Subterms
Late-night hosts responded to White House faith adviser Paula White-Cain’s claims that Trump is ‘the GOAT’On Thursday night, Stephen Colbert responded to White House adviser Paula White-Cain’s claims that Donald Trump is “the GOAT”, while Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers addressed ICE and Jeffrey Epstein. Continue reading… More
A crypto startup founded by Trump’s family signed a huge deal with the UAE president’s brother. Where’s the political fallout?Days before Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, an investment firm controlled by a senior member of the United Arab Emirates royal family secretly signed a deal to pay $500m to buy almost half of a cryptocurrency startup founded by the Trump family. Under any other president, such an arrangement, which was revealed this past weekend by the Wall Street Journal, would cause a political earthquake in Washington. There would be demands for an investigation by Congress, televised hearings and months of damage control.But this latest example of corruption involving Trump and his family business hardly made a blip over the past few days, relegated to a passing headline in a relentless news cycle often dominated by Trump’s actions and statements. Continue reading… More
Billie Eilish and Biebers wore ‘ICE out’ pins at the Grammys, as more and more celebrities find their political voicesThe red carpet is being used increasingly as a platform for protest – and one accessory in particular has become key: the pin badge.At Sunday night’s Grammy awards, stars including Hailey and Justin Bieber and Billie Eilish wore black and white pins that read “ICE out”, a condemnation of the recent actions of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Continue reading… More
From minting coins featuring his own face to covering buildings with gold, the president’s proposals for marking America’s semiquincentennial say a lot about the country’s backwards outlookWhen the United States celebrated its bicentennial on 4 July 1976, it marked the occasion with the opening of the National Air and Space Museum’s exhibition hall on Washington DC’s National Mall. Designed in a boldly modernist style by the blue-chip firm Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum (now HOK), it stood as a testament to American aeronautical derring-do, from the Wright brothers to the moon landings.At the time, even though the stench of Republican political shenanigans was never far off, with Gerald Ford replacing the disgraced Richard Nixon in 1974, there was a sense of a nation embracing progress, looking forward, not back. For all the historical re-enactments of Washington crossing the Delaware, the US chose to see itself through the prism of modernity and technological puissance. Continue reading… More
Fascism feeds on the arbitrary killings that have long plagued the US. Ending the horror starts with abolishing ICEIn a recent Saturday Night Live episode, when asked about Minneapolis, one of the white hosts intones: “Well, the first word that comes to mind is unprecedented. You’ve got federal officers roaming the streets just pulling people out of their cars based on how they look. This just doesn’t happen in America.” The joke is, of course, that “this” has been happening forever, but to Black people in America. Now that it is happening to others, and particularly now that white protesters are being killed in the streets, it is suddenly a national emergency.In his 1955 work Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire, the French poet and politician, argues that fascism was the result of bringing to bear on domestic populations the tactics European countries used on their colonial subjects in Africa. This is what has been called in the literature the “imperial boomerang thesis”. As many have been pointing out on social media and elsewhere, if we think of the US Black American population as an internally colonized population, then you can see what is happening on the streets of Minneapolis as a manifestation of the imperial boomerang thesis. Continue reading… More
Cubans, once fast-tracked to US residency, now find themselves targets of Trump’s immigration crackdownWhen Rosaly Estévez “self-deported” from Miami to Havana last November, US immigration officers bid farewell by removing her ankle monitor. The 32-year-old had been told she was about to be detained, so she left with her three-year-old son, Dylan, a US citizen.Heidy Sánchez, 43, wasn’t given a choice. She was forcibly removed from Florida last April but, worrying about Cuba’s failing healthcare system, she left her two-year-old daughter, Kaylin, behind with her American husband, Carlos. Continue reading… More
Their ‘pro-family’ rhetoric is a cynical and hollow shamOf the 3,800 children and infants taken into immigration custody between January and October of 2025, a majority – 2,600 – were detained by ICE officers. That means that the children, as young as one or two years old, were not arrested at the border or legal ports of entry, where asylum seekers frequently present themselves to border officers, but inside the country.That means that those children were not new arrivals seeking help; they were kids going about their daily lives in the US, often with legal status. They were children like Liam Conejo Ramos, aged five, who was snatched from his driveway after school by immigration agents while wearing a blue bunny hat to keep him warm in the Minnesota cold. They are children like one student, a 17-year-old from Liam’s school district in Minnesota, who was taken from their car, or the other child, a 10-year-old girl in the fourth grade, who was taken alongside her mother; or the two other boys, brothers in the second and fifth grades, who were delivered by school officials to an ICE detention center after their mother was arrested and taken there. She had called the school to ask them to bring her boys to her in the prison; there was no one else to take care of them. Continue reading… More
With plans to sell off over a million acres of natural habitat for oil and gas development, the Trump administration is ignoring the dire impact on its fragile ecosystem• Don’t get Down to Earth delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereThis week, the Trump administration took a key step towards opening new leases for oil and gas drilling across millions of acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – a pristine and biodiverse expanse in northern Alaska and one of the last wildlands in the US still left untouched.With a call for nominations officially issued on Tuesday, the US Bureau of Land Management began evaluating plots across the 1.5 million-acre Coastal Plain at the heart of the refuge – an area often referred to as the American Serengeti, thanks to its rich tundra ecosystems, which provide habitat for close to 200 species and serve as the traditional homelands of the Iñupiat and Gwichʼin peoples.Flawed economic models mean climate crisis could crash global economy, experts warnFossil fuel firms may have to pay for climate damage under proposed UN taxThe lithium boom: could a disused quarry bring riches to Cornwall?Trump’s Greenland threats open old wounds for Inuit across Arctic‘Erasure of years of work’: outcry as White House moves to open Arctic reserve to oil and gas drillingArctic endured year of record heat as climate scientists warn of ‘winter being redefined’ Continue reading… More
