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

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

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

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

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

The answer to those questions is no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Findings

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

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

What’s Needed: A Fresh Approach

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

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

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

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

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

Prioritizing Climate Work

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

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

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

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

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

A Prescription for Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Time Is Now

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

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

Next Steps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report on the Process, Not Just the Arguments

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

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

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

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

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

Reliable Sources

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

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

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

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

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

I ended my 2020 letter with this closing paragraph:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Then Piker weighed in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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