she contrasted images of her heavily made-up self with her private one—raw, red-faced, sobbing. I find her both insightful and untrustworthy. “Bitch, I’m at rock bottom,” she posted. “There’s not an embarrassed bone in my body. I care about literally nothing.” So here’s the rock bottom she’s referring to. In 2023, St. Clair’s relationship with Musk rocketed from their D.M.s to her pregnancy to his madness. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” Musk texted St. Clair about his breeding plan for her, according to The Wall Street Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.” Not long after, St. Clair announced the birth of their son Romulus on X, and named Musk as the father. He had evidently hoped to keep this quiet. A beef ensued. “You withdrew most of [the child support] to maintain control and punish me for ‘disobedience,’” St. Clair tweeted at Musk, saying she was facing eviction. Musk then decided St. Clair had somehow entrapped him, and went insane. A tsunami of horrific, pornographic, xAI-generated images of St. Clair as a minor hit X. St. Clair sued xAI. Now xAI has bashed back. Or rather, as she puts it, “my ex’s fuck-ass racist robot company is suing me.”For a new mother in precarious circumstances to go toe-to-toe with Musk, the RMITW, took cojones. To do so on Musk’s own Satan-site, and in the presence of his zillion bloodthirsty acolytes—this gives you a sense of St. Clair’s risk nonaversion. So she took her rock bottom to TikTok. When she arrived, she mostly lip-synched to internet memes. These videos are surprisingly funny, and she still does them. But only last August when she warned about Palantir, and the dangers of “simping for the military-industrial complex,” did she get true engagement. These days, some 70,000 of us are following. The tea is hot, as they say. The apparent debauchery, recklessness, and casual brutality of some of the nation’s leading conservatives is really something. St. Clair chips off jokes about everything she did and had done to her in her early twenties, and her tough-as-nails posture is, by design, only half-persuasive.Then St. Clair can also turn downright somber, as in a video last week. In this one (now removed), St. Clair addressed Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie who had just released a weird video of her own. St. Clair urged Kirk to log off the internet for a time and get better people to advise her. St. Clair then thought better of the post and took it down. “As a mother,” she said in the next video, she didn’t want to encourage people to “dogpile” on Kirk. Once a “brand ambassador” for Turning Point USA, St. Clair also wanted to underscore in this follow-up video that she vehemently opposes the ideology of the Kirks—and the whole movement she once embraced. To this end, she has taken her name off an anti-trans children’s book she published a few years ago. She further aims to take responsibility for having, as she says, dehumanized the trans community—and so many others.“I encourage people within MAGA to really look at what’s happening in this country and what you’re a part of,” she said in a Get Ready With Me video last Friday, with apparent anguish. She went on to say she’s not a grifter or a makeup influencer. She hopes, in fact, to go to law school one day.“I am speaking openly and honestly about my experiences. I understand that there’s a lot of skepticism and critique, and I am open to that, and I am understanding that there are a lot of people that are still going to be angry at me. And I don’t fault them for that because of my role in harm.”Gen Z MAGA—how will we ever understand you? The sincerity crossed with the oddball memes with the deep suffering with the mean-girl zingers. But the GRWM video was done. The makeup was done. In the captions, St. Clair had helpfully included a 15-item cosmetics product list, including Rare Blush in Wisdom, Nars Blush in Dolce Vita, and One Size Liner in Outta Line. What a mess. But maybe the list held a clue to Ashley’s, MAGA’s, or even America’s trajectory. Dolce Vita to Outta Line to some Wisdom at last? What was I doing? I finally scrolled away.

Edward Curtin Jr. “And there are those who claim that Big Data will supplant Sapiens and drag him helplessly along like a straw in the mighty flow of information. We will then be close to knowing almost everything we don’t need to know.”

Nate Bear Do Not Panic The UK has descended into confected hysteria over antisemitism to protect Keir Starmer and Labour from being wiped out by the Greens in local elections this week. The British establishment is well-practiced in manufacturing antisemitism hysteria, of course, having used it to destroy Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party when it got […]

China is playing a growing role in US discourse over domestic tech growth and regulation.

One crazed man holds the fate of the world in his hands and his name is Donald Trump. Can his administration, the U.S. system, the War Powers Act, Russia or anybody else stop him? asks Joe Lauria. Joe Lauria for Consortium News Donald Trump “indefinitely” extended the ceasefire with Iran on April 21 and over […]

Quotable and inscrutable at once, the Louisiana senator is the rare faithful conservative who still confounds the party.

In recent years, Singapore has emerged as a winner of the US-China tech war.