When the clock struck midnight on May 1, the far-right conspiracy website Infowars went offline with a whimper. The organization was dissolved after multiple successful defamation lawsuits were filed against its founder, Alex Jones, and eventually no one could pay the $81,000-per-month rent for the website’s studio space. Jones owes more than a billion dollars after he spent years claiming that the deadliest K-12 shooting in history was a hoax perpetrated by the government to promote the passage of strict gun-control laws. The victims’ families were subjected to relentless harassment and death threats by Jones’s followers, who believed that they and their dead children were “crisis actors.”

Neither my blood pressure nor my sanity can countenance the conspiracy theories that hucksters like Jones peddle as if they were dietary supplements or survivalist supplies. But as much as the Sandy Hook truthers are blinded by hateful ideology, I have to believe some of their fervor stems from how bewildering that particular tragedy was. School shootings are as endemic to 21st-century America as the common cold: Roughly 233 of them occurred last year, though that number isn’t definitive, since there is no standard definition of the term “school shooting.” But even taking into account our acquiescent gun culture and the current adolescent mental health crisis, the mere idea that someone would shoot 20 6- and 7-year-olds with a legally purchased semiautomatic rifle can short-circuit even the stablest of minds.

I have been prone to depression for most of my life, and I have managed it, sometimes more successfully than others, with self-medication and irregular emotional support. Hence, my depressive periods tend to blend together in my memory. (Frankly, they aren’t severe or notable enough to be worth remembering at all.) But the months following Sandy Hook were a different story. The shooting happened at the tail end of finals during my sophomore year of college. I had plenty of time to absorb, and be affected by, the tributes and debates that took place throughout the winter break and the subsequent spring semester.

I felt vaguely embarrassed by how affected I was and brushed off queries from my friends about my low mood. I had no personal connection to anyone who was killed. I didn’t even have younger siblings whom I could project my secondhand grief onto. I suppose part of the reason I was so unnerved by the whole affair was that I knew in my heart that nothing would change, culturally or politically, in its aftermath. Sure enough, those forebodings were confirmed when numerous states passed laws that weakened gun restrictions in the months after the shooting. If 20 dead kids weren’t enough to alter the terms of the gun-control debate in this country, then the debate was over.

My distance from the incident could not heal my raw nerves. I remember my mother offhandedly mentioning that, since it was two weeks before Christmas, the victims’ parents almost certainly had presents for their kids already stashed away in their homes. The heartbreaking banality of that statement undid me like a zipper.

The first time I was first paid for my writing was in my junior year of college when I reviewed a David Spade standup-comedy special for The A.V. Club. It would be another few years before I could call myself a film critic. I settled instead for developing an inchoate cinephilia.

Like most burgeoning cineastes, I embraced a permissive attitude toward on-screen violence as an outgrowth of a generally progressive view of art. But even as a young man, I found it distressing to watch depictions of children getting gunned down to manufacture drama. I remember barely being able to stomach Battle Royale (2000), a pre–Hunger Games dystopian action film about junior-high-school kids who are forced to fight one another to the death by their authoritarian government, when my college roommates screened it in our apartment. Years later, I was asked to review Paul Greengrass’s 22 July (2018), a docudrama about the 2011 domestic terrorist attacks in Norway, and I distinctly remember thinking that the film offered nothing substantial enough to justify its graphic recreation of those brutal events. I have similar difficulties with films I otherwise adore, like John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), in which an unproductively sour taste floods my mouth when a gunman’s bullet blasts through a little girl’s vanilla ice cream and into her chest, leaving her covered in blood.

My fragility around this issue has compounded in recent years as contemporary cinema reflects the normalization of wholesale slaughter as a hazard of American life. Vox Lux (2018), for example, capitalizes on the trauma of mass shootings to lend sociocultural heft to a rudimentary exploration of contemporary celebrity. The weakest shot in Weapons (2025), a supernatural-horror film about 17 children who mysteriously disappear, features a nightmarish image of an assault rifle eerily floating in the sky, cheaply summoning a tangible source of terror as a vehicle for narrative ambiguity. The specious evocation of real-life carnage has become something of a cinematic red line for me, admittedly complicating my otherwise open-minded philosophy regarding artistic depictions of aberrance.

My oft-frustrating sensitivity to cinematic depictions of mass gun violence came to mind as I watched The Drama (2026), Kristoffer Borgli’s new commercially successful (and critically divisive) dark romantic comedy. The film chronicles the repercussions of a woman’s revelation to her fiancé and friends that she had planned, but didn’t carry out, a school shooting when she was a teenager. The hesitant confession of the bride-to-be, Emma (Zendaya), occurs in mixed company—Emma’s maid of honor responds negatively to the admission because her cousin had been paralyzed in a shooting—days before her wedding to Charlie (Robert Pattinson). The final preparations for the nuptials become shrouded in unease and regret, with Charlie haunted by nightmarish images of mass death and the film’s soundtrack peppered with allusions to gunshots and screams of terror.

A crucial portion of The Drama follows a high-school-aged Emma, played by young actress Jordyn Curet, whom we see in a series of flashbacks being pushed into nihilism by her peers’ overt bullying. Obsessed with mass-shooter iconography and online gun-violence forums, Emma simmers with rage until an attack on her school, with specific people in mind to eliminate, feels like her only option. She even records a video manifesto to be discovered after her suicide, but it ultimately gets scuttled by a software update that crashes her computer.

In The Drama, Borgli, a Norwegian director, highlights American gun culture and mental illness and the ways they impact an impressionable child with a matter-of-fact sensibility. He doesn’t treat the teenage Emma as a vehicle for alarmist social commentary or moral instruction about “kids today,” but rather as a developing person whose future isn’t set in stone. Borgli emphasizes the ways that quasi-comical coincidences, like the unexpected computer failure, can push the Emmas of the world off a seemingly inexorable negative path. Case in point: She decides to call off the assault only after a mass shooting at a mall happens to take place on the day she was supposed to mount her own—its own comment on the unfathomable prevalence of such events.

In the aftermath of that attack, which costs the life of a classmate of hers, Emma feels confused and overwhelmed by the outpouring of grief from the very people she had previously scorned. After a peer encourages her to join a new coalition against gun violence, she quickly makes friends in the club, and later becomes an outspoken activist. Fortuitous events and the compassion of her fellow students ultimately shock Emma into a position of empathy, all while she lives with a reminder of her capacity for destruction: her partial deafness, the product of incorrectly practice-firing her dad’s rifle in the woods.

I’ll admit that as I’ve aged, I’ve become even more sensitive to on-screen gun violence in general, regardless of whether it’s inflicted on adults or on children. Sometimes this discomfort can be productive, like with Alan Clarke’s landmark short film Elephant (1989), which coldly depicts 18 murders to highlight the social forces that gave rise to sectarian bloodshed in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Other times, I am merely disgusted, like when I saw the other Elephant (2003), Gus Van Sant’s film about a school shooting inspired by the Columbine massacre that uses minimalist formal techniques comparable to those in Clarke’s film but to dehumanizing and politically disorganized ends.

While I knew what the big reveal was in The Drama before I saw it, I was disarmed by Borgli’s palpably sensitive portrayal of (failed) mass-shooter psychology and his convincing depiction of intervention. “Violence—whether directed outward or inward‚ is rarely spontaneous. It is almost always preceded by signals that, in hindsight, feel painfully clear,” wrote Nicole Hockley, the mother of a child killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, arguing that Borgli accurately portrays troubling adolescent behavioral patterns that parents and educators routinely ignore.

The main preoccupation of The Drama is the psychological effects of the modern panopticon. Much of the film’s comedy involves Charlie’s splenetic paranoia about how others would perceive him and his relationship if they were to discover Emma’s “violent” past. Yet neither the film’s mild satire of American cultural sensitivities and liberal outrage nor its humorously eye-rolling attitude toward Charlie’s less-than-enlightened attitude undercuts its sincere depiction of a troubled child who is pulled from the brink of horror at the last second. In fact, the film’s anxious comedy renders its portrayal of Emma’s youth, and her forced reckoning as a conscience-stricken adult, all the more earnest in contrast.

Some critics have argued that Borgli opportunistically uses the widespread danger of school shootings to construct Emma’s characterization. (The film’s marketing campaign, which treats Emma’s secret as a “surprising” third-act twist for audiences to discover together, doesn’t help matters.) Theoretically, I should concur with this criticism, but Borgli’s mixture of sympathy and concern for Emma’s rage, ably brought to life by Curet, felt appropriately considered in my eyes. The Drama also doesn’t approach Emma’s disclosure lightly. To learn that a loved one was capable of such violence, even if she didn’t follow through with it, does indeed alter one’s perceptions. Borgli may use these ideas as a springboard for dark comedy, but he doesn’t present them with a smirking insincerity.

Borgli’s unsentimental view of American violence—its social foundation and the desensitized public discourse around it, especially—rang true to me as someone who, like many others, has witnessed the splintering of society. But as much as The Drama takes America’s alienated population and their reflexive love for destructive action as a given, it also exhibits a staunch belief in the capacity for human beings to change. Such muted optimism about people and reform can only arise from a hard-earned fatalism about our intractable culture. In a way, it’s the most my own worldview has been reflected on screen in some time.

As of Wednesday morning this week, even after his sexting scandal broke, I knew two things about Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner: I was glad I didn’t have to vote in Maine, and that if I did, I would probably hold my nose and vote for Platner. Senator Susan Collins is despicable, her vote for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh unforgivable. Defeating her is essential.

It’s Friday morning, and now I know deep down I could never vote for Platner. (I’m still glad I don’t vote in Maine so I won’t be tested on Tuesday.)

Platner, as most of the political world now knows, was accused Thursday afternoon in a New York Times story of behaving in “unsettling” ways, as one of the women put it, to at least three girlfriends, between 2013 and 2021. As many people also know, especially Platner stans, the worst allegations in the article—that he was physically abusive, and that he knew his “skull and bones” tattoo was an SS Totenkopf, which he has repeatedly denied—came from a conservative GOP operative. Do I like that? No. But I believe her, and I don’t believe Platner.

The Maine oysterman has been through a lot since his 20-year-old Totenkopf was revealed in October (he had no idea it was a Nazi symbol, he said. He’d danced with his shirt off at a wedding, in front of his Jewish family!). Then came allegations that he had posted, on Reddit and other social media, various icky thoughts about women, Black people, and gay people. He said both the tattoo and the sometimes outrageous Reddit posts were a product of his PTSD and alcoholism from his military service, which included not only the Marines but a stint at the mercenary group Blackwater. He asked for understanding and compassion. He received it.

But consider this, when you think about whether to trust him: If the New York Post is to be believed, as recently as Tuesday he told Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who’ve endorsed him, that there were no more muddy boots to drop, and that the “worst” of the rumors they might be hearing weren’t true. Then he canceled the rest of his Washington meetings and ran home to Sullivan, Maine, to do damage control on the coming New York Times story. Even if you don’t believe that story, or don’t want to believe the Republican victim, you’d have to count what he told Sanders and Warren as something akin to a… lie, wouldn’t you?

Platner did something similar in his interview with MSNOW’s Chris Hayes last night. When Hayes asked him whether there were other “texts, photos, floating around that will hurt the campaign,” and whether he worried about it, the candidate brushed it off: “I’m not worried about it. There may be things out there, but they’re before I was in politics and a public figure.” He repeatedly depicted the negative stories coming out against him as what happens when you’re “going up against an entrenched political machine.” Disapproval was only coming from “career politicians.” Platner went on: “My journey is one of transformation.”

And my journey is one of disillusionment, and maybe some regret that I ever believed him. Dude, you got into politics last August. So anything that happened, say, that spring must be forgiven?

Yes, I’m a little pissed off. I’ve been Platner-skeptical since the Totenkopf reveal, but my Maine friends and acquaintances, as well as people I respect in the broader progressive community, love him. But I think Platner’s rocket to political stardom reflects something ugly that’s developed, not only on the right but on the left too: The only acceptable form of “identity politics” now is white-male identity politics. On the left, women and people of color have been told since Kamala Harris lost in 2024, even going back to Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016, that we are the problem; our “identitarianism” drove away moderates and white men in 2016, and in 2024, even some Black and Latino men.

Over and over we’ve been told: We gotta support candidates, like Platner, who have a lot of guns, and pickup trucks, and tattoos, and a military background, even if it includes Blackwater; a history of racist and sexist remarks and gay slurs on social media, and a history of shady behavior toward women, because it’s the only way to reach white working-class men.

I’d say that’s pretty insulting to white working-class men.

Let me add a couple of other points on the last two Platner scandals involving women. The sexting—which took place after he was married, and which was revealed by his wife to the campaign—actually bothered me, because it reflected recent behavior, not his post-combat meltdown. And for the record, it wasn’t normal old sexting (who among us?) but use of a semi-anonymous app called Kik, frequently used the way Platner used it. His photo on the app showed him shirtless, and in a towel; his profile was only deleted last week. This disturbs me more than if he had been sending smutty consensual texts to someone he knew. For one thing: When Hayes asked him if all his sext recipients were adults, he quickly answered, “Yes,” though he has no way to know. That it happened after his marriage shows a level of sexual compulsion that’s unnerving in a Senate candidate.

Also, when Hayes asked him when he terminated his sexting, he quickly said, “It stopped when it started.” Is that a koan or something?

In Thursday’s New York Times story, conservative Lyndsey Fifield’s stories of violence—he grabbed her so hard he left marks; during a fight, he twisted her arm behind her back, threw her into a bedroom, and held the door closed until, he told her, she got “calm”—are the most harrowing. But they aren’t the only disturbing information in the piece.

Jenny Racicot, a Democrat who dated him, told the Times: “When I saw the old comments that he made online…I was like, that makes sense. This person does not respect women.” While she said he was not physically abusive, she related a story where he came to her house drunk when she had asked him not to. Racicot found it “reckless” and “unsettling.” She also posted on a Facebook page, “Are we dating the same guy?” after a woman posted a photo with Platner. The woman added that “he popped up on a different dating app. I’m concerned he may have a significant other out there.” Racicot posted confirming that he was indeed married and warned against him. That was in November 2024, a year after he married Amy Gertner.

The third woman the Times depicted as having bad experiences dating Platner is unnamed, and is quoted saying only that she felt like “collateral damage to the world that is his.”

Still, the most damning information comes from Fifield. She also says he referred to women as “hatchet wounds,” referring to our genitalia, she believes, and more than once told her: “If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” but added “it would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way…. I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant.”

Again, you can dismiss Fifield because of her politics, or not. I don’t.

But the lefty men who have defended Platner appall me almost more than he does. Substacker Ken Klippenstein, who once worked at The Nation, defended Platner after the sexting story broke as a manly man, unlike the “smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” He named California Governor Gavin Newsom, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, and former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg (who is gay) as examples. “When Washington acts like it’s disqualifying, what they’re really saying is that ordinary people aren’t fit for higher office.” Klippenstein’s piece also contains the lovely sentence that Mills got “her clock cleaned by Platner so badly she’s probably still shitting pieces of her dentures out.” Nice violent imagery! Klippenstein captioned a side-by-side photo of Collins and Maine Governor Janet Mills, who dropped out of the race: “Susan Collins and Janet Mills would never be embroiled in a sexting scandal (too much integrity?)” Sexist, ageist—it reminds me of 2016. (Here’s an excellent piece by Liberal Currents writer Alan Elrod about Klippenstein’s post.)

In Jacobin, David Sirota wrote: “If you are part of this political-media elite, you are probably desperately promoting the idea that politicians’ ‘character’ is defined by their manners, civility, family life, and anything else that has no material impact on voters.” So manly populism matters, allegations of assaulting and demeaning women don’t?

The day before the Times story with the women’s specific allegations broke, author Sebastian Junger weighed in with “I just had breakfast with Graham Platner” on his Substack. “I was interested to meet someone who seemed to represent a new political creature: the working-man liberal,” Junger says in the piece. He goes on to man-worship Platner (and himself) by writing that the two were “the only people [in their swanky restaurant] who had been blown up in a war zone” and that Platner was “the only Democratic candidate or congressman I wouldn’t want to mess with, whereas the Republicans have at least half a dozen guys who could put me in a headlock.” That’s what I want in a senator!

Some have continued to defend Platner after these latest revelations. Maybe the worst defense of the candidate came from acclaimed film and television producer Marshall Herskovitz, the man behind two shows I loved when I was younger, thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. I can’t link to Herskovitz’s ludicrous Bluesky posts, because after a few hours of backlash, he removed them. But I’d copied one. The reaction to Times’ Platner accusations, he wrote, “reveals why the Democratic Party has lost men. Is Platner accused of rape, assault, harassment? Nope. Just being a bad boyfriend.”

Actually, Fifield accused him of assault, Marshall. You should at least acknowledge that, even if you want to add that you don’t believe her because she was a conservative.

And DropSite writer Ryan Grim, who notoriously peddled serial liar Tara Reade’s claim that, as a senator, President Joe Biden raped her, long past the point of credulity (Reade was also a known Vladimir Putin worshipper; she now lives in Russia) has taken the lead in itemizing Fitfield’s GOP background. It’s a service, I guess. Still, “I believe Tara Reade but Lyndsey Fifield is a liar” makes me distrust his judgment.

For the record, Lyndsey Fifield has her own complaints about the Times story, saying it left out corroborating details, which she posted on X.

All of this said, I’m still glad I’m not a Maine voter. Defeating Susan Collins is critical to Democrats’ taking the Senate. The feckless Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, who pushed a reluctant Janet Mills into the race, then embraced Platner after the sexting scandal, and then hailed Collins for her 10,000th Senate vote (by the way, it was the vote to enhance ICE and Border Patrol funding), deserves a lot of blame here.

That tilt-a-whirl performance aside, Schumer and establishment Democrats haven’t invested at all in new candidate development or the state party infrastructure that would put them forward. And all Schumer’s Senate recruits are either establishment Democrats or folks who would have run anyway (like former senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio). In Minnesota, he is reportedly encouraging big Dem donors to support corporate centrist Representative Angie Craig against progressive Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan; I could go on but I won’t.

Yes, taking the Senate is crucial, but right now we have no guarantee Platner can. The polls show that the race between him and Collins has already tightened. And if you believe there aren’t more muddy boots to drop, you’re naïve (though I hope you’re right). He already admitted it was possible to Chris Hayes. And while I’m not thrilled that the source of the most damaging allegations is a Republican, I also think: If she were doing this for Collins, wouldn’t she have held this dirt until Platner had the nomination?

Anyway, this is a mess that I mainly blame on establishment Democrats who are afraid of genuine populist, anti-corporate insurgents, as well as on toxic lefty men who’ve tried to shame anyone who raises doubts about Platner into silence. There’s still a potent strain of misogyny on the left, and I’m not going to shut up about it. Mainers, vote your conscience on Tuesday, whatever that is.

CBS News used to be a place where reporters won Emmys and got raises for telling the truth. This week, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley got fired for it. At a staff meeting, the 68-year-old, 37-year-veteran of the network called out his new boss, executive producer Nick Bilton. Pelley could not contain himself when Bilton said CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss “loves this institution. She loves 60 Minutes.”

Pelley interrupted with controlled fury. “She is murdering 60 Minutes,” he said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Pelley went on: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the Evening News have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

To illustrate his point, Pelley listed the 60 Minutes staffers who had been fired on what is now known at their offices as Black Thursday. That day came in the aftermath of Weiss’s decision to stop the planned broadcast of a story on the brutal conditions at El Salvador’s Terrorism Containment Center (CECOT) where the United States sent Venezuelan migrants for detention after their apprehension by ICE. Weiss felt the story was not balanced, and sought to add a MAGA counterpoint to what 60 Minutes already felt was a balanced, finished piece. 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi publicly criticized Weiss’s decision and was fired.

“I have been a journalist for 25 years,” Bilton shot back. “I’ve sat across from incredibly powerful people like you have, and none of it intimidates me. OK? So you are not going to intimidate me in front of this group of people.” Bilton then proved exactly how not-at-all intimidated he was by bringing Pelley’s outburst to the attention of Bari Weiss. Weiss accused Pelley of creating an unsafe work environment and insisted that he apologize. As this happened internally—an audio recording of the meeting was leaked to media outlets the day of the confrontation. What began as a closed-door shouting match between a reporter and a senior executive—a far-from-unprecedented occurrence in the history of journalism—went public as national news. It raised the stakes considerably. Of course, Pelley refused to back down. He meant every word of it. With his unapologetic criticism now public, CBS fired him.

Nothing says you won’t be intimidated like firing someone for criticizing you. Pelley spent nearly four decades at CBS, reporting, sitting at the anchor desk, and making it to 60 Minutes as a worthy successor to Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, and colleagues like Lesley Stahl. Pelley’s firing comes less than a week after Steven Colbert’s last episode aired and the affable, unremarkable Byron Allen has taken his place with his apolitical, sponsor-friendly show Comics Unleashed. It also comes as reports went viral that CBS News was trying to woo right-wing bro podcaster Joe Rogan over to 60 Minutes, in an attempt to connect with his vast listenership. (CBS now denies this.) A Rogan-branded 60 Minutes would be the journalistic equivalent of Trump building a UFC octagon arena on the White House lawn. In damage control mode, Nick Bilton contacted senior correspondents Lesley Stahl, Jon Wertheim, and Bill Whitaker to reassure them of journalistic independence. Given the last 18 months of CBS acquiescing to Trump, we’ll see how long this lasts. Why is all this happening at once?

Yes, Pelley brought a level of reporting excellence and a historical relationship with 60 Minutes’ audience that can’t be replaced—but in the Trump 2.0 era, those qualities are a hindrance, not a help. People like Pelley tend to feel they know what they’re talking about and question their bosses. Worse, other people listen to them—a definite bug, not a feature for the MAGA model of public discourse.

In CBS’s brave new world, loyalty comes first—namely, the kind Weiss shows to her employers and not to her news division. As Pelley railed about Weiss’s lack of credentials in New York, Republican senators cited the same issue as they balked at at the news of Trump’s appointment of a new director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte. Pulte, 38, has no intelligence experience—a first-order disqualification in the past that roughly equates to a Harvard PhD for the country’s MAGA leadership caste. His chief qualification for the job is a singular loyalty to Trump—the same quality we saw on display from the CBS suits who gave Simon and Alfonsi the boot for their exposé on CECOT abuses and then dismissed Pelley for talking back to senior executives. It means not only does Pulte not question; he doesn’t really have the capacity to question.

It’s hard to believe that Bilton and Weiss acted alone when they sent a senior reporter and CBS icon like Pelley packing. 60 Minutes is the most highly rated news show on television. It’s racked up 4 million YouTube subscribers. Pelley is a large factor in that success. As Dan Rather recently wrote, “Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News, is a bit player in this drama, executing decisions that are made far above her pay grade.”

It’s not hard to divine who the players “far above her pay grade” are; Rather is most likely referencing the owners of CBS, the Ellison family. Recently actor Mark Ruffalo, a vocal opponent and organizer against the Ellison’s mammoth buyout of Warner Bros. and a pro-Palestinian activist, came to a similar conclusion on the I’ve Had It podcast. “To quote one prominent agent whose name I won’t divulge here,” Ruffalo said, “these are some vindictive motherfuckers, the Ellisons.”

Ruffalo went on to talk about the bid from Paramount-CBS to acquire Warner Bros., a deal that has not yet been sealed. The buyout would give the Ellisons control of two movie studios, CBS and CNN, and a host of other cable channels. Ruffalo has organized a petition of artists to oppose the merger, citing the jobs to be sacrificed, the weakened leverage of unions before the Ellisons’ mega-conglomerate, the loss of financial backers for artists, and decreasing diversity of movies getting made.

As the Ellisons have parted ways with everyone from Taylor Sheridan to Anderson Cooper, it’s clear that stellar talents are easily expendable in pursuit of this megadeal. What Pelley was up against on the East Coast is what Ruffalo opposes from the West. Besides the huge hits about to be taken in the entertainment industry, Ruffalo also sees what he calls “the degradation of journalism through political pressure.” Of a recent 60 Minutes interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, where Netanyahu was given a choice of interviewers between Lesley Stahl and Major Garrett (Bibi chose Garrett), Ruffalo said, “He would have never been on 60 Minutes outside of this regime.… that’s another thing that people really understand, there’s a whole other part of this, which is the journalists are starting to sign on. We have journalists who are coming out against this.”

Ruffalo, like Pelley, has clearly reached a breaking point. “I’m not doing this because I’m fearless,” he explained to the hosts of I’ve Had It. “I’m doing this because I know we have to. And I know that no matter what, if I don’t speak out, it’s the same outcome. I’m already on a list, I’m already not a friend of these people. And so, you’re either gonna fight or you’re gonna lay down.”

As the Ellisons court the administration’s approval of their deal, the craven loyalty Trump demands from his cabinet appointees continues to disfigure great cultural and media institutions of our time. If Trump can’t get his name on everything he wants, he’ll settle for the next best thing: leaving a greasy orange stain on everything he touches.

We are often told not to bite the hand that feeds us. In our case, we were not explicitly told not to speak. No one needed to tell us. CBS News funded our education and honored our work—our role was to acknowledge the network’s generosity and graciousness.

The implicit lesson here was that gratitude should speak for itself. The expectation was simple: accept the recognition, cash the check, and leave the criticism to someone else.

We cannot. We are the four most recent recipients of the Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship, funded entirely by CBS News. The network has invested tens of thousands of dollars in our education and recognized us as representatives of journalism’s future. That future—thanks to the corporate leadership of CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss, whose editorial interventions in the network’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, spurred the firing of several of the network’s veteran producers and reporters—is now in jeopardy. The shameful attack on 60 Minutes hasn’t happened because the program, or the network, is losing ratings, revenue, and respect; it’s occurred as part of the bid to impose ideological orthodoxy on the network’s news division. Weiss’s agenda to appease the Trump administration sends the message that institutional loyalty matters more than editorial independence, and that the truth is merely one side of a debate. The upshot of this timorous model of newsgathering is that neutrality, not objectivity or accountability, is the highest virtue of journalism. Mike Wallace didn’t think so, and neither do we. Below, each of us offers our personal reflections on our tenure as Mike Wallace scholars amid the corporate news crisis at CBS.

Silence Is Complicity

Santiago Campos

When I accepted a scholarship in Mike Wallace’s name, I knew I had a responsibility to call out the counter-journalistic practices at the organization he worked for. Staying silent at such a moment would have made me complicit in the disgraceful repudiation of the high standards set by Wallace and his colleagues at 60 Minutes. While I was not expecting the remarks I delivered in acceptance of my scholarship to leave the room, I was not surprised when they did go viral. At a time when public trust in mainstream media is at record lows, my remarks captured a widespread frustration with journalists who are unwilling to take a stand against the ways in which corporate consolidation is disfiguring the work they do at their own outlets. My speech shouldn’t have made headlines—aspiring journalists should be expected to speak out against threats to the profession.

Professional journalists should not need a high school student to ask these questions. Yet my remarks were met by an eruption of applause from nearly every journalist in the room that night. I was glad that they clapped. But the real question is whether they have the courage, integrity, and willingness to speak truth to power when it matters most. Afraid of losing their jobs in a hyper-competitive market, many of them see staying quiet as the safer option.

That’s not a luxury extended to the people they cover. As a student journalist who has spent the past two years covering US immigration policy, I have reported firsthand on the grave threats posed by mass deportation campaigns—not just to undocumented migrants but to the broader American public. Today, ICE has detained green-card holders, American citizens, and has violently menaced protesters, culminating in the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Under the ownership of David Ellison, a public ally of President Trump, and the direction of his appointed lackey Bari Weiss, CBS is suppressing the distribution of stories on the administration’s handling of immigration. Before 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley introduced me at the Emmys, he recognized his ousted colleague Sharyn Alfonsi. Earlier that day, Alfonsi had lost her contract at the network after management worked to suppress her segment on the harsh conditions experienced by Venezuelan migrants at CECOT, the Salvadoran mega-prison used to hold US deportees.

Pelley was soon penalized for speaking out. After a venerable 37-year career, he was fired by the network after criticizing the policies of Weiss and her management team in a contentious staff meeting. Alfonsi and Pelley put their jobs on the line to resist efforts to silence and marginalize their work. All journalists at CBS should follow their lead. Their fear is understandable, but it doesn’t excuse their silence. The stakes are too high.

Truth, Above All Else

Talan Collins

Last year’s Wallace awards ceremony was rife with tension—the scheduled speeches seemed to take place against the backdrop of a ticking clock, the signature soundtrack of 60 Minutes. As I sat on a vented windowsill in Paramount’s corporate headquarters 50 floors above Times Square, I was so caught up in the surreal mood of the evening, I almost overlooked the fact that I was sitting right beside Lesley Stahl. This was real. This was CBS.

As I had just been let in the door, another man had just walked out. After 26 years, Bill Owens had resigned from 60 Minutes, protesting the news division’s constriction of his editorial autonomy and news judgment. After the reception, my scholarship liaison marched me over to him. I didn’t know where to begin. Should I lead with deferential shows of respect and admiration? That seemed unequal to the moment—what Owens had demonstrated, first and foremost, was courage. That’s what inspired me. So when I accepted my 2025 scholarship before a room full of faces I had known from TV news broadcasts since my childhood, I was determined to heed Owens’s courageous example. “The pursuit of truth demands curiosity, but also courage,” I said that night, my own voice trembling at the sight of my heroes. “Courage to confront power, even when truth becomes threatening. Courage to speak, even when silence is safer; when authority threatens access, approval—or acquisition.” I asked the seasoned journalists in the crowd just how many more of their principled colleagues would have to resign before they recovered the courage and audacity to continue serving the public interest.

Mike Wallace once found himself caught between loyalty to CBS and loyalty to a tobacco-industry whistleblower whose allegations threatened one of America’s most powerful industries. That conflict, which reportedly haunted Wallace for years, was immortalized in Michael Mann’s 1999 film The Insider. Veteran anchorman Dan Rather’s final months at CBS News were overshadowed by his efforts to defend a disputed report on President George W. Bush’s National Guard service and the producers who stood by it. His final sign-off was both a warning and a call to arms: “Courage.” Wallace, Rather, and Owens were key figures who made 60 Minutes tick. They were willing to lose what many journalists spend their entire careers chasing: stability, prestige, and—most vitally—access. Journalism, it turns out, is tested when telling the truth carries a cost. As I accepted my Wallace scholarship in 2025, I tried to imagine a place for myself in that reception room. I wanted to believe that the institution still rewarded the qualities that made me admire it in the first place. I now believe the CBS that inspired me is dead. Sooner or later, those who remain there will have to decide what matters more: the comfort of remaining in the room, or the courage to risk their place in it for the sake of truth. Scott Pelley made his choice. Now I’ve made mine.

Heat and Light

Sebastian Broche

After accepting the Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship in 2024, I was approached by Fordham University professor Beth Knobel. She handed me a copy of Heat and Light, the book she co-authored with the late Mike Wallace. As I reread it, one statement from the opening chapter struck me: “Objectivity remains paramount at CBS News to this day.” Two years later, Scott Pelley’s termination reveals that’s no longer the case. Knobel and Wallace argued that the central goal of journalism is to separate fact from fiction. Truth, they wrote, involves nuance and an understanding that a simple both-sides narrative isn’t a substitute for factual inquiry.

That vital lesson has been lost in the present drive to turn CBS News into a messaging platform for the Trump administration. Sharyn Alfonsi’s firing took place because she refused to water down a report on CECOT with an irrelevant interview in which a senior administration official delivered empty talking points. The journalist who spent more than a decade at 60 Minutes was let go because she stood up for the truth as Mike Wallace understood it. CBS News has long presented itself as the gold standard of objective broadcast journalism—which is why industry insiders dubbed it the Tiffany Network. Knobel and Wallace cite the legacy of widely trusted journalist Edward R. Murrow, whose role in facing down the McCarthyist witch hunts set a benchmark for the network’s professional standards. Now CBS has turned those standards on their head, with the firings of Pelley and Alfonsi and many other accomplished and seasoned reporters and producers. As Knobel and Wallace observe, journalists cannot turn a blind eye to truthful reporting because of the “financial consequences of controversy.” The second you step on-screen or you put pen to paper, your allegiance is no longer to the people who sign their names on your checks—it is to the truth. My scholarship is named for Mike Wallace, and he would be the first one to speak out if he saw his legacy tainted by a version of CBS that had lost sight of its fundamental mission to broadcast the truth. Under Bari Weiss’s direction, CBS News is seeking to strike an unsustainable balance between fact and self-interested political fiction. I believe, as Mike Wallace did, in the balance of heat and light.

Three Years Ago

Chris Gloff

Three years is a long time. Three years ago, I had a mop haircut and was seriously considering an offer to play college baseball. Three years ago, I wanted to work for CBS. That’s when I got to stand on the stage of the Palladium Times Square to accept a scholarship from one of the country’s most esteemed journalistic organizations. My mantra at the time was a quote from Christiane Amanpour: “Be truthful, not neutral.”

Since then, CBS and its parent company, Paramount, have paid President Trump $16 million to settle a meritless lawsuit claiming deceptive editing of an interview with his 2024 opponent for the presidency, Kamala Harris. CBS/Paramount also canceled The Late Show in the wake of host Stephen Colbert’s persistent criticism of the administration. The network claims that decision was “purely financial,” even though Colbert’s show drew the highest ratings in the late-night time slot. CBS also fired longtime 60 Minutes producer Tanya Simon, who, despite the program’s top ratings and a growing digital audience, was replaced by print journalist Nick Bilton, who has never worked in broadcast news. Paramount reported a 9 percent increase in ratings for the 2025–26 season of 60 Minutes compared to the prior year; the show’s online engagement doubled over the same period.

Clearly the lead motivating factors in the network’s recent decisions are political, not financial—and these political pressures are corrupting an historic institution. I believe CBS is failing those who built its reputation by prioritizing political accessibility over journalistic integrity. I received a scholarship in Mike Wallace’s name because I endeavored to uncover the truth—not because I conformed to the pressures of those with authority. Wallace would be ashamed of the network that had aired his landmark Watergate interviews. Walter Cronkite would be appalled that the network that had broadcast his groundbreaking coverage of the Vietnam War also fired Scott Pelley for questioning authority. I received money under Wallace’s name to continue the public service of uncovering and broadcasting truth. Journalists like Scott Pelley fought to preserve the institution I wanted to dedicate my life to.

Three years ago, CBS’s legacy was tied to names like Wallace and Cronkite. Three years ago, CBS funded my education. Three years ago, I wanted to work for CBS. Now I can only say that I wanted to work for what CBS used to be.

Biting the Red Wire

We took CBS’s money because we revered the journalists who built it. We now believe the institution that invokes Mike Wallace’s name has betrayed his legacy. We were inspired by—and once aspired to work for—programs like 60 Minutes. But from our perspectives, CBS News no longer resembles the institution that inspired us to pursue journalism. For those prominent anchors, reporters, and producers who remain there, we ask why? Each passing minute the leading voices at CBS sit with their hands tied, something slips away: the trust of the American people. And the clock is ticking. The sound of that clock is no longer the somber passage of time evoked during the credits of 60 Minutes; it’s now a countdown to the detonation of a time bomb, poised to vaporize what little remains of the public trust that an independent press needs to continue surviving. The management of CBS News is threatening to destroy the traditions of truth-telling created during the past seven decades at a once storied news network. From their perspective, we’re biting the hand that feeds us. But they’re bent on setting off an explosion that threatens an American institution—so we’re biting the red wire.

The anti-war cause won a rare and heartening victory on Wednesday when the House of Representatives passed a measure, the Iran War Powers Resolution, calling on Donald Trump to “remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The resolution passed by a vote of 215 to 208, winning bipartisan support from 211 Democrats and 4 Republicans who broke with the president—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Tom Barrett of Michigan, and Warren Davidson of Ohio. While Massie and Davidson are long known for being staunchly anti-interventionist libertarians, the defections of the two other Republicans are significant because they are moderates who represent swing districts.

Fitzpatrick and Madison were surely motivated in part by the fact that the Iran war is overwhelmingly unpopular. A new poll by The Economist/YouGov shows that 68 percent of voters believe Trump “should make a deal to end the war in Iran as quickly as possible.” They and the rest of the bill’s supporters did well to pass a resolution that not only reflects popular opinion but also reasserts the constitutional role of Congress over the waging of war.

Yet passing a resolution is easier than enforcing it.

As The New York Times reports:

The House’s vote was only the first step in a complicated and likely uphill path for the resolution. It now heads to the Senate, which under the war powers law must take it up within roughly two and a half weeks. It does not need a presidential signature, but even if Congress were to clear the measure, its legal force would remain uncertain.

Getting the Senate to pass the measure could be difficult, but it is not impossible. Last month the Senate passed a similar resolution by a vote of 50 to 47, with four Republicans joining almost all Democrats (John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, now an infamous buffoon, being the sole member of his party to vote against the resolution).

If both the House and the Senate pass the resolution, it will not need the president’s support because it will be what is known as a “concurrent resolution”—in effect, a legislative veto. But what happens next is less certain, because it is unclear whether a concurrent resolution used in this manner is constitutional.

The Constitution could not be more explicit that the responsibility for declaring war rests with Congress. Yet, in practice, this power has been eroded by the massive expansion of the national security state, which has led to a centralization of power in the executive branch. The result is an imperial presidency that frequently wages war with minimal consultation with Congress, let alone explicit authorization.

In 1973, in a backlash against the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s abuses of power, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. Under Section 5(c) of that law, a concurrent resolution should be enough to end a war.

But a decade after the passage of the War Powers Resolution, the Supreme Court ruled against the practice of legislative vetoes in the case of INS v. Chadha (1983). Although narrowly dealing with an immigration case, the decision had a far-reaching impact. Within the Reagan administration, an anonymous memo on the case (possibly written by future Supreme Court Chief John Roberts) gloated that “this is a historic ruling in favor of the executive branch. There are nearly 200 statutory provisions containing legislative vetoes. Some prominent examples include the War Powers Act…”

That view has persisted. In January, Vice President JD Vance stated that “every president, Democrat or Republican, believes the War Powers Act is fundamentally a fake and unconstitutional law.” Although Vance didn’t name the Chadha decision, it was clearly what he had in mind. (As often in politics, Vance is a naked hypocrite here, since in 2023 he argued that the War Powers Resolution should be used to constrain Joe Biden’s support of Ukraine).

But Vance was counting his chickens before the eggs had hatched. The impact of Chadha on the War Powers Resolution remains untested. In an essay in Just Security, legal scholar Michael J. Glennon points out that there were important disagreements among three justices in the Chadha case: Chief Justice Warren Burger (who wrote the majority opinion), Lewis Powell (who wrote a concurrence), and Byron White (who wrote a dissent). As Glennon observes:

The veto at issue in Chadha was the most common variant: Congress delegates authority to the executive and then reserves the right to retract it.

But Section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution is structurally distinct. The Resolution delegates nothing. It explicitly provides that nothing in it “may be construed as granting any authority to the President… he would not have had” in its absence. Section 5(c) does not retract delegated authority: it marshals Congress’s own constitutional power against an executive exercise of overlapping—or, in the terminology of the Framers’ design, concurrent—constitutional authority.

Justice Lewis Powell recognized this distinction. Concurring separately, Powell declined to reach the broad constitutional question Burger’s majority addressed. He referred explicitly to the War Powers Resolution and observed that the validity of a legislative veto “may well turn on the particular context in which it is exercised.” He would, he said, “be hesitant to conclude that every [legislative] veto is unconstitutional on the basis of the unusual example presented in this litigation.” Justice White, too, noted in dissent that the war powers context was categorically different.

Glennon also argues there are grounds to overturn Chadha as not in keeping with subsequent court decisions. A similar analysis appeared on the podcast of Lever News.

This means that the Iran War Powers Resolution is not merely a foreign policy issue but also a constitutional one—and makes it likely that the Supreme Court would have the final say on the question.

Unfortunately, there are few grounds for optimism in a legal victory. It’s uncertain whether the courts will even take up the issue. Further, the current iteration of the Supreme Court, which has been all too willing to support an expansive view of presidential power (unless it involves cases where the preferences of big business are at stake, as in tariff powers), cannot be counted on to back the legislative branch in this case.

The Iran War Powers Resolution is thus likely to be merely a symbolic victory. The imperial presidency is deeply entrenched and will require Congress to continue to battle against executive usurpation of power on many fronts. One promising avenue is using its power of the purse to limit and direct military spending. But the struggle to limit presidential militarism won’t come easily and will require anti-war forces in Congress to be stronger than they are now.

A properly functioning constitutional democracy would give Congress real power to start and end wars. The fact that this power is now just symbolic is a scandal. The challenge is to find ways to claw back the powers Congress has lost.

Yes, I began TomDispatch 24-and-a-half years ago and, today, I’m finally putting up my own last piece, at least as the editor in chief of this site. Very soon, the superlative Nick Turse will be running TomDispatch under the auspices of The Intercept (though I’ll undoubtedly continue to lend a hand). It’s been a long run. I only wish I could say that, so many years later, this world is a better place.… Sigh, no such luck. (Anything but, in fact!)

There are so many people to thank, including all the remarkable authors I’ve published. I couldn’t even begin to list them here, though I’d love to thank each of them from the bottom of my heart. And what a mess their pieces might have been if Christopher Holmes hadn’t shown up online to lend an eternal hand or my old friend Annette Liberson-Drewry hadn’t done the same, both proofing the stories in a fabulous and never-ending manner. And let me not forget Annelise Whitley, who was always there, as (until relatively recently) was Erika Eichelberger!

And I can’t even begin to thank the scads of wonderful writers who kept this site afloat all these many years! I only wish I could still thank Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, Eduardo Galeano, Todd Gitlin, Chalmers Johnson, David Rosner, Jonathan Schell, and Howard Zinn, who are now gone from this world of ours, not to speak of so many TD authors (far too many to name) who are still deeply alive and kicking on this all-too-strange Trumpian planet and many of whom, I hope, will continue to write for this site under Nick Turse.

I can’t even imagine what my world would have been like if Hamilton Fish hadn’t called me so long ago. He suggested turning the e-mails I had begun sending out to friends in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on my city and Washington, DC, containing articles that struck me at media sites around the world and my own little explanatory introductions, into a website that he (not I) called TomDispatch. And what would I have done if The Nation Institute (which then became Type Media Center) hadn’t supported me all these years? They—and Taya McCormick-Grobow, in particular—were simply fantastic! And how would I have lasted if so many TomDispatchreaders hadn’t so generously contributed money to keep this site alive?

And so, nearly a quarter of a century (and many exclamation points!!) later, I find myself in a world that would have been unimaginable, even in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when life on this planet became ever stranger. Sadly, then, let me bid farewell not on a planet gloriously or even passingly better, but Trumpianly worse than I ever might have imagined. And let me also offer a small bow of thanks to the many thousands of wonderful readers who have followed this site, sent its pieces around, contributed money to keep it going, and made my life matter. And let me also offer my thanks to all the other sites that reposted TD pieces so wonderfully over the years. Thank you so, so much.

Oh, and if you feel in the mood, I now have my own Substack ready for me, where, after a little time off, I hope to keep writing the odd thing—perhaps the equivalent of my TD introductions—about this ever-stranger planet of ours (as I will also, I hope, continue to do at Nick’s version of TomDispatch from time to time). To subscribe to my new Substack, just click here. And as I used to do so regularly in another life on another planet (or so it now seems to me), I’m soon going to pick up the book manuscript of an old friend (and well-known writer) and begin editing it. And with all of that in mind, here’s my final piece as the guy who created and ran TomDispatch all these years, the last of the hundreds (certainly 300 or more!) I’ve personally written since 2001 at this site.

OK, here’s what this old man remembers nearly a quarter of a century later.

I was living in New York City (as I still am) when, on September 11, 2001, two hijacked planes full of passengers hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, killing almost 3,000 innocent people. Until that moment, of course, such a thing would have been beyond inconceivable, no less watchable on TV, in the United States of America. Had someone written up such a plot with Osama bin Laden and crew in the cast of characters, it would have been treated as the worst kind of unpublishable science fiction.

But, of course, it did indeed happen and, in some strange sense, in its wake (an all-too-appropriate word under the circumstances), our world did indeed seem to flip upside down. That was, of course, after President George W. Bush responded early that October by—God save us!—invading Afghanistan (which, at least to me, was a shock and a half in its own right) and launching his disastrous “Global War on Terror.” Sometime in the weeks that followed, my memory (not exactly trustworthy at almost 82 years of age) is that I saw an article deep inside the print New York Times (which, by the way, I still read daily on actual paper) noting that US soldiers were by then fighting in parts of Afghanistan where the troops of the Soviet Union had struggled endlessly (and lost badly) during that imperial power’s disastrous Afghan war of the previous century, which did indeed help take it down. And that, too, in some grim fashion, stunned me. Talk about mistakes that history had all too clearly signaled should never happen again (and again and again)!

I was at the time (even if barely) online and so I copied that piece into an e-mail and sent it out with a note to a small set of friends. And somehow that began the process that led to TomDispatch.

I soon realized that, thanks to the online world, I could actually read around the globe—the British Guardian, Le Monde diplomatique, etc.—and that out there in the rest of the universe, there were other ways this ever-stranger world of ours was being looked at than the ones that largely dominated attention here in the United States, post-9/11. And so, as I began stumbling across ever more pieces that seemed to offer different perspectives on our increasingly eerie world, I started e-mailing them to a growing list of friends and acquaintances. And after a time—to my complete surprise—people I hardly knew or didn’t know at all e-mailed me that they wanted to be added to my list. And with those send-outs, I began including little introductory explanatory notes or sets of comments (which launched the future TomDispatch form with my eternal little introductions—literally thousands of them over these nearly 25 years—to every piece I posted at TD except my own).

And I remember exactly the moment when I suddenly realized that something out of the ordinary was happening not just in the ever-stranger world out there but to me, too. Susan Sontag, a writer I had long admired but didn’t know from a hole in the wall, suddenly e-mailed me out of the blue and asked to be added to what would become the TomDispatch e-mail list (though it wasn’t yet called that). I was stunned. And soon, I was sending out to—I no longer remember exactly how many—but certainly several hundred people (with more being added every week). And that was the moment when someone I hardly knew (though he, too, was on my mailing list), Hamilton Fish of The Nation Institute, called me out of the blue and asked if I might, in the future, be interested in turning those e-mails of mine into a website that he then did indeed set up for me and that he—not I—called “TomDispatch.”

Initially, at the new site, I simply did what I had been doing in my e-mails. I continued to find interesting pieces published elsewhere about our ever stranger and more disturbing world, wrote little introductions of my own, and then put in their headlines and first paragraphs with a link to the full piece wherever it had first appeared. At some point, however, I started writing longer commentaries of my own on a world that seemed to grow stranger by the week. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I knew a surprising number of writers whose voices, I thought, were distinctly needed in the strange post-9/11 world we were already living through.

After all, among other things, I had been an editor, first at Pantheon Books for 15 years in the previous century and later, in this one, at Metropolitan Books, the publishing house my old friend (and Pantheon coeditor) Sara Bershtel had set up. I had, for instance, published Chalmers Johnson’s remarkable book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire at Metropolitan in 2000 to essentially no attention, minimal (and not particularly good) reviews, and few sales. Osama bin Laden’s assault on New York City and Washington, DC, however, turned that book into a nationwide bestseller and put that title word of his into the language in a big-time fashion (and he would indeed write for TomDispatch memorably in the War on Terror years that followed).

The War on Terror Comes Home, a Terrible Science Fiction Novel

And yes, Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks were indeed a nightmare, but this country responded to them almost unimaginably badly by creating a full-scale, seemingly never-ending set of further nightmares in Afghanistan and Iraq (and, of course, over the years from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Somalia in Africa, not to speak of all those global CIA “black sites” meant for the torture of Global War on Terror prisoners). And out of all those nightmares and so much more (none of which I ever would have imagined possible once upon a time) came the presidencies (and who would have believed that there could be two of them!) of Donald (the mad duck) Trump.

From the start, TomDispatch was witnessing and reporting on America’s distinctly imperial fate. I was watching with both horror and fascination as the greatest power (perhaps ever) on planet Earth (once the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991) was somehow going down, down, down, without even a helping hand from an opposing imperial power. After all, early in this century, China had yet truly to rise and now that it has, it’s not acting like a typical imperial power of history. It has (at least as yet) not launched its own version of a Global War on Terror and its leaders seem remarkably intent not on colonizing the rest of Asia in some unexpected fashion, but on making a fortune producing the world’s green energy machinery (including, at the moment, 80 percent of global solar energy panels), even if they’re also still outdoing every other country on this planet—despite Donald Trump’s efforts—in burning fossil fuels and pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere).

In some strange fashion, I watched and recorded at TomDispatch just how my country was playing out its grim version of the predictable decline of all imperial powers, historically speaking, in a distinctly up-close-and-personal fashion. And of course, in 2016, this country gave decline a remarkable new meaning on an increasingly strange and disturbed planet by electing Donald J. Trump as president.

As my version of TomDispatch ends (and Nick Turse’s launches), I find myself at my advanced age (with my friends beginning to die around me) in a world I simply could never have imagined. Don’t even get me started on artificial intelligence, which, as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, could someday “replace humans in controlling the planet”! Unreligious as I may be, I’m with the pope on AI—though perhaps even more so. My own feeling is that no genuine intelligence could have been senseless enough to create such an obvious nightmare to come.

And the War on Terror Comes Home Yet Again in the Form of Donald Trump

In a sense, it might even be possible to think of Donald Trump as the possible final chapter in this country’s global war on terror. Think of him, in fact, as the way that war came home, big time! In his own fashion, he could hardly have been more of a terror and, to make matters so much worse, in 2026, a year expected to be the second hottest in recorded history, he seems remarkably intent on making war not just on Iran, or any other random country like Somalia or Nigeria, but on this very planet itself. Even his anti-immigrant agenda is, as the Guardian recently reported, ensuring that ever more fossil fuels go into the atmosphere via the stunning number of planes deporting those immigrants, helping make ever more areas of the planet ever hotter, and—of course!—ensuring that ever more people will end up as—yes!—migrants.

In short, whether it’s climate change, Iran, or you name it, Donald Trump (the second time around) is already giving heat new meaning.

And none of this (not a bit!) would I have believed in November 2001 when all of it began for me. Had you tried to show me such a future then, I would have simply laughed you out of the room and gone about my business.

In a sense, you might say that the war on terror simply never ended, since my country has never stopped bombing other countries around the world, the latest (but undoubtedly not the last), of course, being Iran. And I suspect that, without that “war,” Donald Trump would have been inconceivable.

I’m at an age where my friends are indeed beginning to die and it pains me that, when I go, I’ll be leaving such a mess of an all-American planet to my poor grandchildren. They truly deserve better. And once upon a time (if I even imagined them coming into this world of ours), I might have hoped that someday in the then-distant future I would have signed off TomDispatch by claiming that I was indeed leaving them on at least a modestly better planet than when I began so long ago.

No such luck, of course, and that makes me sad indeed. I mean, we already knew that we were truly on the planet from hell when, on his third try, Donald Trump actually managed to garner 49.8% of the popular vote and win another four unbelievable years as president of the anything but United States.

Yes, anyone (even I) certainly could have hoped for better. In fact, I certainly did—even if such hopes proved unrealistic indeed. Of course, one can (and should) still hope that the next great imperial power, obviously China (if, in fact, there are to be more great powers on this ever less great planet of ours), might indeed prove more reasonable and less Trumpian. At least, that country’s leadership plans to make a fortune off the decarbonization of Planet Earth by producing the equipment, from electric vehicles to solar panels, needed to green this world of ours (even while continuing to pour record amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere).

Let’s also not forget that other former great power, Russia, which continues fighting its miserable war in Ukraine into its fifth year, while, of course, pouring ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (as all wars now do), while only recently launching actual nuclear missiles (though with dummy warheads instead of nuclear payloads) against Ukraine. (Just what we need on this planet of ours, of course—the threat of actual nuclear warfare!)

Yes, all in all, we humans are truly a strange (and strangely unnerving) crew and, worse yet, over the decades from atomic warfare to full-scale war on the planet itself, we seem eerily driven to develop the means to be ever more destructive. And with that grimly in mind and only wishing things were better, let me sign off on almost 25 years at TomDispatch. Sigh…

I wasn’t going to write about Nina Schwalbe. As you may or may not know, she’s the global health expert and scientist running for Jerry Nadler’s fabled seat in Manhattan’s 12th Congressional District. (Long focused around the Upper West Side, the district now includes the more conservative Upper East Side.) If you live uptown, you might have run into her chatting with voters at a neighborhood Greenmarket or in front of Zabar’s, or seen one of her posters in a storefront window. But she’s gotten little media attention and few endorsements. She’s right down there with Laura Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer backed by the National Organization for Women who is the other low-profile woman running for the slot.

What made me curious about Schwalbe, and also, to be frank, enraged on her behalf, was a long cover story in New York magazine. The cover, which announced, “The Next Mr. Manhattan,” featured photos of the four top candidates—Micah Lasher, Alex Bores, George Conway, and Jack Schlossberg—squished together in a van, looking very pleased with themselves. Schwalbe was not mentioned once. It’s true that the men’s campaigns are swarming with volunteers and staffers, and are lavishly funded—Lasher has over a million from Michael Bloomberg, Bores more than that from tech- and crypto-bros. All four are also the object of much punditry and polling, with many endorsements from prominent people. I get glossy mailers from Bores and Lasher practically every day, and endless extremely annoying e-mails from Schlossberg reminding me that he is a Kennedy. It is hard to imagine Schwalbe breaking through this wall of media and money, but still: How democratic is the race if you need millions of dollars and preexisting fame to run a visible race? Jack Schlossberg has no relevant experience, and no credentials that I can see, but Nancy Pelosi endorsed him. (At least Schwalbe will be included in a debate next Tuesday on WNYC.)

I asked Schwalbe why she decided to run, when I interviewed her at her modest Upper West Side apartment at the end of May. She is a 60-year-old lesbian mom with a calm, friendly manner and no trace of the urgent egotism that characterizes so many politicians. “Our democracy is in deep trouble,” she told me, “from vaccines to abortion to science, to SNAP, to rule of law.” As for her lack of political experience, she pointed out her deep experience with international health, and how she had been in charge of, among other things, global covid vaccine distribution during the Biden administration. “I’ve worked in over 100 countries—I’ve delivered.”

The immediate impetus for her foray into electoral politics was the mass firings at USAID and CDC, the US departure from the World Health Organization, and the canceling of DEI. “You can’t really do public health without DEI. It doesn’t work.” She continued, “Nobody was stepping in. Congress certainly wasn’t.”

Schwalbe would certainly bring expertise and plenty of experience on public health to Congress. That’s why among her endorsements are Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand, with whom she worked on the WHO’s global pandemic treaty, and her old friend Representative Jim Hines (D-CT), who assured her that her skill set would be valued by her fellow legislators. “I have real insight into how government works, and passing that allocation or appropriation is just the first step. We have a ton of wonderful bills that have been passed but not executed.” For example, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, 60 percent of the subways in the 12th district are not accessible.

It’s good to hear she’d be welcome in Congress, but how does she plan to get there? “Our path to victory is the power of the people,” she told me. Besides street canvassing and the Greenmarkets, the campaign posts frequently on Instagram and TikTok. But I’ve yet to receive a campaign e-mail or invitation to a house party or other event.

There’s a handmade old-style feminist feel to Schwalbe’s campaign—V, formerly Eve Ensler, is an endorser. I like it that she goes into Central Park and asks young women if they feel body-shamed. I like that she mocks expensive glossy mailers. But it does feel a little low-key. People power takes well, lots of people, and it takes a real organization to get them out, or even make it known that you exist. As of last week, she told me, she had gotten about 1400 donations. Only a handful of her TikToks have gotten more than a few hundred clicks. Still, she points out that around 30 percent of voters are undecided. So, in theory, there’s hope.

Our conversation was a bit rambling, but I learned a lot about, for example, Covid. According to Schwalbe the six-foot rule was excessive. It was originally meant for the flu. Closing the schools was another mistake, she said. She actually wrote an article to that effect in The Atlantic in 2020, but the teachers’ union was adamant about the shutdown. “Science is very hard to communicate, and we just have to do a better job of it. You can’t just say something works. We have to be able to explain the nuances. Because that’s where we lose trust.” Even on the Upper West Side, she meets anti-vaxxers who think the Covid vaccine let Bill Gates put a chip in your arm. “I say, he doesn’t need to because you have one in your pocket.” Good answer!

I came away liking Schwalbe as a person quite a bit, and grateful for the science lesson. But what would she say, I asked, to someone who said, I agree with everything you stand for, but you don’t have a chance and if I give you my vote maybe Schlossberg would get in? “I would say, imagine a world where we voted for the person that we wanted to see in office.” Imagine it, sure. But in the real world?

I would love to see Schwalbe win a surprise victory over the media, the money, and, yes, the men. Could that happen? She thinks so: “If I wasn’t an optimist I wouldn’t do this.” I’m more of a skeptic than an optimist these days, but I wish her all the luck.

As hundreds of activists from the latest voyage of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC) and Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) returned to their homes around the world, multiple participants reported that Israeli authorities physically and psychologically abused them in a systematic manner reminiscent of the mistreatment that Palestinian political prisoners are subjected to every day. I spoke with a few of these activists—who had set out to break Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza—and they all described serious injuries inflicted on them by Israeli authorities.

Starting on May 18, Israel intercepted dozens of boats and abducted about 430 activists who were carrying aid to a besieged and starving Gaza, as part of a now decades-long mission started by the FFC. The abductions occurred over two days in international waters, dozens of miles away from the coast of Palestine. Activists were then transported from their boats to Ashdod port in Israel on “prison ships” with makeshift holding areas constructed from shipping containers and barbed wire, without any information on when and where they would arrive. The excruciating journey lasted up to two days.

Cássio Pelegrini, a Brazilian pediatrician who was aboard the GSF boat Hawsha, told me that Israeli authorities beat him until they broke a rib, and then continued to beat him despite his fracture. “They started intercepting us really far from the Palestine coast, so they could have more time to perpetrate the violence, ” Pelegrini told me. “All the violence happens there, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the ocean, when nobody is watching.”

Ariadne Telles, also from Brazil, told me that her hands were zip-tied so tight that she fractured her radius bone. Mecid Bağçivan, from Turkey, said that he was shot with a rubber bullet at close range and wound up needing reparative surgery. Amrou Ibrahim, a US citizen who was aboard the FFC boat Adalah, told me they were violently beaten up three separate times while in Israeli custody.

Pelegrini said his vessel was the second to last to be intercepted, about 90 nautical miles away from Gaza. He was then moved to a prison ship that detainees dubbed the “torture boat” (the GSF believes this is the US-built-and-funded naval ship the INS Nahshon). “After a passport check, they took me to a dark container,” Pelegrini told me. “There were five soldiers with flashlights on their heads and lasers. They asked me to sit. They started kicking me and punching me with guns. I felt my rib being broken, and I stood up instinctively. They asked me to sit again and started beating me again really hard, and then they asked me to stand up and pull my pants down, and they poured more water on me, and then they asked me to put my pants back on again, and they threw me inside.”

Pelegrini said that Israeli soldiers poured water on him multiple times to keep him cold in the damp, dark containers of the ship. Many others had their warm clothes taken from them. Everyone was subjected to some level of cruelty. “We tried to sleep to get some rest, but it was a nightmare. There were 188 people divided in three containers. There wasn’t space for everybody, and also with the fractures, we couldn’t find a comfortable position,” he said. Pelegrini and others on board started to take a tally of the incidents that happened on this military vessel alone; they counted 35 fractures, 22 taser injuries on the head and neck, and 10 cases of sexual violence.

“The harder people screamed, the more [the Israeli authorities] enjoyed it, and the harder and longer they beat you. If you didn’t react, they would eventually get bored,” Ibrahim, who was transported to Ashdod port on a second prison ship separate from Pelegrini, told me. “You could hear screams of torture all around you, and everything was meant to break you and degrade you.”

“I have a fracture in my hand, my radius bone, because they zip-tied my hands until it smashed the nerves and broke my bone,” Telles told me. She said she thinks she was treated this way because she protested the violent assault of her comrades. When she saw Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, who can be seen taunting flotilla activists in a now widely circulated video, she screamed that he was a terrorist and criminal. “They are very sadistic. They enjoy the violence they are doing to us,” she said. Telles and Pelegrini said that the Israelis were particularly violent with people of color, people from the Global South, Muslims, and anti-Zionist Jews.

After arriving at the Ashdod port, Pelegrini was violently beaten up once more, despite telling his tormentors that he had a broken rib. After being processed by Israeli immigration and transferred to Ketziot prison, where most of the flotilla participants were held, Pelegrini was beaten up again. This time, he said, the beating was not as aggressive, possibly because they were under official custody and more eyes were on the Israeli soldiers. At one point, he was taken in for a “medical evaluation,” but he did not receive care for his broken rib.

Bağçivan, who was also on the Conscience when it was attacked last May, told me he was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet as he tried to shield a friend from being detained. He said that Israeli authorities then proceeded to beat him, despite his open wound. Bağçivan was later taken to Givon prison—the only one of the flotilla activists to be held outside of Ketziot, he believes. He said that the Israelis offered to give him surgery afterwards, but that he refused, worrying what would be done to him under the effects of the general anesthesia while he was separated from everyone. He was left with a two-centimeter-deep hole in his leg, which had to be repaired with two surgeries once he returned to Turkey.

In addition to the physical abuse, Pelegrini told me that he and his comrades were subjected to psychological torment throughout their custody. He said the guards would play the Israeli national anthem over and over again—at one point, he calculated that he’d heard it 72 times. At Ketziot, he was taken into a room and forced to watch a video of an alleged militant “decapitating” someone. “These are your friends, Hamas,” he said the Israeli authorities told him. On a previous mission, abducted flotilla activist Yasemin Acar was similarly forced to watch violent Israeli propaganda videos. Participants were also subjected to sleep deprivation, another method consistent with Israel’s mistreatment of people in their custody,

In press releases, both the FFC and the GSF reported that several of their participants were sexually harassed. Pelegrini believes that people were raped. He said that, while placed in a stress position with his hands zip-tied behind his back and his head on the ground, he began noticing that people were being selected and taken into a room, at which point he then heard Israeli authorities making “moaning” sounds. Participants were also subjected to invasive searches, and Muslim women had their hijabs forcibly removed.

The activists were released and boarded a flight to Turkey by May 21. “It was a miracle that no one died [on the flight] because we had injuries that were very serious,” Telles said. As Malaysia prepares to take Israel to the International Court of Justice over the mistreatment of its citizens, Pelegrini hopes that the Brazilian government—which at the time of our conversation, had yet to reach out to the flotilla participants—will join the case.

Now back in their home countries, the activists spoke to me with a newfound resolve and commitment to the Palestinian cause. “This is something really new to me, the strength that comes out of camaraderie and solidarity. Not even for a moment we doubted that we were doing the right thing, and I didn’t see anyone regretting joining the mission,” Pelegrini told me. “We have so much moral clarity on what we are doing.”

Pelegrini reminded me that the flotilla participants are fighting for the over 1,500 medical workers killed in Gaza, and for the “9,000 Palestinians who were left behind in Israeli dungeons, 400 of them children.” He mentioned Walid Ahmed, a 17-year-old Palestinian boy with Brazilian citizenship who was the first child known to have died in Israeli custody since October 2023; an autopsy showed signs of prolonged malnutrition as the likely cause of his March 2025 death. Pelegrini also referenced Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in North Gaza, who has been in Israeli custody without charge for over 500 days and who, like Pelegrini, has sustained broken ribs after being tortured by Israeli authorities and denied medical care.

“It’s important that we don’t center our experiences too much…. the abuse reflects a broader system of violence and dehumanization that Palestinians are still going through in Israeli prisons and detention centers,” Ibrahim, an Egyptian American activist from New Jersey, told me, highlighting the Palestinian political prisoners Ahmad Sa’adat and Marwan Barghouti who have been held in Israeli detention for decades. “Palestinians endure this without all the media attention, largely in isolation, without any diplomatic intervention or any kind of protection, so you could only imagine what the Israelis are getting away with.”

“Our mission was not to just deliver aid, but to confront the political reality that leaves Palestinians in need of aid, the illegal Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestinian land, and the ongoing denial of fundamental freedoms to Palestinian people,” Ibrahim continued.

Telles ties her involvement with the flotilla to her work as a human rights attorney fighting for the indigenous people of the Amazon against aggressive business interests. “I think we are in the same struggles for land and territory,” Telles told me. She said that people from the Amazon “are invisible to the world” until activists from Europe come to fight alongside them. “Only when people with strong passports face a little bit of this violence, they are noticed,” Telles told me. “It’s the same with the Palestinians…. the Palestinian people today face the most evil and cruel colonization experiment. So I need to be with them in solidarity…because I believe that the future of Gaza is the future of humanity.”

The White House recently posted an “Aliens” video, complete with spooky X Files–styled music and an ominous voiceover. The green-lettered narration, designed like the text in a bad sci-fi prologue, explained how for 60 years “they” have walked among “us,” lived among us, sent their children to our schools, but how they aren’t really like us and they don’t belong here.

The cheesy video, which directs viewers to a new Aliens.gov website, is, of course, another effort to dehumanize immigrants. What’s most striking about this Julius Streicher–like exercise, apart from the sheer racial and nationalist animus, is the timeline the video and site focuses on: 60 years.

According to the White House, “they” have been corroding America for the last six decades. That timeline wasn’t chosen arbitrarily, and it signals exactly what is going on here. This has nothing to do with undocumented immigrants and everything to do with the millions of non-white immigrants who entered the country, legally, since the 1965 reforms to the immigration system that ended the nativist quota system put in place in the 1920s and allowed for family unification to be a prime goal of the American immigration system. The conflation here is stunning: It is allegedly about “illegals,” but is in fact designed to rile up viewers against all the different immigrant groups who have made the United States their home since Congress liberalized the immigration system 60 years ago.

This bilious production is being brought to Americans’ screens by members of the US government. Those officials have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and to serve and protect all Americans, not just those with their preferred skin color and political disposition. The website was funded, presumably, by US taxpayers— of all colors, all religions, all cultures. Yet what it is saying, pretty much explicitly, is that America should be understood as a white man’s country, a white man’s project, a white man’s playground. It is a White House endorsement of the Great Replacement theory, the nebulous notion that liberals in Western countries have engaged in a meta-conspiracy over the generations to marginalize white men and Christian culture.

That pretty much gels with “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s caricature-like understanding of the country. This most hypocritical of “Christians,” this man who dares to argue that he is implementing God’s vision by waging war on such “woke” ideas as respect for human rights and adherence to the Geneva Conventions, has been caught, for the second time this year, denying military promotions to a slew of women and African Americans, for no reason other than that they are women or African Americans. He is busily undoing eight decades of efforts to integrate the US military leadership, and is attempting to make sure that Black men cannot give orders to white enlistees, and that women, of any color, cannot be in positions of power over men. In Hegseth’s understanding, to exercise power legitimately one must have both pale skin and testicles.

It gels, too, with ICE recruitment videos, which are now so overtly racist that, according to an Intercept investigation, some local police forces apparently fear they could incite white supremacist violence against non-whites and immigrants.

And it gels with current DOJ investigations into a slew of top-tier universities, some in the Ivy Leagues, others top state universities, basically for their enrollment of Black and brown students. It’s in line, too, with EEOC explicit requests, in recent months, for white men to come forward with claims that they were discriminated against in the workplace because they were white men.

This is the most clearly white supremacist political project in the United States since the end of Jim Crow in the Deep South. It has the stamp of approval of the Supreme Court, which just this week, in the wake of its destruction of the Voting Rights Act, upheld Alabama’s new voting maps that were created with the specific intent of disappearing the state’s one majority-Black congressional district. And it has the enthusiastic backing of the president and his top henchmen.

Increasingly, Trump’s presidency is boiling down to a handful of revenge efforts: white revenge against all of these “alien” types; personal revenge against perceived political enemies (look no further than his primary-election-season destruction of Congress members Thomas Massie, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn); and institutional revenge against political systems and corners of the bureaucracy that he deems to be insufficiently loyal to his authoritarian vision.

Trump regards the entire federal workforce as his subordinates. He views Congress as existing only to rubber-stamp his every whim; hence his reaction when the House of Representatives finally voted, on Wednesday, to rein in his war-making powers on Iran. Trump responded by calling it “unpatriotic.” Of course, it wasn’t. In fact, it may have been the only patriotic vote this feckless Congress has taken during Trump 2.0. What Trump really meant was something like, “I am the state. You oppose me. Therefore you are opposing the functioning of the state.” One can almost see him in his tricorn hat, his face beet red with rage, a power-crazed Napoleon, post-Austerlitz, demanding of his parliament ever-more unfettered powers.

Or take the bizarre nomination of Bill Pulte to be director of National Intelligence. Pulte has zero qualifications for the job, as even this Congress seems to realize. But he does have one almighty upside in Number 47’s eyes: his willingness to crawl through the sewers to make Trump happy. To wit, he unscrupulously abused his position as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to conjure up a series of deeply flawed allegations of mortgage fraud against several high-profile Trump enemies, including Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. And in Trump’s increasingly shriveled brain, that willingness to be a hatchet man for the boss, to degrade himself to the point of absurdity to fulfill Trump’s every desire, fully qualifies Pulte for one of the most sensitive jobs in the federal government.

Trump is going to turn 80 next week. He will celebrate his birthday by watching grown men, glistening with sweat, beat each other to a pulp in a series of cage fights on the White House lawn. This exercise in mindless brutality, this fetishization of cruelty and of inflicted pain, is a perfect metaphor for Trump 2.0. It is coarse; it is crude; it is culturally debased. It is, in short, the quintessential Trump distillate.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a resolution by a vote of 215–208 “seeking to halt Trump from taking further military action amid growing opposition to the war.” President Trump called the vote “meaningless” and lambasted the four Republican signers as “unpatriotic” and “GRANDSTANDERS” who “should be ashamed of themselves.”

This comes after Trump’s various failed efforts to secure a deal and end the war. To be clear, with growing concern from Democratic and Republican members of Congress, worry from allied nations, and anxiety from business leaders, Trump is under pressure to end the war. However, even if Congress clutches the reins, Americans and the rest of the world should be alarmed by Trump’s dangerous bravado and disregard for the rule of law.

We think an investigation is needed to understand just how dangerous Donald Trump is not only on domestic policy, but also on global affairs. As president of the United States, Trump has consistently shown disregard and contempt for the separation of powers, imposing tariffs, ignoring the Constitution, starting wars, and claiming budgetary control not authorized for a president. His conduct has been so brazen that even the US Supreme Court, which has shown a mystifying level of solicitude toward Trump, smacked his hands in the tariffs case. As Chief Justice John Roberts made clear in the court’s ruling, the “power to impose tariffs” has been vested with Congress for over 200 years.

However, neither time and tradition nor orderly governing appear to mean very much to a president who prioritizes corruption and cruelty over human rights, and war over diplomacy. For example, reaching a deal in Iran—or the attempt to—might obscure the many shocking ways that Donald Trump and his administration actively ignore international protocols, domestic laws, and trade diplomacy for violence.

Early in the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reiterated his disdain for international humanitarian law. He said at a March press conference, “No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.” In essence, the Trump administration has leveraged this “common sense” against the US Constitution, federal laws, and international treaties.

This preoccupation with lethality has been a fixation of Hegseth’s since his confirmation hearing, during which he refused to commit to abide by the Geneva Conventions. These foundational legal instruments of international humanitarian law (aka the law of war) amounted to, in his words, “burdensome rules of engagement.” This has been a common thread throughout Trump’s second term and across his cabinet—from Kristi Noem to Pam Bondi—whether on the streets of Minneapolis or in other countries where it has launched unjustified wars.

Notably, polls show that the vast majority of Americans oppose the war in Iran and Trump’s handling of it. Barely one-third are in favor.

Yet the Trump administration’s “maximum lethality” policy in conjunction with a disregard for international humanitarian and human rights law continues unabated. And it looks like the heartbreak of the parents of Reza Habashian, Mahdis Nazari, and Liana Mohammadi—three 7-year-olds who were among the approximately 156 people, including 120 schoolchildren, killed in back-to-back US missile strikes on a primary school in Minab, Iran, on February 28, 2026. The strike was apparently the result of highly outdated intelligence that the school was part of an adjacent Iranian military base.

It also looks like a 30-year-old Ethiopian migrant who lost his legs in an April 28, 2025, US attack on the Sa’ada migrant detention center in Yemen. He had come to Yemen to find work and help his family back in Ethiopia. “Now people carry me to the toilet,” he said to Amnesty International earlier this year. Another survivor of the strike, now living with one leg missing and a metal rod inside of his severely injured remaining leg, is in such pain that when he cannot take a painkiller, he wishes to die. Sixty-one African migrants, most or all from Ethiopia, did die in that April 28 attack.

And it looks like Chad Joseph and Rishi Samaroo. Both had been working in Venezuela—Samaroo cared for goats and cows and made cheese—and were on their way home by boat to Trinidad on October 14, 2025, when they were among the six people killed by a US missile strike. Joseph leaves behind three children. According to the Trump administration, the US launched the boat strikes because those on board were trafficking drugs and “narcoterrorists,” members of designated terrorist organizations. Or at least the administration so asserted, without evidence.

The attacks in Iran and Yemen violated international humanitarian law, which requires states to “do everything feasible” to ensure that the objects of their attacks are military objectives, not civilian infrastructure and populations. Between open-sourced satellite imagery, readily available information on the Internet (including the school’s website), and a UN investigation into a 2022 Saudi attack on the same detention facility, the nonmilitary nature of the school and detention facility (for 10 and five years, respectively) was readily discernible. The world’s intelligence superpower using information years out of date when current information is available to all is a far cry from the “all feasible precautions” required.

While the attacks on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean may not have officially violated international humanitarian law, they also are not part of an armed conflict. As such, they are human rights violations, extrajudicial killings that do not follow judicial or other legal processes. They constitute “arbitrary” deprivations of the right to life. As had been the practice for decades, suspicion of drug trafficking should lead to a law enforcement response—interdiction, arrest, and prosecution—not a military one.

US military attacks on the Minab primary school, the Sa’ada detention center, and the boat carrying Trinidadian laborers do not constitute the only international humanitarian law violations and extrajudicial killings under this administration. Through the first week of May 2026, at least 190 people were killed in the boat strikes. And now by the time of the possible ceasefire with Iran, US and Israeli strikes on Iran have damaged or destroyed more than 1,000 schools and health facilities, according to the Iranian Red Crecent Society. To date, the United States and Israel have already killed more than 1,700 Iranian civilians.

While each attack must be analyzed based on its specific circumstances to determine whether it has violated international humanitarian law, the sheer numbers are highly suggestive that some entailed violations. Indeed, “over 100 international law experts warn: U.S. strikes on Iran violate UN Charter and may be war crimes.”

Simply put, the American government is at war abroad and also with itself. The Trump administration’s fetish with violence is not only at sea or with missiles landing on schools, hospitals, and clinics. His aggression is also at home with brazen violations of the rule of law, human rights, and human dignity. To address this, Congress must step in and restore and safeguard these quintessential values. And Americans must reject the cynicism being foisted upon them that violence equals strength and good judgment. Certainly, the Trump administration has disproven that.

Incredibly, we are marking the 10th anniversary of the passing of “The Greatest,” Muhammad Ali. The heavyweight boxing champion, military draft-resister, proud anti-racist, and champion of the Palestinian people was laid to rest in Louisville, Kentucky, in June of 2016. Being present for his funeral and the celebration of his incredible life was an indelible experience. I wanted to recall that day not only to commemorate the passing of a giant but also because it speaks to what we have all collectively lost over the last decade.

This country is a more violent, more divided, more hateful, and more uncertain place than it was a decade ago. Then again, it’s not like 2016 was some kind of Shangri-la: Racist police killings were in the news seemingly every day. Income inequality was widening. Opioid abuse had become a full-blown epidemic. Environmental catastrophe was already a fact. The hoofbeats of authoritarianism were in the distance. Given all this, you could be forgiven for thinking we’ve always been on a toboggan ride down to our current hellscape. And yet, the future was not, nor is it ever, preordained. There were movements a decade ago, from Black Lives Matter to the push for a Green New Deal, that offered hope. As a country, we had multiple paths—we just took the most nihilistic one on offer.

On that day in Louisville, though, it was possible to feel an optimism that today seems so elusive. When Muhammad Ali was laid to rest, the entirety of the city shut down. Thousands of people, overwhelmingly Black, overwhelmingly—based upon my hurried reporting as I bounced from person to person—living within driving distance of the small city lined the streets. It was the Black South, the very people currently seeing their voting rights destroyed by neo-Confederate politicians and a Jim Crow Supreme Court, who showed up for Muhammad Ali.

School buses filled with children were part of the procession down the city’s main drag; you could hear them chanting Ali’s name as they slowly drove by. The throngs of people looking on joined them in a call and response version of “Ali, Bomaye,” the famed chant from Ali’s victory in the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle against George Foreman in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Then, sticking half of his body out of a hearse to do so, the actor Will Smith began slapping bystanders’ hands. Later, Smith explained to the media later why he gave a thousand high-fives that day. During the filming of the biopic Ali, in which Smith starred, Ali had taken him aside and insisted that they go for a ride on a public bus. Smith said that he was taken aback by the request—they were both too famous for that. Ali said back: “Will, sometimes you have got to let the people touch you so they know you are real.” (It hasn’t been the best decade for Will Smith, either.)

Then there was the packed funeral service at Louisville’s basketball arena. Other than the international dignitaries who would be speaking, it was open seating, and people arrived hours early to be a part of it. The eulogists paid tribute to both the public Ali and the private Ali. Rabbi Michael Lerner spoke with gratitude about Ali’s solidarity with the Palestinian people—a speech that left Bill Clinton looking visibly uncomfortable. And Malcolm X’s daughter Attallah Shabazz pulled back the curtain on Ali’s relationship with her family after Ali’s famous falling out with Malcolm. She spoke of a relationship marked by a level of emotional and financial support that no one knew was taking place. Many of the speakers made it clear that Ali’s public persona would be with us forever. But his private persona, as Shabazz described, was revelatory: not because he was perfect, but because he understood the power of his fame’s effect on people while still holding a deep empathy for the most powerless among us.

Muhammad Ali was robbed of his speech by Parkinson’s disease in the last several decades of his life. Many have remarked that it was only after he lost his radical voice that he was fully embraced by white America. What I am realizing, 10 years after his passing, is that we don’t just miss his voice. We miss his presence on the planet: a living sign, to paraphrase the champ, that we don’t have to be the way they want us to be.

He was, is, and always will be the champ. But his legacy must be that we can all champion the deliberately unheard, and we don’t need a heavyweight title to do the work.

Two weeks ago, I was in surgery. Twenty-four hours later, I was released from the hospital and headed home. I felt much better and was happy to get to take a walk with the dog, hang out with my partner, chat over dinner, and watch an episode of an old British mystery series before getting my first real sleep in a week in our own bed.

This was thanks to the miracles of modern medicine. But it was no thanks to modern American healthcare, which, as I know from my recent experience, is fundamentally broken.

What I realized after leaving the hospital is that I was on my own. My care was coordinated while I was an inpatient, with primary care hospitalists managing a set of three different kinds of specialists; out in the real world, such coordination barely exists. My new condition is apparently chronic, so to get my ongoing follow-up care together, I am making appointments with specialists, arranging tests and scans, and generally being an “impatient patient” trying to fight my way to get what I need. But still, it’s an uphill battle. The system is sclerotic, and trying to get appointments, even for things I have been told are urgent, is a challenge. Getting the different specialists to talk to each other? That’s tomorrow’s struggle.

And I’m someone who has it good. I encountered people during my week in the hospital who would be released with far graver medical complications, far fewer resources, and far more obstacles facing them outside of the ward, from housing insecurity to substance use. I also have a bevy of friends who are physicians in the same healthcare system that cared for me, who can help me when things go awry. My privilege is enormous compared to most people facing down American healthcare in crisis.

When I mentioned all of this to other friends, the stories erupted from both sides of the patient-physician divide. Some of them mirrored mine, but many friends were dealing with more serious conditions like cancer, or juggling multiple diagnoses, requiring dozens of specialists. But every “patient” friend with ongoing complex medical issues was managing their own care or had an advocate in a spouse or partner to do the work, which was an extra part-time or full-time job for many.

One primary care doc in my circle, Wendy Johnson, a family physician at El Centro Family Health in Northern New Mexico, said this: “Your situation is one of a hundred reasons our primary care system is so very broken. For me, as a primary care provider, to really adequately coordinate your care, I’d need an hour to see you and another hour to talk to your many specialists. I’d need a great support team helping with referrals and advocating for timely appointments. Of course, we never have any of that. Post-hospital visits are 30 minutes, support staff are overwhelmed, specialists are largely unreachable. So rather than address the issues with primary care by compensating us enough, so we could spend more time with patients and hire better teams to help us care for patients, the system instead pays for yet another Band-Aid workaround.”

This is a cry for help that goes unheard and unaddressed year after year. No one in power pays any attention to these deep structural flaws in our system. While we battle over the future of American health insurance—which, to be clear, is a huge part of the problem—the rot deepens in the day-to-day foundation of American medicine, at the level of the physician-patient interface. We have a desperate shortage of primary care physicians (PCP) in the US; by 2038, we will have a projected shortfall of 70,610 PCPs, and rural areas will be hit the hardest. Already, as of 2023, 7.2 percent of counties in America did not have a primary care physician at all. And while residency slots have increased by leaps and bounds for vascular surgery (31 percent), neurology (23.6 percent), and psychiatry (22.9 percent) over the past four years, primary care specialties—internal medicine, internal medicine-pediatrics, pediatrics, and family medicine—have seen smaller increases in residency positions. The PCPs out there are also aging out—the specialty is greyer than other professions, so the pipeline is drying up. Meanwhile, PCPs are paid terribly compared to other specialists, while half of them report burnout on the job. This is a rolling disaster playing out in real time.

We clearly need more PCPs in our country. But there are few incentives to go into primary care. Who wants to get paid terribly compared to their peers (particularly when saddled with tremendous medical school debt), and have little support for properly managing patients? No wonder new doctors often choose specialties that pay more and let them practice their profession more easily.

And hospital systems aren’t exactly fond of primary care, since it is often a money-loser. A few years ago, the same hospital system I spent time in last month spun off its primary care efforts to the local federally qualified health centers, claiming that it was helping build a new primary care facility down by I-95 and the waterfront—not exactly a central location for anyone in our city. This move was roundly criticized at the time, including by me. (The hospital got word of my objections, and I was “invited” to the hospital C-suite to discuss my concerns. As a new assistant professor then, it came across as a warning rather than any true interest in engagement. I declined the chance to meet, sensing that this was about shutting down a conversation, not opening up an honest discussion.)

Primary care is fundamental to any decent health system. But in the United States, PCPs are the Cinderellas of the medical profession, with no fairy godmothers or princes in waiting, toiling among the ashes of American healthcare where profits, not patients, are king. This is all also a form of organized abandonment, where the state and capital have withdrawn from basic duties of care, leaving us more vulnerable to sickness and death. Finally, the deliberateness of this choice—after all we can build empires of complex, expensive, tertiary specialty care just not the primary care we need—is sickening in and of itself.

We need a rebuilding of American healthcare and medicine from the ground up. This is a gut renovation; we are going down to the studs. The forces of the status quo that got us here will fight the necessary changes, but the blueprints are there and other countries are leading the way. We cannot have a healthy nation without a real commitment to basic healthcare. Having “the best” of sophisticated tertiary care in this country, where you can receive the latest in new interventions for anything that ails you, means little when it is all built on a foundation of sand.

Postscript: I managed to break through and get someone to take charge of my care late last week. I was the squeaky wheel, and I was lucky. It changes none of the underlying structural issues. Most people I know, friends and colleagues trying to navigate the health system, are still in the predicament I described. Getting good care can’t be a roll of the dice. La lucha continua.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Allyson Felix still remembers the beeping of the monitors in the NICU as her daughter was fighting for her life after her preterm birth in 2018. After developing severe preeclampsia, Felix had an emergency C-section and delivered her daughter at 32 weeks. But even in that critical moment, her daughter’s survival wasn’t the only thing on her mind. Years later, speaking on a panel after the premiere of the short film Lifelines in early May, “I was reminded…what that feels like,” she said, “and then thinking about work.”

“It’s this time when you see your child fighting, and yet here you are thinking about your livelihood, and it’s such a horrible place to be,” said the Olympic champion, who co–executive produced the film. “Until people can really understand what that feels like, what that looks like, we have to continue to raise awareness because [paid leave] is something that everybody should absolutely have.” Running at just under 10 minutes, the short documentary shows how state paid leave programs can give families financial stability and a little breathing room when they need it most.

Standing in the hallway of The Annex in Brooklyn, Felix explained to me that she joined the nonprofit organization Paid Leave for All in co–executive producing Lifelines after her eyes were opened to these issues and the way “that so many families don’t get paid leave, have to be thrust immediately back into their responsibilities and work, and just the effect and impact that has.”

Felix, the most decorated female track-and-field Olympian athlete in history, wrote about her ordeal in a New York Times opinion article in 2019, explaining that “she felt pressure to return to form as soon as possible” after giving birth. Around the time of her daughter’s birth, Felix was negotiating her renewal contract with Nike, and the company wanted to pay her 70 percent less than it had in her previous contract. “If that’s what they think I’m worth now, I accept that,” Felix wrote. But she wanted Nike to agree that she would not lose pay if her performance suffered in the period during which she was recovering from her emergency C-section. “Nike declined,” she wrote, and when she went public with her Times op-ed they were at a standstill.

After facing public pressure and questioning from members of Congress about the experiences of its sponsored athletes, Nike eventually updated its policy to create protections for pregnant and postpartum athletes. It is because of Felix, who ultimately separated from Nike and signed a deal with Athleta, and her fellow former Nike-endorsed athletes Alysia Montaño and Kara Goucher that the new paid leave policy became possible.

Felix was not alone. Just one in four working people have access to paid family leave through their job. With the fight for a federal policy effectively at a standstill during the current Congress, advocates are pushing a 50-state strategy, advancing progressive policies and winning at the state level. Earlier this year, Virginia adopted a new paid family and medical leave program, slated to take effect in 2028, guaranteeing workers up to 12 weeks of paid family leave. The program makes Virginia the first Southern state to pass such a policy.

Felix said that she believes that “when people see these stories [in the documentary], it will affect them in a new way and they’ll have a deeper understanding” of the need for paid leave.

The documentary follows two families whose lives are transformed by paid leave: in New Jersey, Habibah and Rasheed, who faced a life-threatening medical emergency three weeks after Habibah gave birth to their third child; and in Colorado, Lee and Elizabeth, who gave birth at 33 weeks and feared running out of leave by the time their new baby finally came home. Both families were able to receive additional time to care for their children through their respective state programs. “[Lifelines] shows us what is possible when we have supports and policies, like paid family and medical leave, that much of the world takes for granted,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, the founding director of Paid Leave for All.

Huckelbridge told me that while the United States is the only country among its peers without a federal paid family leave policy, Paid Leave for All has tracked wins of various kinds in more than 40 states across the country, as well as more incremental positive changes at municipal levels. “Progress is continuing, particularly at the state and local level, where we are seeing strong leadership, but a federal opportunity could be around the corner,” said Huckelbridge. “It’s important that we keep trying to help people’s lives every day that we can with this state-level work, and that we also engage the advocates and the legislators at the state level in helping to push for a federal guarantee.”

Felix took significant personal risks to become an advocate on this issue. She spoke out about the injustices she and other sponsored athletes were facing while she was negotiating with their sponsor. Asked what motivates her to speak out, she said: “It’s just really thinking about others and…realizing that it’s going to take us all coming together to turn things around.”

“I really shied away from [doing things that are difficult] earlier in my career and stayed more in the safe zone,” Felix said. “And then you do one of the things and you’re like, OK. It doesn’t have to always feel good or you don’t have to always feel ready, but it’s important to try to push for change. You’ve got to put yourself out there.”

In late April, the 40-year-old Olympic champion put herself out there in a big way once again, announcing that she is planning to return to running, with the goal of competing in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Initially, she planned to train without drawing a lot of attention to it. “But I was talking to my brother about it and he’s like, I think if you’re vulnerable and share [your experience], you’d be surprised how many others, especially women, are in this place where they’re 40 and not just doing what’s expected and what the world tells us [we’re supposed to do].” She has since gone public about her comeback and her goal of being the first American sprinter to make the Olympics in her 40s if she succeeds. But succeeding isn’t necessarily the goal.

I asked Felix what she hopes her daughter will take away from the experience of watching her mom publicly document this experience. She told me, “I hope that she sees—we’ve even had some conversations already, at her level—you can try. It’s not always about winning, it’s not always about the outcome, but it’s really important to try things. And you don’t know how it’s going to end, and it can be scary. It can be hard. But it’s important to go for things that you want.”

On Monday, the British government revoked the travel visas of leftist streamers Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur, who had planned to speak at SXSW London and at other venues around the country.

Both Piker and Uygur were told that their presence was “not conducive to the public good.” It is widely assumed that they were targeted for their vocal criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

Britain’s Israel lobby had campaigned for this exact outcome. Last week, a group of MPs and concerned citizens called on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood to ban Piker in particular, claiming he is an antisemite who would pose a threat to the UK’s Jewish community still reeling from recent attacks in northwest London.

But it’s clear from the lobby’s convenient omission of Piker’s 2025 speech at the Oxford Union condemning antisemitism and the conflation of Zionism and Judaism that this travel ban has nothing to do with the safety of the Jewish community. Rather, this act of cowardly capitulation is part of the Labour government’s rapidly accelerating crackdown on expression that is critical of Israel and supportive of Palestine—an effort that is both facilitating the UK’s ongoing complicity in the genocide in Gaza and destroying the country’s own institutions from the inside out.

Last July, the same government department that canceled Piker and Uygur’s visas made the unprecedented decision to designate Palestine Action, a group known for direct actions, such as spraying red paint on factories and offices associated with Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons firm with manufacturing sites and subsidiaries throughout the UK, as a terrorist organization—placing it in the same legal category as ISIS and neo-Nazi groups like National Action and the “Maniacs Murder Cult” (a group that was proscribed at the same time as Palestine Action).

This decision was roundly condemned by human rights organizations and as a grave abuse of counterterrorism legislation. Many noted that the consequences of the ban go far beyond outlawing the group’s activities, as proscription places restrictions on everyone’s ability to express support for the organization and its actions, not only the group’s members. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk warned that the ban “limits the rights of many people involved with and supportive of Palestine Action who have not themselves engaged in any underlying criminal activity but rather exercised their right to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association.” In doing so, he said, it “conflates protected expression and other conduct with acts of terrorism and so could readily lead to further chilling effect on the lawful exercise of these rights by many people.”

That future has come to pass.

In the 11 months since, more than 2,700 people—including many pensioners and faith leaders—have been arrested under anti-terrorism laws for holding signs or otherwise expressing support for the group.

In January, the UK’s High Court ruled that the proscription was unlawful, but the government immediately challenged the decision. While the appeal takes place, the law still stands; recently, around 500 supporters were arrested in London’s Parliament Square.

The impact of the government’s crackdown on Palestine Action has not been limited to mass arrests. Over the last few months, we’ve begun to witness the deeply corrosive effect of this authoritarian turn on the broader justice system.

It was recently revealed, for instance, that a High Court judge will seek to sentence four Palestine Action activists as terrorists—despite the fact that they were not charged with terrorist offenses and their arrests for a raid on an Elbit factory occurred a year prior to the proscription of the organization.

Shockingly, the possibility that a “terror connection” could be retroactively added to the conviction was not communicated to the jury, which found the activists guilty of criminal damage last month. At the same time, strict reporting restrictions kept the developments of the case from reaching the public. According to Novara Media, this is understood to be the first time that a court will use terrorism laws to sentence individual activists taking direct action.

In another unprecedented development, a barrister defending some of the Palestine Action activists, Rajiv Menon, was referred for contempt of court proceedings as punishment for the content of his closing speech in a January trial. Menon, widely recognized as a leading human rights lawyer, allegedly broke a directive from the judge ordering him not to tell the jury that they had the right to acquit the activists on the basis of conscience.

The legal profession’s response to the prosecution has been scathing. In a statement, Garden Court Chambers (a collection of barristers, of which Menon is a member) wrote, “Not only is this the first time in English legal history that a barrister is being prosecuted for contempt in respect of a closing speech at a criminal trial, but the procedure being used to prosecute Rajiv is wholly novel and without historical precedent.” Paul Heron, a solicitor with the Public Interest Law Centre, told Declassified UK that “this case risks establishing a dangerous precedent in which the boundaries of criminal defence are narrowed precisely in cases involving protest and dissent,” and expressed fear that this could place at risk the right to a fair trial.

Menon won an initial challenge to halt the contempt proceedings, but the case against him may still continue.

There are countless other examples of the shrinking space for pro-Palestine speech and activism in British life. In December, for example, police began arresting those who chant or march with a sign that says “globalise the intifada,” deeming such an act to be a “racially aggravated public order offense.” In April, the government’s new Crime and Policing Act 2026 ushered in a host of new police powers to restrict protests near places of worship, all of which are clearly intended to curb the country’s massive pro-Palestine marches, if not offer justification for outright banning them, too.

One doesn’t need to think hard to imagine how a far-right Reform government might command a state with a weakened judicial system, highly restricted civil liberties, and substantially enhanced police and counter-terror powers.

But when it comes to Palestine, it’s difficult to see how Labour’s record of authoritarianism can be surpassed. As Green Party leader Zack Polanski said in response to Piker and Uygur’s bans, “People often talk about [the] dangerous road we’d go down under a Reform government—this is another clear warning we’re down there already.”

From his upstairs window, my neighbor Craig gestured toward the beige towers that had replaced Ebbets Field. For a moment, the ballpark seemed to rise again, its red-brick façade catching the sunlight as the grandstands filled with jobbers, true believers, and socialist teenagers. Craig’s father had been a National League man—not a Yankee fan, never a Yankee fan—so when the Mets came along, five years after the Brooklyn Dodgers had left town, the void was filled without discussion. Craig was 12. “I was always a Mets fan,” he told me. The only problem, in those early years, was that being a Mets fan meant being a “glutton for punishment.”

This slightly sardonic, masochistic devotion is both the subject and the animating spirit of A.M. Gittlitz’s Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People’s Team. Gittlitz’s capacious history was published at the start of a season shrouded in uncertainty. The league’s current collective-bargaining agreement is set to expire in December, and a lockout in 2027 is seen as a likely outcome. The two-time defending-champion Dodgers have hoovered up enough talent to make their next victory almost inevitable, the logical end point of a free-agency system that was won through decades of labor struggle but has since made the richest teams nearly unbeatable. Meanwhile, it’s hard to imagine today’s players caring about the state of the world like Mets ace Tom Seaver cared about Vietnam or reliever Tug McGraw cared about the Kent State shootings. The sport that Gittlitz celebrates—accessible, working-class, countercultural—has been devoured by oligarchs, and the Mets, now owned by hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen, are no exception.

Gittlitz’s book begins well before the Mets existed; he follows mid-19th-century clerks decamping from gloomy Manhattan towers for the sun-drenched Elysian Fields of New Jersey, where they played a folk game that would eventually become what we know as baseball. The game spread through Union Army camps during the Civil War, and by the end of the 19th century could safely be considered America’s pastime. The Marxist historian and cricketer C.L.R. James saw significance in the timing: Organized baseball emerged in 1869, two years before the Paris Commune, because the “same public that wanted sports and games so eagerly wanted popular democracy too.” Not long after, in 1890, the Brotherhood, baseball’s first players’ union, announced its secession from the National League on Bastille Day, built its own ballparks, and lost everything within a season when its backers turned out to want the real estate.

The team that would eventually inherit something of this insurgent spirit earned its name from the act of survival most common among Brooklyn’s workers—dodging trolley cars during their daily commutes—and Ebbets Field became host to a raucous polyglot community whose shared dialect was shouting “Ya bum ya!” at stars like Duke Snider and Roy Campanella. The Dodgers rewarded that loyalty with the signing of Jackie Robinson, several pennants, and a championship in 1955, before leaving for Los Angeles after the 1957 season (as a kid, I always pictured them driving away in the night). A wrecking ball painted white and adorned with blood-red stitches reduced Ebbets Field to rubble, making way for the same beige towers Craig pointed at through his window.

In Gittlitz’s telling, the Mets were the answer to that rubble, a franchise conjured into existence by opportunistic lawyers, real-estate men, and the city’s all-powerful planner, Robert Moses. Moses envisioned Shea Stadium as a final triumph of New Deal civic ambition, rising alongside the 1964 World’s Fair to link the deindustrializing city with the suburbs to which many former Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants fans had fled. (The baseball Giants, it should be noted here, decamped for San Francisco the same year that the Dodgers headed to LA.) The new team even dressed the part, stitching together Dodger blue, Giant orange, and a cartoonish logo that seemed to wink at the Yankees’ imperial self-regard. A new people’s team had arrived in town by 1962, or so it was said. It was owned by Joan Payson, a Whitney heiress who had opposed the Giants’ move west.

Nobody planned for what happened next. The Mets proceeded to lose 120 games in their first season, the worst record in modern baseball history, and were all the more beloved for it. The actively decaying Polo Grounds, their home for two years before Shea was finished, became a cauldron that “stirred old-timers, hipsters, pinkos, drunks, sugar-high kiddies, and newly empowered losers into a singular witches’ brew.” Their cheers were, as Roger Angell put it, “yells for ourselves,” coming from the wry recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in the collective spirit of New York. Among the Mets faithful, who Gittlitz lovingly calls the “New Breed,” a farcical slogan was born: “I’ve been a Mets fan my whole life.” Then again, for some, like Craig, this was literally true.

In April 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and baseball’s owners declared that Opening Day would proceed as scheduled, the Mets unanimously voted to boycott. When Robert F. Kennedy was shot, they did the same. By 1969, the Mets were ready to become something nobody expected. As Gittlitz puts it, their improbable season offered the left “an off-ramp as it sank into malaise following the election of Nixon and the prosecution of the Yippies and Panthers.” The miracle arrived precisely when it was most needed and most dangerous to need. That summer, Shea Stadium was a perpetual carnival, an amalgam of confetti and pot smoke, and when the Chicago Cubs came to Queens in late August with their pennant lead dwindling, on-deck Cubs hitter Ron Santo heard the crowd roar and told the batboy, “Oh man, we’re fucked now.” And that was when the cat showed up, a black streak moving across foul territory as if it had always been there, heading toward the Cubs’ dugout to glare at manager Leo Durocher, who yelled at his players to remove it, before it turned, crossed home plate, and slipped back into the stadium’s underworld.

Two weeks later, after they’d cursed the Cubs, the Mets clinched their division, and 20,000 fans stormed the field. That night, a hundred of them came back to break into the clubhouse, spray one another with hoses, narrate a fictional World Series from the press box, and chant “Shea belongs to the people!” After the Mets swept Hank Aaron’s Atlanta Braves for the pennant, Tom Seaver told the press, “If the Mets can win the World Series, then we can get out of Vietnam.” A skywriter spelled out “STOP WAR” above Shea during Game 4 while fans held signs reading “BOMB THE ORIOLES—NOT THE PEASANTS” and handed out zines plastered with Seaver’s face. When Cleon Jones caught the final out of Game 5, he crouched on the grass and thought of his ancestors, “enslaved people stolen from their homes by greedy, Godless people…guided only by profit and gain with no regard for humanity.” Fellow outfielder Ron Swoboda dedicated the victory to every loser in America. The Yankees had won the World Series 20 times but had never been honored with a ticker-tape parade.

The hangover came fast. After the 1970 shooting at Kent State, Tug McGraw wrote in his diary, “I really don’t know in which direction to head or what to do…. I’m a people and I’m screwed up.” The movement retreated, and the Mets finished third in 1970 and 1971, despite hopes of a dynasty. Winning had somehow induced an identity crisis. Just two weeks before the start of the 1973 season, on Easter Sunday, manager Gil Hodges—who had quietly yet firmly backed his players’ political convictions—died of a heart attack after a round of golf. Meanwhile, New York itself was coming apart: During the ’70s, the city faced a recession, a fiscal crisis, rising crime rates, and a population decrease of nearly 1 million.

By 1973, McGraw was pitching badly, and the Mets were in last place. A self-help guru told him to envision the result and believe, so McGraw stormed the clubhouse screaming the advice to his teammates. “Ya gotta believe” became, semi-ironically, the team motto, and it briefly did work, carrying the Mets to the World Series on fumes and faith before the Oakland Athletics extinguished both. A decade of misery followed. Marvin Miller, head of the players’ union, helped Catfish Hunter—then a star pitcher for the Athletics—win free agency; Hunter promptly signed with the Yankees for a then-record $3.35 million, ushering in an era that was great for players but also for the richest organizations. The Mets, under the penny-pinching reign of chairman M. Donald Grant, had become “a decisively unlovable team,” Gittlitz writes. When Joan Payson died in 1975 and her heirs sold the team to a group including Nelson Doubleday Jr. and real-estate developer Fred Wilpon, the franchise was in ruins—its attendance numbers dismal and its future uncertain.

In 1986, the fog briefly lifted. But even though that team won the World Series, they were seen as hard-partying bad boys more than standard-bearers, and their stars, Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, burned so brightly they eventually burned out and defected to the Yankees. What followed was a different kind of losing, no longer the charming ineptitude of the New Breed era but something grimmer: mounting injuries, late-season collapses, a front office that felt increasingly indifferent to its own fan base. By 2002, Wilpon had bought out his partners entirely, and the slow revelation that his finances were entangled with Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme only confirmed what fans had long suspected: that the people’s team was being run by people who didn’t deserve it. By 2009, Shea’s chaotic intimacy had given way to the corporate cleanliness of Citi Field, which is soon to be dwarfed by an $8 billion casino built by current owner Steve Cohen.

I’ve been watching this rightward drift my whole life, though I didn’t always have a name for it. Ten days after the Twin Towers fell, baseball returned to New York. I remember watching on TV as a peroxide-blond Mike Piazza stepped up to the plate at Shea while thousands of flags fluttered. Rudy Giuliani sat behind home plate, and the crowd’s desperate urge to feel OK pressed against the screen. Steve Karsay was on the mound for the Braves. I was still a child, so Giuliani was just some man wearing glasses and an NYPD hat, and Piazza’s face was ashen as he looked around before Karsay threw a fastball that grabbed too much of the plate, and Piazza swung and drove it to dead center, a tiny white ember soaring over the wall and into the Flushing night. The stadium erupted, flags flying once more. Even then, I could feel that something was off underneath all the pomp and pageantry, that baseball was being asked to do something it couldn’t.

After 9/11, the franchise hardened into what Gittlitz calls a “thoroughly conservative operation,” mandating that players stand for “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch. When Carlos Delgado, who had called the invasion of Iraq “the stupidest war ever,” was pressured into compliance at his introductory Mets press conference, he said only, “Just call me Employee Number 21.” The jingoism that suffused that era never really went away. It was during this conservative turn that the Wilpons fired Willie Randolph, the first Black manager of any New York team, in the middle of a road trip. “It kind of pissed me off to the point where I stopped going to games for a while,” Craig told me. But eventually he came back.

I saw myself in that oscillation. For me, baseball has long been a world safer to inhabit inside my head—a curated game, mostly, one where I can linger on the poetic and the strange and drown out the uglier frequencies. After October 7, 2023, and Israel’s ensuing relentless bombardment of Gaza, I withdrew from baseball altogether, too aware of how easily the sport’s parochial loyalties can curdle into something uglier, and dreading what little would be said. Gittlitz documents that silence, noting that there was “no subsequent mention in baseball of the eliminationist war that followed.” The only Mets player to comment was outfielder Harrison Bader, who wore a “Bring Them Home” dog-tag necklace. Amid all this, Gittlitz’s own conflicted attention to the game has made me feel less alone in my estrangement: At one point, he describes feeling a bit impotent as he sits divided between writing and “a pirated SNY stream” as his peers “blockaded streets and occupied universities hoping to grind the war machine to a halt.”

Gittlitz bravely names this internal conflict without pretending that he, or anyone, can resolve it. The late affect theorist Lauren Berlant called this feeling “cruel optimism,” or the dogged reinvestment in something that keeps failing you, which may actively impede the very aims that drew you to it in the first place. Craig lives it. Gittlitz, in his own way, does too. As for me, I’m trying to figure out how.

It would be easy for me to say that Metropolitans is at its best when it excavates the radical possibilities that ownership and nationalism repeatedly foreclosed; these flickering moments form a meticulous, frequently thrilling history of what baseball briefly was and could have been. But what moved me most was Gittlitz’s own self-awareness about how precarious his project is. In his afterword, he writes, “If the Mets do end up winning their first World Series in my lifetime absent of any meaningful connection with a broader social upsurge, you can safely consider that aspect of the book either a failed experiment in Marxist sabermetrics, or playful fan fiction.” Throughout, he is betting that the desire for something better, even when it can’t be satisfied, is worth naming and preserving.

A year ago, after making their own high-stakes wager by committing $765 million to outfielder Juan Soto, the Mets seemed, if only for a stretch, to rival the Dodgers and eclipse the Yankees, before their summer collapsed in a way that this season has wasted no time in duplicating. And yet, as I sat with Craig, listening to him describe his decades of fandom, I heard something quietly defiant. “Like I say,” he told me, “baseball, I think, was my saving grace.” For him, it’s been a tether, a place to return to. For me, it has become something I carry inside me even as I move closer and then farther away. And yet the game marches on, as it was designed to. Something in me turns toward it, not out of hope, not out of habit, but out of a kind of fidelity: to Craig, to Gittlitz, to the believers in those long-gone grandstands, and to the possibility, however forestalled, that the same public that wanted baseball once wanted something more.

Historically, South America has proven irresistible to certain inhabitants of the northern hemisphere eager to escape the consequences of their terrible actions. Argentina was the favored destination for thousands of Nazis after the collapse of the somewhat-less-than-thousand-year Reich, including Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele; Klaus Barbie, meanwhile, ended up in Bolivia. On a somewhat lighter and more British note, the escaped “Great Train Robber” Ronnie Biggs fled in 1970 to Brazil where he lived large for decades, even recording a couple of tracks with the Sex Pistols, including one in which he asked God to save “Martin Bormann and Nazis on the run / They wasn’t being wicked, God, that was their idea of fun.” (Bormann at the time was thought to be hiding in Argentina; he was in fact lying dead, as all Nazis should be, in Berlin.)

Now another terrible northerner seems to be readying his own ratline to Argentina: the tech-and-finance overlord Peter Thiel. Over the weekend, The New York Times reported that the vaguely reptilian billionaire investor was “decamping to the end of the world.” That meant that Thiel, a longtime connoisseur of doomsday scenarios, had bought a mansion and moved his family, at least temporarily, to Buenos Aires, where he has apparently been meeting with assorted powerful and influential figures, including the country’s anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei. Thiel also reportedly held a gathering for some of the country’s leading economists and intellectuals, treating his somewhat bewildered dinner guests to lengthy disquisitions on the Antichrist.

Taking no chances, Thiel has also procured a backup to the Argentinean exit strategy, purchasing a potential future bunker site near Punta del Este, a city on the coast of Uruguay. This well-appointed getaway has been variously described as “The Hamptons of South America,” “The Monaco of the South,” and the “The Miami Beach of South America,” even though The Hamptons, Monaco, and Miami Beach are not even remotely the same thing.

The big question raised by Thiel’s panicked peregrinations is why one of our country’s richest and most politically influential tech investors has decided to do a runner, as Ronnie Biggs might have put it, to locales some 6,000 miles away at this particular moment in history. Is it a reaction, as some have suggested, to a possible one-time 5 percent billionaire wealth tax in California? This seems hardly credible, given that Thiel had already more-or-less moved himself from Los Angeles to Miami Beach to escape the tiny and still hypothetical threat to his massive fortune; Florida doesn’t even have an income tax.

With the tax-avoidance explanation out of the picture, the clear implication is that an aspiring cosmic prophet like Thiel must know that something is coming—something really, really bad, at least for those of us hapless Yanks deprived of the option of repatriating to a tony neighborhood in a historic city on another continent.

It’s not unreasonable to think that those at the tippy top of the wealth pile may have access to insider information about impending unnatural disasters. Indeed, that’s the premise of a new Web tool called the ⁠Apocalypse Early Warning System, which tracks the number of private jets in the air at any one time. Its operating assumption is that if the world’s richest get tipped off early to, say, an impending nuclear launch, they’ll all hop in their jets at once and head for their private bunkers.

Of course, by the time that our clued-in overclass got into the air, it would probably be too late for the rest of us to flee, assuming we have someplace to flee to; I would probably end up spending the last few moments before nuclear armageddon trying to wrangle my recalcitrant cats into their carriers. Or it would turn out that all these rich people were just flying to the Super Bowl and I once more provoked my cats into stubborn fury for no reason.

And Thiel’s move probably isn’t any more a reliable signal of impending nuclear war than the number of private jets in the sky. Nervous billionaires have been building bunkers for years now; media theorist Douglas Rushkoff even published a whole book on the subject back in 2022, when our president wasn’t the sort of person who might launch a nuclear war on a whim. Thiel himself has been seeking what some have taken to calling “sovereignty diversification” for some time, obtaining New Zealand citizenship in 2011 and buying some land on the shores of Lake Wānaka on the southern island. (He seems to have lost interest in the New Zealand option, though, after the locals wouldn’t let him build a bunker there.)

This is probably a good opportunity to remind any oligarchs out there that you can’t actually avoid the effects of a nuclear war by moving to Buenos Aires, or Lake Wānaka, or even the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The Times story mentions a tech entrepreneur friend of Thiel’s with a second home in Buenos Aires who “has hypothesized that Argentina would be completely unaffected if the Northern Hemisphere were wiped out by nuclear war.” So much for the mythologized genius of the tech power elite—their grasp of the devastation wrought by a global nuclear conflagration roughly corresponds to the implausibly heroic fables crafted by Hollywood disaster impresarios like Michael Bay.

The Times suggests that Thiel might see Argentina as a possible refuge from the dangers of “runaway artificial intelligence,” though it doesn’t bother to explain what that means or why our potential future AI overlords would decide to simply bypass a country where 96 percent of the people are connected in some way to the Internet. Argentina isn’t Dune; its residents have computers and ChatGPT like the rest of us. OpenAI is planning to build a massive $25 billion data center in Patagonia.

My point is simply that we can’t see Thiel’s Argentinian move as a sign that the end is near because the cataclysms he tends to talk about—nuclear war and an AI uprising—wouldn’t spare Buenos Aires. I’m pretty sure that Thiel is well aware of this.

But I do think Thiel suspects that something big and bad is coming—not necessarily for you or me or anyone we know but for him, and for others in his rarified political and social class. The Nazis decamped to Argentina after the war to escape the Nuremberg trials. It’s not quite clear what exactly Thiel thinks is coming now, but he’s let us know that he’d like to be at least 6,000 miles away when it hits.

On the surface, Thiel seems pretty secure here in the United States. He certainly has political influence, with various associates of his taking up positions in and around the White House, including his political protégé JD Vance in the vice presidential mansion. Meanwhile, Thiel’s tech companies, Palantir and Anduril, are gobbling up billions in multiyear government contracts.

But a close connection to the Trump regime ain’t what it used to be. Our increasingly unhinged president is falling apart before our very eyes and taking most of the Republican Party down with him. People are pissed enough at Trump’s chaotic reign that the Democrats seem poised to overcome the electoral ineptitude of the party’s leadership and rack up huge gains in November, knock on wood.

Meanwhile, and perhaps even more to the point, the billionaire backlash seems to grow stronger every day. An Economist/YouGov poll from January found that 80 percent of Americans say the rich have too much political power—including 91 percent of Democrats, 82 percent of independents, and, remarkably, 67 percent of Republicans. More than half see wealth inequality as a “very big problem” and nearly that many (46 percent) say that taxes on billionaires are “much too low.” A Harris poll from last November found that more than half of Americans see billionaires as a threat to American democracy (as well they should). More than 70 percent support a billionaire tax—and 53 percent want an actual cap on billionaire wealth, with most of them saying no one should have more than 10 billion dollars. That would slash Thiel’s wealth by about two-thirds, which is rather more of a slice than the one-time 5 percent wealth tax proposed in California, and a far more radical proposal than any politician has yet dared to advance.

No wonder Thiel is worried. Something is coming. And that something would be us.

Donald Trump’s America is a scary place in significant part thanks to an unholy alliance of MAGA devotees who don’t believe in science and see intellectuals as public enemy number one, and a gaggle of Silicon Valley militarists who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, if not the universe. Add in white Christian nationalists who abuse religious precepts to sow hatred and division and you have the foundations of the political base that elected Donald Trump (twice!). And worse yet, those groupings are likely to be with us long after our current president has gone off to that great cheeseburger stand in the sky.

Still, it’s worth reflecting on whether such an odd coalition of allies can survive without Donald Trump, or even with a president whose policies have become so harmful and irrational that they’re doing severe human and economic damage even to his most loyal supporters (not to mention the rest of us). And it’s also worth considering whether the pillars of the MAGA movement can manage to stick together in the ever-grimmer Trumpian years to come, not to speak of the post-Trumpian ones, or whether the rest of us can organize a powerful, humane alternative to his politics of hatred and division that could transform this country and the world.

The Know-Nothings Meet the Know-It-Alls

As a start, we have the latter-day “Know Nothings,” a term borrowed from a nineteenth century political movement. It’s not that members of that group literally know nothing. Some of them are quite skilled in their given professions and astute at assessing certain kinds of situations. Some are intelligent but woefully misguided. Trump supporter and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, for example, is a brain surgeon.

Members of the anti-science crowd are also often very good at communicating their messages, however wrongheaded or offensive they may be. The problem isn’t that they can’t take in information; it’s that they are distinctly anti-knowledge when it comes to, among other things, separating compelling conspiracy theories from well-documented facts.

The results of their ingrained antagonism toward basic knowledge are profound, making them a threat to public health and democratic practices. After all, we now live in a country where millions of people are against vaccinating their children to prevent potentially deadly diseases and don’t believe that perhaps the gravest threat to continuing life on this planet—climate change—is caused, or even influenced, by human activity or perhaps is even happening at all.

The dangerous delusions of Trump Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now have the stamp of government approval and the power of the US government behind them. There is no way to estimate how many people have already fallen sick or even died unnecessarily due to the implementation of his crackpot theories, but the numbers will undoubtedly be significant. The American Public Health Association captured the grim mood of our moment perfectly in an April 2025 press release entitled “Secretary Kennedy and His Policies Are a Danger to the Public Health.”

On a different spiritual plane, tens of millions of Americans believe in the rapture—the notion that they and their kind will be called up to heaven in the end days, while the rest of us will be left behind, presumably to burn in hell (but not a climate-change version of the same). A 2022 Pew poll found that 39 percent of Americans believe “we are in the end times.” Already! And such a belief, of course, has an impact on how or even whether one wants to devote time and energy to fixing problems here on Earth.

Such an amalgam of opponents of science and skeptics about basic reality bears a distinct resemblance to the “Know Nothing” movement of the nineteenth century that thrived on anti-immigrant sentiments and half-baked conspiracy theories.

The anti-intellectual faction on the right has been propagandized for decades to believe that the biggest obstacle to a better life for them and their families isn’t the predatory corporations hollowing out our economy and manipulating our democracy, but a group of liberal intellectuals clustered on both coasts who allegedly want to replace this country’s bedrock beliefs with a set of “politically correct” prescriptions about how they should live their lives, especially when it comes to DEI or diversity, equity, and inclusion. In such a rendering of reality, that “new class” is seen as sapping the country’s strength and undermining the basic values that would make America great (again!).

The use of that “new class” as a political epithet emerged from the neoconservative movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as Andrew Hartman has explained at his blog on American intellectual history:

Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) about a so-called ‘new class’ of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Members of this ‘new class,’ so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status.

However, the current Trumpian war on DEI should be considered an extension of a longstanding conservative effort to distract Americans from the real sources of their problems by promoting a politics of division and hatred. Mainstream accounts of the drive to eradicate concerns about diversity, equity, and inclusion from public life rarely point out that fighting DEI can fairly be characterized as fighting to make racism, misogyny, and anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination ever more acceptable in the sort of open, unapologetic fashion that prevailed before the modern-day civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements gained strength.

The crusade—and it’s nothing less than that—against DEI needs to be called out for what it is, not treated as some sort of skirmish over language. And rather than DEI programs that stop at raising tough questions about America’s long history of systematic discrimination, what’s needed are programs that truly change people’s lives by creating better-paying jobs and affordable, quality health care for all, regardless of race, gender, class status, or faith. Getting there will, however, require a flowering of faith of another kind—not religious faith, but faith that we can construct an accountable government that serves the public interest, rather than, as in the present age of Donald Trump, the interests of corporations and inhumane ideologues.

Silicon Valley Saviors

In contrast to the “know nothing” faction of the political right in America is the “know it all” faction—Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, and Palmer Luckey. They view themselves not just as business executives cashing in on the latest trend, but as superior beings who should be running the planet. They promise better living through technology and, as new age militarists, see robotic weapons as the future of warfare. But the idea that such new technologies will inevitably change our lives for the better or protect us from the worst has, at best, a mixed record. It depends, of course, on just who is using such technologies and for what purpose.

In addition to owning companies that create new systems grounded in artificial intelligence and machine learning, the new age militarists are angling to shape our foreign policy, our federal budget, and the future of our democracy. They literally want to become masters of the universe by figuring out how to live forever and promote the colonization of space. They dream of video games in which, as Palmer Luckey put it, “if you die in the game, you die in real life.”

The political reach of the Silicon Valley crowd has grown dramatically in the age of Donald Trump. JD Vance, his vice president, was, of course, groomed and financed by Peter Thiel, the founder of the omnipresent firm Palantir, which provides technology to patrol the border, helps ICE identify suspects, and has provided software to Israel that its leaders have used to step up the pace of bombing in their genocidal war in Gaza. After a stint at one of Thiel’s venture capital firms, Vance won a Senate election in Ohio with major financial backing from him and his allies.

When Trump chose Vance as his running mate, champagne corks popped in Silicon Valley and the money started flowing to help Trump get elected, including up to a quarter of a billion dollars in dark money from Elon Musk. As a result, Silicon Valley now has its man in the executive branch.

Nor is Vance alone. Former employees of tech firms like SpaceX and Anduril are now embedded in key agencies of the federal government, and Secretary of—yes!—War Pete Hegseth has gone all in on integrating AI into US military planning and practice to the delight of the billionaire tech moguls and their hangers-on.

To say that Thiel, Musk, Palmer Luckey, Alex Karp, and their financiers like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz have a high opinion of themselves—and of the potential of the technology their companies produce—would distinctly be an understatement.

Kathryn Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz, a self-appointed chief ideologist and cheerleader for the Silicon Valley tech takeover of America, gave a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute in February 2025 that analyst Gil Duran described as an effort to “equate most government actions with communist dictatorships…while positioning tech bros as the ordained saviors of the traditional family.” Boyle’s bread and butter argument—call it a potentially fatal kind of narcissism—was that only the “founders” (yes, they call themselves that!) are serious enough, skilled enough, and endowed by their creator with enough persistence to solve and reverse America’s imperial decline. The rest of us should just get out of the way and let the new techno-gods do their work.

Will Trump’s Patchwork Quilt Come Apart at the Seams?

The Trump coalition is a strange kaleidoscope of confusing views and contradictory cover stories: the know-nothings; the know-it-alls; the false prophets of white Christian nationalism, the billionaires and millionaires, the people who (once upon a time) watched too many episodes of The Apprentice and think Trump is a good businessman; those who want yet another tax break; those men among us who want to control what women do with their bodies, and the (mostly) men who feel liberated because Trump openly and repeatedly makes racist, sexist, anti-gay, and anti-trans statements, legitimizing vocal expressions of prejudice in a way not seen in decades.

Yes, his is a motley crew, but so far they have rallied around the president, no matter the promises he breaks or the harmful policies he jams down all of our throats (policies that could ultimately hit many diehard Trump supporters who aren’t billionaires as hard or harder than they will hit his opponents). Fortunately, there are at least signs that his ability to thrive politically (even as his policies drive America into a ditch) may be fading. His brutal, illogical, illegal, ill-defined war on Iran—complete with genocidal rhetoric about ending an entire civilization—may be the beginning of the end of his grasp of our politics and our psyche.

Unfortunately, he may be as much a symptom of what’s wrong with America as he is a producer of deep damage to the future prospects of democratic governance and human cooperation in this country and on this planet.

Which Way Out?

Any resistance to such know-nothingism and incipient technofascism must start on a human scale. If we are ever going to build a tolerant, welcoming nation that meets the basic needs of its residents, while leaving ample room for scientific inquiry and creative endeavors of all sorts, we need to get off our machines and start talking to—and crucially, listening to — each other.

This is already happening more widely than you might imagine if you’re a prisoner of your news feed. And it’s happening not just in large gatherings like the No Kings rallies, but in local organizing around schools and housing, voter registration and education efforts, and attempts to help communities survive the double-injury of runaway capitalism and the shredding of the social safety net thanks, at least in part, to Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (which is the ugliest, most inhumane piece of legislation in living memory).

We need to fight on at least three fronts—economically, politically, and culturally. Senator Bernie Sanders has shown just how a truly populist economic program could draw support even among diehard MAGA backers, and such a program is a necessity if we are ever to dig our way out of our current predicament.

But economics is hardly the only problem we have. There’s also the reality of racism to contend with, not to speak of a thriving anti-immigrant sensibility, and misogyny, as well as anti-gay and anti-trans discrimination—all deeply embedded in a nation that was founded as a colonial enterprise fueled by slavery and genocide. Such a history has to be transcended by embracing the values and elevating the leadership of the people most impacted by the legacy of America’s repressive past, while building a new culture based on tolerance, respect, and (yes!) love for our fellow human beings.

To be clear (as President Barack Obama would often say), by “transcend” I don’t mean ignore. We must fully acknowledge and seriously commit our society to repairing the crimes embedded in our development as a nation, not to speak of those being committed right now in Donald Trump’s America against so many of us and our planet as well.

And sadly, it’s all too obvious that coming together to save this planet and retain our basic humanity will not be easy. People are messy and, frankly, can be a pain to deal with (yours truly included). We are, however, all we have, and making the effort will matter.

I believe in the saying, attributed to leaders of the Wobblies (the radical union founded in 1905 and known formally as the Industrial Workers of the World), that we must sow the seeds of any new society in the shell of the old one. The way we treat each other in our homes, workplaces, schools, sites of worship, and other public and private spaces will determine whether we can build a better world or are fated to live in a never-endingly Trumpian one. In that context, it’s important not just to speak truth to power, but to begin trying to create alternative sources of power and good ideas aren’t enough for that. (If they were, we would already be living in a far better world.)

Building alternative power and charting a path to such a world will be a distinctly collective undertaking. A handful of charismatic leaders or courageous organizers can’t do it for us. We all need to be leaders since we are all experts (in the sense of knowing our communities and our bits of the world).

There are no guarantees in life, but in this disastrous Trumpian universe of ours, fighting the power should feel far more fulfilling than bending the knee, and if enough of us join that fight, we at least have a shot at building a society and a world worth sustaining for generations to come.

What are we waiting for?

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

On February 3, 1964, hundreds of thousands of New York City children boycotted class and took to the streets to protest the de facto segregation of the city’s school system. Since then, city students have continued to speak out on local and nationwide issues, ranging from the Vietnam War and gentrification to the climate crisis, gun control, standardized tests, and ICE. Today, this kind of free expression lies at the center of a citywide political maelstrom.

On May 20, City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced a revised version of the controversial Intro 175-B bill that would enable the New York City Police Department to establish so-called “buffer zones” around many K-12 schools during protests as a public safety measure. Specifically, the bill calls on the police commissioner to establish a plan to “address and contain the risk of physical obstruction, physical injury, intimidation, and interference, while preserving and protecting the rights to free speech and assembly, and protest.”

The original version, which was vetoed in late April by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, would have included universities, all K-12 schools, all early childhood education centers, and, potentially, museums, libraries, and teaching hospitals in the plan, covering tens of thousands of city blocks. While more limited in scope, the plan under the revised bill could still have significant reach. The new bill covers all elementary, middle, and junior high schools, but only non-public high schools. According to a spokesperson at the City Council, the bill also covers early childhood education centers, except when located in private residences. Together with many city-administered and private nonresidential early childhood education centers, roughly 1,760 public elementary and middle schools, and at least 733 private K-12 schools span the five boroughs, including some located within blocks of common protest sites.

The bill comes in the wake of city college campuses becoming ground zero for protests over genocide in Gaza, heated protests and counterprotests involving a real estate expo hosted by the Park East synagogue that included homes in illegal Israeli settlements, and a significant documented rise in antisemitic attacks and hate crimes. Yet the bill’s implications extend beyond this context, bringing into public focus a core tension: the trade-off between public safety and free speech, and who gets to decide how that trade-off is made.

Bill opponents argue that curtailing protests does not make New Yorkers’ lives safer, while supporters, including Council Speaker Menin and the original bill sponsor, Council member Eric Dinowitz, see the bill as helping ensure that students can attend school without fear and as increasing police transparency. As these debates unfold between powerful political players, the constituency most affected—the city’s students—has its own concerns. For some student activists, the bill has created a sense of deep uncertainty around whether and how their ability to speak out and organize on a range of issues could be affected going forward.

Although in the city, even elementary school students turn out to protests and rallies, the most likely impacted students are high schoolers, who led New York’s earliest youth climate march and school strikes. “The barrier to organizing an effective protest or demonstration of discontent in the first place would be so much larger” if the bill becomes law, said Lucas Phildor, a Queens borough organizer with the youth environmental advocacy organization Treeage. Even if Phildor, a senior at the public Townsend Harris High School, would not find his school directly covered by the plan, the prospect of student activists running into police barriers and feeling under surveillance felt like a high-stakes situation to him. Phildor also imagined this unease would trickle down to younger students. “I can’t imagine at least myself being back in sixth grade, knowing what I would want to do in organizing—the fear that that would instill in me…[around] taking any action.” He also feared that this bill would open the gateway to more buffer zones around public schools.

Alma Adi, a Manhattan borough organizer with Treeage, was afraid the bill’s effects would limit spaces for students to gather without running into buffer zones, especially for citywide protests like May Day. A junior at Hunter College High School, she added that buffer zones would make mobilizing peers more difficult and complicate planning protest routes that would avoid possible security perimeters.

J.P. Perry, a senior staff attorney at the NYCLU, agreed that the bill could have a “chilling effect” on young people. “This measure is really targeted at suppressing campus protest activity,” she said, raising concerns around the uncertainties of what enforcement of the bill would entail in practice. Students could fear possible arrest, disciplinary action, or even consequences in the college admissions process as a result of joining protests that run into a buffer zone, when, she said, “we should be encouraging our students to be standing up to participate in our multifaceted, complex democracy.” The NYCLU previously urged the City Council to sustain Mamdani’s veto of Intro 175-B in a letter signed by over 100 organizations, and has maintained its opposition to anti-speech legislation.

Even if only indirectly, some college student activists fear being impacted by the new bill. For Hagen Feeney, a college senior at Columbia University who is an activist with Sunrise Columbia and a spokesperson for Student Workers of Columbia, and was involved in Gaza solidarity encampments, the bill’s existence functioned almost as a warning for student activists. As is common for a private university, Columbia already regulates protests and demonstrations on its private property, making the surrounding public streets a crucial alternative for student protests. Under the revised bill, the buffer zone plan could cover some of these streets because of their proximity to educational facilities.

Supporters of the bill, however, contend that by outlining the NYPD’s considerations in “determining whether, when, and the extent to which security perimeters” around schools, the bill would provide a core measure of public transparency and allow for “community engagement in NYPD plans to respond to protests.” In testimony submitted to the City Council last February, Michael Gerber, deputy commissioner of legal matters for the NYPD, testified that the NYPD already “exercises its discretion, consistent with the law,” to both facilitate safe entry and exit of schools, and to let protesters exercise First Amendment rights, and that its initial concerns with the bill had been mostly addressed. The NYPD provided this testimony in response to a request for an interview and did not respond to follow-up questions in response to this testimony.

“This increased transparency will help ensure that New York City’s most vulnerable are protected and that students are able to access education without fear of intimidation or harassment,” said Council member Elsie Encarnacion, who is sponsoring the new bill.

Benjamin Feit, a high school freshman at The Ramaz School, a private K-12 school, sees the buffer zone as crucial for preventing the intimidation of students by protesters, especially of Jewish students in the current political moment. Along with peers and parents, he joined the UJA-Federation of New York last March in Albany to lobby for buffer zone legislation at the state level, which recently passed in the New York State Legislature. The UJA-Federation has strongly supported Intro 175-B, calling Mamdani’s veto a “profound failure” to prioritize New Yorkers’ safety.

“There’s no reason why there should be protests [so] close to schools,” said Feit, adding that the same kind of intimidating protest incidents he fears happening outside Jewish schools “could happen outside of a Muslim school or a Catholic school.” Likewise, Feit thinks the bill should apply to public as well as private high schools. “I think all schools should be safe…. there’s no reason why [public] schools shouldn’t be protected if we’re protecting private high schools,” he said.

Many other students, however, fear the bill will have negative safety impacts. Adi said the bill initially seemed logical in a time of deep political polarization. However, she believes that “realistically, the bill won’t be enforced in a way that specifically prioritizes students’ safety and…the harms vastly outweigh any potential benefits.” She notes that many schools already have school safety agents to protect students, while Phildor said he was concerned with the pressing threat to student safety of increased gun violence, not peer protests. Similar to Feit, he finds the exclusion of public high schools in the new bill confounding, given the bill’s ostensible purpose of enhancing student safety, and indicative of a lack of coherence in supporters’ arguments.

Although Intro 175-B does not call for an increase in police presence at schools, the concern that the plan’s implementation and enforcement would inevitably lead to this outcome to support buffer zones raised additional safety concerns for Phildor as a person of color, he said. Adi invoked the school-to-prison pipeline and how students of marginalized and immigrant backgrounds may already be disproportionately targeted by police in schools as a basis for concerns. For Phildor and Ali, the ability for students to protest alongside their peers where they naturally feel most protected—by their schools—also offers crucial support for free expression, since students often find comfort in protesting alongside their peers or, as Adi put it, “as a unit.” For Ami Dube, an Orthodox Jewish student at Hunter College High School, who wrote about Intro 175-B in The Forward, allowing for free speech by students and engaging with “outlooks that make us uncomfortable” is also crucial in his view for “what keeps Jews safe.”

Yet for Feit, the new bill also has straightforward value outside student safety: preventing disruption to school learning and after-school activities by protests. Citing similar concerns around the interruption of student learning, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens also urged Mamdani’s support for Intro 175-B last April. Feit added that law-abiding protesters could make themselves heard at a safe distance from schools.

Ultimately, whether the new version becomes law or the bill remains a powerful omen, Intro 175-B has put the city’s students on notice. And a question that has plagued the nation since its founding—what actually limits free speech and when are such limits necessary to protect people—will likely continue to permeate city politics and classrooms.

“We’re in a time where we’re seeing like a federal assault on so many of our rights…and so often…where you see the most powerful speech [against this] is from students,” said Perry. For now, how students will shape their activism to continue defending those rights and making their voices heard, while navigating any shifting boundaries of city law, remains to be seen.

On a recent Thursday night, I walked into a Broadway Democrats meeting in a community room at Cathedral Parkway Towers, late, to hear New York Assemblyman Micah Lasher address a group of about 25 constituents. Lasher, who is running to succeed Representative Jerrold Nadler in the recently redrawn “East Side/West Side” 12th Congressional District, was speaking animatedly about the importance of enforcing the 1936 Robinson-Patman Act, a New Deal law intended to protect small businesses from large industry consolidators.

The choice of topic seemed obscure. “Why is he talking about this to UWS Democrats?” I scribbled to myself. (This is my district, by the way.)

It turned out this was a forum specifically to discuss grocery affordability, with active and smart West Side Democrats, which I’d have known if I’d been on time. Still, I marveled at how on-brand Lasher was that night, as a man who, New York magazine reports, brags, “Our brand is nerd.” He also told writer David Freedlander, “I can’t help but feel like I am going to emerge as a fairly boring character in your story.” He was right.

Daniel Squadron, a former New York state senator who for almost 10 years has run the States Project, a nonprofit dedicated to electing Democratic state legislative leaders, tells me that of all the 7,386 state legislators nationally, “not a single one has been more effective at pushing back on the Trump administration than Micah.” But Squadron is slightly frustrated by the media’s pigeonholing of Lasher as the wonk in the June 23 Democratic primary, rather than the one with the clear policy chops and accomplishments and the scads of local endorsements.

“There’s a shocking number of people who are wildly enthusiastic about the possibility of Micah going to Congress who have known him for a decade or two or three,” he says. “And it’s actually really rare to have a candidate that excites so many people who they’ve known this long, professionally, or personally, for whom he has solved complex personal and political problems.” Voters’ choice in this primary, he says, “should be a no-brainer.” But he adds, “There’s a question [about whether] those qualities matter as much as they used to or should.”

So far, there’s no clear front-runner in the race. Lasher might be getting more attention if he weren’t facing President John F. Kennedy’s under-qualified, over-handsome grandson Jack Schlossberg, 33, a smack-talking YouTuber best known for his rants against his brain-addled, anti-science cousin, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. (a productive pastime for JKS) as well as shirtless videos where he dances on the beach (where he looks more like a close RFK Jr. relative than he might hope).

Then we’ve got celebrity Republican turned rabid Trump opponent George Conway, ex-husband of Kellyanne, previously best known for his work behind the scenes with Ann Coulter setting the stage for the Clinton impeachment, now hoping to represent a district that has been represented by Nadler, Ted Weiss, Bella Abzug, and former mayor Ed Koch, when he was a liberal. Conway is personally wealthy, and he told New York magazine that if he loses the primary, he’ll “probably go skiing a little bit more.”

NY-12 is an affluent district, but I don’t think that sat well for a lot of constituents. If they saw it.

But while Schlossberg was leading in early polling, and Conway was coming on strong, recent polls have shown both of them losing support. Lasher’s strongest opponent is East Side Assemblyman Alex Bores, who might be emerging as the best-known candidate by virtue of having multiple political action committees on both sides of the artificial intelligence debate pouring money into his race—one side attacking, one side promoting him. (The two are effectively tied in the latest polling.)

Leading the Future, a PAC affiliated with founders of Open AI, has poured millions into attacking Bores, ostensibly because he boasts of sponsoring New York’s AI-regulating RAISE Act (which Lasher cosponsored). A former employee of Peter Thiel’s Palantir, Bores is now getting millions in campaign contributions from PACs and other donors aligned with Anthropic, the AI firm that got credit for insisting that the Pentagon could not use its products for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance (but which is still working on a wide range of defense- and military-related projects). Anthropic and its allies are trying to pitch themselves as the “Good AI” titans, open to sensible regulation. The 12th district race has become a proxy war over whose version of AI regulation—which neither side wants to be particularly muscular—will prevail in Congress.

Meanwhile, crypto-currency billionaire Chris Larsen, who lives in San Francisco, just announced a plan to pour $3.5 million into Bores’s candidacy, ostensibly because of his leadership on AI regulation. But Larsen was one of the biggest backers of pro-crypto attorney John Deaton who tried to unseat Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2024. And over on the other coast, Larsen is a leader in a new PAC called “Grow California,” aimed at curbing the power of progressives and unions and fighting a proposed wealth tax. “Whoever designed that wealth tax in the unions—wow,” Larsen told The New York Times. “They woke up the sleeping giant like I have never seen.”

Bores’s stance on AI won him the endorsement of the Senator Bernie Sanders–affiliated Our Revolution. “Alex Bores isn’t afraid to name or take on the oligarchy,” the group’s executive director, Joseph Geevarghese, said in a statement. He admitted to Politico, “When you ask somebody, ‘What would come to mind when you say leftist progressive,’ it’s probably not Alex Bores.” (Sanders himself has not endorsed in the race.) And when you ask somebody what would come to mind about Our Revolution, it’s probably not backing the same candidate as an anti-union crypto billionaire. But this is a crazy race.

Lasher chafes at the credit Bores gets for his AI stance, at least a little bit. He worked on a draft of the RAISE act with then–state Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, and Lasher and Bores have similar platforms when it comes to AI regulation, though Lasher has called for a national moratorium on data center construction, and Bores hasn’t. But Bores’s crypto ties are another matter, Lasher says.

“I think it’s clear that the Open AI attacks have been a very helpful distraction from the crypto industry’s role in this election,” he adds. “And also from the much more complicated story that’s happening within the AI industry.”

While out-of-town tech-bros and crypto leaders are lining up for and against Bores, Lasher has the support of many prominent elected leaders in New York, from retiring Representative Jerry Nadler to former mayor Michael Bloomberg to Governor Kathy Hochul. Local Democratic leaders like Manhattan Borough President Hoylman-Sigal, Comptroller Mark Levine, and Upper West Side state legislators Linda Rosenthal, Erik Bottcher, and Brian Kavanagh are also behind him. Beloved progressive former borough president Ruth Messinger is a staunch supporter. Lasher also has the support of most of the district’s party committee infrastructure, from the venerable Village Independent Dems to Third Act NYC. (The “Silk Stocking” Upper East Side was merged with the more progressive, more Jewish Upper West Side by a redistricting debacle back in 2022.) But to critics, channeled by New York magazine, that makes Lasher the face of the “Establishment.”

Lasher was a precocious political upstart, and his supporters contest who has known him longest. “I’ve known him since he was 16,” Nadler says. But Nadler now feels that the upstart has the maturity, at 44, to take over the seat he’s held for 33 years. “[Retiring] was hard,” Nadler admits. “I still feel ambivalent about it. And if there wasn’t someone that I felt confident in, who would do a good job and continue to do the things that I want to do, like Micah, I wouldn’t have retired.”

Nadler scoffs at the attention some of Lasher’s rivals are getting, particularly Schlossberg.

“He’s totally unqualified. I have nothing in particular against a Kennedy running or not, but the Kennedy running should be someone with some public accomplishments. And he has none. And no private accomplishments, really, you know?” Schlossberg does in fact have a limited professional résumé.

Nadler refutes the notion that Lasher is diminished as the policy wonk in the race.

“I don’t think people think he’s too serious or too wonky. If there’s anything people want in this district, it’s a candidate who’s serious and wonky. We need it.” He goes on: “I’ve watched him, in all his jobs. He worked for me. He worked for Bloomberg. He worked for [former Attorney General Eric] Schneiderman, he did a lot of great work on antitrust, and then he was policy director for the governor. This is a very policy-oriented district, a very intellectual district. People know what he’s done, and they appreciate it.”

I ask Nadler what he’d like to see Lasher do when he gets to Congress. “Well, if we get a trifecta [in 2028], which I think we will, then you pass my bill expanding the Supreme Court to 13. Thirteen is justified, because the Supreme Court historically has had one justice for each circuit, and there are now 13 circuits. And also install 18-year term limits. But you can’t do that right away.” (Lasher tells me this will indeed be a top priority for him.) Nadler says he has confidence that Lasher will continue the job he’s done for the district.

Stephanie Lasher, the candidate’s mother, tells me the relationship between her son and Nadler “certainly goes beyond the professional. I think there’s a great deal of mutual respect, and fondness, and they are so similar in some ways. I mean, ‘integrity’ is a word that, sadly, we are often unable to use in this arena. The two of them have just impeccable integrity.… I mean, if you want to put it in lofty terms, Micah believes in the nobility of public service, and certainly Jerry is a paradigm for that concept.”

Lasher’s mother has zero problem admitting her son is a nerd—and she says it’s a good thing. “It surfaced when he was a kid,” she told me. “When he would get interested in something, he would do a deep dive. When he was in nursery school, he became very interested in Sherlock Holmes. I mean, we had to get him the outfit, the cap.”

Lasher resists identifying one signature issue. He touts his role in the New York legislature passing the first new FAIR Business Practices Act in 45 years, in his first Assembly term, and his successful fight to more than double income eligibility for childcare subsidies. When I ask him what his “first” big issue in the House would be, he refuses to choose just one. “I mean, it’s housing, childcare, and jobs as a general matter,” he tells me, and he has an agenda to help Americans launch themselves into their first job, first home, and parenthood: “I have talked about a program in which the federal government says: We’re gonna guarantee you can get your first job, through a program of paid national service that is organized as a federal jobs guarantee. We are going to make sure you can get your first home or apartment through a significantly expanded program of down payment assistance, and the creation of an equivalent for renters. We should guarantee you can get through your first year of parenting without getting crushed by the costs, and we should have a program of paid family leave at the federal level.”

A guaranteed year of that kind of federal support, Lasher believes—job, home, family support—would be transformative to an upcoming generation of Americans trying to get a toehold on the American dream. (It would also be fantastically expensive, but hey, we have money for wars and cruel, draconian border patrol, and a White House ballroom.)

Lasher lays out even broader priorities on his website, where he touts what he calls his “book,” Project 2026. It’s a vast, inspiring agenda for fighting Trump while he’s still in office and recovering from the Trump era. He lays out how Democrats can “throw sand in Trump’s gears,” even if they don’t take back the Senate. “Democrats can use the power even of the minority to slow or stall what Trump and [House Speaker Mike] Johnson are doing.” Part two is an inventory of oversight and investigation efforts “that they can and should launch as a House majority,” and a third section takes a detailed look “at a whole bunch of statutes that I think the Democrats need to fix, to prevent a reprise of this under some future president.”

He pauses, and smiles. “I think they are good examples of why being a nerd is not an unhelpful attribute in fighting fascism.”

The clash between Lasher’s deliberateness and Schlossberg’s instinct for working a crowd came to the fore at a recent forum at the 92nd St. Y, where New York magazine reported that Schlossberg attacked Lasher for insisting that the Republicans in the Senate would never vote to impeach Trump, so he couldn’t be removed from office before his term ends. “Not with that attitude, at least,” Schlossberg scoffed. According to New York, “the audience cheered.” That’s how the article ended.

But Lasher insists that he favors impeaching Trump in the House. “I have a fairly clear view of it, which I expressed at that forum, but it didn’t quite get captured in the magazine piece. We have to impeach Trump, because there has been no president in the history of the Republic who has committed high crimes and misdemeanors to the extent that we’ve seen in the second Trump presidency. And if we were to not impeach Trump, we would be normalizing that conduct and declaring the impeachment power a dead letter.

“My point to Jack Schossberg and to George Conway is, I think that they misunderstand the Republican Party of 2026 if they are pinning their hopes to 17 Senate Republicans finding their conscience,” Lasher says. While the House can impeach with a simple majority, a two-thirds majority of the Senate must convict. And while he would vote to impeach Trump in the House, he admits he talks to constituents who fear the crusade could preoccupy a new House Democratic majority. “I firmly believe the party needs to show the American people that we have a substantive agenda that’s gonna make their lives better. Quickly.”

Whichever candidate wins this primary will hold the seat for Democrats in November, given the party’s 57-point registration advantage over Republicans in the district. The four leading contenders are all some version of liberal, none of them overtly courting the left wing. Still, Lasher’s supporters argue, with some evidence, that he is the most battle-tested, and his policy chops will make him the district’s most effective representative.

But this is an era when the imprimatur of the Democratic establishment is being challenged. And that’s not a bad thing. Although Lasher has good relations with Mayor Zohran Mamdani, his former fellow Assembly member, Mamdani is not likely to endorse in the race. Lasher has nonetheless signed up Mamdani adviser Morris Katz as a media strategist, a sign that he understands experience, policy chops, and endorsements aren’t a glide path to victory in this era of resistance, not only to Trump, but to stale Democratic leaders.

The day after Veterans Affairs nurse Alex Pretti was murdered by a Customs and Border Patrol officer in Minneapolis, Lasher took an early flight to the city, to see for himself what it was facing. The decision to go was spontaneous and unexpected. “The day that [Pretti] was assassinated, I went with my son, Ben, to a march in Union Square,” he recalled. “It was a very, very cold day. But I didn’t really want to leave. That is the thing we can do. We can be out in the streets, making clear how we feel about what this band of thugs is doing to our country, to Minneapolis. And coming home I thought: Let me go there. Sometimes, what you can do is show up.

“I didn’t have a particularly fleshed-out plan. I’ve worked with legislators in Minnesota on Trump response legislation. So I went, and I spent two days participating in protests there, meeting with legislators. I visited mutual aid organizations. It was to show solidarity with the people there, and it was also to see with my own eyes what it would look like to have a city that really was occupied by ICE.”

I didn’t see much press about it, I told him—I’d only found out about it myself late in my reporting. Why hadn’t he courted more? “It was a good chance to shake up your brand a little,” I suggested.

He chuckled, then got serious. “I was quite conscious at the time of trying to strike a balance between reporting what I was seeing, trying to be constructive, trying to draw attention to the right things without doing it in a way that was cheap, you know?

“I do say ‘my brand is nerd,’” he goes on. “But I think what that obscures is the tenacity and relentlessness that I bring to fights. It’s not flashy. But that is a big part of who I am.”

Editor’s Note: Due to an editing error, this article originally identified Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Jack Schlossberg’s uncle. In fact, he is his cousin. The text has been corrected.

As the Ukraine war on the ground becomes bogged down in a seemingly unbreakable stalemate, and public discontent in both Russia and Ukraine grows, the governments in Moscow and Kyiv are escalating the conflict in the air in an effort to change the situation to their advantage. This will lead to increased civilian casualties on both sides. It also increases the risk of clashes that will draw NATO and Russia into direct conflict—though it is also quite possible that the war will end in an inconclusive ceasefire and a frozen conflict.

Two developments in May emphasized the danger of escalation. In response to Ukrainian drones flying over the Baltic States to attack targets in Russia, Moscow accused the Baltic governments of complicity and threatened an attack on Latvia. NATO claimed (implausibly, and with no evidence) that the drones had been redirected over the Baltic states by Russian jamming; but it seems at least equally likely that Ukraine was using Baltic airspace, protected by NATO, to get as close as possible to its targets near St. Petersburg before encountering Russian air defenses.

And in response to increasingly damaging Ukrainian drone and missile attacks on Moscow and Russian energy infrastructure (which Russia believes are aimed with the help of Western intelligence), the Russian government warned that it would start attacking Ukrainian headquarters in Kyiv, and warned Western officials and citizens to leave the city. This was widely taken as an indication that Russia is going to attack these targets with Oreshnik ballistic missiles—something that it has refrained from doing so far, presumably out of fear that casualties among NATO advisers would lead to drastic escalation by the West.

For the moment, both sides have stepped back from the brink. NATO has begun to shoot down Ukrainian drones over the Baltic states; and while Russia has increased its attacks on Kyiv, it has not yet made good on its threat to launch strikes that would cause Western casualties.

The danger however remains extremely serious. The Ukrainian air campaign against Russia is beginning to do serious damage (and of course the Ukrainians feel entirely justified, since their infrastructure has been under Russian attack for the past three years). As a result of this and tiny Ukrainian advances on the ground in the Donbas, Western official and unofficial figures are beginning to declare again that Ukraine can “win.”

If by this they mean that Ukraine could fight Russia to a standstill and bring about a compromise peace, they are almost certainly correct. Indeed, Ukraine, with Western help, has already demonstrated its ability to do this. If, however, these supposed friends of Ukraine mean that Ukraine can defeat Russia and bring about the fall of the Putin administration and system, they are being profoundly foolish. Recent Ukrainian advances on the ground in the Donbas have been just as small as Russian advances in the opposite direction. Indeed, this is hardly a matter of “advances” at all. The omnipresence of drones has created a “killing zone” more than a dozen miles wide in which only tiny groups of soldiers can operate, occasionally occupying an individual building or ruined hamlet, and often then having to scuttle quickly back to their own lines.

It is equally foolish to believe that limited aerial bombardment will lead to a revolt against Putin. Much heavier Russian bombardment of Ukraine over a much longer period has not broken the will of the Ukrainian people to resist. In fact, relying purely on aerial bombardment of civilian targets as a strategy has never worked, whether employed by the Luftwaffe, the RAF Bomber Command, or the USAAF.

It is true that war weariness is growing in both Ukraine and Russia, and this is leading to increased calls on both sides for a compromise peace. The problem is that among hardliners on both sides this is leading instead to increased pressure to break the stalemate by drastic escalation.

Pressure on the Ukrainian and Russian governments is increased by their increasing shortages of soldiers. Casualties on both sides have been enormous—higher for the Russians in terms of numbers, but higher for the Ukrainians in proportion to their much smaller population. In Ukraine, this is leading to demands both from the West and from the Ukrainian army finally to start conscripting men from the age of 18; in Russia, to pressure to abandon reliance on paid volunteers and launch mass conscription. Both moves would be bitterly unpopular with their respective populations.

The risk is that faced with this impasse, hawks on both sides will enter into a de facto collusion to try to break the stalemate by dragging NATO into the war. Ukrainian hard-liners may believe that only direct NATO involvement can compel a Russian surrender. Russian hard-liners may believe that a direct confrontation with the West will both bring the Trump administration back into a peace process that it is walking away from and terrify the Europeans into agreeing to peace on Russian terms.

Both beliefs cannot be true; but put together, both can add greatly to the dangers of this war. The Ukrainians can provide one opportunity, by attacking government targets in Moscow, stepping up the assassination of Russian officials, or trying to attack Russia via NATO territory. European governments can provide another, by seizing Russian ships on the high seas; and the Russian hawks would be delighted to seize these opportunities.

Faced with this danger, the US and European governments have—or should have—a strong motive to break the impasse through diplomacy. The Trump administration should reengage in the peace process with a concrete, detailed peace plan to which it would require Russia to agree or face permanent and increased US aid to Ukraine; and if the Russians agreed, then the Ukrainians and Europeans should be faced with a requirement also to agree, or face the immediate and comprehensive end to that aid. The Europeans, who hitherto have demanded a place at the negotiating table without bringing forward any proposals of their own, should offer Russia economic and political incentives to abandon its demand for full control of the fraction of the Donbas that remains in Ukrainian hands.

But the Trump administration is hopelessly distracted by the war with Iran, with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—insanely—responsible for both sets of negotiations. It would also seem that the administration is too dysfunctional and unprofessional to engage at the level of detail required. Its distrust of State Department officials may be justified, given the hostility of many US diplomats to the peace process; but the administration has not reached out to those few but distinguished experts outside government who do in fact support peace. As for the Europeans, they seem entirely content that the Ukraine conflict settle into a version of the Cold War, a confrontation without end; but this time, with the proxy war being waged not in Asia or Africa but on the borders of Europe itself.

Fifty years after Selections From the Prison Notebooks was first published in 1971, the joke remains popular: Antonio Gramsci is a communist you can bring home to your parents. It wouldn’t matter if they were liberals or Maoists, social democrats or anti-imperialists, populists or pacifists—everyone gets along with Antonio.

The reasons for Gramsci’s popularity, as well as his pliability, lie in the unique form of his oeuvre. His themes, for one, are startlingly capacious: serial novels and popular theater, factory councils and peasant estates, Catholicism and communism, newspaper design and comparative grammar, folklore and opera. There’s something here for everyone. At the same time, Gramsci’s prison writing—over 3,000 pages across 33 notebooks—is peppered with myriad “Aesopian” codes and terms. These ciphers were originally intended to confound Benito Mussolini’s Fascist censors, but their diffuse meanings have since triggered a series of heated polemics. And so, apart from attracting an unusually diverse readership, Gramsci’s work has also spawned diverse, frequently disparate, interpretations.

Is “subaltern” a code for the working classes? Is “hegemony” an economic force or a cultural power? Are “organic intellectuals” inherently more progressive? The answers to such questions depend upon your choice of scholar—whether, say, you’re reading a Foucauldian literary critic or a Marxist sociologist, a subaltern historian or a posthuman anthropologist. Over the years, Gramsci’s writing has been polished by critics of such diverse persuasions that it has now become a mirror: One opens his books only to confirm one’s own beliefs.

It’s no surprise, then, that when the English writer Andy Merrifield arrived in Rome, feeling “washed out intellectually,” Gramsci came to the rescue. In June 2023, Merrifield followed his wife’s new job to Italy. Having written a dozen books—about plagues, cities, donkeys, magic—he wasn’t sure if he had another book left in him. The “practical chores” of moving had left him burned out, prompting fears of an early retirement. A visit to the city’s Non-Catholic Cemetery, however, soon cured his writer’s block.

A brilliant bloom of flowers, cicadas, birds, and cypresses: This “tropical” cemetery looked nothing like the rest of Rome. A 2,000-year-old Egyptian pyramid of Caius Cestius stood in the vicinity. The distant Aurelian city walls, equally ancient, towered above the graves. This “magical kingdom” was an appropriate resting place for the cemetery’s famous denizens: the English Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Shelley. But Gramsci? The lush serenity was at odds with the circumstances of the revolutionary’s life. Gramsci had spent his last decade on the earth rotting, quite literally, in Fascist prisons. He suffered from uremia, angina, gout, tubercular lesions, arteriosclerosis, and Pott’s disease. By the time he died in 1937, at the age of 46, Gramsci’s head was so swollen that it resembled the otherworldly granite stones that have littered the southern landscape of his native Ghilarza since the Neolithic age. In a fitting reversal, however, his grave has since become a totem for Italy’s freedom from Fascist rule.

Merrifield, in recent years, has acquired a reputation for his stylish portraits of Western Marxists: the French Situationist Guy Debord; the English critic, poet, and novelist John Berger; the French philosopher and sociologist Henry Lefebvre; and, most recently, Marx himself. Roses for Gramsci is a welcome, if predictable, addition to this rogue’s gallery. What’s surprising, though, are Merrifield’s unconventional, playful methods. Previously, in The Amateur (2017), Merrifield had sketched out a stern critique of “professional intellectuals,” whose research remains detached from the world outside their campuses and offices. Appropriately enough, Roses for Gramsci isn’t interested in recycling academic exegeses of Gramsci’s texts. Instead, Merrifield seeks a living Gramsci, one no longer entombed in books or museums, much less in a cemetery. His trip to Gramsci’s grave wasn’t followed by a visit to the library. Instead, as befits an amateur, Merrifield instantly took up a new job at the cemetery.

Gramsci is, by the numbers, an incredibly popular thinker: There are over 23,000 references to his work—pamphlets, dissertations, newspaper articles, academic essays, artworks—according to the informal biography maintained by the Fondazione Gramsci. In just the past two years, at least three new biographies have been published as well. Gianni Fresu has written an intellectual biography in broad strokes, while Jean-Yves Frétigné has affixed the revolutionary under a microscope (the appendices include family trees and a list of prison visitors). George Hare and Nathan Sperber, meanwhile, have extended the biographical scope by examining Gramsci’s legacy in a contemporary context of right-wing authoritarianism.

Roses for Gramsci, however, isn’t a biography, at least in any conventional sense. It’s a slim book; one is tempted to describe it as a miniature portrait. Its eight chapters—with carefully curated titles like “Goblin” and “A Rose”—certainly give the impression of a refined belletrist at work. But on a closer look, Merrifield harbors a loftier aspiration: He wants to rewire our canonical, hallowed ideas of intellectual labor. Merrifield’s narrative consists of instinctual jottings of archival study, political analysis, travel, photographs, and personal memories. He takes to Gramsci the way a person might take to cooking or gardening. Not surprisingly, some of these diaristic notes were first posted on his blog.

Merrifield’s prose is informal and, for that reason, inviting. And not just for general readers—even professional Gramscians will welcome the change of scenery. In the cemetery, Merrifield works at the Visitors’ Center. His job as a volunteer also inflects his portrait of Gramsci: Merrifield might be holding the brush, but it’s the visitors who command it. For instance, if the old man sitting on the “Gramsci bench” wants to talk about Antonio’s antagonists—the onetime Hegelians Benedetto Croce, who later became a liberal philosopher, and Giovanni Gentile, who later became a Fascist minister of education—then what choice does the caretaker have? He will have to hold his tongue this morning.

These constraints serve Merrifield nicely. For one, they keep him from writing like a pedant or a preacher, roles otherwise so dear to Marxists of a certain vintage. Always by our elbow, Merrifield never gets in our face. Simultaneously, a circumstantial scatter of strangers enlivens the cemetery setting. Apart from the steady trickle of local devotees, who periodically tidy Gramsci’s grave, we also encounter a much larger, multinational crowd on key festive occasions (Gramsci’s birthday and Liberation Day). These celebrations also betray an unexpected political strife: It turns out that, outside the academy, Gramsci’s legacy is the subject of even more fractious quarrels. The International Gramsci Society and the Fondazione Gramsci, whose members don’t talk to each other, organize separate commemorations in the cemetery.

Merrifield frequently shuttles between the cemetery and the key sites of Gramsci’s life: lodgings, museums, and clinics. There isn’t, however, much hand-wringing about “research methods” here. His narrative turns, as a result, retain their freshness. When he is ready, Merrifield simply announces: “I am standing under the entrance arch of the Hotel Villa Morgagni. A hundred years ago, this was a modest lodging house where Gramsci was arrested by Mussolini’s henchmen; now it’s “a 4-star, 34-room, luxury boutique hotel, equipped with Jacuzzis.” Not long after, Merrifield transports us to New York City, where he’s come to visit David Harvey to discuss the economic theories of Gramsci’s friend Pieroo Sraffa. (Harvey was Sraffa’s student at Cambridge and Merrifield’s doctoral adviser at Oxford.) Other guests in the book—both living and dead—include John Berger (the book is dedicated to him), the painter Renato Guttuso, the translator Maria Nadotti, and the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose long poem “The Ashes of Gramsci” is, in fact, set at the Non-Catholic Cemetery.

But this is Gramsci’s story—and, like most Gramsci scholars, Merrifield also centers his narrative on two key historical figures. Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, supplied him with pens and books, served as an intellectual foil in their letters, and eventually smuggled out his prison notebooks. Sraffa, meanwhile, was Gramsci’s favorite sparring partner in left circles—even after moving to England, he continued to foot Gramsci’s bills for hospitals and bookstores and ran an international campaign for his release. Gramsci’s other relationships, however, proved less fortunate and were permanently ruptured by his imprisonment: his landlady, Clara, in Turin (he never found out about her death); his mother, Giuseppina, in Ghilarza (he never found out about her death either); and his younger son, Guiliano, in Moscow (he never saw him). Seven decades later, Guiliano, who retired as a professor from Moscow’s Music Conservatory, was still wrestling with the personal costs of Italian Fascism:

Dear Papa, I’ve aged, am eighty years old. You are always the same—young, intelligent, sharp, and handsome. I’ve never touched you with my hands, but always caressed you on paper, and embraced you in my dreams.

Even seasoned Gramscians will find new details in Merrifield’s portrait. Most notably, it’s the trivial margins of Gramsci’s oeuvre that gleam with a lively, winking crispness. Consider his favored pseudonym—Raksha—for some early articles in Avanti! and Il Grido del Popolo (The Cry of the People). Why should a revolutionary borrow the guise of a she-wolf from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book? Gramsci’s peculiar, even problematic, attraction to Kipling can be productively read as a Machiavellian tactic. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci explicitly stresses the importance of extracting “images of powerful immediacy,” especially from the works of a reactionary imperialist like Kipling. Even so, Merrifield cautions that the deviant charm of wolves and mongooses in Gramsci’s life cannot simply be tallied like zeros and ones on a political abacus.

The roots of this fascination with animals lie in Gramsci’s Sardinian childhood. Frequently bullied because of his hunchbacked appearance (his spine was deformed after an early accident), Gramsci’s only friends as a child were animals: birds of all kinds (barn owls, finches, crows, magpies), as well as snakes, lizards, weasels, and hedgehogs. Writing to his elder son, Delio, from prison, Gramsci often blended excerpts from The Jungle Book with his own stories of animal friends; for his sister’s children, Gramsci translated the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Although these German fables were 100 years old, Gramsci surmised that they would still resonate with children in southern Italy’s backwaters, where the popular folklore was replete with bandits, witches, and all kinds of magical creatures.

This archaic nature of his native south—Gramsci famously theorized it as the “southern question”—was a historical product of Italy’s “internal colonialism.” The southern peasants were forced to extract raw materials, mainly agricultural produce and minerals, for northern factories, which, protected by import tariffs, enjoyed a ready domestic market. In addition to being exploited, then, the southerners were also forced to buy the more expensive northern goods. But this economic imbalance wasn’t sustained by political repression alone. According to Gramsci, “a social group can, and indeed, must, exercise ‘leadership’ (i.e. be hegemonic) before winning governmental power.” In Italy, the “hegemonic” basis of “internal colonialism” lay in the reactionary formation of its intelligentsia. In the south, “traditional intellectuals” like Benedetto Croce served to legitimize the rule of clergy and landlords, while in the north, trade unionists propagated anti-southern prejudice as an essential lubricant for running factories at a profit.

The southerners periodically lashed out, but the revolts by bandits and war veterans remained “disjointed and episodic,” riddled with all kinds of reactionary, feudal notions. Even so, Gramsci refrained from dismissing subaltern rebellions as mere symptoms of a “false consciousness.” “All men,” he countered, “are intellectuals,” even if the capitalist division of labor permitted only a handful to become “professional intellectuals.” In this context, Gramsci’s penchant for southern folklore was more than just the sentimental fondness of a native son—it was a tactical response to the existing forces of political hegemony. Instead of simply importing a “correct” Marxist line from outside, Gramsci envisioned a “Popular Manual of Marxism,” one that was attuned to popular subaltern cultures and could fertilize the seeds of southern discontent into the organic saplings of critical consciousness.

As has become customary in cultural studies, Merrifield frames Gramsci’s interest in subaltern cultures as an implicit critique of contemporary Soviet dogmas, including the widespread belief in the “primacy of economics.” His arguments are certainly compelling. Nor is there any doubt about Merrifield’s ingenuity as a storyteller. His sketches of Gramsci’s life flow fluently, even if his piety sometimes feels theatrical (at one point, he pontificates about “animality” while stroking “The General,” a feral cemetery cat he has nicknamed after Engels). It’s the clumsy handling of Gramsci’s pre-prison activism, however, that disfigures his otherwise lively portrait. Merrifield posits cultural mindfulness as a sure antidote to economic orthodoxy. But his own fixation on Gramsci’s cultural identity—“a lad from the south”—obscures the systemic workings of the “southern question.”

Like several critical theorists over the years, Merrifield affirms Gramsci’s idea of “organic intellectuals” as a counterpoint to “traditional intellectuals” and “northern communists.” But like most of them, Merrifield, too, renders this opposition in cultural terms, celebrating in particular the ability of organic intellectuals to articulate the “elemental passions” of subaltern classes. For Gramsci, however, an organic intellectual was essentially a political actor, one who performed “organizational functions” organic to his context. None of Gramsci’s own political activities, however, find a mention here. During bienne russo, the “red years” of 1919–20, he actively organized workers’ councils in Turin’s metal factories. Routinely overlooked by critics, these pre-prison episodes hold the key not just to the riddle of the “southern question” but also to the unusually capacious range of Gramsci’s texts. It was precisely the northern hustle of Italian socialist and communist parties—running newspapers, proletarian reading groups, and cultural clubs—that molded Gramsci into a unique, shapeshifting intellectual, equally adept at reviewing serial novels and labor politics.

In Turin, the workers’ councils intended to disrupt the “northern compromise” between reformist trade unions and factory owners. But lacking any control over the banks or the bureaucracy, much less the military, their operations remained heavily circumscribed. The workers could occupy the factories and even prove that they were capable of running them on their own. But such occupations couldn’t hold on, much less transform the existing relations of power in Italy. Although roundly defeated, Gramsci still insisted that a political victory in the north was essential for building a united front with southern peasants. Given the poor levels of cultivation in the south, the political regeneration of southerners wasn’t simply a cultural problem. Unless the northern workers permanently captured their factories, a democratic transfer of new agrarian technology to the south was impossible. In the absence of these material transformations, Gramsci warned that progressive policies like land reforms would only feed the “landlord instincts” of the southern comrades.

Such interlinked reflections on national and class politics are lacking in Merrifield’s portrait. These elisions, in turn, also inflect his anxieties about Gramsci’s contemporary relevance: “No, he’s not forgotten, I reassured myself; no, he’s not forgotten.” As if to make a point, then, everywhere he goes, Merrifield sees only Gramsci: in museums, archives, clinics, streets. It is telling, too, that his ethnographic jaunts never introduce us to any workers, peasants, shepherds, or refugees. Instead, Merrifield is increasingly obsessed with capturing his own impressions of Gramsci’s time: “a smell, a texturing of the cultural and natural landscape…the look on people’s faces, the region’s light and warmth, its dusty aridness, the sun beating down.” The succulence of these thick descriptions, however, doesn’t nourish Gramsci’s political vision.

When Merrifield occasionally does look up from these textures to assess the world around him, his sentences, hitherto crackling with wit and insight, also begin to falter. In order to explain the country’s current right-wing lurch, he recycles a number of pallid clichés, including “widespread brainwashing.” The people, we are told, are suffering from “false consciousness.” The intellectuals, meanwhile, have “let the people down, retreated to our college campuses, given ourselves over to the management committees and research assessments.” These criticisms of academics are curious—not because they aren’t true, but rather because, despite his roaming outside the campuses, the political horizons of Merrifield’s “amateur” seem equally restricted. Enchanted by the historical figure of Gramsci, he appears increasingly unmoored from contemporary political and economic realities.

Working in Turin, Gramsci speculated that “industrial centralization” would soon “spread to the entire world of bourgeois economy.” Yet the industries of the Global North have long since shuttered, resurrecting, instead, as informal sweatshops and assembly plants in the Global South. Similarly, the US-led restructuring of world agriculture has long preempted Gramsci’s hopes from mechanized agriculture. Starting in the postwar era, US food-aid programs disseminated new machinery and fertilizers across the postcolonial world, exposing its peasantries to competition with the highly subsidized capitalist farms of the Global North. Over time, the economic and ecological crises in these southern hinterlands have created enormous urban masses of superfluous laborers. As a result, contemporary “southerners” appear increasingly trapped in the global coils of supply chains and migration routes. Even as Merrifield pokes the “professional intellectuals” in their campus cages, he says little about the “southern question” of our own time, and less still about the “organic intellectuals” fighting these new global divisions of labor.

Given his obvious writerly gifts, it’s not surprising that Merrifield is able to rise above these limits to summon a final, artistic flight of imagination. His narrative ends with a searching, forensic aria of counterhistory: What if, in 1937, Gramsci had survived his bout of illness in Rome, instead of dying days before he was set to be released from prison? What if he had managed to make his way back to Sardinia? It is endearing to imagine our withered revolutionary otherwise: fitted with a sparkling set of false teeth, drinking aperitivo with the villagers, and taking gentle walks draped in a typical shepherd’s shawl. This Sardinian junket, however, could have lasted only for so long. Mussolini’s Fascist military would soon stomp across the island, ready to cast beyond the Mediterranean an even wider net of imperialism.

Where would Gramsci go? A ferry from Porto Torres to Marseille? And from there, a ride on the famed Capitain Paul Lemerle to Martinique? On the decks of this famous cargo boat, our folklorist of communism would have jostled with a rowdy cast of dissidents fleeing the Gestapo: the surrealists André Breton and Wilfred Lam, the photographer Germaine Krull, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the anarcho-Bolshevik Victor Serge. But Martinique, controlled by Vichy’s collaborationist forces, wouldn’t have offered a safe harbor. Nor could Gramsci have followed his fellow passengers to New York: He would have been denied entry to the United States because he’d been a member of the Italian Communist Party. Like comrade Serge, then, would Gramsci have settled in Mexico City instead? And would Stalin’s apparatchiks, who denied his application for refuge before his death (they thought he was a “closet Trotskyite”), eventually follow him to his new lodgings?

These speculations are exhilarating. But standing in Gramsci’s place today, it’s not the fable of an individual departure but rather the news of a collective arrival that makes demands on our imagination. If we squint just a little, we would likely find an odd boat floating off the shores of Porto Torres, ferrying dozens of refugees from Tunisia, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, Afghanistan, Senegal, and India. Will a patrolling unit of the Guardia di Finanza seize this boat before it can dock? Or will members of Arci Mediterraneo welcome the refugees with blankets and food? And what will become of these refugees in the coming days? Will they find lodgings at a local integration center? Or will they get picked up by the notorious gangmasters, who, seizing their papers, will condemn them to the purgatory of southern Italy’s farmlands? Will they harvest tomatoes and watermelons in Apulia or olives and citruses in Sicily? Trapped in a variety of barracopoli (shantytowns) and tendopoli (tent cities), will these fugitives ever encounter a reference to Antonio Gramsci in, say, the street graffiti or a radio station run by Campagna de Lotta? And if so, what will they make of the “southern question”?

Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan ran around the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party convention all day Saturday in a dark emerald-green suit, with matching Native-beaded earrings, trying to talk to everyone. Later that day, she won the DFL nomination by acclamation in her race to become the state’s next US senator, and the crowd roared.

But Flanagan is still facing an opponent in her August Democratic primary. Representative Angie Craig campaigned for the DFL nod for months, but two days before the party convened in Rochester, she declared that she would no longer seek the endorsement, and wouldn’t attend the convention.

“It’s not really democracy when 1,200 people get to pick who our candidates are in America. It doesn’t allow every voice to be heard,” Craig said at a news conference Thursday, in front of a few dozen supporters.

“If you can’t show up and face your own party, then you’re not ready to face Republicans,” Flanagan countered in a video posted to social media.

This race isn’t over. Craig, a lesbian mother of four, has support from the state’s big LGBTQ groups, endorsements from many establishment Democrats and four times the funding of Flanagan right now (though the DFL endorsement will open party money and major campaign infrastructure resources for Flanagan). In 2018, Craig won a purple district on the outskirts of Minneapolis and she touts her centrist record as better preparation for a statewide race.

“Minnesotans have always proved that organized people can beat organized money,” Flanagan countered at the convention. “Senator Paul Wellstone was famously out-raised seven to one,” she reminded me Monday on the phone.

Heading into the weekend, local media reported that Flanagan could count on support from at least 75 percent of the convention delegates. In April her campaign told The Nation that she had won more DFL delegates than Craig in over 90 percent of the 117 local-unit conventions, essentially giving her a lock on the DFL’s endorsement. It turns out that was closer to 95 percent.

And while Craig claims that only “1,200 people” made the DFL decision, in fact 40,000 people participated in precinct caucuses, and 57 percent of delegates were first-timers. Until recently, Craig herself was actively seeking the DFL nod, sending “Team Craig” representatives to 113 of the 117 unit conventions. But Flanagan was clearly winning all along, even in Craig’s own congressional district, where the lieutenant governor picked up 70 percent support. All of that seems to have led the congresswoman to pull out of the process two days before the convention began.

Craig was beginning to change her tune about the DFL when I interviewed her in March. “I wanna respect the people who participate in this process, but it’s less than 2 percent of primary voters,” she told me. She went on to depict Flanagan as the insider, while she, the candidate with the big campaign fund, is the upstart. “I’m still the outsider in Minnesota politics,” she told me. “Peggy has been in the political class in Minnesota for her entire life.”

That’s one way to depict Flanagan’s background. She was raised by her struggling single mother, Pat Flanagan, a DFL activist who relied on government programs to raise her daughter while she went back to college. Flanagan still describes herself as “the girl with the different-colored school-lunch ticket,” which tipped off classmates that she got free school lunches. She worked organizing for Paul Wellstone, the late DFL hero, while still in college, and then went on to a range of social-justice organizing jobs. A member of the White Earth Ojibwe tribe, she would be the first female Native senator in American history.

When I tell her Craig is calling herself the outsider in the race, Flanagan responds, “I think that’s interesting, in the most Minnesota way possible”—and I think that’s a play on “Minnesota nice.”

“Congresswoman Craig is someone who has served in Washington for eight years and who has consistently been funded by corporate special interests,” she continues. “So claiming to be an outsider is an interesting tactic, which I think is simply grounded in the fact that people are sick and tired of Washington Democrats who are bending to Republicans.”

But the DFL endorsement has not always won primaries for its recipients. Flanagan herself, running with Governor Tim Walz, didn’t get it in 2018, and the team won anyway; so did wealthy former Democratic Governor Mark Dayton, elected in 2010.

Craig has signaled that she will try to tie Flanagan to the welfare fraud scandal that has rocked Minnesota, which helped Trump justify Operation Metro Surge, the deployment of ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents to Minneapolis. “The number-one issue for general-election voters is fraud here in Minnesota,” she told me in March, a fact I didn’t hear from any other politico in the state. She has continued to push the issue.

“I’ve won a district that Donald Trump carried,” Craig said at her press conference last week. “The job of our Senate candidate is to hold this US Senate seat and to help DFLers up and down the ticket.”

Should Craig lose in August, the issue that will, and should be, cited is her January 2025 vote for the Laken Riley act, which empowered immigration enforcement officials to detain and deport undocumented people merely charged, not convicted, with crimes, including nonviolent crimes. Many so-called frontline (read purple district) congressmpeople did, as well; many have since publicly recanted.

Craig ultimately recanted in March, but that was after the ICE surge had enraged much of the state, and led to the murders of poet Renée Good and nurse Alex Pretti. Many credit Trump’s Operation Metro Surge with driving the interest of those 57 percent of newcomer delegates to the DFL; the February 3 caucuses came only days after Pretti’s murder and were a tangible way to express political anger and activism.

At the DFL convention, outgoing Senator Tina Smith introduced Flanagan. “Minnesotans, I know what this job takes,” Smith told the crowd. “We are ready for leaders that demand change, and that is why there is no better leader for this moment than Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan.” The delegates seemed to agree. “Peggy’s speech was energizing and the reaction in the room was uproarious,” her friend and DFL ally Javier Murillo told me. “The moment that got the loudest crowd reaction was when she said, ‘We got here in part because too many Democrats have been weak.’ The people in that room, all committed Democrats, are as mad at their own party as polls reflect nationally. They’re tired of Democrats who aren’t standing up or, worse, cave to the Trump administration in votes like the Laken Riley Act.”

“I was not completely prepared for how it felt delivering the speech from the stage,” Flanagan told me Monday. “The support, the enthusiasm, it really felt like a movement moment. I know we are going to be outspent, but we will not be out-organized.”

I felt a bit glum when Bruce Springsteen launched his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour in Manchester, England, last year, and took it on the road across Europe. Not because I didn’t love what he was doing—I wrote enthusiastically about his scathing denunciations of Donald Trump—but because I really thought he should have brought the tour home to America. It wasn’t as much needed in Manchester and Milan as it was in Minneapolis and Washington, DC.

Well, it turns out Springsteen knew that too. And so he scheduled a fairly impromptu US tour on February 17 to run from March through May, Minneapolis to DC. And I was there, from Minneapolis to Madison Square Garden to what was supposed to be the final concert in Washington. (Because of sports-team schedules, he wound up rescheduling a Philadelphia show to be last.)

I almost chased him to Philly and then decided: Perfection is perfect. Leave it alone.

You can read a lot of concert coverage that tells you what Springsteen played; I’m going to tell you how it felt. (Music writer Caryn Rose does both here.)

I never tired of hearing Springsteen talk about the “racist, reckless, corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous” president at these US dates (He embellished his European descriptions as things got worse here.)

His Minneapolis show felt the most astonishing and devastating. Not least because people were crying all around me (I was crying contagious tears too). These were people who’d been on citizen protection alert for months already; who were bone tired from caring for their neighbors, but carrying on, standing for hours in that arena; who knew martyrs Renée Good and Alex Pretti personally, or who felt like they did after so much time in the fight together. Those folks felt so seen and so loved. And when we got “Purple Rain,” because Prince, the Beloved One, lived in that sacred city, we all felt blessed.

But the Washington, DC, show was almost as transcendent. The sky opened up when Springsteen played “Streets of Minneapolis,” and the rain poured for a full hour. I kept thinking of his “Jungleland” lyric, “barefoot girls…drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain.” This was crushing spring rain, in sandals, in dirt. But it was baptism, it was cleansing, it was healing. Hearing the ode to Minneapolis that Springsteen wrote alone, now played with the mighty band, in place of his first stripped-down acoustic version, was galvanizing.

There’s always a call and response in the song, when he says, “With our chants of ‘ICE OUT NOW,’” and waits for the crowd to join him, at least three times. We did this time. But we also took up the chant all by its lonesome, “ICE OUT NOW,” after the song ended. Bruce looked so happy. “Let them hear you at the fucking White House!” he said more than once.

Springsteen never changed up the set. Yes, he did add “Purple Rain” in Minneapolis, but we all knew that was coming at the first show. The band added The Clash’s “Clampdown” a few stops in, and it fit, and they never lost it. Almost all of his songs were tailored to rebellion and a regenerative spirit. “Wrecking Ball,” “Youngstown,” “Murder, Incorporated,” “My City Of Ruin,” “American Skin (41 Shots),” “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” They all tell the story.

But so does one of my favorites, “Long Walk Home,” written for the 2007 Magic album, which was to my mind an elegy for John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in 2004. The song has always gutted me: “You know that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone / Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

What we won’t? There’s nothing Trump won’t.

Playing for Kerry was Bruce’s first formal foray into US election politics, and Kerry’s loss inspired him to gift us the phrase: “The country that we carry in our hearts is still waiting.” I think of that every day.

Near the end of every show, he listed Trump’s depredations and punctuated each one with “This is happening now.” Just a few new ones from recent shows: “immigrants being held in for-profit detention centers around the country, such as Delaney Hall in my home state of Jersey… $1.8 billion slush fund for…January 6 insurrectionists… this is happening now.

“This American tragedy can only be stopped by the American people. Do ya hear me, Philadelphia? Are you with us, Philadelphia?” Philadelphia was with him, as we were in all 20 cities the band visited.

Now the “Hope and Dreams” tour is over, and it reminded me that something else I cherish is over, for different reasons, and I’m sad in a different way. Last week, The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert had to hang up his saddle because Donald Trump, Larry and David Ellison, and Bari Weiss terminated him as they destroy CBS. Watching his last week and a half of shows? They were so fucking good. But it also made me feel every day that I got closer to the end like I was watching a crime in progress. Murder Incorporated? How silly.

To lose these two cultural cheerleaders within about a week is hard for progressives, even though both men’s silence will only be temporary. Bruce certainly chose the time and place he wanted to close this part of his artistic life. Colbert absolutely did not, but knew the time and place of his political execution, May 21. And for the two months leading up to it, the show was extraordinary. It was about “reciprocal human connection,” as the show’s band leader, Louis Cato, says. The people that Colbert chose in those closing shows, and the way they chose to talk to him, whether it was Barack Obama, Pedro Pascal, Julia Louis Dreyfus, Steven Spielberg, Bette Midler, or, yes, Bruce Springsteen, too, was extraordinary. And loving.

“You’re the first guy in America who’s lost his show because we’ve got a president who can’t take a joke,” The Boss told Colbert about our tyrannical temporary boss. I’m juvenile; one of my favorite bits featured Colbert and former Late Show host David Letterman throwing pieces of show furniture off the roof and onto a big CBS logo, shattering it.

Both Springsteen and Colbert know how to do grief and resilience at the same time. Colbert lost his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was 10; his seven older siblings were already out of the house, so it was up to him and his mother to comfort (and amuse) one another. Springsteen has written about his role in cheering up his (dancing and singing and often cheery already) mother while his father was suffering from severe depression. I’ve found myself wondering about this similarity in the last few weeks: that these two men who’ve known such deep pain, but had to help family members through it, know how to help us.

“If you’re feeling helpless, if you’re feeling hopeless, if you’re feeling betrayed, if you’re feeling frustrated, if you’re feeling angry, I understand,” Springsteen told the crowd at my last show. “That’s why we’re here tonight. We needed to come to Washington and feel your strength and your hope and your faith. And we needed, we needed to bring to your city some strength and some hope and some faith, and I hope that we did tonight.”

He also said, at his last few shows, in places he has played so many times before, “Thank you for a lifetime.” He has played in so many of these cities 50 years or more. Bruce has told us he is never doing a farewell tour—that the E Street Band will go on as long as it can. But it was hard not to think that he is 76, and I am 67, and… None of us have forever. But we had this.

While the tour may be over, Springsteen’s political crusade is not. He carries on with two America 250 shows in June, with guests ranging from Mavis Staples to Jackson Browne to Rosanne Cash to Kenny Chesney (while Trump’s own Freedom 250 concerts are hemorrhaging acts and may be down to Vanilla Ice. Seriously. “Ice, Ice, Baby” indeed). Springsteen will be back in the DC metro area for Tom Morello’s “Power to the People” show on October 3, with the Dropkick Murphys and other bands. There will almost certainly be more.

At some point during the tour, I came to think about how the bands of the 1940s, from Glenn Miller to Count Basie to Cab Calloway, entertained the troops during World War II, both in the field and via radio broadcasts, to boost morale. We are the troops in this fight for democracy, and Springsteen and his band toured for two months to keep us fighting. Maybe Colbert will join him at one of these next stops.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

When California Governor Gavin Newsom recently proclaimed that Democrats should be more “culturally normal” as part of his ongoing attempt to position himself for the presidency by throwing trans people under the bus, I thought about whales. A few months earlier, Facebook’s algorithm had delivered a bioGraphic essay republished by Nautilus about a newly discovered intersex southern right whale to my feed. While intersex whales are nothing new, this was the first documented example from this particular species, and the author took the occasion to reflect on the creativity and fluidity of nature. “When scientists identify the next intersex animal,” the essay concludes, “that individual, whether a guppy or a whale, will offer another challenge to rigid definitions of sex. What society deems normal is a box carefully drawn around a wild and messy world, and each individual who can’t be contained offers a fascinating glimpse at nature’s true diversity.”

The article came my way via the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the American Cetacean Society, whose posts usually garner reactions and comments in the single or double digits. This intersex-whale post, however, had reams of comments and more than 17,000 reactions. Against my better judgment—as a trans woman, and as a person with other things to do—I read some of the comments. While some maligned the “woke whale” as an “abomination” or “a freak of nature,” others insisted that the story was “fake news” and bemoaned the idea that “liberal idiots made up a transgender whale.”

The Facebook turmoil over an intersex whale was, of course, about something even larger than whales. The post came at a time when efforts to enforce rigid definitions of sex and gender are front and center in public affairs. Evidence of gender and sexual variation in the natural world, such as this intersex whale, can help unsettle the myth that a rigid human gender binary is part of “the natural order” of life on what is indeed a wild and messy planet, as the author of the bioGraphic essay notes.

On the one hand, we don’t need to turn to whales or guppies or any other nonhuman organism to challenge rigid definitions of human sex and gender, since our own species defies such narrow categorizations in its own right. There are many intersex humans, after all, and as a hapless Trump lawyer recently learned in court, the existence of intersexuality dismantles the notion that sex and gender are binary.

Transgender and nonbinary people, in addition to intersex people, likewise dispel the notion of the gender binary as a matter of, as the Trump administration asserts, “biological truth.”

The mere existence of trans and gender-nonconforming people now and throughout human history, in every culture and corner of the globe, is evidence of this. And anyone interested in actual “biological truth” might want to explore the decades of neuroscientific and endocrinological research on gender diversity, from studies showing that many trans people are born with brains that develop to resemble the brains of their experienced gender, to genetic research showing that trans people often have variations in the genes that process the sex hormones androgen and estrogen. This occurs along a spectrum, not in a binary.

This is not to say that all trans experiences can be reduced to these neuroanatomical and genetic measures, or that scientists should give people trans tests with their brain-measuring machines. And trans people certainly should not be required to cite medical studies to prove that we exist as we do. But at a time when biology is being weaponized, it is important to recognize that human biology doesn’t adhere to a cis binary framework. Sexual and gender diversity is undeniably a thing that our species does, in any cultural environment.

And we are certainly not alone in this. Nature is profoundly queer and restlessly inventive, trying out as many possibilities as form will allow. Ninety-four percent of flower plants are monoecious or hermaphroditic, meaning that individual plants possess both female and male reproductive organs. Among the remaining 6 percent, some individual plants that are either male or female can change their sex. Many species of willow trees, for example, exhibit this sex lability and can change from female to male, or to both, and back again.

Excluding insects, 33 percent of all animal species are predominately hermaphroditic. Some of these animals start out as one sex and change to another. Clownfish are an iconic example: They begin their lives as male and have the ability to transform their bodies to become female when the alpha female of their social group leaves or dies. Other fish, such as wrasses, exhibit this same sequential hermaphrodism, but in the other direction. Many invertebrates—such as worms and snails—possess the reproductive structures of both sexes at the same time. Some species have more than two sexes; splitgill mushrooms have over 23,000 different sexes, or mating types.

There’s a lingering misperception of the natural world as a place of uniform cisnormative gender orders and strict heterosexuality, with animals lined up as if on the decks of Noah’s Ark in neat, straight, binary pairs, two by two. But as the ecological-justice organizer Deseree Fontenot explains, “We’re on a planet full of immensely diverse forms of embodiment, sex and gender variations, kinship, care systems, and strategies for living and reproducing. They are expansive and complex and don’t fit into neat categories, and that holds many lessons for our species about adapting, surviving, and cooperating.”

Our species has the ability to learn these lessons and respect this breathtaking diversity within which we are enmeshed. However, as the authoritarian repression of gender diversity intensifies, its erasure campaign has targeted other species. A reading series of the children’s book Wishtree was canceled at a Virginia school district after complaints from adults who took issue with the book’s oak tree character, who describes being monoecious: “Some trees are male. Some trees are female. And some like me, are both… Call me he, call me she, anything will work.” This scientifically grounded statement was enough to shut down the reading series. 

Similarly, Erica S. Perl, author of the book Whale, Quail, Snail, abruptly had her visit to a Virginia elementary school canceled after some adults complained about a snail character who did not fit the male/female binary. (Snails are hermaphroditic.) The illustrated book Worm Loves Worm has been banned in several states for parallel reasons. Worm Loves Worm is a book about two worms getting married, in which both worms, understandably, want to be both the bride and the groom. (Worms are also hermaphroditic.)

President Trump kicked off his second term with his own animal-themed genderfluidity fiction, falsely claiming that his administration was stopping Biden-era research supposedly aimed at “making mice transgender.” Back in the realm of reality, these studies used transgenic–not transgender–mice to study the effects of hormones on things like HIV vaccines, fertility, asthma, and breast cancer. Congresswoman Nancy Mace also sounded the trans-mice false alarm and claimed Biden spent $10 million “creating transgender animals.” Mace went so far as to introduce an actual piece of legislation called the TRANS MICE Act, “Transgender Research on Animals Now Stops and Money for Ideological Cruelty Eliminated Act,” contorting both basic facts and basic English grammatical conventions in her pious crusade against an imaginary threat.

The right is so invested in policing human genders that they are policing the full expanse of the web of life, no matter how far their distortions disconnect us from that web, and from ourselves.

Etymologically, the prefix trans- means “beyond, across, so as to change.” With this in mind, we should think seriously about why some people have such a hard time accepting an intersex whale, or a monoecious oak tree, or a transgender human, when you consider just how very trans—using this broader sense of the word—life is. Whales walked on land before they evolved over millions of years into the aquatic giants we know today. And before that, the ancestors of land-dwelling whales lived in the water. Transformation and fluidity—in gender and in general—are foundational principles of life on this planet, core to the nature of nature. You could say that whales’ “nature” is to swim, but you could also say their nature is to change. And not only do species evolve, but they coevolve, mixing and blending along with one another. Plants evolved their attractive flowers and scents to connect with winged pollinators; we humans can also appreciate the multisensory lure of flowers, even if we are not involved in pollination, because we share enough of the imagination of a bee and the aesthetic sensibilities of a butterfly to be drawn in by a flower’s beauty.

In their book Ways of Being, James Bridle marvels at these types of interspecies entanglements. According to Bridle, our interconnections also reveal the insubstantiality of the imagined boundaries between us. Attempts to tightly box in gender are biologically nonsensical. The closer we look at anything, the more interconnection we find spilling out in all directions. “It’s beautiful, this teeming world of ancestors and progeny, this utterly animated free-for-all, this breaking down of boundaries,” Bridle writes. I agree: It is beautiful—the multiplicity, mutuality, fluidity, and complexity of life’s interconnection. And it’s not just pretty to look at; these principles are sources of our power, of life’s creative ability to adapt, survive, and flourish. And they are particularly important to draw on right now amid rising fascism. Authoritarian movements emerge from a mindset governed by precisely the opposite of these principles: homogeneity, dominance, division, rigidity, fixity, reduction, and fear of change. Often, those who exclude and demonize trans people while working to impose a rigid binary order will invoke divine authority. For example, during the last presidential campaign, Donald Trump declared, “God created two genders: male and female,” and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that US citizens would be forced to get a passport that designated their “God-given” gender.

Similarly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who describes transness as “satanic,” proclaimed, “There are only two genders. And we are made in God’s image.” The former Congress member has also said, “I’m going to tell you right now what is a woman. We came from Adam’s rib. God created us with his hands. We are the weaker sex, but we are our husband’s wife.” Project 2025, the Christian-nationalist blueprint that formed the ideological foundations for Trump’s anti-transgender actions, aims to sculpt American society around a heterosexual “Bible-based” family model, with a cisgender male patriarch at the helm, women in a position of subordination, and LGBTQ+ people abjected and erased.

This regressive, anti-gender social-control politics is a playbook in global circulation. Modern authoritarian leaders—from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orbán to Donald Trump—try to consolidate power by imposing a patriarchal binary order that they claim is derived from “nature” and designed by a male Christian god.

Not only is this binary not actually in alignment with any natural order, it is also not a neutral one, but rather a hierarchically structured oppositional dualism designed to shore up power for cisgender men at the expense of women and others. The subtext of the statement “There are only two genders” is that one of those genders is ordained to rule over the other. As the philosopher Kevin Richardson writes, “Gender, in reality, is expansive…. Maintaining the binary requires constant work: medical classification, legal enforcement, cultural policing, and moral pressure. When people invoke Nature or God to justify this work, it’s worth asking whose interests are being served.”

The assault on gender diversity in contemporary authoritarian movements emerges from the legacies of colonial oppression. Prior to European colonization, many of the world’s Indigenous cultures had polygender systems—some with three, four, even five recognized genders—with specific terminology and traditions to honor variations. Before European colonization, in many parts of Africa, the Americas, and Asia, it was not uncommon for gender-diverse people to assume leadership roles, particularly as spiritual leaders and healers, owing to an assumed adeptness with liminality and a balancing of energies that can accompany gender variance. 

But Christian missionaries and European colonial authorities attempted to systematically eradicate fluid Indigenous gender systems and install a racialized patriarchal binary in its place. They did this by specifically targeting gender-diverse people: publicly mutilating and executing them; sending them into exile; kidnapping Indigenous children and sending them to boarding schools where gender-diverse students were punished and forced to conform to European binary norms; and enacting a system of laws that penalized expressions of gender outside the European binary. 

If this colonial/authoritarian gender binary were so “natural,” one might reasonably wonder why it requires genocide and fascism to try and force it into place.

The “constant work” of transphobia—book bans, bathroom surveillance, obsessions with other people’s bodies and private health decisions—also requires telling a flattened, dessicated story about life on earth that obscures how dynamic it really is. Combating the ugliness of division and domination requires an expansive vision capable of seeing and honoring the beauty of the earth’s transness—that is, of its creativity, diversity, fluidity, and interconnectedness.

For my part, I began my gender transition in July 2023, in the midst of the ongoing assault on trans people. As I’ve written elsewhere, while embarking on my transition at this time has felt like walking into a house that is on fire, it has also felt like coming home. 

“Eco,” from “ecology,” comes from the Greek word meaning “home,” and ecology also connotes the connections between us. When I say that transitioning has felt like coming home, I mean it in this ecological sense. The process of transitioning has involved cultivating a radical hospitality for my whole self, and not only has this made me infinitely more at home in my own body, it has also made me feel closer to others, both human and more-than-human.

My transness is intrinsic to me, and it also originates in the broader ecological systems beyond me. It is one of the many things that connect me, despite our obvious differences, to an intersex whale. In this sense, I see gender diversity as an energetic and material force—rooted in the living planet—that envelops humans and includes us in unique ways. 

Perhaps above all else, I now see my trans identity as a loving gift from the earth. 

In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “To name the earth as a gift is to feel your place in the web of reciprocity.” To name the earth as a gift—and to really feel your place in the web—at a time in which the earth is under such disorienting and devastating attacks, can be emotionally grueling. And it comes with an ethical obligation: to receive the gift with gratitude and to care for the earth the way one would care for a cherished gift. 

For the past several months, my 8-year-old child—who is the biggest fan of animals I know—and I have been going on weekly “nature adventure walks” together. On these walks, we explore the lakefront and the parks near where we live, and try to learn as much as we can about a new lifeform each time: sphinx moths, milkweed beetles, serviceberries, red-winged blackbirds. The point is less to memorize plant and animal facts, and more to let ourselves feel awed by the fascinating things that living things do, to allow ourselves to pay attention, to laugh, to wonder. The point, at heart, is to be amazed, and in that process of amazement, to learn in our bodies, beneath our words, the truth that we and all these other lifeforms belong here.

In 2020, then 32-year-old Chris Smalls was fired from Amazon after organizing a protest at its Staten Island warehouse against the company’s unsafe working conditions in the early days of the pandemic. At the time, the supervisor had been at the company for five years, had helped open three Amazon fulfillment centers in the Northeast, and was one of the most productive warehouse employees in the company’s network. So productive, in fact, that company management shadowed Smalls, he said, building upon his methods to increase productivity quotas for all workers. In April 2021, Smalls helped found the Amazon Labor Union, the first union in the company’s history, at the Staten Island warehouse. He has since become among the foremost faces of a new generation of labor organizers, and was named one of Time’s most influential people in 2022, with ALU cofounder Derrick Palmer.

In May 2026, Smalls made national headlines once again when he jumped a barricade at the Met Gala in protest of Jeff Bezos’s role as honorary chair and sponsor of the event, part of a broader “Ball Without Billionaires” campaign against extreme wealth concentration and worker exploitation. In his first book, When The Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class (Pantheon), out Tuesday, Smalls walks readers through his own harrowing journey to organizing for workers’ rights at Amazon, and details his hopes for the future of the labor movement, and for international solidarity movements on the whole.

The Nation spoke with Smalls about the links he sees between Amazon’s labor practices and the institution of chattel slavery, why labor organizing is so important for young people coming up in the workplace today, and the current state of the “American Dream.”

—Sara Franklin

Sara Franklin: Early on in the book, you describe, in great detail, your experience working in warehouses. You draw clear connections between these workplaces and the system of forced enslavement and labor of Black people, who built this nation’s economy. You explain that in your warehouse, “pretty much every worker was Black or brown, but every supervisor or overseer was white. The place felt like prison. A culture of fear was firmly established.” No one risked “getting into it with management.” When did you come to understand how alive and present this history remains in American labor—especially those workplaces under corporate control—today?

Chris Smalls: [The workers who assemble Amazon packages] are called “pickers.” We’re “the pick department.” They literally use this language for us. Once, a supervisor told me to “Whip your pickers back into shape.” I told him, “Don’t you ever say that to me again.”

When I started in my first department in 2015, the hourly quota was 250 items per hour. Because we worked 10-hour shifts, I was touching over 2,500 packages per day. But I was so good at the job, I was doing twice that much. They never saw the numbers I was producing until I arrived. My building was actually the number-one building in the entire Amazon network. I was picking 500, 600 items an hour. That’s thousands of packages I had a hand in preparing every day. The company studied me. They’d literally have management come watch me. They called it shadowing. At first, I thought it was a good thing. I didn’t realize how valuable I was to the company. But then they began to implement what they saw me doing and increasing the quotas for all warehouse workers. It used to be 250 items an hour, then it was 275, 300, 325… Now, the average across all of Amazon is 400 items per hour in order to maintain our jobs. That means the average Amazon worker is picking over 4,000 items every single day. Doesn’t matter who you are—man or woman, old or young. This is the standard now because of [the company’s] focus on productivity and scale, on getting bigger and bigger.

When it came to how slaves had to pick cotton, it was the same type of productivity metric; the same way slaves used to pick cotton in the field, where they had to produce or pick a certain number of pounds daily and weekly, by whoever kept tabs.

Amazon is the new slavery, but with technology, mechanization, machinery, and AI.

SF: What does it feel like to say those statistics aloud, and to have to keep rehashing those stats in your public appearances?

CS: People keep saying to me, “You gotta say different things in your talks.” And I say, “This is what it takes.”

Unfortunately, in this country, a lot of people hear you, but they’re not really listening. People just see the package show up at their door and they don’t know the process that goes on behind it. They don’t know how many people have touched that package. I’m hoping that I’m spreading the message that people’s lives are at risk, no matter how small the package is.

It can be exhausting, but it’s important. I’m planting the seeds in people’s minds. Our kids, our children are going to work at corporations like this. We need to prepare them to make conscious decisions. Our fight is everyone’s fight.

SF: From your perspective, what’s the cost of our culture’s obsession with perpetual growth and with our societal expectations of success—both for people and businesses?

CS: In 2015, Amazon had seven warehouses in New Jersey. Now they have over 30. They’re not going anywhere, and they continue to build these warehouses every single year. Amazon owns 75 companies. In the next two to three years, one out of every four Americans is going to work at Amazon. Amazon has already hired and fired the equivalent of the entire American workforce in its 30 years of existence.

There are so many costs. I mean, this company has affected all of us. I say this a lot: Did Amazon adapt to us? Or have we adapted to Amazon? This company, over the past 30 years, has completely changed the way we live. Our community used to be crossing guards and teachers and bus drivers. We all grew up playing together outside. I used to be able to borrow sugar and milk from my neighbors because we knew them. My mom was a single mom; we relied upon the people around us.

We used to have to go out and go to the store. Now, we’re hitting “one-click-buy” and getting same-day deliveries. The mom and pop stores are mostly gone. The malls are ghost towns. Those stores that were fixtures of our childhood—the Toys ‘R Us, the JCPenny, the Barnes & Noble—[have] closed or, worse, Amazon is buying them up.

At Amazon, the workers are the ones who are being injured. We’re the ones who have ambulances coming every week, who are passing out from heatstroke, who are suffering miscarriages. Who are dying. I’ve literally seen someone sit down in the break room and never get back up.

Kids now are tech savvy. They have to grow up a lot faster. They’re also paying a lot more attention to what’s going on because of technology. They know a lot more. They know how to use technology.

Still, our way of life has changed. You shop online. It’s self-checkout at the grocery store. At the airport, you’re in a kiosk. Even at McDonald’s, you’re ordering on an app or screen.

You know, at the rate we’re going, AI is going to [affect] 50 percent of American jobs in the next two to three years. We need to fight for the regulation of AI. We need to fight so our jobs aren’t replaced. Not just warehouse workers—we’re talking about teachers, nurses, cashiers at the stores with self-checkout, cashless stores, or the people at call centers. You’re not talking to human beings anymore. Even in the music industry, there are artists who are signed to record labels who are AI. AI is coming for all of our jobs.

I just got back from this Big Tech conference in Vancouver. Of the over 20,000 people there, I was pretty much the only union agitator. [Corporations are] building all these data centers; this is the thing right now. Amazon just laid off 30,000 workers because they’re being replaced by AI. It’s gonna be quick, almost an overnight shift. These corporations want shortcuts. Billionaires want to save money. And if that comes at the expense of a worker, they’ll take it every time.

SF: There are some passages in your “Union Busting” and “No One to Trust” chapters that struck me as chillingly pertinent to what’s happening in this country right now.

By the 1950s, you tell us, nearly 35 percent of all American workers belonged to a union. “Income inequality was at historic lows; pension, health insurance, forty-hour workweek with overtime pay, and employee-provided health insurance became standard.… But the backlash was coming.… It’s almost like they wanted people to keep chasing the American dream so that we could keep believing in the system. But they didn’t want us to ever actually catch it.”

And you write about how Presidents Kennedy and Johnson passed a fair amount of pro-labor legislation, but how Nixon’s election in 1968—the autumn after Dr. King was assassinated—set in motion the “dramatic rollback of civil rights and labor that laid the groundwork for everything we see today,” namely, the consolidation “of white voters under the Republican banner” by, above all, implying “that Black people were and Black liberation was, by nature, un-American…They wanted white people to feel like the country was about to be destroyed by these things and that, by extension, white people were about to be destroyed.”

Can you comment on this history and its parallels with where we are right now? And what do you say to all the people who have been drinking, and continue to drink, the Kool-Aid of the so-called American Dream?

CS: What is the American Dream? It’s really just smoke and mirrors at this point. After the Great Depression, there was a rise in labor unions. Labor unions in America were thriving. Since the ’60s, there’s been a huge decline because of regulation when it comes to legislation that hasn’t been touched. We’re talking about laws from the 1940s. We saw how Biden used 1926 legislation, The Railway Labor Act, against railroad workers because they wanted more sick leave.

Trump, one of the first things he did in his first 10 days was to dismantle the National Labor [Relations] Board. Under the Biden administration, it was already $20 million in debt and understaffed. But Trump said, we’re gonna put Lori Chavez-DeRemer as labor secretary (you know, she just resigned), because they didn’t have enough directors on the board to make it a full board. It’s still [the case] as we speak. So now we have an ineffective national labor board. Whether it’s Trump or the next guy, we’ve got to understand that we have to reform labor in this country.

One job should be enough; it used to be that way. Nowadays? Absolutely not. Both parents have to work, often multiple jobs. Check to check for 60 percent of Americans, and they’re one check out from being on the street.

When I was fired in 2020 from Amazon, I had to face that full-on: Losing my main source of income and my healthcare during the pandemic was an eye-opening experience for me. I [had] put my blood, sweat, and tears into this company as an assistant manager for four and a half years, and they still didn’t give a damn about me. They still considered me replaceable. Nobody’s job is safe. The American Dream isn’t real anymore.

You know, in other countries, labor has a say in government. Musk, with his ego, sent all these Tesla batteries to Sweden a couple years ago. Now, they have 90 percent union density in that country. They wouldn’t take them. They said, “We’re going to leave your chargers to rot.” They’re still on strike against Tesla. It’s been over two and a half years. Musk tried to sue the Swedish government. He didn’t realize that’s not how it works there.

The Google tech-bros and Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos, they’re competitors. They’ve been at odds. But under the Trump administration, they’ve been united. They’re together, right now, on this one particular lawsuit against the National Labor Relations Board, trying to roll back the rights of workers who want to unionize. This is moving forward right now with a federal judge in the state of Texas.

Texas has some of the lowest taxes in the country. A lot of the tech-bros are setting up shop there. All of Bezos’s space programs are in Texas; this is on purpose. There’s no accountability for what they’re doing to the environment, and the governor of Texas is another billionaire corporate guy. [SpaceX v. National Labor Relations Board] has been way underreported in mainstream media for a reason. This is an administration that’s allowing these guys to get away with murder.

SF: Following on that, at the end of your book, you say you feel strongly that workers at Amazon need to organize on an international level in order to enact real change and have broad-reaching, systemic impact. Based on your experience to date, what’s your sense of the appetite for organizing at this level? And, in a global culture that’s increasingly isolated, how do you help folks connect across such geographic range?

CS: I got my first passport three years ago, and have been to 45 countries by now. I was in Vancouver, British Columbia, not that long ago. You know why? They just successfully organized the Amazon warehouse there. Was I a part of it on the ground? No. But they studied us and what we did, and then they pulled it off themselves.

It’s not about being everywhere all the time. I can’t be. But I’m going to be there with them to celebrate their success.

We used nontraditional organizing techniques to go up against this multitrillion-dollar, behemoth company and all their anti-union propaganda. And it worked. People see me and the things I put up on social media—they call me a content creator; I don’t see myself that way—and they can relate. They get ideas. They share them. They take it and make it their own.

You know, for young folks today, if you ask them, “Do you want to be part of a labor union?.” they’re like, “Uh, no.” It doesn’t seem relatable to them. Or they don’t know what that means. That’s starting to change. The way things are trending in organizing right now is more and more about designing strategies and demands to meet basic human needs.

Labor organizing can be hard as fuck. Stressful. Extremely exhausting. You have to sacrifice so much time away from the things and people you love. So the best thing that you can do is make it fun, make it inviting. I think that’s something a lot of labor unions are failing to do.

Traditional organizing methods work in certain sectors. But when it comes to the 21st-century and technology and the tools that we have, I try to make it fashionable, cool-looking. You know, a lot of people still assume that I’m rapping even though I haven’t rapped in over a decade. I still play around with it, though. I try to get labor into different conversations, different spaces, and make it appealing to the younger generations. They’re the ones that are gonna lead the way.

Since I crashed the Met Gala, even those who weren’t aware who I was, now I’m hearing from people in the fashion industry, designers, NBA players, celebrities.… It’s good to see that, as rich as some of these people may be, they understand the power of labor organizing. That’s something that has been [missing] for a long time.

Amazon says their number-one principle is, “Work hard, have fun, and make history.” We used to joke around, “You’ll work hard at Amazon, and the history is when you get fired.” And of course, it’s not really fun. We have to really uphold that principle and make it fun. And the history we’re making? That’s getting organized.

SF: You write, “We also understand now that there are many people who have swallowed the lie that you’ll lose what you have if you care for others.” How do you try to convince people that leading with care is the only way forward in a culture that really encourages looking out for and protecting one’s own at the cost of others?

CS: I tell my organizers, just because we’re radicalized, doesn’t mean that the next person is. I got radicalized six years ago. I had the fight in me my whole life, but I got radicalized in the sense of collective power when Amazon fired me. But that doesn’t mean other people are going to feel the same way. It’s important not to approach other people with the attitude that they should do this because you know better.

It starts with befriending people. Build a relationship, earn their trust. Know what’s going on with their families, their loved ones, what schools their kids go to. You’ve always got to meet people where they’re at. Make it personal. How do you relate? Pay attention to the details, then show you care about them. That one person, that one story, might be the one that changes everything.

One day there was a worker that had high blood pressure—a common thing at Amazon—and he asked Amazon to get him an Uber so that he could get to his hospital, which was 45 minutes away. Amazon refused. So he came out to where we set up shop at the tent across the street from the building. He told me what happened, and I said, “Let’s get you an Uber right away.” We didn’t have much money, but we did it anyway. Next day, when he came back, he said, “You guys saved my life.” The hospital took him right in because his blood pressure was so high. They told him if he hadn’t been seen right away, he might’ve had a stroke. He became our biggest advocate in the building, screamed at the top of his lungs every day that everyone needed to sign up for the union because we actually care about people.

The best accountability is availability. If we weren’t available to have that conversation, that would’ve been a huge missed opportunity.

There’s always something to fight for. And we’ve got to do it with love and solidarity.

Fresh from his dustup with President Trump, Pope Leo released an encyclical targeting a perhaps even more formidable foe: unfettered artificial intelligence. In the missive, he called for regulation of the tech industry, whose products have sparked an era that finds human dignity “threatened by new forms of dehumanization.”

It’s an extraordinarily timely warning. Despite the carnival of corruption and disastrous policymaking unleashed by the sitting president, we may look back on this period not primarily as the Trump era but as the dawn of the AI age. Unbound by term limits, the technology is poised to remake our economy and society—at least, that’s what the guys who earn billions by hyping it say.

But, like the pope, the public—which didn’t vote for any of this—is making its displeasure known. Commencement speakers striking an optimistic note on AI have been booed by new grads entering a workforce menaced by robotic takeover. In offices, employees are quietly sabotaging their bosses’ attempts to embed AI into the workplace. And data centers are so politically toxic on Earth that tech leaders are chasing long-shot efforts to send them to space. As AI becomes ever-more omnipresent, so does resistance to it.

While AI skepticism is a global phenomenon, it’s particularly potent in the US: A poll of 30 countries found that Americans had the least faith in their government to regulate AI appropriately. That’s understandable considering that this nation has watched its business leaders offshore millions of jobs, while its elected officials prove willing to rescue Wall Street and leave Main Streets to painful economic decline. If AI devours entire industries, there’s little reason to believe that the newest members of the precariat will receive more support than autoworkers and textile makers before them.

And that’s to say nothing of the environmental impacts of the water- and electricity-guzzling data centers that power AI computing, raising local utility bills and straining drought-prone regions. If all that weren’t ecologically hazardous enough, the Trump administration announced that it would lend $1 billion to the infamous, currently defunct power facility on Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear accident on US soil. It’s being resurrected to juice Microsoft data centers.

All these potentially catastrophic risks are still part of the best-case scenario, which assumes that, despite its drawbacks, AI will perform the increasingly high-stakes tasks it is delegated as competently as the humans it replaces. Even darker outcomes are possible. A study at King’s College London had three AI models—versions of GPT, Claude, and Gemini—face off in a series of simulated war games. With a full range of tools at their disposal, from diplomatic de-escalation to all-out nuclear war, the models decided to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in 95 percent of simulations.

And the use of AI in war-gaming is not merely theoretical. The US Air Force recently debuted an AI-powered system called WarMatrix with a press release claiming that it’s meant to “enhance” war-gaming, rather than replace existing approaches. Still, the military also touts the fact that these “advanced tools” can enable faster decision-making and provide “timely, credible insights to senior leaders.”

For the past 80 years, humanity has benefited from a collective aversion to the use of weapons of mass destruction. Artificial intelligence feels no such repulsion. As the pope wrote, AI “can only bring about conflict more quickly and render it more impersonal, lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, transforming defense into threat prediction and thus reducing victims to data.” If any global power chooses to rely on this technology for strategic counsel when making legitimately existential decisions, then the 53 percent of Americans who think AI is likely to destroy humanity could well be proven right.

Thankfully, the Four Horsemen haven’t left the barn just yet. With effective regulation, worst-case scenarios can be permanently prevented. To that end, Senator Elizabeth Warren published an op-ed last month advocating for taxing AI companies and data centers. And in March, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill that would impose a moratorium on data center construction.

Like other AI skeptics, Sanders and AOC have been smeared as Luddites attempting to throw a wrench in the gears of progress. But, as John Nichols suggested in a recent article for The Nation, perhaps the designation isn’t quite the withering put-down AI boosters intend. The Luddites weren’t wild-eyed technophobes vainly trying to make the Industrial Revolution grind to a halt. Instead, they were skilled artisans aiming to save their livelihoods and preserve their dignity.

We may be seeing something of a Luddite rebirth. Towns across the nation have thwarted dozens of data center projects, and in April, voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, passed America’s first anti–data center referendum. Maine legislators marked another milestone that month when they approved the first statewide ban. Though it was vetoed by Governor Janet Mills, statehouses around the country are considering similar measures. Meanwhile, parents are pushing back on AI in schools, and a collection of journalists and researchers just launched the AI Resist List, which tracks global efforts to hold the industry accountable.

In community after community, people are organizing to protect human work and perhaps even humanity itself. After all, as Pope Leo put it, “humanity in all its grandeur and woundedness—must never be replaced or surpassed.”

When Joe Biden ran for president in 2020, among the reasons he cited for his campaign’s very purpose was the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which culminated in the tragic murder of Heather Heyer. She was killed by the speeding car of a Donald Trump–supporting neo-Nazi named James Fields Jr. Then-President Trump refused to denounce the right-wing activists who’d held the rally, more or less, in his name and said that there “were very fine people on both sides.” Liberals were aghast. What was also shocking, according to the mainstream press, was that this hate-fest could have taken place in the genteel college town of Charlottesville.

Nearly a decade later, the infamous footage from the rally—such as the tiki-torch-toting extremists chanting “Jews will not replace us!”—has faded into the background as the second Trump regime enacts its authoritarian agenda through ICE raids, attacks on the “DEI” boogeyman, and a wholesale dismantling of the welfare state. And yet while Charlottesville might seem like just one more awful spectacle among the many we’ve been forced to witness, it was arguably a key prefigurative moment of the 2010s, one that ushered in our current state of affairs. Yet its importance has been sidelined amid the quotidian exhibitions of violence and gleeful cruelty that the Trump administration has committed or permitted; the daily assaults on our collective dignity by the MAGA movement have made it difficult to remember the horrors of the recent past as well as the popular resistance to them.

Deborah Baker’s Charlottesville: An American Story is an in-depth, forensic, and panoramic view of the long road to the Unite the Right rally. Through meticulous detective work and journalistic narrative, Baker shows us that the effort to unite the right goes back decades, incubated alongside Charlottesville’s history of harboring anti-Black reactionaries. After all, looming over the town is Monticello, the estate of the University of Virginia’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, who spoke loftily about liberal ideals like reason and liberty, also (as we all ought to know at this point) owned enslaved Black people and, through rape, fathered children by an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings. Baker looks at the self-satisfying glow of Monticello and the politesse it casts on the city below, revealing the sordid underbelly of the city’s legacy of racial hatred, segregation, and subjugation.

There is something all too American, Baker argues, about believing that bucolic scenery and bourgeois pretensions can keep the repressed and foundational histories of this country’s utmost oppressions at bay. Though often weighed down by their encyclopedic density, the book’s numerous character studies untangle seemingly everything about Charlottesville through the four centuries of its existence, from the town’s colonial-era settlement, founded in racial enslavement, to 20th-century UVA professors espousing eugenics, to the small-town activists who violently fought against court-mandated desegregation orders. By doing so, Baker makes it clear that no one should be surprised that this town was the same place a murderous right-wing rally took place in the 21st century.

The first and second parts of Charlottesville: An American Story deal with the historical backdrop, and the book’s third and final part concentrates on the days before and during the rally itself. Between the first and second parts is an interlude titled “The Heart of Whiteness,” which centers on a white Charlottesville resident who seems like an early-20th-century forerunner to Richard Spencer. Similarly, a final interlude before the third part, titled “A School of Backward Southern Whites,” is about a heroic and compellingly flawed white woman who resembles something of an earlier Heather Heyer. It is a curious narrative and structural choice to put the carts before the horses here, introducing contemporaries in the beginning before delving into the history and antecedents, back and forth, over and over again. A more linear and chronological argumentation could have been useful for readers. To her credit, Baker has centered the bulk of the book’s recurring characters not on the headline-grabbing, bumbling far-right nitwits like Spencer and other nationwide hate figures, but on a charming cast of little-known left-wing activists and organizers who call Charlottesville home. Introduced in the first part of the book are the likes of Wes Bellamy and Zyahna Bryant. Bellamy, a Black man, arrived in Charlottesville in 2009 to work as a computer science teacher before launching a quixotic campaign for City Council; he was sarcastically nicknamed “Fresh Prince” and mistrusted by the locals, who saw him as something of an attention-seeking carpetbagger, though he eventually did win public office. Bryant, at that time a high-school freshman, had called upon then–Vice Mayor Bellamy to take down the statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in a public park. She was precocious and iron-willed, someone “sustained” by the Black church who was impelled to embrace a life of activism after the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman. Baker mentions dozens and dozens of others in this book, yet paradoxically, their moving biographies often get lost in the forest of names, dates, archival evidence, and so forth. Sometimes a discriminating eye has its noble uses—though thankfully, Baker does provide a helpful list of the book’s 105 characters.

Baker devotes the book’s interludes to just one person each. The first, “The Heart of Whiteness,” traces the entanglement of the liberal intelligentsia and baldfaced white supremacism in the figure of John Kasper, a 26-year-old graduate of Columbia University. Kasper arrived in Virginia in 1956, months after the state’s “Massive Resistance” movement tried, and failed, to convince the state government to pass laws banning desegregation. Like so many young, alienated white men, Kasper joined the feverish politics of white backlash. Raised in New Jersey, he was an intellectual jack-of-all-trades, admiring tough-talking men of various politics, from Machiavelli to Stalin and, most prominently, Ezra Pound. The Mussolini-loving Pound, who advocated for Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany from an Italian radio station during World War II, was brought back to the United States and committed to an asylum in Washington, DC, in 1945. Kasper began aping Pound’s worldview in this period, combining old-fashioned European antisemitism with thoroughly American anti-Blackness, estranging former colleagues and friends in bohemian Greenwich Village. Possessed of a “smoldering charisma” and described by the New York Herald Tribune as a “Hollywood version of the All-American boy,” Kasper would team up with a UVA student to burn crosses on the lawns of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Like the well-groomed and respectable fascists of today, Kasper had the looks and charisma that charmed audiences and disarmed elites. Kasper and his ilk chose to decamp to Charlottesville as a battleground because the NAACP had done so as well. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, then the chief counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, had sued Charlottesville’s school authorities over its segregated schools, recognizing the city’s importance. Baker writes, “On Marshall’s side were seventy students whose families were willing to risk their livelihoods for their children’s education.” The Charlottesville chapter of the NAACP had grown into the Commonwealth’s largest. Kasper’s far-right rabble-rousing earned him the loyalty of a notorious circle of like-minded racists, with one associate credited with writing George Wallace’s “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech, while others were involved, Baker writes, in “eighty-eight bombing incidents in the Deep South between 1955 and 1960.” Despite Kasper’s agitations, Charlottesville’s schools would become fully integrated in 1962. Still, as a figure, Kasper is interesting because he is emblematic of the type of person that Richard Spencer represents, which makes for one of Baker’s most convincing historical parallels: telegenic all-American men with educational pedigrees and preppy backgrounds who, alienated from the polite societies they were being groomed to join, fall from grace to become an uglier, less respectable type of white supremacist.

“A School for Backward Southern Whites,” the book’s second interlude, is about Patty Boyle, a high-born and pious Virginian woman with a clergyman father who was raised on a plantation, a grandfather who was General Lee’s scout, and another grandfather who was a colonel under Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Boyle was “moonlight and magnolias” personified: In her 40s and married to a UVA professor, she began a campaign to welcome the law school’s first Black student, Gregory Swanson, believing it to be the Christian thing to do. Boyle wanted sincerely to greet him with open arms and argued in local newspapers about how Virginia’s best should treat “our Negroes.” (Her campaign, despite its good intentions, was still tone deaf.) Yet Boyle’s white upper-crust milieu soon began to turn on her. As Kasper stormed around town denouncing the “red-controlled Supreme Court,” posters appeared targeting Boyle and other local “homos, perverts, freaks” and “hot eyed Socialists.” Eventually, Boyle found a cross burning in her front yard and would be radicalized by her estrangement from the community. She was praised in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”; she participated in the March on Washington; her 1962 autobiography, The Desegregated Heart, became a national bestseller; and she was even jailed for the first time, for three days, in St. Augustine, Florida, in June 1964 for protesting against segregation at the Monson Motor Lodge. When desegregation came to Charlottesville, she began to be seen as a courageous rebel, and she joined a Black church that she tithed for the rest of her life. Patty Boyle led the kind of life that Heather Heyer was robbed of.

The third part of Charlottesville: An American Story flows from a trove of citations, and it attempts, often deftly so, to express in writing what has been seen countless times in tweets and videos. Baker acknowledges the narrative difficulties of channeling thousands of social media posts into a neatly organized retelling: “To portray the multiple, nearly simultaneous, explosions of violence that took place in and around the park is a near impossibility,” she writes. One wonders if this is a methodological issue with doing historical work concerning a recent past that lives on millions of phones and in terabytes of ephemeral data.

The road to the Unite the Right rally began at the start of 2017, when an unknown, directionless, and fame-seeking local blogger and UVA alum named Jason Kessler began attacking Black community leaders and the city’s Jewish mayor for voting to remove Confederate statuary in the city. And the rally in Charlottesville was generated from the energy of two other events earlier in the year: the Battle of Berkeley in February, which was sparked by Milo Yiannopoulos coming to town, and a violent protest in Pikeville, Kentucky, that was spearheaded by Matthew Heimbach and his Traditionalist Workers Party. After Berkeley and Pikeville, Richard Spencer held a nighttime gathering in Charlottesville in May to protest what he had seen as an affront to white heritage and civil rights. Here, Kessler “networked furiously”—he later reached out to Heimbach, Spencer, and others over Discord, 4chan, and so on. It wouldn’t be long before the next Charlottesville rally would get a name and a date: Unite the Right, on August 12, 2017. Although Kessler had been struggling for weeks without success to obtain a permit, authorities allowed the rally to proceed as planned, even with the unannounced torchlight rally at UVA occurring the night before.

Before and during the rally, state and local police ignored repeated warnings of gun-toting, “Sieg heil!”–ing street fighters descending from around the country. The Charlottesville cops had been meeting with the fascist provocateurs for weeks leading up to the rally, negotiating with them to keep the protests relatively civil. As for the liberals, they haplessly sang songs and clasped hands on the day of the rally in the face of Confederate-flag-waving neo-Nazis and other far-right militants more heavily armed than the cops themselves. They were quickly driven off the streets, while anti-fascists and other leftists engaged the far right with ferocity. Cops stood idly by as the counterprotesters, left and liberal alike, were assaulted, including the near-lynching of a 20-year-old Black man named DeAndre Harris in a parking garage “literally next door to the Charlottesville Police Department” by a Proud Boy and six other fascists. An eleventh-hour declaration of the hate-fest as an unlawful assembly rang hollow: By that point, punches had landed, epithets and slurs had been hurled, smoke bombs and chemical sprays were already unleashed, and there was an ambient bloodlust in the air.

Ultimately, and monstrously, a car driven by James Fields Jr. sped into a crowd and killed Heather Heyer, a dedicated paralegal and charming waitress. A passionate, hardscrabble defender of working people like herself, Heyer’s last words on Facebook read: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Even after the half-hearted damage control that Trump attempted after his “both sides” comment, no White House officials showed up for Heyer’s memorial service.

Since Heyer’s murder, some Unite the Right participants have risen to greater stardom or notoriety, while others have fallen into obscurity and imprisonment. Jason Kessler, who helped organize the rally, attempted a failed sequel in Charlottesville a year later, which was undone by infighting on the right. Richard Spencer and other leaders distanced themselves from Kessler, and Heyer’s murder, altogether; Spencer had fallen so low that he was reported by Jezebel in 2022 to be on Bumble, describing himself as a “moderate.” As for the little-known rank-and-filers at the rally and the sympathizers throughout the country who followed events with approval on their screens, quite a few ended up at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, including members of paramilitary and street-fighting groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. White-nationalist figures, such as the Internet personalities Nick Fuentes and Anthime Gionet (better known as “Baked Alaska”), were also prominent at both. And another common through line between the explosion of far-right violence in 2017 and in 2021 is Trump’s tacit approval. Charlottesville and January 6 reveal how far-right paramilitaries outside the state machinery and elements within the state are connecting with each other and maturing. Many of the goals that animated the 2017 tiki-torch wielders, from mass deportations to authoritarian power grabs, are coming to fruition under Trump 2.0.

Despite being markedly unpopular on nearly every issue, from kleptocratic malfeasance to a metastasizing cost-of-living crisis, MAGA has faced no real opposition. Like the Democratic officials in Charlottesville who repeatedly ignored the threat from violent right-wing reactionaries, the Democratic Party establishment is proving itself to be just as ineffective. Asleep at the congressional wheel, the likes of Hakeem Jeffries and Charles Schumer prefer to scapegoat and castigate the party’s left flank or participate in photo ops with Benjamin Netanyahu, who is carrying out the ultimate goal of far rightists the world over: illiberal attacks on representative and judicial institutions, ethnic cleansing, and, finally, genocide. If Biden truly reckoned with the legacy of Charlottesville, how can we explain all the mass carnage he permitted in Gaza? Liberals and centrists, from 2017 till now, from Charlottesville’s local government to the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, have stumbled and fallen over their commitments to moderation—misapprehending the threat of authoritarianism and enabling its growing strength. And because of liberalism’s failures, Charlottesville has come to the Oval Office.

Ideally, the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States would be an occasion for a thoughtful patriotism that merges gratitude with reflection. The quarter-millennium since the signing of the Declaration of Independence has been marked by tremendous achievements—most notably the abolition of slavery, the expansion of democracy—but also by horrifying wars and domestic strife. Coming to terms with the full complexity of the US, its successes and failures alike, would be a tremendous opportunity for enriching civic life.

Unfortunately, our world is far from ideal. Donald Trump, a ridiculous caricature of the worst features of US culture, is president. He’s not inclined to introspective patriotism. In fact, any sort of sincere patriotism is alien to him, since it would involve acknowledging a reality larger and more important than himself.

Not surprisingly, Trump is rapidly turning this year’s 250th events—in particular, a planned series of Fourth of July celebrations on the National Mall—into yet another tribute to his own greatness. The story of Trump’s hijacking of the holiday (awkwardly dubbed the United States Semiquincentennial) is instructive.

A big holiday party needs serious preparation. In 2016, when Barack Obama was president, Congress established a bipartisan organization called America250. Ever since, America250 has been laying the groundwork for a string of parades and block parties across the country. The plans are very much in keeping with earlier national anniversaries such as the Bicentennial celebrations of 1976.

But a bipartisan group celebrating a widely shared form of patriotism was a poor fit for Trump’s rabid partisanship and desire to be at the center of every story. The president issued an executive order to create a rival organization that he could control called Freedom 250. Bypassing congressional control is a typical Trump tactic, as is the use of private donations to fund public events. Like his inauguration celebration, Freedom 250 is being financed through a murky private/public funding scheme rife with conflicts of interest. As the good government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington notes, “Many of the companies sponsoring Freedom 250 have business before the government or significant government contracts, including United Airlines, Palantir, Deloitte and Lockheed Martin.”

One of the marquee events Freedom 250 had been planning was The Great American State Fair, which is set to run from June 25 to July 10 in Washington. Prominent musicians had been invited to the Fair, which they seem to have mistakenly thought of as a nonpartisan event. Once the Fair’s connections to Trump were publicized last week, there was a mass exodus, with nearly all the scheduled acts dropping out. As USA Today reports:

A lineup of music superstars rounded up to perform has collapsed significantly in the last two days, with Vanilla Ice and Flo Rida among the remaining acts.

The rest of the fair’s performers have walked back their involvement with the event.

Among those who have dropped out are Bret Michaels, Martina McBride, The Commodores, and Young MC.

With his big party rapidly turning into a fiasco, Trump responded with his usual good grace on Saturday, posting on Truth Social:

I understand Artists are getting “the yips” having to do with their performance on Wednesday, so I am thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists,” and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President! Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called “Artists” that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN. So, by copy of this TRUTH, I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, D.C., same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited—It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This peevish post is at least honest. Trump isn’t pretending to be a president of all the people, a leader who offers a patriotic celebration that appeals to the majority. Rather, his vision of the nation is as narrow as can be. Trump thinks American greatness resides in himself and the people who appreciate him. This is the same shameless narcissism that gave the world Trump Tower, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Airlines, and so many other monuments to an insatiable hunger for fame.

Any honest critique of the United States would acknowledge that Trump does represent part of the national culture. It’s hardly an accident that he was twice elected president and has dominated politics for more than a decade. Trump embodies the dangers of self-aggrandizement that grow out of American individualism. He is the worst-case scenario of the Jeffersonian dream of the “pursuit of happiness” curdling into nothing more than soulless accumulation and boasting.

But if Trump represents one dismal part of America’s patrimony, he is far from the whole of the country. America also includes tens of millions, perhaps even a majority, that reject Trump and everything he stands for. This other America will do well to tune Trump out on the Fourth of July. Now more than ever, Independence Day will be a moment demanding more than mindless flag-waving. It’ll be a day for national soul-searching.

The Trump administration has begun to weaponize long-standing restrictions on freedom to travel to Cuba, focusing on travelers who criticize the US policy of asphyxiating the Cuban economy and threatening a military attack.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)—the arm of the Treasury Department that enforces US economic sanctions against other countries—has sent a “request for information” to the advocacy group Code Pink about its participation in the international humanitarian convoy that brought 500 people from more than 30 countries carrying an estimated 35 tons of food, medicine, solar panels, and other aid to Havana in March. As part of the convoy, Code Pink chartered a plane for 170 participants that also carried 6,300 pounds of medical supplies worth $433,000 arranged by Global Health Partners.

Treasury officials are demanding to know “everything you did while you were in Cuba, who went, how did you go, how did you pay for everything, all the receipts, the detailed description of everything you took for donations…what hotel did you stay in,” Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink, told The Nation.

Benjamin suspects the May 21 OFAC inquiry aims to quell dissent against President Donald Trump’s increasingly harsh approach to Cuba, which has triggered the worst humanitarian crisis on the island in memory. An American oil blockade imposed in January set off a chain reaction of daily blackouts, food shortages, water shortages, medical emergencies, and reported deaths. “I think it’s intimidation, totally, and we don’t want to be intimidated,” Benjamin said. “We’re telling all the people who went with us don’t be intimidated. Just use this as another spark in the fire to challenge this sadistic policy.”

Code Pink has started to compile the information requested by OFAC, Benjamin added. “We think we didn’t do anything wrong.”

Federal scrutiny of the trip has implications beyond one group’s mission to Havana. It’s another blow to Cuba’s already devastated hospitality industry—a major pillar of the economy—and represents an additional tool for turning up pressure on the Cuban government, according to experts in travel to Cuba. “This will certainly serve to chill travel to Cuba by well-meaning Americans who have every right under the current structures and categories to go to Cuba,” said Peter Kornbluh, co-author of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations between Washington and Havana, who has led tours to the island. “But it also is a warning to anybody that opposes the cruel and anti-humanitarian nature” of the current approach to Cuba. “The Trump administration is weaponizing a humanitarian trip to Cuba to persecute, not just to prosecute, those who are speaking out against the cruel and malicious US policy and trying to help the Cuban people.”

The Treasure Department’s press office didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment for this story. The existence of the inquiry was previously reported by Fox News Digital, which also said others received a “subpoena,” including left wing influencer Hasan Piker who traveled to Havana on the Code Pink charter. As of last week, “your boy has yet to receive a subpoena,” Piker told his audience on Twitch.

Official inquiries into American travelers’ activities in Cuba were not uncommon in the 1990s and early 2000s. However, since President Barack Obama sought to thaw relations between the nations and visited Havana himself in 2016, the assets control office has generally left travelers alone. “Obama basically decided that OFAC should be out of the travel curtailment business,” Kornbluh said.

Even during Trump’s first term, US travel to Cuba continued to soar, reaching a record 638,000 visitors in 2018, according to the Cuban government, despite Trump’s tightening some categories of travel. There were few, if any, reports of the US government demanding the records of travelers to Cuba during Trump’s first term and President Joe Biden’s term, said Robert Muse, a Washington, DC, lawyer with long experience counseling clients on OFAC compliance issues.

Americans can travel to Cuba for any of 12 authorized reasons, including “support for the Cuban people,” “humanitarian projects,” and “educational activities.” The Code Pink group traveled under the category of support for the Cuban people, Benjamin said. That means having a schedule of activities that yield meaningful interaction with the Cuban people, according to the regulations. Some members of the group spent all their time painting a mural with Cuban artists, as reported by The Nation from Havana, while others participated in a daily schedule of activities posted in their hotel, including visiting neighborhoods to meet residents, listening to speakers, and making art with children in a playground.

The March humanitarian aid convoy came under withering attack in right-wing news accounts and social media, with headlines like “The Flotilla of Shamelessness in Cuba.” The commentators highlighted a gathering of hundreds of convoy participants one afternoon in the Havana convention center, where Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel addressed the visitors: “Your presence on the island constitutes a profound demonstration of friendship, sensibility, and human commitment to the Cuban people.” The recent Fox News report on the OFAC inquiry claims it is part of a “broader dragnet…of anti-US Marxists, communists and socialists.”

Demands for records like the one to Code Pink “go through cyclical periods depending on US-Cuba relations generally, and we’re clearly in a downdraft here,” said Muse. The winds started to change again in June 2025 when Trump issued a national security memorandum that, in part, instructed the Treasury to ensure that travelers comply with regulations and keep records of their activities for five years. Indeed, participants in the convoy faced lengthy questioning when they landed in Miami on their return from Havana in March. At least 18 travelers had their electronic devices searched, and some phones and laptops were confiscated for several days.

The maximum civil penalty for, say, engaging in tourism, which is forbidden, rather than permitted activities is $111,000, while the criminal maximum is $250,000 and up to 20 years in prison—though lawyers say actual sentences would likely be far lower.

Muse is focused on whether escalating aggressive enforcement against travelers turns out to be the latest screw that Trump has found to tighten on Cuba, along with the oil embargo, the recent indictment of Raúl Castro, threats of military action on the island, and the campaign against Cuban doctors serving in other countries. “If they do an across-the-board set of administrative proceedings, maybe go criminal in a case or two, then they’re fitting it into maximum pressure,” said Muse. “Rights of US citizens then become implicated. This then extends the embargo beyond Cuba and brings it home in aggressive examination of broadly First Amendment–protected activity.”

Benjamin vowed that the scrutiny of the trip would not deter activists advocating for a change in Cuba policy. Last week, Code Pink has been on Capitol Hill advocating for resolutions in the House and the Senate that would force votes on requiring the Trump administration to win congressional approval to launch military action against Cuba. The federal inquiry “is taking time and energy and money,” she said, “but it’s not going not take us away from the main issue,” which is “Cuba and what they’re suffering.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Ramallah—“I feel like I am going to work with zombies,” Lutfi said. “People who have had all of their hopes destroyed. They don’t feel like they’re going to get their money.”

Lutfi works for the Palestinian Authority, the body that nominally governs the occupied West Bank. (He asked that his last name be withheld so that he could speak freely about his work.) But it’s unclear how long he will hold on to his job, because the PA’s ability to carry out basic public services, let alone employ people, is collapsing.

The PA is currently facing a deficit of more than 4.5 billion shekels (about $1.9 billion). Amid the financial emergency, Palestinian youth are attending school only three days a week, as schools struggle to pay rising electricity costs and teachers go without salaries. Ministerial offices, even in the relatively insulated city center of Ramallah, are mostly empty. As of late 2025, civil servants were being paid only 60 percent of their salary, in a slow decline since October 7 that reflects the increasingly dire financial straits the PA finds itself in.

To make matters worse, this crisis is not an accident. It is the direct result of Israeli government policy—specifically the policies of far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has made no secret of his desire to eliminate the PA completely. “As far as I’m concerned, let the [Palestinian] Authority collapse. It is an enemy,” Smotrich told Israel’s Channel 14 in June 2025.

“There is a systematic approach by certain members of the coalition to bankrupt the PA and to dissolve it.”Mouin Rabbani, senior fellow at the Middle East Council, explained. “They need to get the PA out of the way in order to exercise complete control over the occupied territories.”

In the aftermath of October 7, Smotrich cited the PA’s failure to condemn the attack as justification for withholding revenue. He has also pointed to the PA’s “Martyrs’ Fund”—a program providing stipends to Palestinian prisoners, which critics call “pay for slay”—as further grounds for the freeze. The fund became the basis of a March 2026 US appeals court ruling finding the PA liable for financing attacks on American citizens. PA President Mahmoud Abbas ended the payments in February 2025 at the Trump administration’s urging.

The distribution of the PA’s “clearance revenues”—which, per the 1994 Paris Protocol, Israel collects on behalf of the PA and is then supposed to distribute every month, to the tune of roughly $188 million—is still on hold. If Israel does not soon resume transferring the withheld revenue, it will be completely insolvent, “completely bankrupt,” said Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.

Lutfi has seen the impact of Smotrich’s crusade firsthand. He works for the PA’s land registry, documenting Palestinian claims to land in the West Bank. His job is one of the most basic prerequisites for any final settlement: quite literally, who owns what.

But his team’s work is now on indefinite pause. Equipment that they use to assess land in the most remote areas of the West Bank is falling into disrepair, and Lutfi’s union, the Jordan Engineers Association, recently urged its employees to stop showing up to work entirely.

The PA owes Lutfi 17 months of back pay, and, as he recounted to me, the consensus among fellow employees is that they’re never going to get it.

To make up for the budget deficit, the PA has been forced to borrow funds from Palestinian banks, and even if the clearance revenues are released in full, “which is never going to happen,” Lutfi emphasized, it wouldn’t be enough to cover the salaries.

Without some kind of outside intervention, the PA won’t be able to climb out of its fiscal hole. But help does not seem forthcoming. “In the past, the US or Europeans would swoop in to save the PA from complete bankruptcy. But this time, there may not be a savior,” Hassan explained.

For decades, the European Union and its member states have been the PA’s largest external donors, pumping hundreds of millions of euros annually into the West Bank. But times have changed, and Smotrich has shattered the status quo. When Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa recently asked the EU and its other backers to make up the shortfall, caused by what Rabbani calls Smotrich’s “economic warfare,” the EU declined.

This is not to say that the PA was a beloved institution before Israel’s latest assault. Far from it. Part of why Abbas’s approval rating is, as Rabbani put it, “somewhere between zero and zero,” is that Palestinians in the West Bank view the PA for what it is: a mechanism for Israel to administer the Palestinian territories without having to do so itself.

So why does Israel’s far-right coalition want to dissolve the body that has been administering its occupation of the West Bank? It comes down to land and annexation. “If you no longer have a PA, you no longer have a counterpart for the implementation of the Oslo agreements, which neither party has officially renounced, even though they’re functionally nonexistent. Israel will then use that as a pretext to reestablish direct control and annex whatever it wants,” Rabbani explained.

Also at play is the desire to push Palestinians to flee the West Bank, voluntarily at first, and potentially later, involuntarily, explained Nathan Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. By collapsing the PA and keeping the West Bank in perpetual economic crisis, Israel can make conditions so unlivable that residents choose to emigrate, shifting the territory’s demographic balance even further in Israel’s favor.

While the capital, Ramallah, has been somewhat insulated from the worst of the PA’s financial collapse, an economic crisis is operating in tandem across the wider West Bank.

Shut off from Israel after October 7 under the justification of a “security concern,” the 125,000 or more Palestinian workers who once worked in construction inside Israel, and whose wages injected an estimated $380 million per month into the Palestinian economy, are suffering too. “I grew up in Palestine around the time of the First Intifada. That period of the Israeli occupation seems like a golden age compared to the kinds of deprivation and poverty I saw last summer,” Hassan said.

Palestinian families are used to financial hardship. But many of them are now at a breaking point, Lutfi explained. “I think most people can’t lend money from their family members anymore. Because they don’t have it.”

Meanwhile, the PA’s higher-ups have been largely insulated from the economic crisis. They dine in the finest restaurants in Ramallah, discussing monetary policy. (I have seen this firsthand.) Lutfi pointed to the fact that while salaries have been cut, other PA benefits and compensation are still being paid in full, and if you work at one of the PA’s consulates, salaries are still fully intact.

“They have the choice of what gets cut, and they always choose to cut the workers—the actual workers—and anything that does not touch them.” More than half of PA public-sector employees earn the equivalent of $664 a month or less, while some senior officials take home more than $10,000 a month.

“Many Palestinians ask: Why are senior PA officials still enjoying VIP status and a lifestyle that far outpaces any normal Palestinian lifestyle in the occupied territories?” Hassan asked.

The PA is out of the picture for the Palestinian youth I interviewed in Al-Manara, a traffic circle in the heart of Ramallah. They have few prospects, economic or otherwise. Jobs are almost impossible to find; permits to enter Israel have been cut off; and movement restrictions have only escalated since October 7.

“Who cares if [the PA] dies,” one person said. “Let them go. What have they done for us but serve the ihtilal [the occupation]?” 

The Trump administration, via its “Board of Peace,” vaguely attempted to rehabilitate the PA, to give it a place and renewed legitimacy in the postwar governance of Gaza. But this is a nonstarter for the Israelis. Brown said PA bureaucrats are still waiting in hotels in Cairo for a call that they will be part of the deal. They still haven’t gotten it.

Now it is only a matter of time before Israel’s de facto annexation becomes a legal one, and collapsing the PA while keeping the West Bank in dire economic straits is part of the plan. It was when the PA stopped working toward the objectives of Oslo that it fell apart, according to Rabbani.

“If I were Smotrich’s adviser, I’d tell him to just pass a law tomorrow declaring the West Bank an eternal part of the Jewish state. Nobody’s going to do anything about it,” Rabbani said.

More than anything, Trump has sought to project an aura of personal power and decisiveness. Whether through his ironclad rule over the Republican Party, condescending stance toward foreign emissaries, or ruthless exercise of military power, Trump is constantly reminding us of his extraordinary grasp of executive powers and his unique temperament to exploit them. Recent developments in the Middle East, however, have thrown into doubt his capacity to wield power effectively—with unpredictable and potentially perilous consequences.

Trump’s obsession with the public display of personal power was notably evident in his announcement of the January 2 US kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, to face trial in New York on drug charges. “This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history,” he said the next morning. “The United States military is the strongest and most fierce military on the planet by far,” he asserted—a distinction he attributed to his personal initiative. “Under the Trump administration, we are reasserting American power in a very powerful way,” he declared. “We had great dominance in my first term, and we have far greater dominance right now.”

Evidently propelled by these fantasies of domination, Trump concluded—or was led to believe—that a full-scale air and missile assault on Iran would produce a similar outcome, with even greater rewards for Washington.

According to an exhaustive investigation by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, Trump was persuaded to undertake the assault by assurances of unqualified success provided by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mossad director David Barnea during a February 11 meeting in the White House Situation Room. An all-out US/Israeli attack, Trump was reportedly told, would almost certainly result in the collapse of Iran’s clerical regime, the destruction of its ballistic missile inventory, the elimination of its aid to proxy forces like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the permanent cessation of its drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Any potential Iranian ability to retaliate by striking US allies in the Persian Gulf region or blocking the Strait of Hormuz—through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply normally passes—was said by the Israelis to constitute a negligible concern.

Although some US officials, including chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, warned of possible risks from an attack on Iran, Trump chose the path of promised glory, embracing the Israeli plan for a full-scale assault.

The president’s overweening self-confidence and undiluted faith in American military power was on full display when he announced the assault on February 28. “This regime will soon learn that no one should challenge the strength and might of the United States Armed Forces,” he declared. “I built and rebuilt our military in my first administration and there is no military on earth even close to its power, strength or sophistication.”

As events soon demonstrated, however, the Iranian regime was fully prepared to challenge the strength and might of America’s armed forces—and, in doing so, deprived Trump of success in nearly all of his priority areas.

By firing one-way drones and ballistic missiles at US bases in the region and the energy facilities of US allies, the Iranians were able to inflict significant damage to US combat capabilities and to block traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, provoking a global energy crisis. Despite intense US and Israeli attacks, moreover, the regime did not collapse, nor was its ability to conduct drone and missile barrages fully eliminated. In countering those barrages, moreover, the United States consumed a large share of its inventory of advanced air-defense missiles, leaving US forces ill-prepared for any future confrontation with well-equipped Chinese or Russian forces. Most significantly, Iran’s supply of highly enriched uranium remained untouched, presumably still stored in canisters buried in a cave near Isfahan, whose entrance was reportedly sealed by US “bunker buster” bombs during a raid last June.

Faced with these disappointments, Trump—egged on by Netanyahu and pro-Israeli forces in the US—threatened to escalate the fighting even further, attacking not only military and regime targets but also bridges, power plants, and other infrastructure—a severe threat to the health and well-being of Iran’s civilian population. Unless the regime bowed to his demands, Trump declared at 8 am on April 7, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

This was, perhaps, the last time it could be said that Trump exercised full control over the course of battle in Iran. Between 8 am and 6 pm Washington time on April 7, Trump was somehow persuaded by Pakistani mediators and other interlocutors to initiate a two-week ceasefire with the Iranians and to use that time to complete work on a lasting peace settlement, whose broad outlines the Pakistanis had crafted over the previous weeks.

Why did Trump agree to a ceasefire, even though he had yet to achieve his key objectives in starting the war?

While it is almost impossible to reconstruct what went on in the Oval Office during those frantic hours—let alone inside the president’s head—it appears that Trump came under enormous pressure from the leaders of friendly states in the Gulf, where Iranian retaliatory strikes had been concentrated. A new wave of US attacks on Iran, they argued, would invite crippling Iranian counterstrikes against the Gulf’s oil facilities—extending the energy crisis and causing widespread economic harm. These leaders, including top officials from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, have come to wield considerable influence in Trump’s Washington due to their immense oil wealth and ties to the Trump dynasty’s business interests. When they speak out—as reportedly they have on this matter—Trump listens.

President Trump’s deference to the leaders of these countries and others with similar attributes was fully evident in his May 23 announcement that a peace agreement was nearly ready for signing. “I am in the Oval Office at the White House where we just had a very good call with President Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, of the United Arab Emirates, Emir Tamim bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and Minister Ali al-Thawadi, of Qatar, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir Ahmed Shah, of Pakistan, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of Türkiye, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, of Egypt, King Abdullah II, of Jordan, and King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, of Bahrain, concerning the Islamic Republic of Iran, and all things related to a Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE,” he wrote on Truth Social. “An Agreement has been largely negotiated,” he added, “subject to finalization between the United States of America, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the various other Countries, as listed.”

But Trump soon repudiated his avowal of an imminent peace agreement, saying the Iranians had yet to agree to all of his stipulations, especially with regard to the disposition of nuclear materials and control over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran, he claimed, will have to surrender all that buried enriched uranium and allow untrammeled passage through the Strait; until its leaders agreed to this, there could be no agreement. On May 27, Trump indicated that he was prepared to prolong negotiations for months if necessary—even if that entailed the continued closure of the Strait and resulting high gas prices during the coming election season—or to resume fighting. “They want very much to make a deal,” Trump told reporters. “So far, they haven’t gotten there. We’re not satisfied with it, but we will be—either that or we’ll have to just finish the job.”

As if to demonstrate Washington’s readiness to resume fighting, US forces struck Iranian missile bases near the Strait of Hormuz on May 27—a move said to be in response to aggressive Iranian naval actions in the strait—and again on May 28, following an attempted Iranian missile strike on a US base in Bahrain.

All this naturally raises another critical question: What explains Trump’s aversion to concluding a peace deal after repeatedly saying one was nearly at hand?

Once again, it is difficult to determine what is going on inside Trump’s head, but it appears that he is under pressure from another group of actors to reject any peace deal short of a total Iranian surrender or, lacking that, to resume the fighting. This group, which includes Benjamin Netanyahu and influential pro-Israeli politicians in the US, argues that any agreement must incorporate all of the objectives of the original US/Israeli assault that were not achieved in the first round of fighting.

“President Trump’s decision to strike Iran was the most consequential decision of his second term. He was right to do so, and we achieved extraordinary military results,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) asserted on May 23, in a characteristic expression of this outlook. “If the result of all that is to be an Iranian regime…being able to enrich uranium and develop nuclear weapons, and having effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, then that outcome would be a disastrous mistake.”

Trump’s deference to Netanyahu and the Iran hawks like Cruz is apparent in his recent demand that the very countries pushing for a peace deal, including Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, sign the Abraham Accords, entailing diplomatic ties with Israel. “After all the work done by the United States to try and pull this very complex puzzle together, it should be mandatory that all of these Countries, at a minimum, simultaneously, sign onto the Abraham Accords,” he asserted in a May 25 social-media post. “I’m not sure we should make the deal, if they don’t sign,” he added.

While Egypt and Jordan already maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, it is highly unlikely that Qatar and Saudi Arabia will agree to do so, given their oft-stated stipulation that Israel first agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank—a nonstarter for Netanyahu. By making this demand, then, Trump appears to be bowing to pressure from pro-war forces to disregard the pleas of the Gulf states and other US allies and resume the assault on Iran.

At this point, it appears that Trump is more likely to choose a peace settlement of some sort rather than the resumption of fighting, but either outcome is possible. Whatever happens, we can draw two conclusions from all this: First, Trump has lost any claim to be a master of military strategy, having employed US capabilities in a costly and spectacular fashion without achieving his stated goals; second, he has surrendered his executive authority to multiple choruses of regional interests without ever asserting an overarching US strategic objective.

It follows that any course of action he eventually chooses to pursue will likely prove detrimental to US interests. Should he decide to resume the fighting, we can expect intense Iranian retaliation, further damaging Persian Gulf energy installations and perpetuating the energy crisis—possibly triggering a global economic meltdown in the months ahead. Iran’s civilian population would also suffer mightily, producing a mammoth humanitarian crisis and claims of US war crimes. Renewed fighting would also entail the extensive employment of America’s remaining stockpiles of air-defense interceptors, leaving US forces in Europe and the Pacific at severe risk should they be drawn into a conflict with Russia or China. Countries that once looked to the United States for protection and strategic leadership, including the Gulf states and America’s Asian allies, will be tempted to seek alternative security arrangements, much as Canada has begun doing.

A decision to avoid war and sign a peace deal would be preferable in many respects, not the least being diminished human casualties. But it would also entail strategic risks for the United States. To begin with, it would widen an incipient breach in relations between the US and Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly denounced the draft peace agreement as overly beneficial to the Iranian regime and pledged to use force in Lebanon and elsewhere as needed to ensure Israel’s safety—even if this undermines the terms of the agreement.

“I think the war accomplished a great deal, but it’s not over,” Netanyahu told CBS News on May 10. “There are still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled. There are still proxies that Iran supports. There are ballistic missiles that they still want to produce,” he said—“all that is still there, and there’s work to be done.”

A peace agreement that fails to ensure these outcomes will also alienate many US hawks from both parties, who traditionally view close ties with Israel as essential to US security and the existence of any Iranian nuclear capabilities, however diminished, as anathema. By suspending military action and negotiating with the hard-line regime in Tehran, moreover, Trump will be viewed by many in Washington—and elsewhere—as a “paper tiger,” quick to back off when things got tough. The fact that “the strongest and most fierce military on the planet by far” was fought to a standstill by a third-rate military power will surely contribute to this impression of Trump’s ineffectualness.

It is too early to calculate how all this will play out, but it is hard to picture any outcome that burnishes Trump’s reputation as a decisive leader or that bolsters America’s status as a major world power. Rather, we will likely encounter a world that is more divided than ever, with a host of aspiring regional superpowers competing with one another—sometimes violently—for economic and strategic advantage.

In his new book, Hyperpolitics, the historian Anton Jäger offers an explanation for why contemporary life has become so polarized, so riven with political conflict, yet nothing seems to materially change. His explanation traces the collapse of 20th-century mass politics, and in particular unions, parties, and civic institutions that once gave ordinary people real collective power. As these structures eroded from the 1970s onward, what emerged in their wake was something far more disorienting: a public sphere overflowing with moral urgency and viral outrage. Jäger calls this condition hyperpolitics: extreme politicization without political results.

The Nation spoke with Jäger about the idea of hyperpolitics, the historical context out of which it emerged, the intellectual influences that shape Jäger’s thought, and if we are now moving beyond hyperpolitics. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: What do you specifically mean by the notion of “hyperpolitics”?

Anton Jäger: The book examines a mutation in political culture of what Branko Milanovic has termed the “political West.” It opens with a contrast. In the 1990s and 2000s, talk in political philosophy was of “post-politics” and a general disinterest in public affairs. Such a diagnosis appears out of date today. In the past decade, political activity has witnessed a steady return across the West: voter turnout, protest activity, public violence, discursive involvement are all up. This naturally invites comparisons with previous periods of high politicization, mostly the 1930s. As the book shows, however, such a similarity is deceptive: In contrast to the “wild” mass politics of the 1920s and ’30s, today’s politicization rarely takes on a durably institutional form—the hyperpolitics discussed, then, stands for a process of repoliticization without reinstitutionalization. It is in no way a totalizing style or master concept, of course. Hyperpolitics denotes an important and relatively new gravitational pole in contemporary political culture; yet it is not the only tendency around.

DSJ: It seems like you are using it not just as a political concept but also to identify a particular historical moment.

AJ: Indeed, the book is very much a history of a change in political culture, not just a shift in electoral patterns or party competition. It is also not a moral condemnation or indictment. Instead, it is about a new structural transformation of the public sphere, as Habermas would have it, which affects actors across the spectrum. As mentioned, the hyperpolitics discussed in the book is born in contrast: with the post-politics of the long 1990s that preceded it, and the mass politics which characterizes the short 20th century. The latter was marked by a type of politicization that tended towards institutional forms. The 1990s instead mark a decline on two axes: institutionalization and politicization. As turnout at elections declines and strike activity slumped, associational life also enters a secular crisis. This double minus offers an interesting entry point to the sensibility of the 1990s: a period in which citizens retreat from the public sphere and politics undergoes a privatization. The very idea that one would publicly share one one’s voting preferences becomes outré; politics becomes the province of specialists or junkies. The idea of collective action is philosophically suspect. Again, I wouldn’t want to pretend to grasp the entirety of an epoch with the concept. “All theory is gray, green is the tree of life,” as Goethe once said. .

DSJ: So is this ultimately a book about populism?

AJ: It would be dishonest of me to deny continuity with previous work—originality and self-reinvention are all too demanding standards by which we judge intellectual work.

But I would make a distinction, which the book tries to parse too, between anti-politics, populism, and hyperpolitics. The year 2008, coinciding with the credit crunch, is the cutoff point for the repoliticization which the book registers in the last decade and a half. Yet the waves of politicization after 2008 in fact unfold in two distinct stages. First, there is the initial opening salvo of “anti-politics.” This mainly presents a challenge to the methods of crisis management after 2008, in which the Western political class is identified with a post-political stalemate. Such a criticism of post-politics can evolve into a questioning of representation itself, yet there is a fundamental ambiguity here. On the one hand, the slogan “They don’t represent us”—that of the Spanish Indignados—insists on a deficit of representation. On the other hand, it could also slide into a more radical position: “We don’t want to be represented.” Such a logic is patently visible in Occupy, and it reappears in the Gilets Jaunes.

This ambiguity was eagerly exploited by anti-politicians. From the mid-2010s onwards, however, we saw the emergence of movements which, while stemming from this anti-political matrix, adopted a more institutional horizon. Whether Beppe Grillo, Geert Wilders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, or Jeremy Corbyn, each of these actors invoke “the people” and seek to build a representative link between a base and top through parties, electoral mechanisms, and forms of delegation. This necessarily invites evocations of an ideal of popular sovereignty—and therefore of representation, institutions, and structures.

Particularly on the left, such attempts also swiftly ran up against the complexities of institutionalization. Access to power proves less evident than expected, and the exercise of power even more restrictive. There are many examples—from Syriza to Podemos, via La France Insoumise—of movements which devise new forms of organization that are very different from the parties of the 20th century: digital parties, plebiscitary structures, blurred boundaries between leaders and activists. Mélenchon’s “gas-like party” and the very refusal of traditional legal registration are part of this logic. When we realize that entering formal politics is fraught with obstacles, the attraction of hyperpolitics becomes very strong. It does not presuppose any institutional horizon, any representation, any lasting structure. It allows for permanent spontaneity, without elections, without organizations, without long-term projections.

This is why I draw a clear line between anti-politics, populism, and hyperpolitics. The former still retains an institutional dimension, albeit a conflictual one; the latter is almost entirely free of it. Among the Gilets Jaunes, it is no longer just a question of saying “they don’t represent us”: Any claim to representation is suspect on principle; any attempt at a mandate immediately becomes illegitimate. This is a decisive difference.

DSJ: The two main intellectual influences behind your book are unexpected: the French novelist Michel Houellebecq and the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Why do they prove insightful for understanding hyperpolitics?

AJ: “Influences” would be too committal a description. I would say about Houellebecq what Lévi-Strauss said about Rousseau: It takes him two sentences to say what I can only express in five pages. Despite his uninspiring politics, he remains an immensely useful prism for the age. For Baudrillard, he seems to me one of the few figures from the late-century wave of French Theory whose grand anti-theory has, in fact, held up. I’m less interested in Baudrillard the thinker than Baudrillard the moralist, in the French tradition of Saint-Simon, Buffon, or Debord. All mix aristocratic, dandy-esque disdain for the US with a careful ethnographic interest in a society which is both so different and eerily similar to ours. This mixture of detachment and immersion is the main reason why they serve as lodestars for this book.

DSJ: In the attempt to understand the current authoritarian moment here in the US, many pundits, public intellectuals and historians look back to the crisis of democracy that Europe experienced between the World Wars, the party polarization that marked the Gilded Age and/or the failures of Reconstruction. What is your judgment of these historical comparisons given what you consider to be the unique nature of today’s hyperpolitics?

AJ: Humans are metaphorical animals—we can only make sense of our world by analogizing it to what we already know.

The argument to see the contemporary far right as “fascist’ here usually seems either genealogical or ideal-typical. On the one hand, explicit links and consanguinity between contemporary far-right figures and previous formations have been, pointed at, most visible in the Italian MSI and Meloni. On the other, the phenomenal similarities between far-right politics today and in the 20th century are also highlighted: a focus on exclusive citizenship, a highly monistic notion of democracy, a disregard for parliamentary power and focus on executives, suspension of liberal rights, and a conspirationist view of national decline that should be reversed by forcing a break with a stagnant liberalism.

This is compounded by a further difficulty: While the word “populist” is of only limited use when understanding the New Right, the term “fascist” proves equally constraining. In terms of the favoured ideologemes—from “great replacement” to other ethnonationalist fantasies—the continuity with the 20th century is hard to deny. Yet, in politics as in biology, the environment often proves as important as heredity, as historian Christopher Hill once noted, and contemporary fascists must contend with parameters incommensurate with those of their ancestors. These include demilitarization and the absence of a pre-revolutionary threat on the left, which were crucial in the line of interpretation pioneered by Dimitrov and extended by figures such as Neumann and Poulantzas after him. Yet, as Dylan Riley has noted, the peculiarity and the specificity of the far right become clear when contrasted with the fact that fascists were never able to retain any solid working-class support, a point of incessant frustration to many far-right cadres.

Giorgia Meloni’s party won an election in which nearly four out of 10 Italians stayed home, with turnout down by almost 10 percent from the country’s previous vote. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has long received its best tallies in regions that have the highest voter abstention rates—even with recent changes. In Poland, the Law and Justice party rules over a country where fewer than 1 percent of citizens are members of a political party. These are not mass affairs but rather exercises in orchestrated demobilization and passivity. As David Broder has noted on the Italian case, while “latest advance for a far-right party in the land of Fascism’s birth surely lends itself to evocative analogies,” this “does not mean that Mussolini’s heirs merely repeat the past in the present, or even that the fascist elements of their culture are always drawn from interwar Italy.” These indicate the deeply contemporary character of the Europe’s extreme-right surge.

What are better analogies? Rather than looking at the usual suspects in the 1930s or 1970s, the French philosopher Marcel Gauchet has recently made a daring countersuggestion: Look to the 1830s and 1840s, a paleo-industrial modernity far removed from the high modernism usually associated with the 20th century. This covers the advent of what Gauchet terms “the first crisis of liberalism” and the construction of a modern democratic imaginary, including the absence of institutions—political parties, above all—now mired in a deep crisis across the Western world. To the political philosopher, all the elements are there: an era of popular mobilization in which the subject of “the people” is the central point of reference, politics as the affair of professional notables, a political system lacking mass parties, and a public sphere in which public action is only weakly institutionalized except through conspiratorial societies. We have returned to that early post-revolutionary age, according to Gauchet.

Risks of anachronism aside, Gauchet’s suggestion is enticing—and holds potentially useful clues about the presumed post-liberal moment of the 2020s. Both on the left and the right, a stubborn attachment to 20th-century templates has obscured the possibility that our current age is better likened to less heroic ages of democracy and to a more primitive era of political development.

Another suitable analogy would be the period preceding the 1848 revolution, when protest was the dominant mode of political contestation and society remained thoroughly under-organized. There is a reason why Marx and Engels’ entitled their manifesto “The Manifesto for the Communist Party”—a call to channel radical energy into a specific organizational vessel. Yet even there are some major differences: The peasantry is no longer a majoritarian class the ancien régime is no longer with us; we are at the tail end, rather than the cusp, of the West’s Industrial Age. So maybe we’ll have to do our own thinking for ourselves in 2026, rather than rely on comforting templates.

DSJ: Given its slew of electoral successes, it seems as though the authoritarian right has adapted much quicker to hyperpolitics than its liberal and leftist opponents. Why is this?

AJ: There are two basic facts that bear repeating here. The right’s susceptibility to hyperpolitics is structurally lower than the left’s for two simple reasons. Firstly, a lower benchmark of political success, itself related to it being the Party of Order (as Marx termed it) which seeks to stabilise or preserve a set of social relations rather than overhaul it. Secondly and relatedly, an access to private donor funds which releases them from a dependence on membership dues which the left historically had. These enable and constrain the revival of a mass politics on the right: Private moneys are easily available, but these also delay the construction of a sturdy civil society, yet its base also expects less of it.

One could say there is a more contingent reason why the right has “won” the race for hyperpolitics, owing to a sense of class solidarity and discipline, or the quest for thicker notions of sociability. But I wouldn’t understate the extent of the crisis there either. Party democracy was in no way an exclusively left-wing phenomenon—and often had very specific anthropological preconditions, certainly in Belgium. There is a long set of pre-political practices that previously provided a foundation for right-wing political activity that cannot be taken for granted anymore. Even these pre-political practices were once the subject of political decisions; religiosity and sociability can be turned into a dependent rather than independent variable. It could be that the right proves more successful at relaunching a civic authoritarianism; 20th-century fascism, after all, found a welcome base in the security and police forces. Washington is indeed rolling out an arbitrary and cruel deportation machine, but the danger remains that the Trump administration’s emboldening of federal agents promises less social solidity than 24/7 theatrics, visible in their retreat in Minneapolis. But I might well be proven wrong on this criterion in the coming months; social science is not a hard, predictive discipline.

DSJ: What must the left do to counteract such disadvantages?

AJ: This is not a cookbook for the future; prescription is not something it trades in comfortably. But judging by its definition, any move beyond the hyperpolitical impasse would have to tackle the question of reinstitutionalization.

To me, such a question is inescapably oriented on that of the party. I fear I’m a very old-fashioned Leninist in that regard: From the left, I do not see significant social change as possible without parties.

This comes with all the usual caveats. That parties are prone to oligarchization, bureaucratization, and cartelization are old truths in political science, for which many political theorists and strategists have thought out careful solutions. I think this literature should be revisited. As Eric Hobsbawm said of the Tangentopoli affair and campaign against particrazia in Italy in the early 1990s: The Italians threw out the baby and retained the bathwater when it comes to party politics. Parties are always potentially exclusionary, whether vertically (elite capture) or horizontally (in-group dynamics). The question is how to devise checks that protect them against such tendencies.

My sense is mainly that the alternatives for partyism are also limited: either elite pressure, itself a thankless task for a left that cannot naturally find allies on the level of the elite, or collective bargaining by riot, as Hobsbawm put it. In Albert Hirschman’s taxonomy, the only remaining option is post-political apathy or exit.

DSJ: Are there signs that we are now moving beyond hyperpolitics?

AJ: As mentioned, social-scientific theories are not hard predictive tools, despite economists’s enthusiasm for them. In a piece for The New York Times earlier this year, journalist Ross Barkan solemnly declared that 2025 would herald the end of hyperpolitics. “Farewell resistance,” Barkan argued in January 2025, and “where has all the anti-Trump energy gone now?”

Even on the left, political events supply evidence for Barkan’s thesis: the mayoral win for Zohran Mamdani in New York or the recent surge in membership for Die Linke. They show that the default mode of political engagement of the 2010s—protest activity—has lost some of its luster. As a great political theorist once said, there is no such thing as an impossible situation, and an invalidation of the book’s hypothesis might hardly prove beneficial for book sales. But it will surely be good for the world.

We were in hot pursuit of the caravan that was chauffeuring Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who had just arrived in Minnesota the day before. In his wake were a dozen or so cars, some carrying journalists and others full of “commuters”—the term used by citizens who follow immigration agents around in an effort to alert community members to their presence. For months, I and a number of other members of the press had been following Bovino from Illinois to North Carolina to Louisiana, and now to Minnesota, documenting the impact of the Trump administration’s surges of federal immigration agents. We spent a lot of time in rental cars, driving like maniacs.

When you do this kind of work, you walk a fine line: You don’t want to get in the middle of the commuters and agents, but you don’t want to lose the caravan either. In my rental car, I straddled lanes, riding the bumper of the car in front of me. When a BMW tried to cut me off , I held my ground. I locked eyes with the driver, expecting a random pissed-off person who wouldn’t understand why I was acting like a jerk. Instead, I saw a masked man behind the wheel, his eyes and the bridge of his nose immediately identifying him to me as one of Bovino’s guys. The BMW was full of Border Patrol agents, and we were keeping them from the rest of their pack.

I slammed on the brakes, raised my hands, and shrugged. Oops, I mouthed. The driver shook his head and wagged his finger at us. When we ended up next to each other again at a light a few blocks up, the agents rolled their windows down and cracked a few jokes at my expense. Probably not the reaction a random civilian would have gotten.

I never really intended to cover immigration in any capacity, especially not with video. I’m a writer whose work focuses on the far right. But when President Trump brought the National Guard and ICE to Washington, DC, I started recording as much of their activities as I could. This meant recording federal agents lurking around Metro stations, apprehending people for smoking weed, and overseeing roadblocks conducted by the local police. After a few weeks, a friend who had followed ICE in DC with me suggested I go to Broadview, a village outside Chicago with an ICE facility that was central to Operation Midway Blitz, the administration’s name for the surge of federal agents into Chicago, ostensibly for immigration enforcement. By 8 am on my first day there, agents had gassed the handful of protesters who had gathered outside numerous times and had drawn handguns. After one weekend in Broadview, I could not imagine caring about any other story. I spent the rest of Bovino’s tenure following the surges, creating videos for Mother Jones.

The compulsion to stick with this story was not unique to me. A handful of us followed Bovino to the other cities, becoming increasingly obsessed with recording raids and abductions. How could anyone think anything else in the world mattered? People needed to see what we were witnessing. Going home for weddings, birthdays, or just a few days off was jarring. A Chicago-based journalist friend pointed out that if what was happening in Chicago had happened in New York City, it would be on the front page of every paper in the world. Until Renée Good was killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January, most people did not have any concept of the scale of violence we were witnessing. Though Los Angeles was the first city to face a surge, many of the people, reporters included, who traveled around following immigration agents started in Chicago.

Chicago, a city with 560,000 immigrants, has been one of Trump’s favorite targets. Trump has attacked its governor, JB Pritzker, as a “loser” and “fat slob.” And throughout his first and second terms, he has depicted Chicago as a lawless city; crime statistics in Chicago are a favorite refrain of MAGA.

Federal agents guarded the Broadview facility during protests for the first few weeks of Midway Blitz. Their tactics, from tear-gassing the neighborhood to shooting pepper balls directly at protesters, resulted in an extreme amount of violence against a largely unprepared crowd of people. Agents often seemed to single out members of the press, routinely sniping at us from the rooftops of nearby buildings. On September 27, a day so violent and brutal that local police ended up taking over guarding the facility, photographer Dave Decker snapped a shot of an agent near the facility’s gate.

“I bet that picture looks cool as hell,” the agent told Decker, who had been shot with pepper balls numerous times that day as he tried to take photos. “Can you tag me on Instagram?”

We were all gobsmacked by the navel-gazing request. But the agent’s comment was a sign of the perverse narcissism that was to come. DHS agents might not like journalists, but they love being recorded and photographed. Weeks after this event, agents made small talk with another photographer I spoke with who had been following them around the Chicago area since the start of Midway Blitz. They asked if he had photos of them, and he replied that he wasn’t sure, because all the agents looked the same to him. Acting as though that was a ridiculous statement, they explained the differences in how they each wore their vests and uniforms. Eventually, the agents gave up and asked for the photographer’s Instagram handle to check for themselves.

DHS agents routinely stole and repurposed videos and photos taken by journalists and used them in their own propaganda campaigns. In other circumstances this might have given us pause, but there was a stark contrast between the agents’ reactions to the footage and the public’s responses to it. We were documenting the agents to make sure the public saw their violence. The agents just thought they were in the eye of the paparazzi.

At a gas station in St. Paul, I watched Border Patrol agents tackle and arrest a protester unprovoked. The agents then busted out the window of a car driven by a man who Bovino, without evidence, had declared was a Honduran national. Bovino dragged the man out of his vehicle with such force that he fell unconscious. He was hauled off in an SUV and was ultimately deported.

The next day, a photographer and I were following a small caravan of agents from the Bureau of Prisons and BORTAC, the elite tactical unit of Border Patrol. During a stop at a gas station, they asked who we worked for. The photographer explained wire services to them, and I asked if they had seen the previous day’s gas-station melee on the news that morning. I told them it was my video and that the photographer with me had taken a perfect, clear shot of the car window as they broke the glass. Impressed, the agent asked which car was ours, giving us their blessing to follow them.

Two days after I filmed the gas-station detainments, I recorded video as Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman who was driving by as a raid was taking place, was yanked from her car. I was not prepared for the response the video got. People messaged me to tell me it was the first thing they had seen that made them concerned about the immigration surges. News outlets around the world played the footage, and Rahman ultimately testified to Congress about her experience. A journalist from a major national outlet called me about it, expressing horror. They kindly asked me if I was shocked at what I had witnessed. Tired, hungry, covered in tear gas, and unable to regulate my response, I said that the only shocking part of this was that such a large media organization was calling me about it.

And it wasn’t just media outlets that seemed surprised by the footage. Sometimes I would read about my videos in X comments and on Reddit, which reach an audience much larger than my written work does. Those viewers, unaware of who I was, would wonder how I was so close to the violence without being hurt myself. Some speculated that I was lugging around a large television camera and assumed that the agents avoided harming television reporters because of the optics. But I am just a writer who records video on an iPhone, and the truth about the agents was far more bizarre: They accepted our presence and welcomed the attention. Perhaps in their minds we were part of their official entourage.

Early on in Minnesota, an agent I didn’t recognize got out of his car at a red light and yelled at my vehicle, telling us to stop following them. We explained that we were press, but he didn’t care. Less than a minute later, another agent ran up, apparently to do damage control. We were the ones who took a lot of video, right?, he asked us. We shouldn’t worry about that other guy—we were totally fine to follow them! Soon after, a few of us were following a lone commuter in Minneapolis who was honking while tailing a couple of Border Patrol cars. When the Border Patrol cars stopped abruptly and the agents hopped out, so did we. An armed masked agent prepared to pound on the commuter’s window and briefly looked back at us.

“Oh, hey man, what’s up?,” he said, cheerfully greeting a photographer he recognized from Charlotte or New Orleans. Then he turned back and barked at the commuter: “This is your one and final warning!” The guy inside the car looked terrified. Though Bovino has said that the horns and whistles activists use to alert people that Border Patrol is nearby actually help agents, the reality is they irritate the agents and hinder their ability to conduct raids.

In the online magazine Hammer and Hope, the photographer Ashley Gilbertson wrote that agents in Chicago recognized him from his time embedded in war zones in West Africa and Iraq. By the time Operation Catahoula Crunch—an action where law enforcement reassigned Border Patrol agents—kicked off in Louisiana, the Border Patrol agents assigned to Bovino had begun to address some journalists by name, which was startling. Bovino frequently replied to our videos on X, and it was hard to imagine they didn’t all know who each of us were. But to us, the agents were all interchangeable and nameless.

Bovino showed up in Minnesota the same day that Renée Good was killed. The next morning, a fairly large crowd of protesters gathered outside of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, which houses an immigration court and an ICE processing center. Tear gas, pepper balls, and violent arrests ensued, and eventually a line of agents stood guard, keeping the protesters off the property. I started taking B-roll to kill time, but ran into a videographer I knew from other surge cities. We stopped to catch up, close enough to the agents they could have joined our conversation. As we chatted about our experiences in Chicago and New Orleans, the agents remained stone-faced, pretending not to listen or care. But when our conversation ended, one of them asked me what Broadview had been like.

“Extraordinarily violent,” I told him, surprised by his question. I asked if he had been to any of the other surges, and he said no.

As I described the obscene amounts of tear gas that had been unleashed on peaceful protesters and the targeting of the media, the agents nearby gave up the pretense of not listening. They were standing at their home base, where they have guns and some degree of authority, but here I was, telling them what their future deployment would be like. It was as though they were the outsiders at their own event.

In fact, my time covering the surges has been a continued point of interest to immigration agents. When President Trump announced in March that ICE would be stationed at airports to “assist TSA,” I flew to Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport to see what it was all about. The agents were far more talkative than the ones I had met during surges: some right away, while others warmed up after I continued to show up every morning and stand around, or after they saw videos of themselves go viral or get picked up. (In my experience, people don’t like to read about themselves, but they do like to see themselves on television).

On ICE’s second day at the airport, the subject of activist photographers came up. “Isn’t that you?” one agent asked. “An activist?” They hadn’t heard of Mother Jones when they met me the day before, but they had since looked up the magazine. I thought they might tell me to get lost, but for the rest of the week, they seemed to feel that my presence at the surges made up for my political stances. Perhaps they were just lonely, happy to have some female energy around.

Some of these agents had been deployed to Minnesota and told me about their experiences there. A few had been stationed in DC, which surprised me, since the conversion of FBI, ATF, and IRS agents to ICE agents had led me to assume there weren’t many out-of-towners brought in. Some who had not been deployed before asked me what it had been like to be at the surges. One even said he was grateful that he hadn’t been deployed: Apparently, the experience was not alluring for everyone. All the agents who had been to Minnesota told me they never wanted to go back, for any reason.

Some agents in Houston said they were likely deployed to the airport for optics. Many of them were upset that all immigration officials were branded as “ICE”—apparently they didn’t want to be associated with Bovino’s cowboy-style Border Patrol raids. Even so, when I took a video of agents handing out water to people in line, some rolled their eyes, saying it was embarrassing for them to be doing this. According to the crew in San Antonio, some of them had signed up thinking they would get to work the TSA machines, which could at least be cool. Instead, they were stuck being cart boys and girls. A weak and disappointing turn of events!

But as unhappy as they might have been about the public perception of ICE, many agents also did not want to be the new TSA. I knew that they would not be leaving the airport anytime soon. (ICE stayed at the airports in Houston for several weeks). “It’s not my cup of tea, but I’ll drink it,” one agent told me about airport patrol. Another said he had declined the six-hour TSA training, knowing that learning to man the machinery would be a de facto career shift. After all, if he had wanted to be a TSA agent, he would have joined the TSA.

These conversations were always peppered with questions about what I thought of the surges, from topics as benign as the weather in Minnesota to my take on Bovino, who had recently told me he’d love to see me “bustling around the kitchen, baking a pie” (a story that flabbergasted even the ICE agents). In New Orleans, I had a similar experience with a BORTAC team who, after inviting me and a photographer to follow them to a raid, asked us even more questions than we asked them.

For now, the flashy raids that regularly poured tear gas into homes and schools have stopped. Some of the photographers have left for war zones, while others are now covering more routine aspects of life. I am struggling to finish writing an overdue story detailing the entire experience, worried I’ll fail to fully convey the horrors of things I witnessed. Almost all of us would drop everything in our lives and be on the next flight out if the “Papers, please” style of immigration enforcement returned. But for now, at least we have the videos.

Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is absolute. In two runoff primaries in Texas this week, Trump-backed Attorney General Ken Paxton beat incumbent Republican Senator John Cornyn to become the Republican candidate for Senate. Cornyn has been a dutiful MAGA servant in the Senate, but Paxton, whose tenure as AG has been marred by corruption scandals and rank extremism, is an election denier, so he got Trump’s endorsement and eventually won.

In the other Republican runoff, election denier Mayes Middleton beat Republican Representative Chip Roy in the race to replace Paxton as AG. Trump didn’t endorse in this race, but he once again seemed to favor the election denier over the dutiful MAGA servant. Clearly, the best way into Trump’s Republican Party remains falsely claiming Trump won the election he obviously lost.

And once you’re in, you’re all but guaranteed victory. Across the primary spectrum, Trump-backed candidates are wiping the floor with Republicans Trump dislikes. GOP Representative Thomas Massie lost his primary last week, and all Massie did was call for the release of the Epstein files. (OK, he also opposed the Iran War.) Massie promptly hightailed it to Costa Rica, where he was spied this week vacationing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, another MAGA Republican who didn’t even bother to run in a primary after she also pissed off Trump by calling for the release of the Epstein files.

I’ve never seen a president with this kind of control over his party, certainly not one with a 34 percent approval rating. Trump is a stunningly unpopular, lame-duck president (or should be, if the Constitution is to be believed), and yet Republicans who support every one of his awful and unpopular policies are getting thrown out of office for not showing enough loyalty to the Dear Leader.

What really gets me is that the fealty demanded by Trump isn’t even being backed up by any overt acts of violence. Crossing Joseph Stalin or Maximilien Robespierre or Augustus Caesar would get you jailed and, likely, killed. Trump hasn’t needed to enforce party discipline using any of those methods. He threatens people with… mean tweets? And they all crumble before him. And the ones who don’t “self deport” to Costa Rica.

The GOP is not a political party—it’s a cult. I don’t know what to do about that, or how to fight it—and I feel like anybody who tells you they do is lying.

The Bad and the Ugly

• Speaking of Ken Paxton, the Texas AG is now coming after the popular online platform Discord, accusing it of being a “hunting ground” for child predators. For the uninitiated, Discord is a social-media app used primarily by gamers that is particularly useful for voice chatting during gaming sessions. It’s not a thing I let my teenager use (yet), but it’s also not the place where I am most concerned about child predators. That place would be Roblox, which I’ve tried to warn parents about multiple times in this space. But what’s really interesting about Paxton’s move is that Discord is one of those safe spaces for the troglodytes of the white-wing manosphere. (It’s safe for non-trolls too, as long as you join more thoughtful servers.) These are the kinds of guys who vote for Republicans because they hate “woke” Democrats, yet they never seem to care that it’s Republicans who consistently push the regulations that try to bring these gaming spaces under government control. They’re so obsessed with hating women and LGBTQ+ people that they don’t even recognize which political party supports free expression.
• South Carolina Republicans rejected a redistricting plan that would have erased the majority-Black district currently represented by Jim Clyburn. People have been calling this a rare post-Callais “victory” for Black folks, and it is, but it’s also very hard to draw a map in South Carolina that weakens Clyburn but still protects his congressional neighbor, Republican Representative Nancy Mace.
• Trump apparently wants to make federal workers sign nondisclosure agreements as a way to prevent leaks. I’d say the idea is flatly unconstitutional, but the Supreme Court won’t agree with me. It made staffers sign NDAs after the Dobbs leak. 
• The lawyer representing a tourist from Washington State who was captured on video throwing a large rock at an endangered sea lion in Hawaii says his client was trying to protect sea turtles. I’ve seen the video. I don’t see any sea turtles. I do see a giant asshole who I hope gets prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And then I hope they reform the law to make even more draconian punishments available.
• UC Berkeley’s law school has adopted what is probably the most restrictive AI ban we’ve seen in higher education. Students are prohibited from using AI even to check their grammar. While I am no fan of using AI in law, my gut tells me that Berkeley has gone too far.
  

Inspired Takes

Grace Ginsburg shared an intensely personal essay in The Nation about her decision to take GLP-1s. I don’t want to summarize her piece, as it’s a complicated struggle between a feminist rejection of body shaming and her own desire to like how she looks. Instead, I’ll share a little bit of my journey, as I’ve been on GLP-1s for over a year now, and between that and a lot more exercise, I’ve lost about 50 lbs.

Unlike a lot of people who are “morbidly obese,” which is, somehow, the literal medical term for my weight class, I’ve never been particularly morbid about it. I’m fat (a word I much prefer over “morbidly obese”), which I view as unfortunate, but I have the body-confidence of a man half my size (and the general unwavering self-confidence of a mediocre white man). I’ve made my weight part of my “personality.” More important, I’ve enjoyed the lifestyle of a fat person: eating what I want, when I want, not obsessing about the mirror or the scales. Hell, I didn’t even own a scale until I started down this path. I look at people who spend hours at the gym every day and nibble salads for lunch with pity more than envy.

But as I got older, my weight really started to negatively impact my health. Not in the “oh noes, heart attack and stroke” sense, but in a day-to-day “my knees can no longer support my massive frame” way. It was affecting my quality of life and my decision-making: I, like, wouldn’t go up the stairs to check on my kids because I didn’t want to walk up the stairs. Once your lifestyle starts preventing you from doing what you want to do in life, it’s time to at least consider change.

So I started on the wonder drugs and hired a personal trainer out of concerns for my short-term health and quality of life, not because of societal pressure (admittedly, so much harder on women than men) to look different. Two years ago, I needed a cane if I was going to have to walk around for more than a few minutes. Last summer, I walked over 100,000 steps at Disney World without any form of assistance beyond comfortable shoes. My plan is working, more or less.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the benefits have been exclusive to my personal health and well-being. The feedback loop based on how I look has been… shocking and intense. Some people, both strangers and even friends, treat me better (even though I’m still objectively fat) just because I’m not as overweight. People are nicer to me. People smile at me more often. People say I seem “happier,” even though I am objectively despondent about trying to eke out a living under white-wing fascism. I feel almost as if I’m in the Eddie Murphy sketch where he pretends to be a white man. I don’t think it’s just in my head, as, again, my (high) opinion of myself has not changed.

And I’m a guy! Male privilege means I can look like an ogre and still win a popularity contest and become the president of the United States. I can only imagine what this feedback loop is like for women.

I was ambivalent about taking GLP-1s before I started. But I cannot deny that the social life of a slightly less fat person is better than before. I always suspected that to be true but, man, am I dismayed by how true it is.

Worst Argument of the Week

On Thursday, the Supreme Court released its decision in Rutherford v. United States, a case about the First Steps Act, which sought to address mass incarceration. The case involved two men who had been sentenced to 32-year and 57-year mandatory minimum sentences prior to the passage of the act. If they had been sentenced today, they would have likely received 14-year and 32-year sentences. They applied for compassionate release because of the disparity between their sentences and the current standard.

You don’t need me to tell you that the six Republicans on the Supreme Court are “compassionate” only to white folks who use God as an excuse for their bigotry. The prisoners were denied compassionate release, 6–3, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing the majority opinion for the Republican klavern.

Barrett got stuck on the fact that the First Step Act was not made retroactive. Congress could have (and, I strenuously argue, should have), but it did not. Indeed, the fact that Congress could have made the act retroactive, and purposefully did not, is Barrett’s strongest point.

But the First Step Act wasn’t really the issue in this case. Instead, the core legal issue was an opinion from the US Sentencing Commission, which found that courts could look at disparities between the First Step Act and sentences issued prior to its passage when considering applications for compassionate release.

Barrett and the Republicans on the Supreme Court rejected this guidance and instead prohibited courts from considering such disparities when reviewing compassionate-release applications. Put another way, the Commission said judges could think about the gross hypocrisy of one sentence versus another, and Barrett effectively said, “No, judges are not allowed to think about reality.”

Rutherford v. US is thus another case where practical realities don’t matter to Republican justices committed to their ideological obsessions. It’s also another power grab by the Supreme Court over the administrative state. An agency merely said that one issue could factor into a judge’s opinion, but Barrett and the Supreme Court superseded that guidance (which they’re not supposed to do) and ordered judges to stick their heads in the sand.

One of the Federalist Society’s greatest victories has been convincing Republican judges that ideology should trump reality at all times. They’ve created an entire army of jurists who view facts as unimportant distractions—to say nothing of judges like Neil Gorsuch who just make up whatever facts they need to support the outcomes they prefer.

If the Democrats ever reform the judiciary, it will be important for them to appoint judges who believe in such controversial ideas as “Black people and women-people are people-people and should get people rights.” But we also desperately need a new cadre of judges who think about how their decisions play out among real people and not in law review articles.

What I Wrote

Jim Crow suffered a temporary setback in Alabama this week when a panel of district court judges rejected an unconstitutionally racist map put forward by the Alabama legislature. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the ruling will last. That’s because the Republicans on the Supreme Court suddenly become very well acquainted with the real world when it comes to helping Republicans win elections.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

In 2021, Krafton, a South Korean games publisher, bought the independent games developer Unknown Worlds for $500 million. Unknown Worlds was known for making Subnautica, a popular underwater survival game in which you basically crash-land on a water world and have to figure out how to survive and rebuild your ship while exploring the spooky ocean depths.

It’s a good game, though hardly worth $500 million. But the purchase was made in 2021, and the thing about 2021 is that the entire video game industry was just coming off a Covid boom. People were locked inside, playing more games than ever before, and games were making more money than ever before. Even though the industry was obviously in a bubble, companies went a little nuts and spent like the inflated pandemic numbers would last forever.

They did not.

In any event, when buying Unknown Worlds, Krafton included a little carrot for the founders of the company and their core staff: It promised them a $250 million bonus if Unknown Worlds hit certain revenue targets within five years. Unknown Worlds got to work on Subnautica 2.

Fast-forward to 2025, by which point it’s clear that Krafton made a terrible deal. Again, Subnautica was a good game, but it wasn’t going to be worth the $500 million purchase price. That said, Subanutica 2 was probably going to hit the revenue targets needed to trigger most or all of the $250 million bonus.

That’s when Krafton CEO Changhan Kim went to ChatGPT and asked how he could get out of his deal. No, I’m not making that up. When Krafton’s own lawyers told him that there was no way out of the contract, my man asked AI how to breach it.

ChatGPT gave him an answer. Remember, AI is like that desperate kid in high school who just wants to be liked. ChatGPT told him to fire the founders and delay the release of Subnautica 2 to avoid having to pay the bonus. Which Kim then did.

ChatGPT’s legal advice, however, was dead wrong. The makers of Subnautica 2 sued, and, after a trial during which all this ChatGPT stuff had to be disclosed, a judge ordered the founders reinstated and the game released. The judge also extended the timeline for the revenue targets through June 2026 (to account for Kim’s shenanigans) and ordered Krafton to pay a bonus amounting to $3.12 for every $1.00 in revenue, up to the $250 million cap.

Subnautica 2 was released on May 14 for $30 on Steam. The game sold over 4 million copies in under a week. That far outpaces more expensive games you may have heard of, like the recently released Resident Evil 9. Subnautica 2 will almost certainly hit all revenue targets and force Krafton to pay out the full $250 million bonus, which the founders have indicated will be shared with the staff that helped make the game. And the judge still hasn’t ruled on what damages the Unknown Worlds founders are entitled to.

The lesson, as always: Don’t take legal advice from ChatGPT. Well, don’t take legal advice from ChatGPT unless you’re a greedy CEO looking to screw over your partners. If you’re that guy, by all means, feel free to fail in whichever way seems best to you.

***

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Donald Trump is a rotten peacemaker for many reasons—but one of them is that he can’t even remember which enemy he’s fighting. For instance, during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, a reporter asked Trump if the United States would accept a proposal to allow Iran and Oman to jointly administer the Strait of Hormuz. The president responded, “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that. They’ll be fine.”

Trump’s opposition to any settlement that allows Iran partial control of the Strait is understandable, but his menacing words against Oman are puzzling. The Gulf state has, after all, been an American ally for decades, and the US maintains a strong military presence in the country. One supposed rationale of the current US war in the Middle East is to protect Oman and other Gulf allies against Iran.

Oman isn’t the only ally Trump is seeking to intimidate, or the only country to feel the brunt of Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric. The president tried to browbeat Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan into joining the Abraham Accords by saying membership “should be mandatory.” And, as CNN notes, “Oman is at least the 15th country that he has either threatened to attack, left open the possibility of attacking, or actually attacked during his two terms as president.” While some of these countries are long-standing US foes like Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea, many are nominally allies of the United States (or at the very least, not hostile to it): Canada, Colombia, Greenland/Denmark, Mexico, Panama, and Oman.

Trump is in effect using the war against Iran in the same way he exploited the Russia/Ukraine conflict: as a means of turning alliances into protection rackets by exhorting concessions from countries depending on the US military. It’s a mafia foreign policy that uses US military dominance as a tool of extortion to intimidate friends and foes alike.

While violent rhetoric, often manifesting itself in violent action, has been endemic to Trump’s presidency, his lashing out at Oman comes at a particularly dangerous moment. The war against Iran has been a disaster, and the only way to end it is to make substantial concessions to the Islamic Republic. And Iran is joining the ranks of nations that have effective deterrence against the United States and therefore deserve conciliation. Trump’s actions suggest that he has come to see China, Russia, and North Korea in those terms as well.

But a wounded predator can become more violent, lashing out to prove it still has the ability to dominate. This is the brute animal logic behind Trump’s threats against Oman and his increased aggression in the Western Hemisphere. Writing in The Guardian, columnist Owen Jones noted,

With the US “humiliated” by Iran, as Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, put it, you might think Trump’s appetite for conflict would be diminished. But failure does not necessarily restrain declining powers. It can make them more dangerous. Trump and his team have surely convinced themselves that conquering the Caribbean island that has defied Washington for nearly seven decades might scrub away the defeats and restore the aura of US military supremacy.

Jones plausibly suggests that Cuba might be the next US target, since Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have been very open about their desire for regime change in the island nation. Cuba has long been in the crosshairs of the United States, and Trump has tightened the noose by brutally intensifying sanctions. Politico reported on Friday, “The Pentagon has spent months positioning the troops and weapons needed for the U.S. to launch a military attack on Cuba—all it needs is a final go-ahead from Donald Trump.”

Cuba is only one of several likely targets.

Precisely because the United States has difficulty imposing its will on bigger rivals, Trump is eager to find smaller foes that can serve as punching bags. The late neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen, who was a huge admirer of Trump, said in 1992, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”

Ledeen’s words can stand as the core of Trump’s foreign policy with one amendment. Because the US is now declining on the world stage, the need to beat up on a “crappy little country” can’t be a once-a-decade event but has to take place constantly.

Along with Cuba, the other nations Trump is likely to go after are all in the Western Hemisphere, as the president increasingly reverts to a 19th-century form of imperialism that sees the region as being part of the US sphere of influence.

On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is ratcheting up counterinsurgency programs in Guatemala and pushing to do the same in Honduras, under the mantle of the war on drugs. The larger project includes intimidating Mexico to fall in line. Citing “two people” familiar with the plans, the Times reports:

While Washington has been pushing for U.S. boots on the ground and drone strikes, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico has staunchly rejected the requests. The White House’s broader strategy is to normalize an American military presence across Latin America to gain leverage over Mexico…

Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, is spearheading this project. He holds bimonthly “win” meetings to celebrate what he regards as triumphs, including boat strikes against purported drug dealers (a policy at odds with both US and international law).

Needless to say, what Miller regards as “wins” are disgusting and immoral displays of thuggery. As a superpower, the US unquestionably can intimidate neighboring countries and obliterate random boats on the high seas. But such policies serve no national security interest. Even in terms of displaying strength, they are counterproductive, since they are so clearly compensating for the reality that the US keeps losing wars in the Middle East. Under Trump, the United States has become a bully looking for weaker and weaker victims in order to hide its own fragility.

None of this can hide the larger reality that the US is an empire in steep decline. In fact, it only makes that bleak reality more obvious.

Pope Leo’s groundbreaking encyclical on AI reminds us that the great debate of our moment is not really about technology. It is about the policy choices that will decide whether this new industrial revolution—which is destined to upend everything about how we work, communicate, organize society, and fight wars—will be made to improve the lives of ordinary people or the bottom-line interests of billionaires trying to become trillionaires.

Leo is clear about where he stands, writing, “Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.… The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences and indicating paths forward for humanity.”

The pope is right to be concerned and to be engaged in the debate about whether a handful of tech-bro CEOs will determine the future of this planet.

The question then becomes whether political leaders will challenge the rush by a few billionaires to both develop artificial intelligence and buy influence over the future of AI through massive political spending and lobbying efforts. So far, only a handful of elected officials and candidates have displayed the knowledge and the courage to join the debate on behalf of the many.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has stepped up in a big way, calling for a moratorium on the development of AI data centers to slow the AI-driven rush toward the robotification of workplaces, the amplification of disinformation, the elevation of surveillance, and the acceleration of weaponization. So has US Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who has proposed smart strategies for regulating AI, taxing tech billionaires, and ensuring that working-class Americans have access to the education, training, and opportunities they will need to get by in a future transformed by artificial intelligence and robots.

But they are the outliers in Washington, and it’s not much better in the states–except, perhaps, in California, where progressive philanthropist Tom Steyer is mounting a gubernatorial campaign arguing that “the people who stand to profit the most from this technology shouldn’t be making the rules about how it is used. Otherwise, the AI era will be another boom for billionaires—and a bust for everyone else.”

Steyer, a longtime advocate on climate issues and a billionaire who knows his way around Silicon Valley, has emerged as the major progressive Democratic contender ahead of Tuesday’s intense open primary for the most powerful governorship in the nation. Polls show that Steyer, who has self-funded much of his campaign, has a good chance of being one of the two candidates who get through the primary and go on to face each other in November. And AI policy is a key part of his agenda.

Steyer pulls no punches when he talks about taxing the wealth of the tech elite, holding the industry accountable, and using the power of the state so that working-class Californians are not left behind by the AI revolution. “Globalization displaced millions of workers, with no plan for what comes next,” he says. “We can’t allow that history to repeat itself in the AI era.”

With this in mind, Steyer has developed a bold, comprehensive plan to “make sure that all Californians benefit from AI.” He wants to provide smart job protections for workers and to retrain those who are displaced by AI. He also wants to ask voters to approve the creation of the Golden State Sovereign Wealth Fund. As his campaign explains, the fund would serve as “a dedicated investment vehicle funded by a ‘token tax’ on corporate AI use—a fraction of a cent for every unit of data processed by Big Tech.”

The resources in the fund would “help ensure everyday Californians share in the AI boom, through cash dividends, investments in education, training, and job opportunities to help workers succeed, and strategic investments to ensure broad-based economic growth so every Californian can get ahead.”

The clarity of this message helps to explain why Khanna and unions that are increasingly concerned about AI have backed Steyer. His other progressive stances—as a billionaire who wants to tax billionaires, and an enthusiastic supporter Medicare for All, building affordable housing, and making education affordable for every Californian—have attracted support from the California Nurses Association, the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, the Service Employees International Union, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the California Federation of Labor Unions, hotels workers and others organized by UNITE-HERE, the Sierra Club, Our Revolution, former secretary of labor Robert Reich, environmentalist Bill McKibben, and US Representatives Lateefah Simon and Jared Huffman.

Predictably, Steyer has also attracted desperate opposition from free-spending political action committees favored by the healthcare, utility, fossil fuel, and AI industries. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, for instance, recently steered $950,000 into a political action committee that backs Xavier Becerra, a former California attorney general, member of Congress, and Biden cabinet member who has emerged as the favorite of corporate interests in the race for governor.

Steyer’s response was blunt: “Mark Zuckerberg wants a friend in Sacramento. I won’t be.”

Steyer was equally blunt when I spoke to him recently about the race in general, and his stance on AI in particular. “You never know how anything is going to turn out, but the people running the biggest companies—the biggest large-language model [artificial intelligence algorithm] companies—believe this is a 30-foot tsunami coming at us at 100 miles an hour.”

Faced with this reality, the corporate-friendly AI policies adopted by the Trump administration and the disengaged responses of too many Democrats make no sense to Steyer. “Obviously, AI is overwhelmingly being developed in California,” he said. “It’s not ‘going to happen’—it’s happening. It’s absolutely happening.” That being the case, Steyer argued, progressives cannot be on the sidelines of the debate.

“Wait till it hits and see what happens? That doesn’t seem to me to be an appropriate response,” explained the candidate. “By the time the tsunami hits, it’s a little hard to get to high ground.”

So Steyer has met with key figures in the industry, as well as union leaders and experts on labor issues, to get a clear sense of what jobs are threatened by AI and robots—and how to address the circumstance of people who are displaced by technology. “We’ve talked a lot about protecting working people. We’ve talked a lot about real retraining to get people into real jobs.”

In addition, Steyer said, “We’ve talked about the people of California basically getting a token fee, for every calculation done by artificial intelligence—as a way of giving [Californians a piece of the largesse that comes from the transformation of their workplaces]. The people of California have to own part of this, because we can’t have 12 trillionaires and 40 million people who can’t make rent because they’re losing their jobs. It can’t happen, and we can’t let it happen.”

What’s striking about Steyer is the detail with which he has addressed issues that his fellow gubernatorial contenders–like most political figures nationwide—barely touch upon. For instance, Steyer’s campaign says:

• “Tom will make sure we protect workers and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs that AI can’t do. Regardless of its potential, AI will not replace all thinking and creative jobs. While it may make them faster or more efficient, no machine can replace our innate creativity, compassion, and experience—the uniquely human things we bring to our work.”
• “Tom will partner with labor to adopt reasonable guardrails for AI use in the workplace—especially when it comes to privacy, health, safety, and fairness.”
• “Tom will require social media platforms to conduct safety audits and strictly enforce age requirements, including requiring independent safety testing to make sure models are safe before they go on the market.”
• “Data centers should never cost California families a cent. Tom will mandate that data centers ensure energy prices for families go down—not up.”
• “Tom will ban social media for kids under 16, because the link between social media use and the youth mental health crisis is clear.”
• “There must be human oversight of AI with the ability to override, especially in critical areas.”

That’s not the final word on AI, and there are still plenty of questions that Steyer and other candidates, in California and nationally, should be answering about this technological revolution. But Steyer’s willingness to engage with the AI debate, and to propose savvy progressive responses to the issues it raises, distinguishes him as a candidate whose election could have a profound influence on a future that should choose people over profits.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Over the past few weeks, the Trump Department of Justice has been assiduously scrubbing press releases relating to the January 6, 2021, convictions. Hundreds of these documents announcing arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of people involved in the insurrection have simply vanished. It is an astoundingly Orwellian effort at erasing history, at the same time that the agency has created, with taxpayer money, a multibillion-dollar slush fund to reward these men and women who flirted with treason on that dark winter day.

As Trump’s popularity continues to plummet, his authoritarian instincts have kicked into an even higher gear. Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump and his administration are not only corroding basic norms about what the public purse can be used for; they are also marshaling the entire apparatus of the federal government to retell the story of the past decade in a way designed to make the president and his henchmen—including his paramilitaries outside of government—look like anything but the traitors to democracy and decency that they so manifestly are.

At the same time, the Trump regime is also putting extraordinary pressure on public officials to meet self-imposed authoritarian targets on everything from mass deportations to cult homages to Trump himself.

When it comes to the deportations, perhaps no case better illustrates the Kafkaesque depths that the bureaucracy is now plumbing than that of Levi Mendez-Maldonado, a young Honduran asylum seeker in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Mendez-Maldonado arrived, unaccompanied, as a 17-year-old, in 2022, at the height of the most recent surge of asylum seekers at the southern border. He spent a few months in Texas and then relocated to Charlotte, where an older brother lived. A little over two years later, Mendez-Maldonado was shot and killed.

The young man’s immigration attorney, Becca O’Neill, codirector of the Carolina Migrant Network, only found out about his murder months later, when her office received his work permit and she tried to reach him to give him the document. Unable to locate him, she contacted his previous attorney, in Texas, who in turn reached out to his brother, who told the attorneys that Mendez-Maldonado had been murdered more than a year previously.

At the next court hearing scheduled for Mendez-Maldonado’s case, O’Neill told the judge that her client was no longer alive, and she presented media accounts and police reports about his death. Given the circumstances, O’Neill asked the judge to dismiss the case. But, presumably under pressure to rack up as many deportations as possible, the DHS attorney in the courtroom urged the judge, Amy Lee, to instead sign a deportation order, using the impeccable logic that Mendez-Maldonado had failed to turn up for a mandatory court hearing, and that, therefore, under US law his asylum case would have to be denied.

Judge Lee agreed. And in what must surely count as one of the more bizarre legal rulings in American history, Lee ordered the dead man deported back to Honduras. “It’s a case of ‘you can’t make this shit up,’” O’Neill told me. “I thought I’d seen it all.” For the immigration attorney, “it’s a demonstration of how crazy the whole system is. They care not whether some man lives or dies, and they don’t care about him after his death either. It’s just absurd. They have to strip people of their humanity to do what they’re doing.”

While the Mendez-Maldonado saga is just weird, the saga of the Palm Beach, Florida, airport has far more concrete impacts. Earlier this year, Florida officials decided to rename the airport after one Donald J. Trump. Now local commissioners have gone one step further, giving Trump carte blanche to milk the airport for profit in pretty much any way he sees fit.

In a branding deal almost as iniquitous as the fascist slush fund set up by the DOJ and IRS, Trump can now choose which vendors will be permitted to set up shop in the airport and what they can sell, including as much gaudy Trump merch as they can hawk. Trump and his family can monetize the airport name in any way they see fit. They will also have the right to choose exactly how his name, image, and likeness are presented at the airport.

Imagine a hybrid offspring of fascism and hucksterism and you have the newly minted Trump international airport down to a tee. It’s yet another way that Trump has found to use his public office to generate private financial windfalls. And it’s yet another example of the craven ways that state and local officials are finding to curry favor with Trump.

Of course, America’s authoritarian remodeling wouldn’t be complete without a tribute to the most violent and crude manifestations of American culture. As Trump’s 80th birthday nears, workers at the South Lawn of the White House are feverishly putting the finishing touches to an enormous United Fight Championship venue, where thousands will be able to watch cage fights on June 14—and a spillover area for tens of thousands of additional fans to follow the fights on big screens situated around the grounds of the White House Ellipse—while Trump and his minions sit like power-crazed Roman elites, their eyes glued on these 21st-century gladiatorial combats. It’s not exactly a huge leap to imagine the Trump crowd giving the life-or-death imperial thumbs-up or -down at the end of these spectacles.

Some presidents invite top writers, musicians, artists, philosophers, scientists, and civil-rights icons to the White House; others, it seems, invite blood-and-guts fighters to ply their wares on the grounds of America’s temple to democracy. For Trump, America’s first postliterate president, these cage fights, the weigh-ins for which will occur on the hallowed ground of the Lincoln Memorial, are perfect manifestations of the caudillo’s relationship to the mob that he has so assiduously cultivated.

There’s an ick factor to Trumpism that is getting worse by the day. This most malignant of men is making filthy nearly every public institution in the country. As the United States gears up to celebrate its 250th birthday, Trump and his sycophants are plotting ever more creative ways to pillage and to plunder, to besmirch the concept of America, and to mock the high ideals of democracy. There are reports of the Treasury planning to print as legal tender a $250 bill with Trump’s image on it. There are plans afoot to include Trump’s portrait on passports issued this summer of America’s 250th anniversary. One can only begin to imagine what the founding fathers, those men who were so adamant that the new country should never have a king, would have thought of this narcissistic little man and his lickspittle enablers.

The first time I saw Pamela Colloff, she was on stage at an overwhelmingly beige convention hall in a New Orleans Marriott. Colloff, a reporter at ProPublica and staff writer at The New York Times Magazine, was a headliner in one of the few places journalists are cool enough to headline anything: a professional conference for investigative reporters. In a packed, exquisitely air-conditioned room—it was New Orleans in the summer, after all—dozens of media workers sat knee to knee on carpet when the room’s few hundred or so chairs filled just to hear Colloff explain her writing process. Colloff has been a criminal justice journalist for decades. She developed her knack for that brand of reporting as a staffer at Texas Monthly—a job she landed fresh out of college when Austin rent was still $300 a month. In the years since, her work has focused on the wrongly incarcerated and the myriad institutional failings of the US criminal justice system.

Colloff’s first book, Catch The Devil follows her reporting for The New York Times and ProPublica on Paul Skalnik, a jailhouse informant whose false testimony helped prosecutors across the American South secure the convictions of dozens of men, one of whom is still on death row. In exchange for his testimony, detectives and prosecutors awarded Skalnik—whose rap sheet included fraud, grand theft, and an arrest for child sexual abuse—sweetheart deals like sentence reductions, early release, and at one point, an unsanctioned conjugal visit.

Catch The Devil traces Skalnik’s life, as well as those of his victims, who make up a diverse group of scammed ex-wives, molested girls, and incarcerated men. Colloff’s painstaking, comprehensive reporting is a scathing indictment of a country where prosecutors are so often politically incentivized to get a conviction regardless of a defendant’s actual guilt.

Colloff sat down with The Nation to discuss her new book, the state of journalism, and why she’s fascinated with the decisions people make in the worst moments of their lives. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Henry Fernandez

Henry Fernandez: After you won the Hillman Prize in 2020 for your initial investigative piece on Paul Skalnik, you said in a video statement, “I’ve come to the conclusion that jailhouse informants simply should not be in American courtrooms.” In the six and a half years since, has your opinion on jailhouse informants stayed the same? If so, can you explain to our readers how your reporting led you to this conclusion?

Pamela Colloff: No, my opinion has not changed. If you look at how jailhouse informants function in the criminal justice system, the fact that they are what we call “incentivized witnesses” makes their use very problematic. Informants come with all sorts of complications and issues. But, I think people are most used to encountering an informant in an organized crime case, where you’re trying to penetrate a group of people and their activities, and there’s one person who flips and works with prosecutors. Obviously, there are issues with this, but at least that person was in the thick of the activity or a witness to the activity that’s at the center of the case.

A jailhouse informant is someone in jail alongside people in pretrial detention. They have everything on the line, and they’re about to go to trial or decide whether or not to take a plea. The basic conceit of a jailhouse informant, I think, is very hard to buy. We’re not talking about people who’ve already been convicted and have been living alongside fellow prisoners for years. Jail is not a place where you’re talking openly about your crimes.

But the supposed informant knows that anything helpful they bring forward to the prosecution will be beneficial to them. Jurors don’t know that, on the back end, the understanding is that the informant will be rewarded with a sentence reduction or tried on a lesser charge in exchange for their testimony.

So when you put all those things together, the idea that this has a place in our system just doesn’t make sense to me. If you have a good case, you don’t need a jailhouse informant. When you see that a case has a jailhouse informant, it’s a red flag that something’s wrong with the case and that the evidence isn’t good enough.

HF: Something I find fascinating about this book is the way it traces the failures of a variety of American systems—whether it be the courts, the American military, the school system or law enforcement. What did writing this book teach you about the systems that govern the US?

PC: Skalnik, on his own, was just a small-time con artist. To cause all the damage he did, he had to be enabled by a larger system. That system was law enforcement, which wanted to close cases. It was prosecutors who wanted to secure convictions and get long sentences. It was judges who wanted to move cases through their docket and not ask the questions they should have asked.

When you see all those things come together and understand that all those people in power benefited from what someone like Paul Skalnik provided them. So they looked the other way about all sorts of things, including crimes he committed that he was not held accountable for. I think we can see that, in the pursuit of justice, it’s sometimes possible to get lost in what real justice looks like.

In many of these cases, what prosecutors considered justice was getting a conviction, and it didn’t matter what the collateral damage was.

HF: You came up at a time when journalism was a very different industry: Print journalism was read at a higher rate, newsrooms across the country were growing, and a young person getting their start in journalism had a wide variety of avenues to choose from. What is your advice to those going into the field today?

PC: Oh my goodness. I mean, it’s such a completely different landscape than when I started. To be clear, even back in the ’90s, everyone felt that this industry was dying. Pay was bad unless you had a Vanity Fair contract. There are a lot of problems that still existed then that are with us today.

Right now, while a lot of legacy organizations have disappeared, and you used to be able to go to newsstands with 100 different magazines on them, it does seem like there are so many different ways to get your voice out there, whether that’s going to work for an organization or whether it’s putting yourself out there on your own through things like Substack.

I think the challenge right now—especially for investigative work, which takes so much time and so many resources—is how to find a way to make enough money that you can spend many months or even a year on an investigation. My hope is that all of these news nonprofits that are popping up all over the country can do that investigative work. I don’t pretend to know the answer. I feel like I’m always holding my breath, but I have been since I started.

I think the thing that worries me the most is the attention economy we’re in today. I don’t know what narrative nonfiction looks like in five or 10 years. To me, storytelling is the way out of the problems of this attention economy. Deep, immersive storytelling with character-building and twisty plots. That’s what we’ve wanted since the dawn of time.

HF: You got your start in journalism during your time at Brown University. Can you tell us about your first scoop and the lessons or skills you learned as a college journalist that you used while writing this book?

PC: My first big scoop as a college journalist was a story about a fraternity on campus where there were allegations that women inside that fraternity house were being videotaped in the course of sexual acts. That reporting set a lot of things in motion. There were two lessons that came out of that—one good and one bad. The good one was that writing a story could cause change. Writing a story could make things happen beyond the pages of the newspaper for which I was writing. And that felt really exciting, you know? Things I was writing had the potential to cause change.

I think the hard lesson was that the administration at that time, one dean in particular, was not supportive of muckraking investigative journalism. I think [that], naïvely, I was really shocked by that because I went to a college that celebrated the liberal arts and inquiry. To see the institution try to protect itself rather than probing some of the questions I was asking was really disheartening. Discrediting me became a way to protect the institutional priorities.

At the time that that happened, an English professor of mine asked me to stay after class. I thought I was in trouble. But instead, she read me John Milton’s Areopagitica, which is a defense of the free press. She read it to me and said, “I just wanted you to hear that.”

HF: In this book, you write that there is a “fundamental, irresistible human need to invest ourselves in narratives that we want to be true.” Do you believe prosecutors and law enforcement officials across the US truly believed Skalnik’s testimony, or was the truth second to their goal of convicting a defendant?

PC: I can’t say with certainty what was in their hearts and minds. I do think some people believed or wanted to believe what he was saying—especially early on, before the full scope of who Skalnik was was clear. I start the book by telling a story about how he got me to believe a story that wasn’t true. I did that intentionally because I think whenever you encounter a con man story, it’s easy to believe that you would never be so gullible as the people who fell for whatever the story is about.

I wanted to write about the fact that here I was, an investigative reporter, going to visit someone who I know is a career con artist and fabulist in federal prison. And still, when he promises that he has this incredible story to tell and that I’m the person to tell it before he dies and that he is going to entrust me with it and work with me and tell me all the details that he’s never told anybody else, I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I very excitedly told my editor that I had this great story! Of course, he never intended to tell me anything, but he was very good at reading people, and he could see what I wanted and what was important to promise me.

I put that at the front of the book as a way of saying that, while I certainly think that law enforcement and prosecutors and judges should have been far more skeptical of him, I fell for that too.

That was also the impetus for the article and then the book. He’s not going to tell me anything, so I have to go find it all out myself.

HF: Your book touches on the women Paul Skalnik victimized outside of the courtroom: ex-wives who were physically abused, women who were defrauded, and young girls Skalnik molested. What was your process in finding and gaining the trust of these women, and why did you find it important to include their stories in this book?

PC: To me, the people who are the most interesting were the people who were left in his wake. This is different from a con man story, where the focus is entirely on the con artist himself. To me, what was so fascinating was that these younger girls, teenagers in the ’80s, saw through Skalnik when their mothers and others in authority didn’t. They had a radar for him.

The kind of damage that he did by gaining the girls’ trust and then exploiting them is important to recall because they had not necessarily been believed or treated well when they came forward with their own stories. They had not initially been believed. I think the most important and interesting reporting that I did was finding those girls, now grown women.

HF: There’s a cultural obsession and romanticization that Americans have with con men. Bernie Madoff, Jordan Belfort, Elizabeth Holmes. What is your book’s relationship to this long-standing obsession? And why do you think we gravitate so much to these kinds of characters?

PC: We often like to root for the underdog or the person who’s getting away with things. In so many con artist stories, we’re celebrating the con artist. We’re celebrating what they’re able to get away with. We’re rooting for them!

A lot of those stories can come off as victimless; they’re told more like capers. And I think it’s worth spending some time to think about the people who are left behind in these stories and whose story gets told and whose don’t.

For people who are ripped off of their life savings or people who are manipulated in various ways, the consequences can be so devastating.

So I tried with this book to turn that narrative on its head while also showing that the dark, crazy misadventures this man had are almost like fiction. It’s almost hard to believe what he did and what he got away with.

HF: Your book ends in an unexpected way. Following the epilogue and acknowledgments, you do what a lot of journalists would not: You list in rather great detail your reporting process for each chapter. Why did you decide to do this?

PC: It’s always what I want to know. When I read a great work of narrative nonfiction, I think, “Wow, how did they get that?” Whatever the great detail is, whatever the story is.

There are many books that have these exhaustive footnotes at the end of them. If you’re writing an academic work, obviously that’s very important. But when you’re writing something like this where you’re trying to reach a really wide cross section of people, people who may never have thought about the criminal justice system in a critical way before, who are just interested in a good story, having a list of citations in the back doesn’t really do it justice.

It was so much work to unearth all of this. I’m proud of that work. Also, some of it’s so unbelievable that I want people to know that every sentence of the book is grounded in fact and has been exhaustively researched and fact-checked.

Some of my favorite narratives are those in which the reporter takes me along on their journey, and I do that in the last quarter of the book when I go into the first person. Patrick Radden Keefe does that really beautifully in his new book, London Falling, where he sort of sets everything up and then switches into the first person as he uncovers the answers. So, for anyone who wants to take the time to read the source notes of the book, there are a lot of little Easter eggs in there.

HF: Though you have been a journalist for decades, this is your first book. You’ve covered a number of fascinating topics: survivors of the first modern American school shooting, women on death row for killing their abusive spouses, the unreality of bloodstain analysis in forensic science. What about Paul Skalnik made him the right subject for your first book? And why, in a climate where long-form journalism is getting increasingly sidelined, did you choose to write this book at all?

PC: Paul Skalnik was the way into a world that I want people to think more deeply about. But through him, I could tell a really engaging, immersive, and, at times, sort of rollicking story.

If the issues that I’m dealing with in the story didn’t have the benefit of character development and plot and storytelling, then it would just be a lot harder to not only reach readers but to get them to think deeply about these issues and react on an emotional level to them, which I want them to do.

It’s not that I haven’t thought about writing a book before, but this was the first time I could see a story where there was so much to build out. There was a whole world. There were all these characters. It had the sort of epic sweep that I think I was always waiting for for a book.

HF: In a PBS interview with your former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, you said “I’ve always been interested in what people do in the worst moments of their lives.” Why does this interest you, and has this interest evolved or changed as you wrote Catch The Devil?

PC: I typically write about the criminal justice system in one way or another. If you think about each person in that system—whether they’re victims of crimes, perpetrators, witnesses, investigators, or prosecutors— they are undergoing this sort of unimaginable stress test, right? Especially in a murder case, we’re talking about the highest stakes there are. In that stress test, some people make good choices, and some don’t.

That has always fascinated me narratively. One of the main characters of my book is a man named Jim Dailey who’s currently on Florida’s death row. And he’s been there since 1987. How do you keep living decade after decade, sitting in a windowless cell, knowing that you’re never going to get out? How do you find meaning? How do you find human connection? That’s always fascinated me.

On a recent scalding Monday afternoon, hundreds of attorneys and advocates gathered outside the Kings County Criminal Court to protest the most recent violation of humanity to unfold in the Brooklyn courtroom. The previous Friday, May 15, minutes before midnight, someone waiting to be arraigned had given birth while handcuffed during open court. The woman, Samantha Randazzo, was afforded neither privacy, nor dignity, nor competent medical treatment—which was not surprising to the public defenders assembled. In a system that has all but normalized lives’ ending in custody, a person being forced to give birth there wasn’t so far afield. 

“This is not the first time that something like this has happened,” Olga Karounos, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, told me at the demonstration, which was organized by the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys (UAW Local 2325). Three people have died from insufficiently treated medical issues in the 120 Schermerhorn courthouse since early 2025, all arrested for minor charges, and “no changes have happened from that,” Karounos said. “So I think people just really felt like [Randazzo’s giving birth] was the last straw.”

Among the many professionals present during court proceedings, there are no doctors, the public defenders I spoke to noted. They have been trying to change that since last September, when the community of legal advocates issued a 10-step plan calling on the mayor and City Council to implement policy “to Address Growing Crisis of Deaths in NYPD Custody,” including staffing courtrooms with independent EMS personnel. Those workers would supplement existing correctional health staff who sometimes, at the behest of police officers, screen people waiting to be arraigned. The plan also calls for better mental health and substance use services, regular inspections of NYPD policy and central bookings buildings, and the end of custodial arrests for low-level crimes. So far, that 10-point plan is still just a list of unmet demands.

Following the courtroom birth, the news media was quick to craft storybookish narratives about what had taken place, but the public defenders explained in a statement, “What occurred in that courtroom was not simply a failure of protocol or preparedness. It was a profound moral failure and a devastating reflection of the cruelty embedded in our carceral system.”

 “People in medical or psychiatric distress are chained to benches or are squashed together in filthy, unsafe holding cells while waiting for their most simple due process rights,” noted another statement. 

Low-level arrests have skyrocketed in recent years, according to a John Jay College of Criminal Justice report. Between 2021 and 2024, misdemeanor charges rose 70 percent. One attorney told me they had a client arrested for evading his $3 subway fare, which in his statement he explained was so that he could afford baby formula for his daughter. 

These arrests are generating a backlog in an already overburdened carceral system, according to Jane Fox, ALAA’s Legal Aid Society chapter chair. The crisis of accountability lies at every tier: NYPD officers could issue more desk appearance tickets (written notices of an upcoming court date) instead of holding people in custody; district attorneys could use discretion and decline to prosecute.

Instead, people are being held in greater numbers and in filthy and deteriorating conditions, often for offenses as minor as shoplifting or evading subway fares. It’s a criminalization of poverty. Their medical needs are ignored, and sometimes they’re made to wait longer than the 24-hour legal limit to be arraigned. This can lead to deadly consequences. 

Deaths of people in NYPD custody have seen a drastic uptick in the past three years, with 43 people dying in 2023 and 2024 across the boroughs. When the attorneys’ 10-point plan was unveiled, nine people had died in NYPD custody in 2025. Their causes of death ranged from medical episodes including overdose to injury, to suicide, and their arrests were for as minor a crime as shoplifting food. 

Since last fall, the city’s watchdog Department of Investigation has been conducting an inquiry related to deaths in NYPD custody. Until that investigation was set in motion, the NYPD was monitoring its own practices. The DOI’s Diane Struzzi declined to comment for this article, citing an ongoing investigation.

With standards already bucked and enforcement failing across the board, public defenders are advocating a sweeping change in approach. 

In February, Legal Aid filed an emergency petition accusing the NYPD and Brooklyn DA of violating the 24-hour arraignment standard—which is the court’s interpretation of the watershed Roundtree ruling from 1991. Following a snowstorm that temporarily shuttered criminal arraignment courts, more than 100 people in Brooklyn alone had been held for over 24 hours—more than in Manhattan and the Bronx combined. Public defenders sought court intervention, calling for the release of anyone who’d been in custody longer than 24 hours unless police could explain the delays. Officials snapped into action, adding stopgap arraignment shifts to help resolve the bottleneck. Months later, with new deaths and now a birth in police custody, that solution has proven “less impactful than a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” Karounos said. 

Mayoral spokesperson Sam Raskin did not address the 10-step plan specifically but told The Nation, “What Samantha Randazzo went through was horrifying and completely unacceptable. No one should give birth in a courtroom, and New Yorkers deserve a criminal justice and healthcare system that responds humanely and ensures timely medical care for anyone experiencing a medical emergency. The Mamdani administration is reviewing the circumstances that led to this situation and discussing potential next steps, including reviewing the policies and protocols practiced by the NYPD, NYC Health + Hospitals, the courts, prosecutors, public defenders, and other relevant entities as we examine how to address the systemic failures brought to light by this incident.”

In the meantime, legislation long pending in the statehouse could restrict enforcement officials’ ability to handcuff pregnant people in custody during various stages of pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Randazzo’s experience reignited attention toward the bills.

Randazzo had been arrested on low-level trespassing and drug possession charges and was hospitalized for more than 16 hours before her arraignment. It’s unclear why she was discharged so close to giving birth, but if she had been released earlier, she could have given birth in a hospital. Instead, once she went into labor, about 10 minutes went by before a piece of medical equipment was rolled into the courtroom, and about 10 more before an ambulance arrived. 

An NYPD spokesperson told The Nation that Randazzo “was wearing baggy clothes” and “did not inform officers she was pregnant” when she was arrested (one day before she gave birth). The spokesperson also claimed that Randazzo’s handcuffs were removed when she went into labor—an assertion disputed by attorneys who were actually in the courtroom. 

Reporting produced in the immediate aftermath also misconstrued the facts and mood of the courtroom. The New York Times claimed that “the courtroom had transformed into a labor and delivery unit” and quoted Randazzo’s lawyer saying “we saw it” about the birth of the “bouncing baby boy.” One account referred to the court officer’s having “delivered the baby.” But according to Hell Gate’s interview with public defender Jen Kovacs, as well as two Legal Aid staff members I spoke to, Randazzo’s lawyer hadn’t been in the room.

Elena Beeley, an arraignment paralegal who typically works the night shift and was seated feet from the birth, told me that she wanted to correct the false information circulating without further violating Randazzo’s privacy. “The officer did not deliver the baby,” Beeley said. “She delivered into her pants.”

Only on Sunday, two days after she gave birth in court, was Randazzo’s case dismissed.

Attorneys described what transpired in the courtroom as within the realm of normal.

“My last arraignment shift, a man was having a seizure on the bench,” Maggie Bergmann, a trial attorney at New York County Defender Services in Manhattan, told me. “Even I know that in a situation where someone’s having a seizure, they’re supposed to be on their side and their head’s supposed to be supported.” In that instance, the man was “eventually” laid on his side, once minutes had passed. Still he remained in cuffs. 

Public defender Amy Austern described a depraved cycle of sickness and custody, her clients being shunted between hospital and court, remaining in handcuffs at the hospital and still wearing their hospital bracelets in court.

Attorneys witness such indignities all the time: clients sick and seizing, vomiting, urinating and excreting on themselves, all without a shred of concern from officials. Karounos said courtroom officials sometimes think defendants are faking their seizures. She believes EMS presence could help with that: “They could be the one to make the call and say, ‘No, this is a real seizure.’”

Although Randazzo’s experience of giving birth in handcuffs exposed the rampant neglect that those in custody endure routinely at the hands of officials, attorneys are skeptical that without structural changes much will improve.

Family court attorney Sania Chandrani’s clients regularly leave court only to have their children taken, so to watch a birth in a courtroom struck an especially horrifying chord. “It’s likely that she’s going to have to deal with family court after this, like her kid could be taken away,” Chandrani said of Randazzo. “People come to court to find justice, or they’re dragged into court to find justice, and that’s not at all what they receive.”

Legal Aid’s criminal defense practice chief attorney, Tina Luongo, who co-authored the 10-point plan along with attorneys from the city’s other public defense offices, said implementing meaningful system change would start with a joint meeting between members of the NYPD, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, the court system, and possibly the FDNY. “We keep saying, convene all the stakeholders together, so that we can work on these issues in tandem,” Luongo told me. “That meeting has yet to happen, or if it happened, defense counsel hasn’t been invited.”

For close to 40 years, former ALAA president Michael Letwin worked as a public defender in the city. He remembers deplorable conditions, sickness, and filth, but no death. “I don’t know what it was like before 1985, but I’m sure it was horrible as long as anybody can remember, and I think it’s just probably gotten worse over the decades.” He called on Mayor Mamdani to order EMS presence in the courtroom. “The buck does stop with Zohran on all of this,” Letwin said.

Lizz Winstead, founder of Abortion Access Front, told me as we waited for the picket to convene that “the reproductive justice aspect of what has happened to this woman is something that everybody who cares about full-spectrum autonomy should be alarmed about.” 

In the aftermath of the courtroom birth atrocity, attorneys, regular witnesses to the court’s broken justice feedback loop, were indignant but not desensitized. There were murmurs about renewed interest in the 10-point plan from City Hall.

“Interest is one thing; action is another,” Luongo told me. “I have not seen any action.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

On Tuesday, neoconservative acolyte Secretary of State Marco Rubio flew into Yerevan. Rubio arrived in the Armenian capital from India, where he was doing damage control on behalf of President Trump. While in Yerevan, he signed a series of documents with Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan, intended to deepen US-Armenia ties. He also endorsed the beleaguered government of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, one week before the country heads to the polls in the June 7 parliamentary elections.

Although Rubio’s visit lasted just one hour, it signaled the Trump administration’s outsize ambitions for the Caucasus, just as it launched a new attack on Iran, once again, amid diplomatic negotiations. “If nothing else, Rubio’s visit to Armenia shows the Trump administration’s continued addiction to election interference abroad,” notes James Carden, a former adviser to the Obama State Department.

Meanwhile, tucked away among Yerevan’s bustling city streets, in a cozy studio apartment, two young guerilla activists—Hovhannes Ishkhanyan and Nare Navasardyan—contemplate ways to assist Armenian political prisoners. Both are self-described democratic socialists who supported the 2018 “Velvet Revolution” that swept Pashinyan to power. Since the 2020 Karabakh War, however, both have turned sharply against the Armenian PM, as have most Armenians. Ishkhanyan and Navasardyan also wear the hats of journalists and filmmakers and represent a rising independent activist scene in Yerevan. As they underscore, promises to bring true democracy to the post-Soviet republic have been betrayed. Instead, Armenians face a reality in which investigative journalists are silenced, political opponents are hounded, and the pillars of national identity are under attack.

The election on June 7 is the first since Pashinyan’s controversial recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) as part of Azerbaijan in 2022, a declaration that paved the way for Baku’s ethnic cleansing of the majority-Armenian region. Rising discontent in Armenia over economic inequality and democratic decline have not helped the embattled PM. The poll numbers of the opposition forces have been rising—especially Samvel Karapetyan’s big-tent Strong Armenia party and the center-left Armenia Alliance led by former president Robert Kocharyan. Thus, with the election fast approaching, Pashinyan has become increasingly desperate to bolster his political standing.

“This issue of self-determination and democracy is not just an Armenian issue. It’s a universal issue,” maintains Ishkhanyan. “When Pashinyan betrayed Artsakh, he betrayed democracy. He betrayed the right of Artsakh to self-determination. And today we see democracy in Armenia itself being dismantled by his regime. One day is a year in Armenia. Almost every day, there are violations—legal violations, constitutional violations, voting violations, international law violations. Every day, Pashinyan’s gang, masquerading as a ‘democratic’ government, violates my rights.”

Between sips of Armenian coffee, Ishkhanyan sits back and muses: “What business does Rubio have here? Did he come to speak out for the Armenian churches in Artsakh now being demolished by Azerbaijan? Or did he come here to protect this traitor who violated, and promises to violate, the Constitution by threatening to overthrow the leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church?”

Pashinyan has publicly clashed with the Armenian Church and its spiritual head, Catholicos Karekin II, over the latter’s efforts to keep the plight of the Artsakh Armenians in the public eye. The conflict escalated to a point where Pashinyan has inexplicably declared his intention to appoint a new head of the Armenian Church, in clear violation of Armenian law. The situation, the activists stress, is strikingly similar to President Trump’s recent clash with Pope Leo XIV over the Iran War.

“By law,” Ishkhanyan notes, “Armenian clergymen have the same right to participate in politics as all other citizens. It does not mean that the church is part of the state, but it means that clergymen have the right to express opinions about politics like everybody else. So we stand for their rights. What Pashinyan is doing is unconstitutional.”

“Rubio’s presence here is blatant election interference,” chimes in Navasardyan. “But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine in America having a whole network of organizations getting funding from China or Iran with no FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act], no limitation, spreading misinformation about all the candidates opposing their preferred one. This is what we see. It’s absurd, but only accepted because Armenia is perceived as a marginal post-Soviet country that cannot stand up for itself.”

Referring to Rubio’s recent role in attempting to instigate a coup in Cuba, she adds, “Rubio is Cuban, sure, but look at what he’s doing to his own Cuba! He exemplifies US imperialism’s weaponization of ethnic diasporas against their home countries.”

Ishkhanyan and Navasardyan underscore that Pashinyan’s de-democratization of Armenia has been conducted with the blessing of his fellow populist-in-arms, President Trump. Trump’s aim is to secure the Armenian PM’s loyalty in a bid to “checkmate” Iran and Russia in the strategic Caucasus through the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). TRIPP envisions Armenia granting control of its southern border with Iran to private US interests for up to 99 years, while providing Azerbaijan with an unobstructed link to Turkey.

“I feel alarmed that an Armenian prime minister is giving away our lands,” stresses Ishkhanyan. “I have friends and family who live in that part of Armenia, in Agarak, in Meghri, and they are alarmed. We see what Trump is now doing with Iran. His war is a crime against humanity, a gross violation of international law. And can you imagine if America and Iran start fighting here? It’s going to be a disaster! Pashinyan is literally bringing the war against Iran to Armenia!”

Armenia prides itself for being the first nation to adopt Christianity in the year 301 CE. Yet its ancient ties with Islamic Iran are warm and long-standing, dating back to the age of Persepolis. According to recent polls, Armenians overwhelmingly sympathize with the people of Iran and overwhelmingly blame the United States and Israel for the recent war. At the Blue Mosque in Yerevan—a reminder of Armenia’s centuries-old Iranian heritage—locals recently brought toys and flowers to a makeshift memorial in honor of the Iranian schoolgirls who were killed in the US strike on Minab.

The activists further blamed Pashinyan for attacking Armenian identity itself, in moves such as removing the sacred Mount Ararat from Armenian passport stamps and even downplaying the Armenian Genocide. By contrast, both Ishkhanyan and Navasardyan were more positive on the statement commemorating the Genocide issued by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, calling it “refreshing.” “I like Mamdani,” noted Ishkhanyan. “His statement on the genocide can only be applauded. In fact, it is a statement that should have been issued by the Armenian prime minister!”

On the campaign trail, Pashinyan has recently become embroiled in a series of angry arguments with Armenian voters. “Why weren’t you killed off?” he recently screamed at one war veteran, who is now a political prisoner. At the same time, despite continued threats from Azerbaijan, Pashinyan regularly claims that TRIPP has brought lasting peace to Armenia and that his opponents will bring war if they are elected. Ishkhanyan and Navasardyan are skeptical. They note that Armenia has seen more war under Pashinyan than any other post-Soviet Armenian leader.

“Pashinyan threatens us constantly with war in the case that he is not elected,” maintains Navasardyan. “So this is no ordinary election campaign, but political terror repackaged into this neoliberal promise of ‘peace’ and ‘prosperity.’ They don’t even talk about ‘democracy’ anymore. In fact, we see that in every single instance, Pashinyan chooses the interests of these larger, multinational corporations over the interests of the people here. And moreover, he chooses the financial interests of his clique over the long-term prosperity of Armenia. We have no doubt that he will continue on the same trajectory if he is re-elected. But we are ready to continue our fight in any case.”

Former Massachusetts representative Barney Frank died this month at the age of 86. Most obituaries have emphasized Frank’s pioneering role as an openly gay politician first, and his legislative accomplishments second, among them the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform package, a valiant if imperfect effort to root out the abuses that had led to the financial crisis of 2008. Even from his hospice bed, Frank continued to dole out advice to Democrats. Mystified as to why his own preferred candidate for Senate in Maine, Governor Janet Mills, lost out to the insurgent outsider Graham Platner, Frank criticized the progressive left for combining a critique of economic inequality with an impolitic emphasis on “racial and cultural things.” A look back through The Nation’s coverage of Frank’s long and storied political career—admiring, at times sympathetic, but far from uncritical—suggests the late congressman was always a man containing multitudes; a brilliant, brash politician whose famous wit could be directed both at the left and the right.

In 1987, Frank called up a reporter from The Boston Globe and asked her to visit his office with no stated purpose. During the interview, Frank did something that at the time was still unthinkable: he told the reporter he was gay. (The cartoonist Eric Orner depicted the scene in his 2022 graphic biography of Frank, Smahtguy, excerpted in The Nation.)

“To anyone who’s been around Capitol Hill for more than a month,” the late journalist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in The Nation at the time, “the news came as one of the year’s biggest unsurprises.”

Frank, von Hoffman observed, was “one of the smartest men in national politics.” He had seen how reports of an extramarital affair had doomed Democratic Senator Gary Hart’s bid for the party’s 1988 presidential nomination. Frank wanted to avoid something similar happening to him, so he got out in front of it before one of those news organizations von Hoffman called the “gonad-seeking practitioners of sex-snoop journalism” outed him. The rules had changed: Politicians’ private sex lives were now fair game. Frank wanted to control the narrative.

As Frank’s career continued, he became an occasional contributor to The Nation, starting with a letter to the editor in August 2000. The progressive left at the time was torn between supporters of Ralph Nader’s Green Party bid for the presidency and nose-holding voters for Al Gore. A Gore supporter, Frank took issue with a Nation article that quotes Nader dismissing the severe consequences that a George W. Bush presidency would have on social issues. Frank wrote that Nader had “never in his career paid any attention to the abortion or gay rights issues.”

Frank was early to spot some of the key contradictions and hypocrisies in American life that have come to structure the very reality we live in, and he was a rare sitting legislator unafraid to name them. In 2006, he wrote in The Nation that he was skeptical of Democrats who wanted to change the focus of the party’s critique of Bush from specific areas of policy disagreement, like the destructive and illegal war in Iraq and worsening economic inequality, to more abstract charges that the administration harbored secret plans to overthrow democracy in America. Words like “authoritarianism” should not be “thrown around” or “used lightly,” Frank argued, seemingly anticipating the fascism debate that has divided the left in the Trump era.

Yet Frank argued that while the United States under Bush remained a democracy, it was clearly in the process of a significant transition. Some of the fundamental pillars of the constitutional order were being eroded by aggressive executive-branch overreach. Frank argued that the country was turning into what scholars call a “plebiscitary democracy,” one in which “a leader is elected but once elected has almost all of the power.” Congressional Republicans seemed remarkably eager to give up their own powers in deference to a president claiming effectively limitless authority to do what he wanted. “Never in American history has Congress been so willing to give away its constitutional function,” Frank wrote.

I am not charging authoritarianism. It still is a free country, and I encourage people to use that freedom and to be critical and to organize. But we are still talking about a very, very different mode of governance, the mode of governance in which, instead of the checks and balances and the collaboration and the input of a lot of people, you get one man making the decisions…. What we have is an Administration that is radically trying to change the nature of our democracy.

In March 2009, at the dawn of the Obama presidency, when Republicans hypocritically began calling for budget cuts after years of giving Bush blank checks to fight wars on abstract nouns, Frank sarcastically proposed that anyone who called for budget restraint be required to also mention out-of-control military spending. Even liberal and progressive institutions sometimes called for reining in social spending like Medicare and Social Security, while refusing, Frank noted, to “talk about one area where substantial budget reductions would have the doubly beneficial effect of cutting the deficit and diminishing expenditures that often do more harm than good.” In his Nation editorial, Frank condemned what he called a “weaponized Keynesianism that says military spending is important because it provides jobs and boosts the economy.”

There was always money available for a new war, Frank observed—but never for new programs to guarantee healthcare to all: “If we do not reduce the military budget, either we accustom ourselves to unending and increasing budget deficits, or we do severe harm to our ability to improve the quality of our lives through sensible public policy.” Somehow, in their infinite wisdom, American policymakers in the years since have elected to do both.

Soon after drafting and passing the Dodd-Frank financial reform package in 2010, Frank decided not to seek reelection to Congress in 2012. At the time, The Nation’s John Nichols called Frank “not a perfect progressive on every issue but a steady liberal.” He noted that Frank’s signature bill “pulled punches that should have been thrown at the big banks and the Wall Street speculators.”

Longtime Nation contributor Jon Wiener emphasized the point in 2015, taking Frank to task for an episode the retired congressman described in his memoir as the “stupidest” decision he ever made. The year was 1966. Frank was a student leader at Harvard’s Kennedy School when he invited defense secretary Robert McNamara to speak on campus. At the time, Wiener was a member of the Harvard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, which protested McNamara’s appearance. Wiener wrote that Frank’s account of the episode left a lot out, such as that the student protesters wanted McNamara to debate an anti-war activist publicly rather than speak only to a select group of students in private.

Frank wrote admiringly in his memoir about McNamara’s composure when he was surrounded by student protesters. He even praised students who initiated a petition to apologize to McNamara for his treatment on campus—rather than the students who protested McNamara’s senseless, destructive war. In concluding that the rowdy student protesters had hurt the Democratic Party in the 1966 midterm elections and thereby “opened the door to Nixon,” Frank took exactly the wrong lesson from the incident, Wiener argued: “Barney Frank is wrong about the ‘stupidest’ thing he did. It wasn’t bringing McNamara to Harvard—it was his failure to join the movement calling for an end to the Vietnam War.”

Frank’s record, then, is one of a man who understood power clearly: how it worked, who had it, who was lying about it. But Frank was sometimes less reliable when it came to solidarity with the people who were trying to challenge power. He saw the abuses of the Bush years with unsparing clarity, named Wall Street’s pathologies and depredations with rare acuity, and came out as gay in an era when doing so took genuine courage. But when protesters surrounded McNamara’s car, Frank wanted them to apologize. That instinct to protect established institutions even as he criticized them runs through his career and still defines the Democratic Party he proudly served for decades.

Ken Paxton’s resounding win over long-serving Senator John Cornyn in the Senate Republican primary runoff in Texas is yet more evidence of Donald Trump’s personal stranglehold on the party. That this elevates the unpopular and toxically corrupt Paxton into a contest with the charismatic and cherubic Democratic nominee, James Talarico, suggests that the stranglehold has become a death grip.

I am less optimistic about Talarico’s chances in the fall than others, but I can assure you this: Paxton’s victory will blow a Texas-sized hole through Republican plans. It tears apart their Senate map, and it creates yet another disgruntled incumbent Republican with time in office on his hands and resentment to burn.

Trump’s most significant boost to Paxton’s campaign was his long stretch of quiet after the primary failed to push Cornyn into a clear victory—a silence that echoed his refusal to endorse incumbent senator Bill Cassidy’s ultimately doomed campaign for renomination in Louisiana. His blessing withheld, Paxton and Cornyn both competed to make the only case that matters to Republican primary voters these days: I’m the one most like Trump. And on that front, Paxton had the showiest, if not the most quantifiable, case.

Cornyn’s voting record actually set him above fellow Texas Senator Ted Cruz in terms of supporting Trump’s policy agenda (99 versus 95 percent). But, unlike Paxton, Cornyn has been trapped by the slow and maddeningly collegial machinery of the Senate for decades. The structure of the institution makes it difficult to successfully avoid the taint of a bipartisan action. What’s more, Cornyn committed the offense of engaging in a little institutionalism, voicing tepid criticism of Trump as, you know, maybe bad for the party. (“Time has passed him by,” he whispered back in 2023.)

Paxton, on the other hand, has been dedicated to using his capacity as state attorney general to offer slavishly Trumpian stunts and empty PR grabs as long as he’s been in office. (Too late, Cornyn tried his hand at such embarrassing ploys, only to give off the flop sweat of a perpetual tryhard.)

Flip back through the press releases on the AG’s website and you’d be pardoned for thinking Paxton a Trump cabinet member or otherwise a direct flunky: He’s mentioned at least once every 10 releases or so, and not just in the context of well-known Trump pet projects. For every “Attorney General Paxton and America First Legal Join President Trump to Defeat California’s Attempt at Forcing Radical ​’Green Energy’ Car Standards on America” there’s one touting a Trump agenda item you, and maybe Trump himself, didn’t know about: “Attorney General Ken Paxton and Trump DOJ Secure Historic Antitrust Settlement with Agricultural Data Broker to Lower the Prices of Meat Products.” Also no doubt attractive to Trump was Paxton’s singular obsession with suing Beto O’Rourke over O’Rourke’s Democratic fundraising operation, a campaign that allowed Paxton to call O’Rourke a “loser” in official state documents—and peevishly refer to him as “Robert Francis O’Rourke.” (O’Rourke ultimately succeeded in getting Ken Paxton’s suit dismissed.) Even Paxton’s historic and breathtaking level of corruption probably put him on Trump’s good side.

Trump’s explicit if tardy endorsement of Paxton on May 19, a day after early voting started, was no surprise, but it undoubtedly pushed Cornyn’s loss into straight-up embarrassment territory. It also gave Paxton coattails: Two other statewide runoffs pitting a kind-of-Trumpy candidate against a more florid character both wound up tipping toward the more MAGA candidate. The race to fill Paxton’s seat saw Representative Chip Roy, who endorsed Ron DeSantis in 2024, go down to a state senator with no courtroom experience and lots of money who branded himself as “MAGA Mayes” Middleton.

In the more obscure race for Texas railroad commissioner, a Trump acolyte candidate so objectionable he was decried by the Texas lieutenant governor succeeded over the incumbent. Last June, Bo French posted a poll to X, asking, “Who is a bigger threat to America?” With two options: “Jews” or “Muslims.” In response, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick called for French’s resignation as the Tarrant County GOP chair. Now French is the Republican commission chair nominee. The railroad commissioner seat is a quietly powerful sinecure that, confusingly, oversees the gas and oil industries; its primary relationship to traditional GOP interests has been in not actually overseeing those industries that much. But French has said he’ll use the power of the office to “defend Texas, stop the Islamic invasion, and defeat the left,” presumably using scraps of metal from the 10,000 abandoned oil wells in the state.

All of this is worth rehearsing because, obviously, the exact same record that helped Paxton grind Cornyn’s career to fine dust and propelled the most MAGA candidate onto November ballots will be a powerful weapon in the fall.

Before getting further into the good news, we might as well address two sunny assumptions that out-of-state Democrats seem to be making about why Paxton is such a delicious opponent: first, that his weak fundraising haul against Cornyn means he’ll have trouble putting up cash against Talarico, a darling who pulled in the biggest fundraising haul of the campaign off Paxton proclaiming victory. Second, that there will be some slice of Republican voters so disgusted with Paxton that they’ll sidle over to Talarico.

Both of these happy forecasts are untrue, but they are untrue in ways that offer their own kind of hope.

1. Paxton will raise money just fine—and it will come at the cost of every other seat the Republicans are trying to either flip or protect. According to Time, Republicans on the Hill are whispering about shelling out an estimated $250 million just to hold the seat. Figuring that Democrats are prepared to put up that kind of cash—and Talarico does seem set to draw in such sums—that sets the Senate race up to become the most expensive in American history. This draws out of the Democrats’ coffers as much as Republicans’, but, crucially, Republicans were not planning on having to defend the seat.

2. Republican voters gonna Republican. The thought of peeling off former Cornyn voters engages in the sort of wishcasting that put Kamala Harris on stage with Lynn Cheney. Polls prior to the election showed that 90 percent of Cornyn voters would vote for Paxton if he got the nomination. Two percent said they would vote for Talarico. (And the margin of error for the poll was almost 3 percent.) But what hopeful progressives need to remember is there just aren’t that many dedicated Republicans left.

Demographics are trending strongly in Democrats’ favor in this regard. A New York Times analysis has suggested that national-level gains among both Latino voters, a full 25 percent of the Texas voter cohort, and white voters have put Texas in play for similar reasons that (expensive, and ultimately purple) George now is.

The question isn’t whether Talarico wins but what it costs Republicans that he can credibly compete.

There are numbers and there are vibes, and the national repercussions of Paxton’s win might be felt along the taut strings of grievance more than the solid ground of polls and fundraising totals. Imagine with me a scenario in which Cornyn goes the route of other politicians recently toppled by a Trump-endorsed opponent: In the wake of his defeat, Thomas Massie promised to read the names of the Epstein victims into the Congressional Record and teased being able to prove that Melania knew. Following his, Cassidy poked at Trump in his concession speech, noting that he was in fact conceding rather than “claim[ing] the election was stolen.” Later, Cassidy laughed off a reporter’s question: “Do you think Trump has been honest with you?”

Cornyn embarrassed himself—such humiliations can be salved by either retreat or churlishness. The former party whip could still have enough hustle to bend a few equally disgruntled colleagues into something resembling at least soft resistance. That he was bumped off by a man with the morals of a ground snake might put the MAGA movement on Cornyn’s fighting side. He’s found some level of courage before. Yes, at a micro level, I believe it is more possible to peel off Cornyn than those who showed up to vote for him yesterday.

With all the reasons that Texas seems winnable, it’s tempting to forecast a Talarico victory, straight up. But that’s not the most certain success on the table.

A $500 million race that drains the RNC, forces it to defend Bo French to the world, and produces a free-agent Cornyn is a different kind of Republican victory than the party wanted. Trump won the runoff. Whether he can survive his own win is an open question.

I unexpectedly found myself in the hospital for six days last week, including a five-hour surgery last Monday. This was, to say the least, unusual. Though I work in public health, I don’t typically get anywhere near healthcare itself. Most of my experience of the healthcare system is in outpatient services to manage my antiretroviral drugs or deal with the chronic maladies of growing older. So, to find myself in a hospital room for almost a week was a new experience.

I have lots of thoughts about my stay, but one thing stands out to me: Nurses are care. I did see doctors, but they showed up in the mornings for brief visits—my life in room 954 on the day-to-day and night-to-night was in the hands of a dozen nurses. For six days, they were in and out of my room constantly: to take blood, check my vitals, make sure I was comfortable, attend to my symptoms, help me get to the bathroom, and deal with an infernal IV pump which kept going offline and beeping an alarm at all hours. I was probably the least sick person on the unit, but the nurses took care of me with the same measure of attention and solicitude as the worst off among us.

Nurses are the backbone of healthcare in America, and nursing is the largest healthcare profession, with more than 5 million registered nurses across the country. Yet, we still have shortages of nurses in the US and by 2035 these deficits will hit these states the hardest: Washington (26 percent shortage), Georgia (21 percent), California (18 percent), Oregon (16 percent), Michigan (15 percent), Idaho (15 percent), Louisiana (13 percent), North Carolina (13 percent), New Jersey (12 percent), and South Carolina (11 percent).

Of course, the Trump administration will always do the wrong thing on most matters. Just this month, the government published a final regulatory rule lowering the amount that graduate students can borrow from the federal government. The caps are based on whether a degree is considered a professional or graduate program. Students in professional programs can borrow up to $50,000 a year and $200,000 total, while those in graduate programs will face annual limits of $20,500 and a lifetime limit of $100,000. The list of professional programs includes pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, and theology. See anything missing?

Nursing has been tagged as a graduate degree, and advanced training in nursing can cost close to $80,000 a year—four times the new cap of $20,500. Nursing groups have rightly noted that this will force students to take on the burden of more expensive private loans or leave the profession entirely, endangering the future nursing workforce in America. Under this new regime, other key health professions—physician assistants, physical therapists and those in my profession of public health are also shuttled to graduate student status.

This new definition of professional degrees is not the result of a congressional mandate or expert advice. It’s the work of Secretary of Education (and Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment mogul) Linda McMahon and the Trump administration. Their rationale for the move is to cut down on student borrowing and to get universities to lower tuition costs, but to many it seems arbitrary and capricious. Why can future podiatrists and clergy, veterinarians and chiropractors, borrow twice as much as those who are going into nursing? It makes no sense. McMahon and her cronies completely ignored the tens of thousands of comments opposed to the new definition of health professions and bipartisan concern by Congress.

Moreover, 25 state attorneys general think the plan violates the Administrative Procedures Act, which has led them to sue the federal government to block this rule. The lawsuit also notes the impact on healthcare worker shortages, and in particular on rural communities, where master’s-level clinicians and advanced practice providers sustain access to care in these underserved places. McMahon is on the hot seat even with her own party, with Florida GOP Representative Randy Fine asking her two weeks ago: “Does it make sense for us to take a field where we have real shortages and create a situation where we may not be able to create the [healthcare workers] we need, where we already don’t have enough?” No, Randy, it makes no sense.

I feel immense gratitude and affection for the nurses that took care of me last week. But if we all want to thank the nurses in our lives, getting this rule rescinded would be the real gift. The future of nursing in America depends on it.

As Democrats continue to struggle to coalesce around a shared message for the future, last week offered some troubling examples of their refusing, once again, to learn from the mistakes of the past. After a delay, the Democratic National Committee finally released the post-2024 election autopsy report that DNC chair Ken Martin had long promised. It was easy to see why he had tried to avoid making it public. In addition to being incomplete and a mess, the report was notable for not mentioning one of the most divisive and consequential issues in the party: Gaza. Even considering the report’s incoherence, it was a baffling omission, given that Gaza continues to be a real point of tension in the Democratic coalition, one that cuts to the core of what kind of party, and what kind of country, we really want to be.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t last week’s only example of Democratic-aligned organizations trying to throw Gaza down the memory-hole. On May 19, the Center for American Progress, Washington’s largest Democratic Party–aligned think tank, held its annual “Ideas Festival,” featuring a panel on “The Future of US Foreign Policy.” Three of the four panelists were former Biden administration officials, and two of those—former secretary of state (now CAP board member) Antony Blinken and former UN ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield—were top decision-makers during Biden’s catastrophic handling of the Gaza war, which a growing consensus of experts has categorized as a genocide. Gaza was not even mentioned on the panel. (It’s notable that Blinken appeared at the event unannounced, possibly to avoid protests that now follow him everywhere.)

The previous day, Foreign Policy for America (FP4A), which describes itself as a group “working to strengthen support for principled US leadership in the world,” held an event honoring Thomas-Greenfield with a lifetime achievement award. While Thomas-Greenfield had an admirable diplomatic career before joining the Biden administration, as UN ambassador she vetoed multiple UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions, measures that might have saved thousands of lives, to enable Israel to continue its assault. FP4A’s choice to honor her with an award was an insult to every Palestinian killed, maimed, or still suffering in Gaza, and a middle finger to everyone who tried to get the Biden administration to change course.

Another Democratic-aligned foreign policy group, National Security Action, has also recently been in the news. Cofounded in 2018 by former Obama administration officials, former Biden administration national security adviser Jake Sullivan rejoined its board of directors, as he did with FP4A’s board shortly after leaving the government in 2025.

I have worked with all these organizations. I spent six years at CAP as a national security policy analyst. I have been involved in numerous meetings and workshops with both National Security Action and Foreign Policy for America since their founding. I spoke at FP4A’s launch event in 2017 alongside Sullivan. All these organizations have many talented, principled staff—such as the recently relaunched National Security Action’s new executive director, Maher Bitar—and the potential to play a positive, constructive role in the future of the Democratic Party and of our democracy. Progressives need strong organizations to help build and mobilize our movement. But they cannot do that if those organizations facilitate impunity rather than accountability.

Elite impunity is at the core of our political crisis. Far too often, the wealthy, the powerful, the well-connected pay no price, whatever their offense. They operate under a different set of rules than the rest of us. Anger at this impunity and disillusionment with a self-dealing establishment is what Donald Trump exploits when he rightly claims that “the system is rigged.” The fact that it’s rigged on behalf of the wealthy and powerful like Trump and his cronies doesn’t matter; his words resonate because they’re true. It’s no surprise that candidates who effectively channel this disillusionment are winning.

Joe Biden declared in a 2022 speech that Americans were locked in a “battle for the soul of the nation.” Allowing those officials who assisted him in perpetrating the Gaza genocide to simply move past it and resume careers of respect and remuneration, and possibly eventually return to positions of government power, would be another loss in that ongoing battle. Democrats cannot hope to offer the American people a compelling alternative vision of governance while turning a blind eye to the previous Democratic administration’s abuses. Accountability for Gaza is both good policy and good politics. Democratic voters are motivated and energized to engage when they feel leaders are acting with honesty, transparency, and moral clarity.

Recently, two leading Democratic senators, Hawaii’s Brian Schatz and Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen, noted the need for a Democratic foreign policy housecleaning. “I’m not into blacklisting anyone from future work in their area of expertise but I do think it’s fair to want a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers in the next democratic administration,” Schatz tweeted on Sunday.

Van Hollen was even more direct: “Primary voters won’t trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues, especially if, as a legislator, he or she voted to send Mr. Netanyahu bombs even as his government imposed a total blockade on Gaza,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed calling for a course correction on Israel-Palestine. “Nor will they support a candidate who plans to re-enlist the senior Democratic decision makers who whitewashed the truth during the Biden administration and refuse to acknowledge their complicity.”

A predictable argument against seeking accountability for former officials is that it divides Democrats and distracts from the threat of Trump and Trumpism now. Echoing Barack Obama in 2009, when he decided not to seek accountability for the Bush administration’s crimes, they believe we should “look forward as opposed to looking backward.” (If you want to know why Donald Trump acts seemingly without fear of consequences, just look at the guest list for Dick Cheney’s funeral.)

But this is not simply “looking backward.” The Gaza genocide is not over. It is ongoing. Accountability is necessary to not just prevent future atrocities but also raise the alarm and hopefully stop one still being committed. Democrats cannot hope to credibly punish the Trump administration’s constantly mounting acts of corruption and criminality while absolving our own side for its own abuses and lies. If we are serious about restoring and strengthening our democracy, unrigging the system and the elite impunity it sustains is essential. This isn’t just about the past. It’s about the party and the country we want to build for the future. We need organizations that are genuinely committed to that struggle.

In a typical year, the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center in Dayton, Ohio, receives approximately $550,000 in funding from the federal government to enforce fair housing rights and educate the public about them. But like many similar housing nonprofits, during the second Trump administration, the organization has struggled to access congressionally appropriated money. Last June, the organization went to court to sue the Trump administration for failing to disperse fair housing funding. After an extensive legal back and forth, it finally caught a break at the end of last September: The Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded it a $125,000 yearlong grant to conduct education and outreach on fair housing rights. But the money never arrived. Jim McCarthy, the organization’s president, heard from his assigned contact at HUD that higher-ups had questions about his organization’s activities, including an outreach event it was planning for victims of domestic violence. When the Violence Against Women Act was reauthorized in 2022 on a bipartisan basis, HUD was given new authority to pursue justice for victims of violence in federally supported housing whose landlords discriminated against them, and the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center wanted to make victims aware of their rights.

Finally, McCarthy received an e-mail from his contact at HUD headquarters. “VAWA is not a activity [sic] that aligns with the current administration’s priorities,” the e-mail, which was shared with The Nation, said.

“This is the law. So it’s like, what do you mean?” McCarthy told The Nation. “What the hell?” Despite his confusion, he resubmitted the grant application with the outreach event for victims of domestic violence removed. After that, the grant was officially approved.

The e-mail that baffled McCarthy isn’t an outlier. It fits into a pattern in which the Trump administration has failed to disburse funds for services for domestic violence survivors that Congress appropriated and, through policy changes, has ignored or outright stymied the rights and needs of domestic violence victims. Some of the changes have been wrought by reduced funding and slashed staffing; some of them seem to stems from ideological crusades. All of the administration’s actions will almost certainly to lead to more violence and put victims’ lives at risk.

The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, which was enacted in 1984, funds more than 2,000 domestic violence shelters and programs throughout the country. “It is the only federal funding source that is solely dedicated to domestic violence shelters and programs,” said Melina Milazzo, director of public policy at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, and it’s especially critical because many states don’t spend their own money on such services. But to access the money, states must apply for funds, and the Trump administration hasn’t even released the notice of funding opportunity yet, which is the first step in the process. It takes about six to nine months, Milazzo said, from when the notice of funding is posted for programs to receive funds. “This essentially means that domestic violence shelters and local programs across the country will face at least three months, likely more, without this core funding that essentially keeps their lights on and their doors open,” she said. Most operate with “very limited reserves and cash on hand, which essentially means any funding delays are effectively funding cuts,” she said. “Programs will be forced to reduce services, lay off staff, or even, in worst case scenarios, close altogether.”

The delay in FVPSA funding is compounded by other funding problems. About $200 million in discretionary grants from the Office of Violence Against Women from last fiscal year still hasn’t gone out, and so far there has been a “slight delay,” Milazzo said, in the notice of funding opportunity for that money for this fiscal year. “Cumulatively, this is all having a devastating impact,” she said. “Programs have been making cuts already and reducing services and are incredibly concerned about how long they’ll be able to sustain.”

NNEDV has already documented a gap in services; last year, local programs and shelters weren’t able to fulfill over 13,000 requests for help in a single day. That’s concerning, because victims of domestic violence are often in emergency situations that require immediate help. When NNEDV asked programs how long they could sustain their services if federal funding was cut by 50 percent or more, over half said they wouldn’t make it past six months; almost a quarter could only last one to three months.

If the delay in funding leads programs to cut back or close altogether, Milazzo expects more people who seek out services will get turned away. “It will mean more survivors and their children won’t have a shelter bed to go to, it will mean more survivors and their children won’t have legal assistance, safety planning, crisis counseling, the ability to get out of an unsafe situation and start to rebuild and heal,” she said. In worst case scenarios, she said, “you will see more fatalities, domestic violence homicides.” In other words, people will die. “The most dangerous time for a person in an abusive relationship is the time that they’re leaving,” she said. “If there’s no place for them to go, that means they have to return to an abusive relationship.”

There’s been little to no information from the administration about whether and when all of the funding will flow, Milazzo said. At least some of the holdup seems to be lengthy reviews to make sure funding is in line with Trump’s various executive orders, such as the one trying to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion and another denying the rights of trans and nonbinary people. “We can’t really get any answer from any of the agencies with respect to where things are, when things will come out,” she said.

Survivors of domestic violence are also getting caught up in the Trump administration’s crusade against immigrants. Immigrants living in the US who experience domestic violence—as well as trafficking, labor abuses, or other crimes—can petition for visas to stay legally, known as VAWA visas. Federal law says that these applicants generally shouldn’t be targeted for immigration enforcement. But Vanessa Alonso, CEO of law firm Alonso & Alonso, based in San Antonio, Texas, is representing clients who have pending VAWA cases who have received notices to appear before immigration judges—something completely outside of the VAWA visa process. “It’s really concerning,” she said. Some have even been picked up by immigration officials.

In addition, only US Citizenship and Immigration Services staff trained to deal with VAWA cases should be able to access details of such cases. But some of Alonso’s clients have had information from their visa petitions shared with other parts of the immigration system. One client, who had never been in an immigration database, filed a petition for a VAWA visa that included her address and immigration status; shortly afterward she received a notice at her home telling her to see an immigration judge. “It’s clear the application was used and that information as shared by USCIS improperly with ICE,” Alonso said.

“We’re seeing degradation of that protection and lines being blurred,” she added. “It’s almost as if the laws in place to protect this population are no longer being respected.” While she added that only a small percentage of cases are being affected by these problems, it’s concerning “because it’s never been done before.”

Meanwhile, in December USCIS announced that it would increase the standard of evidence domestic violence victims must meet for their petitions to be successful. According to the relevant statute, Alonso said, “credible evidence” is sufficient to win a VAWA case. Under that requirement, she was able to win cases based on clients’ own statements laying out the abuse they’d suffered. But “USCIS on their own are moving the goal posts,” she said. Now she’s advising clients to find text messages, photos, even witnesses to corroborate their stories. That’s not easy. “Often when someone’s experiencing this in a relationship, they’re not necessarily thinking about, ‘Let me collect this evidence so I can get my status on my own,’” she said. For the first time, immigration officers are interviewing her clients about their abuse. Clients are obligated to retell their stories, sometimes for hours, hoping that they’re able to relay it exactly as they did in their written declarations.

Some of Alonso’s clients are now hesitant to apply for VAWA visas at all. These cases take a long time, typically about four years, to resolve, which means that for some of Alonso’s clients, they submitted petitions that satisfied one set of rules and have now had the rules changed while they waited. Some have canceled their cases. Demand for these legal services is “extremely low compared to last year,” she said.

Alonso can no longer assure her clients that they’ll be protected from deportation while their applications are pending. “It’s just a different conversation when you’re speaking to a victim today. You have to say, ‘Look, the protections that the law has written are not being respected at the moment,’” she said. “A victim really has to weigh all of this and say, ‘Is it worth it to go forward?’ if potentially they are scared of their partner finding out, if it is going to take four years, if it’s not going to prevent deportation.”

“If the Trump administration’s intention is to get less people applying, I think it’s definitely working,” she added. And that, she said, will result in domestic violence going unchecked. “The less participation we have in those programs, the more perpetrators we will have potentially in our community who can continue doing what they’re doing.”

On paper, victims of domestic violence have been protected against discrimination in housing under VAWA for decades. But the housing protections lacked an enforcement mechanism. In its 2022 VAWA reauthorization, Congress directed HUD to enforce those rights the way it does with protections against racial, sex, disability, and other types of discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. Rights under VAWA include protection against eviction on the basis of gender-based violence and against discrimination in admission to housing programs, and they apply to people in housing complexes or programs administered by HUD, such as public housing or rental vouchers, as well as by Veterans Affairs and a few other federal agencies. That means domestic violence victims shouldn’t be evicted because their abuser damages the property or because the victim frequently calls the police to the unit.

During the Biden administration, the agency started accepting VAWA complaints and training its staff on how to process and remedy them. “We were standing that up and I thought it actually was starting to move pretty well,” said Sasha Samberg-Champion, special counsel for civil rights at the National Fair Housing Alliance who served as deputy general counsel for enforcement and fair housing and HUD under President Biden. The agency reached settlement agreements in “quite a number of cases,” he said, and was able to do it quickly. HUD not only helped victims quickly relocate to get away from their abusers, for example, but forced landlords to change their policies.

“We had the ability to fully investigate cases, to send them forward for prosecution, to settle them freely,” said Paul Osadebe, former trial attorney in HUD’s Office of Fair Housing, speaking as a union steward at American Federation of Government Employees Local 476. “It was a full green light.”

But that changed in the second Trump term. “None of that is the case now,” Osadebe said. All of the people Samberg-Champion had worked with to set up the new capabilities at HUD are now gone, he said. Osadebe was on that team (he was fired in February after speaking out about the administration limiting HUD’s ability to enforce the Fair Housing Act), and he said that through firings and reassignments only one or two people are left working on VAWA enforcement at HUD. “That slows things to a crawl,” he said. VAWA complaints, as with all other fair housing complaints, are not being allowed to proceed. “It doesn’t matter whether someone is under threat of imminent violence,” Osadebe said. “It’s all treated as if it’s not urgent and is worthy of suspicion and needs to go through 20 layers of review and it’s presumed it shouldn’t go forward.” Like Alonso, he observed that victims were required to have hard proof of their abuse in order for HUD to move for a settlement. All other cases “just sit,” he said. Natalie Maxwell, chief legal officer at the National Housing Law Project, hasn’t heard of a single VAWA complaint getting resolved since Trump took office.

But enforcing VAWA protections in housing is not optional. “It’s completely illegal that HUD is not adjudicating complaints filed under VAWA,” Samberg-Champion said.

Only HUD has the jurisdiction to process VAWA complaints, and it can not only secure justice for a victim but also force systemic change to make sure others aren’t harmed. Victims can try to sue on their own, but “that is not an easy process and there are not enough attorneys to represent all the folks that need help,” Maxwell said. “It leaves survivors without an avenue for relief.”

Right before he was put on administrative leave, Osadebe had been working on a complaint that involved a victim of stalking who had to flee her home and was trying to get her housing back. “That person is homeless and will remain homeless and is probably homeless to this day,” he said. “I wasn’t allowed to help someone I could have helped.”

The administration’s actions paint a picture of an ideological opposition to the rights of domestic violence victims. And they come from one led by a number of people who have been accused of sexual misconduct, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of abusing his second wife. Two members of Trump’s first administration resigned after being accused of domestic violence. President Trump himself was caught on a microphone saying he could grab women “by the pussy” and kissed women without their consent, was accused of rape by ex-wife Ivana Trump (who later disavowed the allegation), has been accused by at least 26 other women of sexual abuse, and was found liable for sexual abuse by a jury. Last September, he downplayed the severity of domestic violence, calling it a “lesser infraction” that shouldn’t be treated as a crime. “Things that take place in the home, they call crime,” Trump complained. “They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, ‘This was a crime scene.’”

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump surveyed his top military brass on the prospect of making war in Iran. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine urged caution, presciently predicting that a ramped-up campaign against Iran could lead its leaders to close the Strait of Hormuz. However, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “secretary of war,” jumped at the prospect of such a conflict.

“Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up,” Trump recently recalled at a press event. “And you said, ‘Let’s do it, because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.’”

Americans join the military for any number of reasons: to serve their country, gain economic stability, or simply join a community. For Hegseth, a thirst for martial victory and a desire for a masculine metamorphosis seemed to surpass all else.

Much to Hegseth’s chagrin, however, his career as an Army officer corresponded to a series of distinctly failed military campaigns. After graduating from Princeton in 2003, he deployed to two doomed military locales—Afghanistan and Iraq—and then relentlessly defended the Pentagon’s occupation of parts of those places in essays, speeches, and, ultimately, as a weekend host on Fox News. While Hegseth’s rhetoric on those wars long reflected mainstream Republican talking points—papering over chaos and death in the Middle East and beyond with pledges that stable democracies were close at hand—his zeal indicated something deeper: a desperation, it seemed, to wring some sort of personal validation from his time in uniform.

“The rank and file, and even some of the officers, have accepted the gravity of the war’s failures,” Adam Weinstein, a Marine Corps veteran and deputy director for Middle East policy at the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank focused on peace and diplomacy, told me, speaking of Iraq and Afghanistan. “There’s a deep sense of sacrifice and loss for nothing. And that can lead to fatalistic beliefs. It can lead to Islamophobia. In its healthier form, it can lead to questioning the principles of interventionism and the US foreign policy establishment.”

Hegseth, for his part, chose to totally avoid any personal or geopolitical reckoning. Once the Global War on Terror became politically untenable to defend, he cast about for excuses that wouldn’t implicate his own career in the military. Rather than zero in on tactical or intelligence failures, his rhetoric took a dark turn, increasingly inflected by Islamophobia, misogyny, and a distinctly toxic version of masculinity.

As his profile rose, Hegseth argued ever more forcefully that the Pentagon was weak-willed, insufficiently lethal, and overrun by incompetent and cowardly leaders, many of them women or minorities who (in his eyes) had been unfairly promoted. His proposed remedy was as blunt and dense as his diagnosis: America simply needed to fight harder in the Middle East until the mission was accomplished and “Islamic extremism” was eliminated. As one of his former coworkers told me, “I never got the feeling that he wanted to abandon the Middle East.”

I asked Weinstein if, during his own 2012 deployment to Afghanistan, he saw Islamophobia bubbling below the surface. “It was right on the surface,” he responded. “But what do you think the World War II generation was saying about the Japanese? Dehumanization is a natural outgrowth of war.”

“If You Want Something, You Go After It”

As a boy growing up in Minnesota, Hegseth appeared to be a perfect version of the American male. He was religious, athletic, well-spoken, and remarkably handsome. He was ashamed, however, of his self-perceived softness. “I didn’t get in fights as a kid and shied from confrontation because, frankly, I was scared of it,” he wrote in his 2016 book In the Arena, Good Citizens, a Great Republic, and How One Speech Can Reinvigorate America. In it, he went on to hail his father, Brian, for his “integrity” and “Scandinavian work ethic,” before evincing thinly veiled resentment for not having been reared effectively in the masculine art of aggression. “My father was—and is—an incredible man,” he reflected, “but confrontation isn’t necessarily his forte.”

Military service, Hegseth figured, would imbue him with some much-needed and previously missing manliness. It was also his best path to class mobility and prestige. When it came time for college, he applied to West Point, America’s most prestigious service academy, and Princeton, where he was gunning for a ROTC scholarship. He got into both schools and chose the latter, touching down on its verdant New Jersey campus in 1999.

In deciding on Princeton, Hegseth launched himself on a path eerily paralleling that of another Minnesota native of a previous era, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. Both of them were working-class lads who attended Princeton, where they bristled at the elitism while craving its validation. Both developed a writing voice on campus and then joined the Army. Both also struggled with the bottle and with women, though Fitzgerald, unlike Hegseth, was somewhat reflective about his vices. He initially called his first novel The Romantic Egotist (later, This Side of Paradise). It followed a handsome, middle-class Princeton man whose greed and social ambition inhibited his ability to find true love. Hegseth himself expressed a similar ambition in a 2015 interview: “If you want something, you go after it—you’re willing to sleep a little less, put up with more, put up with a little insanity and do things you don’t want to do.”

In a widely read 1927 essay on his alma mater, Fitzgerald asserted that Princeton men “resent any attempt at analysis.” Hegseth also did his best to make such analysis impossible. At Princeton, he was deemed a man with “many faces,” loudly endorsing the Iraq War and attacking feminist groups on campus (even if, in quieter moments, he showed a capacity for nuance and kindness).

One of his former professors has pointed out that Hegseth’s current persona and his Princeton one “don’t fit.” Part of the disconnect stems from the fact that his puffed-up, bellicose military posturing in the Trump era doesn’t match either his Ivy League education or his actual service record. Hegseth came away from the war in Iraq with a Bronze Star that, it’s worth noting, was issued “without valor.” (It was, in short, a lesser version of the medal that, according to The Washington Post, was “issued somewhat liberally” during the War on Terror years. Some enlisted personnel joked that such a decoration was little more than a “participation trophy” for needy officers.)

Hegseth’s award citation was indeed dry and formulaic, chock-full of the soaring platitudes then used by the White House to sell the American public on the disastrous war in Iraq. It asserted (in what was, historically speaking, a fantasy) that he had “contributed immeasurably to the success of building a free and democratic nation for the citizens of Iraq.”

In reality, the supposed heroes of Hegseth’s war were generally not pedigreed Army National Guard officers like him, but door-busting, ass-kicking Green Berets and Navy SEALs. This was largely thanks to movies like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty that lionized their contributions.

After returning home, Hegseth made inroads with such operators via his advocacy work at a series of astroturf veterans groups, including the “Concerned Veterans for America” (backed by the Koch network), which advocates for the privatization of the Veterans Administration. As part of his duties, he embarked on a 10-city “Defend Freedom” tour in 2014. Such events featured Madison Rising, billed as “America’s most patriotic rock band,” as well as speeches from decorated military heroes and family members.

On that tour, Hegseth connected with Karen Vaughn, a Gold Star mother whose son, Aaron, a SEAL Team Six member, had been killed in Afghanistan. Vaughn told me that she supports Hegseth mostly because he listens to those who have experienced conflict up close. “His friends are the people who fought these wars,” she said. “They are not the people who sat around white linen tablecloths with glasses of wine discussing them.”

Vaughn later introduced Hegseth to Eddie Gallagher, a SEAL who ignited a simmering debate over the military’s rules of engagement when he was accused of killing civilians and fatally stabbing a wounded captive. Hegseth used the case of Gallagher and two others accused of grisly war crimes against civilians in an attempt to move the Overton window on what should be deemed acceptable rules of wartime engagement. “These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” he brashly asserted. “They’re not war criminals, they’re warriors.” Ultimately, President Trump agreed with him and reversed Gallagher’s demotion after he was acquitted of the most serious charges, while pardoning other troops who had been convicted of war crimes.

It was through this work that Hegseth earned serious credibility among that badass class of warfighters and ultimately came to embody the essential Trumpian soldier archetype of this moment: white, male, and God-fearing.

The Jerusalem Cross Secretary of War

According to 2019 Department of Defense data, approximately 70 percent of active-duty service members were Christian (and that undoubtedly hasn’t changed in the era of Donald Trump). It’s the people who look, talk, and pray like Hegseth who also seem most receptive to opposing women serving in combat roles and in favor of Islamophobic war rhetoric. “If we’re going to send our boys to fight—and it should be boys,” he wrote in his memoirs, “we need to unleash them to win. [America needs] them to be the most ruthless.”

But the United States had already sent too many boys into harm’s way in disastrous wars and its citizens were becoming exhausted by conflict. By 2013, as Hegseth’s star was rising, 53 percent of polled Americans already saw the Iraq war as a mistake. That same year, Hegseth first ventured to Jerusalem, where, in a piece penned for National Review, he hailed “Israel’s sense of purpose.” Unlike other nations, Hegseth observed, Israel maintained “an ever-present understanding that the fragile peace they enjoy and their nation itself are preserved only through intentional, purposeful, and courageous action.”

Here was a nation that could satisfy Hegseth’s unquenched thirst for military dominance in the Arab world. And unlike the United States, which sought technocratic rationales for war, Israel had the advantage of framing everything in biblical terms. “I find myself envious,” Hegseth concluded, “of the gravity and substance of the Israelis’ task.”

He repeatedly visited Israel in the years that followed, something that helped rejuvenate his faith in both God and war. In Israel, Hegseth consulted with conservative political figures and soldiers of the Israeli Defense Forces; visited military bunkers on that country’s northern border; and toured Hebron, a Palestinian city in the West Bank that Israel has targeted with attacks and settlements. He also produced a series of on-the-ground, pro-Israel documentaries for Fox News’s streaming service, including Battle in the Holy Land, Battle in Bethlehem, and Life of Jesus. While filming one of those projects, he first spotted a Jerusalem Cross, a symbol once used by the medieval crusaders, and had it tattooed on his chest “to show that my religion is front and center in my life.”

Hegseth’s skin would come to perfectly illustrate his signature version of hyper-aggressive Christian masculinity. His collage of body ink today includes an American flag, an assault rifle, and the words “Deus Vult” or “God wills it”—a motto from the Crusades that has been adopted by white supremacists and was seen at the deadly 2017 march in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hegseth also inked the word “kafir,” meaning “infidel” or “non-believer,” on his right bicep.

By 2016, he had come to see Israel’s success as inexorably bound to that of the United States. That January, when President Barack Obama ratified a historic nuclear deal with Iran, Hegseth saw a cowardly capitulation to a country that, he argued then, “would wipe both Israel and America off the map if it could.” During a visit to Israel that year, he pledged to an audience that the United States was forever prepared to “lock arms and shields with all of you in defense of freedom and western civilization.”

It’s this history, as much as anything, that helps explain America’s current war with Iran. In Secretary of War Hegseth, America now has a man with a bone-deep desire for national revenge, one largely animated by his poorly disguised sense of embarrassment and emasculation by the utter failures of the wars he fought in.

These are, of course, profoundly flimsy, deeply egotistical excuses for sending American troops into harm’s way yet again. Not surprisingly, then, there have even been a series of public rejections and defections by former Trump administration figures frustrated by the conflict with Iran. The most notable of these is Joe Kent, a former counterterrorism official in the Trump administration who resigned his post, citing “no imminent threat to our nation” from that country. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe have also tacitly acknowledged that the war in Iran was not launched by an actual threat index.

As Hegseth has made clear in his words and deeds, the latest American war is largely animated by emotional factors, plus (as reporting has shown) intense pressure from Israel. Now, being in charge of the Pentagon, and with a renewed opportunity to pummel the Middle East, he has dropped all institutional pretense to compassion or caution. “We are punching them while they’re down,” he recently told reporters, “which is exactly how it should be.” In practice, this has meant a brutal bombing campaign in conjunction with Israel that targeted, among many other things, a girls’ primary school and oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, acts that respectively killed children and polluted the region. Hegseth also pledged not to offer quarter to enemy combatants, in violation of international law.

He certainly hopes that faith and masculine posturing alone can secure success. Absent tangible intelligence, he has taken a page out of Israel’s book by injecting religiosity across the ranks, recently promising on CBS News that “the providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.” Asked directly if he views this conflict as a religious one, Hegseth said, “Obviously, we’re fighting religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.”

To bolster such an atmosphere, he has hosted Pentagon prayer services involving fiery Christian nationalist pastors and a Grammy Award–winning religious singer. His department’s promotional videos have displayed Bible verses alongside military footage. Watchdogs further claimed that US commanders have counseled troops that the war is fulling biblical prophecies around Armageddon. Hegseth’s fusion of strength, religion, and violence was encapsulated in a poster allegedly displayed at a US military installation in recent days. It featured Jesus Christ firing a mortar round.

Hegseth’s 2024 book, The War on Warriors, further sketches out his theory for reinvigorating the military’s masculine ethos, often through half-assed aphorisms that could fit on a Ford F-350 bumper. Sprinkled in are mythical tales, most of which have Hegseth or another aggrieved white guy at their center. The military has become so warped and woke, he writes, that it has diluted standards to allow women in combat while simultaneously kicking out “good soldiers for having naked women tattooed on their arms.” In Hegseth’s eyes, of course, women should only be on the front lines if they’re naked and in ink.

The US District Court in Alabama has decided not to let the state go quietly back to the Jim Crow era as the Supreme Court would like. In a ruling issued on Tuesday, a three-judge panel, which included two judges appointed by Donald Trump, rejected Alabama’s latest attempt to gerrymander away the political power of Black people.

Alabama has already indicated that it will file an emergency appeal. I’m forced to assume that this appeal will be granted and the white-wing Supreme Court will overrule the lower court. But the decision is still a striking and emphatic rejection of the racism Republicans wish to reinject into American elections.

The case is just the latest in the long-running saga of Allen v. Milligan. After the 2020 Census, Alabama redrew its congressional map in such a way that only one of its seven districts was majority-minority. The map purposely diluted the voting power of Black people in Alabama, especially those living in the so-called “Black Belt,” which cuts laterally across the state.

This map was challenged by voting-rights activists who asked the state to draw a second majority-minority district. Alabama is 26 percent Black and 6 percent Latino, so having two of seven districts be majority-minority makes mathematical sense. The voting-rights activists won in district court but, in February 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that it was too close to the November 2022 midterms to force Alabama to redraw its maps. The 2022 election went ahead with only one majority-minority district.

In 2023, the Supreme Court once again took up the case—this time to rule on its merits, not just timing—and ruled that Alabama’s maps were racist and therefore unconstitutional. The Alabama legislature then put forth another map, which the district court calls the 2023 Plan, which was essentially the same as the 2021 map the Supreme Court had just rejected. The district court rejected this 2023 Plan as well, and ordered a special master to draw a new map. That new map had two majority-minority districts that kept Black communities intact across the state.

The district court calls this map the “special master map.” The 2024 elections took place under this map, and the 2026 midterm elections were set to take place under the same map. But at the end of April, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. This case effectively killed the 1965 Voting Rights Act and allowed the states to resurrect Jim Crow types of voter suppression, including gerrymandering away Black voting power.

Whites in Alabama immediately sprung into action. The state interpreted Callais as overruling Allen v. Milligan, and attempted to reinstate its planned 2023 map.

That map is what the three-judge district court panel rejected, for essentially the third time, on Tuesday. The court found that, even after Callais, the remaining shard of the Voting Rights Act still prohibits maps that are intentionally racist, and Alabama legislature’s map intentionally seeks to take voting power away from Black people. This is a finding that the Supreme Court itself made back when Milligan was decided, and the district court saw nothing in the record to suggest a different conclusion. Instead, the district court ordered Alabama to continue using the special master map, which has two majority-minority districts, for the upcoming elections.

Part of what’s happening here is that white Republicans in Alabama are being shiftless and lazy. Their map has been ruled intentionally racist by multiple courts on multiple occasions. Trying to ram through this particular map is the worst possible version of trying to make fetch happen. Could Alabama draw a map with only one Black district in a way that courts approve? Probably! Again, there are two Trump judges on this very district court panel, and it’s not exactly difficult to get Trump judges to give the go-ahead to racism. But trying again and again to get the courts to affirm an old map that has already been ruled unconstitutional borders on insanity.

Then again, while Alabama doesn’t have a good legal argument for using its old, unconstitutional map, it does have something arguably more important: a Supreme Court that might be so desperate to crush Black voting rights that legal arguments don’t matter.

To understand how the court could maneuver this, it helps to know about a legal doctrine invented by the court to help it generate the outcomes it wants: the Purcell Principle. At its most basic, this doctrine states that changes to election rules (like, for instance, which districts exist) cannot be made “too close” to an upcoming election. How close is too close? Only the Supreme Court knows. In 2022, the Supreme Court used this principle to uphold the racist map Alabama now wants to use, and the court could well do it again.

Whether it does will depend on which map the Supreme Court decides to use as the “current” map—and, therefore, which party it believes is trying to change the rules. The district court argued in its ruling that the special master map is the legitimate one because the election was set to be held under it until several weeks ago; under this logic, Alabama is trying to change the rules. Alabama, however, is likely to argue in its appeal to the Supreme Court that the planned map, the one that wasn’t set to be used in this election, is the current one because the legislature voted after the Callais decision to try it again. Who will be right? Well, obviously the district court is correct. We know this because candidates are literally already involved in primary contests based on the special master map. We are well past the time when the state should be able to change the boundaries of its districts.

But the Supreme Court is apparently happy to ignore its Purcell Principle whenever there is an opportunity to take away voting power from Black people. Just a few weeks ago, it literally rejected the traditional 32-day waiting period that should have followed the Callais decision just so that states could take away Black power expeditiously—which a bunch of states promptly did. Louisiana straight up called off the primaries so that it could erase Black districts before the midterm elections. Tennessee split the city of Memphis so that it could take away the state’s lone Black district.

I expect the Supreme Court to continue its racist streak when it weighs in on this case. I expect it will stay the lower court’s ruling, citing Purcell, and allow Alabama to conduct the 2026 midterms with its racist map. Perhaps, in 2027, the Supreme Court will reject the map again and force Alabama to do the apparently backbreaking work of drawing a new racist map. But as the operating goal of the current Supreme Court appears to be helping Republicans hang on to the House in 2026, it will likely rule for Alabama in the short term.

The only hope here is that Chief Justice John Roberts and either alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett are offended by Alabama’s sheer laziness. They already rejected Alabama’s legislature’s map as intentionally racist. To allow it now, they would have to essentially admit they were wrong. And such an admission would encourage states to ignore future Supreme Court rulings on the theory that adverse rulings are just temporary setbacks.

The district court put that issue front and center in its ruling. The panel wrote:

Alabama cannot use Callais to legitimize its pre-Callais decision to double down on the discriminatory vote dilution that we and the Supreme Court found.… If such retroactive validation strategies were available, States would be encouraged to govern themselves according to what they think federal law ought to be, not what it is.

We know Roberts hates Black voting rights. But we also know he loves power. Is he willing to sacrifice the latter to accomplish the former? I guess we’ll find out soon.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

After the Supreme Court gutted the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, states such as Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, and Louisiana immediately moved to redraw and eliminate majority-Black districts, muting their political voices. What those states have in common—aside from revanchist politicians pining for a return to Jim Crow—is a social, political, and economic addiction to college football, an institution dominated by Black athletes. To paraphrase Maya Angelou, these are states that deify Black talent, love Black entertainment, and depend upon Black labor, but demean and politically silence Black people.

In response, the NAACP dropped a political bomb last week, calling upon Black high school athletes to boycott universities in states that are gutting the voting rights of Black residents. Their call immediately sparked a series of debates: Can threatening the South’s obsession with college football produce positive political change? Will teenagers and their families being offered NIL (name, image, likeness) money accede to this? Is it even fair to ask 16-year-old Black kids to sacrifice these kinds of opportunities? Why should they have to deal with the failures of older generations, to protect what so many sacrificed to achieve? And shouldn’t this call extend to white athletes as well, in the name of solidarity, if nothing else?

The NAACP’s new campaign has launched a thousand opinions—but there is one we should care about hearing above all others: that of Dr. Harry Edwards. Now 83 years old, the sociologist and activist has spent his career organizing Black athletes to see themselves as a community that can exercise power, make demands, and speak their minds. Dr. Edwards is perhaps best known as the lead organizer of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, which led the attempted boycott by Black athletes and their supporters of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. For the past three decades, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, he played an essential role in establishing sports sociology as an academic discipline. His studies of sports through the prism of race changed how all culture—music, film, dance—has been interrogated. Unlike so many offering opinions on the NAACP’s boycott proposal, he is someone who has not only been in the trenches—he dug the trenches.

When I reached out to Edwards about the NAACP decision, he replied with a long and thoughtful answer. Here is what he said.

The NAACP needs some historical insight regarding their proposed Black athlete boycott and to consider their own potential contradictions as well as counterproductive outcomes. I want to make it clear from the outset that I am not averse to their proposal. I’m just pulling their coattails on the complexities of their proposed effort—not to speak of the fact that the athletes haven’t been heard from yet. There is better than just a possible chance that, as things now stand, many Black athletes will ignore or be outright opposed to the NAACP regarding a Black athlete boycott strategy, especially under circumstances of there being no “Black movement” in the broader society sufficiently influential and compelling enough to travel over stadium walls and through pavilion turnstiles to provide athletes with an ideological and definitional strategy, with political identity and ideological affiliation within a broader society-wide movement—one that informs, frames, and fuels their involvement and generates the popular political connection and support they need and deserve as they put everything on the line, their present and their future.

The situation at this point should be about messaging—how many ways are there to get the message out to both Black athletes and the states targeted? And what determines what would be a suitably urgent and creditable range of responses—not just from the athletes and schools but from the states involved. Organized and politically educated Black athletes collectively, certainly, might be able in the short run to pursue some gains directly associated with their sports involvement: e.g., they might be able to drive up the NIL price of their participation in the SEC, and ACC, or be able to send a message to two or three states on a “targeted” school-by-school basis. (Of course, the schools targeted would enlist their former Black student athletes to speak against the NAACP effort and dissuade any current athletes from supporting the NAACP. ) But no organized Black athlete effort will be met with institutional acceptance: Here will be a price to pay principally by the activist athletes. Still, whatever the goals, clarity in messaging from the outset is critical. In September of 1967, in the run-up to the Olympic Project for Human Rights, I organized a boycott of the University of Texas, El Paso versus San Jose State season opening football game. Then in February of 1968 we sent a further “message” by organizing a total boycott of the NYAC indoor track and field classic. We “sent a message” during the most politically violent five years in America since 1860–1865. That was 1963–1968: a time that consumed a president, a presidential candidate, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Dr. King, and civil rights workers and leaders. In the end, our implemented strategy was a combination of boycotts and protests, highlighting the strategic need for flexibility and multiple options.

It would appear to be more efficacious today for the NAACP to target two or three schools with the threat of others being singled out for targeting in the NEAR future. And it’s not too late for the NAACP to downsize and diversify its boycott effort in this fashion. But I’m still not convinced that the NAACP’s goals can be achieved in the absence of a broader, society-wide, Black popular political movement. Today there is nothing like the post–World War II civil rights movement, which gave us the social-political context for Major League Baseball’s “Great Experiment,” Jackie Robinson, the desegregation of professional football and basketball, and Wilma Rudolph’s post-1960 Olympics desegregation efforts. There is nothing like the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, which saw the Muhammad Ali Cleveland Summit, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, nor the Black Lives Matter movement, with Ariyana Smith, Colin Kaepernick, and countless others; nor the rise of women’s sports coinciding with Roe v. Wade, Title IX, and the #MeToo movement. In calling for today’s athletic boycott, the NAACP has not, to my knowledge, discussed the imperative of embedding any athlete boycott effort in a broader popular political movement context that would provide imperative political framing and scaffolding within a broader-based societal movement.

As we look at the challenges strategically facing the NAACP today, with so much of the organization’s focus clearly on college football and perhaps, in some part, on basketball, we must also remember that in most past instances, it was Black women in sports who ignited the relevant movements. In 1959, at the Chicago Pan Am games, Rose Robinson sat on an ice cooler during the playing of the national anthem in protest of racial segregation—a year before Elgin Baylor, and nearly two years before Bill Russell boycotted participation in NBA games over segregated dining facilities at their team hotels. Ms. Robinson’s protest, staged during the anthem, was almost 10 years before Smith and Carlos [raised their fists at the 1968 Olympics].

After the 1960 Rome Olympics, it was Wilma Rudolph who refused to participate in racially segregated parades and dinners in celebration of her three gold medal performances at the games and who subsequently undertook to desegregate her hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee, not Ali, who didn’t become outspoken on racism until after his defeat of Sonny Liston in 1964. In 2014, two years before Kaepernick took his knee in pre-game protest during the anthem, Knox College basketball player Ariyana Smith lay on the gym floor for four minutes and 20 seconds during the presentation of colors and playing of the national anthem at a game in Staten, Missouri, about 12 miles from Ferguson, in a commemorative protest of the four hours and 20 minutes that police blocked the family of Mike Brown from retrieving his body from the street where he was killed by a white police officer. In July of 2020, the women of the Atlanta Dream of the WNBA mobilized to drive out a member of their team ownership—also a US senator—who spoke derisively and condemned the Black Lives Matter movement, in the process leading a drive to elect two Democrat senators to the US Congress from Georgia for the first time since the era of the Dixiecrats.

Sports recapitulates society, so don’t look for a leader such as a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to emerge and spark that imperative, broad scale movement in society. Rather, look for the next Claudette Colvin or Rosa Parks—if history is any guide, she is already on her way—and in this male-dominated, patriarchal society and sports institution, the leader will likely follow.

So the question must be raised: Does the NAACP’s proposed boycott encompass women’s collegiate sports, or just revenue-producing men’s collegiate sports? If not, the effort will be denying the relevance of both women’s sports and the historic role-potential of women athletes in igniting protest movements in both sports and society. Clearly, then—and this is my broader and more basic point—a great deal of strategic analyses and a lot of groundwork must be done regarding the NAACP’s proposed Black athlete boycott of collegiate sports if there is to be any chance of even a minimally successful effort. Furthermore, we must not ask Black athletes—male or female—to squander their hard-won power resources for lack of thorough analyses and planning.

As Trump attempts to distribute his $1.776 billion slush fund to the right-wing mob that trashed the capital; as 10,000 white South Africans are being given US citizenship while hundreds of thousands of people waiting for green cards are being told to leave the country; and as Black voting rights are being eradicated, this is a red-alert, wake-the-fuck-up moment for anyone who doesn’t think we should live under the heel of white supremacist violence. And while this kind of a boycott could have an incredibly positive effect, Edwards reminds us that “waking up” is insufficient. We have to organize “over the stadium walls and through the pavilion turnstiles” to actually see results. Or, as Harry Edwards said in 1968, “Activism divorced from thorough strategic analyses is conducive to nothing so much as contradiction, chaos and ultimately failure.”

By early 2027, the first models of the “Chorus” will be rolling off assembly lines at the French car manufacturer Renault. It’s not a new emissions-free vehicle at an appealing price point—the elusive savior of Europe’s once confident automobile sector. Rather, the Chorus is the French brand’s first foray into the burgeoning market of military drones. Designed with weapons contractor Turgis Gaillard, the Chorus drone will be put together across two of the carmaker’s industrial sites. Engines manufactured at Renault’s Cléon facilities near Rouen will get final assembly at the group’s factory in Le Mans, a site usually known for its chassis frames.

The final product, according to the manufacturers’ magazine L’Usine Nouvelle, is an ordnance with dual offensive and reconnaissance capabilities. Lauded in industry circles as a reply to Iran’s Shahed drones or compared to Ukraine’s Flamingo cruise missiles, the Chorus will purportedly be capable of carrying a 500-kilogram payload with an estimated range of 3,000 kilometers (slightly over 1,864 miles), at a unit price of €120,000.

Renault management denies that drone production could ever become a pillar of business strategy. The group “does not aim to become a major actor in the defense sector,” it said in a press release this winter, after its drone partnership was approved by employee representatives. For now, the scale of its agreement appears minimal: Renault is said to be broaching a 10-year pact with the French state valued at €1 billion. (In 2025, the group reported just shy of €58 billion in worldwide revenue.) For now, monthly output is expected to reach 600 Chorus drones when production hits full speed over the next year, compared to the many thousands of engines or car frames manufactured at the two sites in question.

Yet these small steps are part of French President Emmanuel Macron’s calls to bring France to a “war economy” footing. Tony Fortin, of the Lyon-based NGO L’Observatoire de l’Armement, warns that Renault’s entry into the drone market has it starting down a familiar path. Denouncing “an extension of the military into civilian industry,” Fortin said that Renault’s deal “normalizes the notion that weapons are a market like any other.”

It also comes at a time of mounting difficulties for European automakers, with the twin threats of US tariffs and rising Chinese supply in the strategic market for next generation electric vehicles. At the peak of the critical metals crunch last October, when European heavy industry found itself in the crossfire of Trump’s tug of war with Beijing, its chief automobile lobby warned that European corporations were “days away” from full work stoppages. With operating profit margins declining by a little over one percent in 2025, Renault is still faring better than some of its European competitors. On May 21, Stellantis, which owns brands like Peugot, Jeep, and Fiat, projected an estimated 800,000 decline in its European automobile output by 2030.

Renault is also not the only automobile group leaning into military hardware. Volkswagon is reportedly considering a partnership with Israeli armsmaker Rafael over missile defense production. Ola Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz, told The Wall Street Journal on May 15 that “Europe needs to strengthen its defense capabilities” and that “if [Mercedez-Benz] can play a positive role in that, we would be prepared to do so.”

Historically, industrial groups like these are no strangers to arms production, even if the trend since the 1990s saw them divesting from military-linked assets. In 2001, the French automaker sold off its military vehicles division, Renault Trucks Defense, to Volvo. Rebranded as Arquus, the firm is now owned by the Belgian industrial group John Cockerill. Two decades after its sale, Arquus is reportedly back at work on an un unmanned land vehicle with its former parent company. According to Le Figaro, Renault is also expected to roll out at June’s Eurosatory expo a mobile command post model with the French arms major Thales.

The drift toward rearmament has workers in a difficult bind, with traditional labor hesitation making space for acceptance at the prospect of new contracts. Weeks before abstaining at the social council vote held in February, the Renault branch of the left-wing CGT union wrote in a press release: “If there’s going to be weapons production, it must only serve the needs of national defense, be under strict public oversight, and can under no circumstances be driven by market forces, the search for profits, or as exports to fuel armed conflicts.”

Force Ouvrière was the only union at Renault to approve the partnership, and its Renault delegate Mounir Mestari claims that among workers, “many, if not a clear majority, look favorably” on the drone plan. Renault management agreed that work on the military hardware would be on an exclusively volunteer basis and guaranteed special security measures at the industrial sites manufacturing the Chorus.

The relatively mooted response at Renault is hard to dissociate from the crisis gripping the broader European auto industry. “Our position has been very clear: there’s no denying that car makers are struggling to really take off when it comes to electric vehicles, so any activity that could bring employment and industrial production is a good thing,” Mestari told The Nation. Though tapped as a site for producing engines for Renault’s electric vehicles, total employment at the Cléon facility is stagnant at around 3,000 workers, down by several hundred since the late 2010s. With Renault currently restructuring its Ampère electric line, Stellantis appears to be doubling down on partnerships with Chinese brands.

Without the state protections afforded to Chinese carmakers, corporations in the European Union have taken aim at the bloc’s environmental regulations, winning carve-outs last December to the EU’s planned 2035 phaseout of new internal combustion engines. Mestari expressed similar frustrations, claiming that 25 percent of staff at Renault’s Guyancourt site, its technical research and development facility in the outer suburbs of Paris, are employed in norms compliance. Yet, by that same logic, the technicians at the very same facility working on Renault’s drone projects are also diverted from the work of car making, at a critical juncture in the industry’s history.

Still, Renault executives have said that drones will be just a “complement” to the group’s regular business activities. But the French state will be there to coax things along too. Speaking before a senate hearing in February, Patrick Pailloux, director of the defense ministry’s arms procurement bureau, argued that the rapprochement with Renault was less about buying a line of drones that “will soon be obsolete” than it was about getting a system up and running: “This work will ensure that Renault, if the day comes, will be able to produce in volume.”

As a sensitivity reader, your job is to peruse novels in progress to ensure that they do not include any harmful depictions of people whose identity differs from that of the author. The source of your authority on the matter? Your own race, sexual orientation, disability, or other identity marker. There are Taiwanese sensitivity readers, Muslim sensitivity readers, trans sensitivity readers, wheelchair-using sensitivity readers, and even white ones whose expertise is the ethnic-Greek experience. This raises the possibility of the following scenario: Say you’re a Greek American whom an editor has offered $500 to take a look at a forthcoming novel, since its cast of characters includes the child of a Greek-diner owner who, the editor fears, might seem a little stereotypical. The author is more of a Mayflower type, so how much insight could they really have into the generational trauma of food service in suburban Detroit?

Reading through the novel, you’re repelled by the procedural prose, but since your role is limited to performing a sensitivity read, you laser in on the 20 or so pages where the Greek kid appears. You note the thinly veiled references to his father’s “kalamata-stained fingertips” and his ultramasculine swagger. Your own parents were professors from Kolonaki (indeed, you’re quite looking forward to your next family trip back to Athens), so you can’t quite parse a reference to the character’s great-grandfather emigrating to Michigan from a town you’ve never heard of in Thessaly. Still, you dutifully make your notes, suggest a few changes (“I’ve never met a Greek named Harper”), and e-mail them to the editor. You hope, when your own novel in progress is ready for submission, you’ll be looked upon favorably.

This scenario, however baffling, is an increasingly common feature of the publishing business. Sensitivity readers first came into vogue around 2016, when Jodi Picoult reportedly hired some to help her craft a depiction of a Black nurse in the novel Small Great Things. The Guardian and Current Affairs applauded her and other early adopters as refreshingly enlightened, with the latter publication proclaiming: “Bring On the Sensitivity Readers.” Since then, at least one publishing imprint, HarperCollins’s romance-focused Harlequin, has added sensitivity readers to its permanent staff, while the indie publisher Riptide, according to The New York Times, “has begun requiring authors writing outside their own identities to have their manuscripts reviewed by a sensitivity reader before it will accept them, submits all such manuscripts itself to a second sensitivity reader, and has promised to distribute a formal sensitivity guide among all of its staff and authors.” The Times report states that the use of sensitivity readers is most pervasive in children’s publishing, where they “have practically become a routine part of the editing process.”

In That Book Is Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing, the scholar Adam Szetela attributes the rise of sensitivity readers to the fear of publishing executives that a book from their list might be the next one to trigger outrage online. For this study, Szetela anonymously interviewed dozens of book professionals, including authors, agents, and C-suite denizens from the so-called Big Five publishing houses. Szetela critiques what he calls “the Sensitivity Era” of publishing and the counterintuitive toll it’s taken on what books can get published, with racial essentialism being prized over nuanced characterizations that seek to fully articulate the complexities of American identity across class and educational backgrounds.

Szetela details several high-profile incidents in which a book became a whipping horse online, including when Jeanine Cummins, the white author of American Dirt, was pilloried for her depiction of Mexican characters, and when Ramin Ganeshram, a Trinidadian American writer of Indian and Iranian descent who wrote a children’s book called A Birthday Cake for George Washington, was excoriated for how her book “whitewashes slavery.” Borrowing a term from the McCarthy era, Szetela labels each burst of digital indignation a “degradation ceremony” and charts how they spiral predictably from social media to the highest echelons of corporate publishing.

Publishers take very seriously even the most bad-faith campaigns to tar a book; a handful of posts on X or Goodreads can sometimes generate enough backlash to force a house to rethink its relationship with the author in question. “In some cases,” Szetela writes, “the degradation ceremony continues until an author loses their literary agent, has their book pulled from distribution, or otherwise takes a hit that will diminish their ability to provide for themselves and their families.”

Initiated by chronically online crusaders, these degradation ceremonies serve no purpose beyond affirming the moral rectitude of their participants. More troubling, Szetela argues, is how attuned the publishing industry has become to this online coterie—so much so that the responsiveness of the liberal sectors of publishing to keyboard warriors ends up providing cover to the conservative wings of the same houses, which often flourish without critique. Even if acquiring a book by a demagogue or a controversial politician generates some consternation within a publishing house, that sort of internal dissent matters less to executives than taking the external chattering class into account when it might attack an author for misrepresenting one or another identity category. What could possibly explain the same group’s showering of opprobrium on allies and its continuing indifference to foes? For Szetela, it all comes back to the refusal of anyone involved in this toxic cycle to pay even the slightest attention to the working class.

Tracking degradation ceremonies can feel like playing whack-a-mole. Szetela’s narrative begins in 2019, when Amélie Wen Zhao’s debut novel, Blood Heir, became a target for social-media rage because its jacket copy described a world where “oppression is blind to skin color, and good and evil exist in shades of gray.” L.L. McKinney was one of a number of fellow YA authors who shared that text with their followers, tweeting: “someone explain this to me. EXPLAIN IT RIGHT THE FUQ NOW.” Zhao issued a public apology on Twitter, and her publisher postponed the book’s release so it could be significantly revised. Two months later, an author named Kosoko Jackson, who had also criticized Zhao on Twitter, found himself in a similar situation when a Goodreads user wrote that “I have never been so disgusted in my life”—because the villain of Jackson’s forthcoming A Place for Wolves, a novel set during the Kosovo War, was an Albanian Muslim, the demographic targeted by Serbs for extermination during that conflict. The book was never released.

Similar brouhahas have continued to break out on a regular basis. Last year, for instance, the romance novel Sparrow and Vine was withdrawn by its publisher because some Goodreads users were incensed that one of the characters was rude to undocumented farm workers and praised Elon Musk. It hardly mattered that the book’s author, Sophie Lark, had deliberately set out to create a “flawed character” whom readers were meant to view with skepticism; such subtlety is missed when literary analysis stops at the level of key words.

Szetela argues that the willingness of publisher after publisher to cave in immediately to social-media pressure stems from a more enduring problem: the inequality within their offices. In 2023, a survey from the publisher Lee & Low found that the industry was 72.5 percent white, while the ranks of leadership were 76.7 percent white. Although the survey found that diversity in the overall publishing industry had grown over the previous four years, the leadership looked practically the same. When diversity is seen as a zero-sum game, it becomes harder for those from working-class backgrounds, regardless of race, to break into the industry: One agent observes that, because salaries for entry-level jobs at publishing houses are so low, “a lot of people have parental support. That cuts out a big portion of people who might otherwise be interested in the field.”

The same critique could have been made of publishing 20, or 40, or 60 years ago. The difference now is not just the way that social media creates a vector for the public to directly attack publishers for their blind spots but also the cottage industry that has sprung up to shield them. Indeed, it is not social media itself that defines Szetela’s Sensitivity Era but rather “sensitivity readers, diversity gurus, and other moral entrepreneurs selling consultations, seminars, webinars, weekend retreats, and so on.”

There is little room, in this environment, for a meaningful reform of publishing. Instead, Szetela writes, the mores of the Sensitivity Era “endow VPs, editors, agents, and other gatekeepers with moral capital while not requiring them to sacrifice anything in return.” This makes publishing little different from any other progressive workplace, from the marble edifice of an Ivy League university to the linoleum kitchenette of a local nonprofit. Everywhere, conscientious white liberals feel immense pressure to address the iniquities of society even as they resist any changes that might compromise their positions of authority.

The cognitive dissonance around diversity inside elite spaces is obvious to the wider public, which helps to explain the unpopularity of political correctness in America writ large. That the Sensitivity Era has persisted through the opening year of the second Trump administration suggests the deep disconnect between social-media gadflies and the actual human beings they purport to represent. Calling out a romance author for her unflattering depiction of an undocumented migrant does little to change the wider discourse around immigration—indeed, it only underscores the tendency of progressives to emphasize the country of origin of undocumented laborers over their living conditions and lack of legal protections. Meanwhile, publishing executives quietly play both sides, ensuring that both Ibram X. Kendi and Josh Hawley have a place in their catalogs.

Aside from the “moral entrepreneurs” whose livelihood revolves around monetizing the fear of cancellation, nobody has benefited more from the Sensitivity Era than conservative politicians. Whenever a particularly gaudy bit of inclusivity furor breaches containment on social media—the discovery of some racist images in old Dr. Seuss books, or copies of Harry Potter being burned because of J.K. Rowling’s transphobia—conservatives are quick to seize the opportunity to paint anyone who champions multiculturalism as the Thought Police from 1984.

The same Republican who defends the First Amendment in one breath may call for banning a book that acknowledges the existence of gay people or addresses the history of American slavery in the next. However hypocritical this may seem to a free-speech absolutist, it showcases the calculated way that many conservatives navigate questions of censorship. Conservative media’s forever war on political correctness is ideologically aligned with MAGA revanchism: Firing Black government officials, the mass deportation of immigrants, and the restriction of abortion rights all fit into a coherent vision of returning America to an era when comedians could feel free to offend anyone and everyone and C-suites were exclusively white and male.

Even as these cultural currents reshape the nation, the publishing industry’s inattention to class has left it stuck in the paradigm that produced Kendi’s Antiracist Baby. Though they may “love to talk about the differences between black people and white people, trans people and cis people, and queer people and heterosexual people,” Szetela writes, “many of these liberals have little or nothing to say about the differences between the overwhelming majority of Americans on the one hand and highly educated Americans with high incomes (themselves) on the other.”

When class is removed as a consideration, it becomes all too easy to cast any minority writer as a spokesperson for their demographic—yet sensitivity readers effectively argue for the essentializing of racial characteristics by claiming the ability to adjudicate the “authenticity” of a fictional character. The result is an array of well-intentioned white people so terrified of online backlash that they feel empowered to ask a Black author to justify a Black character’s desire to go to a national park (“if this little girl loves to camp, you need to figure out how that happened”) or to turn down a Latina author for “not writing in an authentic Latina voice.”

There are limits to how much of America’s complex polity the publishing industry is willing to wrestle with, especially when it might affect the bottom line. One of Szetela’s interview subjects reflects that not everyone “can afford to have these complicated, impossible to follow belief systems as a way of showing—kind of as a way of relieving their guilt for being so privileged.” That leaves authors holding the bag. With no impetus from publishers to include class in their constellation of carefully curated identities, how can you blame an aspiring writer for focusing on what might actually get them published?

This sort of posturing feels downright naïve in the current political climate, to the point that it’s tempting to assume that the Sensitivity Era may already have come to a close—after all, the multiyear lag between acquiring and publishing many titles means that the backlash from the heady days of 2020 is still not completely evident in bookstores. At least four of the Black women who were named to prominent roles in the Big Five in that period have since moved on or been dismissed. (That group includes Lisa Lucas, who led Pantheon when the house acquired my first book but was gone by the time it was released last year.) Even so, could it really be possible that a MAGA era is forthcoming when the same publishers who assimilated #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #OwnVoices activism into their business models over the past 10 years were simultaneously quashing internal resistance to releasing books by conservative ideologues like Jordan Peterson and Milo Yiannopoulos?

An executive at one house remarks to Szetela that although many production and marketing staffers loathe being assigned to books by conservative figures, “anyone who is incentivized to make money is in support of conservative imprints because they have tended to be very lucrative.” That sentiment is echoed by a different publishing executive, discussing the fact that practically every book published for children or young adults today revolves around identity: “The truth is when books sell, we do more of the kinds of books that sell. It’s that crass.” Publishers recognize that there is profit to be made on both flanks of the culture war, so they have adroitly moved to capitalize by investing in imprints specifically geared toward serving both markets: All Seasons Press and Threshold Editions for the right, Joy Revolution and Emancipation Books for the left.

From this perspective, sensitivity readers begin to seem less like an inescapable part of the publishing industry and more like an inescapable part of the relatively narrow portion of the industry that serves progressive parents and young adults. The idea of hiring a few people to give your manuscript a read to ensure that you haven’t unintentionally used a harmful stereotype before you try to sell that book to the people most likely to be offended by it is understandable. Far more odious would be a mandate that every book must be subject to this kind of scrutiny, but there’s little evidence that such a mandate exists outside of a select few imprints. As far as the sensitivity readers themselves, it’s hard to get too upset about a category of young writers taking whatever opportunity they can to participate in an industry that is so notoriously impenetrable.

If the Sensitivity Era can indeed survive the resurgence of fascism, it will say less about the durability of its ideas than the continuing bifurcation of America. Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts, pronouns are still a common feature of e-mail signatures and LinkedIn profiles, ethnic-studies programs and affinity groups continue at most universities, and the children’s section of every locally owned bookstore remains populated by a Rainbow Coalition. Each signal of multiculturalism, acceptance, and, sure, political correctness persists because it does not fundamentally challenge our economic model. We can welcome the alternative vision to the MAGA machine that these signals represent, even as we work to craft a world of revolutionary equity.

Donald Trump is caught in a trap of his own making. The US-Israeli war on Iran has gone so badly that even inveterate war hawks, like the neoconservative strategist Robert Kagan, admit that defeat is almost inevitable. Iran’s ability to choke off trade in the Strait of Hormuz has turned out to be a powerful weapon, one that has forced Trump to scale back his initial agenda of regime change. The current period of ceasefire and negotiations might more accurately be described as a holding action. In truth, the ceasefire is more nominal than real. On Monday, the United States resumed bombing Iranian naval bases and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to intensify the ongoing bombing campaign in Lebanon directed against Iran’s ally Hezbollah. Netanyahu’s bellicose words are a reminder of one major hurdle to ending the war: Israel has no problem with scuttling negotiations by escalating hostilities.

The prospects for long-term peace thus seem dim, and even if a negotiated settlement could be reached, Trump would face the political problem of dealing with the powerful bipartisan coalition of Iran hawks in Washington. The “bomb Iran” caucus has been strengthened in the Republican Party with the primary defeat last week of Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, a loud anti-war voice. Senators such as Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham have been stridently warning that a peace deal with Iran would be a disaster. Prominent Democrats such as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz are equally vociferous in decrying any concessions to Iran as an abject failure.

To placate the Iran hawks, Trump is trying to expand one of his signature foreign policy initiatives, the Abraham Accords. Originally signed in 2020, the agreement normalized relations between Israel and five Muslim nations: Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump pushed for a “mandatory” expansion of the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Jordan. Trump even suggested that Iran could eventually join the Abraham Accords.

With typical braggadocio, Trump argued that the expanded Abraham Accords, which would be sealed as part of a peace agreement with Iran, would “bring true Power, Strength, and Peace to the Middle East for the first time in 5,000 years. It will be a Document respected like no other that has ever been signed, anywhere in the World. Its level of Importance and Prestige will be unparalleled!”

Even making allowances for Trump’s typically hyperventilating rhetoric, this is a crackpot scheme. Egypt and Jordan have no need to sign the accords, for the simple reason that they have had diplomatic relations with Israel for decades. And the Saudi government—which previously evaded Joe Biden’s entreaties to do a deal with Israel—has repeatedly said it won’t sign the accords unless there is a resolution of the Palestinian question. If Saudi Arabia is adamant on this point, it’s hard to see how Iran would be any more pliant.

The renewed push for the Abraham Accords makes little sense except as an exercise in domestic politics. As The New York Times notes, “If more countries sign up to the accords, it could placate some Iran hawks who have criticized Mr. Trump for pursuing a peace deal.”

Even if expanding Abraham Accords is being proposed largely for show, this gambit illustrates why Trump is unlikely to achieve any lasting peace.

The Abraham Accords are immensely popular with the bipartisan foreign policy elite. Although launched under Trump, they were avidly co-opted by the Biden administration. In 2022, Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said, “The Abraham Accords are making the lives of people across your countries more peaceful, more prosperous, more vibrant, more integrated.”

Both Trump and Blinken are selling a fantasy. Far from creating a lasting foundation for peace, the Abraham Accords have exacerbated conflicts in the Middle East. They are partially to blame for three of the major catastrophes in the region: the October 7 terrorist attack, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the current conflict with Iran.

As foreign policy analysts Matt Duss and Zuri Linetsky document in a recent article in Foreign Policy, the Abraham Accords were not about normalizing Israel within the region but rather creating an alliance between Israel and autocratic US allies. Israel had already had covert relations with Arab autocracies, but the Abraham Accords brought them into the open and formalized them into a military alliance based on opposition to Iran. The Abraham Accords were also designed to sideline Palestinian nationalism.

As Duss and Linetsky note, the Abraham Accords

undercut the pressure that Arab states were willing to apply to Israel over Palestinian issues; fed the illusion that the Palestinians could be sidelined and regional security assured by investing in friendly authoritarians; and helped Israel establish itself as a regional hegemon whose reckless warmaking now poses a threat to its own neighbors, to the broader interests of its U.S. patron, and to global prosperity.

The Abraham Accords were sold as a framework for delivering regional peace and stability. They have delivered the opposite. It should have been clear at the time that any “peace plan” premised on sales of arms and repressive technology to authoritarian regimes was bound to fail. The political conflicts that continue to bedevil the region will not be solved through force of arms, no matter what Washington’s ideologues say.

In Bahrain, popular opposition to the Abraham Accords and to the alliance with Israel has led to a ferocious crackdown on free speech. North South Notes, a new publication edited by author Vincent Bevins, has posted a report detailing the repression in Bahrain:

On April 27, the King issued an extraordinary decree to revoke the citizenship of 69 Bahrainis for “sympathizing with hostile Iranian acts,” without due process. On April 28, the criminal court gave 5 people life sentences for espionage, while dozens more were given 5 to 10 years in prison for uploading videos of attacks. Bahraini influencer Sayed Baqer Al-Kamel was given ten years for posting an Instagram Reel mourning the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamene.

The repression in Bahrain is symptomatic of larger regional tendencies. There’s little love for Israel among the general population of most Middle Eastern countries. Conversely, the cause of Palestinian liberation retains sympathy. Given that reality, the Abraham Accords can only function through repression. The accords are not a peace deal, but a way of ensuring that the Middle East will be mired in apartheid, despotism, and war.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

One of the less remarked upon reverberations of Trump’s disastrous rule of this country is that he has turned its architectural critics into exegetes of his sleazy plans for Washington, DC’s built environment. Instead of writing about the burgeoning (and often life-affirming) shifts in today’s architectural culture—from adaptive reuse to beautiful, functional affordable housing—we critics keep getting yanked back into the slopworld of ballrooms, arches, and faux gold leaf.

It goes without saying that the proposed 250-foot-tall triumphal arch (one foot for every year the United States has existed!) is absurd and tacky. Modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, it boasts gaudy gilded lettering and a 80-foot cake-topper statue—Trump can’t help but cheat, even on the height of his own precious arch. His McMansionized conception of what is monumental and “historic” is, much like his culinary penchant for McDonald’s itself, one of his most idiosyncratic qualities.

The motivations behind Trump’s building frenzy are not exactly mysterious. “We’re building a valuable piece of real estate right back here,” he told attendees of an Easter lunch, gesturing to construction work on his infamous ballroom. “It’s going to be amazing.” Referring to the White House as “real estate” is a bit of parapraxis, letting slip that the executive branch, in more ways than one, is indeed for sale. He is also jonesing to build a kind of knock-off One World Trade Center (but this time, of course, with a hotel) as his presidential library (perfect for a man who probably hasn’t read a book in 30 years), driving home that he is, above all, a developer at heart. His understanding of power derives from this fundamental belief that to control the land is to control the world.

As a true son of the 1980s, he believes in spectacle over quality. Arches, ballrooms, even queues for the White House, as though it were the fast-track lane at Disney World—all of these reek of what architecture critic Michael Sorkin warned us about way back when: the “theme-parkification of the American built environment.” Facing his impending 80s, Trump keeps spouting off erratically about his architectural plans. In a bizarre TruthSocial post, he bragged that the ballroom is going to have “Bomb Shelters, a State of the Art Hospital and Medical Facilities, Protective Partitioning, Top Secret Military Installations, Structures and Equipment, Protective, Missile Resistant Steel, Columns, Roofs, and Beams” (I should hope so), plus “Military Grade Venting, and Bullet, Ballistic and Blast-proof Glass.” He clearly views these building projects—these displays of undemocratic and militaristic might—as crucial to his legacy.

Those who realize what poor taste it’s all in have little recourse, given the extent of Trump’s capture of the rather complex and elaborate legislative framework that protects the historic built environment of the nation’s capital. In fact, many of them only have themselves to blame. This, more than anything else, is what interests me about the situation: architecture as a form of power. It is a case study in how ideologically invested architectural movements can secure power for themselves—and what can happen when the monkey’s paw curls.

Before Trump circumvented or infiltrated them, various DC agencies, each with its own internecine processes, governed how new buildings are erected in the heavily protected historic landscape that forms the iconic backdrop of American power. These agencies and their extensive regulations exist to prevent exactly what is happening now from happening. The hard-right-wing architectural advocacy group the National Civic Arts Society, which wants all that ugly modernism out of public spaces and nought but classical refinement in its place, reportedly played a big role in Trump’s “make federal buildings beautiful again” executive order. Their acolytes now staff the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission. Meanwhile, the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which details a multistep process for authorizing and designing memorial works in DC (such an arch), mandates that all such work be approved by Congress. Oh, well!

The White House has its own guidelines set by the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. The director of the National Park Service chairs this committee, which is staffed by federal officials and others selected by the president (many from the Commission of Fine Arts). Facing this total capture, the nation’s usual architectural gatekeeping organizations (such as the American Institute of Architects) can only make statements condemning Trump’s follies.

At this point only the courts can step in. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued to stop the construction of the ballroom with some success; construction has been paused as of writing. Meanwhile, a group of Vietnam veterans is in the process of suing to stop the building of the arch out of concern that it obstructs the view to Arlington Cemetery. Never has a president been in a better position to alter the shape of the city from which he governs. Similarly, with perhaps the exception of the New Deal, never has a group of architects with an explicit ideology gotten so close to realizing their political vision.

This capture comes with a price. As Trump waits out the pause on the ballroom construction, his toadies in the Commission of Fine Arts (including his now-fired ballroom architect, James McCreary) are pretending that their actual vision and opinions on architecture matter. The New York Times reported McCreary remarking of the statues on top of the arch, “I wonder if you need those up there,” and that “[it would be] a better, more Washingtonian design” without them. Similarly, about the proposed lions at the arch’s base: “Work on the lions and find replacements for them…. As I said earlier, they’re not of this continent.”

One can easily see how McCreary, with his overtly nativist views, ended up in the position he’s in. However, the Faustian bargain the so-called neoclassical movement within architecture has made with Trump in order to secure access to basically unlimited control over what gets built in the nation’s capital comes with the caveat that they are now beholden to someone bereft of taste. Not only that, they are and will forever be pariahs in their own field. Their complicity in the wanton destruction of DC will all but kill the nigh-50-year project of reviving neoclassicism in architecture. And for all their populist bloviating about speaking to the true aesthetic preferences of the American public, 58 percent of Americans do not approve of Trump’s changes to the White House. Art of the deal indeed.

How much has anti-billionaire sentiment pervaded the Democratic Party? Even the billionaires are getting in on the action.

In the ultra-competitive primary for California governor, businessman Tom Steyer has sold himself as “the billionaire who wants to tax billionaires.” He has spent much of the campaign touting the plutocrats and corporations who oppose him as a signal of credibility. And he has emphasized his commitment to the Giving Pledge, meaning he and his wife intend to give up most of their money while they’re alive; as he put it, “I will not die a billionaire.” (That makes 342 million of us.)

Steyer and his team recognize where the energy can increasingly be found in progressive politics. In a nation reared on Horatio Alger myths of self-made tycoons, 18 percent of Americans see being a billionaire as “morally wrong;” that figure is one in three among young people. Over half of American adults now believe billionaires are a threat to democracy. And as more blue states consider wealth taxes, it’s clear the public is increasingly demanding a reckoning with extreme inequality.

Yet right now, the person who may be best positioned to lead the charge against billionaires—in the state where the highest number live—is one of their own.

It’s a reflection of a catch-22 that’s long challenged progressives: For the long-term health of democracy, the systems that have allowed the ultra-wealthy to exert unlimited financial influence over politics must be dismantled. But can those systems be toppled without the help of their billionaire beneficiaries?

Excessive wealth inequality in the United States isn’t new; we’re not heading into season four of The Gilded Age for nothing. Yet it continues to soar to record highs. The top 1 percent of Americans now hold over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth; in no other industrialized country is that number greater than 28 percent. There are now roughly a thousand billionaires in America, with a collective net worth of around $6.9 trillion. Meanwhile, the median American’s wealth now lags behind their peers’ in countries like Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

No matter how you measure it, the richest Americans are jealously accumulating more wealth every day at the public’s expense. But the hoarders might finally be due for an intervention.

As the political analyst and Pitchfork Populism author Bradford Kane has described, America has a long-standing split personality: “rugged individualists on the one side, and communal collectivists on the other.” Over the centuries, the tension between those two groups has boiled over, time and again, into populist movements.

Kane argues that in 2016 and 2024, Trump successfully channeled this resentment into a kind of faux populism that empowered himself over the masses. (The true progressive populism of Bernie Sanders also energized broad swaths of the public but faced an uphill battle against the Democratic establishment.) Now, as Trump approaches his final midterm election as a historically unpopular president, he’s dropped the veneer and no longer even pretends to care about the economic struggles of everyday Americans. Progressives, meanwhile, are running and winning with platforms laser-focused on affordability and inequality.

In states like California, New York, Washington, and Maine, lawmakers are pushing for new taxes on millionaires, ultra-millionaires, billionaires, and owners of pieds-à-terre. This has led to cries from some oligarchs that such taxes will cause the so-called job creators in liberal havens to flee to DeSantis Country.

This has not happened. Nearly six months into the mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani, departure threats from his wealthy detractors have proven, thus far, empty. You can also look at a state like Massachusetts—which passed a 4 percent tax on income over $1 million in 2022—where the millionaires have largely stayed put. With that revenue, the state has been able to bolster its transportation infrastructure and education, making it easier for young, working families to remain as well. As my colleague Michael Massing has written for The Nation, the only lifestyle change that the ultrarich might experience from this sort of policy would be giving up a private plane, yacht, or 12th home.

As the democracy-undermining effects of highly concentrated wealth become a staple of American political discourse, a plaintive counter-response is often invoked: Aren’t billionaires people, too? Must we bash and blame the 0.1 percent? But, as Americans are forced to skip meals in order to afford healthcare, it’s vital that the Democratic Party resist retreating from small-“d” populist policies when discussing wealth and class.

That doesn’t mean that Steyer and the Patriotic Millionaires have no role to play in those discussions. In his endorsement of Steyer, Robert Reich recalled: “We’ve had wealthy Democratic politicians before. FDR and JFK had tremendous fortunes, yet they enacted some of the most progressive policies in American history.”

If anything, Steyer’s willingness to seek higher taxes for himself and his peers makes him a strong messenger—immune to the accusation that advocates for wealth redistribution are merely suffering from class resentment. Instead, he has just as much credibility as anyone to call for the disruption of the structures that allowed billionaires (like him) to consolidate vast amounts of money and power in the first place.

As the Bernie Sanders–affiliated PAC Our Revolution explained in their tweet endorsing Steyer: “We’ve never endorsed a billionaire—but [he] is using his position to upset the system.”

That said, as Inequality.org’s Chuck Collins wrote in an incisive column for Inside Philanthropy, “If we’re waiting for the billionaire class to summon their urgency to step up and solve the pressing problems of our day, we are in trouble.” Instead, undoing extreme inequality requires mass mobilization, and responsive electeds more accountable to the public than to big donors.

Higher taxes on the ultrarich and redistributive policies may seem like an uphill fight in a nation that has long mythologized free enterprise and sky’s-the-limit ambition. But the heyday of middle-class America has been just as mythologized. And at that time, the top federal tax rate was 90 percent, antitrust enforcement was robust, and a third of the workforce was unionized.

Seeking a truly fair share from the ultra-wealthy isn’t contrary to the American dream. It’s what allows the rest of us to pursue it.

As Donald Trump arrived in Beijing last week for the first visit to China by a US president in almost a decade, it felt hard to remember the spiraling escalation of US-China economic warfare that could have easily ended in a permanent break between the world’s two most powerful countries.

After all, it took place last year. So many other crises have kicked off in that intervening 13 months that the world’s most consequential international relationship now seems like an island of stability in a sea of chaos.

But in judging the paltry outcomes of Trump’s summit with President Xi Jinping—some nice words and China’s promise to buy American soybeans and airplanes—it’s worth recalling that US-China conflict almost pushed the world into an out-of-control economic crisis last year. And because economic tension has provided cover to a US national security establishment pursuing confrontation with China, mutual economic aggression could have developed fairly rapidly into something more violent. Perhaps, then, it was enough that Trump and Xi agreed to pursue “constructive strategic stability” without offering much idea of what that would mean in practice.

Yet the summit also demonstrated how unhealthy the relationship remains. The United States seems to be stuck between two diametrically opposed approaches to China that somehow both manage to exacerbate the pressures driving us toward conflict: unsound peace or unfettered confrontation.

The first approach was crassly illustrated by Trump’s entourage of billionaires. Among the oligarchs who accompanied Trump on Air Force One were Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and a dozen of the other richest financiers and tech barons in the country. Trump’s “very first request,” he posted on the way to China, would be asking Xi “to ‘open up’ China so that these brilliant people can work their magic.”

It was precisely the entangled economic interests of elites in the two countries that, despite persistent tensions, kept the peace for decades before the US-China relationship collapsed starting in 2018. Yet this peace was built on fundamentally unhealthy foundations. The economic growth that enriched well-connected businesses and corrupt politicians in both countries also systematically decimated the power of labor—again in both countries. The outcome was devastating inequality and intense everyday insecurity achieved through the free-market form of globalization that bound the US and China together. Ultimately, symbiotic expansion of market society led to destabilizing populist politics in both countries.

In the United States, populism took on an anti-China cast: The dislocations of the globalization era were associated with China because of its outsize role in the system. The American politicians and corporate leaders actually responsible for union-busting and offshoring jobs were happy to play on xenophobia to escape accountability. And in a global economy defined by cutthroat competition, even progressives had difficulty articulating a vision of growth that would benefit workers of all nationalities rather than pitting them against each other. Labor activists and nativists converged on vilifying China. By doubling down on inequality and corruption as the basis for great power peace, Trump could push this animosity deeper.

If the capitalists are exacerbating the forces that drove the two countries apart, the militarists are exploiting the resulting discontent to move an agenda with a little popular support. For decades, the US foreign policy establishment saw its mission as orchestrating a global system that would institutionalize American power while privileging US business elites. As that system came undone in the populist passions of the 2010s—while China’s influence grew rapidly—status quo leaders sought to salvage their position by channeling popular anger against their main geopolitical competitor.

They redefined China not as a part of their system but as its primary enemy and started to build the institutional and ideological apparatus for great power conflict. Raising the specter of a threatening foreign power, they hoped to reestablish social unity and the legitimacy of the ruling class.

The new strategy came together under the first Trump administration, but it was systematized by Jake Sullivan at Biden’s National Security Council. Those officials who brought the US into the Gaza massacre were also committed to international conflict on a far larger scale.

Today, the prospect that Trump might take the United States off a confrontational posture with China is the occasion for much handwringing within the foreign policy establishment. The editorial board of The New York Times argued that “Trump’s China Policy Has Weakened America.” Oren Cass of the Trump-aligned American Compass was in a panic that, by welcoming Chinese investment, Trump “may be on the verge of tying the United States to China irrevocably.” Ely Ratner, Biden’s top China official at the Pentagon, denounced Trump’s lowering of the temperature as a dangerous “bid to placate Beijing.”

A resolution cosponsored by 16 of the Senate’s leading foreign policy figures from both parties defined China as “the foremost rival and strategic competitor of the United States” threatening all the core security, economic, and strategic interests of the US and its allies. Introducing the resolution, Democrat Chris Coons said, “Beijing is trying to create a more aggressive, coercive, and lawless international landscape that harms the American people.” His counterpart on the Republican side, Pete Ricketts, added: “Communist China is the greatest threat to the American way of life.”

Such hyperbole is a willful misrepresentation of China’s foreign policy motivations and goals, which are sometimes counterproductive, but—in contrast to highly coercive domestic policies—are generally cautious, restrained, and system-supportive. Rhetoric from the national security establishment is not aiming to grapple with the complex challenges posed by China’s rise, but merely to shut down discussion and channel American energies into conflict.

Is there an alternative to these two approaches, which seem to force us into a choice between peace and security? Yes, but it runs through the one thing that both the unconstrained oligarchs and the foreign policy elite refuse to consider: egalitarian social reform at home and abroad.

The kind of world that could accommodate both the United States and China is the same kind of world that would no longer pit American workers against Chinese workers. The global reform agenda needed to get there would focus on raising labor standards worldwide, expanding the global provision of public goods, acting decisively to resolve the climate crisis, and driving development investment into those places cut off from growth.

This program would reduce inequality within and between countries. It would end the race to the bottom in labor conditions. It would raise wages and living standards across the world—desirable in its own right but also leading to greater consumer demand, thereby creating large new business opportunities and dampening speculative volatility.

Greater everyday security would deprive reactionary politics of the grievances that allow scapegoating of Chinese people and other foreigners. A broader and faster growing world market would end the sense of zero-sum competition that turns US-China commercial rivalry into an existential struggle and justifies attempts to prevent Chinese development.

Together, these outcomes would generate social cohesion in the only way possible—giving people a stake in their society. Imposing unity artificially, through the compulsory loyalty demanded by international conflict, is not just a danger to peace and civil liberties; it is also doomed to fail.

Could the United States and China work together on such a global reform agenda? China’s vision for world order remains exceedingly vague, but it often highlights long-standing demands of the Global South that would be accommodated by these reforms. Other components, such as how to improve labor rights and increase the level of consumption in the Chinese economy, would require difficult negotiations. Yet a shared goal of global reform is a far more promising starting point than the threats and denunciations that have marked the US approach to disputes with China for decades.

Perhaps the bigger question is whether the United States would ever embrace a voluntary diffusion of power in the global system to build a multipolar world based on positive-sum multilateralism, rather than the world of all-around strife we are currently encouraging. That, however, is a question for the American people—one we have refused to face for too long.

Pierre Guyotat has suffered that ambivalent fate haunting all great writers: to become more mythologized than read. Notwithstanding the legends surrounding his first masterpiece, 1967’s Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers—first scrawled on loose scraps, over three months, while in solitary confinement during the Algerian War for “morally corrupting” his fellow French conscripts—there is the brute fact of the text itself: a monstrous catalog of violence and sexual obscenity set during a colonial war in a thinly veiled Algeria (called Ecbatana) that unspools over 400 breathless, largely plotless pages into an apocalyptic prophecy, as immersive as it is unsparing. Guyotat’s next great novel, Eden, Eden, Eden (1970), focalized this delirium into a single 200-page sentence that was banned in France for a decade, albeit with endorsements by Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Michel Leiris, and Philippe Sollers that anointed Guyotat as the foremost avant-gardist of his era.

Across the following decades, in five more novels, three plays, and a series of memoirs, Guyotat continued to pursue his professed aim of remaking the French language by ripping it apart at the seams of syntax, then phoneme. Writing, for Guyotat, was a task of uncompromising physical intensity: There was The Book (1984), infamously written while masturbating, the manuscript plashed with his semen, and Coma (2006), where writerly monomania drew him into a semi-mystical torpor, starving himself nearly to the point of death. A glance at his last fiction, 2014’s Joyful Animals of Misery—a convulsing morass of gutter French, transliterated Arabic, and typographical abandon—attests that even age could not temper his zeal. Indeed, a prime reason for Guyotat’s relative unknown in the Anglosphere is that translation becomes a progressively moot concept when the original can hardly be said to have been written in French. 

Guyotat, who died at the age of 80 in 2020, is invariably epithetized as “the last heir to Sade.” He is a latter-day heretic in a tradition that runs from the Marquis’s cold despotism and Goya’s late thrashings, through Lautréamont and Baudelairean Spleen, to Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Kathy Acker. This lineage sees obscenity not as a bratty lashing-out against bourgeois mores but as an ethical program: that the extremities of eroticism or expressions of violence might augur the revelation of a novel moral order that radically renovates our own, so beholden to the sexual cant and staid platitudes that bely its structural violence. This is an eminently political project. In his public life, Guyotat was a vociferous advocate on behalf of veterans, immigrants, and sex workers; his art, meanwhile, was a vision of radical egalitarianism.

Idiocy, recently translated by Peter Behrman de Sinéty, is Guyotat’s most explicitly political work: his last book before his death and an account of that dark fulcrum of his life and career, his military service in Algeria. Guyotat’s memoirs are not supplements to his novels, but by contextualizing the quasi-cosmic vision of his art within the circumstances of his real life, they clarify that art not as some libertarian fantasy of freedom, but as an aesthetic of subversion. Idiocy proceeds from the friction of these two parallel registers—a biographical narrative of poverty, war, and dissent combined with the portrait of a young artist negotiating his bearings in language and desire—whose superposition of life and art, politics and poetry, form the basis of his aesthetic vision.

Idiocy’s first third wallows in Parisian squalor. We first encounter a teenage Guyotat in 1958 sleeping rough under the Pont d’Alma, having run away from school in Lyon for reasons never specified: The book largely evades linear logic—characters sidle in and disappear; events are as summarily picked up in media res as they are left unresolved—embodied above all in its heady style of compounding semicolons and rhetorical questions, drawing us into the unimpeachable present and the uncertainty of lived experience. This chaotic flow enlivens Guyotat’s destitution as he haunts dank hovels and wanders the Parisian night; evades capture by an investigator hired by his father; and consorts with other phantoms of this grimy subalternity—the scabies-ridden Lice Girl, the rent boy Liba the Beautiful.

Yet urban indigence is not a prelude to bohemian indulgence. On the one hand, Guyotat lavishes adolescent desire upon long montages of unwashed and exposed flesh, couplings glimpsed askance, genitalia momentarily grazed. Yet his perversion is exclusively voyeuristic, as Guyotat expends pages describing his body aquiver with desire, while nevertheless remaining pointedly aloof, even innocent—indeed, he remains a virgin throughout Idiocy.

This intensifies when Guyotat steals money from his widowed father, which he elevates into a kind of ur-transgression: He inflates this petty crime into a mythological Fall, “older than original sin…every tragedy of the world, everything I see before me at this instant…marked by my theft.” Yet this breach of paternal authority does not liberate him from morality but instead tightens its bonds, afflicting him with an intense shame that impinges on his very sense of self, where the “attempt to find a vantage point upon myself…collapses as my inner eye approaches the moment of the theft.” Transgression precipitates not the superman but the subhuman, evicted from all sense of identity, time, and “humanity…from which I am excluded.”

This prostration, however, is not a ploy for forgiveness; Guyotat knows that he is guilty. Adamant that “no remorse, no punishment can abolish the offense,” he refuses even “Christ, too inclined to forgive when my shoulder would resist his pierced hand.” But he is no blasphemer, at least in his telling: Guyotat speaks reverentially of God throughout Idiocy and has claimed that if he were not a writer, he would have been a priest. Like many heretics, his infractions are perpetrated in fidelity to a higher principle proscribed only by the worldly machinations of orthodoxy. Elsewhere, this recasts his obscenities as articles of antinomian faith: “Does God demand of the human, as proof of his submission to Him, that he profane what is purest in this world?” And here he does not reject grace—a mortal sin—but debases himself so deeply as to preclude it. His crisis throws him into a fugue state, starved and half-delirious, eventually ending up in a church where he is nursed back to health. Rather than casting off morality, Guyotat sees a possibility of escape in the opposite direction: that by masochistically making himself unworthy even of judgment, he might find exemption from the law—“my theft is beyond these two authorities: God himself, the Creator, cannot unbind me from this theft, tighten the cord of my life again.”

He never attains this exemption, however, his dark night of the soul ending only when his older brother, recently returned from service in Algeria, laughs his guilt off as trivial. This mockery marks Guyotat’s induction into the nightmare of history: What are the persecutions of petit-bourgeois morality against the brutality of colonial war? Soon conscripted himself,  he must modulate the internal ethical drama of the book’s first part—his intimation that freedom lies not in transcendence but in subaltern humility—into concrete praxis when set against the disciplinary institutions of the army and prison, the racism of colonial occupation, and the horrors of war. 

Idiocy is a war memoir only in the most outward sense. For all the gratuitous bloodletting of his fiction, Guyotat witnesses little of it in reality, joining the signal corps after training before spending the majority of the war imprisoned, first in a cellar for three months and then in a penal colony, the violence cordoned off at a remove—the gunfire but a din, the “distant clamor of massacres” evinced only in rumor. News of major events, such as the Generals’ Putsch or the Évian Accords, are certainly not met with diffidence on his part, but assume indirect significance as the backdrop of a text overwhelmingly focused on the vagaries of his immediate perception, the raw visual torrent and undulations of desire in his prose becoming a kind of seismograph of the historical record.

While Guyotat is apprised of the Algerian FLN’s atrocities, hearing news of Oran and lamenting the fate of the Harkis, he reserves his sharpest barbs for France’s barbarism, excoriating “the initial conquest, cruel, of the repressions to keep it in place, the plunderings, the contempt for the history of the Other.” His partisanship is always vehemently on the side of the victims: for the colonized over the colonizer, but also the inmate over the captor, the civilian over the militant, the woman, the child, the meek. This Manichaean simplicity is the lightning rod of Guyotat’s artistic ambition, a searing moral clarity that enables him to analogize his wartime experience across the boundaries of eras and art. His Algeria is overlaid by a historical and literary palimpsest that speaks a single truth: the transhistorical fact of oppression. Above the entrance to his barracks, Guyotat sees “superimposed upon the regiment’s numbers and letters, the motto of a Nazi camp or the command at the entrance of the third canto of Dante’s Inferno.” Later, he reads Faulkner to his fellow inmates, evoking mass graves not in Sétif or Guelma but in Yoknapatawpha County. In his solitary confinement, summarily pronounced after a 10-day interrogation, he belittles his tribulations beside the concentration camps, Antigone, and Thomas Hardy’s Jude.

After he is eventually stationed to a remote signals post, Guyotat’s infractions come to a head as he is officially accused of corrupting morale, primarily for aiding a deserter and the discovery of his hyper-violent fiction, mistaken for the compromising reportage of real events. Submitted to that 10-day interrogation, face-to-face with the living incarnation of authority, Guyotat finds that his rage and impudence are tempered by the same strange masochism that beset him following the theft from his father, prone to a self not emboldened but dissolving, “a ghost [before] absolute power…shapeless clay that circumstances will form into a hardened thing.”

Such “circumstances” arrive in the form of his infamous, underground solitary confinement. If the theft was Guyotat’s Fall, his incarceration is a purgative Flood—literally so, one night, as a storm almost drowns him amid the vomit and excrement in his oubliette. And yet where Guyotat sees deprivation as an ulterior means of evading power, the sheer inhumanity of his treatment may be leveraged, “hardened,” into the materiel of rebellion. This is the meaning of the book’s eponymous “idiocy…inferior to whoever bears stripes and corrupts in shouted commands our language, which I have now begun to reject…. What authority, except divine, could make me bow my head now?” Idiocy is a state of holy foolishness: It names the nadir of abasement wherein the bonds of earthly power are shed, and our vision of the ideal is thus diametrically, impossibly clarified. From this comes “the epic of the idiot…the more the mind and its preoccupations are limited, the more the word is beautiful and ample…a piercing and shattering apart of the real.”

Moreover, whereas humiliation earlier threw Guyotat into crisis, the mire of solipsism now becomes the grounds of solidarity. Emerging from solitary confinement to live among his fellow inmates, he discovers fellow feeling alongside the punished, “the naked nakedness of those whom the Law has bruised, threatened, afflicted.” The loss of self before the law becomes collective—that is, political—when pursued not as a puritanical flight inward but as an outward embrace of the Other: “All infirmity disarms me, leaves me helpless to my heart, I go toward it as a brother.”

And so when freedom arrives in Idiocy’s long dénouement, “Exodus,” it resonates all the more powerfully across both the historical and personal registers, the withering of French dominion paralleled in the camp’s evaporating discipline. A carnivalesque mood ensues as Guyotat and a fellow inmate go AWOL for a night in Algiers, the libidinal fervor of his former bohemian Paris transposed from the colonial center to the half-lit alleys and cavorting bodies of the periphery.

Solidarity, meanwhile, clarifies his artistic vision. On the one hand, Guyotat refuses the hubris implicit in any claim to “speak for the oppressed,” asking how, as “neither an Algerian nor a European of Algeria…I can claim the right to speak of these convictions only from a moral perspective.” Instead, he envisions literature as an act of split identification in which, through “the account of an atrocity, I live it from within those who live it and, in addition, from the perspective of one who watches it take place.” To be both “within” and “watching” is to disclaim the full rights of either—neither total identification with the victim nor the “clean hands” of the removed witness. Art, rather, is a vector of incessant movement between these positions, “always oscillat[ing] between distance and immediacy: between the spectator—the witness forbidden to cry out—and the tortured.”

This oscillation is the impetus of his prose’s irrepressible dynamism, its heady onrush of clauses, so that style, for Guyotat, is where art becomes politicized, enabling it to hold a plurality of stereoscoped perspectives in tensive union: Thus the “duty of universal empathy [provides] the tension necessary for the spontaneously transgressive Great Work.” Idiocy’s extraordinary vim derives from the myriad binaries that embroil it: art and life, biography and history, desire and sex, human and animal, witness and victim, any of whose resolutions would stifle it. Transgression, for Guyotat, does not abide in the supersession of limits, but rather in the militant exacerbation of their tensions, a ceaseless traverse of contradiction evangelizing desire itself over any end. Transgression as the transcendence of authority is a psychosis: Tarrying with authority, being neither entirely of nor outside this world, it becomes a mode of insurrection.

While the biblical Exodus heralds both emancipation and the deputation of a new law, Guyotat’s “Exodus” never cedes the latter; the book ends with the precise moment that he leaves the army—the loss of tension is also that of art. In Idiocy, transgression does not furnish a new morality but the rudiments of a radicalized aesthetics, premised in our collective degradation under the powers that be and laying the loam of Guyotat’s career. It is a rejoinder to the right, for whom transgression is a nihilism—whether the psychotic fantasy of unconstrained desire or else the high camp of trolling, whose tired irony belies its perverse enjoyment of the law it purports to infract. Against the reduction of transgression to animal regress or ironic feint, Guyotat recuperates it as a materialist and collective strategy of subversion: not an empowerment to surpass the law, but the seething acid bath wherein all values are corroded, so that we may realize the powerlessness that is both our sole commonality and the grounds of any truly universal struggle—“humiliated…but determined to do battle; everything is to be reconquered.”

At the end of Émile Zola’s 1890 novel La Bête humaine, a runaway train careens through the night, an “escaped monster” of astonishing force that advances toward “the future in spite of all, heedless of the blood that might be spilt.” Zola’s was one of the first novels to seriously consider the social and cultural ramifications of the train, which had yanked Europe into the industrial age and facilitated a great migration of workers from the country to the city. With this had come profound anxiety about the perils of modernity, incarnate in the hulking machines now roaring across the continent. What Zola saw in the train remains relevant: If anything, we have only become more apprehensive about our reliance on unfeeling technology—and the possibility that we might lose something of ourselves in the headlong race toward an optimized future. 

In Europe, the railway still reigns as a mode of transport: More than twice as many people in France alone travel by train each year as in America. But this is more than just evidence of a well-maintained intranational infrastructure. The railways that crisscross the continent are seen as a birthright and a site of contestation for the fragile social democracy that knits together much of Europe. An outsider might confuse the SNCF, the state-owned company that operates regional train service in France, for an entire branch of the French government, so omnipresent it is in the daily lives of millions, and so dispositive of national disorder. Persistent battles over wages and pensions lead to regular railway strikes—as much a part of the annual calendar as Paris Saint-Germain matches—that snarl the country’s matrices of commerce. Railway workers (or chéminots) are leading figures in the perennial struggle for workers’ rights, but also objects of misplaced ire: deemed tyrannical by the disgruntled commuters and scheming bosses for whom their demands for dignity are merely inconvenient, yet relied upon to to keep a nation smoothly functioning. 

It is this presumption of authority—and the suggestion of danger—that attracts the anonymous narrator of Mattia Filice’s verse novel, Driver (translated by Jacques Houis), to his calling. Waiting for a commuter train delayed by a storm, he is suddenly struck by the driver’s control of quotidian rhythms and the appealingly transient, adrenalized nature of his work: “no office or sedentary living.” A film projectionist by training, the narrator admits he has only “a rough idea” of who a driver might be—a cowboy of sorts, “a deep voice a cocky attitude / a guy who stands up for himself.” But this vague impression is motivation enough for him to undertake a series of grueling interviews and psychological tests, and to agree to a militant course of training with the SNCF, cloaked here in a secretive epithet: “the Company.” 

The narrator and his fellow trainees “are evaluated 24-7 / observed scrutinized peeled / like the orange” a colleague eats every morning. They attempt to memorize the 12,000 technical terms contained in their manuals, and to prove to the watchful Company that they won’t succumb to such intolerable afflictions as fatigue or nerves. So much for our John Wayne of the rails: Bruised from his hazing, he sees that what he has been initiated into is “an apprenticeship in kowtowing.” The driver, he quickly realizes, is a “hybrid creature,” one “invested with both power and submission.” His colleague puts it more simply: “You don’t thank an orange / You squeeze it.” The trains they operate are heirlooms from a bygone age of European prowess, to be defended and maintained with prideful care. But the drivers themselves are rendered nearly invisible to the public they serve. Sequestered in their train cabs—and asked to apply a kind of monastic focus to their work—they are the thankless guardians of a crucial institution, and Driver sets out to uncover the unique pressures of their role. But it also charts the enervating and even corrosive nature of work itself—and the means of resistance, however partial, that might be available to all of us. 

Like his narrator, Filice began driving SNCF trains in the early 2000s, and he started to write about his life as a driver around the same time. Writing, he has said, was “an outlet, a way to express myself when my company didn’t necessarily allow me to.” Indeed, Driver unfurls with a kind of breathless, confessional intensity, freed from the constraints that the Company places on language. Drivers must master a dense lexicon, its colorless phrases designed to be dutifully intoned: “I obey the signal passively and immediately / I perform a one-bar decrease and watch the manometers.” For Filice’s narrator, these locutions “form a chain and enchain the imagination,” forcing him to seek “a sensitive refuge” in the poetry he reads between training sessions. He also finds relief in the easy patter of his colleagues, ”a hodgepodge of society” from both the French metropole and its former colonies. Snatches of Bambara and Moroccan Arabic whiz by, followed by fragments of Rimbaud and Apollinaire. Hundreds of other dashed-off references suggest a cultural consciousness oversaturated by globalism—most of Filice’s touchstones are from the Anglophone world, from Star Wars to Kendrick Lamar—and geopolitical unrest: One Company manager is distracted, mid-drubbing of a trainee, by news of the Madrid train bombings. 

Crude technical jargon is also repurposed, somewhat defiantly, into figurative language. A particularly demanding trainer has “eyes shaped like smoothing coils”; an unusually brawny driver, “a world class Bro,” is “thick as a catenary support.” One student driver who wakes up late for the day’s session—a mortal sin in this world of rigid timetables—puts a “bridge rectifier in his voice / to seem serene” when he asks a Company functionary where his classmates have gone. Drivers are prone to merge with their environs, so thoroughly have they absorbed their training: Regarding one veteran driver, the narrator notices that the “the furrows of the tracks have formed” on his face.

And if all of this might not be enough to juggle, Filice often indulges in the mythic register, which provides a narrative blueprint, laying out the Manichean terms of engagement. The novice drivers are vying to become “knights” and questing for a “Grail” (a sheet of paper authorizing them to control a specific route), while also revolting against an intractable “lord” (management) who fights “battles in the conference room.” (In a novel full of stylistic flourishes, this one works much less successfully.)

Clearly, Filice means to overwhelm—to simulate, by way of a propulsive, cacophonous style, the   head-spinning experience of commanding a 1,800-ton “metallic serpent.” One lurches, dizzied, from one stanza to the next, searching for the stability of a familiar reference, an unfractured sentence. Amid the deluge, certain unsettling details flash into focus, as when the narrator learns that the “absolute record” for fatal incidents experienced by one (still-active) driver is 16. “He took my share,” the narrator assures himself, a little hysterically. “No doubt about it. It’s settled. I settled it.” Or when one of those very incidents appears in frame, summarized with a swift, grim precision: A young woman uses a temporary walkway to exit a station in Normandy and “looks at the exact moment, both quick and cruel, when the alignment between the train leaving and the train arriving at 147 kilometers an hour produces a blind spot.” (The SNCF was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter in her death, having failed to adequately warn pedestrians of the danger posed by crossing—or to protect the driver who tried in vain to alert her.) 

This episode is one of many in the book that illustrate a certain disconnect between the political rhetoric that has long surrounded Europe’s nationalized rail networks and the reality of their management today. The trains, it’s often suggested, belong to and benefit the people; they complement the robust social protections—universal healthcare, retirement schemes—that underpin European life. But decades of neoliberal policy have chipped away at these welfare states, undermined unions, and prodded public companies into behaving more like private ones—which is why Filice’s narrator finds himself working for a Company stacked with “mass-produced” managers who possess the “capacity to be compassionate” to workers’ grievances but blithely rule out the possibility of actual reform. The result is a system that does not always privilege the human, contrary to its claims. Faced with one irksome situation after another—a fatality here, a malfunction there—the Company might produce a terse statement or gin up an investigation to locate a scapegoat. As the narrator observes, “it’s not in the Company’s interest / for us to die on the job / it’s a stain.” And though he is not immediately given to striking—fretting that “victory is out of reach”—he begins to grasp the purpose of collective confrontation: for these workers to make themselves starkly visible to a Company that would rather not deal with them at all. 

As Filice’s narrator earns his stripes and settles into his work for the Company, he encounters yet another alien vocabulary: the invective and doublespeak his bosses use to goad their subordinates into accepting ever more precarious conditions, and to root out dissidence before it flowers. These are “slippery words—smooth as a Photoshopped image meant to make scrollers salivate”; they are “instant words, syrupy, limp, and gelatinous words.” The drivers are told that they are “the last link in the chain”—the vital, galvanizing component—but also that they should stop “acting like spoiled brats falling out of love” with their “toys”: “we should even be happy about our situation.” That means a life lived in perpetual arrears, as the age of retirement rises. (“When I joined the company / I had thirty-two years left / Now I have thirty-four,” a chéminot laments.) To the Company’s representatives, to strike is to self-flatter, to dare to consider oneself above parsimony. “If it’s such a chore for them they should say so,” one mandarin sniffs at the picket line. “There are those who do public service and those who undo it.”

The narrator and his colleagues are only free from Company talk (and Company surveillance) in the moments they steal in lounges between train departures, or in the dormitories where they crash for a few fitful hours before returning to the rails. In those liminal settings, “we cut our thoughts short and slice up our words / like our meals that we’ve learned to eat / at an accelerated speed.” Add to this the debilitating effects of enforced insomnia, and the narrator is left with “torn, short, amputated thoughts,” which seep out in jittery spurts of prose, as if the lyric form can no longer contain them. These are the most compelling moments in Driver—when the  sheer profusion of language seems liable to give way altogether, revealing a psyche under siege:

I am a zombie, I am present, walking on the sidewalk, but above my body, beside my body, I am watching my body as it moves, I can see my body as it moves, I see nothing but my body and on every side shadows, reflections, bits of information, a street sign, a red light turning green, crumbs of thought.

Here, Filice reaches beyond the specifics of this highly specialized profession to gesture at something more universal: the way the punishing cadences of work tend to break down the language we might otherwise use to shore ourselves up, and leave us depleted and alienated. Work “sets the pace of my days, compresses my emotions, and violates my desire,” the narrator notes bitterly. But recording his experiences allows him to “regulate the tensions that course through my body.” And by carefully threading together his colleagues’ stories—the respected mentor who passes away in his sleep, three years before retirement; the gadfly who invites passengers into his cab to ward off loneliness—he restores to them the subjecthood they have been denied as workers, throttled by a system that sees them as yet another pliant part of the machinery. 

Of course, to register the violence of work—by way of writing, or public declamations of protest—is not to ensure its diminishment. As Filice warns us, a thrown switch is unlikely to halt a runaway train. So long as a national economy exists to be serviced, the Company will stay the course, gathering more velocity as it narrows its outlays and barrels toward profit. Driver ends with the narrator and his comrades celebrating a successful strike, but also warily plotting out their next steps: taking stock of still-unmet demands, anticipating the next action. Half-hopeful, half-restive, the narrator reflects that “solidarity is a fire that needs to be stoked or it goes out.” There are still more chéminots to be drawn into their efforts; there are disagreements to be parsed, tactics to be sharpened. These lively moments of communion and friction are the necessary preconditions of movement-building. But they are also reminders of what it means, and feels like, to be a worker, pressed into relation with your fellow laborers. Such experiences flicker in and out of our working lives, puncturing monotony, leavening dread—and delivering us back to ourselves, if only for an instant.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Remember the Golden Age? That was the main pitch behind Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign: On his return, he’d tame the inflationary legacy of the Biden White House, institute a new regime of tariffs to strengthen America’s standing in the global economy, pass yet more tax cuts for the wealthy, preside over a newly resurgent manufacturing sector and investment economy, and revive America’s hallowed extractive industries of oil and coal while mothballing federal subsidies for solar and wind energy.

Cut to a year and a half into his second term, and Trump has accomplished almost nothing in his promised suite of Golden Age breakthroughs. Yes, there were sweeping tax cuts in his 2025 taxation and spending bill, but they have produced no real broadly distributed economic growth; the labor economy has stalled, and manufacturing continues to decline in a service-dominated US economy. Even before the Supreme Court found them unconstitutional, Trump’s tariffs yielded little more than higher retail prices for consumers. And his feckless war of choice with Iran has sent the costs of energy, food, and other mainstay products skyrocketing.

Trump’s dismal economic record is more than an indictment of his policy agenda: It goes to the heart of the bogus public image he’s lovingly cultivated during his tour through American celebrity culture—the fable that he’s a Promethean business genius whose unerring instinct for exploiting market opportunities has vastly improved both his fortune and the world surrounding him. This was the origin story that launched Trump onto the bestseller lists with The Art of the Deal, landed him in the Rolodexes of a generation of TV bookers and producers, and fueled his mythic political image as an omnicompetent DC outsider who could “fix” all of the many ills besieging our once-mighty businessman’s republic.

It was also complete bullshit from the word go. Trump’s fortune, like that of many self-aggrandizing business titans, was built on his father’s wealth—amassed in his case through a racist New York real-estate empire. Trump’s initial run of Manhattan development projects became profitable through the exploitation of tax abatements and other government subsidies; and in emulation of his political mentor Roy Cohn, Trump further padded his bottom line by stiffing vendors and contractors on an epic scale. The mediagenic image of Trump as a business wizard was rudely upended in the 1990s when his Atlantic City casinos flatlined, joining his airline and his United States Football League franchise in the dustbin of Trump-branded properties. Before the decade was out, the world-shaking dealmaker had filed for bankruptcy six times over.

You’d think that anyone too clueless to turn a profit from a chain of casinos would have his business-genius credentials promptly retired. But Trump overcame the stigma of bankruptcy the same way he became a national real-estate brand in the first place—with massive subventions of public funds and family cash to leverage his debts. That he no longer owned anything capable of accruing actual economic value no longer mattered; Trump doggedly shilled out his name for licensing fees on a seemingly endless regress of aspirationally gilded consumer items, from vodka and health supplements to motivational lectures and his fraudulent eponymous university.

As the New Yorker scribe Mark Singer wrote of this echt-American transformation in a 1997 profile, “Trump’s vaunted art of the deal has given way to the art of ‘image ownership.’” It was the NBC producer Mark Burnett who lifted Trump out of this welter of self-branding squalor by tapping him as the host of The Apprentice in the early aughts. The hit show was in many ways the perfect self-referenced gloss on Trump’s tour as a market demigod: He was pretending to be the boss on TV of a legion of fame-hungry cosplayers miming their own version of savvy market prowess for the cameras. The only genuine product on offer in the whole Kabuki spectacle was celebrity.

Thus, when Trump makes a harried show of walking back his threats to commit more war crimes in Iran in order to calm the restive spirit of the stock market, it’s crucial to understand that this prime mover of the American political economy literally has no idea what he’s doing. The same goes for Trump’s fallacious zero-sum understanding of how tariffs and trade balances work.

Trump’s fundamental economic illiteracy appears to be grounded in a breakdown of basic arithmetic. He’s often announcing his determination to send drug prices plunging by as much as 1,500 percent; he once vowed that he’d ensure the price of the weight-loss treatment Wegovy would plummet “from more than $1,300 to $199, a 578 percent difference.” There’s also strong circumstantial evidence that the man doesn’t understand what a trillion is—wildly inflating the estimated cost of last fall’s government shutdown by a factor of 100, while adding an additional trillion to his already bogus assessment of $2 trillion in estimated tariff revenues in the space of day, fueled by nothing more than MAGA-branded hopium.

Many of Trump’s opponents cite these frequent numerical face-plants as evidence that the president of the United States is simply an oaf, but the truth here is more troubling. Trump’s understanding of numbers, like his understanding of the economy, isn’t steeped in rank ignorance so much as in the business pieties of positive thinking.

That’s why the most revealing of Trump’s many court actions was his suit against his biographer Timothy O’Brien, for claiming that the ’80s-bred brand hustler was not, as he perpetually claimed, an actual billionaire. In his deposition for the suit, Trump argued that he was a billionaire for the simple reason that, on most days, he felt like one: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with my feelings…. Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day.”

The world is now captive in much the same way to Donald Trump’s ever-changing moods—only these days, instead of suing his way out of its obdurate unwillingness to play along, he’s sending the message with bombs.

Strega Nona is an illustrated children’s book about an Italian witch with a magic pasta pot. One day, a young neighborhood deviant named Big Anthony learns the spells required to turn on the pot and accidentally makes so much pasta that he floods and destroys the village. His punishment is being forced to eat it all, which is supposed to be a terrible curse. Both then and now, however, this story just makes me jealous.

I first read Strega Nona when I was 9 years old, and unlimited spaghetti was the thing I wanted most, as well as the thing I most needed to avoid. I love pasta to a ridiculous extent—I love how much bite it has, how it’s inherently rich and sweet and delicious and hefty even when served plain. It is impossible to know, though, whether I love it for its extraordinary taste and texture or if it’s a love born out of scarcity. I can never remember eating pasta without feeling as though I were doing something wrong.

When I was a kid, my parents were terrified that I was fat and made their concerns clear. Food obsession runs in the family. My parents’ parents—both pairs—are also fixated on weight: I have never seen my maternal grandmother eat dinner, and her sister died of anorexia in her 50s. My dad’s parents drink only low-sugar wine. My parents always said their concern was for my health or, in my teens, my “body image”—a curious phrase, since worrying about someone else’s body image implies they must already be ashamed of it.

And I was definitely a chubby kid. I’ve been approximately 30 percent fatter than I should have been—according to a handful of doctors, pseudoscientific BMI calculators, and the imprinting of modern Western culture—since I was 9. Still, it was obvious that my parents were terrified not about my diet, or my “body image,” but about my fatness. My sister, on the other hand, has always had extremely low (11 percent) body fat and eats 3,600 calories a day—1,200 of which are usually, say, Gushers—but instead of giving her the “eat less and slower” look in front of family friends at the dinner table, humiliating her as they did me, they would just laugh. But no one laughed when I ate sugar. My babysitter once pried my jaws open to see if I had any chocolate chips in there.

It should be obvious by now that I have never had an intuitive, “natural” relationship to food, hunger, and fullness. My desire to eat always begot restriction, which begot desire, which begot more restriction. In the darkness of my parents’ kitchen, I made pasta for myself like Big Anthony—secretly, late at night. I was so paranoid they would find out that I made stove-popped popcorn directly afterward just to mask the smell, even though plain pasta is, for all intents and purposes, odorless.

When your metabolism doesn’t operate at lightning speed, and your first understanding of your body is that it is somehow wrong and that what you eat should be carefully considered so as not to exacerbate your fatness, and you’ve begun to learn explicitly and implicitly that thin equals pretty, and you are an adolescent girl who wants to be pretty, because it’s the most important thing in the world—when all of this is true, food and exercise become all you think about. My general sexual invisibility for a lot of my teen and young-adult life was verifiable evidence that any whiff of fatness was enough to render me undesirable. I couldn’t, and still can’t, shake off the fact that skinny girls with plain faces and so-so personalities will almost always get male attention more easily than fat girls who are gorgeous and interesting.

I never learned how to like, or even feel neutral about, my body. I have been in a constant war with it my entire life, squinting and posing and contorting in front of the mirror to avoid confronting the reality that I was a little fatter than I wanted to be, and I couldn’t think my way to feeling sexy the way all of the think pieces in women’s magazines told me I could or should be able to do. I couldn’t attempt weight loss without driving myself to insanity, unable to even go for a walk without thinking about how one mile would be 100 calories burned.

That changed a little over a year ago.

In January of 2025, I started using an off-brand compound of semaglutide, a GLP-1—cheap Ozempic. At the time, I was 24, single, the most depressed I had ever been, unemployed, spending my days watching Vanderpump Rules and playing Fruit Merge, an iPhone game where you combine fruits to make increasingly larger fruits. And devastatingly, disgustingly, my primary concern was what would happen if, on top of all of that, I also gained weight. I couldn’t handle that possibility, and I didn’t have the internal wherewithal to expend any emotional energy forcing myself to hit any sort of step goal; I couldn’t even get out of bed. I knew, largely due to my Instagram algorithm, that off-brand GLP-1s were becoming more widely accessible, and using them was a silver bullet at a time when nothing except maybe benzodiazepines would make me feel as good as losing 20 pounds.

After spending a lot of time on Reddit, I came across Beauty With Bubbly—a medspa based in Northfield, Illinois—and requested a virtual consultation for off-brand GLP-1. The various direct-to-consumer companies that offer GLP-1s, along with a host of other peptides, have websites with portals, sans-serif fonts, and an interface that is inherently comforting to young people because it looks and feels native to an iPhone. Beauty With Bubbly’s website, on the other hand, was reminiscent of the early 2010s Internet: It was janky, with small white text over a black background, and I knew that if I called the number, I would immediately be connected to a real person and not a robot.

I called the number. The nurse was nice and knowledgeable enough to reassure me that by going on these drugs, I was not going to fuck up my health, at least not terminally so—something that genuinely had me scared. Ironically, my mother is a doctor and probably could have answered any question that crossed my mind, but I was entirely unwilling to have that conversation with her. The shots would run me $125 a month, which I agreed to pay.

When the drugs arrived, I ripped the label off the extremely tiny glass bottle of red liquid. It was no bigger than an AirPod, so my roommate wouldn’t identify it in the fridge where it needed to be stored. I hid the needles and the antibacterial wipes in my dresser. I don’t remember the experience of my first injection because I don’t think I was even emotionally present, unable to square how ashamed I felt with the fact that I was doing it anyway. All I remember was watching the instructional video the medspa had sent of a little blond nurse walking her viewers through the steps, vlog-style, in a kitchen that looked like Ina Garten’s.

I tolerated the injections relatively well, but I was nauseous a lot of the time, and the once erotic and sensorial process of eating became something that hurt and made me feel sick. It didn’t matter: As I started to see the pounds drop off my body, I felt sexy, so I felt good. The amazing part was that it didn’t happen through a years-long process of restriction and compulsive exercise and obsession with everything that I consumed. This route was so much more pleasant than the ones I’d tried in the past. People noticed that I’d lost weight, but it happened slowly enough that I could shrug and chalk it up to new antidepressants.

I recently revisited an essay by the young writer Rayne Fisher-Quann on her Substack newsletter, in which she cites Suzanne Scanlon’s Committed, a memoir that includes a portrait of an elderly woman who spent decades struggling with anorexia. Fisher-Quann reflects that the woman’s diary contains “decades of pages full of carefully-logged calories and I feel fat, I ate today and I feel fat in her own handwriting again and again, and is humiliated, most of all, by the banality of this obsession—by the plain cliché of looking back and seeing so clearly that her weight and her body were her life’s greatest passions, her most dedicated field of study.”

Before I started taking a GLP-1, my body was almost certainly my most dedicated field of study. I was convinced that my lovability and sexual market value hinged on my weight. I got a boyfriend immediately after I lost 25 pounds on this drug. For most of our relationship, he didn’t know. I was afraid to tell him, because the body he was attracted to was not the one with which I’d been naturally endowed. It is hard to say whether his attraction was purely due to my new body, the new confidence that accompanied it, or both. But the idea that thinness has improved my ability to get what I want from the world has been empirically reinforced not only by a pretty significant body of evidence, but also by my experience as a young woman—a conclusion too painful for any choice-feminist body positivity to override.

Once I lost weight, my brain was freed up to think about literally anything else: I read and wrote more, exercised only when I felt like it and didn’t self-flagellate when I didn’t—better yet, I was able to notice that exercise actually did make me feel good for reasons other than caloric expenditure. I had better sex because I wasn’t concerned about whether or not I looked fat the whole time. I fell in love. I never thought about food and was cool with whatever I managed to eat, which was often pasta, because I was full after three bites. I chemically obliterated the rush of erotic pleasure I’d get at the mere thought of Big Anthony’s unlimited spaghetti. I let people take pictures of me in a bikini. I took nudes and liked them. I had never felt that way before.

But whatever shame I shed along with those pounds only reinforced my predetermined notion that getting thinner would change my life for the better. Worshipping thinness this much is decidedly antifeminist, if not almost fascist. But I do not currently have the power to resolve the fact that my intellectual understanding of what is good and right and available to me conflicts with what my lived emotional experience tells me about what I can and should want and have: to like myself, to feel desired, and to not have to worry about my weight, a freedom with which I had not been acquainted for my entire life. To be honest about my use of weight-loss drugs without the explanation I’m giving here would be to admit how desperately I wanted to be thin, a humiliation I have simply not been able to stomach because of the way it comes up against my own notion of how beauty should be defined. I don’t want to conflate body and personhood at all. I wish, after all, that I felt good in the body I used to have.

Instead, I have internalized something of a cultural hierarchy. At the top of it are people who are inherently thin and eat whatever they want (my sister, the thin one, eats so much that her friends call her “Porky,” which maintains even the possibility of being funny—it isn’t—only because her thinness affords her a charm where a fat person’s overindulgence would induce revulsion). After them are the people who are thin and who restrict their eating and maintain regular exercise habits to stay that way—who work in a dark silence, where bites of dessert are still taken and exercise is done because it makes them “feel good.” (I know that exercise does feel good, but I find that this refrain severs the act of exercising from its aesthetic ends, which is often a lie, or at least a conflation.) Next are the people who are fat and who make themselves thin through sheer force of will. At the bottom are the people like me—who now number about one in eight Americans—who use these drugs to lose weight, the ones who “can’t control themselves.” I have, at many times in my life, paid for thinness in more covert ways, either in the form of healthier foods or exercise classes or going to a gym, and it hasn’t ever really worked. What makes using these drugs more harmful and dystopian?

The people in my social and Internet circles, people I love and respect, generally oppose GLP-1s. When the drugs first entered the cultural lexicon in mid-2022, there was controversy about people like the Kardashians using them for aesthetic reasons when diabetics—the intended beneficiaries of the medication—couldn’t even get their prescriptions filled. Fitness TikTok influencer Janelle Rohener was flamed online for continuing to sell her weight-loss plan—which was basically just stuffing cream cheese in raw bell peppers—when she suddenly lost weight, not due to the peppers but to Ozempic, and didn’t tell her followers. Many well-meaning critics have also opposed GLP-1s from a political position, emphasizing the materialist dystopia they present (read looksmaxxing).

This discourse is complicated by the fact that opposing GLP-1s requires a kind of collective agreement to pretend that fatness has no bearing on how the world treats people, which of course isn’t true. It’s almost impossible to admit out loud that being fat makes you less legible as attractive—not because it’s true in any absolute sense, but because that admission would concede that our homogenizing culture is right. I know that weight has bearing on the lives of many, many people, myself included, even as I wish that it didn’t and resent every motor of the cultural machine that has made it so. I think the leftist, feminist critiques of GLP-1s are all correct, but I took the drug anyway.

The truth is that I do like myself more now. And it completely sucks that this is the case. I have never been prohibitively fat—I always fit into airplane seats and have always been able to buy conventionally sized clothing, for example. I’ve been pursued by men even when I couldn’t bear to look at my own naked body in the mirror, and the fact that my body image is probably the most painful element of my existence will be entirely uncompelling to many people—maybe even offensive. I can also trace where my own delusion began: with misguided parents who were taught to be so by the misguided parents before them, in a misguided society that will invent an endless stream of reasons to make money off of people who hate themselves, or that invents reasons for people to hate themselves in order to sell them even more products. But everything I learned about my body annihilated my desire to live in it. I never understood my body to be inherently desirable regardless of what it looked like because I was only ever taught that it wasn’t.

What would you like me to do about it?

The editorial board of Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post dedicated an entire editorial over the weekend to criticizing Supreme Court reform and expansion. The piece is titled “The Court Packing Comeback,” which might make you think it will offer a balanced look at the surging popularity of court-expansion proposals, but the URL tells you what the editorial board is really after. It reads: “kamala-harriss-mindless-flirtation-with-court-packing.” The article isn’t really about Harris, beyond the fact that she recently said that there are “no bad ideas” when it comes to court reform. The fact that the editorial board used that offhand comment to go full sexism—Why is Harris’s statement “mindless”? How is she “flirting”?—tells me they’re scared that court reform is gaining in popularity.

Beyond this base and gross sexism, the editorial board marshals, dare I say, mindless tripe to defend the current court set-up. Here’s the basic premise: “No matter how much someone disagrees with recent decisions by the high court, threatening to subordinate judicial independence to the whims of a political party befits a banana republic. Turning the court into a partisan plaything would destroy one of America’s strongest bulwarks against tyranny.”

Let’s do a close read:

• “No matter how much someone disagrees” is a phrase intended to minimize the horror of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. I will stipulate that for your average cis-hetero white Washington Post editorial writer, the court’s decisions are, at worst, disagreeable. But for many of us, these decisions are matters of life and death. They certainly are for the trans people the Supreme Court is trying to erase. And for the women who live in states where their lives cease to matter the second they get pregnant. And while political representation is not necessarily a life-or-death issue, the demolition of the Voting Rights Act and the right of Black people to participate equally in the process of democratic self-government cannot be dismissed as a mere matter of disagreement.
• “Threatening to subordinate judicial independence to the whims of a political party befits a banana republic.” First of all, the current court is subject to the whims of a political party, the Republican Party. The Post’s editorial writers just happen to like it that way. And second, most functional democracies have high courts that are far less powerful than ours. Having nine unelected judges-for-life determine which laws we’re allowed to have is antidemocratic. Actual republics, banana or otherwise, do not cede the functions of democracy to unaccountable people with lifetime appointments.
• “Turning the court into a partisan plaything” is what Senator Mitch McConnell did. Court reform is a way to undo that, thanks for asking.
• “[O]ne of America’s strongest bulwarks against tyranny.” Is it, though? Is the Supreme Court a “bulwark” against tyranny? From where I sit, I see a litany of examples of American tyranny that were supported by the court. Slavery, segregation, internment of Japanese Americans—all of these atrocities came with the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval. Police violence, gun violence, and ecological destruction all flourish in this country because of what the Supreme Court has allowed. More often than not, the Supreme Court is a bulwark against progress.

After this inauspicious set-up, the editorial goes on to make all the usual arguments against court reform: It decries “tribalism,” agonizes about the possibility of tit-for-tat expansion, and recasts Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt at court-packing as a “failure,” even though the mere threat of it helped FDR get his New Deal policies through a hostile Supreme Court.

It all boils down to this: The Washington Post editorial board thinks the current Supreme Court is working just fine and doesn’t want anybody to change it. And they’re not wholly wrong about the first part: The current Supreme Court is working just fine—for The Washington Post and the moneyed interests it now represents.

So let me put it like this: If Jeff Bezos doesn’t want the Supreme Court to be reformed, that should be a sufficient reason for the rest of us to be in favor of it.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The Department of Justice has filed an indictment against Raúl Castro, former president of Cuba, over the downing of civilian airplanes over international waters while he was defense secretary. The indictment is the usual “lawfare” the Trump administration carries out against non-whites the world over, but I want Democrats to notice something: Castro is being indicted for an event that took place when he was the defense minister. If Trump can do that to Castro, our defense secretary, other countries can certainly indict Pete Hegseth for his war crimes. Hegseth shouldn’t be able to step foot outside this country without winding up in The Hague for the rest of his life.
• Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche continued his Better Call Saul impression this week when he apparently lied, under oath, about meeting with victims of Jeffrey Epstein. (He claimed he did, when he absolutely did not.) Blanche is another Trumper who should be prosecuted for his crimes when this is all over. I hope Jack Smith is keeping a list.
• Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia sued the Department of Education for new restrictions it placed on loans for students attending professional schools. It appears Linda McMahon doesn’t think we need nurses. As clear as I can tell, McMahon hasn’t committed any crimes, so instead of prosecuting her I vote to set her adrift—put her on an ice floe while her students assure her that climate change isn’t real and she should be fine—when she is out of power.
• Jeff Bezos thinks that the bottom 50 percent of wage earners shouldn’t pay any taxes. I think Jeff Bezos should pay his workers a living wage. We are not the same.
• Waymo, the driverless taxi company, suspended service in Atlanta because its cars don’t know how to deal with flooding. A similar thing recently happened in San Antonio, and the company has also issued a general recall because its taxis keep driving into water. The idea of AI being flummoxed by the very climate change AI is helping stoke feels like a plot point in a Michael Crichton novel.

Inspired Takes

• For The Nation, Kali Holloway dives into the new trend among always-online white supremacists: livestreaming their harassment of Black people with racial slurs and insults while threatening to shoot them. Holloway rightly points out that, while some people will see this as a new evil brought about by social media, Black people know this is an old evil brought about by white supremacy.
• Speaking of undesirable men, there’s a really interesting article from Planet Money about how there’s a shortage of economically stable men in today’s “marriage market.” It details how college-educated women are marrying men who lack a college education but are nonetheless doing well for themselves, leaving almost nothing left over for women without a college education who are increasingly choosing to parent on their own. 
• Not gonna lie, the “marriage market” article sent me down a rabbit hole and, well, I ended up at Playboy—just for the articles, I swear! The piece that caught my attention was fascinating because it explored the case of undesirable rich men. It concluded that billionaires are so interpersonally odious as to be “unfuckable,” with the result that only rich women who are used to and complicit in their odious behavior want to have sex with them. These two articles led me to conclude that “nice guys” do not actually “finish last” (my editor points out that this is because guys, in general, rarely finish last) and the obsession with the “male loneliness epidemic” is just about granting victimhood status to assholes.

Worst Argument of the Week

On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee released its “autopsy” of the 2024 election—but don’t get too excited: The DNC has its head so far up its ass that we now need an autopsy for the autopsy. DNC Chair Ken Martin initially said he wasn’t going to release the report, then changed course as people, including Kamala Harris herself, demanded its release. Then, it released a report that was full of errors—like, it literally gets people’s names and positions wrong and cites figures that are provably incorrect.

In addition to the report, Martin put out a statement. This paragraph stings:

I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount. So, today I am releasing the report as I received it—in its entirety, unedited and unabridged—with annotations for claims that couldn’t be verified.

It’s the most “I’m not a member of an organized political party—I’m a Democrat” moment we’ve encountered in a while.

I could end this week’s “worst argument” section here. Martin’s “I put out a shambolic report riddled with errors that I am not proud of” is a terrible look. So, for that matter, is “Ken Martin should be the head of the DNC.” Martin is so obviously bad at his job that he should be playing for the Mets.

Still, I’m not going to end this section on Martin, because there is one thing that’s even worse about the DNC report—and that is what is not in it: any mention of Gaza. Somehow, the Democratic Party did a 192-page review of what went wrong in 2024, and its response to the genocide in Gaza didn’t rate a single mention.

I don’t know how you do that. I mean, I guess I do know because I know how cowardice and complicity translate into better jobs and power within the Democratic Party. But even for an establishment from which I expect so little, the decision to ignore Gaza really shocks the conscience.

This report gives me no hope for the future. How can the party learn lessons when it won’t even acknowledge facts?

I’m not normally one of the guys who thinks that the Democratic Party needs to be burned to the ground so that we might build something better from its ashes. But in moments like these, it’s hard for me to argue that anything could be worse than the current Democrats.

…Except, of course, for the current Republicans.

What I Wrote

Did you hear about the $1.8 billion white-grievance slush fund Trump created? I wrote about it. And I also urged Democrats to use it as a model for future reparations to those who have been victimized by the Trump regime.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I finally got around to watching the Ken Burns documentary The American Revolution, which came out in November. I had been avoiding it because, while I love Burns’s work, I wasn’t in the mood for a hagiography of this country’s founders. I’ve watched every one of his films, multiple times, and I know how he deals with atrocities. I don’t think it’s fair to say he sanitizes or whitewashes them, but he tends to put them off to the side. In his series The Vietnam War, for instance, My Lai gets about as much screen time as Jane Fonda. In his World War II documentary, The War, the Holocaust doesn’t happen until American troops are pushing into Germany.

I understand this style of filmmaking: He’s trying to tell a story from 30,000 feet, and focusing too granularly on the atrocities would overpower the rest of the narrative. You shouldn’t watch his Civil War documentary for a historical account of American chattel slavery; that’s not the point of that show. And, in fairness, you don’t need to understand slavery to understand how Robert E. Lee screwed up at Gettysburg.

Still, despite my initial reluctance, I finally watched the American Revolution series because, as we hurtle toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I wanted to refamiliarize myself with what most people have been taught. The American Revolution was, to my mind, one of the most hypocritical wars ever fought. It saw slaveholding whites demanding their natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness while running an economy based on human bondage—and poor, landless whites fighting so that they might one day steal land from Native Americans. The level of intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the project is something I’ve been aware of since I was old enough to memorize the dates of the battles.

The film does surface all of these hypocrisies. It rightly characterizes George Washington as an inveterate slaveholder and Indian killer—and also the only person holding the revolutionary army (and thus the entire fledgling country) together. But, as I feared, it also largely lets the founders off the hook. Their disgusting treatment of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans is a side plot in the larger story about fighting the British.

Those Brits, however, get an interesting treatment in this film. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the United States’s founding, but I don’t think I’ve been exposed to a more evenhanded treatment of the British perspective during the Revolutionary War. Burns was able to show me how the British thought about the uprising, and how the 13 colonies were, to their mind, small potatoes, compared to their incredibly lucrative slave-powered colonies in the Caribbean.

It’s hard to imagine that Black people and Native Americans would have been better off if the British had won the war, but there’s no way they would have been worse off. The founding generation had an insatiable appetite for land—and for the enslaved people to work those lands. Once they were freed from England’s shackles, they unleashed a terror of genocide and suffering across the entire continent.

All of which is to say, I left the documentary as I leave any contact with the history of the United States’s founding: firm in my belief that calcifying American constitutional law in the “original intent” of these slack-jawed, slaveholding, racist, sexist, genocidal, backwoods mouthbreathers is stupid. I reject orignalism in its entirety.

***

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Last night, Stephen Colbert of CBS’s The Late Show joined a growing list of critics of President Trump who lost their jobs this week. Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky lost his primary for defying Trump on the release of the Epstein files. Republican Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana lost his primary for voting to impeach President Trump in 2021. And Stephen Colbert lost his show for the far worse crime, the unforgivable crime, in Trump’s eyes, of laughing at him.

Of the three, I’ll miss one of them. Eleven months ago, as the Ellison family sought final approval from Trump’s FCC to buy Viacom-Paramount, which then owned CBS, it was announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was to be canceled on May 21, 2026. CBS argued that even with high ratings, Colbert’s show was too expensive to make money for the network. Still, the timing of the announcement, alongside the FCC meeting, the $16 million 60 Minutes settlement paid to Trump, and David Ellison’s hiring The Free Press’s conservative editor and co-owner Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News, sent a strong signal that the Ellisons offered Colbert up to appease Trump.

Of the late-night comedians, whether on weekdays or on Saturday Night Live, Colbert is hardly President Trump’s harshest critic. His jokes are not harder, meaner, or more piercing than Jimmy Kimmel’s or those on SNL’s Weekend Update. This week, Colbert’s monologue included a dissection of the absurd “negotiation” between Trump and his own IRS for the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. The Late Show did it with a series of clips from seemingly dozens of Trump interviews stitched together to create a “negotiation” to give himself that amount. It illustrated the brazen corruption of the fund in a clear and funny way, but it can’t be said to have had the viciousness of a South Park scene showing Trump nude. It can’t be said to have infuriated the Trumps, like Kimmel’s recent joke about how lately Melania Trump has “the glow of an expectant widow.”

Back when Colbert played his alter ego—Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report—he was a little more cutting. Then he played a spot-on parody of a right-wing Fox News host modeled in part on Bill O’Reilly. Colbert’s greatest moment in that era still remains his 2006 face-to-face monologue with then-President George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. That night, he presented himself as George W. Bush’s biggest fan, there to celebrate Bush and commiserate with his hero that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Twenty years ago was another world. One where a president could sit for a dressing down by a comedian and pretend to have fun. The president we have now demands that a comedian like Colbert be fired for his transgressions and Kimmel, too, in the wake of his joke on Trump’s insincere public grieving over Charlie Kirk’s killing. They suspended Kimmel, one thinks, only because, in the aftermath of the announcement of Colbert’s firing, public outrage over Trump’s silencing another comic led ABC to back off.

So why Colbert? Colbert is the one comedian critic that Trump could get rid of because the new owners of CBS were willing to sell out their own talent to clinch their deal—as they did their news division. Trump would have all his critics fired if he could. What sets Colbert apart is what made him so unique for these times. More than any of his contemporaries, Colbert is openly philosophical about the purpose of his humor, and that philosophy is what makes him so vital to the moment. As he told James Kaplan in 2007 in Parade magazine, “Not living in fear is a great gift because certainly these days we do it so much. And do you know what I like about comedy? You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time—of anything. If you’re laughing, I defy you to be afraid.” As Colbert told Playboy’s Eric Spitznagel in 2012, “Fear is an attempt to impose tyranny over someone’s mind. It’s an act of oppression.”

Defusing that fear at the end of our day is what Colbert’s show tried to do. After his opening monologue, often laying into Trump, Colbert generally spent the rest of the show in an uplifting mood with his guests and comedy pieces. The Late Show band itself was called The Joy Machine. A bit twee? A bit corny? Yes, but Colbert’s show was meant as an antidote for the day’s Trump news, an attempt to disarm it, not out-snark it.

No president in American history has used fear on the American public like President Trump. Fear keeps the Republican Party in line, although of late some do seem to fear losing their jobs more than they fear Trump. Trump threatens Iran, Greenland, TV networks—his threats alone often get him what he wants. It’s how Trump rules, and no matter how many times his threats prove to be empty or he himself backs down, every once in a while it works, and so we lost Colbert.

Colbert’s final weeks brought some big-name guest stars to the program: President Obama, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, and last night’s sole interview, Sir Paul McCartney. The last shows have been peppered with cameos, featuring old friends from Jon Stewart and Amy Sedaris to Robert De Niro and Neil de Grasse-Tyson and Tig Notaro. A lot of it felt random. Who are these people to Colbert? He did not bother to explain.

As Colbert prepared to sign off, his most interesting show, and most touching, was Monday’s “The Worst of The Late Show.” In that, he brought up several key writers and designers from his staff who got to present favorite bits of theirs that had been cut over the preceding 11 years. Were they overlooked gems, bad calls by Colbert? No, he was right about most of them. That wasn’t the point so much as the chance for Colbert to give them a moment to shine and say goodbye to his coworkers.

Shows get canceled. Hosts get replaced. This matters so much because Trump made it happen, not because it wasn’t going to eventually happen. Today, few people can quote Lenny Bruce, but we remember that he was censored and thrown in jail for telling jokes powerful people did not like. Few can quote The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS from the 1960s and ’70s, but we remember that they were canceled for telling jokes powerful people did not like. Most of Colbert’s jokes about Trump are already forgotten with yesterday’s news, but Trump has assured Colbert a permanent spot in the pop-culture memory by canceling him. Trump has made sure that Colbert will be remembered as a comic who spoke truth to power, and that Trump will be remembered as a power that could not handle his truth.

Ask anyone these days, and they’ll probably agree that we’re living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty.

Wars in Iran and Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, a climate emergency rearing its head across the globe, and creeping inflation making more and more of life feel out of reach—and all the while, AI is churning out an endless flood of disorienting slop and threatens to render many of our careers obsolete.

It can be easy to feel helpless, like we have no control over the tides of change that are leaving us in the dust.

But even amid this atmosphere of tumult, people continue searching for places to exercise their own political agency and cultivate democratic power. And one place that search is playing out is in the aisles of the Park Slope Food Coop, a member-owned neighborhood grocery store in Brooklyn. This coming Tuesday, the coop is holding a series of crucial votes about an issue that has dogged it for years: whether or not to boycott Israeli products in protest of Israel’s ongoing policies of apartheid and genocide.

For the members of Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine (PSFC4Palestine) who have organized around this issue for years, the campaign is about more than just holding Israel accountable. It is also about translating widespread moral outrage and a longing for democratic community into tangible collective action at a moment when doing so feels increasingly difficult. And it could serve as a model for those who continue to feel as if they are careening toward a less democratic future.

The Park Slope Food Coop has never been just a grocery store. Since its founding in 1973, it has grown into an actual democratic institution with political responsibilities. The coop’s 16,700 members each volunteer to work a two-hour-and-45-minute shift every six weeks in exchange for discounted groceries and a vote on store policies. And for many coop members, the opportunity to collectively decide everything from what type of music should be played in the store to whether to stock alcohol is even more appealing than cheaper produce and healthier organic snacks.

As coop member, board member, and PSFC4Palestine organizer Tess Brown-Lavoie put it, the coop functions almost like “a small city”—large enough to reflect broader public opinion trends, but small enough for members to still feel that their participation matters.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a trip to the coop does not always feel like an escape from politics. That communal ethos—and the reality that economic choices carry moral and political weight—has long shaped what does, and does not, appear on the coop’s shelves. From its early years, members treated the store as a site of intersectional, global solidarity. In the 1970s and ’80s, the coop joined broader international efforts to boycott South African goods in protest of apartheid. Members also voted to boycott Chilean products under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and later took aim at corporations like Coca-Cola over allegations of complicity in violence against Colombian union organizers.

These were not symbolic gestures so much as extensions of the coop’s core philosophy: that a democratic institution, however small, has a responsibility to reflect the values of its members in practice. Boycotts were debated, sometimes vigorously contested, but they were never treated as out of bounds.

In this context, PSFC4Palestine’s years-long effort to bring about a boycott of Israeli products is neither novel nor particularly radical. Rather, it represented a continuation of a long tradition aimed at aligning the coop’s stated values with its everyday practices. But Israel’s defenders—as they so often do—insisted from the beginning that Israel should be treated as an exception.

Calls for the coop to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement first emerged in the wake of Israel’s 2008–09 assault on Gaza, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. Within a few years, the issue had sparked one of the most contentious political battles in the coop’s history, culminating in a 2012 meeting that drew thousands of members to debate a possible referendum on boycotting Israeli goods. While members in attendance ultimately voted down the call for a referendum, the explosion of interest made clear that the debate over a boycott of Israeli goods was far from over.

In the years that followed, pro-Israel coop members adopted a new strategy. Rather than simply trying to win the argument over whether to boycott Israeli goods, they focused on restructuring the procedural terrain on which the argument itself could be fought. In 2015, four coop members interrupted and derailed a presentation by members who were calling for a boycott of SodaStream, the Israeli seltzer-machine company that operated a factory in a West Bank settlement. They reportedly unplugged the projector, stormed the stage, and shouted “antisemite Jew haters!” until the presentation had to be called off. They were later suspended from the coop for one year. (This was all detailed in the coop’s in-house newsletter, the Linewaiters’ Gazette.)

In 2016, the coop adopted a new rule requiring any boycott to pass with a 75 percent supermajority at a general meeting, rather than the simple majority that was required for previous boycott votes. The rule was framed by its supporters as a way to preserve “community and cooperation” within a deeply divided membership.

But in practice, the new rule ensured that any future boycott effort would need overwhelming support—an extraordinarily high bar in a community where even the volume of the store’s music can cause tensions.

Keyian Vafai, another coop board member and organizer with PSFC4Palestine, helped put the absurdity of that threshold into perspective.

“You could propose an agenda item that says, let’s dissolve the coop and close its doors forever, and that would take 66 percent of the vote,” Vafai said. “Or you can look at the US Congress. There’s nothing that requires that level of support. It’s very obvious why they did that.”

For boycott supporters, it seemed clear that the coop was reproducing yet another example of the “Palestine exception”: the tendency to treat Israel as uniquely exempt from the moral and political standards routinely applied to other states, and Palestinians as uniquely exempt from the rights afforded to others. The principle of boycotts was not being challenged—after all, members had long embraced them as legitimate tools for opposing apartheid, dictatorship, labor abuses, and other injustices. But the rules suddenly had to change—because now, the target was Israel.

When Israel’s genocide in Gaza began, old fault lines within the coop reemerged with new urgency. Now, though, boycott proponents faced a procedural terrain that many felt was effectively rigged. At an October 31, 2023, general meeting, a member raised the possibility of revisiting the boycott in light of Israel’s unfolding assault on Gaza. Boycott supporters said that the reaction inside the room was immediate.

“There was a huge resonance,” Vafai recalled. “A bunch of hands shot up.”

But before the conversation could meaningfully develop, Joe Holtz—then the coop’s general manager—abruptly shut it down, citing unexplained “time constraints.”

“I was genuinely amazed,” he said. “Only two of the allotted 15 minutes had passed. I was like, ‘What are you talking about? There’s hands in the air.’”

For Vafai, the moment felt clarifying. And the attempt to stifle conversation had the opposite effect that coop leadership intended.

“It was that immediate censorship that actually caused us all to meet each other,” Vafai said.

Within days, organizers were approaching fellow members at protests and outside the coop, asking a simple question: Are you a member, and do you support a boycott of Israeli goods? What began as a small gathering soon evolved into a much larger organizing group of over 200 activists and 50 core organizers that has met nearly weekly. Since then, organizers have gathered thousands of signatures, canvassed members across Brooklyn, and built support for two upcoming votes: one to restore the coop’s previous simple-majority standard for boycotts, and another to finally allow members to directly decide whether Israeli goods belong on the coop’s shelves.

But just as support for the campaign multiplied, so too did the procedural and political obstacles placed in its path. One of the greatest challenges organizers faced was not persuading ordinary members to support the boycott but navigating what Brown-Lavoie described as “systematic obstruction” by both coop leadership and anti-boycott members.

Discussions were repeatedly delayed by coop leadership’s refusal to move meetings into larger venues and its continued resistance to holding them virtually or in hybrid form, despite the coop’s having used Zoom extensively during the pandemic. Anti-boycott supporters, who also formed their own organizing group, told reporters that they opposed hybrid meetings because it would make it easier for a BDS vote to pass.

It got so bad that during their successful runs for the coop board, Vafai and Brown-Lavoie were targeted by ads from the pro-Israel social-media group Israel War Room, which circulated caricatured images of the two organizers online and labeled them “Jew-hating” and antisemitic. The coop had rapidly become a microcosm of the broader contours of the debate around Israel and Palestine.

As sympathy for Palestinians continues to grow and views on Israel plummet, the narrative battle has increasingly shifted away from the substance of Israel’s actions themselves and toward the mechanisms governing whether criticism of Israel can be publicly expressed at all. Israel’s supporters no longer behave like people confident that they can win a free and open debate. Increasingly, they behave like people trying to prevent one from happening at all.

This dynamic has become impossible to ignore across American political life. University administrations continue to crack down on students who criticize Israel or express support for Palestinians. Many campuses across the country remain on effective lockdown in hopes of preventing the reemergence of pro-Palestine encampments. Congress overwhelmingly acts to sanction pro-Palestinian student activists while continuing to fund the destruction of Gaza. Critics of Israel are routinely accused of antisemitism, fired from jobs, hauled before disciplinary committees, or subjected to coordinated harassment campaigns.

But more than that, the anti-boycott movement reflects the state of US democracy itself, mired by the growing contradictions between public opinion and actual policy. The vast majority of Americans might support a policy, whether increased gun restrictions or cutting US military funding to Israel, but never see those policies enacted. And it is precisely because of that crisis of mass politics, that gap between what increasing numbers of Americans want and what their institutions continue to do, that campaigns like the one at the Park Slope Food Coop are so important.

Tuesday’s meeting will feature two votes: one on whether to lower the threshold for a boycott back to a simple majority, and another to determine whether to boycott Israeli goods.

For Brown-Lavoie, the significance of the campaign extends far beyond the handful of Israeli products on the coop’s shelves. “The Park Slope Food Coop is a bellwether,” she told me. “It’s a political entity. There’s different perspectives, different relationships to Palestine. And we’ve had to actually learn how to listen to each other and collaborate across differences.”

For her, the campaign became about more than a boycott vote. “It’s been incredibly frustrating, edifying, empowering at different turns,” she said. “To understand the coop as a site where I can actually express political agency.”

Vafai framed it similarly. “I don’t think the point of it is necessarily the grand economic impact that it’ll have alone,” he said. “We’re offering a blueprint of what it looks like for a democratic organization to stand up for justice against this genocide in a way that involves organizing members, having conversations, and not doing anything unilaterally.”

This is part of why the backlash to the boycott effort has been so intense. Organizers understand something the campaign’s skeptics often miss: local democratic actions can punch far above their weight.

The boycott of apartheid South Africa did not begin with government action. It began with churches, unions, student groups, and grocery stores willing to transform moral outrage into collective refusal. In fact, it was workers at Dunnes Stores in Ireland who refused to handle the sale of grapefruit from apartheid South Africa that sparked a campaign in 1984 that eventually generated enough public pressure to convince the Irish government to officially ban the importation of South African goods. Those campaigns mattered not only because of their direct cumulative economic impact but also because they normalized the idea that it was possible for ordinary people to withdraw their complicity from seemingly ubiquitous systems of oppression.

No one involved in the Park Slope Food Coop campaign believes that removing a handful of Israeli products from a Brooklyn grocery store will, on its own, stop a genocide. But it is about more than that. The point is what people do when the institutions that claim to represent them actively enable the very atrocities they spent decades insisting the world must “never again” tolerate. The point is whether democracy remains something people can actively engage in together, or nothing more than a spectacle that is ultimately secondary to the interests of power.

At the Park Slope Food Coop, members are still trying to answer that question for themselves.

The whole debate about whether the Democratic Party would release its autopsy report on the 2024 presidential election—as it finally did this week—always seemed silly to me. How, I wondered, could a hastily prepared report by a party insider tell us anything we hadn’t already known for a very long time?

The party’s many missteps in the 2024 election were clear before anyone cast a vote: too much time spent campaigning with Republicans like Liz Cheney and too little time spent rallying in the union halls of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; inadequate attention to core economic issues in a moment of intense anxiety over inflation; a failure to develop a steady and coherent critique of an increasingly cultish and corrupt Republican Party; and a stark refusal to recognize the depth of opposition to the genocide in Gaza.

That the Gaza issue threatened to upend the party’s best efforts to defeat Donald Trump was evident months before the Democrats nominated Kamala Harris for the presidency in August of 2024. By April of that year, more than 500,000 people had voted “uncommitted” in primary elections across the country to send a message to Democrats to shift their Gaza policy.

In late May of 2024, prior to the dismal debate performance that destroyed Joe Biden’s reelection bid, I met with grassroots Democrats in rural southwestern Wisconsin’s Lafayette County.

Lafayette County is about as far as you can get from the urban centers and college campuses where protests developed in the spring of 2024 over the Biden administration’s failure to oppose Israel’s assault on Gaza. The county‘s biggest city is Darlington, population 2,462. The most notable political statement in that community is a reminder that the region stood on the right side of the bitterest conflict that defined America: a 56-foot high monument topped with the statue of a Union army soldier from the Civil War.” A plaque announces, “They died, the Nation lives.”

The Democratic loyalists who gathered in Darlington that day were doing their best to convince voters in Lafayette and surrounding Wisconsin counties to reelect Biden—just as they would eventually work to elect Harris. Yet they faced a challenge. One of the first people who spoke up when I visited told me that, when she knocked on doors, she kept running into voters who were upset with the administration’s failure to act decisively to save Palestinian lives in Gaza.

That was just one of many instances during the 2024 presidential campaign where it became clear that the Democratic strategists in Washington—who imagined that the party’s election prospects would not be influenced by anger over US complicity with the Israeli assault on Gaza, which had already killed tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children—were agonizingly out of touch. US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is precisely right when she says that Gaza was “very clearly a major dynamic and a major threat that was happening in 2024, regardless of how one feels about that issue.”

Polling data would eventually confirm the harm done to Harris’s 2024 bid —which attracted 6 million fewer votes than Biden received in 2020—by the vice president’s failure to make a clear break with Biden on Gaza issues. A postelection survey conducted by the Institute of Middle East Understanding and YouGov “found that 29 percent of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 and didn’t vote for Harris in 2024 cited ‘ending Israel’s violence in Gaza’ as their reason for withholding their vote.” The IMEU assessment of the survey argued, “Vice President Harris lost votes because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.” Indeed, according to the analysis, “That reason surpassed the economy, immigration, healthcare, and abortion, all of which have historically been major voter issues in past presidential elections.”

When word spread that the Democratic National Committee was preparing an autopsy report on the 2024 campaign, it seemed obvious that, to be credible, any such document would have to tackle the failure by candidates, party leaders, and strategists to grasp the seriousness of the grassroots outrage over Gaza. Yet when the autopsy was finally published Thursday by CNN, the network analysis noted, “The report is silent on some of the biggest and potentially juiciest aspects of the 2024 campaign. That includes any judgment about Biden’s decision to run again, the impact of the war in Gaza (which split Democrats) and the fact that Harris was allowed to take over the ticket without anything amounting to an electoral process for choosing a replacement.”

No mention of Gaza? Seriously?

In a statement on Thursday, DNC chair Ken Martin said he finally allowed the release of the document, which had been prepared by party consultant Paul Rivera, “for full transparency”—even though CNN reported that Martin believed that the autopsy “wasn’t close to being ready for public consumption.”

Whatever the excuses may be, an analysis of Democratic missteps in 2024 that fails to mention Gaza betrays a lack of self-awareness that is distressing, not just from a historical standard but also as a measure of the party’s ongoing refusal to recognize and learn from its own mistakes.

US Representative Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who tried in 2024 to get Harris and the party to focus on the plight of the Palestinians, said Thursday, “There is not a single mention of Gaza in the 192-page autopsy report that was just released today. As someone who campaigned in Michigan and Wisconsin, let me tell you that one of the reasons we lost is our blank check to Israel and Netanyahu while they committed genocide in Gaza. We must speak and confront hard truths if this party is to win in 2028.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

“I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” newscaster Howard Beale hollers, as he spirals into an environment-induced madness, on air, in the classic 1976 movie Network. Speaking to a TV camera, he urges his audience to open their windows and scream out that they are also mad as hell. From coast to coast, as Americans respond to Beale’s primal scream, those windows open and those screams of rage and of fury at being betrayed by their own government are heard. It’s perhaps the most breathtaking four minutes of cinema ever made.

Right about now, I’m tempted to open my windows and scream the same cri de coeur out into the ether. For more than 16 months, the Trump regime has done one outrageous or cruel or corrupt or unconstitutional thing after another, but this week I reached my breaking point.

I refer to the extraordinary agreement between Trump, the Trumpified Department of Justice, and the Trumpified Treasury Department to settle the president’s outrageous $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service by both granting Trump and his hoodlum family immunity from investigations into potential tax fraud, and also creating a $1.776 billion slush fund to be disbursed at will to January 6 insurrectionists and others who claim to have been “victims” of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department. The kicker: It would be funded using tax money from you, me, and everyone else in this country.

To be 100 percent clear here: Unlike the men, women, and children who have simply been disappeared into makeshift concentration camps by Trump’s regime, those “victims” actually received jury trials, were found guilty by their peers, and were sentenced not for being Trump fans but for battering Capitol police officers, for hunting congressional members with the intent of killing them, for vandalizing the citadel of American democracy, and for trying to subvert the will of the people by preventing the peaceful transfer of power. Now, members of this ragtag band of traitors, fools, hucksters, and brass-knuckle men stand to gain wealth, possibly millions, through the transfer of your and my hard-earned tax dollars into their bank accounts. Six dollars from every man, woman, and child in this country; that’s about what this slush fund for fascists will end up costing if the courts don’t stop it—a number of Capitol police officers have already sued—or if Congress doesn’t muster the decency to intervene.

One of the hallmarks of an authoritarian government is that the ruler regards the nation’s treasury as their personal piggy bank—to be raided at will, with its contents parceled out to friends, family, regime loyalists, and enforcers. That is exactly what “Acting Attorney General” Todd Blanche has signed off on in agreeing to this odious deal with Trump. Blanche, who is surely the most loathsome, pathetic, and spineless creature ever to have sat in the AG’s office (and yes, the comparison list includes Pam Bondi), has given the DOJ’s imprimatur to a Mafia-quality shakedown operation. It is the quintessence of public corruption.

“One of the most basic problems with this Anti-Weaponization Fund is there are no objective criteria for determining who would be eligible for compensation,” Jonathan Rusch, director of the Anti-Corruption Law Program at the American University Law School, told me. Rusch—who spent 26 years as a federal prosecutor working on high-profile public corruption cases, some of them involving members of Congress, and who teaches a summer course on tackling corruption that is popular not just among law students but also international officials looking to root out malfeasance in their own political institutions—believes the fund has been established to give maximum discretion to DOJ officials as to how and to whom they distribute the money. The formal document creating the fund “doesn’t say what the actual, articulated purpose is. This is a further effort to provide for people out to disrupt the congressional process for their service in Trump’s interest.”

Shortly after the announcement of the settlement agreement, Brian Morrissey, the Treasury department’s top lawyer, abruptly resigned. While he has not made a public statement, the timing suggests that he was deeply uncomfortable with what was unfolding. Rusch guesses that he concluded it was contrary both to the law and to sound public policy, and that, in the long run, it would expose those who signed off on it to significant legal risks.

What are those risks? The effort to shield Trump, his children, and the family business from all IRS scrutiny could all too easily be seen as obstruction of justice, Rusch notes. The financial rewarding of Trump’s political allies, through the use of taxpayer dollars, could be interpreted as being part of a conspiracy to defraud the United States. And federal laws prohibiting the misappropriation of public property could also kick in if it can be proven that the fund involves a fraudulent appropriation of property. “This is a handout scheme to buy the affections of people who are your supporters,” Rusch explained to me. “Including the Proud Boys and other white supremacist groups. This is all about financial handouts to supporters.”

As for his thoughts on Blanche? “The Acting AG is completely supportive of and prepared to carry out every wish and demand the president makes with regards to retaliation. It is a derogation of principled constitutional government.”

That, I suspect, is lawyer-speak for saying that Blanche is now using the full force of the DOJ to not only prosecute Trump’s political opponents but also smooth the way for some of the most shady uses of public dollars in American history in the service of a deeply autocratic and anti-constitutional new power elite. He has become American fascism’s most visible consigliere.

Howard Beale, who found absolute clarity of vision in his frenzied madness, would have simply added it to the list of heinous woes confronting society. The ICE death squads. The senseless wars. The assassinations of fishermen in the Pacific and Caribbean. The insulting of allies. The dismissal of Americans’ economic pain. The use of tariffs to reward Trump’s friends and punish his foes. The tearing apart of USAID. The shameful evisceration of the country’s refugee resettlement program. The dismissal of climate change as a hoax. The firing of top public health experts. The attacks on the First Amendment rights of academics and journalists. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the Southern stampede to neutralize Black political representation. And now, the billion-dollar plundering of the public treasury to further exonerate those who attempted to launch a putsch to keep Trump in power in 2021.

Then Beale would have looked into the camera and, his righteous fury in full flowering, told his audience to open their windows and scream at the top of their lungs that they were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore.

In March, Bryce Crawford, an evangelical Christian influencer, came to the heart of Times Square to spread the gospel. The show, which took place in The Town Hall, was part of his “I Love Jesus Tour.” Crawford had packed the 1,500-seat venue with Gen Z fans who were hungry to hear him preach.

The “I Love Jesus Tour” was part pop gospel concert (with worship music from Liberty Collective, a band hailing from the ultraconservative Liberty University), part evangelical church service led by Crawford, and part fan meetup, all bundled in the aesthetics and entrepreneurial spirit of influencer marketing.

When I first arrived at The Town Hall, I was met by a long line of people snaking up the spiral staircase toward the balconies. I thought the crowd was bottlenecking for their seats before realizing that they were waiting to buy something at the merchandise table. I passed somewhere between 50 and 100 fans, many of whom were already wearing Bryce’s merch and had come back for more. The merch style is tailor-made for Gen Z—it’s kitschy, referential, tongue-in-cheek, with the wholesomeness of nondenominational Christianity. “I Love Jesus” in the style of a Waffle House logo. The D.A.R.E.-like messaging of “Crack This! Not Drugs!” with an illustration of a Bible. Just before the event officially started, someone started a cheer, shouting “Je-sus! Je-sus! Je-sus!” like Beatlemaniacs calling Paul out for an encore.

The question of whether a Gen Z–led return to Christianity is taking place in the United States has been hotly contested. This “revival” has been flaunted as a cultural victory for the religious right and debunked as a propaganda myth by the secular left. There is a discrepancy between the statistics and a diffuse, vibes-based sentiment that young people are, indeed, demonstrating an increased interest in the Christian faith. I began to wonder if statistics measuring religious participation, like church attendance, could be used as a litmus test for the Gen Z revival. It seemed to me that the popularity of faith-based content creators revealed something that traditional metrics were missing. If Crawford could get thousands of twentysomethings across the US out of their houses and off of their phones to hear the gospel in person, surely something was going on.

Crawford is an evangelist, a podcaster, an influencer with an audience of over 3 million, most of them Gen Z. He has a goofy, distinctly TikTok Hype House look to him: silver hoop earrings, tattooed thighs, baggy camouflage pants. Picture Joel Osteen with boy-band looks and a ring flash. Allie Beth Powell, 19, a college student who attended the “I Love Jesus Tour” in Atlanta, told me Crawford came out onstage wearing red Lightning McQueen–themed Crocs, which she said made him more “relatable” to her and her peers. Crawford is also the founder of an energy drink brand called “Praise Energy,” which comes in flavors like “Rainbow Candy” and has a friendly, children’s cereal-style mascot named “Zion the Lion.” While he has managed to make himself immediately legible as cool and Gen Z–friendly, his content is gravely serious. A life lived in sin, Crawford often reminds his audience, is a life bound for Hell.

Gianna Calabrese, 24, received tickets to Bryce’s tour stop in Pittsburgh as a gift from her friend and posted a TikTok of herself crying tears of joy. Another fan, Heather Farley, 24, who is also a faith-based content creator, drove four hours from her home in North Carolina to Georgia and back to see Bryce’s live show. A huge part of Bryce’s appeal is that he possesses the coolness and relatability of any other influencer, but with the authority and knowledge of a bona fide preacher. “He’s young, he’s attractive, he has a sense of humor, while being so knowledgeable on the word [scripture],” Farley said. “That’s what captured me. I was searching for something I didn’t know existed, and he introduced me to that. He’s been a beacon of light in this dark world.”

It can be hard to distinguish Crawford from your garden-variety Los Angeles influencer. He has built a successful enterprise from the same bricks: monetization of online engagement, flashy merchandise, energy drinks, and ticketed live engagements across the United States. Like critics of televangelists, one could leverage the accusation that the influencer lifestyle—fame-seeking, entrepreneurial, and often ostentatiously wealthy—is at odds with the Christian values of modesty and charity.

Crawford got a bit of heat on a Christian subreddit after his wife posted a photo from the couple’s honeymoon in what appeared to be first-class plane seats. The post prompted bigger questions about Bryce’s Patreon subscriptions, where fans pay between $5 and $100 a month to support his ministry. It would be easy to declare Crawford and his enormous fan base as nothing more than the inevitable manifestation of the televangelist adapted for 2026, if not for how seriously his fans take him, his ministry, and, in turn, their own faith.

“It seems like the only thing that we can’t escape in this lifetime is suffering,” Crawford said in a projected video onstage at the tour in New York. “Will the pain ever stop?”

That’s a prescient question to ask a group of people who, statistically speaking, appear to be in a great deal of pain. The Gen Z mental health crisis has been an ongoing point of discussion, and for good reason: in 2023, the CDC reported that 40 percent of American high school students experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the past year. Mental health issues are also a cornerstone of Bryce’s story. He says that on Christmas Day 2020, he was battling depression, anxiety, and an “addiction to explicit videos” so severe that he made a plan to take his own life, a plan that was intercepted while he dined late one night at a Waffle House in Georgia. He credits what he calls “a supernatural encounter with Jesus” at the restaurant for influencing him to keep living and devote his life to Christ.

I spoke to several fans of Bryce across the country, ranging in age from 19 to 24, and their generational suffering came up repeatedly. Many of them had traditional religious upbringings, less fervent and animated than the kind of Christianity Bryce preaches. A few of them lost interest in religion in their teenage years and returned to God during times of personal hardship, feeling their faith bolstered and comforted as Bryce runs through their algorithms. They see their age group as addled with mental health issues and overwhelmed by political and economic uncertainty. They consider their faith as a remedy, and Bryce as a healer.

“I think the way that Bryce talks about Jesus in the Bible is very relatable because he relates to the things our generation might be struggling with,” Calabrese said.

Another fan, Holden Juliano, who struggled with severe anxiety in high school, credits Bryce and his faith in God for helping him manage his symptoms. “Anxiety is washed away when you put your faith in Christ,” he said. “As far as strengthening my faith, Bryce planted a seed in my head and my heart so I could fully understand that.”

When I asked Farley if she thought the Gen Z Christian revival was a real phenomenon, the answer was an unequivocal yes. She highlighted economic precarity and despair among her generation as a possible reason why. “Let’s say I get a nine-to-five job, but then I can’t afford gas. I can’t afford food. I’m not fulfilled in what I’m doing, and I can’t afford to buy a house. So what is the point? I think Gen Z is realizing that everything kind of leads to a dead end. Finding Jesus is a renewed fulfillment, because happiness fades, but joy is everlasting.”

The people I spoke to were mostly gun-shy on the issue of politics, but there was widespread agreement that Bryce is an apolitical figure. I agree that he’s hard to pin down: Crawford avoids sharing his personal politics. However, he has appeared on Fox and Friends, hosted Tucker Carlson on his podcast—which devolved into Carlson spewing a conspiracy theory that online pornography exists to turn American men into “eunuchs”—and spoke onstage at Turning Point USA’s “AmericaFest” following the killing of Charlie Kirk. He may not overtly claim the political right as his tribe, but they seem to have claimed him as part of theirs. He feels right-wing-coded, but this is not of much concern to the fans I spoke to. Instead, they seem to appreciate Bryce’s nonpartisanship and see him as an even-keeled, empathetic voice. This, of course, erodes the argument that increased Gen Z religious participation is rooted in fascism more than it is earnest belief.

People are right to question whether the Gen Z religious revival is as great a trend as it’s purported to be. However, naysayers on the left would be wise to consider whether traditional methods of measuring religious participation in America, like church attendance, membership, or even self-identification, can still be relied upon in an era when faith is something increasingly abstract and online. The practice of contemporary Christianity in America is as tied to performance and personality as it is to doctrine, meaning, and institutions. Those personalities, like Bryce Crawford, are a convincing presence in the lives of millions of young people, many of whom are desperately seeking meaning and fulfillment. That’s something to be seriously reckoned with.

As an organizer, I do not see this moment as an abstract idea or confined to the pages of a history textbook. As an Afro-Latina mother, I know the actions of today shape the nation our children will inherit. We are at a moment in which true patriots and believers in our representative democracy must step up and take action.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down Louisiana’s Black-majority congressional district did not happen in isolation. This story is as old as our nation: those in power rig the rules to protect themselves from accountability. And when entire communities are politically silenced, the avarice fueling environmental injustice, mass unemployment, high infant mortality, and crushing costs goes unchecked.

The ruling has only upped the ante.

Within hours, Tennessee Republicans carved up a majority-Black district in Memphis in a deliberate effort to weaken Black political power. In Alabama and Louisiana, lawmakers continue advancing racial gerrymandering efforts designed to dilute fair representation. Across the country, voter suppression laws are making it harder for working people, seniors, students, and communities of color to fully participate in our democracy.

And when politicians like Donald Trump and the Republicans who bow to him see working people rejecting their failed agenda, they do what powerful interests have done throughout our history: rig the rules instead of answering to the people they’ve hurt.

But none of this is new.

These attacks never stop with one community. When any community is denied full representation, the consequences ripple far beyond that community. This is not simply another political fight; it is an act of war on democracy itself.

And in many ways, that struggle has defined the American story from the very beginning.

At the founding of our nation, “We the People” proclaimed that all men are created equal, and yet we did not mean all men. As our nation approaches its 250th year, America is still grappling with the gap between its promises and its reality.

Still, ordinary people have repeatedly forced this country to move closer to its ideals through solidarity, organizing, and collective action. Time and time again, Americans have expanded the promise of democracy by demanding this country live up to its principles. The most powerful of these moments—our second founding, in fact—was achieved with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, amendments that expanded freedom and the idea that we could all live free.

Yet, like a tug of war, every expansion of democracy in this country has been met with backlash from those desperate to hold onto power.

We saw it after Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow. We saw it after the civil rights movement was met with voter suppression, racial polarization, and mass disenfranchisement. And we are seeing it again now.

Since the gutting of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, states across the country have passed voter suppression laws, closed polling locations, and redrawn district maps to protect those already in power.

That suppression has taken different forms throughout our history. Sometimes it is systemic: targeted disenfranchisement, limiting who has power and whose interests are served. Other times it is violent. From Black Wall Street in Tulsa to the streets of Minneapolis, violence has long been used to instill fear and suppress demands for justice.

These efforts have too often been aided by an ideologically aligned Supreme Court willing to erode the spirit of democracy to protect those already in power.

And when Black voters are silenced, the damage does not stop with Black communities. Our entire democracy suffers. Inequality deepens, representative government weakens, and the people most affected by bad policymaking lose the power to fight back.

Because the consequences of these attacks reach far beyond elections.

Representation shapes who gets heard when families are struggling to afford healthcare, housing, childcare, or groceries. When communities lose political power, they lose control over the decisions shaping their daily lives. Then, like now, the politically silenced become vulnerable to bad policymaking, unable to protect themselves at the ballot box or in the halls of Congress.

That is why voting rights and economic justice are deeply connected.

Too much power in our politics is concentrated in the hands of wealthy interests while everyday people are increasingly shut out. That is exactly why some politicians work so hard to weaken democratic participation rather than expand it. They fear what happens when ordinary people organize and demand a government that answers to them.

As an organizer before anything else, I have seen firsthand what happens when people come together to demand change.

I did not run for office simply to occupy a seat. I ran because I believe ordinary people deserve power over the decisions shaping their lives. That belief was shaped long before I stepped foot in Congress, by the communities I organized alongside and the families struggling under rising costs while being told their voices did not matter.

History teaches us that progress has never come from the top down. Every major expansion of democracy in this country has been fought for by ordinary people demanding America live up to its ideals.

The biggest threat to an authoritarian is an informed electorate.

That responsibility now belongs to us.

We cannot meet this moment with silence or cynicism. Across this country, politicians are actively working to hollow out our democracy in plain sight because they fear what happens when ordinary people organize and demand power over the decisions shaping their lives.

We must fight for our democracy the same way generations before us did: by organizing, building people power, protecting voting rights, and refusing to surrender the promise of a multiracial democracy where every voice is heard.

I, for one, refuse to stand by and watch as our nation’s democracy deteriorates. The question is whether we will fight for it before it is too late.

For 70 years, a PhD in economics was the ticket to a comfortable and often prestigious career. Universities kept up a steady hiring pace to meet the robust student demand. Corporate offices looked to the profession for pricing and profit strategies. Governments depended on trained economists to guide policy and imbue US leadership with scientific authority, embodied in the president’s powerful Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). For decades, economics worked like a sextant for navigating the murky waters of world commerce, whose mysteries could be charted if only one had the right models. If there was a figure who personified the American Century, it was not the statesman or the industrial worker but the economist.

No longer, though. Last July, The New York Times ran a puzzled look into the unhappy fate of the professional economist. Student interest in the field is down as federal funding cuts slash university budgets. A fintech-filled corporate sector obsessed with so-called artificial intelligence sees the economist’s highly quantitative skill set as redundant. The Trump administration has laid off government economists as part of its austerity push, while its former CEA chair (and current Federal Reserve Board member), Stephen Miran, is best known as the face of Trump’s unorthodox tariffs regime. (A newly minted PhD featured in the Times story was unable to get a job in flyover country even after his mother intervened on his behalf.) To put it in the profession’s terms, economists are facing a big negative shock to their demand curve.

A similarly downcast beat thrums through Eswar S. Prasad’s new book, The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling Into Disorder. Economists of his ilk (i.e., elite, credentialed ones, in his case as a professor at Cornell) have long hailed global trade and its political adjunct, liberal democracy, as the tickets to an era of prosperity. Deregulation would unshackle businesses as job creators; opening up local and underdeveloped economies to foreign investment would spur growth, raising incomes for the majority; digital technologies would power an unprecedented wave of efficiency; and democratic institutions would wrap it all up in a nice package of clear, legitimate rules. Economists would continue to serve as a priestly caste for liberal civilization.

Now the old daydreams are smashed to smithereens, like the White House East Wing, demolished to make room for Donald Trump’s neo-Victorian ballroom. In Doom Loop, Prasad attempts to answer a riddle: Why did greater economic competition, long thought to be one of globalization’s biggest benefits, lead instead to our current era of conflict and chaos? How did liberal democracy go from being the uncontested winner of the Cold War to a hapless doormat for reality-TV stars and know-nothing podcasters? Why did it all turn out so different from the way that the experts—including, as Prasad puts it, his own “tribe of economists”—thought it would?

As a former International Monetary Fund researcher and head of the IMF’s China Division, Prasad schmoozed with the elect at the World Economic Forum and cruised around the world’s capitals in limousines. His specialty in trade has given him a cosmopolitan point of view on the economist’s perennial goal: stable growth. Once upon a time, the ability of economists to help deliver that goal with quasi-scientific policy advice earned them respected seats in the inner circles of government. Now, not so much. As free markets are discredited in favor of a personalized, haphazard rule by fiat that flouts the very notion of laws, reality grows less tractable to the economist’s tool kit. The intellectual world of economics is itself destabilized.

Thus the liberal policy elite struggles to understand reality, never mind to effectively act on it. To add insult to injury, it finds itself spurned by the MAGA regime, which couldn’t care less about the niceties of macroeconomics. Prasad’s charge in Doom Loop is not only to guide the reader to an understanding of this dangerous new era but also to offer a theodicy for a field indicted by history.

So how does he approach this task? Like any good economist, Prasad takes competition as an article of faith. “My tribe of economists believes that competition is a positive force in practically every realm,” he explains, “certainly better than unchecked monopoly power. Competition spurs efficiency, discipline, and innovation.” Conveniently equating markets with democracy, Prasad observes that the diffusion of power into the hands of many, rather than one or a few, is a dearly held democratic principle of “the West.”

This introduces the main puzzle of Doom Loop: As competition intensifies across commercial, geopolitical, and technological fronts, the result is not a healthy rivalry fueling expanding world output but a sharpening conflict amid economic slowdown. Competitive bids for influence and investment lead not to innovation that benefits everyone but to rising hostility from increasingly reckless, shortsighted establishments—not a new, stable equilibrium but a permanent, chaotic disequilibrium. As inequality scales ever more vertiginous heights, politicians are either complicit or unable to do much about it, fueling even more desperate attempts to blame economic decline on these competing states. Multipolarism is not strengthening international democracy but rather dismantling it. Everywhere you look, competition is accelerating the crack-up of the world.

Thus Prasad’s “doom loop”: Deteriorating economic outcomes prompt “populist” governments to portray trade as a zero-sum knife fight; geopolitics usurps business as the dominant theme of international relations; and the resulting instability feeds back into increasingly agitated domestic politics. Fraying commercial ties push national governments to double down on the same aggressive policies fueling confrontation in the first place. This is how the tragedy of globalization plays out, its greatest strengths becoming the very forces that will destroy us.

What accounts for this doom loop?

Early on in the book, Prasad admonishes complacent elites who believe that the current chaos will naturally settle into a new, more stable balance. For him, this is dangerously misguided. Global trends that would normally push toward stability now undermine it, he maintains; there apparently is no self-correcting tendency at work in the world’s economy. Something has malfunctioned badly in the normal tendency of market-led economies to converge on a steady, competitive state.

Challenging the assumption of equilibrium is a good starting point, and no small task for an economist. For the dismal science, equilibrium is not just an assumption but something like a structuring worldview, and Prasad deserves credit for calling it into question. But this is still only describing the problem. To explain globalization’s great reversal, one needs to analyze what caused it. This is where Prasad’s intellectual background (and professional affiliations) becomes a liability.

As an economist, he is committed to free markets as essential to growth and prosperity, by definition. So to diagnose the problem, Prasad points to the ways that states have failed to govern markets effectively. Regulators are asleep at the wheel as corporations amass unchecked monopoly power. Federal agencies that are supposed to look out for the public interest allow new technologies like generative AI to spread out of control, with little sense of what they are or how they work. Wealth concentrates in ever fewer hands, and the lack of a decent safety net leaves the underemployed and unemployed with few opportunities. The highest levels of society have been captured by elites uninterested in the common good, corroding trust in foundational pillars of liberalism like the judiciary and the media. Economic mismanagement, in short, has undermined market democracies.

Prasad saves some of the blame for the failures of international organizations. He criticizes his former home agency, the International Monetary Fund, for holding wealthier countries to different standards than poorer ones—for instance, by imposing harsher funding terms on debt-distressed governments in the Global South. The World Trade Organization could have been more vigilant about enforcing its own rules, as in the case of China, whose alleged abuse of them enabled it to hollow out US manufacturing after China joined the WTO in 2001. This, the story goes, left behind a disgruntled hoi polloi open to irresponsible “populists” like Donald Trump. Such failures have further eroded trust in global governance and made cooperation around existential issues like climate change nearly impossible.

In short, whether the rules were poorly enforced or not up to the task in the first place, the problem is not free markets, efficient as ever, but the corrupt, outdated institutions that have failed them. And so reform is needed to restore market-led growth. As Prasad puts it, governments should “involve” themselves in markets to ensure that they work fairly, but they should not “interfere” with them. If this sounds like a dubious distinction, that’s because it is, but it highlights a critical weakness in his argument. Having criticized the easy assumption that the international order will settle back into a natural balance, Prasad then smuggles in the idea of equilibrium again through the back door, left ajar by his firm faith in the market system. The result is more confusion than insight.

Take a key question of the moment: Is the world settling into a new, post-American multipolar order? As Prasad points out, economists would tend to assume that a more decentralized world will be more stable, as more competition for influence and investment prompts more innovation, encouraging overall growth. But instead we are seeing the exact opposite happen. Prasad prompts the reader to ask, “OK, so why is that?” Yet he has already primed us to expect this supposedly surprising outcome: Prasad notes that a unipolar world has its advantages, such as a central hegemon to back international frameworks for trade and security—all very good for his much-desired stability. Readers could be forgiven for losing him on this point. Does a superpower’s monopoly repress gains from potential competitors? Or does it impose a framework of rules that enables them to compete fairly?

Such obscurity runs through the book, including its practical conclusions. “The world needs true leaders,” Prasad sums up, “who are better able to align their countries’ long-term interests with those of the global community.” We need responsible policymakers and robust institutions to pursue reform across the domains of geopolitics, economics, technology, and the rest. But the task is daunting, because politics has become a refuge “for those intent on perpetuating their own power rather than serving the public good.” Prasad doesn’t specify when or how politicians became so self-serving, so the reader is left guessing.

But there is a more fundamental problem here. Prasad’s concluding call for better leaders and institutions is merely a restatement of his basic premise: It was the lack of these, supposedly, that led to the demise of globalization in the first place. Prasad’s argument, then, does not proceed to or generate anything new but is patently circular. A loop, if you like.

Its emptiness becomes clearer by posing some simple questions: Why might policy elites have initially failed to foresee the disastrous consequences of globalized trade? After all, for decades, politicians, academics, and pundits shared a consensus about the superiority of business over government, about the need to unleash the ingenuity of entrepreneurs and investors to compete in the global arena. Laws and institutions advanced these goals. And for many years, robust growth rates seemed to justify them. Calling for different rules at the time would have been analogous to calling for unfettered free trade and minimal government intervention in our current moment, when economic nationalism has become the unquestioned framework of all policy. Who would have taken it seriously?

This problem applies with equal force to Prasad’s own prognosis of the present. Regarding the changing role of the state, his unsurprising remedy is for a “more nuanced” involvement of government in the economy. “Regulators should avoid picking sides between firms or technologies,” he writes, “leaving that to market forces” in “building a regulatory and institutional framework that allows markets to function well.” At a time when the US government is hell-bent on whatever it takes to win the so-called AI race—even taking direct stakes in a growing number of major companies—who is going to listen to this?

And would this advice apply to financial markets? Evidently, modern finance cannot function without constantly expanding state debt and the government’s commitment to rescue, at the public’s expense, any major firm that is in danger of collapsing—what some commentators have called the “bailout state.” Given the fiscal extremes of the bailout state—currently running a tab of some $6.6 trillion and set to expand, along with a 129 percent public-debt-to-GDP ratio—is this the kind of nuanced regulation that Prasad has in mind? If not, what can really be done about it?

Doom Loop’s argument can be reduced to the platitude that policymakers made mistakes, and now it’s up to these same policymakers to fix the problem they created. The book is meant to track the collapse of the US-led international order, but it is better read as a demonstration of the collapse of liberalism as a way of knowing and acting in the world. This makes Doom Loop interesting, albeit in a different way than the author intended. As a patent product of a bygone establishment, it vividly shows the utter lack of answers on offer from the policy elite. And if they can’t even diagnose the problem, how on earth can they be expected to solve it?

Prasad is a scion of a once-proud clan of mandarins, now shut out from the halls of power. Part of their exile has to do with the misfortune of association with an ancien régime displaced by Trump’s clownish brand of Caesarism. But it also lies in the profound epistemic failure of the policy elite. Economics has always been a “folk science,” to use Jerome Ravetz’s term, an exercise in embellishing common sense with an aura of expertise to reassure a community of believers—in this case, believers in the market system. Now, like its sister discipline political science, it faces an epistemological crisis in which a “research program struggles to deliver an understanding that rises above what ordinary observers can offer.”

The source of the trouble is in the strict separation of economics from politics, an intellectual reflection of a social order in which one class has private control over investment, over the decisions that determine what gets made and who has to make it. This is the world of capital and class, a conceptual domain in which economics and politics are indeed inseparable, and which remains closed to the servants of the order built upon them. But no real historical understanding is possible without it.

Bourgeois scientists (social and otherwise) thus find themselves in a double bind. They appear either unable or unwilling to analyze the real historical movement through which we arrived at the present, an era that seems to have little use for traditional nostrums about the rule of law, market efficiency, or even just a bare minimum of governmental competency—the basic elements of the economist’s worldview. So the world has little use for them. In the end, Doom Loop shows us why that is the case.

“It’s got no anything,” President Donald Trump said of Somalia in a recent xenophobic rant. “All they do is run around shooting each other.”

As is true of so much with this administration, every accusation is also a confession.

US troops have been shooting Somalis since the early 1990s, after lame duck President George H. W. Bush launched an ostensibly humanitarian intervention there that would be embraced by his successor, Bill Clinton. By June 1993, US and UN troops had begun attacking various targets in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, linked to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had helped overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

The next month, in a major escalation, US helicopter gunships attacked a house in that city where a group of Somali clan leaders was meeting. The International Committee of the Red Cross said 54 people were killed and 161 wounded. Aidid claimed that 73 Somalis had died, including women and children, and more than 200 had been wounded. US forces suffered no casualties whatsoever.

And it wasn’t long before—in the early 2000s, under Bush’s son, George W., as part of what became known as the Global War on Terror—American troops began slaughtering Somalis again. In addition to major conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush, the younger, launched early drone wars from Pakistan to Yemen, including in Somalia. His successor, President Barack Obama, upped the Forever War ante, becoming assassin in chief in Somalia and beyond. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, continued the drone war there, too, when he entered the White House.

However, for all those years of slaughter in Somalia, no American president has ever attacked Somalis with the persistence and at the rate of President Donald J. Trump, especially in his second term in office.

The second Bush administration conducted 11 air strikes in Somalia, killing as many as 144 people—including possibly 55 civilians, according to the think tank New America. Obama presided over 48 strikes during his eight years in office that killed as many as 553 people. Trump’s first term saw a massive escalation in such drone strikes. Over his first four years, Trump carried out 219 attacks, a 271 percent increase over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. But even that spike has paled in comparison to the relentless rate of attacks during Trump’s second term in office. While Biden exceeded Obama’s total in half the time—51 strikes in four years—Trump is already set to eclipse his own infamous first-term record in less than a year and a half. He has presided over at least 190, if not more, air strikes in Somalia.

Trump’s killing spree in Somalia is just a small part of his wider war on the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has the US military “run[ning] around shooting” people on an epic scale. During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations—including air strikes, commando raids, proxy conflicts, so-called 127e programs, and full-scale wars—in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. His second term has, in fact been a furious blitz of global war-making, only half-noticed by the American news media. In March, for example, the United States made war on three continents during just three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the United States also struck a civilian boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the US has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” said Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a British-based organization that tracks civilian harm globally. She also pointed to attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the eastern Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

A War on Children

Since the United States began conducting air strikes in Somalia back in 2007, as many as 170 civilians have been killed, according to Airwars. The US military has, however, only admitted to six of those deaths and 11 other injuries—and has never publicly apologized to any families of the victims or those who survived its attacks.

In one April 2018 attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term, a US drone strike killed at least three (and possibly five) civilians. A woman and child were among the dead, according to formerly secret US military investigation documents, but the same report concluded that their identities might never be known. A 2023 investigation I undertook for The Intercept, however, exposed the details of that disastrous attack. The woman and child—22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse—survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, said of the Americans who killed his sister and niece: “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable.”

More recently, President Trump has been responsible for the slaughter of scores, if not hundreds, of children in his war of choice in Iran. “US-Israeli air strikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team, told this reporter and other journalists during a recent press briefing. The deaths include more than 150 children killed in a Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran. The preliminary findings of a US military investigation into that attack acknowledged that the United States was indeed responsible, contradicting assertions by President Trump that Iran struck the school. Publicly, however, the Pentagon continues to evade responsibility. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently told lawmakers, refusing to answer questions about the attack during testimony on Capitol Hill.

The administration has also been responsible for a steady drumbeat of attacks on civilians in the waters surrounding Latin America. Under Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration has conducted around 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, killing close to 200 civilians since last September. Trump officials have insisted that the victims are members of one of at least 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties insist that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians—even suspected criminals—who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Trump has also killed and wounded many people in Yemen, including dozens of Ethiopian civilians killed in an attack on an immigrant detention center there last year. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the US military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said recently. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the US military has taken to address it.”

In the spring of 2025, Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by US air strikes during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes (codenamed Operation Rough Rider) against that country’s Houthi government. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at a minimum of 238 civilians, with another 467 civilians injured.

Such deaths are just part of a long butcher’s bill in Yemen stretching back to the very beginning of Trump’s first term. A report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights examined 12 US attacks in Yemen between January 2017 and January 2019, 10 of them “counterterrorism airstrikes.” The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians—19 men, six women, and 13 children—were killed and seven others injured in the attacks. Among them was a raid by Navy SEALs on a Yemeni village just days after Trump took office for the first time in which women and children died. A year later, the United States fired a missile into a sports utility vehicle near the village of Al Uqla. Three of the men inside were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. The only survivor, Adel Al Manthari, was gravely wounded and forced to turn to a GoFundMe campaign in 2022 to save his life.

“The Attack Was Horrible and Their Response Was Horrible. I Lost a Wife and a Child”

“It’s a horrible place,” Trump said of Somalia during that same racist rant. “Everything is horrible over there.”

Horrible is a word I also recall from my trip to Somalia to meet the family of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse in 2023.

The US attack that killed the mother and daughter was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed, imprecise targeting by a Special Operations strike cell whose members, according to the military investigation conducted later, considered themselves inexperienced. That inquiry led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias (a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information confirming their preexisting beliefs). Despite that, the investigation exonerated the team involved.

“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” according to that investigation. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, was stunned as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told me. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”

Trump had, in fact, secretly issued loosened rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including for drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a partially redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of US air strikes in Somalia had skyrocketed. “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, recalled. During the Obama administration, by contrast, strikes required high-level approval, according to a drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.” Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) US military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple US war zones spiked.

“They have nothing but crime,” President Trump—himself a convicted felon 34 times over—said of Somalia, as he raged on about that country.

To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam—or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia. Nor has anyone been held responsible for those killed in the strike in Yemen that gravely wounded Adel Al Manthari. Or those slain in the raid on a Yemeni village by Navy SEALs. Or the innocents who died in the attack on an immigrant detention center in that country. Or in the strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Or for the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran.

Some of those attacks could well have been categorized as crimes of war. Others are certainly extrajudicial killings—or, simply put, outright murders. Those deaths and so many others can be traced back to Donald Trump and his contempt for the lives of people across this planet.

“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it. “It’s a horrible place,” he continued about Somalia.

And once again, every accusation of his should be considered a confession, too.

On April 7, Del Monte shuttered a peach cannery in Modesto, a town in California’s Central Valley. It was the company’s last remaining factory in California, and its closure left 600 full-time and 1,200 seasonal employees suddenly out of work and 70 growers without a buyer for their contracted 50,000 tons of peaches. In a town with a 7.4 percent unemployment rate, the plant closure was a gut punch.

Since then, the panoply of candidates running to be governor of California have participated in four debates. Modesto is the county seat of Stanislaus County, which leans Republican but not by much. Across all those debates, one or more of the seven Democrats and Republicans on the stage might have brought up Modesto’s plight as emblematic of the economic challenges that California’s rural communities face. Democrats, in particular, should have welcomed the opportunity to chip away at Republicans’ rural dominance, following in the footsteps of the DCCC’s new rural outreach program.

But that’s not what happened. There was zero discussion of farming or other rural issues, such as energy-and-water-sucking hyperscale data centers, the right to repair farm equipment, and the decline of manufacturing, fishing, and logging. There was no mention of the 735,000 rural Californians and 13 Native American reservations that lack safe drinking water. A few candidates called for free college, but no one mentioned trade schools or apprenticeship programs that provide vital pathways for rural youth.

There was also no discussion about the Save Our Bacon Act, which was passed by the US House shortly before the May 5 and 6 debates. The act takes direct aim at California’s Proposition 12, which bans the sale of products from inhumanely confined animals. Prop 12 was endorsed by the United Farmworkers and the Center for Food Safety alongside numerous animal welfare organizations. The California Farm Bureau and large feedlot operators opposed it. Whether the law stands or falls has major repercussions for small pork and egg producers and consumers; why not ask candidates about it?

The sum total of rural debate content was the following: Katie Porter alluded in passing to the state’s hospital closure crisis, an issue that disproportionately impacts rural communities (though she didn’t note that). And San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan let it be known that he grew up in a farming town. That’s it.

The candidates barely discussed the issue that is always top of mind for rural and urban working people: jobs. During the April 28 debate, the sole job creation question came from a college student who asked two candidates (Antonio Villaraigosa and Tony Thurmond) what they would do to bring jobs back to the Golden State. Neither had much of an answer.

On May 6, a moderator asked how the gubernatorial hopefuls would reduce unemployment given the supposed corporate exodus from the state. The strange framing of that question led most of the candidates to rant about excessive regulation and the high cost of living. Front-runner Xavier Becerra, for his part, committed to making sure other states don’t “steal” our Hollywood jobs. And Republican candidate Steve Hilton, currently in second place, boldly proclaimed that we should help small businesses create jobs. Okey dokey.

Where’s the beef? Where’s the industrial policy or government jobs program that will generate stable, well-paying jobs for people without college degrees?

California’s highest-profile industries are technology and entertainment, but in most rural parts of the state, agriculture is still king. Despite its many challenges, ranging from labor shortages to drought to tariffs, California is the largest producer of agricultural products in the nation. Our 69,000 farms and ranches generate $61 billion a year worth of dairy, nuts, produce, and meat, and employ 407,000 workers directly, plus a million more in related industries such as food processing, retail, transportation, equipment, and restaurants. In rural counties, as many as one in six residents are directly or indirectly employed by ag.

We’re used to rural affairs falling off the radar and to farming being all but invisible. We understand that, as far as most urban and suburbanites are concerned, food comes from the grocery store, not from rural communities or people who work the land. (No shade intended: If you don’t work on or drive by farms and ranches every day, it’s easy to lose your connection to food production.) But it’s the responsibility of debate moderators and the candidates themselves to elevate important issues with widespread impact. Ordinary Californians might not be aware of the importance of agriculture, but politicians and pundits surely are—or ought to be.

In 2018, Democrat Josh Harder flipped the 10th Congressional District where Modesto was then located. (It has since been redistricted). While canvassing for Harder in low and moderate-income Modesto neighborhoods, I met several Del Monte workers who considered themselves lucky to have decent-paying union jobs. Compared to many of their neighbors, like the guy I met who commuted four hours round-trip each day to Uber people around in San Francisco, the cannery workers were doing well. Those days are over, but who has their backs?

Strong majorities of rural voters support a number of left-populist economic policies. They’re winnable, but only if we pay attention to them.

The people of Modesto and other rural Californians were left out of the gubernatorial debates. We’re used to it. We’ve heard the justifications of Democratic operatives who write off red-leaning rural communities as unwinnable and, therefore, unworthy of attention. We’ve seen the social-media warriors reveling in the despair of farmers who are getting what they voted for. We’re aware that Republicans convert our social conservatism into votes while doing nothing to materially improve our lives.

The websites of six of the top seven contenders offer little reassurance. The word “rural” isn’t in Becerra’s vocabulary at all. Katie Porter and Tom Steyer decry the impact of Medicaid cuts on hospitals, which is indeed a slow-motion rural catastrophe, but have almost nothing else to say. The closest Antonio Villaraigosa comes to a rural platform is a passing mention of the need for more water storage. Chad Bianco, the most right-wing candidate, calls for improved agricultural water allocation and storage and vaguely “supports” technical education. The standout is Matt Mahan, who made the effort to formulate a four-point platform around agriculture, land use, rural workforce development, and water.

Liberals recoil at rural resentment and are understandably aghast when it metastasizes into a right-wing backlash. But resentment is fueled by neglect. The solution is simple: Stop ignoring our issues. We produce food, fiber, and fuel for the nation and the world at great cost to our bodies, our land, and our water. We deserve recognition and a commitment to addressing our concerns.

Marina Martinez believes that little actions can make a difference. That’s part of why the University of Oregon sophomore joined her school’s chapter of Citizen’s Climate Lobby, a national organization dedicated to advocating for effective climate solutions in Congress.

Martinez, who is the group’s secretary, said the club is open to anyone on campus who’s interested in climate advocacy. Still, out of the group’s 25 regular members, none are men.

“There just seems to be a higher number of women who are eager to take actual day-to-day political action on the left-leaning side,” Martinez said.

Martinez’s observation might not solely apply to her club. Across the country, young women are becoming increasingly liberal. Their male counterparts, however, are not.

According to a Gallup Poll published in 2024, 40 percent of US women aged 18–29 identified themselves as liberal—the highest percentage in decades. Comparatively, only 25 percent of men in that same age group identified as liberal.

“It is just an enormous difference these days,” said Marc Hetherington, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies the dynamics of the American electorate.

Hetherington said this political “gender gap” is largely driven by the behaviors of young women. Because young women are not only more liberal than young men—they’re more liberal than women of other generations by a long shot. And this trend is on the rise, according to past Gallup polls.

In the period from 2001 to 2007, an average of 28 percent of women aged 18–29 identified as liberal. Then, between 2008 and 2016, that average grew to 32 percent.

The most recent period of data—from 2017 to 2024—shows that 40 percent of young women in this age cohort identify as liberal. That’s a 12-point increase in 23 years.

“The below-30 women really stand out as being different from even women of older age cohorts,” Hetherington said.

But young men have not followed the same pattern. Over the past 25 years, the percentage of men aged 18–29 who identify as liberal has fluctuated, but has generally hovered in the 20–30 percent range. In 2001, 25 percent of men in this age cohort were reported to have identified as liberal—the same percentage who identify as liberal now.

For Khasya Tinglin, a junior at the University of Texas at Austin, the numbers aren’t surprising. She’s a rhetoric and writing major, but studied international relations during her first two years of college. Before she changed her major, she said she frequently noticed this divide in her classes.

In many of her required courses, which were often in the disciplines of political science and international relations, Tinglin said she found that male students were more likely to express conservative views. She said this became particularly noticeable when engaging in class discussions about current events and foreign conflicts.

“It was a very unempathetic and unemotional way of looking at the world,” Tinglin said. “There’s multiple perspectives when you’re looking at international relations. You can always do the state argument, but those are actual people’s lives.”

Hetherington said one possible reason for a growing political gender gap could be that support for many women’s issues—such as reproductive rights and gender equality—has become distinctly partisan.

“In my generation, when we were young, there wasn’t a giant difference between the Republicans and Democrats on gender issues,” Hetherington said. “And to the extent that there was a difference, it was really kind of just opening up in the 1980s.”

One example Hetherington pointed to was the presidential election of 1976. During the race, both Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter and Republican candidate Gerald Ford were pro-life and expressed personal opposition to abortion.

Just a few years prior, when the US Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, it was Justice Harry Blackmun who authored the majority opinion, which held that a woman’s right to an abortion was protected by the right to privacy. Blackmun, along with four other justices in the 7–2 majority, was appointed by a Republican president.

“These things have changed a lot, starting in the 1980s, but those types of changes take a while,” Hetherington said. “So, when we were being politically socialized, the choice between the parties was not that stark.”

But that political context is much different from the one that young women today grew up in, Hetherington said. Instead, they watched a conservative Supreme Court with a majority of Republican-appointed justices overturn Roe v. Wade.

Hetherington said other gender issues, such as women’s rights and equality initiatives, have also become more partisan in the past 20 to 30 years. Women, he said, are therefore more likely to flock to the party that supports these rights.

Maggie Oliver, a junior majoring in political science at Pace University, said gender issues such as reproductive health care access influenced why she became politically active.

Oliver, who works on the campaign for Alex Flores, a Democratic candidate running for New York’s 12th Congressional District, is a registered Democrat and describes herself as left-leaning. She said this is shaped in part by her own personal experiences.

“Young men specifically have the luxury of not having to worry about a lot of the same things that I feel like I watched myself worry about growing up,” Oliver said. “I had to think about birth control when I was 15 years old just as healthcare for menstruation.”

But, Hetherington said that the Democratic Party’s focus on gender issues could be alienating young men. “There’s an old definition of politics that comes from a guy named Harold Laswell, and he defined politics as who gets what, when and how,” Hetherington said. “When men see what the Democratic party seems to be offering, as far as gender issues are concerned, they feel like there’s not much on offer for us.”

Partisan support for gender issues is likely not the only reason for a growing political gender gap. Education could also play a role.

Data from the Pew Research Center shows that since the late 1990s, US women have been outpacing men in receiving a college education.

Presently, 47 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 34 have a bachelor’s degree, compared to just 37 percent of men. Women surpass men in bachelor’s degree completion in every major racial and ethnic group, although the size of the gap varies.

Surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed that education is strongly associated with partisanship. The findings showed that adults who have completed a four-year college degree are significantly more likely to identify with the Democratic Party, suggesting that education could be contributing to young women’s leftward shift.

Hetherington asserts that the ideology of young men is also influencing elections. Indeed, Preston Hill, who was the president of UNC–Chapel Hill’s College Republicans club during the 2025–26 academic year, said he thinks the male demographic is a secret weapon for candidates.

Why? He points to the 2024 election.

During the election, young men swung sharply to the right. According to an analysis by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, roughly 56 percent of men aged 18–29 voted for President Donald Trump in a stark reversal from 2020, when about the same amount supported Joe Biden. In comparison, 40 percent of young women in that same age group voted for Trump in 2024.

This marked the first time that a majority of young male voters backed a Republican presidential candidate since the 1988 election of George H. W. Bush.

According to Hill, this demographic of young men is one that has felt “left out” by the Democratic Party and dissatisfied with the Biden administration over issues like the economy and immigration. And during this period of discontent, Hill said conservatives provided young men with a seemingly better offer.

This was true for Kai Lindsey, a junior at UT-Austin. Lindsey said that he, alongside some of his male peers, felt “swept aside” by liberal ideologies that he believes are becoming more extreme.

“When it comes to things like affirmative action and hiring, some of that rhetoric definitely pushed me a little bit to see conservative ideology as more accepting or more caring for my personal issues,” Lindsey said.

Hill said he particularly noticed gender being targeted during the 2024 presidential election. While Trump accepted the invitation to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which has an audience primarily of young men, Kamala Harris did not. In contrast, she campaigned primarily with female influencers and touted an endorsement from Taylor Swift.

“In the end, I think it paid off more for Trump to be going after the younger men,” Hill said.

Briana Edwards, a graduate research assistant at the Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, said the type of content young men consume, like Rogan’s podcast, is likely influencing their conservative slant. Much of the online content targeted towards young men, Edwards said, is part of the manosphere—an ecosystem of toxic male online communities, which she studied for her master’s thesis. This political content, she says, manipulates young men’s sense of being discounted by the political system, and gives them someone to blame: Women.

“It’s misplaced blame,” Edwards said. “I’ve been articulating it as men are looking across at women. They’re looking horizontally versus looking vertically. They need to look up at systems that are acting on them, and look side to side at the women who are facing the same experiences they are in this country, but handling it.”

According to Edwards, there are several subgroups of the content that permeate the manosphere. Not all of it is inherently political. The ideologies that she’s studied within the manosphere include Christian nationalism, men’s rights activism, and anti-woke rhetoric, but Edwards said that even content that is not outwardly political tends to emphasize conservative values. Many of the ideas in the manosphere center around a desire to return to traditional gender norms and values. This longing for the past is something that Edwards said many Republican candidates leverage in their rhetoric.

“I think Trump, RFK, and the broader manosphere does that very well,” Edwards said. “‘Make America Great Again.’ ‘Make America Healthy Again.’ ‘Let’s return to traditional gender norms.’ I think people want to imagine a world where things could be better. But, instead of imagining or speculating about what the future could be, we look at what the past was—what we think it was. There’s that weaponization of nostalgia. I think both groups do it very well.”

As more and more young men consume this content, Edwards said they are becoming more disconnected from young women—both politically and socially.

For some young adults, this is being reflected in their relationships. Lea Martin, a sophomore at the University of Oregon, said that political disagreements contributed to her decision to end a relationship with a romantic partner.

“He identified as a liberal, but didn’t actually vote in the [2024 presidential] election,” Martin said. “He didn’t put any action behind his words. It was just disappointing.”

Martin was raised in a politically active family. She attended her first protest at 8 years old and continued to participate in women’s marches and rallies defending the academy as she grew up. Now, she feels that her political views are more than just beliefs—they’re part of her value system.

“I would say I’m definitely very liberal,” Martin said. “I think everyone deserves equal rights, and the environment deserves protection. I could never be that close with someone who doesn’t have my same ethos.”

A recent study from the University of California at Irvine found that 37 percent of Americans reported experiencing a “political breakup” with friends, partners or family members at some point in their lives. The research suggests the trend might be accelerating, particularly since the 2024 election.

This comes at a time when women are already staying single longer and delaying having children. Using Census Bureau historical data, Morgan Stanley has predicted that 45 percent of women ages 25–44 will be single by 2030—which would be the largest share in history.

Lindsey said he worries about what increasing division between young men and women could mean in the long term.

“With this growing ideological divide, when people are thinking about starting families, I think there’s a disconnect,” Lindsey said. “There’s a growing disconnect between husbands and wives, where the man may have a certain expectation of the wife that the wife does not want to adhere to or, or vice versa. I’m a big believer in the idea that getting married and having kids is an objectively good thing for the country. Seeing the ideological differences of men and women sort of butting heads with each other, I think, is a really bad sign.”

Rue Siddiqui, a junior at DePaul University in Chicago, said she also worries about growing polarization. That’s part of why she founded DePaul’s chapter of BridgeUSA, a student movement designed to fight political division by championing viewpoint diversity and responsible discourse.

The club meets twice a month to discuss a preselected topic, which in the past has included matters such as immigration, DEI initiatives, and local Chicago issues. During the discussions, Siddiqui says all viewpoints are welcome. An executive board moderates all conversations to ensure they remain productive.

And though Siddiqui has noticed that many of the members who discuss more conservative takes tend to be male students, she’s noticed something else, too. At the end of the meetings, all of the participants can leave not necessarily with their minds changed, but with a sense of mutual respect.

Siddiqui said she hopes the same could eventually be true for young men and women.

“When it comes to men and women, those differences might never go away,” Siddiqui said. “I’m not saying that they never will. But until we can talk to each other, nothing’s really going to change.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

“Future historians may well see the Iran war as the moment the US unwittingly ceded leadership to China” as the world’s pre-eminent superpower, writes Jonathan Watts in a reported essay in The Guardian published earlier this week. The piece came out on the heels of Donald Trump’s departure from Beijing after his summit with Chinese president Xi Jinping.

Analysts in Washington have argued for decades over what to do about China’s rise as a global power, but the debate has focused on issues of economic strength and military might. Watts, who spent years in China as a correspondent for The Guardian and is now the paper’s global environment writer, instead emphasizes energy: the lifeforce that animates those economies and militaries. “One of the cornerstones of geostrategic thinking since the start of the Industrial Revolution, 250 years ago, is that the country that controls energy supply controls the world,” he points out. “For most of the past century, that has centered on oil.”

But the era of oil is ending, Watts contends, as the global economy “shifts from molecules to electrons”—or from burning oil, gas, and coal to generating solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energy. The implications are profound, not least for the chances of limiting global temperature rise to a survivable level.

Watts presents his argument across a broad intellectual canvas, ranging from Britain’s opium wars against China in the 1850s to the gargantuan short-term riches that oil companies are gobbling as the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked to the plummeting costs of clean energy, all which illustrate that the fight to preserve a livable planet cannot be understood outside its social contexts. For journalists, the essay is a reminder that the stories we report about, say, the Iran war or climate change–fueled extreme weather surges are not happening in isolation. They are part of a larger narrative, a narrative that makes them each all the more interesting as news stories.

The core of Watt’s argument is that history demonstrates that when “humankind taps new power supplies, new empires rise and old ones fall.” Today, “Beijing’s bet on renewable power and EVs over the past two decades is paying enormous dividends…buffer[ing] its economy from the gas price shocks caused by the conflict in the Middle East, while opening up huge new export markets for solar panels, wind turbines, smart grids and electric vehicles.” China’s clean energy sector is now worth a staggering $2.2 trillion, bigger than all but seven of the world’s economies.

Yes, Watts notes, China still burns more coal than any other country. But its embrace of renewables (China has more wind turbines than the next 18 countries combined) has meant its annual greenhouse gas emissions have been flat or falling the past two years. Equally important, he says, is the fact that “the scale of its renewable industry means Beijing has a growing stake in the success of global climate negotiations. Not just because it is good for the planet, but because it makes solid business sense.”

Meanwhile, Trump is determined to revive the fossil fuels that powered the US’s own rise to dominance in the 20^th century. The US’s possession of vast oil reserves was a major reason it emerged from World War II not only victorious but incomparably more powerful than its rivals in Europe and Asia. That oil also enabled the post-war construction of suburbs, interstate highways, and car culture that fueled the greatest economic boom in history, strengthening US global supremacy.

But things have changed. Solar and wind technologies now generate “the cheapest electricity in history,” according to the International Energy Agency, and economies of scale and technological learning curves make it cheaper all the time. Watts is not alone in contending the Iran war has driven another nail in oil’s coffin. IEA executive director Fatih Birol recently said the price spikes and supply interruptions resulting from the war have forever changed countries’ risk calculations, permanently turning them away from oil and gas, and toward more secure, and cheaper, renewables.

China’s intentions are not necessarily “any more benign” than those of other empires, Watts cautions, and “petro- interests still have political, military and financial might on their side, and they are using that to try to turn back the energy clock.” On the other hand, the devastating impacts of climate change are ever more evident; clean energy is “the fastest growing, greatest job creating chunk of the global economy,” and “throughout the world, a huge majority of people want their governments to take stronger action on the climate crisis,” as CCNow’s 89 Percent Project has been reporting.

However it unfolds, it’s a tale of high drama, immense stakes, and abundant villains and heroes. In other words, a great story, both for journalists and the public we serve.

“There is nothing to be worried about. Israel and the US are only hitting military targets and bases of government repression. Not a single home has been destroyed. Except for perhaps some minor incidental damage.”

I read Amir’s words once, and then once again.

It was March 5, five days after the United States and Israel had launched a war on Iran. A thousand people had already been killed. Tehran was scarred by bomb blasts.

The Iranian authorities had blocked the Internet, but many Iranians turned to VPNs to bypass the blackout. Some, like my friend Amir, a businessman in his 40s, used that access to celebrate the bombing of their country.

Not everyone shared his sentiment.

“It feels like we’re living the apocalypse,” my friend Maryam, an activist in her 50s, told me over the phone. (Maryam’s name, like those of the other people interviewed for this article inside Iran, has been changed to protect her safety.) “The first day, the bombing started around 9:30 in the morning. Kids had just started school. But when the missiles hit, they closed and sent everyone home. There were children everywhere, screaming with tears in their eyes, as they waited for their parents to pick them up and loud explosions boomed all around. And at that exact moment, the Americans bombed a school in Minab, and more than 100 kids died. I don’t wish upon anyone the horrors we’ve lived.”

I spent the war’s first days contacting everyone I knew in Iran, where my family is from and where I lived for several years. Most messages I sent showed a single check mark on WhatsApp, meaning they went unseen and undelivered.

Over time, however, many got back to me, including my friend Kamyar, an architect in his 30s who lives in northeastern Tehran with his parents: “Our apartment is right next to a military zone, and the missiles were hitting all around us. We had to leave.”

On the second day of the bombing, they drove to the mountains near the Caspian Sea, joining 3 million Iranians who were displaced. It was their second time fleeing US and Israeli bombs in less than a year.

Maryam texted me every night of the war’s first week. The messages were almost identical: “Last night was the scariest so far.”

So did Amir. “This is not a war,” he said, telling me not to worry. “It’s a struggle for freedom. This is the victory of light over darkness.”

Bombs tore through schools, hospitals, homes, and a gymnasium where teenage girls were playing volleyball. They hit bridges, universities, and mosques. Dead birds fell in Tehran’s streets, and plants shriveled up after Israeli missiles hit oil depots, unleashing massive explosions and a toxic cloud that turned the sky black and showered acid rain.

I managed to reach Maryam the day of the oil-depot strikes; she’d been stuck in bed with a migraine, overpowered by the gasoline smell that had invaded her home even with the windows tightly shut. Her voice was equal parts anger, resignation, and grief: “Why did so many people think this war was a good idea?”

After Israel and the United States launched a surprise attack on Iran on February 28, President Trump posted videos of Iranians dancing in celebration, which then circulated widely in the Western media. They were mostly filmed among the Iranian diaspora. But in Iran, too, some people rejoiced, including Amir.

Since early January, when Iranian security forces responded to major anti-government protests by killing thousands of people, Persian-language social media had been lighting up with pleas from the Iranian diaspora for the United States to strike Iran. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah, whom Iranians deposed during the 1979 revolution, led the charge. Styling himself as Iran’s future leader, he called on Trump to “intervene.” He was joined by celebrities like Googoosh, a singer with 6.8 million followers on Instagram, who pressed Trump to take “urgent and decisive” action, and activists like Roya Rastegar, cofounder of the California-based Iranian Diaspora Collective, who urged Trump to use “sophisticated” means to hurt Iran’s leadership and prepare for a “transitional government” that would allow Iranians to return to how things were before 1979. When Trump declared on Truth Social, “We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” they cheered his threat.

These voices were echoed on diaspora satellite-TV channels like Iran International and Manoto, which are both headquartered in London and watched by large numbers of households in Iran. They framed the war as a “rescue mission” that would enable Iranians to overthrow their government. There was little discussion of how exactly military strikes would lead to the collapse of Iran’s government. But the possibility raised unrealistic expectations inside Iran. To millions of people still reeling from January’s mass killings, it offered a fantasy that the US could swoop in, remove the government, and replace it with something else—without touching the Iranian people.

Almost overnight, Iranians who spoke out against war were accused of being “apologists” for the government.

“Where were you when they massacred 40,000 people in January?” was one frequent refrain. (While the number of people killed in the crackdowns has been extensively debated, the reality is believed to be closer to a still-appalling 7,000 people.)

“War will kill fewer people than the regime, so it will save lives in the long term. It’s simple math” was another.

“What’s your alternative?” was yet a third.

A quieter chorus warned against the lure of war. “We stand for peace,” Masoud Nikzadi, a historian in Tehran, wrote on Instagram. “We don’t need to explain a plan for why peace is necessary. Those who support war must explain how exactly it will bring freedom.”

A collective of women from the Baloch minority, formed during the 2022 Woman Life Freedom protests, warned: “War should not be sold as an opportunity to people under oppression. Militarization…leads to social collapse and disintegration, just as happened in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.”

But these voices in Iran, lacking large social-media platforms, were drowned out by influencers and celebrities abroad, whose message was embraced by those within the country.

“War will be worth it,” Amir told me a few days after the US and Israel began their attack, “because when it’s done, freedom will come.”

Freedom has not come. In the more than two months since the United States and Israel launched the war, their bombs have killed more than 3,500 Iranians, injured 25,000, and damaged 80,000 homes or businesses. Iran has struck back hard, giving the lie to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims that “the regime” was on its last legs. Despite the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other political and military leaders, the government remains as entrenched as ever—and now believes it’s negotiating from a position of strength. 

To understand how so many diaspora actors were empowered to get things so wrong, it is helpful to consider a recent critical shift within the 5-million-strong community (750,000 in the United States). While many prominent pro-war voices have positioned themselves as representatives of Iran’s people, the reality is more dynamic and complex. The diaspora includes monarchists who fled because of the 1979 revolution—people with close ties to the Pahlavi regime, like Parviz Sabeti, the former head of the SAVAK secret police, who hid in Florida for decades—but also ordinary people who left simply because of the uncertainty that followed. There are people like my father, who arrived in the US in the 1970s to attend college—a cohort that included many who opposed the shah—as well as Iranians who came more recently for the same reason people come from all over the world: economic opportunity and personal freedom. The fact that these emigrants have children and grandchildren who were born and raised in the US adds another layer of nuance.

Within this mix, there has always been a range of politics and perspectives—but for years, diaspora Iranians were a reliably progressive community. A 2008 survey found that Iranian Americans were four times as likely to identify as Democrats than as Republicans. A survey from 2015 showed that nearly two-thirds believed that diplomacy with Iran was better than war or sanctions. Even now, Iranian Americans oppose war by a 2-to-1 margin.

But since Trump first came to power, he has enabled and amplified hard-right Iranian-diaspora voices—including, most notably, that of Pahlavi. And this has helped reshape opinion inside Iran as well.

For decades, Pahlavi was a running joke in the Iranian community. His father was so unpopular around the world that even the United States, his former patron, was unwilling to take him in after he fled Iran. During his 47 years of exile, the shah’s son failed to build any kind of political movement to bring together the diverse political views within the diaspora. For the most part, he lived lavishly if quietly in a gated Washington suburb, popping up occasionally to present himself as the heir to Iran’s long-abolished monarchy.

Then, in 2018, Trump ripped up the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, which had provided a framework for the normalization of relations between the two countries. In its place, he instituted “maximum-pressure” sanctions. Pahlavi responded by positioning himself as the international voice of the Iranian opposition—an effort in which he was aided by the US, Saudi, and Israeli governments, which poured millions of dollars into promoting him. He began giving talks at major universities and think tanks like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a fiercely right-wing, pro-Israel think tank. In 2023, he publicly cemented his relationship with Israel during a high-profile visit that included a meeting with Netanyahu. And after years of opposing military intervention in Iran, calling it a “lose-lose” that would undermine democracy and strengthen the government, he embraced the idea of foreign powers attacking the country.

As Pahlavi’s star rose, he was further helped by a rapidly shifting mediascape. A set of sleek satellite-TV channels emerged out of the diaspora landscape, among them Manoto and Iran International, both of which take a strident pro-monarchy line and often feature Pahlavi as a guest. While the two channels have refused to disclose their funding, a 2018 Guardian investigation revealed that Iran International had received significant financial backing from Saudi Arabia. In 2023, its journalists were photographed in a meeting with Israel’s intelligence minister.

At the same time, the Persian-language social-media landscape has been transformed by a network of thousands of bots funded by Israel—along with a new class of diaspora pundits whose voices were amplified as they swung dramatically right. Pahlavi was Iran’s only hope for democracy, they cried in unison.

For these boosters, it didn’t seem to matter that Pahlavi steadfastly refused to denounce the authoritarianism of his father’s regime. Or that he refused to rein in his followers, who developed a reputation for aggression against anyone who refused to pledge allegiance to their leader. Month after month, year after year, his face and words proliferated on Twitter and Instagram. And thousands of miles away, many Iranians—confronted by a legion of commenters and the online illusion of popular consensus—began to warm up to him.

During Trump’s first term, I lived in Tehran and witnessed this shift firsthand. I was conducting research on power and resistance in the contemporary Middle East for my PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago. It was while I was there that Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, declaring that he wanted a “better” deal and was willing to bring the country to its knees to get it. By the fall of 2018, months after Trump announced that he was going to reimpose sanctions, Iran’s currency had lost two-thirds of its value.

At lunches in Tehran, friends complained that their life savings were evaporating and their families could no longer afford to buy meat. As sanctions choked off supplies of everything from cars to construction materials, necessities like insulin and cancer medications became hard to obtain; on downtown streets where men in sunglasses once sold drugs, they now whispered “medicine” to passersby. I also heard complaints about the Revolutionary Guard, a parallel military force that had developed a commanding stake in Iran’s economy, who were making a brisk profit by smuggling in goods prohibited by the sanctions.

Everyone was mad. But the targets of their anger differed.

I was introduced to Amir through a mutual friend and would join him and his friends for dinner every few months. Amir imported electronics. The currency fluctuations had made business unpredictable, but because he worked mostly with businesses in East Asia, he was surviving the storm.

Amir was loath to blame Trump. “The guy is just doing what’s best for his country,” he would say. His wife, Azita, went further: “Trump needs to hit the regime as hard as he can, make them suffer,” she would say. “They’ve made our lives hell.”

Azita was short on details on how sanctions would lead to the government’s collapse. But she wanted revenge against those she blamed for the country’s woes, ranging from the seemingly intractable economic situation to the broader feeling that Khamenei treated the country as his personal fiefdom, limiting Iran’s democratic institutions, throwing dissidents in jail, and handing sweet economic deals to people with connections in the Revolutionary Guard.

Both Azita and Amir were avid viewers of Iran International and Manoto, where they could enjoy dubbed reality-TV shows, documentaries offering a rosy image of life before the revolution, and interviews with diaspora figures who urged Iranians to give up any hope of reform and embrace the promises of regime change. Like most other Iranians, Azita and Amir had voted for reformists who promised more social and political freedom. But they’d since become disillusioned. At its core, they argued, the system remained oppressive and corrupt. No matter which president wound up in office, the unelected Khamenei refused to allow meaningful change. When Trump offered to punish Khamenei and overthrow his government, Azita and Amir felt that he was providing them a way out of the dead end.

But not all Iranians bought the regime-change fantasy that Trump—and Pahlavi—were selling. “That guy has never done anything in his life,” Maryam said of Pahlavi as we sat in her living room in central Tehran, discussing the pro-Pahlavi hashtags. “We’ve been fighting for years here under difficult conditions, building organizations and networks. But in America, he has built nothing to unite people, even though he lives in total freedom. Now he thinks he can come back and rule this country? Give me a break.”

I had gravitated toward Maryam after moving to Tehran. I admired her work as a veteran of Iran’s grassroots struggles: While others spoke abstractly of change, she spent her life fighting for it. She’d cut her teeth in the student uprising of 1999, participated in the feminist One Million Signatures campaign to reform sexist laws in the 2000s, and marched with millions demanding a recount after the rigged 2009 election. She’d been in and out of prison and now kept a low profile. She was always collecting money for a cause, often linked to Afghan refugees or underprivileged youth in Iran’s marginalized provinces. And she saw firsthand how US policies disproportionately affected the most vulnerable.

“Trump’s sanctions are going to save us? By killing us? No thank you,” she said.

Pahlavi’s supporters seemed less concerned with what Trump was doing or what he was saying than what they wished he was saying. Consumed by rage at Iran’s government, they overlooked the spotty history of foreign intervention in Iran. But it was precisely that history that Maryam called upon to explain her opposition.

Maryam’s hero was Mohammad Mossadegh, the immensely popular, democratically elected prime minister who nationalized Iran’s oil industry in 1953. The Shah saw demonstrations supporting Mossadegh and fled the country in what could have portended a democratic opening. Instead, the CIA paid for a coup to protect US and UK imperial interests, reinstalled the Shah, who used a wave of US funding to launch a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent. He ruled for 25 more years until the 1979 Revolution, relying on the SAVAK secret police to torture dissidents.

Nor was the coup against Mossadegh the first time foreign powers intervened to quash grassroots Iranian democratic aspirations. In 1905, Iranians rose up demanding limits on the absolute Qajar monarchy and an end to concessions to colonial powers. During what became known as the Constitutional Revolution, they successfully established a parliament. But Tsarist Russia and the UK subsequently invaded to defend the project of monarchy, ultimately silencing the revolution in 1911. 

More than 100 years later, Reza Pahlavi sought to erase the memory of Iranians’ grassroots struggle and replace it with its antithesis: royal restoration from above.

While a variety of actors outside Iran have been selling regime change for years, numerous people I spoke with in Iran described Trump’s abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in January—coming on the heels of the spiraling conditions within Iran—as a key reason for the rapid uptake of the fantasy at this moment in history.

The backstory begins in late December, when protests erupted in Iran as the value of the rial collapsed in the aftermath of the Twelve-Day War with Israel, a major bank failed, and the US imposed a new round of sanctions. They began in Tehran’s grand bazaar and quickly spread to poorer towns that rarely saw public demonstrations but bore the brunt of the economic suffering. The protesters were angry about rising inequality, especially the flashy consumerism of the aghazadeh, children of officials who had made big fortunes thanks to their government connections.

President Masoud Pezeshkian’s government announced measures to alleviate the economic pain, even as security forces repressed the demonstrations, killing scores of people. By early January, the protests had largely gone quiet, with only sporadic eruptions here and there. And then Trump attacked Venezuela, abducting Maduro and his wife—and sparking the imaginations of some Iranians who thought those actions could easily be replicated in their own country.

Few paid attention to the 100 lives lost during the US operation, or what happened after: Trump did not overthrow Venezuela’s government; instead, he made a deal with Maduro’s second-in-command, allowing the regime to stay in power. Nonetheless, in a case of extreme wishful thinking, some saw the attack optimistically as a blow against an ally of Iran. Images circulated on Iranian social media comparing Khamenei to Maduro. When Trump said he was “locked and loaded,” many imagined that an attack was on the horizon.

In January, Pahlavi repeatedly issued calls for Iranians to take to the streets; these were echoed by groups abroad like the Iranian Diaspora Collective, which described the protests as “the final battle” to bring down the government. Pahlavi told his followers that tens of thousands of Iranian soldiers had said they would defect and join an uprising. Fresh from a vacation in the Bahamas, he called on Iranians to prepare the ground for the coming regime change by seizing government buildings. That weekend, hundreds of thousands of people tried to do exactly that.

Kamyar, the architect who had fled Tehran for the Caspian coast, watched from a hotel window on the Persian Gulf island of Kish. “I had never seen such huge crowds before,” he told me. “Everyone was happy,” he added, “like it was a victory party.” That mood shifted, however, when security forces confronted the protesters. Videos from across Iran show scenes of enraged crowds attacking the security forces, toppling statues, and tearing down flags. “They burned down every police station,” said Kamyar, who had witnessed the events, “and the next day, it was like the protesters controlled the island.”

But the protesters did not control the island, and the regime was not on the verge of collapse.

When I lived in Tehran, Kamyar had often warned me against the idea that the government could fall so easily. He had worked on government-associated architectural projects, and he recognized that “the regime” was not just a couple of people on top; it was the millions employed by or for the government and the millions more who supported its ideology. He knew that burning down police stations wouldn’t bring down the government; instead, it could provoke a worse reaction. And that’s exactly what happened: The security forces regrouped, and this time they implemented shoot-to-kill orders. They slaughtered thousands of people with a ferocity unmatched in modern Iranian history. Many more were injured and arrested.

Even so, Pahlavi continued to announce that the fall of the regime was near. And as videos of body bags at morgues throughout Iran circulated, the deaths became fuel for another campaign: The calls for a “rescue mission” began appearing on social media.

When I spoke to Kamyar in early April, during a tenuous ceasefire, he was taking a walk in a park in central Tehran, enjoying the cool spring weather and the respite from bombardment. He had only recently returned from the Caspian coast. He’d delayed coming back, he told me, less because of the bombs and more because of the checkpoints.

“They are everywhere,” he said. “There’s Basijis [members of the pro-government paramilitary] with Kalashnikovs checking every car, and they can ask you to show your phone whenever they want. If they find anything they don’t like, they can detain you right there. You don’t know what will happen to you.”

Before the war, checkpoints were largely unknown in Tehran, except late at night when the police tried to catch drunk drivers. The last time military checkpoints had been erected in the city was in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, when authorities crushed all forms of political dissent in the name of national unity against a foreign invader. Now the security forces are checking phones to see if people are posting anti-government content celebrating the war and detaining those who do. And these checkpoints are only one element of a far broader crackdown on dissent.

During the evenings, heavily armed members of the security forces patrol the streets of Tehran, while nightly rallies enjoin Iranians to defend their homeland from new foreign invaders. Hundreds have been arrested for anti-government social-media posts. In early March, the authorities announced that they would begin confiscating the properties of diaspora Iranians who had advocated for the war.

And yet, even amid the crackdown, the war has inspired millions of people to support the government by strengthening its legitimacy. For years, authorities had warned of US and Israeli plots to destroy the country, and many Iranians had shrugged them off as throwbacks to another era. But faced with surprise attacks by a man who has threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Ages” and warned that “a whole civilization will die,” many Iranians who are critical of the government increasingly believe that it’s the only thing stopping the annihilation of their country.

This includes Maryam, who told me she was proud to see Iran’s government firing back at Israel, US bases, and the Gulf countries that host them. “We can’t surrender,” she told me. “Then they’ll just come back and hit us again. I hate the Islamic Republic, but they’re the only ones defending us from destruction.”

The Persian New Year falls on March 20, the first day of spring. Traditionally, Iranians take to the streets and build big bonfires to jump over on the Tuesday night before the new year, a ritual that symbolizes renewal and rebirth.

This year, Reza Pahlavi issued another call for Iranians to take to the streets and bring down their government. Nothing happened. But the government warned any would-be demonstrators that they would be treated as fifth columnists and dealt with harshly.

“We didn’t dare go outside,” Maryam told me.

Since then, Pahlavi’s message has grown increasingly desperate. He urged the armed forces to rise up and commanders in the Revolutionary Guard to betray the government. He offered to help Markwayne Mullin, the new US secretary of homeland security, to identify Iranians in the United States for deportation based on their political beliefs, presumably to make himself seem useful to Trump. He is increasingly detached from reality.

Trump, however, has given up on the idea of regime change, aiming instead for a deal. He’s reportedly taken to calling Pahlavi the “loser prince.”

The diaspora influencers who called for the war are also increasingly adrift. Masih Alinejad, a former grassroots Iranian activist who got a US government job and became a pro-Trump, pro-Pahlavi hard-liner, has urged Trump not to negotiate with Iran’s government. Moj Mahdara, a founding member of the Iranian Diaspora Collective whose previous venture, an event company called Beautycon, nearly went bankrupt, appears regularly on Fox News urging Trump to “finish the job.”

But it is unclear what finishing the job would mean. When asked to explain how they expect bombs to bring freedom, many of the war’s supporters are incapable of articulating a clear theory of change.

Elica Le Bon, née Mojtahedzadeh, a British Iranian attorney and activist, has been one of the loudest online voices for regime change. During a recent appearance on the Triggernometry podcast, she asked why the war hadn’t brought freedom yet. “The precision strikes are so incredible. Why can’t they go for the weaponry that [the government] is using on the protesters?” she ventured. 

“Because they’re just assault rifles,” the interviewer said. 

“Can’t they target that?” 

“No. You’re not going to take out every single AK-47 in Iran.”

She hadn’t lost hope in Pahlavi, she said, because he had lots of support in Iran: “There are 150,000 people within the ranks [of the Iranian army] that are looking to defect to [Reza Pahlavi].” 

“What are you basing that on?” he asked. 

“His team says that.”

The host went silent. 

Those in Iran who bought what Pahlavi was selling are adrift, too.

I spoke with Amir during the ceasefire. He told me that he and the people around him were seized by fear. “Everyone I know is taking sleeping pills every night,” he said, “because we’re afraid Trump is going to let the regime stay in power.”

Pahlavi and the diaspora influencers who boosted him will live to fight another battle. But it is the Iranians inside the country who will pay the price for the war they advocated. Workers have been killed by the missiles targeting refineries, factories, and other infrastructure. Hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs. The value of the currency has plummeted. The economic crisis is far worse than it was before the war.

The day before the ceasefire began, an Israeli missile hit a synagogue not far from where I’d lived in Tehran, a neighborhood that on Friday nights was filled with Orthodox Jewish Iranians walking to Shabbat services, just up the street from Tehran’s largest Christian church, a sleek 1970s modernist-style cathedral. The synagogue was destroyed, and a collection of Torah scrolls that were housed in its ark were buried under the rubble. Photos captured fragile scraps of paper, Aramaic sentences cut short by the jagged burnt edges. Another bomb hit the Pasteur Institute, pulverizing an archive of epidemiological research that dates back a century.

Among those in the diaspora who cheered the war, there is a dawning awareness of the destruction unfolding across Iran. At first, many denied the reality, taking cues from Israeli disinformation, which labeled photos of Iranians killed in the building strikes as “Ayatollahwood.” But as Trump made it clear that he was intentionally hitting civilians, diaspora figures promoted a new slogan: Behtaresho misazim. “We’ll build it back better.”

“Who is going to build it back better?” Kamyar asked me on a phone call. “With what money?

I wondered: Will the Iranian Diaspora Collective start a fundraiser? Will Pahlavi ask Trump to exempt him from the sanctions so he can send the cash? Or was this all a lie, like the fantasy of regime change they had sold to so many Iranians?

A few days later, as Trump appeared to be negotiating a deal with Iran, Pahlavi gave another interview on French TV. “I never asked for military intervention,” he said.

Super PACs funded by the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries have amassed more than $321 million in the 2026 cycle, according to a review of Federal Election Commission filings, as they spend millions to knock out candidates they deem unsupportive of industry-favored regulation.

The proliferation of these industry-funded super PACs, rivaling the size of the giant spending groups controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties, is making its mark on 2026 elections. In the last midterms, the four top spending outside groups were the super PACs tied to House and Senate leaders, crowned by the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF) backing Republican candidates. This year, they face competition from crypto and AI industry war chests willing to target both parties.

Lawmakers are weighing foundational regulatory questions on crypto and AI. Both industries are pushing “light-touch” legislative frameworks, and the money ensures that their preferences are unmissable by congressional leaders trying to protect their members. The crypto industry’s pressure campaign is up for a test: On May 14, the Senate Banking Committee advanced the Clarity Act, the industry’s top legislative priority, after months of negotiation, setting it up for a full Senate vote.

The over $321 million raised this cycle spans 14 federal and state super PACs bankrolled by AI and crypto companies, but even that sum doesn’t capture all the pledged money from the AI industry. A new Republican-focused nonprofit aligned with the Trump White House’s deregulatory AI agenda, Innovation Council Action, has pledged to spend $100 million in midterm contests, likely forming another super PAC. Tens of millions more dollars are sluicing into new “dark money” AI advocacy groups like the Anthropic-funded nonprofit Public First Action.

“The campaign finance landscape, and the lack of any real limits, has opened up this opportunity for industries that have a very clear agenda,” said Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program. “And we see AI, crypto, and some of these Big Tech companies really leaning into that.”

Crypto’s Money Cannon Reloads

In the 2024 cycle, the crypto firm–funded Fairshake super PAC network set a record for independent expenditures by an industry-funded group, shelling out more than $133 million to target lawmakers it saw as not on board with its policy agenda and promote its favored candidates. Fairshake funneled funds to party-specific super PACs for ads that made zero mention of crypto. An allied nonprofit advocacy group launched by Coinbase, Stand With Crypto, handed out scorecards to the industry’s cheerleaders and critics.

Fairshake and its two super PAC affiliates ended the first quarter with $170.4 million in cash on hand—an amount on par with the SLF’s $166.4 million. Its top donors remain Coinbase, Ripple Labs, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which together have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the group.

Already this cycle, Fairshake and a couple of newer pro-crypto super PACs have made nearly $51 million in independent expenditures. One joiner is the Digital Freedom Fund, launched last year by the crypto billionaire Winklevoss twins, who have given the group around $21 million in Bitcoin (not yet liquidated—its cash on hand is under a million). Another new pro-crypto spender is the Republican-focused Fellowship PAC, funded largely with $10 million from Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm now run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s sons that holds multibillion-dollar positions in crypto. The new PAC, which praised President Trump’s crypto moves, touted $100 million in pledges at its September announcement and held around $8 million cash on hand as of the end of March.

The spending arrives as crypto’s flagship market-structure bill, the Clarity Act, advanced by a vote of 15–9 out of the GOP-led Senate Banking Committee after battles with the bank lobby over stablecoin yields and objections from Democratic lawmakers over the Trump family’s crypto ventures. The bill would put most digital tokens under the lighter-touch Commodity Futures Trading Commission, versus the more robust Securities and Exchange Commission, and the crypto industry is racing to get it through the Senate before midterm-season gridlock sets in. Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH), whose 2024 victory over Sherrod Brown was bankrolled by $40.1 million in Fairshake spending, told the DC Blockchain Summit that the end of May is a de facto deadline for the bill’s passage.

AI Adopts the Playbook

The AI industry faces similarly weighty questions in Congress, especially whether lawmakers will pass federal preemption of state regulations, as is being pushed by firms like OpenAI and Big Tech giants like Meta. Since 2025, states have seen a surge in measures seeking to set out AI safety precautions in areas ranging from deepfake videos to chatbot disclosures to consumer protections.

Following the crypto industry’s model, the AI super PAC Leading the Future launched in January with $125 million in announced funding. The group is calling for a national AI framework aligned with the Trump administration’s December executive order, a federal approach that would preempt the AI laws that 38 states enacted in 2025, along with new safety measures advancing this year. Of its announced haul, the group had around $70 million in cash on hand as of the end of the first quarter, including $25 million from OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his spouse, and the same amount from a16z. Donations also came from Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale and Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway. Like Fairshake, the group splits funds between two party-focused super PACs and is rolling out a candidate scorecard—it even shares staff with Fairshake.

Other AI-funded vehicles cut across the industry’s policy goals. Anthropic seeded a new nonprofit, Public First Action, with $20 million announced in February. The nonprofit, which says it “strongly supports” state efforts on AI safety rules and opposes federal preemption, birthed three super PACs—though Anthropic later said its donations weren’t intended for federal election spending, leaving the original source of the super PACs’ spending money in the dark. In the Democratic primary in New York’s 12th Congressional District, its affiliate Jobs and Democracy PAC has spent $2.3 million supporting state Assemblyman Alex Bores, author of the state AI safety bill the RAISE Act. Bores has been hit with nearly $3.3 million in attack ads by Leading the Future’s affiliate Think Big (making virtually no mention of AI regulation). A new super PAC, You Can Push Back, funded by Ripple cofounder and tech billionaire Chris Larsen, announced plans to quickly spend $3.5 million backing Bores’s primary bid.

Meta announced two state-focused spending groups last fall, a super PAC named Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (Meta) California and a 527 nonprofit named the American Technology Excellence Project, pledging $65 million to promote aligned state candidates.

Also, on the Republican side, the nonprofit Innovation Council Action debuted in March with pledges to spend more than $100 million, led by former Trump campaign official Taylor Budowich and aligned with Trump AI and crypto adviser David Sacks.

Looming over them all is the super PAC with the most cash on hand: MAGA Inc., the spending arm of the term-limited President Trump, sitting on $347.8 million as of March 31 and teasing plans to spend for GOP allies in the midterms.

“It’s not just that this super PAC can raise unlimited amounts of money, but it is very consciously President Trump’s super PAC—this idea that they are separate is purely a legal fiction,” said Weiner. “And that’s what allows it to become such a vector for corruption and what amounts to gaining access and influence.”

Some of its donors include Crypto.com’s parent company, OpenAI’s Brockman, the Gemini crypto exchange, the Winklevoss twins, xAI’s Elon Musk, and a16z founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, all of whom have combined for tens of millions given. Whether the GOP-controlled Congress gets crypto’s flagship CLARITY Act to a Senate vote this year, and whether lawmakers in the next Congress are willing to consider substantive AI safety legislation, could hinge on the nine-figure sums about to be dumped on voters in House and Senate races.

Steven Thrasher wants readers of his new book to become a Toni. The novelist Toni Morrison said in a 2003 interview, “When you get these jobs that you have so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”

But as we have witnessed in recent history, the increase in Black and brown faces in high places has not improved overall conditions for people of color and other marginalized groups in the United States. And these positions haven’t led to the empowerment, let alone freedom, of others.

“An overseer framework can be helpful in understanding ongoing structures of power in the United States,” Thrasher explains in his new book The Overseer Class. It is, he writes, “a phenomenon in which people from marginalized populations amass power not by uplifting people from the communities they come from, but by collectively cracking the skulls of their own.”

Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass, knows this firsthand. In 2024, he was the inaugural chair of social justice reporting at Northwestern University, where students set up a Gaza solidarity encampment. That April, he and three other faculty linked arms in an attempt to stop police from violently evicting the encampment. Their efforts were unsuccessful and, under the direction of the Black chief of campus security, campus police brutalized him and his colleagues.

The university filed criminal charges against Thrasher and two other faculty members (which were later dismissed). Spearheaded by the journalism school’s Black dean, who had earlier praised Thrasher’s contributions, the university pursued further charges against him before denying him tenure and canceling the next two years of his classes.

Thrasher’s experiences are no anomaly. University presidents, such as Claudine Gay (Harvard) and Minouche Shafik (Columbia), were both hailed as the first Black and Middle Eastern women to hold positions at their respective colleges. When interrogated by Congress about pro-Palestinian activities on campus, both threw student protesters under the bus, which still did not save their careers.

Thrasher exposes how, even as people of color seem to rise into positions of power in government and military offices, police departments and corporate headquarters, they do so frequently by betraying, exploiting, and sometimes outright brutalizing those from the same demographics.

The Nation spoke with Thrasher about why we need to think past skin-deep identity politics of diversity initiatives and imagine more liberatory roles. This interview has been edited for clarity.

—Victoria Law

Victoria Law: You write, “May the anger you feel reading this book match the anger I had writing it.” Audre Lorde famously reframed anger as a weapon against oppression. Talk about the anger that propelled you to write this book—and anger as a tool to fuel action.

Steven Thrasher: We are encouraged not to feel anger about injustice. Black people—Black men, Black women, Black queer people—are especially made suspect when we express anger.

I got very good advice from one of my Palestinian cousins, whose father had been exiled from Palestine. My cousin would notice that, when I find out scary news, I would initially feel sad and scared, then eventually I’d feel angry. My cousin said, “You need to get to that place faster because understanding that you have a right to be angry puts you in a fighting spirit, and then you don’t feel so frightened.”

I think that if we’re going to find justice, we have to acknowledge anger as a personal emotion, but also from the Lorde quote as full of information and energy that can fuel what it is that we need to do.

VL: There’s a collective belief that carceral institutions have to exist and it’s better that one of us be in a position of power. Can you unpack how this feeds into the overseer class?

ST: I met a young Black man who had been incarcerated and is now in college. He asked, “But somebody has to be in these jobs, so why shouldn’t it be a Black person who’s a prison guard or police officer?” I was trying to challenge him on the necessity of having these jobs. Can we create the conditions where policing and prisons don’t have to exist? Does somebody have to be in those positions?

That’s why I quote Toni Morrison.

But, structurally, you’re set up not to be able to do that in overseer positions.

VL: There’s a direct line from overseers and slave catchers to cops, but fewer people connect overseers to media, universities, corporate America, or nonprofits. Can you talk more about overseers in those places and why they are more difficult to recognize?

ST: Media and academia are the two domains [in which] I’ve worked over the past decade and a half.

I had initially thought that people who shared my identity characteristics, particularly Black men, Black gay men, who were administrators, would help me in my career. Soon I found out that they were there to keep people like me in line. When I would push these individuals, sometimes on lessons they had taught me in their classroom, [it became clear] that they’re not here to expand that kind of learning into the administrative domain. They’re here to repress it. And then I got to visit a lot of Gaza solidarity encampments [at different universities across the country]. I went to seven or eight myself. I was reporting on them happening all over the country. [And] I’ve met with students who participated in them on three continents. But it was very disheartening to see, at City College and other universities, the administrators calling the cops on their students to come beat their heads. Sometimes [the administrators] were Puerto Rican liberation scholars, who had participated in anti-apartheid South African protests as college students themselves, but often had a scholarly background very much in the thematic domain of what students were protesting. They were hired into those positions to give cover when the university suppressed dissent. And so that’s how I started thinking of them as overseers.

I reread Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The president of the college in that book is like the people I have encountered. He tries to suppress the narrator and tries to end his career. I found the overseer a helpful analogy in seeing that when somebody is in a high-visibility position, they can give a face and then repress whoever strays too far from the interests of the corporation or the institution.

I looked at 22 different universities—these are all primarily white institutions—and 19 have a Black chief of security. Then I compare that to their percentages of Black faculty and students, which are very, very low. That’s how in conversation with my friend Victor Ray—who wrote On Critical Race Theory, which I cite extensively—I started realizing that diversity is happening in the disciplinarian domain.

VL: You coin the term “copablanda” to critically examine the propaganda promoting Black police, corrections officers, and other law enforcement. Talk about what copablanda is and how it is different, or similar, to regular copaganda?

ST: I coined copablanda to think about what it means that we are seeing Black cops so often [in movies and TV shows]. This is a response to the Black Lives Matter movement, to the increasing willingness of the American public to question policing institutionally. The American public is increasingly critical of policing and military solutions as the answer to the world’s problems.

One of the most dispatched responses when police are called racist is to trot out Black cops.

When I began reporting in Ferguson, the police force was around 93 percent white even though the city was [nearly] 70 percent Black. Now, it’s a majority-Black police department with a Black chief of police and Black mayor. Even as these demographics changed, the level of police violence has not. We’ve had about 10 years of solid data on how many people are killed by police nationally. It has not gone down. It has not gone down in places with more diverse police forces. The figure of the Black cop is a counter to that reality. It’s to say, “Hey, things aren’t perfect, but we’re moving in the right direction.”

Copablanda plays a huge role in getting us not to see other possibilities.

As Thrasher and I talked about copablanda, Kwaneta Harris, a nurse, writer and mother incarcerated in Texas, called my phone.

Harris and I had already been in touch for nearly a decade, and she was most recently featured in my book Corridors of Contagion. She said that reading The Overseer Class confirmed her own observations and experiences behind bars. And she had her own questions for Thrasher.

Kwaneta Harris: I am surrounded by overseers who look like me, who grew up poor like me, who may even be queer, but who weaponize every one of their identities—their melanin, their gender origin, their working-class upbringing, even their sexuality—to perform a form of solidarity they have no intention of honoring. They wear our culture like a costume to disarm us, to make us lower our guard, and make us grateful for their presence. Then, the moment their bosses need a body to slam, they are the first ones on the scene, deploying our shared identity and betraying their proximity. My struggle—and I say this as someone trying to organize from inside these walls—is that my incarcerated peers are often more committed to protecting the feelings and image of these overseers than they are to protecting each other.

Because internalized hierarchy has taught us to mistake representation for liberation and confuse visibility with safety. Hence, we feel a misplaced racial/gender loyalty to the very person holding the damn key that will never turn in our favor.

Drawing from the theoretical framework of The Overseer Class, how do we develop—specifically for incarcerated people operating inside the most surveilled, isolated, and resource- starved environments imaginable—the Toni’s you describe?

ST: That is such a big problem that we see. We’re encouraged to have our alliance with someone in a position of power. How do we have it with each other?

For example, the Barack Obama Presidential Center [will] open in Chicago [in June]. It’s a billion-dollar center paid for by the Wall Street donors whom he helped bail out when he was in office, and there’s been enormous, enormous harm happening to the people who live around it. The rents are going up. People are getting evicted. They can’t afford apartments that used to be for rent and are now turned into Airbnbs for tourists. We’re encouraged to have a sense of solidarity with the first Black president. But how do we form that solidarity with the people who are being displaced, who are also Black? How do we do that?

KH: Guards will pull me aside, because I’m a maternal figure and I can calm my peers down. [Often] an older Black guard will say to me, “The regional directors are coming around. Keep the girls calm. Don’t make me look bad. I got a kid in college.” And I would do it. Then when something [an incident] happens, they’re the same ones who body slam and tear gas us. What happened to looking out for each other?

We don’t have gangs in women’s prisons. We’re not afraid of one another. We’re afraid of the guards. We stick up for one another. I’ve seen a white woman with a giant swastika tattoo fake an emergency to keep a young Black girl from going into a utility closet with a guard. She was new, and the guard was trying to get her into a utility closet [which has no cameras]. The white woman faked an emergency to stop him.

ST: My job as an educator and a journalist is to point out where our solidarity can lie. I think about the solidarity that Palestinian journalists have, which is so different from how we’re socialized as journalists to be individualistic in the United States.

We have to be in solidarity, not with the desire to have the best-paid, safest tenured position, but to make sure our students are safe, our neighbors are safe, that they all feel welcome in spaces of learning, that the learning is not only happening in a racially and economically segregated space, but that it’s shared publicly. So that’s how I think about your question: How do you organize a sense of safety with people who are at the mercy of the violence of the guards? If one of your peers can fake an emergency to stop harm to somebody else, then there are things all of us can do.

The call cut off as we were speaking, because Texas prison calls last 20 minutes. I had one last question. I asked Thrasher, “What do you want readers to take away from The Overseer Class?”

He responded: “Kwaneta talked about what can be done even amongst those who have the least access to safety. She asked, and then answered, that there are things that women in prison can do to protect one another. I observed that from afar in Palestine and firsthand in Uganda, South Africa, and other places where I’ve reported: that people with far fewer resources than I have are able to protect ideas, ideals, and each other collectively in a very different way than we are socialized in the United States to protect ourselves and our own careers first.

“If they can protect other journalists, why can’t the US Press Corps? Why can’t US academics?”

Ever since he joined Congress in 2012, I’ve probably disagreed with Representative Thomas Massie at least 90 percent of the time. But I can’t help but feel that his defeat in the GOP primary for his Kentucky congressional district on Tuesday night was both a tragedy and a travesty.

Massie has always had an insurgent streak. He joined national politics as a Tea Party Republican, strongly affiliated with the Rand-and-Ron-Paul libertarian wing that so unnerved the GOP establishment. Ever since, he’s shown a consistent willingness to buck his party.

Often, this defiance has been in service of bad ideas, such as trying to push Republicans to be even more opposed to the welfare state. But in Trump’s second term in office, Massie has put his rebelliousness to good use. He has emerged as a major thorn in the president’s side, playing a key role in pushing for the release of the Epstein files and being one of the few Republicans who is an outspoken critic of the Iran War.

Unfortunately for Massie, open opponents of Donald Trump rarely survive long in today’s GOP, which has made fealty to the president its overriding principle. Trump made removing Massie from Congress a key priority in this year’s midterms. So did AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby group opposed to his anti-war politics. Trump and AIPAC threw their support behind Ed Gallrein, a Navy SEAL who promised to toe the party line.

The combined forces of Trump and AIPAC proved insurmountable, even though Massie was well-liked by Republican voters. Because of the involvement of AIPAC and other pro-Israel donors, this primary was the most expensive in American history, with at least $32 million spent. Massie ultimately lost in a landslide; while votes are still being tabulated, early results suggest Gallrein won by 55 percent to Massie’s 45 percent.

Massie joins the long list of GOP politicians who have had their political careers cut short because they stood up to Trump, often for conflicting reasons. This roll call of vanquished Republicans includes Mark Stanford, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Jeff Flake.

As Mother Jones notes:

This year, Trump helped oust five Republican Indiana state legislators who had rejected pressure from the president to redraw the state’s congressional maps to create two new Republican seats in mid-decade redistricting. And this month, Louisiana GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy lost his primary after Trump targeted him over Cassidy’s vote to convict him in his 2021 impeachment trial.

Massie, an astute observer of the internal politics of the GOP, was unlikely to be surprised by this development. In an interview with the Washington Examiner in 2017, he had some prescient thoughts on how voters who had previously supported libertarian leaning candidates were gravitating toward Trump. Massie told the interviewer: “All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

Yet, while Trump and AIPAC are currently triumphant, theirs may still turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory.

AIPAC’s campaign against Massie calls to mind its 2024 success in two supporting candidates in Democratic primaries who ousted outspoken congressional critics of Israel, Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. Those were the two most expensive primaries in American history prior to Massie/Gallrein. Yet, since that victory, AIPAC has found its brand becoming toxic among Democratic Party voters, appalled at the Gaza genocide and the close alliance pro-Israel groups have forged with Trump. This year, it’s become common for Democratic politicians such as Vermont Senator Peter Welch to insist that they will not take money from AIPAC.

Massie’s defeat suggests AIPAC is still entrenched in Republican politics, but that too could change. According to a recent Pew poll, “57 % of Republicans ages 18 to 49 have an unfavorable opinion of Israel, up from 50% last year.” Gallrein’s support skewed towards older Republicans, the one significant demographic cohort that remains pro-Israel. According to a poll by Quantus Insight, Gallrein had strong majority support among voters over the age of 55, while Massie had an equally strong majority support among voters under 55. This suggests that AIPAC’s ability to shape Republican elections might rapidly diminish in the coming decade.

Trump’s grip on the GOP might itself turn out to be an anchor dragging his party down. Trump’s approval among voters, including independents, is at an all-time low in his second term, standing at 37 percent in a recent New York Times/Siena poll. If the GOP were even a little bit more ideologically diverse, Republicans facing the voters in the midterms could argue that they should be judged on their merits rather than on their approval for Trump. But the current GOP is nothing more or less than a Trump personality cult. It will sink or swim based on how voters feel about Trump. And right now, voters generally don’t like Trump at all.

For his part, Massie has been admirably jaunty and upbeat in defeat. In his concession speech, he indicated he is not backing down from opposing Trump. He told the assembled crowd, “Today is the six-month anniversary of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. We’ve taken out two dozen CEOs, an ambassador, a prince, a prime minister, a minister of culture—and that was just six months. I’ve got seven months left in Congress.”

Massie also said, “While gas is almost $5 a gallon and diesel is almost $6, they’re talking about this big ballroom…. It looks like the Roman Empire. I see a few analogies there…”

These are fighting words. Massie might have lost in the primary, but he lost with his honor intact. Trump won’t be around forever, and if there is a future for the Republican Party, Massie is in a better position to shape it than his colleagues who have disgraced themselves in replacing principles with a personality cult.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Apologies for drawing upon a beer commercial for inspiration, but the one about “the most interesting man in the world” who advises us to “stay thirsty” is never far from my mind when watching San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama. The impossibly tall basketball wunderkind from France is just 22 years old, and no one born in the 2000s—no one whose life is shorter than LeBron James’s entire career—should ever be allowed to be in the running for the “most interesting person” honorific. And yet Wembanyama makes you open to the idea.

Already, in just his third season in the NBA, the seven-foot-four-plus Wemby is a singular phenomenon: a player with an eight-foot wingspan who can handle the ball, shoot like a guard, and also be tough and nasty down low by the hoop. In a sport that has been around since 1891, he is like no player any of us has ever seen—truly one of one. And this season, he became the first player in NBA history to win the Defensive Player of the Year award unanimously.

But even that achievement understates how impressive he is on the court, where he covers ground like he’s wearing rollerblades. To watch him play defense is to watch giant 30-year-old men shrink from his shadow. In his presence, if they’re not missing layups, they’re having their shots rudely blocked. He turns opponents into baby brothers.

On Monday, playing against the juggernaut NBA defending champions, the Oklahoma City Thunder, in game one of the Western Conference Finals, Wemby’s performance was a work of art worthy of being stolen from the Louvre: 41 points, 24 rebounds, countless shots altered, a series of back-breaking dunks, and a 35-foot three pointer to tie the game with under 30 seconds to play in the first of two overtimes. He played a career-high of 49 minutes in a 122–115 victory, and it was breathtaking to watch. That Wemby is changing the geometry of a sport is certainly fascinating, but it’s not enough to merit the “most interesting” championship belt. He’s a contender for the spot not so much for who he is now but because of the person he is clearly becoming. That is, it’s what he has shown off on the court that makes him so intriguing.

While so many athletes now use social media to hawk products, seeming to believe that the highest of all pursuits is to be a lucrative brand, that’s not who Wembanyama is. When Renée Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by ICE thugs in the streets of Minneapolis, Wemby wanted to talk about it. First he pulled the curtain back on how pro sports organizations operate, telling the press that the team’s public relations crew advised him not to speak out. Then he said, “I’m not going to sit here and give some politically correct [answer]. Every day I wake up and see the news, and I’m horrified. I think it’s crazy that some people might make it seem like or make it sound like the murder of civilians is acceptable.” The comments broke through the noise and became a topic of conversation well beyond Texas.

But that’s not all. Wemby, for all of his indomitable NBA cool, geeks out over books, especially science fiction and fantasy. His hero is Brandon Sanderson, who wrote the The Stormlight Archive and the Mistborn trilogy. In March of 2024, Wemby met the Utah-based writer, and they traded signed books for signed jerseys. That Wemby is eager to show his genuine love for something beyond sports and fame is a rare attribute you don’t see in professional sports so much anymore, at least not since the days of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar spending his spare time playing the congas with Gil Scott-Heron. In fact, Wembanyama is such a reader that the San Antonio Public Library has displays and book suggestions under the heading Read Like Wemby, inspired by some of his favorites, which include Frank and Brian Herbert’s Dune series. Alongside veteran teammate Harrison Barnes, Wembanyama also launched a team book club.

But that’s still not all. There’s also his off-season meditation practice, guided by Shaolin Monks; the fact that he can switch effortlessly between French and English; and his general curiosity about the people around him, from teammates to the team staff. It would be so easy for him to stick to being just an athlete, but he seems to aspire to something greater, always driving himself forward and aiming to be the best player in the history of the sport.

The basketball world calls him “the alien,” a nickname I do not love, because what makes him special is how familiar, earthbound, and vulnerable he allows himself to be. But I can see how others find him daunting, or at least unlike anyone they have ever seen or experienced before. Can the most interesting person in the world actually be 22? Wemby is certainly making me wonder.

Watergate analogies, together with the cursed “-gate” suffix, are often the most glib and least useful analytic devices in assessing the scale of government corruption. Still, hear me out: The Trump administration’s extralegal establishment of a free-floating slush fund for aggrieved (and overwhelmingly white) sufferers of Biden persecution complexes stands out in stark relief, by virtue of both its bald self-dealing and its fundamental abuses of power, against the scandals that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

All of the gravest trespasses of the Watergate scandal were brewed up and executed at the behest of the keepers of the Nixon White House’s vast network of covert slush funds. The Committee to Re-Elect the President, chaired by the administration’s fathomlessly corrupt attorney general John Mitchell, was the chief sluicegate for the White House’s dirty-tricks fund—but it wasn’t the White House’s only, or even most notable, foray into mob-style governance. Four months before the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters, a separate slush fund steered $400,000 in corporate dosh to the 1972 Republican National Convention in order to secure a favorable antitrust ruling from the White House. A year prior to that, a group of dairy cooperatives arranged a $2 million donation to the GOP in exchange for the White House agreeing to lift price controls on milk—which worked out to a nifty $100 million return on investment for the nation’s milk producers.

As it later would with Watergate, the Nixon White House sought to suppress and downplay critical reporting on the slush-fund scandals, but to no avail—these casual mob-style shakedowns harmed the administration’s reputation, fueled the greater lawlessness of the administration, and metastasized into what White House Counsel John Dean aptly called “a cancer” on Nixon’s presidency.

Now just review the basic background of the Trump January 6 slush fund. It is, to begin with, a complete legal fabrication—a preemptive make-believe “settlement” in a $10 billion lawsuit that Trump brought against his own Internal Revenue Service after an independent contractor leaked past Trump tax returns to the news outlet ProPublica. Trump’s suit was clearly modeled on the successful, though meritless, claims he’d lodged against CBS and ABC for editing and airing material adverse to his political interests; in all these cases, the objective was not to secure any sort of binding legal precedent but to engineer payouts that would serve to browbeat critics and intimidate dissenters. (Lost in most of the mainstream coverage of the Trump IRS suit was the critical point that the underlying harm alleged in the case—the public release of a president’s financial records—was in fact something that all modern candidates for the presidency prior to Trump had arranged voluntarily as a recognition that the public trust they seek to hold shouldn’t be compromised by conflicts of interest. That, needless to say, is not the Trump model of governance.)

Then there’s the sheer volume of taxpayer money amassed in the fund. The sums collected by Nixon’s enforcers were staggering for the time, but even after adjusting for inflation, the $1.8 billion Trump fund far outpaces them; it works out to roughly $224 million in 1972 dollars—much more than twice the astronomical payoff that Nixon’s dairy donors realized on their slush-fund investment. (The official tally for Trump’s baksheesh reserve fund is, of course, $1,776,000,000, since it was the clear aim of the American Revolution to direct tax revenues into the coffers of aspiring monarchs.)

Finally, just ponder the oversight provisions directing the disbursement of all this cash—which won’t take long, I promise, because there are none. The settlement agreement provides only for a five-member board appointed by Trump’s Department of Justice to approve quarterly payout requests from the fund. And what they decide to do, the settlement’s language stipulates, is very much their own business: “The Anti-Weaponization Fund shall have the power to determine its own procedures for submitting, receiving, processing, and granting or denying claims. The Anti-Weaponization Fund may make those procedures public in whole or in part, at its discretion.” (Calling the slush fund “the Anti-Weaponization Fund” is, like the $1.776 billion figure, a messaging mind-fuck—nothing says that you’re combating the alleged weaponization of justice like creating an unaccountable elite legal panel handing out cash on its own purblind whim.)

The contrast with the Watergate reign of slush is again instructive: Nixon and his henchmen went to great lengths to conceal their crimes, whereas Trump and his MAGA coterie are using their grip on federal prosecutorial power to reward the crime of seeking to overturn the 2020 election. The crisis point in Nixon’s coverup campaign was the “Saturday night massacre”—his effort to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which prompted the resignation of then–Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Richardson’s deputy, William Ruckelshaus. Congressional Republicans were forced then to concede that backing the Nixon White House and the rule of law were mutually exclusive propositions, setting the stage for Nixon’s likely impeachment and forced resignation. Trump and his apparatchiks are operating in the photographic negative of that moral consensus: They are unilaterally dictating the terms of political legitimacy and declaring themselves immune from all legal consequences in advance. When you’re brazenly corrupt, no cover-up is required.

As for what will follow in the wake of all this insurrectionist feather-bedding, well, the Board of Anti-Weaponizers disclaims all responsibility there as well: “Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account,” Attorney General Todd Blanche—who is of course Trump’s former personal attorney—wrote in his order enforcing the settlement, “the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.” And appealing any of board’s financial awards is simply forbidden: “Because the claims process is voluntary, there shall be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the settlement agreement states. The board’s awards are “enforceable and challengeable solely by Plaintiffs, Defendants, and the United States”—i.e., the very grifters who set up this self-dealing boondoggle at taxpayer expense.

As with virtually every other act of this administration, from its DOGE raids on federal agencies, workforces and taxpayer privacy to its mass-deportation sieges in American cities to its illegal wars and foreign murder campaigns, the impunity is the point. The administration is not interested in anything so drawn-out and laborious as an official inquiry into the purported “weaponization” of justice and law enforcement, let alone a reformist remedy. No, the aim is to use power as a brute reminder to everyone else that you’re in power, and are free to declare new public directives, casus belli, and policy mandates out of thin air. You can concoct bogus crime waves in Washington, DC, or a phantom Somali day care fraud epidemic in Minneapolis or nonexistent fentanyl trade routes in Caribbean waters—and then blithely proceed to intimidate, menace, and kill on virtual autopilot, while of course all the while proclaiming your own bitter victimization at the hands of the woke and weaponized liberal administrative state. The impunity zone is the ideological sweet spot where the tinpot corruption of the Trump clan merges seamlessly with the wrecking-ball agenda of Project 2025.

The impunity dividend was on blinding display the day that the settlement creating the Trump slush fund was announced. The White House dispatched Vice President JD Vance, the Yale-credentialed venture capitalist who likes to pose as a heartland empath, to Missouri to tout his farcical race-coded crusade against government fraud before voters in Missouri. Vance asserted that Medicaid fraud runs into the billions—a claim both unsubstantiated and overblown, designed chiefly to distract attention from the administration’s own punitive Medicaid cuts—and then sought to stick his demagogic landing with this appeal: “When people steal billions of dollars from the Medicare program, that is theft from you, and it’s also theft from the people who use the Medicare program to pay their bills.”

What Vance really meant is: Theft is what we say it is, and only counts when we ascribe it to our political enemies. Recall that this is the public official who proclaimed that he’s willing to “create stories” to advance the broader MAGA ideological project. That’s why his task force is suspending Medicaid payments to California and Minnesota—not because the alleged scourge of Medicaid fraud is greater there, but because both of these blue states are in the vanguard of opposition to ICE’s gestapo raids. In this same bleak register, we should recall Todd Blanche’s preeminent qualification to establish and direct the $1.8 billion Trump slush fund: As Trump declared at a recent White House event, Blanche is the man “who kept me out of jail for years.” As John Mitchell declared to Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein at the height of the paper’s Watergate investigations, “You fellows have got a great ball game going.… We’re going to do a story on all of you.” That could well be the motto for the Anti-Weaponization Fund, but here’s a more cogent variation: It’s the impunity, stupid.

They told us this was history. From elementary school through college, it arrived printed in textbooks, laced with authority, taught as truth:

European settlers came escaping hardships, Native people welcomed them, and the nation expanded. “Progress” followed. The Mexican-American War became a “shifted border.” Conquest became destiny; settlement fact.

And we were left to learn their story, not our own.

That narrative held until Dr. Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña intervened in 1972, reshaping the writing of history and a generation’s historical awareness. In Occupied America: The Chicanos’ Struggle Toward Liberation, he wrote, “Incomplete or biased analyses by historians have perpetuated factual errors and created myths.… The tragedy is that the myths have degraded the Mexican people—not only in the eyes of those who feel superior, but also in their own eyes.”

Born in 1932 in a racist Los Angeles, Acuña, who died in March at 93, learned how educational institutions excluded his community. He experienced these structures firsthand as a student, janitor, public school teacher, and community college instructor.

By 1969, despite fierce resistance—including campus repression, police surveillance, and arrests during student-led struggles to establish Ethnic Studies— he became the founding chair of Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), establishing the nation’s largest department of its kind, authoring over 44 courses in a span of two weeks, and laying the institutional foundation for Chicano Studies and the broader field of Ethnic Studies. What exists today—CSUN’s two graduate programs, four undergraduate degrees, and a curriculum offering more than 150 courses—stands as part of Rudy’s legacy.

Many Chicana/o Studies faculty, students, and activists first encountered Rudy by reading his texts, attending his lectures, or standing alongside him at marches or MEChA meetings. He consistently reminded us that the institutions we entered misrepresented our history, disrespected our language, and confined our community to the lower rungs of the economic ladder. For those of us in Chicana/o Studies, Rudy was more than a colleague. He was our conscience. He insisted that scholarship was linked to the people’s struggle. If knowledge did not serve the people, it was complicit in their erasure. Chicana/o Studies was not simply an academic project or a teaching position—it is inextricably tied to our liberation.

Occupied America: The Chicanos’ Struggle Toward Liberation, published in 1972, confronted a field dominated by triumphalist, white-centered narratives that celebrated expansion while rendering Indigenous peoples, Mexicans, Chicanos, and people of color invisible. For those excluded, there was no archive of self, no intellectual home—only distortions and silence. Occupied America changed that, giving Chicanos a language to name dispossession, a framework to confront power, and a ground from which to claim presence. The book became a foundational text for Chicana/o Studies. In it, Rudy wrote:

History can either oppress or liberate a people.… Mexicans—Chicanos—in the United States today are an oppressed people… and, sadly, many believe that the only way to get along in Anglo-America is to become “Americanized” themselves. Awareness of their history—of their contributions and struggles, of the fact that they were not the “treacherous enemy” that Anglo-American histories have said they were—can restore pride and a sense of heritage to a people who have been oppressed for so long. In short, awareness can help them to liberate themselves.

In the decades that followed, Acuña’s interventions extended across issues of labor, land, and migration, producing a body of work unmatched in scope and urgency. In 22 books, including America Ocupada (1976), Community Under Siege (1984), Anything But Mexican (1996), and Corridors of Migration (2007), he integrated scholarship and activism, consistently revising Occupied while producing hundreds of essays, articles, chapters, and public writings. The quintessential activist-scholar, Acuña’s work was always a call to confront power and defend truth.

At CSUN, he was also instrumental in creating Central American Studies, the first academic program of its kind in US higher education, supporting a generation of students shaped by US-backed wars, displacement, and under-resourced LA schools. Working with student organizers from the Central American United Student Association, Acuña helped secure institutional space without exerting control over the process. Building on that foundation, the nation’s first experimental courses on Central America were developed, helping to establish the field nationally and internationally.

Throughout, Rudy insisted that Chicana/o and Ethnic Studies were instruments of struggle, formations born of insurgency that must remain accountable to the communities that made them possible. That insistence remains under attack. Today, right-wing political organizations, state-level policy makers, and local school boards are attempting to restrict Ethnic Studies curricula, challenge its place in education, impose penalties on how it is taught and discussed, and suppress its perspectives, creating a context reminiscent of earlier challenges. Across school boards, campuses, and in public discourse, educators who speak of settler colonialism, decoloniality, and liberation face increasing hostility—an extension of the same struggles that shaped the emergence of Chicana/o Studies and that form part of Rudy’s lineage.

Acuña never let us forget the student activists who founded Ethnic Studies programs, who were surveilled, beaten, and incarcerated:

These students fought for Chicano Studies and the recruitment of Mexican Americans to colleges and universities. Their sacrifices and accomplishments must be placed in context. The government and the establishment did not give them Chicano Studies; they took it.

Rudy’s trajectory exemplifies the depth of his legacy. He transformed the writing of history, rendered previous narratives untenable, and continues to shape those who study, teach, and live its truths. To honor him is to move beyond remembrance.

He endures in students who refuse erasure, in classrooms where Occupied America remains a call to action, in the courses he built, the courage he instilled, and the scholarship fund he created to support future generations.

Professor-artist Harry Gamboa once asked Rudy about his work, and Rudy responded:

“Your work is your understanding of life.… I am a materialist. I don’t think that we’re going to have an afterlife or be judged. And so consequently you want to leave something to this world. Now, if you consume and that’s all that you do, you’re not going to leave something for this world. But if you produce, if you write, if you build organizations, you are going to leave a footprint. I don’t want to be like other people who destroy, nor do they leave anything behind. I think that having the advantage of an education gives you a responsibility to produce something. To do something.”

Acuña did more than leave a footprint; he altered the terrain. And if history remains a site of struggle where we are all on the inside, as he said, the question is not what he leaves but how we carry it forward.

Hasta siempre, Rudy.

The latest trend among white livestreamers for generating “content”? Approaching Black strangers minding their own business, repeatedly calling them “niggers,” labeling however they respond as “chimping out” and—of course—collecting a pile of money from fans who literally pay to be entertained by racial humiliation.

The biggest star of these “ragebaiting” videos, as they’re called for obvious reasons, is 28-year-old Tennessean Dalton Eatherly, better known online as “Chud the Builder.” Eatherly’s sizable fanbase is built on livestreams in which he sidles up to random Black people, provokes them with racist abuse and dares them to react while threatening to shoot them with the gun and bear mace he carries. This little routine realized its Chekhovian inevitability this past Wednesday, May 13, when Chud shot a Black man—reportedly a disabled veteran—outside the courthouse where he was appearing in one of two criminal cases for which he was already out on bond. (Those cases include an early May incident when Chud refused to pay a $371 restaurant bill; the livestreamed footage of the incident, which you can still watch here, features him berating restaurant employees, including a South Asian server he calls a “jeet” and instructs to go “shit in the street.”) On Friday, the judge overseeing the shooting case announced charges of attempted murder, employing a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, as well as a $1.25 million bond. Along with a Black stranger, according to reports, Chud also shot himself in the arm. As writer Dixon D. White notes, there may be no more perfect metaphor for the self-inflicted wound of white supremacy.

The charges may sideline Chud for a bit, but a crop of copycats are scrambling to take his place. There’s Hexumlite, a 23-year-old looksmaxxer whose old shtick was insulting anonymous women on the street, but who’s now pivoting to asking random groups of white women what they “think about niggers” and advising others not to “get attacked by any niggers.” (Sidenote: If you’re unfamiliar with the phenomenon of looksmaxxing, maybe read this.) Then there’s Onlyusemeblade, real name is Brian Russo, a 40-something gaming streamer who in a recent video calls an unknown Black woman a “weird nigger bitch.” Others are surely vying for their time in the spotlight, and they’re joined by white people who aren’t livestreamers but have nonetheless been inspired by them. For example, in a clip widely circulated last week, a white man tells the Black security staff outside a Nashville restaurant they’re “chimping out” after they refuse to let him take his dog inside—which is to say, after doing their jobs. Hexumlite, who just happens to catch the altercation, signals his appreciation by shouting, “Chud the Builder!”

I expect the think pieces implicating social media are being written right now, bemoaning its tendency to reward outrage, humiliation, and spectacle. But I dunno. I actually think the bigger problem might be the racism that has always existed, shaping and grossly contorting American social, economic, and political life. Chud and his imitators aren’t some shocking new aberration wrought solely from the excesses of social media but an old American archetype given new breath by the bully pulpit of his time. White terror—the harassment and intimidation of Black people by white people confident they’ll face little to no meaningful repercussions—is a longstanding American tradition. The brief post–civil rights movement era when this behavior was widely considered socially unacceptable for white people— that’s the actual historical anomaly. A tiny blip along the timeline of an American history featuring a far older pattern of public anti-Blackness.

Every technological advance this nation has ever produced has inevitably become intertwined with the country’s oldest and most cherished traditions, of which the practice of anti-Black racism is perhaps the most salient. Photography gave us lynching postcards; film gave us Birth of A Nation; the Internet offered racists the anonymity that even Klan hoods could not. We are not in unprecedented territory. We are returning to form.

Also not new? The extremely tired reasons white people have historically used, and continue to offer, to justify these behaviors. Chud has cast himself as a crusader for a white race oppressed by the request to not publicly use the word “nigger” or to taunt and traumatize Black folks with it. “I am simply weary after 6 months of being attacked by our government for expressing the constitutional freedoms our ancestors fought and died for,” he whined on social media after his arrest for stiffing the restaurant. “It’s not illegal for White people to say the same word they say to each other.” In a message posted immediately after last week’s shooting, he declared, “We should all have the same right to free speech regardless of what color my skin is.” This has landed him guest spots on Alex Jones’s InfoWars and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes’s show. His videos have likewise been bolstered by Twitter’s algorithm, which, under owner Elon Musk, favors all things white supremacist. But even a right-wing media ecosystem sustained purely by self-pitying white grievance—and demands for Black people to be put in their place—aren’t new. White Americans have, quite literally since the end of slavery, claimed to suffer under the “outrage of Negro domination,” to quote an 1868 newspaper, and claimed that their own violence toward Black folks, from verbal harassment to lynching, is justified by that threat. “The Klan…saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule,” a white woman wrote in 1914. All these years later and Musk, the world’s richest man, is tweet-complaining that Lupita Nyong’o’s being cast as Helen of Troy is evidence of anti-white racism. Black freedom is somehow always tantamount to white suffering.

Also worn out is the old American lie that Black are uniquely dangerous. “Chimping out,” the favorite slur of these livestreamers, is itself a decades-old online slur rooted in a centuries-long American tradition of animalizing Black people as impulsively violent, driven by instinct, and subhuman. The irony is positively breathtaking given what has always been the actual direction of American racial violence throughout history. If any of these people genuinely believed Black folks were half as dangerous as they claim, they would never make a day job out of harassing and verbally assaulting them. They count on Black restraint even as they pretend to believe it doesn’t exist! They know full well that most Black folks aren’t violent, and that even if they were (they aren’t), and even if their racist abuses are captured on video, the legal system has their backs. These are the same people who mock Black folks for talking about biased policing or systemic racism, even as they know no Black streamer could get away with doing this long enough to make a living off it. This asymmetry isn’t lost on them, as much as they pretend to be victims. “Series finale is dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free,” Chud wrote on social media less than a week before the shooting. “Stay tuned.” The power imbalance is the point.

And there’s nothing new to see either in white people using Black people as entertainment, with other white people tuning in to watch, and the whole spectacle being monetized. White Americans have been pay-per-viewing the dehumanization of Black people since minstrel shows became this country’s first original form of popular entertainment (before then, the country produced only derivatives of European and British theater) and lynchings served as white people’s favorite reasons for a Sunday picnic. The pleasure of consuming Black humiliation is worth the price because anti-Blackness is less an ideology than a psychological salve for a people long paranoid about status loss and the potential for revenge. Secure people don’t need to publicly humiliate strangers to feel good, and people who genuinely feel superior don’t pass their days trying to provoke people they claim to view as inferior. The obsessive need to publicly degrade Black people speaks to a profound lack in those who feel compelled to do it—that’s true for the audience who can’t get enough of it, too.

But white supremacy has always masqueraded as strength, while actually being a transparent psychological effort to manage the deepest of insecurities. Which brings us to the truth at the core of all this, which is the profound and pathetic insecurity that drives it. Hexumlite, the aforementioned heir apparent to Chud’s throne, posts an endless stream of videos in which he admits deep self-loathing, saying in one that “deep down inside, man, I’m still miserable” and confessing to feeling like “a piece of shit” in another. Onlyusemeblade—if I’m actually reading this right—recently had to have some of his toes amputated due to years of alcohol abuse. Chud himself is a jobless deadbeat dad with a rap sheet, an estranged baby mama, and a son he doesn’t live with who had to start a fundraiser last year because of his inability to hold a job. If he were Black, his supporters would call him a stereotype. (Instead, since the shooting, they’ve surfaced the old link and flooded it with donations because of course they have.) My point is, these aren’t secure people expressing confidence in their superiority. They’re losers and failsons who use Black people as scapegoats for their own shortcomings and failures.

“There is something distorted about the psyche” of racists, Toni Morrison famously said. “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is: White people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it.”

I have been thinking about archives lately. (Don’t laugh.) A few things sparked my interest. When I wanted to find the papers of Helen Gahagan Douglas—the late California congresswoman whom Richard Nixon called “the Pink Lady” in their infamous 1950 Senate race—I was puzzled. The next thing I knew I was flying to Oklahoma to the Carl Albert Library on the college campus. There was a lone woman working, and I asked her why Helen’s papers ended up there. She explained that House Speaker Albert walked by Douglas’s office while she was cleaning out her materials. He offered his library as a safe storage place. I spent a full day photocopying—all of which helped the play I cowrote about that election.

I recently covered the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival in Palm Springs, which featured virtually every important historian of these times (Jon Meacham, Rick Atkinson, Ken Burns, H.W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Erik Larson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, etc.). And there was not a discussion during which the challenges of their research—archives, documents—did not come up. Even an author who was discussing her new book about New York’s legendary Plaza Hotel said it was extremely difficult since the hotel has no archives. Todd Purdum discussed his new book on Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the couple who pretty much changed television history. For that one, he was aided by their daughter, Lucie Arnaz, who had done most of the personal archiving.

New York University historian Michael Koncewicz is close to completing a book on the late Tom Hayden, arguably the country’s most prominent radical, who later became a California assemblyman. “Archives are incredibly important,” Koncewicz told me. “Tom’s papers are stored at the University of Michigan, which is one of the archives of radical history in the US. I’ve also visited the Wisconsin Historical Society, the California State Archives, the Richard Nixon Library, Smith College, Swarthmore, and UMass Amherst. I’ve also retrieved materials from the Briscoe Center at UT and the Carl Albert Center. Archivists don’t do enough to promote their valuable work!”

Bob Spitz wrote a legendary book on the Beatles, and his new one, on the Rolling Stones, has just arrived and is getting rave reviews. His research seemingly never ends. “Archives are extremely valuable,” says Spitz. “I’m also negotiating right now to be the first person allowed access into the John Lennon archives [a sequel?], which includes his private papers and journals. You usually negotiate for access with a lawyer representing the family.”

Spitz also took on political figures. “When I wrote the Reagan biography, Nancy Reagan allowed me to be the first person to have access to RR’s private papers,” he says, “not those in the Reagan Library but the ones that were in his desk in the White House. Just by reviewing what was there, I got intense insight into how he thought and came to various issues he promoted. So not everything is public, and if you can get your hands on archives, they can be invaluable to researching a subject.”

The ultimate archival heroine? George Stevens Jr. recalls meeting Otto Frank when Stevens’s director-father was beginning the film The Diary of Anne Frank. “Otto told us about when the Germans came to the house to confiscate everything they thought might have value for the Frank family,” recalls Stevens Jr. What did they leave behind? A teenage girl’s seemingly irrelevant hand-scrawled diary.

When Smedley Butler said, “War is a racket,” he couldn’t have imagined that a sitting US president would time announcements about major military operations in order to manipulate the stock market. But as the US economy has been increasingly financialized, so too has the nature of war profiteering, increasingly driven by insider trading, oil speculators, and the portfolio earnings of venture capital (VC) investors, tech billionaires, and private-equity fund managers. Of course, finance has always played a role in US war-making: JPMorgan was investigated by the Nye Committee inquiry into World War I profiteering, and private capital flooded into Silicon Valley on the heels of DOD investment into early microwave weapons and semiconductors. But facing a new era of high interest rates, fallout from a decade of bad lending based on fictional credit documentation, and a liquidity crisis driven by fewer IPOs, private capital is increasingly desperate to restore its previous era of high returns. The surest avenue for this restoration is the capture of the Pentagon budget, recently proposed by Trump at $1.5 trillion.

To access this giant slush fund, private capital has launched an unprecedented effort to capture key posts in the military establishment, rewrite the Pentagon’s vast regulatory and development bureaucracy, and embed its priorities within the military branches themselves.

At the level of personnel, the presence of VC and private equity (PE) is dramatic. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—the highest-ranking military officer in the United States—is Dan Caine, a long-term investor who became a venture capitalist and adviser for Shield Capital and Thrive Capital, two funds with substantial investments in weapons start-ups. Stephen Feinberg, the US deputy secretary of defense, is the cofounder of Cerberus Capital, a $70 billion global investment firm that launched a VC arm in 2024 that is currently headed by an alum of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s VC arm. Dan Driscoll, the secretary of the Army, had a career in PE and VC before his appointment and has vowed to apply the Silicon Valley model to the Army. Michael Obadal, the under-secretary of the Army, is a former senior director at Anduril, which was launched by VC investment. John Phelan, a prominent PE investor and former CEO of MSD Capital, briefly served as secretary of the Navy before being forced out during the ongoing Naval blockade of Iran. Two officials in Trump’s Office of Management and Budget with direct influence over military spending have substantial interests in VC-backed weapons firm Anduril and have characterized their roles as promoting the inclusion of military tech into the DOD. The new appointees to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which the White House hailed as “luminaries in science and technology,” is populated by a list of billionaires and their hangers-on, including co-chairs David Sacks and Michael Kratsios (Peter Thiel’s former chief of staff) and tech tycoons like Marc Andreesen, Larry Ellison, and Jensen Huang. The Trump administration has also invited in as advisers on military priorities longtime investors like Joe Lonsdale (cofounder of Palantir and 8VC, a VC firm focused on military tech) and Trae Stephens, the chairman of Anduril and partner in Peter Thiel’s VC firm Founders Fund, which is also heavily focused on investments in military tech. This is not to mention the direct involvement of Trump’s family, including his sons and son-in-law as advisers and partners in military start-ups and PE funds.

But personnel is only part of this equation: There has also been a massive expansion of bureaucratic infrastructure designed to incorporate VC and PE priorities into the military establishment. Key among these are initiatives like Trump’s Economic Defense Unit, the Biden-era Office of Strategic Capital (OSC) and Small Business Investment Company Critical Technologies Initiative—a joint initiative of the OSC and the Small Business Administration—and DARPA’s Commercial Strategy Office, launched in 2019. In late 2024, the OSC distributed $2.8 billion to a number of private funds investing in military technologies.

As of December 2024, those loan recipients included America’s Frontier Fund, backed by Peter Thiel and former Google CEO (and drone investor) Eric Schmidt; Moonshots Capital (founded by Kelly Perdew, winner of Season 2 of The Apprentice and former executive vice president at the Trump Organization); Snowpoint Ventures (founded and managed by a number of Palantir alums); and RidgeLine Ventures, part of Anthony Blinken’s firm WestExec. Then in 2025, after Trump was inaugurated, OSC made a number of additional investments (not all of which have been disclosed). Funds get access to up to $150 million in Pentagon cash, but must raise an additional $120 million from private sources.

In addition to the provision of loans and high-ranking Pentagon posts, the broader DOD bureaucracy and the individual service branches are getting a private-finance makeover with the addition and expansion of VC units and tech incubators. The DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit was the earliest such initiative, formed in 2015 in Mountain View California and designed to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley’s commercial tech industry and DOD weapons development priorities; it was elevated in 2023 with direct report access to the secretary of defense. Since then there has been a barrage of additional access points created within the DOD: There’s the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Outpost Valley; the US Army’s OnPoint Technologies, Venture Capital Corporation, Executive Innovation Corps, and ArmyFuze, a partnership with Silicon Valley’s biggest incubator Y Combinator; the Department of Homeland Security’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program; the Navy’s NavalX Tech Bridge (an international network of tech hubs); the Crucible Accelerator, designed to help start-ups “cultivate strategic partnerships in the Department of Defense ecosystem”; the Air Force’s AFWERX, and the Marine Innovation Unit (a reserve unit for “tech whizzes and CEOs”). There’s also the Chief Digital & Artificial Intelligence Office, announced in 2022, which has since awarded hundreds of millions in contracts to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI “to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas” and “provid[e] access to many of the latest generative AI (GenAI) models for general purpose use to Combatant Commands.” These new initiatives combine with a range of VC and industry-funded nonprofits and lobbying groups, as well as fellowships and training programs designed to create new networks that bring together emerging tech and investor priorities with military personnel. Some key organizations include the Silicon Valley Defense Group, the Creative Defense Foundation, and the Special Competitive Studies Project, as well as initiatives funded by individual billionaires like Eric Schmidt’s Schmidt Futures foundation, which has leveraged existing government personnel exchange programs to place at least two dozen allies in key positions in government.

However, capitalizing on this special-interest infrastructure also means transforming the way the Pentagon does business. A 2023 white paper produced by Andreesen-Horowitz—one of the largest and most influential VC firms—outlined how this process would require “reengineering the Pentagon’s DNA for a new era” to focus on building an arsenal that provides a “reduction in operational complexity, driv[es] lower costs through commoditization” with “modular modern production” that uses “just-in-time” manufacturing techniques like 3D printing to cut latency” allowing for “decentralizing a military’s industrial footprint.” The DOD eagerly adopted these aims, and issues of commercialization, commoditization, decentralized production, and cheap “attritable systems” became central features of procurement regulations and strategy papers. This extensive retooling of regulatory structures fast-tracks the inclusion of VC-backed military-tech start-ups into the Pentagon’s arsenal. Contracting tools like “other transaction authority” (OTA) have become the default procurement vehicle under the Trump administration, liberating start-ups from the rules and regulations that typically govern procurement, like the Truthful Cost and Pricing Data Act, the Competition in Contracting Act, and the Cost Accounting Standards (among any others). These alternative procurement tools have been expanded alongside the shrinking of other procurement initiatives designed to provide access to native or minority-owned businesses that Defense Secretary Hegseth has characterized as “wasteful DEI projects that don’t help us win wars.” There is also what’s known as the Commercial Solutions Openings (CSO) track, which was dramatically expanded under Trump’s 2025 National Defense Authorization Act. CSO similarly strips out compliance standards and allows for sole-source follow-on contracts. Watchdog groups say these nontraditional mechanisms open up serious risk for fraud and abuse. CSO and OTA are the procurement vehicles used for the DOD’s Drone Dominance program, which has been plagued by equipment failures in testing and in Ukraine, including many related to Anduril’s software and hardware products.

The November 2025 Acquisition Transformation Strategy from Hegseth’s office lays out how critical private capital is to this new contracting landscape, stating, “The Department will regularly collaborate with leading private equity and venture capital firms to communicate operational challenges, demand signals, critical issues, and opportunities for strategic investments.… [t]his increased engagement with the financial community will seek to incentivize increased private capital investments focused on warfighting priorities while providing the Department with greater insights into market intelligence and current and emerging industry offerings.” The document also lays out “industry-focused training to military and civilian personnel focused on topics such as venture capital and commercial practices that drive speed and agility to accelerate capability delivery to the warfighter and overmatch adversaries.”

Just as private capital has rewritten the Pentagon rulebook, it also transformed Silicon Valley from a center of scientific innovation to a military-tech outpost. The role of military spending in the early years of Silicon Valley is well-documented, but during the height of US forever-war fatigue and pressure from rank-and-file employees, some tech firms eschewed military contracts. But hyper-accumulation and the influence of private finance have grown in tandem with the militarization of technological development: For most of the early 2000s, advances in tech like smartphones, tablets, cloud computing, and streaming services brought useful products and services to ordinary people. But the 2007 financial crisis and Covid prompted a period of zero-interest rate policy and loose capital markets that transformed the tech industry into a giant piggy bank for billionaires and asset managers, who gained increasing control over the direction of technological development within the industry itself. Since then, much of the market growth in tech has come from products laying somewhere along a spectrum between outright scams and Rube Goldberg machines. Some of these storied boondoggles include the metaverse, theranos, crypto, NFTs (nonfungible tokens), wearable tech that everyone hated, subscription services for smart tech in everything from mattresses to gym equipment, and of course, “autonomous” systems that are actually remotely piloted by someone in a “digital sweatshop” in Manilla or Nairobi.

As monetary supply dried up, so did the flow of investor cash into consumer software start-ups. The war in Ukraine and the rise of China’s high-tech industry put hardware—specifically military hardware—back at the center of tech development and investment patterns. Between 2020 and 2024, at least $125 billion of venture capital went into military-tech start-ups, up from only $43 billion in the prior four years. Gifted engineers that may initially work on civilian or consumer projects often “pivot” into designing military tech because they’re eager to work in a start-up flush with investor cash so they can continue their research. The developers who created popular gaming apps like Smurfs Village and Pokemon Go! are now working to develop large geospatial models that will allow for navigation without GPS or prior mapping, enabling military drones and other unmanned weapons systems to avoid the GPS-jamming technology used to great strategic effect by Russia in its war with Ukraine.

Because capitalist firms must continue to achieve valuations or dividend payouts at an ever-increasing rate, merely generating profits isn’t enough, and such firms will be targeted for sell-offs or takeovers. It doesn’t matter if you make a good product at a good price; in fact, it’s not even necessary to have a real product. Many start-ups with huge valuations had completely fabricated products (theranos), illegal products (YieldStar), products based largely on insider trading (prediction markets), pump-and-dump scams (meme coins), or unworkable business models that require years of massive subsidies to put market competitors out of business so they can achieve monopoly status and jack up prices (Uber, AirBnb).

The end of this “free money” era sent tech firms and investors in search of other pools of easy money, which they found in the Pentagon, whose budget functions as a giant slush fund with a history of coddling massive conglomerates, granting endless timeline extensions and guaranteeing large profit margins for even faulty equipment. In short order, tech executives and their venture capital partners transformed themselves from software engineers to military strategists (or recruited off-the-shelf experts from the burgeoning ranks of under-employed military veterans). In addition to traditional lobbying, hundreds of expos, expert roundtables, lecture tours, podcasts, op-eds, conferences, and even happy hours are organized by tech execs and investors to convince both the public and the Pentagon that Silicon Valley is key to restoring US global hegemony and salvaging the US military’s reputation in the wake of humiliating defeats across the Middle East. This is precisely the language that investors and tech executives repeat endlessly in their substantial public platforms: restoring American supremacy, unleashing American dynamism, dominating peer competitors, and safeguarding Western/Judeo-Christian civilization.

Despite their (delusional) predictions about the imminent restoration of US hegemony, the revolutionary weapons promised by investors and tech oligarchs have failed to materialize. The best example of this is the Pentagon’s “Replicator” initiative to develop drone swarm capabilities—basically the capacity to field literally thousands (even tens of thousands) of drones simultaneously to overwhelm enemy defenses. This requires that each individual drone unit be very cheap, easy to field, and very fast to deploy, because, as soon as it’s knocked out of the sky, it must be replaced by two more. However, the only “cheap” drone on the horizon—The Low-Cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System—is a reverse-engineered model based on Iranian Shahed drones recovered from the battlefield in Ukraine. Similarly, a much-hyped American production site for “cheap” ($4,000 each) MK-80 series bombs that opened in a decommissioned General Dynamics facility Texas in 2025 is in fact a fully owned subsidiary of a Turkish military producer, and the majority of the Pentagon’s approved list of US commercial drone suppliers meant to enable drone “swarming” operations depend on cameras, motors, chips or batteries from Chinese suppliers.

Despite its label, private capital very much depends on public markets and the state—particularly in their militarized variants—to back-stop its investment outlays. The very first venture capital firm in the US, American Research and Development Corporation, was founded to profit from the new technologies developed for use in World War II. The so-called “legacy” weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin have long had corporate VC arms that invest in start-up firms and acquire smaller tech firms to integrate their products into existing weapons platforms. The rapid proliferation of new private-equity firms and VC funds solely focused on weapons and intelligence firms, however, is a more recent innovation. Veritas Capital, Civitas Group, Arlington Capital Partners, Behrman Capital, Paladin Capital (and hundreds more) specialize in funding military start-ups, while long-established marquee funds that control hundreds of billions of private investment, like Sequoia Capital, Andreesen Horowitz, and General Catalyst, have built out units exclusively focused on military-tech investments.

Such funds combine the government contacts of high-ranking military and national security retirees with investment bankers and their rolodexes of wealthy clients to raise capital for new funds designed to invest in military enterprises. This partnership is reflected in the growing number of military and national security retirees that somehow headline their own funds despite no experience in finance or banking. The truly global nature of capital (which, unlike humans, has zero barriers to cross-border movement) has spawned transnational relationships between capital and weapons that defy even the stated priorities of great power governments. Financing from giant US investment firms continues to flow into Chinese firms with potential military applications because the imperatives of capital supersede even the grandest geopolitical rivalries. Wars feed into the growth of weapons firms’ stock prices as well as the expansion of private markets: The confrontation between Russia and the United States over Ukraine damaged public markets and public investment, driving global wealth further into private markets. More recently, the US-Israeli War on Iran has driven up bond yields (and therefore borrowing costs for governments) and accelerated flight from the US dollar. The cycle of militarization, violence, public austerity and private accumulation is self-reinforcing.

Militarized accumulation and financialization, combined with an interventionist US foreign policy establishment, has produced an emphasis on militarized innovation in other parts of the economy and a financial sector that’s both eager to capitalize on weapons expansion and increasingly influential in our political economy. Venture capitalists are grafting their model of hype cycles, fictional valuations, and extremely condensed timelines onto the military industrial sector to secure continued hyper returns to capital. Their goal is to (in their own words) “exit through the state”: to find start-ups with weaponizable tech, raise funds for prototyping, secure huge valuations, and land lucrative Pentagon contracts so the firms in their portfolios can either go public or raise more investor cash through private markets.

Either route promises massive payouts, but this pathway had to be intentionally engineered. Historically, venture capital returns when commercial/consumer digital technology firms went public have been huge—10 or 15 times the initial investment. The returns for defense tech start-ups were very small—one or two times the initial investment—because typically the large prime contractors like Lockheed acquired small producers very early on, at low prices. Because the arms industry is consolidated with high entry barriers, there may be only one potential contractor that can use the new tech developed by start-ups, and industry collaboration also worked to keep those acquisition costs low. Because the legacy contractors are traded on public markets, they often get dinged by Wall Street if they’re frequently shelling out cash to acquire start-ups. What Wall Street wants isn’t expansion of product lines, hiring, or innovation: They want the firm to use its capital for stock buybacks to drive up shareholder payouts.

Transforming this existing model of weapons development necessitated an extensive and lengthy campaign of influence operations. Tech executives and their investor partners had to change how militaries think of provisioning war, defining what types of weapons are needed, and who the enemies are. Equally important, they needed a compelling and totalizing narrative about how investors, software engineers, and tech executives constitute the alliance necessary to arrest US imperial decline, restore the country’s manufacturing base, secure the raw materials and rare-earth minerals necessary for high-tech weapons systems, and safeguard Western civilization from both the woke mob and alternative power centers in the Global South.

This means not only incorporating the investor class into civilian posts in the Pentagon but likewise anointing tech execs as military officers and expanding private-sector initiatives intended to facilitate the incorporation of the tech industry into the US war machine. This process of incorporation is also visible in the unholy union of corporate and military jargon, engendering new phrases like “targeting workflow,” “forward-deployed engineers,” and “cost-effective kill chains.” The convergence between technological development and global finance capital is poised to drive not only intensified militarization of the global economy but also the wars that it supplies. The extraordinary surplus accumulation at the very top of the income spectrum generates not only a crisis for capital, which must maintain constant circulation and ever-increasing returns, but also a crisis for labor, increasingly proletarianized, subjected to growing levels of militarization and dependent on a fragile ecosystem under constant assault. The alliance of techno-fascists with finance capital and the military-industrial complex is a death cult of the highest order, both a reflection of US empire’s history and a bleak glimpse of our possible dystopian future.

World War I novels tend not to grant their characters much time alone. In Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Paul Bäumer and his classmates are herded by their schoolmaster into enlistment. Joined by Frisian fishers, farmers, and workers, their cohort becomes a training platoon. “Comradeship,” Paul reminisces, was “the finest thing that arose out of the war.” From the first-person plural, Paul describes their daily habits, fighting under fire, and a shared sense of mortal dread: “We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.” One by one, these lives are extinguished, including, in the final paragraphs, that of Paul himself. Remarque saw the war as a mass betrayal.

Others, like the pacifist and socialist Henri Barbusse, found utopian presentiment on the battlefield—a crucible that the men of Europe had to pass through before they could transform society. In Under Fire: The Story of a Squad, Barbusse stages a dialogue between soldiers amid shellfire, storm clouds, mud, and ruin that swells into a choral revelation as they cry for an end to capitalist domination and all wars. Even Ernst Jünger, who placed an extraordinary emphasis on his own heroics in the field, begins Storm of Steel by employing a collective subjectivity: “We listened to the slow grinding pulse of the front…. We shuddered…. We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group.” Vibrating with the madness of August 1914, he writes, “we were enraptured by war.”

A defining feature of World War I novels might be their attempt to squeeze the contradictions of modern subjectivity into regiments of men—to illustrate how soldiers, both together and alone, modeled the societies that their authors either dreamed of or despised. The soldier can appear as a neoclassical warrior who embodies the revitalization of the national spirit (as in Storm of Steel), or as a patsy of merciless monarchical and industrial powers (as in All Quiet on the Western Front and Under Fire).

Ginster: Written by Himself, Siegfried Kracauer’s semi-autobiographical novel published in 1928, defies both tropes. Stunned by the sudden fervor all around him, Kracauer’s protagonist, a young, listless graduate student and architectural draftsman in his 20s, is unmoved: “‘We’ was not about to cross his lips,” Kracauer writes in the opening pages. Days before his conscription, Ginster’s aunt drags him to a public lecture on the philosophical underpinnings of the war. The speaker delivers his points emphatically, which rest on the precept that the peoples of different nations have different “essential natures.” For the various nations of the West, war is a necessary evil, he proclaims, whereas Germans revere it as an art; whereas the West worships false idols like “political freedom,” Germans prize the inner spirit. The professor casts the culture of the former as soulless, rootless, hollow, and of the latter as springing from the genetic material of mankind. Outside the hall, Ginster’s friend asks him what he thinks of the professor. “He has an essential nature,” Ginster responds curmudgeonly.

This is Kracauer’s hero—a man who refuses to sanctify the collective endeavor of war but also refuses to give his reasons, beyond the occasional grunt. One gets the sense that this novel, carrying a whiff of the fin de siècle, thinks that even elaborating concedes too much. If the political realm is too focused on ends to hold Ginster’s attention, his quixotic aesthetic sensibility draws him to the realm of colors, lines, shapes, and objects. Decades later, as a film theorist, Kracauer would argue that cinema had the unique capacity to affect the “redemption of physical reality.” It was overlooked gestures, surface appearances, that held the greatest significance, Kracauer would suggest—and in capturing them, film could counteract ideology. Long before he worked this out, Kracauer invented Ginster, a protagonist with a wandering eye for cinematic detail and someone who, amid a society rife with propaganda, is able to find beauty.

Ginster, we learn early on, is in an enigma. (Indeed, “Ginster” is not our hero’s real name but a schoolyard nickname; it refers to a hardy, bright yellow shrub that grows along train tracks.) His only mission is to stave off the day when he has to become a man. To the extent that men have “set views and a profession…a wife and children besides,” they are “symmetrical ground plans”—baleful things to him, apparently. He exists in a state of superposition, every trait simultaneously itself and its opposite, which is why he shies from observation: Being perceived would force him into something definite.

Perhaps the most unaccountable thing about Ginster is what he makes of the war. Tears roll down his face as a crowd of people amass at the main square as the war begins. He dislikes the völkisch appeals to unity that have seized the national discourse overnight, but he delights in military music and parades. On the first day of the war, Ginster finds himself in the Altstadt contemplating the illumination of a church façade. Nobody is paying proper attention to the quality of the light, he complains. When his friend Otto enlists, Ginster volunteers to do railway logistics for the Army. His petition to evade hardcore military service, which is ignored, proves to be merely the invitation to an absurdist pas de deux with the bureaucracy, which alternately recalls and then exempts him over the course of the war’s four years. Throughout, he displays a disarming naïveté about political developments in his country. “Never had Ginster been introduced to a folk,” Kracauer writes, “merely to individuals, single human beings.” War calls to mind teachers of frightful proportions who once upon a time belabored the history of conflicts and treaties and dates. “I don’t understand a thing about wars, just let me go,” Ginster screams back.

As it turns out, he will not have to live amid the constant shelling and trench rats, as Paul Bäumer did. Instead, Ginster spends his days shuttling between his family home and a small architectural firm, where he comes up with plans for leather and munitions factories. Caught between civilian and military society, Ginster perceives no division between the two. Everyday language takes on a belligerent character to “express the thing-character of human beings,” and his own gaze mutates accordingly. On the night before he reports for duty, Ginster—fussed over by his mother and his aunt—imagines himself as a “projectile shoved deep inside the barrel of a cannon and about to be fired off.” His aversion to joining up, juvenile and misanthropic, amounts to neither conscientious objection nor courageous resistance. His quiet riposte to the broad support for the war is that “a unity requiring wars defeated its own purpose.” Even more than disliking being told to kill other people, Ginster dislikes other people, or at least being lumped together with them against his will. He would perhaps have agreed with Robert Musil when the latter wrote that wars “do not appear like external epidemics, but through inner influences.” A society whose individuals are relentlessly pressured to prove their usefulness in peacetime has simply transferred that authority to commanding its youth to join up and, as Ginster’s uncle directs him to do, become “submerged in the collective.”

Not just figuratively, Ginster harbors a desire to vaporize into thin air. The daydream recurs regularly, functioning like a mantra or, paradoxically, an anchoring exercise: At the heart specialist’s office, he fancies himself “levitating, borne aloft on a faint odor of disinfectant”; at his boss’s presentation, he wishes to “flee into nonspace”; unlike men, he longs to “exist as a gas.” Once called up to serve, he ventures to shed as much bodily mass as he can, employing a stash of contraband cigars and Alsatian cigarettes to keep his hunger at bay. Toward the end of his service, we find him contemplating a meringue at a bakery in town. He enters a reverie, admiring its “little air pockets,” imagining how eating it might buoy him into the sky. Vacillating in the face of the pastry, he finally decides to abstain from the dessert; seconds later, he snatches it “to counter his decisiveness, which threatened to violate him.” As he steps out of the shop, he notices with alarm that the pastry has stimulated his appetite, hurrying back to the barracks at the risk that he might “turn into froth himself.” Does he want to be decisive, or does he want to eat the meringue? In a rare earnest plea, he confesses to a female acquaintance at one point, “Everybody knows how to live, I see how they go on living without me, I can’t find my way in. Walls always shove themselves in front of me, it’s necessary to be polite and go in disguise. Still, there is something to me.”

In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, the archetypal Decadent hero Jean des Esseintes leaves Paris for the countryside, where he lives in isolation and replaces nature with artifice, preferring paintings, perfumes, and literature to landscapes and life outdoors. He idolizes Mallarmé, who seeks “pleasure far from society, in the caprices of the mind and the visions of the brain.” Ginster shares this predilection for withdrawal, favoring the constructions of his mind over the regulations of reality. But unlike des Esseintes, whose megalomania drives him to reorder physical reality, Ginster imbues the object world with a fantastical agency through language.

With a protagonist uninterested in mastering his surroundings, Kracauer turns to extravagant metaphors, which can sprawl across paragraphs, and which burrow deeper and deeper into surreal dream logics. Ginster has tea with a family friend who has just lost her son in the war and immediately sets to work costuming her in his mind. The silent, grieving mother “stumbled from the flood into the inferno; everything in cinders,” her black dress “an impenetrable jungle with regions that had never been explored,” her black hair “shooting up luxuriantly.” In solitude, Ginster takes his profligacy further, defying the strictures of wartime thrift and expending his drafting materials lavishly. “It was impossible to keep the charcoal under control,” Kracauer writes; “it fell in flakes, loomed on the horizon as a storm cloud, and unfurled itself like a curtain. To spur it on until it stopped respecting any limits whatsoever was one of Ginster’s secret joys.” It is in the sheer materiality of the charcoal, its unadulterated form, that Ginster derives his greatest pleasure: It not only grows weary of its wartime commission but renounces representation. Objects, which are as dynamic and delinquent as human beings, can also enervate him. “Normally, after half an hour, they disengaged on their own; Ginster was never successful when he resorted to violence to effect the separation,” Kracauer explains, writing not of parental bickering or a lovers’ spat but of a tangled electric cord. “Complications worthy of old-fashioned novels.”

If these authorial flourishes seem excessive, there is also a necessary restraint built into the plot. Ginster doesn’t have the aesthete’s compulsion to reorder his private physical world according to his whims, to collect Renaissance paintings and Japanese lacquer boxes, to contrive intricate sexual setups. Both he and the subject of Kracauer’s second novel, Georg, published in 1934, belong to the petit bourgeoisie, taking rooms in boardinghouses with other white-collar workers, collecting paychecks for jobs they find tedious. Ginster’s mother presses him to increase his earnings, a particular kind of harassment reserved for college-educated children of the middle class who refuse to capitalize on their credentials. This hectoring annoys Ginster, but still, in spite of his fantasies, he remains rooted in his middle-class milieu, its rigorous social mores and anxious ambition.

Kracauer was fascinated with the occupations, lifestyles, and leisure activities of the Angestellte, the white-collar workers who were exploding in number during the Weimar era. In 1930, he published The Salaried Masses, a book-length “ethnological expedition” into the emergent class of office workers in Germany, which documented processes of rationalization and mechanization that had produced a “homelessness” in their lives. Despite the spiritual emptiness that Kracauer identified in his social class at this historical juncture, he did not try to escape it in his writings.

In the pages of the Frankfurter Zeitung, where he worked as a feuilleton editor for over a decade until the Nazis came to power in 1933, Kracauer argued that it was still more valuable to analyze vulgar, mass-produced cultural objects and phenomena than to “cultivate outdated noble sentiments in obsolete forms.” This reflected the profound influence that the sociologist Georg Simmel had on Kracauer, who as a student often attended his public lectures in Berlin on the relationship between everyday interactions and artifacts and the larger social order. From Simmel, Kracauer inherited the conviction that “inconspicuous surface-level expressions”—punch cards, shop displays, dance-troupe formations, German grammar—could disclose important truths about society’s structure. That same interpretive impulse would underlie his later film theory.

Viewed in the light of his journalistic career and his interests in social theory, Kracauer as a novelist resembles the modernist architect who dreams of reconfiguring social space while emphasizing its blankness. He possesses an unmistakably Decadent appetite for artifice—a way of seeing “the common things about us” through an “opera-glass,” as Arthur Symons first described Decadent literature in 1893—but one that is disciplined by a middle-class conscience and a sociological eye. Perhaps this is why Ernst Bloch referred to the “sober colorfulness” of his style: Kracauer’s formal experiments are simply content with intensifying the lives of surface-level things.

During his stint at the Frankfurter Zeitung, Kracauer became closely associated with the intellectual circle that would later coalesce into the Frankfurt School. Upon an introduction through family circles, Kracauer, who was 29 at the time, became an early mentor to Theodor Adorno, who was just 15. Before long, they devoted their Saturday afternoons to reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason together. For years, the two maintained an intimate correspondence. Around the same time, Kracauer also formed a close friendship with Walter Benjamin, whose essays he helped publish in the Frankfurter Zeitung. In Ginster, Kracauer’s commitment to aesthetic independence and his skepticism of mass culture prefigure the principles that Adorno and Benjamin would theorize in works such as Aesthetic Theory and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Kracauer inherited from the Decadents their “over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement,” in Symons’s phrase, but he applied that aesthetic to the tedium of the urban bourgeoisie: its daily bulletins, public addresses, and domestic routines.

Like many adherents of the Frankfurt School, Kracauer was politically unmoored during the Weimar years, rejecting the totalitarian impulses he saw in the political options arrayed before Europeans: Stalinism, centrist liberal democracy, and revanchist conservatism. Near the end of Ginster, crowds gather in the town again, this time as part of the November Revolution, to bring down the German Empire and demand an end to the war. “Citizens—,” “freedom—,” “long live the republic—”: Ginster’s mind glazes over as he catches these shards of a speech. Kaiser Wilhelm II would abdicate within days, and yet Ginster’s—and Kracauer’s—ambivalence toward the revolution was arguably vindicated: It failed to upend elite dominance over workers or to produce an enduring left-wing coalition.

In a scene in Georg set a decade later, the protagonist enters into a debate with pro-Soviet communists. He is willing to entertain the promise of collectivization, but he has one caveat: art. “Do they also insist on works of art being produced in collectives?” he asks. “Pardon me for saying so, but it’s my firm opinion that some achievements will always be reserved for exceptional individuals…. And besides, there is much which can only be discovered within oneself.”

Ever since North Korea suffered through the death of its first leader in 1994, a loss magnified by an economic collapse and a devastating famine, outside observers have likened the country to an airplane experiencing a serious malfunction. The major question they posed: In the end, would North Korea experience a soft landing or a catastrophic crash?

Perhaps a reformer would come along—say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of reunification with South Korea.

More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but North Korea’s worst-case scenarios might involve violent power struggles, the return of famine, and a free-for-all scramble for the country’s loose nukes. US analysts have gamed out the consequences of just such a hard landing—and so has the Pentagon with its OPLAN 5029—and they all add up to a tragedy not only for North Koreans and the region, but also potentially for the United States and the rest of the world.

The North Korean government has, however, defied such scenarios by somehow surviving, while rejecting reunification with the south and turning up its nose at conventional versions of reform. Despite additional challenges—a sustained Covid quarantine, several distinctly hostile governments in South Korea, and a flatlining economy—the regime has so far avoided collapse and, if anything, tightened its control over its population. For the time being at least, the North Korean plane evidently has no intention of landing, much less crashing.

Today, in an improbable plot twist, however, Donald Trump’s United States is starting to seem ever more like an aircraft in distress.

After all, the present pilot of Air America, exhibiting signs of psychosis or perhaps dementia, has begun to dismantle the cockpit under the delusion that it’s his to transform into a ballroom. The crew—and indeed much of the supporting infrastructure on the ground below—has been decimated by budget cuts. The airline itself is fast taking on debt. Many of the passengers are praying for a soft landing and hoping that, if the plane does touch down for a risky layover, they will get a new pilot.

But another fear lurks in the background. Given the state of the airplane—a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear—it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.

Those of us on board, gripping our armrests in terror, are asking ourselves one question above all else: Is it too late to avert catastrophe?

Trump’s Totalitarian Tendencies

North Korea has come closer than any country in the modern era to building a totalitarian state. Beginning with the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, its leadership has eliminated all oppositional politics, suppressed virtually all signs of civil society, and tolerated no freedom of the press, speech, or assembly. Nor is there any freedom of religion, unless you count the personality cult attached to the Kim family leadership, which is now in its third generation.

But all totalitarianism is aspirational. The Soviet Union had its dissidents and underground samizdat literature. The Confessing Church movement attempted faith-based resistance to the Nazis. Likewise, the North Korean government’s control over the population is not total, as can be measured by rising levels of private enterprise and covert enthusiasm for South Korean culture.

So, too, are Donald Trump’s totalitarian tendencies aspirational. He would like to achieve total control, but he’s hemmed in by institutional limits. Still, he prefers to bypass Congress with rule by executive decree. He has attempted to control the media, rein in the power of universities, and tilt the electoral playing field to benefit his party. He has aligned himself internationally not with democrats but with autocrats. He has had a particular fondness for authoritarian leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Javier Milei of Argentina who consolidated their power within democracies. But he has also gotten cozy with the likes of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who doesn’t bother at all with elections.

The most inexplicable friendship Trump developed while in office is certainly with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson. Having traded escalating threats during part of Trump’s first term in office, the two leaders grew closer after several in-person meetings and a raft of exchanged letters. “I was really being tough,” Trump explained in 2018. “And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really.”

Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites—an elected US leader and the North Korean dictator—is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control. Whether intentionally or not, Trump has applied some of the features of the Kim family playbook to his own governing style. In doing so, he has also damaged, perhaps irreparably, the very idea of America.

Different Beds, Same Dreams

One of the key elements of North Korean politics is the personality cult of the Kim family, which casts a long shadow over the country’s culture. Drawn in part from northern Korea’s earlier Christian heritage—through the development of a trinity of founding figures, the 10 commandments of Kimilsungism, and pervasive themes of sacrifice and redemption—that personality cult has generated so much fervor among many North Koreans that even defectors have spoken of their pride in founder Kim Il Sung and his ideology.

Trump, too, has tried to construct such a personality cult—by placing his name on public buildings (the Kennedy Center), putting his face on US coins (the semiquincentennial dollar), inserting his image in future passports, and planning a golden statue of himself at his presidential library that resembles one of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. So far, however, outside of the MAGA faithful, his cult seems to have generated little more than ridicule.

Another aspect of Pyongyang’s governance that probably attracts Trump is its overemphasis on the military. North Korea devotes 34 percent of its gross domestic product to military spending (compared to Russia at 6 percent and the United States at under 4 percent). Although it hasn’t launched any wars of its own for more than 75 years, Pyongyang has dispatched thousands of troops to help fight Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the 1990s, the government has spoken of a songun—military first—doctrine to justify the sacrifices made to maintain a huge standing army, a range of missiles, and a small but significant nuclear arsenal.

Similarly, the prevailing theme of Trump’s second term has been war and military spending. Despite his once-upon-a-time promises not to become involved in “forever wars,” particularly in the Middle East, Trump joined Israel this year in an attack on Iran, a conflict that cost over $11 billion in its first week alone. He has proposed an astonishing $1.5 trillion military budget, an increase of 50 percent over last year’s already bloated total, and that sum doesn’t even include the costs of the Iran War.

Then there’s Trump’s economic thinking, if you can call it that. He has repudiated the free-market orthodoxy of his fellow Republicans to embrace a form of economic nationalism: high tariff walls to reduce trade imbalances, a focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, and the repudiation of international rules of the road (like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) in order to drive a dagger into economic globalization. In such respects, Trump’s approach resembles North Korea’s path of import substitution and defiance of the international rule of law.

In North Korea’s case, such an economic strategy has been partly born of necessity, given the economic embargo imposed on it after the Korean War of the early 1950s. Trump, however, is steering the US economy into a tailspin without provocation. If you add together the costs associated with his kamikaze tariffs, the follow-on effects of the Iran War and boosts in military spending, the gutting of government programs investing in the economy, the watering down of environmental regulations, and reductions in government revenue because of tax cuts, Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated 1 million people.

But, you might point out, Wall Street is still on an upward ascent. The US economy is still growing, however modestly, and, while US food insecurity is rising, famine isn’t on the horizon. To return to the airplane analogy, the in-flight experience has become more uncomfortable for those who can’t afford business class, but that doesn’t mean a crash is imminent.

Or does it?

A Soft vs. Hard Landing

Whether he is consciously modeling his efforts on North Korea or not, Donald Trump wants to make an indelible imprint on the United States. He aspires to fundamentally change the demographics of the country, the structure of the economy, and the nature of its politics. To do that, he aims to ensure that his MAGA personality cult, his anti-government crusade, and his self-defeating economic policies outlive his own tenure in office. That will certainly require a substantial dismantling of democratic safeguards given that such policies don’t attract majority support.

In other words, much as Kim Il Sung destroyed anything that could have challenged his authority—the church, the intelligentsia, landowners, rival political factions—Trump has now launched a scorched-earth policy to ensure that his successors can’t undo his damage. If the Democrats regain Congress in November and even the White House in 2028, they will inherit an enormous bill for Trump-era damages (and count on a chorus of Republican voices improbably blaming them for the disaster).

Any incoming reformers will face an uphill battle to convince the public to restore funding for infrastructure, whether green or otherwise. And they will have to deal with a terrifying erosion of faith in government, resulting from the incompetence, lies, and malpractice of the Trump administration. At the international level, US allies will think twice about concluding any deals with this country, given the possibility of another political swing in subsequent elections.

Trump’s tactics, in other words, are designed to make a soft landing ever more difficult. An inveterate gambler, he is betting that his extreme approach will enable Air America to climb into the very stratosphere, even if he is far more likely to force an emergency landing.

Nightmare scenarios have long haunted American consciousness. The sheer size of the US debt— at nearly $40 trillion, it’s the highest absolute amount in the world—could put the country into receivership if the dollar slips from its status as the global currency. Default could tear apart an already polarized society. Such a hard landing could look like what analysts of North Korea have often predicted for that country.

But North Korea hasn’t collapsed. With its considerable resources, surely the United States, too, can avoid such a scenario.

True, no one is going to make any money at Polymarket predicting the imminent fall of the Kim regime. But North Korea is not exactly following a recipe for long-term success either. Even if it limps along for another decade or two, with leadership passing to Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, any country that follows its policies of personality cult, autarkic economic policies, massive corruption, military-first approaches, and ruthless suppression of dissent is not likely to prosper over the long term. Just look at how Vladimir Putin has steered Russia into a terrifying nosedive.

Substantial reform could head off such a scenario for the United States. If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whatever it’s called—not a Green New Deal, given the irrational resistance of a large section of the US electorate to anything “green” except greenbacks—such an American renewal plan would need to restructure the US economy to favor the bulk of American workers rather than the current generation of robber barons. Implemented with a much better promotional campaign—led perhaps by future Chief of Reconstruction (and now New York Mayor) Zohran Mamdani—it would link concrete benefits to identifiable government programs and services. It would offer a striking real-life illustration of your tax dollars at work.

Such a reform plan would have to restore trust in government by punishing corruption, enlisting the public as watchdogs, and taxing the super-wealthy into semi-submission. By shifting away from war and aggressive military spending, such a project of renewal would also have to work with partners overseas to promote policies of cooperative prosperity and sustainability in order to restore a measure of trust in US actions globally. Soft landings require soft power, leaving hard power to those determined to crash and burn.

The North Korean case is a reminder that awful policies may not themselves precipitate collapse. Trumpism will not go away simply because it is on the verge of winning multiple Darwin Awards for its counter-evolutionary policies. Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upwards, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction. Sheer inertia could keep Air America in the air—though with steadily deteriorating conditions on board (as in North Korea). Such a “MAGA ‘til we drop” option would not be much of an improvement over a hard landing.

In 2016, archconservative Michael Anton published a piece in the Claremont Review of Books arguing that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who had hijacked America. In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton imagined that Trump, aided by an energized electorate, could rush the cockpit—just like the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked on September 11, 2001—and save the country. (It was certainly an infelicitous analogy, given that Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.) Trump’s 2016 victory, however, turned Anton into a dark prophet and vaulted him into the subsequent administration, despite (or because of) the absurdities of his arguments.

In yet another stomach-churning reversal, Anton’s analogy has now finally become all too applicable. Trump has gained the cockpit not once but twice. Having failed to crash Air America the first time around, he seems determined to put his Flight 93 doctrine of heroic self-destruction into practice today. There is no guarantee that a hard landing can be avoided either now or after his departure from office. But this country, its egalitarian ideals, and its democratic traditions (if not much of its dismal history) are certainly worth fighting for.

We’re losing altitude fast. Elections approach.

Let’s roll.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it was creating a nearly $1.8 billion slush fund to compensate Trump supporters who have been “mistreated” by previous Democratic administrations. The fund is clearly an effort to offer a financial reward to January 6 insurrectionists—who have already been pardoned by Trump.

The program amounts to a white grievance fund paid for with money stolen from the public.

The fund was announced as part of a “deal” Trump made to dismiss his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. Trump had accused the IRS of illegally leaking his tax returns. The Trump administration seems to want people to report these two events as if they are linked—the DOJ has framed the slush fund as a way to “hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare”—but, in reality, they are connected only by the fact that they are both ways for Trump to try to steal money from the government.

The IRS lawsuit would have been thrown out of court if Trump had not dismissed the case. Trump controls the IRS and the Treasury Department. To the extent that the IRS did anything wrong (and the IRS didn’t do anything wrong), Trump’s case against it should have been moot, as he now oversees the agency. There cannot be a “case or controversy” for the courts to adjudicate when one party controls both sides of the litigation. “Trump v. Trump” is not a case. Trump was just trying to extort the government he now runs for $10 billion.

As for the DOJ slush fund, one way to look at it is that Trump is effectively setting up a mechanism where taxpayers have to pay for him to funnel money to his own private army. The people who participated in the January 6 insurrection are literal criminals who acted on Trump’s behalf and were then pardoned by him—only to now be offered taxpayers dollars for their violent efforts. It’s… insane.

Trump socket puppet and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche says that the purpose of the fund is to “make right the wrongs that were previously done” because of the “weaponization” of the Justice Department under previous administrations. First of all: It is not “weaponization” of the DOJ to prosecute the criminals who attacked the Capitol; it is the application of criminal laws. I will stipulate that the white people who attacked the Capitol perhaps did not think that laws should be applied to them, but their expectation of privilege doesn’t change the character of what the Justice Department did when prosecuting their offenses.

Moreover, the Justice Department has never been in the business of handing out free money to “make right” the wrongs of the past. If they suddenly are, boy, do I have some claims to make on behalf of the descendants of enslaved Americans.

Because that’s what this fund is: It’s a reparations fund, but only for white people. It is precisely what the reparations movement has been asking for, only the Trump administration wants to extend monetary apologies to white people who did violence on behalf of Trump.

Taking taxpayer dollars to do this—dollars that include taxes paid by Black people living in this country—well, it all reminds me of the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862. This law, which predated the Emancipation Proclamation, freed all slaves held in Washington, DC, but it did not compensate them—it compensated the slaveholders who “lost” their slaves. Slaveholders who remained loyal to the Union were paid $300 per emancipated person by the federal government.

Obviously, there are many other historical examples of white people demanding government money for their grievances (see: France demanding that Haiti pay an “independence debt” for winning its freedom). Even the Supreme Court’s decision knocking down Trump’s tariffs, which I support, hinges on the idea that (largely white) business owners who paid Trump’s illegal tariffs should be compensated, while the multiracial consumers who have been paying the price of those tariffs at the checkout counter will get nothing. The through line is that when the government does something “bad” to powerful white people, those white people expect to be compensated by the government in real money for their troubles.

Representatives Joe Neguse and Jamie Raskin, both Democrats, have both indicated that they will sue to stop the white grievance reparations fund, but given the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court, we have to assume that Trump will get his way. But: If the Supreme Court decides it wants to create this precedent, then progressives and the left should use it too.

The next Democratic president (if we are allowed to have a Democratic president in my lifetime) should create a slush fund to compensate victims of Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional immigration tactics. Immigrants who have been illegally detained should be able to get money from the government; citizens who have been harassed or brutalized by ICE should be able to get monetary apologies; and families of people who have been murdered by ICE should also receive compensation directly from the public till. And it should cost the government billions.

Trump’s white grievance payments literally set the model for how we should compensate the victims of Trump’s atrocities. Oh, and reparations. After this, I never want to hear white Republicans say boo about reparations for Black people ever again. I never want to hear Democrats hem and haw and deflect on the issue. Even Trump is in favor of reparations! He just wants to give them to white people still pissed off that they can’t own slaves anymore.