The Dictatorship
Musk and Vance’s praise of an extreme-right German party is a truly disturbing development
Alarm bells sounded last week when Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump adviser Elon Musk praised the far-right German party Alternative for Deutschland (AfD)just weeks before that country’s snap national elections are scheduled to take place.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk posted on X, prompting backlash from conservative and mainstream German leaders and the global Jewish community about a key Trump adviser’s endorsement of a party that has flirted with Nazi and white supremacist slogans and espoused dehumanizing and hateful rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims. In the wake of the criticism, Musk doubled down, writing the next day that “AfD is the only hope for Germany.”
Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions.
Vance’s more tacit endorsement for AfD came in the form of a post responding to claims that AfD is dangerous. “It’s so dangerous for people to control their borders,” Vance tweeted sarcastically Saturday, implying support for the party’s anti-immigration positions. “So so dangerous. The dangerous level is off the charts.”
Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions. The AfD has called for mass deportationsargued that children with disabilities should be removed from regular schoolsand runs social media ads blaming immigrants for crime and sexual violence. One anti-immigrant ad run by the AfD showed the belly of a pregnant white woman with the phrase “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.” Another campaign billboard used a 19th century painting of a slave market — depicting a nude, white woman having her teeth inspected by turban-clad, brown men — to warn that Europe could become “Eurabia,” a reference to a conspiracy theory favored by white supremacists.
State-level German domestic intelligence authorities formally monitor some local branches of the AfD as extremist organizations that are working against German democracy. One of the party’s regional leaders has been fined multiple times by German courts for using a banned Nazi phrase“Everything for Germany” (Alles für Deutschland), prompting another politician to refer to the AfD itself as a “Nazi” party earlier this year.
Even other European far- right parties have disavowed the party as too extreme. In May, the far-right coalition in the European Parliament expelled the AfD after its leading candidate stated that not all Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel, the guards in World War II concentration campus) were criminals. On Dec. 20, an AfD supportera doctor and self-described “former Muslim” who was angry at the “Islamification” of Germany, drove his car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing five, including a 9-year-old girl, and injuring dozens.
The overall risk of an AfD victory in the upcoming February snap election is very low. Most Germans view the party negatively, and thousands have marched in protest of its normalization of racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Still, the AfD has steadily gained voters, although it’s currently polling in second place nationally (with 19% support), trailing a conservative alliance that is widely expected to win.
The bigger risk is the normalization of democratic interference that falls outside any system of checks and balances.
Musk has already demonstrated that his social media engagement can shape political outcomes. In the weeks before and after the U.S. presidential election, he used his platform X to help amplify false election claims and push his preferred Cabinet picks for Trump’s administration. Vance has used X and other public venues to describe professional women who prioritize careers over children as choosing a “path to misery,” deride Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies,” share widely debunked claims about immigrants eating pets in Ohio, and argue that American men have suppressed their masculinity.
We now have two key incoming administration officials using a private social media platform to tacitly or explicitly endorse an extreme foreign political party in ways that could impact a foreign election and geopolitics more broadly.
That should worry us all. America’s founding fathers sought to build a system of checks and balances to ensure that no single arm of government could operate without constraint or accrue too much power. But those founders were unable to imagine a world in which the most influential axes of power might not be in any single branch of government, but in privately-owned virtual platforms with unimaginable global reach.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). Her most recent book is “Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right.”
The Dictatorship
Honduras weighs shift in China-Taiwan ties as Trump pushes for US dominance in Latin America
WASHINGTON (AP) — Three years after Honduras parted ways with Taiwan and forged diplomatic ties with China in hope of economic gainshrimp farmers in the Central American country are in revolt.
Their sales to Taiwan fell to a mere $16 million in 2025, down from more than $100 million in 2022, and the Chinese didn’t fill the void as hoped.
“We were deceived,” said Javier Amador, executive director of the National Aquaculture Association of Honduras, as he described the promises from former President Xiomara Castro of better opportunities with China when she severed ties with Taiwan and opened an embassy in Beijing in 2023.
Nasry Asfura, who was elected president with the backing of President Donald Trump and sworn into office in January, has ordered a review of agreements between Tegucigalpa and Beijing. This has fueled expectations that Honduras will distance itself from China, in line with a Trump administration campaign to reduce Chinese influence and economic clout in Latin America.
Asfura is expected to join other regional leaders for a security summit Trump is hosting at his golf course near Miami on Saturday.
“Honduras is probably the most likely country in the world right now to switch diplomatic recognition back to Taiwan,” said Francisco Urdinez, an associate professor at the Political Science Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. “President Asfura campaigned on it, he met Trump at Mar-a-Lago within days of taking office, and his vice president has confirmed the government’s intention.”
“But it’s not as simple as flipping a switch,” he said, noting that Honduras has signed more than a dozen agreements with China since 2023.
China and Taiwan were both diplomatic in responding to questions about a potential shift in allegiance.
Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said Honduras has better prospects for its long-term development since establishing diplomatic ties with China and both countries have “reaped fruitful cooperation outcomes in various fields.”
The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, the island’s de facto embassy in Washington, said Taiwan will continue to advance relations with Honduras “in an open and pragmatic manner, without preconditions, and on the basis of equality and reciprocity.”
The Honduras government has not responded to a request for comment.
Taiwan as a barometer of influence
Latin America’s ties with Taiwan have gained attention because they have become a barometer of the power balance between the world’s two largest economies.
Beijing considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory, while Washington, despite its lack of formal ties with Taiwan, is the island’s strongest partner and has vowed to help Taiwan keep its formal allies, seen as necessary for the island to eke out a legitimate space on the global stage.
Of the 12 governments that still recognize Taiwan’s statehood, seven are in Latin America, including Guatemala, Paraguay and five in the Caribbean.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during a visit to Guatemala in February, thanked the country for sticking with Taiwan.
“It’s not easy in a world where there is a lot of pressure to change that recognition and to break those ties, but you have always stood firm,” Rubio said, as he promised to work with Guatemala to deepen its economic ties with Taiwan.
Rep. John Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, had a similar message when hosting a delegation from Guatemala in November.
“While too many countries bow to the bullying of Beijing, Guatemala stands with the people of Taiwan and prospers through a strong trade relationship,” Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said. “I support Guatemala’s efforts to oppose Chinese aggression in our hemisphere and look forward to working with Guatemala on areas of common ground.”
U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bill that could provide $120 million over three years in assistance to Taiwan’s partners.
Thousands of shrimp farmers lose their jobs
In 2016 and 2017, Panama, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador all switched their allegiance from Taipei to Beijing. Nicaragua flipped in 2021, and Honduras in 2023.
The loss of the Taiwanese market led to the closure of at least 95 shrimp farms and one processing plant, the loss of more than 25,000 direct and indirect jobs, and the loss of millions of dollars in foreign exchange for the Central American country, according to Amador.
“Most of the companies closed in 2024 because many couldn’t ship to other markets, and China hasn’t been the answer, because we’re not competitive for them,” he said.
Amador hopes the president restores ties with Taiwan for the benefit of the 330 shrimp farming companies that are still operating.
“The issue of returning to Taiwan is not about recovering what we have already lost, but about whether we are going to start over to reactivate industry, improve productivity and generate foreign currency and employment,” he said.
Honduras’ new president has a dilemma
For Asfura, who campaigned on severing ties with Beijing, there’s more to untangle. China has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investments in Honduras.
Enrique Millán-Mejía, senior fellow on economic development at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, said Honduras could confer “a special status” on Taiwan and withdraw from Beijing’s global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative, which has helped the Chinese government open markets and extend its influence.
Last year, Panama became the first Latin American country to quit the Belt and Road Initiative, prompting an angry response from Beijing, which accused the U.S. of using “pressure and coercion” to undermine the cooperation.
Urdinez said Asfura may go further and rebuild formal ties with Taiwan.
“Asfura’s calculus is fundamentally about the U.S., not about Taiwan per se,” Urdinez said. “Taiwan recognition is essentially the price of admission to Trump’s good graces.”
___
Gonzalez reported from Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
Iran’s regime has named Mojtaba Khamenei the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, succeeding his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike at the start of the ongoing Middle East war.
Several of Mojtaba Khamenei’s other family members were also killed in the initial strikes, including his wife, Zahra Adel, his mother, Mansoureh Khojasteh Bagherzadeh, and his son, according to Iranian state media.
The ascension of Khamenei to his father’s seat of nearly absolute power suggests a determination by regime hard-liners to dig in against internal and external pressure for reform, even as U.S. and Israeli bombs continue to fall.
It also creates the awkward appearance of a ruling family leading an Islamic Republic that supplanted the monarchy of the shahs after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
In an interview with ABC News on SundayPresident Donald Trump reiterated that any new Iranian leader will “have to get approval from us.”
“If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long. We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it,” Trump said.
But Trump did not rule out accepting a new Iranian leader with ties to the old regime.
Khamenei, the late ayatollah’s second son, becomes just the third person to hold the title of supreme leader, after his father and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the republic.
Like his father when he took power in 1989, Khamenei, 56, is not an ayatollah but a mid-level Shia cleric. The elder Khamenei had the law changed to make himself an ayatollah essentially overnight – a source of tension that never quite went away during his brutal reign of nearly 37 years.
Until now, Khamenei has been considered a quietly powerful figure who has played a behind-the-scenes role in the regime. He has reportedly amassed a vast real estate portfolio through shell companies with several properties in Dubai, Frankfurt, Mallorca and on London’s “Billionaire’s Row” worth more than $100 million combined, according to a Bloomberg investigation.
In addition to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard, his new role also means he is the de-facto leader of the so-called Axis of Resistance, a collection of paramilitary groups within the region united against the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas in Gaza, as well as smaller groups in Iraq.
Regardless of who the leader would have been, they have a target on their back as U.S. and Israeli officials have vowed to assassinate them. Several high-ranking Iranian officialsincluding Defense Minister Amir Nasirzadeh and Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammad Pakpour, have already been killed.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on X on Wednesday that “every leader appointed by the Iranian terror regime to continue and lead the plan to destroy Israel, to threaten the United States and the free world and the countries of the region, and to suppress the Iranian people—will be an unequivocal target for elimination.”
President Donald Trump has said that “someone from within” the Iranian regime may be the best choice to assume power after the U.S.-Iraeli military campaign, but added that “most of the people we had in mind are dead.”
The new leader was chosen by Iran’s Assembly of Experts, the governmental body comprised of 88 clerics established at the beginning of the revolution. The group’s building in Qom, a city south of capital Tehran, was hit in an airstrike on March 3.
In an interview with MS NOW on March 4, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Majid Takht-Ravanchi did not confirm if Mojtaba would succeed his father, but said that “a new body has been established, comprised of three people, so they will be in charge until the new leader is elected,” adding that the group was “working to prepare the ground for the election of the new leader.”
Cabrera questioned Takht-Ravanchi’s definition of an “election,” asking, “Will the people of Iran have any say on who leads this country next? Or is that predetermined?”
“The people have already chosen that body who is going to elect the supreme leader,” Takht-Ravanchi said, calling the process “very transparent” and “democratic.”
Trump had repeatedly and publicly urged Iran to accept his terms for a nuclear weapons agreementamid fragile negotiations mediated by Omani diplomats, and threatened an attack if it did not. More than 1,000 people have been killed in Iran since the war began, according to U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). Iran has struck several U.S. military bases and civilian sites throughout the Middle East in retaliation, with at least six U.S. service members killed and numerous other deaths around the region from Iran’s retaliatory drone and missile strikes.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Press freedom organizations are celebrating the court decision invalidating Kari Lake’s tenure at Voice of America and nullifying the mass layoffs she ordered last year.
Reporters without Borders’ Executive Director Clayton Weimers, said the Saturday evening ruling “confirms what we knew when we first filed this lawsuit almost one year ago: that Kari Lake and the Trump administration acted unlawfully in gutting Voice of America (VOA). There is still more to unpack in this decision and work to be done to ensure VOA’s journalists get back to work. Beyond the immediate implications of the decision, this case is proof that fighting for press freedom matters.”
Lake, a former local news anchor and failed gubernatorial and Senate candidate, had tried to dismantle Voice of America, the U.S. government-funded international broadcaster created during World War II to provide news to a global audience, particularly to countries with little to no press freedom. Lake left her position as CEO on Nov. 19.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found that Lake was ineligible to serve as acting CEO of the United States Agency for Global Media, Voice of America’s parent company, when she was appointed to the position in July without Senate approval.
“The Court finds that these expansive delegations were an unlawful effort to transform Lake into the CEO of U.S. Agency for Global Media in all but name,” Lamberth wrote, adding that “Lake satisfies the requirements of neither the statute nor the Constitution.”
Lake called the decision “bogus” and vowed to appeal it.
Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the country’s largest trade union for public sector employees, called the ruling “a major victory for the federal workers who Kari Lake and this administration have been attempting to illegally fire for the last year.”
“Voice of America employees are dedicated public servants who provide hope for freedom to those living under oppressive governments around the world,” Saunders said. “Yet time and again, this administration has attempted to strip these proud AFSCME members of their collective bargaining freedoms and their jobs.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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