Source: Popular Information
by Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, & Noel Sims
“The Trump administration is engaged in a multi-pronged effort to undermine the integrity of and confidence in the 2026 election. At the center of the effort is President Trump himself. In a Monday appearance on Dan Bongino’s podcast, Trump said: ‘Minnesota is a mess. There’s something in the water up there. I won the state three times, but I got no credit for it. I won that state three times but it’s a rigged state. Really rigged badly with the Somalians, and the Somalians and the theft.’ The Democratic presidential candidate won Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen, which he continues to make repeatedly, have been exhaustively debunked.” (02/03/26)
“Trump and his top officials’ blame-the-gun comments certainly risk backlash from a key Republican constituency, but they also put the gun-rights movement in a no-win position. The heel-turn was foreseeable since this isn’t the first time Trump has proved unreliable on guns. Trump backed the idea of stricter gun laws three times during his first term.” 902/03/26)
“Spain has set a new tourism record, welcoming nearly 96.8 million foreign visitors in 2025, according to figures released Tuesday by the National Statistics Institute. The number of international visitors witnessed an increase of 3.2%, compared to 2024, which saw 94 million tourists. Spain is one of the world’s most popular destinations, where tourism accounts for 12.6% of the country’s gross domestic product. It has ranked third as the world’s top tourism earners, after the United Kingdom and France, on the U.N. World Tourism Barometer.” (02/03/26)
“Shifting justifications for a war are never a good sign, and they strongly suggest that the war in question was not warranted. In the Vietnam War, the principal public rationale of saving South Vietnam from communism got replaced in the minds of the warmakers — especially after losing hope of winning the contest in Vietnam — by the belief that the United States had to keep fighting to preserve its credibility. In the Iraq War, when President George W. Bush’s prewar argument about weapons of mass destruction fell apart, he shifted to a rationale centered on bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. Now, with President Donald Trump threatening a new armed attack on Iran amid a buildup of U.S. forces in the region, the Washington Post’s headline writers aptly describe the rationale for any such attack as being ‘in flux’ and, for the online version of the same article, ask, ‘what’s the mission?'” (02/03/26)
“The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” in February 2017. Some found it pompous, but it reflected a widespread theory about how authoritarianism could come to America. This theory, based on the experience of democratic erosion in nations like Hungary and the work of scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that autocracy wouldn’t be imposed by armed men beating and killing the regime’s opponents. Authoritarian rule, would, instead, be installed through a gradual process of subversion. … But it turns out that predictions of creeping authoritarianism both underestimated and overestimated MAGA. Almost everyone, myself included, underestimated how far MAGA would go in engaging in open violence and abuse of power against those it considers enemies. On the other hand, we overestimated the movement’s impulse control, its ability to mask its tyrannical goals until its power was fully consolidated.” (02/03/26)
“At least 30 people have died and another 324 injured due to heavy snowfall along the Sea of Japan coast over the past two weeks, the Fire and Disaster Management Agency said Tuesday. The highest death toll was seen in Niigata Prefecture, with 12 fatalities, followed by six in Akita Prefecture and four in Aomori Prefecture. Many deaths involved people attempting to remove snow from around their homes. … The Sea of Japan coast continued to see heavy snowfall on Tuesday as a result of wintry pressure patterns bringing freezing cold air above the Tohoku region.” (02/03/26)
“The cybercrime unit of the Paris prosecutor’s office on Tuesday launched a search of the French offices of social media platform X. The raid was connected to an ongoing investigation launched in January 2025 over alleged algorithm manipulation and illicit data extraction that has since expanded to look into allegations of complicity in spreading child sex abuse materials and sexualised deepfakes. … The Paris prosecutor’s office said it launched the investigation after being contacted by a lawmaker alleging that biased algorithms in X were likely to have distorted the operation of an automated data processing system.” (02/03/26)
