I recently had to bury a blog post I loved very much. Last month I read For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, and was inspired to write this grand piece about the morality of the Spanish Civil War, changing views towards Communists in the 1930s-40s, and how we could apply these lessons today, all in one continuous argument. I think it was simply too much, but with so much unused research to draw from I can’t quite drop the subject yet. A through-line that kept appearing in my reading was this phrase: “The Fifth Column”. 

        In my last blog post, I broke down some of the similarities between the Trump-owned social media app Truth Social and Thomas Jefferson’s party newspaper the National Intelligencer. Like Trump’s social media app, Jefferson’s paper was overwhelmingly used as a tool to spread partisan influence between the inner ranks of their party.

Recently, Twitch streamer Hasan Piker’s name was mentioned at the stand of the United Nations General Assembly, by Israel’s own Benjamin Netanyahu, using Piker’s past statements as a weapon against New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

        In the wake of the January 6th riots, Twitter, Facebook, and many other apps took the decisive measure of banning President Trump from their platforms, on account of his supposed involvement. Many wondered if the bannings would silence the social media-savvy President, but Trump had a different plan: if they don’t let you in, do it yourself.

    Today, social media is an ever-present part of daily life, which makes it difficult for us to consider the potential harm it may be causing us. Australian economist Andrew Leigh and mental health researcher Steven Robson found that, among minors, social media correlates with a rise in mental health disorders, self-harm hospitalizations, and suicide attempts, along with sleep disruption, sexual harassment, cyberbullying, and attention/focus problems.

In George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice series, the Iron Bank is a quietly menacing figure that lingers in the background of Westeros’s civil war. The exact power wielded by the world’s most powerful financial institution is made clear when the Queen Regent Cersei Lannister informs the Iron Bank that she would delay repayment indefinitely. In response to Cersei’s default, her creditor throws its financial heft behind another rival, quadrupling his forces overnight and shifting the war’s balance in one fell swoop.