For anyone who believes that Donald Trump, in his infinite narcissism, has no empathy for anyone other than himself, think again. He may project nothing but apathy or glee concerning the pain he’s inflicted on countless families around the world, including his own damaged, parasitic brood; he may threaten war crimes in a national televised address; he may promise to use federal troops to “force ourselves upon” Los Angeles during the 2026 World Cup; but he does genuinely seem to love golfing legend Tiger Woods.

The feeling is reciprocated. After Woods almost died this week—rolling his car, opioids in his pockets—his first call was to Trump’s direct line. According to police body-cam footage, Woods said that he made this call even before the officer approached his car.

What is this connection about? How does this openly ethnonationalist president—who offered preferential refugee admissions  to white South Africans while enacting unprecedented violence against Black and brown immigrants—relate to Woods? Woods, a trailblazing athlete who integrated countless country clubs, used to describe himself as Cablinasian—Caucasian, Black, and Asian. That is, until he got a call from Nike telling him that he was just Black. 

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After that, you never heard the word “Cablinasian” again. Soon, the shoe giant released a commercial—based upon the iconic slogan of solidarity “I Am Spartacus”—in which a diverse group of children said defiantly: “I am Tiger Woods!” It was rebellion without a cause, rebellion for market share, Jackie Robinson if Robinson had been more interested in brand recognition than in civil rights. In fact, maybe Woods and Trump do have something in common: The vacuous nature of branding for the sake of accumulation isn’t too far off from accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Perhaps this is what drew them together. 

Certainly, their attraction is linked to Trump’s obsession with golf. Tiger is the historical apex of a sport that seems to hold Trump’s attention more than the war that has displaced millions of people in Iran and Lebanon, which he illegally launched. Or perhaps it’s because Woods is always appropriately—and humiliatingly—sycophantic in Trump’s presence. He doesn’t challenge Trump. He adores him, and Trump basks in his glow.

It could also be that Woods dates Don Jr.’s ex-wife, Vanessa, whom Trump always seemed to like more than his son. Apparently, Woods’s presence in his life causes Don Jr. no end of distress. In the wake of the DUI arrest, anonymous sources close to Don Jr. told the press, “[Don. Jr.] is furious. Those are his kids. Full stop…. Everyone else gave Tiger the benefit of the doubt. But Don always saw the red flags. Always.” Given Don Jr.’s own erratic public behavior, his concerns feel more like an effort to shame Daddy’s favorite than a protective instinct for the next generation of damaged Trumps.

But what’s most likely is that, as with all of Trump’s relationships, this is also largely transactional. As announced with great fanfare in 2014, Tiger Woods was set to design the Trump World Golf Club in the human rights hellhole that is Dubai. Under orders from Trump, Woods is also now supposed to be redesigning Washington, DC’s public Langston Golf Course, which opened in 1939 as the city’s first course built specifically for Black Americans. There are widespread fears that, following Woods’s makeover, these public courses will go private, shutting out people who can’t afford it and erasing the history of the Black golfers that have used the course for generations. The irony will choke you if you think about it too hard.

But whatever the reason for their mutual affection, Trump took time away from his disastrous war and suffocation of Cuba to express empathy for Woods even before the golfer’s very sad, very glazed-over mug shot hit the press. On hearing the news, Trump stopped threatening universally recognized war crimes, rushed to the nearest phone, and called his old friends at the New York Post to jump to Woods’s defense. He said that Woods “lives a life of pain” from old injuries but is “doing great.” Trump also pointed out that Woods is “under a tremendous physical pressure from his various ailments, you know, the back and the leg.”

Now he cares about people living in pain. The amputees of Gaza, though? Not so much.

Tiger Woods is an American tragedy. He’s the golf wunderkind who was on The Mike Douglas Show, putting for grownups at age 2. He’s the 15-time Grand Slam winner who fundamentally changed the audience of golf, growing it to unprecedented levels. He was the teenager whose future his late father, Earl, said would be comparable to Gandhi’s.

Trump offers no such pressure to be Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Muhammed Ali. Just a smiling brand who dates the mother of his grandchildren. And now Woods has had the kind of fall from grace that mirrors our current culture: rife with performance enhancers, opioids, depression, and decline.

Perhaps that is what’s really at the root of this friendship: the death of hope. Trump is the king of a country where hope goes to die. Woods has become the mascot of a nation’s crumbling greatness. American tragedy? This is American reality.

FIFA released a pair of highly anticipated decisions regarding Israel and Palestine last Thursday, and the world’s soccer governing body reminded fans across the globe what its theoretical commitment to political neutrality means in practice: siding with the authoritarian, the aggressor, the oppressor.

FIFA touts a commitment to staying “neutral in matters of politics” and claims that “discrimination of any kind…is strictly prohibited and punishable,” but under the rule of FIFA President Gianni Infantino, neutrality means the powerful win—and for Infantino, that means MAGA. Taken together, the decisions are an obscene abdication of FIFA’s responsibility to follow its own statutes and its publicly stated commitment to human rights. They’re also a foreboding sign of what we can expect from Infantino during this summer’s World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

FIFA issued two decisions regarding the Israel Football Association. The first responded to a formal complaint by the Palestinian Football Association that its Israeli counterparts were staging matches on illegally annexed land in the West Bank. This complaint is based on facts, not contentions. In 2024, the United Nations pinpointed at least eight Israeli soccer clubs that have either developed or staged matches “in Israeli colonial settlements of the occupied West Bank.” The following year, the sports and human rights group FairSquare published a letter by international scholars explaining how Israeli settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, UN Security Resolutions 446 and 2334, and rulings by the International Criminal Court (ICJ) in both 2004 and 2024. Human Rights Watch has been providing evidence for a decade that the Israel Football Association has organized matches on “settlements in the West Bank on land unlawfully taken from Palestinians.”

And yet, FIFA’s Governance, Audit, and Compliance Committee decided that no action was required because “the final legal status of the West Bank remains an unresolved and highly complex matter under public international law.” That would be news to the ICJ and a cavalcade of international law specialists. In response, former ICJ judge Michael Dugard went off: “FIFA and UEFA [the Union of European Football Associations] have to be held accountable for deliberately contradicting an International Court of Justice ruling on the Palestinian occupied territories.”

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In the second ruling, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee found that the Israel Football Association failed to do anything meaningful to curtail racist and proudly violent behavior by the Israeli soccer team Beitar Jerusalem FC, whose ultras are infamous for their racism and bigotry. The club’s most devoted fans often chant “Death to Arabs” during matches and belt out songs with lines like, “I don’t care how many and how they will get killed / Eliminating Arabs makes me thrilled.”

At times, the ruling was scathing, asserting that “by failing to condemn or remediate discriminatory practices and exclusionary policies—particularly those affecting Palestinians—the IFA has become institutionally complicit in a system that violates the core values of the game.” It added, “This complicity not only exposes the association to disciplinary liability but also damages the moral authority of football as a tool for social cohesion and intercultural dialogue.”

In short, the IFA breached FIFA rules outlawing (1) “offensive behavior and violations of the principles of fair play” and (2) “discrimination and racist abuse.”

What was FIFA’s response to these breaches of its neutrality doctrine? A trifling fine, a “warning” for the IFA, and a requirement “to display in its next three A-level FIFA competition matches at home a significant and highly visible banner with the words ‘Football United the World—No to Discrimination’ alongside the Israeli Football Association’s logo.” Seriously. A banner. One that will surely be mocked endlessly among the Beitar Jerusalem thugs.

In short, FIFA’s two rulings managed to lie about basic facts while issuing a light slap on the wrist to Israel for violating core antidiscrimination principles. The decisions were a double betrayal for the Palestinian Football Association, which had been patiently following FIFA procedures in the hope of securing some modicum of justice. But FIFA-style “neutrality” favors the powerful, and right now that means being a party to ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Infantino’s shameless cover-ups of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians dovetail with the positions of the Trump administration. Infantino is effectively a Trump administrative toady—FIFA peace prize and all. It means that even though Israel did not even sniff the World Cup, its shadow—alongside Trump’s—will be cast over the 2026 tournament.

Infantino’s deference to Trump can be most clearly with FIFA’s treatment of the Iranian team, which did make the World Cup, an accomplishment secured in Azadi stadium, a famous sports complex that the United States and Israel have since leveled. Again, this “war crime” was done without a peep from Infantino who is too busy pledging to build a network of soccer fields to replace the actual people in Gaza. Infantino could teach a master class in sycophancy and sportswashing. Few people can use sports to run interference for war criminals and deflect attention from the bloody work of empire like Infantino.

The Iranian team is due to play its first rounds in the United States, and Trump has already threatened the team, posting on social media, “The Iran National Soccer Team is welcome to The World Cup, but I really don’t believe it is appropriate that they be there, for their own life and safety.”

Iran has asked FIFA to have their games moved to Mexico, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is amenable to it. And yet, Infantino has rejected this plea, lest it embarrass Trump—never mind how it endangers Iranian players, coaches, and their families.

Even though the war on Iran and the genocide in Gaza are issues that Infantino wants to conceal during the World Cup, don’t expect the people in the United States, Canada, and Mexico to let them. International organizations are calling for a boycott of matches in the United States. Fans, not thrilled to have to face down ICE in order to attend a soccer match, are not buying tickets. And there are plans to protest by those who do not want FIFA to get away with its complicity in war and genocide. The people are ready to remind the world that the beautiful game should not be a fig leaf for imperialism and ethnic cleansing.

On Saturday night, Mohamed Diawara, the 20-year-old rookie for the New York Knicks, sat down with 34-year-old New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for Iftar.

Iftar is one of the most spiritually significant meals in Islam. Each night, it breaks the dawn-to-dusk fast during the holy month of Ramadan. Over plates of steaming chicken, lamb, and fish at a 12-table Senegalese restaurant in Harlem called Saint Louis Restaurant Keur Yayou Dara, two of the city’s most prominent Muslims broke their fasts together.

In a country awash in anti-Islamic bigotry—where a GOP member of Congress can post “Muslims don’t belong in American society” without a single member of his party condemning his words—and amid the US and Israeli war on Iran, Diawara and Mamdani’s Iftar meal was a political act, even if it did not announce itself as such. It was a celebration of not just religion but visibility. Given the incredible challenges progressive and radical movements face, representation and visibility won’t be enough. But in the face of state erasure that’s both political and violently physical, it remains a necessity.

“I was sharing earlier with Mo,” Mamdani said, “that it means so much to so many young Muslim kids to know that someone on the team we love is fasting the same way.”

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Diawara, who turned pro in Paris at just 17, has a maturity and sense of self that belies the fact that he was born in 2005. He is aware of his status as a Muslim, an immigrant from France, and a Knick. Living in the United States, he quickly learned that young fans would be looking up to him and understood that he would be a role model. And as a New Yorker, Diawara was excited to meet the mayor.

As for Mamdani, dining with a member of the Knicks was clearly a thrill. “What’s so exciting is that we are seeing one of the strongest Knicks teams in a long time,” he said, his voice animated. “When the Knicks do well, you can feel it in a way you can’t quite describe. You know when it was 70 degrees the other day? That’s how it feels like when the Knicks do well. People are happier. More excited. I remember during Linsanity”—the time when Jeremy Lin, another Knick, went on a one-month jag of greatness in 2012—“I was watching the games on my phone, in college and in class. That’s what it feels like right now. That feeling of excitement is what I want every New Yorker to feel like every day.”

When they were asked whether it is more difficult to run City Hall or play NBA basketball while fasting, the mayor responded quickly: being a Knick. But Diawara disagreed: Fasting didn’t make playing more difficult. “It’s not really hard at all, because I know why I’m doing it and I know the strength of my religion,” he said. “With fasting comes focus, clarity, and makes me feel closer to God.”

It also helped that the Knicks organization and his teammates had been, as Diawara reported, “extremely supportive throughout Ramadan and the fasting.”

“If you’re in a job where you’re talking all the time, you feel the lack of water even more than food,” Mamdani added. “But this isn’t something we are being forced to do. This is something I look forward to—because with the fast comes, as Mo said, a focus and also comes reflection.”

After eating, the five-foot-11 mayor and the six-foot-nine Knick walked nine blocks to the famed Marcus Garvey courts. The mayor’s trademark rapid steps kept up with Diawara’s broad strides, as security and mayoral aides gulped air trying to catch up. Mamdani has faced vocal critics from the right (most recently for sharing an Iftar dinner with former Columbia activist turned political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil) and the left, but as we walked down Lennox Avenue that evening, people on the streets shouted their encouragement. A group of men outside a bodega cheered. After one bystander took a selfie with the mayor, he looked up at Diawara and asked, “You play for the Knicks, right?”

In a time when politics feels like the place where hope goes to die, it was striking to see a Muslim democratic socialist being effusively supported in the city’s streets. This excitement transcends his mayoralty and his policies. It speaks to how New York City feels having elected someone much of the country—and both political parties—would have deemed unelectable, and in doing so the joy of giving a resounding rejoinder to the country’s anti-Muslim bigots. On these corners on this night, Mamdani’s election was a point of pride.

Ibrahim Douf, co-owner of the Senegalese eatery, agreed. “It proves the reason why I am in New York City,” he told me. “It’s because I feel like I belong here. I am West African, born and raised, and I was welcomed. I don’t feel neglected or rejected here. And that the mayor is a Muslim as well and still able to be elected proves that we have the best population around.”

At the courts, Diawara and Mamdani hoisted a few shots with some locals out in the chill for some hoops. The Garvey Courts are lit up at night, and all the six baskets were occupied. The City Game was well-represented—most players were too into their games to notice the mayor and the Knick (Zo and Mo?) take the court. One group took up the mayor’s invitation to play H-O-R-S-E—although they called it H-O-M-E—and in a tie and dress shoes, the mayor took his shots with mixed results, but credit to him for being game and having fun. The smile was affixed, swish or brick.

When Diawara won the game of H-O-M-E (he’s shooting nearly 40 percent from three this season), the three other players said they hoped it was a good omen for the Knicks as they enter the stretch run of the season.

From the beginning of his second term, Trump has tried to bend the (men’s) sports world to his influence. From football to the Olympics to the World Cup to the world of mixed martial arts, little has escaped his greasy grasp. Together with his attacks on media and education, it’s clear that his regime is engaging in a hostile takeover of cultural spaces, where ideas rooted in resistance like the embrace of Black Lives Matter, the fight for women’s rights, the entrance of activists into electoral races, and the initial inclusion of transgender athletes held sway just a few years ago. Diawara and Mamdani’s evening together showed that these ideas are still powerful. At dinner, Mamdani had touched on the role of athletes in dire times like today. “When athletes speak the truth, it carries a different kind of resonance,” Mamdani said. “Growing up and having these incredible figures who you admire not only for athletic ability but precision of their intellectual analysis of the world around them… it matters.”

Many of the country’s most outspoken athletes have also been Muslims—Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf—and Diawara is well aware of that tradition and draws upon the pride that comes with it. Saturday was a night of hoops and heritage: Two Muslim New Yorkers celebrated a holy meal together as the city cheered on their team and an election. It was also a rebuke to all the people telling us whom we can love and whom we should hate.

The Israeli state’s genocidal assault against the people of Gaza now appears to be the first installment in an ongoing series. The next episode is what the United States and Israel are doing to Lebanon and Iran. It’s not just the relentless bombings and missile launches with little regard for civilian life that’s so reminiscent of the war on Gaza. It’s not just the slaughtering of children followed by easily debunked denials. (The casual mendacity of both governments is jaw-dropping.) It’s not the assassinations of governmental and religious leaders. It’s the attempt to kill hope.

A source of hope and joy in Iran—as in Palestine—has always been organized sports. In Iran, soccer, wrestling (where Iran has achieved global acclaim), and volleyball are three of the main sporting ventures in which Iran competes internationally. Yet it’s difficult to play—and by extension impossible for a child to have dreams of athletic glory—when the sports infrastructure is destroyed. As I’ve pointed out for over a decade, Israel has long targeted sport facilities and athletes in Gaza. The logic is that if you kill the joy that comes with leisure pursuits and extracurricular activities, you kill the will to resist.

In yet another echo of Gaza, on March 5, one of the first bombing targets in Iran was the historic Azadi Sports Complex in Tehran. Perhaps the most iconic sports facility in the Middle East, Azadi has played host to many of the most storied moments in Iranian athletic history, including a 1998 World Cup qualifier match against Australia played in front of 128,000 people. The Azadi indoor facility, which holds 12,000 and is a central locale for basketball, martial arts, and volleyball, is now a smoldering husk.

Azadi had been a tourist attraction and the site for countless national and international soccer matches, not to mention the setting for Iran’s 2025 victory that clinched an appearance in this year’s World Cup, although their scheduled matches now do not seem likely to occur.

The stadium was held in high enough international regard that it was the centerpiece of Iran’s bid to host the 1984 Olympics. (A bid that was scuttled after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.) Alireza Sohrabian, president of Iran’s Rowing Federation, said, “The destruction of sports, educational, and healthcare spaces is explicitly forbidden by the Red Cross in wartime, yet today we witnessed a direct attack on a sports venue at Azadi stadium.” Ahmad Donyamali, Iran’s sports minister, called the attacks a “war crime.”

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Azadi holds a grand place in the Iranian imagination, but it’s about more than just the games. Azadi stadium has also been a critical symbol of the women’s movement in Iran. For four decades, women had been banned from the facility, but their fight for “fresh air” and a chance to show their love for sports became a symbol of the reform movement. In 2018, the ban finally ended, and a set number of women could attend the Asian Champions League men’s final in which the Iranian team Persepolis played Japan’s Kashima Antlers. Since then, Iranian women have further opened up the sports world—and Azadi—to their own athletic dreams. Now Azadi—that symbol, that point of pride in social progress—is gone.

The attack on Azadi stadium was not a stray bomb or an isolated incident. The New York Times has reported that “several” sports and youth facilities have been hit since Israel and the US launched this war. This includes a bombing that was initially denied by the United States but was confirmed by the Times in which a strike killed 18 boys and girls in a volleyball match in the southwest city of Lamerd. 

This is straight from the script that Israel used in its razing of Gaza: You erase the idea of play, the idea of joy, the idea of even being children. Trying to kill hope is a monstrous act, and we are living in a time of monsters—something that’s clear every time we hold our breaths before a news story about the latest bombing, the latest civilian deaths, the latest war crimes. Gaza was the first livestreamed genocide. We must not allow the tactics tried there to become the new normal.

I have been a critic of the World Cup for over two decades. Reading books like Andrew Jennings’s Foul!: The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals and my own investigative journalism on the ground in South Africa in 2010 and Brazil in 2014 convinced me that soccer’s governing body, FIFA, is not only an utterly corrupt and immoral entity but even a supporter of dictators and bulwark against democracy. (Since those days, under the leadership of Gianni Infantino, it has devolved even further into a corroded husk led by authoritarian-worshiping gnomes.)

The three main outcomes for countries hosting the World Cup, as I saw time and again, was debt, displacement, and the militarization of public space. The main differences—whether we were talking about Durban or Rio—were the languages used to dissemble and explain the ensuing corruption scandals. And yet, despite all of this, there was also a fourth component: joy. The people of these countries were generous and enthusiastic hosts. Bars turned into fiestas. Fiestas turned into bacchanalias. And bacchanalias became hyper-focused watch parties, as everyone snapped from revelry to riveted attention on the most popular sport on Earth.

We are now 100 days out until the United States—along with Canada and Mexico—hosts the World Cup. In the US, we are certainly getting the financial chaos, the fears of displacement (which the unhoused people of past host cities can attest to), and the hyper-militarization. Plus, this World Cup could end up being an ICE feeding frenzy on attendees both foreign and domestic. But beyond these issues, it is also the first World Cup in my memory devoid of eager anticipation and joy.

The 2026 World Cup has, so far, been cloaked in a grim haze. First, with the United States and Israel launching a war against the people of Iran, the “FIFA peace prize” that Trump’s pathetic quisling Infantino bestowed on our decrepit president last year has moved from a pathetic suck-up to a horrific irony.

Iran’s soccer team was set to play in two group-stage games in Los Angeles and Seattle for this year’s cup. Now they will almost certainly forfeit their matches. “What is certain is that after this attack, we cannot be expected to look forward to the World Cup with hope,” said Iran’s top soccer official, Mehdi Taj, after the bombings began last weekend. If Iran’s team were forced to withdraw from the tournament, it would become the first in 75 years to do so, willingly or otherwise.

Trump, for his part, scoffed at the thought of Iran’s missing the World Cup. “I really don’t care,” Trump told Politico. “I think Iran is a badly defeated country. They’re running on fumes.”

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Then there is ICE. The administration’s murdering shock troops are official parts of the security apparatus for the Cup, raising safety fears for fans. Countries are issuing travel advisories about coming to the United States for the events. International tourism has been hampered, now that enjoying the global game comes with a risk of ending up indefinitely detained in an airport hangar jail or being accidentally placed in a secret prison in El Salvador, which undercuts a key economic argument for hosting the World Cup in the first place. Nevertheless, the administration has refused to rule out that ICE operations will be in full effect. This World Cup could end up being an ICE feeding frenzy on attendees both foreign and domestic.

And of course there are the games scheduled for Mexico, which is currently facing down another surge of drug-related violence following the military assassination of a cartel boss in Jalisco. Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital, is set to host four matches. Top-flight soccer matches have already been canceled because of the recent spasms of violence. ESPN has veered from its “no-politics rule,” asking if matches are being suspended, “could FIFA World Cup games follow?” While President Claudia Sheinbaum is insisting there is no risk for fans coming to the tournament, people are inevitably going to be cautious—that’s not something she or anyone can guarantee.

But it’s not just the war on Iran or the cartel wars that are disfiguring this year’s World Cup. Usually, host cities hold World Cup “fan fests.” These are ways for people who cannot afford tickets to watch the games on big outdoor screens, hang out with thousands of other soccer lovers, and experience the general vibe. This year, all the US fan fests, which were to be held in six cities, have been slimmed down or outright canceled. Cities aren’t getting the federal funds needed to put them on, which the GOP is blaming on holdups of Homeland Security money. Most notoriously, the New York/New Jersey “fan fests” broke with tradition and sold tickets to what was supposed to be and has always been a free event—only to cancel it outright.

When I think of the “fan fests” in Rio, which were just as fun—sometimes more fun—than the matches themselves, the ticketed-then-canceled New York/New Jersey event looks like an apt symbol for how joyless this country has become under the authoritarian eye of the current regime and how pitiable this World Cup will likely be. Only these people could squeeze every bit of fun out of the Cup.

Still, it’s fitting for a country being ruled by chaos and fear. Not even soccer is immune from Trump’s reverse Midas touch. FIFA is just reaping what it has sown.

Update: Since the publication of this piece, a video of President Donald Trump making a locker-room call to the US men’s hockey team emerged. During the call, Trump invited the team to the State of the Union and mocked the women’s team while the men laughed. The women’s team has declined the invitation to the State of the Union. —Dave Zirin

The US men’s Olympic hockey team beat Canada 2–1 in overtime in the gold medal game at the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics on Sunday. The Canadian team showed up angry. Our neighbors to the north were upset because of how bellicose and erratic President Donald Trump has been toward the nation he proposed making the 51st state.

“Canadians feel insulted by who they thought were their allies. It’s a matter of pride,” one fan from Nova Scotia said to The New York Times.

As for Team USA, it was ready to fight—literally—because Trump had deemed Canada, Canadian Bacon—style, the enemy, and the players were ready to follow orders. The US squad was chock-full of Trump supporters who were more than willing to provide a photo op for Vice President JD Vance and the embarrassing FBI director, Kash Patel.

When Trump called the US skier Hunter Hess “a real Loser” for expressing nuanced “mixed feelings” about representing the United States, US hockey player Brady Tkachuk sided with Trump, saying, “To represent the US at this stage in the Olympics is one of the greatest honors that I’ve ever had, so I’m truly grateful to be here representing the red, white, and blue.”

Unlike other US Olympians speaking out against this regime, men’s hockey players chose to be lickspittles. In that regard, this hockey team is part of a rather ignominious USA hockey gold-medal tradition. A fan at the 2026 Milano Cortina Games donned a hockey sweater with “1980” emblazoned across the chest, the year a US hockey team became a legendary symbol of national unity. But in the years that followed, Republicans have used that legend to sow division.

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Trump holds incredible nostalgia for the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey team of 1980. This was the squad that, in one of the great Olympic upsets of all time, defeated the USSR in the semifinals before winning the gold. Pundits turned the victory into a right-wing symbol. It showed that the country had moved away from the social struggles of the 1960s and ’70s and embraced the crypto-fascist variant of patriotism best exemplified in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

In 2020, many members of that 1980 team rallied with Trump in Las Vegas, wearing their MAGA hats, laughing at Trump’s mockery of the Oscar-winning film Parasite, nodding solemnly as he asked why they don’t make films like Gone With the Wind anymore, and praising Trump repeatedly. For some reason, Trump asked team captain Mike Eruzione to tell the crowd he was a good golfer and Eruzione responded, “Whatever you say, sir.”

That team is now in their 60s and 70s, and Trump—as he did when partying with Jeffrey Epstein—is looking for younger models. The gold-medal-winning team at the Milano Cortina Olympics includes players who have caped for the president. Last year, at a White House visit following the Florida Panthers’ Stanley Cup victory, Matthew Tkachuk (Brady’s older brother) heaped praise on Trump: “It’s kind of like that cherry-on-top finish…to be here at the White House today and meet the president of the United States and lucky enough to have him honor us is just so cool and something that I honestly never would’ve imagined.” Addressing Trump directly, Tkachuk added, “This is such an incredible day for myself. You wake up every day really grateful to be an American, so thank you.”

This is 1980 cosplaying, but unlike then, the ugly underbelly is there for everyone to see. Partying with the players afterward was Patel, guzzling beer, jumping around, and thumping the table like a drunken frat boy. It was a humiliating display. He was there to represent Trump—and given Patel’s craven, ham-handed coverups of Trump’s connections to Epstein—there could not have been a better stand in for Trump himself.

The real Olympic heroes are the athletes who won’t—as the right-wing noise machine blared—“shut up and ski.”

Eileen Gu, superstar freestyle skier who herself experienced extreme online abuse when she chose to represent China, rather than the United States at the 2022 Winter Olympics, responded, “I’m sorry that the headline that is eclipsing the Olympics has to be something so unrelated to the spirit of the Games. It really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”

Hess himself responded to Trump—and the torrent of MAGA vitriol that he unleashed—like a champ. Acknowledging that being attacked by a sitting US president led to “probably the hardest two weeks of my life,” he channeled the stress into humor. After completing a run on the halfpipe, he gave L-sign with his hand and said of his imbroglio with Trump: “I definitely wear [it] with pride.” Hess added with a twinkle, “Apparently I am a loser. I am leaning into it.”

US snowboarder extraordinaire Chloe Kim also defended Hess. “It’s important in moments like these for us to unite and kind of stand up for one another with what’s going on,” she said.

Then cross-country skier Zak Ketterson also stood up for Hess, saying, “I think it’s pretty childish to come at somebody for exercising their free speech right, and considering that side of the political spectrum always champions free speech, it’s a little, I think, surprising to see them so triggered.”

He was backed by fellow US cross-country skier and medal winner Ben Ogden, who stated, “I choose to believe that I live in a country where people can express their opinions without backlash.” He had the guts to mention the president directly: “Certainly not…without backlash from the president. And that was really disappointing to see, but I hope it doesn’t continue like that.”

That’s exactly it. During the Milano Cortina Olympics, Trump has been the crotchety, disgruntled grump punching down on a US Olympian from a lesser-known sport. To see the wealthiest, most privileged athletes on Team USA—the Tkachuk brothers play in the NHL, where their salaries dwarf those of freestyle skiers like Hess—is not just disappointing; it’s nauseating. But the solidarity proffered by fellow Olympians was heartening. This is a pick-a-side moment in the United States, and they picked the right one.

Twenty-two years ago, I wrote this about a preternaturally mature 19-year-old hoops phenom named LeBron James and his aspirations off the court:

James has said he has two goals in his life. One is to be “a global icon like Muhammad Ali,” and the other is to be the richest athlete in the history of the world. And while these may be two great goals, they don’t exactly go great together. That’s because people like Muhammad Ali didn’t become global icons because they were rich, but because they were willing to sacrifice everything—including sponsorship deals—to stand up for what they believed in.

In the last two decades, we have seen how James’s desires have conflicted. During the early days of Black Lives Matter movement, he was outspoken in his support for racial justice. In 2012, he posed with his Miami Heat teammates in hoodies to protest the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, and after the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014, he wore a T-shirt that said “I can’t breathe” during warm-ups alongside Cleveland Cavaliers teammate Kyrie Irving.

Yet over the last several years, as his fortune has exploded into the 10-figure category, James’s silence has been noticeable. Neither ICE’s killings nor the Trump regime’s relentless racism has moved him to speak forcefully. One perfect encapsulation of this untenable balancing act was in 2022 when he filed a trademark for the phrase “shut up and dribble.” When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham first bleated this at James in 2018, his supporters were enraged, and it became a rallying cry against the racism that Black athletes have long faced. Now one of James’s corporations says it will put it on items such as “downloadable virtual goods, namely, computer programs featuring footwear, clothing, headwear, eyewear, bags, sports bags, backpacks, sports equipment, art, toys and accessories for use online and in online virtual worlds.” The phrase will go from protest cry to branding exercise.

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This week, the effort to balance the spirit of Muhammad Ali with his life as a 41-year-old billionaire tipped away from Ali. Actually, it didn’t just tip. It crashed to the ground. During NBA All-Star weekend, James was asked for his thoughts on Israeli All-Star Deni Avdija of the Portland Trailblazers. He took the opportunity to speak about Israel more broadly, saying, “If I have fans over there, then I hope you’ve been following my career. I hope I inspire people over there to be better in life. Hopefully someday I can make it over there. I’ve heard nothing but great things.”

James always speaks with great intentionality, and no one should think this was an off-the-cuff comment. It was a statement of support during the second year of a genocide in Gaza alongside the accelerating annexation of the West Bank. Israel has launched a project of ethnic cleansing, and James wanted the world to know that he was unbothered by it. Not only that—he seemed to want to follow in the footsteps of his good friend Draymond Green and take a propaganda trip to do public relations for the Israeli state.

If James’s defenders say that he doesn’t know what’s been happening and we shouldn’t expect more from “just an athlete,” they are being as ignorant as Ingraham. James knows what’s been going on in Gaza, and it’s ludicrous to think that he’s heard “nothing but great things” about Israel. He certainly hasn’t heard great things from his old Cavaliers running buddy Kyrie Irving, who has not been shy about showing his solidarity with the Palestinian people. He hasn’t heard great things from current and former NBA players like former teammate Dwight Howard or Tariq Abdul-Wahad or Etan Thomas and more who have spoken out against genocide and for a free Palestine. Hell, during this past weekend’s All-Star Game, Irving wore a PRESS shirt in solidarity with the journalists in Gaza killed by the Israeli army and Spike Lee wore the colors of the Palestinian flag courtside.

James knows what’s going on. Instead of fulfilling his teenage goal of being a hero to the downtrodden, he has chosen to turn his back on war crimes, permitting his fans to do the same. Perhaps he fears what a backlash will do to that other youthful dream of unfathomable wealth. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.

In contrast to James, Ali visited Palestinian refugee camps and went to Free Palestine demonstrations in the 1970s and ’80s until he was physically unable to do so. When asked why he would visit a refugee camp in Southern Lebanon, he said he had a responsibility to be there since “the United States is the stronghold of Zionism and imperialism.” Ali knew this would entail sacrifice, and he did it anyway because he both consciously and instinctively sided with the oppressed. And that’s why you can go to any outdoor market on earth today and find a knockoff Ali T-shirt for sale. That’s why he remains adored.

James came to a fork in the road and spit on the path laid by Ali before taking the path most traveled. One wonders what 19-year-old LeBron would think about his current self’s making this choice: the choice to reject Ali’s legacy and become just another billionaire stepping over Palestinian bodies to praise the Israeli state.

Child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein did not want to ingratiate himself only to billionaires. He wanted to spend time with people who shaped the culture, and as we saw during Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, nothing shapes the culture quite like the athletic industrial complex.

The website Front Office Sports went through the latest tranche of hurriedly redacted Epstein files, and it is shocking just how many NFL franchise owners are in these e-mails and assorted documents. They include—and this is a partial list—Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots; Steve Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants and first cousin of Jessica Tisch, the current New York City police commissioner; Stephen Ross, owner of the Miami Dolphins; Zygi Wilf, owner of the Minnesota Vikings; and Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons. There are more NFL owners in the Epstein files than attended the Super Bowl.

Denials have already been sputtered, and the owners’ public relations machines are working in overdrive to deny that they are anything more than incidental acquaintances of Epstein. But how many were actually friends with Epstein is less relevant than the fact that everyone who associated with Epstein ignored and excused what was often happening in plain sight around them. And as hard as their PR mavens are working to deflect attention, the sports media is working just as hard to ignore it all.

After all, who could possibly imagine that Kraft would be involved in anything illicit when it comes to exercising power over young women? ESPN has essentially not covered the sports figures involved with Epstein. There are scant few articles under the byline “ESPN News Services,” which draws from the Associated Press. There has been no investigative journalism or televised commentary on one of their yak-fests. When one considers that the NFL now owns a portion of ESPN, not to mention that the NFL is central to much of its programming, the network’s blasé attitude toward the story is odious.

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Even more damning in the released files is the repeated presence of LA 2028 Olympic chairman Casey Wasserman. He says he did nothing wrong, though two Los Angeles supervisors and two members of the City Council have now called for him to resign from his role with the Olympic organizing committee. LA City Council member Monica Rodriguez said that Wasserman represents “a threat to the integrity of the games.”

Wassermans’s clients are already leaving his talent agency in protest. Olympian Abby Wambach and popstar Chappell Roan have dropped Wasserman and are calling for him to step down from the agency that bears his name.

Of course, by any moral marker, Wasserman should not be allowed within 500 yards of the Olympics (or a school). His e-mails to Epstein’s partner in child trafficking, Ghislaine Maxwell, date back 20 years and include unredacted tidbits like, “I think of you all the time. So, what do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?” LA Mayor Karen Bass, however, has not joined the call for him to disappear from the 2028 Games, already being called “The Epstein Olympics.”

The unconvincing excuses for keeping Wasserman at his post include the difficulty of replacing the chair of the LA28 Olympic organizing committee at this late of a date, as well as his ability to raise corporate cash. After what the organizing committee described as an “internal investigation,” Wasserman, whose grandfather Lew Wasserman was one of Hollywood’s most powerful people, is staying on as chair. We need to fight to see every page of the Epstein files with only the names of the survivors and victims redacted—but that is not enough. To paraphrase journalist Nolan Higdon, it is becoming more and more difficult to “shield the architects of the second Gilded Age”—and they deserve no such protections.

The Epstein files have exposed that global elites have never been wealthier and more influential, but they’ve become drunk on power after decades of plunder. This second Gilded Age isn’t ending until the exposure is total and its criminal offenders are frog-marched out of the owners’ boxes.

The past year in Stephen Miller’s America has been unbearably bleak. When masked thugs with “blanket immunity” kidnap 5-year-olds and murder nurses, it tends to darken the national mood. But international mega-star Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (aka Bad Bunny) took the stage during the Super Bowl halftime show and gave the best possible response to Miller’s dystopic dreams: a burst of unbridled joy and a dizzying celebration of love, labor, and the power of living our everyday lives despite hardships, all performed in a lyrical language that Miller, in every possible way, lacks the capacity to understand.

People should view Bad Bunny’s singular performance as the second part of a political two-step aimed at the white-nativist heart of this racist regime. Part one was a week ago, when, after winning the Grammy for album of the year, Bad Bunny began his acceptance speech by saying, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say: ICE out!”—to rapturous cheers. It was an ingenious first step, teeing up the halftime show as a future instrument for broadcasting the anti-ICE fervor hitting red and blue states alike.

Then came step two: bringing the technicolor beauty of Puerto Rican culture to the Super Bowl stage. In a time of monsters, Bad Bunny was posing an alternative world: a place where laborers are seen and celebrated, where hurricanes and their victims aren’t forgotten, and where community—not atomization—fuels society. In the swirl of his irrepressible music, sung only in Spanish, and an elaborate set design that conjured the Caribbean in rich and playful detail, Bad Bunny refused to step into our dismal world. Instead, he brought us into his.

I saw the game in a bar, where the people watching around me initially seemed more interested in the halftime show because of the controversy around Bad Bunny’s selection as a performer—the prospect of his Spanish-only music had predictably enraged right-wingers and prompted them to launch a counter halftime show, which spectacularly failed. In 30 seconds, though, many were standing and dancing, everyone locked into every move on the stage. When Ricky Martin came out as a surprise guest, you could feel the room swoon. At the end, everyone rose in an actual ovation.

The performance was so dense with meaning that, during the fourth quarter, people around me turned to discussing what part of the show they connected with the most—and not only because that was more fun than debating whether the Patriots were going to punt again.

For me, the most powerful moment was when Bad Bunny name-checked, one after the other, every country in the Americas: a bold, delightfully unsubtle statement against white ethnocentrism and USA puffery. When Bad Bunny said during his Grammy speech, “We’re not savage, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans,” the “we are Americans” part had rankled some in immigrant rights circles because it seemed to differentiate the foreign-born. Bad Bunny’s rapid-fire listing—which pointedly did not ignore Cuba or Venezuela—could be seen as a response to that, telling Trump’s cruel regime that “America” is more than just the United States; it’s a region that goes from the top of Canada to the southern tip of Chile. The United States is a part of a community of nations—though it hasn’t been acting like it, instead targeting fishing boats off the coasts of other members of this community and blasting them from the sky like some fascist Death Star.

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Bad Bunny’s performance will launch a thousand term papers intent on decoding every last moment, including when he gave a Grammy to a young child who had been watching from a staged living room seemingly set in Puerto Rico. Such a scene was particularly resonant knowing that, earlier in January, a 5-year-old boy from Minnesota named Liam Ramos had been abducted from his school by ICE and sent to a Texas detention center. Immediately after the show, people began debating online whether the child on stage was Ramos himself. He wasn’t, but it speaks to how deftly Bad Bunny pulled off his two-step that masses of people thought so.

In response, of course, Trump had a racist temper tantrum. Perhaps he was offended by a billboard in the background—in English, for his benefit—that read, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” For this cowardly regime, it’s now a political act just to acknowledge the cultural power of Puerto Rico, to speak a beautiful language, to sing, and to dance, and to live in peace.

During this show of shows, it was difficult to not think about a more serious moment at a recent Bad Bunny concert in Chile. There, the artist led the crowd in a song by legendary Chilean folksinger Victor Jara, who was something like the Bob Dylan of Chile, and whose songs of protest were known around the world. Shortly after the 1973 coup, Augusto Pinochet’s thugs mutilated his guitar-playing hands before the dictator executed him. Perhaps Jara’s most famous song was “El Derecho de Vivir en la Paz.” Bad Bunny had the entire crowd singing this 60-year-old song. For those who don’t know what it means, the title translates to “The Right to Live in Peace.”

One of Pinochet’s early orders was to paint over the vibrant, revolutionary murals of Chile, covering them in gray. Bad Bunny’s performance was an act of protest against such repression. It was the revenge of the muralistas. And not a moment too soon.

On February 6, the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics kick off with an opening ceremony featuring the likes of Mariah Carey and Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli. With lagging ticket sales among locals and protests clogging the streets of Milan to decry the presence of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as security for JD Vance’s delegation, these Olympics already bear the stink of political discontent. When combined with the Beijing 2022 Winter Games and the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, Milano Cortina arrives during the Olympics’ most politically charged inflection point since the back-to-back boycotts of the early 1980s.

In the face of controversy, the Olympic propaganda machine, now headed by new IOC president Kirsty Coventry, is cranking up to 11. Giovanni Malago, the president of the Italian National Olympic Committee, enthused that thanks to the Olympics, “2026 will be the year of Italy.” Olympic officials are promising “a once-in-a-lifetime” experience at Milano Cortina. And yet, for something “once in the lifetime,” its problems are all too familiar.

This is the first Olympics staged after a batch of much-ballyhooed “Olympic Agenda” reforms carried out by the International Olympic Committee that were first approved back in 2014. Former IOC president Thomas Bach noted, “Milano Cortina 2026 will be the first…to fully benefit from our Olympic Agenda reforms from start to finish.”

But how different are these Olympics, really? In the 21st century, the Games are beset by ingrained problems such as overspending, corruption, intensified policing, and greenwashing. Despite cosmetic Olympic reforms, the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics show us that these problems have largely remained unaddressed. Or as sports mega-events scholar Sven Daniel Wolfe wrote, “Olympic reforms risk repeating the crises…that they were ostensibly designed to solve.”

Research from Oxford University has found that every Olympics going back to 1960 has suffered from cost overruns. The Milano Cortina 2026 Games will be no exception. The group Mountain Wilderness found that “costs have risen from the initial estimate of €1.5 billion to €5.72 billion.” This price gouging, as in previous games, is largely due to building the expensive infrastructure required to host the Games, not the sports themselves. According to the watchdog group Open Olympics 2026, launched in 2024 to monitor five-ring spending and promote data transparency, 13 percent of total expenditures go toward “essential Olympic infrastructure.” In other words, “for every €1 spent on something strictly necessary for the Games, €6.6 goes to subsidiary infrastructure.”

With so much money swirling around, it is no surprise that corruption allegations abound. The Italian government’s Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate found that “the Winter Olympics represent a significant event…for criminal syndicates interested in gaining a foothold in the tender awarding procedures.” “Open Olympics 2026” successfully fought for the creation of a portal to track costs related to the Games, but the group notes, “the portal does not indicate who is paying for the cost increases, because financing sources are missing.” This opens the door to “mafia methods” such as extortion, strong-arming, intimidation, and blackmail. In 2024, two senior officials from the Milan-Cortina 2026 Foundation were accused of misappropriating nearly €2 million through irregular tenders for Olympic construction.

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Another source for sky-high costs, as with every Olympics, has been the security state. Back in 2019, the Italian government pledged €415 million toward security, a number that has likely risen considerably. If the Games resemble the Panopticon of Paris 2024 Olympics, heavily armed policing will be omnipresent. According to official plans, the Italian Defense Ministry will be patrolling the skies—with the Air Force on perpetual standby—while between 6,000 and 11,000 military and policing officials will be on the ground. The security plans include a phalanx of hazard-sniffing robots, a fleet of surveillance drones, and a cybersecurity command center. Like every Olympic host, Italy is using the Games to ramp up its security architecture, an architecture that will remain in the wake of the event.

Then there’s the matter of ICE. Members of ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations Division will attend the Milano Cortina Olympics, reportedly in a supporting role for other US law-enforcement agencies in attendance, not as part of President Donald Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown. ICE has played a role in previous Olympics abroad, including the most recent Summer Games in Paris. In truth, the United States has long sent security personnel to oversee the Olympics overseas. For instance, at the 2004 Athens Olympics—the first Summer Games after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—the US sent armed security agents and a bevy of FBI agents.

But in the current political moment, with ICE being used as a gestapo in cities around the country, sending it to Milano Cortina hits very differently. Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala made his feelings crystal clear when he said of ICE, “This is a militia that kills, a militia that enters into the homes of people, signing their own permission slips. It is clear they are not welcome in Milan.” Elly Schlein, a center-left politician in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies, expressed concern that ICE was “an armed militia that is not respecting the law on American soil.” Therefore, she noted, “There is the concern that they would not respect them on Italian soil either.” There are also concerns that ICE could be used to harass and silence US athletes eager to tell the world just how grim it has become in this country.

But that’s not all. Greenwashing, or talking a big environmental sustainability game without real follow-through, is another problem stalking the Olympics. Spanning almost 10,000 square miles, Milano Cortina is the most sprawling Winter Games in history. Olympic organizers’ decision to rebuild a sliding track in Cortina d’Ampezzo set off alarm bells, not only because it was expensive, but also because doing so meant chopping down hundreds of trees and jeopardizing biodiversity in the area. Local activists have accused the Milano Cortina Olympics of being “the most unsustainable Games ever.” Moreover, according to the watchdog group Open Olympics 2026, 64 percent of the 98 Olympic construction projects have been carried out without a single environmental impact assessment.

Luca Trada, a spokesperson for the anti-Olympics group Il Comitato Insostenibili Olimpiadi (The Unsustainable Olympics Committee)—a coalition created to defend local communities from the downsides of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics—told The Nation, “Milan’s development model certainly has enormous environmental costs that are not sustainable in the long term, and events such as the one currently underway confirm this unfortunate trend.”

Trada said anti-Olympics activists have been proceeding on two tracks. First, they are staging alternative sporting events called the “Utopiads,” which Trada described as “essentially three days of popular sport for all who want to compete, without needing to win.” Activists are also organizing an anti-Games mobilization on the afternoon of February 7. “The march will start from the city center and head to the outskirts, towards the areas most affected by property speculation” stoked by the Olympics, Trada said. The idea is to inject a modicum of democracy into the process. Let’s not forget: Milano-Cortina ended up with hosting rights only after numerous cities dropped out of the bidding for the 2026 Olympics because they lost their public referenda, a luxury that Italians did not enjoy.

We are about to witness an undemocratic, debt-ridden, and mobster-infused Olympics, inundated with armed thugs in the streets, in case anyone dares to dissent. At least JD Vance will feel right at home.

This week, a leading German soccer official, Oke Göttlich, said that the time has come to consider the unthinkable: a boycott of the World Cup to protest Donald J. Trump’s United States. The most watched sporting event on earth is due to be played this year in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and Göttlich said in a Friday interview, before a federal agent murdered Minneapolis VA nurse Alex Pretti, that “the time has come” to “seriously consider and discuss this.” Göttlich was responding not only to state agents marauding US streets but also to Trump’s military threats against Greenland and the people of Europe, which have shattered old alliances. However specious these alliances may have been, the alternative that Trump is advancing is a new world order of unchecked US aggression, where the ghoulish Stephen Miller feels free to call for occupation and bloodshed.

Göttlich is no lightweight. He is one of the German federation’s 10 vice presidents and the president of the Bundesliga club St. Pauli. Folks may know St. Pauli as a proudly left-wing, openly anti-fascist team whose fans generally align with what Göttlich is putting forward, although calling for a boycott goes beyond what any European soccer power broker has done. It moves the “Overton window” as to where this discussion could go. Göttlich was pressed by a reporter about the St. Pauli players on the German national team and whether he felt like he was undercutting their personal and national ambitions. Göttlich replied, “The life of a professional player is not worth more than the lives of countless people in various regions who are being directly or indirectly attacked or threatened by the World Cup host. What were the justifications for the boycotts of the Olympic Games in the 1980s? By my reckoning the potential threat is greater now than it was then. We need to have this discussion.”

It is actually past time to have this discussion. Ten long months ago, I wrote a piece with Jules Boykoff titled, “With ICE Out of Control, How Can the US Cohost the 2026 World Cup?” It was a call for countries outside of the United States to boycott. We did not know at the time that the US would threaten war on European soil, abduct world leaders, blow fisher-folk out of the ocean, kidnap 5-year-olds, and execute US citizens in the streets. And yet even 10 months ago, in the aftermath of the ICE kidnappings of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk and the revelations that the US was sending people to labor camps in El Salvador, it was clear that the direction of this country would be toward fascist violence.

Our argument was that countries were being deeply irresponsible by not warning their citizens that traveling to the United States would be perilous and not just for them: players, coaches, and their families would all be at risk. Now even FIFA former chief, that monument to corruption Sepp Blatter, is saying that it could be dangerous for fans to travel to the United States. But Göttlich is taking it to the next level by challenging nations to stay home. FIFA, the world governing body for soccer, has witnessed its chief, Gianni Infantino, affect a weak and bent posture when in Trump’s presence. During Trump’s second term, Infantino has visited the White House more than any foreign leader and presented Trump with that tacky FIFA Peace Prize. Infantino might feel like a world leader when paraded around by Trump like a hairless poodle, but his subservience to Trump has created an opportunity for Göttlich to be a real leader.

“As organizations and society, we’re forgetting how to set taboos and boundaries, and how to defend values,” Göttlich said. “Taboos are an essential part of our stance. Is a taboo crossed when someone threatens? Is a taboo crossed when someone attacks? When people die? I would like to know from Donald Trump when he has reached his taboo, and I would like to know from [German soccer chief] Bernd Neuendorf and Gianni Infantino.”

While Göttlich cited the 1980 Olympic boycott of Moscow following their invasion of Afghanistan, a far better historical comparison comes from his own backyard: the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Hitler used these games to normalize his Nazi regime and project himself as a leader among world leaders. We can, of course, look back at that Olympics and revel in classic sports moments like Jesse Owens winning four gold medals and ruining Hitler’s dreams of Aryan supremacy.

But the deeper story of those games is the shameful decision of countries to travel to Berlin to play for the entertainment of their fascist hosts in the first place. This is not hindsight. There were explosive debates across the globe, particularly the United States, about competing in a Germany already imprisoning dissidents and Jews, burning books, and building a military arsenal for territorial expansion. Organizations like the NAACP agitated for a US boycott. The Amateur Athletic Union, by a sliver of a vote, ignored their pleas as well as the arguments of others and sent US athletes to compete. These decisions now look obscene. Göttlich is offering countries a way to avoid being depicted as cowards, quislings, or villains in the eyes of history. Countries should boycott the World Cup games scheduled to be played in the United States. Ten months ago, they needed to do it for the safety of their own fans. Now they must act for the safety of the rest of us.

One last note: I went to college in the Twin Cities. I still have many friends in the area. My anger at watching Trump send killers to fill the streets of Minneapolis is personal, but the people there have bravely shown that such state violence will be met with a response. Minnesotans aren’t Gianni Infantino. Their backs are not bent, and if you ask them to kiss Trump’s ring, they will bite that finger to the bone.

In a victory for the Palestinian solidarity movement, Israeli soldiers and munitions will not reduce a soccer field in the occupied West Bank’s Aida refugee camp to rubble. In November, Israel announced its plans to demolish the Aida field, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that it is one of the few spaces in the area where kids can play and actually be kids.

The pitch is the only sports facility available to the residents of the Aida camp, and young people from the nearby Bayt Jibrin refugee camp also use the venue. Mohammad Abu Srour of the Aida Youth Center told The Nation, “The football pitch is much more than a sports field for Aida camp. It is also a community hub for families, youth, and social activities. For many children, it represents hope, stability, and a path toward opportunity through sport, education, and psychosocial support.”

In a letter obtained by The Nation, Aida Youth Center board director Munther Amira implored FIFA president Gianni Infantino to recognize that Israel’s decision to raze the field “is a clear and callous attempt to deprive Palestinians, including hundreds of boys and girls of a facility that is of critical importance to their physical and mental welfare.”

Infantino, the only sports official to attend the Summit for Peace in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, last October where Israel and Hamas signed a ceasefire agreement, has been conspicuously quiet while Israel routinely violates the peace pact. But The New York Times reported that Infantino—alongside Aleksandr Ceferin, the head of UEFA, Europe’s governing body for soccer—stepped in, following the outcry, to help save the field from destruction. Palestinians are now awaiting final confirmation that the pitch will actually be saved.

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Nick McGeehan, the program director for the human rights group FairSquare, told The Nation, “This intervention from FIFA and UEFA, is welcome and overdue, but it shouldn’t divert attention from FIFA and UEFA’s statutory responsibilities when it comes to the Israel Football Association and their long-standing violation of statutory rules.”

Abu Srour added, “Sports institutions such as FIFA and UEFA should intervene to protect children’s right to play, including the suspension of Israel from international sporting competitions, as was done previously with Russia and South Africa in response to serious violations.”

The planned destruction of the field barely registered on the US sports mediascape, even as the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has ratcheted up illegal land seizures in the West Bank. But Rachel Griffin Accurso—the popular US children’s educator known to the world as Ms. Rachel—stepped in where the sports media failed, joining kids in Aida via videostream to share her support, saying, “We need help to save this field!”

UEFA’s support to save the Aida refugee camp’s pitch didn’t come out of nowhere. Last August, Ceferin, UEFA’s president,Ceferin allowed a banner before the kickoff at the Super Cup final that read “Stop Killing Children—Stop Killing Civilians.” He was accompanied to the match by two children from Gaza, Palestinian refugees who had been relocated to Italy for medical treatment. UEFA officials also reportedly met last month with organizers from the Game Over Israel campaign to discuss the possibility of banning Israel from international competition. In the end, UEFA allowed Israel to continue to participate in World Cup qualifying matches.

But UEFA’s motivations may lie elsewhere. The news from FIFA and UEFA that Aida’s field would be spared, came the same day that a vote was due to take place in the Swiss Parliament also aimed at standing up to Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza. Swiss politicians put forward a resolution to revoke the tax exemptions of UEFA. It leans on a 2024 advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice that ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was unlawful. And yet UEFA continues to recognize soccer clubs in illegally occupied territories in the West Bank.

The vote was delayed until January 27. If it passes, the Swiss government’s tax authority will give UEFA a deadline to justify allowing the Israel Football Association to continue to compete and explain how the group’s stance chimes with the conditions of tax exemption: fostering peace and combating discrimination. The resolution notes that UEFA moved swiftly to sanction Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, but hasn’t acted similarly when it comes to Israel’s decimation of Gaza and illegal annexations in the West Bank. It then takes aim at UEFA’s pocketbook, noting that it “has long benefited, despite its significant commercial activity, from a tax exemption granted specifically because international sports federations play an important role in promoting peace and combating racism and discrimination.”

Ahead of the vote, Richard Falk, the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, told The Nation, “Revoking UEFA’s tax status will send the sporting world a needed message that even when the UN and prominent governments cast a blind eye to the cause of peace, justice, and law, the authorities of Switzerland will act to uphold their reputation as dedicated to the universal principles of a humane world order.”

Falk concluded, “It is a time of urgency where words alone do not meet the challenge to us all of the ongoing Palestinian ordeal; only action matters.”

Why, might one ask, does the European governing body for football oversee Israel, given the country’s location in the Middle East? The Israel Football Association originally belonged to the Asian Football Confederation, but after Indonesia, Sudan, and Turkey all refused to play 1958 World Cup qualifying matches against Israel, and other countries ramped up their own political pressure, the IFA was expelled in 1974. In the early 1990s, UEFA invited Israel to participate in its competitions, and in 1994, Israel became a full member of UEFA.

President Donald Trump has stripped the varnish off of liberal internationalism. But not everyone is accepting of such gangster governance. Soccer can be a means to show that a large army isn’t a license for domination. And as Swiss authorities have shown—and as a movement is demanding—soccer can also be a way to try to stop the violence.

Thousands of ICE thugs roam the streets, attacking schools, smashing car windows, shooting residents, and “visiting” activists in their homes. Now President Donald Trump is threatening to impose the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to flood the city with troops. Welcome to Minneapolis during the Trump regime.

What is happening in Minneapolis is a fascist shit show, but there is also grassroots resistance. The oppression is all over the news, but the stories of ordinary people fighting back need to be told, too. Dan Troccoli, a public school teacher at Justice Page Middle School and union activist, says that the battle for Minneapolis is not a one-sided rout by ICE—if it was, there would not be these threats to impose martial law.

“Many people around the city have been going around patrolling and keeping an eye on these agents,” he told me. “There are estimates as high as 10,000 people that have been involved in the city in these efforts in the last six weeks. Given the legacy of the uprisings after [the 2020 police murder of] George Floyd, people in the city have been activated for years now. I would argue we were Trump’s target for that reason, but it’s not going exactly like they planned, and people need to know that.”

One example of things “not going exactly like they planned” happened at Roosevelt High School. Only hours after the ICE killing of Renee Good, ICE tried to storm the gates of Roosevelt, when a person they were pursuing ran onto school grounds just as students were heading home. Instead of retreating, ICE assaulted and gassed students and educators. But their attack was met. “In our union, in the Minneapolis Federation of Educators, there has been now, for about a year and a half, a group of educators calling themselves the Deportation Defense Group,” Trocolli explained. “So at Roosevelt, they were ready, and we had a network of people ready to go on this, and we have been doing training around how to be an observer, how to go on patrol, what are the most risky times for students to be dropped off or picked up, and how can we do mutual aid for families who can’t even pick up their kids. So the staff members at Roosevelt were outside of the building ready to ID ICE and physically get in between them and their students.”

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But ICE aggressively pushed forward and then struck and sprayed chemical agents on students and staff. After all of that, ICE arrested one educator, who was then let go hours after the union’s lawyers were on the scene.

The Minneapolis teachers’ unions (there are two) have been front and center in this fight: opening up their halls for meetings every night, partnering with parent organizations, and holding training sessions.

“This past weekend,” Troccoli recalled, “we had a training at one of our high schools, and there were something like 300 parents and staff mixed together, working together to try and organize in their buildings. At recent meetings of this same network of Unionists in MFE, there have been something like 60 to 70 percent of schools represented. And I would imagine it’s much higher now since Renee’s murder, with more buildings getting activated, involved, mostly out of fear and concern for their students’ safety.”

Troccoli stressed that the union’s leadership and active response to the crisis comes from having a unique union president: Marcia Howard. Howard taught at Roosevelt for 20 years. When George Floyd was murdered, she, still a teacher, “was the coordinator, and hub of George Floyd Square.”

Howard took the entire year off then to do this work, turning George Floyd Square into a kind of autonomous zone, and both teachers’ unions made sure she was paid during this time. This drew her closer to the union. Howard, with grassroots encouragement, ran for union vice president and president. “She’s just been a fiery and amazing leader for our union,” Troccoli said, “especially in terms of trying to marry union struggles with other social justice struggles in the city.”

In the face of this resistance, ICE is upping its oppression. Agents are showing up at the homes of people who follow ICE in their cars even at a safe distance are—no matter their citizenship. Troccoli also said that when these ICE-watchers leave their cars, phones in hand, to document their violence, they have been hit, without warning, with mace, pepper balls, and “nonlethal” bullet rounds.

And yet ICE violence has yielded not compliance and pacification but even more resistance. Troccoli said, “A number of unions in the city are now committing to a day-long strike on January 23.” This call already includes the backings of some of the biggest unions in the city including, according to PayDay Report, The Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1005, SEIU Local 26, UNITE HERE Local 17, CWA Local 7250, and St. Paul Federation of Educators Local 28, with more coming. “We’re not sure exactly what’s going to happen that day yet,” Troccoli said. “But it’s happening.

As far as what people can do Troccoli told me that social media support definitely keeps spirits up but “in addition to appreciation, we want emulation. We need that out there in the streets in every city”

After an ICE officer in Minneapolis shot Renee Good in the face, killing the legal observer and mother of three, the Minnesota Timberwolves organization called for a moment of silence before its Thursday night contest against the Cleveland Cavaliers. After two long seconds of silence, one fan howled, “Go home, ICE!” After a shocked moment, another Timberwolves supporter shouted, “Fuck ICE!” At that point, the Target Center arena exploded in anti-ICE cheers. It sounded as if star player “Ant” Edwards had just gone coast to coast for one of his flying dunks. Vice President JD Vance probably thinks all 20,000 people are being paid by George Soros, but the only people getting paid off in Minneapolis are ICE agents, those untrained modern-day slave catchers getting thousands of dollars in signing bonuses whether or not they can do a sit-up.

The next night, Milwaukee Bucks coach Doc Rivers addressed Good’s killing in his press conference, calling it “straight-up murder.” He then spoke at length about what ICE’s mission appears to be with racists like Donald Trump, Vance, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem at the controls, saying, “It’s clear to me we’re attacking brown people, and I just happen to be brown. And I don’t think it should just be brown people who are upset at this. I think we all have to be.”

The NBA coaches were not done. Steve Kerr of the Golden State Warriors said, “It’s shameful, really, that in our country we can have law-enforcement officers who commit murder and seemingly get away with it. It’s shameful that the government can come out and lie about what happened when there’s video and witnesses who have all come out and disputed what the government is saying.… So it’s terrible, terribly sad for her family, and for her, and that city, and I’m glad the Timberwolves came out and expressed that sadness.”

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A small handful of athletes also took to social media, including Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier, to express their horror about what took place, although their posts have disappeared or been taken down.

Then sports opinionist Nick Wright, in a 17-minute monologue on his show—and people should listen to the entire thing—said, in part, “Are we OK that we currently live in a world where we can see a 37-year-old mother shot dead in the street, and we know when we see it, that some people, including some of the most powerful people, will not only justify it but try to convince you that you didn’t see what you just saw?”

I am aware that a howl of anger from one set of sports fans, two coaches, a commentator, and a sprinkling of social media posts does not sound like much amid the enormity of the injustice that happened less than three miles from the Timberwolves’ and Lynx’s arena. But it also should not be dismissed. I wrote two weeks ago that 2025 marked the low point of sports activism. Given the tumult of violence that engulfed this country under year one of Trump’s second term, this quietude from the otherwise boisterous world of sports was gutting. Like the law firms, the universities, and whatever the hell CBS News has become under the leadership of Vichy pundit Bari Weiss and walking blooper Tony Doukopil, sports looked like another industry in a mire of cowardly compliance and complicity with an authoritarian regime.

To see even a ray of light emerge from the sports world is heartening. During the Black Lives Matter movement from 2014–20, sports was at the front lines of the fight for racial justice, especially at the high-school level. As the movement—like all movements—weathered ups and downs, the sports world consistently had players raising their fists, boycotting contests, or taking a knee during the anthem—as inspired by then-49ers, now blackballed, quarterback Colin Kaepernick. The playing field was a central place for organizing and visible resistance. I charted this in a book called The Kaepernick Effect. I am still proud of that work, as it documents and celebrates something that many have dutifully thrown down the memory hole: a period in sports history at odds with today’s cavalcade of right-wing sports yappers, ex-jocks, and gambling hucksters. Last week, before Good’s body was even cold, Stephen A. Smith made unconscionable comments, calling her killing “completely justified.”

I was wrong when I predicted that the Kaepernick effect would usher in a new era in sports. And yet, as this administration continues to fight “the enemy within” (as Trump is fond of babbling between his addled moments), maybe the sports world is waking up. People in the United States don’t need inspiration from sports—hundreds of thousands took to the streets this past weekend without any call from the sports world. But if the sports industry does get involved, it will mean that all those marching, chanting, and yelling “fuck ICE” will have new allies and amplifiers. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and those in the business of sports—that means athletes, their unions, and talking heads—can no longer afford to stand on the sidelines.

I began writing a Nation sports column in 2005, and every December, I take stock of the trends in sports and politics over the previous 12 months. Each year, I try to explain how you can read the political pulse of this country by looking at social resistance in the world of sports. The great sports sociologist Dr. Harry Edwards has described athletes as “the canary in the coal mine,” meaning that the politics and struggles in sports prefigure what will come elsewhere in society. Think of Jackie Robinson integrating baseball nearly a decade before the Montgomery bus boycotts or Billie Jean King signaling the coming of Title IX legislation by standing for women’s liberation in a traditionally male and hostile space. Gay athletes like Glenn Burke and David Kopay showed that LGBT visibility was coming to the broader society. While I still believe the Edwards rule, I also believe that 2025 will be remembered as the exception: This year the canaries were rare.

Trump and his acolytes have turned this country upside down, but you would rarely know it come game time. Twenty twenty-five was the most disappointing, depressing year of sports activism—whether by players, media, or the unions—in my professional lifetime.

This is not to say that the entire sports world remained silent. But the brave exceptions were as scarce as hen’s teeth. We can now see that the effects of Colin Kaepernick’s 2016 protests peaked with the response to the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. That was only five years ago, but it feels like 500. The summer of 2020 seemed like the beginning of a new era. Athletes went on wildcat strikes against police violence—but it turned out that was the capstone, not a foundation block.

Now, instead of players risking—and sometimes losing—their careers, we have even seen a few athletes cheerlead a regime that has claimed the right to throw their immigrant teammates into an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison. This public embrace of Trumpism in the sports world was almost unheard-of during Trump’s first term. Back then, Kaepernick and company were taking a knee in the face of Trump’s rants that they be fired, denaturalized, and deported. Now Eagles star running back Saquon Barkley and Lions wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown perform Trump-tribute dances in the end zone after touchdowns. Still, the regime’s support within the sports world should not be overstated—right now it’s not the support of Trump that’s the problem; it’s the quietude that’s so damaging.

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All the players’ unions have kept their heads down. Some are combative on economic questions, like the fighting WNBA Players Association, but none are standing up or speaking out on social issues in the United States—let alone genocide in Gaza. Neither are the leagues. Neither is the near entirety of sports media. And with very few exceptions, neither are individual athletes.

Sports should be understood as a political sphere—like the law, the university system, and the media. And in each of these realms, many of their major institutions capitulated to Trump this year—and with each capitulation, the power of the fascist Borg increases. The Borg feeds on silence and surrender, and in 2025 the sports world provided a feast. This time there was no LeBron James calling Trump a “bum.” No teams refusing en masse to visit what’s left of the White House. No one seems eager to pick up the baton from Megan Rapinoe or Michael Bennett or any of the resistance heroes of a decade ago.

The silence is particularly infuriating in sports, because Trump works overtime to plant his flag in this space. In January, Trump became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl so he could stand over the crowd and in front of the country like some orange Il Duce. He then spent most of the year preparing to turn the 2026 World Cup—hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico—and the 2028 LA Olympics into fascistic spectacles of state propaganda. The aim is to use the spotlight earned by these great athletes to present himself as the authoritarian of all authoritarians

Then there is the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Trump, with assistance from UFC owner Dana White and diminutive podcaster Joe Rogan, has turned the sport into a recruiting ground for the far right. MMA has a tradition of radical resistance, which makes the Trump/Dana White hijacking of the spectacle for political gain especially abhorrent. Their partnership has been a prelude to Trump’s plan to stage an MMA card on what’s left of the White House lawn during the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations.

Trump also says he wants to change the name of football, because he is sliding rapidly toward incapacitation and a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency. And in almost every speech, however incoherent and no matter the context, he digresses to rail against trans kids who want to play sports.

Radical political traditions and movements have always shown the capacity to rise from the dead. We can understand them, like the Haymarket Martyrs taught us, as a subterranean fire that can never be put out. But this year the tradition of Muhammad Ali, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, and Billie Jean King has been gutted. And the fingerprints on the blade are not just from athletes—but also from the agents, the media stenographers, the unnecessary executives, and, of course, the sports owners, many of whom help bankroll the Trump movement.

Fighting fascism is not a game. Through their indifference, most of the sports world is allowing a sacred tradition—born from people like John Montgomery Ward, Moses “Fleetwood” Walker, Alice Milliat, and Paul Robeson—to expire. The shame of that silence is that across the country people are resisting. Communities are physically pushing ICE out of their cities; trans people and their allies continue to fight against a tidal wave of vicious reaction; socialists are being elected as mayors—and yet athletes and the sports media refuse to reflect this reality.

It’s easy to excoriate cowardice. The bigger question is why. Why, so soon after 2020, does silence rule the day in sports?

There is the larger political climate of compliance and with this comes fear. Athletes see the people being kidnapped off the streets by ICE. They watch others having their careers destroyed because they stood for Palestine or refused to sufficiently mourn a far-right, racist YouTube host. Even if they aren’t noticing, they surely have people in their ear who are.

Athletes, given the stakes, are burying their heads. These “stakes” in return for silence are massive. The sports world is now flush with billions due to the commercial seizure of our games by legalized gambling. The lucrative addiction economy is the reason that everyone from the players to the unions to the networks relentlessly selling us on betting lines avoid upsetting the apple cart.

The transformation of sports commentators into bookies has also been accompanied by a McCarthyite cleansing of their ranks. Once-prominent ESPN voices—like Howard Bryant, Jemele Hill, and Michael Smith—that analyzed athletic resistance have been vanquished from the (Disney and now National Football League–owned) “World Wide Leader in Sports.” They have been replaced by near-interchangeable media-trained ex-jocks who are experts in talking loudly about nothing. The hosts who chose to remain and practice amnesia about what the network just recently was, might as well wear NFL jerseys with “Vichy” printed along the back.

The only politics allowed at ESPN now come from TV-performance artist Stephen A. Smith and the crown prince of stupid, Pat McAfee. Smith claims to want a future in politics and is trying to rant his way into carving out a space on the center-right. McAfee first became known by platforming vaccine denialist and RFK Jr. fanboy Aaron Rodgers and is now Trump’s ESPN yipping head of choice. The “no politics rule” of ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro has been thoroughly exposed as “no to a certain kind of politics.”

Then there is social media. A decade ago, athletes used this town square to speak out. Activists on social media organized the famous Cavs/Nets game after the police killing of Eric Garner where the players, including LeBron, wore shirts that read “I Can’t Breathe.” Ten years later, social media isn’t a town square. It’s a minefield. And tech oligarchs—especially the one who started 2025 with a Nazi salute—are manipulating the algorithms in ways that keep us at each other’s throats.

There also is the conservatizing effect of the billions of Saudi and United Arab Emirates money now flooding into professional sports. This tonnage of filthy lucre always comes with strings attached. This is the US sports world getting paid off to “sportswash” authoritarian, murderous regimes. When “Fly Abu Dhabi” is affixed to the Knicks uniforms, it’s not because the UAE thinks Vinnie from Queens is going to take the family to the Emirates over Labor Day weekend. It’s to normalize themselves as global leaders and acculturate us to disregard any notion of human rights. Petrol dictatorships are buying up teams and tournaments with nary a peep just as our own country descends into lawless authoritarianism.

In this hellscape, some of the best comments by athletes have come from Trump’s (soon to be literal) backyard. It’s UFC fighters. When MMA star Sean Strickland was asked if he’d perform at the White House UFC bash, he said, “I’d wanna do the White House if there was some kind of inclusion for fans, but like, just to go hang out with the fucking Epstein list? I’m good, dog. I’m good, dude.”

Or fighter Brandon Royval who said, “I don’t give a fuck about any of our political figures right now, and it’s like to fight in front of them seems like some fucking Hunger Games type of fucking shit. I don’t give a fuck to fight in front of some fucking billionaires and rich people that could give a shit less about me. Probably throwing parlays. Fuck you guys. Also, I’m too Mexican-looking. [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is suspiciously arresting motherfuckers, and I don’t know. Who knows, bro? Next thing you know, I’m in Mexico, and I don’t speak Spanish.”

No group of athletes is more familiar with Trump-world than the UFC fighters and familiarity, as is often the case with these political grotesqueries, is breeding contempt.

Athletes, their unions, and the sports media do not need to speak out for people to see a victorious resistance. As this rebellion grows, some athletes will honor and amplify the sacrifices by those fighting creeping fascism. Others will join the reactionary herd. But it seems like most will be silent. And history will not be kind to the people who failed to defend their fans, their teammates, or, in some cases, even their own families.

Correction: An earlier version of this misnamed the MMA star who would refuse to fight at the White House. His first name is Sean, not Scott.

Growing up, I was part of a Jewish family that did not celebrate Christmas. Many of the Jewish families at our reform synagogue made secular gestures toward the holiday: gifts under a tree or a trip to see Santa at Macy’s. But with Christmas, my vaguely religious mother drew a line: no Rudolph, no carols, no Christmas goose. Let the goys have it. Our December would be Hanukkah. For my mother, these eight days would be a gentle shield against cultural erasure. In a time before Adam Sandler’s stylings turned Hanukkah into the most celebrated of our holidays in the goyishe world, this meant that in high school I was often asked about “Jewish Christmas.”

That’s part of what makes the Jewish massacre at Bondi beach so obscene: These antisemitic monsters chose Hanukkah, the holiday that has most connected Jewish culture to the world—my mother’s gentle shield against cultural erasure—to commit mass murder. As of this writing, the count is 15 dead and 27 injured. One of the injured is Ahmed al Ahmed, the hero of Bondi Beach who wrested a gun away from one of the shooters.

And now our world’s least principled actors are telling us, without any justification, why this happened and drawing actionable conclusions about it before anyone actually knows the motivations of the killers—namely, linking the violence to support of Palestine. The dead have one use to these people: They exist to justify Israel’s conquest of Gaza and the Palestinian blood that now will surely be shed. Facts be damned.

Sure enough, in the wake of Bondi Beach, Netanyahu set a land-speed record in finding a camera to stand in front of to blame the massacre on the Australian government’s recognizing a Palestinian state. The New York Times’ Bret Stephens published an article the next morning, while the rest of us were still in shock, titled “Bondi Beach Is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” David Frum did the same at The Atlantic with “The Intifada Comes to Bondi Beach.“

Don’t buy their bullshit. They are exploiting our dead. They are tying this tragedy to their own nationalist project for personal gain. They are relentless in their message that standing for Palestinian existence in the face of annihilation makes you party to this atrocity, which is an obscene lie.

Many Jews, including myself, have shouted from the hills that Judaism and Zionism are two separate sets of ideas. Judaism is a religion with 5,000 years of history. Zionism is an expansionist, supremacist ideology propping up a state that’s younger than Goldie Hawn. We have argued that it is, in fact, an act of antisemitism to conflate the two, with the implication that to be a faithful Jewish person translates into supporting the leveling of Gaza and the mass killings of children. Our opponents in this fight to define our culture and religion have been gargantuan: the might of both US political parties; organizations like AIPAC; a university system equating pro-Palestinian protest with antisemitism; and the David Ellison/Bari Weiss media offensive aimed nakedly at whitewashing Israel’s crimes.

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What the Bondi Beach massacre has shown is that these people and organizations have made life far more unsafe for Jews around the world by bonding our existence with theirs. If, indeed, the shooter was targeting Jewish people in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, then these same ghouls have made a fear many Jews share come true: that people will seek retribution for the actions of war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu.

Plus, there is a grander strategy to this. If we can believe that attacking Gaza and slaughtering families will actually prevent attacks like Bondi Beach—an utterly upside-down proposition—then we can sit silent as Netanyahu breaks the Gaza ceasefire, as he did over the weekend. That particular breaking of the ceasefire, according to Axios, even managed to piss off the White House. So Netanyahu must have been thrilled to go back to his happy place: blood libel against his political opponents. It seems like Netanyahu’s guiding political principle is to prove Voltaire’s line, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

While those fighting war crimes are being equated with killers, the Christian Zionists—and lest we forget, there are more Christian Zionists in the United States than all Jewish people combined—continue to be embraced by organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and promoted by opportunistic vultures like Bari Weiss. These are people—and they lurk throughout the corridors of Trump’s White House—who love Israel and hate Jews. To see Weiss turn CBS News, the house that Murrow built, into a toilet of Charlie Kirk conspiracies is to see someone willing to profane the public’s right to know in the service of foreign objectives. For Weiss, it’s a devil’s bargain. Better to rule in Hell.

Meanwhile, the names of the dead at Bondi Beach are being released. People should read every story. Learn about people like Holocaust survivor Alexander Kleytman, who died by bodily protecting his wife, Larisa, also a Holocaust survivor, from the bullets. Feel every tragedy. Do this for them. And do it for Palestinians, who aren’t nameless statistics but people worthy of their own recognition, their own narratives, and each one’s own singular memory.

Please remember that, above all else, there are two sides. One is committed to ending our world’s addiction to hatred, violence, and needless bloodshed. The other stands with a supremacist death cult, willing to justify their own crimes in the wake of every violent tragedy—tragedies that they egg on through their commitment to ethnic cleansing.

In the coming month, Netanyahu will undoubtedly tell the Hanukkah story as a fable of a plucky minority, miraculously victorious in battle against brutal invaders. He will drape his story with the bodies of Bondi Beach, saying that the Israelis are the Maccabees succeeding against all odds.

That’s a lie. The Maccabees of 2025 are those standing against a tide that comprises not only Israeli military might but the whole of the United States government, much of the mainstream media, and all of those who aim to exploit the tragedy of Bondi Beach. We, not they, are proud Maccabees, fighting against a different cultural erasure from what my mother feared.

It’s not Christians with tinsel and holiday cheer trying to erase who we are. It’s Zionists committed to branding our beautiful religion with the stain of genocide and preventing us from preventing a Bondi Beach from ever happening again.

It’s likely you heard the surreal news that FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Donald Trump a “Peace Prize” amid the backdrop of protest outside the Kennedy Center.

It’s less likely that you heard about a far more serious announcement the previous week: that Infantino will be formally accused of aiding and abetting Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.

The ICC filing parties will include a group of Palestinian footballers, Palestinian clubs, land owners, and advocacy groups Irish Sport for Palestine, Scottish Sport for Palestine, and Just Peace Advocates, with support from an expert legal team.

According to a public statement from the filing parties, Infantino, as well as Union of European Football Association President Aleksander Čeferin, are facing accusations that FIFA and UEFA funded settlement clubs—that is, football clubs that operate on land illegally seized from Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. “FIFA and UEFA permit these clubs to play in leagues organised by the Israel Football Association and host matches on the seized land,” the coalition contends. “They also provide financial and structural support to settlement clubs, some of which have played in the UEFA-organised competitions.”

The filing parties write that FIFA and UEFA’s financial support of these clubs legitimizes Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, which contributes to “the transfer of civilian population into occupied territories contrary to the Rome Statute art 8(2)(b)(viii)” and “aids and abets apartheid (a crime against humanity pursuant to Rome Statute art 7(1)(j)).”

“Not only is this establishing clubs on land stolen from Palestinians,” Rebecca O’Keeffe, with Irish Sport for Palestine, told The Nation, “but it also means that Palestinians cannot access these clubs, cannot access playing, supporting, watching anything in these areas. And that is apartheid. UEFA and FIFA are breaching their own statutes against territorial integrity and jurisdiction.”

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“This is historic,” continued O’Keeffe. “This is the first time in history that leaders of the sports associations are being accused of aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity. It shows these leaders of sports institutions that their decisions in relation to illegal settlement clubs may carry severe legal consequences. Hopefully it sets a much-needed precedent and also a first step towards imposing sanctions on the Israeli Football Association.”

The filing is historic, but it shouldn’t be necessary.

From 1961 to 1992, FIFA banned apartheid South Africa from competing. More recently, after the invasion of Ukraine, FIFA and UEFA banned Russia from competing, prompting a chorus of critics—considering efforts to ban apartheid Israel dating back as far as 1958—to say: “Now do Israel.”

Then, one week after being accused of crimes against humanity, Infantino awarded Trump the bogus “Peace Prize.” These kinds of sycophantic displays—including when Trump bent over backward to flatter Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman—will only spur more people to oppose him and his twisted ethics. Many of them are turning out to champion the formal ICC filing. “We have huge support for this initiative from the international sporting community,” said O’Keefe. “We have had new filing parties join every day, and we just made the initiative public.”

O’Keeffe added that this support came despite widespread corporate media censorship of the ICC announcement, and that she remained hopeful that the international sporting community can play a key role as it once did to help end South African apartheid. “FIFA is a cultural dominant force,” said O’Keeffe. “It has commercial domination. FIFA earns more revenue than some countries earn GDP. We have to understand that.”

One can argue Trump understands this as much as anyone—which is why he always makes sure that Infantino has a place at his feet. And yet, their open embrace of each other makes the case against Infantino that much easier. He shamelessly genuflects before the man who armed the last year of the Gaza genocide and is currently complicit in its ethnic cleansing.

In other words, don’t expect Infantino to call character witnesses.

Outside of what DC locals have dubbed the “Vichy” Kennedy Center, people gathered on Friday to protest the 2026 World Cup draw. Campaigners showed up for many reasons—from the security apparatus the World Cup will bring to North American cities to the ways ICE may be planning to use the cup as a hunting ground for undocumented immigrants—but a uniting disgust was that the FIFA boss, a sleazy supplicant to the world’s oligarchs named Gianni Infantino, was going to do something he loves even more than watching soccer: smooch Donald Trump’s ass. Infantino would use the closely watched draw to bestow a made-up award, the FIFA Peace Prize, on a president inflicting violence both at home and abroad.

As Free DC protester Slobodan Milic explained, “We don’t want ICE in our cities during the World Cup or anytime. And this Peace Prize only brands FIFA as the most corrupt organization on the planet. [Infantino] gets the Kennedy Center for free, which usually costs millions, because they flatter the Dear Leader.”

Infantino is groveling in support of Trump’s favorite narrative: that Trump is the “president of peace.” Sure, Trump ordered the Defense Department to change its name to the “Department of War,” and yes, PolitiFact labeled his claim that “in a period of just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars” as “mostly false.” And while his addled mind is prone to blurting self-aggrandizing falsities—sometimes he claims to have ended six wars, sometimes it’s eight, sometimes he incorrectly claims that no other president than he has ever ended a war—one thing is sure: Trump has overseen an alarming increase in government violence.

His administration has orchestrated the drone bombing of alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean, warmed the hearts of war criminals everywhere by sanctioning the International Criminal Court, cozied up to some of the most brutal dictators, armed the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and unleashed a campaign of terror right here at home, with masked agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement marauding through city after city. It’s as if Trump is trying to troll Orwell’s ghost, embodying his “war is peace” shibboleth in gruesome Technicolor.

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Despite all this, Infantino handed the inaugural—and bizarre-looking—FIFA Peace Prize to Trump, explaining why he was chosen to be given this golden spittoon: “This is what we want from a leader, a leader that cares about the people. We want to live in a safe world, in a safe environment. We want to unite. That’s what we do here today. That’s what we do at the World Cup, Mr. President, and you definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action, for what you have obtained in your way, but you obtained it in an incredible way.”

According to reporting by Adam Crafton at The New York Times, the FIFA president’s unilateral decision to establish the award blindsided the powerful FIFA Council—composed of eight vice-presidents, 28 members at large, and chaired by Infantino. Some members of the FIFA Council learned of the prize via a press release. When Human Rights Watch penned a letter to FIFA in mid-November requesting basic info about the prize—its search criteria, the nomination process, the judges for the award—the group was stonewalled.

The prize—officially dubbed the “FIFA Peace Prize – Football Unites the World”—claims to honor “the enormous efforts of those individuals who unite people, bringing hope for future generations.” At the ceremony, Infantino gushed, “You can always count, Mr. President, on my support, on the support of the entire football community, or soccer community, to help you make peace and make the world prosper all over the world.”

The mutually beneficial chumminess between Trump and Infantino is well-established. Trump has issued more White House invitations to Infantino than to any world leader. Trump invited Infantino to attend the Summit for Peace in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where Israel and Hamas signed the ceasefire agreement that Israel regularly violates. Infantino was the only sports official at the event. He had no political role. This didn’t stop him from posting about it on Instagram—as he does with all things Trump—like a besotted teenager.

What Trump gets out of this is the opportunity to be center stage at the most watched televised program on the planet. His cavernous, unfillable ego craves what even for him would be a titanic amount of attention. Him waving from an owner’s box, with Fox News lowering the volume on the boos, would be a visual expression of soft power he cannot resist. What Infantino gets is proximity to that power, and he has no shame about looking like a cheap flunky.

At an event in Miami in early November, Infantino heaped praise on Trump, who was in attendance, stating, “We should all support what he’s doing because I think it’s looking good.” In doing so, Infantino not only provided another example of his shamelessness, but he also likely breached FIFA rules on political neutrality. According to FIFA statutes, “FIFA remains neutral in matters of politics and religion. Exceptions may be made with regard to matters affected by FIFA’s statutory objectives.” Trump likes his sycophancy dolloped on thick, and the ever-oleaginous Infantino obliged: “I’m really lucky. I have a great relationship with President Trump, where I consider him a really close friend.” The FIFA president added, “Of course he’s being very helpful in everything we are doing for the World Cup.”

All this follows Infantino’s Instagram campaign for Trump to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In early October, as a ceasefire proposal between Hamas and Israel inched forward, Infantino posted, “President Donald J. Trump definitely deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for his decisive actions.” He, of course, has not commented about Israel’s ignoring the “ceasefire” whenever the mood strikes.

Back in reality, the 2026 World Cup—and Infantino’s toadying—enables Trump, as many protesters pointed out, to turbocharge his violent deportation machine.

That machine’s intersection with the World Cup is already whirring at a disturbing pitch. This week, Human Rights Watch revealed that at last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup final, an asylum seeker attending the match with his two children—aged 14 and 10—was detained by local police in a parking lot near MetLife Stadium in New Jersey after he tried to use a drone to take a family photo. Instead of issuing him a citation and releasing him so he could attend the match with his kids, police notified ICE, who detained the man and ultimately deported him. This despite the fact that in 2022, the man and his family—who have kept their identity and country of origin under wraps—fled their home country in fear of political violence. Then came three months in ICE detention. His asylum claim was rejected, and the man decided not to appeal his case. “It’s so psychological what they do to you there,” he explained, “You want to get out so badly.”

“The intersection of immigration enforcement and major sporting events creates a perfect storm of risk and chaos,” Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at Human Rights Watch, told The Nation. “People who should be able to enjoy a soccer match with their children instead face the terror of indefinite detention, family separation, and removal.”

Days before the draw, Human Rights Watch held a press conference where numerous civil liberties and media-rights groups sounded the alarm over staging the 2026 World Cup in the United States.

“While FIFA and host cities prepare for the games,” said Jamil Dakwar, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program, “the Trump administration is escalating dangerous policies that put immigrant communities, foreign visitors, and residents at risk…. FIFA risks becoming a stage for authoritarianism” and “a public relations tool to normalize an increasingly authoritarian US government.”

Jamal Watkins, the senior vice president of strategy and advancement at the NAACP, raised a crucial question: “Some folks will say, ‘What are the chances of a family being torn apart and folks being detained in an extrajudicial process and disappearing?’”

He then answered his own hypothetical: “Very high. You see it on the news almost every day. This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s happening in our communities,” adding, “If FIFA turns a blind eye to this, then they actually are picking a political side.

As for the protesters, they held signs that said, “No Cup with ICE” and “Red card for war crimes,” but one chant especially deserves replication: “Soccer is the World’s Game. ICE is the world’s shame.”

Over the holiday weekend in Washington, DC, two members of the West Virginia National Guard, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, were shot at a short metro ride from my house. Beckstrom died from her injuries and, as of this writing, Wolfe remains in critical condition. The news quickly spread that the shooter was a CIA-trained Afghan man named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who seems to have been psychologically ravaged by his experience in a death squad underwritten with our tax dollars. The moment his national identity hit social media, the Trump regime did what it loves most: collectively punish brown immigrants. There would be no national assessment of imperial blowback—just Stephen Miller and his White House mob turning up the xenophobic racism to 11.

In the shooting’s aftermath, there have been many Big Lies circulated, but I think we must begin with the person whose hands are most stained with Beckstrom’s and Wolfe’s blood: West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrisey.

Morrisey, the governor of one of the poorest states in the country and who has spent much of his time attacking “the woke mind virus,” is pushing the following line across the media: “When the evildoers step up, we have to make sure that we do everything in our power to push back against them. We have to stand strong for basic principles like protecting our nation’s capital, for eliminating violence for reducing crime. These should not be controversial topics.”

Not controversial? Leave aside that “evildoers” in his mind does not include the CIA agents training and arming torture squads amid a 20-year war whose purpose seems ever more incomprehensible. Leave that aside, because we must take on “the Big Lie” being spewed across the political spectrum: that the National Guard has been protecting the people of Washington, DC. The idea that the Guard morphed into trained neighborhood crime-stoppers once West Virginians got off the bus at the DC Armory is a lie. Even the idea that reducing crime was a goal of this authoritarian occupation is a lie, and we cannot let these lies take hold.

First—and we cannot say this loudly enough—there was no crisis of violent crime in DC. In fact, crime was at a 30-year low. (Note that this link goes to Trump’s Justice Department’s webpage.) This was step one in Trump’s fulfilling a promise to the MAGA base: During the campaign, he vowed repeatedly to occupy blue cities militarily and uproot “the enemy within.” Forget the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars federal troops from participating in civilian law enforcement. This was about taking advantage of the non-statehood of Washington, DC, and normalizing the use of the military against US citizens—as Trump said in his instantly infamous emergency meeting of US generals. His endgame, again openly expressed, is to occupy our cities just in time for the 2026 midterms.

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We shouldn’t forget that the Reichstag-fire moment used as an excuse to essentially dissolve DC’s home rule was when adolescent children beat up a DOGE employee nicknamed Big Balls. This threatened the wounded masculinity of an entire administration: a Black-run city had taken its big balls.

So the Trump team invented a nonexistent crime crisis just in time for autumn. This was not a coincidence. Crime drops in DC every fall, because school is back in session. DC has cut youth summer jobs programs, and the structure of the school day causes a dip in street crimes. It doesn’t take a PhD in criminology to see this pattern.

Then there is the Morrisey Big Lie that these troops were “protecting the capital.” The National Guard has been picking up trash, mulching, and basically doing all the jobs that teenagers could have been doing over the summer if there were robustly funded summer-job opportunities. And it would be cheaper to hire kids than launch an unprecedented military occupation. The Guard also heard from countless DC folks, very politely and at great cost to their morale (including the morale of Beckstrom), that it would be so nice if they would just leave and stop brandishing heavy artillery at crime-infested areas like the Washington Monument.

The National Guard has protected nothing. All it has done is wreck the local economy and provide a tableau of what fascism would look like across the country. For months, residents have been warning that such a shooting was inevitable. Occupation breeds violence, and guns beget more guns. The Trump administration mocked these pleas. Now Beckstrom is dead because Governor Morrisey wanted to impress the great leader by being first in line to violate legal norms. She is dead because the Trump regime wanted to occupy “Democratic” cities. She is dead because Morrisey sent 300 National Guards people to DC as a sop to Trump’s effort to stage an authoritarian costume ball.

The military occupation has only ushered in more violence. Three other people were killed in DC this week. Say their names: Kevin Booker, Demetrius Alston, and David Warren Childs. Police shot Booker and Childs. Alston died in Metro PD custody. There have been vigils for all three. They are being mourned in part, as the organization Harriet’s Wildest Dreams put it, because

Since the occupation there has been an exponential uptick of terror on our communities, neighbors snatched, residents dragged through court and most recently heightened violent encounters with law enforcement.… Local police continue to coordinate with federal law enforcement for the sole purpose of enacting terror and compliance, but we will not comply. We will fight back.

One last comment from Morrisey needs to be vetted. After first speaking about the need to not politicize the shootings, he said, “We are not going to let the same kind of ideology that drove the defund the police movement—we’re not going to let that happen with respect to the Guardsmen.”

The point of defunding the police and defunding ICE was that untrained people with military-grade weaponry do not make communities safer and that they actually represent a threat to peace. Beckstrom and Wolfe should have been home with their families for the holidays. That goes for Booker, Alston, and Childs as well. To ensure public safety, the National Guard occupying DC should be sent home. CIA black ops—and the presidents who funded them—should be scrutinized for training killers. And this regime—offering only nihilism, collective punishment, and extrajudicial murder—should be tried in a criminal court. But that’s not all we need to see. Offering a different vision of public safety is a matter of life and death—and a federal occupation of our cities must have no role in this vision.

The blue tent is now as much a part of NFL Sunday as the national anthem. It sits in full view on one sideline, and it’s where players are sent to be assessed for concussions after receiving a blow to the head. Their injury is then checked by an independent concussion evaluator—and thank God for this shred of progress. But the tent is also a symbol of what the league wants to obscure: We see players being treated and carted off for dislocated ankles, torn Achilles tendons, and twisted knees, yet concussion testing is now done away from the eyes of the fans. We watch players cry out in pain with compound fractures, but we rarely see the dazed looks, unsteady steps, or vomiting that can result from a traumatic brain injury.

The blue tent makes it seem like the NFL is taking care of an issue that had been dragged into the light by both off-field tragedies and a science-based movement of player advocates: that the repeated concussions endemic to football can cause Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). In recent years, the CTE discourse has mostly disappeared—as if the whole topic had been pulled into a blue tent. But CTE should still be at the center of discussions about the country’s most popular sports league.

So far in 2025, nine former and current NFL players under the age of 48 have died. Of those nine deaths, seven were the result of suicide, actions that signaled deep mental duress, or undisclosed reasons. A Nation overview of other major sports leagues—including the violent worlds of boxing and mixed martial arts, can’t find anything close to similar numbers elsewhere. Yet you’d barely know it. Media members who once predicted that our knowledge of CTE could endanger the sport are now more interested in the gambling experience of fans than the workplace safety of players.

While the media curiosity has died, the players are still suffering. CTE is associated with depression, drastic mood swings, and suicidal ideation. Players know this. Two legendary footballers—Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau and Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson—shot themselves in the chest so their brains could be studied for CTE, which can only be conclusively diagnosed postmortem. This is why the family of former Cincinnati Bengals running back Rudi Johnson, who took his own life on September 23, have gone public with the fact that he was telling people that he was suffering from CTE. Players talk to one another, and they know that many of their former colleagues experience a combination of depression and erratic behavior that had not previously been part of their lives. This is why the family of Doug Martin, a 36-year-old Pro Bowler who just died in police custody after being arrested in an alleged home invasion, has announced that his brain will be tested for CTE. (It also sounds like yet another example of why we need ways to intervene in the mental health episodes of loved ones without involving the police.)

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Impaired impulse control, depression, mood swings, and easy access to handguns become the ingredients for tragedy. There should have been a greater discussion in the media about CTE, violence, and mental illness when former high school running back Shane Tamura burst into the lobby at the NFL’s Park Avenue headquarters with an AR-15 earlier this year, killing four people. He later fatally shot himself in the chest, barricaded on the building’s 33rd floor. This, of course, garnered national coverage. But the media attention dissipated—particularly in sports media—when it was revealed that Tamura’s suicide note said he was driven to do this because he believed CTE was destroying his brain. His autopsy showed that he was correct. Tamura’s suicide note also references Terry Long, a former NFL player who was found to have CTE after he killed himself by drinking antifreeze in 2005.

Of course, mental health challenges can exist independently of traumatic brain injuries, and it is impossible to quantify how stigmas against psychiatric assistance in hyper-masculine sports might play into these deaths as well. Other attendant issues that plague ex-athletes like bankruptcy, substance abuse, and the disorientation of being “retired” at 28 years old should also be considered.

These discussions are not new. What is particularly disturbing, however, is how the traditional league watchdogs—like ESPN and the current iteration of the NFL Players Associations—are saying or doing so little.

When 24-year-old Dallas Cowboys player Marshall Kneeland died by gunshot suicide last week, the day after he scored his first touchdown, the Dallas media clamored to understand the role that CTE and head injuries may have played in his suicide. But CTE was not mentioned in ESPN’s coverage. It also wasn’t mentioned either by the media or teams in tributes to Kneeland held before Monday night’s national telecast of the Cowboys game against the Las Vegas Raiders.

It is complicated and heartbreaking to try to divine why a young football player would kill himself, but such a tragedy still demands rigorous reporting and analysis, which hardly exists in sports media now. A decade ago, when CTE burst into view, ESPN would regularly have televised programming about the latest death or lawsuit. Most of that was funneled through their now-canceled award-winning daily journalism program Outside the Lines. Today, with more online video NFL coverage than ever, CTE discussions are absent. Many of the old journalists have been replaced by loquacious, media-trained ex-players who specialize in talking a lot and saying little of substance and opining more about betting lines than what might be happening “outside the lines.”

According to a Nation overview, from August to November 2024, ESPN published at least seven articles—excluding neutral injury reports—that dealt with the devastating effects of concussions. This year, during those same months, The Nation could identify only one such article, even with this series of tragic deaths.

“It is frustrating that there is less media coverage and investigative reporting on CTE than there was a few years ago,” said Chris Nowinski, CEO and cofounder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. “The NFL has strategically built business relationships with media organizations.”

He added that “with shrinking print media, there are few places that can invest in the coverage of CTE. That coverage thus far has resulted in football becoming safer, and more resources being provided to struggling football families. Many of those changes and services were inspired by investigative reporting, and I worry that without the media, progress will slow or even reverse.”

Sure enough, a former ESPN journalist told me that the fact that the NFL now owns 10 percent of ESPN could be blunting the network’s zeal to investigate the ugly underbelly of the league. The self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader in Sports” matters, because its coverage often determines the focus of other sports networks, all trying to feed in its wake.

As for the NFL players’ union, it has been a rudderless, scandal-plagued shell since the exit of DeMaurice Smith as executive director. “The horrifying events of recent months demand serious attention from every stakeholder in this business,” Smith said to The Nation. “As executive director, I believed it was essential to love players more than the game—and to treat football for what it is: a dangerous workplace that can damage both body and mind. Research, safety protocols, treatment, intervention, and medical care are all indispensable, but so is the professional and collegiate duty to remain unsatisfied with where they stand today.”

In contrast, when The Nation contacted the NFLPA, it said in a statement:

In all that we do, our union’s main priority is to support players as people who go to work every day and have an identity beyond football. We also understand that they are men who navigate unique circumstances during and after their football careers. That’s especially true when it comes to their emotional well-being. Our mental health resources are designed to provide a trusted and necessary source of support for our player members along their journey.

You can read that five times and wonder what it has to do with anything. At least the NFLPA got back to The Nation—the NFL and ESPN did not respond to requests for comment. The saying that “silence is violence” has never felt so appropriate. But there are only so many bodies that they can lead out of view, away from prying eyes and into the blue tent, until the public once again reckons with the human cost of the country’s true national pastime.

Two weeks ago, when a betting scandal rocked the National Basketball Association, the lurid headlines flashed so brightly you needed UV sunglasses to read the text. Stories about Hall-of-Fame-player-turned-head-coach Chauncey Billups being the face of Mafia-run corrupt poker games alongside people with names like “Albanian Bruce” and “Black Tony” guaranteed maximum attention. The other part of the story involves the Miami Heat’s Terry Rozier, who the NBA had previously investigated and found no wrongdoing but the feds say gave insider information to friends who made bets based upon his intel. Kash Patel, the FBI chief, children’s book author, and free-flight enthusiast, said that this would just be the beginning of the investigation.

Now, as the dust has cleared, it’s time to also clear away the bullshit and talk about what is really at play. First, let’s remove Billups’s involvement in rigged poker games. Let’s agree that if these charges are true, getting involved in Mafia “smokers”—New York City outer-borough slang for illegal card games—is a bad idea for a head coach. It’s also been happening as long as there has been organized crime, which roughly coincides with the beginning of professional sports. If this sounds dismissive, it’s because these “smokers” have nothing to do with what this case is really about. This story is not about “Albanian Bruce” and high-tech cheating at cards. It’s about the fear that “federal investigation” is really just code for “payback.” And it’s about the NBA’s fear that if fans begin to doubt the legitimacy of the sport, it could put at risk billions of dollars in revenue from legal gambling.

The investigation stretches back into the Biden administration, but there is no mistaking when the indictments went public: the opening week of the NBA season. We are living under a regime that practices a politics of revenge against US companies and citizens. And during Trump’s first term, the NBA was a thorn in his side, with comments on social media from numerous players including LeBron James putting him on blast. The championship teams during the first Trump term refused to visit the White House, although the petulant Trump would screech online that they were never invited. The NBA also did a massive get-out-the-vote campaign and even opened up arenas as ballot-casting locations. Given the political proclivities of the NBA’s audience and the players’ opposition against Trump, it was a thinly veiled effort to push the president out of the White House.

Even more so than the men’s league, the WNBA—which is overseen by the NBA—foiled Trump’s electoral plans. Players helped prevent the Atlanta Dream franchise owner, Trumpist Kelly Loeffler, from becoming a senator from Georgia and encouraged their fans in the Peach State to vote for the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who won by the narrowest of margins. They even successfully pushed Loeffler, an open critic of players’ standing up to racist police violence, to sell the franchise. It does not take a tin-foil hat to believe that Trump’s desire for revenge could have played a role in Patel’s announcement. Even ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, an increasingly frequent Fox News guest whose politics keep stomping to the right, said that this was all about Trump putting his foot on the NBA’s neck and harpooning it right at the start of the season. Patel took the time to slam Smith, denying that the exquisite timing was anything but coincidental.

But neither crooked poker games nor the FBI’s ham-handed timing are what now furrows NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s slender brow. It’s the fear that the legalized gambling he so fulsomely fronted for over a decade ago could affect how fans view the legitimacy of the games. Yet his puzzle is not how to bring gambling to heel but how to keep the manna flowing without government intervention or a fan revolt.

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Throughout the sports world, the gambling apps have colonized commercial coverage and brought in billions in revenue, engorging the league’s profits and exploding the salaries of top players. In the process, it has created an addiction economy, preying particularly on young men whose brains still lack impulse control. The ubiquitous betting app commercials, which always end with a rapid repetition of the gambling addict hotline, feed the idea that you are limiting your fun by not “getting in the game.” The leagues have engaged in a parasitic practice, targeting the young and vulnerable and leeching their finances dry. Somewhere in the afterlife, wherever he may reside, Pete Rose is very confused.

Silver’s initial arguments for legalization—made publicly on November 13, 2014, in The New York Times—that people were gambling anyway so it might as well be brought into the light and that cheating would be far easier to catch—were convincing at the time but now look farcical. With the gambling-app explosion, anyone can gamble as easily as liking an Instagram post. As for players, the high-stakes gambling that takes place on team planes and in locker rooms has led to some legendary stories, even beyond the many that involve Michael Jordan. In every sport, these are communities of hyper-competitive people with disposable income and a great deal of downtime. The idea that no pro jock would take part in this national sporting bacchanalia is incredibly naïve.

The league, if you read the between the lines, could also be pursuing an extensive attack on players’ speech in order to keep gluttonously feeding at the gambling apps’ troughs of cash. Telling a family member or friend that you aren’t playing that night would amount to a kind of “insider trading” in the eyes of the league, leading to some kind of punishment. Share nothing or risk the “integrity of the game.” This kind of innocuous information is what Terry Rozier, so dragged through the mud by Patel, is accused of sharing. One hopes the union is paying attention, because a serious abridgment of players’ freedom of speech and movement, in order to protect the trough, is coming.

If you watch the sports media covering this story, it morphs into farce. The shows are sponsored by the apps. Sports anchors are now breaking into live coverage to talk betting lines. ESPN even has its own sports book, ESPNBet. Sports journalists are increasingly the new bookies.

Under authoritarianism, shit always flows downhill. Patel’s FBI is on the attack against the NBA, and the league, instead of fighting back, will assuredly go after the players. Anything to protect the true golden goose: sports fans who must remain addicted to gambling.

In summer 2016, Vanity Fair published the article, “How Tony Soprano Paved the Way for Donald Trump,” which argues that the protagonist of the lauded television series The Sopranos explains the allure of Donald Trump. The article is written with a blasé air as if to say, “Trump may be a charming sociopath like Tony Soprano, but it’s not like he’s ever going to be president.”

It’s time to update the parallel for 2025. In the first Trump term, skittish advisers nudged him away from ideas like shooting protesters or sending in the armed forces to seize voting machines. This time, there are no guardrails, and the Tony Soprano presidency has reached an inevitable plot point: the “bust out.” A bust out is when the mob seizes a business from an indebted civilian, bleeds its resources, bankrupts it, and then maybe burns it down for the insurance money. This entire country is now David Scatino’s sporting goods store in Paramus, New Jersey—a once-thriving place being consumed from the inside for the benefit of a corrupt few.

The fundamental moral question of the show is whether the audience should want to save Tony, a sociopathic but charismatic mid-level mob boss, from depression, panic attacks, and the emotional torment of a lousy childhood. And yet, as with so much Mafia-related entertainment, and much to creator David Chase’s agony, viewers seemed to care more about the adrenalized violence than the ethical dilemma of a psychiatrist helping a melancholy murderer become a better mobster. No matter how repellent Chase made Tony and no matter how much contempt Chase expressed through the show toward his audience (leading to the cruelest last shot in the history of the medium), people tuned in to watch Tony kill people with his bare hands and treat people—especially women and Black people—like trash. Chase was trying to comment on misogyny and racism, but he also used his ear for dialogue to make it appealing to an audience that wanted to be entertained by slickly presented hit jobs, creative ethnic slurs, and the silicone implants at the mob strip club, the Bada Bing.

It’s also fascinating how many Sopranos actors were some of the first celeb Trump supporters back in 2016. Drea de Matteo, whose Adriana was the kindest hearted character on the show and was executed while being called a c—-, justified supporting Trump by claiming in 2024—and color me skeptical—that her privileged kids were “not allowed to go anywhere because of how bad crime is right now.” She has now, true to the grift, parlayed this into becoming a MAGA celebrity: a market-corrected Scott Baio. If Chase looked at his audience with contempt, his heart must break when he sees how thoroughly much of his cast also bought into the scumbag archetype he spent years using them to critique.

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Trump, who values loyalty and servitude above all, doesn’t even pretend to be the steward of a country of 330 million people. He’s a mob boss who pardons and commutes the sentences of criminals who have either lined his pockets or sworn cringey loyalty. He’s an extortionist who showers honors on billionaires who give him hundreds of millions of dollars in return for presidential favors. He’s a thug who uses the Justice Department, ICE, and the military to wage war against the cities that voted against him. It’s kiss the ring or feel the wrath of retribution. Now he is demanding $230 million of our money to compensate him for his past legal battles. His brazenly amoral personal attorneys running the Justice Department are in charge of deciding whether he gets this payout. The potential seizure of $230 million is a classic “bust out”—soaking a legitimate business of its assets (in this case, the US Treasury) and then, once all value has been extracted, lighting it on fire (or in Trump’s case, tearing down the East Wing).

Some Trump defenders admit that he’s corrupt but shrug it off, saying every president was a disreputable scoundrel and at least Trump is open about it. There’s an air of truth to this: Heading this empire guarantees the committing of war crimes and having your strings pulled by the billionaire class.

But the Trump regime is different. This is a nakedly authoritarian operation, and just about every Republican has bent the knee to a demented, frustrated strongman yearning for martial law—all while he paves the White House Rose Garden and builds his ballroom bunker.

Trump is, in fact, so repugnant, it makes me want to defend our friend Tony. At least Tony had nothing to do with Epstein’s island of pederasts. At least Tony occasionally got his hands dirty. At least Tony knew a good plate of food and didn’t eat ketchup-covered steak. And yet as a Sopranos/mob-film junkie, I realize I’m falling into the TV version of the same vortex that the right is caught in: the moral relativism that says, “Tony may be a garbage person, but I’m entertained—so who really cares?”

We all see the Big Lie that Donald Trump is still working to make us believe: that the 2020 election was fixed and that the now-pardoned throng of bloodthirsty clowns and future cabinet members who tried to sack the Capitol were freedom fighters. There is another lie, however: that he is some kind of peacemaker; he is working overtime to brand himself as a future Nobel laureate and great leader instead of a lowlife elevated to the highest office whose only talent is picking the meat off the bones of what remains of a functioning government. He demands that underlings treat him like Cicero instead of the sleazy, aggrieved criminal he has always been.

One of the great jokes of The Sopranos was that Tony did not see himself as a murderous parasite, instead believing himself to be more of a military general or “captain of industry type.” Trump has similar delusions that he is something more than what he is: a manifestation of the worst of us and—to quote the title of the last Sopranos episode—“made in America.”

Chase has rarely spoken about the Tony-Trump connection, but he did so in 2019 to The New York Times. “When news shows talk about Trump,” he said, “they’ll say it’s like The Sopranos. People, including your own paper, use The Sopranos as an example of crookedness and culpability. I don’t watch a lot of series television. Unfortunately, what I do is spend my time watching CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. So I get good and depressed and angry.”

“Getting good and depressed and angry”—somehow, it’s comforting to know that Chase is like the rest of us. But Chase is also guilty—at least in the first three seasons, before he turned on his own audience—of pandering to us with the sex, slurs, and violence he aimed to critique. And damn, it was entertaining. The Sopranos was low art—a mobster dramedy—brought to artistic heights.

Maybe Chase, a TV writer of limited success before The Sopranos, could see in 1999 that this country was ready to embrace the archetype of the charming sociopath. Maybe he just stumbled into it and unwittingly altered the history of both Hollywood and politics. Either way, the charming sociopath has escaped the confines of fiction and, from what used to be the White House, is engaged in the ultimate “bust out”: selling off the country in parts while pouring gasoline and striking a match.

The vibe was upbeat, or as upbeat as any meeting can be at the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy in Pennsylvania. On October 16, alongside attorney Noel Hanrahan, I went to see the country’s best-known political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal. A jury, who were told that Abdul-Jamal’s political writings could be used in determining guilt, sentenced the former Black Panther to death in 1982 for the murder of Daniel Faulkner, a Philadelphia police officer. It’s not just committed radical campaigners but organizations like Amnesty International that believe his trial and conviction were a sham and are calling for his case to be reopened. Now Abu-Jamal is on what he calls “slow-motion death row,” yet the state has been unable to silence his political voice or the movement to get him home after 44 years of incarceration.

For Abu-Jamal to meet us—and celebrate some good news—he has to endure a full-body cavity search. This is a precondition for all prisoners before and after visits. No exceptions. A 71-year-old Abu-Jamal is not exempt due to his age or stature as an “old head.”

The meeting room, where all the family, friends, and lawyers of these incarcerated men gather, resembles a high school cafeteria complete with vending machines against the walls. The one difference is that we have to sit around U-shaped tables that prevent prisoners from sitting directly next to their loved ones. There’s also an adjoining unmonitored play area for children with a collection of smudged and sticky toys.

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In the visitor room, the guards keep one eye firmly on Abu-Jamal. Until recently, he could only pretend to stare back. Now he can. For nine months, Abu-Jamal, the author of 15 books, was blind. To restore his sight, he needed a five-second laser cataract surgery. Yet it took a legal battle and protests at the prison gates for him to receive the procedure. The problem wasn’t just being unable to read or see more than light colorful blobs. For his own physical safety, Abu-Jamal had to keep his blindness a secret. When I interviewed him earlier this year for Rolling Stone, I had to agree not to report on his lack of sight. Even for someone to whom many prisoners show great deference, he was vulnerable and could have become a target. So Abu-Jamal covered for it—walking direct lines in daily patterns: food, working out, and then listening (not watching) CSPAN in his cell. Again, this was for nine months. (Abu-Jamal would insist I write here that the criminal neglect of his health is a function of how all prisoners are treated.) Abu-Jamal needs follow-up care. He will have permanent vision loss without more treatments, and there is no guarantee he will receive them. But on this day, we celebrated that he can now get back to completing his PhD dissertation, start in on a stack of books, and just watch his own back.

That wasn’t the only reason for some good feelings. The previous night, Abu-Jamal spoke, without notice or prep, over the phone and into a mic at an event commemorating the recently departed revolutionary Assata Shakur, the former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army who escaped a New Jersey prison to Cuba 46 years ago.

The evening’s host, Marc Lamont Hill, received a call from Abu-Jamal, a friend and coauthor of Hill’s, randomly during the program. “Marc saw the number and took the phone to the stage,” said WPFW program director, Katea Stitt who was on the scene, “We heard the prison operator connect the call, and Marc asked Mumia if he wanted to say a few words. Without a beat, Mumia said that not only was Assata Shakur born free. She died free. And he is saying this from behind bars with the clear voice of a free man; free because the state has not broken him. And this packed room of people were just clutching each other, and you heard sobbing.”

Abu-Jamal was pleased about his comments and the reception his words received. Even doing this has been a struggle; over the years, as his supporters and attorneys have fought to make sure his voice can be heard on calls and in print. It is great for the spirit to know you’re not forgotten.

I had also brought him a gift: my new favorite book, Black History Is For Everyone, by Brian Jones. Under the rules of the Pennsylvania prison system, I was permitted to show Abu-Jamal the book, talk about it with him and thumb through the pages, but he would not be allowed to take it back to his cell. I would have to send it later, through a “security processing center,” and the package would be vetted.

The book resonated with Abu-Jamal. One of Jones’s arguments is that the oft-heard line that “Black history is American history,” while true, is a little pat, because that social-patriotic sentiment cuts out people from Marcus Garvey to Fanny Lou Hamer to Malcolm X to Assata Shakur who, while they all have a distinctly Black American politics rooted in resistance to oppression, are internationalists to the core. They rejected “patriotism” on political grounds

Jones also makes the case that Black history has been and continues to be so relentlessly attacked and banned precisely because there is a liberatory power in a history that exposes the roots of why we have these savage inequalities of this country—inequalities exemplified by having the largest prison population in the world while its military cracks down against cities that buck the will of a grotesquely corrupt regime.

The prison, granting a right Abu-Jamal has fought for, then had a prison worker take our photos using the state equivalent of a Polaroid camera. In one picture, I happen to be holding Jones’s book. They confiscated that one. There are strict rules: no images, no T-shirts with slogans, no peace signs, no closed fist salutes—you can’t even make a heart shape with your hands, because it might be a gang sign.

The prison guards looked exclusively white and were tatted from their arms to their neck. They came to work in Frackville, which once had coal-mining jobs and now has prison jobs. People whose parents may have worked in the mines with one another now are on opposite sides of the cage. It was hard not to think that if ever a community needed some liberatory history, it was Frackville, Pennsylvania. There is a rich tradition here of not settling for scraps. A 10-minute drive from the prison, there is even a statue commemorating the Molly Maguires, legendary 19th-century radical Irish laborers who agitated for better working conditions in the mines by any means necessary. History is everywhere, and Jones’s book makes the case that it needs to be taught.

After a farewell in front of the elevated guard dais, we were each handed two photos minus the confiscated one. Abu-Jamal, a grandfather with failing eyesight, had another body cavity search waiting for him on the other side of the metal doors.

After more than 40 years, legions of people still care about this man and his case. No matter what they do to break him down, he, as Stitt put it, “speaks with the clear voice of a free man.” I think he was excited to hear about Jones’s liberation history, because even behind bars, he is a part of that history. Abu-Jamal remains unbroken, and damn, does it piss the bastards off.

You can tell the world is going to hell when politicians seize the circus. That a mixed martial arts show will soon take place on the White House lawn to commemorate the Declaration of Independence and an autocratic buffoon’s birthday is the sign of a country in grotesque decay.

Then there is FIFA chief Gianni “Johnny Boy” Infantino playing the supplicant, flattering his new fave authoritarian—which has been humiliating to watch, in advance of the 2026 World Cup being hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Every time Johnny Boy fails to say a word about the compromised safety of international travelers or even players—including after the ICE gestapo shot a protesting pastor in the head with a potent “less lethal” weapon—is a glimpse in the mind of someone who inhabits a moral sewer. To see a country that has been committing a genocide—that would be Israel—welcomed into his tournament is to see just another example of Johnny Boy clapping his hands and doing a dance to an autocrat’s tune.

Enter Zohran Mamdani, who stood up and said that Johnny Boy may not care that family members of players are being disappeared from this country, but the people of New York do. In a recent appearance on The Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast, the leading candidate for NYC mayor—an avid soccer fan and longtime supporter of Arsenal FC of the Premier league, the top tier in English football—expressed concern that ICE will violate a sporting event that unites the world. “I have heard from so many already who are terrified of the prospect of being in public life during the World Cup,” he said. “I have long been quite troubled by how the supposed stewards of the game have opted for profit time and time again at the expense of the people that love this game.”

Whatever one’s thoughts on Mamdani at the moment, on this issue he is putting his mouth where the money is. It’s not just podcast shit talking.

In September, his campaign launched a “Game Over Greed” campaign that slammed FIFA for pricing out most New Yorkers from attending the World Cup, another echo of Mamdani’s mantra that the city faces a crisis of affordability. The Game over Greed webpage eviscerates the Infantino plan to operate what’s called “dynamic pricing,” which allows FIFA to jack up ticket prices on the fly, based on demand—like when a rideshare app increases the price in bad weather. Mamdani is calling this out as a high-tech grift that allows FIFA to “raise prices, in real time, depending on how much profit they think they can make off of us.” Mamdani’s team also noted that those same tickets “can then be resold on an official FIFA platform with NO price cap—yet another method of gatekeeping the game.” As if that weren’t enough, FIFA is not setting aside tickets for local residents, as it did for the three most recent World Cups.

FIFA’s call for dynamic pricing sparked immediate outrage, but so far Mamdani is the only politician trying to do something with that anger. The campaign announced that it was issuing a “demand on FIFA to put game over greed, and to end dynamic pricing, to end this idea of a resale market with no caps, and to finally put 15 percent of its tickets aside for local residents.” He also noted that in Mexico, FIFA was allowing for a resale market with a price cap.

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For a nonprofit organization, FIFA is incredibly profitable. The 2026 World Cup is on pace to become the most lucrative event in the history of sports, with a whopping $10 billion projected to slide into FIFA coffers. This dwarfs the $7.5 billion that FIFA gobbled up during the four-year cycle leading to the Qatar 2022 men’s World Cup and more than doubles what the group hauled in during the cycle ahead of Russia’s 2018 tournament. Soccer historian David Goldblatt told The Nation that “FIFA is one of the most hypocritical, self-serving organizations in the world.”

He is, of course, correct. What is jarring is that Infantino now has the benefit of a US leader who is just as amoral and sleazy: Johnny is allowing Trump to use the Cup openly for his own political ends, including favors both above and certainly below the table. While oligarchs and world leaders ooze from one owner’s box to the next, the host cities below militarize even more visibly against regular people, advancing Trump’s vision of putting US urban areas under his iron heel. Mamdani’s voice is a welcome one, but what he’s calling for and calling out is insufficient. Better ticket prices and the killing of dynamic pricing, while politically very savvy, is not enough. Cheaper prices won’t matter much if you end up in the back of an unmarked van.

People of the world should gather for the greatest of all sporting events. But they should go to Mexico and Canada. Stay away from the United States. In our circus, the elephants run loose. To paraphrase Trump’s 2015 racist froth about Muslim people: The world needs to stay away from the United States for their own safety, until “we can figure out what is going on.”

Ahead of the September 28 National Football League game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Minnesota Vikings in Dublin, social justice campaigners invited me to cross the Atlantic to speak about the politics of the NFL. The plan was to screen a 2022 documentary that I helped produce called Behind the Shield, which is critical of the league and its leadership. Organizers would also arrange a series of media events about the film and the upcoming game. The plan was to warn Ireland that while there may be a big party on Sunday, they should be wary of the league’s corporate and political agenda as well as the heavy footprint they would leave behind.

It’s not dissimilar to what I’ve done previously at other troublesome mega events, like the World Cup and Olympics. But this time, people on both sides of the Atlantic advised me to exercise new caution when traveling overseas given the Trump regime’s practice of targeting journalists and its contempt for the First Amendment.

I was told to take a Sharpie and write an attorney’s phone number on my arm like folks do when preparing for an act of civil disobedience and arrest. It frankly seemed a little over-the-top. Were thought crimes against the NFL now a state matter? Maybe? Certainly the GOP has morphed from self-proclaimed “free speech warriors” to cancel-culture kings, eager to criminalize any criticism of Trump or his allies. MAGA supporters are clearly indifferent to looking like shameless hypocrites. Next, they’ll probably launch a child sex ring in the basement of a pizzeria where people can buy merch.

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This advised caution when traveling also seemed less absurd the night I flew out of Dulles Airport. That was Sunday, September 14, when more than two-thirds of NFL home teams compelled their fans to mourn a divisive, far-right YouTube host who made millions denigrating chunks of their fan base. Like the GOP suddenly seeing “free speech” as a danger to the republic, the league yawned at their own hypocrisy and abandoned their “no politics” mantra from the days when another C.K.—the anti-racist one—took a knee against police violence and lost his NFL career.

Save for the Jacksonville Jaguars’ Shahid Khan, all of the NFL’s billionaire owners are white, and the owners’ demand that a stadium of 80,000 people show respect for a political extremist also felt like a message to their players, 70 percent of whom are Black. They were told to stand at attention with flags at half-mast for a person who made his money saying things like “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” (Note to readers: That’s not a fact, and it isn’t happening more and more.) Some in and around the league read this decision as a middle finger to NFL players after a decade of player-led anti-racist resistance. Or as one recently retired Super Bowl champ texted me, “They want that shit erased like it never happened.” (I asked this player if we could use his name. He understandably said, “Not these days.” Yay! Free speech!)

All deaths by violence, whether school shootings in the suburbs, in war zones in the Middle East, or at political events in rural Utah, should be decried. But NFL owners commanding their audiences to mourn this particular person was a show of power, and other than boos at the sight of Kirk’s face on the jumbotron in New Orleans, quite a successful one. The few teams that refused to “play ball” with the compulsory rending of garments immediately became a target for trolls and bots, who demanded a pound of flesh for their insufficient genuflection.

The argument I was taking to Ireland was that in our country’s slide into authoritarian quicksand, the NFL is not a bystander but an aggravator. NFL owners overwhelmingly back the current regime financially and politically. Their meat shield, commissioner Roger Goodell, again and again chooses to shame the memory of his father, the liberal Republican Senator Charles Goodell, who sacrificed his career by defending the right to dissent from the dictates of a lawless president named Richard Nixon. In contrast, four months ago, commissioner Goodell stood with Trump in the Oval Office, his face beaming, as they announced that the NFL Draft will be coming in 2027 to the National Mall. (Hopefully the National Guard will be done with their mulching by then.) Goodell played the supplicant even though in his first term Trump derided, slurred, and slandered both the players and the league. An apology was never offered, but that hasn’t stopped Goodell from capitulating, even removing the words “End Racism” from the end zones at the Super Bowl allegedly because Trump decided to attend and such sentiments get under his paper-thin skin.

In Dublin and then Belfast, I argued that if a slogan of the league is “Football is America,” then Ireland should take a very close look at what “America” has become, because that’s the agenda the NFL is trying to export. I said that the league is not coming to plant a tree. It is coming to plant a flag.

Many Irish people told me that the commercialism of the NFL was already overwhelming them: free branded flag football equipment delivered to hundreds of schools, ads everywhere, and even, yes, flags planted in the Dublin City Center. It cut particularly deeply with people that the NFL was being allowed to stage the game at Croke Park. This is a stadium owned not by some plutocrat but by the Gaelic Athletic Association. It is meant to be a community space, and until recently Croke Park was used exclusively for the promotion and protection of Indigenous Irish sports. There are other, fancier stadiums in Dublin, but the NFL wanted to colonize “Croker” and plant that flag in the most Irish of sporting spaces.

If that sounds conspiratorial or too cunning for the billionaire nepo babies that run NFL teams, it’s actually not. Steelers boss Art Rooney II—whose father, Dan Rooney, passed away in 2017 and had served as the US ambassador to Ireland under President Barack Obama—undoubtedly understands the significance of Croke Park to the Irish people. He therefore must be aware that an NFL game at “Croker” is not a benign act but a statement of economic and cultural aggression.

The other owner ready to storm the beaches of Dublin is the Minnesota Vikings’ Mark Wilf, a choice that also feels intentional. Wilf, who inherited his father’s wealth, is the chairman of the board of the Jewish Agency for Israel. As Rabbi Brant Rosen of Chicago’s Tzedek Congregation explained to me, “One of the most important things people should know about the ideology of groups like JAI is that it is rooted in the maintenance of a Jewish-majority ethno-nation state—that it engages in demographic engineering at the expense of the native Palestinian population.”

The Jewish Agency for Israel, he told me, was founded in 1908 as the Palestine Office for the Land of Israel to encourage immigration to Palestine in order to create a Jewish majority. The JAI continues this work, now collaborating with the Israeli government and other institutions to maintain that majority. That means more settlements to entice emigration. That means driving Palestinians off of their land. That means saying nothing as Gaza is razed. Rosen said, “All of it, of course, is patently antidemocratic—and directly contributes to the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.”

As part of its broad agenda, the JAI has funded therapy for Israelis in border settlements traumatized by Hamas rocket fire. The JAI, however, has not expanded its mental wellness programs to include the Palestinian survivors of Israel’s remorseless and relentless war on the Gazan people in what the United Nations has at long last deemed a genocide.

To bring over Wilf is an especially insulting choice, given that in the game’s host city of Dublin calling for a Free Palestine does not automatically jeopardize your job, your online security, or the safety of your family. During my short trip, I saw Palestinian flags hanging from the windows of homes and shops, a tour guide wearing watermelon earrings, a barback wearing a shirt proclaiming “Free Palestine” in Irish as he carried kegs of Guinness, heart-stopping murals dedicated to the Palestinian fallen that no one would dare to paint over, and a sea of pro-Palestine pins. Anyone who has felt gaslighted by elected officials insisting that the atrocities we were seeing were not actually taking place (a position held by the current subject of our coerced national mourning) can breathe more freely in Ireland. I began to understand why thousands of Americans of Irish ancestry are reversing the journey of their parents and grandparents and sailing back.

Many in Ireland are also very conscious of “sportswashing,” and refuse to allow Wilf and the league’s political agenda to force its way into their country without a challenge. Protest plans are being made, and the NFL, ever so committed to free speech, will have to face the movement for a free Palestine outside the Croke Park gates. Campaigners also told me that the NFL’s martial celebrations of nationalism would feed a nationalist, reactionary right wing that spouts anti-immigrant demagoguery. The nationalism of the NFL also benefits a center-right government that is demanding legal changes that would allow it to fund and deploy a more aggressive military. This brand of militarism is as at home at an NFL game as the tomahawk chop.

My own stress, as the return flight to the United States approached, was ratcheted up dramatically when Vice President JD Vance threatened to “dismantle” my place of employ, because a Nation writer dared to quote what the recently deceased had said. Our colleague also—and perhaps this was her sin in the eyes of Vance—immediately noted that, no matter the shooter’s motivations, this assassination would be exploited to ruthlessly suppress their political opponents.

Just as when he was “creating stories” that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating family pets, Vance was lying, surely aware that it could stoke stochastic terrorism. Watching this from afar, I recalled that I was on immigration forms entering the country as a Nation journalist, and I did not know what that would mean when coming back. Others in Ireland shared those concerns. Upon departing, I had a fresh Sharpie tattoo on my shoulder with the number of an Irish civil liberties lawyer and an opposition party member, again grimacing over the necessity of such precautions.

I got through the line with no more than a couple of bumps, and I’m now back in occupied DC, with no respite from federal troops engaged in “border enforcement,” harassment, and unlawful detention. (I guess it’s no longer just for airports.)

The current situation is intolerable. We must be allowed to speak our beliefs: whether that’s “Free Palestine,” “Trump is America’s Hitler,” or “I do not consent to be searched.” We must not feel coerced to mourn someone who held us in contempt—no matter how many members of this regime’s poisonously stupid cabinet screech for vengeance.

We must have the right to listen to musical groups like Belfast’s Kneecap, currently banned from Canada on ludicrous charges of “antisemitism” and “advocating political violence” because they have consistently supported Palestinian liberation. As a band from the north of Ireland, their starting point is that people have the right to resist colonization—whether they were born in West Belfast or in Gaza. The band members have never made a public statement that could be reasonably read as antisemitic—unless one thinks that criticizing the Israeli state itself is antisemitic. (As a Jew, I think there is nothing more antisemitic than the conflation of Judiasm and Israeli genocide.) There is one Kneecap lyric containing a message that today’s authoritarians don’t want you to hear—that even in the most dire of times, struggle can produce hope: “Underneath all the thundering, there’s magic. And if there’s a better way to live, I’ve gotta have it.”

A correction was made on September 26th, 2025: This article incorrectly identified the current primary owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers. It is Art Rooney II, who became primary owner following the death of his father, Dan Rooney, in 2017.

In 1914, Carl Sandburg famously called Chicago “the City of Big Shoulders.” The poet wrote, “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.” More than a century later, Chicago is living under the threat of military invasion by its own country, but Sandburg’s city remains “Stormy, husky, brawling.” A National Guard sworn to defend the rights of its residents is poised, according to this country’s commander in chief, to occupy the streets as the first act of this regime’s newly branded Department of War. The messaging by President Donald Trump and the dangerously dim-witted Pete Hegseth isn’t complicated: Their most pressing bogeyman isn’t China or Iran. It’s those fighting for justice in the United States, or as Trump described them during his campaign, “the enemy within.”

Those who refuse to kiss this man’s ring are now effectively enemy combatants in their own country. If you’ve read the more disturbing passages in Hegseth’s book American Crusade, you know the secretary of defense dreams not only of defeating grammar and complete sentences; he also thinks that responsible governance involves ordering police and the military to take sides against “radical leftist” dissenters in a coming “civil war.”

Hegseth wants to see his “fellow Americans” who think, act, and live differently from him subjected to military violence. Like Trump’s entire royal court, Hegseth doesn’t work for us. The GOP has long stoked its base by feeding it racist caricatures of Chicago. Now the Republican Party is ready to live out talk radio’s 40-year propaganda fever dream and stomp what Trump’s balding, 31-year-old “youth” leader Charlie Kirk calls “the cockroaches” of this remarkable city.

Kirk, however, is more than a dull racist with a penchant for old-school Nazi verbiage. He was raised in Arlington Heights, a soft, tony Chicago suburb, which explains a great deal, including why he’s a diehard Cubs fan. On August 20, after a 4–3 Cubs victory, Kirk was allowed to take the field and pose with two of the team’s stars, Michael Busch and Matt Shaw. Kirk wrapped his arms around the two players (both white). Shaw brandished a satisfied thumbs-up, and Busch grinned for the cameras. When Kirk posted the photo online, people in Chicago were livid. Here is this suburban dork, scared of the big, bad city and thrilled at the thought of the military on every corner, smiling next to a pair of the city’s best baseball players.

The Nation spoke with Rory Fanning, a former Army Ranger and author, who leafleted around Wrigley following Kirk’s visit. For the Cubs “to be associated with this rabid white nationalist who is front and center in this [political] debate right now,” sets a horrible example, he said. Referring to two Latino players on the team, Fanning asked, “How does Miguel Amaya feel? Willi Castro?”

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Fanning said that the Cubs organization first owes its fans an apology—“particularly the Black, brown, gay, transgender women fans,” he said. But he argues the Cubs should go even further: “Charlie Kirk needs to be banned from Wrigley Field.”

That’s not likely to happen under the ownership of the Ricketts family, who has owned a 95 percent stake in the Cubs and Wrigley Field since 2009. Paterfamilias Joe Ricketts was under fire in 2019 after a series of racist and Islamophobic e-mails were leaked to the online publication Splinter. The next year, Todd Ricketts, the youngest of his four siblings, rose to prominence as Donald Trump’s chief fundraiser for his reelection campaign in 2020, leading to an outcry of protest from Cubs fans. (One might remember Todd’s previous work in 2010 when he went undercover at Wrigley for the television show Undercover Boss and got fired for not cleaning toilets properly.) A June 2020 editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times asked: “What are you to do if you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs but the team’s owners include a guy who’s leading the effort to reelect the most divisive, destructive and incompetent president in modern American history? We’d say there’s always the White Sox.”

And yet there was no such editorial outcry in 2025 about Kirk sullying the sacred spaces of Wrigley Field. Fanning told The Nation, “Wrigley is way bigger than the Ricketts. Wrigley is way bigger than these two doofus players who come out with Charlie Kirk.”

The Cubs are just part of Major League Baseball’s capitulation to the Trump regime. In addition to making sure to flatter their decaying Dear Leader, teams and networks now run ICE recruitment ads in between innings. During a Mets game, you can see advertisements that blare, “Join ICE. Catch the worst of the worst.” Given that Major League Baseball is dependent upon immigrant labor from Latin America, its complicity with this regime is nauseating, especially when considering that Venezuelans are the second-largest immigrant group in the MLB and an open target of this administration. And still Kirk’s photoshoot at Cubs is especially galling. It was like a pretentious Brit in jodhpurs overseeing colonized India and thinking he represents progress. This suburban Illinois man-child, this walking argument against white superiority, does not know Chicago outside of Wrigley.

Thousands of brave Chicagoans filled the streets on Saturday refusing to live under internal occupation in their own country. The protests appear to have stymied these efforts—at least for now. Kirk will bluster, but certainly at a distance. He would never dare face the “City of Big Shoulders.”

Editor’s note: This article was published at 5AM ET on September 10, before the shooting of Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah.

Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser has undergone a rapid transformation over the past three weeks. What began as capitulation to Trump’s military occupation of the city has now become something confused, unclear, and perhaps even ominous. The regime’s criminalization of DC’s residents is no longer—as her defenders claim—something being imposed on Bowser by racist, sexist Donald Trump. This now appears to be something that she is, to quote The Washington Post, “welcoming.”

Despite Bowser’s objections to this framing—earlier this week, she excoriated the Post at a press conference for using “welcoming” in their headline, a word she says she didn’t use—and despite her insisting that she was “outraged over the intrusion on our federal autonomy,” her actions speak louder than her words. First, the Democratic mayor credited the surge in federal law enforcement for reducing crime in the city—a misleading, right-wing narrative that ignores the fact that crime always drops with the start of the school year and that every trend line since 2023 has shown crime dropping in the city. Then, on September 2, she issued an order to continue coordinating with federal law enforcement “to the maximum extent allowable by law within the District” even after Trump’s emergency order expires. That doesn’t sound like “outrage.” That sounds like consenting to a new reality.

And now, given the chance to fight back, Bowser is standing aside. In a press conference after DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb—who does not work under Bowser—sued the Trump administration to stop the deployment of the National Guard in the city, Bowser was evasive, refusing to respond to reporters unequivocally as to whether she supports the lawsuit—which is odd, given her previously stated “outrage.” Sure enough, according to a source very familiar with the decision-making process that went into the lawsuit, it was written and issued independently from Bowser’s office. Even after a federal court ruled last week that Trump broke the law by sending troops into Los Angeles, Bowser won’t back the the attorney general’s move.

So Bowser may insist that she is not “welcoming” an indefinite occupation. But let’s look at what she has, through her actions, already welcomed. She has welcomed the death of home rule. She has welcomed the crippling of the local economy, which has lost billions as people choose to stay home rather than deal with checkpoints or a sneering South Carolina National Guardsman with live ammo on their way to dinner. Because of this, we are now seeing a sharp reduction in shifts for servers and cooks and lost wages. She has welcomed a youth curfew for our commercial areas that now, with everybody staying home, look like ghost towns.

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Thanks to all that Bowser is welcoming into the city, parents are afraid to go to work and children are afraid to go to school. The number of parents keeping their children out of school to avoid the risk of the state abducting their kids is horrifying—and half-empty classrooms are a symbol of this terror. (Of course, the education secretary has said nothing about this. If there is a hell below, Linda McMahon—who thinks AI is a steak sauce—needs to invest in a lot of sunscreen.) One high school is even canceling an annual Hispanic Heritage parents-and-students picnic and soccer game because they fear it will become a ripe ICE target.

That’s not all. Mayor Bowser may rankle at the word “welcoming,” but how else do you describe her silence as federal police and ICE are openly and systemically engaged in racial profiling? This unconstitutional practice is so pervasive that white resisters have taken to wearing Mexican flag decals on their cars in order to bait ICE into puling them over, which wastes ICE’s time and may save people from federal abduction and a slave/torture prison in El Salvador or South Sudan. For the authorities, there is no Constitution in the streets of DC.

By cooperating with a military occupation and emboldening the Metropolitan Police Department, Bowser has stoked fear in the US-born Black community as well. The MPD, with their long-standing issues of racialized brutality, are truly now off the leash. Trump and his white-supremacist lickspittles, like Nazi prawn Stephen Miller, delight in saying that “the Blacks” now love them because they feel safe under their watch. This is not only a lie; it is deeply offensive: an argument echoing the philosophy of an 18th-century plantation master. It does not make a lick of sense in a city where, according to The Washington Post, 80 percent of the people want them gone.

Bowser’s defenders—and they are dwindling before our eyes—are now raising the specter of some kind of blackmail, trying to guess what Trump might “have on her.” Bullshit. That line of inquiry amounts to tired excuse-mongering for a Mike Bloomberg–trained centrist mayor who seems to be—as centrists often do—slouching toward the side with the guns. The other excuse they claim is that, without statehood, Bowser has no choice but to take this posture. Also bullshit. It’s true that the federal government can proclaim a 30-day state of emergency in DC. But Bowser had grounds, as AG Schwalb is showing, to challenge the emergency declaration in court: Because violent crime in the city has hit a 30-year low, there is no actual emergency—or at least there wasn’t one until the Tennessee National Guard started patrolling the streets with live ammo.

Bowser could be approaching this in a way that protects her constituents and resists authoritarianism. She could be holding press conferences every day, highlighting the military occupation’s effects on residents and the local economy. She could be saying that she stands with both the protesters and the Democratic politicians that have shown some spine, like Baltimoree Mayor Brandon Scott, who is running a city where violent crime has dropped to a 50-year low. Even if Bowser had been overrun in the courts, she could still have drawn a line in the sand that the federal occupation of cities, absent a real emergency, is an authoritarian, unconstitutional power grab, nearly unprecedented in US history, and must be resisted at all costs. Instead, when the military took over Union Station—probably because when Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth wanted to gladhand and grab a fascistic photo op with the soldiers, they were heckled mercilessly—there was no word from Bowser on the Trump regime’s proclaimed triumph in the battle of Shake Shack.

Historically, being the mayor of DC is a dead-end gig. Former populist mayor Adrian Fenty’s ditching the town to chill on yachts with Steve Jobs’s widow, Lauren, is probably the best any of them have done climbing the ladder. The hyper-ambitious Bloomberg acolyte Muriel Bowser clearly has greater ambitions, and she is willing to climb over the bodies of her constituents to get there. (Anti-Zohran speaker at the DNC? Ivanka or Melania’s new “friend” for public appearances? New VP of the Trump Organization?) In the process, she is undercutting the people actually doing the work to make this nightmare end.

What is clear is the importance of a broadly built Free DC demonstration on Saturday, September 6, at 11 am, in Malcolm X (or Meridian) Park. The stakes are high to show the city and the world that Bowser is not the voice—or at least not the sole voice—of DC.

Don’t think of it as a local protest. Everyone should come: Because if we don’t fight back, your city will be next.

Occupied Washington, DC—When the night comes, it is not just the National Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a jumpy police department walking the streets. In an otherwise eerily quiet city, the people are present as well. Armed only with cell phones, medical kits, and the confidence to assert their dwindling rights, groups of local residents trail and record Trump’s occupation forces. They’re known as the night patrols.

These night patrols watch over the city to ensure that people are protected from state violence, false arrest, abduction, and harassment. Failing that, their goal is to document the constitutional violations or brutality they witness, so people can see the truths about the occupation that a compliant, largely incurious media are not showing. Their footage has gone viral and exposed the mainstream media’s lies about how happy DC residents are to see the South Carolina National Guard marching by their kid’s elementary school.

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There is no centralized night-patrol planning committee. People in different groups don’t necessarily know each other, but everyone with whom we spoke was either experienced in this kind of work through previous cop-watch trainings or are compelled by what is happening to play their part in making sure the foot soldiers of the surveillance state know they too are being surveilled.

While we do not know the number of unconstitutional jailings that have happened over the last two weeks, the angry reactions of federal judges when these cases come before the bench speak to how violently careless, amateurish, and dangerous Trump’s police state’s conduct has been. This is unsurprising given that the chief DC prosecutor is another Fox News incompetent: the sloppy, allegedly soused Jeanine Pirro. We now have in DC a military fascism run as cheaply and poorly as one of Trump’s failed casinos. If Trump were the fascist leader of Italy in the 1920s, the trains would not have run on time. (Unfortunately the Trump administration has also seized control of DC’s Union Station, so set your watch to the coming ineptitude.) It’s maddening, but people are pushing back, and the night patrols are on the front lines.

Every night patrol is different. One volunteer told us that it “fluctuates depending on events and community needs. Different crews have their own rhythms.” Sometimes that means groups are small—maybe just three or four people—and other times it means flooding the streets with rallies that turn into patrols when the speeches are done. Above all else, it is a commitment to peaceful, legal, and direct confrontation. The people who do night patrol work are serious, and if you volunteer, they expect you to know what you are doing or listen to those who do.

We spoke to night patroller Ash Lazarus Orr, who described the patrols as consisting of “a lot of young people, a lot of people of color, queer and trans folks,people who have been directly impacted by policing, and folks with street medic backgrounds. It skews toward people who already know what it’s like to be criminalized.”

These efforts are supported by work going on across the city, including cop-watch trainings, court-watch trainings, “know your rights” guides, handbooks on filming the police, and jail support by the Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network.

The patrols do more than just bear witness. Orr has had to bandage terrified people beaten by and fleeing DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, returning home at sunrise with his clothes stained with blood.

Another time, Orr said, he saw officers trying to arrest a man over a burned-out taillight “while his two young children sat alone in the car, crying.” “Thankfully,” he explained, “our group managed to put pressure on these officers [phone cameras out and ready], and they eventually let the man and his children go.” That happens more often than you’d think. Weapons and a free pass to beat people doesn’t mean that they have the resolve to do this awful work when confronted with people with cameras.

Recently a night patrol captured ICE and the MPD arresting without cause a Black corporate attorney and West Point graduate named Paul Bryant at 2:00 am in Logan Circle. The police and feds on the scene asked his name and why he was out at that hour. Bryant refused to answer, as is his right. He was released the next day after the judge excoriated the DC prosecutors. A lawsuit is now expected.

The night patrols are clearly making a difference. Many of the occupying forces have shifted their tactics from walking around and harassing people to a “jump out” strategy in which they stay in their cars until screeching to a halt and storming out to accost people. Their selections are, no doubt, driven by shameless racial profiling. No rights are read, no badges shown. When it’s ICE, their faces are covered. These terrifying “jump-outs” are not new to Washington, DC; the DC Justice Lab has long called them “DC’s scarier version of stop-and-frisk.” They are supposed to be unconstitutional. Yet it’s a sign of the effectiveness of the night patrols that they are resorting to this tactic in order to avoid people’s questions, cameras, and assertion of rights. The armed occupiers aren’t defending the Constitution. They fear it.

While one tactic is to work in smaller groups like Orr, another has been to mobilize cop-watch rallies or “Defend the District” go-go shows in order to draw in people—especially youth—for larger showings of strength. “Go-go is the native music of Washington, DC,” one attendee told us. “This music has been used for our resistance time and time again.”

The attendee added that there is “joy in the revolution,” and that it is important to show the occupation forces that they are unafraid: “There are police everywhere. We are outside. We are not scared of you. This is our home!”

At one such event, Frankie Seabron, an organizer with Harriet’s Wildest Dreams (HWD) said, “We need to keep Black people in this city safe. We need to keep youth, migrants, and our unhoused people safe. Because those are the people who this fascist system is targeting.”

Last Saturday, the DC Against Trump Coalition (DCAT) started a rally at 14th and U in one of DC’s curfew zones, where minors are barred from gathering after 8 pm, allowing police to target Black youths as soon as the sun goes down. The event ended with groups of protesters patrolling different areas of DC up until 4 am.

This is becoming its own method of organizing. During the last week, the night patrols have grown in number and frequency. They often occur after mobilizing rallies from organizations and coalitions like FreeDC, HWD, DCAT, and the independent DC media group Liberation Lens. It can be dizzying keeping up, but FreeDC’s calendar is a good start.

This week a group of fed-up military veterans associated with the group FLARE USA, which stands for For Liberation And Resistance Everywhere, have joined in on the overnight cop-watch efforts. “We are also here to disrupt ICE Raids,” retired marine Mathew Gordon told us. “ICE is kidnapping people off the streets, and we are doing everything they possibly can to make their lives miserable.” These vets go to ICE checkpoints and pepper the agents with harsh questions on camera about the immorality and illegality of their actions until they leave.

When FLARE vets approach National Guard members, they employ a calmer, less confrontational strategy, educating them about their rights to challenge orders they think could be illegal. Gordon said this was more effective since “most are much younger and don’t want to be here.” FLARE will have a series of actions next week.

“We feel that deploying the US military to the streets of Washington, DC, to police our own citizens is unconstitutional,” Gordon told us. “We took an oath to support and defend this country against all enemies foreign and domestic—that is our oath, and that oath doesn’t expire.”

There’s a common and familiar refrain at protests, which in DC has become more than slogan—it’s an organizing principle. Ty Hopson Powell at the Defend the District go-go rally repeated it to us as he explained the importance of grassroots organizing: “It is us that will save us! It is the message that we have been saying on the streets for years as frontline organizers who are the most invested in this work. WE WILL SAVE US! They won’t save us.”

Local government institutions certainly will not, as Washington’s Mayor Muriel Bowser has made perfectly clear. Even though 80 percent of the city feels “less safe” since the occupation began, Bowser is in open collaboration with Trump, praising him earlier this week for what she pointedly calls “the surge” and undercutting not only the people she represents but also other cities facing down this regime’s threats to make urban militarization the new normal.

The failures of Bowser and the city government to stand up for its residents means Powell’s words have never rang truer. No one is coming to save the people in DC—and yet, no one should bet against the people of DC saving themselves. “What does keep us safe is people showing up for one another,” said Orr. “Cop watch, night patrols, mutual aid—these are ways communities step in to protect each other when institutions only cause harm. When we document, de-escalate, offer medical care, or simply stand beside someone in crisis, we’re proving that safety comes from solidarity, not surveillance.”

Doing this kind of work empowers communities, and the videos expose the truth of life under occupation more effectively than a thousand empty speeches. “This isn’t about individuals playing hero,” said Barr. “It’s about collective accountability and care. The most important thing is to start where you are, with the skills and resources you already have.”

Baltimore—On Monday at 6:30 am, hundreds of people gathered outside the ICE field in Baltimore to be there with Kilmar Ábrego García and his family as he entered the building to face almost certain federal detention. The headlines say that Ábrego García will likely be “deported,” but that is not what this should be called. The Trump administration is attempting to abduct Ábrego García as part of a human-trafficking operation in which it pays countries with atrocious human rights records to incarcerate people who had been US immigrants. It wants to send Ábrego García—born in El Salvador, living in Temple Hills, Maryland—to Uganda, where he could be jailed indefinitely, tortured, and God knows what else.

Ábrego García’s “crime,” we must recall, was no crime at all. The Trump Justice Department admitted in court that it had imprisoned him and sent him to an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison due to an “administrative error.” The judge was appalled, particularly that Ábrego García—a union worker legally in the United States—was sent to be brutalized in El Salvador without due process, and the judge insisted that he be brought back to his family. That was March, and Ábrego García has been in hell ever since. Ábrego García is not suffering because of anything he did. He is suffering because the Trump regime’s autocratic outlook is defined by the idea that it cannot make any mistakes. The great leader, and by extension his slavishly loyal hacks, must be infallible. Therefore, in Ábrego García’s case, the person fired by the Justice Department was not the one who made the “administrative error” but the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who admitted it in court. Think about it: The Trump administration fired a Justice Department attorney for not lying to a judge.

Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, the crusading law-and-order Christian who authorizes deals with child predators to protect her boss, simply rejects due process as an inviolate constitutional right. After all, if people still have due process, it gums up the administration’s mass human-trafficking plan. If Ábrego García were to go free, it would legitimize the concerns of the judge and Bondi/Trump’s own former immigration lawyer, Reuveni, that due process had been denied.

The regime’s case is a marriage between lazy incompetence and legalized barbarism. First, it said Ábrego García was in the gang MS-13 because he was a Chicago Bulls fan. When that argument fell apart, it claimed that Ábrego García was a human trafficker. (Accusing others of what it does has gotten so tired at this point.) Then Trump officials said he was an abuser of women—a charge his wife rejects—and we were supposed to take seriously that an administration stacked with alleged rapists really cares about the safety of women, but that claim, too, fell apart. Then the charge was driving undocumented people across state lines. That’s what earns you Uganda. Normalizing cruelties—and nativist white nationalism—is the point. If they can normalize discourse like that of balding 31-year-old “Trump youth leader” Charlie Kirk, who called Black and brown people living in cities “cockroaches” in order to support a military occupation of Chicago, then the battle is mostly won. (Having Kirk as a special guest of the Chicago Cubs last week—like he’s just another celeb—also makes this rank nativist bigotry seem ordinary and endangers many of their own players. Clearly the Cubs’ owner, TomRicketts—a dark-money GOP patron—does not care.)

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In the face of this army of cowards is Kilmar Ábrego García. The Trump administration offered Ábrego García a deal where he could be deported to Costa Rica with the promise of serving no jail time. He said no and is risking everything—indefinite incarceration in Uganda!—to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. It is especially poignant because a judge released him only four days ago to await ICE sentencing. After months of being in an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison and a Tennessee detention center, Ábrego García has had four days with his wife and children before being taken away again. That judge had actually been holding him in the Tennessee jail to keep ICE from grabbing him. It was legal protective custody against our own unlawful government.

Before entering the courthouse, flanked by his family, his union, local politicians, and hundreds of community members, Ábrego García addressed the crowd: “Thank you to my wife, Jennifer, my family, my union, CASA, my home away from home, and all of you. You have filled me with gratitude, and you have filled me with hope. Happiness is just being with my family. When I was detained, I thought about going to the park with my family or on a trampoline with my children. Those moments give me hope in this fight. To all the families that have been separated or are being threatened with separation, this administration has given us heartache. But God is with us, will never leave us, and will bring justice. With our community by our side, love will triumph. Never lose hope. We are all family. Regardless of what happens at my ICE check-in, please promise you will still pray, resist, fight, love, and continue to demand freedom.”

Then Ábrego García entered the building, flanked by his attorney and family. Meanwhile, ICE agents looked down smugly from the top of the stairs at the throngs of people. It did not take long before word got out that the expected had taken place: An authoritarian, weak-minded administration petrified of looking weak had put Ábrego García in chains.

They want to send Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda for no reason other than that it endangers their nativist project to treat him like a human being and not “a cockroach.” Let the last word go to Ábrego García’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who accompanied him into the facility. The sneering ICE brigade around her husband was clearly chosen for the cameras. They were all white, tatted up, and so bulky that their muscles had swallowed their necks. Vasquez Sura stared at these men twice her size and said, “Tonight when you look at your family or look at your kids, think about the fact that today you kidnapped my husband and took him away from us.”

These shameful pissants wouldn’t meet her eyes, showing no heart and spine to go with their lack of necks. Vasquez Sura showed us true courage. Now it’s our turn. We need to fight Trump’s human-trafficking scheme for her, for Ábrego García, and for all the people in our communities who could be forcibly put on a plane and sent to an undisclosed location.

As summer ends, masked, badgeless ICE thugs and red-state National Guard militias stalk an unnaturally quiet Washington, DC. Five years ago, the city was different. After the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, massive multiracial demonstrations filled the streets. While these protests were constant, there was one we should be remembering this week. It started downtown at the Capitol One Arena, home of the NBA’s Washington Wizards, and was led, bullhorn in hand, by Wizards captain John Wall.

On August 19, Wall quietly retired from the NBA after a star-crossed 11-year career. Injuries dramatically cut short Wall’s prime, but for several seasons he captured the imagination of Washington, DC.

Basketball is a way of life in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area. There is even a documentary by local product Kevin Durant called Basketball County: In the Water about the incredible percentage of pros who come from these parts. Even an above-average NBA team would be an obsession here. Instead, DC has the Wizards. The last time they won a championship, Jimmy Carter was the most powerful man on earth. The last time they won 50 games, ET had yet to phone home. And yet there was this moment when it looked like John Wall was going to harness all of the area’s untapped basketball electricity and lead the Wizards somewhere special.

DC loved Wall, and not just because of his play—the quicksilver speed, slam-dunk award-winning hops, and 360-degree, open-floor flair. It wasn’t even because Wall poured money into underserved communities and seemed to truly enjoy working with kids. It was that Wall’s family was torn apart by poverty and this country’s system of mass incarceration. He was raised by his mother, Frances Pulley, who worked multiple jobs to raise him and his two sisters. His realness and authenticity—rare in today’s flattened, media-trained NBA where everyone wants to be an influencer but few have anything to say—made him a star in schoolyards throughout the city. White sports radio scolds like Colin Cowherd howled reactionary trash, including the argument that since Wall’s father had been imprisoned, Wall couldn’t be trusted as a “leader.” The racism and class contempt that Wall faced from conservative commentators only bound him to the DC community more. In the ultimate show of respect, a two-story mural of him was painted onto the side of DC’s legendary Ben’s Chili Bowl. In 2020, this was John Wall’s town.

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Then Wall, at the height of his cultural influence in the city, decided that he would take a megaphone and lead that march. John Wall is missed right now, and not because the Wizards will likely be terrible once again. We miss him, and people of integrity like him, because the DC mayor, Michael Bloomberg acolyte Muriel Bowser, is faceplanting. Following the 2024 election, Bowser made every effort to show the Trump administration that she would not be a thorn in his side. The president even complimented her on July 8 for the relationship she’s built with his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. He praised their conversations about “testing” a takeover in DC. This received little attention at the time. It should be revisited in order to ask when Bowser knew this occupation would be happening and what she did to prepare the city.

Centrists still don’t understand that reaching out to the Trump administration is only ever interpreted as weakness. Bowser, scrambling, now argues that what Trump is doing is not “a federal takeover” but rather “a surge of law enforcement presence.” That is completely out of touch with the depression, anger, and fear gripping so much of the city. Bowser cannot even do what Mayor Michelle Wu did in Boston, saying this week, “Stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures.” Bowser is more likely to say that the worst thing about military checkpoints demanding people’s papers is that they will lengthen commute times.

Bowser is not going to save this city, and John Wall does not live here anymore. But DC residents aren’t waiting on feckless politicians or cultural icons. We are starting to see speak-outs, large outdoor press conferences, impromptu anti-ICE demonstrations driving feds off the streets, groups of neighbors clanging pots and pans in the evening, and the leadership of groups like Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, Free DC, and the Long Live GoGo Movement. Many of the people who make up the heart and spine of these organizations were also marching, getting gassed, and being shot by rubber bullets in 2020. There is continuity here and that is the greatest hope people in DC have: They know each other, they trust each other, and they are not going to quit.

On Thursday evening, as Donald Trump oozed out of the White House to show the media an occupied DC that’s bent to his will, the streets were booming just a few miles away at a demonstration against the occupation that doubled as a go-go music concert. In DC, the clanging go-go drums have long been the soundtrack of movements against gentrification and displacement, and on Thursday night, they were a call to resist the tyranny of occupation and Trump’s vulgar, violent effort to paint over the vibrancy of the city. The regime wants to duplicate the DC occupation in cities across the country. The people fighting for a free DC hope that what gets replicated is their refusal to remain silent.

It was 8 pm, humid, and I was by myself, across the street from where my kids went to elementary school, banging a large metal spoon against a pot. I was alone, because I had gotten the address wrong for a pots-and-pans demonstration against Donald Trump’s military occupation of Washington, DC. What I missed was a cacophonous community protest, one of many across parts of the DMV (DC, Maryland, and Virginia). After living in DC, I am now a five-minute walk across the border in Maryland. But my family works in DC, my neighbors (those who haven’t yet been laid off) work in DC, and our lives are wrapped up in a town suffering under another Big Lie.

As absurd as I felt doing a pots-and-pans solo performance while families looked at me quizzically, this now feels appropriate. It was no more absurd than proclaiming a crime epidemic in a city where crime has fallen significantly since 2023. It was no more absurd than being lectured about law and order by Justice Department officials covering up a child-sex ring that seems to involve their boss. It was no more absurd than a white, middle-aged Justice Department employee named Sean Dunn becoming a folk hero (no pun intended) for calling one of Trump’s troops a “fascist,” chucking a messy sandwich at close range into his chest, and then outrunning them in boat shoes. It was no more absurd than hearing Attorney General Pam Bondi, with her cross necklace big enough for an impromptu crucifixion, say that the sandwich guy with boat shoes is part of the “deep state” that she’s been tirelessly fighting.

It was no more absurd than the fact that the city’s Reichstag Fire was sparked by the alleged assault of an Elon Musk acolyte known as “Big Balls” by kids as young as 12 years old. It was no more absurd than seeing White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt being asked by white-supremacist gadfly, Russian stooge, and plagiarist Benny Johnson in an official White House press briefing if Big Balls would be getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It was no more absurd than hearing these oh-so-manly Republicans line up to say how scared they are to go work in the morning. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin, a brutish dolt who challenges liberal congressional witnesses to fistfights, said he doesn’t buckle his seatbelt in DC out of fear he’ll be carjacked. Representative Tim Burchett said he sleeps in his office, terrified of the city outside.

Whether they are making themselves laughingstocks to prove their loyalty to Trump or because they actually live with this fear, I cannot imagine admitting such things publicly. They are fine with their kids thinking that Dad, in the most heavily policed part of the United States, is scared to leave his office. A cornerstone of white conservatism in 2025 is howling about the death of American “manhood” and extolling the virtue of the gun—all while confessing to being a coward.

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Trump says from the safety of the freshly paved-over Rose Garden, where his UFC ring will likely go, that we have “caravans of youth rampaging through city streets at all times of the day.” (Note the use of “caravan,” a descriptor usually saved for immigrants trying to cross the border. It’s Klan Mad Libs.)

Please listen to me: I am out here every day, and there are no “caravans of youth” looking to carjack Oklahoma senators with manhood issues. Instead, Trump is trying to nationalize what he did to the Central Park 5 and, just like with the Central Park 5, it’s a divisive lie. This is one more Big Lie, facilitated by Fox News, that Trump’s supporters need to believe. They crave for Trump to be their white knight, which is why he is desperate that they not reckon with his time on Epstein’s island. Trump needs to distract them, and he needs to suppress democratic revolt against a failing, increasingly unpopular agenda—and this move does both.

This is not about street crime. This is about the president’s public desire to militarily occupy cities in states with Democratic governors, put a final stake in the heart of democratic norms, and, most critically, do it all on fictitious terms. The key is to make people accept the lies so they become complicit. Crime-rate drops are irrelevant. Murder rates in red states are irrelevant. When you choose to believe the lie, then you find yourself defending it. When you defend it, you become a part of the harm it does. Trump getting people to believe what is untrue is the political version of getting more prints on the handle of a gun.

DC is the perfect testing ground for this coup, because it doesn’t have statehood and only limited home rule. As longtime DC civil rights leader the Rev. Graylan Hagler told me, “We were already occupied by law enforcement making DC one of the most police-occupied cities in the country, with Capitol police, park police, transportation police, the FBI, the DEA, and the list goes on, and many of those agencies additionally having separate police departments of their own. Only the MPD [The Metropolitan Police Department] was under local control, and that no longer exists. With the National Guard on the streets and all local empowerment gone, we are a city and people living under martial law.”

This is why civil rights leaders like Reverend Hagler have long advocated for DC statehood: Because without it, DC residents are GOP prey. From charter schools to mandatory drug laws, a GOP-controlled Congress always treats DC as its own political laboratory. This is the end result: A federal tyrant running the city without any accountability. Banners hang from overpasses now with a tweak on the longtime slogan of both 1776 and the DC statehood movement: “No Occupation Without Representation.”

That occupation involves checkpoints, ICE raids, the terrorizing of unhoused people, and Washington Post interactive neighborhood maps so you can watch the seizure of the nation’s capital from the comfort of your couch. National Democrats and centrists have never taken the DC statehood movement seriously. The price for that will be paid well beyond the district’s borders.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David Maraniss says that he never speaks for the dead, but in this one case, he’ll make an exception. I had asked the best-selling author of Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero what baseball Hall of Famer and Latin American icon Roberto Clemente would say about Trump’s sadistic immigration policies and Major League Baseball’s silence in the face of these policies. Maraniss responded, “I have no doubt: Clemente would speak out on behalf of the many thousands of Latino jibaros and trabajadores who give so much to this country and are now living in fear of ICE shock troops. Clemente would be clearly denouncing Trump’s overtly racist policies.” Maraniss added that Puerto Rico’s favorite son would also be agitating for a league so dependent upon Latin American talent to stand up for its players.

Major League Baseball’s silence over (or perhaps silent support for) Trump’s denaturalization efforts would have been shattering for Clemente, because his era was one of progress. Clemente’s generation changed the complexion—and languages—of MLB clubhouses forever. When Clemente entered the league in 1954, he was one of the first Latino players with the dark skin tone that would have kept him out of the game before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947. Clemente later said that he first learned about racism—and first learned about what it meant to be Black—upon entering Major League Baseball and coming to the US mainland. Clemente fervently supported the rising Black freedom struggle. Clemente entered a league with racial quotas, which on some teams was still zero. In 1972, he left as captain of a Pirates team that could field a lineup of African American and Afro Latino players, a team beloved in what was then a white, blue-collar town.

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Today one can imagine Clemente, if somehow reanimated for the present, initially ebullient over the state of Major League Baseball. He would see a record six managers of Latino descent. He would hear his first language and music in the clubhouse, including the reggaetón of Puerto Rico’s own Bad Bunny. He would appreciate stars like Manny Machado and Julio Rodriguez. And then his heart would break to see the league refuse to defy Trump and protect these players and their families. Not even the ballpark, that place of escape and community connectivity, is a sanctuary. If anything, they are ICE target zones.

Mari Corugedo, vice president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, wrote me, “The fact that you can’t go to a favorite pastime of the United States, like a baseball game, without thinking in the back of your head, that someone in a mask, someone who won’t show you their badge or name, can come and separate and use this as a weapon against your parents, your family members, your friends, anyone who attends these sports events.”

If the NFL’s tagline is “Football Is Family,” MLB’s might as well be, “Baseball: Your family is not at present in an undisclosed location. Enjoy the game.”

Maraniss made another point about Clemente. “As a strong member of the players union,” Maraniss said, “he’d be pushing for them to take an unequivocal stand.”

Indeed, Clemente helped lead baseball’s first union strike in 1971 and was one of the few Major League Baseball players to defend fellow All-Star Curt Flood’s efforts in 1969 to win free agency for all baseball players. Clemente’s instincts to look to his union to fight Trumpism would have been spot-on. The Major League Baseball Player’s Association could be a uniquely powerful force against Trump’s anti-Latino assault.

This is a union where a quarter of its members were born in Latin America and many of the rest of its players are from comfortable suburban backgrounds and colleges with names like Gunnar, Colton, and Adley (to just use my favorite team as an example). What a statement to a divided country and a nativist president if this union of both Kades and Eduardos could publicly condemn the terror being imposed on their members. The players would become leaders giving voice to people who right now are living in shadows, deliberately unheard.

The Nation reached out to the MLBPA, but on this issue, it has been less deliberately unheard and more deliberately silent. “The PA is closely monitoring all U.S. immigration developments that could impact our members,” a representative of the MLBPA wrote. “We have advised non-U.S. citizen Players to carry proper immigration documentation with them when they travel and to ensure that their paperwork and personal information is up to date with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). We are available to Players and agents around the clock as a source of information and support, and we will remain attentive to any enforcement trends that could impact Players and their families.”

This echoes what Tony Clark, the executive director of the MLBPA, told the Baseball Writers Association of America during the All-Star break. The following was sent to us by the union, complete with vocalized pauses. After Clark made the same declaration of legal support, he said, “We told them to carry their documentation, uh, uh, wherever they go.… we’ve got immigration council and immigration lawyers on staff to provide, support in a way that we have in the past, but not to the extent that we do now in order to ensure guys are in the best position possible to get to the ballpark and do their job.”

There is no way this would be good enough for Clemente. Make sure you have your papers? Here is a number of a good lawyer? That doesn’t meet the moment. It accedes to it.

There is no shortage of bold and brave people speaking truth to this administration. Yet, while people are speaking out, institution after institution refuses to lift a finger, even to an alleged child rapist using racism to ransack this country. Baseball isn’t special. It is just one institution on a list. And Clemente would definitely be calling out the league for not raising hell. After winning MVP of the 1971 World Series, Clemente, being interviewed on the field, said, “Before I say anything in English, I would like to say something in Spanish to my mother and father in Puerto Rico.” His words were simple: “En el día más grande de mi vida, para los nenes la benedición mia y que mis padres me échen la benedición.”

The crowd’s response was rapturous. Even those fans who couldn’t understand him roared. The great Clemente was never ashamed of who he was. And he would never cower before that angry, burning rash known as Stephen Miller.

Clemente’s heroism turned into mythos on December 31, 1972, when, despite a crippling fear of flying, he attempted to travel with aid to Nicaragua following a massive earthquake. Almost immediately, his plane crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico’s Piñones Beach. Since that day, MLB has celebrated his legacy as a humanitarian, but he was more than that. He was someone who would never surrender an inch of his dignity.

It is staggering how much Clemente gave to Major League Baseball, how many doors he opened, how much life he brought to the game. And it is equally staggering how comfortable MLB owners are that the families of 25 percent of their players live in terror. It is staggering that they have said nothing about the 63 players from Venezuela whose families must live in a state of fear. It is staggering that so many white MLB players have said nothing on behalf of their teammates. And it is staggering that the union’s approach is just “carry your papers, and we have lawyers if you need them.” None of this is good enough.

Yes, Maraniss is correct that we should be wary of speaking for the dead, but we also cannot let MLB erase the dead: their beliefs, their words, or their sacrifices. The MLBPA cannot erase Clemente’s fierce pride. It cannot erase the fact that Clemente, if alive, would use his moral authority to stand up to an aspiring dictator and condemn the cowardice of the sport that he loved so dearly.

My 9-year-old self, uniformed in a Mets hat and Coke-bottle glasses, was a Hulkamaniac. It’s embarrassing now for countless reasons. I first saw the man born Terry Bollea as Thunderlips in the 1983 classic Rocky III. He was improbably muscled, blond, and tan: pure kid catnip. I became a World Wrestling Federation fanatic and was glued to the Zenith as Hogan rapidly climbed the WWF ladder. In January 1984, Hogan completed a meteoric rise to defeat the Iron Sheik and avenge the Iran hostage crisis (seriously). That title match wasn’t fake to me. It was as real as game 7 of the World Series, and when Hulk broke free from the Sheik’s dreaded “camel clutch” and secured the pin, I jumped up and down so much that the people downstairs called up to complain.

What I did not know was that there was a real world at odds with this ecstatic experience. I did not know that the Iron Sheik, a former Olympic wrestler who was once a bodyguard for the shah of Iran, could have cracked Hogan in two. He even almost went off script to do so because he found Hogan to be, as the Sheik put it, “a jabroni.” It was all 1980s fake, as fake as Reagan’s jet-black hair.

Now that Hulk Hogan has died at 71, the media, top wrestling honchos, and particularly the Trump administration are verbosely mourning this leather-skinned mass of steroids and bile stuffed in spandex. The media is treating Hogan’s death like they are in on a bit. They praise “Hulk Hogan” for being an American hero while ignoring that Terry Bollea led an ugly, amoral life; that he was accused of abuse by both one of his wives and a daughter; that he was broadly loathed by generations of wrestlers; and that his final act involved shilling full-time for Donald Trump. Hulk Hogan was a racist scab and a liar, which made him a natural fit for a prime-time appearance at Trump’s Republican National Convention.

It is gratifying, however, that last Thursday is, in addition to the day of Hogan’s death, the 10th anniversary of the National Enquirer’s publishing audio of Hogan going on an n-word-laden tirade. The coincidence is serendipitous, allowing the legions he harmed to remind people that many mourning this man are mourning a myth. His racism also matters because it dovetails with years of complaints made by Black wrestlers about both his treatment of them and his role as WWF co-owner Vince McMahon’s right-hand man, making sure they never got a shot at his top spot. (In fairness, many white and brown wrestlers have made the same claim.)

Then, as Hogan has himself admitted following years of accusations, he informed on his coworkers, telling Vince McMahon about a secret unionization push led by Jesse “The Body” Ventura. When one considers the shocking number of wrestlers who prematurely died in the 1980s and ’90s because of depression and addiction, both results of being hellaciously overworked, a union could have saved lives.

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But Hogan’s harm can be counted in more ways than just what took place behind the curtain. He sold what was left of his soul to Palantir founder and sweaty, ham-faced fascist Peter Thiel who bankrolled Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. With Thiel’s help, Hogan crushed an audacious Internet journalism outlet that I guarantee would have published the Epstein lists by now. That we lost Deadspin because of Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan will never not make me apoplectic.

Speaking of Jeffrey Epstein, Hogan’s death, as well as adoration for alleged rapist and alleged sex trafficker Vince McMahon, now also provides an opportunity for the secretary of education, Linda McMahon, to change the subject from Trump’s depredations. Fresh off freezing billions in desperately needed public education funds, Linda McMahon, the billionaire wife of Vince, will use Hogan’s death to try not to look like a repulsive representative of a scandal-soaked administration. It will be Hogan’s last act of fealty to the McMahons.

The Hulk Hogan of 2025 embodied all that is wrong with this country. He should be remembered as a living expression of our national decay: a hero exposed as a fraud, a fraud exposed as a coward, and a coward who cried with joy upon finding an authoritarian who told him that his sins were, in fact, virtues.

As Donald Trump’s followers formulate ever more fanciful reasons why their cult leader is definitely not a pederast, our authoritarian president is desperately grasping for news-cycle distractions. Now Trump is going with: “Don’t think about me sexually exploiting children with Jeffrey Epstein. Instead, think about making football racist again.”

On Monday, Trump posted a particularly toxic tweet, which I will not quote in full because of its use of a racist slur. In it, Trump called for the Washington Commanders football team to go back to their previous name, the R*dskins, a derogatory term that Indigenous Americans spent decades trying to change. Trump threatened to bar the DC City Council from using over a billion dollars of local public funds to build a new stadium unless the name reverts back to this dictionary-defined slur.

Trump also falsely claims that Indigenous people love the racist old team name. In fact, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) as well as dozens of tribal councils called for it to change. It’s a demand that goes back at least to the American Indian Movement, which launched in 1968.

Yes, Trump’s tweet is meant to be a distraction from his alleged attraction to children. Yes, this move dovetails with the contempt and racism he has long shown toward Indigenous people. But that’s not all. This power play furthers Trump’s agenda to end home rule in DC, something he has argued for by fueling crime hysteria and feeding racism.

It is also a sop to billionaire Trump-backer Dan Snyder. The almost universally loathed Snyder was forced to sell the Washington football team after accusations that cheerleaders had been sexually trafficked and for being a sweaty creep around the women he employed. (When it comes to his friendships, Trump certainly has a type.) Even other NFL owners couldn’t stand Snyder, maybe because he hired private investigators to collect “dirt” on them in case they ever tried to force him out. That was a bridge too far: Snyder could be a trash human, the owners’ message was, but don’t hack into our search histories. In one last humiliation, the belligerently racist Snyder had to announce that the R*dskins name that he so adored and defended would be retired. But it wasn’t decades of Indigenous activism that moved him. It was sponsors—particularly FedEx, which owned the naming rights to his PG County stadium stadium—who told him in 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd that they no longer wanted to be in the racism business. (If you want to know the history of how the most racist owner in NFL history, George Preston Marshall, conjured up the name “R*dskins,” read here.)

But this push to change the name back to a slur is not just about creating a distraction. It’s about dehumanization. Central to the Trump agenda is the rehabilitation of violent white supremacy as a guiding national principle. The only way to be able to justify his regime’s sick, smirking, gleeful torture of brown and Black immigrants is to dehumanize them in the eyes of the native-born. The masked, warrantless racial-profiling gestapo known as ICE have even been arresting Indigenous people in the “immigration” raids, detaining them “accidentally” and “indefinitely.” Returning this racist branding to the mighty NFL—a league whose spineless leader Roger Goodell seems physically unable to stand up to Trump—facilitates that agenda.

The name change would also help erase the ways that the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations pushed corporate power to reevaluate their own racist practices. Trump’s followers want to eradicate any legacy of the largest demonstrations in the history of the United States and the movement’s efforts to dismantle institutionalized racism.

In the great local symbol of this, Trump (with the willing participation of Michael Bloomberg acolyte DC Mayor Muriel Bowser) had Black Lives Matter plaza jackhammered out of existence. Calling for a R*dskins renaissance is an obvious next step. The White House wants its base to believe that by humiliating brown immigrants, we can return to a fantasy of the 1950s. It is fascist fan fiction.

Trump’s rant also muddies the real stadium debate taking place. The plan put forward by the mayor with team owner Josh Harris, who can afford his own damn stadium, is a terrible deal for Washington, DC. All football stadiums built with public funds are scams: Politicians send billions for structures that economic studies show do not provide a return on their investment and starve social safety nets. But even by NFL standards, this boondoggle is horrible. As DC council member Charles Allen said, “In stark financial terms, at a time when the district is facing a recession and tens of thousands of workers are losing their jobs, this proposal is asking DC residents to pay more than $4 million for each and every home game for the next 30 years, a proposal that doesn’t even include funding for a sorely needed Metro station expansion to give people alternatives to driving.”

If built, this stadium will accelerate displacement and gentrification, hurting residents of the neighborhood who could never afford $400 tickets to go to a game. Pro-stadium liberals will welcome a fight about the team name (a fight, I bet, they would surrender if push came to shove) instead of whether this is worth building at all.

It all points to the need for an anti-fascist left that not only stands up to Trump’s revanchist racism but also prioritizes the economic needs of working people—an anti-fascist left that won’t excuse or ignore the sexual exploitation of children.

Regardless of who wins Sunday’s Club World Cup final at MetLife stadium between Chelsea FC and Paris Saint-German, the real winner will be FIFA and its smarmy sycophant of a president, Gianni Infantino. The FIFA chief has been using the tournament to continue toadying up to Donald Trump, in advance of the North American–hosted World Cup, and to representatives of another future World Cup host, Saudi Arabia.

In fact, Infantino has been so focused on kissing the feet of authoritarians that he’s hardly paid attention to the health of the men whose magical feet keep the stands filled. By holding the Club World Cup in the extreme summer heat—in the offseason for most of the 32 clubs involved—FIFA demonstrated blatant disregard for the health of the players. A handful of matches were delayed due to soaring temperatures well past 100 degrees after FIFA scheduled midday kickoffs to accommodate television audiences in Europe. FIFPRO, the global players union that represents more than 60,000 professional footballers worldwide, has long slammed FIFA for valuing petro-dictators’ bottom lines over the well-being of the athletes. Back in 2023, the union noted that the Club World Cup schedule “demonstrates a lack of consideration for the mental and physical health of participating players, as well as a disregard for their personal and family lives.”

According to FIFPRO, modern-day players are already logging gobsmacking hours on the pitch. Twenty-two-year-old Brazilian phenom Vinícius Júnior (aka Vini Jr.) has already played twice as many minutes (18,876 of them) for club and country than legendary string-puller Ronaldinho. France’s Kylian Mbappe—Vini Jr.’s teammate at Real Madrid—had already logged 48 percent more minutes at age 24 than former French striker Thierry Henry logged at the same age. This is a major reason why young athletes have been breaking down in baseball and basketball. Plus, because of the professionalization of youth sports, there are more practices, more games, and more miles on the body’s odometer.

Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in soccer have called out Infantino’s FIFA for treating the players like equipment. Former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp called the tournament “the worst idea ever implemented in football” in light of the fact that the tournament is scheduled smack in the center of European clubs’ summer break when the already overtaxed players need rest. Pep Guardiola, manager of Manchester City, which participated in the tournament, said that because of the wear and tear on players’ bodies, playing in the tournament could “destroy” the team’s upcoming season. Even Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s former criminal-in-chief, has said of the FIFA Club World Cup, “It was a mistake.”

Why would the world’s best soccer clubs even play in the FIFA Club World Cup? The answer is money. The tournament total prize money pool has $1 billion in it, with $525 million doled out to clubs simply for participating and another $475 million allocated based on results. Despite Guardiola’s warnings, Manchester City, owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi United Group, reportedly walked off with nearly $52 million just for reaching the final 16 of the tournament. The winner of the tournament will nab a cool $125 million. But the money shuffle is rigged to benefit the world’s richest clubs, something that the Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer—which participated in the tournament but did not emerge from the group stage—protested, donning T-shirts at a match last month emblazoned with the phrase “Club World Cash Grab.” Grunge lives.

The FIFA Club World Cup is an egregious grift. And the tournament might not have even come off the ground were it not for an injection of Saudi cash. German investigative journalist Jens Weinreich has asserted, “Saudi Arabia’s wealth and influence have permeated nearly every facet of this expanded tournament.”

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After the major networks passed on airing the tournament, putting the entire spectacle at risk, DAZN, a middling sports network, found a billion dollars to buy the rights. It then emerged that the House of Saud had recently become a minority owner of DAZN. It bought 10 percent of the network—and just guess for how much.

Infantino might not be able to properly execute a corner kick, but he knows how to cozy up to power. He has long cultivated relations with Donald Trump—his bowed, bent, supplicant, shaved head could be seen at the back of the VIP section at Trump’s recent inauguration. He regularly posts on Instagram about his BFF DJT (and even his son Eric and the cringey JD Vance). At the Club World Cup, FIFA conspicuously ditched its in-stadium antidiscrimination messaging—even inoffensive statements like “no racism” and “no discrimination”—seemingly in deference to Trump. This was similar in effect (no matter the cause) to when the NFL took “No Racism” lettering off the field before the Super Bowl out of kindness to Trump.

Infantino then accompanied a clutch of players and staff from Juventus FC —the Italian club participating in the tournament—to visit Trump at the White House. Extreme awkwardness ensued as journalists asked Trump questions about Israel, Iran, and Joe Biden, while the players stood there silently. Then Trump, who seems most awake these days when hating someone, pivoted from slamming Biden for supporting transgender people to asking the players “Could a woman make your team, boys?” The footballers’ eyes darted nervously around the room until a member of the contingent, refusing to take the anti-trans bait, finally said, “We have a very good women’s team.” Trump looked back at them blankly, probably not knowing that Italy had a women’s soccer program.

Remember that blank, unknowing look when Trump attempts to reenact the 1978 World Cup in Argentina (overseen by a brutal junta, with Henry Kissinger in attendance) by standing astride the globe’s most watched sports tournament. He is in fact going to rehearse that on Sunday, appearing live with Infantino at the Club World Cup Finals. Here’s hoping the air-conditioning in the owner’s box is on the fritz—then the sheiks and sycophants can get an up-close view of a melting Orange glob and feel one-thousandth of what the players, at great risk of injury, are doing on the field.

In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s resounding defeat of Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, politicians in both parties have tried to destroy the democratic socialist’s campaign with slanderous claims that he is antisemitic.

Defending Mamdani from defamation has prompted a renewed call to be hypervigilant about anything that could be deemed antisemitic among his supporters. The strategy among anti-Zionists hoping to avoid charges of antisemitism has been to argue that the issue should be less about Israel and more about our military and political support of Israel: The United States is driving this ethnic cleansing, and Israel, as in the past, is our attack dog—our “cop on the beat”—in the “dangerous neighborhood” of the Middle East. Therefore, the instruction goes, we need to push back when people say that US government policy is controlled by Israel—that it is their lobby, their influence, and their own fascistic political agenda that the US is following in canine fashion.

But the US is following Israel here. We are the dogs—a country leashed to a genocide, without an electoral path to stop the arming of a military that is killing Palestinian children seeking food for sport. The contention that the US is in the driver’s seat with Israel the “cop on the beat” is an old and musty one from the 1990s that has not aged well. It does not correspond with what Israel is perpetrating, nor does it take into account the politics of genocide.

The malignant growth of end-times Christian Zionism—there are more Christian Zionists in the US than the entire Jewish population of the world—has metastasized within the GOP over the past 15 years. What started with accruing votes from megachurch freak shows has become a powerful bloc central to all decision-making in foreign and domestic policy. Christian Zionist anti-intellectualism—which simultaneously seeks dominion in all walks of life while waiting impatiently for the Rapture—also needs to be central to our understanding, foremost because Benjamin Netanyahu has largely played its adherents like a fiddle.

We can’t allow an endless argument about what is and isn’t antisemitism when it moves us away from confronting the central issue: the question of how to stop a genocide. A recent poll shows that 82 percent of Israeli Jews support “the transfer (expulsion) of residents of the Gaza Strip to other countries.” In other words, a majority of Israeli Jews support ethnic cleansing. “Genocide is not just a murderous madness,” the author Michael Ignatieff wrote. “It is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics—one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.”

This is what we are dealing with: a quasi-religious, sub-imperial madness beyond anything seen since the Nakba. It’s not antisemitic to point out that this is no longer about the needs of the United States, whether for oil or cultivating influence in the Middle East. Trump has already shown in the Abraham Accords of his first term that the US can buy friends—or, in the case of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, that countries can be bribed and bought off. This is not 1993, with the US seeking friends in the region and a “cop on the beat.” It is about Israel’s desire—and the US’s Christian Zionist Pavlovian response—to eliminate Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, “from the river to the sea.” It is driven by fascist Israeli politicians and an Israeli public overwhelmingly comfortable with this agenda. It is being supported by this administration because it dovetails with the end-times fascism that drives much of their agenda and inhabits their base. Southern Baptist—not a Jew!—Mike Huckabee’s appointment as the US ambassador to Israel gives the game away.

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These annihilators of Palestinian culture and history—antisemites waiting for a rapture that will see Jews go to hell—have become Israel’s most dependable ally. Now Trump is trying to simultaneously support Israel’s agenda without starting a war with Iran—an impossible position that gave us the fruitless and deadly bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities to assuage Israel while not angering new allies.

Israel has its share of apocalyptic religious holy warriors in government, but it’s not a group of Hanukkah Huckabees. The Netanyahu circle has cannily taken advantage of the global right-wing, white nationalist, deeply antisemitic, and authoritarian wave by allying with them and taking their place as a junior player. And if you don’t support this? They or their US apparatchiks will brand you as antisemitic and try to destroy you. But if you support their expansionist operation, you can hate Jews all you want. That’s why Trump gets to call us “shylocks” and shamelessly fill his cabinet with antisemitic, Stormfront message board scum.

Love Israel. Hate Jews. And joyfully, without hesitation, bomb Iran while funding a genocide. That’s all that Bibi and 82 percent of Israel’s population asks. Hell, burn a cross in your backyard as long as you support the burning down of Gaza. Nepo-bigot John Podhoretz made this clear—and shamed the ancestors—when he tweeted this week, “Trump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I’m concerned.”

This gets us to the Biden Dems. They don’t repeat the rapture fantasies of Christian Zionists, but they will hold hands with them, even if it means slandering and rejecting base-expanding candidates like Mamdani. Instead, they join the far right in slandering Mamdani as an antisemite, that classic reactionary Trojan horse used to attack leaders fighting for democratic socialism—who are currently overwhelmingly young and pro-Palestinian. They do this even though Netanyahu openly, and with a smirk, led the Democratic Party off a cliff in 2024. People like Hakeem Jeffries are fine raking in AIPAC cash and losing elections—because they are terrified: of youth, of the left, of taxing the rich, of challenging the tech oligarchs who smirk at them just like Bibi, of losing AIPAC money, and of being branded as antisemitic. A centrist liberal fears being called anti-Israel more than being called anti-genocide.

In 2025, even though the pro-genocide position makes it impossible to draw in masses of young voters or even campaign on college campuses, as Cuomo fearfully refused to do, the centrist Democrats don’t shift. When anti-Zionism is tied to social democracy, they attack. No one wants to end up like Jamaal Bowman. Better to lose an election than stand up to a fascist Israeli government and risk possible irrelevance.

Of course, we need to challenge antisemitism wherever we see it. But I’m Jewish, and fielding bad-faith accusations of antisemitism is far from the priority in my mind. A genocide is happening. There is nothing antisemitic about pointing out the global influence of Christian Zionism and the open thirst for ethnic cleansing among this generation of Israeli leadership. They are driving this train, though we are certainly paying for the engine and the tracks. We are not ordering them to commit war crimes, though we are giving them the thumbs up to do it. We are the cheerleaders and weapons dealers. Even Reagan, who tried to freeze Israeli settlements, was far tougher than 98 percent of Democrats on this.

If anything, people like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor-Greene will benefit from the Democrats’ cowardice—both are now publicly challenging Israel in a way that the Democratic Party is not. The left needs to fill that space. And while we have a responsibility to oppose our own government’s support for genocide, we also need to rightfully point out that Israel is at the heart of this atrocity without fearing that it comes across as antisemitism. Not doing so is a dead end—it’s a dead end for young people, and it’s a dead end for the brave students who populated last year’s encampments.

We need to catch up to the current reality. The attack dog is not only off the leash. It’s out for the kill. To say so loudly and clearly matters now more than ever.

Any argument for voting for Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City is about as convincing as an RFK Jr. vaccine briefing. But the worst reasoning for choosing Cuomo over Mamdani is that the young assemblyman would “hurt the brand” of Democratic anti-Trump opposition and “voters need to play the long game.” In other words, yes, Cuomo might not be as politically daring or charismatic as Mamdani, but if Cuomo loses, a fundamentally centrist country will turn against Democrats for electing such a radical. But the “long game” is a losing one, and it is remarkable how many times the Democratic Party needs to learn this lesson.

Ranking Cuomo is to reward a legacy centrist for his corruption and to ignore his misogynistic personal life. It should be disqualifying that Cuomo supported a group of Republican-aligned Democratic state legislators known as the Independent Democrats who blocked laws that would have helped working people. It should be disqualifying that as governor he covered up the number of Covid nursing-home deaths. It should be disqualifying that he is credibly accused of sexually harassing at least 13 women. The “long game” means cheering for a candidate whose only principles are uncritical support for Israel’s genocide and the prosperity of billionaires (who, of course, will raise all boats).

The establishment Dems making this case—from Bill Clinton to James Clyburn—seem to have zero awareness of how toxic Cuomo is as an individual and how repugnant his political profile has become to voters, especially in this era of acute crises and rising fascism. People crave politicians who promise programmatically, not just rhetorically (followed by a text to ask for money), to oppose the right. (Why do I get texts asking me to help pay for the DNC’s debt? How did it get my number?)

The “long game” has produced 50 years of political defeats and ensures more. Our few victories since Nixon won 49 states in 1972 have been due to courageous social movements with roots in the 1960s and ’70s. Everything else has been near-invisible change around the margins, performative representation, and a bipartisan attack on workers that has produced a level of wealth in the top 10th of 1 percent that is destabilizing and would have been unimaginable even 15 years ago, when it already felt apocalyptic. With Cuomo Democrats in charge or even as the opposition, we will need to get ready for the trillionaire class. Get ready for more gated communities, more private police, and more vigilante violence from both sides.

I hope Zohran wins. Not because I think he’ll succeed in all his initiatives and not because I’m naïve enough to think that there won’t be an ugly bipartisan backlash. I hope he wins because it will a statement about the appeal of his platform; it will be a statement against Trumpism and especially ICE’s gestapo war on immigrants; it will be a statement that the people of the city find current Trump-controlled Mayor Eric Adams’s violent cop crackdown on peaceful Palestinian rights protesters unconscionable; and it will be a statement that Trumpism demands a political response and not some multimillion-dollar search for “the left Joe Rogan.”

Perhaps most importantly, it will be a resounding statement that the centrist Democratic gerontocracy (Cuomo is 67) that has been clutching to power for decades is about as relevant—and about as pleasing to the ears—as Internet dial-up. But ranking Mamdani and not Cuomo is not just a vote against something. I find Mamdani’s agenda and the movement to elect Mamdani—which is rousing my most (understandably) cynical high school buddies to not just vote but campaign—inspiring and optimistic at a moment when both emotions are in short supply. Without inspiration and optimism, building the movement that could change this country for the better is impossible.

I make no prediction as to who is going to win or whether as mayor Mamdani would be able to execute his ambitious plan to actually make the city livable for working-class people again (I swear it once was), but I do know that it will be a blow to the boorish liberal centrists that refuse to let go of power—even for a scumbag like Cuomo. The demise of these Whigs cannot come soon enough.

The Los Angeles Dodgers have long had a transactional relationship with the city’s Chicano and immigrant communities. In 1949, the city seized land for Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine from a Mexican community that had turned the greenspace into “an immigrant Shangri-La.” Families would come to the park and say, “Your uncle lived where the third-base line ends at home plate.”

Then in the 1980s, a young pitcher from Mexico, Fernando Valenzuela, became a Dodgers icon. When Fernandomania arrived, Angelenos of Mexican descent filled the rafters of the stadium, and team management welcomed the crowds. Today, to go to a game is to see multigenerational Chicano families decked out in Dodgers blue and eating Dodger Dogs. They are the heart and soul of this fan base, and that is why pressure has been rising on the World Series champions in this current climate of terror facing Latino immigrant communities.

People in the city have been waiting for team owner Mark Walter to step up and say something about the ICE riots in Los Angeles. And yet, as their fans were being thrown into trucks by badgeless, masked, armed ICE agents—or at least that’s what these thugs said they were; there’s no way to confirm who they actually were—the Dodgers have tried to stay out of it.

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That is no longer the case. On June 20, the Dodgers announced that they would give $1 million to families of immigrants “impacted by recent events in the region.” The team didn’t exactly denounce ICE, but the message was clear: It understood that it couldn’t work with the Trump administration and expect its fans to remain quiet.

The events that led to the Dodgers pledging money to its immigrant fans started a few hours before a game between the Dodgers and the San Diego Padres when a line of black SUVS and white vans attempted to enter the stadium parking lot. The people in the vehicles were masked, and they carried neither badges nor warrants. Photos were flying around social media as people wondered if the Dodgers were allowing an armed, warrantless immigration checkpoint inside and outside the stadium. But Dodgers security, on orders from up high, would not allow them into the stadium grounds. As the extralegal army that is ICE searched for another place to set up, dozens of people showed up on a tweet’s notice to protest and film them. The feds scurried off, to fight (and again lose) another battle—this time in public relations.

Locals praised the Dodgers when the team announced on social media that it had realized who actually buys their expensive tickets and sent Trump’s attack dogs on their way.

ICE and DHS, in contrast, have been snippy and defensive since they were shown the door and initially, and laughably, just posted tersely, “False. We were never there.” Then they admitted that Customs and Border Patrol were there as photos and videos flooded social media. Emily Phillips of an Echo Park Rapid Response network reported that the feds said that they needed the stadium to process detainees since doing so out in the open at Home Depot would be “too dangerous.” It should frighten as well as offend everyone that such a cowardly, frightened group gets to be masked and armed and arrest people without warrant.

Let’s be real. It would be a mistake to think that the Dodgers, whose ownership and (some) players visited the White House several months back and kissed the ring, are born again. This was done because of all the people who bravely stood up to the LAPD, the National Guard, the Marines, and whatever motley group of agencies has been diverted to California—a state that, like Greenland in the springtime, Trump clearly wants to seize. And yet the actions by the feds here is also an escalation. They expect to be able to use a stadium to “process” those suspected of being undocumented—or even worse, that they can pull people out of the crowd at a ballgame and throw them into the backs of white vans. Given the history of stadiums being used across the globe as mass holding cells, with all kinds of small rooms perfect for “enhanced interrogations,” it would be particularly traumatizing for those connected to countries where sports arenas double as torture chambers. “The fact that these raids continue is what we Angelenos should be very concerned about. Dodger Stadium is a place where Angeleno families come and have fun,” said Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights member Jorge-Mario Cabrera.

We need instead to make sure that the calculus for the Dodgers ownership isn’t just ticket sales or a ratings drop. They need to know they will be publicly humiliated if they so much as bat their eyelids in ICE’s direction. The owners need to stand up not only for their profits and not even only for their fans, but because they owe it to the ancestors whose homes the team destroyed in Chavez Ravine. The bare minimum reparations should be standing with their community of fans and players in the face of a manufactured crisis. Dodgers ownership did not want this fight. But it’s come to them, and fans are forcing them to pick the right side.

Born June 5, 1945, John Carlos became part of one of the most iconic photos in sports or protest history, when he raised his fist at the 1968 Summer Olympics. Sharing the 200-meter medal stand with Tommie Smith and Australian runner Peter Norman, the image of Carlos and Smith, their fists aloft, went global. This was the first Olympics broadcast around the world in technicolor and, truly, color was the way it had to be.

But Dr. John Carlos’s birthday or what he did on that cool October morning (the summer games—due to the weather or civil unrest, depending on the source—were postponed until October) is not why he deserves our attention today as we wrestle with effective resistance in troubled times. I had the honor of working with the track and field Hall of Famer on his memoir John Carlos: The Sports Moment That Changed the World and learned the unexpected. The great feat of this man’s life was not a raised fist for 90 seconds in 1968. It is the straight back he has held for the 57 years since. Both Smith and Carlos knew that there could be hell to pay for their protest on the Olympic medal stand, but the intensity of the backlash they could not have predicted.

But they also never expected there to be two statues of them, one at their alma mater San Jose State and one—at least until Vice President JD Vance rips it from the floor—at the National Museum of African American History in Culture. But this kind of acknowledgement and adulation has been a part of Carlos’s life only for the last 15 to 20 years.

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Before that, there were decades of slander and disinformation about why they protested. Carlos and Smith did not expect their families and especially their children to suffer for their actions. They did not expect to be pariahs with no access to athletic employment opportunities—or even regular employment. They did not expect the FBI to be trailing their steps.

Over the next 57 years, Carlos, however, accomplished something rare: Carlos never made us ashamed to have that image taped to our walls or affixed to our homescreens. Given what he was put through, Carlos had every reason to succumb to demons. But he never had to come back from the depths, because his antagonists could never push him that low. There were bleak moments: The time Carlos had to chop up furniture in front of his family for firewood; the time his marriage to Kim Groce ended due to the pressures of being post-Olympic outcasts; and the time soon thereafter when Groce died by suicide. None of the pain stopped him from living with dignity. None of it stopped him from being there for his kids, and now they have their own children who adore their grandaddy.

Critical for the rest of us, none of these hardships caused him to repent. When actors or athletes are put on a blacklist, their status as public figures gives them an escape hatch that a blacklisted teacher, factory worker, or office employee cannot access. They can condemn themselves, denounce their former comrades, and then proceed to watch the doors reopen. You don’t even have to really believe it. The important part is for the world to see you bend the knee.

But Carlos, in the tradition of people like Paul Robeson, never expressed teary remorse for choosing to challenge oppression on the brightest possible stage. Instead, he wore his blacklist like a badge of honor. He worked with his hands and hustled when he could, before eventually becoming a counselor in the California Public School system for 20 years; an anonymous icon striding to his office among a throng of kids. Today, the word “sellout” has fallen out of use. In a time of modern-day blacklists, it needs to be reintroduced. Carlos never sold out, and that helped the rest of us stay the course.

We are in times when telling the truth, having political ethics, or holding up a mirror to this warped country are dangerous acts. They also seem to many to be increasingly irrelevant values. Why tell the truth when you can, like the president, make up your own? Why have principles if they stop you from accepting that gambling app sponsorship for your podcast? Why criticize this American nightmare if it comes with a steep price? One thing Carlos said to me upon meeting over 20 years ago was “I refuse to be exploited.” This refusal cost him money, but he along with his partner, Charlene, and their family, have had a better life for it, one where grandaddy is a hero. Carlos’s present and past are reminders, to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that “a back can only be broken if it is already bent.” Happy 80th to Dr. John Carlos. Here’s to 80 more.

Sometimes the irony doesn’t just burn. It flays the skin. Donald Trump’s education secretary, Linda McMahon—she and her family are the longtime overlords of World Wrestling Entertainment—has made billions in part by having her wrestlers embody ethnic and racial stereotypes to the thrill of the crowd. Black pimps, savage Pacific Islanders, and, of course, primitive Indigenous people with fake war cries and painted faces played by people who are about as Native American as Colin Firth—all part of the program.

This has always reflected the comedic tastes of Linda’s violently misogynistic and virulently racist husband, Vince, all of which McMahon knew how to monetize. Racism as popular entertainment is Linda McMahon’s lane. With no education experience, often looking confused when questioned about the subject (for McMahon, AI is a steak-sauce), her only qualification for working in Trump’s cabinet is her talent for covering up alleged rape and child abuse and defending racism—both handy for this administration.

The shamelessness reached a new peak on May 31 when McMahon held a press conference at Massapequa High School in Long Island, New York, to defend racist Indigenous mascoting. Linda excoriated the state’s ban on Indigenous mascots for public high school sports because, wait for it, it’s the banning of these minstrel shows that is, in fact, racist.

Because of this so-called racism, she announced that Trump will pull education funds from the state unless Massapequa High School can keep calling themselves “the Chiefs.” The regime also demanded that Governor Kathy Hochul issue a personal, public apology for responding to grassroots pressure and enacting the ban. It’s more unprecedented mafia politics from this regime, using the threat of destroying the state’s public schools unless its reactionary social agenda is obeyed.

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“The Trump Administration will not stand idly by as state leaders attempt to eliminate the history and culture of Native American tribes,” McMahon said, surrounded by a coterie of white students. McMahon was also backed by the Native American Guardians Association, a conservative organization of Indigenous people that had been flown in from North Dakota. Meanwhile, the actual tribal councils in New York State have affirmed and reaffirmed that mascoting is degrading, and, according to American Psychiatric Association studies, harms Native kids. Given McMahon’s history of allegedly covering up child abuse, the education secretary’s disregard of these studies is chilling. She is here to hurt children at the behest of this administration’s retrograde racial politics.

By conflating Indigenous minstrelsy—white people in face paint—with representation, it also makes it easier for non-Natives to ignore actual issues plaguing Native communities, like poverty and poor healthcare access. It’s a warped version of visibility that only serves to erase. As a spokesperson from the National Congress of American Indians said, “These depictions are not tributes—they are rooted in racism, cultural appropriation, and intentional ignorance.”

McMahon traveled to Massapequa following a report decrying mascot bans by the Civil Rights Division of Trump’s Justice Department, which has now been weaponized to attack all anti-racism as prejudicial to whites. Like a remedial debater backed by zero studies or stats, Trump and his cronies contend that if we can have mascots like the Dutchmen, as a different high school in Long Island does, then it is racist to prevent Native Americans from being mascots too. It’s a stupid, tiresome argument straight out of 1982, but I’ll address it nevertheless: There aren’t broad, national organizations of Dutch people clamoring to change these names. Maybe that’s because during this thing that happened called history, the Dutch were the conquerors of the greater New York City area, not the conquered. They were not the victims of land theft and genocide. Making mascots of Native Americans not only commemorates the demeaning stereotype of savageness but also implicitly celebrates the white folks in the stands whose ancestors had the gumption—or more accurately, the guns and germs—to eradicate them. This isn’t about Indigenous rights or representation. It’s about making non-Native students and community members comfortable with their own racism: white supremacy without the guilt, which is a running theme of this administration.

Then there is the poisonous lie that Trump cares about Indigenous populations, when his bald racism against Native people has been a consistent part of his life for decades. If he really cared, he’d apologize for the fact that Native people are being “mistakenly” arrested by ICE. It’s just more gaslighting from this regime, akin to this cabinet of open antisemites claiming to have zero tolerance for antisemitism. This past week, a true hater of Jews, conservative nepo baby Kingsley Wilson, was promoted to spokesperson of the Department of Defense over the meek objections of the ADL.

As for Massapequa, despite being a very conservative community, on hours’ notice it pulled together a significant protest that filled the streets outside the school. We need more of this. Or we can passively accept that Linda McMahon, part of the family that took an Italian wrestler named Joe Scarpa and renamed him Chief Jay Strongbow, gives a damn about any of this.

Some might say that this is yet another of the administration’s weapons of mass distraction, diverting our attention to this absurdity instead of the new budget that will upend people’s lives and kill many people who will be forced to lose their health insurance. This may be true on one level, but we have to see that McMahon’s erasure agenda walks hand in glove with Trump’s oligarchical heist. The more we are divided, instead of unified like the protesters in Massapequa, the more they will steal. Anti-racism is not a side issue. It’s an essential part of the kind of unity that can successfully challenge an outlaw administration.

That’s why they hate it so much. Trump and McMahon are willing to halt school funding, humiliate elected officials, and demonize—or even criminalize—people who won’t mock Native Americans at sporting events.

It boggles the mind that this is how they are choosing to exercise the most powerful levers of federal power—until you realize that their agenda cannot succeed without division, no matter how racist, no matter how undemocratic, and no matter how violent.

There are three messages that the United States is sending to the world in advance of the 2026 World Cup, and you should take two of them seriously. The first comes from President Donald Trump, who said at a recent press conference hyping the 2026 World Cup, “We can’t wait to welcome soccer fans from all over the globe.” These are the words of an addled carnival barker, whose ego gets a jolt every time he thinks of doing a Hitler-at-the-1936-Olympics impression at the world’s most popular sporting event. This you should not take seriously.

The second message is from that smarmy supplicant JD Vance at that same press conference. The vice president attempted a joke probably workshopped with someone he follows on X who has a YouTube show boosting eugenics. He said, “I know we’ll have visitors probably from close to 100 countries. We want them to come. We want them to celebrate. We want them to watch the game. But, when the time is up, they’ll have to go home. Otherwise they’ll have to talk to [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem.” Nothing like a veiled threat to have people sent to the USA’s offshore torture/labor camp in El Salvador to prime the tourist profit pump.

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But make no mistake, Vance’s message is serious, as serious as the naked ambition that emanates from this barely shaved chipmunk. Expect the preparations for the World Cup to be accompanied by raids of non-white communities, immigrant and otherwise. Given that it is normal to see the state off its leash anyway in host cities before the World Cup, one can only tremble or seethe at the thought of what will take place. Trump will likely exploit the Cup to engineer a crackdown—particularly in Los Angeles, with its high population of undocumented immigrants and its Democratic mayor, Karen Bass—that looks more like the 1978 World Cup held by a torture regime in Argentina than the comparatively placid one in South Africa in 2010 (despite the media hysteria).

This leads us to the last point: Stay the fuck away, world. This is not a safe place for anyone without a passport, and these days even a passport guarantees nothing. US citizens, including Native Americans, are being scooped up by ICE. Navajo Nation president Buu Nygren recently recounted that numerous Navajo citizens are experiencing “negative and sometimes traumatizing encounters” with ICE.

If the out-of-control crackdown being orchestrated by ICE and the US Customs and Border Patrol is dangerous to this country’s First Peoples, then you can bet it is perilous for visitors from around the world. Ask the teenage backpackers from Germany who reported being strip-searched and imprisoned after landing in Hawaii. Ask the Canadian entrepreneur who spent two weeks in the Otay Mesa Detention Center, an experience she described as being “kidnapped, thrown into some sort of sick psychological experiment meant to strip us of every ounce of strength and dignity.” Ask green-card holder and lawful permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil. Ask student visa holder, the now blessedly free Rümeysa Öztürk.

Hosting the 2026 World Cup in the United States is dangerous for teams, their families, and their fans. And the word is out. A new group—Boycott USA 2026—has emerged to demand that “games scheduled in the USA must be moved or boycotted.” The organization is concerned that international visitors may be in danger and that the Trump administration may use the soccer tournament as an alibi for intensifying its deportation machine.

Numerous countries have issued travel warnings against the United States, including Canada, France, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, and Finland. They are among the growing number of people who can see that Vance’s joking is serious business.

Vance once claimed that telling jokes with his “guy friends” is “the essence of masculinity.” (There goes Vance lying again—this time about having friends.) More importantly, members of the Trump administration—from Vance to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Trump himself—have used what they call jokes to make political space for depraved social policy. When critics push back, the standard-issue riposte is to tell those humorless fuddy-duddies not to be so uptight. But Trump and his ilk use crude humor to normalize xenophobia, racism, sexism, and transphobia. And once people are judged as unworthy of basic human dignity—after all they are “poison in the blood”—then come the arrests, camps, the prisons, and the death of due process. It’s all one agenda, and everything is in service of that agenda.

Vance got plenty of attention for his “joke” at the task-force presser, but Trump let one fly as well. When the president was asked whether people who have been engaging in “pro-Palestinian protests across the world” should feel safe to travel to the United States to enjoy the World Cup, he responded, “I think people are allowed to protest. You have to do it in a reasonable manner. Not necessarily friendly, but reasonable. Otherwise Pam will come after you, and you’re gonna have a big problem.” This is the third message.

“Pam” is US Attorney General Pam Bondi who, in a spate of Trumpian sycophancy, recently yukked it up about sending drug traffickers to a reopened Alcatraz Prison. Bondi also just signed off on Trump’s receiving a “new Air Force One” plane from Qatar as a gift, a brazen piece of corruption by a regime on a historic grifting spree. For those of us who remember scandals like donors spending the night in the Lincoln bedroom, it’s remarkable how any moral standards now appear quaint. All too often, mainstream journalists are complicit in laundering this new political reality.

We can’t expect FIFA to stand up to Trump. The world’s governing body for soccer claims to care about human rights. But of course, sitting elbow-to-elbow with Trump under the press-conference spotlight, FIFA president Gianni Infantino somehow didn ’t raise any concerns about ICE snapping up undocumented residents and sending them off to the notorious CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador. Instead, Infantino chuckled along when the president interrupted him to insist that the United States be listed first as the host of the event, ahead of Canada and Mexico. Infantino has even moved to Miami—some 70 miles down the road from Mar-a-Lago—where FIFA reportedly foots the $5,000-per-month bill for his daughter to attend private school. He was a special guest at Trump’s inauguration earlier this year, where he yanked out his phone as the president took the oath of office, presumably so he could post to Instagram, where he regularly vies against heavy competition to be Trump’s greatest sycophant.

The 2026 World Cup starts in only 13 months (on June 11, 2026). And yet, according to the US State Department, wait times are 18 months for visas from Colombia, 12 months for Nigeria, 11 months for Ecuador, and five months for Algeria (these are for general visas unrelated to the World Cup). Adam Crafton reported in The Athletic that State Department officials are expressing concern that DOGE’s reckless dismantling of the federal government may well exacerbate these wait times as well as the acceptance rates for World Cup tourists who need a visa.

People should start pulling their visa applications (even applying now comes with the threat of “enhanced vetting”) and to not come to the United States for the World Cup. You are entering an airspace where, thanks to government cuts, planes can no longer safely take off and land. Once off the plane, you will be entering an airport that could become your prison. Once you make it through, you are a leaving-your-visa-papers-in-your-hotel-room away from a gulag. Please, for yourselves, for your families, stay away from the United States. As for the players, do not bring your families into the United States. Do not endanger the people you love. It may be difficult to imagine a boycott of the US portion of the World Cup. But if you must see the tournament in person, the wonderful World Cup venues in Mexico and Canada provide an alternative for those who don’t find concentration camps “funny.”

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred’s shock announcement that alleged game fixers “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and “the Hit King” Pete Rose would no longer be banned from the sport’s Hall of Fame was not about justice or closure. This is Manfred telling the high-minded baseball world that in the current political and economic climate, ethics are for suckers.

For those who don’t know the specifics, Joe Jackson hit .356 in his career—the fourth-highest batting average ever—and was banned for being a part of the Chicago “Black Sox” plot to fix the 1919 World Series. The charges beggared belief, since Jackson hit .375 in the postseason with zero errors. Jackson, who could neither read nor write, almost certainly took money, although it’s unclear if he understood the ramifications of what he was doing. Along with seven other Chicago White Sox teammates of varying innocence and guilt, Jackson saw his career destroyed. Baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had recently used the Sedition Act to sentence leading trade unionists to prison, banned the players from baseball, sending a message to the country that the honor of the sport could never be compromised.

As for Pete Rose, aka “Charlie Hustle,” no one in Major League Baseball has ever had more hits. He’s part of the history of the game whether people detest him or not. But fealty to the game’s history is not why Manfred is making this move. Some are positing that Donald Trump’s advocacy for Rose, his fellow alleged statutory rapist, is why this is happening. At the end of February, as ICE was abducting people from US streets, Trump found the time to tweet the following: “Over the next few weeks I will be signing a complete PARDON of Pete Rose, who shouldn’t have been gambling on baseball, but only bet on HIS TEAM WINNING.” Trump also apparently met with Manfred to facilitate this, part of his campaign to force every independent institution to wallow with him in his moral degeneracy.

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Part of Trump’s reasoning is that Rose “only bet on his team winning.” Rose, from what we know, bet on his team as a manager, not a player. Shadowed by heavy debts and mobsters, Rose may have made pitchers stay on the mound longer or played people who were injured even if risking their long-term health. That’s why the “gambling on his team winning,” as if this were admirable, is a morally bereft argument. Trump sees nothing wrong with such managerial decisions, since it’s how he’s always treated his workers.

But please don’t believe that Trump is the reason Jackson and Rose are finally going to enter Cooperstown. Manfred may allow Trump to bask in the smell of his own influence, but this decision is rooted in something bigger: the sport’s surrender to the gambling-addiction economy, which could, in theory, be subject to federal or legal intervention.

Baseball has always taken pride in its history of patriotism and piety. Its early proponents were charged with spreading the sport in order to mend the United States and fortify the union after the Civil War. The first professional athletes to be feted at the White House were two baseball teams, guests of President Andrew Johnson in 1865. In 1889, Walt Whitman said, “Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic! [It] belongs as much…as our constitutions and laws. It is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.”

Hypocrisy, just like the country of its origin, is also baked into the game. It’s “the national pastime”—and it maintained a color line until 1947. Its Hall of Fame has shut out union trailblazers like legendary All-Star Curt Flood while honoring several rumored KKK members, including Rogers Hornsby. The MLB has enshrined alleged steroid users it likes and banned the ones it finds disagreeable.

But if there was one policy that would never be treated as ethically disposable, it was the league’s punishment for game fixing: banishment. The game had to be a stern exemplar of Christian probity even if the team owners were surely not. These war-profiteers and miscreants had stumbled upon virtue-branding: the profit potential of making clear to the public that this was not a low-born sport—like boxing or dog fighting—that lent itself to vice. Baseball would be a pastoral game on a verdant field that’s fit for the entire family.

This ironclad commandment around game fixing is now a casualty of Manfred’s reign, another example of his penchant for treating the game’s history as a nettlesome barrier to greater financial windfalls.

The Jackson and Rose decisions need to be seen in this context. Baseball has an aging fan base, and Manfred is trying to turn this around by catering to the hive of young, male addicts swarming around gambling apps. The sport that once suspended its greatest retired stars for shaking hands at a casino now has gambling partnerships with five different companies. The American Gaming Association is banking on MLB’s receiving $1.1 billion in betting profits this year. That’s four times the number in 2023.

Funding after-school leagues is not how Manfred sees growing the game. Instead, he is pursuing more and more partnerships that deliver gambling to kids without the brain development to handle the rush or the crash. The league used to want kids to want to become Major Leaguers. Now it wants them to steal their dad’s FanDuel code and become the class bookie. (I have a kid in high school; there is, in fact, competition over who gets to be the class bookie.) And if the addiction hotlines are ringing with youth gamblers, that’s not Manfred’s problem.

Manfred waited patiently and cruelly for the hard-living Rose to die, which occurred last September when Rose was 83, and only then did Manfred decide Rose could enter the Hall of Fame. Some of this was surely spite, as Rose has been a critic of league gambling hypocrisy, but it’s also because Rose in death can serve a new purpose: He can become a symbol that Major League Baseball isn’t your father’s stuffy sport as well as a symbol that gambling and addiction, far from being harmful, are really as American as apple pie. This has been a year when ethical guidelines once held as eternal have been shredded. MLB’s embrace of online betting signals the demise of another principle in a time of abject moral carnage.

I saw Rage Against the Machine in concert at a packed Capitol One arena in Washington, DC, in 2022. Lead singer Zack de la Rocha performed the show in a wheelchair, because he’d shattered his ankle on stage during their last stop. He was incredible, hitting every note from the seated position. Tom Morello was inventing new sounds on his guitar, and on a dark stage under a spotlight, bassist Tim Commerford had a mind-boggling solo.

There was also a middle-aged muscle-head with a red MAGA hat sitting two rows in front of us. I was transfixed. He would jump up and down shouting along with lyrics like, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” But when 20,000 people chanted, “Some of those that work forces / are the same that burn crosses,” he got sullen and searched for people to fight. Meanwhile, the woman he was with took out her phone, apparently trying to capture a viral video of him being MAGA-tough. I wondered if he wanted to knock one of us out for the camera like the black-bloc kid did a few years earlier to the neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.

I could see how livid MAGA-man was when Zack shouted out the names, accompanied by a slideshow photo tribute, of the Black people who had been killed by the local police over the last year. This was something Rage had been doing in every city where they had played a show. Then this ball of aggro stuffed into a too-tight T-shirt got really mad when the band took a short medical intermission, so Zack could attend to his leg. (I’m still not sure how Zack managed this show.) During the break, Rage showed a slow-motion film of a police van burning while some young Black kids just slowly rode their bikes around it.

In his own kind of rage, the MAGA guy kept looking for people to fight, but we either ignored him or shouted lyrics in his direction and pointed. This made him angrier, and his face soon matched his stupid red hat. Even worse, his special lady friend wasn’t getting any good content for her Instagram page! When the show ended, he started yelling, “Who threw that at me? I will fuck you up!” (I guess someone threw something at him.) I was fed up and said something to the effect of, “Shut the fuck up. No one threw shit at you. Go home!” He was going to step to me, but then he noticed I was with a large friend who was staring daggers at him, and he did indeed shut up and left the concert seething. He’d had a terrible time with no viral video content to show for it.

This all came back to me with force when I saw a comedic headline that read, “Right-Wing Rage Against the Machine Fan Wishes We Could Go Back to the America That Existed When He Was Too Stupid to Understand the Lyrics.” These assholes like to say things like, “MAGA is the new punk rock,” but there is nothing rebellious about them. They are reactionaries. They are scared of op-eds, speeches, and petitions. They are scared of books. They want to erase history that they can’t bear to read. They are the machine that Zack, Tom, Tim, and drummer Brad Wilk are raging against. As long as their 78-year-old dictator daddy and his autocratic state brutalize the people they want brutalized and silence the people they want silenced, they will be happy no matter the price of eggs. They are as punk rock as Stephen Miller’s spray-on hairline or Kristi Noem’s Rolex that she wears for slave-labor camp photo-ops. They are as punk rock as a recalled Tesla truck.

There is a reason young people, especially young women, are learning to loathe Trump. His support among Zoomers has dropped precipitously in his first 100 days. Young people rightly see a despot who, alongside the richest people on earth, is strip-mining their present and selling off, if not destroying, their future. Trump certainly does rage—but it’s just against the parts of the “machine” that fund efforts to cure cancer, save our National Parks, and deliver programs to survivors of gender violence. But he loves the machine that can ban books, override due process, arrest judges, abduct students, fund El Salvadoran labor camps, and invade Greenland. He loves the part of the machine that delivers violence against the people of his choosing. This, however, is the part of the machine that Rage wants to smash.

I was also reminded that MAGA can’t claim punk rock—or any form of truly rebellious music. Its supporters may pump iron to Tom Morello’s guitar, but, like the snowflakes they are, they can’t accept that Tom has devoted his life trying to dismantle everything they so proudly represent. They may love Zack’s primal scream, but not when they realize he’s screaming at them. Rage Against the Machine stands with Mumia. MAGA quislings stand with Mumia’s tormentors. Rage Against the Machine is ours. And these Planet Fitness fascists can listen to Kid Rock on repeat and shut up.

Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr had finally seen enough. After his team’s play-in game against the Memphis Grizzlies, he arrived at the post-game press conference wearing a Harvard basketball T-shirt. Kerr made the wardrobe change as a prelude to speaking about the Trump administration’s threat to put a university that predates the American Revolution by almost 150 years into government receivership if it wants billions in federal funds. Unlike Columbia, some of the most prestigious law firms in the country, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and numerous other august institutions, Harvard—after making several concessions—decided to refuse to kiss Trump’s mafia pinkie ring. Before taking questions about Steph Curry’s thumb and the benching of Jonathan Kuminga, Kerr said, “I believe in academic freedom. I think it’s crucial for all of our institutions to be able to handle their own business the way they want to—and they should not be shaken down, told what to teach, what to say by our government. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, but it’s kind of par for the course right now. Yes, this is me supporting Harvard. Way to go. Way to stand up to the bully.”

Kerr has a history of opposing right-wing autocracy. He made himself heard during the first Trump administration when he joined his mentor and fellow coach Gregg Popovich in speaking out against a president that he saw early on as a threat to democracy and decency. Yet with Coach Pop recovering from a stroke (he’s on the mend!), Kerr had been quiet during this second, far more vicious and openly fascistic Trump administration. He hadn’t said much of anything, joining almost the entirety of his league. Players, who were so outspoken during Trump I, have thus far chosen silence.

In talking with players, I’ve identified three reasons why they aren’t publicly criticizing Trump. The first is physical safety, both for themselves and their families. No pro athletes are as exposed as NBA and WNBA basketball players. No player wants to be on the lookout for a smuggled-in weapon if fans storm the court. The second reason is that players, unlike in 2020, do not think that the league institutionally will have their backs. NBA commissioner Adam Silver and the franchise owners—once seen as more progressive than their NFL counterparts—are now either compliant or complicit with the oligarchal aims of this administration. If a player speaks out without organizational support, they fear, as one retired player said to me, of “getting Kapped,” slang for getting shot and also of course a reference to Colin Kaepernick, the NFL quarterback exiled from his job for his opposition to racist police violence.

The third reason is feeling queasy at the thought of risking generational wealth. Compared to 2020, let alone 2016, salaries have exploded. Today a mid-nine-figure contract merits barely a yawn for a mid-level star. This is a result of inflated televised-rights packages for streaming services and the addiction economy of gambling apps. There is more money than ever, and that means more risk. Why fight for player power to have more influence in the league’s direction if you can afford to be part of a group that can buy a team? Unheard of in previous generations, it’s now a goal for several top-end players.

It is in the face of this that Kerr rediscovered his voice. Kerr, of course, has a different background than your typical NBA coach. His father, Dr. Malcolm Kerr, was president of American University in Beirut. Dr. Kerr believed that education, understanding, and challenging Western racism could help bring justice and peace to the region. This made him a threat, and he was killed by two assassins. The group Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility. If he weren’t killed, Dr. Kerr would be widely known today as an influential Middle Eastern studies scholar whose work earned praise from a generation of academics, including from Edward Said, who essentially founded Palestinian Studies in the United States. Instead, the Middle East Studies Association, an academic organization of over 2,700 academics, names its annual award for the best dissertation after Dr. Malcolm Kerr. This same Middle East Studies Association has condemned the Israeli genocide in Gaza in “the strongest possible terms.”

This is Steve Kerr’s stock: standing up to racism at home and abroad and standing up to “bullies,” aka right-wing autocrats. Now the question, especially as we enter the playoff season in the NBA, is whether some players or coaches may pick up Kerr’s torch and have something to say. This is a league whose popularity was built—and continues to be built—largely by Black players, players who, in the past, have spoken out on issues of racism. In 2020, they even went on strike after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Given Trump’s endorsement of police violence, the attacks on Black employees in the federal government, the erasing of Black history in schools, the stated intention by Trump’s bottom-feeding parasites like Chris Rufo to overturn the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there is no shortage of stands for players to take. Whether it happens is an open question, but it always starts with one person. Courage may be contagious, but there needs to be a patient zero. Last time, it was Coach Pop. Now it’s Coach Kerr. Throughout these playoffs, we will see whether his words mark the start of a political contagion or if he’ll be quarantined by a skittish sports media and fearful league.

Passover has always been a favorite Jewish holiday of mine. A seder is the time to remember the lash of oppression and the joys of deliverance. It is a time when the youngest are encouraged to question their elders, a time to celebrate the fall of pharaohs and false gods, and a time to be replenished by talking with family and friends about how Jewish values apply today.

With the approach of this year’s Pesach, I feel neither fortified nor replenished. I am, instead, trembling with contempt for those in my Jewish community ignoring the core lessons of the seder: the pain of subjugation, the joys of freedom, and the questioning of why we do what we do, at the table and in life.

Jewish supporters of Trump’s risible “fight against antisemitism” are bereft of morality, propping up a set of principles at odds with what has sustained us. Israel, not Judaism, is their religion and false god. They rally around the state as if it’s a golden calf. They act as if those who question do not deserve to be heard, only punished. And Donald Trump is their pharaoh.

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Where is the dignity in being Bari Weiss and making excuses for Elon Musk and Steve Bannon’s Nazi salutes? She has no honor, essentially worshipping an apartheid state. Where is the dignity in being Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that has become a PR machine for right-wing antisemites? The people he now defends from “defamation” are certainly not Jews. The acceptance by my pro-Israel Jewish brethren of having Mike Huckabee, a Christian Zionist, as US ambassador to Israel is a choice to forgo self-respect and to be treated like a schmatte. Many of my fellow Jews are now saying that Israel’s interests are best served by someone who believes in a version of Christianity that says we belong in hell when the rapture comes. They are saying that Israel’s importance does not lie in “protecting Jews,” as Weiss insists, but in creating an end-of-the-world Disneyland for radical right-wing evangelicals. By making this choice, Trump is doing what he does to everyone who capitulates to him. He is humiliating Jewish supporters of Israel because their acceptance of humiliation only breaks them more.

But nothing is as broken in our collective religious community as the pervasive idea that this administration packed with antisemites must shred our civil liberties in the name of fighting antisemitism. A recent headline in The Guardian read, “Leo Terrell, Trump’s antisemitism chief, shares post by prominent neo-Nazi.” How many headlines like this must we see? In his first term, Trump offered a hand of friendship to street thugs chanting “Jews will not replace us” and those who trashed the Capitol on January 6. In his second term, they are making policy.

We are seeing Jewish organizations align with ICE in their quest to abduct and indefinitely imprison international students who protest, sign op-eds, or have the temerity to marry someone objectionable in their eyes. That these organizations are not only silent in the face of this but supplying names and doxing people for the purpose of armed abduction is a betrayal of previous generations. It’s an erasure of our own history at Passover: our own bitter tears, represented on the seder plate by horseradish and salt water. Jewish supporters of the Israeli state are in the thrall of seeing their golden calf spread from “the river to the sea.”

The desecration of debate and acceptance of having a thought police is not in our interests as a people, and it marks the negation of our spiritual selves. Whatever ICE has been since it was launched in March 2003 as George W. Bush’s scaffolding for the current moment, a graphic it posted yesterday shows clearly what it has become, reading, “If it crosses the U.S. border illegally, it’s our job to stop it.” The graphic then lists what its mandate is to stop: “people, money, products, ideas.” ICE believes its job is to stop “ideas” from crossing the border, particularly any notions that value Palestinian life or self-determination.

Then there are this week’s reports of Trump’s intention to essentially take over Columbia University, effectively destroying the institution in order to, Trump says, make Jewish students “feel safe.” What Jew with any respect for their ancestors could support a governmental seizure of higher learning? My grandfather, the first person in our family to go to college, would die a second death if he was here to see such a thing. And not only because the university that delivered him from poverty was a school he barely was able to attend because of quotas on Jewish students. That school was Columbia University—and it wasn’t Palestinians enforcing those quotas.

These threats, as Jewish Columbia professor James Schamus wrote, are actually about bringing what has always been a hub of Jewish debate to heel: “They are coming after Columbia precisely because the University is, to the (not-) ‘populist’ base in front of whom they perform their Hitler salutes and at whom they hose their antisemitic memes, an emblem precisely of Jewishness: it’s ‘globalist,” ‘cosmopolitan,’ New York-based, ‘liberal,’ etc.”

Proof of Schamus’s point is seen in the number of Jews who were central to the Columbia encampments. Proof are the Jews standing up for Mahmoud Khalil, the student leader who was abducted from the streets of New York by masked gunmen without badges calling themselves ICE. According to documents submitted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Khalil has committed no crimes. He is innocent of everything but a belief in a free Palestine. The Trump administration’s only claim is that Rubio can deport Khalil if he determines that Khalil’s “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful” will compromise US foreign-policy interests. What the hell is a deportable “expected belief?”

To have Jewish organizations celebrate such a thing shows such contempt for who we are as a people and what we have endured. Expect Canary Mission to compile a list of the youngest people at every seder for daring to ask the four questions and feed those names to Rubio who at the pharaoh’s bidding will have them abducted from ICE and the Department of Homeland Security’s new favorite hunting ground: elementary schools. No shred of decency exists, only a humiliating hypocrisy in calling oneself a Jew and supporting this administration of Christian Zionists, fascism enthusiasts, and enemies of free thought. A place at the seder table this year, however, is quite appropriate. Jewish supporters of Trump represent a darkness, a bloodshed, and an attack on the young. They have become our 11th plague.

In April 2022, I was at a packed Dodger Stadium, rubbing shoulders with the ghosts of Chavez Ravine. This wasn’t just a game. It was a celebration of the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson smashing Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947. On this night, the team’s ownership group handed out tens of thousands of baseball jerseys with Robinson’s number 42 on the back. Then, in a showstopping moment, Jackie’s incredible then-100-year-old widow, Rachel Robinson, was driven around the field waving to the fans. I’ve never heard a stadium so loud before the opening pitch. It was beautiful. Yet now when I think about it, I wince. I wince because the 2024 World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers have announced that they will be visiting the Trump White House on April 7.

Two weeks ago, an outcry arose when Trump’s secretary of defense, former Fox & Friends cohost Pete Hegseth, oversaw the removal of a webpage praising Jackie Robinson’s military service during World War II. The page redirected to one with a URL containing the initials DEI. In Trump world, being branded “DEI” means you are undeserving of acknowledgement, because, for “woke” reasons, you leapfrogged a better white man. “Woke” has become a stand-in for every slur Trump’s followers are itching to say.

The bumbling Hegseth even had his press department blame DEI on “cultural Marxism,” a phrase that stupid people use to try to sound both antisemitic and smart. I hope 89-year-old Dodgers legend Sandy Koufax isn’t aware that his team is wading into this sewer of antisemites by visiting the White House. He’d put a broch on the organization he loves.

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After an uproar that Hegseth’s band of idiots never saw coming, the Defense Department reversed course, blaming an AI program for trashing Robinson’s page. No apology was issued. Only a smirk. This kind of unrepentant reaction is why Dodgers primary owner and multi-billionaire Mark Walters needs to understand that going to the White House feeds the Dodgers into Trump’s propaganda machine. Trump is sending a message to followers and anti-racist detractors alike: “I can be racist as I want, even toward Jackie Robinson! And the Dodgers will still come crawling.” Breaking people is how this administration projects strength. Walters will smile alongside the president, looking both complicit and broken while Trump puffs out his chest, making clear that he operates not only above the law but any standard of decency. When stories are told in the future about the indignities Robinson had to suffer, people will learn about the role played by Mark Walters.

The Dodgers should also refuse this invite because Trump has put the lives of several Dodgers and their families at risk. There are 63 Major League Baseball players who were born in Venezuela. On the Dodgers, Edgardo Henriquez, Brusdar Graterol, and Miguel Rojas are all from Venezuela. Given that the United States is now sending Venezuelans without due process to an El Salvadoran labor camp, telling these players to set foot in this White House seems cruel. It’s telling them to shut up and play, or risk something worse than a team fine.

The Dodgers have a beautifully diverse tradition marked by legends like Robinson, Roy Campanella, Koufax, Fernando Valenzuela, Hideo Nomo, and now the great Shohei Ohtani. Diversity has been their strength. There is, however, a parallel Dodgers tradition that this visit to the White House snugly fits into. That tradition is marked by former owner Walter O’Malley’s choosing profits over people: first by moving the team out of Brooklyn to Los Angeles and then successfully lobbying the city to uproot the Mexican immigrant community of Chavez Ravine to build Dodger Stadium. Then there was team president Al Campanis, who in 1987 said on national television that “Blacks don’t have the necessities” to manage teams or be executives. Campanis bleated this on a show meant to celebrate Jackie Robinson. Going to this White House, in 2025, will join that shameful list.

Instead of saying no, the Dodgers have made the coward’s choices. The team is acting furtively, with no one on the team saying if there was even a discussion as to whether to decline the White House invite. No player will respond to questions about the insult to Robinson’s legacy or if they are concerned about the dangers of the ICE kidnappings. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said in 2019 that he’d never visit a Trump White House. Now Roberts says, “It’s certainly a huge honor to get the invitation to the White House. To my understanding, every World Series champion gets that honor, so it’s a great honor for all of us.” He said “honor” three times. One only does that under duress. Someone check Roberts’s eye blinks for Morse code.

This country is being run into the ground by an addled, narcissistic autocrat who takes a special pleasure in seeing former opponents break. He is smirking at you, Mark Walters, because he doesn’t have to apologize for anything. In fact, your presence is an apology to him. If the team visits the White House, you will become part of stories that we’ll tell about Trump’s desecration of Robinson’s memory. You will have done nothing on behalf of the team’s Venezuelan players. You are not living up to the best of your franchise’s history. You are living down to the worst. You aren’t Jackie Robinson. You’re Al Campanis. And you should either cancel or have everyone on the team wear #42 jerseys when meeting Trump. Make a statement—because Jackie Robinson, whom you claim to honor, never suffered in silence when there was something that needed to be said.

If you want to tell the team how you feel about this, just e-mail fanfeedback@ladodgers.com.

Countless soccer fans across the globe are planning on entering the United States in droves for the 2026 World Cup, which will be hosted by North America, with games being staged in Mexico, Canada, and primarily the United States.

But as we’ve seen recently, the treatment of people as they are entering this country has borne more resemblance to airports in Tel Aviv or Pinochet’s Chile than those in a democratic country. The price for wanting to visit the US has meant having your electronics searched, your politics interrogated, or getting strip-searched and left naked in a back room at Logan Airport.

These are things that have happened to people from Western Europe. Now, imagine what could happen to fans from the Middle East. Will an interrogation land them in a holding cell in a remote Louisiana facility, like the one Mahmoud Khalil, Alireza Daroudi, and Rumeysa Ozturk are being held in? What about the thousands of expected visitors from South America, which will likely include young men who happen to have tattoos—will they find themselves “lost” in a system that eventually sends them to an El Salvadoran slave labor camp? Consider the Canadian actor who was detained by ICE for more than two weeks after she tried to cross the border. Will incoming visitors feel, as she wrote of the experience, “like we had all been kidnapped, thrown into some sort of sick psychological experiment meant to strip us of every ounce of strength and dignity”? What about fans from countries like Iran, which just qualified for the 2026 World Cup? And what about those from the 43 countries on Trump’s draft list of travel-banned nations?

Given this, for the safety of the players, their families, and fans, games scheduled to be played in the United States must be moved to Canada and Mexico, and every qualifying country should say that they will boycott the World Cup if they aren’t.

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It’s not just global soccer fans tuned in to the US’s recent depravities who are harboring serious concerns. The US Travel Association’s Commission on Seamless and Secure Travel recently sounded the alarm, noting that the glory days for US tourism are in the rear-view mirror. The US ceded its position as top destination for global travel in 2018, halfway through Trump 1.0, sliding behind countries like France and Spain in terms of international visitors. The US’s “market share” of global travel has shriveled, falling from 12.8 percent in 2015 to 9.1 percent today. The commission projects that China will surpass the United States in the coming decade.

The report notes that “the 2026 FIFA World Cup is expected to attract more than six million visitors to the U.S. According to FIFA, eight of the top 15 countries that have traveled to attend previous World Cups are non-VWP [Visa Waiver Program] countries that will need visitor visas to attend in the U.S.” With the capacity of the US federal government debilitated by Elon Musk and his DOGE-bags, the visa application system is already careening toward disaster—right before it needs to shift into high gear to process potential World Cup tourists.

Feeling the political heat, Trump issued an executive order creating a White House Task Force on the FIFA World Cup 2026. The task force is housed in the Department of Homeland Security, with Trump serving as the chair (and Vice President JD Vance as vice chair), presumably during his time off from running the Kennedy Center and tanking the economy.

Given that ICE is being used as a masked abduction force, and given “border czar” Tom Homan’s contempt for the courts, it is unconscionable to encourage people to visit this country. Some respond to this blithely by pointing out that FIFA stages the World Cup in autocratic countries all the time. But saying, “What about Russia, what about Qatar?” elides the fact that—however brutal these countries were to their workers, and however repressive they were toward their citizens—players, coaches, and tourists were treated like VIPs, afforded the privilege of ignoring the conditions of the host country, and allowed to focus on soccer. In Russia and Qatar, World Cup tickets were tantamount to visas. That will most assuredly not be the case under Trump.

For many globe-trotting soccer fans, the chickens have now come home to roost. They said nothing when autocracy made the World Cup pleasant and quiet for tourists. Now, US autocracy, armed with hyper-nationalism, can send them, potentially, to prison without due process. First, they came for them. Now, they’re coming for you.

Don’t expect any resistance from FIFA or its president, Gianni “Johnny Boy” Infantino. While FIFA’s leaders have been sketchy long before him, Johnny Boy is the first to decide that cozying up to the United States, at the expense of the world, is the wisest course of action. Infantino revved up the sycophancy machine even before the Electoral College issued its final tally, posting on Instagram, “We will have a great FIFA World Cup and a great FIFA Club World Cup in the 🇺🇸 United States of America!🤝” FIFA’s president shared six photographs featuring himself alongside Trump, grinning, gripping hands, and even donning a specially made “Trump 26” World Cup jersey. Infantino was rewarded with a special seat at Trump’s inauguration, his unmistakable pate bobbing only a few rows behind the oligarchs in the front row and the former US presidents who were in attendance. Of course, Infantino posted about it on Instagram.

Starting now, we need to push international sports federations to put in writing how their politics and policies will change to ensure the safety of not only tourists, but the players, coaches, and their families. They need to provide answers in writing or say directly that it’s not safe for foreign nationals to attend. Self-interest alone should keep countries away from the United States like the plague. (Although, thanks to Robert F Kennedy Jr., by 2026, plague might be on the table as well.) 

These federations should listen to the statement just made by the seven teams that make up the British Columbia–based Eves of Destruction roller derby federation. The 130-person league made the decision that it could no longer tell its players to cross the border to compete in the United States. This “preemptive safety call” was not made in protest of Trump or in solidarity with those affected by the atrocities of the US government. It was made because the Eves of Destruction believed they could not guarantee the safety of their players—particularly their trans players—and coaches crossing the border into the United States. Unfortunately, they are correct. And increasingly, they are not alone.

It’s no wonder that Canada, alongside numerous European countries, have issued travel advisories for the United States. This includes longtime allies like Denmark, Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom. Leaders from these countries realize that they can no longer guarantee the safety of their citizens, should they attempt to enter the United States. Why would they subject their citizens to the “sick psychological experiment” unfolding under Trump? The very real fear is that their compatriots’ identification cards could be seized, and they could end up, without a trial, in some grim ICE gulag in perpetuity. This is now the reality of the United States.

People in this country do seem to be waking up to what we have become—now international sports federations need to do the same. If we continue acting like a pariah nation and a rogue state, then the rest of the world should act accordingly by boycotting World Cup matches taking place in the US. Attend matches in Mexico and Canada instead, and send the message that you refuse to support neofascist sportswashing.

Earlier this week, University of Alabama PhD student and Iranian citizen Alireza Doroudi was abducted from his home at 5 am and disappeared by the US Government. As of March 28, Doroudi was moved by ICE to a jail in Jena, Louisiana. Initially, it was unclear where he had been taken; three days later, he has still not been charged with a crime. 

Doroudi’s attorney, David Rozas, told the AP: “In the words of his fiancé, he is a nerd. All he does is study and is literally trying to fulfill his dream, the American dream, of becoming a researcher and professor of mechanical engineering.” Rozas also said that Doroudi had “not been arrested for any crime, nor has he participated in any anti-government protests.”

So far, there is no evidence that Doroudi wrote or said anything about Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza—the Trump administration’s unconstitutional, altogether illegal pretense for going after international student visas over the past month. Doroudi’s arrest is yet more evidence that their entire “antisemitic administration against antisemitism” battle plan is something they can take or leave as a pretense for kidnapping international students and shredding due process. So far, all the Department of Homeland Security has said about the arrest is that he “posed significant national security concerns,” without giving details.

Was it a random abduction because Doroudi is an Iranian citizen and any pretense to provoke Iran into war is part of this administration’s agenda? Is Netanyahu, in his clamoring for attacks on Iran, unilaterally rewriting, or at minimum inspiring, how we now do policing in this country? Were the years of “pacification” training US police chiefs and officers received in Israel just seeding the ground for this moment? Did DHS assume that if it singled out someone at the University of Alabama, neither the community nor the school’s administration would be up in arms? Is there an irony in a school so dependent on Black football players for its notoriety and largesse not intervening in what might be a purely racist targeting? I’m just asking questions.

It’s hard not to focus on the “American dream” part of Doroudi’s lawyer’s plea. Instead of streets paved with gold, he ends up in indefinite detention. This is exactly what would have happened to Marco Rubio’s grandfather when he fled Fulgencio Batista’s right-wing, authoritarian dictatorship in Cuba in the 1950s. I guess when his gramps told horror stories of Batista’s secret prisons where people were tortured, baby Marco was taking notes. Grandpa Rubio remained in the United States illegally before going back to Cuba to help Castro, then returned to the US on a “vacation” only to be detained as an undocumented immigrant. He was set to be deported, but instead he stayed for years, ultimately applying for a “retroactive refugee” status. While this much-parroted story has never quite sounded true, we do know that Marco’s grandpa did not end up in an El Salvadoran labor camp.

As for Marco, he was 4 years old before his own parents became naturalized citizens. If Musk/Trump gets away with ending birthright citizenship and then Little Marco accidentally sideswipes a Tesla, he might find himself up close and personal with one of the aforementioned El Salvadoran concentration camps. Here’s hoping he doesn’t have any tattoos in support of autism awareness or he could be in extra trouble.

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Little Marco’s sole talent is a willingness to be bluntly cruel to the weak while bowing and scraping for the strong. Little Marco, for all his grasping ambition, is a very dull blade and that serves him well. Shamelessness is Washington, DC’s new superpower.

As for Alireza Doroudi, Tommy Tuberville—failed Auburn football coach and semi-sentient senator from Alabama—is the only member of Alabama’s statehouse to comment on Doroudi’s abduction, with something so casually idiotic that I won’t quote it directly. Tuberville says he proudly knows nothing about the case but is convinced that Doroudi must be guilty of something.

As we’ve long known, Tuberville was a better football coach than he is a human being, and that ain’t great. The Florida-based Alabama senator can get away with the blithe dehumanizing of Doroudi Doroudi because, unlike the other disappeared, Doroudi has next to no grassroots base of people agitating for his release. He wasn’t part of any movements. No state politicians are saying his name. The students at the University of Alabama are not in the streets by the thousands, as we have seen in the cases of Columbia University’s Mahmoud Khalil or Tufts University Fulbright Scholar Rumeysa Ozaturk. According to one report, many are shocked and angry that these abductions taking place at elite northern colleges have come to roost in their backyard. As Bryanna Taylor, a UA student, said, “It could be anyone in our classes who we may not see anymore because they’re going to get taken away.”

To prevent that—to stop Rubio from making good on his threat to do this to the “hundreds” of student visas he claims to have revoked—we need to say the names of the disappeared, and say them loudly. This is especially the case with Doroudi, who clearly needs every bit of amplification and attention he can get. Or we can look away—and become further numbed by what is getting normalized in our names.

The relief felt throughout the worlds of documentary filmmaking, Palestinian society, and Palestinian solidarity was palpable on March 25 after news spread that Oscar-winning documentarian Hamdan Ballal had been freed from Israeli detention. The lauded cocreator of No Other Land, which won the Academy Award for best documentary earlier this month, had been beaten bloody by masked Jewish settlers, who attacked him near his house in the Occupied West Bank, with rocks and sticks. Then Ballal was arrested and thrown in jail, presumably on charges of assaulting an innocent rock. As one of his codirectors, Basel Adra, said to the Associated Press: “We came back from the Oscars and every day, there is an attack on us. This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like punishment.”

For hours, no one seemed to know where Hamdan had been taken. (The answer, it was later revealed, was a police station in the Jewish-only settlement of Kiryat Arba.) But after an outcry that included a strong and angry statement in Variety from the International Documentary Association, he has been freed. Yet, even unchained (literally, he was chained), he still needs medical attention, and this remains an ugly attack on free speech, freedom of expression, and art as a mode of truth-telling, in addition to an open attack on Palestinian existence

Israel’s goal in such an assault brings to mind a quote by Howard Zinn, who said, “Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four), I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.”

Ballal helped make a work of art that has smashed through more than the dullness. It shatters the sociopathy and contempt for Palestinian life that runs through “ordinary political discourse” about Israel and Palestine. That is why Israel is not relying on “discourse” to silence Ballal. There is no “counter-film” in the works. Instead, in order to keep Zinn’s “artists on our side” from speaking truth and creating art, Israel’s solution is to just kill the artists.

Ballal’s story could have ended very differently, but it didn’t, thanks in part to the international outcry. Yet even as people rallied to his cause, another atrocity, this time a targeted assassination, was perpetrated on another Palestinian truth-teller. The lauded 23-year-old Drop Site and Al Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat was killed by an IDF missile, his car targeted solely and without warning, according to witnesses. To know of Shabat, who has been reporting in Northern Gaza for 18 months, is to know of a journalist both courageous and tireless. He was displaced 20 times while continuing to file stories and suffered medically from severe food deprivation as Israel blocked aid from entering the Strip. Israel’s open policy of targeting reporters in Gaza makes Shabat’s, and all of the journalists still on the ground, both heroic and increasingly scarce. On the day he was assassinated, Palestine Today correspondent Mohammed Mansour was also killed by the IDF in Khan Younis. This brings the number of slain Palestinian media members, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, to over 170 in the past 18 months.

Shabat’s loss will be felt intimately by his family, friends, and colleagues. It will also be felt by those of us who have depended upon his work in trying to amplify what is happening to the people of Gaza. Shabat’s Drop Site editor Sharif Abdel Kouddous wrote the following about an exchange they had at the end of last year:

In December, after the Israeli military killed five journalists in an airstrike on their vehicle, I messaged to check in on him.

“Our job is only to die,” he responded. “I hate the whole world. No one is doing anything. I swear I’ve come to hate this job.” About his surviving colleagues he wrote, “We’ve started saying to each other: ‘Ok, whose turn is it?… Our families consider us already martyred.’”

When Israel resumed its scorched earth bombing last week, I messaged again to check in on him. He responded with one word: “Death.”

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In an article by Shabat that Abdel Kouddous highlighted in his heartbreaking tribute, he explained what life was like in January, during the three days between the announced ceasefire and the day it was enacted:

[The IDF] targeted the al-Falah school; they bombed an entire residential block in Jabaliya; they killed families, like the Alloush family, whose bodies have not yet been recovered and still lie under and over the rubble. The children I saw that night appeared happy but they were no longer living, their faces frozen in a mix of smiles and blood.

Please, whether relieved, infuriated, or a mix of both in regards to Hamden Ballal, say Hossam Shabat and Mahmoud Mansour’s name in the same sentence: three truth-tellers in a part of the world where the price for speaking a truth that gets past the checkpoints is violence, prison, or a death sentence. Three truth-tellers not wanting but willing to die for a free Palestine.

Back when I was a young reporter, I needed to interview former heavyweight champion, boxing legend, and grill impresario George Foreman. It would have been the third sports interview of my life. The first was with 1968 Mexico City Olympic medalist and medal-stand protester John Carlos. The second was with another 1968 Olympic rebel, record-setting sprinter Lee Evans. I had asked them both about their 19-year-old Olympic teammate George Foreman who, after winning the heavyweight gold medal, waved a small American flag and bowed to all four sides of the ring. This happened just days after Carlos and fellow medal stand protester Tommie Smith had been expelled from the Olympic Village and told to go home. The media read Foreman’s move as a rebuke of their actions. To my surprise, both Carlos and Evans defended Foreman. They said they loved “Big George” and never saw his flag-waving as a reprimand. This was unexpected, given that every history of the storied 1968 games that I had read described it as exactly that. 

I realized I needed to ask Foreman himself, but the problem was that I had no idea how to find him. This was still the early days of the Internet, before you could shoot someone a DM or track down a publicist by simply tapping out a few words on Google. Instead, I had to start by going to a search engine called Ask Jeeves, which required searches to be framed in the form of a question. I proceeded to ask Jeeves, “How do you contact George Foreman?” Jeeves’s only response was a link to the George Foreman Grill website. Thanks for nothing, Jeeves.

It was the end of the day, and I thought I’d take a shot in the dark. I went to the site and clicked on the “contact us” link, meant for people trying to reach a customer-service representative. In the small window that popped up, I submitted a message noting that my Grill was fine, but I was a reporter hoping to interview Foreman about the 1968 Olympics. At best, I thought, my e-mail might get referred to a publicist of some kind who, if I was lucky, would send a response in a few days. That’s not what happened.

Ten minutes later, just as I was about to leave the office, I received an e-mail that read simply, “Hey, this is George. Here’s my phone number. Give me a ring.” After regaining my breath, I called, my hands clammy, and, sure enough, Foreman picked up. What followed was an unforgettable two-hour conversation. Utterly unprepared, I came up with questions on the fly. Even worse, the telephone recording equipment had been checked out of the office, so I was forced to use my horrible computer shorthand. Eventually, I was the one to end the interview because my hands were cramping.

I wanted to hear about 1968, but also about his life leading up to Mexico City. I asked him when he was first aware of the Black freedom struggle. He started by talking about the extreme poverty of his youth, when even a school lunch was out of his reach. “Growing up poor, I didn’t even have a lunch to take to school,” he recalled. “Lunch was 26 cents, and we didn’t even know what 26 cents looked like.” Life was survival. That changed when he was hired at a public works jobs program as a 16-year-old, and a “young Anglo-Saxon boy from Tacoma, Washington,” introduced him to Bob Dylan. I asked him what Dylan song opened his mind about the state of the world. I thought he’d say “The Times They Are A-Changin’” or “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Instead, he invoked “Rainy Day Women Number #12 and 35”—the first track on the 1966 album Blonde On Blonde. “Do you know that one?” Foreman asked. Before I could answer, he started to sing. In a voice richer and deeper than I had expected, he crooned, “Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ ’long the street. They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to keep your seat. They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ on the floor. They’ll stone ya when you’re walkin’ to the door. But I would not feel so all alone. Everybody must get stoned.” When he’d finished, he asked me if I understood what Dylan was trying to say. Taken off guard, I said, “I think he’s singing about weed?”

“Bite your tongue, young man,” Foreman shot back. “That song is about the way people are always trying to put you down—and if anybody tries to say or do anything, we’ll get stoned. It’s about Jesus and being strong in difficult times.” I mumbled back, “I still think it’s probably also about weed,” and he said, “Shame on you, young man.”

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Given that we had only been speaking about 10 minutes, and I was not sure if the born-again preacher was actually annoyed, I pivoted quickly and asked him what his thoughts were as a young boxer when, in 1964, newly minted heavyweight champion Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali. He said it terrified him that people were calling Ali a “Black Muslim.” I asked him if the scary part was Ali’s rejection of Christianity and conversion to Islam, a shock to the world and something no star athlete had yet to do publicly. George said, “Heck no! What scared us was that people were calling him Black! The word frightened everybody. No one had heard the word Black in Texas to describe a so-called ‘Negro’ at that time. Everyone was saying he was crazy.” 

We kept talking. There was one yarn he told about sparring with Jimi Hendrix, which is still unimaginable to me. I see Jimi, outweighed by George by probably close to 100 pounds, in a feather boa, throwing jabs. Then again, given Jimi’s army experience and famously large hands, maybe they were able to have a good tussle.

I was so dizzy from this conversation, I almost forgot to ask him about 1968 and why he waved that flag. When I did, he started his answer by describing how track stars like Carlos and Smith were seen like rock stars every time they entered the Olympic Village and how he, as a teenage Olympian, four and five years younger than they were, looked up to them in awe. He said that when they were kicked out of the Olympic facilities and forced to go home, he had a strong urge to leave with them. Instead, he stayed, won gold, and waved that flag.

True to what Carlos and Evans had told me, Foreman said it had nothing to do with them. After an upbringing of hunger and poverty, he was just feeling overcome with gratitude toward the United States. This was a very different perspective on the Olympics from that of Carlos, who, after returning home to Harlem, explained why he protested, saying, “I can’t feed my children with medals.” Still, 35 years later, Carlos and Evans refused to sit in judgment of what was, at worst, a naïve display of patriotism. They were confident that they knew what was in his heart. They never thought for a moment that their mammoth “little big brother” would be taking him to task.

There was more to the interview, but I’ll leave it there. A section of it was published in Counterpunch and a section in The Source. But the published copy will always be secondary in my mind to the fact that George Foreman, for some reason, was at Grill headquarters willing to give two hours to somebody he didn’t know. I think about him whenever there’s a chance to pay it forward.

In the days after Foreman’s death, I spoke to Dr. John Carlos. He shared memories of his old friend and talked about wanting to attend the funeral services. Carlos wants to offer one last show of what was a deeply mutual respect, whether the history books recorded it that way or not.