It’s The Donroe Doctrine — AGAIN
Trump is pulling away from Old Europe as Latin America shifts right
Friends, if there’s one under-appreciated and under-publicized aspect of Donald Trump’s second administration, it’s the Donroe Doctrine—that is, Trump’s pulling Latin America back into the sphere of U.S. influence.
And yet strangely, the president rarely talks about it. We can’t account for it.
Either way, two events occurred over the weekend that demonstrate the Trumpian view that America’s security future lies less with the traditional NATO alliance and more here at home.
Now, must that be a zero-sum equation? Of course not. But consider the current state-of-play:
America is pulling its bombers out of Britain. The Air Force has removed its deployed B-1s, B-2s and B-52s from RAF Fairford following the extraordinary security breach there, where six people were arrested in connection with a suspected terrorist plot near the base. The Pentagon isn’t saying the plot caused the withdrawal—but the timing is unmissable.
Meanwhile, France is literally burning. Violent student unrest has spread across the country, with schools torched or ransacked, thousands arrested and riot police battling protesters. France’s hard-left has been accused by government intelligence officials of helping organize the unrest—an allegation it denies. We’re not buying it. This is the Euro version of the red-green alliance that here at home has given us the likes of Zohran Mamdani and Abudul al-Sayed—far-left progressive socialists with a political Islamist agenda.
Across the Atlantic, Brazil just delivered another political earthquake. Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, finished ahead of socialist President Lula da Silva in Sunday’s first round and now heads into an October 25 runoff with a very real chance of taking Latin America’s largest country to the right—and closer to Washington.
And Brazil isn’t happening in isolation. Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and other nations have already moved rightward. Funny what happens when USAID is removed from the equation.
There are still leftist governments in Latin America—including Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba and Uruguay—so the map isn’t uniformly red. But the trend is unmistakable, and Cuba’s communist days are severely numbered.
Latin America is moving right, Washington is once again treating the Western Hemisphere as a strategic priority, and the Pentagon itself has now publicly embraced the “Donroe Doctrine” concept.
Latin America sees the change.
What’s strange is that many Americans—especially those of Hispanic origin—don’t seem to.
Maybe it’s time Trump started talking about what is arguably his greatest foreign policy success, and punt concerns about daylight savings time until after the midterms.
Legal Editor: AOC Accused Seven Men of Rape. Can They Sue?
The Cornell story dominated the news cycle and social media this week, and it is not difficult to understand why. It has virtually everything the modern media machine feeds on: sex, scandal, accusations of rape, fraternity culture, men versus women, left versus right, questions about privilege, and a famous university caught in the middle. It was a natural.
But underneath all of the political commentary, social-media outrage and cable-news argument is something considerably more serious. Real young people are involved, and their entire lives may be affected by what happened, what can ultimately be proved, and what millions of people are now being told about them.
With all of that flying around, one basic fact can easily get lost: nobody has been convicted of any crime arising from this case. The allegations in the lawsuit remain allegations.
So how can someone simply announce to the world that identifiable people committed rape?
Isn’t that defamation?
Potentially, yes. And the consequences can be enormous.
Consider the second E. Jean Carroll case against Donald Trump. That January 2024 trial was not a trial over whether Trump sexually assaulted Carroll. Liability had already been determined, and the jury was essentially deciding how much Trump should pay for defamatory statements he made in 2019 denying Carroll’s allegations and attacking her credibility. The answer was $83.3 million: $18.3 million in compensatory damages and $65 million in punitive damages. That judgment was subsequently affirmed on appeal.
The point: words alone can become extraordinarily expensive.
Which brings us to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
On September 27, AOC addressed a packed public gathering in Ithaca. Published estimates place the audience somewhere between roughly 1,200 and 2,000 people. She is also a national political figure speaking before cameras, and her comments were quickly distributed to a national audience.
And she did not hedge. “Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman,” she said.
Then she became more specific: “They lured her into a fraternity house. They drugged her with ketamine.”
She continued that they posted that the woman was incapacitated and that “seven men took turns gang raping her for seven hours.”
Those are extraordinary factual accusations.
They are also significantly different from simply saying, “A woman has accused seven men in a lawsuit.”
The civil complaint recently lodged against the students doesn’t allege all seven raped the complainant. Jane Doe’s own attorney has expressly said the seven were not all accused of rape: “We didn’t lump them all together and say, ‘Oh, they all raped her.’ They didn’t. I’m not gonna say they did.”
Yet AOC said exactly that.
Horrendously irresponsible? I think that is an easy argument to make.
But illegal?
Well, not criminally illegal. Defamation is ordinarily a civil wrong. And proving it here would be considerably harder than simply demonstrating that AOC got the facts wrong.
A false accusation of rape can constitute defamation per se in New York (essentially meaning that no financial damage needs to be shown). And because only seven men comprised the group she identified, her failure to recite their individual names would not necessarily protect her. Elias v. Rolling Stone demonstrates that members of a sufficiently small identifiable group can still sue.
The real battle would be over actual malice.
New York’s anti-SLAPP law (designed to protect public figures from these sorts of claims) would likely require a plaintiff to show that AOC knew her statement was false or spoke with reckless disregard for whether it was true.
But that is where this becomes interesting.
Because AOC plainly knew there were seven separate men. She was speaking about a specific lawsuit involving specific individuals. Presumably she obtained her information somewhere. Did she read the complaint? Did her staff? What news reports did they review? What briefing materials were prepared? Was she told that different allegations were made against different men? Why did “pressured to take drugs” become “they drugged her”? Where did “they lured her” come from? She went on her own.
And, most significantly, how did allegations involving some of the men become the categorical statement that all seven took turns raping her? Jane Doe is not alleging that.
Those are legitimate discovery questions.
Political motivation alone would likely not establish actual malice. But context is relevant. AOC was clearly using this case to make a much broader political argument about sexual violence and elite institutions. She told the audience that the case demonstrated a “culture of rape, sexual assault, and pedophilia” protected by elite institutions. Her description of what supposedly happened at Cornell fit that argument perfectly (although it is unclear where the pedophilia references are coming from).
If emails, texts, staff communications or briefing materials showed that she knew the actual allegations were more complicated, or encountered information giving her serious reason to doubt the sweeping version she presented and used it anyway, the case becomes considerably more dangerous for her.
And the damages question would not be trivial. These were accusations of gang rape, delivered by a sitting member of Congress before a large audience and then broadcast nationally about young men whose identities were readily ascertainable.
So the question is no longer merely whether AOC was irresponsible. She was.
The question is what she knew when she said what she said.
And she may not particularly enjoy the discovery process necessary to find out.
True Crime Girl: The New York Times, The Trans, And The Murder
Jonathan McKinsey, the 40-year-old Director of Engineering for the New York Times’ Games section, was shot to death on September 26 in the parking lot of the Dublin Sports Grounds in Dublin, California. He suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene. Children and families were at the park when the shooting took place.
An elderly married couple, Shili Chen and Shouyong Zhang, both 77, are accused of shooting McKinsey. They are also his in-laws.
Three eyewitnesses identified Chen and Zhang as the shooters, and surveillance footage reportedly showed them shooting McKinsey “in concert.” Witnesses said the couple wore masks and calmly walked away after the shooting. Police apprehended them minutes later.
According to a probable-cause declaration, Chen invoked her Miranda rights, while Zhang admitted shooting McKinsey. Authorities also recovered two firearms. On September 30, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office charged Chen and Zhang with murder and personal use of a firearm causing death, along with the special circumstance of lying in wait.
The back story is quite something. Reportedly, McKinsey, the victim, was married to Chen and Zhang’s daughter, Candice Jang. The couple was involved in a particularly contentious divorce and custody dispute over their three children. McKinsey and Jang accused each other of abuse.
McKinsey was also facing two unresolved misdemeanor child-abuse charges at the time of his death. Jang had accused him of slapping their 6-year-old son across the face, allegedly leaving a mark. When authorities subsequently went to the family home, they found the couple’s 2-year-old child alone upstairs while McKinsey was out shopping. McKinsey pleaded not guilty to both charges. He disputed the allegations and later claimed he did not know the 2-year-old had been left home alone.
McKinsey was also a transgender “man”—that is, a biological woman—and alleged in court documents that Jang and her parents had abused and mistreated him because of this. He alleged in family-court filings that Zhang had punched him in the chest while he was recovering from a double mastectomy and that Chen had directed anti-LGBTQ slurs at him and one of his children.
Before he was killed, McKinsey was seeking greater access to his children. In late August, a judge granted him unsupervised visitation twice a week for two hours at public locations, despite Jang’s objections. McKinsey was reportedly at the Dublin Sports Grounds for a court-ordered visit with his children when he was killed. A hearing in the couple’s divorce case was scheduled for the following week.
Police and prosecutors have not publicly identified a motive in this twisted family drama. That leaves several significant questions unanswered: How did Chen and Zhang know McKinsey would be at the park that day? Was his court-ordered visitation schedule known to them? And if so: was it provided by their daughter? Or was McKinsey followed? And what additional evidence supports the prosecution’s allegation that the couple was “lying in wait”?
The evidence publicly disclosed against Chen and Zhang appears substantial. Three witnesses identified them as the shooters. Surveillance footage reportedly captured the attack. Two firearms were recovered, and Zhang allegedly admitted shooting McKinsey.
Yet neither defendant had entered a formal plea as of their October 1 court appearance. Chen’s court-appointed attorney, Curtis Briggs, said she intends to plead not guilty. If convicted as charged, each defendant faces the possibility of life in prison without parole.
What remains to be seen is what elements of this extraordinary family conflict allegedly led a 77-year-old married couple to conclude that conspiring to commit a murder—and then following through on it—was the way to resolve it.
And finally…
Wow—what could the difference be?
