Ishaan Tharoor
@ishaantharoor
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Global affairs columnist @WashingtonPost, anchor of The Post's WorldView column and newsletter on int'l politics. Dad. New Yorker. Victoria concordia crescit.
DC
Joined June 2009
Incredibly honored to be the recipient of the 2021 Arthur Ross Media Award in commentary.
Ishaan Tharoor's keen and nuanced analysis of global politics in the Washington Post's daily column and newsletter Today's WorldView attracts a huge daily audience of readers from around the world. @ishaantharoor @washingtonpost
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Mexican President Sheinbaum fires back at Trump in a statement: "Seventy percent of the illegal weapons seized from criminals in Mexico come from your country. We do not produce these weapons, nor do we consume synthetic drugs. Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost.
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Israel destroyed all the universities in Gaza.
I get a strange inkling that all these Columbia and UCLA students running around yelling “Free Palestine” would not be jumping at the opportunity to do a semester abroad in Gaza.
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Japan received NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern with two Kiwis balefully swaying to music.
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I just voted for the first time in my life. I told the lady registering me that I had naturalized this year and hadn’t voted before and she yelled out “first time voter” and all the poll workers and volunteers clapped and cheered. Thanks, America.
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Something is odd about this. Looks like a group of subject matter experts. Where are Biden's relatives? How are they supposed to lead the country like this?.
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Appalling that a nation would give another nation the armaments to bomb civilians.
John Kirby: "Our information indicates that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea recently provided Russia with ballistic missile launchers and several ballistic missiles. Russian forces launched at least on of these North Korean missiles into Ukraine."
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Here's the full statement:. Mexico City, November 26, 2024.Dear President-elect Donald Trump,.I am writing to you regarding your statement on Monday, November 25, concerning migration, fentanyl trafficking, and tariffs. You may not be aware that Mexico has developed a.
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And now he's dead.
Anchor : “Why don't you go with your family to South Gaza?”. Palestinian Doctor Hammam Alloh, Al-Shifa Hospital : “And If I go, who treats my patients? We are not animals, we have the right to receive proper health care. You think I went to medical school and my postgraduate
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I do not understand people being outraged by this. It’s no surprise that 18-year-olds at an elite northeast university are mostly progressive. Do we exercise such monitoring of views over police precincts? Hedge funds? The military?.
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The Elizabeth Warren DNA gambit encapsulates in microcosm what the Dems have been prone to for so long: A credulous insistence that fact-checking can dispel talking points made in cynicism and bad faith.
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Just a reminder that a fifth of Lebanon's total population are refugees. A small country collapsing under a series of calamities is coping with more than any current Western society could imagine.
This is devastating. Lebanon was already spiralling, in the midst of a political and currency crisis with accelerating COVID-19 cases. People were going hungry - and that's the city's largest grain elevator right there.
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I finally watched the whole thing. It is excruciating and ghastly and deserves lengthy commentary in its own right.
“You had the Nobel Prize?” Donald Trump learns of Yazidi activist Nadia Murad. Here’s how the interaction unfolded
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The reverse argument — that Trump voters ought to have empathy for those who did not vote for him — is never made. Why?.
Stop insulting Trump voters and their concerns, @AbernathyGary writes. Talk to them.
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A simple fact that can't be overstated: In no other country in the world is climate change the subject of partisan debate.
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The influential Israeli settler movement -- the driving force that helped bring Netanyahu into power -- constantly makes clear that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is their goal. It's unabashed, open, and Western officials shamefully try to minimize what it reflects.
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Shot, chaser
LIVE from Al-Shifa hospital in #Gaza — Kids trying to have fun by drawing on papers while the bombing is going on everywhere around them. (On IG: @motaz_azaiza )
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Maybe I’ve missed it but I haven’t seen the same sort of lengthy profiles of these voters and their anxieties that accompanied Trump and his supporters in 2016.
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This @AFP photo from Aleppo is one of the most haunting, powerful images I've seen in a long time. A novel in one shot.
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It’s part of the current asymmetry of US politics that the GOP winning the popular vote by a 2 percent margin can get represented as an epochal landslide and cause for a staggering mandate, whereas the reverse would never be interpreted that way.
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Israel killed a journalist who was a US citizen. and the US did effectively nothing.
Til now, the IDF has just killed Palestinian journalists, those from other Arab states, and Al Jazeera workers. Now they've killed a CNN producer's family. Will this be enough to get the US establishment to treat this like they treated Kashoggi's murder?.
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A colleague forwarded me what the IDF shares with reporters re the lists of imprisoned Palestinian women and teenagers up for release. All labeled terrorists, despite some not even being charged with anything and others picked up in murky circumstances and brutalized in jail
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Hard right Brazilian Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo, who believes climate change is a Marxist conspiracy, is speaking at @heritage right now. Currently complaining about left "infiltration" in the system.
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We are here — the dumbest moment yet in US politics — thanks to every centrist and liberal pundit who thought it was worth their time to punch down on college students and elevate silly campus freak-outs into a national crisis.
DeSantis: As president, I recognize that the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress.
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Some personal news:.🎶This land is your land, this land is my land🎶
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There's an eerily practical purpose to it, though: To impede HK govt/Chinese efforts to use facial recognition tech to track the protesters.
These lasers Hong Kong protesters are pointing at riot police through billowing tear gas, it's like something out of a sci-fi movie. #AntiELAB
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This will be lost amid the other coverage, but Petro's speech against the war on drugs was arguably the single most important #UNGA address delivered today.
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This is the most FT mistake imaginable.
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Two million people live in Gaza.
Chilling words from Israeli Defence Minister:. “As of now No electricity, no food, no fuel for Gaza .”
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The 18-34 demographic shift to me is the most startling. At the risk of painting with a far-too broad brush, it's an entire generation that's trending toward post-literacy — that doesn't read full articles, doesn't read books, gets its information from bits and bobs of video.
Losing with some typically means winning with others and vice versa. Losing big with everyone across the board is nearly unprecedented and hard to conceive of as even possible.
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It's been frustrating to watch US journalists and politicians describe what's happening in their country like this. Ordinary people in Baghdad and Kabul have shown far more resilience and strength in far more adverse circumstances. American exceptionalism dulls the mind.
.@MarthaRaddatz: "It is so horrible to know, we are in America where this is happening, on Capitol Hill. I'm not in Baghdad. I'm not in Kabul. I'm not in a dangerous situation overseas. We are in America." . LATEST:
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Mount Pleasant, DC has had an hour-long pot banging session post-curfew and it’s only getting louder
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Tactics from Israel, now in India.
House of two suspects- Muzzamil and Abdul- involved in the protest and violence in UP's Saharanpur being demolished by the local administration.
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Amazing how the same people in the West who get up in arms about welcoming any refugees or migrants also expect governments in the Middle East to take in 1 million+ people overnight, or think it doesn’t matter whether those people get to live in what they see as their homeland.
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Some in the American “anti-imperialist” left are embarrassing themselves in defense of a literal imperialist, but they are of minimal relevance and have no constituency. It is the pro-Putin rhetoric of prominent people on the Trumpian right that is a stark sign of things to come.
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It is genuinely remarkable that we've spent a whole news cycle on Ilhan Omar's two very short tweets about AIPAC influence and completely disregarded POTUS's grotesque apparent joke about the genocide of indigenous peoples or his casual bigotry re disastrous "Latin Americans.".
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"We're rolling out Nakba 2023" — Israeli minister just flatly says it, while many in the West tie themselves up in knots to avoid seeing things as they are
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For these comments, Israel is trying to cancel the UN Secretary General.
António Guterres: "it is important to also recognise the attack by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of occupation. their people displaced & their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution. have been vanishing"
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The "worst atrocities since World War II" claim is a reminder that a lot of the discourse around this war is just Westerners/Europeans talking to each other.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tells the U.N. Security Council that the Russian military must be brought to justice for war crimes. In a video appearance, Zelenskyy accused the Kremlin's troops of the worst atrocities since World War II.
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This Moroccan team just radiates charisma and personality. How can you not love them.
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VERY STRANGE that votes getting counted changes the numbers of votes that have been counted.
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Astounding bad faith from the GOP. It's rather uncontroversial to suggest that Stephen Miller has white nationalist politics. But when @IlhanMN says it, it's somehow anti-Semitic??.
During my time in Congress before @IlhanOmar got here, I didn't once witness another Member target Jewish people like this with the name calling & other personal attacks. In 2019 though, for @IlhanOmar, this is just called Monday.
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They claimed a photo of a dead Palestinian baby was a "doll" but it was a dead Palestinian baby.
Over the weekend, we shared an article based on faulty sourcing. The article in question did not meet our editorial standards and was thus removed. We take this matter seriously and will be handling it internally in order to prevent similar incidents from reoccurring. We.
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As a Bengali, I feel entitled to say that this image -- of a man plundering a large fish from the deposed prime minister's residence -- is one of the most Bengali pictures of all time
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FBI now investigating Kansas man's murder of Indian engineer as a "hate crime." These GOP fliers sent about the state last year are relevant
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The Harvard students, the random BLM account, some Twitter leftist with a Pokemon avatar—they all said stupid, dumb things. But it's amazing how much more energy a lot of people are expending on denouncing them than this de facto genocidal rhetoric from a sitting senator.
We’re in a religious war and I unapologetically Stand with Israel.
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Bolsonaro attacks his predecessors who were "all applauded" when they came to the UN and made "totally disengaged" speeches. He's fully aware of how much of the international community sees him in a negative light.
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In a normal, healthy democracy, there would be no doubt that Burr would immediately resign.
BREAKING: SEC says Sen. Richard Burr had material nonpublic info re COVID economic impact. After Burr dumped stock, he called his brother-in-law. His brother-in-law called his stock broker **the next minute** .
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A day after a schmuck failed at blowing himself up in NYC, the White House is using his immigration background as evidence to cause pain and heartache to countless innocent people. A day after a white American killed 58 people and injured more than 500, what did the WH do?.
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Anecdotally, from my experience, this is a relatively new thing: The most bloodthirsty, genocidal comments in the wake of Hamas's awful rampage that I'm seeing here are all coming from right-wing, pro-BJP Indians.
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Israel has shot/killed more journalists in the space of a year than the world's worst dictatorships this century.
Israeli army shot our colleague, @AJArabic cameraman Fadi Al Wahidi while working in northern Gaza. He’s currently in critical condition. The moment I saw these images, I remembered my colleague and dear friend Shireen Abu Akleh laying same way on the ground after she was shot
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Dehumanization on a mass scale.
תיעוד אווירי של המבצע להכנסת סיוע הומניטארי לצפון רצועת עזה, המראה כיצד ההמון פלסטיני התנפל על המשאיות וכתוצאה מכך נהרגו עשרות מצפיפות, דוחק ודריסה>>
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Our happy news:.
Some big news: Currently on maternity leave with our new bundle, Kahaani❤️. Kahaani means story in Hindi and @ishaantharoor and I are so grateful to belong to hers.
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When the Holocaust Museum has to issue a statement condemning Trump supporters
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This week, a senior European official visiting Washington said to me that the far-right party in their country, which has neofascist origins, would be in the moderate wing of the GOP. All other factions in their country, the official said, would be like US Democrats.
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A "limited operation" that has displaced a quarter of the entire country.
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@Heritage @GeneralMourao Bem-vindos, meus novos seguidores brasileiros. Assine aqui a minha newsletter :)
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The worst, absolute worst phenomenon generated by this website is the emergence of weird yet influential grifters who make sweeping, unserious claims about history and culture that then compel everyone else to engage said claim as if it merits any consideration. An endless spiral.
The Muslim golden age is a false myth on multiple levels: it consisted in mere preservation of Greek and Roman texts at best (which usually entered west European civilization by other routes anyway); almost ALL of the great figures of the Muslim Middle Ages/Cordoba etc were.
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@Heritage @jairbolsonaro I've never heard Araujo speak before and it's striking how rambling and incoherent his remarks are. Now says something about 21st century socialism being Gramsci meeting the drug cartels. Now is namedropping Marcuse and the whole Frankfurt school. Now is talking abt Foucault.
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Absolutely no quit here in the shadow of the world's most powerful authoritarian state. There's the common assumption that HK's democractic hopes are, at least in the long run, doomed. But we are watching in real time a society rise up and stand against the tide of history.
Hong Kong protesters occupy roads around Gov't HQ again, as huge anti-extradition law rally escalates .
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Just this headline makes Imran Khan's visit to DC a win.
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And specifically thank you Columbia Heights poll workers for being so awesome and DC for having civilized voting laws that allow disorganized and clueless people like me to register in-person up till Election Day.
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Just remember the rounds of obfuscation (and lies) before they admitted that an IDF soldier was responsible for the death of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
This tweet was just edited to remove video @Israel presented as evidence that Gaza hospital was struck in an outgoing barrage fired by militants — likely because NYT reporter @AricToler had already noted the clip was recorded about 8pm local time, 40 minutes after hospital strike.
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Amazing Mandalorian sign guy at the celebration in McPherson Square
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A territory home to 2 million people is being systematically destroyed before our eyes and yet a bewilderingly large segment of the commentariat is whining about protesters in Western cities and campuses.
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It took a while, but the hysteria over campus protests finally led to journalists talking to the protesters (rather than caricaturing them).
Here’s an interview with a Columbia protester named Ava where she talks about why she’s there, anti-Semitism, and the historical echoes of this movement.
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Your phone has a camera in it.
Wish I could share with everyone the beauty and majesty of being in the White House and looking outside at the snow filled lawns and Rose Garden. Really is something - SPECIAL COUNTRY, SPECIAL PLACE!.
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An old Trump tweet is like a beautiful ancient artifact, so lovely to raise from the earth and hold in the light
Attention all hackers: You are hacking everything else so please hack Obama's college records (destroyed?) and check "place of birth".
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"Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings," an Israeli security official tells Israel's Channel 13.
גורם ביטחוני אומר לאלון בן דוד: ״עזה תהפוך בסוף לעיר אוהלים. לא יהיו בניינים. התמרון הקרקעי יפתיע את חמאס״.
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The Afrikaners had a word for this.
1/2 The Supreme Court of Israel just held that IDF forces can search Palestinian homes in the West Bank with no warrant, although homes of Israeli settlers are protected by due process. Why? Inter alia b/c different legal regimes apply to both populations. Call it what you will.
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What’s horrific is how many people I see on this website who seem to think this unironically.
Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas
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My struggles with a lackadaisacal boomer today: @ShashiTharoor insists on going to Parliament with hordes of other people pressed together in close quarters even as Indian government enacts significant measures to begin imposing social distancing. This is nuts.
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The moral courage and clarity to take this position after losing your parents to Hamas terror is extraordinary, and wholly absent in some of the overheated discussions taking place far away from Gaza.
"I'm not crying for my parents - I am crying for those who will lose their lives in this war. We must stop the war." . Powerful testimony from @maozinon on @BBCNews - just days after his parents, Bilha and Yakov, were killed by Hamas.
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Unless you are racist or stupid or both, it shouldn't make any sense to ask a prospective federal judge of South Asian Muslim background to offer some political interpretation of the situation in Israel at his hearing.
I asked President Biden’s judicial nominee today, Adeel Mangi, whether Jews are “colonial settlers” in Israel. He refused to answer the question. It’s unacceptable this is the type of judge the Biden administration nominates.
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Tens of thousands words on the conflict from folks like me sitting in the US mean nothing compared to the account here
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There's a special kind of cynicism of the online people who are right now looking away from what's actually happening on the ground in Gaza to make the conversation about what a bunch of irrelevant campus leftists are saying.
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So, the biggest "threats to conservatism" are a functioning democracy and more healthy civic discourse.
Lindsey Graham says the biggest "threats to conservatism" are election officials making it easier for people to vote and social media companies cracking down on disinformation.
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This is literally the story of America
.@TomiLahren: "You don't just come into this country with low skills, low education, not understanding the language and come into our country because someone says it makes them feel nice. That's not what this country is based on." @WattersWorld
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I don't care if it's whataboutism, but if a Russian air force officer set himself alight in Moscow or a Chinese PLA officer in Beijing in protest of their government, there would be more attention in the US than there is now for Bushnell's self-immolation in DC.
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It's also just incredible to me that people are trying to scrub any use of the word "decolonize" in the academy, media and elsewhere. Decolonization is the recent historical experience of the majority of people on this planet.
The 25 courses that mention the word “decolonize” in their titles or descriptions are 0.1% of the course catalog. That’s not an exaggeration.
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Here’s Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset (or parliament) today… “Burn Gaza now”
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Foreign journos sitting next to me booed Trump's attack on the press.
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@Heritage @jairbolsonaro This is a fascinatingly ideological speech for a foreign minister abroad (and somewhat incoherent). "Our civilization is losing its symbols," he says. Now is talking about theories of "hegemony" and lecturing about Rosa Luxembourg and "symbolic confiscation.".
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The enthusiasm here is something to behold. And for all those warning about "erasing history": Was it a problem when statues of Lenin and other communist leaders were taken down post-1989? Erecting a statue is itself an act of history; toppling a statue is one, too.
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An American teenager was killed by Israel in the West Bank just days ago. What was the response?. Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian journalist and an American national, was gunned down by Israeli soldiers. What was the response?.
BREAKING: President Biden warns, "If you harm an American, we will respond" after U.S. strikes Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria.
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Glorious.
🇩🇪🗳 Leader of far right AfD: youth should “learn more German folk songs, more German poems” in school. Kid reporter: “I think we already have to memorize plenty of poems in school. What’s your favorite German poem?”. AfD leader: “I can’t think of one.”.
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I genuinely do not understand a human being who perceives briefly having to wear a mask at a grocery store as the height of oppression and tyranny.
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@Heritage @jairbolsonaro This is amazing. Unclear if he's ever read critical/neo-Marxist theory beyond Wikipedia entries, but he's asking a lot of an audience at the Heritage Foundation to know what he's talking about. Okay, now to the meat of his views:.
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In a brief chat with Norwegian PM @erna_solberg, I asked her about Trump's encouragement of immigration from Norway: "Today there are more Americans coming to Norway than Norwegians going to America.".
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The problem with so many folks laughing from afar about the hysterics of Indian cable news is how deeply unfunny its effect has been for Indian democracy and society
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Biden went from "we'll make Saudi Arabia a pariah" to "can you pretty please not have a secret high level murder squad?".
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