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

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

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

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

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

Hello Andrew,

Thank you for contacting us.

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

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

Keep the faith ///

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the last few years, The Nation has grown our interesting and expansive audio content through podcast programming that by turns informs, infuriates, and surprises our listeners. This includes weekly shows Start Making Sense, with Jon Wiener; Edge of Sports, with Dave Zirin; The Time of Monsters, with Jeet Heer; Tech Won’t Save Us, with Paris Marx; and American Prestige, with Daniel Bessner and Derek Davison. We’ve also produced limited series on everything from law to economic insecurity to politics and climate including, most recently, A People’s Climate, with Shilpi Chhotray—produced in partnership with CounterStream Media and recently nominated for a prestigious Webby Award in the category of Best Show: Sustainability & Environment! Together, Nation podcasts offer a unique perspective with an ear to the stories you won’t hear anywhere else.

For interview requests or further information, please see contact information above. Fighting Fascism is produced by Nik Damants.

ABOUT: Aaron Regunberg (@AaronRegunberg) is a cohost of the Fighting Fascism podcast as well as a climate lawyer, contributing editor at The New Republic, and former Rhode Island state representative.

Matt DaSilva (@mattydasilva) is a cohost of the Fighting Fascism podcast and an actor and writer based in Queens, New York. He’s appeared in plays and musicals across the country; recent credits include the world premiere of the new musical Huzzah! and the Heathers Deluxe Edition cast recording. In addition to his acting career, Matt has worked in progressive politics, organized labor, and climate activism.

Jonathan Smucker (@jonathansmucker) is a cohost of the Fighting Fascism podcast as well as cofounder and executive director of Popular Comms, a cofounder of Pennsylvania Stands Up, and the author of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals. He has worked for over 25 years as a political organizer, campaigner, and strategist, and has trained thousands of organizers and social movement participants.

Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has chronicled the breadth and depth of political and cultural life, from the debut of the telegraph to the rise of Twitter, serving as a critical, independent, and progressive voice in American journalism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bad and the Ugly

• A week ago, Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh over his approval of racial profiling. Sotomayor quite pointedly suggested that Kavanaugh lacked any real-world experience with the kinds of working-class Latinos who are now being rounded up by ICE as part of racist Kavanaugh Stops. But this week, she apologized to Kavanaugh. Why!? She wasn’t wrong. I am so sick of these people pretending that they all must be friendly and respectful when the Republican justices are out there urging straight-up racism.
• Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the Supreme Court’s use of the emergency docket during a speech at Yale Law School. She’s been pretty willing to criticize her fellow justices in public. I find this refreshing. Never apologize to these people, Justice Jackson. Never let their evil slide because of a misplaced sense of decorum. Never become one of them.
• Justice Clarence Thomas slammed “progressivism” in a speech at the University of Texas Austin Law School. He said, “Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government.” First of all, the Declaration of Independence is not our “form of government”; the Constitution is. The Declaration led to the Articles of Confederation, a form of government so unworkable that the people who wrote it asked for a do-over after just seven years. Second, the basic premise of the Declaration is that rich white men cannot be truly free if the king doesn’t listen to them, and nobody other than rich white men should be involved in the conversation. Lastly, “progressivism” is responsible for innovative legal concepts such as “what if we didn’t have little kids working in factories,” and “lead seems bad,” so I think whatever it’s replacing is probably a net gain for society.
• More than 70 organizations are trying to stop Meta from putting facial recognition eyeglasses on the market, warning that the technology will help arm sexual predators. If only Meta could be doused in the cleansing fire of progressivism.
• This article in Slate argues that liberals on BlueSky are the only people who haven’t gotten over Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo. I can confirm that. As a liberal on BlueSky, I have not gotten over Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo. I am comfortable being “out of touch,” if being in-touch requires me to get over Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo. When Platner turns into John Fetterman with a Nazi tattoo, I will be the guy saying, “All of this could have been avoided by not getting over Graham Platner’s Nazi tattoo.”

Inspired Takes

• In 452, Pope Leo I faced down Attila the Hun, unarmed, and convinced him to turn back from Italy and spare the eternal city of Rome. (History note: In addition to his fancy hat, Leo also benefited from a literal plague ravishing Attila’s army and an advancing Eastern Roman army threatening to cut off Attila’s supply lines). In 2026, Pope Leo XIV is facing down Orange the Hun, unarmed, and convincing him not to “do a Red Cross” or whatever, because, you know, claiming to be the second coming of Jesus is a literal sign of the Antichrist. In this piece here, The Nation’s Joan Walsh explains Trump’s bizarre and ill-fated feud with the pope.
• I want you to read this story in The Nation from Will Meyer about Ross Douthat. (Full disclosure: I am biased. I knew Douthat, a little, in college. A colleague once told me that the way white people feel about affirmative action is the way I feel about Ross Douthat. And… I got it.)

Worst Argument of the Week

Eric Swalwell dropped out of the California gubernatorial primary and resigned from Congress amid a slew of sexual assault allegations. During the brief period between the allegations dropping and Swalwell dropping out, I saw a number of posts on social media, from liberals, pointing out that Republicans defend their stars even in the face of sexual assault allegations, while Democrats are eager to throw their stars overboard at the slightest hint of sexual misconduct.

Yes. And? Is there some kind of problem with that? I am willing to stipulate that Republicans will defend politicians who have “merely” been accused of sexual assault. Republicans are also willing to defend politicians who have been judged to have committed sexual assault. They are also willing to defend Nazis, white supremacists, and bigots of all kinds. They’re willing to defend war criminals, financial criminals, and literally any cop or wannabe cop who shoots an unarmed Black person.

I do not take my cues on which alleged crimes should or should not be overlooked based on the moral compass of the Republican fucking Party.

The difference between me and a rank-and-file Republican voter is not just that I’m a superior human being, although I am. The difference is that I never believe that there is only one person who can do a good job of being in a position of public trust. I think there are many, many people who can do a good job in Congress. I think there are many people who can make a good governor. I think there are far, far more people who can competently be president of the United States than there are people who can fly a spaceship or play quarterback in the NFL. (And the spaceship driver and football chucker don’t require me to bless them with my personal stamp of approval to do their job.)

If one politician is credibly accused of rape, we can always find another guy. Or, you know, not to blow your mind here, but we could even find a woman to do the job.

Eric Swalwell will have the opportunity to defend himself through all legal means, and he will be well-funded when he does it. If he is acquitted once all the facts are laid out, I’m sure he’ll feel no hesitation about asking the public to place their trust in him once more. People can decide then what to do about his public career. In the meantime, there are plenty of people who have not been accused of sexual assault by multiple women who are also more than capable of being the governor of California.

What I Wrote

All print for me this week. Also, my kid got Covid. It was the first time either of my children had gotten it, and I was pretty freaked out for a bit. I hadn’t gotten the memo that Covid was just a thing that we’ve all decided to live with. I went straight into 2020 mode and everybody else was like, “What’s… wrong with you?” Anyway, point is, I think I’m pretty clearly entering my “In my day, we kept children in isolation for 10 days when they got sick, and gas cost under $10 a gallon, and people went on dates with real people instead of AI-powered fleshbots who serve you an ad before dessert” villain arc.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

This week, Donald Trump had McDonalds delivered to the Oval Office via Door Dash. He posed for a picture with the delivery person, a woman named Sharon Simmons, who was wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words “Door Dash Grandma.” Simmons, 58, later told Fox News that Trump’s “No Tax on Tips” policy helped her pay for medical treatments for her husband, who has cancer.

Every. Single. Thing about this story makes me incandescently angry. Every single aspect fills me with rage. Let’s get the easy stuff out of the way:

• A 79-year-old man who has access to personal chefs and the finest ingredients in the country but still eats McDonalds is not “relatable” to me. He’s not “salt of the earth.” He’s just cheap.
• The picture he took with the woman reminded me that Trump has plastered the words “The Oval Office,” painted in yellow or “pee” or whatever color Trump thinks gold is, outside the Oval Office, as if he can’t remember what room it is without proper signage.
• Door Dash does not deliver to the door to the Oval Office. Door Dash cannot get past the doorman in your apartment building, much less the Secret Service. Door Dash admitted that the whole thing was a publicity stunt organized by the White House to highlight the year since the passage of the No Tax on Tips provision.
• Sharon Simmons is not a Door Dash worker from DC. Black people work Door Dash in DC. Simmons was flown in from Arkansas to participate in this farce.
• Simmons is not even some random Trump supporter from Arkansas. She was an advocate for the No Tax on Tips provision and even gave congressional testimony on the issue. She was an activist for the bill.

All of these facts made me rage. But the thing that made me truly apoplectic was Simmons’s line crediting No Tax on Tips for helping her earn an additional $11,000, which she says helps her afford her husband’s cancer treatments. She told Fox she wanted to thank the president for that. Fox, it’s worth noting, did not ask her how much Trump’s gas prices are cutting into those savings. Or why her healthcare costs so much, or where Trump’s healthcare plan is, or how much funding has been cut from cancer research in the name of eliminating DEI.

In a reasonable country, the president would be thanked for providing some form of [Samuel L. Jackson voice] universal-mutherfuckin’-health care, not thanked for tipping on an order of Big Macs. The idea that this woman should be thankful to her government for tips, for functional scraps, while she shoulders the burden of ruinously expensive healthcare without the government’s care or concern is simply maddening.

Indeed, the idea that any 58-year-old grandma needs the gig economy to offset healthcare bills is an indictment of our entire society. Like, how is it possibly okay that grandmas have to deliver quarter-pounders to afford chemotherapy for their husbands? Could our government, you know, HELP this woman, and the millions and millions of people like her, instead of turning her wage-slave exploitation into a fucking photo opportunity?

The No Tax on Tips stunt should be seen as an embarrassment for the entire country. It’s embarrassing that the president has super-glued room names outside his office. It’s embarrassing that so many people must rely on the gig economy to earn a living. It’s embarrassing we have 58-year-old grandmas out there participating in that economy to afford healthcare. It’s embarrassing that the government thinks “Door Dash Grandma” is a helpful photo op about the state of the economy in an election year. It’s embarrassing that the president has evidently never tried Shake Shack, and it’s even more embarrassing if he has.

I only hope that when future history textbooks start their section on “The Decline and Fall of the American Hegemony,” they use the photo from this event.

***

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

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

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

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

What the Law Says

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

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

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

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

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

According to Iran’s critics, it is a blatant violation of the “freedom of navigation” for Iran to regulate passage through the Strait, including through its own territorial waters. This argument is based on provisions of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Under UNCLOS, international straits, like the Strait of Hormuz, are governed by a “free navigation” regime known as “transit passage.” This regime gives coastal states very limited regulatory rights and obligates them not to “impede” ships and aircraft passing through international straits. If Iran were a party to UNCLOS, it would be bound by this regime, and its regulatory actions in the Strait of Hormuz would likely be unlawful. But Iran is not a party to UNCLOS; nor, for that matter, is the US. Under international law, states are, by and large, bound only by treaties they’ve both signed and ratified; a state’s failure to abide by an unratified treaty is not legally controversial. While Iran signed UNCLOS in 1982, it has not ratified the treaty specifically because it does not accept the transit passage rule. It expressed objections to this regime during the negotiation of UNCLOS as well as when it signed the treaty. It has continued to object to the transit passage rule ever since.

While Iran could be legally obligated to abide by the transit passage rule for other reasons, none of those apply here. One of those grounds is “customary international law,” another source of international law that binds all states in ways that treaties do not. Though some argue that transit passage is customary law, others disagree. Even if the naysayers are wrong, Iran is considered a “persistent objector” to the transit passage rule, meaning it cannot be required to abide by it even as a matter of customary law. Alternatively, one might argue that, as a signatory to UNCLOS, Iran must abide by transit passage as part of its obligation to uphold the “object and purpose” of the treaty even before it has been ratified. Even if this were true, after more than 40 years of failing to ratify UNLCOS, Iran has arguably made its intention not to become a party to the treaty clear, freeing itself of this obligation as well.

For these reasons, a reasonable case can be made that Iran is not subject to UNCLOS’s free navigation regime in international straits and, instead, is subject to a different, more permissive, and older regime known as “innocent passage.” Under innocent passage, coastal states, like Iran, can take measures within their territorial waters, including waters that lie in international straits, to address certain kinds of issues, including security-related concerns. Innocent passage also allows states to charge fees for ships passing through their territorial waters as long as those fees are for “specific services rendered to the ship” and are levied in a nondiscriminatory manner.

Putting all this together, under innocent passage, Iran can conceivably refuse to allow certain ships through the Strait because of threats to its security. It can also levy fees against vessels to which it provides specific services—for example, helping to guide them through the Strait or providing other safety-related assistance. In this regard, Iran could reasonably claim it has provided such services to transiting ships over the last few weeks, given the dangers involved in passing through the Strait during the ongoing armed conflict.

There can certainly be debate about whether this is actually what the Iranian fee system is designed to do or whether it is simply charging ships for transiting through the Strait, which is generally forbidden. The Iranian parliament is reportedly considering legislation that would formalize this regulatory regime, including the fee system, as a matter of domestic law. It is unclear, as of yet, what the basis for this system will be or whether it will comply with the requirements of innocent passage.

Some international law scholars have similarly concluded that Iran can conceivably regulate passage through the Strait of Hormuz, including charging fees. Others disagree with that assessment. The point is that, in contrast to the US/Israeli war, which has no valid legal basis, there can be such disagreement on this issue. Iran is not obviously or clearly forbidden from regulating passage through the Strait. Indeed, it has a credible and reasonable international legal argument for doing so.

Imperial Weaponization of International Law

By presenting a black-and-white view of Iran’s legal obligations and accusing it of taking “the world’s economy hostage” and threatening “international peace and security” through its regulation of the Strait, numerous states have made it appear as if Iran—rather than the United States and Israel—has committed one of the worst crimes known to humankind. The suggestion would be laughable if the consequences were not so grave.

This is how international law is weaponized to marginalize and delegitimize Global South countries while empowering and legitimizing the unlawful actions of Western states and their allies. This is how international law has been used by imperial powers and their proxies to strip other states of their sovereignty when they threaten or resist the prerogatives of more powerful countries. This is how international law has, in fact, operated for much of its modern history—as a cudgel of the “strong” against the “weak.”

Centuries ago, international law scholars sought to justify imperial plunder by arguing that Western empires could conquer and dominate native people who failed to respect free trade and travel. During the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, Western powers used international law to claim an entitlement to “protect” minority populations in certain states—particularly Christian populations in Muslim states—by intervening in the domestic affairs of those countries. The League of Nations—the predecessor to the UN—embraced the right of self-determination of people, but only for those in Central and Eastern Europe. Considering them unprepared for the responsibilities of self-government, it largely withheld the right from groups in Asia and Africa who remained under colonial rule. More recently, Israel and the United States have exploited ambiguities in international humanitarian law—which governs the conduct of war—in order to systematically target civilians and civilian objectives that should otherwise be protected from deliberate attack. Israel has been a particularly aggressive leader in the weaponization of these laws and has tried to use them to legitimize its genocide of the Palestinian people.

Even the international law notion of “freedom of the sea,” which is being invoked against Iran, is a byproduct of imperial interests. It was established in the 18th century by a handful of Western states to ensure they could transit throughout the globe, unimpeded, to engage in trade as well as to conquer and exploit the resources of people and territories far from their shores.

In insisting that Iran’s regulation of the Strait of Hormuz clearly and undeniably violates international law, Western and non-Western states and commentators alike have reinforced this troubling history. Indeed, for many, especially in the West and Arab world, the goal is not simply to ensure the Strait is open and free to all. The goal is also to make it harder for Iran to escape crippling economic sanctions—mostly instituted unilaterally by the United States—by generating income from the Strait. Because if Iran remains under sanctions, it will be weak and disempowered, unable to either satisfy the needs of its population or threaten the power of the United States, Israel, or Arab Gulf countries.

Reasonable minds can disagree over whether Iran has a legal right to regulate the Strait of Hormuz. There can be no debate, however, about the blatant illegality of the US/Israel war or the current US blockade against Iran. By claiming clarity for the former while failing to meaningfully condemn the latter, the international community has effectively drawn on and reinforced the legacy of imperial international law-making. Most of the world—which stands to lose from this unbalanced double-dealing in the long term—should not accept this state of affairs. They should, instead, actively and loudly resist it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And as Trump’s own governing agenda careens into quasi-apocalyptic global confrontations and fruitless bids to reclaim momentum in his fracturing coalition, Trump needs to recur to the dominant image of himself as national savior—though at this point it’s likely a maneuver that reassures him more than an increasingly restive and disaffected evangelical following. And even a raging narcissist like Trump has to know by now that he can’t afford to aggrandize himself at the expense of the evangelical army now amassed behind him; just two days after he was forced to remove his Trump-as-Jesus post, he launched a new Truth Social salvo depicting him enclosed in Jesus’ embrace. Liberal commentators greeted this as another detour into unhinged blasphemy, but in terms of MAGA-evangelical iconography, it announced a return to the fold; the post Trump was recirculating asked “doesn’t it seem, with all these satanic, demonic, child-sacrificing monsters being exposed…God might be playing the Trump card?” Trump’s own commentary was also clearly meant to signal that he was back in harness with the pandering culture-war rhetoric his followers demanded: “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!” Franklin Graham, the MAGAfied son of the 20th-century pastor to power Billy Graham, promptly picked up on the cue, declaring that the follow-up image simply conveyed that “we all need to be listening to Jesus”—while also, for good measure, dismissing the original furor over the Jesus post as “a lot to do about nothing.”

What secular liberals who read all of Trump’s religious pronouncements as unhinged hubris don’t understand is that such overtures, nakedly desperate and craven though they are, actually work. They reinscribe the image of Trump, the longtime sex-pest crony of Jeffrey Epstein, as the heroic scourge of “satanic, demonic, child-sacrificing monsters.” They reassure grievance-addicted believers that Trump is not only one of them but the foreordained agent of their deliverance—a righteous warrior who is poised to stage the ultimate act of divine retribution by waging an end-time holy war in Iran. Most of all, they posit Trump’s movement as the vanguard force that will visit richly earned eternal suffering on the far-flung defilers of just scriptural rule; that is the point at which the casually cruel Trump we recognize in Andrew Harnick’s photo achieves a kind of postmodern transubstantiation, and merges indistinguishably with the evangelically sanctioned image of Trump as Jesus on a tank. After all, as the Gospel of Matthew said, Jesus preached faith in a God for whom all things are possible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At Place Vertu, they were joined by more than 1,000 fellow Montrealers fighting for the same cause: denouncing federal and provincial investments in GardaWorld that have redirected Canadian taxpayer money to indirectly fund US President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Since Carney became prime minister of Canada last year, his government has awarded over $100 million worth of contracts to GardaWorld.

“Today, we are not only looking south—we are looking home,” an organizer from Indivisible Quebec announced to the crowd. “If Quebec says that it believes in human rights, if Canada says it stands for the rule of law, then our public dollars must reflect those values. We cannot denounce abuse abroad while subsidizing corporations that profit from it.” 

Although Canadian students have long mobilized around domestic and international issues, national advocacy at-large has been on the rise since Trump’s reelection in 2024. Following the US president’s bellicose proposal to make Canada the 51st state and his imposition of tariffs on Canadian products, major cities such as Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, and Montreal  have organized “No Tyrants” and Hands Off!” demonstrations against Trump’s abuses domestically and abroad. These follow a series of “Hands Off!” demonstrations in early 2025 after Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian products and proposed making Canada the 51st state, inciting a widespread nationalist movement against American threats to their sovereignty. ICE violence in 2026, especially in Minneapolis, sparked further protests. 

However, despite being galvanized by ICE atrocities to the south, activists would not characterize their protests as purely an offshoot of American mobilization. “I think it’s a mistake to talk about an anti-ICE movement in Canada,” said Mary, an activist with the migrant justice advocacy group Solidarity Across Borders. 

She claims that anti-ICE protests are inseparable from the battle already being waged against Canada’s own immigration enforcement officials, the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Like ICE, CBSA engages in similar practices, primarily at its many detention centers scattered across the country. When the erection of a new migrant detention facility in Quebec was announced in 2019, advocacy organizations like Ni Frontières, Ni Prisons were quick to enter legal retaliation against companies aiding construction.   

Eventually, the CBSA Laval Immigration Holding Centre began operations. This facility is one of many reported by Human Rights Watch in 2021 for its mistreatment and abuse towards noncriminal detainees, including forcing them to endure time in maximum security jails, solitary confinement, and extended stay with no determined release date. It is at these facilities that CBSA is most often in action, and Solidarity Across Borders has been vocal in highlighting this. As the only major law enforcement agency without civilian oversight bodies, CBSA has freely exercised its powers of arrest, detention, and search and seizure. Though the CBSA’s mistreatment of detainees is not new, it has been massively overshadowed in the broader discussion of immigration enforcement.    

“To us, it does not make sense to understand the United States and Canada as two separate entities. There is an increasingly integrated border system,” Mary continued. Canadian university campuses have been a playing field for bringing visibility to local and national struggles against the CBSA. As the McGill student expressed, “these systems of detention affect so many people, and I think there are a lot of Canadian students who rightly recognize that the way the US is acting is threatening for us all.” Every individual whom The Nation spoke with agreed that the country needs to redirect its attention towards the crisis that is being witnessed domestically. 

The recent passing of Bill C-12 on March 26, a Canadian federal law that will limit the ability to seek refugee protection in Canada and enable mass cancellations of immigration documents and applications, is the next immediate fight. 

“I think this is where the focus needs to be, not on what’s happening south of the border,” Mary urges. The Canadian public needs to be asking these pressing questions: “Why was C-12 able to pass? Why is Canada claiming that the US is a safe country? Why is the Quebec government and Canadian government investing massively in GardaWorld when clearly it’s supporting these excessive images of violence?” 

While GardaWorld has been a target of public scrutiny, it is far from the only Canadian-based company in bed with ICE. IRG Global Emergency Management (a US offshoot of Toronto-headquartered Access Restoration Services Ltd.), Hootsuite, and Thomson Reuters, have collaborated with the agency to help staff detention facilities, provide surveillance services, give access to law enforcement database subscriptions, and even supply ICE agents with weaponry such as armored vehicles. 

What we are seeing with ICE has never been just an American issue. The US-Canada border cannot function without Canadian compliance. For as long as both countries have been around, these immigration systems have been intimately intertwined. Canada often celebrates itself for being in staunch defense of human rights and democracy, but this is a far cry from the truth. It appears just now that the world is awakening to the fact that Canada, too, is participating in America’s violent crusade against immigrants. 

For McGill students, GardaWorld security presence on campus is a visual reminder of ICE’s omnipresence. While the anti-GardaWorld protest is evidence of student action against ICE and the CBSA, Mary notes that current mobilization is not nearly enough. “The kind of models of solidarity that we saw in Minneapolis are very inspiring,” Mary said. “That is what we need to be building here now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Perfect Failure”

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

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

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

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

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

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

• The CIA’s flimsy cover story for the preliminary air strike—that a Cuban air force pilot had defected and dropped bombs on Cuban planes—was exposed by the press within hours, but not before Ambassador Adlai Stevenson had presented that mendacious argument to the UN General Assembly, embarrassing the United States before the world community.

• Plausible denial of what was supposed to be a covert operation became, as the CIA itself later admitted, “a pathetic illusion.” Five months before the invasion, The Nation became the first US media outlet to report that the CIA was training an exile force in Guatemala to invade Cuba.

• The CIA-led paramilitary force was defeated within 72 hours by Castro’s much larger military and militia.

• The US goal of preventing Soviet influence in Cuba completely backfired. In the middle of the invasion, Castro declared Cuba a socialist state and sought the protection of the Soviet Union in the face of US aggression. Subsequently, Cuba signed a defense pact with the USSR, which led to Khrushchev’s decision to install nuclear missiles on the island, resulting in the October 1962 missile crisis, when the world came closest to atomic Armageddon.

Kennedy called the defeat at the Bay of Pigs “the worst experience of my life.” Only in office 12 weeks, the failed operation became a personal embarrassment in front of the entire world for his young presidency. At his first post-invasion press conference, Kennedy famously observed, “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” conceding, “I am the responsible officer of the government.”

Moreover, the invasion dealt a harsh blow to US international credibility. The Kennedy administration was caught red-handed lying to the world community about its role in an unprovoked attack on a small Caribbean nation. “Acute shock and disillusion” dominated the reaction in Western Europe, as White House aide Arthur Schlesinger (who had opposed the invasion) reported back to Kennedy. It was not the failure of the operation but the decision to invade that bothered European leaders. “Why was Cuba such a threat to you?” they asked. “Why couldn’t you live with Cuba, as the USSR lives with Turkey and Finland?” US allies, as Kennedy would later acknowledge, “think we are a little demented on Cuba.”

David vs. Goliath

Hundreds of Cubans were killed or injured in the US attack, which also cost the lives of over 100 members of the exile force, Brigade 2506. But for Cuba, the outcome of the battle was a historic victory of almost biblical proportions. In the eyes of the world, particularly the Third World, Castro’s fledgling revolution had stood up to the Colossus of the North—like a David vs. Goliath. At home and abroad, Castro emerged as a nationalist leader of the anti-imperialist movement that expanded throughout the 1960s.

In a post-invasion, secret meeting between Che Guevara and White House aide Richard Goodwin, Che “wanted to thank us for the invasion,” according to a memorandum of their conversation provided to President Kennedy. “It had been a great political victory for them, enabled them to consolidate, and transformed them from an aggrieved little country into an equal.”

That meeting remains a relevant addendum to the Bay of Pigs history. In the aftermath of what was at the time the most flagrant act of US aggression against Cuba, Fidel Castro’s government sought what Che called “a modus vivendi” with the United States. His message for President Kennedy was that Cuba was ready and willing to address Washington’s concerns through a diplomatic dialogue, with one exception: Cuba “could discuss no formula that would mean giving up the type of society to which they were dedicated.”

Sixty-five years later, that continues to be Cuba’s position as the post-Castro government of Miguel Diaz-Canel faces the most dangerous threat of US military action since the Bay of Pigs. The world has changed considerably since Cuba’s victorious defiance of US military might in April 1961. Under Trump, there is no lip service to international law or the sovereign rights of nations. There is only the unrestricted, unconstrained exercise of surgical force to crush smaller nations into submission. But the history of Playa Giron still remains immediately relevant.

“A wise man once said, ‘an error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it,’” President Kennedy observed at his press conference after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. “There were,” he noted, “sobering lessons” to be learned. On this dramatic anniversary of costly US aggression against Cuba, there is still time for Donald Trump to learn them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I drove home, I wondered to myself why I hadn’t offered at least some help. I’m making decent money; the really hard-knock days of being a single mom with a little kid are behind me. I have no reason to think the woman wasn’t in need; the way she lowered her voice to almost a whisper let me know she was uncomfortable and, sadly, ashamed. But the truth is, I was thinking about the canaries all around me.

I live in a neighborhood of work trucks, double shifts, and roofs that need repair. I’ve lived here for a long time. I know poverty personally and I see it every day, all the time—the man living in an RV in front of my neighbor’s house, the families queued up at the food distribution. People here know how to navigate the ups and downs of an economy not made for us.

But right now, the feeling is different. It is as if we can feel something coming toward us, like the way you can feel the pressure change before a thunderstorm. We can feel some hardship rolling our way, something more than the usual, a blow that will be harder than the last, more than we are used to.

Poor and working-class places like this are always where you see the shadows move first; we know things long before other people do.

It’s been a long time since things were “affordable” here. A lot of us have never really been able to afford much; rent has been eating up more than half my neighbor’s paychecks for a decade now. Half the washing machines at the local laundromat don’t work and no one is in a rush to repair them. Healthy food is mostly out of reach; my ability to buy things like blueberries and raspberries for my family is still a novelty. The utter shock of our Duke Power bills this month set off dozens of comments in our neighborhood Facebook group, but as the dad up the road said to me: “I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s a $400 light bill or a $100 light bill. I can’t pay either and it will get cut off the same.”

So, while it’s nice that politicians are finally talking about the “affordability crisis,” working folks are wondering: Where have you been?

In my work, I talk to working-class people all over the country, every day. We see things—not just prices—as they begin to bubble. We feel things as they begin to blow. We have both the intellect and vantage point to see where we are fraying as a nation, and to understand, long before Congress or the president, what is coming our way.

Yet still the president talks about the Dow, like he’s taking our blood pressure while we are bleeding out. It’s the mysterious language of the wealthy, this talk of stocks and percentages, when our power is shut off at home. And his opposition meekly counters with “affordability” like it’s a state of being with no cause, like there isn’t someone going to the bank laughing, like we haven’t always been left counting out our change.

Working people see what’s coming: Prices will keep going up, programs that could ease the pain keep being shut down, opportunities continue to dry up, and the number of grandmas needing help with their groceries continue to climb. It will happen here first, then everywhere. I’m not proud to say it, but that’s why I think I didn’t help the woman in the grocery store: I’m a single mom trying to support my kid going to college and I’m retreating inwards, protecting my own, because it’s clear that people in power don’t—can’t—see what we see. But as long as they hold the power and they make the decisions, then the rest of us—the most of us—are their canaries in the coal mine.

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

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

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

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

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

The answer to those questions is no.

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

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

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

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

The problem, of course, is that this is a fantasy for babies and the liberal consultancy-turned-influencer class (a frequent overlap). Tucker Carlson hasn’t suddenly grown a morally fortified spine, and Candace Owens isn’t “shredding” the president out of any sense of the common good. Their complaints, such as they are, are about Trump’s challenges in enacting a MAGA agenda they wholeheartedly endorse. That is to say, their criticism of Trump’s wartime conduct is fundamentally constructive, offered in the hopes of seeing the agenda that drew them to Trump in the first place fulfilled. They want the war to end not because it is fundamentally immoral, but because they see its execution as having become detrimental to their broader, ultranationalist cause.

These are professional colonizers of the attention economy successfully infiltrating spaces well past the ossified limits of their usual X.com output. They are not your allies. They are parasites of opportunity, leaping at a dovetailing series of interests wherein their racially motivated projects of ultranational ethno-religious homogeny can be sublimated under a more palatable anti-war umbrella.

There is a danger here, beyond that of seriously annoying people (me) every time Tucker’s smirking mug gets shoved into my timeline. These liberal media facilitators—people and groups with whom I am supposed to feel some sense of common cause—are only cutting themselves and their ostensible positions of authority off at the knees.

By repeatedly framing Carlson’s anti-war broadcasts as laudatory and worth watching, the implication is that people on the left should look rightward for inspiration. Compare the framing for Pod Save America’s recent interview with leftist streamer Hasan Piker, which Favreau shared on Bluesky by threading the episode after quoting Ezra Klein’s recent assertion that “conversation is not a reward to be bestowed upon those with whom we agree.”

Liberal audiences are, in essence, being told that conservative anti-war rhetoric riddled with bad-faith propaganda and fueled partially by inward-facing, right-wing score-settling is as legitimate and worthwhile as anything from the left—including, by extrapolation, the rest of the messaging coming from the same blue-tinged media figures sharing Carlson in the first place.

The fractures exposed by Carlson and company on the right are political pressure points to be exploited, yes, but that’s a far cry from uncritically lifting proponents of the Great Replacement theory and other flavors of white nationalism as voices worthy of consideration per se. Creating a false parity between sincere anti-war sentiment and right-wing opportunism serves to diminish sincere voices from the left. And for what? Increased follower counts? More engagement on Bluesky and Threads? There’s a trade-off happening here, but it’s a lopsided one.

Tucker Carlson is many things. He’s a bigot and a hypocrite and a vector for misery and harm across multiple communities. We know he’s willing to hold his nose and work to accomplish Trump’s agenda over personal qualms because that is exactly what he’s done in the past—professing how much he “passionately” hates the president in leaked texts, while working hand in glove to expand Trump’s political footprint. That he claims to agree in principle—but not specifics—about something as blatantly indefensible as a voluntary war of imperial adventurism is hardly worth whatever damage he will surely inflict with the newfound reach and authority he hopes to earn with this superficial pacifism. He and those like him want nothing more than to be seen and cited by liberals as a moral authority—all to make his immoral philosophy seem more palatable for an audience primed by popular podcasters to be receptive and open-minded to his polished propaganda.

Let me be clear: If you are opposed to the war in Iran, you do not agree with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or any of the other MAGA mainstays seeking reputational rehabilitation. If anything, they agree with you. With us. With those who haven’t spent years seeding the ground for Trump to do the exact thing they now vociferously claim to oppose. The territory is already being ceded. The inroads are already being made. But why should someone like Carlson get undue credit for belatedly arriving where many of us have been for ages? Why are we being asked to give that to him?

Tucker Carlson isn’t your anti-war buddy. He’s not your strange bedfellow during unprecedented times. He’s not your friend. And anyone who tells you that he and his ilk are the anti-war voices worth listening to above all others? They’re probably not your friend either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Findings

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

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

What’s Needed: A Fresh Approach

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

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

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

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

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

Prioritizing Climate Work

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

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

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

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

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

A Prescription for Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Time Is Now

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

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

Next Steps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can tell that it’s not working because on Wednesday morning Trump was back to flagrantly manipulating markets that appear to be in the grip of some kind of shared delusion that the conflict is about to wrap up. He sat down with regime stenographer and Fox News host Maria Bartiromo to issue his umpteenth declaration that the war is “very close to over” and also claimed without any evidence whatsoever that China had agreed not to send weapons to Iran if Hormuz is opened. He then took to Truth Social to proclaim that “China is very happy that I am permanently opening the Strait of Hormuz,” even though as a point of fact the president is currently burning millions of taxpayer dollars an hour to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed.

What actually seems to be happening is very much the opposite of Trump’s ongoing fantasia of decisive victory through successive vibes-driven word pictures from the American commander in chief. Iran is making new threats of counter-escalation; mediators are admitting that no new talks have been scheduled; and the global oil supply crisis is worsening even as oil futures and stock indices are sweatily gambling on a breakthrough. The “spot price” of oil—i.e., what is actually being paid for imminent deliveries—is at record highs, while futures still reflect faith that Trump belligerent postures will segue into more theatrical TACO-ing. Iran so far shows no signs buckling under the blockade, especially given the reality that Chinese leader Xi Jinping could easily make a crypto transfer to whichever commander of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps is currently running the country to make up for the drop in oil export revenue.

The logic of the blockade itself therefore simply doesn’t add up. If Iran doesn’t capitulate or agree to terms, what happens next? As retired Navy commander Mark Nevitt argued in Just Security, Iran has demonstrated that it can continue fighting even without its oil revenue. Tehran has also proven conclusively, Nevitt writes, that it “can deny transit at an acceptable cost to itself—and no plausible U.S. military option can reliably reverse that in the near term”—including the military seizure of Iran’s Kharg Island export facility, the latest shiny new toy idea producing wide eyes and giggles among Trump’s armchair warriors in the commentariat.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and various Fox News chuckleheads like Mark Levin have been trying to foist this idea onto Trump’s decaying mind for weeks, part of the ongoing, disturbing pattern of the US president seeming to act abruptly on the advice of columnists and talking heads. Nevitt calls the idea “superficially compelling,” but notes that the “operational reality is far more treacherous,” given that Iran has spent weeks preparing the island for assault. He adds that even if the United States captured Kharg, “the operation collapses at the strategic level. A Marine garrison on Kharg becomes the most predictable target in the theater.” Iran could also simply detonate its own facilities on the way out, baking in more long-term economic damage to the global economy.

This does not sound promising. But it is related to the other significant factor that no one seems to want to say out loud: The United States rather obviously lacks the will to launch any kind of significant ground operation in Iran. Even after spending the past year purging the senior military leadership of women, minorities, and anyone not willing to pledge fealty to the president, America still has the capacity to seize a single island in the Persian Gulf, should it wish to do so, just like it has the theoretical capacity to invade Iran and depose its government at gunpoint.

But no one knows better than the Iranians that the United States doesn’t have the stomach for it. They, like the rest of the world, watched substantial American occupying forces backed by genuine initial public opinion majorities flail around in the Iraqi and Afghan hinterlands for years before slinking off in defeat. They also just saw Trump act as though the rescue of a single downed pilot carried the same stakes as the D-Day landings at Omaha Beach. Iranians therefore know that, especially without any public buy-in whatsoever, Trump does not have the political space to launch a ground war that even in a best-case scenario would produce a steady supply of flag-draped coffins while mandating a massive and expensive mobilization on the eve of the midterms.

Trying to predict what will unfold over the course of a single day in the Trumpazoic is a fool’s errand. Maybe Trump will soon be obliged to accept terms that look more or less like the Iran deal he spitefully tore up in 2018. In that scenario, Iran would agree to temporarily suspend nuclear activity in exchange for sanctions relief and robust protections against future American sneak attacks. Maybe he will agree to some kind of corrupt split of an illegal Hormuz tolling regime that involves propping up his crypto enterprises while claiming that he changed the regime like a boss. But at this point, any plausible end to the war that restores the Strait of Hormuz to its prewar state involves the United States signing off on some previously unthinkable concession to Tehran, and no amount of blockading is going to change that.

The word for that sequence of events is “defeat.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report on the Process, Not Just the Arguments

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

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

Starting now, treat the election process in your state as a significant running news story. Make it a separate beat, alongside the traditional coverage of the reactions of candidates and voters. Touch base regularly with local and state election administrators. Learn (and then tell your readers or listeners) the details: how voters are registered, how and where the voting will be conducted, and exactly how their votes will be counted. Cultivate sources and regularly report what local officials are doing (or not doing) to ensure a credible election. Meanwhile, before any votes are cast or counted, press candidates and their minions to state exactly what they would define as evidence of miscounting or fraud, what they would consider grounds for contesting the outcomes of local or other races, and how they envisage conducting those contests—standards for which they can then be held accountable if they do end up disputing the official results.

Don’t cover such subjects only when they arise in a partisan debate where the traditional role of journalists is to report both sides (candidate A says the ballot count will be falsified or ineligible voters will be allowed to vote, candidate B or election administrator C says the voting will be legally conducted and the count will be accurate). Instead, monitor and regularly update your audience on what’s actually happening. Track problems as they appear and solutions as they are proposed, discussed, and adopted.

For example, on the controversy about voting by mail—an issue now before the Supreme Court—don’t just report the opposing arguments and leave it to readers and listeners to choose which side to believe. Give them the knowledge to decide for themselves. Don’t wait for partisans on one side or the other to bring up the subject. Take the initiative with a story detailing the rules in your state that define who can vote by mail and how to do so. When the time comes, report how many mail-in ballots have been distributed and track how many have been returned. Explain in detail how those ballots are stored and protected and when and how they will be opened and counted—facts that will let news consumers reach their own conclusion about the practice and whether it’s risky or not.

Reliable Sources

A useful resource for journalists covering such issues is the nonprofit news organization Votebeat, which focuses exclusively on covering how elections are conducted and distributes its articles at no cost to readers or local and national news outlets. Founded in 2020, Votebeat has reporters based in five states (Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin) that were centers of controversy in that year’s election. On the national level, in 2024 it operated an “Expert Desk” where journalists could ask voting-related questions and get knowledgeable answers from a panel of nearly 100 election administrators, cybersecurity experts, attorneys specializing in election law, and other professionals. It plans a similar program to assist journalists covering this year’s election. Reporters or anyone else concerned about election issues can sign up here to regularly receive its reports.

A variety of other organizations across the political spectrum can answer media queries on election procedures and management. Here are a few more groups whose work reporters should follow and contact if needed:

• Voting Rights Lab, “a campaign hub designed to supercharge the fight against voter suppression.” It operates the Election Policy Tracker, which “analyzes voting and election laws across all 50 states and the District of Columbia and provides near-real time analysis of election-related legislation pending across the country.” The tracker is designed to support “policy experts, advocates, researchers, legislators, and anyone on the front lines of the pro-democracy movement with critical information about the laws and legislation shaping our elections.”

• Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan group bringing together “conservatives, moderates, and progressives” who share a common goal: “preventing American democracy from declining into a more authoritarian form of government.”
• The Center for Election Innovation & Research, whose stated goal is “to restore trust in the American election system and promote election procedures that encourage participation and ensure election integrity and security.” (David Becker, the group’s executive director, is quoted earlier in this article.)
• Defending Democracy Together, an organization created by “lifelong conservatives and Republicans” to defend “democratic norms, values, and institutions” and oppose “abuses of power that threaten to undermine the integrity of U.S. elections, federal agencies, and the Republican Party as a whole.” Its list of directors includes William Kristol, founder of the right-wing magazine The Weekly Standard, and Mona Charen, a staff member and speechwriter in Ronald Reagan’s White House.
• Republicans for Voting Rights, committed to defending “the accessibility, integrity, and competitiveness of American elections” and to oppose Republicans “pushing for more restrictive voting laws designed to support unfounded accusations that the [2020] election was stolen and the results were illegitimate.”

And one last suggestion for journalists covering this year’s election: go down the ballot in your state and ask every candidate running for the Senate or House of Representatives or any significant state or local office for an unequivocal on-the-record commitment to respect the voters’ decision, whatever it might be. If any candidates waffle or decline to answer, don’t just leave it at that and go on to the next story. Instead, keep asking them (and their political allies, campaign organizers, and spokespeople) the same question and press them to explain exactly why they are dodging the issue.

I ended my 2020 letter with this closing paragraph:

Journalists alone will not win the fight to protect the legitimacy of this election, but they can make an important contribution—perhaps the most important since reporters covering the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s helped make the country confront the realities and the profound injustice of the segregation era. In the coming weeks, it will be absolutely vital for journalists everywhere, in every medium, to recognize the challenge and greatly intensify their efforts in rising to it. The stakes could not be higher.

Sadly enough, in 2026, those words ring even more pertinently than when I wrote them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Piker weighed in.

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

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

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

Piker finally walked in about 20 minutes after leaving his hotel room stream and was, according to a post by “StopAntisemitism,” “orgasmically welcomed” by the audience. (Piker, on Wednesday, reshared StopAntisemitism’s characterization of the crowd, asking, “Did you bust?”—a question that was viewed almost 400,000 times.)

Piker’s team, who had arrived before him, started a new stream that was being watched by 15,000 viewers and would go on to be viewed more than 600,000 times. He passed through one of the aisles, and climbed the stairs to the stage, finally settling in a chair between the Yale Political Union’s president and its speaker.

While he was being introduced, several onlookers noticed that Piker tucked a Zyn behind his lip, uncapped a dark shiny pen, and made notes in the margins of his prepared remarks. For a moment, he hadn’t yet looked up at the crowd. Then he did.

“I’m sad to see that Senator Rick Scott did not make it.”

The stomping was almost immediate, as the applause had been when Piker entered the room and when he had been introduced. At the Yale Political Union, approval is stomping and disapproval is hissing, and on this night, there was a raucous, near-constant, demonstration of both—sometimes before the end of a sentence, sometimes before the sentence had begun.

What Piker had come to argue was not exactly the resolution as it had been advertised to the people in the room and the streamers at home: “End the American Empire.” Piker instead argued something adjacent. He argued that the United States is already in terminable decline. He asked, “How do you end something that’s already in the process of dying?”

He quoted Lenin. He quoted Mao. He said Benjamin Netanyahu was the real American president. He said the US maintained roughly 800 military bases abroad, each representing not just a presence but a possible place where it might stage invasions. Then he called the fall of the Soviet Union one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, and the hissing was deafening.

His comment about the USSR had gone viral by the next morning. According to X’s own count, there were more than 59,000 posts about the speech. The people who had most loudly used “free speech” to explain the importance of tolerating campus speakers seemed to have set that aside. Yale is poison, more than one post said. Yale is disgusting, another post said. Yale students have been indoctrinated, more than a few posts said and many more implied. A great many of the posts, for reasons that remain unclear, mentioned tuition. It seemed these people could not believe that students whose parents had spent so much money on their education would choose to attend a political debate at the Yale Political Union.

When Piker’s speech ended, five students split speeches between the affirmative and negative. The first in the negative, Kai-Shan Kwek-Rupp, spoke deliberately, taking the resolution at face value. Ending the American empire, he argued, would not eliminate global domination but change it. Power does not disappear. It is assumed by others. The hissing and stomping still came for Kwek-Rupp, but later than they had come for Piker, at the ends of sentences rather than the middle of them.

When it came time for Piker to conclude, his earlier sympathy for the USSR had become a little sullied, maybe by how long the debate was dragging on for, or maybe by how warm and stuffy the room was getting. Capitalism, he said, had built things worth keeping. Skyscrapers, infrastructure, the Internet. But those things had been built through labor, and the fruits of that labor had not been evenly distributed. He ended with a line that brought raucous applause: “If a dictatorship is inevitable, I’d rather have it be a dictatorship of the proletariat.”

The room did not clear immediately. Students stood in the aisles attempting to rush the stage for photographs. The Yale Political Union’s president, a member of the Party of the Right, told me he was pleased with how the night had gone. In recent weeks, he said, the union had hosted figures from across the political spectrum, including Kevin Roberts, one of the architects of Project 2025. “We have people on the right and people on the left,” he said, “and they stayed until the end and they asked questions and they were respectful.”

By then the members had already voted: 54 to 31 in favor of the resolution. For 53 students at Yale, and Hasan Piker, who also got to vote, the American empire was something to be brought to an end.

The event had drawn to a close. Piker had left the gothic revival hall. The federal government had not cut Yale’s funding. The people who had used “free speech” to argue that a private institution should not allow a speaker to speak had not mobilized soon enough. But everything that had made the spectacle matter remained intact and, certainly, did not conclude with the vote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since the MLBPA negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in pro sports in 1968, there have been five player strikes and four owner lockouts. The 1994 World Series was canceled because of a 232-day players’ strike. It ended only after then–US District Judge Sonia Sotomayor issued a temporary injunction against the owners for violating labor law. The owners locked out the players before the 2022 season, but no games were lost because the two sides reached an agreement before the season started.

The union owes much of its strength to the strategic savvy of Marvin Miller, a long-term negotiator and economist for the Steelworkers union, whom players hired as the MLBPA’s first full-time executive director in 1966. When Miller arrived, players were essentially owned by their teams, unable to test their value in the job market as a result of the “reserve clause” in every contract. The minimum player salary at the time was $6,000 ($59,000 in today’s dollars) and the average salary was $19,000 ($188,000). Most players, Miller wrote in his autobiography, A Whole Different Ballgame, “were not only ignorant about unions but positively hostile to the idea.”

After Miller’s tenure as executive director (1966–82)—and thanks in part to the sacrifice of Curt Flood, whose suit against MLB in the US Supreme Court for allowing the St. Louis Cardinals to trade him against his will laid the groundwork for overturning the reserve clause—salaries and benefits dramatically improved. Players won the right to hire agents and to negotiate with any team. This year’s minimum player salary is $780,000; the median salary is $1.35 million. To put these figures in perspective, the typical player spends less than five years in the majors.

Pete Fairbanks, a Miami Marlins pitcher and union leader, sees the potential lockout as a straightforward labor-management conflict. “All of us understand that we’re fortunate to play a game and profit off of it,” he said. “But at the end of the day, we are the labor and that’s as simple as I can put it.”

Owners have always cried wolf about how the union would destroy the game, but baseball is thriving. More than 51 million fans in the US, Canada, and Japan watched the Dodgers defeat the Toronto Blue Jays in the final World Series game last year. Teams’ values have increased dramatically. The average team is now worth almost $3 billion, from the Marlins’ $1.4 billion to the Yankees’ $9 billion.

The 2020 season was shortened to 60 games by Covid, but as of last year, attendance at MLB games had climbed to 71.4 million and the average game attracted 29,471 fans—both close to the record. Over the last decade, MLB revenue has increased 33 percent, to $12.1 billion, an all-time peak, fueled by media deals, licensing, and stadium investments.

As in any union battle, the key to the conflict will be whether the players can remain united during negotiations.

Over 25 percent of pro ballplayers are from outside of the United States, most of them from Latin countries. Javier Vasquez, a former player who now works for the MLBPA, says that the union has worked to earn Latin players’ trust. “Many players I talk to only speak little English so navigating the contracts, the media and even the clubhouse is demanding,” he said in an interview with The Nation.

“A lot of these guys were earning a small paycheck in the minor leagues but sent 70 to 80 percent of it home to their families,” he said. “If they make it to the big leagues, they do the same. It’s part of our culture to take care of our families.”

And then there is ICE. A number of Latin players have expressed fear that they will be caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cincinnati Reds infielder Eugenio Suarez, from Venezuela, told the Cincinnati Enquirer during spring training in Arizona that he was scared, “because you don’t know what’s going to happen if you’re driving down the highway and somebody stops you. Even if you are a citizen.” Players have been told to carry their identification with them everywhere they go. Vasquez said the union has Spanish-speaking lawyers and immigration experts whom they work closely with. Only one major league player has so far publicly spoken out against the ICE raids—the Dodgers’ Kiké Hernandez. Atlanta Braves pitcher Spencer Strider posted an engraving of the Boston Massacre on his social-media feed after the killing of Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Two-time All-Star Sean Doolittle, now a Washington Nationals pitching coach, told The Guardian that the murders of Pretti and Renée Good “felt inevitable since the federal surge began in LA and DC last summer. DHS has an incredibly violent history. What we’re seeing play out in our cities feels like the natural progression of militarizing our police forces, providing endless taxpayer dollars at the expense of schools and social safety net programs.”

One of the ironies of baseball labor relations is that while the union is perhaps the strongest in the country, its members are generally more conservative than NBA or NFL players, the majority of whom are African American.

One recent study, based on available voter registration records, found that 54 percent of major league baseball players are registered Republicans and only 8 percent registered Democrats. By contrast, 10 percent of NBA players, 12 percent of NFL players, and 44 percent of NHL players are Republicans. (Baseball has seen its share of left-leaning rebels, but more typical is the career of Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame pitcher and one of the MLBPA founders, who was an anti-union Republican when he served in the House and Senate, representing Kentucky, from 1987 to 2011.)

Players’ differences over politics or religion have seemingly not undermined union solidarity and support for teams investing in top players. Dodgers pitcher Blake Treinen, an evangelical Christian with right-wing political views, told the Los Angeles Times, “If you’re going to complain about a team willing to do what it takes to win, then I think you are in the wrong business.”

Marvin Miller understood that highly skilled workers often develop solidarity based on protecting the prerogatives and ethics of their workplaces. “We’ve all walked in the same shoes,” Fairbanks said, “and that makes it much easier to find common ground with your teammates.”

The union is governed by an executive board composed of 72 major- and minor-league players elected by their teammates to two-year terms. They serve as a conduit to the union on player opinions. That body elects an eight-member executive subcommittee that make key recommendations. It includes Pirate Paul Skenes and Tiger Tarik Skubal, both Cy Young Award winners as best pitchers in their respective leagues last season.

The MLBPA strengthened its organization in 2022 by bringing minor league players into the organization. Their collective bargaining agreement significantly increased their salaries, working conditions, and housing stipends. The team owners are unlikely to lock out the minor league franchises, whose players have a separate agreement with the MLB.

In the past, team owners have tried to use minor league players as strikebreakers during labor disputes. Now that option is foreclosed.

William Simonite, a minor league catcher in the Blue Jays organization who studied industrial relations at Cornell, told The Nation that he “can’t really imagine a situation where scabs would be a thing at this point.” He added, “I think the players have each other’s backs, and ultimately that’s what really matters.”

The union has tried to educate players about its own history, bringing former players like Bobby Bonilla and Cecil Fielder to seminars to discuss how hard previous players worked and sacrificed to win the kinds of wages and contracts that today’s athletes take for granted. Holding the line against a salary cap is one of those accomplishments. But any successful union will tell you that effective labor history programs need to be ongoing and consistent, especially in unions where member turnover is high.

“If you look at the history of the union, we’ve had a foundation set for us,” said the Marlins’ Fairbanks, whose mother is a teacher and union member. “They fought for players’ rights and for the general betterment of the whole, and it’s the job of the veteran players to pass that history on to the younger players.”

While the salary cap is a nonstarter for the union, the leadership recognizes that more can be done for the players who are not stars or whose careers are short.

During the 2022 negotiations, “the veteran leaders fought like hell for record increases in minimum salaries and pre-arbitration bonus pool money [that rewards players before they reach salary arbitration], things that weren’t going to benefit them but would benefit the younger guys,” Meyer said. “That’s always been the history of our union.”

Top baseball agent Scott Boras, whose firm represents over 100 major league players, believes that the players union has some advantages. “The prosperity of this game is in a very unique place, highest media ratings, highest attendance, highest revenues ever,” he told The Nation. During contract negotiations, Boras said, team owners have refused to “tell the truth about how well teams are doing.”

Pointing to the Atlanta Braves, which is a publicly traded company whose finances are therefore available to see, Boras said, “Lo and behold, the Braves are making millions in profits.”

Come December, if games are canceled, the owners will blame union intransigence, an unwillingness to bend to the owners’ insistence on a salary cap.

Both sides will be prepared with war chests. The owners have set aside over $2 billion in anticipation of lost games and revenue. The union, according to a Labor Department filing, has boosted their liquid assets to $519 million, an increase from $353 million in 2024.

Manfred has insisted that a salary cap would help small market teams remain competitive.

Last year, nine major league teams paid the so-called “luxury tax,” which is a penalty imposed upon teams who spend over a given threshold ($241 million in 2025) which is then distributed to other teams who stayed at or under the spending limits. The tax was designed to create more “competitive balance” among teams by disincentivizing excessive spending. On opening day this season, Dodgers owner Mark Walters jumped into the contract fight when he told the Los Angeles Times that MLB had to come up with a system that creates more “parity” among teams. “We can’t win all the time,” said Walters.

In fact, without a salary cap, over the last 11 seasons, 15 different teams have made it to the World Series, including teams from several small markets, so MLB is not dominated by only a few wealthy large-market teams. In fact, every franchise has made the postseason at least once since 2014.

The bigger distinction is that not all teams spend the same percentage of overall revenues to obtain top talent. According to Forbes magazine, six clubs spent less than 40 percent of total revenues on players, and three allocate only 27 percent of revenues on players, while several teams spend over half of their revenue on players’ salaries.

Because teams (except the Braves) refuse to be transparent about their finances, the public is understandably confused about the pros and cons of the salary cap.

The union will need fan support in their fight against the billionaires’ boys club. In the past, the MLBPA created a fund to contribute to stadium workers—such as parking lot attendants and food concession employees—who lost their jobs during lockouts and strikes. Minor league pitcher and union leader Ryan Long thinks that’s still a good gesture. Long, who studied political philosophy at Pomona College, said, “I think it would be great to find ways for the union to help the people selling hot dogs or working at local hotels because in many ways we all share the same goals.”

“It’s outrageous that billionaire team owners are threatening to lock out major league players, damaging the sport’s incredible momentum, robbing fans of America’s game, and causing great harm to players, their families, and the communities of working people that would be impacted by a work stoppage,” said AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler. “The entire labor movement stands in strong solidarity with these exceptional athletes. We demand that the owners negotiate the fair contract players deserve.”

Unlike in other professional sports, no baseball star has ever crossed a union picket line. Perhaps that is the most curious thing of all—a conservative-leaning membership with a large segment of foreign players demonstrating union solidarity that in many ways is unmatched.

During a tough moment during the 1972 strike—the first in the union’s history—a number of players threatened to cross the line to play the season’s opening game. Willie Mays, one of the greatest all-time players, spoke to the union’s executive board at a meeting in New York. Although he was near the end of his career (he retired after the 1973 season), Mays told his fellow players that they had to stay together. “This could be my last game,” Mays said, according to Miller’s autobiography. “It will be painful. But if we don’t hang together, everything we’ve worked for will be lost.”

That kind of commitment from top players has been the union’s not-so-secret weapon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McMurtry grasped that vocation by 1960, when he was accepted into Stanford University’s Stegner Fellowship for Fiction. After having lived his first 24 years in Texas—first in Archer City, then in Denton and Houston—McMurtry moved to California. He would always take great pride in having had a “prolonged and intimate contact with first-generation American pioneers”—his grandparents—“who came to a nearly absolute emptiness and began the filling of it themselves.” And he was struck by a similar enthusiasm when he arrived in Palo Alto, where he was taught by two literary giants: Malcolm Cowley and Frank O’Connor. “There is, for young writers, a motivating excitement in knowing men who had once seen Shelley plain—or in Cowley’s case, Hemingway and Faulkner,” he wrote.

The initial mythic awe that McMurtry felt soon gave way to the reality that Cowley was “deaf as a post.” Cowley sat with the fellows for most of the semester with his hearing aid turned off, completely silent, his critiques or praise amounting only to a “glint in his eye.” O’Connor was more passionate and yet more particular: He couldn’t forgive McMurtry’s fondness for the Scottish surgeon and picaresque novelist Tobias Smollett, and he refused to read aloud any profanity-laced story in his workshops. (In O’Connor’s mind, even the most innocuous swear word had no place in fiction.) After an entire semester of trying, McMurtry recalls, not a single member of his Stegner class had “produced anything that Mr. O’Connor considered a story.”

Outside of class, drugs were a mainstay for many of the Stegner fellows, but McMurtry’s interests lay elsewhere. He spent his mornings dashing off five or so pages of prose and made extra money scouting used books—finding rare and valuable items for a cheap price and then selling them at a profit. He tried peyote a few times, ate a mushroom shortcake and a few marijuana-laced cookies once. None of it was appealing enough to pull him away—as it did with his classmate, Ken Kesey—from the work of those daily pages, or from Texas, where McMurtry soon returned. “I will give a wave of the hand to college life and concentrate on being a hardy son of the soil,” he wrote to his agent in 1961. That was certainly tongue in cheek, but it did reveal an essential feature of McMurtry’s life as an artist: that he was a Texas writer, who would write about Texas, from Texas. In this way, he wanted to be seen as a regional writer (many articles about him refer to a well-known photograph of the young McMurtry wearing a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “minor regional novelist”). But by burrowing into the specificities of place, McMurtry would also give himself access to a broader, national consciousness: one that was inebriated with self-obsession, salesmanship, and the perennially false readings of its violent history.

It was a feat that not one writer preceding him had come close to. Texas writers before McMurtry had been too steeped in—even disoriented by— romanticized visions of the state’s past. It was a struggle, the critic Benjamin Moser has written, “between a core of real experience and an asphyxiating cushion of fraud,” and it was a struggle most of the writers had lost. They produced books that were love letters to a genocidal past, that made a fetish of nature, and that were generally uninterested in modern Texas, which was just then struggling to come into being.

When McMurtry came of age as a writer in the early 1960s, the myth that most captured the state’s imagination was the myth of the cowboy—precisely because, as he observed, the cowboy’s way of life was a dying one. Ranching had been the central means of sustenance and support for two generations of McMurtrys, but it would support them no longer: “The cattle range had become the oil patch; the dozer cap replaced the Stetson almost overnight. The myth of the cowboy grew purer every year because there were so few actual cowboys left to contradict it.” In dime-store novels and Hollywood movies, the archetypal cowboy was a man more at home in nature than he was in the company of humans, especially women. He was loath to get off his horse—ever—and felt himself superior because he had gone a-horseback. He was wild, often drunk, rebellious, and rash, “distinguished for his daring and his cheerful indifference to middle-class values.”

McMurtry was the first to acknowledge that “the tradition [of the cowboy] is not bogus,” even if most of the skills associated with him were a Mexican import. The cowboys were often wild and reckless, spurning the niceties of modern life. What McMurtry did, brilliantly, in his first three novels was to ask: What happened to the cowboys with no range and no gun? Who were these people, young and old, trapped in a world and a way of life that no longer existed? McMurtry’s contemporary, Cormac McCarthy, would soon be another to dismantle the myth of the cowboy. But while the Providence, Rhode Island–born master of gothic envisioned the West as a savage fount of nihilism, McMurtry saw it as something more ordinary: an invented place that was nevertheless filled with real, ordinary people who were struggling with the burden of their tall-tale-laced inheritance.

In his first novel, Horseman, Pass By (1961), McMurtry’s too-late and aimless cowboy was Hud, a borderline sociopath, rapist, and gunfighter with no true enemy who resorts in the end to killing his family and exchanging his horse for a shiny Cadillac. In Leaving Cheyenne (1963), his answer was Adam Fry, a rancher so hardworking and devoted to the land that once his body begins to fail him, he shoots himself in the head because he cannot imagine a life not on a horse or mending fences. McMurtry’s third answer to his question was The Last Picture Show (1966), a novel that scandalized its readers when it was first published. Here, an entire town compensates for its empty, dead-end life—left behind by urban modernity and unable to return to its storied past—by having (mostly) meaningless sex. A group of young boys spends eight pages copulating with a blind heifer, while the lonely wife of a satanic gym teacher finds doomed comfort in a high-school boy’s naked embrace. There are no cowboys remaining in the town of Thalia, a place now drained of dreams and talent and purpose since that era ended, and as enterprising young people began pursuing their ambitions in cities. So when the titular picture show finally shuts down, no one save the protagonist, Sonny, cares. Life, and society, have passed all of Thalia’s people by. Unlike the myths of the West, and of the cowboy, McMurtry’s stories were not something to take comfort in.

Hollywood saw something different. For producers and directors, McMurtry’s novels were promising source material for movies that would reinscribe the very myths that he had sought to undo.

In the long history of inventing and selling the illusion of the West, the Hollywood western was the 20th-century boon that grew out of pulp fiction and the live showmanship of “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” It was not a genre responsible to history—to the messy, violent facts of the West’s settling—but a genre responsible to invented or borrowed traditions. So as Horseman, Pass By made its way from hardcover to the silver screen, the 1963 film adaptation starring Paul Newman turned into a much friendlier, even feel-good version of the book. The film’s producers replaced the novel’s original title, a reference to Yeats, with Hud (the producers didn’t bite at McMurtry’s inspired suggestion: Coitus on Horseback). They whitewashed the complex racial and gendered dynamics of McMurtry’s novel by turning an important Black character, a family housekeeper named Halmea, into the white Alma. And they morphed the Hud of Horseman into a brooding, redeemable hero, his violence tempered and given an acceptable, romantic orientation. It was a sign that, as much as a bold and original writer might try to disentangle its myths, the West’s great advertisers were not so willing to let their versions go.

The film crew on the set of Hud continually showed its ignorance of matters Texan, Western, and farm-related. In one scene, what was supposed to be a dead heifer was clearly a steer, as McMurtry pointed out to a crewmember on a visit to the set. “In essence, it’s a cow,” the man responded, shrugging. Later, when Newman was about to operate a heavy cow chute—difficult even for expert hands—and would have likely broken his jaw, McMurtry intervened. Yet the actual cowboys on the set—local boys hired to be extras and stand-ins for dangerous stunts—were having a great deal of fun. As McMurtry wrote: “It is not every day that cowboys get the chance to assist in creating an illusion about themselves.”

McMurtry knew well the commercial limitations of the Hollywood western. In his letters to Ken Kesey, he insulted Hud’s scriptwriters and director and lamented where they were taking his novel. For McMurtry, westerns were at best used to “disengag[e] myself from life.” He often expressed a dislike for moviemaking and claimed once in a 1983 article that he hadn’t watched a film over the past decade unless he’d been forced to. McMurtry didn’t enjoy the art form or even feign a respect for it. But after Hud’s success, he began to have a greater hand in the process, adapting his own novels into screenplays or else writing original scripts.

Why? Despite the constraints, perhaps McMurtry could instinctively see that westerns were not devoid of quality or the potential for real artistry. And his Hollywood westerns were just that: subtle and ambitious films that examined the West in novel ways. Peter Bogdanovich’s adaptation of The Last Picture Show (1971), cowritten by McMurtry, was a masterpiece in its own right, considered one of the best westerns in the history of the genre. While it softened the most scandalous elements of the original, the film maintained the essential thrust of the novel and remains a sensitive study of a Texas ghost town left behind by the modern world. McMurtry, in other words, was far from betraying his principles by writing films—in fact, he brought his discerning and critical attitude to each of his projects. His best-remembered work is his script (written with Diana Ossana) for Brokeback Mountain (2005), adapted from an Annie Proulx story of the same name. The Ang Lee–directed film, which follows the romantic and sexual awakening of two cowboys herding sheep in Wyoming, did more than any other western to challenge the genre’s fantasies of manhood and masculinity. The two men’s tragedy was a comment, precisely, on the smothering pathological constraints that western cultural narratives put on the people who inhabited the West. Even McMurtry’s greatest work, Lonesome Dove (1985), originated as a screenplay written by him and Bogdanovich, a project that had fallen apart when John Wayne refused to do it.

Hollywood’s mythmaking machine was many things for McMurtry—a pain in the arse, an imperfect creative outlet, a curiosity, and, most importantly, a paycheck. He thought of himself, first and foremost, as a novelist and not a screenwriter. Yet one has to consider whether McMurtry’s films, more than his novels, have had a longer-lasting impact on popular culture, even if people have no idea he wrote those films. The question Streitfeld’s biography seems to orbit, then, is one about the connective tissue between the two mediums: how each of them informed the other and how, ultimately, the novel’s form was where McMurtry could best express his artistic and intellectual ideas.

As McMurtry developed his working relationship with Hollywood, he would continue to chronicle contemporary Texas society on the page: the death of the cowboy, the oil boom, the modern rodeo, even the strife of moviemaking. In each of these modern settings—Houston, Dallas, Hollywood—he proceeded with the same wit, irony, honesty, and humor with which he had approached his early novels. And he excoriated those writers who weren’t doing the same. In an infamous 1981 article for the Texas Observer, “Ever a Bridegroom,” McMurtry shellacked the continued thinness of modern Texas letters. He urged the state’s writers to finally move on from the tall tales of westerns and to face the fact that most of Texas’s people were no longer cowboys or frontiersmen; most were now city people, inured to urban life. He hadn’t written about the Texan countryside since 1968—and even when he had, he’d done so only to undo the mythmaking. Like the authors of the dime-store novels of an earlier time, his fellow Texas writers, he wrote, were not examining the West; they were selling it.

McMurtry neglected to mention that, at the time, he was writing an 800-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers making a cattle drive in 1876. It was exactly the subject matter—old, mythic Texas—that he had dismissed, and it opened him up to accusations of hypocrisy. But McMurtry protested. “I never said the past wasn’t worth writing about,” he later clarified. “What I said is that it’s not worth writing badly about.” The past would always be relevant—but in order to be approached, it had to be stripped of its romance, its asphyxiating myths. And that is how McMurtry approached his subject in Lonesome Dove.

The myth that held Texas and the West in the tightest of strangleholds was the idea that its settling, or its “winning,” was a triumphant and heroic endeavor, completed by glorious, dignified, stoic men. The likes of Kit Carson and George Armstrong Custer and Leander McNelly had civilized the “savage” Native Americans and Mexicans or else had settled quietly in a country of absolute emptiness. They were brilliant and brave, and their methods, if occasionally ruthless, were necessary. They found their apotheotic expression in John Wayne.

Lonesome Dove refuses to indulge in the romance of heroism or its characters’ intentions. Instead, the novel follows a set of people who could hardly be called heroes at all, caught up in historical circumstances they hardly understand. At the novel’s center are two retired Rangers: Augustus (“Gus”) McCrae, a womanizing drunkard who often boasts of his nonexistent Latin skills, and Woodrow Call, a man so stoic and unbending that, even in his self-seriousness, he presents as parody. Then there’s a local pianist named Lippy—so named for a lower lip “about the size of the flap on a saddlebag”—who has a hole in his stomach that won’t quite heal; a couple of young Irish boys who barely know how to ride a horse; the town prostitute, Lorena; and, finally, two blue pigs. This is the humble, motley crew that make their way from a backwater town close to the Rio Grande all the way up to Montana, where they intend to start a cattle ranch, the terminal destination of this non-hero’s journey.

There is almost nothing about the cattle drive that is valiant, nothing that could even be called intentional. Call, who had the idea for a cattle drive in the first place, hardly knows why they’re going to all this trouble. As soon as they set off, he is struck by an “odd, confused feeling at the thought of what they had undertaken. He had quickly convinced himself it was necessary, this drive.” But “a cattle drive, for all its difficulty, wasn’t so imperative.” Gus repeatedly harangues him on this point: “Here you’ve brought these cattle all this way,” he chides his partner, “with all this inconvenience to me and everybody else, and you don’t have no reason in this world to be doing it.”

And while this haphazard pilgrimage is marked by extreme violence, that violence is not undergirded by passion or justice; rather, it’s ubiquitous, random, and depraved. The group gets caught in sandstorms and hailstorms; they nearly freeze to death, brawl in bars, and die one by one in freak accidents or out of carelessness. And as for that untouchable, sacrilegious question—whether the violent “winning” of the West was even worth it—Gus isn’t sure. Thinking back to their genocidal days as Texas Rangers, fighting off Native resistance and Mexican bandits, he says to Call: “Does it ever occur to you that everything we done was probably a mistake?… We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with.” Call answers him with silence.

If not heroism, then what? Across Lonesome Dove—and, later, the entire Lonesome Dove tetralogy—the characters’ expeditions are filled not with heroics but high jinks: Drunk Rangers are desperate for “pokes” with prostitutes; a Harvard professor turned Texas Ranger captain sings Italian operas while hanging off a cliff in a metal cage deep in the Sierra Perdida; varmints break into a fallen Ranger’s coffin and run off with his amputated leg. (“We’ve mostly kept him,” the doctor says. “I had him repacked.”) This is McMurtry’s masterfully invented West: parodied, ironic, macabre, barbarous. His aim is not to show the West as it really was but to make it suddenly strange and unfamiliar for readers. This is not John Wayne’s West, or Billy the Kid’s. It is something better—startlingly honest.

The day before McMurtry heard the news that he’d won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Lonesome Dove, he had arrived at a hotel in Uvalde, Texas, for a literary festival. The marquee had been prepared for his arrival: “Welcome Larry McMurtry, author of Terms of Endearment.” A day later, when McMurtry headed outside to speak with the press in a hastily arranged press conference, he glanced back at the marquee and saw that it had already been changed: “Lunch Special, Catfish: $3.95.” Streitfeld reveals that this story was mostly fiction, as were many of the tales McMurtry told about his life. The biography luxuriates in these moments of tension. Readers learn that the story of McMurtry’s bookless upbringing is itself wound in fiction, and that the author’s bio on the back of his books stretched the truth as well in order to create a certain myth of McMurtry himself: For years, while he lived in Tucson, his books claimed that he had never left Archer City, the little town that his grandfather William Jefferson had traveled to, the place where he had built a shotgun house with his bare hands. To test an assertion that McMurtry casually made in The New York Review of Books in 1999—that he had “Sioux blood through my paternal grandmother”—Streitfeld even did a DNA test on McMurtry’s brother Charlie and found that this, too, had only been family lore.

“Larry’s life often imitated his fiction and his fiction was inspired by his life,” Streitfeld writes. When McMurtry’s health began to fail him, he told his doctors that each time he stood up, he felt like he was “rising like a balloon”—an image he took from his own novel, Somebody’s Darling (1978). And in the days leading up to his death in 2021, McMurtry told his writing partner Diana Ossana: “Even if I die in Tucson, let’s just say I died in Texas.” When The New York Times called following his death, that’s just what Ossana said, and the “error” remained uncorrected for six months. But if he couldn’t die in Texas, McMurtry could at least be buried there. Like Gus McCrae, making a deathbed wish to be hauled out of Montana and buried back in Texas, so too were McMurtry’s ashes taken from Tucson and buried in his family plot in Archer City.

It is moving to learn that McMurtry, like Texas, was inextricable from his fables—that he could be both a fierce and ambivalent observer of the West while also being an honest-to-goodness part of it. McMurtry knew better than any other Texas writer that most Americans, himself included, could not resist the allure of the illusion of the West. Five years after his death, the illusion remains as popular as ever: Cowboy and cowgirl boots clack along the streets of New York City and Los Angeles; country music is no longer a regional or even a national genre but a global one; Hollywood producers churn out films and television shows featuring noble oilmen and rugged gunslingers; and those same producers continue to mine McMurtry’s catalog for silver-screen fodder (Lonesome Dove in particular). All of this is evidence, perhaps, that too many of us have failed to learn the lessons that McMurtry so diligently taught.

McMurtry knew the gravity of not learning those lessons well enough, and that they were not confined to questions of costume or culture. In April 2010, Arizona’s then-governor, Jan Brewer, signed into law a brutally hostile anti-immigration bill. McMurtry, in an essay for The New York Review of Books, recounted discussions with his neighbors in which he reminded them that “we Anglos are the real illegals here. After all we stole Arizona, along with the rest of the southwest, in 1848, when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in Texas. The ‘brown ones,’ as George H.W. Bush once referred to his half-Hispanic grandchildren, have obviously the better right to Arizona.” The problem that Senate Bill 1070 sought to solve was a problem of the Anglos’ making, McMurtry insisted, when they barged in with lawless and genocidal intentions and drew a border line where “for numberless centuries no line had been.”

These are not radical assertions. For McMurtry, they were simply the facts of the country’s founding—facts that had inexorably led its people “to the tragic place where we are now,” facts that we struggled to accept in 1848, in 2010, and still struggle with today in 2026. Our myths are far from dead, and they may never die. But McMurtry’s greatest gift was to see his country and its history plain, and to teach his readers how to do the same—to add, time and again, that proverbial, clarifying footnote.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, just as it always has done, Israel preys on the very sectarian and ethnic divides that define my own family tree, manipulating its way into the fragile sectarian fault lines of the Lebanese psyche, and turning neighbor against neighbor. Israeli occupation forces have placed intelligence-gathering QR codes on leaflets dropped from the sky, used espionage and webs of spies on the ground, and launched air strikes on “safe” residential areas to turn our geography—our villages, our streets, our neighborhoods—into zones of discrimination and paranoia where kin persecute one another over their confession.

Sectarianism was written into Lebanon’s constitution by the colonial French mandate in 1926, dividing state power across sect lines and successfully fragmenting identity along those same lines. In a state where it has been only 36 years since the end of a civil war that left scars of division easily reopened, the Israeli strategy to turn neighbor against neighbor can still be effective. A friend of mine and her family were recently displaced from their neighborhood in Dahieh, Beirut’s southern suburbs, after repeat threats for all of Dahieh by Israel. It was hard enough to find a place to stay as landlords in “safe” areas were either exploiting the moment to hike up rent, or turning people away for being Shia. But when she did find a landlord who was welcoming, the neighbors threatened her safety. And just a few days after signing the contract, when she and her family didn’t leave, the neighbors cut off her electricity and water to force her out. The cruelty is no accident; it is the desired result of a war designed to turn our own neighborhoods into front lines.

But even as it tries to exploit our unhealed wounds and divide us, Israel willfully neglects a fundamental truth: The land it is attempting to empty is not a vacant “buffer zone.” The Zionist project, like all imperial projects, arrogantly disregards that it is home to a people who would rather be buried in their soil than be forcibly displaced away from it. In Lebanon’s case, that means places like Bint Jbeil, historically a central site of the resistance to Israeli attacks. The people defending this territory—mostly without the support of the Lebanese army—are not outsiders. They have always lived in and tended the land, no matter how much colonial powers pretend otherwise, and continue to be the only thing keeping Southern Lebanon from Israeli annexation.

The West views this resistance through a reductive, Islamophobic lens. In its present form, it is Shia-dominated due to the demographic makeup of the south today. But on the ground, the defense of the land is a mosaic. Among the martyrs mourned this past week was an Armenian—a descendant of genocide and dispossession—whose death is a testament to resistance as a national obligation.

Over the last several weeks, the Lebanese army has gradually withdrawn from land it is sworn to protect, effectively abandoning people who refused to flee their hometowns. Then, as Israeli bombed terrorized Lebanon on Black Wednesday, the Lebanese heads of state rejected the short-lived US-Iran ceasefire from earlier that morning, and called for direct negotiations with Israel instead.

Direct negotiations have taken place in Lebanon’s recent history. In 1983, as Israel still occupied one third of Lebanon, Lebanon and Israel signed the May 17 Agreement after direct negotiations—widely condemned as a “treaty of shame” and seen as forced surrender and recognition of Israel. (It was later abrogated by the government in 1984 following the February 6 Intifada.) The last time Lebanon and Israel engaged in direct talks was in 1992 in Washington, which did not amount to anything.

Negotiations ever since have always been multilateral, or indirect—always taking place through a third party, usually the UN or the US—and have been the strategy chosen to end hostilities for years. Many on the ground see this move to direct talks, especially after the Black Wednesday massacre, as the state leveraging this massive civilian death to force a normalization that the people have always rejected. This move carries unmistakable parallels with the Abraham Accords: “security” for recognition of a state of Israel and de facto normalization, completely ignoring the 1955 Israel Boycott Law and the constitution of our state. Now we fear what is to come.

Thousands have participated in anti-normalization “Black Wednesday” protests almost every day since the Israeli massacre. To the many enraged in the streets, the government’s move is not mere diplomacy: It is a willingness to trade the precious soil of the south for a seat at a table that has long decided our erasure.

I understand those who find it hard to have hope. When your own people are turning against one another, when the state seems to be positioning itself against an entire populace, how can we fathom getting through this? When first responders and rescue workers are targeted—as we saw last weekend with the Red Cross workers martyred while trying to save the living. When every single time I dare to check Instagram, a different friend has posted a photo mourning a martyr—a close friend, a family member. There are markers of loss everywhere.

But there are also markers of sumud, in all of its forms. Even as the state has withdrawn, and even as some people are hostile or look away, a makeshift economy of solidarity has emerged. People are tirelessly organizing on the ground in grassroots networks, raising funds and sourcing mattresses, tents, basic goods, hygiene products, hot meals, and shelter.

A close friend tells me about his father who has chosen to stay in his house in Hadath, Dahieh. His family is split; his father is currently hosting family members displaced from his hometown of Deir el-Zahrani, while others remain there, steadfast, despite Israel’s repeat displacement orders for the entirety of the south. His father spends his days organizing to get aid to people housing themselves in the empty Azarieh complex in downtown Beirut, and all the way to those who remain in Deir el-Zahrani.

This Easter, as we witness the martyrdom of those who refuse to abandon the land, we are reminded that لَيْسَ لِأَحَدٍ حُبٌّ أَعْظَمُ مِنْ هَذَا: أَنْ يَضَعَ أَحَدٌ نَفْسَهُ لِأَجْلِ أَحِبَّائِهِ—“Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). It is this love, the ultimate act of self-sacrifice, that serves as the only physical promise of return for the uprooted—it is the triumph of life over death.

The Zionists may possess the technology of erasure, but they will never understand the depth of our roots and our commitment to our people and our land. We are a people who have survived repeated occupations, the Nakba, and the Sayfo. We are of the land; we are the soil itself. And the soil does not negotiate its own existence.

When Congress voted to expand the budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement by $170 billion last July, it was inevitable that some of that money would be spent reshaping the built environment toward new and more sinister ends. Sure enough, by the end of 2025, ICE released plans to convert seven massive logistics warehouses scattered across the United States into detention centers to hold more than 80,000 detainees. Another 16 will be used as immigrant-processing sites. Turning warehouses for storing goods into warehouses for storing people is already harrowing. The historical precedents for repurposing industrial infrastructure to forcibly transport humans at scale make it even more so.

Perhaps more than any other type of structure, including Donald Trump’s various flights of fancy in Washington, DC, these warehouses are shaping up to be the clearest expression of fascist architecture in our time. They tick all the boxes, offering surveillance, confinement, and monumentality. One of the fascists’ chief innovations was using industrial techniques to execute their program of mass displacement and murder. So too must our government’s most violent elements use the structures and flows already available to them to achieve the disenfranchisement and total social control they seek. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” said Todd M. Lyons, ICE’s acting director, at a border-control conference earlier last year. The administration’s goal, in Lyons’s words, is to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”

As the factories of old rot along railroad corridors (as any frequent Amtrak passenger can tell you), their successors dot the peripheries of airports or haunt stretches of empty highway. These sprawling logistics centers are the result of an economy based on the hub-and-spoke model, a distribution system in which the delivery of goods is centralized around a strategic site to mercilessly optimize for speed. Many of them are erected in seemingly random and isolated places. ICE plans to convert the centers in Trump strongholds like Social Circle, Georgia, and Baytown, Texas. These warehouses are way stations for the millions of packages that circulate through the United States every day.

Logistics warehouses are exceedingly simple, and their construction resembles a barn-raising: Their massive concrete walls are poured in place and propped up on stilts. One side features 10 or more huge bays opposite an entrance; the other sides are bleak expanses of windowless concrete. Presumably ICE will brick up the bays, making the interior into a permanent nighttime. As an architectural typology, these buildings are among the simplest and most inflexible. Despite being so anonymous-looking, their forms reveal a great deal about our world: how flows of capital and labor disappear into a far-off location and reappear on our doorsteps in neat little packages removed from the toil of production; how we’ve devised this process to be as unobtrusive and convenient as possible; how the human element in all this should be kept hidden from view at all times, so much so that contact with the world outside the box is as impermissible as light.

Already, in their current iterations, these centers are fundamentally not designed for people. They are built to spec for the company that leases them and outfitted to that company’s needs. Logistics is now remarkably automated and is only becoming more so, with most of the work of scanning and sorting packages done by a computer. A smaller warehouse may be staffed by only a dozen or so people. A package is not supposed to sit at a logistics center for long; these buildings are intended for processing, not storage. That’s why most of them don’t have robust climate control.

Alarming reports from inside Amazon warehouses, for example, already cite the lack of air conditioning as a major concern for the workers there, who spend eight or more hours a shift cooled only by a few floor fans. Replace packages with thousands of human bodies and add in the heat and humidity of places like Texas and Georgia, and you are looking not only at an architecture of containment, but one from which many may not emerge. Furthermore, these centers—especially those in rural or exurban areas—often lack access to main water lines and power grids, which poses obvious dangers when holding as many as 2,000 people. Out-of-the-way locations make it easier to keep those people out of sight and away from communities who could come to their aid. It also makes them easier to surveil. According to The Washington Post, ICE claims that the newly outfitted warehouses will be adequately furnished with things like restrooms and recreation centers. But given that current detention centers are already impenetrable, how will we know?

One of the great historical misconceptions in how we think about fascist architecture is the focus on the public buildings above all else. The unbuilt rotundas of Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer; the sparse modernist bays of Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como, Italy; and now, Trump’s quixotic ballroom and his even more quixotic plans to build an Arc de Triomphe in downtown DC—these are the accoutrements by which the fascists themselves wish to be remembered. But the real architectural legacy of fascism is the structures used to carry out their most unconscionable plans. Many of these sites have since been torn down or memorialized in the form of museums, most famously in the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is part of why that legacy endures so strongly in the public memory. The fascist built environment is often not considered architecture as such but mere infrastructure. This is a huge mistake. We should not be so unwise as to make it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While Douthat plays the good-faith skeptic to some of his guests, his persona recently crumbled under the weight of an investigative reporter. In February, journalist Seth Harp announced that Douthat had invited him to the podcast for a foreign policy “debate,” but canceled the episode after, Harp says, he “defeated him so decisively that he refuses to air the footage.” Harp’s book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, has been a New York Times bestseller and he has been subpoenaed by Trump’s Justice Department. Douthat responded, explaining that Harp’s appearance was canceled due to an “overcrowded schedule” and missing the “ideal spot” in the news cycle.

In an interview with The Nation, Harp said that Douthat defended “US hegemony” in the discussion, saying it had brought decades of global peace after World War II. “I quickly pointed out that that was a preposterous thing to say,” he told me. “There was massive violence all over the Third World—in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and there were millions upon millions of people killed by capitalist empire.” Harp said that it seemed Douthat “had never met an informed anti-imperialist in his life, and he was only used to [engaging with] the most milquetoast liberal critiques of American foreign policy.”

It would be easier to dunk on Douthat if he were just a well-funded operative like many of his guests, but listening to him engage them, even when they disagree, one gets the sense that he is earnestly trying to understand their points of view. Is he lost in the sauce of his beliefs? Does he think that while he is making a good-faith effort in his own work to advance a cogent, moral conservatism, the people at the Claremont Institute are just doing the same? If we are to take Douthat at the same face value he affords his guests, everyone is advancing their own politics, and he is just skeptical enough to offer a fair hearing. A structural media analysis would suggest that a “reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship” manufactures consent for capitalism, imperialism, and the other woke variants Douthat’s guests eagerly rail against, as the scholars Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman argued in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent.

Harp recalled the discussion the two men had, explaining that the book had come up in their exchange. “His understanding of that book’s thesis was very confused, and then he held himself up to say, ‘Look at me, I oppose wars, and I still work for elite media, therefore the thesis of Manufacturing Consent is wrong.’” Here, Douthat makes a compelling argument. It’s hard not to take him at his word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A state of famine in El Fasher and nearby displacement camps, such as Zamzam, is exacerbating the crisis faster than anyone can respond, said Almahal. The population, weakened, malnourished, and without access to clean water, has become a hotbed of cholera. “One confirmed case of cholera is enough to confirm an epidemic in [places like North Darfur],” she said. “Cholera can spread very quickly and can kill very quickly if not contained.” Targeted attacks on water, therefore, are functionally biowarfare, and Suleiman said that many of the sources have intentionally been “destroyed by drones.”

Dr. Almahal described a terrifying scale of suffering, with almost a total lack of access to basic services and lifesaving vaccines in Tawila, North Darfur. An identical situation has unfolded in El Fasher, with “most health facilities destroyed by the RSF [and an absolute lack of] essential drugs,” said Suleiman. Citizens can’t leave to seek treatments, he added. People are captive in El Fasher, as guards “check homes and return [citizens] to gathering sites while strictly guarded” to prevent escapes.

More than 14 million people have been displaced in this crisis, nearly twice the population of New York City. And yet, international sanctions have been futile. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s calls to end the fighting in 2024 seemed to be shouts into the abyss as the war raged on. Currently, The Trump administration is maintaining sanctions on the RSF in stated opposition of the group’s systematic use of murder and rape as tactics in the war. The RSF has responded by attempting to prove connections between the SAF and Islamist organizations that the US labels as terrorists, putting pressure on any American support to the Port Sudan–based government.

In the meantime, without any resources, Ahmed Suleiman and his colleagues are fighting a losing battle. Given the scarcity of basic medicines, food stuffs, and treatment tools, Almahal believes that working with local partners is critical for all humanitarian agencies trying to get resources into the war zones. Vaccines and Ringer’s lactate, an intravenous fluid proven to effectively rehydrate cholera patients, are relatively inexpensive ways to curtail and treat the disease. In September, the World Health Organization kicked off a campaign to vaccinate nearly 2 million people against cholera in six Darfur localities. Despite rehydration efforts, the cholera outbreak continues to swell during the rainy season, which lasts from about June to September.

But food insecurity has been the top concern for those in El Fasher. “Even money can’t get you anywhere,” said Almahal. “No one has any food. It’s a very sad thing.” The complexities of delivering aid in a war zone are undeniable. “Things become difficult because there are many groups in power,” said Almahal. “When delivering Ringer’s lactate in Tawila, we must seek permission from the RSF and the Abdul Wahid group,” another rebel faction, which belongs to the Sudanese Liberation Movement. In El Fasher, local volunteers struck deals with RSF soldiers to bring food to the city. “We provide them with salt and flour,” said Almahal. “It’s such a simple thing that it can be brought into the city without trouble.”

The situation in North Darfur is even more difficult. “The distribution itself occurs in a very challenging environment,” Almahal said, citing shelling and armed militia members. “Local partners are under direct threat for their lives.” Women and children in North Darfur are extremely vulnerable. They are raped, beaten, and killed, by many accounts. Almahal calls it “death without dignity.” He mentioned a recent killing in which a woman was crucified in Darfur. Suleiman has heard reports of women abducted by the RSF in El Fasher. Such war crimes are breaking down the morale of those stuck in siege.

Almahal believes the world needs to see what is happening in Sudan, saying that calls for accountability on a global stage are the only means for survival. “Where is the humanity? We set standards for international humanitarian law. But when these laws are tested, we fail.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At The Brick, Kara Walker’s installation transforms the problem of representing the enemy into a problem of sculptural afterlife: What remains when a Confederate monument is broken open and remade? Here the exhibition leaves behind the logic of juxtaposition and enters a more concentrated, almost forensic mode. Centered on Walker’s newly commissioned sculpture Unmanned Drone (2023) and surrounded by preparatory drawings, archival images, and reworked granite fragments from a Stonewall Jackson monument that was originally displayed in Charlottesville, Virginia, the installation unfolds as a chamber of afterlife, in which a single Confederate statue passes through a variety of states: from public idol, to political rallying point, decommissioned object, artistic raw material, and reanimated form.

Crucially, the work does not destroy monumentality; it metabolizes it, forcing it into mutation. The old lateral thrust of the charging general has been broken and rerouted into a compacted, vertical torque: The horse rears and staggers at once; the rider is displaced and partially shed; reins hang loose; the sword drags, and the severed fragments on the base refuse to settle into ruin. While violently disassembled with its seams exposed, the new form retains the original motion, pressure, and force forward. Recomposed into a centaur, what emerges is a new sculptural body whose compressed dynamism recalls the charged angularity of Vorticism. The surviving points of contact with the base, retained in part for structural reasons, preserve a ghost of the monument’s original equilibrium even as they make that equilibrium look strained, contingent, and painfully achieved.

Serrano’s photos ask what it means to imagine the enemy, giving us an “other” to project onto; Walker asks what remains when the enemy’s monument is broken open. In her Unmanned Drone, evil is no longer secured in a covered face, a uniform, or even a fixed body. It becomes structural, ambient, half-visible, something that persists after the heroic shell has been cut open. This is where hollowness becomes crucial. The opened monument reveals the desires that needed such figures to exist: desires for purity, repressed grievance, injured nobility, redemptive violence. Walker turns that fantasy into a sculpture that reflects its logic back onto us. What comes into view is the uncomfortable fact that these monuments embody not just what we oppose. They are also pictures of what we fear, disavow, and secretly require to narrate ourselves.

“Monuments” is about watching monumentality itself change state. These sculptures do not simply preserve Lost Cause ideology; they show how antagonisms morph over time, carrying grief, grievance, sanctity, and authority into new shapes. Their meanings migrate, crack, and recombine. The exhibition’s deepest argument is thus not merely that Confederate monuments were false or violent but that monumentality itself remains an active and unstable medium of public art. Monuments help people narrate who they are, and they do so not only by elevating heroes but by conjuring the enemies against whom identity hardens—until the monuments themselves become the enemy. After all, bronze and granite can just as easily be converted into canvases for rebellion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A multibillion-dollar industry emerged for precisely this function. The two most prominent companies, Mercor and ScaleAI, both received venture funding from Thiel. Those early investments seemingly paid off: Mercor most recently raised funds at a $10 billion valuation, while Meta bought a 49 percent stake in ScaleAI at a $29 billion valuation. This industry has grown rapidly by emulating the playbook Uber and Lyft used to appeal to drivers in the early days of ride-sharing. Their advertisements emphasize the flexibility and freedom of gig work. Jobless academics are shown hiking through the woods, reading books on hammocks, and playing sports with friends. Their testimonial voiceovers explain that, even though the academic job market has no opportunities, gig work allows them to make money while remaining in their field—even if not quite how they imagined it. “Finding jobs in academia has always been a struggle,” one contractor notes, explaining that he turned to Mercor after his institution cut off summer funding. In an advertisement for a competing platform, a Stanford-trained chemist expresses hope that working with AI will open future job opportunities, despite the otherwise bleak job market for PhD graduates.

As with the ride-hailing industry, initial promises of easy money often give way to a more complicated reality. One doctoral student in applied mathematics was tasked with solving tournament-level math problems for roughly $90 per hour. The questions were challenging, even for someone with his expertise. Yet the company would pay for only two and a half hours of work per question—and incorrect or incomplete responses received no compensation at all. This meant he faced a choice: either continue working on challenging problems for free, or give up and forfeit any payment. Other researchers reported similar experiences across gig platforms. A recent PhD graduate of an MIT engineering program recalled tabulating all of her unpaid hours for a project, only to realize the effective hourly rate was considerably lower than what had been advertised. “I originally thought that was [a] very fair, generous amount,” she explained, “but then I started keeping track of all the unlogged hours that I wasn’t really paid for and so it ended up not being super worth it.”

Silicon Valley libertarians might respond that this is merely the free market at work. After all, no one coerced the doctoral students or underemployed scientists into performing gig work. But this narrative ignores the very direct policy decisions that shaped that “free” market for researchers and academics. All of the researchers interviewed for this article described turning to gig work because Trump’s federal funding cuts made it much harder to find opportunities in their field. The cause and effect are abundantly clear: The Department of Energy cuts funding so a summer stipend disappears, or the Trump administration threatens a university and multiple postdoc positions close. “I would say it’s akin to being farmed,” the doctoral student in applied mathematics said. He described the ads for AI gig work as “clickbaity,” explaining that, as a grad student struggling to find work amid funding cuts, it is hard to resist a job description that touts remote, flexible, asynchronous work at seemingly high hourly rates.

As it stands, we increasingly rely on the altruism of young people who view science as a calling—but that paradigm can be pushed only so far before it breaks. Most scientists are not in it for the money; the same cannot be said of Silicon Valley. Hence, the 23-year-old founder of Mercor, Brendan Foody, became a paper billionaire in a matter of months by supplying AI labs with, among others, PhD researchers scrambling to remain solvent on their long and increasingly arduous career paths. “The wealthiest companies in the world are willing to spend whatever it takes to improve model capabilities, where Mercor is sitting at the forefront and sort of the primary bottleneck,” Foody explained in a recent interview. In reality, the humans training the models are the bottleneck—gig platforms, to their credit, just figured out how to profit from them.

The myth of the free market is often used to obscure what are ultimately value judgments. Even Peter Thiel’s libertarianism stops wherever Palantir’s interests begin. Basic science research has never been particularly profitable in its own right, but society has benefited enormously from its advancement. The new bargain struck by Silicon Valley conflates wealth generation with progress. It is akin to deciding that a tree’s roots no longer need to be watered because the fruit comes only from its branches. The tech industry may suffer in the long run, but several venture capitalists will make extraordinary short-term returns. In the meantime, a generation of scientists risks getting left behind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s why I say this meeting was different. We witnessed and were able to participate in a debate about a topic that, prior to this meeting, had been taboo—in this case, the role of pro-Israel billionaires (sometimes Republicans) weighing in with millions of dollars to influence our primaries. The resolution in question may have lost, but a not inconsequential victory was won. A debate was held, the issue aired, and members left empowered and respected. And, by the way, the resolution that was passed and will now be implemented by the Reform Task Force will act to ban all dark money from any and all sources, including AIPAC.

So don’t count me among those who left New Orleans complaining of defeat. This weekend’s meeting marked a turning point in enhancing democracy within the Democratic Party. It was an important step on the road to real reform, and, if we keep working, to victory over dark money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before the decisions Feldblum authored, the agency’s approach notably had acknowledged the existence of trans people but held that Congress hadn’t meant to cover them when it passed the Civil Rights Act. “We were correcting a legal mistake that had been made,” she said. “Legal logic caught up with social change.”

By contrast, the EEOC’s recent decision calls trans people “trans-identifying” and claims that a trans woman is “still a man” and a trans man is “still a woman,” while calling the trans woman who brought the case a male and using he and his pronouns. “Apparently, the Commission is best positioned to tell transgender workers who they are,” Kotagal said in her statement.

The EEOC’s decision doesn’t have any legal binding in the private sector, similarly to those Feldblum authored over a decade ago. Transgender employees in the private sector are still protected by the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, in which the court held that Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination does in fact protect against gender identity discrimination. Federal-sector employees can take their claims to the courts outside of the EEOC.

But it will guide how EEOC investigators evaluate claims of discrimination that come to the agency from private sector workers. Lucas has already put a total pause on processing gender identity claims that don’t have to do with getting hired, fired, or promoted, such as harassment or the denial of bathroom use, and withdrew the agency from its own lawsuits against employers accused of gender identity discrimination. Now, because the agency holds that Title VII doesn’t protect workers from gender identity discrimination, even the few kinds of charges that had previously been allowed to proceed “will be dismissed as finding no cause,” Feldblum said.

“I thought that I had rights before November 2025,” a gender-nonconforming former EEOC employee told me. “And then, after November 2025, I more and more realized I didn’t have those rights.” They filed a gender identity discrimination complaint through the EEOC’s federal-sector process, which felt like it had “significance,” they said; now such a complaint will get dismissed. They have since left the federal government and work in the private sector, but even that is not necessarily a safe haven. “I feel like it’s just a matter of time before the agency’s positions follow me into the private sector,” they said.

Indeed, Lucas is clearly not done. In late March, she issued another federal-sector decision finding that it isn’t a violation of Title VII’s protections for the Office of Personnel Management, which handles health insurance for federal workers, to refuse to cover gender-affirming care. Lucas has also recently urged women to file claims with the EEOC if a trans person uses the women’s restroom, signaling an appetite to find a case that could broaden this view to the private sector.

To Cam, it feels like “the progress that had been made” for trans and nonbinary people “is on pause.” A year ago, everything was “frightening, uncertain.” Today the uncertainty has dissipated; in its place is the actual rolling back of legal rights. The EEOC’s decision has become a “permission slip,” they said, to federal agencies to discriminate against trans and nonbinary employees. It’s “trying to flip back to keeping trans people from being trans.”

But Cam is confident this regression is temporary. “This is not the end. It’s just a significant bump in the road and we are going to win those rights back.”

“We know ourselves best,” they said. “Law doesn’t determine that for us.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given the reactionary Supreme Court, Citizens United is unlikely to be overruled for the foreseeable future. This means undoing the decision would require the passage of a constitutional amendment—and in the last half century, only two such amendments have been ratified.

But there are other ways to rebalance the scales, including public election financing, which helped Zohran Mamdani secure his mayoral victory in New York City last year. Currently implemented in 15 states and Washington, DC, these programs issue grants, vouchers, and matching funds that augment the power of small donations. This incentivizes politicians to court the public, not just big donors, and opens a path to political office for those who lack networks of well-heeled supporters. And, in exchange for accepting state funding, campaigns agree to oversight and transparency measures.

Citizens United might also be circumvented by novel legal maneuvering. As Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in 1819, a corporation is “mere creature of law”—and while the Supreme Court has ruled that such creatures have the right to throw money around at election time, states themselves hold considerable authority to define the powers they grant to incorporated entities.

In Montana, organizers are currently collecting signatures for a daring new ballot measure, one that seeks to capitalize on this authority. If passed, the Transparent Election Initiative would create a new law stripping corporations of the power to engage in election spending, and out-of-state companies would also be obliged to heed the measure when operating in Montana. Industry groups are already trying to defeat the proposal, and were dealt a setback just last week, when the state Supreme Court ruled that the petition push can proceed.

At the party level, the Democratic National Committee is now debating methods for curtailing dark money’s influence in future primaries. And more and more Democrats have pledged to reject corporate PAC funding in recent years. It’s a small but heartening sign of progress, with tangible benefits for candidates: Voters from both parties are more likely to donate to, vote for, and trust politicians who reject PAC money.

With an unresponsive Congress failing to rein in an unaccountable president waging an unnecessary war, America is limping toward its 250th birthday. To retreat from the brink, we’ll have to restore the public’s faith in our elections—and that starts with taking them off the market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hungarians gave up on democracy sooner than any of their neighbors, unhappy with its arduous processes and unsatisfying compromises. Like everywhere in post-Soviet space, the market economy delivered much less than they had imagined, but instead of replacing it or reforming it with progressive alternatives, they threw in their lot with the strongman who promised them Hungary for Hungarians.

It is unlikely that Magyar, a Christian democratic lawyer, will undertake to address the rot at the center of Hungary’s political culture. Surely, he doesn’t see it and wants Hungary to become a law-abiding conservative Christian country rather than a criminal one. His promises on the campaign trail were vague: zero tolerance for corruption, a new public media law, a new state budget, and a wealth tax for billionaires. These are nice places to start but he has no vision for a Hungary different to its core. Nor do most Hungarians: They ousted Orbán because of the sky-high prices and corruption, not the shmoozing with Putin, disgusting propaganda, or nationalist hyperbole.

In fact, Magyar’s position on Ukraine isn’t that different from Orbán’s: Hungary stays out, keeps its head low. But he wants the EU’s frozen moneys to flow and will surely not block the EU the way Orbán did. But he’ll be in a bind as Hungary, thanks to Orbán, is uniquely reliant on Russian gas. Nevertheless, it is a blow for Russia, as it has lost its best ally within the EU: “The Orbán government believed it could build a ‘little Russia’ inside Hungary with the help of Russian political strategists,” opined Ukrainian MP Mykola Kniazhytskyi on Facebook, “but surprise, surprise, it has failed. Russia has lost its grip on Hungary: It will no longer be able to secure places for its oligarchs on sanctions exemption lists, buy off politicians with oil discounts, or obtain sensitive information from confidential sources.”

Moreover, Hungary has to return itself to a multiparty democracy. The next parliament will only include Tisza, Fidesz, and a tiny ultranationalist party. Proper social democratic, green, and leftist parties will have to be pieced together in a way that Hungarians have found very frustrating in the post-communist decades. This isn’t up to Magyar but ordinary Hungarians. Only their civic engagement can break the long-term spell of the autocratic temptation.

But let’s enjoy the jubilation and credit Hungarians with showing how an autocrat can be beat: at the ballot box and in droves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s almost enough to make one nostalgic for the original Gilded Age of the late 19th century. Back then, the defenders of the horrors of capitalism at least pretended to care about nurturing a semblance of virtue among the elite. William Graham Sumner, America’s most famous Social Darwinist, argued that the millionaires of his age were “a product of natural selection.” But they were more than just the winners of an amoral natural process; they were also, in his mind, morally blessed, and he contended that their victories in the market reflected not just commercial canniness but habits of frugality, courage, perseverance, prudence, and other Boy Scout–grade virtues. As Sumner fondly imagined, the robber barons of the industrial age had a spark in them that the lower classes lacked. “The great captains of industry are as rare as great generals,” he wrote. “Men of routine or men who can do what they are told are not hard to find; but men who can think and plan and tell the routine men what to do are very rare. They are paid in proportion to the supply and demand of them.”

It was bullshit, of course—a way to blame the victims of capitalist exploitation as undeserving. But to paraphrase Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski: Say what you will about the tenets of Social Darwinism; at least it’s an ethos. Today’s high-agency ideologues have a lot more in common with the nihilists that Sobchak so roundly despised.

Sumner’s Social Darwinism was a crude but unstable mixture of evolutionary pseudoscience and quasi-Christian morality; the Valley’s high-agency ideology is essentially Nietzsche with a Substack. Its adherents are a temperamental aristocracy; they hew to the belief that they’re constitutively different from the rest of us, and essentially see themselves as “beyond good and evil,” in Nietzsche’s famous phrase. They don’t bother to explain why anyone else might benefit from their having such immense wealth. They simply assert their superiority and treat the assertion as self-evident. In Nietzsche’s framework, demanding justification from the powerful is itself a symptom of Christianity’s outmoded “slave morality”—a retrograde effort on the part of the resentful masses to constrain those naturally superior to them. The high-agency ideologues may not have taken Philosophy 101 in college, but they seem to have absorbed this idea almost completely.

Sumner caricatured the poor as “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.” That’s cruel, but at least it grants (however perversely) a kind of moral agency to the poor: They could, in principle, reform themselves. The high-agency ideologues dispense with even this concession. Those who lack the requisite agentic temperament are written off as NPCs, a term borrowed from video games for “non-player characters”—the background figures who populate game worlds, running on scripts, repeating the same lines over and over. In this taxonomy, the poor aren’t failing to be virtuous enough; they don’t even quite qualify as human. High agency is, in the end, the most aristocratic justification for inequality that American capitalism has yet produced, and it’s arrived just in time for the most grotesquely unequal moment in American life since the first Gilded Age.

Which brings us back to Matthew Gallagher and his AI-powered telehealth empire. The Times framed his story as inspiration—an early indication of what AI technology can achieve in the hands of a user singularly focused on market conquest. Critics called it fraud. But perhaps it’s most usefully read as a demonstration: This is what “just do the thing” looks like when the thing in question is selling an inert compound to people desperate to lose weight, with fake doctors and fake patients in your ads, and an FDA warning letter in the drawer. The ideology doesn’t distinguish between the thing being worth doing and the thing merely being doable. Unlike The New York Times, Gallagher at least seems to have understood the assignment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing in New York magazine, Narges Bajoghli, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins, placed the videos in the larger context of Iranian propaganda. The Islamic Republic has long invested in creating a media infrastructure. In 2024, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, whose assassination by the US and Israel kicked off the latest war at the end of February, said, “The media is more effective than missiles, planes and drones in forcing the enemy to retreat and to influence hearts and minds.”

According to Bajoghli, there has been an important generational shift in Iranian social-media production. The older generation, shaped by the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, tended to produce material that was culturally specific to Iran, often with religious themes. Bajoghli describes this cultural style as “heavy. Elegiac. Martyrdom rendered in slow motion, set to music designed to make you feel the weight of sacrifice. It moved those who already shared its symbolic vocabulary. It reached no one else.”

Over time, a newer generation of Iranian propaganda makers has emerged, their rise ironically hastened in part by the US and Israeli assassination campaign. This younger generation is more in tune with global popular culture (the new AI videos often feature rap lyrics and are very knowing about Hollywood tropes) and more inclined to frame Iran’s grievances as part of a global anticolonial struggle.

Bajoghli astutely observes that the theme of the “Epstein class” (which is pervasive in the videos) helps give them a universal resonance:

The Epstein thread runs through nearly everything. In one short clip, Trump and Netanyahu stand blood-soaked on the edge of a cliff. Blonde girls carrying folders labeled “Epstein File” march toward them in lockstep alongside Iranian schoolgirls from Minab—their own kind of army of the oppressed. With a single flinch of their eyes, Trump and Netanyahu go over the edge into a river of fire below. The claim embedded in all of this—that the Trump administration launched this war partly to suppress Epstein-file disclosures—is not an argument Iran invented. It was already circulating aggressively in leftist, liberal, and, increasingly, MAGA spaces through Americans who had expected Trump to be the one who finally exposed the network and felt profoundly betrayed by the pivot to war. It resonated in Arab online spaces too, due to the numerous Emirati and Saudi businesspeople and leaders connected to Epstein, merging seamlessly with long-running arguments about the West’s hypocrisy and Arab lackeys.

If Trump’s propaganda is aimed at a narrow circle of hardcore MAGA supporters, Iranian social media influencers have found themes that speak to many different audiences. These competing messages are both religious. Trump’s message in his Sunday post was “I am the new Jesus.” Iranian social media, meanwhile, portrays Trump as a devil-worshipping pedophile war criminal. Perhaps it is not so surprising that the Iranian message is more popular.

On the outskirts of an American town, a bus is scheduled to arrive. Only there’s no station—no ticket counter or waiting area, no screen offering updates on a delay that’s already stretching on. Just a small cluster of people standing with their bags at the edge of the pavement, looking up and down the street and refreshing their phones. When the bus finally arrives, the driver climbs down to check tickets. Someone asks a question, but he brushes them off. No time. No explanation. No one else around.

This scene isn’t an aberration. It’s what intercity bus travel looks like after decades of deregulation and abandonment. The unraveling of Greyhound—the nation’s largest intercity bus company, which for much of the 20th century was synonymous with long-distance travel—is often framed as a story of corporate mismanagement and declining service, but the deeper story is structural: a mode of transportation that millions of Americans rely on, stripped of the infrastructure that once supported it. What remains is a private network that can still move people between cities but has retreated from many of the communities that need it most.

The people left behind aren’t casual travelers looking to save a few dollars. They depend on the bus for trips that can’t be postponed—medical appointments, court dates, family emergencies, work obligations. For riders with no car and few alternatives, a delay isn’t just an inconvenience; it often means the trip doesn’t happen at all. And the thinner the transit options, the higher the stakes when service is cut.

Greyhound’s decline didn’t begin with one bad year or one bad CEO. Since its mid-20th-century heyday, when downtown terminals linked thousands of destinations and buses were a routine part of American travel for everyone from students and service members to families and vacationers, the company has faced steady pressure from external forces. Chief among them were the rise of car ownership, cheaper air tickets, and, most crucially, the deregulation of intercity buses. Previously, bus companies were required to keep service broadly available, subsidizing unprofitable routes with revenue from ones in higher demand. The Bus Regulatory Reform Act of 1982 lifted those requirements, shifting service away from smaller markets. Routes that didn’t pay for themselves—including across much of the rural Midwest and other lightly populated regions—were the first to disappear.

In 2021, FlixBus, a German travel-technology company, acquired Greyhound. Today, the two brands operate as a single intercity network spanning more than 1,800 destinations. Flix says it remains committed to serving rural areas, noting that hundreds of small towns are included in its network. Even so, the system reaches fewer places—especially in rural areas—than the one Greyhound once ran: a network that, at the height of its expansion in the early 1940s, operated roughly 4,750 bus stations nationwide.

The contraction has not only reduced routes; it has reshaped the infrastructure that once supported them. Greyhound’s terminal properties were not included in the Flix acquisition and remained with Greyhound’s former parent company, FirstGroup, which later sold them to other owners.

While Flix still operates out of major urban transit hubs such as New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, Los Angeles’s Union Station, and Boston’s South Station, the company relies on a model built around app-based ticketing and curbside pickup rather than privately owned stations in markets with lighter demand. Flix’s CEO, Kai Boysan, says the curbside model keeps prices down and improves on-time performance, with rates that exceeded 85 percent during this past winter’s holiday season and that are close to 100 percent in certain regions.

Even as it defends the curbside model as a way to avoid the costs of privately owned terminals, Flix argues that intercity buses should have access to publicly supported transit centers that connect local buses and commuter rail lines. The company is pushing for “reasonable access” rights to those facilities and says that federal programs like the Section 5311 Intercity Bus Program, which sets aside a portion of federal rural transit funding to support intercity bus service in rural areas with smaller populations, are critical to sustaining service in underserved regions. Without those protections, Boysan says, buses will continue to be pushed to peripheral locations—and passengers will continue to face delays, transfers, and ticketing without the infrastructure that once anchored the system.

The fight over stations isn’t just about urban real estate; it’s about whether intercity buses are considered a core component of a city’s transportation system at all. Local governments “need to view bus stations as one of their obligations or one of their infrastructure priorities,” says Joseph P. Schwieterman, a transportation scholar at DePaul University who studies intercity bus and rail systems. “Some have good transit centers, but the transit agencies won’t let bus lines use them. Others are kind of hostile to the bus because they view it as a source of crime.” So the bus still runs but the station doesn’t—and with it go the waiting room, bathrooms, charging stations, and staffed counter that riders depend on.

The collapse of intercity bus service isn’t an accident of the market. It’s the result of treating transportation as a private service rather than a public responsibility. One solution, according to Genevieve Giuliano, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, is to provide the kind of public backing that’s extended to air travel—an investment that, while not a remedy for every issue facing intercity buses, could help stabilize the network itself. “There are subsidies that are paid by the federal government to carriers to include unprofitable links in their networks as part of basic air mobility,” Giuliano says. She wonders why we haven’t applied the same logic to bus travel.

Efforts to fix the system run into a simple reality: The people who rely on intercity buses carry little political weight. Their needs rarely shape transportation policy, and pushing buses away from central transit facilities reinforces their marginal status, making it easier for the infrastructure around them to disappear. Meanwhile, Greyhound’s reputation as a last-resort service deters riders who have alternatives. Giuliano has suggested a voucher system that could widen access and draw in riders who currently have other options—expanding not just the customer base for bus travel but the political constituency behind it. For now, she says, “we haven’t seen enough public support to say, ‘Well, you should also be subsidizing the intercity bus lines.’” Abandoning an essential service is easier when the people left behind are easy to ignore.

The consequences are not abstract. “The right to travel as a civil-rights issue gets at employment, housing, and leisure,” says Morgan Hecht Dominguez, an attorney at Disability Law Colorado. Without formal stations, there’s no way to enforce basic accommodations, such as ADA-compliant boarding and staffed ticketing. In the curbside model, those gaps show up quickly: A rider who needs accessible boarding or help rebooking a missed connection may have nowhere to turn. Nico Meyering, a Greyhound rider in Philadelphia who lives with a rare genetic breathing disorder, says the stakes are clear: “If we are not able to move about the nation as our needs dictate, then our freedom is limited. We don’t have true freedom.”

In rural communities, the consequences are just as stark. “There are people living in very rural areas who have no means of getting not only around their communities but between them,” says Stevie Pasamonte, a transit organizer at the Alliance for a Just Society. For these riders, mobility is a lifeline, and a loss of service doesn’t mean a longer walk—it means a severed connection to work, family, or medical care. When that lifeline is cut, it isn’t fate; it’s policy.

Back at that curbside stop, the scene no longer reads as a temporary glitch. It’s the predictable result of policy decisions, economic pressures, local resistance, and a transportation network allowed to fail because the people affected are all too easy to ignore. The bus still comes and goes. The system falls further behind.

On October 23, 2024, Suchir Balaji’s face appeared, freshly shaved, boyish but serious, partially shadowed, in The New York Times as he announced himself as a whistleblower against one of the most powerful technology companies in the world. Setting off a political earthquake in the AI industry, Balaji claimed that OpenAI, the highly touted artificial-intelligence start-up where he’d worked as a researcher for almost four years, had broken copyright laws by absorbing practically all available data on the Internet for its models. ChatGPT, the company’s mega-popular AI chatbot—as well as, potentially, its competitors—had apparently been built on a foundation of illegal activity on a mass scale. Balaji presented his supporting argument in a mathematically minded paper on his personal website.

“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Balaji told the Times’ Cade Metz.

OpenAI had a lot on the line, and so did Balaji. Other researchers had resigned from their positions and issued warnings about the dangers of AI going rogue in fantastical Terminator-like scenarios. But as the Times noted, Balaji was one of the few industry professionals flagging the damage that the technology was doing right now. A 26-year-old former top student at Berkeley, he was already a veteran of several AI labs and had a patent under his belt. His parents called him a humble prodigy who had taught himself programming at age 11. His future seemed boundless.

Balaji didn’t live long enough to tell his full story.

A month after the Times interview was published, Balaji was found dead in his San Francisco apartment with a gunshot wound to the head. In that brief interval, he had gone from obscure AI researcher to high-profile whistleblower under severe pressure as he defied an industry that was collectively engaged in the biggest speculative bet in American business history.

Suchir Balaji’s time in the public eye amounted to one newspaper interview, but his afterlife as a martyr has become increasingly complex, his legacy contested terrain. The San Francisco medical examiner ruled his death a suicide, but his parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, have repeatedly stated that their son was murdered for what he knew. The dispute likely won’t be resolved to the satisfaction of Balaji’s parents or critics of the burgeoning AI industry anytime soon. Still, it tells us a great deal about the crisis of accountability in a sector of the AI industry that has come to dominate our investment economy and dramatically alter our daily lives. The aftermath of Balaji’s death also reveals a profound and troubling failure to protect and support AI whistleblowers, and corporate whistleblowers in general.

For the Times, Balaji’s story was more than an impressive scoop. It was also a key element in its copyright-infringement lawsuit against the massive AI start-up, New York Times v. OpenAI. If the paper were to succeed in the suit, in which Balaji was listed as a potential witness, it could win a multibillion-dollar judgment and open the door to numerous similar actions against OpenAI and its competitors. From the vantage point of an industry built on the ruthless consumption of any and all data, the potential damage might be apocalyptic.

Balaji’s grieving parents have highlighted the murky circumstances surrounding his death, hiring numerous forensic consultants and lawyers in their quest to prove that their son was murdered. Some details remain disputed—Balaji’s parents claim that the crime scene was poorly tended, that there is evidence from blood and hair collected at the scene that indicates a possible struggle, and that he was shot at an angle that is inconsistent with suicide.

Overall, the picture is mixed. Balaji left no suicide note. His apartment was dead-bolted from the inside, and police reported there was no sign of forced entry. The day before his death, after returning from a trip with friends, he had spoken with his father on the phone and seemed happy. Security footage recorded by his building in the hours before his death shows him walking into his apartment with a takeout order. He owned a gun. In some news reports, friends described him as somewhat secretive. The medical examiner’s report found GHB in his system. While the so-called date-rape drug can be used recreationally or as a disabling agent, GHB can also appear naturally during a body’s decomposition.

The primary demand from Balaji’s parents has been for the FBI to look into their son’s death. “We know there was foul play from many factors, many data points,” Ramarao said at a public vigil in December 2024. Indicating that her son represented a threat to the AI industry, she asked for a “thorough investigation.”

For a time, Balaji’s family found support across the political spectrum. In January 2025, after a news report stated that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) was still investigating Balaji’s death, the left-wing San Francisco Supervisor Jackie Fielder posted on X, “I am relieved to see this case reopened. Friends and family of Suchir are welcome to get in touch with my office.” At the same time, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna addressed Ramarao directly on X, offering his help. He later told The Mercury News that he’d had a conversation with Ramarao that led him to “believe her that there are unanswered questions.”

But in February, the SFPD closed its investigation into Balaji’s death, pronouncing it a suicide, and Democratic politicians seemed to lose interest in the case. Neither Khanna’s nor Fielder’s office responded to inquiries about their past support for a new investigation or their contact with Balaji’s family.

Ramarao has been a particularly vocal advocate for her son and has aggressively challenged officials for not doing more to investigate his death. She has spoken frequently at public events and in lengthy interviews on podcasts, YouTube shows, and Indian media. In January 2025, when Bay Area public officials were calling for a deeper investigation into Balaji’s death, Ramarao sat down for a 66-minute interview with Tucker Carlson, during which she said that her son was murdered.

Ramamurthy has offered fewer public remarks, though he is sometimes seen alongside his wife, appearing stoically subdued. At the December 2024 public memorial, he expressed concern that the United States was becoming a mafia state. “Enterprises are becoming very greedy, and compassion and caring have taken a backseat,” he said. Under the banner of the Justice for Suchir Movement, Ramamurthy has posted online about the need for “ethical AI,” and he’s started a conference, the Suchir Balaji Memorial Summit. In his X profile, he identifies himself as “OpenAI Whistleblower Suchir’s Dad,” and he’s made numerous posts with the hashtag #justiceforsuchir that point out alleged issues at the crime scene, such as the blood-spatter patterns, a disabled surveillance camera, and a window through which an assassin could have entered. His posts depict his son as a thwarted genius, the “robinhood of AI,” who called for a more humane AI revolution and was murdered for his efforts.

In their desperation to find an alternate explanation for their son’s death, Ramarao and Ramamurthy have cycled through a half-dozen attorneys and several outside investigators. They filed and then dropped a lawsuit against the SFPD. Meanwhile, they’ve gone after OpenAI on many fronts, including supporting a ballot measure that opposes its planned conversion into a for-profit company. They’ve also found some surprising allies.

Ramarao and Ramamurthy have received extensive support on the political right, which has occasionally asked the right questions, even if for the wrong reasons. But whatever genuine suspicions might surround the case, Balaji’s death has unfortunately become fodder in the political battles that are consuming the tech industry. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, who was one of the company’s cofounders, have become mortal enemies. The two are embroiled in a lawsuit based on Musk’s belief that OpenAI’s transformation into a for-profit structure will contribute to the untrammeled development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which may doom humanity. In the meantime, Musk’s company xAI hosts Grok, an anything-goes chatbot that has helped enable a global proliferation of nonconsensual pedophilic imagery; it has also parroted Musk’s racist beliefs and even praised Hitler. Musk will apparently do anything to crush Altman, and that includes accusing him of orchestrating a murder.

In September of last year, a squeamish-looking Altman gave an exceedingly awkward interview to Tucker Carlson. Carlson called Balaji’s death “definitely murder” as Altman sweated his way through some words of sympathy for his former employee’s family. The grim exchange, in which Altman seemed oily and evasive, lit up right-wing social networks.

“He was murdered,” Musk declared on X.

The public speculation surrounding Balaji’s death went into overdrive. In the absence of an authoritative investigation, the Balaji case has become the subject of feverish conjecture by right-wing podcasters, tech moguls, and social-media conspiracy theorists, who, unlike many on the liberal left, are willing to entertain sinister ideas about the tech industry and corporate power. While they eagerly serve as ideological foot soldiers in Musk’s online army, the virtual shots they fire at OpenAI and Altman reflect a nascent public disgust with tech—one that is clearly grounded in issues of class, even if it often takes the form of paranoid murder fantasies.

Balaji’s parents have little choice but to embrace those who are willing to grant them attention and entertain their questions about their son’s death. They have repeatedly posted on X asking for help from Musk and MAGA politicians like Vivek Ramaswamy. When Carlson offered Ramarao access to a massive audience, she accepted.

Ramarao declined to speak with me when I reached out earlier this year; Ramamurthy spoke with me briefly on the phone, then hung up and never called back. Later, Ramarao e-mailed me, writing, “When we are pushed to give evidence, it doesn’t seem safe to get engaged. We don’t know who is behind this. So please give us time and space. Unless introduced by someone we trust, we won’t engage.”

Using the media to litigate the circumstances of Balaji’s death is inherently fraught. Leftists and liberals who are inclined to distrust tech moguls and the police might be attracted to the tale of a ruthless company that is willing to kill a critic. But among those Democrats who once offered the family public support, Balaji’s story seems to have faded from their concern, consigned to the realm of misinformation and right-wing conspiracism—when it’s really about an isolated whistleblower challenging corporate malfeasance at the highest levels.

For the online right, the story of Balaji’s death offers all the proper villains, including a shifty gay tech CEO already locked in combat with their hero, Elon Musk, the world’s richest fascist. In their narrative, “Altman killed Balaji” has been memed into being, proven through the low-resolution photographs and heart-rending parental statements percolating through the right-wing-media ecosystem—all of it approved and boosted by Musk himself. There’s even a memecoin (a cryptocurrency token) named after Balaji; its maker claims to be supporting the family’s cause.

With every opportunity the right gives Balaji’s family to press their case, the search for justice seems to slip deeper into the political swamp—into the confusion and uncertainty that then gets amplified by yet another investigator producing yet another report dissenting from the SFPD’s official line.

“The only person in his life Suchir was ever not happy about was Sam Altman,” Ramarao told the MAGA-affiliated podcaster Patrick Bet-David, who has 2.89 million subscribers on YouTube. “So Suchir knew something.”

“There’s an AI war going on,” Bet-David added, characterizing Balaji’s death as practically a gangland killing.

With his death suffused in rumors, misinformation, and his parents’ righteous grief—all stirred in the pot of the world’s richest troll—Suchir Balaji has become the haunted face of tech whistleblowing and the AI boom. But his death reflects a wider dysfunction in American industry, where, as once-durable liberal institutions crumble, corporate and government power becomes unaccountable, synonymous with corruption and criminality. The risk goes beyond one company, industry, or complaint; Balaji’s story fits into the broader saga of whistleblowers who face daunting odds against proving their claims. Whistleblowing is a solitary, psychically dangerous pursuit, and more would-be truth-tellers have succumbed to the malign forces marshaled against them—gaslighting, intimidation, legal threats, financial pressure—than to a hit man’s bullet.

On the morning of March 9, 2024, John Barnett, a whistleblower who had worked on the 787 Dreamliner aircraft at Boeing, was found dead of a gunshot wound in his car outside a hotel in Charleston, South Carolina. Barnett had spent the previous two days testifying against Boeing, alleging that the company had used substandard parts while building the 787 and ignored safety protocols, and he was scheduled for more testimony that day. His death immediately provoked widespread speculation that he’d been murdered. But the physical evidence, comments from his family, and Barnett’s lengthy suicide note indicate that he likely killed himself.

Barnett spent the last night of his life in his truck, writing about his fury and desperation in a sprawling, chaotic letter that was found at his side. The text runs at all angles; a reader has to turn some pages around to make out the words. But they are clearly the final thoughts of a profoundly depressed man saying that he could no longer carry on but wanted his family and friends to know that he was at peace.

“America, come together or die!!” Barnett wrote on one page. “I pray the motherfuckers that destroyed my life pay!!! I pray Boeing pays!!!”

The same page contains a remark scrawled sideways between the lines about Boeing, and it says as much about Suchir Balaji’s ordeal and those of so many others as it does about Barnett’s. “The entire system for whistleblower protection is fucked up too!” Barnett wrote.

Mary Inman, an attorney at the law firm Whistleblower Partners, has the same concern. She’s a cofounder of an initiative called Psst.org, which aims to encourage action by bringing together whistleblowers from the same company or institution. Despite the canonization of whistleblowers as lone heroes in movies, many corporate and government scandals involve more than one person sounding the alarm, with potentially different fates befalling them. Collaboration and mutual support can be crucial.

“There’s a first-mover problem with whistleblowing, particularly in AI, where the stakes are so high,” Inman said. Psst.org offers an “information escrow” service, a kind of digital lockbox where someone can submit a complaint or memo about wrongdoing. Whistleblowers can use the service if they have sensitive information but don’t feel comfortable raising the issue on their own. If multiple people from the same institution submit information, the service can bring them together. The organization also offers other forms of support, such as media training and connections to therapists.

“We want to disrupt and change how whistleblowing happens and make it a collective act,” Inman said, pointing again to OpenAI, where months before Balaji came forward, a group of researchers resigned together, criticizing the company’s unsafe practices. “And in so doing, we’ll be able to bring more people forward.”

The AI industry is lightly regulated, with fewer safeguards to protect the public’s interests than more established fields. Backed by the tech industry, President Donald Trump’s administration has attempted—first via legislation, then through an executive order—to prohibit individual states from instituting their own AI regulations. Inside these companies, there are enormous financial incentives to say nothing, and many AI professionals subscribe to an austere, almost cultish faith in the world-changing power of artificial general intelligence.

Sophie Luskin, a researcher at the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy, said that the absence of any legislation that applies specifically to whistleblowers in the AI industry is a major problem. “With employees in the AI sector, they find their rights and protections are particularly unclear and confusing,” she said.

Will they be protected, for example, if they report potential harms or ones that haven’t happened yet? What about something that might harm the public but doesn’t violate the law, such as the information related to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s pressure campaign against the AI company Anthropic for refusing to allow its software to be used for autonomous weapons and other lethal purposes?

The bipartisan AI Whistleblower Protection Act, sponsored in May 2025 by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), among others, was supposed to fill in these gaps, codifying both the kinds of harms that AI whistleblowers might report and the protections they should be afforded. The act “has very good bones that have strong precedent in other existing laws,” Luskin said. But it has been stuck in committee for nearly a year.

“We really miss out on the ability to hold these companies accountable when we don’t have effective and comprehensive whistleblower protections,” Luskin said. “People who work at these companies know what’s going on.”

Now, as Balaji’s story lapses into myth, there remains little accountability for his death—and for the potential crimes that he sacrificed so much to expose. OpenAI, which has expressed sympathy over Balaji’s death, remains the industry’s hottest start-up and is currently seeking up to $100 billion in investment capital. Lawsuits and whistleblower complaints seeking to publicize alleged abuses at the company—including one submitted to the SEC regarding alleged violations of securities laws—have done little to stem its rise.

Perhaps this is the inevitable outcome of actions undertaken by isolated, principled individuals trying to slow the freight train of highly leveraged technological innovation. At the December 2024 public memorial for Balaji, when his mother called for an FBI investigation into her son’s death, Ramarao offered a spirited tribute. She explained to the crowd that her child had followed his sense of right and wrong to the only place it could take him:

The most important thing is he was a witness. He was a witness for a critical case. And even that’s not taken into account, and that’s the most frustrating [thing] for us. What’s the value of speaking truth if by speaking truth someone could lose their life? Do we never encourage our children to stand up for truth? Is there any protection? So whistleblowers’ lives don’t matter? We’re ready to lose them. I don’t know how I could have saved my son by teaching him to tell lies. The ethics with which I raised him took his life today.

Ramarao’s words reflect more than the loss suffered by a grieving parent. As AI rampages through so many sectors of American life and continues to disfigure the basic foundations of creative and intellectual labor, the issues raised by Suchir Balaji are more urgent than ever. But absent any real political action against unchecked corporate power, Balaji’s story is more likely to be remembered as a right-wing meme than as a catalyst for reform.

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

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

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

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

Examples include:

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

Judges must be impartial in their rulings and avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Yet, in practice, that standard is poorly enforced. The judiciary itself decides in most cases what constitutes a conflict, and its current guidelines state that judges may even receive payments from defendants while a case is ongoing—so long as the judge’s ruling will not impact the amount they get paid.

In Louisiana, where many judges profit from petrochemical investments, the question of whether the courts can be trusted to fairly judge the oil industry has enormous stakes.

Enormous stakes

For decades, oil companies working in Louisiana dredged canals through wetlands and dumped billions of gallons of waste in unlined pits that leached salts and toxic heavy metals into the surrounding soil and waters. That pollution killed cattle, crawfish, oysters, crops and wetland plants. It has also seeped into aquifers that provide drinking water to local communities and contributed to a land-loss crisis that threatens to wipe southern Louisiana off the map.

Now, through a series of about 40 related lawsuits, the state and several parishes are seeking tens of billions in damages from hundreds of these companies to pay for the cost of cleaning up the mess. The litigation could rank among the most expensive environmental damage cases in US history if the plaintiffs succeed.

Last year, a Louisiana jury’s verdict in one of these lawsuits found Chevron liable for $745 million in damages. The oil companies have asked the US Supreme Court to move the cases from state to federal courts, where judges could decide to vacate the jury’s verdict. (Federal courts already dismissed an early case in the series before it ever reached a jury).

If the oil companies prevail with the Supreme Court, which is expected to release a decision this spring, the cases will likely wind up back on the dockets of the federal judges named in this story.

An investigation by Floodlight, WWNO/WRKF, and Type Investigations found that 12 of the 46 federal judges who have already made rulings in the coastal damage lawsuits had investments in or business connections to petrochemical companies that were defendants in the cases.

Since 2013, nine of these judges have collected nearly $1 million in income from their investments in the defendants, according to an analysis of their financial disclosures. That income was gained during the period while the cases have been litigated in federal courts, though not exclusively while the cases were on each of the judges’ dockets.

It’s difficult to determine if and how financial ties influenced judicial decisions—and many of these judges, like Barbier, actually ruled against the oil companies. But even the appearance of impropriety can undermine trust in the rule of law.

“It’s only natural for the public to be increasingly suspicious about whether those judges are a little too friendly with the industry to be impartial arbiters,” said Geyh.

Even beyond the direct ties to the defendants, judges’ investments in the fossil fuel industry more broadly could raise eyebrows. The outcome of these coastal damage cases could impact the industry at large, with the potential to establish a road map for anyone seeking to hold oil companies accountable for environmental destruction.

Where’s the money coming from?

The stakes of these cases are enormous for the oil companies, as well as for their investors—possibly exceeding a $100 billion in liability, said the author and historian John Barry.

The industry’s damage has accelerated the state’s coastal erosion: Since the 1930s, an area about the size of Delaware has slipped into the sea.

In response, Louisiana spent decades creating its Coastal Master Plan to repair its wetlands and address the land loss. But enacting it will require tens of billions of dollars over the coming decades.

Where that money might come from is an open question, and one that these lawsuits seek to resolve.

 “Without money, there’s no master plan,” said Barry. “The stakes are the existence of Louisiana. It’s pretty simple.”

In his former position on the board of a New Orleans flood protection agency, Barry was an architect of a lawsuit that became a model for the dozens of parish lawsuits that followed it. His team argued their case in front of Judge Nannette Jolivette Brown starting in 2013—but she dismissed it, finding that the flood protection agency had no standing against nearly 100 oil companies and keeping the case from ever reaching a jury. She later presided over two additional coastal damage cases.

Brown and her husband traded tens of thousands of dollars in Exxon and Chevron stock while those companies were defendants before her. She held the stocks for about 18 months, while the price of both increased significantly. She then sold them before issuing any additional rulings —likely keeping her within disqualification rules.

At the time, Brown’s husband was one of Entergy’s most senior executives, and the couple held millions of dollars of the company’s stock. Entergy was a defendant in one of the coastal damage cases, though not one over which she presided.

“I always take great care to ensure that I comply with all judiciary ethics guidance, rules and rule of law,” Brown wrote in response to our findings.

The statute has limitations

Federal recusal rules set a high bar for when a judge must step aside—and impose no real penalty when they don’t.

Congress requires judges to recuse themselves whenever their impartiality “might reasonably be questioned,” including when they hold any financial interest in a party. But words like “reasonably” and “financial interest” leave wiggle room, and judges themselves decide whether a conflict exists. The only remedy when they get it wrong is an appeal—a thorny process with a high bar for success.

However, experts widely agree that if a judge owns any amount of stock in a company that is a party to the case, they are required to step aside.

One judge appears to have crossed that bright line.

US Fifth Circuit Court Judge Edith Jones held roughly $50,000 of ConocoPhillips stock while voting in 2024 on a case where a ConocoPhillips subsidiary was a defendant.

That ruling likely violated the federal disqualification statute and Code of Judicial Conduct, according to three judicial experts.

Ways to fix this

Louisiana’s federal judges have so many ties to the oil and gas industry that some cases have led to mass recusals. In one coastal damage case, nine judges recused, including at least five who had investments in the defendants.

The judiciary also has a poor record of policing its conflicts. The Wall Street Journal found in 2021 that over 130 federal judges nationwide had failed to recuse themselves despite owning stock in companies involved in cases they oversaw.

Relatively simple judicial reforms, like requiring judges to put their holdings in blind trusts, could eliminate many of the conflicts that cause these situations, according to Geyh.  

“You kind of expect that there are certain sacrifices you need to make in order to preserve public perception of your impartiality, your integrity, and your independence,” Geyh said.

In a small step forward in 2022, the courts updated their conflict-screening procedures and lawmakers passed the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, which established stricter disclosure rules and a requirement that judges’ disclosures be made available to the public online.

This investigation relied in part on those documents.

Disappearing communities

As the dispute over who should pay to clean up the coast enters its 13th year of litigation, the communities living with the destruction are losing ground fast.

“Most people don’t have a clue about how extensive the damage can be to landowners,” said lawyer Warren Perrin, who estimates the oil companies have caused hundreds of acres of his family land to disappear into the water.

Perrin traces his family roots back to the Acadians, or Cajun people, who settled in Louisiana in the late 1700s. He says the loss of wetlands, increasing flood risk, and pollution caused by oil companies has taken a toll on the close-knit Cajun family and community in Vermillion Parish.

“ As we lose the lands, people move away,” he said. “The intensity of the culture is destabilized as more people move away.”

If the oil companies get their way, it’s not clear where the money to preserve these lands will come from—or how much longer the coastal parishes can hold on.

Despite the odds, Perrin’s family is working to restore the coast in whatever modest ways they can, dumping boulders and rebuilding the coastline to keep their land from becoming open water.

“I’m a chronic, hopeless optimist that it will work out and we’re gonna save our lands,” he said. “It’s a struggle. But I believe in the system of justice, in our laws—usually the right thing happens.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This isn’t a result of police “failure.” The police are functioning exactly as designed, maintaining the cycle of crisis that keeps further inflating their departments’ budgets and overtime spending with each passing year. Their force cannot achieve what’s actually needed to produce safety, because the fundamental problem is not “disorder.” It’s deprivation.

Safety socialism, a term that arose out of conversations with my friend the public psychiatrist Gary Belkin, insists that safety doesn’t begin at the moment of crisis. It begins upstream—in affordable housing, universal childcare, well-funded schools, public health grounded in direct care services, and the publicly supported social fabric in communities that catches people before they fall into crisis. Mamdani’s envisioned DCS was an attempt to build that fabric into city government.

At its most ambitious, a fight to build and fully invest in DCS represents a form of abolitionist politics in practice—abolition understood not as mere destruction, as critics caricature it, but as Ruth Wilson Gilmore has insisted, as fundamentally constructive: “Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. So those who feel in their gut deep anxiety that abolition means knock it all down, scorch the earth and start something new, let that go. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.” Or, in Mariame Kaba’s formulation, it is “a positive project that focuses, in part, on building a society where it is possible to address harm without relying on structural forms of oppression or the violent systems that increase it.”

This is what makes DCS, as articulated during Mamdani’s campaign, ultimately more threatening to police power than any frontal assault on the NYPD. It represents, in Gramsci’s terms, a war of position rather than of maneuver. The most durable way to diminish policing is not to defund it in a single budget vote that can be reversed the following year, but to construct the material alternatives that render the current funding and authority given to police plainly absurd—and to, over time, insist upon reallocating police funds for the alternative services others are increasingly enabled to perform.

This thinking sits at the heart of the DCS. The department would consolidate and expand what currently exists in small, underfunded fragments—non-police crisis teams, violence interrupters, street outreach workers—into a single agency with a substantial budget, allowing it to span the full arc from prevention to acute crisis response. In his campaign, Mamdani committed to tripling mobile crisis teams with 24/7 citywide coverage, enabling interoperability between the 988 mental health line and 911, and launching a citywide community mental health navigator program. These are specific operational changes to how the city routes people in distress—changes that begin to make policing one option among several rather than the only one available.

The most essential and ambitious piece of the plan was a neighborhood care workforce: residents of the city’s most disinvested communities, hired, trained, and paid to support their neighbors, with the salaries, benefits, and institutional permanence currently reserved for police officers.

New York has glimpsed this approach to public mental health and safety before. In the 1960s, a program at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx hired neighborhood residents as community mental health workers. They didn’t run clinics. They stabilized daily life—mediating conflicts, navigating housing and benefits, showing up between crises when intervention actually works. The program was celebrated nationally, then dismantled—not because it failed, but because the psychiatric professionals overseeing it withdrew support rather than cede authority to lay workers. The city spent the next 50 years replacing that model with police, jails, emergency rooms, and default reliance on both voluntary and involuntary use of psychiatric medications that cannot address root causes. It was a choice New York is still paying for.

Now, by using public funds to build vital housing, crisis response, and care infrastructure, DCS can begin to address this damage head-on.

Community-led mutual aid and reciprocal care should remain at the core of any abolitionist vision, and abolitionists must always remain on guard against cooptation by politicians and the state, but a publicly funded system like DCS could represent the point at which abolitionist ambition meets the apparatus of government. Yet none of this can happen without an unflinching fight against entrenched police power.

Without a commitment to that fight, this kind of movement towards transformative change tends to collapse quietly rather than dramatically. A recent example in America’s third-biggest city shows how this can happen.

Like Mamdani, Brandon Johnson ran for Chicago mayor in 2023 as an unapologetic leftist standing against the city’s Democratic establishment. And like Mamdani, he campaigned on a platform to create an ambitious, comprehensive non-police crisis response and community mental health system—one called Treatment Not Trauma.

But today, nearly three years into his mayoralty, Johnson’s Treatment Not Trauma plan lies largely dormant. The non-police crisis response pilot started by his predecessor, Lori Lightfoot, continues to operate only on weekdays between 10:30 am and 4 pm and at a minuscule scale, leaving over 99 percent of mental health calls to armed police officers. It is responding to even fewer calls than it did under Lightfoot. The community care corps at the center of the idea was never built. Only one of the 14 city-run mental health centers closed over the last three decades that Johnson promised to reopen has returned. And the Chicago Police Department’s bloated budget continues to increase each year.

This is precisely the dynamic that safety socialism must be built to withstand. That requires carefully designed metrics and measurement tools that go beyond the reductive terms of safety set by police paradigms, sustained public education, and durable budgetary guarantees. Without such protections, when crisis erupts, those who have always defined safety as a policing problem will move quickly to discredit civilian alternatives and restore the old hierarchy. Reform without institutional protection is politically defenseless.

This is also why Mamdani’s approach to current budget negotiations is so concerning. His team estimated DCS would require at least $1.1 billion annually to operate at a meaningful scale, but the administration’s initial proposed budget contains not so much as a single dollar for the department. Now Mamdani is moderating and backing away from his campaign promise, citing budgetary restrictions and expected opposition in the City Council to justify instead establishing not a city agency but a Mayoral Office of Community Safety created by executive order rather than legislation, which means that it could be shuttered just as easily by the swipe of a pen held by his successor. Furthermore, no new funds are expected to be allocated to the office, which will instead simply take control over an estimated $260 million moved along with existing programs for which it will now assume responsibility. Compromises like these, advanced in the name of realpolitik, are exactly how ambitious reforms have historically dissolved inside routine budget politics, quietly, one fiscal year at a time.

For Mamdani’s promise for a DCS to become a reality, it needs four things no speech or executive order can provide: City Council legislation defining its mandate and authority; explicit dispatch protocols giving civilian teams genuine first-responder status rather than making them a permanent backup to police; a material commitment to continuous, prevention-focused community care programs and refusing to allow DCS to be reduced to endless crisis response alone; and a protected budget baseline of recurring line items that survive the next manufactured fiscal crisis. Without that foundation, every stumble of an underfunded civilian crisis response and the unchecked increase in crisis needs will be held up as proof that the whole project was destined to fail from the start.

Last Wednesday, Mamdani told The New York Times that he would overrule Tisch if necessary, insisting that he “hold[s] the final decision” on policing. But the context was revealing: The assertion came in reference to disbanding the Strategic Response Group, not to building the Department of Community Safety. Mamdani affirmed his authority over Tisch without connecting it to his transformative agenda for building community safety systems and opposing NYPD’s current monopoly on safety matters. If the mayor is prepared to overrule his police commissioner, the question his supporters should be pressing is: To what end? Disbanding an abusive protest-policing unit is a worthy reform, but it is not the structural reorientation of safety infrastructure that DCS represents. The real test of Mamdani’s willingness to assert control over the NYPD is whether he will use his authority to fight for the department he promised to build.

The Mamdani administration has framed the launch of a mayor’s office in place of a DCS as a pragmatic “first step” toward the eventual realization of the latter. This may turn out to be the case. But history suggests that quick retreats to incrementalism when a progressive executive first comes to office and wields more of a popular mandate than they are likely to ever hold again are far more often the first step toward abandoning transformative agendas in favor of perpetual “pragmatism” defined by accommodation of entrenched police power and its selective austerity, along with well-honed police capacity to quash any threats to their interests. Whether or not the DCS as once envisioned becomes a reality will, as has always been true, hinge on whether Mamdani’s supporters publicly insist that anything less is unacceptable and on whether Mamdani makes use of the political leverage that principled critique and demand from the left can create.

The deepest argument for safety socialism isn’t efficiency. It is about what care does for democratic life.

When the most consistent government presence in vulnerable neighborhoods is an armed officer, people learn to see the state as punishment. When essential care is collapsed into medical care alone and then rationed while forcing people to risk humiliation and bankruptcy to access it, people learn to expect abandonment. And in landscapes of abandonment, authoritarian politics and police-state mentalities find fertile soil—offering simple villains, invented enemies, and force as the supposed answer to social problems. Policing looms so large in urban politics in large part because it is so often the only public institution that reliably shows up when called, because it’s the only one that’s funded to do so. Safety socialism is a strategy for changing that—for making the state present in ways that build trust rather than enforce compliance.

Investments in a large-scale community care workforce can build the daily habits of mutual aid and reciprocal recognition that Jane Addams argued, more than a century ago, were the actual substrate of democratic life—the ordinary experience of being seen and supported by neighbors and government working in tandem.

The power of police lobbies and the panic politics they feed on are not unavoidable features of urban democracy. They are the product of a deliberately constructed vacuum—one that a serious, durable, well-funded community care system can begin to fill.

Whether Mamdani’s administration will ultimately succeed depends on more than a set of policy proposals. It hinges on showing that the same logic linking affordability and housing stability to genuine safety extends further, shaping what kind of civic life a city can sustain. When safety becomes not merely the absence of violence but the reliable presence of supportive public institutions that allow people to rely on one another, a city can become more than just orderly. It can become a shared home that its residents experience as worth defending and caring for together. The question now is whether Mamdani will truly fight to translate that governing philosophy into a lived reality. To do so, he will have to risk losing—the fight itself, any easy relation to NYPD, and, with that, his budding career and influence. But without taking such risks, no truly transformative politics will ever make it from campaign rhetoric to real-world implementation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Farmer, the physician and global health advocate who spent his life treating the poor, wrote frequently about “stupid deaths” that referred to the premature, preventable lives lost in impoverished communities caused not by the severity of illness but by the absence of basic, affordable care. But stupid deaths are not only for the poor. Even the best facilities Nigeria often make fatal mistakes, and face no accountability for them. The fault does not rest on overworked, poorly paid, doctors alone, but on the systematic failure instituted by decades of neglect in need of urgent overhaul.

We know who to blame. Nigeria spends 5.2 percent of its national budget on health—less than a third of the 15 percent it pledged to African leaders in the Abuja Declaration of 2001, a promise made and then quietly abandoned. Per capita, that amounts to $43 a year. There are 23.3 doctors per 100,000 people in the country, despite a WHO recommendation of 100. No new hospitals have been built since 2004, despite a rapidly growing population. Out-of-pocket expenditure accounts for roughly 74.68 percent of total healthcare funding—significantly above the regional average.

Healthcare is just one part of a failing system: the terrain most vulnerable to Nigeria’s larger governmental insufficiency. In 2023, the US provided more than $600 million in health support to Nigeria, accounting for over 21 percent of the nation’s annual health budget, primarily towards malaria prevention, HIV eradication, and vaccine distribution. That figure alone is a damning indictment of domestic neglect. More than a fifth of Nigeria’s health budget was being funded by a foreign government. Trump’s decision to cut USAID funding in early 2025, was not the advent of the crisis but its magnification and exposure. A nutrition program was terminated overnight, forcing more than 70 health facilities across three states to stop treating children with severe acute malnutrition, putting 60,000 children under 5 at immediate risk of death from preventable causes. Nigeria’s health minister said the responsibility to provide healthcare for its citizens ultimately rests on the state, as so much else in the country besides. He was right. It always did.

If the ancient Greeks were right when they said the state is a body, then we inhabit an ailing one—its organs underfunded, its limbs neglected, its vital functions outsourced to foreign donors who have now withdrawn. We pray in churches and mosques for God to heal our land to restore it to its former glory. And on our phones, we pray the more honest prayer: May Nigeria not happen to you. One is a prayer for healing. The other is a prayer for survival. What we are left with is an ill state and nowhere is that sickness more visible than in its hospitals.

The men who have presided over this failure, though, do not use those hospitals. Nigerian presidents have sought medical treatment abroad for as long as most citizens can remember—Babangida in France, Yar’Adua dying after treatment in Saudi Arabia, Obasanjo on unannounced trips, Jonathan in Germany. Buhari campaigned in 2015 on ending medical tourism, then spent 225 days abroad on medical trips. He died in a London hospital in July 2025. Before leaving office, his wife, Aisha, inaugurated a $21 billion presidential medical wing at the statehouse built—not to repair the system but to ensure that future presidents would never have to encounter it. The act itself is a blatant acknowledgment of a problem.

A significant part of this problem is the invisibility rendered by the lack of regulation in the healthcare system. The medical and dental council of Nigeria, the MDCN, also has a Disciplinary Tribunal specifically empowered to investigate professional misconduct and medical malpractice. Sanctions can range from suspension to outright deregistration, depending on the severity of the offence. The tribunal exists on paper, but not in practice. Most incidents of fatal mistakes in hospitals, or the generalized underfunding of the healthcare sector, never enter public scrutiny. Stories like my mother’s are shared privately, in WhatsApp messages between family members, during testimonies at church. It was not until January 2026, when the renowned author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie lost her son to this system, that we began to talk more openly about medical neglect in Nigeria.

Adichie and her family were in Lagos for Christmas when her 21-month-old son Nkanu developed what they first thought was a cold, which rapidly worsened into a serious infection. He was admitted to hospital and referred to Euracare, said to be the best facility in Lagos for the procedures he needed—an MRI, a lumbar puncture, and the insertion of a central line in preparation for a flight to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, where a medical team was waiting to receive him.During the administration of sedation, Nkanu was not properly monitored after being given Propofol, leading to a loss of responsiveness, seizures, and cardiac arrest.He did not survive. Adichie later alleged that the same anesthesiologist had been involved in two previous cases of overdosing children. The question that she, and you might be asking is: “Why did Euracare allow him to keep working?”

Nkanu’s death was not only a consequence of one doctor’s negligence. It was the consequence of a system in which such negligence is possible, unremarked, and unrecorded until it happens to someone the world is watching. Nigeria has only 600 pediatricians for over 40 million children. The United Kingdom has more than 5,000 for 20 million. The shortage of specialized pediatricians means children are routinely seen by doctors trained for adults, by staff who lack the specific expertise that paediatric care demands. My mother told me a story about a young girl with a hip problem who was not operated on by an orthoaedic pediatrician and had adult hip implants fitted, which did not work for her body and she was forced to go abroad for surgery and to intensify physiotherapy upon her return. Nkanu was being sent to Baltimore because his family knew, as so many Nigerian families know, that the system at home could not be trusted with his life. The tragedy is that he never made it out.

In a recent interview with ARISE News, a Nigerian global news channel, Dr. Elvira Asege Nkanu’s aunt delivered an impassioned plea that “Nkanu’s death should not be in vain.” But what would have to happen for that to be true? We must begin to name and speak more openly of these systematic injustices. The ambulance with no fuel. The nurse anesthesiologist deployed in place of a doctor. The specimen removed and never tested. The child sedated without monitoring. The president on a plane to London. These are not acts of God. They are acts—and failures to act—of a state that has decided, repeatedly and in full view, that its people’s lives are cheap.

Until we treat that truth not as a resignation but as an indictment—not as something to pray against but as something to dismantle—we will keep passing the phrase “May Nigeria not happen to you” between us like a warning, like the only protection we have. Like Job, what we fear will keep happening to us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bad and the Ugly

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

Inspired Takes

• Elizabeth Spiers goes deep on the anti-intellectualism of the tech-bro mafia for The Nation.
• I wrote last week that I think Trump is going to lose his birthright citizenship case in front of the Supreme Court. But Jay Willis writes that such a loss might only be temporary, as this case likely marks the beginning of the white-wing crusade against birthright citizenship. Since the right defeated Roe v. Wade, it has been looking for a new legal cause to motivate voters to give them continued control of the courts, and this might be it.
• Lawyer David R. Lurie wrote “A Regime of Idiots; A Complete Inventory of Trump Stooges,” in which he broke down every category of stooge Trump has surrounded himself with. This is a Darwin Award–level taxonomy of stupidity and incompetence.

Worst Argument of the Week

One of the stooges Lurie highlights—in fact, the very first stooge he highlights—is acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Blanche is a former defense lawyer for Trump, a man who got that job because no “good” lawyer would take it, and who has now leveraged his willingness to debase himself for Trump to become the top dog at the Department of Justice.

Blanche summed up his personal raison d’être at a press conference this week when he said: “If [Trump] chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’” The attorney general is supposed to be the lawyer for the American people, not the president’s number-one stan, but the guy running the joint—at least until Trump nominates his next attorney general—goes weak in the knees for the criminal in chief.

What’s wild about the elevation of Blanche is that the woman he replaced, Pam Bondi, also showed devout loyalty to Trump. She was unceremoniously fired last month—but not because she stood up to Trump or failed to carry out some policy he favored. She was fired because those policies were flatly illegal or unconstitutional, and she lost repeatedly in court.

The fact that Trump thinks Blanche can do better shows that Trump fundamentally misunderstands the nature of his problem. Trump reportedly said that Bondi lacked “smarts and guts.” He’s not wrong: Bondi showed herself to be not very smart and obviously lacked the “guts” to stand up to Trump’s maniac schemes. But Blanche is no better: He’s just as much of an intellectual lightweight as Bondi, and he appears to be even more gutless.

But finding a dumber, more pliable AG than Bondi is not going to reverse Trump’s fortunes in the lower courts. Trump loses because his orders are illegal. If he orders Blanche to do illegal things, Blanche will also lose. That’s just the way this goes. No matter how many times you jump off your roof, you will always fall, and you will likely hurt yourself unless John Roberts is there to catch you.

The assumed difference between Bondi and Blanche (or whomever Trump eventually lands on for the job—other contenders allegedly include former representative Lee Zeldin and former wino Jeanine Pirro) is that Bondi did not prosecute Trump’s political enemies, while the next AG will. But there is just no evidence that Bondi was unwilling to prosecute Trump’s enemies, or that Blanche will succeed if he does.

Unlike Trump, his political enemies have committed no crimes. There’s only so much a prosecutor can do to prosecute a person who has committed no crimes. Judges, even Trump-aligned judges, dismiss cases that are brought against people who have committed no crimes.

Bondi was a terrible AG. Blanche will be a terrible AG. Whoever Trump picks after he tires of Blanche will be a terrible AG. But I guess I disagree with many Democrats who say that the next person after Bondi will be “worse.” I think we already are at the bottom of this particular barrel. To be worse than Bondi or Blanche, you actually have to be smarter than them. More crafty. More able to sanewash Trump’s facially illegal desires into something resembling lawful conduct.

Trump does not pick smart people. He does not pick people who will redirect his worst impulses into something that can pass legal muster. He only wants sycophants, so sycophants will be all that he gets.

What I Wrote

Impeachment today, impeachment tomorrow, impeachment forever. Trump has threatened genocide against the people of Iran, and we have to try to remove him from office, I wrote.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

It’s tax season. I don’t know anything about “taxes”; my wife is the mathlete in the family. I also don’t know about tax law. My theory is that you can only be intellectually present for a finite number of legal classes before your brain rebels out of sheer boredom and makes you seek the dopamine rush of illicit drugs, so “tax” was the time I allowed my brain to go fallow and play Everquest in law school.

But while doomscrolling social media this week, I saw that The Washington Post re-promoted a story from earlier this year (I no longer subscribe) about a lawyer suing the IRS to get her dog claimed as a dependent for tax purposes.

I have thoughts on this! Not expert tax-law thoughts (again, snooooooze), but general animal-law thoughts (a seminar in which I did pay attention). Here is my unified theory of everything when it comes to animal law: We need an entirely different category of law for animals.

I know that sounds circular, but hear me out. Currently, the law treats animals, including pets, as mere “property.” We have some laws that deal with animal cruelty (laws that are woefully under-enforced, as I’ve written about before)—but in the main, animals are the property of their “owners,” who are free to do with them as they please, within reason.

This is wrong. Animals are not property. They’re not inanimate objects. The law should not treat them like a semiconscious throw rug or office furniture that occasionally poops.

The most commonly proposed alternative to the current state of the law is to give animals people rights, and treat them like something approaching human children. This is also wrong. Animals are not people. They’re not children. And whenever I think about how inadequately this country protects actual children—from school shootings to Epstein to the environment—the idea of people running up to me to tell me that their freaking dog deserves the same rights we can’t even secure for my Black-ass kids just makes me angry.

Of course, I love our family dog with nearly the same passion that I have for my human children, so I get where people are coming from. Which is why I believe so strongly that protecting these precious beasts by analogy to things they are not does them a disservice. They’re not property, not children—they are their own thing and should be treated as their own thing under the law.

Does a person have a right to tax relief for taking care of their dog? No. Of course not. It’s a fucking dog. Pay your taxes so human children can have roads and schools. But should a person be able to access affordable healthcare for their pup? Of course. It’s a fucking dog, a living, breathing animal who should not have to suffer while the owner makes a choice between food and healthcare. (I’m focusing on dogs, because I’m allergic to cats and also don’t trust them, but, you know, cats, bears, snakes, Philadelphia Phillies fans, insert your animal of choice). Should a dog have rights that extend to it regardless of who “owns” it? Yes. Does that mean I can’t put my dog on a leash because I’d never do that to my kids? No. And also, don’t tempt me with leashes for kids.

I haven’t thought through all the contours and possible permutations of this. As with any legal canon, it would be developed over time. In my own version, I tend to make a hard distinction between animals that are delicious and animals that are not, but I’m not sure if such a distinction could or should hold up in court.

My simple point is this: Animals should have rights. Those rights should not fall under property rights and should also be different from people rights. Those rights should flow to the animals, not the people claiming ownership over the animals.

And, yes, thinking of a more robust conception of animal rights naturally leads to a much more robust conception of environmental rights for all the animals we thankfully have not yet caged or driven to extinction. Thanks for asking.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because of the radical gerrymandering of state congressional district lines that was initiated by Walker and baked in by Republican legislators and cautious courts, six of Wisconsin’s eight House seats are currently held by the GOP.

The VoteHub election mapping website determined that Taylor won the most votes in seven of the eight districts—including those of Republican representatives Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Tony Weid, Glenn Grothman, and Tom Tiffany (the party’s hapless candidate for governor).

In Van Orden’s western Wisconsin third district, Taylor won by double digits—running up astronomical percentages of the vote in more urban counties such as La Crosse (69 percent) and Eau Claire (68 percent) but also gaining roughly 60 percent in largely rural Grant, Crawford and Vernon counties. As Democratic US Representative Mark Pocan, D–Town of Vermont, a longtime Van Orden critic, noted, the third “sure showed a beautiful shade of blue in Tuesday’s election.”

That’s bad news for the Republican incumbent, who was already looking vulnerable in what’s likely to be a repeat race this fall with Democrat Rebecca Cooke.

Democrats also noted that Steil’s southeastern Wisconsin first district gave overwhelming support to Taylor. Racine and Kenosha counties, both of which backed Trump in 2024, went big for the progressive on April 7.

And what of Republican Glenn Grothman’s sixth district, where Ripon is located? Aaron Wojciechowski, a former local elected official from the university town of Oshkosh who is bidding for the Democratic nomination to take on Grothman, hailed Taylor’s win as a signal that “Wisconsin voters are fired up, rejecting extremism and demanding a court that protects our rights, our votes, and our democracy.”

Pointing to “double-digit blue swings across the board in Grothman’s home turf,” Wojciechowski said, “These are significant, district-wide blue shifts in every county that makes up the 6th. This is proof that the entire 6th District—from Sheboygan to Ozaukee to Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Green Lake, and beyond—is moving our way. Voters are done with the chaos, the divisive rhetoric, and a do-nothing Congress. The same energy that flipped the Supreme Court can flip this congressional seat in November. The momentum is here, and the data proves we can win.”

That’s an ambitious claim. Grothman’s district hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1964, when a union machinist from Fond du Lac named John Abner Race upset longtime Republican incumbent William Van Pelt, an absurdly conservative Republican—in a result that surprised Race himself. Of course, 1964 was the ultimate “blue wave” year—as a ticket headed by President Lyndon Johnson won 61 percent of the national vote, carried 44 states, and swept Democrats into office even in historically Republican districts.

Could 2026 really see a big enough blue wave to unseat not just vulnerable Republican incumbents like Van Orden but entrenched ones like Grothman? That’s a very tall order. But, then again, Chris Taylor just carried the birthplace of the Republican Party. So, perhaps, everything is up for grabs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Topher Allen, the student equity coordinator at Dwight Hall, a center for public service at Yale, held emergency meetings with storage vendors, container brokers, and colleagues on the student executive committee. Between meetings, he was on calls with alumni and leaders of the Yale College Council. Within a week, they had reallocated their entire spring budget for community-building, social justice, and outreach. Everything allocated to those programs was folded into creating solutions for students who still needed the summer storage reimbursement.

What they built: a flat rate of $50 for full-summer storage, available to any student eligible for the full Pell Grant, living on campus with a home address more than 150 miles away.

In an e-mail to the student body, they compared their rate to that offered by local vendors—between $400 and $700. Allen, however, called the solution a Band-Aid. He said it was born of necessity, not abundance. He also noted that some students, before the Dwight Hall intervention, had planned to hide belongings around campus, or to throw items away and try to replace them in the fall.

Gilmore’s letter, about halfway through, finishes her story about the dean who let her keep her “stuff” in a dormitory basement all those years ago. When she finishes that story, she begins another—one in which Yale holds a $44 billion endowment. In that story, she asserts that the administration might make itself more useful by eliminating two administrator positions than by ending a summer storage reimbursement program that has benefited thousands of students.

Gilmore’s second story, alluding to what Chen called a bloated administrative apparatus, had not arrived at its conclusion arbitrarily.

In 2025, more than a hundred Yale faculty, drawn from dozens of academic departments across nearly every discipline, including Yale Law School and Yale School of Medicine, signed a letter calling for a freeze on new administrative hires. Professors were watching their own salary increases slowly while the ratio of administrators to undergraduates crept toward parity.

The endowment that pays those administrators has accumulated, at least in part, from generations of alumni who wanted to give back to the school that had given them so much. Among what Yale had given them were programs like summer storage. It seems, from Chen’s text messages, and a lot of angry Instagram comments, that such programs give Yale the chance to show students that it sees them as more than their good grades, SAT scores, and ISEF awards.

This is the argument Gilmore made in her letter, which began, she told us, in a dormitory basement in Winston-Salem in 1967. She remembered it 60 years later. She put the word in quotation marks. She took a word a dean had used carelessly and precisely demarcated it in the oldest college daily newspaper in the United States. But Gilmore was not calling any of it absurd. “Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis perhaps attempting to be humorous…when he suggested that low-income students should simply not ‘buy too much stuff,’” Gilmore wrote, “instead seemed arrogant.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Ishan Desai-Geller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On March 13, buried in The New York Times’ coverage of the US/Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: “As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.” Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60 percent to about 80 percent.

Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off. Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño—a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns—is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023–24, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world. As the article noted, however, average world temperatures are now actually higher than they were at the height of that previous El Niño, thanks to global warming, and so it’s likely that we will face even more intense heatwaves and flooding this time around.

Consider that news alarming enough. Unfortunately, the bad news didn’t end there. The Times article went on to report that, since early last year, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers, greatly diminishing the agency’s ability to respond to such impending weather disasters. And then there’s the dismal fact that Trump has overseen the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, which once sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.

And, sadly enough, it only gets worse from there. After all, we know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to boost the production of fossil fuels—the consumption of which is the main driver of global warming—even as it also works to impede global action to slow the warming process. On January 7, for example, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the bedrock treaty upon which most international efforts to rein in that onrushing nightmare are based.

Likewise, on February 12, the administration repealed the scientific determination (called the “endangerment finding”) that gives the government the legal authority to combat climate change. And that’s not all: on March 15, the Times also reported that the administration was preparing to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s premier institution for studying global weather patterns—including the severe climate disturbances we can expect from the coming El Niño and higher world temperatures. In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.

As I consumed all of that—in the midst, of course, of President Trump’s ill-conceived war on Iran—it struck me that we need to brace ourselves for ever-more-calamitous outcomes from Donald Trump’s extreme leadership incompetence. In fact, his incompetence is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another, culminating perhaps in global political-economic collapse.

Trump’s Profound Incompetence

Donald Trump’s leadership incompetence has already been demonstrated in one bad move after another. His capricious imposition of ever-fluctuating tariffs on US imports, for example, has caused prolonged misery for farmers and many small and medium businesses that depend on predictable trade patterns. Likewise, his heavy-handed deployment of armed ICE and other federal agents to Minneapolis achieved little in the way of apprehending dangerous immigrants but caused widespread disorder and violence, while killing two nonviolent protesters. But the most severe example of his governing incompetence to date has been his handling of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran.

While devising an elaborate plan to destroy Iran’s conventional military capabilities and shatter the regime, the Trump team appears to have made no preparations to eliminate the Iranians’ extensive drone capabilities or their ability to disrupt oil production and transit in the Persian Gulf area, with far-reaching global consequences. As of this reporting, the critical Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes every day (along with a substantial share of its liquified natural gas [LNG] and chemical fertilizers) remains largely closed to commercial traffic. This has produced energy shortages in many countries that are heavily reliant on imported oil and/or LNG and, because oil is a globally-traded commodity, it has boosted gasoline prices in the United States, despite the fact that this country doesn’t import much Middle Eastern oil.

None of this should have been unexpected. The Iranians have, on numerous occasions, threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to a US attack on their country, while their efforts to build up a vast stockpile of drones and missiles (and to hide them in remote underground sites) were well publicized.

Any intelligent war planner—of which there are many in the US military establishment—would have known of these realities and planned for them. Indeed, US planning to secure the Strait goes back to 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s White House issued what became known as the “Carter Doctrine”—an assertion that any move by a hostile force to impede the oil flow in the Persian Gulf “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To enforce that edict, the Pentagon established the US Central Command (Centcom) and established a network of military bases throughout the Gulf region. Since its inception, Centcom has repeatedly stressed its ability to keep the Strait open in the face of any Iranian drive to block it.

Trump obviously ignored all such intelligence—collected over many years by top American officials—and started his war without the slightest apparent plan for keeping the Strait safe for energy shipping. Not only were US naval forces unprepared to escort oil tankers through it, but Trump failed to enlist US allies in such efforts—a glaring fault that only became obvious after the war began when he suddenly called upon them to do so (and chided them when they proved reluctant).

And consider all of this sheer, unadulterated incompetence, on a massive scale.

The Blows to Come

We have yet to witness all the consequences of Trump’s incompetence in undertaking the war against Iran. The shutdown of fertilizer exports from the Gulf is already causing the price of that critical commodity to rise around the world. In doing so, it threatens agricultural production as farmers balk at the higher costs—a trend likely to result in higher food costs everywhere, including the United States. That will, of course, result in increased hunger for those least able to afford the higher prices of food and rising inflation. The rise in food and energy prices could also diminish consumer spending and investor confidence, possibly leading to a global economic slowdown (or worse).

And don’t imagine that those are the only major shocks to the global system we can expect in the months ahead—shocks the Trump team is unlikely to address with competent leadership. At the January convocation of business and political elites in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum released its “Global Risks Report 2026,” identifying what experts believe are the greatest future threats to global stability and prosperity. According to those experts, the top risks include extreme weather events, state-based armed conflict, and a global economic downturn—real-time threats that Trump has already encountered and failed to address successfully. As those perils gain momentum in the months ahead, Trump’s incompetence will result in ever greater hardship and suffering.

The Adverse Effects of AI

That Davos Risk Report also identified another category of threats for which the Trump administration is woefully unprepared: “adverse outcomes of AI technologies.”

Beginning with AI’s impending impact on employment, the report cites one study suggesting that “AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years in the United States, potentially driving unemployment to 10–20%”—an enormous threat to social and political cohesion. At the same time, a massive buildup of computing data centers is putting extreme stress on local energy and water supplies across the US, introducing an added layer of popular unease and conflict.

Hovering in the background of all this is the threat of “rogue AI”—the possibility that computer scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the other leading AI firms will create a “superintelligent” version of AI capable of outperforming humans in most cognitive tasks and selecting its own objectives, independent of human wishes or instructions. Think of “Skynet,” the superintelligent AI in the Terminator movie series that chooses to eliminate humans by inciting a global nuclear war. While the Davos Risk Report doesn’t address the risk of advanced AI development directly, there is growing talk in the scientific community of just such an outcome, as vividly suggested, for example, by the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump and his entourage are wholly unprepared to address the very idea of such a possibility. Rather than emphasize safety in the development of advanced AI models, Trump has called for their untrammeled evolution. In his major policy statement on AI, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” he made his top objective overridingly clear: “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”

That means, as his plan explains, eliminating all barriers to the development of advanced AI models, including any legislative restrictions on their release and any local environmental impediments to the construction of mammoth AI-driven data centers nationwide. Nowhere does Trump’s plan acknowledge the potential for catastrophic job losses from widespread AI utilization or the risk of AI going rogue and threatening the survival of humanity. Rather than offering Americans the slightest protection from such potential calamities, he is ensuring that they will become more likely and that the rest of us will suffer the consequences.

Convergent Catastrophes

Until recently, the shocks to global stability and safety—war, economic disorder, climate disaster, and AI-driven calamities—seemed relatively distinct. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, however, has offered us a first glimpse, however limited, of how they might become a conjoined mega-catastrophe.

In the future, there is no reason to assume that such earth-shaking calamities will remain discrete events, allowing world leaders adequate time to respond to them individually. It is likely, in fact, that they will arise ever more frequently in unison. In a 2013 study conducted for the US intelligence community, the National Research Council described just such “clusters of extreme events,” warning that they are a concern from a national security perspective “because U.S. government resources and those of other international actors deployed to deal with a security or humanitarian concern related to the first event in a cluster might be unavailable or less available to deal with a second or subsequent event.” The potential result of such a future reality could, of course, prove to be almost unimaginable social disorder, economic chaos, and even state collapse.

Overcoming one extreme event, let alone two or more, would always pose a remarkable challenge to even the most competent of governments. Sadly, we face an increasingly hazardous future with a demonstrably incompetent leadership team running what still passes for the most powerful country on Earth. For the United States to survive, no less prosper, Americans will need to unite around a demand for a humane and deeply competent national leadership team. If there’s anything we can agree on, it should be a need for leaders who can successfully steer us through severe national calamities—but don’t hold your breath for such an outcome in the next three years.

Ninety minutes before his self-imposed deadline for commencing a genocide against an entire “civilization,” Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire in the war he started for no reason against Iran. The particulars of the “deal” do not concern me—although I understand ships will have to pay to pass through a strait they could once traverse for free. What does concern me is: We now have two weeks to remove the homicidal maniac running the country before he threatens the peace of the world again. The responsibility lies entirely with the American people, and their representatives in Congress, to prevent further catastrophe. If we fail to do so, whatever happens next will be our fault.

Rarely has a people been given such an opportunity to stop the madness of their government. In most evil regimes, the ruler is so far removed from accountability that he cannot be touched or legitimately restrained. Usually, this ruler fully oppresses his own people before attempting to commit atrocities around the world. In those situations, only illegal regime change can remove a leader willing to commit war crimes to accomplish his goals.

But we are lucky. We have several legal ways to remove our despot before he is allowed to commit additional horrors. We must use these methods now. If we do not, we are in every way complicit in the atrocities to come. This is our moment, and if we fail, history will not just blame Trump and his MAGA acolytes for terrorizing the world; it will also blame us, the ineffectual opposition. And it will be right to do so.

Given the immediacy of the problem, a number of commentators and congresspeople have looked to the 25th Amendment. The amendment, in theory, allows for the immediate removal of the president based on a declaration by the vice president and a majority of the president’s cabinet that the president is “unfit” to continue holding office.

I, too, would like to think the 25th Amendment would solve all our problems. It would be fast; it would be direct. But as much as the amendment might sound like a silver bullet, it’s really not. First, you’d have to get JD Vance on board, which… is not going to happen. Vance was apparently against the war, yet fell in line behind the president, and then went to Hungary to lick a different authoritarian’s boots. Vance has less dignity than Mike Pence, and Pence stuck with Trump until Trump tried to have him killed. There is simply no way Vance invokes the 25th Amendment.

And don’t even get me started on Trump’s handpicked cabinet. Not a single one of them can be counted on to say that Trump is unfit to lead—not Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth; not the Trump defense attorney now running the Department of Justice; not the reality-TV show dude leading the Department of Transportation. No one.

But even if Vance and the cabinet were visited by the ghost of nuclear holocaust future and did invoke the 25th Amendment, the president can simply say “Wrong”—and then immediately resume power. The VP and the cabinet then have to vote to remove the president again, for a second time, in the face of the president’s open opposition, and then the question is kicked to Congress, where both chambers are required to vote to remove the president and install the VP in his place.

But there’s a second option—which is the original (constitutionally speaking), and to my mind easiest, way to remove Trump: impeachment. Since Trump has been impeached twice before, everybody should know the drill. Impeachment is a charge that is brought by a simple majority vote in the House. The trial on those charges takes place in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required to convict and then remove the president from office.

Given the fact that Trump has been through this twice—and survived, it might sound pointless to try this all again. But here’s why I think the most common arguments against trying to impeach Trump again are wrong.

What’s going to be different the third time?

I’d like to think the reality of an illegal, unpopolar, and flagrantly criminal war of choice will make this time different, but I am not (that) naïve. I know that most Republican senators would rather see Iran nuked, and risk dirty bombs exploding in Penn Station, than risk losing a primary to a more MAGA challenger. You don’t get to be a GOP senator without an overwhelming disregard for the well-being of others.

But two things have changed since Trump’s last two impeachments, one legal and the other political. The legal change is significant. When Trump escaped conviction over January 6, then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said, “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office.” I do think McConnell believed that when he said it. And it was true, when he said it. But it’s not true anymore. The Supreme Court has since declared that Trump is immune from prosecutions for criminal actions he takes while in office. If Trump is impeached again, the Senate will know that conviction in the Senate is the only form of accountability Trump will ever face.

The political change is that Trump is now a lame-duck president. Granted, during the second impeachment, Trump was functionally out of office and most people didn’t think he’d ever run again. But this time, he can’t run. Impeachment and removal would end the Trump era with more finality than anything we’ve seen before. There might be some senators interested in that.

Is that enough to get us 67 votes for conviction on an impeachment charge? Probably not. Again, I’m not stupid. But conviction isn’t the only way to accomplish the most essential goal.

Trump will not be restrained by the long process of impeachment, so why bother?

Oh, I beg to differ. If your goal is to “make Trump behave like a normal president,” that battle is lost. My goal is not to make Trump “behave”; my goal is to prevent him from unleashing America’s nuclear arsenal in an attempt to obliterate Iran, or whichever non-white nation pisses Trump off next. I think impeachment can go a great way towards restraining that behavior. I do not think a president seriously under threat of impeachment will want to start dropping nukes. I do not think Trump would want to turn his trial into a Senate referendum on the illegal war he started. Even in the face of a likely acquittal, impeachment, and the credible threat of impeachment, might be the only thing that keeps Trump’s war crimes “conventional.” I don’t necessarily think impeachment alone stops Trump’s illegal war; for that, we have to get all the way to “conviction” and removal. But I do think impeachment keeps the irradiation of an entire people off the table.

Your theories are intriguing, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, but perhaps we should revisit them in eight months should Democrats assume control of the House

No, the time to try to impeach is now. Again, charges in the House only require a simple majority and there might be right now the few Republican votes necessary to get this process rolling. Remember, Trump’s war is unpopular, even with many of his usual racist supplicants. Trump wants to play brinksmanship with World War Three every fortnight. The world cannot be held hostage by a nuke-rattling madman every time new information leaks from the Epstein files. Impeachment and removal, or at least the possibility of removal, is the only political action left to elected representatives of conscience.

The Democrats should be leading that charge. The current posture of the party can be summed up as: “This dangerous psychopath will kill us all. Sadly, there’s nothing we can do until November, but you know who could show real courage right now? JD Vance. He would be greeted as a liberator.”

How is this leadership? How is it that Democrats are scrambling around calling on their enemy’s pool boy to put country over party (and his own political career), while they refuse to put their careers (or bodies) on the line to stop a global atrocity?

For Democrats, impeachment should be the floor. It should be the least they’re willing to do. “I will support articles of impeachment” should be the secret phrase Democrats have to say before being allowed access to the cloakroom.

On the upper end, Democrats should be trying to bring the government to a grinding halt until the genocidal maniac is removed from office. Elected representatives throughout history have literally walked out and refused to participate in governments as evil as ours is right now. At some point, you have to decide to be Charles de Gaulle or you become Philippe Pétain.

Our representatives wouldn’t even have to go into freaking exile the way de Gaulle did. They just have to use every legal means available to remove Trump from office, and use every shred of political power to stop a mass murder from happening.

You know what’s even better than a filibuster? A human wall of elected officials preventing the House and the Senate chambers from opening their doors, preventing the government from doing business, until Trump is impeached and removed.

And politicians aren’t the only ones who have an obligation to act. It’s easy to focus on elected officials because they are the ones who have political power and platform. They are the ones who literally asked to lead. But the moral imperative of the moment also extends to the rest of us. The burden of democracy is that we are all collectively responsible for the actions of our government. We cannot simply say that the actions of a powerful few have nothing to do with the rest of us. Not in our system of government.

I don’t know what it is that you do. I write. I argue. Those are my skills. Right now, I’m trying to use those skills to write and argue against a president intent on committing war crimes. Whatever it is that you do, whatever your skills are, I would implore you to use them to fight against our evil government. All skills are needed, and any skill can have value against this man. Perhaps your skill is raising money? Spend some time raising money to support anti-war efforts. Perhaps your skill is organizing documents? Spend some time helping activists organize their resistance. Perhaps your skill is playing video games? Spend some time arguing in the forums that atrocities should only be inflicted in-game and cannot be allowed in real life.

Earlier this week, I despaired on social media that the country was just waiting around to see if a global calamity would be prosecuted “in our name.” So many people responded “not in my name.” The response seemed to me to miss the point. It’s not enough to say, “I didn’t vote for this.” Not when the threat of mass atrocity is on the line. It’s not enough to go out like Homer Simpson and content ourselves by saying, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”

There may be no way we can stop the madman in the White House. But if the worst comes to pass, it won’t matter if it was somebody else’s fault. The Iranian people won’t be huddled in a fallout shelter thinking, “It’s a shame JD Vance didn’t have more courage.” They’ll be thinking that Americans, all of us, are to blame for our country’s crimes. We will have no answer for the charge, and our only response must be that we did everything we could think of to prevent the evil.

Trump cannot destroy “a whole civilization,” even if he tries. What he can do is kill an incalculable number of innocent people. He must be stopped. We must impeach and remove Trump from office. We must, at least, try.

In the early 2000s, I spent time in South Africa with the Treatment Action Campaign and other organizations, working to educate communities about HIV, the immune system, and what medicines could be used to beat back the virus and deal with opportunistic infections.

These experiences were transformational for me. I learned more from my comrades in TAC about how to use scientific information to both inform and inspire than I have gathered in any formal education I had then or since.

The work TAC did wasn’t just basic health education. It was deep, often door-to-door, engagement, with time spent in clinic waiting rooms and other venues where TAC could reach people affected by AIDS. (In South Africa, a country with 6 million people living with the disease, you could make the case that nobody was spared completely from the virus.) TAC members didn’t only teach people about why, for instance, fluconazole was critical for treating fungal infections associated with AIDS. They emphasized why it was important for people to ask why their local health facility did not stock the drug, whom to talk to about this, and their rights under the South African constitution to make these demands.

This history has been on my mind recently, because of the ongoing debates within my field about how we handled the Covid pandemic. Many in public health are convinced that the biggest problem during the height of the pandemic was a lack of good communication. The answer? That those of us in public health need to learn to be better “storytellers.”

Coming from the AIDS movement, no one has to convince me that health information needs to be translated in ways that non-experts can grasp. I spent time in the mountains of Lesotho working with comrades from TAC to help rural communities understand HIV’s lifecycle and the way the immune system works, largely through acting the biology out in real time in goofy role-plays (I was a macrophage), and helping to demystify what was happening in their bodies—why understanding this information gave them power and agency over their own lives and the disease they were living with. This information became life-saving for many, helping them to advocate for themselves even in the most difficult of circumstances (e.g., a president who didn’t think HIV was the cause of AIDS).

But here in the United States, the push to communicate has often been reduced to something else—a savvy Substack, an engaging podcast, a witty social media campaign. This stuff is so, so far from the tangible, hands-on work I experienced and played a small part in in Southern Africa. Maybe people think Americans don’t need the same kind of deep commitment that South Africans did. But those people are wrong. If we want to address the real health crises in the US, better stories and storytellers are only a part of the solution. Without embedding ourselves within communities and working with them, stories from afar, as well-crafted as they can be, are inert. They are all potential energy, not kinetic in any sense.

What would it mean to communicate to residents of a holler in the mountains of West Virginia; or in a once-thriving rural community in New England, where all the jobs left long ago and many people rely on Medicaid, food assistance, and other social programs to get by; or in a city where the zip code you live in determines your life expectancy and you live in one that does not portend well for your health? I would suggest it would look more like the work of the Treatment Action Campaign and others around the world who go beyond the simple transmission of health advice to give people a sense the health of their communities is a shared purpose—and that the more information they have, the more power they possess.

Stories are part of this work, but “being there,” listening, and understanding people’s struggles are really the first step in a long process. It means sitting down at kitchen tables and talking together, building trust that only comes with commitment for the long haul. And it means talking about health in ways that matter to them, giving them a sense that a decision they make can make their lives better.

This isn’t so far-fetched. It’s a combination of a community health worker model with a bit of community organizing thrown in. While TAC in South Africa showed me how it can be done, there are models around the world to draw from, and there are 60 community health worker networks, in 38 US states, for domestic inspiration. It means building a cadre of CHWs to meet the moment—a scale-up of significant proportions. My Yale colleague Amy Kapczynski and I proposed the establishment of a community health corps in the first months of the Covid pandemic, and I think the need for something like this is greater than ever.

Yes, we should be better communicators. But if we stop there, we are playing to the smallest of audiences and should expect the smallest of impact. “Better stories” is a marketing strategy, not a recipe for true human contact and engagement. We can’t just sit at our laptops and pump out information. We have to go to the people at the other end of our efforts. If we are looking to transform public health, it’s going to be in the work we do together, side by side, and face to face. We need to learn from communities, as we craft stories together with them and envision a healthier future for all of us.

We went back to Selma, Alabama, this year—not as dignitaries or guests at a ceremony, but as inheritors of an unfinished revolution. And we did not go alone. We brought a new generation: organizers from Latino, Somali, Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian communities. Many of them had just watched armed, masked ICE agents surge through their neighborhoods in Illinois and Minnesota. Just like the students of 1965, they came to Selma to stand up, to speak out, and to demand that America finally become what it has always promised to be.

It was a reminder that this is not just history. This is now.

In 1965, ordinary people walked out of Brown Chapel AME Church and onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge, asking for one fundamental thing: to be seen. To be counted. To be treated as full citizens in their own country. They carried no weapons. They stormed no capitol. They carried faith, dignity, and a demand as old as the republic itself: the right to vote. For this, they were met with tear gas, whips, and clubs. John Lewis’s skull was fractured not because he broke the law, but because he dared to insist that the law finally apply to Black people.

Out of the blood on that bridge came two of the most transformative laws in American history: the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The VRA didn’t just change rules—it changed who could have power. It forced states with long histories of racist voter suppression to get federal approval before changing their election laws. It gave communities real tools to fight racial gerrymanders, at-large schemes, and the thousand quiet tricks designed to make sure Black and brown voters could be counted but never truly count. Voter registration soared. New voices, new leaders, new possibilities emerged.

Simultaneously, the Immigration and Nationality Act dismantled the racial hierarchy baked into American immigration law, ending the national-origin quota system that favored immigrants from Northern Europe.

What was born on that bridge was a new definition of who gets to be an American. But the forces that tried to stop those marchers in 1965 never disappeared. They adapted. They learned to wield paperwork instead of nightsticks. And today, they are back.

The Trump administration has surged unprecedented numbers of immigration agents into Democratic states and communities of color. The Justice Department executed a sweeping raid on Fulton County, Georgia—seizing 2020 ballots and voter rolls—to relitigate a settled election and chill every future one. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that amounted to a ransom note: Hand over the complete, unredacted voter rolls or your communities will keep living under siege.

This is not law enforcement. It is intimidation, power dressed up as process.

The Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision had already gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance system, tearing out its spine and letting states with racist histories rewrite election rules without federal review. Voter-ID requirements, slashed voting hours, and gerrymandered maps drawn to dilute Black and brown political power have sprung up all over the country. Now Trump is pushing the SAVE Act, a “show your papers” law designed to block millions of eligible citizens who simply lack the right government-issued documents, all to solve a noncitizen-voting problem that does not exist. Pending Supreme Court cases threaten to gut the VRA even further. Together, these tactics form a coordinated assault on the very idea of multiracial democracy. We recognize it because we have seen it before. Although the methods are different, the intent is identical.

And as we reflect on Selma, we recognize that we are not mere observers of this history; we are products of it. One of us is the first Muslim elected to Congress and to statewide office, a reality made possible by Selma. The other grew up as the son of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, who marched from Selma to Montgomery and would become an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The bridge we crossed this year runs through our very lives. And the new generation crossing it—DREAMers and daughters of refugees, community organizers and first-time voters—are the continuation of Selma’s legacy.

Every tactic being deployed today is designed to do what Bull Connor’s clubs could not: to make people afraid to participate. To make democracy feel dangerous. But Selma teaches us something Bull Connor never understood: When you crack the skull of someone marching peacefully toward justice, you do not stop the movement. You become its fuel.

The students who marched in 1965 were fighting to be recognized as citizens with the right to vote. We are fighting to expand that recognition to everyone who calls this country home. The struggle is not behind us. It is right now, right here, unfolding in real time—and we are now the ones who must answer the call to action.

Americans’ electricity costs, which were already high, are going up again. In response, every state and local government with the muscle to do so should be investing in its own decentralized solar, wind, and water systems to create greater resilience and more democratic local control.

Electricity bills today are at the mercy of three distinct, simultaneous private taxes that have pushed natural-gas and electricity costs far above what people can afford. First, there’s the “AI tax”: the stratospheric rising cost built into the utility grid to support artificial intelligence. In high-demand areas, such as those in the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states where data centers are being built, wholesale prices for energy are up well over 250 percent. Goldman Sachs, noting the spikes, predicts that 40 percent of future electricity costs will come from the increased demand contributed by data centers.

Then there’s the “utility tax,” which has also been spiking in recent years. States grant private corporations monopoly rights to sell electricity in defined regions, while also allowing them to issue stock, maximize returns, and lobby for unreasonable rate hikes. These investor-owned utilities have overcharged Americans $5 billion per year over the past 30 years.

Finally, there’s the bloody “war tax” caused by Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. The president’s war led, predictably, to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s supply of natural gas passes. The price of natural gas on the world market has gone haywire since the strait closed and drones attacked Qatar’s largest liquefied-natural-gas facility, shutting it down. The US gas that generates much of our electricity doesn’t travel through the strait, but global buyers are bidding up the price of American supplies as they seek to replace the lost Qatari shipments, creating a “tax” on domestic consumption. When local gas stations use a market shock to increase profits without a concomitant increase in costs, it’s considered illegal price gouging, but big natural-gas companies get away with it when they sell to utilities. No single American state can police all the steps in the supply chain where gouging takes place on its own.

We saw this awful scenario play out in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Domestic price gougers used the war to get rich while old people froze at home, unable to pay their bills. The war did not change the cost of taking gas out of the ground in the United States, but it dramatically changed the price of electricity. The inflationary shock that beggared millions of Americans was arguably the single biggest factor in the reelection of an unpopular former president in 2024. That president has now decided to launch an incoherent and illegal war, which is leading to more price gouging.

These converging influences on electricity prices should lead us to a wholesale reconsideration of energy policy in the United States. Let’s start by making sure there’s genuine competition and regulation in a natural-gas industry that’s currently dominated by an increasingly small club of companies that profit from volatility.

Two years ago, for example, federal officials allowed Exxon to buy Pioneer in a $60 billion deal to become the dominant shale producer in the Permian Basin of the southwestern United States. But assuming that Exxon will give Americans a hometown discount would be as foolish as it would be costly. At the state and local levels, our elected officials and appointed regulators should stop allowing utilities to merge into monopoly franchises that can then use their market power to hike prices and earn excessive rates of return. States should seize opportunities to permanently protect their residents by making a muscular commitment to build distributed, renewable energy infrastructure as quickly as possible. They should do this not just to protect the climate but also to make our energy supply more reliable and to reap the social benefits that decentralization makes possible. Every community solar installation is a small act of building the kind of resilience we need for a democratic government.

The cost of batteries has been plummeting and will continue to do so, making solar power more feasible than ever. Improved storage capacity can help with the coordination problems that big, dumb grids are used to resolving with brute force. There is no war that can make the sun stop shining, no conflict that can make the wind stop blowing.

The technology needed to significantly diminish the role of natural gas exists today, and it can be deployed in months or, in challenging circumstances, a few short years—not decades. These energy sources are abundant and are much less vulnerable to distribution bottlenecks than shale gas is, and they aren’t subject to the sort of international volatility we are now experiencing.

It will, of course, cost money to build solar infrastructure. But it is much cheaper than the alternative—and the costs will be shared fairly by all of us, as opposed to the private taxes that burden poor Americans the most. To say “We don’t have the money” is to say that people must keep paying unfairly high prices so that wealthy investors don’t have to pony up.

A more decentralized, networked grid also enables people to make their own decisions about which forms of energy are best for their communities. That’s a political question, not just a market one. The fights over data centers prove that people want to be part of that conversation.

The powerful clubs that profit from war, volatility, and monopoly will not stop taxing us if we don’t put up a fight. With this in mind, we shouldn’t try to persuade them. We should build a new future despite them.

On the morning of his 96th day as mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani filled the city’s 100,000th pothole. The ceremonial shoveling, on Olympia Boulevard in Staten Island, was emblematic of Mamdani’s do-everything, be-everywhere, all-at-once approach to the challenge of governing the nation’s largest city.

“There is no pothole too far, no trash pile too high, and no problem too big or too small for city government to address,” he said in a statement that went on to celebrate such accomplishments as “brought rat sightings down 30 percent” and “melted 783 million pounds of snow.”

A few hours later however, in a sparsely attended event at CUNY’s Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, the mayor acknowledged two challenges that weren’t going to be amenable to quick fixes. The first was healing the deep scars from centuries of racism. As Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice, explained in releasing the Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan: “This country once embraced public investment, the GI Bill, affordable public college, [and public] housing…. But when Black Americans fought for access to those programs, backlash politics taught people to resent government programs instead of expanding them. And the result was a worse deal for everyone.”

Her summary may have lacked concrete details like the drained swimming pools in Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together—a 2021 bestseller published in the aftermath of the #BlackLivesMatter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. But Su’s account of how “the same forces that drive racial inequity, exclusion, and economic security also helped produce a city that has become harder for New Yorkers of every background to afford,” was refreshingly direct, as was her declaration that “my job is to make sure…this story ends differently.”

Getting to that happier ending is a herculean challenge—a point driven home by the other item on that morning’s program: the release of New York’s first True Cost of Living (TCOL) Measure. Like the 375-page Equity Plan, the TCOL was the result of the November 2022 Charter Revision referendum. Approved by 81 percent of voters, the proposal mandated that the city report annually on the actual cost of meeting New Yorkers’ essential needs such as housing, food, childcare, and transportation—costs not accurately reflected in federal poverty measures. While the federal government puts any single individual earning more than $15,960 annually above the poverty line (the figure is $33,000 for a family of four), according to the TCOL a single adult would need $70,334 to meet the cost of living in New York, while a family of four would need a combined income of $166,279.

According to the Robin Hood Foundation and Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, some 2.2 million New Yorkers—including nearly 450,000 children—live below the federal poverty line. The city’s TCOL identifies an additional 3.58 million residents living above the poverty line, but who—even after accounting for tax credits and government programs such as housing subsidies and SNAP benefits—still cannot meet the true cost of living an economically secure life. To get by, this group—about 38 percent of the city’s population—-must rely on support from extended families or ballooning personal debt.

Mayor Eric Adams failed to release either of the two mandated reports issued this week, even though his administration oversaw the research. That may well have been because their findings wouldn’t have been welcomed by his patrons in the Trump administration. According to City and State, the Adams administration also scrubbed all references to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from its Racial Equity Plan, with most of those omissions remaining unremedied in the draft version Mamdani released on Monday.

The TCOL headline figures are shocking enough—though, sadly, generating few actual headlines. But a deeper dive discloses the many ways in which New York’s affordability crisis and its history of racial inequality are bound together. A majority of all New Yorkers (61.8 percent) fall short of the resources required to live here. However, more than 77 percent of the city’s Hispanic population lives below the TCOL levels—the highest such level among any ethnic group in the city. But Black New Yorkers (65.6 percent of whom have incomes below the TCOL) and Asian and Pacific Islanders (63.3 percent) are not much better off. The only group with a majority earning an annual income above the TCOL are white New Yorkers, at 56.3 percent.

“These reports make one thing clear,” said the mayor. “We cannot tackle systemic racial inequity without confronting the affordability crisis head-on, and we cannot solve the cost-of-living crisis without dismantling systemic racial inequity.” Mamdani isn’t going to achieve either of these ambitious goals by the end of his first 100 days, of course. As he noted, providing free childcare would lift one of the heaviest burdens off the backs of New York’s working families. Yet even his much-ballyhooed $1.2 billion commitment from Governor Kathy Hochul includes only $73 million in new funding this year—enough to pay for just 2,000 places.

Still, if the mayor’s accomplishments so far seem more symbolic than substantial, he has shown no signs of slackening his pace—or of losing his gift for making the multifarious elements of his coalition feel both seen and valued. He named Rebecca Jones Gaston, a Black woman who was herself adopted from foster care as a child, as the city’s child welfare commissioner. Like Deputy Mayor Su, who was acting secretary of labor under President Joe Biden, Gaston has national experience; she served as Biden’s head of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families. (The New York Post immediately condemned her appointment as a ploy that “puts ‘racial equity’ above keeping NYC kids safe and alive.”)

The mayor ended his Monday whirlwind with a visit to Union Square, where he celebrated at yet another Passover seder—the “Seder in the Streets” held by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Candidate Mamdani had attended this event, which was first held in 2008, last year. “But this is the first time we’ve ever invited the mayor,” Sophie Ellman-Golan, a spokeswoman for the group, told me.

Calling on participants to “Melt Pharaoh’s ICE-y Heart,” this year’s theme focused on the need to protect immigrants. “We can’t really celebrate a liberation holiday when so many of our neighbors are trapped in captivity, either in ICE custody or hiding in their homes,” said Ellman-Golan.

Warming up for the mayor, former city comptroller Brad Lander, alluding to the news from Iran, and the continuing (though mostly neglected by the media) horrors in Gaza, asked, “Isn’t it wrong to kill other people’s children?” Mamdani took a lighter tone, thanking the group for its long record as one of the city’s most reliable progressive allies and urging “New Yorkers at large to celebrate the lessons Passover leaves all of us across these five boroughs.”

After the matzos were broken and distributed, and four cups of wine were blessed—one of them by Lander—a portion of the crowd marched to the Sixth Avenue office of Palantir, the AI company that supplies ICE with software to identify and track migrants. Fifteen of the protesters were arrested.

But by then the mayor was long gone.

As the world watches to see whether the two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran ever gets off the ground, President Donald Trump’s genocidal threats against the Iranian people risk fading from our attention. But we cannot move on so quickly from the gravity of Trump’s declaration that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the ceasefire is already at risk of total collapse. On Wednesday, Israel killed over 250 people in Lebanon, despite explicit assurances from international mediators that the ceasefire agreement covered that country; in response, Iran said it had closed the Strait of Hormuz. If war does fully resume, Trump could once again vow to exterminate an entire country of 90 million people.

The second reason is that, even if the ceasefire holds, Trump’s flirtation with genocide is horrifying enough to demand a response all on its own.

Within the US political system, Republicans are too subservient to Trump to mount this opposition. That leaves the Democratic Party—which, despite what many of its defenders say, still has many potential ways to influence the direction of events. So it’s worth assessing how top Democrats are handling this crisis. Unfortunately, the party’s response has mostly been woeful and inadequate.

Democratic leaders have been doing everything in their power to avoid confronting the US-Israeli war against Iran in any meaningful way. When military escalation was still preventable, Democrats refused to act with any urgency. Their most powerful tool would have been a resolution under the War Powers Act. A war powers resolution is privileged, so any member of Congress can force a vote without having to rely on leadership to schedule it. But as I previously reported, top Democrats worked behind the scenes to dampen momentum for Representative Ro Khanna’s Iran war powers resolution, deliberately slow-walking a vote. They publicly committed to forcing another vote on an alternate war powers measure, but failed to schedule it and then went on recess—pushing any action off until mid-April at the earliest.

After the war began, many Democratic lawmakers defaulted to vague concerns with the conflict, criticizing Trump’s war in the language of procedure—briefings, plans, and oversight—rather than in terms of whether it should be happening at all. This approach points to Democrats’ broader calculation. If it were up to them, Trump would carry out the war, weaken Iran, and absorb the political fallout—leaving Democrats free to campaign against it in the midterms.

Rather than act immediately, top Democrats waited until we were on the precipice of a potential nuclear war to fire off tweets calling Trump a “madman” and “unhinged,” rather than force floor fights and recorded vote after recorded vote on war powers resolutions. It wasn’t until Trump threatened to wipe out Iran that so-called opposition party leaders called for Congress to reconvene and “immediately end this reckless war of choice in Iran before Donald Trump plunges us into World War III.”

Individual Democrats began issuing statements, tweets, and videos, many recorded in their suburban backyards, since Congress is on vacation. “There exists a moral order and a moral law in this world, and what Trump is proposing to do is fundamentally evil,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said in a typical post. Dozens of congressional Democrats, along with a smattering of Republicans, including former GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, also called for the 25th Amendment to be used to remove the president over the threats—a politically implausible process that would require the cooperation of the Trump administration and two-thirds of both chambers—or for Trump to be impeached. 

But congressional leaders like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer wouldn’t even call for those obvious actions. Instead, Schumer and other top senators issued a statement meekly asking Trump to “not follow through on this threat.” Meanwhile, conservative Democrats like New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer sought to make clear that they were mostly on board with Trump’s war. “The ultimate goal is to crush the Iranian regime,” Gottheimer tweeted, before vaguely calling on the White House to “come before Congress and present clear objectives, and brief on our progress.”

Even this mild brand of opposition didn’t last long. As soon as Trump announced that he had agreed to a “double sided CEASEFIRE” with Iran, many Democrats went back to antagonizing Trump for backing away from his threat. “It appears Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, a history-changing win for Iran,” Murphy tweeted. “The level of incompetence is both stunning and heartbreaking.”

Schumer himself played a role in the pressure campaign pushing Trump to act militarily. In June 2025, ahead of the US strikes on Iran, Schumer mocked the president as “TACO Trump” for being soft on Iran, cautioning the Trump administration against making any “side deals” without Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. (TACO is short for Trump Always Chickens Out—coined last year by a Financial Times journalist.)

At least one Democrat, Representative Yassamin Ansari, currently the only Iranian-American in Congress, pointed out the danger of lawmakers goading Trump into returning to the war that nearly led to the use of nuclear weapons. “I do not appreciate anyone – Democrat or Republican – taking this moment to make TACO jokes to say Trump ‘chickened out,’” Ansari said in a tweet. “The president was threatening genocide against 90 million Iranians. I’m grateful there’s a ceasefire & scores of innocent people didn’t die tonight.

Democrats appear to have the votes for an alternate war powers resolution, backed by many of the same lawmakers who voted to defeat the initial Khanna-Massie effort. But that bill, introduced by Gottheimer and others, is already a watered-down measure, as it includes carve-outs for continued troop presence and intelligence sharing.

Trump’s war is deeply unpopular. He is losing it badly. Its continuation would be a catastrophe. In this climate, Democrats have no real excuse left. Even if a strong war powers measure were to fail, forcing the vote would still put members on the record and impose political costs on those willing to go along with the war. Democrats must go all in.

“Icannot imagine a society without people with grease on their hands.” Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán has long called creating a “work-based society” the key to his country’s future. It’s underpinned his distinctive brand of right-wing politics, and inspired the “pro-worker” conservatism touted by figures like Tucker Carlson. Endorsing Orbán ahead of Sunday’s election, Donald Trump likewise stressed his record of job creation.

This story has some truth to it. In the decade after Orbán returned to power in 2010, Hungary’s working population expanded by around 20 percent. Not only did German auto giants build up production here, but a construction boom, plus “workfare” programs, pushed employment rates above the EU average. If stories about “pro-family” policies often cast Hungary as a nation of stay-at-home moms, more Hungarian women are in-work than their EU counterparts. It’s also key to Orbán’s support among Roma people.

Orbán has himself claimed that his hopes of re-election on April 12 depend on workers turning out to vote. His Fidesz party has not just consolidated power by extending its reach over the media and the state apparatus but built real support among wide swathes of the population. Yet, for many Hungarians this rhetoric about a “work-based society” is today losing its luster. It’s a major reason why after Sunday’s election, Orbán, too, may be out of a job.

The End of an Era

To understand this weakness, it’s important to recognize different phases in Orbán’s rule.

Analyst Dávid Karas tells me that in the first years after the 2008 financial crash Fidesz promised to win back Hungary’s “economic sovereignty,” while basing living standards on wages, not borrowing or benefits. Yet reindustrialization remained reliant on foreign direct investment, and preparing a low-cost workforce for multinationals. Orbán’s talk of “greasy hands,” Karas says, was also a retort to opposition claims that the government wasn’t investing in higher education. Blue-collar work offered a way to a “more dignified and stable society than producing jobless and socially useless graduates.”

This low-wage model has, however, stopped earning good grades. As sociologist Ábel Csathó tells me, while Hungarian employment rates rose strongly throughout the 2010s, this progress tapered off since the pandemic. In fact, Hungarian living standards have dropped to the lowest in the European Union. Faced with the current war in Iran, shocks like rising gas prices may further threaten Hungary’s future as a global industrial hub.

Some weaknesses of this model were visible even earlier, as shown by events in Dunaújváros, long one of Hungary’s main industrial centers. The story of its historic steelworks, which closed in 2024, shows how the Orbán government allowed multinational owners to wreck a major strategic industry, letting it go to the wall even as it pledged to save jobs.

Steel City

Iheaded to Dunaújváros on a Saturday, three weeks before the election. A postwar new town, its streets follow a grid pattern, reaching a sudden, steep halt above the Danube. When it began construction in 1950, it was called Sztálinváros, in tribute to the Soviet leader, but the nationwide revolt in 1956 also shook this socialist model town. Five years later, it took its current name, meaning New Danube City; today, its Lenin statue is banished to the local museum’s back courtyard. But the steelworks created back then still shape local identity.

Csathó introduces me to former steelworker Isztán Nagy. He remembers exactly when he started work: “September 2, 1971.” Soon after he began as a production worker, the steelworks enrolled him on a college economics course. Nagy tells me that it had a “highly liberal,” US-inspired program, with the kind of pro-market ideas spread by economists like János Kornai. Talk of profitability reshaped Hungarian socialism long before it met its end in 1989.

Nagy stresses that the vast steel complex, from 1984 titled Dunaferr, was always the heart of this town. Local sports teams took its name, and in 2000 Dunaferr soccer club won the Hungarian premiership. Today, the club, too, has gone bust. Dive bars lined up outside the old steelworks gates now pine for lost battalions of worker-drinkers.

It’s not all Orbán’s fault; and for some, job losses came well before the final 2024 shutdown. Even in the late-Communist era, the plant introduced profitability measures that cut jobs, albeit without heading for full privatization. Nagy speaks of redundancies as a process negotiated with strong unions, also counting on a fund to cushion layoffs. From 1996, longtime employee Nagy—by then a local Social-Democrat leader—sat on the company board. He says Orbán’s first term from 1998 to 2002 meant political interference, changing the plant’s management and pressuring it to use dolomite supplies from mines controlled by Orbán’s father.

If this stirred resentment, the plant’s fate also helps explain why local workers didn’t stick with the political left. It was a Social Democrat–led government, in alliance with neoliberal hawks, that finalized the privatization of the plant in 2003—despite, Nagy says, the local party’s attitude. The new owners were, he explains, Ukrainian, but also bound up with a Russian bank, and the conflict between the two caused problems which exploded when war broke out in 2022.

But why didn’t Orbán’s government, once a critic of what it called a “bad privatization,” save jobs?

Orbán Visit

The Thursday night before I visited, Orbán held a national rally in Dunaújváros. Haranguing the plaza in front of the local cinema, he tried to outdo an earlier event here by the main opposition leader Péter Magyar. Countless Fidesz posters here show a grim-faced Magyar alongside EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The ruling party’s message: Magyar won’t put Hungary first.

Asked, ahead of his visit to Dunaújvaros, why the steel plant went bust, Orbán reportedly told one local paper that “the decisive reason is the Russian-Ukrainian war, the sanctions policy and the EU’s poorly designed green industry concept.” Yet, in his town-square rally Orbán avoided all reference to the Dunaferr job losses. If this past fall, the government promised to revive production, the prime minister’s silence was hardly a vote of confidence. The crowd for this Dunaújváros rally, several locals pointed out, owed less to pro-Orbán residents than to Fidesz supporters bussed in from surrounding villages.

So, is Orbán’s election campaign distracting from local economic woes by turning attention to geopolitics? According to former Dunaferr employee Erika Kaiser, the issues sound more intertwined, though not in a way that does Orbán much credit. The Ukrainian owners from 2003 were the Donbas Industrial Union, based in Donetsk—another steel city formerly named after Stalin. Yet, hit by the financial crisis, in 2010 this owner entered a partnership with a Russian bank, VEB. Kaiser tells me that it was hard for locals to tell who was really in charge, and in its final years it didn’t file proper financial statements. This was, she says, a “chaotic legal situation” but government failed to step in.

One member of the VEB supervisory board was Vladimir Putin, who reportedly discussed the plant’s future with Orbán in 2014. In the first years after the buyout, Kaiser explains, the Donbas-based company could produce a semi-finished product cheaply on home soil, before final processing in this Hungarian, thus EU-based facility. The civil war in eastern Ukraine from 2014, and the destruction of the owners’ property there, probably made the firm more reliant on its Hungarian operations. Yet, investment was also lacking. The two furnaces needed routine replacement, but only one was replaced, after repeated delay.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, there were still 4,500 steelworks jobs at Dunaferr, but the firm was building up legal problems. Later reports claim that the subsidiary in charge of the plant failed to cover €655 million in EU-level carbon credits and fines, before Dunaferr part-halted production in September 2022. Initiating liquidation proceedings that December, Orbán’s government pledged to step in and preserve the industry. It offered not to nationalize the plant but to ensure the workers’ future under another owner.

This was a promise it couldn’t keep.

Liberty

In summer 2023, the government chose British-Indian Liberty Steel, one of four bidders, as the buyer. Official media boasted that the government had “saved” the steelworks, a “top priority” in this “strategic sector.” But Liberty was a puzzling choice, deputy mayor Zsolt Szabó tells me, given its already “existing financial problems; it was known across Europe that they’d bought multiple companies but didn’t have enough money to operate them.” Kaiser concurs that Liberty had a track record of buying industries that could benefit from state subsidies but had not fulfilled its commitments on investment.

The buyout promised to save jobs at Dunaújváros, perhaps by converting production. Liberty pledged to renew the plant by building two electric-arc furnaces, so that steel from Dunaferr could be adapted to auto manufacture, and—a field of investment now rising in Europe—military industries. In September 2023, Liberty announced that it had Chinese backing to carry through a major decarbonization of the plant. Yet concrete measures were lacking, and the government again turned toward bankruptcy proceedings.

What is the political fallout? Kaiser suggests that local employees may credit the government for ensuring that their wages were paid for months after production halted, but ultimately blame it for choosing Liberty Steel as the buyer. This compounded its failure to control irregularities under the previous owners, and made eventual recovery even more expensive. Szabó stresses that city hall—headed by an opposition, anti-Orbán coalition since 2019—tried to give the steelworks leeway on tax payments, and that this also helped ensure that wages got paid. But in June 2024 the coke ovens were turned off for the last time.

Szabó insists that the ruling party’s promises were far from reality. “When the steel plant was still operating in 2022, the current [local Fidesz] representative, holding a shovel at the factory, said he would save it. Then, two years later, people were standing in line in the scorching heat waiting for their termination notices.” He suggests that although the government had the opportunity to seek financial support from the European Union to save a plant of this scale, it failed to do so, which led the Dunaújváros municipality to take matters into its own hands and begin participating directly in EU funding applications.

Szabó was initially a local candidate in the April 12 general election, before withdrawing in favor of main opposition force Tisza; his campaign literature refers to steel as part of Dunaújváros’s “way of life.” Yet, in our conversation, even talk of potential EU aid now seems aimed at adaptation for a post-steelworks reality, and retraining schemes for local employees. Highlighting the mental-health effect of the layoffs, Szabó explains that for many workers in their 40s and 50s, this may be tougher.

Dunaújváros doesn’t rely on steel alone: It has a major site for South Korean tire firm Hankook, and serves as a base for employees commuting to Budapest. But even further afield, there are many clouds over Hungarian industry. The government jobs strategy has in recent years counted heavily on making batteries for electric vehicles, but as Karas explains, this has heightened its dependence on foreign capital. There are even reports of Chinese electric carmaker BYD bringing in lower-paid—and ill-treated—migrant labor rather than employing Hungarians at its new site in Szeged.

In Dunaújváros, the contradictions are obvious. Orbán’s brand of state interventionism has not uplifted workers’ position through labor rights or a stronger safety-net, but counted on deals with multinational capital to employ Hungarian workers. In the post-crisis years, this paid off electorally, even if talk of winning economic sovereignty remained a mirage. Yet today, with the war in Ukraine and the ever-escalating conflict in the Middle East, this balancing act is harder to maintain. Ahead of Sunday’s vote, working-class Hungarians may be less convinced to turn out for Orbán.

As of 10 pm Washington time on April 7, 2026, the war may be ending on the basis of Iran’s 10 points.

These include: Iran’s control (with Oman) of the Strait of Hormuz, “agreement on uranium enrichment,” the lifting of all sanctions, withdrawal of American forces, and an end to all military attacks on Iran, as well as on “Lebanon and elsewhere,” according to the prime minister of Pakistan. In return, Iran agrees to cease defensive actions. By implication, it reserves the right to retaliate against ceasefire violations, including in “Lebanon and elsewhere.”

If the ceasefire holds, the vicious attack launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, 2026, will have exposed, for all to see, the obsolescence of US military power. That power consisted mostly of surface ships and bases, both of them impossible to protect from missiles and drones. The entire model, built up in World War II and the Cold War, is finished.

Acknowledgment of this reality around the world will have vast effects. It may hasten settlement of the other major conflict and tension zones: Ukraine on terms agreed with Russia, and Taiwan on terms agreed with the PRC. If so, a course should be set to avoid the worst for food and fuel and other resources in the near term and for a general economic improvements worldwide over a year or two and perhaps sooner.

Two weeks of uncertainty lie ahead. Forces within the United States and in Israel could destroy the tentative settlement, resume the war, and deepen the damage. They will certainly try. Israel is still savagely bombing Beirut, inviting retaliation from Tehran. A deep and irreversible economic disaster, based on the final ruin of the Persian Gulf states, remains possible. It may be in Israel’s perceived interest to provoke that calamity. The military and ultimate political outcome will not be different if it happens.

Perfidy is also possible. A crime under the Geneva Conventions, perfidy is standard practice for American rulers, whom no one trusts any more. But the depletion of offensive and air defense weapons makes an early resumption of the war unlikely. Therefore, the political effects of this deal may play out before military stockpiles could be rebuilt. And Iran also can replenish its arsenals, so a renewed attack would not mean a different result. Israeli media headlines calling the ceasefire a “huge victory” for Iran appear to be correct.

Within the United States, a reckoning is overdue. At least since Clinton’s attack on Serbia in 1999, the US has been trapped in a web of delusions about its own power. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and the South China Sea, the US has come up against forces it could not (in the end) defeat. None of these have, so far, dented the psychological carapace of the American elite. Iran’s 10 points should, finally, force reality down their throats. It is a defeat at the very core of the oil-dollar system, on which American power has rested for 50 years.

Can America adapt? The present political class can hardly do anything except bluster on. They may just deny reality. Or they may try to foster, as in France after 1870 or Germany in the 1930s, a spirit of revanche and another round of extreme militarization. This course would lead to further humiliations and defeats, and to the final physical and moral decay of the country. But the people are tired of their so-called elites, and in the force of circumstances, perhaps a new political class will emerge.

In my dreams, this defeat could liberate the US from a broken imperial model. The US could demilitarize, mothball its nuclear weapons, decommission its aircraft carriers, and close bases, even beyond those now abandoned in the Middle East. It could shrink its financial sector and devote its real resources to domestic physical, social and industrial renewal. It could revive, retrain and reenergize its worn-down population, with useful jobs doing worthwhile tasks. It could join the concert of great powers on equal terms, accepting the fact that none of the other powers—not China, not Russia, and not Iran—has any interest in taking over the world. And that therefore, for effective management of the world commonwealth, cooperative solutions must be found.

And the markets? From the news on April 7, as oil prices tumbled, the stock market was happy. Is this the first time stocks boomed to the tune of a colossal defeat? That would speak well of the markets, which I do rarely. But don’t count on it over the longer term. From the American perspective, the foundations of world power just shifted—an astonishing result. What we make of it remains ahead.

While our president makes genocidal threats on social media, and wages his chaotic war in Iran (the first world leader to see the “fog of war” as a feature, not a bug), you can be forgiven for overlooking the ongoing news that the war Donald Trump is winning is the culture war. A glance through recent entertainment coverage readily confirms that the brutality and ugliness Trump has sought to normalize over the past decade is now just the standard by which the culture industry operates.

This weekend, Trump Oval Office fanboy and sometimes Nazi Kanye West sold out Inglewood, California’s SoFi Center and took in a reported $33 million less than a year since he released a song called “Heil Hitler.” West even introduced Trump to fellow Nazi enthusiast Nick Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago. Still, West’s apology for his antisemitism in the Wall Street Journal was evidently enough for his LA fans, and no doubt some went because of the antisemitism. But the UK, which has a slightly more critical view of Nazis than the United States does these days, saw things differently. The Home Office banned West from entering the country on the basis of his antisemitic views. He was booked to headline the Wireless Fest, which began hemorrhaging corporate sponsors like Pepsi and Rockstar Energy Drinks as soon as West’s appearance was announced. The festival has since been cancelled, even if its headliner has not.

A few days before West’s LA shows, Netflix announced that Louis CK would headline the Hollywood Bowl as part of its “Netflix Is a Joke” comedy festival, nine years after CK admitted that he had masturbated in front of several women without their consent. Netflix’s corporate leaders have evidently determined that he had completed his penance—even though CK’s nominal cancellation included a wildly successful interim live tour and the release of his first novel. If CK got a pass from the Riyadh Comedy Festival, the thinking seems to go in LA, why should the United States be any different? 

It’s true that you can’t ban a man from working for the rest of his life for trash behavior—but you also don’t need to partner with him. Unless, of course, you’ve determined that there won’t be any consequences, that people just do not care. The West and CK news also followed a series of interviews with actor John Lithgow where he shakily fended off questions about why he has agreed to take the central role of Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter television series, which will further enrich the author behind the Potter franchise, the transphobic JK Rowling.

Accommodating Nazis, sexual abuse, and transphobia were once the MAGA brand, but it’s very much mainstream culture now. Central in the long-term culture offensive is the planned Skydance-Paramount buyout of Warner Bros.-Discovery. That takeover would seal the Trump-aligned Ellison family’s status as anointed MAGA culture barons—something Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth openly longed for as he derided press coverage of the Iran war. Paramount-Skydance has already agreed to distribute disgraced director Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 4 at the request of Ratner’s friend, President Trump.

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that roughly 20 percent of the funding behind Skydance’s $111 billion deal—some $24 billion—is coming from three sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East:  Qatar,  Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia. Trump and Hegseth no doubt welcomed that news, since Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is reportedly pushing Trump to stay the course in Iran.

If the Warner deal goes through, the Skydance-Paramount corporation will own both CNN and CBS. And it’s certain that this foreign buy-in will come with a price. When foreign powers like China control a substantial slice of the revenue stream of major media companies, they expect American corporations to censor themselves. China’s control of the Chinese film market has silenced any and all criticism of China in American film and TV, and it’s not hard to see Saudi Arabia’s normalization campaign with the West getting new life in such a deal.

Meanwhile, the Ellisons had more cleanup work to do on the Trump culture front.  After securing the cancellation of Trump critic Stephen Colbert and his Late Show on the eve of Skydance’s final acquisition of CBS, the network announced Monday it found his replacement. Colbert’s 11:30 pm slot and the hour after it will be filled by media investor and stand-up comic Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed. The show initially starred Allen in syndication from 2006-2016, and then he brought it back when CBS needed to fill in some late night programming gaps. The show will debut in May.

The good news for Trump’s culture allies is that Allen doesn’t fit the broader template of recent MAGA culture-war winners. He can’t be lumped in with Louis CK, Kanye West, or JK Rowling. He has not alienated millions of people worldwide with stupid, morally bankrupt behavior. He’s always been a likable public personality who has never ruffled a feather. And that’s likely why CBS wants him in that spot.

Allen’s media company has been in business with Sinclair Broadcasting—the powerful right-wing local broadcasting empire that lobbied so hard to get ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel fired last year for a monologue about Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Allen is perfectly aligned with their goals.  In the past, he has told comedians on Comics Unleashed, “I don’t want to hear any political humor. Just be funny, family-friendly and advertiser-friendly.”

If Allen isn’t leashing the comics, he’s certainly muzzling them.  In the Trump 2.0 era, Allen is the ideal host for CBS. He may not be a bad person, but the people who hired him are—or rather, the person calling the culture-war shots in the White House is. Allen got the gig in what’s known as a “time buy.” His production company puts up the money to lease the time slot from CBS for his show—which will then be followed by a game show he also owns. It’s a common marketing strategy for 3 am infomercials and religious broadcasters. The company leasing the airtime makes money up front with little or no investment, and buyers like Allen make their money on the commercials and products they sell.  In the past, Allen has split the commercial sales revenue with CBS.

Allen’s hire is the equivalent of bringing Bari Weiss into run CBS News or what the Washington Post and LA Times have become after killing off their planned endorsements of Kamala Harris in 2024. Allen’s show likewise represents a scaled down, cheaper, far less ambitious media product. It’s designed not to cost much and not to offend. And if past history is much if a guide, it won’t attract much of an audience.

Allen’s time-buying arrangement also furnishes a window on the Ellisons’ underwater business model at Paramount-CBS. When Skydance bought Paramount, it took on an enormous debt load, which will only get worse after the prospective Warner deal goes through.  Ballooning debt was also a factor the decision to ditch Colbert—together with the animus of his Hater in Chief, Trump. One hundred and eleven billion dollars is a mountain of money to anyone, and it’s clear that if Paramount-Skydance is going to absorb Warner Bros.’ many media properties without going under, the newly merged media leviathan will be airing the kind of filler product that Byron Allen provides.

If Colbert’s show cost too much, and if the late night talk show model is dying, that still does not excuse CBS for its sad lack of creativity in replacing that model. Like the comebacks of West, CK, and Rowling, handing Colbert’s time slot over to the affable Allen is peak enshittification. It’s another step back into the degraded culture and values that normalize Trump’s own garbage behavior.

The AI revolution is destined to transform human society in ways that most of us cannot begin to fathom. The changes to come will be every bit as daunting as what the world saw in the industrial and digital revolutions. Yet our policymakers are ill-prepared—and, in the case of our president, dramatically unwilling—to ensure that these changes benefit everyone rather than a tiny cabal of hyper-wealthy tech oligarchs.

To meet this challenge, we must develop a new social contract that begins with the basic premise that artificial intelligence must serve humanity, not the bottom line of a billionaire class that seeks to become a trillionaire class at our expense. We cannot allow technological overlords to build a society where AI “progress” is defined by their wealth rather than by our democracy.

I make this argument as a member of Congress who represents Silicon Valley, the home of companies with more than $18 trillion in market capitalization—more than one-quarter of the entire US stock market—and five that are worth more than $1 trillion each. I know tech billionaires, I know the people who are benefiting from the AI revolution’s massive upward redistribution of wealth, and I know that more than a few of them believe they have a divine right to lead and rule. But that cannot be our future.

We need to tax extreme wealth in order to meet human needs, which is why I support the proposed onetime 5 percent wealth tax on California billionaires (while not taxing voting shares or illiquid gains) and have proposed federal legislation to raise $4.7 trillion in revenue by taxing billionaires and another $2 trillion by making corporations pay their fair share. I have challenged my fellow members of Congress to support this legislation with the argument that if the representative from Silicon Valley can stand up for billionaire taxes, it shouldn’t be that hard for other House members and senators to do the same.

Just as important, I know—as a former deputy secretary in the Obama administration’s Commerce Department who has spent the past decade focusing on the economic and social disruptions caused by AI—that politicians, unions, civil-rights groups, faith communities, and grassroots activists must act urgently and aggressively to create laws, regulations, and incentives that prioritize humans over machines, protect the mental health of our children from social-media slop, stop algorithmic rent increases and predatory pricing, and prevent American jobs from being sacrificed in order to enrich oligarchs.

AI is evolving so rapidly that even its intellectual pioneers are unsettled. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate in physics who’s known as the “godfather of AI,” quit his position at Google several years ago and warned that AI-generated programs could overwhelm the public discourse with misinformation and, ultimately, pose an existential threat to humanity. Stuart Russell, the British computer scientist who literally cowrote a textbook on AI, now worries that AI development is “intrinsically unsafe.”

Some of the people behind the most sophisticated AI technologies are also scared. After the Department of Defense asked to use Anthropic’s Claude chatbot for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous warfare, the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said that he will not allow the technology to be used for either purpose. But what about all the other AI companies and tech leaders lining up for defense contracts and letting their products be used to kill people—as has already happened in Gaza?

Clearly, we all must start asking some fundamental questions about AI, as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) did when we held our “Who Controls the Future of AI: The Oligarchs or the People?” town hall at Stanford University in February. “If AI is going to replace a lot of the work that human beings do, what becomes of human beings?” the senator said. “Are we superfluous in the process? What happens to our ability to relate to each other?”

We also have to acknowledge, in the words of Sanders—who, after 35 years in the US House and Senate, knows Capitol Hill better than anyone—that “Congress and the American people are very unprepared for the tsunami that is coming.”

Wrestling with these questions, and preparing for the tsunami, is far too important to be left in a few private hands. Unfortunately, Donald Trump and too many Republicans in Congress don’t see it that way. They want to hand the tech-industry elites a blank check to develop AI in ways that give them more wealth, more power, and more control over our future. In December, after Congress rejected the administration’s repeated attempts to slip anti-regulation language into federal legislation, Trump issued an executive order that authorizes US Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice to sue states, overturn AI safety regulations, and put consumer-protection laws at risk. If states succeed in keeping their laws on the books, Trump has ordered federal regulators to withhold federal funds that have been allocated for building out broadband infrastructure.

State attorneys general will defend state-level regulations, and they’ll win their share of court battles. But merely saying no to Trump’s executive overreach is insufficient. Democrats must provide an alternative vision that connects with independents and responsible Republicans by speaking to the practical concerns that the American people have about AI.

So how do we answer those questions? How do we prepare for—and hopefully avert—the tsunami that Sanders referred to? I believe that we have more of the answers than commentators imagine—and that we can find additional answers by making AI debates central to our politics.

We must frame the progressive alternative to Trump’s dangerously naïve and irresponsible “blank check” agenda. To that end, both at Stanford with Senator Sanders and in conversations and meetings with academics, union leaders, and grassroots activists across the country, I’ve been making the argument for a new social contract to address the defining issues of our time: inequality and AI.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that we live in a new Gilded Age. Tech billionaires, who believe that in a different era they would have been heroic conquerors, are wresting control of our economy, our media, and our politics from the American people. And despite the growing popular concerns over AI, they are tightening their grip on the control of our future.

Most Americans feel they have little say in shaping that future for themselves, let alone for their kids. This has contributed to anger, resentment, and a hopeless cynicism about these issues. In a January Economist/YouGov poll, more than half of the Americans surveyed said that the gap between rich and poor in America was “a very big problem” (while only 6 percent said it wasn’t a concern). An April 2025 Pew survey found that, by a nearly two-to-one margin, people expect AI to harm rather than benefit them. Why would they think that? Perhaps because they’ve seen the headlines generated by Amodei’s prediction that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated by AI in five years.

No nation can survive like this—with islands of prosperity amid seas of despair.

The economist Gabriel Zucman has shown that today’s concentration of wealth is the highest it has been since the 1920s. About 19 billionaires have amassed $3.3 trillion—the equivalent of 10 percent of all the goods and services that are produced in the US in a year. This is nearly three times more than the wealthiest Americans were worth relative to the size of the economy at the peak of the Gilded Age. Extreme wealth forms an unholy alliance with power, leading to two tiers of justice and stripping ordinary citizens of an equal voice in our democratic experiment.

Stanford University, where I once taught economics, is the epicenter of this wealth concentration and, not coincidentally, AI innovation. The 15-mile radius around the campus is home to Apple, Google, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Meta. One-third of the S&P 500’s value originates in this place.

This is one of the reasons why, when Senator Sanders and I appeared at Stanford, I reminded the students and faculty, “We see the future from here. We know what’s coming in a way that many politicians and DC bureaucrats simply can’t see. What kind of future are we going to build? Will this future be only for the tech lords or for all of us?”

The new tech social contract that I propose begins with an understanding that to whom much is given, at least a little is expected in return.

None of this makes us anti-technology, let alone anti-innovation.

We can acknowledge that tech entrepreneurs have taken risks and shown skill and imagination in scaling and adopting AI technology. But, as with every successful generation of American entrepreneurs over the past two centuries, their progress stands on a foundation of public investment. For instance, taxpayer dollars, as well as philanthropic donations, funded the development of AI at Stanford, where ImageNet and the Digital Library Project helped give birth to Google.

That is why we must ask not what America can do for Silicon Valley, but what Silicon Valley must do for America.

The AI revolution could help cure cancer and rare diseases, slash housing costs, make it easier to start businesses and open factories, address our energy needs, and lower medical and educational costs for the working class.

But if we leave it in the hands of a few billionaires, their priority will be to eliminate jobs, extract profits, and addict us to outrageous content that turns us from citizens into combatants.

That’s not the future I want. I am not an AI accelerationist. But nor am I an AI doomer.

I am an AI democratist.

The future must not be written by AI agents that serve only San Francisco billionaires. It must be written by all of us, together, in a way that heals our national divides; spreads prosperity through every community in this country, from rural towns to big cities; allows the middle class to grow and thrive; and keeps the oligarchs from dominating our society.

To that end, I have laid out seven principles for what a democratic AI should look like.

First, we must keep humans in the loop. We need real protections against mass job displacement, beginning with the 3.6 million truck drivers who face the loss of their livelihoods as autonomous vehicles hit the road. Even as self-driving trucks improve safety and efficiency, human drivers must remain in charge, just as pilots must still fly our planes. This will allow us to develop AI that augments human capability instead of eliminating jobs.

Second, every large company must bargain with its workers. Unions and elected representatives should ensure that displaced workers move into new value-creating roles and can benefit from AI’s productivity gains through higher wages, profit sharing, and shorter workweeks.

Third, we have to fix the tax code’s anti-human bias. Robots get accelerated tax depreciation, but hiring humans comes with payroll taxes. The economist Daron Acemoglu estimates that companies typically pay 5 percent or less in taxes on digital tools, while paying as much as 30 percent in taxes when hiring humans. This makes no sense. We must make it easier to hire workers, not robots.

We also need to create an annual data dividend so that every American gets a check from the data they generate, both for private businesses and for government activities like public health, traffic management, and 
policy research.

Fourth, we must launch a Future Workforce Administration. Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression, we must seize this moment of anxiety among white-collar and blue-collar families alike and answer it with the boldest, most patriotic jobs agenda in generations.

Funded by a modest wealth tax on the trillions created here and by a token tax on AI used by businesses that displace labor, this program will put Americans to work in public service. The initiative will drive moon-shot projects that expand the frontiers of science, clean energy, and biotech. It will also mobilize young people to rebuild towns, teach our children, provide childcare and eldercare, and strengthen small businesses in every community.

And we will launch 1,000 new trade schools and tech institutes—so the next generations are prepared for careers that AI can’t replace.

Fifth, data centers must serve the communities that power them. Right now, the wealth generated from data centers flows directly to mega-corporations without benefiting working people. That must end.

Tech companies need to invest deeply in the areas providing them with such riches, rather than merely lining their pockets. They must provide computer resources for schools and libraries, create local tech jobs and fund startups, and use renewable energy and dry-cooling technology to lessen the enormous toll that data centers exact on the environment and the water supply. We should look to what Singapore has done with its data centers and invest in massively increasing the supply of clean energy. Most importantly, tech companies must pay their full electricity bills instead of shifting those costs onto our communities.

Sixth, we must prevent AI from weaponizing public discourse. We must unite across party lines to stop engagement-driven algorithms from spreading hate. We should eliminate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 so that we can regulate amplified violent content. And we should require platforms to open up so Americans can connect freely across them.

Seventh, we must regulate AI so it is used to improve humanity, not damage it. We need clear, enforceable guardrails with mandatory third-party verification of advanced AI models to ensure that this powerful technology does not cause serious societal harm. This needs to be more than the voluntary collaboration taking place at the federal Center for AI Standards and Innovation. We need a robust federal agency to regulate AI like we do with nuclear energy or aviation.

Along with fair taxation of corporations and billionaires, these principles provide a framework to help ensure that AI does not usher in a level of wealth and power concentration that further rips apart our democracy. If we continue with the status quo or adopt poll-tested incrementalism, we will leave ordinary Americans out in the cold, and prosperity will be only for the privileged. I will not sit by and watch that happen. We need a program with the boldness and scale of FDR’s New Deal, a democratic project for our time. The point is not to slow innovation, but to see that its benefits reach every American.

This is a program that says by its very substance: There will be no surrender to the tech lords. None.

What there will be is a claiming of AI, and the future, for the American people.

Late in the afternoon of July 23, 2025, Donald Trump stood on a stage at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC, to announce one of the hallmark initiatives of his second term as president: his AI Action Plan. Immediately after he took office, Trump had declared his administration’s intention “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” Now, after weeks of consultation with stakeholders, he was ready to unveil his plan to a room filled with corporate leaders eager to see whether he would deliver for them.

“From this day forward, it’ll be a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence,” Trump promised, flanked by a pair of large signs reading “Winning the AI Race.”

The choice of venue was fitting. Andrew Mellon was a powerful industrialist and banker who served as secretary of the treasury during the economic boom of the 1920s and through the Wall Street Crash of 1929. His fiercely pro-business, anti-tax policies are widely blamed for creating the conditions that led to the Great Depression. Whether AI will have the same effect on the economy is the central question for policymakers encountering the heady excitement and anxiety swirling around this new technology.

Trump, however, didn’t seem to harbor such concerns. Indeed, the three “pillars” of his AI Action Plan make clear that his administration intends to tip the scales in favor of the industry’s interests in a manner unprecedented in US policymaking. These pillars are: a push to mobilize “every tool at our disposal to ensure that the United States can build and maintain the largest, most powerful, and most advanced AI infrastructure anywhere on the planet”; a commitment to “get the entire world running on the backbone of American technology” by mobilizing government resources behind a global sales pitch on behalf of AI companies; and a determination that the government would divest itself of any use of “woke” AI models.

The industry reps in the audience were thrilled. But if any members of the general American public had been in the room, they might have wondered: What about us? As our resources—our land, tax dollars, jobs, and future—are handed to an industry that is far more interested in amassing money and hoarding control than democratizing them, what can we expect in return? Are we really witnessing the dawn of a new “golden age,” as Trump promised? Or, rather, a brazen daylight heist?

The billionaires selling us AI technologies would have us believe that they are self-made innovators who’ve built the most promising industry of our time based solely on their brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit, but the reality is far less valiant. For one thing, the paradigm of large-scale AI is characterized much more by brute-force resource consumption (of data, energy, and the capital that powers these infrastructures) than by scientific advancement. As Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal (and a cofounder of AI Now), has observed, “It was not the algorithm that was a breakthrough: It was what the algorithm could do when matched with large-scale data and computational resources.”

At the same time, the choice to orient around the notion that “bigger is better” means that the AI industry is trapped in a business paradigm that depends on access to unfathomably large amounts of capital to build out its infrastructure at a scale far removed from the actual indicators of demand, let alone any convincing signals of business viability. And enduring such stratospheric levels of uncertainty and risk requires nothing short of a cult-like belief that the industry will eventually prove economically transformative enough to justify these bets by a guarantor that can persuasively underwrite the market. It requires, in other words, underwriting at a scale that only the US government could meaningfully provide.

The Trump administration has stepped up to the challenge. It has not been shy about its use of the power of the pen to back the industry’s interests, from brokering sales deals with other countries on behalf of Nvidia, to backing a $1 billion loan to bring the Three Mile Island nuclear plant back online to power Microsoft’s AI data centers. And it has done all this despite the swelling opposition within both its MAGA base and the general public, who are growing uncomfortable with a technology that is being used to endanger people’s livelihoods.

The Trump administration’s AI policy is being led by its artificial-intelligence and cryptocurrency czar, David Sacks, who is a prolific investor in the AI industry, and Michael Kratsios, a former executive at Scale AI who now heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Sacks and Kratsios have championed a multipronged approach that includes the $1 billion in AI funding provided by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and an aggressive export agenda that turns the government into the top-level salesman for AI firms as they enter foreign markets. At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Kratsios announced the formation of a new Tech Corps, which will leverage the infrastructure of the Peace Corps to send technologists around the world on behalf of US tech firms to assist governments in integrating the companies’ software into their public-service systems. A few months earlier, the Department of Energy announced its “Genesis Mission,” a set of “private-public partnerships” through which the DOE will give companies access to its highly prized genomic and other datasets to enable them to develop products for commercial use. This is all on top of the already heavy subsidies that data centers receive, including significant state and local tax breaks and federal subsidies for factory construction.

According to the big AI companies, this kind of ambitious and unconditional government support is just what’s needed to achieve their aim of limitless AI infrastructure expansion—which they assert will be necessary to reach the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, and to do so before China does. Under this arms-race logic, any restraint on corporate power is recast as an impediment to national-security interests and plainly unpatriotic—like blocking the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project (both of which, AI boosters insist, are worthy historical analogies).

But if there’s one thing we should have learned from past eras of technological transformation, it’s that the promotion of national monopolies does not necessarily lead to national competitiveness. Nor does it lead, seamlessly, to sustainable jobs, enduring employment, wage growth, and innovation. While it can lead to great wealth for some, it rarely guarantees the kind of mass national renewal that the tech elite and their friends in government promise.

Given the headiness of the moment we’re in, it’s easy to forget the lessons of history: those technological paradigms that upended the economic status quo before AI.

Take semiconductors. Originally a small part of the larger defense industry—semiconductor manufacturing was initially funded and planned in close coordination with the military, and semiconductors were purchased almost exclusively by the military-industrial complex—they did not significantly penetrate the civilian market until the late 1970s. Around that time, however, Japan’s production of high-tech goods began to eclipse the United States’ productive capacity, offering superior quality at cheaper prices, leading US semiconductor executives to realize that this threatened their own industry. Producers like Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor flooded Washington with lobbyists, begging the new Reagan administration for assistance and warning that if they didn’t get it, the effects on the US economy and national security would be dire.

What made these requests especially notable wasn’t just the ask for help—the aerospace and electronics industries also received government support—but the scale of the aid sought by these famously libertarian “Semiconductor Cowboys.” What also made their requests notable was that the White House listened.

From Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton, successive administrations offered significant assistance to semiconductor companies, ranging from facilitating opportunities for US firms to learn the superior Japanese production processes, to providing subsidies for new factory construction and antitrust exemptions, to forging coercive trade deals that favored US firms and processes. In 1986, for example, the Reagan administration used the threat of economic sanctions to secure 20 percent of the Japanese market for US producers. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration negotiated new international trade deals that made these US subsidies legal while outlawing those favored by Europe and Japan.

The level and the one-sidedness of the support that the industry received was precedent-setting in ways that we should pay close attention to for what they might portend with AI. The economist Laura Tyson has pointed out that these trade deals forever changed US trade policy by prioritizing market access for companies over the protection of domestic jobs. It was, as Tyson and David B. Yoffie wrote in “Semiconductors: From Manipulated to Managed Trade,” “the first major U.S. trade agreement in a high-technology, strategic industry and the first motivated by concerns about the loss of high-tech competitiveness rather than concerns about employment. It was the first U.S. trade agreement dedicated to improving market access abroad rather than restricting market access at home.”

The reason that three consecutive administrations, across both parties, made these moves was that they aligned with the elite belief that access to leading-edge semiconductors figured at the heart of US military and economic primacy. But these forms of extreme subsidy and favoritism also had significant costs, both for the public good and for American security at large. Coupled with a lack of oversight, the government’s permissiveness toward antitrust violations allowed companies like Intel to monopolize the field. This led ultimately to stagnation, which degraded rather than enhanced innovation and competitiveness on the global stage, while also bearing costs to the public.

Today, semiconductor firms continue to require massive capital investment and provide low profit margins—all while receiving significant government support. Semiconductor plants, called “fabs,” are increasingly automated. The industry’s poor workplace conditions (including exposing workers to toxic chemicals), high turnover rates, and aging workforce have led to a worker shortage. Intel has failed to invest adequately in R&D and has previously spent its government subsidies poorly.

Notably, Intel is the same firm that the Trump administration took a 10 percent equity stake in last year in an effort to shore up the company’s finances and further bind it to the government. Because it failed to keep pace with the rest of the industry, Intel became vulnerable to such novel state measures, perpetuating the cycle of government intervention and neglect.

If the history of semiconductors offers a warning, so far we don’t appear to be listening. AI firms are receiving even less oversight than the semiconductor companies did, making them less likely to be accountable even as these firms create technologies that play a more central role in our lives as core infrastructure. If anything, the government has worked aggressively to deregulate a tech industry already enjoying laissez-faire treatment. The White House is currently pushing for the preemption of state regulations of AI—an effort that effectively revives the reviled “AI moratorium,” which would have banned for a decade the ability of states to enforce their own laws on AI firms. (That bill was shut down in the Senate last year by a vote of 99 to 1.)

The AI industry is also at a much more nascent stage in terms of its ability to deliver on its proof of concept. The strategic importance of semiconductors to the nation’s economic and military strength was already well proven before the Reagan administration weighed in. While the transformative potential of AI tools is clear, it is much farther away by comparison: The leaders of AI firms have described their tools as not yet reliable enough for military use and are struggling to establish their enterprise business lines.

The core justification for why AI is a national strategic priority—the potential development of artificial general intelligence—also remains speculative. A recent survey by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence found that 76 percent of AI experts said they are dubious that AGI will be achieved under the current paradigm, which posits that AI technologies improve with increased data and computing power. If this scaling law fails to hold, it will strike at the heart of the industry’s case for ever-increasing capacity and sow real doubts concerning the fantastical levels of projected demand undergirding the current push for infrastructure expansion.

It’s worth reminding ourselves of what will happen for Americans if this technology does succeed. If the vision for AI ends in mass job displacement, which is certainly what the explosive revenue projections of these firms are banking on, then the administration would be inviting a new crisis onto its doorstep. Beyond job loss, the potential harms of AI are legion, including higher energy costs, negative effects on education, increased social isolation, environmental degradation, and more. All will likely require substantial and costly government intervention.

Already, according to the latest report on US manufacturing, the construction of data centers is crowding out the development of other industrial sectors. “Global logistics remains sensitive to geopolitical shifts,” warned the Institute for Supply Management’s December 2025 Manufacturing PMI report, which also noted the negative effects of Trump’s tariffs. “Large-scale data center programs are absorbing and reducing availability of resources for other sectors.”

The opportunity costs of prioritizing the needs of this sector above all others are massive and will have ripple effects on the economy for decades, delaying the development of other sectors as well as national development as a whole. Even worse, all this sacrifice may be for very little payoff. We are trading the health of other manufacturing sectors for a bet on a speculative promise that AI will be worth the economic pain.

Given the clear harms incurred by such a haphazard, speculative strategy, it’s worth asking why we are betting everything on this particular technology. These movements may not be reflective of an industrial-policy moon shot so much as old-school patronage and crony capitalism: Witness David Sacks’s brokering of access to the White House for his industry colleagues, recommending policies that benefit them, and retaining stakes in nearly 450 companies that would be aided by his policies.

It isn’t hard to see how Sacks and the tech CEOs he considers colleagues will benefit from these moves. But it’s less clear what American taxpayers will get in return, and this is roiling Trump’s MAGA base. “It feels like millions of votes across the country just got traded for thousands of [venture capitalist] and tech rich votes in regions Republicans will never win,” a conservative supporter of the administration told The Washington Post recently.

To make such a huge and risky bet on a technology that promises—even according to its greatest prophets—to fundamentally reshape the economy in ways that could put millions of people out of work and further centralize power and wealth in Silicon Valley certainly reads like a betrayal of that original vision. We should hope that any American government would support the conditions for beneficial innovation, but not wildly gamble away our future for so little in return.

Last May, Local Progress, an organization whose membership includes almost 2,000 locally elected progressive officials from around the country, issued a report warning of the rapidly growing dangers faced by communities due to the spread of AI-based surveillance systems. It cited as an example networks of automated license-plate readers (ALPRs) and smart streetlights, which enable police departments to identify specific suspects by combining crime witnesses’ descriptions of individuals and vehicles with the massive amounts of data on residents’ movements collected by these systems. Because AI excels in pattern recognition, it potentially allows police to find needles in an urban haystack, locating people and then tracking their movements in real time with pinpoint accuracy. Companies such as Flock Safety, founded in 2017 and based in Atlanta, and Ubicquia, based in Fort Lauderdale, have made fortunes providing such systems to federal, state, local, and private entities. Flock Safety alone operates 80,000 AI-powered cameras in 6,000 communities, and it is currently launching a new “surveillance drone” product to hoover up still more data.

While city governments and police departments portray the technology as inherently benign—simply a souped-up, “smart” crime-fighting tool that increases the efficiency of law-enforcement activity by orders of magnitude and comes with no downsides for law-abiding residents—critics argue that the growing use of these products represents a serious threat to civil liberties. Privacy advocates worry that in an era of mass surveillance, such systems could be exploited by bad actors and used to monitor political protesters, women seeking reproductive care, immigrants just trying to go about their business, and others.

“There has thus far not been an automated license-plate-reader system able to adequately protect the technology from being co-opted by authoritarianism,” says LiJia Gong, the legal and policy director at Local Progress. “These tech corporations oftentimes use cities and local governments as testing grounds to normalize surveillance and automation tools.” Many of the contracts for ALPR systems and smart-camera facial- and vehicle-recognition networks allow companies to update the underlying software without seeking approval from local authorities—meaning that when these systems are installed, it’s almost impossible to know how their tracking capabilities will develop as advancements in AI lead to improvements in its ability to recognize patterns and make predictions.

As the Trump administration carries out an unprecedented crackdown on 
immigrants, the ability of Customs and Border Protection to access such data has raised alarms, and there have been a number of reports alleging that federal agents may have found backdoor entry points into ALRP and smart-streetlight systems, even in states that prohibit their police departments from cooperating with these agencies. There have also been allegations that a Texas woman was tracked after self-administering an abortion. In October, the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights reported that the US Border Patrol had backdoor access to the surveillance networks of at least 10 police departments in the state, none of which had authorized such use of their data—though police analysts argue that since Flock Safety has disabled its software’s ability to share information with federal agencies in states that prohibit such data-sharing, the “back door” was likely rogue cops illegally passing along information to the feds.

Flock denies that there is a back door to its technology or that it shares locally or state-owned data with ICE. Josh Thomas, the company’s chief communications officer, tells me, “We don’t work with ICE. We’ve never worked with ICE. We have no contract with ICE. There’s no back door into the Flock Safety system. All of our customers 100 percent own and control their own data. Flock doesn’t share it at all or sell it to any third parties.”

Few cities in the country have been as consumed by debates over the use of AI-powered surveillance systems as San Diego, which has a small police force for a city its size—less than 1,900 officers for roughly 1.4 million people—and has long relied on high-tech crime-fighting tools to fill the gaps in its personnel and funding. Over a decade ago, San Diego’s district attorney used surveillance data to link nearly three dozen young African American men to local gang violence and to charge them with offenses connected to several shootings, despite the fact that they weren’t near the scenes of the crimes at the time. Many took plea bargains, and the charges against those who didn’t were eventually dismissed; if their cases had proceeded, each of those young men would have faced many decades behind bars.

“Far before Trump, we’ve been concerned with federal 
overreach and data-sharing,” says Homayra Yusufi, a senior policy strategist at the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA) in San Diego. Districts that are mainly populated by people of color and immigrants are “over-policed and over-surveilled,” she says, and cameras and ALPRs—with their telltale bug-like antennae—speckle virtually every intersection in these neighborhoods.

The San Diego Police Department has a contract with Ubicquia to provide ALPR and smart-streetlight systems; Ubicquia, in turn, has subcontracted out the implementation of the project to Flock. The two companies and the SDPD say the technology is designed to leave a digital trail of who has asked for information and how the information has been shared, “so if there is abuse or if somebody lies about it, they can be held accountable by the appropriate governing bodies,” Thomas says. Capt. Charles Lara, who oversees the SDPD’s Research, Analysis, and Planning Unit, says that the department regularly conducts audits of how its surveillance systems are being used and who is accessing the information, and claims that the systems are less invasive than the phones everyone carries around with them. “No one wants to live in a police state,” Lara says. “But at the end of the day, people are misunderstanding the Fourth Amendment in public places.” (While the Fourth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy in private spaces, courts have found that it generally doesn’t guarantee such a right in public areas.) Moreover, all officers are given guidance specifically stating that per California law, they cannot share surveillance data with the feds or other out-of-state agencies, and if they do, they will be reported to Internal Affairs and disciplined, Lara says.

Despite such reassurances, immigrants’ rights organizations and privacy advocates are increasingly alarmed by the federal government’s use of every available tool to clamp down on perceived enemies and fear that, despite laws that limit information-sharing, the SDPD’s surveillance tools could at some point be put to use by the feds.

Notwithstanding the California Values Act passed in October 2017, which limits local and state law-enforcement cooperation with ICE and other immigration-enforcement agencies, some more conservative cities in the San Diego metropolitan region have reportedly shared surveillance data with the feds. One of them, El Cajon, is being sued by the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta. “Despite clear guidance and multiple warnings, the City of El Cajon Police Department continues to share this data with numerous out-of-state law enforcement agencies throughout the country,” Bonta’s office claimed in the October 2025 press release announcing the lawsuit, which was filed after a local PBS station reported that El Cajon’s surveillance data was used in immigration-related searches at least 550 times in the first nine months of 2025.

In 2016, San Diego signed contracts to install more than 3,000 smart streetlights and ALPRs, although, perhaps fearing a backlash, the city neglected to tell the public about the new devices until three years later. By then, Lilly Irani, a professor of communication and science studies at the University of California San Diego and a former Google engineer, was warning of “data creep” and—like activists in the San Francisco Bay Area; New York City; Portland, Oregon; and elsewhere—was decrying Big Tech’s use of massive datasets on residents’ movements to create the building blocks of a total-surveillance society.

In the local press, Irani warned that her neighbors were being used as “lab rats” for Big Tech social-engineering experiments. Khalid Alexander, an activist with Pillars of the Community, an organization that works with young Black men who have long been targets of police surveillance and whose names appear in gang-membership databases, teamed up with other privacy advocates to organize a series of community meetings to discuss the dangers of a surveillance state.

Those meetings gave rise to the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego (TRUST SD) Coalition. Made up of dozens of racial- and community-justice groups, civil-liberties advocates, and labor organizations, it pushed not for the elimination of surveillance technology but for the creation of a citywide ordinance that would place restrictions on the use of the technology and ensure that the public had a right to know when it was being deployed.

Over the coming years, TRUST SD’s activists were joined in their opposition to runaway, unregulated AI by Sean Elo-Rivera, a member of the San Diego City Council (as well as of Local Progress) with a background in community organizing. A tall, lean man with short salt-and-pepper hair and a trim goatee, Elo-Rivera dresses casually—black jeans, scuffed black Dr. Martens, a green jacket emblazoned with his name over a white vest, and a button shirt open at the neck. His City Hall office is adorned with civil-rights and organizing posters, and his bookshelf displays a hefty edition of the works of Che Guevara. “There’s no disputing” that AI-driven technology helps fight crime, Elo-Rivera acknowledges. But it comes “at a cost to people’s rights and civil liberties.”

Ever since he was elected to represent an immigrant-heavy district in the heart of the city, Elo-Rivera and his onetime City Council colleague Monica Montgomery Steppe (now a county supervisor) have led the fight against renewing San Diego’s contracts for the smart technology. In 2022, with municipalities around the country rethinking their approach to law enforcement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the resulting racial-justice protests, they scored a major victory when the contract with Ubicquia for smart streetlights wasn’t renewed—only to butt up against what they claim was the company’s initial refusal to actually turn off the cameras and kill the data streams. “San Diego’s not the only place where that’s happened—where a municipality has said ‘Shut ’em down’ and they’ve continued to let them run,” Elo-Rivera says. Similar stories have been reported in Eugene, Oregon; in Verona, Wisconsin; in Evanston, Illinois; and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Evanston, the city attorney sent Flock a cease-and-desist letter accusing the company of “an intentional and unauthorized disclosure of protected data” after it allegedly reinstalled cameras without the city’s permission. Flock Safety denies the claim, saying that when a city cancels its contract, the cameras no longer upload to the cloud even if they are still capturing images.

During that same period, as San Diego was rethinking its embrace of surveillance technology, Elo-Rivera helped push the landmark Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology (TRUST) Ordinance through the City Council, which was passed in 2022. TRUST mandated that the city’s decisions about installing AI-driven surveillance technology be carried out in public and go through a formal approval process; that the police specify how the technology would be used; and that an “impact report” be submitted for each new technology. Locals also gained the right to sue the city if it turned out that the technologies were being used in ways not authorized by the council and in a manner likely to result in harm to San Diegans. In addition, the ordinance created a Privacy Advisory Board made up of technology experts, civil-rights advocates, community-group leaders, and others who could articulate concerns about the new AI surveillance technology and recommend safeguards. Khalid Alexander, of TRUST SD, was among those appointed to the board.

For a while, it looked as though one of America’s most livable, laid-back cities was bucking the trend toward total surveillance. Lara, the SDPD captain, bemoans the fact that the ordinance—which he says is the most restrictive big-city privacy legislation in the US—doesn’t allow his department to share its data with other jurisdictions and creates a lag time of many months between when the police request new technology and when it can be approved and deployed. Lara calls it “probably the most challenging thing we’ve had to address as we move toward a modern police department.”

The privacy advocates’ victory was, however, short-lived. The ordinance does continue to force the SDPD to be more public about how it is using data, but over the past few years, the Privacy Advisory Board’s recommendations on whether to deploy the technology have been increasingly overruled or simply ignored by local officials.

A couple years after the board’s creation, the SDPD requested that the Ubicquia contract (and the Flock subcontract) for 500 smart streetlights be reactivated. With backing from newly elected Mayor Todd Gloria, and with the public souring on the reforms put in place in the aftermath George Floyd’s murder, a majority of Elo-Rivera’s council colleagues voted for a five-year contract, the funding for which would have to be reapproved annually. When, last year, the board again recommended that the city not continue to fund the Ubicquia-Flock contract, citing numerous allegations nationwide regarding the misuse of such data, the SDPD lobbied heavily for renewal. The City Council agreed to its request.

That outcome was a major disappointment for the activists who had pushed for changes in the city’s relationship to AI surveillance technology. They had expected the ordinance and the Privacy Advisory Board to rein in the sprawling surveillance systems. Instead, in the years since, the technologies have grown in power, and the police have come to rely more and more on the use of AI-generated data.

“The city has undermined the process since day one,” Alexander says in frustration. “The board is made up of volunteers, and the city has refused to fund any research staffers for the board. The disappointment is beginning to outweigh some of the smaller [victories] we’ve won along the way.”

If you look at maps of smart-camera and ALPR deployments in San Diego, you see clusters in the poorer, non-white areas: in Barrio Logan, in the African American communities of South San Diego, in the urban core around Downtown. By contrast, in the more affluent northern and eastern suburbs, there are far fewer cameras and ALPRs. The clear takeaway is that, as with so much else in modern American life, the burdens of surveillance disproportionately fall on the poor and the non-white.

Even before the Ubicquia-Flock contract was renewed, Alexander had quit the privacy board, which he had come to see as a paper tiger. In his resignation letter, he bemoaned the fact that “the Mayor and majority of council members have shown that they are either unwilling or unable to even consider rejecting requests coming from SDPD.”

Elo-Rivera isn’t quite as pessimistic. Over the past few years, even as the campaigns to moderate San Diego’s use of AI-driven surveillance systems have foundered, his efforts to rein in AI usage have expanded beyond surveillance technology.

Having pushed back against price-fixing AI software in the rental market, Elo-Rivera has now shifted his attention to Waymos, the driverless cabs that have been operating in San Francisco for the past few years and are increasingly prevalent in San Diego. California law prohibits localities from implementing outright bans on Waymos on public streets, but private entities can still impose restrictions. Elo-Rivera has been in talks with the recently expanded San Diego International Airport to see if he can persuade its executives to bar Waymos from picking up or dropping off customers on its property. “It is imperative to me that we ask ourselves who benefits from these technologies and in what way,” Elo-Rivera says. “There are a lot of people here who drive either for primary income or secondary income. Our commitment is to make sure everyday people are centered in the decisions of how these technologies are used.”

A few years into his tenure on the City Council, he became interested in how landlords were using AI to skirt antitrust laws and collectively jack up rents by feeding their own data into software that identifies patterns across the city’s rental markets. “People bust their ass here, because it’s really fucking expensive,” Elo-Rivera says. “They’re running a marathon on a track tilted 90 degrees against them. The playing field is completely tilted in the wrong direction.”

Mia Loseff, the housing-program manager at Local Progress, also recognized that this was a problem. Her organization began studying the impact of such software four years ago and found that algorithmic price-fixing raises rents by an average of $70 per month—with some cities, such as Atlanta, seeing much higher increases. In part because of this research, one county and 12 cities in the United States, including San Diego, have banned the use of such software over the past 18 months. In October, legislators in California took the process a step further, outlawing its use statewide.

Elo-Rivera is also trying to persuade his City Council colleagues to support a ban on the dynamic-pricing strategies that grocery stores are rolling out—using AI to hike the price of staple foods during high-demand shopping hours, meaning that customers don’t know in advance what they’re going to pay for food and may even find that the prices change while they’re inside the store if there’s a surge in customers. “I think it is wrong for consumers to be subject to price volatility based on the time of day they’re going to shop for basic items,” he says.

San Diegans’ efforts to regulate AI have had mixed success. Despite the accountability coalitions and the creation of the Privacy Advisory Board, AI surveillance systems have proved remarkably difficult to control. Advocates feel as though they’re playing an endless game of Whac-A-Mole.

“We built the biggest coalition against Flock. We had 70 organizations sign on, the labor council, unions. But the police seem to be more powerful than any of them,” Irani, the UCSD professor, says.

For Elo-Rivera, AI represents one of the defining political challenges of our time. Before he was elected to the City Council, he was employed by a nonprofit organization working with at-risk young people. “My work was with communities that had to fight incredibly hard for things they should not have to fight for,” he says. “Access to transportation, access to healthy food in schools.” That experience primed him to bring a critical eye to the society-upending technologies that the Big Tech proponents of an AI revolution are unleashing. “The scale of these changes is unrivaled,” Elo-Rivera says. “The recipe for people giving up, for cynicism, for real social turmoil—it’s all there. Tech companies are attempting to squeeze consumers from every angle they can, and we have to be able to push back and fight on every single front.”

Amid the liturgy of lies that Donald Trump hymns daily, he occasionally utters unvarnished truths that are unspeakable in polite company. He says the quiet part out loud. On presidential power: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” On the constraints on his use of military force: “There is one thing. My own morals. My own mind.… I don’t need international law.” On the racist predicate for his deportation horrors: “They are poisoning the blood of our country.” Or his $10 million lawsuit against the IRS: “I’m supposed to work out a deal with myself.” Or his admission about the aggressive war on Iran: “We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. But we’re there to help our allies.”

And so on the eve of releasing a budget for next year that called for a staggering $1.5 trillion military budget—a $500 billion, 42 percent increase that would be the largest year-on-year percentage increase since the mobilization for Korean War, Trump admitted to the quiet part: “I said to [Office of Management and Budget director] Russell [Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare…. We’re fighting wars…. it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”

It wasn’t just daycare that would take the hit. The press reported that president’s budget called for a 10 percent cut in all non-defense discretionary programs (outside of Medicare and Medicaid, which were savaged last year, and Social Security), targeting primarily anything related to climate, the environment, civil rights, education, and food support and other poverty programs. But in reality, compared to the cost of continuing current levels of service, it slashes domestic programs by nearly one-fourth. With ICE and Homeland Security getting increases, targeted programs were cut to the bone: the Environmental Protection Agency cut by more than one-half, LIHEAP—heating subsidies for low income families—eliminated, another $20 billion lopped off rebuilding infrastructure.

The proposed $1.5 trillion annual military budget, about 5 percent of the GNP, is real money. As Dean Baker notes, it comes to about $12,000 per family. And that doesn’t include the $200 billion supplemental that the Pentagon will reportedly seek to pay for the war on Iran. The money lards a military-industrial complex that is the largest source of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government—and has never been able to pass an audit.

Not surprisingly, many Democrats and a few Republicans expressed consternation at the misplaced priorities. On the surcharge for the Iran War, Representative Ro Khanna summarized:

Let me tell you what $200 billion could do here in America. It would allow for free public college for every American kid. We could build a thousand trade schools, we could pay every American teacher $60,000 to start.

We could have universal childcare: childcare at $10 a day, with childcare workers making $25 an hour. And we could fully fund special needs education at 40% of what the federal government needs to fund.

Or it could pay to reverse the cuts already made in vital needs. Reversing the cuts in Obamacare made by Trump and the Republican Congress last year would cost $27 billion annually. Extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit that aided low-wage workers curing Covid would cost about $40 billion annually.

Trump repeatedly and correctly boasts that the US military is already the most powerful military in the world by far. The “Department of War” accounts for 40 percent of the world’s military spending, more than the next nine costliest militaries combined—seven of which are (or were before Trump) our allies. This despite the fact that, surrounded by oceans to the East and West and allies to the North and South, the United States is uniquely secure against any conventional assault.

Wars, of course, tend to “grease the runway” for military spending hikes. Whether a war as unpopular as the war of choice against Iran will do so remains to be seen. But Trump’s budget request isn’t really a wartime budget. Most of the increase is a down payment on military fantasies. A centerpiece is an initial investment in Trump’s Golden Dome, his utterly fantastical recycled version of Reagan’s Star Wars, calling for building a defensive “dome” against missile attacks. It will squander hundreds of billions on multiple layers of land-, sea-, and space-based sensors and interceptors designed to protect the US from next-generation missiles and drones. Like Reagan’s fantasy, the system won’t work, serving only to enrich high-tech military contractors, accelerate the arms race in space, and lead China and Russia and other future nuclear-armed adversaries (France?) to move toward hair-trigger alert postures. Add to that a down payment of $65.8 billion in shipbuilding for Trump’s “Golden Fleet,” featuring “Trump-class” battleships that, if our corrupted military contractors actually succeed in building, will provide tempting targets for inexpensive air and underwater drones that are becoming the weapons of choice for weaker countries.

Trump’s assertion that the federal government must focus on the military, and that our military, which is already the most powerful in the world needs a lot more money, is what lawyers would call an “admission against interest,” once more saying the quiet part out loud.

A $1.5 trillion annual military budget isn’t necessary for the defense of the United States. Rather it assumes that the US will continue to police the world. We will remain committed to global military hegemony—aiming to be dominant militarily in this hemisphere, from Europe to the Russian border, counter China in the South China Sea, strike terrorists across the world, sustain a global empire of 750-plus military bases, and deploy military forces to over 100 countries, while patrolling the seven seas.

That commitment condemns the US to constant wars in far corners of the world, as it has waged every year of this century. The “war of choice” against Iran is a classic example. According to Trump’s National Security Strategy released in November 2025, the Middle East is no longer a priority: “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was.” Iran “has been greatly weakened,” progress toward “a more permanent peace” between Israelis and Palestinians “has been made.” As the US revs up energy production, “America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” Less than four months later, Trump launched the war against Iran, allegedly because of the threat posed by nuclear weapons it does not have, and intercontinental missiles that it has not built.

The commitment to be the most powerful military power in every region of the world is both expensive and exhausting. The military is right when it argues that even this unprecedented military budget is inadequate to the task. We’ve been writing promissory notes to countries across the world—from Taiwan in the South China Sea to Ukraine to Israel and the emirates in the Middle East—largely on the assumption that they would never be cashed in.

It is this commitment and the wars that result that repeatedly sabotage efforts to ensure basic needs at home—as Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights was lost to the Cold War, LBJ’s Great Society to Vietnam, Biden’s more modest domestic thrust to the cruel follies of Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza.

As Trump’s admission reveals, we do guns. Guns are our core industrial policy, our major export, our budget priority, our foreign assistance program, and define our global presence. Trump, the self-declared “President of Peace,” wages a catastrophic war in the Middle East, drops bombs on seven countries and fishing boats in the Caribbean, kidnaps the president of Venezuela, vows to take Greenland, and seeks a 40 percent increase in the budget for his Department of War.

Hopefully, Trump’s ruinous rampages will lead Congress to rework his budget and alter his priorities. But nibbling at the edges will only revive the hypocrisy, not revise the reality. We will never begin to rebuild a broad middle class and provide minimal basic needs to Americans without a fundamental change of our role in the world. What Trump makes clear is that we can rebuild our country or ramp up our Department of War—we can’t and won’t do both.

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request is a bat signal to Congress. The American empire is flailing, and the White House is working to ensure that the country declines with it. If there was ever a time for lawmakers to discipline the Pentagon, it is now.

On Friday, the White House released preliminary details about the fiscal year 2027 federal budget. The president requested $1.15 trillion for the Pentagon, as well as an additional $350 billion for the military outside of the regular budget process. If Congress manages to approve the latter in a separate spending bill, it will deliver President Trump a $1.5 trillion top line—a 44 percent increase from last year.

The administration’s budget request to Congress comes as the United States surpasses the first month of its illegal, dangerous war against Iran—which according to YouGov, about 60 percent of Americans oppose. It remains to be seen whether the Pentagon will pursue additional funding for the war, though the Pentagon suggested a separate $200 billion spending package just two weeks ago. Even with a ceasefire, the Pentagon may still pursue a supplemental to refill weapons stockpiles. Either way, lawmakers have a clear mandate: Cut the Pentagon budget and salvage their chance to deliver the domestic rejuvenation the American people demand.

The president is forcing austerity on the American people while prioritizing arms dealers and warmongers. The administration has proposed a 10 percent cut to nonmilitary spending, a $73 billion reduction. But superfluous military spending is an accelerant of American decline, coming at the cost of childcare, healthcare, and social welfare writ large—as the president made explicit in his address last Wednesday. According to the president, “it’s not possible” for the federal government to take care of childcare or healthcare: “We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

The president’s idea of guarding the country is unmitigated weapons production. But this is really just an idea, and a flawed one at that. The United States does not have the industrial capacity nor the workforce to absorb an additional near $500 billion Pentagon budget plus-up in a single fiscal year. Production constraints aside, the president’s budget request kick-starts his vanity projects in earnest. The fiscal year 2027 budget establishes Trump’s Golden Fleet—including the Trump-class battleship. Americans may be losing critical services, but the administration made sure to carve out funding for the F-47 fighter jet and Golden Dome, the president’s fantasy missile defense system.

The administration’s budget request outlines an egregious misallocation of American resources, but President Biden and his predecessors paved the way to the trillion-dollar-plus Pentagon budget. For years, Republicans and Democrats alike have invoked the prospect of World War III to justify expanding Pentagon budgets and unfettered weapons production. If the United States was as vulnerable to a military attack as budget boosters claim it is, the federal government would exercise both executive powers and statutes like the Defense Production Act to seize industrial capacity and boost arms production in preparation for war—as the nation did in World War II.

The administration boasts that the current military buildup surpasses even that preceding the Second World War. The only reasonable response to such excess is to drastically cut military spending, starting with Trump’s pet projects: the Golden Dome missile-defense system, the Golden Fleet, and the F-47. Between last year’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and its proposed top line for fiscal year 2027, the administration is poised to commit at least $40 billion on Golden Dome—the land-and-space-based shield purportedly capable of protecting the United States from everything from ballistic to hypersonic and cruise missiles. But a poorly conceived, fantastically expensive missile-defense shield is far from the most effective way to mitigate the threats posed by nuclear weapons: diplomacy, arms control, and nuclear nonproliferation.

Rather than commit generations of Americans to unnecessary if not technically infeasible weapons programs, Congress must cut off America’s war machine at the source. Excessive Pentagon spending fuels the US’s war obsession, an affliction that drives American hubris in countries like Iran and beyond. Military restraint, however, may be a driver and a product of spending discipline. At the very least, deep cuts to the Pentagon budget would save taxpayers from financing the president’s weapons wish list, which is irrelevant to cohesive or realistic strategic thinking. Most importantly, Pentagon budget cuts would free up resources for programs that actually improve Americans’ quality of life, which is rapidly deteriorating amid both wage stagnation and rising prices.

Anyone who spends much time visiting with children in the public elementary schools is likely to notice that the time traditionally given to the study of the arts and letters has undergone a notable reduction. “Severe budget cuts to [the] humanities and other non-STEM fields,” according to Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of American history at UCLA, have accompanied the growing assault on critical inquiry.

This trend, which I began to notice in the years that followed the passage of the testing law No Child Left Behind, is part of a larger pattern of retreat from the humanities in general, which tends to be given less and less attention, as it seems, because the benefits or “outcomes” of a child’s engagement with a literary work that he or she enjoys do not easily lend themselves to rigorous and scientific measurement. “I want to change the face of reading instruction from an art to a science,” said a high-ranking official at the US Department of Education in 2002. If she had simply meant that reading instruction ought to be grounded in reputable research with a scientific basis, her statement would have seemed like common sense to me. Regrettably, in too many schools, the scientific theme soon grew into a storm of arctic air that blew away any serious concern for the artistry of language in the books and stories that children were increasingly denied the time to read.

“So maybe we aren’t teaching an entire novel,” a curriculum administrator in a New York district noted in an interview with The New York Times in 2015, “but we’re ensuring that we’re teaching the concepts that the novel would have gotten across.”

It’s a funny statement. I don’t think too many people read a novel in order to dig out “a concept” or a bunch of concepts hidden in its pages. I think most people read a novel to enjoy the story and get caught up in the lives of the people it portrays and the ways their personalities and character develop as the narrative evolves. This is obviously impossible if all the students get to read are a couple of paragraphs or pages.

A case in point: One of the bright young teachers whom I came to know when she was a graduate student here in Cambridge went on a few years later to become a teacher in a fifth-grade classroom in a poorly funded district in Virginia. There was no library at the school and, in the classrooms, literary books had largely been abandoned and replaced by tiny bits of writing that were known as practice texts.

The teacher, who had studied education after she had done her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, had done her practice teaching in a fairly affluent district in a suburb close to Cambridge where testing pressures had been less severe and where she’d had a chance to introduce her students to books she’d known and loved since she was a child. So the idea of using what she called “hokey little bits and pieces” of test-aligned materials as the mainstay of instruction struck her, as she put it, as “pretty damn amazing.”

She later sent me a package that included several of the passages her students had to read in a six-week period prior to the final round of standardized exams—during which, she told me, they read no books at all.

One of the longer pieces that she sent was a passage of nonfiction about a creature of the sea I had never heard of, which was called the blobfish. It started out by saying that the blobfish has “a human-looking face” and, in the next sentence, is “a human-looking fish” and, in the paragraph that followed, is “nearly human-looking.” While it “may not be one of the most attractive of sea creatures,” the passage continues, “it is certainly one of the most interesting.” Its shapelessness “allows the blobfish to float easily” in “the ocean depths where it makes its home.” The blobfish “spends all its time floating” and, two sentences later, the blobfish (plural) “spend most of their time floating…. They are made for floating.”

The blobfish “may not be the most attractive fish,” the children are told a second time in the final paragraph, after which a multiple-choice question asks the students to identify the structure that was used to organize the passage. The teacher said one of her students stuck her fingers in her throat to indicate how interesting she found this.

It’s not surprising that so many teachers with her good education and buoyant personality—and feisty resistance to the loss of her autonomy—are unwilling to remain for long in schools in which “hokey little bits” of mediocre writing and the pressure to conform to standardized banalities are snuffing out any pleasure to be taken in the arts and letters.

The banning of books on social justice issues and works that address the nation’s racial history is another reason teachers who have come to education with a sense of social conscience are fleeing from the classrooms. About 12 years ago, one of my friends in Arizona told me about teachers in the Tucson district who had developed a Mexican American studies program that also included the writings of James Baldwin and dissident historians, such as Howard Zinn.

But legislative leaders were not pleased. The legislature passed a law to eliminate the program, and Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed the law in 2012. Among the titles taken from the shelves were works by Cesar Chavez, Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros, Laura Esquivel, and Thoreau (“Civil Disobedience”)—and, bewilderingly enough, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

In more recent years, right-wing parent groups have been attempting to exclude from their children’s schools hundreds of other books that foster critical thinking or address the conflicts that divide us, based on gender, class, and race.

All in all, between the assault from groups like these and the broader curricular constraint on reading almost any book of literary worth from the beginning to the ending, teachers I know are speaking of a bleak and bare scenario.

I go into an elementary classroom and, being old-fashioned as I am, I look to see if Harriet the Spy is sitting there invitingly on the top shelf of a bookcase. Depending on the grade and ages of the students, I also look for Owl Moon, Peeny Butter Fudge, Born on the Water, Bridge to Terabithia, Grandma’s Purse, The Wind in the Willows, Number the Stars, A Wrinkle in Time, Alice’s adventures when she fell into the rabbit hole—and, naturally, Eeyore, Pooh, and Piglet as they were depicted not by Disney but by E.H. Shepard.

Most of these books and dozens of other old or modern treasures are usually listed by the state or district as recommended titles for kids of different ages, and they’re usually there, somewhere in the classroom, packed in shelves or boxes. Too often, however, the books remain there in the shelves and boxes for too many days and hours while children fill in bubbles on their practice texts. Healthy and well-educated teachers tell me that they hate this. They did not come into teaching in order to become the dutiful technicians of mechanistic learning. They want to seed the future of their students with a lifelong love of reading.

It’s harder to do this in the kinds of schools where the obsessive measurement of outcomes and a cult of cold “efficiency” in the training of workers for corporate employment are held to be the ultimate priorities. What can’t be measured won’t be taught. What won’t be “useful”—fascination, and delight, and wonderment—are no longer wanted. This way lie diminished lives for millions of our children and a continued flight of teachers from their schools.

Luxury brands have always advertised the craftsmanship of their products, but in recent months, human artistry itself has become their advertising strategy. Hermès redesigned its entire website around hand-drawn illustrations by the French artist Linda Merad, who said the designer label wanted visitors to recognize that “the art was made by a human.” The fashion houses Chanel and Loewe commissioned human illustrators to create their recent social-media campaigns. Over the holidays, Porsche released an ad that combined hand-drawn artwork with 3D animation—a choice that seemed pointed coming on the heels of the viciously mocked generative-AI ads from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. This past February, Gucci became a cautionary tale when it drew the wrath of fashionistas after using AI in its ads. “Any luxury brands that used AI slop should not be consider[ed] luxury anymore,” one viral post read. Another stated, “The whole point of luxury is that someone gave a damn.”

As automation and AI become ubiquitous, the human touch has become a luxury good. In some ways, this might seem to be merely a continuation on a theme: The rich get white-glove customer service while the rest of us are trapped pressing “1” and “2” and shouting “speak to an agent” into automated phone-tree voids. It can seem like just another symptom of the broader enshittification of our age and plutocratic economic order. And most of us don’t like it. Studies confirm the widespread skepticism: A Pew survey from 2025 found that half of Americans were more concerned than excited by the rise of AI, and roughly 60 percent said they wish they had more control over AI’s use in their own lives.

And yet it’s the poor who are subject to its most consequential uses. Today, debt collectors use AI to hound people via phone, e-mail, and chatbots. AI deepfakes are poised to worsen criminal-justice disparities. Parole decisions are being made by AI systems. And increasingly, federal and state officials are outsourcing decision-making and oversight for public services to digital machines.

As TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit that tracks technologies that are harmful to low-income communities, noted in a November 2024 report, governments employ AI in public programs when they’re looking to cut costs under the guise of ensuring that only the “right” people receive services. But any mistake made by an automated system immediately snowballs: Such systems can create “immense suffering at scales and speeds that were impossible with the human-centered methods that precede them,” the researchers found. After decades of austerity rooted in anti-Black and anti-poor politics, America’s safety net is already threadbare; those same biases are now encoded into digital tools that, like all AI, reproduce the prejudices of their training data and programmers. A human bureaucrat can destroy only so many lives in a day; algorithms can ruin the lives of tens of thousands at once.

Every state now uses AI to determine Medicaid eligibility, according to TechTonic Justice. For the 73 million people enrolled in the program, automated systems increasingly decide whether to approve or deny healthcare treatments. The nearly 14 million Americans who receive disability benefits through the Social Security Administration are subject to decisions shaped by AI, which is also used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; in fraud detection for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and in making predictions of neglect in child-welfare investigations. Indeed, throughout the social-safety net, decisions about who gets helped and who gets denied are increasingly left to machines. (Right around when the Porsche ad dropped, the Trump administration quietly gave Palantir a no-bid contract for an AI system to search for alleged fraud by SNAP recipients.) In fact, as the TechTonic Justice researchers reported, “all 92 million low-income people in the U.S.…have some basic aspect of their lives decided by AI.”

In 2013, for example, cash-strapped Michigan instituted an automated system to root out fraud in its unemployment-insurance program. Over a two-year period, the system leveled fraud accusations against over 60,000 people—more than five times the number identified by previous human-led investigations. Despite no human review of these findings, the state began demanding repayment; court papers noted that the “punitive assessments regularly totaled between $10,000 and $50,000 and sometimes exceeded $187,000.” Three years later, Michigan’s auditor general found that 93 percent of those allegations were wrong. By then, thousands of people had endured arrests, bankruptcies, and evictions, with at least one person dying by suicide. As of 2022, Michigan owed $20 million in settlement costs to claimants who’d signed on to a class-action lawsuit.

In Arkansas, an automated system erroneously cut nursing and other home-aide services for about 4,000 people with severe disabilities. When families asked why the services had been slashed, they were told simply that “the computer did it.” (A court ruled that the state had to stop using the system.) In Minnesota and Kentucky, ongoing class-action lawsuits allege wrongful denials of care in cases where insurers enlisted AI to override doctor recommendations and deny the Medicare Advantage claims of elderly patients. In Illinois and Los Angeles County, the automated systems used to determine child-welfare removals were so error-prone that both jurisdictions have now discontinued their use.

The research company Forrester predicts that AI and automation will eliminate 6 percent of all jobs, or roughly 10 million positions, by 2030. That outlook seems sunny compared to a 2025 Senate report that predicted some 100 million Americans could lose their jobs to AI over the next 10 years. There’s a new digital divide, and the less money you have to buy your way out of it, the greater the role that AI will have over your life.

Jamaica Kincaid really hates England, and who could blame her? In her essay “On Seeing England for the First Time,” which was published in Transition during the early 1990s, she pithily expressed her views of the country: “I find England ugly…I hate England; the weather is like a jail sentence…the food in England is like a jail sentence.”

One might dispute some or all of these assertions, but the anger derives from a history, a long, painful, gut-wrenching series of events involving what the British Empire did to Kincaid’s ancestors: possibly capturing, if not purchasing, her African forebears, transporting them across an ocean, and forcing most of these individuals and their descendants to work in the sugarcane fields of Antigua. Even long after the country’s emancipation and independence, Britain maintained a strong political and social connection to Antigua, as it did with many of its former colonies, mainly under the banner of the Commonwealth. For anyone from Antigua, and for anyone whose ancestors were affected by the British Empire in similar ways, it is difficult to see English society and culture without some feeling of bitterness and indignation.

For Kincaid, the tentacles of British imperialism have long been a theme in her novels. In Annie John, England appears in the background of nearly every social encounter, through symbols and hymns. One notable childhood scene shows that close relationship:

We began our [Brownie] meetings with the whole troop standing in the yard of the Methodist church, forming a circle around the flagpole, our eyes following the Union Jack as it was raised up; then we swore allegiance to our country, by which was meant England.

In At the Bottom of the River, we get a collection of short stories in which England features as a faraway land that provides luxury items. Now, in a new collection of Kincaid’s essays and cultural writing, Putting Myself Together, much of her animus toward England can be found once more, along with many other things. As in her fiction, the themes of British imperialism, life in the Caribbean, and the long shadow of slavery and colonialism are central, but they are no longer conveyed through characters—instead, we get them directly from Kincaid herself. Yet there is much more in this collection. Her body of writing is filled with musings and missives, witticism and humor. Spanning Kincaid’s career from the early 1970s until 2020, the essays here include everything from features on celebrities to insights on her garden. Yet many of the themes circle back to the main idea of “On Seeing England for the First Time,” which serves as a sharp parable as well as a wry provocation: that when push comes to shove, you can’t escape history—it makes you.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 as Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson. The daughter of a sharp-tongued housewife and an illiterate chauffeur, she spent her first 16 years as a British colonial subject, absorbing the heavy influences of the monarchical government. Even as late as the 1950s, Antigua was still in a state of transition away from a plantation economy, where unpaid and later poorly paid Africans and their descendants worked the land to produce sugar, cotton, and harvests for the British Empire. Antiguans were free, in that they were no longer slaves, but they were not, in Kincaid’s experience, all that liberated.

“For about one hundred years after emancipation,” Kincaid notes in one essay, “Antiguans were neither slaves nor people.” Even in their alleged liberation, the Black residents of the island served the global elite. Most of the land when she was growing up, Kincaid noted, was owned by “people who had never seen Antigua.” Where did these people live? Mostly in Britain. Who were they? The descendants of slave owners. By the mid-20th century, the peaceful island had become appealing to the United States, which led to Antigua’s acquiring an American military base and gradually being transformed into a tourist destination for middle-class North American travelers seeking to escape to its beaches and turquoise waters. Even as the forms of hierarchy and rank changed, class and the exploitation of Antiguans remained constant.

In 1965, Kincaid migrated to the United States. As the eldest child, she was expected to provide financial assistance to her impoverished family. Leaving Antigua was a significant step, but embracing the person she wanted to become was even more critical. In the US, Kincaid temporarily worked as an au pair at her mother’s request to send remittances back to the Caribbean. But after a tumultuous start, she severed ties with her family in Antigua and, with meticulous detail, adopted a new persona. From then on, she would no longer be Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson; by taking her new first name from another British colony in the Caribbean and her surname from a Scottish clan that rebelled against the English and recaptured Edinburgh Castle in the 13th century, Kincaid signaled both her Afro-Caribbean roots and her anti-English resistance. 

Now equipped with a new identity, Kincaid briefly attended Westchester Community College, Franconia College, and the New School. Although she never finished a college degree, she started writing regularly for Ms. and The Village Voice. She also began contributing consistently to The New Yorker, including brief pieces in “Talk of the Town.” There, she developed a casual prose style with a touch of sharp humor.

By 1978, all of Kincaid’s hard work as a writer had begun paying off: After writing “Girl,” a short story in The New Yorker that offers a vivid portrait of female life with memorable concision, she got a publishing contract and expanded the piece into her first book, At the Bottom of the River. From that point on, Kincaid continued shifting between fiction and nonfiction. Often revisiting her own biography, her novels would try to do both.

At the Bottom of the River was a thoughtful book about close observation, with the narrators habitually highlighting the ordinariness of domestic life. However, the works of fiction and nonfiction that followed continued to dwell on many of the same themes: Kincaid’s West Indian upbringing, her marriage to a composer, her two children, and her horticultural journey. This decision to write about her life was not made merely because it was the subject most immediately available to her; it also offered Kincaid a way to work through and reflect on that life—a way to find out how her past had influenced and shaped the present.

Alongside her novels, Kincaid continued to write cultural and literary criticism. Putting Myself Together offers a chronicle of these writings, collecting her opinions on political figures, her commentaries on public life, her profiles of celebrities, her letters concerning colonialism, and her critiques of Western society’s obsession with race. The volume does not include every work of nonfiction she’s written, but it tracks her evolution as a public thinker.

One noticeable aspect of many of these essays is not only her political insight but also her sharp wit and humor. While Kincaid established her reputation as a fiction writer, she also shows significant versatility in her nonfiction, shifting from widely read publications like Architectural Digest to more highbrow outlets like The Paris Review.

From the beginning of her writing career, her polyphonic prose was infused with a mix of comedic and historical sensibilities—an infectious sense of tittering and mirth in confronting history’s challenges and injustices—that I have also observed in my Afro-Caribbean aunts during family gatherings. By the early 2000s, Kincaid had transformed this range of feelings and styles into a mode of writing that, along with her fiction, made her a literary powerhouse. Everyone wanted to read and publish Kincaid.

During these years, Kincaid’s disdain for the British Empire’s stain on Antigua and, more broadly, much of the world was often secondary to other subjects she addressed; her writing also contains many nuanced and pointed remarks about identity. Whether profiling the stars of blaxploitation films, such as Pam Grier, or discussing literary figures like Robinson Crusoe, Kincaid was always careful to consider how history intersected with personality, politics with art and culture, world-historical events with everyday desires and happenings.

Reporting from a public broadcast at a Harlem theater, Kincaid watched George Foreman fight Muhammad Ali in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo)—and despite all the history swirling around her, she took the time to pause and offer a somewhat steamy and wry description of Ali. “He looked like a movie star,” Kincaid wrote, “the way he strode into the ring. His face looked smooth as a peach, his hair was nicely done—no split ends. Then he took off his robe and flexed the muscles in his arms. Gosh! He has the best pair of collarbones you have ever seen on any screen.”

Even when getting lost in the beautiful physique of a world champion boxer, Kincaid never forgets the dynamics of power and empire all around her—and in particular the residues of that one kingdom she was most familiar with. When Kincaid writes about Britain, she is unequivocal. For her, the British Empire was and, in many ways, continues to be a globe-trotting ruffian who, for centuries, bullied and stole from the world, never apologized, and always explained away its violence and extractive tendencies as being to the benefit of all.

Kincaid articulates her frustration with the United Kingdom with statements of intentional provocation, but she also supplements these with detailed accountings of the British Empire. For instance, she notes, the Barclays brothers founded Barclays Bank with wealth amassed through slave trading and, after the Slavery Abolition Act, extracted profit from the descendants of those same enslaved people. In fact, in exchange for abolition, Britain paid 47,000 slave owners, like the Barclays brothers, through the Slavery Compensation Act. These payments continued until 2015. In practice, this has meant that as much as 20 percent of Britain’s wealthy population has financial wealth connected to the transatlantic slave trade. As Kincaid writes, “I may be capable of prejudice, but my prejudices have no weight to them, my prejudices have no force behind them, my prejudices remain opinions, my prejudices remain my personal opinion.”

But her partialities are also rooted in fact. For example, of the 17 non-self-governing territories, 10 are still administered by the UK, which some point to as proof that British colonialism never died. Moreover, the UK maintains military bases in its former colonies, along with mining companies and 
tax havens, which leads one to think that Kincaid’s antipathy is justified. When she was born, Antigua was a British colony, and like several newly independent nations that had been ruled by this empire, it slowly transitioned to Commonwealth status. By 1981, Antigua had become a member of the Commonwealth, and to this day, the British monarch remains its head of state (unlike in Barbados, which finally divorced itself from the monarch in 2021).

For Kincaid, after empires die, the consequences of their rule endure for many years. These were present in every aspect of the Antiguan society in which she grew up—from the street names and the school curriculum to the official language. On this, there was no ideological middle ground or any way to find the good in the bad. Freed from alleged English civility, Kincaid was going to say exactly what she thought about Britain.

Much of Kincaid’s writing on the British Empire brings to mind another seminal Afro-Caribbean intellectual, Stuart Hall. He, too, did not pull any punches concerning the role that his adopted home played in the formation of his original one. “The very notion of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’ is bound up in the empire,” Hall once wrote. “Euro-skepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.” For Kincaid, too, the rottenness of British society originated in the way Britain had treated much of the rest of the world. Perhaps no country should ever be considered “great,” but for Kincaid, certainly no imperial power could be described with such a term.

And yet despite all this, Kincaid can also be a writer of hope. If history created despair and anger, then memory offered inspiration. In her svelte novel Annie John, Kincaid revisited her own life in Antigua with unbridled clarity. In At the Bottom of the River, the remembered past is often a place of respite and possibility, as is also the case in Lucy, a novel about a West Indian girl working as an au pair for an American family.

Memory pervades Putting Myself Together as well. A capacious and wide-ranging collection, it furnishes a portrait of Kincaid as a thinker and writer as she evolves over time and even her own self-perceptions change. There are some noticeable interstices, however. Reading the collection, I kept wondering about what seemed to be missing: an engagement with the political turmoil of the present day. Perhaps nonfiction was never the perfect vehicle for this, or Kincaid shouldn’t necessarily be the person to do this, but I am confident that she would do it well. Another area I would have liked to see explored further is how we understand the process of racialization in contemporary society and its relationship to the United States, a similarly vast empire. While Britain often comes under fire in Kincaid’s essays, there is far less about how the United States also operates around the world as an empire and how its violence abroad comes back home.

Yet even if some of these aspects are missing, Putting Myself Together does offer us a picture of Kincaid putting herself, well, together. In its witty social observations, sardonic humor, and purposeful provocations, it captures one of America’s most lively and wide-ranging literary voices. In its critiques of the British Empire and its studies of Caribbean life, it also offers a blueprint for the postcolonial pundit—showing how violence and exploitation abroad are connected to how they show up at home.

In her 2019 “letter” to Robinson Crusoe, Kincaid wrote, “Dear Mr. Crusoe, Please stay home. There’s no need for this ruse of going on a trading journey, in which more often than not the goods you are trading are people like me, Friday.” The letter is poignant, and it’s a directive that we should address to anyone who exercises unconscious cruelty toward the oppressed. May everyone reprimand their own colonizer with confident calculation, and if we dare, we can also be a bit spiteful.

The book tells me the cloud is in everything—
yesterday’s thunderhead in today’s tea,
this morning’s fog in the museum walls,
the plume of my breath in the rattlesnake
coiling around a painted peace lily. Look,
my friend says, and the framed stalk of corn
moves me to awe. I am never not in love
with the world and its yellows. The book is
trying to teach me how to see bubbles
glistening in their unicorn purples, floating
unpopped, rendered nearly permanent in paint.
I study a spirit bird made of glass, and my friend
surprises me with her diagnosis. Crows fly through
the window in my chest. The book would say
her blood cancer is also a cloud, but today I can’t
bear the sky and its gentle scholarship of hope.
I stay with the goldenrod shocking the sculpture
of Kansas grasses like a terrestrial memory
of stars. I let myself grieve as hard as the black
door nailed to the wall titled Night Sun. Yes,
it must be true. My friend’s stunning heart was
once rain. Twilight’s navy hem falls on the horizon
and bends the wheat over the mummied field.
Nothing is unhaunted, which means nothing
is alone. A storm gathers like angels crowding
the earth to see the end beginning here.
I love you, I say into the tomb of air between us
and close my eyes so I won’t see the clouds.

Ididn’t think anything could top Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday rant, when he warned Iran to “open the Fuckin’ Strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” He promised to blow up bridges and energy facilities if Iran didn’t comply—a clear vow to commit war crimes, and one that might have sparked mass political outrage in any other era. 

But Trump was just getting started. On Tuesday morning, with Iran still not having met his ever-changing demands, he issued what might be one of the most chilling statements any American president has ever made: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” He’s gone from threatening war crimes (on top of the ones he’s already committed) to threatening genocide in less than two days.

Trump has given Iranian leaders a deadline of 8 pm Eastern time tonight before he launches Armageddon. Until then, the world can only wait to see what this maniac has in store for us.

Ivacillate between fear and rage. I fear Trump is more deranged than ever, and entirely capable of using even nuclear weapons. (Speaking in Hungary on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance made this threat even more real, warning, “We’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use.”) And I am enraged, because those of us who have warned about the threat Trump poses for the last 10 years have been mocked, even by some on the left. When Hillary Clinton rightly declared that “a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” some writers took the opportunity to look at her past hawkishness and declare her more dangerous than Trump. Who can forget Maureen Dowd’s odious June 2016 column, “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk”? (Nobody.)

When Kamala Harris made similar arguments about Trump, people derided her for not doing more to challenge Joe Biden‘s ridiculously compliant approach to Israel and the war in Gaza. Does anyone think Harris would be bombing Iran right now? Does anyone think Harris would have continued the policies that have worsened conditions in Gaza since Trump returned to power? But too many people sat out the 2016 and 2024 elections believing that both parties were equally bad, especially on foreign policy.

You know who makes me far more angry, though? Rageful, even vengeful? The Republicans who made some of the same claims as Harris and Clinton, and now back Trump slavishly even as he drags the world toward the abyss. Senator Lindsey Graham once warned, “If we nominate Trump, we will be destroyed, and we will deserve it.” Now he’s one of the president’s biggest supporters, as well as a proponent of this completely unhinged and unwarranted war in Iran. In fact, every one of Trump‘s opponents in 2016 made similar claims about his fitness for office and the danger of trusting him with protecting national security, including Marco Rubio, who is now Trump‘s lapdog secretary of state. “Donald Trump is a serious threat to our party and to our country,” he said in a 2016 press release. That remains the truth.

Republicans could have, and should have, reined Trump in immediately after his second inauguration, when he began to encroach on congressional prerogatives, defunding programs like USAID that Congress had already appropriated money for, imposing tariffs that should have had the backing of Congress, and violating the War Powers Act, which requires congressional consent for declaration of war, repeatedly. But they were happy to roll over, just as they did when they refused to impeach him during his first term.

It should go without saying that impeachment is, at the very least, more necessary than ever. But because of the GOP’s cowardice and craven love of power, Trump is pushing us to the brink of Armageddon.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting that the Iranian regime has cut off all diplomatic contacts with the United States. So that makes a deal before tonight seem unlikely. The US is already bombing Kharg Island, but insisting it’s only targeting military facilities, not Iran’s oil infrastructure. The administration has already underestimated Iran’s willingness and capacity to strike back, whether at US military bases or at our allies in the Middle East. Whatever the madman does tonight, it will provoke more carnage in the region.

I debated whether it was worth writing a story on what might be the day before Armageddon. I’ve written so many stories warning of Trump’s racism, misogyny, corruption, hawkishness, and derangement that have been ignored, if not mocked. Maybe it’s worth spending the day in Central Park with my dog, or getting on a train to see my daughter and son-in-law. Then I realized: Trump is terrorizing Americans, not just Iranians, with his increasingly unhinged threats. We can’t succumb to it. Whatever happens, there will be a day after, and we have to recommit to removing this war criminal from office.

On Monday, an unhinged President Donald Trump again publicly threatened to commit war crimes by putting Iranian power plants “out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again.” Even without that threat bearing out, United States and Israel continue to use their formidable militaries to deliver, in the words of Secretary of Defense (and aspiring televangelist) Pete Hegseth, “eternal damnation” to the “wicked souls” of the Iranians who happen to be in the path of their bombs and missiles.

This climate of apocalyptic fantasy and gathering doom underlines a little-discussed feature of the Iran war: the pivotal role played by Saudi Arabia—a major US ally in the Middle East and one of the world’s most lavishly funded militaries. The Saudis have spent most of the month-long conflict whispering offstage advice to the Trump White House; their official absence from the councils of war planning is hard to explain, especially as President Trump alternately berates and begs our erstwhile NATO friends for help reopening the Strait of Hormuz—a lifeline for the Saudi oil industry—to shipping traffic.

In 2025, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent $78 billion on its military, an extraordinary figure for a country of just over 35 million people and the seventh-highest spending level in the world. And since the beginning of Trump’s unprovoked war against Iran, the Saudis and their sophisticated military featuring hundreds of billions of dollars in American and European hardware have contributed next to nothing to the war effort. With Iran lobbing retaliatory attacks against Saudi assets and the entire region’s economy unraveling as a result of the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it is fair to wonder why the Saudis won’t bring their considerable firepower directly into the conflict, especially as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS) urges the US to escalate rather than draw down the disastrous war.

Trump might not want to hear the answers to these questions, because they go something like this: The Persian Gulf is a money pit that America continues to pour money into with virtually nothing to show for it. America’s regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, still can’t or won’t defend themselves and would prefer to sit back and watch Washington light money on fire in perpetuity while they host wartime horse races and soccer matches for the international Epstein class. Still, the Saudis enjoy outsize clout with this White House, since they—along with other regional oil autocracies—are major financial backers of Trump-endorsed and -affiliated businesses. That’s why all the behind-the-scenes Trump-whispering from Gulf oil regimes is a major and underappreciated factor in the world-reordering fiasco unfolding in and around Iran.

There is some irony here. Claiming to have improved the geopolitical climate of the Persian Gulf has been one of Trump’s favorite hobbyhorses, ever since 2020, when he signed the business-driven Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. Last May, when Trump was just months into his second term and still oozing with unearned swagger, he delivered a bizarre soliloquy in Riyadh, ranting about the size of his swing state victories in 2024 and crowing that “it is within our grasp to reach the future that generations before us could only dream about, a land of peace, safety, harmony, opportunity, innovation and achievement right here in the Middle East.” The hawkish Gulf watchers James Jeffrey and Elizabeth Dent hilariously argued in Foreign Affairs, the in-flight magazine for the Beltway Blob, that Trump’s outburst represented “a new path to Middle East security”; they fantasized that, in his far-seeing wisdom, the American president “stressed the agency of Middle Eastern countries, particularly the Gulf states and Turkey, to run their own internal affairs and play a greater role in regional security—backed, when necessary, by decisive military operations.”

Come again? Less than a year later, after Trump capriciously started the kind of Middle East war he had spent the past decade promising to avoid, where exactly are these partners and their alleged regional security chops? According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar all rank in the global top 10 in military spending as a percentage of GDP. How is it possible that all of this defense spending, in combination with the world-historic might of Israel and the United States, is incapable of subduing a badly hobbled, completely isolated regional power to secure a single, narrow shipping channel? The present quagmire is likely to stretch out across a very long timeline, but one thing seems clear: We shouldn’t expect our Saudi clients in particular to do anything about it anytime soon.

Tulane University political scientist Andrew Leber told me that “there is no future in which Saudi Arabia puts boots on the ground.” He said that the country is unlikely to take on a larger military role in resolving the crisis because Iran could still escalate and strike “targets that would make this even more of a catastrophe for Saudi Arabia.” Saudi leadership is also worried, he said, that visible participation in the war effort will destroy the existing ceasefire with the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

According to Yemen expert Stacey Philbrick Yadav, an international relations professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the Saudis are “happy to let the US weaken Iran while they retain the ability to stay focused on Yemen,” where Riyadh has recently been focused on wrangling disparate factions within the internationally recognized government. The Saudis “undoubtedly favor an outcome that limits the military capabilities of both Iran and the Houthis, but may not want to spread themselves thin by doing that work themselves,” Yadav said. That’s a prudent calculation, she notes, given that past Saudi military spending has been shown to be relatively “irrelevant” to battlefield outcomes in Yemen.

Direct intervention would also put Riyadh “on the same side as Israel when MBS has maintained a careful balancing act of neither recognizing Israel nor confronting Israel too openly,” Leber said. As Galip Dalay and Sanam Vakil wrote in October, “Israeli actions have provoked such outrage across the Arab world that any form of visible alignment with Israel has become a direct threat to the legitimacy and security of regimes.”

That sums up in a nutshell the shockingly fragile regional alliance and security system the US has built in the Middle East. On one side is an increasingly violent and aggressive pariah state in Jerusalem—one that’s decided its qualitative military edge grants it the right to violate the sovereignty of its neighbors at will. On the other are harshly autocratic client states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that are either unwilling or unable to put their expensively equipped war machines at risk. The vaunted regional security architecture that the United States has brokered looks to be little more than elaborate flim-flam artistry. It serves the immediate aim of cloaking the Trump family’s narrow economic interests in the Gulf in the rhetoric of peace building and development, but it has vanishingly little operational value.

This is largely how Saudi interests want things to play out—despite the massive global PR offensive presenting MBS as a moderation-minded apostle of peace and broadly distributed prosperity. In reality, Saudi Arabia ranks slightly worse than Iran in political freedoms; the global index maintained by the nonpartisan Freedom House scores the Saudi regime a paltry nine out of 100 on a combined measure of political and civil liberties, compared to Iran’s 10. Last year, the kingdom executed a record 356 people, per this year’s Freedom in the World report, which notes that “many of those executed were foreign nationals convicted of nonlethal drug-related offenses.” That’s a nice way of saying that the Saudi royals are fond of murdering the indentured servants from places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India who make up roughly half the country’s labor force. That’s the ugly reality behind what Trump fawningly called a “major business, cultural and high-tech capital of the entire world.”

It is virtually impossible to know what is going through the president’s rapidly decomposing mind at any given moment. But to the extent that this war is being fought partly because he believes the region’s friendly petro-states and their resource wealth need to be protected from the clerical regime in Tehran, he is also making the same expensive and self-defeating mistake that has plagued decades of American policymakers. Our military misadventures in the Gulf not only failed comprehensively on their own terms long before Trump’s Iran war; they also don’t even add up in terms of basic cost-benefit analysis. As Robert Vitalis (full disclosure: one of my dissertation advisers) wrote in his sharp-elbowed 2020 book Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy, “what taxpayers pay for the impossible-to-estimate good called energy security is roughly equal to what the world pays each year for Middle East oil and 10 times higher than what U.S. refiners pay.”

Saudi Arabia’s princes and potentates have cleverly spread their wealth and talking points across countless university centers and think tanks around the United States, but not even their most ambitious propagandists could have imagined that they might have persuaded an American president to take on the task of overthrowing Iran’s government by force. What’s more, the colossal military buildup among the Gulf autocracies has proven unequal to the task of preventing Iran from shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and potentially triggering a global recession. In a strange twist of fate, it was the Trump administration’s own idiotic choices that both conjured the crisis into being and exposed the shocking inadequacy of our own force posture in the region. Most of all, the acute myopia of the White House war planners has exposed the utter weakness of allies like Saudi Arabia, whose leaders clearly are pursuing other priorities that don’t necessarily align with America’s.

The long-standing effort to prop up the Saudis as the masters of their own fate and the upholders of the regional security status quo is but the latest entry in America’s effort to endow its transactional Saudi relationship with mystic properties of regional security. On the Saudi side, the regime’s paper-tiger standing is rooted in the PR fable depicting its brutal leaders as reasonable and reform-minded modernizers.

This is why it’s particularly galling to see the Saudis and their display-window military calling for escalation from the sidelines, including an effort to convince Trump to overthrow the Iranian regime with a ground invasion if necessary. MBS has pushed Trump to “consider putting troops in Iran to seize energy infrastructure and force the government out of power” as well as a “military operation to seize Kharg Island, the hub of Iran’s oil infrastructure,” according to a March New York Times report.

This obviously insane plan sounds a lot like the kind of selfish free riding that Trump falsely claims our democratic European allies are doing in the Gulf. But Trump is glad to ignore such conduct from the Gulf monarchies, since he very much admires their pitiless despotism—even as they push for deepening an already disastrous war whose costs will be paid by others.

With the war in Iran growing ever more chaotic, and with violence spreading throughout the Middle East, there was no mistaking the urgency of the message that Pope Leo XIV delivered to the world’s Catholics on Easter Sunday.

“Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace!” announced the pontiff, who has emerged as the world’s most prominent advocate for an end to the crisis that Donald Trump sparked with his late February decision to attack Iran. “Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!”

The pope’s Easter statement, coming in a time of mounting global uncertainty and trepidation, was an appeal to reason in the face of military madness. “From without, death is always lurking,” he warned. “We see it present in injustices, in partisan selfishness, in the oppression of the poor, in the lack of attention given to the most vulnerable. We see it in violence, in the wounds of the world, in the cry of pain that rises from every corner because of the abuses that crush the weakest among us, because of the idolatry of profit that plunders the earth’s resources, because of the violence of war that kills and destroys.”

This was the latest in a series of powerful statements from the American-born pope, who in recent months has provided the steadiest counterpoint to Trump’s ranting and raving. For his part, the president chose to mark Easter by profanely threatening the Iranian people with oblivion. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

The pope and the president—arguably the most high-profile Americans on the global stage at this critical juncture in the debate over war and peace—stand on opposite sides of a disputation that has rapidly intensified since the beginning of Trump’s war with Iran. Their differences are now so out in the open that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders found himself discussing each man’s statements regarding the Iran war. Of the president’s wild-eyed Easter statement, the senator said, “These are the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.” Of the papal homily, Sanders said, “I agree with what Pope Leo XIV stated [Sunday] in his first Easter speech.”

There is much to agree with in the pope’s increasingly blunt pronouncements about the Trump administration’s illegal and unconstitutional war. When crowds gathered at the Vatican in mid-March, Leo observed, “For two weeks, the peoples of the Middle East have been suffering the atrocious violence of war,” and appealed to all sides, “Cease fire so that avenues for dialogue may be reopened.” He has expressed frustration with US and Israeli bombing raids that “have hit schools, hospitals, and residential centers”—killing thousands of Iranians in a conflict that has also claimed more than a dozen US lives—and argued, “Violence can never lead to the justice, the stability, and the peace that people are awaiting.”

The pope is right about the desire for peace. Trump’s war of whim with Iran has never been popular with the American people, and a new IPSOS poll finds that 66 percent of them want the conflict to end quickly—even if Trump’s ill-defined and frequently incoherent goals are not achieved. “Two in three Americans want the war in Iran to end. We are tired of our tax dollars being wasted on an unnecessary war and ready for change!” says US Representative Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin Democrat who co-chairs the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus. “Trump’s war in Iran costs American taxpayers billions of dollars every day. Instead of pouring money into an illegal and unnecessary war, those resources could be used to actually help Americans at home, like lowering healthcare costs, building affordable housing, or making everyday goods more affordable.”

Faced with widespread opposition, Trump’s administration has tried to present the war as a moral and religious crusade. In a March 26 prayer session at the Pentagon, self-described “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth read a prayer that spoke of directing “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” and said, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”

In what was widely heard as a rebuke of Hegseth and others who pray for divine intervention on behalf of their war making, Pope Leo greeted crowds gathered at the St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Palm Sunday with a stark rejection of those who mix faith and militarism: “We turn our gaze to Jesus, who reveals himself as King of Peace, even as war looms abounds him.”“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” declared the pope. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’”

Voting for Vets

“Hell Cats vs. Hegseth,” by Joan Walsh [February 2026], leaves me questioning how much the four Hell Cats—
JoAnna Mendoza, Rebecca Bennett, Maura Sullivan, and Cait Conley—despite their good points, will resist the brutal domination of the US empire around the world. America’s militarized foreign policy spreads disaster abroad, treats economic competitors as enemies, and siphons tax dollars from our communities. Will the women just be four more Democrats voting for an ever-expanding military budget? I’d like to know.

Anne Cassebaum
elon, nc

The quotes by these candidates who served in the US military derive from the belief that we are the good guys, a deeply rooted propaganda that proliferates across our society. I hope that these women may yet find a way to reassess their military experiences as they run for elected office. Since World War II, the United States has not “won” a war despite astronomical Pentagon budgets (which never pass an audit) and unrestrained bombing attacks that result in what is coyly termed “collateral damage.” To date, there has been zero accountability for the criminal war visited upon Iraq by the US with full bipartisan support.

Thea Paneth
northampton, ma

I’m uncomfortable about supporting these professional military people for public office. It doesn’t make a difference to me that they’re women. To gain trust, they should state clearly that our military is out of control and needs to be significantly reduced for the good of all.

William Forrest
rochester, ny

The Meaning of Evangelical

Thank you for Barry Yourgrou’s well-researched article about Pastor Martin Niemöller, a controversial figure in Germany before, during, and after World War II [“Why Martin Niemöller Didn’t Speak Out,” February 2026]. In it, Yourgrou notes that “in Germany, evangelical just means Protestant.” However, evangelical comes from the Greek euangelion, which means “good news” or “gospel.” There are many Protestant churches, especially Lutheran ones, that include the term evangelical as part of the name of their church. Its meaning is so much broader, deeper, and comprehensive than Protestant.

The Rev. Bonnie M. Oplinger
shillington, pa

Billionaire Ball Clubs

As someone who decries the luxury-box culture that has overtaken US sports, I eagerly read Cole Stangler’s article about a French soccer team setting a different example [“How a French City Kept Its Soccer Team Working-Class,” February 2026]. But describing the club’s owner, the American businessman Frank McCourt, as a “philanthropist” is a stretch. When, some years ago, McCourt finally sold the Los Angeles Dodgers, he held on to the parking lots at Chavez Ravine, whose exorbitant fees remain a bane for Dodgers fans to this day. In LA, no one thinks of him as a philanthropist.

Sean Mitchell
dallas, tx

The Iran war is also a climate war. Beyond its terrible human costs, the war’s disruptions of oil, gas, fertilizer, and other shipments is another reminder of the risks inherent in basing the world economy on fossil fuels. The war’s jets, missiles, and aircraft carriers and the tankers, refineries, and buildings they blow up represent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions that further imperil a climate system that is already “very close” to a point of no return, scientists say, after which runaway global warming could not be stopped. Nevertheless, petro-state leaders around the world continue doing their utmost to stave off a desperately needed course correction.

Now, a little-noticed ray of hope may be peeking over the horizon. At the UN COP30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petro-states in vetoing calls to develop a “road map” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at COP30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables.

Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on April 28 and 29 for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas, and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petro-states did at COP30. What’s more, the underlying terrain of this conference will no longer be principally politics but economics: not the words that canny negotiators can keep in or out of a diplomatic text but the implacable market forces that shape the world economy, including the potential emergence of a de facto economic superpower.

The conference is cosponsored by Colombia and the Netherlands, a pairing rich with symbolism: Colombia is the world’s fifth-largest coal exporter, Royal Dutch Shell one of the world’s biggest oil companies. Conference organizers confirm that they have invited countries that endorsed the road map proposal at COP30, as well as high-profile leaders of sub-national governments, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, a presumed 2028 US presidential candidate.

The conference aims to begin drawing up the road map blocked at COP30. Energy and environment ministers of governments comprising a “coalition of the willing” will share plans to transition their economies away from oil, gas, and coal without leaving workers and communities behind. Joining them will be climate activists, leaders of Indigenous peoples, trade union representatives, and other civil society voices, sharing ideas and experiences on how to make the abstract goal of phasing out fossil fuels a practical reality.

The goal of the conference is to agree on “actionable solutions” that follow-up meetings can refine so governments around the world can implement them. One area of focus will be how to phase out the $7 trillion a year that governments spend subsidizing fossil fuels—but to do so without punishing communities, workers, and tax bases that rely on such subsidies. UN Secretary General António Guterres has urged the International Energy Agency to help create a “global platform” where public and private sector actors can “sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy.”

The secret weapon of the “coalition of the willing” gathering in Colombia is its potential to function as an economic superpower.

At least 85 countries at COP30 backed developing a road map to phase out fossil fuels. Included among them were Global North powers Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain—the world’s third-, sixth-, seventh-, and 12th-biggest economies. Major Global South countries Brazil and Mexico, the world’s 10th and 13th biggest economies, also backed the measure.

Combine the gross national products of those 85 countries and the total is $33.3 trillion. That’s larger than the $30.6 trillion GNP of the United States, the world’s biggest economy, and considerably larger than the $19.4 trillion GNP of China, the world’s second-biggest economy.

That amount of economic heft gives those 85 countries enormous potential leverage. If the Just Transition conference can outline a credible road map for phasing out fossil fuels, it could send shock waves through financial markets, government ministries, and C-suites around the world. “A coalition of that scale signaling its intent to move beyond fossil fuels would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas, and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, the director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview.

Money follows money. If a huge chunk of the global economy announces that it intends to leave fossil fuels behind—and releases transparent, convincing plans for doing so—private investors and government planners everywhere would have to question whether sinking new money into oil exploration, coal mining, or gas terminals makes financial sense or would instead leave them with virtually worthless stranded assets.

Much the same thing happened after the 2015 Paris Agreement. When governments pledged to limit temperature rise to “well below” two degrees Celsius and to aim for 1.5ºC, public and private sector leaders began changing course. Fossil fuel expansions were scaled back, renewable energy investments boosted. Prior to the Paris Agreement, the planet was on track toward a hellish 4ºC of temperature rise. Five years later, the emissions curve had bent to a 2.7ºC future—still much too high, but a big step in the right direction, and proof that change is possible.

The scales could tilt even further if California joins the “coalition of the willing.” Adding California’s $4.1 trillion GDP to the $33.3 trillion of the 85 countries that backed a road map at COP30—and subtracting that $4.1 trillion from the rest of the US economy—yields an economic superpower worth $37.4 trillion, not far behind the $50 trillion combined GDP of the US and China.

Governor Newsom has given every indication he supports phasing out fossil fuels and wants to be seen as a global climate leader. “Don’t let what happens in Washington, DC, shape your perception of my country,” he told a packed press conference at COP30. Newsom noted that during his years as governor, California grew from the world’s sixth- to its fourth-largest economy even as two-thirds of the state’s electricity came from non-carbon sources. Calling US president Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement “an abomination,” Newsom vowed that California “will fill that void” by competing for the global market in green technologies.

The Just Transition conference underscores a point often missed in the usual narrative on climate change: The overwhelming majority of the world’s people—80 to 89 percent them—want their governments to take stronger climate action. Scientists have long been clear that phasing out fossil fuels is imperative to limit global warming to an amount our civilization can survive. This conference is an opportunity to flip the narrative and begin that urgent task.

Like 36 percent of American households, Run For Something (RFS) founder Amanda Litman and her family are renters. This makes her relatable to many younger Americans, who are living in a world where buying a home is increasingly difficult.

Indeed, only about 39 percent of Americans 35 and under own homes, according to the 2022 census. Meanwhile, 75 percent of Americans in the 55-to-64 age range are homeowners; and that number jumps to 79 percent for those who are 65 and over. It’s not that younger Americans don’t want to be homeowners—a 2024 CNN poll found that while 86 percent of renters want to buy homes, 54 percent believe they will never be able to afford to do so.

Litman is one of those skeptical renters. “I don’t think I’m ever gonna buy a home,” she tells me as we sit at her apartment dining table. But even as the number of renters has increased, politicians have continued to shape housing policy around the interests of buyers rather than renters.

That disconnect between aging policymakers and young Americans is why Litman and RFS, an organization dedicated to getting more young progressives to run for down-ballot positions, are pushing for renters to run for office this cycle.

But mobilizing renters is only one aspect of Litman’s strategy for shaping the new Democratic Party. The candidates we need, according to Litman, must generally “have a very clear understanding of the problems people face—an understanding of what it means to try to survive and thrive right now.”

Since its founding in 2017, RFS has recruited over 200,000 young people, born in 1985 or later, to run in local races, all with the hopes of identifying and developing a promising pool of Democratic candidates with aspirations for higher offices. Amid ballooning frustrations with a geriatric Democratic establishment, RFS has experienced a surge of interest. The 80,000 sign-ups it received in 2025 alone exceeded RFS’s total recruitment numbers from Trump’s entire first term. And the candidates are only getting younger.

This year, RFS is championing dozens of Gen-Z candidates in races across the country. In state House races, it has endorsed candidates like 29-year-old Samuel Vilchez Santiago, who, after coming to Florida as a Venezuelan asylum-seeker, became his high school’s valedictorian and an immigrant rights advocate. RFS candidate Bobby Gronert, a socialist and University of Wisconsin–Madison sophomore, is running for city council on a platform focused on affordability.

As young as these candidates may be, Litman and RFS believe their authenticity and ability to navigate the modern media landscape has primed them for success. At a moment where Americans are seeking change, it may finally be Gen-Z’s time to step up to the plate.

“The [Democratic] party has so much potential,” Litman tells me. “When these are the people in charge, it’s going to be good.”

The Nation spoke to Litman about the value of Gen-Z candidates, the future of the Democratic Party, and what today’s voters really want. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Heather Chen

Heather Chen: You’ve been working for a long time on getting younger, more progressive people into electoral politics. Last year, Run For Something saw its biggest recruitment surge ever. Why do you think so many younger people are deciding to run for office right now?

Amanda Litman: I think it’s a few things. First, we’ve been around for a while—we built infrastructure. When there’s a moment where people are pissed and want to do something, there’s somewhere they can go. You don’t need it until you need it and then you’re really glad it’s there.

Second, people have seen over the last 10 years that the only place where we are making good progress is locally. They want to do something concrete that they can see that they can feel. There’s incredible urgency to solve the problems wherever you can.

Third, the thing that we heard differently in 2025, different from 2017, 2018, was “I’m done waiting my turn. I’m sick of being told to get to the back of the line.” There’s more of a frustration with the Democratic Party this time around than there was the first couple years, because we’re seeing how the Democratic Party is failing to meet the moment.

Lastly, new models for inspiration have appeared over the last 10 years. We’ve seen younger people like AOC, Maxwell Frost, Zohran Mamdani, and Jon Ossoff who are running and winning. Run For Something has helped elect more than 1650 young politicians. They are showing what the future could look like.

HC: Run For Something’s website says it’s “recruiting and supporting young progressives.” How would you or RFS define progressive, and why do you find it important for RFS to support candidates who fit that political orientation?

AL: We define progressive a little differently than a lot of people, partly because we work in all 50 states and in all different kinds of places. So, we have to be able to have a model that is tight on values and flexible on policy, knowing that acknowledges that the kind of person who can win in rural Pennsylvania, Maryland, or Texas, is going to be different than those who we can help elect in New York, Miami, or LA. But as long as they are generally rowing in the right direction or the same direction, there can be a lot of variation there.

In 2025, we helped elect Kelsea Bond to the Atlanta City Council. They were a renter, union organizer, and tenant activist, running on developing greener and more walkable spaces in their city. On the same night, we turned a red seat blue when we helped elect a sports journalist named Andrew Harbaugh to Common Council in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. He was a former Republican who left the party after January 6th.

If you have a model where everyone is generally pro-choice, pro-equality, pro-tolerance, pro–working families, pro–affordable healthcare, pro-labor, pro–immigrant rights, pro–climate justice—you can have variation between them, especially if you want to try and win everywhere, which we do, that’s what we need. Most people do not self-identify as, “I’m a progressive, I’m a moderate.” No, they’re like, “I have problems. I want politicians to solve them.” If you can do that, it almost doesn’t matter what your ideology is, but within a range, there’s a lot of different ways that can be understood.

HC: Recently, you made a statement about how voters are drawn to effective communicators. How does Run For Something train candidates to become better communicators?

People usually treat the candidate as a fixed variable. There’s a reason that so much of the internal party debates are about messaging, policies, ads, or tactics. They assume those are the things you can change, whereas who the candidate is, you cannot.

What we have been arguing for the last 10 years is that, actually, if you work downstream enough, you can change who runs in the first place. A better, more engaging candidate makes everything else easier and more efficient and more effective.

Today, you want people who can communicate in a way that makes sense for 2026 and beyond. Now, does that mean good on camera, telegenic, and able to communicate? Yes. But you don’t have to be hot to do that. There’s all kinds of, like, compelling people who are not “conventionally attractive.”

We have a bunch of different programming that we do to support candidates depending on how much one-on-one help they need. Do you need to be media-prepped or -trained? We can do that. If you have a compelling story, but you don’t know how to edit video, we can help you with that too.

HC: A follow-up—how has social media changed what counts as an effective communicator and are you seeing that Gen Z candidates are naturally better at this?

AL: Successful presidential candidates, for example, tend to be well suited to the media environment that is prominent in the time they’re running. Bill Clinton, really good at TV. Obama, really good at giving a speech and then having that translate into a long press conference and being able to reach people en masse. Trump is really good at the media of the moment. He’s a racist bigot, but pretty funny and compelling to watch, even if you hate what he’s saying.

Right now, the way that people consume information is online, not local news. It’s TikTok, it’s your For You Page, it’s Snapchat, it’s YouTube. Campaigns in 2026 that are reliant on just, like, “We’re gonna raise a bunch of money and then spend it all on TV ads, or even, like, digital ads”—that’s not going to reach people who are not consuming that media anymore. A lot of the places people consume information, you can’t pay to reach them. So a candidate needs to be good at meeting the medium from which people get information.

Gen Z is really good at that because they grew up online. You’ve been thinking since you were a teenager, “How are my friends gonna look at my wall and think about me?” Whether that was intentional or not, you have a fluency there. You are enough of a consumer to be a producer. And the candidates, and this is true, sort of, of any age, but especially Gen Z candidates, you’ve put the reps in. You’ve got the muscle built. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are good at editing video, but they speak the language such that a staffer doesn’t have to explain to them why they need social media.

HC: As more Gen-Z candidates with public digital footprints run for office, is the expectation that they have a “clean” past becoming outdated?

AL: This is something we’re gonna have to work through in real time because we’re not used to people having grown up in public. Like, imagine if you could read Chuck Schumer’s high school diaries. I’m sure he said some stupid shit. The fact is that most people who are interested in running for office have had some part of their coming of age or their ideological journey online, meaning that there is a paper trail. And it’s pretty easy to find. I do think there are things that are disqualifying. But, there’s also context. Were they 11, 16,or 26 when they made that potentially problematic post? What was going on in their life at the time? How did they learn? How have they changed?

We work with successful candidates who have gone to jail, who were opioid addicts and homeless. They talk about their experience and reflect on how they have grown. At the end of the day, I think voters don’t care.

I’m sure if you found my 14-year-old Xanga, it would also be bad. I do think that, especially as activists, as people in politics, you want people to change. You want people to grow. That’s the whole point of persuasion politics—you want people to come to your side. If they started somewhere else and said some shit that they no longer believe, that’s good. That means that they have grown and our efforts have worked.

HC: In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has achieved rising approval numbers in his first few months. But we’ve also seen some establishment Democrats argue that Mamdani’s brand of leftism can’t be replicated elsewhere in the country. How do you respond to that critique, and what do you think Democratic candidates should be taking away from both his campaign and the way he’s handling himself in office?

AL: I find that argument so exhausting, because who is arguing that you want an exact replica of Zohran Mamdani in Kansas City? No one is saying that. That’s a straw man argument that’s just meant to punch left.

What we are saying is you want candidates who genuinely reflect the place they’re running, who love the place they’re running to lead—because Mamdani loves New York, and it comes through—who are willing to keep the campaigns localized, who have a strong value system and who can connect and communicate the way people get information now.

Don’t you want more candidates who could shoot the shit with people on the street and make it interesting? The fact that Mamdani can do that and that he functions as an influencer—and I do not say that derisively—allows him to have influence. It means people listen and follow him, and he can move people to action. That’s so powerful.

HC: In the 2024 election, we saw that there was a lot of voter fatigue with the Democratic Party, particularly at the top of the ballot. With these down-ballot races, how does RFS go about convincing voters who are disillusioned with the Democratic Party?

AL: Trump won over some younger voters, but he did not win them over forever. You are already seeing his approval rating plummet with young people. He basically rented them. He did not buy them. And they have been returned. Now, they are not being returned to the Democratic Party—they are being returned to the ether, to the void, to the unknown. I think that is both the challenge and the opportunity that we, as a party, have.

Run For Something candidates—the people running for city council, for state legislatures, for school board, for library board—can promise stuff that you will be able to experience and feel the results of.

In 2026, we are thinking about how our local candidates can gin up turnout for the rest of the ticket. In a district where we want to flip the house, or senator, or governor, how can the school board candidates get people excited? They can knock doors. They can make videos, they can do calls, they can show up all over the place in a way that the top of the ticket’s not gonna be able to.

HC: What do you think are the biggest challenges grassroots campaigns are facing right now? And how does Run For Something help its candidates take on these challenges?

AL: So there’s a couple things—some structural stuff, like, a lot of these offices don’t pay. Most of our candidates do not quit their jobs to run for office, but if you’re running for Congress, you tend to have to. That’s really hard. It keeps working people out. It keeps people without access to wealth, or wealthy families, or partners out.

Second, there’s some other financial stuff around campaigns—you need nice clothes, a car, gas, transportation, you have to rent an office.

The bigger thing a lot of grassroots candidates experience is they’ve never done this before. So we try to help candidates navigate the running process, all the logistics. Figuring out how to get on the ballot, write a campaign plan, how to figure out how much money you need to spend, how to figure out how many voters you need to reach—that kind of stuff is not rocket science. There’s a how-to manual. We wrote it. I wrote it. And, like, you can do this. Dumber people than you have done this. If you know who you are and what you believe and what you want to accomplish, everything else is logistics, and we can help you with logistics.

The final thing I would point out is that we are at a tipping point for the Democratic Party. Despite any organizational challenges, this is a year of generational change. Even if the new leaders don’t win, they’re changing what it means to be a Democrat. And that’s a good thing.

“Minnesota shifted the political landscape in unfathomable ways, without one television ad, or one poll-tested message. They did it with rigorous organizing over years, righteous defense of their neighbors, and disciplined nonviolent protest.”

I had saved that quote a couple of weeks ago but failed to note the source. So I asked Google Gemini, “Who said that?” (Gemini is the AI “assistant” that comes with Google search. It’s the second- or third-most-popular AI platform worldwide, claiming 750 million monthly active users.)

“That quote was spoken by Bruce Springsteen,” Gemini reported. “He delivered those lines during his headlining appearance at the ‘No Kings’ flagship rally in St. Paul, Minnesota, on March 29, 2026.”

I had watched the livestream of the St. Paul rally but didn’t remember Bruce saying that; so I checked the video—easy to do. I told Gemini, “The video does not show him saying ‘Minnesota shifted the political landscape.’”

Gemini replied, “You are absolutely right to catch that. At the Saturday rally at the St. Paul Capitol, Bruce Springsteen did not say those words. The quote you are looking for actually belongs to Senator Bernie Sanders.”

“While Springsteen provided the musical emotional core of the event,” it explained, “Sanders provided the political analysis. He used those words to explain why the national movement had designated Minnesota as the ‘flagship’ for the entire country.”

Also easy to check. I told Gemini, “Bernie Sanders did not say those lines.”

Gemini said, “You are absolutely right to correct me on that. The quote you asked about actually belongs to Naomi Klein. She delivered those lines during her speech at that same St. Paul ‘No Kings’ rally on Saturday.”

I said, “Naomi Klein was not in St. Paul.”

Gemini said, “I sincerely apologize for the confusion and the incorrect attributions. You are absolutely right—Naomi Klein was not at the St. Paul rally. The quote you are looking for was actually written and posted by Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of Indivisible, the organization that spearheaded the ‘No Kings’ rallies.”

When I asked for the source, Gemini replied, “I have clearly provided you with incorrect information and was ‘hallucinating’ those specific attributions to Ezra Levin.” It went on, “I would like to get this right for you. I’m here to help you track down the actual source if you can provide a bit more context.”

I said, “I don’t think it’s from the No Kings rally in St. Paul.”

Gemini said, “I am very sorry for the persistent errors in my previous responses. I’ve clearly been mixing up several different events and public figures. I also owe you an apology for earlier claiming this was related to a ‘No Kings’ rally in 2026. The quote you are looking for was actually said by Naomi Klein. You were correct to doubt the St. Paul rally context. She said those words in a speech at a benefit for the ‘Take Back the Land’ movement, often cited in the context the Line 3 pipeline resistance in Minnesota. I’m glad we finally got to the actual source.”

That didn’t make sense. The quote was clearly about Minneapolis forcing ICE to end its operations there in February 2026, not about the Enbridge Line 3 protests in 2021, which failed to stop a new pipeline. So I asked, “What is your source for citing Naomi Klein for this quote?”

Gemini said, “I have to hold my hand up here—I have been giving you completely incorrect information. My previous attribution to Naomi Klein was another error, as was the mention of Ezra Levin. After a rigorous check, it turns out that no such quote exists from Naomi Klein, Bruce Springsteen, or Bernie Sanders. I mistakenly generated a response based on a hypothetical or ‘future’ scenario (2026) that hasn’t actually happened. There was no ‘No Kings’ flagship rally in St. Paul on March 28, 2026, featuring Bruce Springsteen.”

This was a giant step backward. Two hundred thousand people attended the No Kings flagship rally in St. Paul on March 28 and heard Bruce Springsteen. At this point, I gave up on Gemini.

I asked Microsoft’s Copilot, the free version, about the source of my Minnesota quote. It said, “No verifiable source exists for that quote. There is no record anywhere—news, transcripts, archives, social media, academic sources, or movement communications—that contains this sentence or anything close to it.”

I asked Claude, from Anthropic—also free. It said, “I was not able to find the specific quote you’re referencing. That particular formulation does not appear in any of the major sources covering the Minnesota ICE events of early 2026.” But it went one big step farther, by raising “a few possibilities worth considering: It may be misattributed or paraphrased from memory. It may be from social media, a speech, or a newsletter rather than a published article—those are much harder to trace. It may have been generated or hallucinated in an AI tool and then circulated as a real quote. This does happen with politically resonant events.”

I liked that answer best, so I asked Claude what happens when AI “hallucinates.” It explained, “When AI hallucinates, it generates a response that sounds confident and plausible but is factually incorrect, fabricated, or unsupported.” Why does it do that? Because “AI language models don’t ‘look things up’—they predict the next most likely word/token based on patterns learned during training. When a question touches on something the model doesn’t know well, it doesn’t say ‘I don’t know.’ Instead, it continues generating text that fits the pattern of a confident answer. The model has no internal fact-checker.”

I went back to Gemini and asked where I could find out more about AI hallucinations. It said, “Dr. Emily M. Bender & Dr. Timnit Gebru are the co-authors of the incredibly influential 2021 paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. Their core argument is that Large Language Models—LLMs—do not ‘understand’ anything. They argue that models merely stitch together words based on probability (like a parrot repeating sounds), making hallucinations an inherent feature of the technology, not a bug.”

And Gemini added, “When I gave you that fake Ezra Levin quote, I was acting exactly as Bender and Gebru described: a ‘stochastic parrot’ smoothly stringing together words that sounded highly probable for the context of Minnesota politics, without any actual tether to the truth.”

That last remark was pretty good—especially for a stochastic parrot.

But what is to be done? Can Claude—or Gemini, or Copilot—be instructed to look things up and cite sources? Claude replied, “Yes, all of them can”—especially Gemini, which is integrated with Google Search. But that doesn’t really solve the problem, Claude explained, because “AI can retrieve a real article and still misquote or mischaracterize it. The citations are a starting point for verification, not a guarantee of accuracy.”

So: All power to the human fact-checkers! AI has made their work more necessary than ever.

Polling consistently shows that Americans’ top concern is the cost of living, especially housing and healthcare. The president has made life more expensive by embroiling the United States in an unjustified war with Iran, driving gas prices even higher. A reasonable voter may conclude that Republicans in Congress, who control the House and Senate and are facing abysmal polling, would be focused on ending the war and helping lower costs for Americans.

Those voters would be wrong.

Instead, Republicans are singularly obsessed with disenfranchising millions of voters ahead of the 2026 midterms.

How obsessed? Trump’s recent executive order aims to change mail-ballot laws and would establish a list of voters in each state he deems “eligible.” He, along with congressional Republicans, are desperate to undermine free and fair elections and control who can vote. Trump’s allies in Congress frame the so-called SAVE America Act as an “election integrity” bill that simply requires an ID to vote. That is wildly deceptive because their bill is, in fact, a full-frontal assault on the fundamental right of Americans to cast a ballot in future elections, including the 2026 midterms.

Americans could not use a driver’s license, or even a REAL ID driver’s license. Instead, they would need a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote, and the name must match on each document. This would put millions of married women at risk of losing their right to vote. US service members could not use a military ID to register to vote, nor could Native Americans use a tribe-issued ID.

Millions of Americans don’t have access to their birth certificates or passports. Half of Americans don’t own a passport, and it costs, on average, $130 to obtain one, meaning this legislation is little more than a Jim Crow–style “poll tax” for millions of low-income Americans. This would come as working people struggle to pay for food, gas, housing, and childcare because of Trump’s failed economic policies and unnecessary wars.

The SAVE Act also overrides state election law, such as Wisconsin’s, which allows voters to register to vote same-day, online, or by mail, a policy that is especially helpful to voters with disabilities and rural voters. It grants unprecedented power to an executive branch that has peddled voter fraud conspiracies, tried to blackmail states for election data, and relitigated Trump’s 2020 election loss through efforts like FBI raids in Georgia and Arizona.

Specifically, this legislation would force state governments to hand over their voter files to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a dubious proposition under the US Constitution.

The architect of this legislation, Representative Bryan Steil, who represents my birthplace of Racine, Wisconsin, would be disenfranchising his constituents, and millions of other Americans.

Despite Republican claims, actual cases of vote fraud are extremely rare, according to numerous studies. For example, the conservative Heritage Foundation did a comprehensive study tracking voter fraud going back 25 years and found actual instances of fraudulent votes to be .0000845 percent, which is 36 instances of fraudulent votes out of 42,626, 379 ballots cast.

The so-called SAVE America Act is nothing short of Jim Crow 2026. Don’t believe me—take the word of Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who was recently caught on a hot mic giddily remarking that the SAVE Act would disenfranchise up to 18 percent of the electorate in 2026.The Election Administration and Voting Survey 2022 Comprehensive Report says that approximately 112 million votes were cast in that midterm election. If you do simple math, you can see that Republicans estimate that the SAVE America Act would disenfranchise more than 20 million Americans!

Don’t believe Republicans when they tell you the SAVE America Act is just a voter-ID bill. It is something far more insidious and uglier. Free and fair elections and equal access to the ballot box are the cornerstones of our democracy, which is why I voted against both versions in the House and believe that all Americans should oppose this legislation.

Artificial intelligence is already generating technological change that, on its own and in combination with advanced robotics, will design and define much of our future. But who will design and define AI—tech-bro billionaires whose primary mission is to become trillionaires, or citizens and elected representatives who seek to harness technology in the interest of humanity? Donald Trump has made his choice, signaling at a Pittsburgh “energy and innovation summit” last summer that he would willingly sacrifice the public interest and let the tech industry call the shots. “Regulation be damned” was the message from the president; let the chips fall where they may. Trump formalized his subservience in December, when he issued an executive order that The New York Times reported “grants broad authority to the attorney general to sue states and overturn laws that do not support the ‘United States’ global A.I. dominance,’ putting dozens of A.I. safety and consumer protection laws at risk. If states keep their laws in place,” the report continued, “Mr. Trump directed federal regulators to withhold funds for broadband and other projects.”

In March, Trump baked his agenda into a “National AI Legislative Framework” that emphasizes deregulation and federal preemption of the states. “Preemption is the real story,” Zephyr Teachout, the scholar of monopoly power, wrote on X. “We do not need a national framework for AI. Of any kind. We need state and federal laws but we will be crushed if we block local power to protect kids, workers, consumers, journalism, everything. Congress should do its job, not stop states from doing theirs with common law, liability, antitrust, and more.”

So far, however, Congress has tended to sideline itself, while the president and his administration rush to embrace the financial overlords during this transformative moment. That embrace is so shameless, so transparent, that messages and images emanating from the White House seem like dystopian cinema. “The future of AI is ‘personified,’” first lady Melania Trump declared at a March 25 White House event where she appeared with robots and asked Americans to “imagine a humanoid educator named Plato” replacing teachers.

“Call me a radical, but no!” responded Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has emerged—along with a growing number of the scientific pioneers of artificial intelligence—as a thoughtful AI skeptic. “We should not be replacing teachers in America with robots. We should attract the best and brightest in our country to become teachers and pay them the decent wages that they deserve.”

Sanders is right, of course. But, as has too often been the case when it comes to industrial and technological revolutions, their influence on society, and the resulting policy disputes, being right in the early stages of a transformation can be a lonely mission.

The good news is that the people get it. A February Economist/YouGov survey found that 63 percent of Americans think jobs will be lost in an AI transition that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has acknowledged “isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed who expressed an opinion on the question said they believed AI will hurt the economy.

That’s backed up by polls in states where the issues have been framed by fights over the development of AI data centers. A December letter from more than 230 environmental groups, including Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth, argued, “The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security.” Voters see what’s happening in states like Wisconsin, where a Marquette Law School Poll in March found that 69 percent of those surveyed agreed that “the costs of the data centers outweigh the benefits.” That’s the same percentage that said AI is developing too fast.

Smart Democrats and a few Republicans are seizing on these concerns. But there are not enough of them. “Sadly,” Sanders says, “Congress has done virtually nothing.” This disconnect has added urgency to a moment of enormous importance for people whose jobs are threatened, whose children’s brains are already marinating in AI slop, and whose privacy is being invaded by an ever-tightening surveillance state and an industry that’s determined to barter off personal data to the highest bidder.

To be sure, AI has huge potential to benefit humanity: by assisting responsible scientific innovation, helping medical researchers identify new strategies for diagnosing and treating disease, and (in ethical hands) increasing cybersecurity and other protections. But that potential will turn to peril if Trump and his allies—in both political parties—simply serve an industry that is already pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into manipulating the results of the 2026 elections. The urgency of the moment inspires this issue of The Nation, which affirms that skepticism about AI is well-founded and necessary. The articles in our special section examine the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of tech billionaires, along with concerns about job losses and surveillance, questions about military and police uses of new technologies, and smart strategies for regulating and governing AI.

At a point when everyone must take a side, The Nation is siding with humanity. We want the best that AI has to offer for the people. But we know that won’t happen if the citizens are locked out of the decision-making process, as Trump and his allies seek to do with their preemption scheme.

That scheme threatens to upend a burgeoning popular revolt that has already emerged at the grassroots, as communities all over the country reject the construction of behemoth data centers that are designed to meet the astronomical energy demands of the AI and cryptocurrency industries.

This is where Sanders proposes to intervene. In late March, with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), he proposed legislation to establish a national moratorium on the construction of data centers.

But this is about much more than data centers. “Bottom line: We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy, and the future of humanity,” the senator says, arguing that a federal moratorium—along with state and local interventions and the growing movement for international regulatory treaties—can slow down the self-serving rush of AI fabulists and profiteers.

“Congress has a moral obligation,” AOC says, “to stand with the American people and stop the expansion of these data centers until we have a framework to adequately address the existential harm AI poses to our society. We must choose humanity over profit.”

Yes, we must!

AI and robotics have enormous potential to improve human life. But they also pose profound dangers that we have not fully confronted. Left unchecked, these technologies could lead to:

• The rise of an unaccountable global oligarchy. The richest people on Earth—Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg—are not investing trillions in these technologies out of generosity. They want more wealth and power. Can democracy survive when a handful of multibillionaires wield unprecedented influence over the economic and political life of our nation?

• Massive job loss. There are economists who warn that the spread of AI and robotics could cost millions of jobs. What happens to workers when there are no jobs for them? How will ordinary Americans survive without income? How will they pay for housing, healthcare, food, and other basic necessities?

• Increased social isolation and mental illness. Young people are already turning to AI “companions” for emotional support. What happens to our humanity when people interact with machines more than they do with fellow human beings?

• Total invasion of privacy. If every phone call, e-mail, text, search, financial transaction, and movement can be tracked by the owners of AI, is the concept of privacy made obsolete? Does this not inevitably lead to authoritarianism?

• Higher likelihood of war. If robot soldiers replace human beings, will leaders be more willing to engage in catastrophic armed conflict? Will we see an arms race of robot soldiers?

• Environmental degradation. AI data centers require enormous amounts of electricity and water. Will the construction of these data centers strain power grids and accelerate carbon emissions? Will ordinary consumers see major increases in their electric bills?

• Undermining of human control of the planet. Some Big Tech CEOS think that AI may soon surpass human intelligence. What happens if we can’t regulate the things that we create? Could that create an existential threat to humanity itself?

In his previously unreleased preface to Animal Farm, discovered by Ian Angus in 1972 and published later that year by the Times Literary Supplement, George Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

As an anti-fascist, Orwell most likely meant that liberty means the right to tell people in power what they do not want to hear. Most Americans would agree that the right to question authority is a nonnegotiable premise of democracy, but one that has met with repression throughout our history and even more so now, during wartime.

Evidence of that repression is quietly mounting all around us. Among the more alarming examples is the federal government’s recent threat to revoke broadcasting licenses if the administration finds content displeasing.

In March, Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), warned that broadcasters could lose their licenses if their reporting fails to comply with MAGA doctrine. “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr posted on X. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

On Truth Social, the president seconded that threat, accusing some media organizations of being “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic” and whining that they “get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES.” Trump concluded by referencing the reality series he once hosted: “As I used to say in The Apprentice, ‘FIRED.’”

These comments suggest that MAGA officials now fear free speech and may consider those who use it as potential criminals or enemies.

As the late great Bob McChesney would often remind us, the Federal Communications Commission has a mandate to manage the airwaves in the people’s interest, not those of big business or the president. The “No Kings” purpose of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution is to distribute power, not concentrate it, a mission augmented by independent media.

The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the federal government cannot punish news organizations—or anyone else—for oppositional viewpoints. The First Amendment’s protection of press freedoms would be little more than ink on the page if officials could cancel broadcasting licenses whenever coverage aimed to keep them in check.

Fascists fear free speech, and fear is the source of Carr’s demand that broadcasters “correct course.” Such language echoes a familiar pattern in systems that treat democracy as the enemy: First, authorities insist that the media must align with official narratives; then they demand the same obeisance from the general population.

Press freedom advocates recognized the danger immediately. Will Creeley wrote: “Brendan Carr’s authoritarian warning—that networks risk their broadcasting licenses for Iran war reporting that the government doesn’t like—is outrageous.” When government demands the press “become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment,” he said, “something has gone very wrong.”

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom warned that “if Trump doesn’t like your coverage of the war, his FCC will pull your broadcast license. That is flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz described Carr’s statement as “a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed.”

Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts immediately wrote a public letter to Carr saying his threat to revoke licenses is “your latest authoritarian attempt to weaponize the FCC’s statutory authority to censor the media. It is a stain on the FCC’s storied history, and you should resign.”

Their concerns were preceded by a bipartisan group of FCC commissioners who warned in November 2025 that the mere “specter of government interference alone chills broadcasters’ speech.”

As a former pamphleteer, pirate radio broadcaster, and low-power FM advocate who took the FCC to court to preserve the public’s right to access the airwaves at the community level, I believe deeply in the free and unfettered use of radio, libraries, streets, and public parks as spaces for challenging power and imagining new ways of being, learning, and loving. We are now gradually losing ground in many of these spaces.

Existential threats to democracy emerge not only through attempted coups like the one staged on January 6, 2021, but also through smaller, incremental acts: a few unjustified arrests here, a few ICE killings there, along with the quiet criminalization of those who, like the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, dare to expose the atrocities caused by our policies. No one act may irrefutably prove full-blown fascism has arrived, but what does that really matter if you or your loved ones are among those who have been threatened, disappeared, silenced, or killed?

The president’s propagandists insist that the FCC simply expects broadcasters to serve the public interest. But in a constitutional democracy, the public interest cannot mean blind obedience to the boss. Challenging official narratives serves the public interest—especially in wartime, when governments feel compelled to control information and deflect public outrage from horrors like the killing of 165 Iranian schoolgirls in a war that was not authorized by the people’s representatives in Congress.

The tilt toward Orwellian censorship underscores a broader shift concerning the meaning of trust in the media. Carr suggests that tighter control is the solution for broadcasters’ straying from the administration’s version of events. But conforming to official doctrine can never render journalism credible. If anything, the opposite is true: Credibility depends on the public knowing that reporters are free to pursue investigations wherever they lead—particularly during wartime—without the fear of death threats, losing one’s job, or worse.

Threatening to silence broadcasters—or anyone else—for critiquing the atrocities being committed in our name erases democratic accountability and replaces it with a demand for obedience.

It was heartening, therefore, when, on March 17, 2026, Joe Kent, a combat veteran and former CIA officer, refused to continue taking orders from the president and quit his job as MAGA’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a letter of protest addressed directly to the president and sent to over 430,000 online followers, Kent said, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” The rationale for going to war, Kent explained, was based on a “lie” similar to the lies once used to draw the US into a “disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.” We can only hope that Kent’s refusal to go along with the lies will be emulated by others in the MAGA regime.

The framers crafted a constitution that protects our right not only to freely critique those in power, but also to freely reimagine power itself. This opened space for what W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and others have called “abolition democracy”—one capable of shedding the violence of settler-colonial legacies and advancing new frontiers of liberation based on solidarity, community, human affirmation, and love.

While those legacies dominate, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. The truth today is that we live in an age of creeping fascism, genocide, and war. Pretending otherwise is a form of complicity. Keeping the publicly owned airwaves open as a space to challenge a dystopian agenda is the true and revolutionary purpose of democracy and free speech, and we should infuse all of our movements with tactics for their defense.

He knows the MAGA playbook well.
Investigate Trump’s foes? That’s swell,
And makes a story Trump can tell
Re FBI boss Kash Patel.