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- Democrats’ Influencer Era Has Arrived
Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat trying to win the governor's mansion in Texas, confessed her love for the Wicked musical whilemixing a strawberry milk latte witheli.rallo (an influencer with 1.2 million TikTok followers). Peggy Flanagan, the Democrat trying to win a Senate seat in Minnesota, ran around the state fair withemmalinechilds (300,400 TikTok followers), wielding“pronto pups” — Midwestern corn dogs — and declaring it the “best day ever.” And Roy Cooper, the Democrat trying to win the Senate race in North Carolina, stood on the sidelines of a campaign rally to askmerenator (57,800 Instagram followers) what her biggest challenge is,teeing up a response about a shaky economy for small business owners. This is campaigning in the age of influencers. As political campaigns are waged more and more on the internet — a place where everyone seems driven by an insatiable hunger for attention — a debate is brewing about whether elections can be won or lost online. After Trump’s 2024 victory, Democrats are playing catch up by taking a page from the GOP playbook: Influencers are being deeply embedded into campaigns, from Florida to Alaska, and candidates are popping up on screen with them, on their turf. Developing an influencer program is now a common component of a campaign, mapped alongside traditional voter outreach methods like door-knocking and phone-banking. This approach isn’t without controversy. Within the Democratic Party there’s a raging discussion about the ethics of engaging boisterous online personalities — and sharp disagreement about whether influencers should be brought on board at all. No one can agree if they should be paid or remain volunteers or if they should be considered independent journalists or campaign surrogates or something else entirely. Longtime Democratic consultants tend to be antsy about influencer adoption, skeptical that any investments will reap dividends come Election Day. Meanwhile a cottage industry of digital firms specializing in connecting campaigns with vetted influencers is booming — a new consultant class eager to cash in on Democrats’ internet inexperience. “This is not something that is optional anymore,” says Stuart Perelmuter, co-founder of digital firm Good Influence, one of those operations. “In the ‘26 cycle, that's when our side woke up to the power of this work.”Nearly 20 years ago, rapper/producer will.i.am of Blackeyed Peas fame stared directly into the camera, looking somber. As a few guitar chords began to play, Barack Obama, a baby-faced Democrat running for president, appeared on… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - The Tech Bro in the Treaty Room
If you want to impress a foreign official, the State Department’s storied Treaty Room, with its gilded arches, baroque chandeliers, elaborate portraiture and historical heft, provides the perfect set for political theater. These days, signing an actual treaty in the State Department’s storied Treaty Room is an exceedingly rare occurrence. But on this day in early May, it was being used to make a point: It’s time to get behind the U.S. to beat back China’s technological supremacy. More than 30 diplomats, State officials and staffers cram in there, decked out for the occasion with an array of Norwegian and U.S. flags. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, a one-time anti-TikTok crusader and Democratic fundraiser turned “Trump whisperer,” strides into the room. Accompanying him is Anniken Huitfeldt, Norway’s ambassador to the U.S. After customary speeches — today’s are all about securing supply chain security — Huitfeldt and Helberg take pen in hand and get down to business: signing Norway onto Helberg’ssignature Pax Silica Declaration. For all the pomp, there’s an assembly line feel to the process that reflects how practiced Helberg and his team have become in steering — some would argue strong-arming — foreign officials into signing the Pax Silica and join a coalition aimed to break the back of China’s control of the mineral supply chain essential to the technologies fueling the artificial intelligence revolution. So far, Helberg has managed to land a total of 24 country members — including the European Union and critical mineral resource powerhouses Chile and Kazakhstan — to sign the declaration. His pitch to foreign governments is simple: link arms — fast — with the U.S. to oppose what he calls Beijing’s “systemic weaponization” of the global supply chain or risk losing control of tech infrastructure to “people who don’t have our best interests at heart.” The stakes are high. Helberg's role as the State Department's AI champion coincides with a souring in public sentiment that’s intensified this year, particularly over concerns about data centers and a more visceral fear that a super intelligent AI system could plot the extinction of the human race.Meanwhile, Beijing has weaponized its dominance with rare earth minerals through export restrictions that have starved U.S. defense and civilian manufacturing of essential production materials.Helberg seeks to end that dependency and spur joint high tech research, development and manufacturing among the U.S. and its allies and partners.… [TheTopNews] Read More.3 weeks ago - The Future of Western Sahara Runs Down the Donald J. Trump Highway
LAAYOUNE, Western Sahara — Two Moroccan gendarmes idle by the roundabout. One rests against a white van while the other waves through, or stops, the cars that pull to a halt in front of them. Those allowed to pass — and, eventually, all are — skirt a traffic island where a trio of Moroccan flags flutter in the wind and then, if they take the exit towards the city of Guelmim, embark upon the first stretch of the Donald J. Trump Highway, a 655-mile road renamed in honor of the U.S. president as a “personal expression” of King Mohammed VI’s “high regard.” No plaque yet bears Trump’s name, no triumphal arch covers the divided highway, nor have the Stars and Stripes been planted amid the scree and plastic bottles that line the roadside. The signs on the first 300 miles of the highway allude to the more prosaic dangers of driving further and further into the desert: beware camels, sand on the road or tiredness. When those sands still form stable, tree-dotted dunes on either side of the pristine tarmac, the novice driver can be tempted to regard the instructions as merely a local curiosity. But as you head on, wispy yellow fingers start to play at your wheels; then come currents that yank on the steering wheel; and finally, ferocious blasts of sand roar against the windows, filling the car with a sound like radio static and reshaping the land ahead in front of your eyes. After that, the real problems start.“Oh yes, I read about it on the news,” said the manager of a truck-stop cafe when asked if he had heard about the renaming of the highway, still known on Google Maps as National Route 1 or the Tiznit-Dakhla Expressway. “It’s politics,” grumbled a man named Ibrahim, further down the road, as he cranked out two coffees from a Brasileiro machine stacked into the back of his van. That puts it mildly. Of all the hotels, entertainment venues and crypto-currencies that bear the name of Donald J. Trump, none comes close to this road in terms of its geopolitical significance. Travel along and you arrive at one plausible explanation for why, at the end of July, tens of thousands of Moroccans plunged into the ocean in wetsuits or on small boats to storm into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta — unaccosted, for the most part, by Morocco’s… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 weeks ago - The 3 Mistakes That Doomed the Department of Homeland Security
Americans were badly surprised by the 9/11 attacks. But what would have surprised Americans even more during the fall of 2001, in the wake of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people, is that al Qaeda never successfully attacked the United States homeland again thereafter. Twenty-five years later, what might surprise Americans now is how little the major government reorganization meant to prevent attacks — the creation of the Department of Homeland Security — had to do with that remarkable track record of success. In fact, amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing unprecedented use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection to target cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, large swaths of the nation today seem more likely to say that they fear DHS itself than terrorists from overseas. Roughly half the country now supports outright abolishing ICE. Today, as the nation marks the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, many experts and politicians are calling for radical reforms of the very Cabinet department created to prevent the next attack. I’ve been studying 9/11 and the ways the attacks transformed America and its national security apparatus and in recent months, I’ve been talking to those who helped build and run DHS, including two of its Senate-confirmed secretaries. One of them, surprisingly, now agrees with critics that the department needs to be broken up and rebuilt into something different. That’s because instead of an ever-vigilant department that defends Americans from pressing terrorism threats, DHS has swelled over the last quarter-century into a giant, sprawling, inchoate amalgam of agencies with an annual budget so vast it exceeds the entire military budgets of all-but four countries — the U.S., China, Russia, and Germany — and larger than the entire annual government budgets of New Zealand, Hungary or the Philippines. Moreover, a department that originally was created to look externally, identifying threats and stopping plots before they could enter the U.S., has instead become increasingly focused on policing U.S. residents. To understand why DHS has become such a lightning rod for controversy, it pays to revisit what politicians of both parties have gotten right and wrong about homeland security over the last 25 years and reconsider three critical decisions that shaped the department and set it up for failure.The morning after 9/11, George W. Bush gathered the nation’s security leaders at the White House in an unlikely venue for… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 weeks ago - America Grew Up Believing the Good Guys Always Win
Most Americans learning history at a young age grow up believing three things:First, that America is on the side of the good guys.Second, that the bad guys often perceive all the arguing and disarray and indulgence that is interwoven with freedom as a form of weakness — and thereby dangerously underestimate American power and resolve.And third, that the good guys always win in the end.Yes, yes, of course — as one gets older and understands the path more deeply, it is clear how much the American story is filled with contradiction, complexity, contingency. Most honest people acknowledge that there have been plenty of occasions when American power was not on the side of the good guys, when this power did not achieve its aims, and that in a large and diverse planet the American perspective is not always going to prevail.Yet on a day — a quarter-century after the 9/11 attacks — when many people are reflecting on one of the most searing imprints on the American experience, it is worth acknowledging how much of the narrative we grew up believing in grade school and high school is grounded in genuine history.Ken Burns’s documentary, The American Revolution, released last year ahead of our 250th birthday, was a riveting reminder of how tenuous the country’s founding was. Even afterward, many European elites did not expect democratic self-governance to last — especially in a country riven by slavery — and at key junctures leading up to and culminating in the Civil War it looked likely the skeptics would be right. Marx thought capitalist societies would be destroyed by internal contradictions, and it took the modern social state — and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States — to prove him wrong. In the 20th century, leaders of totalitarian states from Germany to Japan to the Soviet Union thought the United States was too complacent, too disengaged from the world, too enthralled with material comforts and middle-brow consumer culture to fight and win a global clash of civilizations.In each instance, however, after a lumbering and uneven start, the good guys won in the end. Adversaries fatally misunderstood American character.How does this foundational American narrative hold up in the case of the violent pivot history took 25 years ago today?If 9/11 is the modern equivalent of Pearl Harbor, we are now living through the equivalent of 1966. By then, World War II was emphatically… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 weeks ago - Charlie Kirk’s Lieutenant Has Second Thoughts
PHOENIX, Arizona — Five days a week, or sometimes more if news requires it, Blake Neff takes his seat behind a V-shaped plexiglass desk on the set of the Charlie Kirk Show. Directly to Neff’s left, toward the center of the V, sits “Charlie’s chair,” the high-back green leather rolling chair favored by the show’s namesake, the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Following Kirk’s death one year ago during an event at Utah Valley University, his colleagues at the Charlie Kirk Show started filling the studio with a collection of the gifts and commemorative knick-knacks that fans were sending in droves. The tidal wave of gifts eventually tapered off, but the habit of keeping a small pile of items stacked in front of Kirk’s seat persisted, transforming “Charlie’s chair” into a kind of semi-permanent memorial to the show’s departed host. On a Tuesday morning earlier this summer, Neff, a bespectacled 36-year-old with a clean-shaven head and a naturally nerdy affect, catalogued the contents of that pile for me: a gold and white Trump “47” hat, a pocket Constitution, a gold challenge coin inscribed with a Bible verse and a plush giraffe hand puppet beloved by Kirk’s two children. Neff joined the staff of the Charlie Kirk Show in 2022 as a writer and producer, but since Kirk’s death, he has assumed full-time hosting responsibilities alongside Kirk’s longtime spokesperson Andrew Kolvet. His new role as the public face of the Charlie Kirk Show has come as something of a surprise — chiefly to Neff himself. A self-described “cultivated wordcel” with a passion for elaborate military-historical board games, Neff told me that he never expected to have a permanent on-air presence, having spent most of his career cranking out scripts for more telegenic bosses. But in another sense, Neff’s new gig is just the latest unlikely twist in a career that has been unusually full of them. By his own admission, Neff has become a kind of Forrest Gump of the conservative movement, a little-known figure who, through a combination of dumb luck and sheer pluckiness, has found himself at the center of several pivotal moments in the recent history of the American right. In 2016, while working as an education reporter at the conservative website The Daily Caller, Neff was tapped to serve as the lead writer of the newly created Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, which Neff helped transform… [TheTopNews] Read More.4 weeks ago
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