Noem urges Poles to elect Trump ally as Cpac holds its first meeting in Poland
The two candidates vying to replace Polish President Andrzej Duda offer starkly different visions for Poland: Rafal Trzaskowski, the pro-European Union liberal mayor of Warsaw, and Karol Nawrocki, a conservative historian backed by the Law and Justice party who is sceptical of the EU.
'We need you to elect the right leader,' Kristi Noem, the US Homeland Security secretary and a prominent ally of the US president, said in a speech at the event.
'You will be the leaders that will turn Europe back to conservative values.'
Mrs Noem described Mr Trzaskowski as 'an absolute train wreck of a leader' and Mr Nawrocki as someone who would lead Poland in a style similar to Mr Trump.
She opened her speech saying: 'I just had the opportunity to meet with Karol and listen: he needs to be the next president of Poland. Do you understand me?'
She also implied that electing Mr Nawrocki would strengthen the US-Poland relationship.
'If you (elect) a leader that will work with President Donald J Trump, the Polish people will have a strong ally that will ensure that you will be able to fight off enemies that do not share your values,' she said.
'You will have strong borders and protect your communities and keep them safe, and ensure that your citizens are respected every single day.
'You will continue to have a US presence here, a military presence. And you will have equipment that is American-made, that is high quality.'
The United States currently has some 10,000 troops stationed in Poland, a mission aimed at reassuring the front-line Nato nation worried about Russian aggression.
'Donald Trump is a strong leader for us, but you have an opportunity that you have just as strong of a leader in Karol if you make him the leader of this country,' Mrs Noem said.
Cpac chairman Matt Schlapp opened the proceedings with a speech claiming that conservatives around the world are locked in a battle against 'globalists', whom he described as enemies of faith, family and freedom.
Mr Schlapp claimed Cpac had stood by Mr Trump throughout his legal battles and declared that similar threats were playing out in countries like Poland.
'Are you happy that America is getting closer to being great again?' Mr Schlapp asked the audience.
'Did the re-election of Donald Trump bring you joy?'
He added: 'When one of us is under attack, the rest of us must come to that person's defence.
'The globalists intend to take each one of us out one by one — to shame us, to silence us, to bankrupt us, to ruin us, to make our kids turn against us.'
He said that is why it was important to 'win all these elections, including in Poland, that are so important to the freedom of people everywhere'.
The conference took place in Jasionka, near the southeastern Polish city of Rzeszow, located in a region of Poland that is staunchly conservative.
Jasionka has also been the hub for US and Western weapons sent to Ukraine following Russia's full-scale invasion more than three years ago.
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The Independent
24 minutes ago
- The Independent
A look at the top buyers of Russian oil as Trump pressures China and India to stop buying it
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Telegraph
25 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Murdoch takes on Trump in press baron's last stand
When Rupert Murdoch stepped down as executive chairman of both News Corp and Fox just under two years ago, it was seen as a cautious first step into retirement for the nonagenarian media tycoon. Although still ultimately in charge of his empire, Murdoch has handed day-to-day responsibility over to his son Lachlan. Meanwhile, he has focused his attention on succession planning, including a bitter legal battle with his own children over the family trust. But any suggestion that Murdoch might slide into a quiet dotage now appears premature. Donald Trump's $10bn (£7.5bn) defamation lawsuit against Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), is aimed squarely at Murdoch himself. The legal challenge is the latest salvo in Trump's increasingly aggressive assault on the media. It also sets up what will likely be a final battle for the world's best-known newspaper tycoon – and one that could define his legacy. As one of his former executives puts it: 'The American president has taken on Rupert Murdoch, an extraordinary media force for the last 50 years ... It's a box office story.' Trump's lawsuit relates to a WSJ story alleging that Trump sent the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein a 'bawdy' birthday card complete with a drawing of a naked woman. Trump, who called the Journal's editor Emma Tucker from Air Force One in an effort to shut down the story, has branded it 'fake' and is seeking $10bn in damages. Trump has sniped at Murdoch, insisting the tycoon wants to settle. In a further provocation, lawyers for Trump last week filed a motion demanding an expedited deposition of Murdoch, citing the fact that the mogul is 94 and 'has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life'. The scale of these alleged health issues was laid bare in a 2023 Vanity Fair article. It revealed Murdoch had been taken to hospital with a severe case of Covid-19, alongside several other incidents. Alex DeGroote, a media analyst, says the prospect of a trial in which Murdoch would have to take the stand is 'surely not a prospect Dow Jones and the WSJ want to entertain'. He adds that the tycoon may have been shaken by his recent legal clash with Dominion Voting Systems. In a case that signalled the end of Murdoch's cordial relations with Trump, Fox in 2023 agreed to pay $787m to settle a lawsuit with the voting machine company after the channel repeated the president's false claims that the 2020 election was rigged. That said, Murdoch would have a decent chance of success in any legal battle. Unlike in Britain, US libel laws are stacked in favour of the defendant. Trump will have to prove 'actual malice', meaning the WSJ knew the story was false and deliberately published it anyway. It is a high bar for Alejandro Brito, the Miami-based sole practitioner Trump has hired to represent him, to meet. 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Stephen Colbert branded the settlement a 'big fat bribe' and was axed from the network shortly afterwards. By contrast, though, many believe Murdoch will not roll over and that the WSJ will stand by its reporting. '[Trump] assumes someone will settle and pay him an improbable amount of money, and I suspect that's not Murdoch,' says Stephens. The former executive adds: 'So many people think that Murdoch is the suppressor of a free press. Here you've got a very good example of the fourth estate standing up to the American president.' The source also points to the fact that two key figures – Robert Thomson, the Australian News Corp boss, and Emma Tucker, the British editor of the Journal – may be more willing to stand up to the US head of state than their American colleagues. Another senior figure who previously worked at News Corp agrees that Murdoch will 'close ranks' in defence. 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Murdoch's status is unique. Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, is undoubtedly a mogul and a far wealthier one, but with tech rather than media values. His tendency to intervene in his publication in ways that have pleased Trump has already come under scrutiny. 'This is the last of the big tycoons in newspapers,' says Murdoch's former lieutenant. 'There's just a lot less money to be made in newspapers than there was and so it won't produce these very powerful media tycoons in a world where the media landscape is pretty fragmented and atomised.' 'Any number of people might have more money than Murdoch and they might even desire to have that level of influence, but they may not know how to do it. It's a skill to remain relevant and ultimately what he's done is stay relevant.' As a result, the newspaper proprietor in its traditional sense – as a wielder of political power and influence – seems an endangered species. 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The Guardian
25 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Progress by Samuel Miller McDonald review – humanity's greatest myth?
Everything is in decline, argues the geographer Samuel Miller McDonald. Democracy and free speech are in freefall. Inequality is soaring, with the 1% scooping up ever-larger shares of global wealth. These days, the US has a Gini coefficient – the most common international measurement of inequality – on a par with slave-owning Ancient Rome. Maternal mortality rates for American millennials are three times higher than those of their parents' generation – and this in the world's richest society. Global life expectancy is falling. So, too, are food standards. Outside a few bourgeois sourdough enclaves, real bread has vanished. In its place we get mass-produced, spongy, tasteless 'pseudo-bread' – as Guy Debord lamented in The Encyclopedia of Nuisances. In an earlier age, there would have been bread riots. Now? Just muted indigestion. What accounts for our complacency? False consciousness, claims McDonald in this sparky polemic against the myth of progress. We have been hoodwinked by elite propaganda. The 'progress narratives' of the ruling classes assure us that history only moves forward, that we should trust the system and surrender agency to our betters. Even when protests have erupted, they have mostly sought modest tweaks rather than revolution. But progress, argues McDonald, is a false prophet. History hasn't followed a tidy upward arc. Moreover, what counts as progress has often produced huge collateral damage, including ecological devastation. There was a time when human beings had a 'commensalistic' relationship with nature, turning on veneration rather than exploitation. Embracing egalitarianism, most primitive societies didn't have hierarchies of class or gender. Then, around 3000BCE, the 'parasitic' economy emerged. Mesopotamians were the first to behave as though nature was no longer to be communed with but subdued. Religion took the place of animism, preaching dominion over the Earth. For McDonald the Epic of Gilgamesh is the first piece of progress propaganda: in it, the eponymous hero kills the forest guardian, tames the wild, and builds a city, filling it with bread and beer to the unbridled joy of his acolytes. The Book of Genesis follows suit. God commands Adam and Eve to 'subdue' the Earth and tame every living thing. Later, Christianity – by then a far cry from Jesus's radicalism – proved useful to Constantine, who saw in monotheism a handy formula: one god, one empire, one emperor. Fast-forward a millennium, and capitalism picks up the baton. Progress, now secularised, means capital formation: wealth siphoned from the masses to the enlightened few, who return to us the bric-a-brac of modernity – antibiotics and air fryers and suchlike. The logic of extraction remains unchanged; nature and proletariat alike suffer. McDonald's book is a satisfying corrective to the smugness of thinkers such as Steven Pinker, who insist that conditions only ever improve. Yet he oversells his case with sweeping judgments. His account of religion, for instance, amounts to little more than a crude reprise of Marx: it's all opium for the masses, a tool to pacify resentment. But that's far too simple. From the Peasants' Revolt to the Taiping Rebellion, Christianity has supplied radicals with a script for inverting power structures. Equally damaging is McDonald's uncritical endorsement of David Graeber and David Wengrow's vigorously contested claim that Enlightenment ideas came from Indigenous America – specifically from the Wendat diplomat Kondiaronk – a theory historians such as David A Bell have dismissed as fantasy. On the latter's account, the French nobleman Baron de Lahontan wasn't so much lifting his ideas from Kondiaronk as putting his own progressive views into the mouth of a naïf – a common literary device in the early modern period. Readers may find all the doom-mongering a bit much. Indeed, there's a whiff of the swivel-eyed prophet about McDonald. And like all doomsayers, he is sure that the end-times are nigh. 'Climate change and ecological collapse,' we are told, 'are very likely to cause political fragmentation that nullifies legal and cultural precedents like [slavery] abolition … If market economies continue, there is little reason to assume they will not return to trade in indentured human beings.' Very likely? The confidence is grating and ignores the simple fact that we no longer live in a labour-intensive economy. If anything, AI is making the return of slavery less, not more, likely. McDonald's dismissal of the possibility of mass investment in nuclear energy in a 'neoliberal' world has already aged poorly, with enormous sums being poured into small modular reactors this year. All of which goes to show that the predictions business is a tough one: things can just as easily go the other way. Progress: A History of Humanity's Worst Idea by Samuel Miller McDonald is published by HarperCollins (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
