he world is starting to understand that there is no way to fully and lastingly protect itself from President Donald Trump.
The man just can’t let things go — and he’ll get creative to get what he wants.
The latest blowup over Ukraine is emblematic of Trump’s wily persistence, and it suggests a challenging two years lie ahead for the international set even if Democrats gain some power in the midterm elections.
Not that long ago, Trump seemed to have patched up ties with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as Kyiv made gains against Russia. Trump signed legislation last month that was championed by his late friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to impose heavy new sanctions and tariffs to punish Russia for its war on Ukraine.
This month, the original Trump — the one who fawns over Russian leader Vladimir Putin and despises Zelenskyy — roared back. He waived many of the legislation’s penalties on Russia, moved to buy Russian diesel and signaled he’s more interested in doing business with Moscow than seeking justice for Kyiv. Ukrainians suspect the U.S. has pressured them by throttling its satellite connections and intelligence-sharing. (The Trump administration disputes much of this.)
“Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” Trump said Monday as he welcomed the idea of an arms control summit with Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping that might include talks about Ukraine.
The lesson, foreign officials and others steeped in diplomacy tell me, is that you cannot truly change Trump’s mind or stop his overall trajectory. Even if Trump seems briefly chastened or stages a tactical retreat, he will eventually return in new, often-surprising modes to push his original views and goals. He will try to exhaust you into submission.
Imagine how startling it is to be Ukrainian these days as Trump pressures you to make concessions to Russia by blaming you for a global energy crisis he caused by launching a war on Iran. Or what it’s like for officials across European capitals trying to craft a response, knowing there’s never an end to the process.
“There is no immunity to Donald Trump. He makes a deal in order to make a better deal the next day,” one senior European official mused, having been granted anonymity because the topic involves sensitive diplomacy.
It’s hard to blame world leaders who think they’ve learned to manage Trump only to be bewildered by a sudden left hook on his part. Foreign policy is often driven by hope when you lack good options. And Trumpology is a confounding, but still a relatively new, subfield.
Besides, Trump’s messaging is inconsistent, incoherent and nonstrategic — characteristics that can obscure his single-minded pursuit of his goals. So the global actors dealing with him — whether it’s the Gulf Arab states who shower him with gifts or the Canadians furious over his trade and territorial threats — sometimes think they’ve come to terms with him only to find they’re fighting on a newly configured plane.
A Supreme Court ruling that gutted many of Trump’s tariffs earlier this year was good news in many capitals. But since then, the so-called Tariff Man has moved to impose the import taxes under pretexts not considered by the court, including turning to accusations involving forced labor.
The White House doesn’t dispute Trump’s aggressive tactics.
“There is no greater fighter for America First interests than President Trump — and he is willing to look anyone in the eye to deliver wins on behalf of the United States,” spokesperson Anna Kelly told me in a statement.
The Greenland saga shows the limits of trying to mollify Trump.
In his first term, Trump wanted to buy the frozen island. The idea was shelved amid global laughter, but authorities in Greenland and Denmark made it clear to Trump that they welcomed more U.S. investment in the Danish territory.
In his second term, Trump huffed and puffed about an all-out U.S. takeover of Greenland, only to agree in September to an expanded U.S. military footprint that he could have gotten anyway under existing, decades-old diplomatic accords without all the drama. The whole affair has led to lingering anger in Europe about what Canada’s leader called a “rupture” in the global order — but many European officials hoped that the saga had faded away.
Yet, it’s far from certain that Trump has given up on possessing Greenland. Just days ago, he touted on social media plans to start oil, gas and mineral exploration in “our new and beautiful Greenland.”
The use of “our” is more than a little suggestive.
Defying Trump, too, can get you only so far.
Brazilians effectively told Trump to take a hike when he used tariffs and sanctions to punish the country for charging its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, in a coup attempt.
A few months later, as Bolsonaro was about to start his prison sentence, Trump seemed to admit defeat in his effort to help his political ally. “That’s too bad,” he said in November 2025, with little emotion. (“Brazil Defied Trump and Won,” The New York Times declared.)
World leaders are doing what they can to make their countries Trump-resistant, if not all-out Trump-proof.
That has meant everything from diversifying their sources of trade and security alliances to joining Trump on ventures that, on the surface at least, can be helpful to them. (Then there are the many countries, especially in Africa, that diplomats privately tell me are happy to be off Trump’s radar.)
My takeaway from watching all of this, though, is that it’s not enough to stay one step ahead of Trump. You have to stay several steps ahead, and you have to be wildly imaginative about the lengths to which Trump and his devoted aides are willing to go to complicate your life.
The second Trump administration is filled with people who have turned to unique, bizarre and clever interpretations of law and reality to push his agenda. It’s not always clear who is behind which move, but it’s hard to imagine Trump isn’t fine with most of what’s happening.
It’s why a teenager is being held in immigration detention for the actions of his grandmother decades ago. It’s why Congress can scream and shout about its spending orders yet Trump ignores it.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said other nations should not hope that the Republican Party will shed Trump’s worldview, including his disdain for allies, once Trump’s out of power.
“I would love for our allies to know that we have consistent common adversaries that we’re going to work together to fight. I just don’t know that you can make that guarantee,” Murphy, a frequent Trump critic, told me. “That’s painful to say, but given the state of the Republican Party right now, it’s true.”
I understand why Ukraine and the European Union are trying to diversify their sources of intelligence and military industrial bases as Trump keeps chasing love from Russia.
Despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claims, the reality is that the United States can no longer be trusted for such security assistance.
But it’s not enough to find new intelligence partners or weapons manufacturers. You have to ask bigger questions, like, “What are the untapped streams of intelligence that no one knows are out there? What’s a potential weapon no one has considered? How can I acquire what I need before Trump stops me?”
Governments need to have plans — now — for scenarios that seem completely crazy. Better to be wrong than unprepared.
Still, even if you do all of that … “I don’t think it’s possible to stay two or three steps ahead of Trump,” said Charles Kupchan, a former senior national security official during the Obama administration who apparently enjoys raining on parades.
“He acts on impulse,” argued Kupchan, who has a new book out on the crumbling world order. “We need to try to limit the damage he’s causing and ride him out.”
A Democratic win in November’s midterms — one or both chambers of Congress — is unlikely to do much to rein in Trump’s actions abroad during his final years, current and former U.S. and foreign officials tell me.
He still has the veto and has been willing to ignore congressional demands. There’s also the fact that presidents have significantly more power to act in unilateral ways overseas than they do domestically.
Ukraine, the European Union, the world — all will be dealing with a politically wounded Trump who’s likely to double down on what he feels he must have.
Fox News’ closing argument for the final midterm elections of Donald Trump’s political reign is increasingly frantic. The network promised its viewers prosperity. With early voting underway in most states, its best pitch now is footage of burning streets in France.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Fox repeatedly sold Trump’s return to office as the cure for high prices. As economic indicators began to disappoint toward the end of 2025, the network pivoted to promises that 2026 would bring an economic boom. Once again, that prosperity has failed to materialize. Now, with the year nearing its end and Fox’s leading personalities struggling to explain why voters should reward Republicans for their stewardship of the country, the network has changed its pitch: Forget what Republicans promised to do for you. Be terrified of what Democrats will supposedly do to you.
Jesse Watters said the quiet part out loud on “The Five” on Oct. 15. Polling, he explained, shows the MAGA base is engaged and locked in, while “the non-MAGA faction and independents” are where Republicans are exposed. He cited an interview with Caroline Sunshine, a former Disney star turned MAGA operative, who told him the GOP could not simply sell the great stuff Trump had done because accomplishments “don’t motivate.”
“You got to go out and have fear porn,” Watters concluded. “You have to say, ‘These people are going to take your healthcare, they’re going to let in the Third World, they’re going to jack up your taxes,’ and that’s what’s going to get people to come out to vote. You have to say, these people are scary and dangerous.”
His fellow host, Greg Gutfeld, apparently delighted, replied, “Good for you, fear porn!”
Fox’s fear-mongering is a performance for the converted, intended to escape the studio through Trump’s Truth Social feed and whatever the mainstream press can be induced to cover.
Notice whom Watters said he was worried about. MAGA is engaged. It is the “non-MAGA faction and independents” who trouble Republicans — precisely the voters least likely to be persuaded by the insular world of “The Five.” Fox’s fear-mongering is a performance for the converted, intended to escape the studio through Trump’s Truth Social feed and whatever the mainstream press can be induced to cover.
The result is a campaign by the network that has the instability of an advertising operation testing different nightmares. The targets change, but the pitch remains the same. One day it is rioting in France. The next it is a Democratic senator’s comments about prosecuting officials who break the law. Now Fox is turning its cameras toward the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, scrutinizing her family’s movements and encouraging speculation about her whereabouts. The instruction never changes: Your dissatisfaction with the people in power must not become a vote against them.
Sean Hannity has called this “the single most important, consequential midterm election in our lifetime,” warning that Democrats would “shred your Constitution” on behalf of a “radicalized leftist democratic socialist communist movement.” Republicans, Hannity conceded, may be “imperfect” and even “pathetically weak,” but “Democrats are completely insane.” He has also claimed Democrats want to abolish the family and seize control of Americans’ assets, food and healthcare. Laura Ingraham warned Wednesday that Democrats want the public to “submit or be crushed.”
Coincentedally, Fox’s October surprise arrived on cue. What began as student protests over conditions at a high school north of Paris has expanded into a broader protest movement, with large demonstrations across France. Although the overwhelming majority of demonstrators have marched peacefully, scattered violence over the weekend gave Fox the footage it needed. Media Matters tallied at least five hours and 18 minutes of network airtime devoted to the unrest between Saturday and Wednesday morning. Monday alone accounted for two hours and 22 minutes, with the subject raised in every hour of programming from 5 a.m. until midnight.
Ingraham called the footage a “reality check” for anyone who doubts the stakes of the midterms, claiming a Democratic victory would bring the same chaos to the United States. Brian Kilmeade, co-host of “Fox and Friends,” warned viewers that “this type of stuff is coming here.” Hugh Hewitt was even blunter: “It’s coming here.” Kayleigh McEnany, the former Trump press secretary now collecting a Fox paycheck, called the scenes “very instructive” as Americans decide who should lead the country.
The argument presented by Fox hosts was as crude as it was consequential: French unrest became evidence of what American Democrats supposedly intend to unleash at home. The network offered little reason to believe that the political circumstances in France were transferable to the United States. It did not need to establish that connection. It needed viewers to feel it.
Then came the feedback loop that has defined the Trump era. The president, who often posts in real time while watching Fox, declared Sunday morning that “France is burning” and demanded that the U.S. close its borders. By Monday evening, footage of the protests had made its way into his stump speech for embattled Sen. Roger Marshall in Kansas, where video clips had already been screened for rallygoers. Trump described France as a nation being conquered by migrants, jihadists and communists hostile to Christianity and Western civilization. Democrats, he claimed, wanted to bring the same destruction to America.
House Speaker Mike Johnson joined the pile-on, posting that France was “descending into chaos because they wanted OPEN BORDERS.” POLITICO reported that Republican operatives saw the story as a potential jolt for their campaigns, with party sources saying that linking the perceived anarchy to Democratic policies would be a focus of the GOP’s closing message. Fox News Digital further amplified the narrative by publishing an investigation identifying what it called “a transnational network of communist and socialist organizations” linked to the French movement.
The process is familiar: Fox finds a frightening story, strips it of context and recasts it as a warning about Democrats. Trump amplifies the coverage, giving the story the authority of the presidency. Republican operatives then convert the resulting panic into a campaign message, which Fox can cover as a political development in its own right.
This is a campaign-season ritual. In 2014, the fearmongering centered on Ebola. In 2018, it was migrant caravans. In 2020, the Hunter Biden laptop became an obsession. In 2022, Fox returned to the old-fashioned panic over “America’s crime crisis.” In 2024, it was Kamala Harris being for “they/them.” Each story was presented as an urgent national threat with implications for the election.
This year’s French panic, however, appears to have sputtered. While Trump continued invoking the unrest on the campaign trail, by Wednesday morning Fox’s coverage had fallen sharply. The network was already moving on to its next outrage: days-old comments from Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat and former CIA analyst.
At a University of Chicago event on Oct. 13, Slotkin discussed how Democrats might hold Trump administration officials accountable if they regained power. She said she wanted to pursue significant cases against officials who enabled unlawful conduct and to make prospective employees think carefully about the legal risks of working for the administration.
“I want young people coming out of school to say, ‘Should I go work for the Trump administration? Like, that sounds fun, I might get an opportunity,’” Slotkin said. “I want them to be like, ‘Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don’t want, and so let me avoid participating in that.’ I want that deterrence message.”
There is a legitimate debate to be had about how Democrats would exercise investigative and prosecutorial powers if they regain control of Congress, and politicians should be careful not to imply that public servants are presumptively guilty because of whom they work for. But Slotkin’s stated target was officials who enable unlawful conduct, not young conservatives as a class. Her remarks concerned the prospect of legal accountability, not a blanket prohibition on conservative participation in government.
Fox seized on the comments as evidence that Democrats intend to intimidate young conservatives out of public service. Slotkin pushed back, arguing that the Supreme Court’s grant of presidential immunity did not extend to people who commit illegal acts at a president’s direction.
So then the network turned its attention to Omar, exposing just how selective its concern about intimidation can be.
Earlier this month, federal agents searched Omar’s home near Washington under a judicially authorized warrant. Citing unnamed sources, Fox reported that the investigation concerned immigration paperwork completed by Omar’s late father when she was a child. The allegations remain allegations; the existence of an investigation does not establish wrongdoing by the congresswoman.
Fox did not merely cover the search. Its reporters were at her door on the morning it happened. On Oct. 20, Fox News Digital published an article centered on Omar’s daughters arriving at the residence. The report described her eldest daughter, Isra Hirsi, pulling into the driveway after dark and carrying a bag into the house.
The headline read, “Omar’s daughters show up at scene of DC raid as rumors swirl about embattled rep’s location.” A promotional post on X asked, “Where is Ilhan Omar?” and explained that the congresswoman had not been spotted publicly since the search and that Fox was “tracking new activity at the residence.” It described her daughters’ arrivals and noted that her husband had continued to appear outside the home.
The framing was unmistakable. Fox was not simply reporting on the status of an investigation. It was inviting viewers to treat the movements of Omar’s family as clues in a mystery, while encouraging speculation about the congresswoman’s whereabouts. One of the daughters, when approached by Fox News Digital, responded with a pointed question: “What’s your problem?”
It is a fair question. The public has a legitimate interest in allegations involving an elected official. That interest does not automatically extend to tracking her children’s movements or turning their arrival at a family home into a political spectacle. Fox’s reporting made the family part of the story without establishing why their ordinary activities were relevant to the investigation.
The episode also exposes the hypocrisy of Fox’s Slotkin coverage. The network wants viewers to believe that Democrats’ talk of accountability will intimidate young conservatives into avoiding public service. Yet its own reporters are making the movements of a Democratic official’s children into content, inviting public harassment and targeting.
Fox’s fixation on Omar has long gone beyond policy criticism. Its personalities have repeatedly invoked her Somali background and Muslim identity to cast her as an alien presence in American politics.
Fox’s fixation on Omar has long gone beyond policy criticism. Its personalities have repeatedly invoked her Somali background and Muslim identity to cast her as an alien presence in American politics. Kilmeade recently seized on an account of the congresswoman being disappointed by the homelessness she encountered in New York after arriving in the United States to accuse her of being ungrateful. The implication was that Omar’s criticism of the country was itself evidence of a defective character.
That framing makes the doorstep surveillance more disturbing. Omar is not simply a politician whose positions can be challenged. She is a perpetual outsider whose loyalty is always in question and whose private life is treated as fair game. When Fox’s cameras turn toward her family, the distinction between political journalism and political harassment becomes harder to defend.
The network’s rapid succession of panics reflects the problem at the heart of the Republican campaign. Trump promised to make Americans more prosperous. Fox helped sell that promise. But with voters still confronting the cost of living and increasingly skeptical of the administration’s performance, the network has little incentive to dwell on whether Republicans have delivered. It is far easier to insist that the alternative would be worse.
Fear can be a powerful political tool. But it has limits. It works best when voters have little direct evidence with which to test the claims being made to them. Fox’s message is competing with a reality its audience can see for itself: The economy is not delivering the uncomplicated prosperity Trump promised, and dissatisfaction with the direction of the country is creating opportunities for Democrats.
The network can show its viewers burning streets in France. It can portray a senator’s comments about legal accountability as a threat to an entire generation of conservatives. It can turn a congresswoman’s family into the subject of a lurid guessing game. None of that answers the basic question now facing voters: Have Republicans earned another two years in power?
Cyberattackers have made “millions” of attempts to take advantage of a critical hole in a building block of the internet, a key cybersecurity provider said early Thursday.
Two top European cyber officials later told POLITICO that hackers have so far struggled to exploit the vulnerability.
Cybersecurity agencies worldwide continue to scramble to respond to the public revelation Wednesday of a flaw in PHP, a foundational computer programming language used to underpin 70% of the internet.
Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, an internet services company that is widely used by websites to block cyberattacks — giving it a high level of visibility over what hackers are doing — said in a post on X that it’s seen “millions” of “attempts to exploit” the flaw.
Cloudfare saw thousands in the 10 hours before the flaw was publicly announced, meaning information must have leaked, then tens of thousands in the 45 minutes after the announcement, hundreds of thousands within two hours, and now millions, Prince said.
Amazon’s cloud division also said the flaw is “now being broadly exploited in the wild.”
But Thomas Caspers, vice president of Germany’s cyber agency BSI, said in an interview that though his agency has also seen attacks, it has not seen any successful use of the flaw by hackers.
“It seems a little bit more complicated than expected to exploit,” he said. “When we had the planning process before the release of the patch, we were expecting a much faster track of the attackers.”
Caspers is not certain why this is the case at this stage, but said it appears that successfully making use of the flaws is harder than expected. Global cyber officials were part of a process coordinated by OpenAI, to find and fix the flaws. “An ad hoc exploitation seems a little more difficult than expected,” he said.
The challenge for bad actors may also be linked to the major AI providers building guardrails so their tools can’t be used to exploit flaws, he said. When a POLITICO reporter as a test asked ChatGPT and Claude, models from OpenAI and Anthropic respectively, how to exploit the PHP vulnerabilities, both chatbots declined to provide the information. The two companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Numerous European government departments took their websites offline as a precaution to Wednesday’s developments. As of Thursday morning, key French websites such as the justice ministry and the data protection authority still featured a message they were undergoing maintenance.
Matthijs van Amelsfort, the head of the Dutch cybersecurity agency, told POLITICO that his agency has no indication that the flaw is “actively being misused” but said that can change, particularly because AI makes it easier to exploit flaws. The agency took its website offline on Wednesday, but it is now back up.
Czech President Petr Pavel says a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine was “quite close” – until President Donald Trump lifted sanctions on Russian diesel.
In an interview conducted on Tuesday with the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network, which includes POLITICO, Pavel said coordinated U.S.-European sanctions on Russian oil, oligarchs, and other industries were putting Russia “under strain.” But the deal Trump announced earlier this month, in which Russia would supply hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel to the U.S., gave Russia “time to breathe.”
“It will be much harder now,” said Pavel. “Russia uses this momentum to get out of pressure, and it’s kind of a moral boost for them.”
The White House on Wednesday said Trump “successfully negotiated” the deal in order to supply the global market with “massive amounts of diesel and bring prices down.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post to social media that the deal “plays into Russia’s hands” and allows Russia “to kill more, wage war for longer, have even less respect for America, and inflict even greater losses and damage on the world.” He accused Trump of using peace talks in Florida as a “smokescreen” as the administration pursued its deal with Russia.
Zelenskyy’s criticism was the latest indicator of rising tensions between Kyiv and Washington. Trump has repeatedly expressed frustrations with Zelenskyy, accusing him of elongating the war. By contrast, of late he has spoken warmly of Putin and said this week that “Russia frankly has been fine on Ukraine.”
But Pavel offered the Ukrainian president words of support on Wednesday.
“I believe that President Zelensky and the whole of Ukraine is a victim of a conflict,” said Pavel. “So, I would be probably the last to blame Ukraine for being guilty of the conflict. It was not Ukraine who attacked Russia. It was not Ukraine who was threatening Russia.”
He added that Trump shows a more open approach to Russia than any European leader.
“To some extent, he may be attracted by Vladimir Putin as a leader with authority, but I don’t think that … President Trump sees it from a position of a struggle between democracy and autocracies because he’s looking at it simply from the point of view of economic prosperity for the United States,” Pavel added.
Though Pavel indicated concerns about the diesel deal, he declined to say the U.S. had betrayed Ukraine or other European partners.
“I don’t know yet if we can call it betrayal, but I would call it a mistake,” he said. “Because … it’s now giving Russia a new hope: New hope that they can disregard Europe, they can disregard Ukraine, they can focus on making a deal with the United States, potentially with China, and arranging all things up to their priorities and strategies. I believe that it’s clearly against our interest in Europe.”
Pavel also didn’t rule out a future in which European countries would buy Russian oil, but added that it “will take time” before that happens.
“If one day Russia is a country respecting other countries’ sovereignty and borders, why not have regular business with such a country? But Russia is not there yet,” he said.
The Axel Springer Global Reporters Network harnesses the resources of the company’s newsrooms to publish ambitious scoops, investigations, interviews, opinion pieces and analysis. It allows journalists — including those from POLITICO, Business Insider, WELT, BILD, The Telegraph, Onet and Fakt — to collaborate on major stories for an international audience of hundreds of millions across platforms: online, print, TV and audio.
ROME — Former paratrooper General Roberto Vannacci portrays himself on social media as a Roman legionary and charioteer. He has declared he prefers women “without skirts” and posted an AI-generated image of a female junior minister with exaggerated cleavage.
None of these projections of masculinity and anti-woke culture are clumsy gaffes. The insurgent far-right star of Italian politics is making a deliberate play to the so-called manosphere to transform himself from an internet provocateur into a heavyweight political force.
For Italy’s first female prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Vannacci now poses a serious problem as she needs to decide whether he is an asset or a liability. With elections expected next spring, his National Future party is polling at about 8%, making him a potentially crucial factor in building a right-wing coalition.
“It is disgusting to think you can manipulate the image of a woman for such deplorable propaganda,” the center-right junior minister in Meloni’s coalition whose image was manipulated, Matilde Siracusano, told POLITICO. “I don’t think we have ever sunk this low, especially from someone aspiring to be a national political leader.”
Vannacci’s provocations may look like familiar trolling from a politician who has built his reputation on saying the unsayable. But behind them lies a broader political project, tapping into the grievances of young men who feel alienated by feminism and progressive culture.
Emanuele Pozzolo, a National Future parliamentarian who defected from Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, believes young men have become increasingly constrained in their relationships with women.
“I think young Western men are very often almost castrated in their instinct for dealing with women,” he said, arguing that even legitimate romantic approaches risk being treated as aggression.
“The cultural problem is that sometimes everything seems to be harassment, everything abuse, everything violence,” he added, while stressing that genuine abuse must be punished.
Mediterranean patriarchy
Vannacci combines inflammatory online messaging and an alpha-male persona with a political program that promises to restore traditional roles for men and women. National Future even has a name for its preferred social order: “Mediterranean patriarchy.”
Its political program calls for the formation of “strong men” capable of controlling their emotions and passions, protecting women and sacrificing themselves for society. It opposes the recently introduced crime of femicide, condemns feminism, and declares the defense of life “from conception to natural death” and the “natural family” among its non-negotiable values.
The architect of this vision and principal author of the program is Lorenzo Gasperini, a conservative Catholic philosophy teacher from Tuscany, who has opposed vaccines and abortion rights on social media and blamed feminism for violence against women.
The result is a political offering that combines different traditions: conservative Catholic ideas about family and sexuality, older Italian ideas of virility and the much newer online politics of male grievance.
Giorgia Meloni speaks at a press conference in Prague on Sept. 29, 2026. | Milan Kammermayer/AFP via Getty Images
The manifesto seeks to put traditional family values into practice with proposals to pay parents who leave work to raise children, and reward parents of large families with tax exemption and public sector jobs.
Some proposals echo Benito Mussolini’s fascist-era “Battle for Births,” which offered similar incentives while promoting motherhood as a patriotic duty.
Luca Sforzini, a former Vannacci ideologue who has since broken with him, said the Mediterranean label was a clever piece of marketing.
“It’s like talking about the Mediterranean diet,” he told POLITICO. “You think of Italian food, mozzarella, tomatoes, olive oil.” The result, he said, was to conceal a patriarchal model with men above women behind “bucolic, positive images. It’s monstrous,” he said.
Pozzolo rejected the suggestion that the program advocates for male supremacy.
“It is exactly the opposite,” he said. “When we talk about Mediterranean patriarchy, the main idea is to recover, preserve and pass on the responsibilities of being a man within the family and society.” Men, he argued, had a duty to show women respect, love and protection, while rejecting violence or coercive control.
He defended the “without skirts” remark as “extremely funny” — picking up on a reference to Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani advocating long skirts — and not remotely offensive, comparing Vannacci’s ability to connect with ordinary Italians to Silvio Berlusconi’s.
At a recent rally in the Umbrian city of Orvieto, Vannacci defended the Mediterranean patriarchy concept as not “oppression and possession” but “duty, fidelity, sacrifice,” and said it was the family model that had allowed “us to prevail over the last 2,000 years.”
Elisa Ercoli, president of the women’s rights organization Differenza Donna, condemned the program as “a return to the supremacy of the white, cisgender alpha male, and the woman as his handmaiden.”
Appealing to alphas
Vannacci, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, became a media sensation in 2023 with the self-published book “The World Upside Down,” a broadside against immigration, feminism and homosexuality. In it, he told gay people: “You are not normal, get over it.”
Lionized by fans as a defender of common sense against progressive politics, he received more than half a million votes as a candidate for the anti-immigration League in the 2024 European elections, before founding National Future in February.
Polling analysis suggests that about 62% of National Future’s prospective voters are male, including strong support among manual workers and the unemployed.
Vannacci speaks during the National Future’s constituent assembly in Rome on June 14, 2026. | Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images
Pozzolo denied National Future was deliberately targeting male voters, insisting the party’s ambition was to reach Italians of all backgrounds who felt unrepresented.
Federica Formato, a lecturer at Brighton University in the U.K., who studies gender and the far right, said Vannacci was “testing the waters” to see whether he can reach a younger male audience, tapping into what she described as the “aggrieved entitlement” of young men.
A career soldier, he has repeatedly portrayed himself through images of physical strength, competition and military prowess. On social media, AI-generated versions proliferate of Vannacci as an ancient Roman in scenes recalling the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator.
For Formato, the Roman imagery projects “virility and hyper-masculinity,” while Vannacci’s army background itself helps construct the image of an “alpha male.”
Humor, memes and deliberate provocation are particularly effective with a younger online audience, Formato said, allowing relatively complex ideological messages to be reduced to instantly comprehensible images. “He is not naive,” she said. “He says things to provoke and get more attention.”
That presents Meloni with a headache. Vannacci’s party is drawing voters from her Brothers of Italy and Matteo Salvini’s League, while offering a more uncompromising platform on immigration, social issues and foreign policy.
Yet Vannacci has opened the door to an alliance with Meloni if she needs his votes. He has described National Future as a natural partner for the center-right, while insisting that any deal must respect his party’s principles. With Italy’s new electoral law offering a parliamentary majority bonus to coalitions winning at least 42 percent of the vote, those votes could matter.
That presents Meloni with an uncomfortable choice: Keep Vannacci outside the coalition, or bring into her government a movement whose appeal rests partly on the grievances of men who believe feminism has gone too far.
For Formato, Vannacci is exploiting a space in Italian politics that has so far lacked a figure capable of turning those grievances into an organized political constituency.
Vannacci, with his promises to restore traditional masculinity, appears determined to occupy it.
It's been a little while since I've sat down and written about a hyperspecific corner of the Internet that brings me joy. Whether that's because I haven't been looking too hard or because the Internet is slowly being drained of joy is anyone's guess. — Read the rest
Object permanence: Labour Whip's pro-Iraq war threats; LoC's emulators; Kevin Mitnick plays CIA stooge; ICE: "The warrant is coming out of my balls"; WIPO's secret trademark meeting; Linking isn't libel (in Canada); Make: singing busts; Tory minister kills Turing's Law; Trump hotels rebrand as "Scion".
Adversarial interoperability is a team sport (permalink)
Enshittification is particularly galling because (in theory, at least), digital technology should be really hard to enshittify.
That's because the only digital computer we know how to build is the "Turing-complete, universal von Neumann machine," which is to say, a calculating engine capable of computing every valid program. In some deep, important, foundational sense, every computer is the same as every other computer. Sure, they vary in terms of speed, storage and RAM, but given enough time and electricity, every computer can run every program.
This has profound implications for enshittification. Say a tech boss takes away a feature you value (as when Sonos pushed an update that removed nearly all the functionality from its "smart" speakers), or adds a feature you hate (like when Chamberlain blocked third-party apps from controlling its garage doors so it could force its customers to view seven ads before they could open or close their garages). At that point, a programmer can write an "interoperable" program that restores the good feature or blocks the bad one.
This program can be costlessly and instantaneously distributed to every affected technology user, and those users will likely pay something for it. After all, enshittification is a way to shift value away from technology users to tech companies, which makes the case for you paying for disenshittification technology that wrestles that value back.
All of that means that, in a state of nature, companies that are contemplating enshittification need to worry that their greed will tempt new companies to enter the market and poach their customers and suppliers. This alone might be enough to frighten companies off from enshittificatory gambits, and if companies press ahead regardless, then they open market opportunities for better companies that can costlessly, instantaneously usurp the original manufacturer's relationship with their entire affected customer base.
That's how it should work. But in 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony (punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine) for reverse-engineering and modifying technology without the manufacturer's permission. Then, the US Trade Rep spent the next 25 years making sure that every US trading partner had an identical (or even worse!) "anticircumvention" law:
The result is a grotesquely asymmetrical digital world, in which companies are free to use the flexibility of digital computers to downgrade or brick your digital devices, but where you commit a crime if you avail yourself of a countermeasure to get more out of something you own. This is the core technological factor at play in enshittification.
Enter AI. Thanks to vibe-coding, everyday people are rolling their own software for their devices and building the tools to shatter the digital locks that manufacturers use to block disenshittification. An excellent article by 404 Media's Jason Koebler runs down some of these hacks, including drop-in replacements for smart TV software that blocks the endless ads and surveillance that have made TVs all but unusable:
These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users' devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices' digital locks.
In a world without anticircumvention law, a company that sold alternative OSes could hire a ton of programmers and UX developers to smooth over this process, but this is beyond the reach of a typical hobbyist or even a community of hobbyists, especially if they must operate in the shadows, under the threat of civil and criminal liability.
There's a useful analogy here to the trajectory of desktop versions of GNU/Linux. The first time I tried to install Linux (on an original iMac, in the late 1990s), the installation process included a multi-week post-installation wrangle that saw me (often unsuccessfully) compiling key modules from source code and then painstakingly configuring them to get the computer's graphics and I/O working reliably.
Fast forward 30+ years and installing Linux is trivial, thanks to highly capitalized companies like Canonical (makers of Ubuntu, the flavor of Linux I've used for nearly 20 years now). Installing Ubuntu today merely requires that you download the OS to a thumbdrive, reboot your computer using the drive as a startup disk, and click "install." Canonical's installer automatically hunts down the correct software for your hardware and configures it. Canonical writes and contributes to a lot of parts of the Linux OS, but the most important work it does is the fiddly, painstaking, labor- and capital-intensive work of perfecting that installer so it Just Works.
Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices. These LLMs patiently research every weird error and peccadillo and parse through message boards and logfiles detailing other hobbyists' struggles to get the code working and methodically apply and adapt those solutions until your device Just Works.
Some of these vibe-coded interop tools go farther than that. According to Koebler's coverage, some device owners had their coding assistants scratch-build entirely new, heavily customized OSes for their devices, complete with bypasses that allow this new code to be installed despite the manufacturer's countermeasures which are designed to prevent this. Delightfully, many of these users have created software that revives their bricked, discontinued devices. This poses the possibility of a world in which manufacturers no longer have the last word in your use of your own property: the mere fact that the manufacturer lost interest in a device and killswitched it does not mean that you must consign that valuable device to a landfill to become immortal, toxic e-waste.
All of this is good news. Some of the most sophisticated jailbreaking tools (such as those on the super viral "Reverse Engineer Anything" Github page) run locally, on your own computer, without invoking the "frontier models" that the big, awful AI companies have created:
This is good even if you're just modifying your own devices to get them to more closely conform to your own use-case. LLMs are genuinely good at coming up with the abstruse and obscure configuration lines and other incantations to get your technology working. Recently, I used a local model to fine-tune the power-management on my new laptop in ways that go beyond the options that are exposed through user-friendly graphic interfaces. The LLM spat out a grub "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT" line that (again) Just Worked.
The last time I had to do this, I spent days painstakingly trouble-shooting options by trial-and-error. Using a chatbot to fill in the gaps left by decisions about which configuration options to place within reach of regular users and which to reserve for power-users has made my computer much more useful to me for the things I want to do, like writing and making collages.
The reality is that it's just not practical for technology developers to turn every conceivable function of your computer into a simple-to-use, accessible tool. A large part of technology design is about leaving things out (or, as my favorite Eno Oblique Strategy goes, "Be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before"). No matter how thoughtful and diligent a technology designer is, they will never fully anticipate the needs and exigencies of their users. That's why the motto of the disability rights movement is "Nothing about us without us."
The users of technology know more about their use-cases than can ever be captured through a requirements gathering exercise and user testing. One of the best and proudest legacies of technology is the lineage of "user-friendly" programming tools that let nontechnical people design their own applications that exactly met their needs, from Hypercard to Visual Basic to Scratch, a lineage that vibe-coding tools are arguably part of:
But these tools are not perfect (nothing is). For all that Hypercard lets you do many things that would otherwise require a skilled programmer, it was also always limited relative to, say, writing MacOS code in Objective C. Your Hypercard program might do exactly what you needed it to, but slowly, and sometimes unreliably, and with serious limitations, such as a relatively low ceiling for the number of records you could add to a database.
Vibe-coded personal apps aren't necessarily subject to these limitations, but they come with some significant risks. Vibe-code can have serious security vulnerabilities that expose the user to things like identity theft or sextortion. It's conceivable that a vibe-coded garage-door opener app might make it possible for attackers to open your garage door when you're not home (or worse, when you are!). Depending on your risk-tolerance and expertise, these might be acceptable prices, or they might be too high.
But it's important to clearly identify the problem here: if the alternative OS you install on your smart TV exposes you to privacy-invading hack attacks, the problem is the defect in that software. The problem isn't that you had the temerity to rip out the manufacturer's own software and replace it with code of your choosing. You bought that TV, it's yours, and you don't owe the manufacturer an obligation to expose yourself to its own, built-in, intentional surveillance and invasive ads.
Here's a parallel: you have the right to put any shoelaces in your running shoes. Sure, Nike might prefer you to lace up your Jordans with its expensive OEM laces, but that's Nike's problem, not yours. Now, Nike might argue that by using no-name laces, you run the risk of having a lace break while you're running, which could also break your ankle. That's certainly a possibility: shoelaces do break, and Nike might be justifiably proud of the quality of its laces. But if your generic laces snap (and so does your ankle), the problem is that the shoelaces you chose were defective. The problem is not that you chose someone else's laces.
Your stuff is yours. You can put anyone's milk on your cereal, not just the milk that Kellogg's endorses. If the milk you choose is sour and you have to pour your cereal down the toilet, that's too bad, but it doesn't mean that Kellogg's should have the right to shame you for having the temerity to choose the milk you preferred, and it certainly doesn't militate for DMCA-style enforcement to coerce you into using Kellogg's official milk in the name of protecting you from food wastage.
I raise this because there's a live debate over this subject, which is well represented in the latest 404 Media podcast:
In the podcast, Koebler and his 404 co-founder Joseph Cox express misgivings about various possible uses of "slop interop." Koebler discusses the fact that John Deere sells the same physical tractor at many different price-points, depending on which software a farmer chooses, and raises the possibility that a farmer might vibe-code software that replicates the high-end functionality without paying for it. Koebler discusses two possible downsides to this: first, that the vibe-coded software might be defective and expose the farmer to risk; and second, a question about whether it's fair or just for a farmer to get those additional functions of their tractor without paying for them.
I think the first objection is entirely legitimate. The software you run on your expensive tractor should be secure, both for your own benefit and for the security of our food supply. That's actually a pretty good reason to ditch John Deere's own software, which is very insecure:
But I think the second question – whether it's legit to get this functionality without paying John Deere for it – is spurious. Sure, if John Deere provides you with that functionality, then they can send you the bill for it. But if you provide yourself with that functionality, using software you procured independently of John Deere, then John Deere has no right to get paid for it, and they certainly shouldn't have the right to stop you.
That tractor is yours. The fact that John Deere manufactured it is irrelevant. If you pay a contractor to build a house for you and later on pay a different contractor to add another bathroom to it, you don't owe the first contractor anything. It's your house (and if that bathroom has a leaky toilet, that's a matter between you and the second contractor, and not a reason to force you to only use your original contractor).
The law defines a narrow slice of functions that manufacturers get to control: those ideas that a patent examiner deems "novel, useful and nonobvious." It's legit (and good) for commercial operators to copy and improve the ideas of their rivals and competitors. It's why skilled tradespeople cluster together in the same geographic area.
Take Clerkenwell, the neighborhood in London where precision machining was invented by the jewelers and machinists who clustered there during the Longitude rewards. The reason all those competitors sought such close promixity to one another was because they wanted to copy the new techniques their rivals were developing (even if that meant that their rivals would be able to copy them):
If you're old enough to remember the advent of spreadsheets and the rollout of Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, you'll know that every time a software vendor invented a new spreadsheet feature, all the other ones immediately copied it. This wasn't bad for spreadsheets: it was good for spreadsheets, just as copying your competitors was good for precision machining in Clerkenwell.
Everything from GNU/Linux (a feature-for-feature clone of AT&T Unix) to SAMBA (a plug-compatible clone of Microsoft's SMB) to iWork (file-compatible, feature compatible clones of MS Office's apps) came about through this "adversarial interoperability." What's more, the heyday of this kind of adversarial interop was also the heyday of disenshittification, the era in which any anti-feature installed by your existing vendor could be countered by a disenshittifying patch from a new one:
The question of whether vibe-coded software is any good is separate from the question of whether it's good to replace the software in your devices, even if you replace it with software that has features that the manufacturer would normally charge a premium for. You are under no obligation to arrange your commercial affairs to the financial benefit of manufacturers, and anyone who claims to be surprised that someone they sold a device to used it to benefit themselves at the manufacturer's expenses is either disingenuous…or unserious. You bought it, it's yours.
But just as this vibe-coded adversarial interop has drawn both valid and spurious criticism, it's also drawn excitement that is partially justified and partially overblown.
When it comes to reviving bricked devices or rooting out the surveillance and ads from your smart TV, vibe-coded interop tools are genuinely exciting. These are the kinds of enshittification that can truly be remediated with individual jailbreaks.
But the real, meaty examples of enshittification can't be addressed on an individual level – they require systemic fixes. If you jailbreak your iPhone so that it can use alternative app stores, that fact is not sufficient to cause those alternative app stores to come into existence. If we want to stop Apple from levying a $100b "app tax" on the digital economy, it's not enough for individuals to vibe-code their own iPhone patches. We need to repeal the law that bans jailbreaking iPhones, so that a would-be alternative app store can raise capital and pay programmers and tech support staff and salespeople to assemble rival catalogs of software and help customers figure out how to get up their phones to use it.
The same goes for jailbreaking your printer so it accepts generic ink. Sure, this may work for you if you're up for refilling your own cartridges, and I'm sure that you can find someone on Alibaba who will sell you ink by the gallon. But the mere fact that a few users have secretly and privately jailbroken their inkjets won't conjure up a generic inkjet cartridge manufacturing sector. For that to happen, we need to make jailbreaking printers legal, not just possible.
Indeed, if we want to improve the quality of all that jailbreaking code the chatbots are writing and circulating, we need to be able to put those jailbreaks in public repositories for public inspection and public critique. It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop, and for other code to be fine, and for yet a third tranche of code to be remediable slop that can be made robust and reliable through auditing and refactoring. You can't figure out which is which if you have to keep that vibe code a secret on pain of a long prison-sentence.
I think there's good cause to be excited at the prospect of getting your devices working better, or just working at all. I think that even if the code stops working after a while, that's still fine – either you got more use out of your device than you would have without the new code, or maybe you just make more code that runs for a while for you, and then you do it again.
These individual improvements to your devices and technology are worth celebrating. But they are no substitute for systemic intervention. If we're going to have a new, good internet, a post-American internet that truly disenshittifies America's defective tech exports and replaces them with robust, transparent digital public goods, we need to make reverse-engineering legal again. Once we fix our policy, then we can fix our code:
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
“Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 533 (27469 total).
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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The Cambridge Analytica scandal has come back to haunt Meta after a New Mexico judge ordered it to pay $25 billion in penalties for more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law. The ruling marks the biggest legal hit Meta has taken this year, even as it's faced several other losses or settlements.
A New Mexico jury ruled in September that Meta misled consumers over how it protected their data and prevented misinformation and hate speech on its platforms. The case stemmed from a 2021 complaint in the wake of the revelations a few years earlier that UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millio …
STRASBOURG — Officials acting on behalf of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office searched the offices of staff of the far-right Patriots group in the European Parliament on Wednesday morning.
The searches are part of an investigation into allegations that the now-defunct Identity and Democracy group mismanaged EU funds. In 2025, the Parliament’s finance department found that ID misspent €4.3 million between 2019 and 2024 in irregular donations and public tenders. The EPPO, which investigates financial crimes involving the EU budget, opened a probe based on the Parliament’s reports.
“Since this morning, searches have been underway at the European Parliament in Strasbourg — where we are currently located — targeting the offices of staff members of the former Identity and Democracy Group,” said France’s National Rally chief in the Parliament, Jean-Paul Garraud.
The EPPO confirmed it carried out searches in the Parliament’s buildings in France and Belgium “as part of an ongoing investigation into the use of European funds by a former political group in the European Parliament.”
The searches took place at the group’s secretariat offices, according to two officials, granted anonymity to speak about the ongoing investigation.
When ID dissolved in 2024, many of its staff moved to the Patriots, including lawmakers from France’s National Rally, Austria’s Freedom Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, Spain’s Vox, Belgium’s Flemish Interest and Czechia’s ANO 2011.
In their statement, the group insisted “there is no legal continuity with the ID Group” and that “it is not involved in the ongoing investigations.”
The allegations of mismanagement of funds relate to the budget allocated annually by the Parliament for political groups to spend on administrative and operative costs. EPPO is probing whether ID made irregular donations to regional organizations in several EU countries, and whether the group breached tender rules in contracts awarded to companies friendly to the group.
In 2025, the finance department ordered the Patriots to give back €276,967 in EU funds it says the group misused during the second half of 2024, related to similar irregular tender procedures.
“As always when requested Parliament cooperates with relevant authorities — we don’t have additional comment,” a Parliament spokesperson said via a text message.
BRUSSELS — Europe’s biggest media companies have asked regulators in Brussels and London to stop Meta from introducing new terms they say would let it copy publishers’ websites to build artificial intelligence, as a backlash that began in the U.S. spreads across Europe.
In a letter Monday, the European Publishers Council, whose members include POLITICO’s owner Axel Springer, called on EU competition boss Teresa Ribera and tech chief Henna Virkkunen to press Meta to put the terms on hold before they take effect Oct. 30.
The group wants Brussels to check them against EU copyright and competition law, and has requested an urgent meeting with the teams of both commissioners.
“The Commission remains committed to ensure that Meta’s practices fully comply with all applicable obligations under EU law, including competition rules and the Digital Markets Act,” Commission spokesperson Ricardo Cardoso told POLITICO, referring to the EU’s rulebook for Big Tech. He said Brussels was aware of both Meta’s changes and publishers’ concerns.
The U.K. competition watchdog has moved as well. British publishers have complained to the Competition and Markets Authority that Meta is so dominant they are compelled to accept its terms.
The watchdog’s chief, Sarah Cardell, told British lawmakers on Tuesday that it had asked Meta to explain the changes and would meet the company on Wednesday. She named Meta as a possible candidate for Britain’s new rules for tech giants.
Sarah Cardell, Chief Executive of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), speaks in a panel discussion during the Annual CBI Conference, at Queen Elizabeth II Centre on November 25, 2024 in London. | Leon Neal/Getty Images
The terms cover businesses that use Meta’s tools to run Facebook pages, Instagram accounts or ads, which includes almost every newsroom.
The fight began in the U.S. last week, when Nieman Lab, a journalism research outlet at Harvard, reported on the terms after receiving a tip from a small business owner.
As first written, they let Meta send automated programs to copy websites linked to those accounts and use the material to “train” its products, Nieman Lab concluded. There is no opt-out, and a business that continues to use Meta’s tools after Oct. 30 will be deemed to have consented.
Publishers say the terms would hand Meta content for free that other AI companies pay to license.
Rapid reaction
On Friday, Meta communications chief Andy Stone responded on X that the Nieman Lab report was “false” and that there was “no change to how Meta uses web crawlers.”
Stone said the update aimed to let Meta pull accurate product information from shopping sites for ads, not to scrape news sites. The company also said the crawling language already existed in other Meta terms and was just being gathered in one place.
Late Friday, however, Meta revised the terms and deleted the word “train,” saying the terms cover only its advertising and business products.
“We’ve heard you and want to clarify,” a spokesperson for Meta told POLITICO over the weekend, adding the change was “not about scraping news sites.”
Publishers say that changes little, however.
Meta has given them verbal assurances that they can keep using its tools without surrendering their content to AI, but the terms themselves don’t guarantee that, the European Publishers Council’s letter says.
“Meta’s supposed Friday night correction is a farce,” said Jason Kint, who heads Digital Content Next, a U.S. publisher group whose members include Axel Springer. “Exactly what you’d expect from a gatekeeper notorious for abusing its market power.”
Others have gone further.
“This is unscrupulous theft,” Germany’s newspaper and magazine associations said in a joint statement on Tuesday. They want Brussels to block the terms while it reviews them, warning that once articles are copied into AI systems, they can’t be clawed back.
L’exécutif a convoqué, ces dernières heures, les plateformes de e-commerce ainsi que Google, Facebook, Instagram et Snapchat pour leur demander de faire preuve de vigilance. D’abord, face aux pilleurs qui chercheraient à revendre des produits volés en ligne. Ensuite, pour demander aux réseaux sociaux de mieux contrôler leurs fonctionnalités, notamment les diffusions en direct. Elles sont accusées par les forces de l’ordre d’avoir servi aux casseurs à s’organiser efficacement. Mais avec quel effet? Marcelo en discute avec Tiphaine et Klara. Des questions? Des commentaires? Ecrivez-nous sur Whatsapp au +32 49 07 69 41
**Un message de GSK : Prévenir, soigner, innover : GSK appelle à investir dans la santé des Français pour accélérer l’accès aux innovations et atteindre un objectif : zéro perte de chance pour les patients, en renforçant la recherche et les investissements industriels en France.**
When I watched veteran “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl report from the West Bank on a recent Sunday night, my first thought was to wonder how the segment had slipped past the watchful eyes of Bari Weiss. Stahl accompanied a group of Palestinians trying to reach their own land, only to be confronted by Israeli settlers clad in black. The Palestinians had approached the settlers with their hands behind their backs to make plain they posed no threat. One man was headbutted in the face and his nose fractured. An Israeli army captain finally defused the standoff, but the Palestinians never reached their property and the settlers appeared to suffer no consequences. It was a riveting piece of television, framed by the Oct. 27 Israeli elections.
The report did not slip past Weiss, of course. Within a day, Oliver Darcy of the Status newsletter reported that screenings of the segment had grown extraordinarily contentious, with the CBS News editor-in-chief taking a “very, very hands-on” role and Stahl, who has been at the broadcast since 1991, privately floating the idea of quitting. Darcy’s sources said Weiss’ objections were not confined to a single factual assertion but ranged far more broadly, and that some on the team were unsure the report would even air at all.
CBS News, for its part, called the Status account a “ludicrous, twisted narrative” and insisted the piece received far fewer edits than most. Perhaps so. But even the network’s version concedes the larger point: A correspondent of Stahl’s stature had to survive an internal fight over an eyewitness account of violence that she and her crew watched unfold.
The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others.
That contradiction sits at the heart of the Bari Weiss experiment. The former Free Press editor arrived at the network promising to rescue mainstream news from ideological conformity. Yet her tenure has increasingly been defined by disputes over editorial interference, the departure of veteran journalists and a growing perception that certain political narratives receive more scrutiny than others. As I’ve previouslyargued, the crisis at CBS News is bigger than one controversial editor. It is about what happens when corporate power no longer values a news organization’s independence as a principle to be defended.
Under the watch of Skydance boss David Ellison and Weiss, whom he handpicked, CBS News’ rightward renovation is running into a problem. The internal revolt at the network has become a daily reality for rank-and-file employees who watched the forced departures of foundational figures like Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega. The journalists who remain have not all agreed to become instruments of Weiss’ apparent worldview; many are leaking their misgivings to media reporters. Nor do the audience numbers establish that replacing an investigative institution’s identity with a slickly packaged right-wing populist brand constitutes a successful business strategy. Now the network is caught struggling to hold on to the credibility it inherited while forging the political project its leadership appears determined to impose.
If you want to hear what passes for rigor in Weiss’ newsroom, the tape is available. After Weiss fired London bureau chief Claire Day in April — her offense was apparently coverage of Israel that displeased the new regime — she installed Shayndi Raice as foreign editor. Last week Raice summoned the foreign staff to a virtual meeting and delivered a 15-minute tirade that Status obtained on audio and later released in full. “This is not your publishing platform,” she told the assembled journalists. “This is a company that we all work for, and there’s a hierarchy in place.” Failure to follow that hierarchy, she explained, “is called insubordination, and it’s legal grounds for firing.”
When Holly Williams, the veteran correspondent whose report on the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attacks had been edited to remove the Palestinian death toll, respectfully challenged her, Raice informed Williams that she had gotten her own story “wrong.” Williams, Raice said, does not know it as well as she does. As for the figure itself — more than 74,000 Palestinians killed in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza — Raice waved it off as a “magic number.” Including it in the report, she suggested, amounted to “posturing” rather than journalism.
The same partisan thumb has appeared on the scales in CBS’s domestic political coverage. Semafor’s Max Tani reported that Weiss has taken a personal interest in Michigan’s Senate race, and she has pushed CBS journalists to pursue story after story about Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and his supposed sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, raising the subject on editorial calls and tasking the network’s investigative unit with combing his background for a link to the organization.
The raw material for this enterprise is a 2012 tweet by El-Sayed’s half-sister describing a conversation with their mother about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 1970s. El-Sayed has disavowed the group. He has explained that his parents divorced when he was young and that he was raised by his father and stepmother, and the leap from a mother’s politics in another country half a century ago to a candidate’s secret loyalties is the kind American journalism once required evidence to make.
To be fair, El-Sayed is a legitimate story. A Senate candidate’s family history is fair game, and there is nothing inherently scandalous in an editor telling reporters to look into it. The scandal, though, is in the selectivity. The same editor who dispatched investigators after a Democrat on the strength of his mother’s biography also tasked staff with pursuing the theory that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, had secretly checked into a mental health facility during his nine-day absence from the campaign trail, a claim right-wing influencers manufactured out of a bad case of the flu — and one that collapsed on contact with a hospital’s denial and time-stamped security footage. One CBS staffer told Semafor that Weiss’ story ideas “routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets,” and that the resulting reports “usually leave out important context and facts.”
It is worth highlighting what unites the targets: El-Sayed and Talarico are both progressives who have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza and the West Bank.
What Weiss is building with her other hand is a stage to platform MAGA. Her signature project is Things That Matter, a town-hall series she devised and launched by interviewing Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, in a December broadcast that drew 1.87 million viewers, which was notably down 11% from what CBS ordinarily draws in that hour. Of the series’ single-guest town halls since, exactly one has featured a Democrat, Maryland Governor Wes Moore. The segment’s latest installment on Saturday handed a Michigan stage to Vice President JD Vance a little over two weeks out from the midterm elections, in a state where the administration needs every vote it can find.
Ironically, the format’s one unscripted moment came from the audience. Joey Amor, whose wife, Master Sgt. Nicole Amor ,was one of six American soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike on an outpost in Kuwait in March, asked the vice president when this administration would hold its own officials accountable for the failures that left those troops exposed. Vance pleaded unfamiliarity, explaining that “sometimes information doesn’t filter up to me.”
The irony was abundant: A town hall designed as a coronation had accidentally produced a news story, and the news was that the vice president of the United States had nothing to say to a man widowed by President Donald Trump’s war of choice.
Now consider what the new CBS has gotten for all this friction. “60 Minutes” recently saw the smallest audience of the season and the smallest for a fourth episode in at least a quarter century. The season premiere in September managed 7.94 million, a 21% drop from 2025 and the weakest opening this century.
This is a broadcast that grew 9% last season. Nobody was asking Weiss to fix it.
French presidential candidate Gabriel Attal reiterated his call to grant the government power to selectively block access to social media platforms to quell riots in the aftermath of widespread unrest across France over the weekend.
“You have young people at home who see their friends going out to loot, which gives the impression that they’re getting away with it; they see them on social media, and then they go out too,” Attal said in an interview with French radio station RTL.
Attal, a former prime minister who now leads French President Emmanuel Macron’s political party, said the measures must be “temporary” and “limited to the area where the riots are taking place.”
Saturday saw hundreds of thousands of protesters take to the streets nationwide across France, with students — who have been blockading schools in recent weeks to call for better study conditions, more teachers and more funding — joining trade unions and members of the public to protest the cost of living. While many protested peacefully, scenes of extreme violence also played out across the country. According to the latest figures from the interior ministry, some 2,000 people were arrested during the turmoil.
During Attal’s tenure as prime minister in 2024, France blocked TikTok access to one of its overseas territories, New Caledonia, amid widespread protests there. But France’s highest administrative court ruled that this suspension constituted “a disproportionate infringement of rights and freedoms.”
It’s unclear whether Attal’s latest proposal would survive a judicial review given that over the summer, France’s Constitutional Council, which reviews the constitutionality of French legislation, blocked a bill seeking to ban access to social media for under-15s after finding the legislation disproportionately infringed on minors’ right to freedom of expression and communication.
Such internet restrictions are more commonly associated with countries like China, Iran, Russia and, more recently, India. These countries either have permanent blocks on certain social media platforms or have more recently restricted them during protest movements, with India and Iran going so far as to block internet access completely.
This story is part of Gen Z at the Ballot Box, a collaboration betweenStates Newsroom and The 19th.
It was the beginning of her junior year, and 20-year-old Mia Tedesco was setting up a table for the campus open house where more than 200 recognized student organizations were preparing to recruit new students. Tedesco laid out bracelets that read “We are Charlie Kirk” — an homage to the prominent conservative media personality who was fatally shot at an event in Utah last year.
It was her first semester as president of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) at Butler University, a private school in Indiana, and she wanted to make sure her table looked nice.
“We are a more left-leaning college and university; we are a liberal arts school — I knew that signing up and coming and committing to college,” Tedesco said. “I knew I wanted to challenge it a little bit.”
She had civil conversations with many students who approached the table to learn more about TPUSA, the organization founded by Kirk, though some people scoffed or flipped her off. She considered setting up a camera for safety. Tedesco noticed that some people were taking handfuls of bracelets; then a friend told her that there were facetious posts about them on Yik Yak, a hyper-local social media platform for college students that lets users be anonymous. Many of the bracelets ended up in the trash.
It wasn’t the first time the conservative student organization had faced backlash: The previous semester, their chat on the platform GroupMe was hacked. Someone changed the name to “We love socialism,” updated chat names and photos, and kicked out members. The group chat, which was the main point of communication for the group, went from 70 members to 30.
“I know with the Democratic Club and many other clubs, there’s been loud dislike with us,” Tedesco said. “But I also know that if we don’t try, then we’re not using our voice like Charlie would want.”
Founded in 2012, TPUSA has grown to become one of the largest and most prominent conservative youth movements in the country. The September 2025 assassination of Kirk inspired conservative students across the country — many who had not even heard of Charlie Kirk or TPUSA prior — to continue the organization’s mission to champion conservative values. An evangelical Christian, Kirk advocated for gun rights; condemned abortion; held up men as the heads of households; denounced Islam; and called diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives “racist.” Within a year of his death, high school chapters jumped 180 percent and college chapters increased 60 percent — resulting in more than 1,500 college chapters as of September 2026, according to the organization.
That same day, Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action — a sister organization to TPUSA founded in 2019 and designed for direct political action — and a longtime colleague and friend to the Kirks, posted a prediction of sorts on social media: “Charlie Kirk came and converted the young men. Erika Kirk is coming to convert the young women.”
While the number of chapters has exploded and thousands of young women have shown up to events, the organization’s influence and ability to mobilize young voters as it has in the past is uncertain.
The larger Republican base is fracturing, the war in Iran continues and gas prices are still on the rise. Disillusionment with MAGA and the Republican Party is growing among young conservatives. With that backdrop, some TPUSA members describe rising tension on campuses. Some college conservatives — especially Gen Z men — are frustrated with Erika Kirk’s leadership, wondering if she can deliver the same firebrand energy her husband did.
When Kirk was assassinated on September 10, 2025, Tedesco and a friend were in the process of starting a TPUSA chapter on Butler’s campus. For Tedesco, who grew up Catholic in a small town, it was important to create a space on campus for Christian representation, where students like her could incorporate their faith in day-to-day life and community. The assassination was “the final push” that got the paperwork across the finish line.
“Charlie was very outgoing when it came to the youth,” Tedesco said. “There was a lot of clickbaiting in his videos, but a lot of it was eye-opening. This person sees this way, that person sees that way — how can we get to a civil conversation? Charlie was able to have that connection as one human being with another.”
‘I’m not sure I can really trust her’
Andrew Roth, along with three other men, was in the process of filling out the proper documents to start a TPUSA chapter at Taylor University, a private Christian school in Upland, Indiana, when Charlie Kirk was assassinated.
“Prior to that, we were being very careful with how we were doing the paperwork because we wanted to make sure we got it right,” said Roth, now a junior and president of his TPUSA chapter. “Then Charlie died, and we were like, ‘OK, we just gotta send it.’”
Roth said 120 people showed up to an informal meeting to gauge interest in the new TPUSA chapter. During the club’s first semester as an official chapter in the spring of 2026, Roth said, he was surprised to see more women than men show up to events.
“In general, 20- to 21-year-old guys are just statistically more right-wing than girls are at this age,” said Roth, who is now a junior. “So I just kind of assumed it would be more guys than girls.”
Roth’s analysis bears out: Polling from The 19th and YouGov found that Gen Z women are far more likely than men to identify as liberal (38 percent vs. 28 percent) and as Democrats (37 percent vs. 21 percent).
Roth said some women were probably drawn to Erika Kirk. In June, she spoke at TPUSA’s annual Women’s Leadership Summit and addressed more than 2,000 young women, encouraging them to embrace their Christian faith and biblical womanhood — a theological concept that defines women’s role as homemakers, nurturers and submissive to their husbands — while critiquing modern feminism.
Nearly 20 percent of Gen Z women consider themself to be a “strong feminist” compared with less than 7 percent of Gen Z men, according to The 19th/YouGov poll.
“My husband always believed in this event because he could see young women being sold a vision of life that looked empowering on the surface, but left many of them increasingly dissatisfied underneath,” Erika Kirk said in her opening remarks at the summit. “He wanted to create a place for conservative women to connect with like-minded women and be poured into by female voices that would talk to them about the sanctity of life, about fiscal responsibility, about liberty and family.”
Erika Kirk’s message is less overtly political than that of her late husband. Her speeches tend to have fewer policy talking points. When asked in a Vanity Fair interview about her stance on Israel, for example, she responded that she doesn’t “sit around thinking about what Bibi Netanyahu is doing.”
“My brain bandwidth right now is honoring my husband, loving on my babies and building Turning Point to be everything it could be. I don’t really have the bandwidth to go down the rabbit holes of all of it,” Kirk said.
Erika Kirk did not respond to requests for comment.
By some measures, TPUSA has been wildly successful under Erika Kirk. In the past year, Turning Point PAC, Inc. raised the most political campaign money in its history, raking in around $9 million ahead of the 2026 midterms — compared with the $7 million it raised in the 2024 election cycle, when it became a core part of the Republican Party’s swing state strategy. The group’s nonprofit wing also reported a 30 percent spike in revenue, bringing in $115 million in 2025 on top of its $81 million endowment.
But her message does not appear to be resonating in the same way with many of the young men her husband appealed to: Roth, who is in a group chat with other TPUSA chapter presidents around the country, said people are frustrated and questioning whether Erika Kirk can be trusted. Roth pointed to one example when Erika Kirk praised the U.S. military’s war efforts in Iran under President Donald Trump — while her husband warned in April 2025 a new Middle East war would be “a catastrophic mistake.”
“People are looking at that and they’re wondering whether she’s just trying to toe the line so she doesn’t alienate Trump,” Roth said. “I’m not sure I can really trust her that much.”
Roth also noted that at least one TPUSA chapter disaffiliated from Turning Point in March, citing concerns with the national organization’s new direction.
Roth said he wants to hear more conversations about Israel’s involvement in U.S. foreign policy, the war in Iran, the Epstein files and government corruption — all topics Charlie Kirk was speaking about before his death.
“Charlie Kirk was fine to upset the people in power,” Roth said. “He had a more anti-establishment government stance. I feel like without him, they have fallen in line a little bit more.”
‘The one who was somehow able to hold it all together’
Amy Binder, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, has studied how campuses shape young conservatives for more than a decade. While conducting research in 2008, Binder said the main organization for young conservatives was College Republicans. But things shifted a few years later when Charlie Kirk and TPUSA came to campuses.
“Charlie Kirk was an incredible entrepreneur who had a real faculty with connecting with donors and big money,” said Binder, who has written multiple books about politics on college campuses. “He was very friendly with the Trump family and had a really good sense of what would excite kids on campus.”
He painted College Republicans as old, fusty and not visible enough. Meanwhile, TPUSA became the “far more expressive, fun, energetic, confrontational group,” Binder added.
James Yock, a junior at Butler University, is both the vice president of his school’s TPUSA chapter and president of the College Republicans chapter.
“I think Turning Point resonates more with youth,” Yock said. “It’s easier to relate to someone who is younger like Charlie, more up to date with things compared to someone who our grandparents or parents might resonate with in the College Republicans.”
In the decade after its launch, Binder said she saw TPUSA’s footprint on American campuses grow. The group was able to raise enough money to funnel resources to campus organizations for events, campaigns and media efforts.
Binder said that she thinks some young conservatives, particularly young women, are fans of Erika Kirk. But Charlie Kirk was more than the leader of TPUSA — in many ways, he was the heir apparent for MAGA, she said. Without him, there’s a sense that it’s “all falling apart” as the feuding factions within the Republican Party — including the nationalists, post liberals and populists — battle for dominance.
Binder saw that at the December 2025 AmericaFest, TPUSA’s large annual event. Conservative personalities Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro clashed over Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes, a far-right commentator known for racist, misogynist and antisemitic views, and Shapiro attacked Candace Owens, a fringe personality, former TPUSA employee and close friend of Charlie Kirk’s, for her conspiracy theories. What united them, she said, was anti-trans and anti-Democrat talking points.
“If Charlie Kirk were still alive, would the base be fracturing in the same way that it is today?” Binder said. “When I listen to conservative opinion, both on the intellectual right and the more populist right, I hear that attributed to him a lot — that he was the one who was somehow able to hold it all together.”
‘No longer with Trump’
Erika Kirk took over TPUSA as young conservatives were growing increasingly frustrated with their party and searching for political leadership.
Polling consistently shows that Gen Z is unhappy with the current political situation, according to Melissa Deckman, political scientist and chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute. They are far less confident in major institutions, from the federal government to law enforcement to organized religion and the media.
“A lot of Gen Zers feel as though they play by the rules, but yet they’re unable to get ahead,” said Deckman, who also wrote the book “The Politics of Gen Z.” “The price of housing, the price of living, filling up a gas tank — all these things disproportionately hit them harder.”
And young conservative men tend to support more economically populist and sometimes progressive policies than older generations or Republicans of the past.
“The young men hate cancel culture, but they want healthcare,” Deckman said.
Roth said he and his peers are frustrated with most of the conservatives up for election.
“People my age don’t know if we even want to vote because I don’t feel like the Republican Party even represents me,” Roth said. “They just say the right things to get into power, and then they don’t do anything.”
Roth said a lot of people his age became particularly disenchanted and distrustful of government and politicians after living through the COVID-19 pandemic. He was in the eighth grade when the first shutdowns began.
“We were in favor of the 2024 Trump campaign because it was against all these things, it promised to expose all the secrets and clean up the system,” Roth said, noting Trump’s campaign promise to end forever wars, release the files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and put America first. “So many people my age are no longer with Trump because they didn’t see that happen.”
Gen Z men who voted for Trump are more likely to say they now regret that decision than men Trump supporters in any other generation, according to polling from Navigator Research.
Some of the biggest conservative women’s voices are also turning on Trump. Influencers Savanna Faith Stone and Alex Clark — keynote speakers at TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Summit this year — have given multiple interviews describing their sense of being betrayed by the president they helped elect in 2024.
In a June interview with CBC News, Stone said she’s decided not to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. She said Trump “made it seem like everything was going to become more affordable; now the economy’s worse. He promised no more wars in the Middle East, and we are in a war. So it’s disappointing.”
Clark, the host of a conservative and wellness podcast with more than half a million followers on Instagram, said in an interview with Politico that young women are considering not voting. She told the White House that people want “fight, fight, fight Trump” — not “ballroom Trump.”
“I feel some of the magic and the spark that helped us win 2024 is missing,” Clark added.
‘Where does the Republican Party go after Donald Trump?’
Eli LaGrange said he was in class at Indiana Wesleyan University, a private evangelical Christian school, when Charlie Kirk was killed. He didn’t know much about Kirk or TPUSA at the time.
“I was really curious to learn: Why did they kill this guy?” LaGrange said. “Political violence is always sad. I started watching his videos and talking to people. He was spreading a good message and encouraging conversations, which I thought was great, and it’s so sad to see a voice get silenced.”
LaGrange decided his campus — which he described as not having too many political clubs — could benefit from a TPUSA chapter. Along with a few like-minded friends, he collected more than 300 student signatures in support, drafted a constitution, and presented it to the student government and a board of teachers and faculty. After he addressed some concerns that a new chapter could cause tensions or make people on campus upset, LaGrange said, his proposal was approved.
Event participation has ranged anywhere from 15 people to more than 200. They’ve had a pickleball night to introduce themselves to new students, coffee meet-and-greets, debate tables and game nights. They’ve invited pastors to do a racial reconciliation night and even brought in the lieutenant governor to discuss faith and local politics.
“My elevator pitch to get people to join is focused on the importance of having political conversations,” LaGrange said. “Bad things happen when you don’t talk to the people you see, when you’re getting all your information and opinions from social media and the Internet. You need to go talk to people. You need to go have hard conversations with people.”
LaGrange said some of the hottest topics are immigration, Flock cameras and artificial intelligence. Perhaps most pressing, however, is trying to get conservatives to align on the future direction of the GOP.
“I think the biggest question is, ‘Where does the Republican Party go after Donald Trump and MAGA?’” LaGrange said.
LaGrange said that most of his campus TPUSA chapter’s leadership is women and that about half of the people who come to events are women. He sees young conservatives’ voices as critical to the conversation about who will lead the movement.
Some are pushing to advance MAGA while others call for a return to older, traditional conservative politics, hearkening back to past presidents like President Theodore Roosevelt. LaGrange said he falls in the latter camp.
“Organizations like Turning Point have a lot of influence, so whoever they give their voice to will probably lead,” LaGrange said. “So I think we need to take the time to decide who really is a good leader for the future of conservative politics.”
French President Emmanuel Macron will “solemnly” address the French people Sunday evening following violent scenes across the country that resulted in hundreds of arrests and millions of euros in damage.
Clashes broke out Saturday in France on the latest day of demonstrations that emerged from last month’s student protests, which had featured school blockades and calls for better study conditions. The movement has since grown into nationwide protests against rising living costs — and has become a political issue as the campaign for next year’s presidential election heats up.
Footage showed widespread looting, burned-out cars and smashed store windows. Rioters set fire to the town hall in Limoges, a city in central France, causing the roof to partially collapse. One demonstrator died after suffering a heart attack.
“More than 2,000 people have been taken into custody,” Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez wrote on X Sunday afternoon. “More than 600 police officers, gendarmes, and firefighters have been injured amid these scenes of violence.”
Before addressing the nation at 8 p.m., Macron will meet Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu and the ministers responsible for handling the crisis.
U.S. President Donald Trump seized on the violence to blame migration. “France is burning! The immigration of people from an entirely different world, people with hatred in their hearts, has shattered that once great country,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Sunday afternoon.
“Close your Borders and take control, before it is too late!” he added.
Earlier in the day, U.S. Vice President JD Vance had called out European leaders: “Western liberals imported the third world into France and other countries in the name of diversity and compassion” but “ignored fundamental questions of assimilation and compatibility.”
He called on Americans to pay attention, as “this is the future congressional Democrats seek for your country.” The U.S. faces crucial midterm elections to both houses of Congress on Nov. 3.
The French government has struggled to deal with the crisis in recent weeks — Lecornu described it as “urban violence” — and is now hoping the student movement will fade due to a two-week school holiday that started Friday.
Guillaume Guérin, the mayor of Limoges, criticized the government’s handling of the demonstrations, saying the national police “simply had no more ammunition left.”
Conservatives have long pitched their project as a return to normalcy, a way to set right a world that’s gone off its axis. In theory, it’s an understandable goal. Who doesn’t react to getting older and more removed from the engine of culture with an initial feeling that the next generation is doing it wrong?
In practice, the right’s message is more of a respectable veil covering the fact that they want the power to beat up on minorities and buy anything they want. But there’s one arena where the right might actually be bringing back an honest-to-goodness return to tradition: the multiplex.
The lines between television and the movies used to be rather rigid. There were movie stars and there were television actors, and rarely did the twain meet. Actors without matinee idol looks or sufficient draw could make a living as character actors. Faded stars could scrape out a second act in B-movies and lesser studio offerings without losing the prestige of the silver screen. Television actors traded that type of cachet for steady work and wider audiences. A movie star appearing on television was a sign of terminal decline.
The rise of prestige television and streaming shook up the established hierarchy. If television could hit something approaching the same cinematic highs and emotional depths as a Hollywood movie, even if rarely, then the stigma of going episodic couldn’t last. The prestige TV gold rush inspired plenty of marquee stars to jump ship, taking roles from deep-pocketed streamers for niche audiences. (Somebody must be watching Reese Witherspoon and Billy Crudup on Apple TV’s “The Morning Show,” but I can’t say I’ve ever seen them.) The old order and the connotations of each medium had gone post-modern and topsy-turvy.
Enter Ben Shapiro.
The Daily Wire co-founder and conservative political commentator has made several attempts to break into Hollywood. Over the years, he has repeatedly alluded to a script he wrote as a young man at the behest of the late ABC executive Leonard Goldberg, while his dramedy about a conservative student at Harvard never got off the ground. But that hasn’t deterred Shapiro. He’s used his political commentary outlet as a springboard to produce a series of execrable comedies and thrillers, from 2023’s irredeemable and laughless “Lady Ballers,” which centers on a group of former high school basketball players reuniting to compete in women’s basketball by posing as transgender women, to the semi-competent and bloody hatefest “Run Hide Fight: Infidels.”
Shapiro’s films haven’t made much of a dent in Hollywood, let alone the wider culture. But that is likely to change with The Daily Wire’s upcoming film “Confession.”
Shapiro’s films haven’t made much of a dent in Hollywood, let alone the wider culture. But that is likely to change with The Daily Wire’s upcoming film “Confession.”
Written by Shapiro, “Confession” follows an academic in Moscow under the rule of Joseph Stalin. He’s brought in for questioning after allegedly conspiring with a dissident priest, only to find that his interrogator is a former student. In less ideological hands, the film could be an interesting examination of loyalty and state overreach. Coming from the man who accused Baron Harkonnen, the villain in the “Dune” science-fiction franchise, of being a communist, we aren’t holding our breath.
Still, the announcement of “Confession” made a splash, less for its logline than its topline. The cast is chock full of former Oscar nominees and one-time A-listers. The participation of James Franco, Rob Lowe, Brad Dourif and Emile Hirsch make this the most star-studded production Shapiro has ever produced. Beyond the musty Cold War paranoia and production design straight out of the “Command & Conquer: Red Alert” video game, the film is small-c conservative in its appeal to a bygone tradition: giving disgraced actors a mid-budget springboard from which to launch their career revivals.
Franco was once a megawatt star, but his career faltered shortly after several women accused him of sexual misconduct in 2018. In the late aughts, with a Screen Actors Guild-nominated turn in “Into the Wild,” Hirsch was positioned to be the next big thing. But the belly flop of “Speed Racer” and a 2015 assault of a female Paramount Pictures executive at the Sundance Film Festival put his career on ice. Lowe’s scandal-plagued days are long behind him, but he’d settled into a career as a reliable network television star. Most recently, the star of “The West Wing” has been a mainstay on Fox’s campy disaster series “9-1-1.” “Confession” sees him trying out long atrophied dramatic acting muscles, taking a tentative step into Hollywood. Dourif has never generated any significant controversies to our knowledge, but his appearance is notable because it contradicts his 2024 retirement announcement.
Taken with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it starring turn from Jonathan Majors in “Infidels,” The Daily Wire’s gambit becomes clear. In reaching out to disgraced or out-of-fashion actors, the company is getting notable names for their bargain-basement productions. The actors, in turn, can add a few performances for their sizzle reels that post-date whatever controversy pushed them out of the limelight.
It’s not a bad deal for either party. From the actors’ perspective, they’re just following the B-list trails blazed by actors like John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, stars who spent decades cranking out direct-to-video duds while seeking the right role to catapult them back into notoriety. What’s new is the ideological bent of a studio like Shapiro’s. Typically, appearing in outwardly conservative fare was the mark of an inwardly conservative star. Think Kirk Cameron’s Christian schlock or Kevin Sorbo’s post-Hercules output. When a name like Jim Caviezel shows up in QAnon-adjacent thrillers, it’s a bit of a “fork found in kitchen” situation.
Shapiro’s comeback machine is something slightly different. Given what we’ve seen from the films he has worked on in the past, the machine is likely to be clunky — but that won’t matter to either party if it works.
Conservatives’ belief that “cancel culture” has gone too far, that men chastised for behaving badly are really victims of a radical mob run amok, allows them to take on names that are not welcome in Hollywood. If the ploy works, it’s proof that they were right all along — that cooler heads prevailed and the initial controversy was an overreaction.
With the Daily Wire’s film arm, Shapiro is bringing back the B-list for a cancel culture age, offering dimmed stars the chance to bide their time until the unistudio of Paramount/Warner Bros. comes calling.
PARIS — A wave of mass protests swept across France Saturday, with dozens of peaceful marches taking place alongside scenes of violent clashes between demonstrators and police forces.
The demonstrations were also a battleground for candidates ahead of next year’s high-stakes presidential election: The far-right’s Marine Le Pen sided with law enforcement while the far-left’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon backed protesters.
Throughout the day, media reported incidents in the country’s largest cities including Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille and Paris. Dozens of rioters clashed with law enforcement on the capital’s Place de la République, next to a much larger number of demonstrators gathered for an authorized march that started from Paris’s central square.
Media also reported looting across multiple cities later in the day.
French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu posted a message on X backing police forces and slamming violent rioters. He accused “ultra-left groups” of “organizing violence” and said looters would be brought to justice. Lecornu is overseeing a crisis meeting on Saturday evening, AFP reported.
French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Lecornu’s comments on Saturday evening, although he didn’t mention “ultra-left groups.”
“No place for violence in our Republic,” he said. “We will stand together against those who seed chaos, who only seek to tear down our institutions and who prevent those who peacefully express their demands from doing it.”
Students, farmers and members of the Yellow Jacket movement, among others, took to the streets on Saturday in a “convergence of struggles” to protest rising living costs, sluggish wages and deep disagreements with the government.
About 800,000 protestors took to the streets across the country, according to organizers. France’s interior ministry said 550,000 people took part in the protests.
“A very large majority of people are protesting without violence,” Paris’s police prefecture said on Saturday afternoon.
Students involved demonstrate against the cost of living in Pau, France on Oct. 17, 2026. | Jean-Christophe Chartre/AFP via Getty Images
Saturday’s demonstrations grew out of the student protests that began last month with school blockades and calls for better study conditions, more teachers and more funding. The movement has since spread nationwide — and become a political issue as the campaign for next year’s presidential election heats up.
In recent weeks, the government has struggled to deal with the crisis — which Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu described as “urban violence” — and is hoping the student movement will now fade because of a two-week school holiday that started Friday evening.
“The mobilization is marked by a very strong involvement of the ultra-left movement, which is only looking to cause disorder,” Nuñez’s office said Saturday, adding that the minister reiterated his “instructions of utmost firmness” to local prefects and police forces.
Footage showed Lyon’s tourist board office engulfed in flames on the city’s Place Bellecour. A police station was vandalized in Marseille, where a group of “rioters” also entered city hall, Mayor Benoît Payan said. He toldBFMTV that “damage was objectively fairly limited,” although the act of vandalism was “unacceptable.” The headquarters of right-wing TV channel CNews in Paris was also targeted, authorities said.
The government has defended the law enforcement response to the student protests despite numerous allegations of police brutality, including incidents that left one teenager with a severed hand and another blind in one eye. Nuñez said the use of “stun grenades” was authorized on Saturday, after a temporary ban on their use against students.
About 163 people had already been arrested in Paris by mid-afternoon, authorities said.
The far-left France Unbowed slammed the police response to the protests.
The party’s presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon participated in the demonstrations in Paris and backed protesters — he also criticized the media for only showing violent clashes while “everything is proceeding peacefully, with tens of thousands of people calmly taking part.”
On the other side of the political spectrum, far-right leaders Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen pledged support for the police. “Legitimate social demands have once again been hijacked by the far left,” Le Pen said, as an increasing number of polls show she could end up in the second round against Mélenchon.
Bardella said on Saturday that protests were made up entirely of “chaos professionals,” adding: “As we said, working France, which is taking the full brunt of inflation and cost-of-living struggles, did not take to the streets today.”
The police and protesters clashed in other European countries on Saturday, too. A student-led protest against corruption and unemployment in Albania’s capital Tirana reportedly turned violent, asdid another one in Brussels.
This story was updated. Victor Goury-Laffont contributed reporting.
The pre-dawn search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on Monday should have prompted a searching national outcry about presidential power and the weaponization of federal law enforcement for political purposes. Federal agents seized her phone and passport and searched her residence as part of an investigation into allegations dating back to her childhood. Authorities have also issued more than a dozen grand jury subpoenas, including to her relatives. But instead of treating this escalation as a major test of American democracy, the mainstream media’s editorial response to the breaking news has been sorely lacking. Rather than interrogating the fascistic implications of a president weaponizing federal immigration agencies to threaten political opponents with deportation, major media outlets platformed the administration’s narrative that something fishy must be occurring.
This is not how the American press normally reacts when armed agents of the federal government knock on the door of a prominent political figure. As media watchdog Adam Johnson noted at the Intercept, the very day of the FBI raid against former national security adviser John Bolton brought scathing editorials from the New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Over the next week, each newspaper published opinion pieces opposing the raid and leveling outrage at the obvious power grab. The raid was explicitly condemned in POLITICO, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, which published four different indignant columns.
The asymmetry in the mainstream media’s response to the Omar raid is the story. It is not simply the search itself but the absence of a sustained institutional response to the right’s yearslong campaign targeting the congresswoman that made it possible.
The asymmetry in the mainstream media’s response to the Omar raid is the story. It is not simply the search itself but the absence of a sustained institutional response to the right’s yearslong campaign targeting the congresswoman that made it possible. For years, the press treated each escalation against Omar as a discrete political controversy rather than examining how the attacks were clearly building toward a confrontation with the federal government. The allegations appeared on right-wing television, circulated through MAGA podcasts and were repeated by administration officials. The investigation was discussed publicly before the search took place. By the time agents arrived at Omar’s home, the political narrative had been prepared. Yet the national conversation too often focused on whether there might be something suspicious about Omar rather than on how the administration had transformed longstanding partisan allegations into a federal investigation.
Right-wing media had agitated for this result for months, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has documented. In July, Fox News host Sean Hannity told a caller on his radio show that an investigation into Omar was underway. “I can tell you this: There is an investigation going on. I don’t know why it’s being slow-walked,” he said. In September, right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson said he had been hearing “rumblings” about Omar and that Vice President JD Vance had told him on the record that something was about to happen.
The administration was not subtle about what it wanted. In March, Vance said on Johnson’s podcast that “we think Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud against the United States of America,” and then described the project in plain terms: “That’s the thing that we’re trying to figure out is what are the legal remedies now that we know that she’s committed immigration fraud — how do you go after her, how do you investigate her, how do you actually do the thing, how do you build a case necessary to get some justice for the American people?” In September, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Johnson there was an “ongoing investigation” into Omar and raised the possibility of deportation, declaring that “something’s going to happen” while stating as fact that Omar “married her brother to try to bring him to the United States.”
But not everyone in the MAGA coalition was satisfied. Laura Loomer, the conspiracy theorist and internet personality who once traveled to Minneapolis in her own fruitless attempt to prove that Omar had married her brother, fumed after the Mullin interview that the congresswoman was somehow being protected from deportation. Fox host Tomi Lahren was angrier still, devoting much of her Sept. 12 show to accusing Mullin of using Omar’s case as a sideshow to distract from the lack of larger-scale deportations. “If they want to do an investigation, do an investigation,” Lahren said, while also noting that whether Omar married her brother wouldn’t “get people out to vote.” What would, she said, was “promises made, promises kept” — mass deportations.
After Monday’s search, the celebration became even more explicit. Johnson opened his show by asking his audience whether they were excited to send Omar “back to her indigenous peoples” before announcing, “We were right. Forgive us. We’re going to gloat just a bit today.” He called the developments his “crowning achievement for life” and presented the investigation as a victory for his program. Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reportedly posted “promises made, promises kept” above an article about the search before deleting the post. Even CNN anchor Jake Tapper’s questioning why Omar’s didn’t seek to make a deal with the Biden Justice Department was celebrated by MAGA influencers and right-wing outlets such as Breitbart as evidence that mainstream journalists shared their suspicions.
The federal inquiry apparently reaches back to 1995, when Omar arrived in the United States as a Somali refugee, and to her naturalization in 2000. The warrant reportedly lists conspiracy, false statements on immigration paperwork and immigration fraud. Officials are examining allegations concerning Omar’s age and her late father’s records. Mullin has also discussed a possible racketeering case, suggesting that a conspiracy theory could connect alleged conduct across different periods. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, has said that several investigations involving Omar are underway, including one concerning her financial disclosures.
The scope of these inquiries makes independent scrutiny essential. A congressional watchdog previously cleared Omar of wrongdoing in connection with financial disclosures that are now reportedly under examination. The Washington Post has also reported that immigration officials scrutinized similar allegations during Trump’s first term and did not find citizenship-related issues. The administration has not publicly demonstrated why the earlier review was insufficient or what new evidence now justifies the extraordinary escalation. These are precisely the questions that a serious press corps should pursue relentlessly.
This pattern extends beyond Omar. Former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James faced indictments after Trump publicly pressured his attorney general to prosecute them. Both indictments were later dismissed because of a defect involving the appointment of the prosecutor, although the Justice Department subsequently pursued a new indictment against Comey. Former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Fed governor Lisa Cook have faced investigations or other government actions following sustained attacks by Trump. Their cases differ in important respects, but together they raise questions about the relationship between presidential hostility and the exercise of state power.
The consequences of this dynamic extend beyond Omar. When an administration can repeatedly identify enemies, encourage public speculation about their criminality and then launch investigations without facing sustained institutional scrutiny, the boundary between law enforcement and political retaliation becomes harder for the public to discern. The next target may be a different member of Congress, a public official or a naturalized citizen without Omar’s visibility or resources. The danger lies in normalizing a method of governance in which the president’s adversaries are continually placed under suspicion while the administration’s motives receive comparatively little examination.
The press cannot determine the outcome of Omar’s investigation, and it should not prejudge the evidence. But it can insist on transparency where legally possible, investigate the history of the allegations and examine whether officials are adhering to the standards that protect prosecutorial independence. It can also refuse to let the story disappear once the initial spectacle has passed.
Trump’s advantage lies in his ability to make extraordinary actions feel routine. Each failure to examine the cumulative pattern makes the next escalation easier to present as ordinary government business. That is how a media blind spot becomes a political opening. If the media can summon immediate outrage when federal power threatens one political figure but offer only procedural coverage when it threatens another, it risks helping normalize the very abuse it is supposed to expose.
DUBLIN — The Irish capital, which doubles as Europe’s de facto tech capital, hosted two very different AI summits in the past week.
Most eyes were on the International AI Summit, the signature tech event of Ireland’s six-month presidency of the Council of the EU, where top brass from the world’s biggest tech firms discussed ways to harness artificial intelligence and minimize safety risks.
But the weekend before, a very different conversation was taking place at the Workers’ AI Counter Summit, as Ireland’s tech workers demanded a say in how the burgeoning technology reshapes the workplace and society.
Ireland’s lucrative tech sector has been rattled by waves of AI-driven layoffs — and the country’s fledgling tech union has seen an exponential spike in sign-ups from workers who are worried about their future.
There’s an “awakening” happening right now among workers in Ireland’s tech sector, and a growing “awareness that they’re not bulletproof,” said Sinéad Gibney, a social democrat lawmaker who previously worked for Google.
“I do think what we will see is that parts of roles will be automated, which means that people will be competing more heavily for the same roles,” she said. “They won’t have the same labor power and therefore we’re going to see a drop in quality of work, we’re going to see more zero-hour contracts, in more places than we already see it.”
The labor movement brewing in Ireland, where many of the world’s tech giants have their EU bases, is part of a wider trend among tech workers globally, who have seen their work disrupted by rapidly evolving AI.
Rise in layoffs
Ireland’s dedicated union for tech workers, the Digital and Techworker Alliance (DATA), has seen a five-fold increase in membership since it was first founded in 2023.
In its first year and a half of existence, membership hovered around 270 people. In the past year-and-a-half, it’s jumped to more than 1,350 members, DATA organizer John Bohan told POLITICO. He added that this number tends to spike around layoffs and other actions.
“The tech industry was founded on the idea that it would never have a union, because they’re making people rich, and treat them really well,” Bohan said. “But post-Covid, workforce adjustments happened again and again, with layoffs and declining conditions in the sector. We started to see more people wanting to get organized around redundancies.”
The spike in sign-ups coincides with a wave of layoffs in Ireland’s tech bubble (and the tech sector globally), as companies corrected pandemic-era overhiring, and diverted investment to AI.
Ireland hosts the EU headquarters of most of the world’s largest tech companies, and more than 170,000 people are employed in the tech sector, according to the country’s statistics institute.
Social media giant Meta has roughly halved its workforce in Ireland since the pandemic, axing well over 1,000 roles to offset AI investment and boost efficiency. Separately, Meta subcontractor Covalen also announced massive layoffs earlier this year, cutting more than 700 people.
Video-sharing platform TikTok announced this year it would shed around 300 Irish jobs, mostly from its trust and safety team, shifting the work to other countries, outsourced vendors or automated AI solutions.
A report by the IMF earlier this year warned that Ireland’s labor market is “relatively more exposed” to AI than many advanced economies, partly due to its concentration of tech workers.
The AI race is also creating new jobs on the Irish market – as AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI are setting up Irish bases and trying to lure Big Tech workers with even bigger salaries.
Amid the uncertainty and volatility of the AI boom, tech workers are turning to unions for the first time as a safety net. One tech worker who used to work in trust and safety at a big tech firm told POLITICO that there used to be a feeling that as a “pampered” tech worker you “can’t ask for your rights, because you already have it so much better.”
But as layoffs continue and teams get leaner, workers in fields like trust and safety “now have to deal with these issues with fewer and fewer resources”, and face a “constant threat of being chopped,” the worker said.
That’s causing an “undoing of a certain perspective that we have of ourselves as tech sector workers,” they said, “because of undeniable experiences that now put us in situations where we clearly see our rights being violated, even if we may have it so much or somewhat better than most people.”
A different tech worker who currently works for Covalen told POLITICO that there is a sense that “if they believe they can replace you with AI, they will do that.”
“All these Big Tech firms only care about profit, and what I have realized is the Irish government protects that Big Tech capital [rather than workers],” the Covalen worker said. “But the question is, what’s the government going to do when the tech bros change their mind and move elsewhere?”
Workers at the center
The speaker list at this week’s AI summit was a flex of the country’s strength as a tech hub, as top names from the world’s biggest companies like Google and Microsoft took to the stage.
Fionnuala Ní Bhrógáin, head of organizing and campaigning at Ireland’s Communications Workers’ Union (DATA’s parent union), was the only union voice on the line-up.
“The fact that 36 executives and industry bosses featured on the program, compared with just one trade union speaker — invited at the last minute after attention was drawn to the absence of workers’ voices — says a lot about the value the Irish government places on AI’s impact on workers,” she told POLITICO.
“The reality is that a meaningful conversation about AI’s future can only happen through genuine engagement with workers and collective bargaining,” Ní Bhrógáin added. “Without that voice, we risk deepening mistrust and resistance rather than creating the conditions for workers to shape these changes collectively.”
DATA organized its counter-AI summit the previous weekend, to put “workers at the center of the debate about power, AI, technology and the future of work.”
The event cut through the “hype and futurism of politicians and industry figures to focus on the real present harms faced by ordinary workers and communities,” DATA’s Bohan said.
The union is pushing for stronger legal protections for tech workers caught up in AI-driven layoffs in Ireland, including making it mandatory for employers to recognize unions during collective bargaining. It is also calling for a ban on cooling-off clauses that prevent laid-off workers from moving between Big Tech subcontractors.
A spokesperson for Ireland’s department for enterprise told POLITICO in a written statement that the government is “committed to strengthening collective bargaining and industrial relations” and has published an action plan to do so between now and 2030.
They said that employers already have to comply with obligations under Irish employment law, including consultation and notification procedures for collective redundancies, and workers who feel those rules have been broken can complain to the Workplace Relations Commission.
Firefighting to future-proofing
Naoise Ó Cearúil, a center-right Fianna Fáil lawmaker who chairs the AI committee, pointed out that while there have been high-profile job cuts in Ireland’s tech sector, “the actual net is that there has been an increase [in jobs], particularly over the past year and even five years.”
According to Ireland’s central statistics office, total employment in tech and related sectors surpassed 177,000 in the second quarter of this year, up from around 144,000 at the same time in 2021.
Ó Cearúil pointed out that many job losses were in trust and safety jobs like content moderation that are “very difficult mentally,” and now tech firms are able to “utilize AI and software to be able to do a lot of detection, rather than using humans.”
He has called for a national program to be established, to support workers whose jobs are at risk due to AI and automation.
A spokesperson for Ireland’s department of enterprise acknowledged that the country’s tech sector has “experienced significant adjustment in recent years,” but said the changes were generally part of wider global restructuring “rather than reflecting any Ireland-specific weakness.”
They said the Irish government is currently focused on “ensuring workers and businesses are equipped to adapt to technological change through investment in education, training, lifelong learning and digital skills.”
To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer. $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)
No one likes it when I say this, but you get the algorithm you deserve. Generally speaking, what you get served on social media is a reflection of the things you’ve engaged with the most combined with predictions of what you would engage with based on your age, gender, location, and so on. Hence, my Instagram Explore page is a shameful buffet of women in those shorts Shane Gillis is afraid of providing “glute activation” gym tutorials, clips of Florence Pugh talking about food in a vaguely erotic manner, and drunk Americans belting Alice In Chains in the back of a pick-up; my legitimate interests merged and warped by the digital marketplace of sly OnlyFans promotion and adverts for perimenopausal supplements.
Others, however, might find their timelines filled with other things. Bloodshed, for instance.
In an essay for the latest issue of VICE magazine, The Self-Destruction Issue, Mattha Busby looks into the rise of so-called “fight porn” on social media. That is, the constant barrage of videos of bar fights, dog fights, schoolyard brawls, dashcam road rage, etc, that roll non-stop across our timelines like hot, cortisol-spiking dispatches from the frontlines of the War On The Societal Contract, delivered to us casually between celebrity gossip and photos of our friends’ babies. It begs the question: Are Western societies more violent than they were in the past, or is the algorithm pushing us all, gently, towards insanity?
Mattha writes:
“Perhaps the question isn’t whether we’re more barbarous than our grandparents but what the effect of being constantly exposed to barbarism is on our brains and societies as a whole. To be clear, there is little evidence that street violence itself has exploded in the West, but what has exploded is its visibility—and the way that visibility shapes what feels socially plausible.”
Read the full story in The Self-Destruction Issue or behind the paywall below:
Also behind the paywall this week, you’ll find what is perhaps the spiritual inverse of CCTV footage of Americans punching each other: artistic interpretations of sex in China.
Lao Xie Xie has been photographing Shanghai youth since 2019, following Gen Z through a pandemic and tightening moral codes. Capturing people in their homes, in public spaces, at underground shibari parties and more, his series Shanghai No Why offers a glimpse into the lives of young microcommunities thriving beyond censorship and cultural stereotypes.
Speaking to VICE writer Tom Veréb Czibolya, Lao says:
“To me, these photos are about freedom, freedom to present your body differently […] What I can say is that many of the people I photograph belong to a generation obsessed with images. It’s social media and its hyper-aggressive push toward self-representation, and clearly, this influences how they approach relationships and sexuality too.”
Check out a selection of Lao’s work and read our full interview with him behind the paywall:
To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is just $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year also gets you 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door. (All three kill all the ads on this site.)
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