Idon’t drink anymore, but a vestigial hangover clouds my recollection of the major events of recent history. On the morning of the Unite the Right rally, I lumbered down the staircase of a Catskills Airbnb rented for a bachelor party to learn that only hours before, a gang of white nationalists stormed the University of Virginia campus wielding Tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” My stomach wasn’t as queasy that morning as it had been on Election Day, nor did my head throb as sharply as it did after the inauguration, when I braved the crowded Washington Metro en route to the Women’s March. Like the protagonists of 1984 and The Berlin Stories, which I reread that winter with an earnestness I now find slightly embarrassing, mine was a gin-soaked existence, senses dulled against the baffling chaos closing in.

By the time I got back to Brooklyn, where I’d been crashing with the soon-to-be newlyweds, the haze curdled into indignation and shame. I had wasted a weekend killing brain cells and hiking in sandals toward nonexistent watering holes while an innocent woman was dead 300 miles away. There was no doubt in my mind that I was living in a totalitarian hellscape. When the president said that there were “some very fine people on both sides” that Tuesday, I knew that he wasn’t talking about me.

For two years, I had been living in Atlanta, where I was due back later that week to prepare for another semester of teaching freshman English to computer science majors training to engineer universal obsolescence. I’d moved to the South from California during the twilight of the Obama administration, when the idea of a Trump presidency still retained the whimsy of a Simpsons joke. As a hesitant Yankee, I’d tried to blend in with my surroundings without sacrificing an often volatile opposition to the region’s dominant norms. It was far from impossible to find like-minded individuals with whom to commiserate, but the peaceful assemblies in which I gathered lacked a discernible outcome and did nothing to assuage the precarity I felt as a carpetbagging knowledge worker on a fixed-term contract.

I retreated to points north and west at every conceivable opportunity, and when it came time to leave New York, the compounding dread sucked me into an Internet wormhole that culminated in an e-mail offering my services to the local branch of antifa, whose address I probably found on Reddit. (While the group may not be the vast conspiracy that the right assumes it to be, there very much is a real, decentralized network of activists working to combat fascism.) What volunteering for the organization might entail, however, I had no clue, aside from a vague notion of the tasks with which a literary man such as myself could be assigned: writing pamphlets, making speeches, chauffeuring freedom fighters to and from demonstrations. At 32, doomscrolling on an under-inflated air mattress in an overstimulated fugue, I was ready to put my body on the line.

The light of day softened my resolve, even as an unsigned message arrived in my inbox:

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for contacting us.

It would be best for us to meet up sometime so we can talk about how people can get involved, whatvwe [sic] do, our expectations for involvement, etc.

Let us know about any time you have available and we can meet and chat.

Keep the faith ///

I immediately promised to sort out the details as soon as possible, though I didn’t know that I actually would. A more anodyne fate awaited me as I touched down at Hartsfield-Jackson: playing piano in an indie rock band.

I’d met Virgil at a mutual friend’s house on a sweltering Georgia night earlier that summer, Michael Mann’s Heat projected onto the living-room wall. He was the type of guy with which I had become familiar over the previous decade and a half of recording and performing music: unwashed and longhaired, animated and scrawny. We weren’t fast friends, exactly, but he sought me out after listening to the albums I’d self-released, and soon after Charlottesville, we began to spend a lot of time together, our mutual disaffection a binding force.

Virgil is not his real name, though he’s gone by so many that I wouldn’t be surprised if it had a spot in the rotation. He worked as the night manager at a shabby hotel a short walk from my apartment and shared a house with other underemployed hipsters a decade his junior. He liked to hang out at Trader Joe’s, sipping free coffee samples and chatting up strangers. He idolized Harry Nilsson, and the record he’d recently put out wasn’t half bad, as imitations go. I was manic with angst and disappointment that grading papers, revising abstracts, protesting, and tweeting failed to dispel. Since childhood, music had been my refuge from the familial and social dramas that had unwittingly prepared me for an era of political instability. Remembering the boy who had spent so much time in the principal’s office, I lost faith in the virtue of my instinct to fight. So I settled for symbolic rebellion in a smaller arena where I could express my discontent and assert to myself, if no one else, an illusion of control. “Don’t shoot the piano player,” the old joke goes. “He is doing his best.”

We booked a gig opening for a touring act whose debut had scored an 8.3 on Pitchfork, back when those ratings had some cachet. The night before the show, Virgil showed up at my place with a friend from Florida who had produced his album. Roland, he told me, was sober, but it only took a dozen or two beers between us for him to call up his old dealers, and it wasn’t until 7 am that we stopped jamming in Virgil’s hallway. In the light of day, I understood why recovery was a smart decision for Roland; I was less than relieved to receive a call from my wife on my way home. “If you ever do that again, I’m divorcing you,” she said with chilling stoicism as I walked in the door.

Soon, I was practicing several nights a week with the rest of the band: the lead guitarist, a divorced dad gone gray; the bassist in 11th grade; and the drummer, a resident of an intergenerational punk house near the federal penitentiary that booked DIY shows in the basement. Other nights, Virgil would appear unannounced to raid my fridge and persuade me to spot him the cover at the Star Bar or one of the galleries downtown, where I overheard unsettling rumors from those who’d known him longer than I. Mounting suspicions notwithstanding, Virgil’s unflappability was intoxicating: Here was a truly apolitical man, seemingly unhindered by conviction, fear, or awareness of current events—a twee Cosmo Kramer with overgrown fingernails and an Instagram addiction. In his own private Southern bohemia, there had never been a Confederacy and the 1990s dream of the 1970s lived on, so it was easy to forget about the indignities of our demoralizing reality in his presence. My wife, who was writing international news for cable TV at the time, resented how compliantly I’d been seduced.

In music as in the studiousness of his disheveled appearance, Virgil demanded precision, and I was grateful to show off the chops I’d honed sitting nightly with a six-pack atop the upright I inherited from an acquaintance. Long hours at the keyboard had resulted in new compositions, but Virgil wasn’t much interested in my songs. One I called “Atlanta” aptly captures my sentiment at the time:

Forgot about the anniversary
Of the offbrand fascist state
I felt like shit so I ate some Fentanyl
America’s never looked so great
You see, down here we do things different
We talk to Jesus all the time
Our dicks get hard for mama’s barbecue,
Going to church, and getting high

I was playing Randy Newman to Virgil’s Nilsson, the topicality of my own irony pointing in directions he wasn’t willing to commit to. And frankly, nor was I, beyond my clownish smirk and the anti-authoritarian rants I hosed at students who mostly yawned in response. The shallow incredulity of liberal colleagues more concerned with getting tenure wore on my patience, and the news cycle stalked my wife home from work. Doubting the wisdom of enlisting in a movement that even Democrats were beginning to associate with terrorism, though I knew that wasn’t true, I never followed up with antifa.

My classes that fall considered the history of punk rock as a site of radical politics and artistic experimentation, but I didn’t believe what I was saying half of the time; in retrospect, this must have been clear to the hiring committees who skimmed the hundreds of applications I shipped off for teaching jobs across the country. Moonlighting in the indie rock scene restored an enthusiasm that I’d missed for too long. Atlanta’s scrappy underground, small as it was vibrant, gave me a sense of purpose and belonging, however puerile, that the university could not, and whenever I chipped away at the proposal for a monograph that I never wrote, there was always something I’d rather be doing.

The ideas of the moment that had me preoccupied—from Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalisation and Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies—contextualized my malaise in the post-Watergate retreat from politics of the artistic milieu that abandoned the collectivist action of the New Left in favor of a nihilistic turn inward, which I recognized in my extracurricular activities as pointedly as in the texts assigned on my syllabus. Like the early punks who sneered at the sentimental hypocrisy of hippies’ utopian ideals, I too had cast aside society in favor of the self, channeling my frustration into deceptively upbeat verses and hooks. Guilty though I must have been of identifying with my subject, there was comfort in seeing myself among a lineage of daydreamers sublimating the horrors of reality into an alternative plane. Playing music allowed me to conjure a material record of experience that was more euphonious and infinitely less dismal than the conditions under which it was produced. The consciousness I courted was false without question; I was living in a fantasy, laboring through a process of wish-fulfillment that is, Freud argued, the vocational province of creative writers and children alike. It made little difference to me that no one was paying much attention to what I was up to: The vibrations that plugged my fingertips into my cochleae closed the circuit on a one-man feedback loop, overpowering the dissonance more effectively than substance abuse or moving to Canada ever could.

In February, about six months into my stint with the band, my wife and I drove to New Orleans, where a drag queen collective was to lip-sync the George Michael remixes I’d made for the annual ball of a vaporwave-themed Mardi Gras krewe. At the 11th hour, Virgil insisted on tagging along, and my wife reluctantly agreed on the condition that he secure his own place to stay, and not rely on us to serve as his tour guides: We had our own people to see, and she had been assigned to cover the event for a website. Virgil slept in the front seat for the duration of the seven-hour drive shortly after volunteering, insincerely, to take the wheel. We parted ways outside of his friend’s house uptown, but the next day, as I shuffled electronic equipment around the venue, my phone began to blow up with texts and calls from Virgil requesting my whereabouts. I ignored him as long as I could bear, and he showed up obscenely early, hungry for kicks he expected me to facilitate.

The night elapsed in a psychedelic blur: Win Butler DJ’d between sets, and the staging of my remixes moved me to the verge of tears. At the afterparty, my host showcased rap skills that came as news to me, and not long before dawn, we all stumbled back to Alvar Street, Virgil trailing behind. We’d been had, and now we were stuck. As our movable feast assembled at the parade grounds the following evening, there was Virgil: bumming cigarettes, beers, sandwiches, and cash from whomever he could manage to entrap in conversation. In his burlesque of the spirit of New Orleans, I saw myself as the rube. I’d had enough, and told him so; soon my wife and I were shouting at him with enough volume that the bartender threw him out. Livid as ever the next morning, I looked up the cost of a Megabus back to Atlanta and Venmo’d him the fare, skeptical that he had enough in his bank account to make it on his own.

I haven’t spoken to Virgil since, but from what I can gather online, nothing much has changed. As I have attempted, in the intervening years, to disentangle the act of creation from the romantic myths of my youth, I have managed to understand that Virgil’s Dionysian influence on me wasn’t all bad. His ostrich stance and Peter Pan lifestyle amounted to the very passivity that had drawn me to him, an unlikely antidote to the anomie I blamed on my armchair Marxism. At his best, he approached a negative capability, embracing the forces of creativity against the voices of reason amplifying futility—a perspective that provided the perfect foil for my brooding over the artist’s role in society. I have not forgotten the catharsis his lumpen hedonism unleashed from my information-induced paralysis, initiating a dialectical process of synthesizing art and politics that has brought me, if no closer to enlightenment, some clarity, and intermittent peace.

Meanwhile, the ensuing onslaught of international crises, domestic terror, and the countless microaggressions of everyday life under fascism has not subsided in undermining my efforts to lead a meaningful life, but the capacity for introspection, creation, and common ground that music has not ceased replenish as my habits gradually approximate the expectations of a teacher, husband, and father eases the anxiety of catastrophic times.

Art demands suffering to the same extent that being does, and I am not naïve enough to believe that music will see us through, no matter how many tragedies Bruce Springsteen deems worthy of a song. But the persistence of humans in humming a tune or plucking a string as an affirmation of community or personhood is a form of resistance that transcends the vicissitudes of tyranny and destruction. For as long as we are alive, there will be harmony and discord; the prominence of one does not altogether silence the other. Perhaps Virgil already knew something that I’m still figuring out: that to maintain the vision, energy, and motivation required to make art, one must find ways of drowning out the noise. The machines at my disposal may not kill any more fascists than Woody Guthrie’s did, but nothing sounds so sane or so true to my ear when, as happens all too often, the world is going to shit.

New York, NY—The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture, today announced our podcast, Fighting Fascism, with longtime political organizers Aaron Regunberg and Jonathan Smucker, and cohost Matt DaSilva, as your guides to fighting back against the latest executive overreach and outrages roiling the country.

The new weekly program will discuss the history of fascist takeovers, the conditions enabling them, and the resistance movements that have defeated them, to draw lessons for today’s fights against Trump, MAGA, and the growing threat of modern authoritarianism. Each week, Regunberg and DaSilva, with frequent appearances by Smucker, will sit down with historians, strategists, and activists from inside and outside of The Nation’s orbit to draw real lessons for the fights happening right now.

“Fighting Fascism treats antifascism not as just a moral posture, but as a strategy rooted in building majorities,” said Nation president Bhaskar Sunkara. “It will be an important part of The Nation’s expanding audio lineup.”

“We’re in a moment that demands not just outrage, but strategy,” added cohost Aaron Regunberg. “We’ve all asked ourselves that question, ‘What would you have done in 1930s Germany?’ Well, here we are. This show is an opportunity to think through what we can do about it.”

“I’ve been struggling to figure out how to combat the daily barrage of badness coming out of the administration,” said cohost Matt DaSilva. “Doomscrolling and signing online petitions isn’t cutting it. So I’m looking forward to learning some actionable steps we can all take to fight back against the current regime.”

In Episode 1, authors Astra Taylor and Mark Bray have a big-picture conversation about what antifascist organizing actually looks like in this moment—and why building a majoritarian coalition isn’t as hard as it sounds: “Let’s Fight Some Fascists.”

In Episode 2, Morris Katz, lead strategist for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, explains why the Democratic Party keeps fumbling and how to make it stop: “What if Democrats Didn’t Suck?”

In Episode 3, Nation columnist David Klion talks about the role that Israel has played in the rise of American fascism and what it all means for American Jews: “America, Israel, and the Jews.”

Forthcoming episodes will feature historian Eric Rauchway on America’s original antifascist, FDR; tenants union organizer Tara Ranghuveer; journalist Charlotte Alter on AI and Big Tech; and much, much more.

Future episodes will go live every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and check out our other regular programming and limited-run series at thenation.com/podcasts.

On Tuesday, Senate majority leader John Thune told the Washington Examiner that the Senate is “prepared” to confirm a replacement for Justice Samuel Alito before the midterm elections should Alito retire at the end of the Supreme Court’s term this June. If anybody thought the Senate Republicans were going to follow Mitch McConnell’s rule of not confirming a Supreme Court justice in an election year—a rule that McConnell used to block Merrick Garland from succeeding Antonin Scalia but ignored so that Amy Coney Barrett could succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg—then you haven’t been paying attention to the level of hypocrisy Republicans are comfortable living with.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump offered his own thoughts on a potential SCOTUS opening when he told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News Business that he was “prepared” to name a new justice should the opportunity arise.

Given that everybody with half a brain cell knows that Trump and the Republicans would rush through a Supreme Court pick before the midterms if given the chance, it’s a little weird that Trump and Thune said anything at all. I suppose we can chalk Trump’s statements up to his chronic inability to keep his mouth shut for more than two seconds at a stretch, but Thune is usually a little more reticent.

One possibility is that all Thune is doing with his statement is alerting the always-behind Democrats that a confirmation battle is brewing (not that Thune should be particularly worried that the Democrats can or will do anything to stop him). But I think another potential reason might be to send a direct signal to Alito himself. Thune may be signaling that he’s not sure Republicans will be in charge in the Senate should Alito delay retirement past the midterms. Thune certainly has access to polling data Alito does not, and this might be his way of telling Alito, and Alito’s wife, “Buddy, leave while you still can.”

Helping Thune telegraph this case was Senator Chuck Grassley—but from where I sit, he really screwed up the messaging. Like Thune, Grassley said that the Senate was “fully prepared” to push through a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court, but Grassley also named names. He said he was in favor of one of his colleagues, Senator Ted Cruz or Mike Lee, getting the job.

Folks, I’ve been trying to prepare people for an imminent Alito retirement for two months now. Whenever I talk about it, liberals respond with either “Hmm, that seems bad… anyway,” or “Well, the next guy can’t be worse than Alito, right?” I can tell people about all the horrors of Andy Oldham or Jennifer Mascot or some other Federalist Society judge most people have never heard of, and I can watch the interest slowly drain from their eyes. But when Grassley floated the idea of Ted Cruz being given lifetime power, my social-media feeds blew up like the Supreme Court was on fire: “Lord help us!” “That would be the END of the Supreme Court!” “How can this be stopped?!?” Putting a face as punchable as Cruz on this thing really seemed to clue liberals into what could be about to happen.

Personally, I don’t think Cruz is likely to get the job. But I do think that he would be the easiest person for Trump to confirm. Cruz might get 99 votes in the Senate… because his colleagues hate him and would relish seeing him literally anywhere else.

If Alito retires, the Republicans will try to push through a nominee, and the only thing that could potentially stop them is a human wall of people preventing them from doing their work, and even that might not be enough. It’s going to be a long summer.

The Bad and the Ugly

For weeks, much of the world, from the Arab Gulf states to Europe, has accused Iran of violating international law by regulating the passage of and charging fees to ships transiting through the Strait of Hormuz. At the UN Security Council alone, multiple resolutions have been introduced to condemn Iran’s regulatory actions in the Strait. One of those resolutions passed with support from nearly 140 member states. Hours before the United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire on April 7, 11 members of the Security Council voted in favor of another resolution, which was ultimately vetoed, that would have condemned Iran for its regulatory actions and authorized every UN member state to go to war against it in order to open the Strait.

By contrast, not a single resolution has been brought before the Council condemning the US/Israel war against Iran. The disparity between these two responses bears little relationship to the fact that only one side in this conflict has unequivocally broken international law—and it isn’t Iran.

The US/Israeli war is indisputably unlawful. It constitutes one of the gravest crimes under international law—the crime of aggression. The legality of Iran’s regulation of the Strait is, however, less clear-cut. Though Iran has not formally blockaded the Strait, it required ships to coordinate with it and abide by its regulatory regime in order to pass through during the war and ceasefire. It outright forbade US and Israeli-linked ships from transiting. As of today, it appears Iran is allowing all commercial ships, with the possible exception of those linked to the US and Israel, to pass through the Strait for the duration of the 10-day Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, though ships must still use a “coordinated route” that passes close to Iran’s coast. Iran has also reportedly charged a fee to some passing ships. Unlike the United States, however, Iran can make a reasonable case that it is within its rights to do all these things under international law.

Instead of reflecting these realities, however, the international community has effectively treated Iran—rather than the two states that started a clearly illegal war against it—as the pariah nation in this conflict. This practice aligns with long-standing Western and allied tendencies to leverage international law to legitimize and whitewash imperial actions while simultaneously constraining Global South states that resist Western domination, including through legal means. While these resistant states are depicted as serial rule-breakers, nations in the imperial core are framed as reliable, committed to the rule of law, and fundamentally dedicated to a peaceful and secure world. In this case, as is so often the case, the opposite is true.

What the Law Says

States are legally prohibited from going to war unless they have a right to self-defense—which is limited in scope—or are authorized to do so by the Security Council. This means they cannot use war or the threat of war to, for instance, force another country to make concessions over its nuclear program, ballistic missile program, or support for non-state actors. This is, however, precisely what the United States and Israel hoped to do in launching their war on Iran on February 28.

Despite this blatant illegality, the Trump administration has made half-hearted attempts to justify its joint attack against Iran as defensive. Hardly anyone—including America’s Western allies—has bought into these legal justifications, even though many still support the US/Israeli war politically and militarily. In fact, with the exception of a few countries, like Spain, most Western governments have not clearly and unequivocally condemned US and Israeli actions against Iran. A few days after the war began, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggested that Iran was not even entitled to the protections of international law.

The United States’ latest move against Iran—to institute a naval blockade against its ports and coastal areas—is also clearly unlawful but has similarly generated little legal pushback. Blockades are prototypical examples of illegal uses of force and acts of aggression, where not justified by the right of self-defense or a Security Council resolution. In the case of Iran, the US blockade is both unlawful—as it is not otherwise legally justified, and continues the aggression that began on February 28—and effectively ends the ceasefire between the United States and Iran.

The US blockade also violates the laws of naval warfare, which prohibit blockades if “damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from” the action. The purpose of the US blockade is not to pursue any military advantage against Iran but rather to achieve the political objective of increasing US leverage in ongoing negotiations with the Iranian government. For this reason alone, the blockade is unlawful. But even if that objective were somehow a valid, military one, the blockade would still be illegal because it is designed to do significant damage to the civilian population by collapsing the Iranian economy. This would obviously have devastating short-term and long-term impacts on the Iranian people that substantially outweigh the goal of enhancing the US bargaining position.

By contrast, the legality of Iran’s regulation of the Strait of Hormuz is far less black-and-white. Contrary to what some have claimed, the Strait does not constitute “international waters” or the high seas. It is classified, instead, as an “international strait” exclusively composed of the territorial waters of two countries: Oman and Iran.

Donald Trump’s harshest critics accuse him of being an aspiring king, but recent religious controversies make clear that the president could have even higher ambitions: to be a spiritual monarch and perhaps even the King of Kings.

In early March, Trump asserted that he should have a say in picking the replacement of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had been assassinated by the US as part of the regime-change war Trump launched. Trump’s desire to name a new ayatollah might seem absurd, but it is part of a larger pattern of using US military might to subdue rival regimes and religions into submission.

In January, the Pentagon requested a meeting with Cardinal Christophe Pierre—the Vatican’s then-ambassador to the US—for a meeting. The Free Press reported that Pierre had to endure “a bitter lecture warning that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants—and that the [Catholic] Church had better take its side.” According to The Free Press, one Pentagon official even reportedly brought up the historical example of the Avignon Papacy, a 14th-century crisis where for nearly seven decades successive popes were forced to live in France under the thumb of the French crown.

Other reporting on the meeting cast some doubt on whether the Avignon Papacy was mentioned, although not definitively. Whatever the case, the January meeting was clearly an attempt to intimidate the Catholic Church, and specifically Pope Leo XIV. It fits into a long pattern of Trump and his allies trying to cow the Vatican. Leo’s predecessor, Pope Francis, was intensely hated by the MAGA right, who often derided him as a “woke pope” for his criticism of environmental degradation and economic inequality. In 2019, Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, allied with the late Jeffrey Epstein, a power broker and notorious convicted pedophile, in efforts to undermine Pope Francis and bolster traditionalist opposition factions inside the church.

Leo has disappointed right-wingers who hoped for a return to the hard-line conservatism of Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI. Born in the United States, Leo lived for many years in Peru, where he served as bishop from 2015 to 2023. This has given him an empathy with the Global South tha1t runs through his frequent criticisms of militarism. In a speech in Cameroon on Thursday, the pope condemned the “handful of tyrants” ravaging the world and rebuked those “who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic or political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” In addition, Leo has called for governments to treat migrants and refugees humanely.

While the pope has not named Trump directly in these messages, the president has clearly felt their sting. This explains Trump’s Truth Social Post last Sunday that claimed “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Trump returned to this topic on Thursday, telling reporters that the pope “says Iran can have a nuclear weapon. I say Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” Trump, as he so often does, is lying. As CNN reports, “Pope Leo hasn’t made any statement saying Iran can have a nuclear weapon. In fact, the pope has repeatedly denounced nuclear weapons and made unequivocal calls for the countries of the world to abandon them.”

Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019 at age 35, has found a niche for himself as the official White House attack dog against the Vatican (though Trump now appears to be competing for that title). For some reason, Vance has chosen to do this by presenting himself as a bigger expert on Catholicism than the pope. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic notes, Vance

could have taken his cues from John F. Kennedy or Mario Cuomo, Catholic politicians who were careful to note that their faith was personal and important to them, but that in their public life, they must govern as Americans according to the Constitution. Vance decided on a different approach: The pope, he implied, wasn’t a very good, or very smart, Catholic.

Lecturing the pope on theology might smack of hubris, but it is an outgrowth of an even more arrogant idea: that Trump himself is a holy figure. In a now-deleted Truth Social Post, Trump shared an AI image of himself in the role of Jesus healing the sick. In response to the backlash that the image was blasphemous, Trump deleted the post and offered the dubious defense that he thought the picture merely showed him as a doctor healing the sick (despite the fact that it was replete with religious iconography).

What shreds the credibility of Trump’s defense is that the idea that he is nearly Christ-like is not uncommon in MAGA circles. When Trump first emerged in politics in 2015, evangelical Christians who admired him would often compare him to King David, an admittedly flawed man given to sexual excesses who nonetheless was an instrument of God’s will. But as these Christians have gotten used to Trump, the King David analogy has given way to comparisons with Christ. In other words, Trump is no longer seen as a necessary evil but as a positive embodiment of good.

At an Easter event in the White House, Paul Caine-White, the president’s spiritual adviser, said, “And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.” On Thursday, Representative Troy Nehls said Trump was “almost the second coming.” That same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth compared “the legacy Trump-hating press” to the biblical Pharisees who “scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative.” Implicit in this analogy is that Trump is like Jesus, the good man the Pharisees persecuted.

The idea of Trump as Jesus is of course something that only cultists can believe. MAGA in its most intense form does resemble a cult. Trump-as-Jesus is also a theology of authoritarianism. It implies that Trump cannot be criticized. This explains the frenzied MAGA attacks on Pope Leo. Even those of us who are not Catholic or Christian can recognize the church as an autonomous institution with a right to uphold its own value and vision of the world. But Trump can’t abide any powerful institution outside his control. The authoritarian tendencies of MAGA make it plausible that the Avignon Papacy was invoked in the January meeting. Perhaps the next logical step is, as some have suggested, an American Avignon Papacy, with Mar-a-Lago as a new Vatican. When Pope Francis died in 2025, Trump was quick to post an AI image of himself sitting on the throne of Peter in full papal regalia. That was a troll, of course, but like many of Trump’s trolls, it spoke to a hidden desire.

Taking a break from convulsing the news cycle with nonsensical ultimatums about the Iran war, President Donald Trump elected to stir things up at the start of the week by posting an image of himself as Jesus on his Truth Social account. That now-infamous depiction came in the wake of a long screed Trump posted the day before assailing Pope Leo XIV for his dissension from the illegal attack on Iran (as well as for being “soft on crime,” in an apparent call to revive the Spanish Inquisition). The general run of dazed commentary about Trump’s self-deifying display grouped it together with other Trump-branded power plays; as the Son of God, Trump could clearly claim to outrank the lowly pontiff. After evangelical and Catholic detractors properly called out the post as blasphemy, Trump finally took it down, and the backlash from diehard Trump devotees on the religious right seemed poised to dissipate, in keeping with thousands of other episodes of Trump-centric transgression.

Trolling the pope was no doubt part of what might be charitably termed the president’s strategic thinking, but there’s a broader, though equally demented, logic at work here. The best way to plot out this logic, curiously enough, is to contrast Trump’s Jesus post with another Trump image that came into prominence this week: an Oval Office shot from Getty Images photographer Andrew Harnick, which won the White House Correspondents Association Award for Excellence in Presidential New Coverage by Visual Journalists. It shows the president standing at the Resolute Desk as a group of White House functionaries have rushed in the background to attend to a pharmaceutical executive who fainted during the president’s photo-op touting a White House initiative to lower prescription drug prices.

It’s a revealing foil for the Trump-as-Jesus image, being such a vivid reminder of who the actual Donald Trump is. As everyone else in the room is animated by concern for the fallen man’s well-being—they’re elevating his legs to ensure that blood is flowing to his brain—Trump is assuming the bored-to–petulant affect he normally shows when he’s not the center of attention. He’s standing with his arms dangling at his side with his prepared remarks open on the desk in front of him. He’s registering awareness of the health crisis behind him with an exasperated sidelong glance, showing his seeming impatience to resume the carney-patter presentation of a drug plan that’s achieved vanishingly little in the way of actual consumer savings.

The photo sums up what we’ve long known about Trump: He brandishes the clinical narcissist’s hatred of weakness, disease, and dependence, which all serve as rude reminders of the mortality of the self. This trait goes far back in Trump’s biography, starting with his repudiation of his alcoholic brother, Fred, and his bid to secure the disinheritance of Fred’s disabled grandson with the reported comment that the boy’s father, Fred Trump III, should “just let him die.” On the stump during his first presidential campaign, Trump cruelly mimicked the movements of the disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, and then denied having done so—much as he ludicrously sought to dismiss his blasphemous Truth Social post as merely a depiction of him as a doctor, with no religious meaning whatsoever. (Baldfaced lying and gaslighting are of course two other central components of the narcissist’s psychic tool kit.)

But Trump’s half-assed evasions aren’t enough to shore up his central role in MAGA mythology as a righteous force of deliverance, vengeance, and redemption. That’s where MAGA’s evangelical wing—far and away the most ardent partner in the Trump coalition—comes in. Faced, during Trump’s first campaign, with a presidential standard-bearer who was a sociopathic bully and a confessed serial sexual assaulter, evangelical apologists for Trump jury-rigged a crude, but still notionally biblical, basis for supporting him. Following the lead of New Apostolic Reformation preacher Lance Walnau, they embraced the image of Trump as a Cyrus figure—someone who, like the ancient Persain king, could help bring about the reconstruction of the faith while falling outside the strictures of formal worship. This interpretation allowed for evangelicals to hold the cognitive dissonance of Trump’s true bottom-feeding character in place while fantasizing that he was, in the grander scheme of things, a powerful instrument of God’s will.

Yet that ultimately proved thin gruel for a political movement craving a savior. So after Trump’s first term—and most especially after the evangelical-fueled bid to overthrow the government on January 6—MAGA true believers entered what religion writer Jeff Sharlet calls the movement’s “martyrdom period.” This involved the depiction of the forces of liberal pluralism as literal demons, seeking to eradicate Christianity outright and establish Satan’s dominion over Earth. The evangelical mobilization for January 6 thus sought not merely the intervention of lickspittle GOP congresspeople, but the Lord himself. Figures such as Ashli Babbit, the demonstrator shot to death in the Capitol, were sanctified as martyrs for the holy cause.

Trump also underwent a profound spiritual makeover in the wake of January 6. No longer an ascriptive outsider to the true faith, he was its full-blown redeemer. A widely screened video during Trump’s 2024 campaign was called “And God Made Trump.” It was modeled on radio personality Paul Harvey’s encomium to the yeoman figure of Middle American mythology, “And God Made a Farmer”—but went into a far deeper and more disturbing spiritual register than Harvey’s oration. While depicting members of the political opposition such as Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez as wolves and pleading for a savior figure to “wrestle the deep state,” the video assures anxious viewers that, in the person of Trump, the moment of deliverance has arrived: “God had to have somebody willing to go into the den of vipers, call out the fake news for their tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips, and yet stopped. So God made Trump.”

Against this blatantly messianic backdrop, you can readily understand how Trump—whose grasp of theology is negligent to nonexistent—would have thought it was no big deal to post an image of himself as MAGA Jesus. In his mind, it was another instance of turning the pandering dial up to 11—a difference in degree, not in kind.

After all, the image Trump used in the post was a modified version of a worshipful piece of AI slop circulated by MAGA influencer Nick Adams, which caused no stir among Trump’s followers when it first appeared. The image shows the president plainly attired in the manner of Jesus, apparently healing a bedridden hospital patient with the aid of a mysteriously glowing orb in his hand, as a corps of grateful citizens—a nurse, a soldier, a woman in the attitude of Christian prayer, and a gray-bearded generic patriot—all look on in wonderment. Overhead, an angel and a group of spiritually transfigured soldiers look down on the scene as an Air Force plane and a bald eagle fly by.

The cumulative impact of all this crass spiritual self-aggrandizing may now shock the evangelical conscience after surfacing with a presidential imprimatur, but all of its components were firmly entrenched in MAGA circles long before the president decided it was a good idea to flame the pope. As Sharlet explained in 2024, when I interviewed him about Trump’s post-January 6 spiritual persona, “When you think of the Christian iconography of Trump, he is the Jesus figure on a tank. Or maybe there’s a Jesus figure hovering somewhere behind him, but Trump is always the focus. It’s an incarnation.”

The mayor of the largest city in the United States appeared on the widely viewed CBS Mornings show Thursday and talked up the national appeal of democratic socialism.

“Before I was the mayor, I was an Assembly member [representing] Astoria and Long Island City. At that time, I was told that you could only be a democratic socialist in northwest Queens. Then I became the mayor. Now, the next question is the state. The next question will be the country. I think that this is a politics that can flourish anywhere because, frankly, there is only one majority in this country—that’s the working class,” announced Zohran Mamdani during an interview in which he touted the successes of his first 100 days as mayor of New York City. “And it’s time we have politics that puts them at the heart of what it is that we’re pursuing, and not as part of the appendix.”

This was the latest iteration of the mayor’s unique response to the attention that’s been coming his way as he’s finished his first 14 weeks in office. Mamdani’s 100-day publicity blitz has featured compelling reflections on his accomplishments—progress on universal childcare and safer streets, cracking down on bad landlords, 102,000 potholes filled—but that’s to be expected. Ever since President Franklin Roosevelt did it in the midst of the Great Depression, newly elected executives have used the arbitrary measure of their first 100 days to reassure voters that the right choice was made in the previous November’s balloting.

But Mamdani is doing something more—he’s framing his still-fresh tenure as not only a measure of his ability to govern but also a sign that the ideology of democratic socialism can work in practice, not just in theory. Indeed, he suggests, his first months in office have begun to illustrate “the change that democratic socialism can deliver.”

“After years of broken promises, no one could be blamed for doubting that government held either the ability or the ambition to upend the status quo. Yet, as I said on that freezing January afternoon to more than 8.5 million New Yorkers: We will make no apology for what we believe. I was elected as a Democratic socialist and I will govern as a Democratic socialist,” declared Mamdani in his address to cheering supporters, who waved “Childcare for All,” “NYC Groceries: Fresh Food, Fair Prices,” and “Pothole Politics” posters during last Sunday’s 100 Days event at a Queens concert venue.

“I know there are many who use ‘socialist’ as a dirty word—something to be ashamed of. They can try all they want, but we will not be ashamed of using government to fight for the many, not simply the few,” continued Mamdani. “We will not be ashamed of adding more heat pumps to New York City Housing Authority buildings in the Rockaways, or building more supportive housing in Harlem or standing steadfast alongside our trans neighbors. We will not be ashamed of investing in youth mental health clinics, or working to close Rikers or fighting for immigrants targeted by ICE. To any New Yorker, whether you’re under attack from the federal government’s cruelty or suffocating under the affordability crisis, we will stand beside you.”

The mayor was joined on stage by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 presidential bid renewed interest in democratic socialism nationwide—and whose 2020 bid inspired a young Zohran Mamdani to enter the political fray. On Sunday, the senator noted the ideological focus of Mamdani’s remarks—and the change that Mamdani represents. “I have been on platforms with hundreds and hundreds of mayors and all kinds of public officials,” said Sanders. “This is the first time I was ever introduced by someone who talked proudly about democratic socialism, and it feels great.”

What made Mamdani’s talk about socialism so compelling was his determination to link the history of past successes with current struggles. “Because government is a series of choices,” explained the mayor, “socialism is the choice to fight for every New Yorker—to extend democracy from the ballot box to the rest of our lives. We are hardly the first socialists to embrace good governance. One hundred and ten years ago, the city of Milwaukee elected a mayor named Daniel Webster Hoan. Hoan was considered young for the job—only 35 years old when he took office. I know—crazy, right? More importantly, Hoan made no apologies for being a socialist.”

Recounting the remarkable story of the longest-serving socialist mayor of a large American city—one of a trio of Socialist Party mayors of Wisconsin’s largest city, Hoan was elected in 1916 and served until 1940—Mamdani recalled that “Mayor Hoan knew then what we know now: The worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery. As Emil Seidel, the socialist mayor who came before Hoan, once said, their entire governing philosophy was simple: ‘Go after it and get it.’ Under Mayor Hoan, Milwaukee built the greatest public park system in the nation and weathered the Great Depression better than almost any other American city. Under Mayor Hoan, Milwaukee purged corruption and graft, built the first municipally sponsored public housing development in the nation, and transformed the city’s sewage disposal system. He believed, just as we do, that to deliver this great society, we should tax the rich. Today, we know these leaders as the ‘sewer socialists.’ But for years, Milwaukeeans knew them simply as leaders who delivered. It’s time we bring that to New York City.”

And, ultimately, to the rest of a country where, if Zohran Mamdani is right, socialism has the potential to “flourish anywhere.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

In my early 20s, I worked in a courthouse. Courthouses aren’t as exciting as you might think; real trials rarely happen and mostly papers are filed, data is entered, callers are put on hold. Courtrooms are a depressing parade of people who have messed something up in some fashion or another and now are having their lives turned upside down by judges, bailiffs, attorneys, and jailers who rarely look up from their desks.

Most of the work isn’t in the courtroom but the adjacent office. This is where dozens of people, nearly all women, stamp documents, clack on keyboards, and stand on their tippy toes to retrieve files. It was the office where I met Carla, a fortysomething grandma who kept stuffed animals in her desk drawer for the children who had to wait by her desk while parents went in court.

Everyone loved Carla. She was generous, gregarious, and good at her job. She’d been a clerk for nearly 20 years, and when I met her, she had just gotten approved for a mortgage for her first house.

It was 2004 and Carla was building a home. On Mondays, she would report to us on the progress. The lot was selected. The cement pad was laid. The framing was up, the driveway poured. The plumbing, the drywall, the bathtub were in.

By the end of that summer, I drove to Carla’s single-wide trailer where she, her two sons, her mother and her grandson were all living and helped load up a U-Haul. We drove out of the dingy city, up the highway, to where her new, suburban life was waiting.

Two years later, I was helping load up another U-Haul. Unable to keep up with the high payments, Carla, her mom, her sons, and her grandchildren had been served with a foreclosure notice. We packed all day, and that evening, as I drove out of the neighborhood, I noticed waist-high grass in several yards and another foreclosure notice on the door of what was once the neighborhood’s model home.

The following Monday, Carla was quiet at her desk with the drawer full of stuffies. I overheard another clerk, when she offered Carla a hug, whisper: “I just lost mine, too.”

A year later, the nightly news started carrying stories about the foreclosure crisis. It was yet another year before politicians used the term “subprime” and longer still before anyone added the descriptor “predatory.” But that’s the way it is for working people: Our skin is the skin that’s exposed so we always feel the wind first.

We are, I suppose, the canaries in the coal mine.

I thought about Carla last fall while shopping in my neighborhood Food Lion. I was comparing prices on shredded coconut when an older woman driving a motorized cart came towards me, smiling. I smiled back. Once she had maneuvered up next to me she said, quietly, “Excuse me, Miss, can you help me buy some food?” I declined and wished her luck.

Sixty-five long years after the Kennedy White House launched a CIA-led paramilitary invasion at the Bahia de Cochinos, the specter of that failed attack haunts the current crisis in US-Cuba relations. Almost daily the Trump administration has escalated its threats to once again use military force in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government; the White House has now issued a directive to the Pentagon to be ready. “Military planning for a possible Pentagon-led operation in Cuba is quietly ramping up, in case President Donald Trump gives an order to intervene,” USA Today reported just this week.

Trump has given every indication that he intends to assert US dominion over Cuba—a country that has stood as a symbol of Latin American independence since the 1959 revolution. The quagmire of war with Iran appears to have given the imperial president no pause. “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with [Iran],” Trump cavalierly stated on April 13. “Cuba is going to be next,” Trump declared just two weeks ago about his regime change intentions.

In the context of the present Cuba crisis, the 65th anniversary of the infamous Bay of Pigs debacle takes on renewed and immediate significance. The CIA-organized paramilitary effort to roll back the Castro revolution remains a cautionary history of the high costs of US intervention in Cuba—and elsewhere.

“The Perfect Failure”

The covert regime-change effort against Cuba began just 15 months after the 1959 revolution, with a March 17, 1960, authorization of President Dwight Eisenhower. The original “Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime” focused on creating CIA-backed teams of exile guerrillas who would be infiltrated into the mountains of Cuba to organize a counterrevolution. That effort failed miserably, as Castro’s forces quickly intercepted the infiltrators and CIA airdrops of weapons to them landed in the hands of the Cuban military, rather than the counterrevolutionaries.

At the first meeting of the CIA’s “Branch 4 Task Force,” the CIA’s director of Western Hemisphere operations predicted that the effort would fail “unless Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara could be eliminated in one package.” The regime, he argued, would only “be overthrown by the use of force.” Within months, the covert plan was reconfigured to become a paramilitary assault by a brigade of CIA trained exiles.

And the CIA did try to decapitate the Cuban leadership by enlisting the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro, diverting $200,000 of the invasion budget to pay for those operations. The CIA officer in charge of managing the paramilitary effort, Jacob Esterline, forcefully opposed the assassination plot. “I thought it was absolutely immoral that we involve ourselves in anything of this sort,” Esterline told me in an interview some years ago. “I thought it would be the most self-defeating thing for the operation, which was going to be difficult at best.”

Of course, the CIA-Mafia assassination plot also failed, establishing a pattern for the invasion even before it was launched. Indeed, in the words of political analyst Theodore Draper, the Bay of Pigs would go down in history as “the perfect failure.” Consider this cascade of operational disasters:

• The paramilitary assault was supposed to be a surprise, middle-of-the-night incursion. But Castro’s militia was waiting at the beach and opened fire the moment a CIA officer placed a beacon on the beach as the landing began.

• The CIA’s preliminary air strike on Castro’s air force failed to destroy all of Cuba’s planes, leaving enough of them to attack and sink the supply ships for the invasion force, on the morning of April 17, 1961.

Five days before Hungarian voters threw Viktor Orbán to the curb, in the most significant setback to global far-right forces since Jair Bolsonaro’s 2022 reelection loss in Brazil, JD Vance staked what dwindling political capital he has left on the Hungarian autocrat’s reelection.

In an act of astonishingly overt election interference, Vance flew into Hungary on April 7 for a quick bout of campaigning on behalf of the OG of hard-right populism and his Fidesz party. Now, there’s nothing new about US officials using covert tactics to influence political events and elections overseas; leaders around the world do this, and certainly Americans have been no exception. But historically there has been something of a tacit understanding that, at least in public, one denies such sordid activities; after all, it doesn’t look good when a country avowedly committed to democratic ideals and the principle of self-determination shrugs off those ideals at the first opportunity. Under this administration, however, the gloves have been removed. When Trump officials want to secure a political outcome overseas, they do so openly, shamelessly, with not even a hint of awareness—or care—that this impinges on the sovereignty of other countries and their populaces.

Standing next to Orbán at campaign rally events, Vance praised the prime minister to the rafters, and even put Trump on speakerphone to also shower superlatives on Orbán, before slamming the European Union for what he called “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference” and accusing the Brussels bureaucracy of attempting “to destroy the economy of Hungary.” The Guardian’s headline writers had some fun with it all: “JD Vance accuses the EU of ‘interference’ as he visits Hungary to help Orbán win election.”

That Vance’s mission ended in such spectacular failure is, of course, the icing on the cake. Far from helping Europe’s most reliable MAGA ally, Vance’s appearance may have further crystallized the stakes in play for voters in Hungary. After all, the election wasn’t just about whether Orbán had been in office too long; it was also about whether Hungary should ally with the autocracies of Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America over its European neighbors. By their millions, Hungarians chose Europe.

When the votes were tallied, the opposition had won two-thirds of the seats in parliament—a margin so large that even Orbán couldn’t ignore it; he conceded, calmly, peacefully, within hours of the polls closing, on Sunday. For Trump, who has pushed the narrative that if populist right candidates lose it can only be because of fraud, Orbán’s meek departure from the spotlight must be particularly galling.

There is a serious lesson to be learned from the Fidesz party’s crushing electoral defeat, and from the Trump administration’s abject failure to secure the result it so desperately wanted in Hungary.

Having been all too publicly stymied in his aims at a quick in-and-out aerial assault operation in Iran, Trump has been lashing out ever louder against any and all European institutions, which he seems to blame, without distinction, for the fiasco he finds himself in in the Middle East. On a near-daily basis, he attacks NATO, threatening to pull the US out of the alliance, and accuses America’s treaty allies of cowardice and of abandoning the nation in its moment of need in the Strait of Hormuz. This week, after a month of relentless sallies against British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and mockery of the country’s military, Trump all but declared the US-UK special relationship dead, called the country’s immigration policies “insane,” and warned that he could choose to scrap the carefully worked-out trade deal between the two countries. When he’s not been making apocalyptic threats to destroy Iranian civilization, or publishing AI-generated images of himself as a Christ-figure, Trump has lambasted the Spanish and French leadership in starkly personal terms, fallen out with his erstwhile ally Italian far-right Premier Giorgia Meloni, and, in a twist bizarre even by this administration’s surreal standards, gone to verbal war against the pope—months after Pentagon officials reputedly implied to the papal representative in the US that they could take action to depose the pope and install an alternative far from the Catholic Church’s power-center of Rome.

Trump has also resurrected his fixation on Greenland, referencing the island in bizarre comments and online posts. “It all began with, if you want to know the truth, Greenland,” Trump told reporters last week, referring to his escalating dispute with NATO allies. “We want Greenland. They don’t want to give it to us. And I said, ‘bye, bye.’”

Throughout his senescent presidency, Trump has also made clear his all-consuming disdain for the supranational project of the European Union, and for the blending of races and cultures that it epitomizes. He has called the continent “decaying,” and warned in starkly racist tones that it faces “civilizational erasure” because of immigration.

And yet, even as Trump’s propaganda machine cranks up the anti-European rhetoric, it appears that the MAGA administration’s ambitions to bend Europe to its will are being stymied. The attacks on the UK have led to a rash of recent moves by the British government to start drawing closer to the EU, 10 years after the calamitous Brexit vote. French President Macron, who has long attempted to maintain cordial relations with the snarling Trump administration, finally gave up and told Trump he had to “be serious.” In Germany, even the neo-Nazi AfD, surging in the polls and beloved by the Trump administration, has formally come out against the war in Iran, and has even gone so far as to suggest that all US bases in the country should be closed down.

Trump has attempted to impose a MAGA agenda on the whole of Europe, and points beyond. Instead, as the economic disruptions triggered by the Iran war pick up speed, Europe is coalescing against the Donroe Doctrine’s increasingly bizarro sense of manifest lunacy. After his election win, the new Hungarian leader, Peter Magyar, pointedly said that he would not be phoning Trump, though if Trump chose to call him, he would make himself available. It was a none-too-subtle announcement that another European leader has joined the growing club of political figures who no longer see the need, or the point, in playing sycophant to Trump’s increasingly off-the-rails presidency.

Trump wants to export his crude and cruel brand of politics worldwide. Yet the more he rants the less appealing that political project seems to the rest of the world. In fact, in what must surely rank as one of the speediest collapses in global ratings ever recorded, fewer people around the world now approve of the US’s global leadership role than approve of China’s. Among US neighbors, only 22 percent of Canadians and 15 percent of Mexicans have confidence in Trump’s doing the right thing on the world stage. In country after country, a majority of voters express distrust in Trump’s role as a world leader.

Trump just keeps on losing. And, as we have seen over the past couple weeks, when a megalomaniac such as Donald Trump is exposed as nothing more than a repeat loser, the puncturing of his myth of invincibility may drive him entirely crazy.

If you’ve never heard of GardaWorld before, you’ve likely seen them. As the largest private security firm globally, GardaWorld’s armored cars and personnel can be found everywhere from Kabul to the San Fernando Valley. But, the Canadian firm has recently ventured into new territory: the notorious South Florida Detention Facility, Alligator Alcatraz. 

Last summer, the US-based subsidiary of the corporation, GardaWorld Federal Services, was found to be one of several Canadian-based companies to have entered into contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). GardaWorld’s involvement with ICE surfaced in July, when the Montreal Gazette revealed that the firm had posted job listings for armed guards who would be stationed in Ochopee, Florida. The requirements included holding a Florida gun license, one year of armed experience, and legally owning a registered semiautomatic handgun. 

The reported stationing of GardaWorld security and correctional officers at Alligator Alcatraz was only one piece of the firm’s larger involvement in the US’s deportation strategy. A month later, The Globe and Mail confirmed that GardaWorld Federal Services, based in Arlington, Virginia, had signed on to $138 million worth of ICE contracts to aid with an “emergency detention” program, according to federal procurement records. And, in early March, the firm was awarded around $313 million in contracts to operate a detention center in Surprise, Arizona.  

Before its foray into detention center-management, GardaWorld—founded and headquartered in Montreal—served as a primary security service for local universities. Today, Canadian students at institutions like Université du Québec à Montréal, Toronto Metropolitan University, and McGill, must contend with a new reality: The officers policing their classrooms are part of the same company that is providing the manpower to staff brutal ICE facilities. 

“It’s frustrating because it makes me feel that the US is so economically tied to Canada,” reflected a third-year McGill student from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who wished to remain anonymous for her safety. Reflecting on the happenings in her hometown, she said, “Seeing what my neighbors, family, and friends are doing down there is really beautiful.” But, learning of Canada’s under-reported complicity in the atrocities has made her feel that she is “missing out on the chance to do something collectively about it.” 

“There are all of these connections to US political choices, to the machinery of the military-industrial complex, and to the US prison system,” she further told The Nation. “I would have never expected for campus security to be tied to Alligator Alcatraz. That’s just crazy.” 

According to McGill professor Barry Eidlin, the realization that campus security is part of a larger political system has become increasingly common among the student body. “It’s a link that has been made possible as a result of the administration’s reactions to  Palestine solidarity activism,” he said. “The university has responded to campus protests by militarizing the campus and establishing checkpoints to threaten and intimidate students under the guise of making them feel safer.” 

So, when the city organized its first anti-GardaWorld march in mid-February, McGill students jumped at the opportunity. Divest McGill, a student-led climate advocacy campaign, and a primary organizer for campus activism, announced three days before the march that a student contingent would join the protest. The post stated: “we, the students, refuse to stand idly by while McGill, Quebec, and GardaWorld aid and abet ICE terrorism.” 

The Nation reached out to McGill for comment on whether the university will sever its ties with the firm given its involvement with ICE. An administrative spokesperson responded, “To ensure the safety and security of approximately 40,000 students, 12,800 employees, 218 buildings, two campus[es], and numerous visitors, McGill University relies on internal employees and an external supplier…McGill requires all its suppliers to respect human rights.” 

On February 13, around 30 students convened at McGill’s Roddick Gates to begin their nearly hour-long commute to Place Vertu, a plaza located two kilometers away from GardaWorld’s headquarters. They navigated the metro and bus systems to a remote area of the city, far from McGill’s downtown campus, in below freezing temperatures to join activist organizations and political groups, including Indivisible Quebec, one the primary organizers for Montreal’s “No Tyrants” rallies. Accompanied by a banner which read “Garda Off Our Campus,” McGill students were set on making their voices and demands heard. 

Pop quiz, hotshot: Who has the best, most inspiring anti-war message in the United States today? Is a faith leader? A labor organizer? A rock star? No? What if I told you it was a high-profile, unapologetic bigot? Or the other one? Or the other other one, if you really want to collect the full regressive set?

Weird as it sounds, that’s the subtext of some of the messages we’ve been getting from the liberal side of the aisle these days. If you’ve spent more than a minute on social media this past week, odds are good that you have noticed an uptick in presumably liberal-leaning media figures online encouraging you to engage with a growing list of MAGA notables who can’t wait to tell you how offended they are by Trump’s war in Iran. Just for fun, try logging onto your social media platform of choice, search some iteration of “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with Carlson,” and watch your browser sizzle up and crash. Be careful you don’t find yourself buried under an avalanche of “Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” JPEGs while you’re at it.

The “entire,” 43-minute-long anti–Iran War monologue of Carlson’s April 6 episode is “worth watching,” former Obama speechwriter-turned-podcaster Jon Favreau told his 1.3 million followers, sharing a more-than-two-hours-long episode of Carlson’s eponymous show.

Headquarters Newsroom, the liberal media outlet built from the ignominious remains of Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign, has been similarly enthusiastic whenever MAGA media Oprichniks voice rare, and often conspicuously tempered dissatisfaction with the regime’s Iranian adventurism; “Candace Owens cites our post while shredding Donald Trump in new video,” bragged a recent Bluesky message, preceded by three other Owens-centric posts. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna went even further, crediting Owens, Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene—and nobody else—by name, along with other anonymous “progressive activists & anti-war conservative voices” he claimed pushed Trump back from an atomic Iranian brink. To date, his message has around 2.3 million views.

So what’s going on? Should we welcome these previously verboten figures into our lives now? Should we make a space for them in the anti-war vanguard?

The answer to those questions is no.

What’s happening here is obvious: Carlson and his ilk are savvy operators, well-practiced in the art of sneaking their rhetorical farts into the day’s prevailing political winds. Public opposition to American-Israeli military action is an opportunity for them to launder an ideology of racial and religious hierarchy through a sanitized lens of politically expedient isolationism.

None of these people are bothering to hide this. It’s just that liberals don’t seem too inclined to look. For instance, that Carlson episode Jon Favreau eagerly pushed at his legions of followers? It also featured segments like “Why Is Corruption So Prevalent in American Protestant Churches?” and “The Attempts to Usher in the Antichrist.” Less than a week later, Carlson readily admitted that his reason for opposing Israel’s assault on Beirut was that the city’s Christian residents “may not be the majority, but they’re in charge.” To Carlson, Beirut’s value then lies simply in being the right kind of theocracy.

But in order to gain more converts, Carlson, Owens, and those like them need partners to help with that laundering from across the ideological aisle. As it turns out, there are a number of left-leaning facilitators willing to meet Carlson & Co. halfway.

In a perfect, frictionless world, where perpetual motion is possible and nobody cares about rebooting Firefly, I suppose I could understand the underlying logic seemingly at play here: Who wouldn’t want to revel in the knowledge that their anti-war cause is so virtuous and pure it can convert demons from the pits of MAGA hell? Who doesn’t feel good knowing that they’ve picked a side so overwhelming in its justness that even someone like Carlson gets it?

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

All parts of the media—news media, social media, entertainment media—play a decisive role in how humanity confronts the climate challenge. These media are largely responsible for what people know and feel about that challenge, and what people know and feel in turn shapes what they say and do: whether and how they vote, what products they buy or don’t buy, how they talk with friends and family, whether they act or not.

News media play a particularly important role, both because huge numbers of people still read, watch, or listen to their reporting and because that reporting shapes the narrative that politicians, social media, and the public engage with. “Literally billions of people know about climate change only because the media has reported it,” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, has said.

Voluminous empirical data show that most of the public cares about climate change. And an overwhelming majority of the world’s people—80–89 percent of them, according to peer-reviewed studies that gave rise to Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project—want their governments to take stronger climate action. But this overwhelming majority does not realize it’s a majority, partly because its existence is not reflected in most news coverage. In other words, they have been a silent majority but also a silenced majority.

This white paper, published in April 2026 by CCNow, focuses on mainstream news media and how it has been covering the climate story. Established by journalists, for journalists, CCNow has worked with hundreds of journalists and news outlets to help all of us do a better job of covering the defining story of our time. CCNow was launched in 2019 with the express intent of breaking the “climate silence” that prevailed in most news media. And for a few important years, that silence was broken.

Now much of the media has gone, if not silent, certainly quiet. Climate coverage declined globally in 2025 by 14 percent, according to the Media and Climate Change Observatory at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In the United States, The Washington Post gutted its climate team amid a larger set of layoffs. So did CBS News, where correspondent David Schechter and producer Tracy Wholf had run 61 climate stories during 2025. NBC News also cut back its climate team. Collectively, the three broadcast networks reduced the airtime devoted to climate change by 35 percent, according to the watchdog group Media Matters.

There are, it’s important to note, exceptions to this trend. Major outlets including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Associated Press, Time, Bloomberg Green, CNN, Telemundo, France Télévisions, and the Hindustan Times continue to cover the climate story robustly. Every television station in Japan over the next two years will run public service commercials noting that 89 percent of Japanese people support taking climate action. And journalists across the Global South generally continue to see climate change as a major story—no surprise, given that they’re on the front lines.

To understand this retreat from climate coverage and how it might be remedied, CCNow executive director Mark Hertsgaard held conversations in early 2026 with more than 30 climate journalists at leading TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, and digital news outlets in Asia, North and South America, Europe, and Africa that collectively reach a total audience of billions of people. These conversations took place “on background” so the journalists could speak freely. Journalists quoted here by name have given express permission for CCNow to do so.

This white paper draws extensively on those conversations, as well as on analyses by independent scholars and experts. It is also informed by CCNow’s years of working closely with journalists and news outlets around the world, including our newsroom trainings and live events, our annual Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards, and the exemplary climate reporting we curate in our weekly newsletter, The Climate Beat.

The Findings

The overall picture that emerged was mixed but with general agreement on these points:

• The amount and prominence of climate coverage is indeed down across the news media, but with important exceptions.
• The trend is more evident in the US than internationally.
• One reason for the decline has been a relentless firehose of news on other topics that audiences understandably wanted to know about (e.g., the Iran War); news outlets can produce only so many stories a day, and audiences have only so much time to read or watch the news.
• Another reason: newsroom staff cuts, due to fewer consumers’ paying for news and corporate owners’ prioritizing profits over the public’s right to know.
• Another reason: News coverage often mirrors what political leaders talk about, and US president Donald Trump in particular talks little about climate change except to deny that it’s happening. That denial has emboldened others—in business, in politics, and in media—to downplay the climate threat.
• Despite the backsliding, internal audience data at newsrooms indicates that the public remains interested in the climate story and that audiences respond when journalists tell the story well.
• Many journalists do understand that the world faces a climate emergency (that’s the word thousands of scientists deliberately choose), and they’re committed to telling the story. Some of them labor for news organizations that may or may not be doing justice to the climate story; others have struck out on their own to say what needs to be said.

What’s Needed: A Fresh Approach

CCNow’s interviews suggest that perhaps what’s lacking is not an interested public but fresh thinking from journalists about how to tell the climate story. “People really do care about this stuff,” said Fiona Harvey, an environment editor at The Guardian. Angus Foster, the climate editor at BBC News, pointed to two stories his team recently produced—one about a public auction for new wind turbines off the UK coast, the other about household heat pumps—that got “huge audiences, both on digital and broadcast.” His conclusion? “The audience is still with us, but we have to find ways into the climate story that are fresh and provide information that they really want.”

This need to find fresh ways to tell the climate story was the most frequently made point during CCNow’s background conversations with journalists. And the most frequently cited reason for this need was the challenge of engaging audiences in the face of an unrelenting firehose of news on other subjects, from the Iran war to the Minneapolis anti-ICE protests, the Epstein files, and more.

“The same number of people are reading or watching our news coverage as before. They’re just paying attention to other subjects,” said a reporter at a leading international news outlet. Stories about yet another scientific study were of particularly little interest to audiences, leading this organization to all but stop doing them. Internal audience data showed that “nobody was reading those stories,” the reporter emphasized. This reporter and their colleagues hypothesize that their readers “already know the general picture on climate science and don’t feel the need to keep up with each new twist and turn.”

In response, news organizations that remain committed to climate journalism are offering more human interest, enterprise, and explainer stories and making greater efforts to make the climate connection in their reporting on other topics. For example, the German newspaper taz has found that leaning into the drama of the climate story can attract readers. “Polls show that people’s concern about climate change is as high as ever,” said taz climate editor Jonas Waack. What readers like, he added, are stories that expose hidden conflicts or secret dealings, such as taz’s uncovering that a public referendum aimed at blocking wind turbines in southern Germany was covertly organized by a far-right front group.

The investigative outlet DeSmog has broadened its audience with stories featuring villains and heroes, especially involving AI’s energy-hungry data centers. “Big Tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg are much more visible in the public mind than, say, the CEO of Exxon,” said global managing editor Geoff Dembicki, “and our investigations have documented that Big Tech is increasingly embracing the climate-crisis-denial rhetoric of Big Oil.” Such reporting has appealed across the news spectrum. “Last year, we partnered with the Financial Times, and our reporting was also featured in the socialist news site Jacobin,” said Dembicki.

Prioritizing Climate Work

The “firehose of news” explanation goes only so far, however. Newsrooms often succumb to “the tyranny of the immediate”—the tendency to focus solely on the day’s events but miss the bigger picture—and climate coverage suffers as a result. As CCNow cofounder Kyle Pope has written, getting diverted from covering climate change “reflects a failure to understand how urgent, and far-reaching, the climate story is. As long as it’s seen as peripheral, it will always fall off the agenda.”

The US Spanish-language TV network Telemundo demonstrates that climate need not disappear when other subjects demand attention. Vanessa Hauc, a veteran correspondent at the network, said Telemundo has focused on immigration in recent months for the obvious reason that its viewers care intensely about it, and the network has been rewarded with record high ratings. At the same time, Hauc said, her weekly climate and environment program, Planeta Tierra, “remains popular and is well supported by management.” Likewise, when public broadcaster France Télévisions replaced its usual weather forecast on its flagship evening news program with a climate-and-weather segment, its ratings went up—and they continue to be strong in 2026.

One factor that distinguishes outlets that have stuck with the climate story is that top management conveys to the respective newsrooms that climate coverage matters. Karl Malakunas, a senior journalist at Agence France-Presse, said, “We see climate and environment as a massively important breaking news story that remains a core priority. Whether it’s fires in Los Angeles, extreme heat in Southeast Asia, or other such events, pretty much every day, somewhere in the world, one of these stories is breaking. AFP needs to be there and make the climate connection in our coverage, or it’s a massive fail for us.”

That commitment contrasts sharply with the experience Chase Cain, NBC News’s former national climate reporter, recounted in an interview with the newsletter Heated. Cain left NBC in March, ground down by having to ceaselessly remind his bosses of the importance of the climate story. “I was just kind of exhausted by…the constant trying to explain and remind, like, ‘Hey, this is important, please run this story,’” Cain said.

Meanwhile, staff cuts throughout the news business have meant that remaining staff are expected to do the jobs that two or even three colleagues had previously done. “Everyone feels beaten down, left without resources and leadership,” one network veteran lamented.

A Prescription for Change

Looking ahead, what can be done to encourage news organizations to provide abundant, high-profile coverage of the climate crisis and its solutions?

Reject climate hushing. “We’ve got to get past this flavor of the month idea that climate change is an issue that’s come and gone,” said a senior editor at one of the world’s largest news organizations. “The crisis is not going away. In fact, it’s only getting bigger the longer we wait to act. So [the disinterest] is not going to last.” This editor suggested that the current lull “could actually be good for climate journalism if it forces us to think in new ways about how to tell the story so we actually engage people.”

Listen to your audience. People don’t need to keep hearing only about how bad the climate crisis is. What they want is to know how it can be fixed. Of course, news outlets should still cover genuinely significant scientific findings. But the totality of coverage should convey the whole story: not just what’s going wrong, but also how it could be put right.

This does not mean sugarcoating the facts or engaging in activism. It means rigorously interrogating potential solutions—from switching to solar power and other technological fixes to changing laws and other political responses—so the public and policymakers can decide which ones to pursue and which to shun. It also means alerting people to the growing problem of climate disinformation, and debunking that disinformation with facts.

One way to listen to your audience is via the science behind CCNow’s 89 Percent Project: A supermajority of the world’s people, eight in 10 persons, want their governments to take stronger climate action. But this supermajority doesn’t realize it is the majority, partly because it doesn’t see that fact reflected in the media. In Japan, TV broadcasters are addressing that disconnect. For the next two years, every TV station in the country will air public service commercials pointing out that 89.3 percent of all Japanese support climate action—so people shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it.

Recognize that different circumstances call for different approaches. For example, often what limits climate coverage at some Global South news outlets is not a lack of interest but a lack of resources. In response, CCNow organized a one-year pilot project to provide 21 Global South newsrooms with free access to the climate news feed of AFP. The participating newsrooms, which collectively reach 457 million people, ended up running 2,875 climate stories, stories their audiences would not have seen otherwise.

Take initiative inside your news organization. If you’re a journalist who specializes in climate change, explore teaming up with a colleague from a separate beat. Maxine Joselow, a climate reporter at The New York Times, feels fortunate that her newsroom values the climate story. She advises fellow journalists to look across the newsroom and “if you see someone whose work you admire, send them a Slack message, compliment them on the story they did, and ask if you can have coffee. Have a conversation about the overlaps between their beat and climate change and share ideas about something you might work on together.”

The Time Is Now

There is no good reason that telling the climate story cannot be both the right thing to do journalistically and the smart thing to do commercially. The vast majority of people around the world care about climate change and want it tackled; if our coverage highlights this majority rather than silencing it, the public is more likely to read, watch, and listen to what we report.

Journalists are storytellers, and the climate story overflows with elements of compelling storytelling: heroes and villains, gargantuan sums of money, and countless human lives in the balance. If audiences are not responding to our stories, that’s on us. CCNow invites our fellow journalists everywhere to seize this opportunity, and we hope this white paper triggers thought and discussion within the news business and beyond toward that end.

Next Steps

If this white paper sparked comments, concerns, ideas, please reach out. We’d love to chat, to learn from you, and to see how we can support your work. Write to us at editors@coveringclimatenow.org.

Correction: An earlier version of this white paper mistakenly stated that ABC News had “all but eliminated” its climate team. In fact, the core of its team remains in place.

A few weeks before the 2020 presidential election, I wrote “An Open Letter to My Old Tribe,” urging “every reporter who is covering this election at any level” to focus on a crucial question—whether the public would trust the election procedure and the losing candidate would accept the result as legitimate. “It does not seem an exaggeration,” I wrote then, “to say that the future of American democracy, perhaps its very survival, depends on the answer.”

More than five years later, with less than seven months to go before the midterm elections, that question is before us again, but in far starker terms than I could have imagined in 2020. So, here’s an updated letter to the media tribe I once belonged to, with suggestions broadly similar to those I made five years ago, but with a far sharper sense of urgency, even fear.

Here’s my first suggestion: Reporters in 2026 need to pay more attention to and offer more forceful coverage of President Trump’s continuing insistence that Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was fraudulent and that year’s election illegitimate. (As recently as March 15th, he tweeted this completely false allegation: “With time, it [the 2020 election] has been conclusively proven to be stolen.”)

While Trump keeps repeating that long-discredited claim, journalists should not treat his falsehoods as “old news” that no longer requires detailed coverage anymore. They should instead consider it an important and newsworthy story right now. Instead of briefly repeating a shorthand conclusion (“false” or “without evidence”) after a quote from the president, they should take a few more lines of type or minutes of air time to remind readers or listeners of the facts that show irrefutably why they should never believe his words. After all, Trump’s “rigged election” claims haven’t been validated in a single one of 64 court cases—that’s right, 64!—challenging the election results, or in any official investigation or recount.

On that point, reporters can cite an authoritative 2022 report, “Lost, Not Stolen: The Conservative Case That Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Election,” written by a panel of authors including two former Republican senators, a lawyer who served as solicitor-general under President George W. Bush, and five other prominent conservatives. After exhaustively reviewing every judicial proceeding and postelection probe in six states where election fraud was alleged, the authors concluded that “Donald Trump and his supporters had their day in court and failed to produce substantive evidence to make their case.” Their definitive verdict on the overall issue was: “There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct.”

(Journalists might also pass on this thought from David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, who, in a recent podcast, suggested that all 2020 election conspiracy theories rest on this dubious premise: “Democrats, being out of power, somehow managed a conspiracy against a sitting president, who controlled the entire government, to steal an election from him…and that four years later when those same Democrats held every lever of federal power, they forgot to do it again.”)

Reporters should also remind their audience of another important fact: Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election were emphatically refuted by Mike Pence, his vice president, and Bill Barr, his attorney general, both of whom publicly broke with the president, strongly denied his allegations, and unequivocally recognized that Joe Biden had been legitimately elected.

In that connection, here’s a related suggestion for reporters: Ask every Republican candidate on your state’s ballot to answer this question: Do you really believe that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, and lost only because of massive vote fraud? Press as hard as you can for an on-the-record, yes-or-no answer, and if you don’t get one, keep pushing. If a candidate says yes or evades the question, follow up with questions like: “What evidence do you have? How do you explain that those charges were not verified in a vote recount or in a single one of more than 60 judicial proceedings? Were judges in 64 courtrooms across six states all part of a nefarious conspiracy against Donald Trump, or do you have any other explanation?”

Report on the Process, Not Just the Arguments

Journalists in 2026 also have a much broader task: to keep their audiences informed on the details of the election process and the ongoing efforts to undermine its legitimacy. Covering those themes systematically and proactively will not be easy at a time when the headlines are bound to be filled with other explosive issues: a major war in the Middle East (and possibly beyond); the ongoing bitter controversy about the Trump administration’s chaotic immigration enforcement campaign that led to the violent deaths of two US citizens; the continuing effects of drastic staff reductions in federal agencies that have eliminated or significantly reduced government services and benefits for millions of Americans; and a long list of other divisive subjects. But the threat to public trust in the election process poses a clear and present danger to the principles, traditions, and values of the American political system, and news organizations need to adapt their campaign coverage accordingly.

So, here’s a suggestion (one I made in that earlier letter years ago) to reporters, editors, and news directors across the country:

To almost no one’s surprise, the ballyhooed launch of last weekend’s “marathon” negotiations in Islamabad for a stable ceasefire accord with Iran collapsed in much less time than it took for Trump’s first-term communications director Anthony Scaramucci to be ditched. Then, in equally short order, President Donald Trump fired off another impulsive policy diktat from his social-media website, announcing a total blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by the United States. And no sooner than Trump had nonsensically assured the country that a double blockade of the vital shipping route would magically reverse the harm wrought by Iran’s initial bid to control it, the administration was walking back this latest smoke-and-mirrors bid to simulate progress in its disastrous Iran war; it amended Trump’s trademark policymaking-by-stream-of-consciousness, explaining that the United States would only blockade shipping traffic coming from or heading to Iranian ports.

It was the kind of “I’m rubber, you’re glue” diplomacy that has become synonymous with the Trump presidency, and it also quite plainly is not going to work. Trump’s congressional allies must soon face a very sour electorate that had been promised a golden age rather than indefinite, self-inflicted economic suffering. Meanwhile, Iran’s tyrants have proven quite willing to wantonly slaughter their own civilian protesters to preserve their grip on power. So the answer to the question of who can “endure more pain” in the Iran conflict should be obvious: It’s not us. The blockade also makes it plain that Trump continues not to understand, even on a basic level, why most ships refuse to transit the Strait of Hormuz and how difficult it will be to return to the status quo ante as long as Tehran’s leaders want the critical shipping channel to be choked off.

Trump has floated countless ideas to fix the Hormuz problem, and has seriously pursued precisely zero of them until now. It has, for example, been nearly six weeks since Trump said the United States would start escorting tankers through the Strait. That was around the same time he unveiled a harebrained scheme to have America insure everyone’s tankers. Once again, the second act in this policy set piece involved the realization that no one in the administration had the slightest idea how the breakthrough maneuver was supposed to work. With his other proposals flaming out, Trump ended up lifting sanctions on Iranian oil in March in a failed effort to keep prices down—an economic windfall for the enemy he was trying to outsmart. Before long, Trump was reduced to making the argument that high oil prices were actually good for the American economy—by which he meant, as usual, the corporate grifters who are his allies and donors.

It’s also been more than two weeks since Trump switched tactics again and declared, during a televised primetime national address, that America doesn’t need the Strait of Hormuz anyway and that it was up to unspecified allies to “build up some delayed courage” and then “​​grab it and cherish it.” In the same speech, he also argued that the Strait would “open up naturally” after the war, which would also end at any moment, given that he also said, “We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran.” These words all came out of the same mouth in the same 19-minute speech.

Earlier in that very same day, the president had tried jawboning US allies by threatening to withdraw from NATO. But America’s sudden lack of friends is a testament to the sheer scale of the reputational damage Trump has inflicted on the United States. That in itself represents a major reason the blockade gambit is likely to fail. Earlier this year, for example, Trump’s endless bluster terrified Denmark, a peaceful NATO treaty ally, to the point that Copenhagen developed a plan to blow up the runways in Greenland if an American invasion materialized. Trump even pissed off one of his only remaining European friends in Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni when he and our illustrious vice president started beefing with the pope this week. Iranian, Russian, and Chinese leaders all understand the additional leverage this public feuding grants them and are eagerly finding new ways to exploit it.

Having failed either to hand-wave the Hormuz problem away or strong-arm other countries into fixing it for him, Trump then pivoted again to the familiar comforts of threatening non-white people with annihilation. On April 7, he briefly rattled even the GOP’s committed lickspittles in Congress by threatening a jaw-dropping act of genocide against Iranian civilization if the Strait wasn’t opened by 8 pm Tuesday, April 8. When Iran called his bluff, he apparently then deemed a hilariously maximalist set of Iranian demands, including a permanent tolling system that would be a source of staggering new revenues for Tehran, a “workable basis” for negotiations in order to secure a two-week ceasefire that the Israelis immediately undermined by continuing their unhinged rampage in Lebanon. Trump then dispatched his son-in-law, one of his golf buddies, and the author of Hillbilly Elegy to the Islamabad negotiations to deliver a framework they all knew perfectly well was unacceptable to Tehran before high-tailing it out.

Worse, the situation in Hormuz has not improved even with Tehran abiding by the terms of the cease-fire. Iran reportedly laid an unknown number of naval mines in the Strait (while claiming not to know where they are), but is otherwise not doing much of anything else to actively obstruct it. For more than six weeks now, these mines—wherever and however many they may be—together with the threat of drone and missile attacks have been sufficient to discourage commercial shipping captains and their insurers from making the journey.

Trump and his apologists may not like it, but exporters and shipping companies are simply not going to resume normal operations in the Strait absent a conclusive resolution to the war. With Iran’s new leaders believing not without justification that they were holding the better hand in Islamabad, Trump pivoted to his instantly diminished blockade plan, which nails that MAGA sweet spot of being (of course) illegal according to international law and so far completely ineffective.

At most McMurtry family reunions at the Clarendon Country Club, the days were split between mealtime and storytelling. After lunch, the aging uncles—all of them cowboys—would gather round and tell stories of their gallant youthful suffering on the Texas frontier, aggrieved that the days of their heroism lay behind them, that their bodies were now failing them. But the story that stayed with a young Larry McMurtry, more than any of the cowboy exploits, was the one about a molasses barrel. It was fall, at the turn of the 20th century. McMurtry’s grandfather, William Jefferson, had traveled by wagon 18 miles to the small town of Archer City in search of winter provisions. He returned to the family ranch with the wagon loaded, and sitting among the supplies was an 80-pound barrel of sorghum molasses, “in those days the nearest thing to sugar that could be procured,” McMurtry wrote.

Such sweetening as the family would have for the whole winter was in the barrel, and all gathered around to watch it being unloaded. Two of the boys rolled the barrel to the back of the wagon and two more reached to lift it down, but in the exchange of responsibilities someone failed to secure a hold and the barrel fell to the ground and burst. Eighty pounds of sweetness quivered, spread out, and began to seep unrecoverably into the earth…. They could speak with less emotion of death and dismemberment than of that moment when they stood and watched the winter’s sweetness soak into the chicken yard.

Yet at the end of this retelling—in his 1968 book of essays on Texas, In a Narrow Grave—McMurtry included a sardonic footnote of correction. What “really happened,” he wrote, was that a sow had come along and pulled the spigot out of the barrel, causing it to run dry. The emptied barrel was discovered, and the children lined up at the scene of the catastrophe to cry. The fault was no human folly but an animal’s. Nevertheless, “as with many family stories,” McMurtry concludes, “I think I prefer the fiction to the truth.”

Truth and fiction have been two threads in the grand yarn of the American West since before the West was even settled; they are wound so tightly together that it becomes moot to distinguish one from the other. In fact, as McMurtry knew intimately, “the selling of the West preceded the settling of it, sometimes narrowly but other times by decades.” It was an “inescapable fact” that the American West’s so-called traditions were actually “invented by pulp writers, poster artists, impresarios, and advertising men.” To tell the story of the West, then, the teller needs to voice the truth about its fictions, even if that means telling fictions about its truths. McMurtry devoted his whole career to doing just that, across dozens of novels, essay collections, memoirs, a biography, and over 30 screenplays.

In his fiction, McMurtry chronicled the lives of Texas Rangers and Comanche warriors, the lives of cowboys turned suburbanites, of Houston city slickers studying for their PhDs. And in his essays and histories, he took aim at the many figures who had a hand in inventing the formidable myth of the West: Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley, Kit Karson, and P.T. Barnum. In each of these settings, McMurtry refused the seductive invitation to write in a register of high romance. His subjects might have been tragic, dark, or absurd—but they were never treated with nostalgia.

McMurtry was not interested in clawing back the “reality” of the West from its complicated illusions, either. He wrote with the knowledge that the myths were inextricable from the history of the place itself, at once bloody and banal. McMurtry saw that any idea of the “real” West was as fabulated as the illusions were, and that the pursuit of it was equally harebrained. “To do the cowboy realistically would have amounted to a sort of alchemical reverse English: it would have meant turning gold into lead,” he wrote. In other words, it would have meant turning the cowboy into something he was not and never was and losing hold of him entirely. Instead, McMurtry approached his subjects by exchanging one kind of fable—the high romance of myth—for another: the picaresque. Through his rogue’s gallery of hucksters, deadeye bandits, and hardheaded Rangers, he unveiled the West as a place of absurd, mythical invention. His great and lasting contribution was to teach Americans how to see their country and to read its history—as legend, reality, and advertising.

Unsurprisingly, then, McMurtry’s inventions went beyond the page. “I have this compulsion to fictionalize,” he once confessed. “And I don’t make a good journalist, either. I just can’t stick to the facts. By necessity, I invent.” It turns out that the writer who devoted his career to reweaving Texas’s yarns could not help but tell yarns about himself. This is the motivation for a new biography, Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry, written by McMurtry’s longtime friend the journalist David Streitfeld. “I wanted to rescue things [in McMurtry’s life] that were hidden or even scorned,” Streitfeld writes early on, “and to see beyond his self-inventions.” By treating McMurtry like one of his rogues, one finds that he—like all Americans, yarn-tellers every one—occupies an ambiguous relationship to his country’s history. Which is to say that we, Americans, all indulge in some kind of mythmaking, and it was McMurtry who understood how integral that was to the place we call “the West.”

When McMurtry was born in 1936 in Archer City, he, his parents, and his paternal grandparents lived under one roof—a simple shotgun house that his father and grandfather had built with their bare hands. At that time, “the Depression sat heavily on all but the most fortunate, a group that didn’t include us,” McMurtry later wrote. The family had a cook and the occasional resident cowboy, but no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no telephone.

There was also a conspicuous absence of the thing that would go on to define McMurtry’s entire life: “Of books there were none,” he recalled. Perhaps there was a magazine or two, and surely there was a Bible (whereabouts unknown). But mostly, McMurtry described growing up in an aural culture: “My mother, father, grandfather, grandmother, and whatever uncles or cowboys happened by, sat on the front porch every night in good weather and told stories.” That changed one day in 1942, when McMurtry’s cousin stopped by on his way to enlist in the Marines and dropped off “the gift that changed my life”—a box of 19 books.

Those books were a godsend for a bronchial kid who considered the many animals on the family ranch his first “enemies,” and remembered with measured disdain the time he tumbled off the front porch into a pile of cow manure. Or the time his cousins threw him into a pig pen. Or how he suffered the torments of his schoolmates on the 80-mile bus ride to school: “They did make fun. It did not scar me for life. I overcompensated,” McMurtry later told Streitfeld. He read the 19 books to tatters, often sick in bed, staying home from school, “closeted like a tiny Proust.” (The stack included Sergeant Silk: The Prairie Scout, Poppy Ott and the Stuttering Parrot, and Jerry Todd in the Whispering Cave, all of them boys’ adventure books that would have been McMurtry’s first introduction to the western as a genre.) He didn’t remember learning to read at all or who, if anyone, taught him. But he quickly decided that reading was the thing he was meant to do, even if he had no idea what kind of vocation he could make of it.

Rob Manfred, the Major League Baseball commissioner, thinks this is the year to break the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), perhaps the country’s strongest union. Manfred represents the owners of the 30 major league teams, while the players association represents the 780 major league players and, since 2022, the approximately 5,500 minor leaguers.

Even before the new baseball season began in March, Manfred was employing his union-busting strategy. He hopes to divide the union members between the star players who, he argues, take in the lion’s share of total salaries, and the lower-paid players who he says are being shortchanged. Manfred and the owners are demanding a salary cap—which is actually a total payroll cap for every team, not a limit on individual players’ compensation—a move that the union has always opposed and insists it will not accept.

Among MLB’s team owners, 29 are billionaires. The wealthiest is the New York Mets’ Steve Cohen, whose net worth is $23 billion. The sole non-billionaire owner, the Miami Marlins’ Bruce Sherman, is worth $500 million. Both earned their fortunes in finance.

Baseball’s moguls, who made or inherited their wealth through the workings of free enterprise capitalism, want to limit what players can be paid. This apparent contradiction will most likely lead to a shutdown of baseball at the end of this season.

Bruce Meyer, the MLBPA’s new interim executive director, met with players on each team during his tour of spring training camps in February. He told The Nation that Manfred’s divide-and-conquer approach was “really nothing new.”

“This is something that’s been going on for decades, including in baseball,” said Meyer, who has worked for the union since 2018 and led several recent negotiations. “This is standard management-labor tactics.”

In anticipation of negotiations over a new five-year contract, Manfred sought to talk directly with players. This is like the CEO of General Motors demanding an audience at a United Auto Workers union meeting. Manfred claimed that the owners intend to “lock out” the players after this season. This is essentially a strike of owners, by refusing to allow the players to attend spring training next year. A lockout would potentially delay or even cancel next year’s regular season.

Last July, when Manfred visited the Philadelphia Phillies players in their clubhouse, Bryce Harper, the team’s star player, confronted Manfred, telling him to “get the fuck out of our clubhouse” if he wanted to talk about a salary cap.

While many fans regard a fight between owners and the players as a squabble between millionaires and billionaires, high-profile union battles have a way of resonating through the broader society. In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan busted the highly skilled Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, it sent a clear message that the federal government would look the other way if corporations broke labor laws. Overall union membership has steady declined since then, even though over two-thirds of Americans support unions, according to the Gallup poll.

If baseball’s owners defeat the players union, it will send another anti-union message to America’s corporate class. And if a lockout drags on, you can be sure that President Trump will try to intervene, given his penchant for surrounding himself with famous athletes and inserting himself into high-profile sports conflicts. In 2016, he told NFL owners to fire players, like Colin Kaepernick, who refused to stand during the national anthem protest over police brutality and racial inequality. Two years later, Trump engaged in a Twitter battle with NBA star LeBron James, who accused the president of “using sport to try to divide us”—meaning the country, not just athletes. Last year, Trump talked with Manfred and urged him to end MLB’s ban on disgraced Pete Rose’s eligibility for the Baseball Hall of Fame because as a player he bet on the sport and then lied about it to investigators. Manfred complied and changed the rules. In February, Trump called Olympic skier Hunter Hess a “real loser” after the athlete expressed “mixed emotions representing the US right now” in the Winter Olympic games. Trump invited the men’s gold-medal ice hockey team to his State of the Union address, and said he would also have to ask their female gold-medal-winning counterparts or he “probably would be impeached.” The women’s team declined Trump’s invitation.

It had been six months, almost to the day, since Florida Senator Rick Scott gave a speech at the Yale Political Union, when, on April 14, the oldest collegiate debate society in the United States heard from Hasan Piker. Piker is a left-wing online streamer who said, in a March 2025 livestream, “If you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott,” the former CEO of a healthcare company who had overseen a $1.7 billion settlement for Medicare and Medicaid fraud. This was, apparently, the relevant criteria for what Piker would later call “maximum punishment.”

For the first couple of days after the Yale Political Union announced the event, it seemed as though it might pass without any serious backlash. Then Laura Loomer got ahold of the event’s advertisement.

Loomer complained that parents were paying nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year to send their children to a communist indoctrination camp, where they were being taught to destroy America by a Muslim communist streamer who was, she noted, captured on video saying America deserved 9/11. Senator Rick Scott saw Loomer’s post and reshared it. “This is WILD,” he wrote. “I spoke at the Yale Political Union last year.… now they are hosting a guy who said I should be killed.” Scott called for action. “Yale receives billions from the federal government,” he declared. “President Trump and Congress need to IMMEDIATELY revoke it.”

Scott’s words seemed to imply that he wanted federal input on the Yale Political Union’s debate docket. But the group makes those decisions independently of the university, and it does not appear that anyone defrauded by Scott’s company was given any say about Yale Political Union’s decision to host Scott last October.

This spectacle—the announcement, the backlash, Scott’s rallying cry—finally made its way back to Yale when reporters at the Yale Daily News reached the president of the new Turning Point USA chapter on campus, who called Piker’s language anti-American and added, more pointedly, that it was “antithetical” to Yale’s mission to promote free speech.

Before the YDN had received those comments about what was American and what wasn’t, who could have free speech and who couldn’t, the discussion about the debate had been about Piker’s past words. About Scott, about 9/11, about antisemitism. But the Turning Point USA chapter president had come along and added free speech to the spectacle.

Then Piker weighed in.

On Monday, from his stream, Piker scrolled through the Yale Daily News article previewing his visit to Yale—until he reached the relevant quotes at the bottom. He read the words about free speech and anti-Americanism and said, “Charlie Kirk clearly had enough respect for me—he wanted to debate me at Dartmouth,” continuing, “So I don’t know what the fuck this guy is chirping about.”

On Tuesday, Piker began his seven-hour stream, from a hotel room with distracting wallpaper in New Haven, Connecticut. He talked for more than four hours about the news of the day. Then, around 6:45 he left and got into a car heading for Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall.

Four hundred students sat around me, eyeing the hall’s exit door and backroom entrance, longing for a glimpse of Piker’s arrival. The crowd thought they had spotted him entering a few times and clapped for rank-and-file Yale Political Union members whom they mistook for Piker.

Last Sunday was Easter—a day theologically dedicated to the triumph of life over death. But here in Lebanon, the air was heavy with grief. On April 8, Israel killed 303 people in at least 100 air strikes conducted across Lebanon in around 10 minutes—a day we have collectively called “Black Wednesday” since—with many still lost and unaccounted for.

Since the wider Israeli war on Lebanon began on October 8, 2023, there has been black Wednesday after black Wednesday. At The Public Source, the news outlet where I work, I’m part of a team that is counting our dead; there is no official toll being provided by our government. We meticulously note their names, their photos, their hometowns. We ask: Did they die alongside their entire family? Are they the children of fighters killed before them? Was a massacre committed by Israel in the strike that killed them? So far, Israel has killed at least 6,691 people, by our count, since October 8.

For the last two and a half years, being around the elders in my family at times like this has been the natural lens for reflection. Against all odds, we celebrated my mother’s Easter on Sunday. Her family is Syriac Orthodox, and my great-grandmother watched Ottoman soldiers stab her mother to death when she was just a girl. My maternal great-grandparents survived the Sayfo—the “sword” of Ottoman genocide that forced their people, the Assyrians, to flee the heartlands of upper Mesopotamia a century ago. My grandfather’s village, Azekh (now İdil), is known for its prolonged resistance to Ottoman erasure.

The Sunday before, April 5, we celebrated my father’s Easter. My paternal grandparents were forced out of Palestine in the Nakba that began in 1948, uprooted by the same Zionist death machine that today issues forced displacement orders and unleashes scorched-earth policies on the steadfast Lebanese villages of our south. And its goals for them are the same. The settler colonial state seeks to depopulate so that it may expand, to erase and destroy so that it may occupy.

To be all of these things in this moment in Lebanon’s history—a moment that has continued in perpetuity since the inception of the Zionist project—is to recognize that I live in a home built on survival. A century ago, my maternal great-grandparents fled Ottoman soldiers to find refuge here. Decades ago, my paternal grandparents fled Zionist militias. Today, I watch as Israeli occupation forces attempt to ethnically cleanse the entire south up to the Litani and Zahrani rivers, under the guise of a “security” belt.

Fifty-five years ago, Imam Musa al-Sadr foresaw this expansionism. In a televised speech, he emphasized that the danger “is not limited to Palestine…but will extend and extend, forming a threat to all regions of the east, and even to the west.” He mocked the “global stupidity” of colonial powers who believed they could rein Israel in.

The Sayfo and Nakba are not isolated tragedies. They are casualties of the same imperial line in the sand that today attempts to cut the south out of Lebanon; the very same imperial line through which the “Greater Israel” vision attempts to manifest on our soil.

During World War I, to secure their military service, the United Kingdom promised its “Smallest Ally,” the Assyrians, their ancestral homeland. In 1916, Sykes-Picot divvied up Bilad el-Sham between the French and British mandates. And then in 1923, the UK signed away the Assyrian homeland in Lausanne, and secured the new borders of its mandates under Paulet-Newcombe, creating what we now know as Lebanon.

When France took the mandate for Lebanon and the UK for Palestine, they each settled refugees of the Sayfo and Armenian Genocide. This “solved” the Assyrian problem and shed responsibility for their return. And it allowed France to create pro-French Christian buffers against Arab nationalist movements—a direct ancestor of Israel’s historical attempts to weaponize sectarian geography.

This colonial history is the obvious blueprint for the Zionist project. The architects who sidelined the survivors of the Sayfo to carve up Southwest Asia are the same ones who issued the Balfour Declaration and facilitated the Nakba. They have always viewed us not as a people tied to our soil but as demographic variables to be managed, displaced, or erased in service of greater imperial interests.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Once Confederate monuments are removed from their plinths, they do not simply lose their power. At the “Monuments” exhibition, they metamorphose. Brought indoors, stripped of their granite base, paint-bombed, broken, dented or cut open, they cease to function as public commands and begin to solicit scrutiny again: strangely seductive artifacts that can look ridiculous, brutal, theatrical, even beautiful. The achievement of the exhibition is that it largely refuses to deploy their damaged surfaces into the reassuring clarity of a morality play. Instead, we encounter the shapeshifting life of monuments, revealing how they persist, mutate, and acquire new power precisely when they are undone, stripped of their original meaning.

Curated by Bennett Simpson, Hamza Walker, and Kara Walker, the show is split between MoCA Geffen and The Brick. The former holds the bulk of the exhibition and the latter functions almost like a chamber piece. At the Geffen are nine largely “intact” decommissioned monuments, one monument rendered into bronze ingots, and fragments from the bases of the Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis monuments in Richmond, Virginia. Produced between 1887 and 1985, these objects are confronted by works from 18 artists and collectives made between 1990 and 2025. The Brick, by contrast, revolves around Kara Walker’s sculptural reworking of a Stonewall Jackson statue paired with archival imagery that recounts the monument’s history from its unveiling in 1921 to its removal a century later.

Rather than narrating American history as linear, the exhibition stages the life cycle of the Confederate monument itself. It begins with the monument’s original function in the Lost Cause era: to turn defeat into dignity, grievance into stone and bronze. But it also shows what happened after that meaning hardened and then began to crack through the civil rights era, through decades of uneasy civic coexistence, and finally through the recent wave of protest, defacement, removal, and decommissioning. The decommissioned monument emerges here as a time-thick object, one that has accumulated layer upon layer of political meaning without ever fully shedding the old one.

The contemporary artworks in “Monuments” serve several functions at once: They investigate the history of antebellum Confederate imagery beyond the pedestal, test the continued force of monumental form, and at times explore counter models of memory. The exhibition’s best moments resist the temptation to turn history into a diagram and cleanly separate these functions into binaries.

Fraser’s Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson (1948) and Thomas’s A Suspension of Hostilities (2019) is one of the exhibition’s most striking and disquieting juxtapositions. On paper, the contrast seems easy enough: A bronze equestrian monument to Confederate heroism faces a verticalized replica of the “General Lee,” the muscle car from The Dukes of Hazzard, another vehicle through which Confederate iconography was naturalized in American popular culture. But the pairing is more unsettling because of how they operate with a surprising formal kinship. Both are upright, frontal, weighty, and imposing; both address the viewer through mass, scale, and a kind of declarative stillness. The question, then, is not only what the Lost Cause taught but also how it ciruclated—through which forms, which postures, which repetitions of authority, seduction, and spectacle.

If Thomas’s sculpture exposes the migration of Confederate myth from civic monument to entertainment commodity, it also recognizes that the inherent meaning, or grammar, of the monument survives the shift. This is where the exhibition is at its strongest, when juxtaposition produces not a tidy correction. Instead, seeming difference gives way to formal resemblance, creating an uncanny parallel that the viewer has to grapple with.

“Monuments” is at its most searching when it asks how political myth is made to feel like mourning. One of the most charged examples is the pairing of J. Maxwell Miller’s Confederate Women of Maryland (1917) with Jon Henry’s Strange Fruit photographs (2014–21). Both stage the mourning mother, the broken son, the downward weight of grief held in the body; both rely on a Christian image tradition of maternal lament, most immediately the Pietà. That echo is productive precisely because it is not equalizing. Miller’s monument mobilizes maternal grief in the service of Lost Cause redemption, turning Confederate defeat into a sanctified image of suffering; Henry’s photographs, by contrast, return the maternal lament to the history of racial violence from which such monuments sought to avert their gaze. The pairing presses on a harder question: not whether mourning is universal but how it gets politicized. What made the Lost Cause so seductive to its adherents? Was it because the movement could present itself through the language of care, tenderness, and bereavement? And how does religious imagery help monuments convert ideology into feeling? How does commemoration depend less on the ability to claim injury, sacrifice, and the promise of redemption?

For the most part, the exhibition’s two modes—contemporary art and historical monument—feed off each other: Their meanings are intensified, as if each work were refracting the other into sharper visibility. The exhibition’s logic of refraction extends to the question of redemption. In Lost Cause monuments, the redemptive arc is built in. A case in point is Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl’s Confederate Soldiers and Sailors (1903), with its angel bearing a fallen man heavenward, turns Confederate defeat into sacred vindication; even the red paint splattered across its dark bronze now intensifies the sculpture’s injured, martyred pathos.

Davóne Tines and Julie Dash’s HOMEGOING (2025) is one of the only contemporary works willing to meet that redemptive logic head-on. Commissioned by the curators for the 10th anniversary of the 2015 massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, and carried by Tines’s immense rendition of “This Little Light of Mine,” the video stages an ascent of another kind: not mythic absolution but the difficult, collective labor of mourning through song. Tines’s voice rises, but not with the easy upward arc of allegory. It carries grief, witness, and endurance without pretending that history can be washed clean. It is one of the exhibition’s most moving and beautiful works.

If the Lost Cause monuments teach through pathos and redemption, they do so without usually depicting the enemy they require. This is one of the exhibition’s more revealing fault lines. Compared to the contemporary art on display, the Confederate sculptures are notably absent in their depiction of explicit antagonists: No Union soldier appears, no freed slave, no Lincoln. Perhaps that absence is itself telling. Their enemy must remain implicit. The placement of Edward Valentine’s dented and paint-splattered Jefferson Davis (1907) vis-à-vis Andres Serrano’s extraordinary photographic series The Klan (1990) makes that submerged antagonism explicit. Serrano’s isolated, frontal, sharply lit Klansmen are stranger and more disturbing than straightforward illustrations of evil. Deploying the cool conventions of fashion and studio portraiture, the photographs turn the exhibition upside down, asking not how a culture sanctifies its heroes but how it imagines its enemy. Turns out, monuments can also help produce the figures we learn to fear, hate, and oppose.

“Everyone left in El Fasher has changed,” said Ahmed Suleiman, who has seen more than 260 Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacks since the paramilitary laid siege to North Darfur State’s capital. Three blood-soaked years after Sudan’s civil war broke out in April 2023, rates of infectious disease, displacement, and malnutrition have reached a fever pitch in the Darfur region—now a critical battle zone.

Suleiman, the program manager of the Darfur Organization for Development and Human Resources, has grown numb to the continuous artillery shelling and drone strikes, but he describes the ache of watching people die of hunger as cholera tears through an already weakened population. “There is a huge number of bodies,” he said, “scattered in open air, homes, inside water tanks within houses, and some bodies were not properly buried.”

Without any meaningful way to tamp down the spread of disease, the fighting in Sudan has created a perfect storm for cholera outbreaks, exacerbated by the severe lack of access to clean water and food for most residents of North Darfur. The region forms part of Sudan’s western frontier, known for its vast plains, jagged volcanic peaks to the south, and arid savannahs which blend into Libyan deserts to the north.

Since the fighting began, the number of cholera cases has risen at an alarming rate. Worsening famine, intensified by USAID cuts in a region where up to half of all international aid was American, have accelerated infection rates. The intestinal disease is marked by a severe and total depletion of salt and water in the body, and is called the “unrelenting killer” for its ability to spread rapidly, most often through contaminated water sources.

“Patients die of severe, unstoppable dehydration; there are tons of fluid in their bodies that they must expel with diarrhea. These are lives which can and should be saved with proper rehydration salts,” said Dr. Manal Shams Eldin, an epidemiologist and researcher with Doctors Without Borders. “It’s a sad disease, a disease of poor hygiene and no access to clean water.”

In 2003, rebels attacked the Sudanese government, protesting the marginalization of non-Arabs and launching the modern Darfur conflict. The Khartoum government’s response was to deploy the Janjaweed, an Arab militia that steamrolled Darfur. A ceasefire agreement in 2004 and international peacekeeping missions in 2008 and 2010 did little to slow the carnage. By 2014, the United Nations reported that more than 3,000 villages in Darfur had been razed and that rampant sexual violence, among other human rights violations, was pervasive.

The Janjaweed raids were notable for their brutal tactics, primarily targeting civilian villages. Following attacks by air, Janjaweed infantry rushed through towns, murdering men, raping women, and kidnapping children. Though international governments vehemently denounced the genocide, it took, by some estimates, over 10 years and more than 20,000 peacekeeping troops to curtail the violence. Millions of Sudanese have been displaced and hundreds of thousands were killed. Healthcare infrastructure was all but rubbed out and the march to recovery has been punishingly slow.

In April 2023, wavering efforts to rebuild infrastructure ground to a halt with the outbreak of the Sudanese civil war. North Darfur has been a strategic target for both warring factions in Sudan: the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary RSF. Since May 2024, as reported by Al Jazeera, the RSF has maintained a bombardment of El Fasher, cutting off supply routes and trapping 260,000 people, 130,000 of whom are children. The military progress of the RSF has prevented sorely needed humanitarian aid from entering the city.

Dr. Mohamed Almahal, the Sudanese American Medical Association’s executive director, described a dire situation in western Sudan and efforts to help going in vain. “[El Fasher has] become a symbol of resilience for the Sudanese people who really don’t want [it] to fall to the RSF,” he said, referring to the continuing deadlock in the struggle. “Even military personnel are struggling without food, becoming completely exhausted. And for those stuck in El Fasher, there seems to be no hope on the horizon.”

Health systems were already groaning under the weight of entire towns annihilated by the fighting, but a series of targeted attacks on healthcare centers has left providers at a complete dead end. Heavy artillery strikes last October left the city an “open morgue,” with hospitals and shelters pulverized, according to the El Fasher Resistance Committees Coordination. Each blow leaves the region weaker and more vulnerable to food insecurity and health threats. In the months since, conditions in El Fasher have remained as dismal as ever, according to Almahal.

Conservative New York Times columnists have historically occupied a peculiar place in the discourse. They have to intellectualize conservative positions, but in a way that flatters the sensibilities of a center-left audience. This has created a strange genre of writing from the likes of Bret Stephens and David Brooks (who now works at The Atlantic) that will often employ personal anecdotes to highlight positions like “Trump Just Reminded Me of Why I’m Still a Neocon” or “I Detest Netanyahu, but on Some Things He’s Actually Right”. While this approach may come wrapped in more elegant packaging than a Fox News rant, it ultimately serves a similar function: to manufacture consent for a right-wing—and, in the case of Netanyahu, an openly genocidal—agenda while creating enough moral distance to placate the Times’ readership.

Ross Douthat, the paper’s current leading conservative writer, doesn’t quite fit this mold—if only because his brand of conservatism is a little different than the Stephens-Brooks version. For one, Douthat is markedly more socially conservative. His rise as a columnist hinged on his anti-abortion Catholic views, and he still distinguishes himself as a heterodox religious voice within the liberal institution.

But while his religious takes are quite confident, his political views present as more searching and less self-assured. For example, Douthat refused to take a position in the 2024 presidential election between President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, hedging his choice in a column days before the vote. These two modes complement each other. By playing his political cards closer to his chest, Douthat is able to create the appearance that he is carefully thinking through hard choices, which has helped to bolster his credibility with a wider audience. And by leaning on his faith, including in his most recent book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, he positions himself as politically skeptical of various groups—namely liberal institutions, Silicon Valley, and MAGA.

All of these strains of Douthat’s public persona have come together in his most prominent forum yet—his podcast Interesting Times, which, somewhat improbably, has turned Douthat into a liberal darling. A recent profile for Slate explained that the podcast creates “a communication line between us embattled liberals and the barbarians at the gates”; the piece’s headline called Douthat “the one conservative liberals will actually listen to.”

But appearances can be deceiving. In the inaugural episode, Douthat introduced the show as “a set of conversations that attempt to map out the new political order with people at the forefront.” And Interesting Times certainly does feature conversations; Douthat has conducted over 50 interviews since the show premiered this past April, with the likes of billionaires, politicians, political operatives, activists, and others of many political stripes. But while Douthat loves to have a left-leaning figure to spar with every once in a while, like Hasan Piker or Chris Hayes, the show’s guests skew, by my calculations, overwhelmingly male (83 percent of guests) and right-wing (83 percentof guests). Rather than a rolling debate between all sides of the spectrum, the audience has instead mostly been treated to a nightmare blunt rotation of seedy characters like Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and Christian nationalist Doug Wilson.

According to Slate, “Douthat finds plenty of disagreements” with all of his guests, and “examines those fault lines and probes moments of tension…without ever fully tipping over.” But Douthat’s good-faith interviews often fail to grapple with bad actors acting in bad faith. One recent interview was with the Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl about his book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart. (Carl was nominated for a State Department post but was forced to withdraw in March because his white nationalist views were too extreme even for Senate Republicans.)

Over the course of the interview, Douthat pressed Carl on his positions about “cultural genocide” and legal bases for “anti-white discrimination.” After establishing that American in-groups have always shunned outsiders, Carl was asked why he opposes wholesale immigration, and claimed that “visual differences in many groups that are coming over create more challenges to assimilation.” In response, Douthat credulously asked, “What do you mean by visual differences—clothes?,” as if to imply he didn’t understand his guest’s euphemism for skin color.

Despite discussing the supposed negative influence of racial and ethnic minorities on “American culture” for an hour, the minority that bankrolls Carl’s work remained completely out of focus. The Claremont Institute is funded by right-wing billionaires, including the Scaife, Bradley, and DeVos families. As the think tank’s profile has grown alongside the Trump administration’s rise to power, the group has invested in muddying the waters on election-fraud claims and creating intellectual justifications for fringe positions on race and immigration. In Douthat’s theory of the world, Carl’s views might be a little odious, but they help his audience make sense of the new right.

Douthat frequently engages in these kinds of good-faith interviews with bad-faith guests. His inaugural three episodes featured Steve Bannon, Christopher Rufo, and Marc Andreessen—three guys who, like Carl, are well-funded anti-woke crusaders. But Douthat gives these characters a fair shake and plenty of space to air their views, yet fails to map out the financial interests or scandals that might compromise their credibility. Shortly before appearing on the podcast, Bannon pleaded guilty to fundraising to build a portion of the southern border wall and ultimately pocketing the money, raising questions about where Bannon’s political arguments end and grifting begins. Yet, as Bannon railed against immigrants on Interesting Times, Douthat failed to ask him about how he defrauded his audience.

Rufo, like Carl, is a compromised think-tank operative and beneficiary of right-wing dark money, but Douthat focused on how he came to harbor his own views on gutting the Department of Education, and not the powerful backers who share them. Andreessen, the Silicon Valley tycoon, blamed his rightward evolution on the children of elites who attended “politically radical institutions” and learned how to become “America-hating communists” who infiltrate and “capture” Silicon Valley companies. Douthat mostly let these strawman arguments float by. And he hardly scratched the surface of Andreessen’s heavy pivot toward defense tech—funding companies and start-ups that stand to clean up from instability.

Our daughter, Rachel Corrie, was killed in 2003 in Gaza, while trying to protect a Palestinian home facing illegal destruction by the Israeli military. She was 23 years old. The massive, armored Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer that crushed her was manufactured in the United States. It was the same type of militarized bulldozer that US presidents from George W. Bush through to Donald Trump have delivered to Israel.

Today, Senator Bernie Sanders will force a vote in the Senate to try to end this cycle of death by banning the transfer of D-9 bulldozers to Israel. We hope he will not take this stand alone.

In his final months in office, President Joe Biden blocked the shipment of militarized bulldozers to Israel, finally recognizing the role the machines play in Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian homes. But one of President Trump’s first acts upon taking office was to overturn that decision and resume the transfers. In the months since, Israel has only accelerated its destruction of homes, not just in Gaza but in the West Bank too, and now in its invasion of southern Lebanon.

What does it say about our country’s values when, in violation of international and US law, we continue to use taxpayer money to supply Israel with machines that kill, and that destroy homes halfway around the world—all while many Americans sleep on the street and young people have given up on one day owning a home for themselves? What responsibility do we bear to change this?

The word “bulldozer” may conjure images of construction, of building and rebuilding. But these machines are not being sent to Gaza for these purposes. Israel has blocked the entry of heavy machinery and construction materials into Gaza, even as the land lies in ruin from Israel’s genocidal, indiscriminate bombing campaign, and nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians have nowhere to live. The Rafah crossing into Gaza remains closed by Israel, blocking desperately needed supplies and equipment that could begin to rebuild homes, hospitals, and schools.

Caterpillar bulldozers are being used not to build but to destroy—to erase communities and deliberately make land uninhabitable. If Israel were serious about reconstruction, it would open the crossings and allow needed machinery in. Instead, it is importing American bulldozers to tear down what little remains.

Rachel believed she had a responsibility to fight for change. She went to Gaza to act in solidarity with Palestinian families who were being thrown out of their homes illegally. In the weeks before her killing, she wrote about neighborhoods reduced to rubble, and the looming presence of bulldozers that could arrive at any moment to erase homes and entire families’ histories.

At about 5 pm, on March 16, 2003, wearing a brightly colored vest, Rachel stood to prevent another such home destruction. Witnesses say she was in plain sight of the 60-ton Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer in front of her. The two Israeli soldiers operating the bulldozer did not stop.

In the decades since, our family has sought accountability—not just for Rachel’s killing but for the system that enabled it. Since her death, over a dozen Americans have been killed by the Israeli military or Israeli settlers. But the Israeli government has never charged anyone—and successive governments have failed to open independent investigations into Rachel’s and other cases. The destruction of Palestinian homes has only become more commonplace, not to mention the horror of Israel’s genocide. And American taxpayers continue to fund it all.

No policy can bring back those taken from us by these actions—children and other loved ones. But the Senate now has an opportunity to honor the memories of our daughter, other Americans, and thousands of Palestinian civilians killed, and to show that their deaths, and all the destruction, will no longer be condoned and funded. We hope those elected to represent us, the American people, understand the message that voting to block these D-9 bulldozers will send. This will not be a symbolic gesture, but a concrete step toward the protection of human life.

Just weeks before she was killed in Gaza, Rachel wrote to us, “This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop…. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it.” Rachel embodied the conviction and courage that have continued to inspire her family and many others. We urge all of our elected officials to act with the same conviction and courage, and with devotion to the better country and world Rachel believed in and fought for. We call on all US senators to vote yes on Senator Sanders’s Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block the transfer of Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers and other weaponry to the Israeli military.

Silicon Valley would not exist without government-funded research. Foundational technologies, including the semiconductor and the Internet, emerged from Cold War–era military research programs. As graduate students at Stanford, Larry Paige and Sergey Brin relied on funding from the National Science Foundation to develop the search algorithms that would eventually become Google. The touchscreens and lithium-ion batteries that we now carry around all day were likewise developed in university labs funded by government grants. Even generative AI—incessantly touted as the crowning achievement of the free market, upon which the fate of the American economy depends—emerged out of decades of research underwritten by the Department of Defense (DOD). Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winner known as the Godfather of AI, left his academic position in the United States precisely because he wanted to avoid Pentagon contracts. Hinton nevertheless turned to the Canadian government to help fund his lab at the University of Toronto, which eventually produced leading AI researchers for OpenAI, Google, and Meta.

Given how much Silicon Valley has profited from government-funded research over the years, you might expect a certain amount of reverence for the system. At the very least, even the staunchest techno-libertarian rationalists should recognize the value in not killing their golden goose. Yet Silicon Valley elites are at the very heart of the Trump administration’s devastating assault on public science funding—and, not coincidentally, have positioned themselves to profit off the wreckage. In particular, conservative venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point” and vowed that universities would “pay the price” after “they declared war on 70% of the country.” Most troublingly, Andreessen called for the National Science Foundation to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.”

Thiel has long set his sights on shifting federal research dollars from universities to private industry. In numerous interviews, Thiel has pointed out that we have 100 times as many science PhDs as we had a century ago, yet the rate of progress is about the same. The claim itself is dubious. He offers no clear benchmark by which to measure scientific progress, nor does he consider the possibility that science has become more complicated after a century of advancement. Could it be that more bureaucracy, however flawed, is needed to operate a Large Hadron Collider as compared to a microscope and Bunsen burner? For Thiel, the answer is a definitive no: “The average PhD is 99% less productive than people were 100 years ago,” he concludes with unwavering confidence. But even he cannot ignore the successes of Cold War research programs. However much it might pain his libertarian soul, Thiel acknowledges that DARPA—the research and development arm of the DOD—functioned well early on, but he has conveniently decided that it was a one-time acceleration that “came at the price of completely corrupting the institutions.”

In any case, the justifications now matter less than the actual results. Trump entered his second term with a plan to cut federal science funding and extort prominent universities with threats of targeted budget cuts. The attacks were orchestrated by Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who previously served as the chief of staff to Thiel at his venture capital fund. The proposed budget included funding reductions of 40 percent for the National Institute of Health, 57 percent for the National Science Foundation, and 24 percent for NASA.

Although Congress has since attempted to roll back some of the cuts, the administration has already inflicted enormous damage. Over 10,000 federal workers with STEM PhDs left the federal workforce last year. University labs have been forced to fire researchers, cancel studies, or just shut down operations altogether. Some academics sought refuge in Europe; others retired early. An unmistakable chill has taken hold of the scientific establishment—one that will linger long after the Trump presidency.

Why would tech billionaires attack a system that made them enormously wealthy at virtually no personal cost? The most obvious explanation is that much of that newly freed-up funding can be redirected to the tech industry. Thiel and Andreessen position start-ups as the remedy to the supposedly bloated, inefficient scientific bureaucracy. They cast themselves as the true champions of science, locked in an existential battle against pencil-pushing charlatans. If Newton were around today, the thinking goes, he would be applying to Y Combinator and ordering swag for his B2B SaaS start-up. This grandiosity is coupled with a strong sense of paranoia. In a 2025 interview, Andreessen described the Biden administration as being preoccupied with “the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation, and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation,” concluding: “Absolutely tried to kill us.”

When Trump took power, it was their turn to strike back. As science budgets got axed, portfolio companies backed by either Thiel or Andreessen—and sometimes both—received billions of dollars in federal contracts. The administration quickly deregulated crypto and threatened to punish states that enacted “onerous and excessive laws” relating to AI. This agenda was spearheaded by Trump’s policy advisers, including the billionaire venture capitalist David Sacks, who led PayPal alongside Thiel, and Sriram Krishnan, who was previously a partner at Andreessen’s investment firm.

The attacks on science also created a new talent pool for Silicon Valley to exploit: newly displaced STEM researchers. Within the AI industry, executives frequently cite the goal of creating models that are “PhD-level experts” across various academic disciplines. But training those models requires actual PhD-level experts to write relevant prompts, generate training data, and verify the output. How do you get someone with a doctoral degree in physics or math to sit down and solve hundreds of challenging problems? One way is to hire them, pay a competitive salary, and offer health insurance. Another, perhaps less obvious, approach is to kill off as many of the previous job opportunities as possible, such that highly credentialed researchers might be enticed to perform mind-numbing gig work for $30 an hour.

As a food delivery worker in New York City, Gustavo Ajche realized during the pandemic that there were few spaces for workers like him to rest between delivering orders. The Fulton Street subway station or the open lobby at 60 Wall Street have long been gathering spots for deliveristas like him who work in the lower Manhattan and Brooklyn area.

“We’ve always thought that it would be great if we could have a space where we could rest or get a coffee when we are working,” Ajche, an immigrant from Guatemala and a cofounder of Los Deliverista Unidos, a delivery workers group said.

A little over five years later, that idea turned into a reality when the country’s first deliverista hub for delivery workers was opened near City Hall in New York on April 7.

The hub on Broadway near Murray Street was first announced by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who pledged to use funds from a $1 trillion infrastructure bill to build rest stops for delivery workers in October 2021.

After Schumer secured $1 million in federal funds, delivery workers and their advocates had hoped to move quickly to build the hub on Parks Department land. The project made little progress under the Eric Adams administration, and the Manhattan Community Board 1, a local advisory body that represents the neighborhood around City Hall, rejected the plan in 2024. The board said it felt like the hub’s modern design was out of step with the historic area and worried that it would draw crowds. They, however, could not legally stop the project and in January, the Mamdani administration made completing the hub a priority.

At the ribbon cutting last week, Schumer addressed the delays. “For years, my office pushed and prodded the previous administration, overcoming bureaucratic hurdles, overcoming inertia,” he said. “I want to congratulate the new administration. They have moved quickly to expedite the process.”

On opening day, the deliverista hub, which consists of two rooms and no furniture, was still not fully operational—Con Edison had been unable to locate the electrical connection and said it would have to return. There will also be no bathroom, because of a lack of water hookups.

But workers and advocates were excited that the space they had been organizing for was now a reality. “We live in a system where the entire city has been designed for the wealthy, for the cars. Why not for working people?” asked Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Workers Justice Project.

Guallpa said the hub will also serve as a space to organize more workers. In one of the rooms, Workers Justice Project staff will be on hand to help delivery workers challenge app deactivations and recover stolen wages and tips.

The hub will be open Monday through Friday from 11 am to 5 pm. Workers can also fix flats, charge their e-bikes on two exterior charging cabinets, and charge their phones at the hub. E-bikers can drop off the battery and check the progress via a mobile app, which will alert them when the battery is ready to be picked up. “We can come here before or after the lunch rush or before the dinner orders start coming in,” said Ajche.

The charging and rest hubs were one of the key aims of Los Deliveristas Unidos, which was formed in the pandemic in 2020 by Ajche and Guallpa. The city’s 80,000 delivery workers, 90 percent of them immigrants, complete 2.64 million deliveries every week, and they now hope to open similar hubs in the Upper West Side and in the Bronx under an administration receptive of their ideas.

The hub opening is the latest in a series of actions by the Mamdani administration against gig companies—since January, the city has sued a delivery app for wage theft and secured a $5.2 million settlement from Uber Eats, HungryPanda, and Fantuan for shortchanging nearly 50,000 workers.

“The streets are our workplaces, and we must fight so that dignity exists here,” Ajche said “We celebrate today, but the work is not finished. Our work ends when every worker in this city has full rights, safety, fair pay and dignity.”

I’ve been a member of the Democratic National Committee for 33 years. In that time, I’ve gone to scores of meetings and have frequently been left frustrated by the lack of membership engagement I’ve seen. This past weekend’s meeting in New Orleans was different, for reasons I’ll describe below.

Throughout my DNC tenure, I, along with other like-minded members, have fought for reforms in how the party operates—particularly for more financial transparency, accountability, and internal democracy.

Current DNC chair Ken Martin was elected a little over a year ago in part because he promised to implement these kinds of reforms—and, indeed, some of that work was in evidence in New Orleans. There’s greater transparency in the budget. The DNC’s allocation to state parties has been dramatically increased (causing some of the consultant class to complain that there’s less for them). Instead of the chair appointing all of the at-large members to the DNC and selecting who would sit on the decision-making standing committees, the membership elected by their states or party caucuses and councils are now empowered to vote on a portion of the at-large positions. While more can always be done, these initial steps are consequential.

There were two other significant developments at this past week’s meetings that must be noted. First and foremost is Martin’s insistence that we take steps to stop corporate and dark money from taking over our elections. The second was the debate on this issue that occurred during the DNC’s general session.

At the August 2025 meeting of party members, Martin was able to pass a resolution that called for banning corporate and dark money from Democratic presidential primaries. Dark money refers to election spending that is not subject to federally imposed limits or reporting requirements. It does not include contributions to campaigns by individuals or registered political action committees—both of which have established limits and must be reported to the Federal Election Commission and then released to the public at regular intervals. Nor does it include actions by membership groups that are entitled to endorse candidates and spend money in consultation with their members. These are also regulated by law and must be reported.

By contrast, the nearly unregulated dark money world allows billionaires to create groups with nondescriptive names that will spend millions of dollars in a campaign to boost or tank favored candidates or causes—all without disclosing any of this activity to the public. The amounts of such dark money outlays have grown so dramatically in recent years that in several competitive races they exceed by 10 times the amounts spent by the candidates themselves or the party’s committees supporting them.

In 2023 and 2024, I was part of a group that attempted to get the DNC to pass a resolution that would ban dark money in all Democratic primaries. In both instances, we failed. And so we were delighted when chair Martin took the lead last year in passing his resolution to ban dark money in presidential primaries. His focus was limited to presidential primaries for two reasons. While dark money is a problem in all elections, the party has greater control over the processes involved in presidential primaries, so they are the best place to start dealing with this problem. Second, Martin’s resolution deals only with primaries so as not to suggest that Democrats would unilaterally disarm in a general election against Republicans. Following the passage of his resolution, Martin created a Reform Task Force to develop the plan to implement this dark-money ban in time for the 2028 presidential primaries.

At last weekend’s meeting, two separate additional resolutions on dark money were submitted by some members to the party’s Resolutions Committee. One called for banning dark money from groups supporting artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency interests. The other noted the negative role played by pro-Israel individuals and groups that have targeted progressive candidates for defeat. The first resolution was amended to strip mention of the specific groups cited. The second was defeated and passed on to the party’s Middle East Working Group.

At the general meeting, when the final report from the Resolution Committee was introduced for consideration, a motion was introduced from the floor to reconsider adding back into the final resolutions package the two original proposals that mentioned the three named sources of dark money. Both Chair Martin and Resolutions Committee Chair Ron Harris concurred that the motion to reconsider be debated, and a debate ensued with multiple speeches for and against. The motion was ultimately defeated, but was nevertheless noteworthy. Here’s why.

In my more than three decades as a DNC member, with 11 of them serving as chair of the Resolutions Committee, there have only been a handful of occasions where an issue of controversy was actually debated and then voted on by the full membership. Because of this, I have sometimes described being a DNC member as akin to being a prop to fill seats at meetings to listen to speeches. Because I’m a Catholic, I’ve felt I could compare it to going to church, where we learn when to stand up, when to sit down, when to clap, when to leave, and not to ask tough questions.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

There’s money to be made in California this spring, no start-up pitch or buzzy screenplay required. Instead, signatures are one of the state’s most coveted commodities: Campaigns are paying $15 apiece to those willing to collect them.

Petition distributors can thank Sergey Brin for this pay bump. In an effort to kill California’s proposed billionaire tax, the Google cofounder and other local tycoons are funding a political group that has hiked the going rate for signatures collected in support of countermeasures. In all, foes of the wealth tax are expected to spend $75 million in their attempt to quash the proposal. Brin himself has donated $45 million to the cause—a sum that suggests he just might be able to afford a higher tax bill.

Billionaires offering bounties for signatures is just the latest indignity in a political system long defined by the machinations of the wealthy. With more than $125 million poured into advertising, Texas’s recent Senate election was the most expensive primary race ever. In 2024, billionaires contributed 19 percent of all reported donations to federal elections, while AIPAC and an associated super PAC spent nearly $100 million. That’s also how much one AI industry group plans to shell out during this year’s midterms. The political funding arms race is deepening. And all that most Americans can afford to bring to the fight is one vote.

The crisis has escalated since 2010, when the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision shredded limits on independent corporate election spending, fueling the cash-flush super PACs and anonymous dark-money nonprofits that now dominate our political economy. Cycle after cycle, the proportion of that money that is untraceable has only increased. In 2024, $1.5 billion in super PAC donations came from organizations that aren’t required to name their donors.

Though plenty of individual Democrats and Republicans have been buoyed by this deluge of dollars, the ruling has, on balance, boosted conservatives. In states where Citizens United struck down existing bans on corporate donations, Republicans received a four-point electoral bump, even though voters themselves didn’t move to the right.

Rampant income inequality has also fueled a parallel democratic deficit. The richest 10 percent of Americans now own 93 percent of the stock market, and the number of billionaires in the US has increased by 50 percent in the last eight years. This means a larger pool of individuals with essentially unlimited political spending power. Only 23 Americans donated $1 million or more in the 2004 election. Twenty years later, 408 people did the same.

Even now, the Supreme Court is considering dismantling one of the final restrictions on big money in politics, a law that caps the amount party organizations can spend in coordination with campaigns. But to do so would be to exacerbate a status quo that is already extraordinarily unpopular: more than three-quarters of Americans disagree with the Citizens United ruling, and approximately 80 percent say that Congress is unduly influenced by donors.

When Cam, a federal worker who has worked for the government for eight years, came out as nonbinary to their colleagues, it was “nerve-racking,” they said. But their federal coworkers were supportive, and the environment felt accepting. After coming out, Cam used whatever bathrooms felt right for them. Being able to be open with their coworkers, Cam said, felt like making it to the top of “a mountain.”

Now everything has changed. Cam—a pseudonym to protect them from retaliation—still works for the same federal agency, but the reality for trans and nonbinary federal workers has been completely turned upside down. In the first days of his second administration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to “protect men and women as biologically distinct sexes.” Shortly after, the Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to all agencies telling them to implement the order by, among other things, ensuring that bathrooms and are “designated by biological sex and not gender identity.”

Now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with protecting federal and private-sector workers alike from illegal discrimination, has issued a decision that reverses its previous, decade-old stance that federal employees are protected from gender identity discrimination by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. At the end of February, it found that law’s prohibitions against discrimination based on sex do not prevent a federal agency from forcing trans employees to use bathrooms that don’t align with their gender identity. The decision “is consistent with the plain meaning of ‘sex’ as understood by Congress at the time Title VII was enacted,” EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas said in a statement. “Biology is not bigotry.” It gives federal agencies official permission to deny access to bathrooms that align with people’s gender identities.

Today, Cam has started avoiding the men’s bathroom at work. Most of the time, they leave their workplace entirely to use gender-neutral bathrooms at a nearby building, which takes a half hour. “I just hope that nobody keeps an eye on it because I am away from my work computer,” they said. If the need is more urgent, they’ll use a bathroom on the first floor that doesn’t get used as frequently. “I am getting used to it, unfortunately,” they said. Still, they added, “I’m frustrated each and every time.”

“Before there were stepping stones and clear steps” Cam felt they could take to be accepted as themselves at work, they said. “Now I feel like those steps are not there and I’m on a hill of gravel.”

Former EEOC chair Chai Feldblum echoed how massive the shift was. “For 10 years, federal transgender employees had an absolute guarantee that they could use the restrooms and facilities consistent with their gender identity,” Feldblum told me. “That guarantee has now been pulled out from under them and then reversed completely.” After this decision, trans and nonbinary federal employees who find access to bathrooms that align with their identities at work cut off have no recourse. “What do these workers do on a day-to-day basis?” said an EEOC employee. “Where should they simply go to meet their basic biological needs?”

The evidence is that they will incur physical costs to avoid using the bathroom as much as possible. In a 2015 survey of transgender people, over half of respondents reported not using the bathroom when they needed it, while a third avoided eating or drinking so that they had to use it less. The health consequences were clear: Eight percent had experienced a urinary tract or kidney problem due to bathroom avoidance over the previous year. In a 2008 survey of transgender people in Washington, DC, who had problems using restrooms at work, 13 percent said it affected their employment by having to change or quit their jobs, negatively affecting their performance, or leading to excessive absences. In a pending class-action lawsuit brought by federal employees, the lead plaintiff, transgender Illinois National Guard employee LeAnne Withrow, says she regularly starves herself by skipping breakfast every day and often lunch and dehydrates herself by drinking a single cup of coffee and as little water as possible to avoid using the bathroom.

The EEOC decision was approved by a two to one vote; Kalpana Kotagal, the sole remaining Democratic commissioner after President Trump fired two others before their terms were up, dissented. “No one should have to risk harassment or health issues just to be able to provide for themselves and their families,” Kotagal said in a statement about her vote.

“Really we just want to go about our day like anybody else,” Cam said. “We are humans just like everybody else.”

Besides defending private-sector workers against violations of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the EEOC fields discrimination complaints from federal workers. But unlike in the private sector, where it can bring litigation but can’t issue decisions that set legal precedent, its Office of Federal Operations has a quasi-judicial power to issue decisions that affect the entire federal workforce. It was under those exact powers that, in 2015, the agency found that federal employees must be allowed to use bathrooms that align with their identities or they would be subjected to a hostile work environment. That came after a 2012 EEOC decision finding that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination prohibits firing a federal employee based on their gender identity because such discrimination is based on sex. “You were fine when she was a man working for you,” Feldblum, the commissioner at the time who wrote those decisions, explained. “When she’s a woman, you fire her—the only thing that has changed is sex.”

The Catholic Church’s first American pope, the former Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago, now Pope Leo, has emerged as an increasingly vocal and essential voice of global conscience, advocating for peace in the Middle East, attacking the American abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and calling for an end to the mass deportation of immigrants. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth invokes God and Jesus in our illegal war with Iran, Leo has retorted that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” He said Trump’s threat against Iran, that a “whole civilization will die tonight” was “truly unacceptable.” He never mentioned Donald Trump by name in his statements, until today, but we all know who the bad guy is, according to Leo’s moral accounting.

Trump has struck back before, but Sunday night he went berserk. “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” the president wrote on Truth Social, as though the pope is a big-city mayor or a Senate candidate. He said he doesn’t “want a Pope who criticizes the President of the United States because I’m doing exactly what I was elected, IN A LANDSLIDE, to do.” (There was no landslide.) Oh, and he was really bugged by the pope’s visit with “Obama Sympathizers like David Axelrod” (more on that later). Trump then posted a creepy AI version of himself as Jesus Christ, “healing” a man in an apparent sickbed. Again, it’s a kind of projection: Trump is truly sick and in need of healing. Fast.

“I have no fear neither of the Trump administration, nor of speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel,” the pope told reporters on his plane as he headed for a visit to Algeria and several other African countries.  They asked about Trump’s comments on Truth Social, and Leo responded: “It’s ironic—the name of the site itself. Say no more.” He added: “I do believe the message of the Gospel—‘blessed are the peacemakers’—is the message that the world needs to hear today.”

Trump’s escalation comes after a shocking report last week by Bari Weiss’s Free Press that senior US military officials called a top Vatican diplomat to the Pentagon in January. Anonymous sources “described it as a bitter lecture warning that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants—and that the Church had better take its side.” Trump’s representatives even reportedly invoked the memory of the Avignon Papacy, a 14th century crisis when, under threat from King Philip IV of France, several popes moved the Holy See to Avignon, France.

Both Pentagon and papal officials deny that any such threats were made, describing the meeting as cordial and respectful. I don’t like Bari Weiss or much Free Press reporting, so I suppose I can’t pick and choose to only believe its writers when their revelations fit my priors. But I don’t exactly disbelieve the Free Press story, either. It has the ring of truth, about the thuggishness of Trump and those around him.

Why are Trump, and others, so fascinated by Axelrod’s visit with the pope? I saw a frankly ludicrous headline in USA Today suggesting it’s because Axelrod and other Democrats see the pope as a possible presidential candidate. Of course, when you read the piece, the only people suggesting this possibility are social-media wags, and even they seem to be joking. Canon law prohibits the pope from running for office, and he’s currently the leader of 1.3 billion Catholics in 193 countries. The presidency is small beer.

To me, the meeting was not so weird; Axelrod and his family are active Chicago Catholics. If it had any political motivation at all, it might have been to help facilitate a meeting between two sons of Chicago, Barack Obama and Pope Leo. As Obama recently said on a podcast: “Being president, or even being an ex-president, I can kind of meet everybody. So, I’ve met a lot of folks. The person who I have not yet met, and that I’m looking forward to meeting—and I hope I get an opportunity sometime in the future—is the new pope, who’s from Chicago, and a White Sox fan.”

Obama’s presidential library opens in June, but people close to the pope have said he is unlikely to visit during a big election year. He turned down an invitation to Washington from Trump; he might resist one from Obama on the eve of crucial midterms. But I hope he doesn’t. Neither canon law nor American law prohibit a papal visit this year. Americans, especially American Catholics, of which I am one, could use a moral and spiritual boost. In the wake of the Iran war, Trump’s approval rating among Catholics is below 50 percent. Maybe a papal visit could get even more of them to reconsider his presidency. At any rate, Trump has met someone he can’t bully.

Editor’s Note: This article initially misspelled Pope Leo XIV’s given surname. It is Prevost, not Provost.

The astounding landslide victory of the opposition Tisza party in Hungary on April 12 over the far-right, Trump-backed Fidesz party of strongman Viktor Orbán is stunning news for Hungarians, the European Union, Ukraine, and democratic forces around the world. Orbán’s Fidesz party functioned as a self-perpetuating machine designed to enrich its elite that many—including myself—couldn’t see the end to. It took a defector from within the party, namely Peter Magyar, a Fidesz member for years and second tier administrator, to unite the bickering tiny opposition parties and ride dissatisfaction with the “embedded autocracy” to victory. The lopsided win handed Magyar a two-thirds supermajority thus granting it sweeping power to change the constitution. Magyar has the way open to dismantle the Fidesz state and replace it with a European democracy.

Hungarians rushed into the streets and partied in neighborhood bars relishing the moment. “Boldog új évet!” or “Happy New Year” they greeted one another. “Hungary has made its choice—this is a moment for history,” posted filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó on Instagram. “After years of tireless work and unwavering belief, we have arrived here together. God bless Hungary.” “Back together! Glorious victory, dear friends!” Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wrote on X, adding in Hungarian: “Russians, go home!” “The result is beyond expectation,” economist Laszlo Andor gushed to The Nation. “A massive Gen Z dynamic in play.”

Indeed, the largest turnout in democratic Hungary’s short history included droves of young people, types who never knew anything but Orbán and Fidesz: the corruption, the heavy-handed propaganda, the hate campaigns against “enemies,” the neglected state services, the pro-Russian fawning. Fidesz’ second run in office began in 2014, making only Belarus’s Lukashenko a longer-tenured leader in Europe.

It is a slap, too—and perhaps writing on the wall—to the Trump administration as Vice President JD Vance campaigned openly for Orbán in Hungary, displaying yet again that Trump’s sympathies lie with the far-right politicos across Europe: those who aim to bring down the EU and lord over a new authoritarian era in Europe. Hungarians rose up and voted sensibly. Perhaps US Americans, Italians, the Netherlands, Finland, Slovakia, and Croatia will do the same. Both Washington and Moscow (and, to a lesser extent, China too) weighed in for Orbán—but it didn’t save his skin, on the contrary. Theirs was the kiss of death. Their lack of clout underscored again that the far right isn’t a single transnational movement but rather national and nationalist phenomena that may treat certain topics similarly but whose fate is tied to domestic and other factors, not the actions of their cousins in other countries. They can copy from one another but they’re largely powerless to help ideological allies.

The good news should not be sullied with the long list of reforms that Tisza has to make to coax democracy back to life. But the Orbán era has changed Hungary much for the worse by latching onto a political culture that has deep roots in Hungary, traditions much stronger than the country’s thin democratic credentials—those limited largely to the first post-communist decade when diverse political parties competed for power in an open society.

In deconstructing Hungary’s political culture, most observers look back to the arch conservative and fascist dictatorships that allied with the Nazis. And, of course, this source of the toxic nationalism was integral to Orbán’s repertoire. But just as important is the political legacy of late Soviet communism, the decades associated with the Soviet-picked leader János Kádár. Kadar took the reigns in Hungary after Soviet tanks squashed a popular uprising in 1956 against the Stalinist Hungarian regime. Hungarians, he understood, weren’t going to tolerate a suffocating Stalinist dictatorship—so he sweetened the pot. In exchange for political passivity, Hungarians received more room to live according to their individual choice and more goods to buy in department stores than their more orthodox bloc neighbors. The mix of communist and market economics won the label “goulash communism” and the faint praise as the “cheeriest barracks” in Eastern Europe.

Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller’s critique of “Kadarism” focused on its “dictatorship over needs,” where consumerism replaced political freedom. Heller argued that the Kádár regime operated by monopolizing the definition of citizens’ needs, offering increased living standards and consumer goods in exchange for political compliance. While Kadarism improved living standards, it stifled political activity and created a state-dependent population, opposing her vision of active citizenship.

Fidesz functioned much the same way, though with regular elections. Citizens nodded mechanically to the Fidesz machine and were rewarded with perceived security won by shielding it from EU norms while cashing in bigtime of EU structural and other funds. Orbán told them that only he had Hungarian interests in mind and he would act to protect them, as he did by maintaining Hungarian access to cheap Russian energy when the rest of Europe was sanctioning Moscow. He convinced them that neutrality on the war in Ukraine—or even pro-Russian overtures—would keep Hungary out of the fight. Insiders say that he expected to be rewarded with a chunk of Ukraine’s Carpathian mountains (a Hungarian minority of 150,000 lives there) should Russia occupy the entire country and call the shots.

Was The New York Times just bamboozled by a grifter? Earlier this month, the paper of record ran what it clearly intended as an inspirational story for our AI age, profiling a 41-year-old entrepreneur named Matthew Gallagher who used an assortment of AI tools to conjure up a telehealth marketing start-up called Medvi. According to Gallagher, the company is on track to do $1.8 billion in sales this year, with a staff of only two (Gallagher and his younger brother).

Too good to be true? Well, yes. Almost immediately, critics online filled in what the Times had left out: a warning letter the FDA sent to Medvi over alleged deceptive marketing practices; a RICO lawsuit against Medvi’s fulfillment partner over a weight-loss compound that hasn’t been proven to work; a slew of AI-generated fake doctors shilling for Medvi in thousands of spammy ads.

After the online outcry over the article, the Times added a few paragraphs describing some of the ways that “Medvi’s aggressive advertising has led to legal and regulatory issues”—which is putting it a little gingerly. But the story remains largely unchanged on the Times website. I say let it stand. Because every age gets the heroes it deserves, and Gallagher is in many ways a perfect representative of our current Gilded Age 2.0.

The problem runs deeper than the Times’ questionable editorial judgment; the paper seems to have been seduced by an ideology that made it incapable of seeing the con. That ideology is “high agency,” Silicon Valley’s currently trendy success mythology, which suggests that the defining trait of the exceptional individual is the refusal to accept constraints. Its catchphrase is “you can just do things.”

The high-agency concept was introduced in 2016 by Eric Weinstein—mathematician, podcaster, and at the time managing director of Peter Thiel’s investment firm. Weinstein described high-agency people as those who, when told something is impossible, immediately begin formulating ways around the limitation. The concept lay largely dormant until early 2024, when a viral essay by writer and entrepreneur George Mack titled “High Agency in 30 Minutes” sent it exploding across Silicon Valley and into mainstream business culture. Mack’s touchstone example: a quote from Silicon Valley “hacker philosopher” Paul Graham about Sam Altman, now the CEO of OpenAI: “You could parachute him into an island of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king.” High-agency heroes, in this telling, don’t just work hard; they exist in a different relationship to reality than the rest of us plebes. The world’s “no” just means “try harder.” Rules, regulations, institutional procedures—they’re all just temporary obstacles to work around.

Talk of agency is everywhere in Silicon Valley these days, with Altman himself arguing that in the age of AI “the returns on agency clearly have never been higher.” With the help of AI tools, he says, “a single person with drive and an idea and willpower can make incredible things happen.” Indeed, several years ago Altman predicted that AI would enable a single person to build a billion-dollar start-up. He just didn’t predict that the “incredible things” the start-up would be doing would include using AI to generate before-and-after weight-loss pictures of wholly imaginary customers.

But he probably should have. Because if you look at the names that come up again and again in the writings of the high-agency ideologues, you’ll quickly discover that many of them are at least as ethically challenged as Gallagher is.

There’s Elon Musk, described by one AI expert as “the most holistically intelligent, high-agency person I know,” who has not only turned what used to be called Twitter into a haven for Nazi shitposters; he also, far more egregiously, used his position running DOGE to dismantle USAID, an action that that researchers at The Lancet estimate could cause as many as 14 million excess deaths by 2030. Then there’s Mark Zuckerberg, who allowed Facebook to be used as a platform for incitement during the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar—with just two Burmese-language content moderators for 60 million users. Internal company documents also reveal that Meta knew that Instagram was engineering addiction among teenage girls. As for Altman himself, The New Yorker recently published an exhaustive investigation in which former colleagues described him in terms that don’t appear in most CEO profiles: One said he possessed “almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.”

On Sunday, as tens of millions of Orthodox Christians around the world observed Easter, the most important holy day on their calendar, Donald Trump launched a series of bizarre, religiously themed attacks. The first was a lengthy Truth Social post assailing Pope Leo, who has become a prominent opponent of Trump’s policies. Trump ranted that “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” and suggested that “Leo should get his act together as Pope, use Common Sense, stop catering to the Radical Left.” This was followed by another Truth Social post featuring a bizarre AI-generated image that seems to show Trump as Jesus Christ, wearing a robe and healing a sick man, while angelic figures hover in the background. Former Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, not too long ago an ardent Trump supporter, denounced this post as “more than blasphemy. It’s an Antichrist spirit.” Even those who aren’t Christian can agree that the image is shockingly disrespectful of Christianity. (Trump eventually bowed to the outcry, deleting the post on Monday.)

Trump’s posts were part of a larger conflict he’s been having with the Catholic Church, due to criticisms major church leaders, including the pope, have made about his immigration policy and the Iran War. One thing that likely triggered Trump was a Sunday night 60 Minutes segment featuring three American Catholic cardinals, Joseph Tobin, Robert McElroy, and Blase Cupich, who have all been sharply critical of Trump. (At one recent vigil mass for peace, McElroy said, “We are in the midst of an immoral war.”)

During the 60 Minutes segment, Capich strongly condemned social-media posts from the White House that celebrated alleged US victories by mixing together war footage with scenes from triumphalist Hollywood films such as Top Gun: Maverick and Braveheart. He lamented that splicing “movie cuts with actual bombing and targeting of people for the purposes of entertainment is sickening.”

The fact that social media posts by Trump and his administration are alienating religious leaders and former political allies is symptomatic of a larger political trend. Trump rose to the presidency in part through his mastery of social-media trolling. But these days, his unparalleled ability to get people to pay attention to his boorishness is hurting him politically as the world grapples with the mass death and economic upheaval caused by his militarism.

Both Trump and the Iran War are intensely unpopular, with approval for both hovering below 40 percent in Nate Silver’s aggregation of the polls. Even troops don’t want the stench of the war on them; there are signs that the Pentagon is facing a growing retention problem, with soldiers taking early retirement rather than risk fighting in an unpopular conflict. One prominent war supporter, Max Abrahms, an international relations scholar at Northeastern University, has lamented that public opinion is undercutting the war effort.

Social-media posts likening the current conflict to movies starring Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson clearly aren’t working; nor are Truth Social posts showing Trump to be Jesus. The propaganda coming out of the White House is clearly a case of preaching to an ever-shrinking choir. It’s red meat that might feed the MAGA faithful, but only repels the non-MAGA majority.

Yet even as Trump is losing the meme wars, the nation he attacked is proving to be surprisingly adept at using social media to win a global audience. One of the unexpected developments of the war has been Iran’s resilience in both actual warfare and the fight to shape the conflict’s online narrative. Most prominently, a company called Explosive Media, which seems to be loosely affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has released a string of AI-generated satirical, Lego Movie–style animated music videos mocking Trump and his main advisers, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The videos are blunt, vulgar, and undeniably memorable. A recurring theme is that the US is run by the predatory and Satan-worshipping “Epstein class.” One focuses on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, detailing his long history of alleged sexual assault and alcoholism. The Hegseth video includes these lines: “We hitting the Baal-worshipping Epstein Island crew, the ones who hurt the kids. Revenge for every American soul you and Trump’s dirty crew oppressed and did. We taking payback for the girls you broke.”

These videos have gone extremely viral, spreading well outside the narrow circles who might pay attention to Iranian diplomatic communications. The conservative-leaning comedian Tim Dillon lamented,

We’re trying to win the war on social media and we’re not even doing that. We’re not even winning the shit talk war…. You’d think America would win that at least, if we’re going to win one thing. We’re getting bodied by Iranian AI in the war of shit talk. Truly How embarrassing. We invented shit talk, and we’re getting lit up.

While the Iranian videos are sometimes dismissed as “slopaganda,” there is no denying the fact that they have achieved a global persuasive power rare in wartime propaganda.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

For generations, “socialist” has been among the most effective slurs in American politics—a way to end an argument before it starts. It is against that backdrop that an unapologetic democratic socialist’s decisive election as mayor of the nation’s largest city took much of the country by surprise. But what Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City showed is not just that “socialist” no longer lands as the curse it once was, but also that he succeeded in remaking what socialism meant to voters—particularly when it came to ideas of public safety.

Mamdani didn’t win by relitigating abstract debates about the size of government or the management of capital. He won by insisting upon what democratic socialism could look like in practice. Most commentary on his campaign has focused on his affordability platform: rent, daycare, groceries, bus and subway fares. That framing isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. Affordability wasn’t a separate campaign plank; it was the most elementary expression of a deeper argument about safety.

In Mamdani’s framing, socialism was an answer to a question about which every New Yorker cares: How can we actually make people safe? Not safe in the narrow sense of crime statistics alone, but safe in housing, community, the ordinary vulnerability that marks all human lives, and in the exceptional crises that so often end up with our loved ones in either an ambulance or the back of a police car.

To be one missed paycheck from eviction, one health crisis from bankruptcy—these are not inconveniences. They are conditions of persistent precarity that shape everything else about how people move through the world, from interactions with neighbors, classmates, coworkers, and city employees to a person’s vulnerability to emotional stress, anger, and mental illness and crisis. They make people unsafe—and, Mamdani insisted, real security cannot exist without addressing these issues.

Mamdani called this governing philosophy “community safety.” We might instead call it safety socialism—the idea that genuine safety is a collective good, rooted in public systems for care and connection rather than coercion and containment. Affordable rent is one part of that. A functioning mental health system is another. So is a care network that shows up when you’re in crisis to meet your needs—and, ideally, long before. These are not different issues. They are instead different expressions of the same underlying problem, and they point to the same necessary remedy.

Despite being attacked as a “defund the police” candidate, Mamdani did not run on cutting the police budget upfront—something that no politician at his level has yet succeeded in doing. Instead, he ran on something that, if successful, would prove even more threatening to the political order by attacking the premise on which police budgets are based—namely, that police should be regarded as the default authority on what safety means, how to achieve it, and who should be allocated public funds to deliver it.

For decades, police lobbies—with help from their allies in news media and academic research—have maintained their power not simply through political muscle but through a story that violence and perpetual crisis are inevitable; that force is the only realistic response; and that anyone proposing otherwise is dangerously naïve. Safety socialism doesn’t attack that story head-on. It displaces it by talking relentlessly about the housing instability, untreated mental illness, poverty, and social isolation that make aggressive policing seem necessary.

Build the material conditions that prevent crisis, and the political ground shifts under the lobbies that depend on it to maintain their continued power. That was the deeper logic of Mamdani’s campaign, and it is what makes his proposed first-of-its-kind Department of Community Safety (DCS) something more than just another reformist social services proposal.

This is why Mamdani’s now-unfolding apparent retreat from his campaign promises around DCS is so alarming. Not only has he allied himself with a vocal opponent of the DCS vision in NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and declined to allocate any funds toward building a Department of Community Safety—or the new work it is meant to do—in his proposed budget, but his administration has also decided, for now, against even taking on the political fight to establish such a department, issuing instead an executive order to create a new mayoral office as more expedient option. With no new funding for the office, it appears to be a symbolic substitute for the bold vision Mamdani promised to make real.

For half a century, Democrats and Republicans alike have shared an almost mystical faith in police, prisons, and punishment. This has produced American cities saturated with insecurity: isolation, gun violence, mass incarceration, rising mental illness and suicide, and a collapse of trust in public institutions. People managing trauma, mental illness, and addiction cycle endlessly through emergency rooms, shelters, and jails without anything resembling relief. A 911 call for a psychiatric crisis still overwhelmingly routes to police officers with no real tools to help—leading to arrest, an emergency-department waiting room, a brief hospitalization, and discharge back to the same conditions that produced the crisis.

Adozen federal judges have presided over some of the most consequential environmental lawsuits in Louisiana’s history despite having investments in or business connections to the petrochemical companies being sued, an investigation by Floodlight, WWNO/WRKF, and Type Investigations has found.

Their ties took various forms: holding stock or corporate bonds while presiding over the cases, having previously worked as attorneys for the oil companies, receiving large sums of money from investments in the companies prior to hearing the cases, leasing mineral rights to defendants, or having a spouse who was a partner at a law firm defending the oil companies.

But even when they appear to have direct conflicts of interest, almost none of those judges broke the ethical rules governing the judiciary.

“To the extent they’re following the rules, they can’t really be faulted,” said Charles Geyh, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and an expert in judicial disqualification. “But from a systemic standpoint, do you really want judges to be drawn from a pool of people who have a stake in the industry?”

Examples include:

• Judge Carl Barbier of the US Eastern District Court of Louisiana held over $100,000 of corporate bonds in five oil companies while presiding over four different cases in which one or more of those companies was a defendant.
• Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown, of the same court, reported that she or her husband traded tens of thousands of dollars of Exxon and Chevron stock while she presided over a case in which both companies were being sued.
• Judge Jerry Smith of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of oil companies in one of the cases after receiving over $100,000 in mineral royalties since 2013, when the litigation first arrived in federal court.

Iam packing my mother’s bags for the hospital. Neither of us know how long she’ll be away for, or precisely what the problem is, but around midnight she woke up with severe pain in her lower abdomen and a fever of 106°F, so we know we have to go. By now, I am practiced at this. Packing for the hospital has become normal and routine for us, a task akin to doing laundry or taking the dog for a walk. I put her toiletries, fresh clothes, her wallet, her Bible into her favorite bag, which is woven with brightly colored ankara fabrics. It looks more like the kind of bag you’d take to a party than to emergency surgery. When the packing is finished, the hospital informs us that there is no ambulance available tonight; they send apologies accompanied by vague excuses: no fuel in the car, no one around to drive. It’s not the first time this has happened. My uncle will have to drive us. By now, he’s practiced at that too.

We get my mother into the car safely, but as she takes her seat she turns around to look at me and sees the fear plain on my face. She tells me not to be afraid, that “what [you] fear will come upon [you].” I don’t realize this myself until much later, but she is quoting from the book of Job, the Bible’s most famous theodicy. Job, a rich man, favored by God, loses everything: his money, his family, his health, at the behest of Satan, who wants to test his faithfulness. After Job’s family dies and his wealth dries up, he curses the day of his birth, crying out that “what I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me.” My mother quoted Job to stem my anxiety: His fear, the logic goes, is what opened the door to his ruin. In the absence of fear, the door stays shut.

But her instruction was impossible to follow. Outside, the car moves through potholed roads absent of street lights towards a hospital with no emergency staff, where a doctor’s actions further endanger my mother’s life. As my uncle pulled out of the metal gate away from our home, I watched as the night swallowed the car whole. I could not stop being afraid—because what if what you fear is not God, Satan, or some abstract terror, but your own nation’s indifference to your survival?

Nigeria has its own saying, a prayer really: “May Nigeria not happen to you.” The Nigeria in “May Nigeria not happen to you” is a metonym for a dysfunctional state, where a power cut occurs in the middle of a life-saving operation in Minna, or where a building burns in Lagos with no emergency services to evacuate its inhabitants. “I pray from the depth of my heart that Nigeria never happens to me or anyone I care about” is what journalist and activist Sommie Madegwu wrote on the night before armed robbers invaded her building in Abuja. When the men burst into her apartment, she jumped from her balcony and survived the fall. She did not survive the hospital. Staff at Maitama General Hospital reportedly insisted on seeing identification documents before providing medical attention, despite a Nigerian law requiring immediate treatment for victims of accidents or armed robbery. If Job feared that one day God would take away his riches and blessings, Nigerians have a different fear: We fear that the country we live in will be responsible for our death.

Nigeria happened to my family on November 18, 2020. My mother was in a bus with several of her friends, who were driving from Benin city to Akure on the way to a funeral. It was nighttime. They were riding along dilapidated roads with little to no visibility, when out of nowhere a truck crashed into their bus. My mother was one of two survivors. She was left with several fractures, including in both of her legs, and was bedridden for months. Over the course of two years, she would undergo multiple surgical procedures and physical therapy sessions to recover her ability to walk. After it happened, friends and family reminded me frequently of how God had saved my mother. God had saved her from becoming another statistic in Nigeria, where road accidents are the third-leading cause of death and the most common cause of disability. The WHO records 21.4 deaths per 100,000 people significantly higher than both the global and African averages. For comparison, the equivalent figures for the United States and Britain are 15 and 7 respectively. It is estimated that one in every four road accident deaths in Africa occurs in Nigeria. But Ngeria does not have an established national traffic accident database, and there is no framework for accurate reporting of road traffic incidents meaning the true scale of the problem is almost certainly undercounted. God spared my mother’s life, but Nigeria was not finished with her.

Two years later, at the end of 2023, my mother was diagnosed with kidney stones and referred to a hospital specializing in endoscopic and laparoscopic surgery. By this point, she was walking again. The procedure at hand was supposed to be simple and routine. After a surgical procedure to extract the stones was recommended, she raised a concern with the medical director: Her spine had been through too much. The trauma of the accident, fracture, and surgical procedures weighed heavily on her; she felt it in her lower back every day. Cedarcrest Hospital, her previous treatment center, had an anesthesiologist she trusted, one who knew her medical history, and she offered to pay for him herself, to arrange his release from Cedarcrest personally, and to do everything necessary to ensure he would see to her care. The medical director told her it would not be necessary. The referring doctor had already briefed him fully on her history. He would put his best doctor on the team.

But he did not. Or the best wasn’t good enough. Weeks after the surgery, my mother discovered that the hospital had not provided an anesthesiologist at all, but a nurse anesthesiologist, someone with less training—against her expressly stated wishes. By then she already knew something had gone wrong. During the administration of anesthesia she had suffered a total spinal block. She described how shortly after the needle was inserted into her spine, her breathing became labored, her skull felt as though it was held in a vice, growing tighter and tighter with each forced breath, the edges of her vision went dark and blurry, and she fought to stay alive. It is one of the most dangerous complications of an epidural. She tells me that the doctor administering the anesthesia shouted at her “don’t close your eyes, don’t close your eyes” as she struggled to remain conscious. She did her best to obey him, but the procedure nearly killed her.

The day after surgery, she was discharged. She vomited as the nursing staff wheeled her out to the car. But they sent her home anyway. At two in the morning, she spiked a fever of 100°F and had to be rushed back to the hospital, where she was treated for malaria and discharged by evening. When the fever returned, we rushed her to Cedarcrest, the hospital she had asked for from the beginning. There she was diagnosed with septicaemia and put in urgent care.

She had survived a truck crash on a dark road in Ondo state. She had survived two years of surgeries. What else was she supposed to endure? Two weeks after her kidney stone procedure, she requested the test results from the surgical specimen—she wanted to know what kind of stones they were, and how to prevent them from returning. The hospital told her the specimen had not been tested. They had removed it and discarded it, unexamined. She would never know.

My family’s experience with the healthcare system in Nigeria was a largely fortunate one. It did not end with a casket, a funeral, apologies on grief-stricken ears. But countless others are not so fortunate. It would be easy to simply move past the experience, to chalk it up to providence and ignore its implications within the issue of medical negligence and wider institutional failures in the country. But it is that very forgetting, that privatization of suffering, that a failing system depends on. We have no recourse to systems that hold doctors accountable for their mistakes, no databases that record accidents and deaths properly in order to determine trends and errors that might be used to prevent future harm, no processes instituted to ensure patient safety. No lessons learned.

Let’s start with a rare ray of good news. In Wisconsin, liberal judge Chris Taylor absolutely boat-raced her Republican opponent, Maria Lazar. The victory gives Democrats a 5–2 advantage on the Wisconsin state Supreme Court and ensures that Democrats will control the court during the 2028 presidential election cycle.

People might remember last year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court race—the one that Elon Musk tried to buy, the one that became the most expensive judicial election in history. The GOP candidate lost anyway, and Democrats took control of the court for the first time in 15 years.

This year, the stakes weren’t as stark. Taylor and Lazar were running to replace a Republican judge, meaning that even if Lazar won, Republicans would still have been in the minority (3–4) on the court. Moreover, Musk and all of the Republican-aligned PACs kept their money in their pockets, meaning that Taylor was actually able to outspend Lazar. Turnout was low.

Still, Taylor didn’t just beat Lazar in the liberal strongholds of Milwaukee and Madison; she beat Lazar in rural Wisconsin, flipping 29 counties that went for Trump in 2024. In some places, she shifted those counties to the left by 33 points.

I don’t want to read too much into these results. A low-stakes, low-turnout judicial election is not really an analogue for the November midterms. But it’s another example of a problem Republicans have had throughout the Trump era: Trump voters show up for Trump; they don’t turn out in numbers when Trump’s name is not on the ballot.

The problem with running a cult of personality is that, eventually, the cult leader dies, and his personality goes with him. The post-Trump Republican Party is, frankly, unknowable at this point. Even they don’t know what they’re going to do once he’s gone. People will be vying to be “the next Trump” for the rest of our natural lives. And we simply have no idea what lies or stupidity Trump’s voters will believe next.

In the meantime, Trump’s name will not appear on any ballot this November. If Trump actually allows us to have a normal election, that could be very bad for his party.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The second-most-terrifying story this week (second to Trump’s threats to wipe out an entire civilization) was this New York Times report about silicon sampling. No, it’s not a story about tech bros licking sand to find more material for their data centers, though it would be nice if they tried that. It’s about a poll that was recently published where the responses to the poll were generated by AI. Our tech overlords are literally trying to obviate the need to ask the public their actual opinions, in an opinion poll, and instead just use AI to tell us what opinions we hold. It’s straight-up dystopian.
• A group of Latino New Yorkers has filed a massive class-action lawsuit against ICE alleging racial profiling. They argue that ICE is targeting Latinos for stops and arrests without any reasonable assessment of their citizenship status. This is precisely the scenario alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh gave his blessing to in a shadow docket ruling last year that centered on ICE’s occupation of Los Angeles. In that case, ICE’s unconstitutional racism was not the central issue, but it will be in this one when it undoubtedly makes its way to the Supreme Court in a couple of years.
• We learned this week that Justice Samuel Alito was briefly hospitalized two weeks ago for “dehydration.” I continue to believe that Alito will announce his retirement in June so he can be replaced by Trump before the midterms.
• The Third Circuit Court of Appeals blocked an attempt by the state of New Jersey to regulate Kalshi and other “prediction markets.” The court essentially said that the sites are not a form of sports gambling but are effectively contractual “swaps,” meaning that the only appropriate regulator is the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. See, to me, this only proves that commodities trading is also a form of gambling and should be regulated as such… but nooo, when rich people do it, it’s not “gambling,” it’s “finance.”  
• U.S. News & World Report released its first ranking of American law schools in 1987. Yale Law School was number one. Yale has been number one every single year that the law school rankings have existed—until now. This year’s USN rankings put Stanford at number one, with Yale falling into a tie for number two with the University of Chicago. I have not read up on the vagaries of how USN produces its rankings, so I’m just going to chalk this up to Yale finally getting dinged for producing JD Vance.

Inspired Takes

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 in a little white schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, a community that has remained Republican for the vast majority of the ensuing 172 years. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in Ripon in 2024—even after Harris campaigned there—by a comfortable 55–45 margin.

But, as in a growing number of historically Republican red areas that have begun turning purple or even blue since Trump’s disastrous second term began, Ripon took a sharp turn last Tuesday—as part of a now indisputable national shift toward progressive and Democratic candidates. The city voted by around 58 percent to send Chris Taylor, a very progressive former Democratic state legislator and jurist, to the state Supreme Court. The rest of Wisconsin had a similar idea. Taylor was elected Tuesday in a landslide, flipping a previously conservative seat and giving progressives a 5–2 majority on a powerful state court that, less than a decade ago, was a bastion of right-wing judicial activism. That matters for Wisconsinites, of course, but it also has significance for the whole country.

Wisconsin is the ultimate presidential battleground state, having backed Donald Trump in 2016, Joe Biden in 2020, and Trump once more in 2024, all by margins of under 1 percent. Yet Taylor, a former lawyer and policy director for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin who currently serves as a state appeals court judge, won the seat by a 20-point margin over fellow Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar, a prominent and well-connected conservative who, as an assistant state attorney general, defended former Republican Governor Scott Walker’s assaults on organized labor, public employees, and fair elections.

Taylor ran a significantly smarter and better-funded campaign than Lazar. But this margin of victory was unprecedented in recent major elections in Wisconsin. In an election where Democrats voted enthusiastically while a lot of Republicans apparently stayed at home, Taylor carried urban, suburban, and rural regions across the state.

The scale of Taylor’s win drew national attention, as observers at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics noted that she “became the first Democratic-aligned candidate since 2015 to carry a majority of the state’s counties—42 of 72.” Twenty-nine Wisconsin counties that backed Trump in the fall of 2024 backed Taylor in the spring of 2026. Historically Republican strongholds in the suburbs of Milwaukee and Madison favored the progressive in the officially nonpartisan contest, as did rural counties across western Wisconsin and into the north, where many regions saw shifts of 20 points or more from right to left.

So, what does this tell us about the midterm elections this fall, when control of the Republican-led US House and Senate chambers, as well as statehouses in places like Wisconsin, will be up for grabs?

A spring election for a technically nonpartisan Supreme Court seat is different from a partisan contest for a US House seat or a governorship. But just as the big wins for Democrats in 2025 off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia were indicative, and just as the overwhelming pattern of Democratic wins in special elections for state legislative seats nationwide revealed Republican vulnerabilities, so the Wisconsin results are relevant for the 2026 midterms—especially when it comes to US House races.

Currently, Republicans have a razor-thin 217–214 majority in the House (three seats are vacant). Democrats need to flip just a handful of districts nationwide to take control of the chamber. While a great deal of attention has been paid to whether Democrats can win additional seats in states such as California, New York, and Virginia, their majority could also run through Wisconsin and a handful of other Midwestern states, like Iowa.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Early in Here Where We Live Is Our Country, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple’s history of the Jewish Labor Bund—a staunchly anti-Zionist, socialist movement founded by Eastern European Jews in 1897—she describes in harrowing detail the waves of anti-Semitic pogroms that tore through the Pale of Settlement. During a brutal convulsion of violence in January 1905 in Odessa in which pogromists murdered hundreds of Jews, Bundists reported to comrades abroad that “pogroms exist only where the government wants them.” Drawing an apt comparison to the racialized terror of police-backed lynchings in the American South, Crabapple writes that Bundists, and the Jewish community at large, faced insurmountable odds precisely because “both police and soldiers helped their attackers.” Today, in the name of Zionism, the descendants of those ravaged by pogroms and genocide subject Palestinians to the same crimes.

According to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli settlers have displaced 1,700 Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank since January of this year—a figure that exceeded in three months the entire total from 2025. What is obscured by the bloodless language of this UN report is the horror, in all its visceral particularity, of such attacks. Far-right Israeli settlers—often backed and even armed by the Israeli state—have beaten, sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, leaving burnt homes, cars, and agricultural land in their wake. Crabapple’s archival reconstruction of the debates animating the Bund’s political world reveals the ethnonationalist through line linking European antisemitism and Zionism from the late 19th century to the present.

Remarkably, she shows that Bundists themselves foresaw the inevitable inversion of victim and perpetrator demanded by Zionist ideology. In 1938, Bundist leader Henryk Erlich wrote, “Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism…. The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and to make the Arabs second class-citizens.” In the Bund’s political project—its emphasis on the practicalities of mutual aid, labor organizing, and armed self-defense; its unwavering rejection of all ethnonationalism, including Zionism; and its steadfast belief in intergroup solidarity—Crabapple identifies “a guide for our moment.”

The Bund’s revolutionaries, poets, and militants fought and died not just in the name of an emancipated socialist horizon. Rather, they forged a capacious form of belonging, at home in diaspora and exile, reliant not on blood and soil but a shared struggle for freedom and dignity wherever they found themselves. They called their philosophy do’ikayt, or “here-ness.” We would do well to listen.

The Nation spoke with Crabapple about socialist internationalism, Yiddish cultural production, and the tedium of leftist infighting. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Ishan Desai-Geller

Princeton, New Jersey—At a community forum in 2023, Jim Kyle, a municipal planner, approached the dais and spoke about focusing “more density in town and near public transit.” Kyle was working with the city to redevelop land in the town’s Western Section, a wealthy, tree-lined neighborhood of Tudor and Colonial homes near downtown.

The municipality hadn’t yet settled on its final proposal to build 238 apartment units, 48 of which would be designated affordable, on that 4.8-acre tract, but the resistance to it was already mounting.

Over the course of that morning, homeowners overwhelmingly balked at the prospect of increased density—what one town consultant would call the “the D-word.” One resident of Princeton’s Western Section told the room, “Those of us who own historic homes are subsidizing the community”—and was met with applause. Another pointed out that when it comes to historic preservation—i.e., maintaining the homes they own and live in—the “weight is borne by individuals in this community.” Then a resident took the mic to “take on the role of the Lorax and speak for the trees.” (The project’s lead architect, Dean Marchetto, says the plan would prioritize maintaining trees along the streets.)

In the three years since, the conflict has grown fiercer. Locals make the dispute sound like the Second Battle of Princeton. The housing proposal has pit pro-preservation residents against their pro-housing neighbors. It’s prompted a lawn-sign war, public insults, private threats, and at least one assault. And in this way, experts say, Princeton is like a lot of other towns. In upper-class suburbs, a group of organized residents will almost always fight to maintain the single-family status quo.

Matt Mleczko earned his PhD from Princeton in 2024 and founded Princeton Grows, a local housing advocacy group. He’s now a political science professor at Marquette University, and he told me, “If you replicate this same scenario thousands of times over in all the other places like Princeton that have a lot of resistance to building multi-family housing, I would imagine it starts to become a little bit clearer why we’re in such a housing crisis.”

Neighbors campaigning against the development point to the illustrious parts of town history: Einstein’s house, Revolutionary War sites, and Nassau Hall, which served as the US Capitol for four months in 1783. But they usually leave out Princeton’s less glorious history of discrimination.

In 1696, Princeton’s first known Black residents arrived: seven enslaved people belonging to Richard Stockton, grandfather of Declaration of Independence signatory Richard Stockton. “The enslaved Stocktons not only worked the land but also cleared and built the Stocktons’ stately home, as well as their own slave quarters in the back,” Kathryn Watterson writes in I Hear My People Singing, a book on Princeton’s African American history.

The address of the proposed housing is 108 Stockton Street—part of Stockton’s initial 400-acre tract.

What affordable housing Princeton did have was rendered that way by segregation, according to the Princeton Affordable Housing Project. Beginning in the late 1800s, 12 concentrated blocks were home to most of the town’s Black population. A fence separated that area from higher-income housing to the west. Black entrepreneurs opened businesses, including grocery stores, beauty salons, and the state’s only Black-run newspaper. Businesses along Princeton’s main drag largely did not allow Black clientele, so the neighborhood’s residents created an affordable micro-economy, with the Black YMCA as its social hub.

Then, in 1929, a rich Princeton alum bankrolled the construction of what would become the town’s economic center. To make way for these plans “to enhance the student experience,” those 12 blocks were demolished and the Black residents displaced.

Now anti-development signs have sprouted up across town, demanding “Defend Historic Princeton.” The eponymous group behind the signs says its organizers “oppose town-wide overdevelopment at the expense of Princeton’s multifaceted historic character.”

Adam Gordon, the executive director of Fair Share Housing, a statewide advocacy group that has settled housing-related cases with more than 340 towns across New Jersey, looks to the rhetoric of safeguarding Princeton’s history and sees an echo with another movement. “Defend historic Princeton.… it’s Make America Great Again,” he told me. “It’s this romantic vision of a past that didn’t really exist.”

Because of its long history of discrimination, Princeton’s metro area is the sixth-most-segregated in the country, according to a 2023 study out of Berkeley. And lacking affordable housing, many poor and working-class residents have been pushed out. In 2024, Princeton’s household median income was $192,079, nearly twice the statewide median income of $103,556 and close to four times that of neighboring Trenton.

In a paid advertisement printed last April in Town Topics, a group of prominent academics—including liberal historian Sean Wilentz and topped by filmmaker Ken Burns, who does not live in Princeton but is a friend of Wilentz’s—wrote, “Few if any American towns are as distinguished as Princeton.” They call the proposed development “aggressive high-density urbanism.”

“This is not just any town, any municipality, just like this is not just any university,” Wilentz told Princeton University’s student newspaper last fall.

His organization, Defend Historic Princeton, and another, Princeton Coalition for Responsible Development, separately filed legal challenges against the town to halt the development plans from becoming part of the planned affordable housing stock. Those lawsuits have so far been dismissed. In February, the US Supreme Court sided with the state of New Jersey in upholding towns’ obligation to implement affordable housing—a requirement that several of the state’s wealthiest municipalities were trying to shirk.

New Jersey has mandated affordable housing since the 1970s, when an influx of wealthy white families to the South Jersey suburb of Mount Laurel priced out longtime Black residents. A lawsuit between the township and the local chapter of the NAACP resulted in the Mount Laurel doctrine in 1975, which banned exclusionary zoning and stipulated that towns had to offer their “fair share” of affordable housing. In the following decades, updates to the legislation and the formation of the Council on Affordable Housing strengthened state oversight and enforcement capacity.

Still, for decades, towns did not build affordable units at scale. Regional Contribution Agreements allowed wealthier towns to offload their fair-share obligations onto poorer towns with compensation until 2008 when the state eliminated these deals. And in 2015, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that compliance with Mount Laurel was within the judicial system’s purview, making it possible for the courts to compel towns to follow the law. Since then, Fair Share Housing has settled cases with hundreds of towns—including Princeton. In the past 11 years, some 25,000 designated affordable homes have been built statewide—a testament to “how successful and influential the Mount Laurel framework has been,” Jag Davies, Fair Share Housing’s director of communications, told me. Several other states enacted housing laws similar to New Jersey’s. Still, it hasn’t been enough: New Jersey has a 150,000-unit shortage of low- and moderate-income homes.

Critics of the proposed housing have downplayed the affordable housing in the project and lambasted it as “a massive luxury apartment development,” not in keeping with neighborhood architecture and character. “It’s as lopsided to its context as the Trump White House ballroom is,” Wilentz told me.

Mleczko, the Marquette professor, pointed out that the housing deficit exists across class brackets, with affordability meaning different things to different people. “If everything that’s new is luxury, the term starts to not mean much of anything.”

The 48 designated affordable units would be split into three income-restricted tiers, the lowest being for families making 30 percent or less of area median income. Building these units requires funding. “Affordable housing cannot pay for itself,” Patrick McAnaney, a DC-area housing developer, wrote. “Government subsidies exist, but they can rarely finance entirely affordable developments. Developers often account for the funding shortfall by “utilizing market-rate housing to cross-subsidize affordable units.”

Responding to the initial ad signed by Wilentz, Burns, and four other historians, Councilman Leighton Newlin published a letter in Town Topics titled: “‘Defending’ Historic Princeton? From Whom, and From What?” Newlin extols the possibility of inclusionary multi-family affordable units in town, and describes anxieties related to traffic, aesthetics, and stormwater as “a plantation mentality in progressive clothing.”

In his response to the response, Wilentz decried Newlin’s “predictably” pro-forma portrayal of the housing opponents “as elite racists out to exclude Blacks and Hispanics from Princeton.” Wilentz stands by his claim that the development only replicates the town’s racial inequities.

Some of the houses in Princeton are centuries old, but the town has also seen hyper-modern mansions get built without raising any alarms. A 2017 Princeton Magazine feature called “Evolving Neighborhood” describes how a gabled, Cape cottage–style home in the Western Section was “deconstructed” to make room for “a modernist’s dream.” The magazine says such residents have risen “to the challenge of modern living in an historic neighborhood.” In 2012, an effort to designate this same area historic—and limit teardowns—caused some inhabitants to express feeling “disenfranchised” by losing property rights. One resident described the historic designation as “a creeping cancer.”

The much-debated housing proposal is for a vacant, previously developed site and wouldn’t involve any further demolition. (In 2022, three historic Princeton Theological Seminary buildings were leveled on the property, to neighbors’ chagrin.)

For Jessica Vieira, the historical significance of Western Section drew her to the neighborhood, even if it comes with an added price. Vieira lives down the street from the proposed development, which she described as “a massive structure in what is a colonial village.” She worried that the construction would tower over the Barracks, a 17th-century estate where James Madison and Alexander Hamilton slept during the 1783 Continental Congress. “We feel like we’re sitting here in our little historic homes, and they’re basically building huge developments around us,” Vieira told me. “I recognize that we need to be able to build housing, but this is insane.”

Some neighbors argue the area is better simply better suited to single-family homes. One new family next door is more “in keeping” than dozens. It boils down to “the idea that some element of the big city is coming to take a place in their town,” said TAPInto Princeton editor Richard Rein. “And people find that very frightening.”

At the end of one community forum in 2023, Rein, then 75, was shoved and cursed at. “Fortunately, I had myself braced in such a way that I didn’t go down,” said Rein. “What was more shocking to me was the dropping of an F-bomb from two different women of retirement age living in the Western Section of Princeton.” Rein’s coverage leans in favor of the proposed development.

Rein is not the only one feeling the heat of social tensions. “We have experienced constant animosity, threats that are personal, political and professional,” said Councilwoman Mia Sacks, chair of the Affordable Housing Committee.

The attention blitz has also bred a kind of meme-ification. After the orange “Defend Historic Princeton” signs cropped up, blue ones imploring “Princeton for All” started populating dissenting yards. The sign skirmish was waged by university neuroscientists Jonathan Pillow and Sam Wang, who told me they thought the orange ones sent an “unwelcoming message, keeping people out to preserve the town as it is.”

Then suddenly there were lime-green signs too, stating simply, “Princeton.” An e-mail address at the bottom reads mysignisbetterthanyours@gmail.com. Someone calling themself “Princeton Yard Sign Syndicate” said via e-mail: “We can neither confirm nor deny that our sign is our official entry into the ongoing battle of the yard signs.” And at local pub trivia, graduate students studying housing policy have competed under the name “Destroy Historic Princeton.”

Sacks grew up in Princeton and returned in 2008 after more than 20 years away. Arriving “felt like I was moving to a stage set of a town that had been frozen in time,” Sacks said. “It felt like the town was basically preserved in formaldehyde, and that it was not evolving.”

Mleczko sees the development question as part of a social contract, in which housing is both a need and a right. He said these debates require us to ask ourselves: “Are we going to provide for neighbors? Are we going to provide for the people who want to be our neighbors but can’t because there’s not enough housing to go around?” As for balancing housing and environmental priorities, Mleczko takes issue with the heady philosophizing: “It’d be one thing if this were a debate in a vacuum [about] what’s more important, housing affordability or historic preservation. But we’re not in a vacuum. We’re in the backdrop of an unrelenting housing crisis.”

Princeton is not alone among blue towns in having a chasm between its purported values and real-time stance. This is especially true at municipal meetings, which disproportionately draw people opposed to housing proposals. A study by Data for Progress analyzing Massachusetts voters’ attitudes toward affordable housing found respondents much more likely to support hypothetical affordable housing than actual projects in their neighborhoods. Fifty-six percent of voters supported affordable housing abstractly in a ballot referendum, but 63 percent of municipal meeting attendees opposed development projects.

By the time later community forums rolled around in Princeton, housing advocates were showing up in larger numbers, diluting the density panic and showing that a smattering of housing-apprehensive voices had been disproportionately loud.

“There’s general agreement that affordable housing serves an important role in the community,” Liz Lempert, Princeton’s mayor from 2013 to 2020, told me. “The debate is more on where it should be, and oftentimes it’s, ‘not here, it should be there.’”

Princeton has a reputation as a liberal, intellectual bastion—but like many towns, its progressivism, for many residents, crumbles at the prospect of lower property values or a changing view across the street.

Early on Monday morning, someone from the Yale College dean’s office sent me a message on WhatsApp. A link led to a letter by professor Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore published in the Yale Daily News. It was a letter written about a word. The word was “stuff.”

In 1967, Gilmore finished her first year at Wake Forest. When school let out, she had nowhere to go, so she found a friend with a room on campus where she could stay for a few weeks. She also found a place in the dormitory’s basement where her belongings—presumably, a suitcase and the accumulations of her first year—could wait for her sophomore year.

A dean eventually found her and what she had stashed in the basement. He told her to leave it exactly where it was.

Gilmore is now the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor Emerita at Yale, where she holds appointments in history, Black studies, and American studies. But she did not write her letter to the Yale Daily News about any scholarship or expertise in the many fields for which she is considered an authority. She wrote it to describe that dormitory basement at Wake Forest. And she wrote it because the dean of Yale College, Pericles Lewis, defending his administration’s decision to eliminate its summer storage reimbursement program for first-generation and low-income students, suggested that those students simply “should not buy too much stuff.” Dean Lewis had used “stuff,” so Gilmore did too. She put quotation marks around it. She was, after dealing with universities for 60 years, precise.

A week before it ran her letter, the Yale Daily News published a story about the cuts to the summer storage reimbursement program. When the News posted the story on Instagram, it received nearly a thousand likes and more than a hundred comments from current students and alumni. Jake Thrasher, a PhD candidate at Yale, wrote the most-liked comment: “If I made $450k/year (according to public info), I personally think it would be tacky as hell to tell the poorest students here ‘not to buy too much stuff’ but what do I know?” Lizzie Conklin, who graduated last year, commented, “This is genuinely absurd.” Elizabeth Shvarts, who will graduate next month, wrote, “Let’s just store it in his mansion.” Another commenter compared Dean Lewis to Marie Antoinette. Several others called the situation absurd.

Alex William Chen was not one of those who commented on the Instagram post. But Chen is the Yale College Council’s speaker and has helped allocate the council’s remaining budget—almost $13,000—toward supporting students who need financial help with summer storage costs.

Chen texted me a message he’d like to send Yale’s administrators: “Please come down from your offices and meet with students on campus. Explain to us how the utility of financial support for Yale’s most financially vulnerable students is somehow less than the utility of preserving an exponentially bloated administrative apparatus.”

Chen told me that he knew several Yale students from New Haven who were offering up their own homes to store boxes for friends who will lose reimbursement for summer storage. He asked, “Would these Yale administrators be willing to do the same?”

The reimbursement program had covered summer storage costs for first-generation, low-income students and had provided relief for qualifying students whose socioeconomic backgrounds do not provide a financially feasible option for summer storage. Its elimination upended the relief that had become expected.

A week after the announcement, and a day after Gilmore’s letter, a new announcement came—this one from a student who, like Chen, wanted to figure out a way for students to fix this on their own.

Iwas living in New York City when Al Qaeda terrorists flew jet planes into the World Trade Center, and I will never forget the panic that I felt as the certainties of the architecture around me went up in flames.

I remember, too, that shortly afterward, anthrax attacks were launched against seemingly random targets. Suddenly, the air we breathed seemed suspect—our environments turned against us by faceless enemies, terrorists, intent on inflicting maximum physical and psychological damage.

Webster’s dictionary defines “terrorism” as “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.” It defines “terrorist” as “an advocate or practitioner of terrorism as a means of coercion.”

“Terrorists” are reviled, because of their willingness to impose indiscriminate terror, fear, and violence on civilian populations to get their way politically or economically. If you want to gin up a populace against a particular group of people, label them “terrorists.” It’s shorthand for “despicable, bloodthirsty, murderous thugs, people with no moral limits.” Such was the contempt that the George W. Bush administration had for Al Qaeda terrorists that they secured legal opinions saying that Al Qaeda captives did not have to be accorded the respect that the Geneva Convention grants other prisoners of war. And then they waterboarded them and sent them to Guantánamo Bay. In 2015, candidate Trump said the only way to effectively fight terrorist groups such as ISIS was to kill the family members of known terrorists.

I mention this because over the past week Donald Trump, the senescent man whose word can unleash the most fearsome weapons known to humankind, revealed himself to be simply a common terrorist, albeit one with a potentially world-destroying arsenal backing him up. If the United States’ dwindling list of allies had any illusions about the man, they were surely cast to the winds this week.

First, after days of threatening massive attacks on Iran’s infrastructure and to bomb the Iranians “back to the stone age, where they belong,” Trump spewed out a profanity-filled Truth Social post on Easter Sunday that reveled in his ability to obliterate the infrastructure upon which Iranian civil society—and the lives of its 90 million residents—depend. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” Not wanting to be left out of the fun, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth also cryptically posted on X, “Back to the stone age.” (Although to be fair, in his case it wasn’t clear if this was a threat to Iran or simply a status update of Hegseth’s own all-too-visible reversion to primitive-man status.)

Two days after his tirade, Trump announced that at 8 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He added, almost as if he had no control over his own actions, “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” I have scoured my historical memory, and I cannot think of another major international figure since Hitler who has made such explicitly genocidal threats, so devoid of euphemism—and even Hitler and his henchmen generally couched their apocalyptic visions in just enough euphemism to give them the cover of plausible deniability. So much for Trump’s efforts to secure the Nobel Peace Prize next year.

Since even the US president does not possess magical powers by which he can wave a wand and magically disappear a 6,000-year-old civilization, the only plausible explanation behind the specificity of Trump’s words was that he was threatening to unleash a nuclear apocalypse on the Iranians—which would, indeed, destroy a civilization, killing tens of millions of people in the process.

What I am struggling to even begin to fathom is what it must have felt like to be an Iranian trapped in that bombed-out country in the hours between Trump’s pledge that at 8 pm their civilization would be erased and the announcement of a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire 90 minutes before Trump’s deadline. I can’t imagine how slowly time must have ticked by, each second bringing the country closer to destruction. For those 12 hours, 90 million Iranians must have felt like the condemned on death row as the time of their electrocution neared.

I can’t imagine what husbands and wives thought as they realized their partners might soon be atomized by Trump’s bombs. I can’t imagine what parents felt looking at their children and knowing that a few hours from now their bodies might be obliterated. I can’t imagine what children thought knowing their power to protect their aging mothers and fathers was gone—that they were all at the mercy of a madman’s diktats.

And I can’t even begin to fathom the rage that those millions of Iranians must have felt at the US soldiers and sailors and airmen blithely going about their business in loading up weapons and pretending that this was just another day at the office. Or, rather, I can, just ever so slightly, get a glimpse of that rage, that powerless fury, because in September 2001, that’s the rage, fear, and horror that I felt in New York when I realized that men I had never met, from places I had never been to, had tried to kill me and my fellow New Yorkers—and had done so in a way deliberately calculated to inflict maximum enduring trauma on those who survived the attacks.

Even if the US-Iran ceasefire holds, which as I write this seems by no means certain, tens of millions of Iranians will be left with that sense of panic, that stomach-churning, vertiginous sense of the fragility of… everything.

And here’s the thing: That act of terror was carried out in our name, by a man whom 80 million-plus Americans voted into office and whom the GOP-led Congress has repeatedly failed to rein in. Had he ordered the military to carry out what would surely constitute crimes against humanity, there’s precious little evidence the military would have balked (though there is some reporting that military lawyers were unwilling to sign off on Trump’s actions) or that the majority in Congress would have significantly pushed back against him. Unless I’m missing something, not a single general has resigned from the military in the past week in protest at Trump’s war crimes rhetoric. Not a single battalion has laid down its weapons. Not a single figure in the national security hierarchy, the State Department, or the Pentagon has called it quits and gone public with their opposition to Trump’s Hitlerian threats. Not a single cabinet member has quit in horror. Not a single GOP member of Congress has switched parties as a way to bring Trump under some form of congressional control.

Even after Pope Leo denounced Trump’s genocidal language, even as previous MAGA enthusiasts such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones mustered the moral clarity to condemn Trump, Americans in positions of power within the government and military chose to bury their heads in the sand rather than confront this evil. It is the starkest abnegation of moral authority in modern US history.

That could be because all the honorable officials have already been purged—either by DOGE or by more localized departmental purges initiated by Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and Tulsi Gabbard. It could also be because those who haven’t been purged have been cowed into silence. And it could be, quite simply, that, as a society, we have grown, unfortunately, used to following orders, no matter how mad those orders may be.

Whatever the reasons, I do know this: When the supposed “leader of the free world” embraces the methods and rhetoric of apocalyptic terrorism, the international order as we have long known it is no more. Trump launched this war without thinking through the consequences. With his bloodthirsty rhetoric, he has compounded the damage by showing the world that the United States is, under its current leadership, truly a rogue nation.

Chris Lehmann writes this month about Tucker Carlson. He quotes an acquaintance calling the podcaster “the Father Coughlin of the twenty-first century”—a peddler of ugly bigotries dressed up as the pseudo-populist vindication of the forgotten man.”

The Nation started sounding the alarm about Coughlin soon after he burst onto the national scene in the early 1930s, denouncing bankers and corporations for preying on ordinary people. An Ontario-born Catholic priest in suburban Detroit, Coughlin began broadcasting his Sunday sermons over the radio and found a massive audience. He initially claimed to support the New Deal, but soon turned against it as insufficiently opposed to high finance. 

Early on, The Nation evinced a prescient skepticism toward Coughlin’s populism. In 1934, Raymond Gram Swing published a two-part profile, warning that the pastor’s program, though vague, bore a clear resemblance to fascism. Swing’s portrait calls to mind none other than Carlson: “In type he is an actor, with an advanced sense of stage management. He plays several roles…. Few visitors get to know the real Father Coughlin, perhaps because there is no real Father Coughlin. The reality may be just this succession of parts.” 

Columnist Heywood Broun observed in 1936 that Coughlin “has a certain contempt for his own fuzzy followers and sees them as so much fascist fodder…. he is solely a fascist faker using whatever means come to his hand to lend dignity and cover to his effort to achieve literal dictatorship in the United States.” 

And then, in 1939, the journalist James Wechsler published “The Coughlin Terror,” which showed how the Coughlin-aligned “Christian Front” organization was behind a sharp rise in anti-Semitic street violence in New York. In response, Coughlin repeatedly attacked “the Bolshevik Nation.” The editors responded: “Well, we are used to verbal rocks from both right and left, but our readers know, even if Coughlin does not, that for nearly seventy-five years The Nation has been not a Bolshevik but a liberal magazine which has fought hard for the civil liberties of all groups without distinction of race or creed.”

American entry into World War II eroded support for Coughlin’s pro-fascist message. In 1942, his Catholic superiors ordered him to give up broadcasting. He continued ministering to his Michigan church until the late 1960s and died in 1979.

In 1965, The Nation reviewed a book about Coughlin. The reviewer, Harvey Bresler, asked whether “some new Coughlin-like mass movement” might rise in the future: “In the eventuality of a prolonged economic collapse like that of the 1930s, almost anything could happen. But that is not likely, today we have too many built-in precautionary mechanisms…. Furthermore, American society is not as polarized as it was thirty years ago.” 

Well, today it seems about as polarized as in the 1930s, and those built-in precautionary mechanisms don’t appear to be quite as sturdy as they used to be. Only time will tell how far our own “fascist faker” chooses to take his hateful grift, and what it will take to stop him.