1. The wake-up call: a coordinated campaign against truth The Department of Home Affairs has found itself in an uncomfortable and deeply troubling position. It has been thrust into the middle of a firestorm of disinformation, a coordinated and deliberate campaign that appears designed to mislead the South African public about a recent Constitutional Court judgment. The judgment in question, handed down on 7 July 2026, relates to the Scalabrini of Cape Town matter, a case that deals with the operational processing of asylum applications. The Department has made it clear that it is alarmed by what it describes as…

The morning air outside the Democratic headquarters in Garden City, Long Island, carried the kind of crisp tension that often arrives with the final weeks of an election. Inside, a small group of candidates stood together, not to celebrate a rally or announce a new policy, but to confront something far more personal: the contents of their own mailboxes. For weeks, campaign flyers had been slipping through mail slots across Nassau County, bearing the candidates’ names, their faces, and accusations they say they never could have imagined. The mailers, they argued, were not just tough politics. They were lies, engineered…