As the writer Zora Neale Hurston eloquently observed, “There are years that ask questions, and there are years that answer.”

Nineteen sixty-five was one of those years that answered. And 2026 is shaping up to be its heir.

In 1965, a group of ordinary citizens stood on the doorstep of history. On one side, the brutal reality they had lived since the final days of Reconstruction, one of white hoods and open caskets, strange fruit and sundown towns. On the other was the promise of true equality, which had eluded them for so long.

They didn’t know it then, but their fearless actions on a bridge in Selma would set in motion a series of events that would dramatically alter the course of history, dividing the struggle for civil rights into two eras: before Selma and after. The Voting Rights Act, signed into law five months later, codified what the Constitution had promised Black Americans for nearly a century.

As we mark 61 years since that fateful march, we find ourselves at another inflection point—standing on another doorstep. But behind this door is not progress; it’s regression.

Two consequential voting rights developments greet us this year: a seemingly innocuous change to Postal Service procedure that actually has massive ramifications for mail-in voting, and an imminent congressional vote on the so-called “SAVE America Act,” which passed the House last month and now heads to the Senate. Together, they threaten to erode the promise secured by the foot soldiers of Selma.

Despite its misleading name, the SAVE America Act is not about saving our elections. It’s about sabotaging them. The measure would require American citizens to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. The problem: Nearly half of Americans don’t have a passport, and 69 million women could not use their birth certificate to prove their citizenship status because it doesn’t match their current legal name.

What the SAVE America Act conveniently overlooks is that we already have a strong voter verification system in place. Every state in this country verifies the identity of voters. Every single one. When you register to vote, your information is cross-checked against state databases—your driver’s license number, the last four digits of your Social Security number, your address.

And this system works. Because when states have gone looking for the voter fraud the SAVE America Act claims to be solving, they find virtually nothing. The Bipartisan Policy Center tracked noncitizen voting over 24 years and found 77 confirmed cases.

Seventy-seven. Across a quarter century.

The SAVE America Act replaces this system, which works, with one that creates a hurdle that tens of millions of American citizens cannot clear.

We know what happens when governments do this because Kansas tried it, beginning in 2013. Its legislature passed a law nearly identical to the one being proposed now. The result: Roughly 31,000 eligible citizens—12 percent of all applicants—were unfairly blocked from registering to vote. The law was eventually ruled unconstitutional.

And then there’s what’s happening to the US Postal Service. This shift is so technical, you’d be forgiven for missing it, but it has far-reaching implications for voting.

The day before Christmas, the USPS quietly updated its rulebook to clarify something it says has always been true: A postmark is not, and has never been, a record of when a piece of mail was deposited. It’s a record of when the mail was processed.

For decades, this distinction didn’t matter much, because the old postal network was structured in a way that made the two dates align almost automatically; mail dropped off at a Post Office was typically processed and postmarked that same evening at a nearby facility. The postmark became, in practice, a reliable timestamp for when a piece of mail—for instance, a ballot—was deposited with the USPS.

But now that’s changing. Under the Postal Services’ massive overhaul, mail processing has been consolidated from nearly 200 local facilities to just 60 regional hubs. Post offices of more than 50 miles from a regional center have been reduced to a single morning pickup. Mail deposited in the afternoon waits until the next day to even begin moving toward processing. The gap between the date a ballot is mailed and the date it receives a postmark—a gap for years was virtually nonexistent—is now a day or more for millions of Americans, especially those in rural areas.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia allow ballots to be counted after Election Day if they are postmarked by Election Day, treating that postmark as legal proof a voter acted in time. But when a ballot deposited on Election Day routinely isn’t processed until the following day, that proof may never materialize, even for voters who did everything right.

Taken together, these two issues form an interlocking system. The SAVE America Act prevents millions from registering in the first place. The Postal Service changes mean that even those who do register and vote can have their ballots disqualified. The tactics may look different. One is dressed in the language of election security, the other in the language of operational efficiency. But the result is the same: a smaller electorate, and outcomes shaped before a single vote is counted.

The Postal Service’s modernization efforts should not come at the cost of mail-in voters, particularly those in rural communities who depend most on the mail to make their voices heard. The Senate must recognize the SAVE America Act for what it is—a modern poll tax dressed in the language of election security—and reject it accordingly. And all of us should honor Selma by actively defending the inclusive, multiracial democracy it made possible.

Make no mistake, 2026 will be a year that answers. The question is whether that answer will honor the sacrifice of those who crossed the bridge at Selma—or betray it.

Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, was in San Francisco in early 2010 when she was jolted awake by a call from a Washington, DC, area code. It was 4:30 in the morning, California time. Half-asleep, Keenan answered. It was Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff for President Obama. Fellow Montanans, Messina and Keenan had known each other for years.

“Keenan,” Messina said. “It’s Jim.” “Hi, Jim,” Keenan replied sleepily.

Then she heard President Obama’s voice on the line.

In stark terms, he laid out some of the highest stakes Keenan had faced during her six years at the helm of the leading pro-choice political organization. Obama’s health reform law, which would extend healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, was nearing passage after months of political struggle. Obama had been fighting not just Republicans but also a contingent of anti-choice Democrats led by Michigan Representative Bart Stupak who were withholding their support over abortion.

A major sticking point was whether insurance plans created by the health reform law—which would be subsidized by the federal government—would cover abortions. Decades earlier, just three years after Roe v. Wade granted the right to abortion nationwide, abortion opponents had launched a successful attack on Medicaid funding, arguing that while abortion was legal, taxpayer funds should not cover it. The Hyde Amendment, named for Illinois Representative Henry Hyde, passed in 1976. (The ban actually wasn’t Hyde’s idea, but he became the face of it because he was charming and popular.) Hyde was candid about his wishes. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” he famously said in 1977. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the…Medicaid bill.”

As I traced the death of abortion rights for my book Killers of Roe, I came to see the Democrats’ failure to mount a real opposition to the Hyde Amendment as the key to understanding how they could lose Roe itself, decades later. Congress has renewed it each year, with varying exceptions for a pregnant person’s health and for rape and incest. Over time, policymakers have extended Hyde-like bans to Peace Corps volunteers, military service members and their families, people in federal prison and immigrant detention, federal employees, Children’s Health Insurance Program enrollees, and Native Americans who rely on the Indian Health Service.

Hyde had shaped the abortion rights movement into a mutual aid operation, forcing many of its most dedicated activists to spend their days raising millions of dollars to plug the gap left by federal funds. It was never enough. By 2010 the Hyde Amendment had caused more than a million people who couldn’t afford an abortion to give birth instead.

It wasn’t just Republicans who supported the Hyde Amendment. Of the senators and representatives who voted for it, 60 percent were Democrats. The ban passed Congress on the eve of the 1976 election, when Democrats including Jimmy Carter were courting a burgeoning new political force of evangelical voters. “[A]s you know there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people can’t,” Carter mused when asked about the ban in 1977. “But I don’t believe that the Federal Government should take action to try to make these opportunities exactly equal, particularly when there’s a moral factor involved.”

Taking on Hyde became a tough sell even within pro-choice organizations.

“I can attest that by and large, donors, board members, people on the street—they were all like, ‘Well, you know, funding, that’s a different thing; that’s different from having a policy that says abortion is legal,’” Gloria Feldt, who served as president of Planned Parenthood from 1996 to 2005, told me.

Into the 1990s and 2000s, many Democrats continued to embrace Hyde as a “compromise” position. Joe Biden voted against exempting rape and incest victims from the Hyde Amendment in 1977 and 1981 before finally caving to pressure and denouncing the ban in 2019. Bill Clinton expressed opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion while he was governor of Arkansas before calling for Hyde’s repeal when he ran for president.

Barack Obama, too, had opposed the Hyde Amendment on the campaign trail, raising hopes that he would repeal it at last. Yet to win support for healthcare reform, he quickly conceded that the Hyde Amendment would stand. Pro-choice lobbyists realized early on that Obama was not going to let abortion get in the way of his wider agenda. Before he was elected, he had promised that signing the Freedom of Choice Act to codify Roe would be “the first thing that I’d do.” But once in office, with a Democratic trifecta in the House and Senate that he would lose the following year, he declared that FOCA was “not the highest legislative priority.” His priority was healthcare reform.

But Obama’s surrender on Hyde did not convince abortion opponents. Stupak had pushed the Democratic-majority House to accept an amendment that heavily restricted private coverage of abortion on the new insurance exchanges.

Finally, after months of maneuvering, Obama had struck a deal he hoped would salvage the bill while letting antiabortion Democrats save face. Keenan didn’t recall the precise details of what she and her team saw that day after the early morning phone call, but the terms of the final deal would become public soon enough. The Affordable Care Act would allow states to ban abortion coverage in plans sold on its exchanges. And to placate Stupak and his ilk, Obama would issue an executive order affirming that the ACA would adhere to the Hyde Amendment.

“‘Nancy, we’re close on the healthcare act,’” Keenan recalled Obama saying. “‘And as you know, it’s all hung up on this issue of abortion. And we have some language we think will get us there.’”

The White House wanted Keenan to give her blessing.

Keenan recalled that Planned Parenthood was asked to do so, too.

“It was the two big ones, NARAL and Planned Parenthood, that had to really be the ones that said we could live with it,” Keenan told me.

Not that they were given much choice.

It was clear that if they objected, they would be torpedoing a bill that extended health insurance to millions. And so, Keenan recalled, NARAL said they could live with it. Not long afterward, the House passed a compromise bill, and Obama signed the executive order reaffirming the Hyde Amendment. It was yet another surrender on Hyde from a pro-choice Democrat.

And in its wake, a new long-shot campaign would grow into the abortion rights movement’s greatest surprise success story in a generation.

The first major challenge to the Hyde Amendment since the Supreme Court upheld the policy in 1980 had come almost two decades earlier. After the outrage over Anita Hill’s treatment by the Biden-led Senate Judiciary Committee, the 1992 election saw a record 47 women elected to the House, and four new women in the Senate. With these new allies, the Black Women’s Health Project saw the opportunity to challenge the dogma on Medicaid funding for abortion. The group was leading a movement to repeal the Hyde Amendment, the Campaign for Abortion Rights for Everyone (CARE). They had reason to hope they would prevail. In 1993, Clinton submitted a budget to Congress that omitted the ban. Democrats, with a majority in both chambers, had their chance to repeal it at last.

Yet, in a raucous debate over the appropriations bill in the House that, according to one press account, “exploded in a near shoving match,” they refused.

“I’ve been here for five months, and things are still run by white men in blue suits,” Florida Representative Corinne Brown, one of 10 Black women in the 435-member House, railed, decrying “white Southern males” who “think they know what’s best for poor women.”

Representative Henry Hyde claimed he was defending Black babies against eugenicist abortion advocates. When another of the body’s 10 Black women, Illinois Representative Cardiss Collins, expressed her offense, Hyde shot back: “I probably know your district better than you do. Talk to your ministers.” He later apologized and had his remarks stricken from the record, but not before offending the Black caucus and driving at least one member to tears.

But Hyde did make a concession that dealt those agitating for repeal a partial victory—while winning over moderates. He agreed to restore the rape and incest exceptions that had been removed under Reagan in 1981. In return, the Democratic-led House voted 255–178 to keep the Hyde Amendment.

Democrats still had another shot to expand abortion rights that year.

Senator Carol Moseley Braun, the first Black woman elected to the Senate, had cosponsored the Freedom of Choice Act, a bill to enshrine the right to abortion in federal law. The bill took on new urgency after a close call the year before, when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, allowing states to limit abortion unless their laws caused an “undue burden.” But the bill soon exposed a rift within the movement over the two perennial third rails of abortion politics: public funding and parental consent for minors. Planned Parenthood and NARAL, the two organizations with the most influence, supported a version of the bill that would have enshrined Roe without touching those third rails. A coalition including the National Black Women’s Health Project and NOW believed the bill did not go far enough.

“If we have to continue to fight [the abortion issue] in 50 state capitals, then I am not clear what the point is with moving ahead with the Freedom of Choice Act,” NOW’s president Patricia Ireland declared. So Moseley Braun withdrew her support of the bill.

The backlash was swift. “The Freedom of Choice Act may not accomplish all the goals the pro-choice movement would wish, but it’s a constructive start, and it should not be held hostage to Senator Moseley Braun’s rigid, all-or-nothing stance,”The New York Times wrote.

“If, ultimately, we accept nothing because we cannot get everything, we hand opponents of choice a victory they did not win,” NARAL president Kate Michelman concurred.

Michelman had her own vision of how to win. Under her watch in the mid-1980s, NARAL had begun to tack toward Reaganite language about getting the government out of personal decisions, in order to court moderate voters. The messaging embodied in slogans like “Who Decides?” emphasized letting families choose. Decrying government control succeeded in part because it tapped into white resentment over the government’s role in school desegregation and gun control. And while Michelman may not have intended it, the “choice” message could be used to promote parental consent laws and ban public funding of abortion. After all, if the government is supposed to stay out of private healthcare decisions, then why should it fund those decisions?

Black women, whose choices had been curtailed by forced sterilization and coercive family planning practices, had long pursued a vision more sweeping than “choice.” In 1994, after the Clinton administration failed to adequately address reproductive health care in its own ill-fated health-reform plan, a dozen Black women gathered to chart a framework they called reproductive justice. It included the right to have children, the right to not have children, and the right to nurture children in a safe and healthy environment. It was a harder framework to sell in the post-Reagan era, because, unlike “choice,” it wasn’t compatible with notions of small government. But it was the frame that met the needs of Black women.

The “choice” framework, on the other hand, could be twisted to justify what was arguably the crowning achievement of Reaganism, which took place under a Democratic president in 1996: the gutting of “welfare as we know it.” In his book Bearing Right, Will Saletan argued that NARAL’s messaging inadvertently bolstered the conservative logic that led Clinton to overhaul welfare, ending cash payments to families in favor of block grants to states. “Protecting taxpayers and passing responsibility to families meant, among other things, welfare reform,” Saletan wrote. That reform made it far harder for many people to afford the second tenet of reproductive justice: the right to have the kids you want. As Sara Matthiesen wrote in her book Reproduction Reconceived, the establishment of the right to abortion in 1973 coincided with changes like the decimation of the social safety net and the rise of mass incarceration, so that many low-income people gained the illusion of reproductive “choice” at the very moment when the ability to make a decision about child rearing free from social and economic coercion was becoming more elusive.

In the end, the lesson that many people took from FOCA’s failure was that fighting to repeal Hyde could put even modest gains at risk.

Perhaps that was why, 16 years later, leading pro-choice groups did not mount a major campaign to repeal the Hyde Amendment through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But in 2009, even after the concession on Hyde, 64 House Democrats voted for Bart Stupak’s amendment to ban the use of federal subsidies for any plans sold on the new healthcare exchanges that covered abortion—including private plans. Women who wanted abortion coverage would have to purchase separate riders.

Some advocates felt they had been duped. “We were trying to diffuse the situation, knowing that the time to fight on the notion of federal funding for abortion was not this political moment—the healthcare reform bill is hard enough,” Laura MacCleery, then director of government affairs at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the Associated Press in November 2009. “Now I’m thinking we might have recognized that we were going to have this fight, and we should have stood firm a year ago and we might not have found ourselves here.”

After the Stupak amendment passed the House, pro-choice groups and allies like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were ready to stand their ground. The late Cecile Richards, who was president of Planned Parenthood at the time, wrote in her memoir that the organization’s board voted unanimously to oppose any version of the Affordable Care Act that banned abortion coverage. “If there is an abortion ban in the Affordable Care Act, there won’t be an Affordable Care Act,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reassured her.

At the time, Clare Coleman had just become president of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, an alliance of clinics that provide birth control to low-income patients under the Title X program signed into law by Nixon. Ahead of a meeting with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, she urged the movement to take a fighting stand. “We’ve all got to go in there and say we’ll oppose the bill, and we’ll light ourselves on fire in front of the White House, and we’ll tell everybody that you’ve betrayed us,” Coleman recalled saying. “This guy only understands arson. You go in and you say, ‘We’re going to burn it all down.’”

But movement leaders were not ready for arson.

In the end, the ACA would transform healthcare in this country, ending the exclusion of people with preexisting conditions and granting coverage of contraception with no copay. While the Stupak Amendment didn’t make it into the final law, the bill allowed states to ban abortion under policies sold in their new insurance exchanges. As of 2025, half of states do so.

The entire saga had publicly demonstrated the limits of the pro-choice movement’s alliance with the Democratic Party.

“The conditions that allowed healthcare reform to totally exclude abortion existed before it happened,” Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for Choice, told The Nation at the time. “The difference now is that everyone knows we’re powerless.”

But a new way of building power would form in the wake of this defeat.

In May 2010, weeks after the Affordable Care Act passed, groups committed to abortion funding called a convening in Washington, DC, that was attended by dozens of movement leaders, including representatives from NARAL and Planned Parenthood. The summit was organized by the National Network of Abortion Funds (NNAF), the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, and Black Women for Reproductive Justice. It wasn’t the first time these groups had tackled the idea of repealing the Hyde Amendment.

“Women of color were always saying, ‘We need to repeal the Hyde Amendment,’” Dr. Toni M. Bond, a cofounder of the reproductive justice framework and former board president of NNAF, told me. “And women of color were always told, ‘Oh, it’s not the right time.’”

NNAF joined the first Hyde repeal campaign led by the National Black Women’s Health Project in the 1990s and continued to press the issue, which they understood because their member funds were paying for abortions when Medicaid didn’t. They launched a repeal campaign in 2000 and another in 2006, on the ban’s 30th anniversary.

In 2010, the way public funding had been scapegoated in the Affordable Care Act debate created a new sense of urgency for the cause. Ahead of the convening, facilitators with the consultant firm Management Assistance Group surveyed some 60 leaders across the reproductive health, rights, and justice movement about the issue of public funding of abortion.

“During healthcare reform, ‘tremendous ground’ was lost on the issue of abortion funding, as well as on access to abortion more broadly,” notes summarizing the feedback from these advocates read. “White House could not be counted on and was unwilling to expend any political capital on the issue. Congressional Democrats, even those who are considered pro-choice, did not stand up for access to abortion for poor women—nor for middle-class women.”

In the aftermath of this defeat, not everyone at the 2010 convening agreed that tackling Hyde was a good idea. “People were asked to actually take a position and put their cards on the table: What is your position on going after Hyde for real?” Megan Peterson, who was then the deputy director of NNAF, told me. “And there were people who…did not want it to be a priority.” One high-level pro-choice operative got so angry she left the room.

But organizers from the National Network of Abortion Funds and the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health were ready for a major push. They formed the Coalition for Abortion Access and Reproductive Equity (CAARE), named for the original 1990s coalition. CAARE’s steering committee included Choice USA (now URGE), Advocates for Youth, and the Reproductive Health Technologies Project. They realized that leadership on Hyde would have to come from a set of groups that didn’t have political clout to lose, “groups who had no skin in the game, and therefore were going to be able to be a little bit riskier, bolder, and also who represented the communities that are most impacted by Hyde,” Destiny Lopez, who would become a co-leader of the coalition’s public-facing campaign, All* Above All, told me.

Silvia Henriquez was hired in 2011 as manager of the CAARE campaign. She recruited Kierra Johnson, who was then with Choice USA, and is now president of the National LGBTQ Task Force. “I’m pulling together some people to talk about the Hyde Amendment,” Johnson recalled Henriquez telling her. “I want you there.”

Soon CAARE was encountering resistance everywhere. The ACA’s passage had hinged on Democratic assurances that Hyde was the law of the land. And now these activists were questioning that? Even sympathetic Democrats in Congress were skeptical. “The number of times I heard ‘the law of the land,’” Johnson told me, “the number of times that I heard: ‘Well, it’s the status quo. We’re not changing the status quo’!”

The odds were steep. After the ACA passed, Republicans were fighting even its incremental gains, which they decried as “socialism.” Now this upstart coalition was mounting a campaign that seemed to unite all of Republicans’ favorite talking points. “Our issues sat at the nexus of, like, every social evil: abortion, poverty, racism, sex, and then government programs, and all the racism that goes into who’s on government programs,” Ravina Daphtary, who joined the campaign in 2012, told me.

The larger pro-choice groups were focused on a bill to enshrine Roe called the Women’s Health Protection Act, which did not reverse Hyde or parental involvement laws. Laurie Rubiner, a former Planned Parenthood lobbyist, was now chief of staff to Senator Richard Blumenthal, WHPA’s lead sponsor. She said repealing Hyde through WHPA just wasn’t possible. After all, Democrats who considered themselves pro-choice still supported the ban. “It wasn’t going to happen, unfortunately,” Rubiner told me.

It was the same rift over strategy that had opened in the 1990s. “It’s not unlike a lot of issues that we confront: Do you try to get everything, or do you try to get a piece?” Rubiner said. “They’re hard conversations.” She added, “And now we get nothing.”

Once again, no one within the movement doubted that repealing Hyde was right, but no one thought it was possible, not even Daphtary. In 2012 the group hired her as a state strategist who would take a page from the opposition’s playbook, pushing for restoring public funding in cities and states, one by one. “I was like, ‘Sure, I’ll get on board,’” she told me. “But I didn’t think it was going to happen or go anywhere.”

Daphtary felt like the early skepticism surrounding the effort was in part about turf. Two groups had dominated the landscape in Washington for years, and now a coalition that included many young women of color was disrupting the status quo. “Sometimes it was about Hyde,” she recalled, “and sometimes it was just about, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’”

Dozens of reproductive health and justice organizations were rallying behind the idea of repealing Hyde, even if those on the Hill were skeptical. The effort soon grew into a professional operation with philanthropic support, fiscal sponsorship from the New Venture Fund, lobbyists from the top firm Forbes Tate, and a new brand developed with the public relations company Conway Strategic. They called the campaign All* Above All and adopted the slogan “Be Bold.”

“I see urgency sweeping reproductive rights and justice groups—and a new commitment to put the lives of poor women, women of color, and young women center stage in a way that was unthinkable a few years ago,” Stephanie Poggi, then executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, wrote of the campaign in September 2013. “A movement that was primarily focused on not losing more ground is now setting its sights on ensuring that every woman can make and carry out her own decision about abortion.”

In November 2013, the campaign planned its first lobby day to educate members of Congress about the need to repeal Hyde. On the same day, Planned Parenthood convened a press conference to promote WHPA. It felt to some like an effort to undermine the nascent campaign. (A former Planned Parenthood official who was there at the time told me the organization would not undermine a coalition partner that way.)

To deal with resistance, All* Above All developed a Do No Harm code, asking Congress members and pro-choice groups who didn’t wholeheartedly support the strategy to at least not actively sabotage it. In exchange, they agreed not to seek support from Democrats facing tight reelections. They began to poll voters and to test new ways of framing the issue. Instead of talking about taxpayer funding of abortion, they talked about how someone’s ability to access abortion shouldn’t be determined by income or zip code. While members of Congress might consider the issue settled, polls showed, “the American people don’t consider it settled,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, an early leader in the effort, told me.

Soon incremental victories began to mount. In 2012, Florida voters rejected a ballot amendment that would have banned the state from spending public funds for abortion. In 2016, a Boston city councilor named Ayanna Pressley partnered with All* Above All to pass a City Council resolution urging Congress to repeal the Hyde Amendment. She would go on to become one of the campaign’s greatest champions in Congress. In 2017, Illinois Republican Governor Bruce Rauner signed a law that repealed state restrictions on Medicaid coverage of abortion. Right away, at the Chicago clinic Family Planning Associates, Dr. Allison Cowett noticed a change. She started to see patients with seven or so kids coming in for the first time.

“I’m thinking, ‘What’s bringing you?’” Cowett told me. “And they’re like, ‘What’s bringing me is now I can get an abortion.’”

There were incremental wins at the federal level, too. In 2012, Congress loosened the ban on abortion coverage for military personnel and their dependents, allowing it in cases of rape or incest and in 2014, they did so for Peace Corps volunteers. By then All* Above All had settled on a bolder strategy to change the conversation around the Hyde Amendment: introducing a standalone bill to repeal the ban and all related federal restrictions. The bill was a way to send a strong message and to educate Congress and the public about the harms of the ban. But their doubters didn’t think they could get even 15 or 20 sponsors in the House.

As a lead sponsor, they courted California Representative Barbara Lee, a Black woman with a compelling story of traveling to Mexico for an abortion before it was legal. Lee had been a congressional aide when the ban passed and could remember Henry Hyde’s patronizing words about saving “little ghetto kid[s]” from abortion. But she would be swimming upstream by introducing a bill to repeal the Hyde Amendment. Right before she was supposed to do so in early 2014, Lee learned that All* Above All hadn’t won all the support from Democratic leaders that she believed they needed. In a tense meeting, Lee chastised the campaign for being unprepared. Jessi Leigh Swenson, the federal policy director for the National Abortion Federation, had been called into the meeting because she was being considered for a leadership role with the coalition behind All* Above All, which organizers were still calling CAARE.

“We got reamed out,” Swenson told me. “Barbara Lee is a wicked smart politician and she knows how to do hard things correctly.”

Later that year, Swenson became co-leader of CAARE’s federal strategy coalition. The team conducted a “forensic analysis” of the setback with Lee. They determined that they needed to build grassroots momentum while further educating progressive and pro-choice members of Congress. Even among their allies, “‘Hyde is law of the land’ comments still pepper floor and committee debate,” an internal strategy memo noted. “This needs to be fixed.”

The summer after their setback, the campaign rented a truck decked out with lime-green accents and the words: “Unite to lift the bans that deny abortion coverage.” The Be Bold Road Trip visited 12 cities, including Oakland, where they gathered signatures from Lee’s constituents.

By July 2015, they were ready. Defying the doubters, they had amassed a stunning 71 cosponsors. Planned Parenthood and NARAL signed on at the last minute, a leading advocate at the time recalled.

“They realized, OK, the train was leaving the station and they weren’t going to be on it,” the advocate said.

(A former senior Planned Parenthood official who was with the organization at the time said it was not unusual for the group to sign on to campaigns at the last minute because they always review the final version of any language.)

With their press conference launching what’s now called the EACH Act, the campaign had moved the third rail of abortion politics into the center.

The following year, two leading Democratic presidential contenders, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, denounced Hyde on the campaign trail, and in a major shift, the Democratic Party’s platform called for a repeal of the ban. By 2019, when he was running for president, even Joe Biden was forced to flip, declaring, in line with the campaign’s messaging, “If I believe healthcare is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s zip code.” In 2021, the EACH Act was introduced in the Senate, and for the first time in more than 40 years, the House passed a version of the appropriations bill that didn’t include Hyde.

Neither EACH nor WHPA has so far passed into law. But the conversation on public funding has transformed.

“We made some serious headway and shift faster than I’ve seen any campaign in the repro movement, ever,” Johnson told me. “The way we changed the whole game,” she added, laughing, “now these members of Congress act like they always supported [Hyde’s repeal]. I mean, it’s the cutest thing.”

Clare Coleman, who worked as chief of staff to the late pro-choice stalwart Representative Nita Lowey from 1999 to 2005, agreed.

“There was no appetite, I can tell you, among House Democrats at least, to try to undo Hyde,” Coleman told me. “And it was really funny, when All* Above All came to be…and began to lead from a reproductive justice perspective, and talk about how racist Hyde was, there were lots of House members who suddenly went to the floor with some version of: ‘We’ve always known that the Hyde Amendment was racist.’”

The makeup of power in the movement changed, too.

“The work on the Hyde Amendment was a huge part of kicking the doors down for women-of-color-led reproductive justice policy organizations,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, who is now the executive director of United for Reproductive and Gender Equity (URGE), told me.

In 2023, All* Above All would face its own racial reckoning over accusations of anti-Blackness that culminated in layoffs of its staff. Today, the organization’s president is a Black woman named Nourbese Flint. In the summer of 2025, I asked Flint what her side could learn from the killers of Roe.

“I think they have radical imagination,” she said. “Their radical imagination is why we are here; they dreamed it to believe it.… I think there’s a lesson learned in having a radical imagination for our communities.”

Today, Roe is gone, and the Trump administration and Republican-led states have continued to devise ever-more-draconian ways to restrict access. But All* Above All paved the way for deploying more radical imagination on the abortion rights side. In the first three months after Dobbs, a record 17 states and at least 24 municipalities passed legislation or issued policies to protect and expand abortion access, according to the National Institute for Reproductive Health. Since Dobbs, Rhode Island, Colorado, Nevada, and Delaware have passed provisions to fund abortion under Medicaid.

The abortion rights movement’s response to the slow killing of Roe had long been to fend off the cuts with defensive maneuvers, mostly by challenging state laws in court. But All* Above All broke the loop through which abortion politics usually played. They started with what was right, and then, step by step, they made what was right feel possible.

The Department of Justice is in a crisis, at a level that hasn’t been seen in decades, if perhaps ever. Not since 1975, when US Attorney General John Mitchell was prosecuted and convicted for conspiracy and obstruction of justice related to Watergate, has there been a more toxic and chaotic environment at the department. Today, under Pam Bondi, the DOJ shows a flagrant disregard for the rule of law and contempt for the Constitution. A once-exalted institution that was integral to the protection of civil rights now resembles an elite agency that serves the private interests of a president rather than vulnerable Americans.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this state of affairs is how we got here. In January, after Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis, was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, said that the department would not investigate whether the agent had violated any federal laws. US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed there was “no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation,” despite clear video evidence showing otherwise. “We don’t just go out and investigate every time an officer is forced to defend himself against somebody,” Blanche added. “We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate.”

At the same time, the DOJ began pressuring its prosecutors to investigate the victim and her wife. Six attorneys resigned from the department in protest, including Minnesota’s second-in-command at the US attorney’s office, Joseph Thompson.

Around two weeks later, the same day that Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse, by shooting him 10 times at close range, Bondi sent a threatening letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, offering a chilling quid pro quo framed as “common sense solutions.” Bondi demanded that Walz provide access to voter rolls, end the state’s sanctuary policies, and release sensitive records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service programs, including data from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In exchange, Bondi claimed that those “simple steps” would “help bring back law and order to Minnesota.”

These actions not only mark a radical shift at the DOJ but also expose how compromised and corrupt the department has become.

Yet it is not the DOJ’s response to ICE’s lawless conduct in Minnesota alone that raises serious alarm. The department has been severely tarnished by unlawful appointments and the politically motivated prosecutions of officials who have criticized Donald Trump. The failed criminal cases against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey come to mind. US District Court Judge Lorna Schofield disqualified the acting US attorney, John Sarcone III, ruling that he had not been lawfully appointed when he issued the subpoenas against James. Bondi had appointed Sarcone as a “special attorney” and given him an “indefinite term” inconsistent with lawful DOJ appointments, which are made by the president with “advice and consent from the Senate” and are four years in length.

Months earlier, US District Court Judge Cameron McGowan Currie had dismissed the cases against James and Comey, explaining that the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully installed by the department. “All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment…were unlawful exercises of executive power and are hereby set aside,” Currie ruled.

Not surprisingly, the DOJ’s shameful abuse of power has pushed career lawyers to leave. The Justice Connection, a network of former DOJ employees, estimates that roughly 6,400 workers across the department have been terminated or left their positions voluntarily. Dena Robinson, a former lawyer in the Civil Rights Division, said that under Bondi, the job has changed from fact-finding investigations to finding “facts that would fit the narrative.”

Hundreds of military officers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps are now filling in, some temporarily serving as immigration judges and others as special assistant US attorneys—a role that “DOJ policy once barred…outside a military base,” Defense One reported, which raises serious ethics concerns.

Today, the DOJ no longer reflects the role that Congress intended it to play: that of securing America’s democracy during the Reconstruction era. Principally, that meant upholding the rule of law and enforcing the Constitution and federal laws in the aftermath of slavery and civil war. In the ensuing decades, that also included playing a vital role in investigating and prosecuting hate crimes. Now, however, the DOJ pursues a different mission: one that regards Americans as subjects rather than citizens.

The steady weaponizing of the DOJ to do Trump’s bidding has weakened its integrity, tarnished its trustworthiness, and dangerously undermined its credibility. For now, Congress should heed the demands of the civil-rights organizations calling for more oversight of the Department of Justice—before it’s too late.

The Short American Century, which began in 1945 and continued until 2016, was made up of four distinct eras. The first, from the victory in World War II until the student rebellions of 1968, was an era of confidence in which most Americans believed that the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan provided just cause for the United States’ domination of the “free world.” The second, which lasted until Ronald Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, was an era of skepticism—the failures of Fordism at home and the Vietnam War abroad suggested to many that global American “leadership” might not be achievable at an acceptable cost. The third, which comprised the 1980s, was an era of exuberance, as deregulation, financialization, and a renewed American militarism reinvigorated a hegemonic project that the 1970s had almost annihilated. And the fourth and final era, which began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, was characterized by a hubris that insisted the Soviet Union’s collapse demonstrated the ultimate triumph of US-style democratic-­capitalist imperialism.

Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put the kibosh on the widespread consensus that the United States was a New Rome, able to weather any domestic or international crisis. It turned out that the Great Recession and the Global War on Terror had undermined both American society and the “liberal international order,” and that the faith in eternal US domination had been misplaced.

In retrospect, it is clear that the populist rage that fueled Trump’s rise marked the end of the Short American Century. But for many liberals, it took quite a while to accept this new reality. Liberals spent much of Trump’s first term trying to explain his victory as an aberration, the consequence of the anti-majoritarian structure of American politics, or Russian interference, or the innate racism of a foolish American populace who didn’t realize, as Hillary Clinton put it, that “America never stopped being great.” For them, Trump’s election marked a brief but unfortunate departure from the progressive arc that US and world history were bound to trace, and once a Democrat won the presidency again, things would return to normal.

Joe Biden’s election in 2020 seemed to confirm this perspective. Liberals concluded that Trump the person, and Trumpism the movement, were anomalies. True, some admitted, Trump had exposed some disturbing fissures in American society, and maybe the economy was more of a problem than they had supposed. But the Biden project was primarily viewed as a restoration—as the president himself declared to European allies soon after he assumed office, “America is back.”

Trump’s second victory, however, revealed that this perspective was profoundly mistaken. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump soundly defeated Kamala Harris, winning 312 to 226 in the Electoral College and garnering 2 million more votes than the vice president.

The 2024 results forced liberals to take their heads out of the sand; it turns out that you can only deny reality for so long. Finally, after almost a decade, liberals started to reckon with the fact that the era of unipolarity, globalization, and neoliberal consensus had produced a nightmare instead of a utopia.

If any individual embodies the closing era of the Short American Century, it is George Packer. His résumé reads like an establishmentarian bingo card: Currently a staff writer at The Atlantic, Packer was previously a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, a fellow at the Washington think tank New America, a member of the Peace Corps, and a graduate of Yale University. The world that Trump destroyed was to a significant degree Packer’s world.

Though best known for his nonfiction—his 2019 biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrooke was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize—Packer has just published a novel, The Emergency, which wrestles with the reality of Trump and Trumpism. Described by the author as a “political fable,” the book is Packer’s attempt “to convey what it feels like today…to watch a world you thought would always be there because it had always been there disappear before your eyes with a speed that you can’t begin to fathom.” Unfortunately, The Emergency makes it clear that while liberals like Packer are finally opening their eyes to the world as it is, they have little to offer when it comes to charting a way out of the crisis, because they cannot admit that it was their own regime that created it.

The first thing to say about The Emergency is that it is boring. It is not so much poorly written as indifferently written. The prose is workmanlike—“Looking back, Doctor Rustin realized that the Emergency had been a long time coming. This was how empires of old that he had learned about in school fell: imperceptibly, then shockingly”—and the plot twists predictable. Ironically given the title, the novel lacks urgency; it is there to teach you something, entertainment be damned.

The protagonists of The Emergency are a family named the Rustins: Dr. Hugo Rustin and his wife, Annabelle, as well as their daughter, Selva, and their son, Pan. The Rustins live in “the city by the river” in “the empire,” which has ruled for as long as anyone can remember. This empire has two main social classes: “Burghers,” who live in the cities and whose elite embodies the professional managerial class, and “Yeomen,” who live in the countryside as peasants and farmers. Since the world of The Emergency doesn’t seem to have any advanced industry, there is no industrial working class. As such, Packer presents a stark binary between the urban and urbane and the rural and uncultured—the liberal PMC vision revealed.

To be fair, Packer does offer a critique of meritocracy when The Emergency addresses “Excess Burghers”—those who do poorly on a series of “comprehensive exams” that Burghers take as teenagers, which “placed them on tracks to positions in their family guilds.” If a Burgher does well on these exams, they are afforded a life of dignity; if they don’t, they are doomed to live on society’s margins. And beyond Burghers and Yeomen are a group referred to only as “Strangers,” who speak a different language and are not considered by either Burghers or Yeomen as a part of their shared 
political community.

Needless to say, everything in The Emergency has an obvious analogue to our own reality: The divide between Burghers and Yeomen reflects the divide between the PMC and red-state America; the comprehensive exams and their outcomes reflect the SATs and the sorting that occurs between those who ace them and those who do not; Strangers represent immigrants; and so on.

Indeed, if anything defines The Emergency, it is these ham-handed references: Packer may believe that he is writing for the cognoscenti, but he doesn’t seem to trust his audience very much. Every point in the novel is underlined in proverbial red ink. For instance, Packer criticizes social media by having young Burghers wear “goggles” that immerse them “in a continuous stream of images that seemed to leave them smiling and optimistic.” Meanwhile, Yeomen boys embrace a reactionary ideology called “Dirt Thought,” which is essentially the philosophy of the far-right Internet influencer Bronze Age Pervert transposed to a rural setting. The obviousness of these references could be forgiven if they were in service of some greater insight. But they are not. Packer doesn’t like social media and he doesn’t like the manosphere; it doesn’t go much beyond that.

The titular “emergency” refers to the breakdown of the empire. Nevertheless, Packer is extremely vague regarding what exactly led to the crisis, stating only that it began with an “impasse at the top of government,” which led to a “standoff” that dragged on “for weeks, paralyzing imperial functions,” which was followed in turn by “street fighting in the capital,” the flight of “the ruling elite,” and the dissolution of the empire. Burghers and Yeomen are thus left in a situation where there is no recognized 
political authority, which soon leads to social revolution in the city by the river and causes relations between the two classes 
to disintegrate.

It is quite strange that a novel about collapse glosses over the reasons for that collapse. The only explanation that Packer gives for the end of this great and mighty empire is that it “died of boredom and loss of faith in itself.” The absence of class conflict as an explanation for the empire’s downfall is telling and suggests the limits of a novel that attempts to explain Trump’s rise without sustained reference to the system that produced him. There are many reasons why Trump won in 2016 and 2024; “boredom” and America’s “loss of faith in itself” are not among them.

After the empire’s fall, a new social movement takes over the Rustins’ city. This movement, which dubs itself “Together,” has six rules: “Everyone belongs,” “I am no better and neither are you,” “No Burghers are Excess Burghers,” “No one is a Stranger,” “Listen to the young,” and “You shall be as gods.” Together is a transparent reference to the youth movement of China’s Cultural Revolution; suffice it to say, Packer thinks that Together’s communalism is both ridiculous and naïve—in an interview, he called it a “flimsy new utopian philosophy.” Predictably, Together rapidly degenerates into tyranny, and eventually, in an echo of the infamous Red Guards, a paramilitary youth organization called Wide Awake assumes control over the city by the river.

The Rustin family is directly affected by these developments. Paterfamilias Hugo, much like American liberals in 2016 (in an interview, Packer explicitly referred to Hugo as a “liberal”), refuses to accept that things have changed and soon loses his job as chief surgeon at the local hospital. Hugo then enters a long, dark night of the soul, which forms the spine of the novel’s plot. For their part, his wife Annabelle and daughter Selva embrace elements of Together—the former its focus on community and the latter its emphasis on radical equality. Eventually, Hugo and Selva go on a trip into Yeoman country, where they learn that the sureties of imperial life are unlikely to return.

The major outcome of this journey is that Selva becomes the victim of Yeoman violence, which after several twists and turns leads Hugo to abandon his liberal faith in reason and rational exchange. By the end of The Emergency, Hugo has rejected the notion “that if we just all sit down and talk to each other…we will understand each other and be able to get along through compromise.” Instead, he embraces a gauzy humanism—The Emergency literally ends with Hugo, in the middle of a battle sweeping the city by the river, preparing to open his door to help a stranger.

Hugo Rustin serves as a stand-in for Packer, who admits that “a few years ago, I began to lose faith in the power of facts to create any kind of shared reality.” But nothing has replaced this disillusionment, save for a general disorientation. As with Hugo, Packer’s shift from liberalism to humanism is an evasion masquerading as evolution. Liberalism at least claimed to have answers, whether institutions, norms, or reasoned discourse. Humanism, in contrast, offers only the possibility of individual moral gestures. That this is Packer’s answer to the collapse of the empire suggests how thoroughly he has given up on any collective political project that might actually address the crisis he describes. It is hard to imagine a more damning statement on liberalism’s 
present condition.

If any emotion defines The Emergency, it is bewilderment. Hugo just doesn’t understand the new world, and neither does Packer, who repeatedly—and perhaps despite himself—defaults to prejudice in his novel. Yeomen, for example, are nothing more than a collection of liberal anxieties about the white working class: They are drunk, ignorant, bigoted, and violent. The same can be said for Packer’s treatment of Together as naïve idiocy. For all his understanding that things have changed, Packer isn’t interested in examining the sources of this transformation, as his hurried explanation of the empire’s collapse underlines.

On some level, Packer understands that the era of liberalism is over. In an interview with the podcaster Andrew Keen, he remarked that “it seems today as if [liberalism has] run out of gas, as if it no longer has answers for the deep dissatisfactions of Western publics.” But this is about as much self-reflection and diagnosis as we get, from Packer and in The Emergency.

When Packer was asked by PEN America’s Julia Goldberg what “it might take for Americans to demonstrate the same willingness [that Hugo Rustin has] to open their doors to everyone, metaphorically speaking,” all he could offer in response is that Americans must “take the risk to go out and encounter, really see, the other,” and in so doing “face our country’s moral collapse and return to human decency, common humanity —something more basic and universal than politics.”

Yet even Packer seems dissatisfied with this rather timid response. The Emergency ends with a civil war breaking out between the Burghers and the Yeomen (the Yeomen, of course, strike first, deploying “shitapults”—catapults filled with feces). Uninterested in addressing the causes of social decay or exploring the political and economic solutions that might chart our way out of the morass, The Emergency concludes with fantasies of savagery. Like all capitalist realists, Packer can more easily imagine the end of civilization than he can the emergence of an alternative system.

Packer claims that he wrote The Emergency because he believes fables are a useful means to illuminate present politics. And The Emergency is useful, albeit not in the way Packer intended. The light it sheds is on the limits of a liberal imagination indifferent to both the causes of and the solutions to our current crisis. The Short American Century is over, and while no one knows what comes next, it has become increasingly clear that liberals likely won’t be the ones leading us into the future. The Emergency is thus less of a novel than it is a confession: that liberalism has nothing useful left to say.

Snow as little prayers, or wings,
clipped and left behind by angels
that decided to become
humans today. And today,
the interiority of rain. It’s true,
I don’t know how to make meanings
of my mess. My palms, pinkened
as they scooped up an armful
of torn, crystalized wings, feathered with
ground & dirt, and held it close
to my chest. Where can I put it down?
Anne Carson’s persona in The Glass Essay
replied, when her mother told her
her memories need some sorts
of unhoarding. I wonder about ways
to respond to that, when all the
spaces I have left are, already,
behind me (?) The snow that charmed me
has now brushed against that window-pane,
where stood a boy, donning
the straps of his mother’s maxi dress.
The mirror in front of him has
this slight torque from fingerprints.
Fake silverware and light, reverberating in
mythic photons. Vision of a snowfield,
where winter frost bruises everything
into a quiet something. Little metaphors
that are beautiful in this life only.
You must wonder now—
if the snow has become the boy’s mucus,
pooling on his wrists, as he crouched down,
hands scratching kneecaps. Or is it
the milkwood flowers outside,
pluming the streets with their pale, steely
canopies. Like the said God’s arms,
flailing and reaching to hear the last
words of his kind—

The most militant people I’ve ever met have been women in mourning. They grieve in anger and with purpose. Women in mourning know that there are no times of peace; no reprieves from suffering. There are only the times when they’re expected to behave as though they believe peace to be possible even if there is demonstrable proof of the opposite.

This is something I have always known to be true, but was only brought to the forefront of my mind after reading The War, by Marguerite Duras, which she published in 1985, 40 years after the end of World War II. This book, billed as a memoir, might actually be better described as a collection of found texts: six stories told across three chapters, all of them in some way about Duras’s life towards the end of World War II, some of them presented as true and some as fiction.

It is in the book’s first section where mourning is written as a feeling that reshapes one’s world and worldview. According to Duras, these first pages are a diary of the days she spent waiting to find out if her husband, Robert Antelme, had survived after being arrested and deported to a concentration camp for being a member of the French Resistance. It is April of 1945 and news of the camps being liberated by Allies is trickling throughout Paris, but she has yet to receive any news about where Robert—“Robert L.”—might be, dead or alive.

Duras disowns the memoir before giving it to us. She claims to have found it in her home in Neuphle-le-Chateau, but with “no recollection of having written it.” The exercise books found in her blue cupboards are hers, she knows. She knows the people and places written in there; she recognizes her own handwriting. And yet, “I can’t see myself writing the diary. When would I have done so, in what year, at what times of day, in what house?” Even years later, she finds herself shaken by the contents of the book and the fact that she was capable of writing “this thing that I still can’t put a name to, and that appalls me when I reread it.” The handwriting she recognizes is “calm, extraordinarily even,” and the words confront her “with a tremendous chaos of thought and feeling.” There were earlier drafts of what became The War, where Duras apparently wrote that she knew everything one could know when one knows nothing. She wrote what we read when she was apart and alone from herself.

To read these fugue-addled pages now is to find stories and scenes of the last days of war written with such intensely intimate darkness they feel as if they have been excavated rather than told. On one of days when she’s also still waiting for the news, she sees a 20-year-old woman, eight months pregnant, collect the belongings of her dead husband. The pregnant woman keeps talking, repeating the last letter her husband sent her over and over again: Tell our child I was brave. “I think of her,” Duras begins, and it is impossible to say if what follows is pity or jealousy—“because she isn’t waiting anymore.”

When she considers her actions and their emotions, she decides that she’s “never met a woman more cowardly than I am.” Other women are waiting for their husbands, too, and they are brave, as far as she can tell. “[W]e’re the only ones who are still waiting, in a suspense as old as time, that of women always, everywhere, waiting for the men to come home from the war.” But Duras believes she is a coward beyond measure or description, and decides to make it her virtue. “Not for a second do I see the need to be brave,” she writes. “Perhaps being brave is my form of cowardice.”

In May, she gets a call from one of the leaders of the Resistance (François Mitterrand, later the president of France), who tells her that they’ve found Robert in Dachau. Duras doesn’t recognize him, until he smiles with a “weariness from having managed to live till this moment.”Robert returns weighing 75 pounds, so sick and immobile that when they first call the doctor the man is confused: it takes him a minute, after seeing Robert, to realize that the patient is still alive.

There is no love story in this book, and yet all it is a story about love. Duras’s fidelity to her husband, her desperation to see him return, is both singular to Robert and universal; she tries to explain “his own peculiar grace which carried him through the camps—the intelligence, the love, the reading, the politics, and all the inexpressible things of all the days: the grace peculiar to him but made up equally of the despair of all.” Does it matter that they were never going to stay together? Without him there, and knowing that the marriage would end either by death or divorce, what would she have done without the man who became her second husband, D, she and her reader will both ask. Without her neighbors? Without the other members of the Resistance? She would never have to know the answer to that question because they were always there. The diary ends sometime in many confusing futures, both a day at the beach and also referencing the day Robert would die in 1990. Whenever it is, it is the day Duras tells a friend that she’s written something about Robert coming home, and that in doing so she has “tried to say something about love.”

On a number of occasions I have joked, (viciously, glibly) about a truth that will surely be recognizable to any organizer of any kind: Among your people there will almost always be one person who genuinely believes they could lead a revolution in the streets, but somehow is not capable of updating a spreadsheet. These little indignities are neither a symptom nor a consequence of the work. They are the work itself: the task of knowing and seeing people for who they are and what they are capable of, and holding it up against what they believe about themselves. This is, in many ways, annoying. In other ways it is a privilege. Most of those people are humbled and learn to contribute where they can make the most difference rather than hang on to their isolating ideas about heroism and hierarchy. The few who won’t let themselves learn either inevitably tell on themselves, or show themselves out.

Where and when in their lives people come into what I often hear broadly described as “the work” —whether that is organizing for labor or community, or protesting against fascism and genocide and war—is something I’ve paid attention to, noting what I see and when I see it. For a few years I was alternately reasonably and unreasonably obsessed with my work organizing digital media workers, which often overlapped with many other kinds of cultural and precarious labor—much of my time was spent with writers, but also people who worked in galleries, museums, movie theaters, nonprofits, grad programs, and at fashion brands. I got to know certain patterns and learned to compare them with the friends I made who were staff organizers in more traditional industries—nurses, teachers, factory workers. Many of those people told me they wanted write about their experiences; some even did draft essays or stories or the start of books. I don’t know where those pages are now. I wonder about cupboards where they might be eventually discovered.

Back then, we taught each other to recognize the bursts of vitality from those who are brand new. Then there is a kind of protective nihilism among those who have stayed too long. These differences of experience conflict and complicate each other in the painstaking, agonizing, humane process of understanding where a person is coming from. Similarities are usually thought of as inherent to solidarity, but it’s really the differences that create it. One of my favorite quotes about organizing is from the professor and activist Loretta Ross. “A group of people thinking the same thing and moving in the same direction is a cult,” she once said. “A group of people thinking different things and moving in the same direction is a movement.”

Still, there is that one pattern I’ve seen abound in particular, and it is among those women in mourning. Their grief might be recent or it might be embedded in how they understand themselves. It might be the loss of a person in their life that is permanent or temporary, or the loss of an idea that they once felt was necessary for every other thought they’d ever had. Some of them were radicalized by loss and others had their radical nature confirmed by it, but all of them know pain as though it is an essential text. I’m using the word “militant” deliberately, if imprecisely; I don’t know a better word to describe a purity of reason and an awareness of one’s own power.

I should perhaps say, instead, that the most militant people I respect have been women in mourning. I’ve encountered other militancies in other types of people, and often found a resilience that is hollow. I’m suspicious of a force that has no memory of the occasion that warranted it. Certainty and conviction can easily become postures with no interest in either doubt or faith, only in creating a weapon out of that sureness to intimidate those they consider an enemy, whether that’s because they are on the other side of a divide or because they display a weakness that can’t be tolerated. Instead, women in mourning have an understanding of what happens after losing the belief that anything really ever ends. You can stop knowing or seeing or feeling another person, but their presence lasts long enough to convince you that they aren’t completely gone. This is the kind of thinking one has to possess in order to believe things can be made different than they are.

In a 2023 essay in the London Review of Books, Toril Moi writes of realizing that she had been so “used to thinking about Duras as a writer focused almost exclusively on femininity and madness” that she had missed something: Duras’s “enduring preoccupation is with pain that goes unalleviated.… In later works, Duras almost obsessively returns to this theme, most often in the form of the psychic pain experienced by solitary, enigmatic characters (usually women) who are incapable of giving it expression.”

In my past experiences reading Duras I’ve felt uncomfortable with her bluntness, her odd and clipped way of stating the obvious as obviously as possible. She flattens other people on the page and then pulls them back up with her own words. In a 1991 profile for The New York Times Magazine, Duras talked about feeling oppressed by the conventions of literature, such as writing by Balzac, who she complains “describes everything. It’s exhaustive. It’s an inventory.… There’s no place for the reader.” In a 1970 interview, she says that she would “like the material that is to be read as free as possible of style. I can’t read novels any more,” she claims. “Because of the sentences.”

Sometimes I am easily lost in this rough simplicity. Other times I am lost at a distance from these words, unsure of what to believe or what remains in Duras’s famously few words. Something in this style pulls me while it pushes me away: The language is cut clean but the feelings described are frayed.

Part of what makes Duras endlessly compelling, as a person and an artist, is how confusing she is. Her political history, as it were, is not so clean. She and Robert joined the Resistance in 1943, but only a few years prior, she wrote a work of propaganda about the supposed good done by French imperialism. In 1942, she worked as a secretary for the Book Organization Committee, a service dealing with paper quotas for publishers run by the Vichy government. They would deny materials to books considered too dangerous, such as the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Zola, and Colette. Being on this committee is possibly why her first novel, The Imprudent Ones, was even published. “Duras, with her considerable powers to mythologize the past,” wrote Edmund White in a New York Review of Books essay about his complicated love for the writer, “knew how to invent a suitably leftist record for herself.” Her militancy may have been the zeal of the convert, or the penance of a sinner.

The quality I do find in Duras—or rather, the quality I am looking for that I know I can trust to find in her work—is a viciousness. To be vicious is a characteristic I often miss when it’s absent in writing or thinking. Much like organizing, which is not inherently good so much as it is a tool that can be and is used by anyone to any ends they choose, not every instance of suffering makes us worse or better. A thorn can pierce the skin if a stem is held the wrong way; that doesn’t make a rose a weapon. I want someone capable of being brutal in their thoughts and who knows that an idea can be a cudgel; someone who risks unfairness and damage in service to their points. The root of the word vicious, I only recently learned, comes from the Latin for immorality; its antonym is “virtue,” another quality that can be used to immoral ends. Maybe being brave is my form of cowardice.

The second section of The War is more about Duras’s work in her time of waiting, the assignments she alone was capable of carrying out.“Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier” is a true story about Duras’s time waiting to find out if her husband would return—even though by this point we know he does. It’s a story about bravery. As part of her work in the French Resistance, Duras was tasked with cultivating a relationship with the Gestapo officer who arrested her husband. Pierre Rabier is a fake name, but the personality she describes of an obsequious and pestiferous man was real. Rabier saw himself as only temporarily an agent of Hitler’s agenda. He believed that after Germany’s inevitable win he would belong to a French creative class under German rule. “Rabier was fascinated by French intellectuals, artists, authors,” Duras writes. “He’d gone into the Gestapo because he hadn’t been able to buy an art bookshop.”

The story of their time together is a dangerous one, written in and with the terror that was always a part of Duras’s risk. Still, in the disclaimer in the story’s opening pages, Duras wonders why even publish it. Yes, it’s true, and yes, it terrified her to have done it—so what? Some friends, she tells her reader, convinced her to include it here. Rabier represents, to them, “the illusion that a person may exist solely as a dispenser of reward and punishment. An illusion that usually takes the place of ethics, philosophy, and morality—and not only in the police.”

Rabier seems enamored with Duras as both a woman and an artist, but even more so with the power his access to her husband gives him. He is the only way she can get mail or packages to Robert; he is the only one who can assure her he is even still alive. They walk, go to cafés, eat meals together. Other members of the Resistance are forbidden from any contact with Duras to preserve the lie that she is just a wife and novelist, only married to a member and not one herself, a necessary isolation that is still insanity. Duras secretly talks to D, her lover and later, her second husband, every day about Rabier, finding herself struggling to convey “his fundamental stupidity.” The only thing that calms her is the trust she has that, once she knows Robert and his sister are safe, the movement will have a chance to kill him: a certainty that preserves her balance. Rabier will die, and it will be her people who do it.

She does learn some useful information from Rabier. He tells her that the other Gestapo officers are getting scared, and are no longer certain about Hitler’s victory. He tells her it was another member of the Resistance who gave up her husband’s name. In one tense moment, Rabier asks her to identify another member of the Resistance, showing her a photo of Mitterrand and offering to release her husband if she does so. Duras could have Robert back tomorrow, he promises, if she turns someone else in. But she is unwilling to sacrifice her convictions, even under complete duress. “When it is not just your life that’s involved,” she says to explain the stillness she feels, “you find what you need to say…I am saved.” Duras tells him easily that she doesn’t know who the man is, and if she did, she would never tell him.

Rabier did die eventually, though Duras doesn’t know where or if it was done by the Resistance. She, above anything else, holds onto the messiness of contradiction. Her own description of herself is of a woman who is often strange both in the way she behaves and in the way she recounts her behavior. At the trial of the man Duras names Rabier, she testifies twice: once to tell the story of his evil, the second to tell a story of some good. Rabier had decided not to deport a Jewish family, he had told her during the time of her mission, because when he had gone to their home he had seen their child’s coloring book and crayons. He told Duras, in one of their meetings, that he promised to warn her if she ever was at risk of being arrested. In recounting the story of his supposed mercy, Rabier is “absolutely indifferent to human suffering in general, but indulging himself in the luxury of his own forms of squeamishness. And to this we owe our lives, the little Jew and I.”

When Duras enters these facts into the record, “the whole courtroom,” she writes, “was against me.” The judge yells at her, berates her for being of two minds, accuses her of wasting the court’s time. Duras only says that she wanted to tell more about what she knew in case it saved Rabier from being sentenced to death; he was executed soon after.

Of course viciousness could be a kind of vice. The instinct is faulty and cruel, influenced not by a need to tell the truth or share in a feeling so much as it is a drive to wound with whatever words will do the most damage. For all of Duras’s claims that this book is simply found rather than made, words mystically received rather than chosen, it is still hers and was published to serve her story.

I’ve always thought that I write to be where I’m not. In writing, I can be anywhere besides where the sentence lives. Duras is and isn’t like that. She rewrote her own stories again and again, returning to where she had begun to retell the same story, although maybe it was her own form of searching for another place: When she comes back to her own story, she finds it as she expected and entirely different. Her characters in film repeat the same lines of dialogue over and over again, like the lovers in Hiroshima, mon amour, when the woman repeats over and over again to the man: “You destroy me. You’re so good for me.” The character of Anne-Marie Stretter appears as the impetus for the events of The Ravishing of Lol Stein as well as The North Chinese Lover and The Vice-Counsel; it is the name of the woman in her film India Song. Her real name was Elizabeth Striedter and she was married to a French governor; apparently when the couple moved to Vinhlong, Elizabeth’s lover in Laos killed himself. The woman Duras remembers had “an invisible quality, the opposite of showy, very quiet.… But there was also this power of death in her, death-giving power, the power to provoke death.” Duras often said that she wondered if learning about this moment in someone else’s life is why she became a writer: so that she could keep telling and hearing this story of a love only known as grief. With each repetition, she had another chance to reify and contradict the stories of her life.

In The Places of Marguerite Duras, a transcript from a documentary recently published by Magic Hour Press, Duras says that writing, for her, begins without faith. “You start out mistrusting yourself,” she said, “with a sense of guilt and second-rate baggage that others have thrown together forever. “ We put our faith in other people, she notes. Why not ourselves? “I trust myself as I would trust any other,” she claims about where she ends up as a writer. “I trust myself completely.”

Duras could have believed her decisions and her actions and her beliefs during the war and the time after were perfect, if she wanted, as “perfect” usually is meant to describe that whatever is is only how it could ever have been. Of course, that usage of perfection is really only applicable to death. Still alive, Duras would never know or feel that everything has happened as it should have and that everything she was capable of doing was right to have done. All she knew was the trust she put in her ability to write, and her writing the same story only stopped when she died. Afterward, they have happened to you, is how Duras described her story of torturing an informant. They might happen to anyone.

There’s an element of propaganda here, one that I have to remind myself of: not to warn myself away, but just to remember that the word isn’t restricted to when it’s used in service of ideas I don’t agree with. I have also been influenced by the women I’ve encountered in my time in labor organizing who are as committed to their cause as they are to their pains, and I know I’m not alone. All organizers are, to the people they organize, celebrities of sorts. While the work is certainly not easily described as glamorous, the work they do is a mixture of cool and warm; it requires charisma and absence. Taken together, these contradictions become a kind of grace. I can only imagine what someone like Duras would say to a modern term like “emotional labor,” and believe she would most likely reject something that takes such pride in being able to contain an impossible depth of experience into a single phrase. But sometimes we need the stupidest labels to remain smart about what we know.

This work requires more secrets, more silences, than others. Inside it is babies being born and parents dying, people abandoned by or trapped in their commitments. Car crashes, botched surgeries, abortions, miscarriages, evictions, empty fridges, court summons, broken contracts. Betrayals and heartbreaks are the background of every life and in a movement that needs its martyrs these wounds can become a virtue.

In Jaqueline Rose’s book Mothers, the writer tells a story about speaking to her therapist after the death of her mother. Rose was waiting, she felt, to return to normal; this grief was interstitial, she believed, and only an era of her life that would soon pass. The therapist replied with exactly the kind of viciousness I admire and hope to convey here when she told Rose that that would never be the case. Grief is the real life, and the reprieves of peace are just places we visit in between. To treat a woman in mourning as something special, extraordinary? It would be harder to find one not in mourning.

Grief’s capability to level the griever is one I respect probably too much, trusting pain as though it is eternal honestly and pleasure as though it is a temporary lie. Destruction can be as much of an art as creation, in the way it reveals what was once unseen or unknown. But destruction is easy to valorize because it is easily misunderstood as quick. I often hear people use the phrase it just happened to explain all kinds of disasters, as though they are events disconnected from the rest of time and made of a substance designed to dissolve. Loss is inevitable, and love is a miracle: Only one, in this way of thinking, is guaranteed, and it’s not the one that makes us feel the happiest. Is this the kind of thinking that comes from living through too much war, or too much peace? The English translation of Duras’s memoir title claims that this is a book about wartimes, but I think the reason I fell so completely into the writing is because of the impossible dissonance between which life Duras is in: Technically, this is not a book about the end of a war, but of the first days of peace. Technically, these are the days of a new era of history. And yet the days never lose the feeling of suffering, and the idea of peace never replaces the memories of what preceded that arbitrary declaration. When Duras published the original text in French, she called it La Douleur. What name did she think this time deserved? Pain.

Texas held its congressional primaries on Tuesday, and the good news is that turnout was really high for a primary. I have been harping on the idea that voters who do not want to choose between “a lesser of two evils” in November need to show up to vote in the primaries process. I hope to see record engagement all throughout the spring and summer, building toward the November midterm elections.

I am, however, a little disappointed with the results of the primary on the Senate Democratic side. James Talarico defeated Jasmine Crockett, and while I know there are a lot of people who are excited about the prospect of a current seminarian and soon-to-be minister appealing to the racists who clothe themselves in the church, I can’t help feeling very “Beto O’Rourke II” about the whole thing. Talarico can throw down, verse for verse, against the most Bible-humping Republicans Texas has to offer, but getting excited about that presupposes that there are a significant number of Republicans who are guided by their faith and not their bigotry and misogyny.

I don’t believe that. I believe these people vote for white supremacy and the oppression of others. They’re not followers of Jesus; they’re followers of white privilege and whatever version of religion they can manipulate to support it. I do not have faith that Talarico will lead them to the light.

On the other side of the aisle, Senator John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ended up in a runoff to see who will be the Republican candidate this fall. I’ve seen a lot of liberals hoping that Paxton pulls it off, because Paxton is one of the most odious public figures around and Democrats think that he can be more easily beaten in the general election than the stuffed suit that is Cornyn.

I have a problem with that analysis because… Paxton is one of the most odious public figures around. Supporting a worse candidate because you think you can beat him is not something I will ever fall for again. Not after the 2016 presidential election. I’m telling you, if I could go back, I would clap for Jeb Bush. This feels especially true in the case of a person like Paxton in a state like Texas, where Democrats haven’t won a statewide election since 1994. If Paxton wins the primary, Paxton is going to be a US senator, and that is the worst possible outcome.

Writing for The Nation, Ana Marie Cox says I’m wrong about most of this. She says Texas is winnable for a Democrat, Talarico has the juice, and a bruising runoff between Cornyn and Paxton will help their chances.

I’ll be thrilled if Cox is right. And I’m thrilled people are participating in the primary. I just wish voters weren’t so focused on the circular and self-defeating argument of “electability.” Choosing a candidate based on how you think other people will vote is just insane to me. Most people struggle to pick a restaurant their friends will like, but they think they can pick a candidate that complete strangers will like? Strangers who largely disagree with them and everything they stand for? Electability is a ludicrous argument, which is probably why it’s most often deployed as a dog whistle to warn people against voting for a Black person or a woman or especially a Black woman.

But, whatever, it’s Texas. If Jesus were a Democrat, he could literally lose by six points to a penis brought to life and given a cowboy hat. How else can you explain the continued political existence of Ted Cruz?

The Bad and the Ugly

• In a shadow docket ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that schools in the state of California must “out” trans students to their parents. I’ve said this before, but if you are the parent of a trans kid and that kid doesn’t want to tell you, the fault is yours, not the state’s.
• The court heard oral arguments this week in Montgomery v. Caribe Transportation, a case ostensibly about whether freight companies can be held liable for negligent hiring when their drivers cause accidents. But alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh made it all about whether Trump can demand that truck drivers read English.
• The court also heard arguments in US v. Hemani, a case about whether a federal law banning drug users from owning guns violates the Second Amendment. Just to put a point on how stupid “originalism” is… there were extended questions from the justices about whether the current federal law is “analogous” to laws imprisoning “habitual drunkards” in the 18th century. We are trying to figure out if a cocaine addict can have an Uzi based on whether Tommy the Town Drunk had to spend a night in the sheriff’s bridewell in 1775. We are not a serious people.
• The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from a computer scientist seeking copyright protection for art generated by AI. On his application, the guy listed himself as the owner of the art (he asked the machine to create), and listed his software as the art’s author. The DC Circuit ruled that “human authorship” is a fundamental requirement of the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Supreme Court will let that ruling stand, but I promise you this isn’t the last we’re going to hear about this issue.
• I should mention that the Senate failed to do anything to stop Trump’s illegal war against Iran. Thus continues our long and shameful history of engaging in undeclared wars of choice and aggression while the people’s representatives cower in fear, refusing to exercise the powers given to them by the Constitution.

Inspired Takes

• Mark Hertsgaard and Giles Trendle wrote in The Nation that the illegal war against Iran is also a war against the climate. That’s an angle on the current horror show that I hadn’t thought of before.
• In his Nation article, Jack Mirkinson argues that the US-Israeli war against Iran will, in the long run, be bad for US-Israel relations. He says people will figure out that Israel played a big part in pushing us into this war, and that people ultimately won’t like that. I hope he’s right.
• Over at SCOTUSblog, Zach Shemtob is starting what I believe is an important series. He’s taking a deep dive into how other countries use their high courts, what powers those courts have, and comparing them to our Supreme Court. I have long believed that if Americans understood how weird and powerful our Supreme Court is compared with other high courts in other large democracies, more people would want to reform and defang our court. His first case study is the UK.

Worst Argument of the Week

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected an immigration appeal from Douglas Humberto Urias-Orellana, who claimed that a hit man was out to kill him and his entire family in his native El Salvador. Urias-Orellana applied for asylum in the US, but was denied by an immigration judge. The case went up to the Supreme Court on the question of how much power courts should have to review and overturn decisions made by immigration judges. Urias-Orellana lost, with Ketanji Brown-Jackson writing for a unanimous court ruling that the asylum decisions of immigration judges are nearly final.

I’m not surprised. Indeed, when I previewed this case at the start of the Supreme Court’s term, I predicted not only Urias-Orellana’s loss but also the fact that he would lose 9–0, as he just did.

I still think it’s a terrible decision. I do not think courts should defer to the opinions of immigration judges, at least not under our current immigration system. Immigration judges are massively overworked, meaning that even those judges operating with the best of intentions are often unable to give each individual case the time and attention it deserves. There are also far too few free or affordable immigration lawyers to represent all the asylum applicants, forcing them to go before judges on their own, without someone who can make sure they bring their best evidence and arguments to their hearings.

Meanwhile, assuming immigration judges are bringing their “best intentions” is itself a fiction in the Trump era. Many of the most sympathetic immigration judges have retired or been fired, meaning those who remain tend to be most comfortable with Trump’s xenophobic ideas. Indeed, we’ve recently seen Trump commandeer military JAG officers, who have no immigration training at all, to serve as rubber stamps for Trump’s anti-immigrant regime. The idea that the decisions made by these people should be given nearly complete deference by real judges on appellate courts who actually understand the law is ridiculous. I wouldn’t trust a Trump-appointed immigration judge to know whether Abu Dhabi or Agrabah is the real place.

So why was the decision 9–0? Why did the liberals go along with it and commission Jackson to write the opinion? Well, Jackson’s opinion makes the rulings of immigration judges nearly insurmountable. Her opinion leaves a path, a very narrow path, through which asylum seekers can obtain appellate relief. It says that asylum seekers can appeal their cases if they bring “substantial evidence” that the immigration judge was wrong—evidence that “no reasonable factfinder” would disagree with. Basically, Jackson is leaving the door open for an asylum seeker who (perhaps thanks to better representation) is able to bring more evidence on appeal than they were able to bring to their initial hearing.

I do not believe that door would be open if this opinion had been 6–3 and written by somebody like Justice Sam Alito. The ruling is bad, but it’s not the very worst version of this ruling that could have happened.

Still, “it could have been worse” is cold comfort in the Trump era. Trump has enlisted a cadre of immigration judges into his deportation regime, and the Supreme Court just unanimously told those judges their decisions will probably never seriously face appellate review. That means those immigration judges can really be accountable only to Donald Trump, not a higher court or, heaven forfend, the facts or the law.

What I Wrote

I didn’t really have anything new or interesting to say about the horrors the United States is inflicting on Iran, so I kind of sat this one out. I mean, how many times can I write, “What the president is doing is illegal and… nobody is going to stop him”? How many times can I write, “American foreign policy is violent and evil”? How many times can I write, “Our country is a rogue state that should be sanctioned and punished by the international community”? Don’t worry. I’m sure we’ll attack another brown country soon, and I’ll get to say it all again.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Major League Baseball is implementing a new system that will allow robots to call balls and strikes. It’s called the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System (ABS). During the game, players will be able to challenge an umpire’s call by appealing to a computer replay system.

The system has been tested in the minor leagues for a couple of years. It allows only the batter, pitcher, or catcher to challenge the call of the pitch, not other players on the field or even the manager. Each team will get only two challenges per game, but they retain the challenges if they are successful—so you can challenge as many pitches as you want as long as you continue to be right. If challenged, the ABS system (which is just a bunch of high-speed cameras and motion sensors) displays a graphical representation of the previously pitched ball on the big screen. In minor league testing, challenges were resolved in an average of 13.8 seconds.

Here’s an article from MLB.com explaining all you need to know about ABS.

I… kind of hate this. I guess I’m a baseball “purist.” I don’t like the designated hitter, don’t like middle relievers, and don’t like singing “God Bless America” in the seventh inning. (I do like sabermetrics and advanced stats, but that impacts how I understand the game, not how the game is played).

I recognize I’m in the minority here. Fans overwhelmingly approve of the robots. During one spring training game this year, an umpire lost five ABS challenges, which feels like a lot.

But overall the impact has been minimal: During spring training, only 2.6 percent of calls have been challenged thus far, and those challenges have succeeded just 52 percent of the time.

You can take those numbers both ways. Some people might say that getting a few more calls correctly is a net positive, especially if it takes under 15 seconds to get it right. I would counter that getting a few calls wrong here and there has been part of the game for over 100 years, and keeping it that way means I don’t have to wait for a stupid replay before I know if I can be happy or not when reacting to a play on the field.

I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I mean, professional football has degraded to the point where I need to wait 10 minutes to see a replay at three different angles before I know what a “catch” is, and I’m in the process of getting used to that. So I’m sure I’ll learn to accept “Strike three! No. Wait. Ball four! Take your base, lmao.”

But part of being a baseball fan is to look modernity in the face… and scoff at it. I will learn to accept ABS, but I’ll never like it.

***

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Donald Trump has often praised William McKinley, a White House predecessor who shared the current president’s love of tariffs and territorial expansion. A pious man, McKinley claimed he had divine sanction for the 1898 US annexation of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish-American War. According to McKinley’s account, he was tormented by what to do with the former Spanish colonies when he “went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance.” Then he was struck by a divine insight: that the United States had a mission to “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

It’s impossible to imagine Trump, for all his stated admiration of McKinley, going down on his knees and seeking heavenly council. While Trump is the head of a political coalition whose largest element is evangelical Christians, his own personal faith seems, at best, a cynical and barely disguised performance. In 2015, at the start of his political career, he said he had never asked God for forgiveness. When asked if he preferred the Old or the New Testament, he said, “Probably equal. I think it’s just incredible.”

Yet, in a curious way, Trump has managed to reinvent McKinley’s fusion of imperialism and piety—and never more so than in his current war on Iran. There was only a cursory effort to prepare the public for the conflict; as The New Yorker tartly observed, this is a “no-explanation war.” Since it started last Saturday, the White House has offered a plethora of conflicting justifications, including regime change, pressure from the Israeli government, fear of an imminent attack by Iran, fear of Iran getting nuclear weapons, and a desire to pressure Iran in negotiations.

This puzzling kaleidoscope of excuses has created an opportunity for the religious right to recast the war in its image. Since there is no coherent, agreed-upon talking point coming out of the White House, the MAGA movement is free to explain the war with its own pet theories.

As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann pointed out last year during the so-called 12-day war between Israel and Iran, Pentecostal pastors such as John Hagee are quick to exploit any turmoil in the Middle East as proof the long-promised Apocalypse is at hand, a consummation devoutly desired as a fulfillment of God’s plan, even if it means the end of the world.

Under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who styles himself the “secretary of war,” this apocalyptic Christianity has sanction from the commanding heights of the Pentagon. In a Substack post, journalist Jonathan Larsen reports,

Hegseth has enshrined evangelical Christianity at the uppermost levels of the U.S. military, airing monthly prayer meetings throughout the Pentagon. Last year, the Pentagon confirmed to me that Hegseth attends a weekly White House Bible study. It’s led by a preacher who says God commands America to support Israel.

Quoting complaints made to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), Larsen has provided startling evidence that Hegseth’s theocratic militarism now saturates the military. On Monday, one commander allegedly told troops that Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” MRFF claims to have received at least 110 similar complaints from more than 40 units.

These military commanders are echoing language that is pervasive in political life, especially in the last week. On Thursday, Senator Lindsey Graham said, “This is a religious war, and we will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years.” House Speaker Mike Johnson asserts that Iranians have a “misguided religion.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims that the war is necessary because Iran is “run by lunatics—religious fanatic lunatics.” In a news briefing, Hegseth said, “Crazy regimes like Iran, hell-bent on prophetic Islamic delusions, cannot have nuclear weapons.” The White House got in on the act on Thursday, releasing Oval Office footage of a group of evangelical pastors laying hands on Trump and praying for his success in the war.

This language of religious abuse is shared by leaders in Israel, the chief US ally in the conflict. Benjamin Netanyahu has compared Iran to the Amalekites, a biblical people associated with pure evil whom God commands the Israelites to utterly annihilate.

There is, of course, a long history of apocalyptic religious language being used in war. Armies like to think they fight not just with weapons but also with the support of God. Religious language provides an illusory moral clarity that allows violence to be justified.

Ibrahim Abusharif, an associate professor at Northwestern University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that religious framing “carries risks: once a war is cast in sacred language, political compromise becomes harder, expectations become higher, and the global perception of the conflict can shift in ways that complicate diplomacy.”

Even George W. Bush, hardly a paragon of diplomatic tactfulness, was capable of understanding, after a little tutoring, the danger of apocalyptic language. After the 9/11 terrorist attack, he talked about the need for a “crusade.” When it was explained to Bush that evoking the crusades would make Muslims think he wanted to wage a holy war of conquest, he refrained from using that word again.

One way to describe Trump’s Iran attack is that it is Bush’s bellicose foreign policy waged without even a minimum of diplomatic effort or persuasive skill. Noting the rise of religious language by US politicians, Vali Nasr, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, argues, “This may be an act of desperation to explain a war plan gone wrong to Americans, but the more [the] US casts this as a holy war and another crusade, the more it is making it a regional conflict, enraging Muslims far beyond the region.” This is the real danger: that Trumpist rhetoric of a holy war might convince the broader Islamic world that the Christian West is the enemy. If that happens, what is already a large regional conflict will truly spiral out of control into a new era of global strife.

On March 2, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke from the site of an Iranian ballistic missile strike in the city of Beit Shemesh, 19 miles west of Jerusalem. Beit Shemesh had come under fire from Iran’s allies before, with the Houthi movement targeting a military base near the city in November 2024 with a hypersonic missile. The Iranian strike, which came days after the US and Israel launched an unprovoked war on Iran, hit Beit Shemesh directly, killing nine Israelis and injuring 27 more. When Netanyahu spoke to the media from the site of the devastation, he remained defiant and told gathered reporters, “But we are acting here together with the US, in the name and for the sake of all humanity. In this week’s Torah portion, we read ‘Remember what Amalek did to you.’ We remember and we act.”

Amalek, in the Torah, is described as one of the nations that fought against the Israelites. In the Bible, the prophet Samuel tells the Israelite King Saul that God wants him to “go and destroy Amalek. Destroy all they have, and do not let them live. Kill both man and woman, child and baby.”

Israel has long sought to deemphasize the invocations of Amalek in its Western-facing communications, not just because there may be unfamiliarity with the religious reference but because Israel routinely compares modern-day Palestine to Amalek as part of its justification for the Gaza genocide. “Wipe out the memory of Amalek” has become an oft-used phrase at the highest levels of Israel’s government, a dog whistle well understood to call for the extermination of the Palestinians.

Now, by linking Iran and Amalek, Israel’s government seems to be bringing that same genocidal logic to its latest conflict—only one of a number of different religious frameworks Netanyahu’s government is working within as it wages war alongside the United States.

Reports conflict about how far in advance the beginning of the war was planned, but reporting from Drop Site News indicates that the start date, on the eve of Purim, was apparently decided weeks in advance. While it is perhaps unlikely that the IDF, however committed to genocide against the Palestinians, would organize its campaigns around the onset of certain holidays, the Israeli government has seized on the religious significance of starting this conflict as Purim begins.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a US-Israeli strike last weekend, had long been referred to by Israeli commentators as a Haman of modern times, referencing the scheming Persian vizier in the book of Esther that sought to exterminate the Jews of the Persian Empire. In the biblical story, Haman is executed by the king when his plot is revealed, and his children are killed in battle against the Jewish people defending themselves from extermination. Khamanei’s assassination, which occurred alongside the killings of his wife, daughter, and 14-month-old grandchild, has been spoken about in this register, with both pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu politicians alike boasting that the modern Haman had been eliminated. Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, declared that there had been a “great miracle…like on Purim” and that “they will all end like Haman.”

Ben-Gvir, a far-right extremist and an instrumental member of Netanyahu’s cabinet, has also used Amalek comparisons when discussing the Iran war. While some Israeli commentators who invoke Amalek’s name in describing Iran make the differentiation between the Iranian government and an allegedly Israel-friendly people waiting to take power, Ben-Gvir has made no such distinction, posting on X at the beginning of the war, “Blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget!”

Ben-Gvir has, unsurprisingly, also invoked the name of Amalek in reference to Palestinians both before and after the war against Gaza began. Ben-Gvir went so far as to post a placard from his political party, Jewish Power, including with Khamenei’s photo one of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, captioned with a verse from the Book of Esther: “That the Jews had rule over those who hated them”—and a giant noose. Reports of Ahmadinejad’s assassination at the hands of Israel have apparently been greatly exaggerated, but the potential news of the killing of someone who had not been president for over 13 years was to be supported by Ben-Gvir regardless.

While Israel does not desire to depopulate and settle Iranian territory in the way that it does Palestinian or Lebanese land, the policy of collective punishment of the entire population has been much the same, both now and during the so-called 12-day war in June of last year. For whatever Netanyahu has said about encouraging a mass rebellion by the Iranian people, his defense minister, Israel Katz, declared in 2025 that the “residents of Tehran will pay the price, and soon.” As massive bombardments rained down on the capital last June, Katz, who is still in charge of executing carpet bombings of Tehran in this war, bragged bluntly: “Tehran is burning.” That ethos remains in the current war, as was proven when a US-Israeli strike targeted an elementary school in the town of Iran. At least 168 people, many of them young girls, were killed in scenes hauntingly reminiscent of the massacres of children and the destruction of educational institutions in Gaza.

Israeli politicians have not been the only ones engaging in religious symbolism and eschatology. The US military under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who sports several tattoos with Crusader symbols and mottos, has evidently revealed itself as rife with commanders who believe the war with Iran to be the final one before Armageddon. The president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation said on Tuesday that it has received reports from 30 different installations about commanders invoking the idea of this war being “God’s plan,” that the Book of Revelation foretold these events, and that Jesus would be returning soon. One commander apparently told troops that Trump had been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.” Whether Christ’s return is imminent in the same way that the Iranian attack was imminent remains to be seen.

Hegseth has levied accusations against the Islamic Republic that it is “hell-bent on prophetic Islamist delusions,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the country needed to be attacked now because “that entire regime is led by radical clerics who make decisions on the basis of their view of theology, which is an apocalyptic one.” Meanwhile, the executors of this war phrase the conflict in apocalyptic terms of their own, saying that they are fulfilling the promises of their own holy books, and that their justice is in fact God’s.

Both the US and Israel have long asserted the right to commit imperial violence with impunity, while expecting other countries to pay a high price if they do the same. Now that double standard is being applied to the idea of holy war itself. Theocracy, it would seem, is wrong only when some people do it. To play on an old trope: “The apocalyptic prophecies are coming from inside the house.”

Fifteen miles east of San Diego, on a street called Calzada de la Fuente, there is a sprawling immigration detention center in the neighborhood of Otay Mesa. It is situated at the base of a hill, up and down which snakes the double row of border fencing separating the scrublands from the sprawl of Tijuana. The area, along a remote stretch of Route 905, is a dumping ground for society’s despised: Within a few minutes drive of the immigrant concentration camp are a juvenile detention facility, a county jail, and a large state prison. There’s a large Amazon warehouse and a massive water treatment plant. It’s the sort of place, out of sight, out of mind, one doesn’t drive through by accident. I have, over the years, been to similarly depressing epicenters of incarceration in South Texas and in Arizona.

The Otay Mesa Detention Center is run by the private prison company CoreCivic, which states that the facility has a capacity to hold 1,358 inmates. CalMatters recently reported that there have been days when more than 1,600 people have been held there. Legislators, including Senator Alex Padilla, have been rebuffed in their efforts to gain entry to the site, but inmates who managed to throw notes detailing their conditions of confinement, taped to shampoo bottles and pads of deodorant, to the protesters, part of a group called Otay Mesa Detention Collective, who congregate on the street outside the facility every Sunday afternoon, reported diets that don’t meet basic nutritional needs, a lack of medical care, damp and cold cell blocks, minimal outdoor time, and rampant overcrowding. Women have reported that if they couldn’t afford to buy sanitary pads, they were left to bleed on themselves during their periods. “Every day, we were coming and they were throwing stuff over, but the guards would race us to the notes,” recalls one of the protesters, Arturo Gonzalez.

Eventually, CoreCivic’s staff responded to the messages from the detained by locking down the institution during the two-hour protests, so that inmates could no longer access the outdoor exercise pods from which they were throwing their pleas. But by then, according to one of the Collective’s cofounders, Tin-Lok Wong, the protesters had managed to secure the names and identity numbers (known as A-Numbers) for more than 300 inmates, allowing them to collect money that they could then put onto the inmates’ commissary accounts so that they could buy more food and place phone calls to friends, families and attorneys on the outside.

The Otay Mesa Detention Center, with its razor-wire fencing and its desperate detainees, is just one of many visible signs of sprouting authoritarianism around our borders. (As is the ICE presence at the San Diego Federal courthouse—the basement of which has been converted to a makeshift immigrant detention center for those ICE detains when they show up for their hearings. Last week, after monitoring ICE’s presence there since last spring, Detention Resistance observers, including a US marine who served in Afghanistan, were cited for “obstruction” by federal authorities.)

Even as more and more of the country is rejecting Trump’s snarling, lockdown vision for America and for the broader world, Team Trump is lashing out against immigrants in the US and foreigners overseas in every direction. Domestically, DHS issued a stark memo to agents in late February urging them to arrest and detain already-vetted refugees, in the country legally, who don’t yet have their green cards. And, of course, internationally over the past week it has embarked, at the urging of the Israeli government, on a preposterous, patently illegal, and potentially globally catastrophic war with Iran.

Trump is entirely contemptuous of the niceties of international law, the role of Congress in major decisions of war and peace, and the importance of public opinion (only 27 percent of Americans polled support the bombing of Iran). Rather than seeking to bring the public along before ordering the bombers into the air, he simply announced the onset of hostilities in a video on social media, and then spent the next 48 hours trying to get his own story straight about whether this was a regime change mission, an effort to stop “imminent” Iranian attacks on the US, or a campaign to wipe out the nuclear potential of a regime whose nuclear potential Trump claimed to have already “obliterated” during US bombing raids in June.

Of course, congressional leaders are all too aware that wars are supposed to be authorized by Congress; and so, in language shockingly redolent of Putin’s description of Russian intervention in Ukraine, neutered Speaker Mike Johnson has gone out of his way to describe the wholesale aerial bombardment of Iran, the sinking of its navy, and the lethal bombing of a girls’ school not as being acts of war but as part of a “defensive operation.”

Having made the fateful decision to go to “defensive operation” against Iran without, apparently, consulting any allies other than Israel—and despite warnings from the top US military brass that the campaign would be a long and brutal slog, during which US air defense missile stocks would be depleted—Trump has, since the bombing began, spent his sundowning hours unleashing verbal tirades against the leaders of close NATO allies.

When UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed initial reluctance at letting the US fly planes from British bases in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean (though he did subsequently allow Diego Garcia to be used as a launch pad from which planes could target Iranian missile sites), Trump rounded on him, saying that he was “not Winston Churchill.” Now, it is certainly true that, for many reasons, Starmer is no Churchill—not least that Churchill was far better at standing up to bullies and hoodlums such as Trump than Starmer has been ; but that is a judgment call for the British people to make, not for the American president to impose via social-media postings.

When the Spanish refused to authorize use of their bases in the “defensive operation” efforts, Trump made the extraordinary announcement that he would cut off all trade between the US and Spain—leading European Union officials and leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron to note that since the members of the EU operate in tandem on trade issues, Trump couldn’t target Spanish goods without targeting the entire trading bloc.

To reiterate: The Supreme Court has recently ruled that Trump can’t capriciously impose tariffs against countries and industries simply out of spite; yet now, barely a week later, in a fit of political pique, America’s faux-Mussolini is claiming the right to economically blockade a NATO ally.

None of this is how democracies do business, or go to war, or treat immigrants—but, in its capriciousness and its brutality, in its arrogation of power outside of constitutional limits and democratic constraints, it is exactly how countries falling to strongman governance go about interacting with the rest of the world.

Back at Otay Mesa, the protesters have seen through Trump’s snarling-at-everyone act. Each Sunday since November, dozens of people have shown up to bear witness. They drive in to sing protest songs, shout out, through their bullhorns, messages of encouragement to inmates, and chalk notes of resistance on the sidewalk. “Love the foreigner for you yourselves were once foreigners—Deut: 10.19,” is one such missive. Another is simply “Hands off our neighbors!”

The term “neoliberal architecture” has come to encompass a number of different developments over the last four decades, from the glittering, anonymous office towers of the financialized economy to the touristified “smooth” city of endless convenience and passive surveillance best viewed through a phone camera, or from the back of an Uber. But when I learned in November that the architect Robert A.M. Stern—one of postmodernism’s last living holdouts—had passed away at 86, I couldn’t help but redirect my gaze toward the original neoliberal architecture. It is impolite to speak ill of the dead, but the times in which the dead were living and working are fair game. The architecture of Stern’s generation, which reached its zenith in the 1980s and ’90s was, despite its fun colors and cartoonish irony, one whose clientele consisted largely of the elite and the institutions that fostered their rise to power. In this, Stern participated more happily than perhaps any of his peers.

Stern was conservative—one could even say a neoconservative. This was true both architecturally and politically, though he tended to launder his politics and keep them close to his chest. Born in 1939 to a middle-class family, and graduating with an MArch from Yale in 1965, he got his start designing Manhattan penthouses and summer houses for the well-heeled along the windswept coasts of New England. The coastal homes were often informed by the shingled vernacular of the late 19th and early 20th century so beloved of his peers like Robert Venturi and Charles Moore. (Stern would later spin off a house-building office from his firm RAMSA, devoted solely to the replication of actual historical houses.) This clientele, and the project of neo-historical architecture, would typify his work for the rest of his life. The apogee of this mode of working is one of his last but most famous buildings, 15 Central Park West, which towers over the eponymous park in imitation of the great prewar apartment buildings replete with stately masonry and patient doormen.

Stern’s early work in the 1970s fell neatly into the emergent style known as postmodernism, which rejected the stark, unornamented forms of modern architecture as well as the directive, so precious to the prior generation, to directly shape the way we live by shaping architecture. The form-follows-function ethos that had propelled architecture forward for almost 80 years had gradually become entangled in mixed modes of expression, and previously bare technical elements—such as staircases and mechanical systems—became covertly ornamental ones. The answer to this dilemma was to disregard functionalism altogether and return to the languages of the past, which the postmodernists revived through pastiche and often ironic forms. In Stern’s 1974 Lang Residence in Connecticut, for example, a stucco, macaroni-colored box on a rolling green hill is punctured by six windows like the front of a die, each of which is framed by molding plucked from a baseboard and glued on the facade. The house flaunts the languages of the time: pastiche, irony, and the play of history and new materials.

From the ’70s onward, the interrogative quality of postmodernism, including its celebration of the vernacular, from the Las Vegas strip to the suburban house, faded while its historical gestures gradually grew cartoonified. This development would only accelerate in the 1990s when nearly all postmodern architects, including Stern, became deeply entangled with the ersatz worlds of the Walt Disney Company. Stern’s architectural ethos is on full display in a 1986 special he did with PBS called Pride of Place (which was sponsored by Mobil). The show, which also involved a companion book, is a star-spangled overview of American architecture from the Shakers to the mall. It’s not necessarily a bad overview of the subject, but like all genuinely patriotic works, it’s not without revanchism. Stern accepted unquestioningly a version of history in which the United States is always a benevolent actor. He believed wholeheartedly in the American project and all of its attendant kitsch, which is evident in everything from his Norman Rockwell Museum (inspired by the Greek Revival but featuring a bizarre floating pediment on the front) to his preoccupation with theme parks. In his Pride of Place tie-in book, he writes,

As resorts seem to free their patrons from the constraining conventions of the workaday world, so does their design free their architects. Just as one can see normally button-down men and women reveal their every physical and psychological nuance during a summer afternoon at the beach, one can see national architectural preferences, free at last from so many economic and societal constraints, intensely expressed in resort architecture.

This last line really reveals his vision of American architecture: an apolitical playground in which the architect, working in a distinctly national tradition, could be “set free.” His work for Disney—at its most Mousified in the animation studio building capped with the hat from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and at its most twee in the BoardWalk resort complex, a 1:1 replica of a shingled, late-19th-century hotel—best showcases this fantasy. Architecture as entertainment, architecture as sign, architecture as theme and playground for the leisure class (with the city itself soon to follow suit). These ideas, as innocuous as they may seem on their face, are in part responsible for the way we now view the built environment as a site of consumption.

Stern’s generation yearned to remake America in the misremembered image of the soda fountain and the pre-integration small town. A new generation raised on the Mouse but bereft of both property and hope produces AI-slop shadows of the same fantasies.

However, the most quintessentially neoliberal thing about Stern was his willingness to work with the (literal) architects of neoliberalism. There was not a single college business school—so often historicized in neo-Georgian colonnaded brick—he refused to lend his name to. When the time came to hire an architect for the George W. Bush Presidential Center, there was only one man for the job. These and the Disney buildings are perhaps the most public-facing of Stern’s work. What is a resort but an imaginary and commodified commons? It is one of postmodern architecture’s great ironies that Stern and his contemporaries were so invested in the revival of small-town urbanism in the form of planned communities like Seaside, Florida, and its Disney-owned sister, Celebration, but, in an overcorrection to modernism, remained singularly uninterested in true public space and in true public commodities, especially mass housing.

Stern’s unrepentantly elitist projects ran the gamut from top universities to some of the most expensive residential properties in Manhattan. He believed in the architect as celebrity and brought those values to the previously rather straight-and-narrow architecture program at Yale, where he served as dean from 1998 to 2016. A very successful protégé of his recently regaled me with tales of Stern pioneering the after-lecture cocktail hour, and how he often sent students back to Yale from Manhattan in limousines.

But the man also represented a time, now in the rearview mirror, when the wealthy were tastemakers, when they helped curate rather than just rule the world. Today, the architect has never been less relevant in elite culture. Since we are unfortunately stuck with elite culture, this is for the worse. Increasingly replaced by the custom builder, the architect has lost her grip even on the production of architectural culture. Gone is the heyday of Rizzoli coffee table books and Architectural Digest. Celebrities now stream from their McMansion basements and hole up in cruise-ship-like fortresses crammed into the Hollywood Hills. In an age of academic austerity, his deanship at Yale also feels like a relic of the distant past. Stern, for all his conservatism, was often a fun architect, especially in his early work and his interiors. But it’s never been more clear that the fun is over. The world he helped make will never make another one of him.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson never stopped campaigning. Even in the last years of his life, when he was suffering from the progressive neurological disorder that slowed his steps and his speech before his death on February 17, at age 84, the reverend kept calling his Rainbow PUSH Coalition together for one more mission, one more crusade for justice. He did so with an urgency that belied his condition and drew old allies and young protégés into fights that were righteous and necessary and, frequently, prescient.

Such was the case in January of 2024, at a point when few political figures were prepared to call out the Israeli assault on Gaza that has now claimed more than 75,000 Palestinian lives and has been identified as a genocide by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Association of Genocide Scholars. In the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israeli kibbutzim and a music festival, there was a tentativeness to the discourse about how to break the cycle of violence. Yet here was Jesse Jackson, on a frigid morning after a winter storm swept through Chicago, pulling together Muslims, Christians, and Jews, grassroots activists and faith leaders, scholars and members of Congress, to pursue “immediate action to bring an end to the crisis,” preaching about the need to “build upon the historical legacy and current global movements for peace, justice, and liberation.”

His voice may have been halting, but it still rang out with moral clarity, as it had for the better part of 70 years, from the days when Jackson was an essential aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to when this son of South Carolina built street-level movements to tackle poverty and corruption in his adopted city of Chicago, began to travel the world as a strikingly successful citizen-diplomat, and, eventually, ran twice for the presidency as the leader of a multiracial, multiethnic “rainbow” insurgency that would forever transform the Democratic Party—clearing the way for the candidacies of Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and so many others who were inspired by his courage.

The Nation was one of the few publications that endorsed Jackson’s 1988 campaign, embracing his offer of “hope against cynicism, power against prejudice and solidarity against division.”

“The Jackson campaign is not a single shot at higher office by an already elevated politician,” the editors wrote. “Rather, it is a continuing, expanding, open-ended project to organize a movement for the political empowerment of all those who participate.”

The reverend appreciated that description of his campaign as more than just a candidacy, even if the Democratic Party struggled to wrap its head around the concept. After he delivered one of the greatest addresses in the history of American politics at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Jackson’s formal bids for the presidency were done. Yet as his longtime aide Robert Borosage observes, “His greatest legacy is that the mission, strategy, message, and agenda of those [1984 and 1988] campaigns remain directly relevant four decades later.”

That didn’t just happen. Jackson kept that vision relevant by mounting new campaigns—not for high office, but for higher ideals. To a greater extent than even his friend and longtime supporter Bernie Sanders, Jackson leveraged the status he’d earned as a contender for the presidency to champion causes on which presidents (and most candidates for the job) were unwilling to spend their political capital. He raced across the country at a moment’s notice to join union picket lines, stood with farmers to save their homesteads, and rallied with Black Americans who knew the civil-rights struggle was unfinished, with women seeking gender equity, with LGBTQ+ couples who wanted to marry, with peace advocates in the far and forgotten corners of the world, and with Palestinians who sought a homeland.

When Jesse Jackson looked at America—and at the world—he saw a gorgeous mosaic of humanity. He wanted the rest of us to see it as well. So he kept campaigning for the day when the storms of cynicism, prejudice, and division would begin to pass, and we might all recognize the promise and the power of the Rainbow.

No one knows how many people were killed in Syria during the civil war. Local human rights organizations estimate that, by mid-2013, more than one hundred thousand people died, a figure that is almost certainly a gross undercount. Most of the dead were likely civilians, the vast majority killed by the Assad regime and its allies. The killing was targeted and systematic, a government policy designed to quell the rebellion.

This slaughter came in three forms. There was the house-to-house variety, the hulking men in bandoliers burning people alive, raping women—of which there exist many recorded instances, like Monk Farm in 2013, spanning multiple provinces. Such massacres require boots on the ground, though, which proved a challenge for the regime when swathes of the country fell under rebel control. So the second variety of killing came from bombers and helicopters; in some corners of Syria, bombing raids became so common-place that locals, upon overcoming the shock that their own government was dropping explosives on them, cobbled together an early-warning system for approaching aircraft by stationing spotters near air bases.

The third mode of death occurred in the dozens of detention centers strung across the country, some no larger than a few cells, others housed in sprawling military compounds. We know something of the inner workings of such repression due to regime defectors, who smuggled tens of thousands of government documents out of Syria. These files, which include communiqués between branches of the security services, detail a govern-ment policy, drawn up in 2011, to crush the protests by targeting categories of people, such as demonstration organizers and those who “tarnish the image of Syria in the foreign media.”

It’s unclear how many people passed through this gulag archipelago, though some estimates suggest over one hundred thousand. In the early days, most detainees were released after confessing under torture, but as the rebellion spread, the torture grew more sadistic, and growing numbers of prisoners never returned home.

The regime catalogued these deaths, photographing the corpses, presumably so jailers could report their progress to superiors. In August 2013, an employee at Military Hospital 601 in Damascus, code-named Caesar, stuffed into his socks flash drives containing nearly fifty thousand images of bodies and fled the country. Caesar’s photos provide the clearest evidence of the charnel house that was the Syrian prison system: naked corpses, faces battered beyond recognition, eyes gouged. The victims showed signs of severe malnutrition, their skin furrowed at the rib cage, limbs like twigs. They lay with an alien grimace, in the ghastly repose of the dead of a concentration camp.

For many Syrians, the scale of the horror unfolding in their country, orchestrated by such cold bureaucratic machinery, conjured one word: genocide. Yet according to the Genocide Convention of 1948, that word refers to the “intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Under these terms, the slaughter in Syria cannot be classed as a genocide; while many of the dead were Sunni Muslims, the government was clearly targeting anyone who opposed it, regardless of religion. To muddy things further, you could find Sunni Muslims in the regime’s army and among Assad’s supporters. But if the Syrian government’s campaign of mass slaughter was not, legally speaking, a genocide, that may tell us more about our Western moral categories than it does about the devastation in Syria.

The concept of genocide arose following the horrors of World War II—it provides a moral compass of sorts, a standard against which we judge right and wrong. We see genocide as the “crime of crimes,” the greatest possible injustice humans can inflict upon each other. Genocide is, for the secular West, the hallmark of “evil.” What makes genocide evil? Industrial-scale slaughter is not enough; recent history is filled with grisly examples—such as General Suharto’s mass killing of leftists in Indonesia—that do not rise to the conventional designation of genocide. Rather, what gives genocide its distinctive moral cast is that people are targeted merely for the ethnic or religious group to which they happen to belong. That is, people are targeted for something they did not choose, something they have no control over.

International law, then, does not consider the slaughter in Syria a genocide, because people were primarily targeted primarily for their political activity—something we normally understand as resulting from free choice. After all, no one forced protesters to organize against the dictatorship, eventually resulting in revolution. But putting it this way seems to miss something important about the human condition. What if engaging in political activity is an essential exercise of our humanity, and to obtain the things we need to live a good life, we have no choice but to be political?

We tend to associate politics with the undertakings of political parties, which has made politics something of a dirty word: think of the hollow pageantry, the dissimulation, the greased palms, the horse-trading, the crass maneuvers of special interests. Politics, in this conception, happens behind closed doors; it involves scheming over the heads of ordinary people. It’s no wonder that, given such a cynical kabuki, most of us want little to do with politics. The ancient Greeks, though, viewed the matter quite differently. Because we live in community with others, we can only obtain the things we desire through others. If we are powerful or wealthy, we can simply command others to do our bidding. But if we aren’t, then we must coordinate, cooperate, cajole, and com-promise with others. So politics, for the ancient Greeks, is the art of forming alliances to obtain the goods of collective life. It’s what happens when neighbors organize a community garden, when parents band together to contest a school board election, when workers strike for better wages. Aristotle wrote, “The man who is isolated—who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient…must be either a beast or a god.” From this, he concluded that the human “is by nature a political animal.” He means that we cannot achieve our aims alone, that we must act collectively—and when we are inhibited from doing so, we have lost an essential part of our humanity.

There are many ways to stifle our political nature: dictatorial repression; legal and institutional barriers to political participation; poverty and precarity. And that—Syrians’ political nature—is precisely what the Assad regime sought to eradicate. It was a campaign of extermination as total, as apocalyptic, as any genocide. Yassin al-Haj Saleh, an activist who was imprisoned by the regime for many years, calls such slaughter “politicide.” Whatever the term, the glaring truth is that the Syrian regime was indeed orchestrating the “crime of crimes.”

Under dictatorship—what the Greeks called tyranny—laws and institutions make it impossible for ordinary people to form alliances to obtain collective goods. Manbij, a city in Northern Syria, suffered forty years of dictatorship, during which time free associational activity was banned; there was no political party or professional association or labor union or religious institute or media organization or football team or chess club that was not controlled by the regime. Yet when the people of Manbij overthrew the government in 2012 for eighteen months, independent councils and assemblies and newspapers and charities and unions appeared overnight. They did so because people felt compelled to secure the goods crucial to life, like free information and clean streets and fresh bread, and could only do so by allying with each other. In other words, the people of Manbij started doing politics. They felt they had no choice but to do politics, because that’s what the situation demanded. No one taught them to be political. There were no international NGOs conducting trainings, no instruction manuals, no political theorists offering guidance. They engaged in politics simply because that is what people, given the opportunity, will do. What the revolution shows, in a striking confirmation of Aristotle’s thesis, is that people are political animals—that when the fetters are removed, their political natures will flourish.

That an activity is natural, though, does not mean it comes easily. We naturally walk and talk, but it takes years to master these skills. Likewise, the people of Syria were learning, in the most adverse of circumstances, how to be political: how to debate, how to listen, when to protest, when to abstain. Eventually, after years of tribulations, Syrians finally succeeded in overthrowing Assad for good. The country’s new leaders, a hardline rebel group, have their own authoritarian tendencies. There will be new woes, unforeseen inequities, fresh abuses–but people will still organize and resist, not because they are radicals or ideologues, but simply because it is who they are.

Finally, justice for little Cricket. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who boasted in her 2024 book that she shot her 14-month-old puppy for misbehaving, became the first Trump cabinet secretary fired in his second administration. She was quickly replaced by almost-certain-to-be-just-as-bad Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, but we can afford to enjoy a few rare moments of happiness over Noem’s downfall.

It’s unlikely Cricket factored into Trump’s decision today—it was probably the cumulative effect of Noem’s two-day humiliation by Congress, plus the way she botched Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis and forced the administration to at least draw down if not remove her henchmen. But Cricket got a moment of vindication Tuesday when retiring North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis, a known dog lover, loudly berated the DHS secretary for cruelly shooting her puppy, whom she hadn’t adequately trained, and then citing it as an example of her leadership steeliness in her book.

Now, Tillis could have learned about the Cricket murder before voting to confirm the plainly unqualified Noem last year. But his anger on Tuesday reflected what he’d come to realize: Noem cited that as strong leadership, and it was the same leadership and terrible judgment that led her to falsely defend the murders of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti as a strike against “domestic terrorism,” and to allow her agents to detain legal immigrants, and even some US citizens.

“You decided to kill that dog because you had not invested the appropriate time in training,” Tillis told Noem. “And then you have the audacity to go into a book and say it’s a leadership lesson about tough choices?

“But my point is, those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment—not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis,” he continued. “We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership, and you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”

Even I hadn’t made the connection between her Cricket cruelty and her cavalier approach to human suffering as DHS secretary—and I wrote about Cricket’s murder when her book came out.

Tillis wasn’t the only Republican visibly incensed by Noem’s corrupt leadership. Louisiana Senator John Kennedy was likewise irritated by her slandering Good and Pretti in early remarks. Kennedy was also angered by reports that she had funneled a $220 million ad campaign, designed to boost Noem’s sexy cowgirl image, to a company run by one of her former top aides. Apparently, Trump was angry when she said multiple times that the president had approved the contract; he told Kennedy and others he’d known nothing about it.

Noem also faced questions about her hiding-in-plain-sight affair with her chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, and the couple’s using a luxury jet with a fancy hot-sheets queen-sized bed for their travel. Noem, who is married, didn’t quite deny the rumors about her also married chief of staff, but she chided Democratic Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-CA) for asking her if she “had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski.” She replied, “I am shocked we’re going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee.” But Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz pressed her. “I really think you need to say the word ‘no’ into the record so that you can clear that up,” Moskowitz said.

Noem replied, “I think the ridiculousness of this and the tabloids that you are quoting and referencing are insane,” and then added, “This has been something that I’ve refuted for years, and I continue to do that,” she added. Nobody seemed convinced. (On MSNOW Thursday, after Noem’s firing, Moskowitz sported a “JUSTICE FOR CRICKET” button; how can I get one?)

But Trump didn’t fire her over an affair, of course. Her job has been hanging by a thread since he banished her Customs and Border Patrol “commander at large,” Greg Bovino, he of the Nazi greatcoat and penchant for tear-gassing innocent protesters himself, and replacing him with “border czar” Tom Homan. Homan is no bleeding heart, but he did curtail the worst of the Minneapolis violence and quickly announced an agent drawdown (which is still not complete).

Even so, the about-face on Operation Metro Surge was the first defeat for Trump in the 14 months of his second term, and has provided a model for other communities to resist federal cruelty. (Credit where it’s due: Minneapolis learned a lot from activists in Chicago and Los Angeles, in Portland, Oregon and Lewiston, Maine. Minnesotans have been training national activists on the lessons of their crusade for the last week, at the awful Whipple detention center.)

But between the televised murders of two innocent American citizens and the cruelty of agents captured on video daily, the operation was a black eye for an administration that values optics above all. Trump doesn’t mind tough-guy optics, but he does mind incompetence. Endless videos of hapless ICE agents slipping and falling on Minneapolis’s famously icy midwinter streets, or giving up and letting detainees go (there wasn’t enough of that, but there was some), gave a Keystone Kops feel to what was in fact a brutal community assault that no one should minimize.

Things won’t get reliably better until the Santa Monica sadist, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, joins Noem in the unemployment line. (Actually, Trump gave her some kind of Nazified new title, “Envoy for The Shield of the Americas,” to lead “our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere.”) But it feels good to see someone in this administration pay a price for cruelty and incompetence. I wonder if her “Shield” job comes with the use of the luxury jet, and a sinecure for Lewandowski.

I have been a critic of the World Cup for over two decades. Reading books like Andrew Jennings’s Foul!: The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals and my own investigative journalism on the ground in South Africa in 2010 and Brazil in 2014 convinced me that soccer’s governing body, FIFA, is not only an utterly corrupt and immoral entity but even a supporter of dictators and bulwark against democracy. (Since those days, under the leadership of Gianni Infantino, it has devolved even further into a corroded husk led by authoritarian-worshiping gnomes.)

The three main outcomes for countries hosting the World Cup, as I saw time and again, was debt, displacement, and the militarization of public space. The main differences—whether we were talking about Durban or Rio—were the languages used to dissemble and explain the ensuing corruption scandals. And yet, despite all of this, there was also a fourth component: joy. The people of these countries were generous and enthusiastic hosts. Bars turned into fiestas. Fiestas turned into bacchanalias. And bacchanalias became hyper-focused watch parties, as everyone snapped from revelry to riveted attention on the most popular sport on Earth.

We are now 100 days out until the United States—along with Canada and Mexico—hosts the World Cup. In the US, we are certainly getting the financial chaos, the fears of displacement (which the unhoused people of past host cities can attest to), and the hyper-militarization. Plus, this World Cup could end up being an ICE feeding frenzy on attendees both foreign and domestic. But beyond these issues, it is also the first World Cup in my memory devoid of eager anticipation and joy.

The 2026 World Cup has, so far, been cloaked in a grim haze. First, with the United States and Israel launching a war against the people of Iran, the “FIFA peace prize” that Trump’s pathetic quisling Infantino bestowed on our decrepit president last year has moved from a pathetic suck-up to a horrific irony.

Iran’s soccer team was set to play in two group-stage games in Los Angeles and Seattle for this year’s cup. Now they will almost certainly forfeit their matches. “What is certain is that after this attack, we cannot be expected to look forward to the World Cup with hope,” said Iran’s top soccer official, Mehdi Taj, after the bombings began last weekend. If Iran’s team were forced to withdraw from the tournament, it would become the first in 75 years to do so, willingly or otherwise.

Trump, for his part, scoffed at the thought of Iran’s missing the World Cup. “I really don’t care,” Trump told Politico. “I think Iran is a badly defeated country. They’re running on fumes.”

Then there is ICE. The administration’s murdering shock troops are official parts of the security apparatus for the Cup, raising safety fears for fans. Countries are issuing travel advisories about coming to the United States for the events. International tourism has been hampered, now that enjoying the global game comes with a risk of ending up indefinitely detained in an airport hangar jail or being accidentally placed in a secret prison in El Salvador, which undercuts a key economic argument for hosting the World Cup in the first place. Nevertheless, the administration has refused to rule out that ICE operations will be in full effect. This World Cup could end up being an ICE feeding frenzy on attendees both foreign and domestic.

And of course there are the games scheduled for Mexico, which is currently facing down another surge of drug-related violence following the military assassination of a cartel boss in Jalisco. Guadalajara, Jalisco’s capital, is set to host four matches. Top-flight soccer matches have already been canceled because of the recent spasms of violence. ESPN has veered from its “no-politics rule,” asking if matches are being suspended, “could FIFA World Cup games follow?” While President Claudia Sheinbaum is insisting there is no risk for fans coming to the tournament, people are inevitably going to be cautious—that’s not something she or anyone can guarantee.

But it’s not just the war on Iran or the cartel wars that are disfiguring this year’s World Cup. Usually, host cities hold World Cup “fan fests.” These are ways for people who cannot afford tickets to watch the games on big outdoor screens, hang out with thousands of other soccer lovers, and experience the general vibe. This year, all the US fan fests, which were to be held in six cities, have been slimmed down or outright canceled. Cities aren’t getting the federal funds needed to put them on, which the GOP is blaming on holdups of Homeland Security money. Most notoriously, the New York/New Jersey “fan fests” broke with tradition and sold tickets to what was supposed to be and has always been a free event—only to cancel it outright.

When I think of the “fan fests” in Rio, which were just as fun—sometimes more fun—than the matches themselves, the ticketed-then-canceled New York/New Jersey event looks like an apt symbol for how joyless this country has become under the authoritarian eye of the current regime and how pitiable this World Cup will likely be. Only these people could squeeze every bit of fun out of the Cup.

Still, it’s fitting for a country being ruled by chaos and fear. Not even soccer is immune from Trump’s reverse Midas touch. FIFA is just reaping what it has sown.

Power is felt, attributed, invisible, all-important, descriptive, without shape, and so much more. There is personal power, governmental power, and the collective power of the people. Power can be bought, sold, traded, bestowed, even rescinded. It can be good or bad, positive or corrupt. However you might wish to describe power, one thing is clear: how it’s used depends on the society in which we live.

At present, of course, our society is one in which President Donald J. Trump is the quintessential seeker of power, a man who needs power the way most of us need food. And as it happens, he has at his beck and call not just the entire military establishment, but ICE (and so much more). With him in the White House, power is distinctly in fashion.

Personal Power

Married and with children, my brother, who was a veteran, kept guns in his basement. “To hunt,” he told me when I objected. But he didn’t hunt, not in Nassau County where he lived, not by taking part in a sport that cost money he didn’t have to travel somewhere, get licenses, and who knows what else. Did he keep guns because he felt afraid? Absolutely not, he insisted. Was his neighborhood one with many break-ins? No, he assured me. So, why did he need weapons in his basement? He couldn’t say, except that it was important to him to own them.

Why? I kept asking him. As a soldier, he reminded me, he had been taught that without his gun he was in danger of being killed.

Had he been a man of means, that inculcation wouldn’t, I suspect, have been as powerful, but he wasn’t and never did feel empowered. He’s gone now, but his world isn’t. Guns remain as much a staple in the United States as potatoes.

Well-off families keep guns, too, hopefully in locked places and have the money to buy hunting rifles, licenses, and whatever other paraphernalia they need. But in the United States today, all too many guns—sometimes even untraceable “ghost guns”—aren’t locked in boxes but carried by young people on the streets and even sometimes into schools. The guns on the streets of inner cities, in rural areas, and even in some suburbs are all too often unlicensed stolen ones. And a desire/need to be seen/known/heard all too often leads to someone shooting others with one of those weapons in a mall, movie theater, or school. Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in this country in 2023. Such shootings occur more often in the United States than in any other nation. Why?

Under the Trump administration, when more is taken away from so many people than given to them, guns offer those who carry them a reprieve from a sense of powerlessness over their daily lives and futures. Many of them are young people alienated by a society that cares little about their well-being. With gun in hand, they experience steadiness, security, and yes, hope (however false it may prove to be).

With a weak social safety net, a gun offers a false sense of personal power and security. Should anyone come too close and aggravate the anger that may be boiling inside, however, that gun could go off. And who wouldn’t be angry? Too many young people in working-class families today are unsure where they might be headed and fear the dead-end jobs that they know lie in their future. The Trump administration, of course, offers such young people little or nothing—and if they weren’t born in the United States, they face the everyday menace of fear, degradation, and deportation. In America today, immigrants have become the scapegoats for such unvarnished racism that it takes one’s breath away. And don’t imagine that this is about so-called borders. Not a chance! Rather, it’s part of Donald Trump’s and his adviser Stephen Miller’s plan to rid the country of as many people of color as they can, with the end result, they hope, being white supremacy.

Though guns should be difficult (if not impossible) to obtain, like drugs, they are, in fact, available around more or less any corner in the most impoverished areas of any state. To stop the acquisition of guns, we would need more than enacted laws. We would also need to strengthen hope and offer a deeper belief in the daily safety of those who don’t for a moment feel taken care of in the most powerful country in the world.

And there’s no hiding from those in need how power is used to procure more and more money for the already wealthy, the Trumpian billionaires of our world.

Why should some, but not most of us, have an equal chance to do more than survive? For too many, their present and future safety becomes their personal problem, while Trump and crew are busily engaged in pursuing military and imperial power to gain yet more wealth for themselves and other billionaires, none of which enhances the power of the American people. And don’t forget that Donald Trump’s blatant racism is a vile infection that spreads daily from the Oval Office.

From Toy Guns to Machine Guns to Tanks

From toy guns to actual machine guns, the United States offers a constant example of how to express power through weaponry. There are the guns of war, the guns of intimidation, and the guns used against countries whose governments we choose to assault. Take Venezuela, where a recent US military sneak attack killed untold numbers of civilians and snatched its president to imprison him in the United States. That, I say, is one hell of a lot of nerve. The Trump administration certainly didn’t do that to make life better for the Venezuelan people, but to steal that country’s oil riches, which Trump plans to use for the benefit of US oil companies.

And with that in mind, let me head into the past for a moment. In 1968, when riots erupted in many communities to protest the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tanks first appeared on the streets of American inner cities—big, bulging, heavy vehicles, much like the ones being used in the Vietnam War that was then still raging.

That moment could, in fact, be seen as the public start of the militarization of this country’s police—the start but far from the end of it, which we see today, 77 years later, in many states like Minnesota. There, masked, gun-carrying (as in the old West) Border Patrol and federalized ICE agents have invaded, terrorizing and killing innocent civilians and pulling people out of their cars to deposit them in deportation camps. Such scenes increase not only the frustration and fear of so many Americans but also the desire to carry licensed (or unlicensed) guns to protect themselves.

ICE is the most recent incarnation of weaponization in this country, in which the agents themselves have become the weapons.

Such macho terrorizing actions as in Minnesota, Chicago, Los Angeles, and so many other places in this country, involving the rounding up of immigrants, are all too much like the 1930s Gestapo in Nazi Germany rounding up Jews. The use of such terror is not only sanctioned by the Trump government but also encouraged by racists like Miller. He is the quintessential representation of where this country is headed, if not stopped and stopped quickly.

In addition to guns, ICE agents carry other weapons of war: fire suppressers, lasers, accessory mounts, dump pouches, magazine wells—and they use drones. Pepper spray and other debilitating substances are also being used against those who protest the terror.

War is now being waged against Americans on the streets of our country, which is not only antithetical to all our laws but distinctly unconstitutional and, of course, immoral to the nth degree. Such weapons are perfected for one reason: to kill.

Unsurprisingly, ever more money is once again being spent on the Defense Department (now the Department of War), instead of on health, education, science, and so much else. And Donald Trump wants to spend far more. “Guns over butter” is an old meme, which we simply must not accept.

People Power

In Minnesota, ordinary people organized against the fascistic actions of ICE. Their resistance was not only brave but an important example of the ways in which the people have chosen the good over the actions and behaviors of a bad government, president, and the Stephen Millers of this world. As demonstrated in Minnesota, we Americans have refused to go quietly into ICE’s nightmare. We wouldn’t stand for such injustice and intuitively began organizing to meet the needs of our neighbors and those who are being treated horribly. Watch groups, food groups, school groups, even singing groups were organized by ordinary citizens, inspired by an innate sense of justice and an innate hatred of injustice.

The struggle of Americans during the siege of Minnesota has indeed had results. The Department of Homeland Security, Trump, Miller, and their cohorts have lost some credibility and perhaps some of their ability to frighten people into obedience. It’s more than unfortunate, however, that, in the process, children had to (and will continue to have to) experience the unjust power exhibited by ICE and Trump.

The use of guns will undoubtedly continue to be a staple of Donald Trump’s war of intimidation, clearly focused on developing a society where white supremacy rules. (See Project 2025.) His followers are laying the groundwork for the few to rule the many at the cost of our freedom.

The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov once wrote that if you introduce a gun in Act One, you should make sure to use it by the end of the play. In other words, unless stopped, what the Trump administration has been doing will only grow more brutal. Its attempt to militarize this country goes beyond the Department of War to other government departments like the Department of Homeland Security. Its plebeian belief that might is the only right (and only its right) is also its way of opening a road leading to an authoritarian government, where voting itself will undoubtedly become endangered.

We’re living through an exceptionally dark time where tyranny, lies, and encroaching fascism at home, and the rapidly accelerating destruction of our planet (again, with a distinct helping hand from President Trump) are happening in tandem. Our elected representatives have shown themselves to be spectacularly ill-prepared in the face of such threats.

But neither the president nor his government owns the people. We the people have power, too. There is power in knowledge, power in organizing, and power in resistance, all of which can be used to halt the brutality and lies of this administration. Moreover, the people have the numbers. If we wish not to be overtaken by an authoritarian government in whose hands so many more will suffer, then it’s important to resist now.

We the people know how to do that. We have done so throughout history. We have rallied and demonstrated. We have called on our neighbors, friends, and families. We have called on our local media. We have called on members of Congress. We have written letters and posted signs and billboards. We have sat in protest, walked in protest, and even gone to jail in protest. And we weren’t to be stopped. We made our voices heard across society. We appeared in thousands of towns and cities across America.

The history of this country has shown not once but many times that people together resisting and fighting for justice (without guns) can win. It was how Social Security was won, how child labor was ended, how the Vietnam War was made ever more difficult to pursue, and that’s just to start down a long list of examples. Recently, on MS Now, TV host and political analyst Lawrence O’Donnell said, “The protesters always win. It takes longer than it should and people die, but the protesters always win.”

History proves O’Donnell right.

Amini-brouhaha has erupted over whether the Democratic National Committee has buried a so-called “autopsy” report into Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 presidential election. There’s a fear that the report isn’t being released because it suggests that Harris’s defeat was due to her refusal to break with Joe Biden’s disastrous support for Israel’s sustained genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza. As a result, some groups are charging the DNC with a cover-up and demanding that the autopsy report be released.

I’ve been on the DNC for more than three decades. I served 16 years on the party’s executive committee and 11 as co-chair of its resolutions committee, and in 2016 I was appointed to serve on that year’s convention platform drafting committee. Finally, this past year, I was appointed by DNC chair Ken Martin to serve on a Middle East Working Group he created to help us sort out how our party deals with America’s policies in the Middle East.

I am no stranger to how the party handles—or, more accurately, avoids handling—issues involving Palestine/Israel. In 1988, I spoke from the Democratic National Convention podium in Atlanta to introduce Jesse Jackson’s platform plank calling for “mutual recognition, territorial compromise, and self-determination for both Israelis and Palestinians. For my efforts, I was asked to withdraw from the DNC, because “party leaders” were concerned that Republicans would use my membership and support for Palestine as an issue in the campaign. (I was reinstated in 1993). On eight occasions over the years, I testified that the party needed to acknowledge Palestinian rights. Having argued and lost this many times, I am well aware of the party establishment’s fear of addressing Palestine.

But I believe that the fight over this autopsy report is not where those of us who support Palestine, and who know that leading Democrats have been on the wrong side of this issue for far too long, should be focusing our energy.

I say this because any report on the Democrats and Gaza would only tell us what we already know: that voters, especially Democrats and independents, are fed up with blind support for Israeli policies, and that too many establishment Democrats and political consultants are blind to this reality. We have years of polling and election data to prove this. We don’t need another report to confirm it.

A wide range of polls have established just how extensive the erosion of US public support for Israel is. The most comprehensive recent survey about this was conducted by The Economist in August 2025. Here’s some of what they found:

• Forty-three percent of voters favor decreasing military aid to Israel, with only 13 percent wanting to see an increase in such aid. Among Democrats, the decrease/increase ratio is 58 percent to 4 percent. Among independents, it’s almost the same.

• Is Israel committing genocide? Forty-four percent of all voters say “yes” and 28 percent say “no.” Among Democrats, the ratio is 68 percent “yes” and just 8 percent “no.” And among independents, it’s  45 percent to 19 percent. 

Other polls show the same thing. Just last week, Gallup reported that, for the first time ever, more Americans say they sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. And voters are repeatedly affirming that they are more likely to support candidates who advance such positions and less likely to vote for those who defend Israeli policies and want to maintain current levels of military aid to Israel. 

As if to provide further evidence of this shift, with just months before the midterm elections, it’s striking to note that more than three dozen congressional candidates have already declared their intent to reject PAC contributions from AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups. This includes a number of sitting members of Congress, all of whom have previously been strong supporters of Israel and received millions of dollars from pro-Israel sources, including PACs and dark-money independent expenditures.

While these changes in attitudes toward Israel have been brewing for several years now, they were dramatically accelerated by Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza. While it is true that the horrors accompanying Hamas’s October 7 attack generated an initial flush of support for Israel, as the toll of Palestinian civilian casualties grew and the extent of Israel’s gratuitous mass devastation of Gaza became clear, support for Israel collapsed. 

This was clearly in evidence in the 2024 presidential contest. Post-election analyses showed that Vice President Kamala Harris lost the backing of a wide range of Democratic and independent voters because she refused to make a decisive break with President Biden’s support for Israel. Instead of listening to her own instincts and being more critical of Israeli practices and more vocal in support of Palestinian rights, she listened to the establishment political consultants who cautioned against “rocking the boat” on this “sensitive issue.”

The consultants, campaign operatives, and media analysts didn’t get the changes that were afoot then, and they still don’t get it now. They are still pretending that Israel’s genocidal war has not completely transformed US politics around the Middle East. But change is happening with or without them.

It used to be said that criticism of Israel was akin to touching the “third rail” in American politics—avoid it or get burned. In a way, it still is, but in reverse. Support for Israel was once the sine qua non for candidates for Congress. Polls now show that voters are less likely to vote for candidates who refuse to criticize Israel or who take money from pro-Israel PACs. 

As we get closer to the 2026 midterm elections, we can expect more candidates to publicly distance themselves from Israeli policies. We can also expect that pro-Israel groups will panic and up the ante by pouring tens of millions into defeating candidates who are critical of Israel. My sense is that this may backfire, as it did with the recent special House election in New Jersey, because in 2026, what will be controversial is support for Israeli policies and pro-Israel campaign contributions, not the opposite. The sooner the analysts, consultants, and media figure that out, the better our politics will be. 

The DNC autopsy should be released. But it’s more important that we work to deepen the change of the last few years. Our attention might better be focused on supporting candidates who are refusing to accept pro-Israel PAC contributions and running on platforms challenging the failed policies of the past. We should also join the growing number of Democratic National Committee members who are calling on the party to ban dark money in elections. This is an instance where looking forward, not backward, will help to bring the change we need—and take the party to where Democratic voters already are.

Texas has now been home to the most expensive general election Senate campaigns in history. Spending in 2018’s contest between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz was just over $100 million; Cruz’s battle with Colin Allred in 2024 topped $160 million. And now, it’s seen the most expensive Senate primary election in history, as the combined spending on advertising along among the major candidates this year soared to $125 million—and it’s not even over.

The primaries on Tuesday decided the Democratic candidate in that cash-swamped contest, state Senator James Talarico. At the moment, the Republicans are headed to a runoff between Attorney General Ken Paxton and incumbent John Cornyn. Talarico’s boyish charm and ability to practice Bible-verse judo with conservative Christians already helped him wrangle the tens of millions he needed to surge ahead of Representative Jasmine Crockett for his place on the November ballot. With a marquee race in the offing, no matter who wins the Republican berth, another record-setting race is guaranteed.

But after getting their hearts broken by Allred and twice by O’Rourke, whose losing race for governor in 2022 was just as pricey as his Senate run, liberals are justified in asking if they should not just spend elsewhere but also lower their expectations. Is the dream of a statewide Democratic win (elusive since 1994) as insubstantial as barbeque smoke, as full of bullshit as the King Ranch?

What if I told you Texas is as full of potential for Democrats as an Austin yard in early March? Whether it’s milk thistle weeds or Saint Augustine, there’s something growing there; it just needs to be tended. This week, after all, saw an even more important record than mere spending broken: turnout. More than 2 million Democrats voted in the primary, the most in a midterm primary since 1970 and only a little short of the votes cast in the primary for the 2008 presidential race. Based on those numbers, one Republican pollster has already predicted that Democrats will add 480,000 voters to their turnout in the fall, saying, “This is a code red alert for Texas Republicans.”

Now that Crockett has conceded to Talarico, the party is set to surge into the fall with the most favorable conditions possible: an electrified base, a battle-tested general election candidate with his former foe converted to an asset, and a Republican flame-throwing freakshow run-off sure to turn off all but the most steroid-pumped red-hat bros.

The national media magnified the flashes of bitterness that both parties’ races threw off. Paxton is a genuinely vile person who can be separated from trumpeting his achievements in oppression only by opportunities to commit more subtle offenses. He is very popular with the GOP base, however, and has eagerly exploited the thin slices of daylight between Cornyn and the far right. One Paxton ad featured an AI-generated video of the senator two-stepping with Crockett, a reference to the two acknowledging their work together on some bipartisan issues.

For his part, Cornyn (a traffic cone with cowboy boots) pointed to Paxton’s historically significant trail of known crimes and adultery. In 2023, Paxton became only the third sitting Texas official to be impeached by the state House, though he was acquitted by the Texas Senate on 16 charges, including ones related to a donor hiring Paxton’s mistress in order to curry favor with him. Paxton’s soon-to-be-ex wife, a state senator herself, was in the chamber for testimony. Thank God the flavorless Cornyn offloaded the juiciest attacks to a campaign aide—Ted Cruz’s former chief rat-fucker, Jeff Roe, who can really make this stuff sing in ads: “It’s voting time, so let’s cut through the bulls**t. Crooked Ken Paxton cheated on his wife. She’s divorcing him on biblical grounds, so now Paxton’s wrecking another home, sleeping around with a married mother of seven.”

Cornyn dropped over $44 million airing Real Housewives–level slime against Paxton, while Paxton tore into Cornyn as a incompetent fossil. Unless Trump makes good on his promise to endorse “soon” and the challenger acquiesces to the president’s demand that “the candidate that I don’t Endorse to immediately DROP OUT OF THE RACE,” there is plenty more of that to come.

Serious pundits largely focused on the sniping between Talarico and Crockett. And why not? They are both attractively tenacious, social-media-native politicians who set themselves up to battle over who could better make the case against Trump; that their spirits overflowed into friendly fire is to be expected. The ugliest moments had to do with accusations that Talarico used Crockett’s race as a proxy for electability.

Talarico has denied the explicit allegations. It is undeniable, however, that race played a factor in his win. It played into many possible latent motivations of voters, who could be either explicitly racist or just trying to vote strategically. Republicans did not make too much of a secret that they felt more confident in running against an outspoken Black woman.

Ironically, GOP fuckery may have helped inadvertently push the race toward Talarico. Most notably, FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s interest in forcing comedy and lifestyle shows to adhere to the “equal time” rule led to CBS shutting down Stephen Colbert’s interview with Talarico. In the 24 hours after Colbert publicized the interference and ran that interview on YouTube, Talarico raised $2.4 million.

Likewise, the Dallas County GOP’s commitment to screwing with election accessibility surely wound up redounding to Talarico’s benefit. Crockett was expected to do well in the area, which includes both her congressional district and the second-largest population of Black people in the state. But last year, the county Republican Party maneuvered to force residents to cast primary votes in their local precincts rather than anywhere in the county (which is the practice in almost every other county in the state).

On election day, polling places reported that between 50 and an astonishing 90 percent of voters had to be diverted from the station they originally reported to. This undoubtedly hurt Crockett’s totals; early in the day, analysts marked the low turnout as a sign that she might not pull through. A county judge okayed a move by both Crockett’s and Talarico’s campaigns to extend voting hours after the fiasco became obvious, only to be shut down after Paxton (wearing his attorney general hat) took the issue to a compliant Texas Supreme Court. Why would the GOP block a process that could give them the candidate they wanted? It’s clear that they weren’t thinking that far ahead—they were operating on the muscle memory of a state party dedicated to assuring that the act of voting seems as arduous and futile as possible.

Tuesday night saw an understandably skeptical Crockett imply that she would not concede and would sue to count the ballots cast after 7 pm. But after Talarico continued to run up margins around the state, Crockett’s concession came Wednesday morning, along with a promise to throw her energy into electing the party’s nominee.

She will be a gift to Talarico’s November campaign and to the rest of the state Democratic ticket. She was undoubtedly a near-equal partner in generating the excitement that led to the overwhelming presence of Democrats at the ballot box, especially among Black voters. Even with all the shenanigans pulled by the Dallas GOP, more Democrats voted in the county’s primary this week than in 2024, 2022, or 2020. That turnout doesn’t disappear when Crockett concedes. We have not seen the last of her, neither in this campaign or a campaign to come. Many would like to see her pop the smirk off Ted Cruz’s face come 2028.

Talarico’s margins, a disappointment for Crockett, are also part of the good news for Texas Democrats at large. He drew substantial victories in counties with the state’s highest shares of Latino voters, reversing the drift of Latinos toward Trump in 2024.

On Wednesday, Trump took some time away from ballroom designing and war planning to state that intent to step into the Texas fray: The primary, he bleated, “cannot, for the good of the Party, and our Country, itself, be allowed to go on any longer.” But his endorsement would not necessarily cheat Democrats out of the spectacular and expensive sideshow a Cornyn-Paxton runoff would otherwise provide. The Atlantic reported the rumor that the recipient of Trump’s thick-fingered love tap would be Cornyn.

The prospect of Trump’s rejecting the ebulliently vicious Paxton—a man who has positioned himself as Trump’s man in Texas for a decade—in favor of Cornyn and his slightly less obsequious support of the MAGA agenda is itself sublime. But feast on this: Trump would also be turning his back on the one man in the country as hungry to turn an election into a revenge tour as he was. Cornyn is a cardboard box filled with Senate leadership PAC money. Paxton is a feral raccoon with nothing to lose. He may not have as much cash on hand as Cornyn, but he has even fewer scruples and a history of bleeding opponents out over long campaigns.

What’s more, a Trump endorsement of Cornyn means that both Paxton and Cornyn own Trump, for better or for worse. Who has “worse” on their bingo card? I have “worse.”

Trump’s endorsing Paxton may be unlikely, but it could be the GOP’s best-case scenario. Cornyn might be willing to shuffle off stage rather than be humiliated by Texas’s crookedest rodeo clown, and that would at least save Republicans some money in the short term even if polls show that a Paxton-Talarico showdown gives Democrats the best shot at turning their 30 years of bad luck around. After all, “best shot” at this point only means they are just about tied.

To anyone who wants to see the Senate flip, the deadlock between the obvious goon and the fresh-faced former school teacher and seminary student feels like both a promise and a threat. After all, O’Rourke raised hopes sky-high; running against Cruz in 2024, Colin Allred seemed like the real deal. But if you’re cynical, you don’t understand Texas.

There is no one more resolute and optimistic than a modern Texas Democrat.

When I tell people who know my politics that I live in Texas, they sometimes say, “I’m sorry.”

I’m not.

There are reasons to leave, and if you’re reading this, you probably know them (abortion access, voting rights, guns, climate change…). If I had a trans child, I would try to move. But for most of us, leaving is neither an option (jobs, family, the housing market) nor that appealing. We have work to do. That work is paying off, too. This year, Democrats fielded a candidate in every state and federal race on the Texas ballot, the first time in modern history that either party has done so.

Imagine what it takes to run as a Democrat in a county that has elected Republicans by a margin of more than 80 percent for four cycles in a row. There are 20 of them. There are over 50 more where the margin is in the 70s. Imagine getting up every day, knowing you’re going to lose and then doing it anyway. Imagine that across the whole state.

Liberals outside the state and Republicans in it insist that leftists in Texas are the outliers—that we’re the ones who should leave or don’t belong. But we’re the ones who keep fighting even when the numbers say quit. We’re as Texan as it gets.

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

At just before 11 pm last Wednesday, the press release issued by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office advising the city’s media of the mayor’s plans for the following day was uncharacteristically brief: “Mayor Mamdani has no public events.” Although true, that statement was also intentionally misleading.

Wearing a dark hat and a mask to hide his face, the mayor boarded a flight to Washington, where—we now know—he met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. At their previous meeting, shortly after Mamdani’s election victory in November, the unexpectedly cordial rapport between the democratic socialist mayor and the MAGA president generated headlines around the world. During that introductory confab, Trump invited Mamdani to return “with ideas of big things” they could build together. At the top of Mamdani’s agenda last week was just such a proposal: that Trump provide federal aid to revive a long-shelved plan, developed during the de Blasio administration, to build 12,000 affordable apartments over the massive 180-acre Sunnyside Yard railroad junction and maintenance facility in Queens.

Catering—or, as some might say, pandering—to his audience, Mamdani came bearing the gift of two Daily News front pages: the famous (and genuine) “Ford to City: Drop Dead” from the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis and a (fake) mock-up bearing the heroic headline: “Trump to City: Let’s Build.” This actual specimen of fake news celebrated the president for backing a “new era of housing.” Thanks in part to the secrecy surrounding the meeting, and to Trump’s good-natured willingness to pose holding up both front pages behind the Resolute Desk, the photo commemorating the meeting soon went viral (the mayor’s tweet of the event garnered 28.5 million views).

The news that, during the meeting, Mamdani had also intervened on behalf of Columbia senior Ellie Aghayeva, who had been seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at her university-owned apartment earlier that morning, seemed designed to neutralize criticism of the mayor for cozying up to the president—especially when, in response to Mamdani’s urging, Aghayeva was released from custody by the end of the day.

Although the housing announcement was all smoke and mirrors—Trump didn’t actually commit a single dollar, and Queens elected officials reiterated many of the same concerns about displacement and affordability that put the project on hold in 2019—the whole episode seemed like just another example of what we might as well call the “Mamdani effect”: the ability to dominate a news cycle (and charm potential adversaries) through sheer force of personality.

That changed on Saturday morning, when New Yorkers woke to the news that their country was, once again, at war in the Middle East. The mayor’s immediate response was forthright. He condemned the initial strikes as “a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression.” Noting that the United States and Israel were already “bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war,” Mamdani declared, “Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change.”

But this time the mayor’s charm—and his ability to disarm his critics—seemed to have limits. Some Jews complained that while he spoke “directly to Iranian New Yorkers,” assuring them, “You will be safe here,” Mamdani offered no words of comfort to Israelis or others on the receiving end of Teheran’s missile barrages. An Iranian exile criticized the mayor’s failure to say anything about the repressive nature of the Islamic Republic. Nor did the conspicuous absence of any mention of Trump in Mamdani’s statement escape notice.

By Tuesday morning, the retrospective grumbling about Mamdani’s stunt in the Oval Office threatened to derail what was meant to be the triumphal rollout of the city’s new 2-K free childcare program in four neighborhoods. The announcement itself—a reprisal of the double act the mayor and Kathy Hochul had first debuted eight days into the new administration, when the governor committed two years’ worth of state funds for the program—went perfectly smoothly. Mamdani spoke with evident warmth of “our partner in this work…the first Mom governor of New York state,” while Hochul told the story of how she’d been forced to put her own career on hold when, at the age of 27, she found herself “having to stay home because I could not find childcare we could afford.”

While the first few queries from the press corps were focussed on funding—inevitably, Hochul was asked whether at some point “raising taxes on corporations and…the wealthy would be in the cards”—matters of war and peace soon dominated the proceedings.

“Mr. Mayor, do you think Iran is better off without the ayatollah?”

In his reply, Mamdani did his best to thread the needle, noting that he has “said before that the Iranian government has engaged in systematic repression of its own people…. It is a brutal government,” while also pointing out that he is “old enough to remember the devastating consequences for our country pursuing a war with the intent of regime change in that very same region not that many years ago.”

None of the remaining questions were about childcare. Instead, the reporters asked whether he had anything in particular to say to Jewish New Yorkers or Iranian dissidents, pressed him on his use of the Signal messaging app, wondered if he’d spoken again with Trump since his White House visit, requested updates on the status of his application for a security clearance, and solicited his response to WABC radio host Sid Rosenberg describing him as a “Radical Islam cockroach.”

Describing the slur as “painfully familiar,” Mamdani countered Rosenberg’s bigotry in remarks that are worth watching in their entirety—both for their dignity and for the mayor’s moving defense of his faith and his determination to lead “a city where every single New Yorker who lives here can call it his home.”

But if that eloquence represented Mamdani’s best face, the same can’t be said of his sycophantic courting of the president. The mayor who was shrewd enough to appoint Ana Maria Archila, former codirector of the Working Families Party, as commissioner of international affairs must know that diplomacy is as important to this city’s identity as food carts or taxicabs. The candidate who was confident enough to break the mold by not promising to visit Israel—or Italy, or Ireland—as mayor should realize that while clever media stunts might win the news cycle, succeeding in office will require other, more demanding qualities. As another famously charming American, Benjamin Franklin, once observed: “He that lies down with Dogs, shall rise up with fleas.”

Perhaps next time the mayor feels that particular itch coming on, he’ll resist the urge to scratch.

War makes climate change worse in many ways, and vice versa. The human costs of the US-Israel attack on Iran—the hundreds of people who have died, including a reported 175 young girls and teachers killed at the Shajareh Tayyibeh primary school—are a tragedy. The mounting economic risks—disrupted supply chains, rising energy prices, shaken stock markets—are ominous. The danger that this war of choice launched by two nuclear-armed states will escalate further, drawing in powers across the region and beyond, is alarming. And threaded through each of these concerns is the fact that modern warfare is inextricably linked with climate change.

The linkages flow in both directions. Wars unleash gargantuan amounts of planet-warming emissions: Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example, has generated emissions equal to the annual emissions of France. Those extra emissions drive deadlier heat, drought, storms, and other impacts that wreck livelihoods, destabilize economies, and spur migration, making armed conflict more likely. The British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 warned in January that climate disruption and biodiversity loss, if left unchecked, will cause “crop failures, intensified natural disasters, and infectious disease outbreaks…exacerbating existing conflicts, starting new ones, and threatening global security and prosperity.”

The outbreak of any war is bad news for the climate, just as the election of politicians hostile to climate action is. The climate implications of this new war are not the center of attention at the moment, but they are essential context for understanding what’s at stake. At a time when civilization is hurtling toward irreversible climate breakdown, to overlook the climate consequences of three of the deadliest militaries on Earth going to war would be journalistic malpractice.

Yet war has the perverse effect of pushing the climate story down the news agenda. The news media is event-driven, prioritizing breaking developments and immediate threats. And wars generate powerful images and dramatic narratives, which stoke the public appetite for news (at least in a war’s initial stages). Climate change, by contrast, typically unfolds over longer timescales. Except during acute disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, the climate story tends to lack the urgency that garners headlines and boosts audience interest.

Is this a war for oil? The fact that Iran possesses the third-largest oil reserves on Earth inevitably raises the question, as does the long history of US-Iranian conflict over those reserves, including the CIA’s overthrowing a democratically elected leader who sought to nationalize them. When the US attacked Venezuela in January, President Donald Trump openly said that he wanted to gain control of that country’s vast oil reserves. Now more reporting is needed to establish just how much of a factor oil was in the decision to attack Iran.

What’s beyond dispute is that this war could not be fought without oil. The aircraft carriers, jet planes, and the myriad support systems they require gobble immense quantities of fossil fuels. Which helps explain why the US Department of Defense is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases globally, as Neta Crawford, a professor at Oxford University, documents in her book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War. Taken together, the world’s militaries have a bigger annual carbon footprint than all but three of the world’s countries.

Given this war’s immense implications—for the climate emergency and so much else—the question of why it was launched in the first place demands scrutiny, especially in view of the wild shifts in the Trump administration’s stated rationales. Within 24 hours of the first strikes, The Washington Post cited four administration sources as saying that “US intelligence assessments saw no immediate threat” from Iran. Nevertheless, Trump opted to attack, the Post reported, “after a weeks-long lobbying effort” by Israel, which views Iran as a bitter enemy, and Saudi Arabia, Iran’s long-standing regional rival and fellow petro-state.

As with most wars, so with climate change: The poor and the innocent suffer most. Climate change is not peripheral but structurally embedded in modern warfare. Journalists cannot fully and fairly cover a war this carbon-intensive, destabilizing, and consequential if its climate dimensions are treated as optional add-ons rather than core fact.

In Sirāt, a band of ravers drive deep into the Moroccan desert searching for the next gathering where they can dance freely. A father and son impulsively join them on a search for a missing daughter, despite their limited resources and a vehicle unfit for the treacherous terrain. The last rave they all attended was broken up by soldiers enforcing a mandatory evacuation in response to news that war has gripped the world outside the desert. Later, as they’re listening to a radio broadcast, one raver asks another, “Is this the end of the world?” The other raver replies, like a cheeky punch line to a bad joke, “It’s been the end of the world for a long time.”

The speculative global conflict in Sirāt that writer-director Oliver Laxe alludes to in broad, elliptical terms stands in neat contrast with The Secret Agent’s granular depiction of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which endured from 1964 to 1985. From its opening scene—a shakedown of Armando Solimões (Wagner Moura) by local authorities at a rural gas station—Kleber Mendonça Filho immerses viewers in a world of casual corruption and clandestine violence endemic to authoritarian rule. Anyone who can be cheaply characterized as “left wing”—academics, scientists, and members of queer and minority communities—are routinely targeted by those in power. The year is 1977. For the film’s ensemble of political dissidents, many of whom are on the run under assumed names, it’s been the end of the world for a long time.

The Secret Agent and Sirāt are among the five films nominated in this year’s Best International Feature Film category, all of which confront state-backed oppression. It Was Just an Accident is about former Iranian political prisoners exacting vengeance against their onetime torturer. The Voice of Hind Rajab reenacts the cold-blooded killing of the 6-year-old eponymous Palestinian girl by the Israel Defense Forces. Even Sentimental Value, a bourgeois family drama about an absentee aging filmmaker and his two semi-estranged daughters, pivots on understanding the consequences of inherited trauma from a tortured Resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of Norway.

Living with or dying under tyranny pertains to each of the nominated films, yet The Secret Agent and Sirāt are primarily concerned with the texture of a fascist atmosphere. Differences in style and tone abound, but both films capture the psychology of knowing that one’s fragile world is on the brink of collapse but persevering anyway in spite of overwhelming despair. Neither Laxe nor Mendonça are interested in peddling pat bromides. They recognize the disquiet of our times, and the unsettling awareness that the worst is yet to come.

Paranoia is the dominant framework in The Secret Agent. A former professor, Armando returns to the city of Recife to visit his young son who has been living with his in-laws. He stays in an apartment complex that houses other political fugitives and works as “Marcelo” at the city’s identity card office where he tries to locate information about his late mother. Though he struggles to remain unnoticed in his former home city, he eventually learns from a Resistance fighter that he’s been targeted by hitmen and must flee the country.

Armando’s struggle to escape persecution makes up the main narrative in The Secret Agent, but Mendonça takes the long view of his subject’s political situation by meticulously reconstructing an environment rife with fascist tension. His recreation of the 1970s Brazil of his youth—Mendonça was 9 years old in 1977, the same age as Armando’s son—impresses on its own merits, but the hyper-specific period design isn’t just a means to an end. The director understands that reconciliation with a country’s history demands a complete picture of the past, warts and all, because it’s the only way to prepare for an uncertain future.

Mendonça’s bird’s-eye approach illustrates the sundry interconnected ways that the dictatorship’s insidious claws sink into society’s fabric, from government through private enterprise into the public sector. The hitmen after Armando, for instance, were hired by Henrique Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), a vindictive executive at Brazil’s major utilities company Eletrobras who holds a grudge against the academic and his university for using public funds to conduct scientific research on “electric autonomy” projects, such as an electric car. Ghirotti believes the cabal of communist sympathizers at public universities should have their funding criteria so radically changed that they’re forced to work for private industry instead. Recife’s corrupt cops—friendly with both “Marcelo” and the hitmen in an effort to play “both sides”—bribe a hospital employee to retrieve a severed leg found in a tiger shark that belongs to one of their victims. The newspapers, under the thumb of the cops, gin up a story of that same severed leg attacking gay cruisers in the dead of night to create a local frenzy that distracts from the authorities’ corruption and homophobic violence.

The coordinated, conspiratorial subjugation present in The Secret Agent isn’t on display in Sirāt, if only because Laxe focuses his eye on the people who have built communities outside of conventional society. Beginning with a group setting up an enormous speaker system, Sirāt opens with an extended desert rave sequence featuring a diverse selection of people gyrating to Kangding Ray’s pulsating score. Even before Laxe narrows on a group of five ravers—Bigui (Richard Bellamy), Stef (Stefania Gadda), Josh (Joshua Liam Henderson), Tonin (Tonin Janvier), and Jade (Jade Oukid)—who chart their own dangerous path away from watchful military eyes, he demonstrates the value of bodily freedom within a like-minded collective.

Generally, Laxe leaves the details about the world beyond the limits of the desert to implication. The brief glimpse of soldiers directing the evacuation of partygoers suggests a general restriction of movement waiting for everyone back in civilization. Radio broadcasts discuss war in the broadest of terms. Even before the ravers heads into no-man’s-land, resources are scarce and profiteers have jacked up prices for fuel. The characters in Sirāt actively choose to forgo social comforts in favor of the Moroccan desert, which Laxe turns into an alien planet, visually recalling David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The remote, unsettling landscape implicitly presents two distinct possiblities—the chance to restart society in a wide-open land or, more likely, the site of an anonymous graveyard.

Laxe cast nonprofessional actors for his main cast, some of whom have disabilities (a prosthetic leg, a missing arm) and visual scars, all of whom present as nonconformists. He never exploits these physical differences (no one comments upon or others them, for example) but instead implies why these people might desire connection beyond a love of music and drugs. Much like the refugee community in The Secret Agent who depend upon a sympathetic network of anti-fascists merely to survive, the ravers in Sirāt have learned the hard way that traditional social structures were never designed to save them. They must rely on themselves.

The middle-aged Luis (Sergi López) has no affiliation to the rave scene; he considers the music to be noise. His daughter, Mar, however, sought refuge on the dance floor. Laxe hardly conceals the reckless, doomed nature of Luis’s quest to find her (mar, Spanish for “sea,” can’t be found in the desert), but personal tragedies multiply after Luis’s son perishes in a freak accident after their van rolls backward off a cliff. Later, the group suffers further fatalities when they improvise a rave in a section of desert covered in mines.

Laxe successfully conceals these “explosive” twists until Sirāt’s second half; before then, the film assumes an observational approach to the opening rave and the warm chemistry amongst the ravers. Even at its most welcoming, however, Sirāt’s set of references reveal a harder edge. The visual legacy of the Mad Max films weighs heavily on Sirāt, with its emphasis on vehicles, the desert setting, and the ravers’ generally flamboyant costuming. The climactic sequence where Luis and the remaining ravers traverse a minefield harks back to William Friedkin’s Sorcerer.

Aside from the strong Abbas Kiarostami influence in his first feature, the quasi-documentary You All Are Captains featuring Moroccan school children, Laxe’s previous films haven’t signposted their influences. The Atlas Mountains–set western Mimosas and the Gallican character drama Fire Will Come owe minor debts to road film tropes and mid-century Werner Herzog films, but they primarily feel excavated from Laxe’s spiritual practice and nomadic personal life, which has taken him from Paris to Gallica to Barcelona to Morocco, where he lived for over a decade. Laxe builds upon that foundation in Sirāt’s milieu by foregrounding his love for New Hollywood cinema—mainly the existentialist wandering portraits like Easy Rider, Zabriskie Point, and Two-Lane Blacktop.

On the other hand, Mendonça, a former film journalist who grew up attending Recife movie theaters, has never concealed his voracious, populist cinephilia in his work. Urban thrillers and the works of Robert Altman and Brian De Palma linger over his first two features, Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, both ensemble-based neighborhood portraits set in Recife about deepening class anxiety. Meanwhile, Bacurau, his third feature, takes cues from John Carpenter films and 1960s and ’70s spaghetti westerns to chronicle the efforts of a fictional Brazilian town to repel a band of wealthy American tourists paying to hunt its impoverished inhabitants. Scenes of suspenseful action and gory violence neatly contrast with an anthropological view of the local culture, replete with psychedelic traditions and corrupt local politics.

However, Mendonça doesn’t express his love of cinema merely for navel-gazing. Similar to Laxe in Sirāt, he deploys it as a lens to explore his country’s history from the inside. It’s why Mendonça loves creating hangout films that often subordinate conflict, as much as they thrive on it. The Secret Agent is no exception: Mendonça revels in the luster of late-’70s Recife, filled with indelible characters who briefly convey their own rich interiority. His genre motifs give shape to his expansive design: the use of period-specific Paramorphic lenses, recurring references to Steven Spielberg’s Jaws as a source of mass fear and entertainment, the history of conspiracy thrillers that haunt the film’s furtive dealings and covert payphone usage. A surreal sequence involving the invented “hairy leg,” which feels ripped from a forgotten B-grade horror lick, makes the uncomfortable implications of its bigoted corrupt origins go down smoother.

“Idon’t want to be in a museum,” Laxe explained upon the release of his third film, Fire Will Come. “The world is ending. I want to serve people and the community and invite them into our caravan. We need to be reminded that cinema is high culture but also popular culture, of the people.” While neither The Secret Agent nor Sirāt would ever be mistaken for mainstream entertainment, they both offer enough commercial appeal to reach American audiences and Oscar voters alike. The Academy has a history of nominating safe, stodgy films across the board, but especially in the International Film category. This trend has slightly changed in recent years, at least partially due to American distributors’ providing better access to a wider swath of films within a more globalized world. Mendonça nomination has special significance considering his previous two narrative films were suspected of not being selected to be Brazil’s official submission to the Oscars because of a far-right political boycott of the left-wing director.

Neither The Secret Agent nor Sirāt shy away from aleatory chaos and its corresponding victims; in fact, their panic and volatility feel particularly attuned to our modern shell-shocked psychology. Armando doesn’t survive The Secret Agent (though his murder appears off-screen). He survives in archival recordings and newspaper clippings discovered by a graduate student conducting research. Meanwhile, the randomness of the deaths in Sirāt are compounded by the absence of aid and the speed with which they’re forced to adjust.

Both filmmakers understand helplessness, but neither indulge in hopelessness. Their characters still find ways to unify as a rebuke against a desolate, atomized world. The threat of governmental reprisal bonds the refugees in The Secret Agent, with Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), the elderly manager of the sanctuary and a former revolutionary in her own right, insisting her fellow fugitives raise a toast to “a better Brazil, with less mischief.” Laxe emphasizes the compassionate commingling of bodies as his ravers’ ranks shrink—the grief that initially paralyzes them also forces them to forge ahead, like Luis crossing the minefield in a straight line, a literal sirāt, the Arabic word referring to the thin bridge to paradise that sits atop the bowels of Hell. The bombs always hide in plain sight, both films suggest; the only thing to do is evade them or hope to survive their inevitable detonation.

When Steven Gray’s family first received their monthly EBT allowance, the trips to Costco were “life-saving.” Gray said that when he was growing up in South Brooklyn and struggling with food insecurity, running out of funds often meant scrambling to make money with their siblings to help their parents afford groceries. Later, as a financially independent undergraduate student, Gray applied for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program themselves. After being accepted, they were finally able to fill their own refrigerator. “SNAP is not only just food being put on the table,” said Gray, now a student at Columbia Law School. “It’s stability for the future.”

At midnight on October 1, as President Donald Trump’s administration fought to withhold funding for the nation’s largest anti-hunger program, the chaos and uncertainty around the program led Gray, one of the more than 3 million college students eligible for SNAP, uncertain of their next meal. “We shouldn’t be waving around SNAP benefits and other social benefits as political bargaining chips,” said Gray.

The temporary pause on SNAP benefits during the government shutdown only exacerbated the larger food insecurity crisis among college students, especially in New York City. In 2019, nearly 50 percent of students in the City University of New York system were reportedly food insecure. Food costs have risen more than 30 percent over the last decade. and more than 40 percent of families cannot afford the average median price of weekly groceries. Without reliable access to food, students have lower GPAs, worse mental health, and are less likely to get their degree.

In 2025, campuses needed extensive planning to keep students fed. In preparation for the government shutdown, Dee Dee Mozeleski said her pantry on the City College of New York’s campus started bulking up on food in August. Mozeleski, a former SNAP beneficiary and the senior vice president of the university, oversees Benny’s Food Pantry, which distributed more than 30,000 pounds of food last year. Without extra preparation, she said, the pantry would not have had the capacity to service the 12,000 visits it has had since August.

The organization’s funding comes from City Council funds, private donations, and long-standing community partnerships. Many of the pantry’s volunteers live in NYCHA housing, according to Mozeleski. While student organizations and activists at City College have tried to increase food drives on campus, Mozeleski says it’s been difficult, as some of their partners are funded by the USDA, which saw mass layoffs during the government shutdown. “The first thing you see,” said Mozeleski, “is a heightened sense of fear on campus.”

The new city administration offers fresh hopes of successfully confronting the food crisis among students. Mayor Zohran Mamdani has previously said that “the job of city government is not to tinker around the edges while one in four children across our city go hungry,” and a meeting between Trump Mamdani in November saw surprisingly positive discussions around affordability and desire to lower grocery prices.

Mamdani is no stranger to the hunger students face. As a State Assembly member, he advocated for, and helped pass, legislation that increased funding for public school students to get free meals. He famously also went on a 15-day hunger strike for taxicab drivers. During his campaign, Mamdani proposed the establishment of city-run grocery stores in each borough that would buy and sell products at wholesale prices. The initiative would cost an estimated $60 million and is supported by two-thirds of New York voters, though it’s unclear if the City Council will approve the proposal.

“Publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30 percent lower than conventional retail,” wrote Raj Patel and Errol Schweizer for Civil Eats. “If the private market cannot or will not deliver affordable, nutritious food to all its citizens—and it has proven that it won’t—then the public sector must.”

Dr. Celina Su, the author of Budget Justice: On Building Grassroots Politics and Solidarities and a member of Mamdani’s transition team, believes that a city-run grocery store is not as “far-fetched” as people believe, and that new ideas are also needed to serve New Yorkers and keep them engaged in the political process. “People will be more aware, they’ll be more excited. They can contribute their local knowledge to what might work and what won’t work,” she said. “Solidarity can help people to actually problem solve and build upon the knowledge and experiences, rather than emphasizing who has the financial investments here.”

But Su says food insecurity is only one part of the larger conversation surrounding the city’s affordability crisis. Childcare costs have risen nearly 80 percent since 2019, which Mamdani hopes to address through a universal childcare initiative, which would guarantee free care for children between six weeks and 5 years old as well as expand free pre-K and 3K programs, and is expected to cost upwards of several billion dollars. Governor Kathy Hochul and Mamdani recently announced a road map to expand childcare access for all 2-year-olds by the 2028–29 school year.

Currently, the initiative has the backing of several children’s advocacy organizations. Like Mayor Mamdani’s other proposals, such as free buses and city-run grocery stores, critics are concerned about the costs of implementing and maintaining such programs. However, advocates say that funding for these programs can be found if capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, and high-earner taxes are increased. In February, Mamdani proposed raising property taxes if Hochul refused to raise income taxes on the wealthy to address the city’s budget deficit.

In tandem with Mamdani’s ideas for food affordability, advocates from organizations like No Kid Hungry New York also say that schools, which serve nearly 1 million students under the K-12 system and an additional 240,000 students from the CUNY system, should be at the forefront of the food insecurity crisis. On-campus resources to help students enroll for SNAP, an increase in school pantries and more substantial school meal programs have been suggested by advocates.

The initiative to increase food access for college students has been in the works before Mamdani, according to Kate MacKenzie, the executive director for the mayor’s Office of Food Policy, in part due to Food Forward NYC, the city’s first-ever 10-year food policy plan that aims to create a more equitable and affordable food system by 2030. The plan is organized around five core goals, which MacKenzie says Mamdani supports. “No New Yorker should experience the challenges of struggling between paying rent and feeding their families,” MacKenzie said. “That is certainly central to Food Forward. It is central to his campaign, it is central to his childcare message, it is central to free buses. It is essential to everything.”

Since January, this work is expanding, with hopes to further collaborate with the CUNY system on scaling up initiatives like their food pantries, CUNY Cares, and other food programs the university already implements. MacKenzie also plans to continue working with the Mayor’s Office of Mass Engagement to increase awareness of other existing food programs for eligible students, such as the Social Cares Network (for those who are enrolled in Medicaid) and Groceries to Go, and for students to understand their eligibility for SNAP.

“We’re gonna continue to work with CUNY, and we’re gonna continue to work with the neighborhoods that surround all the CUNY campuses to make sure that whether it’s the CUNY students or our public school students, that we’re thinking about food in every facet of the day,” MacKenzie said. “And I know I won’t have to convince Mayor Mamdani or this administration that that’s something we need to care about.”

As far as city-run grocery stores go, MacKenzie has already had some conversations regarding its feasibility. While there’s no concrete plan yet, as budgets are still being put together, she says the office is committed to new ways to address food affordability, and that the motto for the office is simple: “Yes, and?”

“I think the focus on grocery store prices is going to be an ongoing factor,” MacKenzie says, referring to “the challenges we face with our federal government and the cuts to SNAP, which I’m dealing with at the CUNY system. While there are not a huge number of students on the SNAP program, it is largely a system of students that are low-income, that are facing cuts to their Pell grants, and overall that carry jobs. It is a system of students that struggle with affordability. We need to make sure that whether you are going to class after caring for kids during the daytime, you need to eat before you go to class, or even bring groceries home at night.”

For college students, SNAP was already difficult to access because of the work requirements. But in March 2026, the program will require recipients to work at least 80 hours a month. “The policies are set up to primarily emphasize and focus on if you’re somehow cheating or leaching off the welfare system, rather than ‘Do you have enough to eat?’” Su said. “Do we want to be spending so many of our tax dollars policing people?”

Katherine Ames, a Hunter student who helps run Hunter College’s Purple Apron Pantry, has high hopes for Mamdani’s administration. When the pantry first opened pre-pandemic, it would operate two to three times a week. Since then, it has expanded to six days a week as the need has grown. Along with the other affordability proposals, the city-owned stores would help treat food as a “public right,” she said. “Affordable access to these core foods would encourage healthier diets, helping students choose nourishing meals over cheaper fast food.”

In 2024, the pantry hit a record high of 8,000 student visits throughout the year, according to Raquel Torres, who manages Hunter’s Immigrant Student Success Center. But between late August and early November 2025, nearly 3,500 students visited the pantry. To account for this, the pantry had to hire a second assistant and install additional fridges and freezers to store fresh, accessible food for students. “What I really love about New York is we take care of each other,” Torres said. “We take care of our own.”

For Gray, while the momentum of the Mamdani administration is exciting, “it’s really important that we begin as a city that are thinking forwardly about food insecurity, about the other factors that are contributing to food insecurity,” Gray says. “That includes access to affordable housing, medical care, and public and free education.”

It’s been a dizzying few weeks for the AI firm Anthropic. After a barrage of MAGA-led tantrums, the company lost its $200 million contract with the Pentagon by refusing to suspend key safeguards within its operating system that protect it from manipulation by bad actors; in terminating the deal, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed that the AI lab posed a “supply chain risk to national security.”

But it appears that risk was short-lived, at least when it comes to a new intervention in the Middle East. As the Trump administration launched its invasion of Iran, the military reportedly relied on Anthropic’s AI technology to identify targets and coordinate bombing attacks. The whole episode speaks volumes about our failure to reckon with the true scale and implications of the AI sector’s growing dominance over all facets of American life—including the fateful life-and-death decisions entrusted to the country’s military-industrial complex. As the MAGA war complex and the Silicon Valley elite battle over the finer points of Anthropic’s role in modern war-making, the larger story remains unchanged: AI overseers are enthusiastic partners in a morally disastrous campaign to insulate the most destructive decisions that military commanders make from their actual consequences. And as usual, the casualties often marked for elimination in our emerging post-human war-making regime are powerless civilians on the ground.

None of this has entered into the high-profile spat between Anthropic and the Department of Defense. When news of the company’s breach with the Pentagon broke, AI boosters and tech analysts embarked on a fervid round of wishcasting, depicting Anthropic and company CEO Dario Amodei as swashbuckling defenders of responsible data collection against the forces of government surveillance and repression. “Dario Amodei lost his tender with the Pentagon but the Anthropic CEO held onto his beliefs and cemented his reputation as a man of courage,” Russian dissident and former chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov wrote on his Substack, having convinced himself that the contretemps was “a story bigger than Iran.” Meanwhile, Anthropic’s AI chatbot app, Claude, shot to the top of the charts on the App Store and Google Play.

It didn’t hurt Anthropic’s case that its opponents seemed to be doing their best impressions of monologuing cartoon villains. “The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War,” Trump thundered on Truth Social. Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael declared on X that Amodei was a “liar” with a “God-complex” who “wants nothing more than to try to personally control the US Military and is ok putting our nation’s safety at risk.”

Yet the heavy-breathing partisans on both sides of the Pentagon-Anthropic spat have fundamentally misread the tech-military alliance they think they’re describing. Before we hand Amodei the Nobel Peace Prize that Trump so desperately covets, it’s worth remembering that Anthropic isn’t some innocent tech ingenue that’s been dragged into a slap-fight with Trump and Hegseth. The $380 billion company had been an enthusiastic, voluntary participant in Trump’s war machine, signing its Pentagon contract, eyes wide open, in July 2025, long after it was abundantly clear just what Trump 2.0 was all about.

The honeymoon went sour some time in January, when the administration decided, Darth Vader–style, that it needed to alter the deal it had agreed to. Pentagon officials removed wording from the Anthropic contract designed to ensure that Claude was not used for mass domestic surveillance or to guide fully autonomous weapons designed to kill without human oversight.

Anthropic said no to these demands, more than once. Hegseth, always in Fox News grievance mode, grew increasingly peeved at the company’s insolence—as well as at the predominance of Democrats in the company’s C-suites, some of whom occasionally said things about the Trump regime that it didn’t like. In a speech in January announcing the Pentagon’s new partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI, Hegseth muttered darkly about the evils of “equitable AI” with “DEI and social justice infusions…that won’t allow you to fight wars.” Insiders told Semafor’s Reed Albergotti that Hegseth was indeed referring to Anthropic and its refusal to grant the Pentagon carte blanche access to its tech.

Elon Musk had of course had no qualms of his own, as he rushed to cut his own AI deal with the military. In his Pentagon contract, Musk agreed to the use of X’s AI chatbot Grok “for all lawful purposes”—not exactly a reassuring standard given the administration’s rather cavalier attitude toward legality, very much including the unconstitutional invasion of Iran. It’s also not exactly reassuring to imagine the unreliable and ethically challenged chatbot that once called itself “MechaHitler” in charge of a fleet of fully autonomous killing machines.

The standoff between Anthropic and the administration came to a head last Friday, with Trump announcing in a typically unhinged message on Truth Social that “I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology,” by which he meant sometime over the next six months in the Pentagon’s case. “Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow,” he threatened.

Shortly afterward, Hegseth piled on with his declaration that the company was a “supply chain risk”—a designation typically reserved for companies run by autocratic enemy governments. The defense secretary went on to say his order would prohibit all companies doing business with the military from using Anthropic’s tech—a lurch into commercial he-man cancel culture that is almost certainly illegal. Why the government would demand for itself the unrestricted use of a tech that it thought was an immediate security risk is a topic I imagine will be discussed in some detail in court.

All the administration’s complaints about “woke AI” aside, the idea that Anthropic is a company run by a bunch of peaceniks that had somehow backed into the role of pulling down massive Pentagon contracts does considerable violence to the reality of the situation. Like other big-ticket defense vendors, Anthropic had actively sought its Pentagon contract, and had in fact already licensed its technology to Palantir, a surveillance tech company named after the “all-seeing” stone used by the evil wizard Saruman to keep track of his enemies in the Lord of the Rings. Palantir, founded by Silicon Valley anti-democracy troll and end-time enthusiast Peter Thiel, has become notorious for, among other things, its work with ICE, and for enabling the Israeli government to track and kill Palestinians in the Gaza genocide.

Even before Claude began mapping out the bombing attacks in Iran, the US Central Command had used it during the attack on Venezuela that kidnapped Maduro and dropped him in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. In the Iran attacks, Claude-Palantir software partnership has yielded civilian casualties already numbering in the high hundreds, including many of the students at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southern Iranian city of Minab. This isn’t by any stretch of the imagination a breach of Anthropic’s contract with the Pentagon; it’s precisely what all parties signed up for.

Indeed, last Thursday, a day before the final rupture, Amodei released a decidedly un-woke statement seemingly intended to remind the government that Anthropic was happy to be part of the Trump war machine. Making considerable use of the administration’s favored martial lingo (“Department of War,” “warfighters”), Amodei assured his readers that he “believe[s] “in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” To that end, he went on to explain,

Anthropic has…worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks…and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.

He made abundantly clear that in all but “a narrow set of cases” he was down with whatever the Pentagon had in mind for Claude. This included using the company’s tech for the mass surveillance of foreigners—but not American citizens. And, as he explained in detail, he was also fine with the use of Claude for “[p]artially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine,” which he said were “vital to the defense of democracy.”

And while Amodei noted, with some understatement, that current “frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons,” he asserted that there was every reason to believe that in the future “[e]ven fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense.” In other words, damn the torpedoes, and bring on the killbots!

The appeal of using artificial intelligence to make decisions or recommendations on the battlefield is not only due to its incredible efficiency. It’s also that AI offers a certain moral buffer to those using it. The technology creates the illusion of an arm’s distance gap between Pentagon war planners and the consequences of their divisions; with a chatbot whispering in their ears, they’re able to pretend that they’re not truly responsible for any innocents they might recklessly kill, because they were only following the expert advice of the machine. That’s a valuable alibi—even when the bombing engineers, like the rest of us, know that the AI we have today is given to lapsing into strange hallucinations and errors.

Ironically, by insisting that the Pentagon keep humans “in the loop” when selecting which people to kill, Anthropic is insisting on a different sort of moral buffer for itself. The logic is simple: You can’t blame Claude—or, more to the point, its makers—for killing innocents if a human being ultimately has to pull the proverbial trigger on Claude’s “suggestions.” In practice, of course, people tend to defer to the supposed expertise of the machine—especially amid the fog of war, when they may only have mere moments to make their life-or-death decisions. A devastating 2024 investigative report on the Israeli government’s use of its own bespoke AI in Gaza by +972 Magazine and Local Call drove the point home: “One source stated that human personnel often served only as a ‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s decisions,” adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about ‘20 seconds’ to each target before authorizing a bombing—just to make sure the [AI]-marked target is male.” (And thus, presumably, more likely to be Hamas.) In other words, the moral buffers coveted by Pentagon war planners represent but a 20-second rubber stamp in the orchestration of mass death on the ground. In Gaza, this demented death-optimization logic has produced 75,000 fatalities; in Iran, the body count is just beginning. Or to put this all in terms Silicon Valley is more apt to understand: garbage in, carnage out.

It’s never a good idea to expect Donald Trump to stick to one argument. The president is a congenital liar who loses a little more brain function with each passing day. Inventing new rationales for terrible decisions is kind of his whole thing.

But even by that degraded standard, Trump’s ever-shifting justifications for his war on Iran are breathtaking. Every few hours seems to bring a new explanation for why the United States and Israel decided that it was a good time to launch an illegal, unprovoked, open-ended assault on another country. The two countries struck because of some undefined imminent threat! No, wait, it’s because the nuclear program Trump definitely “obliterated” last year was perhaps un-obliterated and needed to be re-obliterated! Sorry, what he really meant was that the Iranians took Americans hostage… in 1979, and it’s time someone did something about it! Hmm, scratch that—it’s to do regime change! Actually, hold that thought…

This nonsense makes Trump look like what he is: a reckless imperialist engaging in an already spiraling war of choice. It also helps create what he may feel is an encouraging level of confusion about what exactly he wants out of this catastrophe.

There’s just one problem: Other people are also talking about why we’re suddenly at war. And a lot of them are giving the same reason: because Israel wanted it. That has the potential to erode both the US-Israeli relationship and Israel’s already shaky standing with the American people. For anyone who wants to see the US-Israel alliance, with all of its inherent cruelty and oppression, consigned to the dustbin of history, this can only be a good thing.

Before we get to why that is, though, it’s important to understand how this story has unfolded over the past couple of days.

The first thing that really raised eyebrows was Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s explanation of why a war with Iran was happening “now,” that “the President made the very wise decision—we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties…”

Translation: Israel had made it plain that it was going to bomb Iran, so the US felt it had no choice but to join in. (In a sign that Rubio wasn’t going rogue, the White House’s official “rapid response” account tweeted a video of his comments.)

Rubio’s words chime with other public statements and with recent reporting. The New York Times reported on Monday that Rubio had made a similar case when briefing members of Congress days before the war began:

In the briefing, Mr. Rubio argued that, no matter if Israel or the United States struck first, Iran would respond with a powerful barrage of weapons against U.S. bases and embassies. It was logical then, Mr. Rubio said, that the United States should act in concert with Israel, since America would be dragged in anyway. And Israel, Mr. Rubio said, was determined to act.

House Speaker Mike Johnson made the same case on Monday, telling reporters, “Because Israel was determined to act with or without the US, our commander in chief and the administration and the officials had a very difficult decision to make.”

Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Monday that this was also the explanation given in a briefing after the war started. “This is still a war of choice that has been acknowledged by others, that was dictated by Israel’s goals and timeline,” Warner said.

The Times also reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had lobbied Trump intensely—and successfully—to ditch ongoing negotiations with Iran in favor of war. As if to confirm that he was on a mission that had little to do with anything happening right now, Netanyahu issued a statement on Sunday making no mention of an imminent Iranian threat. Instead, he said that the United States had helped him fulfill a decades-long dream:

We are in a campaign in which we are bringing the full strength of the IDF to the battle, as never before, in order to ensure our existence and our future. But we are also bringing to this campaign the assistance of the United States, my friend, US President Donald Trump, and the US military. This coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years: smite the terror regime hip and thigh.

Awkward.

Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump belatedly tried to put a lid on things. “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand,” he said. “We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they [Iran] were going to attack first.” (The same “rapid response” account that, less than 24 hours earlier, had tweeted Rubio’s diametrically opposite comments quickly tweeted Trump’s new line.) Rubio was also wheeled out to walk back his previous version of events.

Hmm. Which story should we believe: the one briefed out in public, in private, to journalists, and to elected officials for days, or the totally different one that emerged after Trump found himself in a political bind?

Now, it’s obviously important not to overstate things. The United States is not a puppet dancing mindlessly to whatever tune the Israelis play. Combine the plethora of bloodthirsty, Iran-hating psychopaths in Washington with Trump’s seeming desire to start a new conflict every week, and you already have a recipe for war before Israel even enters the picture.But the preponderance of evidence would appear to show that, at the very least, Israel played a huge part in getting Trump to pull the trigger on this war—and it’s not some antisemitic conspiracy to say so.

Why does all of this matter? For two key reasons—both of which could have the salutary effect of weakening support for Trump, Israel, and this awful war all at once.

The first is simple: It is, for want of a better phrase, an extremely bad look for top US government officials to be sending the message that the reason this country finds itself plunged into a bloody, spiraling conflict with no clear justification, no legal authority, and no end in sight is because a different country had a war itch it needed to scratch. That’s especially true when the government in question is run by a bunch of goons who can’t stop droning on about how much they love both carpet-bombing the universe and telling other countries what to do. No wonder Trump felt the need to try to claw back the narrative.

The second, more important reason is this: Israel already finds itself on the ropes with the American people thanks to widespread disgust over the Gaza genocide. Just last week, Gallup found that, for the first time ever, more Americans say they sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. The Israel lobby’s grip on US politics, though still strong, is weakening at an unprecedented rate, with both main parties.

The implication that Israel is the driving force behind the deeply unpopular war with Iran—one that has led to the deaths of at least six American soldiers so far—only bolsters the truth that more and more people have come to understand over the past two years of genocide and repression: that, time and again, the United States does terrible things, both domestically and internationally, in service of its alliance with Israel, even if those things fly in the face of logic, morality, and basic self-interest.

The challenge now is to turn that increasing outrage into concrete change—whether that’s blocking military aid to Israel, supporting Palestinian liberation, halting the efforts to suppress criticism of Israel and its relationship with the United States, curbing the power of the Israel lobby, growing support for the BDS movement, or forcing the US and Israel to abide by domestic and international law.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have singularly failed to convince US voters that they had a duty to funnel endless amounts of money and weaponry so that Israel could slaughter children in Gaza. There’s no reason to think that those same voters now want that same money and weaponry to be used to slaughter children in Iran—not for whatever shifting motives the Trump administration keeps putting forward, and certainly not on Israel’s behalf. Trump may now be trying to force this latest unhelpful cat back in the bag, but he can’t force growing numbers of Americans to unsee what is already so clear: that the sooner the US-Israel alliance ends, the better the world will be.

In 2014, at a small Stanford University lecture hall, the Merriam-Webster editor Peter Sokolowski introduced the crowd of assembled nerds to the idea that a dictionary is not a static document but a living object, constantly updated and remade in response to how people write and speak. In a talk titled “The Dictionary as Data,” Sokolowski emphasized that the editors at Merriam-Webster look to how the general public uses language to guide their work. He shared enticing tidbits, including that xi and za, classic Scrabble words, were popular late-night searches in the online dictionary, and that people regularly look up love ahead of Valentine’s Day. Awed, I wrote in a campus magazine a few days later that “we forget that the dictionary, a seeming bastion of objective reality, is compiled by people who use language, too.”

I had not, until that evening, thought much about how the dictionary came to be the way it is. I had always seen it as one of those things that was just kind of there, like a textbook or a museum wall text or the other ambient bits of language that seemed to arrive in front of me for my education and consumption.

But the totemic reference book that we know as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Sokolowski argued, is a dynamic text. The book is formal and highly structured; it seems like something from another, vaguely bygone time. Still, dictionary editors have long paid close attention to how language is used and perused—in signs, in novels, in articles and pronouncements, and lately on the Web. Sokolowski told us about how he could trace the emotional ripples of tragedies by looking at the data on the words that people look up in the online dictionary. In the immediate aftermath of an event like 9/11, he stated, people might first look up the unfamiliar matter-of-fact words (rubble, triage), then the technical or conceptual ones (terrorism, jingoism). Soon, though, people turn to the psychological ones (succumb, surreal). We don’t just go to the dictionary to learn new words; sometimes, in moments of flux, it’s an attempt to latch on to a source of vetted truth, and to confirm what we thought we understood.

In January of 2020, for example, the word pandemic started trending on the dictionary’s website; on March 11, searches for that word exploded. Eight days later, coronavirus spiked. At different points that year, searches for mamba, malarkey, and defund also skyrocketed. On election night 2024, the top searches on Merriam-Webster.com included fascism, LOL, bellwether, and gaslighting. Through it all, irregardless remained a very popular search (Merriam-Webster says it is a word and a synonym for regardless, though it suggests using the latter “if you wish to avoid criticism” because the former is “widely disliked”).

The Internet has sired and popularized a huge range of new terms. Twerking and trolling, Karens and -core, dumpster fire and microaggression and post-truth and safe spaces, Covid and rawdog and OK Boomer have floated into the mainstream vocabulary. As absurd or obscene as these words may be, dictionary editors track them, keeping an eye on their usage and circulation. And if the words meet a set of rigorous standards, the editors allow them into the book itself, or at least the online version. That’s because the role of the contemporary dictionary is not to prescribe how we talk but to describe how language is used.

It wasn’t always this way. In the dictionary’s early days, which Stefan Fatsis enthusiastically recounts in his roving new book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary, gatekeepers pronounced from on high. The 1604 Table Alphabeticall aimed to “helpe” the “ignorant” learn about words and ideas in the English language.

A couple of centuries later, some ambitious Yalies dreamed of imposing their linguistic views on the public, too. In the 1780s, a young Noah Webster, styling himself as “the prophet of language to the American people,” became fixated on shaping and capturing American English. After decades bogged down in various other pursuits (including feuding with Alexander Hamilton, editing a newspaper, publishing a book that advocated for phonetic spelling, and supporting Benjamin Franklin’s efforts to replace the letters C, J, Q, W, X, and Y with new ones), Webster published an American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, at the age of 70. His dictionary was an achievement, Fatsis notes, but “far from perfect,” rife with suspect etymologies and quirky phonetic spellings. In 1844, shortly after Webster’s death, the Merriam brothers, a pair of eager publishing upstarts, nabbed the rights. Along with some scholarly associates, they set about editing and improving the sloppy original, predicting—rightly—that the dictionary could be a major commercial endeavor.

Fatsis’s most compelling writing involves his work digging into this history, deciphering the “swooping penmanship” in the G. & C. Merriam Company Archive at Yale’s Beinecke Library. He gushes about the drama between the Webster and Merriam families and shares his admiration for the enterprising Merriam brothers. Their 1864 edition, he writes, nabbed “rave reviews and boffo sales.” As John Morse, the retired president and publisher of Merriam-Webster, told Fatsis, “Webster invents American lexicography, and the Merriams invent dictionary publishing.” The Second Edition of the unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary, published in 1934, was marketed as the product of America’s intellectual elite, a rulebook produced, as Fatsis notes in a typically cheeky summation, by “stuffy, privileged white dudes.”

But a new editor, Philip Gove, brought in a new, somewhat radical vision when he took over as editor in 1950: that dictionaries should not dictate but rather reflect language. His team cast a wide net into the sea of colloquy and took seriously what it dragged in. The result was a fiasco. The Third Edition, published in 1961, was pilloried for its informality, especially for its inclusion of ain’t. The New York Times editorial board called the edition “disastrous” because it reinforced “the notion that good English is whatever is popular,” and Wilson Follett, writing in The Atlantic, deemed it “a very great calamity.” So dramatic was the blowback that David Foster Wallace, in his 2001 Harper’s Magazine essay “Tense Present,” referred to it as “the Fort Sumter of the contemporary usage wars.” It is quaint to think back to a time when so many people cared about a dictionary. But for all the pearl-clutching, the Third Edition reset the role of the American dictionary: With its publication, a new era of the reference book began.

Fatsis embraces Govian informality. He writes of faves and haters, says things like “I mean, omg,” and “wut,” and responds to the news that alt-right has been added to the dictionary with “Yas!” But he also doesn’t shy away from imposing his own views on the English language onto dictionary readers, attempting as he does to squirrel his own favorite words into the reference book.

The thrust of Fatsis’s memoir—broken up with history lessons and charming, if slightly disjointed, profiles and dispatches from dictionary-related events—is a recounting of his time embedded in the Merriam-Webster offices during a stretch of great linguistic and economic change. During his apprenticeship as a professional lexicographer, which spanned the late Obama and early Trump years, Fatsis harbored many pet projects and words that he wanted to add or update, which included gender pronouns, sports terms, trending political words, and adolescent humor. Fatsis demonstrates how words get added to the dictionary through his own confident but oft-foiled efforts to get his definitions in. Sometimes, his climactic encounters with language reflect words in “the current cultural stew”—for example, the then-emerging terms safe space and microaggression. (His pride at getting these words into the dictionary curdles into contrition when, a few years later, after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, he muses that “a microaggression is whatever its recipient says it is.”) But just as often, his submissions merely reflect his own interests: He spends time on the slang terms Dutch oven (as when someone farts under the sheets) and fluffer (the person who keeps porn actors hard on set). He fixates on getting sportocrat into the dictionary, grasping for usage examples; he lavishes attention on slurs, taboos, and the obscene.

Fatsis is open about both his ambitions and his skepticism of the dictionary’s fusty ways. As he works on his definitions, he bristles against edits and faces negative feedback, suggesting more than once that the dictionary might consider shaking things up a bit. “While I respected the Merriam process,” Fatsis notes as he heads to the company’s offices in drab Springfield, Massachusetts, “I also copped to a selfish, subjective quest to scribble my initials on the language.” His failure to get ze past the gatekeepers “pushed [him] to the belief that there are times when The Dictionary benefits from flexibility, when it’s okay to welcome a word that might just fall short of its ingrained standards—or might change those standards.” After causing a PR headache for Merriam-Webster, he writes, “I wasn’t predisposed to the inoffensive, the way a seasoned definer would be. I thought a funny, cutting, sexy, or culturally relevant quotation could say more about how we use language than a vanilla sentence devoid of context.” Stephen Perrault, a staid, stalwart editor who keeps Fatsis at bay, counters: “We’re not looking to be provocative.”

Fatsis is, though. Throughout this book (and in subsequent writing), he flirts with the narrative that Merriam-Webster is in big trouble, as “another early twenty-first-century digital media outfit battling to survive an increasingly bookless world,” goosing traffic with games and spinning toward obsolescence. He writes, concerning the dictionary’s years of struggle, that “I was never rooting for that story, just chronicling it,” adding that he was glad to see the clicks and revenue recover. Still, it’s hard to shake the sense that Fatsis is skeptical about its future and keen to sniff out doom. A catastrophe would make for a zestier book. That things eventually bounce back means that he seems uncertain, in the end, what to say about the dictionary. Over the decade-plus he spent thinking about it, it had some ups and some downs. Its future is unclear, but so is the future in general.

Fatsis doesn’t, in the end, hack the dictionary. He doesn’t uncover a wild story or form a cohesive narrative or argument about his beloved reference book. He observes its constructors in action for a few years, then roves around and learns some more; his work culminates in an oddball appreciation of their work more than an exposé.

For all his waxing on its problems, Fatsis delights in the dictionary, and his prose teems with enthusiasm. And the dictionary, for all its flux in recent years, is now on pretty solid ground. Merriam-Webster still sells about 1.5 million print dictionaries a year, a modest but respectable sum. And its website has seen well over a billion visitors in the last 12 months. After some years of contraction and cringe—the brief stretch of viral Twitter clapbacks from the dictionary’s account in 2016 and 2017 was a low point—Merriam-Webster is still here. Its team, by and large, still tries to engage with the world as it changes. Lately, that’s meant Greg Barlow, the president of Merriam-Webster, going on the radio to talk about what human editors do that artificial intelligence cannot. “AI tries to figure out what the definition is,” he told Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace in October. “At Merriam-Webster, we actually write the definition. We create it, invent it, so it can’t be wrong.”

That’s a lofty claim. But Fatsis, in a way, bolsters it. After spending hundreds of pages bouncing around with him—watching his thinking on language evolve in accordance with political trends and personal hang-ups, seeing him get the proverbial bee in one’s bonnet or take a stand or get carried away—I have to say: The editors’ resistance to Fatsis’s interventions serves as a convincing testament to their process. The good book is going strong. It maintains its standards yet.

Last Friday, Bari Weiss—former New York Times columnist, founder of the website The Free Press, and now, improbably, editor in chief of CBS News—was due to deliver a lecture at UCLA on “the future of journalism.” Weiss is one of the most controversial and polarizing figures in media today, alternately praised as a pro-Israel, anti-woke crusader and attacked for her obvious right-wing tendencies. Many wonder if she’s just a MAGA shill, demonstrating a new way to control the airwaves.

While Weiss claims to be improving “free speech” in the news, she’s also clearly moving CBS in a more conservative direction—whether by delaying a critical 60 Minutes story about the infamous El Salvadoran prison where the Trump administration sends many deportees; commandeering the airwaves for a fawning interview with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika; changing the CBS style guide to replace the term “assigned sex at birth” with “biological sex at birth” when referring to trans people; or turning the network over to an infinite string of pro-war propagandists in the wake of the US-Israeli attack on Iran.

Given all of this, there was considerable interest in what Weiss would say at UCLA—including from me. I had purchased a ticket to the event and was ready to witness the Weiss experience for myself. But—for better or worse—it wasn’t meant to be.

About a week before the event was set to take place, Weiss canceled (or at the very least, postponed) her appearance, citing “security concerns.” It wasn’t clear what those concerns were, though nearly 11,000 people had signed a petition opposing the lecture. University of California president James B. Milliken released a statement affirming his support for Weiss and “free expression on our campuses,” a seemingly coded reference to the platforming of her right-wing agenda. So far, the university has not publicly announced a rescheduled or virtual date, though some seem to think the event may ultimately go forward.

Though Weiss has been uncharacteristically silent about the cancellation, it seems safe to say that she relishes another opportunity to present herself as a martyr for free speech. But Weiss’s history reveals a fundamental tension between the values she claims to possess and the actions she inevitably takes.

As Nation columnist David Klion wrote in The Guardian, “Weiss wrote the playbook on canceling anti-Zionists and ‘woke’ progressives, even as she decried ‘cancel culture’ and claimed to champion free speech.” Weiss first came to prominence by trying to get Palestinian professors at Columbia fired, after all. So why, one may ask, is purging wokeness not the same kind of censorship that Weiss detests on the left? Meanwhile, she uplifts and spreads the gospel of numerous right-wing pundits, canceled men, and technocrats, from Senator Ted Cruz and Woody Allen to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. In 2022, she interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and she has decisively backed Israel even as it massacred an unprecedented number of journalists during the genocide in Gaza.

The woman who once said she felt sidelined as a Jewish lesbian Zionist on both the right and the left has also become much warmer toward Trump’s second-term agenda. “I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Weiss said after Trump was reelected in 2024. She added that he probably enacted “a lot of policies that I agreed with.”

But this sort of slipperiness is par for the course. Weiss frequently reinvents herself, decrying her previous employers as too conservative, too woke, or too censorious, all while claiming that she is the true victim. Yet she’s hardly spent any real amount of time working “outside the establishment.” Her tenures at national newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the Times attest to that. Now she runs one of the major networks and is regularly profiled by mainstream outlets—the gold standard of which may be Claire Malone’s excellent essay in The New Yorker. One can easily picture the scene Malone reported of Weiss sporting a CBS baseball cap and blurting out: “Let’s do the fucking news!” when she first took control of the network.

Weiss’s move to LA was a big part of her most recent rebranding effort. Now, UCLA—or at least its students—seem poised to reject her. “She was much more cerebral, intellectually curious, and well read than most people in L.A.,” one entertainment executive told New York’s Charlotte Klein. (She’s now moved back to New York.)

Hollywood enjoyed her provocation and anti-left sentiment. She was business-minded, not just a writer. Her prose was never that stirring anyway. It wasn’t just the pro-cultural appropriation, anti-trans, anti-feminist content; it was her inability to land a joke. (A typically thudding conclusion to one of her Times columns: “When I will inevitably get called a racist for cheering cultural miscegenation, I might borrow a line from the director of Taylor Swift’s new video, who wrote: ‘I am down for cultural appropriation. That sounds hot. Appropriate me.’ Feel free to steal it as well.”)

Weiss tries to own both the illiberal left and the illiberal right, but her work frequently fawns over conservative raconteurs. This is how Weiss diagnosed the left in an anti-DEI polemic for Tablet: “People were to be given authority in this new order not in recognition of their gifts, hard work, accomplishments, or contributions to society, but in inverse proportion to the disadvantages their group had suffered, as defined by radical ideologues.” Her solution? “What we must do is reverse this.” Stunning prose.

In a review of Weiss’s book How to Fight Anti-Semitism for Jewish Currents, Judith Butler pointed out Weiss’s violent hypocrisies. But it may be her banalities (“Lies—maybe harmless for the moment, maybe even noble —create a lying world”) that are the most glaring. Her essays are typically composed of short, fragmentary sentences surrounded by white space.

In a 2017 column on intersectionality, she wrote, “Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.” Yet who is really playing the victim here? Despite the prevalence of Jewish anti-Zionists, Weiss refuses to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza. Why would she? It’s her brand. She would rather call Jewish leftists “ideologues” or self-haters. She seems to think that pro-Palestinian sentiment on college campuses is the result of institutional brainwashing, rather than perhaps entertaining the idea that encampments are simply political activity based on moral courage.

Time will tell if Weiss writes about the UCLA lecture in some form. The statements about “security concerns” are perhaps vague references to the possibility of protests occurring. It seems like an easy way for her to argue that the left is trying to silence the right. But it’s also a sign of shifting political sands. A year ago, during the beginning of Trump’s second term, it would be unlikely for such an event to be canceled or postponed at all. Now, perhaps liberal dissent has teeth.

Margaret Peters, UCLA Department of Political Science’s vice chair for graduate studies, resigned from her position at the Burkle Center for International Relations, the organization that hosts the lecture series Weiss was set to be a part of, over Weiss’s invitation. She will remain a professor at UCLA.

“The more I heard about what was going on at CBS, the more it disturbed me that we would invite her for this honor. Frankly, for these kinds of lectures, we bring out the same kind of people that everybody else is. This is a kind of boring choice,” Peters told me on the phone. “On the one hand, I’m supportive of free speech, but on the other hand, I had this nagging feeling in the back of my head. This was an invited lecture, basically conferring an honor upon her. After Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were killed in Minneapolis, I just felt I couldn’t be a part of an organization that was tilling the line of an administration that’s killing our citizens who are engaging in free speech.” Peters compared inviting Weiss to speak on journalism to inviting an anti-vaxxer to speak about public health. It’s an apt comparison.

Certainly, the left can repress controversial ideas at times. Nobody is blameless when it comes to dealing with people or opinions they find repellent. But most leftists have neither the institutional nor the economic power that Weiss has. If anyone truly has the ability to suppress speech, it’s her.

People are tired of Weiss’s conservative shtick that masquerades as free speech while bulldozing those she doesn’t agree with. “It’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in…acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture. I don’t mean that in a censorious, gatekeeping way. I mean that about having people who are clearly on the center-left and on the center-right in conversation with each other,” Weiss said of her plans for CBS. “Intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at the Times,” she wrote after resigning from the Times.

But whom is she willing to platform now at CBS News? Not trans people. Not people of color. I imagine she won’t be inviting anyone who leans too much to the left. Her preferred journalistic range is a limited set of prima facie conservatives. Weiss feels that anything else is a form of “political heroin” that poisons the cultural debate.

But there’s unrest internally at CBS. Many worry that Weiss is not doing such a great job running the network’s news division. Not just because of her views but also her ineptitude as a boss who takes a “dim” view of her staff. Apparently, despite this, she can be quite charming. That’s how she rose to the top. She knew how to turn working on a kibbutz into a story about hard work and life lessons. Her impassioned narratives of victimization gain traction for their totemic calls for justice—even though Weiss wants justice only for a certain segment of the population.

In synagogue last week, I witnessed a bar mitzvah. A young boy delivered a drash on Terumah considering the need for a space away from the mundane world, a temple for peace and meditation. He said we needed a form of Judaism without dogma, without the need for a rigid hierarchy, an open space where all are welcome.

Bari Weiss once professed to argue the same, believing we need an open “tent.” But no longer. She wants to shrink the discourse to include only those who can comfortably justify a conservative regime. It’s an all too familiar DARVO-like refrain: deny, attack, reverse victim, offend. If we want to actually push forward political dialogue, we’ll have to find different tactics from the ones Weiss favors—suppressing the kinds of political stories we don’t like, or that may hinder our careers. Sucking up rarely pays off if one takes the long view of history.

On February 28, Trump embarked on a war against Iran, deliberately targeting its Supreme Leader, as well as a girls’ school, and calling openly for regime change. This aggression has been sanitized as a “war of choice” in the mainstream press, as if such an option exists in the domain of international law. This sugar-coating language seeks to divert attention from the massive breach in international law. The UN Charter couldn’t be clearer. Its core and most vital norm is set forth in Article 2(4), which without any qualification prohibits all uses of international force except in the exercise of self-defense against a prior armed attack.

In shallow efforts to offer legal justifications, hawks have called this unprovoked attack on Iran amid negotiations to end the threat of war “a war against Iranian terrorism,” “a preventive war against an imminent Iranian threat to US national security,” and “a regime-changing humanitarian intervention.” These are polemical talking points but not serious attempts to offer a rationale that remotely attaches a reputable argument as to the “legality” of recourse to war.

Somehow Trump gave the game away when he declared that he supports international law so long as he is the final arbiter of what is lawful or not. The precedent being set by the US in launching this war of aggression against Iran will long live in infamy, and not only for its victims, but for any hope of a sane, peaceful, law-abiding future for international relations. The Iran War, coming after the Venezuelan military operation, is a further sign that America’s support for internationalism has been replaced by a 21st-century variant of imperial geopolitics.

Withdrawing From Benevolent Internationalism

In the first week of the New Year, the White House released a largely neglected memorandum announcing US withdrawal from 66 “international organizations,” 31 of which are situated within the UN System. Another 35 were independent of the UN, dedicated to the functional tasks of global scope. In addition to ending participation, this withdrawal also means no more US funding. This would disastrously limit the capabilities and performances of these organizations, whose work is vital in so many areas of international life. Such an initiative, although unprecedented, should come as no surprise. Donald Trump has never made a secret of his hostility to internationally cooperative arrangements established to address practical global concerns, whether it be climate change, disease control, cultural heritage, economic development, human rights, enforcing piracy on international waters, and most of all, the management of global security and international conflicts.

The White House alleged that these organizations “operate contrary to US national interests, security, economic prosperity or sovereignty.” An accompanying memo elaborated on “bringing to an end…American taxpayer funding” and how such actions contribute to the wider Trump effort to “restore American sovereignty.” These misleading abstractions hide the true motivation behind this regressive series of moves.

The veil of deception surrounding this deliberately dramatic move against what might be called “global wokism” (the liberal extensions of domestic commitments to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” reliance on cooperative international arrangements, and support for the UN and human rights). The Orwellian doublespeak of the Trump Memorandum was somewhat clarified in a statement issued on the same day by ever-dutiful Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It had this candid heading: “Withdrawal from Wasteful, Ineffective, or Harmful International Organizations.” In the text, Rubio elaborates that these organizations favor global governance and are “often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests.” In other words, this anti-internationalism should not be sugarcoated as a revival of outmoded traditional US isolationism. It is a matter of clearing the path that impedes Trump’s brand of narcissistic imperialism as set forth in the National Strategy of the United States, which was released in November 2025.

The concluding words from Rubio also express the Trump ethos that this wholesale withdrawal from internationalism is an unmistakable message that the US government rejects any international entanglement that requires funding or dilution of American sovereignty:

We will not continue expending resources, diplomatic capital, and the legitimizing weight of our participation in institutions that are irrelevant to or in conflict with our interests. We reject inertia and ideology in favor of prudence and purpose. We seek cooperation where it serves our people and will stand firm where it does not.

Trump’s Geopolitical Internationalism

What the Trump leadership does not tell the world is that the US has its own preferred manner of dealing with threats to its economic and political interests, as amply illustrated by the recent Venezuela military intervention, the threats to unleash unprovoked military aggression against Iran, and the Greenland gambit best interpreted as a menacing new form of territorial piracy.

In effect, these MAGA moves are rationalized as a repudiation of the woke liberal “global leadership” style of American foreign policy that exerted influence by its participation in and funding of bipartisan internationalism. The argument, not without certain merits, is that the Obama/Biden geopolitics should not be romanticized as global benevolence, the virtues of “a rule-governed international order,” or an embrace of fiscal conservatism. In this spirit, it is responsible to recall that US pre-Trump military spending was 10 times greater than that of the next 10 states, and devoted in large part to maintaining US global dominance rather than national security as traditionally understood. To be sure, it is a glaring example of MAGA hypocrisy exposed by Trump’s seeking and obtaining from Congress a 50 percent increase in the US peacetime military appropriation, to a staggering total of $1.5 trillion.

A considerable amount of the bloated military budget will be used to pay the high maintenance costs of 850 military bases all over the world, a posture hardly consistent with the Trump claim to reduce American foreign policy ambitions to their earlier hemispheric dimensions, which itself overlooked US colonizing adventures in the Pacific region that peaked at the end of the 19th century. The smaller pre-Trump military budgets proved sufficient to finance regime-changing interventions and costly failed state-building and market-oriented undertakings, most visibly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden’s Cold War nostalgia was not restrained by military budget constraints. He most revealingly chose war rather than diplomacy in the context of the Russian attack on Ukraine, and like Trump could find even less to criticize in Netanyahu’s genocidal approach to Gaza.

Trump’s refusal to expend US dollars to fund cooperative approaches to global issues, whether involving bettering economic and social conditions of others or working to control disease, food security, and climate in ways that benefit the US, exhibits an extremely shortsighted and dysfunctional view of national interests. True, such international activities go against Trump’s electoral pledge to contract the role of the state or to curtail the dangerously expanding national debt and certainly not to reduce militarist geopolitics. While defunding internationalism, the Trump military budget is the highest instance ever of peacetime military spending. It can neither be justified by national security nor be of benefit to the lives of the great majority of Americans.

As the National Security Strategy released by the White House in November 2025 explained, American foreign policy would henceforth reembrace the discarded Monroe Doctrine as expanded by the addition of the Trump Corollary. This bundle of initiatives was immediately dubbed the Donroe Doctrine, giving Trump’s brand of narcissistic geopolitics its due. This formal statement served as a clumsy doctrinal prelude to the attack on Venezuela as well as added threats directed at Cuba and Colombia to expect similar treatment if they don’t do what Washington demands. Even more radical in its implications were strong assertions that non-hemispheric actors were expected to refrain in the future from economic and infrastructure involvements in Latin America. Obviously, this was a thinly veiled warning to China to downsize, if not eliminate, its extensive investment and trade relations throughout Latin America. The message to non-hemispheric actors was henceforth to avoid economic, social, and political Latin involvements or else expect hostile pushback from Washington’s commitment to “hemispheric preeminence.” Time will tell whether this grandiose claim of control over Latin America will spark a new cycle of national resistance to such a brazen contraction of the right of self-determination of these countries as conferred by Article I of the Human Rights Covenant of Political Civil Rights. It also remains to be seen how China and other countries will respond to this outright interference with their freedom to engage in peaceful relations with Latin America.

This mass withdrawal from international cooperative problem-solving is also a virtual admission in this Trump era that the US has opted for “transactionalism” and post-colonial imperialism. The most salient feature of this tectonic shift away from Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America, as brazenly announced to the world, and especially to the hemisphere, including more shockingly to Canada, is that the US is giving priority to its strategic ambitions free from discarded liberal pretenses of respect for international law and the United Nations. It seems to be telling the world that its only guide when it comes to foreign policy in the future will be the warped and personalist amorality of Donald Trump. In the future, Latin America can expect to be treated as an exclusive US “sphere of influence,” perhaps more accurately known as “a sphere of dominance.” If such is the case, the closest recent resemblance is to the Soviet relationship to Eastern Europe during the Cold War.

A Second Look at US Withdrawal From Internationalism and Pre-Trump Resistance to Latin Economic Nationalism

In this sense the withdrawal from the 66 organizations is a gigantic step away from US engagement with the liberal approach that served as a bipartisan guide to American foreign policy and the projection of its blend of hard and soft power ever since 1945. The previous posture of American foreign policy avoided the arrogant Trumpian language of “preeminence,” adopting as an alternative approach to the bipartisan post–Cold War euphemistic language of “global leadership.” This earlier terminology also did not play by the rules of respect for the sovereign rights of states. It too was guilty of geopolitical disregard of legal constraints when it served strategic national interests. It resorted to regime change by covert interventions throughout the Cold War on behalf of its free-market ideology and in opposition to economic nationalism by elected leaders or in the aftermath of popular revolution. This pattern of covert intervention in Guatemala in 1954 generated and orchestrated a coup against a democratically elected government that was alleged to have Communist leanings, and more concretely threatened the interests of United Fruit Company, nationalizing some unused land owned by this powerful corporate investor.

This pattern of a more overt justification for promoting regime change—combining an ideological rationale with underlying hostility to economic nationalism—shaped the US response to the Cuban Revolution a few years later. The US relied for many years on harsh economic sanctions while lending marginal support to counterrevolutionary Cuban exile proxies in a series of failed attempts to duplicate its earlier success in Guatemala. Castro’s leadership in Cuba was delegitimized by liberal American leaders at the time as “incompatible” with the ideals and values of the hemisphere, yet seemed more directly motivated by a toxic opposition to economic nationalism taking the principal form of nationalizing Cuba’s sugar industry, by a mixture of hardline foreign policy hawks and coup-minded Cuban exiles. In a shameful continuing display of heartless foreign policy, annual one-sided votes in the UN General Assembly favor ending sanctions against Cuba that have persisted for more than 60 years after the Castro ascent to power, causing severe economic hardship for the population.

The US also lent covert encouragement to the 1973 anti-Allende Pinochet coup in Chile. It also carried out in 1989 a lawless intervention in Panama centering on the kidnapping of the de facto head of state Manuel Noriega and forcibly bringing him to the US to face criminal charges of drug trafficking. The self-serving code name for the intervention was Operation Just Cause, officially defended as needed for the protection of US economic interests, enforcement against drug trafficking, and for the security of the Panama Canal.

These were peculiar ways of expressing neighborly good will, to say the least, covertly carried out or ideologically asserted as elements of Cold War “containment” geopolitics. This anti-communist veneer masked accompanying economic motivations to crush Latin nationalism and thereby promote the interests of US corporations to uphold the security of private-sector investments that had long exploited Latin resources. This pre-Trump strategic militarism was never limited to the Western Hemisphere, as many American regime-changing and state-building ventures were carried out in Asia and the Middle East. The arc of US interventionism after 1945 stretches from the CIA-engineered overthrow in 1953 of Mossadegh’s democratically elected government in Iran and its replacement by the authoritarian Pahlavi Dynasty to the Venezuelan undertaking in 2026. In both cases the common strategic stakes were to ensure that the vast oil reserves of these two countries were managed for profit by US corporate energy giants.

Before Trump, US foreign aid, support of the UN, and assorted initiatives such as the Peace Corps were in fact idealistic features of American foreign policy. Yet all along such policies had a hybrid character. They served also as PR ploys to pursue covertly the warrior and economistic sides of US “global leadership”—that is, covert means to prevent countries in the non-Western world from moving toward either socialism or economic nationalism. Unlike the Monroe Doctrine era, which was preoccupied with resisting European intervention, the Cold War period and its aftermath represented a geopolitical reset that was rooted in Atlanticism, pitting the West against the non-West in alliance with Europe, as given salient expression in the NATO alliance.

This alliance originated as a collective defense arrangement designed to deter alleged Soviet expansionist ambitions toward Europe but revealingly has limped along for more than three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was its original justifying rationale. It should not be overlooked that principally the main NATO members after 1993 joined in their complicity toward Israel’s genocidal policies in Occupied Palestine. This was convincing testimony that the Atlanticist coalition that existed during the Cold War broadened its agenda to encompass Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, redesigning containment to validate the post-Soviet civilizational containment of Islam. Such policies fulfilled Samuel Huntington’s prophetic expectations that the Soviet collapse would produce a “clash of civilizations” rather than “an end of history.”

Beyond Hemispheric Preeminence

Atlanticism is currently being redefined by Trump as acceptable so long as it submits to his efforts to control coercively ongoing confrontations with the non-West, shifting their ideational locus from Communism to Islam, with Iran currently in the US gunsights. As mentioned, the distinctive features of Trump’s overtly nihilistic geopolitics, despite its declared intentions, will not be confined to the Western Hemisphere. As metaphor and sign of political pathology, Trump’s absurd fantasy is that if the Bureau of Peace administering Gaza is “successful,” whatever that might come to mean, it will emerge as the peace-building center of yet another “new international order.” In that event, the UN will be cast aside as weak, wasteful, and ineffectual—a relic of the old order that will be replaced by the strong, efficient, and effective Bureau of Peace as administered from Washington. This outlandish project can be understood as an institutional equivalent to Trump’s anger that he was robbed of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize that he alone richly deserved.

Looked upon more objectively, if a Nobel War Prize existed, Trump would surely deserve to be the leading candidate, and likely recipient.

Where Is Trump’s Foreign Policy Headed?

In effect, Trump’s anti-internationalism should be reinterpreted. The US is certainly retreating these days from the Atlanticist neoliberal globalist model of world order. This disappoints and worries those who continue to value the US global leadership role, however blurry its nature, as the only feasible alternative to chaos, economic crisis, and Western decline. In contrast, what Trump seems to be now proposing is undisguised American unipolarity as qualified by transactional calculations of national advantage. This is the message to Europeans, as evident in the leveraging of tariffs as policy instruments to punish and reward, most recently softened somewhat by Rubio’s “breadcrumb diplomacy” speech that seemed to delight the European audience attending the Munich Security Conference in mid-February. Rubio’s well-chosen words were received as reassurance that after all Europe would not be cut loose to fend for itself and could still rely on partnering with the US so long as it let Trump run the show. The standing ovation given to Rubio at the end of his speech seems best understood as an unexpectedly servile display of fealty by the leadership of Europe to US global imperialism.

My suspicion is that, despite such appearances to the contrary, the Trump worldview might be slouching toward a “beautiful” geopolitical bargain with America’s two geopolitical rivals: China and Russia. Its enactment would involve enlarged spheres of influence reciprocally accepted, and a trilateral management of global security. The UN would be diminished, if not relegated to the status of serving minor functional issues—a kind of “petty internationalism” with tight budgetary constraints. It would be naïve to suppose that such a world order arrangement would benefit the majority of the world’s peoples or address the global public good as specified in general terms by the Preamble of the UN Charter, but we should all know by now that these goals were never endorsed by Trump.

A preferable alternative architecture for a new order exists but is hampered by the inter-civilizational rivalries now flourishing to block suitable attention to the agenda of benign internationalism—focusing on nuclear weaponry, climate change, xenophobia, developmental equity, racism, human rights, and fashioning regulatory frameworks for weapons, AI, and robotics. Such a future is also treated as irrelevant by the “political realists” who wield influence in the inner sanctums of the reigning geopolitical actors. Such thinking, however outmoded, continues to dominate the foreign policy elites of almost all major countries, undermining any present prospects for generating a new world order animated by promoting the global public good. The most that can be hoped for in the near future is a more prudent and responsible realism that becomes sensitive to the limitations of militarist geopolitics. Thus, adaptation to the changing global setting is confined to rearrangements of ill-fitting and often antagonistic “parts” rather than finally affirming the politics of the planet as an organic “whole,” which seems alone capable of preserving a humane and resilient future.

Our corporate media is often caught flat-footed by the many rapid convulsions in the American polity and broader economy—whether it’s the frenetic wishcasting behind the AI bubble or the collapse of the once-imposing 2024 Trump coalition. With Donald Trump’s surreal, unjustified, and illegal war on Iran, however, our press lords have regained their cognitive footing with a vengeance.

Like their yellow-press predecessors plumping for the opening conflicts of the modern American empire over a century ago, today’s establishment press is shaping yet one more narrative of interventionist impunity, out of the same hoary materials. Now, as in 1898, American leaders are posing as the selfless guardians of global self-governance; now, as then, the country professes that it will meekly deliver the sovereignty it has defiled back into the hands of a grateful and oppressed mass public on the other side of the field of battle. Now, as then, this newest imperial mission already seems fated to wreak broader havoc across the affected region—at which point, the government will move on to its next destructive adventure, and leave a rearguard contingent of freebooters and crony capitalists to clean up, albeit only in the metaphoric sense of the phrase. And now, as then, the press can’t get enough of war.

The familiar jingoistic media reset is so sweeping that even prominent supposed critics of Trump’s imperial presidency are pushing their way into the front of the cheering section. In my billionaire-ravaged hometown paper, normally reliable Trump-baiting tory columnist George F. Will has turned in a chin-jutting encomium to the rudderless Trump action worthy of William Randolph Hearst. Its headline bears eloquent testimony to Will’s palpable relief to be back in belligerent pundit mode: “At Last, the Credibility of U.S. Deterrence Is Being Restored.” The ensuing prose hallucination exults that “Iran’s regime, whose mantra since its inception in 1979 has been ‘Death to America,’ is near death by the clasped hands of Israel and America.”

That’s only Will’s second sentence. He proceeds nimbly from there to tarring critics of Trump’s surprise monarchical bid to achieve regime change in Iran as uncivilized fifth columnists: “Iran’s protesters dramatically underscored the regime’s barbarism, so those who today regret the regime’s demise reveal their barbarism.” And though Will often poses as a defender of strict constitutional obeisance (at least when it comes to overturning campaign finance laws or dismantling the regulatory state), here he waves away the idea that the intervention is a “war of choice”; it is, rather, a heroic act of national self-preservation on par with Lincoln’s refusal to permit the Southern states to quietly secede. (Yes, he really makes that comparison, though it’s somehow difficult to imagine our first assassinated president as the biggest fan of a state-engineered hit on a foreign leader.) Killing Iran’s head of state and hundreds of its citizens has suddenly turned Trump in Will’s eyes from an American Caesar manqué to the inheritor of the legacy of the Great Emancipator: “Donald Trump’s administration has chosen not to wager U.S. safety on Iran’s abandoning its multi-decade pursuit of nuclear weapons, or on Iran’s acquiring them but not really meaning ‘Death to America.’”

While Will offers the respectable high-church brand of war-mongering, the rest of our mediasphere is reveling in the ugly work of creating some semblance of popular support for Trump’s latest strongman escapade. Toggling over to the news coverage in The Washington Post, there’s a breathless account (supplied of course by wire-service reporters, after the paper shuttered most of its foreign desks) of how Israel’s brutal response to Hamas’s October 7 massacres brought Iran into its crosshairs: “Iran left the status quo behind,” a subhead enthuses, as if a genocidal campaign of state terror were nothing more than the handiwork of a brash tech startup. For a similarly credulous piece of reporting on the raid that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, see The New York Times’ quadruple-bylined paean to good old American spookery, “The C.I.A. Helped Pinpoint a Gathering of Iranian Leaders. Then Israel Struck.”

Of course, Trump himself has since lamented that this “pinpoint” operation also took out America’s top choices to lead the country after Khamenei’s murder. And serious students of Iran’s politics—i.e., people without any chance of a sustained hearing in Trumpian diplomatic or military circles—have observed that, however you grade the operational savvy of this particular mission, killing the supreme leader of a militant Islamic regime who openly courted martyrdom is not the strategic knock-out blow that the Trump White House desperately hopes it will be.

Yet American imperial narratives are rarely upended by mere empirical details. Instead, the fantasies of remote and painless US-engineered takeovers of the country are already flourishing in our mediasphere. The most stunning and shameless example comes, of course, from CBS News, which under the watch of new network owner David Ellison has become a replica of Fox News with fewer adult incontinence ads and blonde anchor-bots.

CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss was exulting on social media over Trump’s Iran invasion and wasted little time in translating those sentiments into marquee coverage. On Sunday, the network’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, opened with an adulatory extended interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the late exiled Shah of Iran, as he auditioned to be the country’s post-invasion leader.

This was a stretch on several levels—Pahlavi hasn’t lived in Iran for nearly 50 years, and his alleged popular support relies in no small part on foreign social-media bot farms, as well as a desperate mood of monarchist nostalgia among some Iranian opposition leaders. Yet 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley was a jingoist Johnny-on-the-spot, feeding Pahlavi softball questions in his luxe Paris headquarters. (An early indication of the many spit-takes in waiting for hapless viewers came in the studio introduction to the segment, when the voiceover relayed the grim developments of the past weekend in Iran, and then awkwardly transitioned into the inapposite revelation that “Scott Pelley was in Paris.”)

Pelley opened with a query about Pahlavi’s leadership ambitions, which yielded a clumsy bit of evasive circumlocution. Iranians “trust me as a transitional leader,” said a man who has spent none of his time on Earth as an adult living with Iranians. “Not as the future king or future president or whatever. I’m totally focused on my mission in life, which is: Let me bring the country to the point where they can make that free choice. That would be enough for me, having said “Mission accomplished.’”

For any aspiring leader in the Middle East to be citing with a straight face George W. Bush’s infamously premature declaration of victory after his similar causeless and illegal invasion of Iraq should set off a torrent of skeptical follow-up questions from any honest journalist interlocutor. But this was Scott Pelley on Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes, so when he did manage to cite the horrific plunder and repression orchestrated by Pahlavi’s dad, he allowed the exiled prince to whitewash the historical record while also (awkwardly) reassuring viewers that state vengeance just wasn’t his jam.

“Look, my father left Iran voluntarily to avoid bloodshed,” Pahlavi said, without of course noting that the prospective bloodshed in question would have been the shah’s own. “And he said, ‘I’m a king. A king doesn’t build his throne on the blood of his own people.’ If the nation today wants me out, I would leave. I would not turn my guns on them.” Apart from Pahlavi’s entirely ahistorical account of monarchy and his father’s reign, his “I will not turn my guns on my subjects” T-shirt could not help but raise many more questions than it answered.

For anyone other than Scott Pelley, that is. The designated war shill for this once-revered investigative journalism franchise opted instead to serve up confections like this: “When you see the courage on the streets that we’re witnessing now, I wonder how that moves you.” Pahlavi teared up repeatedly as he praised the genuine heroism of Iran’s street demonstrators, which then prompted this creaky bit of studio-voiceover explication from Pelley: “Pahlavi told us that there are units within the military and the police that would turn on the hard-line government. He says that many but not all troops could be given amnesty in a process of national reconciliation.”

In other words: Now that CBS’s choice for presumptive Iranian leader-in-waiting has done his Oprah turn before the cameras, he’s pledged to institute a US-grade crackdown on dissidents and critics. No doubt George Will and scores of TV producers and pundits across our failing imperial republic were weeping in concert—in relief over reclaiming their true vocations.

When American pundits talk about China, they often speak in the language of binaries. It is a place of limitless economic opportunity, or of cruel oppression. Its people are either courageous dissidents or brainwashed propagandists. Such polarity affirms an idea of power as monolithic and unchanging and presents only two options for its citizens: complete resistance or complete submission. Against these extremes, the journalist Yi-Ling Liu offers an alternative language: one of dance. Her book, The Wall Dancers, is informed by a metaphor that began to gain purchase among Chinese journalists in the 2000s: “to dance in shackles.” To live in China, Liu writes, is to participate in “a dynamic push and pull between state and society,” a “tango [set] to an erratic rhythm of subversion and acquiescence.” It’s an apt metaphor: A dance is an ongoing negotiation that can unravel as soon as its carefully prescribed choreography is undone. And to evoke the language of dance is to evoke an idea often missing in conversations about China—a recognition of a common humanity; of people just like us, constrained by circumstance, grasping for freedom.

The Wall Dancers—the title also nods to the “Great Firewall” of China, which restricts access to the Internet abroad—is the product of Liu’s eight years reporting about the country, and it tells the stories of the artists and activists she deems “dancers”: individuals pushing for “greater openness and freedom within the state’s shifting bounds.” Tracing the major shifts in the country from the mid-1990s until the present day, it is billed as a book about the Chinese Internet. Yet Liu seems less focused on the Internet per se and more concerned with the vibrant countercultures dotting the country, for whom online life has been a lifeline. There is the former police officer who creates one of the nation’s first gay-dating apps; a pioneering feminist organizer; a science-fiction writer; and an Eminem fan who, faced with the unappealing “conveyor belt future” expected of him and other Chinese youth (good grades, a good job, an apartment and spouse), makes a bid for hip-hop fame. “I wanted to go places,” Kafe Hu recounts (his rapper name is a play on the word coffeepot in Mandarin). “It was like my American dream.”

The arc of The Wall Dancer’s story might seem familiar, in broad strokes, to Western readers. The Internet begins in China as a place of discovery, filled with a sense of anarchic, joyful possibility. As a closeted policeman in the 1990s, when homosexuality was designated a mental disorder, Ma Baoli went to an Internet café, looked up the Chinese term for homosexual, and discovered a like-minded community. He read queer fiction, joined gay chat rooms, watched every gay film he could get his hands on, “sobbing over his takeout noodles,” and felt like “he was no longer alone.” Meanwhile, in Beijing in the 2000s, the freelance writer Lü Pin followed the case of Deng Yujiao, a waitress who fatally stabbed a government official after he tried to contract sexual services from her and turned violent when she refused. “In the pre-internet era,” Liu writes, “Deng’s case might have disappeared and she would have been locked up for good.” This time, however, her story went viral and stoked a public outcry, and the murder charges against her were dropped. Soon after, Lü founded the digital magazine Women’s Voice in order to “popularize China’s feminist movement.” It would become the nation’s most prominent feminist publication, and Lü its best-known voice.

Ma and Lü’s stories speak to the early promise of the Internet, when it was celebrated as a tool for transparency, knowledge, and even democracy. In China’s case, this optimism also reflected the nation’s mood. The state’s embrace of liberal economic reforms was in a delicate dance with the citizenry’s newfound appetite for riches and self-invention. People turned to the private sector to try their luck: Ma, the policeman, was inspired by the rags-to-riches story of an English teacher named Ma Yun (later known as Jack Ma), who set up an e-commerce website that he christened Alibaba. Meanwhile, sci-fi enthusiast Stanley Chen had followed other idealistic and high-achieving university graduates to find a job in Zhongguancun, a northwestern Beijing neighborhood that was becoming home to the nation’s tech start-ups. In 2008, Chen took a job at Google, whose head of operations described the company’s purpose using this equation: “youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation + user focus + don’t be evil = The Miracle of Google.”

This was also the year that China hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics. The opening ceremony was deemed China’s coming-out party to the world: Some restrictions on the Great Firewall were lifted; the slogan “One World, One Dream” was blasted around the capital; President George W. Bush flew in for the opening ceremony and later shook hands with then–Vice President Xi Jinping. All of this seemed to confirm the prognostication that had been offered by another US president eight years earlier. “China has been trying to crack down on the Internet,” Bill Clinton observed, adding: “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” Change of the good kind seemed inevitable; that was the miracle of Google.

Before we get to the downfall—it is coming!—Liu’s account emphasizes how, even early on, China’s Internet was influenced by the world, and especially by America. These worlds may be conceived as entirely separate by many today, but the truth is that cultural and commercial cross-pollination was the order of the day. Liu’s “dancers” found their love for feminism, hip-hop, and science fiction when China opened up to the world. Surplus music records sent to the country as waste products were rescued and sold in underground markets, introducing millions to Madonna, Kurt Cobain, and European metal and opera. Lü, the feminist activist, came to her politics after attending the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing. Jack Ma was inspired to pivot to e-commerce after a business trip to Seattle, where he used a search engine for the very first time.

But it wasn’t only in China’s opening up that American interests could be felt. While globalization brought new cultures, ideas, and a sense of possibility to the nation, it also helped build the very infrastructure that would be used to curtail change. By the late ’90s, the Chinese Communist Party began building ways to control the Internet, with the help of international technology companies. Cisco offered an adaptation of the technology it sold to American corporations seeking to restrict employee access to certain websites. The Great Firewall, historians Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith have observed, was built with “American bricks.” And so the stage was set for the tenuous “dance” that frames Liu’s book: the tango between Chinese “netizens” pushing for change, and the censors charged with scrubbing away their voices. The very popularity of the term netizen to describe the country’s Internet users implies a deep connection between being online and participating in civic life—a life that managed to flourish against the odds, at least in the beginning.

In 2010, Liu herself had believed that “the possibilities of free expression were expanding.” The microblogging app Weibo hosted online civic debates and discussions for its 50 million users, who railed against corruption, followed prominent activists, and protested and shared rebellious memes; people even began to speak of a “Weibo Spring.” One person who did not share this optimism was Eric Liu, who in 2011 began his days at an office in a barren industrial park, where he would log into the backend of Weibo and delete sensitive posts. He was part of a team of 120 people, the human labor at the “bottom of the chain of the command” in an intricate and sweeping surveillance system that encompassed private Internet companies and state organizations. Eric and his colleagues would be given directives from the government on what to exclude, often restricting commentary on corruption, scandals, or—the government’s biggest apparent fear—calls for collective action. They were also ordered to take the initiative and preemptively delete, shadow-ban, or outright ban content or users that might be troublesome. One person examined 3,000 posts an hour under fluorescent lights that were kept on for 24 hours a day, under a banner that read: “The big eyes of Chinese people around the world.”

It’s in Eric’s work that the task of “dancing in shackles” becomes most apparent. Whenever something happened that stoked popular anger—for example, the 2011 bullet-train crash in Wenzhou, the third-deadliest high-speed-rail accident in history, which would turn Eric against his work—the nation’s netizens would track the events in real time, express their sorrow, call for explanations, and rail against attempts at cover-ups. Eric and his colleagues would delete and ban, delete and ban. Netizens soon came up with alternative terms to get around the restrictions. An alpaca dubbed the “grass mud horse” (a semi-homophone for “fuck your mom” in Mandarin) became a subversive meme, pitted against its enemy, the censoring “river crab” (which sounds like harmony in Mandarin), as would the in-joke “404,” which refers to the error screen displayed when one tried to access censored content. Others would download VPNs to jump the firewall entirely. (Eric is now in the United States, working as an editor at a news site founded by a Chinese human rights activist.)

By the mid-2010s, the sense of possibility on the Chinese Internet began to disappear. Feminist activists were arrested; hip-hop artists were asked to assume a more patriotic stance; LGBTQ+ advocacy groups were increasingly monitored and cut off from funding. Liu traces this tightening to the 2018 National People’s Congress, which abolished the two-term limit on the presidency and paved the way for Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power in the CCP. And yet, true to its argument that China can never be understood in isolation from the rest of the world (and thus pathologized), the book charts this development alongside long-term political movements across the globe. The 2008 financial crash, Edward Snowden’s spying revelations, the Arab Spring, and the rise of authoritarianism and far-right nationalism worldwide particularly after the 2016 US presidential election have all played a role by shaking confidence in Western liberal capitalism and encouraging the CCP to further restrict freedoms. Fearing the contagion of the Western world, the party moved to make China’s Internet a walled ecosystem, with its own versions of WhatsApp, ChatGPT, and even its most famous digital export of late, TikTok. (TikTok was created by the Chinese company ByteDance, which also runs its own Chinese version of the app, called Douyin. In January, ByteDance agreed to a deal to transfer TikTok’s US operations to a group of American and international investors, so the app could continue to be used in the States.)

“I thought everything about America was amazing,” Kafe Hu, the young rapper who had chased his American dream in the 2000s, tells Liu in 2020. But he had since realized that “I don’t need the American dream. Like, why did Americans elect Donald Trump?… When Americans criticize China, I don’t trust what they say anymore. I’m, like, your government is pretty shit too.”

“To go online” in China, Liu writes, means something different than it does anywhere else; it is to enter a realm of coded speech and memes with double meaning, a parallel universe with its own versions of globally famous websites and apps. If there is something missing in Liu’s book—which is written with deep knowledge and love—it is a critical analysis of what the Internet meant to her subjects, and to the country, in the first place. Perhaps this is obvious: The stories of her “dancers” are peppered with observations about how it is easier to find fellow travelers online, given the restrictions that exist in person. “If your body cannot participate,” Lü, the feminist organizer, tells her, “you have to re-create the front lines elsewhere.”

Yet it seems to me that thrumming beneath the euphoria of the 2000s Internet, with its flourishing of virtual speech and civic life, was a shared recent history in which embodied speech and civic life had proved calamitous. The book makes a glancing reference to the Chinese writer Wang Xiaobo’s seminal essay on the “Silent Majority,” which discusses how his experience watching students turn on each other in middle school during the Cultural Revolution led him to embrace silence for much of his life, and to become wary of equating speech with an expression of real belief. “I never tried to publish what I wrote,” Wang noted of much of his early life, and “still maintained my silence. The reasons for this silence are simple: I could not trust those who belonged to the societies of speech.”

Reading about the early lives of Liu’s “dancers,” I was struck by how isolated, frustrated, and even paranoid they seemed, filled with hopes they could not safely fulfill or even articulate in person. They came to the Internet for release, and under the cover of giddy, freewheeling anonymity and boundless connection, it delivered—for a while. Decades later, the treatment has become the cause. Both China’s model of state control, and the dominance of private corporations in America, give the lie to the seductive idea that the Internet was a democratic medium for and by the people. Just as an overworked censor might sit in an office block in Tianjin, scrubbing mentions of the latest government scandal, an overworked censor sits on the other side of the world, in San Francisco, working according to the whims of a (likely Trump-pandering) billionaire.

From the early romance of the 2000s Web to its paranoid, doomscrolling fall: In our time, two realities exist at once. We live in an era of deeply entrenched nationalism in both China and America. And yet, at the same time, the Chinese Internet has profoundly shaped the Western zeitgeist: TikTok has led to the rise of short-form video content everywhere (and more recently, seen American zoomers “Chinamaxxing”); Temu and Shein have transformed e-commerce; and the online nihilism of Chinese youth has been embraced far and wide. By the time Liu’s book draws to its close, the early-2000s hustle culture of China has come to an exhausted standstill; the economy has slowed, youth unemployment has skyrocketed, and the lucky ones who do have jobs hate their stultifying and all-consuming routines. A new counterculture has emerged: one that valorizes doing nothing. Viral terms like involution, tang ping (lying flat), and bai lan (let rot) speak to a deep disillusionment with modern life. That they have struck a chord internationally suggests that despite the defensive nationalism sweeping the globe, the forces shaping us, which are making life seem so tiring and the future so foreclosed, are one and the same everywhere.

This could have been a very different book about the Chinese Internet. Liu’s subjects are broadly young, educated, and progressive, though she occasionally mentions another crucial group of netizens: highly patriotic and angry young men, who were first deemed fen qing (angry youth) and are now known as “little pinks.” “A more plural Internet did not necessarily incubate a more liberal online populace,” Liu writes of the emergence of this movement back in 2008, which now reads like a huge understatement. Given this, I wondered how wide a vista The Wall Dancers really opens up on the nation: Would this be akin to trying to learn about the contemporary US by following the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America? There are rare moments when the work of activists spills into the mainstream, and while countercultural memes and posts do go viral, the true extent of their influence—and the number who support them—seems less clear. Then again, that was the very point of the Internet for Liu’s “dancers,” and its early liberating promise: It could be diffuse, fluid, and impossible to pin down, thus creating more room for dance.

That these artists and activists might be relatively small in number and on the political fringes does not diminish their work or make them less “real” as people. By the end of the book, Liu’s “dancers” are either living abroad in exile or have opted for a quieter life away from the big cities. You could see this as a sign of defeat, an indication of the narrowing of political possibility in our decade so far (a metaphor made literal by the fact that, as Liu observes in the conclusion, the Chinese Internet is now actually shrinking, due to increasing censorship and algorithmically honed content-moderation programs). But not everyone sees it that way. Liu gives the final word to the feminist movement, whose ethos of grassroots care and community has provided a crucial antidote to the trend of isolating, depressive withdrawal. “When so much of society has become atomised,” one activist tells her, feminist organising “gave young women the spiritual oxygen to speak out.” Their exiled compatriots in America are pessimistic about the future, but they disagree. There’s still plenty of work to do.

In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town.

The university’s most recent changes include the consolidation of African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies into a single “Social and Cultural Analysis” department, as well as a UT system-wide policy asking faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in the classroom. While the shift seems sudden, these attacks are in line with an ant-DEI, right-wing agenda that has been years in the making.

Both measures are purposefully vague on the timeline, procedure, and funding. “We are in difficult times,” said UT board of regents chair Kevin Eltife during the meeting at which the topics policy was approved. “Vagueness can be our friend.”

For the impacted students and faculty, this lack of specificity serves only to plunge their work and studies into a state of precarity. Reid Pinckard, a first-year PhD student in American Studies, said when the consolidation was announced on February 12, “it genuinely sucked the energy out of the office we were in.” In chats with other graduate students, the measure also caused a “frenzy,” he said. “There were questions like, ‘What are we supposed to do? How can we handle this?’ People that are graduating this semester were like, ‘Is my degree going to be in American Studies, or is it going to be this or that?’ That’s really what this is serving to do, which is to make people feel like they don’t know what’s going on.”

As a teaching assistant, Áine McGehee Marley, a third-year PhD student in African and African Diaspora Studies, said similar concerns rang true for her class of around 50 undergraduate students. “They’re really worried and scared,” said McGehee Marley. “There’s a general fear among a lot of people of ‘what am I allowed to do and what am I not allowed to do,’ and ‘even if I thought I was allowed to do something, could that still get me in trouble?’” 

In November of last year, McGehee Marley and six other students participated in a sit-in at the university’s main tower. At the demonstration, they requested to meet with the school’s provost only to receive notices of disciplinary actions for disruptive conduct and unauthorized entry. The university suspended one student and issued deferred suspensions to the rest of the students, all of whom were undergrads except for McGehee Marley.

The university’s repressive efforts prompted further organizing in support of the students facing disciplinary charges and against UT’s consolidation and President Trump’s overarching “Compact for Higher Education” plan. Throughout the fall semester and into the new year, a coalition of campus and community groups—including UT Grad Workers Union, Palestine Solidarity Committee, Texas Students for DEI, Not Our Texas, and the Austin chapter of Students for a Democratic Society—continued to organize protests, marches, and teach-ins, arrange press conferences, demonstrations, and letter writing campaigns against both the consolidation and Trump’s education plan.

Nonetheless, the university moved forward with the consolidation as expected. “We made it very clear where we stood on this issue, and none of that seemed to matter,” said Alfonso Ayala III, a second-year PhD student in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “There’s a feeling of complete disrespect and disavowal of the value our work has to the university community.”

Yet more students have also become interested in learning about race, gender, and ethnic studies programs. “Since the news has come out, I have had a lot of students asking me about ethnic and gender studies, some expressing interest in joining or getting a minor in it,” said Madee Puente-Bonilla, a teaching assistant and second-year dual master’s student in Women’s and Gender Studies and Information Studies. “The consolidation [and] elimination of these departments has had the opposite effect of what the administration wants. What I’ve seen with my students is that it’s been pushing them towards these departments.”

Out of such desolate circumstances comes an opportunity, or perhaps even a responsibility, to lean into new structures. What comes next, according to Lena Mose-Vargas, a third-year Ph.D. student in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, is unknown because “Texas moves quickly and vaguely,” but it will require “a lot of improvisation and ambition.”

Mose-Vargas said to move forward means to think about alternatives to the institution. “Understanding that they don’t want us to have these spaces, and that they will use any measure they can to make sure we don’t have as much potential to create change in these spaces, mandates that we find ways outside of the university to learn what we want to learn and to have the discussions we want to have.”

On February 12, Austin’s SDS chapter had planned a teach-in about the consolidation, aimed at informing students to prepare them for when the measure would inevitably be announced. It just so happened that the consolidation was announced that morning.

SDS member Alfredo Campos said, as a result, turnout to the teach-in was higher than expected. “Our teach-ins are some of our less popular actions. We usually get no more than 20 people [but] around 50 people showed up,” said Campos, a government freshman who’s also minoring in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies. “We had a packed classroom, which shows that the secrecy around consolidation is something that benefits the administration and is intentional. They don’t want people to know because they know that if people did know, they’d be rightfully angry.”

While race, gender, and ethnic studies programs are being dismantled, the university continues to trumpet the School of Civic Leadership and its right-wing-funded think tank, the Civitas Institute—both of which idealize free enterprise, conservative thought, and Western civilization without critical consideration of race, gender, or class. (This has been called hypocritical given the race, gender, and ethnic studies programs have been consolidated due to supposed “inconsistencies and fragmentation,” yet the School of Civic Leadership is not seen as redundant to the College of Liberal Arts’ classics, government, economics, and philosophy departments.)

Despite growing up in the Rio Grande Valley, a majority–Hispanic and Latino area of Texas, Campos was never exposed to Latino history in school. It was only after coming to UT-Austin and enrolling in courses offered by the Mexican American and Latina/o Studies department that he was able to learn his own history.

“I had no explanation for why the educational system was so poor [where I’m from, or] why there’s very little economic mobility,” Campos said, until he finally got to look at history through a critical lens: “how the border moved past Mexicans; how, when they were made US citizens with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a lot of property was stolen; how, through legal and violent means, they were excluded from participating in society and reduced to laborers.” It was then, after critical analysis of this history, that Campos “started applying it to how I think about the Valley, and it makes sense why I was never taught this information.”

“A history of the United States without explanation of race or gender is an incomplete history,” Campos said. “It’s a white supremacist history,”

Campos’ experience makes clear that the consolidation of such worthwhile departments is a tremendous loss, chief among them is how the restructuring adversely impacts the students who have learned, grown, and been shaped by the affected programs. Karma Chávez, the chair of the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, said it plainly: “It’s going to be bad in every possible way, and students are going to be the biggest losers.”

Even more, Lauren Gutterman, an associate professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, worries that consolidation is not the end point. “My biggest fear is that this is a temporary measure on the path to elimination.” She recalled, for instance, Texas Christian University’s consolidation-turned-elimination of its race and gender studies programs—and there are many other examples. A little over a week after UT-Austin’s announcement, UT–San Antonio said that it will dissolve its Department of Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality Studies by September, folding it into another department. Texas A&M eliminated its women’s and gender studies degree programs last year while restricting teaching on race and gender. Texas Tech, the University of Houston, and the University of North Texas have all implemented similar policies of censorship, limiting discussion of race, gender, and sexuality in the classroom and canceling courses and exhibitions that confront and critique systems of oppression and injustice.

Pinckard, whose work engages with Southern politics, made note that what so often starts out in the South reverberates elsewhere—which is especially the case when the Trump administration cuts federal funding and then incentivizes adherence to its right-wing agenda with funding. The University of Michigan, where McGehee Marley went for undergrad prior to her joining UT’s Black Studies PhD program, axed its DEI offices last year. At UT, it’s all a “part of an ongoing attack,” Gutterman said. “And it won’t end here.”

If there’s any silver lining to higher education’s ongoing unraveling, maybe it lies in a focused commitment to imagining alternatives to learning that are free from the institution itself, as Mose-Vargas suggests. Just as much, it also means looking to students like Campos, who continue to “fight tooth and nail” to preserve these departments. “If I get hit with conduct charges, so be it,” he said. “I’m not going to scurry away.”

As the US and Israel wage a catastrophic war on Iran, the leadership of the ostensible opposition party in Washington is failing to muster an urgent, anti-war message, instead resorting to limited process critiques and vague handwringing. While the war expands across the region, and the death toll mounts—including at least 180 people incinerated at a primary school in Minab, most of them young girls—the Democratic response to what could end up being the biggest geopolitical disaster of the 21st century is foot-dragging, silence, and sleepy, feigned opposition long after the deed is done.

On February 28, the day the United States and Israel launched their latest attack, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, one of the top two most powerful Democrats in the country, issued a press statement that scolded the administration over its failures to fulfill its obligations to the legislative branch but did not take a definitive position on the war itself. “The administration has not provided Congress and the American people with critical details about the scope and immediacy of the threat,” he said.

At times, Schumer seemed to play both sides, expressing critiques that could be read as either pro-war or anti-war, depending on one’s proclivities. “When I talked to Secretary Rubio, I implored him to be straight with Congress and the American people about the objectives of these strikes and what comes next,” he said. “Iran must never be allowed to attain a nuclear weapon, but the American people do not want another endless and costly war in the Middle East when there are so many problems at home.”

Schumer did call for the Senate to “reassert its constitutional duty by passing our resolution to enforce the War Powers Act,” referring to efforts in both the House and Senate to compel a congressional vote on authorization for the war on Iran. While holding such a vote is an important way for legislators to assert some kind of authority over the president’s unilateral and illegal war, it is not enough at this critical juncture to be merely in favor of members of Congress going on the record: We need lawmakers to publicly and formally oppose the war.

Even if Trump had consulted Congress in the proper manner, the war would still be a flagrant violation of international law and a catastrophe in moral and policy terms—just as the Iraq War, which Schumer voted to authorize in 2003, was. Top leaders have a duty to loudly and clearly oppose the war in and of itself, not just appeal to the domestic legal particulars by which it is being waged. The War Powers Resolution ought to be a vehicle for delivering an unequivocal message of “stop this war now,” not a means of deflecting responsibility by referencing poor procedure.

House Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries hasn’t been much better than Schumer. Appearing March 1 on WBLS’s Open Line, he did gesture slightly more strongly at the idea that the war on Iran should not happen, but he still failed to say clearly that the war must end now: “There should be no preemptive need to go after Iran right now related to their nuclear program if you just said to the American people a few months ago that it’s gone. So you either lied then or you’re lying now. And, by the way, this whole notion of regime change—nobody’s feeling that. Now, the Ayatollah was a bad actor. We get that. But we can’t start wars all across the world because we disagree with the people who are in leadership, however bad they may be.”

And though Jeffries, like Schumer, vocalized his support for the War Powers resolution in the House, he dragged his feet for eight critical days before doing so. The New York Times broke the news that Trump was deploying the largest armada in over 20 years to surround Iran on February 18. From that day until February 26—when Jeffries and Schumer belatedly signed off on the War Powers vote a week after it was first proposed—neither Jeffries nor Schumer issued a single press release or social media post about the pending attack. When they finally did, to arrange for votes either this Monday or Tuesday, the war was long underway, and dozens of Iranian officials, including their head of state, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had already been killed.

All of this would be concerning even if the war had majority support (again, as the Iraq War did at its outset). But it’s important to understand just how unpopular this war is with the US public overall—particularly Democrats, on whose behalf Democratic leadership ostensibly works. Before Trump’s unprovoked attack on February 28, only 7 percent of Democrats supported a war on Iran. After the attack, the number was still 7 percent, with 74 percent opposed. This is three points lower than the percent of Democrats, 10 percent, who think Trump rightfully won the 2020 election. The broader public isn’t much more enthusiastic; a Reuters poll on Monday found just 27 percent overall approval for the US-Israeli strikes, with 43 percent opposed and 29 percent unsure. If Democratic leadership equivocated on whether Biden stole the 2020 election, our media would rightfully insist they had lost their minds. But when leadership refuses to take a firm position that nearly three-quarters of their voters do, at a ratio of 10 to one, it’s treated as business as usual. 

There is reason to be concerned that Democratic leaders are deliberately delaying meaningful opposition. Journalist Aída Chávez reported on February 24 that House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats had tried to delay a vote on Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie’s Iran war powers resolution, and that these efforts contributed to a significant delay, pushing the vote until after the war had already begun. This is consistent with reporting by Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill, and Murtaza Hussain for Drop Site News on February 20 that in June 2025, when Trump was mulling  a previous strike on Iran, “a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily.” According to an unnamed congressional aide, Democrats knew the war would be a political catastrophe. “That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it,” Drop Site reports.

There is a debate to be had about what kind of action is appropriate in the face of an unjust war of aggression being waged jointly by the most heavily funded military in the world and the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East. For those who were elected to represent the US, the lowest bar is to at least register opposition: Make it known, make it clear, do whatever you can do to throw sand in the gears until something changes.

Calling for a vote for every member in Congress to go on record days into a rapidly expanding war, without even saying whether you’re against the war itself, does not meet the bare minimum standard of an opposition party supposedly concerned with upholding international and domestic law. Just as in the lead-up to the Iraq War, people are out in the streets in cities and towns across the US to register their opposition to this war. “We call for an end to the bombing and the economic warfare of sanctions that has affected the Iranian working-class the most for decades,” Grassroots Global Justice Alliance proclaimed in a February 28 statement. The least elected representatives can do is say “no” out loud as the Trump administration hurls the world into the hell of an expanding war.

Representative Rashida Tlaib’s statement, released on February 28, shows us it’s possible. “Congress must stop the bloodshed by immediately reconvening to exert its war powers and stop this deranged president,” she said. “But let’s be clear: warmongering politicians from both parties support this illegal war, and it will take a mass anti-war movement to stop it.”

It’s not enough to check the box, to do the bare minimum, to reinforce every argument for war only to balk at the process and ask whether there’s a “plan” for after the myriad war crimes have already been committed. The only way to read this half-hearted response from the Democratic Party leadership is de facto support. Inertia was serving the interest of the pro-war consensus and the Israel lobby that lavishes funding on both Schumer and Jeffries (Jeffries is by far the largest recipient of pro-Israel money in the House). But this is a position only 7 percent of their constituents support. So they did the next best thing: delay, hand-wring, remain conspicuously silent for over a week, and then—once the dogs of war had duly slipped—rush to look vaguely opposed to an attack that 93 percent of their constituents do not support.

On the occasion of Larry Summers’s latest, and seemingly comprehensive, resignation from Harvard in disgrace, it’s instructive to look back at his first one, which he announced exactly 20 years ago last week. It was said to be a response to institutional revulsion over a thing he’d said more than a year earlier about women’s “intrinsic inaptitude” for math and science.

But the precipitating event behind his departure did not actually have much to do with his edgelord misogyny, or his decision to antagonize the celebrity professor Cornel West. The episode revolved around Andrei Shliefer, a close friend, vacation partner, and protégé Summers had sent to Russia on behalf of the World Bank in 1991 to oversee a program to rapidly privatize 225,000 state-owned enterprises. A 22,000-word magazine feature that an anonymous gadfly had mailed in manila envelopes to several senior faculty members showed how Shleifer had exploited the job and the inside information that came with it to turn himself into a mid-level oligarch while the country literally starved.

The fallout was so near-ruinous for Summers he turned to his good friend Jeffrey Epstein for assistance, according to emails the sex- trafficking pedophile of mystery sent his other disgraced friend Peter Mandelson as the two men were frantically lobbying to water down post-crisis financial reforms in 2010. Headed to Davos, Mandelson mentioned he’d be seeing Summers, and Epstein offered cryptic advice: “when larrys close friend ANDRE Schleifer [sic], had trouble at harvard I played the role you play for me. support -friendship-advice.suggest to him you play the same role as I did with Andre Shleifer, if he is not jet lagged he will then open up to you.” Mandelson replied that he was bringing a financial regulator to the meeting and Epstein pressed, “great, is [then Chancellor of the Exchequer alistair] darling more under control? but you should take the opportunity to mention andre, he will then know he can trust you.” A few months later, now giving mild blackmail-lite vibes, Epstein brought it up a third time: “don’t forget to mention ANDRE [sic] SHLEIFER to Larry. his friend got himself in trouble at Harvard, I was there for him 1000%. Larry will then understand , our friendship.” Mandelson, by now perhaps a little creeped out, replied: “Remember I did mention at Davos and he was rather embarrassed.”

And for good reason, though we surely only know the vague contours of the case: Shleifer was, like Summers, a wunderkind economics professor. By 1992, he was running a whole Moscow-based Harvard-sponsored economic Seal Team Six backed by tens of millions of dollars in congressionally appropriated USAID funding intended to help transform Russia into a sophisticated, well-oiled market economy. By 1994, Shleifer and wife, who worked for hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer, had partnered with then-unknown financier named Len Blavatnik (current estimated net worth: $30 billion) to invest in Gazprom, a Russian operator of the country’s telecom monopoly, together with a constellation of aluminum smelters and countless other former assets of the Soviet state. Shleifer was directly overseeing Gazprom’s privatizing raid on behalf of Harvard, and the merger documents for the Harvard deal were drafted pro bono by a Shleifer deputy in exchange for gaudy perks like first crack at the company’s stock offerings (in his father’s name) and special treatment for his new girlfriend’s mutual fund. The Harvard boys deputized a summer intern to analyze obscure data on oil and gas prices and liquidity—ostensibly because oil and gas were “at the forefront of privatization” but actually to guide their own black-market stock purchases. It was all an orgy of frenzied state plunder and insider trading—eerily portentous of the one that took shape in the first days of the second Trump term under the direction of Scott Bessent, George Soros’s main captain of Eastern Bloc economic sabotage during the 1990s.

By 1997, the whole Harvard crew had been kicked out of Russia in disgrace; a vendor reported its activities to USAID, which suspended its funding as an investigation proceeded. While the Harvard boys had been blowing their government funds on limo drivers and girlfriends’ tennis lessons, the Russian GDP, laid waste by mobsters and marauders bearing fancy credentials, shrank to half its 1991 size, and Boris Yeltsin’s approval rating plummeted to 3 percent. It was clearly time for an exit strategy: Summers began laying the groundwork for casting his protégé as some kind of post–Cold War econometric sage—a “predictor” of the financial chaos he had so shamelessly micromanaged for his own financial benefit. A 1995 paper Shleifer had cowritten on arbitrage, we were told, had prophesied the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management that almost triggered a trillion-dollar global financial meltdown. As Shleifer slinked away from the gilded wreckage of the Russian economy, Summers was busy verbally abusing a female regulator who, having actually predicted the crisis, had attempted to centralize and force transparency upon the trade of the unregulated derivatives in which LTCM had recklessly trafficked. In 1999, Shleifer won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, in what the award’s governing body called a “continuation of the empirical tradition that really started with Lawrence Summers.” Two years later, Summers was named the youngest-ever president of Harvard, a perch from which he felt more than comfortable ordering academic underlings to “protect” his protégé from naysayers and federal snoops. Litigation over the Russia debacle would ultimately cost Harvard tens of millions of dollars. “I expressed to Dean Knowles,” Summers testified in a 2002 deposition, “that I was concerned to make sure that Professor Shleifer remained at Harvard because I felt that he made a great contribution to the economics department…and expressed the hope that Dean Knowles would be attentive to that.”

Indeed he was: Andrei Shleifer is a Harvard professor to this day! But Summers is—and it’s hard to wrap my mind around this—somehow not. It was just a few months ago that the Democratic Party’s $50 million-a-year brain trust at the Center for American Progress was tapping the endlessly discredited economist as a lead architect of an initiative it called “Project 2029.” This was meant to be the Democrats’ answer to the dystopian blueprint for extralegally eradicating federal regulation that the Trump administration began to enact at a dizzying pace following Elon Musk’s successful hacks into the Treasury Department’s payment systems. Project 2025 comprehensively destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, commenced the abolition of most public health and disaster relief programs, gutted staffs charged with monitoring weather patterns and infectious disease epidemics and employment and inflation and air traffic, nearly halved the workforce dedicated to auditing the tax returns of the affluent, eliminated virtually all of the personnel devoted to policing corruption and fraud within federal agencies, and vaporized the agency formerly known as USAID. The explicit goal of Project 2025 was to inflict “trauma” on federal workers in retaliation for the elevated rates at which they historically voted for Democrats; the obvious ulterior motive was the bargain-basement usurpation of publicly owned assets ranging from taxpayer data to riverfront real estate on the Potomac. But the overall effect was much broader and existential: the abolition of government, or any institutions whatsoever, from ever-expanding swaths of public life. No attempt to genuinely improve the material conditions of American voters will be possible until the country launches an almost incomprehensibly ambitious crusade to rebuild that capacity to govern. And to mastermind this Herculean endeavor, the Democrats seriously chose… Larry Summers? A man whose intellect seems genuinely invigorated by a debate with his billionaire sex offender buddy over the costs and benefits of first-class versus NetJet?

Even his defenders surely grasp that rebuilding gutted institutions is just conspicuously not Larry Summers’s thing. During the Clinton years, he heartily cheered the mass shuttering of assembly lines from Appalachia to El Segundo, the disposal of toxic waste on Third World countries, and the repeal of the New Deal laws that transformed American banking from a hodgepodge of pyramid schemes into a reliable and safe fraud-resistant financial system that was the envy of the world. As that financial system stood on the precipice of an unprecedented bank run triggered by the secret mass-replication of unregulated derivatives pegged to $125,000 homes lavished with $600,000 valuations, Summers wrote a fawning ode to Milton Friedman, the late “great liberator” who had “convinc[ed] people of the importance of allowing free markets to operate.” Cribbing Friedman’s own encomium for John Maynard Keynes, Summers wrote that “any honest Democrat will admit that we are all now Friedmanites.”

After the 2008 crisis, Summers bullied colleagues who accurately blamed the calamity on the deregulation he and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin had fomented while single-handedly negotiating the proposed federal stimulus package down to $800 billion worth of mostly tax cuts from a more ambitious $1.3 trillion. This larger package would have funded more transportation projects, and the finance-addled Summers bore a bizarre personal animus toward these undertakings that former Democratic Representative Pete DeFazio of Oregon summed up bluntly: “Larry Summers hates infrastructure.”

Thirteen years later, when Congress and Joe Biden were hammering out the $1.9 trillion Covid-19 stimulus bill, Summers made the cable news rounds to argue the package was three times bigger than it should have been. He then took an endless series of gloating victory laps when inflation began to materialize, deputizing surrogates like his former student Catherine Rampell and longtime minion Jason Furman to malign the notion that inflation was opportunistically caused by corporate price gouging as a “conspiracy theory.” It took Elon Musk wielding a chain saw under the influence of a battery of controlled substances for Larry Summers to so much as consider that there might be a toxic level of austerity that he might not approve of. And even when he did acknowledge that DOGE might be destroying democracy, his heart was clearly elsewhere: He spent much of 2025 as he had the year before, posting on the scourge of American “antisemitism” and the “moral weakness” displayed by Harvard University students protesting the genocide in Gaza. There were, in short, few individuals as singularly unsuited to formulating a blueprint for recovering from the domestic version of “How Harvard Lost Russia” as Larry Summers—which is of course why Democratic Party elites were hell-bent on giving him the job.

Even when his diabolically embarrassing series of e-mails to Jeffrey Epstein about a younger extramarital conquest he nicknamed “Peril” (she is the daughter of a longtime Chinese Communist Party official) were made public late last year, it seemed certain that Summers’s lucrative career spouting elite conventional wisdom at Davos and on various media properties owned by David Ellison would survive the cringemaxxing. But then the news emerged that Harvard had launched an investigation into… two students who had posted about his final lecture on social media. That’s right: The more urgent moral lapse here, in the view of Harvard’s overseers, wasn’t Summers’s own depraved personal and professional transgressions; no, it was improperly publicizing Summers’s own comments.

This Mafia-like reflex speaks volumes about the world Larry Summers prospered in, and it bodes ill for the durability of his recently announced retirement. I would like to believe that Summers’s resignations from OpenAI and Harvard represent a clean break between him and the institutions that have enabled his tyranny over the federal budget and the national discourse. But it’s far more likely that this determined survivor of the pillaging of the Russian economy and the disastrous financialization of the American one sees in the fallout from his self-administered “Peril” a chance to lie low before resuming his familiar rounds at Davos and in cable green rooms. Our financial elites are old hands, after all, in downplaying and burying indelicate personal scandals—and they need obliging and nominally Democratic stooges to continue hymning the glorious revival of American Friedmanomics.

On Saturday morning, after President Trump launched an unnecessary, unauthorized, and unconstitutional attack on Iran, US Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie did their jobs as members of Congress.

The California Democrat and the Kentucky Republican had already cosponsored a War Powers Act resolution in hopes of thwarting a rush to war with Iran. Now the war was on. Bombs were dropping, missiles flying, and people dying. So the bipartisan team demanded that Congress step up. Khanna immediately announced, “Trump has launched an illegal regime change war in Iran with American lives at risk. Congress must convene on Monday to vote on US Rep. Thomas Massie[’s] & my [War Powers Resolution] to stop this.”

Seeking to force a congressional debate about the war—as Khanna and Massie are doing in the House, and as Tim Kaine (D-VA) has proposed in the Senate—is a vital first step in pushing back against Trump.

It won’t be easy. Despite a notable level of congressional opposition to Trump’s new war, efforts to establish even the most basic counterbalances to presidential war making will face overwhelming odds. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who serves as Trump’s enforcer in the chamber, will do everything in his power to thwart any meaningful effort to renew the constitutionally mandated role of Congress as the arbiter of matters of war and peace. The same goes for the president.

Yet that does not change the fact that Khanna, Massie, and Kaine are doing their constitutional duty.

Like all members of the House, Khanna and Massie took office only after swearing oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” By reasserting the role of Congress as a check and balance on presidential war making, they are honoring that oath.

The question at this point is whether a sufficient number of House members, and their Senate colleagues, will join them and use their authority under the Constitution to object to Trump’s open-ended attack before it metastasizes into a broader war that could engulf the Middle East.

Even as apologists for executive overreach in general—and this president in particular—spin their self-serving arguments regarding war powers, the constitutional primacy of Congress when it comes to war and peace is not up for debate. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution plainly reads, “The Congress shall have Power…to declare War.”

No mention is made of the president in that essential statement by the initiators of the American experiment. And in case you need even more evidence that this is what the drafters of the Constitution intended, just look at the notes from the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

Roger Sherman, a delegate from Connecticut, moved to establish that nothing in their exposition of the powers of the executive branch of the federal government they were establishing should be conceived as authorizing the president to “make war.”

“The executive should be able to repel and not to commence war,” explained Sherman. The resolution was resoundingly approved by the convention.

Pennsylvania delegate James Wilson confirmed that assessment, explaining, “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress.”

That should have settled it: An executive might assume the mantle of commander in chief, but only to defend the country; never to wage a kingly war of whim—as Trump has done in Iran.

But what of the War Powers Act of 1973? Tortured readings of the act by successive Democratic and Republican administrations have tried to suggest that the measure gives presidents flexibility with regard to war-making. But that flexibility is explicitly limited. According to an assessment of the act by the Congressional Research Service, “the powers of the President as Commander in Chief to introduce US Armed Forces into hostilities are limited, ‘exercised only pursuant to’ a declaration of war or other specific statutory authorization from Congress, or a ‘national emergency created by attack on’ the United States or its Armed Forces.”

It’s stating the obvious to say that Trump’s war on Iran does not meet these criteria. When announcing the attack, Trump claimed, “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people.” But instead of discussing “imminent threats,” he recalled complaints that were, in some cases, decades old.

As CNN explained, “The US and Israel launched this attack without obvious provocation.” Even after the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was confirmed on Saturday, the president was still struggling to articulate a mission statement.

So where does that leave us? When asked by Time magazine to explain whether Trump’s strikes on Iran were legally justified, David Janovsky, of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, answered,

The short answer is no. There’s no indication that there’s any sort of circumstance that would give the President the unilateral authority to order military action. It’s true that presidents have some inherent authority to deploy the military as Commander in Chief, but that’s really limited to true emergency circumstances where there is an attack underway that needs to be repelled, or maybe an extremely clear imminent attack. But there’s no suggestion that that’s the case today—that would make the strikes illegal.

Bottom line: This is an illegitimate and illegal war in which Iranian civilians—many of them schoolchildren—and US troops have already been killed, and in which more deaths are tragically predictable.

“There’s nothing in the Constitution that authorizes the president to do this,” Massie says of Trump’s war. “If we’re going to put lives at risk, we need to say what the boundaries are for the engagement and what success looks like so that they can come home when it’s over, when we’ve reached our objectives.”

That is the sworn duty of Congress.

Speaker Johnson may refuse to recognize that fact. So, too, may Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD).

But Massie is right when he says, “This is not our war. Even if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution.”

On Saturday morning, Donald Trump made a brief speech outlining the rationale for the war of choice against Iran that the United States and Israel had launched hours before. Amid the rambling, one motive seemingly became clear: regime change. With typical grandiosity, Trump intoned, “Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand.… When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

Yet, the following day, Trump told The Atlantic that he was open to negotiations with the government he’d just said he wanted to remove. “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them,” he said.

It’s hardly surprising that someone as erratic and mendacious as Trump is talking out of both sides of his mouth, even about something as serious as a regional war. His Saturday speech was filled with contradictions. He claimed, for instance, that Iran’s nuclear program had been “obliterated” and then said “it will be totally again obliterated.” The phrase “again obliterated” neatly encapsulates a foreign policy with no regard for either facts or logic—which is presumably one reason mainstream outlets such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic are signaling their skepticism about Trump’s war.

If Trump’s interview with The Atlantic is anything to go by, the president seems to want a reprise of the so-called 12-day war the US and Israel launched last June: a short display of US/Israeli military prowess designed to cow the Iranians into yielding during negotiations. This might be described as Trump’s minimum agenda, but it is combined with other contradictory goals that are much more dangerous and far-reaching. Mixing “the art of the deal” with “the art of war” is not a simple proposition. Wars have a way of spiraling out of control—particularly when one side makes incendiary moves, such as the unprovoked assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, that all but invite scorched-earth reactions.

But as with so much of Trump’s agenda, the chaos is perhaps the point. Maybe Trump was willing to join in a war that had been advocated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the last four decades because, for many advocates for this war, the prospect of Iran’s collapsing into turmoil and becoming a failed state is a welcome one.

One notable feature of the two wars Trump has launched has been the assassination of not just top Iranian leaders such as Khamenei but also opposition leaders and dissidents. The fact that the US/Israeli attacks have led to the death of opponents of Iran’s theocracy points to a dire conclusion: that the goal of these wars is not just regime change but regime obliteration, destroying the possibility of Iran’s functioning as a coherent polity in the future.

On June 23, 2025, Israel bombed Evin Prison, known to house political prisoners. As Human Rights Watch noted, the bombing included “prison areas known to hold many activists and dissidents.” In the current war, the same targeting of opposition figures can be seen. As international relations scholar Van Jackson, who teaches at Victoria University of Wellington, observed,

There are claims circulating widely on social media that Israel has been targeting leftists in Iran, in hopes of destroying any coherent political force from cohering in the country. Israel has also definitely targeted the building where the leader of the Green Movement, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, has been under house arrest since 2011, which would further support that claim.

The attempted assassination of Mousavi is particularly telling, since he helped lead the Green Movement uprising of 2009 and has been under house arrest. Mousavi could be a leading figure in any peaceful Iranian transition to democracy, an outcome that the US and Israel seem to want to forestall.

Aaron Bastani, cofounder of Novara Media, points out that the attacks have also been killing border guards along the Iraq/Iran border, which would make it easier for separatist groups to smuggle in weapons. “Killing this many border guards is a clear signal,” Bastani points out. “It is about separatism, balkanization and rendering Iran a failed state.”

Israel and the US are barely hiding this agenda. Axios quotes an Israeli official as saying, “The goal is to create all the conditions for the downfall of the Iranian regime.” Axios adds that “Israel is targeting the entire Iranian leadership—political and military, past, present, and future.” (The “future” part is most concerning, since it suggests a goal of making sure no faction, of whatever political orientation, takes over a unified Iranian state.) And Trump admitted as much when he told ABC News that the people the US had identified to possibly take over leadership of Iran had all been killed over the weekend. “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” he said. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”

This goal of regime collapse is more an aspiration than a clear plan. Trump himself is mercurial and easily cross-pressured. It’s easy to imagine a set of circumstances forcing him to beat a hasty retreat: rising US casualties, rising oil prices, and the pleading of Arab autocracies such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (currently facing fierce Iranian attacks).

But even if regime collapse fails, this war will cast a long shadow in the future. Iranians of all stripes, not just supporters of the theocracy but simple nationalists who want a unified polity, will rightly distrust the US. After the death of Khamenei, there is every reason to think (as CIA analysts suggest) that power will increasingly fall to hard-line nationalists inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Like so many of Trump’s endeavors, the current war is half-baked and badly conceived. Trump was hoping for a variety of implausible scenarios—either a quick Iranian capitulation leading to a return to negotiations or regime collapse. More likely, he’s planted the seeds for future strife in ways that are impossible to predict but still terrifying to contemplate.

In mid-February, NYU Langone Health shuttered its transgender youth clinic under pressure from the Trump administration. Young people who relied on the clinic for counseling, puberty blockers, and hormones found themselves without care. Families scrambled to find alternatives before their children’s medications ran out. Hospital leadership shrugged; the “current regulatory environment,” they told reporters, had forced their hand.

Two days later, another major private healthcare system, Mount Sinai Health System, reportedly did the same. Though the Trump administration has proposed rules that would strip Medicare and Medicaid funding from hospital systems providing gender-affirming care, those rules likely won’t become law for months. Nonetheless, the hospitals complied in advance—and parents of trans kids, speaking under pseudonyms for fear of harassment, told local reporters they weren’t sure where to go.

A parent of a trans teen told Gothamist, she felt that “New York is one of those places where we’ll be safe.” Now, though, she’s not so sure. “I don’t feel so safe right now.”

This is the first major test of the campaign promises that Mayor Zohran Mamdani made to transgender New Yorkers. He pledged to dedicate $65 million to trans care through New York’s public hospital system, establish an office of LGBTQ+ affairs, and legally fortify the city’s trans population against federal attacks. During his campaign, he even stood up to NYU Langone.

In March 2025, when NYU Langone Hospital first threatened to take medical care away from trans kids in preemptive compliance with a Trump directive, Mamdani showed up at a rainy rally with trans kids and their families. “We have seen NYU Langone comply with illegal executive orders out of a fear of their so-called biggest donors,” Mamdani said at the time. “Let us remind them that the city is also one of their biggest donors. Let us remind them that they do not pay a dollar in property tax, [and that] we are a city that is ready to use every single tool to assure compliance with city and state human rights laws.”

Langone backed down. Mamdani supporters had reason to believe that they were working to elect a staunch defender of trans rights.

Trans people were involved in Mamdani’s campaign from its earliest viral-video days to the inauguration: Ceyenne Doroshow, a veteran of New York’s Black trans activist movement, met with Mamdani long before he became a household name. Doroshow is the founder of G.L.I.T.S., an organization providing long-term housing to Black trans people in need—and in 2021, she purchased a 12-unit building in Queens to do just that.

Doroshow and Mamdani met in March 2024. “It wasn’t a dressed-up meeting. It was in-person, at a little coffee place. The lady in the restaurant didn’t even know who he was at all,” she recalled.

This was during Ramadan, Doroshow remembered. “So I sat in that restaurant and ate, he sat in that restaurant and starved.” The first question she asked him was how he’d describe a person like her to the world, if he had to.

“He asked, ‘How should I?’” Doroshow had asked that question many times before—on Capitol Hill, at City Hall—and rarely got a satisfying answer. This one, though, she could work with. “So here was somebody that was willing to ask, ‘How should I address the community?’ You come in and say, ‘Hello, family,’ because basically, we are your family as a city. You’re embracing all of us as a family.”

Doroshow has seen mayors come and go: Some policed Pride, threw around transphobic slurs, targeted transgender students’ bathroom access, and opposed transgender-rights legislation, while others—the better ones, she said—left the trans community more or less alone. With Mamdani, she felt she could finally hope for more: “We’re looking at humanizing our community in ways that have never been done by a politician. And this is what I wish and what I hope for.”

Doroshow and Mamdani spoke for hours: about sex workers’ issues, about housing for trans youth, about New York as a model of hope for trans kids in more repressive states like Florida, which is currently trying to criminalize even trans-affirming mental-health counseling — or Kansas, which has revoked drivers licenses from trans residents.

In a survey from December 2024, the Williams Institute at UCLA found that a quarter of trans respondents had already moved to a state more progressive on trans issues, while another quarter of respondents were considering doing so. New York will likely end up receiving many of those people. The city’s trans population is already one of the largest in the world—estimated at around 50,000 in 2018—and with more and more trans Americans migrating within the country to find safer places to live, that number is likely to grow.

“We’re in a city where our kids may be safe, but what about people that are not in this city?” Doroshow asked. “We set the precedent for change in other cities. Being the mayor of New York practically means you’re the mayor of the nation, and you move accordingly.”

In May, the Mamdani campaign held a trans community town hall at the Queens club Nowadays, where he revealed some of his policy platform for the trans community: He pledged to budget $65 million to “explicitly support and expand access to gender affirming care” for both youth and adults through New York’s public hospitals, build out protections against criminalization of gender-affirming care, and implement policies designed to support incarcerated people.

One of the people who wrote Mamdani’s LGBTQ+ platform is the therapist and social worker Nadia Swanson. Lena Pervez Afridi, a city planner, approached Swanson and asked them to carve out the Mamdani administration’s vision for queer and trans New Yorkers.

“We often are dreaming within a container,” Swanson said. In their six months of work on the platform, they said, “it was like no limits.” The city’s primary office of LGBT affairs, the Unity Project, was founded under Mayor Bill de Blasio, as a hallmark project of first lady Chirlane McCray. Under Mayor Eric Adams, Swanson said, that office’s staff shrank—and its budget and remit increased. “They had to do more with less,” Swanson said.

But under Mamdani, “this has the potential to be so much better,” Swanson thought. Though the trans and queer social safety net in New York is stronger than it is in many other cities, that safety net still has its weak points. And the bread-and-butter issues that plague New Yorkers are often uniquely painful for the city’s trans community, still largely excluded from formal employment and housing. Trans New Yorkers often end up crowdfunding surgery fees and late rent payments in a brutally expensive city, living from gray-market gig to gray-market gig, building up credit-card debt, and perpetually taking sublets, without the stable jobs or family money required to stay on a lease.

In the campaign platform Swanson and Afridi wrote, funding for trans housing programs would increase substantially, as would workforce training and mental and physical healthcare infrastructure: all the things that are needed to build a dignified life.

Early signs for New York’s Mamdani era were positive. Trans people, for instance, were represented at Mamdani’s inauguration: Bernie Wagenblast, a trans woman voice actress best known as the voice that says “stand clear of the platform edge” on the New York City subway, was tapped to announce Mamdani to the world. “I’m sure they could have found a better announcer,” Wagenblast joked. “But the fact that they reached out to me to do that really said a lot.”

Whether they could have found a better announcer is dubious—Wagenblast, beyond voicing the subway announcements, has decades of experience as a radio reporter and voice actress—but the significance of the choice was clear. Mamdani was allying himself with a community that has been redefined nationally as an ideological threat to the United States.

Still, two months into Mamdani’s administration, many of his promises to the trans community have yet to become reality, and there are actions Mamdani could take now to fight back against the slow elimination of trans people from public life. According to the trans journalist Erin Reed, he could direct the city’s massive public hospital network to absorb NYU Langone’s trans youth patients. He could, as he did during his candidacy, threaten to make Langone pay its fair share of property taxes if it refuses to treat trans patients. He could pressure the New York City Commission on Human Rights to move forward with complaints it filed last year against Langone and Mount Sinai. He could add his voice to those of 73 New York state legislators, who have jointly condemned the end of Langone’s Youth Gender-Affirming Care program.

At the city level, other politicians have been more forceful, too. “Donald Trump and right-wing forces are manufacturing hysteria around innocent trans youth to advance a broader agenda of ripping away our healthcare,” said New York City Council members Chi Ossé and Justin Sanchez in a statement in February. “They are targeting youth care today, and if unchecked, adult care will be next. It is deeply disturbing that NYU Langone would so readily comply with that political pressure.” In other states, medical care for trans adults is already being restricted: Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, for instance, is no longer performing gender-affirming surgeries on patients of any age.

For Swanson, it’s not just about those trans people who already live in New York—it’s about those who are coming, fleeing anti-trans policies elsewhere. Though they worked with Mamdani in their personal capacity, Swanson works professionally with unhoused and runaway LGBTQ+ youth, and they said, “We’re seeing a large uptick” in young people arriving in New York from other states. Normally, about half the young LGBTQ+ people in New York shelters come from elsewhere, Swanson said. “That’s gone up by about 10 percent.” So, fortifying the safety net for trans people in New York means welcoming in a new wave of displaced people.

In Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, the president targeted trans youth: “We must ban it immediately,” he said, seemingly talking about any young person transitioning. In that climate, it’s no wonder trans people are moving toward the safest places available—and cities must find a way to welcome them, rather than caving to Trump’s demands.

“We need to meet the need of not just people who are already here,” Swanson said, “but the anticipation of all the people from other states and other countries that are coming and needing this lifesaving care, as well.”

In January 2026, Donald Trump’s foreign and domestic policies achieved a certain synergy.

Following a months-long naval buildup off the coast of Venezuela, US Special Operations forces invaded the country, kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, and decapitated his authoritarian socialist regime. Then Trump kept US weapons trained on Caracas to pressure Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, into giving him control over some of the world’s largest oil fields. These acts of naked imperialism were a reversal of Trump’s repudiation of US regime-change efforts as a presidential nominee. But only a few on the right, such as Senator Rand Paul, expressed any discomfort with this blatant about-face. Trump immediately let it be clear he would not stop at Venezuela. “We have a big armada next to Iran,” Trump said to reporters in late January as the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln moved into position in the Middle East. “Bigger than Venezuela.” On February 28, Trump used that armada to launch alongside Israel an illegal, unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, with the aim of destroying the Islamic Republic.\

Trump has also advanced US designs on Cuba, Gaza, and Greenland. He bombed Somalia repeatedly in January, continuing an onslaught that began in 2025 and has received far less media attention. And as the administration’s foreign policy grows more openly acquisitive, its domestic policy grows more overtly aggressive as it carries out what amounts to an occupation of Minnesota.

A task force consisting of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection has invaded the Twin Cities, in defiance of state and local elected leadership. ICE and CBP agents demand that nonwhite residents prove their citizenship, kidnap children as young as 2 years old, and murder citizens who get in their way, all in the name of “law enforcement.” They have shown that they will refuse to be bound by any law or tradition that inhibits their agenda. The architect of Trump’s mass-deportation agenda, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, described Alex Pretti, a nurse whom five Border Patrol agents had subdued before a sixth shot him in the back, as a “domestic terrorist,” repeating what Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said of Renee Good, whom an ICE agent had killed in Minneapolis two weeks earlier.

Calling people who seek to protect their neighbors “terrorists” provides a crucial clue to the lineage that has led to Minnesota, Venezuela, and now Iran. The so-called War on Terror, a period many think of as having ended, shapes and enables Trump’s aggressions in ways both structural and direct. The Delta Force raid on Maduro’s fortified compound followed on decades of experience—and increased budgets—conducting similar raids in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ICE and CBP agents who have descended on Minnesota are kitted out in the kind of military-style camouflage and body armor that Iraqis and Afghans would recognize. The operation’s initial targets—Black immigrant Muslims from much-bombed Somalia—represent a trifecta of cohorts that were villainized by the nativist politics that the War on Terror revitalized. Both supporters and critics of the Minnesota deployment have compared it to a counterinsurgency campaign. Miller, who was also behind the kidnapping of Maduro, began his rise to White House deputy chief of staff through the ranks of the far right as a campus activist against Islam. Like Trump, Miller has long understood how to take post-9/11 fearmongering about Muslims and direct it toward nonwhite immigrants more broadly.

While many elements of the War on Terror shape Trump’s actions, the significance of the backlash against American power that the War on Terror inspired has, dangerously, not sunk in. After Trump demanded that Denmark cede Greenland to the US as imperial tribute, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney drew a rare ovation at the World Economic Forum in Davos for a speech abandoning the “pleasant fiction” that the “rules-based international order” was anything other than a vehicle for US prerogatives. Carney told Europeans horrified at being treated as the sort of foreign possession they themselves used to seize, “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” But with an insurgency yet to develop in Venezuela, and with NATO hustling to secure a deal to prevent a US move on Greenland, Trump has encountered little to deter him from his mode of imperialism before it reached Tehran. That’s ominous for Havana—and beyond.

Historians will spend decades debating the exact moment when the US empire discredited itself and irrevocably hobbled the international law that it masquerades as. Carney marked it at the Greenland crisis. Many others mark it at the beginning of Israel’s US-sponsored genocide in Gaza in October 2023. I would offer that it’s the War on Terror—corresponding as it does with all but the first 10 years of US global dominance—that defines American power during its period of supremacy. It is an era in which the United States inflicted sustained violence throughout the Global South and called it “order.” But the waves of resistance that US actions generated exposed American weakness. Resentment over the agonies of the War on Terror played an enormous role in Trump’s rise to power.

Every historical era is shaped by its predecessor. The War on Terror was shaped by the Cold War, and it now shapes the empire Trump is constructing. That makes the path of resistance to this new era of imperialism clear: The tools of the War on Terror must be destroyed before Trump uses them to finish building his world order, at home and abroad.

Trump’s unpopularity, both nationally and globally, is no constraint on his administration’s ambitions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio achieved a long-standing goal of his Miami-based Cuban American milieu by ousting Maduro. Venezuela’s oil subsidies to Havana make it the crucial domino to topple in pursuit of the Cuban émigrés’ supreme aspiration since 1959. According to The Wall Street Journal, the administration seeks to do exactly that this year.

Notwithstanding the recent talk about his “Donroe Doctrine,” Trump does not confine his imperial project to what the State Department recently called “our hemisphere.” On January 27, Trump threatened to end US aid to Iraq if that country’s parliament restores the troublesome Nouri al-Maliki to power, right after the Iraqis agreed to take thousands of Islamic State prisoners who were being held by the collapsing US-backed Kurdish forces in Syria.

Decapitating and coercing a regime instead of overthrowing it is a departure from recent modes of US imperialism. But Trump is also pursuing the familiar versions. His “Board of Peace” proposal places him atop a new, US-selected international coalition—one that includes Israel—that will govern Gaza like a 21st-century version of the British Mandate that gave Great Britain control over Palestine. Not only will Palestinian survivors of the Israeli genocide lose what remains of their sovereignty, but according to documents acquired by Sharif Abdel Kouddous of Drop Site News, they will be concentrated into “planned communities” built to monitor every aspect of their lives through “biometric surveillance, checkpoints, monitoring of purchases, and educational programs promoting normalization with Israel.” The Board of Peace also has value to Trump beyond the Levant: His administration floats it as a program to replace crucial functions of the United Nations and further undermine the creaking international institutions it considers unfit for the new era.

Another Trumpian innovation has been a lack of interest in manufacturing consent for any of this. One reason is the persistent rhetoric of the War on Terror: Trump simply called Maduro’s government a “terrorist organization,” much as Noem and Miller did to justify the executions of Good and Pretti, and much as Trump did in his first term when describing the protesters who marched against the killing of George Floyd in 2020. When Pretti’s status as a gun owner wobbled conservatives’ faith in ICE, MAGA strategist Steve Bannon, who occasionally postures as an opponent of endless war, doubled down on the “terrorist” rhetoric on his podcast. All of it attests to how durably the politics of counterterrorism has stifled dissent, intimidated opposition, and enabled state violence—and to how well Bannon, Trump, and MAGA learned from the ever-shifting targets of the War on Terror that, ultimately, the terrorists are whoever the powerful insist they are.

Of course, Trump can also rely on a pliant media to color inside the lines he draws. After the Caracas raid, mainstream news outlets breathlessly foregrounded its tactical acumen and backgrounded the reality that the US had once again overthrown a sovereign head of state to seize oil resources. As the Iran War coalesced, with the buildup of US sea and air forces, news coverage became as bellicose and hidebound as during the buildup to the Iraq invasion. “Before Any Strike on Iran, U.S. Needs to Bolster Air Defenses in Mideast,” read a typical Wall Street Journal headline. You didn’t learn anything in that article about any planning for what would happen after Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched their illegal and unprovoked aggression, an omission reminiscent of the disinterest that 2003-era journalism had in what would happen after George W. Bush overthrew Saddam Hussein. That first day after, it turns out, is characterized by the assassination of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; the shocking bombing of a girls’ elementary school in Minab that killed at least 153 people, including dozens of children; the deaths of three US troops; and destruction in the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Israel, and elsewhere.

It has become fashionable to speak of Minnesota as the War on Terror coming home. The truth is that the War on Terror was always being waged simultaneously at home and overseas. Federal forces targeted non-Muslim immigrant communities along with Muslim ones as soon as the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. Not only were ICE and CBP created in that climate, but as early as the multi-state raids on Swift meatpacking plants in 2006, ICE was terrorizing working-class immigrants at scale. What is happening now is that US citizens are getting a taste of the treatment previously reserved for noncitizens—and for marginalized communities who live the vulnerable reality of conditional citizenship.

ICE has all but announced that it is beyond the reach of the law. In addition to the slayings and the roundups—if such things can be set to the side—the agency has declared that it needs no judicial warrant to enter someone’s home. On January 28, a judge identified at least 96 court orders that ICE had violated in that month alone.

ICE agents seem gleeful about inflicting the “reckoning and retribution” that Trump promised. One muttered “Fucking bitch” after executing Good; another applauded after Pretti was shot. According to a lawsuit, ICE delivered a detainee with a “catastrophic” head wound to a Minnesota hospital and claimed that he “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” After an agent filmed a protester in Maine—apparently as part of an effort to feed a growing number of watch lists, according to the journalist Ken Klippenstein—he taunted, “We have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist. So have fun with that.” Good’s killer, Jonathan Ross, is another example of the dialectical advance of the War on Terror: He joined the Border Patrol two years after returning from a combat tour in Iraq.

No amount of retraining can reform agencies that consider Americans an internal enemy. They must be abolished before they kill at greater scale. But the dominant faction in the Democratic Party is doing its best to avoid recognizing ICE for the threat that it is.

ICE is predicated on the post-9/11 idea that the civil offense of being undocumented ought to be met with a deportation force on the hunt in the interior of the country. Such operations cannot be divorced from nativist politics. Similarly, whatever legitimate border-control functions exist cannot be carried out by what the former Border Patrol agent Jenn Budd has called a “notoriously corrupt and racist federal agency.” Alongside abolition must come accountability for the crimes that federal agents have committed during this crackdown. A central lesson of the War on Terror is that impunity for one atrocity—the “absolute immunity” that Vice President JD Vance falsely declared ICE agents to possess—is a green light for the next.

And it’s not only the DHS. Months before Maduro’s kidnapping, when the US military was blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean, Adm. Mitch Bradley, then the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), approved the shocking “double-tap” strike on survivors clinging to the wreckage of a boat that the US had just destroyed. Killing the shipwrecked is as blatant a violation of the Geneva Conventions as exists. The Pentagon’s own manual on the law of war uses “orders to fire upon the shipwrecked” as an example of a “clearly illegal” command that service members have an affirmative duty to refuse. The New York Times reported that one of the aircraft involved in the strike was painted like a civilian plane. That is known as the war crime of “perfidy,” and it’s the central charge before the military commission trying the Guantánamo Bay detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of blowing up the USS Cole in 2000.

JSOC, the signature military command of the War on Terror, did not descend to this level overnight. Nearly 25 years of relentless deployment has resulted in a grisly moral rot that has recently been documented in books like David Philipps’s Alpha, Matthew Cole’s Code Over Country, and Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel. A command structure that orders the shipwrecked killed cannot be tolerated by any military that postures as lawful, to say nothing of honorable. Special operations must be reconfigured under one that can be trusted to obey the law.

These are only the most urgent tasks; there will be much abolitionist work beyond. The Patriot Act, Section 702, and the rest of the post-9/11 surveillance authorities have decimated privacy and accelerated a surveillance-capitalist industry that has spawned companies like Palantir that build AI tools for ICE. But even with public outrage coalescing around Minnesota, the Democratic leadership cannot bring itself to call for the abolition of ICE. Its objections to Trump’s imperialism have been just as weak. At Davos, California Governor Gavin Newsom, a likely presidential hopeful, implored the Europeans to “have a backbone” against Trump, but Newsom also opposes abolishing ICE. New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, rejected the Pentagon’s recent National Defense Strategy not for its unapologetic imperialism but for not “taking China seriously as the pacing challenge to our nation.” Her Vermont colleague Peter Welch said that he supports “immigration enforcement, not these widespread roundups,” as if the widespread roundups are not the fruit of immigration enforcement.

Trump’s actions are reminiscent of the erratic bellicosity of collapsing empires. But the current Democratic Party cannot imagine a new order; it defaults to its Biden-esque preference for restoring a failed one. Representative Delia Rodriguez of Illinois is the rare Democrat who recognizes that the DHS “needs to be dismantled.” She reflects the explosion in public support for abolishing ICE, at which the party leadership rolls its eyes. It is tragic and typical for the Democratic Party to cynically cling to the politics of security at the moment when the security services—not Venezuela or Cuba or Iran—pose the greatest threat to American life and liberty.

Through every stage of the War on Terror, the establishments of both parties and within the security bureaucracy rejected the argument that their enterprise threatens the very freedoms they claim to defend. They succeeded in banishing from respectability the calls to abolish the institutions, authorities, and ever-metastasizing operations derived from the War on Terror. The results of their victory are on display from Minnesota to Venezuela. Never again can America afford the delusion that what it does abroad is cordoned off from what it does at home. But that is a lesson for after the destruction of this latest phase of the American empire.

Iwent to Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” expecting a vibe—and in this aspect, at the very least, it does not disappoint. The film lacks a lot of things (chief among them, a faithful rendering of the book), but one thing it does succeed in is feeling like the times.

Over the course of the film’s 137-minute runtime, I found myself thinking longingly of another, shorter, more effective vibe-based cultural product, Charli xcx and comedian Rachel Sennott’s Poppi Super Bowl commercial—a tongue-in-cheek spot that achieves in 30 seconds what Fennell’s film, another Charli collab, attempts to stretch into a two-hour-plus film. In it, Charli and Sennott burst in and bring a wild, very 2020s party to a staid college lecture when a can of Poppi is opened. In her “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell tries to bring something like that party to Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, but to shockingly little effect.

In Fennell’s selective interpretation, Wuthering Heights is reduced to a love story, in which the more complicated elements of Brontë’s weird, brutal, lurid novel are ironed out or elided completely, leaving us with what critic Alison Willmore rightly calls “a smooth-brained Wuthering Heights.” It is a simplification and a cliché to say that every generation gets the Wuthering Heights it deserves, but it may just be true in this case—our newest Wuthering Heights is tailored to our short attention spans, our brain-rotted need for constant stimulation, and nothing like Andrea Arnold’s 2011 take, which for all its flaws was a thorny, realistically muddy but earnest attempt to reckon with Brontë’s wrestling with the racial and economic dynamics of her time. Where Arnold struggled to present a Wuthering Heights stripped of any romantic illusions that presented the world of windswept Yorkshire as cruelly as Brontë does, Fennell gives us a shallow vision of romance as sex with next to nothing else.

Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is attuned to our present moment, in which shock and awe undermine history, fashion prevails over depth, and Charli xcx’s and Anthony Willis’s moody score threatens to overwhelm the foreground, rather than providing a fitting backdrop. It’s not exactly the novel cut down to a music video—Kate Bush achieved that better with her kookily earnest, teenaged vision of Brontë’s novel in 1977—but it is a film made for the age of TikTok and Instagram, a movie composed for the algorithm, with flashy and catchy images, from the indelible visions of Margot Robbie, looking amazing in so many outfits, to an swoon-worthy Jacob Elordi, riding off into a Harlequin-cover sunset.

This is not to totally deride Fennell, consistently a canny reader of the zeitgeist. It’s just that, in comparing the Wuthering Heights of the past with the “Wuthering Heights” of the present, it is hard not to miss how this latest rendering of the Brontë novel might have made a pitch-perfect Instagram reel. By demanding that we don’t to think too hard about what the novel is really asking us to think pretty hard about and instead focus on Fennell’s generous reframing of Heathcliff and Cathy, Fennell reduces the agency that Heathcliff and Cathy do have and makes them victims of their own inexplicable passion. Gone are all the reasons why Heathcliff and Cathy are terrible—their selfishness, their cruel, destructive and unafraid determination to ruin other lives with their obsessive desire for each other.

Fennell instead shifts the blame for various ruinations to the secondary characters—poor Mr. Earnshaw and Isabella Linton (a charmingly batty Alison Oliver, downgraded from sister to ward) are made out to be the architects of their own ruin, and the unsettling burden of generational trauma borne by the novel’s younger characters is cut out of the film entirely. Cathy and Heathcliff’s cruelty and disregard are also softened here; rather than a selfish and vindictive wildcat, Cathy is made out to be a tragic heroine doing what she can to save her family; while Heathcliff, rather than being “a devil,” is a diabolical but consent-obsessed dom whose bad deeds are enabled by Isabella, his willing sub. Also excised is the novel’s framing narrative, which gives readers a hint of both its ghastly Gothic qualities (an actual ghost shows up in the novel’s third chapter!) and its necessarily comic remove from real life—we should obviously not take Cathy and Heathcliff as exemplars of romance.

Perhaps most interestingly, much of the blame that Brontë places on Cathy and Heathcliff is shunted onto Edgar Linton and Nelly Dean, again showing Fennell’s apparent disdain for the middle class. Though her last film, Saltburn, is an ostensible eat-the-rich satire and came out in 2023 amid a sea of other class-warfare porn (like The Menu, The White Lotus, and Triangle of Sadness), it’s really about the threat of the hardworking bourgeois striver, exemplified by Barry Keoghan’s weird little schemer. Whether intentionally or not, we end up feeling bad for the outdated, clueless aristocrats, played with unfortunately magnetic charm by Elordi, Oliver, Rosamund Pike, and Richard E. Grant (revisiting his landed gentry schtick from the brilliant Posh Nosh web series).

This classist attitude is further compounded by the questions of race in Wuthering Heights. The two main characters played by actors of color, Shahad Lazif’s Edgar, and Hong Chau’s Nelly, are made out to be the villains of the piece, standing in the way of the unstoppable love of the film’s two very white protagonists, Robbie’s beautiful but unconvincing Cathy, and Elordi’s suitably brooding Heathcliff. It is made abundantly clear that Lazif’s Edgar knows well that Cathy and Heathcliff are conducting a passionate and star-crossed affair under his nose and simply won’t get out of the way while Nelly is changed from a middle-aged servant to a would-be competitor for Cathy, a lady’s companion driven by jealousy and bitterness.

It’s hard to see the colorblind casting here as anything but a cynical ploy to distract from Elordi’s controversial and much-discussed casting as the non-white Heathcliff. Time also acts oddly on characters here; though they start out peers, by the time they become grownups, Heathcliff, Cathy, and Nelly are all played by actors of visibly different ages—Elordi (28), Robbie (35), and Chau (46). This is in keeping with the tradition of aging up Heathcliff and Cathy (nobody ever thought Sir Laurence Olivier was a convincing teen in the 1939 version) but puts Chau’s Nelly in a strange position of being older, ostensibly wiser, and therefore more knowing than her would-be coevals.

Much is also made of the fact that the Wuthering Heights family, the Earnshaws, are old money, who belong in the moors—the highly stylized house is even apparently built into the rock that adjoins it (giving the Heights’s exterior aspect something of a confusing look, a baffling mash-up of abattoir, space ship, and coal mine that is supposed to be imposing, but comes off like a Star Trek set). The Lintons are, in comparison, new money who made their tremendous fortune through the textile trade, who live in a dollhouse-like confection of a house.

Nelly is similarly rendered an up-and-comer, a thwarted lady herself whose illegitimate birth puts her on a lower social rung, in-between but notably not at the bottom. In transforming Edgar and Nelly into actively obstructive figures rather than the innocent casualties they are in the book, Fennell not-so-subtly rewrites the novel’s complicated class dynamics. Furthermore, by converting Joseph from the Bible-thumping old terror of a servant who haunts the Heights to a young, animalistic but deferential farmhand, and even through the film’s (fabricated) first scene of licentiousness at a public hanging, Fennell lets her real fears show. Like Elordi and Pike’s characters in Saltburn, the film regards the poor with a kind of fascinated, condescending pity (they can’t help but be beasts!), while the real threat is the cunning, rising middle classes.

Perhaps it’s facile to say that this backwards-yearning attitude is also very of-the-moment, but it is. Fennell has demonstrated a real knack for diagnosing the times. Her previous films, 2017’s pop feminist black comedy Promising Young Woman and the aforementioned trendy, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too excesses of Saltburn, allowed her to masquerade as a political satirist. But maybe more than diagnoses, what drew us to these films was that they relayed the cultural background noise all around them back to their audience. Lulled by genuinely compelling visuals and excellent performances into the sense that those previous films had more to say than they did, we came to view Fennell’s films as wanting to offer more biting critique than they actually did. But “Wuthering Heights” has no such pretentions. Fennell ignores the novel’s very real and present concerns with class, race, and heredity because that is what she thinks her moment is asking of her. This film may not be Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, but it certainly feels like something. The title—with its quotation marks—perhaps says it all—this, unlike other notably outlandish but intriguing adaptations, keeps its distance from the original text. It is not Baz Lurhman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or even Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This is, unmistakably, Emerald Fennell’s very own “Wuthering Heights.”

When the streets of Iran ran red last January, when mothers searched hospital corridors for sons who never came home, when the internet went dark and the state called its own people “rioters,” something remarkable happened.

From prison cells.

From house arrest.

From union organizers and writers’ circles.

From Kurdish towns and Tehran universities.

Iranian civil society spoke.

They condemned the Islamic Republic’s mass killings as crimes. They demanded accountability, freedom, and transformational change. They called for a referendum and a constituent assembly. They rejected clerical authoritarianism.

And they rejected war.

Now that war has been launched—after weeks of US and Israeli officials speaking casually about “bombing” and “military buildup,” and many of the people most battered by the Islamic Republic warning that foreign military intervention would not liberate them. It would bury them.

Mir Hossein Mousavi is not an exile or a fringe dissident. He was Iran’s prime minister during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. He was the leading challenger in the disputed 2009 election that gave birth to the Green Movement. For more than a decade he has been confined to his home, cut off from public life, for demanding accountability and fundamental political change.

In the aftermath of the January massacre, which left thousands of protesters dead, Mousavi declared that “the game is over.” He called the killings a historic crime. He urged security forces to lay down their arms. And he proposed the formation of what he called an Iran Salvation Front, a broad national coalition to guide a peaceful democratic transition.

His framework rested on three principles: no foreign interference, no domestic tyranny, and a nonviolent path to democracy.

Four hundred sixteen political and civic activists immediately endorsed his call. They demanded the release of political prisoners, an independent investigation, and guarantees of basic freedoms. They warned that desperation can drive citizens to pin their hopes on foreign powers or authoritarian alternatives. But that path, they cautioned, would only reproduce another form of subjugation.

A similar message came from 17 prominent dissidents in January, including filmmakers, lawyers, and representatives of imprisoned Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi. They called the mass killings an organized crime against humanity and named Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei responsible. They demanded justice and the release of political prisoners. But they also warned that any path that bypasses popular sovereignty risks plunging Iran into catastrophic violence.

Even from behind bars, that same warning was being voiced. From a cell in Evin Prison, Mostafa Tajzadeh, once a deputy interior minister and now one of the Islamic Republic’s most outspoken critics, described the massacre as predictable and preventable, the inevitable product of governance by fear. He called for national dialogue and an independent fact-finding committee. He also warned of the “ominous specter of war still flying in our country’s sky,” cautioning that escalation would compound, not cure, the nation’s wounds.

Labor unions with deep organizing roots echoed a similar message. The Syndicate of Workers of the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company, one of the country’s most prominent and durable independent labor organizations, rejected foreign military intervention and insisted that liberation must come through organized internal struggle. Student coalitions from leading Iranian universities jointly declared, “Neither the Islamic Republic, nor monarchy, nor MEK,” referring to the exiled Mujahideen-e Khalq organization, and rejecting authoritarianism in every form, whether domestic or imported. And the Association of Iranian Writers, one of Iran’s oldest and most respected independent cultural institutions, condemned killings and enforced disappearances while rejecting the illusion that freedom could be delivered by missiles.

This anti-war, anti-authoritarian stance did not begin in January. During the June 2025 war between Iran and Israel, some of the clearest rebukes of war came from inside prison walls. In a declaration from Evin Prison, four imprisoned women, Reyhaneh Ansari, Sakineh Parvaneh, Verisheh Moradi, and Golrokh Iraee, denounced what they called “genocide” and “systematized savagery” in Gaza and condemned the complicity of global powers, especially the United States. They rejected the instrumentalization of human rights to justify war or intervention, warning that reliance on such powers would betray both Iranians and the broader region.

Pakhshan Azizi, an Iranian Kurdish political prisoner sentenced to death, delivered a similar message. While rejecting the charges against her, she rebuked US warmongering, its backing of Israel’s war, and the sanctions that have battered ordinary Iranians. If Washington truly cared about human rights, she wrote, it must end its attacks, its support for war, and the sanctions that have inflicted relentless suffering.

This is the part of the Iranian story rarely told in American debates. In Washington, the discourse often reduces Iran to two caricatures: the ruling elite in Tehran and the exiles who promise that pressure and war will bring about regime change. But inside the country, a third current has always existed. It is anti-authoritarian and anti-war at the same time. It rejects both domestic tyranny and foreign intervention. It demands self-determination through nonviolent civic struggle.

Outside the country, however, a different voice dominates. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last shah whose authoritarian monarchy was toppled in 1979, has positioned himself as the face of regime change and has openly called for foreign military intervention.

In a climate of economic hardship shaped in large part by sweeping US sanctions, his message has gained traction, amplified by well-funded Persian-language satellite networks such as Iran International and Manoto, as well as Israel-backed social media manipulation efforts. The scale of this ecosystem is staggering. Public filings show that Iran International alone reported cumulative operating losses exceeding half a billion dollars between 2017 and 2022, without disclosing its ultimate financial backers.

While the protest movement began on December 28, Reza Pahlavi escalated the moment by urging Iranians to flood the streets on January 7 and 8. He cast it as a decisive turning point, arguing that the Islamic Republic was fracturing and claiming that tens of thousands of military and security personnel had registered as defectors with him. Thousands of mostly young and deeply disaffected Iranians answered that call, believing the balance might finally be shifting.

At the same time, President Donald Trump was issuing ominous threats that the United States was “locked and loaded,” repeating before and after the January 7–8 bloodshed, and again after the early morning attack on Iran, that Washington stood with the protesters, that they should “take your institutions,” and that help would be on the way.

According to Iranian opposition channels, demonstrators on those days moved toward police stations, military facilities, and government buildings in dozens of cities. What followed was not a collapse of the regime. Security forces opened fire. Thousands were gunned down.

This is precisely the scenario that Iran’s “third current” warned against. Again and again, dissidents inside the country have argued that militarization, whether from the regime or from abroad, closes the space for civic organizing and leaves ordinary people exposed.

Their alternative is not passivity. It is disciplined, nonviolent mobilization. It is the release of political prisoners. It is the protection of open communication. It is a referendum under international supervision and a constituent assembly that allows Iranians to decide their future without foreign tutelage. They are asking not for bombs but for breathing room.

Against this backdrop, Taghi Rahmani, a veteran democracy activist and husband of Nobel Laurate Narges Mohammadi, has warned that Iran now faces not only the authoritarianism of the Islamic Republic but also the rise of what he calls a “modern far right” within parts of the opposition. Unlike a conventional conservative politics that accepts pluralism and rotation of power, this current thrives on enemy-making, extreme nationalism, and concentrated leadership. It risks replacing one totalitarianism with another.

Ultimately, this war will not weaken repression in Iran. It strengthens it. The June 2025 escalation was followed by tighter controls, expanded criminalization, and a further suffocation of the information space. Escalation consolidates the security state. When bombs fall or sanctions tighten indiscriminately, power flows to the most coercive institutions, and civil society becomes more exposed and more vulnerable.

No one understands this more clearly than those who have already paid the highest price. The Mothers of Laleh Park, whose children were killed in earlier waves of state repression, have explicitly condemned the government’s killing of protesters as brutal state violence and demanded the immediate release of detainees. Linking today’s uprising to past traumas, they warn against repeating the catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Foreign intervention, they caution, risks dragging Iran into “the fate of Afghanistan and Iraq,” where promises of liberation dissolved into instability and suffering.

The recent threats of a new war against Iran, and the giant military deployment sent to carry out such a war, have now come to fruition. With Trump’s call for regime change, and the massive bombardment, this will not be a short, “one and done” attack. The US and Israel are at war with Iran.

The Iranian military is retaliating against US military targets in the surrounding countries, where there are numerous military bases and 40,000 US troops already deployed, as well as Israel. Early reports indicate that the US and Israel have targeted regime leaders, including potentially an effort to assassinate the top religious leader in Iran. There is no indication yet whether those efforts have succeeded. What we do know is that 51 people, many of them children, have reportedly been killed in an early attack on a school in an Iranian port city.

This war is illegal under both US domestic law and international law. It violates the US Constitution, which gives only Congress, not the president, the power to take the nation to war. The UN Charter is clear that use of military force is legal only if authorized by the Security Council or if “an armed attack occurs against a Member.” In this case, neither of these things happened.

It is too late to prevent this war from starting. But as was the case in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 and ’03, it is not too late to see that it will have devastating outcomes. The similarities with the Iraq war have made this war more likely; the differences show why war with Iran could be even more dangerous.

There’s one particularly ironic comparison between then and now: In 2002–03, a huge global movement—what The New York Times called “the second super-power”—emerged to challenge the drive toward war. It brought together a majority of the UN Security Council, a number of individual governments, including important US allies, and, crucially, millions of people, who mobilized to protest around the world. This movement came to a thundering crescendo on February 15, 2003, when what was then the largest protest in human history took place across almost 800 cities around the world. Congressional debate was public and fierce, and when the Authorization for the Use of Military Force was voted on in October 2002, significant minorities in both the House and Senate opposed the war. It was perhaps the most powerful anti-war movement we have ever seen.

And yet, at the height of that movement in 2003, just before the US invaded Baghdad, 72 percent of people in the US still supported going to war.

These days, the hard work of organizing to prevent a new war has been intense. Pushing Congress to reclaim its constitutional role of determining whether the US goes to war, demanding that only the UN can authorize military force, insisting that international law be taken seriously—these campaigns have been happening. But they were not as visible. With the Trump administration eager to lash out around the world with military force, refusing to consult with Congress or the United Nations, and disdaining international law, the UN and Congress had been far less public about the debate than in the past. Trump believes the only constraint on his power is his “own morality.” That has made building a visible protest movement focused on pressuring Congress and demanding that the UN step up to prevent war much harder—and more urgent.

And yet even without a huge and undeniable anti-war movement, only 18 of people support war against Iran. This might be because so many remember the devastation wrought by the war in Iraq. But with an administration more interested in motivating the MAGA base than in taking to account what most people actually think, open, hard-won congressional opposition wouldn’t ever have been enough to obstruct presidential power running wild.

While the Iraq anti-war movement accomplished a number of important goals, including playing a major role in precluding Bush’s war against Iran in 2007, it remains sobering that it could not prevent the war in Iraq. And 23 years later the consequences—economic, military, environmental, and most especially human—of war against Iran could be significantly worse than even the catastrophic costs of the Iraq war.

One reason has to do with the shift in regional power dynamics. Despite the collapse of Israel’s legitimacy around the world following its genocide in Gaza, Israel is militarily more powerful than ever, with hegemonic influence across the Middle East. Following decades of ethnic cleansing, occupation, and apartheid, Israel has obliterated Gaza and caused massive destruction in the West Bank. Tel Aviv’s regional opponents have been profoundly weakened by two years of US-backed Israeli attacks against Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Qatar, and Iran. Israel launched attacks against Gaza flotilla ships in international waters near Tunisia, Malta and Greece, without any consequence. Israel’s uninspected nuclear arsenal is never even mentioned as a major destabilizing factor across the Middle East. And with Washington still providing massive support to Israel, there is little to prevent a US-Israeli assault on Iran from quickly escalating to a major regional war. A more powerful Israel means a more dangerous region and a more dangerous world.

Another reason the consequences could be even worse involves the undermining of domestic and international law. Certainly Iranians will pay the highest price for the lack of restraint from international law, but this collapse of the rule of law makes it more dangerous for everyone else too. In 2002, Bush won congressional authorization for war against Iraq, and he had grudgingly acknowledged the need for Security Council authorization. For months, he tried—using lies, threats and pressure—to get a war resolution passed. The efforts failed, the Council majority stood defiant, and the Bush-Blair team finally launched the war illegally, without UN approval and without any “armed attack” by Iraq that might have justified a claim of self-defense. Now, in 2026, Trump has never acknowledged any need for congressional approval or UN authorization of war against Iran. No one—not the UN, not Congress, not the mainstream press, and few among foreign governments too often cowed by Trump’s threats—even mentions the UN Charter’s restrictions. And although Congress is debating a new War Powers Resolutions designed to prevent a rogue presidential decision to go to war, it remains uncertain whether it will win enough votes to become law. A US war against Iran will deepen the ongoing delegitimization of the rule of law—something that must be taken seriously if future wars are to be averted.

As we saw 23 years ago, the world watched a major military buildup precede the attacks. In recent weeks the US deployed an enormous armada of military weapons and personnel to the Middle East. The waters surrounding Iran filled with two aircraft carrier groups—one of them arriving from its last deployment near Venezuela. Dozens of warships, hundreds of warplanes, more than 10,000 Navy and Air Force troops, and about 40,000 additional troops are stationed at nearby US military bases.

And the same as 23 years ago, US officials and much of the US press are repeating exaggerations and lies about alleged weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq did not have chemical or biological weapons and was not building a nuclear weapon, but many people believed they did and were. Speaking about Iran, Trump complained in his State of the Union speech that “we haven’t heard those secret words: We will never have a nuclear weapon.” But Iran’s top leaders have stated exactly that—publicly, not in secret—since at least 2003, when they explicitly rejected nuclear weapons, saying, “We don’t need atomic bombs, and based on our religious teaching we will not pursue them.” Two decades later the official US position is still that Tehran ended its early nuclear weapons program in 2003 and never restarted it. Lies and exaggerations have resulted in 87 percent of people in 2025 still believing that Iran is a threat to the United States.

Twenty-three years ago UN intermediaries were still trying to negotiate between the US and the Iraqi government, but no one believed the US was serious about those talks. Recently, US-Iran negotiations were underway—sort of. It remained unclear whether the talks were serious, whether the US would actually lift sanctions on Iran under any circumstances, and whether either side was really looking for an off-ramp to avoid war. In June 2025, in fact, the US and Iran were negotiating a possible new nuclear deal, with the next round of talks scheduled for Oman on June 15. At least partly to prevent such negotiations from succeeding, Israel launched its illegal assault on Iran three days before those Oman talks were to begin. Given that the US knew of Israel’s plans and joined its attack on Iran even as those talks were supposed to be underway, it seems questionable whether Iran would be willing to rely on new US promises.

Bush’s initial Iraq deployment in 2003 involved about 160,000 US ground troops, who would fight on the streets of Iraqi cities to overthrow Saddam Hussein and the government in Baghdad. In contrast, Trump’s earlier military strikes around the world (in 2025 alone he ordered attacks against Somalia, Yemen, Iran, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela and Nigeria) have so far all been short-term bombing raids, with no more than a few boots briefly on the ground. The raids killed hundreds of civilians with virtually no US casualties. History provides no examples of regime change being carried out by air attacks alone. But Trump’s military buildup was clearly designed to fight a long air war, whether or not regime change in Iran were the military goal. Trump has sometimes said he intended a quick attack to push Iran towards more negotiations; other times he has warned of full-scale war. Sometimes, like in his February State of the Union speech, he has hinted at both. Building a movement to prevent a massive air war in 2026, being waged for unclear purposes, is a much more difficult task. And when that war takes on Iran, almost four times bigger in land and three times bigger in population than Iraq, with a far bigger and more motivated army than that of its predecessor two decades earlier, the consequences look dire indeed.

All of these similarities and differences together point to the urgency of building a big, powerful anti-war mobilization once again—right now. Not to prevent this war, but to stop it.

In Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968, radio was the sound of invasion: midnight broadcasts announcing that tanks had crossed the border and were lumbering toward Prague. In Minneapolis, in the winter of 2026, it’s whistles and car horns, sharp and urgent—warnings not about tanks but about SUVs rented from companies like Enterprise, the same cars you might drive on vacation. ICE is here, the whistles say. Stay inside if you’re vulnerable; come out if you can. All eyes, all ears.

The ICE invasion has other sounds: words, for instance. The US government uses the euphemism “surge” for the 3,000 federal agents it sent to Minnesota in January, a metaphor of tides and currents that’s been part of the military-political lexicon since at least the Second Gulf War. In the same way, “brotherly assistance” was sent, in the form of 5,000 Warsaw Pact tanks and 200,000 troops, to weed out the reform socialism that flourished in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring.

I’ve studied Czechoslovakia in 1968; I live in Minneapolis. There are similarities between the two invasions, from the code words used to describe them to how time feels within them, to the sounds and images that define them. And sounds and images from Czechoslovakia, 1968 are as much a prefiguration of what’s happened in the Twin Cities this winter as they are a lesson for us—in Minnesota and the United States—now.

The Prague Spring didn’t begin in 1968. Its seeds were planted years earlier, in the early 1960s, when Czechoslovakia’s economy floundered and its third five-year plan (scheduled to run from 1961 to 1965) was abandoned in its second year. As economists began to look past central management, change accelerated in other spheres. Victims of the Stalinist show trials of the early 1950s were quietly rehabilitated. Citizens were allowed to travel freely, even to the West. By June 1968, censorship had been abolished.

Throughout the reform years, and especially in 1968, many Czechs and Slovaks had the sense that they were in on an exhilarating experiment. As historians Rosamund Johnston and Paulina Bren have written, much of this played out on radio and television, where topics (such as the 1950s) that couldn’t be broached publicly before were suddenly fair game, discussed in documentary programs and live interviews with public figures and people on the street, bringing new voices to the receiver and the screen. But this was nothing compared to the week after August 21, when across the country, people came out in astonishing numbers to protest the invasion. In Prague, everyone was in the streets, and it seemed like everyone had a camera. Photographs and films from that week (like Jan Němec’s documentary Oratorio for Prague, whose footage was repurposed for Philip Kaufman’s 1988 Unbearable Lightness of Being) show a city transformed: people stopping invading tanks in their tracks, clambering on top of them, berating soldiers in the Russian they’d had to learn in school. Encouraged by radio broadcasts (clandestine, after troops took over the radio headquarters), protesters removed signs from Prague’s notoriously labyrinthine streets to confound the invaders.

During this winter’s onslaught, the Twin Cities have been transformed, too. Even though Tom Homan announced a “drawdown” (another euphemism) in early February and the media’s attention has drifted away, lulled by the relative absence of pepper spray and riot police, little seems to have changed. Detentions continue, and people are still out observing, patrolling, and protesting, as they have been for months, on sidewalks crusted with strata of snow and ice. Just as Czechs and Slovaks did in 1968, Minnesotans are trying to reason with the invaders (think of Renee Good speaking calmly through the window of her car to the officer who shot her). Stop signs have been amended with the word “ICE,” water poured on frozen sidewalks. And as was the case in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the alliances that are being built feel unlikely and powerful, like a true popular front: Retirees stand watch outside markets and daycares alongside college students, bus drivers, corporate workers, teachers, and nurses. Like other popular fronts, this one hangs together because its message is so simple: Go away, ICE. Get out.

There are differences, of course. In Prague, the invasion played out almost entirely on the streets, but in Minnesota, the streets are the mirror of a whole world inside, thousands of people whose lives have narrowed to the walls of their homes, because this is as much an invasion as it is an occupation, a siege. The number of those in hiding is vast, and their needs are immense: medical care, grocery deliveries, legal aid, safe transport, money to pay the mortgage or rent on a house or apartment that it’s no longer safe to leave.

Whether inside or out, however, a sense of time has settled over the Twin Cities that’s common to invasions. Czechs and Slovaks have shown me diaries from August 1968; one was a sea of black pen until the entry for the 21st, which was scrawled in red, the beginning of something new. Things changed so dramatically after the tanks arrived—from day to day, hour to hour—that some chroniclers of the period gave up on any kind of overview, and resorted to simply listing what happened. Even documentary filmmakers, the 1960s self-styled chroniclers of the everyday, couldn’t keep up. Instead, the invasion remained the high-water mark of radio and television: the media not just of the Prague Spring, but also of the invasion’s perpetual present tense, the now captured in the photographoverlooking Wenceslas Square that Josef Koudelka famously took on August 22 at precisely 5:01 pm, shown by his wristwatch in the foreground.

This perpetual present has been visible and audible in Minnesota this winter—even if it feels quaint, now, to think of radio or television as any kind of media vanguard. Like Alex Pretti, everybody has a phone; our phones are also our cameras and microphones, and these devices are fast. They fragment what’s happening in the city into thousands of nows scattered across Instagram, Reddit, and Signal, calling those down the block, across town, to come watch. Perhaps it’s because of this—because of the brutality and solidarity that they document, because of how quickly they’re able to gather people—it’s reported that federal agents have taken observers’ and protesters’ phones. This was also why, in 1968, Warsaw Pact forces made a beeline for the radio building when they arrived in Prague, and it was why, at some point later, a Soviet soldier stopped filmmaker Karel Vachek by the Prague Castle, forced open his 16mm camera, and unspooled the film until sunlight guaranteed that no one would ever see what he’d shot. Of course, by the time the soldier got to it, Vachek’s footage was already out of date.

Alongside this, there’s another kind of time, subtler but unmistakable: the conditional, the tense of would, could, might. Those of us on the outside can only imagine the agony of the conditional for those whose family members have been wrenched away and rushed to detention, to Texas, or for those who must take unthinkable measures to avoid what might happen, what could happen. Outside, though, things are also in the conditional: In January, I awoke several nights convinced that constantly circling helicopters—whose hum of low-grade dread stems from the same militarized policing that gave us the word “surge”—were the threatened Alaskan paratroopers finally arriving. No one knows when it will be safe for every child to go to school in person again, or how long our neighbors will need essentials delivered. The conditional is a friend to rumor. There’s one going around that DHS has booked local hotels through June.

As intolerable as it is, the conditional might be what we need, because it means that what happens next isn’t foretold. The Twin Cities are in a state of suspension. Pediatricians’ offices, normally busy in the winter months, have empty waiting rooms and too-quiet hallways. The line at the DMV is alarmingly short. Restaurants and shops open cautiously, sometimes with locked doors and watchful eyes, and classrooms are only partly full. This isn’t a world most of us want to live in, and while it may be an exception now, if we stop, if we slacken, we know it will become the norm—for the United States as a whole, not just the Twin Cities.

There’s another parallel to Prague, 1968 here, a cautionary one. The Czechoslovak resistance to the Warsaw Pact invasion took pride in its dignity and restraint. Like its Minnesota counterpart, it was resolutely nonviolent. The Czechoslovak Army was ordered to the barracks even as tanks of the “brotherly armies” ran over people in the streets and foreign soldiers shot civilians, even teenagers. This doesn’t mean that people weren’t outraged and heartbroken; they were. But as the weeks and months went on, they also got tired. The demands of daily life were impossible to ignore forever, and the protests petered out. At the same time, in a futile attempt to preserve the movement of which they were the faces, reformist politicians accommodated Soviet demands—inch by inch, until there was no more room for reform. Then, on January 16, 1969, a student at Prague’s Charles University named Jan Palach sat in the middle of Wenceslas Square, where Koudelka had taken his photograph five months earlier, doused himself in gasoline, and set himself on fire. He died three days later. Palach was the first of four students to commit the act that year, and for each student, the point was this: that the debates about reform swirling in the pages of Czechoslovak literary and political magazines weren’t enough. Reform required action, by both politicians and people.

Yet when Czechoslovak citizens poured into downtown Prague a week after Palach’s death, on January 25, 1969, it wasn’t for a protest or a general strike, like the ones that filled the streets of Minneapolis this January. It was for Palach’s funeral procession, and once again, the filmmakers and photographers were out. One of them was the director Ivan Balad’a, who, with a group of cameramen, filmed the crowd as a sea of figures standing stricken, bundled against the cold, necks craning to see Palach’s coffin and the student honor guard protecting it. The film that Balad’a made from this footage, Forest (Les), also captures what happened after the procession was over, as the crowds dispersed and the city emptied out. Though this is the film’s ending, for Balad’a, it was its heart. As he told me in an interview in 2008, people were sad—they were overwhelmed with grief—but when the funeral procession ended, they “went home quickly, as if from a soccer match.” What he didn’t say was what others have noted since: that if they had stayed in the streets, if the reformers had had the courage to stand up to Moscow, things might have turned out differently in Czechoslovakia, where Palach’s funeral procession was both an echo of 1968 and its death knell. Winter 1969 turned to spring, ushering in the politically and culturally straitened era of “normalization,” and the public sphere that had emerged so vibrantly during the Prague Spring fell into a prolonged retreat.

As exhaustion sets in and resources stretch thin, this is the risk we run in Minnesota now, and it’s a risk that the country runs, too. Don’t go home, the whistles and car horns warn. All eyes, all ears; stay out, stay out.

In the spring of 1983, as the Democratic Party searched for a path out of the Reaganite darkness, Jesse Jackson was a long-shot contender for the party’s presidential nomination—at least in the eyes of much of the political class. But in June of that year, The Nation treated his “embryonic campaign” as more than a far-fetched curiosity. Jackson’s bid for the nomination, the editors wrote, had already come to “symbolize a new dimension of black electoral power,” one that “threatens to reshape the Democratic Party as it stumbles toward the end of the century.”

From the start, the magazine treated Jackson’s campaign as a development with significant implications for the future of the party and the country. It stood to have a “disruptive effect” on the Democratic status quo. After years of unconvincing and morally indefensible feints to the right, it was about time: For decades, liberals had relied on Black voters and other minorities as a dependable base—“safe and stable,” in The Nation’s phrasing—then relegating them to the margins once campaigns were won. In what Jackson called the emerging Rainbow Coalition, by contrast, the candidate sketched the outlines of something more ambitious and durable—a coalition of “the poor of all races, the unemployed, women, Hispanics,” millions of Americans “floating around the edges of the mainstream.”

The excitement was real, but there were tensions within the Rainbow Coalition, and writers in The Nation’s pages debated them at length. In early 1984, after Jewish organizations accused Jackson of bigotry—charges tied both to offensive rhetorical missteps (calling New York “Hymietown”) and, perhaps more to the point, to his support for Palestinian rights—Philip Green mounted a defense of Jackson, arguing that some of the allegations blurred the line between antisemitism and legitimate criticism of Israeli policy. He noted that Jackson had apologized for his remarks. “One apology per error is exactly as many as is required,” Green argued. “Thus we must join him in protesting what he calls the ‘hounding’ of the media pack. It’s worth remembering that there’s only one candidate in the Democratic race who identifies Jews as a specific element of his constituency in almost every campaign speech he makes. That candidate is Jesse Jackson.”

In response, Paul Berman published a long rejoinder—titled “Jackson and the Left: The Other Side of the Rainbow”—contending that Jackson’s “problematic rhetoric” and associations could not be so easily dismissed. “The more support Jackson receives, the stronger he emerges from the election,” Berman predicted, “the more difficulties and nastiness there may be for progressive politics in the future.”

Jackson’s campaign forced a debate not only within the Democratic Party but also within the left itself—over solidarity and accountability, the boundaries of legitimate criticism of Israel and the persistence of antisemitism.

By the summer of 1984, as Jackson’s first presidential run faltered, the tone in this magazine hardened and postmortem recriminations began to appear. In July, an essay by Andrew Kopkind and Alexander Cockburn titled “The Left, the Democrats and the Future” indicted white progressives for what it saw as a failure of nerve. “Long before Louis Farrakhan slouched into the headlines,” the authors wrote, “white leftists had run through every excuse to withhold support from the black candidate.” One objection followed another: Jackson was too radical, too inexperienced, too divisive. The “dark motif” of the 1984 campaign had “changed from Anybody But Reagan to Anybody But Jackson.” “Once again,” Kopkind and Cockburn concluded, “racism destroyed the promise of a populist, progressive, internationalist coalition within the Democratic Party.”

In the ensuing years, The Nation reported on the positive effects that had followed Jackson’s unsuccessful first campaign. In November 1987, Kopkind traced how Jackson’s 1983–84 registration drives had swelled Black turnout and strengthened Democrats in the midterms. The Rainbow Coalition, despite Jackson’s loss in the primary, had gone from being merely a slogan to a genuinely assertive progressive Democratic base. “Few politicians or political commentators who are not on the left margin of society take the Rainbow Coalition seriously as a potential force in national affairs—even if they are awed by and a little frightened of Jackson’s personal popularity,” Kopkind observed. “How far the coalition campaign can go this time is still everybody’s guess and nobody’s sure thing.”

In 1988, pushed by Kopkind and others, the magazine moved from merely analyzing Jackson’s campaign to offering a full-throated endorsement, backing Jackson for the Democratic nomination:

The enormous energy that his campaign releases has created a new populist moment, overtaking the languid hours and dull days of convention politics and imagining possibilities for substantial change beyond the usual incremental transactions of the two-party system. It offers hope against cynicism, power against prejudice and solidarity against division. It is the specific antithesis to Reaganism and reaction, which, with the shameful acquiescence of the Democratic center, have held America in their thrall for most of this decade and which must now be defeated.

Jackson’s platform—economic justice, anti-apartheid solidarity, nuclear disarmament, Palestinian rights—aligned with many of The Nation’s long-standing commitments. His campaign embodied the radically hopeful idea, advocated by this magazine with varying degrees of confidence and credibility ever since the 1920s, that the Democratic Party could be remade as a vehicle for justice and equality by those long consigned to its periphery.

That idea remains alive today, and more vitally necessary than ever, even if the man himself has passed on. Jackson’s presidential campaigns represented the stirring of a dormant movement, the possibility of a class-inflected, multiracial coalition, one teased again in Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign before being unceremoniously thrust aside. Still, the energy of Jackson’s “embryonic campaign” never entirely dissipated. It has resurfaced in intra-left debates over coalition politics, electoral strategy, Middle East policy, and the meaning of populism, debates that continue vigorously today (often in The Nation). Wherever the next progressive disruption comes from, it will have its roots in Jackson’s campaigns.

It turns out that the only thing Suzanne Collins got wrong when she wrote the Hunger Games trilogy was the idea that the game show would be a function of the government—not the way the government functioned. She imagined that the various games masters would serve at the pleasure of the autocrat, while President Snow would keep himself one step removed to focus on more important matters of state.

In the real dystopian nightmare that is Trump-era America, we’ve got things reversed. The president is the games master. It’s the functionaries, Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, who serve at a remove to focus on the more important matters of state, while the president dyes his hair and puts on a show for the cameras. It’s the president who grabs the microphone to revel in the spectacles of violence and death he has created.

The modern State of the Union address is always political theater—but it wasn’t set out to be. The Constitution positions the president and Congress as adversaries, with Congress clearly given the upper hand. Just look at the State of the Union clause in the Constitution. It’s nestled in Article II (the section that creates the executive branch): “[The President] shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” It reads like a CEO (the president) is being summoned to make a presentation to their board of directors (Congress).

You wouldn’t know this from watching our modern spectacle. Instead of treating the president like its employee, Congress debases itself, yearly, while begging for photo opps with the sitting president. Congress has turned a clause meant to remind the president that he is not a king into the most monarchical event on the political calendar.

The State of the Union is always theater, but this year, Trump turned this annual address into a game show. There were celebrity appearances, surprise reveals, and an extended sports break, all while Trump played master of ceremonies over his kingdom—Ilhan Omar did her best to make her pantsuit appear to be wreathed in flame.

Truth is always stranger than fiction, and our truths happen to also be more evil. The thing that Collins got right in her novels is that the game show is, of course, a distraction. It’s a way to turn authoritarian violence into a titillating event instead of an enraging tragedy.

But even President Snow wasn’t using the Hunger Games to cover up a pedophile ring.

The Bad and the Ugly

• During last year’s State of the Union (technically just an “address to the joint session of Congress”), Trump thanked John Roberts for allowing him to be president. This year, Trump castigated Roberts and the Supreme Court for their tariff decision, which he believes denied him his divine right to threaten the global economy. I have entirely more sympathy for Dr. Frankenstein than I do for Roberts.
• During the speech, Trump declared a “war on fraud.” The plan seems to be to appoint a new assistant attorney general who will answer directly to Vice President JD Vance but… that’s not how the Department of Justice is supposed to work. The government’s lawyers are supposed to answer to the attorney general, not the White House. Then again, Pam Bondi doesn’t understand how to do her job anyway, so this is probably a distinction without a difference.
• I’m not an expert on tariff laws, and I don’t intend to become one until I need to buy a new PlayStation, but the people who are experts are saying that Trump’s proposed 15 percent global tariffs also exceed his authority under the new law he is trying to use to ram them through without the approval of Congress.
• Kansas has banned driving while trans. That’s not hyperbole. A new state law says that if the gender on your driver’s license doesn’t match the gender on your birth certificate, your license is invalid and you are driving without a license. The amount of bigotry in this country is astounding, and I’m a 47-year-old Black man who is not easily astounded by American bigotry.
• You know, it’s one thing for RFK Jr. to make it easier for the idiots who listen to him not to vaccinate their kids. It’s another thing for him to make it harder for actually intelligent parents to get their kids vaccinated.

Inspired Takes

• The US Men’s National Hockey team won a gold medal, and then promptly turned themselves into political props for our fascist government. The Nation’s Dave Zirin explains their decision to be used to sportswash a fascist regime.
• The Nation’s Kali Holloway explains how MAGA’s reaction to the Epstein files disclosures reveals its “total moral collapse.” Not that anybody should be surprised. MAGA has always used a fake sense of moral outrage as a front for its very real sense of white nationalism.
• In the last two weeks, there have been a slew of high-profile retirements among Republican federal judges. Balls and Strikes covers these retirements and explains why they’ll lead to the first real test of Trump’s judicial confirmation machine—the one that was so effective in his first term. I’m guessing that Trump will still be able to get whomever he wants through the Republican-controlled Senate, and continue to inflict generational damage on the courts.

Worst Argument of the Week

Why was representative Al Green kicked out of the State of the Union? Green brought a handmade sign to the address that read “BLACK PEOPLE ARE NOT APES!,” a reference to the racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama that Trump shared earlier this year. But why did that mean he could be kicked out?

It’s a serious question. What law or code of conduct did Green violate? Are you not allowed to hold signs at the State of the Union? That would be news to me. Just last year, all the Democrats held (feckless, stupid) ping-pong placards during the speech. They weren’t kicked out. Why was Green?

Was he being disruptive? He didn’t say anything, he just held a sign. The only disruption I saw was when 57-year-old Republican Representative Troy Nehls tried to assault the 79-year-old Green and rip the sign out of his hands. Why was Green ejected and Nehls allowed to stay?

But even if he were being disruptive, that’s never been a reason for someone to be kicked out of the speech. For years, during the Biden administration, we had to endure Majorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert braying like donkeys through half the speech. This year, Representatives Omar and Rashida Tlaib shouted back at Trump while he lied. They weren’t removed. Why was Green?

Was the message on the sign somehow offensive? Can we not all agree that Black people are not, in fact, apes?

Near as I can tell, Al Green was kicked out of a joint session of Congress for no reason other than that he is an old Black man, and everybody knew nobody would stand up for his right to be there. The media wasn’t going to put up a fuss about a member of Congress being excluded from the speech against his will, and not even his fellow Democrats would do or say anything about it. Hakeem Jeffries could be counted on to sit there, mute, while a member of his caucus was deprived of his free speech rights, and everybody knew it.

Well, I’m putting up a fuss. Black people are not apes. And we can’t just be kicked out of places where we have a right to be for no reason.

What I Wrote

• The tariff decision was a mess. That fact has kind of been overlooked because Trump had a temper tantrum after he lost, but I walked people through what the conservatives—both the ones who voted for Trump and the ones who voted against him—were actually saying. Folks, these people are unhinged.
• People might be overlooking the most important Supreme Court decision that came down this week. The justices ruled, 5–4, that the post office can refuse to deliver your mail. That’s pretty significant if you are thinking of, say, mailing in your ballot this November. I explained why the anti-democracy wing of the court turned to its favorite “Black friend,” Clarence Thomas, to do this dirty work. 

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Late last Friday, Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft’s gaming division (known more commonly as Xbox) suddenly retired, effective Monday. His second-in-command and heir apparent, Sarah Bond, resigned. Microsoft announced that the new Xbox CEO would be Asha Sharma. Previously, Sharma was head of Microsoft’s CoreAI division. 

This means that Microsoft pushed out its video game leaders and replaced them with its AI leader. Microsoft is a global behemoth of a company, but Xbox is one of its only consumer-facing divisions. The move strongly suggests that Microsoft intends to shove AI in the face of every gamer, whether they like it or not, and the rest of the industry might be forced to follow along.

Sharma (who has absolutely no experience in gaming and created her Xbox account only a month ago), is saying the right things. In her opening statement to staff, she said that she did not intend to use “soulless AI slop” to replace creative people. Of course, “soulless” is a load-bearing word and could mean anything. I doubt that the head of Microsoft’s CoreAI division thinks all AI is “soulless,” and I’ll bet my premium currency that we’re going to get a lot of “really thoughtful and soulful” AI (slop) from Xbox and Sharma.

Xbox lost the console wars. Both Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo’s Switch have a far larger user base than Xbox. But that’s just the hardware. Xbox has bought up many game developers, including the giants Activision-Blizzard, which they bought for $68.7 billion a few years ago. They own Minecraft, which is the game most of your kids are playing. Their influence on not just the gaming industry but our children’s entire cultural ecosphere cannot be understated.

And now they’ve got their chief AI pusher in charge of all that content.

AI is not inevitable, but the billionaire class is sure trying to make it inescapable.

***

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Last month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers pulled over several cars in Eagle County, Colorado. They took the people away in handcuffs, according to a witness, and left the cars idling at the side of the road. When family members of the disappeared immigrants arrived, there was no sign of their loved ones. What they found instead were customized ace-of-spades playing cards that read “ICE Denver Field Office.”

When I saw an image of that card, the memories came flooding back. I’d seen something similar many years before. Sitting in the US National Archives building—Archives II—in College Park, Maryland, sometime in the late 2000s or early 2010s, I’d spent parts of several afternoons watching film footage shot by—and of—US troops in Vietnam back in the 1960s. One of those silent military home movies always stuck with me.

That short film opened with a Vietnamese woman clutching a child next to a group of 10 or 15 other children huddled together. They all look wary. Worried. Scared. The camera lingered on a young girl, perhaps 5 years old, clutching a baby. If that girl survived, she would be around 64 years old today.

After several shots of those children, the source of their fear was revealed. The film cut to a group of foreign young men—heavily armed US soldiers. They were tanned and gaunt, smoking and talking, standing over the corpses of some young Vietnamese men or boys. We see the dead bodies at a distance, again. Lying together and yet eerily alone. Next, the film cuts to a collection of weapons—perhaps a cache found in or near the Vietnamese village where all of this occurred—that resembled old junk more than lethal armaments. The film kept cutting between short scenes of American troops and Vietnamese bodies until it happened.

I’ve never forgotten the scene that followed because I was initially shocked that it had been immortalized on film. I was also surprised that the film had never been destroyed. But then I remembered how ubiquitous such activity was at the time. How soldiers bragged about it. How it was covered—positively—in the US press. How it even showed up in the Congressional Record, not as an outrage deserving of investigation but essentially as a thank-you to a manufacturer of playing cards.

In the next scene, we see a soldier pull an ace of spades from what looks like a big stack of such cards. He’s nonchalant. He’s clearly not worried about an officer seeing what he’s doing. He obviously knows he’s being filmed. He reaches down and, as another soldier presses his boot into the chest of that corpse to hold it steady, he tries to insert the card into the mouth of one of the dead Vietnamese. It’s apparently not so easy. It takes a bit of doing, but it proves possible. The next scene shows an ace of spades sticking out of the dead boy’s mouth. The camera lingers. It’s oddly and sickeningly cinematic. The following scene shows another Vietnamese, his face blackened. There’s a battered ace of spades jammed in his mouth, too.

“Impeding” ICE

Such “death cards”—generally either an ace of spades or a custom-printed business card claiming credit for a kill—were ubiquitous among US troops in Vietnam in those years. Some soldiers, like those in that unit of the 25th Infantry Division operating in Quang Ngai Province in 1967, used a regular ace of spades of the type you’d find in a standard deck of cards. But Company A, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, for instance, left their victims with a customized ace of spades sporting the unit’s nickname “Gunfighters,” a skull-and-crossbones, and the phrase “dealers of death.” Helicopter pilots, like Captain Lynn Carlson, occasionally dropped similar specially made calling cards from their gunships. One side of Carlson’s card read: “Congratulations. You have been killed through courtesy of the 361st. Yours truly, Pink Panther 20.” The other side proclaimed, “The Lord giveth and the 20mm [cannon] taketh away. Killing is our business and business is good.”

The cards found last month in Eagle County harken back to that brutal heritage. They were the same general size and shape as those shoved into the mouths of dead Vietnamese: black and white 4×6-inch cards with an “A” over a spade in their top left and bottom right corners. A larger ornate black-and-white spade dominates the center of the card. Above it is the phrase “ICE Denver Field Office.” Below it, you find the address and phone number of the ICE detention facility in nearby Aurora, Colorado.

The 10 people taken away by ICE in Eagle County are now reportedly being held in that very same Aurora Detention Facility.

In a recent letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Democrats in Colorado’s Congressional delegation called out ICE’s use of the ace of spades. The card, they wrote, “has long been known as the ‘death card’ and has been used by white supremacist groups to inspire fear and threaten physical violence. It is unacceptable and dangerous for federal law enforcement to use this symbol to intimidate Latino communities.” They continued: “This behavior undermines public trust in law enforcement, raises serious civil rights concerns, and falls far short of the professional standards expected of federal agents.”

ICE’s Denver field office offered a boilerplate response to TomDispatch when questioned about the use of the cards. “ICE is investigating this situation but unequivocally condemns this type of action and/or officer conduct,” a spokesperson wrote in an email, adding, “Once notified, ICE supervisors acted swiftly to address the issue.” The spokesperson said that ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which deals with employee misconduct, will conduct a “thorough investigation,” but the Colorado lawmakers asked for more. Those lawmakers called for an independent investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

“As the son of immigrants and the father of two young children, I am horrified by the abuses being committed by the Trump administration—from the streets of Minneapolis to right here in Eagle County,” said Democratic Representative Joe Neguse, a member of the delegation that wrote the letter. “These outrageous, aggressive intimidation tactics,” he added, “are meant to stoke fear among our neighbors, and it is immoral and wrong. This administration must be held accountable, and we cannot allow this to continue unchecked.”

ICE Denver has a much different opinion. “Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, ICE is held to the highest professional standard,” the spokesperson there told TomDispatch. “America can be proud of the professionalism our officers bring to the job day-in and day-out.”

Americans think otherwise. A clear majority of voters—63 percent—disapprove of the way ICE is doing its job after more than a year of immigration crackdowns across the United States, according to a January poll by The New York Times and Siena University. Sixty-one percent of voters said that ICE had “gone too far,” including nearly one in five Republicans. The poll was conducted after Renee Good, a 37-year-old US citizen and legal observer, was gunned down in Minneapolis by an ICE officer.

Federal immigration officers have shot at least 13 people since September, according to data compiled by The Trace, killing at least five, including Good and Alex Pretti, a Minnesota resident who was gunned down by Border Patrol agents last month. Before their killings, Good and Pretti had been observing the activities of agents. Federal officers frequently confront and threaten those observing, following, and filming them for “impeding” their efforts. In numerous prior instances, they had unholstered or pointed weapons at people who filmed or followed them.

A recent report by the Cato Institute notes that it is “crucial to understand that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) consider people who follow DHS and ICE agents to observe, record, or protest their operations as engaging in ‘impeding.’” It goes on to note that DHS “has a systematic policy of threatening people who follow ICE or DHS agents to record their activities with detentions, arrests, and violence, and agents have already chased, detained, arrested, charged, struck, and shot at people who follow them.” In the wake of Good’s death, to take one example, the Justice Department opened an investigation of Good’s widow for allegedly “interfering” with an ICE operation—apparently for filming the shooting.

A Death Card Moment

Killing, wounding, threatening, or investigating observers are just some of the many abuses and violent tactics of immigration officers in the era of Donald Trump. Others include brutally beating detainees, employing banned choke holds, or spraying chemical irritants on protesters. They also have carried out arbitrary and unlawful arrests and detentions, fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades into crowds, and shattered the windows of vehicles.

Colorado specifically has seen numerous abuses by immigration agents in addition to the use of those death cards. ICE officers in Colorado continue to arrest people because of the color of their skin and in violation of a federal judge’s order, according to a complaint filed earlier this month by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado and two Denver law firms. In November, US District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson found that ICE was routinely conducting illegal arrests in the state.

“Just in Colorado, we’ve seen ICE agents pepper-spray protestors in the face. We’ve seen ICE drag elderly women on the ground,” said Judith Marquez, a volunteer for the Colorado Rapid Response Network and a campaign manager for the Colorado Immigrants Rights Coalition. “We don’t want to wait for another Renee Nicole Good to be murdered.”

Alex Sánchez, president and CEO of Voces Unidas, the immigrant rights group that took possession of those death cards in Colorado, fears that ICE might be using such cards as an intimidation tactic elsewhere, too, but that information about such acts remains unreported because those affected are unlikely to trust local law enforcement officers, elected officials, or even mainstream human-rights groups.

In the wake of the killings of Good and Pretti, the Trump administration quickly branded those observing ICE as domestic terrorists, and federal authorities insisted that Minnesota had “no jurisdiction” to investigate those killings, while blocking the access of state investigators to evidence at the crime scene.

As US District Judge Alex Tostrud wrote in an 18-page decision: “Federal agents collected evidence from the scene.… They won’t share it with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension [BCA].… After BCA agents arrived, federal agents blocked them from accessing the scene.” Earlier this month, Tostrud, an appointee of President Donald Trump no less, lifted the emergency order he had issued the day of Pretti’s shooting that required federal investigators to preserve evidence gathered at the scene of that fatal shooting.

In the absence of independent oversight of the crime scenes, TomDispatch asked DHS if the federal agents who gunned down Good and Pretti had left death cards at the scene of those killings.

The Department never responded.

For more than two decades, America’s forever wars have been coming home in large and small ways. But in 2026, death cards made famous in a war that ended more than 50 years ago—a war that America’s president dodged via a draft deferment for seemingly spurious bone spurs—have made a reappearance. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a war of extreme brutality rooted in racism would have resonance with ICE any more than that those macabre calling cards are on brand for a self-proclaimed peacemaker president who has made war on Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen, as well as on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. While he might not have actually dealt those cards in Colorado, it’s hard not to see them as Donald Trump’s death cards.

While in office, President Donald Trump has enriched himself far more than any American politician before him. He hasn’t done it alone. Perhaps no company has provided more financial and logistical support to Trump’s cryptocurrency empire—the engine of his newly acquired wealth—than Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. Binance has become the principal market for World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s primary crypto venture, which has sold billions of dollars worth of its tokens. Binance employees even wrote the code for USD1, Trump’s dollar-pegged stablecoin.

On its way to becoming the world’s dominant crypto exchange, Binance also became notorious as a financial conduit for cyber criminals, sanctions evaders, and militant groups. During President Joe Biden’s administration, former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (widely known as CZ) spent four months in federal prison after pleading guilty to violating laws against money laundering. The company agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine—one of the biggest in corporate history—and to largely stay out of the US market. Biden’s SEC also filed a civil lawsuit against Binance, which accused the crypto exchange of a range of violations, including market manipulation, illegally serving US customers, and mishandling customer funds. (SEC legal filings alleged that billions of dollars in company revenue flowed through overseas companies controlled by CZ and a never-seen Chinese cofounder named Guangying Chen.)

Under President Trump, that has all changed. Last May, the SEC dropped its lawsuit. In October, Trump pardoned CZ. According to The Wall Street Journal, Binance also worked, with Trump’s support, to relax government oversight of the exchange. Earlier this month, CZ attended a World Liberty Financial–hosted crypto summit at Mar-a-Lago, where guests included Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., the chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and top crypto industry and Wall Street executives.

Its legal and regulatory shackles loosened, Binance now stands accused of behavior that, as the Journal delicately put it, “echoed some of the same concerns that drew US scrutiny in 2023.” According to multiple reports, last November Binance dismantled an internal team of investigators that had uncovered 1,500 Binance accounts in Iran, where the exchange was operating in violation of economic sanctions. Just two of these accounts had moved $1.7 billion worth of crypto to accounts possibly controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. One belonged to an entity that also acted as a vendor for Binance, which indicated that it was more than an average crypto trader. The investigators had also discovered that Russian officials were using Binance to pay crew members from its “shadow fleet” of oil tankers that dodged international sanctions stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine. After Binance’s investigators reported their findings up the company’s org chart, several were fired, and others were reassigned.

With no official headquarters, Binance is an unusual global organization. After starting in China before moving to Japan and then Malta, Binance now calls itself a “decentralized” operation, although much of the business seems to be run out of crypto-friendly regions like the United Arab Emirates and the Cayman Islands. Binance has also maintained a presence in France, where CZ once took a selfie at a dinner with President Emmanuel Macron. Last year, French authorities announced an investigation into Binance for money laundering and tax fraud.

Facing investigations all over the world, Binance has shown itself to be adaptable and resilient, surviving the imprisonment of its CEO, a bizarre standoff with the Nigerian government over alleged currency manipulation, and its constant search for more welcoming jurisdictions from which to operate. Presenting itself as a tool of financial liberation and offering free educational courses about crypto finance , Binance has made deep inroads in the Global South, especially in parts of Africa, Pakistan, and southeast Asia. While the Journal reported that Binance has become less cooperative with government requests for data and legal assistance, the company depicts itself as a partner to law enforcement, posting on social media about the training sessions in blockchain forensics it offers to investigatory agencies around the world. Binance claims to be training local cops to fight the very kind of crime that has flourished on its platform.

Having been replaced by a lieutenant as CEO when he went to federal prison, CZ no longer officially runs Binance, but he is still widely associated with the company, and the culture and practices he put in place seem to persist. In 2020, a report in Forbes—whose claims were later backed up by SEC legal filings—described a “Tai Chi document” proposing a new Binance company strategy. This memo proposed that Binance serve up its small US branch as compliant with US regulations while the main, jurisdiction-less Binance entity would continue to illegally serve American customers. More recently, a number of compliance personnel have left Binance, often posting paeans to their peers on LinkedIn while resolutely ignoring all of the alleged financial lawbreaking that took place under their collective watch for years.

For a US president whose sons and business partners are deeply engaged in crypto finance networks ranging from El Salvador to Abu Dhabi to Singapore, there could hardly be a better partner than the world’s most influential crypto company. The benefits flow both ways, as exemplified by a $2 billion deal in which the UAE government–owned firm MGX bought a stake in Binance using World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin. Instead of wiring Binance two billion actual US dollars in that deal, MGX sent the money to World Liberty Financial in return for two billion USD1 stablecoins, which Binance happily accepted as payment. MGX got its Binance stake; Binance got a new shareholder, while becoming the top market for a hot new, politically connected token; and the Trump family crypto empire got $2 billion to invest in US Treasuries. Later, in an apparent continuation of the quid pro quo, the Trump administration allowed UAE firms to acquire highly coveted Nvidia chips, whose export was usually subject to strict quotas.

After the recent reports about possible Iranian government entities using Binance to move billions of dollars, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote to Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng demanding “records and information related to Binance’s role in Iranian money laundering and its repeated failure to prevent illicit use by sanctioned entities, terrorist organizations, and other criminal actors.” Binance “has long been aware” of how its platform is being used, Blumenthal charged, but instead of addressing the issue, it attempted to cover such abuses up by firing its own investigators.

There could hardly be a more explicit allegation of wrongdoing leveled against a company that once agreed to pay the biggest fine in US corporate history. But under Trump’s kleptocratic administration, Binance’s alleged sins matter far less than its cozy relationship with this country’s leading crypto entrepreneur. After he pardoned CZ, Trump claimed not to know who the Binance founder was. But the president then went on to say that he had heard that CZ—who lived abroad but came to the United States in order to agree to a plea deal—was a victim of lawfare, just like he had been. By any reasonable outside assessment, that’s not true. But when billions of dollars are being channeled into Trump family coffers, the truth ends up being a worthless asset.

Last October, 15 Democratic governors announced the creation of a Governors’ Public Health Alliance—a plan to share resources, coordinate public health guidance and disease surveillance, and exchange information across state lines. The announcement followed the creation of two other public health state alliances—the West Coast Health Alliance (which links California, Oregon, and Washington) and the Northeast Health Collaborative (which links 10 states with Democratic governors in the Northeastern United States). In light of the systemic dismantling of America’s public health agencies, these moves essentially create a shadow infrastructure to maintain some of what is being lost. While this is a promising development, it does nothing to stop a troubling trend that has been emerging for some time: The country is quickly becoming fragmented along partisan lines when it comes to public health, and whether or not you have access to independent, scientifically sound public health guidance may depend on how your state voted for governor.

The responsibility for public health in the United States is normally shared by a patchwork of different agencies at all levels of government. The federal government broadly coordinates disease surveillance for the nation, funds public health programs and scientific research, and provides guidance that local health departments and doctors rely on. The federal government also gets involved when disease transmission is an international or interstate affair. Local health departments, meanwhile, are the boots on the ground, conducting testing (of disease, contaminants like lead, bacteria in lakes, etc.), coordinating immunization programs, taking care of local outbreaks, and providing supplies (like clean syringes to prevent infectious disease spread). Think of the federal government as the engine that powers the machine and the local authorities as the gears that make it run.

As we all know from the Covid years, local and state governments also typically hold the authority to compel people to do things that are in the best interest of the public’s health, like quarantines, vaccination requirements, mandates on capacity, testing, and masking. The federal branch holds little power in this regard, with the exception of interstate and international travel. During the pandemic, for instance, the federal government was able to implement a mask mandate only on transportation and in government buildings.

But these are not normal times, and the usual relationships between governments are breaking down. A useful example to think through is vaccines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is supposed to set recommendations for a vaccine schedule through its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves the vaccines for use in certain populations. State governments then broadly follow the vaccine schedule when deciding what vaccines to make mandatory for schooling. Yet, since Donald Trump returned to power and installed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary, many of the advisers on ACIP have been pushed out and replaced with anti-vaccine advocates, and the CDC staff who support the committee have been fired. The RFK-ified FDA recommended that the Covid vaccine be made available only to those 65 and older and those who are over 6 months and have a high-risk condition. In response, a number of states (all with Democratic governors, save for Virginia) took action to ensure that Covid vaccines would be available to people without a prescription.

It’s not just blue states diverging from Washington; some red states are going their own way too—though in the opposite direction. For instance, the Florida Department of Health announced in September that it was getting rid of all vaccine requirements for schooling—the only state in the nation to do so. (Days later, the state backtracked; however, it has not abandoned the plan). And 400 anti–public health bills have been filed in statehouses across the country, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. These bills deal with everything from vaccines to fluoride to milk safety. Idaho’s Medical Freedom Act, which was passed in April, banned state and local governments from having vaccine requirements. It’s now being heralded as a piece of model legislation for the anti-vaccine movement. Most states have some sort of exemption process for vaccine requirements, but these exemptions are becoming easier to get. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 10 states (all with Republican governors) have made moves this year to make getting an exemption easier. All of this has taken its toll since the Covid-19 pandemic, as vaccination rates have dropped for kindergarteners in the US.

Health disparities already exist along partisan lines. Some of the lowest life-expectancy rates in the United States can be found in Appalachia and the South, while the highest life expectancy can be found in West Coast states. Researchers have also found that Republican-leaning counties (even when adjusted for age and urban/rural natures) have lower life expectancy than Democratic-leaning counties. During the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccination rates were higher in blue counties than red counties. When it comes to Medicaid expansion, only 10 states have yet to expand Medicaid—nine of them have Republican governors.

As the federal government makes dramatic changes, some states will choose to fight in the courts and take other measures to preserve their state’s public health, while others will not and will suffer for it. For instance, 80 percent of terminated CDC grants to local health departments were restored in blue states, compared to 5 percent in red states, according to a KFF analysis. In the midst of this landscape, anti–public health actors are taking advantage and trying to advance bills that serve their agenda. It would be tempting for some to say that the people in the red states are getting what they deserve—but not only is this contemptuous of the people who live there (the vast majority who still get vaccinated); it also ignores the nature of disease transmission.

During the West Texas measles outbreak, measles traced to that outbreak ultimately spread to New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma. There are currently active outbreaks of measles in Utah, Arizona, and South Carolina; this is a problem that the entire United States will have to deal with. What happens in one state can’t be isolated from the others.

Those of us in public health need to recognize the terrain that we are on. Opponents of sound public health measures are mobilizing across all 50 states; we need to do the same. So far, there has been a lot of attention on health communication and behavioral strategies—how we can get people to choose to be vaccinated and tackle misinformation. But we need to start training people in what I call health mobilization. This means we approach vaccination and other public health problems as political issues and work to organize to get public health legislation passed—or to make sure terrible laws don’t get passed. For instance: vaccine exemption laws can always be strengthened to make the bar to get an exemption higher. There are states with Democratic governors facing significant challenges with vaccinations—Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Colorado all have vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine in the 80s (86–88 percent) for kindergarteners, a 6 percent drop for each state since 2019. The target set by the federal government is 95 percent.

There are also several states with Democratic governors and Republican-controlled state legislatures, like Kentucky, Kansas and Arizona. These purple-state governors should join the health alliances set up by their blue state counterparts. The alliances should also publicly extend invitations to Republican led states, even if they are unlikely to join.

Since a significant amount of funding for public health departments comes from the federal government (and this may be slashed, in addition to cuts that have happened), states need to start proactively planning now to fill gaps to ensure critical infrastructure remains, including through new wealth taxes. Similar approaches should also be looked at for Medicaid cuts, which will be devastating for rural hospitals in particular. The federal government created the $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program to offset some of these impacts. However, as analysts point out, such “offsets” may be misleading as Medicaid cuts aren’t set to take effect immediately but their impacts could last longer than this health fund, which is set to expire in 2030.

And all of this needs to be married to a broader movement on healthcare. People are frustrated with the cost of healthcare, are afraid of losing it, and are drowning in medical debt. There’s a reason Josh Hawley and Marjorie Taylor Greene were talking about Medicaid and ACA cuts. While anti–public health voices push legislation under the guise of freedom, public health voices need to talk about how people can’t afford to be healthy, are drowning in costly medical bills and spending time arguing on the phone with insurance companies. One measles infection can represent a lifetime of debt. While states may not be able to pursue Medicare for All, they can pursue public option plans; they can also use funds to cancel medical debt like some states did with money from the American Rescue Plan. These things may seem more difficult in a climate of austerity, but it is this type of imaginative vision that will be required to go to toe to toe with anti–public health movements. We can’t just defend the terrain; we need to expand the horizon.

It is likely that outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease will continue, that we will see a steady decline in our public health infrastructure, and that disparities between red and blue areas will increase. Public officials need to defend and maintain what they can and set the stage for a recovery when that is feasible. We cannot only hope for a new progressive era where public health is strengthened, as bleak as things seem—we can work toward it.

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump puffed up his chest, thrust out his chin, presented his aged jowls to the TV cameras, and from the rostrum of the House Chamber gave his best Mussolini impression.

It didn’t matter what Trump was saying—whether it was a soliloquy about the heroism of the US men’s hockey team (aided and abetted by the dupes on that team showing up to lend their muscled imprimatur to his ugly vision), a meandering monologue about tariffs’ eventually rendering the income tax obsolete (they won’t), or a barely cogent rationale for what looks to be war with Iran—the Republican claque in the auditorium responded by shouting that endless yawp of nationalism: “USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!”

The chant echoed around the august legislative chamber, ricocheting off Congress’s domed ceiling, filling every nook with the thumping rhythm of American fascism.

The president portrayed himself as the deliverer of law and order, though according to NPR Epstein-file reporting from earlier in the day, he had allegedly attempted to force a 13-year-old to pleasure him orally in the 1980s. Pam Bondi—the head of the Justice Department, which had apparently disappeared three FBI reports relating to this particular allegation—sat in the audience and applauded Trump at every turn. The president snarled, blustered, and sought to paint Democrats as in bed with “the illegals.” He asked all those who sided with US citizens over illegal aliens to stand and mocked the Democrats when, refusing to buy into this us-versus-them narrative, they kept sitting. He demanded that Congress impose onerous restrictions on the right to vote—presumably to secure a GOP victory come November. He oozed contempt for global institutions and multinational alliances. And again and again, that mindless chant would begin anew, reverberating around the chamber. “USA! USA! USA!” If you closed your eyes and just listened, you could be forgiven for hearing echoes of scenes from a Leni Riefenstahl movie. “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

This wasn’t democratic, discourse-based politics; rather, it was an attempted projection of dominance, albeit of a senescent, sundowning variety.

In truth, Trump’s speech was long and tedious, as is the wont of aging strongman leaders desperate to tout their past glories. It was, basically, a mediocre Greatest Hits recording on loop. At 108 minutes, his address shattered records for a State of the Union duration—and I’d wager he broke his own record for sheer mendacity. Afterward, Representative Raul Ruiz of California quipped that Trump ought to receive the Nobel Prize for fiction.

In that fictional utopia of Trumplandia, the country has no more economic problems; indeed, it has entered a “golden age.” (Recall that Trump is obsessed with gold; hence the gold trimmings in the White House, the gold picture frames, the gold bathroom faucets, the 15-foot Dear Leader gold statue gifted him by a cabal of crypto sycophants and slated to preside over this year’s G20 summit.) People are leaving food stamps by the millions not because the government is cutting access to the program but because they have suddenly become affluent. (Fact check: That’s preposterous.) “Somali pirates” intent on defrauding US taxpayers are being cut down to size in Minneapolis. “Angel moms” whose children were murdered by undocumented immigrants are seeing the government deliver on their behalf the sword of justice and vengeance to immigrant “monsters.” (I can’t recall another instance in which a national leader so shamelessly exploited the grief of bereft families to push a partisan agenda.)

In Trumplandia, the United States—despite having alienated virtually all its allies over the past year through a combination of economic blackmail, hostility to multilateral agreements and institutions, and territorial threats—is now more respected on the world stage than it has ever been. And the crises of tens of millions of Americans having no access to health insurance, a calamity worsened by Congress’s recent failure to extend ACA subsidies, has been solved by the creation of junk-quality “TrumpRx” accounts for cheaper prescription drugs.

In Trumplandia, the private donations of a few MAGA-affiliated philanthropists into “Trump accounts” for US-citizen children makes up for the assaults on the social safety net, the undermining of education spending, the tax giveaways to the country’s oligarchs, and the forced separation of hundreds of thousands of children from their deported parents.

In Trumplandia, the brave deregulators of MAGAworld have dismantled, once and for all, the “Green New Scam,” and have liberated fossil fuel producers so that they can again spew their toxins into the atmosphere from here to an increasingly hot eternity.

In Trumplandia, the president has ended most of the world’s wars—and those that he hasn’t, including Russia’s war against Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza (despite a purported ceasefire) and the West Bank, are hardly worth footnotes. By my count, Trump didn’t mention either of those conflicts until more than 40 minutes into his rambling speech, and then only to heap praise on himself.

Hannah Arendt wrote about the banality of evil. There was, in this speech, enough banality to fill an oil tanker. Trump prattled on about the glory days when his father was young (a reminder: During those glory days, the young Fred Trump was arrested for his participation in a Ku Klux Klan riot). The KKKer’s son spent a full seven minutes praising the masculinity of the US hockey team. He boasted about the creation of government services, which deliver financial benefits to Americans, named after him—while coyly, repeatedly denying that he had had anything to do with their christening. He lingered on the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, without any sense of understanding of the full complexity and diversity of US history. He created bizarre, fictional, dialogues between himself and overseas leaders about how magnificent American military strength is. He mused, repeatedly, about the “very unfortunate” Supreme Court decision on tariffs, but said there were many other ways to stop the world from “ripping off” Americans.

I’m sure that Trump’s repeated slurs against immigrants, his trashing of transgender Americans, his contempt for anything environmental or social justice–related did succeed in riling up the MAGA base. And I guess it’s possible that his base even ate up his paranoid rants about cunning poor people overseas relentlessly taking advantage of gullible rich people in the United States. But I can’t see how these bigoted 108 minutes made for compelling television for the great majority of Americans who don’t wake up each morning and immediately reach for their MAGA caps.

“USA! USA!” the GOP legislators brayed in response to the elderly il Duce impersonator in front of them. But the sound I heard, emanating from TV dens around the country, was “zzzzzzzzz.”

If you’re a computer science student at the University of Central Florida, you may have the opportunity to build your resume by developing tracking technology for Israeli drones used to commit genocide in Palestine.

The nationwide student movement against US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza has brought renewed attention to the military ties at colleges and universities at a level not seen since the anti–Vietnam War movement. In 2024, the Pentagon provided over $10 billion in research grants to US universities. This doesn’t account for additional university funding that came directly from weapons contractors, nor does it account for funding directly from the Israeli military-industrial complex.

The University of Central Florida (UCF) is one recipient of such funding. The university’s Center for Research in Computer Vision maintains an “industry partnership” with Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest manufacturer of drone weapons, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Elbit’s products include the missile-carrying Hermes 450 UAV and the “suicide drone” SkyStriker UAV. Elbit’s weapons have been used to target civilian homes and infrastructure in Gaza.

According to its website, the purpose of the Center for Research in Computer Vision is to “promote basic research in computer vision and its applications in all related areas including National Defense & Intelligence, Homeland Security, Environmental Monitoring, Life Sciences and Biotechnology and Robotics.” An internal slideshow from UCF’s Computer Vision program also mentions a $635,000 partnership with American military contractor DRS, a $550,000 partnership with weapons giant Lockheed Martin, and a $350,000 partnership with British aerospace company QinetiQ. All three of these corporations actively supply equipment that has been used to kill civilians in Gaza

In 2020, Dr. Mubarak Shah and Dr. Abhijit Mahalanobis, two of the Computer Vision program’s leading researchers, received a $200,000 grant directly from Elbit Systems’s American subsidiary to develop “human activity recognition” technology. Mahalanobis received an additional grant of $60,000 from Elbit for “Algorithms for object detection and human activity recognition.”

Under Shah’s leadership, the Computer Vision program has become an international hub for research on UAV weapons, AI “target acquisition” programs, and other surveillance technology. Students’ research projects include training airborne devices to “track” people, training UAVs to operate in urban environments, and developing “web-scale” facial recognition technology that can recognize faces from large datasets, such as social media platforms.

Shah’s research portfolio also includes $3 million in funding, split with two other Computer Vision faculty members, to develop Walk-Through Rendering from Images of Varying Altitude (WRIVA) technology for the US military. This project is part of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the experimental weapons and technology program of intelligence agencies like the CIA, FBI, and Office of Naval Intelligence. WRIVA technology allows intelligence operators to model ground-level terrain using only aerial images. Mahalanobis, another leading researcher at the Computer Vision program, is credited as a founding father of tracking technology for drones. In 2009, he developed an “automatic target recognition” patent for Lockheed Martin, which was later cited by Raytheon in one of their own target acquisition patents.

“UCF has ties to a lot of different weapon manufacturers, especially Lockheed Martin,” said Marcus Polzer, the president of Students for a Democratic Society at UCF, which has organized for their university to divest from military contractors going back to 2023. “These companies kind of have a stranglehold on UCF to be honest.”

As Polzer suggests, the university’s connections to Elbit don’t end with research. The two institutions share personnel as well. Jeff Crystal, the Technical Director of Elbit Systems’ American subsidiary, is an advisor to UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics. To divestment organizers like Polzer, this represents a clear conflict of interest: “They have a personal and a legal obligation to drive up profits for companies that are selling arms to Israel, who is committing genocide.”

Two graduates of UCF’s Computer Engineering program have gone on to become AI engineers with Elbit Systems of America, according to their LinkedIn profiles. On another former Computer Vision graduate student’s LinkedIn profile, he describes developing “surveillance systems” for Elbit Systems as a research assistant under Mahalanobis.” A fourth alumnus, who contributed to “UAV Video Analysis” research at UCF, now holds a machine learning position at surveillance giant Palantir. 

As a student, Polzer wonders why his university is pushing STEM graduates into the business of genocide profiteering instead of industries like renewable energy, which can be equally if not more lucrative for engineers. “Our stance as UCF SDS is that we love STEM students. We love STEM. We love the idea of it. We love students going into it and pursuing it as a career. We just don’t think they should be funneled into weapons manufacturing. We think they should be funneled into building our infrastructure instead of bombing others. I know Florida has one of the largest solar panel producers … Why can’t we have a partnership with something that’s productive like that?”

The University of Central Florida is just one of countless American universities that are developing UAV weapons technologies under direct sponsorship from Elbit Systems or the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The University of Michigan’s Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Laboratory has produced research on UAV “payload delivery” technology with direct funding from the Israeli military. In the context of military drones, a “payload” can be anything from a camera to a 10kg warhead missile.

Last spring, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology severed research ties with Elbit Systems after a sustained pressure campaign by BDS Boston, the local chapter of the national Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement. Riding that success, BDS Boston is now participating in the “Eject Elbit” against Capital One, pressuring the financial giant to cancel their $90 million loan to Elbit.

While there are laws intended to expose foreign funding of American universities, they function more as speed bumps than road blocks. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires universities to disclose gifts from foreign sources, including foreign governments and corporations, of over $250,000. However, as the US-incorporated subsidiary of a foreign company, Elbit Systems of America could be exempt from this disclosure rule.

The development of Israel’s UAV weapons in American universities with support from American students is nothing new. But with organizations like Students for a Democratic Society, Students for Justice in Palestine, and BDS Boston organizing for divestment, the connections between American academia and Israel’s genocide are showing their first signs of fraying.

“As students, we can make relatively niche topics the center of mainstream news,” Polzer said. “I hate to say it, but think back 15–20 years ago. Palestine was not the central thing being talked about. Israel’s ethnic cleansing was not the central thing being talked about. It’s important to organize because we can do great things.”

On February 12, Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) introduced legislation to finally lift all provisions of the US trade embargo against Cuba and advance the cause of normalized relations between Washington and Havana. The United States–Cuba Trade Act “would repeal or amend several laws codified over decades that restrict trade, exchange, telecommunications, and travel with Cuba,” according to a statement issued by McGovern’s office. The bill also calls for a bilateral dialogue, mandating that “the President should take all necessary steps to advance negotiations with the Government of Cuba.”

“I think we have to establish an opposition to Trump’s policy,” Representative McGovern asserted in an interview with The Nation. “I think we have to say there’s another way to do this.”

The legislative initiative comes as tensions between Cuba and the United States have turned deadly. On Wednesday, Cuba’s border patrol intercepted an armed group of exiles on a Florida-registered speedboat within one nautical mile of Cuba’s northern coastline. An exchange of gunfire killed four and injured six on board; one Cuban commander was also injured. The boat was loaded with assault weapons, Molotov cocktails, and camouflage uniforms, indicating “an infiltration with terrorist ends,” according to Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior. “In the face of current challenges,” the Cuban government stated, “Cuba reaffirms its commitment to protecting its territorial waters…in order to protect its sovereignty and stability in the region.

Those “current challenges” are the result of the Trump administration’s decision to ratchet up economic pressure on the Cuban people by cutting off shipments of Venezuela petroleum and threatening other oil-producing nations to halt all oil exports to the island. The “total pressure” policy of energy deprivation is suffocating Cuba’s basic economic activities—creating a burgeoning humanitarian crisis for the Cuban populace. Foreign airlines ferrying tourists from Canada and Russia have suspended flights because they cannot refuel their planes once they land; tourist hotels are shuttered, costing thousands of Cuban jobs; the Canadian mining conglomerate, Sherritt, has suspended its operations on the island. Clinics and hospitals are closing. For average Cubans, “every day brings extended power cuts, intermittent water, spoiled food, suspended classes, canceled surgeries, and transportation that stops without warning,” Maria José Espinosa and Emily Mendrala reported in El País. “Families spend entire days searching for fuel, cooking gas, or basic goods.”

Across the international community, leaders are addressing the cruelty of US sanctions. At the Vatican, Pope Leo has expressed his concern for the “pain and anguish” of the Cuban people and urged both Washington and Havana to engage in a “sincere and effective dialogue,” free of coercion, to resolve rising tensions. “The blockade that the United States has imposed on Cuba,” stated Chilean President Gabriel Boric, “violates the human rights of the entire population.” “You cannot strangle a people like this,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has asserted, while offering the good offices of her country to facilitate talks between Washington and Havana and dispatching naval vessels filled with humanitarian assistance.

Just this week, at a meeting of Caribbean nations—CARICOM—attended by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, leaders across the region condemned the humanitarian impact of US economic pressure on Cuba. The prime minister of Jamaica, CARICOM chair Andrew Holness, called for a “constructive dialogue between Cuba and the US aimed at de-escalation, reform and stability. We must address the situation in Cuba with clarity and courage,” Holness said.

“The situation in Cuba is dire,” McGovern and Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned President Trump in a February 25 letter to the White House. “Given that Cuba poses no credible national security threat to the United States, we urge you to lift the oil embargo on Cuba immediately to prevent unnecessary human suffering and reduce the potential for a regional refugee crisis.” As their letter admonished Trump: “Your escalation of the embargo and use of tariffs to starve a nation of critical resources are forms of economic coercion without a defensible rationale.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Nation: Representative McGovern, you have introduced a resolution to lift US sanctions and finally end the Cuba trade embargo. In the MAGA-controlled Congress, the votes aren’t there. What, then, is the purpose of moving this bill forward at this time?

Jim McGovern: I think we have to establish an opposition to Trump’s policy. I think we have to say there’s another way to do this. There has been a very little discussion on Cuba, you know, in recent years in Congress. I think a lot of people on the left have thought it’s a hopeless cause. And, you know, the people on the right just figure it’s a matter of time before the government collapses and they can put in whoever they want.

But I think if we care about the Cuban people then we care about opening political space. In Cuba, opening things up economically is the way to go, and that is why the embargo should be lifted. We have introduced this legislation because we need to start building a movement again—a movement calling for lifting the embargo, you know, and turning the page once and for all on what has been a Cold War policy for over six decades and restarting the effort [under Obama] to normalize relations.

TN: Indeed, in a few weeks it will be the 10th anniversary of President Obama’s history-making trip to Havana, a major symbol of his breakthrough with Raúl Castro to turn that page and normalize bilateral ties.

JM: I was part of a small group that pressured Obama to open things up—and he did. Ten years ago, I went with him to Cuba when he went on that trip, and I thought things were getting better on the island.

TN: In your opinion, what are the lessons from the Obama–Raúl Castro breakthrough a short decade ago?

JM: First, that it worked! I mean, more political and economic space opened up in Cuba. More Americans could travel to Cuba.

But I think the Cubans and people in the United States were too slow in kind of taking full advantage of that opportunity. If there had been more exchanges, more business investments, more, you know, cultural exchange…. I think there should have been a greater sense of urgency. I think it would have been harder for Trump to turn it around when he became president.

I thought when Biden became president for sure he’d go back to the to the Obama policies. Biden was in those meetings that some of us had with Obama on Cuba. Vice President Biden actually called me to tell me that they were going to change the policy. But then he didn’t do anything until the last few days of his presidency. He symbolically went back to the Obama policies. But it was too late.

Biden messed up. I don’t know what they were thinking. I don’t know whether they thought they had more time so let’s not piss off the right-wing Cubans in Florida. We might need them in the next election. It was a political calculation, I think.

TN: That has been the fate of Cuba policy for decades. A policy mortgaged to swing state political calculus.

JM: Cuban policy has been more of a domestic political issue than it has been a foreign policy issue.

TN: What do you think the end game is of this Trump-Rubio “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba, essentially blockading all oil shipments to Cuba and deliberately creating a humanitarian crisis?

JM: I think they fantasize that the government Cuba will collapse.

TN: What is your sense of Trump’s statements that Rubio is talking to “high-level” Cuban representatives? Do you see any evidence of a dialogue between Washington and Havana?

JM: Well, the Cuban government has said they’re willing to talk about a wide range of issues. The Cuban government has never said that they’re not open to conversation. The question is: What Is Trump asking for? You know, like return the [expropriated] property? Or maybe just to build a Trump Hotel in Havana? Maybe that’s all they want.

TN: There’s been talk of congressional delegation possibly going to Cuba to highlight the humanitarian crisis. Would you go?

JM: I would, I would, I would like to go. I don’t know whether the current speaker of the House or the committees of jurisdiction would allow it…if they would provide funding for such a trip. It takes about a month or so to get authorization. So the process of planning an official trip to Cuba would move slowly.

TN: Can Congress play a role in fostering a Cuba policy is in the national interest of the United States and the best interests of the Cuban people?

JM: We have to talk about it. Democrats, you know, and thoughtful Republicans, need to talk about it. We can’t be afraid to talk about it. If the issue is immigration, the more misery you cause, the more immigrants are going to be coming to the United States. But that’s what the Trump administration is doing. Again, Trump is always dangerous. He’s arrogant, and he believes that if I say, if I tell somebody to jump, their response should be, how high? You know that history is not in his portfolio.

The future of Cuba needs to be determined by the Cubans who live on the island. Not by Trump and Marco Rubio. Not by those in the United States who want to dictate what Cuba’s future looks like.

Clarence Thomas is the worst thing to happen to Black people since Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the Dred Scott decision. For nearly 30 years, he has been a kind of bouncer working the door of the Supreme Court for the white supremacists, rebuffing every attempt Black people have made to achieve equality, fairness, and justice.

His latest outrageous attack on equal treatment under the law can be found in his majority opinion in United States Postal Service v. Konan. USPS v. Konan is a critical case that could directly affect the integrity of upcoming elections, but it’s gone somewhat under the radar because, on its face, the case is just about the post office. The plaintiff, Lebene Konan, is a landlord with two rental properties in Texas. Starting in May 2020, the post office stopped delivering her mail. Then it stopped delivering mail to her tenants. The post office claimed there was some dispute over the rightful owner of the properties. Over the course of two years and various attempts to rectify the problem, Konan alleged that the post office was intentionally preventing her from receiving mail, thus making it harder for her to run her properties and discouraging new tenants from moving in.

This is where I point out that Konan happens to be a Black woman trying to be a landlord in Euless, Texas (a suburb of Dallas). Konan filed various lawsuits, including ones alleging racial discrimination at the hands of the post office. Most of her claims were dismissed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the most conservative court in the country.

Only one of her claims survived: The Fifth Circuit agreed to let Konan argue her claim under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). The Trump administration appealed, urging the high court to protect the post office from a trial and additional judicial scrutiny.

Generally speaking, you cannot sue the government to recover damages in a tort lawsuit because of the concept of “sovereign immunity”; the idea, essentially, is that the government cannot be held liable for monetary damages arising out of actions taken by the government. But under the FTCA, the government waives its sovereign immunity for issues involving intentional misconduct by government officials.

There are exceptions to the FTCA, however, and a pretty big one involves the post office. It’s called the “Postal Exception,” and it says that the post office cannot be sued on claims “arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.” I get why this exception is there. Mail gets lost all the time. It would be unworkable if people could sue the government every time a holiday card went missing.

But Konan is not suing over her lost greeting cards. She is suing because, she argued, her mail was neither lost, miscarried, nor negligently transmitted but intentionally not delivered—and the postal exception does not cover intentional malfeasance by the post office. She should therefore be able to recover damages for the post office’s willful attack on her business.

Clarence Thomas and four other Republican justices disagreed, however, and overruled the Fifth Circuit. In his majority decision, Thomas argued that the post office is immune from liability, even when its workers intentionally refuse to do their jobs. To get there, he tortured the English language beyond all recognition. He twisted the words of the postal exception, using the only book he seems to read, the dictionary, to come to the conclusion that “refusal” to deliver mail is the same as “loss” “miscarriage” or “neglect.”

To put this another way: Thomas has made the case that the postal exception is so broad that the post office functionally cannot be sued under the FTCA for anything. The post office already can’t be sued for accidental malfeasance; now, according to his ruling, it can’t be sued for purposeful malfeasance. By Thomas’s logic, the post office can burn your mail and there’s nothing you can do about it.

It is notable that Justice Neil Gorsuch, the most “textual” justices of the bunch, joined the dissent in this case, which was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Thomas’s abuse of the English language in serving of hurting a Black landlord was so ridiculous that it made even Gorsuch blush.

In this dissent, Sotomayor pointed out the problems with Thomas’s word games. Apparently, she also has access to dictionaries. She argued that the whole concept of “losing” something suggests unintentional actions: “see also Webster’s New International Dictionary 1460 (2d ed. 1934) (defining ‘loss’ as an ‘[a]ct or fact of losing…esp[ecially], unintentional parting with something of value’). For good reason: As the Fifth Circuit observed below, ‘no one intentionally loses something.’”

I would like to be able to tell you that the tragedy of this decision will be felt only by Konan, or only by Black women landlords. But if the post office can intentionally refuse to deliver a Black landlord’s mail, you know what else it can intentionally not deliver? A Black woman’s ballot. Or a Black man’s ballot. Or every ballot coming out of a zip code where Black people live. Clarence Thomas just gave the green light to Trump’s post office to intentionally “lose” mail-in ballots, six months before the midterm elections.

If you listened to the State of the Union, you might have noticed—between the awarding of medals and airing of grievances—Trump’s call for an end to mail-in ballots. He said: “We have to stop it, John,” while looking directly at Chief Justice John Roberts.

Roberts voted with the majority and joined Thomas’s opinion in this case, by the way.

If Trump tries to rig the elections, there will be a bevy of lawsuits, of course. But USPS v. Konan just cut off one obvious avenue of legal redress. The ruling will prevent individual voters from suing the post office should the post office simply refuse to transmit their mail-in ballots.

Black voters will be the ones most likely to suffer that deprivation of voting rights at the hands of the US Postal Service. Clarence Thomas knows all this, and while it would be easy to say he knows this and doesn’t care, I think he does care. I think he cares a great deal about the suppression of the Black vote; he just happens to think the suppression of Black votes is a good thing. I think the destruction of Black political power has been one of the motivating factors for his entire judicial career.

To my mind, the difference between Thomas and all the white supremacists that have come before him is that most of those guys were interested in the advancement of white privilege. Thomas is motivated by the destruction of Black power. It’s a slight difference, but that difference is what makes Thomas the worst.

Who says there are no do-overs in politics?

Less than a month after a historic snowstorm and cold spell first tested Zohran Mamdani’s administrative mettle, last weekend’s blizzard offered a second chance for New York’s 34-year-old mayor to demonstrate his ability to manage a weather crisis—a challenge that several of his predecessors have failed to meet. It also provided an encouraging indication of his dedication to learning on the job.

As faithful readers will recall, this observer gave the mayor an A- for his first encounter with Big Snow. The streets were cleared quickly and efficiently, but bus stops and crosswalks remained perilous for days. And as the death toll from the cold mounted, claims of an “all-of government” approach to the crisis began to ring hollow.

It’s true, as the mayor noted, that previous snowstorms have been followed in a few days by weather warm enough to melt the ice cliffs left in the wake of Department of Sanitation snowplows. And, so far at least, deaths from cold in the city aren’t out of line with historic levels. But they were still shockingly high for an administration whose top lawyer, Steven Banks, was (according to The New York Times) “the most successful social-services director in New York City history.” And when it emerged that seven people had died from hypothermia inside their own homes, the consequences of a failure to properly coordinate the city’s response became more evident.

As one veteran city official reminded me, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development maintains a data base of heat complaints. That should have made it easy to pinpoint repeat-offender landlords and buildings. Other city agencies are supposed to keep track of homebound New Yorkers, whether from illness, disability or old age, who are in need of assistance. That so many New Yorkers fell through the city’s safety net was a clear sign that changes were needed. Fortunately, someone at City Hall was paying attention.

Earlier this week, the city’s helpful online snow-plow tracker again made for encouraging reading. And this time the administration stirred much more quickly out of the laggard posture that needlessly jeopardized lives in the last storm. Mamdani officials were determined to bring people in out of the cold—even when they preferred to remain on the streets. The city also bumped the pay for temporary snow shovelers—the workers who clear crosswalks, bus stops, and the sidewalks beside city-owned property—to $30 an hour, which helped to quickly double the number signed on during last month’s snowstorm. And it appears that warmer weather this coming weekend may finally reduce New York’s snow-and-dogshit mountains to the mere messy molehills city residents are long accustomed to navigating around.

Although the remark is often attributed to Napoleon, it was an earlier French politician, Cardinal Mazarin, who, upon hearing one of his generals praised for his competence, replied “But is he lucky?” This week’s snowstorm sequel, along with his astonishingly successful come-from-behind campaign in last year’s Democratic primary, suggests that in Mamdani’s case the answer is yes.

But even if his luck holds, the mayor is going to have to keep learning on the job—which will probably mean widening the circle of those he consults. His apparent reluctance to do so is perfectly understandable, given the avalanche of money mobilized against him during the fall’s general election campaign. Although the anyone-but-Zohran initiative turned out to be a colossal waste—according to The City, the final tab worked out to roughly $65 a vote—New York’s wealthiest still have plenty of money to burn. There was a brief period, as Mamdani’s victory became more and more likely, when some portion of the city’s permanent government arrived at a grudging acceptance of the democratic socialist. But that uneasy peace—largely brokered through the efforts of Kathryn Wylde, who at the time headed the pro-business Partnership for New York City (and for the record, a woman I’ve never met)—appears to be breaking down even faster than the ice on the Central Park reservoir.

Wylde has retired, and the incorrigible offenders among New York’s Epstein class are already busily conspiring to bring the mayor down—or at least keep him in line. Their ranks include longtime Cuomo lieutenant Steven Cohen, tech-investor/political operator Bradley Tusk, and political consultant Phil Singer, whose firm worked for Cuomo’s Fix the City super PAC. Scott Stringer, who finished a dismal fifth in last year’s Democratic primary, seems to be auditioning to be the front man for this effort—a sad comedown for a once promising politician who racked up a creditable record as a genuinely progressive city comptroller.

Still, the emergence of such opposition should come as no surprise.  Mamdani’s entire campaign posed a genuine threat to the city’s entrenched plutocracy—especially the overweening finance and real estate interests who have long grown accustomed to calling the shots in both the city and state. For Mamdani to deliver on the three principal promises of his campaign—freezing rents for rent-stabilized tenants, offering free childcare to all New Yorkers, and making the city’s buses both “fast and free”—will require confronting those entrenched interests again and again. That goes double for Mamdani’s lofty pledge in his inauguration speech to “govern as a democratic socialist.”

Mamdani has already shown a repeated ability to out-organize his opposition on the streets. Judging by the turnout for Our Time’s Albany Takeover on Wednesday—at 1,500, more than a battalion, but considerably less than a division—neither the mayor, who skipped the proceedings, nor his troops, are fully engaged in this fight. But then taxing the rich to plug a budget hole isn’t exactly the most inspiring rallying cry. Better messaging might help. And in the meantime, the mayor might also do more to bolster his forces—especially as the battle over the city’s proposed budget heats up. Someone should be energetically making the case right now that having the city provide free childcare and free buses would be good for every business whose workers and customers rely on those services. Mamdani might also reach out to politically sympatico former insiders—Kathryn Garcia, currently running the Port Authority after a long record of hyper-competence in city government, comes to mind—to meet with a select group of current commissioners and agency heads to help them identify actual savings in their departments. That would help give the administration the fiscal credibility its current budget theatrics lack. Brad Lander, a crucial ally whose own congressional campaign is currently paralyzed over uncertainty about district boundaries, could also be a huge help here.

But having donated ($50) to his campaign, and after the great pleasure of voting for him in both the primary and general elections, I certainly want the new mayor to succeed. More than that, I want Zohran Kwame Mandami to join Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the tiny pantheon of New York politicians who genuinely enlarged not only New York’s public sphere but our vision of what is politically possible. Delivering on his three signature policies alone would make Mamdani a transformative mayor. But since, unlike some of his predecessors, he can’t waste time fantasizing about running for president since he’s foreign-born, my hopes for him and his administration run higher than that. LaGuardia and FDR lifted New Yorkers’ imaginations of what city life, and the common good, could include in the middle of the Great Depression. New York today is the wealthiest city, as a famous Brooklyn native frequently observes, in “the wealthiest country in the history of the world.” Free buses are just the beginning of what we should hope for.

Finally a personal note. Some friends have complained that my recent columns have been too hard on the new mayor. It’s certainly true that on November 9, 2016, I adopted “no more wishful thinking” as a professional mantra. Besides, a vigorous skepticism should be part of any reporter’s toolkit; as they used to drill into the young recruits at Chicago’s City News Bureau, “if your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

However, I’ve also seen what happens when high hopes are replaced by disillusion and despair—not just in New York, or the United States, but in Greece, or France, or Britain. When socialists fail, too often reaction and repression come in their wake. To keep that from happening here, Mamdani will need to show the same creativity in government that he displayed on the campaign trail, and to actually deliver on the vision of excellence and transparency he has repeatedly promised in office. Snowstorms pose a small test; getting a final budget that is credible and reflects his priorities will be much, much harder. It will require a lot more than good luck. Still, a little good luck never hurts.

Now, fresh reporting from Bloomberg Green has revealed a new proposed climate bomb—this one financed by Japan but built in the US.

On February 20, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi and US President Donald Trump announced a new aspect of the trade agreement they reached last October. Their announcement was major news in Japan but got little coverage in the United States, crowded out by revelations from the Epstein files and the Supreme Court ruling that Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional. The few stories that did run mostly summarized the two governments’ official statements, leading with the news that, in response to Trump’s tariff threats, Japan will invest $36 billion in three US infrastructure projects: a gas-fired power plant in Ohio, an oil export facility off the Texas coast, and a manufacturing facility in Georgia.

Bloomberg Green’s Aaron Clark and Eric Roston went beyond those official statements to make the climate connection to Japan’s promised investments. Focusing on the $33 billion power plant in Ohio, Clark and Roston noted that its 9.2 gigawatts of generating capacity would make it the biggest power plant in the US, “capable of supplying millions of homes with electricity.” The reporters then cited two estimates—one from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, one from the Rhodium consultant company—of how much carbon dioxide the plant would emit: between 16.2 million and 19.3 million tons annually. The Ohio plant therefore would rank as “one of the nation’s largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation,” Clark and Roston wrote, roughly equivalent to “3.8 million gas cars over a year of driving.”

Even this might understate the proposed plant’s climate impact. As recently as the 2010s, fossil gas was widely regarded as less damaging to the climate than coal, because this gas contains much less CO₂. But a growing body of peer-reviewed science, notably a 2024 paper by Robert Howarth of Cornell University, has found that natural gas is in fact not much better than coal, and liquified gas is far worse. Gas is composed mainly of methane, which leaks throughout the supply chain and is 80 times more potent as a climate pollutant than CO₂ over a 20-year period. That 20-year period matters, because it is during those years that the battle to limit temperature rise to an amount our civilization can survive will be won or lost.

“The future must be zero fossil fuels,” Howarth said in an e-mail interview. Given that solar and wind are increasingly the cheapest sources of electricity, “why spend billions investing in gas?”

Like the 195 oil and gas projects identified by The Guardian, the Ohio power plant analyzed by Bloomberg Green is not a done deal. Whether the projects actually come online remains an open question for government officials, regulatory bodies, courts, financiers, and citizens. Which makes these projects ongoing news stories for journalists to cover and illuminate. The US-Japan trade deal is a reminder that there are climate stories everywhere you look. The trick is to tell them.

The day after Christmas, Jupiter Jetson got an e-mail from her employers at Sheri’s Ranch, one of the oldest legal brothels in Pahrump, Nevada. It contained a new employment contract that her bosses wanted her and her coworkers to sign as soon as possible. After reading through the terms, Jetson sat down on the floor of her living room and began to cry.

“I immediately knew that unless we figured something out, my career is over, because I can’t sign this,” she recalled thinking to herself. “If they won’t back down, what am I supposed to do?” For the past eight years, she’d worked at Sheri’s as a “courtesan”—the ranch’s term for its employees. She’d built a close working relationship with the brothel’s management, who trusted her and often came to her for advice. The new contract—a copy of which The Nation has seen—felt like a betrayal of that bond.

It shows management attempting to secure extensive rights to workers’ likenesses as well as their intellectual property, including any “photographs, videos, [or] writing” created during the course of their employment at Sheri’s. The contract also slipped in language that would give Sheri’s management power of attorney over its employees, which came as an even greater shock.

“Almost every section had something that led back to them owning our [intellectual property], them owning our likeness, them being able to sign our name on documents,” Jetson said. “We had an attorney look at it, who confirmed that we weren’t just overreacting. This was a truly cartoonishly evil contract that they were asking us to sign.”

For people like Jetson, who also models and works in the adult film industry, or Adalind Gray, who recently started a band, the thought that Sheri’s could swoop in to claim the products of their labor is unbearable. “A lot of us are artists,” explained courtesan Paloma Karr, who is also a writer and activist. “We have all sorts of other jobs. The implications are not well outlined on how far they could go, with how predatory they could possibly be.”

“This is how you end up finding out you’re the spokesperson for French fries in Germany, and you didn’t see a dime because you have signed an unlimited license to your photo for no additional compensation or consideration,” Jetson added. “This is not something that only affects people who have IP to protect. If you have a face, if you have an identity, and if you have a future, you have something to protect from this contract.”

Faced with such a disturbing ultimatum from management, the workers at Sheri’s did what workers everywhere do: They got organized.

As soon as Jetson told her about the new contract, Molly Wylder, another longtime Sheri’s employee, hopped online and began mobilizing her coworkers. “Discord was a high-speed, highly effective method for us to get everything together,” she explained. A small server she’d originally set up as a place for workplace chatter rapidly morphed into a fast-moving organizing hub, and as the news spread, the courtesans began to plan their response. They knew that they’d have to take action, but weren’t sure how. “We tried individually reaching out,” Jetson said. “Then we tried crafting a group letter, where about 25 of us signed on to it. As time progressed, they started getting more and more insistent, and we realized they’re going to just start telling us that we need to sign or leave.”

As time went on, the tensions rose between management and the courtesans who still refused to sign. It became clear to Jetson that Sheri’s workers might need to call in reinforcements. She reached out to her friend Siouxsie Q, a writer, adult film director, and sex workers’ rights activist, for advice. Q drew on her past experience working at the Lusty Lady, the country’s first unionized strip club, and got Jetson in touch with Carrie Biggs-Adams, a union official in San Francisco. From there, the courtesans’ story made its way to the Nevada office of the Communications Workers of America (CWA).

Marc Ellis, the president of CWA Local 9413 in Sparks, Nevada, was thrilled to get the call. He’d been waiting for them.

In 2023, after a months-long strike, dancers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood, California, unionized with Actors Equity. Ellis took notice. “At that point, I literally went to my local and said, ‘If they’re doing it in California, we need to do it in Nevada, and we might as well do the brothels while we’re at it,’” he explained. “In my mind, their job is no different than mine. I work for AT&T; they work at Sheri’s. We both have legal jobs, and everybody should be treated with dignity and respect.”

A Zoom meeting was arranged. “The first thing [the union] said in the meeting was, ‘Immediately, upon taking this call, you have some protection from us,’ and the breath that I was able to let out hearing that…,” Wylder said. “The raging storm inside quieted a little bit. It was really nice to hear that somebody had our back, that wasn’t just other sex workers. We are such a tight community because we are all we have, and it’s nice not to be all we have.”

From there, things moved quickly—very quickly. As Ellis remarked, “What they’ve done in six days normally takes us six months.” Once Wylder, Jetson, Karr, and the other women on that Zoom call decided that unionizing was their best hope, they brought the idea to their coworkers, answering questions and whipping up enthusiasm through clandestine in-person conversations at work and open discussion online. “Through phone-treeing and using Discord, we got the vast majority of the ladies who work at the ranch to sign those cards in under 48 hours,” Wyler said proudly. “Sex workers are used to moving fast and breaking things, and we did. We had to. The threat was so imminent to all of us.”

On February 11, The Nevada Independent broke the news that the courtesans were officially unionizing with the CWA as the United Brothel Workers. If successful, they will join CWA Local 9413, whose members now include workers at AT&T, DirectTV, and St. Mary’s Hospital. But the courtesans paid a high price for their actions. 

Thanks to the ranch’s ever-present security cameras, Sheri’s management were already aware of the organizing effort, and responded to the petition for union recognition by unceremoniously firing Jupiter Jetson, Molly Wylder, Paloma Karr, Adalind Gray, Genevieve Dahl, and Gwen Bunny in quick succession. Some, like Jetson, received the news via e-mail; Gray was fired in person after first attempting to sign the new contract with an “under duress” notation. Thinking quickly, she started recording the conversation on her phone when management confronted her. “I was not breaking any laws, certainly not violating the contract, [but] they didn’t like that I was standing up for myself,” she explained. “And at that point, I was officially wrongfully terminated.”

Under Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, it is considered illegal retaliation for an employer to fire an employee for “organizing, joining, or supporting a union,” and CWA Local 9413 has already filed multiple unfair labor practices (ULPs) complaints with the National Labor Relations Board on their behalf. After organizing their historic union at “warp speed,” the United Brothel Workers will now have to wait for their ULPs to wind their way through a sluggish court docket.

As frustrating as the process may be after that initial rush, the workers are comforted by knowing that Ellis has their back. Sex workers have been organizing for centuries, but it is rare to see a union of CWA’s size and stature work so hard to bring them into the fold. “It has been really beautiful to be accepted by this huge organization that didn’t have to put their reputation or their name on the line,” Jetson says. “And they did it purely to protect a group of sex workers. It’s something that I’m just very honored to see in my lifetime.”

There’s one more legal wrinkle that needs to be ironed out before the United Brothel Workers can start thinking about the contract they want. The women who work as courtesans at Sheri’s are hired as “independent contractors” by their employers (Jeremy Lemur, the brothel’s marketing director, provided a statement to Mother Jones that emphasized that specific phrasing multiple times). However, the terms of their actual jobs may not pass the “ABC test,” a legal framework used to determine whether a worker should be considered an employee. Under the NLRB, independent contractors are excluded from having the right to unionize, which has been a major thorn in labor organizers’ sides.

However, Nevada’s independent contractor criteria does cite the ABC test, and one of the three requirements that must be met to qualify is whether “the person has been and will continue to be free from control or direction over the performance of the services, both under his/her contract of service.” As Ellis points out, workers at Sheri’s, who reside at the brothel during their two-week shifts, enjoy no such freedom. “Do they make their own schedule? Can they work from home? If I tell you, ‘You need to do this job, but you need to be here from this day to this day and work from this time to this time,’ you’re not a contractor, you are an employee,” he explains.

In the meantime, they are raising funds for the terminated workers, speaking out about the union drive on social media, and asking supporters to sign a petition calling on Sheri’s to reinstate them. There’s no call to boycott the establishment; if anything, the terminated workers want the business to thrive. “We’re fighting to keep our jobs, not to get Sheri’s shut down,” Jetson says. “As a matter of fact, if you can please come and spend very good money on our coworkers in our absence, we would absolutely appreciate it. Whether they signed a union card or not, we stand in solidarity with our other coworkers.”

The United Brothel Workers may only be a few weeks old, but they’re acting like a union already. (They even have the perfect picket sign slogan ready to go, if their fight gets to that point: “Bust Nuts, Not Unions!”) Making history wasn’t their goal; they had just wanted to protect themselves and improve an unfair, predatory working environment. But as Jetson says, that’s what every other labor organizer throughout history has wanted, too. “Company towns, exploitative working contracts, things like that have always been what sparked the biggest progressions in labor rights,” she explained. “And really, that is what’s happening here, in the realest tradition of the American labor movement.”

When Cecil Elvir-Quinonez was pulled over for speeding on New Year’s Eve, the 25-year-old mother was thinking of her two children in her back seat—a 5-year-old son and a 5-month-old infant she was still breastfeeding. Weeks later, she was still thinking about them—only now, having been arrested and transferred to ICE custody, she was languishing in a privately run detention center in Louisiana, far from her Florida home, and facing deportation to Honduras, a country she had not seen since she was a child. She had also just learned that she was pregnant. In correspondence with The 19th, Elvir-Quinonez wrote that she had received no medical attention despite experiencing persistent bleeding and cramping, and being forced to skip meals due to the unhygienic conditions of the facility. 

Her story is not an isolated one. A monthlong investigation by the office of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, which was released last year, found 41 allegations of physical or sexual abuse and 32 reports of mistreatment of children and pregnant women. And in October, the ACLU documented a series of disturbing allegations from multiple women and pregnant people held at two privately owned ICE detention centers—the South Louisiana Processing Center (Basile) and the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia.

According to the ACLU, three pregnant women reported ICE agents using restraints, such as shackling, even as the women were having a miscarriage; one pregnant woman said she had been held in solitary confinement for days; two women reported medical interventions without informed consent or appropriate translation services; and almost all women interviewed talked about inadequate or denial of prenatal care, medical neglect from health professionals, and limited nutrition and medications, including prenatal vitamins.

The detention and inhumane treatment of migrant women and pregnant people by the US immigration authorities is part of a continuous history of state-sanctioned violence used to regulate the reproductive futures of those deemed outside the national body, turning the “border” into a site of direct domination over the migrant body.

Since 2021, the detention of pregnant, postpartum, and nursing individuals has been governed by ICE Directive 11032.4, which, in theory, requires specific humanitarian standards to be met if detention is deemed necessary, including providing appropriate medical and mental healthcare, regular medical evaluations, prohibiting restraint use, and obtaining informed consent before any medical examination and treatment.

This directive came after legal and medical advocates like ACLU and Physicians for Human Rights, raised concerns about the conditions of ICE facilities and the growing number of pregnant people in ICE detention centers. Between October 2017 and August 2018, 1,655 pregnant women were detained by ICE, a 215 percent increase from the preceding period.

While Congress initially required the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to publish data every six months on the total number of pregnant, postpartum, and nursing individuals in custody, that requirement has now lapsed. As of 2026, the precise number of pregnant and postpartum individuals detained in ICE facilities is unknown. The last publicly available data in 2018 showed that the rate of detaining pregnant migrants increased by 52 percent compared to 2016.

The very limited data we have comes from a patchwork of investigative journalism, congressional reports, and lawsuits. For instance, the Los Angeles Times noted that, according to DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, pregnant women make up 0.133 percent of all unauthorized immigrants in custody. This percentage translates to more than 9,000 pregnant individuals if using the NBC News tracker on immigration enforcement. According to a recent article from The Intercept, immigration experts note that the Trump administration’s commitment to expand deportation efforts and reduce data transparency is contributing to an uptick in pregnant women in immigration detention.

The increase in pregnant people detained does not come as a surprise if we look at the history of immigration laws and practices. Immigration politics is reproductive politics—and controlling and regulating sex, gender, and reproduction through federal and state immigration and immigration-related laws is not a novel practice in the United States. After the Civil War, Congress passed the first federal restrictive immigration law known as the Page Act of 1875, which prohibited the entry of Chinese women who were suspected of polygamy and prostitution to the US.

In her 2005 Columbia Law Review article on the Page Act, Kerry Abrams argues that the objective of the federal statute was to preserve American “traditional” values of family and cultural and racial hegemony. By using the “moral standing” of women to regulate immigration, the federal government also paved the way for subsequent anti-immigration laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

The influence of marriage norms remains significant in today’s immigration policies and regulations. For example, whether an immigrant’s marriage is considered fraudulent depends on underlying cultural ideas about what a “real” or “proper” marriage is, and who it involves. Furthermore, the threat by President Trump to end birthright citizenship is another example of how policies around immigration are tied to reproduction, both dictating who can become a citizen and on what terms.

The US also has a long history of coercive sterilization, targeting people of color and immigrants. The 1927 Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell, which held that forced sterilization based on mental illness, disability, poverty, or race was constitutional, paved the legal pathway for the eugenics movement to deprive many people of reproductive autonomy. Shortly after Buck, women of Mexican descent in California were disproportionally targeted in sterilization practices implemented by the state.

Decades later, the case of Madrigal v. Quilligan highlighted the coercive sterilization of Mexican American women. Organizations such as Planned Parenthood, as well as hospitals, practiced coerced sterilization and the testing of birth control pills on Puerto Rican women without their consent as a justification to solve their “poverty problem.” This practice continues today behind the walls of ICE detention centers. In 2020, a detailed report documenting coerced hysterectomies in a private ICE detention center in Georgia reintroduced the legacy of the eugenics movement to the mainstream media.

The denigration of immigrant women is also explicit when tied to birthright citizenship. In 2007 and ’11—under the Bush and later the Obama administrations—several bills were introduced to end birthright citizenship, albeit to no avail. During the second Trump administration, ads included clips of immigrants of color being chased by ICE agents, and pregnant immigrant women crossing the Rio Grande. The image of women crossing the border to have children in the US is a familiar trope used by the media to capitalize on the stereotype that immigrant women, especially women of color, intentionally come to the US to give birth to “anchor babies.” By framing immigrant women as less than human, immigration opponents invoke fears that people come to the US to “claim government benefits” and “steal jobs.” This racism is used to justify exclusionary policies.

For example, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) bifurcated immigrants into “qualified” or “nonqualified” categories for services like Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Social Security Income.

The restriction to services, including healthcare services—which was maintained even under the Affordable Care Act—has negatively impacted the health of immigrant women and their children. Laws restricting public welfare and health insurance are associated with a higher risk of low birthweight, preterm birth, perinatal mortality, and congenital malformation among infants born to immigrant women.

Equally disturbing are accounts of sexual abuse among women and gender minorities. In September 2025, a complaint filed by ACLU of Louisiana and other human rights groups detailed the experiences of one woman and three transgender individuals detained in ICE centers who were subjected to months of constant sexual abuse, forced labor, and denial of medical care. Despite ICE’s implementation of the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2017, more than 300 formal complaints of sexual assaults were reported in 2018; few of these cases were investigated.

According to the DHS’s Office of the Inspector General, ICE doesn’t always comply with standards in place to investigate sexual assault cases, leaving reports incomplete or further delaying the process. Additionally, under the barrage of executive orders stripping protections from birthing people and transgender individuals, including in cases of rape, ICE detention centers began revoking protective measures and the provision of medical care for transgender detainees and denying or withholding abortion care. As data and protections against abuse is erased, the opportunity to hold ICE officials and facilities accountable also diminishes.

These past and current conjunctures do not occur in a vacuum. They are reflections of power relations and histories that have and continue to shape immigration laws and policies today. History reveals that immigration laws have often been used to control who is deemed worthy of care and belonging, patterns that we should collectively prevent from being replicated.

As wildfire smoke and intensified storms wreak apocalyptic levels of devastation across the country, the climate crisis received no attention in the State of the Union Address delivered by President Trump on February 24.

What did get mentioned? Oil and gas.

“I kept my promise to drill, baby, drill,” the president boasted during his nearly two-hour speech. In 2026, roughly a decade after the signing of the Paris Agreement, his use of this slogan should feel especially anachronistic. Only a few years away from the 2030 deadline, the United States (the world’s biggest historical carbon polluter) and the world remain on track to careen past the emissions reductions required to crucially limit planetary warming, while fossil fuel companies rake in billions.

In his first year in office, Trump and his administration have gone to immense lengths to prop up fossil fuel interests, including most recently by repealing the bedrock of the federal government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. He has dismantled core climate and environmental regulations (including through the so-called “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history” by the Environmental Protection Agency), removed critical climate information and scientific data (and even mentions of climate change) from government websites, and withdrawn from international climate governance.

On foreign policy. Trump has sought control of Venezuela’s oil industry and briefly fantastized about “doing something” with Greenland, a focus that former national security adviser Mike Waltz attributed in part to the country’s critical minerals and natural resources—clarifying, “it’s oil and gas.” These deliberate efforts to extend dependence on fossil fuels, which the world must rapidly phase out to avoid the worst climate change impacts, come at a profound cost for human health and the environment worldwide.

Perhaps most challengingly, the systematic attacks on climate action often seem to fade into a deluge of upended norms that has overwhelmed many Americans. From at times unlawful and inhumane immigration enforcement, including the increased detention of children and killings of Americans by federal officers, to fossil-fueled foreign policy violence and the ongoing affordability crisis that many Americans believe has been exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs, knowing how to focus one’s attention and energy can feel near impossible. This onslaught of distressing headlines has clear consequences: By moving at breakneck speed, the administration is implementing significant parts of Project 2025, while civil society has little time to mount an effective defense of democracy, social justice, and our healthcare and educational systems, and against the accelerating climate crisis.

Despite Trump’s address, Americans must continue to find new ways of making progress: from supporting climate policy at the city and state levels to contributing to creative climate journalism and advocacy, and holding the federal administration accountable on the international stage. Outside the US, international legal systems have moved toward holding governments and corporations accountable for climate inaction and recognizing the human right to a stable climate.

At a moment when the highest level of government is selling out Americans’ futures to fossil fuel interests, we cannot afford to lose faith in the struggle for a just, renewable energy transition.

Major environmental legal organizations have launched a lawsuit against the EPA’s rollback of the “Endangerment Finding” and continue to push back against the administration’s deregulatory agenda. Despite threats to public media funding and recent layoffs of journalists producing desperately needed climate journalism, climate journalists and media continue to persevere in many forms, including at publications like NPR and with the advent of collaborative initiatives like Covering Climate Now. Community members are finding ways to balance standing up for democracy with continuing to call for climate action, recognizing that these fights are fundamentally intertwined. City and state governments are also looking to act where the federal government won’t.

“Drill, baby, drill” was a clarion call to all Americans to maintain our commitment to realizing a future free from climate harm, recognizing that a healthy environment and a stable climate are essential to exercising our most fundamental civil rights and constitutional freedoms.

“Can we summon up the awareness, the moral courage, and the popular demand to meet this clear, present and growing threat to our lives?” the late civil rights leader Jesse Jackson asked in 2021. If there was ever a time to answer that question, it’s now.

Black History Month arrived this February, just as it does every year — except a lot quieter. 

Streaming services featured fewer ads with voiceovers celebrating “Black excellence” and “Black girl magic.” Brand social media accounts — once quick to flood timelines with MLK and Maya Angelou pull quotes — were noticeably hushed. After years of putting on their very best performances of solidarity every Black History Month, corporate marketers have seemed at a loss for words this year. Ironically, that silence says far more about capitalism, cowardice, and complicity than any of their performative displays ever did. 

Those displays peaked in the aftermath of George Floyd’s May 2020 murder, as corporations fell over themselves in a collective rush to perform grief and solidarity? During Black History Month 2021, Nike observed the month by reworking the color schemes of some of its more popular sneakers for limited-edition styles and announced plans to distribute half a million dollars to nonprofits serving predominantly Black communities. Target launched an HBCU student-design challenge, offered a special collection by Black designers, and touted its new commitment to increase the number of Black workers by 20 percent — all of which followed the launch of its Racial Equity Action and Change, or REACH, initiative, which committed to spending more than $2 billion with Black businesses. And roughly 100 globally-recognized brands “mentioned Black History Month or used the hashtag #BlackHistoryMonth 122 times on the social media site formerly known as Twitter,” according to Adweek. 

By February 2025, just two of those same brands — Spotify and Ralph Lauren — mentioned Black History Month even once on the platform. 

The silence was neither coincidence nor accident. The years since 2020 have borne witness to one of the most vicious white backlashes to Black demands for liberation since Reconstruction. In short order, the right launched a cynical misinformation campaign around “critical race theory,” the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority struck down affirmative action, and the idea of racial equity as anti-white “reverse-racism” gained renewed traction. Books by Black and LGBTQ authors were being banned and burned. Bans on the teaching of Black history were codified in at least 18 states. And Donald Trump was reelected — itself a testament to festering white racial resentment — ushering in a wave of anti-DEI policies. 

Trump turbocharged efforts to erase Black history. In March 2025, he signed an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which took direct aim at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, an institution he would later complain is too focused on “how bad slavery was.” The Naval Academy library purged 400 books it claimed promoted DEI, including Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — although it retained two copies of Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf. In Mississippi, at the National Monument Home of Medgar and Myrlie Evers in Mississippi, National Park Service employees removed brochures referring to Ever’s murderer, a known Klansman, as “racist.” This past January, at the former Philadelphia home of George Washington, federal workers were ordered to take down an exhibit that looked at the lives of those he enslaved. Those panels were reinstalled just days ago, Feb. 19, under orders of a judge who noted the Orwellian echoes in their removal. 

Brands made big shows of celebrating Blackness when it was fashionable and, above all, safe. Then they cravenly retreated. One month after Trump moved back into the White House, in February 2025, users noted Google had quietly wiped all recognition of Black History Month — and Women’s History Month, Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Indigenous Peoples Month — from its calendar’s default listings. When pressed for an explanation, Google blamed technical issues related to scalability, a contention that might have seemed more believable had it not announced just the week prior that it was ditching DEI efforts to comply with Trump executive orders. (“In 2020, we set aspirational hiring goals,” a Google in-house memo noted, “but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals.”) The metaphor of erasing Black history and existence from time itself was almost too on the nose. 

Amazon had promoted products by Black makers every February since 2021. But weeks before Trump’s second inauguration, the company scrubbed the phrase “Equity for Black people” from its website and announced it was “winding down outdated programs,” thinly-veiled code for DEI. Meta — which during Black History Month 2022 had even infused its virtual and augmented reality Metaverse with content centering the black American experience — cited the “shifting legal and policy landscape” in the Jan. 2025 memo announcing its DEI withdrawal. One of Target’s eight Instagram posts during Black History Month 2024 labeled the month “sacred.” And yet less than a year later, the company announced it was dropping its Racial Equity Action and Change, or REACH initiative, including the 2021 pledge of $2 billion to black businesses — one of the largest corporate DEI rollbacks amidst a season full of them. 

While those reversals made headlines, it was brands’ public displays of Black support that had been anomalous — not their retreat. For a brief national moment after George Floyd’s murder, public opinion embraced racial justice, with multiple polls finding a majority of Americans, including a plurality of white Americans, supported the movement for Black lives — a consensus that led corporations to recognize its profit potential. All this was a textbook example of an actual principle of critical race theory — as opposed to the panicked distortion that would seize white America shortly thereafter — known as “interest convergence.” Developed by late Harvard legal scholar Derrick Bell, the principle holds that racial progress happens when it aligns with white interests, not in spite of them. Brands are happy to court new audiences as long as the effort only requires hashtags, playlists and altered color palettes. Political inconvenience, not so much. Capitalism exists to follow power, not buck it.

Having brands back away from Black History Month actually recalls the month’s origins and original intent. The reason for the season was not to provide marketing opportunities to corporations. It was a celebration born of struggle during a period now known to historians as “the nadir of American race relations.” In 1926, during that dark era amidst a revived Ku Klux Klan, Lost Cause revisionism and endless white terror violence, Carter G. Woodson insisted on a week dedicated to the truth of Black history in a nation committed to forgetting. 

And this year, on the 100th year of Black History Month, America remains much the same. As the Atlantic’s Adam Harris notes in an essay this month, “Black History Month is sometimes treated as little more than an opportunity for corporate branding and, maybe, school assemblies; but in the face of such erasure, observing it this February feels radical.”

Black History Month doesn’t need corporate validation. It’s already survived a century of segregation, degradation, and attempted erasure. It will also survive America’s latest effort to make Black history disappear. Despite a Jan. 31, 2025, Department of Defense declaration stating all “Identity Months Dead,” Trump still issued a Black History Month declaration on Feb. 3 this year. However begrudgingly. 

There are still some brands showing up. It might not be surprising that Ben & Jerry’s — which is currently suing parent company Unilever for allegedly trying to shush its support of Gaza — has remained a vocal Black History Month supporter. The Gap not only partnered with Harlem’s Fashion Row — an agency that represents up-and-coming Black designers — but also launched a new denim collection from 5 young Black designers, and held a much-hyped pop-up event in Times Square. And there were social media posts from brands that have publicly stated their refusal to abandon DEI goals, including Costco, Delta and Apple, the latter of which again launched its annual Black Unity Collection. 

But perhaps more importantly, there are stories that highlight how non-corporate commitments will always be more important. Illustrator and activist Danielle Coke Balfour created her “Oh Happy Dani” stationary and card brand based on art she’d created for Black History Month 2020. By 2021, Balfour was working with Target, and her line was featured in its stores nationwide. But when the company announced its DEI rollback last year, Balfour decided to pull her items from the store’s inventory. “Our brand has always been built on the very principles that have recently been rolled back by” Target, she explained in a social media post. (In another message, Balfour would also rightly describe Target’s move as “a signal of the dangerous trajectory we’ve been on for years as a result of the backlash to racial equity efforts.”) Balfour’s online store sold out, and she posted an update showing that the customer support she saw in just the week after severing ties with Target wiped out the losses she’d expected to incur over the following year. Where corporate America failed her, the community rallied to fill in, and made the gap overflow. The story feels instructive, and needed, at this moment. 

As for Target, the company faced multiple backlashes from Black consumers and the “Latino Freeze” movement. As of this writing, its stock price has plummeted 61 percent since its 2021 peak. So, Happy Black History month, to those who celebrate.

Cory Doctorow understands the value of a good label. A writer and longtime critic of corporate consolidation, particularly in the tech industry, Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe the process by which corporations degrade their online platforms to maximize short-term profits. It captured the shared experience of our worsening digital lives so well that the American Dialect Society named “enshittification” the 2023 word of the year.

Recently, after posing the question “What would a real political response to fascism look like?,” Doctorow articulated another idea that I think similarly captures our zeitgeist. In a blog post, Doctorow proposed that congressional Democrats launch a “Nuremberg Caucus,” an effort to determine what accountability for the grotesqueries of Trump’s regime should look like. People need to be held responsible for the corruption, concentration camps, and executions of US civilians by federal goon squads.

In Doctorow’s conception, the core of this project would be a public-facing platform where Democrats could assemble evidence of the administration’s crimes and promise trials for the perpetrators. In his words, “Each fresh outrage, each statement, each video-clip—whether of Trump officials or of his shock-troops—could be neatly slotted in, given an exhibit number, and annotated with the criminal and civil violations captured in the evidence. The caucus could publish dates these trials will be held on—following from Jan 20, 2029—and even which courtrooms each official, high and low, will be tried in.”

An initiative like this is necessary on its merits. Healthy democracies do not respond to attempts to impose authoritarian rule by allowing their perpetrators to remain in positions of power. Just this month, South Korea sentenced its former right-wing president, Yoon Suk-yeol, to life imprisonment for his 2024 attempt to impose martial law. And South Korea isn’t alone—both Peru and Brazil recently condemned their former presidents to long prison sentences for their coup attempts. There’s a strong case to be made that our country’s current dystopia is a result of the Democrats’ failure to put this principle into practice after Trump’s first term. Former Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to file timely charges against Trump for seeking to overturn the 2020 election cannot be repeated.

As Doctorow put it when I called him up to discuss this idea, “We’re talking about people who violated their oath of office. They are categorically unfit to be in public service, and they need to be kept away from the levers of power.” The process of organizing a Nuremberg Caucus would force Democrats to commit to holding these bad actors accountable for their crimes.

A Nuremberg Caucus could also be a political boon for Democrats, offering them an effective tool for directing public attention toward the criminality of Trump’s regime. It’s one thing to say, “We need accountability.” It’s more compelling to say, “This specific official committed this specific crime—and here’s the evidence, here’s the witness list, expect a prosecution in early 2029.”

Moreover, this structure would provide Democrats with a powerful narrative to project onto Republicans. As Doctorow explained to me, “The minute you can get your adversary to say, ‘These are the ways we’re not Nazis,’ they are implying that there are a bunch of ways in which they are. It forces the adversary into your frame.” Debating whether Trump officials deserve Nuremberg-style trials is a favorable field on which to fight electoral battles.

In addition to these political benefits, a Nuremberg Caucus could also have deterrent effects. It’s an oft-repeated talking point in liberal circles that Trump officials are not acting like people who think they will have to face free and fair elections again—that the blatant vulgarity with which they’ve been committing their crimes is proof that they know our democracy is in the bag. These concerns are valid. Republicans are preparing to rig the midterms, and we urgently need to be doing everything we can to foil these plots. But there is an additional explanation for their brazenness that I think is just as likely: The GOP has concluded that even if the Democratic Party were to sweep back into power, its leaders are too feckless, cowardly, or incompetent to mete out consequences to Trump officials for their criminality.

This is a rational deduction for Republicans—one based not only on Garland’s failure to prosecute any senior member of Trump’s first administration but also on the Obama administration’s refusal to pursue accountability for Bush-era war crimes or Wall Street’s demolition of the world economy. This reasonable assumption, however, makes Trump’s regime far more dangerous than it otherwise would be.

Assumed impunity is what gives Trump’s Gestapo thugs the confidence to murder civilians on video in broad daylight. It’s what allows Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to order double-tap strikes against civilians, Attorney General Pam Bondi to violate legal orders to release the Epstein files, and Secretary Kristi Noem to oversee the construction of concentration camps. Officials who believed that Democrats would hold them accountable would have some motivation to constrain the breadth and scope of such criminality—motivation that members of this administration obviously lack.

The same might be said of the bootlicking elites who have spent the last year competing to see who can display the most cowardice in the face of Trump’s authoritarian takeover. Why have so many of the wealthy and powerful embraced such a demeaning posture, despite being more insulated from fascist retaliation than the millions of regular people whose response to seeing Renee Good and Alex Pretti get gunned down has been to protest even harder?

Certainly some elites, particularly the full-on oligarchs, are earnestly sympathetic to Trump’s fascist goals. But for many—the Big Law firm heads, the elite university leaders, the corporate executives—the craven collaboration is pragmatic. Trump is a fact of life; there are benefits to participating in his fascist project; and—putting aside honor, dignity, and morality—there don’t appear to be serious consequences on the horizon for those who acquiesce to his corrupt demands.

If US elites care only about their own self-interest, as they have proven conclusively over the course of Trump’s second term, then the impetus is on Democrats to demonstrate that collaborating with fascist criminals will have ramifications once they retake Congress or the White House.

Doctorow said he believes there are actions a Nuremberg Caucus could take to contribute to that calculation shift. For example, Democrats could announce their intent to undertake scrutiny of all mergers approved by the Trump administration, putting corporations on notice that “they should expect lengthy, probing inquiries into any mergers they undertake between now and the fall of Trumpism.” A Nuremberg Caucus could also publish plans to conduct systemic IRS audits of the ultra-wealthy to identify any suspicious wealth gains that might be the fruit of corrupt dealings with the administration.

A final attribute of this project—and perhaps the most fun one to think about—is its potential to sow discord within the ranks of Trump’s regime. Doctorow imagines the Nuremberg Caucus announcing a plan to furnish $1 million bounties to any ICE officer who provides evidence leading to the conviction of another ICE officer for committing human rights violations. If ICE recruits are signing up based on the promise of $50,000 signing bonuses, what would they do for a million bucks? And how would it affect ICE’s operations if agents started worrying that the next time they chose to brutalize an immigrant or kidnap a child or attack a school with chemical weapons, the guy in the balaclava next to them might be taking notes? We can extend that principle up through the ranks of the administration, which we know is disproportionately full of nutjobs with paranoid delusions. A Nuremberg Caucus could do a lot to help feed that paranoia.

Of course, Doctorow’s proposal is just one of many possible answers to the question of how to rebuild our democracy. But it’s a compelling one—compelling enough that, if Democrats won’t take the suggestion, I hope some of the advocacy groups helping to lead the anti-Trump resistance consider it. There are nongovernmental models for this kind of project—for example, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) is an organization “dedicated to collecting evidence up to a criminal law standard for the express purpose of furthering criminal justice efforts to end impunity.” CIJA targets international human rights abuses, with recent efforts focused on war crimes in Syria and Myanmar. But a similar structure—a Nuremberg Project rather than a Nuremberg Caucus—could be organized by progressive nonprofits here in the United States.

Whatever form it takes, this work cannot be ignored. Impunity is a cancer in democracies. Impunity for economic elites helped create the loss of faith in our institutions that was so critical to Trump’s initial ascendance, and impunity for government officials who betrayed our Constitution is what facilitated Trump’s return to power. We cannot keep repeating this pattern.

Over the last year, Republicans have turned our federal government into a vast mafia syndicate whose criminal enterprises—graft and corruption, violence and human rights abuses, cover-ups for the wealthy and well-connected—are being operated without any fear of consequences. That must change, and it’s time for Democrats, and perhaps our broader antifascist resistance movement, to show that we have a plan to bring the architects and executors of this regime’s crimes to justice.

Donald Trump’s second term has been marked by scenes of naked authoritarianism, from federal agents raiding a Georgia elections office to killings in the streets of American cities.

But there is another variety of authoritarian encroachment underway—this one calmly procedural, but with the potential to be just as devastating to American democracy.

Earlier this month, the House passed the SAVE America Act, which threatens to block millions from voting in November. It’s just one salvo in a multipronged Republican effort to undermine the midterms and lay the groundwork for a new round of 2020-style election denialism should Democrats win Congress. From the flurry of Trump-instigated redistricting efforts to the new FCC guidance that spurred CBS to pull Stephen Colbert’s interview with Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico, Trump and his allies are using every tool at their disposal to depress turnout, intimidate voters, and unjustly tilt the electoral balance toward Republicans.

Last spring, election-denier Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice began requesting confidential voter registration data from states and jurisdictions around the country—and suing those that refuse to comply. The information the agency collects is being shared with the Department of Homeland Security, which has launched its own effort to investigate naturalized Americans accused of voting before gaining their citizenship. And, shortly after January’s Fulton County FBI raid, Trump called for Republicans to “nationalize the voting,” though the Constitution he vowed to preserve, protect, and defend gives the executive branch no authority to manage elections.

If approved by the Senate, the SAVE America Act could be this administration’s most devastating blow yet to voter participation. The bill would require states to share their voter data with DHS, along with forcing Americans to furnish a photo ID at the polls and produce proof of citizenship before registering to vote. This is despite the fact that Trump’s own profoundly compromised Justice Department claims it has identified only 10,000 noncitizens on the rolls after examining nearly 50 million registrations. Under the guise of preventing hypothetical ballot-casting by .02 percent of the enrolled voter base, then, 21 million Americans who lack immediate access to their birth certificate or a passport could lose the franchise.

In this attempt to shrink the electorate, Trump and congressional Republicans are using the levers of democratic governance to undermine democracy itself—a strategy sometimes referred to as stealth authoritarianism. It’s practiced by despotic regimes like that of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who reshaped his country’s electoral system to hamstring his opponents. Naturally, he has few more devoted fans than our president, whose administration is bear-hugging Orbán in the lead-up to another technically free yet profoundly unfair Hungarian election.

As our own midterms approach, Americans cannot be sure that Trump will restrict himself to procedural manipulations. He has expressed regret that he did not order the military to seize voting machines after his 2020 loss, and could very well decide to use this cycle to make up for lost time. Even more likely, however, are tactics at the margins designed to intimidate voters and disrupt proceedings. Arizona Republicans are seeking to station ICE agents at polling sites, while their Indiana counterparts want to truncate the state’s early voting period, and the Republican National Committee pushes to restrict the counting of mail-in ballots.

The SAVE America Act at least faces an uncertain path to the Resolute Desk, as Senate Republicans lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster. And despite the right’s myriad efforts to stack the deck in its favor, Americans could still deliver Democrats a November victory so resounding that cries of election rigging will ring obviously hollow. Only a year into his term, the president has already lost considerable ground with the Black and Hispanic voters who helped secure his most recent victory, and states from New York to California are implementing measures designed to fortify their elections against outside interference.

Still, a rout is by no means assured. Democrats have been sounding the alarm on Trump’s authoritarian tendencies ever since his glide down the golden escalator, but calls to save American democracy have failed to resonate amid an affordability crisis that finds families nationwide struggling to contend with the ever-inflating cost of food and housing. So, in a savvy democracy strategy, progressives would be wise to fuse Trump’s threats to the integrity of our system of governance with a bold case for their ability to lift the middle class out of despondency.

During his 1984 presidential run, the late Jesse Jackson credited Ronald Reagan’s 1980 win not solely to his persuasion of Democrats and independents but also to the large numbers of demoralized young, poor, and minority voters who sat out the election altogether. These were the people Jackson claimed as his constituency, ”the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.” Their absence at the polls had handed Reagan the precedency, Jackson argued, a victory delivered “by the margin of despair.”

By suppressing the vote and intimidating their opponents, Republicans are attempting to engineer a 2026 win by the same margin. To counter this, we might take inspiration from Jackson’s lifetime of public service. Defeating the right in November will require a broad mobilization that bridges divisions of faith, race, and class—a rainbow coalition.

“There’s one thing about work, you can’t let it swallow you.” This is the most important piece of advice that Jérôme gives to his daughter, the narrator of On the Clock, French writer Claire Baglin’s debut novella. Translated into English this year by Jordan Stump, On the Clock numbers among a gaggle of recent fictional endeavors, across different mediums, focused on the alienating, even defamiliarizing experience of labor—from Olga Ravn’s The Employees to the Apple TV+ series Severance. Jérôme’s warning underscores, in the broadest strokes, an enduring cross-cultural preoccupation with labor’s intractable grip on life, all the more transfixing for its seemingly insoluble hold: “You can’t let yourself get sucked in otherwise that’s it…. Watch out, watch out for work.”

Jérôme, a factory electrician, might not be referring only to jobs similar to his own when he admonishes his daughter against this capitulation to one’s career. But Baglin—whose own father worked in a factory—focuses her novella squarely on working-class labor, with exacting attention paid to its grinding toil and the abiding financial instability that its meager paychecks typically yield. Rather than focusing on the sterile impersonality of the corporate office—a fixation of many of her peers—Baglin illuminates the blue-collar workplace and foregrounds its simultaneous demands and denials of the human bodies that power it.

In On the Clock, both father and daughter labor in jobs that spurn any claim to bodily sanctity; safety and comfort are privileges conferred stingily, if at all. Jérôme, whose line of work already entails significant physical risk, regularly performs his duties alone, at the formidable heights of a boom lift’s far-reaching neck. As a young adult, his daughter confronts her own set of dodgy working conditions when she helms the fry station at a fast-food restaurant and spends long hours engulfed by a sweltering haze of oil and salt. (During her interview, the hiring manager pointedly asks, “You’re not scared of Covid, or some other disease?”) Baglin’s emphasis on the bodily dangers of working-class labor can feel unrelenting, and pointedly so, for it never turns an eye from the indignity and filth that is inherent to so many physically demanding occupations. The result is a seething and tenacious contribution to proletarian literature—one that imposes upon its readers a sweaty, agitating intimacy with the embodied and emotional duresses of a shift at the fry station. It’s a breathless ride, devoid of sentiment, that delivers to its readers a swift, somatic wallop. One finds oneself reeling at the narrative’s end, deposited without ceremony and almost without warning. We must decide whether our own philosophies of work are changed for it.

On the Clock centers primarily on the experiences of its narrator—also named Claire, although we don’t learn her name until the end of the book—who spends one grueling summer working at a fast-food chain. (As such, the novella is organized into four aptly titled sections: “The Interview,” “Out Front,” “Deep Fat,” and “Drive-Thru.”) We are not privy to Claire’s reason for seeking this job; however, the hiring manager’s reference to the abundance of job applications he has received for the position implies that there are few seasonal employment options available nearby to a young adult home from university. Baglin juxtaposes these episodes with Claire’s memories from her childhood, which focus on her father and the benign tumult of his domestic influence. This oscillating perspective guides us to a certain understanding of Claire and her class position. Since girlhood, she has sought opportunities for upward mobility, through a “junior internship,” admission to boarding school, and now university. Still, she carries Jérôme’s habits and legacy: his lopsided care and tenderness; the familial inheritance of poverty, which ostensibly requires her to work during summer break; and a simmering awareness of workplace injustice.

Jérôme only appears in flashbacks; still, he is the book’s molten center. Baglin’s paternal portrait is finespun—and at times, almost unbearable in its depiction of a loving, abashed man who is battered by the occupation to which he’s dedicated his life. Jérôme navigates fatherhood with a jittery solicitude born from perennial hardship. “So, happy?” he asks Claire and her younger brother, Nico, “every five minutes” as they revel in an uncommon fast-food dinner, paid for with coupons. To his wife’s chagrin, Jérôme takes the family dumpster-diving every weekend, cramming the apartment with discarded electronics, “the latest thing from years ago that he can boast about rescuing, and about how well it works.” Jérôme’s desperation quivers on the page, and one senses that he exhausts himself in an effort to impress his family, who both adores and is embarrassed by him. Yet when they all travel to a beach campsite for summer vacation, Jérôme finds rest elusive: “He stares at the ocean as if someone were drowning out there and he can’t do anything about it.”

Jérôme is, perhaps, seeing a vision of himself. When his wife, Sylvie, worries about the occupational hazards of his job—“You can’t keep going up in the cherry picker with nobody on the ground”—Jerôme silences her with the weight of his resignation: “It’s been reported, but they couldn’t care less, you know how it is.”

When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1905, it served as a fictional vehicle for his muckraking instincts, unearthing as it did the rank corruption in America’s meatpacking industry. Sinclair made waves (and enemies) with his book, and yet since then Anglo-American fiction has seen relatively few depictions of the jobs consigned to its working classes. “Even in the politically committed proletarian fictions of the 1930s…plots tend to focus more on working class life and labor actions than work or labor exclusively,” writes John Macintosh in his entry “Fictions of Work and Labor” in The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction. Macintosh regards this absence as the result of “a longstanding representational problem”: How does a writer render work—so often characterized by mechanized tedium—into action that rises and falls, coaxing a reader’s attentiveness and curiosity?

There have been a number of recent examples in fiction, among them Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted and Dustin M. Hoffman’s short story collection Such a Good Man. Moreover, the vast commercial success of Stephanie Land’s memoir, Maid, indicates the reading public’s interest in first-person narrative accounts of blue-collar labor. But despite this growing body of literature, working-class lives are more often depicted in journalistic form, one exemplified by the work of writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Matthew Desmond. One possible explanation for this generic asymmetry—which On the Clock seems to intuit—is the general reader’s affective bandwidth for realities they do not consider livable. A knee-jerk pleasure, even a kind of guilty relief, sometimes arises when reading the grim details of working-class existence, for it enables a more privileged reader to reaffirm their sense of social difference, even superiority, in the name of self-education. Journalism’s formal guardrails, which frequently preclude intimate interiority or ambivalence, enable a reader to fulfill this urge without the destabilizing proximity that characterizes Baglin’s work.

Since roughly 1980, service industries like fast food have loomed large in the American working-class sphere, bestowing transnational relevance upon Baglin’s narrative premise. As Macintosh observes, this “interactive service work,” which is “performed precisely through interpersonal communication and emotion,” might better lend itself to fictional forms. (He also notes that labor of this sort enjoys uneven representation: American writers are far more inclined to set a novel in the world of fine dining than they are in a Wendy’s or a Taco Bell, precisely because the latter employment comes across as less desirable, less “clean” than the former.)

Baglin, for her part, does not allow her readers to overlook the fast-food kitchen’s mundane, grease-covered details, nor does she peddle any kind of voyeurism. The text turns on a near-merciless hyperspecificity that can make a reader twitch: the fruity reek of cleaning products, dead skin flaking off a thumb, a globule of sweat pointedly left to drip down someone’s nose. It feels, at times, like a provocation: “Why would a person want to read a story about work?” the text prods. “What sort of entertainment did you think you’d find here?”

This insistent attention to the grimy particulars also yields a philosophical implication: that blue-collar labor is both inalienably of the body and in denial of its most essential needs. Claire’s job requires a physical performance that adheres to the company’s mandate—to make food fast. “No one cooks here,” she explains, “what we do is guarantee a high temperature, a suitable appearance, conforming to what the customer already knows…. We operate food-production equipment, and our moves are the same moves crew members made twenty years ago.” It’s a robotic dance routine: its practitioners, the machines and the infinite supply of bodies that attend them. At certain stations, Claire doesn’t mind the subservience imposed by her duties: “On fries, everything’s robotic,” she says, “it stops me from thinking.”

Apply a bit of pressure, and that remark begins to read as strange in context: Both Claire’s childhood memories and her work experiences unfold in the present tense, but in the latter case, her impressions often travel in a haste that thwarts structure or lucid dialogue. Where is the reader, if not directly behind Claire’s eyes as she jostles baskets of fries from fryer to plastic tray? On the Clock’s more immediate plotline seems to rely on her steady current of thought for its very existence: These are not Claire’s memories of work, recollected in the quiet aftermath of a shift, but rather a crush of impressions, interminably received. “[The] crew member looks up and I stare at her,” Claire narrates, working at the front of the restaurant. “Let me just finish disinfecting a table number and then off I go, I just have to put down what I’ve got in my hands to serve, I tell her that with my eyes, yes I’m coming.” While the adjustments inherent to translation might have impacted my sense of proximity to Claire, my confusion over the novel’s temporality gave me pause. I wondered if I had mistaken narrative immediacy for vulnerability: What assumptions had led me to believe that this narrator, who, like so many workers, exchanges physical availability for pay, would render her interiority equally accessible to me?

The narrator’s ambiguous proximity to the book’s events creates a shifty vantage point for the reader: We are at once brought close and held at a distance. Certain sections raise the heart rate: Baglin’s prose is hypnotic, and yet one chases her sentences with the sense that danger or rupture is possible at any moment. It’s a fitting destabilization for a novella that seems to question the efficacy of its own form. At the very least, it implies that the rhythms of fast- food service—whether the strained exchanges at the drive-thru window or the fry station’s furnace-like tedium—thwart more commonplace storytelling modes. On the Clock sets its own formal terms; unlike some works situated in a white-collar office, which tarry in the surreal (the aforementioned Severance and The Employees), Baglin’s novella remains staunchly naturalistic in both setting and circumstances. One wonders if the book does not presume its readers’ familiarity the way so much bourgeois fiction reasonably does—or if the mechanized kitchen of a fast-food chain does not require the same defamiliarization in order to evoke its singular tensions and agonies.

Claire will likely leave this job at the end of the summer—unlike her father, her aspirations seem directed toward white-collar wealth—but the duties comprising it have no end point. There is only the conclusion of a shift; the weary punching of a clock; the swapping of one able body for another. The novella’s momentum resembles not a rising peak, but a pulse that accelerates, leaps, and steadies until it reaches an ending: a lunch rush surges and ends; interminable hours pass in an empty dining room; aggrieved customers “send back their fries because they’re not hot enough,” and Claire seethes with indignant rage. “I long to plunge their hands into the boiling oil,” she says, “my own are red, the salt scratches.” Despite harboring all this rage, she is still dogged by “the boss inside [her] head,” and she is determined to excel at the most tedious tasks, a commitment that becomes dangerous when she uses her bare hand as a barrier to stop a “sizzling hot” fry basket from falling into an oil vat.

Was Jérôme thinking of these sorts of physical sacrifices when he issued his advice—watch out for work? He, too, puts his body on the line, refusing the safer alternative of administrative work. “One day they offered me a promotion, an office job,” he tells a young Claire, asserting his refusal to become “a suit.” His labor narrative is a familiar one, grim in its trajectory: The pleasures of technical skill and competence shatter against the weight of a corporate mechanism that thrives on its workers’ abjection.

As the end of her summer break nears, Claire is poised at the brink of this same abject self-denial. She has given herself over to this job despite herself; she has offered it her bare hands. One might suggest that such automatic dedication implies a certain kind of personality—the sign of a future star employee—or perhaps it is evidence of something more rotten. On the Clock’s interests are more existential in this way: It warns that the relief and dignity conferred by employment can shroud the urgency of one’s most basic needs. It is easier than one might suspect to conflate performance with personhood, to cower before the boss inside one’s head.

In 1965, Malcolm X gave a speech to a local church in Selma, Alabama. In that speech, he addressed the Klu Klux Klan as such: “They put on a sheet so you won’t know who they are—that’s a coward. No! The time will come when that sheet will be ripped off. If the federal government doesn’t take it off, we’ll take it off.”

On February 17, Gianluca Prestianni was not wearing a sheet, but was a coward all the same. The 20-year old Argentine soccer player for S.L. Benfica covered his mouth with his canary-red jersey as he allegedly called Vinicius Jr. “mono,” Spanish for “monkey,” five consecutive times after the star Brazilian had celebrated after scoring a goal. The game was stopped for 10 minutes before play continued. Prestianni denied that he said “mono,” claiming to have used a homophobic slur instead. In response, the club has said that there has been a “defamation campaign” against him. “I heard it,” said Kylian Mbappé of the alleged racist abuse. “There are Benfica players that also heard it.”

Unfortunately, this is not a standalone incident for the sport—especially for Vinicius Jr. Since signing to Real Madrid CF in 2018, Vinicius Jr. has faced over 26 instances of racial abuse. While the regularity of these incidents has transformed him into a global figure of resistance against racial discrimination, it has also intensified the severity of the attacks.

In 2021, Vinicius Jr. was having his best season since arriving in Spain when the first reported incident of abuse occurred while playing against FC Barcelona. The harassment soon evolved from single individuals to entire stadiums. When competing in away matches, the Brazilian was met with monkey noises and other racial epithets. The abuse has been directed at those who support him as well, with an 8 year-old girl receiving death threats for wearing a Vinicius Jr. shirt at the Metropolitano, Atlético de Madrid’s stadium. In January of 2023, rival fans hung an effigy of Vinicius Jr. from a bridge in Madrid. Although four people were arrested for this specific hate crime, a majority of the incidents have resulted in few repercussions.

The Union of European Football Associations, UEFA, implemented a three-step procedure in 2009 that grants referees the power to halt games if they are aware of a racist incident taking place and start an immediate investigation. If there is enough evidence, then the rule grants that the match can be abandoned and the aggressor be suspended a minimum of 10 matches. The procedure has been invoked only once, in 2024, by La Liga in the Spanish premier division.

With this tool virtually never brandished, racist incidents still occur. On January 16, a banana was thrown on the pitch, paired with racist chants outside of the stadium prior to kick-off. The case was met with condemnation from the league but no repercussions. Now Prestianni’s behavior has shown that such vitriol can even come from players without much consequence.

In response, Vinicius Jr. echoed Malcolm’s words over a half a century ago. “Racists are, above all, cowards,” he wrote on Instagram. “They need to put their shirts over their mouths to demonstrate how weak they are.”

UEFA’s investigation is ongoing, but Prestianni’s absence from the second-leg match is confirmed. The Argentine was handed a provisional suspension for the rematch on February 25, announced six days after the initial match.

Immediately after the final whistle, however, Jose Mourinho, the manager for S.L. Benfica, controversially inserted himself into the conversation. During the stoppage, Mourinho revealed that he told Vinicius Jr. that “when you score a goal like that you just celebrate and walk back.” Yet it was Mourinho who was sent off that match for unsportsmanlike behavior, after accusing the referee, Francois Letexier, of biased officiating. “When he was arguing about racism, I told him the biggest person in the history of this club [Eusebio] was Black,” said Mourinho. “Why didn’t he celebrate like Eusebio?”

His invocation of Eusebio was telling. The Portuguese soccer legend was born in 1942 within the segregated capital of Mozambique—a Portuguese colony at the time—and gained Portuguese citizenship only because of an exception made for migrants who showed prowess in the sport. But his new passport did not protect the then-18-year-old Eusebio from racism in Lisbon when he competed for Benfica. In 2011, Eusebio claimed that he would not react when called Black or “much more besides.” He wasn’t vocal about the treatment he received, and he was much more traditional in how he approached the game.

By equating calling out racial abuse with entitledness, Mourinho was asking Vinicius Jr. why he couldn’t just do the same. Mourinho not only blamed Vinicius Jr. for inciting the abuse he receives, but continued to place the docile and non-reactionary Black athlete on a pedestal.

“I’m a field Negro,” Malcolm X said in his speech. “If I can’t live in the house as a human being, I’m praying for a wind to come along.” He made a distinction between himself and the “house Negro” through how much a Black person polices themselves to prioritize the comfort of white people in positions of authority.

This dynamic is now playing out on the European soccer pitch. While players such as Eusebio would alter how they act—and ultimately addressed unfair treatment in ways that would not upset the powers that be—players like Vinicius Jr. experience abuse or basic mistreatment and do no such thing, afraid to openly critique a racist system.

For now, the ability to support the humanity of all players is in the hands of UEFA.“He’s never going to deserve something like this,” Mbappé wrote about Vinícius Jr. on X. “I can’t understand how there are people that tell me that he deserves this.”

In 1970 or ’71, Werner Herzog accompanied a pair of deaf-blind women on their first flight in an airplane. The outing was Herzog’s idea, a joyride in a little four-seat Cessna to celebrate one of the women’s birthdays but also to capture their reactions for a film he was making called The Land of Silence and Darkness. The footage from that afternoon displays many of what would become the hallmarks of Herzog’s style over the coming half-century: the daring gambit on the border of exploitation, the obsession with vision and existential loneliness, and the search for poetry at the extremes of human experience. It is an astonishing piece of filmmaking. No matter how many times I have seen it, it never fails to evoke an overwhelming complex of thought and feeling that is hard to put into words. As with the flight itself, one has to experience it to know what it is about, and even then it is hard not to come away with the sense of having encountered something powerfully human that nevertheless lies beyond our capacity to articulate it in speech. As if to confirm this impression, Herzog, whose unmistakable voice and philosophical commentary have become the most recognizable part of both the man and his work, is silent. He doesn’t even ask afterward what it was like.

This, too, would become a characteristic of Herzog’s oeuvre: the search for an elusive transcendence over the edge of the ordinary that he calls “ecstatic truth.” Herzog is obsessed with the idea of truth and has insisted for decades that it is the central concern of all his films. This might seem rich from one of the great self-mythologizers of our time, who has never hidden the fact that he punches up his documentaries with fabrication, scripted scenes, and misattributed quotes, and who once described Fitzcarraldo as his greatest documentary. Yet the truth that Herzog has in mind is more like the truth of poetry than the mere facts and shared understanding that he mocks as “the truth of accountants.” As he put it in a 1999 manifesto, “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

The idea that an artist, even a documentarian, would mix fact with fiction is not quite so radical today as it might have been at the peak of cinema verité. Yet questions of truth and its relation to reality are more pressing and vexed than ever. Getting at deep truths by means of artful lies may seem less appealing or daring in the era of the deepfake. Herzog’s oft-repeated provocation that only the “conman, the liar who knew what he was talking about, would speak the truth” loses some of its countercultural appeal when the conmen move from the margins of society to the centers of power and bullshit becomes de rigueur.

What separates the auteur who resolutely clings to a personal, unempirical vision of the truth, and who has few scruples about lying if it convinces his audience of that vision’s reality, from the conspiracy theorists and propagandists who seek to deceive the public by similar means? How to distinguish what Herzog describes as his films’ exploitation of the “collective willingness to be transported into the realm of poetry, of madness, and of the pure joy of storytelling” from darker, more dangerous attempts to channel that willingness into political projects and collective madness?

The answer seems obvious. Herzog makes idiosyncratic films about the sorts of truth that can be found in cave paintings and the flight of ski-jumpers and men devoured by bears, while today’s AI-powered propagandists seek to manipulate viewers into a political stance via the banal aesthetics of cable news and social media. But that’s a little too easy; we’d like to be able to say more about how to distinguish between visionaries and what makes one deep truth truer than another. Herzog seems to appreciate the predicament. He has written a book, The Future of Truth (translated by the great Michael Hoffmann), to explain himself, or at least to put some distance between his life’s work and what is widely agreed to be one of the most pressing social and democratic dangers of our time. It is a book that he has been promising to write for years to expand upon his guiding ideal of ecstatic truth, which he has previously only been able to gesture at and move past by saying he’d need a whole book to explain. And now we have that book.

The Future of Truth is divided into 11 chapters with titles like “What is Truth?,” “Philosophical Efforts,” “Fake News: A Brief History,” “Ecstatic Truth,” “The Post-Truth Era,” and “The Future of Truth” that promise insight into Herzog’s vision of ecstatic truth and, by pressing it up against contemporary concerns, perhaps also to shed some off-kilter illumination onto our shared predicament. Alas, what we get in these chapters is a profound deflation of the excitement portended by their titles, not because ecstatic truth is the sort of thing that fundamentally cannot be put into words—as may be—but because the author hardly bothers trying.

It would be unreasonable to demand an exhaustive treatise on the nature of truth from an artist who has spent his life making intuitive magic with images and who has been known to explain himself with Hölderlin’s line that “man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he reflects.” But since he has decided to write a book of reflections on the subject, we would at least like to see him give it a try. A little mischief at a minimum. What we mostly get, instead, are passages repurposed from earlier books and interviews stitched together and repackaged in such a slight and slapdash form—with neither the coherence of argument nor the constellation of collage and aphorism—that one gets the sense that the book was completed either to satisfy a contractual obligation or to finance an upcoming film.

This is disappointing, not least because two years ago, Herzog published a book as original and superb as his best films, the memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All (also translated by Hofmann). Herzog’s memoir is an extraordinary piece of work that proves he is perfectly capable of evoking all the wonder and eccentric illumination of his films in prose. It contains dozens of moments far more illuminating on the question of truth (among much else) than its slim sequel, delivered not through explanation but story and image—an indication of just how indispensable images and narrative are to Herzog’s poetic evocation of a world that exceeds his grasp. Here, for instance, is Herzog at 16, out at sea with some local fishermen off the rugged coast of Hora Sfakion, Crete:

Above me was the orb of the cosmos, stars that I felt I could reach up and grab; everything was rocking me in an infinite cradle. And below me, lit up brightly by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean, as though the dome of the firmament formed a sphere with it. Instead of stars, there were lots of flashing silvery fish. Bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around, a speechless silence, I found myself in a stunned surprise. I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me…. I was completely convinced I would never see my eighteenth birthday because, lit up by such grace as I now was, there could never be anything like ordinary time for me again.

Those curious about Herzog’s views on ecstatic truth would be better served by reading his memoir or the book-length interview with Paul Cronin published as Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, notwithstanding the fact that a good deal of those previous books reappears in this one.

Whole chapters consist of anecdotes from the memoir that are retold or expanded upon with no new revelations or insight, least of all about fake news or the future of truth, as promised. (Although to be fair, his story about Mike Tyson’s prodigious knowledge of the Merovingians is so good that it bears repeating.) The book’s observations about the nature of truth are also rehashed nearly verbatim from previous works to somewhat deadening effect, as the provocations of a visionary begin to sound a bit more like inert slogans than careful (or even wild) thinking on the subject. A highlight of the book—and perhaps its hidden moral—is a two-paragraph chapter about a pig in Sicily that fell into the sewer, was trapped there, and eventually changed the shape of its body to fit its confinement, followed by a rumination on the colossal amount of inbreeding it would take to reach to Alpha Centauri. However, it turns out that this story, too, has already appeared in print at least twice, once in a 1979 diary entry published by The Paris Review in 2009 under the fitting title “Language Itself Resists,” and again in a broader selection from his diaries published that same year as Conquest of the Useless.

Herzog comes closest to considering the place of ecstatic truth in a “post-truth era” in a chapter on the novel powers of artificial intelligence to produce “fictive ‘truths.’” It is one of the few chapters that appears to have been written specifically for this book, which seems to indicate that Herzog is sensitive to the challenge that today’s shifting epistemic tides pose to his guiding ideal. But instead of grappling with the question, or at least giving his view of it, Herzog offers a brief catalog of things that LLMs are OK at, includes a few execrable poems written by AI, and then ends abruptly by informing the reader that an AI-generated photo recently won an international photography contest. Nothing is said about the possibility of an LLM producing anything truly original; or the fact that it doesn’t actually live in, perceive, or understand the world whose signs it probabilistically manipulates; or the enormous environmental costs of using these tools to supplant elementary human thinking, which one would think ought to bother a man who rightly describes the drive to extraplanetary colonization as a morally grotesque abandonment of the only habitable planet we will ever have. And it’s too bad, since we’d like to know what Werner Herzog thinks about all that.

Viewed in the most generous light, the book’s failure to achieve what it sets out to do suggests that perhaps we shouldn’t want an explanation of Herzog’s view of truth,and certainly that Herzog may not want to understand what he means by “ecstatic truth” in fear of extinguishing the need to quest after it.

It is obvious that what Herzog really cares about is the quest—so much so that its object, truth, seems of negligible importance by comparison. It might just as well have been authenticity or beauty or transcendence or something altogether invented, so long as it offered an unreachable destination. In the chapter on “Philosophical Efforts,” Herzog writes, “The quest itself, bringing us nearer to the unrevealed truth, allows us to participate in something inherently unattainable, which is truth.” Anyone else and we’d want to know what grounds he has for thinking that this claim about the nature of truth is itself true, but for Herzog such questions miss the point. The reality of an unattainable, ecstatic truth is an article of faith that justifies and structures his life’s work. Like that other great visionary Don Quixote, Herzog has spent a lifetime plunging himself into ordeals and suffering whose absurdity only serves to intensify his commitment to the quest by testifying to the reality of its elusive, unrevealed object. Who would endure such hardships, we cannot help but ask, if there weren’t some reality to the vision, if there weren’t something true about ecstatic truth? But if this is a sort of truth, then it is a truth in which one must believe but cannot know. It may be the sort of thing we can glimpse in the films and memoirs, but it will be very hard (if not impossible) to capture, rather than allude to, in speech and writing.

Herzog’s attempt to finally grasp the truth he has defined as ungraspable calls to mind the doomed adventures of the incorrigible visionaries he has spent his career mythologizing, men who cling so implacably to their idea of how things ought to be that it seems to elevate them above the meaninglessness of existence even as it sinks them down into it with the inevitable failure of hubris. Yet when I return to the book’s concluding chapter on “The Future of Truth” and find a mere two sentences of the hollowest platitude, I don’t think of Fitzcaraldo or Aguirre but that bit from Hölderlin that Herzog is fond of reciting. The full quote paints a different picture: “O man is a god when he dreams, a beggar when he thinks, and when enthusiasm is gone, he stands there like a wayward son whom the father has driven out of the house and regards the meager pennies that pity gave him for the journey.”

Many times has Herzog faced the world at the start of such a journey, wayward, unfunded, and uncertain where it might lead. And many times has he returned with marvels in his hands. Let us hope that this book marks the beginning of a journey and not its end.

Donald Trump is tanking in the polls. But that public dissatisfaction hasn’t translated into working-class people trusting Democrats to have their backs.

When it comes to either party addressing their concerns about grocery bills, rent checks, pay stubs, retirement, their children’s education—the kinds of things keeping people up at night—working-class voters are still taking a “lesser of two evils” approach.

Having spent the last 14 years reporting on, visiting, or advocating for working-class communities in every region, this status quo doesn’t surprise me. Traveling the country you will hear a consistent message: “They [politicians] don’t care about me”; or “They only come around at election time.”

Above all else, winning people’s trust involves sitting down with them and listening—to their challenges, their ambitions, their ideas… their stories. It takes a certain intimacy to achieve that.

That’s why in the wake of the 2024 election, when a stream of punditry and post-mortems asked how can Democrats reconnect with the working class?—a coalition of state and national organizations (including my current employer, EPIC)—launched the #Listen2Workers campaign.

The campaign is built on a simple premise: Bring workers together with elected officials—local, state, and federal—and have authentic conversations. Ask workers about their lives, what is most pressing, their ideas for change. Listen, and then have a back and forth (no speeches) about what the legislator is hearing—about policy ideas, commitments, remaining questions, how they can work together.

Afterward, a coalition of organizations can help the legislator show their work—through social-media-friendly clips—so the public can see the commitment to working people in action, rather than political leaders simply talking about their commitment. If the party wants to shake the narrative among working-class people that they aren’t committed, they must show the evidence. It comes down to the old adage, Show, don’t tell—if you want it to stick.

Recently, Georgia House minority leader Carolyn Hugley hosted a #Listen2Workers forum in Macon, moderated by Stacey Abrams.

A group of about 25 racially diverse, union, and, importantly, nonunion workers, from both urban and rural communities, talked about wages that no longer cover rent, even for full-time workers. A retired law enforcement officer who had no union said that his wage after 26 years was the same as the entry wage for NYPD officers, despite both risking their lives. A union leader talked about the absurdity of a $7.25 hourly minimum wage, and parents having to work multiple jobs, so they don’t have the time they want and need for their kids.

Others spoke about the quiet devastation of disinvestment. A second-generation brick mason described how vocational programs were stripped from high schools, hollowing out both opportunity for young people and the skilled labor pipeline communities need. Many spoke of homes and lots that stand vacant, abandoned, while evictions rise. A gig worker explained that his “boss is AI,” with no job protections or recourse, and constant fear of being deactivated without explanation. A bartender said plainly, “I don’t want three jobs. I want one job. I want to live—not just survive.” The workers explored policy solutions ranging from rent stabilization to local banks providing entrepreneurs access to capital, to career pathways for young people, to tax revenues, to legislators showing up regularly, and much more.

What tied these stories together wasn’t ideology. It was lived experience—and a shared sense that too many political conversations happen without the people most affected being in the room.

As Abrams reflected afterwards, “People are hungry for solutions.… They are smart. They have clever, doable ideas. What they desperately need is someone who can listen to those ideas and help make them manifest.”

State legislators across 11 states have now pledged to take part in the campaign. In California, more than a dozen are sitting down for one-on-one conversations with workers in their districts—care workers, gig workers, security workers, trade workers, and more.

Imagine if Democrats in red, blue, and purple districts across the country committed to doing this and explicitly tying a #Listen2Workers policy agenda to the stories they heard—shaped by the very people bearing the brunt of policy decisions every day. That kind of politics wouldn’t just move polls, it would help rebuild trust.

But it all starts with listening to the stories. Those are the receipts—for what people want, and how Democrats are responding to what they hear.

Aglance across the news headlines on Tuesday morning bore eloquent witness to the state of our union. President Donald Trump continues to threaten to invade Iran—even though he’s failed to offer a coherent rationale for it; meanwhile, the top general of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warns that an Iran strike would likely trigger a rapid descent into a military quagmire. (The president took to Truth Social to dispute this report, but as usual, he was lying.) Ryan Schenk, a former instructor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, testified on Capitol Hill that agency leaders cut 240 hours of “vital classes” in its already slapdash training program for new recruits, while running roughshod over Fourth Amendment protections for detainees and lying about their handiwork before Congress. Goldman Sachs analysts issued a report finding that the booming AI investment sector hyped by the Trump White House has added basically nothing to economic growth—which isn’t all that surprising, since overall GDP growth nearly flatlined over the last quarter of 2025. Trump’s Justice Department—which now sports a Mussolini-like banner of the president’s visage on its façade—has reportedly suppressed key documents in the Epstein files that reference Trump allegedly sexually assaulting a minor. The White House is scrambling to contain the damage from Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee’s saying that Israel has a biblically sanctioned right to rule over the entire Middle East, while Ambassador to France Charles Kushner has been relegated to persona non grata status there for trying to whip up militant right-wing sentiment over the assassination of a far-right leader.

As a consequence of all this corruption, stupidity, and authoritarian squalor, Trump has logged a historic swoon in polling; his approval rating now sits at a dismal 37 percent. In another poll, 61 percent of respondents—including 30 percent of Republicans—say that Trump has “become erratic with age.”

In a normal presidency, this barrage of bad news and self-owns would provoke an across-the-board reset, and a State of the Union address would serve as the ideal platform for it. In Trump’s second term, however, the clear evidence of total strongman failure is only further proof of the mandate to keep strongmanning harder. That was the message of Trump’s marathon speech Tuesday night, which began and ended with invocations of Trump’s idyll of the new American golden age he imagines himself to be launching, and was punctuated throughout with the awarding of civic and military medals to a corps of heroes invited to attend.

The running ceremonial callouts reinforced Trump’s preferred image of himself as the unrivaled bestower of honor and prosperity—even as his own craving for adulation undermined the solemn displays of state heraldry. As the two-hour speech wound down with one last award—a Medal of Honor given to 100-year-old Navy aviator Royce Williams, Trump ad-libbed on how he also “always wanted a Congressional Medal of Honor” but regrettably had neither the qualifications nor authority to bestow one on himself. It made for a cringeworthy segue into the speech’s conclusion—a prolonged hymn of American exceptionalism to mark the country’s upcoming 250th anniversary, which invoked the nation’s destiny as the handiwork of “Providence” and declared that “when God needs a nation to work His miracles, He knows exactly who to ask.”

One might imagine a benevolent creator rather distressed to be downgraded into a de facto Trump supplicant—particularly in view of the president’s Epstein notoriety and his role in fomenting a deadly coup at the very site where he was letting these sonorities loose. But that was the uneasy tenor of the whole performance: When Trump was sticking closely to the script in his teleprompter, his delivery had a flat and grudging feel. “The spirit of 1776 keeps shining through,” he intoned at one point as something of an infomercial afterthought.

When he veered off script into his preferred mode of sneering, insulting, and mob-baiting, he was in his element—calling out Democrats promoting a new affordability agenda for promulgating “a dirty rotten lie,” or defaming “Somali pirates” in Minnesota whom he again accused without evidence of engineering a multibillion-dollar scheme of welfare fraud.

These lurches into gothic MAGA fantasy were no doubt more frequent because Trump was playing to a lopsided house. Many Democratic lawmakers elected to boycott the address in order to underline just how badly the second-term Trump presidency has defiled the country’s traditions of self-government and aspirations of civic virtue. The House chamber, which normally hosts a narrow-to-vanishing four-vote Republican majority, appeared for the speech’s duration to be a bastion of Trump country. So as Trump continued to riff on his pet themes of MAGA dominance and fantasies of immigrant-and-Democratic social predation, the traditional pieties of the State of the Union address succumbed to the spectacle and rhetoric of a Trump rally.

The shift in mood was apparent at the outset. Texas Democratic Representative Al Green stood in the chamber with a placard reading “BLACK PEOPLE AREN’T APES!”—a reference to a video that Trump posted on his TruthSocial account depicting Barack and Michelle Obama in that fashion. Security guards ushered Green out just as Trump delivered the first big selling point in his speech: “I can say with dignity and pride that we have achieved a transformation like no one has ever seen before, and a turnaround for the ages.” The GOP lawmakers began to chant “USA!” and it was impossible to tell whether they were responding to Trump’s grandiose claim or Green’s coerced departure.

Pundits were primed to see whether Trump would continue whaling into the Supreme Court for its decision overturning his tariffs agenda, as he did in Friday’s paranoid press conference on the ruling. But here too Trump mostly kept grudgingly to his prepared remarks, calling the decision “unfortunate.” He likewise didn’t signal any bellicose new turns in his Iran policy, stressing that he would prefer to reduce the country’s progress toward obtaining nuclear weapons diplomatically, but wouldn’t hesitate to use military force if diplomacy fails. (No mention, of course, was made of his petty and unprovoked cancellation of the Obama White House’s nuclear deal with Iran, nor to his claim to have completely wiped out Iran’s nuclear capacity in last summer’s unconstitutional strike.)

What there was of a domestic agenda in the speech was far thinner. Trump couldn’t credibly make claims for significant economic progress on his watch, so he cherry-picked achievements, calling out his symbolic cessation of taxes on tips and the minuscule deduction for interest paid on auto loans. Absurdly, he claimed to be yet again overturning the Affordable Care Act for a hand-waving proposal to direct government subsidies away from big insurers and toward “the people.” The same GOP Congress who was cheering for Trump eliminated ACA subsidies, and as a result, premiums are doubling for at least 22 million Americans. He touted the House’s recent passage of the SAVE America Act—the regressive voter-ID bill sponsored by Texas GOP Representative Chip Roy—and urged Senate majority leader John Thune to move it through his chamber “before anything else happens.” Trump again went off script with relish here to depict an election system besieged by “rampant” fraud and illegal voting by undocumented immigrants (none of which is true), while claiming that Democrats oppose voter-suppression measures because “they want to cheat. They have cheated, and their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.”

In his most gleeful moment of MAGA choreography, Trump set himself up with the kind of civic-textbook introduction that he rushed through over the balance of the speech, announcing that “one of the great things about the State of the Union is how it gives Americans the chance to see clearly what their legislators really believe.” Then he reverted to rally mode, telling his audience, “So if you agree with this statement, stand up: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” When the members of the thinned-out Democratic delegation remained seated, Trump once more reveled in his dominance, theatrically shrugging and grimacing at them. “Isn’t it a shame?” he called out. “You should be ashamed of yourselves for not standing up.”

No, we should all be ashamed that these kinds of demagogic stunts are what passes for political discourse; it now looks more and more as though Obama’s know-nothing heckler South Carolina GOP Representative Joe Wilson, who shouted “You lie!” at a 2010 joint address to Congress on healthcare, was a man ahead of his time. But Trump is hemorrhaging public support amid economic stagnation and a bloodthirsty and illegal mass detention-and-rendition campaign—and nothing in his stock arsenal of taunts and stunts is likely to reverse his political free fall. Maybe he’ll give himself that Medal of Honor as his final petty consolation prize.

In a 6–3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday, the Supreme Court issued a decisive blow against the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariff scheme. According to Roberts, Trump’s view that he could “impose tariffs on imports from any country, at any rate, for any amount of time” was not grounded in law or reality.

While on the surface it was a case about tariffs, the ruling underscores widespread concerns about the preservation of the rule of law in the United States with a president who shows contempt for checks and balances and scorns co-equal branches of government. Notably, after the ruling came down, the president quickly assembled a press conference, where he called the justices “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left Democrats.”

Despite President Donald Trump’s worst inclinations, the decision ultimately affirmed the rule of law and restrained his unlawful reaches. Even Justice Neil Gorsuch took the administration to task for bypassing Congress, saying in his sharply worded concurring opinion that while “it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises.… the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.… deliberation tempers impulse.”

This decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, concerned whether the International Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) authorized the president to impose unprecedented tariffs that selectively targeted some countries and not others. The plaintiffs, family-owned businesses that create and distribute educational products, were directly affected. They claimed that if allowed to stand, Trump’s tariffs would exponentially inflate their importation costs from under $2.5 million in 2024 to more than $100 million in 2025.

To understand the importance of this case and the court’s decision, consider that nowhere in the IEEPA does the statute use the word “tariff” or “tax.” Further, no president had used it to impose tariffs before in its 49-year history.

However, according to Trump, not only did the IEEPA grant him this broad authority, but Congress had delegated this power to him—claims the US Court of International Trade first rejected nine months ago. That ruling barred Trump from imposing the tariffs, explaining that the IEEPA does not authorize the president to tax and implement his tariffs. Trump appealed the decision, losing at the appellate level and now at the Supreme Court.

We remain concerned that this decision, restoring checks and balances at least in this specific case, may be short-lived and largely symbolic for three reasons.

First, Trump has indicated that his government will not voluntarily return the almost $2 billion that it unlawfully took under IEEPA. Rather, businesses will need to litigate in the courts to get it back, which can take years. Large companies may eventually receive the money, but smaller businesses that can’t bear the costs will lose out.

Second, within hours of losing the case, Trump declared a new global 10 percent tariff under another statute (section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act). The next day, he raised the rate to 15 percent. The never-ending shifts in tariffs continue at the president’s whim, as does the chaos.

Third, this president is bent on grasping all powers from an acquiescent Congress. The Republican-led Congress may be unwilling to pass statutes granting him the authority he wants, whether to impose tariffs or wield other prerogative authority, but it does not challenge him. The courts and American streets have become the only place to do so. As to the former, his administration has ignored numerous court orders. As to the latter, the risks are apparent in the unspeakable killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The problem we see is precisely what Gorsuch pointed to, although perhaps too late given that the Supreme Court itself is implicated in granting Trump unprecedented authority. This tariff case is just one example of this president’s perception that all powers accrue to himself, disregarding legislative or judicial checks. Over the past year, Trump has declared one “national emergency” after another, insisting that he alone holds authority—to impose tariffs, impound funds, ignore statutory procedures, end birthright citizenship, erase transgender identity, remove inspectors general, and fire Federal Reserve Board governors who disagree with him.

We do not believe that the majority’s decision will temper Trump’s impulsive governing nor mitigate the consequences of his unlawful executive orders or the illegal conduct of his administration. Instead, like Justice Clarence Thomas in his dissent, Trump may well perceive that Congress can surrender its enumerated powers to him—a dangerous concept indeed for a president who perceives no boundaries to his authority. In this case, it does not take a crystal ball to forecast who will be most harmed—namely small-business owners who cannot afford to litigate against the president to recoup this unlawful tariff. This, too, is a pattern Donald Trump cannot shake.

President Donald Trump will deliver his annual State of the Union address Tuesday night, and the vast majority of Americans already know how it will go, because we’ve seen it all, and heard it all, before. Trump will try to stick to his script. He will fail. He will say outrageous, irresponsible, and dangerous things. He will drive even more wedges of division into a nation that is already divided because of his decade-long assault on the basic premises of the American experiment. The only real question is how quickly and how completely the speech will go off the rails. 

What may distinguish this year’s address is the desperation Trump feels about how dramatically his approval ratings have tanked. A new American Research Group survey finds 62 percent of voters disapprove of how he is handling his job. A new CNN/SSRS poll puts the disapproval number at 63 percent. If that weren’t enough, results from special elections across the country suggest that independent voters are swinging toward Democratic candidates. Stock markets are in turmoil. Americans are in open revolt against the data centers that are the most easily targeted face of the tech-bro AI grift that the White House has so enthusiastically endorsed. International relations are in crisis, and wars that the people absolutely do not want appear to be looming on Trump’s horizon. And then there’s the devastating blow that the normally Trump-friendly Supreme Court dealt to the tariffs at the heart of the president’s miserable excuse for an economic plan.

Amid all of this turmoil and decline, Americans could be excused for looking away from the State of the Union. But this is not a time for apathy. This is a time for clarity, and US Representative Summer Lee (D-PA) intends to provide it.

In one of several responses to the SOTU address—including an official Democratic rebuttal from newly elected Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger—Lee says she plans to use her remarks on behalf of the Working Families Party to go to the heart of the matters facing this country.

Well aware of the violent chaos that resulted from the administration’s decision to surge masked and armed ICE agents into Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities, and equally aware of threats from the administration and its allies to employ even more chaotic strategies as the 2026 election season proceeds, Lee, a progressive member of the US House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Committee on Education and the Workforce, says that mounting concerns about Trump’s autocratic approach “can’t go unaddressed because we are in a moment of authoritarianism.”

“I think that the way some of our American exceptionalism works, it kind of shields us from really reconciling with what we’re actually dealing with in real time,” says Lee. “I think that there are still a lot of people here [in Washington], a lot of people in our governing bodies, who are hesitant to acknowledge this moment—to acknowledge his governance as an act of authoritarianism, which it is. I think that any response to Trump, any response to the state of the nation that doesn’t acknowledge this, falls short. It does a disservice to Americans who deserve honesty right now.”

Lee relishes the chance to deliver that honesty in her speech. “I think we can all agree that these are really scary times,” she says. “Even before we get to what ICE has been doing in Chicago and Minnesota, the things that [Trump] has been doing are scary to those who have paid attention.” She points to “The cuts at the NIH.… The cuts to USAID, at a time where diplomacy is so important. What does it mean for the United States to no longer have allies who trust our nation? Really, all those things have created a dangerous situation for the United States, and that’s before we even get into the physical acts of violence that he’s inflicted on Americans, on people who are who have come to America to seek refuge. So, yes, absolutely, absolutely we have to address it.”

But Democratic elected officials cannot just discuss the crisis once a year, on the night of the State of the Union, says Lee. “Those of us who are in office, who are in Congress, the statehouses, we have to address that every single day because, if we’re ignoring what we’re dealing with, then how can we actually counter it? How can we navigate our country through it?”

That’s one of the reasons the Pennsylvanian — who on Tuesday night will also attend a People’s State of the Union event featuring almost two dozen fellow Democratic members of Congress—is excited to be speaking for the Working Families Party. The WFP works closely with many Democrats, but it is also aligned with unions and grassroots movements that seek to pull the party to the left.

Lee likes the determination with which the WFP raises issues that challenge both parties, along with the emphasis it places on striving for economic, social, and racial justice.

“Whatever it is that Trump is going to say about the State of the Union, it is going to be filled with disinformation. It is going to be delusional in the sense that it is not going to take into account what the lived realities are for so many people in this country—just like his policies,” says Lee. “I think that people right now are looking for [representatives] who can call it what it is, who are going to be clear and articulating what we actually want to see —what direction we want to see our country going in—and I think that this is a good opportunity to do that, to state it plainly.”

Lee will be speaking amid great concern about Trump’s talk of attacking Iran. She is prepared to declare that “the president, the executive branch, does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally declare war. That is still reserved to the Congress.” She is equally unequivocal in warning about the threat Trump and his allies pose to democracy.

“When Donald Trump says something, I believe him,” says Lee. “He’s always been stress-testing the system—seeing what he can get away with. And in the earlier days…he was stepping a toe over the line in a way that was maybe not as egregious. But every single time he’s done it, he’s doing it to see how far he can actually push the line, until you can’t see that line anymore.”

Lee will be calling out Trump on Tuesday night. But she argues that the threats we face extend beyond one man. The president has exposed flaws in the system, says Lee, who reminds us, “When you can see the fissures in your democracy, your democracy is already failing.”

To address that vulnerability, says Lee, there must be a “stronger opposition” that is prepared to absolutely defend democracy, to boldly oppose wars and speak truth to power in a louder and clearer voice. Tonight, that is precisely what Summer Lee is prepared to do.

Readers can view Lee’s response to Trump here.

On Friday, Donald Trump delivered a characteristically unhinged press conference in the wake of his 6–3 defeat in Learning Resources, Inc v. Trump—better known as the tariffs case. The court ruled that the tariffs Trump issued under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act were unconstitutional, and the loss sent Trump into a rage. He castigated the justices who ruled against him, including the Republican ones, calling them “sleazebags” and “slimeballs” and accusing them of being under the influence of foreign powers. He praised the dissenting justices, specifically calling out alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh as a “genius.” He then seemed to treat the dissent as if it were the winning, majority opinion and imposed new 10 percent global tariffs under a different statute (which he raised to 15 percent over the weekend… because, why not), brushed off the statutory language dictating that his new tariffs must expire in 150 days, and said that the law is now “clear” about his authority to issue tariffs without going to Congress first.

Friends, nothing is “clear.” It’s not clear if the government will have to make restitution to the businesses that have been hit with illegal taxes under the Trump administration’s tariff regime. (This is what the plaintiffs in Learning Resources were actually asking for). It’s not clear if the majority of the Supreme Court will approve of these new tariffs. And if they don’t approve, it’s not clear that Trump will follow the court’s orders when it rules against him. The only thing that is clear is that the global trade economy remains at the mercy of the whims of a madman, while American consumers will continue to pay the price for Trump’s petty international squabbles.

One reason for all this confusion is that the Supreme Court’s conservatives are split on how to apply what they call the “major questions doctrine.” The court didn’t actually use the doctrine in this case, but the conservatives wanted to. The liberals held firm and Trump lost on different grounds, but most of the hundreds of pages of the decision involved the Republicans sniping at each other over this idea.

According to those who believe in it, the major questions doctrine holds that for issues of economic or political “significance,” the Constitution does not intend for the president to act unilaterally. “Major” issues must be decided through legislation, and if Congress wants to give the president unilateral powers, it must do so through clear, precise statutory language.

In theory, the major questions doctrine limits what a president can do without the support of Congress. That has been a long-term goal of conservatives since at least Lyndon Johnson and the civil rights era. But in practice, it puts all the power in the hands of the Supreme Court. Whenever Republicans on the Supreme Court talk about restoring power to Congress, they’re really talking about grabbing power for themselves: What’s an issue of economic or political significance? Only the Supreme Court knows. What constitutes clear and precise statutory language? Only the Supreme Court knows. A reasonable person, president, or legislator cannot know what a “major question” is, or what language is clear enough to avoid running into a problem. Under the major questions doctrine, all roads lead to the Supreme Court. To paraphrase George W. Bush, the Supreme Court, not Congress or the president, becomes “the decider.”

The reason Republicans on the court spent so much time yelling at one another over this doctrine that didn’t actually decide the case is because the major questions doctrine has a critical flaw: It’s entirely made-up. It’s not written down anywhere—not in the Constitution, not in the Declaration of Independence, not in the Magna Carta, not in the Bible or the Mahabharata. It’s just not a historical thing. Nobody currently on the court learned about major questions doctrine in law school, because it hadn’t been invented back when they were in law school. Conservative law professors essentially concocted this “doctrine” circa 2014 (they say necessity is the mother of all invention, and the existence of a Black president certainly seemed to necessitate the invention of ways of curtail Barack Obama’s powers) as they were trying to find some way to limit the effectiveness of Obamacare. Justice Neil Gorsuch soon became the idea’s champion.

You can see why this doctrine is useful to a power-hungry Supreme Court justice. At its core, it allows the unelected members of the court to overrule the policies of an elected president because it deems those policies important. That’s a wild, unrestrained power. Imagine going through the trouble of winning an entire presidential election only to be told by the court that you can’t enact your policies because they are “politically significant.” The major questions doctrine places the Supreme Court first among allegedly equal branches of government.

All of the Republicans on the high court now agree that their imaginary power is real, but, luckily for those of us who would like to vote for our leaders, that’s all the Republicans can agree on when it comes to this doctrine. They don’t agree on where, legally speaking, the major questions doctrine comes from, when it should be used, or what (if any) limitations should be placed on the power they’ve given themselves. That’s why the doctrine has thus far only been used to stop the policies of Joe Biden. In the case of Biden’s student debt relief policy, for instance, the Republicans could agree that they didn’t like the policy—and, since they didn’t have any constitutional or legal reasons to block it, they invoked the major questions doctrine to stop it.

The tariffs are a different matter. The Republicans on the court didn’t agree that Trump’s tariffs were bad policy, so they couldn’t agree on whether or even how to use their new “Democrats lose” button against Trump. Justices John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett all said that the doctrine could be used to prohibit Trump’s tariffs, but the liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—refused to invoke the doctrine. Trump lost the case, 6–3, on the point that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act did not give Trump the authority he claimed to impose tariffs. That’s it, no major questions required.

Democrats in Congress could learn something from the liberal women on the Supreme Court. Despite being in the minority, and despite being offered a whackadoodle theory that would have secured them a short-term victory in this case, the liberal justices held firm, didn’t blink, and forced the conservative supermajority to try to find the votes for their antidemocratic “doctrine” among themselves.

The Republicans couldn’t. They fractured on how to use the major questions doctrine in the tariffs case, with justices Roberts, Gorsuch, Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas all writing separately, each with their own pet theories on how it should work. I’ve seen this kind of splintering of a narrative before because… I watch all Star Wars content. The major questions doctrine is just as much of a fiction as “the Force.” If you watch Star Wars and its trillions of spinoffs, you know that the different writers give Jedis and Sith different powers, abilities, and weaknesses, based on what they need the Force-users to do in their stories. It’s the same with Republicans on the Supreme Court. One of the principal benefits of basing your universe on a fictional power is that it can do whatever you say it can do; the drawback is that different people will say it can do different things.

Only three Republican justices thought that the major questions doctrine should be used in the tariffs case, but even they disagreed about how and why. Chief Justice Roberts said that the major questions doctrine must apply to tariffs, if it applies to anything, because the power to tax (which is what a tariff is) is the most “major” economic issue to the country. Gorsuch said the doctrine is a bedrock constitutional principle (it’s not) that must be strictly applied in nearly all cases where the president acts without explicit congressional authority (including this one). Barrett, in contrast, said that using the major questions doctrine is a “common sense” analytical tool, but need not be the only thing the court considers.

The dissenters also couldn’t come to a consensus. Kavanaugh said that the doctrine “does not apply in the foreign affairs context,” meaning that presidents can do as they please in foreign matters (like imposing tariffs) as long as there is a sliver of congressional authority for them to do so. Kavanaugh’s formulation is a completely new thing that had never said about the doctrine until Friday, and reeks of him making something up on the fly to please Trump. Thomas, meanwhile, agreed with Kavanaugh, but went even further, basically crowning the president a pirate king completely untethered from Congress as soon as his desires hit the water’s edge. Justice Samuel Alito joined Kavanaugh’s dissent but didn’t write separately—I assume because he was too busy planning his retirement party.

All of this chaos means I really can’t tell you how the Supreme Court will decide the next tariff case. Will the Republicans band together to decide that the language in other statutes supports Trump’s tariffs “more clearly”? Or will they continue their sectarian war over whose imaginary friend is more powerful? And what about all of the non-tariff cases where major questions might also apply? Is birthright citizenship a “major question” or is it a foreign policy issue where the president is a god-king? Will Luke Skywalker ever be able to shoot lightning from his fingertips, or is that something only “bad” people do? Who can know? Who can ever know when the Supreme Court is just making it all up as it goes along?

What I can know is this: During tonight’s State of the Union address, Trump will threaten new authoritarian policies. Republicans will clap like trained seals for those policies, but they won’t use their legislative authority to pass them. Instead, Trump will make unilateral executive declarations, Congress will do nothing, and it will set off another round of lawsuits and appeals.

Eventually, the Supreme Court will tell us if the State of the Union is a “major question” or a pointless exercise.

In the industrial neighborhood of Maspeth, Queens, Amazon drivers from the nearby DBK4 delivery station often stop at Angelo’s Deli. It’s where drivers gathered in September 2024 before marching to the facility for the first time as union organizers. On Friday, Mayor Zohran Mamdani chose the deli to sit with a dozen warehouse workers and drivers who have unionized with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and announce that New York City will expand protected time off and crack down on employers where workers rarely use sick leave.

“We are going to be looking at every way that an employer is looking to evade accountability,” Mamdani told me. “It’s time to have a rule of law that applies to everyone, and that includes these kinds of corporations that seem to think of themselves as above it.”

Mamdani announced that the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) will monitor how often workers at each company use their paid leave. If fewer than half of a company’s employees take any time off in a year, the agency will investigate the employer for potential violations.

Jerome Sloss, 32, a driver with an Amazon subcontractor, said Mamdani is following through on his campaign promises. He told me, “His entire campaign has been about taxing the rich and helping working class people, and he’s doing what he said he was going to do.”

The DCWP based the threshold on its analysis of national data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that half of private-sector workers with paid sick leave take at least one day off annually for health reasons. The agency said it will also investigate violations based on complaints from workers.

Since 2014, employees in New York City have been entitled to time off for illness, injury, or other urgent personal business.

The newly expanded Protected Time Off Law, which will come into effect on Sunday, grants private-sector workers a minimum of 32 hours of unpaid time off per year—available immediately upon hire and at the start of each calendar year. This is in addition to 40 to 56 hours of paid time off annually depending on company size. Approximately 3 million New Yorkers are covered under the law.

The law also expands when employees can use protected time off to include childcare, caring for a family member with a disability, attending benefits or housing hearings, responding to declared emergencies, and addressing workplace violence.

Mamdani has previously backed Amazon workers organizing with the Teamsters. On Friday, he sat with a dozen drivers who shared stories about needing time off for medical emergencies and childcare crises. Mamdani said expanding protected time off is central to improving workers’ quality of life: “This kind of legislation is critical to ensuring that a worker can do more than just work—that a worker can also live, that a worker can also take care of their family and themselves.”

Jerome Sloss, 32, a driver with an Amazon subcontractor at the DBK1 facility in Woodside, said workers earn paid leave gradually based on hours worked—roughly an hour of leave for every week on the job: “We don’t get it front loaded at the beginning of the year. You accrue it over the time you work.”

Matt Multari, 25, another driver working at the DBK1 facility, said subcontractors can change their schedules up to 8 pm the night before a shift. Multari asked, “How are you supposed to plan your life around it?”

Other workers said that when they request emergency leave without enough advance notice or when managers question whether the emergency is justified, some subcontractors retaliate by canceling scheduled shifts for the rest of the week. These workers are among more than 200 drivers at DBK1 who have unionized with the Teamsters. Nationwide, the union represents between 7,000 and 10,000 Amazon workers.

Mamdani, who campaigned on reducing income inequality, said strengthening unions is key to that goal. “The more organized a workforce, the better the lives those workers will be able to live.”

“To be here with Teamsters members who have been on the front lines of fighting for these very kinds of rights and so much more in the face of corporate impunity, it shows us the urgency of this task.”

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address tonight promises to be a tedious exercise in boasting about imaginary achievements and berating political foes. We know this for two reasons: first, because, no matter who is president, the State of the Union is practically by definition a tedious exercise in boasting about imaginary achievements and berating political foes; and second, because Trump is facing serious political setbacks and is responding to them by amping up his vainglorious self-celebration. 

Trump gave his version of a sneak preview for the speech on Monday “So we have a country that’s now doing well,” he said at the White House. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had. We have the most activity we’ve ever had. I’m making a speech tomorrow night, and you’ll be hearing me say that. It’s going to be a long speech, because we have so much to talk about.”

Since Trump has never favored brevity, his foreshadowing of a “long speech” feels like a threat more than an enticement. Perhaps he’s hoping that droning on will lull the American people into forgetting that they really don’t like him.

Trump might feel like the economy is gangbusters, but that’s a minority position in the country. According to a Washington Post/ABC News/IPSOS poll released on Sunday, 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, 64 percent his handling of tariffs, and 65 percent his handling of inflation. 

Summing up this polling, the Post records a near-record level of public dissatisfaction:

Americans remain generally sour about his performance, with majorities disapproving of his handling of priority initiatives while saying he has overreached the authority of his office…

The president’s approval rating stands at 39 percent positive and 60 percent negative, including 47 percent who say they strongly disapprove.

Not to be outdone, CNN reports, “Among political independents, Trump’s approval rating has dropped 15 points over the past year to 26%, the lowest it’s been in either of his terms.” Trump has also suffered sharp declines among Latinos and young voters. 

The polling tells a consistent story. Trump’s only robust support comes from the GOP base (though even this group’s approval is slowly trickling downward, going from 90 percent to 82 percent over the last year in the CNN poll). Among the rest of the population of Democrats and independents, Trump is as intensely disliked as any president has ever been. Mainstream culture has already rejected Trump. One telling example is the fact the women’s hockey team that won gold at the Olympics has turned down Trump’s invitation to join the audience at the SOTU address.

Added to these grim figures are the political defeats Trump has suffered recently. As USA Today notes:

President Donald Trump’s aggressive second-term agenda already was faltering when the Supreme Court delivered a hammer blow.

The court’s 6-3 decision released Feb. 20 invalidating Trump’s use of emergency powers to enact sweeping tariffs shattered a pillar of his economic agenda. It’s also the latest in a series of other setbacks, from his withdrawal of immigration agents in Minneapolis to his retreat on seizing Greenland.

These political headwinds have led to not just flagging poll numbers but GOP losses in the special elections. They bode ill for Republican prospects in the upcoming midterms. 

A different president might respond to this by pushing a bland message of national unity. But Trump only ever has one move when cornered: dig in and lash out. So in addition to boasting about his achievements, Trump is likely to go on the offensive. In particular, he has in recent days been hitting hard on the theme of election fraud, advocating for stringent voter-ID requirements in his proposed SAVE America Act (which can pass only if Senate Republicans abolish the filibuster). Trump has also said that if the SAVE America Act doesn’t pass, he’ll use executive orders to make sure stricter voter-ID rules are followed in the midterms—something widely seen as outside his legal authority. 

As in previous State of the Union addresses, Trump will showcase so-called “Angel Families” (those who have lost loved ones to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants). This will allow him to present the issue of immigration as a racialized melodrama of innocent Americans victimized by foreigners. His other usual punching bags—trans people, DEI, the media—might get a mention too. And it seems likely that he will boast about his turn towards neo-imperialism in the Western Hemisphere, threaten war with Iran, and pretend that he is pursuing peace in Gaza.

Trump’s combination of bragging about the economy and demonizing his foes will not help him get out of the political quagmire he is now in. Quite the opposite. This is a message that appeals only to the hardcore MAGA faithful. Trump will show his loyalists that he’s keeping to his hard-line right-wing policies, whether the rest of the country likes it or not. Whatever self-praise he offers himself, tonight’s speech will show that the true state of the union remains bleak.

From claiming the mantle of McKinley to issuing a “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, the Trump administration has never been bashful about asserting what it perceives as its place in history. Marco Rubio took this to a new level recently with an assertion at a security conference in Munich that the US and Europe are engaged in an existential battle with “the forces of civilizational erasure.”

Reinforcing this message last week, the State Department posted a photograph of Rubio on X with the message: “The United States and Europe belong to a civilization that stretches over continents, crossed over oceans, and persisted for thousands of years: from Athens to Rome to America. Western Civilization must embrace its noble legacy if it is to reverse its decline.”

This drew a sharp rebuke from Britain’s first black woman lawmaker. Diane Abbott, who holds the title Mother of the House as the longest-serving female member of Parliament, accused Rubio of “trying to forge a white supremacist version of human history” and said: “Language was first spoken in Africa. Language was first written in West Asia. Mathematics originated in Africa, so too the first translation. The first 2-storey building was also in built in Asia.”

In his Munich speech, Rubio had described colonialism as “a great civilization” that had sent “its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.” To resounding applause, he told European leaders that America would always be “a child of Europe” and then illustrated this with a curious collection of examples.

Credited in turn were the Italians for Christianity, the English for their language and political and legal system, the Germans for farming and beer, the French for exploring the North American interior, and the Scots-Irish for Davy Crocket, Teddy Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong, and Mark Twain (evidently, overlooking the latter’s opposition to imperialism).

Predictably, of course, there was no place in this fairy tale for Indigenous nations who had been ethnically cleansed to make way for colonization. Nor was there any mention of the 7.9 million people whose slave labour created the wealth of King Cotton and whose notional freedom required a civil war in which around a million Americans died.

But what about Spain? Rubio could not credibly omit his own heritage from the story, especially as the Mediterranean members of NATO are as important geopolitically as the Anglo-Saxon ones. Spain, he said without apparent irony, was responsible for “our horses, our ranches, our rodeos—the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West.” And, for good measure, he added that his own European ancestors would never have imagined that “one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation.”

This hackneyed allusion to the American Dream begs examination of the actual history. From the outset, the architects of empire viewed Spanish Americans as inferior and institutionalized their second-class status. When the United States expanded westward, it treated the land it conquered as “incorporated territories” eligible to become “states,” but only once there were enough Anglo-Saxon settlers to outnumber both Indigenous inhabitants and, in the Southwest, the Mexicans from whom the land was taken in 1848. This meant that Arizona and New Mexico were not admitted to the Union until 1912.

However, while incorporated territories were destined for statehood once the right ethnic mix was eventually achieved, the colonies seized directly from Spain in 1898 were a different matter. When the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico became US possessions, there was much debate about what to do with them. Cuba was allowed nominal independence, but with the US retaining—to this day—45 square miles for a military base at Guantánamo. Filipinos mounted fierce resistance that was crushed by US forces in what one senator described as “a foul blot on the flag,” but they eventually gained independence in 1946. Guam and Puerto Rico were, meanwhile, retained as US possessions for their geopolitical value in the Pacific and Caribbean respectively, prompting the need to resolve what their legal status should be.

The solution of giving these outposts “unincorporated” status was proposed by Abbott Lawrence Lowell in an article for The Atlantic Monthly in February 1899. The Harvard law professor advanced the thesis that persons’ being created equal is “quite a different matter” from their being equal politically. While “the Anglo-Saxon race was prepared for [political equality] by centuries of discipline under the supremacy of law,” he claimed that “the Spanish race” had not acquired “the habits of self-government.” Puerto Ricans, he continued, “must be trained for it, as our forefathers were trained, beginning with local government under a strong judicial system, and the process will necessarily be slow.”

Puerto Rico’s unincorporated status was legally formalized in 1901 when the Supreme Court decided that oranges imported from the island into the United States should be subject to duty because “neither military occupation nor cession by treaty makes the conquered territory domestic territory in the sense of the revenue laws.” In the words of Justice Edward Douglass White, Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” because it was unincorporated and therefore “merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”

This judgment continues to underpin Puerto Rico’s status. It was not altered by giving Puerto Ricans US citizenship in 1917, conveniently making them eligible for conscription. It was camouflaged in 1952 where—to quash accusations of colonialism at the United Nations—Congress gave the island limited self-government. And it was exposed as a sham when Washington imposed direct rule in 2016 after a debt crisis that even a US city would have been allowed to manage independently by filing for bankruptcy protection.

The hostility from some quarters toward Bad Bunny’s appearance at the Super Bowl brought to the fore confusion that was bound to arise from the idea that a place can be owned by the US but not part of it. Attitudes have changed little since Lawrence Lowell’s day: Puerto Ricans are OK as fodder for war or for their land’s military value, but they are un-American when they assert their cultural identity. It is no wonder that more and more of them are now demanding political equality through self-determination.

Rubio’s attributing ranches and rodeo to his ancestors was quaint, and might go down well with some European politicians clutching at Atlanticist straws, but having someone of Hispanic heritage at the center of US power does not make it any less a racist endeavour. As another Harvard professor, Samuel P Huntington, put it in 2004: “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”

Alexey Navalny’s death in a Russian prison came from a deadly poison. This news comes from a report by Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, Its analysis of samples from the human rights activist’s body “conclusively” found a toxin common in poison dart frogs in South America, and not naturally found in Russia.

Navalny died in the “Polar Wolf” penal colony north of the Arctic Circle in February 2024. He was 47 years old.

As the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, news of Navalny’s poisoning serves as a stark reminder of the human rights abuses committed by Russia. Those abuses haven’t stopped at the front line in Ukraine, with Russia taking political prisoners and holding them in conditions that have raised concerns among human rights groups.

In the aftermath of Navalny’s death, the US State Department announced new sanctions on three Russians, including the warden. One prison official, Valeriy Gennadevich Boyarinev, reportedly instructed prison staff to exert harsher treatment on Navalny while he was incarcerated. Following Navalny’s death, the official received a promotion.

Russia denied that it had poisoned Navalny. “Naturally, we do not accept such accusations,” a Kremlin spokesman said, according to Reuters. “We disagree with them. We consider them biased and not based on anything. And we strongly reject them.”

Navalny isn’t the only political prisoner Russia has put away in recent years. According to Memorial, a human rights group that keeps track of political prisoners in Russia, at least 4,877 people in Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory have been politically persecuted and incarcerated. Memorial notes that the actual count of political prisoners could be double that.

Sergei Davidis, the head of Memorial, told The Nation that there’s been a recent increase in violence against defendants in political cases, and in the use of treason and terrorism charges for repression. The severity of sentences being handed out by Russian courts is also increasing. He also noted that Navalny’s execution by a toxin found in exotic frog poison is notable.

“Even without reference to specific international treaties, it can be said that the extrajudicial killing of a citizen by the state clearly violates the norms of international law,” Davidis said. “Even more so when the person killed is deprived of liberty and under the complete control of the authorities. In Navalny’s case, we are also talking about the killing of a person deprived of his liberty for political reasons in violation of the right to a fair trial. The creation and use of chemical weapons, which is what the poison used to kill Navalny actually is, also violates international norms.”

Last month, at least 10 criminal cases were brought before one Russian court against Ukrainians who were prosecuted under allegations of “terrorism.” Over a two-week span, the court handed out verdicts in 27 more cases involving Ukrainians, with maximum sentences ranging from seven to 20 years in prison. In another case, a 69-year-old woman from Zaporizhzhia was sentenced to 15 years for allegedly donating money to the Ukrainian military.

In a statement last year on the anniversary of Navalny’s death, the United Nations special rapporteur on Russia said there were at least 2,000 political prisoners in Russia, often enduring life-threatening conditions. Eight political prisoners died in prison in 2024, including Pavel Kushnir, a pianist who was critical of the war in Ukraine. The report noted 12 children who were incarcerated on charges of “terrorism” and “extremism.” In a September 2025 report, the rapporteur said the human rights situation in Russia “continued to deteriorate.”

Navalny was a prominent activist and sharply critical of Putin, who has consistently cracked down on his critics. Take, for example, Boris Kagarlitsky, a prominent intellectual who has been critical of Putin’s authoritarian regime, designated a “foreign agent” and a “terrorist” by the Russian state. He has remained an outspoken critic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from prison, following his arrest in July 2023.

Kagariltsky, 66, has written extensively for The Nation about Putin’s authoritarianism, protests, and the Russian opposition, at great risk. As of November, he had served time in isolation and was in declining health.

Still, he has said he doesn’t want to leave Russia as part of any deal for his exchange. “I have stated several times and I repeat again,” Kagarlitsky told The Nation in November last year, “that I do not wish to participate in such exchanges.… I see no point or benefit for myself in emigrating. If I had wanted to leave the country, I would have done so myself.”

Kagarlitsky represents the spirit of domestic Russian opposition to Putin and the war in Ukraine. As peace negotiations continue to flail and the war drags on—leading to massive losses for Russia (and Ukraine)—the situation’s potential for instability grows, leaving political prisoners in limbo.

“It is important not to forget to support Russian civil society, which opposes war and dictatorship, and, first and foremost, Russian political prisoners, to seek their release,” Davidis said. “This is not only a question of humanity, justice, and law, but also of increasing the likelihood and proximity of change in Russia, its turn towards democracy and peaceful cooperation with its neighbors, which is important for Europe and the world.”

Then there’s the American Stephen Hubbard, a retired teacher who was arrested when the Ukrainian town of Izyum, where he was living at the time, was occupied by Russia in 2022. He remains in Russian custody in reportedly poor conditions.

Hubbard’s sister, Trisha Fox-Hubbard, told The Nation she’s worried that her brother, who is 74 years old, will die in a Russian prison. He was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years for allegedly working as a “mercenary.” In his Russian prison, he eats mostly cabbage and faces beatings. “His mental health is dire,” Fox-Hubbard said. “Being so isolated for over four years, he probably doesn’t know what year or month it is. The guards have screamed at him to die.”

Davidis said the recent involvement by the Trump administration in the release of political prisoners in Venezuela and Belarus gives him hope that the United States might be able to establish a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia that could facilitate the release of additional prisoners.

But the international community seems fractured in its response to the human rights violations committed by Russia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio faced criticism from his recent appearance at the Munich Security Conference, contrasted to the increasing alarm sounded by his European counterparts. In a later press conference, Rubio told reporters that Navalny’s poisoning was “troubling.”

Rubio spoke just hours before a group of America’s allies released their report on Navalny’s death. Notably, the United States was absent from the report. Also absent from Rubio’s appearance in Munich was any threat or caution to Putin amid the looming threat of an escalation of his war in Ukraine, as peace negotiations continue to falter. While America’s allies strap up, the US has threatened its relationships with key strategic partners.

The Trump administration’s relative nonresponse to the news of Navalny’s poisoning could spell disaster for those imprisoned by this long war.

At the very beginning of his final book, completed shortly before his death last year, James C. Scott issues an apology. He had intended to write about rivers, and one river in particular: the Ayeyarwady, whose watershed delimits the nation of Burma. The book would have moved from an ethnographic and ecological account of the river and its people to a meditation on freedom and control—on what happens when a human civilization attempts to dominate a nonhuman system that it does not, and perhaps cannot, understand.

But between 2020 and 2021, the Tatmadaw—the insular junta that has plagued Burmese society for half a century—annulled the election it had lost and seized absolute power, reestablishing what is arguably the purest, most nakedly authoritarian military dictatorship in the world. Scott, a public supporter of the democratic opposition, was barred from the country, and with it access to the river.

That the writing of this particular book was truncated by a fascist coup furnishes the reader with an insight as rich as any contained in its pages. This is a book about blunt attempts to control subtle systems. About the point at which a pulsing river hits a concrete dam; a teeming marsh gets drained and cropped; a lazy oxbow is straitjacketed into a canal.

Seen through Scott’s lens, the junta’s attempts to dominate the Burmese people are not a simile but an extension of the same metaphysical violence: wrought by the simple on the complex, the finite on the unlimited, the profane on the divine. All rivers, he would argue, suffer from and dissent against this violence.

One imagines the blithe Potomac—its mud and its eddies, its frogs and larvae—coursing past Trump’s military parade. It’s a ripple beneath the boots. A seditious, hidden army. A timeless joke we can’t quite grasp.

In Praise of Floods, the book that emerged despite all of this, feels, per Scott’s caveat, like something that has spilled through the cracks in a dam. There are many powerful currents, but they don’t always converge—a geomorphological history of rivers; an exegesis on the role of floods in riparian ecology; a participatory ethnography on spirit worship along the Ayeyarwady River; an imagined parliamentary debate among the plants and animals that live in its watershed.

Scott succeeds most where he upends the received wisdom on what a river is. A river is not, as he convincingly argues, a single, set channel through a landscape. It is a shifting web of capillary detail, composed of tributaries, and tributaries to those tributaries, and innumerable amphibious zones where water and land sponge together in patternless complexity. Our cartographic representations of rivers—blue lines cutting across brown land—are both hopelessly oversimplified and inevitably out of date. Lulled by the easily thinkable scale of days and weeks, we assume we know where a river runs. But on the scale of years and decades, as Scott explains, a natural river is like a loose hose, the main channel whipping wildly around its basin. In this more protean conception of a river, a flood is less a disaster than it is a natural expansion and contraction of the water, a process analogous to breathing.

Left to their own devices, all rivers flood periodically, taking up some greater or lesser portion of their floodplain. The pulse of water gives life to the surrounding ecosystems, drawing in “an entire cavalcade of creatures and flora” for a semi-regular, multi-species feast. When the water recedes, it draws with it the organic nutrients without which the river “could sustain but little life.” Scott lavishes particular attention on the “vast in-between landscape that is transitional, periodically inundated, periodically dry, and periodically damp.” These “backwaters, ponds, marshes, swamps”—formed and sustained by flooding—often host the highest density of life, species adapted to their “periodicity and fluctuations.”

Homo sapiens is not one of those species. Rather than adapt to the river, we have tried to bend it to our will. Scott traces the history of this struggle to the dawn of sedentary agriculture. Attracted to the nutrient-rich soil, early agriculturalists settled on fertile floodplains to grow their crops. The crops grew well, but the settlements got destroyed by the very floods that brought the nutrients. The rivers shifted course frequently and suddenly, leaving a bog where there had been a planted field, or an empty bed where there had been a stream.

Whereas previous forms of subsistence thrived on this dynamic effulgence—the seasonal flush of fish through the mangroves, a suddenly exposed bank of mussels—agricutural societies were defined by their very intolerance to these shifts. The rivers were too free, too fractious. As a result, many societies—from the banks of the Nile to the Yangtze—set out to establish a kind of autocratic control. Levees were built, then dams. Marshes were drained and canals dug. Rivers were forced into straighter, more efficient lines linking headwater to delta. Many were leached dry before they could reach the sea.

Most of what we now call rivers are the heavily domesticated descendants of their wild forebears, which writhed and jumped across the landscape, growing fatter and thinner with the seasons, as different as a wolf from a pug.

But as Scott warns us, “When it comes to living beings—even domesticates—total domination is aspirational; it is never fully realized.” The last chapter of the book devotes itself to the many “iatrogenic” effects of our attempts at total domination, borrowing the medical term for an unforeseen illness caused by previous treatment. The examples are rife, and telling. By engineering rivers to never flood, we have made floods less frequent but more catastrophic. By walling off cropland from seasonal flooding—or by damming rivers to produce power—we have deprived the soil of the nutrients that made it productive in the first place.

It is here that the often-winding course of Scott’s inquiry opens out into its delta. We can see the outlines of a larger backfiring, one that extends far beyond our civilization’s relationship to rivers. In an era of spiking temperatures and ecosystem collapse, the entire natural world is contesting our myth of control. Our attempts to impose order have summoned forth its opposite. And yet we cling to our fantasy of dominion, even and especially as its consequences get worse. Scott is unsparing in his diagnosis: Without this cherished fantasy, we would face too painful a humbling, too terrifying an admission.

The problem with our myopia—self-coddling but ingeniously engineered—is that it keeps us blind to all the things over which we legitimately do not have control. We have the power to harness a river, but not to prevent its lashing out. We have the power to conserve or decimate a species, but we do not decide how that event will shudder through the food web. We have the power to run our economy by burning through the planet’s store of hydrocarbons, but we can’t contain the conflagration that this short-circuit has unleashed in the atmosphere.

All around us, our dominion is being rocked by what we thought were our kingdom’s mute serfs. Scott casts them instead as stakeholders in a grand biological democracy, in which decisions get made and outcomes determined not by the loudest species, but by the congeries of the whole assembly: the water, soil, rushes, swallows, catfish, microbes, etc. What happens, ultimately, is the product of these intersecting forces, each with an irreducible agency over the others. For Scott, this is not an ideal but a description. This is how the world is.

Our grand mistake has been not only to ignore the other members of this vast parliament but to not even realize there was anyone else in the chamber. In Praise of Floods is, in large part, a plea to start casting our attention much more widely, to understand what we’re hearing from our planet’s other constituents, and to act as if our own fate depends on theirs. To act, per the old Daniel Berrigan chestnut, “as if the truth were true.”

Here is a psycho-politics of the Anthropocene. On one side, a politics that seeks to radically widen our sphere of attention and consideration to encompass the lands, waters, and living things with which our fate is entwined. On the other, a politics in which care, attention, and reality itself diminish rapidly in proportion to distance from the self.

This is not quite the same as selfishness versus altruism (Scott’s primary premise, after all, is that humanity should look after rivers out of self-interest). It is something more like universalism versus solipsism. About what you decide to take as real, and therefore what you are capable of taking into account.

To witness this more fundamental divide map itself onto contemporary left-vs.-right politics is to witness a split in strategy, not just ethics. Both strategies emerge from a growing sense—whether suppressed and inchoate or desperate and vocal—of our umbilical dependence on the ecosystems we inhabit.

Scott greets this realization with an essentially responsive strategy: Now that we know we’re reliant on these things, we’d better look out for them, so that they can keep looking out for us. He joins a chorus of contemporaries in reminding us that, though this “knowledge” may still be only half dawning on much of the late capitalist world, it has formed the philosophic bedrock of many Indigenous societies, who for millennia have cultivated the “concepts of rivers as living beings.”

The opposing camp—Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are useful avatars—responds with an essentially avoidant strategy. The realization of interdependence is rejected with revulsion, with an almost panicked violence. The strategy becomes to sever ties, to brandish our will, to make true at all costs our idea of our own independence. Their dreams are rife with this separation: Mars as a vehicle for transcending our physical world; AI as a vehicle for transcending our physical bodies. They do not want to need rivers. They seem ready to scorch the planet in their bid to obviate it.

In this view, Scott’s insistence on the necessity of healthy rivers betrays a lack of ambition, a failure of vision, an essentially decadent stasis. The deterioration of the world is not a crisis but a proving ground for human exceptionalism, a chance to decouple from our dying host.

It’s no surprise that the leaders of this camp seem also to want to eliminate any interdependence with other people. Musk wants to build driverless cars using robots in nonunion factories. Thiel wanted an autonomous micro-nation built on an oil rig, but settled for an off-grid prepper compound in New Zealand.

But why this intensity of response? Why are they ready to do seemingly anything to outrun the fact of interdependence? Why are millions of people so eager, so viscerally relieved, to support this decoupling?

That it was a mistake to build cities in floodplains has long been a cliché among urban planners. Of course it was. We failed to heed the rivers and are still paying the price: in unpredictable catastrophes and in our increasingly expensive defenses against them.

In the shadow of the second Trump presidency, Scott’s choice to retread this ground feels naïve, almost to the point of anachronism. At a time when the embattled horizon of progressive American politics is being drawn (rightly, necessarily) around the rights of all people to basic services (free buses, universal childcare, frozen rent), In Praise attempts to keep a wider, older horizon in view. It’s a vision that passes through and also beyond multiracial democracy, beyond even multi-species democracy, toward something like a planetary demos. We can hardly make it out, but we can sense it there. Our rivers are increasingly in uproar, after all, from Pakistan to the Texas hill country. They are not behaving passively. In the most hard-nosed materialist sense, they are shaping human affairs and being shaped in turn.

Scott’s gift is to take them seriously as stakeholders. This is not an act of granting but acknowledging power. It is essentially grown-up, like a child acquiring a theory of mind: The world is full of others; the self is not the world. Scott wants to scale this realization, to cast the light of a full and separate reality not only on other people but on every thing with which we share the world. For most of us, this requires a long leap, beyond imagination, into something more like faith.

But faith is the source of any durable political project. You need an intuition of the heart, a first principle. When you don’t have one, people feel it. People felt it about the Democrats—that they’d been hollowed out by technocracy, that they “didn’t believe in anything.” Lost now in the wilderness, the American left searches again for something irreducible. And so Scott steps in—ill-timed, unsolicited—and invites us back down to the river, insisting that we see it for what it is: a porous and complexly populated gathering of waters, an entity difficult to hold in the head. And yet the implicit plea is that we do hold it, or try to. That we lend it the attention required for care.

This is difficult, it turns out. The book’s most guileless chapter imagines a forum of all the creatures of the Ayeyarwady addressing humanity in turn. The river’s iconic (and critically endangered) freshwater dolphins have been chosen to moderate, on the premise that humans are more likely to listen to a charismatic fellow mammal. After an introduction from the dolphins, we hear from the snow carp, the hilsa, the oriental darter, the Burmese roofed turtle, the white ginger plant, and a chorus of mollusks and copepods—all of them pleading with “you” (that is, “us”) to stop destroying the river. Each plea is paired with a reminder of how much we rely on them: for protein, for flood management, for clean drinking water. “Without us you would perish; you can flourish only if we flourish too.” The problem with these passages is that their art fails their ethics. We are left with the impression not of newfound understanding, but of redoubled frustration at how hard it is to imagine—really imagine—these alien lives.

Stronger, stranger attempts have also fallen short: the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous struggle to imagine “what it is like to be a bat, for a bat.” Or, more recently, the novelist Mircea Cărtărescu’s unnervingly believable projections into the lives of head lice. They expend considerable cognitive effort to cast human attention and empathy far outside their accustomed bounds—and return with only a modest catch in tow, hauling up just a taste of what must, we assume, lie beneath.

Reading Scott’s clumsy castings, we think back on the solipsists. Maybe this is what Musk and Thiel reject so violently: not just the moral conclusion that other beings exist and matter, but the raw mental effort required to sustain it. It is too scary and simply too hard to imagine far beyond the self. They hate the experience of trying. And, in a profound way, they would rather not have to.

This response is prior to politics, a rage that is less ideological than physiological. They cast out whatever they do not feel capable of entertaining. They are exhausted, we imagine: by the difficulty of the metaphysical leap, by a world that grows more complex the more we understand it. So they refuse the challenge, circle the wagons of the self. They cannot hold a river in their head, and will not be made to.

There are grounds for empathy here. What Scott is asking of us is legitimately difficult, as his book demonstrates. We are quickly forced up against what feels like the limits of the mind, past which we struggle to think. What is it like to be a river, for a river? A sliding gloom with distant limbs? A long vault of water and light? A braid strung through the lungs of fish and the roots of reeds, fraying always into rock? Confronted with the enormity beyond us, maybe we too feel the pull of the self, its familiar harbor.

And yet, we can ask, what is the noble response? Scott believes in people: in our capacity for a much wider attention, earned slowly over time. The solipsists do not. Their imaginations fail them. Contrary to branding, their philosophy is static and defeatist. They do not believe the self can change. They cling to it like a raft in choppy waters.

But you can let go, Scott thinks. You can go for a swim.

Update: Since the publication of this piece, a video of President Donald Trump making a locker-room call to the US men’s hockey team emerged. During the call, Trump invited the team to the State of the Union and mocked the women’s team while the men laughed. The women’s team has declined the invitation to the State of the Union. —Dave Zirin

The US men’s Olympic hockey team beat Canada 2–1 in overtime in the gold medal game at the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics on Sunday. The Canadian team showed up angry. Our neighbors to the north were upset because of how bellicose and erratic President Donald Trump has been toward the nation he proposed making the 51st state.

“Canadians feel insulted by who they thought were their allies. It’s a matter of pride,” one fan from Nova Scotia said to The New York Times.

As for Team USA, it was ready to fight—literally—because Trump had deemed Canada, Canadian Bacon—style, the enemy, and the players were ready to follow orders. The US squad was chock-full of Trump supporters who were more than willing to provide a photo op for Vice President JD Vance and the embarrassing FBI director, Kash Patel.

When Trump called the US skier Hunter Hess “a real Loser” for expressing nuanced “mixed feelings” about representing the United States, US hockey player Brady Tkachuk sided with Trump, saying, “To represent the US at this stage in the Olympics is one of the greatest honors that I’ve ever had, so I’m truly grateful to be here representing the red, white, and blue.”

Unlike other US Olympians speaking out against this regime, men’s hockey players chose to be lickspittles. In that regard, this hockey team is part of a rather ignominious USA hockey gold-medal tradition. A fan at the 2026 Milano Cortina Games donned a hockey sweater with “1980” emblazoned across the chest, the year a US hockey team became a legendary symbol of national unity. But in the years that followed, Republicans have used that legend to sow division.

Trump holds incredible nostalgia for the “Miracle on Ice” Olympic hockey team of 1980. This was the squad that, in one of the great Olympic upsets of all time, defeated the USSR in the semifinals before winning the gold. Pundits turned the victory into a right-wing symbol. It showed that the country had moved away from the social struggles of the 1960s and ’70s and embraced the crypto-fascist variant of patriotism best exemplified in the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.

In 2020, many members of that 1980 team rallied with Trump in Las Vegas, wearing their MAGA hats, laughing at Trump’s mockery of the Oscar-winning film Parasite, nodding solemnly as he asked why they don’t make films like Gone With the Wind anymore, and praising Trump repeatedly. For some reason, Trump asked team captain Mike Eruzione to tell the crowd he was a good golfer and Eruzione responded, “Whatever you say, sir.”

That team is now in their 60s and 70s, and Trump—as he did when partying with Jeffrey Epstein—is looking for younger models. The gold-medal-winning team at the Milano Cortina Olympics includes players who have caped for the president. Last year, at a White House visit following the Florida Panthers’ Stanley Cup victory, Matthew Tkachuk (Brady’s older brother) heaped praise on Trump: “It’s kind of like that cherry-on-top finish…to be here at the White House today and meet the president of the United States and lucky enough to have him honor us is just so cool and something that I honestly never would’ve imagined.” Addressing Trump directly, Tkachuk added, “This is such an incredible day for myself. You wake up every day really grateful to be an American, so thank you.”

This is 1980 cosplaying, but unlike then, the ugly underbelly is there for everyone to see. Partying with the players afterward was Patel, guzzling beer, jumping around, and thumping the table like a drunken frat boy. It was a humiliating display. He was there to represent Trump—and given Patel’s craven, ham-handed coverups of Trump’s connections to Epstein—there could not have been a better stand in for Trump himself.

The real Olympic heroes are the athletes who won’t—as the right-wing noise machine blared—“shut up and ski.”

Eileen Gu, superstar freestyle skier who herself experienced extreme online abuse when she chose to represent China, rather than the United States at the 2022 Winter Olympics, responded, “I’m sorry that the headline that is eclipsing the Olympics has to be something so unrelated to the spirit of the Games. It really runs contrary to everything the Olympics should be.”

Hess himself responded to Trump—and the torrent of MAGA vitriol that he unleashed—like a champ. Acknowledging that being attacked by a sitting US president led to “probably the hardest two weeks of my life,” he channeled the stress into humor. After completing a run on the halfpipe, he gave L-sign with his hand and said of his imbroglio with Trump: “I definitely wear [it] with pride.” Hess added with a twinkle, “Apparently I am a loser. I am leaning into it.”

US snowboarder extraordinaire Chloe Kim also defended Hess. “It’s important in moments like these for us to unite and kind of stand up for one another with what’s going on,” she said.

Then cross-country skier Zak Ketterson also stood up for Hess, saying, “I think it’s pretty childish to come at somebody for exercising their free speech right, and considering that side of the political spectrum always champions free speech, it’s a little, I think, surprising to see them so triggered.”

He was backed by fellow US cross-country skier and medal winner Ben Ogden, who stated, “I choose to believe that I live in a country where people can express their opinions without backlash.” He had the guts to mention the president directly: “Certainly not…without backlash from the president. And that was really disappointing to see, but I hope it doesn’t continue like that.”

That’s exactly it. During the Milano Cortina Olympics, Trump has been the crotchety, disgruntled grump punching down on a US Olympian from a lesser-known sport. To see the wealthiest, most privileged athletes on Team USA—the Tkachuk brothers play in the NHL, where their salaries dwarf those of freestyle skiers like Hess—is not just disappointing; it’s nauseating. But the solidarity proffered by fellow Olympians was heartening. This is a pick-a-side moment in the United States, and they picked the right one.

Donald Trump has always portrayed himself as an opponent of “ forever wars.” But he is in the midst of cooking up a military disaster in Iran that could rival in size and scale the Iraq War unleashed by George W. Bush in 2003.

Hitherto, Trump has appeared mindful of the US public’s limited appetite for costly and protracted wars post-Iraq. Like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the other two presidents who followed Bush, Trump has favored quick and easy displays of violence: drone attacks, assassinations, short bombing campaigns, and kidnappings. This has been Trump’s preferred mode of warfare in the Caribbean, Venezuela, Syria, and elsewhere.

But Trump seems to have much bigger plans for Iran. The New York Times reports that “two aircraft carrier groups and dozens of fighter jets, bombers and refueling aircraft are now massing within striking distance of Iran.” This vast armada suggests a campaign far larger than any quick strike. Kelley Vlahos of Responsible Statecraft notes that there are now 108 air tankers (used for refueling) in the region. This compares with 149 refuelers deployed during the first phase of the Iraq War in 2003.

Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, observes that the current Air Force surge into the Middle East “represents 40-50% of the deployable US air power in the world. Think air power on the order of the 1991 and 2003 Iraq war. And growing. Never has the US deployed this much force against a potential enemy and not launched strikes.”

Pape’s invocation of the two Iraq Wars underscores the continuity of imperialist US policy in the Middle East. But there have been significant changes in how that policy is carried out. The 1991 Gulf War was justified as a response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which was rightly seen as a violation of international law. Whatever the ultimate merits of the war, President George H.W. Bush did get approval from both Congress and the United Nations and was supported by a broad global coalition that included many Middle Eastern countries.

By contrast, George W. Bush was on much more precarious ground in 2003. He had congressional approval to invade Iraq but was unable to secure UN support. The so-called coalition of the willing he assembled was much smaller than his father’s 1991 coalition, and top-heavy with small nations dependent on US patronage. Further, the rationale for the war was a farrago of lies (mythical tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, false suggestions that Saddam Hussein was connected with the 9/11 terrorist attack) and implausible propaganda (claims to want to liberate Iraq and democratize the Middle East).

The Iraq War seemed at the time the height of folly: a war of choice launched on palpably dishonest grounds that would end horribly. Subsequent events more than proved those fears correct. Remarkably, however, Trump seems on the verge of outdoing even George W. Bush in reckless, stupid militarism.

Trump hasn’t sought the approval of either Congress or the United Nations to attack Iran. He hasn’t even had the duplicitous courtesy to conduct the kind of elaborate propaganda campaign that Bush carried out in 2002 and 2003 to manufacture consent for an invasion. Clearly, Trump thinks that his personal desire for war is the only justification he needs. Even more than in 2003, the administration is offering both conflicting pretexts and unclear goals for war. Sometimes, Trump talks as if the goal is to get Iran to sign a nuclear nonproliferation deal only marginally more stringent than its 2015 pact with Obama. On other occasions, the White House talks of regime change.

As The New York Times reports:

Administration officials have been unclear what their objectives are as they confront Iran, a country of more than 90 million people. While Mr. Trump often talks about preventing Iran from ever being able to produce a weapon, [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio and other aides have described a range of other rationales for military action: protecting the protesters whom Iranian forces killed by the thousands last month, wiping out the arsenal of missiles that Iran can use to strike Israel, and ending Tehran’s support for Hamas and Hezbollah.

This lack of clarity is one reason a war seems almost inevitable, despite the fact that some factions of the Trump administration are reportedly hesitant. The Iranian regime can hardly be expected to negotiate with the United States if there is no clear US objective in mind. Based on its past actions, Iran is clearly open to a new nuclear treaty. But the other demands put forward by Rubio, most obviously getting rid of the non-nuclear missile program, are nonnegotiable for the simple reason that no government would ever agree to disarm when its enemies are openly talking about overthrowing it. From the point of view of regime leaders, it’s better to weather an attack and prove they are resilient enough to fight another day.

The government has also been alienating allies that the United States will need for a protracted war. Trump’s threats to annex Greenland have made Europeans increasingly leery. The United Kingdom, traditionally one of the most servile minions in the American empire, is currently refusing to give the US permission to use air force bases for an Iran strike. Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, has caused a major scandal in the Middle East by claiming, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, that the Bible gives Israel the right to rule over vast stretches of the Middle East, including lands currently held by US allies, and saying “it would be fine if [Israel] took it all.” This has led to protests by more than a dozen governments, including Jordan and Egypt.

There is still a possibility for an off-ramp, especially if the Trump administration narrowly focuses on a new nuclear deal. But Trump has shown little aptitude for diplomacy, preferring spectacular displays of force that cause immense damage but do little to win agreement or long-term stability. Given the current trajectory, it is more likely that there will soon be a small war, which will fail to win a capitulation. This will set the stage for a much larger war, a sequel to Iraq that has every likelihood of being an even bigger catastrophe.

San Quintín, Baja California, Mexico—In the dead of winter, Baja California’s Transpeninsular Highway is the road strawberries take on their journey from the San Quintín Valley north to US supermarkets. For a week this January, though, as waiting consumers froze in Midwestern cities, the huge semitrailers loaded with fruit ground to a halt, blockaded three hours south of the border by the people whose labor produces the harvest.

Every morning for over a week, hundreds of workers threw tires and traffic cones down on the highway’s asphalt, and the trucks stopped. After sunset, huge crowds of men, women, and children, dressed in the frayed clothing of field workers, milled around bonfires. The glowing red lights of the huge vehicles, lined up motionless into the distance, lit their blockade.

Walberto Solorio Meza, president of the Growers Council of Baja California, warned that highway closures put the whole strawberry crop in danger. Last year San Quintín Valley companies harvested over 100,000 tons of berries, worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars.

Finally, on February 2, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum came to the valley, in response to the conditions that sparked the blockades. There she announced the San Quintín Justice Plan, a commitment made at her inauguration over a year ago. Sheinbaum scolded leaders of her party for being more interested in taking selfies with her than attacking social problems like child labor and pesticide exposure. “San Quintín is an area with a lot of poverty [with] many struggles by farmworkers for their rights,” she explained later. “I told them to go into the community, get close to the people.”

Mexico plans to create a “labor certification” that exporters must have in order to send farm products to US markets. Employers will have to ensure that workers are enrolled in Mexico’s social security system and abide by labor standards. The San Quintín Justice Plan includes an Integral Service Center, education initiatives, a Justice Center administered by the federal secretary of labor and social services, and support for workers in gaining legal land titles.

The blockades here, and others like them elsewhere in Mexico, show how widespread desperation and anger have become in many rural areas. They highlight a growing danger for the progressive national administration that took power, with the huge election majority for past President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador eight years ago, and the even greater majority for Sheinbaum the year before last.

Mexico’s six previous administrations established a neoliberal system in which corporations, especially foreign ones, were given great freedom to operate in return for investment. That freedom included a system of low wages and company-friendly unions, and a water crisis that has made life almost unbearable for many rural workers and farmers. In San Quintín that system is still largely unchanged. While the blockades have complex political causes, they feed off popular anger that has accumulated for years.

The San Quintín Valley lies three hours south of San Diego, where about 80,000 workers pick strawberries and tomatoes for US markets during winter months. Most are originally Mixtec and Triqui migrants recruited from the indigenous towns of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and other states of southern Mexico. They provided the labor growers needed when industrial agriculture started here in the late 1970s.

Catalina Juana Lopez Reyes arrived in 1976, and lived, she remembers, “in a shack we built of sticks. We slept on tree branches for a year, and my husband had to go hunt rabbits because there was only work for three months each year.” A midwife helped deliver her daughters and charged 17 pesos when that was the wage for a day’s work. Her coworkers began to invade unoccupied land to build housing, led by a radical farmworker organization started by the Mexican Communist Party. Today, as a result, many homes are built on lots where the land title is in dispute, a problem Sheinbaum promises to fix.

It is a desert valley, whose water resources were never enough to support industrial agriculture and a growing population of workers. Who got the water, therefore, was the clearest demonstration of who had political power. Pumping groundwater to irrigate rows of berries led the water table to fall, and salt from the ocean invaded the aquifer.

Marcos Lopez, a researcher at the University of California Davis’s Labor and Community Center, explains that corporate growers built over 80 desalination plants for irrigation. Lopez says he doubts, however, that any plants serve Vicente Guerrero, the valley’s largest town, with 23,000 people, or San Quintín itself. Growers are basically selling or furnishing the town’s water from their own facilities, he believes. More than 95 percent of the water in the valley goes for irrigation. The Reiter family that founded Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry company, even built one small plant on the beach here, just to serve their home.

Luis and his daughter Joanne live in a settlement not far from the Reiters, where there are no water lines at all. They bought their lot for 1,000 pesos a month, from a shady land developer in a rustic development on the outskirts of San Quintín. Some homes in town can get water from a main, called pipas, but it’s so salty it’s virtually useless. Luis and Joanne don’t even have that, and instead spend 120 pesos four times a month for a truck to fill up the tank in front of their house. There’s no electric line either, so the solar panels on their roof cost another 2000 pesos a month. Together, it all absorbs half of Luis’s wages, when he’s working.

In the 1980s, spontaneous strikes swept the valley, and one packinghouse was burned to the ground. In 2015, community activists transformed groups fighting for water access into a worker organization called the Alianza, and struck the growers. When the police sent armed vehicles, called tiburones, or sharks, to shoot strikers in worker neighborhoods, the local police station was torched. Meanwhile, highway blockades became the principal means workers used to hold the growers’ berries and tomatoes hostage. The political leaders of today’s highway blockades “learned a lot from the 2015 movement,” according to Jesus Estrada, a Mixtec labor and community activist who’s worked on both sides of the border.

One of the most important products of the 2015 strike was the creation of the Sindicato Independiente y Democratico de Jornaleros Agricolas, or the National Independent Democratic Union of Farmworkers (SINDJA). It is as much a community union and worker advocate as it is an organization in the workplace, in part because the old system of company-friendly unions is still in place. Almost every San Quintín grower has a contrato patronal, or bosses’ contract, with the old unions that have been part of Mexico’s political structure for decades.

The labor reforms of the last few years, which supposedly give workers the right to choose independent unions like SINDJA, ratify contracts, and elect leaders democratically, have yet to touch Mexican agriculture. “Here everything is controlled by the old unions and the ranchers,” Estrada explains. “Even the water. If people really organize themselves, things can be changed. But it takes a lot of work.”

“Many of us have suffered reprisals, dismissals for wanting to organize, and they put us on the blacklist,” charges Jyreh García Ramírez, SINDJA’s recording secretary. SINDJA, and its sister organization, Women United in Defense of Farmworkers and Indigenous People (MUDJI), therefore use worker complaints of labor violations to organize. The union accompanies workers to meet with their bosses or with government agencies, and shows up when workers take action, usually in short work stoppages.

At present, there is no office of the Federal Labor Secretary in San Quintín. With no monitoring, therefore, worker activists report that well over 100 growers, producing strawberries for Driscoll’s affiliate Berrymex and other corporate exporters, hire workers on a day-to-day basis and are paid in cash.

One frequent problem is discrimination based on indigenous identity. Many workers can’t read work contracts in Spanish and speak only Mixtec, Triqui, or another indigenous language. “Companies take advantage of this, giving them contracts with illegal wages or without benefits,” Garcia says. Last year, the union fought over 50 wrongful dismissals. A further source of corruption is the company practice of inventing social security numbers for workers, deducting contributions but keeping them instead of paying them to the government. Workers wind up with multiple numbers, robbed of the benefits they paid for when they need them.

For many workers, therefore, going to the United States with a temporary work visa is a more immediate solution than going on strike and risking their jobs. According to Estrada, “Two of the obstacles to organizing are the fear of being fired and the H-2A [work visa] program, with this dream of earning a lot instead of staying and changing things. Here it takes eight hours to earn $13 or $15 and in the US it takes one hour.”

H-2A recruitment by labor contractors in the San Quintín Valley has mushroomed since 2015. Some recruiters funnel workers to growers north of the border. Other recruiters are growers themselves, who have operations in both Baja California and in the US Berrymex, for instance, connected to the huge Driscoll’s corporate complex, chooses workers in its own or contracted fields in Baja California, assesses and trains them for work in its operations in the north, and then gets them H-2A visas.

“The dream of so many workers is to go to the United States, because it is more income,” Garcia says. “Here the companies use that hook a lot. They say, ‘Stay with me for five years and I’ll give you a visa so that you can go work there.’ Many times workers have been at a company for 10 years and they have never been given a visa. But they continue working with the promise of next year, and next year never comes. When we organize meetings the worker says, ‘I can’t go because the company will identify me and won’t give me a visa.’ So, the companies use it so that the workers do not organize, do not join the union, do not speak out or say anything, do not demand rights.”

Garcia started working with her mother in the tomato rows when she was 12. Today she and the children of the original migrants are adults, with their own families and expectations. They are pushing for change in the politics of San Quintín and Baja California, as the children of immigrants have done in Los Angeles and California.

The San Quintín Valley was formerly attached politically to the municipio (the equivalent of a US county) of Ensenada, a larger city two hours north. In 2000, a Mixtec leader, Celerino Garcia, became the first indigenous candidate for statewide office, running in the Ensenada district. Then, in February of 2020, the growing demand for an indigenous political voice led to the creation of a separate San Quintín municipio.

“San Quintín is a municipio of migrants,” Estrada explains, “from Oaxaca, Guerrero—from every state. They came as migrants, as workers, and then their children were born here. All the movements, all the blockades, are organized by migrants—people who’ve been outside the system. And because it is a municipio of migrants, working people have not had a political voice. Now, today, they are fighting against local corruption, but this movement is something more than that. They’re looking for a political voice and have been wanting it for a long time.”

Nevertheless, behind the blockades are political interests with multiple agendas. Some, especially the workers at the barricades, want living and working conditions to change. Others are political opponents of Morena, the political party of Sheinbaum and Lopez Obrador, which now governs almost every Mexican state.

On January 23 the Baja California state government announced that it was hiring outside accountants to audit the administration of Miriam Cano, mayor of the new San Quintín municipio. She’s been accused of corruption and diversion of funds for social services. Among her accusers is her opponent in the 2024 election, Gisela Tomez of the Partido del Trabajo (Labor Party). They demand Cano’s resignation and that of 10 other municipal officials. Although Cano cofounded Morena in Baja Californiam and supported Sheinbaum in 2024, the president did not greet her during her visit to San Quintín.

Some workers in the highway blockades support the charges, cynical about progressive organizations and Morena itself. Widespread cynicism also impacts efforts to change the conditions protested by the people standing in front of the trucks, affecting the organizing work of SINDJA.

“Many times, workers tell us a union is useless and does not solve anything,” Garcia says. “They confuse us with the company unions and say we are on the side of the boss. So we demonstrate with facts and our commitment that we are not the same, that we are independent. We will always be on the side of the worker because we are workers ourselves. We know the violations because we live them.”

Farmworkers in San Quintín will judge the government by the same yardstick—whether its plan makes changes on the ground, or is just empty words; whether Morena is really for them or for the growers. The San Quintín Justice Program starts in April, but similar reforms for agricultural labor will apply first to avocado growers in Michoacan, 1,500 miles south of San Quintín, before it hits the tomatoes and berries of San Quintín.

Whether these reforms become a reality will depend on how the government makes its choice in priorities. Enforcing labor rights, raising family incomes, forcing the growers to subsidize water for residents, giving workers a decent life in San Quintín instead of constraining them to leave for the US—these changes will have to be enacted and then enforced. They will face opposition by the corporate elite that has ruled Baja California for decades, forcing the government to choose whom it will serve.

This is not a problem unique to San Quintín. Two years ago, highway blockades there highlighted a similar conflict in priorities—between satisfying the water needs of corporate investors and the welfare of farmers and rural communities. In the Cuencas Libres Oriental basin, in the states of Veracruz and Puebla, farmers have fought pitched battles since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement against industrial pig farms and strawberry and vegetable growers.

This large valley has no outlet to the ocean, so pollutants in its aquifer, particularly the animal waste from Smithfield Farms’ huge network of pig-raising farms, is slowly poisoning the water. At the same time big corporate water users—from strawberry growers supplying Driscoll’s to the broccoli farms of former president Vicente Fox to Smithfield’s pig-raising subsidiary, Granjas Carroll—all get permission to pump water in huge quantities. At the same time, small farmers are told that water scarcity requires denying them access.

“We have been six years with no harvests,” charges Renato Romero, a member of the Movement in Defense of Water in the Libres-Oriental basin. “For three years, we haven’t even had water for planting. I’m 63, and my land belonged to my mother. I’ve lived my whole life here. But we have no way to farm anymore.”

Like San Quintín, the valley’s history of protests goes back decades. In 2024, one blockade in front of Granjas Carroll’s feed processing mill was attacked by the Veracruz state police. When Don Guadalupe Serrano, an old man who’d led earlier protests, was put in handcuffs and shoved into a police car, farmers surrounded it and freed him. Then the police began beating and shooting the demonstrators, killing two brothers, Jorge and Alberto Cortina Vázquez.

Veracruz Governor Cuitláhuac García Jiménez announced that the special police unit that shot the farmers, the Fuerza Civil, would be dissolved. A nearby Granjas Carroll facility was partially and temporarily closed. But then, last July, Romero was arrested on federal charges for occupying a site where a company was installing equipment for pumping water. An outcry by over 50 environmental and human rights organizations forced his release, but the charges have not been dropped.

Social conflicts in Mexico’s countryside over water access, environmental degradation, and labor rights are the product of continuing contradictions, with roots in the neoliberal policies of Morena’s predecessors. And today the Mexican state is administered by people who fought those neoliberal policies in their youth. Both Baja California Norte and Veracruz are governed by Morena. As a student, Veracruz Governor García Jiménez belonged to the Mexican Socialist Party and was a follower of Heberto Castillo, a historic figure of the Mexican left.

“Morena’s economic policies rest on the development of safety nets for poor people especially, with cash transfer programs, including pensions and education subsidies,” explains Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the Center for Mexican Studies at UCLA. At the same time, however, Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum inherited an economy heavily dependent on foreign investment. “The money for those programs depends on healthy economic growth, and that in turn depends on investment and increased ties to the US, Mexico’s number one trading partner. Now we see the contradictions.”

So the government faces hard choices. Garcia and the union have their expectations, but don’t want to simply depend on Morena making the right one in San Quintín. ”I believe soon there will be a strike demanding improvements for everyone,” she hopes, “not just on one ranch or for one person, but in general. If many workers join we can achieve collective agreements and change for everyone. For everyone.”

In April 2021, the sheriff of Humboldt County in Nevada asked Mark Pfeifle for advice on how to contain protests in his jurisdiction. Pfeifle was the right man to ask: A former adviser to George W. Bush and a longtime right-wing political operator, Pfeifle had played a key role in discrediting the protesters blocking construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2016. Through his firm Off the Record Strategies, he was able to portray the protesters as “out-of-state agitators” intent on using violence and intimidation to stop the project. Humboldt County officials were worried that the protests at a local mine could escalate into a Standing Rock–style “occupation.” The police, the FBI, and private security contractors had already begun surveilling the protesters, including a group of Native American activists called the People of Red Mountain. The authorities hoped Pfeifle could help them prevent an Indigenous-led movement from spoiling another resource bonanza.

Northwestern Nevada, it turns out, has lots and lots of lithium. The Thacker Pass mine in Humboldt County sits on what may be one of the largest lithium reserves in the world: an estimated 14.3 million metric tons spread across 18,000 acres of the McDermitt Caldera. The mine’s owners—the Canadian-based firm Lithium Americas and General Motors—stand to earn nearly $6 billion a year once the mine is up and running. As president, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden had backed the project, providing federal loans and fast-tracked permits as part of a bipartisan effort to expand the domestic production of “critical minerals“—minerals considered essential for national security as the world shifts, haltingly and unevenly, away from fossil fuels. Lithium is a critical component of the batteries that power EVs and store the electricity generated by renewables; it is abundant but difficult to extract profitably. The demand for lithium is expected to grow more than 700 percent by 2050 under the most optimistic decarbonization scenarios compiled by the International Energy Agency, driven largely by exploding EV sales. And so a race is on to control the supply.

Places like Humboldt County stand to reap some of the rewards of this race, but they will also bear the costs. Critics of the Thacker Pass mine, whose first construction phase is scheduled to be completed in 2027, say the project will suck up vast amounts of water in the parched region, generate unprecedented volumes of toxic mine tailings, and endanger wildlife. Among those expected to pay the highest price are ranchers, who rely on fresh water for grazing, as well as members of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone Tribe. The latter’s tribal council has signed an agreement with Lithium Americas–GM that requires the company to hire local workers and build an 8,000-square-foot community center for the tribe. But five other tribal councils, as well as the People of Red Mountain, oppose the mine, which they say will further degrade land contaminated by decades of mercury mining and nuclear testing. The mine also threatens their sacred places, including the site of an 1865 massacre of Paiute women, children, and elders by the US Army. Many regard the mine in this context as continuous with a long, violent history of colonization.

Whether one sees it as a source of American energy independence or a neocolonial travesty, the Thacker Pass mine distills the core dilemmas of the global energy transition. If reducing emissions and reversing global warming means using low-carbon energy sources to “electrify everything,” it will require scouring the earth for minerals, like lithium, used to manufacture solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. Eighty-five percent of the world’s commercially viable lithium resources and reserves are on or near Indigenous lands. Many of these lands—from Brazil’s Jequitinhonha Valley to Aboriginal territories in Western Australia—are extraordinarily biodiverse; all are considered beautiful by those who inhabit them. Yet mining in these areas will transform them forever.

“Every single supply chain of green technologies and infrastructures involves mining—and every kind of mining since the dawn of capitalism has brought with it boom-and-bust cycles, social conflicts, and environmental harm,” writes the political scientist Thea Riofrancos in her new book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism. What harms are worth enduring to hasten the death of the fossil-fuel era? Who should endure them? And more importantly, who decides? Such questions are at the heart of Extraction—questions that Riofrancos, embracing the complexity of an issue too often framed in all-or-nothing terms, provides an indispensable inquiry into with her book.

Ultimately, Riofrancos suggests that resolving extraction’s dilemmas will require including more people in decisions about how the world’s critical minerals are used. This is easier said than done, as she acknowledges, but the broader point cannot be made forcefully enough: The people most affected by the green energy transition deserve a much greater say in what the goals of this transition are.

Writing principally as an ethnographer, Riofrancos tracks lithium mining across a global “extractive frontier” connecting the People of Red Mountain to people in Portugal, China, and beyond. But she begins in Chile. The South American nation supplies a quarter of all lithium on the global market and contains a third of all reserves, most of which repose in the salar de Atacama, the vast salt flats in Chile’s north. The salar’s Indigenous population faces threats that would be familiar to the People of Red Mountain. To access lithium, miners pump subsurface water into iridescent brine pools, some the size of Manhattan, and then let it evaporate, leaving behind lithium carbonate—a process that ends up depleting the water used by locals for drinking and farming. (Up to 2 million liters of water must vaporize to produce one metric ton of lithium.) To minimize lithium mining’s harms while maximizing its public benefits, Chile’s socialist president Gabriel Boric has sought to revive a program of “resource nationalism”—restoring the nation’s patrimonio to the nation’s people by placing its mineral wealth under state control.

There is a decades-long history of resource nationalism in Chile and across Latin America. After ascending to the Chilean presidency in 1970, socialist Salvador Allende swiftly moved to nationalize the copper industry, promising to restore public control—and, importantly, dignity—to a sector that had been plundered by foreign capital. (Before nationalization, 80 percent of Chile’s copper production was controlled by US firms.) The United States cried thief, backing the 1973 coup that deposed Allende and installed Gen. Augusto Pinochet as a dictator there. The Pinochet regime transformed Chile into a laboratory for neoliberal governance, flinging open the doors to foreign capital, shattering unions, and imposing austerity—a pattern that would be repeated across the developing world. Leaving little doubt as to neoliberalism’s compatibility with a heavy-handed state, Pinochet also expanded government control of the country’s mining sector, decreeing lithium specifically to be a “strategic state-owned resource,” while granting mining concessions to two multinational firms.

Since protests against austerity rocked Chile in 2019, Chilean society has been renegotiating the terms of this uneasy neoliberal contract. The state’s approach to mining has been at the center of this conflict, and grassroots struggles against extraction—including Indigenous-led blockades of mining roads in the salar—have reinvigorated calls to nationalize the country’s mineral resources. Efforts to do so by rewriting the Constitution failed, but in 2023 the Boric administration unveiled a National Lithium Strategy that would establish a state-owned lithium company; exclude 30 percent of the salt flats from mining; ensure that Indigenous groups are consulted about mining projects; and use mining revenues for development initiatives. Refusing to take a step urged by many activists—to expropriate private mining firms—Boric announced that the state-owned lithium company would partner with the multinational firms of the existing duopoly. The goal is to use the global lithium rush to enrich Chile; the promised reward—still unseen—is that mining revenues will allow Chile to develop a more advanced, “knowledge-based” economy employing Chileans in higher-skilled jobs, though critics say the strategy only deepens the country’s dependence on extraction.

Chile is not alone. Indeed, Riofrancos’s most important insight is that the transition to renewables has become a worldwide struggle for “green dominance”—control over the resources that make moving from fossil fuels to renewables possible. China, which already dominates the global battery-supply chain, looms largest in this struggle, but it is hardly the only country using the green energy transition to advance national interests. Much of the world’s critical minerals are located in Latin America and Africa. After decades of being told how to run their economies by foreign creditors, governments in these regions are using the fact that decarbonization goals in the West depend on mineral resources in the developing world to lessen their dependence on foreign capital. Ghana, Namibia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe have banned some lithium exports, while Bolivia and Mexico have nationalized their lithium industries to varying degrees. There has also been talk of a “lithium OPEC.”

This causes US leaders to break into a cold sweat, gripped by flashbacks of the 1970s, when Arab states cut off the oil spigot to protest US support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. To avoid once again having its “neck stretched over the fence” by bumptious foreign governments, the United States is developing a resource nationalism of its own. Biden championed measures to “onshore” and “friendshore” EV and renewable-energy supply chains, and he imposed tariffs on Chinese solar panels to protect domestic manufacturers from supercheap Chinese imports. Trump has doubled down on this protectionist stance and given it a hyper-nationalist flavor, using the tariff threat and industrial policy to promote American extractive industries, both green and not so green. In August, after declaring “Hot Drill Summer” in celebration of new federal oil leases, Trump’s Department of Energy announced nearly $1 billion in new funding for critical minerals projects to “ensure AMERICAN ENERGY DOMINANCE,” as a DOE tweet put it.

Some scholars suggest that such bellicose nationalism is a symptom of a broader deglobalization of the world economy, perhaps even the emergence of a “post-neoliberal” order. There are reasons to be skeptical of this thesis, however. As Riofrancos makes clear, what we usually think of as the neoliberal program—free trade, deregulation, austerity—has always involved government meddling. And while the rise of protectionism suggests the waning of free trade orthodoxy, capital’s global reach remains undiminished: One of the firms that control lithium mining in Chile, Albemarle, also owns the United States’ only active lithium mine as well as production facilities across China. For developing states fleeced by neoliberal trade deals, resource nationalism may be a way to recuperate wealth and autonomy, Riofrancos argues. But the influence of multinational banks and mining corporations makes “ecosocialism in one country” infeasible for now. Meanwhile, the pursuit of green dominance in North America and Europe has expanded the power of capital, as governments adopt a strategy of “de-risking”: nurturing green industry by using public funds to assume the risks of investment while permitting the private sector to reap the rewards. Given these facts, a wave of resource nationalism seems unlikely to sign the death warrant for globalized capitalism, which is simply mutating as states face mounting pressures to decarbonize.

What Riofrancos calls “green capitalism” is mostly a way for incumbent powers—multinational banks and corporations, as well as the states that headquarter them—to continue to accumulate wealth as economies shift from fossil fuels, by turning “sustainability from an ethical sensibility to a valuable asset.” The idea that lithium mining in the United States represents a “cleaner, greener alternative” to extraction elsewhere is mostly a marketing tactic, she argues—a way to whip up support for domestic extraction, rather than a commitment to environmental stewardship. She doubts that onshoring can reverse the injustices caused by neocolonial looting or prevent similar injustices at home. “Expanding lithium mining in the southwestern United States, with its intertwined legacies of Indigenous dispossession, toxic mining, and nuclear testing, does not repair harm in Chile, nor does it advance the cause of global justice,” Riofrancos writes.

And so the thorny question remains: As Riofrancos puts it, “What does it mean to defend people and the planet from extraction—when others frame this same extraction as necessary to save people and the planet?” More concretely: Where should one build a lithium mine? It is a credit to Riofrancos that this is posed as an open question. She is clear that those directly affected by mining should have a say in whether and how it happens. But “opposition to mining is now coded as NIMBY,” she observes, and even some anti-mining activists in Nevada worry that blocking a mine there could simply cause mining firms to set up shop somewhere else. For Riofrancos, this dilemma highlights the limitations of negotiating extraction’s trade-offs mine by mine, nation by nation. After all, extraction does not begin at the mine: It begins in legislatures and corporate offices in Santiago, Carson City, Washington, Brussels, Beijing, and beyond. To match extraction’s global scope, Riofrancos envisions “Indigenous land defenders and urban transit users” uniting to demand justice up and down the lithium supply chain—an evocative image of transnational solidarity that other scholars and activists will have to flesh out.

As an official in Chile’s environment ministry tells Riofrancos, the sustainability of Chile’s lithium industry ultimately depends on what the lithium is used for. “It isn’t a left-wing project to provide raw materials for [individual passenger] EVs,” he observes. His point is that one way to make lithium mining less harmful would be to use less lithium. Riofrancos agrees: Rather than replace every existing car with one powered by a lithium battery, she suggests that we trade cars for electric buses and trains, sprawling suburbs for denser, more walkable cities. This is by now a familiar “ecosocialist” proposal, sketched more fully in Riofrancos’s other work. The more radical idea is this: Achieving a just energy transition may mean dramatically widening the space of the demos. Perhaps all people who stand to gain or lose something from lithium mining, wherever they live, should have a say in how this shared patrimonio is used.

[The word for magazine in my language: time writings]

I cautiously descend the stairs into myself
not faltering but not sure-footed, either, not quite

I try being funny just to see what will happen
try looking tired so I’ll be excused

I don’t get hungry anymore, and yet I eat all the time
one heaping plate after another

cautiously, descend
scrutinizing each floor as if at an open house

I don’t need to renovate
lazy by nature, I’ve yet to take the studded tires off the car and it’s mid-May

my knuckles are white 

I am not what I eat
I am what I sleep

every morning, my daughter points to the living room window
and says: get the sun

I clink when I walk
my feet are piggy banks

what have I saved up?
steps? love? saying what I want?

I want more time
and if these are the years that pass in a fog
I also want as much comfort as possible 

in twenty years, I’ll emerge from the earth
a mole in late middle age

and I won’t remember writing this poem
while eating this apple

is this life?
yes, this is life, growing larger and smaller in turn
double bags, half-circles under half-circles 

I no longer think in metaphors
metaphors are a privilege

I’ve stopped releasing eggs, I’m stockpiling them
to lob at judiciously chosen houses
like stones 

I punch all sorts of things into a little calculator
estimate the viability of my thoughts
estimate what freedom will cost  

what writing will cost
a clean house

in my language, the verb for
being willing to spend
is to time 

this is because time is our true currency

can I time twenty-four hours?
can I time a week? can I time ten days?

I have a talent:
I can always squeeze a bit more out of a tube of toothpaste

I wend my way down all manner of paths, tramp all manner of treads
reflect tranquility back to some people and childlike glee to others

chemistry is everything
chemistry is really the only thing I’m chasing

me and this apple

but why has my chemistry with
time changed? my rhythm mutated

Monday, Friday, Monday, Friday

ten years ago
I almost broke my husband’s dick

since then, I haven’t gotten my rhythm back again
that way, on top

something happens, and we change
we sleep poorly, and we change

my eyes, two full moons
encircled by shining halos

I walk up stairs and down
forget shopping bags in the middle of the sidewalk, drive away

put dirty clothes in, take clean clothes out
wash this body every two days

I don’t time and my feet are piggy banks 

the laughing and the crying in my house
sync up with the washing machine

I time not verbs anymore, hop from noun to noun

can’t tell you what I did yesterday
yesterday, ferryboat, the great fog

when I hit puberty, I became fixated with
how to have sex without being naked

nudity was an impossibility

until it wasn’t

I think about that a lot, wonder
what will be possible later that is impossible now?

my body has stopped releasing eggs
doesn’t time them, energy-wise

they are piling up now, all in one beautiful raffia basket
month after month

pretty soon, I’m going to cast them, like stones
at some judiciously chosen house

(Translated by Larissa Kyzer)

When I arrived at the food distribution center on a weekday afternoon, the line looked like it was a hundred people long. It brought to mind a photo of a bread line from the Great Depression era.

But it was just a normal day at the Campus Pantry, a nonprofit food center in midtown Tucson, Arizona—within the abnormal circumstances of national politics. Several hundred people a day visit this location (a 119 percent jump since 2019), according to data provided by the Pantry—mainly students, but also plenty of low-wage workers on the University of Arizona (UofA) campus.

Although I’ve regularly visited this food center for years—one of several in the area, which range from religious to anarchist to more of a secular nonprofit model like this one—on this particular day, I was anxious about having enough food. On October 24, 2025, I had received a notification that I had been dreading: I was informed that my November food assistance (SNAP) would not be issued, although I had been approved through summer 2026.

Like 42 million other Americans, I was being cut off from federal assistance for basic nutritional needs. Under the insignia for the Arizona Department of Economic Security, the missive from the Family Assistance Administration read:

The United States Department of Agriculture has instructed states to hold the issuance of November 2025 NA benefits until further notice. November NA benefits will not be available on EBT cards until federal funding is available to states.

The United States Department of Agriculture has instructed states to hold the issuance of November 2025 NA benefits until further notice. November NA benefits will not be available on EBT cards until federal funding is available to states.

Ever since the government had shut down in October of 2025 over a fight to extend healthcare subsidies that were about to expire—the longest government shutdown in US history, surpassing the previous record set during the first Trump administration in 2016—rumor had it that food aid, as a government subsidy for those who don’t have enough to eat, would stop next as government workers were furloughed across the country.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. Action spurred reaction; suddenly a political conflict between local, state, and federal governments ensued. A number of states, including Arizona, sued the Trump administration in a bid to force the government to provide emergency food assistance for the duration of the shutdown.

Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic governor, told the Arizona Capitol Times that Arizona, unlike some of the other plaintiff states, had no emergency money to offset the damage, then at the last minute decided to donate $1.8 million in leftover Covid funds to Arizona food banks.

In the meantime, I had to make some tough decisions in my personal finances. My SNAP benefits had already been slashed earlier in the year. As for virtually all SNAP recipients, my benefits (both before and after the cuts) have never been enough to cover monthly food expenses; it’s always just been a critical supplement for low-income people like me. But to some, even that is somehow un-American. “The American dream is not being on [a] food stamp program,” Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, would later say. “The American dream is not being on all these programs. That should be a hand up, not a handout.”

It was about 15 minutes before the center opened. A group of older women in dark blue scrubs chatted in Spanish next to me in line, passing the time like everyone else. Their names were stitched in cursive on their uniforms, above their hearts, like a mechanic’s. At first, I thought they were nurses, but above their right breast pocket I saw a University of Arizona patch that read: “Housing and Residential Life.”

They told me they were custodians at the nearby university dorms. “Must be a tough job,” I said, to which they replied by nodding emphatically.