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Hello Reader,
The Global Fight for Freedom
- 5 Million Reasons to Believe
- Cradle of Democracy Jails Grandma
- Head of Iran's Snake Severed
- The Triumphant Return of Bangladesh Democracy
- Russia Buries Its Catastrophic Incompetence
Country names are followed by their 2025 freedom scores according to Freedom House. Not a ranking.
The work of lifting a society out of poverty is grinding, thankless, and not terribly compelling. Progress arrives as numbers nobody wants to read—bond yields, monetary aggregates, poverty percentiles. And yet those numbers are the difference between a child eating and going hungry, between a family holding savings worth something and watching them evaporate overnight.
That is the quiet work underway in Argentina—the most ambitious free-market experiment on earth.
Two years ago, Argentina’s inflation was 211%. Today it’s 32%—the lowest since 2018. The peso has gained 5% against the dollar this year. Argentine sovereign bonds—the serial defaulter’s IOUs investors once mocked—now trade close enough to Ecuador’s creditworthiness that Wall Street is pricing Argentina’s return to capital markets.
A country that can borrow at reasonable rates can build hospitals without printing money. That’s what a rising bond price means in human terms.
That work continued last week, when President Javier Milei secured his most consequential legislative victory: a labor reform passing 135–115 through Congress, dismantling 1970s Peronist hiring-and-firing restrictions—the legal straitjacket that kept half of Argentine workers off the books for decades.
On the eve of the vote, FATE—Argentina’s only domestic tire manufacturer, 85 years old—shuttered its plant, leaving 920 workers jobless. Unions blamed Milei. But tariff walls so high, for so long, had allowed firms to grow dependent on margins twice international norms. Remove the artificial protection, and companies built for insulation—not competition—collapse.
Yet much of the Western media still calls Milei “far-right.” The inflation rate doesn’t care what label you use.
This is why I drone on about economic freedom. Because poverty peaked at 52.9% in early 2024. By mid-2025 it had fallen to 31.6%—lifting five million Argentines out of poverty.
For those five million, the boring numbers are not abstractions—they are hope.
Freedom works.
In August 2022, Amnesty International accused Ukraine of endangering civilians by stationing troops near schools—effectively blaming the invasion's victim for Russian war crimes. Ukraine's own Amnesty director resigned in protest. That reflexive moral equivalence—Western democracies as villains, their minor transgressions amplified to match genuine atrocities—has corroded human rights credibility for decades.
This is not one of those cases.
Human Rights Watch's latest report on the United Kingdom is a legitimate indictment. Since 2022, Parliament handed police powers so sweeping that "serious annoyance" or being "too noisy" legally justify banning protests. The laws were so vague—deliberately, critics argued—that officers could define violations on the spot, making every demonstration a potential crime scene. When courts struck down the worst provisions as unlawful, Labour—elected on promises of renewal—appealed the ruling to preserve them. Britain's assault on dissent isn't partisan aberration. It's institutional rot.
Gaie Delap, a 78-year-old Quaker Elder, climbed a highway overpass for one hour to protest climate policy. She received a 20 month prison sentence. When released on house arrest, her thrombosis prevented wearing an ankle monitor—so authorities recalled her to prison and extended her sentence by twenty days.
Five Just Stop Oil activists received two to five years for joining a Zoom call — just to plan a protest. Courts barred defendants from mentioning climate change in their own defense, stripping juries of context.
The country that exported parliamentary democracy to half the world is now sending grandmothers to prison for climbing highway signs.
On August 21, 2013, children in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta woke to sarin. Their muscles seized. They drowned in their own fluid, convulsing in the street, while his advisors directed Bashir Assad's forces. The war he funded would kill over half a million people.
His Quds Force trained Hamas commanders on Iranian soil for two decades, funded the operation, and supplied the weapons. 1,200 people slaughtered on October 7th, 46 of them American.
In 2024, a drone built by Iran's proxy Kataib Hezbollah killed three American soldiers while they slept at Tower 22 in Jordan.
His Shahed drones — shipped to Russia by the thousands, with Iranian trainers in Crimea to teach their use — tore through Ukrainian cities, killing 253 civilians and wounding 1,524 since the war began.
The carnage abroad was vast. But the deepest cruelty was reserved for his own people.
When his chronic economic mismanagement tripled fuel prices overnight in 2019, at least 304 working-class Iranians — laborers, factory workers, the poor — were gunned down in the streets.
His morality police arrested 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, beat her until her skull fractured, and returned her body three days later. His civil code set the marriage age for girls at 13, and when Parliament tried to raise it, he blocked the reform. Between 1997 and 2021, , 500,000 girls under 15 were married.
His regime executed 1,000 people in 2025 alone — many publicly hanged for merely sharing their opinions.
In January, firefighter Hamid Mahdavi spent hours carrying wounded protesters through darkened streets to safety — twenty people, on his back, one by one. A Basij sniper put a bullet through his skull — one of over 30,000 protesters murdered by his regime.
On Saturday morning, thirty Israeli bombs found him in his Tehran compound.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead.
Tarique Rahman entered a Bangladeshi prison in 2007. Eighteen months later, he walked out with spinal damage the torture had made permanent and a forced letter of resignation from politics. After he had boarded a plane to London, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's courts sentenced him to life for a fabricated grenade attack. His mother, Khaleda Zia — Bangladesh's first female prime minister and champion of women's rights — was imprisoned.
For seventeen years, he watched from London as Hasina dismantled Bangladesh's democracy.
Then Bangladesh's Gen Z revolution arrived.
I’ve dubbed Gen Z’s global movement the Soda Pop Revolution — all fizz, no substance — and I stand by that verdict. When the student heroes finally ran for office last month, they won 6 of 30 seats. Their party fractured before election day, senior members resigning, accusing leadership of "drifting from founding commitments."
But they did one thing right: they handed the keys to Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, who spent 18 unglamorous months doing the institutional work they couldn't — and building toward a genuine election. On February 12th, 127 million Bangladeshis voted at 60% turnout, nearly double Hasina's last manufactured majority.
Rahman's BNP won 212 of 299 seats. Jamaat-e-Islami — which has long pushed to remake Bangladesh under Islamic law — won 77, not nearly enough to shape the new government. In a Muslim-majority nation of 170 million, pluralism held.
The caveats are real: Hasina's Awami League was banned, and Rahman carries corruption allegations from his pre-exile years. Some fear Bangladesh's dynasties are simply trading places again. Yet he returns speaking the language of democracy, with a chance to prove the skeptics wrong.
Democracy won in a Muslim-majority nation of 170 million — a resounding victory for global freedom.
Now it must hold.
When Ukrainian HIMARS rockets obliterated an unprotected Russian convoy near Kursk in August 2024 — killing or wounding an estimated 500 soldiers in a single strike — Yuri Podolyaka, whose Telegram channel commands 3 million followers, didn't wait for the Kremlin's spin. "How much longer?" he raged. Another milblogger demanded executions. A third called the general who issued the order a "brainless creature."
Vladimir Putin doesn’t like to be second guessed.
Since May 2025, Russia has averaged 2,000 mobile internet shutdowns monthly — more than the rest of the world combined in 2024. The official justification: stopping Ukrainian drones that use cell towers for navigation. The tell: authorities in Ulyanovsk, physically unreachable by Ukrainian drones, announced mobile internet will stay dark until the war ends.
This isn't drone defense. It's fear.
WhatsApp — used by 100 million Russians — was fully blocked in February. Telegram is being systematically throttled. Since January 1st, every internet service must store user messages three years and surrender them on demand —even deleted content. Russia pre-installs its surveillance replacement, MAX, on every new device sold in the country.
The delicious irony: throttling Telegram has shattered Russia's own battlefield communications. Intelligence that once reached frontline gunners in 60 seconds now takes hours — long after targets have moved.
This week, the FSB criminally indicted Telegram's founder for "assistance to terrorist activities." The timing is not coincidental. Western officials confirmed this month that Russian battlefield losses have exceeded monthly recruitment for three consecutive months — raising the specter of a second mass mobilization.
Putin's censorship machine is no longer silencing dissent. It’s desperately burying evidence of its catastrophic incompetence before 3 million Telegram followers read about it first.
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