The date is October 15th, 2011, and it’s the height of Occupy Wall Street. The movement had launched barely a month earlier, when hundreds of activists with sleeping bags descended on Zuccotti Park, a small public space blocks away from Wall Street, to protest growing income inequality, brutal government austerity measures, and other signs of a seriously unjust economy. Around midday thousands of us stream out of our home base and hit the streets, heading uptown. As the cops stretch their line to block us, people pour through the gaps like streams of water, forcing them to race us and try to regroup at the next intersection. There are just too many of us, and we’re too fast, too relentless, so they give us the streets, deciding to simply follow us as we snake our way between cars like waves around boulders. 

Soon, the march breaks up into different groups, each going to a branch of a different bank, and blocking their entrances. We shut the banks down for hours, until dozens are arrested. We continue from there to a rally in Washington Square Park, which fills and fills and fills until its entire ten acres are completely covered with protesters. Moments after walking off the makeshift stage, I can’t remember a word I said, only the sea of people, the shining faces, the sun glaring down on us, the extraordinary feeling of momentum.

After the rally concludes, we march again, beginning our journey of the thirty-five blocks to Midtown. Now there must be over ten thousand of us, so it’s impossible to go all together. We clog the major arteries of the city to a chorus of cars honking—some in frustration, some in solidarity. 

It’s evening by the time we make it to Times Square—80,000 of us by our count. We sing and chant and light sparklers, feeling big and powerful in a way that to this point I have only read about in books. I stand on a trash can on the corner of 42nd St and Broadway, and can see across the street the ABC building, which has a rolling ticker on its facade, where breaking news scrolls across a massive screen. And then suddenly, as if the world is responding to all these people here together, to our chants, to this dream, the ticker pumps out, in big, red, block letters: OCCUPY WALL STREET GOES WORLDWIDE. 

It feels like time has stopped. Where the days have felt like weeks, these few seconds of watching the red letters tick across the black screen feel not long, exactly, but rather like they’re on a different plane of existence. In this time that has stopped, with this sense that we are part of something world-historic and wondrous and dangerous all at once, I can feel the despair that has for years shaped my sense of powerlessness loosening its hold on me. And I know that years from now I will remember this exact moment as the first time I really considered that this movement—or movements like it, movements of the multiracial working class, movements for the world we all deserve—might win.

Fifteen years ago, Occupy Wall Street shook the world. Sparked by people’s anger at the banks that caused the Great Recession and their disappointment with President Obama’s response, and inspired by a wave of pro-democracy movements from Greece to Spain to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the occupation soon became a whole little world of its own, with hundreds of people camping out and many more spending their days there. At any moment, one might find a half-dozen planning meetings in progress, fresh meals being distributed, an impromptu concert by an actual rock star, an infamously loud and relentless drum circle, or a march to disrupt Wall Street. OWS became the launching pad for a dizzying amount of nonviolent disruption all over the city, leading to thousands of arrests. And the movement spread to hundreds of sites across the country, not just in big cities like Los Angeles and Philadelphia but also in Charlottesville, Virginia; the lawn of the Nebraska State Capitol; and a parking lot in Yellow Springs, Ohio. The demonstrations that emerged included hundreds of thousands of people across the country.

The movement reintroduced class struggle into the mainstream narrative as the “99 percent versus the 1 percent,” politicized and trained an entire generation of activists, and led to dozens of new organizations and campaigns, ultimately ushering in a new era of social movements that drew unprecedented numbers of people into the streets to fight for racial justice, climate action, a free Palestine, and more. Looking back at it now, it’s clear that it also laid the groundwork for the surge in organizing for democratic socialism that has taken place over the past decade, from the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders and the rise of AOC to the recent victory of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the exciting candidacies of left populists across the country.

But Occupy itself was short-lived. Two months after it began, police in cities all over the country raided the occupations and arrested their inhabitants. This was, perhaps, the way it was always going to end: The power of the militarized state far outweighed the power of a burgeoning social movement. But those of us who were there know that Occupy’s collapse was also the product of avoidable mistakes, internal weaknesses, and unhealthy tendencies in the movement. Those stemmed in large part from what I have called the “politics of powerlessness,” a set of ideas and behaviors that fetishize being the righteous underdog, turning movements away from their public and the broader task and inward toward each other. When our movements get used to being on the margins, they begin to accept their powerlessness, and they think and act in ways that perpetuate it. Though the political climate has changed significantly since then, underlying similarities remain, and there is plenty we can still learn from OWS:

Movements must actually want power. At Occupy, the politics of powerlessness took the form of tearing down leaders, refusing to articulate real-world demands or craft a strategy, and engaging in paranoia about being co-opted by liberals and unions. Many other movements and organizations suffer from similar dysfunctions: an insistence on being right over being effective; an obsession with maintaining the boundaries of the movement as though it were a club rather than a vehicle for mass change; an unwillingness to make hard choices that lead to good strategy. Movements must be willing to make sacrifices to get power and build the kinds of structures and processes needed to seize it and wield it.

Movements must combat despair. It is understandable to feel that the world we deserve is out of reach. But despair keeps us home, closes doors, kills movements—and what’s more, it doesn’t reflect the truth: We actually don’t know what’s possible. Occupy itself is proof of this. Mere moments before Occupy began, many of us didn’t really expect it to work. And then it did, at least in some ways, and here we are, 15 years later, tracing the impacts that are still unfolding around us.

Movements must create a sense of belonging that appeals to huge numbers of people. The best antidotes to despair are meaningful action and victories that open up our sense of possibility. Winning movements welcome people in all their beauty and brokenness and trust that those people will develop into agents of change through the movement’s vision, structure, and smart strategy. At its best, Occupy was the epitome of this: so expansive and easy to participate in that people who’d been ignored by the political system for decades could see themselves and their dreams in it, and they began to take action.

The world is, in many ways, even more frightening now than it was 15 years ago. But we are lucky that there are movements around us today that are breaking through, from the resistance to ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, to the rise of democratic-socialist electoral power, to local struggles against data centers and housing insecurity and more. They are teaching us a path out of the politics of powerlessness, out of despair, into mass movements. They are showing us that we can have the world we all deserve if we fight for it.

Ever since the 2024 election, two mutually hostile conservative foreign-policy camps have raced to claim Donald Trump’s victory as a mandate for their respective views. There are the “restrainers,” a coalition defined by a skepticism of interventionist wars like George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and by a deep distrust of Israel and its lobby in Washington. And there are the latter-day neocons—the ones who haven’t defected to the Democratic Party, at least—who regard Israel as America’s indispensable ally and remain committed to the military overthrow of its enemies in the Middle East.

Each camp openly disdains the other. The restrainers see the neocons as Israel Firsters and warmongers, while the neocons see the restrainers as antisemites and isolationists. Both camps have power bases within the Trump administration: Vice President JD Vance and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, for instance, are known to be close to influential restrainers like Tucker Carlson and American Conservative executive director Curt Mills, while Secretary of State and national-security adviser Marco Rubio has been influenced by neocons like Elliott Abrams (who served in Trump’s first administration) going back more than a decade. Both camps, if they squinted hard enough, could argue that Trump supports their goals. And both camps keep being made to look foolish by Trump’s actual policies.

When Trump returned to power, the restrainers seemed to be ascendant. A New York Times article the week after Trump defeated Kamala Harris asserted that Rubio and other top picks for Trump’s national-security team, including Pete Hegseth (now defense secretary) and Mike Waltz (now UN ambassador), had shifted from “neoconservatism” in favor of “America First.” The week before he took office, Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff got Israel to agree to a ceasefire with Hamas, shaming the Biden administration and Israel’s maximalist supporters, who had backed more than a year of genocide in Gaza. And in February 2025, Trump and Vance insulted and demeaned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of a press pool in the Oval Office, suggesting a break with the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine against Russian aggression—support that the neocons had generally endorsed alongside liberals. “This just does not sound like a guy who wants to get involved in an insane war with Russia or Iran,” an optimistic Mills tweeted about Trump in March 2025. Writing in The Nation that month, Matt Duss, former foreign-policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, argued that Rubio’s cynical embrace of Trump showed that maybe the two camps weren’t so different.

But the triumph of the restrainers was short-lived. Trump and Zelensky worked things out, and in recent months Ukraine has actually been able to go on the offensive against Russia. By mid-2025, Trump was bombing Iran alongside Israel, and this year he’s deployed US military might with imperial abandon. In January, Trump, with substantial involvement from Hegseth and Rubio, kidnapped Venezuela’s president and installed a puppet government that Rubio now personally controls. Fresh off that apparent success, in February, Trump accepted Benjamin Netanyahu’s invitation to launch a regime-change war against Iran, something Israel and the neocons had unsuccessfully lobbied multiple administrations to do for literally decades. The result has been a disaster for America, the Middle East, and the entire world, as anyone who’s tried to buy gas or groceries this year can tell you. It has also been a series of humiliations for both the restrainers and the neocons, as Trump has managed to disappoint both camps through months of abrupt and ill-conceived reversals.

John Podhoretz, the pugnacious editor of the flagship neocon journal Commentary, exemplifies this whiplash. In June 2025, he was thrilled that his father, longtime Commentary editor and Trump fan Norman Podhoretz, was still alive to see Trump bombing Iran (Norman died six months later), and in July he memorably dismissed critics of MAGA antisemitism by tweeting, “Trump bombed Iran. He can say Shylock 100 times a day forever as far as I’m concerned.” A few days into the 2026 Iran war, when Mills wrote on X that Trump and his administration “actually don’t know what they’re doing. Conned and bullied by Israeli hawks and Capitol Hill neocons,” Podhoretz replied by calling Mills “the Aristotelian fulfillment of the Platonic conception of clownish idiocy.”

And then the worm turned again. In mid-June, Trump suddenly pivoted to a peace agreement with Iran without Israel’s approval—essentially a return to Obama’s Iran deal, which Trump had pulled out of during his first administration, except that his new agreement was more generous to Tehran—causing a total meltdown at Commentary. “I honestly don’t know if this could be worse!” Podhoretz ranted on his staff podcast. “He has choked! He has chickened out!” (“The Iran Deal is a victory for Trump!” was Mills’s response.) Podhoretz needn’t have worried, though: Less than a month later, and at the time of this writing, the peace agreement had collapsed and America and Iran were once again exchanging fire over the Strait of Hormuz.

There’s a lesson here, not only for restrainers and neocons but for anyone who imagines (including elements on the left) that Trump can be an instrumental champion of their preferred policy agenda. As cringe as the “Blue MAGA” wing of the Democrats and the “Never Trump” conservatives of The Bulwark may seem, they at least have the virtue of consistency: For a decade and counting, they’ve accurately identified Trump as the flaky demagogue he’s always been. Everything Trump Touches Dies, the title of the 2018 book by former Republican strategist turned Never Trumper Rick Wilson, has been a pretty reliable mantra, whatever anyone thinks of Wilson or the book itself. Yet with Trump’s every course correction, the right’s foreign-policy minds keep convincing themselves that they’re special and that this time will be different.

If I asked you to describe what a communist movie looks like, you might think back to Soviet propaganda posters, to Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory, to black-and-white movies screened only in film class, to brutalist buildings all bearing the same look, and to a desaturated aesthetic that screams austerity. You might not think of Keke Palmer squatting in a vacant but decked-out chicken restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You might not think of miniature chase scenes, stop-motion sequences, teleportation devices, vibrant monochromatic garments, a carnivalesque Tune-Yards score, or a tilted condo building like a Leaning Tower of Pisa for the Bay Area’s most tasteless. But Boots Riley’s second film, I Love Boosters, is kaleidoscopic, refracting the director’s radical ideas into a new kind of communist filmmaking.

Like his debut film, Sorry to Bother You, and his TV miniseries I’m a Virgo, I Love Boosters amps up the absurdities of everyday exploitation to point the way to a future in which more workers embrace the possibility of a successful struggle to claw back the wealth that has been stolen from them by business owners and billionaires. More than montage, Riley’s filmmaking feels like collage. It’s not trying to be perfectly clean or seamless. Its vision is deeply human and yet also refuses to hold back or moderate its scope.

Though it can feel like Riley is preaching to the choir, his real goal is to show people that they’ve been humming anti-capitalist tunes all along, even if they haven’t learned the words yet. His version of bringing communism to the masses is so bombastic and crammed with diversions that viewers might be inclined to forgive how overtly the film delivers its lessons. In practice, Riley’s depiction of the splendors and terrors and contradictions of living under capitalism’s thumb might not coalesce neatly, but for many, the message will be worth the mess.

I Love Boosters begins with a regular night out for Palmer’s character, an aspiring fashion designer and shameless hustler named Corvette. To a backdrop of vibey R&B, Corvette sashays her way through a nightclub until she lays eyes on a sleekly dressed man. Soon, she is pointedly asking him about his shoe size and taking him to a private room she keeps nearby. But Corvette isn’t looking for a hookup; she’s out to make a sale. She is a booster, meaning that she “boosts” items of name-brand clothing from fancy stores and sells them at a discount to people who would otherwise not be able to afford the flashy attire.

Corvette and her two co-conspirators (and closest friends), Sade and Mariah, aren’t exactly shoplifters. Instead, they are artistes of boosting—they know which stores to target, what distractions work, and the best way to get the clothing off the racks and into their van. They also choose their victims wisely: They mostly steal from Christie Smith, a haughty and self-righteous fashion mogul (played by Demi Moore) who is the owner and head of Metro Designers. Smith is Corvette’s nemesis and obsession. Corvette claims to hate her, but she can quote Smith’s memoir from memory. At some level, she wants to be Smith—or, at the very least, to have her validation.

When a security camera captures one of their heists and the footage is played on the news, Corvette and her friends are dubbed the Velvet Gang by the media, and soon the stakes get raised: Smith declares that boosters are her enemies and goes on TV to condemn them. As a result, the Velvet Gang has to get more and more inventive in order to execute its haute couture heists.

Corvette’s plans are interrupted when a new figure enters the scene: a rival with a device that can clear an entire shop of its designer clothes in a matter of seconds. The new booster is Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a worker from a Metro Designers factory in China who has stolen a teleportation device and is now using it to force Smith and her company to improve the life-threatening working conditions that afflict her family and coworkers. Realizing that they have a common enemy, the Velvet Gang and Jianhu team up, but for Corvette the struggle is still personal—she can’t look past her own animus toward Smith to see how her struggle and the factory workers’ intersect.

Even with Smith getting closer to catching them, the quartet is soon taking down one store after another. But teleportation is just the beginning; in typical Riley fashion, the giddy escalation never lets up. The gang discovers that the teleporter has settings that can both accelerate and deconstruct capitalism’s contradictions: In one episode, a coffee-fetching intern with his boss figuratively on his back is literally mounted by his boss (“He got his boss on his back!”); in another, it returns designer clothes into the raw materials used to make them and gives workers back the time they lost sewing them together.

Among all the acts of expropriation and the reversals of capitalist exploitation, a Bay Area–wide strike targeting the Metro Designers chain looms, and Jianhu and the Velvet Gang are transformed from petty criminals into revolutionaries. The dialectical teleporter is used to deconstruct thousands of Smith’s garments—giving thousands of factory workers back their time and health and turning employees into a phalanx of striking militants ready to transform the world.

Riley, who made his feature-film debut in 2018, developed his storytelling skills as a labor organizer in and around Oakland. He wrote short political skits for workplaces trying to unionize and planned rallies and shows to agitate for the cause of organized labor. Then, after seeing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” become a rallying cry in a neighborhood struggle with abusive cops, he became a musician. Music, perhaps more than any other art form, can bring people together in a shared aesthetic world. People feel deeply tied to music that conjures a world they want to be a part of (or already feel they are a part of). As the front man for the leftist hip-hop group the Coup, Riley aimed to make political commitment into something that didn’t have to be left outside the party’s doors.

There’s a direct line from the Coup to Riley’s movies, but there are notable differences as well. The hip-hop traditions that form part of the Coup’s genealogy place an emphasis on lyricism and storytelling in verse. It’s about the funk and the feel, yes, but listeners are also primed to think about what the MC is saying. Mainstream movie audiences, though, are much less interested in listening to a political argument. They want a diverting story first, and any message should be gleaned from the implicit terms of the narrative and characters.

Riley’s storytelling style has always been one of excess, where the gags don’t coalesce but instead keep one-upping each other. And he never leaves his message to chance: There’s always a character to explain the political analysis that’s implicit in the narrative. At times, these characters’ monologues feel organic—after all, Riley has spent much of his life surrounded by organizers. But at other times, they can be disconcerting. In films so full of color and ideas, references and side plots, a lecture can bring everything to a screeching halt.

At its best, I Love Boosters is a ride so entertaining that you don’t stop to question it, but at its worst, it can feel too hectic—one idea tacked onto another tacked onto another, each adding color and texture to an already overstuffed collage. Corvette’s interest in fashion is more of a background detail than a defining trait; she has a fight with Sade that flares up out of nowhere and goes nowhere too; her love of the color turquoise and red candy feel like red herrings that are discarded by the film’s final act. There are gags galore, and as with all of Riley’s work so far, the end result is a general strike, although how that strike is achieved is still a bit mystifying. We never really understand why there is a Marxist teleporting machine, or how it can transform the principles of dialectical materialism into reality with the push of a button.

Yet as we come to the end of I Love Boosters, we realize that the film’s nature, both discordant and discursive, is part of the point. Riley’s protagonists never start out as radicals; they need life—and some able organizers—to help them get there in the midst of all of capitalism’s messy excesses. This is the ultimate message of the film: that the path to collective action is neither simple nor linear. It takes many detours and a lot of time to cover the distance needed for any real and lasting social change to occur. As Riley explained in a 2024 interview, even “if I could snap my fingers and get to revolution, I wouldn’t, because it’s all about the journey and what kind of person the journey makes us into.”

Tuesday’s Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary has inspired intense nationwide coverage—mostly because a leading contender, Francesca Hong, is a democratic socialist. The strength of the bid by Hong, a state representative from Madison who has run an energetic grassroots campaign, has triggered endless scrutiny of her past social-media messages, along with hand-wringing by Democratic Party insiders who question her electability.

Much of the national media’s coverage of the primary—in which voters will choose between Hong and three other Democrats, including Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who is backed by outgoing Democratic Governor Tony Evers—has focused on the question of whether a Midwestern swing state is the right place for democratic socialist politics. Headlines like “Wisconsin governor’s race tests limits of Democrats’ leftward shift” and “Democratic socialist Francesca Hong tests how far left voters will go in battleground Wisconsin” are common.

But Wisconsin is a unique place. Its great progressive leaders of the past, including former Republican Governor Robert M. La Follette, worked closely with socialists and sometimes ran with their backing. The state frequently elected members of the Socialist Party of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas as congressional and legislative representatives—and as mayors of Wisconsin cities, including the state’s largest municipality: Milwaukee. Indeed, through much of the 20th century, Milwaukee was governed by so-called “sewer socialists”—Mayors Emil Seidel, Dan Hoan, and Frank Zeidler—who earned national reputations as visionary and efficient managers.

What a lot of the people who are now commenting on the 2026 race probably don’t know is that one of those socialist mayors played a critical role in building the modern Wisconsin Democratic Party.

Almost exactly 82 years ago, on August 15, 1944, Wisconsin Democrats voted by a landslide to make Hoan, a former Socialist Party stalwart who had recently joined the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, their gubernatorial nominee. 

Raised in a radical family in rural Waukesha County, Hoan arrived at the University of Wisconsin in 1901 and quickly formed the campus’s Socialist Club. After passing his Wisconsin State bar exam in 1908, he joined Milwaukee’s vibrant Socialist Party and began working as a labor lawyer. In 1910, when the Socialist Party swept to power in Milwaukee, Hoan became the City Attorney at age 29. In 1916, he was elected mayor and went on to serve 24 years as one of the most respected municipal leaders in the country. So popular and so successful at the basics of governing was the “sewer socialist” that, after his tenure was finished, one of the city’s great landmarks—the Daniel Webster Hoan Memorial Bridge—was named for him.

“He has won office year after year, while other Socialists [nationwide] failed, not only because of his reputation for personal honesty and administrative ability but because he is a colorful campaigner,” observed a 1936 Time magazine profile headlined, “Marxist Mayor.” (That same year, Hoan won his sixth term as mayor.)

“Meantime, he works toward [his political] ends as best he can under the current system. He talks his audiences’ language, knows how to make them laugh and cheer, keeps them fascinated by the way he thumps a table, shakes his finger, wrinkles his face, hunches his shoulders, strides up and down, leaps in the air,” explained the profile.

Hoan came up politically at a time when Wisconsin Socialists were a powerful force in the state’s politics. For many years, during the 1920s and ’30s, the party formed the second-largest caucus in the state legislature. Often working in alliance with liberal Republicans, and then with the state’s successful independent Progressive Party, the Socialists helped to shape electoral outcomes and policies in the state for decades.

But by the early 1940s, with the Socialist Party fading as a political force, Hoan was encouraged to consider running on the Democratic ballot line.

Hoan had maintained a good relationship with Roosevelt during the later years of his mayoralty, and was impressed with FDR’s progressive tendencies. That wasn’t surprising. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt had called for an “Economic Bill of Rights,” asserting that Americans had a right to “a useful and remunerative job” with fair pay, as well as decent housing, healthcare, education and “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.”

This was the context in which Hoan made his next political move. He bid that fall for the governorship on the Democratic line—as the nominee of a party that had struggled for decades to get its footing in state politics. 

Hoan came to the Democratic Party as an outsider who had criticized many of its more conservative leaders and policies. (Following World War I, which was widely unpopular with socialists, he famously refused to sign on to a Milwaukee City Council resolution honoring President Woodrow Wilson as a great American.)

Hoan’s promise to revitalize the withered Wisconsin Democratic Party—after it had won just 8 percent of the state’s gubernatorial vote in 1938, and just 12 percent in 1942—energized a new generation of voters seeking a home for their progressive politics. Running on a platform that echoed Roosevelt’s advocacy for economic democracy, he won more than 40 percent of the vote for the Democrats—a 28 percent increase from the previous election—and swept industrial counties such as Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha.

With his 1944 campaign, and another waged as the party’s nominee in 1946, Hoan began the transformation of the Democratic Party in Wisconsin from what historian William F. Thompson described as “a moribund collection of courthouse gangs,” which competed for federal patronage scraps but got wiped out in state and local elections.

Longtime Milwaukee alderman Paul Gauer, who had worked with Hoan in Wisconsin’s left-wing Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation, said the former mayor’s Milwaukee record and dynamic campaigning won “the confidence of workers in unions and the rank-and-file of Socialists and former Progressives.” That helped a renewed Democratic Party replace the soon-to-collapse Progressive Party and become the chief competitor for the Republicans.

The modern Democratic Party that Hoan jump-started in the mid-1940s would, by the end of the following decade, control the governorship, most statewide posts (including a US Senate seat), the state Assembly and much of the state’s congressional delegation.

“The plain truth is, if Democrats have any memory, that it was Hoan who revitalized the Democratic Party in 1944, when he agreed to run for governor,” recalled Gauer. “It was like a shot in the arm; not only to the state party which had tickets in only seven counties, but to FDR and the national ticket, as well.… His entrance was then electric and an inspiration.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialism has been felt in all kinds of ways since he took office in January. He’s proven to be a strong ally of the tenant class, bolstering the office that handles their complaints and freezing the rent on rent-stabilized apartments for one- and two-year leases. He’s secured funding to launch the first phase of a universal childcare program that might, one day, cover all children before they enter pre-K. He’s fought for higher taxes on the wealthy, and won a new tax on luxury second homes.

If the progressive left, largely, has gotten what they wanted from Mamdani—he’s a popular mayor, closely aligned with DSA, and has a great deal of momentum heading into next year—there’s one policy area where, for now, they have had to accept an uncomfortable compromise. Serious criminal justice reform, of the like that one would expect from a democratic socialist mayor, has not yet come to pass. Some of this is a product of the short amount of time Mamdani has actually spent in office—he’s barely passed the half-year mark—and some of it has been decision-making that has quietly frustrated some allies on the left.

(Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)

The greatest obstacle to reform remains his police commissioner, Jessica Tisch. The pairing is, at best, incongruous. Tisch was Eric Adams’s police commissioner, inherited when Mamdani took office in January. She’s a billionaire heiress, a proud Zionist, and fairly conservative when it comes to her views on policing. Under Adams, she loudly opposed various criminal justice reforms passed in Albany, like the reduction of cash bail and the reform of the discovery process. Like Bill Bratton, the police commissioner for Rudy Giuliani and Bill de Blasio, she can be described as a “law-and-order” commissioner who believes, fundamentally, in cracking down on quality-of-life offenses and maintaining a highly militarized department.

Under Tisch, the NYPD has been flooding summer street festivals and parades in growing numbers. During the Knicks’ championship run, Tisch shut down the area around Madison Square Garden and created multiple “frozen zones” for the team’s parade, limiting the number of spectators. Meanwhile, progressive organizations like the Legal Aid Society, VOCAL-NY, and the Drug Policy Alliance have accused the Mamdani/Tisch NYPD of maintaining elevated rates of low-level arrests. Data from the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice shows that the total number of arrests from January to June 2026 exceeded 130,000, which is a 50 percent increase from the first six months of 2022.

These arrests, more often than not, are of non-white, working-class New Yorkers.

Why has Mamdani retained Tisch? In part, it was because of the enormous pressure applied upon him last year, right after he won the primary. He was a 33-year-old leftist insurgent trying to unite the Democratic Party and keep the peace with a wide variety of political actors, including the governor, Kathy Hochul. Hochul remains a staunch Tisch supporter and helped install her as NYPD commissioner after Adams’s prior commissioner departed under a scandal cloud. To achieve much of his policy agenda, Mamdani needs state support, and that means keeping a strong relationship with the governor.

Another element was the opposition from his right. When Mamdani won the general election, he had to contend with extraordinary spending against him and a candidate in Andrew Cuomo who, as an independent, broke 40 percent. The corporate and real estate elites who backed Cuomo in the primary were deeply wary of Mamdani. Keeping Tisch represented the path of least resistance: defang some of the opposition by showing moderate voters that, on public safety, there would be some continuity from prior administrations. At the same time, Tisch had won praise from the mainstream media, conservative and liberal alike, for tackling corruption in the police department she inherited. During the campaign, Mamdani endured repeated attacks from Cuomo and his super PACs that he planned, as mayor, to defund the police.

He didn’t. And once he vowed, during a televised debate, to make Tisch commissioner, those attacks were neutralized.

The question, however, is how long the relationship can last. Bratton, who was much more conservative than de Blasio, remained commissioner for a little more than two years before departing. Bratton was, stylistically, a very different top cop, a celebrity in his own right who delighted in gabbing with the media. He seemed, at times, to even enjoy undercutting his boss. Tisch is far more understated; she and Mamdani, publicly, have been cordial because he’s permitted her, largely, to do much of what she wanted.

As a candidate, Mamdani promised a stand-alone Department of Community Safety that would limit the role of police in answering 911 calls that were not about crimes. The idea was to prevent tragedies in which police shot mentally unstable individuals who may have just required trained mental health workers instead. As mayor, Mamdani settled for a cheaper, less potent version of his campaign idea: the Mayoral Office of Community Safety. Tisch wasn’t necessarily a staunch opponent of a full-fledged department, but she was hardly supportive. With a different commissioner advocating for Mamdani’s vision, the City Council may have been more likely to consider it and pass a bill making the department a reality.

There are other campaign pledges Mamdani has yet to implement. So far, he has failed to disband the Strategic Response Group, a special unit formed a decade ago for counterterrorism purposes. The SRG is notorious for its militarized, aggressive policing of protests and marches, and first burst into public view in 2020 when police menaced and brutalized New Yorkers marchers in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Mamdani has said he will, eventually, end the SRG, but so far the unit remains because Tisch actively supports it. Mamdani also hasn’t shut down a database of suspected gang members. Tisch backs the database, even as it has faced withering criticism for surveilling innocent young men of color.

Supporters of Tisch often act like Mamdani made the correct and only choice. How else could crime in New York be kept low? Arguments for Tisch always elide that the crime decline, half a decade after the pandemic, has been nationwide in scope. Many cities have seen plunging murder rates. Mamdani really did have other options. Tisch has never walked the beat; the new mayor could have chosen a reform-oriented commissioner who had. One option was Rodney K. Harrison, a former Suffolk County police commissioner who also held high-ranking roles in the NYPD. Harrison served on Mamdani’s transition committee. Or the mayor could have recruited from across the nation, looking to cities with experienced police commissioners who have successfully implemented department reforms.

It should be duly noted that Mamdani has not entirely neglected the project of criminal justice reform. There’s hope that Stanley Richards, the new commissioner of the Department of Correction, can overhaul the city’s notorious jails system. Richards, the former president and CEO of the Fortune Society, was once an inmate on Rikers Island, the infamous jail that is slated for closure next year. The recent appointment of Jennifer Jones Austin, a well-regarded lawyer and civic leader who served as vice chair of the National Action Network, to head up the Civilian Complaint Review Board has been cheered by many reformers and civil rights activists. The Rev. Al Sharpton, in a statement, called Austin an “unwavering advocate for justice,” and Donna Lieberman, the longtime NYCLU executive director, said she was a “strong” chair. The CCRB, the watchdog that investigates NYPD abuses, has been relatively toothless under past mayors, and there’s a belief that if Tisch is going to remain as powerful as she is, the Jones Austin CCRB will at least be an effective counterweight.

For now, reformers will wait and see what comes next out of the Mamdani administration. Opposition, for a little while longer at least, will be muted. How long that can last—a Mamdani-Tisch partnership and peace with criminal justice reformers—isn’t yet known. History suggests, at least, that unrest is inevitable.

Donald Trump is a big fan of the data centers powering the AI industry’s boom: “Everything’s good around them,” he recently told Fox News. Figures as diverse as Willie Nelson, Pope Leo, and Erin Brockovich might beg to differ, however—and all three have warned of the energy-guzzling behemoths’ environmental hazards in recent months.

They’re far from alone in sounding the alarm, and the president’s position is, in fact, increasingly unpopular: Seven Americans in 10 now believe that everything is not good around data centers, and say they’d oppose the construction of the computing hubs in their communities.

American anxiety about artificial intelligence has been rising for years. But until now, there have been limited outlets to channel that anxiety into action. With tech giants racing to build AI server campuses quickly and with limited oversight, Americans now have a (literally) concrete target for their protests.

In an Instagram post striking out against the dozens of data centers slated for construction in his native Central Texas, Nelson summed up the national mood: “The last thing we need is a loud, water thieving, light polluting, data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter).”

The 93-year-old singer-songwriter speaks for backlash that crosses all the usual political lines—and opens promising ground for progressive politics.

In some ways, it’s hard to imagine a construction surge less primed for popularity. Large-scale computing facilities are greedy consumers of water and electricity, requiring the latter in such massive quantities that dozens of natural-gas-burning power plants are being built to keep them online. Data centers offload heat pollution that raises the temperature in surrounding areas, and they can emit a droning hum day and night, resulting in migraines and sleepless nights for their neighbors.

All of which job-strapped communities would perhaps tolerate, if AI data centers produced considerable lasting employment—but they don’t do that, either. In fact, the supposed upside most visibly championed by big business is the idea that the technology will allow employers to replace countless jobs. And while everyday Americans have little ability to slow the AI rollout in the workplace, they can go to a local planning committee meeting and vent their disapproval. No wonder Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are currently cooking up long-shot plans to offshore the mega-computers in space.

Data centers are so resoundingly unpopular that in the response to them the partisan divide marking almost every debate in American life is surprisingly absent. Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) signed the first statewide moratorium on new construction last month, and just last week, Governor Greg Abbott (R-TX) halted data center approvals in Texas pending an audit of their impact on the state’s electric grid—making Trump’s glowing assessment all the lonelier.

A similar consensus is emerging at the grassroots. Earlier this month, over 400 people gathered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, for a critical discussion on the server-building boom organized by the progressive Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. Meanwhile, Humans First, a conservative group helmed by MAGA-loving, election-denying Tea Party alum Amy Kremer, organized a national day of data center protests in July.

The event saw nearly 150 rallies taking place across 42 states.

The issue has also played a significant role in recent elections, with last Tuesday’s primaries netting wins for AI industry critics. Abdul El-Sayed, who made data center regulations an early campaign plank, won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Sunrise Movement cofounder William Lawrence, who supports a federal data center moratorium, won the party’s nomination for the state’s seventh district. And, in a surprising display of bipartisan bonhomie, Republican state Senate candidate Kenny Clevenger ran an ad highlighting his alignment with left-wing Representative Rashida Tlaib in opposing a data center project backed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

All this cross-party pushback has been astonishingly effective: Since June, municipalities have passed nearly 200 new local ordinances restricting construction, and over 50 planned data centers have been canceled in 2026.

Americans often feel an understandable sense of powerlessness in the face of sweeping change. Public opinion is largely decoupled from political outcomes; we live under a historically unpopular president currently waging a historically unpopular war.

But when it comes to data centers, people across the nation have found that they have the power to shape their communities—and the power to send a broader message to Big Tech. The massive server farms are tangible symbols for a fed-up public pushing back against powerful and unaccountable interests.

This backlash may be transpartisan, but it’s rooted in values that anyone on the left should be able to get behind. The interests of deep-pocketed businesses don’t outweigh those of small communities. Markets require management. The public can and should rein in corporate excess. Regardless of where these messages are coming from, their current resonance could well open the door to progressive victories in the not-so-distant future.

In Tennessee, where Musk’s xAI data centers are busily belching out smog-producing nitrogen oxides, one independent voter told Politico that, while he’s typically “not for the progressive agenda,” congressional hopeful Justin Pearson’s data center opposition gave him pause.

“It could very well change the equation for me,” he told the outlet. “This is one issue that could cause me to vote for somebody I wouldn’t otherwise pay much attention to.”

My name is Maryam Tahmasebi, and I am a professor of psychology and statistics at Los Angeles Pierce College—or, I was, until April 9, when my life, and my family’s lives, changed forever.

On that day, I was teaching a class when my son texted me, saying that my husband hadn’t picked him up from school and wasn’t answering his phone, which is very unlike him. I picked my son up from school, came frantically back home, and called the police, thinking that something horrible must have happened to him. Even so, it never occurred to me that he could have been detained by ICE. We are legal permanent residents with valid green cards. My husband, Eissa Hashemi, is also a professor, and has dedicated his life to mentoring PhD students in the Business Psychology department of The Chicago School. We have both mentored many PhD candidates, among whom are veterans who have served this country for decades. We don’t have any criminal record—not even a traffic ticket. I believed in the “rule of law,” and trusted that if there was anything wrong with our immigration status, the government would notify us through legal channels.

I was beyond shocked to realize that an online smear campaign without any merit or legal standing had convinced the US government to try to revoke our green cards overnight without due process or even telling us. The government had decided to punish my husband for being the son of a woman who was a translator for the Iranian hostage takers in 1979, before Eissa was even born.

I came here because I wanted to build a life for myself and my family that was defined by my own actions, not anyone else’s. But now our lives are being upended for something someone else did nearly 50 years ago.

Imagine that you are an independent woman wading through the waters of sexism and patriarchy every day, and then you are told that not only do your own ideas and academic achievements not matter, but you are somehow now responsible for decisions you never made, and for things that happened before you were ever born. That you don’t have an identity of your own, and that your existence can be negated based on relations. This is bloodline punishment. I was hoping that the United States of America, the country that I loved, would be different.

Eventually, my husband’s phone location showed he was at an ICE center in downtown LA. I talked to him there for a minute. He said he had been told that, while he was under arrest, our son and I were safe. That turned out to have been a lie. The next day, when I took my son to school, my car was surrounded by DHS cars, and my son and I were detained. I had to watch my son, who is in high school and has been a legal resident of California for 12 years, be handcuffed. We were shipped to Texas overnight from Los Angeles in horrible conditions that I won’t elaborate on in this letter. We have remained in Texas ever since.

My son and I have spent over 120 days in the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, away from my husband, who was taken to the South Texas Detention Center in Pearsall, Texas. There, he faces even more horrible conditions, and he faces them alone. When I requested that my husband be reunited with us in Dilley, a so-called “family detention center” (the very existence of such a term is deeply troubling), I was told that in our specific case, family separation is the policy and the rule.

I have struggled to understand how this can happen to people who have never broken the law, in a system I believed to be based on the rule of law.

We have been put through hell for the past four months, and our physical and mental health have deteriorated in ways that might not be reversible for years. We are only allowed to speak with my husband for 10 minutes every two weeks, under supervision. My son, who only speaks English and has been in California’s school system since pre-K, is struggling to understand why the only country he considers home is treating him this way.

What has happened to us was designed specifically to break our body and spirit. I am a mother, not a martyr, so I would always choose my son’s health and well-being over any dreams or aspirations I have. But even when we decided to make the difficult decision to asked to be allowed to voluntarily leave the United States—the place we consider our country and our home—the government not only opposed it but suggested that it would appeal any judicial decisions that grant us departure.

In other words, they want to continue our indefinite detention without any end in sight. But for what purpose? I have been asking myself that question over and over. I can’t think of any reason why we are being put through this punitive ordeal. We don’t have money or power to help us, shield us, or buy us favor. We are two working-class educators who had been living a working-class life in a rented apartment, and had never imagined anything like this happening to us.

This is why we need your help. We are in tremendous pain and have been trapped in an unendurable, unending nightmare. I want my son to have a normal life, not spend his days in this awful detention center in Dilley. No child deserves this. No human deserves this. We are asking anyone with a conscience to help us end this nightmare. There are more things I want to say, but this is the shackled version of what I feel safe saying right now. I will end on this: If this could happen to us, a law-abiding family of two professors and a young boy, it can happen to anyone.

Repairs arranged by Donald Trump were botched,
But he still blames wild leftists for assault.
Then Pirro failed to grasp this simple fact:
With Trump it’s always someone else’s fault.

Coolidge, Arizona, is a speck of a town, a place of small wooden bungalows, a few diminutive mom-and-pop stores, and a large number of churches, the steeples of which compete in height with the nearby saguaro cacti. It emerges like a heat mirage out of the desert dust an hour’s fast drive southeast of Phoenix. Blink and it could disappear just as quickly.

From its small, single-story cinder-block offices in Coolidge, Rural Arizona Engagement, or RAZE, is coordinating a campaign to expand voter rights, to educate its mainly Latino target population (nearly one-third of the state’s population is Latino) on how and where and when to vote this fall, and what to do if federal agents attempt to intimidate them at polling places or if their mail-in ballots are not delivered by the US Postal Service. It is also lobbying for the creation of voting centers around the state, which can be utilized by residents from any part of the county they are in, and more drop boxes, which would increase access for voters in remote parts of the state, who often have to drive hours to cast a ballot.

RAZE believes that the expansion of voting centers is crucial for increasing turnout. After all, President Donald Trump continues to undermine the electoral process, from forcing out the members of the independent federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to pressuring lawmakers to pass the SAVE America Act, which the Brennan Center for Justice has said “would be the most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress,” while the US Supreme Court has already weakened the protections provided by the Voting Rights Act. RAZE and its allies scored a major success earlier this year when, after a long and often acrimonious political debate, Apache County agreed to open voting centers. “It was a huge win,” Kassandra Alvarez, RAZE’s communications director, tells me in the poster-bedecked conference room in the Coolidge offices. “It’s a huge example of how you can make change locally.”

Arizona activists are leading by example in other vital ways. Every day, even in the triple-digit heat that scorches the desert from May through October, idealistic young RAZE canvassers head into remote rural areas, urging residents to add their names to the state’s early-voting list so that they’ll automatically be sent a ballot in the mail. It isn’t easy work. During the 2024 election, canvassers reported having guns drawn and dogs unleashed on them. Some had their car tires slashed. Others had their locations publicized on social media. But the canvassers see their work as an integral part of a national struggle over voting rights, particularly with regard to ballot access and the integrity of the vote count, that is shaping up to be the crucial backstory of the 2026 midterms.

From Fulton County, Georgia, to Los Angeles, the assault on democracy has intensified in recent months. Election deniers are suing to gain access to local voter rolls, looking to purge them of people who they claim—without evidence—are not US citizens. And beyond interfering in the upcoming elections via his actions at the EAC and at the Capitol, where he has so far failed to persuade Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, Trump has signed a slew of executive orders in an effort to undermine the vote-by-mail systems that were used by at least 48 million voters in the 2024 elections—a disproportionate number of whom lean Democratic—and to mandate onerous voter-ID requirements. One such order, which is facing legal challenges, calls for the US Postal Service to run its own citizenship tests on prospective recipients and to refuse to deliver ballots to those it concludes are noncitizens. The Postal Service is reportedly drawing up plans to implement Trump’s order, floating the idea of not delivering ballots in states that refuse to hand over their voter rolls to the feds. It’s unclear whether the Postal Service will move ahead with those plans or whether a court will halt the order before the midterms.

“It’s a very dark time and moment for our country and our state,” says Sam Liebert, the Wisconsin state director of the voting-rights group All Voting Is Local, which has branches in eight battleground states, referring to the Trump administration’s pressure on Milwaukee and other Wisconsin cities regarding their voter rolls and vote-counting systems. “They will stop at nothing to meddle in elections.”

Come the midterms, Trump—whose approval ratings have been plummeting over his handling of the economy, immigration, and his war on Iran—may well try to seize control of the voting process by declaring a national emergency. But many of the most significant efforts to suppress the vote and manipulate election outcomes are more prosaic. They are already underway in counties around the United States, often pitting election deniers, who have captured more than 20 percent of recent statewide races for offices that oversee elections, and other Trumpist state legislators against groups like RAZE and the Democratic secretaries of state who have pledged to protect their electoral systems from federal efforts to sabotage them.

In Arizona and elsewhere, frontline defenders of democracy are using a combination of legal action, public education, and street protest to combat the election deniers’ growing array of tactics. In Democratic-controlled states, legislators are also passing laws that bolster protections against federal interference in elections. And 11 states, including, most recently, New Jersey, have passed versions of the now-neutered Voting Rights Act to stop racially based gerrymandering and to provide courts with the power to intervene in assaults on the voting process in their jurisdictions. But in states like Arizona, which has a GOP-controlled Legislature and a Democratic-controlled executive branch, these battles over access to the polls are sowing division between the different branches of government.

At every step of the way, Arizona’s GOP state legislators and conservative county elections recorders have attempted to block the efforts of the state’s emerging voting-rights coalitions, both within the Legislature and among grassroots organizations, to expand the number of people who vote. Taking cues from the Trump administration, conservative Arizona politicians have proposed a raft of laws—many of them based on draft legislation provided by think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council and Heritage Action, an advocacy organization for the Heritage Foundation—that would put up road blocks to mail-in voting, further tighten the state’s already stringent voter-ID laws, limit the number of voting centers and drop boxes for ballots, and set up surveillance cameras around the drop boxes. One particularly Trumpian legislator even proposed a bill that would have made ICE’s presence at voting sites not just legal but mandatory. In Maricopa County, the elections recorder, a MAGA figure named Justin Heap, has been ramping up challenges to voter registration and ballot signatures. “Every week there’s a new threat,” says Alex Gulotta, the Arizona state director of All Voting Is Local. “We’re doing the best we can to not get distracted.” (Heap’s office ignored interview requests from The Nation for this article.)

To date, most of these laws have not passed, and others have been vetoed by Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs. But in some counties, such as Apache County in the northeast or sprawling Yuma County in the southwest corner of the state, where many Indigenous people and immigrants without stable housing do not have mailboxes or permanent addresses (homes on tribal reservations typically do not have street addresses) where they can receive mail-in ballots, election-denying county recorders have, over the past couple of election cycles, dramatically increased the number of ballot signatures they challenge. They have also unilaterally set up surveillance systems around election sites, despite the objections of Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes. RAZE and other advocates claim that in an era of indiscriminate ICE raids, these cameras are likely to intimidate eligible Latino voters and discourage them from voting.

“I think their intentions are bad,” says Edel Ochoa, a 19-year-old nursing student from the remote border community of San Luis. A soft-spoken and earnest young man with large glasses and a shock of curly hair, Ochoa is working as a political intern with RAZE this year and spoke to me at its Coolidge offices. “It’s a matter of fear,” he adds. “They’re trying to intimidate people.”

The organization’s chief of staff, Andrea Varela, wearing a maroon RAZE T-shirt emblazoned with a quote from Aristotle on the need for a strong middle class, concurs. “Our communities are being targeted,” she says. “And it’s not a coincidence. We see with everything going on at the national level that things become very difficult at the local level. It’s causing people of color and our communities to feel like they don’t have their voice.”

But a coalition of more than 20 voter-protection groups stands ready to intercede. The coalition is shoring up a people-powered monitoring system to ensure that neither the GOP nor federal agents intimidate people at polling stations statewide. The groups, ranging from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the American Civil Liberties Union to the Arizona Faith Network and the Arizona Native Vote Election Protection Project, are also ready to file legal challenges if election processes “are turned into political theater,” says Jenny Guzman of Common Cause Arizona. And they have gamed out how to quickly mobilize large numbers of people should the feds try to prevent vote counts from taking place in Phoenix and other large cities. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation,” Guzman says.

Sitting in his flag-and-balloon-festooned campaign headquarters in Phoenix, Secretary of State Fontes, wearing jeans and a deep-blue linen sports jacket, alternates between righteous anger at what the Trump administration is attempting to pull off and confidence that, when push comes to shove, the democratic system will hold.

“The fraudsters and the hucksters [are] trying to get the conversation turned away from the [pro-democracy] work that gets done,” he says. “They’re trying to make everybody scared, and they’re trying to make everybody intimidated…. You realize it is just noise and bluster. It has an anti-voter and anti-‘little-d’-democracy intent behind it.”

For months now, Fontes’s office has been deliberating about what will happen if the Trump administration sends ICE agents to polling places or uses other federal agents to disrupt the voting process. “We’ve got protocols for dispatching law enforcement,” he says. “Because ICE agents don’t have any legal authority to be at polling places whatsoever. We’ve got our courts that will be on a hair trigger, ready to issue orders as quickly as possible.”

That sense of urgency reverberates throughout the country. Poll after poll shows that the GOP is unpopular with voters, and dissatisfaction with the Trump administration is increasing among the all-important bloc of independent voters. Samantha Tarazi, the CEO of the election-protection organization Voting Rights Lab, whose team of policy experts has been tracking voting processes at the state level, is extremely concerned about the multitude of ways that Trump officials, unhappy with the election forecasts, might attempt to undermine the vote.

In her mind, Tarazi keeps coming back to what unfolded in Fulton County, Georgia, earlier this year, when the FBI, under the personal supervision of then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, raided the election offices there in search of supposedly incriminating documents suggesting that the 2020 presidential vote had been manipulated. Agents walked out with hundreds of boxes containing ballots and other election-related materials; then, in the spring, the Justice Department demanded that Fulton County—which has a higher percentage of Black voters than most other parts of Georgia and a more Democratic political bent—turn over the names and addresses of every staffer, most of them volunteers, who worked in the 2020 election.

Tarazi has concluded that there is a three-part administration strategy in play: First, convince a critical number of Americans that the election system is broken; second, intervene in a way that triggers chaos over how individual states and counties administer elections; and third, use that chaos as a cover for the administration and its local allies to try to manipulate the election results, potentially even by declaring a national emergency and ordering federalized National Guard troops or ICE agents to seize voting machines and ballots. “They have an empowered network that knows the playbook and will apply it opportunistically,” she warns.

Astoundingly, in May, the administration attempted to create a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate participants in the January 6, 2021, insurrection against the peaceful transfer of power—a huge nod to the idea that Trumpian paramilitaries who come out to disrupt the electoral process in the future will be protected and rewarded. That same month, the Department of Justice scrubbed its websites of press releases related to Biden-era January 6 prosecutions. Election deniers and fabricators are now in positions where they will be able to challenge the election results and the integrity of the election process should the midterms not go MAGA’s way. And under Todd Blanche, Trump’s former lawyer and the acting attorney general, the DOJ shows every sign that it will be a willing participant in such conspiracies.

In early June, even while California’s primary votes were still being counted, Trump previewed this strategy when he repeatedly and baselessly declared Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News host, the winner of the gubernatorial primary. He fired off multiple social-media posts alleging, without any evidence, that California’s election administrators were “rigging” the results of that race and the Los Angeles mayoral race. Following his lead, the DOJ sent a federal attorney to LA to monitor the vote count, and the US attorney in the city announced investigations into potential vote fraud.

The strategy of disruption was also previewed in the FBI’s Atlanta raid. Dana Barrett, the Fulton County commissioner for District 3 and a former candidate to be Georgia’s secretary of state, has repeatedly argued that it was nothing more than a sloppily put-together fishing expedition aimed at normalizing, in the run-up to the midterms, the idea of federal agents seizing ballots. “If the FBI is able to come in with a criminal search warrant based on nothing and take ballots and break the chain of custody, then they can do it anywhere after the ’26 election if they feel they’re losing,” she says. “It’s critically important given the precedent this raid sets.”

For months now, Trump has pressured Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which mandates that the names on voter rolls match the names on voters’ birth certificates, among other things.

As many as 69 million women who took their husband’s last name at marriage could find their right to vote challenged by these astounding provisions. And even as the legislation flounders in the Senate, many GOP-controlled state Legislatures are locking into place similar provisions, especially around voter-ID requirements. At least 10 GOP-led states have also cooperated with the DOJ’s request to hand over sensitive voter-roll data. The administration will run this information against a federal citizenship database, even though there is no evidence that this will be—or even can be—an accurate process, thus creating a pretext for the Postal Service to refuse to deliver mail-in ballots to alleged noncitizens in these states.

Surrounded by family photos, a small potted plant on the window ledge, and a handful of books on the shelves in her Washington, DC, office, Hannah Fried, the CEO of All Voting Is Local, tells me that federal rule-makers aren’t even bothering to camouflage their intent. As she points out, then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem bluntly stated that the SAVE America Act is all about “making sure the right people can vote.” Noem didn’t explicitly say who the “right people” were, but the implication was clear: This legislation is intended to skew the voter rolls against Democrats and in favor of GOP voters.

During past efforts at voter suppression, Fried says, legislation was generally aimed at preventing people from voting in the first place. Since 2020, it has also been aimed “at the back end, when ballots are being counted.” The after-the-fact seizure of the Fulton County ballots from 2020, as well as the recent seizure of ballots from the 2025 elections in Riverside County, California, ordered by local sheriff and erstwhile GOP gubernatorial hopeful Chad Bianco, are “trial runs to attempt to seize voting equipment or ballots from a live election,” Fried fears. “The president, his allies, starting with the 2020 elections, Project 2025, the executive orders—it’s not a trail of crumbs; it’s whole loaves of bread. This is a test for us, the American people. How are we going to respond?”

Voting-rights groups, election officials, attorneys, and grassroots activist organizations around the country are answering just that question. “People in this country have shown there are lines you cannot cross with them, and they are going to hold those lines,” Fried says in a moment of optimism.

“Overall, in my state, people would not take well to that kind of threat, seizing ballots,” says Kerry Durmick, the director of the Nevada chapter of All Voting Is Local. Nevada is one of the battleground states reportedly targeted by election deniers, who are looking to create a narrative that “the illegals” are voting in Las Vegas and in Reno. Durmick believes that if the feds came to the state to seize voting machines, huge numbers of Nevadans would hit the streets in protest. At the same time, she says, the secretary of state and other legal partners would immediately countersue.

In Colorado, Secretary of State Jena Griswold agrees. “The risk is a power grab,” she says. “We’re seeing that play out in real time.” Griswold’s office has hired an additional attorney to help with potential election litigation. State legislators have passed laws requiring that the chain of custody for ballots and for voting machines be maintained; this way, in the event that federal authorities attempt to seize ballots like they did in Georgia, the feds would at least have to ensure that there was transparency in how the ballots and the voting machines were handled. In other words, the FBI or any other agency simply couldn’t seize ballots and voting equipment and then return them days or weeks later after having perused them—and potentially interfered with them—in private. And the state’s governor is now empowered to declare an emergency in the face of federal interference to keep the elections on track.

“We’re going to require mail ballots be sent out sooner, open drop boxes sooner. We’re going to enable voting centers to stay open after 7 pm if there is, for example, a shortage of ballots,” Griswold says. “We are making clear that our election-interference statutes extend to outside of a drop box and voting center. We’re also making it clear in statute that a candidate seeking a third term of the presidency will never appear on the Colorado ballot,” she says, referring to Trump’s unconstitutional suggestion that he might run for a third term.

Ashiya Brown, the director of Michigan’s All Voting Is Local chapter, says, “We are dealing with an administration that does not believe in law and order. This administration does not honor checks and balances.” But, she says, the state’s governor, secretary of state, and attorney general are willing to go toe-to-toe with the feds to protect Michigan residents’ right to vote. And precisely because the feds have been telegraphing their intentions for months, voter-protection organizations have had plenty of time to prepare. “They aren’t really good at keeping their plans secret,” Brown says with a wry laugh. “Nobody is resting.”

Meanwhile, in Maricopa County, Arizona, home to the sprawling Phoenix metropolitan area, election deniers have sought one audit after another of the 2020 presidential election, despite an initial audit finding that Joe Biden did, indeed, win the state that year.

The GOP can’t win by the numbers, so it’s trying to prune the electorate, says Monica Sandschafer, the Arizona state director of the voting-rights group Mi Familia Vota. Sitting in her ninth-floor corner office, its huge glass windows overlooking sweltering downtown Phoenix, she explains the GOP’s voter-suppression strategies: “Black voters in the South, Latino voters here—disenfranchise people in order to maintain power. Obviously, it’s terrible at a federal level. But we are mobilized. We are organized, informed, and prepared for this fight.”

For Arizona Secretary of State Fontes, this is simply the new norm in Trump’s America. “This is the first time in the history of the republic that the president of the United States of America is actively moving the levers of power against the American public and their right to vote,” he says. “Trump is trying to pick his own voters. And that’s not how this country works—and everyone knows it.” At the very least, Trump’s efforts to interfere in the midterms are proof that he knows he has something to worry about if Democrats take control of Congress in November. “Donald Trump,” says Fontes, “is scared to death he’ll face accountability in Congress by demand of the American people.”

“Our republic has become a political industry dominated by two major corporations, the Republican and Democratic parties,” says South Dakota US Senate candidate Brian Bengs, a retired Air Force officer who has gained considerable traction as an independent challenger to Mike Rounds, a two-term Republican incumbent in one of the reddest states in the country.

Bengs isn’t alone in his frustration with the two-party system. A record number of US voters currently identify as independents: 45 percent, up from 34 percent in 2006, according to a Gallup analysis. Nor is Bengs alone in his bet that rejecting the two big parties is a route to electoral success. An unprecedented number of major candidates are running as independents in the 2026 midterms. Independent Voter News, the tribune of outside-the-box politics, reports that “2026 is seeing one of the largest surges of interest in independent candidates in recent memory.”

This creates a challenge for Democrats, but not as much as it does for the GOP—because most of these contenders have Donald Trump’s increasingly unpopular agenda, and the Republicans who back it without question, squarely in their sights.

America has always had its share of independent and third-party candidates coming from the left, center, and right. But longtime observers say that what’s happening this year feels different. Independents, often with antiestablishment critiques that echo those of US Senator Bernie Sanders, are securing ballot lines from Idaho to Mississippi and beyond.

Why now? Look no further than the bitter experience of Democrats in vast stretches of the West and the Deep South, where competitive statewide elections are increasingly rare. You can drive from the Mississippi River to Oregon, or trace a line from the Canadian to the Mexican border, without passing through a state with a Democratic senator. Some states haven’t elected a Senate Democrat in a generation or more—20 years in Nebraska, 52 years in Idaho, 56 years in Wyoming. That political stagnation has national consequences. A small minority of senators can block constitutional amendments to end gerrymandering or get big money out of politics. Senators from 21 states can band together to sustain a filibuster against popular legislation to feed hungry children or expand the reach of organized labor. And in a year when control of the Senate could be decided by the narrowest of margins, one state could determine whether Trump can add another right-wing judicial activist to the Supreme Court or maintain his war with Iran. If advocates for fairness and accountability cannot compete in whole swaths of the country simply because the Democratic Party’s “brand” has lost its flavor, then the project of upending Trumpism faces high hurdles.

Sanders, the longest-serving independent senator in US history, notes that “there are probably 10, 15 states where the Democratic Party virtually doesn’t exist—despite the fact that there are great progressive activists out there, great working-class activists out there, great trade unionists out there, people who are fighting for justice in every state in this country. And they largely have been ignored” by national Democratic Party donors and leaders. But it also runs deeper than that. In many states, the Democratic “brand” has been so battered that, even with resources and good ideas, the party’s candidates struggle to get their campaigns off the ground.

This is the challenge that Bengs faced in his first Senate bid in 2022, when the lifelong independent decided to run as a Democrat against future Republican Senate majority leader John Thune. Bengs tried to focus on issues where voters were dissatisfied with the GOP. But even when he had a positive encounter, he’d run into the same hurdle. “I’d say, ‘Can I count on your vote in November?’ And the first words out of their mouth were generally, ‘So what are ya?’ And then I would respond, ‘Well, I’m a lifelong independent, but I’m running as a Democrat,’” Bengs recalls. For a reply, “I would get ‘I’ll never vote for a Democrat’—sometimes with an expletive in there as well. And that was it.” Bengs lost by 43 points, carrying just three of South Dakota’s 66 counties. That wipeout was pretty typical in a state that has not elected a Democratic governor since 1974 and where, this year, Democrats have filed to run for just 46 of 105 legislative seats.

The experience convinced Bengs that “I would never do again what I did in 2022. That was just draining and soul-sucking and just beating my head against the wall.” So the lawyer and former college professor struck out on his own, to the vexation of the South Dakota Democratic Party. Now Bengs says he will not caucus with either major party if he’s elected, arguing that “party politics is responsible for our broken government.” Instead, he promises to fight for systemic change to a “zero-sum, winner-take-all political system…where defeating the other party is what matters most.”

The Supreme Court’s destruction of campaign-finance regulations and the rise of unaccountable super-PAC spending has only made it more difficult for outsider candidates to break through. “The Big Money interests funding this partisan warfare are happy with the current political system and its insatiable demand for more of their money, which gives them greater control of elected officials and thus the government,” Bengs states on his campaign website. “Big Money uses this corrupting influence to protect and increase wealth and power for themselves by undermining the political relevance of regular voters.”

That kind of talk is being heard all over the Western United States this year. Many of the independent candidates—including the most prominent, former union leader Dan Osborn, who came close to winning Nebraska’s Senate race in 2024 and is running again in 2026—have been motivated by their deeply rooted nonpartisan convictions. Others are former Democrats. The National Republican Senatorial Committee calls candidates like Osborn “fake Independents who would push liberal Democratic policies in the Senate.”

But many of these independent candidates have taken a tougher line on immigration and gun rights than Democrats in coastal states. Some run to the left of Democrats and Republicans on economics, while others sample from the left, right, and center—often with a dash of libertarianism thrown in. What unites the independents is a recognition that dropping the “D” label makes it easier to build prairie-populist coalitions and defeat the GOP. They are also generally more sympathetic to term limits and much more critical of Democratic leaders such as Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer.

Following Osborn’s dramatically stronger-than-expected finish in 2024, Sanders argued that his campaign was a model for future candidates. “He took on both political parties. He took on the corporate world. He ran as a strong trade unionist. Without party support, getting heavily outspent, he got through to working-class people all over Nebraska,” Sanders said.

After Democrats suffered severe setbacks in the 2024 election, Sanders told The Nation that it was time for the party and progressives to recognize that “where it is more advantageous to run as an independent, outside of the Democratic primary process, we should do that.”

That’s easier said than done. While some Democrats have accepted the notion, others reject it. Osborn is well positioned in Nebraska, where his bid has been embraced by the state Democratic Party. Party chair Jane Kleeb said on X, “We believe a coalition of Dems, Indys and Republicans can beat [GOP incumbent Pete] Ricketts and break up the one-party rule. We like the odds of a mechanic vs a billionaire.” In July, Nebraska Democratic Senate nominee Cindy Burbank dropped out to clear the way for Osborn, just as Alaska Democratic House candidate Matt Schultz quit and endorsed independent Bill Hill. In South Dakota, Democrat Julian Beaudion suspended his bid in early August. But that is not the case everywhere. In Montana, for instance, independent Seth Bodnar is backed by several prominent Democrats but still faces a Democratic rival in November, as well as a Trump-backed Republican.

Should any of the independents overcome the odds and succeed this fall, they could play a critical role in upending the balance of power in the Senate, where the GOP holds 53 seats to the Democrats’ 47 (a number that includes two Democratic-aligned independents, Sanders and Maine’s Angus King). The Democrats might not automatically benefit, as most independents in the Western states say they won’t caucus with either party. But the headache for the Republicans would be worse, with candidates like Osborn pledging to “take on the corporations and their chosen political lapdogs to restore economic liberty and fairness for the working Americans who make this country run.”

That message from Osborn has resonated in Nebraska, where he’s running neck and neck with the incumbent, Pete Ricketts, a reliable Trump ally and the son of billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, who was hand-picked in 2003 by the state’s former governor to fill an open Senate seat. A May 2026 survey by a Democratic-aligned polling firm put Osborn five points ahead of Ricketts and suggested that the challenger will get 92 percent of Democratic votes; he also leads among independents by a 62–20 margin and has garnered 14 points among Republicans and 17 points among self-identified 2024 Trump voters.

Osborn is breaking through as a critic of Trump’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act and his war in Iran—while also backing abortion rights and taking a more nuanced position on immigration enforcement than most Republicans. But he remains focused on “paycheck populism,” directing a palpable fury at union-busting corporations and agribusiness monopolies that shutter plants in Nebraska. Texas Senator Ted Cruz traveled to Nebraska in June to label Osborn “a left-wing Democrat,” an echo of when Trump called Osborn “a radical-left person, a Bernie Sanders–type Democrat” in a campaign video for Osborn’s 2024 opponent. But Osborn will not appear on the November ballot with a “D” after his name—and that could make all the difference.

Democrats in DC often scratch their heads when they see polls showing that voters in historically Republican states favor taxing the rich, regulating corporations, strengthening unions, and protecting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—even while electing Republicans who oppose all those priorities. Nebraskans approved a referendum for a $15-an-hour minimum wage in 2022, on the same day that conservative Republicans swept the statewide and congressional races. In 2024, Montanans voted to add abortion-rights protections to their state’s Constitution, even as they rejected the pro-choice Democratic Senator Jon Tester’s reelection bid. In Idaho, petitions with 110,000 signatures have been filed this year to force a referendum that could codify abortion rights in the state.

What Democratic loyalists often fail to take into account is that patterns of partisanship—some decades old, some developed since Trump upended our politics—can overwhelm ideology and, quite frequently, logic. States that once sent liberal lions like Idaho’s Frank Church and South Dakota’s George McGovern to the Senate no longer give Democrats a chance, just as Republicans struggle to compete in former GOP bastions across New England and along the West Coast. But what if Western and Southern voters are given a chance to vote for populist economics—and against forever wars—without having to tick Democratic boxes on their ballots? Could that create a new political dynamic in historically uncompetitive red states?

That’s the question Osborn started asking in 2024 and that’s now being asked by independent House and Senate candidates from Alaska to Mississippi. They are doing so at a turbulent moment when the upheaval that Trump has brought to American politics has reframed partisanship in this country, leading to a situation in which Republicans are under pressure from the president to march in lockstep with his agenda, and Democrats are under equally immense pressure to fall into line as a one-size-fits-all opposition to an erratic and dangerous executive. But tens of millions of Americans bristle at rigid partisan politics.

James Madison warned more than two centuries ago that the nation’s burgeoning democracy would be ill-served by a factionalized partisanship in which “the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and…measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.”

Despite such warnings, the drafters of the Constitution established a haphazard system that was quickly corrupted by partisans. After 1854, when the Republican Party was formed, the two-party system became firmly entrenched—and things have mostly stayed that way ever since. Republicans and Democrats have fought bitterly over the years, yet they have usually been on the same page regarding their duopoly, recognizing that, while they might have to divide power between themselves, they didn’t necessarily have to share it with anyone else.

Entire books have been written on the barriers to independent and third-party candidacies. In states across the country, independents often face staggering requirements to qualify as candidates—including daunting signature demands and tight deadlines for petitions—as well as the prospect of being placed in a hard-to-find spot on the ballot. The hurdles to getting onto the debate stage are high, and the media is inclined to cover two-party horse races rather than the competition of ideas. More than 100 years ago, Eugene V. Debs, the labor leader who ran for president five times on the Socialist Party line, said of his major-party rivals, “They are opposed to each other on no question of principle but purely in a contest for the spoils of office.”

In such a rigged system, third parties and independent movements in the United States are rarely recalled as anything more than momentary blips on the political radar. Most other democracies have robust multiparty systems, usually with their own major parties but also with politically viable minor parties that win places in parliaments, form coalitions, and influence policy. For too many Americans, on the other hand, elections are not a question of which party to enthusiastically support but which party they most despise—a real but limited choice between “the lesser of two evils.” And the tough reality for the Democrats in a number of red states is that most voters hate them more than they do the Republicans.

Jon Tester, who represented Montana for 18 years as a rural Democrat with a populist streak, lost his bid for a fourth Senate term in 2024 at least in part because his party label had become toxic. Republicans and their allies have fueled this toxicity by pouring tens of millions of dollars into crude and intentionally divisive campaigns that lie about immigrants, trans people, and diversity programs. But Democrats have not helped themselves by failing at the national level to position themselves as allies of farmers and rural Americans. Whatever the exact reason for the party’s unpopularity, Tester says he’s witnessed a real shift since he first ran for the Senate in 2006. “During my last two races, the Democratic Party was poison in my attempts to get re-elected,” he wrote in a widely circulated text message earlier this year. “That is not to say that is the only reason I got beat in 2024…but it was [a] hell of an anvil.” This year, Tester is backing Bodnar, a Rhodes scholar who served the past eight years as president of the University of Montana.

Bodnar and other red-state independents are distinct from the blue-state candidates who’ve sought independent ballot lines, such as the Chicago Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez. The democratic socialist filed to run as an independent after US Representative Chuy García chose not to seek reelection at the last minute, securing the Democratic line for a García aide. Illinois officials have moved to block bids by Sigcho-Lopez and another independent.

Another candidate running as an independent this year was the former Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, who points out, “I’m a revolutionary socialist—I’ve always run as an independent.” She’s challenging Democratic US Representative Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, with the mission of “building the strongest anti-war, anti-genocide election campaign in the nation.” The Stranger, an influential Seattle outlet, gave her campaign a boost in early July when it announced, “Kshama Sawant has the best chance of unseating incumbent Rep. Adam Smith, the unapologetic AIPAC darling whose weapons industry funding and long pro-war career have made him a pariah in his own district.” But Sawant fell short in a multi-party August primary that picked two November candidates.

Plenty of progressive Democrats and reformers have brought antiestablishment messages into the 2026 party primaries, including members and allies of the Democratic Socialists of America who have beaten incumbents and won open-seat contests from New York City to Colorado. But for many of this year’s independent candidates, frustration with the Democratic Party’s deference to the billionaire class has reached a breaking point.

“Ever since the [2010] Citizens United decision, billionaires and super PACs have been able to buy access, write policy, and drown out the voices of everyday working people. It’s not a government of, by, or for the people anymore; it’s a government bought and paid for by the highest bidder. And I refuse to be part of that,” says Ty Pinkins, a Mississippi lawyer who was the state’s 2024 Democratic nominee for the US Senate but this year is running as an independent. Pinkins announced his exit from the Democratic fold in a scathing 2025 essay in which he recalled the party’s response when he started thinking about challenging the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, in 2026. “The first question, over and over and over again, was, ‘How much money do you have? How much have you raised?’” he wrote. “Not values. Not vision. Just dollars.” Pinkins now faces Hyde-Smith and Democratic jurist Scott Colom in November.

The independents say that the money race has excluded candidates—and even entire states—from the calculations of party strategists. Todd Achilles, a former Idaho Democratic legislator, says he is running as an independent Senate candidate this year because the Democratic Party “has given up on little red states like Idaho.”

This frustration with both Democrats and Republicans is what inspired Osborn, who in 2024 won 46 percent of the vote for an independent challenge to Republican Senator Deb Fischer. Now back on the ballot in 2026, Osborn is telling Nebraskans that he’s running for the Senate because he wants to “challenge the system.” That’s a popular message: A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that 62 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction, while just 30 percent said it’s moving in the right direction.

But Osborn’s critique goes far beyond the objections raised by Democratic candidates about the failure of a Republican-controlled Congress to check and balance the president’s kingly abuses of power. In Osborn’s case, the challenge is to the Democrats themselves, and to an American political process that has historically limited voters’ options to a pair of entrenched but not particularly well-liked parties.

Osborn rips into both parties for all “the millionaires” in Congress who are “working for the billionaires and doing their bidding.” An industrial mechanic by trade, he led members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 50G in a nationally recognized strike at a Kellogg’s plant in Omaha in 2021. “I feel like there is still an appetite for my brand of politics,” he says. “I still believe that we need more champions for people who work for a living. I don’t think we have enough of that.”

Voters appear to agree. The number of Americans who identify as independents is now almost twice that of either major party. Trump’s miserable second term has led many independents who backed Republicans (including Trump himself) just a few years ago to lean toward the Democrats as the 2026 midterms approach. But as a Gallup analysis points out, “these party shifts do not indicate that Americans are warming to the Democratic Party. In fact, favorable ratings of the Democratic Party are no better than those of the Republican Party, and are among the worst Gallup has recorded for the Democratic Party historically.”

The inability of the Democrats to lock in an advantage even in the midst of Trump’s failed presidency cannot be severed from the frustration voters have with money in politics and its corruption of policy on everything from healthcare and gas prices to the development of AI data centers.

Sixty percent of voting-age Americans now say billionaires have too much influence on the politics of the country, according to a recent Politico survey. The poll also found that 39 percent of adults believe that money has the power to buy election results, and another 34 percent say it can significantly influence who and what gets on the ballot.

“People understand that the political system in this country is largely corrupt—both parties,” Sanders says. “Why is that? You know the answer. The answer is that you have billionaires in both political parties [who] determine what legislation gets to the floor and who is the candidate.”

This fall’s election results will help determine whether it’s possible to break these patterns. Osborn argues that now is the time “to create a coalition that the state of Nebraska’s never seen before…under one umbrella, with the idea and the truth that working-class people deserve a seat at the table in the United States Senate.”

Languages of Home is John Edgar Wideman’s first collection of essays, profiles, and creative nonfiction. Although it is a welcome addition to his oeuvre, its emergence might be surprising to Wideman’s closest readers. While a master novelist and memoirist, he tends not to be nostalgic or precious about his past work. He doesn’t like looking back, especially at his own literary record.

Wideman may even greet Languages with some ambivalence. He seems to suggest as much in “Joe Wood,” a gorgeous piece from his mesmeric, elegiac 2024 book of fiction and nonfiction, Slaveroad, in which the voice narrating “Joe Wood” worries that collecting his nonfiction would only lead to “inevitable disappointment.” That voice belongs to a writer—simultaneously Wideman-like and not Wideman at all—who, upon scanning his editor’s proposal for a book that sounds a lot like Languages, ponders the futility of such projects:

My initial reaction was who needs it—the who including in the first place, as usual, myself: Why task myself to stir up memories and revisit thoughts and ideas that I probably would just as soon forget, if I’d not already forgotten. Old words nobody else needs either. Writing largely ignored by the reading public when it originally appeared in print—commissioned essays, bits of memoir, lit crit, social and political commentary, woe-is-me victim statements protesting the outrageous, murderous discrimination still visited daily upon people who supposedly enjoy the equality promised by democracy, guaranteed by America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Glancing again at the proposed book, the narrator notices two pieces—“the preface to an anthology of Gulf Coast folktales Zora Neale Hurston had col-lected; an essay I’d contributed to a book about Malcolm X”—missing from the table of contents. He explains that those two essays need to be included, because he continues to draw “substance and reassurance” from their subjects. With “their renewed presence” and his “remembrance of their giant gifts,” the narrator might mitigate the “long-distance loneliness, the sense of wasted time and failure” that comes from revisiting his writing.

Both Wideman’s foreword to the Hurston collection, Every Tongue Got to Confess, and his essay “Malcolm X: The Art of Autobiography,” first published in Joe Wood’s Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, appear in Languages of Home, making this new book a hub of crosstalk among the works in Wideman’s catalog, stretching from these 32 anthology introductions, book prefaces, magazine articles, and literary reviews to Slaveroad and his 1967 novel A Glance Away. In these pieces, you’ll find Wideman thinking through Black history and ethics, interrogating the legacies of violence in American life, and imagining how strong art can lead us to those elsewheres of dreams and possibility. In this way, Languages is an archival distillation of Wideman’s six-decade writing career, specifically in terms of his essays. But this compendium is also something more: It is a craft book about the African American literary tradition and Black vernacular practices, the aesthetic resources that both bestow, and the art of improvising in and on the essay form.

In his prefatory notes on Hurston, Wideman shares an anecdote from his early years as a professor of African American literature. In 1968, a group of Black undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania approached him with a request: Please offer and lead a course on Black American literature. Wideman, who was then teaching in Penn’s Department of English, demurred, arguing that his “education, social conditioning, and status as the only tenure-track assistant professor of color in the entire College of Arts and Sciences” precluded him from teaching such a class. Watching the students’ response to his “brisk, precise dismissal,” he saw

the cloud, the almost instantaneous dulling and turning away and shrinking inward of the students’ eyes speaking a painful truth: I had not simply said no to a course, I’d said no to them, to who they were, who I was in my little cubicle in Bennett Hall, to the beleaguered island of us, our collective endeavor to make sense of the treacherous currents that had brought us to an Ivy League university and also threatened daily to wipe out the small footholds and handholds we fashioned to survive there.

Wideman reversed his decision later that day. Designing a syllabus for that class initiated his training in and teaching of Black aesthetics. In 1971, he established and chaired the Afro-American Studies Program, and as he explains in his 1988 essay “The Black Writer and the Magic of the Word,” his commitment to Black writing and culture transformed his own literary art.

Arranged chronologically, Languages of Home records how the author’s immersive studies reformed his writing. While the personal essays and criticism from the 1970s and ’80s are a public record of Wideman’s education in African American literature and cultural practices, the creative nonfiction of the ’90s and aughts displays his growing authority on matters of justice and the weight of witnessing, the technical properties of autobiographical writing, the stories of Emmett and Louis Till, the liminality of Dennis Rodman, the “hedge against oblivion” that siblings can offer us, the intonations and silences of Thelonious Monk’s music, and the powerful frequencies of time and harmony that one can hear in doo-wop singing.

In pieces like “Defining the Black Voice in Fiction,” Wideman riffs on Gayl Jones, Richard Wright, and Charles Chesnutt to identify what he calls the “unity in diversity” of Black writing. He also goes on to name several of the traits that these Black authors share and how each writer in this larger tradition is compelled to improvise their own singular, personal, aesthetic theories that advance the tradition and, simultaneously, literary art writ large. Reviewing Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues, Wideman remarks that “the fundamental ritual” of Black speech is one’s instruction in and experimental extension of its “evocative…transforming” practices. Precisely analyzing how Murray has assembled his book, Wideman then concludes:

The way Stomping the Blues is put together—the rhythmic counterpoint between words and images; its rhetorical strategies, the stylized intimacy of the narrative voice, the voice’s wide range of speech and literary styles, its incantatory use of exhortation and magic formula; the embodiment of black speech rituals (i.e., signifying, dozens): the constant metaphorical links between language and music, dance movement and speech—point to structural continuities in the various media of Afro-American expressive culture. Murray’s book literally evokes the Good Time atmosphere of the Saturday Nite Function. How we learn about the blues is part of what we learn.

Much like Murray, Chesnutt’s formal and rhetorical innovations influence and guide Wideman the essayist. In a 1972 essay for The American Scholar, and then later in his 1985 preface to Charles W. Chesnutt and the WPA Slave Narratives, he details how Chesnutt rigorously re-envisioned the rules of world building in fiction. Altering “the traditional frame which emasculated black speech,” Chesnutt helped the writers who followed him to recognize “the rich possibilities” found in Black oral narrative practice “when it is transmitted into written word.”

Since then, Black American writers have been transmitting their individual improvisations on Chesnutt’s innovations. Richard Wright, Wideman tells us, “viewed racial conflict in American society as a struggle over the nature of reality.” Black artists writing realist fiction had to challenge and defy that style’s guidelines to represent their realities in print. Chesnutt, according to Wideman, was the first writer to design a defiant Black-realist mode: juxtaposing “the dialect voice with standard literary discourse (a code for the real), dramatizing the inadequacy of the assumptions (encoded in literary discourse as part of the real) that locked the black voice and black character into conventionalized, formulaic molds.” If the old literary molds could not imagine or encapsulate Black humanity, then Chesnutt’s works modeled how African American writers could devise new formal and grammatical rules for representing Black speech and reality in novels and short stories.

Drawing from Roland Barthes’s S/Z, Wideman argues that through this oral mode, now put down in written form, Black writers have revealed that “the code of novelistic realism refers to a pictorial code which is itself not ‘reality’ but a set of conventions for depicting reality within the frame of a classical painting.” Artists such as Wright, Hurston, and Jones, Wideman argues, pushed the tradition in a range of new directions, attacked “the authority” of older practices of literary expression, and therefore bridged not only the gaps between Black speech and literature but also between the written word and experience. In this way, they not only formed “one of the unities in diversity which substantiate a Black Tradition in American Literature,” but they also remade the national literature, inventing aesthetic and intellectual possibilities otherwise not available in it.

The proximity between life and art borne out in the Black American literary tradition, however, created its own burdens, as Wideman also notes. Weak readings arise, he observes, as a result of critics who interpret Black writers “by examining the circumstances of their lives rather than by examining what they wrote.” For Wideman, this can be clearly seen in “the tendency among critics to divide Wright’s life into segments. Based on a broad outline of his life and treatment of each segment separately, the major phases of Wright’s career…are used as proof of a disintegrating rather than an evolving art and personality.” Though biography and history can be useful in literary interpretation, they can also obscure the artist and overwhelm the art. When critics reckon with African American writing on its own terms, Wideman suggests, they can face its power and genius most immediately.

Wideman’s reluctance to look backward seems to be motivated by his desire to keep his past labors from inhibiting his consistent creative output. Interviewed by Elias Rodriques for The Nation in 2021, Wideman explained: “I don’t want to look back. What’s in it for me? One of the scariest things is picking up a story and reading a line and thinking, ‘Why did I spend my time doing that?’ or ‘I wish I had a red pencil to get this boy in better shape.’” Yet what is striking is that although Wideman has long been ambivalent about history and biography playing a role in the critical appraisal of Black literature and art, both have also long haunted his literary works. After the completion and release of his third novel, The Lynchers, in 1973, Wideman entered a seven-year period of “‘woodshedding,’ as [jazz] musicians would say,” a complex, experimental conversion of his own biographical circumstances and family history into the basic material of literary art.

Playing one-on-one with the Black tradition, Wideman recapitulated the lessons he’d learned from his criticism, recalibrated his approach to writing, rejuvenated his prose musically, and crystallized a new style that simultaneously embodied the tradition, renewed it, and moved it into the future. These adjustments served his art and production enormously. Among the innovations of these books is Wideman’s transposing a very real place, the Homewood section of Pittsburgh—what we might call, after Albert Murray, his “briar patch”—into a very special setting in American literature.

Wideman accomplished this first in his 1981 short-story collection Damballah, in which a history of Homewood is established through interrelated stories tracing the French family’s lineage from slavery to the city, and in his novel from the same year, Hiding Place, which tells the story of how Tommy French hides in his reclusive great-grand-aunt Bess’s Hill District house after a botched robbery turns murderous. Wideman then rounded out his now-classic trio of fictional works with the 1983 award-winning novel Sent for You Yesterday, about a novelist and intellectual, Doot—another French family member—who experiences an artistic revival when he learns how to interpolate Homewood’s vernacular speech and blues-idiom music into his stories.

One year later, in his canonical Homewood-focused memoir Brothers and Keepers, Wideman explored his relationship with Robby, his then-incarcerated youngest brother. Robby’s imprisonment led Wideman to put his burgeoning command of African American literary aesthetics to use in narrating the intertwined histories of Homewood and his own family’s lived experience. When he taught Black Fire—the foundational anthology of Black Arts Movement writing and criticism edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal—to his UPenn undergraduate students, he began to see how the young, rebellious Black men in his native Homewood walked “the streets with, as one of the Black Fire writers put it, dynamite growing out of their skulls.” In Homewood, as in his studies of Black writing, Wideman found the aesthetic resources for remaking his own art: The neighborhood became “a repository of black insight, survival techniques, and expressive strategies [for] performing emancipatory rites.” As Wideman writes in the collection’s eponymous essay from 1985, some of Homewood’s powers are preserved in its “bilingual, Creole, maroon, bastardized, miscegenated, cross-cultural acceptance of itself in the mirror only it can manufacture.”

Homewood’s vernacular modes were, Wideman discovered, an expansive, enlivening archive of rhetorical and narrative practices. In the 2008 novel Fanon, Wideman parallels his mother’s style of flattening and fattening “perspective” in her stories with the images in the collages of the Homewood-reared painter Romare Bearden. Both, he notes, find ways to cram “everything, everyone, everywhere into the present,” into spoken and visual narratives that “flow, intimate and immediate.” Their stories are “truly democratic—each detail counts equally, every part matters as much as any grand design. Size and placement don’t highlight forever some items at the expense of others.”

As readers progress through Languages, Wideman turns away from explication—teaching us how Black writers, including himself, make art—and toward the making of that art. In this way, Languages is a guidebook about writing but also an illustration of it. In his guise as artisan, Wideman, like Bearden, is a turntablist, sampling and collaging both fiction and nonfiction. He takes his readers to Cairo and Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City. He details his movements through these cities in a first-person voice that sometimes breaks and pivots into a formal interview or shifts into and out of a personal essayist/memoirist stance. Using typographical markers and rhetorical and scenic changes, Wideman encourages his readers to do their own cutting and connecting beyond any essay’s boundaries. As he suggests in an addendum to “Looking at Emmett Till,” his profound essay about the “unhealed because untended” wound of Till’s murder, readers and writers alike must embrace the imperatives of “imaginative truth-telling”—a form of “communication that gives the lie to language as fact.” “All information,” he continues, “includes a point of view, intention, and author. Facts pretend this isn’t so. Good writing reminds us everyone’s responsible for dreaming a world, and the dream, the point of view embodied by it, within it, is as close to fact, to reality, as we ever get.”

In his 1990s magazine writing, especially his efforts in Esquire, one finds Wideman mixing and matching brilliantly, urging his readers to accept their responsibilities in understanding the worlds around them and dreaming up new ones. Often, basketball serves as a performance model for such imagining. Basketball, especially playground pickup hoop, he argues, is infused with “the spirit of our American place, not the marketplace, mind you, but the vernacular, always-up-for-grabs agency of cultural change, creativity, and possibility.” In “Michael Jordan Leaps the Great Divide,” he evacuates the air from glossy-magazine celebrity-athlete puffery and sculpts from its constituent elements—travel writing, interviews, sports reporting, and personal writing—an avant-garde essayistic statuary. Here, Jordan becomes a Black-vernacular performer whose hang-time artistry, Wideman dreams, might release Americans from their racial strictures.

In a profile of Denzel Washington that was written in anticipation of the actor’s star turn in Spike Lee’s 1998 basketball movie He Got Game, Wideman further explores how basketball can free America from its racial strictures but also how it can sometimes imprison us. Breaking out of a close focus on Washington, he asks his readers why the film’s hero, Jesus Shuttlesworth (played by Ray Allen), must leave Coney Island to fulfill his promising basketball future:

Why does this sharp, affecting, skywalking film low-bridge itself with a tired trope? Why is one more African-American protagonist’s quest for integrity, for actualization, identity, and fulfillment, predictably enacted within the framework of escaping home?

Illustrating Wideman’s particular intellectual debts to W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, “Dead Black Men” observes the gulf between known and experienced reality while offering readers a trenchant, sophisticated, and melancholic study of Los Angeles in the aftermath of the 1992 uprising: There is the LA we know, or think we know, and then there is the LA that is full of a “whole lot of people, black, white, all colors in this country and in other countries,” forced to perform “the function of a captive, exploited, expendable source of labor and resources, colonized, sweatshopped, indentured, commandeered, apprenticed, the labor that built our country into a world power.”

Wideman’s writing on Los Angeles also anticipates his 2002 treatise “Whose War: The Color of Terror.” In the 21st century’s political discourse, he reminds us, not only does “terror” incarcerate all of us and return us to the old divides and perimeters of colonialism: “To label an enemy a terrorist confers the same invisibility a colonist’s gaze confers upon the native.” Worse yet, it also enables the state to proclaim that it is “besieged by terrorists” and therefore cannot be held accountable for its own actions.

The nation-state’s cries of terror have driven it to terrorize racialized and marginalized American communities. “We’ve accumulated centuries of experience dealing with problems of marginality,” Wideman writes, “problems that are suddenly on center stage for the whole society: inadequacy of language, failure of institutions, a disintegrating metropolitan vision that denies us or swallows us, that attracts and repels, that promises salvation and extinction. We’ve always been outsiders, orphans, bastard children, hard-pressed to make our claims heard.” While language and narrative can initiate new forms of freedom, they can also alienate, isolate, instigate, and harden marginalization.

Wideman recognizes these risks; his criticism has helped him source practices for mitigating them. Discussing Hurston’s penchant for positioning “herself firmly, insistently within the language of her Africanized culture,” he explains that “her goal is self-knowledge, self-gratification as she recalls, reconstitutes, the pleasures of speaking and acting within the culture, [she] accomplishes crossover with minimal damage to integrity. Her crossings are expressed through language and customs she shares with the people she interviews and invents.” Rather than commodifying Black people or their cultures, Hurston displays otherness to a perceptive reader “by remembering who she was, who she is, by listening, respecting, by staring clear-eyed at her self, her many selves past, future and present in the primal language, the language of feeling they speak.”

Completing Languages of Home, readers might discern that Wideman’s description of Hurston’s accomplishment could also serve as an elucidation of his own achievement—in the essay and throughout his catalog. In “What Is Afro, What Is American?,” his 1986 review of Ralph Ellison’s essay collection Going to the Territory, Wideman notes that great writers are “always teaching us how to read them. One measure of greatness is how much we need the lessons, how much we appreciate them and then take them for granted. In a master’s fiction there are implicit instructions and when he or she writes about writing, the messages become insistent.” These lines apply to Wideman’s Languages of Home as well.

Yet despite the sweep and capaciousness of the collection, there is something unfinished about the book. The closing piece, “Doo-Wop,” written in 2025, just after Wideman’s 84th birthday, is a response to Mitchell Jackson’s introduction to the collection. Beginning with some riffs reminiscing about his days singing with his Homewood homeboys in a group called the Commodores, Wideman’s essay builds up into a song that ends in ellipsis, an echo that calls for more response, not a final note. Perhaps this volume’s incomplete nature is fitting. Wideman, after all, is still thinking, writing, and participating in the great call-and-response of the playground court. One might argue that his impulse to improvise, to emulate the energy of a pickup game, informs the antiphonic nature of both the essays in Languages of Home and his frequent on-court sparring with the Black literary tradition. He may not need these essays, but we do. These pages communicate ideas for and questions about pursuing freedom. The process of reading them can feel like going one-on-one with the author, or better, rolling to an outdoor court with Wideman and calling out, “Who got next?”

Watching Jesus’s flight from Brooklyn, Wideman likely saw some reminder of his own late-’50s leap from Homewood to the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League basketball player and Rhodes Scholar. He also saw the film repeating some of the constraints and limitations on Black American life that he charted in his 1992 essay “Dead Black Men and Other Fallout From the American Dream.”

The trick of Languages of Home is that the book may be what Wideman wanted all along. Because I’ve spent some time nosing around his archives at Harvard University, I know that he’s been thinking about some version of Languages of Home since the 1990s. In a file folder in one box among many others, there’s a copy of a letter that Wideman once sent to his agent, Andrew Wylie. Dated June 19, 1996, the note describes a table of contents that mirrors both the one described in “Joe Wood” and the one organizing the book in my hands now. “We do work in progress, Mitch,” Wideman doo-wops in reply to Jackson. These pieces are both a life’s work and the resonant call of Wideman’s next new song.

“Hope now has a permanent home,” Obama Foundation CEO and former senior adviser to the president Valerie Jarrett tells an audience of about three dozen reporters in a small auditorium designed for intimate, terraced seating. We are in part of what’s called the Forum, a section of the Obama Presidential Center that is open to the public. Just beyond these walls is a restaurant where one can buy an Obama Burger, and just beyond that is the Fannie Lou Hamer Walkway, sponsored by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, which provides passage to the Nancy Pelosi Garden Pavilion, placed right beside the car park, perhaps an homage to how long the former speaker held her seat in Congress. Farther afield is the rest of the center, which includes a museum, offices for the Obama Foundation, several basketball courts, a branch of the Chicago Public Library, and a playground.

Tina Tchen is here to announce the foundation’s new leadership initiatives, which are about as revealing as the perfunctory placards and memorializations of “hope” and “change” all around us. These include a mid-career program for “the next generation of leaders”—not only “NGO leaders,” we are told, but“folks who are military leaders, who are in government, who are in business, big and small, who are in academia.” Among the participants, Jarrett continues, “we have a young man who is currently the deputy mayor for sustainability in the city of London. We have Emmanuel Macron’s economic adviser. We have a woman in our last class who was the director of the Kosovo Army military-training facility. Here in Chicago, we’ve got a Morgan Stanley banker who’s doing change in their neighborhood.” Oh, I’m sure!

Tchen is soon followed by John Roberson, formerly the city of Chicago’s chief operating officer and now the incoming executive vice president of the Obama Center. Roberson tells the audience that “this is an $850 million investment in the South Side of Chicago. I’m going to say it again: $850 million. Not a single penny of government money. That’s important because that shows the intentionality of the President and Mrs. Obama.” It’s also important because it captures a notable element of Obama’s presidency: promising social change only to implement economic austerity, for example, or bailing out the big investment banks while many Americans’ mortgages went belly-up—and with them, the foundations of their lives. It’s rather like the wall downstairs, largely out of sight, where the Obama Foundation’s offices are located, which lists the names of all the workers whose labor built the project: a hollow paean to the working class, even as the center itself and the real-estate speculation around it forces such workers out of their homes. More than hope and change, irony is the order of the day at the Obama Center.

Earlier, two beleaguered-looking figures took the stage, one tall and lanky, the other diminutive but better dressed in comparison. They were Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the husband-and-wife founders of the architecture firm TWBTA, who won the commission to design the Obama Presidential Center in 2016. (To give you some perspective, the competition winners were announced right after I graduated from college, and as I write this, I am 32 years old.)

As far as large projects go, TWBTA was an interesting choice by the former president, who was intimately involved in the design process from beginning to end. At the time of their selection, Williams and Tsien were in competition with some of the most famous architects in the world, including Renzo Piano, whose Whitney Museum of American Art had just opened in Greenwich Village, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, who had just begun construction on the Shed at Hudson Yards.

TWBTA is best known for the extensive use of stone and other masonry, dramatic transitions in lighting, and spaces that feel intimate and handcrafted. (Seemingly in contrast, the interiors firm has designed boast a lot of patterns and colors, as seen in its lobbies and atria at David Geffen Hall.) While TWBTA wasn’t a household name, its small-to-medium-scale museum work, such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the former Folk Art Museum in New York, was well regarded in architectural circles. As far as architects go, it was a very Obama choice: The firm signaled erudition and sophistication while still being well-known enough to generate buzz.

However, like ma-ny other architecture firms today, TWBTA has a hard time scaling up. This is almost embarrassingly obvious when it comes to the various structures that make up the Obama Center. Instead of a single building, the center is really a sprawling campus. There’s the aforementioned Forum, the public-library branch, the Home Court (designed by a different architect), and the playground, as well as the towering, almost tomb-like museum—nearly windowless and clad from top to bottom in New Hampshire granite—which has been variously called by detractors “the Obamalisk” and “the Death Star.”

When a member of the press asked Williams about the criticism of the building’s design and its Star Wars–like qualities, he said that the museum was built for longevity and that public opinion often changes over time. An Obama Center official then interjected to say that Mark Hamill himself had come to tour the tower with Obama.

Offering their own architectural tour of the center, Williams and Tsien stood awkwardly in front of a presentation and tried to explain their process and choices. A lot of architectural communication is bullshit, but the bullshit is often revealing. As for what inspired the shape of the building, the architects say that it was “designed to look like four hands coming together.” The exact number of hands that were involved in the design, and whose hands they were, was not made clear—but the extent of Obama’s involvement certainly was, as the architectsmentioned that the president wanted the building “to be interesting from all vantage points.” This explains some of the more baffling design decisions, such as the seemingly arbitrary articulations on the surface of the façade on the southeast corner. At the opposite corner from these ridges is the text from Obama’s speech on the 50th anniversary of the March on Selma. It’s easy to joke that the words are pretty much illegible except, perhaps, by drone, which is doubly ironic—not only because it brings to mind Obama’s penchant for using drones to stealth-bomb Afghan weddings but also the use of drones by real- estate people to showcase their properties’ scale and worth.

Much as with Obama’s presidency itself, as one tours the Obama Center, one realizes that the liberal language of community and social justice has often served as a cover for economic disruption and an intense battle to privatize that which for a century has belonged to the public. The center sits on a vast area of Jackson Park, originally designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, which—despite a legal battle by the nonprofit group Protect Our Parks that was ongoing for almost 10 years before the latest lawsuit was dismissed in 2024—the Obama Foundation has essentially made its own by securing a long-term lease from the city in order to build on it. During the center’s construction, the foundation made its possession of this public park clear by removing swaths of trees, whose absence makes the plaza and the playground almost unbearably hot in the summer.

Like many large-scale ventures in real estate, the Obama Center has also not helped the community in which it was built. As it approached completion, rents in the neighboring communities of Woodlawn and South Shore began to skyrocket, with many residents being priced out of units they’d lived in for years or even decades. To help residents prepare for the onslaught of tourists, the friendly folks at Airbnb have partnered with the Obama Foundation to “host a free virtual workshop focused on helping local residents welcome new visitors, earn supplemental income, and champion their neighborhoods…building off of Airbnb’s historic donations to community organizations focused on boosting economic empowerment.” According to Airbnb’s statistics, South Side residents earned more than $15.1 million from hosting visitors through Airbnb in 2025—“income,” the company tells us, “that approximately 60 percent of hosts say helped them stay in their homes and manage the city’s rising cost of living.” Economic empowerment, indeed.

The Obama Center is not a presidential library, though many of the event’s speakers engaged in the parapraxis of calling it that. A spokesperson told me that because Obama’s was the first digital presidency, there was little need for a paper trail. Technically, the library portion is held at the National Archives in Washington, DC. For all the recent outrage about Donald Trump’s commissioning a presidential library that’s actually a hotel, the precedent has been set by his predecessor, who has built for himself a kind of complex, much of which apologizes for itself.

The center’s eight-story museum is so obviously a tourist destination that the idea that the rest of the grounds are for local people is fairly laughable. Allegedly, the lawns and gardens are there to serve as a front lawn for the community, although unlike an actual park, the monumental site, the impeccable landscaping, and the phone-scrolling rent-a-cops pretty much inhibit this outright. Beyond that, timed passes for the museum have been reserved through next year, so we will have to see how the conflict between the explicit restriction of flows of people and the purported function of public space play out.

Intended for the local community or not, the campus sprawls across Stony Island Avenue, where the Main Court—the former president’s NBA-regulation basketball court—resides with the aluminum-paneled hulkiness of a college cafeteria. (It was designed by the firm Moody Nolan, whose Chicago office is led by the local architect Renauld Deandre Mitchell.) The playground, which is the most public-facing and engaging part of the center, suffers from being exposed to direct sun but is otherwise very sweet, with tall, fast-moving slides and jungle gyms shaped like dragonflies. The landscape architecture, especially the green roof of the Forum and the parking garage, is more sensitive than the stone palazzo, complete with an unsettling, hollow-eyed bronze statue of Mr. and Mrs. Obama holding hands, that anchors the three buildings by TWBTA. It reminds me of the REACH, Steven Holl’s addendum to the Kennedy Center, which is more visually dynamic and better integrated into the site. It’s also worth saying that the two smaller buildings—the ones Obama appeared to be significantly less involved with—are not unhandsome. The scale of the Forum and the new branch of the Chicago Public Library are both grand and intimate, and the stonework—made of the same granite as the museum—is, in this context, tactile. TWBTA’s interiors for the library (which includes a reading room of Obama’s favorite books) are likewise bright and engaging.

The two smaller buildings, however, are not the main draw of the Obama Center. That would be, of course, the towering museum, which is completely out of proportion to the rest of its environment. Visually, it is more in communication with the University of Chicago than with the rest of the South Side. In addition to its inappropriate scale, there is the inappropriate scale of the granite slabs that clad the building. They are both too big to add texture and they are too small to create the desired, monumental effect that the building is a singular cast-in-one volume. Combine the outsize scale with the building’s shape, which is somewhat akin to a brutalist Himalayan salt lamp, and one really gets a sense of how mistaken the whole entity is: a massive and unsightly pillar whose awkwardness is only further amplified by the nearly indecipherable text and other stuck-on accoutrements.

When one enters the museum, it almost feels like a joke: The entryway is hostile—one is met with bright lights, security guards, and metal detectors, on the other side of which is the word HOPE in the script of a ransom note affixed to a concrete wall. After picking up an Obama audio guide, one is confronted by a series of confusing atria that feature large-scale works of public art and sculptural stairs and corridors that lead nowhere. It takes a while to find the actual passageway into the museum itself: a claustrophobic escalator cornered against the north-facing wall of the building. Fredric Jameson once remarked about John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel that even in architecture, late capitalism works tirelessly to conceal, abstract, and obfuscate flows of capital and people, and the Obama Center is perhaps as exemplary of this phenomenon as Portman’s precipitous, topsy-turvy lobbies were. The escalators turn into elevators, and the elevators have strange and private stops—to get back down from the top floor, one needs to take a separate, much larger elevator than the one they took going up.

When one finally arrives on the first floor of the museum’s exhibition space, they are greeted by a copy of the Declaration of Independence alongside Native American petitions in a glass case. There are also a handful of small displays that include artifacts from many US civil-rights struggles: the abolition movement, women’s suffrage, the fight against Jim Crow, union activism, and the social programs established during the Great Society era. And that’s about where all of the actual history in the museum stops. These displays and a backlit collage of objects from the ’60s exist merely as a backdrop for the main event: Barack Obama is born.

It is hard to describe just how much this museum is a temple to Obama. While many presidential centers have exhibitions lauding their subjects’ successes, they also tend not to equivocate on their less-successful policies. For example, the mausoleum-like Lyndon B. Johnson Library makes sure everyone knows that he fucked up in Vietnam. There is no such fair play at the Obama Center, however, which is all about celebration. Obama’s voice booms on every floor. Videos abound of him talking about how the 1990s were a time of opportunity. The walls are covered in the careful documentation of his achievements; “hope and change” is baked into the structure.

The first floor of the exhibition is the most interesting, because it covers the time when Obama was most interesting: when he was a community organizer on the South Side, when he was a state senator for Illinois, and of course the 2008 election, which was a genuinely monumental achievement. When I was 14, I attended Obama’s 2009 inauguration on a school trip and remember it very well—the freezing cold, the voice projecting over the jumbotron, the celebrations in the streets. The speech he gave was one of the few times in my life when I considered myself unabashedly proud to be an American. But what follows on the next two floors of the museum exhibition is increasingly ludicrous. The second floor tells us all about how Obama solved the Great Recession—ignoring the fact that he bailed out the banks and General Motors and left everyone else behind. Then there’s a section on his foreign policy, with titles like “Strengthening Alliances” and “Destroying Terrorist Networks.” “To destroy the terrorist groups al Qaeda and [ISIL] President Obama used every element of US power. This included the military, intelligence, diplomacy, homeland security, and a commitment to the rule of law and human rights.” This, despite the fact that the rule of law was seriously undermined by Obama’s expansion of digital surveillance and that human rights no longer applied to the many civilians who were collateral damage in the United States’ targeted strikes.

While there’s a wall and video display devoted to LGBTQ people in the military, the topic of gay rights, which were greatly expanded under Obama, is less prominent. On one of the walls, we get yet another list of Obama’s achievements: the Paris Climate Accords, the Affordable Care Act, restoring diplomatic ties with Cuba. But we get very little on how his continued expansion of the power of the executive branch ensured that Trump could—and would—undo nearly all of these.

In a learning corner for children that feels like an afterthought, one can be taught important concepts of democracy, almost all of which ring hollow, while an iPad lets visitors view “memes” (i.e., political cartoons) from history. Banned books lie behind lift-a-flaps. Several displays ask the viewer: “How would you respond?” A typical question goes something like: “Some Americans question whether freedom is granted equally—or whether certain rights should be guaranteed. If you heard: ‘My rights don’t mean as much as a rich person’s do—I can’t afford to buy a giant billboard or a bunch of ads as part of my free speech,’ how would you respond?” The correct answer is, of course, placation—your rights do matter. (Even though the question is telling the uncomfortable truth.) Another insipid display features three wells of light shining on three buttons and the question “In a 2023 poll, just 28% of Americans said they were satisfied with how our democracy is functioning. What should we do about it?” Visitors can vote for (a) “Continue to make change while upholding democracy”; (b) “Throw democracy out and start over with a new system”; or (c) “I don’t care.” It’s pretty clear at this point that we no longer live in a legitimate democracy of any kind, and yet we are forced to pretend otherwise. As is the case with the rest of the museum, the present—the here and now, the political world we currently inhabit—simply doesn’t exist. The nostalgia for the moment before the disaster and the refusal to reckon with what has actually happened since then is so palpable that at times it borders on delusion. At the Obama Center, one walks into 2008 and never leaves. “Hope and change” doesn’t disappoint, and as such it becomes little more than a brand or, perhaps worse, just something one can say without meaning it. Hope has a permanent home, as Jarrett put it. It is a tomb.

But perhaps what is most ridiculous about the Obama Center museum is the celebrity of it all. The top floor of the exhibition features a number of absolutely asinine displays: little dioramas of parties at the White House; a bust of the man himself; a comic strip about the Obamas’ dogs; a display of Michelle’s dresses; another devoted to the various species named after the former president. Many presidential libraries have a full-scale replica of the Oval Office as it was inhabited by their namesake. In the selfie age, this has more of a photo-booth feel than a historical element to it. By the time one takes the elevator to the observation deck, they’re beginning to feel drowsy with Obama fatigue. Finally, we have escaped—if only we could muster the energy to enjoy the view.

Somehow, the observation deck also has its flaws. An enclosed room at the top of the building, it has a ceiling installation consisting of a pyramid from which little blue rays of text from Obama’s Selma speech emanate. It feels overwhelmingly flat in a room that, with its stonework, textured wood walls, and gargantuan letters, is otherwise dynamic and tactile. The text that interrupts the view is perhaps one of the few interesting design choices in the entire building—one wants to reach out and grab the beveled letters. But unfortunately, once you’ve had your fill of this feature, you then make your way back into the nostalgic world of Obama adulation, taking the elevator down to the ground floor of the Forum, where you’ll be greeted by an expansive Obama-themed gift shop.

After I left the center, I began thinking about what it means as a piece of architecture. For me, it functions as a kind of cenotaph for neoliberalism: a monument—or tomb—for a subject whose body is lost or buried elsewhere. The most famous cenotaph in architecture was the one proposed for Isaac Newton, designed in 1784 by the French neoclassical architect Étienne-Louis Boullée but never built: It consisted of a single, giant, vacuous sphere. And while artifacts and objects technically exist in the Obamalisk, it is spiritually vacuous, its substance is the empty world that Obama’s presidency never actually built. It is a tomb without a body—anyone’s body.

One cannot deny that the Obama Center will have a special place in the architectural canon, not because it’s good but because it is arguably the last building of the 2010s—itself an extension of the 1990s and 2000s—built half a decade too late. The model of production for civic buildings—museums, libraries, concert halls, etc.—by famous architects, reliant on both large-scale private (and sometimes public) funding and large swaths of cheap, developable urban land, is over. The architects responsible—giants of their field—are dying, and both the operations of their firms and the scale of their projects are far less economically viable at a time when land is extremely expensive and governments are turning away from civic architecture. The buildings of this now-bygone era, such as the Whitney, the Shed, and the Paris and Hamburg philharmonic halls, are ostensibly “public-facing” while generating rents of a different kind—those that the Brazilian architectural theorist Pedro Fiori Arantes calls the “rent of form”: They make money through the increased value of the surrounding real estate, as sites for advertising and photo shoots, and as venues for the tourism industry, which has come to displace many others.

For better and for worse, this approach to architecture no longer exists, even as the Obama Presidential Center offers us one last homage to its ambition and optimism. In this way, perhaps the most tragic element of the center is just how far it ended up being from its own declared purpose, which is to foster hope and the inspiration to effect change in the hearts of its visitors. Instead, hope and change exist only in the past tense, though I guess you can buy them on a water bottle in the gift shop.

—40,000 child miners work in southern
Democratic Republic of the Congo

We juggled boastfulness with our phones
in our hands. K said he used one before I ever knew
what it was called. Then I sliced his insolence
with a photograph of a nine-year old me
holding his point-the-light-to-the-soup phone.
I was ignorant of the genesis of phones,
how the light it opened in my face came to be—
the sweats across the neck of little boys like myself.
F said Africans are ignorant in noisemaking for our wound—
to dissect the world with a shrill.
To pull every eye into the body of our drowning.
This time, it’s not cotton picking, but metal digging,
willing & unwilling. Ripping the canopies of schooling
off the backs of little children with a sack of cobalt.
I posted a change for Congo on my Instagram
& bought a new phone a year later.
Two years later, on YouTube, I watched the cobalt hands
of kids unearth the terrain the way it reiterates
the history of rubber & mutilated hands.
In Katanga, Arthur said he digs the world to live in the world—
to battle a shovel like his parents.
Richard carries a bag big as his body—
filled with red sand. Dorsan mourns his mother
with forgetfulness, a misery so big you forget your grief.
To subsist is to be capable of mourning.
what is that bright thing up there?
He asks of the light in the bulb.
Monica sits, the four-year old child
picking stones instead of brick toys.
Natalie says, my finger hurts.
Mukumba carries a lump on his neck,
as if the woes of his country like piles
unfolded inside it. I call mama on the phone,
asks how my sister, who is 3000 km away
from Katanga, fares in school—she’s doing well,
she says. I exhume my Instagram with a new protest post.
I keep watching. The world keeps watching.
Little children with faces as if the offspring of dust.

If the GOP gets wiped out in the midterms this fall, the biggest cause will likely be war-induced inflation, a double betrayal of the campaign promises that brought many new voters into the Republican fold in 2024. 

After all, two of Donald Trump’s chief attack lines against Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were that they had let inflation run rampant and that they had plunged the United States into endless conflict in the Middle East and Europe. But with his bungled, inflation-spiking war against Iran, Trump has done exactly what he warned voters his opponents would do—and turned a wide swath of the public against him. According to a late-July poll by Marquette University Law School, 76 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of inflation, and 69 percent disapprove of his handling of the Iran War.

Writing in UnHerd last week, Sohrab Ahmari, a heterodox conservative, noted that the Iran War and the rise in inflation are deeply intertwined:

In June, inflation rose to 4.2%, nearly double where it stood just before Operation Epic Fury. Gas is a fungible global commodity. Thus, even though the United States is the world’s chief net energy exporter, the supply squeeze in the Strait of Hormuz puts inflationary pressure on gas prices in America. And it’s not just gas prices which are affected, but those in many other sectors, too—from transportation to agriculture to restaurants and hospitality.

It’s hardly surprising that affordability is becoming a proxy front in the larger conflict between hawks and military restrainers on the right. Revealingly, the battle lines in this conflict revolve around whether concerns about war-induced inflation are even legitimate. The most militarist wing of the right is taking the position that inflation either isn’t real or is something the public will just have to live with in order to pay for a necessary war.

On August 3, far-right pundit Matt Walsh (best known for his rabid anti-trans rants) tweeted,

Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader. End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue. It’s one of the main reasons socialists are gaining power.

Andrew Kolvet of Talking Points USA responded with an anecdote indicating that Walsh’s concerns were shared by some young right-wingers:

One of our TPUSA college students gave me his take on affordability: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” Yeah, a lot of this is a hangover from Covid and Biden-era inflation, but the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.

Kolvet’s story about a costly burrito might seem innocuous enough, but it provoked a major backlash on the right, with many leading figures adopting the tone of angry old men scolding the young for being soft. Texas Republican Representative Dan Crenshaw, a loud advocate for belligerent imperialism, responded with a snide and supercilious post that called to mind the apocryphal story of Marie Antoinette advising starving peasants to eat cake:

Just hearing about this dumb $20 burrito debate so just thought I’d make the losers on social media angry before going to bed. Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates. The market doesn’t care what you think something “should” cost. Only communists care (they set prices remember? Then everyone starves, remember?) Are you a communist? Or are you an American adult male capable of handling his own shit?

The message of “let them eat Ramen” is surely as toxic as “let them eat cake.” One reason Crenshaw can afford to make it is that he is leaving politics after being soundly defeated in a March primary by an even more far-right candidate. But Crenshaw’s basic dismissal of inflation as a nonproblem was echoed by other hawkish Republicans, including Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who wrote, “Cry me a river. The burritos in the college cafeteria are included in your meal plan.” Vice President JD Vance, who has been trying to shore up the anti-establishment and anti-interventionist supporters that Trump won in 2024, took a potshot at the columnist by writing, “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.” Vance’s cruel jibe was personal and also irrelevant, since it ignores the fact that the administration Vance serves under has been shaped by pro-war voices such as Thiessen.

Two other pro-war pundits, Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, took the same dismissive attitude as Crenshaw and Thiessen. Adopting the tone of a snotty teacher, Shapiro wrote, “Okay, young people: a burrito does not cost $20. If you’re paying $20 for a burrito and you’re not independently wealthy, you’re doing life wrong.” On his radio program, Levin spoke at enormous grandfatherly length about the suffering of earlier generations of Americans during the Great Depression and World War II to underscore the point that, “young people today do not have it as hard as young people had it 50, 60, 78 years ago.”

Levin’s invocation of World War II underscores the weakness of his own position. In the past, Americans were willing to undergo austerity and suffering for causes they deemed just: the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. These were periods of conscription and rationing, where individual happiness was sacrificed for a collective good. But the Iran War doesn’t have anywhere near the popular support—or the existential stakes—of those earlier conflicts. If people are complaining about the price of gas and of burritos, that is not due to superficiality or softness. Rather, inflation bites even harder if it’s being caused by a war that makes no sense. Lecturing people on the nobility of belt-tightening is obnoxious behavior at the best of times, but even more offensive when done for a bad cause. Trump and allies such as Thiessen and Levin haven’t convinced anyone outside the hardcore MAGA cult that these sacrifices are worth it—and there’s no sign that that’s likely to change.

Otto von Bismarck once offered an unheeded warning against German meddling in other regions by saying the Balkans were “not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.” One can update the Iron Chancellor’s sage advice by saying the Iran War is not worth the price of one burrito.

Now that the looming Paramount–Warner Bros merger is on hold until a lawsuit from nearly a dozen states to stop it is resolved in in an Oakland, California, courtroom next June, backers of the deal have renewed their efforts to sell it as a journalistic-creative breakthrough as well as an entertainment miracle. Former Fox and CNN anchor Chris Wallace, now an adviser to Redbird Capital, which has a major stake in the deal, wrote an op-ed hymning its genius for The Hollywood Reporter. Ari Emmanuel, brother of Rahm and CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship league, which has a $1.1 billion deal with Paramount-Skydance, echoed the same basic case in The Wall Street Journal. But it was the New York Times salvo from Paramount-Skydance’s chief executive, David Ellison, that drew the most attention, as he defended his bid to absorb Warner-Discovery into the maw of Skydance, as well as his checkered first year in journalism at CBS.

First and foremost, Ellison hoped to use his platform at the paper of record to take back the narrative from the hundreds of petition signers, film-industry critics, journalists, and politicians who have decried the bid from Paramount-Skydance to buy out Warner Bros. Discovery for $111 billion as a move to drastically narrow the independence of both filmmaking and news-gathering in the MAGA age. “When California’s attorney general, 11 other state attorneys general and, a day later, the Writers Guild of America sued to stop the deal, I stayed quiet,” Ellison wrote in a disingenuous show of humility. “I quickly learned such restraint has costs. While I was silent, others were happy to write my story for me. No more.”

The ensuing testimony was something well shy of the inspiring story of a scrappy young producer who arrived in Hollywood with nothing but a dream and his father’s Oracle fortune in his pocket. It was a list of talking points that relied more on familiar right-wing claims about the media industry than on a case to deliver even more corporate control and news-making influence into the hands of the Skydance conglomerate. Since a Warner Bros takeover would leave David Ellison, and more alarmingly, his MAGA-devoted father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison, exercising near-unprecedented control over the production of theatrical films, multiple cable networks, and both CBS and CNN, Ellison’s broadside offered little substantive response to the deal’s detractors in multiple industries, unions, and the sprawling global audience their platforms will reach.

Ellison pointedly disregarded such concerns, opting instead to defend his proposed stewardship of CNN in the wake of Bari Weiss’s controversial ideological makeover of his CBS News. “The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.”

And with good reason. During the period of this deal and his buyout of Paramount and its properties, David Ellison was spotted at June’s White House UFC bout sitting next to President Trump. Ellison also attended the State of the Union address as the guest of the now-deceased Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and convened a dinner in Trump’s honor during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend in April.

Trump has been clear in spelling out what he wants. “It’s imperative that CNN be sold,” he said at a cabinet meeting last December. When he’s not deriding network anchor Jake Tapper as “Fake Tapper,” he calls CNN a “disgrace.” He clearly wants some guarantees that the Ellisons will steer CNN into MAGA-friendly territory, in much the same way that Weiss has made CBS News an obliging outlet for Trumpian agitprop. Trump’s cabinet officials have fallen into line; during a Pentagon briefing this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth whined about CNN’s coverage of his debacle in Iran, saying, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” (Ellison’s PR flacks immediately shot back, “Editorial independence will absolutely be maintained. It is maintained at CBS; it will be maintained at CNN.”)

At a Simon Wiesenthal Center gala last December, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav accepted an award and recounted an earlier episode of government censorship—unrelated to CBS—in his acceptance speech. He drew a moral from the episode that seemed squarely aimed at David Ellison, who was in the crowd: “When the government controls the news, that is the end of democracy.”

Ellison’s op-ed sought to deflect attention from the prospect of journalistic interference from Trump’s White House and invoke the declining public trust in the media—a trend vastly accelerated by the MAGA movement’s demonization of the “fake news” industry and journalists as “enemies of the people.” The remedy for the media industry’s crisis in public confidence, Ellison advises is to redouble its commitment to impartial news-gathering. “Great news organizations like CNN and CBS News are here to tell it straight down the middle,” he writes. “That requires newsrooms that reflect the whole world, not one side of it. And it requires independence. Our journalists will continue to answer to the facts and to all the people they serve—not to any party or cause.”

There’s just one problem with this line of thinking: There is no “middle” in journalism—particularly when it comes to covering politics. Political parties are not stationary objects that a “straight down the middle” journalist can mathematically triangulate and break down into an easily digestible equation for public consumption. The GOP moves constantly to the pseudo-populist right. Recent primary elections have shown that the base of the Democratic Party is moving to the left. How do you find the middle with two moving targets? Ellison invokes the exhausted ghost of Edward R. Murrow as his supposed avatar of the endangered straight-news sensibility—but Murrow is best known today for his takedown of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy and his stooge, lawyer Roy Cohn. Now Trump, Cohn’s best-known protégé, is keen to exploit his transactional leverage with the Ellisons, who need his approval for the deal to go through, to remake Murrow’s former network in his own image.

As for the entertainment industry, Ellison seeks to disarm his detractors by announcing that the industry they want to preserve is already dead. In assessing the antitrust actions now putting the merger on hold, he says that “the states claim this deal will give one company too much influence over theatrical releases and cable operators…while [the Writers Guild of America] argues that our combined market power will hurt writers. Both suits imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists—an industry ruled by a handful of legacy studios.”

One hundred and 11 billion dollars is a lot of money to pay for something that no longer exists. Currently in theaters, Disney’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day has generated $655 million in 10 days at the summer box office and Universal’s The Odyssey has grossed $461 million in 24 days. Ellison has promised that his proposed merger will put out 30 feature films a year. Like his promise of an unbiased and confidence-building news industry, that claim has met with skepticism, because no studio has done that in 25 years. What’s more, the newly merged Paramount-WB would set out to turbocharge its production arm, as the company would be saddled with a massive debt load.

When Ellison talks about “a Hollywood that no longer exists,” he’s gesturing toward the real quarry of the Warners deal—streaming and Netflix. During a quarterly-report call in March, Ellison made this objective plain to his investors: “We will combine the streaming portfolios of the two companies into one stronger platform over the coming years.” The same analysis held for Skydance’s earlier absorption of Paramount+ and HBO; Ellison sold that deal by observing that “there are more than 200 million [direct-to-consumer] subscribers today, and more than 100 countries and territories worldwide, positioning us to compete effectively with the leading streaming services in today’s marketplace.”

Competing with Netflix was also the prime directive behind the Disney company’s $71 billion takeover of Fox—a stand-alone legacy studio owned by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp. “The opportunity to buy Fox first came up later that year,” Disney CEO Robert Iger said at the time of the 2019 buyout. “In fact, just a few months after the board approved us buying the majority share of BAMTech—which was done for one reason, to go into the direct-to-consumer business—Rupert and I sat down and talked about a transaction…. We would not have done that transaction had we not decided to go in this direction, because—if we hadn’t, we would have been looking at that business and through a traditional lens.”

Competing with Netflix and expanding Disney’s market share in streaming proved to be an impossible mission for the recombined Disney-Fox company. Since the merger, Disney has lost billions in streaming and only this year generated a profit with advertising and by raising subscription fees. The merger cost some 7,000 jobs in post-Covid downsizing. Disney and Fox’s combined film and television output shrank. Consumers now pay more for far less. This year, Disney’s ABC network lost the Oscar broadcast to Google as it aggressively expands its own streaming business. In a Disney quarterly call, Wells Fargo analyst Stephen Cahill argued that the company should phase out its streaming platform and return to only making and licensing content.

Seven years later, Paramount-Skydance wants to make the same mistake. Acquiring Warner Bros. means that the parent company will take on billions in debt while it reorganizes (read downsizes) the two giant media companies at the center of the deal. To get the takeover financed, Skydance has recruited three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, while also making itself available to a Trump White House keen to prosecute the president’s many vendettas against CNN.

Studios like Sony have done just fine without entering the streaming business and just producing movies and shows. Despite everything, the unchallenged faith of Hollywood takeover kings like Iger and the Ellisons is to become a Netflix—which in practice means warping and disappearing huge swaths of their own legacy-media world in a business model that’s a proven dead end. Perhaps it’s time to ditch that unsustainable goal and break up Netflix instead.

Certainly, that was the thinking of Paramount-Skydance when it looked like Netflix had won the bidding earlier this year for Warner Bros. and the word “antitrust” entered the chat. Suddenly, the free-market billionaires at Oracle and the Trump administration felt capitalism had gone too far (i.e., they were about to lose). The same issue came up during the 2023 labor strike by the WGA and Screen Actors Guild. Miles Mogulescu, a former business affairs VP for MGM/US and current labor union documentarian, argued in the Los Angeles Times that for Hollywood unions to be able to negotiate with the streaming giants, companies like Netflix, which produce their own content for their platforms, must be forced to separate their production arms from their distribution operations. As a precedent, he cited the Supreme Court’s Paramount Decrees of 1948, which required the studios to spin off their theater chains in order to reduce vertical integration in the industry. It forced the Hollywood studios to finally relinquish the deep reach of their chains that strangled competition at local levels—a move that notably broadened the range of films audiences saw.

In 2025, James Cameron waded into the long-simmering theaters debate between streamers and traditional studios over what metrics production companies should meet to have their films qualify for Oscar consideration. Cameron argued that the playing field should be leveled with a requirement that Netflix (and, one presumes, all streamers its size) release a film in at least 2,000 theaters for at least a month. Currently, the rule (meant for indie filmmakers) is to release a film seven consecutive days in brick-and-mortar theaters in designated cities for it to be eligible for nomination. That would secure the standing of independently produced films in Oscar competition, since those offerings can disappear quickly from movie screens but the Netflix movie sits on your Netflix home screen for months of in-house hype until Oscar night.

In all these areas—be it the specter of an omnivorous giant like Paramount-Skydance, threats to working conditions highlighted by Hollywood trade unions, or making the Oscars less skewed against independents—the same problem continually emerges as the central worry: Netflix is too big. At some point, we have to ask why we’re going to such enormous lengths to adapt an entire industry to one company’s model. If Netflix is too big to fail, that means it’s also too big for its competitors to have a fair shot at success.

There’s still ample time for the Warner merger to be stopped in court or simply collapse under its own rickety leviathan-scale debt load. When the Ellisons bought Paramount, the silver lining was that David Ellison is something the industry hasn’t seen in a half-century: a true producer-owner of a legacy studio. He came into the business as a filmmaker—that’s all he’s ever done, and that’s all he wants to do. It’s been 50 years since the last one, Jack Warner, retired to Palm Springs. Ellison still has the chance to be the owner of a great studio—but he shouldn’t be the CEO of two.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

In the wake of Abdul El-Sayed’s insurgent victory in Michigan’s US Senate primary last week, the Democratic Party rallied to support its newly designated nominee in a striking show of unity, despite a singularly bitter and expensive establishment crusade to secure his defeat. El-Sayed’s chief rival for the nomination, Representative Haley Stevens, delivered a swift and gracious concession statement, and a clutch of big-name aspirants to the 2028 presidential descended on Detroit for an El-Sayed kickoff rally, further driving home the party’s determination to stand behind its nominee in the race to win a swing-state seat pivotal to its hopes for a Senate majority this November.

There was one countermovement seeking to squelch all this post-primary Kumbaya momentum, though: the centrist advocacy group Third Way, which seized on the victory of El-Sayed and two other left insurgent House candidates in the Michigan balloting to announce a new $15 million campaign to discredit democratic socialism in this midterm cycle and the 2028 national election. In touting this effort to New York Times political correspondent Shane Goldmacher, Third Way president Jonathan Cowan claimed that the group wouldn’t be targeting individual candidates but rather the Democratic Socialists of America, which he deemed “a mortal danger” to the Democratic Party, thanks to its hard-left positions on issues such as the Gaza war, crime and justice, and the top-heavy American political economy. Cowan also wasted little time in undermining his own above-the-fray messaging by citing the Michigan primary results as a call to centrist arms: “It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states.” As Goldmacher writes, the new Third Way campaign will “include opposition research into D.S.A., polling, social media programs and educating Democratic activists and leaders. It would target both proud democratic socialists and those such as Dr. El-Sayed, whom he derided as performing the ‘D.S.A. dodge’—flirting with democratic socialists enough to get their organizing manpower and support while remaining distant enough to avoid the explicit label.”

It’s a novel strategy, to put things mildly, for a putatively Democratic think tank and advocacy group to devote such a massive outlay of resources to discrediting an ascendant popular movement in the Democratic Party during a high-stakes midterm cycle. But since its founding more than two decades ago, Third Way has hewed to the prime centrist directive encoded in its name, which stems from the 1990s conservative leadership putsches in the Democratic and British Labour Parties: Always punch left.

The organization actually began life as Americans for Gun Safety, a difference-trimming advocacy group financed by tech billionaire Andrew McKelvey; its chief objective was to discredit the long-standing, and legally sound, position that the Second Amendment doesn’t sanction individual gun ownership, and focus more on incremental measures like closing the gun-show loophole to instant unregulated firearms purchases. Americans for Gun Safety won the substantive policy debate in the Democratic Party in short order, and the US Supreme Court formalized its victory when it endorsed—or more accurately, fabricated—a right to individual gun ownership in the disastrous 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller ruling.

By then, Third Way was in full swing. Still captained by former Americans for Gun Safety President Cowan, the group swiftly set about foisting a structurally identical agenda of faux-savvy capitulation to the right on the Obama White House, offering up platitudinous defenses of the failed 2012 “grand bargain” to preserve regressive tax cuts and institute permanent austerity in social spending. When first-term Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren produced a plan to expand Social Security benefits the following year, Cowan and his Third Way colleague Jim Kessler howled (in The Wall Street Journal, of course) that the proposal was “disastrous” and “reckless,” a species of “populist political and economic fantasy.”

That would be the verdict from a group overwhelmingly funded by Wall Street bankers, healthcare companies, and DC lobbying clearinghouses. As Lee Fang reported for The Nation in 2013, Third Way relied on the fundraising prowess of the DC lobbying behemoth Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart as a sluice gate of corporate funding; its other marquee clients included Deutsche Bank, Intel, the Business Roundtable, the International Swaps & Derivatives Association, PhRMA, and the US Chamber of Commerce. As if that weren’t enough, the group’s board included Daniel Loeb and Berek Kaufman, two hedge-fund executives who were major donors to Mitt Romney’s 2012 Republican campaign for the presidency. As a dark-money political group, Third Way isn’t obliged to disclose its donors, but a recent RealSludge survey of its tax filings discloses the same basic plutocratic profile, with Bill Gates’s sustainability network Breakthrough Energy and the big-tech investment fund Arabella Advisors among the lead givers, alongside other corporate stalwarts such as the US Chamber of Commerce.

These, in other words, are the same forces that have held socialism, and social democracy, to be anathema since the first Gilded Age. What’s striking, though, is that this time out, Cowan and his cronies are decidedly on the defensive. They’re no longer issuing disciplinary broadsides to freshman populist senators from the secure battlement of The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed section—they’re seeking to influence electoral outcomes in a political environment that’s shifted radically since Barack Obama’s second term.

A moderate agenda for the Democratic Party simply isn’t an electoral selling point any longer—that’s the key finding in a recent working paper by political scientists Jacob Grumbach and Adam Bonica, which finds that in an acutely polarized political climate, moderate appeals are less the campaign game-changers of Third Way’s fond imaginings than nonstarters. It’s true that “extreme” candidates don’t necessarily perform better, the authors note, but on balance, voters are more responsive to appeals within preexisting ideologies, which produce the dynamic that just played out in Michigan: “More progressive Democratic and more conservative Republican candidates increase the turnout of their respective partisan bases.” These shifts have also altered the ideological composition of both parties, as MSNow’s Zeeshan Aleem observes in his breakdown of Bonica and Grumbach’s research: “plunging trust in institutions and the collapse of the neoliberal consensus have made the banner of ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘populist’ positioning more salient than conventional ideology, as well as changed what constitutes ideological extremism.”

Since groups like Third Way represent the body and soul of the dying neoliberal consensus, they have little choice but to target DSA, which aspires to be their political undertaker. But another $15 million in tendentious attack ads and opposition research stands little chance of arresting the momentum of El Sayed, who has already overcome a nine-to-one spending disadvantage to secure his Senate nomination. In the face of a populist uprising on the left, all Jonathan Cowan and his Beltway colleagues can do is throw more money at what they imagine the problem to be. That’s why their response to the new insurgent politics in the Democratic Party is less telling than their prescription for a party revival in the wake of Kamala Harris’s crushing 2024 defeat: to scuttle the preferences of small donors in the party, and ensure that Democrats become more aggressively “pro-capitalist” and stop “demonizing wealth and corporations.” “GOP messaging suggests they want voters to be rich, while Democrats are seen as focusing on redistribution rather than wealth creation,” read one bullet point. “Have a prosperity gospel aimed at the working class,” went another.

The Clinton era version of third-way politics marketed itself as pragmatic and realistic above all things. Third Way’s think tank bromides today come across as nothing more than desperate plutocratic wish-fulfillment fantasies. To borrow the rhetoric of another prominent Democrat continually vilified by Wall Street for his anti-capitalist sympathies, the leaders of today’s resurgent Democratic left should welcome their hatred.

To hear the DC insiders tell it, insurgent socialists and progressive firebrands are wrecking the Democratic Party. Don’t believe it. The insurgency that swept across the United States during the spring and summer of 2026, with its spike in voter turnouts and headline-grabbing primary results for young candidates who are challenging entrenched incumbents, is not, as some would have you believe, undermining the world’s oldest political party in this critical midterm-election year. The insurgency is revitalizing it. And if established party leaders don’t screw things up—by echoing Republican talking points about a “dangerous” left, or by opting for caution when the electorate is calling for action—this revitalization has the potential to build a vibrant coalition of Democratic base voters and legions of younger, more diverse, and newly registered ones. If it is sufficiently bold and innovative, strategic and inclusive, this coalition can do more than simply check and balance Donald Trump, by giving Democratic candidates and economic-populist independents control of the House and the Senate and key governorships nationwide. In the run-up to the 2028 presidential election, it can merge Democratic candidacies and movement energy into a political force capable of finally realizing the deferred dreams of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights and the Freedom Budget for All Americans that A. Philip Randolph and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. advanced as an essential extension of the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s.

Too many Democratic Party leaders in recent years have complacently mounted campaigns that address legitimate fears of Republican hegemony, yet fail to offer a bolder vision that speaks to the most powerful of all incentives to vote: hope. We’re not talking about vapid “It’ll all work out in the end” optimism or, worse yet, the dismissive “Just trust us” messaging of old-school politicians. We’re talking about a radical hope that lives can be made dramatically better by movements that recognize and embrace Patti Smith’s promise that “people have the power…to dream, to rule, to wrestle the earth from fools.” This is the prospect that FDR entertained when he dramatically expanded the Democratic coalition by proposing a New Deal that pundits dismissed as extreme—even socialistic—but that the electorate embraced as essential. This is what Barack Obama understood when he had the audacity to call a divided nation to “come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.” And this is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson was talking about four decades ago when he pleaded for a new Democratic politics based on the idea that “if you raise up truth, it’s magnetic. It has a way of drawing people.”

The progressive gospel that Jackson preached in his Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s, and that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders outlined in his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids, laid the groundwork for what a new generation of candidates and activists propose today. They are speaking confidently about enacting Medicare for All, taxing the rich, ending poverty, protecting immigrants, and changing our foreign policy. They are remaking American politics and policymaking—as the July vote by 103 House Democrats (including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi) to end US aid to Israel demonstrated. What Politico described as a “seismic shift” in the party and in Congress is taking place because voters all over the country are demanding a new politics.

After a trio of insurgents—Democratic Socialists of America members Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier and veteran progressive Brad Lander—swept New York’s Democratic primaries in June, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was mocked for his claim that democratic socialists with working-class economics and values-driven agendas “can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.” Less than a week later, 29-year-old DSA member Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent in a Colorado House primary. That same day, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who pledged to stand up to corporate monopolies on behalf of workers, farmers, and consumers, overcame a 30-point deficit in the polls to beat a sitting senator in the state’s primary for governor. Weiser’s win shocked the Democratic leadership and his own progressive supporters, whom he heard asking on primary night, “Can I really believe again?”

It’s not just that Democrats can believe again. They must.

The Democratic brand as it’s been defined by its congressional leaders is unpopular, even among Democrats. It doesn’t have to be that way. The party can become every bit as appealing, and electable, as it has ever been. But that won’t happen if control over its future remains in the hands of the people who spoiled the brand in the first place.

Democratic voters know that the party needs a new direction, and they are forging it by nominating candidates such as US Representative Analilia Mejia, a key aide to Sanders during his 2020 presidential bid whose February special-election victory in a suburban New Jersey district shocked commentators. “People will say that this district is not the kind of district in which a progressive or a lefty could win. But it’s not about left/right,” Mejia, the sole candidate in a crowded Democratic-primary field to call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide, said on election night. “It’s about right and wrong.”

By choosing candidates like Mejia, who easily won her general election, Democratic-primary voters are charting a new course. They know—better than many party leaders, it seems—that it is necessary to remake the party as a popular movement for economic, social, and racial justice, for saving the planet, and for a foreign policy that chooses human rights and diplomacy over bloated Pentagon budgets and forever wars.

That gap between the electorate and party leaders has led to this dynamic and sometimes contentious moment. Media outlets are paying attention to Democratic primaries and scrutinizing the results from Maine to California, Pennsylvania to Texas. Right-wing publications like the New York Post run articles warning about dire consequences for Democrats as a result of a “socialist takeover.” Former Clinton-administration commerce secretary William Daley—whose centrist choice for Illinois’s March Senate primary got crushed by a progressive contender—complained that “this far-left socialist, some call ‘progressive,’ part of society [is] basically trying to take over the Democratic Party.” Leaders of Third Way, the DC think tank that puts a contemporary spin on the neoliberal agenda of the old Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)—which Jackson called “Democrats for the Leisure Class”—warn that “the DSA’s radicalism makes it not a faction to be appeased; it is a movement to be opposed.”

But voters don’t see it that way. They are open to candidates—be they democratic socialists such as Pennsylvania House nominee Chris Rabb, or progressives like Minnesota Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan, or old-school economic populists like Troy Jackson in Maine and Sherrod Brown in Ohio—who break with status quo politics. That’s not surprising. Remember: Bernie Sanders represents a rural state and was the first non-Republican to win his Vermont Senate seat since the 1850s; and some of the most progressive members of Congress, such as Wisconsin’s Mark Pocan, represent urban, suburban, and rural districts. And look at the polling analyses from groups like the Center for Working-Class Politics, which remind us that “championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party” and that “contrary to what many might expect, the working class has become both more progressive on economic issues and less conservative on social issues in recent decades.”

Instead of getting distracted by the establishment’s hand-wringing, Democrats should recognize a moment of renewal and potential. The party suffered devastating defeats in 2024, in part because of an enthusiasm gap among its core constituencies, and in greater part because of its failure to engage with the disaffected potential voters who will be essential to a robust governing coalition. Yet now it is suddenly experiencing what the CNN data analyst Harry Enten describes as a “supercharging” moment. A July Washington Post/Ipsos poll, conducted amid the hype about upheaval in the party, found that Democrats had a 10-point advantage over Republicans when it came to voter enthusiasm. That was eight points better than in 2018—the “blue wave” midterm-election year that saw seven governorships and at least 40 House seats flip to the Democrats. “And,” the Post noted, “more than seven in 10 Democrats say it is ‘more important’ to vote in 2026 than in previous midterm elections, compared with just over half of Republicans.” Of course, voters are eager to cast ballots against Republicans who back Trump, but they’re also eager to cast them for a bolder, better Democratic Party.

Jesse Jackson saw this moment coming. “If we lift up a program to feed the hungry, they’ll come running. If we lift up a program to study war no more, our youth will come running,” he declared as he sought to forge a new Democratic politics. “If we lift up a program to put America back to work, and an alternative to welfare and despair, they will come working.”

In 1984, Jackson surmised that the people have the power to change a party and a nation. In 2026, a new Democratic coalition—fueled by the energy of a dynamic multiracial, multiethnic progressive insurgency—can prove him right.

Should you worry about cyclospora? Emily Oster doesn’t think so. Writing in The New York Times in July, Oster, the economist and self-appointed health guru, told readers that the nationwide spread of the cyclospora parasite, which causes watery, sometimes “explosive” diarrhea, was no grave concern. After all, she noted, the infection is treatable, rarely causes serious injury or death, and is not transmissible from person to person.

All of this is true enough—and if, like Oster, you view health as a private family matter, you might draw comfort from her words. But if you think that the Trump administration’s devastating ongoing attack on public health in America is important, the cyclospora outbreak, which investigators think was caused by tainted produce, should matter very much to you.

First, this is the largest outbreak of the protozoal disease since 2019, with more than 11,500 cases confirmed or under investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of late July. This doesn’t come anywhere near the prevalence of other diarrheal diseases like norovirus. But the point isn’t that cyclospora is not as bad as norovirus; it’s that our food supply shouldn’t be making us sick.

Yet the federal agencies responsible for monitoring foodborne diseases, like the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC, have been decimated by staffing cuts in Trump’s second term. The FDA was already having difficulties in inspecting foreign food facilities before Trump 2.0; now, as Brian Ronholm of Consumer Reports told the Times, these cuts have “really put [the FDA] further behind to the point where it’s virtually nonexistent.”

Meanwhile, the CDC last year gutted its food-surveillance program, cutting the number of monitored pathogens from eight to two. One of the pathogens dropped from the list? Cyclospora.

The Trump administration also shut down two Department of Agriculture food-safety committees in 2025 and closed two food-safety labs, only reopening them after a public outcry. Finally, new FDA food-traceability rules, which would have dramatically expedited the search for the infectious culprit in this outbreak, have been pushed back to 2028. At the local and state levels, public-health departments are struggling to survive after multiple rounds of budget cuts by the federal government. The Associated Press reported that “the cuts are reducing the entire system to a shadow of what it once was, threatening to undermine even routine work,” let alone dealing with outbreaks that threaten our communities.

The Trump administration’s endemic corruption is also making it impossible to trust the government’s public-health decisions. The FDA initially suggested that the culprit in the outbreak may be lettuce sold to Taco Bell restaurants by Taylor Farms, a huge national produce supplier. Taylor Farms’ produce is everywhere; as the Times reported, the company “said it made more than 40 percent of all salad kits sold in American groceries” in 2025.

Taylor Farms has been cited for food-safety violations related to previous cyclospora, E. coli, and salmonella outbreaks. It has also donated to pro-Trump super PACS, and its executives met with government officials in the White House amid the latest outbreak. Days after the meeting, the FDA pulled back and said the tests on Taylor Farms’ products were a series of false positives, while insisting that the company is still a focus of its investigations. Are these things connected? The fact that this is even a question says it all.

The conclusion that emerges from all these events is that the United States’ food-safety system is in deep trouble—and it’s just one of the many serious public-health crises we are facing, all as a result of the Trump administration’s relentless assault on the institutions that protect us.

The Emily Osters of the world seem oblivious to all of this. In her Times column, Oster called for wastewater testing and investing in better risk communication, better disease surveillance, and better-funded local health departments, which makes me think she just awoke from an 18-month sleep like Rip Van Winkle and believes Joe Biden is still president and someone in the White House still cares about public health.

We cannot afford to be comfortably numb, wrongheadedly certain in our own safety at this moment, but this is the gospel that Oster and her ilk preach. It is rooted in a selfishness that says no one matters outside “the family firm,” to borrow the title of one of Oster’s books. Just when we need to be thinking about the public good, we have prominent pundits telling us, in so many words, that the answer is to maximize our personal effectiveness and minimize our own anxiety about the world around us.

The cyclospora outbreak may be affecting only a few thousand people in the US right now, but basic human decency should move us to care about them. Absent that, basic self-interest should spur us to recognize that this outbreak is a harbinger of even greater danger ahead, as our public-health system starts to buckle and break, leaving all of us more vulnerable in the years to come.

The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of the world.

The lack of faith in universities is striking. According to Gallup, the portion of Americans who were “confident” in American higher education dropped from 57 percent to 42 percent between 2015 and 2025. Moreover, only 35 percent of US adults now say that college is “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013. A poll by Pew likewise found that “7 in 10 Americans now say U.S. higher education is going in the wrong direction.”

Behind this general loss of confidence lie misgivings about specific issues. Pollsters for Pew have discovered that 79 percent of adults “say colleges are doing a fair or poor job of keeping tuition costs affordable,” while “about half or more give colleges and universities fair or poor ratings on preparing students for well-paying jobs in today’s economy (55%), providing financial help to students who need it (52%), and developing students’ critical-thinking and problem-solving skills (49%).”

Faculty morale is no better: As anyone employed at a US university will readily acknowledge, depression, even nihilism, among professors is real. It’s not for nothing that it is faculty themselves who have published books about higher education with titles like The Great Mistake and Poison Ivy. Both the public and the professors are convinced that something has gone terribly wrong with the American university.

There are various sources of this discontent. First, the labor structure of universities has been transformed from one defined by stable employment to one defined by gig work. A 2023 survey by the American Association of University Professors revealed that almost 70 percent of all US faculty held “contingent”—that is, part-time or adjunct—positions, up from 47 percent in 1987. Then there are the millions of former students who are struggling to pay back the debt they incurred while attending college or graduate school. As of early 2026, the total student-loan debt held by those educated at US universities was $1.833 trillion, with the “average public university student” borrowing $31,960 to get their degree. Finally, universities have become key sites in our never-ending culture war, which has made campuses hostile places for faculty and students, with the general public increasingly viewing them with suspicion. Even on the lists that American university administrators have long sought to dominate, US higher education is in decline. According to the 2025 Leiden Ranking, which rates universities by the number of publications they produced between 2020 and 2023, only one US university—Harvard—ranks in the global top 10. Among the rest, eight are Chinese universities and one is Canadian.

Having long sought to destroy the “radical” and “liberal” university, the right wing now smells blood. In the first year of his second term, President Donald Trump launched an attack on universities. On January 20, 2025—his first day in office—he signed Executive Order 14151, which focused on “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.” On March 20 of the same year, he signed Executive Order 14242, which instructed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” Beyond these executive orders, the Trump administration also unilaterally eliminated billions of dollars in research grants that the federal government had earmarked for universities; deployed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to seize and arrest numerous student activists; revoked the visas of more than 8,000 international students, focusing especially on those connected to pro-Palestine protest movements; demanded that Columbia University place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under academic receivership; and, in exchange for federal funding, offered nine universities the opportunity to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” that promoted the teaching and research of identifiably “conservative ideas.” The modern American university system, which emerged in the period following World War II and was responsible for educating and uplifting millions of people, has never faced such a concerted assault.

Into this breach steps Lee C. Bollinger, a former president of Columbia University and the lawyer renowned for winning Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court case that upheld the affirmative-action admissions policy of the University of Michigan Law School until the court declared affirmative action illegal in 2023. Bollinger understands that US universities are in serious trouble, and his new book, University: A Reckoning, is his attempt to save them. But while the book contains numerous compelling ideas, it is limited by its author’s faith in a liberal center that no longer exists.

Bollinger wrote University: A Reckoning because he was aghast at the feeble way that universities have responded to the Trump administration’s assaults. He was especially disappointed by Columbia, which paid the federal government $221 million in settlements and agreed to implement the various reforms that Trump demanded. In effect, he hopes University: A Reckoning will provide the intellectual basis on which the managers of higher education can “confront the crisis and reimagine who we are now and for the future.” According to Bollinger, “the fundamental purpose of the university” is “to preserve and advance human knowledge about the human condition, about life and about the natural world, and to pass human knowledge and the capacities to pursue it on to succeeding generations.”

Already with this statement, fundamental problems with Bollinger’s rescue mission begin to emerge. His identification of higher education with the modern research university ignores the millions of students who attend non-research institutions, such as community and other two-year colleges. Furthermore, Bollinger’s framing completely ignores the degree to which the university system has essentially become a credentialing mechanism geared toward producing workers for the American market and, at its most rarefied levels, reproducing the extant—and increasingly oligarchical—class structure.

In the contemporary United States, wealth inequality is the worst it’s been in over a century. According to a recent report by Oxfam, “the richest 0.0001 percent control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age.” Indeed, the report notes, “between 1989 and 2022, the increase in wealth of a household at the top 1 percent cutoff was 101 times bigger than the increase in wealth for the median household, and 987 times bigger than the increase in wealth of the household at the 20th percentile.” It is no exaggeration to say that the United States is now ruled by an oligarchy.

Though elite colleges profess a faith in meritocracy and insist that they are engines of class mobility, in practice they reward the already rewarded. A recent study by the economists Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman, for instance, revealed that “children from families in the top 1 percent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.” As The Harvard Crimson likewise noted some years ago, “roughly 26 percent of members of the Class of 2025 who answered a question about parental income in TheCrimson’s annual freshman survey said their families make $250,000 or more per year—earnings higher than 94 percent of American households.” If Bollinger hopes to engender a consensus in favor of research universities, it is unlikely to be built without the support of the many Americans who attend two-year and non-research institutions and who rightly understand elite colleges as gatekeepers of class privilege.

But even when it comes to the research university, Bollinger’s understanding is woefully out of date. For instance, he insists that it is “expected of a professor…that their scholarship must be made fully available to the public.” However, as anyone who isn’t employed by or enrolled at a university is aware, most scholarly material is not available to the public but instead is available only to those who pay significant access fees to various, oftentimes for-profit organizations. In fact, some of those who have tried to skirt these paywalls have suffered serious penalties. The activist Aaron Swartz, to take the most egregious example, was hounded by the government for downloading and making available millions of academic articles from JSTOR, one of a number of groups that belong to an oligopolistic infrastructure whose business model relies on the free labor of scholars.

This is just one of several instances in which Bollinger ignores the actually existing political economy of the modern research university. Most galling for a history PhD like myself, he makes only passing reference to the jobs crisis that has beset so many disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. In Bollinger’s vision, everyone is either tenured or tenure-track, working on behalf of advancing public knowledge—an untenable position in an environment in which the tenure-track researcher is more the exception than the rule.

Bollinger has for decades been ensconced in hyper-elite universities that, until recently, were able to shield themselves from the degradation of the higher-education system as a whole. He imagines a university defined by “gatherings in the faculty commons, workshops over drafts, formal lectures to attend, and shared social events.” But this world doesn’t exist—indeed, it can’t exist in a context in which the disciplines are failing to reproduce themselves. In the past, even when a wider public audience was often prevented from accessing most scholarly production, professors could assume that there would at least be an academic audience for their work. This audience might have been small, but there was a promise that it would continue to exist in the future. Today, that promise has dissipated, which naturally affects how scholars approach their research. It’s not for nothing that a prominent scholar recently joked to me that “podcasts are the new journal articles.”

That Bollinger does not reckon with the reality of what it means to be an academic in the mid-2020s underlines a key feature of his work: While he has much to say about the glories of scholarship, he is ultimately not interested in the people who produce it. This is a serious problem for his program, because at the end of the day, universities are above all else workplaces, and their defense requires a buy-in from the workers who make them what they are.

The most innovative part of University: A Reckoning is not Bollinger’s analysis of the current state of the American university, but rather his legal arguments about how to protect the university from state interference in the future. Working through a century of First Amendment jurisprudence, he argues that “the constitutional principles of freedom of speech and press” can be used to protect universities from government intrusion.

To understand Bollinger’s position, one must run through a potted history of the First Amendment, which he ably provides. The Supreme Court, he notes, started hearing First Amendment cases only in 1919, when numerous radicals—including the Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs—were prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 for inveighing against US participation in World War I. The cases against Debs and others eventually made their way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the radicals’ speech was not protected by the First Amendment. By the end of 1919, however, the court had significantly changed course: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued an opinion in which he argued that, first, freedom of speech was necessary to improve knowledge; and second, truth could be discovered only when all ideas were allowed to compete in the marketplace; and third, the Constitution itself was an “experiment” that could function only if ideas were freely exchanged. Thus, Holmes declared, the government could limit free speech only when there was a “clear and present danger” that would be addressed by doing so.

While there were moments in the 20th century when freedom of speech wasn’t respected—Bollinger highlights the McCarthy-era prosecution of Communist Party leaders—he contends that, in general, Holmes’s pro-free-speech perspective carried the day. This was true even in situations that offended many Americans, such as in 1969, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was legal for Ku Klux Klan members in Ohio to openly wield weapons and threaten Blacks and Jews so long as the Klan’s speech wasn’t, as Bollinger puts it, “directed at inciting imminent lawless action.” With this ruling, he notes, the court made it clear that Americans were expected to “live with the most reprehensible ideas, really until they are about to become action.”

Bollinger cites another case that he argues also has relevance to protecting universities. In 1960, L.B. Sullivan, the city commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama—a hot spot of anti-Black racism and civil-rights resistance—sued The New York Times for running an advertisement that criticized the city’s police force for committing numerous injustices. After hearing this case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Times had not committed any violation because, Bollinger explains, the Constitution assumed “that sovereignty resided with the citizenry and not with the government itself.”

In Bollinger’s telling, this ruling indicated that “the authority and responsibility of citizens to exercise self-government meant that public officials could not be permitted to sue citizens for damages or damaging falsehoods about them absent truly extraordinary circumstances.” If public officials were allowed to sue the press and ordinary people, the Supreme Court warned, Americans might become wary of engaging in public debate, which would undermine the foundations of American democracy.

This all makes for interesting reading, but how does it relate to American universities? For Bollinger, these cases, and much of First Amendment jurisprudence, establish a clear reason why universities need to exist—and to be free of government interference. Since there are “no legal checks on speech that disrespects others, urges violence, revels in misinformation and falsehoods, propagates stupidity, or forsakes ideas and norms we all should value,” the university, he argues, has a critical social function: It can serve as a “moderator” able to “help lead and guide the discussion.”

Bollinger contends that this role has traditionally fallen to the press. But today, he notes, the professionalized press, dedicated to disseminating facts about the world, has been supplanted by social-media companies that have little interest in the truth as such. In Bollinger’s view, “this is where the university comes in.” He insists that “universities are a version of the press [that] offer deeper inquiry into public issues and are always on call to serve as a check on government and society.” Therefore, similar to the press, they should be conceived as an additional, and protected, estate—“a fifth branch” of democratic government “as essential as the press to our collective life and success.”

Bollinger’s case for the university is essentially a functionalist one: that universities should be protected from government intrusion because they serve a crucial, moderating function in a society defined by very permissive First Amendment jurisprudence.

There are several significant problems with this argument. For starters, the First Amendment has nothing to say about higher education, and no amount of legal reasoning will change that. Therefore, any First Amendment–based case for the university will have significant limits and will likely face severe pushback. Second, the labor of journalists and of academics are in practice quite dissimilar. In an ideal world, journalists check government and private power through the rapid and timely exposure of information and behavior. Academics, by contrast, engage in years-long research projects that are concerned primarily—as Bollinger well knows—with expanding our knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. Such work might check state and corporate power, but that is not its primary function, nor should it be. Finally, even if universities were reformed to become the referees of public speech, it is by no means clear that this would engender a better, let alone more moderate, society. If the past several decades have revealed anything, it’s that experts often get things wrong—just look at the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis. In both of these cases, experts failed to check power and contributed to policies that actively made the world worse.

Bollinger’s program embodies the liberal faith in expertise. Like many liberals, Bollinger assumes that the “correct” ideas, developed, articulated, and promoted by an educated elite–cum–expert class, can impel and preserve good governance. It’s an ahistorical perspective that refuses to take seriously the many failures of expertise that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. After all, it was the experts who advanced the arguments that brought us deregulation, financialization, and endless war. Many Americans have thus lost faith in the experts. To paraphrase Anton Chigurh, if the experts we followed brought us here, of what use were the experts?

This leads to the fundamental problem with University: A Reckoning. Bollinger premises his book on defending a liberal “center”—a center defined by its belief that a college-educated elite should make the most consequential political, economic, and social decisions—that has lost its legitimacy. Indeed, his inability or unwillingness to accept this new reality leads him to have little interest in those who could actually defend the university from Trump: the professors, graduate students, and staff who ensure that the university works.

Bollinger, in fact, might be among the most unsuitable people to offer a defense of the university in the present moment. During his 21 years as president of Columbia, Bollinger witnessed multiple graduate-student strikes, one of which was caused by his administration’s unwillingness to recognize their union. Workers, it seems, don’t occupy much space in his imagination, or for that matter in the imagination of most university administrators. In recent years, for instance, administrators at Harvard, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have shown significant unwillingness to recognize, bargain with, or offer concessions to the workers attempting to unionize their workplaces.

Administrators’ hostility to unionization is unfortunate, because if faculty and graduate students don’t organize with one another and with staff across campus, the American university will continue to decline. One only wishes that Bollinger, when he had the power to do so, had aided instead of impeded the workers who made his university what it was. They are, after all, the people on whom any defense, let alone a remaking, of the university will rely.

As the credits rolled at the end of The Odyssey, the Long Island cinema burst into applause. This struck me as strange: The hero had just confessed his guilt for the trick at Troy, disguising a weapon as a gift to the gods—a transgression that would lead to the collapse of his world. There seemed little cause for celebration. Was the audience cheering the hero’s victory over the bad guys, or were they taking a side in an ongoing culture war?

When Christopher Nolan adapted Homer’s epic to speak to a world where American power is being challenged in new ways, it was inevitable that it would provoke the right. Even before the film came out, the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen launched a thousand tweets, and Elon Musk threatened to use Grok to make another version with ethnically Greek (though AI-generated) actors. But it’s not only the casting that made Nolan’s film controversial. It’s also, I think, a more general debate over the genre of epic.

Epics are long narrative poems telling of the most consequential acts by the most powerful people. Different ancient epics treat their protagonists in different ways, and they’re not always straightforwardly heroic. The Iliad tells of Greece’s victory in the semi-historical Trojan War; The Odyssey follows one of the victors, Odysseus, in his meandering return home. The great Latin epic, Virgil’s Aeneid, follows another Trojan soldier, Aeneas, who later became the founder of Roman civilization; by contrast, Lucan’s epic, The Pharsalia, describes Caesar’s triumph in the Roman Civil War only to grotesquely ironize him.

In recent years, the online right has contested adaptations of epic in order to make an argument about masculinity. This was visible in the 2024 campaign against Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey—which Nolan relied on at least in part for his writing of this film—which refers to its hero as “a complicated man.” This choice of words was contested by right-wing commentator Maxwell Meyer, who admitted to having had only one semester of Ancient Greek. Likewise, the podcaster Matt Walsh criticized Nolan’s Odysseus (Matt Damon) as “an anachronistic whiney solemn shell of a man.” Apparently abandoning his earlier plan, Elon Musk offered to fund another adaptation directed by Mel Gibson.

There are many valid criticisms to be made of Nolan’s film (as in the excellent review by Christian Lorentzen), but the decision to make the hero relatively unheroic has precedent in a long line of epics: Dante put Odysseus among the pagan heroes in the first circle of Hell. Shakespeare, who never wrote an epic poem, gave his tragic heroes an unrivalled psychological complexity. Milton’s Paradise Lost casts Satan as a figure of Odysseus-like cunning, and heroizes Adam and Eve’s struggle to accomplish the quieter virtues of humility, forgiveness, and love. Wordsworth’s The Prelude strays even further from martial valor, describing the development of an individual mind in moments of solitude and joy.

In America, epic has had a complicated history. Some years ago, I was teaching a class in a New Jersey prison and found that none of my students knew what “epic” meant. As I tried to define it, I thought of a huge flag I had seen towering over a highway in Washington, DC, taller than Satan’s spear in Paradise Lost, which Milton compares to the tallest Norwegian pine. One difficulty in explaining the genre was that so much about American culture is epic—the love of bigness, the deep respect for the military, the obsession with superhero movies—yet there wasn’t a single famous American epic poem to point to.

Since epic was considered a jewel in the crown of empire, numerous American poets tried and failed to write a good one. In 1787, after a French critic said the USA hadn’t produced a good poet, an insulted Thomas Jefferson said this would be a valid reproach only when the new nation had “existed as a people as long as the Greeks did before they produced a Homer, the Romans a Virgil, the French a Racine and Voltaire, the English a Shakespeare and Milton.” In short, after about 500–1,000 years. Jefferson wasn’t wrong: Over 400 years since the Mayflower, there have been many good American poets but not a single great epic.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is an extended lyric poem that attempts to encompass the whole cosmos in its egalitarian, if presumptuous embrace. Whitman declared the American people were “the greatest poem,” and one that didn’t need the outdated grandiosity of epic. Other American epics have been written since then, though the most obviously Homeric one, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, is from the Caribbean and celebrates a life of quiet survival.

These humble virtues have found a home in the bourgeois novel, which 20th-century critics like György Lukács argued had superseded epic. From Don Quixote onward, the great literary novels have rarely been straightforward celebrations of heroism: Vanity Fair, subtitled “A Novel Without A Hero,” describes the barbarity of the Napoleonic Wars; Moby-Dick is a delusional revenge quest; Middlemarch follows a provincial woman who might have lived an “epic life” if she hadn’t had to inhabit a domestic realm of “unhistoric acts”; James Joyce’s own Ulysses is about a long night of drinking.

As Joyce’s use of a Homer title suggests, epic has retained its cultural importance. In the 20th century, so many Hollywood films, from Citizen Kane to Titanic, flooded America with the epic tales that poets hadn’t been able to supply. This has not abated in our century, but the casting of heroes in video games, Marvel movies, and Disney franchises has increasingly been challenged by right-wing commentators. It was in this context that Jordan Peterson called Disney’s Frozen “dismal, wretched, and pure ideology.”

Right-wing commentators believe that fictional heroes should be admirable in order for men to imitate them, but films made along those lines are often kitsch, unrealistic, and unsatisfying. See, for example, John Aglialoro’s wooden three-part adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which failed to retain the same Aryan actors for each installment. Or war films like 12 Strong, which offer more idealized portraits of veterans than Homer, whose hero returns home and massacres the slave girls in a bloody frenzy.

If it seems odd to want a protagonist to be less complex than one Homer invented 3,000 years ago, parts of the online right have been trying to revive a pre-Homeric worldview. Their Bible is Costin Alamariu’s 2018 Bronze Age Mindset, a polemic that celebrates the prehistoric period (3300 BCE–1200 BCE) as one where Nietzschean supermen still roamed the shores of the Mediterranean. That time had already passed when Homer composed his poem, around the 8th century BCE. To revive the Bronze Age mindset, Alamariu advised making movies more heroic, declaring, “What Mel Gibson does is worth a thousand books.”

Meanwhile, a more communitarian section of the right values ancient epics because they see them as the symbol of a closed community with stable beliefs; the kind of place they want America to become. Whether Homer’s Greece was that stable is debatable, to say the least, but it’s an even more improbable ideal for a multicultural nation in a hyper-networked, multipolar world. Ironically, even as people like JD Vance propose to rebirth a more communitarian nation, his own government has undermined the Declaration of Independence—the closest thing the US has to a collectively held, memorized epic text.

When they cheered at the end of the film, the Long Island audience may have just been acknowledging the end of a blockbuster that had been more serious and edifying than the usual summer fare. As Emily Wilson pointed out in her review of The Odyssey, sales of Homer translations have soared in recent weeks. This is no bad thing in a nation where 40–50 percent of adults no longer read a single book per year.

The revival of interest in epic can do more than fuel a tedious culture war. Epics should encourage us to think more deeply and expansively: As Aristotle said, they are stories about the most consequential human actions. This aspect of the genre doesn’t require the powerful to be admirable, nor ordinary people abject. Shakespeare adapted Homer’s story for Troilus and Cressida, a play about a world made cynical by war. None of its characters are heroic.

When the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, overturning Roe v. Wade, its defenders insisted the ruling was an act of judicial restraint and a decision that returned the question of abortion to democratic majorities in each state. The United States’ top lawyer, Todd Blanche, apparently has other ideas.

On a July 30 conference call hosted by the White House Faith Office —not meant for public ears, though the audio later surfaced on YouTube—the acting attorney general told religious leaders that the administration is working to ensure that the Dobbs decision “becomes permanent in every single state.” He acknowledged that “we don’t have complete victory yet,” but promised the faithful, “Victory will be soon and it will be permanent.”

Blanche seems to have in mind a project that goes far beyond enforcing existing federal law or upholding current state abortion laws. Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department could use the agency as a tool to impose abortion restrictions on all states, even those that protect reproductive rights through their own democratic processes and state Constitutions.

The primary tool Blanche has signaled deploying is the Comstock Act, an archaic federal law passed in 1873 that made it a federal crime to mail any “thing” to “procure an abortion,” including pills but also any article used in abortion care. For most of the 20th century, the anti-obscenity law lay dormant, superseded by Roe and regarded as an artifact of a bygone and unfortunate era. After Roe was overturned, Biden’s Justice Department issued a formal opinion concluding that the Comstock Act could not be used to impose a blanket ban on mailing abortion medications, so long as the sender did not intend the drug to be used unlawfully, which could be almost impossible to prove.

During his confirmation hearing in July, Blanche, Trump’s nominee and former criminal defense attorney, agreed under questioning from Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn to order a review of that Biden-era interpretation. If the Trump DOJ rescinds the opinion, it may be the first step in the agency’s attempting to enforce the Comstock Act’s abortion provisions after 100 years of disuse.

Under Blanche’s leadership, mailing or receiving mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs in medication abortions, could result in federal criminal charges. That would not just affect patients in Texas or Alabama. It would affect patients and providers in California, Colorado, New York, Illinois—states that have not only protected abortion but also have expanded access to it. Comstock would apply nationwide, with no exceptions carved out by the act’s text and with a five-year prison sentence for the first offense.

Medication abortion now accounts for the majority of all abortions in the United States. Since Dobbs, mail-order access to abortion pills, dispensed via telehealth providers operating in states with legal protections (“shield” laws), has become a lifeline for patients in states with bans and the predominant way in which they end pregnancies. Shield statutes, now passed in 18 states and Washington, DC, seek to protect providers from out-of-state criminal, civil, and professional attack; eight shield states extend those protections to telehealth for mailed medication abortion. To be clear, no shield law dictates what any other state does regarding its own abortion laws. But Blanche, on the July 30 call, signaled his DOJ also would target those shield laws, particularly those with telehealth protections.

The DOJ, for its part, has tried to walk back the most alarming reading of Blanche’s remarks on the covertly recorded conference call. A spokesperson said his comments about making Dobbs permanent in every state were “mischaracterized” and concerned only mail-order abortion drugs and not, the agency implied, a broader federal takeover of abortion policy.

That clarification raises more questions than it answers. Dobbs said nothing about mailed abortion pills or how states might regulate them. If Blanche’s purpose was to apply existing law, there would be no need for a DOJ review reversing the prior administration’s opinion. The Biden-era opinion is the status quo based on century-old cases interpreting the act; rescinding or revising it is a new policy choice.

His own words on the faith leaders’ call—promising that the administration is “putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack” the choices of states with abortion bans—suggests an agenda that sees state-level abortion protections, like shield laws, as threats to be neutralized and a de facto national abortion ban as the outcome to achieve.

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced his nomination on a party-line vote. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced that they would vote against him, with Collins directly citing his pledge to anti-abortion groups to prohibit the mailing of abortion medication nationwide, while Murkowski similarly cited “statements that have been made to anti-abortion groups.” But Senator Bill Cassidy effectively sealed his confirmation by announcing shortly after Murkowski’s statement on Friday that he would support Blanche’s nomination.

The confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general will represent a new facet of the post-Dobbs landscape. The debate over abortion access has been primarily a story of state-level politics: ballot measures, state constitutional amendments, legislative sessions, and court challenges fought state by state and county by county. That landscape could change.

An attorney general committed to enforcing the Comstock Act would shift the battleground to federal law enforcement, a domain where neither state legislatures nor state courts have the final word. And a DOJ that treats the interstate shipment of abortion pills as a federal crime would, in effect, impose the most restrictive state-level standards on the entire country. A patient in Minnesota whose doctor prescribes pills via telehealth could find that avenue cut off even though abortion remains legal in the state. A physician in Massachusetts, acting under Massachusetts’s shield law, who prescribes remotely to a patient in Idaho could face federal prosecution and jail time.

The elected representatives of states like Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada have chosen to protect abortion access, as have the voters in Kansas, Montana, Kentucky, Ohio, and Vermont. An attorney general armed with the Comstock Act and the resources of the Justice Department could attempt to override every one of those choices.

Whatever one’s view on abortion, enforcing Comstock would be an alarming exercise of federal power against the backdrop of unprecedented executive overreach.

The path for Comstock enforcement is not straightforward, however. No doubt the DOJ will be sued if it tries to revive the act for criminal prosecutions. Searching through the mail for abortion “things” will be expensive, intrusive, and unpopular. And the reproductive rights movement, as it has done since Dobbs, will advance other means to put pills in the hands of people. Still, the reality that abortion cannot be stopped should not distract from why Blanche made his statements in the first place: to find solidarity with, and ultimately direct federal resources toward, an anti-abortion movement that seeks to end abortion everywhere, no matter the costs.

In the moments before the September premiere of composer-cellist Andrew Yee’s Trans Requiem (a recording of which was just released on New Amsterdam Records), the sanctuary of New York City’s Trinity Church was resonant with tuning instruments—interspersed with a beeping metal detector. That sound felt, to me, like a reminder both of relative safety and potential danger.

Earlier, when I arrived at the church, I had felt relieved to see no protesters. But then I felt silly. Surely, I thought, a classical concert would be niche enough to go under the radar. Still, I reminded myself, this was a large gathering centering trans experience in a place of worship. With each beep, I couldn’t help but imagine the worst: What if someone had a weapon?

I wish I could say that, with the first chords of Trans Requiem, these anxieties dissipated. But that wouldn’t be entirely true. Trans Requiem doesn’t distract from current realities. It mourns them in real time.

A requiem is traditionally a musical setting of the Catholic funeral mass. However, Yee considers Trans Requiem to be “more of a secular-style mass, even though the location is in a church.” Nevertheless, she said, “if people want to accept this mass in a religious manner, they’re welcome.”

Considering the fraught relationship that the trans community often has with Christian institutions, it is especially moving that Trinity Wall Street commissioned Trans Requiem. Before the September concert, Trinity vicar Michael Bird said that he has many times been asked why an Episcopal church would put on such a piece, to which he always replied, “How could we not?”

Yee’s Requiem is scored for string orchestra, choir, and two vocal soloists, in this case, soprano Breanna Sinclairé and tenor Katherine Goforth—both trans women, “one with a high voice and one with a lower voice,” said Yee.

At the September performance, two cello sections sat on either side of the stage, an arrangement that produced a dark, bass-heavy sound in contrast to the silvery voices in the choir. Yee led from one of the cello sections, providing back-up for conductor Melissa Attebury.

Yee, who is the founding cellist of the Attacca Quartet, turned to composition relatively recently. Two years ago, the Queer Urban Orchestra premiered Yee’s Briefly Gorgeous for chamber orchestra, based on the novel by Ocean Vuong. More recently, Or, The Whale, a co-composition with Caroline Shaw based on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, was released on Platoon. At around 40 minutes, Trans Requiem is Yee’s most ambitious work to date.

It is especially ambitious considering that, by writing a requiem, Yee situates herself in terms of a canon that includes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Fauré, and Benjamin Britten.

In terms of other requiems, Yee feels most connected to Brahms’s A German Requiem, which Brahms once said could have easily been titled “a human requiem” because of its universality. But Brahms’s Requiem was also deeply personal, written after the death of his mother and of his mentor Robert Schumann. Handpicking from the Lutheran Bible, Brahms created a text in vernacular German that remained spiritual but didn’t mention an afterlife, instead providing solace for the living.

“I don’t want to compare my piece to his,” said Yee, “but in the same way that Brahms wrote A German Requiem, this is A Trans Requiem. This is my experience.” Trans Requiem is also “a human requiem” in that it shows the humanity of a group that is being increasingly dehumanized.

However, while composing, Yee tried not to listen to other requiems, as she didn’t want their earworms influencing her unconsciously. “I’m just not going to write a ‘Dies Irae’ better than Verdi’s,” she said.

Though Trans Requiem doesn’t include a “Dies Irae,” it does include a “Requiem,” “Kyrie,” “Lux Aeterna,” “Libera Me,” and “In Paradisum.” These Latin texts are interspersed with English ones, mostly written by Yee herself, except for “Death Before Detransition,” which sets a poem by J. Jennifer Espinoza.

“Death Before Detransition” starts, spitting and spinning, in the lower strings. It is as if the underworld has opened up. You might not realize, at first, that the choir is singing in English: “You will have to pry /my gender from my cold /dead hands /and even then /all you will hold / is an idea I carved / into the side of the world / with fire.” It’s a rare moment in Trans Requiem when grief turns, briefly, to anger.

Yee, who began composing the Requiem after Trump’s reelection, said that she was “literally mourning those we’ve lost in the trans community.” However, the piece is “also mourning the loss of protections and support that we had not that long ago.” 

In “Light,” which precedes the “Lux Aeterna,” Yee was inspired by “three-sentence obituaries on social media for trans folks.” These made her think about who gets to be grieved in a traditional manner. Primarily, “Light” honors Cecilia Gentili, the late trans activist, whom Yee describes as “a hero and a friend.” In this movement, avalanches of sound interrupt Yee’s speaking voice, like a life cut short.

In “Lux Aeterna,” Sinclairé’s voice is bright and buzzy, like a high-efficiency bulb, whereas Goforth’s voice is round and rich, like candlelight.

The loss of legal protections is alluded to in “I Am Afraid,” which, sung by Sinclairé, is about fearing for one’s physical safety. “I Am Afraid” is Yee’s take on the “Libera Me,” which, she notes, is “the only text from the traditional mass that was written in first person.” The Latin text reads “full of terror am I, and trembling.”

Another source of mourning suggested by Trans Requiem is the “social death,” or dehumanization, of trans people. Yee’s “Would You Have Mercy?” reinterprets the “Kyrie eleison” text as begging for understanding from a hateful stranger on the street. As the orchestra retreats, Yee accompanies herself on cello: “If I promised to pretend to be a boy again…”

Now, nearly a year later, listening to New Amsterdam’s recording of Trans Requiem’s premiere brings to mind new losses such as that of Juniper Blessing, as well as countless trans women of color whose deaths have gone unreported. In March, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued its latest warning about anti-transgender laws and rhetoric in the United States as being indicative of the early stages of a genocide.

One comment on a YouTube video of Trans Requiem reads: “I listened to part of it when you first performed it, then I listened again after Kansas came out with its horrible act towards trans people.” By the time this article goes to print, there will be something new to grieve.

But “a requiem for transness isn’t necessarily one that is only about sorrow,” said Yee. Indeed, there is something like redemption in “In Paradisum,” the final movement. “In Paradisums are usually sung by a crystal-clear high voice,” said Yee. “But people with lower voices deserve paradise as well.”

Though the word “angelic” is usually reserved for those with high voices, Goforth embodies it in this movement, intoning the final word “Requiem” like a hum.

By coincidence, the same September night as Trans Requiem premiered—perhaps as Goforth’s note was still hanging in the air—the New York Philharmonic was playing a different kind of elegy: Symphony No. 1 by John Corigliano.

Though Corigliano’s Symphony is not technically a requiem, as it does not follow the structure, it is easily the most-played composition memorializing AIDS. (There are a handful of true AIDS requiems, including James Adler’s Memento Mori.)

The movements of Corigliano’s symphony honor friends who died of AIDS. But because the piece is wordless, a listener might not realize this without looking at the program. By writing in mostly-tonal style that appeals to the emotions, Corigliano implores listeners to care about the plight of people with AIDS.

In a 1993 article on “AIDS & Classical Music,” the journalist K. Robert Schwarz quotes Corigliano as saying, “Music’s greatest gift is that it is non-verbal, and so it can also be totally non-threatening to people who could be threatened by this sort of thing.”

Trans Requiem is doing something similar, though not identical, with regards to trans lives. Yee’s Requiem, like Corigliano’s, is tuneful and accessible. But Trans Requiem also has words—pointed and powerful ones, at that.

What also differentiates Yee’s Requiem are the moments, such as in “Would You Have Mercy?” that almost resemble indie folk. These code-switches, at first jarring, are actually the most daring. Here, Yee is, like Brahms, speaking to us in the vernacular.

Schwarz, who would later die of AIDS in 1999, wrote in his article that the classical music world was relatively slow to respond to the disease, even though it ravaged the community as much as any other. It wasn’t until the 1990s, well into the epidemic, that composers began writing music about AIDS.

By contrast, Trans Requiem is a musical response to a catastrophe that is still in its earlier stages. But what happens when you take classical music—a medium that some might argue can have limited relevance—and use it to make a statement of the utmost relevance?

First of all, classical’s music’s ability to stay under the radar could be a strength in terms of resistance. Yee’s concert didn’t get targeted or shut down, whereas a more popular concert might have.

Second, by using the medium of classical music, Yee is historicizing. She is saying that this moment, and that trans people, are historically important. It is through the requiem’s form and musical language that Yee is able to achieve such a level of emotionality.

In her Vogue opinion piece “Trans Lives Should Matter While We’re Still Here,” Grace Byron quotes Douglas Crimp’s call for both “mourning and militancy” when it came to AIDS activism in 1989. Byron writes, regarding trans rights, that “Even as we keep fighting…we have to let ourselves grieve.”

For the trans people that are listening, Trans Requiem creates a space for mourning so that we may keep fighting for our lives. And for others listening, Yee makes a plea for her own humanity, as well as for the humanity of trans people everywhere.

In her liner notes, Trinity’s director Melissa Baker calls Trans Requiem an “act of musical testimony.” If Trans Requiem is “testimony,” what is it saying? Perhaps something like what Yee said in our interview: “I want to be with my family. I want to play music. I want my life to be blissfully uneventful. I’m not trying to do anything radical. I’m just trying to live my life.”

On Thursday, the Trump administration released a proposed rule that would eliminate hundreds of regulations that set safety, quality, and other standards for Head Start, the nation’s free preschool program for low-income children, deleting the entire 133-page set of standards and replacing them with a far more slimmed-down version that eliminates numerous health and safety requirements.

What would be left is “a really watered-down Head Start program that removes a lot of the health and safety requirements, quality standards, and comprehensive services,” Katie Hamm, who served as deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development at the Office for the Administration for Children & Families under President Joe Biden, told The Nation.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose uncle Sargent Shriver helped create Head Start in 1965, said in a press release that the rule is “removing unnecessary bureaucracy, strengthening nutrition and physical health, trusting parents and local communities, and opening Head Start to hundreds of thousands more children. That’s how we renew the promise of Head Start for the next generation.”

The proposed rule eliminates the requirements that limit Head Start class sizes and mandate a minimum number of adults to care for young children. Instead, programs are instructed to follow state rules, but no state has staff-to-child ratio regulations for all age groups that are at least as good as Head Start’s; following state ratios will worsen the minimum requirement for 97 percent of 2-year-olds in Head Start, 93 percent of 3-year-olds, and 71 percent of 4-year-olds, a report from Arizona State University’s Children’s Equity Project found. In its proposed rule, the administration estimates that Head Start teachers would be able to serve between 16 and 32 percent more children in their classrooms if the rule is finalized and that it will “preserve or expand” as many as 236,000 Head Start slots.

But Head Start program directors have told Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association, that they have a “deep fear about a requirement to serve more children,” she told The Nation. Some are already operating at lower ratios than required in order to meet the significant needs of the children they serve. More children are coming into Head Start with emotional and developmental issues; for young children, she pointed out, that often means behaviors like biting or throwing that require intensive, hands-on supervision. It’s not that programs don’t want to serve more kids; “they want to serve children in their care in ways that really meet their needs,” she said. If the administration puts pressure on them to serve more children, staff may quit and programs may just have to close, Hamm noted.

The proposed rule also gets rid of a requirement to have at least one bus monitor on all buses, with more as necessary. Programs are concerned about what that will mean when 3- and 4-year-old are put on buses by themselves. “I am really worried about safety,” said Lori Pittman, a former Head Start parent who works at a Head Start program in Washington State, on a press call on held on Thursday.

It also eliminates curriculum requirements that guide the commercial educational materials that programs can buy and implement. Currently, the rules say that curricula must be scientifically valid, aligned with the program’s outcomes framework, and have standardized materials and training procedures. Head Start is such a big purchaser of these materials that these rules have driven up quality across these companies’ products. But “the accountability and the monitoring comes from what’s in the standards,” Hamm said.

It also gets rid of the requirement that Head Start programs be open for a certain number of hours each year, instead saying they have to be open a minimum of just three hours a day, seven days a week.

Gone, too, are guidelines on when and how children can be suspended or expelled and a ban on corporal punishment. For many other standards—those outlining when and how to give all children developmental screenings, provide medical and dental care supports, serve children with disabilities, and include vulnerable families like those who are homeless or in the foster care system—the proposed rule deletes the current guidelines and instead tells programs to follow what’s in the Head Start Act. But the act designated the 133-page guidelines as the place where its requirements would actually be spelled out. “What the act says is that the standards are supposed to tell programs how to implement these things, so it becomes quite circular,” Hamm said. “It leaves programs without clear instructions about when and how to implement things.” For developmental screenings, for example, programs are currently required to do them within 45 days of enrollment and then follow up to make sure children are getting the necessary services; those requirements would all be erased.

Layoffs will be the likely result of these changes, Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, executive director of the Illinois Head Start Association, said on Thursday’s press call, particularly of the staff who currently offer the mental health and disability services that will no longer be required. Pittman said her program will likely have to do the same. “It will have a drastic impact on children and families,” Morrison-Frichtl said.

“This rule would make Head Start classrooms less safe, weaken standards for critical screenings and health services, strip away support that helps families access care, and deny children the strong start they deserve,” Representative Summer Lee (D-PA), said in a statement to The Nation. “The administration could strengthen Head Start, expand it, and invest in the educators who make it work, but instead they are deliberately hollowing out one of our nation’s most successful anti-poverty programs.”

The administration claimed in its press release that the proposed rule “recognizes parents as children’s primary teachers” and retains rules that programs must engage with them. But “it actually takes away power from parents,” Pittman argued, who currently vote on everything from programs’ budgets to curriculum. Parent committees that weigh in on programs’ policies and services become voluntary under the proposed rule, while current procedures that guide what happens when a program’s board and parent council disagree would be eliminated, tipping the scales away from parents. “This was one government program that really did include parents as equal partners, giving them a space at the table to make decisions about their child, their program,” she said. “That is now being removed.”

The proposed rule also reduces a cap on how much grant funding Head Start programs can spend on administrative overhead from the current 15 percent to 5 percent. “At 5 percent, I don’t know how you could produce quality services,” Pittman said. “That’s like building a house without the framing.” Programs use that money for everything from buses to staff background checks to replacing broken refrigerators. The spending is closely audited, not just by the federal government but by parent councils and governing boards. “Every penny is allocated,” Pittman said. “Everyone I know, including myself, has never become rich from being a Head Start employee.”

The proposed rule says it will free up $2.2 billion by 2031, which it claims is “the largest known reinvestment in the program since its creation.” But the Trump administration is not offering any new funding; it bases those savings on looser child-to-staff ratios, the reduction in mandatory hours of operation, the lower cap on administrative costs, and reduced spending on services like teacher coaching, mental and health services, and home visiting. “They’re assuming that a lot disappears,” Hamm noted.

HHS’s press release claimed, “Nothing in the rule requires Head Start providers to change their current program parameters if they are working for their community.” But given its cost-savings projections, it is clearly anticipating that programs will decide not to offer many services that are currently mandatory. “It feels really disingenuous,” Mauer said. “Programs are going to have to reallocate resources to care for more kids. Things aren’t adding up here.”

“This proposed rule is a mandate to do more with less,” Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said in a statement to The Nation.

The administration claims in its press release that the rule “restores flexibility to programs to meet local needs.” But Morrison-Frichtl says the existing standards allowed flexibility already. She oversees 54 Head Start grantees across Illinois, and “each one looks different, they reflect their community.” The standards are “not simply red tape,” she said. They “ensure that children are safe, healthy, supported, and prepared to learn.”

“Children should not pay the price of deregulation,” she added.

Last week, The Nation reported on an earlier version of the proposed rule that included a new and troubling change to eligibility that would have shut out a number of immigrants, and potentially children who are American citizens, by only allowing those who have at least one parent who is a citizen, US national, or “qualified alien” to enroll. That restriction doesn’t appear in the proposed rule. Last year, the administration attempted to block immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, a move that a judge put on hold as a lawsuit plays out. On Wednesday, the administration sent an additional new proposed rule to review called “Ensuring Program Integrity for Head Start Programs,” the contents of which aren’t yet public.

What did stay in the proposed rule released on Thursday, however, is a mandate to teach children only in English and not their family languages. That would severely disrupt many Head Start teachers’ work. Morrison-Frichtl recently spoke to a teacher in Illinois, most of whose students are dual-language learners. “She said she would be devastated,” she said. Even on a practical level, Mauer pointed out, how will teachers help children, say, put on all of their snow pants in the winter if the kids speak Spanish but teachers can’t? “It appears that the people writing these rules have not met children,” she said. “This is just not based on the evidence that we know about learning [nor] on the practical realities of how you support kids in the classroom.”

Advocates have warned that some of the rule’s changes may contradict the Head Start Act or other laws, which could leave the proposed rule vulnerable to litigation. There’s a requirement in the statute to provide services to dual-language learners, which Hamm sees as contradicting the English-only instruction requirement, as does the lower cap on administrative spending, she said. In addition, the law’s reauthorization in 2007 stated that the performance standards can’t reduce the quality and scope of services provided. When asked whether it would bring a lawsuit against the proposed or final rule, the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the lawsuit against the administration’s attempt to block immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, said in a statement to The Nation, “We’re closely reviewing the proposed rule and evaluating all available legal options.”

For its part, the administration disagrees. “Nothing in this proposed rule alters or waives statutory obligations; rather, it aligns regulatory text more closely with governing law,” it said in its press release.

The proposed rule does not represent the administration’s first attack on Head Start. After Project 2025, an agenda crafted by conservative Trump allies to guide the next Republican president, called for eliminating Head Start, a leaked draft of Trump’s first budget called for doing just that. The administration has fired huge numbers of federal Head Start employees and closed regional Head Start offices. It refused to dole out money to programs that Congress had already appropriated, leading some to briefly close. In May, the administration proposed rolling back higher wage and benefit levels for teachers set by the Biden administration.

“The Trump administration wanted to eliminate Head Start entirely but backed down after outcry from parents, providers, and Congress,” DeLauro said. “Now they seek to hollow out the program through rule-making.”

Democratic Senator Patty Murray agreed. “After Congress and the nation forcefully rejected Trump’s efforts to destroy Head Start, this administration now wants to quietly gut Head Start by eliminating the basic health and safety standards our kids rely on,” she said in a statement, calling it a “travesty.” The rule will be open to public comment for 60 days, and Murray urged parents and teachers to weigh in. “I have seen what happens when enough ordinary people refuse to let something get ripped away from them,” she said.

Morrison-Frichtl and Mauer pointed out that the administration did not talk to program directors or Head Start grantees directly about how it could make running Head Start programs easier. Now they’ll be weighing in after the rule has already been drafted.

“I’m alarmed,” Mauer said. “It’s really demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of the role that the standards have played and are playing in our programs.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

On October 27, Israel will hold its first legislative elections since the start of the war against Gaza and the wider regional conflict it has sparked. Despite this having been the first time since 1988 that an Israeli government has served out its full term, a sign that in any other state would be taken as a signal of sustainability, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in trouble.

Already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having served for nearly 19 years out of the last 30, the 76-year-old leader of Likud is gunning for another term in office. This, despite a widely publicized bribery trial against him and his wife, unending controversy over the issue of conscription of the Haredim into the military, and a war with Iran that remains without an end in sight and has left its greatest adversary in control of arguably the world’s most important waterway. (The genocide and subjugation of Palestinians, something supported by Jewish Israelis across the spectrum, is not one of the major political problems Netanyahu is contending with.)

Many politicians, such as former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, and longtime former minister Avigdor Lieberman, are looking to succeed Netanyahu, to dispense with his legacy, and to bring Israel back into the good graces of the world. But for an increasing segment of the anti-Netanyahu crowd, there is one truly formidable candidate emerging to take his place: former Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Gadi Eisenkot.

Eisenkot’s party Yashar (Hebrew for “Honest”) has skyrocketed in the polls since April, and is now neck and neck with Likud as the country’s most popular political force. Eisenkot has been sold to the Israeli public as the “complete opposite” of Netanyahu, with commentator Raviv Drucker writing in Haaretz in June, “His honesty, thoroughness and seriousness would be the ultimate remedy for us.”

Some outside Israel are beginning to take notice as well. A recent David Remnick profile of Eisenkot in The New Yorker presents the former IDF leader as the “anti-Bibi” in both “manner and character”—a “humble soldier” fighting for a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.”

Heavily downplayed amid these sanguine thoughts about what kind of leader Eisenkot could be is the issue of the kind of military leader he has already been. While this may be of little concern to the Israelis, to the Arabs who have been on the bombarded side, Eisenkot is primarily known as the architect of the strategy of collective civilian punishment known as the Dahieh Doctrine.

Before becoming chief of the General Staff, Eisenkot was the leader of the IDF’s Operations Directorate during the 2006 Lebanon War, and believed that the only way to effectively achieve deterrence against Hezbollah was to heavily bombard Dahieh, the southern suburbs of Beirut. In a 2008 interview, Eisenkot acknowledged that this policy deliberately used disproportionate force against the civilian population, “causing great damage and destruction.” The goal was to make the threat of extraordinary harm to the local population a deterrent against future attacks, and to send a message to other countries that the same could be done to them.

It was not the first time that the IDF had carpet-bombed cities or even aimed to demolish neighborhoods, but Eisenkot worked to bring the doctrine out of the shadows and into mainstream discourse. He succeeded; the Dahieh Doctrine would be utilized again and again with even greater intensity, destroying entire communities that the IDF now declared to be instead “surface-to-surface rocket villages” and “military bases.”

The regional conflict that came in the aftermath of October 7 has seen the Dahieh Doctrine used not only on a massive scale in Gaza, where critical infrastructure and civilian dwellings have been endlessly targeted. It has also been utilized yet again in both Dahieh itself and across Lebanon’s south. Still unsatisfied, calls have emerged from the Israeli right to apply the doctrine to Yemen as well as Iran. During the most recent outbreak of war in Lebanon in March, Eisenkot declared that the “Dahieh Doctrine has never been more relevant…and it must be implemented,” and that the Israeli war that had demolished wide swathes of southern Lebanon had not been powerful enough.

Eisenkot has differentiated himself by arguing for what he deems a much more cautious approach in conflict, an end to the endless wars without objectives that Netanyahu has been engaging in. Eisenkot had advocated against a unilateral strike against Hezbollah early on in the war, arguing that Gaza was supposed to be the primary focus and that Lebanon could wait. Eisenkot has placed particular criticism on Netanyahu’s handling of the war on Iran, saying that its main objectives could have been achieved “in the shadows,” and that overthrowing the Islamic Republic was not possible.

But Eisenkot has still lavished praise on other aspects of the destructive wars Netanyahu’s government has waged, such as unilaterally assassinating Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei and imposing military dominance over Gaza. In some respects, Eisenkot has gone even further than Netanyahu. He criticized the original ceasefire agreement in Lebanon that still allowed Israel almost total freedom of action, and in March, advocated “maximum force in minimum time,” hoping to cause religious strife in Lebanon by “humiliating” the Shia population by forcing them into Christian areas.

With regards to the Palestinians, Eisenkot has done the minimum in acknowledging Arabs within Israel’s borders are indeed citizens of the state. But he has said he will only accept Arabs into his governing coalition if they support the nature of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate, as well as the forced conscription of Palestinian citizens of Israel, something no Arab party has officially agreed to. Eisenkot has also reiterated his opposition to a Palestinian state and his support for maintaining settlements in the West Bank, opposing full annexation not because it is against international law or morally wrong, but because the new Arab population would endanger the Jewish majority in Israel. When Trump proposed the “Gaza Riviera” plan that would see the entire population expelled, Eisenkot called it a “blessing for Israel,” but only if the national leadership “knows how to make use” of it.

Eisenkot’s focus, in a dynamic perhaps familiar to Americans, has been on advocating a return to norms and restoring Israel’s international image. Eisenkot may differ from Netanyahu on some domestic matters, but on the issues that are central to Israel’s identity and place in the world—namely, the continuation of apartheid and genocide against Palestinians and constant wars in the Middle East—there is no functional difference between him and his opponent. Instead, he promises only that the execution of the wars he launches, their displacement of populations and annihilation of societies, will simply be done with more thought and long-term planning.

Eisenkot believes that after opening Pandora’s box, he can wrangle Israel back from the brink, easily managing all that has spewed out from within it—that a state bent on subjugating the region can in fact conduct that subjugation with honor, respect, and the approval of the world, if only it tried. With the approval of the domestic liberal commentariat and, if he continues to gain momentum, the inevitable hopeful hearts of Americans looking to fall back in love with Israel, Gadi Eisenkot may attempt to do just that.

A couple weeks back, I wrote briefly about the stench of fascism that accompanied efforts by Stephen Miller and Marco Rubio, at the international security conference in Washington, DC, that they strong-armed representatives from dozens of countries from around the world into attending, to whip up a frenzy about left-wing political parties, movements, and individuals.

As I have traveled for the past two weeks around Argentina, a country filled with the ghosts of those who were tortured and disappeared during the 1976–83 dictatorship, the Miller-Rubio double-act has struck an ever-rawer nerve.

Both men gave a master class in selective presentation of information. They zeroed in on a few, admittedly horrifying, examples of recent political violence perpetrated by ideological left-wingers, while neglecting a slew of attacks around the world carried out by those with white nationalist or Christian nationalist worldviews, who were seemingly egged on by Donald Trump and his allies.

There was mention of a 72-year-old Greek woman who was burned to death by “far-left and anarchist actors,” but no mention of the 2011 massacre of more than 70 people, mostly teenagers, killed by far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, whose theory of a Great Replacement destroying Western culture has been all but explicitly embraced by Miller. There was mention of assassination attempts against Trump, but no acknowledgement of the deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, or at the US Capitol, no mention of the murder of the speaker of the Minnesota House by a right-wing fanatic, no mention of the attempted assassination of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, which the Trumps (senior and junior) subsequently mocked. Nor was there mention of the racist mobs, which many critics argue have been urged on by Elon Musk, that have, in recent months, burned asylum seekers out of their homes in one country after another in Europe. Going further back in time, there was mention of Cold War–era attacks in Europe by the Red Brigade, but no mention of the 85 people killed in a bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980 by Italian neofascists who likely had links to both NATO and the CIA. There was mention of academics and political leaders supposedly giving a nod and a wink to left-wing violence, but no mention of the assassinations, on US streets, of American citizens and undocumented residents by federal agents who have been promised immunity by Trump and others in the top echelons of American leadership.

These speeches were truly malignant, seeking to tar any-and-all-progressives with the vicious, bloody, legacy of some far-left movements from times past and places distant.

Marco Rubio’s cherry-picked reading of history demonstrated his extreme willingness to massage facts to fit a MAGA agenda. “Far-left political terrorism is not a recent-day, modern novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was, in fact, the dominant form of political violence,” he said, conveniently overlooking systemic acts of terror from far-right forces such as, to take the most obvious and extreme example, the Holocaust. “Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remember—remember the decades of kidnappings and bombings and assassinations and executions, the violent terror of the Tupamaros, of the Montoneros, of the FARC, of the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path, the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes. You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerrillas trained to kill in Castro’s terrorist camps.” All true, but no mention of the tens of thousands of people tortured, raped, driven off of ancestral lands, in many instances killed by government troops and right-wing paramilitary death squads in those same countries during those same years.

He continued with a litany of Cold War–era leftist terror attacks in Europe and in the United States, from the Weather Underground to the Red Army, and then made the inevitable pivot: “Today, we face a new wave of this old evil. Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades.” Rubio went on to list a number of statistics to underscore his point about the purported rising levels of left-wing violence, before explaining why these “architects of revolutionary violence” are committing political acts, like attacking pipelines, railroads, and power grids: “They despise the West because the West is great.”

Stephen Miller, the man most responsible for America’s despicable war on immigrants and for the massively expanded network of immigrant detention camps proliferating across the US, picked up where Rubio left off, conjuring up ever-darker visions of a hate-filled, even physically deformed left. “The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy. The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred. The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet. And they turn those emotions ultimately into a desire to subjugate, to oppress, and to inflict pain and suffering.” Once started, Miller simply couldn’t stop. “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled—to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way—in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”

If this hadn’t been one of the most influential people in Washington speaking, one might have been excused for thinking it was the fevered, hallucinogenic, vision of an apocalyptic preacher. “Trust your instincts to all people and across all civilizations. You know what normal is. You know what beautiful is. You know what good is. You know that families are right. You know that children are precious and beautiful and must be protected. You know that the criminal and the junkie and the predator is a threat to normal, healthy living.”

Online, there were all the predictable jokes about how these dictatorial, ironfisted speeches sounded so much better in the original German. But having spent much of a day last week at the devastating Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Buenos Aires, in the naval-barracks-cum-torture-chamber-cum-execution-center through which thousands of designated enemies of the state were processed before being liquidated, I fear that the jokesters got the language wrong. What Miller and Rubio were arguing for was an all-encompassing domestic counterinsurgency strategy taken straight out of the US-sponsored School of the Americas playbook from the dirtiest days of the Cold War, a playbook that reached its logical, most savage, endpoint with the dictatorships of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s; the wholesale kidnapping and disappearance of left-wing “terrorists”; and, at the urging of Chile’s Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the creation of an international assassination syndicate under Operation Condor, by which the juntas of the region shared out their assassination dirty work with each other, as Peter Kornbluh recently wrote about in devastating detail in The Nation.

By this logic, Miller and Rubio’s chilling, dehumanizing words would have sounded far better in the original Spanish—the clipped, military Spanish used by junta leaders to justify their brutality: kidnapping people off of city streets and out of their homes; subjecting them to unendurable pain and torture at concentration camp–like sites such as the Naval Academy on a main avenue in Buenos Aires—in the basement of which, where victims were electroshocked, beaten, and otherwise subjected to unendurable pain, one can still see the rust-colored stains of old blood on the marble floors; used to rationalize the drugging of these victims once they had been tortured into spilling every bean they could spill, before they were thrown out of airplanes into the ocean below; used to declare entire political movements and parties to be terroristic and thus to justify hurling the full, unaccountable, force of the state against their members.

Miller and Rubio’s words were redolent of those spoken and written in Spanish a half century ago to explain away the kidnapping of the children of the disappeared so that they could then be adopted by good, solid, “normal” Christian family-values types in the military and business elites. They contained echoes of the rhetoric used to defend Western civilization against the Marxist barbarian political hordes clamoring at the gates; the Spanish used by the ironfisted and jackbooted caudillos and their oligarchic pals to denounce homegrown academics, human rights advocates, and economic justice campaigners who dared to dream of a slightly fairer, kinder, gentler world.

Even today, 50 years after the first spate of disappearances under the Argentinian dictatorship, surviving family members still demonstrate in the Plaza de Mayo, the political heart of Buenos Aires adjacent to the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. Originally, the mothers who came out to protest every Thursday afternoon, at a time when protesting could all too easily result in one’s death, wore white cloth diapers folded as headscarves to symbolize their missing children. These days most of the original mothers, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, are long dead—though a handful, now in their 90s and beyond, still show up in wheelchairs each Thursday. It is through their decades-long movement that the memory of the disappeared has been kept alive. It is in tribute to them that in working-class neighborhoods such as La Boca huge murals paint the stories of those disappeared victims. It is through their insistence on accountability that, after the dictatorship ended, and despite the best attempts of the political leadership to enforce an amnesty that would forgive-and-forget the torturers and executioners—and, more importantly, those who ordered the torture and the executions—many of these ironfist acolytes were tried and sentenced for their crimes against humanity.

The Madres’ protest movement is brave, magnificent. It speaks to what ordinary people can do even in the most extreme of circumstances. And it speaks to the need to always call the powerful to account, even when those powerful nebulously claim to be acting to defend civilization against the so-called left-wing barbarians who would, they confidently tell the world, burn it all to the ground.

David Griscom is a sixth-generation Texan, political commentator, and host of The Jacobin Show, a weekly political analysis broadcast. In his new book, The Myth of Red Texas: Cowboys, Populism, and Class War in the Radical South, he undoes the idea of Texas as a place with conservatism inherent to its political bloodline.

I have lived in Texas for almost my entire life, and the El Pasoans and Houstonians I have known do not easily surrender to the conservative oil-and-cattle caricature of Texas.

Griscom breaks past exactly that caricature. The book recovers a Texas whose radical past speaks directly to what still feels possible here: one filled with striking cowboys, tenant farmers, fence cutters, socialists, and Populists fighting landowners, debt, and corporate power. I sat down with him to talk about that political inheritance and what it means to remember it now, as Texas heads into a statewide Senate race in which James Talarico is trying to prove that politics for working people can actually win here.

—Lajward Zahra

Lajward Zahra: One of the first histories you return to is the Fence Cutting Wars of the 1880s, when landless cattlemen cut through the barbed-wire fences that large ranchers erected to control open-range pastures. What made you want to begin with these disputes? Were you imagining the book mainly for Texans, as a way of offering them a different political legacy, or also for the rest of the country?

David Griscom: The book really started when I began researching the story of the fence cutters a few years ago for Jacobin. The way that story is often presented in Texas history is as a story of how law and order came to Texas. But if you are a sixth-generation Texan, you are much more likely to be related to a fence cutter than to the Texas Rangers who put down that revolt.

That is really where the idea started. Both with this book and with my other work on Left Reckoning, I have wanted to encourage people to look into the radical history of the United States. A lot of the other work I have done has been around places like Louisiana and Arkansas, and they also have these very rich traditions that I think are either purposefully hidden or just understudied.

I think it is a two-way street. The right has a very active political movement trying to deny and discredit these moments. I think that on the left, while we are very good at debunking the myths of the right, we sometimes forget that it is also important to root ourselves in a tradition of resistance to dominant power.

LZ: In 1883, cowboys in the Texas Panhandle went on strike against large ranches, demanding higher wages at a moment when corporate owners were tightening control over cattle work. The usual version of the story is that the cowboys lost, but you write that the strike still set a new wage standard and showed that solidarity was there from the beginning of Texas’s cattle economy. What changes when we remember cowboys not as symbols of rugged individualism or as figures placed next to the Rangers, but as workers with shared material interests who organized against cattle barons?

DG: The history of the cowboy strike is really fascinating. Every year around May Day, some newspaper writer will write a quick essay about the cowboy strike, and the story usually goes, “Oh, this is interesting, but the cowboys all got drunk in the saloon and lost the strike.”

I am indebted to Mark Lause for [debunking this narrative] in his book on the cowboy strike for Verso. It is fascinating to go back and see the cliché in action—how the victor writes history. Almost all the records of the strike are taken either directly from spokespeople for the major ranches or from the memoirs of the daughters or grandsons of ranchers. A certain version of the story was presented, and that was the version a lot of Texas historians in the first half of the 20th century were looking at. It became one of those things that gets repeated enough that most people do not go back and look at the original government documents or the sourcing.

As I write in the book, the strike not only happened, but was incredibly successful because of the strategic and deeply wise decision by the cowboys to strike strategically when they were needed for the spring roundup.

I think this myth is especially important for them to uphold. I respond in the book to a writer who basically denies the history of the cowboy strike through a very cultural lens, as if cowboys are individualistic and the West is where solidarity goes to die. But if you look at the actual work of cowboying, it was very communal. These workers understood that they were part of a class, and that they were on the opposite side of the big landowners.

It is important to reclaim that history because the right is trying to define Texans and Texan-ness in a very particular way. We need our own version, but not only as a debunking of the right. We also need to be able to say that we have cowboys and workers throughout our history who we can look toward as models.

LZ: Populism is in the title of, and woven throughout, the book. Today, the term “populist” is often used as a pejorative, denoting the crude, reactionary, or anti-intellectual. What do we overlook when we talk about rural populism with condescension, rather than as a tradition of class consciousness and self-respect? And how does that complicate the way rural populism is discussed today, when the word is often treated as almost synonymous with Donald Trump and right-wing grievance?

DG: At the end of the day, I think it is a fight for dignity. “Populism” is probably one of the most abused terms in American politics today. It usually means a rhetorical style of us-versus-them. And do not get me wrong, the Populists certainly used that kind of style. But when they invoked “the people,” everybody knew exactly who the people were.

One thing that has been lost in the historical record is that when people hear “populism,” they think of people using fiery, inspirational language with a clear enemy. But they also had very specific plans for how they were going to improve people’s lives.

This idea that populism is just about rallying around a demagogue is something that actually existing Texas populism disproves.  After Thomas Lewis Nugent, the great leader of the Texas Populist movement, died, the movement achieved some of its most meaningful results under a completely different leader. Usually, movements like that struggle with any transfer of power or leadership. But Texas populism did something different.

That is because this was not a top-down movement. It was very much grassroots. It came out of the Southern Farmers Alliance, labor, and all these economic organizations of everyday people. That was the source of American populism, and of Texas populism in particular.

I think there is a lot to learn from it. It discredits the idea of populism as a top-down movement, and it also helps us think about how to build something like that again today.

Rural America is suffering. If we can look at the major crises people are experiencing in rural America, organize people around those economic conditions, and then bring that into politics, that is very different from making a political argument after the fact about how supporting this or that politician will improve their lives.

What made populism stick was that everyone in the community was participating in it. They were investigating the problems themselves, so when they made political demands, they understood that those demands were in their own best interest. That is very different from the top-down approaches, like you see with Donald Trump, that people mislabel as populist today.

LZ: If Texas populism was rooted in farmers’ alliances, labor organizations, radical newspapers, traveling lecturers, and communities studying their own conditions, what happened to it? How did a movement with such a robust social base get buried so deeply that Texans are surprised to hear this history at all?

DG: I think a few things happened. The Democratic Party made itself hostile to the Populist movement, but the Populists’ power came from the fact that they had an organized working-class movement of farmers and laborers behind them. When they threatened to create a schism and leave for another political movement, they actually had a social base as leverage. We do not have that in the same way today.

Race was also central. There were real efforts to bring Black Texans into the Populist movement, and Black labor leaders helped accelerate its success. That threatened the ruling class in Texas. In Grimes County, a white Populist sheriff appointed Black deputies, provoking white supremacists in the community to organize a “white man’s union” to take power back. More broadly, the implementation of Jim Crow and the restriction of the vote in Texas, which also targeted poor whites, was a direct response to the success of the Populists.

That is important to remember because these movements were not put down because they were unpopular or because people thought they were not Texan. They were met with white supremacist backlash, voter suppression, violence, and electoral fraud. Later, the right in Texas built a whole project around presenting a very specific view of who Texans are.

LZ: I want to go back to what you call the “California hypothesis,” the idea that Texas’s problems can be blamed on liberal newcomers from California, who supposedly bring Democratic politics with them and threaten the state’s conservative identity. You connect that story to the long Democratic electoral drought in Texas. But one of the paradoxes you point to is that many Republican voters in Texas are themselves recent arrivals, while native-born Texans are often less uniformly conservative than the myth suggests.

What does that reveal about Texas politics now, and about the way ideas of who counts as “really Texan” get used politically?

DG: I come from Austin, and you will see bumper stickers that say things like “Don’t LA My Austin” or “Don’t California My Texas.” I have seen them in Lockhart, too, where they say, “Don’t Austin My Lockhart.”

There is a lot of anxiety in Texas about what is happening to the culture of the state. That mixes with the fact that Texas is becoming more unaffordable. People are having a harder and harder time staying in their communities. Beloved businesses, restaurants, and activities are closing. I think that is a direct result of Republican mismanagement of the state, which has been a boon for the wealthiest Texans and very difficult for everyday Texans. Texas continues to lead the country in some of the most humiliating and devastating poverty statistics, particularly for young people and women.

The California hypothesis is a perfect way for Republicans to do what they are good at, which is culture war. They are able to speak to that anxiety: “Texas is changing, and I feel like I cannot afford it.” But instead of pointing the finger at Republican economic policies, they turn it into a cultural argument. They say Californians have come in and pushed all of this.

But the idea that Californians are moving to Texas and becoming Democratic voters is not accurate to the data we have. The original Republican takeover of Texas was built, in part, on recruiting Republicans who were moving here because of corporate relocation. Today, Texas is seeing a massive influx of people from outside the state who often move to cities like Austin, Dallas, or Houston, which are run by Democrats, but many of them are Republican voters.

In 2018, if the vote had been restricted to native-born Texans, Beto O’Rourke would have won the Senate seat. These new voters are very important to the Republican Party.

That is another part of the California hypothesis that is interesting to me. For people coming here who do not have deep roots in the state, the best way to become a “true Texan” is to vote for the Republican Party. If Texas means conservative politics, then you can become Texan by supporting conservative politics. It works on many levels for them, and I would argue that it is fairly effective.

You can see this in the way people are surprised by this book and this history. That surprise is the product of a long right-wing project to present a very specific view of Texas. One quick example is Dan Patrick, who is from Maryland and is now the lieutenant governor of one of the largest economies in the world. He regularly attacks the Alamo Museum for its programming, to the point of getting leaders at the Alamo fired over museum programming. It is amazing to watch someone in that position get so worked up over whether the Alamo mentions Native Americans.

This August marks yet another anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but 2026 carries a special weight—for the first time since the Cold War, the United States has no active nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, following the expiration of the New START nuclear arms reduction agreement.

Over 80 years ago, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uranium bomb detonated over Hiroshima on August 6 destroyed an estimated 70 percent of the city’s buildings and roughly 140,000 lost their lives. Less than five days later, a plutonium bomb was dropped on the nearby city of Nagasaki, killing an additional 74,000 people, triggering radioactive rain, and driving ground temperatures above 4,000°C. In the years and decades that followed, the few survivors who lived faced immense health complications including leukemia, cancer, deformities, and other devastating health impacts from radiation—impacts those communities are still living with today.

New START itself can be traced back to the Soviet era, when the United States and Russia first launched the SALT negotiations that eventually produced the Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms: a heralded treaty, that went through multiple iterations, that many subsequently considered the last bastion constraining a renewed global nuclear arms race. That treaty expired on February 5, 2026.

In addition to the dangerous dismantling of the modest controls on nuclear escalation that had existed for decades, there has been a systematic effort to erase the devastation of the communities that have been hurt most by the development, production, and testing of nuclear weapons from our memories, and our history books. The combination of an absence of guardrails and an attempt to induce historical amnesia about the true human costs of developing and maintaining vast nuclear arsenals is a volatile mix that increases the risks that nuclear weapons might be used again, despite the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The story of nuclear weapons is more than just the story of scientists working away in secrecy at Los Alamos, or leaders wielding nuclear threats—and, in the case of the Cuban missile crisis, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. It is the story of devastation, disease, and death caused by the development and deployment of those weapons, even if they are never used again in warfare. The deadly consequences of nuclear development have fallen most heavily on communities of color, from the dire health consequences of mining uranium in the Congo and the American Southwest, to the generational cancers in communities downwind from nuclear tests, from the Marshall Islands to the American West; communities of color have been disproportionately affected by nuclear testing and warfare.

These consequences did not start with the bombings in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The testing caused a reckoning that also reached into the scientific community itself, made famous by Robert Oppenheimer’s words after the Trinity test, when he said the world would not be the same, and later invoked the line “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Historians still debate the racialized dimensions of why the bomb was used on Japan; questions of who counts as human, who is deemed worthy of safety, and how ideas of supremacy shape militarization remain unresolved eight decades later. That choice—its weight—also strained the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Japan, raising a question that still lingers: How does a nation set norms it did not itself follow?

The stories of the civilian victims of nuclear arms racing are increasingly at risk of being rewritten, sanitized, or erased from official histories altogether. The risks posed by the lack of arms control measures and the concerted effort to whitewash the dangers of possessing nuclear weapons, as well as the catastrophe that would come from using them, make nuclear use at some future date more likely. With no treaty framework in place, active global conflicts like the runaway wars in the Middle East and the ongoing war in Ukraine, and coordinated efforts to erase the history of nuclear dangers, we need to treat this anniversary as more than a commemoration or an expression of regret. We need to treat it as a turning point for humanity.

We need not just a moment of mourning but a call to chart a new path forward that recognizes the dreadful toll nuclear weapons have imposed, and takes fundamental steps toward reducing nuclear dangers once and for all. As the US has reached its 250th birthday, it is long past time for some truth-telling about communities harmed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and about countries all over the world harmed by nuclear weapons.

Abdul El-Sayed’s Democratic primary win in Michigan is a watershed moment for the Palestine movement in the United States. El-Sayed ran on a platform that consistently centered Palestinian humanity and an end to US military funding to Israel—principled positions that his opponents viciously attacked him for. He faced over $60 million in outside spending for his chief rival, Haley Stevens—including around $30 million from AIPAC alone—and he triumphed.

Polling had predicted that El-Sayed would sweep the race by a wide margin; in the end, he won by under a percentage point. This is a reminder that challenging the status quo is an uphill battle, particularly when the stakes are as high as they are in the Michigan Senate race, and that the unprecedented levels of money our opponents are pouring into these campaigns are a serious threat. So we cannot let up.

We have to keep organizing and turning out our communities to vote in November. Luckily, our movement has shown that we know how to do that. This year, USCPR Action, the political arm of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, where I am the political director, endorsed our first slate of 16 federal and local candidates, each of whom committed to reject AIPAC and end US military funding to Israel. As of this writing, 14 of those candidates have gone through their primary elections—and 11 of them have won. From New York to Pennsylvania to Texas to Michigan, pro-Palestine candidates like Chris Rabb, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Dr. Adam Hamawy have broken new ground for our movement.

If you had told me that this is what the 2026 midterm cycle would look like in October 2023, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you had told me an Egyptian Muslim Michigander running on a pro-Palestine platform would be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, I’d be in even more disbelief.

None of these wins would be possible without the relentless grassroots activism for Palestinian liberation over the past few years—and that work hasn’t been easy, to say the least. After October 7, 2023, Congress, which was already in AIPAC’s choke hold, became even more vehemently supportive of Israel and its genocide against the Palestinian people. In the immediate aftermath, senior Democrats like Chuck Schumer, Jacky Rosen, and Mark Kelly visited Israel. President Joe Biden refused to condemn any of Israel’s heinous massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, and instead gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a bear hug and an unrestricted supply of weaponry.

Congressional Democrats spent most of 2023 and ’24 coming up with new ways to justify genocide and attacking their colleagues who were courageous enough to remind them that Palestinian lives are precious. Rashida Tlaib was censured by the House, with 22 Democrats joining Republicans to rebuke her for daring to speak for her people as the only Palestinian member of Congress. Cori Bush introduced the Ceasefire Now resolution with only 13 cosponsors, facing similar accusations as Tlaib. Things in the Senate were even more dismal; even the most progressive senators like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had to be pressured by their staff and alumni to support a ceasefire in Gaza.

I watched all of these events unfold through my many identities: as a Palestinian American, a new mother, and my work at USCPR. In between trying to organize protests to push members of Congress to support a ceasefire, I watched the mass murder of my people livestreamed hour after hour, day after day. I will never forget the press conferences held by Palestinian children, or the days in which Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta stood over the dead bodies of people whom he and so many others had tried to save. Instead of blocking the bombs used to commit these heinous crimes, members of my own government tried to silence and criminalize our movement.

While I had one foot in navigating establishment politics, my other foot (and my whole heart) were with the grassroots activists fighting courageously for my people. These ordinary people sacrificed their jobs, degrees, and, in some cases, their freedom to end the genocide. Student organizers occupied their campuses to end their university’s investments in Israel. Union dockworkers refused to load ships that carried weapons supplies for Israel. Flotilla activists risked their lives trying to carry aid to Gaza. People confronted their elected officials, protested in mass actions across the country, and participated in boycotts and other BDS tactics.

My organization worked closely with this wave of new activists. We did rapid-response and skills trainings to channel their righteous anger into political action. We supported the launch of legislation like the Block the Bombs Act, which has reached 81 cosponsors as more congressional Democrats wake up to reality. We launched initiatives like Not My Tax Dollars to expose how American taxpayers’ money fuels genocide instead of funding care for our communities—a framing that is now widely used by progressive candidates like El-Sayed and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

This message deeply resonates with American voters who cannot reconcile paying $5 a gallon for gas and $6 for a loaf of bread while the US government spends $12 billion to arm and bankroll Israel. Voters want healthcare, affordability, and childcare at home—not money directed toward Israel’s murder of families in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. Nor do they want foreign influence in elections or dark money buying political seats.

The Democratic establishment often tries to frame the issue of Palestine as unrelated to domestic concerns. But voters clearly understand that all of our lives are connected. This was clear in Michigan; as a Detroit community leader and soccer coach told Haley Stevens, “It’s not a candidate issue, it’s a human rights issue.… those 6-year-olds that I coach here, they’re just as precious as the 6-year-olds in Palestine.” Maybe this is why support for Israel is at a historic low in the US, as 68 percent of Democratic voters recognize that Israel is committing genocide.

A new theory of change in American politics has emerged, as AIPAC’s influence is dying, and unapologetic support of Palestinian liberation is proven to win again and again. Taking a cent of AIPAC money has become a political liability.

As Abdul El-Sayed eloquently said, “This is a moral Rorschach test. If you can’t identify the systematic murder of tens of thousands of kids as a genocide and then you wanna say you’re a fighter for human rights and dignity, that’s just hypocrisy.”

The grassroots activism that has changed the American political landscape needs to keep doing what we do best. We cannot back down just because the political status quo has begun to crumble before our eyes. El-Sayed will need help from all of us to win in November. AIPAC has already said they will oppose him, meaning their misinformation machine will be on overdrive. All of this is preparation for the 2028 presidential election, where it will take our collective activism to make sure that Palestine is a litmus test for Democratic candidates, and a moral compass to guide voter decisions. We will need our legions of grassroots activists to keep reminding them that moral ambiguity on Palestine is no longer acceptable.

Palestinian activists often say that our collective liberation is intertwined, and that none of us will be truly free until Palestine is free. I believe that, and I want us to usher in a new politics rooted in humanism and collective liberation. One that is refreshingly honest and aspirational about who we could be collectively, if we were free of ethnonationalist, corporatist, and antidemocratic influences, and if our government funded care for our communities instead of killing.

Call it a sweep. On Tuesday, progressives ran the table in the Michigan Democratic primary, with Donovan McKinney, Will Lawrence, and Abdul El-Sayed each dispatching their corporate-backed opponents despite a barrage of dark-money-funded attack ads against them—including $70 million spent against El-Sayed, whose campaign overcame an 11-to-one spending disadvantage to secure his remarkable victory.

The big question, now, is whether the Democratic establishment that opposed these candidates so vehemently in the primary will rally around the nominees their voters elected—particularly El-Sayed, whose race is a must-win for Democrats if they are going to take back the Senate.

Fortunately, a number of major party leaders have already announced their endorsement of El-Sayed. Representative Haley Stevens released a classy concession statement saying she is “proud to offer” her support in the general election against Mike Rogers. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who backed Stevens in the primary, also endorsed El-Sayed, saying, “We’re all united by our shared goal of getting things done for the people in Michigan.” Kamala Harris sent out a fundraising e-mail for him. And the machinery of the party is kicking into gear—the Democrats’ Senate Majority PAC has already put out a genuinely moving ad for El-Sayed, set to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”

This shows how far the center of gravity in the party has shifted—and quickly. After all, it was only last year when a number of centrist leaders, including Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani after Democratic voters in New York City decisively chose him as their mayoral nominee. Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand even went on to falsely claim that Mamdani supported “global jihad,” a message echoed by Democratic Representatives Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen. Today, of course, Mamdani is one of the most popular Democrats in the country.

And yet, despite all this progress, it’s clear that we still have a long way to go until the left flank of the Democratic Party is broadly accepted as a legitimate, equal partner—and potentially a future senior partner—in the Democratic coalition, as evidenced by the significant array of party leaders who have not been so forthcoming in their support for the newly minted Michigan Senate nominee.

When asked, prior to Tuesday, if she would back the Muslim-American El-Sayed if he won the primary, Michigan Democratic Representative Hillary Scholten said, “I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue.” Since then, she’s refused to respond to a request about whether she would be endorsing him. Michael LaRosa, who served as press secretary for first lady Jill Biden and special assistant to President Joe Biden, went further. “If [El-Sayed] wins, I will do everything I can to make sure he loses,” he posted before the primary, a position he’s doubled down on since. Other right-leaning Democratic influencers have shared similar sentiments. Then there’s Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress—ostensibly the leading establishment think tank of the Democratic Party—who spent the last month relentlessly attacking El-Sayed on social media. So far, she has not changed her tune, offering no public statements of support for the Democratic nominee—just a bunch of posts implying that he lacks backing from the working class. Meanwhile the corporatist think tank Third Way responded to El-Sayed’s win not with a call to unify against the MAGA right but with the announcement of a $15 million campaign to “discredit” democratic socialism, despite concerns, as The New York Times put it, of “potentially undercutting Democratic nominees in swing-state races and undermining the party’s chances of retaking Congress.”

This refusal—whether real or threatened—to, in centrist parlance, “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” is particularly ironic given that it’s the very crime many of these same establishment figures spent months accusing El-Sayed of committing. The difference is that, in contrast to today’s centrist threats, El-Sayed never betrayed the Democratic Party. The attacks from the right focused on El-Sayed’s support of the Uncommitted movement, an attempt to push Biden on his disastrous Gaza policy during the 2024 primaries—and only during the primaries. As Waleed Shahid, an Uncommitted organizer, explained, “We weren’t trying to blow up the coalition. We were trying to keep it alive.” Indeed, El-Sayed endorsed Kamala Harris the morning after she launched her 2024 campaign.

It seems, then, that we will soon see what counts as a greater betrayal among certain members of the Democratic establishment: using your primary vote to try to persuade a presumptive Democratic nominee to change course on an issue that was (empirically) an electoral catastrophe, or actively undermining the general election campaign of your party’s confirmed nominee in a must-win battleground seat.

Just the fact that this is a question demonstrates the hypocrisy behind some centrists’ past evocation of “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” a line that’s long been used to discipline progressives. What made those admonitions so galling was that progressive Democrats have been overwhelmingly voting blue no matter who, election after election. A higher percentage of Bernie’s voters backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 than Clinton’s supporters in the 2008 presidential primary backed Barack Obama’s general election campaign. The same is true of the 2020 election, when progressives aggressively rallied behind Biden, and the 2024 election, when they did the same for Harris (as I can attest to firsthand, as one of the organizers of the “Progressives for Harris” effort).

The truth is, it’s very easy to say “Vote Blue No Matter Who” when that means voting for your own worldview and interests. It’s a lot harder when it requires supporting someone who is on the opposite side of issues that are deeply important to you. Progressives spend their entire lives swallowing their feelings to do the latter and still get attacked by the establishment for disloyalty. But the moment this dynamic flips—as occurred in Michigan this week, thanks to an array of superior candidates running superior campaigns with a superior capacity to meet this moment—key members of the centrist establishment have shown that their loyalty is not to the Democratic Party but to their side’s control of the party.

Hopefully, this time around, these figures will choose to act with more grace. Hopefully, Democratic elected officials like Scholten will put aside their factional grievances and join the majority of their party’s voters and leaders in helping Democratic nominees defeat the Republicans rubber-stamping Trump’s authoritarian power grabs. Hopefully, centrists can start taking a page from the most committed base of the Democratic coalition—the progressives who have again and again shifted gears from disappointing primary losses to supporting the Democratic nominees in the general election, the ones they had, at one point, campaigned against. If nothing else, hopefully the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” Democrats can muster the basic wherewithal to actually vote blue no matter who.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

We’ve now had a year and a half to see what the “Make America Health Again” movement has wrought. Under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., we’ve seen a full-scale attack on vaccination in the United States and the decimation of agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, among many others. American public health and biomedical research are in free fall—and it’s all hazardous to your well-being. And MAHA and MAGA, despite bumps in the road, are partners in an authoritarian mission to put American health and lives under the thumb of Donald Trump and his henchmen hiding in the shadows, from Russell Vought to Jay Bhattacharya and Dr. Oz.

Yet, despite the people hurt by the administration’s policies, there are always others ready to make excuses for people in power. At the beginning of President Trump’s term, there were those who were in the mode of “wait, hear me out, RFK Jr. has some good ideas on what is wrong with health in America.” This logic depended on cherry-picking a few items on the MAHA agenda—on processed food or pharmaceutical advertising, for instance—while downplaying the very real dangers RFK Jr. posed overall. While these people may have seen themselves as bridge-builders to the new administration, they were really just offering up their own personal and professional credibility to people who didn’t give a damn what they thought. I still can’t fathom why they would do so.

All these months later, those voices have largely gone silent. Apparently, playing footsie with RFK Jr. is not what it used to be. However, what has persisted are those commentators who want to partake in another game of “just pick the cyclospora out of your salad.”

This time, rather than seeingm RFK Jr. as a possible partner, these individuals are seeking to separate MAHA supporters from those who lead the movement. Their pitch: The rank and file of MAHA are not all anti-vaxxers. They have real concerns about pesticides, ultra-processed foods, and the failure of the American healthcare system. You cannot lump them in with RFK Jr. and his ilk—these regular MAHA folks are real people we can work with.

The first problem with this argument is that there are many ways to tackle these issues that don’t involve cozying up to the MAHA faithful. There is an entire environmental movement addressing pesticides, many people addressing the lack of healthy food for millions of Americans, and hundreds of groups pushing for healthcare reform. For the rank and file, the decision to remain affiliated with MAHA and its pernicious politics is a choice. You may have come for the raw milk and beef tallow, but if you stay for the eugenics and outright racism built into the MAHA agenda, these pundits should at least ask why this is so. (What’s more, this country’s political leaders usually promote policies that make their supporters’ day-to-day lives more difficult. Why stay in what is an abusive political relationship?)

Another problem is that the image of MAHA as a broadly bipartisan movement is just not true. In fact, political affiliation is the strongest predictor of identification with MAHA; a Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington Post poll taken last fall found approximately “six in ten (62%) Republican parents identify[ing] with the movement, rising to eight in ten (81%) among Republicans who support the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.” The numbers for Democratic parents identifying with MAHA are much lower at 17 percent and among independents down to about a third.

But none of these questions matter to the MAHA-curious. In fact, for them it’s not MAHA that’s the problem; it’s public health. It’s true that trust in many civic and governmental institutions has been in decline across the board for over a decade. Public health is no exception, and the Covid pandemic did not help. But there is a profound ignorance of history that resides in these arguments. Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, in their book Merchants of Doubt, have described the long-standing campaign to undermine trust in public health and scientific institutions on topics as diverse as tobacco, global warming, and pesticides. During Covid, new merchants of doubt were out sowing discord and anger, often funded by far-right foundations, as well-documented by Walker Bragman and Alex Kotch. At the very least, some acknowledgement that trust can be actively undermined as a political strategy needs to be confronted by these commentators, which they are often not willing to do. They pass over the conservative actors and media ecosystem at work in fueling this crisis.

Improving public health depends on building a big tent. But it is an odd strategy indeed to always look rightward for allies and ignore those who are being hurt most by this administration’s policies—to eschew solidarity with those most in need of someone to care about them and their plight. To build your liberal brand on fetishization of conservative voices is a now well-worn and satirized trope (e.g., the New York Times Pitchbot’s “In this Ohio diner…” series). But in the context of these commentaries on public health, whom you seek out also tells you who matters, and whom you’re willing to leave behind.

A broad-based coalition for public health can be built, but if your starting place is kicking back a cup of coffee in the Ohio diner with MAHA influencers, rather than with the miners in Belmont County dying of black lung disease while the feds block new silica protection rules; or with the families living in food deserts in the Milo-Grogan and Linden communities in Columbus while President Trump axed a probe into price-fixing and collusion between this country’s biggest food company and its biggest grocer; or some of the hundreds of thousands of Ohioans about to lose Medicaid coverage under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, I’d repeat the words of Florence Reese, who sang in 1931 during the Harlan County, Kentucky miners’ strike: “Which side are you on?”

There are always grifters and opportunists ready to seize the moment, and the false populism of RFK Jr. and Donald Trump and the false tribune-of-the-people liberalism of MAHA’s fellow travelers strangely connect in a disinterest in the millions upon millions who will suffer from this administration’s policies. And yes, I think there are also those who, in good faith, see those among the MAHA rank and file as worthy of our concern. I do too. Health is a human right, and it belongs to all of us. But a new collaborationist politics is sprouting up which excuses too much and pretends that the world of MAHA is something other than it is: a movement built to destroy and built on lies by its founders.

If we want to build trust, we can start by telling the truth. To MAHA supporters, we can say in all honesty and with kindness and patience: The people you follow, the movement you are part of, is a con. Those who would redirect you to see public health as “the problem” are leading you astray as well. In the end, MAHA and its not-you-it’s-me mirror image of an illegitimate, untrustworthy conception of public health are just leading us down rabbit holes, away from the core problems we face today.

If you want to strike at the root of what ails all of us, stop and look at the politicians and their billionaire allies who have enriched themselves at our expense, gutting the programs that provide protection from health threats across the board, slashing programs that ensure healthcare for millions, leading many Americans to an early grave. This great unraveling is happening right before your eyes, and things are about to get a lot, lot worse. There is an epic political struggle brewing right now, and distraction is something we cannot afford in this existential moment, whether it is from a Kennedy or the pied pipers of the podcasts.

ReShonda Young, a 51-year-old owner of a health and nutrition supplement store in Waterloo, Iowa, has been self-employed for over a decade. Out of the last ten years, she had employer-based insurance for just one—through her late husband, who passed away three years ago. Every other year, she’s turned to the Affordable Care Act to get health coverage. “I’m really dependent on the marketplace,” she said.

Two years ago, she enrolled in a “gold” plan, the top tier on the ACA marketplace. It was affordable for her—it cost $94 a month with a $1,500 deductible and out-of-pocket maximum of about $5,000—and offered a great network of doctors. “It was just a really solid plan. I was super happy with it,” she said. Then she got a letter last year saying that her premium for her plan would be increasing to $592 a month—a 530 percent increase. “I’m like, ‘Yeah I cannot do that,’” she said.

In 2021, Congress expanded premium tax credits that reduced costs for over 20 million people who, like Young, obtained their health insurance on ACA marketplaces but didn’t previously qualify for the assistance. The subsidies helped more than double enrollment while they were in effect and helped bring the share of Americans covered by health insurance to record highs. But the expansion was set to expire at the end of 2025.

Bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate supported extending the subsidies, and during debate over HR1, the Republican mega-bill focused on taxes and healthcare, members of Congress proposed amendments to extend them. “HR1 was the obvious vehicle to do that,” Anthony Wright, executive director of the healthcare advocacy organization Families USA, told me. But “the Republican leadership blocked them.” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries successfully brought forward a discharge petition to force a bill extending the tax credits onto the House floor, only to have the measure fail in the Senate.

After Republicans failed to act and the subsidies evaporated this year, premiums have skyrocketed, forcing many Americans to downgrade their coverage. The share of people selecting bronze plans—the lowest tier, with smaller provider networks and the highest out-of-pocket costs—grew substantially, from 30 percent of marketplace enrollees to 40 percent. “People have responded by transitioning to lower-premium plans to try to save money and at least get some kind of coverage, but it’s often difficult for them to get the care that they need when they need it,” said Claire Heyison, health insurance and marketplace senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  

Meanwhile, the share of people who dropped their coverage altogether has shot up. Nearly 3 million fewer people enrolled in and paid for marketplace coverage in 2026 than in 2025, a 13 percent decrease—the largest drop in enrollment since the marketplaces opened up in 2014. Previously, declines in enrollment have “usually been in the low single percentages,” noted Heyison.

The reason for the drop-off “is not rocket science,” Wright said. After huge cost increases in the wake of the expiration of the expanded premium tax subsidies, “It’s not a surprise that millions of people dropped coverage and millions more downgraded.”

Young knew she couldn’t forfeit coverage altogether, especially after being diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago. “Not having insurance is not an option,” she said. “But the plan that I had also was not an option.” She reached out to insurance brokers to see if she could get an employer plan, but she was told she wouldn’t be able to get anything better than what she could find on the marketplace. So she downgraded to a bronze plan that has a $7,500 deductible and $10,000 out-of-pocket max.

Her co-pays are also more expensive. She now pays $100 every time she goes to the doctor, up from about $20 on her previous plan. “The goal is not to have to go to the doctor,” she said. Her strategy hasn’t worked out so well this year, however. She’s been dealing with a retina problem that required two laser surgeries and a half dozen doctor visits this spring, costing her about $600.

To absorb the extra costs without her late husband’s income to help her, she’s had to make “lots of changes and big decisions,” she said. After 20 years of being a landlord, she’s been forced to sell some properties to make sure “I’ve got enough of a cushion to be able to cover my health.”

The Trump administration has chalked up the majority of the decrease in insurance coverage to cracking down on supposed fraud, claiming in a report by the Department of Health and Human Services that the increases in enrollment during the Biden administration were due to “weakened program integrity safeguards” and enrollment that is “suspected to be improper, phantom, or fraudulent.” But if there is fraud in the marketplaces, Heyison said, it’s mostly brokers and agents who enroll people without their knowledge to make a commission. “Individuals are not typically fraudulently paying for Affordable Care Act marketplace coverage,” she said.

Data suggests that the increase in costs is the root of the problem. A large share of those who dropped coverage this year are the people who no longer quality for premium subsidies. In a survey conducted earlier this year, 71 percent of those who had dropped or switched coverage said cost was the main reason. All states but one have seen declines in marketplace enrollment—New Mexico, the only state to experience an increase, was also the only one to use its own funding to keep the enhanced premium tax credits. Some of the people who lost coverage may be able to qualify for Medicaid or get insurance through their employers, but one in 10 survey respondents said they were now uninsured.

Ellen Allen is still insured, but just barely. The 64-year-old self-proclaimed eighth-generation West Virginian is the executive director of West Virginians for Affordable Health Care, a nonprofit with a two-person staff. Until taking the job three years ago, Allen relied on employer health insurance, but her current organization can’t afford a group policy. Instead, it pays her a stipend that she takes to the marketplace, where she found a plan that she was happy with. She received the expanded premium tax credits, which helped lower her cost so that the stipend covered her out-of-pocket expenses.

That is, until this year. Her premium increased from $479 to $2,000 per month for a plan that offers less and costs her more out of pocket. In order to afford the monthly premium, she dropped her vision and dental coverage. Even so, she’s feeling the squeeze. “It’s taken money out of our household,” she said. She and her wife had started a bathroom renovation, but they’ve since put that on an indefinite hold. They’ve started clipping coupons. They love to travel, but they’ve put off their semiannual trip abroad for the foreseeable future.

Allen has been working since she was 12 and said that she has been looking forward to retiring next year. She’ll be able to enroll in Medicare then, but thanks to how much of their savings has had to go to healthcare costs this year, “We’ll be living pretty close to the bone, even though we’ve saved our whole life to plan for this,” she said. She thinks she might end up having to get a part-time job.

“It was stunning to me that every single person that West Virginia citizens sent to Washington, every single one, abandoned the healthcare needs of West Virginians,” she said of her Republican congressional representatives. “It was stunning to me how little regard they had.”

As they failed to include an extension of the premium tax subsidies in HR1, Republicans enacted changes to the Affordable Care Act that have led to even more coverage losses. One provision prohibits premium tax credits from going to legal immigrants who have had green cards for fewer than five years. New York State had used those tax credits to finance an extension of its basic Essential Plan and expand eligibility for higher-income residents. With this new restriction, however, the state is redirecting some of the money to keep covering immigrants by shrinking the plan’s expansion. That meant that, as of July 1, 450,000 higher-income New Yorkers lost Essential Plan coverage, which represents the most rapid loss of health insurance in the state’s history, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute, which also predicted that most people kicked off will remain uninsured.

One of them was Lily Fang. Fang had been working remotely full-time for a tech start-up, moving from place to place, until last summer, when she decided to leave her job. She had been spending a lot of time with a partner and friends in New York City, and she needed health insurance, so she decided to officially become a state resident in order to enroll in the Essential Plan. Her coverage was free, with no monthly premium or annual deductible.

Then she got a notice this spring that she was going to be kicked off the plan. She looked into getting other coverage on the ACA marketplace, but it would have cost a few hundred dollars a month for a plan with a $4,000 deductible. She and her partner considered getting a domestic partnership so she could be covered under his employer’s plan, but that, too, was too costly. Fang, who is 30 and healthy, is going without coverage for now. “I’m just trying not to get into accidents,” she said. “It’s pretty stressful.” In the back of her head is an idea to move abroad to one of the many countries that has universal healthcare. She lived in France for a year and speaks both French and Spanish. She and her partner have even discussed getting married to make it cheaper for her to go on his plan. “But I think it feels kind of unromantic to do that for health insurance,” she said.

The turmoil in the ACA marketplace is only likely to get worse. The individual mandate originally included in the Affordable Care Act, a financial penalty for not having health insurance meant to coax everyone to participate in the system, essentially no longer exists after Republicans zeroed it out in legislation they passed in the first Trump administration. As more people drop coverage completely, the ones left behind are costlier to cover. “People with more health needs are more willing to pay the additional price, and people with fewer health needs are willing to go without and take their chances,” Heyison explained. In response to the higher cost of covering sicker people left behind, insurers are already requesting big premium increases for next year on top of this year’s increases. After five years of single-digit rate increases, last year was in the double digits, and next year is looking to repeat that pattern. That, in turn, “leads more people to drop coverage, and the cycle continues,” Wright said. An actuarial firm estimates that enrollment could drop as far as 17 to 26 percent by year’s end.

Republican Senators Susan Collins and Bernie Moreno have proposed legislation that would restore the credits for two years. The proposal has drawn bipartisan interest, but it’s currently being held up over a fight over whether the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion in most cases, should extend to the state-run health exchanges.

“It is tragic that we are rolling back the progress that we showed was possible,” Wright said.

For her part, ReShonda Young has a message for the people in charge who left her with so few health insurance options. “I just wish that our elected representatives, when they’re making decisions, understood and could see the real people behind all the decisions that they’re making,” Young said. “You guys are playing politics with our lives.”

A “communist assault” on the US, you say?

A “red menace” sweeping American workplaces and washrooms?

“Socialist subterfuge” from Chicago to Cleveland?

Such talking points might sound like echoes from a seemingly distant past, from the dark days of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), when even the slightest accusation of communism was enough to destroy one’s life and career. Yet in 2026 President Trump, in his characteristically demagogic style, has sought to dust off such “red” rhetoric and employ it for a new assault against free speech and civil liberties, in advance of a potentially disastrous midterm election. Taking a page from the old playbook of Joe McCarthy, Trump has spared no expense in painting his opponents with the red brush of communism. “Communism’s easy to sell,” Trump declared at the NATO summit in Turkey last month. “I would be the greatest communist in history; I’d be right up there with Lenin,” he boasted, adding that communism has “proven to be a disaster” for “thousands of years.” Never mind that The Communist Manifesto was only published in 1848.

Trump’s buffoonish bravado would seem the stuff of unimaginative comedy were it not to have such deleterious implications for First Amendment rights. The main targets of the president’s fury are New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). A string of recent electoral victories of progressives over establishment Democrats have unnerved the powers that be in both parties. Donald Trump and the GOP have particular reasons to be jittery, amid rising economic turbulence, a historically unpopular war against Iran, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Indeed, a perfect storm seems to be brewing for the president in November. In this context, the reliance on HUAC talking points not only serves as a natural weapon in Trump’s tool kit for debasing democracy, but also as a kind of “salute” to the memory of his mentor, the odious Roy Cohn, a direct link to the McCarthyite legacy of intimidation, lies, and obfuscation.

To be sure, the communist charges leveled against Mamdani are nothing new in the context of the GOP’s larger weaponization of all forms of socialism. However, such accusations have lost their bite in recent years, as more and more Americans turn toward democratic socialism in response to fast-growing wealth inequality, forever wars, and corporate influence on Capitol Hill. In fact, Mayor Mamdani’s impressive record in New York—following in the footsteps of Fiorello La Guardia—only highlights the success of progressive alternatives in American politics. Thus, the revival of explicitly McCarthyite talking points can only be read as a desperate move, a form of fatuous fearmongering from a failing presidency. The situation is apparently desperate enough that even Trump’s “court liberal,” the comedian Bill Maher, has chimed in to castigate Mamdani as a “straight-up communist.”

However, the deployment of “red-hunting” tactics does not stop at mere electioneering. It also serves as a means of attacking civil liberties and silencing domestic critics of the Trump administration. Most recently, one of those critics, the independent progressive journalist Max Blumenthal, in violation of his First and Fourth Amendment rights, had two of his smartphones confiscated by US Customs and Border Protection without any explanation. Blumenthal was returning to the US from Iran, where he covered not only the funeral of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei but also the impact of Trump’s criminal war against the Iranian people. For this alone, Laura Loomer, the looniest of Trump’s neocon nuts, took to Twitter to accuse Blumenthal of being “one of the leading communist voices in America.” The hope of Loomer and her fellow Trumpian loonies is to criminalize dissent and silence all critical reporting on the Iran war and American imperialism more generally. For his part, Blumenthal and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) have fought back, with the ADC issuing a motion calling on the government to immediately return the two seized smartphones. The government complied shortly afterward.

The administration’s attacks on communism are also tied to the president’s focus on giving a new lease on life to American imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. Following the coup in Venezuela and the illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump’s neocon acolytes have become giddy at the prospect of achieving “regime change on the cheap.” Empowered by their “success,” they have now set their sights squarely on Cuba. In his first term, Trump already signaled an interest in reviving American imperialist designs on the island nation—from his decision to cancel Obama-era rapprochement to declaring Havana a “state sponsor of terrorism.” In the push for a coup against “red Cuba,” Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio—the son of Cuban immigrants who fled before the 1959 revolution—has assumed an especially vocal role. By all accounts, it was Rubio who was the chief architect of the aggressive starvation blockade that is now besieging the beleaguered island.

Particularly noteworthy in the context of the rising Third Red Scare have been Rubio’s efforts to directly tie Trump’s regime-change fantasies with the president’s campaign to stifle dissent at home. Baselessly branding Havana a sponsor of what Rubio deems “Far Left Terrorism (FLT),” the secretary of state has issued a 100-page report praising the “harsh government crackdowns” of the McCarthy era and calling for a new wave of repressions against a slew of progressive and anti-war American organizations and individuals. From the DSA, to Code Pink, to even Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, nobody is safe from Little Marco’s “crusade” against the “commies” and other “fellow travelers.”

Yet, if history is any indication, Trump’s “New Red Scare,” much like Joe McCarthy’s, will fall flat on its face. If McCarthy’s downfall was secured by a Senate censure, supported by President Eisenhower, then Trump’s downfall will be secured by the fallout from America’s coming trials and tribulations. Truly, as the Iran war hobbles on and the global economy shows signs of serious strain, it is clear that Trump and his market manipulations can no longer disguise the hard reality that now faces the nation.

“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive better known as a poet, once wrote. As metaphors, money and poetry might be improbably alike; they can both transform one thing (time) into something else (a hairclip, a frozen lake). But for Stevens, maybe this equation had a special import. How could someone who wrote that he had “no life except in poetry” explain the incongruous fact that he spent most of his day parsing surety, risk, and fidelity bonds? Another way to ask this question: If most American poets are required to work at another job (such is the condition of an economy that assigns poetry almost no market value), what tools can be marshaled to make that situation tenable—what fantasies get us through the day?

The Copywriter, poet Daniel Poppick’s first novel, begins with a moment of corporate seduction. The narrator, D__, who markets “last season’s kitsch status pieces” for a living, is called in to meet with his company’s new 24-year-old CEO. “Everything we do needs to have heart,” the CEO tells him, from packaging “Yas Queen” throw pillows to writing copy about eggplant-emoji-shaped drones. “Transfixed, I agree,” Poppick’s narrator reports. “And oddly, not just because my job depends on it.”

Faced with work that one suspects is utterly meaningless, a person might adopt narrower and narrower parameters for meaning. Perhaps reading about the Bluetooth speaker suggestively placed in the tip of that eggplant-emoji-shaped drone really would brighten someone’s day? But then again… really? Almost certainly not.

D__’s acquiescence doesn’t last, and soon after, he’s back to mocking the company’s “garbage” products and juvenile CEO. But he keeps that to himself. At work, he’s punctual, polite, and somewhat obsequious; as he puts it, a “savvy professional operator.” This is such a familiar way of relating to one’s work that it’s become a cliché: to go through the motions without believing in them, to understand one’s compromises as a necessary concession to the stakes of life (such as rent and healthcare) and yet believe that one’s “real” self is located elsewhere. That self might emerge in private, among friends, or maybe in one’s art. In this split, money and poetry return to their familiar, oppositional poles: Poetry is the site of authenticity, money the cause of deception.

The Copywriter follows D___ from 2017 to 2019, a period during which he is fired from his eponymous job, gets dumped by his girlfriend, reads Proust, moves in with his parents, travels across the country, and eventually finds another copywriting job. The book is organized as a series of journals that blend prose, parables, aphorisms, and poetry. D___ describes his (or, really, any) office as a place so incomprehensible, it sounds surreal. The dial tone of the office phone is “the drone of desire, gilded with anticipation.” The calendar is arranged “like a vase of corrected flowers.” When the 24-year-old CEO disappears “like a puddle in extractive sun” just as D___ and his whole department expect to be fired, his absence is like the absolution of a minor god: “The word we are all awaiting never comes.”

Stevens never wrote about his work, giving the impression of its ephemerality and unrelatedness, as if it were completed in a vacuum-sealed container and excised from his inner life. And yet the office—its smells and politics, its grievances petty, existential, or edifying—must have made an impression. Perhaps Stevens chose to locate those conflicts elsewhere, in a snowy field. Poppick takes a different approach: The Copywriter is part office satire but also part poetics of absurdity, making use of the corporate world’s vacuous jargon and ugly furniture. The question becomes: What can poetry do to transform or remake the dull day job—to make it bearable, make it interesting, or simply make it mean something else?

When people learn that D__ is a poet, they tend to ask what his poetry is about. “Most of it doesn’t rhyme,” D__ tells them. If his response sounds disdainful and possibly arrogant, maybe it helps that D__ is tormented by similar questions. He and his poet friends often argue about what poetry should accomplish. “I’m no longer interested in fractured syntax, or even language’s materiality,” D__’s friend Ruth declares. Later, she mourns her creative peak in third grade, when she wrote about “real things” like “Ferrets. Immigration. Poachers in Wyoming. The industrial revolution, the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, the state of Texas.” Like D__, most of the poets in the novel have day jobs. His girlfriend, Lucy, works at a magazine; his friend Will delivers office furniture. A former classmate who works at Apple is praised for having “his shit together.” Ruth is leaving New York to get a PhD, and as D__ drives her to the airport, he assures her that academia won’t “cut [her] off” from poetry. They offer one another consolation, but it’s not clear whether this encouragement can be believed. If these day jobs take up increasing space and significance in their lives, should that be celebrated, minimized, or simply restated as obvious and unavoidable?

D___ becomes so desperate to settle what it means to be a poet that at a combination basement reading/math-rock concert in St. Louis, he corners the only man listening and asks, “What do you think makes poetry different from the conversation that we’re having right now?” The man replies, “I think it’s a little carceral to draw a line, any line, between one thing and another, in any situation.”

Part of the tension of the novel is that D__ really does want to draw a line, in part to separate his “real” writing from the work he does to make money. The failure to separate these two identities, we learn, can become ridiculous, as is the case when D__ commissions his poet friend Will as a copywriter and receives this marketing blurb for a soy candle:

A scent like the ghostly hum of an electric vehicle waiting at a traffic light, a vehicle bearing children just released from a rehearsal of a school musical like Into the Woods, children whose hearts are swollen to the point of bursting with sophisticated song but are still well behaved, cirrus clouds stretching out over the dusk-blackened landscape beyond your windshield like affectionate, white-winged reptiles beckoning you home….

D__ prides himself on being able to mimic the “false” standards of the workplace while, crucially, understanding those standards to be ridiculous. He describes his creative process at his first job this way: “I think of a sequence of words so stupid I can barely bring myself to type them. But I know from experience that this feeling means I’ve landed on a keeper.” And yet the actual sentence he writes in this instance is sort of fabulous: “Feeling pail? Dig this: you need sun, and a castle to call your own.”

D__ might be unnerved by this praise, and even more by my suspicion that what makes this sentence interesting, and possibly even good—its mash-up of cliché and simple language games—is similar to what he aspires to, with more sophistication, in his poetry. Elsewhere in the novel, after a lengthy creative drought, D__ finally writes a poem: “A bell can do everything. / A bell can die entering / A bell called debt exeunt fate, / A bell cannibalizing dew’s extinction feature, gladly / A bell, cancels description’s error for good….” It’s primarily interested in words—which relationships we assume and which we don’t—and what happens to the meaning of something, like a bell or fate, when we make an unexpected next link.

It’s not that D__’s poetry is equivalent to his copywriting, but that they have something important in common. And if D__ understands his presence at work to be a form of playing pretend, his writing suggests that the division between art and work might not quite hold up. More unnerving than the requirement to perform a false self at work may be the knowledge that we carry something of ourselves between places, that the choices we make in one arena of our life will eventually affect our expression in another. The day job is never just a day job.

Toward the end of The Copywriter, D__ is hired by a “storied Midtown Jewish arts and community center.” (Poppick himself currently works at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y.) This might sound better than writing about eggplant-emoji-shaped drones with suggestively placed speakers, but for D___, it’s complicated. “Once I was in the business of selling products,” he thinks. “Now I’m in the business of selling time.” Unlike D__’s first job, with its exclusive interest in profit, this arts center has its own values—values its leaders profess in religious, and often grandiose, terms—and yet those values seem mysteriously inadequate, protrusive in all the wrong ways. After a gunman in Pittsburgh commits an act of mass murder in a synagogue, D__’s office hangs an American flag in the lobby, which feels to him “like putting a cross up in the waiting room of Planned Parenthood after an abortion clinic is bombed.” Later, the center decides to host a series of talks with “a prominent former US statesman of European Jewish extraction” known for “committing an impressive litany of war crimes leading to millions of civilian deaths.” (In other words, Henry Kissinger.) When D__ is tasked with writing the event description, he faces a moral conundrum.

It’s not just that he opposes the choice to host the speaker, but that the event makes him think about how he has spent the last three years of Trump’s presidency, with its escalating violence and bigotry. He has mostly written stuff that he thinks is worthless. But he’s also been writing poetry. And that must mean something, right? D___ anxiously asks Ruth: “What does poetry do?”

There is a certain type of novel that ultimately reveals its characters with grand intellectual ambitions, such as writers and academics, to be petty and venal, more interested in self-preservation than in the ideas they profess to venerate. It’s not hard to imagine that D__ might be unmasked this way. Or that, exhausted from asking too much of poetry, he will eventually ask too little and just give up.

And yet, in the end, D__ does take a moral position, not in his poetry but at work. “I would prefer not to,” he writes to his boss, borrowing a line from that most famous of office refuseniks, Bartleby himself.

Does D__’s moment of courage have anything to do with poetry? Maybe not. In fact, it seems critical that the arena in which D__ ultimately stages his minor rebellion isn’t in his writing, but at the office. The equation that usually flows one way—D__’s unhappy work life becoming the material for his art—reverses course. Something of the critical voice we hear in D__’s prose comes out in public.

And yet this moment also suggests the ways in which money and poetry are not alike. If corporate work asks us to conflate ourselves with our job, to merge our ambitions and standards with those of the office, poetry urges us to take this situation less literally, to ask: What else could this be? What could be substituted for it? And what does that look like, sound like? It’s the poet, not the good employee, who imagines a way to wriggle out of a tricky bind. Which is to say, when it comes to money and poetry’s likeness, a line of verse can do what a line of credit does not: It can make the normal relation between things less standard. It can create the distance necessary to look again, and to respond to the circumstances of our life in our own language. To make the next word not the obvious link but one that undoes the sentence, clearing the path for something else on its way.

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed beat the power of big money in Michigan’s tightly contested Democratic Senate primary. That wasn’t easy. El-Sayed was dramatically outspent and relentlessly attacked by his opponents. Yet the candidate who ran with the endorsements of US Senator Bernie Sanders, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the United Auto Workers union prevailed Tuesday over US Representative Haley Stevens, who benefited from as much as $70 million in spending—in support of Stevens and against El-Sayed—by corporate donors and groups aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“In the words of Muhammad Ali, ‘We shook up the world,’” El-Sayed declared on Wednesday morning, after winning a close primary fight in which his campaign said he was outspent by as much as 11 to one. “What we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money.”

El-Sayed’s win came on a big night for progressives in Michigan, where democratic socialist Donavan McKinney, who was backed by Sanders, Democratic Socialists of America, Justice Democrats, and the Working Families Party, beat Democratic US Representative Shri Thanedar in the Detroit area; and where progressive Will Lawrence, a Sunrise Movement cofounder who assembled a similar coalition of backers, won a three-way contest to take on a vulnerable Republican incumbent in central Michigan’s seventh district. All of the winners are supporters of Medicare for All, taxing the rich, building strong unions, and strengthening Palestinian rights.

But El-Sayed’s win stands above the rest, given that it was considered by many to be the highest-profile Democratic contest of the summer. Now that he’s prevailed in the primary, El-Sayed faces two immediate tasks.

First, he has to unite a Michigan Democratic Party that is far more energized than the GOP, which is plagued by both the growing unpopularity of President Donald Trump and internal divisions over how to appeal to voters who have soured on so much of the Republican agenda. Second, El-Sayed must take his populist challenge to corporate interests—and their influence on our governing—into a general election where he knows he will be outspent but not outworked.

Uniting Democrats is essential. The primary turnout numbers in Michigan—a state where both parties had top-of-the-ballot contests (Democrats for the Senate, Republicans for governor) and extensive down-ballot competition—diverged dramatically. Democrats drew roughly 1.5 million voters to the polls on Tuesday, while Republicans drew around 930,000. “We have not seen this kind of split before,” noted veteran Michigan pollster Richard Czuba. That’s another reminder that the enthusiasm gap favors Democrats this year—if they can stay focused on their opponents and not one another.

The Michigan primary was often bitter. But on Wednesday morning, key players made major moves to pull the party together behind El-Sayed. “I’m proud to give Abdul my full endorsement and support as we head to November together as a unified party,” declared Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow, whose name remained on the Senate ballot after she dropped her own bid last month. “Take it from me—this was a brutal primary. But whatever differences there were between the candidates in this race, those differences are nothing compared to the contrast in November.”

And Michigan Democratic US Senator Elissa Slotkin, a much more centrist figure than El-Sayed, was quick to announce that she’d be working to help beat Republican nominee Mike Rogers because “there is nothing more important than the mission of the next 90 days: uniting, keeping this seat blue, flipping the House and Senate, and providing a real check on President Trump.”

But uniting the party is just one part of the equation.

The other part involves what has emerged as one of El-Sayed’s great political strengths: his development of a dynamic populist message that links the corporate and special-interest money on which the Rogers campaign will rely to federal policies that harm the working families of Michigan. Speaking on Wednesday, El-Sayed mocked Rogers for once attacking Donald Trump and then falling in behind the president: “Is he MAGA? Is he Neocon? No, man, he’s just a corporate sellout.”

That’s precisely the right message for this moment.

Rogers will offer voters a rerun of the attacks that have already been made on El-Sayed. The Republican will have plenty of resources to do this—very probably with funding from the same sources that spent so much money attacking El-Sayed in the primary.

But El-Sayed’s takeaway from the primary is a smart one. He plans to keep running a high-energy campaign that places an emphasis on meeting voters where they live—especially in rural regions, small cities, and the Upper Peninsula, where he showed considerable strength in Tuesday’s results. Yes, he’ll be outspent. But he has learned a pair of confidence-building and strategy-influencing lessons from the primary—both of which can be used against Rogers in November.

First:

“We took on a machine. You’re not supposed to be able to beat $70 million dollars of outside spending—a record amount of money spent in a campaign against a Democrat in a primary in any campaign. You’re not supposed to be able to beat that. And what we showed is that the power of our many is greater than the power of their money. What we showed is that if you are willing to build a movement, brick by brick; if you’re willing to travel your state and have a conversation in rooms big and small, starting in a moment where people aren’t even paying attention to an election—but are paying attention to the price of gas, and the price of groceries, and the price of housing, and the price of health care—that you can build a conversation that builds into a movement that defeats the liar. This is what you all showed me. And my hope is that our democracy will never to the same. So when Big Pharma and Big Tech, when DTE and Blue Cross come a-knocking and say, ‘You know what, this is our democracy and we’re going to own it,’ from here on out, we can always point [to this election] and say, ‘No, this is the people’s democracy, and we will always own it.’”

Second, when faced with an onslaught of negative attack ads, there is reassurance in the fact that “it turns out the commercials are the part of the television show most people don’t want to watch.”

The Committee to Restore Trust, representing approximately 200 Thomson Reuters employees, issued a statement today condemning their company’s deal with the US government to seek “voter fraud” and “immigration fraud” data. The statement reads as follows:

The Committee to Restore Trust finds this latest contract between DHS/ICE and TRSS (Thomson Reuters Special Services) to support the “presidential mandate of the identification of Voters Fraud, Immigration Fraud and National Security” deeply troubling. Numerous sources have reported human rights abuses by ICE and DHS agents during Operation Metro Surge and around the country. We ask the company to refrain from further business with DHS and ICE until an independent board audits and reviews their usage of public records applications in 2026. For context, the only audits Thomson Reuters confirms are from 2025, prior to Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. Furthermore, we encourage executive leadership to cancel existing contracts, speak out publicly against ICE’s violent campaign of terror, and use their platform to demand ICE leave our cities.

In a response to questions posed to Thomson Reuters, the company said, “As part of Thomson Reuters alignment with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), we conduct company-wide HRSA/HRIAs every three years.” Based upon this schedule, the events of Operation Metro Surge (2026) in Minneapolis will not be assessed until December 2028. The company further responded, “As a matter of policy, we do not comment on specific customer contracts, and questions about an agency’s mission and priorities are best directed to that agency.”

The $125 million deal between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its enforcement arm, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Thomson Reuters extends over a five-year period. This deal represents the first time that DHS/ICE has agreed with a data broker specifically to investigate voter fraud.

Thomson Reuters’ flagship investigative platform CLEAR already contains voter-registration data. Some states apparently include address, license plate and phone numbers, and even party affiliation, though data varies by state. Voter data is legally regulated, and CLEAR users are supposed to confirm a legally permissible use of the data in order to access it. This new presidential mandate and DHS/ICE ostensibly make a new case for the use of this data by immigration officials.

The company’s response: “We continue to work with our customers to provide technology and services that support investigations into areas of national security and public safety, such as child exploitation, human trafficking, narcotics and weapons trafficking, fraud and financial crime.”

Technology provided by Thomson Reuters continues to be used to round up immigrants in Minneapolis. According to a network of rapid responders made up of concerned citizens, a total of 358 individuals were detained in recent weeks, two-thirds with no criminal record. Detentions at Walmart stores and gas stations are now most common, as ICE agents pull back on controversial traffic stops. (Two US citizens were shot to death in January in the course of such stops.)

“ICE activity is ongoing and neighborhoods are continuing to organize in keeping each other safe,” says a TR employee, withholding their name for fear of retribution. That fear is real. On March 20, TR senior legal editor and Committee to Restore Trust cofounder Billie Little was fired for a so-called breach of the company code of conduct. (In response to a question about the status of the Little case, Thomson Reuters said, “We strongly dispute the allegations and will robustly defend the case. As this relates to an individual employment matter, it would be inappropriate the comment further.”)

In addition, the US Department of Justice is pursuing criminal charges, subpoenas, and conspiracy indictments against individuals, activists, and local political figures who document, track, or allegedly obstruct ICE operations. These federal enforcement and surveillance actions have escalated during high-profile crackdowns, drawing intense legal battles over First Amendment rights.

Voter-registration data may be the latest front in the White House campaign to instill distrust in the election process in the public mind leading up to the November elections, as well as to foster popular suspicion of the immigrant population.

According to the White House, “Following the 2020 presidential election, concerns about potential irregularities prompted detailed examinations of voting processes, data security, and registration practices across multiple states.” However, after extensive review by state and local elections officials, no significant irregularities have been identified.

By any sane measure, Democrats should be extremely bullish on the electoral prospects ahead. President Donald Trump’s approval ratings continue to crater into the mid-30s, now placing him roughly in the same territory where Richard Nixon was on the eve of his resignation. The GOP’s disastrous war in Iran clocks an even lower approval rating, and the associated escalation in the cost of living now has voters saying they trust Democratic handling of the economy over the GOP’s for the first time in a decade. Three-quarters of the respondents in a recent CNN poll agree that Trump isn’t in touch with the problems ordinary Americans are facing, while nearly that quotient says that he’s neglecting the country’s most important problems. Given these trend lines, the GOP’s razor-thin six-vote majority in the House of Representatives is unlikely to survive November’s midterm balloting, and Democrats are now plausibly competitive in enough Senate races for a majority there to be thinkable—a scenario that would not have been imaginable this time last year.

There’s also considerable energy convulsing the party’s base, as left-reformist candidates continue to run up key primary victories. Last night’s close election in Michigan saw Abdul El-Sayed, a strong advocate for Medicare for All, critic of US support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and scourge of the plutocratic takeover of our politics, land the US Senate nomination—a key seat in the battle for a Democratic Senate majority. El-Sayed overcame the 12-to-one spending advantage of his establishment opponent, Representative Haley Stevens. William Lawrence, founder of the Sunrise Movement, also won the nomination for Michigan’s seventh House district, while Justice Democrat Donavan McKinney defeated centrist millionaire incumbent Shri Thanedar in the state’s 13th district. Coming off of big wins for democratic socialist candidates in New York and Colorado, the Michigan results not only demonstrate that insurgent left candidates are viable in statewide races in the Midwest; they also show a strong ability on the part of grassroots organizers to galvanize an activist base to a reform cause. That factor was notably lacking in the Democrats’ dismal 2024 showing, but became a vital source of strength in a low-turnout midterm cycle. One clear measure of this heightened grassroots enthusiasm: Jocelyn Benson, the winner of the gubernatorial primary who ran all but unopposed, garnered half a million votes more than the winner of the contested GOP primary did—a 60 percent increase in voter participation.

Yet, at the leadership level, the opposition party continues to be stuck in doldrums mode. In political terms, Democrats are still on the back foot before the MAGA right’s multifront series of putsches yielding a brownshirt immigration police state, an open-auction model of Beltway corruption, and a concerted bid to place the toxic fable of a Christian nationalist ethno-state at the center of the country’s civic discourse. The Democrats’ fallback narrative is a pitch to return to normalcy—a fanciful evasion of the fundamental power shifts roiling the American polity since 2016, and an anemic overture to voters who crave basic changes to a top-heavy and oligarchic political economy. You can’t keep robotically invoking a return to “kitchen-table” issues when the kitchen table’s on fire.

This misguided messaging bespeaks a deeper structural malaise in the party. Just as the Democrats currently lack a popular leader to lend greater focus to the party’s anti-Trump appeals, they also possess a party infrastructure that’s failing the basic tests of political organizing. There are many culprits behind this failure, from the errant consultant class atop many of its pivotal campaigns to the corps of centrist politicians and pundits who continue to fetishize a 1990s-branded agenda of “triangulation” in a moral and intellectual vacuum. But one organization serves as a clearing house for this self-inflicted folly: Ken Martin’s Democratic National Committee.

Even in the best of times, the DNC has been a flawed vessel of party strategizing. Its chair is elected by the leaders of the 50 state Democratic parties, and is often a consensus figurehead whose primary mandate is to please the party fundraisers who bear a heavy investment in status-quo political arrangements. (The recent exception to this rule, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, served to prove it over the longer haul, when the donor-led party establishment nixed his 50-state-strategy of keeping the party competitive in traditionally conservative districts and states.)

Martin, a former leader of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party who won his post after withstanding a Dean-style challenge from Wisconsin party leader Ben Wikler in 2024, has largely hewed to the caretaking demands of the job, ensuring that the committee disburses funds more widely among the state organizations that elected him. After another insurgent challenge to the DNC’s inert rollout of resources at the behest of then–committee vice chair David Hogg, who sought to establish his own PAC to promote younger and more left-leaning candidates, Martin moved successfully to purge Hogg from leadership, revising the organization’s bylaws to find him in violation of new strictures of electoral neutrality for group leaders. Once again, the DNC had outflanked the prospect of far-reaching change with a procedural putsch from on high.

But the committee’s charge to sustain a Borg-like force field of donor cash doesn’t really suit election cycles like this one, which are steeped in a fundamental change mandate. This state of affairs has been confirmed by the committee’s most influential cohort: big-money Democratic donors. Disenchantment with the party’s overall direction—and its laggard response to the mandate to fight the Trump White House in a more sustained and militant fashion—has the donor class voting with their feet, stiffing the DNC in favor of targeted individual races, along with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.

The trend has become so pronounced, The Wall Street Journal reports, that donors joke that the committee’s initials actually stand for “Do Not Contribute.” It’s true that the party out of power in Washington always lags the dominant party in election fundraising, but “this year’s chasm is extraordinarily large,” write New York Times reporters Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein. “The party is $2 million in debt, while the Republican National Committee has $125.8 million in cash on hand.” To help cover the shortfall, the committee has taken out a loan on its DC headquarters—a not-uncommon practice in past election cycles—and has also asked vendors to refrain from billing it for services until after the midterms. Meanwhile, Martin himself is starting to resemble The Caine Mutiny’s Captain Queeg, round about the film’s third reel. He’s been largely absent from the media, save for a 3,000-word Substack entry he penned to defend his track record in office. He has reportedly joked mordantly about his own pending dismissal, while unconvincingly urging DNC employees to buck up and smile more; in a burst of frustration, he hurled a phone at the desk of an almost certainly unsmiling subordinate, earning him three consultations with the DNC’s human resources arm.

The money woes at the committee are of a piece with its state of near-permanent ideological drift. Every major donor on the GOP side has a clear fix on what will be delivered in exchange for a major outlay of cash—that’s why, to take but one squalid example, Elon Musk is directing at least another $100 million to support MAGA candidates in 2026. But disenchantment with the direction of the Democrats after the overlapping debacles of Joe Biden’s cognitive reversals and Kamala Harris’s rushed stand-in candidacy—which netted a cool $1 billion in donations—has left the Democrats’ financial backers loath to throw good money after bad. So big donors are not only thronging to select campaigns; they’re backing more entrepreneurial campaign initiatives, such as former Democratic super PAC chair Guy Cecil’s New Horizons Project, which seeks to forge “a forward-looking coalition of voters” that can “build sustainable majorities”—a pair of objectives that, by rights, should be the front-of-mind preoccupations of the DNC.

It’s striking that big-ticket money figures in the Democrats’ orbit are starting to sound like David Hogg. Politico’s own glum account of how the DNC is ill-suited for the major challenge of the 2028 cycle quotes Bob Kerrigan, a Florida attorney who’s given more than $2 million to the Democrats in past cycles, lamenting that “they have never figured out how to be a party of opposition.” And “there’s a more fundamental issue,” he continues: “What the hell do they do? They are all in the beltway bubble and they are all important and they collect all sorts of money but what do they do?” An unnamed bundler for the party’s fundraising operations continues the dirge: “Nobody wants to give [Martin] or DNC money at this point, but worry is focused on the day after the midterms, because the DNC is more of a presidential player. It’s beyond embarrassing and it’s not going to get better until he is gone.”

Martin never really recovered from the botched release of the DNC’s autopsy of the 2024 election, which he initially canceled altogether, and then issued in partial form. Just this week, in fact, Paul Rivera, who wrote the autopsy, charged that Martin excised a key chapter from the long-delayed public version—one that assessed the fallout from both Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to run for reelection, the critical loss of Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian-American support, and the insulation of the party’s well-heeled consultant class from the actual conditions of getting by in these United States. (Martin denies ever having seen the chapter in question, even though Rivera insists that he printed it out in a separate binder and hand-delivered it to the DNC chair.)

“It is…possible the people ‘in the room’ at the highest levels of 2024 decision making misunderstood the mood and practicalities facing everyday America,” the report concluded about the party infrastructure’s capture by the consultant class. If that was the message Martin got from the binder he now disputes the existence of, it’s not hard to understand why he had it disappeared: It’s an autopsy of his own DNC tenure as well as of the ill-starred Harris campaign.

The heir to one of the largest fortunes on earth, who currently runs a billion-dollar media colossus, David Ellison has come hat in hand to New York Times readers asking for their sympathy. He would like, he shares in the op-ed, for us to understand his heart, and imagine him as the child he once was who simply loved movies, and wants only to make people feel what he felt in the dark. He’s a would-be Alfredo threading the projector in Cinema Paradiso! He’s a keeper of the flame! He also, he makes clear in the midst of this saccharine plea, a voter of both parties.

These points miss the mark.

Ellison, so buffeted by billions and flatterers, embarrasses himself. He cannot imagine that the public actually cares about law, statutes, power, or really about anything except him, his politics, whether he can be “trusted” as a steward of CNN. The essay’s thesis is “it’s all about me,” which of course is part of the problem. Research on power shows that those who wield it cannot actually perceive others’ interests and minds. One researcher has compared excessive power to traumatic brain injury; and Ellison appears to be a case study.

But why did he write it? The reason Ellison is so desperate is that 12 state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta, have sued to block the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger under the Clayton Act. And days later, the Writers Guild of America followed suit, with its own case. Both are solid, textbook antitrust cases applying well-established legal standards to the merger’s competitive effects across three markets. We’re not talking about novel legal theories or untested applications of the law. Just facts: This deal would result in multiple highly concentrated markets with devastating effects for writers, movie theater owners, and consumers, to name just a few of the impacted markets. A judge granted a temporary restraining order recognizing the strength of their legal case.

Knowing this and the seriousness of these cases helps to understand this solipsistic letter. The tone is that of bewilderment. He might actually lose, which he will, because he is up against law and the public, not someone who needs more emotional connection.

Ellison knows how to manage Washington with dinner parties, like those he just threw for Donald Trump, and lobbyists. But state antitrust enforcement is a different world. It runs on statutes: law wielded by people who have to respond to the public. Ellison is reduced to writing personal essays in The New York Times because his usual tools of persuasion don’t work when state attorneys general are listening to the statutes.

And history tells us he has reason to be scared. We have seen monopolists like him, and his ilk, come before. And antitrust laws then, and now, ensure a fair playing field. May 3, 1948, Justice William Douglas wrote for a 7–1 Supreme Court that the “Big Five” studios, including Paramount, Warner Bros., and the “little three,” including Universal, Columbia, and United Artists, conspired to monopolize the film industry. The studios were ordered to completely separate film production and distribution from theater exhibition by selling off their owned cinema chains. The decision permanently prohibited anti-competitive methods like forcing theaters to buy multiple films in bundles and coordinated ticket prices. The decision opened the industry to allow for independent producers and actors, leading to an explosion of creativity.

Douglas understood, as we do now, that emotional pleas like the one Ellison penned this week are a distraction.

Industrial power should be scattered into many hands, Douglas wrote in a dissent opinion that year, “so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self-appointed men.”

When he wrote that, he anticipated the howls of the Ellison elite: “The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social-minded is irrelevant.” His argument was later echoed by the great SCOTUS chief Earl Warren, who noted that Congress built decentralization into the statute because Congress was under risk of great concentrations of power.

Antitrust law is not about David Ellison’s Rosebud. Antitrust law exists so that a free press and an open market never hang on the temperament of one well-meaning billionaire.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new program to add testosterone testing to regular health checkups for “war fighters” and to offer testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) for anyone with low levels. Proper testosterone levels, he argued, would “optimize” performance and preserve America’s “lethality” on the battlefield. “We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage,” he said in the July 15 video, which was titled “High T Department of War.”

In the days following, journalists and scientists questioned the medical soundness of this new initiative. Measuring testosterone is notoriously tricky, and there is disagreement on when TRT is needed. But whether this testosterone program will tangibly enhance performance is almost beside the point. Instead, this announcement indicates the arrival of a particular politic of testosterone at the highest rungs of power within the US government.

Rebecca Jordan-Young, a professor at Barnard College and the author of Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, called Hegseth’s new program “another chapter in a very long love affair with the idea that testosterone can solve any perceived crisis of masculinity,” in an e-mail to me.

By rolling out a testosterone program using this language, the Pentagon is legitimizing ideological beliefs about biology, bodies, and masculinity that are deeply harmful. There’s already been a long-standing cultural link between testosterone and violence, including sexual violence. Now political pundits are saying the quiet part out loud. In a Fox News segment discussing the new program, host Jesse Watters issued a warning to women “on base” or at port calls in Asia: “These guys are gonna be wild animals, and you better watch out.”

Under Trump, this language is particularly disturbing, as allegations of abuse and misogyny persist against many of the officials and lawmakers he has lifted into power, not to mention those against Hegseth and the president himself.

Associating testosterone with “lethality” is “a damaging narrative,” Carole Hooven, evolutionary biologist lecturer at Harvard and author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, told me. “That’s not what testosterone is about. It’s not about killing other humans or killing other animals.”

This rhetoric didn’t happen overnight. Although right-leaning podcasters like Joe Rogan have proudly announced their TRT use, and even RFK Jr. and Dax Shepard have openly discussed their testosterone use to bulk up and slow down aging, the idea that men’s behavior can be explained by testosterone actually goes back thousands of years.

The idea that a man’s “vigor” resides in the testes dates back to ancient Rome, when castration was regularly used to influence (human and animal) male behavior and the ingestion of animal testes was a recommended medical treatment. These early efforts fueled decades of scientific experiments—some involving rooster testicles—to try to find the essence of masculinity. Once testosterone was chemically isolated and named (with the root for testes) in the 1930s, false ideas about testosterone and masculinity took firm roots within culture and science alike. Ever since, testosterone has been commonly viewed as the chemical responsible for a man’s strength, energy, bravery, aggression, and virility, despite women’s bodies also producing and needing testosterone. Researchers across disciplines, from biology and physiology to psychology to anthropology, have continued to publish studies to try to identify a biological source for masculinity, and to understand how much of men’s behavior can be explained by testosterone.

A bulk of this science is animated by a desire to postpone the aging process. In perhaps the earliest experiment on record, in 1889, French physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard injected himself with testicular blood and seminal fluids from dogs and guinea pigs in an effort to rejuvenate himself and his libido. His auto-experiment is largely discredited, but it is nonetheless an apt metaphor for testosterone science. It also captures the present moment, in which Hegseth wants to “optimize” the strength of the military by increasing its soldiers’ testosterone, at the same time that the telehealth space is seeing a huge expansion of men’s clinics and individual prescriptions for testosterone are skyrocketing, increasingly among younger men.

The expansion of men’s telehealth clinics, including Ro and Hims, have transformed testosterone into a consumer product marketed as a solution for a vague set of symptoms—fatigue, erectile dysfunction, reduced libido, and osteoporosis—which could be attributed to any number of causes, such as obesity, diabetes, poor sleep or diet, or simply aging. However, through advertising, including the coining of the term “Low-T,” these symptoms have become associated with a deficit of testosterone and masculinity, which could be fixed through medicine. The same medicine, I should add, the administration has sought to make more accessible, by easing its FDA restrictions.

And now, in a political climate where masculinity is often front and center, and where essentialist ideas about sex and gender, including a cultural obsession with ovulation and “natural womanhood,” are increasingly mainstream, the government is granting legitimacy to a largely ideological understanding of men and masculinity.

There are some clear medical benefits to expanding access to healthcare. Relative to women, men are much less likely to get routine medical testing and generally have lower life expectancies as a result, so encouraging more male engagement with providers could be good.

Dr. Tobias Kohler, a urologist and expert in this area, told me he views the risks of this program as “minimal.” He thinks all men, military or not, aged 25 and up should have their testosterone levels tested regularly; without testing in their younger years, providers are unable to develop a comprehensive understanding of their patients’ individual T levels over their life course. Yet he did mention potential side effects of using testosterone to keep in mind, such as decreased sperm and infertility issues, a possibility for thickened blood, and the body’s ceasing to produce its own testosterone. Similarly, urologist Dr. Helen Bernie told me, “Greater awareness [about men’s health] is a really positive development. The challenge is ensuring these conversations remain grounded in evidence-based care.”

This challenge is particularly stark given long-standing disagreements among medical doctors, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and sociologists about the importance of testosterone on human behavior. For some, testosterone is nothing without social conditioning; for others, the power of testosterone far outpaces the social world.

Biological facts aside, testosterone can act as the conduit through which to promote a masculine-centric ideology. Particularly because discussions about sex hormones sound scientific—and thus, objective—hormone talk has the power to peddle cultural beliefs about men and women in the guise of the language of science.

Because of this, misconceptions about testosterone have long dominated the public imagination. Leftist men have been denigrated by folks on the right as “soy boys,” to indicate an excess in estrogen in their bodies. Far-right pundits also claim there is a global decrease in testosterone levels, which they seem to link to an increase in women’s status or the rise of feminism. In reality, decreases in testosterone levels are more likely due to a global increase in obesity, sedentary lifestyles, and environmental endocrine disruptors, such as BPA or even pesticides.

“More testosterone does not equal more manliness unless muscle is your only measure of manliness,” Hooven told me.“It doesn’t make you act more dominant, and lower testosterone doesn’t mean you’re submissive.”

Individual military personnel probably won’t be gravely harmed by this program, but the cultural messaging it sends is enduringly damaging. Cisgender men in the military will now be prescribed hormones while transgender troops continue to be removed from service. Even a federal judge is ordering the defense secretary to explain the discrepancy; Trump’s announcement barring transgender troops in February of 2025 was titled “gender dysphoria is incompatible with military.” But this is not a contradiction to the administration. Rather, it’s a continuation of the underlying ideology that fuels Hegseth’s decisions—one that is rooted in a narrow view of biology, masculinity, and strength.

When we perpetuate the myth that masculinity equals strength, bravery—or worse, lethality—we also do a disservice to men by reducing their humanity to a set of stereotypes.

Donald Trump, rather infamously, was mentored by the notorious Roy Cohn, once the attorney for the fascistic, anti-communist, and anti–civil libertarian Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now, as he flails from crisis to crisis, Trump is turning to Cohn’s greatest hits for relief: Red Scare McCarthyite slander. Trump is using accusations of communism to distract from all the competing scandals and failures that are closing in on his administration.

He’s had the perfect opportunity to do so with the success of Democratic Party candidates who ally with or are members of the Democratic Socialists of America: Here’s another group he can offer up for his base to hate. In addition to immigrants or Muslims, they must now worry about reds under the bed.

While one could be forgiven for wondering if the president is aware that the Cold War ended 35 years ago, this crude name-calling serves a political purpose beyond scaring the Boomer and Gen-X voters glued to Fox News. It’s about the chilling of free speech, free assembly and the right to organize. How fitting that a president whose corrupt renovations have bulldozed the White House and ruined the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool—belching algae as if disgusted with its guardians—is also taking the occasion of the 250th anniversary of this country to weaponize the politics of fear and trample the Bill of Rights.

In response to Trump’s poisonous rhetoric, centrist and liberal democrats have sprinted off to reporters—not to condemn Trump, but to decry their own party’s electoral victories by democratic socialists or candidates with socialists working in their campaigns. We’ve seen before what the cancer of anti-communism brings to the country, and we would do well to remember what happened then. If we knew our history, then we’d know that these liberals that show more energy to fight their left than fight the right are cutting their own throats.

Howard Zinn knew his history, which is perhaps why not only right-wingers but do-nothing liberals decry his work. The longtime Boston University historian and esteemed author of the classic A People’s History of the United States was 26 years old, a decorated WWII Army vet, a husband, a father, and a prominent New York City activist when McCarthyism, in the form of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, came calling. FBI agents accosted Zinn, took him in more than once for questioning, and threatened his family. They targeted him not because he was a member of the Communist Party—although they had their hysterical suspicions—but because he was a leading voice against communists’ being expelled from the powerful social movements that gripped the city.

After coming home from World War II, Zinn threw himself into an organization called the American Veterans Committee (AVC). It quickly became one of the largest multiracial organizations in the United States, with over 100,000 members at its height and more than a thousand chapters, including throughout the Jim Crow South. The Red Scare hearings were dominated by white Southern Dixiecrat politicians. To them, the AVC’s existence must have seemed like an abomination, a hotbed of something far more enraging than communism and far more of a threat to their grip on power: solidarity and “race-mixing.”

The AVC, had it been able to endure as an open organization, could have been a critical bridge to Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement of the 1950s: an infrastructure of politically driven Black and white vets throughout the South ready to lend a hand. Instead, it was destroyed by the Red Scare’s success in coercing its members to betray one another.

Under pressure from the FBI, Hollywood, and liberal anti-communists (including California AVC member Ronald Reagan), the AVC tore itself to pieces. In this maelstrom, the Cold War liberals attempted to expel anyone suspected of Communism. But Howard Zinn—a young, working-class history student and head of the Brooklyn chapter—became the leading voice against expelling members for political thought crimes. He and his compatriots took this position on political principle, but also because they knew the AVC would disintegrate if they engaged in mass expulsions.

As Zinn said at a national committee meeting of the AVC: “We will wholeheartedly endorse the expulsion of any member who discredits AVC or acts in a manner detrimental to its welfare, whether that member be a Communist, a Socialist, a Democrat or a Republican. But we deplore wholesale categorization as unscientific, irrational and unjust.”

Under Zinn’s leadership, the endangered branches fought back. They organized while wearing their war medals. (Reagan, one of their chief opponents in the AVC, never actually fought in World War II; he was grounded stateside due to “near-sightenedness.” So no medals for him.) They demanded that they not be Red Scare collateral damage.

At the end of the day, the medals didn’t protect them. The AVC National Planning Committee suspended Zinn’s chapter and the entire AVC New York Metropolitan Area Council. The liberals also eventually suspended Zinn himself for fighting the expulsions, though this didn’t become official until the following year. The results were exactly as Zinn predicted. The AVC proceeded to limp along as a rump of an organization. They were never a political force again for veterans or for civil rights.

The lessons are quite clear. Trump is not only making wildly mendacious claims about his opponents. (In typical Trump verbiage, he mocks these new left electeds as “sick people” who “don’t believe in God” and against whom he will use every mechanism at his disposal to “stop.”) Trump is attempting, successfully, to divide his opposition by building a wedge between the powerful but increasingly irrelevant centrist congressional Democrats and liberal commentariat and the upstarts who are inspiring voters and actually winning elections.

I know what Howard Zinn would say—because he said it to me: “I don’t study history just to learn about the past but to affect change in the present and future.” The lessons of the past could not be clearer: United we stand, divided we fall. If the liberal establishment does not heed the warnings of history, they will either end up siding with Trumpism or reliving the famous words of Pastor Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the communists, but I didn’t say anything because I wasn’t a communist.… Then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything.” The Trump agenda is to ensure there is “no one left to say anything” against his increasingly erratic and violent rule. Howard Zinn would have fought that agenda tooth and nail. In Zinn’s memory—and out of respect for history—we should do the same.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

In 1969, 21 members of the New York Black Panther Party were arrested in predawn raids and charged with a combined 156 counts of conspiracy. To prove the defendants’ dangerous ideology to the jury, prosecutors screened The Battle of Algiers and read aloud from Mao’s Little Red Book. Among the defendants was 23-year-old Afeni Shakur, who had no attorney and no legal training and chose to represent herself. She was eight months pregnant, facing a 350-year sentence for a conspiracy the prosecution’s own witnesses couldn’t describe (on the stand, one of the state’s key officers admitted that he’d never seen her hurt anyone or blow anything up). In its quest for a conviction, the government leaned on the so-called “conspiracy doctrine,” which requires only agreement with the idea of an action, not action itself. In other words, you don’t need to prove anyone did anything, only that they talked about doing it, or associated with people who did.

The Panther 21 jurors didn’t buy it. After seven months, they acquitted every remaining defendant, on every count, in under two hours.

Fifty-seven years later, in a federal courthouse in Fort Worth, Daniel Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Estrada was one of 22 people charged over a Fourth of July noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, in 2025. It was one of many demonstrations that had sprung up outside ICE facilities nationwide after months of armed federal agents violently sweeping communities, and a detention system on pace for its deadliest year in two decades.

At the protest, one man (not Estrada) shot and wounded a police officer. He says he fired defensively, and that the officer was about to shoot an unarmed protester. Whatever the case, Estrada was not being tried in connection with the shooting. He wasn’t in court for arson, or assault, or any other serious offense. In fact, he hadn’t even attended the protest. His crime? Moving a box of his own zines and political literature from the home he shared with his wife, who had been arrested after attending the protest.

The Prairieland prosecutors leaned on the same conspiracy doctrine used against the Panther 21, treating the defendants as a single, unified network. But Estrada’s fate would be very different from that of Afeni Shakur. Despite years in jail awaiting trial, the Panthers ultimately walked free. Estrada, on the other hand, was sentenced to 30 years. His codefendant and partner, Maricela Rueda, was acquitted of the most serious violent charges against her. That didn’t matter either. She was sentenced to 70 years for her presence at a protest where someone else fired a gun. In all, the Prairieland defendants drew a combined five and a half centuries in federal prison. They were largely found guilty due to mere proximity—being in the wrong place at the wrong time—and their political beliefs.

So what changed between 1969 and 2026? First, the Prairieland judge was able to use a “terrorism sentencing enhancement,” a tool that did not exist when the Panthers were tried that lets a judge multiply a sentence once a crime is deemed “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government.” (This wildly abstract concept would have been catnip for prosecutors in the days of COINTELPRO.) Second, the state’s ability to reach into a person’s life has grown considerably, with a new surveillance apparatus and access to our personal data that allows for repression to take new forms. What ties both together, and gives them a target, is a presidential memo signed last September that few Americans have read but every American now lives under, called National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7.

NSPM-7 is now the administration’s sharpest tool for criminalizing left political organizing. It directs a 10-agency Joint Terrorism Task Force apparatus—including the FBI, DHS, the IRS, and the Treasury’s Terrorism and Financial Intelligence office—to investigate and prosecute what it calls “domestic terrorism and organized political violence,” with targets defined broadly enough to include anyone whose motivations involve “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism,” or views that differ from the government’s on immigration, race, and gender. It pursues not just individuals but networks, funders, nonprofits, or even anyone who shows up to a protest.

The FBI and IRS have created a “mission control command center”—the IRS’s wording—to examine nonprofits, and the FBI’s budget request discloses a permanent “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center” charged to “proactively identify networks.” In other words, its goal is to wield the full power of the state to replicate the repressive tactics of the Prairieland case throughout the country.

It’s important to stress that there is nothing new about the criminalization of left movement activity in the United States, or the presence of political dissidents in American prisons. But most prior cycles of state repression were constrained by a combination of legal hurdles and basic logistical challenges. In 1919 and 1920, the Palmer raids saw federal agents round up thousands of suspected radicals in dozens of cities in a single coordinated sweep—a logistical feat that required advance coordination among field offices nationwide and produced almost no usable evidence beyond membership in a suspect organization, since agents had neither the time nor the technology to build individual cases (they deported hundreds anyway, with little more due process than a hearing). COINTELPRO required infiltrators embedded for years in movements like the civil rights struggle, the American Indian Movement, and the Puerto Rican independence movement; the Panther 21 prosecution required the state’s own agents to create the conspiracy it then charged people with. What changes from era to era is not the targets—those stay remarkably constant—but the cost, both legal and technological, of proving association and manufacturing criminality.

In 2001, the Patriot Act began unraveling some of that constraint, handing the government easy access to the paper trail of a life: Internet history, financial records, travel patterns, library and bookstore records, phone metadata, and—through expanded “sneak and peek” warrants—the ability to search a home or seize property without notifying the owner until well after the fact. And a private surveillance apparatus has since wound itself around the federal one like beans up a trellis—cameras in stores, on transit, on your neighbor’s porch, at protests; license plate readers; facial scans; data brokers selling your locations to anyone willing to pay, including government agencies. That last part isn’t hypothetical: The FBI renegotiated a data broker contract around the time of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and a separate data broker was caught boasting that it had harvested location data from nearly 17,000 phones at BLM demonstrations across four cities.

Meanwhile, the federal government has spent more than a decade failing to contain mass mobilizations (the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion, Standing Rock, Occupy Wall Street, the student encampments, Stop Cop City, the crowds now blocking ICE’s vans) through either ordinary policing or legal repression. Prosecutors in St. Paul charged the RNC 8 under a state terrorism statute after a protest at the Republican National Convention, then dropped the terrorism counts; a Chicago jury acquitted the NATO 3, accused of plotting Molotov cocktails, of every terrorism charge; the great majority of the roughly 800 people charged at Standing Rock over a winter-long standoff saw their cases dismissed or won them outright (even after the federal government sent informants into the protests). After 200 people were kettled downtown at Trump’s 2017 inauguration and charged with felony rioting for simply being in a crowd, six were acquitted at trial; the government dropped the charges for the rest. The criminal conspiracy case against Stop Cop City protesters has almost completely collapsed, with the RICO charges against all 61 people dropped.

NSPM-7 is best understood as both a response to those failures and the latest attempt to transcend them. It is an architecture broad enough, with a Department of Justice aligned closely enough with the executive, to make the earlier attempts look meek.

It does this not by creating new laws but by redirecting existing power. It steers the FBI’s roughly 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces toward leftist organizing, directs agencies to use authorities they already had against nonprofits and activists, and hands the attorney general a new administrative designation, “domestic terrorist organization,” for groups engaged in offenses as minor as trespass or as vague as “civil disorder.” The designation itself creates no new offense (there is still no crime explicitly called “domestic terrorism” that a person can be charged and convicted of), but it does create a long target list, and lets prosecutors use tools already at their disposal: conspiracy doctrine, material support statutes, terrorism sentencing enhancements. The absence of new law is sort of the point—nothing in NSPM-7 needs, for example, congressional approval.

Nationally, the memo runs through an entity called Joint Task Force Vanguard, which greenlights prosecutions across the country. Washington’s instruction has been explicit. On a conference call this year, a senior DOJ official told prosecutors the department wanted headlines with the indictments. “Go big,” he said, “and go loud.” Days before signing NSPM-7, Trump signed a separate executive order purporting to designate “Antifa”—an ideology against fascism with no members, leadership, or headquarters—as, you guessed it, a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Two things are being further criminalized under NSPM-7, and neither is violence. The first is the group. Conspiracy law punishes agreement to commit a specific unlawful act—not membership in an organization, and not sympathy with its aims. The Constitution has drawn that line explicitly, twice, through the NAACP: in 1958 the Supreme Court refused to let Alabama pry loose the NAACP’s membership list, holding that the freedom to associate for a cause is inseparable from the freedom to speak at all; in 1982 it struck down liability against NAACP boycotters in Claiborne County, Mississippi, for other people’s violence, because belonging to a group whose members sometimes break the law is not itself a crime.

But association requires something to belong to, and “Antifa,” the concept used by the state to throw the book at the Prairieland defendants, is not a thing you can belong to. It has no members, no leadership, no headquarters, no dues; the FBI itself described it for years, accurately, as an ideology, not an organization. Trump designated it a domestic terrorist organization anyway, and the invention has proved more useful than a real organization, because a group without a membership list is one whose members the government simply gets to make up. (And the inventions keep expanding: in July, the State Department convened representatives from more than 65 countries for what officials informally called the “Antifa summit,” where the Secretary of State accused Iran and Cuba—without offering a shred of evidence—of working with “Antifa”).

The second thing criminalized is thought. NSPM-7 writes politics directly into the charging framework, listing “anti-capitalism” among the motivations that turns ordinary protest into terrorism and, in practice, presence into conspiracy. The state no longer proves what you believe by what you did; it proves what you did by what you believe.

Implementing this new repressive regime has not come without its hiccups. The day after the memo was signed, six protesters were arrested outside the Broadview ICE facility near Chicago; when grand jurors refused to indict them, prosecutors dismissed the grand jurors and re-presented until they got their indictment—which then collapsed after the government conceded there was no plan, only a “spontaneous conspiracy” that coincidentally began the moment the protest did. The charges have since been dropped entirely.

In those same months, the DHS announced the arrest of a “domestic terrorist” named Marimar Martinez—a 30-year-old teacher whom a federal agent had shot multiple times. The affidavit contradicted the press release; her lawyers say the body cameras contradicted both; a grand jury declined to indict. By spring, more than a third of around 300 anti-ICE protest cases had fallen apart, by ProPublica and Frontline’s count. The department’s answer was not to retreat but to escalate, right as public opinion turned sharply against it. By February 2026, two-thirds of Americans said ICE had gone too far, up from just over half the previous June; independent support for the agency’s tactics had cratered further still.

Despite these bumps, the NPSM-7 rollout has generally been smooth, its road graded long ago by both parties. “Terrorism” is now a word that gets stretched until it means whatever the state needs it to. Bill Clinton’s 1996 terrorism law (the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act) built the material support doctrine, which didn’t require violence, or even intent to enable it—just a connection to a designated group.

Under George W. Bush, the FBI declared “eco-terrorism” the nation’s leading domestic terrorism threat, and Congress passed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act with barely a dissenting voice. DHS fusion centers monitored Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter under a Democratic president, and soon after, the FBI invented a short-lived “Black Identity Extremist” threat category. After the January 6 insurrection, Democrats pushed for a new domestic terrorism statute, over objections from civil rights groups who warned—correctly—that every such tool eventually bludgeons the left.

In Atlanta, weeks after NSPM-7 was issued, an activist named Sam Tunick was indicted for wiping his own phone during an attempted search by a Customs and Border Protection “Tactical Terrorism Response Team” at the airport—not for anything he did at any protest but for what he did with his own phone afterward. And after a Fulton County judge dismissed the Cop City RICO case, the federal government came back, bolstered by NSPM-7, and charged two people over a four-year-old protest, using the same consumer-fireworks-as-terrorism enhancement as Prairieland. There will likely be more such instances: The attorney general’s implementation memo ordered five years of files be mined for “Antifa-related intelligence,” which is how conduct from 2022 becomes an indictment in 2026.

In Minneapolis, 15 residents were charged with felony conspiracy to impede federal officers over anti-ICE protests earlier this year. Four also face separate, individual charges—a kicked SUV, a knocked-away notepad, a sideswipe during a vehicle follow, tailing agents across a state line. But those specific acts aren’t what holds the case together. The conspiracy charge binds all 15 defendants regardless of what any one of them actually did—that’s simply how conspiracy law works, and has for a century. What NSPM-7 supplies is the will to use it broadly: to charge 15 people as one network over conduct this thin.

The “overt acts” in the indictment alone make the point: They include attending a meeting at a DSA office, posting a flyer to Signal, wearing a gag sweatshirt that says “I’m Antifa,” carrying a bullhorn, handing someone a radio, and receiving—twice—an automated text message from U-Haul. Writing an eyewitness account for an anarchist blog counts as an overt act. So does giving a public talk in Chicago. People stood on public sidewalks photographing the license plates of government vehicles, and were charged as conspirators by a government that scans millions of civilian plates a day without a warrant.

The alleged conspiracy is entirely about opposing ICE, peppered with mentions of “antifa” so that prosecutors can invoke NSPM-7’s terrorism architecture instead of an ordinary obstruction charge. When reporters pressed the US Attorney in Minneapolis on whether any defendant had actually harmed an officer, he was unequivocal: That, he said, wasn’t the point. In Fort Worth, the judge who sentenced eight of the Prairieland defendants—assigned their cases days before sentencing, having called the protest an “assault on democracy”—said from the bench that he was imposing the maximum because the state wants “to send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.”

Which is why the real question isn’t what any of these protesters did but what they were responding to. Editorials and commentators and politicians have framed protest this way for as long as there’s been protest to cover: The protest itself becomes the story, and whatever the protest was actually responding to gets minimized, if it’s covered at all. That’s exactly the inversion at work throughout the NSPM-7 prosecutions. In Minneapolis, the indictment itself quotes defendants reacting to “another ICE shooting,” to the shooting of Renée Good, to “the murder of Alex Pretti.” Said plainly: Federal agents killed two people, and 15 of their neighbors were criminalized for protesting it. Indignation over a kicked government SUV, in the face of a government that kills with near impunity, would be laughable if it weren’t so devastatingly real.

After all, who are the radicals? The people NSPM-7 names as terrorists imagine a world with fewer cages in it, a place where no one can be disappeared from a parking lot or shot while driving with their toddler in the back seat. The government calls that extremism. The world its authors defend—where masked agents shoot bystanders, where 2 million people sit in cells, where insulin is rationed, and corporations poison our water and air—is called moderation. It isn’t. It is the most radical proposition in American life: that this much cruelty is a reasonable amount, and it survives only as long as we agree to fear the people who refuse it. In Minneapolis, the morning after federal agents broke down the organizers’ doors, their neighbors came out with whistles. They followed the agents down the street. By evening, there were groceries on the defendants’ porches, and someone was already fixing the door.

During the last week of July, as a heat wave desiccated the Mediterranean basin and wildfires ravaged cities on both sides of the sea, an estimated 50,000 Moroccan migrants crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in northern Morocco, swimming the short distance around the border post. By July 31, more than 48,300 had already returned home, after finding a local immigration processing center packed, shops and restaurants closed, and nothing to eat or drink. What looked to be a massive humanitarian crisis was defused almost as soon as it had started.

Theories quickly circulated on social media. That thousands of young Moroccans had spontaneously crossed into Ceuta after Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants arriving by sea could not be sent back immediately. That Morocco had enabled these crossings after Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited its political rival Algeria, to remind the prime minister that Morocco can still exert control over migration flows into Europe. That Morocco had sent people to the border at the behest of the United States and/or Israel, because the Sánchez government had recognized Palestine as a state. That Morocco wanted to reassert its territorial claims over Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s last two outposts in Africa. Everyone was grasping for a sensible explanation to the crisis or some kind of strategy behind the madness.

The influx of migrants happened on Throne Day, when King Mohammed celebrated his 27 years in power at a series of ceremonies held in the north of Morocco. Dignitaries in suits, jellabas, and caftans streamed into the palace for celebrations, while just a few miles away young Moroccans were throwing themselves into the sea hoping to cross into Spain. The contrast was jarring. To add to the surreality, that evening the Moroccan Women’s National Team defeated its Algerian counterpart in the group stage of the Women’s African Cup of Nations, a qualifying event for the World Cup. Gianni Infantino, lately embroiled in a scandal over the privatization of FIFA, was present at the palace celebrations. You can’t write coincidences like this even in a work of fiction.

But it beggars belief that, in the week leading up to Throne Day, thousands of young people could stream to the border post unnoticed and unchallenged. Posts on social media had falsely claimed that anyone who made it to Ceuta by sea could obtain legal status in Europe. (In fact, residents in the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla are subject to identity control and cannot freely enter Schengen Area countries.) Witnesses say that the Moroccan police enabled the crossings by pointing would-be migrants in the right direction. There are disturbing precedents. Back in July 2022, an estimated 2,000 sub-Saharan migrants scaled the fence into Ceuta, leading to a stampede in which two dozen were killed. And in May 2021, in the midst of a diplomatic row between Spain and Morocco over Western Sahara, more than 8,000 migrants were allowed to cross into Ceuta.

Spain and Morocco have a history that stretches back centuries. What happened at the border last week probably has more to do with internal politics and competing interests than with anything else. There may not be a simple or single reason, though there is a wider context. Relations between the two countries, which had warmed considerably after Sánchez announced his support for Morocco’s autonomy plan in Western Sahara, have been cooling again. Not long ago, the Spanish government said it would grant citizenship to people born during its colonial rule over the desert territory, a change in status it did not apply to its former colonial areas in northern Morocco. The decision likely came as a sign of bad faith in the autonomy plan that Morocco has long championed. But this, too, is conjecture. Until we know who started the online rumors promising legal status in Europe to people who cross by sea into Ceuta, we can’t say what triggered the migration event or why it wasn’t stopped in a week as sensitive as that leading to Throne Day.

Whatever the strategic (mis)calculations behind this crisis, what is indisputable is that on any given day, there are tens of thousands of young people in Morocco who are willing to risk everything for a chance to live in Europe. Men, women, and even families with young children took part. It didn’t seem to matter what studies reveal about the actual lives of undocumented people, or what newspapers report about low wages, social alienation, or human trafficking. The viral claims of legal status proved too tempting, and the images on social media too seductive.

Compounding the problem is the fact that, every summer, Moroccans from the diaspora return to the kingdom on holiday, spending their annual savings on cash and gifts for families back home, and providing a boost to the local tourist economy. Young Moroccans see friends and family members enjoying a lifestyle that they don’t have at home and conclude, not unreasonably, that Europe holds promises that their own country doesn’t.

What promises? Jobs, for one thing. The youth unemployment rate in Morocco is notoriously high, and, despite evidence to the contrary, many migrants believe they will find well-paying jobs in Europe. At least some of the people who joined the crowds crossing into Ceuta appear to be employed, if poorly, in their own country. A nurse told a Spanish news outlet that, for all his degrees and training, he makes €300 a month. These migrants want more than underemployment; they want decent wages and healthcare and a decent standard of living.

Rights, for another thing. Spain guarantees its people freedom of expression and bodily autonomy and a chance to live your life without interference from the government. Jobs and human rights together operate as “pull” factors, drawing the imagination of young Moroccans and making them believe that a better future means a future outside Morocco.

In the last decade, we have witnessed many mass migration events: refugees fleeing Syria, Ukraine, Palestine, and Sudan, to name just a few. People who escape civil war or genocide or starvation or atrocities of all kinds are determined, no matter what happens on their long and arduous journey, to make it to safety. But the Moroccan migrants who crossed into Ceuta did not appear to share this overwhelming desperation or unshakable determination. Nearly all of them returned just 24 hours after the crossing, which suggests they are not subject to a “push” factor.

Some expressed relief at being back in their homeland. A young woman who swam around the border post and found only a beach packed with other would-be migrants, a few corpses, and no resources of any kind, returned by land to Morocco and told a local news camera, “I ask forgiveness from all Moroccans.” A young man told a Spanish journalist, “To be honest, I don’t even know why I’ve come.” It was as if thousands of young Moroccans had been gripped by a mass delusion that they would be handed legal status and jobs, then quickly found out they were wrong. The grim result is that more than 70 people died in the crossing.

Morocco will be cohosting the World Cup with Spain and Portugal in 2030, and has embarked on vast infrastructure projects, including building newer stadiums, more railroads, and updated airport terminals. That thousands of Moroccans are willing to leave the country at the first sign of opportunity is a terrible indictment of these priorities. Unless the government provides better jobs, education, healthcare, and human rights to young people, the pull factors will remain, and the crisis we witnessed this last week will happen again.

What prompted the scenes this past week of 50,000 Moroccans and others streaming into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta is more complicated than it seems. Ceuta is one of two Spanish presidios on the north coast of Morocco that have been inhabited by Spaniards for centuries and, like the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean and the Canary Islands in the Atlantic, are recognized Spanish territories. Being the only part of the European Union with a land border with an African nation, it has long been a destination for migrants desperate to cross that heavily fortified international boundary.

The human wave that entered Ceuta, including the dozens who drowned trying to get around the border fence sticking out into the sea, were not such desperate refugees, however. Video footage indicates that virtually none of them were carrying bags or other personal belongings. There are also videos showing truckloads of young men, apparently organized by the Moroccan government, being ferried to the edge of Ceuta, as well as scenes of Moroccan border guards waving them through. It even appears that Moroccan intelligence agents were among the crowd in an apparent effort to get a better sense of border security and the Spanish response. Indeed, having tens of thousands of people simultaneously appear at the frontier undoubtedly required major logistical support.

This provocation appears to have been designed by the Moroccan regime to embarrass Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez in response to his efforts to warm relations with Morocco’s longtime geopolitical rival Algeria, a key supplier of natural gas made scarce as a result of the Ukraine and Iran wars and whose president he met with the previous week. The Moroccans orchestrated a similar cross-border influx in 2021 in retaliation for Spain’s allowing Western Sahara President Brahim Ghali, whose nation Morocco claims for itself, into the country for medical treatment.

Perhaps not coincidentally, this comes at a time when the American and Israeli governments have been furious at Spain’s Socialist government over its support for Palestinian rights and opposition to the Iran War.

Trump has labeled Spain as “hopeless,” with “bad people,” in response to Sanchez’s not increasing the country’s military budget as much as he demanded and, in particular, Madrid’s refusal to allow US military bases on Spanish territory to be used in the war on Iran or to allow overflight by US military aircraft. Last month, Trump directed the secretary of the treasury to cut trade ties with Spain, despite that being impossible due to Spain’s membership in the EU, and he was looking for other ways of punishing Madrid.

Given how Trump has developed a greater affinity with repressive Arab monarchs like Morocco’s King Mohammed VI than with traditional European allies, it is perhaps not surprising that he would criticize rather than defend a NATO ally faced with a violation of their sovereign territory.

American political figures allied with Trump have been openly supporting the idea of Morocco’s taking control of the two Spanish territories. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute has called for a Moroccan conquest of the presidios, and Representative Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL), who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Security and is one of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s closest congressional liaisons, recently declared that the enclaves “are not in the geographic territory of Spain” but rather—despite having not been part of Morocco for over 600 years—are “in the territory of Morocco.”

Similarly, an article published in the right-wing Israeli media outlet ynet in March directly called on Israel to support Morocco’s irredentist claims as a means of discrediting the Spanish government’s opposition to the Israeli occupation by insisting that Spain itself was an occupier.

Indeed, Israeli government officials and pro-Israel advocates in the United States have been hammering the message that the Spanish government is a colonialist oppressor and therefore has no right to criticize Israel, ignoring the fact that the enclaves have a majority of ethnic Spaniards and there is little indication that even their ethnic Arab and Berber residents would prefer to live under the autocratic Moroccan monarchy.

While having any European territory on African soil is certainly problematic regardless of its particular history and demographics, it is hard to imagine that these right-wing figures are actually motivated by anti-colonialism.

In addition, the wave of border crossings has created images that far-right parties in Europe are now using to claim that there is an uncontrollable refugee crisis, feeding racist and xenophobic attacks against Sanchez and other left-leaning governments for allowing a foreign “invasion” of EU territory. Conservative European governments have demanded that Spain be removed from the Schengen Zone that allows for passport-free movement within most of Europe despite the fact that Spain maintains tight internal migration control between the presidios and the Spanish mainland and that none of 50,000 who illegally crossed into Ceuta have made it onto the European continent.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Vice President JD Vance blamed the border crossings on “radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West,” while Trump warned that scenes similar to those of the tens of thousands of dark-skinned people storming the border in Ceuta would occur in the United States as well if Democrats get back into office.

Ironically, rather than being anti-colonial, Morocco itself is a colonial power, having illegally invaded, occupied, annexed, and colonized the nation of Western Sahara, a full member state of the African Union and recognized by the United Nations as a non-self-governing territory. The United States and Israel are the only two countries to formally recognize that occupied country as being under Moroccan sovereignty.

Morocco has long used the threat of opening the floodgates of migrants into Spain and other European nations to extract political and economic concessions, including in regard to Western Sahara. It has led even Sanchez, soon after the 2021 incident in Ceuta, to endorse Morocco’s dubious “autonomy” plan for Western Sahara, which would supersede the Western Saharans’ right to self-determination and create the dangerous precedent of international recognition of a country’s territorial expansion by force. Other left-leaning European governments have done the same, willing to sacrifice international legal principles out of concern that a massive refugee flow would hurt their political capital and bolster the far right.

The assault on Ceuta is part of a long-standing Moroccan tradition of appearing “anti-colonial” as a cover for their own colonialism. Along with a simultaneous armed invasion, Morocco assembled 300,000 unarmed Moroccans in the 1975 “Green March” to lay claim to Western Sahara on the verge of its independence from Spain. The conquest, quietly supported by the United States, came in direct contravention of a landmark decision of the International Court of Justice and a series of UN Security Council resolutions calling for self-determination. A brutal military occupation remains to this day.

The recent border crossings, therefore, were neither a genuine humanitarian crisis nor part of an anti-colonial struggle, but part of efforts by the growing US-Israeli-Moroccan nexus—codified and strengthened by the so-called Abraham Accords—to weaken a progressive European government, divide Europe, and undermine international law and human rights.

On January 1, hours after Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, he visited a rent-stabilized apartment building in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. For months, residents of 85 Clarkson Avenue had been raising the alarm that their homes, managed by Pinnacle Group, were falling into disrepair: Pipes were rusting, leaks spreading; in one unit, a crack in the ceiling had released a cascade of cockroaches.

Pinnacle’s 93-building portfolio had accrued more than 5,000 open hazardous violations and 14,000 complaints, Mamdani said during a press conference held in the 85 Clarkson lobby. He paced the hallways alongside tenants and toured an apartment with faulty heating. He knelt on the floor, peeling back crumbling vinyl tiles.

Trailing the mayor that day, as they had throughout his runaway campaign, was a video team whose energetic, cinematic style has become a hallmark of Mamdani’s political brand. Work by that team—currently made up of six filmmakers whose backgrounds span from video journalism to streaming documentaries—created a modern, buzzy visual language that helped propel Mamdani to an unlikely victory.

It’s a common refrain that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But Mamdani has been governing in the same language that made him mayor. On the first day of 2026, the team continued to hone its visual instincts, resulting in their most ambitious project yet: a 13-minute documentary titled Union of Pinnacle Tenants.

The short film, which will be released tomorrow on the mayor’s social-media platforms, signals an evolution in how the administration is using video to communicate with New Yorkers. Part explainer, part issue-driven documentary, the film pairs observational footage of the tenants at 85 Clarkson Avenue with an interview with Cea Weaver, the head of the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants.

Throughout, the documentary takes a notably jaunty tone: It’s narrated by Morgan Spector, an actor and outspoken advocate for progressive politics, who intones his lines over a pizzicato-string score with the literary panache of Alec Baldwin in The Royal Tenenbaums. “She’s here to tell us a story,” Spector says as he introduces Weaver, who gazes into the camera from a stately, upholstered armchair.

More Andersonian whimsy: The film unfolds its account over five chapters, each introduced by an onscreen title. The chapter headings—“The Buildings,” “The Landlord,” “The Tenants,” and so on—and chyrons are rendered in a sans-serif, sunflower-yellow typeface with a red drop shadow.

Our central subject is Josie Wells, a longtime tenant of the 85 Clarkson. She grew up there, and holds memories of its earlier days, when the building was clean and well maintained. Garbage was kept under control. Christmas decorations were even installed in the lobby over the holidays. “This notion that people who live in rent-stabilized buildings can’t have these amenities, I think, is crazy,” she says early on in the film.

Wells, we come to learn as the film progresses, began sharing complaints with her neighbors, and eventually organized a tenants’ association. They went on to connect with residents of other buildings managed by Pinnacle Group, and after months of discussion, formed a union. The group hoped to challenge their landlord and have a say in who manages their property. In referring to Pinnacle, they prefer the term “slumlord.”

“The Union of Pinnacle Tenants has shown what becomes possible when neighbors organize,” Mamdani said in a statement to The Nation. “Across nearly 100 buildings, tenants came together and won important victories that made real, material impacts in New Yorkers’ lives. I’m proud to stand with them as they continue the fight for affordable, dignified housing across the city.”

The film shows how, in the mid-2000s, Pinnacle snapped up more than 100 rent-regulated buildings, then pursued aggressive efforts to push out tenants. In 2025, the company filed for bankruptcy, putting its buildings up for auction in court. The film pairs Pinnacle’s story with a brisk history of New York’s rent protections, beginning with the post–World War I housing shortage and culminating in the landmark 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

The film marks a departure from much of the work that the Mamdani administration has produced thus far. There’s no news peg, no rush to release it for a holiday or anniversary. At once a triumphant David and Goliath story and a how-to guide for grassroots organizing, the film is closer in kind to sleekly produced public-access television than the scroll-and-you-miss-it vertical content you’d normally find on social media.

“Thoughtful, accessible video is a great way to communicate with the greatest city in the world,” Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesman for the mayor, told me. “New Yorkers deserve to see themselves reflected in world-class content about their city and government that is free and accessible to all.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Establishment Democrats’ response to the electoral victories of candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) should be of concern to anyone invested in the future of Black politics: The strategies Black Americans utilize to make our political demands legible within a system designed to narrow and delegitimize them.

At times Black politics has taken the form of polemic, as in David Walker’s Appeal. In other moments, it has taken the form of armed abolitionist resistance. Black politics have also been peaceful, as in the now-celebrated campaigns of the nonviolent movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. When white conservative Republicans attempted to destroy the political power Black Americans gained during Reconstruction, Black politics became insurgent within the Republican Party itself. Black Americans enrolled in Union Leagues, constructed independent institutions, and formed oppositional factions within the party to protect Black political and social interests.

The DSA is practicing a similar form of insurgent Black politics. It uses the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle while organizing against the party’s leadership, donors, and ideological constraints, a legion of forces sometimes openly hostile to Black political imagination and possibility. Despite sloganeering as the vanguard for Black political representation, the establishment Democratic Party is mounting an opposition to the DSA’s contemporary iteration of Black insurgent politics.

“If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” said Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, after a slate of DSA-endorsed candidates defeated party incumbents to win Democratic primaries in New York. “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.”

Democratic strategist and former Clinton adviser James Carville went further, suggesting Democrats purge the caucus of democratic socialists. Among them, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who defeated five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District. Speaking about Avila Chevalier’s victory, Carville argued that House Democrats “should not seat her in the caucus.” “We believe in pluralism,” Carville insisted, before declaring that Avila Chevalier was “not a Democrat.” Her views, he said, are incompatible with the Democratic Party.

The views in question are social-media posts Avila Chevalier made admonishing Black and Arab men who fetishize white women (Avila Chevalier has deleted the posts and disavowed her comments). More recently, Van Jones criticized Avila Chevalier’s calls to abolish prisons and borders, positions he called “regressive nonsense.”

Certainly, Democrats are entitled to condemn Avila Chevalier’s remarks and are free to oppose prison abolition, open borders, or dispute any other “far-left” policy proposals espoused by DSA candidates. However, to suggest that the party should deny a democratically elected Black and Dominican woman a place in the Democratic caucus after she won a primary election for a congressional district that is 50 percent Hispanic and 24 percent Black is to delegitimize her voters’ political judgment.

Avila Chevalier won a plurality of predominantly Black precincts in a majority-minority congressional district that is one of the poorest in the country. Approximately one-fourth of the population lives below the poverty line, more than double the rate in the United States, and the district has the third highest poverty rate of the 148 majority-minority congressional districts. Those are the voters Avila Chevalier represents. To oppose the will of those voters is to infer that their attempt to redress their suffering through a politics that challenges entrenched power is invalid.

The establishment’s hostility to the DSA also reveals the narrowness of the Democratic Party’s “big tent.” There might not be room inside it for defunding the police, but there is room for politicians financed by corporations that profit from mass incarceration. There may be no room for aggressive redistributions of wealth, anticapitalist rhetoric, or open antagonism with the billionaire class, but there is room for Democrats who accept money from financial institutions that plunder wealth from Black communities. There may not be room for “nutty” policies like the eradication of borders, but there is ample room for politicians who support the colonization of Palestine and the domination of Palestinians.

Instead of treating the emergence of voters’ support for DSA-endorsed candidates as evidence of legitimate dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s economic and foreign-policy association, prominent members of the party establishment—including members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the CBCPAC—have often treated socialist insurgency as a threat to Black Americans, even alleging the DSA is flush with white supremacy.

Citing a 2021 DSA internal survey that revealed the organization is 82 percent white, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards posted to X, “White supremacy comes in all forms.” This criticism represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Black politics. Black politics is a strategic approach to holding power in conditions of formal and socioeconomic apartheid—not a demographic exercise in individual representation. Black politics is best understood by its purposes: whether a political strategy enhances our capacity to exercise the political power to advance the material interests of Black Americans. A majority-Black institution can act against Black interests, just as a multiracial or predominantly white organization can avow policies and strategies that benefit Black communities.

Black politics has never been confined to Black-only organizations or individual Black representation. It has included alliances with labor movements, religious institutions, and multiracial coalitions to aid Black Americans’ pursuit of freedom, security, economic justice, and political independence.

“Don’t try to distract with a conversation about DSA being racist and being anti-Black,” said former representative Jamaal Bowman, “especially when America’s DNA, bone marrow, roots and foundation were built on anti-Black terror and racism and enslavement.”

“DSA is not the problem,” continued Bowman. “White supremacy is the problem and capitalism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy.” The larger critique Bowman is making is not about whether racism exists in any one organization. In an anti-Black country, racism can be found everywhere, and while no purely ideological crusade is likely to rid America of white supremacy, there is no element of racism in socialism or the DSA that does not already exist in capitalism or the Democratic Party.

“The DSA challenges dogma, and I want change,” said Bowman. “I want to end poverty in America—not just for Black kids, for all kids. I want affordable housing for everyone. I think healthcare is a human right. We should have universal child care. I think we should take the tax breaks we give to billionaires and the money we put toward the military and pay for that stuff. If that makes me a socialist, so be it.”

The DSA endorsed Bowman during both his congressional bids, but Bowman’s time in Congress was cut short due to AIPAC’s record-breaking spending to unseat him. In his post-congressional life, Bowman has endorsed DSA candidates like Avila Chevalier and Melat Kiros, an Ethiopian woman who defeated Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary to represent Colorado’s first congressional district. Bowman is not alone in his support of DSA-endorsed candidates. Progressive members of the CBC have also backed DSA-endorsed candidates including Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley.

The difference in endorsements between progressive CBC members and the CBC establishment class reveals a welcomed rupture within the CBC. Progressive CBC members, particularly those affiliated with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have been more willing to endorse DSA candidates, while establishment CBC leaders and the CBCPAC have endorsed their opponents. Several of those candidates have received endorsements, fundraising support, or independent spending from AIPAC’s political network—those affiliations, along with incumbency, can transcend race-based solidarity with CBC leadership.

When Bernie Sanders ran as a democratic socialist during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, the CBCPAC endorsed Hillary Clinton. To explain their endorsement for Clinton, members of the CBC misled Black voters on Bernie Sanders’s civil rights record, ignoring his leadership in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and his participation in a sit-in to protest housing discrimination. Instead, the CBCPAC lamented Sanders for voting in favor of the controversial 1994 Crime Bill without acknowledging 24 members of the Congressional Black Caucus also voted for the bill. (Sanders voted for the measure only because it was attached to the Violence Against Women Act.)

Ten years later, the CBCPAC is recycling the same ploy, launching a disingenuous smear campaign against William Lawrence, a white progressive candidate running for the Democratic nomination to represent Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District. During a 2024 episode of Lawrence’s podcast, Lawrence spoke with Black anti-war organizer Khury Petersen-Smith about how the Democratic establishment’s support for Israel has diminished the moral authority of the Black Freedom Struggle—a moral authority that the CBC fails to harness yet claims to represent. In asking Smith about the implications of endangering the credibility of the Black Freedom Struggle, Lawrence criticized older Black political leadership:

“The extent to which the older generation of Black political leadership are such a pillar, frankly, for establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power through their role as this kind of traditionalist, establishment-ist pillar of the Democratic Party, it’s a big problem,” Lawrence said. “It’s a big problem for left politics in this country. And it gets us every single time. It really defangs the white left and puts us in impossible positions, really.”

The CBCPAC called Lawrence’s comments “hateful,” and urged Lawrence’s supporters to denounce him and withdraw their support. “[Lawrence] really showed his ignorance and his racism,” CBC chair Yvette Clarke (D-NY) said. “The CBC is the heart and soul of this country, the conscience of the Congress,” Representative Greg Meeks (D-NY), who leads the CBC PAC, said.

I spoke to Lawrence, who expressed regret and remorse for framing his comments around the “white left.” “What I believe in is building a multiracial movement and a multiracial democracy to live up to our country’s best ideals,” said Lawrence.

“We’ve got a strong Black community, especially in Lansing. I’ve done organizing in Lansing, especially around the issue of housing,” Lawrence said. Lawrence is a cofounder of Lansing Rent Is Too Damn High, a local tenants union, organizing around four state policy goals: rent control, housing first, social housing, and a renter’s Bill of Rights. “That’s the work I’ve been doing for the last five years.”

Following the CBCPAC’s attempts to manufacture outrage, Black leaders in Michigan and elsewhere came to Lawrence’s defense. “It’s time for all the mudslinging to stop,” said former state Board of Education member Barbara Roberts Mason, the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Michigan history. “It’s quite disappointing that the Black community is being used as pawns in various races in Michigan,” wrote Denzel McCampbell, a Detroit city councillor, on Facebook. “I listened to the actual [Lawrence] conversation and it’s one that we’ve been having constantly about establishment leaders selling our communities short.”

One of Lawrence’s political endorsements came from Representative Chris Rabb, a Black DSA-endorsed candidate who won the Democratic nomination for Philadelphia’s congressional district 3. Rabb said the CBCPAC’s attempt to smear Lawrence was a “cynical move.”

“If you’re gonna call out white people, make it stick. Don’t come up with specious distractions from the substance. The substance is, regardless of ethnicity, if you’re an institutionalist, you’re part of the problem.”

That may be difficult for members of the Black political establishment to hear, especially when some CBC members have fought racial injustice and supported progressive policy positions such as Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, tuition-free public college, and strengthening financial regulations. Yet these positions sit awkwardly alongside the institutionalist backing of today’s CBC—most especially the group’s electioneering ties to corporations whose interests can harm Black Americans.

“You can do good work as an establishment incumbent,” said Rabb, “but I’ve learned to sit with a harder question: For every act of help, how much of it quietly reinforces a system built on entrenched power rather than justice?”

That question was at the core of Lawrence’s comments, which are rather innocuous when one considers their veracity: The CBCPAC and the same CBC members who admonished Lawrence receive contributions from AIPAC, which is also funding Republicans’ efforts to erase majority-Black congressional districts. According to Lobbying Disclosure reports, since 2019 the Congressional Black Caucus Institute (CBCI) has received at least $150,000 from CoreCivic, Inc., one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the United States, and one of ICE’s most frequent contractors. The CBCI is a separate entity from the CBC; however, their leadership overlaps. For example, the current CBCI co-chair is the Democratic Party’s long-standing kingmaker Jim Clyburn. In 2019, CoreCivic disclosed $25,000 in honorary expense contributions to the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, citing Representative Clyburn and CBC member Representative Bennie Thompson as honorees on the CBCI’s leadership board.

Federal Election Commission data also shows that the CBCPAC has received contributions from financial institutions, such as Citigroup, whose predatory lending schemes disproportionately harmed Black Americans during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.

Confronting the forces that materially undermine the CBC’s claim to be acting as the “conscience of Congress” may be more urgent than contemplating what DSA candidates’ victories mean for Black leaders in New York or the Democratic Party at large.

Here are the words of former representative William Clay, cofounder of the CBC, writing about “a new Black politics” in 1971: “Political independence is predicated on financial independence. It must be made crystal clear that a working partnership can be established with white political interests without Blacks becoming totally enslaved to those interests. Black politics must start with the premise that we have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, just permanent interests.”

In the spirit of coalescing around common interest, in 1971 the Congressional Black Caucus sent policy recommendations to then–California Governor Ronald Reagan that are squarely in line with the positions of today’s DSA, calling for redistribution of wealth, universal healthcare, and a guaranteed income.

This is just one small but telling instance showing how the democratic socialist tradition informed the Black political project in the United States. Other key socialist organizers at the vanguard of Black politics include W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph—and even the now-venerated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Over the past half-century of mounting Black influence within the Democratic establishment, much of this crucial movement history has been effaced, as leaders such as Jaime Harrison, Hakeem Jeffries, and James Clyburn have taken on the traditional role of ethnic power-brokering within a national party structure. These dynamics have produced a grim irony: the erasure of socialist leadership in Black political history has indirectly fed the bad-faith critiques of Clyburn and others that today’s socialist movement doesn’t prominently feature leaders who “look like them,” creating the ahistorical impression that socialist politics have retained a lily-white complexion throughout modern American history.

In reality, this whitewashing of the past has abetted the marginalization of actual Black socialist politicians such as Bowman and their progressive allies such as Summer Lee and Cori Bush. Broader Black movement leaders such as union organizer Chris Smalls, meanwhile, are strikingly divorced from the professional Black leadership caste in Congress—a state of things that would have been unthinkable for prior Black union figures such as Randolph and Bayard Rustin.

The same dynamic has also blinded many of us to the real state of Black establishment politics today: amid the steady chorus of pro forma plaints of congressional leaders about insurgents in and around DSA who are stealing their organizing thunder, no one pauses to note the conditions of moral inanition overtaking institutionalist bulwarks like the CBC. The caucus’s longstanding project of attempting to redirect the country’s moral compass from within the Democratic Party establishment has ossified into a familiar saga of bureaucratic and institutional self-preservation for its own sake. What began as an effort to leverage power in the service of Black politics seems more an inert instrument to extort declarations of loyalty to the party establishment.

As a result, Black voters are seeing their voice in Congress overtaken by such prerogatives. Black voters are urged to embrace a diminished and self-defeating brand of interest-group lobbying masquerading as movement politics. In this blinkered vision, the conduct of Black politics is reduced to the donor-driven pursuit of insider access, the elevation of seniority over movement organizing, and the reflexive embrace of individual Black representation as the sole measure of Black political progress. The leaders who preside over this status quo correctly surmise that Black socialists are a threat to it—but they’ve forgotten that one of the key points of American Black politics is to create and sustain such threats.

Whatever happened to our court jesters? Stephen Colbert’s late-night show has been canceled. Jimmy Kimmel has signaled that he might just retire when his ABC contract expires in 2027. Seth Meyers—whose set at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner humiliated Donald Trump so deeply it has become part of his presidential-villain origin story—may be on borrowed time. Jimmy Fallon, who playfully tousled Donald Trump’s hair just weeks ahead of the election in 2016, was never actually interested in challenging power in the first place. In exactly the moment when we have a power apparatus that demands reverence and punishes dissent, we need defiant comedy more than ever.

During an interview on the eponymously named Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, comedian Zach Galifianakis took note of the jester’s disappearance. The conversation between Galifianakis and O’Brien had inevitably turned to Between Two Ferns, Galifianakis’s mock interview show, which cast him as a cable-access host who routinely humiliated an endless stream of rich, famous, and powerful guests. The show remains beloved because of how masterfully it skewered the inanity of celebrity interviews, late-night TV, and promotional media. The topic was timely, too, coming as it did after Trump demanded, for the second time, that ABC fire comedian Jimmy Kimmel over a joke, but before the final broadcast of Stephen Colbert’s show, whose cancellation Trump also demanded. Galifianakis used the moment to call out the comedians who hosted Trump on their podcasts ahead of the 2024 election only to fawn all over him like fanboys.

“All the podcasters that have had the president on now—they don’t do their court jester,” Galfianakis said. “They just suck up to him. So, the comedians, [who] are podcasters, that have had Trump on, they’re not doing their job. That’s not the job of a comedian. You are to challenge. You are to make uncomfortable. You’re not to sit there and fake laugh. That is not the job of the court jester. Period.”

He didn’t name names, but he didn’t need to. He was nodding to those comedians who, as The Cut writer Jesse David so perfectly puts it, “all position themselves as outside the mainstream due to their resistance to political correctness, contrarian takes on liberal conventional wisdom, and ‘both sides are corrupt’ nihilism.” Their entire brand is about being anti-establishment, objective skeptics who bow and scrape to no one. Yet when Trump embarked on a tour of roughly a dozen of those manosphere—my descriptor, perhaps not theirs—podcasts throughout the 2024 campaign season, every host glazed him like an absolute doughnut. Those anti-woke podcast comedians who are all about saying what no one else will say seemed to lose their voices as soon as Trump entered the room.

There was Andrew Schulz, giggling but failing to make a good joke when Trump, the world’s most prolific liar, described himself as “basically a truthful person.” We had Theo “Aw-Shucks” Von calling Trump “homie” and failing to challenge JD Vance as the vice president wormed around justifications for funding genocide. Internet celebrity and podcast bro Adin Ross—who to be fair, isn’t even a comedian—deserves a mention here for pulling the ultimate simpmaxxing beta cuck move of gifting Trump a Rolex and a Cybertruck. And, of course, there is comedian Joe Rogan, who hosted Trump, the man he had called “an existential threat to democracy,” just two years earlier, for three hours. The two chatted amiably about Martian life, Trump’s great “comedic instincts,” and how he had advised Kim Jong Un to take a vacation day off from “building nuclear.”

Of course, comedians are people, and famously have political opinions. The issue isn’t that the manosphere bros have their own politics. It’s no surprise that any podcaster whose material can be categorized as “anti-woke” would pull the lever for Trump. The issue is their rapid turn to obsequiousness in the face of power. Galifianakis makes no secret of his own leftist political leanings, and the 2014 episode of Between Two Ferns featuring Barack Obama was mostly just an opportunity for the then-president to urge people to sign up with a new healthcare thing called the Affordable Care Act. But Galifianakis remained in character for the episode, subjecting the then-president to the same disdain and mockery as any other guest. “I have to know,” Galifianakis asked at one point, “what is it like to be the last Black president?” As O’Brien noted during the podcast, “I don’t think anyone’s talked to, certainly a sitting president” like that.

Not one had, and that’s precisely what made the whole display funny. The performative ignorance and shocking rudeness of Galifianakis’s behavior—and the resulting awkwardness and discomfort—were the point. This is the historical role of the court jester: to say what no other member of the royal court would be permitted to without fear of losing their head. The jester is not just allowed but encouraged and even expected to openly mock the king in ways unthinkable for the rest of us. The throne allows this because it actually benefits from this little fleeting illusion of ridicule. Obama understood that when power willingly submits to the jester and plays along, it renders the powerful more likable, more real and, above all, more human.

Trump actually gets this innately and it’s precisely what terrifies him so much. For the autocrat, whose only interest is in being feared and obeyed, being humanized is anathema. Thin-skinned would-be dictators cannot stand the idea of being laughed at because laughter takes the wind out of their puffery, shrinking him back down to size. “Laughter matters because tyrants require seriousness. They need to be feared, obeyed, treated as unstoppable, inevitable. Mockery breaks the spell. It pokes and jabs at the thin skin beneath the armor and sends the message they hate most: we are not afraid,” Nadine Smith, a journalist and activist writes in an essay titled “Laughter, Not Obedience.” “When you laugh at a strongman, you strip him of the mystique he needs to rule. You remind everyone watching that this person is not unbeatable; he is absurd.” This is why Trump seeks out podcasters who flatter him and rages at comedians who don’t.

It is also why Trump, despite the fact that the whole media ecosystem is increasingly owned by MAGA sympathizers, remains so fixated on what comedians are saying about him. He used disingenuous outrage over political events to go after longtime critic and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, successfully pressuring ABC to suspend him last year. Recently, Trump attack dog and FCC head Brendan Carr demanded that the network and its owner, The Walt Disney Company, submit reviews of its broadcast licenses now, instead of when scheduled in 2028. The company has rightly called the demand “an extraordinary demonstration of power and coercion directed at disfavored editorial voices which sends a clear warning to every broadcaster in America,” and an obvious “threat to the First Amendment.” Since his first term, the president has called for Saturday Night Live, an American institution, to be pulled from the air for making jokes about him, and previously tried to have both the FCC and the Department of Justice conduct probes into the show. He has called on NBC to cancel both Seth Meyers and even Jimmy Fallon. He celebrated Colbert’s cancellation by posting an AI video of himself throwing the comedian into the garbage. He has threatened to sue comedian Trevor Noah and suggested that he might remove American citizenship from longtime comic critic Rosie O’Donnell.

These things may seem extraordinary in the context of American history, but they are utterly predictable from the history of autocrats. “Dictators fear laughter more than bombs,” to quote antifascist journalist Arthur Koestler, who survived both Hitler and Stalin and lived to write about it. Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels expelled three “Aryan” comedians from the Reich’s Chamber of Culture and, though it was not explicitly stated, a 1939 New York Times article suggested that what most inflamed the Nazis’ ire was how “they deftly, but unmistakably, caricatured some gestures, poses and physical characteristics of National Socialist leaders.” After Kukly, a satirical Russian puppet show, ignored the Kremlin’s demands to refrain from mocking Vladimir Putin, its network was brought under state control and the show promptly canceled. In 1969, Richard Nixon—in many ways Trump v. 1.0—got his FCC to lean on CBS executives to cancel the staunchly anti–Vietnam War Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, but outrage kept the show on the air. In 2023 under Xi Jinping, whose power Trump has openly coveted, China fined a comedy studio $2 million over a joke it claimed “wantonly slander[ed] the glorious image of the People’s Liberation Army.” And of course on the heels of his 1940 Hitler takedown, The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin was forced to leave the United States as McCarthyism took hold of the country. The fact that dictators consistently work to silence comedians is evidence that comedy, and satire above all, has actual cultural power.

“In a totalitarian state, you can crush the courts; you can crush elections; you can crush everything. But you can’t crush laughter. If a caricature cracks people up, it’s because it rings true,” Viktor Shenderovich—the Russian satirist and showrunner of Kukly when it was targeted by Putin, told Politico last year. “Satire is the sharpest instrument of free speech. And the first thing all dictators do is crack down on freedom of speech.”

Perhaps the most urgent directive from Yale historian Timothy Snyder in his now landmark book On Tyranny is not to give into fascism proactively. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” Snyder writes, noting that a citizen who preemptively concedes to repressive regimes “is teaching power what it can do.” The root problem is not that podcast comedians played host to Trump. It’s what Snyder calls the “anticipatory obedience,” or the ease with which they abandoned the adversarial stance comedy has long held in the face of power—a stance that anti-woke comedians, more than anyone, have elevated to their entire identities. Sitting around and guffawing at Trump’s jokes and nodding along with his rambling is less comedy than access journalism. Perhaps my favorite description of this phenomenon is from journalist Seth Abramovich, who wrote that brocasters’ “signature achievement has been to convert politics into hangout material and then to insist, sincerely, that nothing political happened.” These are the people who insist that they’re uniquely fearless—unafraid to shout down college students, DEI proponents, and women who have decided that childrearing is not for them. But when actual state power enters the room, they prove remarkably deferential. Turns out they only speak truth to the powerless, I guess.

Galifianakis recalled that ahead of his Between Two Ferns interview with then–Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, her team demanded that “her e-mails” be off limits. He responded by suggesting that they call the whole thing off. Her team quickly backed off. (“When you tell powerful people ‘no’— it’s crazy,” Galifianakis recalled.) Compare that to Trump’s podcaster interviews, which were so deferential, Trump allies would later suggest they’d helped him get elected. After Trump’s victory speech in 2024, a triumphant Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, gave them a gushing shout-out. “I want to thank the Nelk Boys,” White shouted, jubilant, “Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With the Boys and, last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan!”

Comedy is one of the rare cultural institutions that’s specifically tasked with challenging authority. Comedians have license to say the thing we want to say out loud but fear would upset polite company—and anti-woke comedians have basically martyred themselves over their willingness to do that more loudly and crudely than anyone else. No one, and certainly not Galifianakis, is suggesting that they needed to act as rigorous journalists, grilling Trump on policy; nor did they have to turn their shows into some kind of political debate. But they should have at least been willing to subject Trump to the same irreverence and discomfort they regularly inflict on people with none of Trump’s power. What this moment needs from comedians, more than anything, is a refusal to be reverential before actual power—and to recognize what that looks like, while understanding that irreverence is not partisanship. If the podcast era has given us bro-comedians who think access is tantamount to bravery and punching down is hilarity, I long for a next wave that will recognize Nadine Smith’s sage advice: “When authoritarians claim failure as victory, laugh. When they demand loyalty, mock their incompetence. Make their movement embarrassing. Make it uncool to repeat their talking points without irony.”

On August 1, 1946, President Truman signed the Fulbright Act into law, creating what would become one of the world’s most prestigious educational exchange programs. Eight decades later, “Fulbright” has become shorthand for international scholarship, as hundreds of thousands of students, researchers, and educators have crossed borders under its banner. But somewhere along the way, we forgot the philosophy that animated the program—a radically different vision of how the United States should engage the world.

Its architect, Senator J. William Fulbright, was one of the 20th century’s most incisive critics of American militarism. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Cold War and the Vietnam era, Fulbright watched US global leadership grow through overwhelming military power and concentrated executive authority. Long before phrases like “forever wars” or the “national security state” entered the political lexicon, he warned that the greatest danger facing American democracy was not adversaries abroad but the gradual acceptance of militarism as the central orientation of foreign policy. That warning deserves another hearing.

In the aftermath of World War II, Senator Fulbright introduced Senate Bill 1440 in order to establish an international educational exchange program as a form of peace-building and grassroots diplomacy. The legislation declared its purpose to “exchange students, create a better understanding of our mutual problems, and promote friendly relations, while avoiding possible ill feelings between Nations resulting from inability to meet obligations set up in accordance with traditional methods.”

It is these “traditional methods” of foreign policy—zero-sum competition, military intervention, and covert operations—that Fulbright spent nearly his whole career challenging.

Writing in his 1989 book The Price of Empire, Fulbright called attention to the failures of US foreign policy by outlining the central pathologies he believed had come to define US engagement abroad. Fulbright argued that a “Cold War psychology” had conditioned Americans to mistake confrontation for security. Nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed the nature of international politics, he wrote, yet policymakers continued to rely on orthodox assumptions about balance-of-power competition and military superiority. Rather than recognizing humanity’s shared interest in avoiding catastrophe, the United States locked itself into an arms race whose logic was, in Fulbright’s words, “suicidally irrational.”

Fulbright was equally troubled by what militarism was doing to American democracy. He argued that Congress had steadily ceded its constitutional responsibilities over foreign policy while presidents—from Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion to Reagan’s Iran-contra affair—had accumulated extraordinary authority to shape America’s role in the world with limited democratic oversight. Fulbright warned that an “imperial presidency” was expanding beyond meaningful legislative accountability in foreign affairs.

This concern feels remarkably contemporary. Recent US strikes against Iran—which Americans overwhelmingly oppose—illustrate how familiar the pattern has become: The executive office increasingly claims broad authority to initiate military operations while Congress debates after the fact. Fulbright condemned this dynamic across the Cold War–era interventions in Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, and understood that this normalization, beyond any single decision, posed a deeper threat for the future of American democracy and global leadership.

His critique also extended beyond foreign policy to the underlying structures of political economy. Building on President Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex, Fulbright argued that militarization had become so deeply embedded that it distorts America’s national interest. Communities grew economically dependent on defense spending. Industries that profited from military expansion gained enormous influence over policymaking. Politicians discovered that advocating larger defense budgets carried few political risks, while questioning military priorities invited accusations of weakness or naïveté.

Fulbright insisted that this consensus carried enormous costs—both democratic and economic. Every dollar devoted to weapons represented resources unavailable for schools, infrastructure, scientific research, or public health. Weapons, he wrote, “are sheer non-productive assets. They do not contribute to the welfare of the country in any positive way. On the contrary, they drain resources—human as well as material.” For Fulbright, weapons do not strengthen a society—nor its national security—in the way investments in the public sector do. This trade-off argument remains strikingly relevant as the Trump administration routinely slashes domestic investments while requesting a Pentagon budget of nearly $1.5 trillion and an additional $67 billion in funds for the war on Iran.

Yet Fulbright’s legacy is more than a critique of American power. What distinguished him from many opponents of military intervention was that he offered an alternative vision of international leadership grounded in mutual understanding.

The Fulbright Program itself was part of that vision. Studying abroad was never, for Fulbright, merely exercise in cultural diplomacy. Educational exchange was also an integral, iterative investment in peace. If militarism depended upon fear, misunderstanding, and the assumption that other societies were fundamentally antagonistic, then repeated grassroots interaction offered another path to sustain relations between nations. Future leaders who had lived abroad, studied another language, and experienced another political culture would be better equipped to resolve disputes through cooperation rather than coercion.

“The essence of intercultural education,” Fulbright wrote, “is the acquisition of empathy—the ability to see the world as others see it.”

Fulbright believed the United States should lead through exchange rather than domination. The scholarship, thus, was never separate from his foreign policy; it was the practical expression of the senator’s anti-militarism.

Appreciating that legacy, however, doesn’t require treating Fulbright as an uncomplicated hero. His early opposition to racial integration and civil rights legislation remain a stain on his record, and any honest assessment must grapple with those shortcomings. Historical figures rarely arrive free of contradiction. But acknowledging those weaknesses should not prevent us from engaging seriously with ideas that continue to illuminate our own political moment. Fulbright’s writings demand attention not because he was right about everything, but because his legacy generates questions that American politics still struggles to answer.

How much executive authority over foreign policy can a democracy surrender before it ceases to be meaningfully accountable? If militarism is a political choice, what would it look like to choose something else? And, perhaps most fundamentally, can the United States practice global leadership rooted less in coercion than in cooperation?

Eighty years after the creation of the Fulbright Program, these questions seem newly urgent. As debates over increasingly aggressive, unilateral foreign policy once again dominate American politics, Fulbright’s central insights deserve renewed reflection.

The 80th anniversary is rightly an occasion for celebration. The Fulbright Program remains one of America’s most long-standing instruments of grassroots diplomacy, fostering generations of scholars, artists, and public servants whose lives have been shaped by international exchange. Yet its future is no longer something Americans can take for granted. While the program is still operational, a combination of previous funding freezes, proposed FY2027 budget cuts to broader State Department educational exchange programs, and public concerns from members of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board call into question the federal government’s commitment to the form of diplomacy Fulbright championed.

This uncertainty makes today’s anniversary more than a commemoration. It is an opportunity to reconsider the political philosophy that animated the program in the first place. Fulbright argued that the greatest threat to American democracy was not the existence of external rivals—as traditional international relations orthodoxy may instruct—but the gradual acceptance of empire as the driving logic of foreign policy. His central warning was that militarism eventually becomes ordinary. His greatest hope was that it does not have to.

Ben Wikler wants his fellow Democrats to win in 2026 as a check and balance to the catastrophic presidency of Donald Trump. But the serial organizer—who served as campaign director for the global activist group Avaaz, Washington director for MoveOn.org, and chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, where he innovated a tech-savvy, door-knocking, agenda-setting model for winning over swing-state voters—wants so much more than an election victory.

When the party is returned to power, he argues in his new book, This Is the Plan, Democrats need to wield the gavels of power with a new sense of purpose to renew and expand democracy. In addition to the immediate work of easing the pain of the many who have suffered during the Trump years, Wikler says Democrats must systematically address the deep dysfunctions of American electioneering and governing—money in politics, racial and partisan gerrymandering, the right-wing judicial activism of the US Supreme Court, the fundamentally unfair Electoral College—with an honest recognition that those dysfunctions gave us Trumpism and could do so again.

This Is the Plan offers a vision for a multiyear project of system reform and voter empowerment that focuses on removing the barriers to achieving economic, social, and racial justice, and to saving the planet. Ben’s steady determination to identify the real forces that drive inequality and injustice—which I’ve witnessed since my fellow Wisconsinite was a teenager penning letters to the editor and organizing against corporate influence on education—is an antidote to the legitimate impatience and anger felt by Democratic voters over the broken state of contemporary politics. This essay, adapted from his remarkable book, is a blueprint for how we return the power of our democracy to the people. We would do well to consider it.

—John Nichols
 

Our country is spiraling into authoritarianism—but, together, we’re going to fight our way out.

How do I know? We’ve been doing it in Wisconsin, my beloved home. I’ve seen firsthand how thousands of grassroots activists working their hearts out to win elections at every political level, alongside a vast array of allies and partners, can build a movement that unrigs a political system. It’s how the Wisconsin Democratic Party stopped the world’s richest man from buying an election for a state Supreme Court justice. It’s how Democrats nationally swept off-year elections in 2025, and dramatically boosted turnout in special elections since Donald Trump began his second presidential term.

Here’s how we are going to end America’s meltdown and save democracy. But, as you read this plan, it’s essential to keep three fundamental principles in mind.

First: Your superpower is not just your vote, but your power to organize, to persuade, and above all to join or bring together a group of like-minded people to make grassroots engagement a part of your lives, week after week, year after year, election after election. As long as freedom survives—and despite Trump and his allies’ cruelty and ruthlessness, we’ve still got enough of it to keep on organizing—you’re free to use your freedom to fight for freedom’s survival.

Second: Your modus operandi should be to organize and advocate where you are, affecting elections in which you’re a constituent and seeking to affect the decisions of your own elected officials— and, at the same time, lend a long-distance hand to those on the front lines of the fight, in the tipping-point states, districts, and battles across the country where a little change can make a huge difference.

And third: remember that the potential voters whose votes are most pivotal—those who rarely vote, or who switch parties—are often the people who are thinking about politics the least. If you want to persuade them, don’t lecture. Listen to them about what they care about, find out where it intersects with what you care about, and then find a basis for common action.

Make sense? Okay. This is the plan.

2026

For democracy to survive, the single most important priority is likely to be found in state governments. That’s because elections are run by states, not by the federal government—despite Trump’s illegal efforts to try and override the Constitution. Thus, your goal this year: to achieve governing trifectas in the states whose Electoral College votes are likeliest to tip the presidency one way or the other in 2028. Reach that goal and we can make it very hard for Trump and his allies to nullify the result of the next presidential election.

Help turn out and persuade voters in the closest state legislative districts in the most likely 2028 battleground states—in a way that can simultaneously help win House seats and statewide contests. Where there’s a high-stakes statewide fight, organize everywhere— not just to swing purple areas but also to lose by less in deep-red areas and to drive up margins and turnout in blue ones.

Even as we lock down state trifectas, we should be aiming to win the US House and US Senate majorities. The more House and Senate seats we win in 2026, the more we can stem the damage of the Trump presidency and begin an era of accountability.

The closest state in 2024 was Wisconsin, which—after a years-long struggle against authoritarianism and gerrymandering, is finally within striking distance of turning into a blue trifecta.

The next closest Trump-won states from 2024 are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona. Four of those states could become blue trifectas in 2026. In Georgia, ensuring that Keisha Lance Bottoms wins the governorship would prevent MAGA gerrymandering or election sabotage before 2028. In North Carolina, the key state-level targets are Anita Earls’s reelection to the state Supreme Court and the prevention of GOP supermajorities in the state legislature. In many of these states, offices key to election administration and jurisprudence—such as attorneys general, secretaries of state, state supreme court justices, and key local offices—will be on the ballot as well.

Those were the battleground states from the last three presidential elections—2024, 2020, and 2016. So, if it’s close, they’re the likeliest battlegrounds in 2028 as well. The GOP’s path to holding the presidency, in the short term, runs through those states. If you, if we, ensure that people who believe in democracy triumph in those states in the fall, then we’ll know that—if we win the presidential election in 2028—it won’t be overturned.

Not only that, but those states contain two key US Senate races and more than enough close US House races to move the speaker’s gavel to Hakeem Jeffries.

But let’s shoot bigger than that.

Let’s open up every possible path to passing the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. That’s a state law, already passed in states representing 222 Electoral College (EC) votes, that comes into effect once it’s been passed in states representing 270 EC votes—enough to determine the winner of a presidential election. Once it comes into effect, all the participating states assign their Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote. Just like that, the idea of “battleground states” and “safe states” in presidential elections will be tossed into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.

That means aiming to win a trifecta in New Hampshire too—the state that Trump lost but came closest to winning in 2024 (Harris won by 2.8 percent). And let’s help the multi-partisan pro-democracy alliance in Alaska, which could yield a US House seat, a US Senate seat for Mary Peltola, and—if we win the governorship—a potentially NPVIC-friendly state trifecta in a state where Trump won by 13 percent.

To shoot for a US Senate majority, we’ll have to expand the map still further.

If we’ve defended Michigan and Georgia and flipped North Carolina and Alaska, we just need two more.

Let’s ease Susan Collins into a long-overdue retirement in Maine.

And let’s go for broke in Iowa, where we could win three US House seats (IA-01, IA-02, IA-03), the governorship, and the US Senate race.

In Ohio, let’s lend a hand to Sherrod Brown. And let’s put James Talarico into the US Senate seat in Texas. Don’t sleep on Dan Osborn in Nebraska. As Trump careens further into abyssal approval ratings, yet more opportunities continue to arise.

Want to adopt a House district? Want to travel to it to knock on some doors—but all of the states above sound inconveniently far away? Good news: There are also swing House districts that could benefit from your support—to defend Dems or defeat MAGA Republicans—all over the nation, very much including giant blue states like California and New York.

And there are winnable state legislative districts in every state. Winning more of them is critical to Callais-proof red states, especially in the South, that might try to re-gerrymander after 2026 to eliminate districts currently protected by the Voting Rights Act.

OK. Huge push for the 2026 midterm elections. Check.

And then: Do you stop? No. Can’t stop. Won’t stop. We’re building a permanent campaign.

2027

In 2027, we’ll advocate for our various state elected officials to pass policies that will upgrade the democratic processes in our states and make them dictator-proof. We’ll also push them to pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. And we’ll build grassroots support as they pass legislation that makes a direct, positive difference in the lives of regular people.

In some states, start collecting signatures for some ballot initiatives to raise wages, protect the environment and defend democracy. In states like Wisconsin, where the state legislature, not the people, launches the process of amending the state constitution, keep that on your advocacy to-do list as well.

At the same time, you can advocate for the new Democratic majorities in the US House and the US Senate to conduct aggressive oversight and prepare bills and coalitions around historic legislation for the next Democratic trifecta. The phone number for the Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Use it.

If Democrats and independents do win a majority in the US Senate in 2026, they should, immediately in 2027, amend the Senate’s rules to restore the vision of our country’s founders and make their legislative body a majority-rule institution. Bust the filibuster. Get it over with. Bring closure to 60-vote cloture.

Meanwhile, throughout 2027, you’re helping with state and local races in places like Wisconsin, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Virginia. Don’t get rusty. Keep organizing.

2028

Big year.

We don’t know who the Democractic presidential nominee will be or what crises and issues will be dominating the news. Instead of fretting about the primaries and messaging, roll up your sleeves and build the general-election presidential operation in advance. Build state and local Democratic Party organizations. Elect democracy defenders to key offices in local and special elections and engage more and more voters and volunteers over time.

By the time the two parties nominate their candidates in 2028, you will have helped build the organizing and communicating juggernaut that will become your nominee’s campaign apparatus.

In 2028, your goal isn’t just to win the presidential election. It’s also to win as many seats as possible in the US House, US Senate, and state legislatures; to win the state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin (in April) and flip the state Supreme Court in North Carolina (in the fall); and to win all possible state executive offices, as well as local ones.

If it’s a 2016/2020/2024-style nail-biter, you’ll be glad you worked so damn hard. If it’s a 2008-style blowout, you’ll have a chance to win in places that seem impossible from the viewpoint of 2026.

You’re doing all this for two reasons. First, you want to generate as much positive change as possible. And second, you know that the next election, in 2030, is likely to be tough, because of the pattern of midterm backlash against incumbent presidents’ parties.

On election night in 2028, you’ll see the fruits of so many labors turn into electoral triumphs. You’ll cheer as your presidential candidate starts rolling up swing states. You’ll pump a fist in the air as Ron Johnson’s US Senate seat goes blue while Wisconsin Democrats hold on to their state legislative majorities. You’ll experience the rush of having helped change the world.

And you’ll recommit, even as you dance in the streets that night, to keep going. Because you know the fight isn’t over.

2029

Suppose we win in 2028. The first giant question of 2029 comes in January: Do we have a peaceful transfer of power, or not?

This will be the acid test.

The answer to that question depends on everything you, and the giant movement that you’re now part of, has achieved up to this point.

If the Electoral College is tied or subverted such that no candidate gets 270 Electoral College votes, then the job of determining who won the election will go to the House. Under the Constitution, each House delegation will get one vote. So our goal is not just to have a pro-democracy House majority—it’s to have, after the 121st Congress is sworn in at noon on Wednesday, January 3, 2029, pro-democracy majorities in a majority of House delegations. Right now, the GOP controls 30 out of 50 delegations. We’ve got two election cycles to change that. If this scenario happens, you’ll be very glad that you’ve leaned into House races in states like Iowa and Alaska.

Knock on wood: On Saturday, January 20, 2029, the next president and vice president of the United States will take their oaths of office. Not President Vance and Vice President Trump. Two entirely different people with entirely different names who belong to an entirely different party.

The nation, and the world, will finally exhale.

And then, after a killer party and a greasy breakfast, it’s time for the real work. Because 2029 has to be a year of action.

States with pro-democracy trifectas will have a great deal of work to continue from the 2027–28 legislative sessions. But now they’ll be joined by a federal government that can actually pass good-for-America bills into law, signed by a good-for-America, good-for-the-world president, and can then implement them in good faith. Along with whatever emergency bills are necessary in order to address whatever acute disaster Trump has left America as a parting gift, the federal trifecta of 2029 has to pass democracy reform. Right away.

The time will have come to pass the 2029 versions of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act—with voting rights protections, a national gerrymandering ban, donor disclosure requirements, and other anti-corruption measures.

But that’s just the start.

US Supreme Court reform: either 18-year term limits (after which justices, who have lifetime appointments, take “senior status” in which they don’t vote on cases), or a court expansion, or both.

Statehood for DC and, if Puerto Ricans so wish, Puerto Rico.

House reform: doubling its size, and adopting multi-member districts with proportional representation, so that everyone, across race and ethnicity and geography and ideology, can have a voice in the People’s House.

And then so much more. Economic policies that level the playing field and reward work instead of entrenching wealth. Laws that build prosperity and ensure that all of us, not just the few, benefit from it. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, and the Protect America’s Workforce Act. Comprehensive immigration reform. Maybe it’s time for a reorganization of the executive branch, to make it more effective and less susceptible to corruption and authoritarianism. Laws to ensure that artificial intelligence enriches us all, not just the few, and doesn’t undermine our livelihoods, our self-determination, or our existence. Laws to protect the rights and freedoms of every American, especially the most vulnerable. Measures to make life affordable, build opportunity, keep us safe, catch us when we fall, help us build the lives and families we choose, protect the earth, and lift up the dignity of all.

It’s not just that the executive and legislative branch will be in new hands. It’s that the laws they pass won’t be struck down by a rogue US Supreme Court.

In 2029, with new 18-year term limits on active service, the next president will be able to appoint a Supreme Court justice as the longest-serving justice, likely Clarence Thomas, moves to senior status, allowing him to spend even more time island hopping on Harlan Crow’s superyacht. We can hope that the court, knowing that its composition will mechanically shift over time, will stop ruling as though it will have a permanent MAGA-supporting majority.

Oh, and we shouldn’t forget a total recasting of America’s role in the world so that our foreign policy reflects both our values and our interests, in place of Trump’s approach, in which it reflects only his.

This will be the time for boldness. The year 2029 is shaping up to be one of those rare moments, like the period after the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II, when we have to rethink everything. When, in the wake of Trump, so much is broken, our goal must not be to simply repair what used to exist. Let’s build what we actually want. We’ll need visionary leaders. And we’ll need an engaged public pushing for a future that works for everyone.

Also, there will be elections. Free and fair ones. Wisconsin will have a supreme court race, and local elections, in April. That fall, Virginia and New Jersey will vote to reelect Governors Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill. They, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, and other local officials from coast to coast will face the first contests that tell us whether (or how much) the tub of political momentum is sloshing in the opposite direction under the next Democratic president. Let’s keep organizing to win them all.

2030

In 2010, after Obama’s 2008 landslide, thermostatic public opinion— turbocharged by Citizens United—led to a Tea Party/GOP wave. Which led to a raft of GOP state trifectas, from Wisconsin on out. Which, in turn, led to a plague of gerrymandering and other horrors before the 2012 elections that have sickened our politics ever since.

In 2030, our collective job is to prevent that from happening again.

Let’s just agree now to keep on organizing right through the 2030 elections—while also passing laws in 2029 that will reduce the risk to democratic self-governance if things do go badly. In particular: If we’ve banned gerrymandering in 2029, then a 2030 red wave won’t lead to the GOP’s rigging maps in state after state in 2031.

2031

The Census, which will have been responsibly overseen by the government of the 48th president of the United States, will deliver its results. The likeliest finding: that the population—and, hence, House seats and Electoral College votes—will have shifted south and, to a lesser extent, west.

Analysts predict that the head counts in California and New York, where the most populated areas have become increasingly unaffordable, will have plateaued or shrunk as people with dreams of, say, buying a home have moved to states like Texas (which might gain four House seats and Electoral College votes) and Florida (also poised to add four). Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota each lose one; Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and North Carolina each gain one.

If the Electoral College is still functioning as it does now, Democrats will not only have to keep winning the states where they’ve been doing well—they’ll also have to turn purple states blue and start winning states that are currently long shots if they want to have a chance of holding on to the presidency in 2032.

For that reason, you’ll be very glad by this point that you and so many others have spent the previous five years organizing locally in states that were, as recently as 2026, very red.

Or better yet, you’ll be thrilled that you helped pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in enough states for it to come into effect before the 2032 presidential elections.

2032 and Beyond

In a NPVIC world, the 2032 US presidential election would be the first one ever that is genuinely small-d democratic. Whoever gets the most votes wins. The years of patient long-term local organizing everywhere—not just in swing states, but in every state (all 51 or 52 of them!)—now matter a great deal. Every voter counts the same in choosing the most powerful person in the world, no matter their zip code. And every superpowered organizer can multiply their own impact by turning out their neighbors to vote.

In every state, the congressional and state legislative races will be conducted on post-Census map lines that are drawn fairly, or in multimember districts that choose representatives on a proportional basis.

We can’t now know who has the best shot at winning. But we’ll have secured democracy for posterity. We’ll have rebuilt our republic. We’ll have gone from American meltdown to glorious glow-up.

For most of our history, the United States regularly adjusted its rules. We expanded and contracted the US Supreme Court; we expanded the House, and changed federal election laws; we added states and the methods of electing US senators; we shifted the mechanics of the Electoral College; and we amended the Constitution. For the last half-century, we’ve been stuck. It hasn’t worked very well. The weakness and brittleness of our institutions has led to federal paralysis on the greatest issues of our day.

But enough democracy still survives that, if we join together, we can, in effect, wish for more wishes: We can use the tattered remnants of self-government to stitch together a new fabric for our country, one strong enough to protect us all.

This will take years of work. That work begins now.

In May of 2024, Alan Garber, the interim president of Harvard University, was met with boos at commencement, followed by a thousand-student walkout in protest of the Harvard Corporation’s denial of the degrees of 13 students who had participated in a pro-Palestine encampment.

A year later, May of 2025, Garber, no longer interim but the official president of Harvard, was met with resounding applause at the same event. Amid a sprawling legal fight with a similarly freshly inaugurated Trump administration, Harvard’s PR campaign had successfully spun Garber into a titan defying unjust attacks on academic freedom from an increasingly authoritarian presidency. The Atlantic wondered if he was the man that could “save Harvard,” although whether that meant from the Trump administration or from pro-Palestinian student protesters remained unclear.

This past commencement ended in a third way—most faculty, students, and families sat contently through the hours of ceremony. But the second Garber, or Provost John Manning, began speaking, echoes of clanging and booing reverberated around Harvard Yard as the Harvard Graduate Student Union crowded outside the university’s gates.

By May 28, commencement day, the graduate students were on the 38th day of their strike and 15 months into negotiations for a new contract, which had expired June 30, 2025. The union has several key demands among the many articles on the table, starting with pay for graduate student workers, most often employed as teaching fellows or research assistants. 

Under the current pay structure, teaching fellows make $26,300 per year guaranteed for two semesters of teaching,with bonuses throughout the semesters and the summer which bring their total compensation  to $50,000. For humanities PhDs, however, the bonuses  only last for four years, after which they make only the base $26,300 amount without lessening their teaching schedules. Research assistants make around $40,830 shouldering the same workload—20 hours per week for ten months on top of the academic work for their programs. 

As the union has noted, the MIT living wage calculator estimates that a living wage in the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metropolitan area is around $32.46 an hour, or roughly $67,000 yearly for a single adult with no children.

The union put forth its demand, a raise to $55,000 with five percent or inflation-equivalent raises, whichever is higher, and began waiting for a response.

Over a year into negotiations, Harvard still had yet to provide a response to this wage demand as well as several other proposals, including increased protections for noncitizen student workers and benefit fund eligibility. In one instance, according to HGSU President Denish Jasawl, when the union presented an article that would codify the university’s existing policy forbidding ICE from entering campus without a judicial warrant, “it took them 10 months to even give us a response.”

“That response, of course, was just rejecting everything,” Jasawal added. 

Similarly, HGSU asked the university to allow student workers to turn to third party arbitrators to resolve harassment, bullying, or discrimination complaints, of which HGSU bargaining committee member Sarah Johns says one in five members report experiencing. Johns noted that peer institutions, including Yale, have these procedures in place.

Union members had been asking for more harassment protections since the last contract was ratified without them following a short strike in 2021. As HGSU Vice President Evan Lemire said, the exclusion elicited “disappointment” from many members at the time, especially “on the heels of high-profile harassment cases, particularly the Comaroff case.”

When questioned about this article, Harvard spokesperson Jason Newton quoted a 2021 Crimson article which reported that the union had “conceded its demand for third-party arbitration of gender- and sex-based harassment and discrimination claims” during those negotiations for the now-defunct contract.

At the bargaining table, Johns and others described “frustration” after months of negotiation at how the university representatives seem to view their demands.

“They’ve laughed at us. And audibly laughed at us.” Johns said. “They even show up sometimes without their computers charged. And so it’s just very clear over and over again that they’re not coming to engage. They’re coming to do their job, and their job is not to give us a protective contract.”

Now, over a year after the contract expired, the union has ended its historic 40-day strike, which ran from April 21 to June 1 and ended with no contract and little progress. Union organizers say they are willing to go on stroke again in the fall, if given a new reason. Harvard seems to be committed to waiting the union out. 

Organizers, as well as faculty and other unions, have theorized why the university is set on doing so, outlining what they see as the university’s desire to privately appease the administration and conservative donors amid its very public legal battle, accompanied by a media blitz from Garber, against billions of dollars in federal funding cuts. 

The fight is still ongoing—while a district judge ordered the money to be restored last September, the Trump administration has appealed and the case is pending in federal court.

Government professor Steve Levitsky questioned the timing of HGSU’s strike considering what he assumed  Harvard’s position would be given its ongoing fight.

According to Levistky, Harvard “has been prioritizing establishing and maintaining an image as sufficiently right of center to try to fend off attacks from donors, Congress, the White House. And it has been very, very consistently trying to portray a sort of non-left, non-woke image.”

“It was not a moment where it was willing to pay the external political price of being perceived as giving in to striking graduate students,” Levitsky said.

Jasawal and her fellow organizers felt similarly. When faced with backlash, they said, the university often pivots the blame to the Trump administration, obfuscating its own financial and legal ability to mitigate the effects of Trump’s attacks. The administration is invoked as a powerful threat and is therefore an easy scapegoat.

Carrie Barbash, former president and current organizer with the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, observed similar justifications from Harvard in their round of proposed Faculty of Arts and Sciences layoffs, for which Harvard paid McKinsey & Company at least $250,000 in consultancy services. 

“They just essentially were saying ‘Trump’s attacks are scary, our finances are so precarious, so we’re going to lay off 20% of our staff,’” Barbash said. HUCTW, like HGSU organizers, are skeptical of Harvard’s financial claims. 

In a draft report of FAS’s finances obtained by HUCTW, which was not published on the FAS website as it had been in previous years, FAS reported around an $8 million deficit, compared to hundreds of millions in surpluses in previous years. However, notably, this did not include the entirety of the funds that, stripped by the Trump administration, had been retroactively restored.

“Payments received on federal sponsored grants that were subsequently reinstated will be recognized as revenue in fiscal year 2026,” the draft report read.

Regardless of the cuts, both HGSU and HUCTW pointed to the school’s infamous $57 billion endowment (including $6 billion in reserve funds excluded from the $57 billion total) which is larger than the economies of over 120 countries, as a place where the university might look in times of financial upheaval. 

The endowment saw an 11.9% increase in fiscal year 2025, including a total of $10,249,710 in unrestricted funds, which can be distributed at will. Barbash said Harvard’s claim that it is struggling financially, including Dean Hopi Hoekstra’s communication with staff about FAS’s proposed $350 million structural deficit, is misleading considering its endowment and its record-breaking year of fundraising. 

Jasawal, meanwhile, qualifies for food stamps after making around $26,000 for the last few years. So do other union members, according to Johns. “At the end of the day, I think what they’re doing is they’re fashioning themselves in the image of Trump,” Jasawal said. “They are bringing the authoritarianism that we are fighting across this country…home, and they are making the lives of their workers and communities much worse.”

The future remains to be seen on both sides. According to Harvard’s financial report, endowment spending must be “deliberately managed to balance the demands of today with the needs of tomorrow’s scholars.” Those scholars, Johns said, are who the union, particularly the bargaining committee made up of soon-to-be graduates, continue negotiating for. 

“This has had a significant impact on our own progress as in the PhD program,” Johns said. “But we’re not benefiting from this contract, we’re fighting for this for younger years. And so we keep showing up.”

On a warm Wednesday morning in early April, I stood with around two dozen masked protesters outside the entrance to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, an industrial park on the New York City waterfront. I knew by now to bring earplugs, since the goal of this weekly demonstration was to make as much noise as possible. Beneath the screech of whistles, the blaring of an air horn, and the banging of pots and pans, activists waved Palestinian flags and handed out flyers to workers exiting the complex. The protesters were there because they had found evidence that companies operating out of the massive property were supplying the Israeli military, which for over two years had been carrying out a genocide in Gaza.

The protests, led by an autonomous group called Demilitarize the Brooklyn Navy Yard, targeted Easy Aerial, a drone manufacturer, and Crye Precision, which makes tactical gear. Because the Navy Yard sits on land owned by the city of New York, the DBNY picket extends to the complex as a whole, with the organizers arguing that military contractors should not receive tax breaks or be allowed to operate on public property. For over a year, they demanded that the two companies be evicted from the Navy Yard; after Easy Aerial’s lease expired in May (without being renewed), they focused their campaign on getting rid of Crye Precision.

These weekly protests ebbed and flowed as groups from around the city answered DBNY’s call to mobilize at the Navy Yard, and they sometimes escalated into more direct confrontations. Earlier on that April morning, a brief scuffle had broken out after a cop slapped a demonstrator blowing an air horn in his face. Toward the end of the demonstration, I watched as a protester in a hooded sweatshirt and green keffiyeh stood atop a picnic table and spoke into a megaphone.

“Politicians and international bodies have not stopped the genocide in Palestine, or of the oppressed masses of the world, and they were never willing to stop it,” the speaker declared, his voice partially muffled by the keffiyeh. “To fight US imperialism, we have to choke its flow of supplies.”

His sentiment reflected how I’d been feeling for months—as well as many others I knew who cared about Palestine. During Israel’s two-year genocidal campaign in Gaza, protests around the United States focused on stopping the daily bombardment and killing of Palestinian civilians. As the official death toll rose to more than 70,000 (likely a severe undercount), “Ceasefire now!” became the rallying cry of most major actions in cities like New York, alongside the more radical demands from student encampments, which called on their universities to divest from Israel.

But despite the ceasefire that was announced last October, the killings have not stopped. The United States continues to send weapons to Israel, which is still targeting Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, the latter flush with armed settlers. By 2025, the war for American popular opinion, it seemed, had been won: For the first time since polling began, more Americans had an unfavorable view of Israel than a favorable one. Meanwhile, aside from some major victories for pro-Palestine politicians in cities like New York and Washington, DC, this sentiment has not translated to a shift in policy. Logic and historical precedent both seemed to suggest that it was just a matter of time. But as with our planet in the climate crisis, Palestine was running out of time.

It was during this period of frustration over the United States’ continued material support for Israel, and the perceived ineffectiveness of mass protest, that I first came across Demilitarize the Brooklyn Navy Yard in August of last year. Rather than occupying a massive public space, such as Times Square, to express discontent and raise awareness on the issue, the DBNY campaign was doing something different: pushing for targeted actions at the local level to end the flow of weapons to Israel. Such protests have always been a part of pro-Palestine organizing, but in the nine months since the ceasefire was announced, I’ve seen them take on much more prominence, applying pressure to specific people and businesses with financial ties to the Israeli military.

There was something, too, in the fact that this was all taking place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a former military shipyard that after a multi-decade transformation is now home to more than 550 businesses, from film studios to breweries. The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, a nonprofit that administers the property on behalf of the city of New York, has made a concerted effort to draw young people to the area, offering the space as a venue for electronic-music events. The Navy Yard sits at the nexus of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, traditionally working-class neighborhoods that are rapidly gentrifying, filling with young transplants who are largely supportive of Palestine. This is perhaps why the DBNY protests felt different, both to me and the other demonstrators that I saw there. At the Navy Yard, I had the chance to channel my frustration into something that felt concrete and tangible: getting weapons manufacturers out of Brooklyn, the borough where I also lived.

But protests like this were not exceptional. In 2024, a similar effort in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pushed for the eviction of a local office of Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer. In California and New Jersey, activists and dockworkers have united under the Block the Boat movement, which uses blockades and sit-ins to prevent ships carrying Israeli military cargo from docking at international ports. And, of course, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long sought to apply pressure on Israel by targeting the flow of money, goods, and people to and from the country.

Learning about these successful campaigns gave me hope that DBNY was just one prong in a multifaceted movement, one that was just gathering steam rather than fading out. And unlike previous campaigns, DBNY is escalating at a time when Americans everywhere are being introduced to direct action under the second Trump administration. DBNY has revealed that Crye Precision, which makes uniforms worn by the Israeli army, also supplies Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant operations in places like Minnesota. The mass pushback against Operation Metro Surge beginning late last year made it clear that many Americans are willing to engage in direct action and organize at the grassroots level to resist authoritarianism. DBNY can harness that energy by demonstrating that militarism abroad and militarism at home are one and the same.

Demilitarize the Brooklyn Navy Yard was formed in September 2024 with the goal of materially disrupting the supply chain of weapons and technology between the United States and Israel. The group decided to narrow its focus to two companies, starting with Easy Aerial, which has publicly advertised that its drones are used by the Israel Defense Forces. Crye Precision, meanwhile, produces camouflage gear for the Israeli military supplier Agilite. Both Easy Aerial and Crye Precision have also supplied the Department of Homeland Security; aside from searching publicly available federal contracts, the DBNY campaign identified ICE and Border Patrol officers wearing Crye Precision uniforms and gear through photos, videos, and news reports.

Campaign organizers told me that early on, they attempted a dialogue with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation. In June of last year, activists met with Lindsay Greene, the organization’s president and CEO, and Hank Gutman, its board chair, to urge the BNYDC to evict the two companies, as well as to ban any military contractors from leasing space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the future. At the meeting, according to the organizers, Gutman and Greene said the board could not evict tenants without a legal or financial reason. Producing weapons that kill civilians might be morally wrong, but it is neither illegal nor against the BNYDC’s policy. (Through a spokesperson, the BNYDC also denied that any weapons are manufactured in the Navy Yard, despite evidence to the contrary).

Since then, the BNYDC has demonstrated a clear lack of interest in engaging with the campaign, organizers told me. Although its meetings are supposed to be open to the public, last year the BNYDC quietly removed the public-comment period from its board-meeting agendas and began limiting the number of people who could sit in on meetings to avoid any potential disruption from protesters. The attendees are also siphoned off into a separate room where they can watch the meeting take place over video link, as I did several times in the past year. At no point during the board meetings I witnessed were the protesters outside the building acknowledged.

As their frustration with the BNYDC grew, the protesters decided to escalate their tactics. At their weekly demonstrations, they have held up signs denouncing Greene and Gutman as “genocide profiteers.” In June of last year, four activists were arrested after blocking the entrance to the elevators in the building that housed Easy Aerial and Crye Precision. That same day, a Crye Precision employee was captured on video physically assaulting a protester.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve seen the campaign’s protests draw in various pro-Palestine groups from around the city, from the borough-wide Brooklyn Families for Palestine to the national anti-war organization Code Pink. But the core of the Demilitarize campaign is hyperlocal, consisting of community organizers, Brooklyn Navy Yard workers and tenants, from woodworkers to designers, and residents of the surrounding neighborhoods. Organizers have made a sustained effort to connect support for weapons manufacturing at the Navy Yard and lack of investment in the nearby community.

“There really is no manufacturing space anymore in New York. This is why places like the Navy Yard were created,” said Maisha Morales, whose family has lived in the neighborhood since 1931, speaking to the crowd at a protest in September that drew well over 100 people and resulted in eight arrests. “Yet there are still no spaces for people who look like us, but they find a way to give thousands of square feet to companies who profit off of genocide and war.”

It’s been six years since I began attending pro-Palestine demonstrations. Raised in a decidedly apolitical household and trained in the norms and practices of mainstream American journalism, which prioritize distancing oneself from any subjects of potential coverage to maintain “objectivity,” I did so tentatively at first, simply watching from the sidelines as an onlooker rather than an activist or reporter. Eventually, I began to participate more openly, joining in on the chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” For a long time, this felt like a radical act in and of itself, and in many ways it still is. But after October 7, it no longer felt like enough. And I wasn’t the only one feeling this way.

“For many decades, Palestine was a fringe issue in the US,” Eman Abdelhadi, an activist and professor at the University of Chicago, told me on a recent phone call. “There wasn’t really a path toward actual cutting of material ties” to Israel, and the movement instead focused on “symbolic wins” and political education. That changed after October 7, 2023, Abdelhadi said. Even as public opinion turned decisively against Israel for the first time in his decades of organizing, it became clear that this would not be enough to stem the flow of weapons to the country, which was still being promoted by many in the Democratic Party despite opposition from their constituents. “There was a shift within the [pro-Palestine] movement to want to make a material impact,” Abdelhadi added, “to move beyond the symbolic and the rhetorical, to actually impose a cost on Israel.”

DBNY organizers told me that their campaign was started as a direct response to what they viewed as “symbolic and performative solidarity,” such as electoral campaigns and protests that, in their view, don’t call for material change. “The Palestine solidarity movement in NYC has largely focused on mobilizations, without any long-term strategy around a larger goal,” the group said in a written statement. “The goals of the DBNY campaign have been very clear, focusing on disrupting the supply chain of imperialism by targeting weapons companies, rather than asking politicians and institutions to end the genocide.”

I’ve also had numerous conversations with friends in the movement who see protests without direct action as funnelling popular anger and organizing energy away from campaigns that could make a material impact, and in many ways I sympathized with their frustration. However, I learned from speaking to experts that previous successful organizing efforts, such as the boycott of apartheid South Africa, incorporated action at all levels.

Rama Kased, an associate professor in Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University who was born and raised in Brooklyn, told me that as the repression against pro-Palestine organizing rises, decentralized direct action like the kind undertaken by DBNY will need to be supplemented by electoral work and legal advocacy.

Abdelhadi emphasized that the next step is for campaigns like DBNY to share materials and organizing strategies with other groups around the country. “These campaigns are often more successful when they can maintain pressure locally at the starting point and replicate across different places,” Abdelhadi said. DBNY has talked to groups in Philadelphia, Chicago, and upstate New York, the group told me. I also found parallels between Demilitarize the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Cancel Capital Factory campaign in Austin, Texas, which similarly targets a tech hub with ties to Israeli weapons manufacturing.

DBNY is still calling for a full cultural and economic boycott of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, emphasizing that people should avoid spending money in the complex or hosting events there until its demands are met. Because it’s a decentralized group, there are many ways to participate in DBNY: Some people join the weekly noise demos, which aim to divert people away from shopping or dining at the Navy Yard, while others organize autonomous actions such as sit-ins or blockades. The group is hopeful that its strategy is paying off after Easy Aerial was forced to leave in May after its lease expired and the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation declined to renew it. DBNY has also called on the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric has been supportive of Palestine, to take action (although Mamdani has not publicly acknowledged the group and recently reappointed Greene as the BNYDC’s chief executive). In the words of the DBNY organizers, their campaign is here to stay.

On January 19, Carlos Mero, the captain of an Ecuadoran fishing boat named La Fiorella, called his wife on an emergency line and expressed his alarm at seeing “American aircraft, two drones, and a blue patrol ship” nearby. Mero was right to be worried. Starting in the fall of 2025, the Trump administration, on the pretense of waging a war on drugs, had ramped up a military campaign to bomb supposed drug-running boats in the Caribbean and Pacific—often in concert with regional allies such as Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa. Mero was baffled as to why his boat was seemingly under the gunsight of the US military, since La Fiorella had been inspected and cleared by a local coast guard.

As Drop Site News reported, witnesses saw La Fiorella explode the next day. Its eight crew members, including Mero, all disappeared. There is still no confirmation that the boat was targeted by the US military, but the facts of the case are in keeping with the more than 60 boats in the Caribbean that have been bombed, which have left at least 221 dead (a number that does include probable but unverified kills such as La Fiorella).

Other examples of US-sponsored extrajudicial killing were recently highlighted in a report by Human Rights Watch. According to the organization, the report documents

serious human rights violations in a rural community on the Colombia-Ecuador border, as well as attacks on and the disappearance of fishermen at sea near the Galápagos Islands. Each incident either clearly implicates the US-Ecuador security partnership or surfaces questions about responsibility. Ecuadorian forces tortured and arbitrarily detained four farm workers, and later burned and struck a dairy farm, during what the United States called a “partnered operation.” And drones of unknown origin attacked two fishing vessels, injuring several crew members. A third vessel remains missing.

Donald Trump is inordinately proud of his intensification of the war on drugs, which he’s touted as a great success. In a Truth Social post in April, Trump claimed, “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” Quoting Trump’s words, The Washington Post reports, “Trump has said at least 15 times, including as recently as last month, that the strikes have reduced maritime drug trafficking into the country by 97 or 98 percent.”

Any sentient creature will be skeptical of Trump’s claim since he has a long history of outrageous and completely divorced from reality lying. But it’s worth noting that even if Trump’s claims were true, they would not in fact justify the US killing spree. Smuggling drugs is a crime, not an act of war that merits summary execution. As I’ve noted before, Trump’s policy is a war crime, full stop.

But as it turns out, these war crimes are as ineffectual as they are vile. On Monday, the Post reported:

The Trump administration’s deadly military strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats have not reduced the amount of cocaine entering the United States, but they’re prompting criminal organizations to develop new strategies and tactics and undermining traditional investigative methods, according to a previously unreported assessment by the Drug Enforcement Administration, a closed-door congressional briefing and interviews with current and former U.S. and foreign officials.

In a recent assessment reviewed by The Washington Post, DEA analysts found the strikes had failed to affect the supply or price of cocaine in the United States and had led traffickers to diversify beyond go-fast boats and to avoid international waters, opting instead for larger boats and hemming close to coastlines, where U.S. forces are less likely to open fire. In a closed-door briefing last month, Pentagon officials told lawmakers the strikes in international waters off South and Central America had not reduced its purity.

This was an entirely predictable fiasco. The War on Drugs has been a bipartisan effort dating back to the Nixon administration. The simplest way to document its failure is to note that during this period, the price of drugs that are regarded as most dangerous has continued a long-term decline. In 2012, the price of cocaine was 80 percent less than in 1982. According to the Post, “Based on pricing, there might, in fact, now be more cocaine circulating in the United States. In Florida, cocaine is selling for $13,000 to $15,000 per kilogram, a senior DEA official said, a drop of roughly 50 percent over the last five years.”

The War on Drugs might in fact be the only effective anti-inflation policy the United States has ever developed. While nearly everything else, ranging from food to housing to transportation, gets more costly, it has never been cheaper to get high as a kite. This is true no matter how many innocent fishermen the United States military drops bombs on or how many Central and South American governments get trained in the dark art of torture. The drug issue is driven by supply more than demand. As long as people in the United States have an inordinate interest in drugs, drugs will be extremely profitable, which means that smugglers will find ever-more-ingenious ways to get their goods to the market.

Trump’s escalation of the War on Drugs is vile, but it reflects a deeper failure in the US political system. Trump isn’t the only one who has failed to learn that the War on Drugs is lost. On this issue, at least, he is merely building on a long and discredited tradition.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

In 2015, my editors at The Nation first set me the task of covering Donald Trump by asking me to write about his coarse, mobster-like use of the English language. In the years since, Trump-speak has continued to fascinate—and horrify—me.

On Wednesday, two weeks into the renewed hostilities between the United States and Iran, Trump announced on Fox News that “we’re going to beat the fucking shit out of them. We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” In the past, such a tirade would have at least been termed “unpresidential”; quite likely, it would have triggered calls for the president’s resignation. Of course, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and countless other senior political figures swore like sailors, but they did so in private, understanding that democratic political systems are sustained, in part, by the illusion of civility. Trump deliberately dispenses with that illusion. There’s a swagger to how he communicates that is intended to project a murderous, unstoppable intent. His speech is similar to how the erstwhile Filipino strongman leader Rodrigo Duterte talked of meting out violence to his enemies and to street criminals while in office, and to how Jair Bolsonaro addressed his supporters in Brazil.

In the Oval Office, on the same day that Trump pledged to beat the fucking shit out of the Iranians, the madman in chief told a gathering of journalists who were questioning him about Iran’s latest attacks on US military facilities in the region, “They’ve already apologized, but you know we gotta smack them a little bit.”

This isn’t the language of high-stakes foreign-policy decision-making; it is a crude, brutal way of talking that Trump thinks will convey toughness. It’s a simulacrum of the strong man, a fantasy woven in Trump’s brain to present an image of indomitability. It’s the language of the made man in a Mafia movie explaining how you gotta soften people up, rough them up just enough to make them pay for protection or pony up their late rent or do whatever favor the Godfather has asked you to do.

I can practically hear Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone saying with a combination of menace and self-pity, “You don’t ask with respect. You don’t offer friendship. You don’t even think to call me Godfather.” Except Brando was a first-rate actor; Trump is as third-rate as you get, and in his dotage, he is getting more third-rate by the minute. As his tired and desperately boring performance at the recent White House Correspondents’ Dinner showed—do we really want a commander in chief who thinks the funniest thing in the world is to make fat jokes about his political opponents?—he’s become little more than an aging Catskills’ performer, seeking just one more chance to win the adulation of an audience. The thing is, no one is buying it anymore. Witness the reaction of the Alabama Daily News, which tends to cater to a conservative, business-friendly audience in the Deep South—the sort of people who have voted for Trump and MAGA candidates in every election cycle since 2016. As Trump launched into a series of bizarre personal attacks on CNN’s Kaitlan Collins (a onetime Alabama native) that were supposed to amuse the captive members of the news media, the newspaper reported, “There was no laughter or any sound from the audience.” His jabs had fallen flat, and his punch lines were met with crickets.

For a man as needy as Trump, the silence must have been brutal. Like all authoritarians, Trump insists that he knows best about everything, be it humor—if he says something’s funny, then goddammit it must be funny—be it war, or be it culture.

Take his shamelessly fascist efforts to try to intimidate the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History into toeing the MAGA party line. Last week, after months of failed attempts to bend the museum to his will, Trump signed an executive order mandating that the National Park Service put up warning signs and alternative exhibits in public areas surrounding the museum, informing visitors that the museum’s exhibits were “inaccurate” and that the museum has “failed to appropriately honor the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence.” More generally, the warnings were designed to let visitors know about “the ideological capture” of the museum by a bunch of anti-American lefty lunatics. By doing so, Trump is posing as an all-knowing historian; just as during the World Cup, he became the all-knowing arbiter of soccer fouls.

If you aren’t familiar with the Nazis’ clampdown on “degenerate art,” I suggest that you read up on it. I suggest, too, that you study how Joseph Stalin used the cult of the personality around his leadership to attack—and ultimately to have imprisoned or killed—artists, musicians, writers, and other cultural figures whose work, and whose understanding of the Soviet Union, he disapproved of.

Trump and his enablers know that time is running out on their odious project. For months, the public has soured on every signature policy they have put forward, and the latest poll numbers regarding Trump’s leadership are devastating: Just one in five Republican voters are “enthusiastic” about his remaining years in office, and more than two-thirds of US voters polled are fearful or pessimistic about the country’s future so long as Trump remains in power. With inflation surging again, the Iran War intensifying, ICE agents going on a killing spree, and public-health crises such as the Cyclospora outbreak escalating, those numbers aren’t going to get better any time soon.

Yet the more the public turns against this vicious political movement, the more extreme Trumpism becomes. The KKKer Fred Trump taught his son that thuggery is the way of the world, that compromise and an admission of fault signify only weakness. And so no matter how distasteful most Americans find his schtick, Trump will work ceaselessly to shore up his thug credentials, nominate more extreme people for senior government rolls, and push more extremist policies via executive order. He will always, always, always go on the attack. And if the public doesn’t buy what he’s selling anymore, well that’s clearly the public’s fault. It’s a Götterdämmerung philosophy that threatens to bring the house down not only on his regime but on the American democratic experiment.

Donald “Don” Snook is 73. He has been in prison for 52 years. Now incarcerated in Washington’s Stafford Creek Correctional Center, he wears compression socks and spends his days in a wheelchair, playing Sudoku on his prison-issued tablet. Snook has survived four strokes and lives with a chronic lung disease. He has an 80 percent blockage on the left side of his heart that can’t be treated, as he is too weak to recover from surgery.

In 2019, Snook was diagnosed with colon cancer, which spread to his lymph nodes. He recovered, only to be diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer.

Washington State prisons have an Emergency Medical Placement program, which allows some seriously ill incarcerated people to complete their sentences in community-based medical institutions. But because Snook is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, he is not eligible. He has waited months for some medical appointments and relied on younger men in the prison to help him eat and walk when no nurses were around.

“They’re tryna kill me, I believe that,” Snook said.

America’s incarcerated population is getting older—and sicker. Unspecialized staff, low budgets, and systemic medical neglect have led to a lack of basic medical care for aging prisoners like Snook.

In prison, the health conditions that typically define someone as “elderly” begin at 55, according to studies from the National Institutes of Health—a full decade before most outside of prison begin to meet this definition. People aged 55 and over make up nearly 17 percent of the incarcerated population nationwide. In 1991, this number was just 3 percent.

“People in their 50s in prison exhibit a lot of the physical and cognitive decline characteristics that people in their 70s and 80s face in the community,” said Christian Gonzalez-Rivera, associate director of the Public Policy Program at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.

Gonzalez-Rivera explained that both the stress of prison life and the conditions that led people to be imprisoned in the first place—often trauma, mental illness, or poverty—can lead to faster aging. “Because medical services are so inadequate in prison, by the time that people need care, they need a very high level of care and become a high-cost patient immediately.”

Incarcerating a young person costs up to $70,000 annually. For an older person, this can soar up to between $100,000 and $240,000, according to a 2023 elder parole brief. These costs are funded entirely by the taxpayer, and often, people do not receive the level of healthcare they require.

“If you commit a crime and the judge says you’re going to spend 20 years in prison, that is the sentence: taking away your liberties, your right to vote, to do other things,” said Marc Stern, a correctional physician in Washington State. “The sentence didn’t include losing your leg from diabetes or losing your life from poor care.”

Snook was arrested in 1975 for taking his aunt’s car without permission. He was placed in Washington State Penitentiary—Walla Walla—an infamously violent prison. Here, he says he was tortured by a fellow inmate, whom he killed in self-defense. In 1977, he killed another inmate. He was charged with first-degree aggravated murder, and is now sentenced to life without parole.

Snook found blood in his stool in early 2019. Doctors dismissed him, saying he had hemorrhoids. By the time he was finally diagnosed with colon cancer, it was Stage III.

In 2021, Washington’s Department of Corrections was investigated for delaying cancer diagnosis and treatments by the state’s Office of the Corrections Ombuds. The DOC declined to respond to a detailed list of questions from The Xylom regarding Snook’s health, explaining that HIPAA prevents them from discussing any incarcerated individual’s personal health information.

On the other side of the nation, in Pennsylvania, lives Irvin Moore. Now 79, Moore served 52 years for first-degree murder and aggravated robbery before being released in 2021.

“Medical care in prison is horrendous,” Moore said. “At best.”

“I’ve lost so many friends to Stage IV cancers of all different sorts,” he added. “How can a person get to that stage if they’re being examined and checked regularly? I think for the last six or seven years, I may have had a checkup twice, at 75 years old.”

Gonzalez-Rivera described this as an “epidemic of misdiagnosis.” He highlighted an example of one incarcerated person’s stomach pains being treated with an over-the-counter medication like Pepto-Bismol. The pain turned out to be stomach cancer.

“Signifiers of chronic conditions that might be tested for and analyzed in community medical settings are just not flagged in time,” Gonzalez-Rivera said.

Stern, the Washington correctional physician, explained that due to budget constraints, diagnosis and care are often not provided by staff with the required qualifications. Conditions that require treatment from physicians are often left to physician assistants, and roles meant for registered nurses are handed to lower-paid practical nurses with only two years of training.

Colin Creveling, a registered nurse supervisor at Laurel Highlands, a low-security prison in Pennsylvania, believes that these problems stem from a broader crisis in medical staffing nationwide, as well as the stigma of working in prisons.

“The medical field has been battered since Covid,” Creveling said. “The staffing issue is not just in a prison, but anywhere. The issue with prison is, you don’t go to nursing school and think, I’m going to work in a prison.”

When speaking about hospice care behind bars, both Moore and Snook responded with a bitter laugh. “There’s absolutely no hospice care,” Snook said.

“It’s a shame that I would have to even laugh at something like that, because it’s no joke,” Moore said. “Guys lay in bed until they die.”

“It’s what we call DBI,” Moore continued. “Death by incarceration.”

Most states outsource prison healthcare to for-profit contractors, meaning profit shapes every level of care. Since the federal Affordable Care Act protections do not apply to prisons, incarcerated people are not guaranteed regular checkups, prescriptions, or access to doctors.

Ruth Greenberg, a criminal defense lawyer who helped bring medical parole to Massachusetts, said that contractors often start by estimating the cost of an inmate’s needs before treating them. If their care turns out to be more expensive than the estimate, there is no guarantee that the extra cost will be met.

Furthermore, taking an individual to a hospital requires paying for at least two accompanying officers, sometimes with an overnight stay, explained Gonzalez-Rivera. This leads to bigger, more expensive procedures’ being ignored or avoided. Snook’s prostate cancer took 17 months to get treatment.

Another example of cost-cutting is dental care: Removing a tooth is cheaper than a filling, so people are often left with missing teeth. Loretta Pierre—who has been in prison in Mississippi for four decades—once booked an appointment in 1997 and wasn’t seen until 2002.

“All of my teeth are falling apart,” Pierre said. “That’s one of the things that I’m gonna have to take care of whenever I get out of here.”

This lack of basic medical attention leaves individuals with no alternatives for finding or receiving healthcare.

“Who can you complain to?” Moore, the formerly incarcerated man from Pennsylvania, asked. “It’s like policing the police.”

“We are such a punitive country,” said Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab, a national policy resource center. “We’re really the only country in the world that keeps people locked up so many years. We are getting so used to that here that we forget that that’s not normal and other countries look at us like we’re crazy.”

In 2016, a report from The Sentencing Project found that around 40 percent of incarcerated individuals in the United States—that’s 600,000 people—were imprisoned without any legitimate public safety justification. Moreover, 83 percent of the entire world’s life-without-parole population is behind American bars.

In countries like Finland, Germany, and Norway, prisons promote rehabilitation with shorter sentences. In turn, they see lower rates of recidivism and violence. Experts have suggested that there is no benefit to longer, more punitive sentences.

“They have much more progressive mindsets and systems,” Carole Cafferty, who worked in Massachusetts jails for over 30 years, said of these countries. “They incarcerate people for the sake of rehabilitation and use restorative justice practices. We incarcerate people for the sake of punishment and retribution.”

Greenberg explained that she has had multiple clients who died shortly after their compassionate release applications were denied. “There’s all these really sick people there in wheelchairs, on dialysis four times a week,” she said. “They’re paralyzed from the waist down, they have pancreatic cancer, very sick people, and the commissioner is saying, too dangerous to release.”

For those struggling to understand compassionate release, Cafferty argued that improved victim services could build ground for empathy. She explained that families may then be better equipped to cope with loss, grief, and what Cafferty calls “retributive anger,” where families wish to keep people locked up even when it no longer serves a purpose.

“If victims had more services and help, we would probably get a lot more people paroled, and medically paroled, so they can die with dignity—at home or in a hospice facility—or turn their medical issues around and have a second chance,” Cafferty said.

Shneaqua Purvis’s sister was shot and killed by a stray bullet in 2002. After her sister’s assailant completed a manslaughter sentence and was released, Purvis began mentoring him. She later testified before the New York State Senate in support of the Elder Parole and Fair & Timely Parole bills, which seek to expand parole eligibility and reform parole decision-making.

“Justice to me means that he goes on to help prevent other acts of violence from happening,” she wrote in her testimony.

Luz Marquez Benbow also testified in favor of these bills after being sexually assaulted three times in her life.

“Prisons are inherently violent institutions,” Benbow wrote. “To get at the root of such violence demands that we invest in supporting real accountability, which means fundamentally changing one’s behavior and giving back—not dying in a cage.”

Jonathan Kirkpatrick, who was incarcerated alongside Snook for around 17 years, says Snook is one example of someone who no longer needs to be in prison. “If they let him go, he wouldn’t be a very productive member of society, but not destructive either. He’d just sit with his plants on a porch,” Kirkpatrick said with a laugh.

At Stafford Creek, Snook is holding on. He’s noticed that he needs to write things down now to remember them, so he plays Sudoku to keep his mind sharp. He can’t leave his room without his wheelchair and is constantly in “excruciating pain.” His only treatment, currently, is three Tylenol pills a day.

As we spoke on the phone, Snook sat alone in his cell. He described his door, a little wider than others to fit his wheelchair through. He described his old cell in a different facility. He had 38 plants there.

As of 2021, nearly 16,000 people in prison had spent over half of their lives behind bars. More than 18,000 people had served over 30 years, some incarcerated since 1965. The end of the Vietnam War, the fall of the USSR, the creation of the Internet, and the Covid-19 pandemic have flown by while people like Snook have remained incarcerated.

Yet for 50- to 65-year-olds arrest rates hover around 2 percent. That drops to almost 0 percent for people over 65. Greenberg explained that because of this evidence, personal emotion shouldn’t play a role in compassionate release decisions.

“If somebody killed my husband, my daughter, I’d want them to die in prison too,” Greenberg said. “But that’s a different question, what a person feels and what the state should do.”

Chris Blackwell, an award-winning incarcerated journalist and Nation contributor who spent time in the same facility as Snook, agreed.

“I have never met a single one of those individuals, in their 70s and 80s, that would cause any harm if they were to go home,” Blackwell said. “Most of them would go home and sit in a wheelchair and just be around their family.”

Studies found that incarcerated individuals can change by developing hope, building positive bonds with others, and changing their outlook on life. Many people describe feeling regret, seeing things differently, and becoming calmer, less impulsive versions of their younger selves.

“When I first met Don, we were both not very likable people,” Kirkpatrick said. “But we’ve both grown in different ways.”

People like Snook and Moore were incarcerated in their early 20s. The prefrontal cortex—the brain area responsible for moral reasoning and impulse control—only fully develops by 25. The incidence of violent crime also decreases after 25.

“My younger self—or any other younger prisoner coming in—I would advise they put the blinders on,” said Snook. He spoke of the man he killed in 1977, who he says was a child rapist. “While it stopped that particular person from harming children, others still did. You can’t stop the sickness.”

Snook says he has been on the “low risk to reoffend” list for 14 years, with almost 20 positive behavior observation evaluations.

“There’s so many people in [prison] that deserve a second chance,” Moore said. “They weren’t the same people that they necessarily are today.”

Snook’s story shows what happens when a system is unwilling to acknowledge change.

“You’ll see a lot of the older gentlemen, they’ve been in prison so long that a lot of guys will look up to them,” Blackwell said. “They get guidance from them. Especially the lifers because it’s, like, the one thing they can give, right? Most of them know they’re gonna die in here. They’re always looking for ways to mentor young men.”

Today, Moore is a student at Penn State University, working toward an undergraduate degree in Rehabilitation and Human Services. Pierre still hopes to go to the dentist when she is released. She is currently no closer to finding out when that will be.

“We need leaders, we need people in positions of power and authority to ensure that people are treated justly, people are treated humanely,” Moore said. “Cost cannot be the overriding priority, because if it is, people will be crushed. People will not be considered.”

Snook works as a game porter, keeping track of all the games people in the prison have access to.

While he was in isolation in Walla Walla, most of his friends were sparrows. They’d get caught in the barbed wire of the prison, and he’d clean them up and splint their wings. He made them nests from his T-shirt and fed them pieces of bread.

He named most of the sparrows Chance.

When the sparrows’ wings healed, Snook would take them outside and set them free.

When Michigan Democratic US Senate candidates Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed faced each other in their debate this week, the talk was as much about the broad topic of money in politics as it was about the particular issues that separate Stevens, a corporate-aligned centrist, and El-Sayed, an economic populist with a sweeping progressive agenda.

That wasn’t surprising. The money fight frames an electability debate between Stevens, who is relying heavily on support from special-interest groups and wealthy donors, and El-Sayed, whose campaign has placed a heavy emphasis on grassroots fundraising from small donors. Democratic primary voters will decide which of these paths they want to follow when they go to the polls on Tuesday; surveys show El-Sayed with a significant lead over Stevens.

El-Sayed and his backers charge that Stevens has effectively sold out to the monied elites. And they’re blunt about it. In this week’s debate, El-Sayed argued that Stevens had been “bought off” by free-spending special interests, who know she would be “a reliable vote” for their agendas.

Stevens backers counter by charging that El-Sayed’s leftist views will scare off swing voters—and, presumably, big donors—who disagree with the populist’s stark criticisms of corporate monopolies, a healthcare system that’s effectively owned by the insurance companies and Big Pharma, and of the Pentagon, defense contractors, and Israel’s assault on Gaza.

But El-Sayed isn’t blinking. He’s leaning into the money issue in a way that has relevance not just for the primary but for the general election fight against heavily funded Republican Mike Rogers. El-Sayed has been mounting a “Michigan Is Not For Sale” campaign, in which he says, “Maybe ‘electable candidates’ are the ones who don’t need $60 million from corporations and special interests to run and win campaigns. Maybe electable candidates aren’t the ones who have to carpet bomb the airwaves with 30-second glossy ads lying about themselves and about their opponents.”

El-Sayed hit the same theme in the standout moment of this week’s debate. “When you ask $60 million to come into a race for you, and then say that somehow you’re ‘electable,’ I think you don’t quite understand what electability means. If you need a $60 million crutch, you probably can’t be elected on your own terms,” he said of Stevens. Then, addressing Democratic primary voters, he added, “So, I would just say that you should probably, if you really want to beat Mike Rogers, find the candidate who is electable without having to find a $60 million crutch to do it.”

Whichever Democrat is nominated on August 4, the truth is that they’ll almost certainly be outspent by the Republicans and billionaire-funded political action committees. But El-Sayed has a much stronger critique of the corrosive influence of this big money—one that could resonate with voters—than Stevens, who critics complain has long been a prodigious recipient of support from corporate interests.

“Stevens has benefited from overwhelmingly lopsided support by outside groups,” explains Michigan Bridge, a nonpartisan news site, while CBS News reports, “Stevens’ campaign and six super PACs that back her have spent over $61 million on ads during the primary, according to advertisement tracking firm AdImpact. El-Sayed’s campaign and outside groups combined have spent over $15.3 million, according to FEC reports.”

Where’s the Stevens money coming from? “The majority of Stevens’ outside assistance has come from United Democracy Project, an offshoot of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. The group has spent nearly $25 million to boost Stevens, including $14.1 million since the start of July,” notes Michigan Bridge. “Another PAC, called A Stronger Michigan, has spent more than $16 million on ads to boost Stevens since its creation in late May. The PAC is funded almost entirely by Center Forward, a dark money group that does not disclose donors and promotes centrist candidates.”

Stevens backers hate it when El-Sayed rips into their candidate’s fundraising—and when his critique is amplified by backers such as US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). That’s understandable, because El-Sayed has hit on a way of talking about money in politics that, as his wide polling lead over Stevens suggests, is resonating. It is not hard to see how he could extend the argument to Rogers in a general election.

This matters—a lot—because Michigan is not merely a swing state. It is a state where cash-rich Republicans think that, with enough spending, they could flip a Democratic seat. If they were to do so, that would provide a huge boost to their efforts to retain control of the Senate—even in the face of President Trump’s cratering approval ratings, awful “generic ballot” numbers that give a measure of the turn against the GOP, and strong Democratic candidate recruitment in “red” states such as Alaska and Ohio.

Republicans have a 53–47 Senate majority. But Democrats are currently mounting viable campaigns for Republican-held seats in North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, Texas and Alaska. Let’s say the “blue wave” hits and Democrats take four or five of those states—an incredible but not impossible prospect. That would position the opposition party to form a sufficient majority to take charge of the chamber—so long as Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman stays in the caucus.

Democrats are also well-positioned to retain the seat US Senator Tina Smith is vacating in Minnesota—so long as an intense primary contest between progressive Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and centrist US Representative Angie Craig doesn’t go off the rails. They must also mount an effective defense in New Hampshire, where Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen is stepping down, and, of course, in Michigan, where Democratic Senator Gary Peters is standing down.

What makes all of this difficult is the immense Republican money advantage. On Wednesday, MS Now reported that the GOP, through its various fundraising arms and super PACS, had around $500 million more in the bank this year than the Democrats.

Republican Senate majority leader John Thune’s Senate super PAC had $238 million on hand in mid-July. That compares with Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC, which had roughly $126 million on hand at around the same time. And Thune’s operation continues to raise money from billionaires and corporate interests at a far faster clip than Schumer’s.

Republicans and “independent” groups that boost Republicans will use that advantage to try to flip Michigan’s seat.

So the question of “electability” comes down not just to the money that the respective parties might raise, but also to the prospect that a Democrat might effectively denounce the billionaires and their political pawns.

El-Sayed is uniquely prepared to frame the debate around the threat posed by Big Money—because of the way in which it seeks to buy not just election results but the policies that extend from them.

“Here’s the thing about it: None of it actually makes your life better,” he says of the huge amounts of money that are flowing into our politics in 2026. “Think about the $60 million that got spent in this [primary] race. What could $60 million do for a community in Detroit? What could $60 million mean for erasing medical debt?… But they want to spend it to get the congresswoman elected. Why? Because, at the end of the day, they know that they’re going to have a safe seat doing their bidding instead of yours.”

If that messaging works for El-Sayed in the primary election where he is being extremely outspent, then there is every reason to believe it can work in a general election where the spending will be just as extreme.

Since the collapse of June’s hastily signed Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the United States, President Donald Trump has responded to the steady reversal of American progress in the Iran War by repeatedly going through a now-familiar cycle of feigned indifference, theatrical threats, and humiliating retreats. Last week, the administration signaled that it was preparing for a significant bombing campaign, only to back off at the last moment—reportedly after the Pentagon warned the president that supplies of critical munitions and already-scarce missile interceptors would be depleted by such an escalation. After a brief lull in the fighting earlier this week succumbed to a fresh round of Iranian ballistic missile attacks on US bases in Jordan, the president promised on Wednesday morning, with his typical lack of decorum, to “beat the fucking shit” out of Iran and then launched a new round of strikes on Thursday. The clear takeaway from all these frantic off-the-cuff bids to reshape the guiding narrative of the conflict is that the Trump administration no longer bothers trying to connect the use of violence to any kind of political goal.

A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that we are trapped in some kind of eternal recurrence loop, condemned to experience its clear pattern of escalation and retreat “once more and innumerable times more,” as Nietzsche once wrote. But despite the sometimes bleakly amusing nature of the president’s ineptitude, we may now be entering the most dangerous moment of the conflict, with no clear off-ramp for either side. Iran’s leaders believe, with pretty good reason, that they have the upper hand and can now wait for Trump to buckle under the coming waves of economic pain. Iran doesn’t seem to care whether negotiations are restarted at all, given that their American counterparts can’t be trusted to send professional negotiators or follow through on their commitments—and that the United States reveals a fresh strategic vulnerability every time the shooting resumes.

On the Iranian side, the conflict is threatening to engulf more of the region. Tehran has already demonstrated the ability to disrupt operations at the UAE’s Fujairah port facility. This site marks the terminus of an East-West pipeline whose capacity the Emirati regime is seeking to double by next year and whose output has helped keep the global energy crisis from spiraling. But a simple glance at a map demonstrates why continued reliance on Fujairah is not a workable long-term strategy if Iran is committed to establishing its hegemony over regional energy exports. The port sits just outside the Strait of Hormuz on the Gulf of Oman, well within range of Iran’s ultra-cheap drones and stockpile of ballistic missiles.

Meanwhile, the Saudi port of Yanbu, while further from Iran, has a similar set of vulnerabilities. Pipelines are relatively easy to repair, but that’s not the case for the expensive, vulnerable infrastructure at the ports. And because the cost of offensive weapons will always be lower than the cost of missile-defense systems, there is no feasible way to ensure the long-term safety of these facilities as long as the Iranian regime exists in its current incarnation.

Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen have also joined the war effort by announcing their intent to close the Bab al-Mandab strategic shipping chokepoint, impose passage fees through the waterway and harass shipping in the Red Sea moving to and from the Suez Canal. The Houthis control the vast majority of Yemeni territory and are eager to demonstrate their leverage, which has fundamentally altered Iran’s strategic position in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s direct hit on an American base in Jordan on July 17 and 18, which killed three service members, also revealed a significant new weakness for the United States and its regional basing strategy and may have played a role in Trump’s once again backing down from threats.

As if all this isn’t bad enough for the United States, the war, which was meant to last days at most, is now clearly on track to become another regional forever war. The latest round of fighting now threatens to interrupt energy flows that thus far have survived relatively unscathed, and even reach into the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Europe. On Monday, Ukraine struck an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea—an incursion that represents the first time the two countries have traded blows directly despite Iran’s supplying Russia with drones and drone technology throughout its barbaric war against Ukraine. The precision of Iranian strikes against American and allied assets in the region suggests that Russia is, in turn, providing advanced targeting data to Tehran.

After mostly sitting on the sidelines early in the war, Saudi Arabia is now participating directly in combat, as are the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The United States and Saudi Arabia are carrying out strikes against Iranian proxies in Iraq, much to the chagrin of the Iraqi government. Iranian drones struck two American ships, including a natural gas tanker, in Egypt on Wednesday, essentially putting the region on notice that it can reach and damage energy infrastructure much further afield than the Strait of Hormuz. This is exactly the spiral of region-wide escalation and retaliation that credible experts warned would be the inevitable outcome of an attempted regime-change operation against Iran.

What might Trump be willing to do to extricate himself from the hole he has dug for himself? For months, he has intermittently and casually threatened to attack Iranian civilian infrastructure like power plants, bridges and even water-desalination plants. His gobsmacking threat to eradicate Iranian civilization was issued fewer than four months ago. So the idea that this is some kind of moral line that Trump would never cross is absurd. After all, the man who talked him into the Iran fiasco in the first place, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, still presides over the wanton and deliberate destruction of Palestinian civilian infrastructure in Gaz—and both he and Trump have shrugged off the resulting humanitarian crisis. If it bothers the president that millions of Palestinians are living in rubble-strewn squalor without electricity or running water, he has never said so in public.

Having effectively signed off on the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, how would Trump be prevented from doing the same to Iran? These prospective war crimes would almost certainly fail to achieve the objectives of either dislodging the Iranian regime or forcing it to reopen Hormuz on America’s terms—but that’s far from any guarantee that a reckless and inattentive figure like Trump wouldn’t try. Yet such attacks would only lead to further Iranian escalation, including assaults on undersea fiber optic cables that have thus far been deemed off limits even by the aggressive new leadership in Tehran.

In the midst of all this feckless mayhem, Iran’s leaders almost can’t believe their dumb luck. Whether it’s the still-unseen Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khomeini pulling the strings or a de facto Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps junta, Tehran’s strategy has quickly evolved from bare regime survival to something more far-reaching. Far from being eager to settle and return to the status quo ante—which included crippling sanctions, the constant threat of Israeli or American assassinations and sabotage, and the distinct possibility of being overthrown in a popular uprising—Tehran now sees a path to a decisive break with its prewar predicament and an end to America’s decades-long policy of “containment” against the Islamic Republic. This new status quo would position Iran as by far the most powerful state in the region, unshackled from the preexisting global sanctions regime and free to pursue both conventional and nuclear capabilities. Any deal that Tehran would agree to today is likely to offer substantially worse terms to the United States than the one Trump signed in June.

America’s ongoing inability to bring Iran to heel only accelerates this dynamic. With Iran’s pivotal control over the Strait of Hormuz firmly established alongside its demonstrated ability to destroy both American bases and energy infrastructure at will, there will be no more unanswered bombing raids of Iranian nuclear facilities, cost-free assassinations of senior IRGC leaders, or open-ended backing of opposition groups. If Iran can credibly threaten the global economy, and the United States either can’t or won’t do what is necessary to neutralize that threat, it’s no longer clear that any element of the prewar containment regime can survive for long.

The only way to prevent this bleak outcome from taking shape, as Trump surely knows by now, is to depose the Iranian regime with a massive ground invasion. But even that dire move may not be possible, given the country’s challenging terrain, capable defenses, and motivated population. Just pacifying Tehran, a sprawling, mountain metropolis of 15 million people—not much smaller than the entire population of Iraq circa 2003—would be a daunting task. A March report from the Cato Institute’s Brendan Buck argued that 1.6 million troops would be required to mount an invasion of Iran—a figure that exceeds the current number of combat troops available to the whole US military. Even if the actual figure is half that, it would require a vast and costly mobilization on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. Political blowback from that sort of commitment could put a filibuster-proof Senate majority for Democrats in play this November.

It would be easy to glibly dismiss the possibility that Trump will elect to pursue such a disastrous course of action. But he has a lifelong track record of making terrible, immoral choices and a very recent history of happily inhaling the vapors of whatever his most militant interlocutors are smoking. Eventually, he is going to run out of patience with his own bomb-and-bail routine, which is paying zero dividends. At that point, he will confront the same choices he’s had before him for months: return to some version of the bitter peace that he agreed to in June, give aerial war crimes a try, or prepare for the biggest war that nearly anyone currently alive has witnessed. Whatever he chooses, it is likely now far too late for the midterm elections to be anything other than a referendum on the Trump administration’s decision to plunge the country into this hopeless situation.

The struggle over how to make housing more affordable has riven the American left for several years now. The fight roughly divides into two camps. One, known as the YIMBYs (yes in my backyard) or Abundance movement (taken from the best-selling Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson book), argues for the market as the ultimate solution. Build enough housing and prices will fall. Prominent Abundance pundits like Matt Yglesias are skeptical of rent regulation and tough tenant protections. Anything that is seen as strangling the housing supply the private sector provides must be opposed.

And the second camp, the traditional progressive left, backs tenant protections, rent regulation, and believes all the talk of supply is just a way to enrich real estate developers at the expense of tenants. How will someone making minimum wage be helped by a glassy condominium shooting up next door, one where apartments might rent for $6,000 or more a month?

What makes the young Zohran Mamdani mayoralty so fascinating is that it has, so far, tried to find a middle ground. He is only the second New York mayor in the 21st century, after Bill de Blasio, who could be described as pro-tenant. Though Mamdani wouldn’t use the label necessarily, he could also be described as a YIMBY. He very much wants to build. He rejects the orthodoxy that supply doesn’t matter. He represents the triumph of a new breed: the Left YIMBY.

There’s logic to this approach. Both camps really do have a point. A lack of housing supply has led to a surge in prices. The 2008 economic crash and subprime mortgage crisis created a building crunch that the country never really recovered from. Suburbs and cities alike need to build more homes for people to live in. But the most aggressive YIMBYs can never quite admit that the market alone, in highly desirable locales like New York City, will never solve all of these problems. There will always be an ultrarich investor class, domestically and globally, that drives up prices. Some YIMBYs dream of the day when New York’s rent-regulated housing stock is transformed into market-rate housing, thus creating more supply on the open market, not understanding that this would just mean that a bunch of apartments that now rent for $2,000 a month might require, a few months later, far more. If a landlord doesn’t have to contend with any regulations, working-class tenants will suffer.

Left YIMBYs aim to reckon with this reality. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has already successfully frozen the rent on all rent-stabilized apartments, which represent around 40 percent of the rental stock, fulfilling a major campaign promise; de Blasio froze rents as well, but Mamdani has gone further by halting increases, for the time being, on two- as well as one-year leases. His appointment of Cea Weaver, a top housing activist, to lead the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants placed one of the great enemies of the landlord and real estate lobbies into city government. The office, defanged under Eric Adams, is now empowered to address tenant complaints, and Weaver has been involved in the rescue of distressed rent-stabilized buildings owned by overleveraged, predatory landlords.

(Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)

At the same time, Mamdani has stood at the forefront of a Left YIMBY movement that predates him at City Hall. A good deal of it was spearheaded by Open New York, a housing advocacy nonprofit that has become the policy and political backbone of Left YIMBYism. In the 2000s and 2010s, the real estate class and the progressive tenant movement clashed repeatedly because the former was committed to weakening or eradicating altogether the tenant protections built up in the 20th century. And even the development policy that was supposed to, in theory, create a supply boom was circumscribed. The Bloomberg administration oversaw significant rezonings that added housing density in a few select neighborhoods, usually those ripe for gentrification, but also downzoned wealthier, whiter neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. The de Blasio administration backed mandatory inclusionary zoning requirements citywide, but still focused on building density in lower-income, non-white communities because the politics of building in the richer neighborhoods were still fraught. It was only at the end of his second term, with the rezoning of SoHo, that the pendulum began to shift.

Eric Adams was a shambolic, corrupt mayor, and many of his appointees were patronage hires with limited competence. A few, though, weren’t: Dan Garodnick, his city planning commissioner, and Maria Torres-Springer, his first deputy mayor and a de Blasio administration veteran, helped oversee, along with the City Council, a crucial housing plan known as City of Yes. The first truly citywide rezoning plan in many decades, City of Yes was a blow to the hyperlocal opposition that often derailed development, especially in whiter neighborhoods desperate to preserve their suburban “character.” City of Yes was a rare moment for Adams, usually an enemy of the left, to work with progressives, and he left Garodnick, Torres-Springer, and the City Council, including Speaker Adrienne Adams (no relation), to hammer out the details of the plan. Mamdani, as a state assemblyman, backed City of Yes, though his support was symbolic since the vote took place in the City Council.

A second major shift was the ballot measures, passed by city voters in 2025 and backed by both Adams and Mamdani, that dramatically changed how land would be rezoned in New York City going forward. Instead of a drawn-out land use process that would inevitably end up with a single City Council member deciding whether a project would get built in their community, a new three-member appeals board made up of the mayor, City Council speaker, and borough president can overturn land use decisions or modify housing plans. Mamdani’s goal to build 200,000 affordable homes will rely, in part, on these new powers, and it’s unlikely a recalcitrant City Council will stymie him. Mamdani’s ambition led him into talks with Donald Trump about reviving the massive Sunnyside Yard housing plan; nothing new has happened since their White House meeting in March, but there’s hope Mamdani can eventually make some progress there.

This will be the Left YIMBYism of Mamdani: build a lot more while defending tenants. The greater question, still to be answered, is whether this will all work. In the state government, Mamdani has found a partner in Governor Kathy Hochul, who wants to build housing and is far less hostile to tenants than her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo. The state legislature is largely in his corner. Mamdani is hoping, too, that he can somehow rehabilitate the city’s public housing stock, which has decayed for decades and has suffered from mismanagement and a lack of funds. Capital repair costs are in the tens of billions and there is no chance the Trump administration or a Republican Congress will assist. Mamdani, there, can only do so much. One day, though, there will be a new president and maybe a different party controlling Congress. The young mayor’s fate is hardly sealed.

Even as it continues the war in Ukraine, Russia faces serious challenges: While Kremlin insiders concede that the economy is reaching a crisis point, Ukraine’s recent drone attacks have created long lines at the gas pump and other hardships for the general population, polls point to increasing public dissatisfaction, and the war has now persisted longer than World War I (a war that ended badly for those who hold power in Russia).

Putin talks tough and shows no sign of backing down. Yet, given the challenges his country faces, why not seek a negotiated end to the war? One distinct possibility: Putin may well believe that his rule could be threatened by an unsatisfactory end to the war. Whenever—and however—this war ends, it is hard to imagine a scenario that does not involve a harsh reckoning by the Russian people over the costs, and rather meager gains, from this war.

While Putin’s grip on power certainly seems firm, he has long been obsessed with “color revolutions,” popular uprisings in post-Soviet states that have deposed longstanding leaders. However unlikely the prospect of such an uprising in Russia, the downside risk to Putin would be severe. If he thinks so, the implications for the war’s outcome are considerable.

So what’s next for Putin? We don’t know. Beyond missile strikes and other attacks in Ukraine, he will no doubt continue Russia’s “hybrid war” tactics trying to unsettle European governments and populations. In a war with no clear outlet, might Putin be tempted to “test” NATO or escalate in some other fashion? Perhaps. There has certainly been increasing speculation on that front. If at the beginning of July one could say “war talk is swirling around Europe,” by the end of the month, after Ukraine destroyed an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea, the talk was of “total war.”

However, it is imperative to note that were he to escalate, Putin would not be acting from a position of strength but rather from fear, or even a sense of desperation. If that is the case, how then should the West respond?

The Guardian’s Simon Tisdall simultaneously argues that Putin is “losing the war” and “desperate,” making Putin now at his “most dangerous,” but negotiations appear pointless since any ceasefire may simply allow Russia to “freeze the conflict while reorganizing and rearming.” He is not alone in arguing that Russia finds itself in a dire situation from its prolonged and costly war on a much smaller Ukraine, while also believing the country could revive itself and attack a much more powerful NATO in a few years. Simply stated, both cannot be true, and Russia’s threat to NATO appears greatly exaggerated.

Likewise, writing in the journal Foreign Policy, some think tankers agree that the war is at its “most dangerous,” but “pressure on the battlefield” will not bring Putin to negotiations, since inevitably “autocratic logic demands escalation.” Yet, while “Ukraine has to survive the escalation,” by circular reasoning they argue that the West needs to “widen the pressure” and “generate crises across multiple fronts” so that at some point negotiations become the only option. Yet they forget that unlike the examples they point to—Omar al-Bashir’s Sudan or Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iran-Iraq war—Russia is a nuclear superpower.

Indeed, the only response that most European leaders can find is greater military pressure. The continent is engaging in what has been called its greatest military buildup since the 1930s. This includes long-range missile systems designed “specifically to hit the Russian heartland” as well as plans to move nuclear-capable weapons systems to Russia’s borders, including in formerly neutral Finland. While European leaders rightly condemn Putin for speaking only the language of war, they themselves offer little else.

Europe needs to remember that deterrence is not the only—and not always the best—strategy for dealing with military confrontation. The alternative is to recall the logic of the “security dilemma,” the spiral of action and reaction on both sides that invites escalation, which some have called the “quintessential problem” of international relations. With that dynamic in place, the chances for miscalculation are high, for instance if an apparently errant Russian missile were to land in Poland, as one just did.

Putin has made clear that he wants to capture the entire Donbas—a region of symbolic importance since it was the coal and steel heart of imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union, allowing him to proclaim some kind of “victory.” Putin hoped that Trump would convince Zelensky to surrender the rest of the Donbas, but Zelensky of course refused, and Trump has since become distracted by his own fruitless war. Yet Putin states that he wants to continue his grinding drive for the territory, despite the growing crisis at home. He needs to be shown an alternative, and to realize that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are not coming to his rescue.

Given the stakes, European leaders need first to open lines of communication to prevent miscalculation, and then begin the difficult but necessary process of negotiating. Europe—with or without the US—needs to explore face-saving measures that might provide an outlet for the Kremlin. They might be symbolic, such as expressing a desire for a partial thawing of relations, or material, such as limited sanctions relief following successful negotiations and steps toward ratcheting down the regional arms race. Simply raising the costs, either through drone strikes or new “crushing sanctions,” will not be enough to end this war.

Some would argue it’s not our job to give Putin a way out of his war of choice. They’re right. It’s not. But it may well be in our interest (and in the interest of the Ukrainian people) to comprehend the stakes from the other side, and to seek an outcome that doesn’t lead to greater death and destruction. Indeed, finally bringing the war to an end might have another benefit—forcing Putin to face the Russian people and attempt to justify his historic debacle.

A specter is haunting the 2028 Democratic presidential field: the specter of reactionary centrism, which sports the political brand name of Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel, the former Clinton White House policy enforcer who went on to become chief of staff in the Obama administration and mayor of Chicago, is going through all the motions of an early presidential hopeful. He’s completed a “spin-free” bike tour through New Hampshire, he’s staged a photo-op on an Omaha “beer picket line,” and he’s delivered a high-profile speech arguing that America needs to adopt a more aggressive posture toward Benjamin Netanyahu’s irredentist warfare regime in Israel (without, of course, affirming anything close to the legitimate political agency of Palestinians). He’s making the rounds on the very serious interview and conference circuits to tout his broader foreign-policy sagesse.

Through it all, Emanuel has burnished his credentials as a wised-up disciplinarian figure in a Democratic Party that’s poised to succumb to a wild-eyed left-wing agenda that will poison its standing among independent-minded Real Americans during a pivotal election cycle. There’s a singular irony in Emanuel’s peddling this prescription in 2026, ahead of an all-but-confirmed 2028 presidential run: It’s the same hoary consultant-brewed panacea that he introduced as one of the initial class of New Democrats in the early 1990s. For this same structural critique to hold more than three decades later, you have to bracket the history of three centrist Democratic administrations, together with the disastrous legacies on trade, labor, financial regulation, and brain-dead austerity they left the MAGA movement to exploit at will. You have to somehow accept the idea that a Democratic establishment dominated by big-money donors, tech lobbyists, and their leased consultant mouthpieces has fallen victim to a sans-culotte insurgency led by left-wing congressional staffers and “the groups” of the nonprofit sector, while the forgotten Middle America scours the political landscape in vain for a voice to represent it.

You also, not incidentally, have to disregard most of the actual political career of one Rahm Emanuel. It’s no exaggeration to say, with apologies to Hegel’s characterization of Napoleon at the Battle of Jena, that Emanuel has embodied the neoliberal world-spirit on horseback. Back then, Emanuel’s policy portfolio was largely taken up with the push to win congressional approval for NAFTA and the 1994 crime bill—both measures that symbolized the savvy New Democratic repudiation of the old liberal interest-group model of lawmaking. After weathering right-wing assaults on liberal governance as a prolonged study in crime coddling and kowtowing to union bosses, the Clintonian Capitol Hill strategists led by Emanuel were declaring their independence from the ancien régime by embracing traditional right-wing policy initiatives and placing a modest it-takes-a-village rhetorical spin on them. By the squalid and inert later phase of the Clinton policy agenda—when the administration signaled total moral capitulation to the Gingrich right by signing its welfare-eradication legislation into law—it was no surprise to see Emanuel leading the charge in the White House. Emanuel also sought, unsuccessfully, to turn Clinton into a hard-line immigration hawk, urging the president to “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.”

You could say that Emanuel was simply playing to his base: He became a key player in the Clinton White House after leading the big-donor fundraising initiative of the 1992 Clinton campaign. Emanuel’s long-mythologized DC reputation as a blunt, loud, and profane interlocutor stems from this time, when he could be heard berating big-ticket prospects with come-ons like “Five thousand dollars is an insult! You’re a twenty-five-thousand-dollar person!”

This marks the other sprawling paradox of Emanuel’s career: In posturing as the advocate of commonsense pragmatic governing, he is always representing a boardroom-first vision of politics. Prior to his election to Congress in 2002, Emanuel spent a lucrative tour as an investment banker, bringing in a cool $16 million payday over three years. (He was, in fact, one of three former investment bankers to serve as chief of staff in Obama’s hope-and-change administration.) What he has rhetorically packaged as a savvy, problem-solving approach to lawmaking based on bipartisan outreach has always been the drearily consistent wish list of capital, from his effort as mayor to kneecap the Chicago Teachers’ Union to an accompanying wave of school closures and privatization to a bloated private-equity plan to take over the city’s parking operations to a disastrous accord with Elon Musk’s Boring Company to create a transit tunnel. When a pair of reporters from the Chicago Reader filed a FOIA request to access the mayor’s meeting schedule—which had been mostly shielded from public view—they found that he met almost exclusively with donors, and almost never with actual community leaders. In other words, if you want an advance vision of a Democratic politics shorn of the influence of “the groups” and other irksome activists, look no further than Emanuel’s plutocratic governing record in Chicago.

Alternately, you can divine the waning influence of groups-style activism in the very fact that Emanuel is now bruited as a serious candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination at all. The scandal that paralyzed, and effectively ended, his mayoralty in Chicago was his administration’s obscene cover-up of the police murder of 17-year-old Lacquan McDonald, a Black man shot 16 times in the back by the police as he was walking away. When the video of McDonald’s killing was released, 64 percent of Chicagoans disputed Emanuel’s claim that he had never seen it before; more than half agreed that he should resign office immediately. It says everything about the priorities of establishment Democrats that Emanuel should be an early 2028 contender, just six years after Senator Amy Klobuchar was effectively forced to scuttle her future presidential prospects in the wake of George Floyd’s police murder, since she had previously served as a county prosecutor in Minneapolis.

Grim as Emanuel’s litany of policy calls is, it may not represent his most woeful legacy in Democratic politics. That distinction likely falls to his 2006 tour as head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. During that pivotal midterm cycle, Emanuel largely prevailed in a feud over the “50-state strategy” advocated by Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean. Dean argued that for the Democrats to secure a long-term governing coalition they had to mount viable candidates in—and devote resources to—states and districts that presented as redoubts of deeper-red Republicanism. The idea was akin to bolstering a flailing major-league team’s farm system with prospects that would yield significant dividends over the long haul, in lieu of a more myopic “win now” strategy focused on immediate returns. In his accustomed role as gatekeeper to the large-donor caste, Emanuel carried the day, using his campaign coffers to effectively cut loose Democratic candidates in districts that would be a stretch to win in that cycle, and lavishing money on his preferred brand of donor-friendly campaign hopeful: right-leaning difference trimmers who often had a military résumé, some of them former Republicans. Even in that historic Democratic wave election, Emanuel’s handpicked standard-bearers fared poorly—but, far more consequently, Democrats relinquished viable candidacies in formerly contested states and districts for the political generation ahead.

A 2013 study from Governing magazine found that Dean’s project—which wasn’t officially mothballed until the end of his DNC tenure in 2009—yielded striking results. In 20 deep-red states, Democrats gained three House seats, and 39 state legislative ones, while clocking an increase in presidential vote share between 2004 and 2008 in 15 of the 20 states. “Overall, Democrats either improved their results in the reddest states between 2005 and 2009 or, at worst, suffered only minor setbacks, which, given the obstacles the party faced in these solidly Republican states, was almost a victory in its own right,” Governing’s managing editor Elizabeth Daigneau wrote. In the initial post-50-states dispensation, from 2009 to 2013 , the showing of Democratic candidates was nothing short of “catastrophic,” she notes:

In these 20 solidly red states, the Democrats controlled 13 legislative chambers in 2005, a number that fell to just three in 2013. Of the 40 chambers in these states, only two experienced a net gain of Democratic seats between 2005 and 2013; in the other 38, the Democrats lost ground.

And because state legislative seats and lower statewide offices provide the “bench” for future runs for governor and Congress, these developments could prompt a self-perpetuating death spiral for the party in these states.

One could go further still, and note that as Democrats retreated to safer, donor-anointed battlegrounds to leave greater stretches of the political map in play for the right, ruthless GOP electioneers pounced. The follow-on midterm cycle witnessed the devastating assault that the right termed Operation REDMAP—a bald effort to gerrymander as many congressional seats for Republican candidates as possible coming out of the 2010 Census. In other words, as Democrats, high on their own donor-driven presidential-cycle savvy, believed they were cleverly targeting winnable districts in lieu of expanding the electoral map, Republicans seized control of the map, and every individual vote they could get their hands on. As election analyst David Daley writes, the REDMAP initiative birthed the Tea Party insurgency of 2010, and years of Republican one-party rule beyond:

REDMAP flipped state legislative majorities to Republicans in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Alabama, among others, and also handed complete control over both legislative houses in Florida, Georgia and Texas. With the help of sophisticated new mapping software and terabytes of granular voter data, GOP strategists devised state legislative maps so immune to the popular will that Democrats have not recaptured a single chamber in any of those states since—even when they win hundreds of thousands more votes. Those same legislatures then drew their state’s congressional maps and the results were immediate. In 2012, Barack Obama carried Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—but Republicans won 64 of the 94 congressional districts they crafted in those states.

Emanuel’s latest ploy for elite Beltway attention is an interview with Politico correspondent Jonathan Martin. It bears all the hallmarks of brain-dead access journalism, from a hackneyed introduction by Martin flogging all the clichés of Emanuel’s foulmouthed rise to power to Emanuel’s own farcical efforts to depict himself as a lone misunderstood apostle of financial regulation in the Obama White House and a heroic advocate of improved educational performance. (Tell it to the Chicago Teachers Union, pal.) But its chief selling point—yet again—is Emanuel’s wised-up counsel to Democrats who dare to believe in a world where they might be allowed nice things. “I’m not very excited by people that took an election that was focused on Donald Trump’s corruption and now focused on a party that has candidates that want to defund the police, decriminalize the criminal justice system, and want to run an open border policy,” he maunders, before circling for good measure into some performative bigotry: “I’m tired of discussions about bathroom access, and I want to start having discussions about classroom excellence.”

The good news here is that the feeling is very much mutual. As Bernie Sanders declared on Face the Nation this weekend when host Margaret Brennan presented him with Emanuel’s latest screed against “the Bernie bros” in The Wall Street Journal: “People are sick and tired of the Rahm Emanuels and Democratic establishment and Republican establishment…. The American people are tired of a rigged economy, a corrupt campaign finance system. They want real change. They don’t want Rahm Emanuel and the establishment maintaining the status quo.”

Amen. Politico opportunistically titled Martin’s interview “Rahm Emanuel on Why the Democrats Keep on Losing.” The subhead should have simply explained that the short answer is Rahm Emanuel.

The Trump administration is on the verge of publishing a proposed rule that, if finalized, will gut most of the crucial standards that ensure uniform quality of Head Start programs across the country while adding new requirements aimed at shutting out immigrants for the first time in the program’s history, according to two people with direct knowledge of the draft regulation. Head Start, the federal program that provides free preschool education and services to low-income families, was created in 1965 and currently serves more than 700,000 children, with an annual budget of $12.4 billion. In a leaked 2025 budget draft that called for eliminating Head Start entirely, President Trump said, “The federal government should not be in the business of mandating curriculum, locations, and performance standards for any form of education.”

The administration’s proposed rule, which has been drafted by the Department of Health and Human Services and sent to the Office of Management and Budget for review, would rescind the entire 133-page set of “performance standards” that currently spell out how Head Start laws must be implemented by states, counties, and programs, they said. While the Head Start Act includes some specific requirements, most standards in the program have been delineated by this set of rules. Instead, a much shorter set of standards would take its place, leaving it up to states and local governments to implement their own standards if they so choose.

“What it does is transform a program that has high quality,” one of the people said, “and create a generic early-childhood funding stream that doesn’t look like Head Start.” The Administration for Children and Families, which oversees Head Start, did not respond to a request for comment. In a post to X on August 1, HHS said that the rule “expands opportunity for children, cuts unnecessary red tape, and reinforces Head Start’s core mission.”

Currently, the Head Start guidelines place limits on class sizes and specify how many adult staff are required to supervise certain numbers of children. The new regulations would eliminate those class size and ratio requirements; instead, they would require programs to adhere to state and local laws. Some states have strict childcare ratio requirements, but others are much looser, permitting higher ratios of children to teachers than Head Start currently allows. Head Start teachers work with some of the nation’s most vulnerable children and report that since the pandemic children have presented with such significant needs that they struggle to serve children under the program’s existing ratios, the first source said. The proposed rule also nixes specific requirements that mandate the curriculum standards programs must adhere to.

The proposed rule removes guidance around the circumstances in which children can be suspended and expelled. The existing standards prohibit corporal punishment, a prohibition that will disappear in the proposed rule. It gets rid of required developmental screenings for all children and detailed regulations governing how children with disabilities must be given access to services and included in classroom instruction. Gone are guidelines around how homeless families and children in foster care should be accommodated so that they can enroll.

“If it’s not explicitly stated in [the Head Start] statute, it won’t seem to exist after this proposed rule is finalized,” the second person said. That statute was last revised nearly 20 years ago under President George W. Bush, and at that time Congress directed the Office of Head Start to keep issuing regulations to continuously improve the program. “It really turns over its authority to states and localities on how to handle almost everything.”

What the proposed rule adds is just as troubling as what is disappearing. If the rule is finalized, it will only allow children who are citizens, United States nationals, or “qualified aliens,” and with at least one parent with that status, to enroll. That will shut out a number of immigrants, and potentially children who are American citizens, for the first time ever. As of 2022, about 4.4 million American children lived with at least one undocumented parent. (Jonathan Cohn previously reported the proposal rule’s changes to immigration eligibility and to the class size ratios at The Bulwark.) The rule would also put the onus of verifying children’s immigration eligibility on Head Start programs, which will require extra administrative resources. All families, meanwhile, will face an added paperwork burden of proving their citizenship status.

The rule states that all teaching must be done in English, except for in Native American tribes, and says that if a child’s native language isn’t English, programs must prioritize teaching them in English anyway.

The rule creates a new requirement that staff must maintain records proving a family’s income, immigration, and other eligibility for a certain amount of time and provide them to HHS upon request. It says that programs have to report staff who violate eligibility requirements to HHS. The combination will create a massive increase in paperwork and the possibility that staff members will be penalized for clerical errors. “They’ve made it very high stakes,” the first person said. It’s “a very dangerous proposition to be having coworkers question their colleagues’ work at this level,” the second person added.

The current standards say programs must establish parent committees that weigh in on the program’s policies and services; the proposed rule would make those optional.

While the proposed rule would not affect Head Start’s budget, it nevertheless changes regulations that will force programs to tighten their belts. Under current regulations, programs are permitted to spend up to 15 percent of their grant funding on administration and overhead, which was already a difficult threshold for programs to meet. But the proposed rule reduces that to just 5 percent. “That’s going to be a pretty significant burden for programs,” the second person said.

The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that removing government regulations makes public programs easier to operate. However, losing so many specific regulations may instead put a greater burden on Head Start programs, as well as the states a`nd counties that must now regulate them. Requirements will end up varying significantly from state to state or even county to county, which “gets into a really complex and confusing patchwork that just places a more significant burden on every grantee,” the second person said, while leaving parents with program quality that varies depending on where they live. Some states may fail to do anything to maintain standards at all. Many programs, meanwhile, are motivated to provide high quality, but with fewer requirements some may find it cheaper and easier to do less. “The standards are supposed to be the floor so everybody gets the same thing in Head Start,” the first person said. But “there are financial realities in these programs.” The first person also worries that the reduction in rules and regulations will open the doors for corporate behemoths to get into the space. “This is a $12.5 billion investment that comes with strings right now,” they said. “There’s a danger to exploit that if it comes with no strings.”

“What we’re looking at is very much the wild, Wild West of an early childhood patchwork of programs and regulations and statutes across the country,” the second person said.

The proposed rule could change before it’s made public and may change before being finalized. Even if it is finalized in its current form, it is likely to be subject to litigation; a number of its provisions appear to contradict the Head Start statute and a 2007 reauthorization that mandates that the standards don’t eliminate or reduce quality.

But the details fit squarely with the administration’s agenda. Project 2025, the document crafted by conservative Trump allies during the Biden administration to guide the next Republican president, called for eliminating Head Start entirely. Trump’s first budget after being reelected nearly proposed doing just that: A leaked draft called for zeroing out the program’s funding. The administration has closed a number of regional Head Start offices, leaving programs with nowhere to turn to get answers, and despite Congress fully funding Head Start, last year the Trump administration sat on some of the money, refusing to dole it out, while implementing a new “defend the spend” process that held up grant disbursement. Late last year, it attempted to block certain immigrants from enrolling in Head Start, only to have the effort blocked by a federal judge. Then in May, the administration proposed rolling back the higher wage and benefit levels for Head Start teachers set by the Biden administration. “It’s one attack after the other on the very core of the program,” the second person said.

The proposed rule, then, seems to be a new way of attempting to gut the program. “This is another run at it,” the first person said.

It’s part of a “consistent approach that Head Start is not a priority for them,” the second person added. “If you can’t eliminate something, shrink it to the smallest possible degree and make it difficult to operate.” Then, when the program struggles to continue operating and providing high-quality education, it will likely be used as justification to further reduce it. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” the second person said.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated with a post to X by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

“To cover up 1 high level report…looks odd,” remarked Caroline Lucas, the former leader of the UK’s Green Party. “To cover up 2 looks like a pattern.” Lucas was commenting on reporting in The Guardian revealing that the Labour party was again burying an explosive report by UK military and intelligence leaders warning that the global collapse of ecosystems poses grave threats to the UK’s security and food supply within as little as five years.

The UK “has no future” if it cannot “restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air,” said Chris Hinchliff, who is among the members of Parliament pressing the government to release the full report, rather than a shorter, redacted version. Even that version, which was obtained by The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey, “paints a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation,” Harvey wrote.

Meanwhile, massive wildfires in France and Spain have been forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate, and prompting countermeasures from governments. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the fires were the effects of the “climate emergency.” For the second year in a row, the prime minister responded to ferocious wildfires by calling on political parties across the ideological spectrum “to reach an agreement, a State pact, [and] to address the climate emergency.”

As if to validate the UK spy chiefs’ report in real time, food production in Europe is already suffering from the extreme heat of recent weeks, which has been “sucking soils dry.” France’s maize harvest is the lowest in 50 years; across Europe, 9 million tons of grain have been lost. Such losses are of particular concern for the UK, which imports much of its food.

The UK report is notable for highlighting not only climate change but the related problem of biodiversity loss and collapsing ecosystems. For example, scientists have warned that continued logging and high temperatures are pushing the Amazon rainforest toward an irreversible shift into a savannah. That would drive further climate chaos as the Amazon transforms from an absorber into an emitter of carbon.

Aides to former Labour prime minister Keir Starmer twice quashed plans to release the UK report, Harvey reported, allegedly for fear that the climate-denying Reform UK Party would attack Labour for putting climate concerns ahead of the cost of living. Climate denial persists in the UK media as well: Even as wildfires scorched Europe, the front page of the Rupert Murdoch–owned Times of London featured a rant against the net-zero emissions goal that scientists say is essential to preserving a livable planet. And across Europe, most news outlets are not reporting that climate change is driving these fires and heatwaves, even as they illustrate their stories with “fun in the sun” images of people at the beach. “The pictures do not convey the severity of the moment Europe finds itself in,” observed Al Jazeera English.

Andy Burnham, who replaced Starmer as prime minister on July 20, has yet to speak publicly about the buried report or climate change in general. He has said, however, that he remains open to approving increased drilling for oil and gas of Britain’s coast in the North Sea. This, even as the smoke from wildfires in France and Spain—and in Scotland in the UK—is estimated to cause “well over 100,000 excess deaths globally,” according to Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London.

Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project spotlights the reality that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger climate action. In this summer of smoke and fire, the public is waiting for their politicians and their press to respond. “Voters are much more tuned into this than most of our [elected] representatives are,” author George Monbiot said on the UK’s Channel 4. “And indeed than most of the media is.”

Their names were James Feehan, Isabella Gonzales, Michael Emmanuel Swinton, and Angel S. Rampersad. The four US soldiers, one just 19, were killed amid President Donald Trump’s recent escalation of the war on Iran. Their deaths at US military bases in Jordan and Iraq highlight the vulnerability of US troops across the Middle East.

Since the illegal war’s first days, US bases have suffered extensive damage from Iranian retaliation. The losses include 18 US military deaths, dozens killed in host nations, and billions in infrastructure costs. This damage and the limited military utility of US installations are forcing a much-needed reconsideration of the US military presence in the Middle East. A growing consensus finds that dramatic changes are needed.

The result will almost certainly be the end of the nearly half-century-long era when scores of US bases have occupied the Middle East. The sooner US leaders accept this reality and start moving the military out of the region, the safer our nation, our troops, and our world will be.

Base Buildup and Vulnerability

US bases began dotting the Middle East around 1980 when Presidents Jimmy Carter and, after, Ronald Reagan started building installations in response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and Iran’s 1979 revolution. More appeared during the 1991 Gulf War and the 2001 and 2003 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They remained long after original rationales disappeared. Today, the military has at least 80 installations in almost every country across the region.

The Iranian military has attacked most countries hosting US bases because they’ve helped enable the US/Israeli war. In addition to the human toll, damage to military infrastructure and hardware runs into the tens of billions of dollars.

US troops have been so vulnerable that military leaders moved many to local hotels and offices, likely violating the laws of war. Iran has made many Middle East installations “all but uninhabitable,” reports The New York Times.

Calls for Change

Many, including former military leaders, are urging change. Current infrastructure “has become an anachronism that endangers US troops,” writes one of the architects of US Middle East basing, former high-ranking George W. Bush and Trump 1.0 administration official Elliott Abrams.

Some want to “harden” installations by improving their ability to survive attacks. Others want to “disperse” troops to more locations, especially those farther from Iran, including Israel.

Both supposed solutions would cost taxpayers tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars in construction and operational costs. No amount of hardening and dispersing can fully protect US troops, let alone host nations. Iran could still hit US bases farther away, Abrams acknowledges, as recent deaths and injuries in Jordan show.

Governments may refuse to host as they increasingly question allowing US bases to occupy their territory. The US military turned hosts into targets for Iran rather than offering protection, as US leaders promised.

Moving more US forces to Israel would be even more dangerous. Thousands of troops have already moved there due to damage to other bases. No missile defense system, including Israel’s “Iron Dome,” can keep US troops completely safe, as recent Iranian missile and drone strikes demonstrate.

Politically, Israel is increasingly isolated internationally and dramatically less popular across the US political spectrum. Expanding the US military presence would deepen US complicity in Israel’s crimes in Gaza, encourage more untethered Israeli aggression, and increase the likelihood that retaliatory attacks on joint bases draw the US into Israel’s wars.

Ending the Era

The era of US bases in the Middle East isn’t over yet. US officials have already announced contracts to rebuild in Qatar.

Still, closures are inevitable, just as past empires eventually abandoned bases overseas. US leaders can choose whether closures will happen through a careful process involving replacing troops with empowered diplomats or through chaos, potential military defeat, and wasted billions.

Every president since the Cold War’s end has closed bases, including in the Middle East. President Trump has openly questioned the hundreds of US bases worldwide. “What are we getting out of this?” he’s asked.

What we’re getting isn’t peace and security, as conventional wisdom long said. The war on Iran has shown how US bases are rarely defensive. Instead, they’ve been platforms for disastrous offensive wars in Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond.

With overwhelming public opposition to this war, we should demand an end to US bases in the Middle East as part of ending the conflict. Taxpayers shouldn’t spend another nickel on installations that enabled endless wars responsible for the deaths of James Feehan, Isabella Gonzales, Michael Swinton, Angel Rampersad, and thousands more across the region.

In 2022, student journalist Elizabeth Wilson filed multiple public records requests, seeking access to records related to sexual assaults, alleged labor violations, and alleged administrator misconduct on Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s campus. After multiple spurned attempts to meet with employees of the public records office and a letter to the university from the First Amendment Coalition on her behalf, Wilson says, she was still empty-handed.

In April 2024, Wilson, then a reporter with the student newspaper Mustang News, sued Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, alleging that the campus violated the California Public Records Act (CPRA), which gives every member of the public the right to access public records unless records are exempt from disclosure by law. Wilson’s lawsuit prompted an immediate release of the records and ended in a settlement.

Countless campuses across the country list press freedoms and information access among their core values. But when universities are called on to answer for their own actions, these values waver. In an increasingly repressive national landscape for journalists of all stripes, Wilson is one of many journalists who have had to fight for greater transparency and communication from universities that have increasingly stifled the student press.

This is a nationwide trend on college campuses. According to reporting from Poynter, calls to the Student Press Law Center’s legal hotline rose 42 percent from the 2022–23 academic year to the 2023–24 academic year. The number-one culprit? Censorship.

Some student papers were forced to create new independent publications when their universities would no longer pay printing fees or for advisers. Other universities exerted power editorially, putting pressure on editors to change content. At student papers that are entirely independent, with no advisers or funding from the university, administrators stifle reporting by forcing journalists to only go through spokespeople for information or denying students access to records.

Student journalists do vital work. They are often the first or only outlets to report on their universities. At UC Berkeley, The Daily Californian broke the story that the university had shared the names of 160 faculty, staff, and students with the Trump administration as part of a federal antisemitism probe. UC Berkeley is not alone. The Harvard Crimson was the first to investigate Harvard faculty’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. During 2024’s pro-Palestine encampments, reporters at UCLA’s Daily Bruin, Columbia University’s Daily Spectator, UT Austin’s Daily Texan, and countless others were correspondents on the ground as their universities cracked down on protesters.

Meanwhile, as local news struggles to survive across the country, student papers are sometimes the last remaining outlets reporting on the neighborhoods and towns surrounding their universities. But many students have found that rather than aiding this crucial work, universities are increasingly impeding it.

In 2025, UCLA’s Daily Bruin published an editorial claiming that reporters at the paper had made more than 70 requests through the university’s public records office that had gone unfilled for over six months. The CPRA requires that public documents be disclosed within 14 days.

“Repeated failures to comply with CPRA—from suppressing footage to stonewalling advocacy groups—are not isolated missteps or oversights,” the editorial reads. “They reflect a much deeper institutional parasite that is failing to be accountable.”

The editorial alleges that these delays in releasing public records are antithetical to the university’s stated values, including open access to information and dissemination of knowledge. Because the university withheld public records from the Daily Bruin, important questions about the annual budget, campus security, and the police presence during the 2024 pro-Palestine encampment went unanswered.

In 2025, the College Heights Herald, Western Kentucky University’s student paper, was honored by the Student Press Law Center for a series of accountability stories. Reporters covered budget discrepancies, dropping enrollment, and a structural inspection that led to the surprise shutdown of three dorms. Since this coverage, Herald editor in chief Anthony Clauson says, the university’s treatment of student reporters has changed.

Reporters before Clauson’s time had the university president’s personal phone number. The previous president regularly sat down for in-person meetings with the paper. Now, Clauson says, the university president holds press conferences for all local media outlets, declining to meet with the student paper individually. According to a statement from a university spokesperson, these press conferences are an effort to increase transparency and ensure equitable access to the university president for all local news outlets.

Last year’s editor in chief, Jake McMahon, said there are not many other outlets in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the small city where the campus is located, that cover the university like student reporters do. He and his colleagues see the College Heights Herald as a watchdog for the university. But when the paper reported on falling enrollment numbers and shuttered dorms, McMahon says administrators got “defensive.”

From any other source, this might be an expected part of reporting negative news. From the university, an entity with an outsized amount of power to help or hurt student journalism, restricting lines of communication can enter repressive territory.

“There was not really any attempt on their side to have a cordial relationship with us and understand that we were just trying to report the news,” McMahon said. “If we reported something negative on the university, it was always, ‘the Herald only reports negative stuff; they’re making news out of nothing.’”

In Clauson’s reporting on three dorms that suddenly closed, he found that students did not know why their dorms were closing. He spoke to some who speculated that a sinkhole had opened up under one building, which was not true. Clauson’s deep dives into public records uncovered the structural inspection that closed one of the buildings in 2024. He says the university still has not released a statement on the building closures.

According to a statement from a university spokesperson, a separate entity, the Student Life Foundation, owned the residence halls; therefore, the university was not authorized to speak about the cause of the closures. When student reporters asked, the spokesperson said, they were redirected to the Student Life Foundation’s spokesperson instead.

“After some of this reporting came out, is when we saw a lot of the restrictions on being able to talk really tighten,” Clauson said. “It was kind of a culmination of, from their perspective, bad press.”

At The Daily Californian, UC Berkeley’s engagement with reporters follows a tight script: students send their questions to university spokespeople, and they respond with an e-mail statement within 48 hours. But if journalists attempt to contact a campus administrator directly, they typically receive a “slap on the wrist,” as recent UC Berkeley graduate and former Daily Cal university news editor Alexa Vazquez put it.

Though these reprimands don’t carry formal disciplinary weight, students take them seriously enough that new reporters are warned about the rules in the paper’s training.

Vazquez said that while some enterprising student reporters have gone directly to university employees in person to seek comment, many of these visits have been futile: even some student employees have told the reporters that they were instructed not to speak to them.

Vazquez sees these rigid rules of engagement as a way for spokespeople to maintain Berkeley’s public image and appeal to prospective students.

“Berkeley really cares about its reputation…the image of Berkeley as this revolutionary place for academics, for its history, for its politics,” Vazquez said. “The spokespeople here at Berkeley…their primary job is to uphold the reputation of the university.”

In some ways, the university’s highly structured relationship with the student paper works in the Daily Cal’s favor. UC Berkeley campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore said her office works closely with the publication, processing two or three requests from reporters per day. The office meets with editors semesterly, and collects information from across departments and relevant experts to respond to reporters’ questions.

But at other universities, information is less restricted. Sophia Dasser, editor in chief of The Cornell Daily Sun, said that, unlike the Daily Cal, her paper’s editing team is in constant communication with administrators, and regularly conducts direct interviews with them. Reporters attend Cornell’s faculty senate meetings to speak to administrators there.

In Dasser’s view, university administrators depend on the student paper, not the other way around.

“​​We’re going to publish this piece either way, and so if it shines a negative light on [administrators], then they should want to make their point of view clear,” Dasser said. “People read the Sun. People don’t often read [university] statements.”

According to Vazquez, dealing with a university that restricts students’ access to people and information doesn’t make for bad journalism training.

“There are definitely times when it’s really important, especially with closures or cuts to departments and centers, that we talk to the people at the source, and sometimes, campus spokespeople will be a bit of a hurdle to overcome,” Vazquez said. “I’m kind of glad that I had these maybe slightly unsavory interactions with [spokespeople],” he continued, “Now I’m not going to crumble if I have a spat with a spokesperson and it’s not entirely professional. I can hold my ground.”

When Wilson filed her lawsuit against Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, she was the editor of the Mustang News investigations team. Without reliable access to public records, her team learned to uncover information and data in creative ways. To find university data from previous years no longer on active sites, Wilson used the Wayback Machine. When the school didn’t respond to her public records requests, she directed her queries to campus spokespeople instead.

“​​We figured out how to deepen our reporting since we weren’t getting the information [from the university]… or there were delays,” Wilson said. “It’s kind of interesting, balancing that frustration that was very much real, but also the agency of: We got to figure it out; we got to publish the story.”

Dealing with hard-line, uncooperative universities can be hugely detrimental to important coverage. By the time her lawsuit against Cal Poly wrapped up, Wilson was in her senior year. She was looking forward to life after college and a journalism career beyond Mustang News. Even though Wilson ultimately received the records she was seeking, she did not write all the stories she had planned to because of the delay.

Clauson, at Western Kentucky University, sees the university’s adversarial posture toward student journalists as part of a national wave of distrust in the media that, in the long term, can only hurt the industry and the communities it serves.

“You can’t have a thriving democracy if you don’t have a free flow of information through credible sources like newspapers,” Clauson said. “This trend to just have a tight hold on everything is ultimately not beneficial for anybody.”

Cairo—“Don’t forget us! Don’t forget Canada Camp!”

It was July 1994. The wails lifted from thousands of displaced Palestinians marooned in Egypt’s Sinai. They were pressed into a plot of land ringed by a barbed-wire barricade dividing Egypt from Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, still remembered among residents as the “shouting fence.”

Just behind the spindly partition erected after Israel relinquished its occupation of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 was the newly established international border between Gaza and Egypt. Over 4,000 Palestinians who had been “accidentally” deserted on the Egyptian side of the border were craning to catch a glimpse of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat, who was making his triumphant return to Gaza after 27 years of exile in Tunis.

The 64-year-old Egyptian-born leader was being hailed by a pageant of rapture across Gaza City. But things took on a far darker cast on the Egyptian side. Mothers wept for children on the other side of the border, some of whom they had not seen in over a decade.

The “Canada Camp” the families referred to was the original name for a housing complex constructed by Israel in the early 1970s to warehouse Palestinian refugees whose homes in Rafah were demolished under the innocuous-sounding pretext of a “road widening” and “security clearance” campaign. (The clearance operations were led by Ariel Sharon, then-commander of the Israeli army’s southern force.) The camp name came from a former Canadian military housing barrack that was set up following the 1956 Suez Crisis in then-Israeli-occupied Sinai. The site, located just southwest of Rafah on the Egyptian side of the border, was repurposed into a UNRWA resettlement project. Lex Takkenberg, UNRWA’s former chief of field relief and social services, called it a “forgotten no-man’s land.”

By 1982, that land was in Egyptian hands, handed back by Israel as part of the Camp David Accords. Egypt and Israel devised a plan to begin relocating the families back to Gaza within six months. But it would be 18 years before everyone was allowed to return. Writing in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Dick Doughty observed that the move constituted “the only instance of an exiled Palestinian community—[in their many thousands], re-entering Israeli-controlled territory since the beginning of the 1967 occupation.”

During that time, contact between Palestinians in Gaza and their displaced relatives was measured in 50 kilometers of sand, patrolled by Egyptian and Israeli soldiers. Those stranded on the wrong side were left in administrative purgatory, orphaned between two jurisdictions—never absorbed as Egyptian citizens, nor permitted to cross back into Israeli-occupied Gaza.

Today, this dreadful repatriation process, from Sinai back to Gaza, feels eerily contemporary, a prototype for the postwar United States–led “Board of Peace” that has already fast begun recruiting its new technocratic “Palestinian” government, and made plans to deploy an international occupation force and ghettoize Rafah. Only now, instead of 4,000 people, over 200,000 Palestinians are languishing in Egypt, driven out of Gaza by Israel’s genocide. Who is willing to stake political capital on their return?

Just as it was some 30 years ago with Camp David, the stubborn “catch-22” in yet another deal mortgaging Gaza’s future is never Israel’s illegal military occupation and apartheid regime but rather how to warehouse all of its “inconvenient” leftovers. Time and again, Egyptians are being asked to “manage” Palestinian life spatially rather than reckon with Palestinians’ inalienable right of return.

At 18, Rafah-born Nisreen Najjar left Gaza to attend Birzeit University in the West Bank. She was there the moment the Washington-brokered Sinai-return bargain lurched from parchment to practice, effectively separating her from her parents, who were quarantined on the wrong side of the newly drawn border.

Before the 1982 boundary was established, Rafah had historically been a contiguous urban center, teeming with shared Egypt-Gaza markets and heavily integrated municipal life, according to Najjar. The town straddled what had been the old Ottoman administrative boundary between Egypt and Palestine, but for both sides, it had yet to acquire the force of a true border.

The lightly enforced frontier, though marked on maps since the 1949 armistice, had not yet been transformed into the elaborate border apparatus that would soon cleave the jointly administered city. It remained porous enough to sustain the social amalgam of kinship, commerce, and Bedouin life that bound Rafah’s Egyptian and southern Gazan communities, allowing families, merchants, and traders to cross with little sense that they were ever entering a different country.

By Najjar’s account, Gaza felt less like a periphery than an extension of the Egyptian nation itself. “Egypt felt like a walk across town, not another world. Crossing was an unremarkable feature of daily life for many,” she says. She adds that during former Egyptian President Abdel Gamal Nasser’s era, “and only his,” Palestinians were granted scholarships to Egypt’s most elite universities.

“Our borders once meant kinship—families crossing at ease, students attending top universities through fully funded scholarships, cultures mingling, trade flowing,” Oroub ElAbed, associate professor in the Forced Migration Programme at Birzeit University, tells me.

ElAbed spent more than two decades interviewing Palestinian refugees across Egypt for her 2009 book, Unprotected: Palestinians in Egypt Since 1948. She says that under President Gamal Abdel Nasser Palestinians were met with radical inclusion in Egypt—granted access to public-sector employment and scholarships to attend top private universities and obtain property. In practice, they moved through public life with many of the same guarantees as Egyptian citizens. Their children enrolled in state schools. Universities charged them domestic fees. The promise extended outward, eventually encompassing PLO fighters and cadres, as well as Palestinians who had served within Egyptian state institutions.

Najjar, now 62 and living in Georgia (USA), remembers the dominance of Egyptian culture from her childhood in 1960s Rafah. Fashion was made up of loafers and brogues paired with crisp trousers or flamboyant skirts—sartorial residues from Egypt’s colonial past. Mohamed Mounir’s Nubian folk used to saturate the streets of Rafah. Cairo’s distinctive accent was slung back and forth among shopkeepers from dusk to dawn. Evening markets were alive with revolutionary Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm’s unvarnished verses. “It was in every sound. Egyptian music was on the radio, on TV, in our classrooms. Our curriculum was entirely Egyptian. Our books. Our literature. Our hearts have always leaned that way,” Najjar says.

That brief housewarming slammed shut after 1967, when Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. Nasserism suffered a devastating blow. Palestinian national movements gained greater autonomy from Arab states. And Pan-Arabism, one of Israel’s most formidable obstacles on the road to Camp David, began to retreat.

By 1969, roughly 33,000 Palestinians remained in Egypt, according to ElAbed. They lay suspended between a flash of pan-Arab ambition and experimentalism that had largely expired and a “temporary” displacement from their homeland that was quickly turning permanent. “Palestinians lost their lifelines to Gaza and Egyptians lost a neighborly intimacy that had once blurred any difference between them,” ElAbed says. “What had always been warmth and friendship turned into surveillance, deep suspicion, and ultimately where we are today on a national scale: estrangement and exclusion.”

Then, in 1982, the Israeli military bulldozed a 50-meter swath just south of Rafah, fencing it out on either side. Thousands of families, Najjar’s among them, were marooned in Canada Camp. By the time Najjar graduated and returned to Gaza to live with her grandparents in 1985, her parents had found themselves trapped on Egyptian soil for three years. They were effectively stateless.

Soon after, barbed wire was erected, and those who had once crossed into the West Bank for work found that access was withdrawn. Proximity initially prevailed; hands could meet across the barbed fence. But not long after, Israel balked at the closeness between Canada Camp and Gaza and imposed a 10-meter buffer between the two fences that would later swell to 40. Separated families could meet only by appointment.

The partition acquired an infamous nickname—the “shouting fence”—at two designated points along the barbed wire, positioned a stone’s throw apart from one another. Because the border ran so absurdly close, separated families in Rafah easily traded greetings—within a literal shouting distance—across it. Hands waved, names were yelled, kisses were blown. The divide was close enough for brides on one side to twirl in the sand in front of their parents on the other side.

“One of the cases my family remembers well is of a newlywed woman from our town who was forced to return to Canada Camp after the temporary three-month permit to Gaza expired. Israeli authorities repeatedly denied her requests to reenter and be with her husband after the wedding,” says Najjar. “She was pregnant and had her baby in the camp. The father did not even get to hold his own child until she was 3 years old.”

Lex Takkenberg, former UNRWA chief operator and head of the food distributions to Canada Camp, saw this too. “I witnessed it on countless occasions: neighbors and relatives speaking across the [barrier],” he says. “Eid celebrations and big family news traveling over the wire. Children were lifted above shoulders to show parents how much they had grown.”

At the fence, Najjar shouted across to her parents that she had found the love of her life, a painter she had met in college. “Every girl needs to hold their father’s hand on their wedding day. He was supposed to walk me down the aisle. Yet even this, he had to ask Israel’s permission for. It was hard to afford the costly Israeli permits to return to Gaza every three months.”

Najjar’s father found his daughter’s wedding increasingly impossible to attend. Palestinians jettisoned onto Egyptian soil could not move—not toward their local markets where they once bought their favorite snacks, not toward their children, spouses, nor workplaces in the occupied West Bank.

“Usually, when one visited the shouting fence, it was known…. we never got to stay long,” Najjar says, “both sides would inevitably kick you out. But I was emotionally unable to stay regardless. It was too much…. Just too much.”

Neither Egypt nor Israel hurried to repatriate Najjar’s family, or any of the other residents of Canada Camp to Gaza. Ann M. Lesch, a professor of political science at the American University in Cairo, concluded in a study in 1985 that the major obstacle to progress for the camp’s residents was “internal opposition [in Israel] to letting the Palestinians return from Sinai to Gaza,” where Israel had already established illegal settlements. According to the late Ron Wilkinson, then head of Cairo’s UNRWA office, “Even despite the availability of funds and land, there were various [moments] when the process of relocation was stalled by the lack of political will, on both ends.” By October 1991, Egypt’s formal admission of insolvency offloaded “the Palestinian problem” to UNRWA, already starved of funds.

In the end, nearly 20 years elapsed before the last residents-in-limbo of Canada Camp, a total of 4,388 individuals as UNRWA recorded, were finally allowed to move to the Tel-Al Sultan housing project in Gaza. Under Canadian prodding, a timetable was drawn up to shepherd the process to its long-resisted finish line. Canada offered up more funds to pay for the final infrastructure in Tel al-Sultan.

UNRWA’s camp administrator compiled household registries and submitted them to Egyptian authorities in Rafah via the Liaison System of Egypt (LSE), who then transmitted the names of proposed returnees to Israeli officials. Once Israel assented, confirmation traveled back through the LSE to UNRWA in Canada Camp. Families sent word outward, notifying their sons working in the Gulf or Libya, and to their daughters studying abroad, to return, timing their reunions to the uncertain moment when a plot of land in the newly developed Tel-Al Sultan camp was deemed “habitable.”

The rebuilding fell to the fathers and their sons. The head of the household, often with one or two boys in tow, crossed through Rafah’s Salah Al-Din Gate to commence the building project by hand. Weekends were spent back in Canada Camp, with families still waiting.

Though newly built, Tel al-Sultan had limited infrastructure and chronically underfunded municipal services. It was a prerequisite for the head of the paternal family to build a dwelling and bring it to a standard deemed “livable” before the crossing of the full household could be authorized. Israeli officials decided when that threshold was met—a task later taken over by the nascent Palestinian Authority. Once it was determined that a shanty was ready, families in Canada Camp packed their scant belongings, hired a truck, and traveled south to the Al-Ouja/Nizzana crossing, where return was capped at four households a day. From the Israeli side, another truck was hired to carry them the final leg to Tel al-Sultan.

“My parents finally came back after almost two decades of unnecessary exile, in 1995,” Najjar tells me. “My father’s house alone cost more than $80,000. They gave him 12 [as compensation]. Twelve thousand for a life dismantled. Twelve thousand for walls that once held and lost generations. And those who took it built shelters of asbestos.”

With Canada footing the bill, the last 10 families returned to Gaza in December 2000. The modest reversal of their banishment—not restoration to their original homes, but a rerouting to a new camp—was bittersweet and short-lived. As the Second Intifada gathered momentum in 2000, Israel unilaterally widened the Rafah buffer zone to 200–300 meters, installing a corrugated eight-meter metal barrier that stretched over a kilometer and a half, compressing it into the heart of what had once been a densely inhabited quarter of Palestinian life.

After the death of Israeli soldiers in the buffer zone in May 2004, Israel formally approved plans to widen the zone even further, enforcing demolition of all homes within 300 meters of Israeli military outposts—roughly 400 meters from the border itself—prompting widespread destruction that left swaths of Rafah, once more, depopulated.

Egypt, predictably, kept pace with its treaty-bound friend. On the Egyptian side of Rafah, the state began its own clearance operations in the mid-2010s, razing thousands of homes and forcing Bedouin families out in the name of anti-smuggling and Islamist counterinsurgency. Beginning in 2014, the Egyptian military was pushing outward to roughly 1.5 kilometers inland from the border, flattening residential and commercial structures and displacing several thousand Egyptian families in North Sinai.

Rafah is now an aggressive buffer zone that has time and again dispossessed both northern Egyptians and Rafah’s southern Palestinians. This was never about territorial adjustment but social clearance and militarized housekeeping: land incrementally hollowed on both sides, pressed inward against civilian life, until Rafah was refashioned into a disconnected terrain where ever-expanding steel barricades and armored perimeters injure our most vulnerable.

At times throughout her life, Najjar wondered what no fence at all would look like—an unbroken expanse of Palestinian backyards stitched together in a quilt of soil, sun, and the poetry of Gaza’s nature. A quilt of harvested herbs, Rafah’s finest cherry-red kalaniyya flowers, an endless sea of grass and aubergine beds. Sinai’s Bedouin and Rafah’s children playing in the open space, their limbs flinging toward earth and air like they had every right to be there; parents free from the cruelty of man-made borders and all-encompassing grief and estrangement.

“No matter who sits in Egypt’s palaces, my people love them,” Najjar says. “Egypt has always been our second home. That love is older than governments, older than fences. Older than any corruption. It is the music and sorrow still playing in our hearts.” When proletarian cries of “bread, freedom, justice” detonated in Egypt’s Tahrir Square in 2011, cheers of recognition and allegiance fanned across Gaza’s streets, Najjar tells me, the likes of which she had not seen before. After all, Gazans and Egyptians remained kin in everything but policy.

Today, as the lone Arab state to house hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without the auspices of any UN-affiliated or humanitarian camps, “Egypt’s stance is unique in that it has always acted, [rhetorically] on the pretense of preserving [Palestinian] identity,” says Maysa Ayoub, associate director at the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo.

“The irony is undeniable,” says ElAbed. “Today, while condemning Israel’s siege, Egypt enforces similar restrictions at Rafah and within its own territory.” By excluding Palestinians from the formal labor market, professional syndicates, social welfare programs, and state-issued refugee identity documentation, the state converts temporary refuge into an intergenerational legal vacuum. “Cairo justifies this as ‘national security’—shielding Sinai from further volatility through the influx of Palestinian nationals—but the effect is collective Palestinian punishment,” ElAbed adds.

“Stripping a people’s rights and reducing them to misery, in the name of preserving their return, is legally bullshit,” Takkenberg says.

Nearly three decades have passed since the last of Canada Camp’s families returned to Gaza. But their cries have outlived every “ceasefire.” For those shuttled back after each violent round of displacement, their invisible lives in Egypt are defined by just the same accursed wait from the same forsaking hands: for refugee documents owed by international law, for sustenance yanked from precarious, “underground” networks, for recognition. For return.

Peace in the Middle East, the victors called it. A table set for everyone but the Indigenous, who remain as Canada Camp and every subsequent relocation has left them: unconsulted and unaccounted for. Long after the credits roll and the world moves on, they will still be here, lugging the same exhausted cries—relics of a hundred-year war that never ended.

“Don’t forget us.”

Half a century after his death, Francisco Franco, the military dictator who ruled Spain for nearly 40 years, still has friends in high places. “The image people have of him is that of a strict and cold man, but in private, at least with me, he was always kind, smiling, and talkative,” Juan Carlos I, the former king of Spain, says in his recent memoir. “My relationship with him was like a son to a father,” he adds. “I became king thanks to him. I have never allowed anyone to criticize him in my presence.” For a monarch who is notorious for his deceptions—financial, marital, and otherwise—these words are curiously honest.

Juan Carlos is not the only prominent Spaniard who sees little reason to distance himself from Franco. “Why would I condemn something in which my father participated?” José María Aznar, Spain’s former prime minister and éminence grise of the center-right Partido Popular (PP), said this past November to explain why his party has always been coy about breaking with the legacy of the dictatorship. Aznar’s lack of embarrassment about his family’s political history—his father and grandfather were both leading figures in the regime—is not surprising: The PP’s forerunner was founded in 1976 by Francoist officials. More alarming is how quickly the Spanish public at large has forgotten what the Franco era was really like.

In fact, the man who in 1926, at age 33, became Europe’s youngest general, who in 1939 defeated the Spanish Republic after a three-year civil war, and who died in 1975, at age 82, after ruling Spain for decades, has a growing number of admirers. According to a poll from last October, over 21 percent of Spaniards believe the years of the dictatorship were “good or very good,” including a majority in both major parties on the right—PP and the far-right Vox. In another poll, run by the newspaper El País, only half of those between 18 and 28 years old were able to correctly identify when Franco ruled, while close to half of far-right voters wrongly believed that the defenders of the Spanish Republic killed more people than their right-wing Nationalist opponents. (In fact, the Nationalists’ victims were triple those of their Republican foes.) Even in the United States, Franco’s reputation has had something of a revival: He is frequently cited with admiration by the likes of Internet commentator Mike Cernovich and Vice President JD Vance.

Last November 20 marked the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death. In 1975, his long-expected demise was followed by the swift coronation of Juan Carlos I, whom Franco had handpicked as his successor in 1969. Although the king had sworn loyalty to the regime, by 1978, mass popular mobilization, international pressure, and his desire to salvage the monarchy convinced Juan Carlos to relinquish the absolute power that Franco had granted him and accept the largely ceremonial role of constitutional monarch. The move helped usher in what would turn out to be the longest-lasting democracy in Spanish history.

How Franco’s legacy should be assessed was a question Spaniards used to be happy to avoid. In 1977, a negotiated amnesty law shielded Francoist perpetrators from prosecution (and also, in effect, from investigation). By the 1980s, as a democratic Spain burst onto the world stage, Pedro Almodóvar boasted that he made movies as if Franco had never existed. But the days when Spain could ignore its dictatorial past are over. For the past 25 years, grassroots pressure from Franco’s victims and their families has pushed left-of-center parties in Spain to address the unfinished business from the country’s transition to democracy. In 2007 and 2022, Spain passed two “memory laws,” which provide state support for families looking to recover the remains of loved ones killed by the regime but stop short of repealing the amnesty law. In 2019, the government finally removed Franco’s body from the massive state-sponsored monument in which he was buried. All of this happened over the objections of the PP and Vox, many of whose supporters see no reason to revisit the past, or who prefer to see Franco as the man who saved Spain from left-wing chaos and subversion.

In the face of these debates, the judgment of longtime Guardian journalist Giles Tremlett is unequivocal. Franco, he writes in his new biography, El Generalísimo, was “a cold-blooded militaristic authoritarian” who ended up at the helm of his country through a combination of “relentless ambition” and “considerable luck.” He is best described as “a giant dam, determined to control the flow of Spanish history—in part by holding back the societal and political changes that brought welfare and freedom to much of the Western world during his life.”

Tremlett portrays Franco as a consummate survivor, driven by boundless ambition, an absurdly inflated self-image, and sharp political instincts. His victory in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39)—a bloody military conflict that caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths—was won in large part thanks to support from Hitler and Mussolini, and its ultimate objective was not the country’s liberation, as Franco proclaimed, but instituting a regime with two main goals: to punish his enemies (which included more than half of his countrymen and anyone else who favored communism, liberalism, or democracy) and to return Spain to its former greatness as a crusading Catholic empire. He was much more successful in the first than in the second.

How Franco maneuvered himself into the center of power, where he lasted to his dying breath, is fairly straightforward. Pinning him down politically is a different story: Was he a fascist? A conservative? An antisemite? It’s complicated. Franco’s ideology, Tremlett writes, “does not fit the models of the twentieth century…because Franco’s politics were born out of Spain’s nineteenth-century history of imperial humiliation. His simplistic reactionary ideals were about righting that, as if everything from the French Revolution to the Enlightenment and the fall of the Spanish empire could be reversed.”

Those simplistic reactionary ideals, Tremlett shows, hewed to military and traditionalistic views of honor, sacrifice, discipline, and patriotism—coupled with a steadfast belief in his own and his country’s greatness and including a handful of phobias, including of Jews, Freemasons, and “communists,” a catch-all term for anyone to the left of conservative Catholicism. Beyond that, ideas were not Franco’s thing. His political coming-of-age, in Tremlett’s telling, was born of psychological conflicts that shaped his life from the beginning. That such a simple man might become world-historical, and that his ideas continue to shape Spain, says something about the peculiar place that the country occupies in 20th-century history. While Spain technically remained neutral during both world wars, it became a key US ally during the Cold War. As a result, it was one of the countries where fascism would rule the longest.

Born in 1892, Franco was raised in the “military ghetto” of Ferrol, on the Galician coast; for generations, the Francos were known as naval officers. He was the second of five children, though one of his sisters, Paz, died when she was only 4. Raised mostly by his mother—a doting, conservative, and deeply religious woman—Franco grew to resent his philandering, liberal father, an officer in the Armada who abandoned the family when Franco was young to go live with his mistress in Madrid. Here and elsewhere, Franco’s 19th-century simplicity sometimes seems to seep into Tremlett’s own analysis. To explain the political structure of Franco’s youth, for example, Tremlett resorts to the “two Spains” trope, reducing national political fault lines and the Franco family dynamic to a divide between a conservative mother and a liberal father.

Franco dreamed of following in his forebears’ footsteps and joining the navy. But these ambitions were thwarted in 1898 by Spain’s defeat in the Spanish-American War, and he settled for the army instead. It wasn’t an easy route: “Franquito” was relentlessly bullied by his fellow cadets. He was short, pot-bellied, and had a high-pitched voice, possibly due to a deviated septum. In Tremlett’s telling, these early humiliations hardened Franco and provided him with a lifelong supply of spite. They also made him cautious. When faced with big decisions, he often seemed neurotically hesitant. Over time, his hedging would be reconfigured into a sly disposition: Franco kept his cards close to the vest before setting on a ruthless course of action.

One of the most interesting family dramas that Tremlett traces in the book is Franco’s rivalry with his younger brother Ramón, a pilot who flew the first transatlantic flights from Spain. Politically, Ramón swung far to the left, becoming an anti-monarchist. According to Franco, Ramón betrayed the family’s honor. The enmity, however, ended under mysterious circumstances during the Civil War, when, upon returning from his post as an attaché in the Spanish embassy in Washington, Ramón inexplicably joined his brother on the Nationalist side. Franco quickly promoted him to lieutenant colonel, against the wishes of his air-force chief and personnel. Tremlett chalks up Franco’s change of heart to family loyalty. Yet the story behind Ramón’s political U-turn and Franco’s embrace of the brother he once hated remains a mystery to this day.

Despite his many challenges, Franco’s military career was meteoric. From 1913 through the 1920s, he served in the colonial army, which fought a bloody, drawn-out war against rebel forces in present-day Morocco. His steely approach would allow him to outlast others vying for power. When a fellow general, the hotheaded José Sanjurjo, attempted a military coup in 1932, he failed. Franco’s attempt, four years later, did not.

Yet that’s where the differences stop. Franco shared the paranoid worldview of his fellow generals, indulging in elaborate conspiracy theories. He also shared their penchant for making war as brutal as possible, though he often passed the dirty work off to others. And, like his peers, he had an enormous ego born of an inferiority complex: His social status wasn’t high enough; his religiosity, which he came to later in life, wasn’t pure enough. His manhood, even when he was a general, was constantly questioned; it made him a crueler commander, but it also fed into his cultivated public image—a strict father figure, not afraid to mete out punishment to his unruly nation.

Franco did not launch the July 1936 coup by himself. In fact, he only belatedly joined the plot, which had been concocted by Sanjurjo, who was exiled in Portugal, and Emilio Mola, a fellow general—though everyone involved knew that Franco would eventually have to come on board, given his status in the military and his power over the Spanish colonial army. He would only become the coup’s official leader in September, voted in by his fellow plotting generals and colonels.

Franco avoided risk at all costs, during the Civil War especially. Tremlett usefully unearths a series of moments in which Franco appears to be the least ruthless of the Spanish generals. This was deceptive, Tremlett shows. In practice, Franco’s vindictiveness often came with a delay: He waited until he was certain his actions would not elicit a response that he wouldn’t also be able to crush. A general in Zaragoza who was late to join the 1936 coup, for instance, was arrested and put on trial, where he plausibly claimed that the uprising—which had been quite disorganized—had taken him by surprise. Franco, who had been the general’s mentor, half-heartedly requested a pardon but did not stop the execution of his loyal disciple. According to Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and a leading figure in the early years of the regime, the episode exemplified Franco’s “coldness and indifference.”

That coldness was also a delaying tactic. During the Civil War, Franco deliberately slowed his advance, allowing him time to methodically purge the zones his army controlled—the same military approach he had honed in colonial North Africa. Just as Franco dithered on the ground, he postponed revealing his political commitments. This, too, was a tactic: It allowed him to claim the upper hand over anyone with whom he was negotiating. Still, his compulsive need for control could also be a weakness. When Hitler suddenly decided to increase his involvement in the war, sending the Nationalists significant military support—everything except for ground troops—it upset Franco. “Franco’s churlishness,” writes Tremlett, “reflected his hatred of others making decisions on his behalf”—even decisions that would prove decisive to winning the war.

The Spanish Civil War ended when Franco entered the capital of Madrid on April 1, 1939. By that point, his authoritarian state had already been up and running across most of the country. Franco then turned his sights abroad. Not long after his victory, he sought to join the Axis war effort, offering Hitler support in exchange for North African territory. But Hitler turned him down. Following a familiar pattern, Franco later recast this embarrassing moment as a brilliant decision to keep Spain out of World War II. In reality, he didn’t begin distancing himself from the Nazis until it became clear that they were losing.

To the disappointment of everyone who had supported the Spanish Republic’s fight against fascism, Franco did not go down with Hitler and Mussolini, the two dictators who had helped him win the Civil War. The Allies’ anti-fascist liberation campaign stopped at the Pyrenees. During the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath, the regime had executed an estimated 140,000 people, held hundreds of thousands in prisons and concentration camps, and exiled a quarter-million Republican supporters. Yet during the postwar period, Franco nonetheless became a coveted ally for the British and the Americans, who were willing to overlook Spain’s bloody postwar repression if it gave them an upper hand in the Cold War.

Even though the Franco regime was formally excluded from the Marshall Plan and international organizations, the logic of the containment eventually justified US President Dwight Eisenhower’s military and economic pact with Spain in 1953 and the country’s admission to the United Nations in 1955. Franco, ever the shrewd tactician, took advantage of these international shifts to strengthen his domestic position, often at the expense of former allies. In the late 1950s and ’60s, this meant opening up the country to tourism, handing the rapidly expanding economy over to technocrats from Opus Dei, and allowing more than 2 million Spaniards to emigrate north as guest workers. The collective memory of this experience helps explain why many Spaniards today feel more solidarity toward immigrants than do other Europeans.

Franco’s dictatorship transformed Spanish society at all levels. If Tremlett’s psychological analysis works reasonably well for capturing Franco the man—even if the upshot is that he wasn’t all that compelling a person—it is less useful for understanding the regime named after him. The dictatorship, in Tremlett’s telling, became over time “a project that was about little more than law, order, repression of dissent and imposition of Roman Catholic morals.” This seems a bit underwhelming. Though Franco’s own ideas may have been limited, Francoism generated plenty of them. Ever on the ideological vanguard, his state-funded think tank the Instituto de Estudios Políticos (Institute of Political Studies) inducted Nazi Germany’s premier theorist of dictatorship, Carl Schmitt, as an honorary member in 1962. In 2024, Nicolás Sesma, a French historian of Catalan Spanish descent who has studied the institute closely, published a nuanced account of Francoism, its roots, and its long-term effects that became an unexpected bestseller in Spain.

Buoyed by compelling storytelling and mountains of historical research, Sesma’s lively cultural and political history shows that Francoism was more complex, more variable, and in a way more interesting than the dictator himself. As it turns out, almost every claim that Franco and his regime made about Spanish culture and history—and their own place within it— was false, beginning with the dictatorship’s very slogan, España: una, grande, libre. As the book’s title indicates, Spain under Franco was Ni una, ni grande, ni libre: not one, not great, and certainly not free.

Among the other myths that Sesma debunks is the notion that Francoism paved the way for democracy; that it played a largely positive role during World War II as a haven for Jewish refugees; and that both Franco and Francoism were in any way inevitable. Instead, he describes how many Spaniards learned to live with an oppressive regime whose overthrow seemed impossible to imagine, even by its enemies. The fact that the democratic transition left Franco’s carefully constructed myths largely untouched—including a convenient minimization of his links with the Axis powers—was a testimony to the continued power of his representatives. But leaving those myths in place also helped mitigate Spain’s collective embarrassment, whether its citizens had actively supported the regime, passively benefited from it, or failed to defeat it.

While Franco has new admirers among the global far right, contemporary scholars of fascism have worked to reconnect his regime to other European and Latin American revanchists and fascists. Here, Franco’s colonialist roots are particularly compelling. In Spanish Fascist Writing, a recent English-language anthology of far-right Spanish texts from the 1920s to the 2010s, Justin Crumbaugh and Nil Santiáñez argue that Francoism was the particular form that fascism took in Spain. Considering Spanish fascism on its own terms rather than focusing on how it deviates from the German and Italian variants, they write, “will enable deeper understanding not only of Spanish fascism but of fascism as a whole,” including its later incarnations elsewhere. Francoism not only inspired right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, as Kirsten Weld has shown, but it has also had admirers among the US Catholic far right, such as L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley Jr., Fritz Wilhelmsen, and, more recently, Adrian Vermeule, JD Vance’s longtime mentor.

Although fate played a much smaller role in Franco’s life than he liked to think, it was predictable that a military dictator would come from the northern town of Ferrol. The town had historically been a seat of Spain’s elite naval power and proudly claimed never to have succumbed to enemy invasion or capture.

Still, Ferrol has another side. From the 19th century onward, it has also been a town of shipyards and foundries, of dockworkers and metalworkers, and, before that, in the 18th century, of copper-sheathed ships and galley slaves. Franco is not the only political leader that Ferrol has spawned. Born there, too, was Pablo Iglesias (1850–1925), who in 1879 founded the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and corresponded with Friedrich Engels. And Spain’s current labor minister, Yolanda Díaz, was born just across the bridge in a Ferrol suburb. The two faces of Ferrol came to a head in 1972. Franco, who knew his end was near, had appointed the young Juan Carlos I as his successor three years earlier. On March 10, thousands of Ferrol shipyard workers went on strike. They were met with gunfire by the Francoist police force. Two workers died, several dozen were injured, and hundreds more were detained, jailed, and fined. In 1997, the regional parliament officially declared March 10 the Day of the Galician Working Class.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

This interview with Grigory Yavlinsky, the founder of Russia’s Yabloko Party, comes in the run-up to national, regional, and local elections scheduled for September 20. The regime’s failure to achieve its goals in Ukraine and the increasing costs incurred by its retaliatory strikes across Russia, on cities and facilities that were not impacted even by World War II, is making the regime increasingly insecure, and its response to any critique is rapidly hardening. Since the start of the military operation, five members of Yabloko, including its vice chair and the recent head of its caucus in the Moscow City legislature, have been sentenced to terms in a penal colony, ranging from one to 10 years, and nine of its leading and most recognizable members other than Yavlinsky (who is not seeking office) have been banned from running in the elections.

Whether the Kremlin will allow Yabloko to appear on the national party-list ballot will become known by August 5—the deadline for the Central Election Commission to finalize the registration of the parties. So far, the signals have largely been negative: Just in the past week, Yabloko’s slates were denied registration in two major cities of Russia’s northwest, St. Petersburg and Petrozavodsk, where it has been relatively more popular than in most of the country and was previously represented in city councils; meanwhile, in the only region where its slate has been registered to compete in regional elections (the Republic of Karelia, of which Petrozavodsk is the capital), a nationalist party sued to get that registration canceled. If Yabloko is kept off the ballot, the next question will be whether it is allowed to survive at all, in legal and financial terms, until the end of Putin’s rule.

—Katrina vanden Heuvel
 

Yabloko was founded in 1993. The Yabloko party’s electoral platform consists of the following 43 words:

For peace and freedom! For a life without fear!
For a cease-fire agreement, for diplomacy and for achieving peace!
Our goal is to avert a nuclear war!
For a Russia that is free of fear and of political reprisals!
For the preservation of human lives, respect, dignity and well-being!
Our goal is a prosperous, democratic Russia!

Yabloko is the only party that has steadfastly advocated for the cessation of military operations in Ukraine since 2022.

The Nation’s Nadezhda Azhgikhina spoke with Grigory Yavlinsky, Yabloko’s founder and the chair of its federal political committee.

Nadezhda Azhgikhina: Grigory Alexeyevich, what do you offer in these elections, and what do you expect?

Grigory Yavlinsky: Our message in these elections is the unconditional demand to put an end to the loss of lives, that is, to conclude a ceasefire agreement in the nearest future. This is the gist of our platform. It has merely 43 words in it. These elections are not about taxes, utility fees, salaries or pensions. They are about human lives, freedom, and Russia’s future.

In effect, this will be a referendum. Its plausible number of participants will be over 60 million. Unfortunately, Yabloko is the only party in Russia which stands for a ceasefire agreement with Ukraine, for freedom, and for a life without fear. All the other parties largely support the status quo.

These elections will essentially have two sets of results: the numbers that they will officially announce, and the real one. And the authorities will know how people voted in reality. That will be the main outcome—the top officials of the country seeing how many Russians actually support a ceasefire and that vision of Russia’s future that Yabloko offers, a vision that matches the future of the 21st century.

Elections are not the same as a sociological poll of some 1,500 people conducted by a government agency. Elections are the confidential vote by millions of people. It is possible that Yabloko has been allowed to run in these elections to gauge the actual sentiments of the people.

At this time for us, the seats in the parliament are not the main issue at play in these elections. The most important is to reveal what it is that a significant part of the people of Russia actually wants. Over the past four years, our position has remained the same: The loss of lives must be stopped; a ceasefire agreement must be concluded immediately; after that, diplomatic negotiations about the future must begin in earnest.

NA: What is the overall mood within the party? Recently, Yabloko has been under pressure as never before: Eight members have been arrested and are currently in jail, while many prominent party politicians have been barred from running…

GY: We got thousands of official party members and over a million of registered supporters; throughout this entire period, not one of them has filed a notice of leaving the party, in spite of the fact that, as you mentioned, eight of our colleagues have been imprisoned, that 12 of them have been under criminal charges, that dozens have been fined for stating our position about this military conflict in public, and that the party leader and all of its incumbent elected officials have been deprived of the right to run for office. And yet the number of young people joining the party has been on the rise. This is a sign that our party has a future despite all this pressure.

NA: Why did you not put yourself at the top of the slate?

GY: I did not do it because we ought to be paving the way for young people to enter politics. My generation lost its game by completely derailing the reforms of the 1990s. This brought our country to a catastrophic outcome. We had a historic chance, yet we failed to take advantage of it.

Now there is a new generation coming up, and our task is to support and help them in every way possible. Personally, I will stand with them in public and be helping them as long as needed, in terms of substance as well as funding. Right now, the image of the party whose slate of candidates is led by well-educated young people is very important. The future belongs to them.

NA: What is the geographic reach of the party?

GY: The entire country. We have enjoyed consistently high support in the northwest, in the Urals, in Siberia, and in the far east, as well as in major urban centers. There is a pattern in it; namely, our support is usually stronger in the old Russian cities, such as Tomsk, as compared to the large Soviet-era cities, such as Novosibirsk. Yet we are in a special moment: People’s mindsets have been changing in many ways, particularly over the past four years. For example, according to recent polls conducted on the Internet, our supporters made up 29 percent out of over 83,000 respondents. Our share of support in that poll was only exceeded by those who said that they were not planning to vote for anyone at all for the time being.

NA: The polls conducted by Zhivoi gvozd [A Living Nail], an anti-government YouTube channel, showed that 84 percent of its audience were prepared to vote for Yabloko. Does that mean that your message has finally been getting across?

GY: Not only that. The point is that people are coming to the conclusion, on a substantive basis, that things just cannot be allowed to continue along the current track. First of all, it has been four years of casualties. And, of course, everyday challenges—inflation, gas prices, all kinds of restrictions, the threat of another mobilization—affect almost everyone, and they only keep growing.

It is unquestionable that we represent the political force that enables people to express their views of the current situation, by supporting us. Under present conditions, selling this to them is not the issue: People are facing serious problems, and they are starting to search for a solution.

NA: And what if at the last moment the authorities will rule out Yabloko’s participation in the elections?

GY: This can happen as well. If it does, the pressure on us will only become stronger. But we will not surrender our principles, our convictions, and our platform. And we do not plan our work based on conjectures. We do everything that is vitally needed in this time and place.

NA: In the West, you have been criticized at times for participating in the elections at all and for allegedly playing by the rules set by the authorities. What is your response?

GY: People who say these kinds of things either do not understand what this is about or are just making money there in this way. Let them come here and we shall discuss it.

Our position is simple: This is our country and our people. We will do everything that is needed so that people do not get killed and so that our country, as well as Ukraine and Europe have a normal future.

NA: Some people hold the view that reforms in Russia failed because of the “Russian destiny” and the “slavery gene,” and that democracy does not take hold on the Russian soil.

GY: The catastrophic failure of the reforms is the fault of specific individuals in Russia—and, by the way, of some Western officials too. By now, the contemporaneous records of, say, the US National Security Council have been declassified. They show that the US leadership refused to support our economic program for political reasons, despite the high marks given to it in professional terms. US Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady said at the NSC meeting, speaking about the Soviet Union, that “turn them into a third-rate power…is what we want.”

Boris Yeltsin trusted the recommendations of his American advisers without questioning them. This was one of the main tragic errors.

That said, those inside Russia who were making decisions in 1991–99 still bear the primary responsibility for the outcome: the hyperinflation reaching above 2,600 percent, the criminality of the privatization procedure, and the formation of a corrupt oligarchic system that has no positive future.

NA: You talk and write a lot about the need to put human beings and their interests at the core of the new world politics. What should be done to achieve this?

GY: First of all, politicians in Russia and in the West ought to understand why reforms failed, why Europe has largely lost its diplomatic capabilities and is banking instead on weapons and escalation, and why the US is unable to secure a peace agreement.

In the absence of diplomacy, we have stayed on the present course for more than four years already. If this escalates toward a direct clash between Russia and NATO, nuclear weapons will be used in the very first days. There will be nothing else. I am gravely concerned about this and about the future.

Given the situation that we have, I believe that justice means first and foremost putting an end to the killing of people. Everything possible must be done to achieve this. All other issues can be discussed and resolved at the negotiating table for as long as it takes.

NA: What do you wish to Americans and to US politicians?

GY: To America, I wish the absolute best: that is, peace, prosperity, and success. I congratulate it on its 250th anniversary! I respect America and have very good feelings toward the American people. If you do well in every respect, this will be better for us too. Tackle your challenges, you got plenty of them. You cannot solve Russia’s problems. And do not hope that under the new conditions you can subjugate other countries. We need fundamentally novel, different, modern policies. And, by the way, do not think that money will always be on top of all other things. A lot will change in the middle of the 21st century.

NA: What gives you hope?

GY: I love my people. I love Russia, love Europe, and love America. I love people in general. My reason tells me that today’s policies can end up with very bad outcomes and catastrophic events. But my heart is not prepared to accept this, and I have hope.

Pope Leo XIV was already in a tough spot when he acceded to the highest office of the Catholic Church just over a year ago. His predecessor and ally Pope Francis managed to move the needle on migrant and LGBTQ rights globally from within one of the world’s oldest institutions—which antagonized many of the church’s most revanchist elements. Observers the world over were eager to see whether the onetime bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, would pursue a similarly progressive pontificate, or attempt to conciliate the reactionaries. He answered decisively with a recent surprise move that political leaders contending with growing reactionary movements could stand to learn from.

As he ascended the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica for his public introduction, the Chicago-born pope was already caught between constituencies that wanted to build on Francis’s transformations and those intent on turning back the clock. Archconservative elements of the church eager to take back the reins after a decade-plus of Francis were initially mollified by Leo’s “traditional” presentation. Less of a public firebrand than his mentor, he cut a diplomatic figure that a friend memorably called “a dignified middle of the road.” But the most hard-line traditionalists proved impossible to satisfy. The fringe, ultraconservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), long a thorn in the Vatican’s side, forced a showdown earlier this month. Dignified, middle-of-the-road Leo responded by unilaterally excommunicating not only the leaders but potentially adherents of the order.

SSPX was formed in 1970 by French prelate Marcel Lefebvre in direct opposition to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which among other things gave individual churches more leeway to run their own affairs, eased up on requiring traditional practices like the Latin mass, expanded dialogue with other religions and—somewhat ironically—diluted the pope’s own power by expanding the power of bishops. The order took its name from the early-20th-century Pope Pius X, whom it lionizes for his “unmasking of Modernism,” which it considers the ultimate heresy. (“Modernism,” in a Catholic context, is a term a bit like “woke”—it can mean drastically different things depending on who’s deploying it, but generally refers to attempts to reconcile the church with modern culture.)

While many of SSPX’s specific grievances would be arcane even to practicing Catholics, at its root is disgust with a (slightly) more open and democratic church that had understood that it needed to adapt to changing times, and a desire to strong-arm it back to insularity and intolerance. Its concerns map neatly onto the culture-war outrages that animate the contemporary far right, political and religious. The order, which counted under 1,500 members as of 2025, trains seminarians and holds liturgies around the word. The number of laypeople who attend their masses is contested, but The Guardian estimates between 150,000 and 200,000.

The institutional church never quite knew what to make of the Lefebvrists, as SSPX members are sometimes known, as they kept pushing the envelope. In 1988, after repeated warnings from church officials including Pope John Paul II, Lefebvre himself participated in the unauthorized consecration of four new bishops, after which he and all of those who participated were excommunicated. He died three years later, still at odds with the church, but in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI made the decision to reverse the excommunications of the four bishops, including Holocaust denier Richard Williamson, capping a series of efforts to bring the SSPX reactionaries back into the fold. Even Francis extended a hand, allowing SSPX priests to officiate marriages in 2017.

Fifteen years after Benedict’s reversal, SSPX did it again. Earlier this month, the society conducted the unsanctioned (and livestreamed) consecration of four new bishops at its seminary in Écône, Switzerland, before an audience of thousands, after repeated warnings from the Vatican. Leo shocked observers by declaring that the society had not just committed a schismatic act but was now itself fully schismatic from the church. He excommunicated its bishops (including two who had already been excommunicated in 1988 before the effective pardon), its priests, and certain laypeople who remained faithful to it. The Vatican set out a relatively onerous procedure for priests and adherents to return only after renouncing the order.

The severity of the sanction was surprising to many, given Leo’s known preoccupation with church unity and “synodality,” or a commitment to dialogue and openness. Yet what Leo and his advisers understand is that continued accommodation of SSPX would not help foment a pluralistic church but instead keep pulling it apart at the seams. Several consecutive pontiffs’ efforts to appease the splinter group out of a fear that it would otherwise tear the church apart were arguably what allowed it to build up the strength to once again act outside the Vatican. A complete removal of institutional backing and the threat of excommunication for its followers will most likely let the SSPX slowly die on the vine.

Pro-democracy leaders should take heed. Here in the United States, Democrats’ terror at alienating some imagined moderate base even in deep-blue areas have left us on the precipice of total reactionary triumph. After his 2020 victory, Joe Biden told the nation it was time to “turn the page as we’ve done throughout our history, to unite, to heal.” Just over two weeks later, Donald Trump incited an insurrection to violently prevent the transfer of power, in tandem with a battery of procedural efforts to overturn the election.

Some four years after that, Trump entered the presidency again, having faced practically no meaningful repercussions for these or any other actions. In France, far-right National Rally leader and convicted embezzler Marine Le Pen has announced that she will run for president after an appeals court shortened her ban on running for public office. Ten years ago, UK Prime Minister David Cameron called the Brexit vote, thinking he was throwing a bone to the rabid right-wingers that would put the matter to bed. Instead, he lost, to disastrous consequences for his country and for Europe.

The Vatican, of course, is not a democratic country but an essentially monarchical institution in which the pope is vested with the authority to make these sorts of sweeping decisions more or less unilaterally. There is no Congress to negotiate with and a far less complex system of checks and restrictive case law and so on, and this is by design in both directions. We should certainly not jettison democratic constraints to combat the encroaching far right, which is ultimately the same thing they want to weaponize anyway.

Nevertheless, there’s a useful underlying lesson here for both liberal and progressive constituencies: Our institutional systems cannot actually accommodate everyone. This is a tough pill to swallow for any political vision that has an “all are welcome” bent. But we can’t welcome the people and groups who’ve made it their mission to set fire to our governments and institutions—whatever their inadequacies, these are the most consequential tools in trying to build just societies. These elements must be isolated, starved of resources, held accountable where possible, and eventually ignored. There is no moral law that requires us to listen to and work with the opponents of human dignity or civil liberties.

There’s also something to be said here about the virtue of just ripping the Band-Aid off. I’m sure there were alternative and more conciliatory plans for dealing with SSPX, in keeping with the Vatican’s decades of gentler admonitions. But what would that have achieved, exactly? It’s not like the sect hadn’t been warned that it was inching toward this outcome. Leo had specifically implored the group not to proceed with its unsanctioned consecrations, begging SSPX Superior General Fr. Davide Pagliarani to “please turn back” in a letter just days before they went ahead anyway. Pagliarani and his followers knew that this was a direct and public challenge to Vatican authority and went defiantly forward.

After his excommunication, Pagliarani wrote a letter to Pope Leo that defended the order as answer to the Catholic Church’s “moral confusion” and called the schismatic adherents victims of “unjust and invalid” sanctions, but simultaneously implored the church to allow SSPX back into the fold “for the good of the universal church and of Your Holiness.” You could replace a few words here and imagine identical statements made by revanchist political groups around the world, from the MAGA contingent to Le Pen to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. They are perennially both a steadfast voice of reason doing what must be done, and put-upon victims of injustice by a decadent power structure, and they must always, always be accommodated for the good of the whole.

Moves like the illicit consecration aren’t just petulant for their own sake; they’re tire-kicking. Each time that an institution draws a line in the sand and then allows reactionaries to step over it, the latter walk faster. Leo’s following through with real consequences doesn’t necessarily mean that SSPX collapses—its diehard faithful have believed they’re in conflict with the church for decades, and some will stick it out—but it will make it less relevant, take away its institutional power, and deprive it of legitimacy and followers. The reactionaries can preach to half-empty rooms.

Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, began his tenure last week in a country ablaze.

In the Scottish Highlands, hundreds of villagers were evacuated from the path of a raging fire that started in Cairngorms National Park. In the English midlands, the Tintwistle Moor Fire has been burning for over a month. It’s now the size of a small town and is visible from space. Wales, too, is consumed by fire, from north to south. At the end of last week, the Welsh government activated “crisis management arrangements” because there were no helicopters available to provide aerial support in the country’s remote, rugged terrain—they had already been deployed to England and Scotland.

The fires are the most visible sign of a nation on the ropes—a country stuck in a seemingly interminable cycle of political instability (Burnham, who replaced the widely loathed Keir Starmer, is the country’s sixth prime minister in the last seven years, and the seventh in the last 10 years), crumbling living standards, and a lack of direction after decades of immiserating privatization, deindustrialization, centralization, and austerity.

But you wouldn’t know any of this if you only followed Burnham on social media, where he’s yet to acknowledge the UK’s unfolding climate catastrophe. Instead, we’ve been treated to a video of Burnham ranking pub snacks and footage of a new government office in Manchester—dubbed “Number 10 North”—inexplicably set to the theme song of the US version of The Office.

These trivialities are not only at odds with the crises facing Britain. They’re also at odds with Burnham’s supposed reasons for wanting to be prime minister in the first place.

Burnham, who was a long-serving member of Parliament before spending a decade as the mayor of Greater Manchester, says he gets the scale of the UK’s problems—and has proclaimed himself the solution. He has pledged to be “a circuit breaker” for the country, installing “a new political and economic model” to reverse the last 40 years of neoliberalism, devolve power from London to local and regional authorities, and strengthen public control over vital utilities. He’s promised to publish a 10-year plan promoting reindustrialization and social housing later this year.

Yet, so far, Burnham’s action has not matched this ultra-lofty rhetoric. And as his true vision of a hydrocarbon-fueled, “chips and drones” approach to Britain’s future comes into view, there’s less and less reason to believe he’s the right man for the job.

Hours before he became prime minister, Burnham received some unlikely praise.

“The People of Aberdeen, in Scotland, are dancing in the streets because the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has stated that he will be opening up, all the way, the invaluable North Sea Oil!” Donald Trump crowed.

The president was reacting to reports that Burnham would soon announce plans to drill in two oil and gas fields in the North Sea.

The possibility has provoked widespread outrage from environmental groups. Global Witness, an organization that investigates industries fueling the climate crisis, called any plans to intensify fossil fuel production “mind-boggling” at a time when “firefighters battle wildfires across the country and families fear for their kids’ futures after three intense heatwaves.” Critics also point to the fact that the privately operated but publicly subsidized Jackdaw gas field, one of the two sites where drilling could occur, is estimated to create only 27 direct full-time jobs, while Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, has advised that opening these fields would not improve the UK’s energy security or lower bills for consumers.

In more ways than one, the North Sea question has already rippled through Burnham’s young administration.

In the weeks leading up to his assumption of power, it appeared that Burnham was seriously considering Ed Miliband for chancellor of the exchequer—the second-most-important role in the British government. As energy secretary in Starmer’s government, Miliband (a former Nation intern) opposed oil and gas expansion, supported increased investment in renewables, set net-zero commitments, and called for an era of “clean energy security” in response to the oil shock produced by the US/Israeli war on Iran.

As the party’s left lobbied Burnham to empower Miliband with control of the Treasury, the bond markets signaled a sell-off to discipline the incoming prime minister, and even major trade unions foolishly objected to Miliband’s views on the North Sea and pressured Burnham against the appointment.

Ultimately, Burnham chose John Healey, rather than Miliband, to administer the UK’s public spending. (Miliband was made foreign secretary.) A longtime MP, Healey had recently resigned as Starmer’s defense secretary, saying that Starmer wasn’t prepared to spend enough money on the military.

The decision to install Healey as chancellor quickly revealed the hard limits of Burnhamism. Having already decided to maintain the Starmer government’s needlessly restrictive rules on government borrowing, it’s now clear that Burnham will prioritize warfare over welfare.

On his second day in office, Burnham took control of the Ministry of Defence’s social-media accounts and posted a video addressed to the defense companies at the Farnborough International Airshow, promising that they would be central to the UK’s reindustrialization.

The government then awarded a £708 million contract to BAE Systems, Leonardo UK, MBDA UK, and Rolls-Royce—all companies implicated in the Gaza genocide—for AI and augmented reality-equipped “air combat technology.” Three days later, the ministry of defence announced up to £400 million for a fleet of spy drones from Tekever UK.

The problem, beyond British militarism itself, is that this is a bad economic strategy. As researchers Noah Sylvia and Khem Rogaly have argued, the defense industry is simply not an engine for widespread economic prosperity. Compared to investment in civil infrastructure, public services, or domestic consumption, “defense expenditure is among the least effective forms of government spending for economic growth.” Compared to investment in green energy, healthcare, or education, it provides far fewer jobs.

And yet, new AI minister Kanishka Narayan recently told the Financial Times that to understand Burham’s economic vision, “we should think about chip factories. We should think about drones and defence and we should think about AI being applied to run manufacturing processes better.”

Of course, this all comes at a cost. After a week of small-scale affordability moves, like capping bus fares, announcing a light tax cut on energy bills, and reducing the business-rate taxes for pubs, social clubs, and music venues—announcements to give people “breathing space”—the prime minister announced that he will make it harder for people to claim benefits as he works to reduce the welfare bill. Only some people should breathe, it would seem.

On a host of other issues—from his support for Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s relentless campaign against the rights and dignity of migrants, to his wholly inadequate statement on Gaza in which he failed to acknowledge Israeli genocide, and his decision to staff his team and his cabinet with fixtures of the toxic Labour right—Burnham has maintained extensive continuity with the historically unpopular prime minister he deposed, and has shown little desire to forge a new direction.

If it is maintained, the gap between Burnham’s big talk and limited, or even contradictory, execution will define his premiership. If he continues to fail to actually challenge the orthodoxy that sustains neoliberalism and face the urgent crises of this moment, there will be little point to this government—and no Instagram video will save him, or his party, at the next general election.

Bangor, Maine—As delegates to the Maine Democratic Party’s special Senate nominating convention on Saturday morning filed into a convention center in the former “lumber capital of the world,” a box truck sponsored by Teamsters Local 340 pulled up to the curb. It was flying “Troy Jackson for Senate” flags from the hood, and the trucker inside pumped his fist to egg on the attendees. Inside, a handful of union officials compared notes on fifth-generation logger and former state Senate president Troy Jackson’s improbable ascent from second runner-up in the primary for governor to emergency Senate nominee. Jake Teitelbaum—treasurer of the Maine Service Employees Association, a union that represents state employees—explained it to me: “Maybe some of the other candidates could mobilize money quickly, but Troy had the connection to labor. And we mobilize people.”

Jackson’s political career began in the late 1990s when he joined 14 fellow loggers in a wildcat strike in northern Maine. Not surprisingly, during his two decades as a state legislator in Augusta, his support for organized labor was unwavering. Those enduring ties help explain why Jackson was able to outmaneuver his rivals to secure enough delegates to turn Saturday’s convention into a coronation ceremony.

As the assembled delegates waited to sit down in the hall where his nomination would be made official, some gathered around a TV playing clips of Susan Collins expressing concern at any number of Trump administration outrages, then picked up signs reading “Retire Susan” on one side and “No more concerns” on the other. Everyone who wasn’t already wearing swag from SEIU or the UAW found themselves pulling on a blue or yellow Troy Jackson shirt as a show of party unity.

One exception was B.J. McCollister, one of the Jackson campaign’s lead strategists, who stood near the TV in a blue suit, looking bleary-eyed. McCollister said he’d barely slept in days, not that he minded. “I’ve worked in Maine politics for 15 years,” he said, “and I’ve never seen anything like the energy over the past week.” McCollister told me that more than 1,000 volunteers had leapt into action as soon as Graham Platner dropped out of the Senate race, making it possible for Jackson’s hastily thrown-together campaign to contact tens of thousands of Mainers ahead of the county meetings where his victory was secured. When I asked what it would take to keep that level of energy going through the general election, McCollister cited the support of organized labor: “Troy has always stood up for them and now they’re standing up for him.”

McCollister excused himself as the delegates began to head into the convention hall to find their seats. In the rush, I found Cynthia Phinney, the president of Maine AFL-CIO. “We’ve had so many successes in the legislature that Troy was key to,” Phinney enthused, ticking a few on one hand: raising the prevailing wage for workers on publicly funded construction projects, ensuring that apprenticeship programs are recruiting women and minorities, and combating wage theft. Phinney was especially complimentary of Jackson’s willingness to wrestle with Governor Janet Mills over mandating union labor on major projects, a years-long fight that culminated in 2023 when Mills vetoed project labor agreements for the offshore wind industry. “Labor standards are one of the things that a lot of people are first to cave on when it comes time to compromise,” Phinney said. “Troy does not cave on those things. They’re fundamental to any project he’s supporting.”

If Troy Jackson manages to defeat Susan Collins in November, he will immediately become one of the most influential voices for the labor movement in Washington. With that in mind, I canvassed prominent organizers in Maine as well as Jackson’s colleagues in Augusta ahead of Saturday’s convention in order to get a better sense of exactly how his commitment to unions has manifested over the years in a place that’s not typically associated with organized labor.

“This is a rural state,” said Beth Edmonds, who led the Maine Senate when Jackson was first elected to the body in 2008. To her, Jackson’s career proves that labor is not synonymous with the urban working class. “When you organize a union here,” she said, “you’re doing it in a much smaller, more local way. But I think that’s what more and more people are asking for as the economics continue to divide people with huge wealth from the rest of us.” Jackson embodies that broadening of the movement. “Troy represents those who have worked on the ground for a long time,” Edmonds said. “I think that’s going to speak to a lot of people.”

The first time a photo of Jackson made the news in 1998, he stood between two fellow loggers in a Chicago Bulls flat brim and flannel shirt, all of them staring down some Maine State Police officers amid their blockade of a border crossing into Quebec. This blockade was one of many in the decades-long effort to stop lumber companies in Maine’s northern tip from hiring Canadian loggers. Because those workers received government-sponsored healthcare in Quebec, companies had long sought them out in order to avoid paying for the benefits American loggers demanded.

Jackson once told the Maine Beacon about how his father’s life had been similarly upended a generation earlier, when his bosses had reclassified his status with the company. “One day he’s an employee, and the next day he was a contractor,” Jackson said. “I mean, it just happened like that.” By the late ’90s, loggers like Jackson had ample reason to feel like people in a profession that had formed the backbone of Maine’s economy for two centuries were being left behind.

While the 1998 blockade drew national attention to the plight of the loggers, Jackson realized that they would need to enact systemic change if they hoped for better employment conditions. It remains a foundational event in his life. On Saturday, Jackson recalled the episode. “That fight opened my eyes,” he told the crowd of delegates during his victory speech. “I went from somebody that didn’t want to get out of line—was told not to get out of line—to where now I understand that you have to get out of line because the people in power are keeping us there.” “Working people,” he continued, “are not powerless. We’re only made to feel powerless when we stand alone, and that is what they’re trying to do: divide us. And that’s why I entered public life.”

Jackson was elected to the state House in 2002, representing the district surrounding his hometown of Allagash in Aroostook County, then moved to the state Senate in 2008. While much has been made of his early conservative views on social issues—Jackson initially opposed abortion and gay marriage, before becoming a champion of both women’s reproductive rights and the LGBTQ as Senate president—nobody has ever doubted his ironclad commitment to labor. Come 2019, he sponsored and passed legislation that made it possible for loggers to finally engage in collective bargaining with lumber companies.

“Troy has been a strong worker-progressive from day one,” said Betsy Sweet, a longtime activist known for staging spirited primary challenges against centrist Democrats like Mills and Sara Gideon, the most recent challenger to Collins. While national observers have criticized Jackson’s faltering cadence in his speeches and his everyman approach to politics, Sweet thinks that those qualities are exactly why he has so much credibility with the working class. “He is different. He isn’t polished. He doesn’t have a consultant telling him what to do,” she said. “He kind of goes with his gut, but he gets it.” You don’t need to be a stunning orator to reach people if you have “this visceral sense of injustice. It’s innate. It’s in the fabric of who he is.”

Case in point is how Jackson threw his weight behind an unionization effort by nurses at Maine Medical Center, the state’s largest hospital, in 2021. In an op-ed for the Portland Press Herald, Jackson recounted having a heart procedure at Maine Med when pandemic protocols were still in full effect. “Like most Mainers who’ve been hospitalized during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Jackson wrote, “I was completely alone.” He described how it was the nurses at the hospital who had “put my anxiety to rest, answered my questions and gotten me back on my feet.”

“After all that these nurses have done for me,” he continued, “the least I can do is be there for them in their hour of need.”

Beyond providing rhetorical support for the organizing campaign, Kelli Brennan, a nurse at Maine Med, told me that Jackson had proved to be a major ally of their union in Augusta. The first time she met Jackson was during a lobbying event organized by Maine AFL-CIO, when she and other nurses visited the Senate chamber. “He made sure we all had a place to sit, pulled up a chair, and then he let us go roundtable about what our issues were,” Brennan said. At the time, their main priority was passing a bill that would create nurse-to-patient ratios at Maine’s hospitals. “He knew that our bill might have some areas where it would be difficult to get other people to compromise on, but that didn’t stop him from supporting us,” Brennan said. (Jackson managed to shepherd the bill through the Senate, though it failed to clear the state House.)

Jill Duson, a state senator from Portland, was similarly impressed by Jackson’s accessibility. While their constituencies—the state’s largest city and most thinly populated county—would seem to be diametrically opposed to each other, Duson said, “I just found him very open to hearing our concerns and providing useful advice on how we might approach legislators from other communities.” That included a bill that would have helped Portland’s minor league baseball team, the Sea Dogs, renovate their stadium—an issue bound to generate resistance from the rest of the state. For Jackson, the key was highlighting how including labor protections for the construction workers renovating the stadium could set a precedent for future projects. “Troy was instrumental,” Duson said, in arguing “that it was not a Portland bill. That the success of the Sea Dogs was a success for the entire state—and we actually got that through!”

Now Jackson is poised for some much larger fights than haggling over project labor agreements for a AA baseball stadium. Reflecting on Jackson’s emergence as a national champion of the working class, Sweet told me, “I believe that there are people in Washington right now freaking the fuck out. They thought they could put this back in the bottle.” Having chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in Maine back in 2016, Jackson would undoubtedly join the senior senator from Vermont as among the most progressive legislators on Capitol Hill. Jackson has said that, if elected, he would not support Chuck Schumer’s leadership bid, would push to abolish ICE, and would refuse to approve sending any military funding to Israel.

After the delegates made Jackson’s nomination official on Saturday, organizers played a song by another favored son of rural New England, Noah Kahan. The 700 or so attendees rose to their feet, waving “Retire Susan” signs in front of an American flag that covered the entirety of one wall, as Kahan’s bright guitar and telling lyrics—“Forgive my northern attitude / Oh, I was raised out in the cold”—briefly filled the room. Just as quickly, as Jackson took the stage, chants of “Troy! Troy! Troy!” drowned out the music, his crooked smile broadening as he acknowledged the cheers.

After making his necessary thank-yous, Jackson turned to the matter at hand. “Susan Collins keeps telling us everything is just fine,” he said to jeers and at least one delegate shouting, “Bullshit!” Jackson pointed out that Collins has been in the Senate since he and the other loggers were staging their border blockade. “I was just trying to figure out how to keep taking care of my family,” Jackson said. “Thirty years later, Susan Collins is still in Washington.”

“They act like we’re idiots,” Jackson said, pausing to throw up his hands in disbelief. “But we all have eyes. We can see what’s happening. We can see our paychecks and the bills that we have. We know that we are getting screwed, and we also know who’s to blame. I’m running to change that.”

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

During his mayoral run, Zohran Mamdani’s opponents warned that he was inexperienced, idealistic, and sure to be ineffective. But, just over six months into his term as New York City’s chief executive, Mamdani and his team have made demonstrable progress on his banner campaign promises—freezing the rent, universal childcare, public grocery stores, fast and (eventually) free buses.

They are proving—most recently by appointing trust-busting former FTC commissioner Lina Khan to the city’s Economic Development Corporation—that they are serious about making New York fair and affordable.

But perhaps the most visible shift that Mamdani has so far brought to the office has to do with lighter, yet no less serious, concerns. This mayoral administration is improving life for everyday New Yorkers through a politics of joy.

As Mamdani said on his ninth day in office, his agenda is not simply about curbing the city’s most urgent crises, but also includes helping “working people to afford lives of joy.” That includes an intentional, visible effort to make many smaller-scale improvements to quality of life in the city. And it also includes efforts by the mayor himself to show up in the places where New Yorkers let loose and celebrate side-by-side with them.

This is not something that New Yorkers have always been able to take for granted. In flexing their tough-on-crime bona fides, local politicians have long focused on deterring unwanted behaviors while providing far less support for the infrastructure and programs that help make a city an enjoyable place to live.

Rudy Giuliani’s administration made little affirmative effort to cultivate joy. In a New York Times piece titled “No-Fun City,” Rudy Giuliani was described as spending much of his second term “shadowboxing against errant cabbies and jaywalkers” before being thrust into the national spotlight by 9/11.

Meanwhile, Eric Adams—who, as mayor, admittedly provided a joyful municipal presence at many nightclubs and high-end eateries—consistently painted a stark picture of New York as a fearsome, dangerous town. In a 2022 interview, he said that “in my professional career, I have never witnessed crime at this level.” Major crimes had, at that point, declined over 80 percent since 1990. But that didn’t stop Mamdani’s Republican foe for the mayorship, Curtis Sliwa, from describing the subway system as being akin to A Clockwork Orange.

After so many local leaders who perpetuated a politics of fear, Mamdani’s demeanor is a breath of fresh air. And it’s backed up by actions and initiatives that seem designed to genuinely foster a joyful city.

Just last week, the Mamdani administration revealed more than 50 reforms designed to make life easier for small businesses. They include streamlining the process for setting up outdoor dining, and reducing fees for street fair sellers and mobile food vendors—sure to help the mayor fulfill his campaign pledge of curbing “halalflation.”

As much as these reforms benefit New York’s business community, Mamdani has also emphasized the pure, happy impact they will have on their customers. In touting the elimination of a frozen dessert permit, he called it “a win for every ice cream lover across New York City.”

The Mamdani administration has also been fighting everyday annoyances that make life in the city more frustrating. In his first 100 days, the city repaired over 100,000 potholes. The mayor’s office even tried to make minor infrastructure repairs more participatory and upbeat by opening a March Madness–style “Municipal Madness” bracket of quality-of-life fixes up to a public vote.

The mayor has also been fortunate to preside over what may be the greatest sports summer in New York history. While he may not be able to personally take credit for the citywide vibes generated as a result, he has found ways to augment the moment. The administration gave away hundreds of free tickets to City Hall’s ceremony honoring the Knicks’ victory and secured 1,000 affordable World Cup tickets for NYC residents. During the tournament’s run, the city also kept soccer pitches open and illuminated all night long, making it easier for everyday New Yorkers—including those who work late—to access community fields.

Least publicized, but no less impactful, the administration has also highlighted the city’s many free and affordable leisure opportunities that may otherwise go under-utilized. City Hall launched an interactive “Summer in NYC” website designed to help youth find nearby activities, from free movie screenings to craft classes at local libraries—all of which have underlying public safety benefits. As Renita Francois, the new deputy mayor of community safety said, “Safety is not just the absence of violence, but the presence of opportunity, dignity, and community.”

That is exactly the philosophy of governance that Mamdani is demonstrating with each and every pro-joy action he takes. “I like that he stands for making sure nobody seems to feel marginalized, like we’re all in this together, we all win together,” one small business owner and former Adams supporter told The Guardian. “If that’s what socialism is, I’m all for it!”

For the first time in a long while, New York has a mayor who shows, in his words and his actions, that feel-good politics can be far from frivolous. In a country founded in part based on the pursuit of happiness, other leaders might consider doing the same.

In his remarks at the Knicks ticker-tape parade, Mamdani shared a reflection about the occasion that could also describe the kinds of summer days his administration is working hard to cultivate. “So often, when this city comes together, it is because we are forced to by a moment of tragedy or adversity. What a gift it is to be brought together by pure, unfiltered joy.”

Shortly after announcing the mission of turning the 2026 midterms into a “hate election,” the campaign brain trust for the Republican Party has settled on the secret-weapon epithet it plans to deploy against its Democratic congressional rivals: “Communism.”

No, really: Three and a half decades after the collapse of the Cold War, the campaign chieftains of the right are planning to revive the paranoid political stylings of Joe McCarthy. The rationale for this round of 21st-century red-baiting stems largely from the recent string of primary wins racked up by Democratic candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America; in the perfervid imaginings of the right, socialists are just genteel stalking horses for Communists, with Marxism serving as the intoxicant of choice for raving leftists of all description. So the thing to do is to call out any and all Democrats as no-good Reds, determined to undermine and overthrow true-blue American individualism and laissez-faire capitalism at every term.

This advice is distilled in a polling memo that the conservative political research firm co/efficient drafted for the House Republican Conference and circulated to GOP House members on July 20. Washington Examiner reporter Hailey Bullis obtained the document, which peddles this spittle-flecked counsel to GOP House candidates: “Call them what they are: Socialists, Marxists, Communists. Communism rings the loudest alarm with constituents (42 percent name it the most dangerous system).… Connect all three, fruit of the same poisonous tree, and let the family name carry the alarm.”

There are a few difficulties with this line of argument, to put it mildly. To begin with, of course, Communism was never anything more than a fringe-minority allegiance in American politics, even during its heyday in the “Red decade” of the 1930s. The penchant for descrying it as a lurking menace in—take your pick—American university classrooms, federal government bureaucracies, diplomatic redoubts, labor unions, and the liberal intelligentsia typically said more about the persecution complexes raging through the id of the American right than it did about the actually existing state of recruitment activities by an American Communist Party that claimed membership in the tens of thousands at its peak. That became the damning consensus view in the wake of the alcoholic and demented McCarthy’s self-implosion on the national stage three years prior to his death.

Yet the primal grievances of the American right are endlessly fungible, and can be repurposed with just a few minor linguistic tweaks or revamped Kulturkampf come-ons. The revival of McCarthyite insinuations and smears is a convenient conceit for a MAGA movement that’s losing any plausible footing in public opinion, thanks to the Trump administration’s pointless and epically unpopular war in Iran and singularly maladroit management of the economy. (The Trump administration’s staggering corruption is also starting to make a noticeable dent as a campaign issue, despite the Democrats’ stupefying inability to make it an election-year crusade.) The GOP’s lurch into red-baiting is the electoral version of the old lawyer’s saw: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.”

Then there’s the opinion survey that the co/efficient campaign savants treat as gospel. On the face of things, it’s monumentally incoherent. Start with the poll’s top-line finding that “63 percent of Americans are very or somewhat concerned about socialist candidates taking office.” On inspection, none of the poll’s lead respondents—who are clustered into numbingly broad categories such as “women” and “Americans of color” that disclose almost no useful information about their actual demographic profiles or broader political worldviews—clock majorities in the “very concerned” affiliation, while the “somewhat concerned” designation is so pointedly nonsignifying that Susan Collins has forged an entire political career out of it. It’s reasonable to infer that this 63 percent bloc represents the largely unformed views of voters just tuning into a primary cycle that’s been awash in centrist and right-wing freakouts in the elite media about the alleged specter of a DSA takeover of the Democratic Party. One useful corrective to such frantic hand-waving is this sturdy data point: The most prominent democratic socialists now holding office are among the most popular politicians in the country.

Now consider the findings that prompted these polling wizards to tie up all Democratic candidates in a tidy red bundle. The query to respondents was: “What do you consider the most dangerous system of government for the United States to pursue?”—not exactly a phrasing designed to yield much in the way of thought or reflective nuance. The offered range of response is a further case study in preselected bias: Communism (42 percent), socialism (15 percent), Marxism (6 percent).

That’s it: the whole spectrum of co/efficient-branded government danger. No mention of rampant authoritarianism or fascism, Christian nationalism, tech oligarchy, or Muskism—all far more present threats to the well-being of ordinary American voters, and many of which are polling worse than the Communist specter is among voters. Indeed, a reality check to all this brackish electoral Bircherism is a recent poll conducted by the anything-but-pinko news outlet CNBC finding that voters would prefer a DSA candidate over one endorsed by President Donald Trump or (worst of all) one strongly identified with the MAGA movement. Another reality check comes from a recent Economist/YouGov poll on the communism question, which found that just 18 percent of respondents regarded the moribund ideology as a major threat on the American scene; 25 percent designated the threat level as “minor,” while a 33 percent plurality declared it, on the soundest empirical grounds, not a threat at all.

And here, too, the survey’s historical incoherence is a wonder to behold. To throw the disparate forces of Communism, socialism, and Marxism all together as “fruit of the same poisoned tree” in a decidedly post-Communist global order is akin to ascribing the onset of the Industrial Revolution to the distempers of Greek mythology. In all likelihood, Communism carried the day among the poll’s harangued respondents as a simple exercise in name recognition: It’s the ideology that Americans have been most forcefully instructed to despise for more than a century, whereas socialism has produced many central and tangible improvements to the fortunes of working Americans. The 6 percent of respondents who went out of their way to calumniate Marxism are the rough polling equivalent of a shrug emoji. (It also says everything about the methodology here that Marxism is not a system of government at all but a nearly 200-year-old philosophy; socialism antedates it by about another century—unless, that is, you count the early Christians.)

Still, it’s clear that the red-baiting branding will continue apace on the right as it tries to seize on any and every brand of grievance calculated to distract attention away from its actual governing record. In a July 3 speech at Mt. Rushmore, Trump declared that the “communist menace” is once more stalking the American civitas, and vowed to “vanquish Communism quickly” and send its adherents “into exile.” He also vowed to continue the MAGA purge of dissent from universities and public discourse—a stance his administration is now planning to codify into a series of ideological disclaimers slapped on to American-history installations at the Smithsonian and elsewhere: “As for those who peddle Marxist lies about our heritage, tell our children that we live on stolen land or that our heroes were oppressors, they’re doing something much worse than slandering our past. They are slandering and attacking our future—not going to let that happen.” Trump’s State Department followed up that outburst with a high-paranoid report on the alleged global red threat called “Cuba: the Capital of Twenty-First Century Communism,” which delivered this fantasia of Castroite world dominance: “For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States.… Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

Even during the many derangements of the Cold War, such unhinged conspiracy-mongering was chiefly fodder for public derision and satire. It’s now the everyday discourse of our presidency and State Department—a twist that poor drunken Joe McCarthy could never have envisioned, but that was always plainly in the sights of his far more disciplined lieutenant Roy Cohn, who also doubled as Donald Trump’s political mentor. Yet what neither Trump nor his quisling party seem to understand is that Cohn never had a chance in hell of being elected to anything. Good luck running on his platform in 2026.

Many writers have tried, and few have succeeded, in capturing the experience of an all-night rave. Attempts to evoke techno’s oceanic feeling—this vortex of bodily sensations that seems to outpace description—tend toward the histrionic. Returning from such a dimension, it’s natural to want to shout it from the rooftops, but writers get a little overexcited, reaching for stylistic flourishes that rise to its intensity and the sense of having, ever so briefly, escaped the strictures of the normative world. It’s true that rave culture, with its insubordinate ethos and hedonistic drive, can provide a vantage point from which to question the existing social, sexual, and moral order—and a bubble in which to test out new ones. But this has culminated in a writing style plagued by purple excess and a tendency to overstate the politics of the personal, all in the service of justifying the culture’s existence as radical. “Raving is resistance” goes the fashionable platitude.

This utopian bent is wired into rave culture’s DNA, although it was often tempered by a healthy cynicism, as we see in Superstars, the 2000 cult novel by the French author Ann Scott, which follows a lesbian DJ’s misadventures, as told in the first person, in the toxic milieu of Paris’s fin de siècle techno scene. The many clubs and warehouse parties that the book’s protagonist, Louise, guides us through on her road to rock bottom are distinctly unsafe spaces full of broken people. Scott, a former musician raised between London and Paris, began the book as a memoir of her friend group, an entourage that formed around the ’90s queer club icon DJ Sextoy. A rare example of an author writing with a true insider perspective, it’s an unvarnished snapshot of rave culture’s second wave, when the major-label takeover was in full swing and techno was, as ever, being declared dead.

Following the romantic entanglements of a group of lesbian and bisexual club rats, Superstars is about the drama, the addiction, and the identity crises that come with staying up for three days straight. And crucially, it’s about being young in the city, and the relief of finding a family—dysfunctional as it may be—in a world of misfits unbothered by the circadian dictates of punching the time clock. We used to call that feeling nonconformity, and it was considered a virtue without having to think of it as praxis.

Like many spirals, this one starts with a manic high, when Louise opens her mailbox to find a record deal from Virgin Records to the tune of 100,000 francs. That’s a lot of money for a recovering heroin user living off her murkily defined roommate/best friend/lover, Pallas, and whose earthly possessions consist of a room full of music hardware—samplers, synths, compressors, floppy drives—that will soon be considered obsolete. The first thing Louise does is hoof it to the home of another kind-of-ex and perennial frenemy, a big-time DJ named Alex, wave the contract in her face, and ask to borrow 500 francs before a visit to the coke guy.

“Literally flying, shearing through the warm late-May air,” Louise runs home from Notre-Dame to the Rue du Chemin Vert and snorts prodigiously until it’s one in the morning and she’s lying on the couch listening to her own erratic heartbeat, when Pallas finally returns her call from the sidewalk outside the club. How much, she asks. How much? “Ten times what I owe you,” Louise whispers into the phone.

The bank transfer won’t hit for a few weeks, but that doesn’t stop them from celebrating. And the natural celebration: a rave—a big one, “all anyone could talk about for two months,” where Alex and another DJ friend named Jessie are booked to spin records and, they hope, get their big break. The flyer reads: SUPER-MEGA RAGER. Detroit. London. Berlin. Brussels. Paris. The best the underground has to offer. “No address, obviously, otherwise the cops would have camped out for two straight months, but also no named affiliations or any indication of sound quality, which was truly unusual. And more mysterious still, no DJ list,” Louise observes. “That kind of secrecy suggested ­either a wild first-class rave, like in the early days, or a hyper-­commercial crapfest with smiley-­face T-shirt stands and other baloney.”

Anyone who’s done time in the trenches will feel the pre-party butterflies as Louise and her crew split up into two overcapacity cars and blast off onto the dark suburban highway, kick drums rattling the panes of their half-lowered windows. Wearing big pants and tight designer tees, they roll up to a circus tent an hour outside Paris and are greeted at the entrance by an airport-sized display panel listing a lineup that would still sell out the biggest rooms in Brooklyn, including The Hacker, DJ Hell, Kevin Saunderson, and Laurent Garnier. “Holy shit,” Louise says to her friends, “you two and Alex are the only two girls.”

Cue the first of many blurry rave scenes, written in short, fractured sentences that mirror the strange dissonance of rushing on E, of feeling supernaturally attentive and yet constantly distracted by just about anything. The best lines are cinematic flashes (“I looked at my undulating hands as they opened and closed”) or quietly incisive musings (“anyone who says this ­music is cold and inhuman should have their head checked”). But the author isn’t immune to the kinds of high-flown metaphors so common in electronic-music criticism, a by-product of trying to convey something so visceral, so rapturous, and yet so alien to anything we experience in daily life as the feeling of being ravaged by a military-grade subwoofer, as in: “The bass kept plowing, a deaf, blind locomotive climbing upward with that voice tirelessly repeating its urge to fuck you all night.” Read that again.

A lot of the prose in Superstars can tend toward the amateurish. But the unedited fanzine style also feels punk, so you can take it for what it is, or not, depending on your tolerance. The translation is occasionally marred by hilariously uncool dadspeak, like when an after-hours party gets raided and Louise’s friend cries: “It’s so pissy—­Jessie was on a heater when ­these gasbags came and told her to shut it all down!” But the rawness is mostly endearing, and authentic as a record of a time when underground music wasn’t so depressingly professionalized. It’s also tonally consistent for a book about a woman consumed by music, in an era when you couldn’t just sleepwalk into the nearest Spotify playlist in search of a personality.

The mind of today’s music fan could hardly comprehend holding a tape recorder to the TV during a Patti Smith rerun concert to capture her cover of “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” by the Byrds because it wasn’t available on CD, as Louise does at one point in the book. That’s not to say today’s fans are any less fervent or that they’re in it more for the lifestyle than the music. But there’s a reason these older fans went to such lengths for the music, and it’s not because it bolstered their politics—though it often did—but because it stirred their souls.

Superstars is also a rich psychological profile, a glimpse into the mind of the young, middle-class nonconformist at the tail end of the pre-Internet age. And that person—every character in the novel, in fact—is a real piece of work: starved for sex and affection, disloyal and disorganized, materialistic in a way that would have seemed tacky to their Berlin counterparts, pathological liars who start drama because there’s nothing good on MTV. Worst of all is Louise, who—as a way of procrastinating on her album—steals her ex’s new young girlfriend, Inès, to have as an impressionable pet on the couch, going “ooh” and “aah” as she makes beats on her drum machine. But even in the midst of all the back-stabbing, when they do get that strung-out, early-morning call from a friend who overdid it, they know to open their door with a warm bath and a pull-out couch ready. That’s what a scene usually is, isn’t it? Neither irreproachable nor totally depraved.

These days, raving is held to great expectations. If you believe the recent spate of highbrow writing on the subject, it can do just about anything. It can prime you for direct action—as in the case of one writer who describes emerging from a club in Berlin “drenched in sweat, ready to riot,” only to join the “tumultuous, violent May Day protests” the next day. It can, when paired with the right mind-altering substances, open a space for healing: a way to “psychically rearrange a world…corrupted by moral hypocrisy and the profit motive,” writes another. Meanwhile, its hypnotic, long-haul mindset can even deprogram such deep-seated constructs as our very perception of time, says a third, defying the “chrononormativity” of “straight time” to create new emancipatory epistemes: “a dissociative time, a transsexual time, a ketamine time.”

It’s not that these writers are over-theorizing the rave so much as that they all seem to suggest that it can somehow make you a better person. Today’s discourse, with its insistence on raving as more than mere frivolous diversion, carries a distinct whiff of the Protestant work ethic, that secularized inheritance that none of us can seem to escape. But Superstars belongs to a different time, when most people’s concerns were, in the author’s words, that “the drugs were good, the music was good, the sex was good.” If anything, today’s priorities seem like a pendulum swing away from the Gen X attitude on display here, which excused toxic behavior as a sign of being tortured and deep. None of these characters would describe their lifestyle as uplifting or edifying or even use a term as rosy as community (which doesn’t appear in the text once). What’s more, they probably wouldn’t use a word like lifestyle, which would have been considered a fraudulent concern, a distraction from the music. Yes, music… remember that old thing? Of course, music is political, always has been—and the scene’s recent awakening to that fact has made it safer and more equitable. But given all the ink spilled in these discussions about lifestyle, Superstars is a welcome reminder of the power of sound itself—why someone might go so far as to hold a recording device to a TV so they can savor it over and over and over again.

Although we know that the Israeli public has moved to the right, particularly the younger generation, as the Israeli elections scheduled for October 27 draw near, something is happening on the Israeli left.

On Monday, July 20, the new Democrats Party held its primary to select its candidates for the upcoming elections. The party is a merger between the left-Zionist parties Labor and Meretz and activists from the mass pro-democracy movement, against the attempt to undermine the independence of the courts and freedom of expression that brought some 150,000 people into the streets every week before the war began on October 7.

The enthusiasm generated by the new party motivated over 114,000 people to register as members, making it the second-largest membership party after Netanyahu’s Likud—which has 140,000 members. The party is led by former IDF deputy chief of staff Yair Golan, who lost his chance to become chief of staff when he stated on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2016 that “if there is one thing that frightens me in remembering the Holocaust, it is identifying horrifying processes that took place in Europe…particularly in Germany…and finding signs of them here among us in 2016.” The 64-year-old Golan, who started out in politics in Meretz, became a hero on October 7 when he got into a car, went south, and rescued a number of young Israeli civilians who were hiding in the woods from the murderous attack by Hamas.

The excitement generated by the primary was partly due to the new digital system that created a sense of genuine ownership of the process. All members were sent a link via WhatsApp and e-mail that when opened contained the names and photos of 51 candidates for the Knesset list. The list was composed of veteran Knesset members and activists from both Labor and Meretz, as well as many key activists from the protest movement and veterans of the security establishment who believe that diplomacy and a quest for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be a central aim of the next government. Ninety-seven thousand members actually voted, 87 percent of the total membership. Also noteworthy is the equal number of male and female candidates.

The only other parties that hold a primary are the Likud and Smotrich’s smaller religious Zionist party, though Netanyahu is trying to control the process and is considering even canceling the primary. All the other parties have their candidates chosen by their leaders or institutions.

In the polls, the Democrats consistently receive an average of 10 or 11 seats among the 120 Knesset members. That would probably lead to the party’s having three ministers in an alternative government, as well as heading important Knesset committees.

A second important segment of the Israeli left is the four predominantly Arab parties, the leftist coalition Hadash (formed by the Communists and others), the secular Arab nationalist Ta’al, the United Arab List moderate Islamic Ra’am, and the secular nationalist Balad. Ra’am was the first Arab party to be a full partner in an Israeli government, the “Government of Change” led by Prime Ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in 2021. All four parties are dedicated to defeating Netanyahu’s government, and to removing the fascist follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane Itamar Ben-Gvir from his post as minister of internal security. An average of only 45 to 50 percent of the Arabs vote in national elections, compared to 70 percent in the Jewish sector. When they ran together as a Joint List in the 2020 elections they got 15 seats. Running separately, polls show them winning 10 or 11 seats.

Getting out the Arab vote will be key to defeating Netanyahu.

One of the problems the left faces is that the continuing trauma created by October 7 feeds opposition within Jewish Israeli society to partner with an Arab party in the government. Yair Golan’s Democrats are the only opposition party calling for Jewish-Arab partnership in government. Yet there may be no alternative to such a partnership if a new “Government of Change” is to be formed.

Another interesting development on the left is the new joint Jewish-Arab “A Place for All of Us” party, founded by leaders of “Standing Together.” Founded in 2015 as a joint Jewish-Palestinian-Israeli grassroots movement for peace, equality, social justice, and an end to the occupation, after October 7 it was the only Israeli movement to take to the streets and immediately call for a ceasefire, the return of all the hostages in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, and an end to the occupation and to stress the need for peace. The party is led by one of the co-leaders of “Standing Together,” Palestinian-Israeli Rula Daoud, the only party led by a woman. The Israeli system requires a party to get at least 3.25 percent of the vote to pass the electoral threshold. In the last elections, that meant 154,820 votes, which equals four Knesset members. While the foundation of the party has inspired many people on the Israeli left who believe in the importance of Jewish-Arab solidarity, cooperation, and partnership, the party is unlikely to get that number, and Jewish co-leader Alon Lee-Green has said that in such a case the party will drop out and not waste votes. Party leaders say that they have aroused a tremendous amount of enthusiasm among women and young people in the Arab sector, who don’t feel they are adequately represented by the four traditional Arab parties. One possibility might be that they could form an alliance with a new Joint List or with Hadash, adding Rula Daoud since none of the Arab parties have a female candidate.

Another very interesting and important development is the fact that former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, with his new Yashar (Direct or Honest) party, has overtaken former prime minister Naftali Bennett as the potential leader of an alternative government. Bennett defines himself as a liberal man of the right who is opposed to a Palestinian state (though his partner in the Beyachad [Together] Party Lapid supports it). Although some people claim that Eisenkot is on the right, he is also viewed by some as a pragmatic centrist, while the Likud smears him as “a leftist.” One clear point of contention between him and Netanyahu was the 2016 Elor Azaria affair, when a young IDF soldier shot and killed a wounded Palestinian who had stabbed an Israeli soldier. Netanyahu said he was a hero, while then–chief of staff Eisenkot said he should be punished (he was). Unlike Netanyahu, who has constantly called Iran an existential threat to Israel, who encouraged Trump to leave the 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal and then encouraged him to attack Iran in “Operation Epic Fury,” he maintained that the JCPOA was working, and added in 2018, “In my view, the Iranians have not carried out an attack initiative in the past 1,400 years.” Eisenkot, who lost a son and two nephews in Gaza, is avoiding saying anything clearly about his views on a Palestinian state or partnership with Arab parties and is trying to appeal to voters from the right. Yet at least two Israeli peace activists, Gavri Bar-Gil, a former executive director of the Peace Now movement, and Uri Zakai, a former chair of the Meretz executive board, are campaigning for him. And while Netanyahu, born into the Jerusalem Ashkenazi elite, has always claimed to represent the disadvantaged Sephardi/Mizrachi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, Eisenkot, despite his Askhenazi-sounding name, is actually of Moroccan background, and is considered a “soul brother” who appeals to Netanyahu’s base. He would become the first non-Ashkenazi prime minister.

An alternative “Government of Change” will not be capable of carrying out a serious diplomatic process with the Palestinians. However, it would be able to stop Netanyahu’s “forever wars” policy and put diplomacy back on the table. It would focus on defending the independence of the courts and freedom of the press and education, end the exaggerated subsidizing of the ultra-Orthodox and settlers, combat crime in the Arab sector that Ben-Gvir has allowed to run wild, penalize the “hilltop youth” who are carrying out pogroms in the West Bank, protect the gatekeepers and remove the fascists Ben-Gvir and Smotrich (with his 2017 “Decisive Plan” to drive out the Palestinians and annex the West Bank) from power, end dreams of resettling Gaza, and reestablish constructive relations with the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, and Jordan. Even Bennett has stopped talking about annexing Area C, 60 percent of the West Bank.

Israeli elections are not the only ones that will influence the prospects for the future. The Palestinians are scheduled to carry out elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council promised for November, to be followed by elections for president, to create a leadership that has the confidence of the Palestinian people. The current leadership is considered corrupt and ineffective. The release from Israeli prison of Marwan Barghouti, who is considered a potential Palestinian Mandela, would help. Palestinian elections will be an important component for any possible progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

What will then be needed is serious international engagement with Israel and the Palestinians, pressure either by Trump, who still wants that Nobel Peace Prize, or a more activist Democratic president after 2028, together with support from the European Union and the League of Arab States.

Israeli peace activists like myself have welcomed the change in direction within the Democratic Party. We don’t need an “Israel right or wrong” approach. We also welcome the fact that AIPAC is now considered toxic for Democratic candidates. One of the party’s potential presidential candidates, Representative Ro Khanna, recently came for a visit to the West Bank, witnessed and spoke out against the injustices carried out against the Palestinians. And Rahm Emanuel, another potential candidate, warned Israelis in a lecture at Tel Aviv University that their current policies are turning the country into a pariah state. We know that. He proposed that a future Democratic administration should actively promote a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, issued by all 22 Arab states, including the PLO representing the Palestinians. The API declared the readiness of all Arab states to recognize the State of Israel and have normal relations with it depending on an end to the occupation, the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital, and an agreed-upon solution for the refugee problem with the Israeli government. Later, the idea of mutually agreed-upon minimal land swaps was added, which would enable 80 percent of the settlers to be within the State of Israel, neutralizing the problem. He called it the “23 State Solution,” the 22 Arab states, including a demilitarized Palestinian state (an idea accepted by the PLO leadership), alongside the State of Israel, a concept originated by J Street. The API was never discussed by an Israeli government and is still on the table.

While support for a two-state solution has declined in both Israeli and Palestinian society, polls carried out by the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD) at the Hebrew University indicate that a majority of both Israelis and Palestinians would support a regional peace and security agreement between Israel and all its Arab neighbors that would include a demilitarized Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel. That’s what the Arab Peace Initiative proposes.

All of the above creates a sense of cautious hope on the Israeli left.

Fittingly, the disgraceful second edition of the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) was celebrated in a venue that embodies Donald Trump’s corruption and impunity.

The ceremony was initially held in April at the Washington Hilton, but was interrupted by a failed assassination attempt. The second dinner took place on Friday at the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC, which from 2015 to 2022 was known as the Trump International Hotel Washington DC.

In Trump’s first term, the fact that the sitting president owned a hotel in the capital quickly led to recurring conflicts of interest: Many foreign dignitaries and political allies paid for the services of the hotel, a quick and easy way to curry favor. At least five people who received presidential pardons from Trump previously stayed at the hotel while the commander in chief owned it. Now, in his second term, Trump no longer owns the hotel—and, as the weekend’s nauseating spectacle showed, he probably wishes he still did.

The central event of the WHCD was a more-than-hour-long speech by Trump, during which he marveled at what he got away with when he owned the hotel. “I was very proud of this building,” Trump told the audience consisting mostly of journalists and White House staff. “This building was hot. Remember the lobby floor? 82,000 feet. For those in the real estate business, 82,000 feet. That’s a major, that’s a major floor. That thing was packed every single night. It was packed mostly Republicans, I would say, but it was packed every single night. It almost brings back memories.” Trump being Trump, he went on to a digression about the “beautiful chandeliers” at the hotel, which were “very special” and made from “Czech crystal.”

The throwaway comment about “mostly Republicans” filling the hotel would be damning if the United States were a country that took the constitutional prohibition against emoluments seriously. By acknowledging that the building was being used by political allies to enrich the president, Trump was displaying what jurists call mens rea, a guilty mind.

Luckily for Trump, he wasn’t speaking to a jury. He was speaking to a much friendlier crowd—the supposed crème de la crème of US political journalists. By all available evidence, they didn’t care. What does a little corruption matter, especially compared to the truly gargantuan graft of Trump’s second term?

Not that the billions Trump has funneled into his personal coffers since returning to the White House mattered to the WHCD attendees either. If it did, they wouldn’t have shown up on Friday. And that tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

To be sure, the event has always been tawdry and cringe-worthy, even under presidents much less brazenly criminal than Trump. It’s a backslapping affair where the media that is supposed to hold the government accountable spends an evening making bad jokes while reveling in its proximity to power. Like the Al Smith dinner in New York, the WHCD is supposed to humanize the political system by showing that seemingly adversarial figures can come together for a good laugh. But in reality, these rituals of comity are also rituals of elite impunity—the whole point is to create an inner-circle bond through social ties that override any larger commitment to principle.

Last April, my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann made the case for getting rid of the WHCD altogether:

The phoned-in rationale for the whole thing has always been that it’s an opportunity to deepen the (already corrupt) practice of access journalism by permitting reporters and government sources to lay aside their structural divergence of interests for an evening and relish each other’s well-lubricated company. But for this alibi to hold water, someone somewhere should by now be able to point to a concrete scoop or productive thaw in press-government relations that issued from all the schmoozing. I’ve lived in Washington for a quarter century, and amid all the secrets, whisper campaigns, and speculations that propel DC journalism, I’ve never heard the faintest suggestion that the Correspondents’ Dinner served any useful newsgathering purpose.

Lehmann’s critique of the WHCD was more than vindicated by Friday night’s fiasco. The polymathic literary essayist Guy Davenport once wrote, “Sometimes when reading Goethe I have a paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.” Anyone who listened to the soul-crushing attempted mirth of Trump’s WHCD speech was overcome by that same paralyzing suspicion.

Instead of humor, Trump resorted to racism and homophobia. He openly insulted his political foes and journalists in the crudest possible ways. He even crowed about the fact that his plutocratic friends now own the media and are in a position to punish journalists who criticize him.

Trump repeated rancid racist lies about Ilhan Omar, saying the Minnesota representative “and her brother are thinking about moving in together. Very much in love.” He added, “She ought to get the hell out of our country. She shouldn’t be here.” Trump complained that his advisers told him he shouldn’t call Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker “a fat pig.”

Trump made a bizarre sex joke and then berated the audience for not laughing:

The other day, a senator I knew got a text, a great guy, from his wife. And she said, “When you get home, I wanna have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me.” And he said, “I can’t do both.” You know what the—ha ha. You know?

In other words, ha ha, can’t go up the stairs and make love. He, does anybody get that one? I thought that was actually pretty good. That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole fricking stupid speech that they wrote. That was the only good one. And that went down with not exactly great laughter.

Trump pretended to congratulate CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins on winning an award and then started to denigrate her. “I want to personally congratulate CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on receiving her award,” Trump said. “It was all about me. It’s a fake—she shouldn’t get the award, it was a fake. But I didn’t mind, I said, ‘Kaitlan, congratulations.’ But it was fake, there’s no question about it.” Trump went on to conflate Collins with trans actress Dylan Mulvaney, which the transphobic president clearly meant as an insult.

Of all of Trump’s many failed jokes, the two most revealing involved allies who are helping to reshape the media to make it more friendly to the president: David Ellison, who runs CBS, and Bari Weiss, the faithful minion executing Ellison’s agenda. Trump’s comments about these two were pure exercises in humiliating the mainstream media.

About Ellison, Trump said:

But tonight’s event is even crazier than the last time.

In fact, it’s so successful that I’ve been informed by CBS News’s David Ellison, who’s gonna do a fantastic job. He’s the owner. He’s the owner. He bought it, spent a lot of money, and he’s gonna make, I think, fantastic changes and keep some of the great stuff going. But the next year, they’re going to call it the Trump White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

He told me that. And I like that very much. We’re gonna change the name of it, okay? Well, it’s gonna be so hot, just like our country is hot. We are hot, by the way. But to be honest, it’s just about the only way that they’re gonna ever get me back here. You’re gonna have to change the name of the dinner.

The joke about Weiss was premised on the fact that she’s married to a woman. Trump said:

I have to say that we’re having an amazing load of accomplishments that the media never talks about. For example, under my administration, a once-feared and powerful regime that relentlessly attacked America has finally been toppled. Their former leaders have been removed and they’re now being run by a gay dictator facing internal divisions.

But I, for one, wish Bari Weiss all the best at CBS News.

Although Trump has borrowed stylistically from comedians such as Don Rickles and Howard Stern, he doesn’t really do comedy. Rather, he indulges in insults, which mimic the effect of comedy by violating social norms. But the goal isn’t a laugh: It is humiliation. And in the case of the comments about Ellison and Weiss, the point was to underscore that Trump has powerful friends who can fire people at CBS (and possibly soon at CNN).

None of this is completely new. The types of comments Trump made at the WHCD are largely material Trump has used before in his MAGA rallies. But in this case, the audience wasn’t his MAGA fans but the media elite. By showing up to the WHCD, they have given Trump a venue to humiliate them. All of this was done in order to preserve access journalism and the rituals of elite civility. But Trump’s sheer, unmitigated cruelty had one redeeming quality: It made clear for all to see that elite civility is only empowering the decline of democracy.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Over the past few years, the United Auto Workers, a union representing workers at auto plants, aerospace manufacturers, universities, and more across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, has undergone a transformation from a demoralized, shrinking union to the vanguard of the fighting wing of the labor movement. Led by president Shawn Fain and his slate of reformers, the union has taken on bold, member-led organizing projects from the historic Stand Up Strike at the Big Three automakers in 2023 to unionizing Southern auto plants, including workers at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2024. This dramatic shift was precipitated by a 2020 corruption probe by the Justice Department that resulted in convictions of more than a dozen union officials and three Fiat Chrysler executives on charges including racketeering, embezzlement, and tax evasion, and ushered in a democratic revolution that put Fain at the helm of the 400,000-member union.

The federal investigation also prompted the district court appointment of a federal monitor to oversee union finances and operations and root out corruption. The court put Neil Barofsky, who co-chairs the monitorship practice at the white-collar firm Jenner & Block but has no prior experience working with unions, in that role. It’s less common for courts to impose monitorships on unions than on corporations, but previous monitorships at the Teamsters and other unions have supervised democratic elections and safeguarded against corruption. Between 2021 and 2025, Jenner & Block billed the UAW more than $25 million for the monitorship.

Fain is currently running for reelection along with the “United UAW” slate of 13 International Executive Board candidates. Fain is favored to win, but has faced bruising opposition from candidates including Rich Boyer, the vice president of the Stellantis Department who ran on Fain’s slate in the last election. In 2024, Fain stripped Boyer of some of his responsibilities after finding that he had been too conciliatory in negotiations with the company. Fain’s letter removing Boyer alleged that he had “agreed to concessions on absenteeism” and agreed to delay the implementation of a profit-sharing agreement, among other strategic disagreements. This prompted Boyer to file a complaint with the monitor, who last month released a report accusing Fain of removing Boyer for retaliatory reasons.

But now Fain claims that the monitor’s inquiry actually stems from a conflict between union leaders and the monitor over the union’s stance on Gaza that has played out quietly over the last two years. Fain and other union leaders had not spoken publicly about this conflict, pursuing a strategy of appeasement with the monitor and fearing legal sanction—until two weeks ago, when Fain issued a blistering statement accusing the monitor of election interference for releasing his latest report accusing Fain of improper actions just six weeks before ballots drop in the union’s presidential election. “I’m done being silent,” said Fain. “Neil Barofsky has a political grudge against me because the UAW took an anti-war stance about what was happening in Gaza.”

Fain’s issues with Boyer stem from a core disagreement over how the union should engage with the company, and how to fulfill the reform movement’s promise to reject backroom deals with the bosses. “The truth when it comes to Boyer is that I didn’t want him running the Stellantis Department because he wasn’t doing a good job for our members,” said Fain in the statement. “I wouldn’t let him hire family members into UAW positions, and I wouldn’t stand by while he bargained concessions with Stellantis and failed to enforce our contract.” Barofsky, however, concluded in the report that Fain did not sufficiently establish that Boyer was “derelict in his duty,” and thus that his removal was justified. He instead found that Fain retaliated against Boyer, abused the authority of his office in matters involving his fiancée and her family, and should face possible further disciplinary proceedings. Fain entirely denies these findings.

Union leadership now alleges that Barofsky is overreaching because of a personal political vendetta over the UAW’s call for a ceasefire in Gaza. That conflict dates back to December 2023, when Barofsky called Fain to express his concerns over a statement in which he said, “I am proud that the UAW International Union is calling for a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine. From opposing fascism in WWII to mobilizing against apartheid South Africa and the CONTRA war, the UAW has consistently stood for justice across the globe.” According to an audio recording of that call obtained by The Nation, Barofsky told Fain, “Comparing Israel to the Nazis, to say that they’re acting and engaging in acts of genocide…that does potentially cross the line into the area of antisemitism.” Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib has now called on the monitor to resign, saying in a statement, “Neil Barofsky’s personal support for genocide is irreparably interfering with his duties.”

The upcoming presidential election is a referendum on not just how UAW members interpret the drama that has burst into public view in recent weeks but also their faith in the reform movement that has promised to make their union more democratic and more militant. During a Facebook Live stream last week, Fain spoke directly to members. “If Rich Boyer is your next president, I can assure you one thing. The company will be in heaven,” he said. “The choice here is between a union that fights or a union that fails.”

Barofsky was appointed as the UAW’s federal monitor in 2020 after the DOJ’s corruption probe cleared out the leadership bench of the union. For years, union leaders enriched themselves with freebies from automakers and lucrative kickback schemes from vendors producing UAW merchandise. A federal court ordered a referendum in which union members voted overwhelmingly to implement “one-member, one vote,” allowing them to directly elect their leadership. In the union’s first-ever direct elections, Fain and the “Members United” slate, which included Boyer, won office on a platform of “No Concessions, No Corruption, No Tiers.”

Beyond his mandate to investigate corruption, the recently surfaced recording of Barofsky’s call to Fain and his subsequent actions show that he took issue with the positions on Gaza that the union came to democratically. In November 2023, the UAW’s International Executive Board passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, making it the largest national union to do so at that point. A couple of weeks later, Barofsky called Fain, emphasizing that he was reaching out in a personal capacity. “In the statement, when you made comparisons to the UAW’s prior statements against fascism in World War II, against apartheid in South Africa and the Contras, it unintentionally—I believe, unintentionally—drew a parallel between the actions of Israel after it was attacked by Hamas,” Barofsky said on the call. Fain said he disagreed with this characterization. “My problem with this is they’re killing tens of thousands of innocent fucking civilians in the process, and it’s complete bullshit,” he told Barofsky. “OK, so that is what your intent was, to compare it to the Nazis,” Barofsky replied.

Later in the call, Barofsky disputed Fain’s claim about Israel’s targeting of civilians. “As you would say, wholesale killing of tens of thousands of people—which, I think that number is not not accurate—but a lot of innocent people have been killed for sure. Much like you know, 100,000 people were killed in the bombing of Dresden during World War II by the Allies. And that’s not to excuse it, but it is an aspect of war,” said Barofsky. By the end of December 2023, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reported that approximately 21,800 Palestinians had been killed in Israeli strikes. “Whatever you want to say about Israel, if they wanted to commit genocide, it wouldn’t look like this,” Barofsky continued. “Genocide looks like what Hamas did, right?” He told Fain that his children had been traumatized by Students for Justice in Palestine protesters on college campuses in New York City “chanting ‘gas the Jews.’” “And if you look at the photographs, they’re holding UAW signs while they’re chanting that.”

“When you use language like that and are making those types of comparisons, you risk crossing a line,” Barofsky said. Before ending the call, he added, “This is not a monitorship thing. I just want to make that any more clear.”

In February 2024, Barofsky forwarded to the union’s board a letter he had received from the Anti-Defamation League expressing concerns about a pro-BDS statement issued by UAW 7902 in New York, composed of NYU and New School lecturers and teaching assistants. Barofsky acknowledged that the issue was outside of his jurisdiction, but said that he felt it was important to send along “given the serious concerns raised here.” Benjamin Dictor, an attorney working with the UAW, said in an email to Barofsky that same month that he was improperly inserting himself into the union’s political stances. Barofsky’s firm, Jenner & Block, is listed by the ADL as one of its “Corporate Partners Against Hate.”

While the initial call was calm in tone, if politically charged, tensions between Barofsky and Fain erupted at a February 2024 International Executive Board meeting in Detroit, which Barofsky dialed into from Switzerland. According to previous reporting on the meeting by The Detroit News, Barofsky denied that he had used the word antisemitic or suggested as much about Fain during the phone call. As the now-public recording of the call shows, Barofsky did in fact say that Fain’s statement “potentially [crossed] the line into the area of antisemitism.” During the board meeting, Fain took offense to Barofsky’s mischaracterization of their call, and replied forcefully. He said, “For anybody to ever fucking say I’m antisemitic, brother, I’ll fight your ass in front of this building in a heartbeat.” Barofsky replied, “I don’t think that you’re antisemitic.… I have no reason to think that you’re antisemitic.… And if you heard that or perceived that, I’m really sorry that that happened. But I’m very careful in my wording, and I would never have said something like that, even if I did believe it, and I did not.”

Fain said during the meeting that he had been rattled by Barofsky’s call. “You’re the monitor over us,” he said. “You have a realm of power over us. So yeah, it concerned me greatly.” Cathy Highet, a board member of the Association for Union Democracy who represented Teamsters members during their union’s federal monitorship, said Barofsky’s promises that he was calling in a personal capacity were hollow. “This is someone who has the power to investigate officers and try to tee them up for removal,” she said. “So if somebody with that sort of power ‘suggests’ that you do something, that is exercising his power. You can’t take that hat off.”

Days after the February board meeting, Barofsky opened his first investigation into Fain over a complaint from the union’s secretary-treasurer, Margaret Mock, who alleged that Fain had stripped her of some of her responsibilities for retaliatory reasons. Mock ran on Fain’s slate in 2022, but had since chafed with the union’s new leadership. According to a thorough account by labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein in the New Labor Forum, Mock angered Fain’s staff by delaying approvals for organizing-related expenses, and denying reimbursements for petty charges like a $151 pizza bill. Mock told Fain she was running a tight ship to avoid even the appearance of corruption. But comments she has made suggest that her hostility also stemmed from resistance to the new leadership of the union, many of whom were hired from outside of the union’s membership. “I am totally against hiring anybody from outside. We have hundreds of thousands of members,” she said according to minutes from a February 2024 Executive Board meeting. “So I take offense that our people aren’t qualified.”

In the first months of Fain’s tenure, Mock tried to pressure the union to hire her son into the Stellantis Department, which Fain blocked. On the Facebook Live stream last week, Fain said that vice-president Boyer had confessed to going along with Mock’s request because she had refused to approve shelving and furniture for his office if he did not. “So why doesn’t the monitor investigate that?” Fain asked. In February 2024, the executive board voted to strip Mock of 11 departments under her supervision due to a report from the UAW’s compliance officer asserting that she had used her authority to “delay, obstruct, or even block the work of other departments.”

Months later, Boyer tried to have his grandson hired into the UAW’s security staff, which Fain also blocked. In text messages between Boyer and Fain from May 6, 2024, a screenshot of which was obtained by The Nation, Boyer threatened to make a complaint with the monitor. “Company disrespect me. You disrespect me what does a man do [sic],” Boyer wrote. “My grandson.” He continued in another text, “I’m sitting at home thinking about what I tell Monitor on Wednesday. Mad as hell.” Fain wrote back, “I haven’t disrespected you, trying to do the right thing, that’s what we campaigned on and ran on.”

Barofsky’s most recent report stems from a complaint filed by Boyer alleging that Fain improperly removed him from his responsibilities overseeing the Stellantis Department. In May 2024, Fain removed Boyer, alleging that he concealed bargaining concessions during the 2023 Stand Up Strike and agreed to delay profit-sharing payments for supplemental workers, among other bargaining issues. In his letter removing Boyer, Fain accused him of “agree[ing] to watered-down language in private” and “allow[ing] the company to backtrack on what they actually agreed.” The UAW constitution grants the president the power to remove an officer from a department if he determines they have been derelict in their duties. In the following months, Fain took a more aggressive approach to dealing with Stellantis management, threatening a nationwide walkout. In December 2024, Stellantis’s CEO abruptly resigned and the company ultimately reversed a decision to lay off about 1,100 employees at an Ohio Jeep plant.

To investigate Mock and Boyer’s complaints, Barofsky conducted extensive interviews of UAW staffers and officers, dissected internal texts and e-mails, and dug into the minutiae of internal union decision-making. In the ensuing two years, he released a series of reports excoriating Fain for his decisions and actions. In 2025, after Barofsky threatened to take charges against Fain to the Trump Justice Department, union leaders negotiated a de facto agreement to mend the relationship with the monitor wherein Fain would return Mock and Boyer’s assignments, and Fain’s chief of staff, Chris Brooks, would resign.

That fragile détente was broken with the release of the monitor’s June 2026 report. In it, Barofsky argues that Fain fired Boyer in retaliation for Boyer’s refusal to intervene in a workers’ compensation claim filed by the sister of Fain’s fiancée and refusal to approve a bonus for workers at the Stellantis National Training Center where Fain’s fiancée works. “I never sought special favors for anybody in my family,” said Fain in the Facebook Live stream. “If Rich was honest, he would tell you himself he’s tried to get his daughter and grandson hired by the international union. I blocked these requests time and again, because it goes against everything that we ran on.” The Department of Justice has reportedly opened a grand jury investigation into Fain’s conduct.

Highet sees much of the material in the latest report as potentially out of the bounds of the monitor’s court-ordered authority. “The monitor has the authority to investigate allegations that…officers are engaging in corruption,” she said. “But not…to enforce the union’s constitution outside of the context of corruption.” In one illustrative example, Barofsky dismisses Fain’s concerns that Boyer made substantial concessions to management in negotiating Stellantis’s absenteeism policy. Barofsky acknowledges that Boyer made such concessions, but writes that this alone does not prove the “dereliction of duty” that Fain claimed to have Boyer removed. According to Barofsky’s reading, Boyer would have acted improperly only if he had hidden the concessions from the President’s Office. Barofsky finds that Boyer made Fain and his staff aware of the concessions as he was negotiating them, and thus was not derelict in his duty. But Fain has made it clear that the concessions themselves are the point, as they demonstrate that Boyer was undermining his administration’s agenda, which pushed for a more aggressive bargaining approach. “What Fain is saying is he wanted Boyer to be more aggressive against management, and that’s the sort of thing that elections are supposed to decide,” said Highet. “How aggressive are we? How conciliatory are we?… That’s outside the scope of the monitor’s authority.”

In another example, Fain took issue with Boyer’s decision to hold the annual meeting of the Stellantis Council, the body that coordinates bargaining at Stellantis, in Puerto Rico, despite the fact that the UAW does not represent any Stellantis workers on the island. Prior to Fain’s tenure, holding union meetings in resort locales had been common. In his letter removing Boyer, Fain wrote that this decision “has continued to haunt [the union] in our new organizing drives, where anti-union employers have repeatedly thrown it in our face—just as [Fain] predicted they would.” But Barofsky concludes that Boyer’s decision to hold the conference in Puerto Rico was “the result of good-faith reliance on UAW guidance.”

He adds that while there was some negative press around the conference, “it does not appear to have been widespread.” The conference was held in the midst of a major (and ultimately unsuccessful) organizing drive at Mercedes-Benz in May 2024. Leading up to the Mercedes vote, the anti-union Center for Union Facts unleashed an advertising campaign against the UAW’s organizing in the South, placing billboards in cities emphasizing the union’s past corruption scandals. Following the Stellantis Council meeting, the Center published a mock-up postcard with Shawn Fain’s face reading, “Greetings from Puerto Rico!”

When ballots drop in the presidential election in late August, we will find out whether Barofsky’s reports have undermined members’ support for Fain’s leadership. On the Facebook Live stream, Fain argued that the ultimate winners in the clashes between his reform movement, other union leaders, and Barofsky are the bosses. “They want to go back to the old way of doing things, just kissing ass and writing paychecks. They don’t want a UAW that’s fighting back.” Now that he’s gone public with his conflict with the federal monitor, Fain says there will be more to come. “With this latest action, I am done being silent. The membership deserves to know what the hell is really going on here,” said Fain. “And if Rich Boyer is your next president, I can assure you one thing. The company will be in heaven.”

If you have spent any time on the British side of social media—Elon Musk’s X, in particular—you will know that the United Kingdom is being invaded by foreigners.

They arrive professing their love of the place. They are made welcome. Then they settle in like Penelope’s suitors: occupying the hall, running down the estate, insulting the kingdom, and maintaining throughout the assumption that one of their own will soon be master. They hold British norms in contempt. They don’t speak proper English. They infiltrate British politics and influence it against British interests. They are convinced that their culture and religion are superior, and they won’t shut up about it. They are here, above all, to extract.

Let’s not be politically correct. We all know whom I am talking about: Americans.

For the UK, the “special relationship” has always been an unrequited love. Westminster will stay up until the last state is called. Washington cannot reliably remember that we have a chancellor of the Exchequer rather than a treasury secretary. In the past 10 years, Brexit and the war in Ukraine have turned the British desire to please Americans into the necessity of appeasing Donald Trump.

Through conferences and sponsorships, media ventures, no-bid State Department grants, and fat public-affairs contracts, the MAGA industrial complex has spent 10 years trying to buy British politics.

The question is whether MAGA got the return on investment it expected. Has Trumpism won British hearts and minds? Or is the sight of his brand on British soil no more meaningful an endorsement than a Kardashian holding up a bottle of gummies?

Musk’s purchase of X was the first turning point. British tabloids are even more swayed by what trends there than their Washington counterparts, and the dominoes fall fast: Whatever is trending by breakfast is what some minister has to answer for on the morning round. Back then, being liked by the man who owns the algorithm felt like a massive undeclared political donation. Now it is starting to feel like the kiss of death.

Michael Gove—“Baron Gove”—was once one of the most powerful men in the Conservative Party. A former cabinet minister, he is now editor of The Spectator, the oldest surviving magazine in the world and a home of British Toryism. He is critical of Trumpism’s entertainment-industry metastasis in the UK.

“The people within it sustain a cartoonish view of the country’s problems,” he tells me.

You see this most clearly in the conferences funded by American evangelical, cryptocurrency, defense, and technology interests: CPAC, NatCon, and Turning Point.

“They have a pantheon of demons, but you will never see them seriously engage with the fundamental problems, like improving transport or making devolution work,” Gove says.

At the first Great British CPAC, held last week in London, I encountered a parade of increasingly uncomfortable, formerly respectable British Conservative figures dancing like bears at a Gypsy wedding for rich Americans whose political agendas are irrelevant to the British public. This spectacle has become the British right’s greatest political liability.

“It’s sad what happened to Liz Truss; she morphed from a serious political figure into the ringmaster of a circus,” Gove reflects. “CPAC used to be a useful exercise for American Republican politicians to test their message, but it has become an amalgamation of baby podcasters, YouTube Zoomers, and thrill-seeking transgressives who want to ‘own the libs.’”

A Young Conservative volunteer I meet has been tasked with handing out free tickets the day before the conference, in order to avoid the embarrassment of a hall containing more left-wing journalists than right-wing attendees. He maintains a perfect stiff upper lip as I quiz him about the event’s obscene aesthetics.

“This is grifting,” he sighs. “It has nothing to do with British values.”

Ed Vaizey—“Baron Vaizey”—another former Conservative minister and a radio presenter, is also unimpressed and most certainly not in attendance.

“Speaking the same language doesn’t mean sharing the same culture or interests,” he tells me. “When Obama came to support the Remain campaign, Brexiteers were outraged. Now they are happy to have Trump tell Britain what to do.”

Writing about the Second World War in The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell credited British hypocrisy with fascism’s failure to take hold among the British elite. Or, as the American self-help guru James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits, identity drives behavior. A person who identifies as health-conscious waves away the dessert menu without thinking about it. A Briton whose identity has been forged in the national myths—Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of the Nazis—cannot bear the idea of Trump’s White House.

There is, as Gove puts it, “a residual British belief that governing should include dignity.” Replace the quiet dependability of a press release with the vulgarity of race-slop memes? No, thanks. We are British.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, the right-wing party competing with the Tories, and CPAC GB’s headline speaker, personifies Trumpism’s failure to win genuine buy-in in Britain. The right-wing press that courted him for a decade has found the meme-king kleptocracy impossible to stomach.

The first crack came with Christopher Harborne, Reform’s biggest donor, a Thailand-based billionaire who gave Farage £5 million personally—a sum Farage failed to enter in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Jacob Rees-Mogg, his fellow GB News presenter and a former Conservative minister who has argued for a Reform–Tory merger, tactfully suggested that he give it back. The commentariat held its nerve.

Two months later, it ran out.

George Cottrell, a convicted fraudster who has cowritten a book about grooming politicians into corruption by picking up the bill for nondeclarable expenses such as travel and accommodation—which is precisely what he did with Farage—turned out to be a mainstay of Reform’s political operation.

Here is one thing I learned in 14 years of living among the British: They won’t show you contempt to your face. You’ll see it in what they do.

For all their aversion to earnestness, every English politician secretly wants his Love Actually moment. Hugh Grant’s prime minister, repelled by an American president who has made a pass at a junior No. 10 staffer, does something astonishingly un-British: At the joint press conference, he takes the microphone and says the quiet part out loud.

The relationship has gone bad, he tells the room. The president takes what he wants and ignores “all those things that really matter to, erm… Britain.”

Whatever the financial desperation of individual British right-wingers, the small-c conservatism of the British psyche may prove more resistant to the MAGA grift than progressives have been bracing for since 2016. The next time American money comes knocking, I hope the British do what they do best and tell it to go back where it came from.

In Mexico City, in March of 2025, I was browsing in an English-language bookstore in Roma Norte and found a worn, secondhand copy of J.M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians. I knew nothing about the book but had a vague sense that I’d been meaning to read it, and I enjoyed the idea of it as a souvenir from my trip: It was so incongruous, bringing a book by a South African Nobel laureate, written 45 years earlier, home from Mexico.

When I got home, I realized why the title was familiar: I already owned a copy. I remembered now that I’d been avoiding it because every time I picked it up and skimmed its opening, I sensed the doom and suffering steaming off its pages. Now two used copies of Waiting for the Barbarians sat next to each other on my bookshelf, like a pair of accusing eyes, watching to see when I would be brave enough to start reading.

It is especially hard to choose to read this kind of book when the world already seems so dark. Ever since Donald Trump took office for the second time, my cultural diet has tended toward the escapist and comforting. It took me nearly a year, but I finally bucked up and read the novel this past winter, and two things quickly became clear. First, it was even more brutal than I had imagined. Second, it was actually just the right book to read at that moment, holding up a fun house mirror to our current reality, the kind that distorts images slightly but also reveals them in all their true grotesquerie.

As the ICE crackdown unfolded across the country and reached a climax in Minneapolis, and people were getting hauled out of their homes and cars, beaten and shot in the streets, jailed and deported, Coetzee’s book became a kind of handbook for me, a guide to understanding how an oppressive regime wields power. But it also taught me something about resistance, and about how to hold fast to your own sanity and morality in increasingly insane and immoral times.

Waiting for the Barbarians is set in an unnamed country at an unspecified time, in an outpost of an anonymous imperial government, a place referred to as the “frontier.” The long arms of empire have reached this remote front and established a town here, complete with military barracks and watchtowers and a locked gate that keeps some people out and others in. In settling this land, the citizens have pushed the so-called “barbarians,” an amorphous, nomadic people, off this fertile spot and into the harsh surrounding deserts and plains. The barbarians are rarely seen but serve as the symbolic enemy for the people in the frontier town: the threat from without, the unknown forces that lurk at the edges of civilization, the bogeyman in the wild.

Surely the fact that Coetzee was writing from within apartheid-era South Africa informs every word of this book. But the empire of the novel is any and every empire, and the “capital,” which serves as the seat of power, is every capital. In the novel, emissaries of the government travel from the capital to the frontier to perform displays of military power and to reinvigorate the citizens’ fear of the unknown, with constant reminders that they are at war and that the barbarians are the enemy at the gates.

Our narrator is a magistrate in the town who has doubts about the actual threat the barbarians present. He is friendly with the soldiers, cooks, and servants who work for him at the military barracks, and he entertains himself by occasionally visiting the local brothel or going out for drinks with acquaintances. He also takes long walks among the ramparts of a partially uncovered structure in the desert that hints at another civilization that once occupied these lands and has been buried by the sands of time. The fragility and futility of empire runs beneath the story like a faint but steady hum.

The peace is disturbed by the arrival of Colonel Joll, the novel’s own Pete Hegseth, a warmonger from the capital, and nothing good happens after that (which is too bad, because his arrival happens on the first page). Joll makes a show of capturing, imprisoning, and torturing a band of barbarians who were supposedly plotting against the town but were more likely minding their own business and trying to survive the harsh winter. The colonel is something of a corollary to O’Brien in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four—the unrepentant torturer who believes that, as our magistrate puts it, “Pain is truth.”

One of the justifications for arresting the members of this pitiable little tribe is that, as one of Joll’s soldiers explains, “When they saw us coming they tried to hide in the reeds…. So the officer, the Excellency, ordered us to take them in. Because they were hiding.” He also mentions that none of the soldiers could speak their language, which means the barbarians couldn’t offer a defense. It is guilt by circumstance: You are foreign and you looked scared, so you must have been doing something wrong.

The magistrate, watching all this, instantly realizes that he’s out of step with Joll and his men; it is at this moment that he begins to see, as Orwell put it in his famous anti-colonial essay “Shooting an Elephant,” “the dirty work of Empire at close quarters.” The magistrate begins to question everything and also muses on his own complicity as he continues to follow Joll’s orders, even as his loathing for the colonel grows: “The Empire does not require that its servants love each other, merely that they perform their duty.”

With every page of Waiting for the Barbarians, America was increasingly revealed to me in its political morass. The violence in the novel even unfolds against a wind-blown, wintry landscape—“From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow”—much like the backdrop of the scenes we all witnessed in the streets of Minneapolis in January and February.

The phrase “criminal illegal aliens” was (and still is) bandied about by the likes of Kristi Noem, then head of the Department of Homeland Security, and Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called “border czar.” Meanwhile, immigrants have been cast by Trump as “animals” and “hardened criminals,” a “massive invasion” of foreigners “poisoning the blood of our country.” These words signal the inhumanity and undesirability of undocumented immigrants, the overwhelming majority of whom have never committed a crime and are living peacefully with their families in American towns and cities. Their only “crime” is their desire to be part of this supposedly free and open nation.

Coetzee knows that in order for the wheels of power to turn, they must be fueled by hatred for some perceived enemy. The barbarians are a peaceful people who mostly appear in the frontier for the purposes of trade and resource-gathering. There is no evidence that they have ever waged war or plotted against the citizens. But if the people stay scared, they are much easier to control. And if they’ve been persuaded to disregard the humanity of a certain group, they can convince themselves to tolerate—even perversely enjoy—the government’s cruelty to that group. After all, they’re not the ones being beaten and broken.

As with the barbarians, who are paraded through the public square and assaulted in the novel, we have seen immigrants getting humiliated and hurt and disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Our “barbarians” are Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and, most of all, Latin American. They have brown skin, and so they must be suspect. The barbarians in the novel are of nonspecific, non-white origin with Indigenous overtones—the magistrate tells us that a girl has “the straight black eyebrows, the glossy black hair of the barbarians.” Like everything else in the novel, they are stand-ins for any marginalized ethnic group in a Eurocentric world.

The Martiniquan poet Aimé Césaire says in his 1950 book Discourse on Colonialism that “in France people spoke of a civilized world and a barbarian world. The barbarian world was Africa, and the civilized world was Europe.” So it was, and so it remains. Here in America, as the cultural descendants of Europe, we have clung to what James Baldwin calls “the very warp and woof of the heritage of the West, the idea of white supremacy.” Just like those in power in Coetzee’s world, Trump and his followers legitimize this belief and invite the entire country to partake in the public spectacle of treating racialized others as slightly less than human.

But it is also true that in witnessing and passively condoning these events, we chip away at our own humanity. Coetzee shows us again and again that the real barbarians, in a spiritual sense, are not the ostensibly uncivilized “others” but those who enact their cruelties upon them. In his book, Aimé Césaire exhorts us to “study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism.”

The magistrate does everything he can to keep his soul unscarred, even as his body, after his imprisonment and torture for disobeying the regime, becomes scarred beyond recognition, a crippled mass of rags and bones. At the same time, the magistrate does not argue for his own moral superiority over the soldiers. After all, he too is part of the system and has been enjoying the fruits and luxuries of his position all his life. In thinking of Colonel Joll, he is forced to acknowledge that “I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.”

At one point, the magistrate takes stock of the “warden,” his primary torturer and Colonel Joll’s right-hand man: “I find it hard to hate him in return. The road to the top must be hard for young men without money, without patronage, with the barest of schooling, men who might as easily go into lives of crime as into the service of the Empire.” Though Coetzee wrote these words back in 1980, I can imagine no better description of the men who were recruited and trained by Noem’s DHS to become ICE agents. These men, perhaps as much as anyone in America, are also victims of the crackdown, since look what they’ve had to turn themselves into to do the work they do.

In the novel, the magistrate appears to be the only dissident in the town, attempting to live in such a way that future generations can say that “in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.” He is an imperfect hero, but he is our hero nonetheless, simply for his refusal to stand down. This refusal takes many forms, from proclaiming truth in the face of the government’s lies, to imploring others in the town to look to their own moral compass, to actively trying to stop torture and murder as they occur, to inviting the torture upon himself.

But as I read this book and simultaneously took in the stories out of Minneapolis, one key difference occurred to me: The people resisting in Minnesota were not, like the magistrate, alone. Although in both Coetzee’s world and our own, “the soldiery tyrannizes the town,” only one of those towns was crushed beneath the boot of tyranny. The people of Minneapolis kept getting kicked and then standing up again, because—most crucially—they were helping each other to rise. By caring for and watching out for their neighbors, citizens and immigrants alike, they reminded each other (and all of us) of our common humanity—not our commonality with people of our own race or nationality, but with all people in the human race.

This acknowledgment is not good for those in power, since it throws doubt on the justifications for their wars, and perpetual war is necessary to keep people in line. Shortly after the events in Minnesota, our government shifted its focus from a war within to a war without. We have stayed busy since then fighting a war with Iran—no one, the president least of all, knows why—and we have destabilized that entire region, so that countless lives are being lost or destroyed while we sit back and watch the mayhem unfold on our screens.

Meanwhile, the imprisonment, abuse, and destruction of the lives of immigrants proceeds steadily on our own shores. Trump has increased his calls for mass deportations, and the conditions in the ICE holding centers should make all of us ashamed. In late June, the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision, narrowly prevented Trump from realizing his ultimate white-supremacist dream: stripping automatic citizenship rights for all babies born on US soil. And in early July, as ICE raids once again ramped up in American cities, two people were shot and killed in their vehicles by ICE agents within six days. Through a combined strategy of intimidation, brute force, and legal challenges, the Trump administration keeps reminding Americans just who our enemies are.

What Coetzee’s magistrate wants, what all the people in the frontier town want—and likely what the people of Minneapolis and the people of Tehran want—is to return to the peaceful lives they had before the soldiers came. To live in communion with nature and with their fellow humans, including the so-called barbarians. But, Coetzee’s narrator asks, “What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe.”

America has long been an empire, asserting itself on the world stage and taking what it wanted. It used to espouse a sense of responsibility and an uplifting of other nations—notwithstanding the actual effect of some of its actions—but now even that pretense is gone. The mask is off, and it turns out we are what we have always been.

“One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire,” Coetzee writes: “how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era.” His novel suggests the irony: In fighting to maintain its power, an empire ultimately eats itself, through the corruption of its own values and the destruction of the peace of its own people. The current catastrophe—or rather the current string of catastrophes, coming one after another in blindingly quick succession—may mark the end of the American empire, or at least this phase of it. But we can decide how to fit ourselves within the shattered picture. Resistance is both an idea and an action, and sticking together is our best chance to not get snowed under by the storm.

New Jersey made a mistake. Well, more accurately, software used by New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles made a mistake. The state learned this week that a computer malfunction at the DMV led to approximately 6,600 individuals who indicated that they were not US citizens being registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024. Around 400 of these people who were registered incorrectly voted in a New Jersey election.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill apologized for the error, which occurred before she was in office. She released a statement expressing how seriously she takes the problem and assuring the public that the glitch has been fixed and the registrations revoked.

You can imagine how this all went over with the Trump administration. Even before this revelation, the Republican National Committee was working to subpoena voter registration records in New Jersey as part of their endless fishing expedition for alleged voter fraud. That request was soundly rejected in court. But we can expect the RNC to try again based on this DMV error.

And they’ll be joined by the Trump Department of Justice. The DOJ has now requested the full names, addresses, and voter information of the noncitizens incorrectly registered in New Jersey. There’s no reason for the DOJ to have this data; if anything, the DOJ should be investigating the software company that produced the error, not harassing the people who answered truthfully and were accidently registered anyway.

But something worse than harassment will probably happen to the nearly 400 noncitizens who voted. The DOJ will come down on them like a hammer and, most likely, attempt to detain and deport them.

Since nobody in power in the Democratic Party will have the courage to say this, I will stand on a hill and shout that 400 people voting illegally doesn’t matter. Approximately 6,600 people accidentally being registered doesn’t matter.

New Jersey has 6,682,699 registered voters. The DMV error meant that 0.0988 percent of those voters shouldn’t have been registered. In the 2024 presidential election, 4,272,725 people cast a ballot in New Jersey. If 400 people did vote illegally, that works out to 0.00936 percent of total ballots cast.

This error is negligible. It had no effect—and unlike Governor Sherrill, I don’t take it seriously. Caring about this is like caring that somebody is going (pulls out the calculator) 55.005148 miles per hour in a 55mph zone. This entire “issue” is stupid.

The Bad and the Ugly

• Trump’s army of election deniers took all the big prizes in Arizona’s Republican primaries this week. Andy Biggs won the GOP primary for governor. That’s the same Andy Biggs who, as a representative in the House, voted against counting his own state’s electoral votes in 2020. Meanwhile, Alex Kolodin won the primary for secretary of state. Kolodin is a longtime election denier who helped file the “Kraken” lawsuit after the 2020 election. Let us hope voters in Arizona actually want their votes counted.
• In May, a federal judge ruled that ICE has no authority to make immigration arrests inside New York City immigration courts. ICE has made at least six arrests inside Manhattan courthouses since being explicitly told it couldn’t.
• Workers who say they were laid off from Meta based on metrics gathered by AI were denied a temporary restraining order that would have prevented the company from firing them. The judge ruled that the workers suffered no “immediate harm” because they can always sue after they’ve been fired if their terminations were legally bogus. I’m starting to wonder if all federal judges were just the kids in middle school who got right up in your face and shouted, “I’m not touching you. You can’t be mad because I’m not touching you.”
• Trump has rejected nearly 6,000 clemency applications from people who weren’t part of the mob he sent to overthrow the government on January 6. While “removing the presidential pardon power” isn’t at the top of my list of “constitutional amendments we need right now,” it’s for sure on the list.
• This won’t technically go down as another ICE murder when the truth and reconciliation commission finally gets going, but a Mexican man was killed when he was hit by a truck as he tried to run across a busy road to flee ICE. The man was a tourist, just here on vacation, with a valid travel visa. Some might ask, “Well then, why did he run?” The answer is that ICE is terrifying, regularly kidnaps people, and appears to be subject to no law or regulation. Running away from jackboot thugs empowered to violate your body and your rights is the rational play. ICE didn’t hit him with the truck, but it was the ultimate cause of his death.

Inspired Takes

• I hate that I am aware that Andrew Tate exists. But Jeet Heer explains in The Nation why I kind of have to be aware of him. Among other things, he has the ear of the Trump boys, especially Barron.
• I have spent a lot of time thinking about emigrating from this fascist nation. But I always run into the same roadblock: Where the fuck else is measurably better? I’m a Black man raising two Black children. Where the hell am I supposed to go? In The Nation, Edna Bonhomme tells me “not Germany.” In fairness, I could have guessed that. Still, the piece is confirmation that, as much as it sucks to be Black here, it sucks to be Black anywhere. Best thing I can say about America is that it is the devil I know.
• Journalist Radley Balko lays out the case for suing Stephen Miller. It absolutely needs to happen: Miller needs to go to jail to tell future Stephen Millers that they too might go to jail. But… I don’t think it will ever happen.

Worst Argument of the Week

One of the reasons I have little hope that Miller or any of Trump’s odious henchmen will ever face accountability for their fascist actions is that law professor John Yoo is still out there, free and spreading evil. This is the guy who wrote the torture memos during the George W. Bush administration. He’s literally the legal architect of war crimes. And yet, he’s still a “respected” law professor, at Berkeley no less, who regularly goes on television and is allowed to live a life of freedom, despite being the guy who gave Dick Cheney the legal cover for waterboarding. Justice never comes for these people.

Yoo is back in the news because he has the ear of the current administration, and he’s arguing for lawfare against the guy who scares Republicans the most: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the UN General Assembly this fall, Mamdani said he’d “look into” what his options were to arrest the man. Netanyahu is on the lam from the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for his arrest. Mamdani said he’d ask his lawyers if there is anything he can do about that.

He could have asked me (though I’d like to think I’ve priced myself out of a city government salary). The answer is “no.” Netanyahu is protected by diplomatic immunity while traveling to the United Nations. Mamdani literally can’t even give him a parking ticket. And that [deep existential sigh] is as it should be. Leaders from all over the world must be able to travel freely to the UN for the UN to function, and those leaders include strongmen and dictators and people some countries perceive as “evil.” Diplomatic immunity must exist, and must be respected. New Yorkers are not uncivilized thugs like the Spartans.

There’s also a law, the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, that prevents Mamdani from doing anything. This is a Bush era law that prevents US officials from working with the International Criminal Court in any capacity. The Bush regime was particularly interested in not being held accountable for war crimes.

That’s the law Yoo invoked on Fox News while declaring that Mamdani should be investigated by the Justice Department. But, as Joe Patrice explained at Above the Law, Yoo overplayed his hand. You can’t investigate a guy for talking to a lawyer. You can’t charge a guy for breaking the law when he hasn’t broken it. Mamdani called around, asked a few experts; they ultimately told him that Netanyahu is untouchable, and—as Mamdani acknowledged—that’s that. Yoo’s attempt to threaten Mamdani is just another case of MAGA trying to gin up some reason to go after the popular lefty mayor.

The American Service-Members’ Protection Act is, by the way, a shit law. It’s something that either Obama or Biden should have repealed the first chance they got. It’s sometimes called the “Hague Invasion Act” because it preposterously argues that the United States can send military forces to the Hague to stage a prison break should one of our people be held there for, let’s not forget, war crimes or crimes against humanity. Any American president should be willing to abide by the rules of the International Criminal Court, and the fact that none of them do—not Republican presidents nor Democratic presidents—is a stain on our country and one of the (many) reasons we’re viewed as global thugs.

Anyway, neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor John Yoo should be able to travel to any country that respects international law. Fortunately for both of them, our country protects war criminals.

What I Wrote

I didn’t put anything on the board this week, but, in fairness to me, it’s the middle of the summer, and my kids are done with camp. Also, Jay Willis on Balls and Strikes wrote everything I was going to say about the Supreme Court’s declining poll numbers.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I haven’t written about the Nolan Wells situation. Wells was an 18-year-old college football player who disappeared over Fourth of July weekend after a boat trip with friends to Horn Island, off the Mississippi Gulf coast. Wells and a bunch of friends went out, but Wells never came back. His body was found six days later. Mississippi officials have not released the autopsy, although the family ordered a private autopsy that came back inconclusive as to the cause of death.

I haven’t written about it because, even though Wells’s family has hired high-powered lawyer Benjamin Crump, there’s nothing for me to say about the legal, or potentially criminal, circumstances surrounding his death. We don’t know how he died, we don’t know why he died, and while the Mississippi officials appear incredibly unconcerned about his death, there’s not as of yet a cause of action against the state that I can see.

I can only speak about Wells as a parent, and the Wells situation strikes at an acute fear I think is shared, in full, only by other Black parents. Wells happens to be Black, but most of the friends he went on the trip with are white. I can tell you that sending your Black child to any kind of party with predominantly white friends is its own special kind of terror.

You’re not worried that the white friends are going to kill or lynch your child, not exactly anyway. You’re more worried that, should others decide it’s time for a lynching, the white friends will be of no help. You’re not exactly worried that the white friends are going to do something; you’re worried that they won’t do anything when something needs to be done. You’re worried that, in an all-white crowd, your kid is alone, even if the kid thinks they’re with a bunch of friends.

Wells’s white friends all claim that they have no idea what happened to him. I believe them. I have no reason not to believe them. But that’s kind of the point: a whole group of friends, and nobody knows what happened to the Black one. A whole group of buddies, and nobody was looking out for the Black one—on an island in Mississippi, of all places.

And don’t even get me started on how this situation would play out if the races were reversed. If a bunch of Black kids with one white friend went out to an island, and the white one didn’t come home, the Black kids would be under the jail until somebody “remembered” something.

In college, I had a couple of white friends I could trust. On campus, it was whatever, but if we ever went into Boston, they wouldn’t leave me. They knew they couldn’t leave me. They couldn’t let me be the lone Black guy trying to drunkenly get home on the train out of Southie. They had to be around to hail the cab I couldn’t otherwise get.

I survived college. And I’m still friends with them to this day. When I watch my children interact with their white friends in and around school… this is literally the only quality I’m looking for.

***

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Andy Beshear’s biggest political problem right now is that he isn’t Mitch McConnell. Hospitalized on June 14, moved to “a rehabilitation center” per social-media post on July 12, and dead silent since that day, McConnell has left Kentucky’s Democratic governor—and the 4.6 million Kentuckians he’s supposed to represent—with pretty much no information and even fewer options on what comes next.

The Kentucky governor announced on Monday that despite his July 8 letter requesting evidence of McConnell’s capability to serve, Beshear has received “not an email, not a letter, not a call, not a video…absolutely nothing.” A growing chorus of Democratic voices has only grown more impatient and angry with Beshear in the interim for what they perceive as typical Democratic inaction. Although, to be fair, there’s not much the governor can do under Kentucky law and with a Republican-controlled state legislature. But were the roles reversed, you can bet that McConnell—a man whose career has been about power at all costs, political rules and norms be damned—would sure as hell not be waiting by the mailbox for a response.

We can accurately predict what McConnell, and just about any member of the state’s power-hungry Republican Party, would do because they’ve already done it. Twice. First in 2021, when Kentucky’s GOP legislature rewrote state law to strip the governor of the historically held power to appoint a US Senate replacement, instead requiring that he pick from a short list handpicked by state Republicans. Then–state Representative Patti Minter rightly groused at the time that “it wouldn’t be happening if we had a Republican governor.” The Democrat would also call it a “blatant power grab”—which I would call vintage McConnell, who even admitted the change was his idea, deeming it “the best way to go.” As with the roughly 40 other bills stripping him of traditional gubernatorial powers that session alone, Beshear—not coincidentally, Kentucky’s first Democratic governor since 1999—vetoed the measure, but the Republican legislature just overrode his veto.

Three years later—and less than 24 hours after McConnell announced his retirement in 2024, no less—Kentucky’s GOP changed the law again, overriding another Beshear veto, to require a special election in the event of a US Senate vacancy, effectively sidelining Beshear from the process altogether. “I had no idea that the senator was going to make his announcement yesterday,” said the bill’s sponsor, Republican Steven Rudy, who calls McConnell, as if it isn’t obvious, his “political mentor.”

But Beshear’s McConnell problem isn’t just the law that McConnell himself rewrote. It’s that McConnell taught Republicans to have little patience with the difference between “legal” versus “not legal.”

So WWMMD?

I’ll start by telling you what McConnell wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t wait patiently for “proof of life” from a senator who has missed at least 30 roll-call votes, and whose office has released what may be the most yassified photo of said senator ever taken, while his staff do not respond to media queries about his condition, and Republicans seem to run down the clock. Because after August 3, under the aforementioned Kentucky law, that Senate seat can’t be filled until January. Do you really think McConnell—the man who spent nine months in 2016 repeatedly lying about an obviously made-up “long-standing tradition” against presidents filling US Supreme Court seats in election years just to block President Barack Obama’s nominee—would wait until August 4 for news? The same McConnell who, four years later, reversed course entirely, proving that the “tradition” was always a lie, announcing within hours of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, just six weeks before the 2020 election, that Trump would fill her seat, callously defying her explicit dying wish that her replacement be chosen by the next president? That Mitch McConnell?

There’s plenty of conjecture that McConnell would have already declared the seat vacant and triggered the special election Kentucky law requires. He would probably be doing lots of cable hits citing Senate Rule VI, which states, “No Senator shall absent himself from the service of the Senate without leave,” and demanding video proof of life before standing down.

But I suspect McConnell would go even further.

He’d invoke Section 152 of the Kentucky Constitution—the one Beshear has only gingerly raised—which states, “Vacancies in all offices for the State at large, or for districts larger than a county, shall be filled by appointment of the Governor.” Except instead of wondering aloud if that power extends to federal positions, he’d state that it absolutely does. Then he’d dare Kentucky Republicans to explain, especially to the Bluegrass State’s residents, why laws they slapped on the books just two years ago override the Commonwealth’s most sacred legal document. As an actual lawyer, he might want to start with Republican lawmaker Josh Calloway, who is not an attorney but recently threatened that if the governor doesn’t play by Kentucky GOP rules, “there will definitely have to be something done in a legal manner.” Beshear would call his bluff and tell him he’ll see him in court.

I think he’d flex the political capital that winning two elections has gotten him by mobilizing every crony, surrogate, and remotely friendly lawyer to fan out like righteous locusts across every media channel, every social-media platform, every podunk podcast that would have them to demand answers on behalf of the American people. He’d bang the drum for hearings, threaten subpoenas, and insist that anyone currently claiming McConnell is fit to serve should be willing to say, under oath, exactly what they know and whom they’ve spoken to. That includes every aide, every elected official, and every pundit who claims to have had a recent “lengthy” conversation with McConnell. If they’re willing to say it on Fox News, he’d argue, they better be ready to say it under oath. Basically, he would turn the mystery of McConnell’s status into a daily political liability for Kentucky’s GOP until someone finally blinked.

It would be giving myself too much credit to call this speculation. I’m just running McConnell’s playbook, the one I’ve watched him and the GOP more broadly run so many times I know their moves like the back of my hand. The same is true of the Democrats who, like Beshear, I’ve also watched do what they do for a decade—things like expressing concern, writing sternly worded letters, giving the bullies their lunch money before they ask. It’s a whole party of people who, despite watching Republicans treat rules and norms like something for the other side, keep treating this like a good-faith fight.

Look, I get that Beshear is making the cautious and, frankly, legal choice. The problem is that McConnell’s legacy—beyond stocking the Supreme Court with enough corrupt conservative partisans to make America a joke on the world stage—is helping turn American politics into an endless power grab. Even if, and perhaps especially if, you hate the man and everything he stands for and want to do away with it, you have to ask yourself, “What Would Mitch McConnell Do?” And then, if the situation calls for it, do that.

The ultimate irony here is that if anyone actually takes action on McConnell’s absence, it’s likely to be Republicans. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley complained that in McConnell’s absence the party is “down a vote,” meaning its hyperconservative projects like the SAVE Act—an antidemocratic federal voter-ID proposal—have failed because “we don’t have the votes for that,” and that “we might want to do something about that.” Representative Tim Burchett said the time to talk about incapacitation clauses is “yesterday” and called the situation “pathetic.” Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin, told a reporter he thought McConnell’s “proof of life photo” was “older” than suggested. And Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville said, “Somebody needs to do something. Somebody needs to come out and put a little video out.”

In the end, it’s not proof of life—or the Kentucky electorate—Republicans care about. It’s a 52nd vote.

I guess if there’s anyone most likely to put McConnell’s playbook to good use, it’s the party that’s already been putting it into practice.

As a Palestinian-American who grew up in New York City, it is difficult to describe how uplifting—and, honestly, surreal—it feels to witness the mayor of my hometown speak about Palestinians as though our lives possess intrinsic value.

The bar is admittedly extremely low. For decades, New York politicians treated Palestinians as an inconvenience at best as they shamelessly competed to demonstrate ever greater fealty to Israel. Against that backdrop, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s refusal to abandon Palestine represents a genuine breakthrough.

That is why it felt momentous to watch Mamdani look directly into a camera this week and declare Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a genocidal war criminal who is not welcome in New York City—even if those words were followed by an acknowledgement that, despite Mamdani’s wishes, he does not have the independent authority as mayor to arrest Netanyahu for those crimes if Netanyahu ever sets foot in the city.

Of course, it was always doubtful that a New York City mayor possessed the authority to order the arrest of a sitting foreign leader, particularly one whose impunity is so deeply underwritten by Washington. Even before Mamdani took office, legal experts warned that his campaign pledge to arrest Netanyahu would run headlong into the constitutional limits of municipal power.

That does not mean the pledge was worthless. It held international law up as a standard that should be followed and helped force Netanyahu’s criminality and prospects for wider accountability into mainstream political debate. It provided a sharp contrast with Mamdani’s chief rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo, who joined Netanyahu’s legal team after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for the prime minister. And it demonstrated that ritual deference to Israel is no longer a nonnegotiable tenet of US politics. Here was the mayor of New York City, the most institutionally and demographically Zionist city outside of Tel Aviv, openly describing the Israeli prime minister in the same terms that Palestinians, human rights organizations, international legal institutions, and much of the world have used for years.

Judging from the response to Mamdani’s video this week, there is a hunger for this kind of moral clarity: At the time of writing, Mamdani’s video address had garnered over 90 million views on Twitter and 9 million likes and counting on Instagram.

And yet, as praise for the video flooded social-media feeds, the initial exhilaration gave way to a familiar unease that once again, rhetoric was eclipsing material action. Because for Palestinians there has always existed a cruel chasm between recognition and consequence—a chasm that has only grown during the Gaza genocide. For nearly three years, we have watched a growing number of governments acknowledge our suffering while continuing to facilitate it; journalists document our deaths while laundering the justifications and excuses provided by those killing us; and politicians condemn the right people and say the right things while falling short of fundamentally challenging the system that sustains the slaughter.

Mamdani’s sincerity and courage when it comes to speaking up for Palestine is not in question. Nor is his desire to hold Israel accountable. But now that he has confirmed that arresting Netanyahu is off the table, he needs to show what concrete steps he is prepared to take to end New York City’s entanglement with the political, financial, and policing infrastructure that sustains Israel’s impunity. And make no mistake: There are concrete steps Mamdani can take.

New York’s complicity in Israel’s crimes is not abstract. It is embedded in bond portfolios, procurement records, surveillance contracts, police partnerships, and the tax privileges extended to organizations helping dispossess Palestinians. These relationships fall far closer within Mamdani’s actual remit than the arrest of a foreign leader ever did.

Upon taking office, Mamdani rescinded Eric Adams’s executive orders barring city institutions from divesting from Israel and imposing on city agencies the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which falsely conflates criticism of Israel with antisemitism. That reversal reopened political space that Adams had deliberately tried to close.

But rescinding an anti-BDS order is not the same as actively pursuing divestment.

New York City’s pension funds have held hundreds of millions of dollars in Israeli assets, and Comptroller Mark Levine has promised to resume investing in Israel bonds (his predecessor, Brad Lander, had allowed the investments to lapse). City officials have previously used pension governance to pursue divestment from industries and governments they deemed beyond the pale. There is no principled reason Israel should remain uniquely insulated from the same scrutiny.

Mamdani cannot liquidate investments by executive decree: The city’s pension systems are governed by separate boards, and the comptroller exercises substantial authority over their investments. But the mayor is not powerless. Mamdani can make divestment from Israeli government bonds and companies implicated in occupation, apartheid, settlement expansion, surveillance, and genocide an explicit policy objective of his administration. He can push his pension-board appointees to propose divestment, appoint trustees who support Palestinian rights, and work with unions and pension beneficiaries to secure the votes needed to push his agenda over the line.

Mamdani could also order a comprehensive public audit of New York City contracts and institutional relationships with Israeli military and security companies. The NYPD, for example, has pursued contracts with Israeli intelligence firms and has maintained a liaison presence in Israel. Mamdani should determine which of those relationships remain active, disclose them to the public, and end those that bind the city to the architecture of Israeli occupation and genocide. He could also publicly call on New York State Attorney General Letitia James to open an independent investigation into how Netanyahu and other Israeli officials may have harmed New Yorkers.

Finally, Mamdani can use the political power of City Hall to confront the New York–based nonprofit infrastructure that helps finance Israel’s settlement project. As mayor, he cannot command the state attorney general or unilaterally revoke an organization’s tax-exempt status. But he can demand investigations into whether New York–registered organizations financing settlement expansion or settler violence have violated charitable-purpose requirements, disclosure rules, sanctions, anti-fraud laws, or other existing legal obligations. Mamdani can also do more to stop stolen-land auctions from being held across the city, and at the very least protect New Yorkers’ right to protest them.

And when Netanyahu eventually does visit New York City, as he is expected to for the UN General Assembly in September, Mamdani can ensure that his visit is devoid of the red-carpet welcome he is used to. The mayor could look back to 1995 for inspiration from then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ejected from a Lincoln Center UN concert while he was in town for the UN General Assembly. He could direct the New York Police Department not to assist with Netanyahu’s motorcade. And when protesters take to the streets, Mamdani should ensure that the NYPD doesn’t brutalize them.

None of these measures promise the theatrical aura of arresting Netanyahu on the tarmac. They are more bureaucratic, more difficult, and a lot less likely to produce a viral video (although Mamdani’s social-media team has proven they can make content about even the most procedural issues go viral). But these steps can directly impact the lives of Palestinians who face Israel’s genocidal onslaught every day.

What’s more, they will accomplish something that Mamdani’s focus on Netanyahu cannot: reinforce the truth that Israel’s genocidal nature is about much more than a single individual.

Democratic lawmakers have spent years evading the demands of genuine accountability by recasting the destruction of Gaza as “Netanyahu’s war”—a sleight of hand that isolates one especially repellent perpetrator while obscuring the vast political, military, and social machinery required to carry out a genocide. In doing so, they paint Israel’s genocide, occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing as mere deviations from an otherwise redeemable system, rather than expressions of that system. If Israelis could only get rid of Netanyahu, a more reasonable, liberal Israel might emerge. But Netanyahu was not alive in 1948 when Zionist militias forced over 750,000 Palestinians out of their homes at gunpoint during the Nakba. He did not invent the siege of Gaza. Nor did he birth an Israeli society in which 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. If Netanyahu were somehow arrested tomorrow, Israel’s genocide would continue under the stewardship of another Israeli leader.

Reducing Israel’s crimes to one man offers the broader system that cultivated him an escape hatch. It allows Americans to imagine that accountability can be satisfied with one arrest, rather than with the dismantling of weapons pipelines, financial investments, diplomatic protections, police partnerships, and political alliances that sustain the genocide. That is why the focus must move from the spectacle of arresting Netanyahu toward the less cinematic but more consequential work of confronting complicity at its roots.

I want to be clear again: I do not doubt Mamdani’s solidarity with Palestinians. I think he wishes he could do far more and operate unconstrained by the torturous realities of governing, coalition-building, and electoral politics. Like so many people across the country, I am deeply inspired by Mamdani’s vision for New York City. He has already made life for so many New Yorkers measurably better, as is his main prerogative. At the same time, he has dramatically expanded the boundaries of what Democratic politics can look and sound like at this pivotal moment in American history.

But I am also old enough to remember another leader who rose to the highest office in the country on an enticing message of hope, only to leave us without the material change he promised. Mamdani has an opportunity to break with that legacy—to prove that hope need not remain a rhetorical posture, and that moral clarity can be translated into the patient, difficult work of dismantling the financial, political, and institutional architecture that binds his city with a genocidal apartheid state.

Supporters of Palestine have struggled against extraordinary odds to change public opinion and enter institutions of American power. Mamdani’s victory and the blueprint he has revealed for prospective leaders across the country are among the most promising outcomes of that struggle. But a transformation in cultural hegemony alone will not stop a bomb, rebuild a hospital, or return a displaced Palestinian family to its home. Merely reaching the halls of power against all odds will do nothing for Palestinians being killed, starved, and expelled every day, unless that newfound power is converted into bold, material pressure on both the individuals and institutions enabling genocide.

Mamdani may lack the jurisdiction to arrest Netanyahu, but he does not lack the power to begin disentangling New York City from the system Netanyahu represents. For the sake of all New Yorkers, and all Palestinians, he should get started right away.

Donald Trump loves to trumpet imaginary victories and exult in unreal achievements. In a previous column, I described this as “a severe case of premature proclamation.” It’s related to another condition that besets the president: projectile dysfunction, which involves an excessive reliance on the ability of missiles to achieve political and diplomatic goals.

In truth, the use of air power to drop bombs from great distances, although able to inflict horrific damage, rarely secures control of territory. This is a bitter truth the United States has been taught again and again—in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran. Trump has repeatedly boasted that US air power has “obliterated” the Iranian military. The resumption of heavy fighting in the Middle East, with Iran inflicting damage on the US and its allies, has given the lie to Trump’s braggadocio.

Claiming that the US had achieved its military goal, Trump signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran on June 17. But the deal quickly unravelled because it was based not on a shared understanding but on a shared misunderstanding: Trump fantasized that the deal vindicated his story about a great victory, while the Iranians saw the agreement as consolidating the control of the Strait of Hormuz they won in the war. As Will Saletan summed up in The Bulwark:

Six weeks ago, to rationalize pulling out of the war, [Trump] committed himself to a story. The story was that Iran had capitulated, peace was at hand, and the world’s oil supply would soon be back online. He’s going to cling to that story, no matter how long the war goes on.

But nobody ever accused Trump of learning from his mistakes. He is now engaging in yet another round of premature proclamation—this time regarding the startling nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that he announced this week.

The deal as initially described would allow Saudi Arabia to achieve its long-standing goal of having the US greenlight and assist in its civilian nuclear program without having to make any of the compromises that had previously prevented an agreement. The Wall Street Journal called it a “big win” for the Saudis, and Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute noted:

Compared to previous negotiations, Riyadh has secured remarkable concessions. It no longer appears to have to normalize relations with Israel as part of the package. It is reportedly not required to sign a traditional Section 123 agreement that would deprive [Saudi Arabia] of enrichment technology. And there are no comprehensive [International Atomic Energy Agency] safeguards comparable to those Washington has long insisted upon elsewhere.

If these reports hold, Saudi Arabia has achieved what few thought Washington would ever accept.

But within 24 hours, the landmark deal was already starting to unravel. The New York Times reported that the deal was “in doubt” because Trump had “added a new condition to the sale of nuclear reactors to the kingdom, declaring that the entire arrangement now depends on the Saudi willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.”

This was a typical Trump negotiating tactic: pulling the rug out from someone after proclaiming a done deal. Journalist Laura Rozen reports that Saudi Arabia might not go along with Trump’s antics:

On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: “It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate.” “Tweets don’t overturn signed agreements,” he added.

I asked, did KSA agree to normalize with Israel at some point in the future in the deal or annexes. Saudi source said: “Nope.”

Leaving aside the issue of normalizing Saudi-Israeli relations, the deal is bad on its own terms. By forgoing IAEA safeguards and allowing Saudi Arabia access to enrichment technology, the Trump administration was undermining the logic of its war on Iran. This free pass to Saudi Arabia could also easily trigger nuclear proliferation. This was especially true since Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, has openly stated since 2018 that the kingdom doesn’t rule out building nuclear weapons.

What’s more, Saudi Arabia is a brutal dictatorship with a long history of unstable behavior, ranging from the sponsorship of international terrorism to the assassination of critics of the regime such as Jamal Khashoggi. Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network was initially nurtured in the 1980s by the Saudi state. The extent of the Saudi government’s complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attack remains murky and the subject of investigation. To help the Saudi state get on the path to becoming a nuclear power is the height of madness. It is likely connected to the corrupt business deals the Trump family has made with the Saudi government.

Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey notes that when Marco Rubio was in the Senate he “was among the loudest voices warning about the dangers of giving Saudi Arabia, which has openly vowed to develop nuclear weapons, access to nuclear technology.” Now, as secretary of state, Rubio is just as loud in trying to sell this deal.

Markey forcefully makes the case against the deal:

Since the start of his second term, President Trump has launched two illegal attacks against Iran, in part to prevent Tehran from enriching uranium. Ironically, the administration is now opening the door for Saudi Arabia to gain access to that same technology. The Trump administration has needlessly abandoned the “Gold Standard,” which would ban enrichment and reprocessing and require International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) additional protocol safeguards.

Trump’s and Secretary Rubio’s hypocrisy is matched only by their recklessness. They are allowing Saudi Arabia, a belligerent and authoritarian nation, to develop nuclear weapons technologies while starting a war with Iran under the guise of preventing an Iranian nuclear bomb. This deal would make us all less safe. We must stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The Saudi nuclear deal is a typical Trump foreign-policy fiasco. In his usual fashion, Trump has announced an agreement based on deception, then rushed to paper over the holes in the deal. The good news is that Trump’s slapdash execution might undermine the deal, a desirable outcome since it is a reckless policy that could spur nuclear proliferation.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Early Wednesday morning, Trump announced on social media that every time the Iranians hit a ship in the Straits of Hormuz, the US military would take out an Iranian bridge or power plant.

Under international law, the targeting of civilian infrastructure is a war crime. That doesn’t mean that previous administrations haven’t flouted these laws, but they generally haven’t publicly gloried in ordering such crimes. Trump, by contrast, is gleefully promising to do so, essentially daring the world to stop him.

In bygone years, the military’s legal watchdogs would have raised enough red flags that such threats (a) likely wouldn’t be made in the first place and (b) wouldn’t be acted on if they were made. But the Trump administration has neutered the military’s watchdogs, and with the leadership of the armed forces besmirched by having gone along with such obviously criminal acts as the assassination of sailors in the Pacific and the Caribbean, there’s little chance of seeing significant military opposition to Trump’s demands to strike civilian infrastructure.

Coopting the military leadership in the crimes of a civilian leadership is a telltale sign of authoritarian governance. The dirtier you can get the hands of the generals and admirals, the easier it is to then involve them in additional plans to solidify your power and to destroy your political opponents. Trump seems to instinctively know this. He knows, too, that his rationales for expanding the Iran war are flimsy and ever-changing—but that this shapeshifting justification for military aggression almost certainly won’t trigger effective resistance within the US military.

Witness his recent pivot to focus on Pickaxe Mountain, a fortified underground site in Iran that may or may not host some basic nuclear facilities and storage sites. This renewed focus on the remnants of Iran’s nuclear program would perhaps carry some moral weight if Trump hadn’t paired his newfound attention on this site with the signing of an extraordinary agreement with Saudi Arabia to allow the dictatorial, fundamentalist kingdom to go whole-hog on enriching its own nuclear fuel.

To put it plainly: While the United States is now spending tens of billions of dollars in a war of choice to stop Iran—which hasn’t directly attacked the United States—from getting nuclear fuel, it is inking a deal with Saudi Arabia, home country to most of the 9/11 hijackers, allowing it to accumulate the same uranium fuel deemed too dangerous for the Iranians to possess. This is morally imbecilic.

Not surprisingly, the administration’s authoritarian actions are not confined to events overseas. Addressing an international security conference in Washington, DC, last week, Stephen Miller, architect of the most ghastly and violent of Trump’s domestic policies, not only mocked the physical appearance of left-wingers but gloried in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which, as he put it, “directs for the first time in American history all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country. It’s very important to understand that left-wing political terrorism seeks as its ultimate goal the overthrow of our system and form of government.”

Miller went on to warn that “left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, suffering… inevitably, left to run its course, it always becomes a gulag, the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of rights and freedoms, inflicting immense pain, humiliation, and suffering in order to establish total control.”

Hmm… I can think of another group of people, with far more power than antifa, who seem to be experts on inflicting pain, humiliation, and suffering on vast swaths of people in the United States and overseas. This recalls, of course, the adage about the pot calling the kettle black. The White House often ascribes attributes to its opponents that most neutral observers would say best describe the administration itself.

Here we have Trump’s right-hand man, the architect of the occupation of Minneapolis and the assault on migrant communities around the country, ranting about how the left wing wants to put its opponents in prison, while, down the street, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin was putting together a plan to jail local elections officials who refuse to comply with unlawful federal efforts to intervene in state election systems, the Department of Justice was subpoenaing the phone records of New York Times journalists and their family members, and the State Department was attempting to smear, by name, an array of left-wing individuals and organizations for allegedly pro-Cuban activities in the United States. In Texas, a group of anti-ICE protesters were recently sentenced to prison terms ranging up to 100 years in length. In Minneapolis, 15 anti-ICE protesters have been indicted on charges of conspiring to “violently oppose law enforcement” after attempting to use messaging apps to coordinate a “blockade” of a federal building.

As for the inflicting of “pain, humiliation, and suffering,” perhaps Miller should look at how elder-care homes around the country are firing support staff because of the administration’s vindictive decision to remove Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Syrians, and other vulnerable groups. Perhaps he should focus on Trump’s imposition of 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian produce—a move that could result in huge numbers of Canadians losing their livelihoods—days after he threatened to levy tariffs on Canada as punishment for being the source of wildfire smoke drifting across the border into the United States. Perhaps he should look at the growing body count associated with ICE enforcement actions, including two recent fatal shootings of immigrants, one in Texas, the other in Maine. Perhaps he should read the recent Washington Post exposé of how immigrants are being held without adequate medical care and supplies of food in overcrowded rooms that lack beds, toilets, and showers. Perhaps he should talk to Cyclospora victims caught up in a public-health emergency thanks in part to the firing of so many Cyclospora experts who might have identified the outbreak in its early stages before it spread around the country.

When Trump and his henchmen accuse others of crimes, it’s a pretty good bet that they are deflecting from their own immoral actions. Today, the enemy is Iran and antifa; tomorrow—since in the authoritarian schema, new enemies must always be found—it will be some other targets of convenience.

An American producer, a German director, and a French screenwriter are sitting in a screening room watching dailies for a new production of The Odyssey. “Gods, I like gods, I like them very much. I know exactly how they feel. Exactly,” says the producer. “Each picture should have a definite point of view,” says the director. “I have a theory about The Odyssey,” says the producer. “I think Penelope has been unfaithful.” The screenwriter mostly keeps his mouth shut. It is a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, an adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel. Jack Palance plays Jerry the vulgar producer, and his face lights up with childish glee when he sees on screen the image of a naked woman, a mermaid tossing and turning in the sea. “Fritz, that’s wonderful for you and me but do you think the public is going to understand that?” he asks the director, who is Fritz Lang playing himself. Fritz and Paul the screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) then trade quotations. “All at once what happened as we felt is no more,” Paul says. “Our joy changed to grief as the sea closed above us.” It is unclear whether he is quoting a classic, suggesting a line for the film, or talking to himself about his marriage to Camille (Brigitte Bardot). Money is tight and the couple is unhappy. That is why Paul is working for Jerry, who will write him a check on the back of his bent-over assistant and eventually try to seduce Camille. Paul, you see, is also Odysseus. He is not absent, but he is also not himself. He has betrayed his artistic calling. He is a sellout.

I sometimes wonder if Christopher Nolan thinks of himself as a sellout or a god. The former might explain all the guilty feelings afflicting his heroes, from Bruce Wayne to Robert Oppenheimer. Was his Batman trilogy a series of nuclear detonations that wiped out non-indie middlebrow moviemaking? Or was it a Trojan Horse meant to smuggle Nolan’s cinematic genius into Hollywood before an inevitable tech-driven apocalypse would wipe out the remnants of the studio system? Nolan has now staked his claim to The Odyssey, an infinitely fertile text about a man who gets lost making his way home from war, a franchise everybody owns. You can set it anywhere from Dublin to the Deep South to outer space. You can render it as a comic picaresque, a romantic fantasy, a ballad of the aftermath of war, or combine all three and heighten the ironies. Nolan has brought it back to the Bronze Age and pursued an unmistakably personal vision. His joyless Odyssey turns out to be a box-office bonanza. 

Nolan must feel bad about something. Why else all the pensive onscreen melancholy of Matt Damon as Odysseus? And why all the overcompensation in the publicity campaigns devoted to the director’s technical commitments? He uses IMAX cameras that have to be reloaded every three minutes. He does things the old-fashioned way, with minimal reliance on computers. His Polyphemus, the Cyclops, is a giant animatronic puppet. His seafaring scenes are shot in deep-water tanks at a studio in Malta or on the open seas off the coasts of the Aeolian Islands, Scotland, and Morocco. All this trivia is neat to know, and I’m not against the details, but the barrage of technical information leaves you with the impression that it is artistic camouflage. Did you hear that Nolan prints his scripts on red paper so they can’t be copied or leaked and has them hand-delivered to guarantee security?

He should hire somebody better at writing them. There are some risible lines, and most of them belong to Matt Damon’s Odysseus. “We’ve been on this beach for 10 fuckin’ years,” he says in a flashback of leaving Troy. “Let’s go home.” Sure, any soldier or sailor will curse, but the line is unpoetic. So too is Damon, when he demands to be tied to the ship’s mast saying, “I wanna hear the Sirens’ song,” like a Boston teenager in 1988 cuing up the new Aerosmith album. The script, to be fair, has fewer laugh-inducing passages than many costume dramas of late that have appropriated classics—like Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, in which William Shakespeare spontaneously recites the “to be or not to be” soliloquy on a Thames dock to mourn his dead son—but, as in Hamnet, both the many clunkers and the few passages of eloquence zero in on the same subjects: trauma and survivor’s guilt.

Nolan’s films mount elaborate conceptual narratives that arrive at morals that are simplistic to the point of triteness. Under the disorienting dream scramble of Inception we find the story of a father who knows he ought to be back at his suburban dinner table. In Interstellar, we meet an astronaut who leaves the galaxy to save the world through the transcendent power of familial love. In the Batman films, we are left with the idea that only the very wealthy can protect the public from disaster, even if they must do so in secret and without being subject to any laws. In Oppenheimer, idealism and the best of intentions bring with them unintended consequences, such as the existence of arsenals that could destroy the world or retrospectively suspect political associations. In a Nolan film, there is plenty to feel guilty about even if you did not mean it, even if what you really wanted to do was save humanity.

Performing heroic acts of historic geopolitical significance when all you want to do is get home to the wife and kid: It can at least be said that Homer anticipated Nolan’s obsession with this eternal paternal theme. Now Odysseus joins Nolan’s menagerie of tedious brooders who also happen to be good at fighting. He impales and he cries. Having gone to war out of political obligations to do with honor, although he suspects what King Agamemnon is really after is control of “trade routes,” he returns a broken man, if one still capable of kicking serious ass.

Damon is an actor of great range and comic talents, but here he is not scheming Tom Ripley, crooked cop Colin Sullivan, or sarcastic whiz Will Hunting but a grown-up Private Ryan, bland and dutiful, until in the last act he turns into Jason Bourne and remembers how to perform a rushed series of perfunctory and conventional action sequences to slay Penelope’s suitors. Among ancient heroes, he resembles less the wily Odysseus than the pious Aeneas, the dutiful Trojan who fled his burning home with his father on his back to found Rome.

Compare Damon’s Odysseus to Kirk Douglas’s in Mario Camerini’s 1954 Ulysses. Both Damon and Douglas are unmistakable overgrown all-American boys, but Douglas shows off his comic and sexual charisma while Damon represses his. As befits the 1950s, Douglas is constantly surrounded by an international cast of pin-up models that dates the movie as much as its skimpy gowns and goofy sets. Damon’s grim characterization makes sense of some of Nolan’s elisions of Homer’s poem. He doesn’t tell his story at length to the Phaeacians because he is a man of few words, and not proud ones, the opposite of a raconteur. He doesn’t outwit Polyphemus by identifying himself as “nobody” because that would just be another dirty trick to feel guilty about. The same goes for the sex he doesn’t have with Circe and Calypso. It’s too complicated. Left out too is the shade of Achilles, who says he’d rather be the lowest tenant farmer in the land of the living than the greatest hero in the land of the dead. It doesn’t fit Nolan’s theme. He doesn’t regret slaying Hector. He just wants to be alive.

Usually the best things in any Nolan picture are incongruous performances by great actors tasked with playing villainous, or at least mildly distasteful, roles: They are the only characters with vivid personalities. Thus Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight, Robin Williams’s serial killer in Insomnia, Joe Pantoliano’s con-artist murderer in Memento, and so on. The Odyssey is stolen in brief moments by Samantha Morton as the misandrist witch Circe, Robert Pattinson as the conniving suitor Antinous, and Jon Bernthal as Menelaus playing an Achaean chieftain and embittered husband in the manner of James Caan as Sonny Corleone. Lupita Nyong’o glows in dual roles as his insouciant wife, Helen, and her mariticidal sister, Clytemnestra. Elliot Page, dead and alive, embodies the pathos of a betrayed casualty of war. Travis Scott as Ithaca’s house bard is a nice nod to the Homeric tradition and its closest contemporary counterpart in hip-hop. James Remer as Tiresias speaking sooth to Odysseus in the realm of shades comes the closest to the classical acting we associate with the sword-and-sandal epics of Old Hollywood. Contrary to the anticipatory right-wing backlash, perhaps the best any big-budget adaptation of The Odyssey can do is showcase the styles and talents of its moment.

Yet no matter these bold standouts, they are still overshadowed by the bland (Damon, Anne Hathaway as an expository Penelope, John Leguizamo as Eumaeus the elderly swineherd) and the bad (Zendaya as a therapist Athena appearing over his shoulder whenever a bad memory comes to mind, including one of witnessing the slaughter of a Trojan girl who looked just like her; Charlize Theron playing Calypso like a sexless yoga instructor; and Tom Holland as the po-faced and impotent prince Telemachus). Zendaya, Theron, and Holland’s performances point toward the contradiction at the heart of Nolan’s reconception of the epic. He prefers a materialist interpretation to a mythological one, except when it comes to spectacle. So while we have visually stunning renderings of Odysseus confronting and escaping Scylla and Charybdis, his band tricking and fleeing Polyphemus, and Circe transforming his men into pigs and back, the dialogue keeps circling back to tiresome lessons about “Zeus’s law”—the ancient concept of “xenia” or hospitality to strangers—a golden rule repeatedly violated both by Odysseus and his antagonists. These crimes are bringing to an end what Damon calls “our age of bronze” with anachronistic self-consciousness. Nolan smuggles this theory in from Eric H. Cline’s book 1177: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which overturned the old thesis that the great Mediterranean cities of two millennia ago collapsed because of invasions by mysterious “sea people” and replaced it with the notion that they fell from within. As Penelope’s epiphany to Odysseus puts it after he recounts the war crimes he masterminded at Troy: “You are the sea people.”

The contemporary political analogies are obvious enough. The collapse of American imperial hegemony is because of a threat not from outside but from within. We have come to mistreat both strangers and the poorest among us all while waging endless wars that violate our ideals and leave our veterans maimed and traumatized. We are coming to the end of our civilization, and that is because of our own actions. To the extent that he identifies himself with this flagging neoliberal world order, Nolan is right to feel guilty. His is not an Odyssey I can ever imagine wanting, but, as they say, it might be the one we deserve: an epic of simplistic populism in which irony, comedy, and playfulness have been replaced by trauma, shame, and healing. You imagine Nolan reading any given translation of The Odyssey and you hear the voice of Jack Palance: “Fritz, that’s wonderful for you and me, but do you think the public is going to understand that?”

The Democratic Socialists of America have never been more relevant. And with this rise comes an inevitable backlash—not so much from the voters themselves as the Democratic elites wary of the insurgency and the media organs that, more often than not, reflect their blinkered conception of the world.

Why are Democrats panicking so much about DSA? Why has at least one Atlantic columnist labeled them a “parasite”? This is the price of victory—of becoming, at last, a threat. The socialist left, for almost a century, was nothing more than a footnote on the American political scene. A major force in the Eugene Debs era, with more than a thousand elected officials scattered across the country, the Socialist Party withered in the 1920s and ’30s, a victim of the first Red Scare and attacks from the major political parties. Franklin Roosevelt had weakened them as well, dragging the Democratic Party left and adopting many of the economic policies they had supported. As anti-communism took hold in America, there was no place for any prominent politician using the “s” word, and even when Michael Harrington founded DSA in the early 1980s—unlike the old Socialist Party, his DSA would compete in Democratic primaries—there was little hope that the organization, with just a few thousand members, could decide elections.

The rise of Bernie Sanders changed all that, reinvigorating DSA. Membership boomed. Sanders himself wasn’t a DSA member, but he called himself a democratic socialist. Still, the Democratic establishment could worry only so much. Sanders was defeated twice. DSA members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did begin to win congressional primaries and a handful of socialists entered statehouses and city councils, but there were only so many of them. A centrist Democrat repeatedly denouncing DSA would have seemed a bit silly. Who really cares about DSA? When Donald Trump was defeated and Joe Biden returned to office, DSA maintained its small foothold but effectively stopped growing, and the Democratic establishment could exhale. The socialist fervor, it seemed, had passed.

Zohran Mamdani changed all that. A socialist winning America’s largest city was a great shock to the establishment Democrats who believed the DSA moment had come and gone. The primaries last month proved that Mamdani’s victory wasn’t an anomaly, a political fad. Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, Melat Kiros, and Chris Rabb are all heading to Congress. DSA is continuing to grow its presence in state legislatures. As in the 1960s, when a graying Democratic establishment backed the Vietnam War while the youth revolted, many Democrats today clung far too close to Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel and are paying the price. Pro-Palestine sentiment has reinvigorated the left. This success has driven some pundits and political leaders to declare that DSA members should be thrown out of the Democratic Party. Jamie Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, said on X not long ago that socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” he posted. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” In his “parasite” Atlantic column, Jamie Kirchick argued that the Democrats should be “prohibiting DSA members from joining their party and throwing out the DSA members already honeycombed within it.”

For an anti-socialist liberal, it’s a nice idea. Make the Democrats the party of Rahm Emanuel and Tom Suozzi and leave it there. The trouble for them is the American political system, one that is flawed but does permit quite a bit of grassroots democracy. There is literally no mechanism for the Democrats to accomplish what Kirchick seeks. Unlike parties in European parliamentary systems, the Democrats and Republicans can’t expel members or control their ballot lines. Both parties, ultimately, are empty vessels, and it’s the competition in the primaries that decides who leads them. Republican elites didn’t want Donald Trump in 2016, but Trump won the primary. He became the party.

Harrison’s argument is especially absurd because there are few “resources” or “infrastructure” a centralized Democratic Party deploys for most races. It’s up to candidates themselves to raise money and recruit volunteers. Eventually, the DNC or a national fundraising arm might arrive to pump cash into competitive, high-profile races, but this is long after the actual organizing is done. The DSA candidates who win certainly do not use Democratic Party resources and “volunteers.” There’s no hotline to call up to request bodies from the DNC. DSA finds their own people. They just understand, as Harrington did, that running in the Democratic Party primary is a much better way to make tangible change than forming a third party and losing more often than not. Ironically, many of the same political leaders and pundits who call for a DSA purge today would be equally livid if they formed a third party tomorrow, contested general elections, and potentially siphoned votes from Democrats.

Democratic socialists are far from a preeminent power in this country. They’ve found success, though, by doing the basic political organizing that establishment institutions used to take much more seriously. In the 20th century, there were genuine Democratic political machines, urban and rural vote-pulling operations that engaged in politics on the granular level. Plenty of them were corrupt. What they did do, though, was show up. Tammany Hall, for all their infamy, didn’t neglect their immigrant-heavy wards. They offered their own social safety net. By the time Ocasio-Cortez had felled Joe Crowley, the boss of the Queens Democratic Party, these kinds of machines had effectively ceased to exist. What Harrison described in his furious post isn’t a reality of American politics anymore.

DSA will keep winning as long as it keeps showing up. Mamdani has demonstrated this in New York, as the omnipresent first-year mayor. (Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.) The DSA council members and state legislators will have to stay focused on material concerns and maintain robust constituent services. Some of DSA’s success will hinge on how successful Mamdani’s tenure ends up being. Ocasio-Cortez’s potential presidential bid—how far it goes, if she can be competitive or even win—will determine, too, how high the socialist ceiling reaches. We won’t know for a long time. In the interim, the establishment will need a new strategy. The voters are wearying of them.

Economic policy has lately been convulsed by a proposition unthinkable under past Republican administrations: increased public ownership of major stakes in private companies. Under a growing array of public-equity deals engineered by the Trump White House, US government agencies are going well beyond their former arm’s-length initiatives to influence corporate decision-making to become shareholders in the companies themselves.

This move is stoking ideological blowback. The laissez-faire right sees it undermining the traditional divide between the market (good) and the state (bad). Adam Kinzinger and Joe Scarborough— Republicans of the Never Trump persuasion—have derided the policy as “ACTUAL communism/socialism” and called for privatizing the Trump equity stakes. Even left economist Robert Reich, whom the Cato Institute once attacked for advocating industrial policy, has now outflanked Cato by likening Trump’s taking of equity stakes to Nazism.

All this inflammatory rhetoric serves mostly to distract attention from the real policy questions at the heart of the public-equity debate, which are at their core about democracy. As technologies like AI boom, will the public get any meaningful say in how a handful of companies remake the American workplace, public discourse, and much of our common world?

Part of the problem with the Trump administration’s abrupt lurch into equity ownership last year is that public debate has played little or no role. As Trump regulators in the Commerce Department retired a Biden-era grant to semiconductor maker Intel, they demanded a 10 percent equity stake in the company itself—a position that is now worth five times more than the government paid for it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did not make much attempt to justify the move, other than to issue decidedly nonideological and pragmatic comments about national security, and a better return for the American taxpayer than what was realized under the Biden approach of “just giving grants away.”

It turns out that was just the beginning of the Trump public-equity binge. Despite having almost no support from more traditional Republicans, the administration kept plowing ahead, announcing shareholding deals with more than two dozen companies worth billions of dollars, in sectors ranging from rare earths to energy.

Despite the unease from some quarters here at home, other major economies around the world have not been shy in pursuing their national interest by holding public-equity stakes in private companies and maintaining sovereign wealth funds to manage them. China is the extreme example of a state capitalism that involves government closely in the means of production—but virtually every other country in Europe and Asia has adopted a “lite” version of the same practice. Iconic firms from Volkswagen to Renault to British Steel are owned in part or fully by public agencies, limiting the offshoring of jobs and better aligning corporate practices with the national interest.

Equity stakes can also potentially solve a problem that bedeviled economic officials in the Biden administration: speed. Traditional government tools such grants, loans, and antitrust legal actions can take years to negotiate or litigate, while markets move in hours and days. Look at the experience of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund under Biden, intended to further solar and other projects. It took two years after the Inflation Reduction Act authorized the office for the grants to be obligated—and even then, the recipients did not have the funds on hand when Trump came back into office. He quickly killed the program. In contrast, equity deals can be inked at the speed of corporate transactions. Within months of acquiring partial control over US Steel, the Trump administration forced the company to reopen a Granite City, Illinois, facility staffed by unionized steelworkers.

That example highlights how the conversation about equity stakes has moved beyond a technical solution to narrow market failures (though it’s important there too, as even Biden alumni that didn’t use the tool now acknowledge). Rather, it’s about building a more small-d democratic political economy.

That’s the thinking behind Bernie Sanders’s proposal for an American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund. While Sanders’s fund bears a superficial resemblance to the earlier Trump public-equity deals, it’s much more ambitious and far-reaching than they are. Sanders proposes to mandate that any AI company earning more than $200 million make a one-time deposit of 50 percent of its shares in a publicly owned sovereign wealth fund. California Governor Gavin Newsom embraced a version of the idea, as did Sam Altman of OpenAI and Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul el-Sayed.

Sanders’s plan, and the follow-up proposals it sparked, reverses the traditional model of equity partnerships: The dominant capital flow here comes not from government to a corporation in the first instance but from a corporation to government, via a gift of shares to the Treasury. It would thus substantially lower tech billionaires’ net worth.

These ideas could have significant revenue implications. Sanders estimates that the transfer could represent $7 trillion in value to the federal government. That’s a number almost equivalent to the entire federal US budget in 2025, and more than three times the size of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (currently the world’s largest). This could go a long way toward helping any workers displaced by AI to get back on their feet, oraddressing the climate crisis, which could be set back by the runaway erection of gas-fueled AI data centers.

But money is only part of the reason to take equity stakes—and a fairly small part at that. After all, it is entirely possible that AI is a bubble that will pop, rendering a massive tranche of government-held shares comparatively worthless. Even without a full-on meltdown in the AI sector, the actual cash flow value to the US government isn’t rooted in the paper value of the shares it might sell but the annual dividends they bring while the government holds onto them. Even at current valuations, that’s only likely to be in the tens of billions—not that much in the grand scheme of federal budgeting.

The bigger reason to seriously consider some version of Sanders’s sovereign wealth fund is to shore up our beleaguered democracy. Equity stakes empower the government to use shareholder votes and even occupy board seats. That, in turn, allows public officials to help steer corporate policy from the inside, or as the writer Matt Bruenig puts it, to exert “more fine-tuned control” over consequential economic decisions.

In our current political economy, voters do not get to elect OpenAI’s board. They aren’t able to weigh in on a ballot measure determining whether Anthropic’s or Google’s models are programmed to privilege user engagement over accuracy, or whether the next generation of data centers runs on gas or wind.

Markets aggregate consumer preferences through purchases, but with equity stakes and sovereign wealth funds, we can aggregate citizen preferences about how a general-purpose technology should be governed. A public equity stake, if designed with real anti-corruption guardrails, is one of the few tools that can help achieve these critical aims.

Public ownership can also help meet the challenges already emerging in the AI sector: If management is pushing coders to pump out exploitative and misleading AI slop in the name of short-term profits, a public voice on a corporate board can rescind that policy directive on pain of dismissal. If data centers rely on emissions-intensive natural gas rather than renewable energy sources, a vote from a company board can set them straight.

These are not hypothetical thought experiments. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund uses its shares to limit executive compensation, have employees represented on boards, and promote the hiring of women. France’s fund votes its shares to push for greater climate disclosure; Singapore’s fund promotes corporate alignment with ESG targets. And the Norwegian government has instructed its own fund to push all the companies in its vast 7,000-plus-company portfolio to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050—even though the initial source of this wealth is Norway’s fossil-fuel production. This offers a precedent for how government guardrails can tilt against the profit motive of a constituent industry, and how social movements can leverage these commitments to hold the fund’s feet to the fire.

None of this is to suggest that public-equity stakes are a panacea. There are plenty of reasons to believe the actually existing US government would fail to use equity stakes in the public interest. A centrist government might dogmatically refrain from going against company management; a MAGA government might push boards to help the president’s family enrich itself or oppose sustainability standards (this latter mandate is indeed now encoded in a bill before the Alaskan legislature as it seeks to direct the priorities of the state’s sovereign wealth fund). Moreover, the entanglement of private and public interest might further advance the rampant corruption we see in our political and economic life, provoking private interests to further intervene in our elections, or public officials to be still more deeply aligned with and captured by the interests of that of capital.

But these problems can be addressed. Congress has to step up and exercise oversight and control over government shareholding votes in the same way that it does over regulatory actions, to ensure that the public’s representatives at companies exercise independence from management. On the politics side, this tsunami of private electioneering is happening even without public-equity stakes—a strong indication that campaign finance and court reform are the way to tackle the problem at its source. And any pro-democracy movement worth its salt has to recognize strong public opportunities where they emerge. This year has seen an explosion of activism against data centers, and primary election upsets against candidates backed by AI donors. Public-equity stakes allow parties and movements to lay out a vision for how they would use influence over the AI industry and to specify what guardrails may be necessary to make that influence resistant to corruption of all kinds.

Some critics suggest that it’s better to wait for a more ideologically sensible government to take office before embracing a broad vision of public-equity stakes and sovereign wealth funds to advance small-d democracy in our billionaire-blighted political economy. But given the speed of technological and political development, our current democratic emergency may not afford us that luxury. What’s more, there are precedents for taking inadequate proposals by right-wing administrations and making them better in the future. America’s most ambitious program to advance public equity—the 1932–57 Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC)—was created in the waning days of the Hoover administration to administer a patchwork system of economic relief in the early days of the Great Depression. During the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration turbocharged the RFC to build housing, infrastructure, energy, and war-preparedness projects. Today’s conditions are similar: The companies Trump has invested in are aware that future administrations could well adopt a different agenda that they will have to adapt to, and they’ve said as much in their security filings.

In the face of the Depression, FDR and his allies recognized the need to act boldly and creatively to reassert public influence over the direction of the American political economy. The interlocking crisis of democracy, MAGA authoritarianism, and unchecked AI impunity demand that we act in the same fashion—and leaders like Sanders, Newsom, and el-Sayed are pointing to the path forward.

Odysseus was my hero when I was a child. I loved that he was a wanderer, an adventurer, a teller of tales, but most of all I loved that he was really really smart—polutropos, “the man of many wiles.” He got himself into and out of tight spots by being clever, by talking, paying attention, looking ahead, making a plan. The other Greek heroes, Heracles, for example, were just big oafs waving swords. I barely noticed that Odysseus did plenty of his own sword-waving. He wasn’t just brain; he was brawn too. I just took what I needed as a small female person who loved writing poetry and hated gym.

You could say Christopher Nolan did the same, just taking what he needed, in his three-hour all-star, all-IMAX film of Homer’s epic. Guilt and trauma have long been themes of his work (Oppenheimer, Memento), so why not make Odysseus a traumatized veteran of the Trojan War, obsessed with guilt for his crimes against humanity? After all, he did come up with the stratagem of the Trojan Horse, which, after 10 long years of stalemate, allowed the Greek army to enter the walled city and slaughter its desperate, screaming inhabitants—a horrific scene presented by Nolan several times in flashbacks. But I’m not sure the ancient Greeks were as tender-hearted as we are (or pretend to be). Certainly, there is no suggestion in Homer that Odysseus was troubled by his part in the war. His very first deed on the way home was to lead his men on a raid of the Troy-allied island of Ismaros, where they stole everything not nailed down, killed the men, and enslaved the women. (It ends badly, but only because his men lack Odysseus’ prudence and hang about feasting while the inhabitants regroup and attack.) Think of Odysseus as a kind of Viking—he plunders both for treasure and for glory.

Nolan skims over that, along with much else. He doesn’t tell us that after the killing of 108 suitors, Odysseus forces the slave women who’ve consorted with them to clean up the carnage and then directs his son Telemachus to kill them. Telemachus, blandly played in the movie by Tom Holland, goes his father one better: Those sluts don’t deserve an honorable death by the sword, so he hangs them (“they gasped, feet twitching for a little while, but not for long,” in Emily Wilson’s translation). Telemachus also cuts off the nose, ears, genitals, hands, and feet of the disloyal goatherd Melanthius. If Odysseus is a Viking, Telemachus has the makings of a first-class serial killer.

The omission of these savageries isn’t what troubles me about Nolan’s version—a modern audience would be revolted by them, and it’s not like the film lacks blood and gore and cruelty. It’s that he cuts out so much that is funny, beautiful, witty, and poetic. We have the Cyclops episode, but not shrewd Odysseus directing his men to grasp on to the wooly underbellies of the Cyclops’s sheep so the now blind giant won’t feel them as they escape the cave. We don’t have possibly the world’s oldest dad joke when the Cyclops asks for the name of the man who blinded him and Odysseus shouts “No One” causing the giant to bellow out “No one hurt me!” to the great bewilderment of the other giants. We don’t meet the charming, peaceful Phaiacians and their adorable teenage princess Nausicaa. We don’t hear the Sirens’ song. We do have Odysseus’ seven-year dalliance with the beautiful goddess Calypso (Charlize Theron)—but Nolan has her secretly drugging Odysseus with lotus flowers so that he forgets about his past life, including his beloved wife, Penelope. Calypso is like a New Age sex healer, prone to pronouncements like “Give yourself to the storm.… give up control and live.” And indeed the two of them look very Californian, taking long walks on the beach wearing billowy, sand-colored robes. In Homer’s poem, Odysseus knows perfectly well that he’s married, and weeps on the beach every day from homesickness.

A more effective modernization is the Circe episode. In Homer, Circe, who enjoys turning men into animals, for some reason, is a beautiful goddess in a lovely palace, with whom (after forcing her to free his men from their transformation into pigs) Odysseus has a year-long mutually delightful affair. Nolan makes her a weary, middle-aged Wiccan in a tumbledown stone cottage, who turns his men into pigs because “this is who they are.” Preach, sister! Samantha Morton is absolutely brilliant in the part—just about the only actor in the film who comes across as the character she is playing and not a movie star playing a part. Anne Hathaway is a passionate and angry Penelope, but mostly she is Anne Hathaway dressed in shimmering blue gowns and elaborate gold jewelry. You never forget that Odysseus is Matt Damon.

Much has been written and tweeted attacking Nolan’s decision to have a gorgeous Black actress, Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. It’s true that she is “white-armed Helen” in the poem, but come on, people! You should be used to nontraditional casting by now. You could even say that making Helen Black is a way of showing how different she is from everyone around her, being half divine and born from a swan’s egg and all. What bothered me was the scene where Telemachus, looking for news about his father, visits her and her husband, Menelaus, in their palace at Sparta. In the film, Menelaus is a brute and a wife-beater, who has horribly scarred Helen’s face. In Homer, Helen and Menelaus are generous and sophisticated hosts, seemingly untouched by all they have been through. Like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, they’ve caused immense damage that has no effect on them, rather like the Homeric gods themselves.

Taking out this material leaves us with a simpler, more sentimental story of a man who just wants to go home, who loves his old dog, his son, and his wife, and somehow ends up killing an enormous number of people. He doesn’t seem particularly clever or wily and he’s anything but complicated (Emily Wilson’s translation of polutropos). He’s basically yet another action hero—big-biceped, strong, sweaty, taciturn. Nolan leaves out the plot points most alien to contemporary sensibilities—the extreme violence and sadism, the gods constantly interfering in human affairs. (Only Athena, played by Zendaya, appears now and then, mostly to criticize him, less a majestic deity than a girlfriend who is really tired of picking up his socks.) But he also leaves out much that makes Homer’s Odyssey an indelible work of imagination, Odysseus an endlessly fascinating character, and his story so rich in multiple meanings—so polutropos—that people have been turning it over in their minds for three thousand years.