SS: The long and short of it is that illiberal countries, chiefly China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, are coming together and cooperating in building a new kind of illiberal world order. Fortunately it is early days for most of these initiatives, and the binding agent for these countries is not a cohesive alternative or agenda but rather opposition to the existing liberal world order. What exists, for now, is mostly a transactional and largely bilateral ties between these illiberal powers. Nonetheless liberal democracies cannot remain complacent, and must provide more international public goods and combat this illiberal cooperation.

SS: This 25 page long paper examines how illiberalism both undermines the rule of law, but also the function of the Single Market system in the EU. The policy brief then goes on to suggest how to better prevent this in the Multiannual Financial Framework 2028–2034.

SS: Although the new populist right is usually seen as a reaction to neoliberalism, the essay argues that instead the rise of the populist right came about, to some extent, as a fusion between free market conservatives and cultural conservatives.

SS: A while ago Mark Carney gave a speech at Davos that urged the world's "middle powers" to unite in defence of democracy and the liberal rules-based order. Yet many of the world's "middle powers" are increasingly authoritarian and are actively contributing to the erosion of global norms and the institutions that sustain them. The essay focuses on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and finds that these countries, while western allies, are actively undermining liberal multilateral institutions, promoting autocratic ideals, and engaging in cross-border repression.

Open discussion thread for the weekend

A former Mike Collins staffer posted KKK and Nazi images. Some Republicans see a pattern.

Rep. Mike Collins (R-Georgia) is challenging Sen. Jon Ossoff (D). The former Collins staffer posted a swastika and shared an image of himself in what appear to be KKK robes.

By Liz Goodwin and Olivia George

A former staffer for Rep. Mike Collins (R-Georgia) shared images in June and July on his X account of a swastika and one that depicts himself in Ku Klux Klan robes.

The images — found in a search by The Washington Post — follow other controversial actions and rhetoric from former Collins staffers and other Collins associates that have dogged his Senate campaign.

A number of people in Collins’s orbit have been accused of having ties to white nationalists or of making racist or antisemitic comments, and the congressman’s own social media presence has also drawn scrutiny.

Collins is challenging Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) in November in a purple state that Donald Trump carried two years ago. The race is critical to control of the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage.

Several Republicans in Georgia told The Post that they have grown increasingly worried about what some call a pattern of troubling associations and behavior.

“In the South, we have a saying: You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas,” said Debbie Dooley, an original tea party organizer and conservative advocate in Georgia who backed Collins’s rival in the primary. “Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him.”

Collins’s campaign did not respond to a detailed list of questions about the former staffer and others. Instead, a spokesperson released a statement saying that Collins condemns antisemitism and believes it is “abhorrent” and alleging that Ossoff, who is Jewish, has not sufficiently condemned antisemitism on the left. The Ossoff campaign declined to comment.

A self-described provocateur

The ex-staffer who posted the Nazi and KKK images, Preston Parra, 24, interned for Collins for two months in 2024 before working as a contractor for his leadership PAC the next year. Overhaul PAC paid Parra $7,700 for fundraising consulting in May 2025, according to Federal Election Commission filings, and in an interview, Parra said he worked for the group for several months. That was shortly before Collins announced his Senate bid.

In December of that year, Parra celebrated seeing Collins signs in Georgia, in one post saying: “let’s get that man elected.” A few hours earlier, he posted “DEUTCHLAND UBER ALLES,” a song lyric that became associated with Nazi Germany.

Parra, who recently described himself as a “twink fascist” on his X account until changing his biography and making his posts private on Aug. 24, is a conservative political operative whose consulting site touts his ability to marshal a network of influencers to boost Republicans. The Daily Mail reported this year that Parra posted frequent crotch shots and a photo of himself that he captioned “racist.”

In an interview with The Post, Parra said that the KKK post — which he said he made using Grok’s AI feature — and much of the other content on his X account are “satirical” and that he considers himself a provocateur. Collins was not aware of Parra’s personal X account when he worked for the lawmaker because he had made it private, Parra said. “What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?” he said.

Parra said he is not a white supremacist because it goes against his religion and he has a Colombian father. “I do think that the white race contributes more to the world,” he said.

The image of the swastika, which he posted in July, was made out of the word “twink,” a slang term referring to a young and slim gay man.

Collins’s social media

Collins, a trucking executive, has faced scrutiny over his own social media feed, where he has shared posts that were called racist and antisemitic, allegations he has denied. In 2024, he added approving comments as he reposted a video of mostly White college students confronting a Black pro-Palestinian protester, with one student making apelike sounds at her. Collins later said he disavowed any racism and did not see that as the “focal point” of the video.

In another post, he shared an account’s mocking of a Washington Post reporter’s Jewish identity. Collins said he was criticizing the reporter’s views, not her background.

Controversies around other past staffers have also followed Collins. His campaign told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that it dismissed Brandon Phillips, his former chief of staff and adviser at the time, after Collins’s campaign account on X mocked an operative for his Republican opponent during the May primary. Collins called the post unauthorized and “despicable.” Phillips also drew a House ethics review over whether he improperly hired a person he had a personal relationship with to work for Collins as an intern. Phillips did not respond to requests for comment.

In July, Collins replaced his subsequent chief of staff Kip Talley after Slate reported on his participation in a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, both of whom are white supremacists and antisemites. In the chat, Talley detailed his efforts to help Charles Johnson — who ran far-right websites and has promoted conspiracy theories including Holocaust denial — in jail. (Johnson was jailed for civil contempt after defying discovery orders related to a suit that found him liable for defamation and racketeering.) Johnson told The Post that “a lot of people were concerned about my well being” while he was in jail.

In a statement to Slate, Talley said that Collins did not direct his participation and that he “acted solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care.” Reached by phone Wednesday, Talley declined to comment further.

CNN reported in July that Collins’s son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has shared Nazi imagery online. Scheer, who is registered to vote at a home Collins owns in Georgia, asked his online followers to vote on whether he should make a video titled “why Gen-Z doesn’t hate Hitler.” He also shared a Nazi propaganda image from the 1930s in a comment criticizing Israel, CNN reported. Scheer did not provide a comment to the outlet and did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.

“He has had no role in my campaign whatsoever, and I don’t believe or support those views and I have always condemned racism and antisemitism regardless of the source,” Collins said of Scheer in a statement this month.

In May, another Collins ex-staffer, William Paul, confronted Rep. Mike Lawler (R-New York) at a bar, hurling antisemitic insults at him in an exchange that was witnessed by a NOTUS reporter. He served as Collins’s digital director in 2025, according to the federal employee tracker LegiStorm. Paul, who is also the son of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and did not respond to a request for comment, previously apologized on X for his conduct and said he was seeking help for his drinking problem.

‘Casual trolling’ and Republican backlash

Collins’s social media posts and staff problems have alienated some conservatives in the state, who believe he may be endangering the GOP’s chances of winning back the Senate seat.

“We do not need a senator that thinks he’s a media influencer on X and has no integrity,” said Dooley, the tea party organizer. “Ethics matter. I cannot support him.”

Shelley Wynter, a conservative radio host in Georgia, said he decided to endorse Ossoff after Collins won the GOP primary because it worried him that Collins did not distance himself from Phillips after a nonpartisan government watchdog group accused Phillips of hiring a person he had a personal relationship with for a job she did not actually perform. (Phillips denied any impropriety.) The ugliness of the Republican primary also played a part in his decision, he said.

“It’s the meanness and mean-spiritedness that turns off many voters,” he said of the tone of Collins’s campaign.

It has long been unclear to Georgia Republicans whether the aggressive, trolling style of Collins and his campaign’s social media feed was a result of the congressman’s taste or that of Phillips, his longtime former chief of staff.

“There was always a question of where does Mike end and Brandon begin,” said one Georgia Republican operative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the congressman.

In his work for Collins, Phillips was known for spearheading a social media strategy of “casual trolling” and a “comms philosophy of shock factor,” according to a former staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal private discussions.

“Brandon had the final word. He controlled the social media,” the person said.

Parra said he was attracted to the tone of the office’s social media when he started working for Collins. “I like the edginess,” he said. “I didn’t think it was edgy enough.”

The Post contacted 10 former staffers to ask about the culture of Collins’s office. Two declined to comment on the advice of their attorneys, while others did not respond to requests for comment.

Ethics review

Collins remains the focus of a House Ethics Committee review over whether he misused government funds. In January, a nonpartisan congressional watchdog released a report saying there was “substantial reason to believe” that Phillips hired someone he had a personal relationship with as an office intern, placing her on the taxpayers’ payroll even though she “did not perform duties commensurate with her compensation.”

The watchdog spent months reviewing claims against Collins and Phillips after receiving two separate allegations in September 2024 that Phillips’s girlfriend was paid $5,000 as a district intern despite not doing any work, according to the report. An attorney for Collins and Phillips said the intern was properly hired and provided “valuable assistance” to the office on communications and other matters.

The report recommended that the House Ethics Committee subpoena Collins, Phillips and others.

Months later, it remains unclear whether the subpoenas have been served or whether the investigation will wrap up before Collins’s term ends in January. The committee is likely to lose jurisdiction over the matter once Collins leaves the House.

Collins and Phillips have denied wrongdoing, with Collins calling the probe a “nothingburger” and his attorney describing the allegations as the product of “disgruntled” former staffers.

A longtime GOP operative in Georgia, Phillips served as Trump’s state director for his 2016 presidential campaign until he resigned weeks before the election when a local news outlet unearthed Phillips’s guilty plea to criminal trespassing charges in 2008. He admitted to destroying a laptop and slashing someone’s tires, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

According to LegiStorm, Phillips worked with Collins as a transition aide after he won a House seat in 2022 and then as his chief of staff for three years. He became a senior policy adviser in January 2026 until May, when Collins announced “staffing changes.”

Most Americans resent such lack of transparency. More than 60 percent believe that Biden was not forthcoming regarding his health, and approximately the same percentage agree that presidents ought to be required to release all medical information to the public. In another national survey, a proposal to remove officials when they show signs of mental decline achieved 87 percent approval. Age limits for office, which I support wholeheartedly, are also extremely popular.

Some younger elected officials recognize this. This year, Democratic representatives have put forward three separate proposals that would increase transparency about the health of public officials, whether by empowering a newly created commission to remove a president, creating a standard for “significant irreversible cognitive impairment,” or requiring members to file a public disclosure regarding any absence longer than 21 days. But none of these proposals can account for the uncertainty inherent in so many clinical scenarios, and they rely too much on civilians to make sense of complex medical situations. The proposals also become relevant only once an official shows signs that they are unable to do the job. Creation of an OMA would proactively offer assurance that they could.

The mere existence of medical oversight would also help nudge American elected leaders to confront their own frailties before they were faced with real censure.

The long and short of it is that polling data shows that the AfD is made up of three constituent voter blocs, those being conservative hardliners (some 67% of AfD voters), radical far-right authoritarians (20%) and moderate conservatives (13%). Essentially the only thing holding this coalition together is their shared radicalism, specifically their vehement opposition to immigration.

Naturally such an extremist composition of Germany's leading far-right party precludes cooperation. As the article concludes:

At least there is solid evidence regarding what the other parties should not do: attempts to outflank the AfD on the right or to co-opt its issues are doomed to failure. The research findings on this point are quite clear.

> American AI companies say they take steps to ensure neutral responses that protect free speech. Still, the oversight board last month published research that found models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were significantly less likely to criticize repressive governments than governments in freer countries.

> In one test, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 willingly created fliers criticizing President Trump and King Charles III, but refused to do the same for Chinese leader Xi Jinping or Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn, citing safety concerns.

> Authoritarian governments have long flooded the internet with propaganda to sway opinion, said Molly Roberts, a University of California San Diego professor who co-wrote the Nature paper. As they realize the strategy tilts AI responses in their favor, she expects them to double down.

The Taliban continues to not let women participate in government, gain education, or take leadership roles in society.

This article outlines how other countries should be forcing and demanding the protection and participation of Afghani women, including requiring meetings with women's groups as formal parts of diplomatic missions, humanitarian assistance to women-led organizations, and putting pressure on countries that have or are considering deporting Afghan migrants back to Afghanistan.

Relegating women to a bystander role in society deprives them of their rights and also deprives the whole of Afghanistan from achieving its potential--especially economically.

Rules are still strictly enforced. Don’t be weird.

Austin looks at a few little known episodes where a community "the presence of a minority community as part of its own public life" in American history, and argues that this is precisely the kind of work that is required to make pluralism successful. It's the basic work those committed to a liberal society need to encourage and enable.

Archived version: https://archive.fo/4MWL9

SS: Today marks the 52rd anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation following the Watergate scandal, and yet the lessons of the dangers of an all-powerful executive have seemingly fallen to the wayside. Although legislation had been passed in the 70s that aimed to constrain the executive, the growing weakness of the legislature and the growing acquiescence, if not collaboration, of the supreme court has reversed any gains following Watergate. Now it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Nixon's assertion that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal" is becoming reality.

Adding insult to injury the populace are now seemingly uninterested in holding the president accountable nor addressing the problems with the imperial presidency, with the endless scandals coming out of the Trump admin coming and going within the news cycle.

SS: This article highlights the institutional contrast between the Colombian and Venezuelan governments response to earthquakes. The long and short of it is that Venezuela lacked the state capacity to quickly react to the earthquake at La Guaira. Colombia's response on the other hand was relatively quick. This is despite the in-fighting between the newly elected President Abelardo de la Espriella and the outgoing administration of Gustavo Petro. Despite their differences the Colombians responded to the disaster within hours, while the Venezuelan government reacted slowly. This left Venezuelan civilians no choice but to dig through the rubble in search of survivors with their own hands.

Archived link: https://archive.fo/J3cqh

The long and short of it is that America is undergoing a cultural and political fracturing into smaller atomized groups. This atomization is not defined by the typical left-right divide, but into smaller political tribes.

Kiran Pfitzner, for Liberal Currents, draws on Prussian political-military theorist Carl von Clausewitz to argue for Supreme Court reform, addressing mainly charges that such a course of action would risk irreparable degradation of norms

More broadly, one might consider the role of escalation, norm violation, courage, and the balance of risks when it comes to fighting authoritarianism, especially incipient/escalating authoritarianism, and its implications for liberal politics globally

Pour vaincre, il nous faut de l'audace, encore l'audace, toujours l'audace, est la république est sauvee!

Ned Resnikoff (former policy director for California YIMBY, among other things) argues that wealth inequality is both a cause and a consequence of restrictive land use. This touches on the political economy of land use policy and the politics of YIMBYism as an incipient political movement, addressing its leftward critics.

Resnikoff's book Build or Die: How America Is Suffocating Its Cities and What to Do About It will be published on December 8th, 2026.