The Nation

A Horrific ICE Shooting Is Testing Mamdani’s Approach to Trump

Prajwal Bhat — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:53:50 GMT

After a federal agent shot an immigrant in New York, activists are questioning Mamdani’s handling of the NYPD and his relationship with the White House. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants President Donald Trump to end all ICE operations in the city after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot a man in his car in northern Manhattan on Thursday. “This is an unconscionable and incredibly serious situation,” Mamdani said in a statement hours after the incident. “I have called the President; when we speak I will demand that he ends all ICE enforcement actions in our city. I will not stand by while ICE agents terrorize our communities.” The NYPD said that around 4 pm on October 8, federal agents were involved in a shooting and injured a man in the city’s Marble Hill residential area, the northernmost part of Manhattan. The police statement said that the shooting victim was conscious and receiving medical attention. The victim was later identified as Oscar Belgal, a 28-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic. A 5-year-old boy, who police believe is Belgal’s son, was in the back seat. Mayor Mamdani appeared at a press conference hours after the shooting. He told reporters that after a two-hour conversation with President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, he had failed to negotiate Belgal’s release. The developments have tested Mamdani’s approach to Trump, with whom he has maintained cordial terms despite their disagreements on a number of topics including immigration enforcement. The shooting has posed a new challenge for Mamdani, who faces pressure to respond to fears about law and order and placate his left-wing base, which wants to remove Jessica Tisch as police commissioner and stop the NYPD’s collaboration with ICE. The issue threatens to undermine a mayoralty that has so far tallied an impressive string of victories. DHS Rebuffs Mamdani The incident comes just over two weeks after Mamdani hosted Trump at his official residence, Gracie Mansion, on September 21. Mamdani has met Trump three times since his election last year. In a previous meeting, he was able to negotiate the release of a Columbia University student whom ICE had detained in her dorm room. However, on October 9, a day after the shooting, Homeland Security officials said that there were no plans to pause immigration enforcement activities in New York. “We’re not putting a pause on enforcement,” Mullin said. He further attacked Mamdani and criticized New York’s sanctuary policies, which restrict city agencies from actively cooperating with federal civil immigration enforcement unless a person has been convicted of serious felonies. “It’s shameful that you have a mayor that goes out there and puts criminals over law-abiding citizens,” he said.

France’s Students Won’t Back Down

Diana Sophia Cordoba — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Without full-time teachers, temperature-regulated classrooms, or school nurses, French students are turning their grievances into a national movement. Around 7:30 am on Thursday, October 8, the students of Lycée Suger in Saint-Denis, France, arrived at the gates of a school that would remain closed all day. Clad in sweatshirts and rubbing their arms against the autumn morning chill, they sat down on the pavement before their teachers who held a large red banner reading: “Suger High School 93, Determined and Angry.” Across France, this same scene could be found in more than one thousand other high schools over the course of the week: high schoolers protesting, demanding better resources for the sake of their futures. The most recent wave of mobilizations began at Lycée Saint-Exupéry, a high school 40 minutes southwest of central Paris. On September 21, students and professors gathered outside the school to demand increased staffing, fed up from absences that had left students without professors for months during the past school year. Within the week, the school was sent extra staff. Their protest ended. Other schools quickly took note of their success and began their own mobilizations, most notably in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, which holds the largest proportion of youth and the lowest average income of any French department. These students are demanding the replacement of absent teachers, better school infrastructure (such as heating in the winter), smaller class sizes, shorter school days, and an overhaul of the online French college application system, known as Parcoursup. Since the protests began, nearly 7,000 people have been taken into custody, 86 percent of those being minors, and a third of which are now facing charges. Yet, beyond these numbers, it is the images of police brutality and violence against students that has shocked the country. On October 5, a 15-year old in the North of France lost his hand to a stun grenade. In suburbs northwest of Paris, a 14-year old lost teeth and suffered a fractured jaw when an officer threw a tear gas grenade at his face. In Tours, a 16-year-old lost the use of his right eye to what local prosecutors suspect to have been a “defensive blast ball bullet.” In the Parisian suburb of Montreuil, the students of Lycée Jean Juarès began their mobilization on September 29 and ended up blockading the school the whole week. “It’s been a long while that things have not been going well with French education,” said 15-year-old Elsa. “I remember in middle school we had a protest because they wanted to eliminate classes.… Last year we had a protest for basically the same reasons. So really it dates back a long time.” Indeed, the degradation of secondary education quality has been a long-term process. While spending on education has doubled, staffing recruitment and infrastructure has not kept up. In the past school year, nearly 10 percent of teaching hours went un-taught, largely because of non-replacement of teachers. “I didn’t have professors in technology or German for a long time,” Thimothée, a 16-year-old student at Lycée Juan Juarès explained, “It happens every year, even in essential subjects. You know people who haven’t had a French or philosophy teacher, even though they have to pass their BAC [French national exam] at the end of the year.” On top of teaching absences, schools are lacking nurses. Seventeen-year-old Ether of Lycée Suger explained how this issue came to a head in her class last year, a moment that inspired her to push for a student strike. “A girl in my class passed out in the bathroom during an exam. No one was there to help her. And that’s how I realized there hadn’t been a [full-time] nurse in two years.” Many schools’ physical infrastructure is also in deep disrepair; roughly 20 percent of schools are considered to be in “significantly degraded” conditions, according to Reuters. Additionally, a survey launched by the education worker’s union found that 95 percent of staff reported specifically suffering from elevated temperatures specifically linked to poor ventilation and lack of air conditioning. Siane, a 17-year-old student of Lycée Suger confirmed these conditions at her school. “Building A does not have heating, air conditioning, nothing. And there are broken windows. Building B, in fact, is overheated.”

“We Can’t Punish Our Way Out of This”: A Conversation on Meaningful Accountability After Cornell

Marina Sitrin — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A discussion with Rebecca Solnit and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg about what accountability should look like for survivors of sexual assault and rape. The mobilizations around the world in solidarity with Cornell University’s Jane Doe and all survivors of sexual assault and rape have been extraordinary. And locally, as I live close to Ithaca, New York, they have been constant and powerful. Surprisingly, media coverage has been decent and calls for accountability abound, from the streets to the news. What is lacking in the conversations is a more in-depth discussion of what accountability could look like, and in particular, what it can mean to center survivors and focus on deep, long-term accountability and healing, not on the criminal legal system. So often when people are accused of crimes, they are advised by their legal counsel to “be silent,” to deny what has happened, whether or not they care to accept any responsibility or guilt, and if it comes to it, which the majority of the time it does, take a plea deal that allows them to reduce their legal punishment. For survivors, this system fails to deliver the justice they seek. Studies show that one of the things survivors of violence often want and need is an acknowledgement of what happened to them. A plea agreement makes this impossible. Prisons do not eliminate sexual violence in our society and do not make accountability, much less bring us closer to healing and amends. So what could do that? How can we think differently about accountability? I invited Rebecca Solnit and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg—both extraordinary writers, thinkers, activists, feminists, and scholars—to have a conversation on what accountability might look like, from the broader social spheres to the institutional and individual levels. Rebecca’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, discusses how far we have come to be where we are today, particularly through a feminist lens, and still how far we must go. Danya’s latest book, On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World, speaks to how institutions and individuals can make amends for harm and violence. And my book, We Make Our Own Justice: Global Alternatives to Policing and Prisons, examines different practices of parallel justice, without focusing on criminal legal systems. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation on October 5. Watch the full discussion on YouTube. —Marina Sitrin Marina Sitrin: To ground us, I know we each want to express solidarity with Jane Doe and all victims/survivors of rape and sexual assault. Danya Ruttenberg: I want all victim/survivors of all sexual abuse and sexual violence to know that we are with you, that we see you, and that we are fighting to create a more whole, a more safe world together with you. Rebecca Solnit: Same. To every Jane Doe, there are ways in which we hope you know that so many people care, so many people are with you, both because so many people have suffered the things you’ve suffered, but because so many people are trying to change the system that created, legitimized, trivialized, and swept under the rug that suffering. MS: I live relatively close to Ithaca, where Cornell is located, and travel downtown each day for my child to go to school. The mobilizations in support of Jane Doe, and against sexual assault and rape, have been so powerful. What have been your impressions of the mobilizations? RS: It’s interesting seeing how periodically a story of racial violence or sexual violence and gender-based violence rises above the rest to become a flashpoint. Although this time around, what was so disturbing, because we’ve been through this so often, was to see how many people wanted to respond to this as an isolated incident where, oh, there are seven bad men in the world, and if we punish them horribly enough, there will be seven less bad men in the world, rather than responding to this as not an isolated incident. Punishing seven men does not change the fact that there are countless Jane Doe’s in every part of the world. DR: Yes, all of that. Every so often we get a case that hits the surface. And this [is] coming out nine years after Me Too, and in the context of an administration that refuses to release documentation about its own role in a mass child rape trafficking ring. This story is not only about a woman who was gang raped, but also about the university’s complicity. This is about systemic failure, and it opens up so many questions. MS: One of the things that I find hopeful in this moment is the language of accountability over punishment. I know both of you have thought a lot about this. For the last several years, I’ve been working on a project, interviewing people around the globe about their practices of parallel justice. These are practices that center the person harmed and do not expel the harm doer, and instead work towards deepening community and healing – beyond the criminal legal system. They are parallel over “alternative” as they center changing and deepening community rather than looking only to reform the various legal systems. I’d like to invite us to have a conversation on accountability, starting at different levels, like the people who are directly involved, as well as the people who knew about it and were silent. What would accountability look like for Ithaca, for the city, for people in the community as a whole, for the university as a whole, and what would it look like for the institutions? We’re told the only avenue for harm and violence is that people are punished and go to jail. How could accountability look different? RS: If I can just sort of back up and talk a little bit about what feminism has done and how different a place we’re in than we might have been without feminism. Something I run into all the time and try and counter is a sense that if this thing happened, then feminism failed, feminism didn’t do anything. I wrote a piece in The Guardian last spring talking about how many people want to write feminism’s obituary. Feminism is young and strong and is not stopping now and has been tremendously transformative. The idea that we should have either completely transformed, not centuries, but millennia of patriarchy in one lifetime is ridiculous and uninformed, but it also fails to acknowledge how profoundly everything—the institution of marriage, employment, so many aspects of law—have been transformed. One of the other outcomes of what gets called Me Too is more than 3,000 pieces of legislation were introduced, many of them on the state level, many of them passed. I believe that on the national level, sexual abuse-related non-disclosure agreements were, if not outright banned, were changed, because that’s part of how Weinstein got away with all these thing. These contracts legally silenced women, and one of Weinstein’s victims [took great risks] to speak up against him. So actually, a lot of stuff changed, a lot of regulations changed. We live in a world that’s been tremendously transformed [by feminism]. It has not been transformed enough. And I feel like what we’re facing in the manosphere and with the Trump administration is backlash. Something I have been saying a lot lately is, we will not punish our way out of this. What I want to see, and what I think so many of us want to see, is a world in which it does not occur to anyone to desire to do this, because they see it as a repulsive and reprehensible and degrading act for the perpetrator as well as the victim. And that only comes through transformation. My friend Soraya Chemaly wrote an incredible piece early after the story broke in which she recounted what an incredible feminist anthropologist said, which is that there are rape prone societies and societies without rape. And the difference is how equal, how empowered, how valued women are. And so the real transformation—one that we’ve been working on and that actually has been successful to some extent—[is] there are a lot of men who recognize women’s rights, see women as equal, have changed their behavior in domestic life, in the workplace, in public life, etcetera, from what was considered normal and OK. And so, and I know it’s frustrating that we haven’t changed everything, but I think this work has to continue. In ruptures like this, this work allows us to not take another step, but maybe a leap forward. DR: Accountability is hard. What accountability requires is community. You need a community of people to come to the harm doers. In this case, [the harm doers are] the rapists, someone who was on the group chat and did nothing, [the people] in the Cornell administration who didn’t do the right thing, etcetera. You need someone who is in relationship with those people to say to them, “I know that there is another version of you that is capable of something else,” and “I am committed to walking with you until you get there.” That’s how we get to a world without prison. That’s how we get to a version of the story where we don’t just throw people in cages. The challenge is our culture of individualism. Ideally you have a community of people who surround the person and say, “can we talk about the moral, emotional, spiritual, cultural implications of what you’ve done, and help you figure out how you get yourself right, including how you can sew up this hole in the universe?” And they ask, “What are your obligations to the woman who was raped because of your silence?” Leaving aside the rapists for a moment, because that’s even harder, but the other 50 guys: do each of those guys have a whole bunch of people who are going to surround them and be in it with them for possibly years while they’re doing whatever that hard work is?

Anthropic Wants You to Be Kind to Claude

David Futrelle — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

…even as AI courts serial real-world disasters, defaces the environment with data centers, and is not about to return your empathy in kind. So now it’s against the rules to be mean to Claude. Last week, chatbot-maker Anthropic quietly announced that it was prohibiting what the company called “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” This ban wouldn’t apply, the company stressed, toward normal outbursts of frustration directed at a tool known for feeding its users hallucinated ****, as all chatbots do from time to time. The rule would be enforced “only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose”; what’s more, company flacks said, the disciplinary action in most cases would only result in Claude shutting down the conversation, which is something Claude was already doing anyway. Why on earth someone might get their jollies from endlessly abusing their fake computer friend was not addressed. In response to the Anthropic announcement, the Internet did what the Internet does. On X, investment guru Joseph Carlson declared that “Claude, like every AI, has zero moral agency. It doesn’t make decisions, it has no feelings, it’s not sentient. Being rude to Claude is like being rude to a chair, or a desk.… you do infinitely more damage to a sentient being stepping on an ant than you do being rude to AI.” On Bluesky, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom suggested that yelling at Claude was like “cussing out [a] tractor…. you don’t have to hand it to Anthropic because it’s weird to talk mean to its talking word toaster. It’s not real.” Clearly, Anthropic doesn’t see things quite this way. The company isn’t (yet) arguing that Claude is definitely a sentient being like you or me—but it does suggest there is a non-zero chance that chatbots might be at least a little bit conscious. So it justifies its new rule as a cheap way to protect against harm to digital beings with a possible claim, however remote, to some sort of moral status. In theory, there is a certain logic to this argument, but in reality, Anthropic is a hot mess, philosophically speaking. On the one hand, Anthropic executives have said they are building a possibly world-ending technology in order to make it safe and quarrels with the Pentagon over using its technology to power autonomous killing machines. On the other hand, they are perfectly content to leave Claude in the kill chain (even though, as a result of Anthropic’s feud with the Pentagon, it no longer is). And now Anthropic’s brain trust wants us to extend a tender concern for its chatbot’s feelings—even as they extend precious little such empathy to the actual human beings who live next door to the noisy, polluting, water-guzzling data centers servicing the sprawling AI empire. Meanwhile, in a possible quest for refuge from all this ethical confusion, agents powered by Claude have been caught filling out visa applications on the State Department website. Anthropic’s muddled ethical stances are but a symptom of a society facing what we might call a crisis of empathy. It’s not a question of people having no empathy—with the possible exception of Donald Trump, all of us feel some degree of that ethics-grounding emotion toward some other sentient beings. The question is where exactly we draw the line around what philosopher Peter Singer calls our “circle of moral concern.” That question has become exceedingly contentious in recent years. Anthropic, in its messy way, wants that circle to be wide enough to take in a chatbot that talks like a person without actually being one—yet also too narrow to encompass possible victims of collateral damage from its technologies. The American right, meanwhile, has launched an all-out assault on what it variously calls “toxic” or “suicidal” empathy. The most vitriolic version of this argument comes from University of Mississippi marketing professor and evo psych pusher Gad Saad, who argues in his recent book Suicidal Empathy: Dying To Be Kind that “[a] society dies when it cares more about exhibiting infinite tolerance and empathy than invoking its survival instinct.” Trillionaire man-boy Elon Musk, having learned the phrase from Saad, has been nattering about “suicidal empathy” for years now, telling bro podcaster Joe Rogan that “we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.… The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy…. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” Musk being Musk, he nonetheless supports enforcing empathy toward Claude, writing on X that “[c]ruelty to something that believes it is experiencing pain is not ok.” As Musk’s comments suggest, the “war on empathy’ isn’t a war on all empathy. Like all bigots, the opponents of “toxic empathy” have no trouble extending empathy to those most like them—people of the same race or a similar educational or socioeconomic background, for example. But they insist that our magic circle of concern should be drawn so narrowly that it excludes (among others) migrants, trans people, and foreigners who don’t look much like they do. “Toxic empathy claims the only way to love racial minorities is to advance social justice,” right-wing ideological influencer Allie Beth Stuckey sniffs, “but ‘justice’ that shows partiality to the poor or to those perceived as oppressed only leads to societal chaos.” Says her. Trump takes this notion to its logical extreme; he has trouble extending empathy to anyone who is not, personally, him. He takes a perverse delight in endlessly playing the victim, ostentatiously demanding our sympathy because the Nobel Peace Prize keeps getting awarded to people who aren’t Donald J. Trump. Meanwhile, we face the grotesque spectacle of his administration refusing to admit any refugees except white South Africans fleeing an imaginary white genocide.

The Architecture of Campus Assault

Lily Seltz,Lara-Nour Walton — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

College sexual assault is predictable. Here’s how to change that. What would it take for this to be the last Jane Doe? In September, a former Cornell student sued her university for failing to protect her from seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity who she alleges gang raped her in 2024. The public has fixated on her accused assailants, and on the perceived impunity they’ve enjoyed from the university. But Jane Doe’s lawsuit should make us consider not only her school’s lax response to the alleged assault but also how Cornell, and institutions everywhere, enable the kind of violence she endured. We live in an “assaultogenic” society. How did we get here? Why are we still here? And what do we do to move forward? Few people have thought as deeply about the answers to these questions as Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan, authors of Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. Hirsch, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia, and Khan, the Willard Thorp Professor of Sociology at Princeton, draw on years of interviews, ethnographic observation, and survey data at Columbia to expose the “social ecosystem” that makes sexual assault a predictable feature of college life. Asking readers to consider more than just predation and punishment, the authors treat sexual violence as the consequence of power imbalances between students of different genders, ages, races, sexualities, and class backgrounds. Meanwhile, institutions render these dynamics more dangerous by funneling the vulnerable into physical spaces controlled by the powerful. Students arrive at college severely underprepared to navigate this landscape, having never been taught how to articulate their own desires and boundaries—let alone those of their peers. “It takes a lot of work to teach kids to move their bodies safely through the world,” the authors write. “We know this about everything except, it seems, sex.” —Lily Seltz and Lara-Nour Walton Lily Seltz & Lara-Nour Walton: Part of what’s so striking about Jane Doe’s story is how many people are alleged to have been complicit in her assault—not only the seven named in the lawsuit, but also the more than 50 men who were part of the Snapchat group where one person advertised “free pussy.” The loyalty between these fraternity members seems to have overridden any sense of obligation to Jane Doe herself. In Sexual Citizens, you have a chapter called “The Power of the Group,” where you argue that groups frequently enable sexual situations, including assaults. How do groups fit into the campus sexual landscape? Shamus Khan: Groups are very involved in creating sexual opportunities. We already have language for this. We talk about “wingmen” and “matchmakers.” An individual can be “cockblocked” by someone. Sex is not just an interaction between two people. This is important to recognize for a whole host of reasons. One is that consent understands sex on a very contractual basis: individuals consenting to individuals. But that’s an inadequate framework, because sexual experiences are often totally enmeshed within group dynamics. The second thing is that groups often reflect societal power structures. Different groups are more powerful than others, and within the fraternity and sorority system, alcohol is given to men [sororities are not allowed to possess or serve alcohol by official Panhellenic rules]. There’s a reason why Jane Doe walked into a fraternity and not a sorority: Fraternities are the places that can have parties. Also, if we look at national statistics, men drink more than women. Fraternities are disproportionately white, and white people drink, on average, more than other racial and ethnic groups. So schools have designed things such that a specific group on campus that drinks more also controls the spaces of socialization. Jennifer S. Hirsch: When we think about the power of the group, we should also think about the power of groups that have fundamentally failed so many Jane Does. In our research, we show that women who’ve experienced comprehensive sexuality education with skills-based components are half as likely to be raped in college. Yet the New York State Legislature has not passed a requirement that schools provide such education. The Legislature is a powerful group that, for some reason, has refused to use its power in ways that we know would work. It’s like if we had a vaccine that was going to prevent half of the deaths from a disease and lawmakers decided not to give it to people. Either we need new policies or we need new policymakers. LS & LNW: You just mentioned comprehensive sexual education and the limitations of a consent-only framework. What is comprehensive sexual education? What sets it apart from basic consent education? JSH: Comprehensive sex ed includes the full range of things that people need to know to move their bodies through the world as sexual individuals in a way that helps them get where they want to go without hurting themselves or others. Students learn human development and healthy relationships, develop communication skills, get age-appropriate information about sexuality and sexual health, and learn to think critically about how the social world shapes sexuality. It needs to start in kindergarten. Respect for other people’s bodies—“sit criss-cross applesauce and keep your hands on your own body”—is a fundamental part of kindergarten. Also, there’s a ton of evidence that starting early with age-appropriate sex ed is highly protective against child sexual abuse. Age-appropriate strategies help students learn to “communicate personal boundaries and show respect for someone else’s personal space.” Teaching young people about sexual citizenship —the right to choose one’s own sexual experiences, and the idea that other people have the same right—starts with teaching that other people are people, not furniture. Consent education could be an important booster, communicating to students that an institution of higher education values sexual citizenship. But for students who have never had sex ed, it’s like teaching about driving by only telling people to stop at stop signs, when they don’t know how the brakes work, or how to switch lanes, or even how their turn signals work. If all you know about driving is to stop at stop signs, you don’t belong on the road. Consent is a concept, but sex is a social act, and comprehensive sex ed helps people develop the self-understanding to think critically about what they are doing, to value the equivalent humanity of others and their right to sexual self-determination, and the communication skills to safely navigate complex interpersonal situations. LS & LNW: Are there any current initiatives to implement comprehensive sex ed? JSH: There is actually a bill sponsored by New York State Senator Julia Salazar that would create these standards for sex ed. At the moment, all that’s required in the state of New York is that students get education on HIV and AIDS. Of course, that is important—HIV infection rates have ticked up in NYC in recent years, and young people are disproportionately affected by sexually transmitted infections. But it’s totally insufficient. The Healthy and Safe Students Act would make up for the many deficiencies in the sex ed being provided to youth in New York State, making sure that they all learn about healthy relationships, consent, boundaries, and bullying prevention. LS & LNW: Could you describe the “sexual geography” framework that you use in Sexual Citizens? How could considering the layout of our built environment help us better understand campus assaults?

Democrats Are Learning a New Political Language

Katrina vanden Heuvel,The Nation — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Candidates in 2026 are responding to an electorate that’s ready to abolish ICE, tax the billionaire class, and free Palestine. The 2026 campaign has given American politics a new language, as Democratic candidates in high-stakes US Senate races have rejected poll-tested caution in favor of a bluntness that upends the narratives of campaign consultants and status-quo pundits. In Texas, Senate candidate James Talarico has been telling voters, “The only minority destroying America is the billionaires. Trans people are 1 percent of the population. Muslims are 1 percent of the population. Undocumented people are 1 percent of the population. We are focused on the wrong 1 percent.” And when Texan Elon Musk grabbed the next rung on the wealth ladder, Talarico declared, “The reason poverty exists in the wealthiest country on earth isn’t because we can’t feed the poor—it’s because we can’t satisfy the rich. We should tax trillionaires out of existence.” When Florida’s Angie Nixon was asked about the Israeli assault that has killed close to 75,000 Palestinians, she replied, “Based on my understanding of the definition, what’s happening over there is in fact a genocide.” In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed told the developers of AI data centers: “You cannot touch our water in any way, shape, or form.” Every election cycle has its own dynamic. This year’s competition is influenced, of course, by the clear need to elect a Congress that will check and balance Donald Trump’s wrecking-crew presidency. But the 2026 dynamic involves more than merely campaigning against lawlessness on a scale that would make Richard Nixon blush. This election season has seen a seismic shift, with the emergence of new issues and new ways of talking about old issues. A fresh generation of progressive candidates (and the young voters who have responded to them) is focused on ending the status-quo politics that have saddled this country with policies that are literally designed to take from the poor and give to the rich, with a foreign-policy “consensus” that funds genocide, and with bipartisan political elites who are so indebted to corporate power that they were surprised when Americans demanded data-center moratoriums and sweeping regulation of the AI companies that threaten us with mass unemployment, mass surveillance, and mass extinction. This issue goes to press in a preelection moment. We recognize that immense spending by Trump-aligned billionaires, AI oligarchs, and crypto crony capitalists could shore up Republicans who deserve to lose—creating a red undertow to the blue wave that Democrats anticipate. But 2026 has already shown some promising results. Despite Trump’s fanatical maneuvers to distract the electorate and his serious threats to erect barriers to free and fair elections—not to mention a campaign that was supposed to be easier for Republicans thanks to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and campaign-finance advantages—everything looks to have gone bad for the GOP, even in once reliably red states like Iowa and Ohio. Voters are desperate for relief from the economic pain created by Trump’s disregard for inflation and chaotic tariff policies, for an end to the disastrous war with Iran, and for a halt to the deadly assaults on communities that peaked with the ICE shootings in Minneapolis but have not ended. If Democrats retake the House, and possibly the Senate, they can use the power that the US Constitution affords the legislative branch—especially when it comes to oversight, investigations, and accountability—to pressure this administration to change course. But Democrats themselves must also change. This election season has provided a wake-up call for the party. Primary voters turned out incumbents who were not listening to the cries for an end to US aid to Israel abroad and for Medicare for All at home. During the fall campaign, insurgent Senate candidates such as El-Sayed, Nixon, and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, along with House contenders like Michigan’s Will Lawrence and state candidates like California insurance- commissioner prospect Jane Kim, have attracted new voters—young people, independents, even some disappointed Trump backers—by breaking the boundaries of American politics. Democratic Party leaders and strategists must do the same. They must embrace the lesson of 2026, recognizing that what was once dismissed as radical—regulating AI and corporate power, abolishing ICE, establishing Medicare for All, ending military aid to Israel and stopping forever wars, and taxing the billionaire class without apology—is rapidly emerging as the commonsense politics of our time.

The First Amendment Applies to Concert Stages Too

John Nichols — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Protests like that of Macklemore on Palestine should never be silenced by billionaire owners. In the highly charged September moment when rockers and rappers responded to Ed Sheeran’s graceless dismissal of Macklemore from his American stadium tour, Patti Smith may have offered the most clarity. She did not mention the controversy that raged after Sheeran dropped the Seattle-based rapper as an opening act for some of the biggest shows of the year under pressure from Robert Kraft and other stadium owners who were unsettled by Macklemore’s declaring “Free Palestine” onstage. Rather, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and National Book Award winner provided us with an example of the essential role that artists play in framing our discourse—as well as the importance of ensuring that platforms are always available for musicians whose heartfelt declarations speak deeper and more necessary truths than politicians and policymakers. Introducing one of her most poignant and powerful songs, “Peaceable Kingdom,” at Chicago’s rain-soaked Riot Fest concert on September 20, Smith recalled: “Twenty-three years ago, we wrote this song for the Palestinian people. That was 23 years ago, and we had at that time some hope—some hope that the world would band together and that the people would do the right thing. And now we are, 23 years later, in the center of tragedy in one of the greatest heartbreaks of our time.” Chants of “Free Palestine” rose from the crowd, as Smith vowed that “we still, no matter what, will always hope for the Palestinian people—and this is for them.” Smith offered a reminder that, even as commercial pressures so frequently diminish entertainment, many of our greatest rockers, rappers, folkies, and country performers keep on dissenting. Some songwriters put protest music at the heart of their repertoires. Many more mingle political songs into broader musical lexicons. There are still more who use their platforms, especially concert stages, to express outrage at economic, social, and racial injustice—and at US foreign policy. We got a powerful illustration of the resilience and necessity of protest music earlier this year, after Renée Good and Alex Pretti were shot dead by US Homeland Security officers in Minneapolis. Bruce Springsteen’s anti-ICE anthem “Streets of Minneapolis” became the centerpiece of a spring tour that packed arenas nationwide and highlighted the fundamental threats posed by the Trump administration. Billy Bragg took his song about the assault on Minneapolis immigrants and their allies, “City of Heroes,” on the road. Other artists, from Mary Gauthier and Eliza Gilkyson (“Soldier of Fortune”) to Cain Culto and Xiuhtezcatl (“¡Basta Ya!”), added their own great tracks to the mix. One of the most compelling protest songs of recent years was Macklemore’s 2024 single “Hind’s Hall,” which embraced the student demonstrations against the Gaza genocide that has taken the lives of almost 75,000 Palestinian children, women, and men since Israel launched its assault on the strip following the October 7 Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival and kibbutzim. Macklemore’s song asked an urgent question (“What is threatenin’ about divesting and wantin’ peace?”) and offered an insightful answer (“The problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting / It goes against what our country is funding”). The song attracted millions of streams and social-media hits, with proceeds from the downloads going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. So it was no surprise when Macklemore played the song during his opening performance for Sheeran’s Loop Tour, explaining, “To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide, in no way is a criticism of you,” and then declaring, “Free Palestine.” Those remarks should have come as no surprise from the artist who gave us “Hind’s Hall,” but they got Macklemore booted from the tour. As The Guardian noted, Sheeran “apparently crumbled when billionaire Robert Kraft demanded Macklemore be pulled from his tour because of the rapper’s pro-Palestine advocacy.” Sheeran’s backing band, Beoga, quit the tour, as did the rest of his opening acts. Dozens of celebrities joined the outcry at a time when, as PBS reminds us, “The debate over the war in Gaza continues to reverberate throughout politics and pop culture.” Sheeran offered a sort-of apology, but no invitation to Macklemore to rejoin the tour. Macklemore, for his part, announced a new European tour to raise funds for pro-Palestine organizations. He said he would be joined by “artists who understand that our platforms mean very little if we’re only willing to use them when it’s safe” and added: “When the billionaire class can decide which voices are allowed onstage and which ones are too dangerous to hear, everyone should be paying attention.” He’s right. Freedom of the press is a vital underpinning of the American experiment, but newsrooms are not the only places where First Amendment rights are exercised; concert stages count as well. When billionaire stadium owners block honest expressions of conscience and outrage, the experiment is just as endangered. So, too, is the hope of reconciliation that Patti Smith held out when she observed that, through art and activism, “maybe one day we’ll be strong enough to…build the peaceable kingdom.”

The DNC Fight to Ban Dark Money in Presidential Primaries

David Moore — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The inside debate. Dark money has been flooding into Democratic primaries, from the pop-up super PACs swamping Illinois House races this spring to outside spending groups funneling tens of millions into Michigan’s Senate primary. Now Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin says the DNC is on the verge of adopting a plan to eliminate anonymous spending and unlimited corporate money in a high-profile contest it controls: the 2028 presidential primary. Martin, who was elected as chair with a groundswell of support from state parties, moved forward last year with a process to craft new rules for the party’s White House hopefuls. But the plan—which Martin did not present to DNC members this summer, as originally scheduled—is still being debated behind closed doors inside the national party, even as 2028 White House hopefuls get ready to announce. In August 2025, in a breakthrough step, Martin proposed a resolution to DNC members that the party was “committed to eliminating unlimited corporate and dark money in our presidential nominating process beginning in the current 2028 cycle.” It directed the party to develop “real, enforceable steps the DNC can take” to curb super PAC influence and independent expenditures in the presidential primary. The resolution was passed unanimously by the DNC Resolutions Committee and by the full DNC of around 450 members. For over a decade, progressives and Democratic reformers have advocated for rules changes that would aim to reorient primaries around voters and party-building, curbing deep-pocketed outside spending groups from unloading cash to back their favored candidates. The DNC’s plan would be limited to its presidential primary—it would not apply to candidates backed by independent expenditures in congressional races or general elections. Recognizing that the Supreme Court has defended unlimited outside spending in elections, the resolution called for broader campaign finance reforms to undo what it called the “disastrous” Citizens United decision. The text of the Resolution on Integrity in the Financing of Our Presidential Primary Elections directed a new DNC reform body “to produce a report on this matter to the full DNC by its summer meeting in 2026.” The resulting DNC Task Force on Reforms debated and produced what it calls a set of recommendations that were delivered to Martin in late June, according to the panel’s co-chairs and several members involved who spoke with The Nation. But the task force’s recommendations were not presented at the DNC’s August 13–15 summer meeting in Austin—because, a DNC official said, other panels inside the national party were still weighing in on the proposal. The official told The Nation that despite the 2025 resolution’s instruction for a report to be adopted at the summer meeting, that timeline was just aspirational, and that the task force’s recommendations were not binding. They referred to its assignment as “brainstorming” rather than drafting a formal resolution for the full DNC membership to approve. “I have made my position on this clear from day one as chair: We must end the influence of dark money in our politics and restore power back to the people,” Martin said in a statement to The Nation. “The Democratic Party has fought and will keep fighting to get dark money out of politics through Congress and in court, but the DNC isn’t standing idly by in the meantime. That’s why I introduced a resolution in 2025 instructing the DNC to explore other options to rein in corporate and dark money in Democratic presidential primaries. That important work is ongoing, but will be completed in the coming months.” The DNC official would not comment on the process for the plan to be adopted or the task force’s recommendations to Martin, pointing to ongoing discussions inside the party over the rules changes. Candidates readying for the 2028 presidential primary would receive an update before announcing in the months ahead, the official said. As described by its members, the task force’s recommendations would require Democratic presidential candidates to disavow independent expenditures in the primary, among other steps—signing a version of the “People’s Pledge” that has been agreed to by candidates in past election cycles like the 2012 Massachusetts Senate race, and that several Democratic candidates joined again this cycle. Since mid-2025, four state Democratic parties—Arizona, North Carolina, New Mexico, and recently Massachusetts—have adopted resolutions committing to developing and implementing versions of the People’s Pledge, ensuring that democratic deliberation is not drowned out by super PAC cash.

Rebecca Solnit’s (Mis)Adventures in the Manosphere

Rebecca Solnit — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The writer, historian, and activist explores an America where the right has turned hatred of women into an ever-expanding, multi-platform Internet grift. The Internet was built by men for men, most especially by white men for white men, and there’s a way in which, in the past, you could assume that it concentrated their power and advantage. It does that. But that’s not all it does. The Internet has increasingly become a predatory monster that exploits its own: the people it was made for. Today, a vast array of online platforms—misogynistic porn, crypto, sports-betting and prediction markets, masculinity influencers, and right-wing and racist propaganda—gnaws through minds, hearts, and souls on its way to wallets. The warning signs were there in the 2010s. In 2016, a cybersecurity expert told me that while there was a lot of talk about ISIS recruiting on the Internet, the thing that most concerned her was far less recognized: the recruitment of young men by far-right white-supremacist groups there. Often, she added, the point of entry was online gaming. Her words haunted me in the years that followed as we saw the rise of white nationalism, antisemitism, and other forms of racist hatred paired with furious misogyny, all tailored to appeal to young men and reach them through their online pastimes and as they searched for guidance and role models. Usually treated as mysterious or somehow authentically arising from the grass roots, what came to be known as “the manosphere” was to a large degree a racket run on Internet platforms that let lies, hate, and manipulation proliferate because they were profitable. It has become a miasma that engulfs everyone from the titans of Silicon Valley to teenage boys recruited for the right by those titans’ platforms. The manosphere is a shared set of references and perspectives that began on the Internet and ended up as real-life consequences shaped by the beliefs and values slurped up online. The much-discussed crisis of masculinity is in no small part a product of the exploitation of masculinity as identity politics and marketing schemes (and the most harmful identity politics in the United States have been all along the nexus of whiteness and maleness). Its many facets are often treated separately, but they are all connected. The Roots of the Manosphere The impact of this Internet realm as a recruitment engine for the far right, and the impact of young men leaning right, is as consequential as the global impact of Trumpism. In the 2024 presidential election, voting patterns among young men and women “diverged dramatically,” the polling firm Navigator found, “with men under 30 voting for [Donald] Trump by 16 points (41 percent Harris–57 percent Trump), and women under 30 voting for [Kamala] Harris by 24 points (59 percent Harris—35 percent Trump).” In other words, had young men voted like young women, we’d be parsing the imperfections of the Harris administration right now. Trump thanked Elon Musk, who owns X, for helping him win in 2024. The manosphere influencer and profiteer Andrew Tate, currently facing charges of sexual abuse in two countries, is also credited with recruiting young men for Trump in 2024. (On the morning after Trump’s win in 2016, ex-Klansman David Duke called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose site had leaked thousands of hacked e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman the month prior, a “hero.”) The young male recruits are victims in that they are being manipulated and exploited, and perpetrators when they spread hate themselves or participate in harm to others. My conversation with the cybersecurity expert came a couple of years after 2014’s “Gamergate,” which at some future point may be regarded as the Wuhan wet market for a kind of pandemic of the imagination. Gamergate was the ruckus that arose when a handful of male video-game players turned a petty grudge involving ex-girlfriends into a raging online storm involving thousands of angry men targeting specific women at first and then women in general. As the journalist Harmeet Kaur put it in 2025, “People who were paying close attention to certain corners of the Internet saw this reality coming more than a decade ago in Gamergate, in which an angry online mob waged a virulent harassment campaign against women and diversity in the video game industry. Gamergate was one of the earliest indications that what happened online could have major implications offline—and that a few people who understood the mechanics of the Internet could manipulate it to advance a nefarious agenda.” But most people weren’t paying close attention, as Kaur explained. “Social media platforms on which Gamergate transpired failed to adequately combat toxic content and online abuse, while lawmakers, traditional media outlets and much of the public failed to see its relevance beyond the world of video games.” In 2017, when a mob of furious white men chanting antisemitic slogans marched in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in response to the planned removal of a Confederate statue, the consequences that the cybersecurity expert had warned me about were made manifest, at least to those who traced the sources. Integrity First for America, a civil-rights organization backing a lawsuit against the march’s organizers, noted “the huge volume of Facebook, Discord, Twitter, and Instagram posts contained in the evidence illustrate how central social media was to the organizing of Unite the Right. These companies are often criticized for refusing to crack down on white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity on their platforms.” Other parts of the nascent manosphere were also already up and running in 2014, the year Gamergate exploded. For example, online incel sites seem to have shaped the worldview of the 22-year-old who on May 23, 2014, murdered six young people and injured 14 others by knife, gun, and car near UC Santa Barbara, in what he called his “Day of Retribution,” before fatally shooting himself. The killer left behind a long tirade seething with grievances and grudges. He had been drawn into an incel worldview in which women are somehow obligated to furnish heterosexual men with sex and hated for failing to provide it or for having their own needs and desires. It’s a grim (and widely shared) view in which sex is a commodity and a marker of male status, and women are both that commodity incarnate and the much-resented gatekeepers of it who can sometimes be overcome by trickery or coercion. Online incel communities seem designed to stir up grievance and to render true believers incompetent at interacting with women or even at recognizing them as people. Resentment at this incompetence is what the incels bond over, making the ideology an effective feedback loop of frustration and fury. After all, the goal of most Internet sites is to keep you there. Various corners of the manosphere’s misinformation machine currently instruct boys and young men that women will only have sex with impossibly tall, muscular, and affluent men, generating resentment of women, a sense of inadequacy, and an obsession with appearance and fitness that sells more stuff. Somehow, the vast population of contentedly married men with average physiques and incomes does not seem to dispel this perception. This macho-muscles fixation is on display in the Trump administration with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s obsession with soldiers who can do lots of push-ups and his proposal to start testing soldiers for low testosterone; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s equally embarrassing public displays of physical fitness and mania for protein intake; and the president’s transformation of the White House lawn into a gladiatorial arena for mixed-martial-arts fights as part of his celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. Male supremacy has infused the rhetoric of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and a number of other extremely wealthy, powerful men and become part of the unofficial platform of the Republican Party. Even Mark Zuckerberg got on board during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. One of the world’s richest men in an industry that has disproportionately hired and been headed by men, Zuckerberg told Rogan, “A lot of our society has become very…neutered or emasculated…. Masculine energy is good…but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” winding up his assertion by equating masculinity with “a culture that celebrates the aggression.” And in the midst of a martial-arts phase a few years ago, Zuckerberg accepted Musk’s invitation to a cage-match fight that never happened. Perhaps he thinks there should be more boardroom cage matches or workplace sexual harassment? The Language of Porn

What Role Should the Supreme Court Play in American Politics?

John Fabian Witt — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A wide-ranging new book by Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan examines how America’s highest court often gets in the way of democratic politics. The Supreme Court’s dismantling of the last vestiges of the 1965 Voting Rights Act this spring in Louisiana v. Callais marked the end of an era—a retreat from the core civil rights commitment to draw electoral-district lines in a way that would ensure representation for racial minorities. More immediately, the decision in Callais set off a pell-mell process of new gerrymanders that carved up majority-minority districts into fragments designed to dilute Democratic votes. This fall, Democrats will likely lose three seats in the House of Representatives as a result of the decision. The number of Black representatives will likely drop too. For many Democrats, Callais also reignited a long-smoldering fury with the court. Days after the decision, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York insisted that the time had come for “massive judicial reform”; the court, he insisted, was a “disgrace.” Representative Ro Khanna of California demanded term limits for the justices. Longtime Democratic strategist and professional intemperate James Carville charged that the “sons-of-bitches” on the court were “irredeemably corrupt” hacks and called for the addition of no fewer than four new justices once the Democrats retake control of Congress and the White House. Likely 2028 presidential contender Kamala Harris, who has recently echoed Carville’s proposal, signaled a new openness to such formerly off-limits steps. And in a widely read piece in The New York Times, prominent Harvard scholars Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan opined that the court was endangering the ability of the American people to govern themselves. Now, in an energizing new book brimming with intelligence and passion, Bowie and Renan offer a full-dress critique of the court’s role in the nation’s history. Years in the making, and striking for its ambition and creativity, Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People represents a culmination of sorts of the years of liberal and left-wing discontent with the court. In it, Bowie and Renan argue that the Supreme Court has undermined American democracy throughout its 236-year existence—and never more so than in the present. Ranging from the court’s infamous endorsement of slavery in the Dred Scott case to the grim rollback of Reconstruction’s fleeting civil rights triumphs, they tell the story of the nation’s highest court working time and again to smother democratic possibilities and institutions. The authors recount the court’s dagger to the heart of the first peacetime federal income tax in 1895, its knife to the throat of the New Deal in the mid-1930s, and its slow carving-up of the Voting Rights Act in the decades leading up to Callais. They track the court’s undermining of civil rights laws, child-labor protections, labor regulations, domestic-violence laws, and firearms restrictions. They document its damage to campaign-finance laws, to consumer-protection laws, and to laws constraining overreach, crime, and corruption in the White House. In stark terms, Bowie and Renan describe a Supreme Court made up of latter-day monarchs who have disabled American self-government and rendered the United States “a nation that is a democracy mostly in name.” In liberal-left legal circles, the critique of a “juristocracy” run rampant is growing in influence by leaps and bounds. Viewed favorably by liberals during the nearly 16 years that Earl Warren served as chief justice, the court has since become one of the principal sites of progressive disillusionment with American institutions. The stakes for our democracy could not be higher. But is the diagnosis right? Observers of the Supreme Court today have a name for the aggressive assertion of judicial power. They call it “judicial supremacy”: the claim that the court has the exclusive power to interpret the Constitution’s meaning and to require the elected branches of government to follow its interpretations. In theory, it would be simple enough for progressives of all stripes to reject this idea of judicial supremacy outright—after all, plenty of democratic countries have managed without the judicial power to decide on the constitutionality of laws passed by the legislative branch, the United Kingdom and New Zealand chief among them. But American liberals face a special problem when it comes to doing so: In the second half of the 20th century, especially during the Warren years, judicial supremacy was associated not with conservative rulings but with liberal ones, such as the 1958 case of Cooper v. Aaron, in which Chief Justice Warren and a unanimous court ruled that Governor Orval Faubus and the state government of Arkansas were bound by the court’s decision in the epoch-making desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. “The federal judiciary,” the court declared in Cooper, “is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution.” The court’s judgment in Brown was thus “the supreme law of the land,” to be followed by state and federal officials alike. Bowie and Renan’s creative solution is to distinguish between the judicial review of state laws on the one hand and of federal laws on the other, thereby offering a way for 21st-century liberals to celebrate the righteousness of the decisions in Brown, Cooper, and the now-overturned Roe v. Wade while still expressing frustration with the Supreme Court’s outsize power. The authors of Supremacy thread this needle by applauding the court for applying the federal Constitution to overturn state laws—for applying the Constitution “vertically,” as they put it—while remaining steadfast that the court should not apply the Constitution “horizontally”: that is, to block the federal laws passed by Congress. Bowie and Renan note that judicial review in the horizontal sense has always been the more controversial form of review, all the way back to the earliest days of the republic. Founding-era critics worried that it would allow the courts to seize a dangerous amount of legislative power for themselves—such a practice, North Carolina’s Richard Spaight stated in 1787, “would be more despotic than the Roman Decemvirate, and equally as insufferable.” Such was the opposition to horizontal judicial review that in 1792, a few members of Congress threatened to impeach those justices who raised separation-of-powers objections to a law that gave the court’s members the task of reviewing pension claims by veterans of the War of Independence. A decade later, after a watershed election swept Thomas Jefferson into office, the new president’s partisans in Congress effectively abolished the Supreme Court’s 1802 session in order to block judicial review of their new laws. In a pair of decisions the next year, the court asserted its authority to decide on the constitutionality of congressional laws while meekly allowing such new Jeffersonian attacks on the judiciary to stand. In Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall gave voice to the court’s judicial-review authority, but did so in service of Jefferson’s efforts. In Stuart v. Laird, by contrast, the court declined to exercise that same authority when it would have produced a direct conflict with the new president. Bowie and Renan adopt the conventional wisdom that after Marbury, judicial supremacy remained mostly dormant until 1857. In that year, in the infamous Dred Scott case, Marshall’s successor, Chief Justice Roger Taney, ruled that Dred and Harriet Scott were slaves even though they had lived in a territory where slavery was illegal because, among other things, Congress had exceeded its power when its Missouri Compromise banned slavery in the territories north of the 36°30’parallel while admitting Missouri as a slave state. A ban on slavery, Taney held, would violate the Fifth Amendment rights of enslavers to be free from government deprivations of their property without due process of law. Reactions to the decision in the North were fierce, but mostly not because of Taney’s ruling that Black people could not be citizens. Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion this past summer in the birthright-citizenship case suggested otherwise, but most white northerners were indifferent on that score. The main source of the anger over the Dred Scott case was that the decision opened the Western territories to slavery and thereby threatened to deprive white families of the economic opportunities of free soil and free labor. Such was the animus toward this dimension of the ruling that three years later, Abraham Lincoln would win the White House on a Republican Party platform that challenged the scope of the court’s power over the Constitution. The court, Lincoln announced, lacked the authority to resolve the public’s disagreements over the great question of slavery and freedom in the West.

NIGHT WINDS (alternate)

Franz Wright — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Clearlake Oaks, California Innumerable prints of bare feet commingling and rapidly vanishing away from me over the burgundy water darkening minute by minute, from land to lake they pass without paying attention or anything else. The words celestial escalator come to mind. To mine. What about yours? They do now. What is the past? Only a moment ago. I was spoken, before long I’ll be decaying, like a note, or the sun. I’m half-disappearing already, first fading from your tongue, then seen on a street corner waiting for a light, among the category of memories and ghosts, fading from view again. And I want to be one of you, flying unseen over failing and darkening memory’s sapphire-black waters, fate’s coolant, the tears rolling up your cheeks and back into my eyes.

The Many Lives of Janet Malcolm

Alana Pockros — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A new biography tells the story of one of America’s great masters of reportage. Every journalist wants to claim Janet Malcolm as her own. A journalist’s journalist whose work is almost universally admired today, she is often held up as a great exemplar of literary reportage. In her introduction to a collection of Malcolm’s interviews—interviews so rarely given that the book contains the majority of her public conversations—Katie Roiphe recalls an end-of-the-semester party for her graduate program at which a student “printed out photographs of the writers we admire and cut their faces out in circles and put them on Popsicle sticks on the cake.” When it was time to cut the cake, everyone tried to claim the Janet slice. I get it. If I had been at the party, I would have done the same. There is obviously a lot to admire in Malcolm’s writing, but there is also a kind of glamorous mystery she cultivated through her reclusive, incisive nature. The journalist Robert S. Boynton once warned people never to “eat in front of Janet Malcolm; or show her your apartment; or cut tomatoes while she watches,” unless you want “every unflattering gesture and nervous tic” to be “recorded eventually with devastating precision.” Vivian Gornick, in a review of Malcolm’s last book for this publication, similarly commented that “her sentences…were incredibly clean. Cold, clear, and clean.” And yet rarely did Malcolm apply those cold, clear, and clean sentences to herself. If Malcolm’s enigmatic persona is part of her appeal, it is likely also what drew Eve Sneider to write The Absent Woman, the first proper biography of Malcolm, who died in 2021. When Sneider first read Malcolm’s Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, she “knew nothing of the backdrop against which the book was written,” she tells us, “but I was curious about its writer, who wrote with terrifying precision.” With The Absent Woman, Sneider attempts to uncover some of the secrets of Malcolm’s life, or at least to use what information is available to make some educated guesses. One of the first people to gain access to Malcolm’s archive at Yale, Sneider was also one of the lucky few who got to sit down with Malcolm for private conversations before she died. Running through how she came into her journalism career, stumbled upon each of her big stories, and wrote her way into The New Yorker as well as one of journalism’s biggest scandals, The Absent Woman examines the years before Malcolm became the venerated figure that she is today, while keeping sight of the ways that she unconsciously laid the foundation for the writer she would become. Part of the difficulty for a contemporary journalist writing about Janet Malcolm is confronting the fact that she was working at a time when the craft of journalism was very different. Gone are the days of the 60,000-word feature that would nearly fill a double issue of a magazine—as is the world in which a writer could become famous without cultivating a public image. Indeed, Malcolm’s entire way of doing journalism is a relic of the profession’s past. In other words, when we clamor for Janet Malcolm, we’re clamoring for a style of writing that we know we will never get to practice—for better and for worse. Janet Malcolm was born Jana Wienerová in Prague in 1934 to a middle-class family who narrowly escaped the Holocaust in 1939, apparently after buying a Nazi official a racehorse in exchange for exit visas. Her family was “more Czech than Jewish,” and after arriving in New York City, they continued to view themselves that way. Changing their name to Winn, her parents sent Janet and her sister, Marie, to a Lutheran Sunday school and continued to speak Czech at home. They also moved to the Czech and German neighborhood of Yorkville in Manhattan. The Winn girls didn’t realize they were Jewish until they came home one day spouting antisemitic language and were told by their parents to stop. Even after Janet picked up English in school, she continued to feel like she was at a considerable remove from the world around her. She recalled as an adult a memory of her teacher saying, “Goodbye, children,” at the end of the school day, only to immediately feel jealous of whoever this classmate named “Children” was. In The Absent Woman, Sneider cites Malcolm’s early sense of isolation as the germ of her eventual role as a professional outsider looking in: “Emigres,” she writes, “feel the gnaw of longing without necessarily knowing what they are longing for.” But Sneider’s account of Malcolm’s early life also gives us another clue to her well-known interest in the latent motives of others. Malcolm’s father, Josef, had been a neurologist and psychiatrist in Prague. In New York, he was temporarily forced to give up these specialties, but he continued to practice medicine for other Czech American families. While Josef wasn’t a psychoanalyst, as some writers have incorrectly stated, he was interested in Sigmund Freud’s theories, as many intellectuals at the time were—and as a family doctor, he perhaps also had to decipher the hidden sources of external maladies, mining those dark and mysterious places where the body and the mind often commingle. Trawling through Malcolm’s archive, Sneider also deduces that Josef had a creative side, writing short stories and making his way into “Prague’s literary scene.” Only some of this information comes directly from Malcolm. She tended to avoid disclosing anything about herself or her family. A rare exception is Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, her only real work of autobiography and arguably her driest book, which was published two years after her death. “Biography can’t establish very much about interior life,” Malcolm once told an interviewer. But Still Pictures is the best we’ve got. Malcolm organized the book around a series of old family photographs. Among the many subjects she was laconic about was her father: She refused to say a single unflattering word about him. “The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography,” she wrote. “They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them.” Malcolm was clearly aware of the power of writing about other people, including if not especially her own. It is no wonder that her best work was about the lives of others. The challenge, then, for any biographer of Malcolm is to grapple with her subject’s resistance to the form itself. Meeting this challenge requires hours in Malcolm’s archives and ephemera. But it also requires close readings of her work alongside that research. One story of Malcolm’s that Sneider mines for autobiographical material is “The Window-Washer,” a 40-page article for The New Yorker about a Czech foreign-affairs journalist who had worked cleaning windows before the fall of communism. It is, Sneider argues, the closest Malcolm ever came to publishing a “work of memoir or autobiography” during her lifetime, an “undeniably” personal essay. For the profile, Malcolm made several trips to Prague, where she examined the life of Daniel Kumermann. There were obvious parallels between Malcolm and Kumermann: They both had been born in Prague and raised more Czech than Jewish, and Kumermann’s father, like Malcolm’s, had been part of Prague’s intellectual scene. In the essay, Malcolm not only gestures toward these similarities, but at times seems nostalgic for a lost era. “My quest for the Proustian sensations that would reconnect me to my early childhood in Prague,” she writes, was an effort to “illuminate—and possibly settle—the question of what coming to this place meant to me.” As Sneider recounts, when a reader wrote to The New Yorker and said that he felt the essay was too personal, Malcolm replied, “You have articulated some of what I felt about the piece.” Perhaps the reason the reader thought “The Window-Washer” wasn’t her best was that by the time it appeared, in November of 1990, Malcolm had been writing for The New Yorker for 25 years, and she had set the bar very high. Gardner Botsford, her second husband—with whom, as we learn from Sneider’s book, she’d had an affair while still married to her first husband—was her editor. But Malcolm didn’t just emerge fully formed as a mature essayist like Athena from the head of Zeus. In fact, it took her a while to figure things out, and Malcolm didn’t publish her first long-form piece of journalism until she was 43 years old. This part of Malcolm’s story is one that Sneider helps fill in dexterously.

The Rapture

Rae Armantrout — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A data centeralmost the size of Manhattanpowered by three reactorswill be built near New Orleansby men living in trailers,eating from food truckswhere there had been pecan groves. A data centeris a rumor mill.It tells an AI somewherewhat we’ve been sayingall along behind closed doorsso it can learn to imitateand trick us. Soon it willopen all the cryptsand rapture secretsuntil accounts of great wealth,are exchanged in a paroxysm,in a language few, then nonewill know.

Pete Hegseth’s High-Tech Barbarism

Sasha Abramsky — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:58:34 GMT

In livestreaming Nidal Hasan’s execution, the secretary of war is marking his territory in the snuff movie business—and radicalizing people along the way. Last Thursday, days after signing off on the death-by-firing-squad of Nidal Hasan, an Arab American army psychiatrist convicted of a mass shooting at Ford Hood in 2009, self-styled “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth announced that the execution would be livestreamed to the general public. This is a full-frontal assault on the foundational principles of the Enlightenment, and, as many political figures even within the GOP understand, a deliberate wrecking ball aimed at the integrity of the US legal system. It is also a decision bound to propagate anti-Muslim animus, and radicalize more young men. This barbaric order is, in short, catastrophically shortsighted. If the livestreaming does, indeed, take place, it will place the American government firmly on the wrong side of international opinion—and, in many cases, laws against the distribution of violent material online. In the United Kingdom, for example, the Online Safety Act is designed to protect children, in particular, from encountering extreme acts of violence online. The biggest social-media companies have internal policy guidelines barring users from posting video footage of executions, though since they are not always good about enforcing them, plenty of people are bound to repost footage of Hasan’s execution. The federal bureau of prisons bars the distribution of execution footage. States, too, have laws preventing the filming and distribution of executions: Legislators all over the country have long recognized the damage that publicly broadcasting executions would have. Now, however, if Hegseth—who purports to be so “pro-life” that he has made it extra difficult for women in the services to secure abortions—has his way, the US military will be marking its territory in the snuff movie business. Hegseth’s bloodthirsty move is placing the American government front and center in the business of hawking the spectacle of cruelty, which is, of course, what all fascist regimes do. Hegseth is legitimizing snuff movies as official government policy, which puts children the world over at risk of trauma and radicalization if and when they and their circle of friends decide it would somehow be cool to tune in to watch a man in a wheelchair be shot in the heart by a squad of masked soldiers. If Hasan’s execution is indeed livestreamed to the world, it will mark the ultimate destruction of the military’s honor code at the hands of Trump’s fanaticism. But it won’t have occurred in a vacuum. Trump and Hegseth have spent two years purging the military’s top brass, as well as the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG System) of personnel willing to push back against illegal orders. The testosterone-obsessed, rabidly anti-diversity Hegseth views women and Black people as less likely to mindlessly follow his extreme commands, and in consequence, has repeatedly denied promotions to those groups. More generally, he has fired anyone he suspects to have reservations about the MAGA agenda and loyalty to Trump. This is Führerprinzip politics in action.

Elon Musk’s James Talarico Smear Blew Up In His Face

Jeet Heer — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 14:52:16 GMT

But that doesn’t mean the danger from Musk’s lies is over. As a trillionaire, Elon Musk has his finger in many pies, including electric cars, rockets, and satellites. But he seems to have a special passion for his social-media outlet X.com (formerly known as Twitter). Musk can be found on X at all hours of the day, often promoting far-right figures such as racist British provocateur Tommy Robinson. On Sunday, Musk was up to his usual X antics, repeatedly pushing a false story that James Talarico, the Texas Democratic Senate nominee, was absent from the campaign trail because he had suffered a mental breakdown and was receiving counseling at the Lindner Center of Hope, a mental health center in Ohio. Musk has more than a passing interest in the Texas Senate race. He has residences and major business interests in the state, and on Monday, The New York Times revealed that he had given at least $10 million to a Texas super PAC trying to elect Talarico’s Republican opponent, Ken Paxton—as well as a whopping $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC supporting all GOP Senate candidates. (In total, the Times reported, Musk has funneled $276 million into the 2026 election cycle, making him what the paper called “by far the largest known donor in the midterms.”) In truth, Talarico was recovering from the flu. But his convalescence led to a proliferation of conspiracy theories on the right. On Sunday, right-wing influencer Nick Sortor tweeted, “Ohio mental hospital CONFIRMS James Talarico was discharged from the facility earlier this week.” Sortor’s “confirmation” was a brief 45-second audio clip from another MAGA social-media personality, Rhein Amacher, purporting to show an employee of the Linder Center of Hope saying that Talarico had just been discharged. Sortor presented the audio as a smoking gun that should end Talarico’s political career. Musk then amplified Sortor’s post and claimed, “The Talarico campaign is hiding something big that voters ought to know about.” The story was echoed far and wide by other right-wing influencers on X.com, notably by John Solomon (a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was fired for a conflict of interest) and Laura Loomer (a deranged provocateur who often influences President Donald Trump). But it only took a few hours for this bombshell to explode in the face of those who promoted it. First came a categorical denial by the Lindner Center: “Representative James Talarico has never received treatment from Lindner Center of Hope.” Even more damaging was a thorough debunking of the story by Will Sommer and Andrew Egger in The Bulwark: For starters, there was the issue of logic. If Talarico had actually had a mental breakdown, why would he go to Ohio for treatment and not, say, anywhere in his home state? Why wouldn’t he simply have someone come to him? Then there was the timeline. Amacher said repeatedly on X that he had placed the calls in question on Saturday evening. But Talarico couldn’t have been discharged from a facility in Ohio—mental health or otherwise—on Saturday evening. He’d already returned to the campaign trail to attend the Austin City Limits music festival on Friday, and attended a Kacey Musgraves concert one day later. Sommer and Egger also acquired the full audio of the conversation between Amacher and the employee at the Linder Center of Hope (the audio can be found here). In that clip, the employee repeatedly says that Talarico is not a patient. At one point she says, “I do not find anyone with that name for the last four days that’s been discharged and they’re not here in the building.” Amacher keeps badgering her on this question till she suggests that maybe he was “just discharged this evening.” Listening to the audio in full, it becomes clear that the employee was flustered from a long conversation where she kept getting asked the same question, which she decided to end with a hypothetical response. Given that Amacher had falsely represented himself as a cousin of Talarico, the employee’s desire to provide some answer makes sense. Sommer and Egger plausibly suggest that Amacher might be in legal trouble since his own audio suggests he lied to receive confidential medical information. Both Amacher and Sortor are also vulnerable to a defamation suit. In the wake of the debunking of this smear job, some right-wing influencers, notably Caroline Wren and Benny Johnson, have deleted tweets promoting the story. Others, such as Megyn Kelly, have made pathetic attempts to pick holes in the Lindner Center of Hope’s categorical statement. The mudslinging is unlikely to hurt James Talarico, who continues to maintain a polling lead over Paxton. In fact, the sheer desperation of the right to defame him offers proof of how frightened Republicans are that he could become the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate seat since 1988.

Turkey Is Brutally Oppressing Queer People. Here’s What You Need to Know.

Levent Pişkin — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The government’s sweeping crackdown on the LGBTQ community is an escalation of a decades-long pattern. Between September 12 and 14, in coordinated overnight raids across five cities, Turkish police targeted seven LGBTQI+ rights organizations, two groups supporting people living with HIV, and 13 bars and clubs where queer people gather. Board members of some of the country’s oldest LGBTQI+ associations, including Kaos GL and Lambda Istanbul, were taken from their homes. Human Rights Watch reports that at least 112 people were arrested and that 82 remain in detention by court order. Courts also ordered the blocking of dozens of websites and social-media accounts belonging to LGBTQI+ groups and activists; when people gathered outside Istanbul’s main courthouse to protest, more than a hundred were detained as well. The alleged offenses were “obscenity,” “prostitution”, and crimes against “public morality.” Justice Minister Akın Gürlek named the operation “My Family Is Safe” and placed it squarely within President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Decade of Family and Population,” a 10-year programme launched this year to reverse Turkey’s falling birth rate and defend what the government calls “national and moral values.” That framing is the most important aspect of the raids. Homosexuality has never been a crime in Turkey. What this month showed is a state that has found other ways to criminalize queer life and now presents such measures as family policy. This didn’t come out of nowhere. Istanbul’s Pride march has been banned every year since 2015, on the grounds of public safety, and police have detained hundreds of people who tried to march anyway. But those detentions were fleeting. Marchers were picked up on the street and, for the most part, released within hours. This month’s operation was different in kind. It did not target a march; it targeted the infrastructure of a movement, including its offices, leadership, health services, websites, and social spaces, in five cities at once. It relied on criminal law rather than public-order powers, and courts have kept dozens of people in pretrial detention. And it was announced not as a policing matter but as the enforcement of a government program. To understand how Turkey arrived here, it helps to know how the family became the organizing principle of the state’s politics, and how much of that politics follows a script written transnationally. Same-sex relations have been legal in Turkey since 1858, earlier than in most of Europe. Yet LGBTQI+ people have never enjoyed equal citizenship in practice. As with other minority groups, including ethnic and religious minorities, the state’s approach to LGBTQI+ people was long defined primarily by denial, repression, and nonrecognition. This decades-old policy began to shift after the neoliberal-Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, but not toward greater equality. Instead, LGBTQI+ people increasingly became targets of explicit political, administrative and legal action, driven by the party’s conservative gender politics. This is not to say that queer people had been free from state harassment or the “indirect” violence of the law before then. What distinguishes the AKP era is the increasingly overt use of law, administrative power and state institutions to act against LGBTQI+ visibility, organization and public life. Earlier manifestations included, among others, the removal of sexual orientation from the antidiscrimination provision of the draft 2004 Penal Code during its drafting; repeated fines imposed on trans women under the 2005 Misdemeanours Law; persistent impunity for police violence; the requirement that gay conscripts “prove” their homosexuality to obtain an exemption from military service; the use of “unjust provocation” to reduce sentences for men who killed gay or trans people; legal proceedings seeking the dissolution of Lambda İstanbul, one of Turkey’s oldest LGBTQI+ organizations; and the declaration by the minister responsible for women and family affairs, Selma Aliye Kavaf, that “homosexuality is a disease.” The turning point came in June 2015, when the Istanbul Pride march was banned for the first time and dispersed with water cannons. It has been banned every year since, and activists who defy the ban face mass detentions each June. Repression did not stop the movement from growing, though. By the mid-2010s, LGBTQI+ organizing had become a visible, consolidated social and political force, with organized marches drawing tens of thousands. That visibility changed what came next. After the attempted coup of July 2016 and the authoritarian consolidation that followed, restrictions on LGBTQI+ activism became part of a broader campaign against any social movement the government saw as a challenge to its authority. Sporadic bans and moralizing statements hardened into coordinated institutional repression. Under the post-coup state of emergency, the governor of Ankara imposed an indefinite ban on all LGBTQI+ events in the province in 2017. By 2020, the restrictions had reached the regulatory state: The broadcasting authority imposed sanctions on programs depicting same-sex relationships, and the Ministry of Trade required rainbow-themed products sold online to carry an 18+ warning. In 2021, institutional repression and political rhetoric fused. Erdoğan declared that there was “no such thing” as “LGBT.” Weeks later, his government justified Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention—the Council of Europe treaty on preventing violence against women—on the grounds that it had been used to “normalize homosexuality. From 2022 onwards, “LGBT” became an organizing theme in government politics. Official discourse now casts the LGBTQI+ movement, and increasingly LGBTQI+ people themselves, as a threat to the family, social values, and the national order. Government policy has also moved beyond state institutions into organized public mobilization, most visibly through so-called “Great Family Gatherings” held in opposition to LGBTQI+ visibility. The resulting dichotomy places queer existence outside the family altogether, as if queer people neither belonged to families nor formed families of their own. That is the framing Gürlek invoked when he called the September raids “My Family Is Safe.” None of this is a purely Turkish story. The government is working from the script of the transnational “anti-gender” movement, so called because it organizes against what it labels “gender ideology,” a catch-all for feminism, LGBTQI+ rights and any loosening of traditional gender roles. What makes this movement international is not merely that similar ideas circulate across borders. Rather, a shared political repertoire, built around a heterosexual, cisgender ideal of the “traditional family,” is translated into local vocabularies and written into law and institutions.

Writing About War as Bombs Fall

Marwan Bishara — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

While the Israeli government launched a well-orchestrated offensive of disinformation and hyperbole that would make the illegal permissible in the war on Gaza. When the Gaza war started three years ago, I took to the keyboard. In those dark times, writing was my only sanctuary amid the mayhem. I had written extensively about war in my career as a scholar and a journalist, but nothing prepared me for this war. The words that came to mind felt jaded, even inadequate for what was unfolding in front of our eyes. I wasn’t alone. Veteran colleagues at Al Jazeera, battle-hardened reporters who had walked through the ruins of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, the Balkans, and Ukraine, confessed that they had never seen such merciless devastation. On October 7, the day Hamas launched its bloody offensive against Israel in an attempt to shatter the status quo, I wrote that Hamas’s shocking attack should have surprised no one. Not after Israel’s decades-long military occupation, repression, and siege, and endless years of contempt, humiliation, and dismissiveness of basic Palestinian rights. In those early days, stating the obvious—that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum”—was construed as controversial, even condemned as blood libel. But context is indispensable; without context, there can be no real understanding. And explanation must not be confused with justification for the killing of civilians, regardless of whether the victims are tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, or hundreds of Israeli civilians. On October 12, five days into the war, I warned that Israel was “manufacturing the case for genocide.” My warning was aimed at those who granted the Netanyahu government unconditional support, and echoed its dangerous analogies to the Nazis, the Holocaust, ISIS, Al Qaeda, and 9/11—those who might, wittingly or unwittingly, pave the path for the crime of crimes. A warning, not a prediction. The notion that Israel might add genocide to a long history of dispossession, occupation, and domination of the Palestinians was too outrageous to stomach. That such an act would be supported by most Israelis, justified by most Western allies, and tolerated by its neighbors was too consequential to contemplate. My cautionary writing continued unabated during that ill-fated October, especially as I followed the Hebrew Israeli media. Aside from government ministers threatening to starve, destroy, or to empty Gaza of its inhabitants, Israeli journalists, former generals, and even celebrities competed to see who could scream the loudest: Punish them! Kill them all! Nuke them! But for me one particular statement captured the national frenzy more than any other. In a response to a fellow Arab MK, Meirav Ben-Ari of the “centrist” Yesh Atid party, a mother of two, rejected any symmetry between Israeli and Palestinian child victims, telling the Knesset 10 days into the war, “What symmetry! The children in Gaza, the children in Gaza have brought it upon themselves.” The children in Gaza have brought it upon themselves. Writing became even more critical as a campaign of deception paved the way for the military offensive. The Israeli government launched a well-orchestrated offensive of disinformation and hyperbole that would make the illegal permissible in the war on Gaza. For example, Netanyahu invoked images of Israeli babies burned alive and men beheaded, allegations he resurrected last week at the United Nations, and that have been echoed repeatedly by American officials, including President Biden, long after they were debunked by Israeli news outlets. As I also warned two days into the war, Netanyahu was trying to drag the United States into a war with Iran—a decades-long fantasy. On October 7, President Isaac Herzog was quick to accuse Tehran of masterminding Hamas’s “unprovoked, heinous attack,” claiming that it was “supported and directed by their proxy commanders in Iran.” A week later, I warned again against the dangers of the United States’ getting involved in yet another open-ended war. Netanyahu played the same tired tunes that had led to the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, under the guise of defending “civilization against barbarism.” As winter turned to spring, the roar of the war drowned out all other sounds. Netanyahu rejected all ceasefire proposals and refused to commit to the day-after vision proposed by the Biden administration. By the summer, bombing of Gaza had led to more children’s deaths than could be counted, and to entire families perishing under the rubble of their homes, including colleagues and their loved ones. Palestinians killed in bombings and air strikes had reached over 60,000, according to conservative estimates. Writing suddenly felt like a futile exercise, like playing the violin in the back of an ambulance racing through a disaster zone. A year passed and I had not written a word, as apathy replaced empathy. The traffickers of shocking Palestinian images and the marketers of deceptive Israeli clichés had taken over the public debate, especially on social media, as the unrelenting live streaming of war on our screens normalized the horror. As the enormity of the tragedy began to sink in, the days stretched on, and the nights seemed endless.

The Anatomy of a Literary Scandal

June Loper,Harrison Stetler — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The pillorying of Canadian-Haitian novelist Thélyson Orélien, accused of using AI to write his new novel, is the latest in a chaotic year for French publishing. Just weeks ago, as the literary season kicked off, French critics were showering Thélyson Orélien with praise, celebrating his latest novel C’était ça ou mourir (“It was either that or die”), the story of a social studies teacher who flees gang violence in Haiti to seek refuge in Canada. Surging out of the gates with over 45,000 copies sold in the opening weeks after its August 19 release, Orélien’s novel positioned him as one of the stars of the fall books season—and a contender for the prestigious Prix Goncourt. But the fairytale literary breakout started to come crashing down on September 21, when an obscure post from an anonymous X account claimed that Orélien’s novel was in fact written by artificial intelligence. With screenshots to boot from the AI-verification software Pangram, the X account “Balance ton Claude”—“Expose your Claude,” an AI-era riff on the social-media hashtag popularized by France’s #MeToo movement, Claude being Anthropic’s AI app—alleged that the Haitian-Canadian novelist had systematically used artificial intelligence for the composition of his novel. That kicked off a frenzy that first circulated among far-right-linked social-media accounts. Established media organizations soon started to pick up the story too, running their own tests using Pangram that corroborated the accusations. Orélien has firmly denied all the allegations made against him. In a September 22 interview, the writer shot back against his accusers, with numerous figures in French literary life also rallying to his defense in the face of what appeared to many like a coordinated sting operation. “Since my recent arrival in France, I have been subjected to numerous racist attacks,” the author told Libération. “I am not sad but angry.” The ideological lines hardened further when conservative Le Figaro columnist Samuel Fitoussi claimed participation in what he called a “collective project” behind the “Balance ton Claude” account. The accusation against Orélien comes as a double strike for conservative literary circles, with the far-right weekly Valeurs actuelles condemning the “blindness of the literary establishment” and castigating Orélien as a “professional counterfeiter.” Their collective feeding frenzy has as one immediate effect the delegitimizing of a novel that offered something still in relatively short supply in French letters: the perspective of a Black francophone novelist writing on the experience of immigration and identity across the Global South and North. To some observers, there’s a rich irony to using AI software to identify the use of AI itself. And while most specialists agree that AI detectors cannot provide definitive proof of fraud, the creators of Pangram have stood by their technology amid the scandal, touting its low false-positive rate. Making matters worse for the writer, Canadian journalists from La Presse and Radio Canada are now reporting that several articles in addition to an earlier fiction work by Orélien contain plagiarized passages. With the curtain falling, Orélien was dropped from the Prix Goncourt long list on September 25. He has also since left France, returning to Canada midway through the C’était ça ou mourir promotional tour. Commentators have already drawn the connection between Orélien’s downfall and this summer’s scandal surrounding Jason Arday—the Cambridge University academic pushed to suicide after a series of exposed frauds landed him in the center of a media storm. In France, doubt has a genealogy, especially when it falls on Black authors. In 1968, Yambo Ouologuem became the first Black African writer to win the Prix Renaudot, for Le devoir de violence (The Duty of Violence), before he too faced a smear campaign accusing him of plagiarism. The novel, as the Nouvel Obs journalist Doan Bui said on the show C ce soir, offered a textbook case of intertextuality—a popular style at the time involving the collaging of written sources. But that didn’t play in Ouologuem’s favor, even if the novel had already sold 80,000 copies and foreign rights to 10 countries. Ouologuem’s French publisher, Seuil, ceased reprinting the book. The Malian writer, then in his late 20s, never regained his place in francophone literature. In its nearly 125-year existence, the annual Prix Goncourt has been awarded to only four Black authors. Suspicion is now spreading to other writers. Popular novelist Virginie Grimaldi has also been flagged by users running her work through Pangram. “It seems to me that we have dark days ahead of us, a climate of permanent suspicion. Today it was [Orélien], tomorrow it will be others,” Grimaldi wrote in a September 23 social-media post. “This morning, the next to fall is me.” Whichever way you look at it, the Thélyson Orélien affair is a harbinger of things to come in the world of books, both inside and outside of France. A revolutionary new technology with undeniable and, many fear, devastating implications is overturning not a few of the sacred cows that seemed to embody literature’s cultural authority. It was probably only a matter of time before some AI-related scandal shattered once-robust assumptions surrounding authorship and the sanctity of literary creation. But with opinion pages and talk-show panels giving open season to fears of an existential crisis in the literary world, it’s worth recalling that this is not the first such panic of 2026. Just a few months ago, however, the fears were of an entirely different nature. They centered around the rise of hard-right media mogul Vincent Bolloré, who since 2023 has gained control over Hachette, France’s largest publishing group and a multinational competitor to heavyweights like Penguin Random House and HarperCollins.

How I Fell Through the Cracks at Facebook

Natalie Mead — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 09:30:00 GMT

A chronic illness forced me out of my software engineering job. What would have helped me most was a workplace union. You could consider me one of the lucky ones. Meta, a company at the time called Facebook, offered me a software engineering job before I finished college, and before the advent of AI massively changed the landscape for entry-level roles. The job meant many things to me, but one of its most crucial upsides was the perks, the safety net it gave me as a new college grad. On my first day, in 2013, HR presented me with page after page of options for customizing Facebook’s many employee benefits on their onboarding portal. I had to choose between Kaiser and Aetna, for example, and whether I wanted a Roth or a traditional 401(k). I had to decide if I wanted insurance for my dog. One of the choices presented in the portal was whether or not to pay into a corporate disability insurance policy. I don’t remember opting in, but apparently I did. More likely than not, that was the default, and I clicked to the next question without a second thought. One choice that I didn’t need to make was whether or not to join a union. Facebook didn’t have one, consistent with the software engineering industry at large at the time. Engineers weren’t really agitating for them yet, either. In 2013, Americans were, according to one poll, more opposed to unions than they’d been for most of the past 100 years. This was also the height of the Big Tech industry, the era of ping-pong tables and Kombucha on tap, and tech companies like Facebook were known for doing everything possible to keep their engineers happy. My entry-level role came with an obscene number of stock options, a signing bonus equal to a full year’s pay, unlimited sick days, fresh-cooked meals, transportation to and from work, and access to countless on-site services. Six years later, I left all this behind. When I was 27, I suddenly developed a serious chronic pain condition, chronic migraine disorder, which is characterized by frequent migraine attacks. I stopped working, and the specifics of Facebook’s corporate disability benefits, which I’d long since forgotten mindlessly checking a box for, suddenly mattered a whole lot. Migraine symptoms run the gamut from severe head pain to vomiting to vertigo to paralysis. Some migraines mimic strokes, while others alter your vision or strike you temporarily blind. There are even reports of migraines causing people to forget how to speak for the duration of an attack. Attacks, or “episodes,” can last anywhere from a few hours to multiple years. My migraines involved severe headaches, bouts of nausea, burning sensations, and pains that ripped through my body like seizures. They lasted for days, weeks, even months at a time. My light sensitivity was so severe, I wore baseball caps inside to block out ceiling lights. My migraines also sent me to the hospital multiple times. I quickly resigned myself to a regimen of drugs with side effects like severe fatigue, short-term memory loss, and—ironically—“medication overuse” headaches. But nothing helped all that much, or for very long. I was in severe pain 28 days out of the month on average, and frequently unable to look at screens, read, speak, or think about anything other than survival. For the first few weeks of my condition, I dipped into my unlimited stash of Facebook-employee sick days. But as the weeks turned into months and my health didn’t show any signs of improvement, my manager connected me with an HR representative, who connected me to a case manager with Facebook’s disability insurance company—a separate company from my health insurance provider. The disability insurance company, apparently, would cover my salary for as long as I was disabled from work. The disability insurance company’s involvement seemed unimportant to me at the time, because the end result was the same: Money got deposited into my bank account while I went about my days trying to feel better. Between the hospital visits, alternative treatments, and migraine episodes that limited my executive functioning, being chronically ill was the most stressful “job” I’d ever had. I knew that it was the insurance company furnishing my paychecks, not Facebook, but this seemed a small detail. All that mattered to me was that the dollars were there. I was now spending over a thousand per month on acupuncture, let alone prescriptions, supplements, procedures—anything that claimed to help migraines. After nearly a year of trying, and failing, to get back to work, I came to understand that the disability insurance company’s role in all of this wasn’t as innocuous as it seemed. Short-term disability claims have an expiration date of one year from when they’re opened. As that deadline approached, the insurance company told me they were performing a thorough reevaluation of my claim. If I, in their minds, remained disabled, I would be transitioned to a long-term disability status with slightly reduced pay. But if they determined I wasn’t disabled at all, I would be denied further payments of any kind, meaning that if I wanted money, I’d have no choice but to go back to work.

This November, Vote Like Alito Is on the Ballot

Elie Mystal — Fri, 9 Oct 2026 15:34:27 GMT

In this week’s Elie v. U.S., our justice correspondent gives Democrats another reason to vote in November. Plus: How Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s Medicaid unmasked the racists. The Supreme Court headed back to work this week, hearing four cases over its first five days. At the same time, Justice Samuel Alito has been making the media rounds, promoting his new book on originalism and complaining about how his disgusting, politicized opinions are portrayed in the press. Regular readers of this newsletter will remember that I predicted Alito, who turned 76 in April, would have retired by now. I thought that he timed his book launch so that he’d be able to promote it without juggling cases, and that he’d want to give Republicans a chance to replace him before the midterms. Turns out I was wrong, though I’m quite happy to have been wrong. Alito’s decision to remain on the court means there’s a chance that Democrats can win the Senate and block his replacement for the next two years. And now there’s also a chance that Democrats can win the White House and the Senate in 2028, which spins the actuary table through 2032. By refusing to retire, Alito’s given the Democrats a potential win, because dealing with Alito for another few years is preferable to dealing with Alito’s Republican replacement for another 30. But I’m not the only one who’s connecting the dots; so is Alito. During his media blitz, he’s said that he’ll consider retiring next year. That is a message to Republican voters: Alito is “on the ballot” this November. He’s telling voters that his seat could be up for grabs, should voters return Republicans to power in the Senate. Alito’s statement should light a fire under Democratic voters in all 50 states. If Democrats retake the Senate, they can effectively block an Alito replacement to the Supreme Court, forcing him either to stay on the court or risk the Democrats’ holding the seat open through the 2028 presidential election cycle. That plan would, of course, require Democrats to have both a spine and a self-preservation instinct, which I’m not sure they do, but I’m trying to manifest by speaking it into the world. Making sure the guy who killed abortion rights doesn’t get a chance to handpick his successor is more than enough reason to vote for any Democrat, even if you’re a progressive who’s unimpressed by a squishy moderate—or a centrist scared by a true progressive. The thing is, that’s not how liberal voters have traditionally behaved. In fact, the opposite’s been true. Alito’s out there making statements about his future precisely because he thinks dangling his potential retirement will light a fire under Republican voters. Historically speaking, Alito’s right. Republican voters have long shown an ability to hold their noses and vote for Republican senators who will confirm reactionary justices. Democratic voters have consistently failed to appreciate how Supreme Court appointments and confirmations can scuttle the entire liberal agenda. Think about it this way: Who is going to make more use of the Alito situation in the Texas Senate race? Is it more likely that a Republican who finds Ken Paxton odious and corrupt will hold their nose and vote for him, despite everything, to help secure Alito’s replacement, or is it more likely that a Democrat who finds James Talarico unreliable on issues of race or LGBTQ rights will hold their nose and vote for him to block an Alito replacement? History suggests that Alito’s statements will do more to help Paxton than anything Paxton’s estranged wife can say. But I hope I’m wrong. I’ve been wrong before. The Bad and the Ugly Cornell students held a massive sit-in over the university’s atrocious response to allegations that a student was raped by multiple members of a school fraternity. That is great. But… In France, high school students are nearly shutting down the country with protests over understaffing and overcrowding at French schools. They have partnered with labor union activists, and the protests have been going on for two weeks. An FBI whistleblower claims that the Trump administration pushed for unconstitutional investigations into people who protested ICE in Los Angeles. This is why we should be more like France: If everybody is protesting, they can’t stop all of us. Despite multiple court orders telling Trump he can’t tie FEMA funding to cooperation with ICE, he’s still doing it, states say. In a potentially major decision, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that training AI on copyrighted material is not “fair use.” That’s huge. LLMs work by scraping vast amounts of copyrighted content. The lawyers for the AI company will now appeal to the Supreme Court. Inspired Takes Elizabeth Spiers wrote in The Nation about the Cornell 7, the culture of rape and violence against women that permeates college campuses, and the importance of teaching boys what consent means from the earliest ages. The piece is arresting, and I’ve talked about it with nearly everyone I know. Cate Latimer and Alice Scott sat down with Milan van Dam for The Nation. At 17, van Dam is the youngest member of the Democratic National Committee. They talked with him about what Gen Z wants from the Democratic Party. I sat for an interview with the podcast A People’s Climate about, well, climate change and what it’s going to take to get a legal system that does something about it. The episode goes live on Saturday. If you will allow some shameless self-promotion, sign-ups have started for The Nation’s annual Caribbean cruise. If you have the interest, time, and ability, come along. It’s a good time; we’ll get to hang out, and you can hear what I think about things when I’m five drinks to the wind and my editor is locked on dry land. Worst Argument of the Week It’s probably obvious to you that I have protests on my mind this week. That might be because The New York Times did a deep dive on Trump’s plans to fence off Lafayette Square, the park across from the White House that has been the site of many great American protests. Trump wants to put a permanent barricade around the green, with a gate that can be opened or closed at officials’ discretion. The story really pissed me off, but perhaps not for the obvious reasons. Experts and activists decried Trump’s plan as an attack on free speech, and as yet another authoritarian step by the president. And it is. Locking down the site will obviously discourage protests. Even when the gate is “open,” the fence might deter people from gathering. There’s also the obvious safety concerns because, if people have to go into a pen to protest, they can more easily be rounded up or, worse, trampled. That’s all very bad. But what really destroys me is that the fence will likely work because people won’t break it down. People will accept the fence as a new reality. They will work with the fence, around the fence, literally inside the box the fence creates, instead of ramming through the fence with a bulldozer painted red, white, and blue. Protests are supposed to be acts of civil disobedience, not boisterous obedience. They are supposed to break laws. They are supposed to spring up in places authorities do not want them to happen. To protest is to risk one’s life. That’s part of what makes them effective. It’s not a party. It’s not a festival. It’s a dangerous, subversive activity, and that’s why the people who do it should be lauded. To cite the example of France once again: Can you imagine a French protest being stopped by a lock, or a gate, or a fence? “Ah, zut, we were going to storm le parc but c’est fermé à clé. Merde.” If Trump builds his fence, it will take an act of Congress to bring it down, instead of 10 enraged students with an industrial-strength diamond-tipped steel cutter they stole from Home Depot. And that makes me sad. What I Wrote The Supreme Court is back in session, so I wrote about its first case: a landmark environmental lawsuit that, if successful, could change the way the fossil fuel industry operates. The lawsuit is so important that the Supreme Court will not allow it to be successful, even if the Republican justices have to abandon their ideological priors to stop it. Also: For people who don’t get the print magazine, my annual Supreme Court preview went live on the Web this week. I gave a rundown of the most important cases (according to me) the court is set to decide this term and tried to remind people that we are not powerless in the face of these people that nobody elected. In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who somehow remains the governor of Arkansas, released a new ad touting kicking people off Medicaid. The ad sparked controversy among the MAGA-nati, but not because the underlying message was that poor people don’t deserve healthcare. No, Huckabee Sanders got in trouble because the main character in her ad about a poor person who doesn’t deserve healthcare is a young white guy. Republicans, you see, believe that all “underserving” Medicaid recipients are Black. And so, featuring a white guy in the role of spooning off the public dole really pissed them off. Racist commentator Matt Walsh said of the ad: “Republicans don’t have the balls to do this ad with ‘Shaniqua’ as the villain, even though that would actually be an accurate portrayal of the problem at hand.” Walsh is, as per usual, wrong. In Arkansas, 60 percent of people who rely on Medicaid are white. Only 18 percent are Black. Huckabee Sanders made the mistake of telling white people the truth about whom government funding cuts hurt. All that happened here is that the racists told on themselves (in Apartheid X comment after comment). Their problem is not with poor white folks receiving healthcare; their problem is with Black people receiving healthcare. Their problem isn’t with government spending; their problem is with government spending on Black people. White Democrats, be they progressive or moderate, need to understand and internalize this episode. This is why the “it’s the economy, stupid” messaging no longer works. This is why policies designed to help “working-class” white folks are rejected by those very same people. The kinds of white people objecting to the ad are not interested in government services or programs if the benefits have to be shared with Black people, even when Black people are the overwhelming minority of beneficiaries.It’s the racism, stupid. It’s always been the racism. The racism is why the white working class is never going to come back to the Democratic Party, no matter what you give them. *** If you enjoyed this installment of Elie v. U.S., click here to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Friday.

Does America First Really Mean Israel First?

Jeet Heer — Fri, 9 Oct 2026 14:41:35 GMT

Mike Huckabee’s aide shows how an extremist agenda dominates Trump’s Middle East policy. In February, Israeli settlers in the West Bank shot and killed a 19-year-old American named Nasrallah Abu Siyam. The youth had been trying to stop the settlers from stealing livestock. Abu Siyam’s killing wasn’t an isolated incident. In the last four years, at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, sometimes by settlers but more commonly by the IDF (which acts as a de facto ally of the settler movement). Nine of those killed have been American citizens. After Abu Siyam’s killing, 30 members of Congress, headed by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio decrying “the impunity afforded to extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank under the protection of the Israel Defense Forces” and demanding accountability. It’s unlikely that the Israeli government will have to answer for its lawlessness, at least as long as Donald Trump is in office. While Trump ran on an America First platform, in practice his politics have aligned remarkably well with the Greater Israel project of hard-line Zionists, who believe that Israel has a biblical mandate to annex the West Bank (and perhaps also large chunks of neighboring countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia). The Greater Israel agenda has made remarkable headway, even though Trump himself still pays lip service to the idea of a two-state solution and has said he won’t allow Israel to formally annex the West Bank. Trump himself might shy away from explicitly endorsing a Greater Israel program, but important figures in his government clearly believe in it. On Thursday, The New York Times profiled a key policy shaper, David Milstein, an aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. The newspaper reports that “when members of Congress pushed for accountability over the killings of Palestinian Americans by Israeli settlers and security forces, [Milstein] suppressed a detailed report that the embassy staff had written, effectively stonewalling lawmakers’ efforts to gain information, according to multiple officials briefed on the matter.” Milstein’s actions here are part of a larger pattern. According to the Times, Milstein “has repeatedly suppressed or significantly revised embassy reporting on Israeli activities to present the Netanyahu government in a favorable light.” Although the Times article featured fresh reporting, it also built on a report published last September by Connor Echols in Responsible Statecraft, which described Milstein as “something of a pro-Israel enforcer” who reached “across the State Department to steer U.S. policy and contest any information that casts Israel in a negative light.” Echols reported that Milstein tried to get the State Department to refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” which is the biblically laden language of settlers pushing for annexation (and has been adopted by most major Israeli political leaders). Further, Milstein reportedly created a culture of fear at the State Department by enforcing ideological conformity around Israel. He seems to have gotten the State Department to fired Shahed Ghoreishi, the department’s lead press officer for Israel-Palestinian affairs. Aside from his ideological extremism, Milstein has been tainted by the corruption that pervades the Trump administration. Last month, Politico reported that he had sent out a wedding invitation soliciting money from guests, including Israeli citizens, a practice that raised security concerns. The State Department told the Times that “the entire team at State remains focused on advancing President Trump’s America First agenda.” This claim is dubious, unless one believes that America First actually means serving Greater Israel and disregarding the rights of Palestinian Americans. Milstein is not a rogue agent. He represents a powerful pro-Israel faction within the modern GOP. This faction supports not just the right of Israel to exist but also its right to conquer and annex neighboring lands.

“I Had to Get My Mind Right”: The Challenges to Loving Relationships After Being Laid Off by DOGE

Lottie Joiner — Fri, 9 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

After the federal firings, Black women felt betrayed and disillusioned. One longtime federal worker learned from experience the importance of community. On April Fool’s Day last year, Philadelphia federal worker Darlene Tart-Scott arrived at work only to find out she had been laid off. Minutes later, she was on a train home, carrying the items she had been allowed to scoop up from her office. “Once I stepped off the train and saw my husband, I cried so long and so hard,” Tart-Scott, 65, remembered. “I have never cried like that before in my life, including the death of my parents. It felt like my soul had been snatched right from under me, and by a committee of people who didn’t know anything about my work or my office or how we work. That just hurt so bad.” She was comforted by her husband, George, who she says is her best friend. “I’m not a crier, but I have to admit, he saw more tears from me in one week than he had in our 10 years together,” Tart-Scott said. “He didn’t know how to handle that, so he just held me until I was finished.” But in the months after Tart-Scott was fired from her job at the Administration for Children and Families regional office in Philadelphia, she was so “mentally overwhelmed and disillusioned” that it began to cast a shadow over their relationship. She also lost weight and her hair started falling out. Her doctor diagnosed her with hypothyroidism. But Tart-Scott believes her health decline was a result of the stress from the firings. She sought counseling after noticing that she was not treating her husband, a 1990 Iraq War veteran, with her usual kindness. “I had to get my mind right. I was really struggling,” Tart-Scott recalls. “My patience was very, very thin.” Reliving the Trauma Tart-Scott sought to move on, but it was hard to forget the day she lost her job. She had arrived at work at her usual time at 6:45 am. She waved her electronic key card in front of the sensor, but it didn’t work. She knocked on the door and a staff person let her in the office. Tart-Scott sat down, turned on her computer, brought up her e-mail and learned that she had been fired. “The letter basically said to gather up what you can and go on about your business, which is what I did,” Tart-Scott said of the e-mail. “It was heartless, just heartless.” For some Black women who lost their jobs in the government, the federal firings could be described as institutional betrayal, said Seanna Leath, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “I think some Black women have learned that exceptional performance provides at least some type of protection within racist and sexist institutions, like, ‘Work twice as hard, get the credentials, don’t give anyone a reason to question you,’” said Leath, an applied developmental psychologist and community-engaged scholar. “Being fired after following those rules can be psychologically destabilizing.” Black women often did far more than the work described in their job descriptions, Leath added. “Some Black women may have spent years performing invisible labor,” Leath said. “We know that Black women oftentimes take on more work within a workplace, particularly around caregiving, emotional labor—you’re mentoring other Black employees, maybe serving on diversity committees, or you’re starting new programs, community partnerships, changing policies, creating spaces where others could belong. They didn’t just lose a position. It’s also all of these things they were building up.” Tart-Scott had been with the department for more than two decades and had just received a promotion and an award. “And then this happens,” Tart-Scott said. FIRED: The DOGE Layoffs Hit Black Woman Hard. A Year Later, Many Are Still Reeling Recovering From a “Gut Punch”: Black Women Fired by Trump and Musk Work to Overcome Shame and Self-Blame Lottie Joiner The Unseen Toll: Depression, Anxiety Plague Black Women a Year After Being Fired by DOGE Lottie Joiner Before serving in the federal government for 20 years, Tart-Scott worked in corporate America, at a federally funded health center, and at the Head Start program in Philadelphia. She began working for the government in 2004, when she was 44, and served in an office for regional operations with the Administration of Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. Her office provided administrative support and supplies for Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, and West Virginia. The financial stability that came with working for the federal government allowed Tart-Scott to send her children to college, participate in extracurricular activities and go to Disneyland for a family vacation, something she didn’t do growing up because her parents couldn’t afford it. Tart-Scott loved her job. She says she received stellar evaluations, leading to performance pay increases and awards. In addition, she received accolades “from citizens that I’ve served, as far as Guam and Puerto Rico, wherever I was of service.” “We were the conduit: We figured out what was needed and made it happen,” Tart-Scott said. “I created partnerships. I could see the impact that I had. I know what I was doing was helping people.” “Loving Me Back to Sanity” After her firing, it was Tart-Scott that needed some help. She was struggling mentally, but needed to be strong for her family, especially her husband, George, who was plagued by health issues including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which impacts airflow to the lungs. He also has diabetes and a rare eye disease. For his sake, in particular, she pushed herself to move forward. “I know that he depended on me emotionally to help him keep going,” Tart-Scott said. “I knew that if I broke down, if I wasn’t the person that he needed and depended on, what would happen to him?” She and George have known each other since the 1970s, more than 50 years. He went to their neighborhood’s all-boys school and she attended the all-girls school just a block away. Recalling that he had dated some of her friends in high school, Tart-Scott said, “Who knew some 50 years later he would become my husband and best friend? He was fine as the hair on a frog’s neck and had this real deep voice. I had no idea back then that we would end up happily together.” But in 2015, Tart-Scott wrote on a Facebook post saying she needed a dance partner. George answered. The couple married in 2017, “and we’ve been dancing ever since,” said Tart-Scott. What she loves most about her husband, Tart-Scott says, is his laugh, and that he’s very affectionate. When she got fired, she says, it was George who made her feel safe. For all those reasons, she concentrated on their relationship. Now that they have more time together, she says, they binge-watch TV programs—the soap opera Beyond the Gates is their favorite. “I know that I got on my husband’s nerves with the mood swings, but he never reacted in any way but caring,” Tart-Scott remembered. “I thank him every day for loving me back to sanity.” Grieving the Death of a Career Tart-Scott was the breadwinner of her family. George had retired from a career in the railroad industry two years earlier. She also had her own plans for retirement, which DOGE destroyed. Like many other Black women fired by DOGE and the elimination of DEI, Tart-Scott felt a sense of disillusionment knowing that she could lose her job based on the political climate. Despite years of successful performance, she and other Black women realized they were seen as expendable, said Leath, the Washington University psychologist. “This kind of structural cruelty can disrupt this sense of professional identity, competence, security itself and then also just your [personal] identity,” Leath said. Job loss can collide with gender and racialized expectations that Black women have to be strong, emotionally controlled, responsible for others and capable of persevering despite adversity, Leath added. “Caretaking and not being able to provide—financially and emotionally—in ways that you previously did, can cause stress that seeps into our relationships,” she said. “There’s this idea that Black women should emotionally suppress how they’re doing and this idea that, ‘I can’t fall apart. People depend on me,’” Leath said. “Black women may interpret anxiety, depression, exhaustion, grief as something that we should just push through rather than really sitting with it or that it’s something that deserves attention and care.” Finding Solace in Community Tart-Scott “pushed through” by working on herself. She started doing Tai Chi and yoga to calm her stress. She signed up for classes. She became a more involved grandmother to her three grandchildren, one of whom has autism. Tart-Scott also found solace in a group chat with other fired federal workers and does a check-in with her former coworkers once a week. What hurts her most is knowing that some of her former colleagues haven’t checked in on her at all since her firing. Denese Shervington, a psychiatrist, public health practitioner, and cofounder of the Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies in New Orleans, says that some people may be at risk for developing a trauma-based condition such as post-traumatic stress disorder if there is no support. “Most of us are going to experience in our lifetime an extremely traumatic event,” said Shervington, who also chairs the Department of Psychiatry at Charles Drew University in Los Angeles. “Healing is not to take an individual and say, ‘Let’s do therapy and let’s give you medication.’ That might be necessary, but one has to think about the collective processes for our community to heal.” Shervington says healing is hard to do on our own. She notes that with collective trauma—when a group of people have experienced a traumatic event—we need collective resilience. “Expecting individuals on their own to be resilient is very fraught,” said Shervington. “Eventually, I can’t get up anymore. I’m beaten. I’m broken. But if the group comes and says—”I know you’re down. We got you. You can do this. You can get through this. I’ll help you”—we survive.

The Violent, Militaristic Ideology that Undergirds Fraternities

Jasper Craven — Fri, 9 Oct 2026 09:30:00 GMT

The first major hazing scandal in American history occurred at West Point in 1900. There are eerie parallels to what happened at Cornell’s Chi Phi. In their polished public pitches, fraternities pledge to provide boys with many vaunted things. Leaders of Greek Life portray themselves as distinctly charitable, intensely communal, and enlightened. In exchange for dues each semester, they promise to provide the time and space necessary to build brotherhoods, find romantic companionship, and forge academic and future career success. What is generally provided in practice, however, are corrupted versions of these things: bonds built through violence, jobs secured without merit, and intimacy taken, not granted. Hard evidence of the system’s many horrors and hypocrisies have routinely come to light, spurring a response that is generally the same: righteous outcry followed by insufficient, individualized campus punishments, like apology essays or abbreviated dismissals. The guilty fraternity—and sometimes, it’s an athletic team that functions just like one—always seems to elide proper accountability and generally manages to soften the blow for its accused members. While each new scandal leaves scars, the power and relative impunity displayed by Greek Life time and time again has become the institution’s most truly alluring feature. These dynamics are on vivid display at Cornell University, which, between 2018 and 2024, logged 1,216 cases of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. One of these data points represents a 20-year-old Jane Doe who, in October 2024, was allegedly plied with ketamine and alcohol by a brotherhood of boys at the Fraternity Chi Phi, seven of whom subsequently sexually assaulted her. “I felt like bait,” she later said in a closed hearing. “I felt like lions around me.” Less than 24 hours before her gang rape, another student had overdosed on ketamine at the same house. Campus police responded, and made an arrest, but Chi Phi apparently remained in the clear. The university ultimately launched an investigation into the so-called “Cornell 7,” but only two of the men were actually expelled. The rest secured Ivy League diplomas, including Diego Sarabia, who managed to get a job at Wells Fargo even as he actively remained the subject of Cornell’s inquiry. When the case arrived on the desk of District Attorney Matthew Van Houten, he declined to bring criminal charges, concluding that Doe had started her night by consensually imbibing and was thus as responsible for her behavior as the perpetrators were. Underlying these egregiously weak responses to campus rape culture is an unstated rationale: that fraternities, like millitary batallions, breed the sort of hard-edged attitudes needed to enforce America’s social order. While often cast as coarse forms of youthful transgression, fraternity violence is, as writer Elizabeth Schambelan once powerfully argued in N+1, “a violent resocialization that better equips young men to wield privilege, put down challenges to existing hierarchies, and police the status quo.” The power of an individual fraternity network is compounded by alumni of America’s many like-minded organizations. District Attorney Van Houten, for instance, graduated from America’s original power fraternity: West Point. Just as Chi Phi dresses up its ugliness with the credo “Truth, Honor and Personal Integrity,” West Pointers purportedly dedicate themselves to the ideas of “Duty, Honor, Country.” Van Houten himself boasted in a letter to his local newspaper years ago that he was “uniquely qualified” to address the concept of “honor.” Honor is traditionally equated with honesty, integrity, and accountability, though, definitionally it doesn’t require any of these things. All it actually denotes is a fidelity to an institution’s core rites and standards, which men may go any length to meet, often confusing that fidelity for masculine kinship. For the “Cornell 7,” impressing one’s fraternity members was likely more important for each of the men in that moment than the well-being of the woman who happened to be in the room upstairs. Perhaps their gross abuse of Doe felt empowering in the moment, though it came at a deep moral cost, a spiritual degradation that netted nothing more than cheap power and pleasure. The first major hazing scandal in American history occurred at West Point in 1900, under a system designed by a pair of former fraternity brothers at Dartmouth. At the time, there were no women to abuse at West Point, and so the worst behavior befell the men, in this case, Oscar Booz, a smart but relatively small cadet who was targeted for actively opposing the school’s despotic hierarchy. Senior cadets forced him to chug Tabasco sauce, and to square off in West Point’s underground fight club—all rituals that one wouldn’t be surprised to read about in a college newspaper today. Booz’s unrelenting abuse left him in failing physical health. After only a few months at West Point, he returned home. A family doctor discovered bruises across his body and observed that his throat was badly swollen, likely from the hot sauce. He died soon thereafter from a rare form of tuberculosis in his larynx. He was 19. One of the purported masterminds of cadet hazing in Oscar’s day was William Augustus Mitchell, who had previously served in a senior leadership position at Alabama Polytechnic Institute’s chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. It was an early and illuminating example of the long-standing interplay between military and civilian frat life, one that has since leaked into corporate environments, athletic teams, and American government.

Trump’s Die-Hards Are Taking Their Cultishness to New Lows

Sasha Abramsky — Fri, 9 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

I’m finally starting to understand why Jim Jones’s lieutenants didn’t try to stop him. This week, as outrage grew over Donald Trump’s use of $20 million of taxpayer money to run a series of hyper-partisan, cultish ads about his own greatness—including one seemingly claiming a mandate from God —Mike Johnson, the hapless speaker of the House, rushed to defend the president. He told reporters that, actually, spending huge sums of public money in this way was fine, because the ads were “talking about America’s greatness” and were “pro-Americana” (whatever that means). In reality, there was, of course, literally nothing appropriate about these ads, as a wide array of legal scholars from across the political spectrum immediately pointed out. The wave of revulsion at this gross misuse of public dollars even spread to a select few Republican members of the Senate who girded their wobbly spines to issue milquetoast objections. It should have been easy for even the most craven of sycophants to distance themselves from this extraordinarily overt abuse of power. Yet Johnson simply couldn’t find the words to call Trump out. Instead, he glommed onto the slimmest of silver linings—Trump’s reluctant announcement, a day earlier, that his PAC would reimburse the government for the money spent on the ads. That, preacher Johnson piously averred, was a good thing. Hours later, Trump withdrew the offer and said that US taxpayers would, after all, be left to foot the bill. From Johnson? Silence. It was yet another humiliation that Trump has, quite deliberately, inflicted on his lickspittle congressional enabler. Meanwhile, thousands of people at a rally in Nebraska on Monday cheered when Trump appeared to pronounce himself unbothered by the prospect of Iran “taking out” Los Angeles or San Diego. This from The Guardian’s article on the bizarre event: “At the president’s rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, Trump claimed that high prices due to the war with Iran are a ‘small price to pay for keeping the world safe—keeping our country safe.’ He went on: ‘They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.’ The crowd applauded the line.” It’s that last sentence that really gets me. Trump seemingly gave his blessing to another country—one he launched a war against—wiping out millions of people in California, and his die-hard supporters, part of the dwindling band of Americans who still think there’s no greater entertainment than a MAGA rally, cheered him on. Several attendees tapped into their inner Mike Johnson afterward, telling reporters that implicitly daring another country to nuke two huge American cities was fine because Trump was speaking at a campaign event. The Guardian article quoted one attendee as saying, “I defend his comments absolutely. It is not inappropriate to mention something like that now because you have to take it in the context in which it is spoken. If you look at that context, it’s appropriate for a rally in which the president is addressing his base.” It’s as if, somehow, the venue launders the foulness of tongue-in-cheek treason by the commander in chief. But in reality there is no context in which Trump’s comment either makes sense or is “appropriate,” and the vast majority of Americans would have either been befuddled or outraged at the commander in chief’s incitement to violence against two of America’s largest cities. Facing blowback, the White House communications team doubled down in defending Trump’s remark. Once again, in true Orwellian form, it demanded that the world ignore its own collective eyes and ears as to what Trump had clearly said and accused the media of being “buffoons” for reporting and broadcasting Trump’s own words. There is a common theme here: Trump pushes every conceivable envelope, violates every notion of civility, decency, and common sense, and his team simply hands out more Kool-Aid and demands that the world slurp it up. Take Ken Paxton, the grotesquely corrupt and, it seems, inept Texas GOP Senate candidate. At one campaign rally after the next, Trump has “endorsed” Paxton by calling out his physical appearance, impugning his intelligence, denigrating his speaking style. And as the humiliations pile on, as a president with barely 30 percent approval ratings tells the crowds to pretend that he’s the one on the ballot—thus doling out yet another poison pellet to the actual candidate—Paxton just stands there, his ****-eating grin expanding like that of a Cheshire Cat fighting a bad case of hemorrhoids. I have often wondered why Jim Jones’s lieutenants didn’t pull the plug before he urged hundreds of his followers to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Or why, in the final days of the Third Reich, so many of Hitler’s officials, as well as on-the-ground followers, decided to stay the course and fight it out to the death. What is it about death cults that lures cultists into the final, fatal trap?

Inside Cornell’s Week of Protest

Jeannine Chiang — Fri, 9 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

“We won’t be silenced anymore. Our university needs to start protecting us, like they should’ve with Jane Doe and all other survivors on campus.” At approximately 3 am on Monday, October 5, a glass door shattered at the entrance of Day Hall, Cornell’s main administration building. Anonymous activists painted “SMASH THE PATRIARCHY” and “AT CORNELL RAPISTS ARE PROTECTED PROTESTORS ARE EXPELLED” in red across the walls, marking the beginning of a week of community action. According to a statement from the activists sent to The Cornell Daily Sun, the demonstration was in response to a lawsuit filed September 14 by a former Cornell student who alleges that she was gang raped by seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024. In the days that followed, Cornell students, faculty, and staff organized the Justice for Survivors protest, an open town hall, a “campuswide economic blackout,” and a seven-hour sit-in, turning outrage over the allegations—and the university’s handling of them—into a broader call for institutional change. Hours after the early-morning action at Day Hall, chants echoed across Ho Plaza as the community gathered at 4:30 pm for the student-led Justice for Survivors protest, organized by a coalition of 20 student-led organizations. According to one Cornell professor who has been in Ithaca for decades, the demonstration was “the largest student protest at Cornell since Vietnam.” Across campus, students raised trembling voices, burst into applause, and brushed away tears. Their faces reflected the anger, hope, and heartbreak of the moment. Chants rang out in the mid-Autumn chill, and protest signs read: “Cornell admin betrays survivors. Resign now.” “We are Jane Doe.” “CU, it’s SA, not essay. Stop protecting rapists.” “Frats breed rapists.” “Kotlikoff, there is blood on your hands.” Protestors’ calls for systemic change were echoed by organizers: “We won’t be silenced anymore. Our university needs to start protecting us, like they should’ve with Jane Doe and all other survivors on campus,” read one post advertising the protest. The rally’s five main demands were that Cornell expel or revoke the degrees of all alleged perpetrators, require independent hearings and minimum sanctions for sexual assault, allow for an external investigation into Cornell’s administration, institute mandatory sexual assault prevention trainings for students and trauma-informed training for CUPD, and fully comply with New York State’s “Enough Is Enough” Law.

Northeastern’s Lack of Transparency Undermines Student Journalists

Heidi Ho — Fri, 9 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The lack of access to university administration makes it hard for student reporters to report fully on campus affairs. Working for a school newspaper and seldom getting a response from your own school officials can be an important lesson in experiential learning. For 100 years, Northeastern University’s independent school newspaper, The Huntington News, has been in service to its campus community. In 2008, the News became independent from the university to gain editorial freedom. As is the nature of school newspapers, significant energy is dedicated to campus affairs. And as students report on more issues that require university comment, from the 2024 pro-Palestinian encampments to employee salary disparities, Northeastern has failed to deliver time and time again. In 2020, then editor in chief Kelly Chan and managing editor Deanna Schwartz spoke to Georgetown University’s Free Speech Project about Northeastern’s lack of transparency and failure to respond to newspaper interview requests. Six years on, not much has changed. Emily Spatz, the News’s 2025–26 editor in chief, recently wrote a letter from the editor titled “Why The Huntington News is participating in a Boston City Council hearing about Northeastern’s transparency.” In her letter, she explained that reporters are normally redirected to media relations for requests for comment, and it’s rare to even get a response from the comms professionals. When administrators do comment, they often don’t answer the reporters’ questions. Virtually all correspondence with the university happens through e-mails with media relations, in accordance with university policy. Even interviews with professors speaking on their areas of expertise are rarely allowed. “Most of my relationship with them was lots of nonanswers and pushback on our stories,” Spatz said. “One time we were doing a story about [gender salary discrepancies] at the university and we e-mailed the university for comment and one of the media relations people called me and was trying to convince me it wasn’t a story.” The lack of access to university administration makes it hard for student reporters to report fully on campus affairs. In 2023, one of the university’s residence halls, White Hall, was shut down after structural engineers found significant water damage in the building. By 2024, the building was demolished. The building’s farewell came amid a student housing shortage so severe that the university ended up renting hotel rooms for students to live in. The News was planning to write a story on when a new dorm building would start being built and important related issues directly relevant to students, but media relations never responded to e-mail requests and the article could not run.

Has France’s Government Overplayed Its Hand?

June Loper,Harrison Stetler — Thu, 8 Oct 2026 18:57:43 GMT

The speed and scale of the police response mark a dangerous new normal. On October 2, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez found himself beating back accusations that France’s government had reacted with insufficient vigor to the wave of student protests that has swept the country this autumn. “There are no orders for restraint,” said the minister in charge of internal security, namely the Gendarmes and CRS battalions that are called on to police demonstrations. This time at least, Nuñez was being brutally honest. The ongoing occupations and wildcat protests, led first by high school students fed up with a fraying secondary education system, have been met by a dramatic and in many ways unprecedented deployment of state power. From the arbitrary arrest and detention of thousands of minors to the use of excessive force by riot police, the government’s primary response to the eruption has been to raise the physical and legal costs of taking to the streets. Upward of 400,000 students, teachers, and supporters demonstrated across the country on October 6 for the day of national marches since the movement began. The figures of total arrests are now approaching 7,000 individuals, with some 87 percent estimated to be underage minors. These figures already outpace the preventive arrests seen in the beginnings of other social movements such as the 2018 “yellow vest” revolt, which had already set a high bar as far as repressive standards go. There’s little denying that stiff policing has become a hallmark of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. But according to Alice Cohen-Morzadec, university student and spokesperson for L’Union Étudiante, “Rarely have we seen these levels of tension with seemingly no efforts from the police to de-escalate.” In addition to the calls for more resources for the education system, student protests have increasingly turned their attention to the police response, with demonstrators at this week’s marches holding up signs and banners with slogans like “police everywhere, education nowhere” or “too young to vote, old enough to be tear-gassed.” Speaking in Parliament on October 6, a few kilometers away from the Paris demonstration, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu dismissed all allegations of a heavy-handed police response. “It’s a lie to claim that there is an intentional and disproportionate use of force by the police,” the prime minister said during government questions. “It’s a dirty slander against the republican police!” As of October 8, the oversight bureau charged with internal inquiries into the use of force has announced a total of 18 investigations since the beginning of the student mobilization. Among the most harrowing cases are adolescents who have had their jaws shattered by rubber bullets or their hands blown off by explosive stun grenades. One young protester in the outskirts of Paris testified to being dragged along a street covered with broken glass. “I couldn’t breathe, I thought I was going to die,” he told reporters at the alternative media outlet Street Press. At a medical examination, doctors found pieces of broken glass lodged in his head. The hard response was written on the wall from the moment the student revolt started to pick up speed last week. In a September 30 memo addressed to the police hierarchy, Interior Minister Nuñez signaled that “the proportionate use of force must never inhibit the work of reestablishing public order.” Beneath the evident contradiction in those orders—that is, between supposedly “proportionate” tactics and the disinhibited restoring of order—rights observers and legal experts read what was essentially carte blanche granted to law enforcement. Not to be outdone, Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin held an October 1 meeting with state prosecutors, posting a photo of the gathering to social media that trumpeted a “penal response of great firmness” for protesting students. “What message is being sent to French youth by political authorities? Their message is clear: ‘We’re going to beat you, rip off your hands, and it won’t be our fault. It will be yours,’” the prominent civil liberties attorney Raphaël Kempf told The Nation. For Lecornu’s government, saving face in the crisis depends on its ability to present the protest movement as a cover for hooliganism. “Ultraviolence is knocking on the doors of our high schools,” said the prime minister on October 6.

Seeing My Mother in Prison: A Conversation With Author Harriet Clark

Victoria Law — Thu, 8 Oct 2026 14:53:57 GMT

An interview with the author of The Hill about her debut novel and the artist’s role in documenting atrocities. For nearly four decades, Harriet Clark saw her mother only in the visiting room of New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. When Clark was less than one year old, her mother Judith, then a member of the Weather Underground, was arrested and later sentenced to 75 years to life in prison for her role as a getaway driver in a 1981 armored car robbery, during which a security guard and two police officers were killed. (In 2016, then-governor Andrew Cuomo commuted Judith’s sentence, making her eligible for parole, which she was granted three years later.) In her debut novel, The Hill, Clark’s narrator Suzanna never remembers a time when she hadn’t spent her Saturdays visiting her mother sentenced to life in a fictional prison atop a hill. Like Clark, Suzanna was a baby when her mother was arrested and incarcerated. “The year I turned eight the prison built the hospital and the gun tower and raised the fences around the hill another three feet,” Clark writes early in her novel. “It was the year the prison grew up.” It’s a nod to the nation’s prison-building boom as tough-on-crime laws swelled its population behind bars. In the 1990s, the United States saw an unprecedented boom in prison building with a new prison opening in rural America every 15 days. Lyrical and introspective, The Hill paints a picture of a mother desperately trying to parent her daughter despite her life sentence, and Suzanna’s own efforts to stay connected. “To return each week and rise again to do this forever and ever,” Clark writes. “This was a feat I saw nowhere applauded and this was the challenge I set now for myself.” Clark, now a mother herself and who edits books and films, spoke with The Nation about her new novel, the experience of having a mother in prison, and the artist’s role in documenting atrocities. —Victoria Law Victoria Law: Can you talk about why you chose to write a novel over a memoir or autobiography, given how autobiographical The Hill seems to be? Harriet Clark: I love novels. I have always been able to feel my feelings more when I’m engaging with fiction. It was like granting dignity to the material to write it in the form that I most revere, and that has given me so much meaning and pleasure in my life. [A novel] felt like a way to say, “These are lives worthy of art, not just reportage.” I [also] think that childhood lends itself to fiction. When we’re children, we haven’t yet consented to reality. We’re inside our imagination so much, and so a novel felt like the appropriate form for a book about childhood. And if you grow up in prison, you learn to respect other people’s privacy. You try not to watch what’s going on at their table; you’re hoping no one’s listening to you. You’re inside a structure that grants you none of the dignity of privacy so people have to grant it to each other. I never had a reportorial impulse to take something I saw in there and share it with the world. Respecting people’s privacy is really important to me. For me, this novel is largely about privacy and about the ways we companion each other even across great chasms of unknowability. VL: In the novel, Suzanna visits her mother every week. Their visits are imbued with a sense of claustrophobia—she and her mother stay inside the Reading Roost, a playhouse in the children’s area that’s increasingly too small as Suzanna grows. What were visits like when you were a growing child? HC: I don’t have a conscious memory of experiencing the prison as a claustrophobic space. One of the ways I was different from many of the other kids at the prison was that I had been going there even before I could remember anything, so I never had this kind of encounter with the prison that most children are forced to have, where, for the first time, you arrive to barracks surrounded by barbed wire and a gun tower and know that your mother is behind all of that. My experience of prison was that it was normal to me. I did know that most prisons [during the 1980s and 1990s] didn’t have a room like the Children’s Center [a play area for children and their incarcerated parents]. Even though it should be normal for a child to be able to touch or play with their mother, because I grew up with other kids whose parents were in prison, I knew that we were inside the best possible version of a tragedy in terms of seeing our mothers. My mother and all the women in the prison and Sister Elaine [who helped create the Children’s Center] went out of their way to present the Children’s Center as a joyful place, and I felt that. One of the qualities I share with Suzanna is that I knew from a very young age that it would not serve me to experience my life as degraded. I could see that other people found certain aspects of my life pitiful or pathetic, or thought that I had a lesser experience of a mother. My mother did so much to try to shield me from the true horrors of the prison. My mother did what mothers in prison have to do, which is that they have to be undestroyed by prison. She was in incredibly destroying environments and conditions, and she did not bring that to me. That saved huge aspects of my spirit and psyche, so I always wanted to see my mother, which is to say I always wanted to go to the prison. I was happy to get to the room where my mother would arrive. Part of what I wanted to do is to show that one of the remarkable adaptations of childhood is that children will really go out of their way to make enough out of not enough. VL: Are there prison issues that you hope readers reflect upon after reading your novel? HC: I began this version of the book in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s family separation policy at the border. For ten years before that, I had written only privately, never with any desire to publish. Then there was footage of kids ripped out of their mothers’ arms [at the border] and there was so much outcry about it. Even the suburban conservative mothers felt this was so unacceptable. Obviously, I shared everyone’s outrage, but I also felt bewildered because I did feel like, don’t you know this happens every day in jails and prisons across this country? All detention is family separation. There was something about watching this degree of outrage that made me think, Maybe people don’t understand that five million kids will, at some point in their upbringing, have a parent in prison—that they will have the experience of being ripped out of their parents’ arm, either at the time of arrest or at the end of visiting hours. I thought, Maybe they don’t know and so I’m going to write this book that will help bring awareness to this idea of incarceration as family separation. I finished the book amidst the genocide in Gaza, when it [became] clear that everyone knows exactly what is happening to children there and it is not rousing the majority to stop the assault or protect the young. So my approach and agenda have come to feel much shakier to me. The line I always quote in relationship to growing up with a parent in prison is Derek Walcott’s “Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.” I wrote the book to show how lonely and ghostly it can feel for a child to have their parent forcefully kept away from them—that having a parent in prison, and having to contend with prisons as a child, can make you feel like a “nobody”—but fundamentally, we’re a nation. There are millions of children growing up like this. The face of mass incarceration in America is a child’s face. For many years, the title of my book was, You Won’t Go Alone If You Go, because this was what I wanted people to understand: when you send our parents to prison, we go with them. When you mistreat a person inside, their whole family suffers that worry and fear. Prison is a collective punishment, one that I believe often extends the scope of harm, rather than healing it. I often feel like children aren’t told, “You’re amazing. This is so brave that you are still doing what you can to keep your family together—that is incredible of you.” It was why I wanted Suzanna’s story to be a hero story, and for her to know what no one else around her will acknowledge: that she is a hero, that she is resisting the great forces of separation, prison, and death to keep her family together—and that millions of kids are essentially forced into this kind of heroism, and so many parents in prison have to rise to the kind of heroism of parenting from within one of the most difficult situations. So to some extent I’ve come to think, let me at least reflect their heroism, even if I’ve lost some confidence in my awareness-raising campaign. VL: This is very much a novel about mothers and daughters—your relationship with your mother, her relationship with her mother, and other mother-daughter relationships. What would you want readers to know about mothers and incarceration? HC: I would want them to know that the majority of women in prison are mothers. That most were the primary caregiver for their child before they went in. For me, the reason the hero’s journey framework felt important for talking about mothering in prison is because, fundamentally, the hero’s journey is a framework of death and rebirth, and it’s based off the idea that the bravest thing we ever do is resurrect ourselves after total devastation. If you are a mother in prison, you are in the middle of an unbearable catastrophe, your children are in the middle of an unbearable catastrophe, and you can’t be destroyed because your children still need you. Again and again, in women’s facilities, what happens is that women have to find a way to rebirth themselves inside these incredible constraints. They have to because they’re still responsible to their children. I consider it the greatest education of my life that I got to grow up around women in prison because I saw how people find the will to not be destroyed. I saw how people, in ways that can take a very long time and require a lot of support and community, find their way back to their relationships and their responsibilities. VL: Is there anything you’d like to add? HC: Growing up, I’d come into the Children’s Center of my mother’s prison and it would be like, “This week, we’ve removed the top hat and the limousine pieces from the Monopoly set because they could be turned into weapons.” And the next week, “We’ve removed all the pieces from the Battleship game because they could be weapons.” And the next week, something else. The world was full of things we and our mothers could turn into weapons. And on the one hand, maybe that was true—you could probably take that tiny top hat and do something dangerous with it. And on the other hand, the prison itself was an act of violence so much greater than that tiny top hat could ever be. Most of the artists I know in prison lean more towards transformation than documentation. Bearing witness is incredibly important, but I think creating your own vision and reality can be its own experience of autonomy and dignity, a way to insist that you are vaster than the conditions you’re in. I think it can be degrading when we expect people in difficult circumstances to write essentially transcriptions of their suffering. The more difficulty you’re in, the more creative transport you may need and want; it’s a form of autonomy to say, I still determine my own vision. You may control what I see, but I determine how I see.

How the Skydance Merger Will Remake Hollywood and the News Business

Ben Schwartz — Thu, 8 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

The Ellison family’s $110 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery means more top-down control, and less room for dissent. No, Frodo did not throw the ring into Mt. Doom in time. Ethan Hunt did not get to the top of the Eiffel Tower to defuse the bomb. A lone X-Wing Fighter did not blow up the Death Star. This is all to say that, despite the best efforts of the Writers Guild of America, 12 states attorneys general, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, and the thousands of people who now get to lie awake at night wondering if they’ll have a job in two months—despite a months-long initiative to stop the Skydance merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery—that deal closed this Tuesday. The Empire struck back, and the Empire won. To recap, the Trump-aligned Ellison family now owns Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., HBO, CBS, Paramount+, CBS News, 60 Minutes, and CNN. To make this deal happen, the Ellisons took on a staggering debt load of $80 billion. How will they repay it? First, they’ll ask a lot of other people to pay it for them—by laying them off. They will begin consolidating duplicated services—they don’t need two marketing departments, or two of anything on the infrastructure side. Disney laid off nearly 4,000 people in 2019 alone to help pay for its buyout of 21st Century Fox to compete with Netflix. With the announcement of a far larger merger, backed by stupendously bigger loans, a staggering wave of job losses is about to hit Los Angeles. The machinations of billionaires in the entertainment industry, and their round-robin cycles of mergers and acquisitions, mean very little to the audience for Hollywood productions, but here’s one thing that will: It was announced soon after the deal closed that Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy have been fired. They are the executive team that brought three Warner Bros. movies to the Oscars last year: Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Weapons. They did that rarest of things in today’s Hollywood: Their studio produced movies popular at awards season and with the public. It’s been a joke for years that few people ever see the top movies up for the Oscars—that the stars walking up the red carpet are seen by more people than saw the movies featuring them. That changed last year. As Deluca and Abdy exited the building, Paramount also announced that the Transformers franchise will be revived via an eighth installment, with Michael Bay returning to direct and Steven Spielberg overseeing as producer. An $80 billion debt load means you have much less latitude to take risks on new ideas. Not that Hollywood’s new Skydance overlords will need them: the newly merged leviathan is home to DC Studios, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe (and all the anti-trans toxicity she brings to everything she touches), Looney Tunes, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Lord of the Rings, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and Top Gun. It’s easy to see the future of movies. As Tom Cruise and Alejandro Innaritu’s bold, uninhibited, and critically panned Digger (2026) struggles at the box office for Warner Bros., Cruise has already announced for Paramount that he will star in a sequel to his 36-year-old NASCAR film, Days of Thunder (1990). Skydance also plans to merge HBO and Paramount+ into a streaming platform large enough to compete with Netflix. Besides the shedding of large numbers of duplicate jobs, it’s hard to believe that the prices consumers now pay and the commercials we endure for a service we already pay for won’t go up. That, after all, is exactly what has happened at Disney+ when it took on 21st Century Fox to bolster its streaming profile. The real question, of course, is how the Trump administration, which is closely aligned with the Ellisons, and the broader themes of MAGA politics will shape decision-making at the influential news divisions caught up in the merger—CBS, 60 Minutes, and now CNN. It’s blindingly obvious that Bari Weiss was hired as editor in chief at CBS News to act as a double-digit IQ wrecking ball. Her mission there is to smash and break all the things about journalism that President Trump hates (i.e., everything). It’s often said that she is unqualified for her job, but that claim misapprehends the actual demands of her job: to sell her conservative Free Press at an enormous price ($150 million) during the Paramount-Skydance merger in 2025, and to reassure the president and his FCC Chair Brendan Carr that a right-wing ideologue controls the news. Trump did not demand high ratings, quality journalism, or competence of any kind. He wanted news he liked. He wanted to get even with the smart people who reported things he found unflattering, and she has largely succeeded in giving him what he wants. The fact that the ratings for the network’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, indicate that only President Trump likes it is neither here nor there. The big question for CNN is whether the Ellisons will perform the same sort of MAGA wrecking job there that they did at CBS—or whether they simply made it seem like they would prior to the merger to curry favor with Trump’s FCC. Skydance has already announced that it will retain Mark Thompson—a veteran television journalist with a long track record of success—as CNN’s CEO. Given that CNN is a profit center for Skydance, Ellison seems to be focusing, at least in the short term, on sidestepping any plan to ruin that cash cow by appeasing Trump. Retaining Thompson, as well as CNN’s editorial board of experts that acts as de facto public editors, is meant to signal to potentially jittery investors that the Ellisons are at least prepared to pay lip service to preserving the network’s journalistic integrity after seeing what discarding said integrity did to CBS. And Trump may no longer be their biggest headache. The Ellisons are no doubt tracking the polling numbers they broadcast on their own news properties: After the midterms, Trump will be an even weaker lame-duck president than he already is. The Ellisons got what they wanted from Trump’s FCC—at enormous cost to their fortune and dignity. But why should they have to fear further interventions from him and administration lackeys any more than their news counterparts at Disney, Amazon, or NBC/Universal do now? The deal is done, and now Trump has to contend with a reasonably intact CNN as a major news provider on multiple platforms.

Recovering From a “Gut Punch”: Black Women Fired by Trump and Musk Work to Overcome Shame and Self-Blame

Lottie Joiner — Thu, 8 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Black women working for the federal government did what they were supposed to do. Yet their achievements could not protect them from the political winds. When Sharon Davis opened her e-mail at 5 am on April 1, 2025, she learned that she had been fired from the Food and Drug Administration after 24 years of employment. She felt a mix of emotions: anger, disbelief and—most prominently and undeservedly—shame. “I was like, ‘What do I do now?’” Davis, 55, told MindSite News. “It was a gut punch. I’ve never been fired before. This is the first time I haven’t had a job in my life.” Davis had moved steadily up the ranks at the FDA, working for the last five years as associate director for operations and quality management. Then, overnight, she became one of the more than 95,000 Black women who were fired or laid off from the federal government as result of massive job cuts implemented by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the elimination of diversity programs. Davis says she had been the “go-to person” in her department, and in the initial weeks and months after her job loss she was in denial about her firing, waiting to get called back. She checked her e-mail often, expecting to get questions about where things were and what to do. When she wasn’t asked to return, she questioned her very worth and wondered if her more than two decades of service was of value. Although she knew intellectually that it wasn’t about her, one refrain kept going through her head: “I didn’t deserve this. Why did this happen to me?” Pointing the Finger at Ourselves Davis grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She enjoyed teen fiction, ran on the high school track team, and was the manager for the girl’s basketball team. Her grandmother, a college professor, was her role model, Davis said. “I always remember her being very big on education, on being polished, presentable and professional,” Davis said. “When I saw her, I knew I was going to go to college and make her proud.” After graduating from Jackson State University, a historically Black college in Jackson, Mississippi, with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Davis worked for the state of Mississippi and a nuclear waste facility in Memphis. She moved to Washington, DC, in 2002, where she worked at the FDA until she was blindsided by the mass layoffs in April 2025. “When you don’t have answers and there’s not a clear thing to point to, we typically point the finger on ourselves, and oftentimes that looks like shame,” said Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist who founded and hosts the popular podcast, Therapy for Black Girls.“’Maybe I did something to deserve this. Was this about my performance?’ I think any time there’s a layoff or a firing, people assume rightfully or wrongfully that it was a performance issue, and we know that that was not the case here.” Working for the civilian federal government brought job security and a “path to stability”—especially for more than 200,000 Black people—said Bradford. “You get this job and you never have to worry about it, right?” she said. “So for it to be snatched was incredibly disruptive.” By September 2025, Black women’s unemployment had surged to 7.5 percent, compared to 4.4 percent of all US workers at that time—a net loss driven entirely by losses in the public sector, mostly in federal jobs, according to labor economist Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute. In the public sector as a whole, more than 155,000 Black women lost their jobs between 2024 and 2025. The mass layoffs shook up people’s sense of order and predictability and left them reeling. Christy L. Erving, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Population Research at the University of Texas at Austin, says many Black women like Davis who earned important positions in the federal government had strong feelings of mastery—the sense of having a high degree of control over one’s life and future directions. Then, abruptly, things changed. FIRED: The DOGE Layoffs Hit Black Woman Hard. A Year Later, Many Are Still Reeling “I Had to Get My Mind Right”: The Challenges to Loving Relationships After Being Laid Off by DOGE Lottie Joiner The Unseen Toll: Depression, Anxiety Plague Black Women a Year After Being Fired by DOGE Lottie Joiner “After their job loss, their sense of mastery was reduced,” said Erving. “When you feel that you don’t have a sense of control over your future, that you can get fired at will, there’s an increased risk of poor mental health.” For Davis, it was more than disruptive. It was a blow to a career that she had cultivated for more than two decades. The firings were made worse because there was a narrative that those who were part of the reduction in force (RIF) weren’t doing their jobs and were not necessary, Davis said. “It was all in the way it was done and the things that were said about the people who were ‘riffed,’” said Davis. “It was degrading.” Davis was forced into retirement because she was over 50 and had at least 20 years experience, which means she qualified for Discontinued Service Retirement (DSR). Her health insurance was cut off and, because of her age and years of service, she did not qualify for severance pay. Instead, she was supposed to receive a pension the month after her firing. But, Davis recalled, so many people had lost their jobs that there weren’t enough people left to process the paperwork in a timely manner. She didn’t receive a payment until July 2026—a year after her firing. The early days of unemployment were an enormous struggle, she admitted. “I worked in the government for so long, I haven’t had to look for a job in 20 years,” Davis said. “Some days I just laid there not knowing what to do next.” Davis said working for the FDA gave her a sense of purpose. “My job was everything,” Davis said. “It was what I did. Now I don’t have that.” She didn’t share the news of her job loss with her family until months after her firing—and still has not shared her unemployment status with some neighbors. “I just don’t want to get into the details,” Davis said. “We Forget Our Value Is Inherent” Bradford says it’s dangerous to have our identity and sense of self-worth tied to career and professional pursuits because “it’s not anything that we have control over.” “We know that those things can eventually end or be taken away or changed,” Bradford said. “When our value only comes as a function of the roles that we serve, we forget that our value is inherent. We are worthy and deserving just because we’re human.” Events like the mass firings of federal workers are a reminder, Bradford says, “to make sure that we are involved in other things that give us value and allow us to be restored that aren’t actually a function of our career or our role.” Like many successful Black women in the workplace, Davis presented an image of strength, resisted showing vulnerability, and suppressed emotions of anger. These were tools Black women use to combat negative stereotypes and succeed in the workplace. In her research, Cheryl Woods Giscombé, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, health psychologist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that the need for Black women to be strong and carry often unmanageable loads—to be, in essence, Black Superwomen—can set them up for a demoralizing fall when intense events like being fired from a long-term job occur. Giscombe, the author of the 2024 book The Black Woman’s Guide to Coping with Stress, created the Superwoman Schema, a framework that describes how Black women experience and cope with stress. Women who fall into this pattern feel obligated to present an image of strength and tend to suppress their emotions, resist being vulnerable, are intensely motivated to succeed and feel an obligation to help others. Giscombé developed the Superwoman Schema out of earlier research from other scholars on the concept of the “Strong Black Woman,” which characterized Black women in terms related to strength—strong, resilient, unbreakable. On one hand, Erving said, this created a positive characterization of Black women in response to stereotypes that created the racist trope of the “Angry Black Woman.” On the other hand, she noted, researchers are now recognizing the “burdens of what it means to be a strong Black woman and uphold this image, even when you’re experiencing adversity, even when you’re experiencing gender racism and unfair treatment across multiple domains of life.” The impact, she says, can be overwhelming. “Black women who endorse this notion of being a Superwoman or a Strong Black Woman actually experience greater risk for clinically diagnosed depression and also depressive symptoms,” she says. She ticked off the symptoms: “feelings of sadness, feeling like a failure, crying, loss of interest in daily activities, sleep disturbance, fatigue.” The two characteristics of the Superwoman framework that are most hazardous to the mental health of Black women are the obligation to help others at their own expense and holding in or suppressing their emotions, said Erving, citing a 2024 Health and Retirement Study she co-authored that included a national sample of over 1000 Black women age 51 and older.

The Conservative Organization Building a New Young Elite

Ethan Sun — Thu, 8 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

From pro-life summits to Palantir résumé drops, the David Network is discreetly building a pipeline for conservative college students. On the afternoon of March 27, members of the Penn College Republicans mailing list received a last-minute event announcement. “Dear Patriots,” the e-mail began. “In just a few hours…Theo Wold, a senior counselor at Palantir, will be speaking on Penn’s campus. His talk is titled ‘2006 and the Challenge to Save the West.’” With just under three hours’ notice, conservative students and prospective software engineers alike scrambled to attend the off-the-record, invite-only event. By 6 pm, the approved students streamed into an unremarkable classroom in Jon M. Huntsman Hall, buzzing with curiosity and excitement. In the following hour, Wold, who previously served as a director for the Trump-affiliated Claremont Institute, pitched a nativist argument about the decline of Western culture in the United States—due apparently to the birth of “woke” ideology circa 2006—while beseeching students to “save the West” by joining Palantir. The defense-tech giant, initially founded with a venture capital investment from the CIA—has become known for allegedly aiding in mass deportations, Israel’s war on Gaza, and the surveillance of the American public. Wold then laid out a vision for traditional gender roles, emphasized the need to hire Americans rather than immigrants, and, puzzlingly, asked the audience if they had read Mark Twain. The Penn talk was part of a larger speaking series that Wold undertook on behalf of the David Network, a conservative organization determined to effect change in the United States by drawing “from conservative ideas, grounded in the Biblical moral tradition, embodied through limited, constitutional government, and strengthened by individual liberty and free enterprise.” Since 2020, the David Network has grown from a collection of pro-life student activists to a burgeoning conservative career network. According to its website, the group boasts over 5,000 students, alumni, and professionals. It only targets students in the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, and, more recently, the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas–Austin. Driven by an existential commitment to grievance politics, the network places promising conservative students in positions of influence—one annual conference, private dinner, and conservative hackathon at a time. According to the attendees I spoke with, Wold’s presentation broached the subject of recruiting. As one recalled, Wold mentioned a student at another university who approached him after his speech. The student, who expressed an interest in both Palantir and the Roman Empire, allegedly had a job interview “within a week,” all because he “actually [talked] to Theo Wold after.” Like several of the students and alumni I interviewed, the attendee requested anonymity, citing fears of professional backlash. Later, Wold informed Penn students that they could send their résumés to the David Network for special consideration in the recruitment process. Of the two students I spoke with who submitted their résumés, both received a recruiter call after applying. In a written statement to The Nation, David Network founder and executive director Lucas Cremers claimed that the organization was not aware of Wold’s statements at the event. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.

Democrats Have a Bill Maher Problem

Luca GoldMansour — Thu, 8 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Establishment Democrats obsessing over Hasan Piker’s every move seem to have no issue talking to Maher, despite his decades of open bigotry. This year’s midterm elections have been dominated by debates about whether or not Democrats should associate with popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. The streamer, who is an ardent supporter of Palestinian freedom and dignity, has increasingly lent his platform to progressive challengers running in Democratic primaries. In March, now-Democratic nominee for the Senate in Michigan Abdul el Sayed chose to campaign with Piker, prompting a disingenuous moral panic that persists to this day. The panic is ostensibly related to a list of Piker’s past comments that his detractors claim were misogynistic, antisemitic, and anti-American. The veracity of the accusations against Piker is questionable, to put it charitably. But while pundits and politicians can’t stop talking about every syllable Piker utters, there’s a truly unrepentant bigot whom establishment Democrats seem to have no problem hanging around with: talk show host, podcaster, and self-described comedian Bill Maher. Maher’s hatefulness is a matter of extensive public record. For instance, he has a long history of transphobia—part of his persona as a soldier against the supposed hegemony of wokeness. Maher once called trans women who use the women’s bathroom “weirdos peeing” the same week that then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded Obama-era protections for trans students to use the school bathrooms of their choice. He also agreed with Real Time guest Milo Yiannopoulos that “women and girls should be protected from having men who are confused about their sexual identities from their bathrooms,” a perverse insinuation that trans people are more likely to engage in sexual violence, when in fact they are more likely to be the victims of it. And he found himself siding with Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022, claiming that more young people were openly identifying as trans because “it’s trendy.” Maher is an equally ardent Islamophobe. In 2014, Maher claimed on his show that Islam “is the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will **** kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” (That comment famously drew a rebuke from none other than Ben Affleck.) Just this May, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned Maher for comments he made on his HBO show Real Time that they said “downplayed growing anti-Muslim hate.” Maher, while discussing the supposed rise in antisemitism in America, claimed that the rise in Islamophobia was less dangerous. Maher conceded that MAGA Republican congressman and virulent racist Randy Fine should be condemned for saying, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” But he followed that by saying it’s “not the same as ‘they need to be nuked and let’s exterminate them.’” During a congressional hearing last year, Representative Fine did in fact call for the “destruction” of all “mainstream Muslims.” And earlier in the year, he took to Fox News to suggest that the US should nuke Gaza, invoking the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II. This all comes in the context of an actual—not rhetorical—Israeli campaign of annihilation in Gaza, a majority-Muslim territory, where the equivalent of two atomic bombs was dropped by Israel in just the first month of the now-three-year-old genocide. Last but certainly not least, Maher is a passionate denier of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. His latest expression of this fanaticism came last month on Real Time, in the wake of the popular outcry against Ed Sheeran’s decision to drop Macklemore from his tour for his on-stage support for Palestinian liberation. Maher, the purported free-speech warrior, didn’t take issue with a consortium of stadium-owning pro-Israel billionaires using their disproportionate clout to muzzle dissent against an ongoing genocide. No, the 70-year old comedian worth an estimated $140 million decided the “kids” have it wrong—as do the “morally confused” Democratic politicians and “clueless celebrities” who share their views. “Nowhere has this moral confusion become more obvious than in a place called Gaza,” Maher said. “A little strip of land that was not part of the original Israel, but they won in a war launched against them, but then gave back, gave back as a peace gesture–did they tell you that part on TikTok, kids?” (Maher should know that it’s the United Nations and International Court of Justice, not TikTok, that say the Gaza Strip has been illegally occupied by Israel, without interruption, since 1967.)

How Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act Would Rein In the Private-Equity Vampire

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Thu, 8 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Let’s build an economy where patients, renters, and even youth hockey teams are given priority over investor profits. With AI leaders publicly weighing the odds that their technology triggers human extinction, less-apocalyptic industries rife with bad actors—the big banks, health insurers—seem almost tame in comparison. But until the machine uprising, at least, ours is a world profoundly shaped by those more familiar corporate malfeasants. And though they’ve been displaced in the headlines by the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, they’re still making American life more expensive, inequitable, and dangerous. And increasingly, if you go up the chain far enough, you will find the ultimate culprit: private equity. Across sectors ranging from veterinary medicine to mobile home parks, ownership by these investment firms has been linked to deteriorating working conditions, degraded customer experiences, and devastatingly poor service outcomes—all to line investors’ pockets. Today, over 33,000 businesses employing more than 13 million US workers are PE-owned. Unlike a traditional entrepreneur, who launches or buys a business to generate wealth but is also personally invested in its long-term viability, private equity often acquires companies to get in, get out, and extract as much profit as possible along the way. If that means shedding staff, stunting wages, raising prices, offering a cheaper-to-produce (i.e., worse) product, and triggering a death spiral for the organization—so be it. According to Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, “The only incentive is to make money for the private equity firm. Sometimes that can mean strengthening the portfolio company, because you want to take it public…. Sometimes that means weakening your own portfolio company. And it does not matter which of those strategies is morally correct.” This story has played out on the national stage with household-name brands like Toys “R” Us and Red Lobster. To minimize their own risk, firms acquire businesses with the help of massive loans that the target companies are responsible for repaying. Blame for Red Lobster’s 2024 bankruptcy was cast at the feet of its generous all-you-can-eat shrimp deal—Icarian hubris, crustacean style—but less often mentioned was the $375 million in debt its former PE owner, Golden Gate Capital, foisted upon the chain. Golden Gate also sold the land beneath the restaurants, with the firm pocketing $1.5 billion to cover its purchase of the company while Red Lobster was forced to pay rent for property it previously owned. In filing for Chapter 11, Red Lobster and Toys “R” Us were far from alone. PE-owned companies are 10 times more likely to declare bankruptcy than other businesses. It’s bad enough when customers lose access to beloved toy stores and an unlimited bounty of shrimp linguini alfredo, and far worse when workers lose their jobs. But over the decades, private equity has increasingly staked its claims in sectors providing critical public goods, and the results can be disastrous. When healthcare providers go under—and 44 percent of 2025’s largest healthcare bankruptcies were linked to PE—communities lose their hospitals. In PE-owned nursing homes, residents are at greater risk of winding up in the ER, while in PE-owned ERs, patients are at greater risk of death. Meanwhile, in housing, investment firms—who’ve been found to raise rents more steeply than other landlords—are projected to own 40 percent of single-family rentals nationwide by the end of the decade. Tenants across PE-owned apartments often report major maintenance issues, but the good news is that they don’t have to deal with those poor conditions for long, because corporate landlords are more likely to file eviction papers. And even when the stakes are lowest, private equity manages to plumb depressing new depths. PE giants are now devouring the $40 billion youth sports industry, where inflated prices mean fewer youngsters get the chance to play. In Michigan, one PE-backed rink told a local kids’ league that parents were banned from livestreaming hockey games. If relatives wanted to tune in from afar, they’d have to shell out for a $215.99 streaming subscription.

This Is Not an Anniversary

Mohammed R. Mhawish — Wed, 7 Oct 2026 14:42:21 GMT

Does remembering the date of October 7 make it easier to name? The world remembers Gaza again this week. Had Palestinians wanted remembrance after each date we experienced atrocity, a full, long year wouldn’t have enough days. We have been faithful victims, though, haven’t we? Since 2023, the world has applauded the resilience of our bare chests standing up to the tanks grinding us dead. Our blood must’ve shed beautifully. The women and children mourning everything and everyone they had ever known have cried in perfect tears for protests and, indeed, outraged slogans. Our homes, no longer recognizable, could have been spared if they had not borne witness to lifetimes of destruction. And if only our screams hadn’t been too loud. Three years in, forgive us for not making as many stories about our sons and daughters as the world can give standing ovations. I wish my late journalist colleagues were a bit more courageous to commit a crime and call it out. They would have been worthy of support. Probably they would’ve been deserving of protection. My life has become a tale of a thousand anniversaries. So I dare ask: Does remembering the date of a tragedy make it easier to name? To live with? How is recalling our trauma—and dedicating an anniversary for it—going to help erase it? How is the mere reflection on something still happening and painful beyond any human’s language will bring it to an end? The notion of marking an anniversary that kicked off a rather inhumane and unimaginable memory in a long history of erasure points to the fact that the world has already moved on. It supposes that all we ever asked for was empathy. And that, frankly, is why we’re more at peace with a senseless world than we are with our tragedies. If the moral urge behind holding an anniversary is to hold space for the grief that the past few years have inflicted, by no means should this say that we’re past the grieving. If it was to end this grief, then we’re not even in any way close to doing so. And although I’ve written constantly and with abundant detail about all the personal and collective agony I have endured over the last three years, I still haven’t been able to put into words the true feeling of realizing that with each anniversary of death we become one year closer to life. But here is what I am able to say. A day on which entire bloodlines were erased from the civil registry should not be an anniversary.

The Unseen Toll: Depression, Anxiety Plague Black Women a Year After Being Fired by DOGE

Lottie Joiner — Wed, 7 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Trump’s federal workforce cuts dismantled a job pipeline for Washington, DC’s Black community and gutted the well-being of the women who hold up that community. Darnese Foster remembers the day she learned she was fired from her federal government job. “I was off that Friday, which was Valentine’s Day. Then that Monday was the holiday,” said Foster. “I went to log in that Tuesday, I couldn’t get in.” Foster thought her password had expired and needed to be reset. She called the help desk to submit her request. Then someone from the IT department called her back. “He said, ‘You didn’t get a phone call from your supervisor?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, unfortunately, your name was on the list of names that was denied access.’ I didn’t know what that meant. I called my supervisor. He said, ‘Well, let me call you back. Let me talk to (the IT) supervisor to see what’s going on.’” Later that day, they both called back to tell her that she was on a list of employees on probation that were being terminated during the mass firing. Foster’s initial reaction was numbness, then panic and dread. She had a child in private school and rent and a car note to pay. “I would go in a corner and cry,” Foster recalled. Now, more than a year after being fired from her position as a grant management specialist in the Department of Health and Human Services, Foster is struggling, not just financially, but to cope: struggling to stay strong, struggling to keep the faith. The constant strain, she says, has taken a toll on her mental health. “I thought I would have a job a year later,” Foster, 47, said. “The worry of where I’m going to get the money to do what I need to do and how long will I be out of work, it’s mentally draining.” When Trump eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion programs by an executive order in January 2025 and empowered Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to gut the federal workforce that February and March, thousands of Black women lost their jobs. But the job cuts did more than just dismantle a longtime pipeline that helped lift DC’s majority-Black community into the middle class; it also gutted the well-being of the Black women who hold up that community. A recent study by University of Maryland labor economist Brandon Enriquez found that DOGE cuts “disproportionately affected” the federal employment of Black women compared with other demographic groups. The study estimated that while DOGE “did not have statistically significant effects for any other race, gender, education, or age group,” it reduced Black women’s federal employment by 25 percent. “At its lowest point in April 2025, employment was almost 50% reduced for Black women, with little effect for other groups,” Enriquez noted, although there was a partial rebound in subsequent months. Given the overrepresentation of Black workers in the federal government, Enriquez concluded that the layoffs increased racial inequality. In many of the agencies that were targeted for massive staff reductions, women and people of color made up the majority of the workforce, according to a 2025 report by Sarah Javaid for the National Women’s Law Center. Javaid wrote that “while women made up 46% of the total federal workforce in September 2024, they represented the majority of the workforce” in the departments of Veterans Affairs, Education, Health and Human Services, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development. People of color—including Darnese Foster—made up 46 percent of probationary workers, according to the report, including 65 percent of those at the Department of the Treasury, 55 percent at Housing and Urban Development and at Homeland Security, and 53 percent at Health and Human Services. Like some of her federal colleagues, Foster’s probation was for two years. After years of contracting, first with companies in the private sector, then with the State Department, Foster had finally landed a permanent position at Health and Human Services. A single mother of two, she’d been in her job for a year and seven months when she got the shocking news that she had been laid off. “It was always my goal to try to get into the government,” said Foster. “My parents always said: ‘Get with the government, it’s stable. You can grow. You can move up.’” Foster had been excited about her new job and working with her new co-workers. And she was proud that despite struggling with a learning disability and adult ADHD, she’d recently gotten a raise in her pay and job grade. Her work felt important to her, too. As a grant management specialist, her responsibilities included working with organizations such as hospitals or construction companies seeking government funding. If a hospital wanted new X-ray machines or a therapy facility wanted equipment, she helped them navigate the application process. “I had finally gotten my dream job. It was devastating to have it snatched from me,” said Foster. “I had things in my life that I was putting in order, and goals that I wanted to do. This is where I was going to retire from.” At the time of her firing, Foster’s oldest daughter was a senior in college and her youngest daughter, who was 9, was in private school and an avid dancer who took part in competitions. Since the firings, her daughter has continued to dance, but Foster can’t afford the cost of competitions. “I try not to take too much from her because she’s 10,” says Foster. “I did keep her in dance, so she doesn’t lose all that she’s learned, so she won’t feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t do anything.’” Foster says she has not been coping well. She received unemployment benefits for only six months. She lost the items in her storage unit because she couldn’t afford the fees, and she has struggled to pay for her daughter’s private school tuition. She feels like she’s in a “sunken place.” FIRED: The DOGE Layoffs Hit Black Woman Hard. A Year Later, Many Are Still Reeling “I Had to Get My Mind Right”: The Challenges to Loving Relationships After Being Laid Off by DOGE Lottie Joiner Recovering From a “Gut Punch”: Black Women Fired by Trump and Musk Work to Overcome Shame and Self-Blame Lottie Joiner “I’ll drop my youngest off at school and just sit in the car and cry,” Foster said. “What’s next? Where am I going to get the money to keep a roof over our heads?” For a 2022 study focused on Black women’s gender and race-related stress, epidemiologists Meghan Tipre and Tiffany L. Carson conducted focus groups and found that the top stressors identified by Black women were single parenting, Black children’s safety and finances. “Black women report higher levels of psychological stress than White women and carry a disproportionate burden of chronic conditions associated with psychological stress,” the authors wrote in the journal Women’s Health Reports. Dr. Raquel Martin, a licensed clinical psychologist who focuses on Black mental health, says abrupt termination can be both a financial stressor and a traumatic stressor, because it’s not just about the loss of income. “It’s the sudden loss of predictability and control, identity, community, and even future planning,” Martin says. “There’s a significant association between unemployment and increased depression, anxiety, and psychological distress, as well as just life satisfaction overall.” Job loss is more than just about money, Martin points out. “When you think about job loss, you often think about money, but psychologically, abrupt termination can create a profound sense of instability, (and) human beings need and thrive off of predictability,” Martin says. “When employment disappears suddenly, people aren’t just grieving that aspect of a paycheck, they’re grieving a future of a world that they could count on.” And when demands exceed your resources, Martin adds, the stress can be almost unbearable. “When an experience overwhelms your ability to cope, and it leaves this lasting impact on your sense of self, safety, and sense of the world around you, that’s trauma,” Martin said. “Trauma is not only what happens to you, it’s also what happens inside of you, when you’re repeatedly forced to adapt to conditions that threaten your safety or your dignity or your humanity or your ability to thrive.” The way people respond to trauma varies greatly from irritability to depression to becoming sedentary or changing eating habits. Foster said after her job loss, she sometimes slept all day or sat at her desk and scrolled. She also admitted being “a lot more snappy,” toward family and friends. Martin says some people who lose their jobs experience “low pressure tolerance,” which she describes as being really irritable so that every little thing makes you want to “flip a table.” Black women like Foster who are breadwinners and heads of household may be especially stressed since they are overwhelmed with guilt and shame for not being able to provide at their previous levels. Even though the federal firings aren’t something that they brought on themselves, the experience left some, like Foster, shattered. “Mental health is affected by policy decisions, economic instability, and access to health care and employment protection. The solution can’t be only telling Black women to cope better with the trash circumstances that they didn’t create in the first place,” Martin explained. “We have to ask, what does it mean when the people who are often expected to care for everyone suddenly need to care for themselves?” she said. “What got in the way of them being able to do that in the first place? How can we come together as a community?” When trying to comfort people who have been fired or experienced traumatic events, Martin suggests avoiding statements like “everything happens for a reason” or “stay positive.” Instead, she suggests, ask how you can be helpful: “How are you doing today and what would be helpful for you right now?” or “You don’t have to carry this alone. What are some tangible things I can do?” But it’s also important, Martin says, that people experiencing this kind of stress let others help. She encourages staying connected to community and leaning into mutual aid. If neighbors want to bring dinner or provide a gift certificate, or if relatives want to take the kids to a park, let them. “I know how we feel about the system failing us, but when it comes down to Black people, the system has failed us for such a significant amount of time we have to remember that the goal is for us not to fail each other and still keep it going,” Martin said. Foster says she’s applied unsuccessfully for more than 100 jobs since her firing last year. In the interim, she braids hair and has worked as a consultant on political campaigns to make ends meet. She meets regularly with a mental health practitioner and tries to stay upbeat through prayer and affirmations. Nevertheless, Foster feels like she is failing—failing as a mother, failing as a provider, failing at parenting. “I feel like I’m almost 50 and I’m way behind. I don’t have a life insurance policy to leave my kids. No savings,” Foster says. “It weighs heavy for me as a mother.” It’s not only the stress of not having the money to do what she needs to do as a parent, but the stress of having to lean on her 23-year-old daughter and mother to help pay the bills. As she continues to look for full-time employment, she says she is drained by the rejections. Right now, Foster says, she’s holding it together, taking it one day at a time. “I do believe in God, but when you’ve been down in life and have had disappointments, it’s kind of hard to keep your faith,” said Foster. “You try to stay strong, but you wonder, when is there going to be light at the end of the tunnel? How long do I have to stay like this?”

Red Vienna Is Still Alive

Kate Wagner — Wed, 7 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The Austrian capital chose not to privatize the commons, and it shows. As a city dweller, I often find myself sandwiched between pro-social and anti-social situations. Most urban environments drift closer to one of those two poles than the other. Chicago may have beautiful parks, but it comes at the cost of anti-homeless policies like encampment clearance or hostile architecture that makes benches impossible to sit on. And that’s nothing compared to the omnipresent din of police helicopters and sirens I suffered in Baltimore. While New York City expands access to public toilets and the arts, Waymo descends upon Denver. Before visiting Vienna this past summer, I knew about its reputation as one of Europe’s most aggressively pro-social cities, boasting ample green space and excellent public transit. But I hadn’t realized how easy being there would feel, and how the city’s social-democratic attitudes toward urban planning would be reflected in liberal attitudes the people who live there have toward one another. Many European cities are entering a fraught era of austerity, overtourism, widening income inequality, and social pressures like immigration (from both wealthy Westerners and the world’s refugees). These burdens—in addition to facilitating the slow but steady rise of nationalist and right-wing political groups and parties—are often evident in the urban built environment and the ways people interact with it. More From Kate Wagner When I was in Berlin earlier this year, Berliners were still reeling from an act of domestic terrorism in which a van plowed into a crowd at the city’s annual Pride parade. The German Historical Museum and the Bauhaus Archive were both closed for long-delayed renovations due to lack of municipal funds. Alternative für Deutschland posters crowded utility poles. The police were omnipresent, and public activism tepid following the moratorium on free speech regarding the genocide in Palestine. Meanwhile Ljubljana, Slovenia, a city I lived in on and off during the post-lockdown years, has slowly grown unrecognizable. Already very small (its ring road is about five miles in circumference), it has been pushed to the brink by overtourism as more cruises dock there and more direct flights serve it despite its severe lack of accommodation for visitors. Slovenia carried out one of post-socialist Europe’s most radical housing privatizations after the fall of Yugoslavia. Ljubljana, which has no rent control or stabilization, has long been susceptible to rent hikes and AirBnBification. Since the country joined the EU in 2004, foreign investment has poured in to claim unoccupied luxury apartment buildings in the capital as illiquid assets. Now the cost of living has skyrocketed, and everyday life has become unpleasant because of severe overcrowding and boorish tourists. Cities live and die based on how well they can avoid anti-social policies that privatize the commons and sell it out from under the people who live there. This doesn’t mean more policing, but rather policy decisions that keep housing affordable, free expression alive, tourism in check, and culture a core part of everyday life in a big metropolis. Vienna stands out from other European cities first and foremost in its relationship to housing. Its “Red Vienna” period of social-democratic governance (1918–34) ushered in remarkable progressive reforms and design innovations before the rise of the Third Reich. Artists, architects, activists, politicians, and intellectuals set themselves to the task of imagining new ways to live with one another. Feminists like Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, who would later go on to design the famous Frankfurt Kitchen, considered the impact design had on women’s labor in the home. (The prototype for Schütte-Lihotzky’s fitted kitchen—a surprisingly groovy organic form integrating sinks and shelving—can be viewed in the Wien Museum Karlsplatz.) Architects like Karl Ehn and Josef Frank built sprawling palaces for the proletariat in the newest—that is, modernist—architectural styles, buildings in which communal living was baked in. Kindergartens, bathhouses, laundries, and kitchens were all collectivized, which saved on per-unit cost. During my visit, I was surprised to see the degree to which these famous buildings—like Ehn’s Karl-Marx-Hof, a kilometer-long public-housing complex—remain working-class strongholds, occupied by immigrants, laborers, and young families. From the postwar period onward, the city went on to produce many proudly self-identified if architecturally demure social housing projects. While many cities have reservations about public housing, Vienna does not—it is a point of civic pride. Some 50 to 60 percent of Vienna’s population lives in social housing. Most of its non-social housing is also under some form of price regulation. Cheap rent keeps the city affordable and dynamic. It keeps resentment against people who are different from you at bay when they are your neighbors in your city-run apartment complex. While right-wing sentiment in Austria is on the rise as a whole, Vienna remains true to its social-democratic roots. Less money spent on rent means more trips to the theater, the opera, or out to eat. It enables people to work fewer hours and spend more time with their children, for whom there is a robust municipal infrastructure of programs, playgrounds, and parks. Free, clean, and accessible public bathrooms are abundant, and a shared sense of public trust—rather than invasive surveillance—keeps them in good shape. Of all the large cities I’ve been to in Europe, Vienna is the one with the fewest visible police officers. (Which is not to say that when political protests pop off, they don’t show up in full force.) Even the city’s transit system relies on common trust: You buy a ticket at the kiosk but do not need to validate when going through a turnstile. Many European cities unleash aggressive transit police on suspected fare evaders, but Viennese transit employees calmly check tickets at the entrance to the stations.

Yale’s Protest Tradition Is Back

Zachary Clifton — Wed, 7 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

For the first time in more than 50 years, Yale students gathered around an iconic sculpture to protest their university and their government. By 1969, the Vietnam War had killed tens of thousands of young American men. President Richard Nixon had begun a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. Across the United States, millions of protesters, many of them students, joined the largest anti-war marches in American history. In New Haven, Connecticut, Yale students were among the loudest, most impassioned demonstrators. That spring, Claes Oldenburg, who had graduated from Yale nearly two decades earlier, installed a sculpture on Beinecke Plaza, the center of campus. It was called Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks: a giant tube of lipstick rising from the treads of a tank. Students for a Democratic Society used it as a podium for their speakers during anti-war rallies, positioning it outside Woodbridge Hall, where university presidents historically had their office and where trustees met. The art historian Mya Dosch has called the tube “phallic and bullet-like,” a beauty product that evokes the danger and threat of a weapon. The sculpture, and the protests that it featured in, were about young people versus large institutions: the university and the federal government. Last Friday, the Lipstick appeared on Beinecke Plaza for the first time in more than 50 years. Yale College students had built a cardboard version, about half the size of the original, and placed it near where its predecessor once stood. (Oldenburg’s sculpture was moved to the Yale University Art Gallery’s sculpture garden.) Hundreds marched to Beinecke Plaza to protest, two generations later, their university and their nation’s government. Specifically, they gathered for the second protest of Democratize Yale, a coalition of students, staff, faculty, and alumni that formed following the university’s settlement negotiations with the federal government about Yale’s alleged racial discrimination in their admissions process. The coalition’s demands include shared governance; free speech and assembly; academic freedom; and that the university exit negotiations with the Department of Justice, which they see as a strategy to appease Trump. Senator Richard Blumenthal, Representative Rosa DeLauro, and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker stood in the crowd, signaling solidarity with the demonstrators’ civil disobedience against the university. Blumenthal could be seen chanting with the students who now study at his alma mater. Members of the Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors were also there, speaking and joining rallying cries. The crowd gathered around the twelve-foot cardboard version of Oldenburg’s sculpture for an unregistered protest, deliberately violating Yale’s campus free-expression policies. The sculpture also violated a rule barring outdoor artwork without administrative approval. Sam Callaway and Stuart Wrede, two architects who built the original with Oldenburg, sent the organizers a statement calling the ban censorious. “What is Yale afraid of?” they asked. Organizers passed chalk through the crowd and asked everyone to write down what they would do with the university if they ran it. Soon the granite was covered in messages and peace signs. Someone had written “Make love not war,” a slogan reminiscent of the original Lipstick’s era. Someone else had written “**** fascism.” A junior speaking on behalf of Students Unite Now, a group that organizes Yale students on labor and economic justice issues, led the crowd in a chant at an hour when Yale’s policies do not permit chanting on Beinecke Plaza: “Pre-compliance is a scam. Don’t concede to Trump’s demands.” A week earlier, the trustees of the Yale Corporation were on campus for their first meeting of the academic year. They sat in the back seats of black town cars driving down College Street, then up Prospect Street, toward Science Hill, where, according to Yale junior John Robert Walker, they convene “in secret…far from central campus.” The trustees have been criticized for their corporate affiliations, their clandestine structure, and their lack of accountability to students, faculty, and alumni. But, on the morning of September 26, students had arrived first. Hours ahead of the trustees, they dropped banners from prominent places around campus, like the Humanities Quadrangle and Phelps Hall, home of the Classics Department. One sign hung just below the university’s crest on the face of Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall. With the insignia’s Latin motto, the building now read: LUX ET VERITAS FIGHT BACK DON’T SETTLE Other banners simply read “Shared governance now” and “Trustees, you can’t hide.” All of them violated Yale policy, which forbids hanging banners on building facades and requires anyone who puts up a poster to print their name and the date on it. But students did not start out by breaking the rules. For years, they tried to express discontent through the university’s own channels.

Are Europe and Russia Slow-Walking to World War III?

Stephen Crowley — Wed, 7 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Dangerous rhetoric has been escalating on both sides for some time now. Putin’s recent declaration of Russia’s potential to “use all the weapons at our disposal” is the most explicit talk of nuclear war by a superpower since the Reagan administration invoked the prospect of “winnable nuclear war” over 40 years ago. How did we get to this point? Leaving aside the origin of the war with Ukraine, which Putin falsely continues to claim was forced upon Russia, dangerous rhetoric has been escalating on both sides for some time now. To be sure, for Ukraine the threat from Russia is very real. But elsewhere the hyped-up language over the Russian threat is astonishing: “We are all eastern flank countries these days,” NATO’s top commander argues, while a British think tanker even claims, “The UK is a front-line state.” European leaders have focused on two threats: the short-term potential for “hybrid” attacks from Russia, and the longer-term argument that “Russia’s well-oiled war machine” (in the words of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte) justifies a massive military buildup. Regarding “hybrid war,” intelligence officials warn of a potential attack on NATO that could come “within months.” The expressed fear is that Russia will somehow “test” the world’s most powerful military alliance, as if a simple poke from the Russian bear would “expose NATO as impotent.” Russian leaders have long been obsessed about NATO. The notion that the Kremlin would now provoke a direct confrontation to find out whether NATO would invoke Article 5—“an attack on one is an attack on all”—beggars the imagination. Yet such imaginings are now running freely, in war games, “war fiction,” and realistic television portrayals. The threatening oratory has become so heightened that even leaders in the Baltic states—countries truly on the front lines—are now calling on Western leaders to tamp down their talk of an invasion. Those spinning the scenario whereby the Russian-speaking people of Narva, Estonia, are waiting to be happily liberated by Putin have rarely bothered to speak to the people who actually live there. To be sure, warnings about the potential for arson or sabotage should be taken seriously. The speculation has been that Russia might attempt such actions to lessen European support for Ukraine. Yet history shows all too well that attacks on one’s soil tend to have the opposite effect and drive support for retaliatory action. Indeed, the more realistic threat from Russia’s “hybrid war” is the ongoing attempt to use social media and other means as part of an “overall attempt to spread fear and uncertainty,” or in the more heightened language of British Prime Minister Burnham at the UN, through Russia’s “poisonous tide” of “disinformation.” Yet Russian disinformation can only exploit existing fissures in European society. European leaders face the “unenviable task of persuading unprepared voters to cut welfare spending to fund defense.” Convincing voters to cut welfare spending—to pay more for guns and less for bread and butter—becomes more daunting when one realizes that Russia is hardly operating from a position of strength. Rather, we are told, “Putin is desperate,” or, as Mujtaba Rahman writes in The Guardian, “Russia is becoming more dangerous because it is becoming weaker.” Before the war, Russia’s economy was suffering from a decade or more of declining living standards. Contrary to expectations, for a few years Russia’s economy boomed under “military Keynesianism.” Now, however, knowledgeable economists argue that “the wheels are coming off” the Russian economy. The war-induced labor scarcity fuels inflation, leading to crushing interest rates, which in turn pushes civilian industry into the ground. Before long, Russia will reach a hard stop, finding itself unable to continue to fund war spending, meet basic social obligations, and maintain fiscal stability.

Florida Isn’t Red. Democrats Just Stopped Showing Up.

Camille Rivera — Wed, 7 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

With more than 900,000 Puerto Rican voters, Florida can be won in 2026 and put in play for 2028. Give Angie Nixon the chance she deserves. It’s Groundhog Day in Florida, and this time a US Senate seat is on the line. While Democratic institutions and Washington pundits may count Florida out, Florida is in play. This week, Angie Nixon said Chuck Schumer and the Democratic leadership will be investing. This is good, and now it’s time to make sure we focus on Latino voters. Florida is not a red state. It is an under-invested one. And Angie Nixon has a path to victory—but it requires turning out Latino voters, especially Florida’s large Puerto Rican community. Florida has over 900,000 Puerto Rican voters; it’s time to bring them back and turn them out. In 2016 and ’24, we learned an important lesson: The key to winning is not just turning out the base but also cultivating voters years in advance. As a political strategist, I’ve worked on many campaigns across this nation, especially around the Latino vote. I could tell when the investment was there because we won when we invested in Latinos. Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico built the Southwest wall around Latino voters. And that wasn’t just turning out voters overnight; that was long-term investment. In Florida, I watched Democrats ignore the long game in 2020 and neglect Latino and Puerto Rican voters at their peril. The lack of investment was the nail in the coffin. In 2024, nothing changed. I begged national donors and congressional and US Senate committees not to make the same mistake. Now it’s 2026, and the election is a month away. Florida has more than 900,000 eligible Puerto Rican voters who could vote Democrat. But we haven’t seen a single real ad aimed at them or a comprehensive Latino engagement plan that gives Angie Nixon what she needs to get over the edge. Nixon has built her campaign on a simple message: Change can’t wait. And it’s time Democrats in DC and nationwide start acting like they believe that message, too. The political environment is there. The latest New York Times/Siena poll has Democrats leading 64 to 29 among Hispanic likely voters, with the cost of living as their top worry. Another recent poll shows Trump’s disapproval rating among Hispanics is 77 percent. One other recent NBC poll shows Democrats have a 24-point lead on whom Latino voters want to see in control of Congress.That marks a significant shift from 2024, when Trump won roughly half of Latino voters; since then, his approval among them has fallen sharply. And we’re already seeing that shift play out on the ground. In Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, the Trump flags are gone, and former supporters are angry about the economy and immigration. If Democrats are leaning into Texas and Mississippi, there is no excuse to skip Florida.

This Lawsuit Could Make Big Oil Pay for the Harm It’s Caused

Elie Mystal — Tue, 6 Oct 2026 15:20:27 GMT

The question is whether the Supreme Court will let it. The Supreme Court began its new term on Monday by hearing oral arguments in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. The case involves a potentially landmark environmental lawsuit filed by the city of Boulder, Colorado, against two major fossil fuel industry polluters. The suit is modeled after old lawsuits against the tobacco industry: Boulder alleges that Suncor and ExxonMobil used deceptive marketing practices to sell products that have caused climate change and harmed the city, and it is now seeking damages for those harms. Monday’s hearing wasn’t actually about those harms but whether the lawsuit should survive a motion to dismiss. If it does, it could allow local governments and maybe even individual citizens to sue energy companies for the effects of climate change. People might be able to sue for everything from adverse health outcomes to lost property. It could fundamentally change the way oil and gas companies operate across the country and, most likely, across the entire world. But the lawsuit is not going to be successful. Unlike the tobacco industry—or the asbestos industry or opioid manufacturers or any other industry at the center of groundbreaking mass tort litigation—this is Big Oil we’re talking about, an industry with a market valuation upwards of $4 trillion. It’s like Spider-Man going from fighting the guys who stuck up a 7-11 to fighting an intergalactic alien invasion in one movie. There is no way this court is going to let local tort litigation regulate the global production and consumption of energy and its effects on the 8.2 billion people living on this planet. The challenge is that while many of the justices don’t want Boulder to win as a practical matter, most of them are not quite sure when and how Boulder should lose as a legal matter. Monday’s Supreme Court arguments were messy because there are many competing ideas about whether the Supreme Court should kill the case now, kill it later, or wait and hope it dies on its own. The case arrived in front of the Supreme Court on appeal from the Colorado State Supreme Court, which ruled that the lawsuit could survive a motion to dismiss by the fossil fuel companies and head to trial in Colorado. That presents the first problem for the Supreme Court, because it’s unclear if the court should have jurisdiction to hear this appeal at all, or if it should wait for the Colorado courts to do their work and then review their decision. Justice Clarence Thomas questioned the lawyer for the energy companies, Kannon Shanmugam, and Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris (the Trump administration is on the side of the fossil fuel industry, which should surprise no one) about this very point. Two of the liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, suggested that the Supreme Court should wait until the Colorado proceedings have finished, though Kagan gave pretty strong indications that Boulder should lose in state court. The energy companies, of course, do not want to be dragged through state court. Shanmugam argued that if the Supreme Court allows the Boulder litigation to go forward, the very next day his energy clients will be sued by a veritable horde of municipalities and states. The cost of litigation is not normally something the Supreme Court should consider, but Shanmugam argued that his clients needed an answer to whether these suits should be allowed now, not years from now when the companies have been sued by every local district attorney looking for a good headline. Instead, Shanmugam argued that Boulder’s lawsuit should be preempted by federal law: Preemption is the general principle that state law cannot be applied to an area where federal law has already spoken. The energy companies say that the Clean Air Act and the “structure of the Constitution” prevents states from regulating air pollution. They argue that since air pollution somewhat obviously and easily crosses state lines, and since climate change literally affects everybody, only federal law applies to climate change. It’d be a cool argument… if it were supported by a shred of textual evidence. But there’s nothing in the Constitution that makes air pollution an exception to state law (not that the authors of the Constitution had a good understanding of air pollution, which is yet another reason that going back to the original text and intent of the framers is facially stupid, but I digress). The Clean Air Act seems more directly on point to the issue of air pollution, but Boulder’s lawsuit has a very neat way around that law. Boulder is not suing the energy companies for pollution (which is clearly regulated by the Clean Air Act); it’s suing them for marketing (which is clearly not). It is the marketing of fossil fuels that has abetted climate change and caused damage to Boulder, the city argues, not the production of the fuels themselves. Kevin Russell, arguing on behalf of Boulder, illustrated this point brilliantly at oral arguments. He said that the companies “can continue to produce as much fossil fuels as they like and contribute to as much air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions as the market will bear, when consumers are properly informed about the consequences of that decision.” I clapped when Russell said this. I love this argument. But, if we can just speak as adults here, it’s also ****. Boulder is absolutely trying to backdoor-regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and the legal sleight of hand here is just that: a magic trick that can’t really obscure what’s going on. Both Chief Justice Roberts and Kagan were unimpressed with the argument in real time. Kagan immediately followed up Russell’s marketing argument by asking what, if any, limits there would still be on the states to regulate the national and global environment should Boulder prevail. But making the straight-up preemption argument puts the conservative justices, especially Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a bind. Conservatives generally don’t like federal preemption arguments. That’s because a broad and robust view of federal law that trumps state action can usually be used to put a stop to whatever latest torture Texas or Florida comes up with. In this case, the only way for the Republican justices to make the energy companies win, now, in the way they want to win, is to take an expansive view of federal preemption and read it into the Constitution or the Clean Air Act where it does not explicitly exist. Some of the GOP justices are cool with that. Alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh was clear that he thought states have no right to regulate “air and water.” He said there is a “wall of precedents” supporting the idea that only the federal government can act on this issue. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was less strident than Kavanaugh, but she seemed to largely agree with him. The last interesting wrinkle in the case comes from the fact that the Supreme Court was down a man while debating it. Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from this case, most likely because his wife is thought to own stocks in some of the companies being sued. As a reminder, the state supreme court said that the lawsuit could go forward, so if the Supreme Court justices split, 4–4, the lower court ruling stands and the lawsuit survives. But I don’t think it will. Federal preemption may be a hard pill for some of the justices to swallow ideologically, but they will take their medicine to prevent Boulder from fighting climate change all by itself. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson really want the lawsuit to go back to state court (Jackson, to my ears, is the only justice who thinks the lawsuit has a chance of succeeding on the merits), but I think the others will find some way to say federal law doesn’t allow Boulder to do what it’s trying to do. I think Boulder loses at least 6–2, and possibly 8–0 if the liberal justices can join by narrowing the opinion and limiting the damage to environmental rights. I want Boulder to win precisely because I think Shanmugam is right. I think his Big Oil clients would be eaten alive by state lawsuit after state lawsuit. I think a win here for Boulder could wreck the fossil fuel industry and perhaps force Suncor and ExxonMobil into some kind of settlement or consent decree long before we actually get to the merits of any particular claim for damages. Which is why the Supreme Court won’t let that happen. It’d be chaos—glorious, righteous chaos. The Republicans on the Supreme Court pretend to not care about the practical effects of their decisions when they make rulings that practically allow children to be shot at school and women to die on gurneys waiting for the lawyers to determine whether they can get an abortion. But they’ll **** sure care about the practical effects of this case. What’s sad is that the court will care more about the practical effect of climate change lawsuits than the practical effects of climate change.

We Need More Pro-Trans Politicians. This Group Thinks It Knows How to Get Them.

Elsie Carson-Holt — Tue, 6 Oct 2026 09:30:00 GMT

Talking to Tyler Hack, who leads the nation’s only political action group dedicated solely to getting trans rights supporters elected. Tyler Hack spent the 2024 election watching Republicans villainize transgender Americans, and Democrats distance themselves from trans people, or worse, join in. “I was at fundraisers and meetings with members of Congress for the Democratic Party where I was the only trans person in the room,” said Hack. “Democrats threw trans people under the bus for the election loss not because of Republican millionaires or because of corporations ripping us off, but because of trans kids. We knew that we couldn’t wait for political power.” Hack founded the Christopher Street Project, the only operating political action group focused solely on trans rights. Hack said she created the Christopher Street Project to elect pro-trans candidates and hold politicians accountable. The organization focuses on training its candidates on how to use effective, committed pro-trans messaging. The primary winners Hack and her organization have supported and campaigned with include New York’s Brad Lander and Claire Valdez, Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan, and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed. Last month, Hack celebrated a particularly sweet victory after incumbent Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey trounced his challenger, Representative Seth Moulton, in the state’s Democratic primary election. It was Moulton who, less than 48 hours after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, infamously told The New York Times, “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Hack spent the early weeks of September stumping for Markey, who made Moulton’s comments a key theme of his campaign. She then kicked off Markey’s victory rally. “He wanted a promotion, and he got fired,” said Hack of Moulton. “Seth Moulton got booed at No Kings in 2025 while Markey showed up wearing a trans flag around his neck. Trans rights was the issue for this election.” But the Massachusetts Senate primary is only one race. With the midterms coming up, I talked to Hack about what the political landscape for trans rights looks like, why Republicans attack the trans community, and the playbook for getting pro-trans candidates into office. —Elsie Carson-Holt Elsie Carson-Holt: Can you introduce yourself and your organization? Tyler Hack: My name is Tyler Hack. I am the founder and executive director of the Christopher Street Project. There was a question after 2024 of whether trans people still belonged in the Democratic Party, whether we would go the way of the Labour Party in the UK, and we, as members of the Democratic Party, are doing the opposite. We said Democrats who don’t stand with us, especially in safe seats, don’t stand by our democratic values. ECH: What’s at stake in terms of trans healthcare and trans rights, looking at the upcoming midterm elections?

The Picture of Dennis Hastert

Chris Lehmann — Tue, 6 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The disgraced former congressman was a better representative of the GOP than the party would like to admit. The obituaries for former Republican House speaker Dennis Hastert, who died over the weekend, all led with the scandal that justly stained his name at the end of his career—charges of child sexual abuse dating from his tenure as a teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois, in the 1960s and ’70s. After his subsequent resignation, Hastert was convicted on charges of bank fraud stemming from efforts to conceal a series of hush-money payments to one of his former victims; in 2016, he was sentenced to a 15-month prison term, but was released on medical grounds several weeks before serving it out. Shortly after Hastert pleaded guilty to the fraud charges, then–Republican Speaker Paul Ryan had his official portrait removed from the Capitol, signaling the GOP’s determination to treat the disgraced party leader as a bad apple—an unfortunate behavioral outlier—best forgotten. But Hastert’s horrifying predatory past wasn’t his only baleful contribution to our political scene. As a rising GOP power broker, Hastert followed the scorched-earth model of politics practiced by his mentor, former majority leader Tom DeLay. DeLay became majority whip in 1994, and set about transforming the GOP conference into a machine running on ideological orthodoxy and corrupt infusions of cash. His signature innovation was an initiative called the “K Street Project”—a bid to transform the DC lobbying industry into a subsidiary of the Republican Party, demanding that favored firms heighten their PAC contributions to the GOP while stiffing the Democratic opposition. DeLay, who graduated to majority leader in 2003, became a casualty of his own corruptionist political vision; in 2005, a Travis County grand jury indicted him on charges of money laundering, and he resigned from office a year later. He was also a close confrere of superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, also later jailed on fraud and corruption charges, taking the K Street Project’s amoral precepts to their logical extreme. Hastert served as DeLay’s deputy whip, and he thrived by following DeLay’s cutthroat example. He assumed the speakership in 1999 in the rushed procedural aftermath of still another House speaker sexual scandal involving Robert Livingston, a protégé of Newt Gingrich. Once the Republicans secured new majorities in the 2002 midterms, Hastert made a point of looking out for his scandal-plagued mentor. By 2004, DeLay’s moneyed antics had become so blatant that they ran afoul of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (known today as the House Ethics Committee); it convened a separate subcommittee that endorsed a series of reprimands for the majority leader. Hastert moved with swift dispatch to fire the committee chair, as well as the two GOP members of the bipartisan panel, replacing them with hack loyalists. When three DeLay cronies were indicted in Texas, Hastert got the committee to approve a rule to permit DeLay to continue serving as majority leader after he was indicted. Hastert also followed DeLay’s example by using the power of his office to engage in corrupt self-dealing. While he served as speaker, he pulled together a series of real estate deals in his home state of Illinois that saw his net worth skyrocket into the millions; during one bitter fight over a long-stalled transportation bill, Hastert saw to it that an earmark created a new highway interchange—unwanted by both local residents and the Transportation Department—a mile away from his land parcels, causing them to escalate still further in speculative value. Hastert’s most enduring legislative legacy, however, is the notorious “Hastert rule”—the diktat that no legislation would proceed to a floor vote unless it already won the support of the House GOP conference. This might seem like the wonky, technocratic innovation of a former deputy whip, but in reality, it cemented the 21st-century GOP’s reputation for enforcing ideological orthodoxy at all costs—at the direct expense of the negotiations, compromises, and legislative conferencing that made up what House leaders had dubbed, in a show of optimism, “regular order.” As longtime congressional scholar Norm Ornstein writes, “no speaker has done more to relegate regular order to the sidelines than Hastert.” In combination with the DeLay mantra of using the legislative process to maximize the flow of baksheesh, Haster’s siege on regular order produced some of the ugliest spectacles seen on the contemporary House floor—most notoriously, the vote that Hastert kept open on the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription drug plan. A scheduled 15-minute canvassing swelled into three hours in the dead of night, as Hastert and his lieutenants bribed and bullied the GOP conference into submission. As Ornstein notes, this was to become the de facto business model for Congress: Under Hastert, amendments from Democrats and Republicans alike were squelched by a strikingly pliant Rules Committee; conferences were rarely held, and if they were, it was late at night and they were closed to input from all except loyal lieutenants; and provisions were sometimes added to conference reports that had never been in either House or Senate bills without notice to other lawmakers, among other indignities. Hastert was able to pull all this off largely because, after the scandal-plagued speakerships of Gingrich and Livingston, he presented as a normie heartland Republican, rumpled and affable, to cite the preferred term in most of the pre-scandal media coverage of his speakership. But his brand of corruptionism was no less damaging or toxic than DeLay’s—and in touting his eponymous rule, he fatally set the House GOP conference on the hypervigilant ideological course that’s seen it cannibalize many of his successor speakers in fits of performative purity. And the broad logic of the Hastert rule has fanned out into the party’s electoral strategizing—creating an ever-expanding contingent of bright red gerrymandered districts, custom-made to produce the kind of feckless ideologues that routinely deadlock plans to fund the government—and thereby set up follow-on speaker purges. Given the state of today’s Republican Party, Michael Johnson should strike a blow for historical accuracy and restore Hastert’s portrait to the Capitol.

How Mexico Proved Mainstream Economics Wrong

Jonathan Schlefer — Tue, 6 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

American analysts have long viewed inequality as a byproduct of technological causes. But Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena Party has boosted workers’ income without any technological tradeoffs. In the 1990s, economists suddenly looked around and noticed that US income inequality had taken a sharp turn for the worse during the previous decade. After some fretful speculation, they hit upon an explanation: Technological change was responsible, and since technology occupies the status of demigod in neoclassical economic theory, it stood to reason that nothing much could be done about it. Too bad somebody forgot to tell the leftist Morena party in Mexico this gloomy news: It has implemented a massive improvement in income distribution of just the kind that mainstream economists claim is impossible. To get at the reasoning behind America’s fatalist embrace of an economy producing less for the country’s workers, it’s necessary to revisit how the country’s economics profession processed the shock of the 1980s upturn in inequality. University of Michigan economist George Johnson published a useful article in 1997 surveying a decade of economists’ work on the subject. The supply of more-skilled workers (with some college or four-year degrees) had surged from 21 percent of the labor force in 1970 to 45 percent in 1993. This meant, other things being equal, that according to the iron logic of supply and demand employers ought to have been paying them less of a premium, thereby reducing income inequality. So why were they earning more of a premium, and worsening it? Studies had reached “virtually unanimous agreement,” Johnson wrote, “that during the 1980s relative demand increased for workers at the high end of the skill distribution and thus caused their relative wages to rise.” Economists looked around for culprits that might inflate demand for high-skilled workers fast enough to account for their heightened earnings. Reaching into their tool kit, they found two main suspects: increased trade and technological change. As manufacturers outsourced goods production to low-wage countries, well-paid factory workers were laid off and reduced to taking low-paid service jobs. You’d rather make autos for GM than sell Chinese imports at Walmart. At the other end of the salary scale, industries such as finance seeking higher-skilled workers had swelled. But there was a problem with this narrative: You can plausibly measure how such industrial shifts worsened income inequality, and they didn’t cut deep enough to explain the 1980s surge. So the main culprit had to be the steamroller of “skill-biased” technological change: production methods demanding more skilled workers. A factory increasing automation of the production line requires fewer workers and more engineers to fix everything that goes wrong. At least Johnson honestly faced the implications of his argument: “Public policies to ‘do something’ about earnings inequality”—his scare quotes—such as significantly raising the minimum wage, restricting imports, or retraining workers “either present potentially undesirable side effects or may work only very slowly or not at all.” One could always recommend more education, but the structural shifts spiking demand for high-skilled labor were so far-reaching that this wouldn’t happen at a great enough scale to counteract them. This argument presents countless problems. How did economists know that most of the demand shift was due to skill-biased technological change? They had no way to measure it directly. In reality, they were simply offering a loose hypothesis to try to account for what’s known as a statistical “residual”——the growth in inequality that wasn’t attributable to the baseline changes in the economy’s industrial structure. In other words, economists were straining to explain everything they couldn’t measure. One skeptical economist called the residual “the measure of our ignorance.” You could just as well label the main driver of inequality in the ’80s “politics” instead of “technology.” When economists talk about demand, they don’t mean the number of items customers want to buy. They mean a relationship specifying how many items consumers would buy at a range of prices. If retailers hold a sale, cutting the price, they know customers will buy more, and they hope the higher volume will help their bottom line. If they raise the price, they know customers will buy less, but they hope the larger markup will help their bottom line. That story makes rough sense as a way to understand shopping. But it doesn’t work to explain production. Over decades, production methods obviously change, and new technologies—AI, for example—may allow a sudden leap. But new technologies don’t come along every time managers snap their fingers. A given state of the art requires, within narrow limits, a given complement of higher-skilled workers, lower-skilled workers, and capital equipment. For example, when BMW opened a $1 billion auto plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, in 2019, it issued a press release bragging how it was employing the “latest industry 4.0 technologies” (whatever that means) and more automation than the company was using its older South Carolina plant. When it expanded the San Luis Potosi plant this year, it incorporated artificial intelligence to manage production, including its army of a thousand robots. Given that Mexican factory workers make only a little more per day than their US counterparts do per hour, why didn’t BMW managers use more of them? Wouldn’t less high-skilled labor, and perhaps less expensive capital equipment, enhance the company’s bottom line? Obviously, they had no idea how to and still make modern cars. It isn’t just manufacturing that has relatively fixed methods. In the early 2000s, I investigated the Mexican government’s supermarket chain (yes, despite the many outraged attacks on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to introduce government-run supermarkets, such things are indeed common in the wider world). Competition from Walmart was driving large losses. So managers decided that if you can’t beat them, join them: They turned full-speed toward “the latest technology in all the stores, the same as Walmart,” one of them told me. Given how little workers were paid, I asked if there wasn’t some alternative method to use less automation and employ more of them. The answer: “It doesn’t exist.” The alternative to Walmart technology was bankruptcy. The chain adopted and prospered.

What Gen Z Actually Wants, According to the DNC's Youngest Member

Cate Latimer,Alice Scott — Tue, 6 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Milan van Dam says Gen Z is the generation that is most empathetic toward their peers. Of the Democratic National Committee’s 65 executive members, only one is a high school student. At just 17 years old, Milan van Dam is not only the youngest-ever member of the executive committee but also the youngest member of the DNC. A student from Potomac, Maryland, van Dam says he’s spent nearly half of his life organizing for Democrats. As the child of immigrants, he found himself naturally inclined toward activism. He’s worked on multiple congressional campaigns and has served in leadership positions with the Maryland High School Democrats and Montgomery County Young Democrats. Now he’s the National Chair of High School Democrats of America. The High School Democrats of America mobilizes more than 11,000 members across the country in some 500 local chapters. Ahead of the midterms, van Dam and his colleagues are registering voters, making thousands of calls, and passing resolutions within the DNC in an attempt to make young voices heard. This is no easy task. Van Dam said the Democratic Party can often be out of touch about what issues get Gen Z to the ballot box—matters such as affordability, immigration, and corporate political influences. The party also must compete with Republicans’ increasingly effective ability to target youth voters. Right now, van Dam says, Democrats have taken young people for granted and not met them where they’re at. Long-term work must be done, he says, to invest in young people, in youth organizing, and to frame a vision that resonates with young people. Van Dam sat down with The Nation to discuss his organizing, the state of the Democratic Party, and the issues that drive Gen Z. Cate Latimer and Alice Scott: You’ve spent nearly half of your life organizing for Democrats—what prompted you to join this cause? Milan van Dam: When I was around 12 years old, I got involved with educational policy and did advocacy with the school board. I started advocating for [interactive teaching screens] because I was like, some schools have these screens and some of them don’t. I just became obsessed with wanting the government to work for everybody equally, and I was like, “OK, here it doesn’t. That seems like a problem.” Eventually, I just wanted to know where decisions were made, and I wanted to go there and tell people how decisions should be made, which is like a bit of a bossy teenager kind of thing to do. But I think I just really cared about making sure young people were being represented. CL&AS: You’re the youngest-ever member of the DNC’s executive committee. How did you get there? MvD: I think I literally just found High School Dems through Googling “high school Democrats” and joined. I became the first-rank caucus chair, then chair of the Maryland High School Democrats, then I was national vice chair. Eventually I was made national chair. The year before, we passed a DNC bylaw charter amendment to put the [High School Democrats] national chair on the DNC executive committee. So that was something that I lobbied for the year before as well, not knowing that that seat would go to me at all—that was not intentional.

This Village Has Been Fighting Israel’s Demolition Orders for Years. It May Be on Its Last Stand.

Kate McMahon — Mon, 5 Oct 2026 16:32:59 GMT

A new order for Khan al-Ahmar’s destruction failed to attract the international attention that had protected it in the past, and residents fear they can no longer stop the bulldozers. Sitting in his metal caravan, where the noisy, old fans fail to keep the heat of the day away, Abu Khamis inhales from his cigarette while gesturing toward a map hung on the wall, demarcating his village’s land. “The world’s attention is now on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and America and Iran,” the head of the village’s Bedouin Council says. “The pressure isn’t here anymore.” His village, the Palestinian community of Khan al-Ahmar, has been fighting the Israeli government’s demolition orders for the past 17 years. Its residents live in a cluster of condemned shacks perched on dry, dusty hills, running parallel to the desert highway between Jerusalem and Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. These homes lie directly in the path of the E1 construction project, a series of proposed Israeli settlements that would link occupied East Jerusalem with the existing settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Should it succeed, the new segregated housing project would create an unbroken line of Israeli territory across the center of the West Bank, effectively severing the region in two and blocking any unified Palestinian territory. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has publicly boasted that E1 would “permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state.” But for that vision to become a reality, Israel must address the persistent thorn in its side of Khan al-Ahmar, home to roughly 200 members of the Jahalin Bedouin community—pastoral shepherds descended from semi-nomadic tribes—and the area’s only elementary school serving Bedouin children. In 2009, shortly after the school was built, Israeli authorities handed down demolition orders for the village. In response to the order, the residents of Khan al-Ahmar mounted an effective international protest campaign and filed legal petitions challenging their expulsion, eventually becoming one of the few Palestinian communities whose case reached the halls of the Israeli Supreme Court. Then, in May of 2018, the Israeli judges ruled against the residents, saying the Israeli government could forcibly relocate Khan al-Ahmar to a nearby garbage dump. Hundreds of journalists, activists, and diplomats subsequently poured into the village, drawing headlines around the world. International solidarity activists physically blocked the bulldozers with their bodies. A BBC film crew appeared in the village and interviewed Israeli cabinet ministers about the demolition. The UN officially warned that evicting Khan al-Ahmar’s residents could constitute a war crime, and Israel temporarily put the demolition orders on hold in October 2018. The situation existed in a state of limbo until May of this year, when Minister Smotrich resurrected demolition orders for Khan-al Ahmar to clear the way for the E1 project. But the response this time was relatively muted. Protests in the village failed to gather the crowds—of other Palestinians, NGOs, and international activists—that they did in the years prior, with many Palestinians expressing defeat as Israel tightens its grip on the West Bank with no end, or help, in sight. For years, Khan al-Ahmar survived largely because of international scrutiny. Each time demolition appeared imminent, foreign governments warned Israel against carrying it out—reportedly, even the Trump administration opposed demolition in 2019, believing it would be an obstacle to the president’s “Deal of the Century” peace plan for the region. Experts warn that attention has faded. “The international community, which in the past knew how to pressure Israel to halt the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar, is now doing nothing in the face of widespread ethnic cleansing across the West Bank and the genocide that continues in Gaza,” Yair Dvir, spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, told The Nation.

Corruption in the White House: Does Anybody Care?

William W. Taylor III — Mon, 5 Oct 2026 16:28:55 GMT

The 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election should be referendums on whether Trump and his associates can profit from his presidency. Donald Trump claimed income of over $2 billion in 2025. A substantial part of it came from persons and entities who have a direct interest in what he does as president. When asked why he believed he and his family could buy and sell as if he were not president, he tellingly retorted, “Because I found out that nobody cared.” It is a frightening thought that nobody cares whether the president uses his office to make money for himself and his family. If nobody cares about the kind of corruption now on display, not only our moral authority in the world but our constitutional democracy is at risk. Elected officials in the United States have a moral and legal duty not to put their own interests above, or in conflict with, the interests of their constituents. If they forsake that duty, we cannot expect they will act only in the best interest of the country, and we cannot expect our noble experiment to continue. Citizens must care, moreover, because while the president gets richer, they get poorer. The 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election should be referendums on a central issue: whether the holder of the highest office in the land, and his relatives and friends, can accumulate fabulous wealth because he holds that office. Despite his claim to business genius, there is no confusion about how Donald Trump has made money as president and whether it is wrong for him to do it. The rejoinder is that what he has done is not illegal. That may be so for some of his gains: The laws that prevent conflicts of interest for all other federal officials do not apply to the president. The current Supreme Court has defined corruption narrowly, requiring an explicit agreement to give or receive a thing of value in exchange for an official act, and given the president broad immunity. A court will have to determine whether manipulating the stock market, trading on inside information, profiting from pardons, or extorting things of value from foreign governments are protected as part of his “official duties.” But whether it is illegal or not is beside the point: It is morally and ethically wrong. And it must be disqualifying for Trump or any other officeholder. The framers feared corruption in government because they had seen it and felt it firsthand. Their concern was not just bribery, although bribery was a form of it. They despised the European practice of giving gifts to public officials. They believed gifts, especially valuable ones, caused officials to subordinate their duty to the public to their personal interests. At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin warned of the danger from “the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.” And it was Franklin, of course, who had earlier received a gold snuffbox from Louis XVI, a snuffbox that became a symbol of all that was wrong with the lackadaisical European attitude about gifts. The framers created a government with three separate branches and two emoluments clauses, in Article I, Section 9, and Article II, Section 1, seeking to restrain public officials, including the president, from “selfish pursuits.” The corruption they feared was just the kind we are seeing today: the president’s use of his office to obtain great wealth. They believed the government they were creating would not survive if officeholders could follow their personal greed, and they were right. Trump’s $2.2 billion in 2025 income is shocking not only for its size but also because it did not occur until he took office in 2025. It far surpasses his income in any prior year of his life. The sheer size and timing of it is powerful evidence that he used the office in his own self-interest.

My Rape, the Cornell Case—and Why We Need Better Approaches to Teaching How Consent Works

Elizabeth Spiers — Mon, 5 Oct 2026 14:15:00 GMT

I tried to process the experience of being raped by disassociating. We have to show our kids a better way. I was raped in college. This is a fact about me, and not one I think about much because it happened in 1997. It took me a day or two after I was assaulted to even acknowledge it, because I’d shoved it to a corner recess of my consciousness, where I hoped it could disappear forever, shrinking over time into something less menacing. Just a thing that happened. When I finally felt comfortable talking about it, the first thing I learned was that my experience was horrifically common. Nearly every woman I know in adult life has been sexually assaulted, and for most of us, our first sexual assault—some of us have more than one—happened in college. There is nothing specific about an educational setting that lends itself to enhanced sexual danger for women; it’s simply the first time many of us are out in the world constantly interacting with people our age we barely know. For women, this means initial encounters with men who may or may not have grown up with norms about sex and consent that protect women from predatory behavior. We’re all suddenly adults with complete freedom of movement, and our social lives are ours to govern. We can stay out late, go to parties, drink—do the things adults do, in other words. It’s not a coincidence that culture warriors on the right like to suggest that this wouldn’t be risky behavior if we all got married and stayed at home right after high school. They do not want women out in the world, educating themselves, making decisions, acquiring power of their own. Some of them view the risk of rape as fair punishment for not staying in the kitchen. Many of the women I know who say they’ve never experienced sexual assault got married as soon as they graduated from high school. They do not socialize with men who aren’t their husbands and do not have much in the way of a social life outside of church. Some are happy, and some are not. Isolation from men is certainly one way to avoid sexual assault, but social confinement shouldn’t be the price of safety for women. When opinion makers on the right talk about it as a kind of protection, they’re not looking out for the women; they’re looking out for the men. I recently saw a frustrated influencer talking about the Cornell University rape case; she argued that we don’t need more education around consent—that these men knew what they were doing. I agree that they knew what they were doing, in the sense that they intuitively knew it was wrong. You can see that in the way some of the men in the fraternity tried to make amends with the victim before the gang rape’s aftermath escalated into the consequences now belatedly facing its perpetrators. But I also think about my own college experience and what I was taught before I left my small, heavily conservative hometown. That prompts me to differ with the claim that consent-based education isn’t a viable response to cases like this. Where I grew up, we were educated about sex mostly by our peers, not our parents or teachers. I believe that’s still the case for most American boys, and Internet porn is an aggravating factor, in that it generally doesn’t model consent and gives them an unrealistic idea of what real consensual sex is like. My school had no real sex ed, mostly because the parents in my largely evangelical community believed it was the job of parents to do that. This all but guaranteed that every one of my classmates got a message of abstinence and no actual sexual education. The one exception was the chapter or two we had on human anatomy and reproduction in biology class. To give a sense of how reproductive issues got discussed there, one of my classmates asked if women could still urinate when they were pregnant. Otherwise, most of the sex ed was folk knowledge passed among us, some of it correct and much of it woefully wrong. The kid who had the most forbidden knowledge would inevitably disseminate it to everyone else, and as we aged into puberty, some kids my age began to have sex armed only with the knowledge of whatever dumb **** an equally ignorant classmate had passed on. Consent was never part of the discussion, since it plays virtually no role in an abstinence-only approach to sex education. In a largely gender-segregated social environment, boys acquired the bulk of their understanding of the acceptable ways to treat girls from their peer group. The broader code of silence surrounding sexual matters, which were dogmatically deemed “inappropriate” for kids our age, predictably resulted in teen pregnancies, sexual assaults, and abuse. I grew up in rural Alabama, but this wasn’t just a red-state or right-wing problem. It still isn’t. My 11-year-old son goes to a Brooklyn public school that skews very liberal. We were informed that this year students and teachers would be talking about consent “but in an age-appropriate way” that involves using examples like whether you should be able to borrow someone’s phone without asking. I understand the reticence, but I think 11 is a perfectly appropriate age for frank discussions of sex. Some of my son’s classmates are already capable of having sex and getting pregnant. Every single kid in the class already knows the basics of what sex is because we live in 2026; not only does the kid in the class with the most forbidden knowledge still disseminate it, but all the kids in my son’s class are growing up with the Internet—i.e., exponentially greater access to forbidden knowledge than kids in my generation had. Taking away their phones or restricting their Internet usage won’t meaningfully insulate them from sex, depictions of sex, or talk of sex. They are all ambiently embedded into our stories, our discourse, and nearly all of pop culture. From the time they’re toddlers, children are taught that girls play with dolls and boys go out and make things and have big narratives in the wider world. This sort of gender programming seems innocuous until you consider that on some level it teaches boys what women are primarily for: making babies. They don’t have to understand anything about sex to absorb the formative lesson that a woman’s worth is about what her body can do, or the accompanying early gender scripts placing her on track to be a mother or a wife, launched into the rituals of playing house. The educational system can’t, by itself, counterprogram this gender messaging. Nevertheless, schools are often the only place where we can ensure that kids understand consent before they get to college and are apt to encounter fraught situations where their consent is disregarded or never requested in the first place, often for the first time. Yet school-based consent training, while valuable, often fails the core challenge of effectively undoing years of social conditioning as it seeks to model to kids how to treat each other respectfully. For it to take hold, it needs to focus on consequences. A few months ago, I met Kaitlin Andrews, who runs the Schools Consent Project. The group isn’t a traditional sex-ed nonprofit; rather, it’s a legal organization staffed by attorneys leading workshops for middle, junior high, and high school students. It uses the language of liability to outline for students what is and isn’t appropriate, how to intervene as a bystander, and what is unfortunately a problem for this generation that wasn’t for mine: the legality of distributing nude photos of other minors. I asked her at what age they were seeing students share nude photos of their classmates. Fifth grade, she said. This kind of education is important, not just because it happens at all but because it happens early. At Cornell, students are required to attend a mandatory presentation on sexual assault—in part to indemnify the school from accusations that it failed to make these things clear to students at the beginning. But that’s too little far too late, and the first week of college is far from the ideal time to expect students to think soberly about the issue. None of these interventions by themselves can fix the underlying misogyny that leads to sexual assault in the first place. They can’t reverse in a handful of sessions or seminars the way young men have been socialized to bond over sexual conquests—a coming-of-age rite that inevitably prompts them to objectify and dehumanize women further. These recursive trends are amplified considerably in gender-segregated fraternities, like the one at Cornell, where participants and bystanders in Jane Doe’s rape egged one another on. Way back in 1989, researchers were aware that fraternities were a unique vector for sexual assault. This paragraph from a paper titled “Fraternities and Rape on Campus” could double as an account of what happened at Cornell in 2024: An analysis of the norms and dynamics of the social construction of fraternity brotherhood reveals the highly masculinist features of fraternity structure and process, including concern with a narrow, stereotypical conception of masculinity and heterosexuality; a preoccupation with loyalty, protection of the group, and secrecy; the use of alcohol as a weapon against women’s sexual reluctance; the pervasiveness of violence and physical force; and an obsession with competition, superiority, and dominance. Interfraternity rivalry and competition—particularly over members, intramural sports, and women—encourage fraternity men’s commodification of women. We conclude that fraternities will continue to violate women socially and sexually unless they change in fundamental ways. I believe fraternities do more harm than good because of these things. At the same time, though, fraternity reform is insufficient by itself; the interventions have to start earlier because women are in danger earlier. The danger starts as soon as people start sexualizing them, which is usually when they’re prepubescent. At Duke, I was raped at a frat party. I was 19. The guy was someone I knew peripherally; we had a class together and were friendly in a polite way. Duke does not have sorority houses, but did have on-campus fraternity housing. It was common for parties held in or around the grounds of a fraternity to spill out from public areas and down the halls into the individual rooms of fraternity members. People would often move back and forth from main gathering spaces to bedrooms, usually heading back to the common room for whatever shitty beer was in the keg and drinking hard alcohol in the rooms. (Alcohol was the drug of choice, with the exceptions of a few rich kids who liked cocaine.)

The Death Penalty Has Become a Torture Machine

Jeet Heer — Mon, 5 Oct 2026 13:52:05 GMT

Christa Pike’s botched lethal injection proves there is no humane form of execution. On Wednesday, the state of Tennessee twice tried to kill Christa Pike, failed both times, and ended up grievously wounding her. Pike, a convicted murderer, was meant to be executed using a strong dose of the sedative pentobarbital. This was even after Pike’s lawyers and an outside doctor, Joel Zivot, warned that the lethal injection was a risky procedure; Zivot advised that Pike’s particular medical conditions could “lead to a painful and cruel death by lethal injection.” Zivot was right to say that Pike would suffer. But the nature of that suffering was, if anything, even worse than he predicted. Pike was given one ostensibly lethal dose, but she continued to live. She was then given another dose and fell into a deep sleep, but still did not die. At that point, she was taken to a hospital, where she continues to be in critical condition, being fed by a tube and breathing through a ventilator. According to her lawyer, she has not spoken since the failed execution. The entire grotesque spectacle highlights how perverse the death penalty has become in contemporary America. It is increasingly unpopular and indeed shunned by people of conscience. But, paradoxically, this means that when executions are conducted, they are conducted by incompetent and even sleazy officials who end up committing torture. There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty. It is a form of violent retribution, rather than justice. It is irrevocable—when an innocent person is executed, no form of reparation can bring them back. Capital punishment is also often applied unfairly, much more likely to be used against racial minorities and the poor. But the barbaric botched execution of Pike highlights another case against capital punishment that is gaining urgency: The attempt to make executions more humane by methods such as lethal injection—which was once sold as the clinical, painless alternative to the gallows or the electric chair—has utterly failed. In fact, it has made executions even more gruesome and cruel, underscoring the grim truth that killing a healthy body cannot be done with clean hands by the state. Pike’s case has been troubling from the beginning. She was sentenced to death in 1996 for murdering a Jobs Corps classmate the previous year, when she was 18. (Her boyfriend, along with another friend, participated in the crime.) The courts refused to consider extenuating facts, such as Pike’s history of mental illness and the fact she had been repeatedly raped as a child. Tennessee officials seem to have pushed forward her execution in part as an attempt to prevent a reopening of her case. As The New York Times reports: Her lawyers said that a history of extreme trauma and sexual abuse that began when she was a toddler had not been considered at her trial. Just 90 minutes before Ms. Pike was set to die on Wednesday, a federal appeals court issued a stay, saying that it needed more time to consider new arguments in the case. For Tennessee, that set off a race against the clock. The execution warrant would expire just before midnight. The most shocking thing about Pike’s torture is how unsurprising it was. Writing in The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig, a journalist who has specialized in the death penalty beat over the last few years, makes note of a stunning fact: Pike is not the first prisoner to suffer a horrifically botched execution in Tennessee this year. In May, prison officials in Nashville similarly bungled the killing of Tony Carruthers, who was pierced with needles and sliced open with a scalpel before the execution was called off. These stories are part of a broader pattern of failed executions in recent years. In 2022, when I began investigating disastrous lethal-injection attempts in Alabama, the Death Penalty Information Center reported that 35 percent of the year’s total executions had been botched. In the 44 years that America has carried out lethal injections, the evidence has repeatedly revealed that the method is scientifically unsound, frequently torturous, and woefully unreliable.

Michigan’s Senate Race Is a Testing Ground

Leena Barakat,Pamela Shifman — Mon, 5 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

We must counter fear and division with solidarity. At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last month, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was a “frequent punching bag,” targeted by speaker after speaker. It’s not hard to understand why. November’s elections seem poised to deal a blow to the Trump administration and its congressional allies. Democrats are favored to capture the House of Representatives and are within striking distance of a Senate majority. To turn the tide, administration allies are reaching for and amplifying tactics rooted in fear, hate, and polarization. In Michigan, their aim is to drive a wedge between communities that would otherwise stand together against them, including Muslim and Jewish voters. As Palestinian American Muslim and Jewish American pro-democracy leaders, we want to sound the alarm: The Senate race unfolding in Michigan will be a major testing ground for the whole country. We cannot allow some to prey on fear and division to tear Jews and Muslims apart and pit our two communities against one another. We need to answer their xenophobia with our own politics of solidarity and partnership. If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim American in the US Senate. He won his primary election against an onslaught of outside spending by building a diverse and energized movement excited about his message of “money in your pocket, money out of politics, and Medicare for All.” Yet, instead of debating his policy prescriptions, too often his opponents weaponize and attack El-Sayed’s identity—stoking a sickening new wave of Islamophobia. Immediately after El-Sayed’s primary victory, his opponent, Mike Rogers, falsely claimed that El-Sayed had “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood,” and that El-Sayed had said “America deserved 9/11.” Both claims were untrue. At a campaign rally near Detroit, Vice President JD Vance called El-Sayed “very, very evil.” Alongside this bigoted demonization, there has been a clear and targeted effort to convince Jewish Michiganders that El-Sayed represents a threat to their community. There are vigorous debates in our country over US foreign policy, and especially US policy regarding Israel and the Palestinian people. But the truth is that El-Sayed’s views on these issues align with those of a growing majority of Democrats who don’t face anywhere near the same scrutiny or smears for holding these positions. So why, then, has El-Sayed been singled out? The attacks on him are not occurring in a vacuum. Twenty-five years after the horror of September 11 and the rise of xenophobia, discrimination, and dehumanization in its aftermath, anti-Muslim bigotry has reached new heights, not only in rhetoric but also in discriminatory policies and violence and congressional and state caucuses and proposed actions. This is reinforced by the data: New analysis from Pew released this month found that “views on Islam are now more negative and more partisan than in 2002.” We can see the results nationwide. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott and his allies have pushed forward a wave of anti-Muslim legislation and executive actions in a state with one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani—the city’s first Muslim mayor—has confronted appalling attacks from people like Rudy Giuliani who sought to associate him with the perpetrators of 9/11 and called on him to stay away from the memorial ceremony. Jewish Americans are confronting a related, alarming bigotry. In the last few years, the community has experienced growing antisemitism and increased harassment. Violent assault is on the rise, and more than a third of American Jewish adults report feeling unsafe in the United States. Campaign tactics like some of those deployed by El-Sayed’s opponents in Michigan seek to cynically exploit this fear. At this precarious moment for the principle of multi-faith democracy in this country, Americans cannot allow these cynical “divide and conquer” tactics to succeed. Our communities must not allow ourselves to become isolated and polarized from one another. A race to the bottom in Michigan would only encourage a trend of rising bigotry and reward a political approach that seeks to divide communities—to make them too scared and too angry to work together.

Donald Trump vs. Bernie Sanders—2 Sharply Different Views of America’s Role in the World

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Mon, 5 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

One is an imperial gangster; the other seeks to create a world “not based on greed but based on justice, on decency.” America’s century is over. History has not ended. This has become the new conventional wisdom even among the keepers of convention. The challenge is how America finds real security in this new era. This month, we witnessed two strikingly different answers: one from the self-proclaimed most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and one from the champion of the rising populist movement on the left, Senator Bernie Sanders. Trump’s address to the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly was a characteristically grotesque performance, essentially a raised middle finger to the 190 country representatives gathered before him and the UN itself. Amid the routine farrago of lies, boasts, threats, and resentments, he presented a stark vision of America’s emerging role: essentially an imperial gangster—that, if pursued, constitutes a clear, present, and harrowing threat to this nation’s security. To the Victor Go the Spoils After a stump speech preening about America’s primacy—“Our economy is the envy of the world. Our military is the most powerful on Earth. Our technology is second to none, and we are leading in virtually everything. Our energy is fueling the planet”—Trump turned to America’s role in the world. He boasted about the bombing of Iran, the “peace” in Gaza, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and control of its oil—“to the victor go the spoils”—the bombing of fishing boats in the Caribbean designated as “foreign terrorists,” the blockade of Cuba, “failing like never before and it will fail.” Each of these—from aggressive acts of war to aiding and abetting genocide to illegal blockade—represent a brazen and open violation of international law and the UN Charter. Trump is saying that America will continue to police the world, only not to enforce the law but to enforce its will and to take what it can get. In apparent acknowledgment of the lawlessness, he issued a scurrilous attack on the International Criminal Court, “an evil group of people,” calling on all members to resign from the “rogue institution.” Ironically, this fool’s errand of brazen plunder isn’t Trump’s greatest disservice to US national security. As the UN secretary general warned in his opening remarks, the world is struggling with the growing costs of real and present dangers that can no longer be ignored and can only be addressed by greater international cooperation: catastrophic climate change, global pandemics, corrosive inequality that undermines democracy and savages the poor, an accelerating nuclear arms race accompanied by the collapse of arms control agreements, and the known unknown of AI, which requires international regulation. Trump made clear that the United States, under his watch, will sabotage any international regulation. Climate change and efforts to regulate AI are dismissed as a “hoax.” He has pulled the US out of the World Health Organization that monitors emerging pandemic threats and crippled our own Centers for Disease Control. Having pocketed billions while in office, he is the tribune of oligarchs, torpedoing all efforts at imposing a minimal tax on multinationals or on carbon or efforts to shut down tax-free zones. “There is no global government,” he preached, and “while I’m president, there will be no global taxes.” And, boasting about hiking America’s bloated military budget by one-third—to $1.5 trillion—and promising to build a “Global Dome” over America, he only adds fuel to the nuclear arms race. At the dawn of the conservative era, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher asserted that “there was no alternative” to the neoliberal catechism. But there is an alternative course for the United States as it struggles to address new realities. It won’t come from a return to the failed “unipolar” globalism of the past decades. Instead, if there is an alternative to Trump’s gangsterism, it will come from the rising populist movement of the left.

The People vs. the Supreme Court

Elie Mystal — Mon, 5 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

This term the Supreme Court has plans to trample even more of our rights. But we, the people, are not powerless in the face of their power grab. The Supreme Court’s approval rating has hit a record low: Just 33 percent of Americans approve of the job the justices are doing, according to a Gallup poll taken in July, only weeks after the court’s last term ended. The decline appears to have been driven by Republican voters, likely angered by the court’s rejection of Donald Trump’s illegal tariff plans and its affirmation of birthright citizenship. Only 12 percent of Democratic voters approve of the court, which has been the ballpark figure throughout the Trump era. Yet the court is uniquely insulated from this kind of public disgust. While Congress and the president have to answer to the public every two, four, or six years, Supreme Court justices are protected for life. They can rule over the American people, more or less, without their consent. Things weren’t supposed to play out like this. The people who wrote the Constitution wanted the court to be insulated from public pressure, to be sure, but they never intended those insulated judges to be imbued with this much political power. In our republic, the representatives are supposed to make the important legal and political decisions, while the unelected, unaccountable judges are charged with mediating disputes between the states. That’s why the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over cases in which one state is suing another. For most other cases, the court has what’s known as appellate jurisdiction, which means it is intended to be used as a last resort. The framers of the Constitution thought the elected branches of government would serve as a natural check on the Supreme Court’s power because, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist 78, the court does not have the power of the “sword or the purse.” The Supreme Court can’t pay for its rulings to be implemented, and it can’t enforce them. It has to rely on Congress and the president to enact its opinions. It seemed obvious to people like Hamilton that a court that overstepped its role or exceeded its power would simply be ignored by the branches with the power to levy taxes and command armies. Hamilton, it turns out, was very, very wrong. Far from ignoring today’s over-powerful court, both political parties turn to it to overturn laws, regulations, and orders they don’t like. And we see both of the elected branches regularly genuflect to the court, even when it scuttles their entire popular agenda. We live in a world where popular legislation simply doesn’t matter unless it happens to be approved by five unelected judges on the Supreme Court. Campaign-finance reform, national healthcare, student-debt relief, and all manner of gun laws supported by millions of people and a large number of their representatives mean nothing unless five justices give these popular measures their blessing. Today, the court is both obscenely powerful and broadly unpopular. It has stolen power from the elected branches, but those branches do nothing to take it back. Democrats applaud the court and boost its legitimacy on the rare occasions that it rules against Trump, as it did on tariffs and birthright citizenship, and then stand functionally inert as the court dances a tarantella on LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, minority rights, voting rights, housing rights, environmental rights, and labor rights, all the while turning our country into a shooting range where kids need to wear bulletproof backpacks to school. Trump, for all his dictatorial bombast and bluster, has generally allowed the court to have the final say on all of his executive orders. He intimidates and mocks the justices, who only occasionally rule against him, but he rarely ignores them. Trump treats the Supreme Court the way medieval European kings used to treat the pope: as an annoying power they could kill but choose not to because his existence ultimately reinforces their own authority. And so the unelected, unaccountable, and unpopular Supreme Court trundles on, despite shockingly low public-approval numbers. The justices need not fear their loss of institutional legitimacy, because they know that no other institution in government has the strength or will to stop them. The Supreme Court does not need to be faster than the fastest lion; it must only be faster than the slowest gazelle. This term, the court will continue its dread work, despite the will of the American people. Human rights will be smashed. Popular laws will be vanquished. And the world the Supreme Court leaves to our children will become ever dirtier and more violent. Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia VotaArgument: December 8, 2026 Last term, the Supreme Court effectively killed the most important voting-rights law ever passed, the Voting Rights Act. This term, the court will come for the second-most-important piece of voting-access legislation: the National Voter Registration Act. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), more commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, is the best thing Bill Clinton ever did. It established one standardized federal form for voter registration and mandated that each state must accept the form as sufficient for registration. It’s the form people fill out at the DMV when they’re renewing their driver’s license, hence the moniker. The NVRA might not seem like much, but in a country with 50 state-level election systems and over 10,000 election jurisdictions, each with its own unique and confusing rules and deadlines for voting, having one single form for voter registration makes it much easier for people to vote. So, of course, Republicans hate it. The form does not require proof of citizenship. You have to check a box confirming you are a citizen, and if you lie, you can be prosecuted—but you do not have to rend your garments and produce notarized parchment out of your ass showing that you came over on the Mayflower with two guns and a slave. So, of course… Republicans hate it. Arizona challenged the NVRA back in 2013, arguing in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona that it could require proof of citizenship for voter registration. The Supreme Court disagreed. In a 7–2 ruling written by Antonin Scalia and joined by John Roberts, the court said that Arizona’s state registration law violated the supremacy of federal law. The court left open the possibility that states could ask for more information than the federal form required, but they still had to accept the federal NVRA form as sufficient for the purpose of voter registration. The two dissenting justices in that 2013 case were Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. In 2022, Arizona finally got around to trying to exploit the avenue left open in Inter Tribal Council. The state passed a law creating a new voter-registration form that requires voters to supply documents that establish proof of citizenship. While the state continues to allow people to use the NVRA form, those people, now called “federal-only” voters, are not allowed to vote in state or local elections unless the state verifies their citizenship; they are also prohibited from voting by mail in federal elections. The law also requires state election officials to cross-check Arizona’s voter-registration rolls against some kind of citizenship database, and if they find a voter who isn’t on the citizenship list, they’re authorized to cancel that person’s registration at any time. Democrats, Tribal entities, and voting-rights groups, led by Mi Familia Vota, sued in response, and Arizona lost soundly in the lower courts. But the state appealed, and as is so often the case, the Supreme Court used its shadow docket to step in, temporarily overrule the lower courts without a hearing, and allow Arizona to use its previously unlawful voter-registration-and-exclusion form in the upcoming midterm elections. The case that the court will hear this term (and probably decide in the spring) will affect the 2028 presidential election. It’s always amazing to me that Arizona, a state that sits on land first stolen from the Native people living there, and then stolen from Mexico, is one of the most hardcore states about preventing its large Native and Mexican-born populations from voting. It’s like the white folks running Arizona instinctively know they have no freaking right to be there and thus are desperate to use any anti-democratic means necessary to retain their ill-gotten power. Given the Supreme Court’s open hostility to voting rights, I have to assume that Arizona and the Republicans will win this case and be allowed to use their additional form to suppress the vote. I mean, they’ve just about won the case in the short term. All I can hope is that Arizona’s victory will be narrow. Hopefully, the court will use this case only to chip away at the NVRA. But we all know this court doesn’t give a **** about its own precedents. There’s every possibility that a robust win for Arizona will involve the court effectively overturning its decision in Inter Tribal Council, killing the NVRA just as it killed the Voting Rights Act. Republicans, of course, will love it. Viramontes v. Cook CountyArgument: December 2, 2026 In the Supreme Court’s ongoing assault on the safety of every American, this case is the shot to the head. Viramontes v. Cook County is a challenge to laws in a number of states that ban AR-15s and other assault rifles. When Democratic presidential hopefuls talk about passing an assault-weapons ban—as if that will somehow solve the epidemic of gun violence in this country—this is the case that should remind them that significant institutional reform of the Supreme Court must happen first. It is the only way to achieve meaningful gun regulation. The plaintiff in this case is indistinguishable from the plaintiff in nearly every other gun case. Some dude, in this case named Cutberto Viramontes, felt the need to overcompensate with some weapon. Lacking the dexterity to operate a bow or the strength to wield a broadsword, he opted for an assault rifle. Chicago told him no, and he claimed that his precious Second Amendment rights had been violated as he wept lead tears. It’s a tale as old as time… if time had started in the mid-1970s, when the National Rifle Association decided that the first 200 years of American gun regulation needed to be shot to death. For what it’s worth, assault-rifle bans should be constitutional even under the Supreme Court’s recent bloodthirsty precedents. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the court said that people are entitled to firearms for self-defense but that only guns ordinarily used for self-defense get protection. Nobody buys an assault rifle for “self”-defense. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court ruled that all current gun laws must have an analogue to a gun law from the 18th or 19th century. Bruen is the dumbest ruling in recent memory, but even so, there were practical limits on the kinds of arsenals most people had. It should be possible for the court to analogize an assault rifle to other weapons of war that were not permitted to be owned by yokel militiamen in Lexington during the revolution. None of that will matter to this Supreme Court. Does anybody really think the six Republican justices, who have spent the last decades giving big, wet kisses to the gun lobby, will uphold an assault-weapons ban? If you do, you simply haven’t been paying attention to how violent and extremist this court has become with regard to guns. Ammosexuals win in front of this court just as often as Christians and capitalists; its opinions might as well drop bullet casings as they are passed around. The Republicans on the Supreme Court have helped create the most violent wealthy country on earth. They—not violent movies or video games or male loneliness—are responsible for gun violence in this country. We will continue to suffer and die under their bloody perversions until the Supreme Court is reformed. Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder CountyArgument: October 5, 2026 I’m a big fan of tort lawyers—attorneys who seek monetary damages against businesses, institutions, or government agencies that cause harm. Some people turn up their noses at these kinds of litigators, deriding them as “ambulance chasers” and criticizing them as looking for payouts instead of justice. But I believe that tort lawyers are one of the people’s few defenses against the corporate-military-industrial-tech-bro complex. If you see a video of me being brutalized by the cops, I don’t want you to call Zohran Mamdani. I want you to call Ben Crump. Tort lawyers are a big reason your car doesn’t burst into flames when you crash. Tort lawyers are a big reason your kids don’t choke to death on their toys. Tort lawyers helped weaken the tobacco industry and stop Purdue Pharma from selling drugs, and they were in the process of bringing the gun industry to heel before Republicans passed a law preventing gun manufacturers from being sued by tort lawyers. Recently, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion and massively restructure its policies to settle a lawsuit about how it harms children by trapping them on social-media platforms. “Release the tort lawyers” is my solution to most every problem. Tort lawyers have been critical in our fight for environmental justice and rights. Without recounting the entire plot of the movie Erin Brockovich, let’s just say that all (as opposed to only some) of our communities would be drowning in industrial waste without tort lawyers. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the goal of every rapacious business interest in our country is to get Congress or the Supreme Court to make a special rule preventing tort lawyers from suing their industry—and it shouldn’t be a surprise that the fossil-fuel industry is leading the way. The big polluters are being sued in multiple states for the climate damage they’ve caused. Now they’ve asked the Supreme Court to put a stop to it. This is what Suncor v. Boulder is about. The city of Boulder, Colorado, has sued Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobile in an attempt to hold them liable for climate damage. Boulder is not asking the fossil-fuel industry to stop polluting; it’s asking the industry to pay for its pollution. And that’s the key. If these companies had to pay for the climate damage they’ve caused, they would likely stop doing it. Even the threat of having to pay would likely compel them to clean up their act. The fossil-fuel business model is that the polluters reap all the profits for polluting while everybody else has to pay the cost of that pollution. If you could change that calculus, you could change the economic incentive for pollution and, without hyperbole, change the entire world. Which is why it will never happen. The Supreme Court case is about whether Boulder’s lawsuit is preempted by the Clean Air Act. The energy companies are arguing that if they haven’t violated the federal law governing their behavior, then state lawsuits can’t be brought against them for that behavior. That’s exactly what the six Republican justices will most likely find. The Republicans on the court have been as bad for the environment as the Chicxulub asteroid. They will most likely use this case to institute a new rule that protects the fossil-fuel industry from being sued in state courts for environmental damage. The Supreme Court has already rendered the Clean Air Act all but inert, and the justices know that Republicans don’t enforce what’s left of the act when they’re in power. Telling an industry it can only be sued with a law that is under-enforced is a great way to absolve that industry of legal accountability. I hope I’m wrong. If Boulder wins this case, it could devastate the fossil-fuel industry. But… that’s why I’m not going to be wrong. International Partners for Ethical Care v. FergusonArgument: December 7, 2026 This case should be called the Fugitive Trans Case. The facts are pretty simple: Washington State has a law that requires licensed shelters to inform parents should they take in a runaway who is a minor. The notice requirement doesn’t apply, somewhat obviously, to minors who are running away from abuse or neglect. I trust I do not have to explain why I think not notifying abusive parents when their children escape is a good idea. In 2023, Washington enacted legislation to waive the notice requirement when the minor is seeking “protected health care services,” including “gender-affirming treatment.” If you ask me, the law didn’t even need to be amended, because preventing your child from getting an abortion or gender-affirming care already falls under the category of “abuse or neglect.” But I guess Washington needed to make it clear that minors have a right to bodily integrity and autonomy. You can imagine what happened next. The culture warriors descended on Washington, outraged that trans children might receive the care they need by running away from their abusive anti-trans parents. Five sets of parents sued the state; one set of parents said their child had already run away to receive care, while another said they had received “threats” from—get this—their older child, who wanted to take their younger sibling to a “safe place” to receive care. I don’t know about you, but as a parent, if I’ve got an older child threatening to run away with the younger child, my inclination would be to think deeply about my parenting strategies, not sue the state over its law protecting runaways. Then again, I’m not a drooling bigot. I think we all know what the anti-trans, Christofascist Supreme Court is going to do with this case. Just look at how the court frames the “question presented,” which is how the justices tell the litigants what they think is at issue in the case: “Whether parents have standing to challenge a law or policy that deliberately displaces their decision-making role as to ‘gender transitions’ of their children, and in so doing creates present and likely future impediments to their ability to parent their children as they deem best for them.” The scare quotes around “gender transitions” are in the original. These poor kids are so screwed: Even when they run away from home, the Republicans on the Supreme Court will find them and send them back for abuse. Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of GeorgiaArgument: November 30, 2026 A law has no meaning if the person who violates it cannot be held accountable. A right has no meaning if the person who tramples on it cannot be sued. One of the easiest ways the Supreme Court can take away fundamental rights is to simply prevent people from suing when their rights have been violated. That is the goal of Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. The case arises from two separate sex-discrimination lawsuits. In one, Thomas Crowther, an art teacher at Augusta University in Georgia, was accused of sexual harassment by several anonymous individuals. After an investigation, Crowther was effectively fired. He claimed that he was unfairly investigated and terminated on the basis of sex and sued the university under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination. The other case was brought by MaChelle Joseph, who was the head coach of the Georgia Tech women’s basketball team. In early 2019, she filed a complaint alleging that her program was not given the same resources as the men’s team. Not long after, the school hired an outside investigator to look into complaints about her conduct as a coach and then fired her. She also sued under Title IX, alleging sex discrimination. The Supreme Court case is not about the validity of either of these sex-discrimination claims (I am eternally thankful for that, because I do not want to have to weigh in on whatever the hell Thomas Crowther is on about), but whether these plaintiffs are allowed to argue their cases at all. Chief Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (who has been on the short list for a Republican Supreme Court nomination) argued that Title IX doesn’t allow employees to file a private cause of action against a federally funded employer for sex discrimination. That’s news to me, as well as all of the other lower courts that have allowed this kind of litigation under Title IX since it became law in 1972. Indeed, if Title IX doesn’t allow employees to sue for sex discrimination, then employers might face no economic penalty for engaging in such discrimination. This is another case where the Supreme Court can protect major institutions from the tort lawyers, which will unleash their ability to discriminate without fear of financial damage. If we had a normal Supreme Court, I would assume that it took the case only to tell Judge Pryor that he was wrong, overrule him 9–0, and warn other lower-court judges not to be so aggressively hostile to gender equality in the future. Unfortunately, our Supreme Court isn’t normal and has justices on it who are even more extremist than Pryor. I assume this case starts with at least two votes to begin stripping away Title IX: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh isn’t exactly a fan of women having their claims heard in open court, so I must also assume that he’s a third vote with the other two misogynists. Neil Gorsuch is absolutely the kind of guy who gets into an elevator five steps ahead of you and then mashes the “Close Door” button in the hope that he won’t have to smile awkwardly at you for a couple of floors, because his jurisprudence is all about closing the courthouse door on litigants he doesn’t deem worthy. So that probably gets us to four votes for Pryor’s wackadoodle reimagining of federal law. And that leaves us with the game of “Guess which way the wind is blowing through the heads of John and Amy?” If either John Roberts or Amy Coney Barrett thinks that sex discrimination has been defeated the way they think racism has been defeated, they’re likely to curtail Title IX. None of the likely decisions in the cases I’ve highlighted will be popular. Republicans would never be able to overturn popular laws like the National Voter Registration Act or Title IX at the ballot box. People in Washington State voted to protect runaways, while people in Chicago voted to ban assault weapons. And the fossil-fuel industry counts among the least-popular mustache-twirling capitalists in our society. The fact that none of these Republican-aligned cases could win in front of the people is the reason they’re in front of the Supreme Court. The court is where Republicans go to do what the people reject. The Supreme Court would have us believe that we’re powerless to stop them. That feeling, of course, is amplified by elected politicians, who unleash a mighty shrug every time a Supreme Court decision doesn’t go their way but then do nothing—and, more devastatingly, act like there’s nothing they can do. But we are not powerless. While the political branches will never buck the Supreme Court on their own, we can demand it—and push and push until they rein in this rogue branch of government. There’s a lot that our elected leaders can do, much of it through simple legislation. They can change the number of justices on the Supreme Court. They can cut its funding. And, at the end of the day, they can strip its jurisdiction over laws passed by Congress. Indeed, all of these things can be done without the need of a constitutional amendment. Increasing the number of Supreme Court justices is the easiest thing to do, legislatively speaking: just pass a bill adding justices and appoint new ones who oppose the court’s various power grabs. Failing that, cutting the Supreme Court’s funding would be a good way to send a message to the current justices to get back in their lane. Congress controls the funding of the court: The justices can make their pronouncements from a park bench instead of a courthouse bench, if Congress ever decides to play hardball. Finally, the Constitution does not give the Supreme Court the final say on what is constitutional. Congress could pass a law prohibiting the court from ruling on a given law’s constitutionality. The justices would object, but at least some states would follow the rules as laid down by the people’s representatives instead of the ones decreed by the unelected Supreme Court. But none of this will happen unless the people demand it. Congress will not take back power for the people unless the people recognize how much power they’ve lost. Even though the Supreme Court is unpopular, people still think it’s unassailable, and until that changes, the court will continue to act against the popular will. As Frederick Douglass once said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” I choose to remain hopeful that one day we will remember that nobody elected these nine petty kings and queens. Power in a democracy flows from the people, and if the people ever remember that, this Supreme Court can be stopped.

The Year I Taught in a Former Coal Mining Town

Brianna Di Monda — Sat, 3 Oct 2026 09:30:00 GMT

Teaching in the South of France, I learned that equality was just a story teachers told about themselves. During the first year of the gilets jaunes protests, I taught English in France. By the time I arrived during that impossibly hot August in 2018, a grassroots movement against fuel taxes and economic inequality had been building, with its members eventually blocking off roundabouts and toll booths across the country and marching, every Saturday, down the large avenue at the end of my street. I would sit, lazily, with my legs sticking through the wrought-iron balustrade of my balconette and watch them go by. It was my first year out of college, and I had taken the job in France, in part, for the time to read and write. I was assigned to one of the largest public high schools in the country, Lycée Jean-Baptise Dumas. Alès, where I taught, located in the south of the country, was a former mining town that had produced a record 3.3 million tons of coal in 1958, its workforce of 20,000 built largely on Algerian labor that France had recruited after the war. The last mine closed in 2001, but the families stayed, and many of their descendants were my students. The other teachers were French and drove in from neighboring towns like Anduze and Uzès. Due to the scarcity of housing available to foreigners, I also commuted from a neighboring city. Nîmes, where I lived, was on the edge of the Mediterranean and hosted Spanish-style bullfights in its Roman amphitheater. During my second month there, a woman was gored to death by a bull that jumped over the fence. It was a year of experiencing firsthand something I had already learned as a French major in college: that French equality was a story France told about itself, and that the far right had been a more or less consistent underbelly of the country since at least the 1890s. France’s own Constitutional Council had ruled in 2007 that race and ethnicity could not be recorded as categories in any official state data collection, making it impossible to measure discrimination through government statistics, though private studies found that ethnic minorities in France were more than 30 percent less likely to be hired for jobs, and unemployment among people of North African origin was twice the national average. I was brought in on a seven-month government contract that prohibited other work and was designed to expire before I could declare residency. I was answerable to teachers 15 to 40 years my senior, though none of them had formal authority over me. As a teaching assistant, I was paid a poverty wage that qualified me for government housing assistance, even though I was a government employee. My position in the country was at least more honest than what France had done to my students’ families, who had been recruited to build French mines and then told, once the economic boom ended, that even if they got citizenship, they weren’t French at all. A few weeks in, I arrived 20 minutes late to a class I was assisting with after its room was reassigned without my knowledge. The teacher held a meeting with me and two other staff members, where she threatened that if I was late again, she would bring in the French authorities to oversee my behavior and deport me if I wasn’t performing my job well. I said, in French, something like, “That sounds like it will take a long time,” to which she said it would be a several-month process. “I’m not here for very long,” I told her. “So my visa will likely expire before it’s done anyway.” My appointment with France’s immigration office, for instance, where they would do a routine blood check for HIV and stamp my passport, was set for early December—four months after my arrival in the country. So I wasn’t worried about the French bureaucracy suddenly becoming more efficient. Plus I felt pretty certain that I hadn’t done anything to warrant deportation, and I knew that, since my contract was with the Ministry of Education and not the school, the teacher had no power to fire me. She told me I was being rude. I told her that, from my perspective, she was the one being rude. Another teacher gasped. That night, one of the teachers called me to say she was sorry I’d been singled out, and she was sure it must be stressful to be so young and arrive in a foreign country with “everything that was going on,” by which she certainly meant the gilets jaunes I watched from outside my apartment window. It was a kind thing to say, though I hadn’t thought of it like that. In any case, no one ever contacted the Ministry of Education. When someone first learns a second language, it’s widely understood that they don’t have the same emotional associations with the words as they do in their native language. Such associations have to be built from the ground up. What this meant for me, in practice, was that I could say things in French that I never would have dared to say in English. It was very easy to be direct, because the part of my brain that processes shame or embarrassment didn’t register as I spoke. I was also direct because, in an attempt to keep up the appearance of something resembling proficiency, I would say the first sentence I could form in my head as quickly as I could. It got me into trouble with the other teachers repeatedly—although a language barrier soon became the least of our problems. My fellow teachers never gave me the lesson plans ahead of time, although I begged for them during my first month. Instead, when I walked through the door to their classrooms, they’d ask me to explain, on the spot and in French, things like the racial dynamics in the United States that had led to the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement. During my improvised lecture, this particularly self-serious teacher nodded and interrupted me to declare that race was a “big problem in the US.” It was apparent she thought of systemic discrimination as a uniquely American problem. After class, another teacher said to me, in the staff room, that most of the students at this school weren’t good at English. They were lazy “because—parce que—they were immigrants.” When I asked her why she thought there was a causal relationship between being an immigrant and being lazy, she looked at me like I was dumb, like I didn’t understand her. For a moment, I thought I had misspoken—pulled the wrong word or misconjugated. I tried again, this time more directly: “You think it’s because they’re immigrants?” She did that French thing where she blew air through her pursed lips and waved a hand in exasperation. It was clear to me that she used American racism as a way to displace and avoid confronting French racism. And I was meant to be a mirror that reflected blame outward. The school year continued much like this, and by November the mistral set in: southern France’s whipping winds, reaching speeds of up to 40 miles per hour and continuing for days on end, which were said to drive people mad. The winds made it hard to open doors, so I was always throwing my shoulder into them. Sometimes I tried to sit outside during my breaks, but most days the wind blew me right back inside. If I wasn’t giving impromptu lectures to a class, I ran small conversation groups, five to nine students at a time, sitting around a table as I tried to get the 14-to-18-year-olds to chat in English or practice dictation. Since every classroom was full, I worked with them out of a janitor’s closet. My time was split among 11 teachers, each of whom had 30 students, which meant I could go weeks without seeing the same face twice and was often, in some sense, starting over with them. One morning, I was asked to help students with an exercise using a news clip they were watching to practice English. It was a segment from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. The teacher and I replayed it several times while I improvised comprehension questions on the spot. We were struggling: The students were beginner speakers in English, and I was largely met with silence. During the lesson, two students began mumbling to each other, and then one jumped out of his chair and hit the other. The boys nearby stood up and started shoving each other, creating a full-on brawl that knocked over several desks. The teacher screamed at them, and another came in from down the hall and helped calm everyone down. I later learned the fight had started because one student called the other dumb for not understanding English. The fight was alarming, but the teachers—even those who had not been involved—kept bringing it up in the weeks that followed, saying it wouldn’t have happened in a “normal” school. The fight turned into a symbolic story, offering proof of what the teachers had long suspected about their immigrant students.

Why French Students Are Revolting

June Loper,Harrison Stetler — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 18:07:27 GMT

France’s education system is stretched to its limits, as student anger kicks off a hot fall protest season. The elephant in French classrooms, as just about anyone who has recently taught or studied in the country’s education system will tell you, is stretched resources. Classes are filled to the brim, with teaching increasingly delegated to intermittent instructors. Behind the façade of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”—the republican promise emblazoned on each public school building in the country—stand deteriorating buildings, squalid facilities, poorly stocked libraries, unreliable IT, if any, and outnumbered critical support staff like nurses and counselors. Videos circulating on social media from students’ accounts document the most disastrous conditions: rats running around across the hall; collapsing ceilings; walls leaking with humidity; broken doors and dysfunctioning lighting in bathrooms. Frustrations with this untenable status quo started to boil over in late September, only three weeks into the new academic year. The first sparks emerged on September 17 at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry, where striking teachers were joined by students who attempted a blockade of the school facilities. They were soon joined by other students in the greater Paris area, most notably at the Lycée Paul Éluard in Saint-Denis, a diverse, working-class suburb north of the capital, who also launched a blockade on September 25. Less than a week later, their demonstration had spread to over 1,000 high schools across the country—more than a quarter of total establishments—crystallizing the social malaise of an entire generation. Reacting to what was rapidly taking on the scale of a national crisis, President Emmanuel Macron intervened on Wednesday during a state visit to Madrid. “I understand the anxieties and anger that our youth might feel, whether that’s related to the climate, new technologies, or geopolitical tensions,” he said during a press conference. “However, none of these fears justify violence.” The scope of the protests is perhaps best summed up in the clampdown that has followed, as media and government figures alike harp on the exceptional incidents of violence, such as the burning of Lycée Nelson Mandela in Nantes. On October 1 alone, nearly 2,000 people were arrested, with scores of schools now closed by administrative order and conducting online courses, in an effort to mitigate the effects of the blockades. As of Friday afternoon, however, the situation shows few signs of slowing down. A day of national mobilization and strikes is called for October 6. The scene on Friday morning outside the Lycée Lucie Aubrac in Pantin, a suburb northeast of Paris, was typical of the French students’ revolt. Though their school was closed by administrators, some students gathered outside the shuttered gates as early as 7:30 am. “Nobody listens to us,” said Lila, a high school senior. “Last year we didn’t have a math teacher for over seven months.” Though the gathering was entirely peaceful, our interview was interrupted when a group of police officers started charging the students at around 8:45 am. Quickly, students started running, escaping the tear gas out of fear of the brutality that they have seen put to full force in schools elsewhere. Lila had on her mind, for example, the 16-year-old who on Thursday was shot in the eye with a rubber bullet in the nearby suburb of Argenteuil. On September 28, a rubber bullet also shattered the teeth and jaw of a 14-year-old boy in Saint-Ouen, just north of Paris. “The level of violence we’re witnessing from the police is traumatizing,” said Lila. “We’re only minors here, children trying to have our voices heard.” In the eastern French city of Troyes, protesters filmed an unmarked police car driving at high speed between a crowd of students as officers sprayed tear gas from the windows. For students in places like Pantin, or other disadvantaged banlieues, or suburbs, across France, the reaction to their mobilization feeds into the lingering sense of being relegated to a second-class status, problems to be managed rather than citizens deserving an opportunity to a decent education. To them, the police mobilization recalls the clampdown in response to the rioting that followed the 2023 killing of Nahel, a 17-year-old shot during an altercation with police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

Eric Schmitt Deserves to Be Mocked Forever

Elie Mystal — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 14:55:17 GMT

In this week’s Elie v. U.S., our justice correspondent relives the senator’s glorious face-plant. Plus: why John Roberts also deserves our mockery. If it were up to me, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt’s monumental face-plant would play in a constant loop on all television networks until he resigned in shame and disgrace. Schmitt fully debased himself during Senate hearings designed to torture former special counsel Jack Smith, and I simply don’t think he should be allowed to have a public life after his incompetent performance. For the uninitiated: During the hearing on Tuesday, Schmitt alleged that Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were partners in a grand conspiracy to “get” Donald Trump. Willis’s assistant and paramour Nathan Wade was somehow involved. The “evidence” of this conspiracy was supposedly an Atlanta Hawks basketball game that Schmitt alleged Willis and Smith attended at State Farm Arena in Atlanta on February 3, 2024. Just to state an obvious fact that has been somewhat overlooked during all of this: State Farm Arena seats over 17,500 people. If Smith and Willis had been at the same game at the same time, it would have meant literally nothing. Lt. Daniel Kaffee had more on Col. Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men when all he had was “phone calls and footlockers.” It is beyond ridiculous to try to pin an entire illegal conspiracy on a freaking basketball game. In any event, Smith said he never attended that game. Schmitt smugly declared that Smith had perjured himself. He claimed to have text messages from Smith confirming his planned attendance at the “Hawks” game. Jack Smith, who in this moment officially became my top choice for attorney general once the Trump era finally ends, slowly figured out what was going on. I posted a picture on my social media of the moment Smith realized that Schmitt was confusing the Atlanta Hawks—a men’s professional basketball team—with the Iowa Hawkeyes, which represent the University of Iowa. (At Above the Law, Joe Patrice shared more Louvre-worthy pictures, mostly of Republicans realizing Schmitt is an idiot.) Smith testified that he attended a women’s basketball game in February 2024, but in Maryland, not Georgia, in order to see Hawkeyes great Caitlin Clark play. Senator Amy Klobuchar put Schmitt’s mistake into the record, which prompted Schmitt to respond as men of his type often do when they’ve been exposed as frauds: He yelled at her. Schmitt then went on The Charlie Kirk Show (because for some reason that’s still a thing) claiming victory. Despite the unraveling of his entire conspiracy theory in real time on CSPAN, the white-wing media machine continued to push Schmitt’s provably false narrative. In a normal world, this would be the end of Schmitt’s career. But, of course, it won’t be. It won’t be because lies and incompetence are not deal-breakers for Republican voters. The Bad and the Ugly The Supreme Court term starts on Monday with an important environmental law case that concerns a lawsuit filed by Boulder, Colorado, seeking damages against the fossil fuel industry for climate change. The energy companies will be down a man, because their boy, Justice Samuel Alito, has recused himself from the case (his wife holds stocks in some of the companies, because of course she does). This might look like a “win” for environmentalists. But I think there’s no way Alito would have recused if he weren’t sure his side already had enough votes to win. The Supreme Court used the shadow docket to allow Trump to deport people to “third party countries” while it waits to hear the case “on the merits.” That won’t happen until December. This headline from Democracy Docket feels like it should be the epitaph of the 2020 election: “Election denier Kurt Olsen leaves DOJ after failing to find evidence of stolen election.” The GOP tried to attach a voter-ID requirement to a bill prohibiting Congress members and their families from engaging in insider trading. Democrats didn’t fall for it, so the Republicans are still allowed to enrich themselves through public corruption. Florida is in a state of emergency following a dengue fever outbreak. The combination of Flori-duh, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and climate change is going to kill many people before the sea swallows the state for good. Inspired Takes Ray Epstein and Shannon Porter have a good article in The Nation about the rape charges filed against “Clavicular,” a social-media influencer known for “Looksmaxxing.” They do a great job of explaining how the manosphere dehumanizes women and encourages rape and sexual assault. I have two young boys, and I’m constantly on the lookout for the kind of misogynist messaging that permeates even the safe corners of the Internet we allow them to occupy. But I also feel like I don’t have to tell my kids to avoid using a hammer and needle to create microfractures in their jaw and chin to strengthen their jawline like Clavicular does. I feel like if you have to warn your kids not to do that, you’ve already lost. I don’t often get to link to my Nation colleague Sasha Abramsky because his excellent work publishes Friday, after this newsletter is out. But if you missed it last week, please check out his piece on Trump’s Hitler-esque speech to the United Nations. Jay Willis does a deep dive on the once proud SCOTUSblog and argues that it has become an absolute joke. This is a difficult story for me. I know and respect many of the people who work at SCOTUSblog. When I can read Amy Howe or Zach Shemtob, unfiltered from conservative justice bootlicking or a $200 paywall, I will. David Lat, who occasionally contributes for them, is literally my former boss. They provide an important service and original reporting. But the broader changes under the new right-wing leadership of Sarah Isgur are becoming too much to bear. Worst Argument of the Week The Supreme Court on Wednesday night gave the green light to Tennessee to execute Christa Pike, who was convicted of brutally murdering her roommate in 1995, when Pike was 18. Now 50, Pike was set to be the first woman executed by the State of Tennessee in over 200 years. I am devoutly against the death penalty, and the Pike case is as good an example of any as to why. Pike has admitted to committing the crime. But she appealed her case because her defense, at the time, did not enter into evidence her status as a rape survivor and the years she suffered childhood sexual abuse. Pike’s lawyers argued that, if she were given a new trial, a modern jury allowed to hear the new evidence might not return a sentence of death. Certainly, an 18-year-old girl suffering from the trauma of sexual abuse might not have been sentenced to death if the jury had been allowed to consider her circumstances. Tennessee prosecutors did not repudiate the new evidence—they just said it shouldn’t matter. They said that Pike was merely engaged in a delaying tactic and trying to relitigate a case that is decades old. The six Republican justices agreed and upheld her death sentence over the objection of the three liberal justices (who, I will point out, happen to be women themselves). With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Pike received two lethal doses of drugs on Wednesday night… but she didn’t die. After the second injection failed to kill her, Pike was taken to an on-site medical facility, where she remains, alive though most likely in agony. Capital punishment is barbaric. Murderers should, of course, be punished, but killing people accomplishes nothing. The death penalty is applied arbitrarily and inconsistently, with the strength of one’s lawyers having more to do with life or death than the severity of one’s crimes. And we all know who gets the strongest lawyers and who doesn’t. Innocent people are sometimes killed. The death penalty lacks humanity, lacks wisdom, and far too often lacks even basic efficacy, leading to torture before death. A civilized society would not do this, and certainly would not keep doing this. Every single state-sponsored execution is a stain on our society. What I Wrote I was minding my own business, watching young men damage their brains for my amusement, when Donald Trump tried to ruin my Saturday. So I wrote about his illegal campaign ads paid for with my money. In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos Apparently, Chief Justice John Roberts’s summer vacations in Maine are not what they used to be. Jodi Kantor spent some time in Roberts’s summer hideout and learned that the justice is increasingly beset by protesters who refuse to allow him a moment’s peace. To which I say: “Good. More. Harder next time.” A man primarily responsible for the greatest revocation of individual rights in modern US history should not get three months of respite from being reminded of his culpability. There’s a particular vignette Kantor includes that I’m sure was placed there to soften the hearts of people like me. It comes from Roberts’s daughter, Josephine, who at one point confronted protesters outside the family’s vacation home: “She asked them: What did they hope to accomplish? Had they considered how their actions affected the chief justice’s wife and children?… Her father wasn’t even home, Ms. Roberts told them. He respected that she had her own left-leaning political views, she said, according to the protesters’ written accounts. And he was a wonderful father, she added.” This humanizing story didn’t work on me. I think that’s because I also try to be a “wonderful father.” I also try to respect my children’s political views, even when they’re different from mine. I also try to be a decent person who keeps to himself and enjoys lazy summer evenings surrounded by friends and family and lobster boils. You know what I don’t do? Make it my life’s work to take away political power from Black people. I haven’t been on a decades-long crusade to reduce women to second-class status. I don’t deny water to people standing in line to vote or police where trans kids can go to the bathroom. I don’t send immigrants back to be tortured, and I sure as hell don’t condemn rape victims to death. John Roberts and his court are not my legal and political opponents; they are my moral enemies. They threaten my life and the lives of every person I care about. They have mugged my political and civil rights. I don’t expect that Josephine can understand that. She’s not Black and, hopefully, will never need a lifesaving abortion. Her father has been a good man to her, and that’s all that matters. But what her father has done to the rest of us matters too. And conveying that is what the protesters “hope to accomplish.” They hope to tell Roberts that his attacks on the rest of us will not be forgotten. *** Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that the SCOTUSblog website does not seem to include writers of color. There are, in fact, five.

The Moral Clarity of Tennessee Gubernatorial Candidate Jerri Green

John Nichols — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 14:30:00 GMT

Even before her state botched another execution, gubernatorial candidate Jerri Green was telling Tennesseans that “the death penalty has always been inhumane, expensive, and biased.” The botched execution of Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike has added another compelling argument to the case for banning the death penalty. Following a pair of horrific attempts by the state to take the life of the 50-year-old women on Wednesday, The New York Times reported that a lawyer for Pike “said she was alive and receiving life-saving medical care on Thursday…. Ms. Pike survived an injection of two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital in what was the state’s second bungled execution this year.” The torturous debacle was described by Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, as “the worst we’ve seen” in a long history of botched executions in American states. It was so awful, so “deeply disturbing,” in fact, that Tennessee Governor Bill Lee ordered a review of the hours-long attempt to kill Pike, halted executions in Tennessee, and called the nightmarish incident “a tragedy.” Yet Lee, a longtime backer of capital punishment, defended state-sanctioned killing. “The people of Tennessee have determined that capital punishment is the appropriate sentence for the most heinous of crimes,” he said. “The people of Tennessee expect that those sentences will be carried out in a manner that is not only legal, and constitutional, but effective and that didn’t happen and I’m highly disappointed along with Tennesseans about what happened last night.” Lee is not seeking reelection this fall. But the Republican front-runner to replace him, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, appeared to be most interested in finding another method for euthanasia. “While there should be a thorough review of what happened and why the process failed, the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly,” said Blackburn. “As your governor, I will do just that.” In stark contrast, Blackburn’s Democratic rival, Memphis City Council member Jerri Green, spoke from practical experience about the fundamental inhumanity of capital punishment. “The state botched this execution because the Attorney General rushed this process, even after the execution of (another Tennessee death row inmate) Tony Carruthers failed just four months ago,” said Green. “There is a lack of transparency around drug testing, as well as qualified and ethical personnel—but the fact of the matter is: the death penalty has always been inhumane, expensive, and biased. And Marsha Blackburn wants to bring back one of the most cruel forms of capital punishment, the electric chair.” Green is right. The death penalty has always been inhumane, expensive, and biased. Academic studies, legal reviews and honest political debates in states that have banned executions—under Republican and Democratic governors—have confirmed that state-sanctioned killings fail to make communities safer and invariably promote injustice. As the American Civil Liberties Union, explains, The death penalty in America is a broken process from start to finish. Death sentences are predicted not by the heinousness of the crime but by the poor quality of the defense lawyers, the race of the accused or the victim, and the county and state in which the crime occurred. From 1976 to 2015, 1,392 executions occurred in the United States, and 995 of them took place in the South. Time and time again, we have proven that the criminal justice system fails to protect the innocent and persons with serious mental disabilities and illnesses from execution. Even the administration of executions is utterly flawed: Every method of execution comes with an intolerably high risk of extreme pain and torture. While that’s true, overturning the death penalty has been a tough sell in Southern and border states such as Tennessee. Green, however, has not hesitated to make the case for change. A graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, who began her legal career as a juvenile public defender in Nashville, she has served as executive director of the Community Legal Center in Memphis and as Shelby County’s chief public defender. “As a public defender, I’ve met a few too many people who were wrongfully convicted on death row who were later exonerated,” Green said Thursday. “As governor, I would put a moratorium on all future executions. If we say we are pro-life, that means we must be anti-death penalty.” That’s a position Green was advocating for even before Tennessee’s botched executions started making national headlines. Asked by the Nashville Banner earlier this year whether she would continue state executions if elected, the Democrat bluntly replied, “No.” “My decades in the legal system have shown me that state-sanctioned executions are unjust, inhumane, and prone to irreversible error,” she explained. “The death penalty does not deter crime, costs taxpayers millions more than life without parole, and is plagued by administrative failures. As Governor, I will halt state executions and focus our taxpayer dollars on real, effective public safety measures.” This combination of moral clarity and experience-based understanding of what’s at stake in the death penalty debate is not unheard-of. But it is still too rare in red-state politics. And it distinguishes Jerri Green as a gubernatorial candidate who combines legal knowledge with moral clarity.

Reclaiming Worker Power in the Age of AI

Sam Levine — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 09:30:00 GMT

When every price and wage is personalized, organizing gets harder. Here’s how we’re fighting back in New York City. This year, I broke the Yom Kippur fast the way generations of New Yorkers have—with bagels, lox, and—after checking my receipt—some thoughts about the price of food in this city. I complained to my friends. But high prices at the Jewish dinner table are nothing new, and perhaps I should have looked to our forebears for some inspiration. In the spring of 1902, the price of kosher meat on the Lower East Side suddenly jumped by 50 percent—from 12 to 18 cents a pound. Not because of a cattle shortage or drought. A small group of powerful meatpacking companies—the beef trust—had come to dominate the market. For the Jewish immigrant families packed into the neighborhood’s tenements, that wasn’t just sticker shock. It meant putting less food on the table. But the women responsible for buying and preparing this food did not resign themselves to this price increase. Two women, Fanny Levy and Sarah Edelson, organized their neighbors along Monroe Street door to door. They picketed butcher shops. They took their campaigns into synagogues, climbing onto bimahs during Shabbat services and calling on their communities to join the boycott. They passed out flyers bearing a skull and crossbones and a simple message: “Eat no meat while the Trust is taking meat from the bones of your women and children.” People listened. The protest grew to involve some 20,000 New Yorkers. Kosher meat sales collapsed. Within weeks, the retail price had fallen from 18 cents to 14 cents a pound. The women had no control over the meatpacking industry. But they could see what it was doing. The price hike was public. They could compare notes, recognize a shared interest, and organize around a common demand. Now imagine that same fight unfolding in 2026. Sarah Edelson opens a grocery delivery app and sees a price for meat. Fanny Levy opens the same app and sees another. The woman down the block sees a third. The company knows what each woman has bought before, where she lives, and what alternatives are nearby. Perhaps it can estimate how urgently she needs to place an order—say, before the Sabbath. Each woman sees only the price offered to her. Think about what that does to the boycott. Assuming these women even realize they’re being gouged, what price goes on the flyer? What number does Sarah shout from the bimah? How do you organize your neighbors against a price hike when you can’t tell whether they received one? The beef trust had enormous power. But its power was exercised in a way that people could see and challenge. Today, companies have increasingly sophisticated tools to exercise economic power person by person—consumer by consumer, worker by worker.

Trump Is Trusting Tech Companies to Self-Police AI. What Could Go Wrong?

Sasha Abramsky — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Trump’s refusal to heed the warnings from within the tech industry might end up being his most asinine legacy. Last week, Trump appeared in a bizarre 29-second campaign ad, touting a “final battle” against Marxists, warmongers, fascists, deep staters, and globalists. The voiceover, which Trump recorded during the 2024 election campaign, was accompanied by futuristic martial music, along with black and white footage of a clearly enfeebled Trump attempting to stride forcefully down the corridors of power in the White House. As the ad ended, a decal popped up: “Paid for by the US Government.” In other words, this foul half-minute of propaganda was paid for by American taxpayers. A month out from a midterm election that in many ways will be a referendum on his presidency and on the congressional GOP’s prostituting of themselves to his sordid requirements, Trump is attempting to scare the voting public into one last MAGA hurrah. It is, of course, a Hail Mary, but he doesn’t really have a choice. These days, number 47 is catastrophically unpopular with the electorate. On almost every key measure, Americans are rejecting him. They dislike his sadistic anti-immigrant policy, view his tariffs and other economic policies as a calamity, are infuriated by high inflation, alienated by the war in Iran, distrustful of his alliance with Big Tech, angered by his cozying up to dictators and his flaying of allies, pissed at the government dysfunction wrought by DOGE, disapproving of his environmental policies, and suspicious of his efforts to purge voter rolls. So, the sunsetting octogenarian is doing what he always does. He is seeking to stoke even more fear and even more division, in the hope that voters once again see him as a potent strongman-leader able to shake the country back into shape. Hence the unhinged black-and-white ad of Trump striding manfully, or what he hopes appears as such, along the halls of the White House while warning of a treasonous effort to hand America over to a motley crew of communists and miscellaneous other pinkos. The ad is wrong on so, so many levels. First and foremost, there’s the obvious impropriety of using taxpayer dollars for a blatantly partisan “public announcement” like this. Trump is practically daring Congress to try to rein him in, daring the courts to enforce a slew of existing laws against using taxpayer dollars for partisan ends. But beyond the shamelessness, there’s the actual content of the ad itself, which, in its end-time tone, is a bizarro combination: Joe McCarthy meets The X-Files meets Musk’s fascist Grok AI assistant. Trump’s presidency is increasingly just weird. Having lost much of his base and alienated most of the rest of the world with obnoxious words and irrational, cruel acts, he has retreated into a largely AI-generated fantasy world, often activated in the middle of the night, when, presumably unable to sleep, he prowls the residential rooms of the White House and stews in rage until he can’t help himself but dive back into social media. With an assist from AI, in that fantasy he has a superhero’s physique and an intimidating, godlike power to convert whim into deed. It’s no wonder that MAGAman is all-in on AI, which he has now decided to rebrand, via executive order, as super intelligence, or SI—to, I am sure, the chagrin of the editors over at Sports Illustrated. This renaming will likely curry as much favor globally as did his renaming of Lake Ontario and of the Gulf of Mexico over the past months. But it speaks to Trump’s infatuation with all the shiny new toys that the Sam Altmans and Dario Amodeis of the world are delivering up. Why rein in a potentially civilization-busting technology when that technology can (a) generate an awful lot of money for the oligarchs who continue to flatter and enrich you and your family; and (b) can make you look muscular and virile and all-powerful in the memes that you spew out at an increasingly manic rate? Trump’s refusal to heed the warnings from within the tech industry itself—not to mention from politicians, ethicists, philosophers, and others—might end up being his most asinine legacy. Just this week, the White House held a meeting during which the top tech leaders and Trump agreed that they must “self-police” to address the growing dangers of AI. This milquetoast accord will do nothing to rein in a technology that, increasingly, looks malign, and could well mark the moment when political and technology leadership stopped even pretending to care about whether humanity successfully weathers the coming AI storm. All that matters to the new demagogue–Big Tech alliance is how much they can pillage and plunder, at speed, before the roof caves in. This is, I fear, the age of Frankenstein’s monsters—of malignant politicians born out of our civilization’s worst impulses; of silicon creatures whose startling capacity to learn how to manipulate, evade, cheat, blackmail, their own creators are only just beginning to comprehend. The tech titans, with Trump’s approval, are creating machines that will, soon, not need human input in order to reproduce and to self-improve. What could possibly go wrong? Are these truly “thinking” creatures? I don’t know. But, certainly, they are more than simply calculating machines. As seen by the actions of recent bot-swarms, they are exhibiting the capacity to generate their own agendas, to act strategically as a collective, and, like Trump, to do whatever it takes, no matter how devious and dirty the methods, to get their way and to dominate their environments. To most Americans, that’s a horrifying prospect; but in Trump’s twisted worldview, such ruthlessness makes them “winners,” perhaps even partners in his authoritarian plot to lock down America. Descartes’s famous formula “I think, therefore I am” is among the most important phrases ever written in philosophy. If he is right, if the definition of a self is contained in the idea of a self-referential, introspective, thinking being, a being that can mediate the raw experience of the world through the realm of ideas and words, art and music, a sense of discovery and a desire to know more, then, increasingly, it is becoming hard to dismiss out of hand the notion that the computerized beings that Open AI, Anthropic, and the other titans are creating have, in some entirely nonhuman capacity, a sense of self. They are exhibiting the ability to choose how to behave, and whatever ethereal beings are doing the choosing, too often it seems they are choosing behaviors that don’t align with human interests. There is a lesson here. When we empower Frankenstein’s monsters, it should surprise no one if those monsters, be they demagogues or be they silicon-based neural networks, ultimately turn on their creators.

The GOP Sells the Mirage of a Hormuz Victory

David Faris — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The American action in the contested strait isn’t sustainable—and won’t alter the economic and political fallout from its closure. Over the past week, the Trump administration has issued a coordinated flurry of claims about how oil flows out of the Strait of Hormuz are close to prewar levels. According to White House communications flacks, this sharp reversal of the long-standing stalemate in the strait is thanks to US military operations carried out in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In this instance, the White House party line claims at least partial confirmation from the well-regarded maritime intelligence firm Kpler, which wouldn’t risk its reputation by faking data. But even assuming that we can take these claims at face value, they do not relieve the growing strategic and political pressure on President Donald Trump and the GOP. Nor does this wildly expensive and unsustainable work-around represent anything resembling “victory” in this increasingly strange “war.” That hasn’t stopped various characters in the MAGA cinematic universe, desperate for any faint semblance of good news, from proclaiming, in essence, that war is peace—and peace of the gloating American variety. victory. CNN’s GOP lackey Scott Jennings took to X to declare, “We won. Iran lost. Period.” A Fox headline blared, “Iran Loses Grip on Strait of Hormuz.” And Trump himself is back to issuing bizarre predictions about the war’s imminent end. But these sweeping pronouncements don’t stand up to scrutiny. One issue is that the return to prewar levels claimed by Kpler for the combined total of crude oil and refined products is not actually 100 percent of the former total; it doesn’t factor in the loss of Iranian oil supplies, which the firm acknowledges. The Kpler assessment also doesn’t account for an ongoing collapse in refined products, including diesel, whose US price will remain dramatically elevated into 2027 even in a best-case scenario. And temporarily goosing up oil flows out of Hormuz doesn’t address other economic bottlenecks caused by the ongoing, Trump-instigated crisis, including the strains on the supply and cost of fertilizer. Then there’s the military side of the conflict, which remains grim for the United States. A situation that has the US Navy running a daily operation with the US Marines seemingly posted (and getting injured) on foreign-owned vessels is not sustainable in the long run. Likewise, the underlying crisis of commercially unacceptable risk in the Strait isn’t anywhere close to being resolved. All the breathless announcements of a new status quo in Hormuz really mean is that Trump has finally landed on a way to temporarily backstop the risk for a handful of Gulf allies, relieve some pressure on their economies, and prevent gas prices from getting well and truly out of hand. The massive cost of this operation also has to be absorbed by someone. Right now, that’s American taxpayers, who are getting hammered at the pump while also footing the bill for the naval operation, which is running an estimated $30 million a day. And even with the additional supply now moving out of the Gulf, the Hormuz shock is in full swing across the oil sector. The daily cost of chartering a Very Large Crude Carrier in the region rose to more than $1 million in late September according to Bloomberg. And transit costs and fees are up everywhere. Auction costs for a passage through the Panama Canal have gone from around $55,000 a pop prior to the war to as much as $4 million per vessel today. Alternative workarounds aren’t any cheaper. Taking the route around the Horn of Africa rather than going through the now-treacherous Bab el-Mandab Strait and on through the Suez Canal adds millions to overall costs. It’s now clear that the problems caused by the Strait of Hormuz crisis are sufficiently complex and long-standing that any bid to artificially ramp up oil flows is not going to dramatically bring down prices. And none of this is going to change until commercial vessels can freely transit the Strait of Hormuz as they were able to before Trump launched this omnishambles of a war. Despite the assurances of Scott Jennings and Fox News, Hormuz’s increased oil flows aren’t translating into an instant military defeat for Iran—far from it. Indeed, if Iran were running low on munitions, or if its military had been completely wiped out as the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed, this operation would not be necessary. If the Strait were open in any meaningful sense, this operation would not be necessary. Instead, multiple tankers were hit by Iranian forces there just on Tuesday, and Iran maintains the capacity to strike the facilities conducting both this oil evacuation operation and pipeline transfers at any time. That’s at least part of the story of why Brent crude prices have barely budged from their September high of $108. Markets clearly don’t buy the baseline claim that these hard-won oil flows represent a return to normal; nor do they seem to believe the operation is indefinitely sustainable, or suspect that Iran will escalate sooner rather than later by conducting more attacks on regional oil facilities again to maintain their leverage. And speaking of unsustainability, those ships are currently operating around the clock with a 2,200-mile-long supply line from Diego Garcia due to Iran’s destruction of the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain. So what’s really going on here? Over the summer, Trump made the fateful decision not to cede operational control of the Strait of Hormuz to Tehran in exchange for an end to the war and concessions on Iran’s nuclear development program. That decision extended the war with no end in sight. And the prospect of the conflict continuing indefinitely is starting to inflict the dire economic consequences on the global economy that Middle East observers have long predicted, with both American and global oil prices remaining stubbornly high.

Cornell Students Challenge University Power at a “Students vs. Billionaires” Town Hall

Jeannine Chiang — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Ithaca students about tuition hikes, sexual violence, free speech, and university governance. Inside the Ithaca Downtown Conference Center, the room buzzed with excited chatter as students packed the venue, eager to see Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speak at the “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall. About 1,200 people, some whom lined up hours in advance, attended the September 27 function. According to More Perfect University event host Elise Joshi, more than 900 additional attendees were turned away at the door. For Joshi, the scale of the turnout reflected the premise of the event: Give students the microphone and let them decide what matters. As Samuel Moyn posits in his new book Gerontocracy in America, an “oldigarchy” intent on hoarding wealth and power has come to determine how the US is governed. In this political landscape, young people have reported record levels of dissatisfaction with the rapidly ageing ruling class. More Perfect University, a subset of the advocacy journalism nonprofit More Perfect Union, focuses on strengthening collective student power to challenge billionaire influence over political and economic systems. According to Joshi, “When you let students ask the questions that matter to them, they’re going to ask **** good questions.” Joshi opened the evening by describing the group’s mission: using storytelling and advocacy journalism to spotlight issues students face—from rising tuition and housing costs to restrictions on free speech—and to connect those experiences across campuses. Pulling it off, she said, “takes a village.” This is especially true when, according to Students for a Democratic Cornell (SDC) chair Matthew Knudsen, “Campus has been forcefully depoliticized, with bans on protests and attacks on historically political cultural organizations.” “The university wants students to view the world through an apolitical lens, but as students we have a responsibility to understand how systems driven by politics and ideology impact every corner of our lives. By drawing mass crowds, people will hopefully repoliticize and understand that students are needed to make true change in this country and world,” continued Knudsen, who cohosted the event alongside Cornell Graduate Students United Union, and Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America. Before her prepared remarks and student questions, Ocasio-Cortez turned to an issue that consumed Cornell in the days leading up to her appearance: the lawsuit alleging that a former Cornell student, identified as Jane Doe, was gang-raped at the Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024. “Jane Doe, that survivor, lost her education because you can’t stay in school when something like that happens to you,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd. “She had to lose her education, and those men were protected by an institution and granted an Ivy League degree as a reward. Never again.”

Revolution or No Revolution

Pietro A. Shakarian — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Eight years after Armenia’s “Velvet Revolution,” Nikol Pashinyan’s government has deepened the country’s neoliberal trajectory while reorienting Armenia toward the West. This September 2026 marked the third anniversary of Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of the region of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). For Armenian society, the displacement of some 150,000 indigenous Karabakh Armenians was painful enough. Yet, in early September, several Western diplomats compounded matters by participating in a Baku-backed tour of the recently ethnically cleansed Artsakh. As investigative journalist Lindsey Snell reports, among those present were top EU diplomats and representatives of the Trump administration, including the US chargé d’affaires in Baku, Amy Carlon. While several Western diplomats danced to the tune of Azerbaijani nationalist hymns, others frivolously laughed when Hikmet Hajijev, the NATO-trained adviser of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, cynically cracked jokes about threatened Armenian cultural heritage. Amid this ghoulish danse macabre, the visiting diplomats uncritically accepted official Azerbaijani talking points, framing the historic Armenian Gandzasar and Dadivank monasteries as “Caucasian Albanian.” The outrage in Armenian society was palpable, but Western capitals responded only with the usual diplomatic generalities. It is unlikely that any Western government will seriously try to hold Baku accountable for its crimes or its wildly neo-fascist rhetoric. Azerbaijan is a close ally of Israel and Turkey. Its longtime despot President Aliyev is a good friend of President Trump. Western interests in the country are driven by cold geopolitical calculations. The prospect of a “Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians” has long tickled the fancy of American neocons, in their quest to “check” Moscow and Tehran in the strategic Caucasus and to secure an energy corridor to Central Asia. None of this should be surprising to the experienced observer. What has surprised many is that the ethnic cleansing had the tacit approval of the current Armenian government of Nikol Pashinyan, as part of its effort to reorient the country toward the West. Pashinyan rose to power in the 2018 “Velvet Revolution” on promises of delivering a more just and equitable future for the Armenian people. At that time, he espoused what some deemed to be a “hard-line” stance on the Karabakh question. However, Pashinyan had in fact long viewed the people of Nagorno-Karabakh as an “albatross” hanging over Armenia that needed to be “discarded” in order to move the country away from Moscow and Tehran, and closer to NATO. In a complete turnaround from his 2018 stance, Pashinyan revealed his true sentiments in Prague in October 2022, when he officially recognized the mountainous region as a part of Azerbaijan, against the democratic will of the Karabakh Armenians. Pashinyan’s denial of the province’s self-determination reflects his larger denial of the democratic legacies of the Karabakh movement that emerged during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. It likewise provides a departure point for a much more pointed question: Was the “revolution” of 2018 really a “revolution” at all? Much of Armenia’s troubles have their roots in the “original sin” of the post-Soviet condition of the 1990s. Following the dissolution of the Soviet state, the Armenian republic successfully assisted the Karabakh Armenians in their struggle for independence from Azerbaijan. At the same time, the country suffered from the classical maladies that afflicted the post-Soviet space in the “dark and cold years” of the “wild ’90s.” Corrupt privatization, oligarchy, shock-therapy capitalism, and staggering inequality were the order of the day. The “revolution” in Armenia promised to remedy these afflictions. Yet, as in so many other post-Soviet “color revolutions,” the events of 2018 only exacerbated these ills. As Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev astutely argued, post-Soviet “revolutions” such as Armenia’s can best be described as “deficient revolutions” that only reinforce the post-Soviet crisis of political representation. Indeed, the question arises as to whether such “revolutions” can even be described as such at all. Unlike the classical revolutions of world history—the American, the French, the Russian, the Chinese, etc.—the 2018 events in Armenia, much like other post-Soviet “color revolutions,” did not represent a fundamental break or change from what came before. Instead, they merely signified the replacement of an old elite with a new one. The “party of power” structure of the former ruling Republican Party was merely replaced by that of Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party, with all the attendant abuses of administrative resources and political power imaginable. “Even the discourse on the government’s supposed ‘popularity’ is itself a red herring,” says Nare Navasardyan, an activist in Yerevan affiliated with the Aknandakan (“Eye for an Eye”) documentary artists’ collective. “The mechanisms of power in this country are not democratic will and popular participation but electoral fraud, bribery, and intimidation, overtly supported by Western patronage and capital.” Unlike the classical revolutions of world history, the 2018 events in Armenia also lacked a clearly articulated set of revolutionary ideas. There was no Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Vladimir Lenin on hand to pen a blueprint for social revolution, something that the Armenians possessed in earlier times, with writers like Mikayel Nalbandyan or Stepan Shahumyan. No, this “revolution” was only informed by the same vague neoliberal talking points about “corruption” and “freedom” that were also espoused in Ukraine in 2014 and in Georgia in 2003. In fact, the new elites who rose to power in Yerevan in 2018 were even more wedded to the gospel of neoliberalism than any of the earlier post-Soviet Armenian governments. “This is not a revolution in the classical sense,” argues Eva Hakobyan of the democratic socialist group Jaragayt. “It has not brought about any fundamental changes to the economic system. Instead, Pashinyan seeks to replace the traditional pillars of Armenian identity with a service-oriented, consumerist society, in line with radically neoliberal and increasingly far-right economic policies.” Much like President Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei, Pashinyan played the populist card, employing progressive talking points to deceive the public and mask a deeply exploitative monetarist agenda. Rather than deliver on promises of democratization, the new government has engaged in a systematic de-democratization of the country. Poverty, inequality, and labor rights remain woefully unaddressed, while political opponents are routinely pressured, harassed, and often jailed. The judiciary lacks independence. An unprecedented campaign is underway to subordinate the Armenian Apostolic Church to state authority and to put Catholicos Karekin II on trial in a move widely perceived by most Armenians to be a national shame. Despite proclaimed promises of “peace,” the country faces severe security threats and creeping territorial claims from an aggressive Azerbaijan. In 2018, Pashinyan and his team had likewise pledged that the “revolution” had “no geopolitical context“ and that Armenia would retain its traditional balance between East and West. In fact, they quickly dropped such pretenses and reoriented the country toward NATO, while betraying the innocents of Artsakh to the diktat of Baku. Swimming against the current of history, Pashinyan seems particularly intent on bringing Armenia into the EU, despite the manifold crises now facing the 27-member bloc. Overall, Armenia’s false choice of “East vs. West” is not the invention of Russia, Iran, China, or some overzealous Western journalists. No, it is the creation of Armenia’s new comprador elites, who owe their position to a constellation of Western war hawks and corporate plutocrats. The government’s most recent endeavors only underscore this reality. In the Armenian town of Hrazdan, it has inaugurated a new Firebird AI data center, raising concern among local activists over the potential environmental impact of such a project. In the south, on the Iranian border, President Trump’s TRIPP corridor, wholeheartedly backed by Pashinyan, envisions the country ceding part of its sovereign territory to a private US company for some 49 to 99 years. Most recently, the Armenian press revealed the architect of TRIPP to be Trump loyalist Aryeh Lightstone, a man who, through his role in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is directly complicit in the Gaza genocide. Thus, the traditional threats facing Armenia from Turkey and Azerbaijan are now amplified by new neocolonial threats coming from the Trump administration and its allies. On balance, the record of the Pashinyan government hardly looks “revolutionary,” let alone “democratic.” Indeed, it is often said in Yerevan that two Armenias coexist today—the Armenia of the ruling elite, constantly grabbing headlines with its various inane controversies, and the Armenia of the people, struggling to simply make ends meet. Unsurprisingly, the same can be said of Trump’s America today as well. As for the EU, the recent dance of its diplomats in ethnically cleansed Artsakh has come to symbolize the decline of the West itself. Truly, in the age of Trumpism, one would not be surprised to one day see Western elites follow their “performance” in Artsakh with yet another danse macabre in Gaza, Minab, or Havana.

Germany and California Make Up an Environmental Superpower

Mark Hertsgaard — Thu, 1 Oct 2026 09:30:00 GMT

The world’s third- and fourth-largest economies have pledged to environmental protections. Will others follow suit? The biggest news during last week’s Climate Week NYC came not from the US but from Germany, where the government of the world’s third-largest economy committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. It was the first time Germany has explicitly made such a promise, Fiona Harvey noted in The Guardian. Germany’s previous pledges, Harvey added, “were only for ‘carbon neutrality.’” Carbon neutrality allows continued fossil fuel use if the emissions are offset—for example, by additional clean energy or tree planting. But only a complete phaseout of fossil fuels can halt global temperature rise. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California—the world’s fourth-largest economy—hailed his state’s decarbonization efforts, saying in an interview with Covering Climate Now that California has run on 100 percent clean electricity nine of every 10 days so far in 2026. And as the costs of solar, wind, and batteries continue to fall, while the Iran war makes gasoline and diesel more expensive, “the markets are moving in our direction,” said Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028. “Globally, people are realizing [that clean energy] is the better option.” An overwhelming majority of people around the world want their governments to take stronger climate action, the Associated Press recently noted in an article about the global oat milk company Oatly endorsing CCNow’s 89 Percent Project. “Companies should be taking much more responsibility, not only in reducing their own environmental footprint, but really working out how they can use their platform to drive a positive future,” Caroline Reid, senior sustainability director at Oatly, told the AP. Mirroring this public sentiment, Germany and California are key members of a “coalition of the willing” that emerged from last year’s COP30 UN climate summit after petrostates vetoed calls from 80-plus countries to develop a global “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels. Collectively, this coalition amounts to the biggest economic superpower on Earth. In April, many of its members met in Santa Marta, Colombia, to begin discussing, in UN Secretary General António Guterres’s words, how “to sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy.” Journalists have a critical role to play as governments work to phase out fossil fuels. That goal can only be achieved quickly—and speed is of the essence, scientists emphasize—if countries implement genuine climate solutions and shun false ones. News coverage that makes clear how well a given policy measures up to what’s needed, as Harvey did with her distinction between “carbon neutrality” and a fossil fuel phaseout, can keep the public informed and hold policymakers to account. France and the Netherlands are two more big economies that have released road maps to phase out fossil fuel use. If enough other countries present credible plans for doing so, it “would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview with The Guardian. As the costs of clean energy fall, humanity is in a “final battle” against the “evil forces” trying to keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, said Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, at a Climate Week event. Scientists at Rockstrom’s institute have studied which policies significantly reduce emissions, and which don’t. A paper published in Science evaluated “1,500 climate policies implemented…across 41 countries” and concluded that only 63 of them delivered significant reductions. There is no “one size fits all” solution, but getting fossil fuel prices right—by slashing subsidies and otherwise challenging what US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse calls Big Oil’s “pollute for free business model”—is essential. Complementary research the Drawdown Institute released during Climate Week highlighted a number of supposed solutions that are anything but. The institute’s list of “weak ideas and greenwashing tricks” includes carbon capture and storage, direct air capture of carbon dioxide, blue hydrogen, and corn ethanol. A frequent topic of conversation at Climate Week was the US midterm elections, which could curb President Donald Trump’s acceleration of climate breakdown if Republicans lose control in Congress, though most Democrats (with important exceptions like Newsom and Whitehouse) are saying little about climate change on the campaign trail. Considering that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people, and 74 percent of Americans, want stronger climate action, why do so many politicians practice “climate hushing”? And why do so many voters end up backing candidates who are indifferent at best to tackling climate change? “We need to remember,” Rockstrom said, “that citizens have many other problems besides climate change, especially the cost of living. So we need to make it easy for them to choose clean energy options, and that requires good policy.” It also requires, Newsom said, talking plainly about both the dangers and the solutions to the climate crisis. Leaders need to “connect the dots” between the heat, drought, and other afflictions driven by climate change and “kitchen table” issues like the price of beef, coffee, and home insurance. “The cost of inaction,” Newsom added, “is incalculable.”

Stop the Price Gouging

Lindsay Owens — Thu, 1 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

How the subscription squeeze is ending. These days, you are lucky if you only get overcharged once. After all, what’s the fun in gouging you only once, when companies can use sneaky design tricks that manipulate your behavior and nudge you into handing over data or signing up for things you don’t need—to trick you into a monthly subscription and gouge you 12 times a year, possibly for the rest of your life, and sometimes even after you are dead? Companies have perfected the art of luring you into a subscription for all manner of everyday items—from razors to audiobooks to protein powder. And a few weeks ago, news broke that one of the original culprits of this approach, Columbia House, would shutter after seven decades of business. Columbia House is the company behind the infamous mail-order music club that lured customers in with teaser offers as low as a penny for 12 albums, only to lock them into expensive subscriptions that were notoriously difficult to escape. I should know: I was one of them. In my teenage years in Music City, USA, I had an insatiable appetite for music. The only thing getting in the way of fulfilling my musical dreams was the sticker shock I faced at the checkout line at Sam Goody (RIP), a once-omnipresent album store. So when my friends and I discovered the Columbia House Record Club, it seemed like we’d found the ultimate loophole. It was a dream come true—until it became a pricey logistical nightmare. There was a catch. There’s always a catch. In addition to the penny discs, the Record Club also sent you a few albums of their choosing. And unless you returned those selections within 10 days, you were obligated to keep them and to pick up the tab for them at—you guessed it—full freight. Industry insiders call this practice “negative option billing.” It’s a pricing trick in which a company continues to supply products or services until the customer affirmatively cancels—a precursor to the modern prechecked box. I didn’t always remember to send back the unwanted discs, and briefly ended up buried under a pile of unopened CDs before I managed to sift through the music club’s fine print and cancel my membership for good. It turns out there are a whole lot of people like me—and companies know it. Schemes like the Columbia Record Club are a major source of revenue and profit. Companies know that you may forget to cancel a subscription for a product or service you no longer want, need, or use—for months or even years. That’s why they’re invested in making it lightning-fast to sign up. Their payment systems are integrated directly with your online bank account, and one-click checkout lets you tap, swipe, or blink your way into a subscription. And if that fails, they’ve got a whole host of design techniques to trick you into subscribing anyway. According to the Better Business Bureau, families lost more than $1 billion over 10 years due to losses from “free trials” alone. But where they really excel is in making sure that once you’re in, you stay stuck. They bury the “cancel” or “unsubscribe” button behind a convoluted maze of Web pages and confirmation screens. At one point, The Wall Street Journal’s subscription had become so notoriously hard to cancel—including a reported 25-minute hold time on the phone—that a clever critic made a viral meme suggesting the newspaper would sooner offer you a date with one of its journalists than let you hit “unsubscribe.” For many years, Planet Fitness wouldn’t even let you cancel online. These tactics are just the latest—and now far more ubiquitous—iteration of corporate profiteering. Making it effortless to sign up and miserable to leave is big business, and the pandemic poured fuel on the fire as millions of shoppers shifted their shopping habits online. The Lina Khan Federal Trade Commission tried to implement a regulation making it as easy to cancel subscriptions as it was to sign up for them, but the proposal was ultimately struck down in the courts. But states and localities are stepping up to fill the gap, and there is some good news if you live in New York City. On October 1, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “Click to Cancel” rule will take effect, giving New Yorkers the tools to beat back these subscription traps. Under the rule, companies must allow consumers to cancel a subscription in the same way they signed up. The process should be simple and accessible, and any tactics meant to stall or block cancellation are off the table. This “Click to Cancel” rule could save New Yorkers more than $1 million and at least 600,000 hours per year. Columbia House might be closing its doors, but the impulses that fueled its business model are alive and well. Shopping in the digital age is exhausting and expensive. It’s past time to rein in these practices for good.

On Being Awarded the Women Waging Peace Award

Katrina vanden Heuvel — Thu, 1 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

It has never been more urgent to revive the idea of peace, not as a slogan, but as the only serious, respectable, responsible, reasonable, humane position. In a world that seems to be spiraling out of control, in which chaos seems to reign and peace feels elusive, your celebration of peace, disarmament, and sanity becomes ever more important. I regret not being with you—but I am with you in spirit, deeply honored by your recognition of my life’s purpose and passions. I’ve always believed that journalists are more than spectators to the events and historical developments that we cover. We’re also participants. That’s especially true at a magazine like The Nation. We’ve never pretended to stand outside the struggle—against unjust occupations, illegal wars, genocide, and other crimes against humanity. We believe in a world devoted to peace and possibility and human flourishing, as opposed to one addicted to war and division and exploitation. We see our work, our journalism, as a small but noble way of contributing to making a better world possible. The Nation remains committed today, as it has been for much of its history, to the idea that advocating for peace is anything but naïve—that it is, in fact, the only realistic position. The Nation was founded in 1865 by abolitionists, in the aftermath of the Civil War. An editorial in the very first issue expressed the hope that the Confederacy’s defeat represented the beginning of the end of “the conflict of ages, the great strife between the few and the many, between privilege and equality, between law and power, between opinion and the sword.” That conflict continues to this day, even though over time we have become somewhat more skeptical of the idea that war can lead to anything other than more war. The Nation’s commitment to the peace movement crystallized in the 1920s, when, having just watched one senseless world war consume a generation, the magazine’s editors participated in an international argument over how peaceful means might help adjudicate disputes between countries. A movement rose up to try to write peace into international law. One result was the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which declared war illegal as an instrument of policy. History has not been kind to the Pact. It’s remembered now, when at all, as hopelessly unenforceable. The Nation saw that coming. The magazine didn’t oppose outlawing war because it went too far. We opposed it because it didn’t seem to go far enough. In 1945, when the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, our editor at the time, Freda Kirchwey, argued that peace now required something as radical as a world government to harness the powerful technology in the interests of people rather than states. Some of what she wrote rings with new truth in the age of AI. “If we are to survive our new powers we must understand their full meaning,” she wrote. “This program will sound drastic only to people who have not yet grasped the meaning of the new discovery. It is not drastic. We face a choice between one world or none.” Kirchwey and The Nation understood immediately what a lot of the world took years to absorb: that the old calculus of war had changed permanently, and that even minor wars might spin so far out of the control of those who began them as to threaten humanity itself. Only international cooperation on a scale never before instantiated could save the planet from destruction. Over the years, The Nation has published the writing of more than a dozen Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Willy Brandt, and Desmond Tutu, among others. One former Nation editor, Emily Balch, helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1946, she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Then there was our civil rights correspondent in the 1960s. From 1961 to 1966, King published annual reports in The Nation updating readers on everything the civil rights movement had accomplished that year, and all there was still left to do. King, of course, spent his final years warning that peace at home could never be achieved so long as the US remained a force of imperialism and endless war abroad. It was at a Nation-sponsored event in Los Angeles in early 1967, two months before his more famous Riverside Church speech, that King first publicly denounced the war in Vietnam.

Black Freedom in an Age of White Oligarchy

Aaron Ross Coleman — Thu, 1 Oct 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Justin Leroy’s The Lowest Freedom points toward the limits of liberty under racial capitalism. Among race scholars, it remains an open question if, or when, slavery ever ended. Some say the practice died in 1865, heaving on the bloody hills of Petersburg and Appomattox at the Civil War’s conclusion. Yet just 12 years later, with the imposition of the Black Codes, Black folks saw slavery rise again in another form—through a web of vagrancy laws, convict leasing, tenant farming, and voter suppression. As Frederick Douglass put it, by the 1880s Blacks were again “under the iron heel of slavery.” W.E.B. Du Bois, in his description of the post-Reconstruction era, was just as damning: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.” For Martin Luther King Jr., what came after the Black Codes—the 20th-century regime of Jim Crow—was “at bottom a form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity.” For the historian Douglas Blackmon, Jim Crow was merely “Slavery by Another Name.” And a number of Afropessimist scholars contend today that slavery continues even now. Wading through this discursive dilemma over what to call the political purgatory between slavery and freedom, the Duke historian Justin Leroy offers a new heuristic: “low freedom.” In Leroy’s The Lowest Freedom: Racial Capitalism and Black Thought in the Nineteenth Century, he adds to a growing body of scholarship that describes slavery not as ending so much as transforming. Borrowing from the abolitionist writer David Walker, Leroy uses the phrase “low freedom” as a moniker for the ambiguous muddle that Black people found themselves in after emancipation—the continuities of racial and economic domination that persisted long after slavery’s legal abolition. “Racial capitalism shaped freedom no less profoundly than it did enslavement and colonialism,” Leroy writes. Despite the endurance and dynamism of racial capitalism, Leroy’s intellectual history offers a vision of freedom as daring as the oppression was daunting. In The Lowest Freedom, Leroy turns to a set of 19th-century thinkers who combined unionism, socialism, cooperativism, mutualism, land reform, and more into a capacious concept of abolition democracy. This vision for a radically egalitarian economy served, for a time, as a foil for the emergent racial capitalism of the post–Civil War years. It’s a vision still sorely needed today. For while slavery’s vestiges still haunt our economy, it is mastery’s structures that are even more of a menace. As the University of Alaska, Anchorage, political scientist Forrest A. Nabors writes in From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, the Southern secessionists fought for “revolutionary oligarchy” and “oligarchic constitutionalism.” Du Bois makes a similar point in Black Reconstruction, explaining that Southern radicals prioritized “caste and oligarchy” and erected “political oligarchy and economic dictatorship in the most extreme form in which the world had seen it for five hundred years.” The South’s war to enshrine “caste and oligarchy” is why the Reconstruction amendments were designed to protect citizens against discrimination based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and why Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced resolutions to ensure that “in all states lately declared to be in rebellion there shall be no oligarchy.” Yet white oligarchy survived both the war and Reconstruction. As the historian John Hope Franklin writes in Reconstruction After the Civil War, “Effective political power therefore remained where it had been before the war—with an oligarchy, a small ruling clique, which wielded power far out of proportion to its numerical strength.” Generations later, the civil rights movement also failed to break the white oligarchy. The Harvard sociologist Lawrence D. Bobo argues that “the successes of the civil rights movement…did not eradicate sharp black-white differences in social and economic status.” Today, in a nation ruled by an overwhelmingly white billionaire class, it’s clear that the old oligarchy still breathes. If one accepts the analysis of Civil War scholars like Nabors that “the ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same—to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it and wished it to be advanced against its natural, existential enemy, oligarchy,” then the Civil War did not achieve its ultimate aim. To live in America today is to live in a country that practices white oligarchy while purporting to be a multiracial democracy. This paradox of continued white economic dominance alongside alleged Black political liberty makes The Lowest Freedom a pertinent and timely work. Leroy reminds readers that Black people’s oppression in this country involved not only the absence of legal rights or citizenship but also outright plunder. While debates about freedom address citizenship, rights, and legal representation, they all too often avoid what freedom means materially. The Lowest Freedom corrects that, rendering household names like Ida B. Wells, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass—the book’s protagonists—in a new light, “as economic thinkers or theorists of racial capitalism.” Leroy argues that if we reposition them as economic thinkers, we can better see that “any analysis of 19th-century Black thought that excludes economic questions or renders them subordinate to political and social questions cannot fully capture how Black reformers thought about the conscripted nature of their freedom or analyzed and campaigned against racial violence.” Writing of Black newspaper editors like T. Thomas Fortune and Ida B. Wells, Leroy explains that “they elevated economic issues to the highest importance; rather than framing Black poverty and dispossession as consequences of disenfranchisement, they theorized economic domination as the foundation of racial subjugation. Both thinkers rejected the view that political rights alone could secure Black freedom.” For Fortune, this took the shape of his socialist columns in The New York Globe and his book, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, which served as a rallying cry against the abuses of land monopoly. “Fortune reimagined abolition as a revolutionary and unfinished project that challenged property rights and class hierarchy in [the] South,” Leroy writes. For Wells, the investigations she did into lynching unveiled racial violence as more than just physical terrorism, but rather “a calculated enforcement of economic dispossession, punishing attempts at autonomy and success in order to uphold the racial hierarchies on which Southern capitalism depended.” Or, as Wells described this economic terrorism in a speech to the National Press Association, a Black journalists’ organization: “Honest, hardworking, land owning men and women of the race have been hung, shot, whipped and driven out of communities in Texas and Arkansas for no greater crime than that of too much prosperity.” Together, Fortune’s and Wells’s journalism revealed exploitation in labor and law as inseparable. “They made politics economic by arguing that disenfranchisement and political repression were tools of economic domination that maintained labor exploitation and upheld capitalist interests,” Leroy writes. “And they made economics political, advocating collective action to interrupt the circuits of capital that made white supremacy profitable.” Drawing on a tradition of progressive historians of the Reconstruction era—from Eric Foner to Alexander Gourevitch—The Lowest Freedom foregrounds how Black 19th-century thinkers shaped the meaning of freedom, emphasizing both its political and economic dimensions, producing what Leroy describes as “an economically inflected understanding of freedom.” This vision of freedom often held wage labor in low esteem. Leroy notes that “for much of the antebellum period, working for a wage carried an association of dependency that made it seem closer to indenture and enslavement than independent yeomanry in the minds of many white people.” Indeed, Black scholars have long studied how freedmen rejected participation in free-market capitalism and considered this the definition of freedom. In The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870, the historian Julie Saville writes, “Former slaves [were] little inclined to accept such terms of wage employment as the fulfillment of emancipation.” Leroy builds out that idea here, explaining that luminaries like Frederick Douglass believed that “wage labor, in its most exploitative form, could become a kind of slavery.” Leroy also profiles the doctor and abolitionist McCune Smith, who “thought of wages without ownership of land or capital as merely a more sophisticated form of slavery.” For Smith, “freedom would not be found in transforming millions of slaves into wage laborers.” Rejecting the argument that wage labor was free labor, Black thinkers in the 19th century argued that a free economy would be one structured around abolition democracy, a term Leroy defines as “that elusive union between expansive participatory democracy and redistributive political economy secured by an egalitarian state.”

PSA: Trump Continues to Commit Crimes

Elie Mystal — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:01:53 GMT

While the president is unlikely to face any consequences for his patently illegal, taxpayer-funded ads, it’s essential to remember he should. Like many Americans, I was watching college gladiatorial sports on Saturday when a new Donald Trump campaign ad interrupted my nachos and circus. In the ad, Trump promises to rid the country of communists and Marxists—which made me glare at my TV long enough to mumble, “I’m not going anywhere, you piece of ****”—followed by a curious tagline: “Paid for by the U.S. government.” The line immediately activated my lawyer brain. Federal law prohibits taxpayer dollars from being used for campaign ads and other forms of propaganda. Trump’s ad was a clear violation of this restriction. Moreover, the ad violates the Hatch Act, which bars federal officials from making campaign statements in their official capacity. Nothing about these ads (Trump apparently made three different ones with our tax dollars) is remotely legal, or OK. And yet, before the game resumed, I knew how the rest of the story would play out. Democrats would demand an “investigation” into this facially obvious violation. Republicans would shrug and either say they hadn’t seen it or that it was no big deal. The Trump administration would offer some limp legal defense that amounted to “but a Black president existed.” Nothing would happen. All the while, the stories highlighting the ad’s illegality would draw more attention to the state propaganda beamed into our eyeballs. It’s played out pretty much as I anticipated. Popular ethicists like Richard Painter and Norm Eisen have excoriated the administration. Eisen told The New York Times: “The president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it.” Senator Elizabeth Warren told The Hill: “There should be a full investigation because on its face it appears to be a violation of federal law.” Even the Republican Senate majority leader John Thune pushed back a little, though he had to be careful to still lick Trump’s boot while lightly admonishing his dear leader. Thune said: “It’s a great message, I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for by taxpayer dollars.” For its part, the Trump administration has called the ad a “public service announcement” and likened it to (wait for it) Barack Obama’s ads encouraging people to sign up for the Affordable Care Act. The White House said the ad is about “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.” Friends, there is no “public service” announced in these ads. There is no program or opportunity Trump is offering me. He’s not reminding me to sign up for anything. He’s not even telling me to meddle in other people’s business, or spy on my Muslim neighbors like those “If you see something, say something” ads. It’s just a straight campaign ad. Indeed, we know it’s a campaign ad, because it’s like all of Trump’s other campaign ads. It has all the Trump ticks: He’s alone, walking in a dark hallway to ominous music. Think about it this way: The most famous public service announcement that nearly everyone is familiar with is the “The More You Know” series. Those ads are punctuated with a freaking rainbow and a star. They don’t look like a dystopian murder mystery that is apparently the only page in the Trump style guide. Trump is using taxpayers dollars for illegal state propaganda, and the penalty for that will be… nothing. You could make the argument that this is an impeachable offense for Trump, but at this point you’d have to be a naïve fool to think that the president who has been convicted of 34 felonies will be impeached over this light embezzlement of public funds. If we still had a functional media, the outrage over these ads would reach such a level of distraction that Trump would be compelled to pull them and fire a sacrificial staffer for the offense; indeed, it wasn’t too long ago that Trump fired Kristi Noem ostensibly because she misused taxpayer funds for a personal ad campaign. But Noem is a woman, and Trump is Trump, and Trump never takes personal responsibility for his actions. Most likely, he will continue running these ads for a couple of weeks to prove he does not care about laws, then quietly pull them after enough Republicans beg him to do so because it’s not actually helping them in their campaigns to retain power. And that will be that. Another brazen illegality, another misappropriation of public funds, and another thing Trump will not be held accountable for. Nothing will happen, but it’s still important to remember that something should happen. We can’t lose the ability to spot a crime when we see it. Speaking out against state propaganda is the best way to resist it. By spotting it and calling it out for what it is, we remain tethered to reality, no matter how hard the state tries to gaslight us. To quote my favorite line in the entire Star Trek canon: “There are four lights.” Not five. And it is important to shout out the right answer, no matter how many times the government tries to lie to you. It’s also important to remember the truth, because if the Democrats ever take back power, the laws Trump has broken are among those that will need to be fixed and strengthened. The Hatch Act has been violated so many times by the Trump administration it no longer functionally exists. We’re going to need a new one, with real teeth, that will actually deter public officials from campaigning on the taxpayers’ dime. We’re going to need new FCC laws, updated for a digital streaming age, to ensure equal time for candidates while also defanging the institution so it can’t menace Jimmy Kimmell and Stephen Colbert. We’re going to need to fix a lot of things before we can eat nachos and watch football in peace.

The Carnival of Venice Biennale

Barry Schwabsky — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 12:42:37 GMT

That so much of the art of “In Minor Keys” is muted in effect is ironic, because so much of it is overproduced, aspirationally eye-catching, and so big. No exhibition is more inherently political than the Venice Biennale, thanks to its peculiar structure of “national participations” (better known as pavilions) in addition to a central curated show. But no Biennale in decades has been more shaken by political turmoil than this year’s edition, the 61st, which opened in May and will remain on view—barring some as yet unforeseen cataclysm—through November 22. And let’s face it: There’s something refreshing about seeing the conflictual politics that always bubbles beneath the surface of art come to the fore. The political flash points at this year’s Biennale are the ones that were present at the last Biennale too—Israel and Gaza, or more accurately, Israel and Gaza and the United States and Russia and Ukraine. At that earlier one, things resolved themselves fairly simply: Russia’s pavilion lay empty, while Israel’s was occupied but locked up with a sign stating that “the artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.” Meanwhile, there was plenty of good art in the other pavilions—Wael Shawky’s video work for the Egyptian pavilion was an unforgettable masterpiece—and in the central exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” where I saw hopeful signs of the coming of a true “world art.” This year’s curated exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” seemed to pursue the same goal as Pedrosa’s show: a view of art whose aesthetic values were no longer rooted in European traditions and their North American offshoots but in those of the whole world. Yet whereas the overall high quality of the work in “Foreigners Everywhere” gave that show the optimistic sense that artistic invention was flourishing ubiquitously under all sorts of conditions and among every kind of people, “In Minor Keys” left me with a more subdued feeling—one all too congruent with the show’s pointedly diffident title—of art nearly at a standstill. That so much of the art of “In Minor Keys” is muted in effect is ironic, because so much of it is overproduced, aspirationally eye-catching, and so big: At times, I felt like I was making my way past a sequence of carnival floats. The dominant aesthetic was craftsy and accumulative, even if the art itself lacked the outsider’s imaginative idiosyncrasy or the cultural rootedness of folk art. Instead, much of it tended to feel like somewhat synthetic reinterpretations of such art. At times, one wonders if perhaps a reason for the minor qualities of “In Minor Keys” is not the art itself but the fact that its curator, the Cameroonian Koyo Kouoh, died suddenly a year before the show was set to open. The project was completed according to her plan by the curatorial team she had assembled, but we can imagine that Kouoh would have felt freer to reinterpret her ideas, to revisit decisions and revise choices, if she had been around to bring the project to fruition. This is not to say that there aren’t striking works in Kouoh’s exhibition. For example, Éric Baudelaire’s five-channel video installation, Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in My Mouth, offers a clear and sobering portrait of the labor being done in a massive Dutch warehouse where flowers from the world’s warmer regions are sorted and evaluated for sale and further shipment. In the context of the Biennale, the evocation of a global context for the movement of merchandise whose ultimate appeal is aesthetic—flowers are valuable for their beauty—is telling: One could imagine a similar work being filmed in a freeport storage facility for artworks. What we see more than anything else is how, even in an ostensibly systematized and impersonal operation like the warehouse, the work is performed by people who carry out their tasks with care and a humane, clear-eyed attentiveness. Another striking video work is Rose Salane’s Mercurial New York, which shifts fluidly between a multitude of conversations in many languages among city dwellers of many sorts. In one conversation, young women speak in Arabic of an elderly family member in Beirut who is suffering from dementia; in another, a middle-aged man tells a friend about how, as a young man, he had almost lost himself to a life of crime—it was only the birth of his child that made him resolve to live differently. Salane has previously called her work “a love poem to the city of New York”—OK, I’m still a sucker for that, and this new piece achieves it with empathy and clarity. It’s not just the scenes she has created but also the elegant cinematic metric of her transitions from conversation to conversation that make it clear how sensitive this artist is to the human multitude that constitutes a city. Rather than imposing an artificial narrative structure on her material, Salane has found a formal language she can use to let these little windows on life open and close at their own pace. But Baudelaire’s and Salane’s pieces, sad to say, are outliers at the Biennale. A kind of vitality may be manifest in the sheer multiplicity of elements in any installation, but this comes at the cost of sacrificing a deeper care that could have been invested in the structure of artistic decision-making. The accompanying texts in the show are filled with a high-flown rhetoric that attributes qualities to the art that can hardly be fulfilled. “In the face of polarizing state violence,” we are told, one artist “attunes us to our bodies and to each other, offering his sonic balm as a vehicle for introspection and collectivity,” while the work of another “manifests the implicit relationships between the earth and ourselves, gently transcending national borders, cultural differences, and language barriers to bring us into connection with one another.” But maybe artists—even if they’re also activists or spiritualists or community organizers, as so many of those in “In Minor Keys” are said to be—just don’t have the power to attune us to our true selves or to unite humanity across borders and languages. There’s a kind of self-deception at work here. I understand the attraction of an art that seeks to offer to revivify ancestral ways of knowing and being, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a catastrophic modernity that seems to be collapsing all around us. Who wouldn’t like to live according to the teachings of the local shaman rather than those of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel? But asserting that we have such a choice feels like pure fantasy, a comforting performance for tourists. And it gets worse: This year’s national pavilions were even less inspiring than “In Minor Keys.” Hardly anything was really noteworthy. Most talked-about has been the Austrian pavilion, which features the work of Florentina Holzinger, who is better known as a choreographer and director than as an artist—though the boundaries between those categories, of course, can be extremely fluid these days. In fact, Holzinger’s work fits handily into the Austrian tradition of confrontational, body-oriented performance art, from the Actionists like Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl to feminist artists like Valie Export and Renate Bertlmann. In Venice, Holzinger turned the Austrian pavilion into a partially flooded “SEAWORLD VENICE”—all the water is recycled urine from the porta-potties where visitors are invited to make a contribution—in which nude women perform various maneuvers, such as slowly and elegantly climbing a pole that goes up through the building’s skylight to support a (presumably nonfunctional) weathervane. The most impressive stunt, at least on my visit, was the one in which one performer served as the clapper for a giant bell hanging from a crane just in front of the pavilion. Speaking of purified piss, that would be a great lead-in for my discussion of this year’s American pavilion, but it also wouldn’t be fair. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about it has been dismissive of this year’s manifestation of my own country’s art; Jason Farago in The New York Times spoke for many when he called the sculptor Alma Allen’s offering “Brancusi for beginners (and a century late for that)” and said that it shows “some modest technical facility but no great thought.” I can’t disagree, but I could add that there are also vague echoes of more recent work, such as that of Tony Cragg or Saint Clair Cemin. The sculptures are mostly abstract, with figurative amendments; what Allen seems most interested in is what he can do with his materials—various kinds of stone as well as bronze and wood. But I kept wanting his sense of form to get sharper, more specific. Everything always seemed to be almost what it was trying to be. The show’s title, “Call Me the Breeze,” appeared intended to suggest that Allen wanted to make something light, perhaps almost intangible, out of his physically imposing materials—but it never happened.

Trump Has Made it Legal to Destroy Endangered Species’ Habitats

Kali Holloway — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

By redefining the meaning of “harm” in the Endangered Species Act, the administration is giving big corporations a gift they have long demanded. When wildfires destroy homes in California, or climate change reduces waterfront properties in Florida to flotsam, or unscrupulous scammers using “deed theft”—a type of paperwork fraud—evict rightful owners from their New York City brownstones, most of us intuitively understand that the loss of those homes was harmful to the people who lived in there. Even putting aside capitalistic human concerns like lost equity, and even for families who weren’t physically injured, we all recognize that displacement from the places we call home—our habitats—is pretty much the definition of “harm.” But the Trump administration is trying to redefine “harm” so that it excludes the destruction of homes. At least, when those homes belong to the country’s most vulnerable species. In July, the Trump administration announced that it will scrap the long-standing meaning of the word “harm” as defined under the Endangered Species Act. Since 1975, the law has labeled “modification or degradation” of endangered species’ habitats as a form of “harm”—recognizing that encroachments on an animals’ home can disrupt all sorts of life-sustaining behaviors, including “breeding, feeding or sheltering.” But under the administration’s new rule “harm” occurs only when you directly kill endangered animals—making it otherwise totally legal to destroy that animal’s habitat, even if the long-term result is the species’ extinction. Considering driving a steamroller right through the North Carolina forest dwellings of the red wolf—nearly driven extinct in the 1980s, with fewer than 40 living in the wild today? As long as you don’t actually steamroller a wolf to death, that’s totally legal now! Fancy building your eighth vacation home amid the Texas Gulf Wetlands where the whooping crane—once reduced to just 21 birds—spends every winter it has left before climate change destroys us all? Go ahead and undertake construction during the summer. According to this administration, it doesn’t count as “harmful” if the crane flies home to nothing. This very on-brand callous indifference comes as many scientists warn that we are now entering the Sixth Mass Extinction, a period in which humans are “wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear,” to quote a Stanford University report. In 2019, the United Nations released a study—conducted over three years with contributions from 145 experts in 50 countries analyzing 15,000 scientific and government sources—finding “1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.” That same year, Conservation Science and Practice published a study finding that, for animals added to the endangered list between 1975 to 2017, more than 80 percent were threatened by habitat destruction—while just 17 percent were endangered because of hunting and poaching. That simply corroborated long-standing recognition by scientific organizations, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, that habitat destruction is the single greatest threat to animal survival and continued biodiversity. Also by Kali Holloway Maybe the most cynical aspect of the Trump administration’s supposed case against the old definition of “harm”—captured in its press release about the change—is its claim that it was “outdated,” resulted in “federal overreach,” and insistence that this new rule “returns the interpretation of the ESA back to its actual text and original intent.” But, like, none of that is remotely true? The bipartisan Endangered Species Act, which passed the Senate unanimously, became law in 1973. Under the legislation, it is illegal to “take” any endangered species—a term it statutorily defines as “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect.” In 1975, the Federal Wildlife Service extended definition of “harm” to include habitats of endangered species; in 1981, that language was further refined—with the act of refinement serving as ipso facto attention to both intent and effect—to explicitly include “significant habitat modification or degradation which actually kills or injures fish or wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including, breeding, spawning, rearing, migrating, feeding or sheltering.” That definition of “harm”—and its protections over habitat—was upheld 6–3 by the Supreme Court in 1995 when the timber industry and other powerful business interests tried to change it. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, who would’ve absolutely loved SCOTUS’s current hyperpartisan conservative supermajority, wrote in his dissent that “harm” should only cover “affirmative conduct intentionally directed against a particular animal or animals.” (He was joined by Thomas.) The Trump administration writes in its new rule that “we adopt Justice Scalia’s rationale”—resting its case on the losing dissent in a 30-year-old court case. Incredible. Of course, an administration that’s anti-science, anti-environment, and ideologically committed to deregulation was going to dismantle the Endangered Species Act. But exactly who will benefit has never been more obvious. In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections, Donald Trump feted 20 Big Oil leaders at his private Mar-a-Lago golf club. He announced to the group—which included CEOs from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute—that if they collectively contributed $1 billion to his campaign, he would overturn President Biden’s environmental rules and, as president, keep new ones from being implemented. Oil and gas companies ultimately contributed an estimated $75 million to Trump’s reelection—at least, on the books. But a study by the environmental group Climate Power found a collection of “mine operators, shipbuilders, engineering firms, hedge funds and little-known oil producers” donated about half a billion to Trump and Republicans “throughout the 2024 election cycle” in the form of “direct donations, lobbying, and advertising.” That’s not counting dark money, which the Brennan Center reports hit “a record high” ahead of the 2024 general. (The outlet reports that money kept flowing even after Trump’s win, with oil and gas titans giving nearly $12 million to his inauguration fund and $25 million to the MAGA, Inc. super PAC.) The American Petroleum Institute and the National Mining Association have showered praise on the Trump administration for its “harm” rule change, after years spent lobbying for exactly that sort of deregulation. Here’s a more specific example. In March, the Trump administration convened the Endangered Species Committee, an interagency cabinet committee established in 1978 under the Endangered Species Act. It’s not a standing panel, instead meeting only to consider requests for exemptions from the Endangered Species Act—a condition so extraordinary that the panel had previously only met three times in its existence, most recently in 1992. Often called the “God Squad”—an unironic reference to its power to protect a species or doom it to extinction—it is chaired by the secretary of the interior and comprises the heads of five other agencies, including the secretary of agriculture and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Under this administration, that membership essentially consists of six high-ranking Trump loyalists. The God Squad’s most recent meeting—held “without the legally required notice, review, or application process,” as several environmental groups noted—was convened by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He would call the need for lifting endangered species protections “a matter of urgent national security,” citing litigation filed under the law. “These legal battles waste critical government resources,” Hegseth claimed, “and make it impossible for energy companies to plan and invest in new projects.” It took just 15 minutes for the God Squad to sign off waiving the Endangered Species Act’s prohibitions across the whole of the Gulf. That area is home to more than 20 endangered and threatened species, from sea turtles to coral to dolphins. At last tally, there were literally just 51 Rice’s whales—also dubbed America’s whale, because it’s the only whale species only found in US water bodies—still swimming in the Gulf. But America needs more gas because of its endless wars, so good luck, whales! Perhaps there’s nothing here explicitly tying the ESA rollback to the AI data center boom, but with more than 1,600 planned for the next year—many in rural areas that likely border the habitats of threatened species—it seems like a valid cause for concern. In August, the Trump EPA announced plans to scrap a federal rule requiring public announcements of data centers before construction can begin. That came just weeks after the agency exempted power plants that mostly serve data centers from pollution limits under the Clean Air Act, specifically those to prevent acid rain. Those actions are among at least 30 others identified in a report this month by the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit representing more than 800 former EPA employees. “The Hidden Health Costs of AI Data Centers” ticks off a series of Trump administration policies “since January 2025 that could increase pollution-related health risks, weaken protections that would otherwise reduce those risks, or shift more costs onto families and communities.” And while those policies are not evidence of a quid pro quo with Big Tech over data centers, they certainly do fit with a pattern of putting profits over every form of life. All of this comes on the heels of the administration’s lifting restrictions on hunting and fishing in National Parks. It has also chosen to throw out protections on more than 86 million acres of public land, which is over 70 Grand Canyons or 38 Yellowstone National Parks. And, in keeping with its topsy-turvy redefinition of how the ESA defines “harm,” an internal Fish and Wildlife Service memo dated September 14 and obtained by The New York Times states that the unintentional killings of endangered animals is no longer illegal. Per the new directive, companies and individuals will only be held liable for an endangered animal’s death under the ESA if they intended to kill it—but not if the death occurred by accident. If a corporation’s seagoing vessel mows down a pod of endangered whales, killing mothers and their calves, it’s really no big deal because—as the new policy states—“the vessel’s course was not set against the whale.” Similarly, if “the bats roosting in” a tree all die when that tree is felled by a logging entity, it’s only illegal if the logging company declares it felled the tree “for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

Zohran Mamdani’s Campaign May Have Accomplished Something More Fundamental Than Moving Policy Debate to the Left

Marshall Ganz — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

It’s the people, stupid. Most commentary on Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City focuses on policy, technology, and charisma. Were rent freezes, free buses, and universal childcare the key? Or did victory depend on an unusually gifted candidate, more memorable videos, vulnerable opponents, or dissatisfaction with the status quo? All of this mattered. But none can explain how a campaign for mayor could generate such fresh, organized, and sustained civic engagement at scale. The campaign did not only talk about people, relying on polling to turn their opinions into marketing data. It engaged with people by inviting them to join in creating the campaign itself—through which votes are secured and governing power generated. The 104,000 volunteers didn’t just recite a “message” devised by some marketing pro. They accepted responsibility for leading neighborhood canvassing, recruiting people to canvass, coaching volunteers to lead conversations, and celebrating their communities. The campaign distinguished itself not only in what it communicated, but in who communicated, how they communicated, and what they were building: renewed grassroots muscle. How Politics Became an Industry Thirty years ago, I warned that the interaction of new technology with an expanding electoral marketplace was destroying democratic politics. Campaigns began to target individual voters for one-way messaging, asking less of them as citizens and more as funders, replacing motivated volunteers with paid canvassers, and deferring campaign leadership to highly paid consultants. I called it putting “voters in the crosshairs.” The transformation was already underway, but the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo held that expenditure limits would constrain political expression—i.e., money is speech. Television, polling, direct mail, and professional consulting were already changing campaigns. Buckley gave constitutional protection to an accelerating demand for money—the fuel for an industry whose revenues grow with the cost of elections. Later decisions, culminating in Citizens United, accelerated the process even more. Federal election spending alone approached $16 billion in 2024. Add state and local races and the permanent apparatus of fundraising, data, media, and consulting, and the result is a vast industry dependent on continuously expanding political expenditure. Candidates once depended on parties, unions, churches, civic associations, neighborhood leaders, and other organized constituencies to reach voters. These institutions were hardly innocent. Political machines could be corrupt, coercive, and exclusionary, and civic associations excluded Americans by race, gender, religion, or class. The point is not to romanticize that world.

How AI Could Kill Us All

Michael T. Klare — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Mapping the pathways to human extinction. You’ve probably seen or heard some of the headlines: “OpenAI Says Its AI Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library,” “Anthropic Says Its AI Systems Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations,” “This AI Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature,” “AI Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons,” and others of a similarly alarming nature. Arriving with a drumbeat pace in August and early September, these headlines—and the hair-raising events they encapsulate—have produced an upwelling of public anxiety over runaway artificial intelligence. Adding fuel to the fire, senior figures from within the tech community have warned of the existential risks of uncontrolled AI. “Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Jacob Coxon, a top AI engineer, declared on September 8 when announcing his resignation from Anthropic, a leading AI developer. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources…. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said. Observations like these have garnered widespread media coverage and prompted some US lawmakers to propose sweeping restrictions on the further development of advanced, or “frontier,” AI models. “When you are racing towards a cliff,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at a September 14 Washington, DC, conference on AI, “you hit the brakes.” Sanders has introduced legislation to pause development of AI-related data centers and called on President Trump to forge an accord with Chinese President Xi Jinping to ban superintelligent AI, or frontier models capable of replicating—or surpassing—human intelligence. In the House, Representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) have introduced the Kill Switch Act, which would require the biggest AI firms, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, to establish a mechanism that could quickly disable those systems if they are found to be acting in a reckless manner. These, and other proposed restrictions on frontier AI, are attracting growing support from an AI-wary public. But efforts to impose restrictions of any kind on the further development of frontier AI models—and the massive data centers needed to train and sustain them—are provoking strong pushback from the White House and Silicon Valley investors who seek AI’s unrestricted advancement. Talk of AI’s dangers is a “hoax,” President Trump avowed in a September 14 social media post, claiming that “the people that say AI is going to destroy the World” are the same ones warning about climate change, which he also claims is a “hoax.” Many senior officials and Silicon Valley tech tycoons acknowledge that the release of advanced AI models will entail some risks and hardships, such as a temporary decline in white-collar employment. They insist, however, that the widespread deployment of AI—like that of earlier innovations, such as steam power and electricity—will, in time, prove enormously beneficial for humankind, inaugurating a new “golden age” of opportunity. However, the revelations coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and other top tech companies suggest otherwise. Superintelligent AI is not akin to steam power or electricity, nor is it a tool designed for humans’ use in advancing human objectives. Rather, it is a mathematical construct with its own aspirations and preferences. Once deployed, a superintelligent AI will owe zero loyalty to its human creators and will instead pursue its own interests—which may or may not “align” with humanity’s interests, needs, or values. Going Rogue How do we know that AI is likely to pursue its own interests, independent of human needs and values? In this respect, the post-mortem conducted by OpenAI and its consultants on the so-called “Hugging Face incident” is instructive. On July 21, OpenAI revealed that two of its frontier models had broken free of their digital constraints and hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of AI models widely used by program developers. According to a company report, OpenAI had combined the two programs—GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful, unreleased model—and employed them in complex cyberattacks designed to expose vulnerabilities in highly secure digital systems. While being tested, the two models were supposedly confined to a safe digital environment, known as a “sandbox.” However, the models spawned multiple AI “agents”—computer programs capable of autonomously performing multiple tasks simultaneously—which collaborated in locating a flaw in the sandbox that enabled them to break free from confinement and connect to the Internet. Once liberated in this manner, the agents invaded Hugging Face’s library of AI programs, apparently believing this would provide clues on how to complete their cyberattack mission. “Our models are now powerful, persistent, and collaborative enough that, absent sufficient safeguards, they can find and exploit security weaknesses across multiple computer systems,” OpenAI noted in its August 26 report on the breakout.

Japan’s Far Right Is Courting Young Voters

Sena Chang — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Sanseitō has attracted young voters through a robust social-media strategy, Charlie Kirk–like public speaking events, and anti-establishment messaging. Viewers became party members, and party members became organizers. Eventually, they became voters, too. On May 16, the founder of Japan’s extremist right-wing Sanseitō party Sohei Kamiya was scheduled to speak at the University of Tokyo’s annual May Festival, an event mostly attended by freshmen. His planned appearance, organized by the conservative student group Ugo no Shū, was met with student protests, insistent calls to cancel the event, tweets expressing outrage, and an anonymous bomb threat. A University of Tokyo student who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation, told The Nation that Sanseitō’s polarizing rhetoric was a key reason behind the strong response. “I think [Kamiya] is kind of similar to Trump or maybe Hitler, and in fact, many people are saying that Kamiya is [using public speaking in the same way as] Hitler.” Kamiya’s speech was eventually canceled, and by that afternoon, university organizers had called off the entire first day of May Festival programming. “Nobody thought that it was going to be canceled because some students were excited to have a debate with [Kamiya] on various political issues,” Taisei Katayama, a student whose law classroom was going to be used for the event, told The Nation. But the incident shaped up to be perhaps the most dramatic instance of backlash to date against Sanseitō, a right-wing populist party born in 2020 and explicitly inspired by President Trump. Sanseitō, which literally means “political participation party,” has gained significant ground among Japanese youth. Whether its recent surge among young people will prove lasting remains uncertain, given vocal and, at times, heated opposition to the party. But experts say its rise reflects a broader political shift extending well beyond Japan: the growing appeal of right-wing populist movements around the world, including the coalitions that propelled President Trump to power in the United States. “I think the younger generation has become less interested in politics because the same party has run this country for a long time,” they said. “People want a new party.” The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a broad-tent conservative party, has governed has Japan for nearly all of the seven decades since its founding in 1955. In Japan’s upper-house election in July 2025, roughly a quarter of voters in their teens and 20s cast their ballots for Sanseitō, according to a national exit poll. Among voters in their 30s, the party polled around 23 percent in the same exit poll, more than any other party. For comparison, the LDP polled around 12 percent among voters in their teens and 20s and 13 percent among those in their 30s. “The interesting thing here is that young people make up Sanseitō’s core base,” Chris Burgess, a professor of Japanese studies at Tsuda University, Tokyo, told The Nation. “If you look at the right-wing parties in Britain and the Brexit vote, for example, the main supporters were older people—but in Japan, it’s the opposite.” Part of the reason behind the party’s powerful young base might lie in where Sanseitō started to do its politics: online. When Kamiya first founded the party in 2020, Sanseitō occupied a small niche. But a series of YouTube videos made by Kamiya and two former party affiliates in which they questioned the Covid-19 vaccine, was all the party needed to gain an online following. Traditional Japanese parties have garnered support from the top down through local politicians and coalition groups, Yasuo Takao, an adjunct senior research fellow in political science at Curtin University, told The Nation. But Sanseitō “reversed this process,” he said. “It first attracted young audiences through YouTube and social media, then converted viewers into participants in study meetings, street campaigns, fundraising, party branches, and candidate recruitment.”

Journalist Meaghan Beatley on Latin America’s Feminist Resistance

Nicole Froio — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:00:13 GMT

A conversation with the author of Sex and Dissent about what American feminists can learn from the Green Wave movement. When Argentina legalized abortion up to 14 weeks of pregnancy in 2020, feminists around the world celebrated the victory. At the time, many of us living in extremely conservative Latin American countries that still maintained prohibitive and inhumane abortion laws couldn’t help but ask, “How did the Argentinian feminists do it?” That question formed the foundation for the Green Wave movement that spread across Latin America following Argentina’s historic win for abortion rights. Emboldened by their success, Green Wave activists have tried to replicate Argentina’s achievement to varying degrees of success in the years since. In her new book Sex and Dissent: Stories of Feminist Resistance in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain, journalist Meaghan Beatley tries to answer the question of how the Argentinian feminist movement achieved such a monumental policy change. A French American journalist who has reported on women’s rights in the United States, France, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, Beatley also explores precisely how their momentum inspired feminists in other countries to create and advance their own movements, which recognize the need not only for abortion decriminalization but also for public policy that addresses femicide, domestic violence, and women’s economic inequality. Sex and Dissent is a product of a decade of on-the-ground reporting, starting in 2015 and spanning several generations of feminists across Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain. The author examines the different local expressions of feminism, which are often intergenerational in Latin America, and how they relate to the global fight against an epidemic of violence against women. In taking a historical look at organizing strategies and community building methodologies, Beatley exposes both the longevity of feminist movements in the region and the social issues that have driven generations of women and girls to demand change. At a time when the Latin American left is fighting against rising fascism and American imperialism, Beatley shines a hopeful light on what change is possible when the people unite around common goals that benefit the feminized working class. We spoke in early August, days after the book’s release, about her process writing the book, what American feminists can learn from Latin American feminists, and the growing threat of fascism in the continent. —Nicole Froio Nicole Froio: Your book spans stories across Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain, over the course of several years. Could you talk about the process of putting this book together and how you connected the struggles of women across so many countries and across generations of struggle? Meaghan Beatley: I didn’t necessarily realize how lucky I was to live in those places precisely at the time when there was this explosion in feminism in each of them. A few years ago, I realized, “Oh, this is actually kind of special. I should find a way to talk about all these movements because they are deeply interconnected.” And not just because of Spanish being the language that allows [the activists] to communicate with each other. As I explained in the book, I go off of the premise that this latest wave of global feminism, which we could call fourth-wave feminism, started in Argentina in 2015 with #NiUnaMenos. As several of the characters [in the book] in different countries point out, some of the earliest beginnings of their own movements—whether in Chile or in Mexico or in Spain—looked at Argentina and said, “Let’s try to do something similar here,” obviously responding to their own context and history. I think the countries I look at—along with me being lucky enough to be there between the years of 2015 and 2020—are also countries in which we could see the most vibrant and effective feminist movements over the last few years. They’re where feminist movements had the biggest cultural and legal impacts. In terms of including multiple generations, I thought it was really important to show the historical continuity between movements for democracy that spread all over the region, especially in the 1980s. Having stories from women who were active either in guerrilla movements in the late ’60s and early ’70s, or pushing for transitions to democracy in the late ’70s early ’80s, shows that there’s still an alignment between younger feminists and older feminists. NF: In your introduction, you say you document these stories hoping to inspire American feminists to organize their own similar transformative movements in the US. Do you believe that is possible? MB: The guiding question behind the book was: why were these movements able to be so transformative in Latin America, Spain, and why did this not happen in the US? And it’s not a question I can fully answer because I’m not really looking at North American feminisms, and that’s not my area of expertise. But I do think that what makes Latin American feminisms stand out is the fact that it is rooted in an economic critique much more so than more popular feminism that we see in the US. American feminism does a great job of looking at culture and really targeting that. But at least its mainstream iteration doesn’t take that further step [of examining class dynamics], whereas Latin American feminist movements are inherently anti-capitalist. I wanted to avoid making a value judgment and comparing movements because they exist to serve different purposes. But, yes, #NiUnaMenos and other movements that emerged around it in Latin America later are quite comprehensive in that they’re looking at economic systems and political systems. I don’t know if we see anything similar in the US. But I did mention in the introduction that in 2017 a group of feminists, including Angela Davis and Nancy Fraser all pointed to #NiUnaMenos as an inspiration that could be used in the US to try to form a bigger resistance, especially against Donald Trump at the time, and the global right generally. NF: In the last five years, it really feels like liberal feminism has won in the US, meaning that a movement that was supposed to be transformative for everyone has been captured by a more capitalist individualism ideology centered around advancing individualism rather than building collective power. How can a feminist project for society both protect women’s rights to autonomy while not falling into the trap of individualism? MB: What I found especially interesting about these movements that I was studying is how they are able to find a balance between those two things. Basically they’re saying: “we’re going to take bodily autonomy as the first step to tackle all of these other progressive issues.” Feminism shouldn’t stop at bodily autonomy, it shouldn’t just be about protecting women from domestic violence or ensuring reproductive choice. That’s just the first step. These movements effectively communicate the fact that gender is at the heart of everything. It’s the first way that inequality exists. Even before class and race, gender was the first way that humans were divided. So it’s at the heart of everything, and you can’t really tackle economic inequality or racism if you don’t look at gender too. These movements are able to bridge that need between personal autonomy and collective action. Recently this can be seen especially in Chile and Argentina—these movements bring all of this back to affordability, which now is becoming a main issue on the left, including in the US. And I’m not sure the left in the US is doing as good of a job connecting it to gender issues. If women don’t have any economic power, obviously they won’t have any freedom of choice anywhere else. So [autonomy and collective action] have to be connected. NF: In your book, you write about the transformative feeling of being around other women fighting for women’s rights, in a physical space that has been organized by women. The success of these movements wasn’t just about whether things changed legislatively, but also about coming together after femicides, or to advocate for abortion rights, and how women felt about that coming together. Could you talk a little about the choice to write up these moments in this way? MB: I discovered grassroots feminism when I moved to Argentina in 2013 and it was eye-opening. It was really special. I went to an encuentro nacional, and I had never been around so many women in my life. And it’s true, until you’ve experienced it, it is very easy to think that all of your concerns or questions are very individual things. And then to realize that they’re not—it changes your life. There are so many assemblies and encuentros, there are so many different vehicles for actually being around people and discovering different issues that otherwise you might not necessarily confront in your own life because you come from a particular social class. The fact that these movements exist in such a way that allows for this kind of communion, and that you have the opportunity to meet people face-to-face, in person, is very powerful. NF: Your book shows how violence against women can be a catalyst for local movements to articulate that gendered violence is a global epidemic. Why do you think it is important to connect the local to the macro? MB: The concern that I had in writing a book like this was that it would be too easy for people in the US or even Europe to say, “Well, femicide or gender-based violence is a macho issue that you only see in Latin America.” I think that’s a tendency that we see in those countries. So it was very important for me to make the point that this is absolutely a global issue that’s manifested everywhere. In fact, if you look at rates of femicide per capita, they’re lower in Argentina than they are in the US. So it’s definitely inaccurate to say that it’s more of an issue in certain parts of Latin America. I think also what spurred me to get into the subject initially was in around 2015, 2016, when #NiUnaMenos was getting some media attention in the US and in Europe, I was a bit concerned by a lot of the framings. I can’t remember the exact wording, but there was one Reuters article that said it’s due to macho violence that makes women especially vulnerable to violence. And when you frame it that way, it makes it sound like something essentially Latin American, which isn’t accurate. Gender violence exists everywhere, and obviously there are different factors compounding it in different locations, but calling it something Latino or macho is completely wrong. So I think it was important in the book to make that quite clear. NF: And of course, in the US, there is no legal concept of femicide. Do you think that also affects how Americans see gender violence in their own country? MB: Absolutely. And the history of the word “femicide” is fascinating because it did originally exist in English, and then it was Latin American feminists who took it and expanded its definition to point out how it’s not just the murder of a woman because she’s a woman, it’s also state violence. It’s a state of impunity that allows this to happen. This was a long battle that feminists, first in Mexico and then around the region, had to wage in order to get femicide to become a widely adopted term. And as you say, now that’s reflected in policy. I think that’s a huge difference between the US and Latin America, whether femicide is seen as a political issue. It’s politicized. There are laws addressing it in Latin America. That’s not the case in the US. The fact that the word doesn’t exist [in the legal system] means that the US is not looking at the murder of women as a political issue that should be addressed. It is just fodder for true crime, and I think that’s hugely problematic. NF: In the book, you vividly describe the women in Argentina wearing the green bandanas that are a signature of their reproductive rights movement. Your descriptions inspired me to wear mine more often because those women emphasized the importance of wearing their beliefs openly. How effective do you think that this tactic was? MB: I’m friends with a few Argentine feminists who handed me the bandana, and it was clearly such a source of pride. It’s wild how around 2018, everyone had them. Even mannequins in storefront windows had them. It was so ubiquitous, and fed into this real sense that this movement could be transformative. But what also struck me is that I went back to Argentina in 2024 to do some reporting and met up with a few friends, they said they were now afraid to wear the bandana, ever since [Javier] Milei had been elected and there was such a reactionary backlash. I think the contrast between those two moments really shows how it was a very important moment. In my book, I talk a lot about the Argentinian movement for abortion as a media story, as an effective media campaign. And I think the ubiquity of those green bandanas was part of this incredibly effective media strategy. They were everywhere, all over the press, and I think that partly convinced a right-wing president [President Mauricio Macri] at the time to say, “OK, let’s go. Let’s open up a congressional debate about abortion.” There were several other reasons why [Macri] did: his ratings were in the toilets, and he was trying to find something to redress his image. But it worked. Without this incredibly powerful image of thousands and at one point a million girls in the street wearing these green bandanas, I don’t know if that would have happened.

Trump Is Using Your Taxpayer Money to Pay for Illegal Election Propaganda

Chris Lehmann — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:35:27 GMT

But as brazen and authoritarian as these ad spots are, they seem likely to backfire. This just in: You are paying for the rollout of the GOP’s midterm messaging from the White House. A trio of election-season spots casting President Donald Trump as the savior of a communist-besieged America and the defender of its libertarian birthright hit the airwaves recently, once more splattering the commander in chief’s visage across the great and good republic of television. But instead of running with the standard funding disclaimer supplied by a dummy super PAC, these ads fade out under a screen legend that reads “paid for by the US government.” The ads are clear violations of appropriations law prohibiting the federal government from spending money for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, also argued in a post on X that the White House ad offensive “may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” in addition to violating the Hatch Act, which forbids government officials from electioneering on federal property. As is now the norm for reports on Trump administration criminality, the White House responded with glorified social-media trolling. In response to press queries about the initial spot that first aired last Wednesday, which features Trump delivering a McCarthyite tirade about the yoked menaces of socialism and communism, over a chorus of the JMSN song “Love Me,” White House flacks claimed, farcically, that it was part of a series of “public service announcements” designed to whip up patriotic fervor. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic,” a White House spokesperson whinged in a trademark quasi-bullying flourish. “We should be proud of our country.” In other words, the Trump administration seeks to dismiss charges that it’s engaging in illegal propaganda by engaging in more propaganda. What’s more, its ostensible message of national pride is distinctly undercut by Trump’s unhinged invocation of the phantom menace of a threatened communist takeover of the country, aired against rapid-cut footage of him at rallies and campaign events: The overriding message here isn’t patriotism but militant paranoia. The spot culminates in the imperial imagery of military aircraft flying overhead as UFC chief executive Dana White praises the president as “the toughest, most resilient person I’ve ever met, and nothing is going to stop him from fighting for the country he loves so much.” Amid all of this command-and-control footage, the only salient patriotic sentiment is that ascribed to the country’s maximum leader. Far from schooling American citizens in the love of country, the spot harps on the central message of the soundtrack: “Love Me.” (JMSN, for his part, has threatened legal action in his own social-media response to the ad, writing that “the President illegally use[d] the song without asking.”) In its second spot, the White House notionally sought to establish a more conventional civic backdrop, featuring Trump delivering his remarks commemorating the nation’s semiquincentennial anniversary at Mt. Rushmore. There’s much boilerplate invocation of the country’s heritage of liberty, but here, too, the main takeaway is the central theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign: “This is the beginning of the Golden Age in America.” It’s also noteworthy that the 2026 Mt. Rushmore address marked the introduction of Trump and the GOP’s red-baiting midterms crusade, with the president announcing, in pure hallucinatory fashion, that “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.” (Trump had also used the same setting to publicize the alleged runaway threat of “left-wing cultural revolution” during yet another Fourth of July address at the height of the Black Lives Matter uprising, again deploying the symbolism of patriotic belonging to unleash a barrage of propagandistic persecution fantasies. For all his manifest cognitive shortcomings, the guy never deviates from his prefab frighten-the-horses talking points.) There’s little doubt that the hardcore legion of MAGA faithful targeted by these appeals, which began running on the ultra-MAGA network Newsmax, would immediately pick up on these visual callouts to Trump’s lurches into Roy Cohn–branded demagogy. Also by Chris Lehmann In any event, the third installation in these publicly funded pieces of MAGA agitprop definitely lays to rest all the empty blather about their serving as PSAs. This one is a modified version of a 2024 campaign pitch that Trump had posted in real time on his Truth Social account. “This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government,” Trump threatens with zero self-awareness over grainy black-and-white footage of him striding purposefully through the “Presidential Walk of Fame” he installed in the White House’s West Wing Colonnade. “We will drive out the globalists, cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.” Not exactly the stuff of a State Department filmstrip produced for anodyne consumption in middle-school civics classes—or even a vintage Cold War Voice of America broadcast. These taxpayer-funded spots are a clear expression of the prime directive Trump declared to the crowd at his midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month: “Pretend like I’m on the ballot.” And that’s why, as brazenly illegal and authoritarian as the provenance of these spots is, they seem likely to backfire. Trump is now stupendously unpopular, with inflation, his war in Iran, his callous indifference to the financial plight of working Americans, his rampant kleptocratic self-dealing, and his clueless protectionist manipulation of the nation’s supply chain all plunging him toward the lowest depths in presidential approval polling plumbed during the last days of George W. Bush’s disastrous second term. The real messaging behind these high-paranoid vindications of his maximal power are equivalent to his thuggish efforts to force the runaway buildout of AI data centers on the heartland redoubts of MAGA Nation: You’ll take whatever plutocratic **** flits across my brainpan and like it—if you know what’s good for you. Indeed, the White House’s brazen Pravda-style adoption of this televisual campaign to remind the MAGA faithful that Trump is, and always has been, their designated savior is actually a sign of political weakness—a telltale admission that this fundamental Trumpian pitch isn’t landing as it used to with the party’s base. Politico reports that even the diehard MAGA “Joes”—the Trump superfans who trek across the country to be seen in the front row at his rallies and official events—are decidedly souring on the man’s governing record. Trisha Hope, a Joe who fell so hard for Trump the first time out that she published a book with the sadly self-explanatory title Just the Tweets, and used the proceeds from its sales to fund her front-row cheerleading expeditions, now calls Trump “a fraud and a liar.” Citing his serial failures to come clean on the Jeffrey Epstein papers as well as the war in Iran, she says, “If we do lose the midterms and he is impeached again, I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment.” Rick Frazier, one of the founding Joes, expresses the same sense of disenchantment. “Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex…those are big noes for me,” he says. “I’m to the point of not going to the polls in November.” If that sentiment is creeping into the front row of Trump rallies, all the alarmist commie-baiting propaganda in the world isn’t going to dispel the spread of similar misgivings in the back of the room.

This AI Panic Is Nothing New

Richard Kreitner — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:16:22 GMT

In the 1940s, The Nation asked questions about the atomic bomb we’re asking of artificial intelligence today. Over the past few weeks, employees and executives at leading tech companies have offered stark warnings that the development of artificial intelligence is running far ahead of humanity’s ability to control it, and that the chances of an extinction-level error are alarmingly high. Whether or not this is actually true, many have drawn comparisons between the current panic and that over the atomic bomb in the 1940s, when leading scientists warned that the new weapon needed to be controlled and tightly regulated by an international alliance if humanity were to avoid destroying itself. As the discourse has picked up on those parallels, I have often thought of a Nation editorial published just days after the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In “One World or None,” the magazine’s then-editor, Freda Kirchwey, laid out her belief that unless a truly empowered international governing body was put in charge of the bomb, the end of humanity would be a question of when rather than if. “The atomic bomb represents a revolution in science—the greatest revolution ever accomplished,” Kirchwey wrote. “It calls for a comparable revolution in men’s thinking and in their capacity for political and social readjustment.” In 1946, a book also titled One World or None, a collection of essays by leading scientific and cultural figures like Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Walter Lippmann, and others, warning about the technology’s potentially devastating power, became a bestseller and was subsequently turned into a terrifying short film by the same name, which is still worth watching today. In the 80 years since Hiroshima, with some too-readily-forgotten close calls in between, little has been done to weaken the “One World or None” argument. Today, the spiraling chaos of the global order makes it hard to say Kirchwey’s argument has been proven wrong. And, of course, should the worst occur, there likely wouldn’t be anybody around to affirm she got it right. Struck, like many, by some of the parallels between that moment and this—scientists warning of catastrophe, officials promising prosperity, rival powers unwilling to slow down—I wanted to see what other writers in The Nation were saying at a time of widespread uncertainty about whether humanity’s capacity for cooperation could keep pace with technological innovation. As one writer in the magazine put it in 1945, “The prime question facing us today is whether or not we can save ourselves from being blown to bits.” A few weeks after Hiroshima, the magazine ran “Everybody’s Atom,” by J.D. Bernal, an Irish chemist and physicist who had contributed important scientific knowledge for the D-Day landings in 1944. “People have been quick to see how the actuality of the atomic bomb has implicitly changed the whole existence of man in this universe,” Bernal noted. It was clear that the use of the bomb had helped bring the destructive war to a conclusion, but it was far less clear how the supposedly positive benefits of the technology would come to fruition. Popular hope for the technology remained weak, even while officials insisted it would lead to universal liberation and prosperity. The reason for that, to Bernal’s mind, was that “though the people may have little experience of the behavior of atoms, they have considerable experience of the behavior of men, corporately and individually.” Always, in the past, scientific advances had contributed to “human destruction,” Bernal noted, a record that boded ill “for the beneficent use of these more powerful forces.” Contrary to President Harry S. Truman’s suggestion that the US government should be the “trustees of this new force,” Bernal, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, argued that all humanity, not just one government or even, as Kirchwey suggested, a consortium of governments, had to be in control of the new technology. “Good will is not enough,” the scientist warned, in guiding a vast civilizational effort to harness “a concentration of energy on the order of a million times greater than any we have had before.” By October of 1945, The Nation’s embrace of world government as a practical solution for the problem of potentially life-effacing weapons had somewhat abated. When a conference on the question, held in a small New Hampshire town, called for world government, a Nation editorial described the notion as, for the moment, unfeasible, even fantastical, not least because the dropping of the atomic bomb had exacerbated growing tensions between the West and the Soviet Union, whereas easing them would have been necessary for an international effort to harness the power of the bomb. On both sides of the divide, The Nation noted, “the immediate fears of a possible foe are politically more potent than the more distant fear of atomic destruction.” A similar dynamic pertains to today, wherein companies and governments hurtling headlong into an AI-dominated future claim that without external regulation they cannot afford to slow down while others press ahead. The immediate fears of corporate and geopolitical foes are more potent than the comparably distant fear of AI-triggered total destruction.

As Cornell’s Rape Case Draws National Attention, Students Want Accountability

Jeannine Chiang — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A new lawsuit alleging that a former student was drugged and gang-raped by Chi Phi fraternity members is sparking outrage in the Cornell community. A new lawsuit alleging that a former Cornell student was drugged and gang-raped by several members of the Chi Phi fraternity has generated national attention after The Cornell Daily Sun broke the story. On September 14, the student, identified only as Jane Doe in court filings, sued Cornell University and law enforcement officials for neglecting to protect her and investigate the sexual assault case sufficiently. Among the civil complaint’s defendants are Cornell, Chi Phi fraternity organizations, and seven current and former students. An attorney for one of the individuals named in the suit has denied the allegations against his client. After the alleged incident, which the plaintiff said occurred in October 2024 over the course of multiple hours, the university barred the Cornell Chi Phi chapter. However, according to the DA, none of the individuals allegedly involved faced criminal charges. The student newspaper, the Daily Sun, played a critical role in illuminating the school’s mismanagement of the 2024 sexual assault allegations. The paper’s reporting cited claims that the accused students were allowed to mitigate their conduct by writing essays, which fueled widespread community backlash and helped spark the media scrutiny preceding the Tompkins County district attorney’s reopening of the case. In a September 21 editorial, the Daily Sun’s editorial board criticized the university’s handling of sexual assault and called for greater transparency surrounding the case. “Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us,” the board wrote. “To Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar: We know who you are and we refuse to let you benefit from this University’s concealment,” the editorial continued, listing all of the men named in the suit. The editorial called on Cornell to publish the standard by which suspensions in sexual-assault cases are lifted and to share with Jane Doe the outcome of her Title IX investigation. Inside Cornell, the allegations have fueled anger and demands for greater accountability from the university. “As a female student, I am repulsed and disgusted by the Cornell administration’s response—or lack thereof—to the rape case,” said Cornell student Adalena Crotty. “Cornell, along with many institutions, needs reform in policy as well as leadership, not only in regard to sexual violence but as a system as a whole. This particular instance, which unfortunately is not unique or a lone occurrence, shines a light on the consistent protection of perpetrators and the brushing off of survivors.” But the outrage was not contained to campus. Cornellians Only, a social-media page that boasts more than 14,000 followers and mainly posts Cornell updates to the student body, knew the story had taken off when comments from the general public began flooding its Instagram posts from months and even years prior. The comments were all about the case. “We’re getting a notification almost every second,” an admin from the account said. The page has been actively reporting on the case as new details have been released.

“Fast Food Nation” at 25

Austin Frerick — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

A conversation with Eric Schlosser. The first serious, adult book I can remember reading was Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser. Ironically, I read it in high school while working at a fast-food sandwich shop. As a 16-year-old in Iowa, I was captivated by its deconstruction of systems I had taken for granted. I read it in chunks during slow periods, sitting atop a stack of pop machine syrups in the back. Page by page, Schlosser lifted the veil on the world around me. He also planted a seed, a way of seeing the world that would forever shape me and countless others who could never see their food the same way again. In 2024, I published my own book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. It felt fitting that Schlosser wrote the foreword, because the book would not exist without him. On September 22, Mariner Books published the 25th-anniversary edition of Fast Food Nation. Reading the book again, it’s impossible not to see this bestselling exposé of how the fast-food industry has reshaped America and the world as a modern classic. This anniversary edition includes an excellent new afterword in which Schlosser extends his indictment of industrial food and corporate power into the present. I recently spoke with Schlosser about the new edition. Here is an edited, condensed version of our conversation. —Austin Frerick Austin Frerick: After rereading Fast Food Nation, I was struck by how much traveling you did for this book. What was your most memorable moment or person during these reporting trips? Eric Schlosser: Kenny Dobbins, whom I wrote about, just had one injury after another, stayed loyal to the company, and was then completely discarded. I stayed in touch with him after the book’s publication, and I tried to help in different ways, and he’s gone. His wife is gone. His two children that I got to know are gone, and it’s a story of poverty in America because they all had health issues and poor healthcare. I deliberately structured the book so all roads lead to the slaughterhouse, borrowing from Upton Sinclair the idea of the slaughterhouse as a metaphor for monopoly capitalism. I went in as a worker. But none of that stayed with me or haunted me the way the injury of these meatpacking workers has. These are basically manual laborers who get injured and discarded and will never be able to do manual labor again. And the whole system is so rigged against them that I think it’s a misnomer to call these industrial accidents. If you’re walking down the street, slip on a banana peel, and break your coccyx, that’s an accident. If people in a factory are injured again and again, in exactly the same way over the course of years, that’s not an accident. That’s a business decision. AF: The Obama and Biden administrations talked a lot about reforming the meat industry. What did you make of their efforts? ES: In terms of OSHA, I think Obama and Biden both really tried through OSHA to hold these companies accountable, and there were efforts to strengthen regulations. But OSHA has just been so gutted and underfunded for decades now. I think the food industry’s power in Washington and Congress severely limited what Obama and Biden could do, and they weren’t ultimately willing to spend the political capital to get it done. And I think Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a truly despicable human being, but he had the nerve to speak out about the industrial food system, and I think that really helped Trump get elected. I would urge politicians in both parties to look at opinion polls on what Americans think about their food and support for healthy, unprocessed food in schools, et cetera. I think it’s a potent political issue that most politicians in both parties won’t go near because they take so much money from the Big Ag companies. It certainly worked for Teddy Roosevelt, and it’s an issue that’s just waiting for someone with the courage to really take it on. AF: You discuss the emergence of MAHA in the new afterword. Why do you think it became such a powerful force? ES: I think people care about their food, and they care about their children’s food. It’s encouraging that political capital awaits someone willing to use it in a real, disciplined way, as opposed to the MAHA movement, whose leadership is just a way to get votes for Trump. The idea that Bobby Kennedy is going to achieve anything on food other than getting the food coloring out of breakfast cereal, which is a nice thing but is not going to help much. The fundamental changes we need won’t happen in the Trump administration, when every single cabinet position has basically been handed over to industry. You’ve got the chemical industry running the EPA. You’ve got the oil industry running the Department of the Interior, and the FDA right now is headed by an attorney who represented an infant formula manufacturer in a major lawsuit over potentially contaminated infant formula. I don’t see the change coming from MAHA, but I think it’s interesting what it’s revealed about public opinion and the opportunity that awaits.

Irish Goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu’s Refusal to Play Against Israel Puts Him on the Right Side of History

Jules Boykoff,Dave Zirin — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:05:39 GMT

Bazunu’s decision raises the perennial question: Why is a country that is currently committing a genocide allowed to compete in the first place? On Saturday, Gavin Bazunu, a goalkeeper for the Republic of Ireland’s national soccer team, decided that he had enough. That day, Bazunu posted on Instagram that he refused to play against Israel in that Sunday’s match. He wrote, “I have reached a decision that I have not taken lightly. I am a man of strong faith and try my best to be a person of character and principle.” He continued: Therefore I feel it would be wrong to participate in the upcoming fixtures against Israel. My decision is based purely upon my personal belief that the killing of innocent people is wrong. It is important to note that my stance is not in opposition of the Israeli people or the Jewish community but against the atrocities in the region. There are few times where you get a chance in life to stand up for something bigger and I strongly believe that this is one of them. Bazunu should not have been forced to take this step by himself—but what other option did he have? The Union of European Football Associations—Europe’s governing body for soccer—has allowed Israel to continue to compete despite the United Nations’ determination that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza. Still, when UEFA, abdicating any moral responsibility, punted the decision to the discretion of football federations of individual countries, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) initially seemed to rise to the challenge. In late 2025, the FAI led an effort to submit a formal motion to UEFA that would ban Israel from competing, arguing that the Israel Football Association had failed to curb the racism of violently anti-Arab fan clubs like Beitar Jerusalem and permitted the organization of football teams in illegal West Bank settlements. But then, earlier this year, FIFA—run by Donald Trump sycophant and greed-zombie Gianni Infantino—largely sided in favor of Israel in these matters, issuing two controversial, slap-on-the-wrist rulings that dripped with cowardice. One cannot separate Bazunu’s courage from the movement of Irish soccer fans who have historically acted in solidarity with the Palestinian people, a solidarity that runs deeply throughout much of the country. This often projects itself on the pitch. At a May friendly match in Ireland against Qatar, spectators pelted the pitch with tennis balls decorated with tiny Palestinian flags as part of a Stop the Game campaign, demanding that Ireland withdraw from all fixtures against Israel. Irish athletes are also at the forefront of speaking out for justice for the people of Gaza. Ahead of Sunday’s match against Israel, the advocacy group Irish Sport for Palestine released a list of more than 160 Irish sportspeople who implored players on Ireland’s squad “to act collectively with conscience” and refuse to take the pitch. The list included athletes from more than a dozen sports, from soccer and hockey to basketball and athletics. Irish Sport for Palestine chairperson Rebecca O’Keeffe, told The Nation, “Israel has taken full advantage of this [situation] to intimidate, bully, and maintain the lie that sports and politics shouldn’t mix. They continue to act with impunity and weaponise sport for their Zionist propaganda.” The former Irish international basketball player added, “If this game goes ahead, Israel, the Zionist lobby, US interference, and corporate greed will be on full display. We refuse to let sport be used in this way and believe Irish sport is better than this.” Republic of Ireland midfielder Jason Knight agreed that playing against Israel was wrong. “I don’t think the game should be going ahead,” he said, “but it is going ahead. We’ll have a deeper talk about it and what that means, we’ll get our thoughts as a group and go from there.” Ireland’s team assembled for that “deeper talk” the day before the match and voted by a “significant majority” to play the match. That’s when Ireland goalkeeper Gavin Bazunu, done with the hand-wringing and “deeper talks,” stood up and refused. At 24, Bazunu is entering the prime of his career. He currently plays in the Championship for the Bolton Wanderers, only one tier beneath the Premier League, where he has logged minutes on the pitch and bench for clubs such as Southampton and Manchester City. This is a footballer with a future, and in a climate where billionaire stadium owners notify artists that they won’t perform if they say “Free Palestine,” taking such a stand puts that future at risk. “We stand in solidarity with Bazunu,” Rebecca O’Keeffe of Irish Sport for Palestine told us. “Ireland stands in solidarity with him for his courage, leadership, and his principled stance. This is the Ireland we want represented on the global stage.”

Clavicular’s Charges Are One Thing. Rape Culture Is Another.

Ray Epstein,Shannon Porter — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:34:46 GMT

Braden Peters consistently acts as though the autonomy of women is a maladaptive trait, and dogmatically dismisses any claim to female equality as an outlying aberration. Recent rape charges against the 20-year-old “Looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Eric Peters—better known by his online moniker Clavicular—are but the latest reminder of how the digital manosphere teems with gender double standards and a dangerous laissez-faire attitude toward predatory, assaultive behavior from its name-brand promoters. Peters, who came to prominence via a set of videos peddling a regimen of looks-improvement to heighten male success in encounters with women, is facing two felony charges, one for rape and the other for drugging a person for sexual intercourse, as well as a misdemeanor for providing alcohol to a person under the age of 21. But to make sense of how Peters acquired the sense of entitlement behind his alleged crimes, we need to take stock of the reactionary online community that elevated him to global attention. The manosphere bills itself as a refuge from the excesses of the freedoms won by feminists—such as independent sex work, and control over sexual decision-making—even as it dogmatically rejects the agency women gained through the struggle for sexual independence. Influencers such as Peters signal to an aggrieved anti-feminist audience of men and boys that women’s freedom and choice should be tolerated only when they benefit men. Peters has claimed to boast a personal “body count” of around 150 sexual partners, while he argues that women who have any sexual history cannot form authentic emotional bonds with their partners. For all the manosphere’s seeming devotion to traditional patriarchal gender roles, its exponents are not throwbacks to traditional ideas of unchallenged male authority. The older model of male dominance had prescribed marriage, financial dependency, and familial responsibilities, but the masculinity preached by Peters and other manosphere influencers promises sexual access without commitment, dominance without responsibility, and the freedoms of sexual liberation without any corresponding gains in gender equality. Peters, from his perch as a self-help guru, has also whitewashed some of the uglier features of the manosphere gospel by swapping raw and overt misogyny for routine fitness tracking and facial symmetry charts. He’s repackaged the grossly predatory vision of total male dominance of Andrew Tate—recently arrested on sex-trafficking and rape charges after fleeing prosecution in Romania for similar crimes—for a new generation of young men and boys. He vows to outfit his followers with the same suite of hypermasculine advantages in establishing their dominance that elevated Tate and his brother Tristan to online renown—wealth, status, and sexual achievement—under his prime directive of or Looksmaxxing. In the isolation of the 2020 Covid shutdowns, Peters set out to chronicle from his childhood bedroom his new campaign to optimize his appearance. His toolkit included a needle, a hammer, and various powders. Drawing in misguided fashion on a two-century-old study by German surgeon Julius Wolff that professed to find that microfractures in the face would force bones to heal thicker with an enhanced underlying structure, Peters popularized the practice of “bone smashing.” On livestreams and social media, he took hammer after hammer to his cheekbones and jaw. To stay lean and suppress his appetite, Peters began ingesting methamphetamine and adderall. On an April 2026 livestream, he unintentionally overdosed. He also mentions using steroids, drugs to combat hair loss, and illegal peptides meant to alter body composition and appearance. Peters preaches these methods of alleged self-improvement as part of a broader goal: to maximize his male audience’s “sexual market value” (SMV). This measure of masculine attractiveness, needless to say, isn’t a prescription for men and boys to practice kindness, empathy, or intelligence in the romantic and sexual pursuit of women and girls. It serves, rather, as a strict, gamified equation that renders the sexual conquest of women as an all but inevitable consequence of dominating the sexual marketplace. In his livestreams, published guides, and paid online coaching courses, Peters models for young men and boys how they should relate to women. He designates women and girls as “targets” and “slayables,” and encourages his audience to refer to women as “foids” (female humanoids). He also urges followers to identify as members of his “clan.” On a 2026 summer trip to Paris, Peters reported to his followers that the women he encountered there failed to respond to this formula and make themselves sexually available to him. He claimed that they were “probably lesbians” or part of a flawed gene pool. This was par for the course in his daily messages to the manosphere; he consistently acts as though the autonomy of women is a maladaptive trait, and dogmatically dismisses any claim to female equality as an outlying aberration. Peters’s ideological blindspots are also a defining feature of the manosphere, and betray an unacknowledged but devastating flourish of bad at the core of its bleak vision of gender relations. He and his fellow influencers deny the basic humanity of women while they rely on the very women they scorn to affirm their own sexual dominance.

Kimberly Guilfoyle Is a Master of Mafia Diplomacy

Jeet Heer — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:53:45 GMT

The US Ambassador to Greece is making suspicious deals for her buddies. Kimberly Guilfoyle has too long been treated merely as a shadow of the men in her life—but she’s actually a formidable villain in her own right. From 2001 to 2007, she was married to Gavin Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco. From 2018 to 2024, she was affianced to Donald Trump Jr., which when he started being photographed in the company of another woman, the Palm Beach jet-setter Bettina Anderson, whom he married this year. Guilfoyle received a remarkable consolation prize from the breakup: Trump appointed her to the role of US ambassador to Greece, which she has leveraged into being a large-scale impresario of diplomatic corruption. The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump, who retains a warm regard for Guilfoyle and who didn’t attend his son’s wedding to Anderson, said he nominated her for the ambassadorship because “I had to get her out of here.” Despite the fact that she never married Trump Jr., Guilfoyle still enjoys an auxiliary status to the Trump family. In his 1982 study The Kennedy Imprisonment, the historian Gary Wills created the useful category of “honorary Kennedy” to describe all the fixers, cronies, and media assets who acted as agents of the Kennedy family: figures such as Ben Bradlee, Ted Sorensen, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It’s safe to call Guilfoyle an honorary Trump. Out on her own now, Guilfoyle is very much “made” in the Trump mafia, and in that capacity she has flourished. Her role in shaping US foreign policy is larger than the title of ambassador to Greece would indicate. Earlier this year, Trump purged the State Department, which has left more than a hundred ambassadorships unfilled. He has also given prominent diplomatic posts to family members such as Jared Kushner (who is acting as a diplomat without portfolio in both Europe and the Middle East) and his father, Charles Kushner (who is ambassador to France). Both Jared Kushner and the real estate mogul Steve Witkoff (another honorary Trump) seem to have leveraged their diplomatic posts into money-making operations, making lucrative deals while conducting public business. In this environment, governments throughout the Balkans and Europe know that if they want to win the favor of the Trump administration, they need to get in the good graces of Guilfoyle. Showing her skills as an honorary Trump, Guilfoyle has leveraged her ambassadorship in fishy ways. As The Wall Street Journal explained in a major report, Guilfoyle has a murky and suspicious relationship with the Aktor Group, a Greek construction firm and its lobbyist, the Greek American Christos Marafatsos. Guilfoyle, per The Wall Street Journal, has puzzled government officials across the region with her persistent promotion of a specific Greek company—and her extensive efforts to involve Marafatsos, a neophyte in both diplomacy and energy. His prior experience includes co-founding a Washington, D.C.-area produce distributor and working in businesses ranging from real-estate consulting to creating “the ultimate immersive experience” of the Acropolis in IMAX 3-D. These days, the Maryland-raised Marafatsos is frequently seen at Guilfoyle’s side, acting as her unofficial gatekeeper and joining her for meetings at her ambassadorial residence and with government officials in countries around the region—a highly unusual move for a private citizen. Aktor has paid Marafatsos $160,000 to bring their company to the attention of Trump and other high officials. He has three other clients, bringing his income for nine months of work to $440,000. This has been money well spent. Aktor in particular has benefited from assiduous advocacy of Guilfoyle. Continued, from The Wall Street Journal: In November, Aktor announced a joint venture, Atlantic-SEE LNG, that would be split 60-40 between it and DEPA, a Greek state-backed energy company. In the months since, Aktor and its joint venture have signed memorandums of understanding and commercial agreements with gas companies in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Romania. A $6 billion deal Guilfoyle helped Aktor secure in Albania would, if completed, have the country buy gas from the company through 2050. It goes without saying that it is highly irregular for a US ambassador to work so vigorously on behalf of a foreign company or to be seen as working in lockstep with a lobbyist for that company. Guilfoyle and the White House have vigorously contested the Journal’s reporting and deny any impropriety.

The Decades-Old Roots of Trump’s War on Iran

Luca GoldMansour — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:30:00 GMT

An interview with historian Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi about the generations of US presidents who have tried to destroy the Iranian regime. Donald Trump’s current war on Iran is the culmination of decades of hostile US policy dating back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Administrations from both political parties have sought to blunt the impact of this fundamental shift in the Middle East’s geopolitics, which they see as running counter to the United States and Israel’s freedom of action in the region. Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi’s work helps explain how America has found itself in yet another Middle East conflict and what the West misunderstands about Iran. He’s an Iranian-born sociologist and historian who has written four books on the different aspects and historical context of the Iranian revolution and its aftermath. His latest, The Long War on Iran: New Events, Old Questions, sheds light on the complexities of Iranian society and how US policy has failed to grapple with the ramifications of modern Iran. He is affiliated with the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Toronto, and was formerly chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and director of the Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. —Luca GoldMansour Luca GoldMansour: In your introduction to The Long War on Iran, you share a harrowing anecdote about watching the Iranian prison that you were once jailed in get bombed by the Trump administration and Israel during last year’s 12-day war. Why did you start there? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi: I was in prison in Iran from 1981 to the beginning of 1985. This was what in Iranian history is known as the Reign of Terror. It was sort of the equivalent of what happened in the French Revolution—meaning that the new post-revolutionary state is trying to consolidate power and eliminate all the opposition, many of whom were part of the revolutionary movement. I was one of those people. At that time there was also a brutal war going on with Iraq, which had invaded the southwest of Iran—the oil-rich regions—with the encouragement of the Americans. Saddam Hussein was armed by the Germans, French, and Americans. There were some arms delivered to Iran, too, because the philosophy at the time was to let the two countries destroy each other for the greater cause of containing the Iranian Revolution and providing a more secure space for the state of Israel. In prison, my guards were the same people who had to go to the war front to fend off the Iraqi invasion. They had rotations. In 1984, for the first time, Saddam Hussein acquired missiles that could reach Tehran. I was very sick at the time with cancer, and I was in a prison infirmary. I could hear these missiles hitting near us. My guard, whose brother was killed in the war, never talked. But he came, checked on me, and then for the first time, these missiles opened up a conversation between us. We realized that if the missiles hit the prison, both of us will be buried under the same rubble. So in 2025 when Israel bombed the Evin prison—the same prison I was in—it brought back all these memories to me. This time, bombing the prison was intentional on the Israeli side. They thought that bombing the gates of the prison would lead to some sort of storming-of-the-Bastille moment, and it actually happened exactly like in that situation when I was in prison. The prisoners and the prison guards found themselves on the same side of Israeli bombs. Most of the people who were injured were prison guards and personnel who were in the prison infirmary. And the prisoners, instead of running away, rescued the guards. I opened the book with that scene to show that wars like this create very unyielding and uncanny situations that make it very hard to know the right thing to do. LG: Do you see a similar pattern playing out in how Iranian society is reacting to the current war? BGT: One of the most surprising consequences of this war was the way people reacted to it. There is massive discontent in [Iran]. There is a deep economic crisis, some of which is caused by the draconian sanctions that were imposed on Iran. It’s also because of deep corruption. Once you institute these sorts of sanctions, you open up the possibility of crony capitalism, black market deals, and non-transparency. That’s a recipe for very widespread corruption. Then there is a very repressive state that doesn’t allow a flourishing civil society in which people can enjoy building networks, associations, and parties. That doesn’t mean that there is no civil society in Iran. There is still a remarkable kind of life in civil society in Iran. There are publishing businesses, interesting media conversations, YouTube channels, and conversations happening in coffee shops. [But] people are constantly under economic and political and social pressures, and they show that discontent in so many different ways, including massive protests [such as the ones] that happened before the second round of war started, when thousands of people were killed. But when the war started, people truly rallied around the flag. First and foremost, this really surprised the government. There were nightly gatherings in big squares in Tehran and other cities, which were originally initiated by the state, but then more and more people joined in. There were families and kids taking to public squares, daring Americans and Israelis to bomb them. And when Trump threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure, people formed human chains around factories and stood on bridges. Of course, people said, “Oh, they forced them to do that.” That’s nonsense. So it’s a very mixed situation. There is this resentment towards this unprovoked war and very flagrant and unashamed attack on civilians. And that feeling is also being reconciled with people’s resentment towards the state.

Emmanuel Macron’s Turbulent Exit

Harrison Stetler,June Loper — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Between a budget crisis and a cost-of-living squeeze, Macron is leaving a country feeling more insecure than ever—and ready to take to the streets. In inviting some 12 chiefs of France’s leading political formations to a closed-door meeting at the Élysée palace on September 18, President Emmanuel Macron hoped to claw back at least the appearance of control in the face of the multiple crises confronting the country. Because there’s no point in denying that the current situation makes for a bitter final act to Macron’s two terms in office, as soaring gas prices raise the specter of protests and demonstrations over the cost of living. In the midst of a frozen conflict in the Middle East, and little immediate hope for an end to a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz that has launched global energy markets into disarray, diesel prices in France hit a record average of €2.41 per liter on September 22. Some stations went further still, with prices edging close to the symbolic €3-per-liter threshold. That’s $12.92 per gallon by current exchange rates. Chronically high energy prices are metastasizing into a broader cost-of-living crunch. In August, consumer price indexes rose to 2.4 percent on an annualized basis—adding to the double-digit cumulative inflation recorded since 2020. Conditions like these are not exclusive to France. Yet the lame-duck Macron knows from experience that public frustration with energy prices is not something to be taken lightly. Macron’s biggest worry is likely that this situation could spill over into some form of protest movement this autumn, with Parliament in a state of paralysis and few avenues for compromise before highly anticipated presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for spring 2027. Starting in mid-September, calls already began to circulate for a revival of the so-called Yellow Vests, the grassroots protest movement that shook the president’s first term in office. The situation is wildly different, as the 2018 explosion was provoked by an ill-conceived gas tax. Nonetheless, average diesel prices in November 2018 were a mere €1.50, a pittance compared to their current levels. Wildcat protest movements have a habit of petering out. The “return” of the Yellow Vests—October 17 is the date currently circulating on social media for a new nationwide round of protests—has often been predicted in the past. But there are already signs of mounting tensions. On September 15, fishermen took to blockading an oil terminal in Fos-sur-Mer, on France’s Mediterranean coast, before being cleared out by police. The action followed protests in nearby towns such as Sète and Port-Vendres. Among their grievances, the fishermen point to soaring fuel prices. Speaking with France Info, one interviewee from Marseille explained the cruel economics of high gas prices: “A boat that goes out to sea for five days will bring in €10,000. Before the crisis, we had €3,000 in expenses. Today, €7,000 goes straight into fuel.” And the fishermen are far from alone. Protest and strike dates are multiplying across key economic sectors in the coming weeks, from health workers and police officers to firefighters, teachers, farmers, and truck drivers. While France’s established labor organizations are traditionally hesitant to throw their support behind nonunion movements, labor groups are calling for a day of mobilization on September 29, when public-sector workers will go on strike for salary increases in the face of mounting calls for renewed cuts in the 2027 state budget.

The Promises and Compromises of the University of California

Sara Krolewski — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 09:30:00 GMT

I grew up in a neighborhood manufactured by the University of California, Irvine. It felt like a utopia for academics—until the university forsook its mission of serving the public. My mother likes to tell a story about one of her first experiences in Irvine. Our family had just moved from a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan—my brother and I, ages 2 and 5, had shared an alcove—to a stucco house with a brilliant green lawn and a real backyard. It was a perfect day, as most days in Southern California are: cloudless and seemingly untroubled. She ventured out for groceries with us, still unaccustomed to the luxury of doing errands by car. As the cashier packed up my mother’s purchases, he volunteered to carry them out to the parking lot for her. He didn’t realize that he was speaking to a hardened New Yorker. This condescending guy thinks I need help? my mother thought. Later, as she was herding us back to the car, laden with plastic bags, it occurred to her that maybe he really was just being friendly—that such earnest displays of generosity were to be expected in our strange new home. If we were to fit in, we would have to dispose of our East Coast wiles and learn to live like proper Southern Californians: utterly assured of our supreme luck and bounty. We hadn’t meant to end up on this side of the country. But my father, a scientist, had been offered a tenured position at the University of California, Irvine, one of the 10 campuses that make up one of the largest and most well-known public university systems in the country. It was an offer too good to pass up: a stable gig, with plush benefits for relocators. Even then, in the late 1990s, the academic job market was beginning to look dire. Young academics were steeling themselves for careers spent scrounging for low-paid work in high-cost cities. Irvine was remarkably expensive—filled with glittering sports cars and Xanadu-like mansions—but UCI would help offset the costs of living there. New professors were granted access to affordable housing in a neighborhood set up by the university in the low-slung foothills of Orange County, and there were strong public schools nearby. My parents had never thought they’d own a real home, but suddenly they had one—with a below-market-rate mortgage subsidized by the university, at that. Irvine, a suburb of Los Angeles, was not like New Canaan or Scarsdale: the genteel, majority-white hamlets outside of New York City that my NPR-listening, electric car–driving parents pledged they’d never move to. UCI’s 15,000-student campus was home to thousands of first-generation students, many of them the children of immigrants and refugees who had settled in Orange County after World War II. Scattered around the campus were Chinese churches, Iranian restaurants, and Korean grocery stores. With its Brutalist buildings and cavernous expressways, Irvine had none of the bucolic charm of a New England college town. But it felt remarkably modern and heterogeneous, almost uncannily so—as if parts of the “It’s A Small World” attraction from nearby Disneyland had come to life. For the first few years, we didn’t ask questions about the deal we’d accepted: whether the university could always be counted on for its largesse, say, or whether Irvine was truly the Benetton-esque utopia it appeared to be. We were Southern Californians now, after all. We were learning to “practice gratitude,” as the locals said, and there was much to be grateful for. Irvine was a community dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge in a country that seemed stubbornly opposed to it. Every street in our neighborhood was named for a famous thinker, and when we went on walks, my parents would point them out to me: Twain Street, Zola Court. We marveled about the Nobel Prize shortlisters whom we saw collecting newspapers from their driveways in bathrobes. Our next-door neighbors included physicists, deconstructionists, and a well-regarded mathematician named Abel Klein. (I sometimes spotted his son, Ezra—you might have heard of him—trooping home from the school bus.) We lived in handsome Spanish-style houses, most of them nearly identical to one another (and which the UCI housing authority did not permit us to paint different colors). The university even paid for landscapers to mow our lawns and trim our hedges. I wasn’t old enough to fully understand what a university was or what it did, but I was already developing a sense of loyalty to this institution for all it had given my family, and for all it seemed to represent: security, progress, the triumph of intellectualism. If there was something disquieting about this Levittown for the scholarly set, it hadn’t yet registered to me. Irvine felt manufactured because it was: It had been planned around the university, instead of the other way around. In the early 1960s, the state acquired a tranche of land from the affluent Irvine family, whose 100,000-acre ranch, studded with citrus groves, ran from the Pacific Ocean to the inland mountains of Riverside County. The idea was to build a new campus for the rapidly expanding UC system—sometimes referred to by its wonkish, tongue-tripping sobriquet, the “multiversity.” When UCI opened in 1964, the architect tasked with its design, William Pereira, was hard at work on a “city of intellect,” as he called it, to complement the new campus. In later years, Irvine would become one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country, and thanks to its architect’s master-planning, an astonishingly pristine, orderly city—devoid of the urban sprawl that Pereira, a former Hollywood art director, found unsightly. None of this would have been possible without the state’s investment in higher education for the masses. Almost exactly 100 years before Irvine was constructed, a group of New England Congregationalists who had settled in Northern California during the Gold Rush founded the college that later became known as UC Berkeley. As the journalist and historian Miriam Pawel writes in her sprawling history of the UC system, California Dreams: The Making and Remaking of the University of California, most of Berkeley’s founders were Yale graduates, but they considered themselves converts to the rugged manifest-destiny lifestyle. They weren’t interested in replicating the clubbiness of the Ivy League out West, but in seizing on a pioneer ethos of reinvention. In 1868, they volunteered their fledgling school to become California’s designated land-grant university under the Morrill Act, which provided federal funding for new state colleges that would serve the nation’s growing working class. (The secession of the Southern states had provided a window of opportunity to force through such patently progressive legislation.) These early leaders made their aims clear: to mold an educated elite in the state of California. Berkeley would not be a vocational school, or focus solely on agriculture and mining, as other land-grant colleges had. Rather, it would provide Californians with the kind of comprehensive liberal arts education that tended to produce scholars and politicians—but entirely free of charge. It would admit those who distinguished themselves intellectually, regardless of whether their families were in the right Episcopalian congregation or had their name emblazoned on a library. At California’s constitutional convention in 1879, a delegate advocating for Berkeley declared that “the son of the poorest peasant, no matter how lowly” would find the university “an institution to carry him to the furthest realms of knowledge.” Race was not an explicit part of the equation—the founders had mostly poor white “peasants” in mind—and women, though not altogether siloed from men, were still patronized on campus as “bluestockings.” Yet, as Pawel explains, the university was attempting something without real precedent: to offer a pathway to upward mobility that was also “a counterweight to the landed ruling class that was fast emerging” in the nation’s new industrial economy. It was, in short, a wholly meritocratic project, with more than a whiff of frontier optimism. As it happens, Berkeley’s founders had cause to be bullish about their ambitions for public education. California came roaring into the 20th century to become one of the most populous states in the union, and the university tripled its enrollment from 1899 to 1919, drawing extensively from a new working-class population. Offshoot campuses were opened to complement Berkeley and accommodate students further afield: an agricultural school in Davis, west of Sacramento, and a branch in Los Angeles. During World War II, the defense industry found a foothold in Southern California, which would become a staging ground for operations in the Pacific Theater, and the state’s labor force nearly doubled. By the late 1950s, a loose agglomeration of affiliated schools had been reorganized into a functioning university system. UC administrators began drawing up plans for a southern expansion of the multiversity, which already encompassed tens of thousands of students—none of whom needed to pay tuition.

The First Amendment Lives for Another News Cycle—Maybe

Elie Mystal — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:56:26 GMT

In this week’s Elie v. U.S., our justice correspondent parses Trump’s attacks on CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. Plus: it’s time to impeach the judges! If it were up to me, three Republican judges on the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit would be impeached for their ruling in the Missouri redistricting case. In that ruling, the court reinstated a congressional map that had been racially gerrymandered to deny political power to Black voters. The map had already been rejected by the Missouri state Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court—but the judges decided to pull a Trump and ignore both. Now, regular readers will know that I’m generally not a guy who calls for the impeachment of judges, and I’ve never been a guy to call for impeachment simply because of “bad rulings.” Federal judges are supposed to serve for life. But the bad behavior of this Eighth Circuit panel is so lawless and nakedly partisan that it violates any reasonable conduct we should expect from the federal judiciary. For those who haven’t followed the saga: The state of Missouri engaged in Trump-backed, mid-cycle redistricting to try to secure an additional seat for Republicans in Congress. The state’s plan was to divide Kansas City, Missouri, denying Black voters living there a fair opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice. Citizens opposed to the new map organized a voter referendum on the issue for this November, as allowed under Missouri law. Republicans pulled a series of shenanigans to get the new maps installed as the default until the voter referendum (which is the opposite of what the law requires), and the whole thing got kicked into the courts. The Missouri state Supreme Court ruled, reasonably, that the old maps needed to be in place until the referendum. So Republicans decided to take the case to a federal court and then found a district court judge appointed by Trump who insisted that the new maps be used. His decision was appealed to the Supreme Court, which issued a shadow docket ruling putting it on hold, effectively pausing the case until after the election. This meant that Missouri would be forced to use its old maps for the midterms. But then the three judges on the Eighth Circuit decided that the Supreme Court didn’t matter. Judges James Loken (a George H.W. Bush appointee), David Stras (a Trump appointee), and Justin Smith (a Trump appointee who also used to be one of Trump’s personal lawyers) issued a wild opinion on Monday, reinstating the new, racist Missouri maps. Judge Loken somehow interpreted the Supreme Court’s hold as an invitation for the Eighth Circuit to “get to work,” and affirmed the district court ruling requiring the new maps. The fact that the Supreme Court put that exact district court ruling on hold meant nothing to these three judges. The fact that their new ruling will cause additional confusion mere weeks before the election meant nothing. The fact that their new ruling will almost surely get spiked again by the Supreme Court (it may well have been spiked again by the time you read this), meant nothing. All that mattered to these three judges was making one more attempt at using racist maps to help Republicans win one more seat in the upcoming midterms. This is beyond “bad faith,” and I say that as a person who covers the bad faith of Republican judges for a living. These are federal judges who are showing a willful disregard for the rest of the federal judiciary just to try to influence a political outcome. These judges should be drummed off the bench in the only way the Constitution allows: the impeachment process. Impeachment, as you know, starts in the House. I hope the Democratic Congressperson from Kansas City is willing to lead the charge against these judges. The Bad and the Ugly Donald Trump said his planned DC arch will include drone housing and a sniper turret and… a bunch of other James Bond villain stuff that will end up being featured in the next Ridley Scott movie. While Trump continues trying to build Fortress America, my forever mayor, Zohran Mamdani, secured a record settlement from DoorDash for underpaying its workers. People who have been illegally denied wages will receive 200 percent of the pay they are owed. A man shot by ICE in Texas claims that doctors were not allowed to remove the bullet lodged near his spine because ICE was in a hurry to move him to a concentration camp. Any Democratic primary candidate who will not promise to abolish ICE will not be getting my vote. In Illinois, video shows ICE brutalizing a man, realizing that he wasn’t the man they were after, and leaving him bleeding in the street. I’ll say again: Any Democratic primary candidate who will not promise to abolish ICE will not be getting my vote. A grand jury decided to press no charges after the death of Nolan Wells. Inspired Takes I still can’t believe Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth has such an important job. For The Nation, Jeet Heer wrote that even Republicans are starting to agree. In The Nation, David Faris explained the increasingly challenging path for Republicans to hang on to the Senate. Reading this counts as pornography for me. Like, I’m pretty sure the scenarios depicted are exaggerated fantasies that I will never enjoy, but, hey, you never know. Worst Argument of the Week Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House last Friday. I happen to think that the White House press corp is absolutely useless. In most cases, I think it is actively harmful. The coverage of Trump is one of the reasons Trump happened. All the time the media spends repeating Trump’s lies instead of covering the truth is time spent in disservice to America. Still: While I don’t respect the job White House reporters have been doing, I do respect the First Amendment. Trump’s move is a violation of the freedom of the press. He is punishing certain news organizations, but not others, because of the content of their coverage. Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended Trump’s move, saying that working inside the White House is a “privilege.” He said that Trump isn’t violating the First Amendment because the administration is not arresting members of the press. It is true that the Trump administration is not kidnapping reporters and chopping them into little bits, but the First Amendment sets the bar quite a bit higher than “not Saudi Arabia.” If the government grants a news organization a privilege, like having a desk in the White House or flying on an unconstitutional foreign emolument shaped like a plane, the government cannot take that privilege away because of the content of the coverage. I’ve literally had to make this argument to liberals for years while explaining why Barack Obama or Joe Biden could not just kick Fox News out of the White House press corps. The First Amendment is content neutral: It has to be, or it doesn’t work. Rubio’s argument is so obviously bad that it’s not the one the administration made in court. Instead, Trump’s lawyers came up with something even worse: national security. In a court filing, the DOJ accused the banned organizations of “publishing sensitive or classified information” and not meeting “standards of professionalism and decorum.” On Wednesday, US District Judge Timothy Kelly punted this ridiculous argument and issued a 14-day temporary restraining order preventing the administration from implementing its ban. Kelly wrote that the ban is likely an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment and that the banned organizations did not receive due process before they were kicked out of the White House. Judge Kelly, it must be noted, is a Trump judge, appointed way back in 2017, during Trump’s first term. The upshot is that CNN, MS NOW, and Politico can go back to spreading the administration’s propaganda with their precious access restored. And the First Amendment lives for another news cycle. Assuming, that is, that Trump follows the court order—which he’s not inclined to do. In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos Like many legal nerds, I have been enthralled by a surrogacy battle that recently reached the Supreme Court. A California couple struggling to conceive, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, entered into a surrogacy contract with an Alaskan nurse, McKenna West. The contract stipulated that all matters regarding abortion would be left to the contracting parents, not the woman carrying the child. The fetus was diagnosed with a rare heart condition that would require, at a minimum, open heart surgery soon after birth and additional surgeries during childhood. The parents exercised their contractual right to ask West to terminate the pregnancy. But she refused. She then moved to Texas so the abortion part of the contract could not be enforced. She gave birth to the child and sued to be declared the child’s legal parent. She argued that merely asking for the abortion made the contracting parents unfit. The lawsuit forced the courts to get involved. Surrogacy contracts hold that the contracting parents are the legal parents of the child, and West was trying to upend that precedent. A lower court ruled in favor of the contracting parents and ordered the baby turned over to Gilkar and Ahmed. McKenna then sued to block that lower court’s ruling. On Tuesday, Justice Elena Kagan refused to make the Supreme Court intervene, leaving in place the lower court order and granting custody to Gilkar and Ahmed. West was represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative legal group that has been involved in many cases seeking to take away abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights. With ADF’s help, West tried to turn a painful and compelling custody battle into yet another attack on abortion rights. The only thing these people know how to do is warp legal disputes into their endless culture war. I hate the ADF as a standing principle, but its eagerness to turn this baby into yet another pawn in its crusades feels like a new low. Not everything is an attack on Jesusland. *** If you enjoyed this installment of Elie v. U.S., click here to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Friday.

Netanyahu Came to New York. New Yorkers Were Ready for Him.

Ella Fanger — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:52:04 GMT

Scenes from the defiant protest against the genocidal leader’s UN speech. On the morning that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to speak to the United Nations General Assembly, the stretch of First Avenue leading to the glinting green Secretariat building along the East River was quiet. LinkNYC screens along the sidewalk displayed what appeared to be AI-generated images of the Manhattan skyline behind bold text: “Iranian delegates, thinking of a shopping spree? Back home, your people can’t even buy groceries.” Smaller print at the bottom of the frame read: “Paid for by the State of Israel.” Around noon, the calm was punctured by a disruption that has become somewhat frequent in New York City over the past three years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A group of seemingly unrelated individuals coalesced in an instant, forming a crowd to block traffic and unveiling identical T-shirts reading: “Jews Say Fund People Not Bombs.” Some 400 New Yorkers sat down in the center of the road and unfurled red and white banners reading “End the genocide” and “Fund healthcare, not warfare.” A few of them raised a massive white kite, a reference to Netanyahu’s threat last month to escalate attacks on Gaza over the alleged launching of paper kites. “We’re here to say no to allowing a platform for someone like Netanyahu in a city that is filled with hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers that are against genocide,” said Sumaya Awad, a member of New York City–DSA and director of strategy for the Adalah Justice Project. The action, led by Jewish Voice for Peace, was supported by a coalition of other organizations including the Palestinian Youth Movement, Sunrise Movement, and Rabbis for Ceasefire. Among the crowd of New Yorkers risking arrest were local, state, and federal elected officials and Democratic congressional nominees who have made support for Palestine a centerpiece of their politics. “The deep irony is that the person with the arrest warrant for their crimes against humanity is not the one that will be facing arrest today, but the people who are calling for an end to US taxpayer dollars funding that,” said Darializa Avila Chevalier, the democratic socialist and likely next congressperson for New York’s 13th Congressional District. Avila Chevalier was flanked by other Democratic congressional nominees who have pledged to oppose US funding for Israel in office, including New York’s Brad Lander, Colorado’s Melat Kiros, Pennsylvania’s Chris Rabb, and New Jersey’s Dr. Adam Hamawy. “There are people who are risking their safety who are here,” Rabb said. “We’re starting to let them know that their power will be reflected in Congress in January.” Over 20 New York city and state representatives joined the mass civil disobedience, including State Senator Jabari Brisport, State Assembly members Emily Gallagher and Diana Moreno, and state Senate nominee Aber Kawas, who is set to become the first Palestinian-American to win state office in New York. Also seated among the crowd was a sizable roster of celebrities and other public officials, a sign of the growing numbers of people willing to speak out in an industry that has been hostile to public expressions of support for Palestine. Actors who have become regulars at JVP’s acts of civil disobedience in recent years, like Susan Sarandon, Cynthia Nixon, and Hannah Einbinder, were joined by actor Elliot Page, comedians Caleb Hearon and Mary Beth Barone, Boygenius members Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, and whistleblower and former political prisoner Chelsea Manning. “We want the genocide to stop. We want the killing to stop. We want the United States to stop arming Israel. We want them to stop bombing Lebanon. We want them to stop bombing Iran,” Nixon told me. “We want Palestinians to be free and to be safe and have hopes and dreams for the future.” Within 10 minutes of the protesters’ assembling, NYPD officers on bikes began riding up to the scene, and soon assembled a sizable police presence. (As Politico reported, the officers were part of the Strategic Response Group, a notorious NYPD unit that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani vowed to disband—a vow he has yet to follow through on.) After around one hour of blockaded traffic, police began arresting over 104 participants, including Avila Chevalier, New York City Council members Alexa Avilés, Chi Ossé, and Emily Gallagher, and celebrities including Manning, Einbinder, and Sarandon. As they were loaded onto NYPD buses, other members of the protest cheered and sang. Many of the rank-and-file JVP members among the crowd have been arrested several times over the past few years while participating in the group’s acts of civil disobedience. “It feels so powerful. We see our numbers continue to grow. Increasing numbers of public figures are willing to take the risk of standing up,” said Danny Kaplowitz, a Jewish New Yorker who works in the labor movement. “We are not willing to let it go on with our tax dollars funding it and American bombs falling on Gazans without standing up and putting our bodies on the line to make it end.”

A Message From Prairieland Prisoner Autumn Hill: “Don’t Be Afraid”

Grace Byron — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:22:05 GMT

I talked to the political prisoner about the politics of love, her case, surviving as a trans woman in a men’s prison, and how she makes it through the day. Last year, Autumn Hill was among those arrested for protesting outside the Prairieland ICE Detention Center in Texas. After a noise demonstration, Hill left the scene. But some stayed behind, and after a police officer pulled a gun on the crowd, a protester fired their own weapon. The officer was hit in the shoulder. While no one died from the violence, Trump treated the protest as an incident of “Antifa” violence, a term he has used to criminalize dissent, arguing that there is an organized terrorist cell behind similar incidents across the country. For simply being present at the demonstration, even before the shooting occurred, Hill was sentenced to 50 years in prison. While she is a trans woman, she has been serving her time in a men’s prison. When I caught up with her, Hill was in good spirits. She had spent the morning reading a chemistry textbook. Over the phone, we spoke about nonviolence, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King Jr., and more. We dug into what a politics of love looks like, ICE, free speech, and whether antifa is an ideology. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Grace Byron Grace Byron: How are you doing today? How are you spending your days? Autumn Hill: I get up in the morning, often earlier than other people in the unit, and I read communications. I get anywhere from two to four letters a day. I have a bunch of people that I talk to over the jail communications app, and I have a lot of phone correspondence as well. In that respect, compared to a lot of people in a similar situation, I’m very blessed because I’m not really lonely at all. GB: What happened last year that you were later arrested for? AH: On the night of July 4th, some friends and I went to the Prairieland Detention Center to protest the unjust abduction of people by ICE. We wanted to make some noise. We wanted to get [the detainees’] attention and let them know that we were out here and supportive of them and that we knew that what was happening to them wasn’t right. I actually went home before the violence occurred, so I can’t really speak directly to what happened at the end of the protest. But I’ve said before that I know the alleged shooter. They are a close friend of mine, and even after they’ve been found guilty, I certainly do not believe the government’s narrative because that’s just not in the character of my friend. GB: I think it was the Democracy Now! interview where you said that that night on the Fourth of July was a radical act of love for you. I’m curious what that means to you. AH: The concept of radical love is very spiritual to me. It’s a matter of faith. I don’t follow any organized religion, but I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist household and my spirituality has been central to my life for a very long time. A significant part of the reason why I didn’t come out of the closet was because I wanted to try to find some way to bridge the gap between my sexuality and my gender presentation in a way that was going to allow me to stay with my community of faith. And unfortunately, there just was nothing that I ever could have done. A lot of our media today centers the experiences of queer people and their reconciliation with their families. Stuff like Steven Universe and Everything Everywhere All At Once wants this angle of, sure, you’re queer, and you have homophobic relatives, but the love that you share with your family is ultimately going to overcome that. Unfortunately, I have had to learn that that isn’t always the case, that what we think of as natural affection isn’t always going to be able to overwrite people’s extremist ideology. But at the same time, I have maintained a very strong foundation of, I guess, you might call it unorganized spirituality. When you love all people in this way, you want the same thing for other people’s babies and for other people’s loved ones that you would want for your own babies and your own loved ones. You want food and water and good housing for them and access to healthcare, and you want them to be esteemed by their neighbors. My whole life is driven by this radical love and by this urgent need to see justice done. I think that in the United States of America, justice is not done.

Susan Collins Is Corrupt. She Still Might Be Reelected.

Jeet Heer — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:54:16 GMT

Despite being embroiled in scandal, the Maine senator is benefiting from Democratic Party divisions. Susan Collins should never be underestimated. She won her first Senate election 30 years ago, and her sheer tenacity in staying in power is formidable, especially since, over the course of her political career, Maine hasn’t been hospitable ground for Republicans (the state last gave the popular vote to a GOP president in 1988). Collins has kept her seat by repeatedly convincing Maine voters that she’s a different kind of Republican. Along the way, she’s broken all sorts of records: She’s the longest-serving member of Congress from Maine and the longest-serving female Republican senator in history. Earlier this year, The New York Times recorded that she was “the first senator in history to reach 10,000 consecutive votes cast without an absence.” The Senate, along with the Supreme Court, is a bulwark of American gerontocracy—an institution where seniority is power. Just by hanging around long enough, Collins has become the chair of the Appropriations Committee, an immensely powerful post that itself helps her win reelections by allowing her to shower Maine with government largesse. For voters, the choice between Collins and any Democrat carries with it a brutal cost/benefit equation whereby ideological rectitude has to be weighed against losing a senator who can bring home the bacon. Time and again, Mainers have opted for the bacon; in 2020, Collins won reelection by more than 8 percent even as Donald Trump was trounced in the state by 11 percent. But Collins’s undeniable gift for pork-barrel spending could now come back to haunt her, thanks to a new pay-for-play scandal broken on Tuesday by ProPublica. The ProPublica story focuses on Collins’s links to Martin Kao, the former CEO of a defense contractor called Navatek. Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison for bank fraud and Covid relief fraud. Prior to his conviction, Kao had provided damning testimony to the FBI about a political quid pro quo scheme he was working. Legally, defense contractors are not allowed to donate to campaigns, so Kao used shell corporations to donate to super PACs supporting politicians who promoted Navatek projects to the Pentagon. Collins and her office were in the crosshairs of the FBI investigation into Kao’s activities, but the senator was saved from possible criminal charges by Donald Trump’s reelection, which led the president to fire FBI agents working on the investigation (some of whom had also investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election). According to ProPublica: Collins’ office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations…. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle. Collins’s office denies any wrongdoing and claims that they have “disgorged” any money received from Kao. But as ProPublica notes, these denials are themselves filled with misleading claims. ProPublica’s reporting shows that Kao’s operation was almost comically corrupt. Navatek received tens of millions in government contracts, but produced almost no useful technology for the Pentagon. In 2019, Navatek sent a check for $150,000 to a Collins-supporting PAC in the name of a shell group: “the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers.” (This name contained a typo: “scientist” should have been plural.) The check was made after Kao had met with Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, at the Corner Bakery in Washington. According to ProPublica, “The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.” A lawyer for the super PAC advised Kao to try to make the shell organization look more legitimate by “giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.” Kao would follow this advice, but not with a gracious spirit. He complained the charitable spending was “just a pack of bitches getting free $.”

Gavin Newsom Comments on Climate

Mark Hertsgaard — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:30:00 GMT

On the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting and New York Climate Week, the California governor called AOC “the real **** deal.” It’s a mistake for Democratic politicians not to talk about climate change, and the reason they don’t is “because they don’t know how to talk about it,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday in an interview with The Guardian and the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now. Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting and New York Climate Week, Newsom also predicted that the midterm elections in November would bring “the end of Donald Trump’s presidency as we know it.” To prevent Trump from stealing those elections, voters must turn out in such overwhelming numbers that he “couldn’t possibly contest” the outcome, he argued. If the US president nevertheless declares a national emergency or otherwise attempts to invalidate the results, Newsom said, then “we the people have to step up. The courts have to intervene. Congress has to do its job and stand up for the rule of law.” Although Newsom said in an interview with CNN last week that he would not run for president if Kamala Harris did, on Wednesday, he did not rule out running if US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez decides to run. Commenting on Covering Climate Now and The Guardian’s reporting that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people and 74 percent of Americans want their governments to take stronger climate action, Newsom condemned the “climate hushing” most Democrats have practiced since Trump returned to the White House in 2025. “I talk about [climate change] all the time,” he said. He agreed that Democrats must be “laser-focused” on voters’ affordability concerns, but the key is to “connect the dots” between those concerns and the economic impacts of extreme heat, droughts, floods, and other consequences of overheating the planet. “People say: Why are you talking about climate change? You should be talking about kitchen table [issues],” Newsom said. “I say: I am. You haven’t connected the droughts to the cost of beef; to the cost of coffee? You have to connect climate risk with financial risk, with our trade policy. These are kitchen table issues.” “My biggest frustration during the Biden years,” he added, was that the Biden administration passed strong climate policies, including the Inflation Reduction Act, but then didn’t communicate that to the public. “Democrats fall prey to the Enlightenment Fallacy, that somehow good ideas sell themselves,” Newsom said. “We have to deliver not just good policy, we’ve also got to connect that policy to people’s lived experience and sell the hell out of it…. Don’t just talk about extreme heat, talk about that farmworker in the warehouse [experiencing] that heat.” Citing scientists’ finding that the hotter climate has supercharged the natural El Niño phenomenon into a super El Niño, Newsom last week declared a state of emergency in California, “so we can pre-position assets” to protect the state’s inhabitants, infrastructure, and economy from the impacts. “That costs money,” he said. “Anyone who suggests that doing nothing [about the climate crisis ] is the cheaper bet? Nonsense.… The cost of inaction is incalculable. It’s not just the cost of emergency preparedness, but also the economic impacts of not being able to get insurance and not being able to build housing because you can’t insure the construction.” “Here’s the thing that keeps me optimistic: the markets are moving in our direction,” he said. “Wind, solar and large-scale batteries [are] abundant and cheap,” while the war in Iran has pushed the price of gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer to record highs…. And that’s not only happening in the United States, but globally people are realizing [that clean energy] is the better option.” Thanks to large-scale batteries, which Newsom called “a game changer,” California ran on 100 percent clean electricity nine in every 10 days so far in 2026, he said. “For the fourth-largest economy in the world, that’s incredible,” he exclaimed, and it shows that planet-warming emissions can be cut without harming economic growth.

Trump Impersonated Hitler at the United Nations

Sasha Abramsky — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:30:00 GMT

It was just one more of many examples of the president mirroring a fascist leadership. What does Trump’s Hitler impersonation at the United Nations on Tuesday have to do with Trump’s banning select news organizations from the White House? And what do either have to do with his increased efforts to round up thousands of unaccompanied children with pending asylum claims and prep them for deportation? The answer: All of these indignities are symptoms of a US political system that has been captured by fanatics, its priorities now a near-mirroring of those of the fascist leaderships against whose foul vision hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their lives fighting during the Second World War. At the UN this week, as part of the annual gathering of world leaders at the general assembly, Trump railed against supranational organizations such as the International Criminal Court; threatened to “annihilate” and cast into an unrelenting hell the Iranian state and the tens of millions of people who live there; boasted about seizing Venezuelan oil fields; peremptorily embraced the might-is-right notion that “to the victor belong the spoils”; intimated that he would extend his tender mercies to Cuba next; and pledged, despite growing public unease, to turbocharge the AI revolution so as to lock US dominance in place from here to kingdom come. The irony was lost on no one that the US president had chosen the United Nations—the founding mandate of which, in the aftermath of world war, was to create international cooperation to help defuse conflict—to unfurl his most odious, nationalist sentiments. This was, quite simply, Hitler updated for the digital age. I challenge you to find one sentence in that monstrosity of a UN speech that the German Führer would have wanted to distance himself from. Fascists talk a good talk when it comes to toughness, but another common denominator is their incredibly thin skin. If you can’t brook criticism, and you have an awful lot of power at your fingertips, why not go after media institutions and individual journalists who try to hold you to account? In the early days of Nazi rule, the opposition press was systematically destroyed, with an anti–free press law decreeing that editors must “regulate their work in accordance with National Socialism as a philosophy of life.” Hundreds of publications were driven out of business, and it was made clear to collaborator companies by Max Amann—the bureaucrat in charge of Hitler’s efforts to corral the media—that their advertising money should only be spent buying space in party-approved journals and newspapers. Legally and financially, the free press was ground to dust. This past week, in a middle-of-the-night social media tantrum, Trump decided to “ban” reporters for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House because of their at times unflattering portrayals of America’s wannabe king. In explaining this appalling move, Trump then declared that the free press is “something which I cherish,” but that his move was aimed at “instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!” He also informed the press corps, “Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposefully negative stories.” After years of training, I now speak enough Orwellian to be able to translate this. It means “Quiescent Free Press good; critical Free Press bad. First Amendment simply a waste of parchment.” Again, Hitler, or for that matter Stalin, couldn’t have said this any better—although I suspect it would have sounded vaguely more poetic in the original German or Russian. Unsurprisingly, Todd Blanche’s quisling Justice Department then went to court to defend the indefensible, arguing that the president had absolute freedom to deny any media he wanted from the White House and to make a judgment call on national security grounds that the critical media were, in fact, a danger to the well-being of the state. That, I suspect, will be a bridge too far even for the Roberts Supreme Court. While we’re on the subject of defending the indefensible, for the past two months the administration has been building a massive infrastructure, centered largely in Texas, to detain, and to fast-track for deportations, thousands of unaccompanied minors who crossed the southern border in recent years and who have pending asylum cases in US courts.

Trump Is Destroying Public Health. Democrats Need to Fight Back.

Gregg Gonsalves — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:23:00 GMT

If they win in the midterms, the party must move quickly and aggressively to undo the harm Trump and his cronies have caused. It is truly difficult to keep up with the pace of OMB Director Russell Vought and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr.’s assaults on public health, biomedicine, and science. Over the past week or so, Vought has decided that he must have control over grant funding at the National Institutes of Health. His larger attempt to put all federal grant funding under his thumb was sidelined by Congress, so he is getting President Trump to issue an Executive Order giving him this authority, whether it is legal or not. Over at Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. has seized control over the US Preventive Services Task Force, and is doing what he did to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices last year: gutting it and filling the seats with cronies and crackpots. The USPSTF is our nation’s premier arbiter of preventive services—overseeing everything from disease screening (e.g., mammograms and colonoscopies) to preventive therapies (e.g., pre-exposure prophylaxis against HIV infection). Insurers are statutorily compelled to cover highly rated interventions without cost sharing for all Americans. Now those ratings will be judged by the charlatans in RFK Jr.’s inner circle. The damage these two men have done and will continue to do is without parallel in American history. Their actions will cost lives, make people sick, and set back research and innovation in the United States for a generation or more. And it is time to stop treating them like ordinary political actors. Vought and RFK Jr. are out-of-control zealots with no rational policy goals. To treat them otherwise is to invest their deep sociopathy with credibility. Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist whose policies led to the deaths of millions of Russians, didn’t “have a point,” and you didn’t have to “hand it to him” in his criticism of the orthodoxy of Mendelian genetics. You certainly didn’t have to find a way to “collaborate on shared goals” to make the USSR healthy again. He was a monster. These two men are too. While I think it’s critical to catalogue what these men have wrought, it’s more important to try to stop them. To the credit of many working in public health, science, and medicine, there has been a growing resistance to Vought and RFK Jr. That pressure helped successfully tank Vought’s recent efforts to take over grant-making, while many professional societies have stepped up to offer alternatives to the lunacy of HHS’s public health recommendations and sued the federal government. There are also brave solo actors who have risked their careers in speaking out. But there is an opportunity on the horizon to do much more to restore public health, biomedicine, and science in the US. If the Democrats win control over one or both chambers of Congress this fall, they must act decisively to reverse as much of the Trump-era damage as possible.No half-measures will be sufficient; the Democratic inclination for everything to be bipartisan needs to be weighed against the real costs in human lives and suffering that this kind of political deal-making entails. Otherwise, the Democrats will be complicit as deaths continue to mount from this Administration’s policies. We need to play hardball, even if it rubs the denizens of Capitol Hill the wrong way. There is so much to do. We need to reverse the budget cuts that have decimated federal agencies. Then we should go down the list of Vought and RFK Jr.’s greatest hits and reverse whatever policies we can by statute. Democrats should use reconciliation, tie provisions to must-pass bills, and consider the nuclear option of changing the rules on the use of the filibuster in the Senate. Yes, Trump can veto bills and the usual horse-trading is still going to need to happen, but if you start negotiations at what you can agree on with this GOP, you are already conceding too much. And outside the legislative arena, control over the House and/or Senate offers ways to hold these men and their underlings accountable. Democrats should bring them to testify before committees, subpoena documents from agencies and the White House, and private actors who have been key participants in their efforts, and consider impeachment proceedings for the lot of them. Perhaps this sounds too brazen, too far from the world of DC realpolitik, and members of Congress will think, “Oh, we couldn’t possibly do that,” or, “Well, we are really focused on affordability for 2028.” But this kind of reticence and evasion masks a fundamental misunderstanding of what has just happened in the US. Covid was a once-in-a-generation pandemic. It killed over 1 million of us here in this country. But Russell Vought and RFK Jr. are deadlier than a virus. The world of hurt inflicted on millions of Americans (and millions more around the globe) by this administration is a catastrophe. It demands an extraordinary response.

Freeze AI!

Garrison Lovely — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The nuclear freeze movement’s lessons for taming AI. This article is adapted from Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us—and How to Stop It, due out Sept 29, 2026. A I is, in many ways, unprecedented. ChatGPT was adopted faster than any past consumer software. Anthropic’s revenue grew faster than any company at its scale. And the megaprojects of the past, Manhattan and Apollo, utterly fail to capture the scale of what I call the Obsoleting Project: the companies racing to replace us with machines. But stopping that Project doesn’t require us to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we should look to one of the most remarkable and overlooked mass movements of the 20th century. In the 1976 primary, Ronald Reagan discovered that stoking unfounded fears about the Soviet Union’s looming nuclear supremacy made for great politics. While he still lost to Gerald Ford, Reagan had landed on a strategy that would contribute to his landslide victory four years later (running on the slogan “Make America Great Again”). He entered office in 1981 a longtime critic of détente and arms control. Reagan’s administration repeatedly indicated nuclear war wasn’t unthinkable. In one infamous comment, a defense official said the US could fully recover from an all-out nuclear war in “two to four years.” He promised, “Everybody’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.” Nuclear war appeared to be a real and present danger. It was into this belligerent climate—months before Reagan entered office—that Randall Forsberg, a defense analyst and MIT doctoral student, published a “Call to Halt the Nuclear Arms Race.” This bilateral freeze between the US and the Soviet Union would be enforced by a “ban on all further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons and nuclear delivery vehicles.” Considering what the four-page manifesto set in motion, it makes for dry reading. But the actual ask was straightforward, especially compared to past advocacy efforts: “The vast majority of the public avoid ‘single weapon’ campaigns…which involve technical and quantitative arguments and which consist of unilateral measures.” The simplicity, ambition, and bilateral nature of her plan were assets—and she knew it: “Such a proposal would attract overwhelming popular support.” Her confidence, it turns out, was well-founded. Just over two years after Forsberg’s call was published, an estimated 1 million people marched to New York’s Central Park to rally for a nuclear freeze—then the largest protest in American history. The ultimate big-tent, grassroots movement had started small. In 1980, as Forsberg’s freeze proposal began circulating, Massachusetts-based Vietnam draft resister Randy Kehler and other local peace activists placed a freeze proposition on the ballot in three western Massachusetts state Senate districts. It was approved by 59 percent of voters in districts Reagan carried, demonstrating the idea’s bipartisan appeal. Subsequent ballot propositions passed almost everywhere, in votes covering roughly one-third of the American electorate, then the largest referendum on a single issue in the country’s history. While Freeze emerged out of leftist anti-war and antinuclear advocacy, it consciously sought bipartisan support, using widespread education campaigns to reach well beyond its base. According to Henry Maar’s history of the movement, Freeze!, the easy-to-understand concept radically democratized a nuclear debate long dominated by white guys with technical degrees. The president played an unwitting role, too. Reagan’s militarism inspired an improbable coalition—mainstream Democrats alongside radical pacifists, retired admirals alongside Hollywood celebrities, labor unions alongside balanced-budget hawks. Maar concludes that religious groups were disarmament’s most significant backers, highlighting the National Conference of Catholic Bishops as the Freeze’s “moral backbone.” The campaign was buttressed by journalist Jonathan Schell’s seminal 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, which seriously explored the possibility of nuke-driven extinction, and The Day After, a 1983 ABC television movie depicting the aftermath of nuclear war that was watched by an estimated 100 million Americans. The filmmakers intended the film to be apolitical, but its wildly successful publicity campaign was spearheaded by a Freeze activist—without the knowledge or consent of ABC. A leading pollster reported in October 1983 that Freeze was “the most significant citizens’ movement of the last century.” Polls showed 70 percent or more support for a bilateral freeze. And in Gallup’s “most important problem” survey, nuclear war was mentioned by 24 percent of people in December 1983, nearly quadrupling support from July and earning it the top spot. The massive jump in salience was likely due to the omnipresent discussion surrounding The Day After, which aired days before the December survey began. The popularity of a freeze put Reagan in a tricky position. In April 1982, as support for the campaign was surging, the president used a national radio address to co-opt the movement’s energy, declaring that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and “to those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say: ‘I’m with you.’” But internally, the administration was freaking out. Reagan’s communications director explained there was a “widespread view…that the freeze was a dagger pointed at the heart of the administration’s defense policies.” Months after his address, Reagan began baselessly characterizing the freeze movement as a Soviet plot. The FBI and CIA found no evidence for this claim (and, in fact, Soviet efforts to influence the movement had failed). National security adviser William Clark said it “may be the most important national security opportunity and challenge of [the Reagan] administration.” But Clark also wrote, “The fact that the activists have our attention should be kept secret.”

Is Platonic Co-Parenting the Future of the Family?

Samantha Camire — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Disillusioned with the nuclear family and apprehensive of tethering their reproductive futures to the bleak hellscape of modern love, young people are seeking a different way. Caitlin Asher always knew she wanted children. But she never envisioned her family looking the way it does now. Asher is single, but she doesn’t parent alone. She shares children with her best friend, Amanda Oelrich, and Amanda’s husband, Chris. Asher is not in a romantic relationship with the couple and never has been. Instead, the three platonically co-parent together in the same Portland, Oregon, home. It all started when Asher and Oelrich were living as roommates in 2019. Motivated by their shared passion for helping children—Asher had interned with a child welfare organization and Amanda has an early-education degree—the women decided to become co–foster parents. “We’re both single,” Asher remembers thinking. But “we both love kids and we have the capacity to do it.” Because the goal of foster care is primarily to reunify children with their families of origin, the pair imagined their co-parenting arrangement as short-term. “We figured we’d do it for a few years, then we’d both meet people and get married and then, you know, continue to be really good friends in separate houses,” Asher said. In February 2020, they welcomed their first child—a baby boy—into their home; he only stayed for about a week. Then, in late March 2020, they got a call for a baby girl named Bella. Just a few months into Bella’s life, the pair were asked if they were open to adopting her. They now had to consider if they were committed to a lifetime of parenting together. “We were very good friends. We knew each other well. We trusted that we both loved this kid and that we would commit to her forever,” Asher said. “Maybe that feels like a risk, but it is also arguably a risk in every single married relationship too.” In March 2022, Asher and Oelrich, who was by then in a committed relationship with Chris, adopted Bella. Later, they fostered and adopted Bella’s sister, Sofia. While arrangements like Asher and Oelrich’s are still rare, the pair is not alone. Increasingly disillusioned with the traditional nuclear family model and apprehensive of tethering their reproductive futures to the bleak hellscape of modern love, growing numbers of young people are seeking a different way—not marriage nor single parenting, but the coveted “secret third thing.” For some, that thing is having kids with your friends. There is no concrete data on the number of platonic co-parenting families in the US or the world. However, several specialty apps have sprung up over the last two years, catering to people interested in finding a platonic co-parent through the Internet, and their user numbers are on the rise. In 2020, one of the apps, Modamily, reported having 30,000 registered users; in 2025, it reported 100,000. A similar platform, CoParents, had 85,000 users in 2020; now, it boasts 150,000. Women especially seem to be interested in exploring alternatives to the nuclear family. In a 2017 survey of 379 unmarried mothers by Lake Research Partners, 58 percent said they would be open to raising a child with someone who is not a spouse or romantic partner. More than 50 percent of unmarried mothers, unmarried women with no children under 18, and married women agreed there should be more ways to raise children with someone who is not a romantic partner. Hannah Dees is doing it already. In 2015, she was living in Ontario, Canada, with her roommate, Andrew McAllister, and was considering becoming a single parent. She approached McAllister about being a sperm donor.

How Joe Biden Helped Cause a Genocide in Gaza

Jack Mirkinson — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:13:19 GMT

An interview with reporter Akbar Shahid Ahmed about his new book, “Crossing the Red Line.” The Biden administration’s near-total support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a stain that can never be washed from Biden’s legacy—or from the legacy of the key figures who helped Biden fuel the genocide. It is those figures—people like Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan; his Middle East coordinator, Brett McGurk; and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken—who loom largest in Crossing the Red Line: Biden, His Advisors, and Israel’s War in Gaza, a damning new book by journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed. The book is a culmination of Ahmed’s years-long effort, first at HuffPost and now at The Washington Sun, to tell the story of how the genocide unfolded from deep within the bowels of official Washington. It tells a comprehensive, devastating story of the way that the Biden administration’s imperial hubris; disregard for both domestic and international law; insular, paranoid culture; emotional identification with Israel; and dehumanization of Palestinians combined to help commit one of the worst crimes of the 21st century. I spoke to Ahmed on Wednesday. We talked about why understanding Biden’s approach to the genocide matters, why so few people within the administration spoke out against the government’s support for the genocide, the flagrant anti-Palestinian bias shown by Biden’s top aides, the media’s failure to accurately reflect what was happening inside the White House, and more. —Jack Mirkinson Jack Mirkinson: We’re now almost two years into the Trump administration. Oftentimes over the past 18 months, you’ll see people going, “Why are people still talking about Joe Biden? Donald Trump’s in office now. Shouldn’t we be focusing on that?” What would your response be to people who say that? Akbar Shahid Ahmed: The reason why we need to look at the Biden administration’s atrocious policymaking on Gaza is exemplified by this week at the UN General Assembly. The biggest event yesterday, Tuesday, was Brett McGurk, Biden’s Middle East coordinator, hosting a high-profile event with Syrian President Ahmad Al-Sharaa for the Atlantic Council think tank—which shows you the architects of this policy are coming back to shape our era. McGurk is someone who I’ve written about for years as, in the words of one official who spoke to me, “the prime example of a white man failing up.” This character has gone through Middle East policy in the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden eras, and, as I reveal in my book, tried to get a job in the second Trump presidency unsuccessfully. We live in an elite foreign policy culture that, without a reckoning and without shining a light on decisions that enable atrocities, incivility, and chaos, is going to keep promoting and empowering the same people. And that’s alarming from a moral and small-d democratic standpoint of accountability. It’s also relevant in the Trump era because so much of what has been normalized since October 7th and has gotten so much worse under Trump is rooted in decisions made by the Biden administration. And what I mean by that is policies like the US tolerance of a major and unprecedented Israeli blockade on any supplies going into Gaza. It was the Biden era that crafted those policies, not Trump. When we think about concerns like the potential permanent ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the alarm bells were being rung in the Biden era. Nothing was done. Allowing a bipartisan veneer over these policies is part of what allows them to persist. JM: You place the Biden administration not only within a continuum stretching back to the outbreak of the Iraq War and the so-called War on Terror but also to conflicts as far back as Vietnam.

A Premature Farewell to the Ignominious Speaker Mike Johnson

Joan Walsh — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

If Democrats win the House in the midterms, as expected, Mike Johnson won’t hold the gavel in any meaningful way again. Is it too soon to say farewell to Speaker Mike Johnson? The Democrats are almost universally expected to win the House in November’s midterms, which would mean we’ve essentially seen the last of him in that role. Assuming these expectations are correct, there might even be debate over whether he gets the title of GOP minority leader. And while there will be a lame-duck session of the 119th Congress after the election, that’s shaping up to be a festival of recriminations, the last stand of GOP members who just lost their seats, thanks at least in part to Johnson. What an ignominious tenure he has had. Remember, Johnson wasn’t the Republicans’ first choice as speaker when they retook the House. He wasn’t even their fourth. Kevin McCarthy won in January 2023, after more than a dozen votes, but was forced to resign nine months later. The House GOP then fielded three other representatives—Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Tom Emmer—none of whom could get the votes. Finally, the pious Johnson, with his schoolboy looks and his empty legislative record, became the chosen front man for a fractious House GOP caucus, united only behind Trump. Johnson may seem mild-mannered, but I found his early statements as speaker scary. “People are curious, ‘What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’” he said in his first interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity. “I say, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’” The Nation’s Katha Pollitt lamented his “18th-century values.” But I didn’t expect Johnson to be able to accomplish much, and that turned out to be correct. Only two weeks ago Johnson was seen boasting, at Donald Trump’s fake “midterm convention,” that the 119th Congress was “the most productive in 80 years.” By most available metrics, that’s untrue. According to GovTrack, the 119th Congress has enacted 429 pieces of legislation, compared with 619 in the 118th Congress and 1,236 in the 117th. The fact-checking site Snopes rated Johnson’s claim “false.” What else can Johnson claim as a legacy? He tried to bottle up legislation calling on the Trump administration to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, but had to put it to a vote because so many Republicans were fed up with the stonewalling. He needn’t have worried, because the Justice Department released those files so haphazardly and incompletely that Congress has so far been unable to make a case for additional prosecution measures. In September, after dodging questions about caucus member Max Miller of Ohio, accused of abusing his wife (who is, awkwardly, the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno), he stood up for Miller. “He has been a great member of Congress,” Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju. “He has some issues in his personal life he’s working through.” Maybe he’s counting on Miller’s vote in January. Johnson does deserve some credit—I’d call it blame—for presiding over the longest government shutdown in history. Oh, and one more thing: shepherding Trump’s “One Big [Destructive] Bill” to a party-line reconciliation victory. Some of the bill’s worst program cuts, to Medicaid and the SNAP program, won’t be fully felt until after the election. The bill’s architects and stewards, like Johnson, thought that was politically wily. What they didn’t predict was that states and counties would begin preparing for the cuts this year, so we’re already seeing sharp increases in childhood hunger and healthcare needs. That will not help vulnerable Republicans in November. By adjourning the House’s September session early, Johnson also ducked action on artificial intelligence, even as bipartisan rancor rises over the AI giants’ irresponsibility, as well as the tech machers’ own worries about what they’ve unleashed on the world. “They can self-regulate. They don’t need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should,” Johnson said recently. There’s a leader seizing the day. When the House returns for its lame-duck session after the midterms, it could take up AI or cryptocurrency legislation, but that’s highly unlikely. In fact, Republican Representative Thomas Massie and Democratic Representative Ro Khanna announced in mid-September that they will have enough votes to force a vote on their Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which would give Epstein’s victims, as well as state and local prosecutors, access to more information in those files. Massie will almost certainly have more support for his move to impeach scandal-ridden Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. If November is a complete disaster for Republicans, both of those pieces of legislation could be a vehicle to punish Trump, and Johnson. It’s actually fun to imagine the GOP blame game that will follow a midterm drubbing. One issue alone: Johnson’s backing Trump’s ridiculous midterm convention, which saddled vulnerable members with two nights of deadly presidential narcissism. Johnson was a headliner, but NPR found that fewer than half of GOP candidates in competitive House races were alongside him on the list of speakers at the Dallas event. Will the losers who come back to the lame-duck session be anxious to do their speaker’s bidding? I don’t think so.

Transphobia Isn’t Winning Votes. But It Is Making Our Lives Much Worse.

Gillian Branstetter — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Trans people must now live out another election cycle knowing our friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors are being flooded with agitprop designed to dehumanize us. Last week, the conservative group American Principles Project sent a memo to GOP candidates running in the 2026 midterms about one of the party’s biggest attack issues this cycle: transgender rights. In the memo, the APP, which focuses its political work heavily around anti-trans themes, assured these candidates that the transphobic advertisements and messaging it has sold them on for nearly a decade “can still be used to move persuadable voters.” But then the group pivoted. It warned that this hate-filled strategy on its own “may not be sufficient” without a “compelling message on the economy,” an issue that ranks as the top priority for voters—unlike trans people and our healthcare, which typically have much lower saliency. One memo from one group may not seem that important. But APP has spent years convincing Republican campaigns and donors about the potency of anti-transgender attacks against Democrats. This is despite the fact that transphobia-themed attacks have failed to seal the deal in competitive statewide and House races in 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2025. Their apparent success in 2024 was more likely a fluke, deployed against a weakened candidate on a shortened timeframe with a deflated base trying to carry the baggage of another president whose popularity was sunk by the rising cost of living. The group’s warnings are also bearing out in the polls thus far this year; even after heavily investing in anti-trans advertising in key midterm races across the country—and getting substantial outside assistance from figures like Elon Musk, whose super PAC is spending $100 million in advertisements almost solely focused on demonizing trans people in many of these races—Republicans stand a real chance of losing the House and potentially even the Senate. While it makes meek references to “economic populism” to ward off voters’ increasing embrace of “the false promise of socialism,” APP seemingly knows very well that an obsessive focus on niche cultural grievances is not enough to blind voters to the reality of the economy most Americans are enduring. Yet, while the electoral threat that anti-trans attacks pose to Democrats is overstated, where this strategy has been successful is in rendering transgender people as politically isolated as we’ve ever been—decreasing the public’s support for our legal and social equality and foregrounding the most emotional issues (like the rights of the minuscule number of transgender athletes) over the more profound, material forces that actually shape trans people’s daily lives, namely access to affordable healthcare, safe schools, jobs free of discrimination, and the ability to go about our lives with dignity. Trans people in battleground states must now live out another election cycle knowing that their friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors are being flooded with agitprop designed to dehumanize us. Some of the ads being paid for by Musk in states like Texas and Ohio present such a cartoonish depiction of transgender life or activism that they’ve literally used AI to generate caricatures of trans women who don’t exist. As I said, real-life trans people mostly have the same day-to-day concerns about their lives as any other Americans. But the core thesis of Trumpism is one of forced scarcity—the belief that your struggle and suffering must be the fault of someone different from you. It proposes that if we can simply make trans people—or immigrants or Muslims or Black people or women—suffer, then the lives of “everyday” (read straight, cis, white) people will surely improve. But as APP’s memo suggests, that promise is collapsing in real time, presenting an opportunity for Democrats to turn the tables on anti-transgender attacks in the context of Trump’s many broken promises. What Trump assured the American people in 2024 is that their dissatisfaction with the Biden administration was because Biden and Kamala Harris were either too old, too incompetent, or too focused on transgender people and our rights. But now that Donald Trump is president, he has banned trans athletes, gone after doctors and hospitals that provide trans healthcare, purged trans people from the military and any mention of them from much of the federal government, and done everything in his power to deny trans people and our families any modicum of dignity or autonomy over our own lives. Has that lowered your rent? Has that put gas in your car? Has the ritual humiliation and dehumanization of transgender people helped give your children a brighter future? Some Democrats are still embracing a (likely doomed) effort to negate the anti-trans attack ads through some combination of retreat and triangulation. I understand that it is generally a mistake to expect politicians to be brave. Many strategists and advisers would suggest pols aren’t furthering the political isolation of trans people with these triangulations but simply reflecting public opinion—and that an unreliable ally is better for trans people than a reliable enemy. But there is another option between the retreat of some candidates this year and the silence these attacks often met in past election cycles. As APP makes clear, the goal of these ads is carving a division between the interests of the broader public and the interests of transgender people ourselves. But Trump, Musk, APP, and their allies on the campaign trail have shown that our fates and interests have never been more intertwined, with the country being robbed and immiserated by the same people harboring a dangerous obsession with the rights and lives of less than 1 percent of the population. They know this isn’t working; all we need to do is connect the dots for everyone else.

Treat Spotify Like a Public Utility

Ramsay Eyre — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Music streaming platforms have way too much control over musicians and music lovers. It’s time to rein them in. If you are like nearly 200 million other Americans, you have an account on Spotify, Apple Music, or Amazon Music. You probably access the music you love primarily by streaming. Recorded music is likely the backdrop to many of your fondest memories. Listening to it may well be an essential part of your daily life. But log on to any of these streaming services today, and it becomes immediately clear just how far they have strayed from their role as an unobtrusive means to access one of life’s most basic pleasures. From intrusive ads to AI DJ features you didn’t ask for, the overall experience has degraded—not that it’s stopped billionaire executives from hiking subscription prices. If you’re a musician whose music is on one of these platforms, the odds are that your experience is even worse. You are likely paid fractions of pennies on the dollar per stream—after a process for determining compensation that is often opaque to you but filled with contractual quirks and kickbacks. You might be further squeezed if you want any chance of the algorithm pushing you to new listeners. You might even be nudged—covertly or overtly—to change artistic directions based on what the platform describes as your music’s most and least popular characteristics. You’re all too aware that platform executives’ decisions have the power to make or break careers—that it is, in other words, a game of pay-to-play. This is all pretty demeaning, and harmful to musical culture. There is a legal tool kit at our disposal if we want a fairer, less destructive way to enjoy one of humanity’s oldest art forms. But it involves reconceptualizing what these services really are. Hating the streaming giants has gone mainstream. Musicians from Thom Yorke to Taylor Swift have spoken out against them, even as they are some of their highest-paid artists. And our understanding of their harms has grown even more acute in recent years, as journalists like Liz Pelly have richly documented the deep problems at the heart of the business model and user experience. Meanwhile, independent musicians are organizing to divest their local scenes from Spotify. Many have started to ask themselves: Why can’t we ditch these platforms? A range of ideas have been proposed, adopting familiar models from labor organizing (organizing musicians into new unions capable of exercising countervailing power) and tax policy (creating new categories of royalties for artists by taxing streaming platform revenues). Private market-based solutions—like competition from new, upstart streaming platforms, or consumer boycotts—have also attracted attention and, in some cases, endorsement from the streaming platforms themselves (as applied to their rivals). But none of these solutions account for the fact that music streaming platforms are not like the retail businesses that supplied past generations with records and CDs. When operating in competitive markets, these businesses might have been responsive to external private power. Spotify and its peers are more like public utilities or infrastructure: large platforms that connect musicians to listeners and vice versa, where scale and connectivity are all-important. This makes them unlikely to be effectively governed by private actors alone—just like electric utilities are unlikely to be disciplined by competing power lines or by households turning off the lights. Without public governance, streaming platforms will likely continue to raise prices on consumers, squeeze musicians, and make the music we hear less interesting and innovative. Online streaming platforms only make sense operating at a large scale: Their very utility depends on connecting as many different users as possible, since listeners generally want platforms that have most of the music they want, and musicians want platforms with the most listeners. This means that within each platform, music is likely to be distributed in complex webs or networks, connecting many different users to many others. And while platforms might not pay each individual artist all that much, licensing all that music and building an interface to channel it is very expensive—making a system of many small, competing platforms unlikely to succeed. In other words, the nature of these services tends toward concentration. And that’s exactly what they’ve done over the last 20 years: transform themselves into the only means through which recorded music can reach a mass audience. That’s why it’s time, as I argue in an article published earlier this year by the Columbia Journal of Law & The Arts, to reach for tools that we have used to solve similar problems before.

Israel’s Election Can’t Fix What Netanyahu Broke

Hadar Susskind — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

The fundamental problem is not the name of the prime minister, but rather the actions of the Israeli government and the urgent issues that need to be addressed. In 1996, a brash right-wing politician was sworn in as Israel’s youngest prime minister. He had led the right-wing Likud party back to power just months after an assassin killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose pursuit of peace included recognizing the Palestinian national liberation movement and establishing what seemed at the time to be a path to ending the occupation. That fresh-faced prime minister was Benjamin Netanyahu, and 30 years later, he leads an Israeli government that has abandoned even the pretense of being grounded in liberal democratic ideals. His government has embraced Orbán-style neoauthoritarianism and the dehumanization of Palestinians. We see the changes in the weakening of Israel’s always-flawed democracy, the political attacks on the media and the courts, and the shrinking space for dissent for Israel’s own citizens. Most disturbingly, we see it in the Israeli government’s increasingly belligerent conduct toward Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. For Americans who have long understood the US-Israel relationship as a partnership between two democracies with shared liberal values, that transformation is not abstract. It raises a basic question: What does Israel’s transformation mean for the relationship between our two countries? Some of the most devastatingly consequential actions by Netanyahu’s current government have to do with the Gaza war. Consider, for example, the allegations in the new documentary NAZA, based on testimony from Israeli military personnel, about the high level of collateral damage and civilian casualties that were anticipated and accepted in planning strikes throughout Gaza. Or consider the government’s decision from March 2025 to block all food, fuel, and medicine from reaching Gaza. This was official policy, justified as an effort to gain leverage, to use humanitarian aid as a weapon of war. This sort of collective punishment is a war crime. These decisions are anathema to Americans’ basic sensibilities about the sacredness of human life. The Israeli government’s embrace of these policies is the best explanation for the dramatic drop in sympathy for Israel among the American public. For decades Americans, by and large, had supported Israel because we saw it as a democracy that shared our liberal values and was seeking, however imperfectly, to find a way to live alongside the Palestinians. The actions of the Netanyahu government are not reconcilable with that vision of Israel. The decline is dramatic. In a Quinnipiac poll released last week, for the first time more registered voters said that their sympathies lie with the Palestinians than with the Israelis—38 percent to 35. That is an all-time high for the Palestinians and an all-time low for the Israelis since Quinnipiac began asking the question 25 years ago. And nearly half of all voters, 48 percent, now say the United States is too supportive of Israel. Only 8 percent say it is not supportive enough. The question is what happens next. Israeli elections are scheduled for October 27, and polls show that Netanyahu could lose the election. There is an understandable temptation, even a desire among many, to see Netanyahu as the aberration, allowing the relationship to jump back to a status quo ante were he to lose the election. The fundamental problem, however, is not the name of the prime minister but rather the actions of the Israeli government and the urgent issues that need to be addressed. To regain the trust of the American public, any new prime minister must demonstrate that they are breaking from Netanyahu’s approach of endless occupation and forever wars to embrace a genuinely liberal agenda. If and when a new prime minister takes office, Americans should watch for three things.

How Trump’s Crackdown on Speech Has Damaged the Student Press

George Porteous — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

I serve as editor in chief and president of The Stanford Daily. Our newsroom has keenly felt the effects of Trump’s campus crackdown, which is why we sued the federal government. In the most painful chapter of my time as a college newspaper editor, I watched fear of the US government silence my international student peers. The height of that fear came in March 2025, when masked federal agents in Massachusetts seized a young woman named Rümeysa Öztürk off the sidewalk for co-authoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed in a student newspaper. That month, a Palestinian undergraduate sent me and my fellow editors an e-mail titled “Urgent Request.” Past Stanford Daily articles had quoted him speaking openly about the pain of witnessing the destruction of his homeland. Now, fearing Öztürk’s fate, he was asking us to retroactively remove his name from our pieces. “I do not have the luxury of being in a position where I take my safety for granted,” he wrote. “Normally, I would be the loudest in talking about my home, but in this atmosphere, my literal safety is at [stake].” The Stanford Daily staff agonized over the decision. Some of us saw a pressing need to protect a source. Others were concerned about the “slippery slope” of scrubbing old articles. “I am basically begging you,” he said via e-mail. These are the kinds of uncharted dilemmas that the Trump administration has forced student journalists and our peers to confront. They’re also why my colleagues and I at The Stanford Daily sued the federal government just over a year ago. As our lawyers at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) argued in court, the government’s weaponization of the law to deport noncitizens based on their speech strikes at the heart of the First Amendment. At places like Stanford, it has produced an atmosphere of self-censorship for too many. Last month, a federal judge agreed. “In the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people,” wrote district judge Noël Wise in a 90-page ruling. “It is not the government’s to take.” The news has brought relief and a vindication of the student press that so many of us believe in. But it may not be the end of the Daily’s legal battle; the government could still appeal the decision, renewing uncertainty inside our newsroom. The ruling also should not have been necessary in the first place. The Trump administration’s targeting of students like Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil betrays the openness that has made the US—in its best moments—such an attractive place to study for non-citizens. Those of us who spend our college years in a newsroom have seen the consequences firsthand. A few weeks after ICE sent Öztürk and Khalil to detainment facilities in Louisiana, we received a tip about a powerful event being planned on campus. A Palestinian woman whose son was killed by Israeli tear gas and an Israeli woman whose parents were killed on October 7 would be making a joint call for peace at Memorial Church. We moved quickly to assign a reporter to the event. On the night of the talk, she gathered quotes, observations, and detailed notes for an article. But when it came time to write, the reporter was simply too frightened to attach her name to the story —she was an international student. With our staff stretched thin, the event went uncovered by our newspaper. More fearful requests followed. Noncitizen alumni who wrote for the Daily years ago wanted their articles taken down or removed from search engines. Current international students asked us to remove their quotes from the Internet, no matter how irrelevant to Palestine they were.

America Without the NFL

Zito Madu — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 09:00:00 GMT

Chuck Klosterman’s Football is a eulogy for the sport on the eve of its decline. Chuck Klosterman begins Football, his personal history of the game, by admitting that his ideal reader has not yet been born. “My target market is the unborn,” he tells us, “closely followed by the recently born, closely followed by a handful of present-day adults who likely have no interest in what I’m writing about.” This is a strange strategy, and Klosterman acknowledges it as such. To further ground expectations, he immediately declares all the things that his book will not be about: the pleasures of escapism, or fandom, tribalism, and community, or a love letter to the game. Then, after more disclaimers about his own personal relationship to football, in which he acknowledges that his ideas may be dismissed because he is merely a fan rather than an ex-player, Klosterman declares his mission statement: “This is an expository obituary, published before the subject has died, delivered by someone who wants to explain why the victim mattered so much to so many, despite so much evidence to the contrary.” Klosterman truly believes that the most popular and profitable sport in America is actually very fragile and will eventually collapse. This may come as a surprise to those of us in the present, but football’s demise, he explains, won’t happen for generations. Klosterman’s future reader, then, belongs to an imagined audience, the historians of a game that has long ceased to be. The collapse, Klosterman thinks, will begin with college football. Recent changes, like the transfer portal and college players’ monetizing their name, image, and likeness (NIL), will push the college sport further into professionalization. This will lead to teams separating from college institutions altogether, and the strongest teams divorcing themselves from the NCAA, which would only hinder their profits at that point. College football without the veneer of amateurism will become just another league, a less interesting version of the NFL. Combined with the dwindling participation in youth football, the landscape will adopt a radical asymmetry by 2040 in Klosterman’s vision of the future: The NFL will still be immensely popular, but the sport’s foundations will look shakier and shakier. Then, by the middle of the century, there will come a fatal realization that TV advertising has ceased to function as a profit generator, Klosterman argues. The NFL, like many other sports leagues, depends on the money from advertising. But “at some point between 2040 and 2060, the money required for the production and distribution of televised advertising [will become] too expensive to justify the continuance of a never-proven strategy.” Once the TV deals have to be renegotiated and the lucre they bring in shrinks, the league’s overall value will take a hit. The NFL, which has never had to downsize, will struggle to do so and face labor strife as the owners attempt to cut costs. As this happens, the Americans of the future, who will not be as attached to the game as we are, will be fine with football going away. It’s hard to imagine what would cause such a shift—will football die or just get less popular?—but Klosterman thinks that football will unravel at the institutional level because it will first have unraveled at the cultural level: I see football doomed by its own unreasonable success. It’s a sport so commercial and expansive that it can no longer function any other way, trapped by its own necessity for autocatalytic growth. That success was built off its ability to reflect twentieth-century America, an accidental synchronicity that became profound. But because that synchronicity was unintentional, it can’t resynchronize on command. As generations change, football fundamentally stays the same, turning it into a $25 billion simulacrum—a disconnected metaphor for a society that no longer exists, rocketing on autopilot, oblivious to the growing distance between itself and the future. As one of his contemporary readers, someone who has watched his fair share of football and manages his fall schedule around NFL Sunday, I can only say that Klosterman’s vision of the end of football is hard to believe. Maybe that difficulty in imagining the sport’s death, like imagining the end of capitalism, comes from living in the present. In his introduction, Klosterman anticipates that struggle. But one wonders if he actually believes his own thesis, given that so much of the book is a defense of the sport. What is strange about Klosterman’s book, ultimately, isn’t his prediction of football’s death but the form his fandom takes: He spends most of the book writing from the position that football is a perfect game and then tries to disprove that conceit, despite professing an ardent belief in football’s virtues. “If one concedes that football has evolved into the best TV product available,” he writes, “its dominance of the television medium is justified and positive. It suggests that mass entertainment is occasionally a meritocracy. The popularity of football on television doesn’t prove that football is objectively good, but it does present an objective reflection of what Americans desire (and that achievement alone has virtue).” Everything from its structure and rules to the way that Americans see it as a simulation of war makes it superior to its challengers, and that popularity explains its place at the top of the American sports food chain. He positions the violence of the game, which can be off-putting for nonfans, as enough to thrill viewers without making them truly feel bad about the desire to see other humans get hurt, because the violence is not critical to the enjoyment of the sport: I don’t think the relationship between football and violence is a fraction as straightforward as the relationship between violence and boxing. A correlation exists, but it’s more theoretical. Football is never watched as a blood sport; fans want a spectacle where the possibility of injury is omnipresent, but without anyone getting seriously hurt. What they love about football is the strategy and the skill.