How Palantir is becoming embedded in major newsroom operations

 Palantir’s CEO admits that his technology kills, but international media outlets still partner with the US tech firm

Protesters near Palantir’s new headquarters in Aventura, Florida, US on 3 March 2026 (AFP)

By Melissa Muller in Zurich, Switzerland

Published date: 21 May 2026 10:57 BST | Last update: 6 days 26 mins ago

Palantir is among the most controversial technology companies of the modern era. Its clients include US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the US Army, police, intelligence, and security agencies in multiple European countries. The company also supplies technology to the Israeli military amid its genocide in Gaza.

Despite mounting scrutiny over Palantir’s alleged links to human rights abuses and Israeli war crimes, several major media organisations have still partnered with the company – including German publishing giant Axel Springer, the new owner of the British newspaper The Telegraph.

Axel Springer – which also owns Politico, Business Insider, Bild, and Welt – uses Palantir’s Foundry software across its media operations.

Palantir has said that Axel Springer used Foundry to integrate data from its various publications and revenue streams, helping to build what the company described as "a more agile, data-driven publishing organisation" capable of responding more effectively to shifts in consumer behaviour and audience interests.

According to Palantir, Foundry enables Axel Springer to gain "detailed insights into readership behaviour, advertising performance, and subscription models".

But the relationship between Axel Springer and Palantir extends beyond technology partnerships. Between 2018 and 2019, Palantir chief executive Alexander Karp served on the publisher's supervisory board.

Karp and Axel Springer's CEO, Mathias Döpfner, first met years earlier "at a party during Döpfner’s university days".

The ties also appear to extend to Döpfner's son, Moritz, who reportedly worked as chief of staff at Thiel Capital, the investment firm founded by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel. German business outlet Manager Magazin has reported that Thiel later invested in a venture capital fund established by Moritz Döpfner, providing around $50m in seed funding.

German outlet Focus Online has further reported that Thiel invested several million dollars in a new European defence company after being brought on board by Moritz Döpfner.

The company, Stark Defence, describes itself as "a technology-oriented defence company that delivers the systems Europe and NATO need now". Its unmanned weapons systems are marketed as "AI-enabled, software-defined, and ready for affordable production at scale".

'We all shall be Zionists'

Axel Springer’s partnership with Palantir also aligns with the publisher’s longstanding public support for Israel. In a press release issued on 9 October 2023, the company said: "Axel Springer stands in unconditional solidarity with the State of Israel."

Israel and Palantir announced a strategic partnership in January 2024, three months after Israel began its genocide in Gaza. At the time, Palantir executive vice president Josh Harris told Bloomberg that "both parties agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions".

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The partnership was intended to "significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense".

Support for Israel is also embedded in Axel Springer’s corporate principles. One of the five core tenets in its corporate constitution states: "We support the right of the State of Israel to exist and reject all forms of antisemitism."

The position was reiterated by the Telegraph owner at the World Jewish Congress in May 2026, when Mathias Döpfner said: "I’m a goy [non-Jew] and I’m a Zionist. With all my heart, out of conviction, and with passion." He added: "We all shall be Zionists."

Axel Springer did not respond to Middle East Eye's questions about its collaboration with Palantir.

The full scope of the technologies Palantir provides to Israel remains undisclosed. However, the company has developed a range of AI-powered military technologies, including its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which Palantir says can assist armies with fast decision making.

Reports have also linked Palantir’s Maven Smart System to Israeli military operations in Gaza. The system analyses battlefield imagery, surveillance, logistics and intelligence data to identify targets. In an interview in December 2025, Karp said Maven had been used in Ukraine as well as "in recent operations in the Middle East". In March, The Washington Post reported that both the US and Israel had used Maven during their war on Iran.

Karp has also publicly acknowledged that Palantir's technology is used to kill. In April 2025, responding to accusations that the company’s systems were involved in the killing of Palestinians, he said: "Mostly terrorists, that’s true."

'Nothing further to comment'

Another major media company that has collaborated with Palantir since 2018 is the Swiss publisher Ringier, which owns dozens of media and entertainment brands across Europe and Africa.

Beyond Ringier itself, Karp and Ringier chief executive Marc Walder are also both involved in Digitalswitzerland, an organisation for digital innovation. Walder founded the initiative in 2015 and serves as its president, while Palantir is listed as a member organisation.

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According to Ringier’s website, the company uses Palantir’s Foundry software to "drive Ringier’s digital transformation and accelerate the transition to a data-driven, global media company".

Palantir has also said that, in addition to newsroom applications, Ringier uses Foundry to improve performance across the advertising departments of its media brands.

In May 2024 – several months after Palantir announced its strategic defence partnership with Israel – Ringier published its 2023 annual report, revealing that it had also begun using Palantir’s Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) as part of a five-year partnership with the company.

According to the report, AIP helps Ringier "improve relevant content and better understand user preferences" by integrating and processing large volumes of data. The technology also enables the "precise targeting and optimization of advertising strategies".

Ringier does not only use Palantir’s technology, it has also hired its own in-house Palantir expert. Last winter, the publisher advertised a position for a “Platform Engineer (Palantir Foundry)”, describing the role as “central to the stability, security, and evolution” of Ringier’s “enterprise Palantir Foundry & AIP platform”. The successful candidate would join the company’s infrastructure team.

According to the job posting, responsibilities included administering the Palantir Foundry platform, implementing data governance practices, cooperating with Palantir teams, and "developing and maintaining automated monitoring and alerting solutions using Foundry APIs". 

Asked about Ringier’s relationship with the tech company, chief communications officer Johanna Walser told MEE: “We have communicated the nature of our collaboration with Palantir via press release.

“Beyond that, there is nothing further to comment,” she added.

Palantir newsrooms

Last year, Fox News Media announced a partnership with Palantir to “build a suite of custom AI newsroom tools alongside its journalists”, according to an Axios report quoting Fox News Digital president and editor-in-chief Porter Berry.

The collaboration resulted in the development of three tools Palantir engineers “embedded into the digital newsroom’s daily workflow”. 

According to the report, one of the tools was designed to help reporters quickly familiarise themselves with developing stories. A second checks articles for errors and adherence to Fox News’s style guide, while a third analyses audience performance and provides insights on story optimisation.

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Fox News Media did not respond to a request for comment regarding its partnership with Palantir.

The partnerships between major newsrooms and Palantir have brought editorial independence into question.

While Fox News Media has described the arrangement as "strictly commercial", concerns have been raised about whether such relationships could influence editorial decision making, particularly in how these outlets report on Palantir itself.

Just a few months after Axel Springer acquired The Telegraph, the newspaper published an opinion piece titled "In defence of Palantir", followed by another article headlined "How Palantir became the left’s favourite conspiracy target".

It remains unclear whether these articles were connected to the broader relationship between Palantir and Axel Springer, or whether The Telegraph is using Palantir technology following the takeover. Axel Springer, The Telegraph and Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.

Serious questions have also been raised about whether newsrooms that use Palantir’s platforms are inadvertently training AI systems used in warfare. 

Fox News told Axios that its agreements "are structured to prevent its AI partners from training on or otherwise exploiting its content".

Palantir did not respond to questions about whether, or how, it ensures that civilian applications of its technology – including in media organisations – are not used to train or inform its defence-related systems.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/how-palantir-becoming-embedded-major-newsroom-operations

What the White House doesn't understand about Iran

 Seymour Hersh

 May 27, 2026

    

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard are ruthless, but they are not irrational, reports Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh.

The Iranian military and civilian leadership structure has so far befuddled the increasingly erratic US president who has lost the ability to speak straight to the American people. President Donald Trump, with the backing and bombs and assassinations from Israel and its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, went to war with Iran on February 28. To the surprise of American war planners, Iran responded by attacking US bases in the region as well as the oil- and gas-producing facilities of our allies and by shutting passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian leadership seems unwilling to give up its now essentially useless supply of enriched uranium. The Iranians, experts in chess as they are, seem secure in the belief that a rattled Trump, facing political ruin as gasoline and other prices soar, will decide at this politically contentious point to leave his ally Netanyahu at the altar - if he can somehow pull off a deal to get the oil flowing. More US and Israeli bombing of Iran - which is continuing this week, according to press reports - will not change the stalemate, nor will America’s and the world’s growing unhappiness with the bumbling leadership of the US president.

His Iranian venture was a failure of intelligence and military planning that has rattled the world’s economy and added to the political woes of Trump’s administration. It has also provided a windfall to the Democrats in Congress who may ride the president’s missteps to a victory in the fall midterm elections. It raises a question of what the extremists who control domestic policy in Trump’s White House - Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget - will do to prevent a massive Democratic victory in the fall congressional elections, which are administered by individual states.

I have been told again and again that some senior aides in the White House intend to disrupt the midterms with allegations of widespread election fraud and mismanagement by Democratic election officials, common claims made over the past decade by the president and other Republicans. They are debating whether to go further in a few key states - perhaps by mobilising the National Guard—to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House.

Such a disruption, especially if it involved the National Guard, would amount to another betrayal of the American people and the US Constitution by President Trump. We’d thought we’d seen the worst last winter in Minneapolis, with the ICE killings of two protesters, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Jeffrey Pretti. These abuses aroused indignation even among the feckless Democrats in Congress, who have otherwise done little to impede Trump’s agenda.

So far Trump’s leadership team gives little sign that it understands how the Iranian military and political systems work. Some light is shed on this by a recent study from the Israeli scholar Amatzia Baram. He did his compulsory military service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) tank corps, earned a doctorate, and became chair of the department of Middle East history at the University of Haifa. Like many Israeli scholars, he has advised the Israeli military and government.

Baram’s paper, “Inside Iran’s fragmented decision-making structure,” was published last week by Geopolitical Intelligence Services. It focuses on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he identifies as the centre of power in Iran today. It is generally seen in the West as a bastion of Shia fanatics who believe that dying in combat will bring them to martyrdom in the afterlife. Baram says that this is not so and argues that without a public opinion poll “there is no way to know.” He writes that “the available historic evidence points in a somewhat different direction.”

“During the Iraq-Iran War,” he says, that ran from 1980 to 1988, the Republican Guard fought bravely while also sacrificing thousands of Iranian children who went into battle in mass infantry charges, often without weapons, against fortified Iraqi forces. Yet, despite such fanaticism, Baram writes, the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard not only accepted a ceasefire sought by the leadership but urged such a settlement. “They were not suicidal,” Baram writes, and in 2013 they agreed with the leadership’s decision to negotiate the future of Iran’s nuclear policy with the Obama administration, and they went along with the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump would disavow in his first term.

Baram writes that the IRGC “may or may not be a highly ideological corps, but either way they know how to recognise the needs of the regime and act accordingly. They certainly are not willing to die for purely ideological reasons” - a belief that is not widely shared in Washington policy-making circles. “Their decisions,” he explains, “are interest-based. The question is: What are the IRGC’s interests?”

Baram says that the Revolutionary Guard’s leadership’s “first interests” are regime survival - even to the point that its troops massacred as many as thirty thousand protesters after widespread anti-administration demonstrations last winter. Baram argues that the Revolutionary Guard was humiliated by the recent Israeli and US bombing attacks, as well as by the assassination by Israel agents of many of the government’s leadership. At that point, he wrote, they were moved “by the understanding that they cannot afford another humiliation. To preserve their status, they need to be able to declare some victory.

“They therefore have four core goals, One: no immediate concession on the nuclear issue. Two: resources for the resuscitation of the economy, namely a complete end to the Western embargo. Three: iron-clad guarantees for the eternal end to the American-Israeli attacks. Four: de facto international recognition of their sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz.” Baram argues that the last goal has already been achieved, “as scores of vessels are coordinating their passage directly with Tehran.”

Baram admits that, as US and Israeli intelligence concluded early in last winter’s air war, that the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was slain in one of the early US and Israeli air raids, along with his wife and other family members. Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, though severely wounded - he is said to have been in a coma for months, and still may be - is nonetheless the new leader of Iran.

“Dead or alive, in coma or in his full senses,” Baram writes, “it makes no difference: At this point, [Mojtaba’s] decisions are being dictated” by the leadership of the Republican Guard. “Yet,” Baram says, “pledging allegiance to Mr. Khamanei is imperative for all regime luminaries, including President [Masoud] Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker and [Republican Guard] General Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, both of whom are relatively pragmatic and trying to reach an agreement with the US. They must know that the new supreme leader is not independent but it makes no difference. Iran is an ‘Islamic Republic,’” he writes. “Constitutionally and in the eyes of many Iranians, the Rule of the [Islamic] Jurist, the legacy of former Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is still binding. …All legitimacy flows from him.”

At the end of his essay, Baram’s tone shifts and he adds some personal words - he did spend years on active and reserve duty with the IDF - that include a bleak assessment of the present and an optimistic guess about the future:

“A true change of regime in Tehran that empowers moderates to abandon Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its territorial claim to the strait and its support for the Islamist proxies, is less likely anytime soon. The opposite is more likely: To keep down a deeply disgruntled population, the regime will be more oppressive. However, if President Trump insists on zero enrichment and an open strait, and the present regime rejects those demands, it will be hurling Iran into a brick wall.

“If it continues with its embargo, then given its present degree of institutional corruption and economic inefficiency, support for distant proxies, huge security-related expenses, and the added burden of the 40-day war of 2026, this regime cannot survive for more than a few years. Even within months, when the Basij [the Republican Guard’s street enforcers] disobey shooting orders, the masses will rise.”

 

Republished from Seymour Hersh Substack

https://pearlsandirritations.com/post/2026/05/what-the-white-house-doesnt-understand-about-iran/

Why have we not heeded Attenborough’s warnings?

Geoff Davies

Dr. Geoff Davies is an author, commentator and scientist. He is the author of A New Australia: Discarding Delusions and Organising for the Wellbeing of All (2023, https://betternaturebooks.net/my-books/regenoz/). He blogs at Thrival Economics https://thrivaleconomics.blog/.

 May 25, 2026

    

We have collectively created a self-propelling destructive system that no-one is in charge of.

The 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough reminded us of how he has championed the wondrous world of living things on this lonely little planet. For a long time the message was implicit: we need to preserve these miracles, which are also our life-support system. The message should have been obvious.

In more recent years he has been politically explicit: coral reefs, and many other ecosystems, are in grave peril and we need action to save them. He has spelt out the obvious because our global industrial-economic system has simply continued relentlessly to destroy the living world, despite the vast majority of people wanting the destruction to stop.

Why have the warnings of Attenborough and countless others not been heeded? Most attempts to answer this question do not get past all of the many misconceptions about how our social-economic system actually works.

We have built a system, a machine, that is self-propelling. Its job is to devour Earth’s natural resources and turn them into consumer products. No one is driving the machine, so requesting politicians and trillionaires to stop it has no effect.

Nevertheless the global consumption machine is a human creation. This means we can un-create it. To do so, we need to properly understand it, to find the off-switch, or the key underlying process, and then to intervene and stop it.

The problem is not just human greed, though greed is part of the problem. The feudal lords were greedy, and they made the lives of serfs miserably poor, but they did not destroy the world.

Another part of the problem is the financialisation of our productive activity. A farmer selling produce at a local market is simply satisfying a local need, but an agribusiness company selling grain or chicken meat into a national or global market is subject to additional imperatives.

The agribusiness must remain financially profitable even as it minimises its selling price, so as to remain competitive with other agribusinesses. In practice many companies minimise costs rather than selling price, and employ political influence to protect their profits, and also to protect them from lawsuits and other protests for polluting and for under-paying suppliers.

A key factor here is that public companies are required to maximise shareholder returns ahead of all other considerations, within loose and incomplete legal restrictions. Thus exploitation and pollution are rendered fair game to the extent a company can get away with them. Private companies are forced to follow, getting down and dirty if they want to survive.

Shareholders commonly know little or nothing about what their investments are enabling, especially if their investments are through a super fund or other large investment vehicle. So the production process is reduced to money, and the real world doing the primary producing fades into obscurity.

Financial markets enforce the competition. Shareholders can, at any time, pull their money and bet on another company. I was going to write ‘invest’ in another company, but the financial process is so divorced from real production that it doesn’t deserve the term. Over 90 per cent of financial market activity is speculative churning, and only a small fraction has anything to do with directing money to the most productive uses.

This competitive financial system is supported by a large propaganda industry devoted to persuading us that we are, or should be, selfish competitors and rugged individualists. Human beings in fact are highly cooperative, and this attempt at brute social engineering induces a lot of emotional and mental dysfunction.

Still there is one more key ingredient in our pathological world-eating machine. Jason Hickel, in his book Less is More, has identified artificial scarcity as the turbo-charger of the monster.

Artificial scarcity harks back to the enclosures that started in the Middle Ages. Aristocrats started fencing off commons. If peasants wanted to make a living they were forced to do so on the aristocrats’ terms. Crucially, some of the people would be shut out, landless and impoverished. Everyone inside the fence lived with the threat that if they didn’t perform they could be replaced with someone more compliant. Land, formerly accessible, was made artificially scarce.

The same dynamic has been implemented in many ways in industrial societies. Most obviously these days, employment is kept artificially scarce by maintaining a pool of unemployed, amounting to around 5 per cent of the work force. If you don’t keep running on the financially-driven treadmill, you will fall off and be replaced.

No-one is in charge of the world-eating machine. It is the collective creation of the wealthy and powerful. To stop it, we must identify key places where we can intervene usefully.

The commons need to be reclaimed. A universal basic income, for example, would be a big step in that direction that would allow people to exit the machine and live more healthily and less destructively. Governments can also return to providing services from natural monopolies like water and electricity, and funding human services for which private provision is inappropriate, such as aged care and child care.

Public companies should be required to put sustainability ahead of share-holder profit – there will be no profit if the resources required to sustain an operation are gone.

Predatory financial markets could be usefully tamed by implementing a modest transaction tax: something between 0.1 per cent and 1 per cent would remove the profit from much speculative activity and return financial markets more to the legitimate business of productively allocating capital.

The economy can be run to maintain full employment, as it was in the post-war decades, presided over by Bob Menzies. Unemployment averaged 1.3 per cent, a number regarded as impossibly low by modern mainstream economists. Prosperity was shared to an unprecedented degree (thanks also to the efforts of much-vilified industrial unions, to which Menzies did not object in principle).

There needs to be a recognition that competitive markets follow profit, even when it involves exploitation and pollution. For example, abuses in the privatised aged care ‘industry’ arise directly from firms cutting costs at the expense of care: their financial incentive is diametrically opposed to their alleged purpose. The claim that ‘free’ markets lead to optimal results is an unrealistic fantasy deriving from the abstract theory used by mainstream economics. Other beneficial reforms are also possible.

Currently we are charging blindly into calamity. We need to look fearlessly and forensically into our socio-economic system so we can regain control and save our civilisation.

Some unconventional claims have been made in this account. Their ready justification is given in my publication A New Australia.

https://pearlsandirritations.com/post/2026/05/why-have-we-not-heeded-attenboroughs-warnings/ 

The Rise of China and the Imminent US Exit: What Must the Arabs Do?

 

 by Ramzy Baroud | May 26, 2026 | 5 Comments

US President Donald Trum’’s state visit to China will go down in history as the day the United States finally acknowledged Beijing’s ascendancy as a global superpower. That acknowledgment does not need to be articulated in a formal statement; it can be clearly read in the subtext of diplomatic behavior, global perception, and shifting media coverage.

During the summit, Trump’s delegation – accompanied by prominent American corporate leaders – engaged with President Xi Jinping not from a position of absolute global dictation, but through a lens of defensive pragmatism. This transactional approach focused on securing bilateral trade commitments and preventing catastrophic economic friction.

The spectacle of the leader of the Western world navigating Beijing’s terms, while actively managing domestic economic anxieties, signals a profound shift. The traditional American posture of undisputed global hegemon has transformed into that of a major power among equals, seeking stable terms of co-existence with an unignorable rival.

The moment is comparable only to Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to Beijing, though the circumstances are entirely different. Back then, the US’s aim was to exploit the Sino-Soviet split and gain leverage over the Soviet Union in exchange for the normalization of diplomatic ties.

In 1972, China was an economically isolated, agrarian society recovering from internal upheaval. Today, Beijing is a financial giant boasting the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity, a critical hub of global supply chains, and a leader in next-generation technologies like Artificial Intelligence.

Militarily, the People’s Liberation Army has transformed into a powerful navy and high-tech force capable of denying access to the Western Pacific. This vast economic and military expansion translates into unparalleled global influence, altering the balance of power across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

All this in mind, Trump’s visit to China appears to be more about a declining empire attempting to manage its own contraction – a move that will likely lead to serious concessions.

Nowhere is the US’s dwindling status more apparent than in the Middle East. Decades of disastrous military campaigns, political alienation, and the unraveling of traditional alliances have eroded Washington’s credibility. Regional powers no longer view the US as an indispensable security guarantor, looking instead toward a multipolar future.

China is already the Middle East’s largest trading partner, with interests ranging from massive crude oil imports to sweeping infrastructure investments under the Belt and Road Initiative, cutting-edge telecommunications networks, and multi-billion-dollar clean energy grids.

Yet Beijing’s approach to the Middle East is fundamentally different from that of the US. The latter inherited the colonial legacy of Britain and France. Though Washington resists seeing itself as a colonial power, it behaves like one: leveraging military might to achieve political dominance and economic privileges.

China is different. Free from the baggage of a regional colonial past – and having historical memory as a survivor of Western imperialism itself – China’s expansion utilizes a completely alternative model: economic integration, development, and trade ties. However, this model could alter should circumstances change. If Beijing finds itself forced to defend its massive interests and energy routes, it may adopt a more muscular posture, similar to its current assertive strategy in the South China Sea.

US influence in the Middle East has been waning for years, and the latest US National Defense Strategy, published in early 2026, is proof of that. The document explicitly anchors American military priorities to a homeland-first posture and the containment of China in the Indo-Pacific. By formally invoking the Monroe Doctrine to focus on the Western Hemisphere and emphasizing conditional support for allies, Washington’s own policy papers reveal a strategic retrenchment and an admission of overstretch.

In this context, the destructive US-Israeli escalations against Iran cannot be seen as an American return to the Middle East, but as a desperate attempt at maintaining relevance. This closely echoes the 1956 tripartite aggression against Egypt by Britain, France, and Israel. Just as that ill-fated campaign was a desperate, violent attempt by dying European empires to demonstrate Western relevance after the devastating toll of WWII, current US-Israeli actions are the volatile spasms of a fading hegemony.

Considering China’s global agenda of expansion and integration, Beijing is likely to find itself the new global player in our region, although such a role can be shaped to mean partnership as opposed to dominance.

Aristotle, warning against the horror vacuii, proposed that every space must be filled with something; if the US exits or its presence continues to dwindle, that political space will not remain empty. For the Arab world, the future carries both a challenge and an immense opportunity. An American exit will create political margins that Arab countries must exploit and fill on their own terms. If they do not, others will.

Arabs nations, like others in the Global South, fully understand the danger of vulnerability during seismic global changes as great powers jockey for influence. They also recognize how US behavior – acting as Israel’s enabler while failing to dictate regional outcomes – only contributes to Washington’s strategic desperation.

This desperation could lead to a sudden, chaotic US exit, leaving an aggressive Israel to expand as a local hegemon, or prompt more unstrategic military campaigns with dire consequences. All of this leaves Middle Eastern nations hostage to a volatile US foreign policy, granting opportunities for an expansionist Israel to reign more chaos.

This moment, therefore, calls for total Arab political clarity and unity, insisting on real sovereignty and the freedom to act based on the interests of the people. This new agenda should prioritize human development and economic prosperity, alongside equality and social justice.

Moreover, Arabs should achieve a new political contract that rejects further foreign meddling or military interventions, holding any government that deviates from this principle accountable.

Finally, a unified Arab position must move past mere rhetoric into concrete action to hold Israel accountable, working ceaselessly toward the freedom of Palestine and ending the illegal occupation of Lebanese and Syrian lands.

Arab political outlooks must leverage these issues in all future integrations with global players, including China, to ensure that the century-long cycle of violence wrought by Western colonialism is over for good.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His forthcoming book, ‘Before the Flood,’ will be published by Seven Stories Press. His other books include ‘Our Vision for Liberation’, ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net

https://original.antiwar.com/ramzy-baroud/2026/05/25/the-rise-of-china-and-the-imminent-us-exit-what-must-the-arabs-do/

The Empire of the Slush Fund: How Trump Turned America into a Banana Republic with Wi-Fi

 https://x.com/BPartisans/status/2059366373826977834

Brainless Partisans 

@BPartisans

Translated from French

The Empire of the Slush Fund: How Trump Turned America into a Banana Republic with Wi-Fi

By

@BPartisans

The United States once loved to present itself as the moral beacon of the free world. Washington handed out lessons in democracy like a televangelist doles out promises of salvation: sanctions here, anti-corruption sermons there, selective outrage everywhere. Then Donald Trump came back. And suddenly, the beacon turned into a flickering neon sign above a political casino where the house always wins—especially when the house bears the owner’s name. The alarm signal is brutal: according to Transparency International, the United States is posting its worst score ever in the Corruption Perceptions Index, sliding to a humiliating 29th place worldwide, behind Lithuania, Uruguay, or Barbados. Yes, the America of “exceptionalism” is now looking in the rearview mirror at countries it treated just yesterday with an embarrassing diplomatic paternalism. The organization’s director, Maira Martini, summed up the situation with an almost clinical euphemism: “this downward trend could continue.” Translation: the termites are already in the foundations, and someone’s sold off the fire extinguishers. The most chilling part isn’t the corruption. Corruption exists everywhere. No. The most chilling part is the methodical disappearance of the mechanisms meant to fight it. In 2025, former federal prosecutor Erez Reuveni publicly accuses the Justice Department hierarchy of misleading the courts and ignoring judicial decisions. Result? Fired. The inspector general looks the other way. The Office of Professional Responsibility does too. It’s like a second-rate mafia series: those who speak end up out on the street, while those who stay quiet keep their seat at the table. Then comes Trump’s financial brand of Trumpism, this doctrine where political loyalty increasingly looks like a cashback program. A proposed $1.8 billion fund, indirectly fueled by public money and intended for January 6 rioters and the MAGA ecosystem, sparked outrage in Congress. Representative Jamie Raskin didn’t mince words: “massive abuse of public funds,” “highway robbery.” At this point, cronyism isn’t even wearing a mask: it’s parading under the spotlights. But the true genius of the Trump system lies elsewhere: turning the presidency into a premium subscription for personal enrichment. Trump-branded wine sold through a system tied to the state, profits funneled to the Trump Revocable Trust, a G20 summit awarded to a Trump hotel complex where foreign governments and the U.S. administration will pay the presidential family directly—even post-Soviet oligarchs would’ve found that a bit too flashy. Trump accused USAID of being “criminal.” Delicious irony: while he was yelling about draining the swamp, someone was already siphoning off the water… to fill his private swimming pool. America isn’t just facing a moral crisis anymore. It’s experimenting with Corruption 2.0: fewer suitcases of cash, more public contracts, bought loyalties, and safeguards methodically put down like old pets. The American Dream? These days, it’s mostly a loyalty program reserved for the king’s friends.

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6:09 AM · May 27, 2026

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https://x.com/BPartisans/status/2059366373826977834