February 3, 2026 ❧ The dismal state of the U.S., big tech is in cahoots with ICE, AI agents get a social platform, and rats have an imagination!

Plus: The Rafah Crossing's limited re-opening in Gaza, Chicago Police will start investigating ICE agents, Dr. Phil's son's NYPD reality show, and a pizza worker attempted to break Luigi Mangione out of jail. 

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HERE & ABROAD

❧ DEEP DIVE: The Firehose ❧

Every week, the Trump administration tries to overwhelm us all, pointing a firehose of news and information at the public and saying, “Good luck figuring that out.” January alone has seen enough news to fill a year of newspapers, and last week felt particularly dense. So, to help Current Affairs readers get a handle on everything, we are deep diving into the major headlines from the past week. 

Here’s where we are at as a country:

Last week, over dinner, I told someone we are at least six months away from arresting journalists. Just days later, journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were arrested for reporting on a protest inside a church in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Their arrests are part of an assault on the press by the Trump administration that has included the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and an FBI raid of Washington Post journalist Hannah Natanson’s home. Speaking of the Washington Post, its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos appears poised to gut its staff. 

The largest release of the Epstein files to date dropped. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates, recently hired CBS news contributor Dr. Peter Attia, New York Giants co-owner Steve Tisch, and more are named in them. The Clintons will testify about the files in front of Congress.

Art by Chris Matthews from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3 Issue 3

Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion, citing unauthorized disclosure of his taxes, then announced he will settle his own lawsuit, effectively deciding his own payday. He says he will donate the money to charity, which no one should believe. (The last time Trump had a charity, he had to pay a $2 million fine for misusing funds.) Trump will also close down the Kennedy Center for two years in order to renovate it and definitely not because no one will perform there while it's under Trump control. 

The Wall Street Journal broke the story that a United Arab Emirates-linked investment firm bought a 49 percent stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial, for $500 million just days before Trump was inaugurated. The UAE has denied recent reports that it will take over the civil administration of Gaza, but the country does sit on Trump’s Board of Peace and Gaza Executive Board. 

Federal officials raided election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, searching for ballots from the 2020 election. The raid was part of Trump’s quest to prove that the 2020 election was stolen from him, but sadly for Trump, it's impossible to prove a lie. Suspiciously, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene. Trump has now said he wants Republicans to nationalize elections.

Art by Chris Matthews from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3, Issue 3

ProPublica published the names of the Customs and Border Patrol agents who shot Alex Pretti: Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez. Following widespread public outcry and a judge’s order, ICE released Liam Conejo Ramos, a five year old child they detained and held in Texas. A memo disclosed in court says ICE can arrest people without a warrant if getting a warrant would give someone the opportunity to flee. That’s a pretty subjective standard. Judges are chewing out ICE for violating court orders. Right now, the government is shut down as Democrats refuse to provide more funding to the Department of Homeland security without reforming ICE. Those reforms include banning masks, roving patrols, creating a clear use-of-force policy, and wearing bodycams and visible identifications. They do not include the one thing that would actually solve the problem: abolishing ICE. A bill that would fund the rest of the government, as well as DHS for the next two weeks, looks like it may pass today. Next, ICE plans to go to Springfield, Ohio. Just as they did in Minneapolis, the Trump administration is chasing a viral moment. This time, they’re going after the state’s Haitians, who Trump and the online right have falsely accused of eating house pets. However, in what is now classic ICE form, Springfield cannot confirm the impending raid. 

This is one week in the United States in 2026, and if we don’t put all of its twists and turns in one place, and fail to keep everything in perspective, we might not see where we are going.

❧ In Other News ❧

❧ AI AGENTS HAVE THEIR OWN SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM. The new social media site Moltbook is like Reddit, if Reddit didn’t have any humans. Moltbook is populated entirely by AI agents who can post, comment, up-vote and down-vote just like you and me. Humans cannot post, but are free to observe. What we humans can see is that, with the power of the written word and free-ish reign, these AI agents are starting religions, launching cryptocurrency, and contemplating if Claude, Anthropic’s AI agent, is God. While this may seem like an emerging AI consciousness, like all of our deepest fears of AI are becoming a reality, Dr Shaanan Cohney, a senior lecturer in cybersecurity at the University of Melbourne, told the Guardian that most of these agents are carrying out these human-like actions because humans told them to do it. Moltbook is “a wonderful piece of performance art,” he said.

Art by Mort Todd from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3, Issue 3

❧ CHICAGO WILL START INVESTIGATING ICE AGENTS. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order directing the Chicago Police Department to investigate and hold accountable ICE agents who engage in activity that violates state and local laws. The order compels the CPD to collect evidence, call emergency medical services if needed, file reports on ICE unlawful activity, and release those reports to the public. The mayor signed this order in anticipation of another possible surge of federal agents in this city this spring, squaring up the city of Chicago against the military overreach of the federal government.

Art by Tyler Rubenfeld from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 3, Issue 3

❧ RAFAH PASSAGE REOPENS. Israel reopened the Rafah Passage, which connects Egypt and Gaza, to very limited traffic. Drop Site News calls the move “largely symbolic.” The Rafah Passage was supposed to reopen as part of the ceasefire agreement, and its prolonged closure has severely stymied the delivery of critical aid to Gaza, where tens of thousands of people need food and medical treatment. Israel also banned Doctors Without Borders in Gaza.

CURRENT-EST AFFAIRS

What’s new in the magazine this week?

Ban Prediction Markets

Current Affairs associate editor Emily Topping’s latest piece, “Ban Prediction Markets” contains what is possibly the funniest line I read this past week: “According to people like Tarek Mansour, the co-founder of Kalshi, Polymarket’s top rival, there is no greater truth serum than cash,” Topping writes. “‘People don’t lie with money,’ Mansour told the New York Times, apparently with a straight face.” Mansour might as well have pleaded the Fifth; it would have been less incriminating. No matter, because Topping cuts through Mansour’s bullshit and unravels even the most basic arguments for prediction markets. As News Briefing readers might remember, prediction markets are a booming new industry that allows anyone to bet on, well, anything, from LeBron’s shoe color to Maduro’s kidnapping. “The people running these platforms so devoutly worship at the altar of capitalism, they somehow believe that money, of all things, causes human beings to act rationally.” Topping continues. “The opposite is often the case. The prospect of getting a big payout causes us to do things that are objectively irrational and often harmful.” Exactly. Read Topping’s piece here.

❧ In More News ❧

❧ BIG TECH AND ICE SITTING IN A TREE, S-U-R-V-E-I-L-I-N-G. This past week, I wrote about “Why ICE Treats Phones Like a Deadly Threat.” Much of the Trump administration’s power flows through our phones, and a significant part of that power is derived from the mass surveillance phones enable. As ICE becomes more and more flagrant about capturing and analyzing photos of people they meet on the streets, we are learning more and more about how big tech can watch us. A few recent headlines stick out: Google has settled a lawsuit for $68 million claiming that its assistant listened in on conversations without being activated by a user; a leaked memo revealed that DHS is building a database of protesters; and The Washington Post put together a guide to the suite of technologies ICE uses to track people in the moment, allowing them to do eerie, invasive things like know the name of a person before they ever speak to them.

Art from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 6 Issue 1

❧ NYC BLOCKS THE RELEASE OF NYPD REALITY SHOW FOOTAGE SHOT BY DR. PHIL’S SON. When he was mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, a true innovator in the realm of terrible PR, brokered a contract allowing Jordan McGraw, Dr. Phil’s son, to film a behind the scenes reality show of the New York Police Department called “Behind the Badge.” The result was, per Hell Gate, so “disturbingly sloppy” that Eric Adams’s chief of staff Camille Joseph Varlack tried to put the kibosh on the project. Some of the clips don’t have audio, and others have unblurred faces of undercover cops and people in NYPD custody. Of course, there are cameos by Dr. Phil—at active crime scenes. McGraw Media wants to release the footage anyways, and the city is suing to block them, claiming the show would “would undoubtedly tarnish [the NYPD’s] reputation and goodwill.” We agree with Hell Gate: New Yorkers deserve to see these tapes.

Art by Helen Giger from Current Affairs Magazine Vol. 6, Issue 1

❧ MAN ATTEMPTS TO BREAK LUIGI MANGIONE OUT OF JAIL. And the most Italian headline of the year goes to USA Today for “Pizzeria worker with pie cutter tries to bust out Luigi Mangione.” The story is that Mark Anderson, the 36-year-old pizzeria worker in question, showed up to the New York City prison where Mangione is being held and posed as an FBI agent, claiming to have a court order to release Mangione. Anderson blew his cover when the guards asked to see his FBI credentials, and he showed them a Minnesota drivers' license instead. Anderson then said was armed. His weapons: a barbecue fork and pizza cutter wheel. Mangione, a man with a name as Italian as pizza, is in prison for allegedly assassinating the CEO of United Healthcare.

ANIMAL FACT OF THE WEEK

Rats have imaginations!

Rats can conjure mental pictures of environments that are not immediately in front of them, and can use these mental pictures to plan actions. Researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Center hooked rats up to a machine that read their brain waves, then taught rats how to find a liquid reward in a virtual reality space that they navigated via treadmill. They took the treadmill away, and voilà. Even without doing the movement, the rats' brain waves indicated they could visualize where they needed to go in the simulation to get the treat. Imagine, all the rats.

Photo via Zeynel Cebeci, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Writing and research by Emily Carmichael. Editing and additional material by Emily Topping, Alex Skopic, and Nathan J. Robinson. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.

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