02d Agit-Prop

South Africa and Afrikaners reject US claims of humanitarian crisis for white people www.euronews.com
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The South African government and advocacy groups for the country’s Afrikaner white minority rejected on Wednesday the Trump administration’s position that there’s a humanitarian emergency affecting white people in South Africa.

The argument served as the administration’s rationale for raising the US refugee cap, but only for white Afrikaners.

The Trump administration said on Tuesday that it will admit an additional 10,000 white South Africans into the US as refugees this year, increasing its annual quota, but blocking people from other countries from entering through the programme.

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Over the holiday weekend, New Jersey Democrat politicians gathered outside Newark’s Delaney Hall, which ICE has been using as a detention facility for over a decade. CNN showed video on Tuesday morning’s The Situation Room of several prominent Democrat politicians. Included in their highlight reel was New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, Senator Andy Kim, and Representative Robert Menendez, who spoke to cameras outside the facility amid swarms of protesters performing the modern Democrat’s favorite pastime as they clashed with officers and attempted to block vehicles coming in or out.

These particular protests were spurred by unsubstantiated “reports of rough conditions like rotten food and a hunger strike by detainees,” according to co-host Pamela Brown.

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The Center for Intellectual Freedom is a comically-named educational institution established by Iowa’s conservative legislature to counter the liberal indoctrination of traditional education. Few students have availed themselves of its “top-tier scholarship,” though, though, leaving commissars with a numbers problem. A solution is at hand: force University of Iowa students to take classes there if they want to graduate.

Republican lawmakers added a provision to a massive budget bill during a 35-hour legislative session requiring University of Iowa students to complete at least six credit hours from the center to earn an undergraduate degree. The bill now heads to Gov. Kim Reynolds’ desk.

The center opened in the spring semester, having been allocated $1m in funding with millions more to come, but enrollment is “dismal”. A report impressed upon its readers the need to require students to take the courses if they are to bother. The bill doesn’t become law until Gov. Kim Reynolds signs it; she may also veto it or use a line-item veto to strip the requirement.

The center launched two one-credit hour classes in late March. Numbers from the University’s website show one class has just 8 of 32 seats filled, and the other has 11 of 32 seats filled. Ben Murrey of the nonprofit research group Common Sense Institute, which the center hired to analyze demand and student interest, said he is not surprised by the low turnout. … “it’s remarkable that they got really any enrollment at all.”

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MEXICO CITY — The Trump administration has deported nearly 13,000 Cubans, Venezuelans and other nationals to Mexico, where they are vulnerable to cartel violence in an unfamiliar country, a report by Human Rights Watch released Wednesday said.

While Mexico has accepted these types of deportations for years, the deportees under the Trump administration are older and have lived in the U.S. for longer than in the past, making it more difficult for them to find work and increasing the urgency of the need for medical care.

The report, which is based on more than 50 interviews in the southern Mexican cities Tapachula and Villahermosa, comes as U.S. President Donald Trump has expanded immigration enforcement to carry out his mass deportation plan.

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In a sharp rebuttal to media speculation, the Trump administration has pushed back against claims that Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard was ousted from her position amid internal tensions.

The controversy erupted on May 22, following Gabbard’s announcement of her resignation, which she attributed entirely to a personal family crisis. Major outlets, including Reuters, highlighted both her stated reasons and anonymous sourcing suggesting deeper White House dissatisfaction.

The Reuters report detailed Gabbard’s resignation as Trump’s top intelligence official, noting her public explanation tied to her husband’s health. However, the article prominently featured an anonymous source familiar with the situation who asserted that “Gabbard had been forced out by the White House.”

The source claimed the administration had grown unhappy with Gabbard over several months, citing issues such as the activities of her Director’s Initiatives Group task force and perceived frictions on national security matters, including aspects of U.S. policy toward Iran.

Reuters noted that the White House initially did not respond to requests for comment on the forced-out narrative, fueling immediate online debate and criticism of media coverage.

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After the Southern Poverty Law Center gets the DOJ’s sham fraud indictment tossed out of court, they should sue every one of these liars for defamation. As we’ve already discussed here, Republicans hate them because they expose the white supremacists and neo-Nazis that make up so much of their base, so now they’re trying to destroy them by pretending they’re sponsoring hatred rather than going undercover to expose it.

Rep. Nancy Mace made an appearance on Fox’s Saturday in America with Kayleigh McEnany this weekend and was asked by guest host Jonathan Hunt what she thought of the accusations against the SPLC, and Mace spewed lots of lies and venom and demanded that the people running the organization be tossed in prison.

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The Israeli prime minister wrote on X: “I spoke last night with President Donald Trump about the memorandum of understanding to reopen the Straits of Hormuz and the upcoming negotiations toward a final agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

“I expressed my deep appreciation to President Trump for his unwavering commitment to Israel’s security, including during Operation Roaring Lion and Epic Fury, when American and Israeli forces fought shoulder to shoulder against the Iranian threat.

“President Trump and I agreed that any final agreement with Iran must eliminate the nuclear danger. That means dismantling Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites and removing its enriched nuclear material from its territory.

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Earlier in 2026 a sub-Reddit called “r/liberalgunowners,” saw one user provide an update after describing a harrowing incident at home – but a New York Times columnist elected to leave out a large part of the story to deliver an anti-gun ownership spiel.

In the screenshot of the initial post on Reddit posted on X on March 2, according to BizPacReview, the user explained how his partner had purchased a Glock pistol “for self-defense as the federal government does fascist things in our community.” The Reddit user apparently provided additional updates later in the thread, based on another screenshot posted on X.

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Can you name one good thing the BLM movement has done for the Black community? No? I didn’t think so. You certainly can, however, name many bad things this movement and people involved in it have done that have been disastrous towards the Black community. This is why it is disingenuous for Sunny Hostin to imply this “uprising” has done anything beneficial for Black people.

According to Sunny Hostin, “there is no compassion between the Black Lives Matter movement and Jan. 6.” And in that regard, she is correct. There is no comparison. However, she justified this stance by claiming there was “very limited destruction of property and violence” during the “uprising of this movement.” This is incorrect because these riots caused the largest insurance claim in American history, while the amount of damage caused by Jan. 6 rioters was less than $3 million. While both numbers should be closer to $0, as Hostin said, it is comparing apples to oranges.

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The focus of Friday’s Washington Week in Review journalist roundtable (which aired on the eve of Memorial Day weekend) was the Department of Defense, especially on Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s war against wokeism, which the panel disapproved of, especially New York Times national security correspondent Helene Cooper, who all but accused Hegseth and the Trump Administration of racism and sexism.

Helene Cooper, National Security Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, that’s a great question, Jeff. I think I would start first with just he’s instilled an atmosphere of fear, which is pervasive now throughout the Pentagon, just because he has fired or threatened to fire or forced to retire just so many of the top brass….

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It’s extremely suboptimal that the only way the constitutional order is being preserved these days is by masses of plaintiffs filing lawsuit after lawsuit against the administration’s flagrantly illegal conduct. While the administration has fought nearly everything tooth and nail, a few settlements have slipped through.

President Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked diversity and wokeness, words that mean whatever Trump wants them to mean on any given day. But sometimes, woke wins, and the administration has no choice but to knuckle under, settle, and cut its losses.

These sorts of victories are few and far between these days, given that conservatives on the Supreme Court make a habit of giving Trump whatever he wants, giving him very little incentive to settle cases. But hey, we’ll take it.

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As Donald Trump and Xi Jinping came face to face outside China’s Great Hall of the People, the pair exchanged a historic handshake, with this opening moment laying bare the nature of their relationship — a body language expert asserting that Xi holds the upper hand.

The two leaders sat down for two hours of talks on Thursday, May 14, with the entire world looking on as Xi hailed US-China relations as the world’s “most important” and Trump declared the discussions “extremely positive”.

From the very beginning of the visit, the power dynamic between the two men has been unmistakable, according to body language expert Louise Mahler, who argued “if life is a competition, for me, Xi won.”

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The Trump/Xi meetings in China were private. It appears that there were no big breakthroughs and “wins” for Trump to bring back to the United States.

Trump tried to flatter the Chinese leader, who responded with threats about Taiwan.

The Trump trip, where he took a bunch of the world’s richest CEOs with him, appears to have been a total bust on all fronts. Republicans were hoping that Trump would have another one of his fake deals with China to announce that would help to get farmers who are being devastated by the president’s toxic combo of war and tariffs off their backs, but there was no big announcement.

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Germany’s federal system of government makes the country’s politics seem so complicated that most people outside Germany give up trying to understand it. At the federal level, there is the parliament (the Bundestag), a ceremonial president and a chancellor. At the moment, all of those branches of power seem normal enough, and are run by the same few democratic parties that have been there since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But if you look the next level down, at the individual states (or länder), the picture that emerges is terrifying.

Germany is still culturally and economically split in two by the old Iron Curtain. Nearly 40 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the promised reunification has still not been completed. People living in the former East look at the Berlin government and see policies that seem to ignore them. There are five states in the eastern part of the country, and opinion polls show majority support for the radical right party Alternative for Germany in all of them. This September, two of these states, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, will be holding elections in which AfD candidates are expected to win, putting them in charge of state governments for the first time. They are hoping for absolute majorities. That would give them sole control of the education system, the prisons and the police force.

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Even if it wasn’t obvious before, it’s certainly been abundantly clear since the start of President Trump’s second term in office that Democrats have no qualms whatsoever about fanning the flames using outright lies and purposeful deception to the point it spurs their outrage mobs to take violent action in the name of  “democracy” and “social justice.”

 

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A protest sign outside Alabama’s statehouse on May 7.Kim Chandler/AP

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In a stunning act of political partisanship, the Roberts Court on Monday night discarded its own precedents to green-light a last-ditch effort by Alabama to use a gerrymandered congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The move, which comes less than two weeks after the court destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, will reduce Black representation.

Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.

“There’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”

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A cluster of high-profile political attacks in the U.S. spotlight the nation’s extreme divisions—but they don’t necessarily signal a broader uptick in politically inspired brutality, experts say.

Politicians, pundits and ordinary Americans are increasingly worried about political violence. The latest round of concern was sparked on April 25, when a 31-year-old man stormed the Washington Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C., during the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, where President Donald Trump was in attendance. Secret Service agents arrested the armed man before he could get to the ballroom where the event was being held. He has since been charged with attempted assassination of the president—which would represent the third serious attempt on Trump’s life since 2024. The man has pled not guilty to this and related charges.

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Democrats must stop conceding that the only answer for various racist voting laws is that Democrats just have to vote more and harder and better.

We try to keep despair out of these pages, tough as the times are. That’s why I didn’t write about Friday’s Virginia Supreme Court’s decision striking down new voter-approved congressional maps for extremely dubious reasons (read Virginia political expert Carolyn Fiddler’s awesome explanation of the ruling here).

Coming after the Supreme Court (of the United States) decision invalidating Louisiana’s congressional maps for taking race into account, the Bayou State’s immediately postponing upcoming elections as a result, and Tennessee’s swift move to use the SCOTUS ruling to wipe a majority-Black congressional district literally off the political map, last week was the worst for voting rights since the court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder ruling struck down two vital sections of the Voting Rights Act. I admit to not seeing much light down this tunnel that afternoon.

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No one agrees on when, where, or how capitalism began, or whether it had a beginning at all, but everyone agrees that capitalism, the word, first appeared in the 19th century. Capital and capitalist slipped into use, unnoticed and unremarked, in the 13th and 17th centuries. Capitalism burst through the barricades of political argument in the 1830s, announcing immediately the hostility of its user. “Long live capital!” cried the French socialist Louis Blanc in 1839. “Long may we go on to attack capitalism, its mortal enemy, with even more intensity.” As much as the word named something, so did it identify its speaker—as a worker, a radical, a hater.

If capital was viewed as a thing and capitalists as people, capitalism was something else. Blanc described it as an act, the taking of collective wealth and turning it into individual or private profit. Proudhon claimed it was a citadel, casting medieval and military shadows across the land. Despite his obvious interest and extensive writing on the subject, Marx steered clear of the term.

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US President Donald Trump will arrive in China from May 13 to May 15 for a closely watched state visit that could shape the next phase of relations between Washington and Beijing. The trip marks the first visit by a sitting American president to China in nearly a decade and the first since Trump’s own 2017 visit during his first term.

Despite years of harsh rhetoric on China, Trump has continued to publicly praise Chinese President Xi Jinping. Just last week, he described Xi as a “good man” and a “smart man” with whom he has “a very good relationship”.

But behind the warm language lies mounting pressure. The summit comes at a moment when Washington is struggling to convert its military and economic power into diplomatic outcomes, particularly in the Middle East.

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When Donald Trump visits Beijing this week, the focus of think tankers and pundits will largely be on what the policy outcomes will be, and there is a tendency to lean towards the negative. Will China deepen the trade war? Will Trump bristle at Xi’s stance on the war against Iran?

But for the trajectory of the relationship between China and the United States, the summit could play a constructive role, facilitating a peaceful recognition of the shift in power dynamics between the two countries and globally. Perceptions in both countries of one another, and of the role each seeks to play in the world, will be shaped by the art of the summitry and what the meeting between the two leaders conveys.

Historically, high-profile summits have proven to be important turning points in U.S. foreign policy by mediating enduring tensions in bilateral relations. The 1959 US-Soviet summit humanized the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev in the eyes of some Americans. The 1972 Nixon visit to China allowed pro-rapprochement sentiment to emerge and circulate in American public discourse, contributing to ongoing discussions and debates on diplomatic normalization for years following the summit. The 1985-87 US-Soviet summits between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were crucial for transforming bilateral distrust into trust.

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As star correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s future at “60 Minutes” remains unclear, journalists at the legendary news show are being careful not to offend their new boss.

Following Bari Weiss’ controversial hiring as CBS News’ editor in chief, compliance is the name of the game.

Attribution: APSharyn Alfonsi attends the CBS 2019 upfront at The Plaza on May 15, 2019, in New York.

A source close to the “60 Minutes” staff told Daily Kos the editorial team is hesitant to pick up the phone or answer texts from people critical of new management.

The nervousness isn’t unfounded. Alfonsi’s time with CBS has come into question after she openly spoke against Weiss and the editorial decisions coming from the top.