Iwas living in New York City when Al Qaeda terrorists flew jet planes into the World Trade Center, and I will never forget the panic that I felt as the certainties of the architecture around me went up in flames.

I remember, too, that shortly afterward, anthrax attacks were launched against seemingly random targets. Suddenly, the air we breathed seemed suspect—our environments turned against us by faceless enemies, terrorists, intent on inflicting maximum physical and psychological damage.

Webster’s dictionary defines “terrorism” as “the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion.” It defines “terrorist” as “an advocate or practitioner of terrorism as a means of coercion.”

“Terrorists” are reviled, because of their willingness to impose indiscriminate terror, fear, and violence on civilian populations to get their way politically or economically. If you want to gin up a populace against a particular group of people, label them “terrorists.” It’s shorthand for “despicable, bloodthirsty, murderous thugs, people with no moral limits.” Such was the contempt that the George W. Bush administration had for Al Qaeda terrorists that they secured legal opinions saying that Al Qaeda captives did not have to be accorded the respect that the Geneva Convention grants other prisoners of war. And then they waterboarded them and sent them to Guantánamo Bay. In 2015, candidate Trump said the only way to effectively fight terrorist groups such as ISIS was to kill the family members of known terrorists.

I mention this because over the past week Donald Trump, the senescent man whose word can unleash the most fearsome weapons known to humankind, revealed himself to be simply a common terrorist, albeit one with a potentially world-destroying arsenal backing him up. If the United States’ dwindling list of allies had any illusions about the man, they were surely cast to the winds this week.

First, after days of threatening massive attacks on Iran’s infrastructure and to bomb the Iranians “back to the stone age, where they belong,” Trump spewed out a profanity-filled Truth Social post on Easter Sunday that reveled in his ability to obliterate the infrastructure upon which Iranian civil society—and the lives of its 90 million residents—depend. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” Not wanting to be left out of the fun, “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth also cryptically posted on X, “Back to the stone age.” (Although to be fair, in his case it wasn’t clear if this was a threat to Iran or simply a status update of Hegseth’s own all-too-visible reversion to primitive-man status.)

Two days after his tirade, Trump announced that at 8 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He added, almost as if he had no control over his own actions, “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” I have scoured my historical memory, and I cannot think of another major international figure since Hitler who has made such explicitly genocidal threats, so devoid of euphemism—and even Hitler and his henchmen generally couched their apocalyptic visions in just enough euphemism to give them the cover of plausible deniability. So much for Trump’s efforts to secure the Nobel Peace Prize next year.

Since even the US president does not possess magical powers by which he can wave a wand and magically disappear a 6,000-year-old civilization, the only plausible explanation behind the specificity of Trump’s words was that he was threatening to unleash a nuclear apocalypse on the Iranians—which would, indeed, destroy a civilization, killing tens of millions of people in the process.

What I am struggling to even begin to fathom is what it must have felt like to be an Iranian trapped in that bombed-out country in the hours between Trump’s pledge that at 8 pm their civilization would be erased and the announcement of a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire 90 minutes before Trump’s deadline. I can’t imagine how slowly time must have ticked by, each second bringing the country closer to destruction. For those 12 hours, 90 million Iranians must have felt like the condemned on death row as the time of their electrocution neared.

I can’t imagine what husbands and wives thought as they realized their partners might soon be atomized by Trump’s bombs. I can’t imagine what parents felt looking at their children and knowing that a few hours from now their bodies might be obliterated. I can’t imagine what children thought knowing their power to protect their aging mothers and fathers was gone—that they were all at the mercy of a madman’s diktats.

And I can’t even begin to fathom the rage that those millions of Iranians must have felt at the US soldiers and sailors and airmen blithely going about their business in loading up weapons and pretending that this was just another day at the office. Or, rather, I can, just ever so slightly, get a glimpse of that rage, that powerless fury, because in September 2001, that’s the rage, fear, and horror that I felt in New York when I realized that men I had never met, from places I had never been to, had tried to kill me and my fellow New Yorkers—and had done so in a way deliberately calculated to inflict maximum enduring trauma on those who survived the attacks.

Even if the US-Iran ceasefire holds, which as I write this seems by no means certain, tens of millions of Iranians will be left with that sense of panic, that stomach-churning, vertiginous sense of the fragility of… everything.

And here’s the thing: That act of terror was carried out in our name, by a man whom 80 million-plus Americans voted into office and whom the GOP-led Congress has repeatedly failed to rein in. Had he ordered the military to carry out what would surely constitute crimes against humanity, there’s precious little evidence the military would have balked (though there is some reporting that military lawyers were unwilling to sign off on Trump’s actions) or that the majority in Congress would have significantly pushed back against him. Unless I’m missing something, not a single general has resigned from the military in the past week in protest at Trump’s war crimes rhetoric. Not a single battalion has laid down its weapons. Not a single figure in the national security hierarchy, the State Department, or the Pentagon has called it quits and gone public with their opposition to Trump’s Hitlerian threats. Not a single cabinet member has quit in horror. Not a single GOP member of Congress has switched parties as a way to bring Trump under some form of congressional control.

Even after Pope Leo denounced Trump’s genocidal language, even as previous MAGA enthusiasts such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones mustered the moral clarity to condemn Trump, Americans in positions of power within the government and military chose to bury their heads in the sand rather than confront this evil. It is the starkest abnegation of moral authority in modern US history.

That could be because all the honorable officials have already been purged—either by DOGE or by more localized departmental purges initiated by Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and Tulsi Gabbard. It could also be because those who haven’t been purged have been cowed into silence. And it could be, quite simply, that, as a society, we have grown, unfortunately, used to following orders, no matter how mad those orders may be.

Whatever the reasons, I do know this: When the supposed “leader of the free world” embraces the methods and rhetoric of apocalyptic terrorism, the international order as we have long known it is no more. Trump launched this war without thinking through the consequences. With his bloodthirsty rhetoric, he has compounded the damage by showing the world that the United States is, under its current leadership, truly a rogue nation.

Early on Monday morning, someone from the Yale College dean’s office sent me a message on WhatsApp. A link led to a letter by professor Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore published in the Yale Daily News. It was a letter written about a word. The word was “stuff.”

In 1967, Gilmore finished her first year at Wake Forest. When school let out, she had nowhere to go, so she found a friend with a room on campus where she could stay for a few weeks. She also found a place in the dormitory’s basement where her belongings—presumably, a suitcase and the accumulations of her first year—could wait for her sophomore year.

A dean eventually found her and what she had stashed in the basement. He told her to leave it exactly where it was.

Gilmore is now the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor Emerita at Yale, where she holds appointments in history, Black studies, and American studies. But she did not write her letter to the Yale Daily News about any scholarship or expertise in the many fields for which she is considered an authority. She wrote it to describe that dormitory basement at Wake Forest. And she wrote it because the dean of Yale College, Pericles Lewis, defending his administration’s decision to eliminate its summer storage reimbursement program for first-generation and low-income students, suggested that those students simply “should not buy too much stuff.” Dean Lewis had used “stuff,” so Gilmore did too. She put quotation marks around it. She was, after dealing with universities for 60 years, precise.

A week before it ran her letter, the Yale Daily News published a story about the cuts to the summer storage reimbursement program. When the News posted the story on Instagram, it received nearly a thousand likes and more than a hundred comments from current students and alumni. Jake Thrasher, a PhD candidate at Yale, wrote the most-liked comment: “If I made $450k/year (according to public info), I personally think it would be tacky as hell to tell the poorest students here ‘not to buy too much stuff’ but what do I know?” Lizzie Conklin, who graduated last year, commented, “This is genuinely absurd.” Elizabeth Shvarts, who will graduate next month, wrote, “Let’s just store it in his mansion.” Another commenter compared Dean Lewis to Marie Antoinette. Several others called the situation absurd.

Alex William Chen was not one of those who commented on the Instagram post. But Chen is the Yale College Council’s speaker and has helped allocate the council’s remaining budget—almost $13,000—toward supporting students who need financial help with summer storage costs.

Chen texted me a message he’d like to send Yale’s administrators: “Please come down from your offices and meet with students on campus. Explain to us how the utility of financial support for Yale’s most financially vulnerable students is somehow less than the utility of preserving an exponentially bloated administrative apparatus.”

Chen told me that he knew several Yale students from New Haven who were offering up their own homes to store boxes for friends who will lose reimbursement for summer storage. He asked, “Would these Yale administrators be willing to do the same?”

The reimbursement program had covered summer storage costs for first-generation, low-income students and had provided relief for qualifying students whose socioeconomic backgrounds do not provide a financially feasible option for summer storage. Its elimination upended the relief that had become expected.

A week after the announcement, and a day after Gilmore’s letter, a new announcement came—this one from a student who, like Chen, wanted to figure out a way for students to fix this on their own.

Topher Allen, the student equity coordinator at Dwight Hall, a center for public service at Yale, held emergency meetings with storage vendors, container brokers, and colleagues on the student executive committee. Between meetings, he was on calls with alumni and leaders of the Yale College Council. Within a week, they had reallocated their entire spring budget for community-building, social justice, and outreach. Everything allocated to those programs was folded into creating solutions for students who still needed the summer storage reimbursement.

What they built: a flat rate of $50 for full-summer storage, available to any student eligible for the full Pell Grant, living on campus with a home address more than 150 miles away.

In an e-mail to the student body, they compared their rate to that offered by local vendors—between $400 and $700. Allen, however, called the solution a Band-Aid. He said it was born of necessity, not abundance. He also noted that some students, before the Dwight Hall intervention, had planned to hide belongings around campus, or to throw items away and try to replace them in the fall.

Gilmore’s letter, about halfway through, finishes her story about the dean who let her keep her “stuff” in a dormitory basement all those years ago. When she finishes that story, she begins another—one in which Yale holds a $44 billion endowment. In that story, she asserts that the administration might make itself more useful by eliminating two administrator positions than by ending a summer storage reimbursement program that has benefited thousands of students.

Gilmore’s second story, alluding to what Chen called a bloated administrative apparatus, had not arrived at its conclusion arbitrarily.

In 2025, more than a hundred Yale faculty, drawn from dozens of academic departments across nearly every discipline, including Yale Law School and Yale School of Medicine, signed a letter calling for a freeze on new administrative hires. Professors were watching their own salary increases slowly while the ratio of administrators to undergraduates crept toward parity.

The endowment that pays those administrators has accumulated, at least in part, from generations of alumni who wanted to give back to the school that had given them so much. Among what Yale had given them were programs like summer storage. It seems, from Chen’s text messages, and a lot of angry Instagram comments, that such programs give Yale the chance to show students that it sees them as more than their good grades, SAT scores, and ISEF awards.

This is the argument Gilmore made in her letter, which began, she told us, in a dormitory basement in Winston-Salem in 1967. She remembered it 60 years later. She put the word in quotation marks. She took a word a dean had used carelessly and precisely demarcated it in the oldest college daily newspaper in the United States. But Gilmore was not calling any of it absurd. “Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis perhaps attempting to be humorous…when he suggested that low-income students should simply not ‘buy too much stuff,’” Gilmore wrote, “instead seemed arrogant.”

Princeton, New Jersey—At a community forum in 2023, Jim Kyle, a municipal planner, approached the dais and spoke about focusing “more density in town and near public transit.” Kyle was working with the city to redevelop of land in the town’s Western Section, a wealthy, tree-lined neighborhood of Tudor and Colonial homes near downtown.

The municipality hadn’t yet settled on its final proposal to build 238 apartment units, 48 of which would be designated affordable, on that 4.8-acre tract, but the resistance to it was already mounting.

Over the course of that morning, homeowners overwhelmingly balked at the prospect of increased density—what one town consultant would call the “the D-word.” One resident of Princeton’s Western Section told the room, “Those of us who own historic homes are subsidizing the community”—and was met with applause. Another pointed out that when it comes to historic preservation—i.e., maintaining the homes they own and live in—the “weight is borne by individuals in this community.” Then a resident took the mic to “take on the role of the Lorax and speak for the trees.” (The project’s lead architect, Dean Marchetto, says the plan would prioritize maintaining trees along the streets.)

In the three years since, the conflict has grown fiercer. Locals make the dispute sound like the Second Battle of Princeton. The housing proposal has pit pro-preservation residents against their pro-housing neighbors. It’s prompted a lawn-sign war, public insults, private threats, and at least one assault. And in this way, experts say, Princeton is like a lot of other towns. In upper-class suburbs, a group of organized residents will almost always fight to maintain the single-family status quo.

Matt Mleczko earned his PhD from Princeton in 2024 and founded Princeton Grows, a local housing advocacy group. He’s now a political science professor at Marquette University, and he told me, “If you replicate this same scenario thousands of times over in all the other places like Princeton that have a lot of resistance to building multi-family housing, I would imagine it starts to become a little bit clearer why we’re in such a housing crisis.”

Neighbors campaigning against the development point to the illustrious parts of town history: Einstein’s house, Revolutionary War sites, and Nassau Hall, which served as the US Capitol for four months in 1783. But they usually leave out Princeton’s less glorious history of discrimination.

In 1696, Princeton’s first known Black residents arrived: seven enslaved people belonging to Declaration of Independence signatory Richard Stockton. “The enslaved Stocktons not only worked the land but also cleared and built the Stocktons’ stately home, as well as their own slave quarters in the back,” Kathryn Watterson writes in I Hear My People Singing, a book on Princeton’s African American history.

The address of the proposed housing is 108 Stockton Street—part of Stockton’s initial 400-acre tract.

What affordable housing Princeton did have was rendered that way by segregation, according to the Princeton Affordable Housing Project. Beginning in the late 1800s, 12 concentrated blocks were home to most of the town’s Black population. A fence separated that area from higher-income housing to the west. Black entrepreneurs opened businesses, including grocery stores, beauty salons, and the state’s only Black-run newspaper. Businesses along Princeton’s main drag largely did not allow Black clientele, so the neighborhood’s residents created an affordable micro-economy, with the Black YMCA as its social hub.

Then, in 1929, a rich Princeton alum bankrolled the construction of what would become the town’s economic center. To make way for these plans “to enhance the student experience,” those 12 blocks were demolished and the Black residents displaced.

Now anti-development signs have sprouted up across town, demanding “Defend Historic Princeton.” The eponymous group behind the signs says its organizers “oppose town-wide overdevelopment at the expense of Princeton’s multifaceted historic character.”

Adam Gordon, the executive director of Fair Share Housing, a statewide advocacy group that has settled housing-related cases with more than 340 towns across New Jersey, looks to the rhetoric of safeguarding Princeton’s history and sees an echo with another movement. “Defend historic Princeton.… it’s Make America Great Again,” he told me. “It’s this romantic vision of a past that didn’t really exist.”

Because of its long history of discrimination, Princeton’s metro area is the sixth-most-segregated in the country, according to a 2023 study out of Berkeley. And lacking affordable housing, many poor and working-class residents have been pushed out. In 2024, Princeton’s household median income was $192,079, nearly twice the statewide median income of $103,556 and close to four times that of neighboring Trenton.

In a paid advertisement printed last April in Princeton Packet, a group of prominent academics—including liberal historian Sean Wilentz and topped by filmmaker Ken Burns, who does not live in Princeton but is a friend of Wilentz’s—wrote, “Few if any American towns are as distinguished as Princeton.” They call the proposed development “aggressive high-density urbanism.”

“This is not just any town, any municipality, just like this is not just any university,” Wilentz told Princeton University’s student newspaper last fall.

His organization, Defend Historic Princeton, and another, Princeton Coalition for Responsible Development, separately filed legal challenges against the town to halt the development plans from becoming part of the planned affordable housing stock. Those lawsuits have so far been dismissed. In February, the US Supreme Court sided with the state of New Jersey in upholding towns’ obligation to implement affordable housing—a requirement that several of the state’s wealthiest municipalities were trying to shirk.

New Jersey has mandated affordable housing since the 1970s, when an influx of wealthy white families to the South Jersey suburb of Mount Laurel priced out longtime Black residents. A lawsuit between the township and the local chapter of the NAACP resulted in the Mount Laurel doctrine in 1975, which banned exclusionary zoning and stipulated that towns had to offer their “fair share” of affordable housing. In the following decades, updates to the legislation and the formation of the Council on Affordable Housing strengthened state oversight and enforcement capacity.

Still, for decades, towns did not build affordable units at scale. Regional Contribution Agreements allowed wealthier towns to offload their fair-share obligations onto poorer towns with compensation until 2008 when the state eliminated these deals. And in 2015, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that compliance with Mount Laurel was within the judicial system’s purview, making it possible for the courts to compel towns to follow the law. Since then, Fair Share Housing has settled cases with hundreds of towns—including Princeton. In the past 11 years, some 25,000 designated affordable homes have been built statewide—a testament to “how successful and influential the Mount Laurel framework has been,” Jag Davies, Fair Share Housing’s director of communications, told me. Several other states enacted housing laws similar to New Jersey’s. Still, it hasn’t been enough: New Jersey has a 150,000-unit shortage of low- and moderate-income homes.

Critics of the proposed housing have downplayed the affordable housing in the project and lambasted it as “a massive luxury apartment development,” not in keeping with neighborhood architecture and character. “It’s as lopsided to its context as the Trump White House ballroom is,” Wilentz told me.

Mleczko, the Marquette professor, pointed out that the housing deficit exists across class brackets, with affordability meaning different things to different people. “If everything that’s new is luxury, the term starts to not mean much of anything.”

The 48 designated affordable units would be split into three income-restricted tiers, the lowest being for families making 30 percent or less of area median income. Building these units requires funding. “Affordable housing cannot pay for itself,” Patrick McAnaney, a DC-area housing developer, wrote. “Government subsidies exist, but they can rarely finance entirely affordable developments. Developers often account for the funding shortfall by “utilizing market-rate housing to cross-subsidize affordable units.”

Responding to the initial ad signed by Wilentz, Burns, and four other historians, Councilman Leighton Newlin published a letter in Town Topics titled: “‘Defending’ Historic Princeton? From Whom, and From What?” Newlin extols the possibility of inclusionary multi-family affordable units in town, and describes anxieties related to traffic, aesthetics, and stormwater as “a plantation mentality in progressive clothing.”

In his response to the response, Wilentz decried Newlin’s “predictably” pro-forma portrayal of the housing opponents “as elite racists out to exclude Blacks and Hispanics from Princeton.” Wilentz stands by his claim that the development only replicates the town’s racial inequities.

Some of the houses in Princeton are centuries old, but the town has also seen hyper-modern mansions get built without raising any alarms. A 2017 Princeton Magazine feature called “Evolving Neighborhood” describes how a gabled, Cape cottage–style home in the Western Section was “deconstructed” to make room for “a modernist’s dream.” The magazine says such residents have risen “to the challenge of modern living in an historic neighborhood.” In 2012, an effort to designate this same area historic—and limit teardowns—caused some inhabitants to express feeling “disenfranchised” by losing property rights. One resident described the historic designation as “a creeping cancer.”

The much-debated housing proposal is for a vacant, previously developed site and wouldn’t involve any further demolition. (In 2022, three historic Princeton Theological Seminary buildings were leveled on the property, to neighbors’ chagrin.)

For Jessica Vieira, the historical significance of Western Section drew her to the neighborhood, even if it comes with an added price. Vieira lives down the street from the proposed development, which she described as “a massive structure in what is a colonial village.” She worried that the construction would tower over the Barracks, a 17th-century estate where James Madison and Alexander Hamilton slept during the 1783 Continental Congress. “We feel like we’re sitting here in our little historic homes, and they’re basically building huge developments around us,” Vieira told me. “I recognize that we need to be able to build housing, but this is insane.”

Some neighbors argue the area is better simply better suited to single-family homes. One new family next door is more “in keeping” than dozens. It boils down to “the idea that some element of the big city is coming to take a place in their town,” said TAPInto Princeton editor Richard Rein. “And people find that very frightening.”

At the end of one community forum in March, Rein, 78, was shoved and cursed at. “Fortunately, I had myself braced in such a way that I didn’t go down,” said Rein. “What was more shocking to me was the dropping of an F-bomb from two different women of retirement age living in the Western Section of Princeton.” Rein’s coverage leans in favor of the proposed development.

Rein is not the only one feeling the heat of social tensions. “We have experienced constant animosity, threats that are personal, political and professional,” said Councilwoman Mia Sacks, chair of the Affordable Housing Committee.

The attention blitz has also bred a kind of meme-ification. After the orange “Defend Historic Princeton” signs cropped up, blue ones imploring “Princeton for All” started populating dissenting yards. The sign skirmish was waged by university neuroscientists Jonathan Pillow and Sam Wang, who told me they thought the orange ones sent an “unwelcoming message, keeping people out to preserve the town as it is.”

Then suddenly there were lime-green signs too, stating simply, “Princeton.” An e-mail address at the bottom reads mysignisbetterthanyours@gmail.com. Someone calling themself “Princeton Yard Sign Syndicate” said via e-mail: “We can neither confirm nor deny that our sign is our official entry into the ongoing battle of the yard signs.” And at local pub trivia, graduate students studying housing policy have competed under the name “Destroy Historic Princeton.”

Sacks grew up in Princeton and returned in 2008 after more than 20 years away. Arriving “felt like I was moving to a stage set of a town that had been frozen in time,” Sacks said. “It felt like the town was basically preserved in formaldehyde, and that it was not evolving.”

Mleczko sees the development question as part of a social contract, in which housing is both a need and a right. He said these debates require us to ask ourselves: “Are we going to provide for neighbors? Are we going to provide for the people who want to be our neighbors but can’t because there’s not enough housing to go around?” As for balancing housing and environmental priorities, Mleczko takes issue with the heady philosophizing: “It’d be one thing if this were a debate in a vacuum [about] what’s more important, housing affordability or historic preservation. But we’re not in a vacuum. We’re in the backdrop of an unrelenting housing crisis.”

Princeton is not alone among blue towns in having a chasm between its purported values and real-time stance. This is especially true at municipal meetings, which disproportionately draw people opposed to housing proposals. A study by Data for Progress analyzing Massachusetts voters’ attitudes toward affordable housing found respondents much more likely to support hypothetical affordable housing than actual projects in their neighborhoods. Fifty-six percent of voters supported affordable housing abstractly in a ballot referendum, but 63 percent of municipal meeting attendees opposed development projects.

By the time later community forums rolled around in Princeton, housing advocates were showing up in larger numbers, diluting the density panic and showing that a smattering of housing-apprehensive voices had been disproportionately loud.

“There’s general agreement that affordable housing serves an important role in the community,” Liz Lempert, Princeton’s mayor from 2013 to 2020, told me. “The debate is more on where it should be, and oftentimes it’s, ‘not here, it should be there.’”

Princeton has a reputation as a liberal, intellectual bastion—but like many towns, its progressivism, for many residents, crumbles at the prospect of lower property values or a changing view across the street.

Early in Here Where We Live Is Our Country, the artist and writer Molly Crabapple’s history of the Jewish Labor Bund—a staunchly anti-Zionist, socialist movement founded by Eastern European Jews in 1897—she describes in harrowing detail the waves of anti-Semitic pogroms that tore through the Pale of Settlement. During a brutal convulsion of violence in January 1905 in Odessa in which pogromists murdered hundreds of Jews, Bundists reported to comrades abroad that “pogroms exist only where the government wants them.” Drawing an apt comparison to the racialized terror of police-backed lynchings in the American South, Crabapple writes that Bundists, and the Jewish community at large, faced insurmountable odds precisely because “both police and soldiers helped their attackers.” Today, in the name of Zionism, the descendants of those ravaged by pogroms and genocide subject Palestinians to the same crimes.

According to the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli settlers have displaced 1,700 Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank since January of this year—a figure that exceeded in three months the entire total from 2025. What is obscured by the bloodless language of this UN report is the horror, in all its visceral particularity, of such attacks. Far-right Israeli settlers—often backed and even armed by the Israeli state—have beaten, sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and murdered Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, leaving burnt homes, cars, and agricultural land in their wake. Crabapple’s archival reconstruction of the debates animating the Bund’s political world reveals the ethnonationalist through line linking European antisemitism and Zionism from the late 19th century to the present.

Remarkably, she shows that Bundists themselves foresaw the inevitable inversion of victim and perpetrator demanded by Zionist ideology. In 1938, Bundist leader Henryk Erlich wrote, “Zionism, in point of fact, has always been a Siamese twin of antisemitism…. The Zionists regard themselves as second-class citizens in Poland. Their aim is to be first-class citizens in Palestine and to make the Arabs second class-citizens.” In the Bund’s political project—its emphasis on the practicalities of mutual aid, labor organizing, and armed self-defense; its unwavering rejection of all ethnonationalism, including Zionism; and its steadfast belief in intergroup solidarity—Crabapple identifies “a guide for our moment.”

The Bund’s revolutionaries, poets, and militants fought and died not just in the name of an emancipated socialist horizon. Rather, they forged a capacious form of belonging, at home in diaspora and exile, reliant not on blood and soil but a shared struggle for freedom and dignity wherever they found themselves. They called their philosophy do’ikayt, or “here-ness.” We would do well to listen.

The Nation spoke with Crabapple about socialist internationalism, Yiddish cultural production, and the tedium of leftist infighting. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Ishan Desai-Geller

Chris Lehmann writes this month about Tucker Carlson. He quotes an acquaintance calling the podcaster “the Father Coughlin of the twenty-first century”—a peddler of ugly bigotries dressed up as the pseudo-populist vindication of the forgotten man.”

The Nation started sounding the alarm about Coughlin soon after he burst onto the national scene in the early 1930s, denouncing bankers and corporations for preying on ordinary people. An Ontario-born Catholic priest in suburban Detroit, Coughlin began broadcasting his Sunday sermons over the radio and found a massive audience. He initially claimed to support the New Deal, but soon turned against it as insufficiently opposed to high finance. 

Early on, The Nation evinced a prescient skepticism toward Coughlin’s populism. In 1934, Raymond Gram Swing published a two-part profile, warning that the pastor’s program, though vague, bore a clear resemblance to fascism. Swing’s portrait calls to mind none other than Carlson: “In type he is an actor, with an advanced sense of stage management. He plays several roles…. Few visitors get to know the real Father Coughlin, perhaps because there is no real Father Coughlin. The reality may be just this succession of parts.” 

Columnist Heywood Broun observed in 1936 that Coughlin “has a certain contempt for his own fuzzy followers and sees them as so much fascist fodder…. he is solely a fascist faker using whatever means come to his hand to lend dignity and cover to his effort to achieve literal dictatorship in the United States.” 

And then, in 1939, the journalist James Wechsler published “The Coughlin Terror,” which showed how the Coughlin-aligned “Christian Front” organization was behind a sharp rise in anti-Semitic street violence in New York. In response, Coughlin repeatedly attacked “the Bolshevik Nation.” The editors responded: “Well, we are used to verbal rocks from both right and left, but our readers know, even if Coughlin does not, that for nearly seventy-five years The Nation has been not a Bolshevik but a liberal magazine which has fought hard for the civil liberties of all groups without distinction of race or creed.”

American entry into World War II eroded support for Coughlin’s pro-fascist message. In 1942, his Catholic superiors ordered him to give up broadcasting. He continued ministering to his Michigan church until the late 1960s and died in 1979.

In 1965, The Nation reviewed a book about Coughlin. The reviewer, Harvey Bresler, asked whether “some new Coughlin-like mass movement” might rise in the future: “In the eventuality of a prolonged economic collapse like that of the 1930s, almost anything could happen. But that is not likely, today we have too many built-in precautionary mechanisms…. Furthermore, American society is not as polarized as it was thirty years ago.” 

Well, today it seems about as polarized as in the 1930s, and those built-in precautionary mechanisms don’t appear to be quite as sturdy as they used to be. Only time will tell how far our own “fascist faker” chooses to take his hateful grift, and what it will take to stop him.

On March 13, buried in The New York Times’ coverage of the US/Israel-Iran conflict was a headline that would have been easy to miss amid the din of war coverage: “As El Niño Simmers, Scientists Warn of Weather Extremes Starting in Late Summer.” Many readers may not even have noticed it, but that article noted that scientists at the Climate Prediction Center, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, had raised their estimate for an El Niño event this summer from 60 percent to about 80 percent.

Admittedly, in this strange world of ours, that hardly seemed like an earth-shattering revelation. But if you had read the piece more closely, your alarm bells should instantly have gone off. Forecasters now predict that the coming El Niño—a warming of the Pacific Ocean that deeply affects global weather patterns—is likely to be as severe as the one in 2023–24, which triggered severe flooding and prolonged heatwaves around the world. As the article noted, however, average world temperatures are now actually higher than they were at the height of that previous El Niño, thanks to global warming, and so it’s likely that we will face even more intense heatwaves and flooding this time around.

Consider that news alarming enough. Unfortunately, the bad news didn’t end there. The Times article went on to report that, since early last year, the Trump administration has laid off thousands of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers, greatly diminishing the agency’s ability to respond to such impending weather disasters. And then there’s the dismal fact that Trump has overseen the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development, which once sent humanitarian aid to disaster-struck countries.

And, sadly enough, it only gets worse from there. After all, we know that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to boost the production of fossil fuels—the consumption of which is the main driver of global warming—even as it also works to impede global action to slow the warming process. On January 7, for example, the president announced that the United States would withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the bedrock treaty upon which most international efforts to rein in that onrushing nightmare are based.

Likewise, on February 12, the administration repealed the scientific determination (called the “endangerment finding”) that gives the government the legal authority to combat climate change. And that’s not all: on March 15, the Times also reported that the administration was preparing to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the nation’s premier institution for studying global weather patterns—including the severe climate disturbances we can expect from the coming El Niño and higher world temperatures. In other words, the rest of us will not only be deprived of emergency assistance during future climate disasters, but also lack timely information about oncoming hazardous weather patterns.

As I consumed all of that—in the midst, of course, of President Trump’s ill-conceived war on Iran—it struck me that we need to brace ourselves for ever-more-calamitous outcomes from Donald Trump’s extreme leadership incompetence. In fact, his incompetence is likely to produce one mega-disaster after another, culminating perhaps in global political-economic collapse.

Trump’s Profound Incompetence

Donald Trump’s leadership incompetence has already been demonstrated in one bad move after another. His capricious imposition of ever-fluctuating tariffs on US imports, for example, has caused prolonged misery for farmers and many small and medium businesses that depend on predictable trade patterns. Likewise, his heavy-handed deployment of armed ICE and other federal agents to Minneapolis achieved little in the way of apprehending dangerous immigrants but caused widespread disorder and violence, while killing two nonviolent protesters. But the most severe example of his governing incompetence to date has been his handling of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran.

While devising an elaborate plan to destroy Iran’s conventional military capabilities and shatter the regime, the Trump team appears to have made no preparations to eliminate the Iranians’ extensive drone capabilities or their ability to disrupt oil production and transit in the Persian Gulf area, with far-reaching global consequences. As of this reporting, the critical Strait of Hormuz through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes every day (along with a substantial share of its liquified natural gas [LNG] and chemical fertilizers) remains largely closed to commercial traffic. This has produced energy shortages in many countries that are heavily reliant on imported oil and/or LNG and, because oil is a globally-traded commodity, it has boosted gasoline prices in the United States, despite the fact that this country doesn’t import much Middle Eastern oil.

None of this should have been unexpected. The Iranians have, on numerous occasions, threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to a US attack on their country, while their efforts to build up a vast stockpile of drones and missiles (and to hide them in remote underground sites) were well publicized.

Any intelligent war planner—of which there are many in the US military establishment—would have known of these realities and planned for them. Indeed, US planning to secure the Strait goes back to 1980, when President Jimmy Carter’s White House issued what became known as the “Carter Doctrine”—an assertion that any move by a hostile force to impede the oil flow in the Persian Gulf “will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” To enforce that edict, the Pentagon established the US Central Command (Centcom) and established a network of military bases throughout the Gulf region. Since its inception, Centcom has repeatedly stressed its ability to keep the Strait open in the face of any Iranian drive to block it.

Trump obviously ignored all such intelligence—collected over many years by top American officials—and started his war without the slightest apparent plan for keeping the Strait safe for energy shipping. Not only were US naval forces unprepared to escort oil tankers through it, but Trump failed to enlist US allies in such efforts—a glaring fault that only became obvious after the war began when he suddenly called upon them to do so (and chided them when they proved reluctant).

And consider all of this sheer, unadulterated incompetence, on a massive scale.

The Blows to Come

We have yet to witness all the consequences of Trump’s incompetence in undertaking the war against Iran. The shutdown of fertilizer exports from the Gulf is already causing the price of that critical commodity to rise around the world. In doing so, it threatens agricultural production as farmers balk at the higher costs—a trend likely to result in higher food costs everywhere, including the United States. That will, of course, result in increased hunger for those least able to afford the higher prices of food and rising inflation. The rise in food and energy prices could also diminish consumer spending and investor confidence, possibly leading to a global economic slowdown (or worse).

And don’t imagine that those are the only major shocks to the global system we can expect in the months ahead—shocks the Trump team is unlikely to address with competent leadership. At the January convocation of business and political elites in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum released its “Global Risks Report 2026,” identifying what experts believe are the greatest future threats to global stability and prosperity. According to those experts, the top risks include extreme weather events, state-based armed conflict, and a global economic downturn—real-time threats that Trump has already encountered and failed to address successfully. As those perils gain momentum in the months ahead, Trump’s incompetence will result in ever greater hardship and suffering.

The Adverse Effects of AI

That Davos Risk Report also identified another category of threats for which the Trump administration is woefully unprepared: “adverse outcomes of AI technologies.”

Beginning with AI’s impending impact on employment, the report cites one study suggesting that “AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years in the United States, potentially driving unemployment to 10–20%”—an enormous threat to social and political cohesion. At the same time, a massive buildup of computing data centers is putting extreme stress on local energy and water supplies across the US, introducing an added layer of popular unease and conflict.

Hovering in the background of all this is the threat of “rogue AI”—the possibility that computer scientists at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the other leading AI firms will create a “superintelligent” version of AI capable of outperforming humans in most cognitive tasks and selecting its own objectives, independent of human wishes or instructions. Think of “Skynet,” the superintelligent AI in the Terminator movie series that chooses to eliminate humans by inciting a global nuclear war. While the Davos Risk Report doesn’t address the risk of advanced AI development directly, there is growing talk in the scientific community of just such an outcome, as vividly suggested, for example, by the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that President Trump and his entourage are wholly unprepared to address the very idea of such a possibility. Rather than emphasize safety in the development of advanced AI models, Trump has called for their untrammeled evolution. In his major policy statement on AI, “Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” he made his top objective overridingly clear: “It is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”

That means, as his plan explains, eliminating all barriers to the development of advanced AI models, including any legislative restrictions on their release and any local environmental impediments to the construction of mammoth AI-driven data centers nationwide. Nowhere does Trump’s plan acknowledge the potential for catastrophic job losses from widespread AI utilization or the risk of AI going rogue and threatening the survival of humanity. Rather than offering Americans the slightest protection from such potential calamities, he is ensuring that they will become more likely and that the rest of us will suffer the consequences.

Convergent Catastrophes

Until recently, the shocks to global stability and safety—war, economic disorder, climate disaster, and AI-driven calamities—seemed relatively distinct. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, however, has offered us a first glimpse, however limited, of how they might become a conjoined mega-catastrophe.

In the future, there is no reason to assume that such earth-shaking calamities will remain discrete events, allowing world leaders adequate time to respond to them individually. It is likely, in fact, that they will arise ever more frequently in unison. In a 2013 study conducted for the US intelligence community, the National Research Council described just such “clusters of extreme events,” warning that they are a concern from a national security perspective “because U.S. government resources and those of other international actors deployed to deal with a security or humanitarian concern related to the first event in a cluster might be unavailable or less available to deal with a second or subsequent event.” The potential result of such a future reality could, of course, prove to be almost unimaginable social disorder, economic chaos, and even state collapse.

Overcoming one extreme event, let alone two or more, would always pose a remarkable challenge to even the most competent of governments. Sadly, we face an increasingly hazardous future with a demonstrably incompetent leadership team running what still passes for the most powerful country on Earth. For the United States to survive, no less prosper, Americans will need to unite around a demand for a humane and deeply competent national leadership team. If there’s anything we can agree on, it should be a need for leaders who can successfully steer us through severe national calamities—but don’t hold your breath for such an outcome in the next three years.

Ninety minutes before his self-imposed deadline for commencing a genocide against an entire “civilization,” Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire in the war he started for no reason against Iran. The particulars of the “deal” do not concern me—although I understand ships will have to pay to pass through a strait they could once traverse for free. What does concern me is: We now have two weeks to remove the homicidal maniac running the country before he threatens the peace of the world again. The responsibility lies entirely with the American people, and their representatives in Congress, to prevent further catastrophe. If we fail to do so, whatever happens next will be our fault.

Rarely has a people been given such an opportunity to stop the madness of their government. In most evil regimes, the ruler is so far removed from accountability that he cannot be touched or legitimately restrained. Usually, this ruler fully oppresses his own people before attempting to commit atrocities around the world. In those situations, only illegal regime change can remove a leader willing to commit war crimes to accomplish his goals.

But we are lucky. We have several legal ways to remove our despot before he is allowed to commit additional horrors. We must use these methods now. If we do not, we are in every way complicit in the atrocities to come. This is our moment, and if we fail, history will not just blame Trump and his MAGA acolytes for terrorizing the world; it will also blame us, the ineffectual opposition. And it will be right to do so.

Given the immediacy of the problem, a number of commentators and congresspeople have looked to the 25th Amendment. The amendment, in theory, allows for the immediate removal of the president based on a declaration by the vice president and a majority of the president’s cabinet that the president is “unfit” to continue holding office.

I, too, would like to think the 25th Amendment would solve all our problems. It would be fast; it would be direct. But as much as the amendment might sound like a silver bullet, it’s really not. First, you’d have to get JD Vance on board, which… is not going to happen. Vance was apparently against the war, yet fell in line behind the president, and then went to Hungary to lick a different authoritarian’s boots. Vance has less dignity than Mike Pence, and Pence stuck with Trump until Trump tried to have him killed. There is simply no way Vance invokes the 25th Amendment.

And don’t even get me started on Trump’s handpicked cabinet. Not a single one of them can be counted on to say that Trump is unfit to lead—not Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth; not the Trump defense attorney now running the Department of Justice; not the reality-TV show dude leading the Department of Transportation. No one.

But even if Vance and the cabinet were visited by the ghost of nuclear holocaust future and did invoke the 25th Amendment, the president can simply say “Wrong”—and then immediately resume power. The VP and the cabinet then have to vote to remove the president again, for a second time, in the face of the president’s open opposition, and then the question is kicked to Congress, where both chambers are required to vote to remove the president and install the VP in his place.

But there’s a second option—which is the original (constitutionally speaking), and to my mind easiest, way to remove Trump: impeachment. Since Trump has been impeached twice before, everybody should know the drill. Impeachment is a charge that is brought by a simple majority vote in the House. The trial on those charges takes place in the Senate, where a two-thirds majority is required to convict and then remove the president from office.

Given the fact that Trump has been through this twice—and survived, it might sound pointless to try this all again. But here’s why I think the most common arguments against trying to impeach Trump again are wrong.

What’s going to be different the third time?

I’d like to think the reality of an illegal, unpopolar, and flagrantly criminal war of choice will make this time different, but I am not (that) naïve. I know that most Republican senators would rather see Iran nuked, and risk dirty bombs exploding in Penn Station, than risk losing a primary to a more MAGA challenger. You don’t get to be a GOP senator without an overwhelming disregard for the well-being of others.

But two things have changed since Trump’s last two impeachments, one legal and the other political. The legal change is significant. When Trump escaped conviction over January 6, then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said, “President Trump is still liable for everything he did while he was in office.” I do think McConnell believed that when he said it. And it was true, when he said it. But it’s not true anymore. The Supreme Court has since declared that Trump is immune from prosecutions for criminal actions he takes while in office. If Trump is impeached again, the Senate will know that conviction in the Senate is the only form of accountability Trump will ever face.

The political change is that Trump is now a lame-duck president. Granted, during the second impeachment, Trump was functionally out of office and most people didn’t think he’d ever run again. But this time, he can’t run. Impeachment and removal would end the Trump era with more finality than anything we’ve seen before. There might be some senators interested in that.

Is that enough to get us 67 votes for conviction on an impeachment charge? Probably not. Again, I’m not stupid. But conviction isn’t the only way to accomplish the most essential goal.

Trump will not be restrained by the long process of impeachment, so why bother?

Oh, I beg to differ. If your goal is to “make Trump behave like a normal president,” that battle is lost. My goal is not to make Trump “behave”; my goal is to prevent him from unleashing America’s nuclear arsenal in an attempt to obliterate Iran, or whichever non-white nation pisses Trump off next. I think impeachment can go a great way towards restraining that behavior. I do not think a president seriously under threat of impeachment will want to start dropping nukes. I do not think Trump would want to turn his trial into a Senate referendum on the illegal war he started. Even in the face of a likely acquittal, impeachment, and the credible threat of impeachment, might be the only thing that keeps Trump’s war crimes “conventional.” I don’t necessarily think impeachment alone stops Trump’s illegal war; for that, we have to get all the way to “conviction” and removal. But I do think impeachment keeps the irradiation of an entire people off the table.

Your theories are intriguing, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter, but perhaps we should revisit them in eight months should Democrats assume control of the House

No, the time to try to impeach is now. Again, charges in the House only require a simple majority and there might be right now the few Republican votes necessary to get this process rolling. Remember, Trump’s war is unpopular, even with many of his usual racist supplicants. Trump wants to play brinksmanship with World War Three every fortnight. The world cannot be held hostage by a nuke-rattling madman every time new information leaks from the Epstein files. Impeachment and removal, or at least the possibility of removal, is the only political action left to elected representatives of conscience.

The Democrats should be leading that charge. The current posture of the party can be summed up as: “This dangerous psychopath will kill us all. Sadly, there’s nothing we can do until November, but you know who could show real courage right now? JD Vance. He would be greeted as a liberator.”

How is this leadership? How is it that Democrats are scrambling around calling on their enemy’s pool boy to put country over party (and his own political career), while they refuse to put their careers (or bodies) on the line to stop a global atrocity?

For Democrats, impeachment should be the floor. It should be the least they’re willing to do. “I will support articles of impeachment” should be the secret phrase Democrats have to say before being allowed access to the cloakroom.

On the upper end, Democrats should be trying to bring the government to a grinding halt until the genocidal maniac is removed from office. Elected representatives throughout history have literally walked out and refused to participate in governments as evil as ours is right now. At some point, you have to decide to be Charles de Gaulle or you become Philippe Pétain.

Our representatives wouldn’t even have to go into freaking exile the way de Gaulle did. They just have to use every legal means available to remove Trump from office, and use every shred of political power to stop a mass murder from happening.

You know what’s even better than a filibuster? A human wall of elected officials preventing the House and the Senate chambers from opening their doors, preventing the government from doing business, until Trump is impeached and removed.

And politicians aren’t the only ones who have an obligation to act. It’s easy to focus on elected officials because they are the ones who have political power and platform. They are the ones who literally asked to lead. But the moral imperative of the moment also extends to the rest of us. The burden of democracy is that we are all collectively responsible for the actions of our government. We cannot simply say that the actions of a powerful few have nothing to do with the rest of us. Not in our system of government.

I don’t know what it is that you do. I write. I argue. Those are my skills. Right now, I’m trying to use those skills to write and argue against a president intent on committing war crimes. Whatever it is that you do, whatever your skills are, I would implore you to use them to fight against our evil government. All skills are needed, and any skill can have value against this man. Perhaps your skill is raising money? Spend some time raising money to support anti-war efforts. Perhaps your skill is organizing documents? Spend some time helping activists organize their resistance. Perhaps your skill is playing video games? Spend some time arguing in the forums that atrocities should only be inflicted in-game and cannot be allowed in real life.

Earlier this week, I despaired on social media that the country was just waiting around to see if a global calamity would be prosecuted “in our name.” So many people responded “not in my name.” The response seemed to me to miss the point. It’s not enough to say, “I didn’t vote for this.” Not when the threat of mass atrocity is on the line. It’s not enough to go out like Homer Simpson and content ourselves by saying, “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”

There may be no way we can stop the madman in the White House. But if the worst comes to pass, it won’t matter if it was somebody else’s fault. The Iranian people won’t be huddled in a fallout shelter thinking, “It’s a shame JD Vance didn’t have more courage.” They’ll be thinking that Americans, all of us, are to blame for our country’s crimes. We will have no answer for the charge, and our only response must be that we did everything we could think of to prevent the evil.

Trump cannot destroy “a whole civilization," even if he tries. What he can do is kill an incalculable number of innocent people. He must be stopped. We must impeach and remove Trump from office. We must, at least, try.

In the early 2000s, I spent time in South Africa with the Treatment Action Campaign and other organizations, working to educate communities about HIV, the immune system, and what medicines could be used to beat back the virus and deal with opportunistic infections.

These experiences were transformational for me. I learned more from my comrades in TAC about how to use scientific information to both inform and inspire than I have gathered in any formal education I had then or since.

The work TAC did wasn’t just basic health education. It was deep, often door-to-door, engagement, with time spent in clinic waiting rooms and other venues where TAC could reach people affected by AIDS. (In South Africa, a country with 6 million people living with the disease, you could make the case that nobody was spared completely from the virus.) TAC members didn’t only teach people about why, for instance, fluconazole was critical for treating fungal infections associated with AIDS. They emphasized why it was important for people to ask why their local health facility did not stock the drug, whom to talk to about this, and their rights under the South African constitution to make these demands.

This history has been on my mind recently, because of the ongoing debates within my field about how we handled the Covid pandemic. Many in public health are convinced that the biggest problem during the height of the pandemic was a lack of good communication. The answer? That those of us in public health need to learn to be better “storytellers.”

Coming from the AIDS movement, no one has to convince me that health information needs to be translated in ways that non-experts can grasp. I spent time in the mountains of Lesotho working with comrades from TAC to help rural communities understand HIV’s lifecycle and the way the immune system works, largely through acting the biology out in real time in goofy role-plays (I was a macrophage), and helping to demystify what was happening in their bodies—why understanding this information gave them power and agency over their own lives and the disease they were living with. This information became life-saving for many, helping them to advocate for themselves even in the most difficult of circumstances (e.g., a president who didn’t think HIV was the cause of AIDS).

But here in the United States, the push to communicate has often been reduced to something else—a savvy Substack, an engaging podcast, a witty social media campaign. This stuff is so, so far from the tangible, hands-on work I experienced and played a small part in in Southern Africa. Maybe people think Americans don’t need the same kind of deep commitment that South Africans did. But those people are wrong. If we want to address the real health crises in the US, better stories and storytellers are only a part of the solution. Without embedding ourselves within communities and working with them, stories from afar, as well-crafted as they can be, are inert. They are all potential energy, not kinetic in any sense.

What would it mean to communicate to residents of a holler in the mountains of West Virginia; or in a once-thriving rural community in New England, where all the jobs left long ago and many people rely on Medicaid, food assistance, and other social programs to get by; or in a city where the zip code you live in determines your life expectancy and you live in one that does not portend well for your health? I would suggest it would look more like the work of the Treatment Action Campaign and others around the world who go beyond the simple transmission of health advice to give people a sense the health of their communities is a shared purpose—and that the more information they have, the more power they possess.

Stories are part of this work, but “being there,” listening, and understanding people’s struggles are really the first step in a long process. It means sitting down at kitchen tables and talking together, building trust that only comes with commitment for the long haul. And it means talking about health in ways that matter to them, giving them a sense that a decision they make can make their lives better.

This isn’t so far-fetched. It’s a combination of a community health worker model with a bit of community organizing thrown in. While TAC in South Africa showed me how it can be done, there are models around the world to draw from, and there are 60 community health worker networks, in 38 US states, for domestic inspiration. It means building a cadre of CHWs to meet the moment—a scale-up of significant proportions. My Yale colleague Amy Kapczynski and I proposed the establishment of a community health corps in the first months of the Covid pandemic, and I think the need for something like this is greater than ever.

Yes, we should be better communicators. But if we stop there, we are playing to the smallest of audiences and should expect the smallest of impact. “Better stories” is a marketing strategy, not a recipe for true human contact and engagement. We can’t just sit at our laptops and pump out information. We have to go to the people at the other end of our efforts. If we are looking to transform public health, it’s going to be in the work we do together, side by side, and face to face. We need to learn from communities, as we craft stories together with them and envision a healthier future for all of us.

We went back to Selma, Alabama, this year—not as dignitaries or guests at a ceremony, but as inheritors of an unfinished revolution. And we did not go alone. We brought a new generation: organizers from Latino, Somali, Hmong, Cambodian, and Laotian communities. Many of them had just watched armed, masked ICE agents surge through their neighborhoods in Illinois and Minnesota. Just like the students of 1965, they came to Selma to stand up, to speak out, and to demand that America finally become what it has always promised to be.

It was a reminder that this is not just history. This is now.

In 1965, ordinary people walked out of Brown Chapel AME Church and onto the Edmund Pettus Bridge, asking for one fundamental thing: to be seen. To be counted. To be treated as full citizens in their own country. They carried no weapons. They stormed no capitol. They carried faith, dignity, and a demand as old as the republic itself: the right to vote. For this, they were met with tear gas, whips, and clubs. John Lewis’s skull was fractured not because he broke the law, but because he dared to insist that the law finally apply to Black people.

Out of the blood on that bridge came two of the most transformative laws in American history: the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The VRA didn’t just change rules—it changed who could have power. It forced states with long histories of racist voter suppression to get federal approval before changing their election laws. It gave communities real tools to fight racial gerrymanders, at-large schemes, and the thousand quiet tricks designed to make sure Black and brown voters could be counted but never truly count. Voter registration soared. New voices, new leaders, new possibilities emerged.

Simultaneously, the Immigration and Nationality Act dismantled the racial hierarchy baked into American immigration law, ending the national-origin quota system that favored immigrants from Northern Europe.

What was born on that bridge was a new definition of who gets to be an American. But the forces that tried to stop those marchers in 1965 never disappeared. They adapted. They learned to wield paperwork instead of nightsticks. And today, they are back.

The Trump administration has surged unprecedented numbers of immigration agents into Democratic states and communities of color. The Justice Department executed a sweeping raid on Fulton County, Georgia—seizing 2020 ballots and voter rolls—to relitigate a settled election and chill every future one. Attorney General Pam Bondi sent a letter to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that amounted to a ransom note: Hand over the complete, unredacted voter rolls or your communities will keep living under siege.

This is not law enforcement. It is intimidation, power dressed up as process.

The Supreme Court’s Shelby County decision had already gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance system, tearing out its spine and letting states with racist histories rewrite election rules without federal review. Voter-ID requirements, slashed voting hours, and gerrymandered maps drawn to dilute Black and brown political power have sprung up all over the country. Now Trump is pushing the SAVE Act, a “show your papers” law designed to block millions of eligible citizens who simply lack the right government-issued documents, all to solve a noncitizen-voting problem that does not exist. Pending Supreme Court cases threaten to gut the VRA even further. Together, these tactics form a coordinated assault on the very idea of multiracial democracy. We recognize it because we have seen it before. Although the methods are different, the intent is identical.

And as we reflect on Selma, we recognize that we are not mere observers of this history; we are products of it. One of us is the first Muslim elected to Congress and to statewide office, a reality made possible by Selma. The other grew up as the son of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson, who marched from Selma to Montgomery and would become an aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The bridge we crossed this year runs through our very lives. And the new generation crossing it—DREAMers and daughters of refugees, community organizers and first-time voters—are the continuation of Selma’s legacy.

Every tactic being deployed today is designed to do what Bull Connor’s clubs could not: to make people afraid to participate. To make democracy feel dangerous. But Selma teaches us something Bull Connor never understood: When you crack the skull of someone marching peacefully toward justice, you do not stop the movement. You become its fuel.

The students who marched in 1965 were fighting to be recognized as citizens with the right to vote. We are fighting to expand that recognition to everyone who calls this country home. The struggle is not behind us. It is right now, right here, unfolding in real time—and we are now the ones who must answer the call to action.

Americans’ electricity costs, which were already high, are going up again. In response, every state and local government with the muscle to do so should be investing in its own decentralized solar, wind, and water systems to create greater resilience and more democratic local control.

Electricity bills today are at the mercy of three distinct, simultaneous private taxes that have pushed natural-gas and electricity costs far above what people can afford. First, there’s the “AI tax”: the stratospheric rising cost built into the utility grid to support artificial intelligence. In high-demand areas, such as those in the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern states where data centers are being built, wholesale prices for energy are up well over 250 percent. Goldman Sachs, noting the spikes, predicts that 40 percent of future electricity costs will come from the increased demand contributed by data centers.

Then there’s the “utility tax,” which has also been spiking in recent years. States grant private corporations monopoly rights to sell electricity in defined regions, while also allowing them to issue stock, maximize returns, and lobby for unreasonable rate hikes. These investor-owned utilities have overcharged Americans $5 billion per year over the past 30 years.

Finally, there’s the bloody “war tax” caused by Donald Trump’s attack on Iran. The president’s war led, predictably, to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s supply of natural gas passes. The price of natural gas on the world market has gone haywire since the strait closed and drones attacked Qatar’s largest liquefied-natural-gas facility, shutting it down. The US gas that generates much of our electricity doesn’t travel through the strait, but global buyers are bidding up the price of American supplies as they seek to replace the lost Qatari shipments, creating a “tax” on domestic consumption. When local gas stations use a market shock to increase profits without a concomitant increase in costs, it’s considered illegal price gouging, but big natural-gas companies get away with it when they sell to utilities. No single American state can police all the steps in the supply chain where gouging takes place on its own.

We saw this awful scenario play out in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Domestic price gougers used the war to get rich while old people froze at home, unable to pay their bills. The war did not change the cost of taking gas out of the ground in the United States, but it dramatically changed the price of electricity. The inflationary shock that beggared millions of Americans was arguably the single biggest factor in the reelection of an unpopular former president in 2024. That president has now decided to launch an incoherent and illegal war, which is leading to more price gouging.

These converging influences on electricity prices should lead us to a wholesale reconsideration of energy policy in the United States. Let’s start by making sure there’s genuine competition and regulation in a natural-gas industry that’s currently dominated by an increasingly small club of companies that profit from volatility.

Two years ago, for example, federal officials allowed Exxon to buy Pioneer in a $60 billion deal to become the dominant shale producer in the Permian Basin of the southwestern United States. But assuming that Exxon will give Americans a hometown discount would be as foolish as it would be costly. At the state and local levels, our elected officials and appointed regulators should stop allowing utilities to merge into monopoly franchises that can then use their market power to hike prices and earn excessive rates of return. States should seize opportunities to permanently protect their residents by making a muscular commitment to build distributed, renewable energy infrastructure as quickly as possible. They should do this not just to protect the climate but also to make our energy supply more reliable and to reap the social benefits that decentralization makes possible. Every community solar installation is a small act of building the kind of resilience we need for a democratic government.

The cost of batteries has been plummeting and will continue to do so, making solar power more feasible than ever. Improved storage capacity can help with the coordination problems that big, dumb grids are used to resolving with brute force. There is no war that can make the sun stop shining, no conflict that can make the wind stop blowing.

The technology needed to significantly diminish the role of natural gas exists today, and it can be deployed in months or, in challenging circumstances, a few short years—not decades. These energy sources are abundant and are much less vulnerable to distribution bottlenecks than shale gas is, and they aren’t subject to the sort of international volatility we are now experiencing.

It will, of course, cost money to build solar infrastructure. But it is much cheaper than the alternative—and the costs will be shared fairly by all of us, as opposed to the private taxes that burden poor Americans the most. To say “We don’t have the money” is to say that people must keep paying unfairly high prices so that wealthy investors don’t have to pony up.

A more decentralized, networked grid also enables people to make their own decisions about which forms of energy are best for their communities. That’s a political question, not just a market one. The fights over data centers prove that people want to be part of that conversation.

The powerful clubs that profit from war, volatility, and monopoly will not stop taxing us if we don’t put up a fight. With this in mind, we shouldn’t try to persuade them. We should build a new future despite them.

On the morning of his 96th day as mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani filled the city’s 100,000th pothole. The ceremonial shoveling, on Olympia Boulevard in Staten Island, was emblematic of Mamdani’s do-everything, be-everywhere, all-at-once approach to the challenge of governing the nation’s largest city.

“There is no pothole too far, no trash pile too high, and no problem too big or too small for city government to address,” he said in a statement that went on to celebrate such accomplishments as “brought rat sightings down 30 percent” and “melted 783 million pounds of snow.”

A few hours later however, in a sparsely attended event at CUNY’s Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, the mayor acknowledged two challenges that weren’t going to be amenable to quick fixes. The first was healing the deep scars from centuries of racism. As Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice, explained in releasing the Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan: “This country once embraced public investment, the GI Bill, affordable public college, [and public] housing…. But when Black Americans fought for access to those programs, backlash politics taught people to resent government programs instead of expanding them. And the result was a worse deal for everyone.”

Her summary may have lacked concrete details like the drained swimming pools in Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together—a 2021 bestseller published in the aftermath of the #BlackLivesMatter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. But Su’s account of how “the same forces that drive racial inequity, exclusion, and economic security also helped produce a city that has become harder for New Yorkers of every background to afford,” was refreshingly direct, as was her declaration that “my job is to make sure…this story ends differently.”

Getting to that happier ending is a herculean challenge—a point driven home by the other item on that morning’s program: the release of New York’s first True Cost of Living (TCOL) Measure. Like the 375-page Equity Plan, the TCOL was the result of the November 2022 Charter Revision referendum. Approved by 81 percent of voters, the proposal mandated that the city report annually on the actual cost of meeting New Yorkers’ essential needs such as housing, food, childcare, and transportation—costs not accurately reflected in federal poverty measures. While the federal government puts any single individual earning more than $15,960 annually above the poverty line (the figure is $33,000 for a family of four), according to the TCOL a single adult would need $70,334 to meet the cost of living in New York, while a family of four would need a combined income of $166,279.

According to the Robin Hood Foundation and Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, some 2.2 million New Yorkers—including nearly 450,000 children—live below the federal poverty line. The city’s TCOL identifies an additional 3.58 million residents living above the poverty line, but who—even after accounting for tax credits and government programs such as housing subsidies and SNAP benefits—still cannot meet the true cost of living an economically secure life. To get by, this group—about 38 percent of the city’s population—-must rely on support from extended families or ballooning personal debt.

Mayor Eric Adams failed to release either of the two mandated reports issued this week, even though his administration oversaw the research. That may well have been because their findings wouldn’t have been welcomed by his patrons in the Trump administration. According to City and State, the Adams administration also scrubbed all references to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from its Racial Equity Plan, with most of those omissions remaining unremedied in the draft version Mamdani released on Monday.

The TCOL headline figures are shocking enough—though, sadly, generating few actual headlines. But a deeper dive discloses the many ways in which New York’s affordability crisis and its history of racial inequality are bound together. A majority of all New Yorkers (61.8 percent) fall short of the resources required to live here. However, more than 77 percent of the city’s Hispanic population lives below the TCOL levels—the highest such level among any ethnic group in the city. But Black New Yorkers (65.6 percent of whom have incomes below the TCOL) and Asian and Pacific Islanders (63.3 percent) are not much better off. The only group with a majority earning an annual income above the TCOL are white New Yorkers, at 56.3 percent.

“These reports make one thing clear,” said the mayor. “We cannot tackle systemic racial inequity without confronting the affordability crisis head-on, and we cannot solve the cost-of-living crisis without dismantling systemic racial inequity.” Mamdani isn’t going to achieve either of these ambitious goals by the end of his first 100 days, of course. As he noted, providing free childcare would lift one of the heaviest burdens off the backs of New York’s working families. Yet even his much-ballyhooed $1.2 billion commitment from Governor Kathy Hochul includes only $73 million in new funding this year—enough to pay for just 2,000 places.

Still, if the mayor’s accomplishments so far seem more symbolic than substantial, he has shown no signs of slackening his pace—or of losing his gift for making the multifarious elements of his coalition feel both seen and valued. He named Rebecca Jones Gaston, a Black woman who was herself adopted from foster care as a child, as the city’s child welfare commissioner. Like Deputy Mayor Su, who was acting secretary of labor under President Joe Biden, Gaston has national experience; she served as Biden’s head of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families. (The New York Post immediately condemned her appointment as a ploy that “puts ‘racial equity’ above keeping NYC kids safe and alive.”)

The mayor ended his Monday whirlwind with a visit to Union Square, where he celebrated at yet another Passover seder—the “Seder in the Streets” held by Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. Candidate Mamdani had attended this event, which was first held in 2008, last year. “But this is the first time we’ve ever invited the mayor,” Sophie Ellman-Golan, a spokeswoman for the group, told me.

Calling on participants to “Melt Pharaoh’s ICE-y Heart,” this year’s theme focused on the need to protect immigrants. “We can’t really celebrate a liberation holiday when so many of our neighbors are trapped in captivity, either in ICE custody or hiding in their homes,” said Ellman-Golan.

Warming up for the mayor, former city comptroller Brad Lander, alluding to the news from Iran, and the continuing (though mostly neglected by the media) horrors in Gaza, asked, “Isn’t it wrong to kill other people’s children?” Mamdani took a lighter tone, thanking the group for its long record as one of the city’s most reliable progressive allies and urging “New Yorkers at large to celebrate the lessons Passover leaves all of us across these five boroughs.”

After the matzos were broken and distributed, and four cups of wine were blessed—one of them by Lander—a portion of the crowd marched to the Sixth Avenue office of Palantir, the AI company that supplies ICE with software to identify and track migrants. Fifteen of the protesters were arrested.

But by then the mayor was long gone.

As the world watches to see whether the two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran ever gets off the ground, President Donald Trump’s genocidal threats against the Iranian people risk fading from our attention. But we cannot move on so quickly from the gravity of Trump’s declaration that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the ceasefire is already at risk of total collapse. On Wednesday, Israel killed over 250 people in Lebanon, despite explicit assurances from international mediators that the ceasefire agreement covered that country; in response, Iran said it had closed the Strait of Hormuz. If war does fully resume, Trump could once again vow to exterminate an entire country of 90 million people.

The second reason is that, even if the ceasefire holds, Trump’s flirtation with genocide is horrifying enough to demand a response all on its own.

Within the US political system, Republicans are too subservient to Trump to mount this opposition. That leaves the Democratic Party—which, despite what many of its defenders say, still has many potential ways to influence the direction of events. So it’s worth assessing how top Democrats are handling this crisis. Unfortunately, the party’s response has mostly been woeful and inadequate.

Democratic leaders have been doing everything in their power to avoid confronting the US-Israeli war against Iran in any meaningful way. When military escalation was still preventable, Democrats refused to act with any urgency. Their most powerful tool would have been a resolution under the War Powers Act. A war powers resolution is privileged, so any member of Congress can force a vote without having to rely on leadership to schedule it. But as I previously reported, top Democrats worked behind the scenes to dampen momentum for Representative Ro Khanna’s Iran war powers resolution, deliberately slow-walking a vote. They publicly committed to forcing another vote on an alternate war powers measure, but failed to schedule it and then went on recess—pushing any action off until mid-April at the earliest.

After the war began, many Democratic lawmakers defaulted to vague concerns with the conflict, criticizing Trump’s war in the language of procedure—briefings, plans, and oversight—rather than in terms of whether it should be happening at all. This approach points to Democrats’ broader calculation. If it were up to them, Trump would carry out the war, weaken Iran, and absorb the political fallout—leaving Democrats free to campaign against it in the midterms.

Rather than act immediately, top Democrats waited until we were on the precipice of a potential nuclear war to fire off tweets calling Trump a “madman” and “unhinged,” rather than force floor fights and recorded vote after recorded vote on war powers resolutions. It wasn’t until Trump threatened to wipe out Iran that so-called opposition party leaders called for Congress to reconvene and “immediately end this reckless war of choice in Iran before Donald Trump plunges us into World War III.”

Individual Democrats began issuing statements, tweets, and videos, many recorded in their suburban backyards, since Congress is on vacation. “There exists a moral order and a moral law in this world, and what Trump is proposing to do is fundamentally evil,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said in a typical post. Dozens of congressional Democrats, along with a smattering of Republicans, including former GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, also called for the 25th Amendment to be used to remove the president over the threats—a politically implausible process that would require the cooperation of the Trump administration and two-thirds of both chambers—or for Trump to be impeached. 

But congressional leaders like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer wouldn’t even call for those obvious actions. Instead, Schumer and other top senators issued a statement meekly asking Trump to “not follow through on this threat.” Meanwhile, conservative Democrats like New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer sought to make clear that they were mostly on board with Trump’s war. “The ultimate goal is to crush the Iranian regime,” Gottheimer tweeted, before vaguely calling on the White House to “come before Congress and present clear objectives, and brief on our progress.”

Even this mild brand of opposition didn’t last long. As soon as Trump announced that he had agreed to a "double sided CEASEFIRE" with Iran, many Democrats went back to antagonizing Trump for backing away from his threat. “It appears Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, a history-changing win for Iran,” Murphy tweeted. “The level of incompetence is both stunning and heartbreaking.”

Schumer himself played a role in the pressure campaign pushing Trump to act militarily. In June 2025, ahead of the US strikes on Iran, Schumer mocked the president as “TACO Trump” for being soft on Iran, cautioning the Trump administration against making any “side deals” without Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. (TACO is short for Trump Always Chickens Out—coined last year by a Financial Times journalist.)

At least one Democrat, Representative Yassamin Ansari, currently the only Iranian-American in Congress, pointed out the danger of lawmakers goading Trump into returning to the war that nearly led to the use of nuclear weapons. “I do not appreciate anyone - Democrat or Republican - taking this moment to make TACO jokes to say Trump ‘chickened out,’” Ansari said in a tweet. “The president was threatening genocide against 90 million Iranians. I’m grateful there’s a ceasefire & scores of innocent people didn’t die tonight.

Democrats appear to have the votes for an alternate war powers resolution, backed by many of the same lawmakers who voted to defeat the initial Khanna-Massie effort. But that bill, introduced by Gottheimer and others, is already a watered-down measure, as it includes carve-outs for continued troop presence and intelligence sharing.

Trump’s war is deeply unpopular. He is losing it badly. Its continuation would be a catastrophe. In this climate, Democrats have no real excuse left. Even if a strong war powers measure were to fail, forcing the vote would still put members on the record and impose political costs on those willing to go along with the war. Democrats must go all in.

“Icannot imagine a society without people with grease on their hands.” Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán has long called creating a “work-based society” the key to his country’s future. It’s underpinned his distinctive brand of right-wing politics, and inspired the “pro-worker” conservatism touted by figures like Tucker Carlson. Endorsing Orbán ahead of Sunday’s election, Donald Trump likewise stressed his record of job creation.

This story has some truth to it. In the decade after Orbán returned to power in 2010, Hungary’s working population expanded by around 20 percent. Not only did German auto giants build up production here, but a construction boom, plus “workfare” programs, pushed employment rates above the EU average. If stories about “pro-family” policies often cast Hungary as a nation of stay-at-home moms, more Hungarian women are in-work than their EU counterparts. It’s also key to Orbán’s support among Roma people.

Orbán has himself claimed that his hopes of re-election on April 12 depend on workers turning out to vote. His Fidesz party has not just consolidated power by extending its reach over the media and the state apparatus but built real support among wide swathes of the population. Yet, for many Hungarians this rhetoric about a “work-based society” is today losing its luster. It’s a major reason why after Sunday’s election, Orbán, too, may be out of a job.

The End of an Era

To understand this weakness, it’s important to recognize different phases in Orbán’s rule.

Analyst Dávid Karas tells me that in the first years after the 2008 financial crash Fidesz promised to win back Hungary’s “economic sovereignty,” while basing living standards on wages, not borrowing or benefits. Yet reindustrialization remained reliant on foreign direct investment, and preparing a low-cost workforce for multinationals. Orbán’s talk of “greasy hands,” Karas says, was also a retort to opposition claims that the government wasn’t investing in higher education. Blue-collar work offered a way to a “more dignified and stable society than producing jobless and socially useless graduates.”

This low-wage model has, however, stopped earning good grades. As sociologist Ábel Csathó tells me, while Hungarian employment rates rose strongly throughout the 2010s, this progress tapered off since the pandemic. In fact, Hungarian living standards have dropped to the lowest in the European Union. Faced with the current war in Iran, shocks like rising gas prices may further threaten Hungary’s future as a global industrial hub.

Some weaknesses of this model were visible even earlier, as shown by events in Dunaújváros, long one of Hungary’s main industrial centers. The story of its historic steelworks, which closed in 2024, shows how the Orbán government allowed multinational owners to wreck a major strategic industry, letting it go to the wall even as it pledged to save jobs.

Steel City

Iheaded to Dunaújváros on a Saturday, three weeks before the election. A postwar new town, its streets follow a grid pattern, reaching a sudden, steep halt above the Danube. When it began construction in 1950, it was called Sztálinváros, in tribute to the Soviet leader, but the nationwide revolt in 1956 also shook this socialist model town. Five years later, it took its current name, meaning New Danube City; today, its Lenin statue is banished to the local museum’s back courtyard. But the steelworks created back then still shape local identity.

Csathó introduces me to former steelworker Isztán Nagy. He remembers exactly when he started work: “September 2, 1971.” Soon after he began as a production worker, the steelworks enrolled him on a college economics course. Nagy tells me that it had a “highly liberal,” US-inspired program, with the kind of pro-market ideas spread by economists like János Kornai. Talk of profitability reshaped Hungarian socialism long before it met its end in 1989.

Nagy stresses that the vast steel complex, from 1984 titled Dunaferr, was always the heart of this town. Local sports teams took its name, and in 2000 Dunaferr soccer club won the Hungarian premiership. Today, the club, too, has gone bust. Dive bars lined up outside the old steelworks gates now pine for lost battalions of worker-drinkers.

It’s not all Orbán’s fault; and for some, job losses came well before the final 2024 shutdown. Even in the late-Communist era, the plant introduced profitability measures that cut jobs, albeit without heading for full privatization. Nagy speaks of redundancies as a process negotiated with strong unions, also counting on a fund to cushion layoffs. From 1996, longtime employee Nagy—by then a local Social-Democrat leader—sat on the company board. He says Orbán’s first term from 1998 to 2002 meant political interference, changing the plant’s management and pressuring it to use dolomite supplies from mines controlled by Orbán’s father.

If this stirred resentment, the plant’s fate also helps explain why local workers didn’t stick with the political left. It was a Social Democrat–led government, in alliance with neoliberal hawks, that finalized the privatization of the plant in 2003—despite, Nagy says, the local party’s attitude. The new owners were, he explains, Ukrainian, but also bound up with a Russian bank, and the conflict between the two caused problems which exploded when war broke out in 2022.

But why didn’t Orbán’s government, once a critic of what it called a “bad privatization,” save jobs?

Orbán Visit

The Thursday night before I visited, Orbán held a national rally in Dunaújváros. Haranguing the plaza in front of the local cinema, he tried to outdo an earlier event here by the main opposition leader Péter Magyar. Countless Fidesz posters here show a grim-faced Magyar alongside EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The ruling party’s message: Magyar won’t put Hungary first.

Asked, ahead of his visit to Dunaújvaros, why the steel plant went bust, Orbán reportedly told one local paper that “the decisive reason is the Russian-Ukrainian war, the sanctions policy and the EU’s poorly designed green industry concept.” Yet, in his town-square rally Orbán avoided all reference to the Dunaferr job losses. If this past fall, the government promised to revive production, the prime minister’s silence was hardly a vote of confidence. The crowd for this Dunaújváros rally, several locals pointed out, owed less to pro-Orbán residents than to Fidesz supporters bussed in from surrounding villages.

So, is Orbán’s election campaign distracting from local economic woes by turning attention to geopolitics? According to former Dunaferr employee Erika Kaiser, the issues sound more intertwined, though not in a way that does Orbán much credit. The Ukrainian owners from 2003 were the Donbas Industrial Union, based in Donetsk—another steel city formerly named after Stalin. Yet, hit by the financial crisis, in 2010 this owner entered a partnership with a Russian bank, VEB. Kaiser tells me that it was hard for locals to tell who was really in charge, and in its final years it didn’t file proper financial statements. This was, she says, a “chaotic legal situation” but government failed to step in.

One member of the VEB supervisory board was Vladimir Putin, who reportedly discussed the plant’s future with Orbán in 2014. In the first years after the buyout, Kaiser explains, the Donbas-based company could produce a semi-finished product cheaply on home soil, before final processing in this Hungarian, thus EU-based facility. The civil war in eastern Ukraine from 2014, and the destruction of the owners’ property there, probably made the firm more reliant on its Hungarian operations. Yet, investment was also lacking. The two furnaces needed routine replacement, but only one was replaced, after repeated delay.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, there were still 4,500 steelworks jobs at Dunaferr, but the firm was building up legal problems. Later reports claim that the subsidiary in charge of the plant failed to cover €655 million in EU-level carbon credits and fines, before Dunaferr part-halted production in September 2022. Initiating liquidation proceedings that December, Orbán’s government pledged to step in and preserve the industry. It offered not to nationalize the plant but to ensure the workers’ future under another owner.

This was a promise it couldn’t keep.

Liberty

In summer 2023, the government chose British-Indian Liberty Steel, one of four bidders, as the buyer. Official media boasted that the government had “saved” the steelworks, a “top priority” in this “strategic sector.” But Liberty was a puzzling choice, deputy mayor Zsolt Szabó tells me, given its already “existing financial problems; it was known across Europe that they’d bought multiple companies but didn’t have enough money to operate them.” Kaiser concurs that Liberty had a track record of buying industries that could benefit from state subsidies but had not fulfilled its commitments on investment.

The buyout promised to save jobs at Dunaújváros, perhaps by converting production. Liberty pledged to renew the plant by building two electric-arc furnaces, so that steel from Dunaferr could be adapted to auto manufacture, and—a field of investment now rising in Europe—military industries. In September 2023, Liberty announced that it had Chinese backing to carry through a major decarbonization of the plant. Yet concrete measures were lacking, and the government again turned toward bankruptcy proceedings.

What is the political fallout? Kaiser suggests that local employees may credit the government for ensuring that their wages were paid for months after production halted, but ultimately blame it for choosing Liberty Steel as the buyer. This compounded its failure to control irregularities under the previous owners, and made eventual recovery even more expensive. Szabó stresses that city hall—headed by an opposition, anti-Orbán coalition since 2019—tried to give the steelworks leeway on tax payments, and that this also helped ensure that wages got paid. But in June 2024 the coke ovens were turned off for the last time.

Szabó insists that the ruling party’s promises were far from reality. “When the steel plant was still operating in 2022, the current [local Fidesz] representative, holding a shovel at the factory, said he would save it. Then, two years later, people were standing in line in the scorching heat waiting for their termination notices.” He suggests that although the government had the opportunity to seek financial support from the European Union to save a plant of this scale, it failed to do so, which led the Dunaújváros municipality to take matters into its own hands and begin participating directly in EU funding applications.

Szabó was initially a local candidate in the April 12 general election, before withdrawing in favor of main opposition force Tisza; his campaign literature refers to steel as part of Dunaújváros’s “way of life.” Yet, in our conversation, even talk of potential EU aid now seems aimed at adaptation for a post-steelworks reality, and retraining schemes for local employees. Highlighting the mental-health effect of the layoffs, Szabó explains that for many workers in their 40s and 50s, this may be tougher.

Dunaújváros doesn’t rely on steel alone: It has a major site for South Korean tire firm Hankook, and serves as a base for employees commuting to Budapest. But even further afield, there are many clouds over Hungarian industry. The government jobs strategy has in recent years counted heavily on making batteries for electric vehicles, but as Karas explains, this has heightened its dependence on foreign capital. There are even reports of Chinese electric carmaker BYD bringing in lower-paid—and ill-treated—migrant labor rather than employing Hungarians at its new site in Szeged.

In Dunaújváros, the contradictions are obvious. Orbán’s brand of state interventionism has not uplifted workers’ position through labor rights or a stronger safety-net, but counted on deals with multinational capital to employ Hungarian workers. In the post-crisis years, this paid off electorally, even if talk of winning economic sovereignty remained a mirage. Yet today, with the war in Ukraine and the ever-escalating conflict in the Middle East, this balancing act is harder to maintain. Ahead of Sunday’s vote, working-class Hungarians may be less convinced to turn out for Orbán.

As of 10 pm Washington time on April 7, 2026, the war may be ending on the basis of Iran’s 10 points.

These include: Iran’s control (with Oman) of the Strait of Hormuz, “agreement on uranium enrichment,” the lifting of all sanctions, withdrawal of American forces, and an end to all military attacks on Iran, as well as on “Lebanon and elsewhere,” according to the prime minister of Pakistan. In return, Iran agrees to cease defensive actions. By implication, it reserves the right to retaliate against ceasefire violations, including in “Lebanon and elsewhere.”

If the ceasefire holds, the vicious attack launched by the United States and Israel on February 28, 2026, will have exposed, for all to see, the obsolescence of US military power. That power consisted mostly of surface ships and bases, both of them impossible to protect from missiles and drones. The entire model, built up in World War II and the Cold War, is finished.

Acknowledgment of this reality around the world will have vast effects. It may hasten settlement of the other major conflict and tension zones: Ukraine on terms agreed with Russia, and Taiwan on terms agreed with the PRC. If so, a course should be set to avoid the worst for food and fuel and other resources in the near term and for a general economic improvements worldwide over a year or two and perhaps sooner.

Two weeks of uncertainty lie ahead. Forces within the United States and in Israel could destroy the tentative settlement, resume the war, and deepen the damage. They will certainly try. Israel is still savagely bombing Beirut, inviting retaliation from Tehran. A deep and irreversible economic disaster, based on the final ruin of the Persian Gulf states, remains possible. It may be in Israel’s perceived interest to provoke that calamity. The military and ultimate political outcome will not be different if it happens.

Perfidy is also possible. A crime under the Geneva Conventions, perfidy is standard practice for American rulers, whom no one trusts any more. But the depletion of offensive and air defense weapons makes an early resumption of the war unlikely. Therefore, the political effects of this deal may play out before military stockpiles could be rebuilt. And Iran also can replenish its arsenals, so a renewed attack would not mean a different result. Israeli media headlines calling the ceasefire a “huge victory” for Iran appear to be correct.

Within the United States, a reckoning is overdue. At least since Clinton’s attack on Serbia in 1999, the US has been trapped in a web of delusions about its own power. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and the South China Sea, the US has come up against forces it could not (in the end) defeat. None of these have, so far, dented the psychological carapace of the American elite. Iran’s 10 points should, finally, force reality down their throats. It is a defeat at the very core of the oil-dollar system, on which American power has rested for 50 years.

Can America adapt? The present political class can hardly do anything except bluster on. They may just deny reality. Or they may try to foster, as in France after 1870 or Germany in the 1930s, a spirit of revanche and another round of extreme militarization. This course would lead to further humiliations and defeats, and to the final physical and moral decay of the country. But the people are tired of their so-called elites, and in the force of circumstances, perhaps a new political class will emerge.

In my dreams, this defeat could liberate the US from a broken imperial model. The US could demilitarize, mothball its nuclear weapons, decommission its aircraft carriers, and close bases, even beyond those now abandoned in the Middle East. It could shrink its financial sector and devote its real resources to domestic physical, social and industrial renewal. It could revive, retrain and reenergize its worn-down population, with useful jobs doing worthwhile tasks. It could join the concert of great powers on equal terms, accepting the fact that none of the other powers—not China, not Russia, and not Iran—has any interest in taking over the world. And that therefore, for effective management of the world commonwealth, cooperative solutions must be found.

And the markets? From the news on April 7, as oil prices tumbled, the stock market was happy. Is this the first time stocks boomed to the tune of a colossal defeat? That would speak well of the markets, which I do rarely. But don’t count on it over the longer term. From the American perspective, the foundations of world power just shifted—an astonishing result. What we make of it remains ahead.

While our president makes genocidal threats on social media, and wages his chaotic war in Iran (the first world leader to see the “fog of war” as a feature, not a bug), you can be forgiven for overlooking the ongoing news that the war Donald Trump is winning is the culture war. A glance through recent entertainment coverage readily confirms that the brutality and ugliness Trump has sought to normalize over the past decade is now just the standard by which the culture industry operates.

This weekend, Trump Oval Office fanboy and sometimes Nazi Kanye West sold out Inglewood, California’s SoFi Center and took in a reported $33 million less than a year since he released a song called “Heil Hitler.” West even introduced Trump to fellow Nazi enthusiast Nick Fuentes at Mar-A-Lago. Still, West’s apology for his antisemitism in the Wall Street Journal was evidently enough for his LA fans, and no doubt some went because of the antisemitism. But the UK, which has a slightly more critical view of Nazis than the United States does these days, saw things differently. The Home Office banned West from entering the country on the basis of his antisemitic views. He was booked to headline the Wireless Fest, which began hemorrhaging corporate sponsors like Pepsi and Rockstar Energy Drinks as soon as West’s appearance was announced. The festival has since been cancelled, even if its headliner has not.

A few days before West’s LA shows, Netflix announced that Louis CK would headline the Hollywood Bowl as part of its “Netflix Is a Joke” comedy festival, nine years after CK admitted that he had masturbated in front of several women without their consent. Netflix’s corporate leaders have evidently determined that he had completed his penance—even though CK’s nominal cancellation included a wildly successful interim live tour and the release of his first novel. If CK got a pass from the Riyadh Comedy Festival, the thinking seems to go in LA, why should the United States be any different? 

It’s true that you can’t ban a man from working for the rest of his life for trash behavior—but you also don’t need to partner with him. Unless, of course, you’ve determined that there won’t be any consequences, that people just do not care. The West and CK news also followed a series of interviews with actor John Lithgow where he shakily fended off questions about why he has agreed to take the central role of Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter television series, which will further enrich the author behind the Potter franchise, the transphobic JK Rowling.

Accommodating Nazis, sexual abuse, and transphobia were once the MAGA brand, but it’s very much mainstream culture now. Central in the long-term culture offensive is the planned Skydance-Paramount buyout of Warner Bros.-Discovery. That takeover would seal the Trump-aligned Ellison family’s status as anointed MAGA culture barons—something Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth openly longed for as he derided press coverage of the Iran war. Paramount-Skydance has already agreed to distribute disgraced director Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour 4 at the request of Ratner’s friend, President Trump.

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that roughly 20 percent of the funding behind Skydance’s $111 billion deal—some $24 billion—is coming from three sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East:  Qatar,  Abu Dhabi, and Saudi Arabia. Trump and Hegseth no doubt welcomed that news, since Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman is reportedly pushing Trump to stay the course in Iran.

If the Warner deal goes through, the Skydance-Paramount corporation will own both CNN and CBS. And it’s certain that this foreign buy-in will come with a price. When foreign powers like China control a substantial slice of the revenue stream of major media companies, they expect American corporations to censor themselves. China’s control of the Chinese film market has silenced any and all criticism of China in American film and TV, and it’s not hard to see Saudi Arabia’s normalization campaign with the West getting new life in such a deal.

Meanwhile, the Ellisons had more cleanup work to do on the Trump culture front.  After securing the cancellation of Trump critic Stephen Colbert and his Late Show on the eve of Skydance’s final acquisition of CBS, the network announced Monday it found his replacement. Colbert’s 11:30 pm slot and the hour after it will be filled by media investor and stand-up comic Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed. The show initially starred Allen in syndication from 2006-2016, and then he brought it back when CBS needed to fill in some late night programming gaps. The show will debut in May.

The good news for Trump’s culture allies is that Allen doesn’t fit the broader template of recent MAGA culture-war winners. He can’t be lumped in with Louis CK, Kanye West, or JK Rowling. He has not alienated millions of people worldwide with stupid, morally bankrupt behavior. He’s always been a likable public personality who has never ruffled a feather. And that’s likely why CBS wants him in that spot.

Allen’s media company has been in business with Sinclair Broadcasting—the powerful right-wing local broadcasting empire that lobbied so hard to get ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel fired last year for a monologue about Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Allen is perfectly aligned with their goals.  In the past, he has told comedians on Comics Unleashed, “I don't want to hear any political humor. Just be funny, family-friendly and advertiser-friendly."

If Allen isn’t leashing the comics, he’s certainly muzzling them.  In the Trump 2.0 era, Allen is the ideal host for CBS. He may not be a bad person, but the people who hired him are—or rather, the person calling the culture-war shots in the White House is. Allen got the gig in what’s known as a “time buy.” His production company puts up the money to lease the time slot from CBS for his show—which will then be followed by a game show he also owns. It’s a common marketing strategy for 3 am infomercials and religious broadcasters. The company leasing the airtime makes money up front with little or no investment, and buyers like Allen make their money on the commercials and products they sell.  In the past, Allen has split the commercial sales revenue with CBS.

Allen’s hire is the equivalent of bringing Bari Weiss into run CBS News or what the Washington Post and LA Times have become after killing off their planned endorsements of Kamala Harris in 2024. Allen’s show likewise represents a scaled down, cheaper, far less ambitious media product. It’s designed not to cost much and not to offend. And if past history is much if a guide, it won’t attract much of an audience.

Allen’s time-buying arrangement also furnishes a window on the Ellisons’ underwater business model at Paramount-CBS. When Skydance bought Paramount, it took on an enormous debt load, which will only get worse after the prospective Warner deal goes through.  Ballooning debt was also a factor the decision to ditch Colbert—together with the animus of his Hater in Chief, Trump. One hundred and eleven billion dollars is a mountain of money to anyone, and it’s clear that if Paramount-Skydance is going to absorb Warner Bros.’ many media properties without going under, the newly merged media leviathan will be airing the kind of filler product that Byron Allen provides.

If Colbert’s show cost too much, and if the late night talk show model is dying, that still does not excuse CBS for its sad lack of creativity in replacing that model. Like the comebacks of West, CK, and Rowling, handing Colbert’s time slot over to the affable Allen is peak enshittification. It’s another step back into the degraded culture and values that normalize Trump’s own garbage behavior.

The AI revolution is destined to transform human society in ways that most of us cannot begin to fathom. The changes to come will be every bit as daunting as what the world saw in the industrial and digital revolutions. Yet our policymakers are ill-prepared—and, in the case of our president, dramatically unwilling—to ensure that these changes benefit everyone rather than a tiny cabal of hyper-wealthy tech oligarchs.

To meet this challenge, we must develop a new social contract that begins with the basic premise that artificial intelligence must serve humanity, not the bottom line of a billionaire class that seeks to become a trillionaire class at our expense. We cannot allow technological overlords to build a society where AI “progress” is defined by their wealth rather than by our democracy.

I make this argument as a member of Congress who represents Silicon Valley, the home of companies with more than $18 trillion in market capitalization—more than one-quarter of the entire US stock market—and five that are worth more than $1 trillion each. I know tech billionaires, I know the people who are benefiting from the AI revolution’s massive upward redistribution of wealth, and I know that more than a few of them believe they have a divine right to lead and rule. But that cannot be our future.

We need to tax extreme wealth in order to meet human needs, which is why I support the proposed onetime 5 percent wealth tax on California billionaires (while not taxing voting shares or illiquid gains) and have proposed federal legislation to raise $4.7 trillion in revenue by taxing billionaires and another $2 trillion by making corporations pay their fair share. I have challenged my fellow members of Congress to support this legislation with the argument that if the representative from Silicon Valley can stand up for billionaire taxes, it shouldn’t be that hard for other House members and senators to do the same.

Just as important, I know—as a former deputy secretary in the Obama administration’s Commerce Department who has spent the past decade focusing on the economic and social disruptions caused by AI—that politicians, unions, civil-rights groups, faith communities, and grassroots activists must act urgently and aggressively to create laws, regulations, and incentives that prioritize humans over machines, protect the mental health of our children from social-media slop, stop algorithmic rent increases and predatory pricing, and prevent American jobs from being sacrificed in order to enrich oligarchs.

AI is evolving so rapidly that even its intellectual pioneers are unsettled. Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate in physics who’s known as the “godfather of AI,” quit his position at Google several years ago and warned that AI-generated programs could overwhelm the public discourse with misinformation and, ultimately, pose an existential threat to humanity. Stuart Russell, the British computer scientist who literally cowrote a textbook on AI, now worries that AI development is “intrinsically unsafe.”

Some of the people behind the most sophisticated AI technologies are also scared. After the Department of Defense asked to use Anthropic’s Claude chatbot for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous warfare, the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, said that he will not allow the technology to be used for either purpose. But what about all the other AI companies and tech leaders lining up for defense contracts and letting their products be used to kill people—as has already happened in Gaza?

Clearly, we all must start asking some fundamental questions about AI, as Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) did when we held our “Who Controls the Future of AI: The Oligarchs or the People?” town hall at Stanford University in February. “If AI is going to replace a lot of the work that human beings do, what becomes of human beings?” the senator said. “Are we superfluous in the process? What happens to our ability to relate to each other?”

We also have to acknowledge, in the words of Sanders—who, after 35 years in the US House and Senate, knows Capitol Hill better than anyone—that “Congress and the American people are very unprepared for the tsunami that is coming.”

Wrestling with these questions, and preparing for the tsunami, is far too important to be left in a few private hands. Unfortunately, Donald Trump and too many Republicans in Congress don’t see it that way. They want to hand the tech-industry elites a blank check to develop AI in ways that give them more wealth, more power, and more control over our future. In December, after Congress rejected the administration’s repeated attempts to slip anti-regulation language into federal legislation, Trump issued an executive order that authorizes US Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice to sue states, overturn AI safety regulations, and put consumer-protection laws at risk. If states succeed in keeping their laws on the books, Trump has ordered federal regulators to withhold federal funds that have been allocated for building out broadband infrastructure.

State attorneys general will defend state-level regulations, and they’ll win their share of court battles. But merely saying no to Trump’s executive overreach is insufficient. Democrats must provide an alternative vision that connects with independents and responsible Republicans by speaking to the practical concerns that the American people have about AI.

So how do we answer those questions? How do we prepare for—and hopefully avert—the tsunami that Sanders referred to? I believe that we have more of the answers than commentators imagine—and that we can find additional answers by making AI debates central to our politics.

We must frame the progressive alternative to Trump’s dangerously naïve and irresponsible “blank check” agenda. To that end, both at Stanford with Senator Sanders and in conversations and meetings with academics, union leaders, and grassroots activists across the country, I’ve been making the argument for a new social contract to address the defining issues of our time: inequality and AI.

Let’s begin by acknowledging that we live in a new Gilded Age. Tech billionaires, who believe that in a different era they would have been heroic conquerors, are wresting control of our economy, our media, and our politics from the American people. And despite the growing popular concerns over AI, they are tightening their grip on the control of our future.

Most Americans feel they have little say in shaping that future for themselves, let alone for their kids. This has contributed to anger, resentment, and a hopeless cynicism about these issues. In a January Economist/YouGov poll, more than half of the Americans surveyed said that the gap between rich and poor in America was “a very big problem” (while only 6 percent said it wasn’t a concern). An April 2025 Pew survey found that, by a nearly two-to-one margin, people expect AI to harm rather than benefit them. Why would they think that? Perhaps because they’ve seen the headlines generated by Amodei’s prediction that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated by AI in five years.

No nation can survive like this—with islands of prosperity amid seas of despair.

The economist Gabriel Zucman has shown that today’s concentration of wealth is the highest it has been since the 1920s. About 19 billionaires have amassed $3.3 trillion—the equivalent of 10 percent of all the goods and services that are produced in the US in a year. This is nearly three times more than the wealthiest Americans were worth relative to the size of the economy at the peak of the Gilded Age. Extreme wealth forms an unholy alliance with power, leading to two tiers of justice and stripping ordinary citizens of an equal voice in our democratic experiment.

Stanford University, where I once taught economics, is the epicenter of this wealth concentration and, not coincidentally, AI innovation. The 15-mile radius around the campus is home to Apple, Google, Nvidia, Broadcom, and Meta. One-third of the S&P 500’s value originates in this place.

This is one of the reasons why, when Senator Sanders and I appeared at Stanford, I reminded the students and faculty, “We see the future from here. We know what’s coming in a way that many politicians and DC bureaucrats simply can’t see. What kind of future are we going to build? Will this future be only for the tech lords or for all of us?”

The new tech social contract that I propose begins with an understanding that to whom much is given, at least a little is expected in return.

None of this makes us anti-technology, let alone anti-innovation.

We can acknowledge that tech entrepreneurs have taken risks and shown skill and imagination in scaling and adopting AI technology. But, as with every successful generation of American entrepreneurs over the past two centuries, their progress stands on a foundation of public investment. For instance, taxpayer dollars, as well as philanthropic donations, funded the development of AI at Stanford, where ImageNet and the Digital Library Project helped give birth to Google.

That is why we must ask not what America can do for Silicon Valley, but what Silicon Valley must do for America.

The AI revolution could help cure cancer and rare diseases, slash housing costs, make it easier to start businesses and open factories, address our energy needs, and lower medical and educational costs for the working class.

But if we leave it in the hands of a few billionaires, their priority will be to eliminate jobs, extract profits, and addict us to outrageous content that turns us from citizens into combatants.

That’s not the future I want. I am not an AI accelerationist. But nor am I an AI doomer.

I am an AI democratist.

The future must not be written by AI agents that serve only San Francisco billionaires. It must be written by all of us, together, in a way that heals our national divides; spreads prosperity through every community in this country, from rural towns to big cities; allows the middle class to grow and thrive; and keeps the oligarchs from dominating our society.

To that end, I have laid out seven principles for what a democratic AI should look like.

First, we must keep humans in the loop. We need real protections against mass job displacement, beginning with the 3.6 million truck drivers who face the loss of their livelihoods as autonomous vehicles hit the road. Even as self-driving trucks improve safety and efficiency, human drivers must remain in charge, just as pilots must still fly our planes. This will allow us to develop AI that augments human capability instead of eliminating jobs.

Second, every large company must bargain with its workers. Unions and elected representatives should ensure that displaced workers move into new value-creating roles and can benefit from AI’s productivity gains through higher wages, profit sharing, and shorter workweeks.

Third, we have to fix the tax code’s anti-human bias. Robots get accelerated tax depreciation, but hiring humans comes with payroll taxes. The economist Daron Acemoglu estimates that companies typically pay 5 percent or less in taxes on digital tools, while paying as much as 30 percent in taxes when hiring humans. This makes no sense. We must make it easier to hire workers, not robots.

We also need to create an annual data dividend so that every American gets a check from the data they generate, both for private businesses and for government activities like public health, traffic management, and 
policy research.

Fourth, we must launch a Future Workforce Administration. Just as President Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression, we must seize this moment of anxiety among white-collar and blue-collar families alike and answer it with the boldest, most patriotic jobs agenda in generations.

Funded by a modest wealth tax on the trillions created here and by a token tax on AI used by businesses that displace labor, this program will put Americans to work in public service. The initiative will drive moon-shot projects that expand the frontiers of science, clean energy, and biotech. It will also mobilize young people to rebuild towns, teach our children, provide childcare and eldercare, and strengthen small businesses in every community.

And we will launch 1,000 new trade schools and tech institutes—so the next generations are prepared for careers that AI can’t replace.

Fifth, data centers must serve the communities that power them. Right now, the wealth generated from data centers flows directly to mega-corporations without benefiting working people. That must end.

Tech companies need to invest deeply in the areas providing them with such riches, rather than merely lining their pockets. They must provide computer resources for schools and libraries, create local tech jobs and fund startups, and use renewable energy and dry-cooling technology to lessen the enormous toll that data centers exact on the environment and the water supply. We should look to what Singapore has done with its data centers and invest in massively increasing the supply of clean energy. Most importantly, tech companies must pay their full electricity bills instead of shifting those costs onto our communities.

Sixth, we must prevent AI from weaponizing public discourse. We must unite across party lines to stop engagement-driven algorithms from spreading hate. We should eliminate Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 so that we can regulate amplified violent content. And we should require platforms to open up so Americans can connect freely across them.

Seventh, we must regulate AI so it is used to improve humanity, not damage it. We need clear, enforceable guardrails with mandatory third-party verification of advanced AI models to ensure that this powerful technology does not cause serious societal harm. This needs to be more than the voluntary collaboration taking place at the federal Center for AI Standards and Innovation. We need a robust federal agency to regulate AI like we do with nuclear energy or aviation.

Along with fair taxation of corporations and billionaires, these principles provide a framework to help ensure that AI does not usher in a level of wealth and power concentration that further rips apart our democracy. If we continue with the status quo or adopt poll-tested incrementalism, we will leave ordinary Americans out in the cold, and prosperity will be only for the privileged. I will not sit by and watch that happen. We need a program with the boldness and scale of FDR’s New Deal, a democratic project for our time. The point is not to slow innovation, but to see that its benefits reach every American.

This is a program that says by its very substance: There will be no surrender to the tech lords. None.

What there will be is a claiming of AI, and the future, for the American people.

Late in the afternoon of July 23, 2025, Donald Trump stood on a stage at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC, to announce one of the hallmark initiatives of his second term as president: his AI Action Plan. Immediately after he took office, Trump had declared his administration’s intention “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” Now, after weeks of consultation with stakeholders, he was ready to unveil his plan to a room filled with corporate leaders eager to see whether he would deliver for them.

“From this day forward, it’ll be a policy of the United States to do whatever it takes to lead the world in artificial intelligence,” Trump promised, flanked by a pair of large signs reading “Winning the AI Race.”

The choice of venue was fitting. Andrew Mellon was a powerful industrialist and banker who served as secretary of the treasury during the economic boom of the 1920s and through the Wall Street Crash of 1929. His fiercely pro-business, anti-tax policies are widely blamed for creating the conditions that led to the Great Depression. Whether AI will have the same effect on the economy is the central question for policymakers encountering the heady excitement and anxiety swirling around this new technology.

Trump, however, didn’t seem to harbor such concerns. Indeed, the three “pillars” of his AI Action Plan make clear that his administration intends to tip the scales in favor of the industry’s interests in a manner unprecedented in US policymaking. These pillars are: a push to mobilize “every tool at our disposal to ensure that the United States can build and maintain the largest, most powerful, and most advanced AI infrastructure anywhere on the planet”; a commitment to “get the entire world running on the backbone of American technology” by mobilizing government resources behind a global sales pitch on behalf of AI companies; and a determination that the government would divest itself of any use of “woke” AI models.

The industry reps in the audience were thrilled. But if any members of the general American public had been in the room, they might have wondered: What about us? As our resources—our land, tax dollars, jobs, and future—are handed to an industry that is far more interested in amassing money and hoarding control than democratizing them, what can we expect in return? Are we really witnessing the dawn of a new “golden age,” as Trump promised? Or, rather, a brazen daylight heist?

The billionaires selling us AI technologies would have us believe that they are self-made innovators who’ve built the most promising industry of our time based solely on their brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit, but the reality is far less valiant. For one thing, the paradigm of large-scale AI is characterized much more by brute-force resource consumption (of data, energy, and the capital that powers these infrastructures) than by scientific advancement. As Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal (and a cofounder of AI Now), has observed, “It was not the algorithm that was a breakthrough: It was what the algorithm could do when matched with large-scale data and computational resources.”

At the same time, the choice to orient around the notion that “bigger is better” means that the AI industry is trapped in a business paradigm that depends on access to unfathomably large amounts of capital to build out its infrastructure at a scale far removed from the actual indicators of demand, let alone any convincing signals of business viability. And enduring such stratospheric levels of uncertainty and risk requires nothing short of a cult-like belief that the industry will eventually prove economically transformative enough to justify these bets by a guarantor that can persuasively underwrite the market. It requires, in other words, underwriting at a scale that only the US government could meaningfully provide.

The Trump administration has stepped up to the challenge. It has not been shy about its use of the power of the pen to back the industry’s interests, from brokering sales deals with other countries on behalf of Nvidia, to backing a $1 billion loan to bring the Three Mile Island nuclear plant back online to power Microsoft’s AI data centers. And it has done all this despite the swelling opposition within both its MAGA base and the general public, who are growing uncomfortable with a technology that is being used to endanger people’s livelihoods.

The Trump administration’s AI policy is being led by its artificial-intelligence and cryptocurrency czar, David Sacks, who is a prolific investor in the AI industry, and Michael Kratsios, a former executive at Scale AI who now heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Sacks and Kratsios have championed a multipronged approach that includes the $1 billion in AI funding provided by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and an aggressive export agenda that turns the government into the top-level salesman for AI firms as they enter foreign markets. At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Kratsios announced the formation of a new Tech Corps, which will leverage the infrastructure of the Peace Corps to send technologists around the world on behalf of US tech firms to assist governments in integrating the companies’ software into their public-service systems. A few months earlier, the Department of Energy announced its “Genesis Mission,” a set of “private-public partnerships” through which the DOE will give companies access to its highly prized genomic and other datasets to enable them to develop products for commercial use. This is all on top of the already heavy subsidies that data centers receive, including significant state and local tax breaks and federal subsidies for factory construction.

According to the big AI companies, this kind of ambitious and unconditional government support is just what’s needed to achieve their aim of limitless AI infrastructure expansion—which they assert will be necessary to reach the holy grail of artificial general intelligence, and to do so before China does. Under this arms-race logic, any restraint on corporate power is recast as an impediment to national-security interests and plainly unpatriotic—like blocking the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project (both of which, AI boosters insist, are worthy historical analogies).

But if there’s one thing we should have learned from past eras of technological transformation, it’s that the promotion of national monopolies does not necessarily lead to national competitiveness. Nor does it lead, seamlessly, to sustainable jobs, enduring employment, wage growth, and innovation. While it can lead to great wealth for some, it rarely guarantees the kind of mass national renewal that the tech elite and their friends in government promise.

Given the headiness of the moment we’re in, it’s easy to forget the lessons of history: those technological paradigms that upended the economic status quo before AI.

Take semiconductors. Originally a small part of the larger defense industry—semiconductor manufacturing was initially funded and planned in close coordination with the military, and semiconductors were purchased almost exclusively by the military-industrial complex—they did not significantly penetrate the civilian market until the late 1970s. Around that time, however, Japan’s production of high-tech goods began to eclipse the United States’ productive capacity, offering superior quality at cheaper prices, leading US semiconductor executives to realize that this threatened their own industry. Producers like Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor flooded Washington with lobbyists, begging the new Reagan administration for assistance and warning that if they didn’t get it, the effects on the US economy and national security would be dire.

What made these requests especially notable wasn’t just the ask for help—the aerospace and electronics industries also received government support—but the scale of the aid sought by these famously libertarian “Semiconductor Cowboys.” What also made their requests notable was that the White House listened.

From Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton, successive administrations offered significant assistance to semiconductor companies, ranging from facilitating opportunities for US firms to learn the superior Japanese production processes, to providing subsidies for new factory construction and antitrust exemptions, to forging coercive trade deals that favored US firms and processes. In 1986, for example, the Reagan administration used the threat of economic sanctions to secure 20 percent of the Japanese market for US producers. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration negotiated new international trade deals that made these US subsidies legal while outlawing those favored by Europe and Japan.

The level and the one-sidedness of the support that the industry received was precedent-setting in ways that we should pay close attention to for what they might portend with AI. The economist Laura Tyson has pointed out that these trade deals forever changed US trade policy by prioritizing market access for companies over the protection of domestic jobs. It was, as Tyson and David B. Yoffie wrote in “Semiconductors: From Manipulated to Managed Trade,” “the first major U.S. trade agreement in a high-technology, strategic industry and the first motivated by concerns about the loss of high-tech competitiveness rather than concerns about employment. It was the first U.S. trade agreement dedicated to improving market access abroad rather than restricting market access at home.”

The reason that three consecutive administrations, across both parties, made these moves was that they aligned with the elite belief that access to leading-edge semiconductors figured at the heart of US military and economic primacy. But these forms of extreme subsidy and favoritism also had significant costs, both for the public good and for American security at large. Coupled with a lack of oversight, the government’s permissiveness toward antitrust violations allowed companies like Intel to monopolize the field. This led ultimately to stagnation, which degraded rather than enhanced innovation and competitiveness on the global stage, while also bearing costs to the public.

Today, semiconductor firms continue to require massive capital investment and provide low profit margins—all while receiving significant government support. Semiconductor plants, called “fabs,” are increasingly automated. The industry’s poor workplace conditions (including exposing workers to toxic chemicals), high turnover rates, and aging workforce have led to a worker shortage. Intel has failed to invest adequately in R&D and has previously spent its government subsidies poorly.

Notably, Intel is the same firm that the Trump administration took a 10 percent equity stake in last year in an effort to shore up the company’s finances and further bind it to the government. Because it failed to keep pace with the rest of the industry, Intel became vulnerable to such novel state measures, perpetuating the cycle of government intervention and neglect.

If the history of semiconductors offers a warning, so far we don’t appear to be listening. AI firms are receiving even less oversight than the semiconductor companies did, making them less likely to be accountable even as these firms create technologies that play a more central role in our lives as core infrastructure. If anything, the government has worked aggressively to deregulate a tech industry already enjoying laissez-faire treatment. The White House is currently pushing for the preemption of state regulations of AI—an effort that effectively revives the reviled “AI moratorium,” which would have banned for a decade the ability of states to enforce their own laws on AI firms. (That bill was shut down in the Senate last year by a vote of 99 to 1.)

The AI industry is also at a much more nascent stage in terms of its ability to deliver on its proof of concept. The strategic importance of semiconductors to the nation’s economic and military strength was already well proven before the Reagan administration weighed in. While the transformative potential of AI tools is clear, it is much farther away by comparison: The leaders of AI firms have described their tools as not yet reliable enough for military use and are struggling to establish their enterprise business lines.

The core justification for why AI is a national strategic priority—the potential development of artificial general intelligence—also remains speculative. A recent survey by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence found that 76 percent of AI experts said they are dubious that AGI will be achieved under the current paradigm, which posits that AI technologies improve with increased data and computing power. If this scaling law fails to hold, it will strike at the heart of the industry’s case for ever-increasing capacity and sow real doubts concerning the fantastical levels of projected demand undergirding the current push for infrastructure expansion.

It’s worth reminding ourselves of what will happen for Americans if this technology does succeed. If the vision for AI ends in mass job displacement, which is certainly what the explosive revenue projections of these firms are banking on, then the administration would be inviting a new crisis onto its doorstep. Beyond job loss, the potential harms of AI are legion, including higher energy costs, negative effects on education, increased social isolation, environmental degradation, and more. All will likely require substantial and costly government intervention.

Already, according to the latest report on US manufacturing, the construction of data centers is crowding out the development of other industrial sectors. “Global logistics remains sensitive to geopolitical shifts,” warned the Institute for Supply Management’s December 2025 Manufacturing PMI report, which also noted the negative effects of Trump’s tariffs. “Large-scale data center programs are absorbing and reducing availability of resources for other sectors.”

The opportunity costs of prioritizing the needs of this sector above all others are massive and will have ripple effects on the economy for decades, delaying the development of other sectors as well as national development as a whole. Even worse, all this sacrifice may be for very little payoff. We are trading the health of other manufacturing sectors for a bet on a speculative promise that AI will be worth the economic pain.

Given the clear harms incurred by such a haphazard, speculative strategy, it’s worth asking why we are betting everything on this particular technology. These movements may not be reflective of an industrial-policy moon shot so much as old-school patronage and crony capitalism: Witness David Sacks’s brokering of access to the White House for his industry colleagues, recommending policies that benefit them, and retaining stakes in nearly 450 companies that would be aided by his policies.

It isn’t hard to see how Sacks and the tech CEOs he considers colleagues will benefit from these moves. But it’s less clear what American taxpayers will get in return, and this is roiling Trump’s MAGA base. “It feels like millions of votes across the country just got traded for thousands of [venture capitalist] and tech rich votes in regions Republicans will never win,” a conservative supporter of the administration told The Washington Post recently.

To make such a huge and risky bet on a technology that promises—even according to its greatest prophets—to fundamentally reshape the economy in ways that could put millions of people out of work and further centralize power and wealth in Silicon Valley certainly reads like a betrayal of that original vision. We should hope that any American government would support the conditions for beneficial innovation, but not wildly gamble away our future for so little in return.

Last May, Local Progress, an organization whose membership includes almost 2,000 locally elected progressive officials from around the country, issued a report warning of the rapidly growing dangers faced by communities due to the spread of AI-based surveillance systems. It cited as an example networks of automated license-plate readers (ALPRs) and smart streetlights, which enable police departments to identify specific suspects by combining crime witnesses’ descriptions of individuals and vehicles with the massive amounts of data on residents’ movements collected by these systems. Because AI excels in pattern recognition, it potentially allows police to find needles in an urban haystack, locating people and then tracking their movements in real time with pinpoint accuracy. Companies such as Flock Safety, founded in 2017 and based in Atlanta, and Ubicquia, based in Fort Lauderdale, have made fortunes providing such systems to federal, state, local, and private entities. Flock Safety alone operates 80,000 AI-powered cameras in 6,000 communities, and it is currently launching a new “surveillance drone” product to hoover up still more data.

While city governments and police departments portray the technology as inherently benign—simply a souped-up, “smart” crime-fighting tool that increases the efficiency of law-enforcement activity by orders of magnitude and comes with no downsides for law-abiding residents—critics argue that the growing use of these products represents a serious threat to civil liberties. Privacy advocates worry that in an era of mass surveillance, such systems could be exploited by bad actors and used to monitor political protesters, women seeking reproductive care, immigrants just trying to go about their business, and others.

“There has thus far not been an automated license-plate-reader system able to adequately protect the technology from being co-opted by authoritarianism,” says LiJia Gong, the legal and policy director at Local Progress. “These tech corporations oftentimes use cities and local governments as testing grounds to normalize surveillance and automation tools.” Many of the contracts for ALPR systems and smart-camera facial- and vehicle-recognition networks allow companies to update the underlying software without seeking approval from local authorities—meaning that when these systems are installed, it’s almost impossible to know how their tracking capabilities will develop as advancements in AI lead to improvements in its ability to recognize patterns and make predictions.

As the Trump administration carries out an unprecedented crackdown on 
immigrants, the ability of Customs and Border Protection to access such data has raised alarms, and there have been a number of reports alleging that federal agents may have found backdoor entry points into ALRP and smart-streetlight systems, even in states that prohibit their police departments from cooperating with these agencies. There have also been allegations that a Texas woman was tracked after self-administering an abortion. In October, the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights reported that the US Border Patrol had backdoor access to the surveillance networks of at least 10 police departments in the state, none of which had authorized such use of their data—though police analysts argue that since Flock Safety has disabled its software’s ability to share information with federal agencies in states that prohibit such data-sharing, the “back door” was likely rogue cops illegally passing along information to the feds.

Flock denies that there is a back door to its technology or that it shares locally or state-owned data with ICE. Josh Thomas, the company’s chief communications officer, tells me, “We don’t work with ICE. We’ve never worked with ICE. We have no contract with ICE. There’s no back door into the Flock Safety system. All of our customers 100 percent own and control their own data. Flock doesn’t share it at all or sell it to any third parties.”

Few cities in the country have been as consumed by debates over the use of AI-powered surveillance systems as San Diego, which has a small police force for a city its size—less than 1,900 officers for roughly 1.4 million people—and has long relied on high-tech crime-fighting tools to fill the gaps in its personnel and funding. Over a decade ago, San Diego’s district attorney used surveillance data to link nearly three dozen young African American men to local gang violence and to charge them with offenses connected to several shootings, despite the fact that they weren’t near the scenes of the crimes at the time. Many took plea bargains, and the charges against those who didn’t were eventually dismissed; if their cases had proceeded, each of those young men would have faced many decades behind bars.

“Far before Trump, we’ve been concerned with federal 
overreach and data-sharing,” says Homayra Yusufi, a senior policy strategist at the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA) in San Diego. Districts that are mainly populated by people of color and immigrants are “over-policed and over-surveilled,” she says, and cameras and ALPRs—with their telltale bug-like antennae—speckle virtually every intersection in these neighborhoods.

The San Diego Police Department has a contract with Ubicquia to provide ALPR and smart-streetlight systems; Ubicquia, in turn, has subcontracted out the implementation of the project to Flock. The two companies and the SDPD say the technology is designed to leave a digital trail of who has asked for information and how the information has been shared, “so if there is abuse or if somebody lies about it, they can be held accountable by the appropriate governing bodies,” Thomas says. Capt. Charles Lara, who oversees the SDPD’s Research, Analysis, and Planning Unit, says that the department regularly conducts audits of how its surveillance systems are being used and who is accessing the information, and claims that the systems are less invasive than the phones everyone carries around with them. “No one wants to live in a police state,” Lara says. “But at the end of the day, people are misunderstanding the Fourth Amendment in public places.” (While the Fourth Amendment guarantees a right to privacy in private spaces, courts have found that it generally doesn’t guarantee such a right in public areas.) Moreover, all officers are given guidance specifically stating that per California law, they cannot share surveillance data with the feds or other out-of-state agencies, and if they do, they will be reported to Internal Affairs and disciplined, Lara says.

Despite such reassurances, immigrants’ rights organizations and privacy advocates are increasingly alarmed by the federal government’s use of every available tool to clamp down on perceived enemies and fear that, despite laws that limit information-sharing, the SDPD’s surveillance tools could at some point be put to use by the feds.

Notwithstanding the California Values Act passed in October 2017, which limits local and state law-enforcement cooperation with ICE and other immigration-enforcement agencies, some more conservative cities in the San Diego metropolitan region have reportedly shared surveillance data with the feds. One of them, El Cajon, is being sued by the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta. “Despite clear guidance and multiple warnings, the City of El Cajon Police Department continues to share this data with numerous out-of-state law enforcement agencies throughout the country,” Bonta’s office claimed in the October 2025 press release announcing the lawsuit, which was filed after a local PBS station reported that El Cajon’s surveillance data was used in immigration-related searches at least 550 times in the first nine months of 2025.

In 2016, San Diego signed contracts to install more than 3,000 smart streetlights and ALPRs, although, perhaps fearing a backlash, the city neglected to tell the public about the new devices until three years later. By then, Lilly Irani, a professor of communication and science studies at the University of California San Diego and a former Google engineer, was warning of “data creep” and—like activists in the San Francisco Bay Area; New York City; Portland, Oregon; and elsewhere—was decrying Big Tech’s use of massive datasets on residents’ movements to create the building blocks of a total-surveillance society.

In the local press, Irani warned that her neighbors were being used as “lab rats” for Big Tech social-engineering experiments. Khalid Alexander, an activist with Pillars of the Community, an organization that works with young Black men who have long been targets of police surveillance and whose names appear in gang-membership databases, teamed up with other privacy advocates to organize a series of community meetings to discuss the dangers of a surveillance state.

Those meetings gave rise to the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego (TRUST SD) Coalition. Made up of dozens of racial- and community-justice groups, civil-liberties advocates, and labor organizations, it pushed not for the elimination of surveillance technology but for the creation of a citywide ordinance that would place restrictions on the use of the technology and ensure that the public had a right to know when it was being deployed.

Over the coming years, TRUST SD’s activists were joined in their opposition to runaway, unregulated AI by Sean Elo-Rivera, a member of the San Diego City Council (as well as of Local Progress) with a background in community organizing. A tall, lean man with short salt-and-pepper hair and a trim goatee, Elo-Rivera dresses casually—black jeans, scuffed black Dr. Martens, a green jacket emblazoned with his name over a white vest, and a button shirt open at the neck. His City Hall office is adorned with civil-rights and organizing posters, and his bookshelf displays a hefty edition of the works of Che Guevara. “There’s no disputing” that AI-driven technology helps fight crime, Elo-Rivera acknowledges. But it comes “at a cost to people’s rights and civil liberties.”

Ever since he was elected to represent an immigrant-heavy district in the heart of the city, Elo-Rivera and his onetime City Council colleague Monica Montgomery Steppe (now a county supervisor) have led the fight against renewing San Diego’s contracts for the smart technology. In 2022, with municipalities around the country rethinking their approach to law enforcement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the resulting racial-justice protests, they scored a major victory when the contract with Ubicquia for smart streetlights wasn’t renewed—only to butt up against what they claim was the company’s initial refusal to actually turn off the cameras and kill the data streams. “San Diego’s not the only place where that’s happened—where a municipality has said ‘Shut ’em down’ and they’ve continued to let them run,” Elo-Rivera says. Similar stories have been reported in Eugene, Oregon; in Verona, Wisconsin; in Evanston, Illinois; and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Evanston, the city attorney sent Flock a cease-and-desist letter accusing the company of “an intentional and unauthorized disclosure of protected data” after it allegedly reinstalled cameras without the city’s permission. Flock Safety denies the claim, saying that when a city cancels its contract, the cameras no longer upload to the cloud even if they are still capturing images.

During that same period, as San Diego was rethinking its embrace of surveillance technology, Elo-Rivera helped push the landmark Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology (TRUST) Ordinance through the City Council, which was passed in 2022. TRUST mandated that the city’s decisions about installing AI-driven surveillance technology be carried out in public and go through a formal approval process; that the police specify how the technology would be used; and that an “impact report” be submitted for each new technology. Locals also gained the right to sue the city if it turned out that the technologies were being used in ways not authorized by the council and in a manner likely to result in harm to San Diegans. In addition, the ordinance created a Privacy Advisory Board made up of technology experts, civil-rights advocates, community-group leaders, and others who could articulate concerns about the new AI surveillance technology and recommend safeguards. Khalid Alexander, of TRUST SD, was among those appointed to the board.

For a while, it looked as though one of America’s most livable, laid-back cities was bucking the trend toward total surveillance. Lara, the SDPD captain, bemoans the fact that the ordinance—which he says is the most restrictive big-city privacy legislation in the US—doesn’t allow his department to share its data with other jurisdictions and creates a lag time of many months between when the police request new technology and when it can be approved and deployed. Lara calls it “probably the most challenging thing we’ve had to address as we move toward a modern police department.”

The privacy advocates’ victory was, however, short-lived. The ordinance does continue to force the SDPD to be more public about how it is using data, but over the past few years, the Privacy Advisory Board’s recommendations on whether to deploy the technology have been increasingly overruled or simply ignored by local officials.

A couple years after the board’s creation, the SDPD requested that the Ubicquia contract (and the Flock subcontract) for 500 smart streetlights be reactivated. With backing from newly elected Mayor Todd Gloria, and with the public souring on the reforms put in place in the aftermath George Floyd’s murder, a majority of Elo-Rivera’s council colleagues voted for a five-year contract, the funding for which would have to be reapproved annually. When, last year, the board again recommended that the city not continue to fund the Ubicquia-Flock contract, citing numerous allegations nationwide regarding the misuse of such data, the SDPD lobbied heavily for renewal. The City Council agreed to its request.

That outcome was a major disappointment for the activists who had pushed for changes in the city’s relationship to AI surveillance technology. They had expected the ordinance and the Privacy Advisory Board to rein in the sprawling surveillance systems. Instead, in the years since, the technologies have grown in power, and the police have come to rely more and more on the use of AI-generated data.

“The city has undermined the process since day one,” Alexander says in frustration. “The board is made up of volunteers, and the city has refused to fund any research staffers for the board. The disappointment is beginning to outweigh some of the smaller [victories] we’ve won along the way.”

If you look at maps of smart-camera and ALPR deployments in San Diego, you see clusters in the poorer, non-white areas: in Barrio Logan, in the African American communities of South San Diego, in the urban core around Downtown. By contrast, in the more affluent northern and eastern suburbs, there are far fewer cameras and ALPRs. The clear takeaway is that, as with so much else in modern American life, the burdens of surveillance disproportionately fall on the poor and the non-white.

Even before the Ubicquia-Flock contract was renewed, Alexander had quit the privacy board, which he had come to see as a paper tiger. In his resignation letter, he bemoaned the fact that “the Mayor and majority of council members have shown that they are either unwilling or unable to even consider rejecting requests coming from SDPD.”

Elo-Rivera isn’t quite as pessimistic. Over the past few years, even as the campaigns to moderate San Diego’s use of AI-driven surveillance systems have foundered, his efforts to rein in AI usage have expanded beyond surveillance technology.

Having pushed back against price-fixing AI software in the rental market, Elo-Rivera has now shifted his attention to Waymos, the driverless cabs that have been operating in San Francisco for the past few years and are increasingly prevalent in San Diego. California law prohibits localities from implementing outright bans on Waymos on public streets, but private entities can still impose restrictions. Elo-Rivera has been in talks with the recently expanded San Diego International Airport to see if he can persuade its executives to bar Waymos from picking up or dropping off customers on its property. “It is imperative to me that we ask ourselves who benefits from these technologies and in what way,” Elo-Rivera says. “There are a lot of people here who drive either for primary income or secondary income. Our commitment is to make sure everyday people are centered in the decisions of how these technologies are used.”

A few years into his tenure on the City Council, he became interested in how landlords were using AI to skirt antitrust laws and collectively jack up rents by feeding their own data into software that identifies patterns across the city’s rental markets. “People bust their ass here, because it’s really fucking expensive,” Elo-Rivera says. “They’re running a marathon on a track tilted 90 degrees against them. The playing field is completely tilted in the wrong direction.”

Mia Loseff, the housing-program manager at Local Progress, also recognized that this was a problem. Her organization began studying the impact of such software four years ago and found that algorithmic price-fixing raises rents by an average of $70 per month—with some cities, such as Atlanta, seeing much higher increases. In part because of this research, one county and 12 cities in the United States, including San Diego, have banned the use of such software over the past 18 months. In October, legislators in California took the process a step further, outlawing its use statewide.

Elo-Rivera is also trying to persuade his City Council colleagues to support a ban on the dynamic-pricing strategies that grocery stores are rolling out—using AI to hike the price of staple foods during high-demand shopping hours, meaning that customers don’t know in advance what they’re going to pay for food and may even find that the prices change while they’re inside the store if there’s a surge in customers. “I think it is wrong for consumers to be subject to price volatility based on the time of day they’re going to shop for basic items,” he says.

San Diegans’ efforts to regulate AI have had mixed success. Despite the accountability coalitions and the creation of the Privacy Advisory Board, AI surveillance systems have proved remarkably difficult to control. Advocates feel as though they’re playing an endless game of Whac-A-Mole.

“We built the biggest coalition against Flock. We had 70 organizations sign on, the labor council, unions. But the police seem to be more powerful than any of them,” Irani, the UCSD professor, says.

For Elo-Rivera, AI represents one of the defining political challenges of our time. Before he was elected to the City Council, he was employed by a nonprofit organization working with at-risk young people. “My work was with communities that had to fight incredibly hard for things they should not have to fight for,” he says. “Access to transportation, access to healthy food in schools.” That experience primed him to bring a critical eye to the society-upending technologies that the Big Tech proponents of an AI revolution are unleashing. “The scale of these changes is unrivaled,” Elo-Rivera says. “The recipe for people giving up, for cynicism, for real social turmoil—it’s all there. Tech companies are attempting to squeeze consumers from every angle they can, and we have to be able to push back and fight on every single front.”

Amid the liturgy of lies that Donald Trump hymns daily, he occasionally utters unvarnished truths that are unspeakable in polite company. He says the quiet part out loud. On presidential power: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” On the constraints on his use of military force: “There is one thing. My own morals. My own mind.… I don’t need international law.” On the racist predicate for his deportation horrors: “They are poisoning the blood of our country.” Or his $10 million lawsuit against the IRS: “I’m supposed to work out a deal with myself.” Or his admission about the aggressive war on Iran: “We don’t have to be there. We don’t need their oil. But we’re there to help our allies.”

And so on the eve of releasing a budget for next year that called for a staggering $1.5 trillion military budget—a $500 billion, 42 percent increase that would be the largest year-on-year percentage increase since the mobilization for Korean War, Trump admitted to the quiet part: “I said to [Office of Management and Budget director] Russell [Vought], ‘Don’t send any money for daycare because the United States can’t take care of daycare. That has to be up to a state. We can’t take care of daycare…. We’re fighting wars…. it’s not possible for us to take care of daycare. Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things, they can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing, military protection.”

It wasn’t just daycare that would take the hit. The press reported that president’s budget called for a 10 percent cut in all non-defense discretionary programs (outside of Medicare and Medicaid, which were savaged last year, and Social Security), targeting primarily anything related to climate, the environment, civil rights, education, and food support and other poverty programs. But in reality, compared to the cost of continuing current levels of service, it slashes domestic programs by nearly one-fourth. With ICE and Homeland Security getting increases, targeted programs were cut to the bone: the Environmental Protection Agency cut by more than one-half, LIHEAP—heating subsidies for low income families—eliminated, another $20 billion lopped off rebuilding infrastructure.

The proposed $1.5 trillion annual military budget, about 5 percent of the GNP, is real money. As Dean Baker notes, it comes to about $12,000 per family. And that doesn’t include the $200 billion supplemental that the Pentagon will reportedly seek to pay for the war on Iran. The money lards a military-industrial complex that is the largest source of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government—and has never been able to pass an audit.

Not surprisingly, many Democrats and a few Republicans expressed consternation at the misplaced priorities. On the surcharge for the Iran War, Representative Ro Khanna summarized:

Let me tell you what $200 billion could do here in America. It would allow for free public college for every American kid. We could build a thousand trade schools, we could pay every American teacher $60,000 to start.

We could have universal childcare: childcare at $10 a day, with childcare workers making $25 an hour. And we could fully fund special needs education at 40% of what the federal government needs to fund.

Or it could pay to reverse the cuts already made in vital needs. Reversing the cuts in Obamacare made by Trump and the Republican Congress last year would cost $27 billion annually. Extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit that aided low-wage workers curing Covid would cost about $40 billion annually.

Trump repeatedly and correctly boasts that the US military is already the most powerful military in the world by far. The “Department of War” accounts for 40 percent of the world’s military spending, more than the next nine costliest militaries combined—seven of which are (or were before Trump) our allies. This despite the fact that, surrounded by oceans to the East and West and allies to the North and South, the United States is uniquely secure against any conventional assault.

Wars, of course, tend to “grease the runway” for military spending hikes. Whether a war as unpopular as the war of choice against Iran will do so remains to be seen. But Trump’s budget request isn’t really a wartime budget. Most of the increase is a down payment on military fantasies. A centerpiece is an initial investment in Trump’s Golden Dome, his utterly fantastical recycled version of Reagan’s Star Wars, calling for building a defensive “dome” against missile attacks. It will squander hundreds of billions on multiple layers of land-, sea-, and space-based sensors and interceptors designed to protect the US from next-generation missiles and drones. Like Reagan’s fantasy, the system won’t work, serving only to enrich high-tech military contractors, accelerate the arms race in space, and lead China and Russia and other future nuclear-armed adversaries (France?) to move toward hair-trigger alert postures. Add to that a down payment of $65.8 billion in shipbuilding for Trump’s “Golden Fleet,” featuring “Trump-class” battleships that, if our corrupted military contractors actually succeed in building, will provide tempting targets for inexpensive air and underwater drones that are becoming the weapons of choice for weaker countries.

Trump’s assertion that the federal government must focus on the military, and that our military, which is already the most powerful in the world needs a lot more money, is what lawyers would call an “admission against interest,” once more saying the quiet part out loud.

A $1.5 trillion annual military budget isn’t necessary for the defense of the United States. Rather it assumes that the US will continue to police the world. We will remain committed to global military hegemony—aiming to be dominant militarily in this hemisphere, from Europe to the Russian border, counter China in the South China Sea, strike terrorists across the world, sustain a global empire of 750-plus military bases, and deploy military forces to over 100 countries, while patrolling the seven seas.

That commitment condemns the US to constant wars in far corners of the world, as it has waged every year of this century. The “war of choice” against Iran is a classic example. According to Trump’s National Security Strategy released in November 2025, the Middle East is no longer a priority: “the days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over—not because the Middle East no longer matters, but because it is no longer the constant irritant, and potential source of imminent catastrophe, that it once was.” Iran “has been greatly weakened,” progress toward “a more permanent peace” between Israelis and Palestinians “has been made.” As the US revs up energy production, “America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” Less than four months later, Trump launched the war against Iran, allegedly because of the threat posed by nuclear weapons it does not have, and intercontinental missiles that it has not built.

The commitment to be the most powerful military power in every region of the world is both expensive and exhausting. The military is right when it argues that even this unprecedented military budget is inadequate to the task. We’ve been writing promissory notes to countries across the world—from Taiwan in the South China Sea to Ukraine to Israel and the emirates in the Middle East—largely on the assumption that they would never be cashed in.

It is this commitment and the wars that result that repeatedly sabotage efforts to ensure basic needs at home—as Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights was lost to the Cold War, LBJ’s Great Society to Vietnam, Biden’s more modest domestic thrust to the cruel follies of Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza.

As Trump’s admission reveals, we do guns. Guns are our core industrial policy, our major export, our budget priority, our foreign assistance program, and define our global presence. Trump, the self-declared “President of Peace,” wages a catastrophic war in the Middle East, drops bombs on seven countries and fishing boats in the Caribbean, kidnaps the president of Venezuela, vows to take Greenland, and seeks a 40 percent increase in the budget for his Department of War.

Hopefully, Trump’s ruinous rampages will lead Congress to rework his budget and alter his priorities. But nibbling at the edges will only revive the hypocrisy, not revise the reality. We will never begin to rebuild a broad middle class and provide minimal basic needs to Americans without a fundamental change of our role in the world. What Trump makes clear is that we can rebuild our country or ramp up our Department of War—we can’t and won’t do both.

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2027 budget request is a bat signal to Congress. The American empire is flailing, and the White House is working to ensure that the country declines with it. If there was ever a time for lawmakers to discipline the Pentagon, it is now.

On Friday, the White House released preliminary details about the fiscal year 2027 federal budget. The president requested $1.15 trillion for the Pentagon, as well as an additional $350 billion for the military outside of the regular budget process. If Congress manages to approve the latter in a separate spending bill, it will deliver President Trump a $1.5 trillion top line—a 44 percent increase from last year.

The administration’s budget request to Congress comes as the United States surpasses the first month of its illegal, dangerous war against Iran—which according to YouGov, about 60 percent of Americans oppose. It remains to be seen whether the Pentagon will pursue additional funding for the war, though the Pentagon suggested a separate $200 billion spending package just two weeks ago. Even with a ceasefire, the Pentagon may still pursue a supplemental to refill weapons stockpiles. Either way, lawmakers have a clear mandate: Cut the Pentagon budget and salvage their chance to deliver the domestic rejuvenation the American people demand.

The president is forcing austerity on the American people while prioritizing arms dealers and warmongers. The administration has proposed a 10 percent cut to nonmilitary spending, a $73 billion reduction. But superfluous military spending is an accelerant of American decline, coming at the cost of childcare, healthcare, and social welfare writ large—as the president made explicit in his address last Wednesday. According to the president, “it’s not possible” for the federal government to take care of childcare or healthcare: “We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”

The president’s idea of guarding the country is unmitigated weapons production. But this is really just an idea, and a flawed one at that. The United States does not have the industrial capacity nor the workforce to absorb an additional near $500 billion Pentagon budget plus-up in a single fiscal year. Production constraints aside, the president’s budget request kick-starts his vanity projects in earnest. The fiscal year 2027 budget establishes Trump’s Golden Fleet—including the Trump-class battleship. Americans may be losing critical services, but the administration made sure to carve out funding for the F-47 fighter jet and Golden Dome, the president’s fantasy missile defense system.

The administration’s budget request outlines an egregious misallocation of American resources, but President Biden and his predecessors paved the way to the trillion-dollar-plus Pentagon budget. For years, Republicans and Democrats alike have invoked the prospect of World War III to justify expanding Pentagon budgets and unfettered weapons production. If the United States was as vulnerable to a military attack as budget boosters claim it is, the federal government would exercise both executive powers and statutes like the Defense Production Act to seize industrial capacity and boost arms production in preparation for war—as the nation did in World War II.

The administration boasts that the current military buildup surpasses even that preceding the Second World War. The only reasonable response to such excess is to drastically cut military spending, starting with Trump’s pet projects: the Golden Dome missile-defense system, the Golden Fleet, and the F-47. Between last year’s “Big Beautiful Bill” and its proposed top line for fiscal year 2027, the administration is poised to commit at least $40 billion on Golden Dome—the land-and-space-based shield purportedly capable of protecting the United States from everything from ballistic to hypersonic and cruise missiles. But a poorly conceived, fantastically expensive missile-defense shield is far from the most effective way to mitigate the threats posed by nuclear weapons: diplomacy, arms control, and nuclear nonproliferation.

Rather than commit generations of Americans to unnecessary if not technically infeasible weapons programs, Congress must cut off America’s war machine at the source. Excessive Pentagon spending fuels the US’s war obsession, an affliction that drives American hubris in countries like Iran and beyond. Military restraint, however, may be a driver and a product of spending discipline. At the very least, deep cuts to the Pentagon budget would save taxpayers from financing the president’s weapons wish list, which is irrelevant to cohesive or realistic strategic thinking. Most importantly, Pentagon budget cuts would free up resources for programs that actually improve Americans’ quality of life, which is rapidly deteriorating amid both wage stagnation and rising prices.

Anyone who spends much time visiting with children in the public elementary schools is likely to notice that the time traditionally given to the study of the arts and letters has undergone a notable reduction. “Severe budget cuts to [the] humanities and other non-STEM fields,” according to Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of American history at UCLA, have accompanied the growing assault on critical inquiry.

This trend, which I began to notice in the years that followed the passage of the testing law No Child Left Behind, is part of a larger pattern of retreat from the humanities in general, which tends to be given less and less attention, as it seems, because the benefits or “outcomes” of a child’s engagement with a literary work that he or she enjoys do not easily lend themselves to rigorous and scientific measurement. “I want to change the face of reading instruction from an art to a science,” said a high-ranking official at the US Department of Education in 2002. If she had simply meant that reading instruction ought to be grounded in reputable research with a scientific basis, her statement would have seemed like common sense to me. Regrettably, in too many schools, the scientific theme soon grew into a storm of arctic air that blew away any serious concern for the artistry of language in the books and stories that children were increasingly denied the time to read.

“So maybe we aren’t teaching an entire novel,” a curriculum administrator in a New York district noted in an interview with The New York Times in 2015, “but we’re ensuring that we’re teaching the concepts that the novel would have gotten across.”

It’s a funny statement. I don’t think too many people read a novel in order to dig out “a concept” or a bunch of concepts hidden in its pages. I think most people read a novel to enjoy the story and get caught up in the lives of the people it portrays and the ways their personalities and character develop as the narrative evolves. This is obviously impossible if all the students get to read are a couple of paragraphs or pages.

A case in point: One of the bright young teachers whom I came to know when she was a graduate student here in Cambridge went on a few years later to become a teacher in a fifth-grade classroom in a poorly funded district in Virginia. There was no library at the school and, in the classrooms, literary books had largely been abandoned and replaced by tiny bits of writing that were known as practice texts.

The teacher, who had studied education after she had done her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, had done her practice teaching in a fairly affluent district in a suburb close to Cambridge where testing pressures had been less severe and where she’d had a chance to introduce her students to books she’d known and loved since she was a child. So the idea of using what she called “hokey little bits and pieces” of test-aligned materials as the mainstay of instruction struck her, as she put it, as “pretty damn amazing.”

She later sent me a package that included several of the passages her students had to read in a six-week period prior to the final round of standardized exams—during which, she told me, they read no books at all.

One of the longer pieces that she sent was a passage of nonfiction about a creature of the sea I had never heard of, which was called the blobfish. It started out by saying that the blobfish has “a human-looking face” and, in the next sentence, is “a human-looking fish” and, in the paragraph that followed, is “nearly human-looking.” While it “may not be one of the most attractive of sea creatures,” the passage continues, “it is certainly one of the most interesting.” Its shapelessness “allows the blobfish to float easily” in “the ocean depths where it makes its home.” The blobfish “spends all its time floating” and, two sentences later, the blobfish (plural) “spend most of their time floating…. They are made for floating.”

The blobfish “may not be the most attractive fish,” the children are told a second time in the final paragraph, after which a multiple-choice question asks the students to identify the structure that was used to organize the passage. The teacher said one of her students stuck her fingers in her throat to indicate how interesting she found this.

It’s not surprising that so many teachers with her good education and buoyant personality—and feisty resistance to the loss of her autonomy—are unwilling to remain for long in schools in which “hokey little bits” of mediocre writing and the pressure to conform to standardized banalities are snuffing out any pleasure to be taken in the arts and letters.

The banning of books on social justice issues and works that address the nation’s racial history is another reason teachers who have come to education with a sense of social conscience are fleeing from the classrooms. About 12 years ago, one of my friends in Arizona told me about teachers in the Tucson district who had developed a Mexican American studies program that also included the writings of James Baldwin and dissident historians, such as Howard Zinn.

But legislative leaders were not pleased. The legislature passed a law to eliminate the program, and Republican Governor Jan Brewer signed the law in 2012. Among the titles taken from the shelves were works by Cesar Chavez, Isabel Allende, Sandra Cisneros, Laura Esquivel, and Thoreau (“Civil Disobedience”)—and, bewilderingly enough, Shakespeare’s play The Tempest.

In more recent years, right-wing parent groups have been attempting to exclude from their children’s schools hundreds of other books that foster critical thinking or address the conflicts that divide us, based on gender, class, and race.

All in all, between the assault from groups like these and the broader curricular constraint on reading almost any book of literary worth from the beginning to the ending, teachers I know are speaking of a bleak and bare scenario.

I go into an elementary classroom and, being old-fashioned as I am, I look to see if Harriet the Spy is sitting there invitingly on the top shelf of a bookcase. Depending on the grade and ages of the students, I also look for Owl Moon, Peeny Butter Fudge, Born on the Water, Bridge to Terabithia, Grandma’s Purse, The Wind in the Willows, Number the Stars, A Wrinkle in Time, Alice’s adventures when she fell into the rabbit hole—and, naturally, Eeyore, Pooh, and Piglet as they were depicted not by Disney but by E.H. Shepard.

Most of these books and dozens of other old or modern treasures are usually listed by the state or district as recommended titles for kids of different ages, and they’re usually there, somewhere in the classroom, packed in shelves or boxes. Too often, however, the books remain there in the shelves and boxes for too many days and hours while children fill in bubbles on their practice texts. Healthy and well-educated teachers tell me that they hate this. They did not come into teaching in order to become the dutiful technicians of mechanistic learning. They want to seed the future of their students with a lifelong love of reading.

It’s harder to do this in the kinds of schools where the obsessive measurement of outcomes and a cult of cold “efficiency” in the training of workers for corporate employment are held to be the ultimate priorities. What can’t be measured won’t be taught. What won’t be “useful”—fascination, and delight, and wonderment—are no longer wanted. This way lie diminished lives for millions of our children and a continued flight of teachers from their schools.

Luxury brands have always advertised the craftsmanship of their products, but in recent months, human artistry itself has become their advertising strategy. Hermès redesigned its entire website around hand-drawn illustrations by the French artist Linda Merad, who said the designer label wanted visitors to recognize that “the art was made by a human.” The fashion houses Chanel and Loewe commissioned human illustrators to create their recent social-media campaigns. Over the holidays, Porsche released an ad that combined hand-drawn artwork with 3D animation—a choice that seemed pointed coming on the heels of the viciously mocked generative-AI ads from Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. This past February, Gucci became a cautionary tale when it drew the wrath of fashionistas after using AI in its ads. “Any luxury brands that used AI slop should not be consider[ed] luxury anymore,” one viral post read. Another stated, “The whole point of luxury is that someone gave a damn.”

As automation and AI become ubiquitous, the human touch has become a luxury good. In some ways, this might seem to be merely a continuation on a theme: The rich get white-glove customer service while the rest of us are trapped pressing “1” and “2” and shouting “speak to an agent” into automated phone-tree voids. It can seem like just another symptom of the broader enshittification of our age and plutocratic economic order. And most of us don’t like it. Studies confirm the widespread skepticism: A Pew survey from 2025 found that half of Americans were more concerned than excited by the rise of AI, and roughly 60 percent said they wish they had more control over AI’s use in their own lives.

And yet it’s the poor who are subject to its most consequential uses. Today, debt collectors use AI to hound people via phone, e-mail, and chatbots. AI deepfakes are poised to worsen criminal-justice disparities. Parole decisions are being made by AI systems. And increasingly, federal and state officials are outsourcing decision-making and oversight for public services to digital machines.

As TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit that tracks technologies that are harmful to low-income communities, noted in a November 2024 report, governments employ AI in public programs when they’re looking to cut costs under the guise of ensuring that only the “right” people receive services. But any mistake made by an automated system immediately snowballs: Such systems can create “immense suffering at scales and speeds that were impossible with the human-centered methods that precede them,” the researchers found. After decades of austerity rooted in anti-Black and anti-poor politics, America’s safety net is already threadbare; those same biases are now encoded into digital tools that, like all AI, reproduce the prejudices of their training data and programmers. A human bureaucrat can destroy only so many lives in a day; algorithms can ruin the lives of tens of thousands at once.

Every state now uses AI to determine Medicaid eligibility, according to TechTonic Justice. For the 73 million people enrolled in the program, automated systems increasingly decide whether to approve or deny healthcare treatments. The nearly 14 million Americans who receive disability benefits through the Social Security Administration are subject to decisions shaped by AI, which is also used by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; in fraud detection for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and in making predictions of neglect in child-welfare investigations. Indeed, throughout the social-safety net, decisions about who gets helped and who gets denied are increasingly left to machines. (Right around when the Porsche ad dropped, the Trump administration quietly gave Palantir a no-bid contract for an AI system to search for alleged fraud by SNAP recipients.) In fact, as the TechTonic Justice researchers reported, “all 92 million low-income people in the U.S.…have some basic aspect of their lives decided by AI.”

In 2013, for example, cash-strapped Michigan instituted an automated system to root out fraud in its unemployment-insurance program. Over a two-year period, the system leveled fraud accusations against over 60,000 people—more than five times the number identified by previous human-led investigations. Despite no human review of these findings, the state began demanding repayment; court papers noted that the “punitive assessments regularly totaled between $10,000 and $50,000 and sometimes exceeded $187,000.” Three years later, Michigan’s auditor general found that 93 percent of those allegations were wrong. By then, thousands of people had endured arrests, bankruptcies, and evictions, with at least one person dying by suicide. As of 2022, Michigan owed $20 million in settlement costs to claimants who’d signed on to a class-action lawsuit.

In Arkansas, an automated system erroneously cut nursing and other home-aide services for about 4,000 people with severe disabilities. When families asked why the services had been slashed, they were told simply that “the computer did it.” (A court ruled that the state had to stop using the system.) In Minnesota and Kentucky, ongoing class-action lawsuits allege wrongful denials of care in cases where insurers enlisted AI to override doctor recommendations and deny the Medicare Advantage claims of elderly patients. In Illinois and Los Angeles County, the automated systems used to determine child-welfare removals were so error-prone that both jurisdictions have now discontinued their use.

The research company Forrester predicts that AI and automation will eliminate 6 percent of all jobs, or roughly 10 million positions, by 2030. That outlook seems sunny compared to a 2025 Senate report that predicted some 100 million Americans could lose their jobs to AI over the next 10 years. There’s a new digital divide, and the less money you have to buy your way out of it, the greater the role that AI will have over your life.

Jamaica Kincaid really hates England, and who could blame her? In her essay “On Seeing England for the First Time,” which was published in Transition during the early 1990s, she pithily expressed her views of the country: “I find England ugly…I hate England; the weather is like a jail sentence…the food in England is like a jail sentence.”

One might dispute some or all of these assertions, but the anger derives from a history, a long, painful, gut-wrenching series of events involving what the British Empire did to Kincaid’s ancestors: possibly capturing, if not purchasing, her African forebears, transporting them across an ocean, and forcing most of these individuals and their descendants to work in the sugarcane fields of Antigua. Even long after the country’s emancipation and independence, Britain maintained a strong political and social connection to Antigua, as it did with many of its former colonies, mainly under the banner of the Commonwealth. For anyone from Antigua, and for anyone whose ancestors were affected by the British Empire in similar ways, it is difficult to see English society and culture without some feeling of bitterness and indignation.

For Kincaid, the tentacles of British imperialism have long been a theme in her novels. In Annie John, England appears in the background of nearly every social encounter, through symbols and hymns. One notable childhood scene shows that close relationship:

We began our [Brownie] meetings with the whole troop standing in the yard of the Methodist church, forming a circle around the flagpole, our eyes following the Union Jack as it was raised up; then we swore allegiance to our country, by which was meant England.

In At the Bottom of the River, we get a collection of short stories in which England features as a faraway land that provides luxury items. Now, in a new collection of Kincaid’s essays and cultural writing, Putting Myself Together, much of her animus toward England can be found once more, along with many other things. As in her fiction, the themes of British imperialism, life in the Caribbean, and the long shadow of slavery and colonialism are central, but they are no longer conveyed through characters—instead, we get them directly from Kincaid herself. Yet there is much more in this collection. Her body of writing is filled with musings and missives, witticism and humor. Spanning Kincaid’s career from the early 1970s until 2020, the essays here include everything from features on celebrities to insights on her garden. Yet many of the themes circle back to the main idea of “On Seeing England for the First Time,” which serves as a sharp parable as well as a wry provocation: that when push comes to shove, you can’t escape history—it makes you.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 as Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson. The daughter of a sharp-tongued housewife and an illiterate chauffeur, she spent her first 16 years as a British colonial subject, absorbing the heavy influences of the monarchical government. Even as late as the 1950s, Antigua was still in a state of transition away from a plantation economy, where unpaid and later poorly paid Africans and their descendants worked the land to produce sugar, cotton, and harvests for the British Empire. Antiguans were free, in that they were no longer slaves, but they were not, in Kincaid’s experience, all that liberated.

“For about one hundred years after emancipation,” Kincaid notes in one essay, “Antiguans were neither slaves nor people.” Even in their alleged liberation, the Black residents of the island served the global elite. Most of the land when she was growing up, Kincaid noted, was owned by “people who had never seen Antigua.” Where did these people live? Mostly in Britain. Who were they? The descendants of slave owners. By the mid-20th century, the peaceful island had become appealing to the United States, which led to Antigua’s acquiring an American military base and gradually being transformed into a tourist destination for middle-class North American travelers seeking to escape to its beaches and turquoise waters. Even as the forms of hierarchy and rank changed, class and the exploitation of Antiguans remained constant.

In 1965, Kincaid migrated to the United States. As the eldest child, she was expected to provide financial assistance to her impoverished family. Leaving Antigua was a significant step, but embracing the person she wanted to become was even more critical. In the US, Kincaid temporarily worked as an au pair at her mother’s request to send remittances back to the Caribbean. But after a tumultuous start, she severed ties with her family in Antigua and, with meticulous detail, adopted a new persona. From then on, she would no longer be Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson; by taking her new first name from another British colony in the Caribbean and her surname from a Scottish clan that rebelled against the English and recaptured Edinburgh Castle in the 13th century, Kincaid signaled both her Afro-Caribbean roots and her anti-English resistance. 

Now equipped with a new identity, Kincaid briefly attended Westchester Community College, Franconia College, and the New School. Although she never finished a college degree, she started writing regularly for Ms. and The Village Voice. She also began contributing consistently to The New Yorker, including brief pieces in “Talk of the Town.” There, she developed a casual prose style with a touch of sharp humor.

By 1978, all of Kincaid’s hard work as a writer had begun paying off: After writing “Girl,” a short story in The New Yorker that offers a vivid portrait of female life with memorable concision, she got a publishing contract and expanded the piece into her first book, At the Bottom of the River. From that point on, Kincaid continued shifting between fiction and nonfiction. Often revisiting her own biography, her novels would try to do both.

At the Bottom of the River was a thoughtful book about close observation, with the narrators habitually highlighting the ordinariness of domestic life. However, the works of fiction and nonfiction that followed continued to dwell on many of the same themes: Kincaid’s West Indian upbringing, her marriage to a composer, her two children, and her horticultural journey. This decision to write about her life was not made merely because it was the subject most immediately available to her; it also offered Kincaid a way to work through and reflect on that life—a way to find out how her past had influenced and shaped the present.

Alongside her novels, Kincaid continued to write cultural and literary criticism. Putting Myself Together offers a chronicle of these writings, collecting her opinions on political figures, her commentaries on public life, her profiles of celebrities, her letters concerning colonialism, and her critiques of Western society’s obsession with race. The volume does not include every work of nonfiction she’s written, but it tracks her evolution as a public thinker.

One noticeable aspect of many of these essays is not only her political insight but also her sharp wit and humor. While Kincaid established her reputation as a fiction writer, she also shows significant versatility in her nonfiction, shifting from widely read publications like Architectural Digest to more highbrow outlets like The Paris Review.

From the beginning of her writing career, her polyphonic prose was infused with a mix of comedic and historical sensibilities—an infectious sense of tittering and mirth in confronting history’s challenges and injustices—that I have also observed in my Afro-Caribbean aunts during family gatherings. By the early 2000s, Kincaid had transformed this range of feelings and styles into a mode of writing that, along with her fiction, made her a literary powerhouse. Everyone wanted to read and publish Kincaid.

During these years, Kincaid’s disdain for the British Empire’s stain on Antigua and, more broadly, much of the world was often secondary to other subjects she addressed; her writing also contains many nuanced and pointed remarks about identity. Whether profiling the stars of blaxploitation films, such as Pam Grier, or discussing literary figures like Robinson Crusoe, Kincaid was always careful to consider how history intersected with personality, politics with art and culture, world-historical events with everyday desires and happenings.

Reporting from a public broadcast at a Harlem theater, Kincaid watched George Foreman fight Muhammad Ali in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo)—and despite all the history swirling around her, she took the time to pause and offer a somewhat steamy and wry description of Ali. “He looked like a movie star,” Kincaid wrote, “the way he strode into the ring. His face looked smooth as a peach, his hair was nicely done—no split ends. Then he took off his robe and flexed the muscles in his arms. Gosh! He has the best pair of collarbones you have ever seen on any screen.”

Even when getting lost in the beautiful physique of a world champion boxer, Kincaid never forgets the dynamics of power and empire all around her—and in particular the residues of that one kingdom she was most familiar with. When Kincaid writes about Britain, she is unequivocal. For her, the British Empire was and, in many ways, continues to be a globe-trotting ruffian who, for centuries, bullied and stole from the world, never apologized, and always explained away its violence and extractive tendencies as being to the benefit of all.

Kincaid articulates her frustration with the United Kingdom with statements of intentional provocation, but she also supplements these with detailed accountings of the British Empire. For instance, she notes, the Barclays brothers founded Barclays Bank with wealth amassed through slave trading and, after the Slavery Abolition Act, extracted profit from the descendants of those same enslaved people. In fact, in exchange for abolition, Britain paid 47,000 slave owners, like the Barclays brothers, through the Slavery Compensation Act. These payments continued until 2015. In practice, this has meant that as much as 20 percent of Britain’s wealthy population has financial wealth connected to the transatlantic slave trade. As Kincaid writes, “I may be capable of prejudice, but my prejudices have no weight to them, my prejudices have no force behind them, my prejudices remain opinions, my prejudices remain my personal opinion.”

But her partialities are also rooted in fact. For example, of the 17 non-self-governing territories, 10 are still administered by the UK, which some point to as proof that British colonialism never died. Moreover, the UK maintains military bases in its former colonies, along with mining companies and 
tax havens, which leads one to think that Kincaid’s antipathy is justified. When she was born, Antigua was a British colony, and like several newly independent nations that had been ruled by this empire, it slowly transitioned to Commonwealth status. By 1981, Antigua had become a member of the Commonwealth, and to this day, the British monarch remains its head of state (unlike in Barbados, which finally divorced itself from the monarch in 2021).

For Kincaid, after empires die, the consequences of their rule endure for many years. These were present in every aspect of the Antiguan society in which she grew up—from the street names and the school curriculum to the official language. On this, there was no ideological middle ground or any way to find the good in the bad. Freed from alleged English civility, Kincaid was going to say exactly what she thought about Britain.

Much of Kincaid’s writing on the British Empire brings to mind another seminal Afro-Caribbean intellectual, Stuart Hall. He, too, did not pull any punches concerning the role that his adopted home played in the formation of his original one. “The very notion of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’ is bound up in the empire,” Hall once wrote. “Euro-skepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.” For Kincaid, too, the rottenness of British society originated in the way Britain had treated much of the rest of the world. Perhaps no country should ever be considered “great,” but for Kincaid, certainly no imperial power could be described with such a term.

And yet despite all this, Kincaid can also be a writer of hope. If history created despair and anger, then memory offered inspiration. In her svelte novel Annie John, Kincaid revisited her own life in Antigua with unbridled clarity. In At the Bottom of the River, the remembered past is often a place of respite and possibility, as is also the case in Lucy, a novel about a West Indian girl working as an au pair for an American family.

Memory pervades Putting Myself Together as well. A capacious and wide-ranging collection, it furnishes a portrait of Kincaid as a thinker and writer as she evolves over time and even her own self-perceptions change. There are some noticeable interstices, however. Reading the collection, I kept wondering about what seemed to be missing: an engagement with the political turmoil of the present day. Perhaps nonfiction was never the perfect vehicle for this, or Kincaid shouldn’t necessarily be the person to do this, but I am confident that she would do it well. Another area I would have liked to see explored further is how we understand the process of racialization in contemporary society and its relationship to the United States, a similarly vast empire. While Britain often comes under fire in Kincaid’s essays, there is far less about how the United States also operates around the world as an empire and how its violence abroad comes back home.

Yet even if some of these aspects are missing, Putting Myself Together does offer us a picture of Kincaid putting herself, well, together. In its witty social observations, sardonic humor, and purposeful provocations, it captures one of America’s most lively and wide-ranging literary voices. In its critiques of the British Empire and its studies of Caribbean life, it also offers a blueprint for the postcolonial pundit—showing how violence and exploitation abroad are connected to how they show up at home.

In her 2019 “letter” to Robinson Crusoe, Kincaid wrote, “Dear Mr. Crusoe, Please stay home. There’s no need for this ruse of going on a trading journey, in which more often than not the goods you are trading are people like me, Friday.” The letter is poignant, and it’s a directive that we should address to anyone who exercises unconscious cruelty toward the oppressed. May everyone reprimand their own colonizer with confident calculation, and if we dare, we can also be a bit spiteful.

The book tells me the cloud is in everything—
yesterday’s thunderhead in today’s tea,
this morning’s fog in the museum walls,
the plume of my breath in the rattlesnake
coiling around a painted peace lily. Look,
my friend says, and the framed stalk of corn
moves me to awe. I am never not in love
with the world and its yellows. The book is
trying to teach me how to see bubbles
glistening in their unicorn purples, floating
unpopped, rendered nearly permanent in paint.
I study a spirit bird made of glass, and my friend
surprises me with her diagnosis. Crows fly through
the window in my chest. The book would say
her blood cancer is also a cloud, but today I can’t
bear the sky and its gentle scholarship of hope.
I stay with the goldenrod shocking the sculpture
of Kansas grasses like a terrestrial memory
of stars. I let myself grieve as hard as the black
door nailed to the wall titled Night Sun. Yes,
it must be true. My friend’s stunning heart was
once rain. Twilight’s navy hem falls on the horizon
and bends the wheat over the mummied field.
Nothing is unhaunted, which means nothing
is alone. A storm gathers like angels crowding
the earth to see the end beginning here.
I love you, I say into the tomb of air between us
and close my eyes so I won’t see the clouds.

Ididn’t think anything could top Donald Trump’s Easter Sunday rant, when he warned Iran to “open the Fuckin’ Strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH!” He promised to blow up bridges and energy facilities if Iran didn’t comply—a clear vow to commit war crimes, and one that might have sparked mass political outrage in any other era. 

But Trump was just getting started. On Tuesday morning, with Iran still not having met his ever-changing demands, he issued what might be one of the most chilling statements any American president has ever made: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” He’s gone from threatening war crimes (on top of the ones he’s already committed) to threatening genocide in less than two days.

Trump has given Iranian leaders a deadline of 8 pm Eastern time tonight before he launches Armageddon. Until then, the world can only wait to see what this maniac has in store for us.

Ivacillate between fear and rage. I fear Trump is more deranged than ever, and entirely capable of using even nuclear weapons. (Speaking in Hungary on Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance made this threat even more real, warning, “We’ve got tools in our toolkit that we so far haven’t decided to use.”) And I am enraged, because those of us who have warned about the threat Trump poses for the last 10 years have been mocked, even by some on the left. When Hillary Clinton rightly declared that “a man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” some writers took the opportunity to look at her past hawkishness and declare her more dangerous than Trump. Who can forget Maureen Dowd’s odious June 2016 column, “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk”? (Nobody.)

When Kamala Harris made similar arguments about Trump, people derided her for not doing more to challenge Joe Biden‘s ridiculously compliant approach to Israel and the war in Gaza. Does anyone think Harris would be bombing Iran right now? Does anyone think Harris would have continued the policies that have worsened conditions in Gaza since Trump returned to power? But too many people sat out the 2016 and 2024 elections believing that both parties were equally bad, especially on foreign policy.

You know who makes me far more angry, though? Rageful, even vengeful? The Republicans who made some of the same claims as Harris and Clinton, and now back Trump slavishly even as he drags the world toward the abyss. Senator Lindsey Graham once warned, “If we nominate Trump, we will be destroyed, and we will deserve it.” Now he’s one of the president’s biggest supporters, as well as a proponent of this completely unhinged and unwarranted war in Iran. In fact, every one of Trump‘s opponents in 2016 made similar claims about his fitness for office and the danger of trusting him with protecting national security, including Marco Rubio, who is now Trump‘s lapdog secretary of state. “Donald Trump is a serious threat to our party and to our country,” he said in a 2016 press release. That remains the truth.

Republicans could have, and should have, reined Trump in immediately after his second inauguration, when he began to encroach on congressional prerogatives, defunding programs like USAID that Congress had already appropriated money for, imposing tariffs that should have had the backing of Congress, and violating the War Powers Act, which requires congressional consent for declaration of war, repeatedly. But they were happy to roll over, just as they did when they refused to impeach him during his first term.

It should go without saying that impeachment is, at the very least, more necessary than ever. But because of the GOP’s cowardice and craven love of power, Trump is pushing us to the brink of Armageddon.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters are reporting that the Iranian regime has cut off all diplomatic contacts with the United States. So that makes a deal before tonight seem unlikely. The US is already bombing Kharg Island, but insisting it’s only targeting military facilities, not Iran’s oil infrastructure. The administration has already underestimated Iran’s willingness and capacity to strike back, whether at US military bases or at our allies in the Middle East. Whatever the madman does tonight, it will provoke more carnage in the region.

I debated whether it was worth writing a story on what might be the day before Armageddon. I’ve written so many stories warning of Trump’s racism, misogyny, corruption, hawkishness, and derangement that have been ignored, if not mocked. Maybe it’s worth spending the day in Central Park with my dog, or getting on a train to see my daughter and son-in-law. Then I realized: Trump is terrorizing Americans, not just Iranians, with his increasingly unhinged threats. We can’t succumb to it. Whatever happens, there will be a day after, and we have to recommit to removing this war criminal from office.

On Monday, an unhinged President Donald Trump again publicly threatened to commit war crimes by putting Iranian power plants “out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again.” Even without that threat bearing out, United States and Israel continue to use their formidable militaries to deliver, in the words of Secretary of Defense (and aspiring televangelist) Pete Hegseth, “eternal damnation” to the “wicked souls” of the Iranians who happen to be in the path of their bombs and missiles.

This climate of apocalyptic fantasy and gathering doom underlines a little-discussed feature of the Iran war: the pivotal role played by Saudi Arabia—a major US ally in the Middle East and one of the world’s most lavishly funded militaries. The Saudis have spent most of the month-long conflict whispering offstage advice to the Trump White House; their official absence from the councils of war planning is hard to explain, especially as President Trump alternately berates and begs our erstwhile NATO friends for help reopening the Strait of Hormuz—a lifeline for the Saudi oil industry—to shipping traffic.

In 2025, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia spent $78 billion on its military, an extraordinary figure for a country of just over 35 million people and the seventh-highest spending level in the world. And since the beginning of Trump’s unprovoked war against Iran, the Saudis and their sophisticated military featuring hundreds of billions of dollars in American and European hardware have contributed next to nothing to the war effort. With Iran lobbing retaliatory attacks against Saudi assets and the entire region’s economy unraveling as a result of the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it is fair to wonder why the Saudis won’t bring their considerable firepower directly into the conflict, especially as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS) urges the US to escalate rather than draw down the disastrous war.

Trump might not want to hear the answers to these questions, because they go something like this: The Persian Gulf is a money pit that America continues to pour money into with virtually nothing to show for it. America’s regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, still can’t or won’t defend themselves and would prefer to sit back and watch Washington light money on fire in perpetuity while they host wartime horse races and soccer matches for the international Epstein class. Still, the Saudis enjoy outsize clout with this White House, since they—along with other regional oil autocracies—are major financial backers of Trump-endorsed and -affiliated businesses. That’s why all the behind-the-scenes Trump-whispering from Gulf oil regimes is a major and underappreciated factor in the world-reordering fiasco unfolding in and around Iran.

There is some irony here. Claiming to have improved the geopolitical climate of the Persian Gulf has been one of Trump’s favorite hobbyhorses, ever since 2020, when he signed the business-driven Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain. Last May, when Trump was just months into his second term and still oozing with unearned swagger, he delivered a bizarre soliloquy in Riyadh, ranting about the size of his swing state victories in 2024 and crowing that “it is within our grasp to reach the future that generations before us could only dream about, a land of peace, safety, harmony, opportunity, innovation and achievement right here in the Middle East.” The hawkish Gulf watchers James Jeffrey and Elizabeth Dent hilariously argued in Foreign Affairs, the in-flight magazine for the Beltway Blob, that Trump’s outburst represented “a new path to Middle East security”; they fantasized that, in his far-seeing wisdom, the American president “stressed the agency of Middle Eastern countries, particularly the Gulf states and Turkey, to run their own internal affairs and play a greater role in regional security—backed, when necessary, by decisive military operations.”

Come again? Less than a year later, after Trump capriciously started the kind of Middle East war he had spent the past decade promising to avoid, where exactly are these partners and their alleged regional security chops? According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar all rank in the global top 10 in military spending as a percentage of GDP. How is it possible that all of this defense spending, in combination with the world-historic might of Israel and the United States, is incapable of subduing a badly hobbled, completely isolated regional power to secure a single, narrow shipping channel? The present quagmire is likely to stretch out across a very long timeline, but one thing seems clear: We shouldn’t expect our Saudi clients in particular to do anything about it anytime soon.

Tulane University political scientist Andrew Leber told me that “there is no future in which Saudi Arabia puts boots on the ground.” He said that the country is unlikely to take on a larger military role in resolving the crisis because Iran could still escalate and strike “targets that would make this even more of a catastrophe for Saudi Arabia.” Saudi leadership is also worried, he said, that visible participation in the war effort will destroy the existing ceasefire with the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

According to Yemen expert Stacey Philbrick Yadav, an international relations professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the Saudis are “happy to let the US weaken Iran while they retain the ability to stay focused on Yemen,” where Riyadh has recently been focused on wrangling disparate factions within the internationally recognized government. The Saudis “undoubtedly favor an outcome that limits the military capabilities of both Iran and the Houthis, but may not want to spread themselves thin by doing that work themselves,” Yadav said. That’s a prudent calculation, she notes, given that past Saudi military spending has been shown to be relatively “irrelevant” to battlefield outcomes in Yemen.

Direct intervention would also put Riyadh “on the same side as Israel when MBS has maintained a careful balancing act of neither recognizing Israel nor confronting Israel too openly,” Leber said. As Galip Dalay and Sanam Vakil wrote in October, “Israeli actions have provoked such outrage across the Arab world that any form of visible alignment with Israel has become a direct threat to the legitimacy and security of regimes.”

That sums up in a nutshell the shockingly fragile regional alliance and security system the US has built in the Middle East. On one side is an increasingly violent and aggressive pariah state in Jerusalem—one that’s decided its qualitative military edge grants it the right to violate the sovereignty of its neighbors at will. On the other are harshly autocratic client states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that are either unwilling or unable to put their expensively equipped war machines at risk. The vaunted regional security architecture that the United States has brokered looks to be little more than elaborate flim-flam artistry. It serves the immediate aim of cloaking the Trump family’s narrow economic interests in the Gulf in the rhetoric of peace building and development, but it has vanishingly little operational value.

This is largely how Saudi interests want things to play out—despite the massive global PR offensive presenting MBS as a moderation-minded apostle of peace and broadly distributed prosperity. In reality, Saudi Arabia ranks slightly worse than Iran in political freedoms; the global index maintained by the nonpartisan Freedom House scores the Saudi regime a paltry nine out of 100 on a combined measure of political and civil liberties, compared to Iran’s 10. Last year, the kingdom executed a record 356 people, per this year’s Freedom in the World report, which notes that “many of those executed were foreign nationals convicted of nonlethal drug-related offenses.” That’s a nice way of saying that the Saudi royals are fond of murdering the indentured servants from places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India who make up roughly half the country’s labor force. That’s the ugly reality behind what Trump fawningly called a “major business, cultural and high-tech capital of the entire world.”

It is virtually impossible to know what is going through the president’s rapidly decomposing mind at any given moment. But to the extent that this war is being fought partly because he believes the region’s friendly petro-states and their resource wealth need to be protected from the clerical regime in Tehran, he is also making the same expensive and self-defeating mistake that has plagued decades of American policymakers. Our military misadventures in the Gulf not only failed comprehensively on their own terms long before Trump’s Iran war; they also don’t even add up in terms of basic cost-benefit analysis. As Robert Vitalis (full disclosure: one of my dissertation advisers) wrote in his sharp-elbowed 2020 book Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy, “what taxpayers pay for the impossible-to-estimate good called energy security is roughly equal to what the world pays each year for Middle East oil and 10 times higher than what U.S. refiners pay.”

Saudi Arabia’s princes and potentates have cleverly spread their wealth and talking points across countless university centers and think tanks around the United States, but not even their most ambitious propagandists could have imagined that they might have persuaded an American president to take on the task of overthrowing Iran’s government by force. What’s more, the colossal military buildup among the Gulf autocracies has proven unequal to the task of preventing Iran from shutting down the Strait of Hormuz and potentially triggering a global recession. In a strange twist of fate, it was the Trump administration’s own idiotic choices that both conjured the crisis into being and exposed the shocking inadequacy of our own force posture in the region. Most of all, the acute myopia of the White House war planners has exposed the utter weakness of allies like Saudi Arabia, whose leaders clearly are pursuing other priorities that don’t necessarily align with America’s.

The long-standing effort to prop up the Saudis as the masters of their own fate and the upholders of the regional security status quo is but the latest entry in America’s effort to endow its transactional Saudi relationship with mystic properties of regional security. On the Saudi side, the regime’s paper-tiger standing is rooted in the PR fable depicting its brutal leaders as reasonable and reform-minded modernizers.

This is why it’s particularly galling to see the Saudis and their display-window military calling for escalation from the sidelines, including an effort to convince Trump to overthrow the Iranian regime with a ground invasion if necessary. MBS has pushed Trump to “consider putting troops in Iran to seize energy infrastructure and force the government out of power” as well as a “military operation to seize Kharg Island, the hub of Iran’s oil infrastructure,” according to a March New York Times report.

This obviously insane plan sounds a lot like the kind of selfish free riding that Trump falsely claims our democratic European allies are doing in the Gulf. But Trump is glad to ignore such conduct from the Gulf monarchies, since he very much admires their pitiless despotism—even as they push for deepening an already disastrous war whose costs will be paid by others.

With the war in Iran growing ever more chaotic, and with violence spreading throughout the Middle East, there was no mistaking the urgency of the message that Pope Leo XIV delivered to the world’s Catholics on Easter Sunday.

“Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace!” announced the pontiff, who has emerged as the world’s most prominent advocate for an end to the crisis that Donald Trump sparked with his late February decision to attack Iran. “Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!”

The pope’s Easter statement, coming in a time of mounting global uncertainty and trepidation, was an appeal to reason in the face of military madness. “From without, death is always lurking,” he warned. “We see it present in injustices, in partisan selfishness, in the oppression of the poor, in the lack of attention given to the most vulnerable. We see it in violence, in the wounds of the world, in the cry of pain that rises from every corner because of the abuses that crush the weakest among us, because of the idolatry of profit that plunders the earth’s resources, because of the violence of war that kills and destroys.”

This was the latest in a series of powerful statements from the American-born pope, who in recent months has provided the steadiest counterpoint to Trump’s ranting and raving. For his part, the president chose to mark Easter by profanely threatening the Iranian people with oblivion. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” he wrote. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F*ckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

The pope and the president—arguably the most high-profile Americans on the global stage at this critical juncture in the debate over war and peace—stand on opposite sides of a disputation that has rapidly intensified since the beginning of Trump’s war with Iran. Their differences are now so out in the open that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders found himself discussing each man’s statements regarding the Iran war. Of the president’s wild-eyed Easter statement, the senator said, “These are the ravings of a dangerous and mentally unbalanced individual.” Of the papal homily, Sanders said, “I agree with what Pope Leo XIV stated [Sunday] in his first Easter speech.”

There is much to agree with in the pope’s increasingly blunt pronouncements about the Trump administration’s illegal and unconstitutional war. When crowds gathered at the Vatican in mid-March, Leo observed, “For two weeks, the peoples of the Middle East have been suffering the atrocious violence of war,” and appealed to all sides, “Cease fire so that avenues for dialogue may be reopened.” He has expressed frustration with US and Israeli bombing raids that “have hit schools, hospitals, and residential centers”—killing thousands of Iranians in a conflict that has also claimed more than a dozen US lives—and argued, “Violence can never lead to the justice, the stability, and the peace that people are awaiting.”

The pope is right about the desire for peace. Trump’s war of whim with Iran has never been popular with the American people, and a new IPSOS poll finds that 66 percent of them want the conflict to end quickly—even if Trump’s ill-defined and frequently incoherent goals are not achieved. “Two in three Americans want the war in Iran to end. We are tired of our tax dollars being wasted on an unnecessary war and ready for change!” says US Representative Mark Pocan, the Wisconsin Democrat who co-chairs the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus. “Trump’s war in Iran costs American taxpayers billions of dollars every day. Instead of pouring money into an illegal and unnecessary war, those resources could be used to actually help Americans at home, like lowering healthcare costs, building affordable housing, or making everyday goods more affordable.”

Faced with widespread opposition, Trump’s administration has tried to present the war as a moral and religious crusade. In a March 26 prayer session at the Pentagon, self-described “secretary of war” Pete Hegseth read a prayer that spoke of directing “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” and said, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”

In what was widely heard as a rebuke of Hegseth and others who pray for divine intervention on behalf of their war making, Pope Leo greeted crowds gathered at the St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican on Palm Sunday with a stark rejection of those who mix faith and militarism: “We turn our gaze to Jesus, who reveals himself as King of Peace, even as war looms abounds him.”“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,” declared the pope. “He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’”

Voting for Vets

“Hell Cats vs. Hegseth,” by Joan Walsh [February 2026], leaves me questioning how much the four Hell Cats—
JoAnna Mendoza, Rebecca Bennett, Maura Sullivan, and Cait Conley—despite their good points, will resist the brutal domination of the US empire around the world. America’s militarized foreign policy spreads disaster abroad, treats economic competitors as enemies, and siphons tax dollars from our communities. Will the women just be four more Democrats voting for an ever-expanding military budget? I’d like to know.

Anne Cassebaum
elon, nc

The quotes by these candidates who served in the US military derive from the belief that we are the good guys, a deeply rooted propaganda that proliferates across our society. I hope that these women may yet find a way to reassess their military experiences as they run for elected office. Since World War II, the United States has not “won” a war despite astronomical Pentagon budgets (which never pass an audit) and unrestrained bombing attacks that result in what is coyly termed “collateral damage.” To date, there has been zero accountability for the criminal war visited upon Iraq by the US with full bipartisan support.

Thea Paneth
northampton, ma

I’m uncomfortable about supporting these professional military people for public office. It doesn’t make a difference to me that they’re women. To gain trust, they should state clearly that our military is out of control and needs to be significantly reduced for the good of all.

William Forrest
rochester, ny

The Meaning of Evangelical

Thank you for Barry Yourgrou’s well-researched article about Pastor Martin Niemöller, a controversial figure in Germany before, during, and after World War II [“Why Martin Niemöller Didn’t Speak Out,” February 2026]. In it, Yourgrou notes that “in Germany, evangelical just means Protestant.” However, evangelical comes from the Greek euangelion, which means “good news” or “gospel.” There are many Protestant churches, especially Lutheran ones, that include the term evangelical as part of the name of their church. Its meaning is so much broader, deeper, and comprehensive than Protestant.

The Rev. Bonnie M. Oplinger
shillington, pa

Billionaire Ball Clubs

As someone who decries the luxury-box culture that has overtaken US sports, I eagerly read Cole Stangler’s article about a French soccer team setting a different example [“How a French City Kept Its Soccer Team Working-Class,” February 2026]. But describing the club’s owner, the American businessman Frank McCourt, as a “philanthropist” is a stretch. When, some years ago, McCourt finally sold the Los Angeles Dodgers, he held on to the parking lots at Chavez Ravine, whose exorbitant fees remain a bane for Dodgers fans to this day. In LA, no one thinks of him as a philanthropist.

Sean Mitchell
dallas, tx

The Iran war is also a climate war. Beyond its terrible human costs, the war’s disruptions of oil, gas, fertilizer, and other shipments is another reminder of the risks inherent in basing the world economy on fossil fuels. The war’s jets, missiles, and aircraft carriers and the tankers, refineries, and buildings they blow up represent millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions that further imperil a climate system that is already “very close” to a point of no return, scientists say, after which runaway global warming could not be stopped. Nevertheless, petro-state leaders around the world continue doing their utmost to stave off a desperately needed course correction.

Now, a little-noticed ray of hope may be peeking over the horizon. At the UN COP30 climate summit last November, Saudi Arabia led a group of petro-states in vetoing calls to develop a “road map” to phase out fossil fuels globally; indeed, the words “fossil fuels” were not even mentioned in the final text agreed at COP30. But the 85 countries on the losing end of that veto may soon turn the tables.

Many of those governments will gather in Colombia on April 28 and 29 for a conference to begin a global transition away from oil, gas, and coal. Critically, the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels will not be governed by UN rules, which require consensus, but by majority rule, thus preventing a handful of countries from sabotaging progress as petro-states did at COP30. What’s more, the underlying terrain of this conference will no longer be principally politics but economics: not the words that canny negotiators can keep in or out of a diplomatic text but the implacable market forces that shape the world economy, including the potential emergence of a de facto economic superpower.

The conference is cosponsored by Colombia and the Netherlands, a pairing rich with symbolism: Colombia is the world’s fifth-largest coal exporter, Royal Dutch Shell one of the world’s biggest oil companies. Conference organizers confirm that they have invited countries that endorsed the road map proposal at COP30, as well as high-profile leaders of sub-national governments, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, a presumed 2028 US presidential candidate.

The conference aims to begin drawing up the road map blocked at COP30. Energy and environment ministers of governments comprising a “coalition of the willing” will share plans to transition their economies away from oil, gas, and coal without leaving workers and communities behind. Joining them will be climate activists, leaders of Indigenous peoples, trade union representatives, and other civil society voices, sharing ideas and experiences on how to make the abstract goal of phasing out fossil fuels a practical reality.

The goal of the conference is to agree on “actionable solutions” that follow-up meetings can refine so governments around the world can implement them. One area of focus will be how to phase out the $7 trillion a year that governments spend subsidizing fossil fuels—but to do so without punishing communities, workers, and tax bases that rely on such subsidies. UN Secretary General António Guterres has urged the International Energy Agency to help create a “global platform” where public and private sector actors can “sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy.”

The secret weapon of the “coalition of the willing” gathering in Colombia is its potential to function as an economic superpower.

At least 85 countries at COP30 backed developing a road map to phase out fossil fuels. Included among them were Global North powers Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain—the world’s third-, sixth-, seventh-, and 12th-biggest economies. Major Global South countries Brazil and Mexico, the world’s 10th and 13th biggest economies, also backed the measure.

Combine the gross national products of those 85 countries and the total is $33.3 trillion. That’s larger than the $30.6 trillion GNP of the United States, the world’s biggest economy, and considerably larger than the $19.4 trillion GNP of China, the world’s second-biggest economy.

That amount of economic heft gives those 85 countries enormous potential leverage. If the Just Transition conference can outline a credible road map for phasing out fossil fuels, it could send shock waves through financial markets, government ministries, and C-suites around the world. “A coalition of that scale signaling its intent to move beyond fossil fuels would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas, and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, the director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview.

Money follows money. If a huge chunk of the global economy announces that it intends to leave fossil fuels behind—and releases transparent, convincing plans for doing so—private investors and government planners everywhere would have to question whether sinking new money into oil exploration, coal mining, or gas terminals makes financial sense or would instead leave them with virtually worthless stranded assets.

Much the same thing happened after the 2015 Paris Agreement. When governments pledged to limit temperature rise to “well below” two degrees Celsius and to aim for 1.5ºC, public and private sector leaders began changing course. Fossil fuel expansions were scaled back, renewable energy investments boosted. Prior to the Paris Agreement, the planet was on track toward a hellish 4ºC of temperature rise. Five years later, the emissions curve had bent to a 2.7ºC future—still much too high, but a big step in the right direction, and proof that change is possible.

The scales could tilt even further if California joins the “coalition of the willing.” Adding California’s $4.1 trillion GDP to the $33.3 trillion of the 85 countries that backed a road map at COP30—and subtracting that $4.1 trillion from the rest of the US economy—yields an economic superpower worth $37.4 trillion, not far behind the $50 trillion combined GDP of the US and China.

Governor Newsom has given every indication he supports phasing out fossil fuels and wants to be seen as a global climate leader. “Don’t let what happens in Washington, DC, shape your perception of my country,” he told a packed press conference at COP30. Newsom noted that during his years as governor, California grew from the world’s sixth- to its fourth-largest economy even as two-thirds of the state’s electricity came from non-carbon sources. Calling US president Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement “an abomination,” Newsom vowed that California “will fill that void” by competing for the global market in green technologies.

The Just Transition conference underscores a point often missed in the usual narrative on climate change: The overwhelming majority of the world’s people—80 to 89 percent them—want their governments to take stronger climate action. Scientists have long been clear that phasing out fossil fuels is imperative to limit global warming to an amount our civilization can survive. This conference is an opportunity to flip the narrative and begin that urgent task.

Like 36 percent of American households, Run For Something (RFS) founder Amanda Litman and her family are renters. This makes her relatable to many younger Americans, who are living in a world where buying a home is increasingly difficult.

Indeed, only about 39 percent of Americans 35 and under own homes, according to the 2022 census. Meanwhile, 75 percent of Americans in the 55-to-64 age range are homeowners; and that number jumps to 79 percent for those who are 65 and over. It’s not that younger Americans don’t want to be homeowners—a 2024 CNN poll found that while 86 percent of renters want to buy homes, 54 percent believe they will never be able to afford to do so.

Litman is one of those skeptical renters. “I don’t think I’m ever gonna buy a home,” she tells me as we sit at her apartment dining table. But even as the number of renters has increased, politicians have continued to shape housing policy around the interests of buyers rather than renters.

That disconnect between aging policymakers and young Americans is why Litman and RFS, an organization dedicated to getting more young progressives to run for down-ballot positions, are pushing for renters to run for office this cycle.

But mobilizing renters is only one aspect of Litman’s strategy for shaping the new Democratic Party. The candidates we need, according to Litman, must generally “have a very clear understanding of the problems people face—an understanding of what it means to try to survive and thrive right now.”

Since its founding in 2017, RFS has recruited over 200,000 young people, born in 1985 or later, to run in local races, all with the hopes of identifying and developing a promising pool of Democratic candidates with aspirations for higher offices. Amid ballooning frustrations with a geriatric Democratic establishment, RFS has experienced a surge of interest. The 80,000 sign-ups it received in 2025 alone exceeded RFS’s total recruitment numbers from Trump’s entire first term. And the candidates are only getting younger.

This year, RFS is championing dozens of Gen-Z candidates in races across the country. In state House races, it has endorsed candidates like 29-year-old Samuel Vilchez Santiago, who, after coming to Florida as a Venezuelan asylum-seeker, became his high school’s valedictorian and an immigrant rights advocate. RFS candidate Bobby Gronert, a socialist and University of Wisconsin–Madison sophomore, is running for city council on a platform focused on affordability.

As young as these candidates may be, Litman and RFS believe their authenticity and ability to navigate the modern media landscape has primed them for success. At a moment where Americans are seeking change, it may finally be Gen-Z’s time to step up to the plate.

“The [Democratic] party has so much potential,” Litman tells me. “When these are the people in charge, it’s going to be good.”

The Nation spoke to Litman about the value of Gen-Z candidates, the future of the Democratic Party, and what today’s voters really want. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Heather Chen

Heather Chen: You’ve been working for a long time on getting younger, more progressive people into electoral politics. Last year, Run For Something saw its biggest recruitment surge ever. Why do you think so many younger people are deciding to run for office right now?

Amanda Litman: I think it’s a few things. First, we’ve been around for a while—we built infrastructure. When there’s a moment where people are pissed and want to do something, there’s somewhere they can go. You don’t need it until you need it and then you’re really glad it’s there.

Second, people have seen over the last 10 years that the only place where we are making good progress is locally. They want to do something concrete that they can see that they can feel. There’s incredible urgency to solve the problems wherever you can.

Third, the thing that we heard differently in 2025, different from 2017, 2018, was “I’m done waiting my turn. I’m sick of being told to get to the back of the line.” There’s more of a frustration with the Democratic Party this time around than there was the first couple years, because we’re seeing how the Democratic Party is failing to meet the moment.

Lastly, new models for inspiration have appeared over the last 10 years. We’ve seen younger people like AOC, Maxwell Frost, Zohran Mamdani, and Jon Ossoff who are running and winning. Run For Something has helped elect more than 1650 young politicians. They are showing what the future could look like.

HC: Run For Something’s website says it’s “recruiting and supporting young progressives.” How would you or RFS define progressive, and why do you find it important for RFS to support candidates who fit that political orientation?

AL: We define progressive a little differently than a lot of people, partly because we work in all 50 states and in all different kinds of places. So, we have to be able to have a model that is tight on values and flexible on policy, knowing that acknowledges that the kind of person who can win in rural Pennsylvania, Maryland, or Texas, is going to be different than those who we can help elect in New York, Miami, or LA. But as long as they are generally rowing in the right direction or the same direction, there can be a lot of variation there.

In 2025, we helped elect Kelsea Bond to the Atlanta City Council. They were a renter, union organizer, and tenant activist, running on developing greener and more walkable spaces in their city. On the same night, we turned a red seat blue when we helped elect a sports journalist named Andrew Harbaugh to Common Council in Clarion County, Pennsylvania. He was a former Republican who left the party after January 6th.

If you have a model where everyone is generally pro-choice, pro-equality, pro-tolerance, pro–working families, pro–affordable healthcare, pro-labor, pro–immigrant rights, pro–climate justice—you can have variation between them, especially if you want to try and win everywhere, which we do, that’s what we need. Most people do not self-identify as, “I’m a progressive, I’m a moderate.” No, they’re like, “I have problems. I want politicians to solve them.” If you can do that, it almost doesn’t matter what your ideology is, but within a range, there’s a lot of different ways that can be understood.

HC: Recently, you made a statement about how voters are drawn to effective communicators. How does Run For Something train candidates to become better communicators?

People usually treat the candidate as a fixed variable. There’s a reason that so much of the internal party debates are about messaging, policies, ads, or tactics. They assume those are the things you can change, whereas who the candidate is, you cannot.

What we have been arguing for the last 10 years is that, actually, if you work downstream enough, you can change who runs in the first place. A better, more engaging candidate makes everything else easier and more efficient and more effective.

Today, you want people who can communicate in a way that makes sense for 2026 and beyond. Now, does that mean good on camera, telegenic, and able to communicate? Yes. But you don’t have to be hot to do that. There’s all kinds of, like, compelling people who are not “conventionally attractive.”

We have a bunch of different programming that we do to support candidates depending on how much one-on-one help they need. Do you need to be media-prepped or -trained? We can do that. If you have a compelling story, but you don’t know how to edit video, we can help you with that too.

HC: A follow-up—how has social media changed what counts as an effective communicator and are you seeing that Gen Z candidates are naturally better at this?

AL: Successful presidential candidates, for example, tend to be well suited to the media environment that is prominent in the time they’re running. Bill Clinton, really good at TV. Obama, really good at giving a speech and then having that translate into a long press conference and being able to reach people en masse. Trump is really good at the media of the moment. He’s a racist bigot, but pretty funny and compelling to watch, even if you hate what he’s saying.

Right now, the way that people consume information is online, not local news. It’s TikTok, it’s your For You Page, it’s Snapchat, it’s YouTube. Campaigns in 2026 that are reliant on just, like, “We’re gonna raise a bunch of money and then spend it all on TV ads, or even, like, digital ads”—that’s not going to reach people who are not consuming that media anymore. A lot of the places people consume information, you can’t pay to reach them. So a candidate needs to be good at meeting the medium from which people get information.

Gen Z is really good at that because they grew up online. You’ve been thinking since you were a teenager, “How are my friends gonna look at my wall and think about me?” Whether that was intentional or not, you have a fluency there. You are enough of a consumer to be a producer. And the candidates, and this is true, sort of, of any age, but especially Gen Z candidates, you’ve put the reps in. You’ve got the muscle built. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are good at editing video, but they speak the language such that a staffer doesn’t have to explain to them why they need social media.

HC: As more Gen-Z candidates with public digital footprints run for office, is the expectation that they have a “clean” past becoming outdated?

AL: This is something we’re gonna have to work through in real time because we’re not used to people having grown up in public. Like, imagine if you could read Chuck Schumer’s high school diaries. I’m sure he said some stupid shit. The fact is that most people who are interested in running for office have had some part of their coming of age or their ideological journey online, meaning that there is a paper trail. And it’s pretty easy to find. I do think there are things that are disqualifying. But, there’s also context. Were they 11, 16,or 26 when they made that potentially problematic post? What was going on in their life at the time? How did they learn? How have they changed?

We work with successful candidates who have gone to jail, who were opioid addicts and homeless. They talk about their experience and reflect on how they have grown. At the end of the day, I think voters don’t care.

I’m sure if you found my 14-year-old Xanga, it would also be bad. I do think that, especially as activists, as people in politics, you want people to change. You want people to grow. That’s the whole point of persuasion politics—you want people to come to your side. If they started somewhere else and said some shit that they no longer believe, that’s good. That means that they have grown and our efforts have worked.

HC: In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has achieved rising approval numbers in his first few months. But we’ve also seen some establishment Democrats argue that Mamdani’s brand of leftism can’t be replicated elsewhere in the country. How do you respond to that critique, and what do you think Democratic candidates should be taking away from both his campaign and the way he’s handling himself in office?

AL: I find that argument so exhausting, because who is arguing that you want an exact replica of Zohran Mamdani in Kansas City? No one is saying that. That’s a straw man argument that’s just meant to punch left.

What we are saying is you want candidates who genuinely reflect the place they’re running, who love the place they’re running to lead—because Mamdani loves New York, and it comes through—who are willing to keep the campaigns localized, who have a strong value system and who can connect and communicate the way people get information now.

Don’t you want more candidates who could shoot the shit with people on the street and make it interesting? The fact that Mamdani can do that and that he functions as an influencer—and I do not say that derisively—allows him to have influence. It means people listen and follow him, and he can move people to action. That’s so powerful.

HC: In the 2024 election, we saw that there was a lot of voter fatigue with the Democratic Party, particularly at the top of the ballot. With these down-ballot races, how does RFS go about convincing voters who are disillusioned with the Democratic Party?

AL: Trump won over some younger voters, but he did not win them over forever. You are already seeing his approval rating plummet with young people. He basically rented them. He did not buy them. And they have been returned. Now, they are not being returned to the Democratic Party—they are being returned to the ether, to the void, to the unknown. I think that is both the challenge and the opportunity that we, as a party, have.

Run For Something candidates—the people running for city council, for state legislatures, for school board, for library board—can promise stuff that you will be able to experience and feel the results of.

In 2026, we are thinking about how our local candidates can gin up turnout for the rest of the ticket. In a district where we want to flip the house, or senator, or governor, how can the school board candidates get people excited? They can knock doors. They can make videos, they can do calls, they can show up all over the place in a way that the top of the ticket’s not gonna be able to.

HC: What do you think are the biggest challenges grassroots campaigns are facing right now? And how does Run For Something help its candidates take on these challenges?

AL: So there’s a couple things—some structural stuff, like, a lot of these offices don’t pay. Most of our candidates do not quit their jobs to run for office, but if you’re running for Congress, you tend to have to. That’s really hard. It keeps working people out. It keeps people without access to wealth, or wealthy families, or partners out.

Second, there’s some other financial stuff around campaigns—you need nice clothes, a car, gas, transportation, you have to rent an office.

The bigger thing a lot of grassroots candidates experience is they’ve never done this before. So we try to help candidates navigate the running process, all the logistics. Figuring out how to get on the ballot, write a campaign plan, how to figure out how much money you need to spend, how to figure out how many voters you need to reach—that kind of stuff is not rocket science. There’s a how-to manual. We wrote it. I wrote it. And, like, you can do this. Dumber people than you have done this. If you know who you are and what you believe and what you want to accomplish, everything else is logistics, and we can help you with logistics.

The final thing I would point out is that we are at a tipping point for the Democratic Party. Despite any organizational challenges, this is a year of generational change. Even if the new leaders don’t win, they’re changing what it means to be a Democrat. And that’s a good thing.

“Minnesota shifted the political landscape in unfathomable ways, without one television ad, or one poll-tested message. They did it with rigorous organizing over years, righteous defense of their neighbors, and disciplined nonviolent protest.”

I had saved that quote a couple of weeks ago but failed to note the source. So I asked Google Gemini, “Who said that?” (Gemini is the AI “assistant” that comes with Google search. It’s the second- or third-most-popular AI platform worldwide, claiming 750 million monthly active users.)

“That quote was spoken by Bruce Springsteen,” Gemini reported. “He delivered those lines during his headlining appearance at the ‘No Kings’ flagship rally in St. Paul, Minnesota, on March 29, 2026.”

I had watched the livestream of the St. Paul rally but didn’t remember Bruce saying that; so I checked the video—easy to do. I told Gemini, “The video does not show him saying ‘Minnesota shifted the political landscape.’”

Gemini replied, “You are absolutely right to catch that. At the Saturday rally at the St. Paul Capitol, Bruce Springsteen did not say those words. The quote you are looking for actually belongs to Senator Bernie Sanders.”

“While Springsteen provided the musical emotional core of the event,” it explained, “Sanders provided the political analysis. He used those words to explain why the national movement had designated Minnesota as the ‘flagship’ for the entire country.”

Also easy to check. I told Gemini, “Bernie Sanders did not say those lines.”

Gemini said, “You are absolutely right to correct me on that. The quote you asked about actually belongs to Naomi Klein. She delivered those lines during her speech at that same St. Paul ‘No Kings’ rally on Saturday.”

I said, “Naomi Klein was not in St. Paul.”

Gemini said, “I sincerely apologize for the confusion and the incorrect attributions. You are absolutely right—Naomi Klein was not at the St. Paul rally. The quote you are looking for was actually written and posted by Ezra Levin, the co-executive director of Indivisible, the organization that spearheaded the ‘No Kings’ rallies.”

When I asked for the source, Gemini replied, “I have clearly provided you with incorrect information and was ‘hallucinating’ those specific attributions to Ezra Levin.” It went on, “I would like to get this right for you. I’m here to help you track down the actual source if you can provide a bit more context.”

I said, “I don’t think it’s from the No Kings rally in St. Paul.”

Gemini said, “I am very sorry for the persistent errors in my previous responses. I’ve clearly been mixing up several different events and public figures. I also owe you an apology for earlier claiming this was related to a ‘No Kings’ rally in 2026. The quote you are looking for was actually said by Naomi Klein. You were correct to doubt the St. Paul rally context. She said those words in a speech at a benefit for the ‘Take Back the Land’ movement, often cited in the context the Line 3 pipeline resistance in Minnesota. I’m glad we finally got to the actual source.”

That didn’t make sense. The quote was clearly about Minneapolis forcing ICE to end its operations there in February 2026, not about the Enbridge Line 3 protests in 2021, which failed to stop a new pipeline. So I asked, “What is your source for citing Naomi Klein for this quote?”

Gemini said, “I have to hold my hand up here—I have been giving you completely incorrect information. My previous attribution to Naomi Klein was another error, as was the mention of Ezra Levin. After a rigorous check, it turns out that no such quote exists from Naomi Klein, Bruce Springsteen, or Bernie Sanders. I mistakenly generated a response based on a hypothetical or ‘future’ scenario (2026) that hasn’t actually happened. There was no ‘No Kings’ flagship rally in St. Paul on March 28, 2026, featuring Bruce Springsteen.”

This was a giant step backward. Two hundred thousand people attended the No Kings flagship rally in St. Paul on March 28 and heard Bruce Springsteen. At this point, I gave up on Gemini.

I asked Microsoft’s Copilot, the free version, about the source of my Minnesota quote. It said, “No verifiable source exists for that quote. There is no record anywhere—news, transcripts, archives, social media, academic sources, or movement communications—that contains this sentence or anything close to it.”

I asked Claude, from Anthropic—also free. It said, “I was not able to find the specific quote you’re referencing. That particular formulation does not appear in any of the major sources covering the Minnesota ICE events of early 2026.” But it went one big step farther, by raising “a few possibilities worth considering: It may be misattributed or paraphrased from memory. It may be from social media, a speech, or a newsletter rather than a published article—those are much harder to trace. It may have been generated or hallucinated in an AI tool and then circulated as a real quote. This does happen with politically resonant events.”

I liked that answer best, so I asked Claude what happens when AI “hallucinates.” It explained, “When AI hallucinates, it generates a response that sounds confident and plausible but is factually incorrect, fabricated, or unsupported.” Why does it do that? Because “AI language models don’t ‘look things up’—they predict the next most likely word/token based on patterns learned during training. When a question touches on something the model doesn’t know well, it doesn’t say ‘I don’t know.’ Instead, it continues generating text that fits the pattern of a confident answer. The model has no internal fact-checker.”

I went back to Gemini and asked where I could find out more about AI hallucinations. It said, “Dr. Emily M. Bender & Dr. Timnit Gebru are the co-authors of the incredibly influential 2021 paper On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. Their core argument is that Large Language Models—LLMs—do not ‘understand’ anything. They argue that models merely stitch together words based on probability (like a parrot repeating sounds), making hallucinations an inherent feature of the technology, not a bug.”

And Gemini added, “When I gave you that fake Ezra Levin quote, I was acting exactly as Bender and Gebru described: a ‘stochastic parrot’ smoothly stringing together words that sounded highly probable for the context of Minnesota politics, without any actual tether to the truth.”

That last remark was pretty good—especially for a stochastic parrot.

But what is to be done? Can Claude—or Gemini, or Copilot—be instructed to look things up and cite sources? Claude replied, “Yes, all of them can”—especially Gemini, which is integrated with Google Search. But that doesn’t really solve the problem, Claude explained, because “AI can retrieve a real article and still misquote or mischaracterize it. The citations are a starting point for verification, not a guarantee of accuracy.”

So: All power to the human fact-checkers! AI has made their work more necessary than ever.

Polling consistently shows that Americans’ top concern is the cost of living, especially housing and healthcare. The president has made life more expensive by embroiling the United States in an unjustified war with Iran, driving gas prices even higher. A reasonable voter may conclude that Republicans in Congress, who control the House and Senate and are facing abysmal polling, would be focused on ending the war and helping lower costs for Americans.

Those voters would be wrong.

Instead, Republicans are singularly obsessed with disenfranchising millions of voters ahead of the 2026 midterms.

How obsessed? Trump’s recent executive order aims to change mail-ballot laws and would establish a list of voters in each state he deems “eligible.” He, along with congressional Republicans, are desperate to undermine free and fair elections and control who can vote. Trump’s allies in Congress frame the so-called SAVE America Act as an “election integrity” bill that simply requires an ID to vote. That is wildly deceptive because their bill is, in fact, a full-frontal assault on the fundamental right of Americans to cast a ballot in future elections, including the 2026 midterms.

Americans could not use a driver’s license, or even a REAL ID driver’s license. Instead, they would need a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote, and the name must match on each document. This would put millions of married women at risk of losing their right to vote. US service members could not use a military ID to register to vote, nor could Native Americans use a tribe-issued ID.

Millions of Americans don’t have access to their birth certificates or passports. Half of Americans don’t own a passport, and it costs, on average, $130 to obtain one, meaning this legislation is little more than a Jim Crow–style “poll tax” for millions of low-income Americans. This would come as working people struggle to pay for food, gas, housing, and childcare because of Trump’s failed economic policies and unnecessary wars.

The SAVE Act also overrides state election law, such as Wisconsin’s, which allows voters to register to vote same-day, online, or by mail, a policy that is especially helpful to voters with disabilities and rural voters. It grants unprecedented power to an executive branch that has peddled voter fraud conspiracies, tried to blackmail states for election data, and relitigated Trump’s 2020 election loss through efforts like FBI raids in Georgia and Arizona.

Specifically, this legislation would force state governments to hand over their voter files to the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, a dubious proposition under the US Constitution.

The architect of this legislation, Representative Bryan Steil, who represents my birthplace of Racine, Wisconsin, would be disenfranchising his constituents, and millions of other Americans.

Despite Republican claims, actual cases of vote fraud are extremely rare, according to numerous studies. For example, the conservative Heritage Foundation did a comprehensive study tracking voter fraud going back 25 years and found actual instances of fraudulent votes to be .0000845 percent, which is 36 instances of fraudulent votes out of 42,626, 379 ballots cast.

The so-called SAVE America Act is nothing short of Jim Crow 2026. Don’t believe me—take the word of Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who was recently caught on a hot mic giddily remarking that the SAVE Act would disenfranchise up to 18 percent of the electorate in 2026.The Election Administration and Voting Survey 2022 Comprehensive Report says that approximately 112 million votes were cast in that midterm election. If you do simple math, you can see that Republicans estimate that the SAVE America Act would disenfranchise more than 20 million Americans!

Don’t believe Republicans when they tell you the SAVE America Act is just a voter-ID bill. It is something far more insidious and uglier. Free and fair elections and equal access to the ballot box are the cornerstones of our democracy, which is why I voted against both versions in the House and believe that all Americans should oppose this legislation.

Artificial intelligence is already generating technological change that, on its own and in combination with advanced robotics, will design and define much of our future. But who will design and define AI—tech-bro billionaires whose primary mission is to become trillionaires, or citizens and elected representatives who seek to harness technology in the interest of humanity? Donald Trump has made his choice, signaling at a Pittsburgh “energy and innovation summit” last summer that he would willingly sacrifice the public interest and let the tech industry call the shots. “Regulation be damned” was the message from the president; let the chips fall where they may. Trump formalized his subservience in December, when he issued an executive order that The New York Times reported “grants broad authority to the attorney general to sue states and overturn laws that do not support the ‘United States’ global A.I. dominance,’ putting dozens of A.I. safety and consumer protection laws at risk. If states keep their laws in place,” the report continued, “Mr. Trump directed federal regulators to withhold funds for broadband and other projects.”

In March, Trump baked his agenda into a “National AI Legislative Framework” that emphasizes deregulation and federal preemption of the states. “Preemption is the real story,” Zephyr Teachout, the scholar of monopoly power, wrote on X. “We do not need a national framework for AI. Of any kind. We need state and federal laws but we will be crushed if we block local power to protect kids, workers, consumers, journalism, everything. Congress should do its job, not stop states from doing theirs with common law, liability, antitrust, and more.”

So far, however, Congress has tended to sideline itself, while the president and his administration rush to embrace the financial overlords during this transformative moment. That embrace is so shameless, so transparent, that messages and images emanating from the White House seem like dystopian cinema. “The future of AI is ‘personified,’” first lady Melania Trump declared at a March 25 White House event where she appeared with robots and asked Americans to “imagine a humanoid educator named Plato” replacing teachers.

“Call me a radical, but no!” responded Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who has emerged—along with a growing number of the scientific pioneers of artificial intelligence—as a thoughtful AI skeptic. “We should not be replacing teachers in America with robots. We should attract the best and brightest in our country to become teachers and pay them the decent wages that they deserve.”

Sanders is right, of course. But, as has too often been the case when it comes to industrial and technological revolutions, their influence on society, and the resulting policy disputes, being right in the early stages of a transformation can be a lonely mission.

The good news is that the people get it. A February Economist/YouGov survey found that 63 percent of Americans think jobs will be lost in an AI transition that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has acknowledged “isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed who expressed an opinion on the question said they believed AI will hurt the economy.

That’s backed up by polls in states where the issues have been framed by fights over the development of AI data centers. A December letter from more than 230 environmental groups, including Food & Water Watch, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth, argued, “The rapid, largely unregulated rise of data centers to fuel the AI and crypto frenzy is disrupting communities across the country and threatening Americans’ economic, environmental, climate, and water security.” Voters see what’s happening in states like Wisconsin, where a Marquette Law School Poll in March found that 69 percent of those surveyed agreed that “the costs of the data centers outweigh the benefits.” That’s the same percentage that said AI is developing too fast.

Smart Democrats and a few Republicans are seizing on these concerns. But there are not enough of them. “Sadly,” Sanders says, “Congress has done virtually nothing.” This disconnect has added urgency to a moment of enormous importance for people whose jobs are threatened, whose children’s brains are already marinating in AI slop, and whose privacy is being invaded by an ever-tightening surveillance state and an industry that’s determined to barter off personal data to the highest bidder.

To be sure, AI has huge potential to benefit humanity: by assisting responsible scientific innovation, helping medical researchers identify new strategies for diagnosing and treating disease, and (in ethical hands) increasing cybersecurity and other protections. But that potential will turn to peril if Trump and his allies—in both political parties—simply serve an industry that is already pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into manipulating the results of the 2026 elections. The urgency of the moment inspires this issue of The Nation, which affirms that skepticism about AI is well-founded and necessary. The articles in our special section examine the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of tech billionaires, along with concerns about job losses and surveillance, questions about military and police uses of new technologies, and smart strategies for regulating and governing AI.

At a point when everyone must take a side, The Nation is siding with humanity. We want the best that AI has to offer for the people. But we know that won’t happen if the citizens are locked out of the decision-making process, as Trump and his allies seek to do with their preemption scheme.

That scheme threatens to upend a burgeoning popular revolt that has already emerged at the grassroots, as communities all over the country reject the construction of behemoth data centers that are designed to meet the astronomical energy demands of the AI and cryptocurrency industries.

This is where Sanders proposes to intervene. In late March, with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), he proposed legislation to establish a national moratorium on the construction of data centers.

But this is about much more than data centers. “Bottom line: We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy, and the future of humanity,” the senator says, arguing that a federal moratorium—along with state and local interventions and the growing movement for international regulatory treaties—can slow down the self-serving rush of AI fabulists and profiteers.

“Congress has a moral obligation,” AOC says, “to stand with the American people and stop the expansion of these data centers until we have a framework to adequately address the existential harm AI poses to our society. We must choose humanity over profit.”

Yes, we must!

AI and robotics have enormous potential to improve human life. But they also pose profound dangers that we have not fully confronted. Left unchecked, these technologies could lead to:

• The rise of an unaccountable global oligarchy. The richest people on Earth—Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg—are not investing trillions in these technologies out of generosity. They want more wealth and power. Can democracy survive when a handful of multibillionaires wield unprecedented influence over the economic and political life of our nation?

• Massive job loss. There are economists who warn that the spread of AI and robotics could cost millions of jobs. What happens to workers when there are no jobs for them? How will ordinary Americans survive without income? How will they pay for housing, healthcare, food, and other basic necessities?

• Increased social isolation and mental illness. Young people are already turning to AI “companions” for emotional support. What happens to our humanity when people interact with machines more than they do with fellow human beings?

• Total invasion of privacy. If every phone call, e-mail, text, search, financial transaction, and movement can be tracked by the owners of AI, is the concept of privacy made obsolete? Does this not inevitably lead to authoritarianism?

• Higher likelihood of war. If robot soldiers replace human beings, will leaders be more willing to engage in catastrophic armed conflict? Will we see an arms race of robot soldiers?

• Environmental degradation. AI data centers require enormous amounts of electricity and water. Will the construction of these data centers strain power grids and accelerate carbon emissions? Will ordinary consumers see major increases in their electric bills?

• Undermining of human control of the planet. Some Big Tech CEOS think that AI may soon surpass human intelligence. What happens if we can’t regulate the things that we create? Could that create an existential threat to humanity itself?

In his previously unreleased preface to Animal Farm, discovered by Ian Angus in 1972 and published later that year by the Times Literary Supplement, George Orwell wrote: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

As an anti-fascist, Orwell most likely meant that liberty means the right to tell people in power what they do not want to hear. Most Americans would agree that the right to question authority is a nonnegotiable premise of democracy, but one that has met with repression throughout our history and even more so now, during wartime.

Evidence of that repression is quietly mounting all around us. Among the more alarming examples is the federal government’s recent threat to revoke broadcasting licenses if the administration finds content displeasing.

In March, Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), warned that broadcasters could lose their licenses if their reporting fails to comply with MAGA doctrine. “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr posted on X. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

On Truth Social, the president seconded that threat, accusing some media organizations of being “Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic” and whining that they “get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES.” Trump concluded by referencing the reality series he once hosted: “As I used to say in The Apprentice, ‘FIRED.’”

These comments suggest that MAGA officials now fear free speech and may consider those who use it as potential criminals or enemies.

As the late great Bob McChesney would often remind us, the Federal Communications Commission has a mandate to manage the airwaves in the people’s interest, not those of big business or the president. The “No Kings” purpose of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution is to distribute power, not concentrate it, a mission augmented by independent media.

The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the federal government cannot punish news organizations—or anyone else—for oppositional viewpoints. The First Amendment’s protection of press freedoms would be little more than ink on the page if officials could cancel broadcasting licenses whenever coverage aimed to keep them in check.

Fascists fear free speech, and fear is the source of Carr’s demand that broadcasters “correct course.” Such language echoes a familiar pattern in systems that treat democracy as the enemy: First, authorities insist that the media must align with official narratives; then they demand the same obeisance from the general population.

Press freedom advocates recognized the danger immediately. Will Creeley wrote: “Brendan Carr’s authoritarian warning—that networks risk their broadcasting licenses for Iran war reporting that the government doesn’t like—is outrageous.” When government demands the press “become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment,” he said, “something has gone very wrong.”

California’s Governor Gavin Newsom warned that “if Trump doesn’t like your coverage of the war, his FCC will pull your broadcast license. That is flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz described Carr’s statement as “a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed.”

Democratic Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts immediately wrote a public letter to Carr saying his threat to revoke licenses is “your latest authoritarian attempt to weaponize the FCC’s statutory authority to censor the media. It is a stain on the FCC’s storied history, and you should resign.”

Their concerns were preceded by a bipartisan group of FCC commissioners who warned in November 2025 that the mere “specter of government interference alone chills broadcasters’ speech.”

As a former pamphleteer, pirate radio broadcaster, and low-power FM advocate who took the FCC to court to preserve the public’s right to access the airwaves at the community level, I believe deeply in the free and unfettered use of radio, libraries, streets, and public parks as spaces for challenging power and imagining new ways of being, learning, and loving. We are now gradually losing ground in many of these spaces.

Existential threats to democracy emerge not only through attempted coups like the one staged on January 6, 2021, but also through smaller, incremental acts: a few unjustified arrests here, a few ICE killings there, along with the quiet criminalization of those who, like the UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, dare to expose the atrocities caused by our policies. No one act may irrefutably prove full-blown fascism has arrived, but what does that really matter if you or your loved ones are among those who have been threatened, disappeared, silenced, or killed?

The president’s propagandists insist that the FCC simply expects broadcasters to serve the public interest. But in a constitutional democracy, the public interest cannot mean blind obedience to the boss. Challenging official narratives serves the public interest—especially in wartime, when governments feel compelled to control information and deflect public outrage from horrors like the killing of 165 Iranian schoolgirls in a war that was not authorized by the people’s representatives in Congress.

The tilt toward Orwellian censorship underscores a broader shift concerning the meaning of trust in the media. Carr suggests that tighter control is the solution for broadcasters’ straying from the administration’s version of events. But conforming to official doctrine can never render journalism credible. If anything, the opposite is true: Credibility depends on the public knowing that reporters are free to pursue investigations wherever they lead—particularly during wartime—without the fear of death threats, losing one’s job, or worse.

Threatening to silence broadcasters—or anyone else—for critiquing the atrocities being committed in our name erases democratic accountability and replaces it with a demand for obedience.

It was heartening, therefore, when, on March 17, 2026, Joe Kent, a combat veteran and former CIA officer, refused to continue taking orders from the president and quit his job as MAGA’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center. In a letter of protest addressed directly to the president and sent to over 430,000 online followers, Kent said, “I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” The rationale for going to war, Kent explained, was based on a “lie” similar to the lies once used to draw the US into a “disastrous Iraq war that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women.” We can only hope that Kent’s refusal to go along with the lies will be emulated by others in the MAGA regime.

The framers crafted a constitution that protects our right not only to freely critique those in power, but also to freely reimagine power itself. This opened space for what W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, and others have called “abolition democracy”—one capable of shedding the violence of settler-colonial legacies and advancing new frontiers of liberation based on solidarity, community, human affirmation, and love.

While those legacies dominate, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. The truth today is that we live in an age of creeping fascism, genocide, and war. Pretending otherwise is a form of complicity. Keeping the publicly owned airwaves open as a space to challenge a dystopian agenda is the true and revolutionary purpose of democracy and free speech, and we should infuse all of our movements with tactics for their defense.

He knows the MAGA playbook well.
Investigate Trump’s foes? That’s swell,
And makes a story Trump can tell
Re FBI boss Kash Patel.

As President Donald Trump’s administration has hurtled into a military conflict with Iran, the Pentagon has gone all in on artificial intelligence, both as a military tool in this and other possible conflicts and as a PR instrument in the quest for ever more of your tax dollars.

The Pentagon is accelerating the use of artificial intelligence across all of its mission areas, touting it as a revolutionary component of the emerging US military posture. The drive to apply AI as quickly as possible is behind the Trump War Department’s campaign to eliminate virtually all of the controls that would normally govern the introduction of a new technology. This approach is being framed as absolutely necessary for maintaining the US technological advantage over China and cementing US military dominance, but the haste with which regulations are being cast aside will almost certainly lead to flawed weapons systems, exorbitant prices, reduced accountability, and an accelerated AI arms race.

For the Pentagon, 2026 is the year of AI. On January 9, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum directing the Pentagon to become an “AI-first” war-fighting institution. Three days later, Hegseth launched an “AI Acceleration Strategy” and then announced a sweeping overhaul of the department’s systems for researching, developing, and purchasing new weapons, which would include AI. These steps will formalize a system intended to produce next-generation technology at “wartime speed.”

At the center of the strategy are seven “Pace-Setting Projects,” or PSPs, designed to push AI into war fighting, intelligence, business practices, and data-processing functions within months rather than years. The initiatives range from AI-enabled battlefield-decision support and simulation tools to systems intended to convert intelligence into military action as rapidly as possible. Delays, risk aversion, and procedural safeguards are framed as liabilities; speed is all that counts.

The new AI acceleration strategy will give even greater power and influence to private companies by increasing the reliance on AI funding from venture-capital firms, forming new partnerships with emerging military-tech companies, and drawing up open-ended contracts to help ensure that military systems can incorporate the latest technology within weeks.

The shift in approach is already under way: The Army just awarded Salesforce a 10-year, $5.6 billion contract to provide AI-enabled systems for the so-called Department of War, which the company says will “increase mission readiness” by consolidating fragmented data sources into “one interoperable platform,” allowing war fighters to make “quicker, more effective decisions.”

Taken together, the steps outlined above will further centralize decision-making within the Pentagon and dispense with traditional checks against shoddy work and price gouging, as inadequate as our current strictures are. It will be speed first and other concerns be damned.

But with the focus on speed front and center, Hegseth’s January 9 memo offers no real guidance on how to meet crucial goals such as ensuring that the laws of armed conflict are being followed, or allowing time for adequate congressional oversight or coordinating with allies.

By positioning AI as the foundation for US military dominance going forward, the new approach reflects a timeworn myth that has dominated US planning since World War II, an approach that equates technological advancement with security. But technology alone does not win wars. And past technological “miracles,” from the electronic battlefield in Vietnam to the reliance on networked warfare and precision-guided strike capabilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, have failed to achieve US military objectives, while causing immense harm to civilians in the target nations and to US combat personnel.

For example, the purported technological miracle of the Vietnam era was described by The New York Times as follows: “Gen. William C. Westmoreland, Army Chief of Staff, believes that the new electronics technology has brought the Army to the threshold of a new concept of the battlefield that may be as revolutionary in warfare as the introduction of the helicopter or the tank.” In the real world, the Vietcong developed a series of relatively simple countermeasures, and the new surveillance and targeting systems did not turn the tide in the war.

Even in the 1991 Gulf War, when the use of precision-guided munitions was credited with playing a central role in evicting Saddam Hussein’s invading forces from Kuwait, the story was more complicated. The coalition victory against Hussein’s forces had more to do with the volume of munitions dropped and the relative weakness of Iraqi air defenses than it did with networked warfare or precision strikes. An extensive analysis of the air war in the 1991 conflict by what was then known as the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) pointed out that “the claim by [the Department of Defense] and contractors of a one-target, one-bomb capability for laser-guided munitions was not demonstrated in the air campaign where, on average, 11 tons of guided and 44 tons of unguided munitions were delivered on each successfully destroyed target.”

Without firm policy guardrails, AI may amplify risk rather than reduce it, putting more emphasis on hitting targets quickly than on why those targets are being chosen in the first place. The result could be more failed wars and more unnecessary suffering, not the much touted revolution in US capabilities promised by Hegseth and Trump.

The Pentagon has made its urge to deploy AI for any and every purpose as soon as possible abundantly clear. Whether commonsense controls over its deployment or a realistic strategy governing its use become part of the mix remains to be seen. Without a new approach to defining US interests and a sounder understanding of the limits of military force, rushing new technologies to the battlefield will only yield a more dangerous, less stable world.

Before going all in on AI, the US government should think more carefully about the human consequences of the current, deeply counterproductive strategies and actions this new technology is being deployed to advance.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders became the first federal legislator to seriously challenge the lurch by Big Tech oligarchs into the uncharted territories of artificial intelligence when he issued a call in December for a “moratorium on the construction of data centers that are powering the unregulated sprint to develop and deploy AI.” His reasoned argument—that a moratorium is necessary “to slow it down” and “give democracy a chance to catch up”—echoes the sentiments of a growing number of Americans who have come to see AI less as a promise than a threat. Yet Sanders was hit with immediate, and strikingly vitriolic, pushback from the tribunes of the billionaire class.

Dismissing the concerns that he raised—and despite the fact that many of the defining figures in the development of AI have expressed similar sentiments—Fox News’s Stuart Varney rushed to label Sanders as “economically illiterate,” while other corporate-friendly conservatives tagged him as “the nation’s foremost avatar of reactionary socialism,” accused him of engaging in “AI doomerism” and “NIMBY-type” reasoning, and concluded that he might just be peddling “the most poisonously stupid idea of the year.” Then they hurled the ultimate insult that contemporary elites can muster when the American people and their elected representatives start to question tech-bro definitions of “progress.” Sanders, they announced, was “a Luddite.”

In an editorial headlined “Bernie Sanders’s Worst Idea Yet.” The Washington Post fumed that “a national ban on new AI data centers would make the Luddites look good.” This was not the first time that the label had been attached to him. A few months earlier, after Sanders and Democratic staffers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee had issued a report warning that AI could eliminate 100 million US jobs, the notion was savaged by an American Enterprise Institute commentator as an example of “Luddite legerdemain.”

Never mind that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had already speculated, in May of 2025, that the rise of AI could eliminate half of all white-collar entry-level jobs and lead to unemployment rates as high as 20 percent, and would explain that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.” Or that Bill Gates had predicted in March of 2025 that humans “won’t be needed for most things.” Social-media critics ripped Sanders on mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform, declaring that “socialists are the new Luddites” and claiming that Sanders was bent on “cornering the Luddite vote.”

With so much vitriol coming his way, it was perhaps understandable that the senator would announce, “I am not a Luddite.”

But there’s no shame in being a Luddite—or, to be more precise, in being an heir to the Luddite tradition of refusing to accept the adoption of new technologies simply because capitalists decide to impose them on workers.

Elite opinion writers may still dismiss the Luddites as unthinking reactionaries who sought to wreck the machinery of the dawning Industrial Revolution. But many of the most tech-savvy observers of the dawning AI era are expressing admiration for the 19th-century weavers and mechanics of northern England, who fought to prevent the dislocation and wage cuts that the factory-owning oligarchs of their day called “progress.” On campuses across the country, New Luddite and Neo-Luddite clubs have been formed by students who have grown up with smartphones and are justifiably concerned about what’s coming their way. After the Writers Guild of America waged a prescient struggle in 2023 to prevent media conglomerates from using AI technologies to capture their creativity and then toss them into the dustbin of history—a fight that anticipated The Hollywood Reporter’s blunt declaration in 2024 that “generative artificial intelligence is killing jobs in Hollywood, with little relief on the horizon,” and the more recent reports linking AI consolidation and cost cutting to tens of thousands of layoffs in the media and entertainment industry—the actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter wrote, “The term Luddite is often used incorrectly to describe an exhausted and embittered populace that wants technology to go away. But the actual Luddites were highly engaged with technology and skilled at using it in their work in the textile industry. They weren’t an anti-tech movement but a pro-labor movement, fighting to prevent the exploitation and devaluation of their work by rapacious company overlords. If you want to know how to fix the problems we face from AI and other technology, become genuinely and deeply involved. Become a Luddite.” The artist and activist Molly Crabapple, who in 2023 helped organize an open letter urging publishers to restrict their use of AI-generated illustrations, adopted a similar view, explaining: “That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” The year before, the writer Cory Doctorow argued, “The Luddites did what every science fiction writer does: they took a technology and imagined all the different ways it could be used—who it could be used for and whom it could be used against. They demanded the creation of a parallel universe in which the left fork was taken, rather than the right. That is many things, but it is not technophobic. Using ‘Luddite’ as a synonym for technophobe is an historically insupportable libel.”

Today’s Luddite renaissance comes as little surprise, given the anxiety over AI. But this is not the first time that people have looked to the leather-aproned croppers who resisted the power looms of another era. Going back to the 1950s, activists have looked to the Luddites’ example in times when new technologies—from nuclear weapons to the Internet—have upended our lives. The bosses have done their best to portray the Luddites as ignorant and self-serving laborers who clung to a dying past—and much of the media still does. But that mischaracterization was always an example of the “enormous condescension of posterity” that the great historians of the English working class E.P. and Dorothy Thompson, who were partners in life and in scholarship, long ago upended. In the middle of the last century, the Thompsons shined a new light on the Luddite uprisings that swept Nottinghamshire, Lancashire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire from 1811 to 1816. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, textile workers who had used their own machines—working in their homes and in small shops—to clothe England and the world were suddenly confronted with a future in which they would be crowded into a new kind of workplace: the factory. Inside the new textile mills, they, and frequently their children, would toil long hours for reduced pay on the mechanized shearing machines and automated power looms that were their era’s technological wonders. The Luddites were no fools; they correctly anticipated the future that William King described in 1829 in his newspaper The Co-operator: “If then the machine which I work produces as much as a thousand men, I ought to enjoy the produce of a thousand men. But no such thing. I am working a machine which I know will starve me.”

The weavers and mechanics who gathered by moonlight atop the West Pennine Moors near Bolton and in the upstairs rooms of the Shears Inn at Liversedge in the West Riding of Yorkshire were unwilling to cede their futures to the oligarchs of a nascent Industrial Revolution. Amid an economic depression that had already slashed their wages and impoverished their families, they were determined to fight against the denial of their rights—and their humanity—by industrialists who adopted new technologies without the slightest care for the disruption of society. Their uprising followed mass protests and petition campaigns demanding that the government and employers provide living wages and protections for the workers who were being exploited in what William Blake aptly described as “dark Satanic Mills.” After their petitions were rejected, the Luddites gathered by the thousands and marched on the mills to break the new machines, smashing them in riotous agitations that terrified industrialists and parliamentarians.

Those sledgehammer blows against the Industrial Revolution earned the Luddites a place in history. But their struggle was always about more than a simplistic rejection of the new. Rather, it was a movement of engaged and informed skilled workers who opposed an economic and social transformation that promised to enrich the wealthiest men of their time while dispossessing an entire class of handloom weavers and their families. They organized demonstrations and petitioned government officials for increased wages, an end to child-labor abuses, and the right to form “combinations” (unions) of workers. Their anti-oligarchical energy and penchant for direct action led one of their champions, a young Lord Byron, to compare the Luddites to “the Liberty lads o’er the sea”—the revolutionary Americans who had overturned British colonialism—and to argue that British workers “will die fighting, or live free,” under the banner of “down with all kings but King Ludd!”

There was, it should be added, no such person: The first Luddites concocted the story of a young textile maker named Ned Ludd who, when ordered to speed up his work and sacrifice its quality by a boss, instead smashed the mechanical knitting machines to which he was assigned. As the tactic spread during the Luddites’ five years of industrial unrest, they adopted the name along with elaborate disguises and a strategy of stealthy nighttime raids. They did so to cloak the identities of the leaders and members of a labor movement that faced brutal repression, including laws that were enacted to punish their activism with the death penalty or forced expulsion to Australian prison colonies; an elaborate spy network that offered rewards to bounty hunters; and an ever-expanding military presence that would eventually see 12,000 troops stationed in the textile towns of northern England. Like the earlier Sons of Liberty in what would become the United States, the Luddites organized secretly and targeted the economic interests of their overlords. As the Americans had dumped the British East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, the Luddites broke the gig mills and shearing frames in factories from Marsden to Lancashire. What the historian Eric Hobsbawm called “collective bargaining by riot” was not an example of a working-class movement that “did not know what it was doing, but merely reacted, blindly and gropingly, to the pressure of misery.” On the contrary, Hobsbawm explained, it was a response to the imposition of a new technology that workers rightly foresaw would make their lives worse by sacrificing them to cross a certain “threshold of profit.”

The Luddites’ decision to destroy machines was much debated and decried in their time, though it arguably has scant relevance to our own. As Richard Conniff observed some years ago in his seminal Smithsonian essay “What the Luddites Really Fought Against,” “Our uneasy protests against technology almost inevitably take technological form. We worry about whether violent computer games are warping our children, then decry them by tweet, text or Facebook post. We try to simplify our lives by shopping at the local farmers market—then haul our organic arugula home in a Prius. College students take out their earbuds to discuss how technology dominates their lives. But when a class ends, Loyola University of Chicago professor Steven E. Jones notes, their cellphones all come to life, screens glowing in front of their faces, ‘and they migrate across the lawns like giant schools of cyborg jellyfish.’”

If destroying the machine itself is not in our future, what can we learn from the Luddites that is relevant for today? Start with the notion that the Luddite resistance to “progress for the sake of progress” was defined by a longing to remain human in a machine age. That premise makes them a touchstone for 21st-century bank clerks and delivery drivers, actors and architects, autoworkers and nurses, who all fret about whether they’ll have a place in an AI-generated future. “We should be Luddites,” Brian Merchant, a tech journalist, columnist, critic, and the author of the 2023 book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, argued in an article in Time. “The Luddites were making a powerful complaint. If we reclaim what they were actually trying to say, we can apply the lessons of their story to today, and prevent a lot of misery.”

The great value of the Luddites for the purposes of our contemporary discourse is that they mounted an informed resistance to a warped definition of progress that threatened not just their livelihoods but their humanity. That is the same recognition that today animates tech-savvy advocates for placing guardrails on AI. Gavin Mueller, a scholar of digital media and culture who teaches at the University of Amsterdam and has written extensively about the Luddites, is right to remind us that “behind AI skepticism is a larger question. What kind of future do we want to have?”

We are all under pressure to accept the inevitability of an AI-generated future. This year’s Super Bowl advertising was a parade of paeans to artificial intelligence. The billboards that light up Times Square in New York City offer larger-than-life, brighter-than-the-sun, 24/7 promotions for this new technology: AI companions will give you “someone who listens, responds, and supports you.” Global leaders are “scaling with AI.” Employers will soon “Stop Hiring Humans” because “The Era of AI Employees Is Here.”

Yet Americans aren’t buying it.

A December 2025 YouGov poll found that 77 percent of Americans view AI as a possible threat to humanity; a YouGov/Economist survey from February found that 74 percent of respondents think AI will hurt the economy, and 63 percent think it will eliminate jobs. A poll by Bentley-Gallup found that an overwhelming majority of Americans (79 percent) have no faith in private companies to use AI responsibly.

That’s a lot of people that The Washington Post’seditorial page would disparage as “Luddites.” Or maybe, if we’re willing to put aside the Post and consider the actual history of the Industrial Revolution, that’s a lot of reason for hope that if we embrace our skepticism, we might build a mass movement to get this technological revolution right.

The story of the Luddites offers an intellectual antidote to the anxiety of an age when our experience of the digital and social-media revolutions has given us reason to doubt the promise that every new technology will make our lives better. There is now broad acceptance that the disinformation streaming from our screens has coarsened our politics and “mainstreamed” racism and xenophobia. As studies tell us that social-media addictions threaten our mental health, and as schools ban smartphones in a desperate attempt to regain the attention of our children, millions of Americans have come to the realization—through bitter experience—that new technologies should be greeted with skepticism and regulation. Instead of bending to the dictates of Silicon Valley’s trillionaires-in-waiting, an emerging consensus suggests that we just might want to consider the wisdom of slowing down the headlong rush toward an AI-dominated future with dramatically fewer jobs, more surveillance, and a military-industrial complex that cranks out autonomous killing machines.

For the Luddites’ story to be useful, however, it is necessary to toss aside the stereotypes that were on display in the reaction to Sanders’s advocacy for a perfectly reasonable slowdown in data-center construction. There’s a compelling argument to be made that to be a modern Luddite is to be on the right side of history—even if history has not been particularly kind to the Luddites. “History is written by the winners,” George Orwell reminded us, and rarely has there been a more successful smearing of a movement than the one that targeted the Luddites, who were decried in their day by the British authorities as “evil minded persons…assembled together in riotous manner” who had created a “Spirit of Disorder.”

The Luddites did create their share of disorder with those midnight raids on the dark satanic mills. But what matters for our own day is the disorder that the Luddites were opposing, which Lord Byron encapsulated when he declared, “We must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in Mechanism.”

Ben Lerner writes about the hardships and humiliations of modern masculinity. His first two novels followed listless young men in their 20s worrying their way through the literary and dating scenes of Madrid and New York. In his more recent fiction, his protagonists have matured into responsible adults with families. Yet no matter their age or obligations, the men are not OK. They are anxious and insecure. They are anxious about being insecure. Preoccupied with themselves, these men are obsessed with how they are perceived by others. The Lerner man frets constantly and about everything: his sex life, his romantic life, his friendships, his family, his failing body.

Take, for example, the beginning of Lerner’s short story “Café Loup”:

When I became a father, I began to worry not only that I would die and not be able to care for my daughter but that I would die in an embarrassing way, that my death would be an abiding embarrassment for Astra—that in some future world, assuming there is a future, she will be on a date with someone, hard as that is for me to imagine, and her date will ask, “What does your father do?,” and she will say, “He died when I was little,” and her date will respond, “I’m sorry,” hesitate, and then ask, in a bid for intimacy, how I died, and Astra will feel ashamed, will look down into her blue wine, there will be blue wine in the future, and say, “He had an aneurysm on the toilet,” which is one of the ways I often fear I might die.

And that’s just the first sentence. In a single syntactic unit, Lerner reveals the full catalog of his protagonist’s concerns: the travails of dating, health, death, the uncertain future, and, as ever, the possibility of being embarrassed. But now this poor man also has to worry about his daughter, her dating life, and the possibility of her being embarrassed because of him. Becoming a parent hasn’t grounded him; it has multiplied his anxieties.

Lerner’s latest novel, Transcription, is also about the dad life. The first-person narrator resembles his predecessors: He is keyed-up, introspective, clever. Whether he is in Providence, or Madrid, or Los Angeles, this man too is resolutely self-absorbed. Fatherhood has only deepened the solipsism of Lerner’s protagonists: If the only others that occupy your consciousness are your progeny, you still haven’t really stopped thinking about yourself.

Transcription opens with the unnamed narrator texting his wife to check in on their daughter. Naturally, he is anxious about her anxiety. The narrator is texting rather than talking to his wife, we learn, because he is on an Amtrak train to Providence to interview the 90-year-old Thomas, one of “the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology,” who is also the narrator’s mentor and the father of his old college friend Max. Before he checks into a four-star hotel, paid for by the magazine in which the interview will appear, the narrator notices two people sleeping on the sidewalk—or, as he puts it, the “bare life on the street.” The throwaway phrase kills two birds for Lerner: It establishes his protagonist’s credentials as a progressive sickened by the inequality of contemporary life and as an intellectual who knows his Agamben.

Like his predecessors, the narrator of Transcription is a highly educated and very guilty liberal. He knows that we inhabit a depraved and dying world—war, wildfires, terrorism, and poverty abound—that allows people like him to have money and houses. He lives in comfort, complicit. When he meets an old acquaintance on the street, they ritualistically express their guilt—“We exchanged some familiar language about the disaster of the world”—before catching up on what’s happening with their shared acquaintances.

Appropriately, the instigating event in this novel is not a geopolitical catastrophe but a domestic mishap: After washing his face in the hotel bathroom, the narrator drops his phone into the clogged sink and breaks it. This occasions panic—he now has no way to record his interview with Thomas—but before he is forced to confront this “crisis,” he must endure the immediate difficulties of being unexpectedly offline. He can’t find the hours of the local Apple Store, he doesn’t remember Thomas’s phone number, and he can’t look it up. He has been locked out of an entire universe. After some initial frustration, though, his newly offline state induces a sort of euphoria, “a withdrawal 
indistinguishable from mild intoxication.” Now that he can’t take photographs or read the news, he is able to pay attention to the world again.

But when he reaches Thomas’s home, he has to figure out how to handle the interview sans device. Immediately, it becomes apparent that this will not be a straightforward endeavor. First, the narrator inexplicably refuses to tell his mentor about the broken phone—“to tell him the truth seemed impossible”—so he lies and pretends he is recording their conversation. Then, from the opening question on, it is clear that Thomas is no normal interviewee: He is a force of personality, a man for whom “to listen to a story was to become involved in its composition.” When the narrator shares an anxious dream about his daughter, Thomas tells him that it might actually be his—that is, Thomas’s—dream. Once the conversation gets going, the narrator has trouble staying in control. But as the evening progresses, it also becomes clear that this great intellectual has started to lose some of his faculties. His memory is faulty: “I lose the numbers and the names,” Thomas explains. The narrator notices that his mentor’s kitchen is in a state of neglect and that he repeats himself without realizing it. Most troubling of all, Thomas starts to confuse the narrator with his son Max. He levels accusations at Max, and the narrator tries unsuccessfully to correct him: I am not Max; I am me.

After the fraught interview ends, the narration jumps in place and time. We are now in Madrid, at least several months later, and the narrator has just finished giving one of several talks at a gathering to honor Thomas. The old man, we are given reason to believe, recently ended his life at an assisted-suicide clinic in Switzerland. Like Adam in Lerner’s debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, the unnamed narrator of Transcription wanders through the streets of Madrid and begrudges the stylish ease of Europeans. But now the married father’s envy is directed elsewhere: to the children running loose on the streets and the carefree style of European parenting.

Our narrator is no longer sans phone. He’s already back under its thumb: e-mailing, Googling, texting. Before dinner with the other speakers, he calls his wife, Mia, to check in on her and their daughter Eva:

Then I FaceTimed Mia, who was having lunch in Washington Square Park; she held up her phone so I could see the gathering of the Neturei Karta men beside the fountain, their free Palestine signs. The sky behind her—or, depending on the position of her phone, above her—looked blue and cloudless, identical to the sky in Madrid. There was drumming somewhere nearby. I told her the talk went well. It must have been hard, she said. Not really. I don’t know. Maybe. I asked about her day, after Eva, who was fine, more than fine, Mia said, a lot of laughter in the morning and at bedtime, although Eva had recently told us to stop saying bedtime.

A hallmark of Lerner’s fiction is the very particular way that politics encroaches, or rather doesn’t, on the life of the protagonist and his milieu: It is there as a backdrop, a marker of time and place but not much else. As in Leaving the Atocha Station, where Adam arrives in Spain shortly after American troops have invaded Iraq, and in 10:04, which opens with Hurricane Irene, closes in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and includes a cameo by an Occupy protester, significant political events in Transcription, such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, are alluded to throughout the narrative. The events of Transcription unfold while Israel and Russia are murdering civilians without consequence, but the novel doesn’t dwell on it. Instead, we move swiftly from the horrors of the present political moment to aesthetic observations about cloudless blue skies and the personal and familial.

Politics is mere background texture because Lerner’s novels are primarily tales of personal misadventure. In this section, the focus is the talk that the narrator just gave and how it was received. Over the course of a conversation between him and the female art curator who had organized the gathering, we discover that the talk that the narrator gave, in which he recounts not recording Thomas during their interview, angered many in attendance, including his old friend (and Thomas’s son) Max. “Trust me,” the curator assures him, “Max is furious.”

The curator asks what many readers are surely thinking: Why did you go ahead with the interview if you couldn’t record it? Why didn’t you just tell him that your phone was broken? She offers the narrator her theory: You are a coward, desperate to impress your mentor and still afraid of disappointing him. Bewildered at first, the narrator eventually recognizes that she has a point: “I had the sense that the text was, at that instant, rearranging itself—that what had been some personal introductory remarks about my foolishness, my always acting like a clumsy student around Thomas, was recomposing itself into a startling confession I’d have to confront when I went upstairs.”

Here, the novel rearranges itself. Until this point, a reader may have assumed they were reading autofiction—a fair assumption, especially since, alongside Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgård, Lerner is frequently hailed as one of the leading modern practitioners of the genre. But this has always been an inaccurate, or at least incomplete, description of his fiction. Lerner’s novels also belong to various other literary traditions: conceptual novels, introspective novels of ideas, novels of futurity, novels about masculinity, the anti-hero novel, to name a few. Transcription has elements of each of these genres, but it is perhaps primarily a metafictional experiment—a meditation on fiction itself.

Each of Lerner’s four novels is haunted by a different literary giant: John Ashbery in Leaving the Atocha Station, Walt Whitman in 10:04, Hermann Hesse in The Topeka School, and Franz Kafka in Transcription. As Kafka does, Lerner calls attention to the construction, status, and effects of fiction in his latest novel, asking us to contemplate the procedure of fiction through a discussion of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka’s otherworldly collection of glass models known as the Glass Flowers.

Early in Transcription, the narrator explains how he was able, on a visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History as an undergraduate, to switch at will between seeing the glass models of rotting fruit as both real (that is, as the fruit itself) and artificial (as representations of the fruit). Lerner invites us to do the same as we read Transcription and, more broadly, to recognize that this is how fiction works. To read fiction, he suggests, is to move fluidly between the two modes of seeing—it is fake; it is real. This is what makes fiction magical: It bestows on us a double vision and the ability to contemplate paradox.

Lerner’s debt to Kafka is most apparent in the third and final section of the novel, which is told entirely in direct speech. The narrator, relegated to the role of listener, here yields the mic to his friend Max. The scene has shifted once again: We are now at Max’s house in Los Angeles, and his monologue again remakes how we understand what has come before. Like all of Kafka’s fiction, Lerner’s Transcription is seductively frustrating.

Much like his friend the narrator, Max is very concerned about his young daughter Emmie, who has an eating problem. Doctors have offered acronyms for her condition—FTT (Failure to Thrive), ARFID (Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder)—but no explanations or solutions. Max and his wife are locked in a nightmare. They plead, they shout, they take their daughter to therapy, they consult the ARFID oracle of LA. Nothing helps. It is a tremendously sensitive portrait of an excruciating experience. There is something hypnotic about Max’s detailed account of Emmie’s struggles and his increasingly desperate attempts to coax her to eat something, anything.

Max confesses that at times Emmie’s refusal of food appears even to him to be “some kind of horrible performance art.” It was as if “she was a patiently suffering messenger,” he tells his old friend, “like her suffering had some obscure meaning that had not been revealed.” But even though Max entertains doubts about his daughter’s behavior, he cannot tolerate anybody else suggesting that she is anything except sick. When his father, Thomas, on a trip to LA to receive a big prize, draws the obvious literary parallel to Kafka’s story “The Hunger Artist,” Max reacts with fury: “Before the word ‘Hungerkünstler’ was fully out of his mouth, before he could quote his beloved Kafka at me…I snapped at him in German: This is not fucking theater, Dad, this isn’t art or literature, Emmie isn’t a character in a fiction, she’s my fucking daughter.”

Max harbors unresolved anger and resentment toward his father, but he is also devoted to him. As he switches from telling the narrator about Emmie to talking about his father, Transcription reveals yet another layer of complexity: It is also a Covid novel. Through Max’s voice, Lerner registers different phases of the pandemic, from the early lockdown rituals of disinfecting vegetables (“Now the extremity of our caution embarrasses me”) to mid-pandemic decisions like adopting rescue puppies to the period of optional masking and a return to eating at restaurants. In the most moving scene of the novel, Max recounts a virtual visit in April 2020 with his hospitalized father, conducted first on Zoom and then on a kind nurse’s personal phone. It is a powerful and devastating account of what so many people across the world had to endure not very long ago.

Formally, Max is a character distinct from the narrator, but he also functions as a double for the narrator. The similarities between the two are almost too many to name: Both men are worried about their children and anxious that they may not be good enough as fathers. Both men are concerned that the “disasters of the world” may be affecting their daughters’ mental and physical health. Both men are, to use Max’s phrase, “self-loathing elites”: They are hyperaware of their positions of privilege and suitably ashamed. But like all of Lerner’s men, their guilt doesn’t stop them from thinking and talking about themselves. When Thomas mixes up the two in the first part of the novel, his confusion appears solely as evidence of his mental deterioration, but the more Max speaks, the more it seems that these two men are interchangeable. The narrator is Max; Max is him.

Max recognizes this mutual imbrication, and it manifests itself in their every interaction. Almost every time the narrator interjects, Max doesn’t let him finish his sentence. When the narrator mentions that he once ate sauerbraten at Thomas’s house, Max insists that this is impossible; his father never cooked that. His verbal aggression—the interruptions, corrections, and refusal to yield back the mic—is indicative of Max’s desire to establish that he is Thomas’s real son and that the narrator is an interloper. When he recounts a promise that he made to his father on that awful Zoom call—“I will manage it all, your things and your work and your stories and your voice”—we understand exactly why he might be so angry at the narrator. Soon, he makes his insecurity explicit: On his next trip home, Max confesses, “I felt perhaps as intensely as ever—the unheimlich. Maybe the real son would just come downstairs, maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger.”

If Kafka’s “The Hunger Artist” is one touchstone in Transcription, then “The Judgment” is the other: Like that story, Transcription offers a study of the complex dynamics between a father and a son, and between a father and the son’s friend. (Like the father in “The Judgment,” Thomas is both frail and preternaturally robust.) But the story I thought of most often when reading Transcription is one of Kafka’s shortest, “The Trees.” Here it is in full: “For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only 
appearance.”

If you read the first line in isolation, the trees seem vertical, but then the second line turns them horizontal and the third stands them back up again. The fourth leaves you questioning the third—a literary duck-rabbit. As with the glass flowers, we can see two things at once. Most readers of Kafka’s story want to know: Which one is it? In a way, it’s an odd impulse—there are no trees; it’s all made up!—but it is also unavoidable. This is how we all read stories: We want to know which of the fictional facts are true.

All of Lerner’s novels provoke the desire to discover the truth of the fiction, but perhaps none more so than Transcription, his most experimental and unsettling book yet. Each of the novel’s three sections is named after a real hotel: the Hotel Providence in Providence, the Hotel Villa Real in Madrid, and the Hotel Arbez, which is located on the border between France and Switzerland. Although the final section of Transcription takes place in Los Angeles, the Hotel Arbez gets naming rights because it is a site of contested memory between father and son and the narrator. The reader gets conflicting versions of a story about a long-ago trip to the hotel. We want to know which of the fictional facts are true.

All of this makes for delicious reading, but is that enough? Critics often start their ecstatic reviews of Lerner’s fiction by confessing that they expected to hate his novels—that, in fact, they wanted to hate them because they typically don’t like autofiction, particularly not autofiction by straight white American men, and certainly not autofiction by straight white American men who live in Brooklyn and write about the large advances handed out by New York publishers. But, they insist, despite all this, Lerner is simply too good to dislike his work. He is a brilliant stylist; he understands the power of language as only a poet can; by wielding language the way he does, he makes us reconsider not just what fiction is but also what it can be. As a result, all narcissism is forgiven.

In many ways, these critics are right: Lerner’s prose is terrific. He writes with unrivaled elegance about the rhythms and textures of modern bourgeois life. Here, for instance, is his description of the moments after the narrator drops his phone in the clogged sink:

I tried to dry it with a towel but my screen was cracked in places and 
the liquid had seeped in; I watched it spread, like the solution across a rapid antigen test. The screen wouldn’t respond to my touch except to blur a little where I pressed it. The home-screen image of Eva and Mia and Luna was growing abstract around the edges.

I rushed out of the bathroom and did a terrible thing: I plugged it in, perhaps with the childlike instinct that power would help it dry. An error message—I could make out a yellow triangle in a gray box—appeared on the screen when I inserted the cable, and then the phone went black mirror. I carried it in my palm like a small, wounded animal back into the bathroom and removed the wall-mounted hair dryer from its charger.

There is a lot to admire here: Lerner’s ingenious use of a Covid test to capture the interaction between water and the diodes of the display, the subtle deployment of the adjective terrible to capture the narrator’s hysteria, the explanation that the panic has caused the narrator to momentarily revert to childhood. But “like a small, wounded animal” is stunning. In just five words, Lerner captures the irrational tenderness with which we sometimes treat inanimate objects in moments like these, as if maybe being gentle might nurture the phone back to life. In “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” Lerner might write novels now, but in this sense, he remains one of our great poets.

And yet even this doesn’t feel like enough. In a rare critical review (published in these pages), Jon Baskin asked why it is that Lerner’s fiction appeals so universally. Or rather, why do the type of people who write reviews for literary magazines love Lerner so unequivocally? Baskin makes a powerful argument: that Lerner is the “leading practitioner of the novel of detachment.” His protagonists embody a certain kind of detachment pervasive among liberal elites. For them, caring about politics is vaguely embarrassing. Baskin is careful not to argue that Lerner’s novels are pro-detachment or pro-indecision; in fact, he notes that they are critical of both. But ultimately, Baskin says (stealing a phrase from Lerner), this is just art as stylized despair.

I agree. But I also want to suggest an alternative hypothesis, or at least a supplementary one, about Lerner’s widespread appeal. The attraction is not—or not only—because his protagonists are models of detachment, but rather because they are motivated by the specter of shame. They are constantly embarrassed or worried that they will be embarrassed soon. They know they should be ashamed—of their lavish bourgeois lives, their insecurities, their desires, their failures, their successes—just as we know we should be. And their shame appeals to us because we have entered an era when the men and women running things are not just shameless but seemingly shame-proof. It makes sense, then, that liberals want a protagonist who is still capable of feeling remorse. But on its own, shame isn’t political. After all, Lerner’s protagonists are ashamed mostly of their petty desires. Worse, their shame is what prevents them from participating in political life. They are so worried about being embarrassed, so terrified that commitment is cringe, that they do nothing but notice that the world is fucked.

The final scene of The Topeka School, in which Adam and his family attend a protest against ICE, suggested that the Lerner protagonist was starting to find a way out of his immobilizing sense of embarrassment. Adam finds the chanting a little mortifying, but (progress!) he still soldiers on. Yet today, even this feels too little and too late. In our age of political shamelessness and state violence, is polite singing really enough?

Last June, the landing page of The New York Times had two articles side by side. On the left, the headline read “The Lethal Risk of Seeking Food in Gaza”; on the right, “The 21 Best Croissants in New York Right Now.” Lerner’s protagonists are likely to be found making small talk about the depravity of war as they park their strollers outside the bakery ranked second on the list.

It might be possible to read Lerner’s fiction as an indictment of these guilty liberals, but I don’t buy it. Surely it is possible to act on rather than become mired in one’s guilt? And are you really feeling guilty if all you do is think about yourself? This might seem unfair. But Lerner’s fiction invites this judgment, for his artist-protagonists are tormented by the power of art. They can’t decide if it is futile (what could it possibly do?) or if it is the most important weapon we have. If there is even the slightest chance that it is the latter, perhaps one of the most talented novelists working today could write fiction that does more than just contemplate itself.

In 1946, the Marxist economist Maurice Dobb published Studies in the Development of Capitalism, his explanation of feudalism’s decline and capitalism’s rise. In it, he argued that it was the class relations involved in the feudal mode of production in England that primarily caused lords to overexploit their serfs, leading the serfs to desert their estates. With the rise of global trade, this flight ended feudalism and established the foundations of a new capitalist age.

However groundbreaking its account, Dobb’s book proved controversial. Four years later, Paul Sweezy, a fellow Marxist economist and the founding editor of Monthly Review, offered several detailed critiques. Dobb had argued, Sweezy claimed, that feudalism and serfdom were synonymous, which misunderstood, in Sweezy’s words, that serfs “can exist in systems which are clearly not feudal.” For Sweezy, what led the lords to overexploit their serfs and the serfs to desert were primarily external, not internal, causes: the rise of trade, pushing the lords to garner even more from their serfs, and the growth of towns to which the serfs could flee.

Though Dobb took Sweezy’s critiques in stride (and, taken together, both accounts offer compelling insight into the rise of capitalism), Eric Hobsbawm, Georges Lefebvre, Rodney Hilton, and other historians soon weighed in on the Dobb-Sweezy debate, as it came to be known. At stake were not only questions of historiography for these mostly Marxist and socialist historians, but also questions of what exactly constituted capitalism (and, therefore, what constituted anti-capitalist politics) and how capitalism might be ended. “We live in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism,” Sweezy confidently proclaimed in his critique, “and this fact lends particular interest to studies of earlier transitions from one social system to another.”

Around the same time, another Marxist thinker offered a different account of serfdom and the agrarian question. In Negro Liberation, Harry Haywood did not look to the English past but to the contemporaneous American South and especially to the so-called Black Belt, the majority-Black region extending from Virginia to Louisiana. There, Haywood found the modern-day equivalent of the feudal system: sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and agricultural laborers working across the fertile area—many, though not all of them, Black—who were, in Haywood’s eyes, serfs who remained unfree, not least because of the vagrancy laws, debt, and physical violence that bound these workers to the lands they worked. Haywood wondered how these serfs might be freed from that seemingly feudal position and how doing so might aid in the fights against capitalism and fascism. Not surprisingly, his account of feudalism differed greatly from those in the Dobb-Sweezy debate. But for Haywood, as for Sweezy, economic transition was imminent, and the question of feudalism’s end had direct implications for his present.

Originally published in 1948 and now newly republished, Negro Liberation surveyed the post–World War II landscape and found that little had changed since the war began. The Black Belt, which had served as a heartland for enslaved agricultural labor in the South, remained an internal colony of the United States. There, the racist treatment of Black Southerners buttressed the continued economic exploitation of workers, providing dramatic profits to a small number of planters and to Northern finance capital while immiserating everyone else. By making this argument, Haywood, a Communist Party member, was not only making the case for Black emancipation but also explaining how anti-Blackness contributed to the oppression of all laborers. The white supremacy legitimating the exploitation of Black people in the Black Belt was also the very mechanism that ensured the working class’s segregation in the North and prevented Black and white workers from uniting to win collective power.

Yet alongside this account was also a specific argument for Black liberation. Taking his cues in part from Lenin’s claim that colonized countries had a right to determine their own governance, Haywood argued that the Black workers of the Black Belt needed to exercise self-determination, as Lenin put it—that the Black people in the majority-Black regions of the South ought to have autonomous socialist governments. To prevent the rise of fascism, which Haywood argued was manifest in the Jim Crow South as well as in interwar Europe, Black agrarian and industrial workers had to unite and organize toward Black self-determination in the Black Belt. This would weaken US imperialism—for instance, by withdrawing the region’s production—and thereby aid other workers subjugated by the United States across the globe.

To fully understand Haywood’s position on the Black Belt and on workers more generally, it’s necessary to first understand his life. Born in 1898 to formerly enslaved parents, he grew up in a society that imparted a sense that Black people could never fully assimilate into America. The Omaha, Nebraska, of Haywood’s youth had not yet become the city in which Malcolm X’s pregnant mother endured an attack by the Ku Klux Klan. But his parents’ tales of slavery and his grandparents’ displaying their scars from the chattel regime soon educated him on American race relations. Reinforcing this lesson, his school taught that “Blacks were brought out of the savagery of the jungles of Africa,” Haywood recalled in his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, “and introduced to civilization through slavery under the benevolent auspices of the white man.”

An incident when he was 15 further educated him on Black people’s place in the country. During the summer of 1913, a group of white men beat Haywood’s father, who stumbled home bruised and bloody. “They said they were going to kill me if I didn’t get out of town,” his father told him. Haywood suggested calling the police, to which his father replied, “That ain’t goin’ to do no good.” His parents decided to leave their jobs and sell their home for a small sum, and then the family departed for Minneapolis. The incident not only uprooted their lives; it suggested that their stability in the United States was only ever temporary.

As a young adult, Haywood found American racism hard to escape. In Minneapolis, he recalled, his white classmates mocked him with a minstrel-like performance of an “old darkie plantation song.” Unsurprisingly, Haywood dropped out in the eighth grade and went to work as a “bootblack, barber shop porter, bell hop, and busboy,” then as a waiter on a train. Bored by Minneapolis, he moved to Chicago and, in 1917, joined a Black Army regiment. Training in the South, Haywood was exposed to Jim Crow before going on to serve in France, where the US Army warned the French that its Black soldiers were a threat to white French women. An ailment sent Haywood to a segregated Army hospital in Brest. Eventually, he and other Army patients returned on a segregated ship to the United States. Upon their arrival stateside, Haywood had his “first view of the New York skyline. Overcome with emotion, tears welled up in my eyes.” Then segregated reception committees greeted the soldiers. Despite expanding his geographic horizons, Haywood’s experiences in the Army reinforced his sense that American racism was structural, far-reaching, and could only be overcome by radical change.

After his 1919 discharge, Haywood grew even more convinced in this belief. Shortly after he returned to the Windy City, the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 broke out. Haywood joined a group of other Black veterans who armed themselves and planned to defend a Black neighborhood from a rumored invasion. While Haywood’s group saw no fighting, another group did, opening fire on a gang of white people, including off-duty cops, in a truck; elsewhere, “two Black cops with a history of viciousness” were killed. Meanwhile, Black people throughout the city were “standing before the burned-out buildings of their former homes.” If Haywood’s early exposures to American racism had opened him up to an incipient radicalism, the Red Summer changed his life. “I began to see that I had to fight,” he wrote in Black Bolshevik. “I had to commit myself to the struggle against whatever it was that made racism possible.”

Haywood eventually found his way to a school of thought that crystallized this burgeoning sense of struggle. After bouncing between jobs and marrying his first wife, Hazel, in 1920, he was introduced to socialist politics by his brother Otto, who was a member of the Communist Party. When Haywood sought an explanation for American racism in literature, Otto replied, “You ought to quit reading those bourgeois authors and start reading Marx and Engels.” Influenced in part by his admiration for the Bolsheviks’ triumph in 1917, whose example offered “a completely clear solution to the problems facing American workers, both Black and white,” Haywood told his brother that he wanted to join the party.

Haywood’s introduction to socialism opened him up to a wide milieu of communist organizations. Otto suggested that Harry join the African Blood Brotherhood, “a secret, all-Black revolutionary organization” founded by the journalist Cyril Briggs, whose members included the poet Claude McKay, which Haywood soon did. In the winter of 1923, he also joined the Young Workers League, and in 1925, the party proper.

The CP provided Haywood with an education. In 1926, he traveled to Moscow to study at the University of Toilers of the East, which also educated Ho Chi Minh, Deng Xiaoping, and Jomo Kenyatta. In his readings on Marxist-Leninist thought and practice, he learned “that the formation of peoples into nations is an objective law of social development” and that nations required four qualities: “a common territory, a common economic life, a common language and a common psychological makeup (national character) manifested in common features in a national culture.” These early lessons proved foundational to Haywood’s thinking on the plight of Black Americans and its solution.

Those ideas crystallized in the Black Belt thesis. In 1928, Haywood, his old associate Charles Nasanov, and others in the Negro Commission of the Communist International drafted and revised a version of this thesis. Later that year, at the Sixth World Congress, the Communist International passed “The 1928 Resolution on the Negro Question in the United States,” adopting the Black Belt program as official policy. American capitalists subjected Black agrarian Southerners to, as the resolution put it, “the most ruthless exploitation and persecution of a semi-slave character” in order to extract extreme profits, and it legitimated this exploitation through racist myths. Black workers in the Black Belt should therefore pursue a politics of self-determination whose achievement would weaken American capitalist imperialism, the resolution held, and strengthen Black workers so that they could better participate in the necessarily interracial and global struggle against global capitalism. In short, Black self-determination would help to end capitalism more generally.

In drafting this policy for the Communist International, Haywood rapidly became one of the most influential communist thinkers in the United States. Over the coming decade, his Black Belt thesis would continue to influence many communist works on the South that appeared in The Daily Worker and other leftist publications. The framing of Black oppression as national oppression also influenced Haywood’s own writing, even when it putatively concerned other subjects.

Here, Haywood’s writing on the Scottsboro Boys is exemplary. After nine Black teenagers were tried and convicted in Scottsboro, Alabama, of sexually assaulting two white women and then sentenced to death, the CP’s legal arm in the United States took on the case and sought appeals. As the attorneys, Joseph Brodsky and George Chamlee, fought for the teens in the courts, Haywood put his pen to their defense. In his 1932 article “Scottsboro and Beyond,” he argued that “lynching and lynch frame-ups” resulted from “class struggles. Lynch law is the threat facing the Negro workers who attempt or dare to struggle.” Both lynching and legal “frame-ups” kept Black people “in terrorized subjection” and divided workers by race.

In his 1934 pamphlet “The Road to Negro Liberation,” Haywood advocated for a solution: Black and white workers, he argued, must organize around “the abolition of lynching.” Rather than merely passing legislation, he continued, “the best ‘bill’ against lynching is militant demonstrations of tens of thousands of white and Negro toilers on the streets and in the factories, beating back the lynchers.” While his belief in Black self-determination led him to focus on the problems that especially affected Black people, his insistence that Black self-determination was not enough—that ending global capitalism was also necessary—ensured that he also advocated for interracial movements 
and solidarity.

In response to the international rise of fascism in the 1930s, Haywood turned his attention elsewhere. “Blacks have always felt the most brutal, racist oppression in the United States,” he recalled in his autobiography, “but fascism would mean a great heightening of the terror and oppression.” After the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Haywood served with other Black soldiers in the conflict, and in 1943 he joined the Merchant Marines, where he would serve for the rest of World War II. After returning to the United States in 1945, he discovered that the Communist Party USA was, in his view, turning away from revolution and toward reform. “The Party’s work in the Black liberation movement,” Haywood wrote in Black Bolshevik, “felt the first effects of this retreat.” Though he had fought to stymie fascism’s intensification of Black oppression through service overseas, he found far less effort being made to alleviate Black people’s sufferings at home.

Under the party’s rightward retrenchment, Haywood returned to his Black Belt thesis, focusing especially on the need for sharecroppers in the South to organize interracially to alleviate their oppression and to end capitalism more generally. And he began writing his detailed account of this theory: Negro Liberation.

To Haywood’s earlier arguments, Negro Liberation added an account of Black people’s postwar conditions. Just as he had served overseas only to return to racism and racial violence back home, many Black people in and beyond the armed forces had fought “against fascist reaction,” only to then have to struggle against their “traditional enemy at home”: the “Nazi-like system of Jim Crow.” If anything, the war’s end only marked a resurgence of this American form of fascism, now goaded on by “the handful of Wall Street monopolists who stand in mortal fear before the advancing tide of democracy in the world.”

Black people’s oppression in the South, Haywood noted, had long depended on “a depressed peasantry living under a system of sharecropping, riding-boss supervision, debt slavery, chronic land hunger, and dependency—in short, the plantation system, a relic of chattel slavery.” That plantation system had not disappeared, and its persistence transformed even the lives of white workers. In comparison with the rest of the nation, white workers in the South earned less, were sometimes forced into sharecropping, and included a larger number of children in their ranks.

The methods for repressing Black Southerners impacted Northern workers as well. The racist myths legitimating the position of people in the Black Belt circulated nationwide, suppressing Black wages in the North, segregating Black Northerners in neighborhoods with worse housing and worse health outcomes, and hindering interracial trade unionism. In Haywood’s view, capitalists “artificially” fostered “racial prejudice” to turn Black people into the “cheap and underprivileged labor” that these capitalists then used to lower wages and break strikes, while preventing Black and white workers from joining together to oppose their exploiters.

According to Haywood, Wall Street also profited from and reproduced the plantation system by controlling its financing. Planters with more tenant liens had more credit, encouraging planters to acquire even more tenants. Northern industrialists and financiers also owned a great deal of the industries on which the plantations depended, like steel and coal. And Northerners owned much of the South’s means of production—for example, they owned more than 35 percent of Alabama’s spindles and looms in the 1930s. Because of its investment in cotton and related industries, Wall Street maintained “the southern lag and poverty as an essential condition for the extraction of super-profits from the starvation wages of the Negro and white masses.” In Haywood’s view, the Black Belt was a colony in part because Northern capital extracted extreme profits from it in the way that colonizers do from their colonies.

Abolishing this plantation system, Haywood argued, would therefore offer the first step toward abolishing the wage system across the country. Doing so would require an interracial movement of Black and white workers disavowing the white-supremacist ideologies that divided them and “the development and organization of the economic and political struggle of the landless masses, Negro and white.” “Supported by the working class and other progressive forces of the country as a whole,” this interracial workers movement could then establish “a truly people’s government.” That government, in Haywood’s eyes, required self-determination. This is where his argument becomes difficult to follow for those not familiar with his earlier writings on the national question. Since Black people constituted the majority in the Black Belt, the democratic “people’s government” that would emerge there would necessarily be one determined by Black people. “The corrupt rule of monopoly capitalism and its allies in the Black Belt,” he wrote, “must be supplanted by the democratic rule of the majority, that is, of the Negro people, with the full participation of their allies among the disenfranchised white minority…. Only government institutions that represent and express the special interests of the preponderant Negro population, and enjoy its confidence, can effect a radical change in the structure of southern landownership, so urgently needed by the bulk of the Black Belt’s people and southern whites generally.” In short, self-government would aid disadvantaged people in the region more generally in addition to solving Black people’s specific problems.

Haywood lived another four decades after the publication of Negro Liberation. Although he left the CP in the 1950s, he remained dedicated to communism as a cause. In 1958, he formed a new communist organization with, as he put it, “mostly Black and Puerto Rican working class cadres.” As the civil-rights movement swept the nation and turned some toward integration under a capitalist system, Haywood continued to advocate for revolution and African American self-determination in the Black Belt. By the late 1970s, he’d turned to writing the story of his life—Black Bolshevik, published in 1978—before his death in 1985.

Even though Haywood wrote about and organized for Black self-determination for some 40 years, Negro Liberation still ranks among his most thorough theorizations of Black oppression, the exploitation of workers in general, and the means of ending both. By arguing that the Black Belt was an internal colony in which Black agrarian workers were subject to brutal exploitation, it offered an analysis of 20th-century capitalism that also situated it in the past and present of colonization. Although Haywood’s book was, as the historian Rebecca Hall noted, replete with “Indigenous erasure,” it offered its analysis at a moment when the United States was becoming an international hegemon and included not just a searing indictment of Jim Crow in the South but of American empire abroad. No matter what quality-of-life improvements might be gleaned from increased production, capitalist exploitation and colonial domination would continue, Haywood argued, until socialist and self-determined governments were put in power—and this was true within the United States as well as around the globe.

For Haywood, this wasn’t merely an abstract notion. He arrived at these beliefs through grassroots organizing. Those experiences led him to conclude that ending anti-Blackness required radical change and that Black people, like all other subaltern groups, would remain perpetual foreigners under the domestic and international American empire without this form of liberation. While the internal-colony and self-determination theses may no longer be in vogue for many as analyses of racism’s contemporary ills or their resolution, Haywood’s insistence on grassroots change remains as convincing as ever, whether in the 1928 Communist International resolution, Negro Liberation, or elsewhere, and his account of serfdom remains more inspiring than many of those in the Dobb-Sweezy debate. To adopt Marx’s language, where others only interpreted feudalism in various ways, Harry Haywood sought to change it.

Back in the George W. Bush years, my then-wife and I had dinner in New York City with Tucker Carlson. At the time, he was settling in as cohost of CNN’s Crossfire after a rocky tour through the cable-hosting wars and savoring his re-anointment as a political insider and media gatekeeper. Over drinks, he sounded off on the invasion of Iraq, which he was then souring on (along with much of the rest of the country) after having enthusiastically supported it. He also derided the GOP’s all-in crusade against gay marriage, which would prove by some accounts key to Bush’s subsequent reelection in spite of the Iraq debacle. And he regaled us with media gossip, recounting the tale of a prominent cable talking head whom he’d heard clumsily trying to burnish his standing as a political junkie by announcing his eagerness to cover the “Iowa primary” and the “New Hampshire caucus.”

Such encounters weren’t all that remarkable for the time, particularly as the Bush White House sank into greater chaos and corruption, and its erstwhile fellow travelers strained to distance themselves from its crimes and imperial folly. Yet as my then-wife and I compared notes afterward, we agreed that Carlson seemed to be verging on a significant revision of his worldview; he appeared to be aligning with the then-trendy-in-DC niche movement of “liberaltarianism.”

Well, that was then. And here we are now. After a few more turns of cable TV’s wheel of fortune, Carlson landed in the heart of Fox News’ prime-time lineup, hymning the MAGA project of national reclamation to his increasingly right-wing audience while peddling ghoulish campfire tales about the plagues of wokeness, critical race theory, open borders, and other damning specimens of anti-American liberal groupthink. Even after his unceremonious dismissal from Fox, Carlson continued his strange trajectory ever more rightward. Setting up permanent shop in the fever swamps of the conspiracy-minded far right, he palled around with Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán and lent his podcasting platform to the Nazi-Groyper influencer Nick Fuentes—a move that inadvertently sparked a still-raging civil war within the Heritage Foundation, the right’s most influential think tank.

Carlson’s transformation from an ingratiating bow-tied pundit into a plaid-and-khaki-clad Nazi enabler is the subject of Jason Zengerle’s Hated by All the Right People, a chronicle of Carlson’s career that is meant to double, as the book’s subtitle suggests, as a broader account of how the intellectual project of American conservatism has gone off the rails. As a straight media biography, Zengerle’s book is an instructive study in the amoral rounds of ambitious striving in the greenrooms and studio sets of cable TV—a kind of What Makes Sammy Run? for the chattering classes of the new millennium. But as a saga of the right’s intellectual decline, it’s less persuasive—not because Carlson isn’t a representative movement intellectual, but because the American right has long since parted company with political life as a forum of ideas. The watchword for the US conservative movement, at least since the rise of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, has been partisan bloodsport and the promotion of an unappeasable and demagogic politics of cultural grievance. Carlson’s descent, then, isn’t the “unraveling” that Zengerle posits it to be so much as a fulfillment of political destiny: In order to become the maximal Trumpist mouthpiece that he is today—and, indeed, an oft-rumored successor to Trump—Carlson had to relinquish the skeptical and heterodox cast of mind he was trying out during his Crossfire incarnation and become instead a hard-line culture warrior of the MAGA blood-and-soil vintage.

What’s striking about this shift is that it was not accompanied by any notable bouts of introspection and self-doubt or by a conventional political conversion narrative; it simply involved his reading from a different set of teleprompters. In the end, Carlson is not someone who relishes the hatred of others but rather is an inveterate people pleaser. Even in his most hate-filled diatribes, he tends to convulse with giggles and revert to his natural preppy, back-slapping mien. That he does so while indulging Nazis, white nationalists, dictators, and assorted edgelord authoritarians is an indictment of our mediasphere, our collective moral compass, and our political imaginations, but it’s largely the same Tucker Carlson at the center of the squalor.

All that said, Carlson’s public career, as Zengerle recounts it, is a compelling story. He grew up in Southern California as the eldest son of the TV journalist Dick Carlson, who would go on to head the Voice of America under Ronald Reagan. Carlson’s parents divorced after his father left Los Angeles for a job in San Diego and his mother, Lisa, stayed behind to savor the 1970s bohemian scene in Laurel Canyon. Dick would soon get custody of Tucker and his brother, Buckley (named for the conservative media icon William F. Buckley Jr.), after Lisa failed to show up for the hearing.

Carlson remained estranged from his birth mother for the remainder of her life, but his father loomed large in his upbringing, schooling his sons in the aristocratic comportment while also ensuring they were well versed in alpha-male exploits. Zengerle writes that Dick would put his sons atop the roof of his station wagon “as he gunned the land yacht’s V-8 engine and careened down a dirt road.” In addition, “the nannies he hired were usually men—including a former Korean intelligence officer whom Tucker and Buckley addressed as Colonel Kwon and who instructed the boys on how to disembowel someone. Dick’s etiquette advice wasn’t just about the proper way to write thank-you notes, but also included tips like how, in prison, ‘the cigarette pack is your friend.’”

Carlson’s upbringing, in short, was quirky but privileged. After his parents’ divorce, his father married Patricia Swanson, heir to the eponymous TV-dinner fortune, and the couple packed the high-school-age Tucker off, first to an abortive stint at a Swiss boarding school and then to St. George’s School in Rhode Island. At St. George’s, Carlson acquired a “reputation as both a conservative and a contrarian” while also cultivating a hybrid prepster-hippie lifestyle, getting high and listening to the Grateful Dead as he dated the headmaster’s daughter, Susie Andrews, whom he would go on to marry.

Picking up the first whiff of potential inner conflict in Carlson’s biography, Zengerle pounces. Carlson’s alliance with Andrews, and his dutiful attendance at the Episcopalian services led by her dad, who was also a priest in the faith, seemed to signal Carlson’s search for a “stability sorely lacking in his own family”—but “when that stability became stifling, he returned to his group of male friends to play Hacky Sack, listen to the Dead, and smoke pot and drink Kool-Aid mixed with vodka. Indeed, Carlson seemed almost to suffer from a double consciousness.”

Nor was that all, Zengerle theorizes. Carlson’s lackluster academic performance at St. George’s—already a “second-tier” New England prep school—foreclosed admission to an Ivy League college, and so he landed instead at another second-
tier institution of the WASP aristocracy: Trinity College in Connecticut. Another proto-MAGA marker was thus laid down: “His failure to gain entrée to the Ivy League gnawed at him,” Zengerle writes, “and would, decades later, serve as a touchstone for his populist ideology.” These labored forays into psychological portent are a sign not only that Zengerle wasn’t able to land Carlson’s cooperation for his biography, but also that Carlson’s life story isn’t long on inner turmoil. Its psychodynamics are all on the surface.

In this regard, Carlson’s life story has many points of affinity with that of the man he’s now most commonly linked with: Donald Trump. Both men came of age in exceedingly comfortable circumstances, and both adopted grievance-driven public personas as a means of dampening the impression that they were Little Lord Fauntleroy–style scions of privilege. Their self-advertised “contrarian” streaks have, over time, proved to be at best elite affectations, and at worst alibis for their rampaging egos. In neither case are they a matter of great psychological interest.

Nonetheless, Carlson, unlike Trump, did eventually become something interesting: a talented and dedicated magazine journalist. When William Kristol, the former chief of staff to the first George (H.W.) Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, launched The Weekly Standard in 1995, he tapped Carlson, who had recently quit his job as an editorial writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, to become a staff writer. Kristol had initially turned Carlson down for the job after interviewing him, but Mark Gerson, a former colleague of Carlson’s during his postcollegiate internship at the Heritage Foundation, prevailed on Kristol to give him another shot. (Carlson had landed the Heritage internship via the good graces of his dad—so much for the career arc of this young proto-populist.)

Carlson instantly took to the gig. “I thought, ‘Jesus, it’s like it’s come out of the womb full grown,” Carlson’s former Standard colleague Andrew Ferguson told Zengerle. “He needed no grooming or tutoring or anything. He was just ready to go out of the box.” Carlson was also moving beyond his facile prep-school “contrarian” profile into gratifyingly unpredictable territory, publishing a withering takedown of the anti-tax advocate Grover Norquist for The New Republic and a damning profile of the anointed 2000 GOP primary front-runner George W. Bush for Tina Brown’s short-lived magazine Talk. (It was around this time that I initially crossed paths with Carlson; when I was working as an op-ed editor at Newsday, I quickly learned that some of the best sources for informed critical appraisals of the GOP were writers from the Standard.) At the height of his tour as a print journalist, Carlson even wrote an impassioned defense of his trade, standing athwart the well-flogged demonology of journalism on the American right:

I couldn’t be sicker of hearing how Ordinary People, Folks Outside the Beltway, Average Working Americans (insert your favorite euphemism for the Great Unread here) have contempt for journalists. (My gut response, seldom voiced, is: Good, now we’re even.) The problem is particularly acute in some conservative circles, where belief in the liberal media conspiracy is part of the catechism. Polls I keep reading about claim to indicate that most people consider journalists inaccurate and arrogant, if not simply evil. This bugs me, and not merely because it’s me they’re talking about. I don’t like the perception mainly because it isn’t true.

At the same time, though, Carlson’s ambition propelled him toward the more lucrative, high-visibility world of television. Zengerle conveys some of Carlson’s early drive for self-advancement in the book’s prologue, when he recalls his first encounters with Carlson when he was still at the Standard. In the late 1990s, Zengerle was an intern at The New Republic, and Carlson came by the magazine’s office for a standing lunch with the TNR writer and editor Stephen Glass, who was later exposed as a serial fabricator and forced to abandon his journalism career. Like many Beltway-adjacent writers, Zengerle sees alliances like that of Carlson and Glass as a relic of the bygone era of civility and professional fraternity among political journalists: “For all the partisan rancor” that ideological opposites like Carlson and Glass aired in the pages of their home magazines, “there was a LARPing quality to all of the political fighting. In print, writers at TNR and the Standard were waging ideological war. In real life, they were meeting for lunch.”

Yet such gauzy evocations of the old DC bonhomie gloss over a more revealing factor in the friendship between Glass and Carlson: the drive to be noticed—and celebrated—by the widest possible audience at virtually any cost. In Glass’s case, the results of this craving proved disastrous, since they involved the complete destruction of his credibility and career. In Carlson’s case, they were simply bathetic, as he laid aside his accomplished writing career to be a barking head in a long regress of pandering TV gigs. This preening impulse was emblazoned in his origin story as a TV pundit: In 1995, he obliged a CBS booker for the network’s newsmagazine show, 48 Hours, to do a conservative-leaning hit on the O.J. Simpson trial. Carlson got the gig not because of his Simpson expertise—he was indeed distinguished by “knowing nothing about the Simpson case,” Zengerle writes—but because the rest of the Standard’s staff was out to lunch when the booker called the office. After delivering an “unremarkable and utterly forgettable” take on the case, Carlson was nonetheless initiated into the great secret fraternity of camera-ready take-dispensers: “Once you’ve been booked, you’re bookable,” he would later explain. “The process is self-authenticating.”

Sure enough, Carlson was invited to supply another Simpson hit for CBS’s morning show the following day, and he eventually swung into the regular pundit rotation on CNN during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Six months into that seamy episode, a political tip sheet calculated that Carlson had clocked the second most Lewinsky hits, after the indefatigable greenroom habitué David Gergen but leading James Carville.

Gergen, Carville, and the legions of more lurid talking heads flogging the Lewinsky scandal, such as Nancy Grace and Geraldo Rivera, were disconcerting company to be keeping if, as Carlson’s longtime Standard colleague and close friend Matt Labash attested, his professional dream had been “to become a war correspondent for The New York Times, or to write some twenty-thousand-word [John] McPhee-style piece on the New Jersey Turnpike for The New Yorker.” But for Carlson, the hits—and the lucrative TV contracts—kept on coming. Come the new century, he’d landed a cohost gig on CNN’s late-night politics show The Spin Room. After eight months of lackluster ratings, the network canceled the show—but it then enlisted Carlson to replace Carville’s wife, Mary Matalin, on its prime-time jousting-pundits show Crossfire when Matalin decamped to work for the Bush White House. Carlson’s Crossfire tour ended disastrously in 2004, when he and cohost Paul Begala devoted an episode to Jon Stewart, who castigated the show’s fatuous pugilism for “hurting America” and Carlson in particular for being an actual “dick” while also playing one on TV.

The new head of CNN, Jon Klein, took Stewart’s words to heart and placed Crossfire on hiatus. Carlson remained under contract and, ever ingratiating, tried out for a news-reading spot on the network’s 10 pm show NewsNight while its main host, Aaron Brown, took a week off over the Christmas holiday. At the time, Carlson also had an offer from MSNBC to host a new show there, but mindful of CNN’s higher prestige and larger reach, he was trying to salvage a spot at the network. The gambit didn’t work, even though the audition went fine. (“I was not particularly worried that he would somehow damage us in prime time” was Klein’s wan appraisal.) On the first business day of 2005, Klein announced that Crossfire was officially canceled and Carlson’s contract wouldn’t be renewed.

Carlson’s acrobatic efforts to accommodate his CNN network boss again drives home how off-base it is to imagine him as a connoisseur of the hatred of others. You couldn’t begin to picture his cohost Begala (a true partisan hack), let alone other cable-anointed merchants of right-wing vituperation like Robert Novak—a longtime Carlson detractor on ideological grounds—or Bill O’Reilly, going for a spin in the news anchor’s chair to cling to their contracts. Carlson’s next career chapter—a woeful turn at MSNBC as the host of The Situation With Tucker Carlson (later desperately rebranded as Tucker by the flailing network suits after it had bombed in a variety of time slots)—further showcased Carlson’s thwarted will to achieve mass approval. When the network pivoted to a more superficially liberal identity under the influence of its popular omni-ranting host Keith Olbermann, Carlson was again out in the cold: Correctly sensing that he was about to be muscled out at MSNBC, he opted for the greatest possible pandering opportunity: a spot on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. Never had John McPhee seemed farther away.

Carlson bombed there as well—he was the first contestant voted off the show, with one of the judges summing up his team’s performance with this 
terse appraisal: “What an awful mess.” Yet, ever dogged and ingratiating, he filmed a pilot for a prime-time game show for CBS called Do You Trust Me? (speaking of the self-authenticating rites of media belonging). But even after the network had taped six episodes, Carlson again was on the outs: CBS passed on the pilot and instead green-lighted a game show called The Singing Bee, Zengerle writes, “a karaoke-style competition that was hosted by Joey Fatone, a former member of the boy band NSYNC.” Carlson returned to MSNBC purgatory, only to have Tucker canceled a few months later, in March 2008.

In the wake of these defeats, Carlson retreated to DC political journalism, launching the right-wing news site The Daily Caller in 2010, after delivering an impassioned speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference declaring the need to revive accurate and accountable journalism in the house of American conservatism. But neither the American right nor the American Web was primed to accommodate such aims, and the Caller was reduced shortly after its launch to desperately courting links from Matt Drudge, who had long harbored a recondite anti-Carlson grudge of his own. Eventually, relations between the Caller and the Drudge Report mother ship thawed, but the site that Carlson captained was on the losing side of that Faustian bargain, chasing increasingly ephemeral Beltway scooplets to maximize clicks, while recruiting a staff that was openly flirting with the white-nationalist and proto-Groyper obsessions that would later overtake the online right.

In the meantime, Carlson continued to court TV renown, albeit at great cost to his ’90s-era self-respect: He signed on as a contributor at Fox News, a network that he had once derided as “a mean, sick group of people.” Carlson may have turned to Fox as a last resort, but by this point in his career he was also ready for the right-wing-grievance go-round. Soon he began appearing on the 6 pm Special Report with its new host, Bret Baier, a policer of right-wing orthodoxies who liked to cosplay as an actual news anchor. Baier hosted a chatter segment on the show that bore a similarly quasi-comic sobriquet: the “All-Star Panel,” which regularly featured old colleagues of Carlson’s like National Review Online founding editor Jonah Goldberg and Standard writer Stephen Hayes, an old fraternity brother of Baier’s. But standing in the way of Carlson’s ambition was yet another grudge-holding executive: Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who had only half-playfully called Carlson a “loser” when he offered him a contract as a contributor and, in the words of one former Fox suit, “loved kicking Tucker down the stairs and beating him up.” So Carlson mainly drew duty as a flunky on the weekend segments of Fox’s quasi-happy-talk franchise Fox & Friends, where he’d alternate standard agitprop outbursts with time-filling stunts like getting behind the wheel of a go-kart or playing cowbell with Blue Öyster Cult.

Still, over time, Carlson became a valued Fox asset. His Fox & Friends fill-in gig became a full-time hosting one, and when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, Tucker Carlson Tonight debuted in the 7 pm slot the following week. Within six months, Fox prime-time mainstay Bill O’Reilly had been yanked from the lineup in the wake of a series of damning and expensively settled sexual harassment charges, and Carlson was suddenly the most influential voice both on Fox and in the new MAGA political order. Soon he was tailoring his show to be a Trumpian messaging delivery system, bringing ardent promoters of alt-right and white-nationalist ideology onto his writing staff, and devoting long editorial segments to the pillaging of Real America at the hands of Democrats, globalists, and a rotating cast of faithless, predatory elites. Even as he emerged as the premier media backer of the MAGA agenda, Carlson sought to keep an arm’s-length distance from Trump himself, perhaps out of deference to his background in print journalism. It didn’t matter, though; when Trump, at a Florida campaign rally, name-checked a fringe conspiratorial claim that the Swedish government was covering up a massive crime wave carried out by Muslim immigrants, it turned out that he had watched a Carlson interview on the subject the night before. Carlson was shocked to discover that he’d become one of the most powerful voices in Donald Trump’s head, simply by beaming out MAGA-grade propaganda on his show. (This revelation had to have hit Carlson’s Fox News colleague Sean Hannity especially hard, since Hannity had been frenetically lobbying Trump and his retinue behind the scenes to land the chief of staff’s job in the first Trump White House.)

In Zengerle’s account, Carlson’s prime-time carnival of MAGA grievance helped translate Trump’s own motley array of persecution complexes and revenge fantasies into “a populist-nationalist ideology that was far more coherent than anything being offered by Trump himself.” And it’s certainly true that Carlson retained a core narrative gift in his new role: He managed to present the hollowing-out of the manufacturing heartland as a tragic betrayal of a key constituency of forgotten Americans and, in one of his most effective monologues, drew a parallel between the callous abandonment of white working-class communities and the perennial effort to pathologize and oppress their Black counterparts throughout our history.

Yet just as often, and arguably far more often, Carlson was as incoherent and conspiracy-driven as Trump. He devoted several reports to publicizing the fake story that South Africa’s Black-led government was unilaterally seizing land from white farmers. In other segments, Carlson flatly declared that white supremacy was “a hoax” and “actually not a real problem in America.” Like Trump, he delighted in the demonization of immigrants, complaining in one infamous segment that American elites claim that “we’ve got a moral obligation to admit the world’s poor…even if it makes our own country poorer, dirtier, and more divided.” These hate-filled episodes might have helped Carlson grow his audience—by 2020, Tucker Carlson Tonight was receiving the highest ratings of any cable show in history—but they don’t really find him translating this politics of fear into an ideology so much as pandering to viewers much in the way that Trump does: deftly seeking out the greatest points of outrage in his audience’s collective psyche and giving them ready-made scapegoats—immigrants, Black Americans, university professors, feminists, Jewish financiers, and globalists.

A more cynical observer might wonder how much Carlson, in his heart of hearts, really even believes all of this rudderless bigotry—particularly after the discovery phase of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox turned up texts from Carlson professing his thoroughgoing hatred for Trump and his relief at Trump’s election defeat in 2020. But perhaps one of the most damning things about Carlson’s career is that, upon examining it closely, one begins to realize that what he believes never really seems to matter much to Carlson himself. Bolstering Trump’s white-nationalist appeal while secretly despising the man is a bit like a tobacco executive donating to the American Cancer Society: Your inner personal misgivings don’t make you any less a part of the problem. Again, the figure of Trump is useful here not as a gauge of Carlson’s actual beliefs but rather as a career model. Carlson’s drift into Groyper conspiracy-mongering is of a piece with Trump’s racist diatribes against Somalis and his justifications of ICE’s executions of protesters like Renée Good. Each man relies on bigotry to strategically conceal his own elite pedigree; Trump and Carlson both castigate remote and ill-defined elites spearheading shadowy plots to purloin the economic and cultural birthrights of white America. And each of these MAGA demagogues has exponentially enriched himself by monetizing online hatred while courting the same corporate backers they profess to despise in the abstract.

The most telling thing about the former glad-handing preppy magazine scribe with New Yorker ambitions making a fortune as a MAGA surrogate is that Carlson is now mired in a world of total intellectual stagnation. Much like pornographers, right-wing hate merchants can only continue getting a charge out of their mass audience by ratcheting up the outrage quotient in their content. So since Carlson was abruptly canned by Fox in the wake of the 2023 settlement of the Dominion suit, he’s been a virtual random-search engine for hyperventilating grievance theater on the right. His fawning two-hour interview with Nick Fuentes, which left Fuentes’s deranged antisemitic outbursts both unchallenged and indulged, was but the latest (if also the most justly notorious) specimen kicked up by this ugly business model. On his YouTube show, Carlson has interviewed a leader of the white-nationalist group VDARE, Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper, and fellow conspiracy-monger Alex Jones, who surrendered his own lucrative Infowars gig after losing a $1.4 billion defamation suit brought by the families of victims in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre, which Jones dubbed a deep-state “false flag operation.” That’s all on top of uncritically platforming authoritarian figures like Putin, Orbán, and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.

As a seeming corollary of Carlson’s accelerating intellectual self-enclosure, he has also become besotted with the apocalyptic political theology of the New Apostolic Reformation movement, despite his continued identification with the Episcopalianism of his prep-school youth. Zengerle makes only glancing mention of this spiritual turn, citing an interview that Carlson gave to a Christian podcaster in which he described being attacked in bed by “a demon.” But Carlson has also interviewed the right-wing evangelical pundit Santiago Pliego, as well as the NAR-adjacent Calvinist pastor Doug Wilson, an avowed champion of theocratic rule. At the 2024 Republican National Convention’s Heritage Foundation policy confab, Carlson warned of a coming “spiritual battle” pitting righteous Republicans against Democrats who stand determined as a body to “eliminate” Christians. Carlson’s embrace of the most militant wing of the evangelical MAGA movement has grimly borne out his former Standard colleague Andrew Ferguson’s view that Carlson had become “the Father Coughlin of the twenty-first century”—a peddler of ugly bigotries dressed up as the pseudo-populist vindication of the forgotten man. And since bathos is never far offstage for the former stunt correspondent on Fox & Friends, Carlson also hosted an event in 2024 where accused sexual assaulter and rapist Russell Brand made his first major public profession of the Christian faith.

It’s easy, Lord knows, to make sport of such blatantly transactional avowals of faith, but the followers of Carlson’s improbable career should by now be well aware that he is an exceedingly savvy early adopter of media and political trends. In the airless room of self-authenticating reactionary MAGA politics, Carlson is charting a new quest for absolute conviction and certainty. Let us pray.

“Freedom of the press,” A.J. Liebling famously wrote, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.” This pithy observation from one of Liebling’s 1960 “Wayward Press” columns in The New Yorker sums up a great deal about how journalism is transacted under the pressures of American capitalism. But the gist of it has to hit different if you have several hundred million dollars sitting around and a reputation that could use a bit of burnishing.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced last week that it was buying Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN), a daily Internet talk show known for its puffball interviews with Silicon Valley execs and hopeful tech entrepreneurs, hosted by two former start-up founders, Jordi Hays and John Coogan. OpenAI shelled out something in the “low hundreds of millions” for the show, according to the Financial Times—a figure likely in the same range as the $250 million that Jeff Bezos spent buying The Washington Post in 2013. The then-venerable-if-troubled paper had a weekday circulation around 450,000 at the time. TBPN, only about a year-and-a-half old, reaches somewhere on the order of 70,000 viewers per show, mostly on X and Youtube. It does, however, have a huge gong, which the six-foot-eight Coogan, the taller of the two hosts, will bang upon to mark any good news guests bring with them to the show. (Hays, for his part, has a soundboard.)

Given that OpenAI just took in $110 billion in new funding (GONG!), valuing the company at some $840 billion, a couple hundred million dollars is more or less a rounding error. But what does an AI lab hope to get from ownership of a tech podcast? The company insists that it’s going to respect TBPN’s “editorial independence,” such as it is, but it’s pretty clear OpenAI isn’t altogether happy with the media coverage it’s been getting lately. The general run of OpenAI coverage these days tends to focus on things like the numerous lawsuits the company faces from the families of former ChatGPT users allegedly driven to suicide by its sociopathic prompts, as well as the company’s cravenly speedy move to sign a lucrative contract with the Pentagon in late February after its rival Anthropic lost a similar deal for taking a small stand against autonomous killer drones and mass domestic surveillance.

In an official statement, OpenAI’s Fidji Simo said that the deal was all about “creat[ing] a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates.” This appears to be a jargon-laden way of saying the company intends to lead conversations that don’t include any actual journalists, who are known even in Silicon Valley for sometimes asking the sorts of questions that tech CEOs would rather not answer in public. Of course, TBPN should be well suited for its new role as a wholly owned media entity given that the show is “already so dedicated to cheerleading for the rich and powerful people in tech as to have been indistinguishable from marketing,” as Patrick Redford of Defector acidly put it.

OpenAI isn’t the first tech company to adopt a strategy of “going direct”—a maneuver that by and large bypasses, well, the media in favor of blogs and podcasts under corporate control. No one has embraced “going direct” more insistently than the venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz, and their story helps illustrate both the promise and the pitfalls of this particular path.

The firm, known widely as a16z, spent the first few years after its founding in 2009 assiduously courting the press with the help of a dedicated and skillful press-whisperer named Margit Wennmachers. She managed, among other things, to get The New Yorker to devote considerable real estate to a laudatory story about cofounder Marc Andreessen, labeled “Tomorrow’s Advance Man,” in 2015. But the company began to sour on what it now derisively labels the “legacy media” not long after, when reporters started raising critical questions about one of a16z’s portfolio companies, Zenefits, and about the much-hyped venture fund itself. So instead of “trying to get reporters to write the right things,” as Andreessen put it in a recent interview, the firm started hiring journalists to run its own media operation, devoting so much energy to the project that some people began referring to a16z as a media company that just happened to do some venture capital investing on the side.

In 2021, a16z tried to take its “new media” strategy to the next level by launching Future.com, a sleek web publication that Wennmachers suggested would become “the go-to place for understanding and building the future.” (Hence, presumably, the name.) Soon, she said at the launch, tech entrepreneurs would be asking themselves “should I try to get this into The New York Times, or should I get it into Future?”

The site sputtered out in less than a year and a half. Apparently the teeming millions of techbros weren’t lining up to read relentlessly positive takes on such topics as “How to Know Your Users as You Grow” and “What Synthetic Embryos Can and Can’t Do.” As Bloomberg’s Brad Stone noted, “it doesn’t always end well when you hire people to tell the world how great you are. Future.com, from my periodic glances, is a snooze fest.”

The Future.com debacle didn’t really alter a16z’s big plans for media domination. The company just shifted direction, and returned to pushing its podcasts and blog posts on its own site. As always, Andreessen Horowitz continues talking a big game—selling its “new media” team hard to startup founders as “the best turnkey media operation in venture.… We offer an extensive menu of services for our portfolio companies, up and down the New Media stack, that add up to one experience: ‘shipping a great story.’” (I think you may see what Stone was getting at with that “snooze fest” remark.)

Speaking of snooze fests, some worry that an OpenAI-owned version of TBPN might lose whatever spark its fans now think it has. (Frankly, I don’t see much of a spark there now, though I am very much not part of the show’s target demo.) But I think the show may face an even bigger challenge in the form of one Elon Musk. TBPN, you may recall, gets most of its current audience on X, and Musk, who owns X, is not what you’d call a big fan of OpenAI or its CEO Sam Altman. Indeed, Musk, one of the original investors in the company, is suing Altman and other OpenAI bigwigs for $134 billion for allegedly lying to him about keeping the company a nonprofit; OpenAI is countersuing him for harassment. Musk, a deeply vindictive man, is widely reported to have sometimes used his control of X’s algorithm to throttle the traffic of media outlets and even individual accounts on the site that he dislikes. If he decides to do the same to the OpenAI-owned TBPN, it will likely trigger a singularly petty clash of press-owning titans. On the plus side, I guess, the ensuing drama would prove far more interesting than anything you’d hear on a TBPN podcast.

Sexual-abuse allegations against Cesar Chavez, the Chicano civil-rights and labor leader, have reverberated across the Latino community and beyond. A New York Times investigation published in March includes accounts from two women who were 12 and 13 when Chavez abused them, and from Dolores Huerta, Chavez’s longtime collaborator and cofounder of the United Farm Workers. In a statement, Huerta said she had two sexual encounters with Chavez, both of which led to pregnancies: “The first time I was manipulated and pressured. The second time I was forced, against my will, and in an environment where I felt trapped.”

These allegations are deeply disturbing and should not be minimized or explained away. They have rightfully prompted a reexamination of Chavez’s legacy. They also expose how much Latino history in the United States has been made to rest on one man.

For many Americans, including Latinos, Chavez is the only Latino civil-rights leader they can name. That overreliance on a single, legible figure has flattened a much richer and more complex history, and we are seeing the consequences of that. When one man is made to stand in for an entire movement, the destruction of his legacy can be used to dismiss the movement’s larger history and impact.

Chavez’s legacy has long been more complicated than the mythology surrounding him. In a Los Angeles Times review of Miriam Pawel’s biography, he is described as “paranoid and dictatorial,” with the organization he built characterized as resembling a “cultish commune.” It was within that warped world that women like Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas say they were abused for years when they were girls.

Chavez also opposed undocumented workers, whom he viewed as threats to the labor movement, and in the 1970s he led efforts to report them to immigration authorities—a stark contradiction for a leader now widely remembered as a champion of the marginalized.

And yet schools, streets, and Chicana/o Studies departments all bear Chavez’s name. In a number of states, including California, Arizona, and Texas, Cesar Chavez Day has been celebrated as a state holiday. Hollywood has immortalized him.

Latinos have long struggled to have our contributions, history, and culture recognized. Chavez—the charismatic leader who organized some of the country’s most exploited workers, who prayed and fasted, who led the grape strikes that captured the country’s attention—became a figure we could rally around. Through him, we could be seen. So we organized, marched, and legislated to cement his place in US history. We rallied around a version of him that could be taught, honored, and defended—a version that was uncomplicated. But that came at a cost.

One of the reasons many of the women who spoke to the Times gave for their decades-long silence was a “fear of tarnishing the image of a man who has become the face of the Latino civil rights movement.” Huerta kept her own experiences private because she “believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement,” which she had dedicated her life to.

That weight should never have been theirs to carry. And yet it was. It meant women who were harmed felt responsible for protecting the very man who harmed them. “It makes you rethink in history all those heroes,” Esmeralda Lopez told the Times. “The movement—that’s the hero.”

She’s right. The movement is what we must now continue to uphold. It was the collective effort of people who marched, organized, and stood alongside its leaders that made it possible for farmworkers to unionize, bargain for better wages, and secure safer working conditions. Now, as some of those gains come under attack, and as Latino contributions to this country are being broadly contested, the challenge is not just how we judge one man but how we expand the story beyond him—because our history and contributions are far bigger than any one figure.

Right-wing politicians like Texas Governor Greg Abbott have already moved to halt this year’s observance of Cesar Chavez Day and signaled that they intend to remove the holiday from state law. Chavez’s name should come off schools and streets. But we cannot allow that removal to become another way our history disappears.

This moment should push us to expand what we remember. It should push us to learn about the many leaders—within both the UFW and other movements—who were overshadowed because we placed so much weight on one man.

Some are already beginning to offer a way forward. In California, lawmakers quickly passed a bill to rename Cesar Chavez Day as Farmworkers Day, shifting the focus away from one man and back to the people who made the movement possible.

For years, I’ve heard Huerta stand before a crowd and ask, “Who’s got the power?”

“We’ve got the power!” the crowd would reply.

“What kind of power?” she’d ask again.

“People power!”

I hear it differently now. The farmworkers movement was never one man. It was never Cesar Chavez alone. It was always the people.

Jay McInerney’s latest novel, See You on the Other Side, opens—humorously, fittingly—at the Odeon in Manhattan. “Stepping out of the cab into the twilight,” McInerney writes, “he felt a rush of nostalgia at the sight of the red-and-white neon sign hovering above West Broadway like an old movie title materializing on a dark screen.”

The glamorous Tribeca brasserie was made famous, or maybe more famous, in McInerney’s zippy, funny 1984 debut, Bright Lights, Big City, a work that, alongside Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, came to define an era and an attitude. It was the 1980s; bratty literary boys in blazers did cocaine in various downtown New York hot spots. For readers who have not engaged with McInerney’s work since then, it may come as a surprise (or not) that he has returned to the source—that is, the Odeon—many times.

Plenty of writers spend their careers circling the same preoccupations, the same geographical locations, the same set of human problems. But it is rare to find the novelist who has done so on such a hyper-specific level. At least four of McInerney’s nine novels involve the same neon-lit patch of ground on West Broadway and Thomas Street.

See You on the Other Side is the fourth, and likely the last, in McInerney’s Calloway series, which follows the Manhattan “golden couple” Russell and Corrine Calloway over the course of a long marriage. Reading it, I wondered how McInerney could possibly wring any new observations out of the same neighborhood, social milieu, and marriage. Could he perform a miracle and hit us with something new and profound about the Odeon’s mahogany bar and legendary bathroom, about staying married in spite of Manhattan’s many hazards, about going out in New York and growing old there?

The novel opens in the early days of Covid. As the virus bears down on the city, Russell and Corrine, now in their 60s, arrive at the Odeon to celebrate their old friend Washington Lee’s 35th wedding anniversary. Russell’s career has apparently flourished since we last met him; he now runs a publishing house, while Corrine, formerly a stockbroker, works for a nonprofit dealing with hunger. They have just moved from a town house in Harlem to a downtown apartment after the departure of their adult children.

The virus, at this point, is still a vague threat. The Calloways and their friends are not yet acclimated to the idea of social distancing or to the elbow bump, the “new greeting in this time of incipient plague”; they keep forgetting and kissing each other’s cheeks. But sharp, sensitive Corrine is nevertheless worried. “She was very concerned about the virus that had infiltrated their city,” McInerney writes, “convinced that it posed a serious threat, and as they gingerly navigated the room, they found others who shared her concern.” It takes about 100 pages, but that concern is finally validated: Corrine contracts the virus and has to quarantine in their new apartment. Meanwhile, Russell flirts with the idea of having an affair with a young novelist (Russell is more or less always flirting with the idea of having an affair) and tries to hold the publishing house together.

While the pandemic is everywhere in the book, See You on the Other Side proves to be a Covid novel without much to say about life during Covid. Corrine weathers her bout with the virus, while Russell grumbles about masking at Citarella. His fellow shoppers, he notes, look like “Japanese commuters.” The book’s style is reference-heavy without being especially satirical, a catalog of cultural figures, magazines, restaurants, and nice wines. A non-exhaustive list of mentions in the first half of the novel includes n+1, Kanye West, Harvey Weinstein, The New York Review of Books, Danny Meyer, Balthazar, The Real Housewives, Dylan going electric, 1996 Montrachet, and Lululemon.

As for the characters themselves, even if we don’t learn much about their inner lives, the book displays a deep affection for their external way of life. “The aromas of dark roast coffee and bacon infused the kitchen like a spritz of morning perfume,” one chapter begins. Russell belongs to a club of wine connoisseurs who bring their own bottles to Per Se, and he and Corrine vacation in Southampton. You get the impression that this is how McInerney himself, a noted gourmand and the author of three books about wine, lives his life.

After a slow-burn beginning—there is a lot of wondering about whether Covid will arrive—the book rushes to an ending, which deals with the death of a major character. A somewhat lackluster look at how the virus impacted well-heeled Manhattanites who mostly live by the scent of dark roast coffee and expensive bottles of white wine, See You on the Other Side doesn’t appear to offer much besides providing a conclusion for the series, a compulsory finish to what McInerney started more than three decades ago. We see how his golden couple live, but without knowing why.

Though to do justice to the novel, perhaps one must begin with the books that preceded it. Published in 1992 and set in 1987, Brightness Falls may seem to be deliberately titled to remind the reader of Bright Lights, Big City. But the novels are unrelated; the title comes from the Thomas Nashe poem “A Litany in Time of Plague”: “Brightness falls from the air; / Queens have died young and fair.” Like See You on the Other Side, Brightness Falls is a plague novel, set in the midst of the AIDS epidemic.

When we meet Russell and Corrine in Brightness Falls, they are newish Brown University graduates, five years married and living in a prewar apartment on the Upper East Side. Their friends think of them as “savvy pioneers of the matrimonial state.” They throw dinner parties that end in people passing out on their couch and try to remain sexually interested in each other. The book functions as a satire of the publishing and financial industries. Ungainly Russell—“Crash Calloway” to his friends—is a mid-level editor at a small but prestigious publishing house, while elegant Corrine works as a stockbroker selling junk bonds.

Reviewing the book for The New York Times in 1992, Cathleen Schine described it as a “trash novel” as opposed to a serious one—more specifically, “an easy, entertaining trash novel.” This assessment holds: Brightness Falls is mean, pulpy fun in the mode of The Bonfire of the Vanities. It takes on the greed and optimism of the 1980s, culminating in the historic stock-market crash.

After Russell walks into his boss’s office one day and finds him with his hand inside a young assistant’s blouse, he catches the bullish spirit of the age and attempts a leveraged buyout of the company. This sets the plot in motion—Russell trying to pull off the deal and falling for his sexy business partner, while Corrine is left to her own devices downtown.

The book ends on a melancholy note that reaches for shades of Fitzgerald: “Whatever plenty befalls them together or separately in the future,” the last line intones, “they will become more and more intimate with loss as the years accumulate, friends dying or slipping away undramatically into the crowded past.”

Despite the downbeat ending, the novel remains enough of an irreverent satire that this is what the reader might expect from its sequel, The Good Life. But something curious happens instead: McInerney makes a 180-degree tonal shift from the comedic to the achingly sincere. To the book’s detriment, his perspective on these characters morphs from mocking to compassionate. Published in 2006, The Good Life is set in the shadow of 9/11, and yet it is less a time capsule of what happened in the months afterward than a portrait of how—at least in this novelist’s view—irony had gone out of style. After their introduction in the previous book as self-interested and self-important yuppies, Russell and Corrine (but especially Corrine) now attempt to become do-gooders. The day after 9/11, Corrine meets a rich finance guy named Luke emerging from the smoke of Ground Zero: “Staggering up West Broadway, coated head to foot in dun ash, he looked like a statue commemorating some ancient victory, or, more likely, some noble defeat.”

The two start volunteering at a soup kitchen for first responders, then embark on an affair. It’s love in the time of global catastrophe. We spend many, many pages with Corrine and her paramour, following him to Tennessee at one point, meeting his mom and learning, for some reason, about her own affair. Russell, sidelined for most of the book, distractedly mourns the loss of a friend who died in the attacks.

The book’s overwhelming sentimentality results in such convoluted sentences as: “[Luke] felt his eyes welling, charged with nostalgia for Christmases past, even as he experienced an unholy yearning to share the rituals of this and future seasons with someone not present—someone with her own family, with her own history and traditions, all of which seemed at this freighted moment to weigh more than his own selfish desire.” Perhaps it is this sentimentality that ends up keeping Russell and Corrine together. The affair wears on the Calloways without tearing them apart.

The third book in the series, Bright, Precious Days, is the least compelling of the four. If the first book embraces satire, and its sequel sincerity, then in Bright, Precious Days we get a tepid mix of the two. We follow the continuing affair between Luke and Corrine, while Russell attends, once again, to some trouble at the publishing house. There is a half-hearted plotline about a fraudulent memoir, echoing James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces scandal; there is a young short-story writer from Tennessee named Jack, who is too broadly drawn to care about. Mostly, the reader gets exhausted by how boring the Calloways have become: Corrine’s love affair drags on; she contemplates an eye lift and eventually dumps Luke. Russell finds out about the affair, but the novel ends with their marriage intact yet again. Nothing changes other than their habits of consumption: Once inundated with credit-card debt, Russell is now drinking better wines and sipping lattes with hearts in the foam.

Taken in this context, then, See You on the Other Side is actually a pretty good book. It is the Rabbit at Rest of the series and deals, more than any of the other books, with aging and mortality, and it does so with less of the cloying mawkishness and melodrama of the previous two novels. Characters start dropping dead abruptly and “undramatically,” fulfilling the prophecy of the final sentence of Brightness Falls. Yet the Calloways barely seem to care about these losses, let alone react. Russell’s wine-club buddy drives his car into a tree out in the Hamptons; later, McInerney’s sacramental substance, cocaine—so much fun back in the ’80s—kills off a promising young writer at the McKibbin Lofts. We are almost up to the present, and now the cocaine is laced with fentanyl—the author’s way of saying, I guess, that the party is truly over.

Does See You on the Other Side work on a stand-alone basis? Mostly not. Characters pop in briefly, only to be killed off or otherwise quickly disposed of. We check in on the fate of Corrine’s sister, whom Russell once habitually referred to as the “slutty little sister,” even though she donated the eggs that produced the Calloways’ children. If someone were to read just one of these books, I would suggest Brightness Falls, which is by far the most densely imagined and broadly comic. It also takes some interesting chances, containing a partial manuscript written by a friend of Russell and Corrine’s, a comic set piece about a high-profile photographer, and many antic, shifting points of view that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.

Those readers following the series from the beginning will get some satisfaction in finding out how everyone ends up. (The Calloways’ children, for instance, become a chef and a Bernie bro.) But overall, the final book can’t compare to McInerney’s very best work, which is probably Bright Lights, Big City, and it can’t compare even to Brightness Falls. I mourned the softening of his once keen satirical eye. I kept thinking of Patricia Lockwood on John Updike’s oeuvre. “I read on and on,” she wrote, “waiting for him to become as good as he had been as a boy.”

At a certain point, McInerney seems to have run out of things to say about marriage. The stock market may crash and recover, buildings may fall and rise again, but the Calloways’ New York doesn’t actually change all that much. There are still the benefits to attend, and the cocktail parties and dinners for their fancy, eclectic friends. The Calloways still swing hard-to-get restaurant reservations and slightly out-of-reach beach vacations. They still cheat on each other and keep secrets and stay together.

“Each marriage is a mystery, an iceberg of which only a fraction is visible from the outside, above the surface,” McInerney writes early in See You on the Other Side, a metaphor unlikely to strike the reader as profound. Couldn’t the same be said about any individual or relationship?

Yet maybe what he’s getting at in these books is that marriages largely don’t change. They are more often static than dynamic, their patterns set in early, and the participants, if they stay together, are destined to repeat the same conflicts and the same actions over four novels’ worth of life. It’s a somber conclusion to what began as an exuberant and ironic project. It takes literal death to alter the Calloways’ marriage. At least they’ll always have the Odeon.

Artificial intelligence is a nightmare to write about. It’s not just the technical parts, which are complicated, or the fact that the field is moving fast enough to give most commentary on it a short shelf life. It’s that the discourse is so extreme that trying to find one’s footing in the scrum can feel hopeless. Artificial intelligence is both a technology and a theology, and in its latter aspect, it too often resembles a doctrinal dispute among an assortment of shrieking priests.

Artificial intelligence will bring us heaven on earth or kill us all. It is the most important invention in human history or a scam. It will eliminate millions of jobs and produce permanent mass employment, or it will prove to be vastly overhyped, in which case the abrupt collapse of the technology’s trillion-dollar investment boom will tank the economy.

We need careful nondenominational thinking to guide us through this mess. The computer scientist Virginia Dignum is well-placed to play this role. Currently a professor at Umeå University in Sweden, she has been working in artificial intelligence since the 1980s. Dignum is an expert on “responsible AI,” which studies how to create and use AI systems in ethical ways, and has written an often-cited textbook on the subject. She is also an influential policy intellectual, having served as an AI adviser to various international organizations and initiatives, including the European Commission, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum.

In her new book, The AI Paradox, Dignum offers an overview of AI with particular attention to its social ramifications. Each chapter is devoted to a different paradox that serves to illuminate a specific dimension of her theme. The “agreement paradox,” for instance, focuses on the surprisingly thorny question of what AI is in the first place (“the more we explore AI, the harder it becomes to agree on its definition”), while the “solution paradox” summarizes the pitfalls inherent in the tech industry’s fondness for the technological fix (“solving problems with technology often creates more problems”).

Not all of Dignum’s paradoxes seem especially contradictory or counterintuitive, but together they form an effective and creative structure for the book. AI has become something of a cliché in recent years; by probing the riddles and antinomies that exist below the surface, Dignum gives the general reader a truer gauge of the subject’s depth. After all, the useful thing about paradoxes is how, as Dignum notes, they “reveal that reality is rarely as simple as it seems.”

The first paradox Dignum presents is the one that holds the greatest significance for her and for many of her fellow humanists: the notion that AI does not diminish but in fact helps clarify what makes us human. “The more AI can do, the more it highlights the irreplaceable nature of human intelligence,” she writes. AI is good at certain tasks, such as “data analysis, logical reasoning, and linguistic processing.” Yet it struggles with others, especially those involving creativity, empathy, “moral and ethical discernment,” the “capacity for complex reasoning,” and the “ability to reason about relationships between concepts.” This leads Dignum to conclude that our “uniquely human traits” will never be “fully replaced, no matter how advanced AI becomes.” Paradoxically, the growing sophistication of AI only serves to underscore our distinctiveness.

This view places Dignum within a tradition of humanist AI critique that is nearly as old as the field itself. Since the inception of artificial intelligence in the 1950s, first as an academic pursuit and then a commercial one, its partisans have maintained that the mind is a machine and that, consequently, it is possible to endow a machine with the intelligence of a human. The humanists —figures like the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum—have countered that, in fact, no matter what AI can or cannot do, it will never truly replicate the human mind because the human mind is nothing like a machine. “The core difference lies not just in capabilities, but in the essence of being,” as Dignum explains. “AI calculates, while humans feel; AI iterates, while humans imagine.”

This doesn’t mean AI is useless. On the contrary, Dignum is optimistic about the technology’s potential. But fulfilling this potential requires seeing AI “as a complementary tool to human intelligence, not a replacement.” Much like a calculator liberates us from the tedium of doing arithmetic by hand, AI’s facility at finding patterns in data can free us up “to focus on more creative, strategic, and profound aspects of thinking.” Dignum casts AI in a supporting role, as the helpmeet that handles the busywork so that we can spend more time exercising our higher—and, in her view, more distinctly human—functions.

The tech industry, of course, has something else in mind. The vast sums of money flowing into the generative-AI boom means that an acceptable return on investment can be attained only by putting large numbers of people out of work. Companies need their computers to start acting and working like humans; the goal is not to enhance human labor but to purge as much of it as possible from production. It remains unclear to what extent this goal can be realized. At a minimum, AI coding tools such as Claude Code are permanently changing how software is written by making the process of programming much simpler and faster. The consequences for the employability of software engineers may be significant.

Because tech people tend to see programming as the hardest thing a human can do, AI’s increasing proficiency in this area is often taken as the harbinger of a fast-approaching “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) or even “artificial superintelligence” (ASI). AGI refers to the threshold at which AI will match the intelligence of a human; ASI would be the point at which AI exceeds it. For Dignum, such notions are ridiculous. She compares the idea of AI’s “approximating or surpassing human intelligence” to the notion that “airplanes will soon be laying eggs, just because we keep improving their flying capabilities.” The analogy “highlights the absurdity of expecting a machine—a nonliving, mechanical artifact—to attain the full spectrum of human intelligence.”

More profoundly, Dignum argues that the concepts of AGI and ASI are rooted in a misunderstanding of the nature of human intelligence. The aspiration of today’s AI firms is not only to replace human workers but to build something that goes well beyond them: a god in a box—a single technological system that knows, and can do, everything. But intelligence, Dignum notes, can never emerge purely in isolation; it has always been a collective endeavor. “Our evolutionary history reveals that social behaviors like cooperation, communication, and group living were not just important for survival—they were the very foundation upon which our intelligence developed,” she writes. “The more we chase AGI, the more we discover that true superintelligence lies in human cooperation.” This is what she calls 
the “superintelligence paradox”—another conundrum that illustrates how humanity can never be displaced by AI.

If we took the cooperative aspects of cognition seriously, then what kind of AI would we create? Dignum argues that it would look somewhat different from the AI currently being developed. Rather than systems that try to replace human labor, we would imagine those that “work alongside humans to extend our capabilities and enhance collective intelligence.” Such a shift might be facilitated by moving away from the large, expensive, and monolithic AI models of the sort that underlie services like ChatGPT and toward a more modular approach, in which a mix of smaller and more specialized models is made available to workers in ways that respect their autonomy and expertise. This strategy would have the added virtue of diminishing the power of the tech monopolies, since their control of contemporary AI is, as Dignum notes, inseparable from the fact that they are the only actors with sufficient infrastructure to train and deploy large models.

The central argument of The AI Paradox, then, is that there is nothing inevitable about AI’s present trajectory. Dignum concludes her book with a plea for a more intentional and inclusive approach to AI development, one in which “everyone has a voice in shaping the direction AI takes.” She wants to banish the quietism that too often clouds people’s minds when technology is involved. “We must resist the seductive narratives that portray AI as an unstoppable force beyond human control, narratives that strip us of our agency and render us passive in the face of technological change,” she declares. AI is made by people, and therefore it “is what we, people, make of it.... The power to decide lies with us.”

Dignum’s message is an empowering one: Humans have a monopoly on true intelligence. AI is simply another tool, like an airplane or a car, and we can steer it in any direction we want.

If The AI Paradox had been published a decade ago, these claims would be easier to sustain. But the arrival of large language models (LLMs)—the computational systems that form the engine of generative AI—in 2018, and their rapid subsequent evolution, has cast doubt on some of Dignum’s assertions. While she concedes that “LLMs represent an incredible advancement,” they do not prompt her to revise her overall view of AI. In her account, LLMs have the same fundamental limitation as the AI systems that preceded them: They are incapable of “actual comprehension.” “They do not ‘think’ or ‘know,’” she writes, “they merely simulate patterns extracted from their training data.”

Given Dignum’s career as a distinguished scholar who has worked in AI for decades, few people are as qualified as she is to offer a judgment on LLMs. But opinion within the field is far less settled than she suggests. Because LLMs are more complex than their predecessors, they pose interpretative questions that are harder to answer. Are they purely imitative, or do they exhibit “emergent” properties on account of their complexity? Are they best understood as pattern-matching machines, or can they engage in conceptual reasoning of certain kinds? Among AI researchers and practitioners, these are matters of active debate. And this debate cannot be reduced, as some AI deflationists suggest, to a struggle between truth-tellers and the marketing department of OpenAI. There are genuine disagreements over how to characterize LLMs and their capabilities. In some cases, these involve empirical disputes over what an LLM is actually doing at any given moment. At other times, the disagreements are more semantic or philosophical, centered on the meaning of terms like reasoning 
and comprehension.

The simplest way to describe an LLM is as a system that tries to predict the next word in a sequence, based on the probabilities it has gleaned from its training set. An LLM learns how to make these predictions through a series of baroque computations whose convolutions are not fully understood. We know why LLMs work—that is, we have a good sense of their basic mechanisms. What’s less clear is how they work: Even their creators can’t say with precision why a model produces a particular response. This is the reason that the debates around LLMs are so vigorous and, perhaps, irresolvable. The technology is, in certain important respects, unruly and opaque.

By contrast, cars and airplanes are not: You can open them up and see how they work. They are deterministic systems that do what you tell them to do. Dignum frequently emphasizes that AI is made by humans. But just because something is made by humans doesn’t mean it will remain within the ambit of human comprehension and control.

If AI is not like a car or an airplane, then what is it? At one point, Dignum describes LLMs as “a cognitive Frankenstein’s monster.” She means it in a minimizing way: LLMs work by “piecing together fragments of human language in a way that appears intelligent” but isn’t. “Like Frankenstein’s monster,” she writes, “they lack genuine understanding and intentionality.”

I hope it is not too pedantic to point out that this is a misreading of Mary Shelley’s novel: Frankenstein’s monster does indeed think, feel, and scheme. He teaches himself to read and loves Paradise Lost. He craves companionship and hates his creator for abandoning him, a hatred that moves him to kill the man’s wife and brother.

Yet Dignum’s analogy does resonate, albeit for different reasons. Frankenstein is a story about the relationship between human beings and their alien offspring. The monster is created by a human scientist and even assembled from human body parts. Yet he is feared and hated by nearly everyone he encounters because of his “unearthly ugliness.” Despite being wholly man-made, he is somehow otherworldly.

LLMs have a comparable set of qualities. They are, on the one hand, a product of human ingenuity—an achievement enabled by more than eight decades of research into computational models loosely inspired by the human brain. They are also a composite of human culture in the broadest sense, having been trained on large portions of the publicly accessible Internet, along with books, academic papers, and other sources. Yet for all the humanness of their inputs, LLMs are irreducibly nonhuman in their operation. They learn by studying large quantities of text and constructing elaborate mathematical maps of the semiotic relationships within them. This is not how the human brain works.

Accordingly, we might think of an LLM as something like Frankenstein’s monster: an alien of human ancestry that is not wholly assimilable to our purposes. This metaphor must be handled with caution; it should not be taken to mean that AI is sentient or supernatural. I agree with Dignum’s assertion that we need to demystify AI and to construct a “simple, clear narrative” about the technology. In doing so, however, we should be careful not to efface the fundamental weirdness of LLMs.

We should also be skeptical of the opposition that she sets up between humanity and technology. This is not a binary that feels supportable, least of all now, as our technological 
entanglements become even more consuming than they were when Donna Haraway christened us “cyborgs” in 1985. LLMs may never “attain the full spectrum of human intelligence,” as Dignum says, on account of their not being human. But they have clearly achieved a kind of hybridity with humanness that enables them to act in ways that most people perceive as at least quasi-intelligent. Rather than dismissing such a perception as delusional, we might see it as evidence of the technology’s mongrel character. LLMs are an object lesson in the porousness of the human as a category, as well as our tendency to extrude ourselves into our artifacts—artifacts that can, in turn, exert influence over us. This is not necessarily a good thing. People are 
having psychotic breakdowns from talking to AI chatbots. Victor Frankenstein dies filled with regret.

You might be asking yourself why the way we interpret LLMs even matters. The answer is that it has consequences for how we respond to AI politically, a subject that Dignum engages with throughout her book. If we think of the technology as a car, for instance, that implies a certain approach. Cars provide certain benefits but also “cause accidents,” Dignum notes. Fortunately, they are “much safer and more efficient” than they were 50 years ago, thanks to regulation. Today’s AI is like “a car without brakes or seatbelts,” which means that we need to find the AI equivalents of such measures. “Just as we regulate cars to protect ourselves from accidents and misuse, AI also requires safeguards to prevent harm and ensure it serves humanity’s best interests,” Dignum advises.

She believes such safeguards should be anchored in the “principles of ethical AI”—justice, accountability, transparency, and the protection of individual rights—and developed through an “ongoing dialogue” among “technologists, ethicists, policymakers, and communities.” Only by “involving diverse stakeholders in the decision-making process” can the correct balance be struck. It is very important to Dignum that regulation not be seen as impeding AI’s development. “Just as brakes and safety measures allow cars to go faster, regulation enables innovation to grow responsibly and sustainably,” she writes. More specifically, the absence of governance could cause “trust in AI [to] erode, leading to slower adoption or even rejection of the technology.” Policymakers can help accelerate AI’s integration into society while ensuring that it remains respectful of our rights and equitable in its distribution of benefits.

These passages convey a faith in managed capitalism that feels distinctly European. The picture is one in which representatives from government, industry, and civil society come together to forge policy frameworks that 
harmonize their interests. We might ask whether harmony is possible, or what kind of struggles might 
need to be waged to compel the tech giants to submit to such a process. (They are currently fighting EU regulators tooth and nail.) But the deeper root of Dignum’s optimism is her view of AI itself. Because AI is a tool, we can retool it. “In whatever way we define AI, it is crucial to understand that it is an artifact, that is, something created by people,” she explains. “Since we build it, we control and are responsible for its trajectory and choices.”

But what if AI is better understood as Frankenstein’s monster—a man-made yet alien entity, by turns familiar and strange, unpredictable and not fully fathomable, semi-obedient at best? Not all AI fits this description, but LLMs do, and LLMs are what the tech industry is trying to make ubiquitous and indispensable. It seems unwise to adopt a policy agenda that promises to help the industry do so, even if the correct technocrats are somehow put in charge. AI can be a tool, and a useful one, but it can also be something else. I am personally not someone who worries about AI killing us all, but I do think that granting such a technology unlimited power over the conditions of our life and work is likely to be a recipe for chaos and misery. Our best hope, at least in the short term, might be to pursue a strategy of containment in which AI is restricted to certain spheres and functions on the theory that alien encounters can be fruitful, but alien invasions are bad.

On a Wednesday evening last November, the staff of The New Yorker gathered at a marble bar in Tribeca to celebrate the retirement of a longtime “OKer”—a kind of New Yorkerism for a frocked copyeditor. David Remnick, the fifth editor in chief of the magazine, addressed the crowd, praising the new retiree’s fastidiousness and talent.

One after another, longtime staffers recounted their stories of working with this dear colleague; all of them noted his careful kindness. When the remarks concluded, the audience rushed to order, taking advantage of the last half hour of an open bar. It was only after attendees had mostly departed that I received an unusually late call from my rep at the NewsGuild, the parent union of The New Yorker union.

I headed toward the door as I wondered why he was calling. A growing feeling of menace spread through my body. “Don’t want to hide the ball, dude,” he said, “they just fired you.” I scoffed, my voice echoing against the surrounding buildings. Why me? I wondered. I had finished my three-year term as the first vice chair of the New Yorker Union the week prior. Condé Nast had violated our collective bargaining agreement and broken labor law dozens of times, but it had never attempted something as reckless as illegally firing union leaders. As the magnitude of the violation set in, the world began falling away, and, with equal gusto, I began to sob.

Six years after my joining The New Yorker’s storied fact-checking department, my career was reduced to a three-sentence e-mail. It cited “gross misconduct and policy violations,” and was signed by Condé’s head of labor relations, a figure whose compulsion for passive-aggression has earned her a certain level of infamy among media unions. Thankfully, this lack of justification was quickly filled by an outpouring of support from colleagues, frustrated messages that underscored the arbitrary nature of the ouster. It was a welcome surprise to see the many writers I’ve worked with, who routinely confront power and describe it with such elegance, write in my defense. Patrick Radden Keefe illustrated it perfectly in a collective action where staff replied-all to an e-mail sent to executives and staff, demanding my reinstatement: “This feels like the sort of hasty decision that would be relatively easy to reverse in the near term—and more complicated to unwind the more time is allowed to pass.”

The “misconduct” in question may have occurred earlier that day. On November 5, 2025, I joined a dozen other shop members to ask an executive about the shuttering of Teen Vogue and about the many layoffs that had ensued as a result. When we encountered the head of HR, we asked if the company had closed the magazine to preemptively comply with the Trump administration’s campaign of dismantling American journalism. One of the participants of the march recorded the exchange, and the video made its way to social media, with the caption “brutally awkward.” It registered over 1.4 million views. In response to our question, the executive told us to go back to work in a convoluted, lawyer-trained way. Three of my colleagues at other Condé Nast publications, Alma Avalle, Jake Lahut, and Ben Dewey, were also fired, two of them former leaders of their union. (There are two unions in the NewsGuild, The New Yorker Union and Condé Nast United.)

It has been maddening to watch a company discard me after years of our weathering the news together. Since the fall, I have tried not to internalize its portrayal of me as a criminal. I know that I stood up for what I believed was right. Our union celebrates stories of members doing this kind of thing: organizing to stop bullying bosses, negotiating wages and longer parental leave. I kept replaying the moment in the C-suite hallway. I had stood quietly while union members posed a series of questions to an executive who had invited employees to bring him their concerns—searching for some act of gross misconduct, if that were even the incident in question. Our contract has a “just cause” provision, which means that the employer must provide a burden of proof to dismiss an employee. Furthermore, without evidence of my “misconduct,” the company violated the National Labor Relations Act, which created the right to engage in collective action and protection against being fired for participation in those actions. But maybe the bosses simply saw an opportunity in the larger authoritarian entrenchment we have been witness to, where truth or fact, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.”

Every spring, Columbia University’s journalism school hosts a career fair where students are matched with publications that the program deems most likely to hire. It had long been a dwindling market by the time of this fair in 2019. I visited the tables for the Military Times, the Daily News, and Newsday, but I remember noticing the name Michael Luo on the vendor list. I recognized his name from a Times article about the 2016 presidential election. In the piece, Mike described being told to go back to China by a white woman on the Upper East Side. It was a catalyzing incident that cut through the mucky microaggressions that defined Chinese American racism at the time.

At the career fair, Mike sat at a folding table behind a line that snaked around the expo floor. I had doubts about approaching him. After all, the school had made it clear that I had no business meeting him. But later that day, I saw him grab his sports jacket. I walked over and greeted him, and he introduced himself as an executive editor of The New Yorker.

Mike and his colleague David Rohde asked me what I wanted to do in journalism. Nearly all my classmates were just out of college, while I was turning 31, my career deferred by a stint as a US Army officer. I thought that delay had put me miles behind. I told Mike and David that I was starting out in journalism and I was looking for a rigorous job to catch up for lost time. Mike asked if I wanted to fact-check. “Sure,” I said, having no idea what that meant. David drafted an e-mail on his phone, turned it to me, and asked me to write myself a message. Afterwards, I joined some friends at a bar in disbelief. Did I just get hired at The New Yorker?

I hadn’t. Not yet. A few weeks later, I went to the World Trade Center to be interviewed, returning for the first time since shopping at the old Century 21 in the spring of 2001. I was an outsider to The New Yorker, but I had also felt that way in the military—a Chinese kid from Queens. I pitched myself as consummately responsible. By summer, I had completed two interviews but hadn’t received an offer, so I started as a runner for the Daily News, delivering stories like the women’s World Cup parade, a wind farm announcement, and a triple murder to reporters.

During my first week, while sitting in the Bronx with the family of a teenager who had suffered catastrophic burns from an apartment fire, I received a call from a 212 number. When I picked up, it was someone calling from the human resources department at Condé Nast. Confused, I told him he had the wrong number and hung up. Strange, I thought. Then the same number rang again, I excused myself from the family and picked up. “Before you hang up,” the caller exclaimed, “is this Jasper Lo?” Even stranger, I thought. “You recently applied for a job with us,” he said. “I don’t think so,” I replied. He continued, “Well I’m here to negotiate your salary for the fact-checking position at The New Yorker.” I asked what Condé Nast had to do with the magazine. With some secondhand embarrassment, he explained.

I began working as a checker for The New Yorker’s website in August 2019. In many ways, the Daily News had been an easy off-ramp from the army: Both required wearing backpacks, walking all day, and a certain proximity to death. Fact-checking, somehow, felt isolating without that terrain.

Each day I built a world in the sonic landscape of source calls that vanished just as quickly with the churn of the web. In my first month, I was assigned to check a dispatch about the democratic crisis in Hong Kong. There was a short runway for it, but it was a thrill to get a serious assignment about a city so close to my heart. Twenty-four or 48 hours with most of the work at night? No problem, I thought. I had learned how to tackle this kind of work in the army. It was finally time to prove myself. I scheduled all my calls at the convenience of the sources in Hong Kong. Would it be correct to say that “Bonnie began to cry when she recalled a violent clash between protesters blocking legislators from passing the national security law?” I asked over the phone. I finished overnight, napping in between like it was a reconnaissance mission.

Shortly after I began checking, an assignment brought me to a call with the Daily News, where a politics editor I had worked with picked up the phone. I said hello and told him I was calling from The New Yorker. Was it correct to say that the newsroom had moved twice? He said yes, then asked, “How is it over there?”—and after a pause, “Bet they don’t yell ‘motherfucker’ across their newsroom as much as we do.” No, I replied, it’s not really a “motherfucker” kind of place.

A decade before I started as a fact-checker, another New Yorker staffer, Dan Baum, had gone viral for his description of the workplace. He tweeted: “Nobody leaves a New Yorker job voluntarily. I was fired. And over the next few days, I’ll tell that story here.” This was when the platform still limited posts to 140 characters, but he exploited the constraint, releasing the story—tweet by tweet—until it reached 4,323 words. Describing the office environment, he wrote, “nobody at the office seems very happy. The atmosphere is vastly strained. I’d get back on the Times Square sidewalk after a visit and feel I needed to flap my arms.”

By the time I arrived, I understood what he meant. I’d often be stuck in the elevator with some of the country’s most successful writers and editors, sharing a heavy silence. “It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying,” Baum had written on Twitter. “Like someone’s dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it.”

The anxiety wore off the more I understood The New Yorker and especially the more I worked with those editors, the copy and photo editors, and all the others that rounded out the office. Magazine reporting, I learned, was unlike most other forms of journalism. There were no producers, no directors, no cinematographers, or gaffers; it was only the writer, their editor, and their talent for turning reporting into a single narrative. (All my respect to the copyeditors who polished pieces into perfection.) Sometimes, when the story called for it, an impromptu investigative team formed. This happened often when I worked with editor David Haglund and staff writer Charles Bethea. Charles’s stories were pulpy—the kind that garnered movie options, while still getting to the heart of a serious national subject. He had been writing about how RICO was being used against Atlanta rappers long before Fani Willis brought charges against then-ex-president Trump.

In another of his investigations, “Is This the Worst Place to Be Poor and Charged with a Federal Crime?,” Charles dove into why the Southern District of Georgia was one of only two in the continental United States without federal or community defenders. The official line was that public defenders weren’t needed since a panel of private attorneys fulfilled the requirements of the Sixth Amendment: the right to be represented by a lawyer. But it seemed like an open secret that this was known to be insufficient. Real estate lawyers, for example, could not provide the robust defense needed for felony charges.

Charles discovered that a federal defenders’ office had existed briefly in the 1980s but was closed after being deemed unnecessary. Sources spoke of a rumor that the chief judge of the district had forced the office to close by making the head of the defenders’ office sign a resignation letter before the office opened, leverage to close the office if he pleased. The problem was that Charles couldn’t reach the man who had allegedly signed it, and the judge was long dead.

This is the curious thing about fact-checking. Sometimes, even after months of the reporter’s trying to get in touch with someone, the checker gets through. After a few days talking to the sources in the piece, people who surrounded this uncooperative head of office, I got a call out of the blue. It was him; he had heard the voicemail I left. It outlined everything that Charles had discovered and how the lawyer was being portrayed. The man had decided that he wanted to set the record straight. In the call, he told me that he had been a young and nervous attorney when he first met the chief judge. In the judge’s chamber, he was trying to make a good impression when the judge unexpectedly presented a resignation letter. The lawyer didn’t want to make a fuss and, though it struck him as strange, he thought it was customary to sign the document. This, in many ways, proved the overarching thesis of Charles’s piece, that local practices seemed to take precedence over federal law.

Fact-checkers weren’t there for factual accuracy alone, in a story like this one; we brought one last push of reporting that could crack the case. That year, citing Charles’s article, Senator Jon Ossoff introduced legislation to require an office of public defenders in the district. As I learned more about reporting, I was making more sense of the magazine itself.

I had never worked at an organization with a labor union before coming to The New Yorker, and had neither the familial history nor the political education to understand it. Still, when a steward asked me to support a collective action, I instinctively agreed. As a young officer in the army, I often had bad ideas called out by sergeants, through side-eyes and tuts. They would guide me toward something more practical and often empathic. By the same token, they told me when to push back on stupid orders or how to subvert them. Through them, I learned that there was a cost to making things go smoothly, or, ethically. There was almost always a way, but it was up to the officer to decide whether they were willing to pay for it. In hindsight, these noncommissioned officers were instructive in how I would confront my problems at The New Yorker.

My path to becoming a shop steward began with a mental health day. I’d never had the self-respect to ask for one before, but the news during the pandemic had become overwhelming. I called my boss at the time, explained the situation, and perhaps overshared. That afternoon, I received a notification that my sick day—of which I had an unlimited amount—had been reclassified. My boss had used my own words as justification for charging the day as personal time. I had been got.

When I was later nominated to be a shop steward and then the first vice chair, I accepted both because I knew it was an opportunity to resolve my hangups with work: the way the workplace encouraged one’s self-worth to be tied to its success among them. Volunteering with the union was a way to both transform and share the transformation, to help others along the way. The New Yorker was a study in contradiction, a place that prioritized humanity while also being needlessly cruel. Everyone agreed that working conditions needed to change, but few wanted to upset their manager. Most people preferred the fantasy of the institution to its reality.

In turn, organizers took on the sublimated resentment that workers carried. I came to understand that it was part and parcel of the organization: If you realized something wasn’t right, you were made to feel alone. When overshadowed by one another’s talent and accomplishment, you start to believe that you have more to lose than most; especially in an environment suggesting that a dozen smarter, more talented candidates stood ready to take your place.

But the lengthy and acidic negotiation of our first collective bargaining agreement began to break this delusion. It forced the staff to confront this duality. And with each crisis, two rounds of surprise layoffs, for example—staffers learned the importance of our union and their individual responsibility within it. It was an education birthed from what seemed like random but grievous acts from Condé Nast. Powerlessness turned into an effort to change the culture, and soon, collective action became the norm.

During one of the layoffs in 2023, shop members marched together to demand an answer for this unprecedented bloodletting. By showing our displeasure with as many members as possible, we convinced Condé Nast to hold an extraordinary negotiation to expand layoff benefits—benefits that were immediately extended to nonunion staffers. These victories required constant vigilance.

It became a regular affair to walk up to David Remnick, who routinely answered our questions by claiming that he was unaware of the issue or powerless to change anything. Consequently, we would seek out the CEO or the head of human resources to see if maybe the buck stopped there. With our hearts pounding, we often marched behind Hannah Aizenman, our unit chair, who stood nearly a head shorter than me. Walking with her reminded me of the pre-mission feeling of danger and anticipation—the kind of blitz that used to surge through me before we set out on missions. In those moments, you felt dizzy from the heady switch between the physical and metaphysical feeling of power. When we found the boss, Hannah would calmly put forth our questions. When no executive was present—which was most of the time—she would deliver a rabble-rousing speech detailing why the circumstances were so wrong. More importantly, she would tell us how we would fix them: together.

Our speedy musters and growing numbers were exhibiting the power we were building. A week before I was fired, I told the new officers beginning their term that the union had never been more powerful, but Condé Nast had never been more erratic. Our strength seemed to grow, even as the magazine tried to suck it dry. The New Yorker’s leadership has been quiet about my firing; they've acted like they have no power here. But the company’s legal inability to fire me has been challenged by dozens of senior editors and department heads, including my boss. Even they had the courage to speak up on my behalf. Why couldn’t their bosses?

In the days after I was fired, I pleaded to Mike Luo my case for not changing course and publishing two pieces I had written about the Chinese community in New York City that I had worked on for a year. They were challenging endeavors, reported and written over a year, while I balanced organizing and fact-checking. He told me that he wasn’t sure if my termination would make it “inconvenient” to publish them. They were killed a week later, for “editorial reasons.”

Today, I find myself a beneficiary amid this steep ascent in organizing power. Though our collective bargaining agreement stipulates that disagreements be mediated by arbitration, there is no provision against extending the process indefinitely by simply refusing dates. The company declined five of these meetings, prompting my union to fire off several more reply-alls and to print a nearly life-size cutout of me—the same image that appeared in the New York Post. Finally, the company agreed to a date this upcoming May.

It’s telling of the leadership at Condé Nast that nobody had thought through the consequences of firing union leaders, especially ones that had stewarded members through such a turbulent time. The labor relations department, for instance, has told our union that this is a corporation, not a democratic town square.

This is a laughable business justification. The point isn’t to workshop despotism; it’s to make and sell a profitable magazine. In decision after decision, the company has a questionable record in proving its fiduciary duty. That’s been a problem since some of the last successful magazines in America remain in the company’s remit. By firing the four of us, Condé Nast has once again forced everyone to stop ignoring the company’s ridiculous decisions and reckon with them. And in doing so, it has created a new kind of character in our unions. Its members are a force that mobilizes more quickly, and they are ready to escalate actions if they are not being heard.

My job at The New Yorker felt like a dream as much as it ended like one. Still, I remain astounded by the incredible talent and care from my coworkers who continue to meet the demands of publishing a weekly magazine while risking their jobs to advocate for their colleagues—of whom I have unexpectedly become the focus. I imagine that it must evoke some ambivalence among members: Advancement requires competition, but an ethical contest requires collective action. In a workplace shaped by arbitrary power, those instincts collide.

I am living in the aftermath of that collision—terminated by an arbitrary decision—yet conscious that I’m the one who has to behave professionally to avoid retaliation and maintain a career as a writer. I share this position with hundreds of recently fired journalists who are forced to blame no one, allowed only to describe their careers as a result of whimsy and luck. What is left of long-form narrative nonfiction now feels a lot like a house built precariously on the edge of a seaside cliff. The views are perfect, but the cliff is crumbling. It often seems like our unions are the only ones recognizing this and attempting to shore up the rock.

My therapist often tells me to externalize my inner critics as demons with recognizable features like horns and sharp teeth. I realize now that I’ve imagined them wrong. They are coiffed, glassy-eyed, and pearly toothed, with the kind of plastic face that resembles a mask. One reason I kept my responsibilities in the union was to have real and external attacks; to separate my inner demons from the real ones. During a particularly memorable appointment with my psychiatrist last summer, I told him that I was feeling increasingly paranoid from fact-checking pieces about the new administration and how the labor relations department was threatening me with discipline in response to our union’s collective actions. He demurred and said he could not, in good conscience, prescribe anything that would dull my awareness of my surroundings. What I was telling him was real. You see, the problem wasn’t in my head—it was in the facts.

For anyone who believes that Donald Trump, in his infinite narcissism, has no empathy for anyone other than himself, think again. He may project nothing but apathy or glee concerning the pain he’s inflicted on countless families around the world, including his own damaged, parasitic brood; he may threaten war crimes in a national televised address; he may promise to use federal troops to “force ourselves upon” Los Angeles during the 2026 World Cup; but he does genuinely seem to love golfing legend Tiger Woods.

The feeling is reciprocated. After Woods almost died this week—rolling his car, opioids in his pockets—his first call was to Trump’s direct line. According to police body-cam footage, Woods said that he made this call even before the officer approached his car.

What is this connection about? How does this openly ethnonationalist president—who offered preferential refugee admissions  to white South Africans while enacting unprecedented violence against Black and brown immigrants—relate to Woods? Woods, a trailblazing athlete who integrated countless country clubs, used to describe himself as Cablinasian—Caucasian, Black, and Asian. That is, until he got a call from Nike telling him that he was just Black. 

After that, you never heard the word “Cablinasian” again. Soon, the shoe giant released a commercial—based upon the iconic slogan of solidarity “I Am Spartacus”—in which a diverse group of children said defiantly: “I am Tiger Woods!” It was rebellion without a cause, rebellion for market share, Jackie Robinson if Robinson had been more interested in brand recognition than in civil rights. In fact, maybe Woods and Trump do have something in common: The vacuous nature of branding for the sake of accumulation isn’t too far off from accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Perhaps this is what drew them together. 

Certainly, their attraction is linked to Trump’s obsession with golf. Tiger is the historical apex of a sport that seems to hold Trump’s attention more than the war that has displaced millions of people in Iran and Lebanon, which he illegally launched. Or perhaps it’s because Woods is always appropriately—and humiliatingly—sycophantic in Trump’s presence. He doesn’t challenge Trump. He adores him, and Trump basks in his glow.

It could also be that Woods dates Don Jr.’s ex-wife, Vanessa, whom Trump always seemed to like more than his son. Apparently, Woods’s presence in his life causes Don Jr. no end of distress. In the wake of the DUI arrest, anonymous sources close to Don Jr. told the press, “[Don. Jr.] is furious. Those are his kids. Full stop…. Everyone else gave Tiger the benefit of the doubt. But Don always saw the red flags. Always.” Given Don Jr.’s own erratic public behavior, his concerns feel more like an effort to shame Daddy’s favorite than a protective instinct for the next generation of damaged Trumps.

But what’s most likely is that, as with all of Trump’s relationships, this is also largely transactional. As announced with great fanfare in 2014, Tiger Woods was set to design the Trump World Golf Club in the human rights hellhole that is Dubai. Under orders from Trump, Woods is also now supposed to be redesigning Washington, DC’s public Langston Golf Course, which opened in 1939 as the city’s first course built specifically for Black Americans. There are widespread fears that, following Woods’s makeover, these public courses will go private, shutting out people who can’t afford it and erasing the history of the Black golfers that have used the course for generations. The irony will choke you if you think about it too hard.

But whatever the reason for their mutual affection, Trump took time away from his disastrous war and suffocation of Cuba to express empathy for Woods even before the golfer’s very sad, very glazed-over mug shot hit the press. On hearing the news, Trump stopped threatening universally recognized war crimes, rushed to the nearest phone, and called his old friends at the New York Post to jump to Woods’s defense. He said that Woods “lives a life of pain” from old injuries but is “doing great.” Trump also pointed out that Woods is “under a tremendous physical pressure from his various ailments, you know, the back and the leg.”

Now he cares about people living in pain. The amputees of Gaza, though? Not so much.

Tiger Woods is an American tragedy. He’s the golf wunderkind who was on The Mike Douglas Show, putting for grownups at age 2. He’s the 15-time Grand Slam winner who fundamentally changed the audience of golf, growing it to unprecedented levels. He was the teenager whose future his late father, Earl, said would be comparable to Gandhi’s.

Trump offers no such pressure to be Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Muhammed Ali. Just a smiling brand who dates the mother of his grandchildren. And now Woods has had the kind of fall from grace that mirrors our current culture: rife with performance enhancers, opioids, depression, and decline.

Perhaps that is what’s really at the root of this friendship: the death of hope. Trump is the king of a country where hope goes to die. Woods has become the mascot of a nation’s crumbling greatness. American tragedy? This is American reality.

Can we add Netanyahu’s war against Iran to Barbara Tuchman’s list of unwise and counterproductive policy decisions detailed in her book The March of Folly?

Just a little more than a week before the beginning of the latest war, I was one of three Israelis who participated in the public launch of an Iranian-Israeli joint dialogue forum under the title “We Are Not Our Regimes,” hosted by the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna. The Iranians were all republicans (not the MAGA variety, but supporters of an Iranian republic) who are opposed both to the Islamist Ayatollah regime and to the monarchists represented by Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran. Since it is impossible under the current circumstances for Iranians who live in Iran to participate in such a joint initiative, the Iranians who participated all live in Europe or the United States, though they all have family and friends who they are in contact with in Iran itself. The Israelis are all opposed to our current extremist, messianic government, led by Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Although both the Iranians and the Israelis would like to see regime change in Iran, they all agreed that a war initiated by external forces was not and could not be the way to achieve that goal (and regime change in both Israel and the United States would also be very welcomed by them). The Iranians emphasized that a desired regime change could only come from an internal struggle by the Iranian people. They listed two possibilities for such a development. One was the fact that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei was almost 87, and not in good health. It was possible that his successor would be more pragmatic and flexible, creating an opening for a more liberal regime in Iran. The second possibility was a renewed nuclear deal with the US, which would lead to a reduction of sanctions—a key to the development of a potent middle class in Iran that would be the driving force behind a successful popular demand for change in the regime.

Instead, what we got was a renewed war against Iran, this time a joint Israeli-American initiative. Netanyahu apparently convinced Trump that such an attack would galvanize the Iranian people to rise up and demand regime change. As Trump said after the war started, “Now is the time to seize control of your destiny.… America is backing you.… Be brave, be bold.… take back your country. America is with you.”

Well, it hasn’t quite happened that way. Instead, after Ayatollah Khamenei was assassinated by the Israelis, his son Mojtaba Khamenei was chosen to be his successor—the candidate of the extremist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who have clamped down on any potential popular protest. His father didn’t even designate him as one of his three potential successors! One of the designated potential successors was former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, the reformist who negotiated the effective JCPOA (Iranian nuclear deal) with President Obama and who, together with his foreign minister, Mohammad Zarif, made overtures to the West. They even made a hint toward the Jews and, by implication, Israel—a greeting on the Rosh Hashanah holiday. Such an appointment as the successor to Khamenei could have led to the realization of both the possibility of a more pragmatic and flexible supreme leader and a nuclear deal that would have led to sanctions relief and the strengthening of key middle-class elements in Iranian society.

And to make matters worse, Israel then assassinated Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, who had actively opposed the appointment of Khamenei’s son as the successor.

Our joint forum, now officially called the Iranian-Israeli Peace Forum, issued the following statement after the war began:

The historical context of the present war is complex but highly relevant. The ideologically driven hostility of the Islamic Republic of Iran toward the United States (the “Great Satan”) and the State of Israel (the “Little Satan”) has long contributed to an atmosphere of confrontation and helped create the conditions that made this deadly conflict possible.

At the same time, this hostility has also served as a convenient pretext for successive Israeli governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu to sustain and escalate tensions. Such escalation aligns with the agenda of Israeli fundamentalist forces and coincides with the political imperatives of maintaining his current governing coalition.

As for the United States, President Donald Trump did not seek congressional approval before launching the war, did not exhaust the negotiations track, and has been unclear about the war’s objectives and what outcome would bring it to an end.

The threats and provocations of the Islamic Republic do not justify the launch of a large-scale war. It is a war of choice initiated by two leaders whose unfounded claims that Iran posed an imminent nuclear threat to the United States and Israel were invoked to legitimize military action undertaken in violation of international law.

We therefore condemn this war unequivocally. Military escalation will bring nothing but death, destruction, and suffering to the peoples of Iran, Israel, and the wider region. War will deepen insecurity rather than eliminate it.

There is no doubt that Iran is governed by a repressive, semi-totalitarian regime, yet its overthrow cannot be imposed from outside. The struggle for peace, freedom, democracy, and human rights must ultimately be waged by the citizens of Iran themselves.

Recent history offers sobering lessons. Foreign military interventions have repeatedly failed to deliver liberation or democracy. Instead, they have too often produced devastation, social fragmentation, and the danger of state collapse.

For these reasons, we call for an immediate end to the military hostilities and a renewed commitment to diplomacy, international law, and peaceful political transformation.

Netanyahu clearly wanted this war to distract attention from Gaza, to delay his trial for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust that he is afraid will result in a conviction and jail sentence, and to boost his standing in the polls toward the Israeli elections that must be held by October 2026.

The Ma’ariv daily publishes a poll every Friday indicating what the results would be if elections were held that day. Ever since the Gaza war began on October 7, 2023, and even beforehand during the period of the mass protests against the government’s attempt to undermine the independence of the courts, the results have been that Netanyahu’s extremist government would lose to the right-center-left opposition. Therefore, I was very anxious to see the results of the first Friday poll after the war began the previous Saturday. The result was that Netanyahu’s coalition gained just one seat, from 50 to 51 out of 120 seats in the Knesset (parliament). The combined opposition of the Jewish and predominantly Palestinian-Israeli parties had 69 seats. By the following week, Netanyahu’s coalition had already lost that seat!

It is true that unlike the majority American public opposition to the war, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish Israelis support the war, though as it completes its fourth week, support for continuation of the war has declined from 81 percent to 68 percent. Even many liberal analysts are gung-ho for this “necessary war.” This is primarily because Netanyahu and his associates have convinced the Israeli public that Iran, with its nuclear program, ballistic missiles, and proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, poses an existential threat to Israel. Statements by Iranian leaders such as Ayatollah Khomeini and President Ahmadinejad that “Israel must be wiped off the map” have reinforced this fear. As the son of a historian, Netanyahu is very concerned with his legacy. He does not want to be remembered as the leader who failed to prevent the murder of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas on October 7 but as the man who successfully dealt with the Iranian threat, an issue that has always been at the top of his agenda.

Yet support for the war has not translated into support for Netanyahu. The majority of the Israeli public still holds him responsible for October 7—for having encouraged Qatar to send $30 million a month to prop up Hamas, which supposedly would be satisfied with just governing Gaza and wouldn’t attack, while ensuring there was no need to negotiate with President Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the PLO and Palestinian Authority, about a political compromise. They hold him responsible for not taking responsibility for this policy and for heavily subsidizing the ultra-Orthodox part of his coalition—about 14 percent of the population—who don’t share in the burden of military service.

Sixty Israeli civil society organizations have twice published an ad in Haaretz calling for an end to the war, and weekly demonstrations have begun in Tel Aviv and other locations calling for an end to the war. The police, under the authority of fascist Minister of National Security Ben-Gvir, attacked and dispersed the demonstrators in Tel Aviv and Haifa for violating wartime crowd regulations, supposedly “for their own safety.”

With the midterm elections drawing near, rising gas prices, and a fear of being dragged into a Vietnam-Afghanistan-Iraq quagmire scenario, my hope is that President Trump will soon declare “we won” and end the war. Netanyahu wouldn’t dare to continue the war against his wishes.

Meanwhile, people are dying and homes are being destroyed in both Tehran and Tel Aviv.

Olga Barrios has been working at the beef-processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, long enough to remember the morning in 2006 when ICE agents stormed in and arrested 260 of her coworkers. She watched as they were rounded up, restrained with cellophane wrap and chains, and marched out of the facility. Recounting that time to me, she grew emotional as she described how a local church took in children whose parents had been detained. To this day, “it’s in the back of my mind,” she said. “The company, instead of protecting the workers, was actually turning them in.”

The owner of the Greeley plant at the time, Swift, was the target of six simultaneous ICE raids across the United States in “Operation Wagon Train,” the largest single worksite immigration enforcement action in US history. Some 1,300 workers were detained in all, depleting Swift’s overall workforce by 10 percent. The company struggled to recover, and a year later it was acquired by JBS, a Brazilian company and the world’s largest meat producer.

Since the raid, JBS has rebuilt its workforce by partnering with refugee resettlement agencies to recruit migrants with work authorization. As of 2020, an estimated 80–90 percent of workers at the Greeley plant were foreign born. Workers speak over 50 languages on the disassembly line as they slice, debone, trim, and grind up to 6,000 carcasses a day. Kim Cordova, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7, which represents workers at the plant, said JBS’s reliance on immigrant labor is strategic. “They’re really good about bringing in folks from different countries that don’t know their rights yet or are here seeking asylum,” she said. JBS knows that precarity and fear means “they can run those chain speeds fast.”

But on March 16, Barrios and her 3,800 coworkers reached a breaking point, walking off the job to launch the first-ever strike at the Greeley plant and the first major strike in the US meatpacking industry in four decades. Members have been working under an expired contract since last July, and have struggled to come to an agreement with JBS on issues including pay and adequate safety equipment. According to the union, JBS has offered wage increases of less than 2 percent per year on average, lower than the rate of inflation. The strike is scheduled to end today after stretching into a third week as the union said JBS refused to come to the table.

Meatpacking is among the most dangerous industries in the United States, with workers standing shoulder-to-shoulder using industrial tools and sharp knives to make thousands of repetitive cuts in a shift. Workers don personal protective equipment including hard hats (with colors indicating their level of seniority), safety goggles, boots, metal-mesh gloves, arm-guards, aprons, and more. But when that gear is inevitably damaged or worn down, JBS garnishes the cost of replacement directly from workers’ checks, which can cost up to $1,100. The plant’s average wage is just $26 an hour.

Amid the Trump administration’s assault on immigrant workers, JBS employees organized across nationalities and languages to launch a historic work stoppage. Many workers in meatpacking plants have Temporary Protected Status, which Trump has eliminated for millions from countries including Haiti, Venezuela, and Afghanistan. Last June, the administration paused ICE raids in agriculture and meatpacking after pressure from the industry, but reversed course just days later. In July, ICE raided a Glenn Valley Foods meat processing plant in Omaha, Nebraska, detaining more than 50 employees, and leaving the plant without most of its workforce. And ICE’s terror campaign across the country puts workers at risk, regardless of their immigration status. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re born in this country or not,” said Cordova. “We’ve had US citizens killed by ICE.”

Even in this hostile political climate, workers in Greeley are fighting back, Cordova said, “Because you can die at that plant.” In 2021, OSHA cited JBS after a worker fell into a vat containing chemicals used to process animal hides and died. That same year, a worker was pulled into a conveyor belt and had to have his arm amputated. “Our union gave us an opportunity to speak up for ourselves and that’s what we’re doing,” said Nathaniel Mann, who has worked at JBS for one year. “Pay us for our work. People are losing their hands. People are losing their lives.”

You may not have heard of JBS, but you likely have seen their products sold under brand names like Blue Ribbon Beef and Certified Angus Beef sold at Costco, Kroger, and Stop & Shop and supplied to McDonald’s, Burger King, and more. JBS is the largest player in the highly concentrated US meatpacking industry, 85 percent of which was dominated by just four companies in 2019. The flagship Greeley plant alone accounts for 5 percent of the country’s beef-processing capacity.

JBS is the largest employer in surrounding Weld County, and has built a workforce of migrants from Mexico, Somalia, Myanmar, and more. By 2007, Greeley’s foreign-born population had swelled to 12,000, constituting more than 12 percent of the total population and a 60 percent increase from 2000. Other companies emulated JBS’s model and as of 2020 more than 45 percent of all meatpacking workers were foreign-born.

JBS relies on a stream of migrant labor constantly replenished by high turnover in its grueling slaughterhouses. According to Local 7, a new hire class of up to 60 workers go through training at the plant every week. “The company would benefit if they took better care of the ones that are there, have been there long, and know the job,” said Barrios.

To meet its labor demand, JBS has allegedly turned to increasingly unscrupulous hiring methods. The company currently faces a class-action lawsuit by over 1,000 Haitian workers who say they were recruited to Greeley via TikTok with the promise of jobs and housing nearby. Instead, they were packed into squalid motel rooms with up to 11 other people, and thrown into hazardous disassembly work without training in their native language.

“We strongly disagree with the claims made in the recently filed lawsuit,” said a JBS spokesperson. “Our employees choose to work with us, understand the terms of their employment, and are free to leave at any time.”

JBS’s market size allows it to set industry standards for pay and conditions, especially for newly arrived immigrant workers who lack other options for entry-level jobs that don’t require English proficiency. From Greeley, an Amazon warehouse that could provide similar work is over an hour away. “JBS is doing whatever they want because they don’t have competition,” said Bienvenue Hovozounkou, a union steward who has worked at JBS since he moved to the United States from Benin in 2019. JBS paid $55 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit alleging that it colluded with other big meatpackers to suppress wages across the industry.

JBS is trying to pressure workers at Greeley to accept the same terms it negotiated with 14 other plants last year. “We presented a strong, fair offer consistent with the historic national contract reached in 2025 in partnership with UFCW International – an agreement that has already delivered higher wages, a secure pension, and long-term financial stability for team members at our other major facilities,” said the JBS spokesperson. But Local 7 says that contract doesn’t account for the higher living expenses in Colorado (compared to other worksites in places like Nebraska and Texas). If workers in Greeley win more, it could open the door for tens of thousands of workers at other plants to demand the same when their contracts expire.

Mann works on the cleaning team, sweeping away discarded innards and cuts of meat that fall to the floor and spraying the conveyors and work surfaces clean of blood. He wears a wetsuit to protect him from the 180-degree water in the pressurized hose he uses. During a recent shift, he heard screaming behind him and turned around to see that the hose’s back end had exploded, spraying scalding water on everyone on the line (who aren’t given protective suits). He watched it burn through a woman’s boot down to her shoe. Two days later, management hadn’t properly patched the hose, and it exploded again.

This time Mann saw it happening and jumped on top of the hose as if to block the impact of a bomb, covering the geyser with his suited body. He felt the scorching water seeping through the seams of his suit until another coworker realized what was happening and turned the water off. Mann’s story isn’t uncommon. JBS has been fined by OSHA for failing to provide proper protective equipment to workers handling the hot water lines and exposing them to severe skin and eye injuries from hazardous chemical cleaners.

A lack of proper equipment can turn a dangerous job into a deadly one. The union says JBS keeps a low inventory of personal protective equipment, which is often given to workers damaged or in the wrong size. Workers use dull, thinned down knives to cut through hide, muscle, and bone. When they ask for a replacement, workers say JBS garnishes the cost directly out of their paychecks, ranging from around $100 for gloves to over $1,000 for mesh gowns. “Our policy is—and has long been—that team members are only responsible for paying for personal protective equipment if the equipment is lost or maliciously damaged,” said the JBS spokesperson.

Even if they avoid the most gruesome accidents, workers often suffer from repetitive motion injuries. Nesly Pierre, one of the plaintiffs in the class action suit by Haitian workers, was assigned to “slaughter intestines” on the kill floor, which required him to stick two fingers into the belly of a cow carcass and pull the intestine out with his fingers. After a few days, his fingers locked in a clawing position and his hand swelled so big that he couldn’t close it.

The pace of work is set by an overhead chain that launches carcasses toward workers who rush to carve them using heavy saws, knives, and power tools. As of 2024, JBS’s crewing guide had a maximum speed of 390 “heads” per hour. But Hovozounkou monitors chain speeds as a union steward, and has seen them reach 420 in the last year. The USDA is currently considering a proposal to allow for even faster chain speeds in pork and chicken processing plants, which JBS has publicly applauded.

A week before the strike began, workers say JBS management brought them into rooms in groups and told them the company couldn’t guarantee that they’d keep their jobs if they went on strike. “Because we hadn’t seen [a strike] before, there was definitely fear and a lot of questioning as to what are going to be the consequences of all this,” said Barrios. But, she added, “We all agreed that this is going to have to happen for…ourselves and also for the future and the betterment of the community.”

The specter of Trump’s immigration crackdowns functions as a means of control to scare workers out of taking action. “The company is doubling down on their threats and intimidation to try to force people to come to work in really bad working environments,” said Cordova. Images from Greeley have captured a striking defiance against the Trump administration’s campaign of fear. On the lively picket line, workers danced and sang in Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, Burmese, Somali, Rohingya, and more. “For many of the workers, this is the first time they’ve ever got to experience democracy, is having the right to vote on their contract,” said Cordova. “A strike represents democracy.”

By striking, workers are hitting back not just at JBS management but also the Trump administration’s embrace of the company. Pilgrim’s Pride, a chicken-processing subsidiary of JBS, was the single largest donor to Trump’s inauguration fund, giving $5 million. Just months later, the SEC approved JBS’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange over the protests of lawmakers and activists based on the company’s history of bribing Brazilian officials, deforestation in the Amazon, and child-labor violations, including at the Greeley plant, where investigators found that migrant children as young as 13 were working overnight shifts.

Hovozounkou sees JBS’s donations to Trump as an insult to workers. “They have money to support someone else who is not even working for them,” he said. “We are the ones who are suffering, making money for them, putting our lives in danger.” Workers believe JBS will ultimately come to the table because it can’t generate its record profits without them. “Without the employees, there is no company,” said Hovozounkou. “We want JBS to listen, to hear from our voice what we want and then give it to us.”