On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued an order to permanently stay a ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit prohibiting the distribution of the abortion medication mifepristone by mail. The court announced that the stay is in place “pending disposition of the appeal” in the lower court, meaning that while mifepristone may continue to be mailed throughout the United States, it remains unclear for how long.

The ruling—barely a paragraph in length—was strictly procedural. The court did not weigh in on the scientifically discredited and debunked arguments that undergird the challenges to mifepristone made by anti-abortion advocates, namely their claim that the drug is unsafe and ineffective.

Even though this ruling centers on the Fifth Circuit’s order, the ongoing dispute reflects the legal chaos, confusion, misinformation, and medical turmoil for women unleashed by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. In that case, authored by Justice Samuel Alito, he argued that Roe was “egregiously wrong,” “deeply damaging,” and “exceptionally weak” in its reasoning.

Alito’s dissent in the joined cases Danco Laboratories, LLC v. Louisiana and GenBioPro, Inc. v. Louisiana shows equal hostility, antagonism, and irrationality. According to Justice Alito, the Supreme Court’s order is “unreasoned” and “remarkable.” In essence, he refers to the drug manufacturers as profit seekers, engaged in a “scheme” to “undermine” his majority opinion in Dobbs and ultimately thwart states’ bans on abortion.

Justice Alito feigns ignorance of the decades of research pointing to mifepristone’s safety, referencing “concerns [that] have arisen ‘about the safety of mifepristone as currently administered.’” This is ironic, especially since the medication has been on the market in the United States for nearly 26 years, and decades before that in France. This type of cynicism and contempt is what women expect from Justice Alito on matters of reproductive health, rights, and justice—and beyond.

He dispenses with key arguments made in the manufacturers’ briefs, calling their claims of potential serious harm only a “passing reference to the possibility of lost sales.”

That said, Justice Alito’s overwrought dissent and that of Justice Clarence Thomas (alleging that mifepristone’s pharmaceutical manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, are engaged in criminal acts) should not be ignored. These dissents not only mirror the arguments peddled by abortion foes but strategically plant seeds from which future cases may bear fruit for criminal prosecutions and punishments involving not only patients and doctors but possibly pharmaceutical company executives. As an example, Justice Thomas noted that he wrote separately ostensibly to unmask a criminal enterprise, explaining, “The Comstock Act bans using ‘the mails’ to ship any ‘drug…for producing abortion.’” That this law has been dormant for decades and potentially implicates products ranging from contraception to medical books is disconcerting.

In other words, despite what is clearly a sign and sigh of relief for patients and telehealth medical providers, the dissents potentially serve as the foundation for a later majority opinion forcing the implementation of the long-dormant Comstock Act. This is worrying because the Comstock Act wasn’t simply in hibernation; it was defunct and rejected. Justice Thomas now seeks to give CPR to an act that justified the banning of medical textbooks simply because of diagrams of the naked human body.

Fortunately, that is now public.

This case is undeniably messy, and not just because the court issued a decision after missing its own self-imposed deadline. For example, the Supreme Court ordered the Food and Drug Administration to issue a brief, given that its 2023 Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) policy that allows for the mailing of mifepristone is at issue. Stunningly, the Trump administration failed to even respond to the Supreme Court’s request and issued no brief in the case.

Instead, with the backdrop of the midterm elections looming and political pressure at its peak, President Donald Trump forced the removal of FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, seemingly responding to the calls from anti-abortion groups. Makary issued his resignation by text just two days before the decision in this case.

Further, as noted in the Danco brief, “there has never been a court-enjoined REMS,” meaning that for the first time a court has inserted itself against the judgment of the FDA to block the mail distribution of a drug.

Indeed, Thursday’s order is a response to Danco’s and GenBioPro’s emergency application petitioning the Supreme Court to stay the Fifth Circuit’s judgment imposing a ban on the mailing of mifepristone. This lower-court ban, sought by the state of Louisiana, is a vital part of the post-Dobbs anti-abortion strategy, and it affected every state, including those where abortion is not only legal but also protected by state Constitutions.

Despite the fact that the block is lifted, serious concerns remain, including the trafficking in medical misinformation and disinformation related to abortion generally, and mifepristone specifically, including its proven safety and efficacy.

As a procedural matter, according to Danco and GenBioPro, the case should never have advanced or been heard by the Fifth Circuit because the plaintiffs lacked standing—a crucial bar that must be met in order for litigants to proceed in the adjudication of a dispute. To underscore their argument, in their briefs they explain that the FDA’s REMS policy does not pose economic nor sovereign harms to Louisiana.

Neither the majority nor dissents paid any attention to that argument or any of the other important substantive claims made by the manufacturers, including the most relevant: If the lower court order were allowed to take effect, it would impose avoidable immediate and irreparable harm on patients. Already, in the post-Dobbs legal reality, pregnant patients in the United States have suffered and been forced into a new Jane Crow landscape. This includes fleeing their home states by all means available to reach needed healthcare in sanctuary states; bleeding for hours outside hospitals in parking lots—until hospitals deem them sick enough to receive treatment, a practice to avoid civil and criminal punishments in anti-abortion states; criminal punishments and convictions; and sorrowfully, preventable deaths due to pregnancy complications.

The Roberts court will be remembered for playing roulette with pregnant patients’ lives. In this sense, both Dobbs and this current order are on the same wheel. The lesson from this week’s order is that through their dissents, Justices Alito and Thomas exposed what may come, providing those who care about the rule of law, reproductive health, and abortion rights with insight and the opportunity to counter their cynicism and deceit.

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, Republicans are aggressively moving to gerrymander away the Congressional Black Caucus and eliminate Black voting power in red states. In my most recent piece, I wrote that it is largely too late for the Democratic Party to stop this race toward the racist bottom ahead of the 2026 midterms. But, assuming Trump doesn’t get us into a global nuclear war while he’s in China, life will go on, and future elections will happen.

Democracy Docket has put forth a plan for how states controlled by Democrats might re-gerrymander their maps ahead of the 2028 election to offset the Republican gains this cycle. This plan offers a way for Democrats to pick up 17 to 27 seats in 2028 while Republicans gain only four to five. The operating theory is that Republicans are currently in the process of getting all the juice they can out of the states they control, while Democrats have barely begun to squeeze. Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Virginia, Wisconsin are all states where Democrats can make up significant ground—should voters in those states choose to abandon independent redistricting commissions, amend their state Constitutions, and fight fire with fire.

The plan is doable, and necessary. But I don’t want people to miss what is still being lost even if Democrats can pull off these gerrymanders. The loss of Black representation in the South cannot be offset with a few more liberal white representatives from Wisconsin. The inability of Black people in Memphis to elect a fighter like Justin Pearson is not mitigated by spitting out another corporate Democrat from Hoboken.

The great Black Congressman William Lacy Clay once said, “Black people have no permanent friends, and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.” Those interests cannot be adequately served solely by white Democrats gerrymandered into suburban districts in the North. Some of those interests cannot even be adequately served by Black Democrats elected from majority-white districts.

Let me put it like this: I live in a suburb of New York City. Could you gerrymander my district in such a way that a guy like me could be elected? Probably. I mean, not me specifically—I’ve written far too much about [gestures broadly] America to be elected to public office. But somebody with my pedigree and profile, sure. But if you can’t spot the difference between me and, say, Cori Bush or Justin Pearson or Jamaal Bowman (who did represent my district until it was gerrymandered away from him), then you’re not really in tune with the Black community.

As I’ve said many times, the point of the Supreme Court’s decision was not only to help the Republican Party win elections. Helping Republicans win elections was the side benefit. The point of the ruling was to crush the political power of Black people in America. You can’t restore that power by creating new districts where very few Black people live.

The Bad and the Ugly

• Trump is set to make his first set of federal district court appointments in states where Senate Democrats could use what is known as the “blue slip” process to try to block them. Blue slips allow senators to stall judges appointed by the president to their states. The Republicans got rid of this tradition for circuit court appointments but have kept it in place for district courts. One would think Democrats would be chomping at the bit to stop any of Trump’s judicial nominees, but Michigan Senators Gary Peters and Elisa Slotkin, and Senator John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, have been “tight-lipped” about whether they will use their power to block Trump’s picks. In related news, I support the dumbest political party on the entire planet.
• The Federal Reserve produced its annual “financial well-being” survey and concluded that Black people are doing worse in Trump’s economy than any other racial or ethnic group. Everyone is doing poorly, but Black folks are being hit the hardest. Of course, “Black people doing worse” is precisely why white people voted for Trump.
• Last month, the Office of Legal Counsel summarily declared that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. Donald Trump, you know, doesn’t want the public to ever know what he’s actually doing. The thing is, it’s not the OLC’s call about whether an entire federal law is unconstitutional, and it’s looking like a judge will block the DOJ’s attempt to get rid of it. However, that’s just the start of the process. I’d say the DOJ will also lose in front of the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court upheld the Presidential Records Act when Richard Nixon challenged it. Then again, if this Supreme Court had been around when Nixon was president, it would have helped him cover up Watergate.
• Republicans in Congress seem poised to give Trump $1 billion of taxpayer money for his ballroom. They’ll just say it’s for “enhanced security” and trust that everybody else is stupid.
• A class of children is suing Roblox for violating child labor laws. Please add this data to my ongoing campaign to get people to stop letting their children use Roblox. Letting your kids spend 20 hours a week playing the most violent video game you can think of is arguably better than subjecting them to the predation of Roblox.

Inspired Takes

• Former NBA player Jason Collins died of cancer this week. Collins made news 13 years ago by becoming the first openly gay professional athlete in one of the four major American team sports. Like The Nation’s Dave Zirin, at the time, I thought Collins would usher in a new era of tolerance and acceptance, and I have been bitterly disappointed. But Collins should go down as one of the bravest athletes in modern sports.
• I’m not really ready to dig into what is going on with the Hantavirus. I still have so much PTSD from Covid. But if you can handle it, The Nation’s Mark Hertsgaard has you covered on this emerging pestilence.
• Slate’s Susan Matthews “went deep” on Neil Gorsuch, the justice you should hate more than you do. There’s also a Slow Burn about his terrible career. 

Worst Argument of the Week

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals is likely to send yet another anti-trans case to the Supreme Court to further menace trans kids. The case, which the court heard on Tuesday, is called Wailes v. Jefferson County Public Schools and involves a religious family suing a school district in Colorado. (Why is it always Colorado?)

When kids at Jefferson Public Schools go on overnight field trips, they are assigned to accommodations based on their gender identity, not their sex at birth.

For reasons entirely passing understanding, this arrangement pissed off some parents. Three sets of families sued the school, and since I cannot explain their reasons without risking losing my entire freaking mind, I’ll let Courthouse News Service summarize their complaints:

Three sets of parents sued in September 2024 after the 11-year-old daughter of Joe and Serena Wailes was assigned to room with a transgender student from another school on a class trip to Washington, D.C. Around the same time, Bret and Susanne Roller learned a camp counselor for their son’s sixth grade camping trip, assigned to the boys’ bunks and showers, was non-binary but assigned female at birth. Rob and Jade Perlman say their daughter might play on her varsity basketball team, and they’re worried that she might room with a transgender student if the team travels for tournaments.

The behavior of all of these parents is unconscionable to me, but the Perlmans take the cake. They’re worried their daughter might play basketball, and that she might room with a transgender girl if the team travels. They joined an entire federal lawsuit just in case!

This case should be thrown out of court, but it won’t be thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Mamhoud v. Taylor, the most important anti-trans decision from the Supreme Court until whatever they rule this June in Little v. Hecox. (Little seeks to ban young transgender athletes from playing sports.) In Mamhoud, the court ruled that parents can prevent schools from reading books about trans kids to students.

The parents in Wailes argue that if parents can use their bigotry to stop a school from reading stories, they can certainly use the same bigotry to change how a school houses students on overnight trips.

The war against trans kids is disgusting, but it’s also very petty. These bigoted parents are effectively complaining about who gets a bunk bed—and they’ll win, because heaven forbid this country lets a trans teenager fall asleep without feeling hunted and bullied by all of American society.

And I’ll bet all the money in my pocket that these parents have no problem letting their kids play Roblox.

What I Wrote

As I indicated earlier, I wrote about the lawsuit the Virginia Democratic Party filed with the Supreme Court to try to win back its gerrymandered maps. Few people will be surprised to read that Virginia will probably lose this case. What might surprise them is that winning this particular lawsuit would quickly make things much worse for all of us.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I spent most of an evening this week in an animal emergency room because my dog ate some grapes. Well, we thought she ate some grapes. One of my kids left their half-eaten dinner on a low counter (the fault was really mine; I interrupted the kid’s dinner to talk to him about the feedback we received from his parent-teacher conference), and when he came back, the plate was empty. He couldn’t remember if he had finished his grapes or not. Grapes are toxic to dogs—they screw up their kidney function—so off we went to the emergency room. (Shout out to my kid for doing the right thing and telling us instead of pretending that nothing was wrong.)

The excellent veterinarians did some tests and induced doggy vomiting… where we found the remnants of my kid’s cheeseburger, but no grapes. I actually felt really sorry for my dog: Imagine hunting an entire cheeseburger and then being forced to give it back. I feel like we violated her natural rights. But, other than this cosmic insult, everything appeared to be fine for my dog and my family.

Then, the bill came—and things were not fine, because it cost $569 to make my dog puke up her ill-gotten cheeseburger.

I had the money (well, my wife had the money—or, her credit card had the money), and I was of course thankful for the services provided. But for whatever reason, the bill really hit me hard. What do people do when they don’t have a spare $569 lying around for emergency grape problems? Does the dog just die? What will I do the next time a plate of unknown foodstuffs goes missing? Will I rush back to the emergency room, or will I Google “what are the first signs of kidney failure in dogs” and just ride it out?

I can’t really complain about pet healthcare, because we live in a country where people have to make these terrible decisions every day about human healthcare. But in a country where 87 million households own pets, and 97 percent of pet owners are like me and consider the pet a part of their “family,” it feels like we should do something to control the costs of pet health care—after we address our embarrassing inability to provide cost-effective human healthcare to be sure. But maybe right after?

Anyway, in the morning, we found approximately $569 worth of grapes, untouched, under the coffee table. The dog looked at me when I found them and I felt like I could hear her saying, “You see, you dumb simian. I don’t even like stupid grapes.”

***

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https://action.aclu.org/petition/tony-carruthers-death-penalty

Guns or butter. Butter or guns. Can we have both? If not, which should come first? Consider it one of those chicken-and-egg conundrums of modern society.

“Guns” is the stand-in for a well-funded military and “butter” for all the human goods, comforts, and needs of a society.

Economists, politicians, and generals have long considered the balance of guns and butter. Wage too many wars, produce too many arms, and there won’t be enough money to keep a nation decently fed and comfortable. Produce too many consumer goods, meet everyone’s needs, and a nation might find itself ill-prepared and vulnerable in the face of a possible attack or even invasion. Everyone from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has had something to say about the balance of guns and butter (or, more likely, the lack of it).

No surprise, but I like butter and don’t like guns. I have long been attracted to the graphics produced by groups like the National Priorities Project (NPP) and Brown University’s Costs of War Project that dramatize the opportunity costs of war investment in the United States. At some point, one of those groups created a pen that had a long scroll on a pull-out flap inside it. At parties, as you were discussing the military budget, you could take out that pen and unfurl a long bar graph comparing US military spending to the budgets for education, healthcare, and infrastructure. Neat trick, right?

These days, NPP has a new factsheet that offers a breakdown of how the cost (so far) of Trump’s Iran “escapade” could have been so much better spent:

• Covering Medicaid for all 14 million people at risk of losing their insurance,
• AND the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, for all four million people at risk of losing food assistance, including 3.5 million due to new work requirements for older people and caregivers,
• AND expanding Medicaid to an additional 10.3 million people.

Those numbers are based on the Pentagon’s request for $200 billion in supplemental funding for the Iran war effort. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capitol Hill on April 30, supporting a lowball estimate of the war costs as a mere $25 billion (and worth every dollar!) and asking for support for an inconceivable $1.5 trillion for Trump’s war machine in fiscal year 2027. Guns vs. Butter? More like guns force-fed foie gras and caviar and sautéed in the world’s most expensive butter.

Every Warship Launched, Every Rocket Fired

If I ever got a tattoo, it would probably be of this line from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 “Chance for Peace” speech: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Eisenhower gave that speech 73 years ago (even as military budgets increased significantly while he was president) and yet the words ring truer than ever today. In reality, I’m unlikely to get a first tattoo at the age of 52, but I did see all of this up close and personal a couple of weeks ago at my Connecticut town’s school board meeting.

For months, school board members had been ringing an alarm bell about their budget. After years of scrimping and shaving, layoffs and early retirement packages, they were no longer able to economize their way to a balanced budget, and so were considering a “nuclear option”: closing one of our local schools.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

When Lilliana Cassells moved to Alabama from New York for college, she was not prepared for how the relocation would affect her access to vital healthcare. But in Alabama, reproductive care is not seen as vital.

“It was just a culture shock coming down here and seeing how vastly different it is from New York,” said Cassells, who has been on and off birth control for health reasons throughout her life. “Up in the Northeast, this was never something that I was concerned about.”

On campus, she has met people who are scared to bring up birth control to their parents, or have no idea where to get it. So Cassells decided to get involved with reproductive rights work on campus, joining a growing army of college students nationwide who are fighting to make contraceptive access easier. With reproductive rights organization Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, Cassells tables on campus every Friday to give out free condoms and Plan B, and offers a free Plan B delivery service to students.

Private institutions typically determine birth control policy, but public universities are at the mercy of their state laws, which have grown far more restrictive with the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade. Since the Supreme Court overturned the landmark case, numerous states have increased the barrier to accessing high-quality contraceptive care, with lower-income people bearing the brunt of the fallout.

“In a state where there is restricted abortion access, you need to be very vigilant with making sure that you’re staying safe because you’re being put at risk by the legislation here,” said Cassells. Alabama has one of the nations’ harshest abortion laws—completely banning the procedure with few limited exceptions. Recently, the state also implemented abstinence-only sex education “There’s no backup plan. It puts so many students at a disadvantage.”

Nearly 20 million American women of reproductive age live in contraceptive deserts. Even in a blue state like New York, which has been lauded for its family planning legislation, the number exceeds 1.2 million. In Herkimer, Madison, and Washington counties, where several SUNY colleges are located, there is not a single reproductive health center that offers the full gamut of contraceptive services.

Natalie Bentley, a senior at SUNY Geneseo, witnessed how the colleges’ rural setting made it more difficult for the primarily working-class student body to access medical offices and sex education resources. So she joined the New York Birth Control Access Project (NYBCAP).

“If people are seven hours away from home and their primary doctor, being able to access reproductive care on campus is extremely important,” she said.

Organizations such as NYBCAP, which work to increase birth control access at the local level, prioritize convenience and affordability in their distribution. For advocates, one of the best solutions has been contraceptive vending machines.

NYBCAP’s machines dispense emergency contraceptives, condoms, and non-hormonal pills. The machines have been installed at various campuses across the state, including NYU, Cornell, and several CUNY and SUNY institutions. At Geneseo, Bentley’s machine not only sells contraceptives but also menstrual supplies and over-the-counter medication like Tylenol.

Iclimbed over the chain-link fence to my neighbor’s yard, a fistful of twenties in my hand. My neighbor, Al, had replaced some rotting boards on my deck while I was at work. His apartment was tacked onto another house, enclosed but flimsy and without a real foundation. Al worked for his landlord’s roofing company, and I’m pretty sure he got the apartment in lieu of pay.

Al was smoking on his doorstep. His big, leathery, tanned shoulders—Al was shirtless for nine months of the year—were drooping, his head hanging between his knees. “Thanks for your help today,” I said, holding the cash out to him. But he shook his head.

I pushed the cash toward him again. He brushed it away.

“Why not? It looks great!” I said, nodding toward my deck.

“Because I pawned your circular saw.” I had left my tools out for him to use.

“Dude, that was my dad’s saw!”

“I know! I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m going to get it back!”

“Please do.”

Al stood up but didn’t move. After an awkward moment, I realized he needed the money from me to go get the saw out of the pawn shop. I handed it to him, but he still stood there. “What?” I asked.

“Can you give me a ride?”

We drove to the American Cash and Pawn at the edge of our neighborhood. It stood between Kroger and the laundromat where it cost $20 a week to do two loads, because the half-broken dryers would eat your quarters until you went home defeated with your jeans still wet. Al went into the pawn shop and soon came back out grinning and waving my saw above his head. He’d set things right and I appreciated that.

The day after President Donald Trump told a reporter that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” in the wake of his economically ruinous war in Iran, the White House duly stepped up with a let-them-eat-loaves-and-fish pronouncement to drive the point home. This Sunday, the Trump administration will kick off its grift-laden commemoration of the nation’s 250th anniversary with a nine-hour prayer jubilee on the National Mall, meant to signal “a moment of renewal” for the Christian nationalist project at the heart of the MAGA spiritual agenda.

It’s rare that you see the bait-and-switch logic of right-wing culture warfare in such stark relief, but the prayer marathon is very much in line with the broader cultural messaging that spurred Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. The central theme uniting Trump’s far-flung attacks on the Biden White House, his fury at the interlocking scourges of wokeness, trans tolerance, and CRT indoctrination, his hate-fueled mass deportation rhetoric, and his tariff-and-tax-cuts vision of a new economic golden age was that this iteration of MAGA was a revival movement in political guise. Seizing on the militant rhetoric of spiritual warfare crafted by self-styled movement prophets aligned with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) like Lance Wallnau, an oil-industry PR flack turned preacher, Trump campaign strategists positioned the president as a vessel for the country’s divine deliverance. Standing athwart political and theological rivals who, in the NAR’s apocalyptic telling, are actual demons seeking to wreak destruction and mayhem on Christian believers, Trump is channeling the righteous fury of the divine elect who have been cast out into the cultural darkness by satanic fifth columnists. Armed with this bellicose version of the gospel, the NAR preaches a full-fledged evangelical siege of what Wallnau and others call the “seven mountains” of cultural power: politics, education, the media, the family, business, arts and entertainment, and the church.

This is the broader polemic backdrop to an event launching a months-long celebration of the country’s founding that explicitly endorses fallacious Christian nationalist accounts of the American past. Project 250, the White House’s umbrella group programming the official recognition of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, is dispatching a caravan of “Freedom Trucks” across the country to promulgate an AI-enabled experiential tour of the country’s past—outfitted with instructional materials from PragerU and Hillsdale College, both premier outlets of Christian nationalist agitprop masquerading as respectable academic discourse.

Another program operating under the remit of Project 250 is the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, which counts both the right-wing advocacy groups Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty as partners—thereby irreparably deranging the founders’ core understanding of what civics is and how it works. Still another initiative affiliated with Project 250 is America Prays, which has partnered with Wallbuilders, a nonprofit headed by Christian nationalist pastor David Barton, and the NAR TV show FlashPoint, which was pivotal in mobilizing evangelical support for the failed coup on January 6. FlashPoint features MAGA spiritual enthusiast Gene Bailey among its hosts—who has repeatedly interviewed Trump and who by his own account subscribes to a “Christo-fascist, Christian nationalist” agenda.

Not surprisingly, Sunday’s Jubilee is featuring speakers cut from the same ideological cloth. There’s Eric Metaxas, a member of the Trump White House’s Religious Liberty Commission and a lead orator at the pre–January 6 “Jericho Rally” for evangelicals seeking to overturn the 2020 election, who announced in a December 2020 Charlie Kirk podcast, “What’s right is right.… We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” Lorenzo Sewell, a Detroit-based NAR pastor, will also hold forth; he announced to Fox News in 2024 that the Democratic platform was “demonic,” while offering the generous Christian disclaimer that “we do not believe that every Democrat is a demon.” He is also a diehard election denier, who testified in the Michigan state legislature’s farcical hearings on post-2020 election integrity. Without citing any credible evidence, Sewell claimed to know of “people that had their votes switched. People that were registered without their knowledge.” He went on to say, “I’m actually the self-proclaimed, and I believe I deserve the title, as the election integrity evangelist.” And be sure to catch Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a Reconstructionist believer (and parishioner at the Church of Tarantino) who sports Crusades-themed tattoos, and who will no doubt deliver his trademark gloss on the gospel as a handbook for both spiritual warfare and the blood-soaked actual variety.

These belligerent apostles of MAGA impunity are, it bears reminding, a universe away from an American founding that sought to firmly distance itself from the corruptions of state-established religion—and expressly stipulated in the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, negotiated by John Adams, that “the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.” The MAGA grifters presiding over Sunday’s rally are also defying the religious-liberty case for the separation of church and state—it was, after all, leaders of the breakaway Baptist denomination, not a clutch of secular Enlightenment philosophes, who successfully fought to disestablish the Massachusetts Congregational Church in the 18th century, and create a model of competitive worship free from state interference for their many later successors.

But figures like Baptist pioneer Roger Williams and the pious but establishment-averse Adams have no real place in the MAGA-branded spectacle of faith convening on the National Mall. In their place, we have prosperity preacher Paula White-Cain, Trump’s closest spiritual adviser and the head of the White House’s National Faith Advisory Board. White-Cain has explained that the Sunday prayer event will stress the nation’s ostensible Christian identity—religious figures “praying to all these different gods” will not be welcome. In the same vein, she has nonsensically solemnized the event as an occasion “about the history and the foundations of our nation, which was built on Christian values, on the Bible.… This is really truly rededicating the country to God.” At this year’s White House Easter celebration, White-Cain likened Trump to Jesus, and she has also announced that “saying no to Trump would be saying no to God.”

In other words, something is being rededicated at Sunday’s marathon prayer jubilee, but it’s not the fabricated tale of the country’s Christian founding; it’s the blasphemy that a serial sexual abuser, compulsive liar, self-dealing aspiring dictator, vicious warmonger, and recidivist fraudster can claim any position of moral leadership in the country’s tattered civic religion. It seems fitting here to summon the authority of Isaiah 1:15-16: “When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong.”

Authoritarians tend not to consider the public purse or the well-being of the public. They regard themselves as the state—modern embodiments of Louis XIV’s “l’État, c’est moi”—and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. What they do care about is their own wealth, and so they are mindful to nurture the purses of those whose support they rely on to consolidate their power—and protect their fortunes. It’s no accident that corruption and authoritarianism are so often a hand-in-glove combo.

Sometimes, however, authoritarians have the good sense to camouflage their greed behind pronouncements about the public good; that’s been the historical model for, say, the caudillos of Latin American strongman rule.

But in the United States, Trump is even dropping the public bromides. Earlier this week, in what is surely going to feature in every Democratic attack ad between here and the midterms, Trump, in talking about the Iran conflict, blurted the quiet part aloud, telling reporters that he “doesn’t think about Americans’ financial situation” and that this wasn’t even a “little bit” of a factor when considering how to negotiate an end to his war-of-choice with the Iranians.

While creepy Veepy Vance tried to deny that the boss had said what the boss had clearly said, the damage was already done. The president had overtly stated his lack of concern for the pain Americans are feeling because of sky-high gas prices and a broader burst of inflation. It was one of the most bizarre “let them eat cake” moments of this decadent and sunsetting presidency.

While Trump is swanning around telling people he doesn’t care about Americans’ economic hurt, he is also rooting around in the public trough with ever-greater abandon. A few months back, Trump announced a lawsuit against the IRS for $10 billion, for damages purportedly incurred when an independent contractor, back in 2020, leaked details of his tax returns to The New York Times. Most observers believe it to be a frivolous lawsuit of the kind that the Department of Justice, representing the US government, frequently bats away. This time, however, Trump’s shameless DOJ lackeys look like they are negotiating a settlement before it gets to court and a judge has the opportunity to dismiss the case because of the clear conflicts of interest involved. Sources have told CNN and other media outlets that part of the settlement could involve a promise not to audit Trump anymore—a potentially huge windfall given the allegations that he and his companies have repeatedly short-changed the IRS.

Since IRS funds come from taxes, this means that Trump is using his public platform to pressure (one might even say “extort”) the US government to give him taxpayer money. Sure, it’s a bit more subtle than a caudillo and his soldiers raiding the treasury and riding off into the sunset with gold bars, but one doesn’t have to squint too hard into that sunset to see the similarities.

Out of the same mode of corruption-in-broad-daylight comes Trump’s ludicrously offensive pressuring of the Food and Drug Administration and Department of Health and Human Services to grant regulatory carve-outs to big tobacco companies that are hawking various flavors of vapes to US consumers. In essence, the saga goes like this: Big tobacco throws millions of dollars into Trump’s 2024 election campaign and toward a series of post-election vanity projects; Trump then picks up the phone and orders FDA officials to fast-track approval for the sale of these addictive, dangerous products—the marketing for which is primarily aimed at young, easy-to-manipulate consumers; senior FDA and DHHS officials, including FDA commissioner Marty Makary, resign in protest; and Trump’s propaganda outfit then declares that Trump is solely concerned with the well-being of the American people and, in true Orwellian form, puts even more pressure on the DHHS to approve these cancer-causing alternatives to cigarettes.

Then there’s Miami-Dade College transferring prime real estate, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to the state of Florida so that it could in turn gift it (or rather, “sell” it for $10) to Trump’s library foundation to build his presidential library and museum-cum-resort-hotel. If that doesn’t violate the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits using public office for self-enrichment, then nothing does.

Renditions of the proposed building, complete with the eponymous logo, look remarkably like Trump’s numerous other gaudy, gold-bedecked hotels. And Trump himself has made it clear that he sees the presidential-library project primarily in real estate terms. He wants to rent out expensive hotel rooms to guests and, to satisfy the requirement that this profit machine is actually a nonprofit monument to Trump’s legacy, tuck a small library and museum somewhere in the building’s nether regions. In late March, he even went so far as to tell a reporter, “I don’t believe in building libraries or museums.” (Hardly a surprise for a man who seems never to read or to have the slightest curiosity about culture, art, or history.)

He does, however, believe in erecting, on the grounds of the White House, a UFC fight arena that will come online in time for his Roman Empire–like gladiatorial celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Republic’s birth, and that major corporations can buy entry into by ponying up $1 million–plus for Trump-promoted causes. (Think of the mad emperors and their wealthy minions, stuffing themselves on the Roman equivalent of popcorn, while watching gladiators bludgeon and stab each other to death.)

If you’re still not convinced that Trump’s presidency is little more than a cash cow for oligarchs, check out the invite list for Trump’s journey to China this week. You’ll see familiar names: Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, as well as top figures from Meta, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, and others.

These economic titans weren’t accompanying Trump to get a good view of the Forbidden City or a satisfying hike along the Great Wall. Rather, they were there to cut deals, ramp up profits, and hawk their vision of an AI-dominated, tech-lord-run global future. This trip wasn’t about securing, or even defining, America’s national interest at a moment of spectacular uncertainty; rather, it was about helping the fat cats get even fatter and shaping the United States’ most important geopolitical relationships over the coming decades in a manner that financially rewards the new techno-elite.

I can’t help but think of that wonderful, disturbing, dystopian Leonard Cohen song, “Everybody Knows,” about how the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful:

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed.
Everybody knows that the war is over.
Everybody knows that the good guys lost.
Everybody knows the fight was fixed.
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.

In the comedy world, there should be nothing more innocuous, safe, and harmless than the words: The Netflix Roast of Kevin Hart. Hart, the star of Scary Movie, Ride Along, Central Intelligence, and three Jumanji movies, has perfected innocuousness as a $100 million brand (and that’s a conservative estimate). Except for getting bounced from the Oscars over a decade ago for a homophobic bit, Hart has been a reliably sponsor-friendly comic for a very long time. That’s why when his roast was hijacked with so much mean-spirited culture-war banter—most not even directed at its nominal target for the evening—it signaled yet another garbage-scented shift in the MAGA era of American humor.

Netflix’s choice of manosphere star Shane Gillis to host the roast looks more and more like the streaming platform gerrymandered its own show from getting too Black. “I’m your extremely white host, Shane Gillis,” he said as he took the stage, “I’d just like to thank Netflix for choosing me to host this celebration of Black excellence.”

Beside Gillis, the dais included MAGA rally headliner Tony Hinchcliffe, “roastmaster general” and last living link to the extinct Friars Club Jeff Ross, Pete Davidson, Chelsea Handler, and a blistering surprise appearance by Katt Williams. The Williams cameo was a surprise, because he has made it clear that he loathes Hart and accused him of “coonery.” It was equally clear that Williams was only there for the check and the exposure, as was Cheryl Underwood (who endured endless jokes about her husband’s suicide). Few of the comics, including Gillis, ever worked with Hart or seemed to know him. Dwayne Johnson does, and he and Kevin Hart spent nearly 43 minutes swapping somewhat creepy homoerotic and cuck jokes about Hart’s wife to end the night.

It’s safe to say that the three-hour roast packed in at least 30 minutes of solid jokes. In normal times, Hart would be an ideal target for roasting: a short man at five-foot-two, the star of reliably mediocre movies, caught on camera cheating on his wife in Las Vegas, and a celebrity with more corporate sponsors than Trump’s ballroom. Gillis paid lip service to the idea of Hart as the subject of the night, but went out of his way to include jokes like “Kevin’s so short that they’re gonna have to lynch him from a bonsai tree.”

It was when Gillis introduced Chelsea Handler that he made it clear that the night was about something else. Gillis’s line of attack: Handler’s abortions and her attendance at a 2010 dinner hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, which also included Woody Allen on the guest list. He then added, “Chelsea’s a Zionist. Not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Speaking of dead kids, she’s had several abortions…”

Seriously, a man who equates Zionism with massacring children can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing? A comedian courting outrage couldn’t take a side on that? Handler has had three abortions, two when she was 16. It says everything about Gillis that he thinks calling out abortions is a slut-shaming own. As for Handler’s Zionism, she’s also pro-Palestinian, and a Mamdani supporter. As she put it, “Shane, just so you know, Judaism and Zionism are two different things. Just like how Chinatown and Koreatown are two different things, but your favorite slur works in both places.” After Gillis brought up the Middle East, she added, “Now that your favorite leader is making the draft mandatory, I assume all of you will be signing up to go fight in Iran… Or do you tough-talking pussies only go to the Middle East for comedy festivals?” Given Handler’s actual politics, it’s not likely that Gillis was calling out her Zionism; he was targeting her religious identity. That impression gained further traction when he later offered this quip: “There’s lots of Jews here tonight. That’s not good… I mean, for the jokes.”

Later, Pete Davidson made a joke about Charlie Kirk’s murder and Tony Hinchcliffe—a featured opener at Trump’s 2024 Madison Square Garden rally whose racist rant on Puerto Rico even had the Trumps squirming that close to Election Day—made one about George Floyd’s. Davidson said of Hinchcliffe, “Tony reminds me of Charlie Kirk, in that he’s definitely been on camera letting a guy unload in his throat.” Hinchcliffe, while roasting Hart, said: “The Black community is so proud of you. Right now, George Floyd is looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe.”

Kirk and Floyd were both murdered and remain martyrs for two different communities. Like Gillis’s jokes on Handler, these are pure exercises in culture-war humor. They’re about wounding the communities that have adopted certain comics as ideological mascots. Davidson’s joke, among many others offered up by the celebrity roasters that night, also made it clear that homophobia and accusing a man of being gay is still the ultimate comedy-roast slam.

If The Netflix Roast of Kevin Hart proves nothing else, it’s that there’s not an inch of cultural space in the Trump 2.0 era that can’t be weaponized. No comic mentioned Trump by name, but his gleefully cruel sensibility dominated the evening. Roasts have long been a comedy staple, dating back to the 1970s when Dean Martin hosted breezy NBC specials where Don Rickles could go off on Martin, Frank Sinatra, or Johnny Carson. It was an hour of G-rated clubby insult comedy. Later, Gen X comedian Jeff Ross brought the roast back on Comedy Central, giving it the cachet of transgressive cable fare. Even with edgier, R-rated jokes, that era of roasts maintained the premise that the comics going after each other were, if not friends, at least friendly.

That’s clearly no longer the case. These people hate one another, and roasting Hart was just window-dressing for the real roast of everyone else. Increasingly, American comedy has reflected Trump culture. Comics looked the other way on huma rights abuses to perform at lucrative rates for the Saudi royal family at the Riyadh Comedy Fest. Some comics were ready recruits to Trump’s now-suspended quest to take control of the Kennedy Center and book the shows himself to weed out dissenting artists. Political comedy isn’t just a diverting perk of office for Trump; no, it’s another front in the culture war that has to be won by any means necessary, like politicizing the Federal Communications Commission to go after resistance-branded comedians such as Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. It’s probably no coincidence that no comic featured in the Hart show went after Trump: Who needs to have the FCC or DOJ targeting you over a Netflix roast?

The signs now are that the hantavirus is not the next pandemic. But with 2026 predicted to be the hottest year on record, the hantavirus outbreak is a warning of what public health experts have long said: A hotter planet is a deadlier planet.

Rising global temperatures and the impacts they trigger—harsher heat waves, stronger storms, and wider spread of infectious diseases—endanger human health in myriad ways. The world’s top medical societies have been sounding the alarm since 2009, when the journal The Lancet called climate change “the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” The Lancet’s 2025 report found that climate change is responsible for “millions of unnecessary deaths a year,” with excess heat alone killing 546,000 people.

The Associated Press and CNN appear to be the first major news organizations to make the climate connection to the hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship that departed Argentina on April 1. CNN reported that hantavirus has long been present in the far south of South America, but its frequency has increased recently in Argentina, where cases “have almost doubled in the past year, with the country recording 32 deaths alongside its highest number of infections since 2018,” according to the Argentine health ministry. Citing local public health researchers, the AP reported that “higher temperatures expand the virus’ range because…rodents that carry the hantavirus can thrive in more places.” A historic drought that drove animals beyond their normal habitats in search of food was followed by intense rainfall. “When precipitation increases, food availability increases, rodent populations grow, and…the chance of transmission between rodents—and eventually to humans—also increases,” Raul González Ittig, a researcher at state science body CONICET, told the AP.

Three passengers on the cruise ship have died from hantavirus, and nine have contracted the virus. The World Health Organization has emphasized that the risk to the general public is very low, and there is no danger of a pandemic akin to the Covid-19 contagion that convulsed the world in 2020.

The link between hantavirus and climate change remains far from definitive; more research is needed to determine how large a role climate change played in this particular outbreak. Journalists can help by reporting on this research as it unfolds and asking public officials what steps they are taking to keep communities informed and safe.

Journalists can also alert our audience to a broader warning that scientists have long issued.As recently explained in the Journal of the American Medical Association, higher temperatures allow mosquitoes, ticks, and rodents that carry infectious diseases to spread to previously inhospitable areas, increasing the threat to humans from malaria, cholera, Lyme disease, and other maladies.

Higher temperatures are exactly what the months ahead will bring across much of the Northern Hemisphere. This year is expected to be the hottest in recorded history, thanks to an El Niño super-charging global temperatures that are already amplified by climate change. Besides threatening human health directly, this heat will also make drought and wildfires more likely.

Too often, news coverage of extreme weather disasters has been silent about climate change’s role; for example, most reporting on the mega-fires that scorched Los Angeles in 2025 focused on the roaring flames but ignored what helped spark them in the first place. CCNow’s recent white paper on the state of climate journalism applauded AP and CNN for their sustained commitment to climate coverage at a time when “climate hushing” has afflicted many other news organizations, especially in the United States. That commitment is what enables the AP and CNN to see the climate connection to breaking news like the hantavirus and inform their audiences accordingly. As hotter and more extreme weather confronts much of the world in the months ahead, these AP and CNN stories offer an exemplary model for how all of journalism can do better.

When we last checked in with our young mayor, New York City was still $5.4 billion away from the balanced budget the city is required by law to come up with by the end of June.

Even getting to that point, from the $12 billion fiscal cliff he found on taking office would—or so the mayor claimed in March—require a raid on the funds the city is supposed to set aside for a “rainy day.” And in the preliminary budget released in February, the mayor had also threatened that if Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature didn’t let the city raise income taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers (which would require permission from the state), the city would be forced to raise property taxes (which is the only major tax the city can raise without Albany’s permission). As the mayor soon learned, threatening to raise taxes on the city’s 1.1 million homeowners—many of whom are Black and brown, and almost all of whom are regular voters—was even more of a political nonstarter than expecting the governor to back a tax increase while she’s running for reelection.

And yet there we were in City Hall’s ornate Blue Room on Wednesday, watching as Mayor Mamdani, first deputy mayor Dean Fuleihan, and budget director Sherif Soliman took a victory lap in front of the assembled members of the press. The mayor and his team unveiled a $124.7 billion budget that they had managed to balance without raising income taxes on the rich or increasing taxes on the most profitable corporations—and without raising property taxes either. Was this some kind of secular—or, dare I say, socialist—miracle?

Not exactly. Most of the heavy lifting was done by the governor and legislators in Albany, who, though still unable to come to a final agreement on their own budget, did include $4 billion worth of policy changes and extra funding for the city. Most of those funds are actually savings from delaying payments the city owes to fully fund municipal workers’ pensions—the kind of under-the-radar creative accounting politicians denounce when done by their opponents but routinely resort to when in office. But what made headlines—and yielded a very snappy YouTube video—was the governor’s announcement last month that she was instituting a pied-à-terre tax (on New York city homes and apartments worth more than $5 million whose owners are not city residents) expected to add $500 million a year to the city’s coffers. The mayor, wisely, both embraced the measure and declared at least a provisional ceasefire in his campaign to tax the rich.

Wednesday’s announcement was also evidence that, despite some initial missteps in their budget debut, the mayor and his team are quickly learning how to play this game. Not only did the mayor recognize that he would get much further by working with the governor than he was ever likely to achieve via confrontation, he was also eager to credit his sometime sparring partner City Council Speaker Julie Menin for the Council’s “proposal to reduce the Unincorporated Business Tax credit,” which, as the mayor noted, overwhelmingly benefits millionaires. The reduction, as Budget Director Soliman pointed out in a technical briefing to reporters Wednesday afternoon, can be made without Albany’s permission, and is expected to generate an extra $68 million in revenue.

Also under the heading of political fence-mending is the allocation of $26 million for the Mayor’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes—a relatively small sum, but, as Mamdani noted in his remarks, a fulfilment of his “campaign pledge to increase hate crime prevention funding by more than 800 percent.” The office, as The Forward approvingly reminded its readers, was created in 2019 to combat rising antisemitism. “Jewish New Yorkers constitute a minority of New Yorkers across the five boroughs,” said the mayor, “and yet constitute a majority of New Yorkers who face hate crimes in this city.”

Not every line of the revised budget is cause for celebration. Although the mayor promised that the cap on spending for the CityFHEPS housing voucher program “will not cut” the number of vouchers, the budget still represents a retreat from his campaign promise to expand the program. Similarly, while the skyrocketing costs of what are known as “Due Process cases” or “Carter cases”—payments to cover private school tuition for children whose special needs are not adequately met by the public school system—has become a significant burden on the city’s finances, the mayor’s confidence that, going forward, the city’s Board of Education will be able to accommodate those children may turn out to be misplaced.

Still, if you think of the city’s budget process as a drama in three acts—the first being the preliminary budget, and the second featuring the mayor’s dealings with the governor—at the end of Act II all the protagonists are in remarkably good shape. Of course the third act, which runs from now until the final budget is enacted by the City Council at the end of June, may well introduce additional plot twists—or, even, perhaps, a deus ex machina.

Because plenty can still go wrong. President Trump could order ICE to occupy Brooklyn and Queens. The NYPD could shoot the wrong civilian. The Knicks could lose the playoffs. More to the point, the budget set aside funds for only 1.5 percent raises for city workers—in a city where the headline rate of annual inflation is up to 4.6 percent. With contracts for the 100,000 members of District Council 37 , the city’s largest public-sector union, due to expire this fall, along with contracts covering a host of other workers ranging from sewer and building inspectors to park rangers and traffic agents, the mayor’s political mettle is bound to be tested.

But a happy ending to this particular piece of political theater, though far from certain, seems within reach—not a prediction anyone could have confidently made a few months ago. As for really raising taxes on the richest New Yorkers, or making the city’s buses fast or free, or offering residents of food deserts city-subsidized oases to buy groceries, or providing day care to every working parent in the city who needs it—well, as they say used in Brooklyn back when the borough had a major-league baseball club: “Wait ’till next year.”

Donald Trump’s particular brand of imperialism, which has broken old alliances and unleashed new chaos around the world, is not merely the manifestation of one man’s hubris. It is the result of a disregard for the US Constitution by the elected representatives who should be its stewards. Of all the failures of Congress—and they are many—none is more consequential than the choice of the leaders of both parties, over successive presidencies, to surrender the authority the Constitution gives legislators in the House and Senate to decide whether the United States goes to war.

Chris Rabb knows this, and he incorporates this knowledge into a worldview, and a platform, that makes him one of the most compelling candidates for Congress in 2026. The boldly progressive Pennsylvania state representative is mounting a primary campaign for an open seat representing much of Philadelphia—the place where the framers of the US Constitution outlined a system of checks and balances with a strong Congress and a constrained executive branch at its heart.

Unlike most candidates—be they Democrats or Republicans—Rabb recognizes the vital importance of renewing the promise of an American experiment that has been derailed not just by Trump but by spineless members of what is supposed to be the people’s house. He speaks about the need to address “the devastation of our collapsing democracy” with sweeping reforms that address both a failed presidency and a system that has failed to deliver for the people of Philadelphia.

The winner of the May 19 Democratic primary in what is often referred to as “the bluest district in America” will almost certainly go to Congress. And if Rabb prevails, he will enter the House as an engaged and experienced progressive with a vision for renewing the intended role of Congress as a counterweight to the warmaking of increasingly imperial presidents. With a clarity that is rare in contemporary politics, he pledges to fight for “real oversight that stops Trump’s dangerous wars and U.S. support for the genocide in Gaza.”

That’s one of the many reasons why Rabb has been endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, Justice Democrats, the Working Families Party, the Sunrise Movement, the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, Peace Action, Jewish Voice for Peace and Philadelphia Democratic Socialists of America, US Representatives Ro Khanna and Summer Lee, and Philadelphia progressives such as state Senator Nikil Saval and City Council member Kendra Brooks. On Friday, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) will headline a Philadelphia rally for Rabb. And, with the approach of the hotly contested primary, The Philadelphia Inquirer joined the list of Rabb endorsers, specifically citing his opposition to the Iran War and arguing that “Rabb has the fire, passion, and conviction people are looking for in the current political climate.”

Rabb is in a tight contest against opponents with substantial resources, close ties to powerful figures in the city’s Democratic machinery, and support from outside donors and interest groups. Referring to one of Rabb’s chief rivals, Drop Site, featured an April 23 headline that claimed, “Despite Denials, AIPAC Is Now Funding Campaign of Ala Stanford in Philadelphia.” Stanford and her supporters have continued to dispute the assertion.

Rabb, an outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, and Stanford have clashed during the campaign over questions related to the Israeli assault on Gaza, which World Health Organization data indicates has killed 72,737 Palestinians since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack. The Inquirer reports, “Stanford has refused to call Israel’s military operation and bombing campaign in Gaza a ‘genocide,’” while noting that Rabb “has excoriated his opponents for refusing to use the word genocide, saying Wednesday during a debate: ‘If you can’t name the beast, you can’t kill it, and that’s injustice.’”

The Inquirer asserts that “it is the wars in the Middle East that have thus far defined the race to replace outgoing U.S. Representative Dwight Evans in Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District.” (Evans has endorsed Stanford, while centrist Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has been critical of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, is reportedly working behind the scenes to undermine Rabb’s candidacy—with Axios writing that “Shapiro is quietly trying to derail a left-wing congressional candidate championed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”)

But Rabb is not merely raising objections to AIPAC and to Trump’s disastrous war with Iran. He is challenging the entire approach that both major parties have taken regarding wars in particular and foreign policy in general. “Every President in modern history has avoided Congressional oversight while conducting bombing campaigns and military expeditions abroad,” his platform explains. “Congress is supposed to act as a check and balance on presidential war-making authority, but it has failed to live up to its responsibility year after year. We must immediately reduce the US military footprint abroad and invest in addressing the root causes of systemic violence across the world.”

Proposing “Peace as a Policy,” the platform argues for:

• An End to Regime Change
• Free Assembly and Self-Determination for Palestine
• Immediate and Permanent Ceasefire Between Israel
 and Palestine Including Release of People Held Without
 Due Process
• Palestinian Right of Return Under International Law
• Unrestricted Humanitarian Aid in Gaza
• End Economic Support for Fascists Abroad
• A New War Powers Act
• No More Funding for Violations of International and U.S. Law
• Ending the Embargo on Cuba

“American leadership for too long has been defined by the violent impact we have on other nations,” is Rabb’s message. “We must immediately dismantle the military industrial complex, cease all imperialist foreign policy, and end all U.S. led efforts for regime-change.”

On the morning of May 6, the FBI raided the office, and a clutch of businesses, belonging to an 82-year-old Virginia state lawmaker named L. Louise Lucas, the Democratic president pro tem of the Virginia Senate. FBI officials didn’t disclose any court documents or charges to back up the raids; they haven’t yet even indicated that Lucas was a principal target in this shadowy investigation.

They didn’t really have to. While some MAGA apologists have suggested vaguely that the probe into Lucas’s affairs dated back to the Biden administration, one calendar date is clearly far more relevant: The raids came just two weeks after Virginia voters approved the redistricting referendum that Lucas had spearheaded—one that would have given Democrats four additional House districts in the recursive gerrymandering war launched by the Republican Party. Like other high-profile efforts from federal law enforcement to go after critics of the Trump model of authoritarian rule, the Lucas action was a show of force, intended to intimidate and frighten MAGA detractors everywhere; any legal rationale was strictly an afterthought—or perhaps more accurately, a half-afterthought.

This mobilization of federal agents as enforcers of political orthodoxy is obviously yet one more indication of the country’s broader slide into autocracy—yet it hasn’t commanded sustained public attention, thanks to the very flimsiness of all these failed indictments and prosecutions. So many of these meritless operations have been tossed out of court or abandoned that they merge quietly into the burgeoning file of rank Trumpian incompetence, alongside fiascos like the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs crusade or his vibes-driven war on Iran. That’s dangerous, since these politically driven harassment campaigns are clearly accelerating—and represent a crisis for the continued rule of law amid broader conditions of democratic decline.

This is the essential context for making sense of the reports surfacing this week that the FBI, under the direction of über Trump loyalist Kash Patel, has launched a “payback squad” dedicated to turning the tables on anyone, like former special prosecutor Jack Smith, involved in investigating Trump during his first term or under President Biden. This chilling authoritarian persecution is likely just getting started—and won’t be much deterred by the potential Democratic takeover of Congress after this November’s midterms. (That indeed was why Patel, who’s otherwise been fighting to save his job amid reports that he’s been drinking extensively on the job, was smugly belligerent in his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee this Tuesday.)

Patel’s payback squad just distills the broader logic behind the GOP’s inquisitorial treatment of Democratic officials, former government employees critical of Trump, and journalists whom the right dislikes. Since Trump took office for a second term in January 2025, there have been precisely zero federal investigations and prosecutions of Republican lawmakers, GOP-aligned nonprofits, or conservative media personalities. Instead, the president has gone out of his way to pardon convicted Republicans and Republican-allied malefactors, like Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and former Tennessee House speaker Glen Casada, who had been convicted of money laundering and fraud. (The FBI did raid the home of former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, and sought to indict erstwhile FBI director James Comey. but that was only after they had become bitter critics of the president.) The only Democrats he has set free are people like Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, who had been indicted on charges of bribery and money laundering by the DOJ under Merrick Garland. Trump then blew up at Cuellar, a conservative Democrat, for not switching parties. “Such a lack of LOYALTY,” bellyached the president after Cuellar filed to run for his seat as a Democrat in December.

Trump loves to threaten prosecution of Democrats for perceived transgressions large and small, and hardly a week goes by without him calling for a prominent Democrat to be jailed. Just last week, he took to Truth Social to offer this appraisal of the House minority leader: “This lunatic, Hakeem “Low IQ” Jeffries, should be charged with INCITING VIOLENCE!”

And Trump has frequently ordered the DOJ to do more than issue threats. In February, a grand jury refused to indict Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a 2028 presidential contender, along with five other Democratic members of Congress, following the DOJ’s attempt to prosecute them. Their “crime” had been posting a video reminding service members that they can and should refuse to carry out illegal orders from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at the height of National Guard deployments in US cities and the Pentagon’s illegal boat-bombing campaigns in the Caribbean and Atlantic. US District Judge Richard Leon also reprimanded Hegseth for his separate efforts to demote Kelly, a retired US Navy Captain, arguing that the administration was “trying to shrink the First Amendment liberties of retired servicemembers,” who “deserve more respect from their Government, and our Constitution demands they receive it!” It’s now quite common for flabbergasted judges to resort to exasperated bursts of exclamation points to capture the sheer gall of the Trump administration.

Others have not been so lucky. US Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), for example, still faces federal prosecution for the crime of “physically impeding agents” while touring an ICE detention facility in New Jersey. Democratic Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was also arrested after the same visit—though his charges were eventually dismissed. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), who while a congressman was a leading figure in Trump’s first impeachment in 2019, was the target of a mortgage-fraud investigation launched in August 2025. The same tactic—involving, ahem, trumped-up charges stemming from mortgage documents for a second home—was used against New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office had won a multimillion-dollar civil judgment against the Trump Organization for fraud in 2024.

Democratic candidates for office have also come in for malicious prosecution under the White House’s direction. In October, Illinois Democratic House candidate Kat Abughazeleh was indicted along with several others for protesting ICE detention practices outside the agency’s Broadview facility. On April 29, prosecutors dropped the felony charges, but Abughazeleh and her colleagues still face misdemeanors and now have to beg for money to pay off their legal bills.

The payback squad also has left-leaning and Democratic-aligned nonprofits in its sites. This month, Media Matters for America settled its litigation with Trump’s Federal Trade Commission, after the FTC launched an investigation of the media watchdog group for publishing content critical of Elon Musk and his social-media platform X. In an amicus brief challenging the FTC’s action, the libertarian Cato Institute noted that the agency’s pursuit of Media Matters created “severe” obstacles to the site’s continued operation—and that it had “curtailed reporting, and other organizations have avoided collaborating with it.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

In 1984, Apple aired a Super Bowl ad about smashing Big Brother. Directed by Ridley Scott, the 60-second slot featured rows of gray-uniformed drones marching in lockstep through an industrial corridor, filing into an auditorium before an enormous blue-tinted screen, their faces bathed in a phosphorescent glow as a stern technocrat proclaimed “a garden of pure ideology” free from “contradictory thoughts”—right before a woman hurled a sledgehammer at his pixelated face.

The ad’s target was unmistakable: IBM, whose blue logo and buttoned-down culture had become synonymous with corporate computing. This was the height of the American antitrust moment. The Justice Department had just shattered AT&T’s telephone monopoly and was actively pursuing IBM for forcing customers to buy hardware and software together. Apple positioned itself as the antithesis of these corporate giants, recasting personal computing as a tool of individual expression rather than bureaucratic control. Yet the company was destined to perfect the very anticompetitive practices then under federal assault: tying watches to phones, tablets to computers, storage to its cloud, apps to its store—creating an all-encompassing orbit few users escape.

Today, the Justice Department wields a similar sledgehammer against Apple. In March 2024, then–Attorney General Merrick Garland accused the company of using its monopoly power to degrade competitors’ products and lock consumers into its ecosystem. When a reporter questioned Apple’s Tim Cook about the quality of iPhone-to-Android video messaging, the CEO responded with a monopolist’s candor: “Buy your mom an iPhone.” But Apple isn’t alone in the crosshairs. The Biden administration’s Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission launched a full-scale assault on Big Tech: Google faces prosecution for monopolizing search, Meta for acquiring nascent competitors, Amazon for squeezing third-party sellers, and Microsoft for trapping users in its cloud. The government’s antitrust apparatus, dormant since the Reagan years, has seemingly roared back to life. So far, the Trump administration has continued every major case, reframing them as protecting conservative speech rather than facilitating market competition. But today’s tech companies present challenges that yesterday’s monopolies never posed: Digital platforms tend toward total market capture, as network effects—in which each new user increases the platform’s value for all—create a gravitational pull toward single-firm dominance.

Tim Wu is one of the intellectual architects of this trust-busting revival. From inside Biden’s National Economic Council, he helped draft the 2021 executive order that unleashed former FTC Chair Lina Khan and DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter on Silicon Valley. In The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity, Wu diagnoses the pathologies of platform capitalism—the crushing of competitive dynamism, the erosion of service quality, the surveillance of users—and then prescribes antitrust as the remedy. He argues that in recent years tech platforms have shifted from enabling to “extracting” (a metaphor evoking oil rigs and strip mines rather than industries that make things) and that aggressive antitrust enforcement—breaking them up, imposing line-of-business restrictions, applying utility-style regulations—can restore “the broad spread of prosperity and democracy” that the early Internet promised. Such measures may be necessary, but Wu’s faith in Progressive-era cures underestimates his 21st-century adversary: Platform power isn’t the product of regulatory neglect but rather of institutional convergence—Big Tech’s marriage with Wall Street and its indispensability to Washington.

The Age of Extraction chronicles how today’s tech platforms came to perform the same bait-and-switch as Apple’s 1984 ad: first positioning themselves as liberators who would empower David-size challengers to the corporate Goliaths, then becoming the most powerful Goliaths in US history themselves. At the same time, the book’s analysis depends on accepting some of tech’s own self-mythology. Wu insists these firms weren’t “sinister operators.” Rather, he writes, they began as “high-minded platforms” with genuine democratic aspirations—citing as evidence Google’s 2004 IPO letter promising to “make the world a better place.” He treats their eventual transformation into “ordinary Delaware corporations answerable to shareholders and Wall Street analysts” as a fall from grace, pinpointing 2013 as the year “everything seems to have changed.” That’s when Silicon Valley’s titans stopped competing fairly and started buying up their rivals, when they pivoted from enabling small businesses to extracting their profits, when the utopian dream of Internet democracy died. The smoking gun, for Wu, was Google’s acquisition of Waze—a company that began as a crowdsourced, peer-to-peer mapping service of the kind he celebrates.

This is a narrative with a clear villain: shareholder tyranny. Why, then, does Wu not trace “the end of the era when the Internet was seen as the great equalizer” to 2004, when Google’s shares debuted on the NASDAQ? Or to 2001, when venture capitalists made Google’s idealistic young founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, hired Eric Schmidt as their adult-supervisor CEO? Or to 1999, when those same founders first accepted checks from Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital—which expected a hefty return on their investment? Wu concedes that “over time, structure beats out good intentions.” But his analysis stops short of the structure’s origins—in the term sheets, the board seats, the liquidation preferences, and the growth metrics imposed by venture capitalists on day one. Of course, investors could colonize the Internet only after it had become commercial territory—the 1995 decommissioning of NSFNet transformed a public research network into private property. The platforms didn’t gradually succumb to structural pressure; they were built from the ground up to satisfy it.

Wu recognizes that financial imperatives determine tech companies’ behavior—what they build, whom they hire, how they monetize—but neglects to treat their funding architecture as a legitimate site for political intervention. This exposes an inherent limit to the antitrust solution. Antitrust, by its nature, is reactive: It investigates monopolies after they form, blocks mergers after they’re proposed, extracts settlements after violations occur. Google faced no scrutiny while building its search monopoly, only after it started spending $26 billion annually to maintain it. Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp with barely a regulatory whisper; the FTC only sued years later, after the damage was done. Antitrust can’t raise the dead—the Amazon third-party sellers bankrupted by fees, the app developers drained by Apple’s 30 percent tax. Worse, it can’t even affect the incentive structures that compel a growth-at-all-costs mentality: the carried interest that VCs want to earn, the quarterly growth that Wall Street demands, the burn rates that require monopoly pricing to recoup.

Over time, antitrust victories often prove illusory: They reshuffle the balance of power within the existing tech-finance ecosystem, while small independent businesses remain trapped in the same vise. Blocking Google’s $20 billion payment to Apple would supposedly foster search competition, but the European Union’s experience shows the likely outcome. When the EU mandated choice screens for Android, they became pay-to-play auctions that benefited Microsoft’s Bing, while mission-driven alternatives like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia were largely priced out. Had the Justice Department’s proposed Chrome sale gone forward, the only potential buyers would have been Google’s peers: OpenAI and Perplexity, AI venture darlings flush with Microsoft and Bezos money, respectively. The TikTok negotiations—though not an antitrust matter—revealed the limited pool of possible acquirers: Only software behemoths like Oracle, sovereign-wealth funds like MGX, or buyout kings like Silver Lake and KKR have the resources to put up. Antitrust effectively referees turf wars between corporate rivals. None of these scenarios is likely to spawn garage start-ups; in each, the victors are existing tech giants, venture capital, and private equity.

Wu’s faith in antitrust rests on historical precedent, particularly the breakup of the Bell monopoly. When AT&T resisted competitors offering services over its lines, the Federal Communications Commission imposed “computer inquiries” rules mandating equal access, and the Justice Department ultimately split AT&T into seven regional “Baby Bells.” According to Wu, this forced opening birthed the online services industry by allowing small developers to build atop the telephone network.

But today’s platform monopolies rest on different foundations. AT&T controlled the physical infrastructure—copper wires, switching stations, telephone poles—reaching American homes. These lines were the only route to customers; without access to Bell’s system, nothing could be built. Software obeys different rules: It faces no such scarcity constraints. It is infinitely replicable; unlike physical infrastructure, opening platform assets to competition would multiply extraction points—competitors would gain access to the same code, algorithms, or data that drive monetization. When PayPal split from eBay in 2015, both retained their historical transaction data—two companies with the ability to mine the same purchases and behavioral patterns for separate profit. The Justice Department’s proposal to spin off Google’s ad tech business exposes a deeper trap: Without Google’s data, the divested unit dies; with it, the monopoly persists. With Judge Amit Mehta’s recent order requiring Google to share user query data with competitors, Wu’s extraction problem isn’t eliminated but rather syndicated—the same data, the same targeting, just more extractors.

On Wednesday, cancer killed a 47-year-old former NBA player of singular bravery. In hindsight, I don’t think we realized just how brave he was when he was in the headlines. His name was Jason Collins, and he played 13 years in the league, following an All-American college career at Stanford where he suited up alongside his twin brother, Jarron. Jason Collins, of course, will be remembered as a trailblazer. Not a Portland Trail Blazer but the person who took on the weight of being “a first.” He was the first openly gay, active male athlete in one of the four big sports leagues—NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL—in North America.

Collins came out in 2013, in a beautiful first-person essay written alongside journalist Franz Lidz in Sports Illustrated. “No one wants to live in fear,” Collins wrote. “I’ve always been scared of saying the wrong thing. I don’t sleep well. I never have. But each time I tell another person, I feel stronger and sleep a little more soundly. It takes an enormous amount of energy to guard such a big secret. I’ve endured years of misery and gone to enormous lengths to live a lie. I was certain that my world would fall apart if anyone knew. And yet when I acknowledged my sexuality I felt whole for the first time.”

The boldness of Collins’s statement was also due to its timing. He was a free agent at the tail end of his career and was taking a risk that he would never play again. What team would be the first to sign a gay player? Especially when they could hide behind his advanced age (34) to dodge charges of homophobia? After waiting for 50 games, the Brooklyn Nets finally called, signing him in 2014. Upon joining the team, he wore number 98 in tribute to Matthew Shepard, the gay teen tortured and murdered in a horrific hate crime in 1998.

I contacted Cyd Zeigler, the legendary cofounder of Outsports for comment, and he said to me, “The world knows Jason Collins for coming out, but the LGBTQ community and the NBA family know him for being out. Not just for that historic moment of courage he showed with the SI cover, but for marching in the parades, for showing up for the fundraisers, for working with the youth and doing it every time, even as he battled cancer, with a genuine smile and love. Jason’s historical significance wasn’t a moment; it was the movement into which he infused his soul. We wouldn’t be where we are today without him.”

The Nets’ signing Collins was cause for relief and hope. And yet I think many of us overestimated the change that it could spark, which only makes Collins’s decision loom larger.

Looking back at my own reportage, I think that I got the relief part right, but I was overly optimistic. I thought—in a moment of victorious overexuberance—that it was going to be a turning point for all gay athletes who had to hide their true selves as the price for playing pro sports. I wrote:

For as long as I have written about this issue and as many times as I have said in recent years that “[a male player will come out] in a matter of months if not weeks,” it still hit me like a triple-shot of espresso cut with a teaspoon of Adderall. Thanks to the courage of 34-year-old NBA veteran Jason Collins, we can no longer repeat endlessly that no active male athlete in North America has ever come out of the closet. Instead we’re now able to say that we were there when our most influential cultural citadel of homophobia—the men’s locker room—was forever breached and finally received a rainbow makeover on its unforgiving grey walls.

If I could go back in time, I would put an arm around the shoulder of my 2014 self and say, “Calm down, champ.”

I wasn’t alone in thinking that we were about to see more male athletes come out. I quoted LGBTQ icon Martina Navratilova, who had joyfully commented about the liberatory example that Collins was providing. She wrote, “Collins has led the way to freedom. Yes, freedom—because that closet is completely and utterly suffocating. It’s only when you come out that you can breathe properly.… Millions of kids will see that it is OK to be gay. No need for shame, no need for embarrassment, no need for hiding.”

Fast-forward to 2026, and Navratilova has now rebranded herself as an anti-trans zealot—no “freedom” and “breathing properly” permitted for trans kids. Her transformation shows that progress is never linear as well as just how far we still must go. The few trans people that play organized youth sports are being hounded off the playing field by the federal government and the International Olympic Committee. This hate ripples out, endangering cisgender gay kids as well.

Collins’s decision to come out didn’t cause a reckoning in the male sports world. He was unable to inspire a generation of gay, male, professional athletes—and yes, they very much exist—to join him out of the closet. The closest we came was in 2014, when linebacker Michael Sam, a lauded college player, was drafted in the seventh round (the last) but didn’t make an NFL roster. According to anonymous quotes from players and executives, homophobia thwarted his efforts. Earlier this year, in the allegedly more liberal NBA, the Chicago Bulls cut Jaden Ivey after he posted a series of homophobic diatribes on social media. Some players defended him, and not a single NBA player directly spoke out against the bile he chose to spew. No one said, “That’s not who we are.” The silence spoke volumes.

In 2013–14, Collins stood alone, and no male player in pro sports has stood up for gay rights like him in the years since. In many of the retrospectives of Collins’s life, there is no mention that Collins leaves behind his husband, Brunson Green, his partner for over a decade. Collins’s story is being erased even in death. We should appreciate the battles he fought, the lives of kids he undoubtedly saved, and the valor with which he chose to live. In the NBA, he stood alone, but by being willing to stand alone, he ended his days surrounded by love, appreciation, and the respect of a generation.

Aminah Elster recalls being told to avoid the gynecologist to protect her uterus. It wasn’t an idle warning. In different yards across California’s women’s prisons, people advised one another to avoid the gynecologist, warning that he wanted to “take their wombs.”

Between 2005 and 2013, over 850 people in California women’s prisons were sterilized. Many were not told beforehand that the procedure would leave them unable to have children.

This includes Ezekiel Teaque. While at Valley State Prison for Women, gynecologist James Heinrich told him that he had a cyst on his left ovary and recommended removing the entire organ. Seven years later, Heinrich told Teaque that he had a cyst on his remaining ovary. At the hospital, Teaque received some confusing news—the surgeon told him that his right ovary had already been removed. He never received documentation confirming whether he still had one ovary or if both had been removed. (Valley State converted to a men’s prison in 2013. Heinrich no longer works for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.)

Robbin Machuca was told by a different prison gynecologist that she had a cyst on her ovary and needed surgery to correct it. “I was young.… I didn’t know about insides and stuff like that,” she told The Nation. She consented to the procedure and later learned that she had been sterilized.

These sterilizations made headlines and sparked outrage. In 2021, after years of advocacy, the state agreed to pay $4.5 million to nearly 800 people in its women’s prisons who had undergone procedures that “could have resulted in sterilization.”

But people in women’s jails and prisons face routine reproductive injustices every day, most of which go unnoticed. And there are a series of factors that allow these injustices to continue.

Behind bars, accurate medical information is hard to come by. Providers may not explain conditions or procedures. Incarcerated patients often do not know that they can ask for more information, ask for more time before making a decision, or say no to a proposed procedure. That’s what happened to Teaque, a Black trans man who entered prison in his early 20s.

“Back then, I never thought a doctor would lie to me,” Teaque, now 54, told The Nation.

Machuca recalled thinking similarly at the time. “I trusted them because it was their field of duty,” she said.

Now both Machuca and Teaque are part of an inside-outside research team seeking to ensure that people in women’s prisons are better-informed and better-equipped to talk with medical providers about their health concerns and that appalling injustices, such as the mass sterilizations, don’t happen again.

The California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), Unapologetically HERS, and researchers with the University of California San Francisco, in collaboration with incarcerated researchers at the Central California Women’s Facility, have published Know Your Reproductive Rights in Prison. The 95-page booklet covers reproductive healthcare, such as cancer, menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, and procedures that can cause sterilization as well as informed consent, evaluating procedures, and accessing or refusing treatment. It also includes information about prison basics, such as grievances, retaliation, shackling, and strip searches.

“A gap that this booklet seeks to fill is to inform people about their rights, what they can say no to, how they can ask questions, and to give people the power to choose and make decisions on their own health care,” Aminah Elster, who spent 14 years behind bars, told The Nation, noting that many had never seen a gynecologist and had little to no experience around healthcare before their incarceration.

“People needed better tools and information because they weren’t getting it from their doctor,” said Jen James, a researcher with UC San Francisco and a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. “They needed better information about how to talk to their doctor.”

Know Your Reproductive Rights in Prison is grounded in reproductive justice, a Black feminist framework advancing the right to maintain bodily autonomy, to have or not have children, and to parent children in safe and sustainable communities. “We see these rights as fundamentally incompatible with prisons,” the booklet’s authors declare. “We seek to build power among incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals, fostering collective advocacy and systemic change.”

“I was incarcerated for 30 years,” said Chyrl Lamar, a member of both CCWP and Unapologetically HERS. “I had no clue [tubal ligations were] happening to any of these people. It was really heartbreaking.” She learned about the sterilizations after coming home in December 2020. She joined efforts to garner reparations for sterilization survivors. The Forced or Involuntary Sterilization Compensation Program ended in 2025. “Even though they stopped giving out compensation, that shouldn’t be the end of the story,” she said.

Elster is now the cofounder and director of Unapologetically HERS, an organization led by formerly incarcerated people advancing racial and gender justice. They are among five formerly incarcerated contributors in the book.

But it’s not just their experiences that informed the book and the process. Unapologetically HERS has a program that trains people inside women’s prisons on participatory action research. Five people incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility, including Teaque and Machuca, learned data analysis and coding. They also identified the reproductive justice issues that were important to them, created a survey, and then surveyed their peers.

Initially denied compensation, Teaque appealed and was ultimately granted compensation. When he learned about the participatory research program, he applied, hoping to use his own experiences and hard-won knowledge to help others. Teaque chose to focus on sterilizations. From his 35 years in prison, he already knew who had been imprisoned when sterilizations were happening and began by interviewing them, asking if they had understood the forms they were signing and the procedures they were scheduled for. Again and again, the answer was no.

Machuca surveyed the people at her prison job and at groups. She gathered people together and asked them about their reproductive history—pregnancies, abortions, live births, menstruation. She had done some research methodology while enrolled in college classes through Fresno State, but this was the first time she was putting these skills to use.

Leesa Nomura, who is also formerly incarcerated and now an organizer with CCWP, recalled connecting with younger women who had been in the system since they were teenagers or even younger. She noted that many had been incarcerated from a young age—in group homes and juvenile detention and later, to county jails and state prison. In none of these institutional settings were they taught about their body or reproductive health, making them extremely vulnerable to being pressured into procedures such as sterilization. “There’s no way to survive in there unless we know what our rights are,” she told The Nation “I’d like to see this [book] be part of every person’s intake so that the things that happened in the past aren’t repeated.”

To that end, the book includes advocacy tools as well as penal codes, laws, and rights pertaining to reproductive rights. “People inside definitely need the penal code [which governs how California’s state prisons operate] to assert their rights,” said Vrindavani Avila, a doula and CCWP member.

Lamar hopes that the book encourages more people to be proactive about their health rather than relying on medical authorities. “I learned that at an early age, and I think this booklet is going to be very helpful for them,” she said.

The process of creating the book has also had intangible effects.

Being part of this research, Teaque said, “has given me purpose, confidence, and the drive to educate myself on things that have to do with our rights. Knowledge is power, and I realize how many people are lacking the knowledge needed to change things.”

For Machuca, the book is a tool to combat reproductive injustice. “How can we stop this from happening and how can this never happen again?” she said. “We could work together to stop the harm.”

Proceeds from book sales pay for sending free copies to incarcerated people.

For several years now, Jewish communal leaders and institutions have been warning of a precipitous rise in antisemitism in the United States—and for several years, I’ve been skeptical. Much of what has been labeled “antisemitism” is actually just energetic opposition to Israel in response to its apartheid regime in the West Bank and its ongoing genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League and thus the ostensible leading authority on what constitutes antisemitism, has made crystal clear that he regards anti-Zionism and antisemitism as indistinguishable; on his watch, the ADL has cheered the Trump administration’s crackdown on Palestine activism on college campuses, the biggest wave of federal repression against academic speech since the McCarthy era. Other alleged authorities—from Joe Biden’s former antisemitism envoy Deborah Lipstadt to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to CBS News’ Bari Weiss—have consistently asserted that waving a Palestinian flag while chanting “from the river to the sea” is the functional equivalent of an antisemitic hate crime.

I’ve certainly encountered my share of antisemitic invective on the Internet, and I’ve been horrified by incidents like the fatal 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville and the 2018 Tree of Life massacre, in which a white supremacist murdered 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue. But at no point in my 42 years have I felt seriously threatened or discriminated against as a Jew in the United States. I find the idea that federal agents could arrest Mahmoud Khalil and detain him without trial for more than three months—causing him to miss the birth of his first child—to be incalculably more disturbing than anything Khalil ever said about Israel on the Columbia campus (which I don’t find disturbing at all), and my attitude toward the many Jewish leaders who disagree is best described as contempt.

But in recent months, it’s become difficult to deny that overt antisemitism is spiking, albeit not in the way Jewish communal leaders have been warning. A signal moment came last October, when Tucker Carlson hosted the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who has praised Adolf Hitler and condemned “global Jewry,” for a friendly interview. Though Carlson faced considerable backlash from across the political spectrum, he stuck to his guns, and his profile has only grown, as have those of other unambiguously antisemitic right-wing influencers like Candace Owens and Dan Bilzerian. Carlson’s fans include a substantial portion of the MAGA right, which shares both his hostility to Israel and to Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war with Iran. He’s also earned occasional props from some on the left who, while sometimes acknowledging Carlson’s more problematic positions, also credit him with a willingness to hold Israel accountable in a way that is all but absent on mainstream TV news.

Two much-circulated Carlson interviews earlier this year—with US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee in February and with the editor in chief of The Economist in March—drew conditional praise from influential progressives like Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan and former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss. Both credited Carlson with posing tough questions about Israel that rarely get asked on TV. And they’re not wrong. CNN’s lead anchors, for instance, include Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, both of whom are unapologetic Zionists and both of whom consider that ideological stance to be consistent with their positioning as neutral and objective reporters.The pro-Israel orientation of much mainstream media has been obvious for years, long before it emerged that Bari Weiss might become Bash and Tapper’s boss.

But even as Carlson raises legitimate and well-articulated criticisms of Israeli violence and lawlessness, he sprinkles his commentary with talking points that mingle barely disguised white supremacy with a winking antisemitism. In an Economist interview, Carlson said: “I’m in no sense a Zionist. I don’t want any country to be destroyed at all, and I don’t want people to die, particularly ones who committed no crime, because I don’t believe in killing innocents, period”—which is a laudable statement any left-wing anti-Zionist might endorse verbatim. But he immediately followed up with: “That’s the basis of Western civilization. Eastern civilization, it’s a whole different view. They believe in collective punishment, I don’t.” Besides being vague (What is “Eastern civilization”? Does it include Israel, which is often and reasonably cast by its critics as a European-derived settler society, and if so, is the implication that Jews are “Eastern”?) and flatly inaccurate (collective punishment has been practiced countless times by Western societies), Carlson clearly intends to signal to ideological racists that his anti-Zionism is compatible with their twisted worldview.

Fuentes, meanwhile, has gone further, explicitly linking “organized Jewry” with Israel and its hypnotic control of American conservatism, to the point of sending white Christian men to die in its wars. “My problem with Trump is not that he’s Hitler,” Fuentes has said. “My problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler.” Fuentes effectively endorses violence against Jews writ large, using the rhetoric of anti-Zionism while collapsing any distinction between Zionism and Judaism.

The elite media’s failure to cover Israel objectively and air progressive anti-Zionist viewpoints has left a wide lane open for bad-faith demagogues like Carlson and Fuentes to exploit, as have the myriad failures of the Democratic leadership. As the world’s major human rights groups have one by one validated what anyone with access to social media can see with their own eyes—that Israel has spent the better part of three years indiscriminately slaughtering the Palestinians of Gaza—establishment forces that refuse to acknowledge the same reality have undermined their own credibility. It’s no wonder that so many people are now open to viewpoints that were once considered fringe, and in some cases for good reason.

But it is also impossible to reckon with the growing influence of the antisemitic right without considering how the bulk of Jewish institutions have themselves have insisted that Judaism and Zionism are synonymous. In mainstream Jewish denominations and organizations, Zionist hegemony is near total. Park East Synagogue, the large Modern Orthodox congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, hosts events selling parcels of illegally occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank, and when activists gather outside to protest, the Democratic governor of New York tries to criminalize their speech while branding it as antisemitic. This unapologetic embrace of Israel is by no means limited to Orthodox Jews; both the Conservative and the Reform movements are committed to Zionism at the highest levels, which means the vast majority of synagogues in America are actively engaged in the Zionist project. Temple Israel in suburban Michigan, the largest Reform synagogue in the country, has the flag of Israel in its logo and markets an event on its website where congregants can register to stay in a five-star hotel in Tel Aviv and mingle with IDF soldiers; and while absolutely none of this justifies the attack on it in March, it’s also impossible to justify on its own terms.

The awkward truth is that no one is more responsible for conflating Israel and Zionism with Jews and Judaism than Jewish leaders themselves. For decades, mainstream Jewish institutions have insisted that to be Jewish is to support Israel and to criticize Israel is to attack Jews. Now, in 2026, Israel is widely and accurately seen as committing crimes against humanity in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and southern Lebanon, not to mention as having dragged the United States into an illegal and strategically inept war against Iran that has driven up fuel and food costs worldwide. None of this excuses violence against Jewish civilians or their places of worship. But it does make both much likelier. And by treating left-wing Palestine activists as no different from literal Nazis like Fuentes, Jewish leaders have cheapened the very concept of antisemitism and created space for the real thing to flourish.

“Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing. It will simply not be possible to treat it as a marginal viewpoint that can be shamed or shunned into invisibility,” Ezra Klein, hardly a radical, recently opined in The New York Times. “If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.”

He’s right, and the corollary is that in backing Israel’s morally indefensible conduct, Jewish institutions have also directly made every Jew on earth less safe. That includes those of us who have argued tirelessly against Israel and Zionism, have warned of this exact danger, and have faced ostracism and alienation from our own communities for doing so. To paraphrase one of our ancient prophets in exile, all of us will reap the whirlwind.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

The Democratic Party is reeling. The Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which functionally disabled the Voting Rights Act, has spurred a new wave of Jim Crow gerrymandering all throughout the South. Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Tennessse are all moving quickly to redraw their maps ahead of the midterm elections and make sure that Black people who live in those states have no opportunity to elect a representative of their choosing.

Democrats had hoped to offset the loss of Black representation by heavily gerrymandering states where they control the legislature, but a ruling from the Virginia State Supreme Court struck down one of those aggressive Democratic gerrymanders. That ruling was unhinged: By a 4–3 majority, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Virginia legislature didn’t follow proper procedures for amending the state Constitution to create a new map. Not only was the court’s reasoning spurious, but it also blithely overlooked the fact that this new map was recently approved by a voter referendum.

As unconscionable as the ruling was, it seems to have finally delivered a long overdue memo to Democratic politicians: Republican-controlled courts will allow Republicans to gerrymander their way to victory but won’t allow Democrats to do the same thing.

It’s a memo Democrats should have received at least 26 years ago, after Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as president without even bothering to count all of the ballots in the state of Florida. Republican-controlled courts are against the idea of Democrats and especially Black people holding political power, and they will do everything in their considerable power to prevent that from happening. Republican judges are not concerned with laws or precedents or facts or fairness. They are concerned with winning. There is no intellectual consistency to Republican court rulings beyond one maxim: Republicans Always Win.

Watching the Democrats attempt to internalize this reality over the past week has been like watching Wile E. Coyote suddenly realize he’s run off a cliff. There’s a lot of flapping and thrashing but nothing that amounts to a real plan.

Virginia Democrats have provided a particularly good illustration of this arm-flapping. They’ve put forward a couple of ideas and acted on one: On Monday, they filed a lawsuit asking the US Supreme Court to overrule the decision of the state Supreme Court. The case amounts to a request for the Supreme Court to rule that the state legislature has the final say over how to amend the Virginia Constitution—and that the state Supreme Court overstepped its bounds by overruling the legislature.

The problem, aside from the now-obvious fact that the Republican justices on the court want Republicans in Virginia to win, is that the Supreme Court already kind of answered this question in 2023, in a case called Moore v. Harper. In that case, the Republicans were the ones arguing for more power by floating what lawyers call the “independent state legislature” theory, which is the idea that state legislatures, not courts, have the final say on election rules. The Supreme Court rejected that argument, with Chief Justice John Roberts, alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joining the liberal block, and we should be very happy that they did. The independent state legislature theory is a way for red-state legislatures to block constitutional protections, not enforce them.

Virginia won’t win this lawsuit in front of this Supreme Court—and if it did, it would be bad, because literally every red state in the country could then make up its own election rules without any oversight from the judicial branch. That is how you go from gerrymandered maps to simply throwing out Democratic votes cast in a presidential election. Using independent state legislature theory is like using a nuke to kill a virus: It probably won’t work, and now you have the original virus, nuclear fallout, and whatever radiation-resistant strain of the virus you just created.

The other idea from Virginia Democrats is more promising and less dangerous. They’ve proposed lowering the mandatory retirement age for the state Supreme Court from 75 to 54, which is the age of the youngest judge currently on the court. This would allow Virginia Democrats to get rid of nearly the whole court and replace it with judges more responsive to the will of the people.

When the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court, scorning judicial precedent and legislative mandate, voted to gut the Voting Rights Act—the capstone legislation of the civil rights movement—the effect was predictable and predicted. Republicans in Tennessee rushed to eliminate the sole congressional district represented by an African American. Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina are scrambling to join them. The disgraceful decision kicked off what will be a concerted effort to reduce African American representation in the nation’s legislative bodies—federal, state, and local.

The gang of six on the Supreme Court served as willing collaborators in what is now a systematic right-wing offensive to roll back the progress wrought not only by the civil rights movement but also all of the civilizing movements of our time—the women’s movement, the LGBT movement, and more. This assault, spearheaded by an authoritarian president, is waged on many fronts. In the courts, the Department of Justice has turned from opening doors to slamming them shut to protect the privilege of white men. On the streets, masked thugs terrorize people of color, particularly communities of Hispanics, Haitians, Somalis, and other immigrants. The full force of the administration is mobilized to eradicate programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in government, corporations, and universities. Public museums, national parks, libraries, and monuments are censored to erase the oppression suffered and the contributions made by African Americans and other people of color.

We’ve suffered this form of reaction before. After the Civil War, after passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments outlawing slavery and guaranteeing equal protection under the law, the Congress launched the reconstruction of the Confederate states. With former slaves gaining the right to vote, multiracial coalitions helped write some of the most enlightened state Constitutions in our history, guaranteeing universal public education, democratic elections, and more.

The reaction was fierce and unrelenting. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized former slaves seeking to vote. Disinformation campaigns spread lies about Black leaders. Upon regaining control, plantation legislators passed “black codes,” effectively using debt bondage to shackle the newly freed slaves. The Supreme Court provided its imprimatur in Plessy v. Ferguson, which, to the lasting shame of the court, ratified segregation, Jim Crow, the American version of apartheid. It took almost another century before the civil rights movement brought that injustice to an end.

We celebrate that movement and its leaders—Dr. Martin Luther King and SCLC, John Lewis and SNCC, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, and more. Jesse Louis Jackson and the drive to register millions of African Americans to blunt the Reagan reaction. And we should never forget that the movement succeeded because ordinary people risked their lives, suffered arrest and beatings and murders, to force the change. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were great presidents, but it was people of conscience—ministers, rabbis and priests, whites and Blacks, farmers and seamstresses, the young and the old—joining together who challenged the horror, exposed the unconscionable, and roused the country to demand change.

This lesson informs our actions today. We will not allow this new reaction to succeed or to last for generations. We will mobilize now—as the citizens of Minneapolis showed—and challenge those who would try to roll back the progress that we have made.

At Rainbow PUSH, we will organize to meet this fierce reaction with a renewed movement for reconstruction. On June 10–13, we will convene a gathering—“Fulfilling the American Promise to Its People”—when we will lay out plans to launch a massive voter registration and mobilization drive, targeted on those states and localities that seek to erase minority representation. Their insult will not discourage us, it will arouse us. Incumbent Republicans will find that instead of gaining seats, they may be putting their own seats at risk.

Build a broad coalition across lines of race, religion, and region to educate and mobilize voters. We will convene faith leaders, grassroots organizers, youth activists, influencers, and public scholars, partnering with civil rights, labor, disability rights, and women’s and immigrant justice organizations to build a powerful movement for justice.

Combat disinformation at the local level by sponsoring community teach-ins, hosting public forums, and partnering with schools and universities to strengthen civic literacy. Counter the efforts to whitewash our history by challenging censorship, while educating today’s activists about the long struggle for enfranchisement—from Reconstruction to this generation’s civilizing movement.

Demand legislative action—at the federal, state, and local level—to strengthen voting rights. Push the Congress to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and drive state reforms to protect voting rights and repeal voter suppression measures. Call for expanding the Supreme Court to counter the increasingly partisan and arbitrary lawlessness of the entrenched right-wing majority. Coalesce to drive reforms to address economic inequality and entrenched poverty, the unfinished agenda of the civil rights movement.

On May 5, the 76th annual Sidney Hillman Awards ceremony was held in New York City. Honoring excellence in journalism in service of the common good, the prize for book journalism was awarded to Michelle Adams for her book The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. Integration remains under siege today, as we witness the Trump administration and Trump court whitewashing history, attacking diversity programs, and cementing educational inequality; Adams’s book becomes an ever more important chronicle of an enduring legal and historical quest for a more perfect union.

Thank you. I’m deeply honored to receive the Hillman Prize and grateful to the Sidney Hillman Foundation for this recognition.

I want to tell you a story about democracy.

When I was writing The Containment, I went back to Detroit—my hometown—and to the case that became Milliken v. Bradley.

The story begins with a group of Black parents and the Detroit branch of the NAACP.

One of them was Virda Bradley, who simply wanted her children to have access to equal educational opportunity in a system that had deliberately denied it.

They brought a lawsuit challenging segregation in the public schools—insisting that what many people treated as accident or preference was, in fact, the result of government action.

In doing so, they forced a conversation that the city—and the country—had not been willing to have.

They put facts on the table. They made claims on the Constitution. They insisted on being heard.

And they were joined—sometimes quietly, sometimes at real cost—by white suburban residents who were willing to imagine a more integrated metropolitan future.

On April 14, 2026, Trump’s Justice Department filed papers asking an appeals court to erase the convictions for “seditious conspiracy” from the criminal records of a dozen rioters who led the planning for the January 6 insurrection. Those convictions resulted from the most serious charges made after January 6, against the masterminds of the operation. All members of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, these insurrectionists had had their sentences commuted, but now, the DOJ is asking that their convictions also be wiped clean from their records. That same day, in a different court, the DOJ also filed paperwork indicating another J6 rioter, David Daniel, plans to plead guilty to sexually abusing two children, one under the age of 12, as well as possession of child pornography.

Daniel had been pardoned by Trump on his first day back in office in January 2025—one of nearly 1,600 insurrectionists convicted or facing pending charges in connection with the Capitol insurrection. Four months before Trump retook office, a magistrate court judge wrote in a court report that evidence in the case against Daniel was “compelling and suggests Defendant engaged in sexual acts with two young girls in his own family,” while also noting that Daniel was alleged to have taken and “kept photos of the genitalia of the victims.” Two months later, in a November 2024 affidavit, investigators confirmed that sexually explicit pictures of both minor girls had been found on Daniel’s electronic devices. Then Trump was inaugurated, and Daniel received what the White House describes as “a full, complete and unconditional pardon.” He remains in jail at the orders of the magistrate, who noted “the mother of one victim (Defendant’s ex-wife) appeared in court to request that Defendant not be released” and that, with two siblings in Mexico, he presents a flight risk.

But Daniel isn’t an outlier. Roughly 40 insurrectionists have been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for crimes that have nothing to with their actions on January 6, according to The New York Times. At least 12 of those insurrectionists were arrested after being pardoned by Trump. A December 2025 investigative report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington found that six insurrectionists have been charged with sex crimes involving children. Five have been charged with drunk driving—two of them having killed other motorists. Five were arrested for illegal weapons possession, including two who had rap sheets with domestic violence charges. And two have been arrested for rape.

Most of the discussion about J6 centers on how destructive Trump and the MAGA movement have been to core American principles and virtues, including democracy, racial justice, and political civility. But there is also a conversation to be had that is less about principles than people—that is, the flesh-and-blood victims and survivors of harms inflicted by so many of those involved in January 6. Some were hurt by future Capitol rioters before January 6, others in the years between the insurrection and Trump’s pardons. Still others were hurt after the president’s blanket clemency. Just days after Trump retook office, NPR reported that pardoned rioters had started “whipping each other up online with increasingly dire threats” against prosecutors, FBI agents, and Capitol law enforcement who were securing convictions for rioters. One official told the outlet that mistrust of Trump’s DOJ meant most of the rioters’ targets were “already not reporting these threats, because we don’t think they’ll care—unless and until one of us gets killed.” A federal prosecutor stated, “Never have I felt less safe than with these defendants.”

Those fears were justified—as were warnings that Trump’s pardons would embolden the already lawless insurrectionists, convincing them they were immune to criminal consequences. Julie Farnam, who on January 6, 2021, was serving as assistant director of Intelligence for the Capitol Police, told HuffPost last month that the pardons removed reasons for bad actors to “play by the book.”

“I think people who have nefarious intentions are kind of thinking the same thing, and a lot of people will feel now they can get away with bad things, especially in the political realm and politically motivated violence,” Farnam told the outlet.

Indeed, insurrectionist Edward Kelley, while free and awaiting trial for crimes committed on January 6, compiled a “kill list” of roughly 40 FBI agents and other people who worked on his case. He “formed a self-styled militia,” according to prosecutors, and “conducted combat drills to realize his plan” of murdering targets in their homes and in public places, such as movie theaters, using car bombs and drones. At trial, Kelley’s lawyers argued that the Trump pardon should also cover his murder plot.

In that case, Trump and his DOJ declined to repardon him for his murderous plot, and in July 2025, Kelley was sentenced to life in prison. But Trump has, in two other cases, pardoned insurrectionists convicted of other crimes, giving victims valid reasons to worry about who might be next. Dan Wilson, who was convicted of a felony before the insurrection, had again been convicted for illegal possession of six guns and roughly 5,000 rounds of ammo that cops found when they searched his house as part of the January 6 investigation. Trump pardoned him for those gun charges; Wilson’s attorney said the pardon “shatters this sham conviction stemming from the January 6 witch hunt.” Susan Ellen Kaye was sentenced to 18 months for a social-media message in which she threatened to shoot FBI agents investigating her attendance at the insurrection. Trump’s DOJ dropped charges against both, offering little reason for confidence in others who were threatened.

Even before Trump returned to office, the GOP’s historically revisionist lionizing of insurrectionists must have been a bitter pill for their victims—of whom, we’re learning, there were many. The pardons only made it worse. This is not an administration invested in abolition, pairing pardons with reparative justice. It’s an otherwise hyperpunitive regime that regularly uses the full weight of its powers against immigrants, political opponents, and marginalized groups. For survivors of crimes committed by insurrectionists, the contrast is probably startling. Former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn spoke to that anger directly in June 2025, amid the administration’s violent, militarized crackdown on Los Angeles protesters—whom the president labeled “bad people” and “insurrectionists.”

“Trump thinks anything done in his name is OK. January 6 was done in his name, so our officers don’t matter,” he told CBS, also noting, “People are still traumatized by January 6. Not just the officers. Everyone who watched it. That hasn’t changed.”

First, the good news: If you are in the United States, you are not going to catch the hantavirus. At least, you’re not going to catch the strain of the pathogen that’s been in the news lately.

That strain is known as the “Andes” variant, so named because it has previously been confined to South America. To repeat: It is not coming for us. We do have our own, made-in-the-USA hantavirus strain, called the “Sin Nombre” virus. It’s transmitted by inhalation of aerosolized rodent feces, urine or saliva and has caused under 1,000 cases since it was identified back in 1993, with the highest number of cases in the Southwest. If you live in New Mexico, Arizona, or Colorado, the risk of acquiring the virus when cleaning out a shed or garage is low but nontrivial. Put on an N-95 mask and wash your hands if you’re concerned. Otherwise? You’re going to be fine.

While the Andes virus has been known to spread by human-to-human contact, the exposed individuals in the United States from the outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius have been sequestered for now at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center/Nebraska Medicine in Omaha or at Emory University’s Serious Communicable Diseases unit in Atlanta. Once they have been assessed, they will undergo a 42-day monitoring period in isolation. If they can isolate at home, that will be allowed. Will we see a few more cases? Perhaps even beyond those now in confinement? Possibly, but even so, Andes has mitigating characteristics that distinguish it from influenza or SARS-CoV-2, and prolonged, close personal contact is required for transmission. All in all, large-scale outbreaks are now unlikely given the control measures in place.

That’s the good news. Now for the not-so-good news.

This is a dry run for any new or known pathogen with pandemic potential. And today, the people who would be in charge of managing such a pandemic are the worst possible people: from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services, to Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to Russell Vought in the White House.

Together, these men have left the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy vacant; have shuttered 10 of the Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases meant to study zoonotic pathogens that jump from animals to humans, like hantavirus; gutted the STOP Spillover Project, a USAID-funded network that tracked “menacing animal viruses across seven countries”; put a hold on research at the Integrated Research Facility in Frederick, Maryland, which studies high-risk pathogens; left key posts at CDC with acting directors including the Division of High-Consequence Pathogens; wound down mRNA vaccine research, which is one of the platforms under consideration for a hantavirus vaccine; refocused infectious disease research away from novel pathogens at NIH toward more common infections; proposed cutting funding for state and local preparedness grants to health departments and hospitals around the country; canned the CDC’s full-time cruise ship inspectors and port health workers; and we have left the World Health Organization, leaving us flying solo without a key source of international collaboration and coordinated planning.

This list is stunning in its comprehensiveness and its dangerousness. If you wanted to make Americans sitting ducks for any new pandemic, these fellas have put all the checkmarks next to the items on the to-do list for ensuring that our collective vulnerability is maximized. Then remember, RFK Jr., is a proponent of terrain theory, the idea that it’s your environment that makes you sick, not infectious diseases, and only those who are weak have anything to fear from viruses like SARS-CoV-2. Jay Bhattacharya, meanwhile, is an economist who made his name by minimizing the threat of Covid-19 based on his own flawed study, raged against infectious disease containment measures, and could barely get through an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN on hantavirus last week. And Russ Vought, the Rev. Jim Jones of the administration, is hell-bent on some apocalyptic vision of the collapse of the US in a superpower suicide from which his Christian nationalist state will rise up, making the rest of us collateral damage on the road to Dominion. For those who were dissatisfied with our national leadership during Covid and championed Trump’s dream team as heralding in a new era in American public health and biomedicine, well, how’s that working out for y’all?

So while there is a lot of chatter out there about the risk of the Andes virus, with everyone now having an opinion on the relatively rare infection and its potential for further spread, the real story is the collapse of pandemic preparedness in this country—all the public health and scientific infrastructure that has disappeared, the purge of talent, experience, and expertise that was meant to keep us safe. A new outbreak is clickbait—everyone wants to get into the mix and get a piece of the action. Those I am truly interested in hearing from are the researchers, clinicians, and epidemiologists who work on hantaviruses and emerging diseases—many of them who have seen their grants from NIH, USAID, and other federal agencies cut. Hantavirus is not the coming plague, but one is surely coming for us in the future. We’ve never been as exposed and vulnerable as we are now for when that moment arrives. That is what should frighten you to your very core.

During a phone call on a warm day in August 2002, the two of us came to an unmistakable conclusion: This bastard is going to take us into war with Iraq!

The “bastard,” of course, was then President George W. Bush, who was in the midst of an aggressive propaganda campaign about the alleged danger posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons program.

As we all know now—and many of us knew then—that program did not actually exist. The real threat to the world was sitting in the White House, not in Baghdad. And the two of us knew we had to do something about it. So, along with many other allies, we got to work, helping to form United for Peace & Justice, the largest of the coalitions that mobilized against US aggression in Iraq.

It is with this background that we offer several thoughts in response to, or, better put, inspired by Eric Blanc’s excellent recent essay on the relative lack of a movement against the war in Iran—and the compelling need to build one. To be clear: This period is very different from the early 2000s, above all because we face a genuinely fascistic MAGA movement that makes the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld group look like amateurs. But the question still remains: Both Donald Trump and the Iran War are deeply unpopular, so why has no mass movement emerged to fight this conflict?

Before discussing the strengths and failures of the last major anti-war movement, we need to step back and look at US history. What that history shows is that the inability to build and sustain an anti-war movement or mass presence is directly linked to the absence of what one might call an anti-imperial/pro-democratic foreign policy on the part of progressive movements. As a result, those who adhere to the notion of a need for peace and justice find ourselves in a Groundhog Day scenario on a regular basis, trying our best to ignite or reignite a mass movement against US aggression each time that aggression raises its ugly head.

The United States has a long history of anti-war movements, and many of them have followed a similar pattern:

• They tend to be short-lived, particularly if most Americans don’t seem to feel the impact of the war in their own lives.
• They immediately conflict with and are often overwhelmed by pro-imperial/allegedly patriotic sentiment.
• They are focused on a particular crisis rather than the imperial system

Time and space do not permit an examination of each of these points, but we would note a few.

Anti-war movements are not instrumentally initiated or connected by only one political or social force, and people who share an opposition to war don’t always do so for the same reasons. There were those, for instance, who opposed the Spanish-American War and the US war against the Philippines because they did not want to see additional people of color becoming US citizens. Other people recognized the criminality of these wars and saw in them a contradiction with the formal and stated objectives of the United States.

This lack of agreement can hamper the sustainability of an anti-war movement. Once Spain was defeated, followed 11 years later by the defeat of the Philippine resistance, the wind vanished from the sails. There was no anti-imperialist consensus that could keep the forces engaged over a longer period of time. The colonized peoples of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba became old news, and the power of Manifest Destiny appeared, to many, to justify the aggression and annexation carried out by Presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft.

After British troops had beaten German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s tank forces at the Second Battle of El Alamein in Egypt on November 4, 1942, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

The same might now be said about humanity’s struggle to defeat the dire threat of global climate change caused by our never-ending burning of fossil fuels. The illegal war of aggression on Iran, abruptly launched on February 28, 2026, by the governments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, has indeed provoked a global energy crisis of a unique kind. The Iranians, of course, responded by imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz that promptly removed about 11 percent to 13 percent of all petroleum from the world market, day after day, week after week, setting off a cascade of steeply rising prices for diesel fuel, gasoline, and natural gas.

Donald Trump’s brilliant idea of joining the blockade of that Strait should be considered the equivalent of coming to the aid of a strangulation victim by pressing a pillow over his or her face. The shortages hit first in Asia (particularly reliant on fuel flows from the Strait of Hormuz) and Africa and then in Europe. The German air carrier Lufthansa only recently cut 20,000 summer flights for fear of fuel shortages (and it will undoubtedly prove all too typical). Nor will the United States, despite having its own supplies of oil, escape such negative developments. While there have been oil price crunches before, as in the 1970s and 1980s, this one is different. It’s a watershed moment globally, heralding the Ragnarök—the Norse “twilight of the gods”—of petroleum.

Forced to Run on One Engine

While American drivers have been complaining this spring about high prices at the pump, in the Netherlands and Denmark consumers are already paying the stunning equivalent of around $10 a gallon. In Asia, where reliance on petroleum that travels through the Strait of Hormuz is enormous, the situation is far worse, since there are already distinct shortages of fuel of a staggering and still growing kind. Philippines President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., recently declared a national energy emergency, as his country had only a little over a month’s worth of petroleum left. Hundreds of gas stations, nearly 3 percent of the country’s total, announced temporary closures, resulting in long lines at those that remained open.

South Korea, which unwisely dragged its feet when it came to turning to green energy, is now scrambling to find just three months’ supply of petroleum from non-Hormuz sources, but the world’s 10th-largest economy faces a potential economic cataclysm. The government has already restricted parking for commuters. The rise in gasoline costs has led many consumers to simply stay home if they can, spurring a buying spree of novels and video games. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung, a human rights lawyer, implicitly blamed Israel’s blatant disregard for International Humanitarian Law for the calamity, engaging in a days-long internet flame war with Tel Aviv in early April.

In Bangladesh, the state-owned Eastern Refinery has been forced to close due to a lack of crude oil to process. Meanwhile, the government has allowed gasoline and diesel prices to rise by 11 percent to 15 percent, putting pressure on the costs of transportation, agricultural production, and consumer items, while creating endless lines for what gasoline remains. With boat operators, ferries, and fishing boats unable to secure enough diesel fuel for their motors, a whole range of livelihoods are being hurt. As Al Jazeera reported, Bangladeshi ferry operator Abir Hussain typically offered this complaint: “We are struggling to maintain our regular schedule. We are forced to run on just one engine to conserve diesel, due to the fuel shortages.”

Heavily dependent on fossil gas for its electricity plants, Bangladesh has already suffered widespread outages, harming factories and schools—and, of course, even if the Strait of Hormuz were to reopen soon, the pain throughout Asia is likely to be long-lasting.

Stagflation

Oil price crises are hardly new. Because of a boycott of Europe and the United States by Arab oil producers during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the rising power of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel, the price of petroleum actually quadrupled between 1970 and 1980. That energy crisis produced economic malaise in the United States, where the economy became afflicted with “stagflation”—both stagnation and inflation, two phenomena not usually found together.

So much capital flowed to the oil states of the Persian Gulf then, particularly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iran, that President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger schemed to avoid deflation in the United States by pressuring those countries to buy enormous amounts of American military equipment. Over the decades, that oil-arms nexus would drive the United States toward ever more ruinous conflicts in the Gulf region, since arms manufacturers and oil companies, two of the more influential corporate sectors in American politics, had a motive for lobbying repeatedly to get Washington to intervene there. And of course, their behind-the-scenes pressure to continue the country’s forever wars in that region would be bolstered by the Israel Lobby.

The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1978–79, the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88, the Gulf War of 1990–91, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 were all further shocks to the energy system. The major industrialized countries responded to such challenges by increasing their fuel efficiency, while switching to nuclear power, coal, and natural gas for ever more of their electricity and heating. In the United States, in part because of government regulation, the average passenger car went from a fuel efficiency of 13.5 miles per gallon in 1975 to 27.5 miles per gallon by 1985, while global per capita use of petroleum declined after the 1970s oil shock and has never recovered.

The Great Hormuz Fuel Crisis

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Asuper PAC dedicated to reelecting Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine recently put nearly $2 million behind television and YouTube ads attacking likely Democratic candidate Graham Platner. The spots, which began airing more than a month before the June 9 Democratic primary, focus exclusively on decade-old personal social-media posts and a tattoo Platner got as a young man and has since covered up. There is no discussion of policy, voting records, or Platner’s platform as a Marine veteran running as a working-class populist. Instead, the ads—focused on the theme “Who Is The Real Graham Platner?”—center entirely on personal attacks, financed largely by out-of-state billionaires and Republican-aligned “dark money” groups seeking to preserve Collins’s seat and the GOP Senate majority.

With Governor Janet Mills recently withdrawing from the Democratic primary citing insufficient financial resources to compete with Platner, the November contest will present a stark contrast between the populist challenger and incumbent Senator Collins. As one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, the contest is expected to be pivotal to determining control of the upper chamber, with Democrats viewing a Platner victory as their best opportunity for flipping the Senate.

The group behind the ads is Pine Tree Results PAC, a super PAC formed in early 2025 that has raised $12.7 million through the end of March, almost entirely from wealthy individuals, corporations, and dark-money nonprofits. Federal Election Commission records show its funding comes from some of the country’s most prominent Republican donors from private equity, oil, media, and conservative dark-money networks. None of it comes from Maine voters.

The single largest donor is Stronger America, Inc., a conservative nonprofit based out of Arlington, Virginia, that is led by longtime Republican operative and former Senate counsel Paul Cooksey. The group gave $3 million to Pine Tree Results in December, and it has also given at least $400,000 this cycle to a pro–Susan Collins super PAC called Stronger Maine. As a 501c(4) social welfare group, Stronger America is not required to release information about its donors.

Pine Tree Results PAC did not respond to requests for comment about its donors, ad strategy, or the funding sources behind Stronger America, Inc.

Stephen Schwarzman, cofounder and CEO of private-equity giant Blackstone, is Pine Tree Results’ second-largest donor, with a contribution of $2 million. Schwarzman has long been one of the Republican Party’s biggest financial backers and a leading defender of the carried-interest tax loophole that lets private equity executives pay lower capital gains rates on much of their income. He also gave $2 million to a pro-Collins super PAC in 2020.

In 2017, Collins briefly proposed reining in the carried-interest loophole to help fund childcare credits, only to back down the next day before providing a key vote for the final tax bill that preserved it. Schwarzman’s latest $2 million donation was made on June 27, 2025, one day before Collins cast a key vote on a procedural motion to advance Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill containing further private-equity protections.

The Collins campaign did not respond to requests for comment about the Pine Tree Result PAC’s donors or the timing of Schwarzman’s contribution.

Lexington Fund, a nonprofit that shares an address with organizations tied to Leonard Leo, the conservative judicial activist who influenced Trump’s Supreme Court picks, donated $1 million last June. Leo owns a home in Bar Harbor, Maine, and in 2019 hosted a fundraiser for Collins after she had voted to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom Leo had personally lobbied for. Lexington Fund is led by Oramel H. Skimmer, a former solicitor general of Arizona and the executive director of Alliance for Consumers, a Leo-tied group that fights against consumer protection laws and class actions against corporations, including climate change lawsuits against oil companies.

Condorcet Initiative Corp, another Virginia-based nonprofit, contributed $250,000.01 to Pine Tree Results in June 2025. The group is led by Staci Goede, a longtime Republican campaign treasurer and the former chief financial officer of the Republican State Leadership Committee. Incorporation documents list Goede as owner of the home address of Ardleigh Impact Corporation, another dark-money entity that has been the subject of an FEC complaint from the Campaign Legal Center alleging that it operated as a straw donor to hide the true sources of its contributions. The complaint remains open.

“Aspeech that should have begun with ‘sorry’” was how veteran Labour politician Emma Lewell summarized Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s speech today. The intervention was briefed by the prime minister’s spin doctors as the moment to draw a line under Thursday’s excruciating election results and to “show Labour values.”

But for Lewell, whose northeast seat of South Shields saw Labour lose in every single council seat they stood for, it was “written in the same internal echo chamber that got us into this mess.” Lewell, who has joined more than 50 Labour MPs calling for Starmer’s resignation, is not the only one reeling from the scale of Labour’s collapse. Across its heartlands, the tremors were felt. In Wigan, a northern English former mining town represented by senior Labour minister Lisa Nandy, 24 of 25 seats went to Reform UK.

It was the party of Nigel Farage, the stockbroker and fawning Trump supporter, that stole the headlines, sweeping up practically all contested seats in solidly Labour northern English areas such as Tameside, Redditch, and Halton.

They became the largest party in Kirklees, an historic socialist stronghold, and in Hartlepool—the former seat of Peter Mandelson, the repeatedly disgraced Labour grandee whose closeness with Jeffrey Epstein was ignored by Starmer loyalists to gift him the ambassador’s role in Washington, DC, and whose name was often mentioned alongside threats of physical violence from voters against door-knocking Labour campaigners.

In Scotland and Wales, where votes for national assemblies were being held, the collapse was generalized. A lackluster campaign from Welsh Labour couldn’t escape the anger over Vaughan Gething, the former Starmerite first minister, who resigned after it was revealed that he lobbied environmental regulators to ease restrictions on the company of a businessman convicted of dumping waste into Welsh waters—but from whom Gething accepted £200,000.

Such sleaze saw Wales, a country whose working class provided a bedrock of Britain’s labor movement for centuries, finally abandoning Labour. Gething’s successor, Eluned Morgan, made an historic first in losing her seat while in office. In Merthyr, where the red flag was first flown in 1831, Labour was left with a single seat, with three for social-democratic nationalists Plaid Cymru and two for Reform. The same was true in Scotland; in areas recently so safe for Labour that its major rivals were communist upstarts, leader Anas Sarwar oversaw the party’s worst result since the start of devolution in 1999, as the Scottish National Party enjoyed a landslide.

For the Greens, who have often beaten Labour in opinion polls and skyrocketed in membership under the self-styled “ecopopulist” Zack Polanski, the results were modest compared to Reform’s, but just as psychologically damaging to Labour. In Manchester, effectively a one-party Labour state for decades, the Greens took 18 of 32 seats. In London, the Greens won five councils, including Lambeth, the south London borough long considered to be a breeding ground for Blairite cadre, and where Starmer’s top aide Morgan McSweeney cut his political teeth.

Starmer’s political indecision can be significantly blamed for Labour’s free fall. After gaining a historic parliamentary majority of 165 less than two years ago, Starmer is one of the most unpopular prime ministers in history. Immensely popular policies such as wealth taxes and rent controls have been considered and shelved, while the government has consistently watered down long-anticipated legislation such as the Employment Rights Act so as to radically weaken its transformative edge.

Since its founding in New York in 1998, the Working Families Party has tested a proposition that many Black voters are led to dismiss outright: Political power does not need to be tethered to permanent loyalty to the Democratic Party. Founded in New York in 1998, the WFP has pursued a strategy rooted in labor organizing, fusion voting, and independent ballot lines—methods designed not to replace the two-party system overnight but to exploit its vulnerabilities. Its aim was to elect more union-backed progressives—and thereby shift the Democratic coalition back in line with the interests of working people.

As voters across all demographics become increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic Party’s failure to function as an effective opposition party during Donald Trump’s extremist second term in office, the WFP’s model raises an urgent question for Black Americans in particular: Does the traditional logic of political pragmatism—holding forth the promise of incremental change in exchange for unwavering group loyalty—still make sense when the Democratic Party stops delivering change?

“What I get frustrated with,” says Colin Radix-Carter of the Independent News Network, “is mainstream commentators will say, ‘The GOP sucks. Democratic leadership sucks, but we need to vote for them.’ You can admit that the Democrats are shit, but you’re not talking about thinking of an alternative, so that we’re not relying on Democrats for things that we need. The [Congressional] Black Caucus is not going to do it for us. The politicians on both sides are not going to do it for us. We need to start talking about alternative means that will enable us to fend for ourselves. We don’t do that enough. And we aren’t having those conversations.”

Radix-Carter is right, and his comments highlight a broader pathology in contemporary Black political discourse: Critique is permitted; independence is not. As Radix-Carter noted, “We call out the problem, we recognize the problem, but the solution we say is that ‘we need to vote for the same people and party.’ And no we don’t.”

Indeed, we do not.

Black Americans have moved in near lockstep with the Democratic Party since the middle of the 20th century—a migration that began with the partial realignment of the New Deal and crystallized after the civil rights era. Black voters’ prior status as party-line voters for Republican candidates in the wake of the Civil War underlines that they, perhaps more than any other segment of the electorate, have seen their political aspirations confined within the two-party system. That’s been an abiding source of tension for Black Americans who also have long honored the legacy of community resistance harking back to the slave diaspora: to make a way out of no way.

In this broader historical context, the question facing many Black progressives isn’t whether to keep faith with the Democratic Party, but rather how we can start imagining a political future beyond it. With a reactionary Republican regime taking up the rhetoric and program of white nationalism, and unleashing death squad assaults on opponents that extend the legacy of police killings of Black citizens, this is less a theoretical quandary than an existential challenge—for both Black Americans and the fate of whatever remains of our multiracial democracy.

The Working Families Party offers one tentative answer—not by rejecting the two-party system outright but by navigating it strategically. The WFP seeks to transform movement-based reform into electoral success through the mechanism of fusion voting, which allows multiple political parties to nominate the same candidate on separate ballot lines. Fusion voting allows voters to support a candidate without having to endorse the major party that typically claims ownership of them. It is a way of registering dissent without disengagement—of signaling political independence while still influencing an election’s outcome. And by adopting provisional alliances with a major party, fusion tickets avoid the major charge levied against third-party candidacies—that they lapse into spoiler efforts that siphon votes away from Democrats, and lend support to the GOP.

“Sometimes we endorse normies [non-WFP-aligned Democratic candidates] to block a Republican,” Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, said in an interview with The Nation. “We don’t vote for the Democrats because we love the Democrats. It’s because we’re in a rigid two-party system, and the Republican Party wants to kill us.”

“We deprive Republicans of governing power everywhere that they’re trying to gain governing power because they are a threat to the human rights of everybody on this planet,” Mitchell continued, “And we advantage union-backed progressives in the Democratic Party coalition. The work we do aims to accomplish both. It’s part of our strategy.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani can reliably infuriate the ultrarich regardless of whether they live in New York City, whether his policies affect them, or whether they can spell and pronounce his name correctly. As a democratic socialist who believes the über-wealthy are paying far too little in taxes, Mamdani is able by his mere existence to send them into paroxysms of outrage and self-pity.

To listen to some of the nation’s wealthiest, you’d think Mamdani was putting them in danger of living like the average American, i.e., someone who struggles to pay higher food and gas prices, who’s increasingly at a loss to afford retirement and healthcare, and who must rely on heavy infusions of high-interest credit-card debt to get by. But no. Mamdani simply wants wealthy Gothamites to pay more taxes on pieds-à-terre worth more than $5 million. Higher taxes on second homes already exist in conservative strongholds like South Carolina and Montana, but if Mamdani adopts them in New York, the ultrarich argue, we might as well be in Soviet Russia. If they cannot have an unfair advantage in a city that’s increasingly unaffordable for middle-class people, they’ll take their ball and go home—or at least to Miami.

And what will the city do without them? They’re job creators, they argue. In a recent Financial Times story, one unnamed and aggrieved well-to-do restaurateur from Miami with a second home in Manhattan spells out the horrifying injustice of it all. “I think it’s shameful,” he said. “I provide a lot of money to people who are blue-collar workers who work for me, servers in restaurants. If we’re not there, there are going to be less people being paid.”

It’s irritating when people who claim to be enthusiastic capitalists ostensibly schooled in the basic exchange of money for labor nonetheless act as though paying workers for work is essentially charity. If this heroic wealth creator had no servers to staff his restaurants, he’d have no profits from it, either. Yet in his telling he should be applauded—and generously subsidized—for hiring people to make himself money.

Nevertheless, the idea that the wealthy benefit the city more than the city benefits them is pervasive among the billionaire and centimillionaire class. It’s rooted chiefly in their conviction that they deserve their wealth based on their superior personal merit—as well as the corollary folk belief that people who are struggling have simply made bad decisions or refused to work hard enough. In this view, hostility toward billionaires’ paying single-digit effective tax rates, or no taxes at all, thanks to a constellation of tax breaks, rigorous loophole navigation, and offshore tax shelters, is simply hostility toward success.

This worldview is on lavish display at the Washington Post editorial board, now entirely captured by the self-enamored plutocratic whims of billionaire Jeff Bezos. After scotching the paper’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris, Bezos proceeded to announce that the Post’s opinion pages would furnish a nonstop and deafening chorus of cheers for the purest libertarian caricature of laissez-faire capitalism. In an editorial published last week, the editorial board adopted the hoary argument that any criticism of capitalism—in this case, New York Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s assertion that wealth hoarding is immoral and bad for society—was simply ill-disguised envy on the part of lazy and unmotivated economic failures.

“Every self-made billionaire—and most of them are self-made—was at one point worth $999 million,” these indignant defenders of unbridled greed announced. “Was everything they did up to that point legitimate? What made the additional million immoral?” The sad truth of the matter, the Post harrumphed, is that Ocasio-Cortez “has a low opinion of human potential.”

Where to begin? For starters, most billionaires are not self-made by even the most generous definition of the term. Extreme wealth in America is almost always the product of inherited money and resources and equity appreciation far out of proportion to the individual contribution of corporate founders and executives. It’s also never accumulated without the support and contributions of workers who are not compensated nearly as well for their work (or, in some cases, even credited for it). And the whole scheme of plunder is sealed by a mammoth assortment of resources and tax breaks that the average person has no ability to take advantage of.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who likes to complain about ungrateful plebes and other foes of his model of space-conquering self-enrichment, is a classic case study in the actual social composition of the billionaire class. Musk grew up in a family that owned emerald mines in South Africa, and had some success (underwritten by massive capital infusions from well-resourced family and friends) with a company he sold to PayPal. He then used the proceeds to buy what became Tesla and Space X from their original corporate founders. Both companies were heavily subsidized by the US government via tax breaks for electronic-vehicle development, federal research grants, additional pure research that would never have been undertaken by any institution outside of the government—and oh, $38 billion in direct government funding, paid for in part by your taxes. In what alternate universe would any of this translate into a saga of “self-made” wealth?

The pernicious myth of the self-made man is a story the wealthiest like to tell themselves for the obvious reason that it flatters their vanity and minimizes their social obligations. And they’ve now somehow built it out into the fanciful dogma that all their many millions are a testament to nothing but their hard work and entrepreneurial persistence. What’s more, since most of the über-wealthy only spend time with other rich people, their vision of hard work is comically divorced from anything like actual productive labor. Instead, it’s memorialized in countless tech-libertarian propaganda outlets as a free-form combination of start-up coding marathons, hustle-bro culture, and the willingness to fail at an overcapitalized business or two in their early careers. In this version of the self-made myth, you prove your indefatigable pluck and market savvy by eating ramen for a year in your 20s while sleeping in your office.

Two years ago, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a historic parliamentary majority, returning to government after 14 years of austerity, Brexit, sleaze scandals, and a revolving door of prime ministers under Conservative rule.

The scale of Labour’s victory in terms of seats won was undeniable. But shrewd analysts noted something that the size of the majority threatened to obscure: Labour’s overall vote share had actually dropped relative to past elections. More than that, Labour’s success in flipping Tory seats was not entirely its own doing. Rather, all across the country, Reform UK, a new far-right party led by Brexiteer Nigel Farage, had systematically chipped away at Conservative votes, allowing Labour to come through the middle. In the end, Reform received the third-largest share of the votes of any party in the election, even though, thanks to the distortions of the United Kingdom’s first-past-the-post system, this breakthrough netted the party only five seats in the House of Commons.

The fact that more Reform candidates hadn’t won led some to declare that its forward march had been halted; one commentator concluded that “the British can also take comfort in the fact that their far right is nowhere [near] the levers of power.” But, as has now become all too clear, the party was just getting started.

Since then, Reform has surged in popularity and leaped over both Labour and the Conservatives in the opinion polls, which it has consistently led since the beginning of 2025. And this past week, the results from crucial elections across England, Scotland, and Wales proved that Reform is no longer a specter looming over the country’s future—it is the party of Britain’s present.

Last week’s elections—in which voters chose the members of local councils in England and the national parliaments in Wales and Scotland—were widely understood to be a referendum on the two years of Starmer’s premiership, which have been an objective disaster. Accordingly, pundits predicted a catastrophic Labour collapse. They were right.

Dragged down by the visceral loathing the entire country seems to have for Starmer, Labour suffered the worst local election defeat in its history. It lost nearly 1,500 local government seats in England and control of over 37 councils. It lost in the north, the Midlands, and the south. It lost councils and borough mayoralities in London. It lost control of the Welsh parliament, the Senedd, for the first time in its 27-year history—a drubbing that also marked the first time Labour failed to win an election of any kind in Wales in over a century. To underscore the depth of the crisis, incumbent Welsh Labour First Minister Eluned Morgan became the very first leader of a national government to lose their seat while in office in British history.

The vast majority of Labour’s losses were Reform’s gains. Reform increased its presence in local government by more than 1,400 seats, about 1,000 more than the next party. It took control of 14 councils, from Sunderland in England’s north to Suffolk and Essex (which it took from the Conservatives) in its east, to even the London borough of Havering.

Where the party didn’t gain outright control of a council, Reform candidates still made substantial inroads into constituencies previously considered safe Labour territory. It is now the second-largest party in Scotland’s Parliament (tied with Labour) and in Wales’s Senedd, finishing behind the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru, respectively.

Reform, however, was not the only cause of Labour’s collapse. The left-wing Green Party continued its astonishing ascent less than a year into Zack Polanski’s leadership, capturing the second-highest national vote share behind Reform. With a left-populist message centered on the cost-of-living crisis, opposition to the genocide in Gaza, and anti-racism, the Greens won over 400 local seats, control of five councils throughout England, and its first ever mayoralities. The party also won its first seats in the Welsh parliament, and its sister party in Scotland made historic gains as well. In a twist on the 2024 election result, it appears that the Greens’ rising popularity across the country—not just in its assumed London base—ate into Labour’s totals and, in some cases, ultimately benefited Reform.

At the time of writing, over 60 members of Parliament have called on Starmer to resign or to set a timeline for his departure—a number that appears to grow by the minute. Several factions within the Labour Party want Andy Burnham, the current mayor of Manchester, to replace Starmer. To do that, though, Burnham needs to win a seat in the House of Commons, something which Starmer has previously blocked him from being able to do.

As a result, the parliamentary Labour Party is in a state of chaos. Nobody within Starmer’s cabinet, including those with well-documented desires to replace him, like Health Secretary Wes Streeting, seems willing to make the first move against him, and no MP representing a constituency in the northeast of England has resigned their seat—something which would trigger a by-election that could provide a path for Burnham to return to Parliament, challenge Starmer, and replace him as prime minister.

We try to keep despair out of these pages, tough as the times are. That’s why I didn’t write about Friday’s Virginia Supreme Court’s decision striking down new voter-approved congressional maps for extremely dubious reasons (read Virginia political expert Carolyn Fiddler’s awesome explanation of the ruling here).

Coming after the Supreme Court (of the United States) decision invalidating Louisiana’s congressional maps for taking race into account, the Bayou State’s immediately postponing upcoming elections as a result, and Tennessee’s swift move to use the SCOTUS ruling to wipe a majority-Black congressional district literally off the political map, last week was the worst for voting rights since the court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder ruling struck down two vital sections of the Voting Rights Act. I admit to not seeing much light down this tunnel that afternoon.

Adding to my dismay on Friday, Virginia Democratic leaders came out against the court’s ruling, but seemed resigned to let its Republican majority undo the will of state voters.

“I am disappointed by the Supreme Court of Virginia’s ruling,” Governor Abigail Spanberger, a centrist who initially opposed the redistricting push, then supported it, said in a statement. “But my focus as Governor will be on ensuring that all voters have the information necessary to make their voices heard this November in the midterm elections because in those elections we—the voters—will have the final say.” Democratic House speaker Don Scott echoed Spanberger: “We respect the court.”

Let me pause here and say: I don’t respect that court, or its outcome-driven reasoning. And I am sick and tired of Democrats conceding that the only answer for various racist laws—Jim Crow redistricting, onerous voter ID, now a GOP-dominated state Supreme Court overturning the will of Virginia’s voters—is that Democrats just have to vote more and harder and better. Because that basically means Black Democrats, as well as Democrats of other races who live in multicultural districts. But mainly Black Democrats. But also, all Democrats have to work harder to jump these Jim Crow hurdles, rather than working to simply get their voters to the polls, as Republicans do. (Republican voters don’t have to go to a government office and prove they are not Nazis, Klan members, insurrectionists, or simply dyed-in-the-wool racists, for instance, before casting a vote. Perhaps they should.)

But over the weekend, it began to look like some Virginia leaders will fight for the maps voters chose. Even House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is normally a little too placid for the taste of most progressives, had taken a stronger line than some of his Virginia Democratic colleagues. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment, and it’s unprecedented in American history as far as we can tell that an actual election has been overturned by a handful of unelected judges,” Jeffries said. “We’re not going to step back. We will continue to fight back.” Now some Virginia Democrats are joining the fight.

Loudoun County Representative Suhas Subramanyam joined a call with Jeffries last weekend and said he was looking for ways to undo the ruling. “Everyone has got to have a strong stomach right now; this is a complete disaster waiting to happen if people are timid. We have Republican states ignoring their constitutions and interrupting early voting and ignoring their Supreme Courts all together. We know based on that, Republicans would explore every single option possible to move this forward.”

Ted Turner, thrice married and a notorious womanizer, had many exes, the most famous of whom was his last wife, Jane Fonda. This was also Turner’s most surprising relationship since, on paper at least, the two couldn’t have been more different. He was a buccaneer capitalist, best known for launching CNN, the world’s first 24/7 cable news channel, in 1980. Politically, he seemed an avatar of the boorish New South, prone to making ethnic jokes and deriding his media rivals in 1980 as “a bunch of pinkos.”

Fonda, by contrast, was more than pink; she was bright red, a Hollywood superstar known for her radical commitments, including her support for the Vietnamese national liberation movement, which took her to Hanoi in 1972 when the American imperialist adventure was careening toward its disastrous conclusion.

Their marriage lasted from 1991 to 2001—a decade when Turner was on top of the world, and not just because he was betrothed to one of the most talented actors in the world. CNN became the defining media outlet of its era thanks to the Gulf War of 1990–91. Prior to that conflict, skeptics had often asked if the world really needed around-the-clock news. But the Gulf War confirmed that CNN had not just a global audience but an unprecedented ability to present the news with real-time urgency. (A decade later, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, CNN was itself supplanted by Fox News, a network whose partisanship and jingoism matched the mood of the George W. Bush administration better than the more sober internationalism and hard-news focus of Turner’s network. CNN has arguably been searching for a coherent identity ever since.)

No one was closer to Turner when he was at the absolute peak of his influence than Fonda. The two remained close even after their divorce, and Fonda bestowed on Turner the title of “my favorite ex-husband.” Fittingly, she’s also provided the most tender tribute to him, placing a surprising emphasis on his sensitivity:

He swept into my life, a gloriously handsome, deeply romantic, swashbuckling pirate and I’ve never been the same. He needed me. No one had ever let me know they needed me, and this wasn’t your average human being that needed me, this was the creator of CNN, and Turner Classic Movies, who had won the America’s Cup as the world’s greatest sailor. He had a big life, a brilliant mind and a soaring sense of humor.

He could also take care of me. That was new as well. To be needed and cared for simultaneously is transformative. Ted Turner helped me believe in myself. He gave me confidence. I think I did the same for him, but that’s what women are raised to do. Men like Ted aren’t supposed to express need and vulnerability. That was Ted’s greatest strength, I believe.

I was taken aback by Fonda’s claim that Turner could express “need and vulnerability.” In public, he seemed the exact opposite: the typical figure of a good-old-boy braggart, a larger-than-life man who exulted in his grand accomplishments. After all, he wasn’t just someone who had turned a regional family billboard company into a global media empire; he was also the owner of winning sports teams and an accomplished sailor. Nor, to say the least, was he modest about how he saw himself. In 1998, he told a reporter, “I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime. And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.” As so often, behind this self-exultation was neediness: an insatiable urge to prove himself.

Yet Fonda is right about Turner’s vulnerability. It’s proverbially true that behind every great fortune lies a crime, and behind every great man is a great woman. A third adage can be coined along the same lines: Every overachiever is spurred on by the need to please a disappointed parent.

Ted Turner was born in 1938 as Robert Edward Turner III, the namesake and heir of Richard Edward Turner Jr. His father, who ran a billboard advertising company, was an abusive alcoholic who took sadistic pride in making sure his son always felt inferior. In 1963, the elder Turner, gnawed by debts and his own demons, killed himself. Decades later, Turner and Fonda would bond over the fact that they were both the children of parents who had died by suicide (Fonda’s mother had also killed herself).

Inheriting his father’s failing company, Turner ignored advice to downsize and pay off debts. Instead, he started his long career of successfully leveraging debt into building bigger companies, expanding from billboards to TV stations and sports teams (buying the Atlanta Braves in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks in 1978). By the 1970s, he had pioneered a successful formula of vertical integration in media, which combined new technology (satellites that gave his local networks national, and eventually global, reach) with old media (the sports franchises, cheap reruns, and talking heads providing grist to feed the unquenchable thirst of cable for content). One genius move, much derided at the time, was buying the vast libraries of old Hollywood studios such as MGM, Warner Brothers, and Hanna-Barbera and repurposing them for Turner Classic Movies and the Cartoon Network.

As a businessman, Turner was a gambler, racking up big debts that usually ended in profitability. His winning streak ended with the 1996 merger of Turner Broadcasting System with Time Warner (and eventually in 2000 with AOL). After the dot-com bubble burst a few years later, his fortune, which had peaked at $11 billion, shrank to roughly $2 billion.

Turner would claim to be humbled by these events, and he turned into a critic of media consolidation. In a 2004 article for the liberal magazine Washington Monthly, Turner called for the federal government to return to a stricter enforcement of antitrust laws. He argued that the hands-off approach to regulation was creating near-monopolies that were inimical to regional and ideological diversity. The problem, of course, has only gotten worse since he voiced his complaint, with plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch and David Ellison controlling an ever larger share of the media pie.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

For the second time in less than five years, a politically driven energy crunch is buffeting Europe, leading to soul-searching about how to avoid these damaging episodes in the future.

In 2022, Russia, while invading Ukraine, slashed natural gas supplies to some European countries, including Germany, its best customer, squeezing businesses, consumers, and forcing governments to spend hundreds of billions of euros on supports.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a key conduit for oil and natural gas shipments from the Persian Gulf region, means that Europeans face the threat of disruption of energy supplies, including aviation fuel, and a rise in prices that were already high. The European price for natural gas, which many countries use to generate a portion of their electricity, has risen about 40 percent since the beginning of the war to levels several times above those of the United States.

For some European politicians and clean energy executives, the lessons from these shocks are clear. Europe, they say, must accelerate already robust efforts to shift to clean energy technologies like wind and solar power not only to mitigate climate change but, increasingly, to avoid blackmail and preserve independence.

“Energy is being leveraged, and this comes at an exceptionally high price for households and businesses,” Rasmus Errboe, the chief executive of Orsted, a Denmark-based developer of multibillion-dollar offshore wind farms, told journalists on Wednesday. “It doesn’t have to be that way,” he added.

“The way forward is obvious,” European Union President Ursula von der Leyen said on April 29. “We must reduce our overdependency on imported fossil fuels and boost our home-grown, affordable, clean energy supply.”

Earlier this month, the world celebrated International Workers’ Day, a solemn occasion that isn’t recognized in America to the same degree as in other toiling nations. That oversight is particularly conspicuous because the day originated on American soil: On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of American workers walked off the job in protest of an eight-hour workday. In Chicago, these eight-hour workday protests culminated in the Haymarket Affair, when police sought to break up a rally near Haymarket Square, and a bomb was detonated in the process. The trial and martyrdom of the eight anarchists who were indicted, charged, and executed led to the formation of a day to recognize the labor struggle.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. One hundred and forty-four years later, on a brisk, sunny May Day afternoon in New York City, home care workers demonstrated outside City Hall, still campaigning for a fair workday. After all this time, a 24-hour workday still exists in this country in the 21st century—even in a deep-blue union town like New York City, which recently elected a self-proclaimed socialist mayor.

The coalition was calling on City Hall to formally abolish 24-hour workdays in favor of a 12-hour limit. The speakers—among them workers, organizers, and elected officials—testified against the practice, along with addressing a litany of other pressing issues facing the Chinatown and Lower Manhattan area, such as healthcare access, housing costs, and the construction of a massive jail-complex in Chinatown. Despite differences in tone and allegiance to the mayor, the speeches coalesced around one central theme: The socialist mayor is colluding with Governor Kathy Hochul against a constituency of mostly women workers of color from South America and China—or at least failing to act on their behalf.

“We’ve had enough of Mamdani’s hypocrisy,” said Cai Qiong Liu, a home care worker who worked 24-hour days for nine years. “Hiding behind a ‘socialist’ banner, while forcing women of color to work 24-hour workdays.”

The crowd was intergenerational, with as many elderly protesters as there were youth of all races and genders, and they belonged to a range of political organizations. In the end, organizers counted some 500 people—an impressive feat in itself, considering that May Day isn’t a federal holiday, for reasons obvious to any student of American history.

The years-long struggle to abolish the 24-hour workday has been led mostly by groups such as the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association; unfortunately, it hasn’t been received with universal goodwill and, in some quarters, has produced fault lines that undermine common sense. The 24-hour shift is an unusual exemption carved out in New York state law. Workers are paid a minimum wage of $19.10 and allotted three hours for meal breaks and five hours for sleep. Worse still, workers are paid for only 13 of the 24 hours. Some workers have reported wage theft; Cai Qiong Liu told Documented that she is owed over $100,000 in back wages. With approximately 130,000 home care workers in the city and the care economy being among the fastest-growing sectors of New York’s economy, the scale of exploitation is breathtaking.

In all my conversations with the assembled care workers, none seemed to have consistently received the five hours of uninterrupted rest the law hinted at. With patients waking up and requiring care at all hours of the night, home care workers found their own sleep disrupted. The accelerant to their own overwork inevitably led to injuries or an early forced retirement. Each of them also spoke to how isolation progressively wore them down.

Yunfang Zhang has been a home care worker for 12 years. Over most of her career, she worked the 24-hour work shift for four days straight, at the cost of both her health and her time with her family. She got involved in the movement when, in 2022, she received a call from a friend who told her about the number of workers who were “rising up” against the practice.

“Our workdays are very inhuman,” she said, “It’s slowly killing us, because the whole 24-hour workday, we work day and night. During the day, I have to do housework, do the laundry, cook, and take care of everything for the patients. At night, we have to help the patient turn over their body every two hours, which caused huge damage to my health.” At the end of the interview, she showed me an image of her hand from 2022, which was twice its size and had a bluish-purple tint.

Despite a large Democratic majority and a strong union presence in both the city and state, the plight of home care workers was largely ignored during the freewheeling Eric Adams era, as former speaker Adrienne Adams refused to bring an earlier version of the No More Act 24 to a vote in 2022. In mid-March, several home care workers launched a hunger strike outside City Hall to demand that the No More 24 Act finally be put to a vote. On the second day, council speaker Menin directly addressed the starving workers, promising not only a vote but also that no changes would be made to the act’s current language.

With World Cup soccer matches fast approaching, FIFA is engaged in price gouging for front-row seats. In New Jersey, the transit authority is charging exorbitant rates for transportation and parking. Beyond the mistreatment of fans, the games are being protested by activists who are putting a spotlight on the growing inequalities in their communities. In the host cities of Miami, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Atlanta, they are organizing to fight ICE raids, jail-expansion projects, rising housing costs, and homelessness.

Anyone who follows soccer is aware that the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, known as FIFA, is no stranger to scandal: In 1978, the dictatorship in Argentina likely fixed a World Cup match; vote-rigging in 2018 hoisted Sepp Blatter to the FIFA presidency; and Qatar gave million-dollar payouts to FIFA executive committee members in order win the right to host the World Cup in 2022. As Dave Zirin wrote in The Nation, FIFA is “not only an utterly corrupt and immoral entity but a supporter of dictators and bulwark against democracy.”

The organization invited further criticism when on December 5, 2025, it awarded the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize to President Donald Trump for his efforts to, in the words of FIFA head Gianni Infantino, “promote peace and unity around the world.” Amid a growing sense of embarrassment over the award, FIFA doubled down on its decision, saying it still “strongly” supported the decision. Of course, after attacking on Iran, Trump’s claims of being “the peace president” are growing ever more absurd.

Across the United States (Mexico and Canada are also hosting matches), FIFA promoters and city boosters are working to capitalize on the games, but communities are making sure that they benefit, too. On the ground, union members, abolitionists, and immigrant rights activists are working together to ensure that the World Cup lives up to its promise of making soccer a force for good.

Miami Activists Issue Travel Advisory

Florida is at the forefront of Trump’s immigration crackdown. The state is home to the infamous Alligator Alcatraz. And more than 280 local and state agencies across the state are empowered to carry out immigration enforcement. At the same time, Miami is a host city for the upcoming World Cup. Soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo will be playing there in what will likely be his last World Cup. Miami is expecting to welcome tens of thousands of soccer fans from around the world.

Given the state’s embrace of Trump’s war on immigrants, a coalition of human rights groups has put out a travel advisory for visitors to the World Cup games in Miami that warns, “Florida is no longer a safe destination for international tourists. With the FIFA World Cup 2026 coming to Miami, travelers may face unprecedented risks of racial profiling, wrongful detention in inhumane conditions without consular access, and heinous human rights violations—regardless of legal travel status.”

Yareliz Mendez-Zamora, policy coordinator with the American Friends Service Committee, a member of the coalition, said compared to matches in California, New York, and New Jersey, the games in Florida will likely be especially dangerous for foreign tourists. “We’re seeing a highly policed state when it comes to immigrants,” she said. “We’ve heard stories about tourists with valid tourist visas who have been caught up in this operation.”

The Florida Immigrant Coalition held a demonstration outside the FIFA offices in Coral Gables, a city in the Miami metro area. It called on FIFA to block federal agents from entering the soccer matches. Mendez-Zamora cited the story from Los Angeles last year when DHS agents were denied access to the parking lot at Dodger Stadium.

This comes as more than a dozen countries have issued travel advisories in response to the increasingly repressive political climate in the United States.

Kansas City Fights the “World Cup Jail”

Anew jail is being built in Kansas City, Missouri, which officials say is needed to promote public safety for the games. The abolitionist group Decarcerate KC is leading a coalition to protest what they have dubbed the “World Cup jail.”

“The city has made it explicitly clear,” Amaia Cook, the executive director of Decarcerate KC, said, “that the jail was to be built before the World Cup.”

In November 2025, the City Council approved a $25 million plan for a jail to be turnkey-ready by June when the games begin. Kansas City currently relies on nearby county jails and claims there is a bed shortage. The new facility has a 100-bed capacity. It is being built by Brown and Root, the multinational construction company (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company where deceased Vice President Dick Cheney was once CEO) that built Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Bay for detainees captured after 9/11.

At a recent City Council meeting, drone footage of the jail’s construction was shown, prompting several council members to comment on how it looks like one of the warehouses being built by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “It looks like an ICE detention center,” councilwoman Melissa Robinson observed. Indeed, public pressure forced the company to pull out of the deal for an ICE warehouse in south Kansas City.

Activists suspect the city wants to sweep up unhoused people to make the city more “presentable” for tourists flooding into the city for the soccer tournament. Last year, the City Council passed an anti-loitering ordinance. Cook said the law can be used during the World Cup “to lock up people and take them off the sidewalks, take them out of areas, in order to arrest them and eventually detain them.”

The coalition argues that the jail will disproportionately harm Black, immigrant, and working-class communities. A survey conducted with the help of Prison Policy Initiative, a national nonprofit organization, found that while Kansas City is 26.5 percent African American, 71.2 percent of people sent to jail are Black.

Organizers recently held a rally titled “We All Deserve a Shot” at a park near the jail site. Protesters called on city leaders to divest from incarceration and fund services for the unhoused community, public transportation, and schools. As the coalition stated in a press release, “Soccer, the world’s sport, belongs to the same immigrant families, working-class communities, and communities of color who would be most harmed by the new facility.”

Atlanta Loves the Game

In Atlanta, Play Fair ATL has brought together a coalition of about 30 organizations that span labor, housing, immigration, and criminal justice issues to ensure that the World Cup games there will “benefit—not criminalize—Atlanta communities.”

“All of our coalition, we’re big soccer fans. We love the game. We want the World Cup to happen. We just don’t want it to happen to people. We want it to happen with people. And thus far, it’s happening to people,” explained Michael Collins, the director of Play Fair ATL.

The World Cup in Atlanta is estimated to generate $1 billion in revenue, but the city is expecting to only make $4 million. “The money is all going to corporations,” Collins said, “but we’re not seeing a penny. We’re paying for this World Cup, but we’re not benefiting from it.”

Many Atlantans still remember when the city hosted the 1996 Olympics. Before those games, the city displaced thousands of people from their homes and jailed unhoused individuals in order to make way for the influx of athletes and fans. Play Fair ATL worked with students at Georgia State University to host a roundtable discussion of the 1996 Olympics and a historical walking tour of the affected neighborhoods.

The group organized a “People’s Cup” tournament in April to educate the public about expensive ticket prices, immigration issues, and the city’s lack of engagement with the community.

Additionally, the group is pushing for policy changes such as a recent resolution passed by the City Council to expand diversion services for low-level arrests in anticipation of the World Cup. They are trying to form a tenants advocacy office for the city. Working with state and local legislators, they are supporting a ban on ICE detention warehouses. They are also advocating for a responsible contractor policy so workers can be paid a fair wage.

“We’re not just about the World Cup,” Collins said. “We’re setting ourselves up for mega events in general. Atlanta is going to have the Super Bowl in 2028 and Final Four in 2031.”

Spectacle LA

In Los Angeles, the games will take place at the SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, the newest and most expensive World Cup venue. For many LA residents, the stadium symbolizes the gentrification of Black and Latino neighborhoods in South Central LA.

In August 2025, the Anti Fascist Football Coalition, a transnational coalition of 50 organizations, launched a boycott of the World Cup games in the United States. Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace, one of the coalition members, said in a statement that the United States has become a “hostile environment for people of the world—particularly for Black, Brown, Indigenous, migrant, and non-European peoples” and should not be allowed to “normalize its violence and international gangsterism.”

After the United States bombed Iran and Trump threatened to wipe out its “whole civilization,” it’s unclear whether Iran’s soccer team will play in the games. Iran is scheduled to play on June 16, 2026, in Los Angeles at the SoFi Stadium against New Zealand. Shortly after the bombing began, Trump posted that he did not think it was “appropriate” for Iran to play in the World Cup “for their own life and safety.” Iran’s sports minister has said that under these circumstances, the possibility of the team’s participation in the World Cup matches is “very low.” Iran wants to move its games to Mexico.

“The US shouldn’t be allowed to host the World Cup games,” said Eric Sheehan, from NOlympics, an organization founded to fight such mega-events in Los Angeles and a member of the coalition calling for a boycott. “And Israel should be kicked out of international football.”

People’s Football Club matches, similar to the ones in Atlanta, have been promoted in South Central Los Angeles in support of pro-Palestinian and anti-ICE causes. “The dream is to merge the athletic side of Los Angeles with the organizing side,” Sheehan said, “and hopefully radicalize people into understanding how life in the imperial core is connected to these spectacles.”

The movement is also getting traction among major labor organizations.

UNITE HERE Local 11, the union representing workers at the SoFi Stadium, is threatening to strike just weeks before the start of the World Cup games. It is calling for affordable housing, fair wages, protection from ICE raids, and that jobs won’t be replaced by automation and artificial intelligence.

Many union members are soccer fans, union copresident Kurt Petersen said: “They’re excited about the games, for sure, but they want to make sure the games benefit themselves and their communities.”

There are 2,000 workers at the newly built SoFi Stadium, including bartenders, servers, cooks, and dishwashers. There are so many workers, Petersen explained, because the stadium is designed around high-end suites. “They’re built for rich people, and those suites have a higher head count of workers per guest. Because they are paying a lot more for those seats, the expectations are higher.”

Half of the workforce there are Latino, “but there’s no daylight between [them] in terms of our position around ICE,” Peterson says. “When we had our first bargaining session, we had five or six workers, of all different backgrounds, tell the company, ‘No ICE in the games.’”

The union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against operators of the SoFi Stadium and FIFA. “The presence of ICE,” Petersen argued, will “chill” collective bargaining because workers are fearful.

Despite efforts, the union has not heard back from FIFA. “FIFA is the power of these games. They have taken over the stadium,” Petersen said. “They are running everything in the stadium according to their own standards. So it’s really about FIFA deciding whether or not ICE is good for the games.”

The class I am teaching this semester is an undergraduate survey of lyric poetry. It’s a class I enjoy teaching and one I offer whenever I can. Modeled on a course I took as an undergraduate, in which the poet, professor, and painter Peter Sacks brought us all to tears in his full-throated lectures on Milton and Shelley and Bishop, the class begins with some anonymous Middle English lyric poems and does a quick swoop through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries before concluding with Modernism, mid-century American poetry, and some contemporary work. We read William Shakespeare and John Donne, Lorine Niedecker, and Terrence Hayes. I tell students, most of whom are sophomores and juniors, that I want them to leave the course with a sense—to paraphrase T.S. Eliot—of tradition in their bones. I want them to leave excited to go out and read whatever strikes their fancy, but to do it with a poet’s sense of the long history of poetry in English and a feel for the way poetry reprises older traditions or echoes older verse, sometimes without the poets themselves even knowing it.

This semester, though, I approached the class with an argument in mind: I wanted to show my students how fundamental a sense of real human presence is to what we understand as poetry. I gave the class a new title: “‘This Living Hand’: Lyric Poetry and the Writing ‘I.’” The quoted phrase comes from a fragment by John Keats, a bit of poetry written towards the end of the poet’s short life, before he died of tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25. The poem reads as follows:

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

My students loved this poem: “It’s like the poem is the hand!” one of them said. It’s creepy, morbid, sensual, and in the end, I think, very moving. The poem is indeed the hand held toward the reader in all the warmth and capability the poet possessed while alive. The poem outlasts the poet; it remains an almost physical gesture of connection from him to us.

I picked this poem as an opening gambit for the class because I wanted my students to think through—and I wanted to think through myself—what language is or does, historically and today. As a student and teacher of poetry, and as a poet myself, I’ve never insisted that poetry communicate emotion directly or at all. I am fine with its moments of indirection and its play of surfaces. I know that poetry—language generally—is as likely to conceal a feeling or a self as it is to reveal it. I revel in poetry that is difficult, experimental, elusive, or tricky. And yet the truth remains: We read poetry for the glimmer of a human presence, even if the writer has been hell-bent (as many of the writers I love were) on hiding that presence from us. In general, extending beyond poetry, we read written language because someone has written it for us.

Even a few years ago, this would have seemed like a dumb point to make. Of course writing is written by humans. How else would it exist? But today, as AI programs capable of generating and refining text proliferate and advance, it feels like a suddenly urgent and precarious notion. The fact is that much of the language that surrounds us right now comes not from humans but from LLMs. I cannot overstate how much this disturbs me. Is there an essential, ontological difference between AI-generated and human-generated language? Poetry helps us see that there is.

Throughout the class this term, my students and I have been struck—moved really—by how much human presence there is in the poetry we read, even in some of the oldest verse. We spent almost an entire class session on the famous and much-discussed Middle English lyric that our Norton Anthology prints as follows:

Westron wind, when will thou blow?
The small rain down can rain.
Christ, that my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again.

An explosive report from Democracy Docket revealed that Bert Callais, the lead plaintiff in Louisiana v. Callais, the case that demolished the Voting Rights Act, was a January 6 protester. It’s unclear if Callais also attacked the Capitol as part of Donald Trump’s failed coup d’état, but it is clear that he’s an election-denying conspiracy theorist.

I can’t say I find this information surprising. That may be because I tend to judge people by the arguments they make in court, not by the color of their skin. Callais took umbrage at being placed in a majority-minority district, in a state that is one-third minority, and made an entire federal case out of it. His core argument was racist: He essentially argued that white people in Louisiana have a constitutional right to be overrepresented in Congress, that they should get more than they deserve. Finding out that a man like this has modern-day Klan robes in his closet is not really “new” information to me, just confirmation of my previous assumptions.

What is, I guess, wild to me is that the lawyers and white-wing forces organizing this attack on the Voting Rights Act knew Callais was a J-6 guy, with a long social-media history of objecting to the voting rights of non-white people, and decided to use him as the poster boy for their case anyway. Just to pull back the curtain a little bit, the “named plaintiff” in a case like this is rarely random. Cases built to get to the Supreme Court do not often start because one average citizen files a humble lawsuit that blows up. These cases are planned. The plaintiffs are picked to put the issue in the best possible light.

Take Plessy v. Ferguson. In that case, the named plaintiff, Homer Plessy, was not just some random brother who decided on his own to challenge segregation on train cars in the South. Plessy was an activist, and he was picked by civil rights organizers… because he looked white. Plessy could pass. To kick Plessy off of a whites-only train car, the conductor had to know he was Black by blood, because you couldn’t tell by just looking at him. Plessy’s phenotype highlighted the issue that segregation was based on blood quantum and nothing else.

The fact that the white folks in Louisiana thought that a January 6 guy was the perfect face for their assault on the Voting Rights Act should tell you all you need to know about the reasons these folks decided to bring the case. Louisiana v. Callais is not about Republicans versus Democrats in the battle for control of Congress. It’s about white folks trying to take political power away from Black folks.

And the Supreme Court ruled “whites win”—again.

The Bad and the Ugly

• In case the Callais decision isn’t enough proof that the government is run on white male grievance, check out the latest lawsuit from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC is suing The New York Times because a white man didn’t get a promotion—an unnamed white man who claims he was “significantly more qualified” than the “multiracial female” who did get the promotion. The complaint does not provide any evidence about the man’s qualifications, or the woman’s, but I guess we’re supposed to just assume that any white man is likely more qualified than a “multiracial female” working at the Times.
• The office of Virginia State Senator L. Louise Lucas was raided by Kash Patel’s FBI. I shouldn’t even need to tell you that Lucas happens to be Black and was a leader of Virginia’s redistricting effort. Again, the government’s goal is to eliminate Black voices from politics.
• Trump and Sean Hannity are trying to convince John Fetterman to run as a Republican. I’m not sure why. He’s been living as a Republican all this time anyway.
• The Supreme Court temporarily paused a Fifth Circuit order that would have prevented abortion pills from being dispensed through the mail. Given that the Supreme Court normally allows the Fifth Circuit’s anti-woman rulings to proceed via the shadow docket, I’ll take this as a good sign.
• The Supreme Court declined to hear a Covid-19 vaccine case brought by former NBA star John Stockton. I was today-years-old when I learned that Stockton is an anti-vaxxer.

Inspired Takes

• I’ve been focusing on how the Louisiana v. Callais case affects Louisiana, but there are a bunch of other former Confederate states that are eager to get in on the racism. For The Nation, John Nichols takes us to Tennessee, where the Republicans are trying to redistrict Memphis and make it impossible for a city that is 62 percent Black to elect a Black representative to Congress.
• I read most of what Gregg Gonsalves writes. This piece about the rise of “Vichy Scientists” who are complicit in the outrages of the Trump regime could also be written about lawyers, media people, and really any number of professionals.
• That said, the Department of Justice is at least struggling to recruit new sycophants and cowards. They’ve resorted to some very weird ad campaigns to get people to apply to work for the once respected institution. This week, in honor of May the Fourth, they turned to Star Wars to encourage applicants, asking lawyers to “join the pursuit…of law.” But in Above the Law, Joe Patrice pointed out that they manage to miss the point of the entire series—which is most definitely not about joining the evil empire to bring its genocidal version of peace and security to the galaxy.

Worst Argument of the Week

Sorry, guys, I am honestly too embroiled in the Voting Rights decision to consider any other bad arguments this week.

What I Wrote

As referenced above, and like everybody else who is decent, I’m still reeling from the Supreme Court’s reinstitution of Jim Crow in last week’s voting rights case. This week, I wrote about how the Supreme Court is using that decision to fast-track getting rid of Black people in Congress.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Last month, Donald Trump asked an 8-year-old: “You think you could take me in a fight?” This prompted YouGov to poll Americans on whether they think they could beat Trump in a fistfight.

I would just like to tell 22-year-old me—the naïve young man who thought that “Whom would you like to have a beer with, George W. Bush or Al Gore?” was the dumbest polling question of my lifetime—that he was so, so very wrong.

Overall, only 55 percent of Americans thought they could take Trump in a fight. I say “only” because… do you have any idea how old 79 is? We’re talking about an age where falling down can be life-threatening. And that’s not even accounting for Trump’s shambling physical state.

The 19th dug into the numbers, and… I just really don’t understand the spell Trump has cast over this entire freaking country. In the poll, 64 percent of men said they could take Trump in a fight, while just 47 percent of women did. I promise you, women are selling themselves way short, but the men (not usually ones to underestimate themselves) are too; just five years ago, YouGov found that 71 percent of men thought they could beat up a goose (which is a ridiculously high number; a goose would kick most people’s asses). The idea that more people think they could beat up a goose than Donald Trump is absolutely insane to me.

But the rub of it all is how the numbers broke along party lines. Eighty–two percent of Democratic men and 71 percent of Democratic women said they could beat Trump—while only 46 percent of Republican men and 19 percent of Republican women said they could trounce the president. In total, 33 percent of Republicans thought they could take Trump.

Let me repeat that: Only 33 percent of these wannabe jackboot, anti-science, gun-toting racists think they can beat a 79-year-old man in a fistfight. I promise you that if they were asked if they could beat Barack Obama (a fit 64-year-old), the Republican number would approach 100 percent.

My point is: These people are in a cult. Only a cult mentality can make you think that a washed-up old man like Trump who can’t even hold a glass with one hand is somehow so “strong” that he can be an effective pugilist.

That said, don’t punch Donald Trump. Even if he hits you first. Just turn the other cheek. Not out of Christian goodness, but because if you turn the other cheek he’ll break his small hand on your face, and then, while he’s screaming out in pain you can say, “Osteoporosis, motherfucker,” and look like a badass.

* * *

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There’s a new Beltway consensus in the making: After a decade of self-dealing, executive-sanctioned thuggery, pardon-auctioning, and donor-appeasement in the sanctums of MAGA power, the electorate is at long last wising up. Whether it’s the White House’s campaign of lying about every facet of the Iran War, Donald Trump’s series of lawsuits against the IRS, his use of the Department of Justice to enrich himself at taxpayer expense, or the Versailles-on-ketamine reveries of a billion-dollar ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be, voters are becoming outraged over an authoritarian regime that no longer bothers to offer any more than phoned-in rationales for its corruption. 

As The Bulwark’s Mona Charen argues, popular opinion has shifted from the cynical view that the venality of high-office holding was pretty much priced into the Trumpist model of power. “Voters in 2024 made a bargain,” she writes. “Though they knew Trump was corrupt, they bet that he would bring them the kind of economy they’d enjoyed in 2018.” Yet, with the cost of living skyrocketing and the tariffs-subsidized “golden age” that Trump hawked a demonstrable bust, that bargain is now null and void:

Economic conditions are now worse than they were in 2024. Nor can Trump rely on partisanship to come to his rescue because it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption, it’s Trump himself and his allies. It is Trump who used the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to make the case for his garish ballroom. It is Senate Republicans who are adding the insult of demanding taxpayers pay $1 billion for this monument to Trump’s ego. It is Trump, not his opposition, who instructs voters that they should be happy with fewer dolls at Christmas. It is Trump who accepts gold bars from the Swiss delegation and adorns the Oval Office in a style that could be called neo-Saddam.

Unfortunately, though, there are several obstacles in the path of a straightforward kick-the-bums-out case against Trump’s malfeasance in the upcoming midterms cycle. First, the MAGA right has been trafficking in its own theology of maximal Democratic and deep-state corruption over the past decade—the claim that Trump is a suffering servant targeted by his political foes is at the heart of the IRS and DOJ suits, as well as being the rationale for allied abuses of law-enforcement power such as the ongoing effort to prosecute former FBI director James Comey for unspecified vibes-driven offenses and the DOJ’s enlistment in a challenge to the $83 million civil action against Trump for assaulting E. Jean Carroll. (The acting head of the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, is Trump’s former personal attorney, so this sort of prostration is presumably second nature to him.) It’s a debased and self-serving political narrative, since no presidency in our history has been more corrupt than Trump’s, but it’s a narrative that’s proven effective across several election cycles and countless frivolous but vindictively targeted  legal actions. 

But the biggest challenge to an effective political case against Trump’s reign of self-dealing comes in Charen’s rushed disclaimer that this round of abuses of the presidency can’t be dismissed as partisan hackery since “it isn’t the Democrats who are making the case about corruption.” That aside contains a universe of failed political initiative, as any patient student of the right’s congressional inquisitions, from the Benghazi hearings to the long regress of Hunter Biden spectacles to the impeachment of Biden’s DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, can instantly confirm. For every ideological witch hunt unleashed by the Jim Jordans and the Trey Gowdys of the right, there’s a lumbering and self-undermining Merrick Garland inquiry into a matter of actual legal substance that went precisely nowhere. 

That’s because Democrats subscribe to an institutionalist, rather than a self-evidently personal, theory of political corruption. What stands out in their treatment of abuses of executive power is that these are regarded as, first and foremost, procedural affronts—defilements of the precious norms that are the foundational principle of good governance—and not a more telling and visceral failing of moral character. For three dreary election cycles, the chief Democratic anti-Trump message is that the MAGA movement is a threat to our revered public institutions—not that Donald Trump is stealing you blind and leveraging all the arms of the federal government into his graft-seeking business model, in precisely the way a Mafia don would. (As I typed these words, I realized that “Mafia Don” has been sitting right there as an ideal Democratic epithet for the occupant of the Oval Office, and yet the party has continued to leave it… sitting right there.) 

The Democrats’ diffidence on this front is more than simple myopia; it’s a class blindspot. Party leaders see themselves as the credentialed gatekeepers of both the institutions now under threat of total MAGA takeover and of the public discourse writ large. They are, in short, managers, by both training and temperament—and like any rule-enforcing managers, they’re aghast when their authority is disregarded. That leads to a rhetorical style grounded chiefly on scolding (when the self-evident directives of institutional sovereignty get rudely shoved aside) and befuddlement (when, again and again, Democrats’ appeals to norms, managerial politesse, and “who we are” as a nation are derided, mocked, and steamrolled). 

You can see this style on full display in this week’s New Yorker—our country’s most reliable outlet for elite venting over transgressed norms. A long profile of Trump’s immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, dilates on his exasperation over the rapid pace of institutional derangement on Trump’s watch—while the former president also frets that he can’t relinquish his statesmanlike role as a “political leader” for that of a mere “commentator.” The natural outcome of this high-managerial anguish is a long recitation of set pieces like this:

In the past year, Obama has watched with disbelief as Trump has used his office to enrich himself and his family, and almost daily commits some sort of travesty. At times, often late at night, Obama will fire off a text or e-mail to a friend about “some dumbass thing Trump did,” Ben Rhodes, who served as Obama’s deputy national security adviser and is now a consultant to him, said. “What drives him insane is the double standard: ‘What if I took a Qatari jet?’ It’s not even sour grapes. It’s objectively insane. If Barack Obama did any of these things, he’d be obliterated on sight.”

As courtroom litigators are fond of saying: true, true, and irrelevant. Complaints of double standards and hypocrisy are nonstarters in ideological discourse, since they presuppose a disinterested arbitration of claims to power where none exists. That’s especially the case when a ruling party is pillaging the government in pursuit of personal gain and political vendettas. The point isn’t that a standard holds for other presidents and doesn’t for Trump—it’s that Trump is rendering standards of all kinds meaningless as he reinvents the presidency as an instrument of personal plunder. But that core message gets a muffled hearing at best in Democratic leadership circles—in large part because, like Obama, party leaders remain immobilized “with disbelief” before the specter of Trumpist corruption.

Among other things, that posture is a response that comes far too late in the cycle of MAGA government-by-graft to connect effectively with the real public disenchantment with Trump’s second term. After mounting ineffective bids to impeach Trump for flagrant abuses of power in his first term—including a literal effort to install himself as a dictator by fomenting a coup—Democrats have mostly retreated to a defensive crouch, intoning the mantra that they are focusing on “kitchen-table issues” instead of waging the political fight to hold Trump and his cabinet of handpicked cronies accountable for their crimes. 

Yet, particularly in Trump’s second term, this is a distinction without a difference: The administration’s forays into corruption have also entailed enormous spikes in everyday living expenses, from Trump’s imperious and unconstitutional tariffs regime to the oil shocks touched off by the illegal war with Iran, to the failure of the red-state farm economy. Unhinged authoritarian leaders despoil all of public life—and the economy is a premier first casualty in this strategy, not a depoliticized sphere delivering offstage verdicts on the regime’s performance and continued fitness for office. 

Under Donald Trump, people go into public service not to do good or administer the state competently but rather to boost their personal brands and make a quick buck. In his pre-presidential days, Trump famously, and lucratively, leased out his name to dubious products, whether it be Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump dolls, or Trump pom-poms. Elevation to the highest elected office in the land has not stopped this cornucopia of kitsch. At the official Trump store you can buy all sorts of merchandise, including hats, golf accessories, and bathrobes.

Trump’s closest political allies have followed his lead. Many of his cabinet team, notably Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, emerged from the world of cable news punditry. They are well-practiced in the art of self-promotion and side hustles such as writing books.

But few in Trump’s circle have so avidly tried to profit from their proximity to power as the appropriately named FBI director Kash Patel. In the many products that bear his name, Patel likes to style himself as Ka$h, with the dollar sign “s” echoing Walt Disney’s money-loving mallard, Uncle $crooge. As Sarah Fitzpatrick, writing in The Atlantic, reports, “Even before he was confirmed as FBI director, Patel sent out Ka$h-branded merch boxes that included hats, socks, and other items depicting the comic-book character the Punisher.” A Department of Justice employee described Patel as “very merch forward.”

In his current position, it would be unseemly for Patel to make money directly from merch. That’s why Ka$h-branded merchandise is now sold by the nonprofit Kash Foundation. But that’s where Patel’s commitment to probity, such as it is, ends. He has created branded mememtos, including a challenge coin and personalized bourbon, that he gives away to people he meets in his line of duty.

As The Atlantic details:

it is not unusual for him to travel with a supply of personalized branded bourbon. The bottles bear the imprint of the Kentucky distillery Woodford Reserve, and are engraved with the words “Kash Patel FBI Director,” as well as a rendering of an FBI shield. Surrounding the shield is a band of text featuring Patel’s director title and his favored spelling of his first name: Ka$h. An eagle holds the shield in its talons, along with the number 9, presumably a reference to Patel’s place in the history of FBI directors. In some cases, the 750-milliliter bottles bear Patel’s signature, with “#9” there as well.

By itself, this habit might seem picayune. But of course it falls hard on the heels of a larger branding crisis ignited by an earlier Atlantic report, also written by Sarah Fitzpatrick, alleging that Patel has been prone to bouts of “conspicuous inebriation and unexplained absences.” Patel has not only strenuously denied these allegations—he’s sued The Atlantic, accusing the magazine of publishing an article “replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office.”

As my Nation colleague Elie Mystal has explained, this lawsuit is on the face of it “preposterous.” As a public figure, Patel faces a very high burden of having to prove that The Atlantic with actual malice published something it knew to be false. Last month, a federal judge in Texas dismissed an earlier Patel lawsuit against MSNBC contributor Frank Figliuzzi, who had also suggested that the FBI director was a frequent drinker.

Further, Patel is not acting as if The Atlantic’s allegations were “fabricated.” Rather, his rage seems to stem from the assumption that credible information was leaked by his own team. In an effort to combat the allegations and other reports of misconduct, Patel has launched a witch hunt against journalists and his own agents. On Wednesday, MS Now reported that the FBI had launched an investigation of Sarah Fitzpatrick. The FBI has also been investigating a New York Times reporter who reported on allegations that government security and transportation had been improperly provided to Patel’s girlfriend.

Patel is investigating not just reporters who have embarrassed him but also his own FBI staff. On Thursday, MS Now reported:

FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, and has been described as being in panic mode to save his job and find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.

Patel walled himself off from some senior bureau leaders this week after multiple media reports raised red flags about his leadership, according to three people familiar with his recent actions. Two of the people told MS NOW that the director ordered the polygraphing this week of former and current security detail members, as well as several information technology staff.

Patel is clearly under siege. One way to understand his actions is that he’s engaged in a doomed effort to salvage his brand. The reporting from The New York Times and The Atlantic has clearly damaged his reputation, so he is working to stanch the leaks. Further, he has recently launched high-profile politically motivated persecutions that are clearly designed to curry favor from Trump. On April 21, the Department of Justice laid charges of financial crimes against the Southern Poverty Law Center, an anti-racist group that has long been the subject of MAGA ire. This was followed on April 28 with charges against former FBI director James Comey of making threats against Donald Trump. This was a particularly egregious persecution, since it rested on nothing more than an Instagram post featuring the numbers 86 47. This was the second time the Trump administration has tried to jail Comey; last year Comey was exonerated in a prosecution based on testimony he gave to Congress.

As I’ve suggested in an earlier column, Patel’s malignancy is tempered by his incompetence. While his politically motivated investigations and prosecutions are an affront to the rule of law, there is little reason to think they will be successful. Neither lawsuits nor lie detectors will save Patel’s tarnished brand. He’s caught in a trap of his own making: The more he struggles to establish his good name, the worse he looks.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Last year, Hungary’s authoritarian Fidesz government tried to ram through Parliament a Transparency of Public Life Bill. Had it passed, the bill, modeled on Russian legislation outlawing so-called “foreign agent” organizations, would have allowed the government to criminalize any civil society organization or independent media outlet that in any way accepted, even unknowingly, foreign funds.

It proved a bridge too far. Hungarians protested in huge numbers. Behind the scenes, according to Hungarian analysts I have spoken with, even some of Viktor Orbán’s political pals balked at the legislation. Days before it was due to be rubber-stamped by the Fidesz-controlled legislature, the government abruptly pulled the bill. In hindsight, it marked the moment that Hungarians began to realize the power of an aroused, organized, and infuriated public and started to believe in the possibility that—despite the prime minister’s manipulation of the electoral system and despite his use both of state-run and oligarch-owned media as propaganda tools—Orbán could be voted out of office.

Last month, in one of the more extraordinary political developments in recent European politics, Orbán was, indeed, defeated. His opponents gained a parliamentary supermajority. Yet the dethroned Hungarian leader’s vision of an “illiberal democracy”—a fortress state within which the populist right could fight its culture wars and demonize its opponents as the enemy within all while an oligarchy looted the state and flouted the law—remains a potent one for MAGA here in the United States.

Even as Hungarians, beset by economic woes and increasingly marginalized within the European Union, overwhelmingly rejected Orbán, Trump and his henchmen are utilizing his tactics in the United States. Notably, they’re leaning into bogus claims of national security threats and “reverse discrimination” to target liberal and independent media outlets.

Witness the appalling Equal Employment Opportunity Commission decision to sue The New York Times for hiring a non-white person to a real estate editor’s position instead of a white man. The lawsuit ludicrously assumes that the federal government is a better judge of editorial qualifications than the senior figures within a news organization. Moreover, for the past 18 months, the EEOC has been dialing back its enforcement of antidiscrimination laws protecting a range of discriminated-against groups, in particular the LGBTQ community, and has largely stopped pushing cases alleging discrimination against Black and brown Americans based on “disparate impact” arguments. In other words, when it comes to standing up for minorities, it is demanding a level of proof of intentional discrimination that largely sidesteps systemic issues and doesn’t consider historical barriers to full participation in the economy. But when it comes to standing up for allegedly discriminated-against whites, its threshold for action is far lower.

In January, Tanya Goldman, a senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women and Families, wrote, “This first year of the Trump Administration demonstrates what is at stake when a civil rights enforcement agency is weaponized to serve an anti-worker, anti-civil rights agenda. The EEOC was created to protect workers from discrimination. Today, it is being used to enable it.” In the months since, as the EEOC action against the Times shows, the trend has only accelerated.

Of course, the authoritarian display of power against the Times isn’t occurring in a vacuum. The Pentagon is increasing its efforts to limit the independence of journalists covering the US military. This anti-democratic effort received a boost last week when a federal court of appeals allowed the Pentagon to temporarily reinstate the Pete Hegseth policy of mandating that journalists be chaperoned at all times by Pentagon minders while in the building.

One likely reason for the administration’s attacks on Pentagon reporters is that every time a government figures opens his or mouth about the Iran war, more Orwellian doublespeak spews forth, something that trained journalists should be able to identify.

To avoid having to go to Congress to request a vote authorizing a continuation of the war, Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the rest of the horsemen of this particular apocalypse are preposterously saying that the country is no longer at war and has downgraded Operation Epic Fury to Project Freedom.

In Rubio’s case, he made this clearly fictive statement while subbing for press secretary Karoline Leavitt, whose maternity leave has given Trump the delicious opportunity to humiliate his underlings by making them rotate into Leavitt’s role. As acting press secretaries, they must publicly defend before the assembled media whatever Trumpian gobbledygook passes for public policy on a given day.

Lina noticed the changes right away when the two sisters returned to school after spending time in a family detention center in San Antonio. “They’re not the same as before they left,” said Lina, a teacher at a mostly Spanish-speaking public school near the southern border in El Paso.

According to Lina, who asked to be identified by her first name only due to privacy concerns, post-detention behavioral changes are not always dramatic. The subtle differences can appear in daily routine, in appetite, in the tempo of a child’s speech. Of the older sister, Lina remarked, “she doesn’t use color as much in her drawings.” Of the other, she observed distress when leftover snacks were thrown away: “She wanted to take extras or whatever was left and she didn’t want me to throw anything away.” Lina is aware that this might seem minor, but not when you are with children every day and know how to gauge when something is very wrong.

Her account comes as family detention has escalated nationwide. Data analyzed by The Marshall Project shows that ICE has detained more than 6,200 children since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, with the daily number in custody rising to about 10 times the level recorded at the end of the Biden administration.

For school staff, the fallout can take several forms: children returning after detention, students coping with a parent’s deportation, and school communities reshaped by the fear of who might be taken next.

There is a simmering sense of dread at schools coast to coast. Evelyn, an elementary school counselor in Don Ana County, New Mexico, said that when ICE raids intensified, she saw parents afraid to let their children attend classes and worried about what information schools might be forced to hand over to the government.

Indeed, according to a national survey from the Urban Institute, 10 percent of adults from immigrant families have stopped sending their kids to school. In California’s Central Valley, ICE sweeps have coincided with a 22 percent increase in daily student absences, with younger students pulled out at the highest rates. Meanwhile, 63.8 percent of US high school principals reported that “students from immigrant families missed school due to policies or political rhetoric related to immigrants.”

Evelyn, who has seen parents terrified at the prospect of agents descending on campus, recalled one undocumented father telling her, “We are here to make the most of your education, not to get in trouble.” What she heard beneath that utterance was simpler: “we don’t want to be seen.”

The children who are still in school amid this turbulent political environment face myriad stressors. Evelyn has seen undocumented children grow resigned—exhibiting a kind of early withdrawal. They think “I’m not from here, so I’m just giving up. I don’t belong,” she said.

Beyond grappling with fears about their own fates, children must also contend with the deportation of family members. In the first seven months of Trump’s second term, ICE detained parents of more than 11,000 children, all US citizens.

At Evelyn’s school, three siblings were shaken by the deportation of their mother. She witnessed the children respond differently, but the changes were clear. “My sixth grader got in some trouble,” Evelyn said. The middle child became “more reserved, more quiet, more introverted.” The third became more open about her feelings, though Evelyn said she was still processing the situation “in a very difficult way.”

Last year, R.J. Horacek, a 29-year-old Illinois resident, was arrested by police in DuPage County. After the arrest, he didn’t spend any time in jail—Illinois abolished cash bail three years ago—but over the past year, he has been required to regularly appear in court as his case proceeds. In December, Horacek moved to Aurora, a six-hour walk from the court. He doesn’t have a car or any extra funds to pay for rideshares; he’s unemployed and was recently homeless. He has no family or friends nearby. “I pretty much have no one,” he said. If he fails to make it to an in-person hearing, he could have a warrant issued for his arrest for failing to appear.

Then in March, a public defender told Horacek about Radical Hospitality Ministries, a nonprofit that runs one of four pilot sites through state grants to offer a variety of free pretrial services to people like him. Three days before an in-person hearing, as he contemplated making that six-hour walk, the organization told him it could get him to the courthouse for free. He immediately felt “that stress lift off my shoulders,” he said. “I’ve been struggling with everything, and just to have this one part of it [taken care of], that is huge.” The organization has given him rides to and from court ever since. “They make it happen no matter what, because they understand people in my scenario don’t have any other means,” he said. “Without their support, it feels quite impossible.”

That wasn’t the only help Horacek received. The organization offers food to people who have been released pretrial and has given Horacek a snack and tea after stressful court appearances. It put him in touch with a nearby legal aid organization. It connected him to a church that helped him print documents for court for free and covered the cost of legal consultation.

Horacek struggled to express his gratitude for the help Radical Hospitality Ministries has given him. It has “been everything I’ve needed and a huge stress off my shoulders,” he said. “No matter what it is, how it is, I do plan on paying them back in some way, shape, or form.”

In 2021, Illinois lawmakers passed the Pretrial Fairness Act, which, as of September 2023, made the state the first to eliminate cash bail. The effects were immediate: Within a year, the urban jail population fell by 14 percent and the rural population declined by 25 percent. But lawmakers didn’t stop there. Last year, the legislature allocated $3.5 million to pilot sites in four counties throughout the state to offer free services to those on pretrial release to help them return to court and avoid getting tangled up with the legal system in the future. The sites have already helped hundreds of people with things like transportation to courthouses, childcare during their hearings, and connections to mental health and substance abuse programs at no cost. Advocates say they are working remarkably well, helping people avoid arrest for failure to appear and, ultimately, move on with their lives.

But the state legislature is currently debating the budget for next fiscal year, and including funding for this program is not guaranteed. Its future hangs in the balance just months after the programs got off the ground.

The abolition of cash bail in Illinois ended the fundamental injustice of people being thrown in jail because they didn’t have enough money to post bail, not because they posed a threat or were about to flee. Between 2016 and 2019, Illinois residents collectively paid nearly $150 million in bail to secure their freedom. But those charged with crimes are still obligated to return to court; a felony case can take two years of court appearances to resolve. Bail, in its original form, was intended to ensure that people returned to court; advocates wanted the state to provide services that would help people make it to their hearings. “We have so many more people now who are getting to return to the community while awaiting trial,” said Matthew McLoughlin, an organizer for the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice. “What else could we be doing to help those folks succeed?”

The Pretrial Success Act offers services that might help people return to court, such as transportation, childcare, and case management. It was passed in the spring of 2024 with enough money to fund up to five pilot sites, but grants didn’t flow until this past fiscal year. Four sites were picked as pilots: Champaign County; Cook County, which includes Chicago; DuPage County; and Will County. Anyone who has been released pretrial for a case in one of those courthouses and has a pending case is eligible for these programs. Importantly, the services offered are voluntary; no one is obligated to accept anything they don’t want.

The services are also intended to help people address whatever it might have been that led to their getting arrested in the first place. “Criminal legal system reform addresses the injustices that happen in the court system,” McLoughlin noted. But such reform “can’t fix the reasons that may have brought people into contact with the courts.” For some, that’s mental health or substance abuse struggles; for others it may be poverty-related issues like a lack of housing or a job. Offering treatment or employment assistance can help people “disentangle themselves from the legal system while they do that work to fight their case,” McLoughlin said. That should help keep people from committing crimes while on release and after their cases are closed, preventing them from “having to go through this process in the future,” McLoughlin said.

Earlier this year, Lauren, a mother of four, forgot about a court date. Caught up in her children’s needs, she said, the court appearance had “just slipped my mind.” The DuPage County court issued a warrant for her arrest for failure to appear.

Twenty twenty was only six years ago, but it feels like 60. It was the height of the Covid-19 pandemic—which both political parties have decided to memory-hole despite over a million deaths in the United States. It was also the year of the largest demonstrations in US history: the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd.

Athletes were at the heart of the 2020 fight, none more so than the brave coaches and athletes of the Women’s National Basketball Association. The players in the W had spent years claiming their place as the conscience of the sports world. In summer 2016, after the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, they protested police violence during the national anthem—months before Colin Kaepernick took his knee. They not only forced Georgia’s MAGA wannabe-Senator Kelly Loeffler out as owner of the Atlanta Dream but stymied her political future by supporting Loeffler’s opponent, the Rev. Raphael Warnock. In 2023, one the league’s brightest stars, Maya Moore, even retired early to fight the racial injustices in the criminal justice system. Others like Natasha Cloud took significant time off to join the struggle for the idea that Black lives do matter.

Today, the WNBA is in a far different place than in 2020. Ratings are way up, franchise values skyrocketing, and home games packed with devoted fans eager to watch a new generation of stars. A second-year expansion team, the Golden State Valkyries, just became the first women’s squad in any sport to surpass a $1 billion valuation. Players, thanks to their union’s fight for a new collective bargaining agreement, have seen their paychecks begin to reflect this growth with massive raises to both the minimum and maximum salaries. For a league that sports podcast bros discussed only as a sexist punchline, the WNBA’s ascent is a satisfying counterpunch to every asshole who mocked these incredible athletes. But success comes with its own strings, and those strings can quickly become chains.

It was difficult to not hear the clanking of those chains at the Met Gala this past week. Three of the W’s brightest stars, A’ja Wilson, Angel Reese, and Paige Bueckers, strutted alongside the entertainers, billionaires, and reality-show parasites. What was especially dispiriting was that this wasn’t your typical Met Gala—which even in normal times is, to quote Tina Fey, a “jerk parade.” There were widespread calls to protest and boycott this year’s Gala—a boycott observed by people like Meryl Streep and Bella Hadid.

The boycott call was made because the honorary chairs and underwriters of the event were Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez Bezos. On top of his obscene wealth, Jeff Bezos is an anti-labor goon whose company has extensive ties to the Israeli military. For the many who care about worker and social justice, this made the Met Gala a celebration of his genocide-enablism and avarice, and it demanded a response.

In the days leading up to the events, activists held several demonstrations. And as the gliterrati strode past, protesters raised signs with slogans such as “Tax the Rich” and “Billionaires for a Dead Planet.” Videos about the amorality of this year’s Bezos Ball were projected on the side of buildings. A widely attended Ball Against Billionaires was held nearby, cohosted by actor Lisa Ann Walter from Abbott Elementary. Small vials of fake urine were placed around the Met, as a symbol of the Bezos policy against bathroom breaks for warehouse workers. While the wealthy preened, former Amazon union leader Chris Smalls was violently arrested outside.

In such a climate, attending the Met Gala was akin to crossing a picket line—not to mention crossing Meryl Streep, which is almost as bad! And people who cross picket lines are scabs. To see WNBA stars, fresh off their own labor victory, scab on these protests was disheartening. It was also a sign that athletes like Bueckers are now more concerned with the commerce they advertise on Instagram—her page hawks more product than QVC—than the humanitarian concerns of years past. It raises a question: Is a league now awash in riches sidelining social justice for commercialism?

Those reading might ask why call out three WNBA athletes among the throngs of wastrels, scoundrels, and finks that attended the Gala to pay homage to Bezos’s America? It’s because the lionhearted actions of WNBA players have led us to believe that the league stands for something more. No one expects anything from a Kardashian or a Bieber, but the WNBA athletes used to be more than brands. That’s the thing about standing for something. If you do it once, people expect you to do it again. To scab for Jeff Bezos has never been what this league is about. But as the WNBA grows in popularity, we see more of it going forward. Women’s basketball and its growing popularity is an incredible phenomenon. Lending its new cachet to the Bezos Ball was a shame and a sin.

Hungary is in a state of euphoria, waiting for “The Man” to take the oath of office as prime minister on May 9. Péter Magyar is the man who was part of Fidesz’s inner circle before challenging Viktor Orbán and then defeating him in the April 12 election, sparking enthusiasm all over Europe. “The Man” is the way Magyar labels himself on social media, as if he were the star of a Netflix series or a teen idol. A huge celebration has been planned in Kossuth Square, in Budapest, to mark Magyar’s inauguration and his party Tisza’s entry into Parliament.

Anyone deviating from the party schedule is being labeled a killjoy, as the mayor of Budapest soon experienced. When Gergely Karácsony launched a concert “to mark the end of the system” on May 8, he found an angry comment from the future prime minister posted on his Facebook feed, reminding him of the capital’s dire economic situation. Karácsony rearranged his plans to match those of the party that controls not only the government but also Parliament: Thanks to the electoral law inherited from the Orbán regime, with 53 percent of the vote, the Tisza party has 141 of the 199 seats. This is what is called a “supermajority,” and it allows Magyar to do what he wants: not only change the Constitution, but also draft a new one, as he has already said he plans to do.

Now, the man who came from the Fidesz system and who benefited from it before the split in February 2024 truly has enough power to do whatever he wants. And that’s the point: Intellectuals can’t get drunk on celebrations. Keeping our mind clear and alert is the best way to honor Hungarians’ huge participation and commitment to change. “It’s not the man himself, but the change he promises,” young people told me a few days before the elections in a crowded “Regime-Change Concert” (Rendszerbontó Nagykoncert) in Budapest. Will these expectations be satisfied?

Even though Péter Magyar claimed that he is “different from Orbán in every way,” his positions suggest quite the opposite. Perhaps Magyar gives reassurances to the European ruling class, with which he is negotiating to secure EU funding, since he resembles the softer Fidesz of the early 2000s, rather than the latest version, pro-Russian enough to become a caricature of itself. But it’s wise to recall that the same ruling class has for years pretended not to see Orbán’s autocratic drift, as well as it is now pretending not to see Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attacking the rule of law. Back in 1993, Fidesz sold its newly acquired headquarters to a bank and gave the money to Orbán’s father, Győző: The true nature of Orbánism—autocratic and corrupt—was there for all to see, right in the city center at Váci Street 38. Since 2010, the Hungarian autocrat has taken over everything: the economy, the media, the construction of discourse; in 2014, he even transformed “illiberal democracy” into a global brand. Yet throughout Chancellor Angela Merkel’s era, Fidesz enjoyed appeasement from the German Christian Democrats, who, with their eyes on German car manufacturing in Hungary, turned a blind eye to antidemocratic tendencies.

Following the same pattern, the European People’s Party, led by Bavarian Manfred Weber, has since 2021 promoted Meloni’s far-right party Brothers of Italy as its tactical ally, to the point that Ursula von der Leyen described Meloni as pro-European and pro-rule-of-law; meanwhile, media freedom, civic space, and the rule of law have been increasingly under attack in Italy.

So is Tisza’s membership in the EPP and von der Leyen’s enthusiastic reactions enough to reassure us about a pro-European, pro-rule-of-law Hungary? No, I would say. And what Magyar himself declares is far from reassuring. The election winner has granted “pragmatic cooperation” toward Russia; when Donald Trump calls him “a good guy,” that’s because Tisza promised the US administration will be its point of reference. The incoming prime minister shows enthusiasm toward Meloni and “her extraordinary achievements,” publicly opposes European political integration, and zealously supports the deregulation underway in the EU (“less is more”). In short, The Man—whose image and election campaign were curated by his friend television director Márk Radnai—has devised the perfect mix to seduce an electorate long accustomed to Fidesz. On the one hand, he has latched onto that same ideological universe, extolling pride and exploiting nationalist aesthetics; on the other, he has secured the global support of Berlin, Brussels, and ultimately Washington, by embodying that pro-corporate approach under the guise of technocratic allure.

In short, Magyar wears the “Bocskai jacket”—with nationalist evocations—and Raybans with the same ease, displaying flags as he captions “Peter in da house” on a selfie from Brussels, where he went to unfreeze EU funds.

An “efficient and humane Hungary” is how Tisza can reconcile the drive for change from the younger generations—those who, as the founders of Fidesz admitted, are “tired of us”—with a substrate of conformism toward a Europe that increasingly resembles a corporation. In recent times, the EU Commission has been destroying its antitrust, liberal tradition, to chase the mirage of monopolistic “giants” (doesn’t that remind you of Peter Thiel’s antidemocratic dream?), while dismantling social rights and the welfare state itself (for example, in Germany as well as in the EU, a push toward privatizing pensions is underway). Nothing suggests that Magyar, who is anything but left-wing, would even bat an eyelid. Quite the contrary.

As minister of economy, Péter Magyar has chosen István Kapitány, formerly Shell’s global executive vice president. The deputy prime minister and foreign minister will be Anita Orbán—no relation—gifted with both political astuteness and international connections: She lived in the United States and even worked in the London office of an American liquified natural gas company (Tellurian), before moving on to manage relations with the Orbán government as Vodafone Hungary, precisely when an oligarch from the Orbán system was preparing to acquire the company. She understands the grammar of diplomacy as well as that of power, a skill she previously exercised for Fidesz before distancing herself from the latest Orbán version and promising to bring Hungary “back under the Euro-Atlantic compass.”

The Man advances with political astuteness and communication skills; we need to see how he will act before criticizing him, Tisza supporters say. But here’s the question: What is the state of pluralism in Hungary? Currently, in the Hungarian Parliament, besides the dominant Tisza party and Fidesz, only a handful of MPs from the far-right Our Homeland Movement (Mi Hazánk Mozgalom) are represented. Just to give an idea of the nationalist aesthetic that Magyar supports and fuels, the leader had welcomed Mi Hazánk’s proposal to have MPs swear in before the crown (an idea that was abandoned only due to logistical problems). Homage to the Szent Korona, the crown of Saint Stephen, the “sacred crown of Hungary,” hasn’t been seen for some time: The last to swear by the Korona was Ferenc Szálasi in 1944. The bold young man taking selfies at the gym has not only defeated Orbán. He has also realized Orbán’s long-held dream: to push the left out of Parliament.