On October 2, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez found himself beating back accusations that France’s government had reacted with insufficient vigor to the wave of student protests that has swept the country this autumn. “There are no orders for restraint,” said the minister in charge of internal security, namely the Gendarmes and CRS battalions that are called on to police demonstrations.

This time at least, Nuñez was being brutally honest. The ongoing occupations and wildcat protests, led first by high school students fed up with a fraying secondary education system, have been met by a dramatic and in many ways unprecedented deployment of state power. From the arbitrary arrest and detention of thousands of minors to the use of excessive force by riot police, the government’s primary response to the eruption has been to raise the physical and legal costs of taking to the streets.

Upward of 400,000 students, teachers, and supporters demonstrated across the country on October 6 for the day of national marches since the movement began. The figures of total arrests are now approaching 7,000 individuals, with some 87 percent estimated to be underage minors. These figures already outpace the preventive arrests seen in the beginnings of other social movements such as the 2018 “yellow vest” revolt, which had already set a high bar as far as repressive standards go.

There’s little denying that stiff policing has become a hallmark of Emmanuel Macron’s presidency. But according to Alice Cohen-Morzadec, university student and spokesperson for L’Union Étudiante, “Rarely have we seen these levels of tension with seemingly no efforts from the police to de-escalate.” In addition to the calls for more resources for the education system, student protests have increasingly turned their attention to the police response, with demonstrators at this week’s marches holding up signs and banners with slogans like “police everywhere, education nowhere” or “too young to vote, old enough to be tear-gassed.”

Speaking in Parliament on October 6, a few kilometers away from the Paris demonstration, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu dismissed all allegations of a heavy-handed police response. “It’s a lie to claim that there is an intentional and disproportionate use of force by the police,” the prime minister said during government questions. “It’s a dirty slander against the republican police!”

As of October 8, the oversight bureau charged with internal inquiries into the use of force has announced a total of 18 investigations since the beginning of the student mobilization. Among the most harrowing cases are adolescents who have had their jaws shattered by rubber bullets or their hands blown off by explosive stun grenades. One young protester in the outskirts of Paris testified to being dragged along a street covered with broken glass. “I couldn’t breathe, I thought I was going to die,” he told reporters at the alternative media outlet Street Press. At a medical examination, doctors found pieces of broken glass lodged in his head.

The hard response was written on the wall from the moment the student revolt started to pick up speed last week.

In a September 30 memo addressed to the police hierarchy, Interior Minister Nuñez signaled that “the proportionate use of force must never inhibit the work of reestablishing public order.” Beneath the evident contradiction in those orders—that is, between supposedly “proportionate” tactics and the disinhibited restoring of order—rights observers and legal experts read what was essentially carte blanche granted to law enforcement. Not to be outdone, Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin held an October 1 meeting with state prosecutors, posting a photo of the gathering to social media that trumpeted a “penal response of great firmness” for protesting students.

“What message is being sent to French youth by political authorities? Their message is clear: ‘We’re going to beat you, rip off your hands, and it won’t be our fault. It will be yours,’” the prominent civil liberties attorney Raphaël Kempf told The Nation.

For Lecornu’s government, saving face in the crisis depends on its ability to present the protest movement as a cover for hooliganism. “Ultraviolence is knocking on the doors of our high schools,” said the prime minister on October 6.

With exceptional examples such as the teacher who was doused in gasoline and beaten up by rioters in southern France on October 2, government ministers and right-wing media alike want to portray the student revolt as little more than a case of youth nihilism run amok. The support for the movement by the left-wing party La France Insoumise, including Saint-Denis Mayor Bally Bagayoko’s claim that “violence can be legitimate,” has also been pointed to in the efforts to dismiss the uprising as an offshoot of far-left entryism.

“Unlike previous student mobilizations, this one is being treated like an urban riot, and much of that has to do with the fact that it emerged from underprivileged neighborhoods,” Arthur Vuattoux, a sociologist who studies juvenile justice, told The Nation. That many of the protesting teens come from minority backgrounds has accelerated what Vuattoux calls their “adultification” in the eyes of the broader public: They are no longer seen as teenagers who deserve a degree of leniency but as delinquents to be disciplined.

One common experience of the state backlash has been arbitrary arrests, with 6,629 protesters detained as of October 7. While a fraction have been held for only a few hours, a significant share of at least 5,000 have been taken into official custody, legally for up to 48 hours. That figure is to be compared with the 1,500 cases handed over to the justice system for a formal investigation and possible pursuits.

The steep drop-off between those numbers leads some legal experts to accuse the government of wantonly arresting individuals in a blatant abuse of power. For Kempf, the defense attorney who has counseled many individuals taken into custody during the student movement, these practices amount to a “violation of the rule of law and an instrumentalization of the justice system by the demands of law enforcement.”

But the most forceful use of state power has been in the recourse to violent police tactics against what is ultimately a movement led by underage minors. In an October 2 press release, Amnesty International France warned against the “disproportionate use of force by law enforcement.” The organization points to footage documenting the use of choke holds—technically phased out under official French policing protocols—the firing of tear gas canisters directly at protesters, and the widespread use of rubber bullets.

The use of force has itself been selective, reflecting the social and racial inequalities denounced since the beginning of the revolt. Cohen-Morzadec from L’Union Étudiante describes unprovoked police charges at the Sciences Po blockade, with students dragged along the ground and beaten by groups of officers. “But even this was a weaker show of force than the violence students faced in Seine-Saint-Denis,” she added. “This shows the difference in treatment between the mobilizations at prestigious Parisian schools and less privileged establishments.”

There are signs of some government backtracking in the face of criticism. Staying at arm’s length from the domestic crisis, and otherwise failing to address the student demands, President Macron has reportedly summoned key ministers to scold them for the police response. On October 7, Interior Minister Nuñez announced the temporary suspension of stun grenades; however, that order applies obly to the use of projectile-launched ordnance, as Mediapart reported, and not its hand-thrown alternative.

The government has also announced class suspensions until the end of the week, dedicating school time to so-called “internal democracy sessions” between students and officials. “This is a maneuver to break the student movement,” said Cohen-Morzadec. “The government has never cared about student representation. Our demands have been clear from the beginning.”

It is also keen to expand the state arsenal. A new anti-rioting bill, termed the “breakers-pay” law, is set to be fast-tracked for consideration by Parliament in late October. If adopted, the bill would sanction individuals accused of having participated in a violent “grouping” by making them financially liable for property damage regardless of direct individual responsibility. Critics fear that in practice this could put anyone who joins a protest at risk of sanction.

Parents are also being pressured to keep their children from exercising their political rights. In some cases, local police prefects have sent moralizing letters of disapproval to parents whose children have been taken into custody. Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin believes they should be “jointly financially liable for the abuses committed by their children.” The “breakers-pay” law would even allow authorities to deduct damages from social welfare such as housing aid and child benefits paid to parents.

With a new day of national demonstrations on October 8, and another scheduled for next Tuesday, the government has left itself few options beside escalation.

For nearly four decades, Harriet Clark saw her mother only in the visiting room of New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. When Clark was less than one year old, her mother Judith, then a member of the Weather Underground, was arrested and later sentenced to 75 years to life in prison for her role as a getaway driver in a 1981 armored car robbery, during which a security guard and two police officers were killed. (In 2016, then-governor Andrew Cuomo commuted Judith’s sentence, making her eligible for parole, which she was granted three years later.)

In her debut novel, The Hill, Clark’s narrator Suzanna never remembers a time when she hadn’t spent her Saturdays visiting her mother sentenced to life in a fictional prison atop a hill. Like Clark, Suzanna was a baby when her mother was arrested and incarcerated.

“The year I turned eight the prison built the hospital and the gun tower and raised the fences around the hill another three feet,” Clark writes early in her novel. “It was the year the prison grew up.” It’s a nod to the nation’s prison-building boom as tough-on-crime laws swelled its population behind bars. In the 1990s, the United States saw an unprecedented boom in prison building with a new prison opening in rural America every 15 days.

Lyrical and introspective, The Hill paints a picture of a mother desperately trying to parent her daughter despite her life sentence, and Suzanna’s own efforts to stay connected. “To return each week and rise again to do this forever and ever,” Clark writes. “This was a feat I saw nowhere applauded and this was the challenge I set now for myself.”

Clark, now a mother herself and who edits books and films, spoke with The Nation about her new novel, the experience of having a mother in prison, and the artist’s role in documenting atrocities.

—Victoria Law

Victoria Law: Can you talk about why you chose to write a novel over a memoir or autobiography, given how autobiographical The Hill seems to be?

Harriet Clark: I love novels. I have always been able to feel my feelings more when I’m engaging with fiction. It was like granting dignity to the material to write it in the form that I most revere, and that has given me so much meaning and pleasure in my life. [A novel] felt like a way to say, “These are lives worthy of art, not just reportage.”

I [also] think that childhood lends itself to fiction. When we’re children, we haven’t yet consented to reality. We’re inside our imagination so much, and so a novel felt like the appropriate form for a book about childhood.

And if you grow up in prison, you learn to respect other people’s privacy. You try not to watch what’s going on at their table; you’re hoping no one’s listening to you. You’re inside a structure that grants you none of the dignity of privacy so people have to grant it to each other. I never had a reportorial impulse to take something I saw in there and share it with the world. Respecting people’s privacy is really important to me. For me, this novel is largely about privacy and about the ways we companion each other even across great chasms of unknowability.

VL: In the novel, Suzanna visits her mother every week. Their visits are imbued with a sense of claustrophobia—she and her mother stay inside the Reading Roost, a playhouse in the children’s area that’s increasingly too small as Suzanna grows. What were visits like when you were a growing child?

HC: I don’t have a conscious memory of experiencing the prison as a claustrophobic space. One of the ways I was different from many of the other kids at the prison was that I had been going there even before I could remember anything, so I never had this kind of encounter with the prison that most children are forced to have, where, for the first time, you arrive to barracks surrounded by barbed wire and a gun tower and know that your mother is behind all of that. My experience of prison was that it was normal to me.

I did know that most prisons [during the 1980s and 1990s] didn’t have a room like the Children’s Center [a play area for children and their incarcerated parents]. Even though it should be normal for a child to be able to touch or play with their mother, because I grew up with other kids whose parents were in prison, I knew that we were inside the best possible version of a tragedy in terms of seeing our mothers. My mother and all the women in the prison and Sister Elaine [who helped create the Children’s Center] went out of their way to present the Children’s Center as a joyful place, and I felt that.

One of the qualities I share with Suzanna is that I knew from a very young age that it would not serve me to experience my life as degraded. I could see that other people found certain aspects of my life pitiful or pathetic, or thought that I had a lesser experience of a mother.

My mother did so much to try to shield me from the true horrors of the prison. My mother did what mothers in prison have to do, which is that they have to be undestroyed by prison.

She was in incredibly destroying environments and conditions, and she did not bring that to me. That saved huge aspects of my spirit and psyche, so I always wanted to see my mother, which is to say I always wanted to go to the prison. I was happy to get to the room where my mother would arrive. Part of what I wanted to do is to show that one of the remarkable adaptations of childhood is that children will really go out of their way to make enough out of not enough.

VL: Are there prison issues that you hope readers reflect upon after reading your novel?

HC: I began this version of the book in 2017 in the wake of Trump’s family separation policy at the border. For ten years before that, I had written only privately, never with any desire to publish. Then there was footage of kids ripped out of their mothers’ arms [at the border] and there was so much outcry about it. Even the suburban conservative mothers felt this was so unacceptable.

Obviously, I shared everyone’s outrage, but I also felt bewildered because I did feel like, don’t you know this happens every day in jails and prisons across this country? All detention is family separation.

There was something about watching this degree of outrage that made me think, Maybe people don’t understand that five million kids will, at some point in their upbringing, have a parent in prison—that they will have the experience of being ripped out of their parents’ arm, either at the time of arrest or at the end of visiting hours.

I thought, Maybe they don’t know and so I’m going to write this book that will help bring awareness to this idea of incarceration as family separation. I finished the book amidst the genocide in Gaza, when it [became] clear that everyone knows exactly what is happening to children there and it is not rousing the majority to stop the assault or protect the young. So my approach and agenda have come to feel much shakier to me.

The line I always quote in relationship to growing up with a parent in prison is Derek Walcott’s “Either I’m nobody or I’m a nation.” I wrote the book to show how lonely and ghostly it can feel for a child to have their parent forcefully kept away from them—that having a parent in prison, and having to contend with prisons as a child, can make you feel like a “nobody”—but fundamentally, we’re a nation.

There are millions of children growing up like this. The face of mass incarceration in America is a child’s face.

For many years, the title of my book was, You Won’t Go Alone If You Go, because this was what I wanted people to understand: when you send our parents to prison, we go with them. When you mistreat a person inside, their whole family suffers that worry and fear. Prison is a collective punishment, one that I believe often extends the scope of harm, rather than healing it.

I often feel like children aren’t told, “You’re amazing. This is so brave that you are still doing what you can to keep your family together—that is incredible of you.” It was why I wanted Suzanna’s story to be a hero story, and for her to know what no one else around her will acknowledge: that she is a hero, that she is resisting the great forces of separation, prison, and death to keep her family together—and that millions of kids are essentially forced into this kind of heroism, and so many parents in prison have to rise to the kind of heroism of parenting from within one of the most difficult situations. So to some extent I’ve come to think, let me at least reflect their heroism, even if I’ve lost some confidence in my awareness-raising campaign.

VL: This is very much a novel about mothers and daughters—your relationship with your mother, her relationship with her mother, and other mother-daughter relationships. What would you want readers to know about mothers and incarceration?

HC: I would want them to know that the majority of women in prison are mothers. That most were the primary caregiver for their child before they went in. For me, the reason the hero’s journey framework felt important for talking about mothering in prison is because, fundamentally, the hero’s journey is a framework of death and rebirth, and it’s based off the idea that the bravest thing we ever do is resurrect ourselves after total devastation.

If you are a mother in prison, you are in the middle of an unbearable catastrophe, your children are in the middle of an unbearable catastrophe, and you can’t be destroyed because your children still need you. Again and again, in women’s facilities, what happens is that women have to find a way to rebirth themselves inside these incredible constraints. They have to because they’re still responsible to their children. I consider it the greatest education of my life that I got to grow up around women in prison because I saw how people find the will to not be destroyed. I saw how people, in ways that can take a very long time and require a lot of support and community, find their way back to their relationships and their responsibilities.

VL: Is there anything you’d like to add?

HC: Growing up, I’d come into the Children’s Center of my mother’s prison and it would be like, “This week, we’ve removed the top hat and the limousine pieces from the Monopoly set because they could be turned into weapons.” And the next week, “We’ve removed all the pieces from the Battleship game because they could be weapons.” And the next week, something else. The world was full of things we and our mothers could turn into weapons. And on the one hand, maybe that was true—you could probably take that tiny top hat and do something dangerous with it. And on the other hand, the prison itself was an act of violence so much greater than that tiny top hat could ever be.

Most of the artists I know in prison lean more towards transformation than documentation. Bearing witness is incredibly important, but I think creating your own vision and reality can be its own experience of autonomy and dignity, a way to insist that you are vaster than the conditions you’re in. I think it can be degrading when we expect people in difficult circumstances to write essentially transcriptions of their suffering. The more difficulty you’re in, the more creative transport you may need and want; it’s a form of autonomy to say, I still determine my own vision. You may control what I see, but I determine how I see.

No, Frodo did not throw the ring into Mt. Doom in time. Ethan Hunt did not get to the top of the Eiffel Tower to defuse the bomb. A lone X-Wing Fighter did not blow up the Death Star.

This is all to say that, despite the best efforts of the Writers Guild of America, 12 states attorneys general, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, and the thousands of people who now get to lie awake at night wondering if they’ll have a job in two months—despite a months-long initiative to stop the Skydance merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery—that deal closed this Tuesday. The Empire struck back, and the Empire won.

To recap, the Trump-aligned Ellison family now owns Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., HBO, CBS, Paramount+, CBS News, 60 Minutes, and CNN. To make this deal happen, the Ellisons took on a staggering debt load of $80 billion. How will they repay it? First, they’ll ask a lot of other people to pay it for them—by laying them off. They will begin consolidating duplicated services—they don’t need two marketing departments, or two of anything on the infrastructure side. Disney laid off nearly 4,000 people in 2019 alone to help pay for its buyout of 21st Century Fox to compete with Netflix. With the announcement of a far larger merger, backed by stupendously bigger loans, a staggering wave of job losses is about to hit Los Angeles.

The machinations of billionaires in the entertainment industry, and their round-robin cycles of mergers and acquisitions, mean very little to the audience for Hollywood productions, but here’s one thing that will: It was announced soon after the deal closed that Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdy have been fired. They are the executive team that brought three Warner Bros. movies to the Oscars last year: Sinners, One Battle After Another, and Weapons. They did that rarest of things in today’s Hollywood: Their studio produced movies popular at awards season and with the public. It’s been a joke for years that few people ever see the top movies up for the Oscars—that the stars walking up the red carpet are seen by more people than saw the movies featuring them. That changed last year.

As Deluca and Abdy exited the building, Paramount also announced that the Transformers franchise will be revived via an eighth installment, with Michael Bay returning to direct and Steven Spielberg overseeing as producer. An $80 billion debt load means you have much less latitude to take risks on new ideas. Not that Hollywood’s new Skydance overlords will need them: the newly merged leviathan is home to DC Studios, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe (and all the anti-trans toxicity she brings to everything she touches), Looney Tunes, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Lord of the Rings, Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and Top Gun. It’s easy to see the future of movies. As Tom Cruise and Alejandro Innaritu’s bold, uninhibited, and critically panned Digger (2026) struggles at the box office for Warner Bros., Cruise has already announced for Paramount that he will star in a sequel to his 36-year-old NASCAR film, Days of Thunder (1990).

Skydance also plans to merge HBO and Paramount+ into a streaming platform large enough to compete with Netflix. Besides the shedding of large numbers of duplicate jobs, it’s hard to believe that the prices consumers now pay and the commercials we endure for a service we already pay for won’t go up. That, after all, is exactly what has happened at Disney+ when it took on 21st Century Fox to bolster its streaming profile.

The real question, of course, is how the Trump administration, which is closely aligned with the Ellisons, and the broader themes of MAGA politics will shape decision-making at the influential news divisions caught up in the merger—CBS, 60 Minutes, and now CNN. It’s blindingly obvious that Bari Weiss was hired as editor in chief at CBS News to act as a double-digit IQ wrecking ball. Her mission there is to smash and break all the things about journalism that President Trump hates (i.e., everything). It’s often said that she is unqualified for her job, but that claim misapprehends the actual demands of her job: to sell her conservative Free Press at an enormous price ($150 million) during the Paramount-Skydance merger in 2025, and to reassure the president and his FCC Chair Brendan Carr that a right-wing ideologue controls the news. Trump did not demand high ratings, quality journalism, or competence of any kind. He wanted news he liked. He wanted to get even with the smart people who reported things he found unflattering, and she has largely succeeded in giving him what he wants. The fact that the ratings for the network’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, indicate that only President Trump likes it is neither here nor there.

The big question for CNN is whether the Ellisons will perform the same sort of MAGA wrecking job there that they did at CBS—or whether they simply made it seem like they would prior to the merger to curry favor with Trump’s FCC. Skydance has already announced that it will retain Mark Thompson—a veteran television journalist with a long track record of success—as CNN’s CEO. Given that CNN is a profit center for Skydance, Ellison seems to be focusing, at least in the short term, on sidestepping any plan to ruin that cash cow by appeasing Trump. Retaining Thompson, as well as CNN’s editorial board of experts that acts as de facto public editors, is meant to signal to potentially jittery investors that the Ellisons are at least prepared to pay lip service to preserving the network’s journalistic integrity after seeing what discarding said integrity did to CBS.

And Trump may no longer be their biggest headache. The Ellisons are no doubt tracking the polling numbers they broadcast on their own news properties: After the midterms, Trump will be an even weaker lame-duck president than he already is. The Ellisons got what they wanted from Trump’s FCC—at enormous cost to their fortune and dignity. But why should they have to fear further interventions from him and administration lackeys any more than their news counterparts at Disney, Amazon, or NBC/Universal do now? The deal is done, and now Trump has to contend with a reasonably intact CNN as a major news provider on multiple platforms.

What won’t change for a long time is that the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and several other Middle Eastern regimes now own a 38.5 percent stake in this company and its news divisions. If the Ellisons need the cash, they can increase that percentage to 49.9 percent—and all indications now are that they do stand in desperate need of fresh money infusions. Given how weak Trump will become in the final years of his term and how increasingly dependent the Ellisons will be on Trump’s financial partners in the Middle East, undue foreign influence via the White House may be the real problem.

In its now-extensive studio holdings, Skydance will have to work with a creative community that has largely stood against this deal—and the creative community has to seriously reevaluate its capacity to collaborate with Skydance. The Ellison family’s colossal studio will presumably buy back a certain amount of good will if it follows through on its mission to get those 32 features a year made, which may cushion at least some of the impact of the layoffs ahead.

But the merger also presents significant political frictions with the creative community—as Mark Ruffalo highlighted by publicizing the links between the Ellisons’ parent software company Oracle and the marketing of surveillance tech to the Israeli Defense Forces for use in Gaza. In response to these reports, Skydance called Ruffalo antisemitic—a charge widely and bitterly refuted by the creative community.

Since this merger radically consolidates the film and television industry, shrinking it, and leaving fewer platforms and studios where creatives can work, the film industry’s pro-Palestinian voices will either have to explore new places to work, or compromise with the industry’s new Skydance overlords. Anyone who signed the Film Workers for Palestine pledge will most likely agree that Ruffalo’s campaign revealed a level of blatant complicity with the Israeli war in Gaza that would add Skydance’s Paramount, WB, HBO, Paramount+, and CBS to the FWP’s boycott list. That list already includes a ban on Disney (for hiring Gal Gadot in Snow White) and the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) for creating an Israeli superhero called Sabra. (Ruffalo still plays the Hulk for the Disney-owned MCU—a role he reprised in the summer blockbuster Spiderman: Brand New Day.)

The Ellison’s large financial reach is a question that FWP signatory, writer-director Boots Riley (Boosters), dealt with after he’d worked with Annapurna, which is owned by Larry Ellison’s daughter Megan Ellison. As Riley told The Guardian last May, “it’s interesting that it’s such an issue when BlackRock and Vanguard—major shareholders in Disney and Netflix, as well as Regal, Cinemark and AMC—also give billions upon billions to Israel. So I get the critique, unless you’re saying: don’t make a movie, don’t show it in theaters, because they get 50 percent of the income. Even if you make an independent movie, you’re still in this business.”

Riley’s right: Not making movies is not an option—but now avoiding some sort of compromise on the issue also looks like a non-option. This is a very different industry than it was on Tuesday morning. Now more than ever, it will be up to workers in the industry to keep it both relevant and accountable.

When Sharon Davis opened her e-mail at 5 am on April 1, 2025, she learned that she had been fired from the Food and Drug Administration after 24 years of employment. She felt a mix of emotions: anger, disbelief and—most prominently and undeservedly—shame.

“I was like, ‘What do I do now?’” Davis, 55, told MindSite News. “It was a gut punch. I’ve never been fired before. This is the first time I haven’t had a job in my life.”

Davis had moved steadily up the ranks at the FDA, working for the last five years as associate director for operations and quality management. Then, overnight, she became one of the more than 95,000 Black women who were fired or laid off from the federal government as result of massive job cuts implemented by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the elimination of diversity programs.

Davis says she had been the “go-to person” in her department, and in the initial weeks and months after her job loss she was in denial about her firing, waiting to get called back. She checked her e-mail often, expecting to get questions about where things were and what to do. When she wasn’t asked to return, she questioned her very worth and wondered if her more than two decades of service was of value.

Although she knew intellectually that it wasn’t about her, one refrain kept going through her head: “I didn’t deserve this. Why did this happen to me?”

Pointing the Finger at Ourselves

Davis grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She enjoyed teen fiction, ran on the high school track team, and was the manager for the girl’s basketball team. Her grandmother, a college professor, was her role model, Davis said.

“I always remember her being very big on education, on being polished, presentable and professional,” Davis said. “When I saw her, I knew I was going to go to college and make her proud.”

After graduating from Jackson State University, a historically Black college in Jackson, Mississippi, with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Davis worked for the state of Mississippi and a nuclear waste facility in Memphis. She moved to Washington, DC, in 2002, where she worked at the FDA until she was blindsided by the mass layoffs in April 2025.

“When you don’t have answers and there’s not a clear thing to point to, we typically point the finger on ourselves, and oftentimes that looks like shame,” said Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist who founded and hosts the popular podcast, Therapy for Black Girls.“’Maybe I did something to deserve this. Was this about my performance?’ I think any time there’s a layoff or a firing, people assume rightfully or wrongfully that it was a performance issue, and we know that that was not the case here.”

Working for the civilian federal government brought job security and a “path to stability”—especially for more than 200,000 Black people—said Bradford. “You get this job and you never have to worry about it, right?” she said. “So for it to be snatched was incredibly disruptive.”

By September 2025, Black women’s unemployment had surged to 7.5 percent, compared to 4.4 percent of all US workers at that time—a net loss driven entirely by losses in the public sector, mostly in federal jobs, according to labor economist Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute. In the public sector as a whole, more than 155,000 Black women lost their jobs between 2024 and 2025.

The mass layoffs shook up people’s sense of order and predictability and left them reeling.

Christy L. Erving, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Population Research at the University of Texas at Austin, says many Black women like Davis who earned important positions in the federal government had strong feelings of mastery—the sense of having a high degree of control over one’s life and future directions. Then, abruptly, things changed.

“After their job loss, their sense of mastery was reduced,” said Erving. “When you feel that you don’t have a sense of control over your future, that you can get fired at will, there’s an increased risk of poor mental health.”

For Davis, it was more than disruptive. It was a blow to a career that she had cultivated for more than two decades. The firings were made worse because there was a narrative that those who were part of the reduction in force (RIF) weren’t doing their jobs and were not necessary, Davis said.

“It was all in the way it was done and the things that were said about the people who were ‘riffed,’” said Davis. “It was degrading.”

Davis was forced into retirement because she was over 50 and had at least 20 years experience, which means she qualified for Discontinued Service Retirement (DSR). Her health insurance was cut off and, because of her age and years of service, she did not qualify for severance pay. Instead, she was supposed to receive a pension the month after her firing.

But, Davis recalled, so many people had lost their jobs that there weren’t enough people left to process the paperwork in a timely manner. She didn’t receive a payment until July 2026—a year after her firing.

The early days of unemployment were an enormous struggle, she admitted.

“I worked in the government for so long, I haven’t had to look for a job in 20 years,” Davis said. “Some days I just laid there not knowing what to do next.”

Davis said working for the FDA gave her a sense of purpose. “My job was everything,” Davis said. “It was what I did. Now I don’t have that.”

She didn’t share the news of her job loss with her family until months after her firing—and still has not shared her unemployment status with some neighbors.

“I just don’t want to get into the details,” Davis said.

“We Forget Our Value Is Inherent”

Bradford says it’s dangerous to have our identity and sense of self-worth tied to career and professional pursuits because “it’s not anything that we have control over.”

“We know that those things can eventually end or be taken away or changed,” Bradford said. “When our value only comes as a function of the roles that we serve, we forget that our value is inherent. We are worthy and deserving just because we’re human.”

Events like the mass firings of federal workers are a reminder, Bradford says, “to make sure that we are involved in other things that give us value and allow us to be restored that aren’t actually a function of our career or our role.”

Like many successful Black women in the workplace, Davis presented an image of strength, resisted showing vulnerability, and suppressed emotions of anger. These were tools Black women use to combat negative stereotypes and succeed in the workplace.

In her research, Cheryl Woods Giscombé, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, health psychologist, and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, found that the need for Black women to be strong and carry often unmanageable loads—to be, in essence, Black Superwomen—can set them up for a demoralizing fall when intense events like being fired from a long-term job occur.

Giscombe, the author of the 2024 book The Black Woman’s Guide to Coping with Stress, created the Superwoman Schema, a framework that describes how Black women experience and cope with stress. Women who fall into this pattern feel obligated to present an image of strength and tend to suppress their emotions, resist being vulnerable, are intensely motivated to succeed and feel an obligation to help others.

Giscombé developed the Superwoman Schema out of  earlier research from other scholars on the concept of the “Strong Black Woman,” which characterized Black women in terms related to strength—strong, resilient, unbreakable.

On one hand, Erving said, this created a positive characterization of Black women in response to stereotypes that created the racist trope of the “Angry Black Woman.” On the other hand, she noted, researchers are now recognizing the “burdens of what it means to be a strong Black woman and uphold this image, even when you’re experiencing adversity, even when you’re experiencing gender racism and unfair treatment across multiple domains of life.”

The impact, she says, can be overwhelming.

“Black women who endorse this notion of being a Superwoman or a Strong Black Woman actually experience greater risk for clinically diagnosed depression and also depressive symptoms,” she says. She ticked off the symptoms: “feelings of sadness, feeling like a failure, crying, loss of interest in daily activities, sleep disturbance, fatigue.”

The two characteristics of the Superwoman framework that are most hazardous to the mental health of Black women are the obligation to help others at their own expense and holding in or suppressing their emotions, said Erving, citing a 2024 Health and Retirement Study she co-authored that included a national sample of over 1000 Black women age 51 and older.

Anger suppression occurs when Black women don’t feel comfortable expressing feelings of anger.

“They try to hide or conceal when they’re feeling angry, so it’s sort of like I’m internalizing my anger,” said Erving. “I may have those feelings, but I’m not outwardly expressing those emotions.”

Burying their anger put Black women at greater risk to experience depressive symptoms and clinically diagnosed depression, Erving says. Her hypothesis, not yet proven, “is that because of those negative stereotypes attached to Black women being angry, anger suppression is essential for Black women to be taken seriously in the workplace.”

It’s a tradeoff that comes with real personal costs.

“It’s something they feel they have to do in order to not be on the receiving end of being stereotyped,” Erving says. “But that also is doing something negatively internally in terms of their psychological well-being.”

Black women also face another obstacle: They are more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to be unmarried and to be the primary breadwinner for their families, attributes that researchers say are associated with heightened risk of depressive symptoms and depression.

Unmarried women may lack both the economic and social-emotional support that a partner could provide, Ervin notes, and they may have less wealth and economic reserves to help them manage a sudden loss of income.

“I think all of that is related to why we see those without a spouse actually having higher depressive symptoms,” she says.

Moving Forward

Davis, single and child-free, lived off her savings until her first retirement check—a full year after her layoff. Seeing her nest egg dwindle was stressful. More than a year after her position was eliminated, Davis is still unemployed and trying to process how to move forward.

“This wasn’t my plan,” says Davis of her forced retirement. “My plan was to retire from the federal government in five years when I was eligible—in 2030.”

Today, the former FDA executive volunteers for a number of food banks that provide meals for unhoused and low-income residents in the Washington, DC, area including Martha’s Table, So Others Might Eat, SHARE and the Capital Area Food Bank. Some days Davis helps pack or sort food donations, and on other days she helps serve food to the most vulnerable populations in the city.

“Volunteering keeps me busy and gives me a sense of purpose,” Davis said. “It makes me feel like I’m helping someone else.”

Davis also volunteers with fundraising efforts to raise awareness for Black colleges, including serving on the local and national boards of the historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) alliance. A former president of Jackson State University’s Greater Washington alumni association for nearly a decade, she now helps the organization raise money for student scholarships. Recently, Davis received the alumni association’s trailblazer award during its annual gala this year.

“I was very honored to receive it,” Davis said of the trailblazer award. “Just knowing that people recognized my contributions meant a lot. It made me feel like I must be doing something right. I was very grateful.”

Davis wants to work again, ideally return to the federal government in some capacity. She meets with her former coworkers for happy hour every other month. Her entire department was eliminated, and everyone lost their jobs. They check on each other frequently and that has meant a lot, she said.

But the camaraderie and her volunteer work, though important, has not taken away the pain of her federal firing: The hurt is still there. She doesn’t remember the last time she’s laughed or felt better about life. She isn’t there yet.

“I have my days,” Davis says. “I just never saw anything like this happening to me.”

On the afternoon of March 27, members of the Penn College Republicans mailing list received a last-minute event announcement.

“Dear Patriots,” the e-mail began. “In just a few hours…Theo Wold, a senior counselor at Palantir, will be speaking on Penn’s campus. His talk is titled ‘2006 and the Challenge to Save the West.’”

With just under three hours’ notice, conservative students and prospective software engineers alike scrambled to attend the off-the-record, invite-only event. By 6 pm, the approved students streamed into an unremarkable classroom in Jon M. Huntsman Hall, buzzing with curiosity and excitement.

In the following hour, Wold, who previously served as a director for the Trump-affiliated Claremont Institute, pitched a nativist argument about the decline of Western culture in the United States—due apparently to the birth of “woke” ideology circa 2006—while beseeching students to “save the West” by joining Palantir. The defense-tech giant, initially founded with a venture capital investment from the CIA—has become known for allegedly aiding in mass deportations, Israel’s war on Gaza, and the surveillance of the American public.

Wold then laid out a vision for traditional gender roles, emphasized the need to hire Americans rather than immigrants, and, puzzlingly, asked the audience if they had read Mark Twain.

The Penn talk was part of a larger speaking series that Wold undertook on behalf of the David Network, a conservative organization determined to effect change in the United States by drawing “from conservative ideas, grounded in the Biblical moral tradition, embodied through limited, constitutional government, and strengthened by individual liberty and free enterprise.”

Since 2020, the David Network has grown from a collection of pro-life student activists to a burgeoning conservative career network. According to its website, the group boasts over 5,000 students, alumni, and professionals. It only targets students in the Ivy League, MIT, Stanford, and, more recently, the University of Chicago, and the University of Texas–Austin. Driven by an existential commitment to grievance politics, the network places promising conservative students in positions of influence—one annual conference, private dinner, and conservative hackathon at a time.

According to the attendees I spoke with, Wold’s presentation broached the subject of recruiting. As one recalled, Wold mentioned a student at another university who approached him after his speech. The student, who expressed an interest in both Palantir and the Roman Empire, allegedly had a job interview “within a week,” all because he “actually [talked] to Theo Wold after.” Like several of the students and alumni I interviewed, the attendee requested anonymity, citing fears of professional backlash.

Later, Wold informed Penn students that they could send their résumés to the David Network for special consideration in the recruitment process. Of the two students I spoke with who submitted their résumés, both received a recruiter call after applying.

In a written statement to The Nation, David Network founder and executive director Lucas Cremers claimed that the organization was not aware of Wold’s statements at the event. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.

The David Network started when Cremers, a Columbia graduate, hosted the organization’s first annual summit with other Ivy League students who had accompanied him to the anti-abortion March for Life protest in 2019.

The summit, which occurred in Washington, DC’s Museum of the Bible, began as a sounding room for social conservatives to debate issues like “the power of Abrahamic tradition” or pro-life activism “post-Roe.” Each year, the event grew in size, attracting conservative students from prestigious colleges seeking reprieve from their liberal campuses.

“I just remember being told that the David Network conference was sort of like [Cremers’] baby,” said Avian Muñoz, a liberal Columbia graduate who attended the 2023 summit as a student reporter. “He cared a lot about it getting popular and being well respected by conservatives, both within universities and the wider conservative civil society.”

At the 2023 event, culture war rhetoric was pervasive, culminating in keynote speaker and then–presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy railing against “corporate wokeness.” “They made a big effort to [make] the Other, aka progressives, into this monster Goliath that they had to fight,” Muñoz says.

The event retained its emphasis on social conservatism in the 2025 summit, when one keynote speaker advocated against abortion even in cases of rape, according to Columbia graduate and 2025 attendee Alex Nagin. By this point, however, the David Network had put a new aspect of its mission front and center: the formation of an elite conservative career pipeline.

“Networking was a huge part [of the summit],” Nagin says. Indeed, the event’s career fair included classic conservative organizations like the Manhattan Institute and Federalist Society, as well as Elon Musk’s brain chip company Neuralink, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale’s venture capital firm 8VC, and Saronic Technologies, a naval defense company now valued at $9.25 billion.

The 600-person gathering also featured a keynote speech from Lonsdale. Nagin recalls that he “kept calling the left ‘commies.’”

Today, the bulk of the David Network’s operations sit outside the annual summit. In its monthly newsletters, the organization advertises private chats and job postings in a range of influential industries, including private equity, software engineering, “nuclear,” and law for the Trump administration.

Events this August included a private dinner with tech founders in New York and a fireside chat with House Republican Rich McCormick on “AI and the American Future.” This past September, the organization hosted “an evening with the Office of Strategic Capital,” an obscure Pentagon department helping orchestrate deals between US oil companies and the Venezuelan government.

According to one former student organizer, these private gatherings help attract conservative students who may then receive more personalized recruiting assistance. Because membership is a loose term—as part of the David Network’s mailing list, I suppose I count—young acolytes-to-be are vetted for ideological alignment before they’re connected to a network-affiliated professional—perhaps a tech founder, a federal government official, or an experienced Wall Street trader.

In a report published earlier this year, the David Network claimed to have placed over 200 of its members in organizations like the Council of Economic Advisors, the Manhattan Institute, and Palantir. It also claimed to have 171 employers in its network, including 43 in tech, 32 in finance, and 28 in government. In his statement to The Nation, Cremers wrote that “we have thousands of exceptional members whom we help place in great positions.”

In the same report, the David Network recorded almost $1.5 million in revenue during the 2025 fiscal year and announced a revenue goal of $3.6 million in 2026, with $2 million raised toward that sum.

With its new money and influence, the David Network has become an increasingly active player in the tech space. This past Labor Day weekend, the organization hosted DNHacks, a hackathon seeking members to “pioneer world-class technology built on the foundation of American exceptionalism.”

The hackathon’s industry partners and attendees included the surveillance giant Clearview AI, the $750 million defense tech company Second Front Systems, and the US Navy’s chief technology officer. Though Palantir was not a publicly listed sponsor, one student hackathon competitor informed me that representatives of the company attended the event. The David Network claimed that “Palantir was not actively involved” in their hackathon.

The hackathon projects ranged dramatically in kind and shock factor—the winning team, for example, developed a self-sensing concrete to measure the structural integrity of key infrastructure, while another team engineered an “autonomous kill-chain” drone with cost-effective facial recognition software.

According to the conservative nonprofit Philanthropy Roundtable, the ultimate goal of the David Network is to “build a talent pipeline of principled conservatives who will reshape some of our nation’s leading institutions and industries, akin to how the Federalist Society has reshaped the courts.” Indeed, the same backroom hiring practice that the David Network is setting up today allowed the Federalist Society, another student-founded conservative organization, to stack the nation’s legal system with conservative judges, leading to our current era of civil rights backslide.

It’s certainly not a perfect comparison. The Federalist Society had a clear strategy and goal, manipulating the country’s rigid court systems to advance the conservative legal movement. By comparison, the David Network, with its split industry focus sitting beside its initial, pro-life moral center, seems more committed to a sustained improvisation than a concrete vision.

At the same time, the recruiting network has only garnered more interest from students and employers alike. For now, it seems all the David Network has to do is maintain its upward trajectory and dream of one day killing its so-called progressive “Goliath.” Who knows what will finally signal the death of that boogeyman? Maybe a new legion of killer drones, maybe an absolutist, anti-abortion surveillance state, or maybe just more C-suite executives with whom to make off-color jokes around the water cooler.

When you’re just getting started, anything seems possible.

This year’s midterm elections have been dominated by debates about whether or not Democrats should associate with popular Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

The streamer, who is an ardent supporter of Palestinian freedom and dignity, has increasingly lent his platform to progressive challengers running in Democratic primaries. In March, now-Democratic nominee for the Senate in Michigan Abdul el Sayed chose to campaign with Piker, prompting a disingenuous moral panic that persists to this day. The panic is ostensibly related to a list of Piker’s past comments that his detractors claim were misogynistic, antisemitic, and anti-American.

The veracity of the accusations against Piker is questionable, to put it charitably. But while pundits and politicians can’t stop talking about every syllable Piker utters, there’s a truly unrepentant bigot whom establishment Democrats seem to have no problem hanging around with: talk show host, podcaster, and self-described comedian Bill Maher.

Maher’s hatefulness is a matter of extensive public record. For instance, he has a long history of transphobia—part of his persona as a soldier against the supposed hegemony of wokeness. Maher once called trans women who use the women's bathroom “weirdos peeing” the same week that then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded Obama-era protections for trans students to use the school bathrooms of their choice. He also agreed with Real Time guest Milo Yiannopoulos that “women and girls should be protected from having men who are confused about their sexual identities from their bathrooms,” a perverse insinuation that trans people are more likely to engage in sexual violence, when in fact they are more likely to be the victims of it. And he found himself siding with Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2022, claiming that more young people were openly identifying as trans because “it's trendy.”

Maher is an equally ardent Islamophobe. In 2014, Maher claimed on his show that Islam “is the only religion that acts like the mafia, that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” (That comment famously drew a rebuke from none other than Ben Affleck.) Just this May, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, condemned Maher for comments he made on his HBO show Real Time that they said “downplayed growing anti-Muslim hate.”

Maher, while discussing the supposed rise in antisemitism in America, claimed that the rise in Islamophobia was less dangerous. Maher conceded that MAGA Republican congressman and virulent racist Randy Fine should be condemned for saying, “If they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” But he followed that by saying it’s “not the same as ‘they need to be nuked and let’s exterminate them.’”

During a congressional hearing last year, Representative Fine did in fact call for the “destruction” of all “mainstream Muslims.” And earlier in the year, he took to Fox News to suggest that the US should nuke Gaza, invoking the use of nuclear weapons against Japan in World War II. This all comes in the context of an actual—not rhetorical—Israeli campaign of annihilation in Gaza, a majority-Muslim territory, where the equivalent of two atomic bombs was dropped by Israel in just the first month of the now-three-year-old genocide.

Last but certainly not least, Maher is a passionate denier of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. His latest expression of this fanaticism came last month on Real Time, in the wake of the popular outcry against Ed Sheeran’s decision to drop Macklemore from his tour for his on-stage support for Palestinian liberation.

Maher, the purported free-speech warrior, didn’t take issue with a consortium of stadium-owning pro-Israel billionaires using their disproportionate clout to muzzle dissent against an ongoing genocide. No, the 70-year old comedian worth an estimated $140 million decided the “kids” have it wrong—as do the “morally confused” Democratic politicians and “clueless celebrities” who share their views.

“Nowhere has this moral confusion become more obvious than in a place called Gaza,” Maher said. “A little strip of land that was not part of the original Israel, but they won in a war launched against them, but then gave back, gave back as a peace gesture–did they tell you that part on TikTok, kids?” (Maher should know that it's the United Nations and International Court of Justice, not TikTok, that say the Gaza Strip has been illegally occupied by Israel, without interruption, since 1967.)

“Gaza equals genocide is a lie, an easily provable lie,” Maher went on. “And the fact that so many prominent Democrats go along with it is, to me, the party’s worst moment since they undid Reconstruction after the Civil War. Democrats are policing their candidates really hard on this issue. Say it—say it’s a genocide. Say it.”

Maher also encourages similarly horrifying comments about Gaza from his guests—such as the infamous moment in 2025 when Van Jones joked, “If you are a young person, you open up your phone and all you see is ‘dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby—Diddy—dead Gaza baby, dead Gaza baby.”

One would think that a party that declares itself concerned about associating with extremism would stay away from a person like this. But establishment Democratic figures have never stopped rushing to sit next to Maher. The long list of Democrats who have made appearances on the latest season of Real Time includes Governors Josh Shapiro, Gavin Newsom, and Wes Moore; Senators Raphael Warnock, Elissa Slotkin, John Fetterman, Adam Schiff, and Chris Murphy; and 2028 presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel. Fetterman, Slotkin, and Emanuel have each condemned or rebuked Hasan Piker, while Slotkin has also stated that she would not go on his stream.

Prominent politicians choosing to join a program hosted by someone with whom they share disagreements is not an issue on its own. The problem is the blatant double standard at play. For all of Maher’s ranting about Democrats’ going along with the Gaza genocide “lie,” most of the party establishment actually agrees with his denialism. Not one of the aforementioned Democrats who has been on Maher’s show has labeled Israel’s onslaught a genocide. (Maher did have one guest who acknowledges the genocide, Representative Ro Khanna, on his show in June.) It seems that the only red line for these and other top Democrats when it comes to engaging with a controversial media figure is whether that figure actually recognizes that Israel’s genocide is occurring—and with Democratic support.

Even without the genocide denialism—which after three years we understand taking issue with is too much to ask of establishment Democrats—Maher’s bigotry extends well into issues Democrats have claimed to care about in the past, like Islamophobia and trans rights.

And even if you concede that trans rights and opposing genocide are not the most salient issues of the day for ambitious Democrats, then at least helping rehabilitate the image of accused sex pest Kevin Spacey might force a reckoning on Maher, given how much of Democratic resistance to Trump’s second term has been focused on sexual misconduct. Apparently not, since the comedian appeared chummy with Spacey—who also admitted to flying on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane—on his podcast Club Random this past June.

Where are all the gotcha questions for Democratic politicians associating themselves with Maher? How is it that Maher’s being awarded the Kennedy Center’s prestigious Mark Twain Prize for American Humor can be elevated as a cultural victory for the anti-Trump resistance? Maher is proving that there is less daylight between him and MAGA than meets the eye, and the silence from establishment Democrats and their media allies demonstrates that there is less daylight for them, too.

With AI leaders publicly weighing the odds that their technology triggers human extinction, less-apocalyptic industries rife with bad actors—the big banks, health insurers—seem almost tame in comparison.

But until the machine uprising, at least, ours is a world profoundly shaped by those more familiar corporate malfeasants. And though they’ve been displaced in the headlines by the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, they’re still making American life more expensive, inequitable, and dangerous. And increasingly, if you go up the chain far enough, you will find the ultimate culprit: private equity.

Across sectors ranging from veterinary medicine to mobile home parks, ownership by these investment firms has been linked to deteriorating working conditions, degraded customer experiences, and devastatingly poor service outcomes—all to line investors’ pockets.

Today, over 33,000 businesses employing more than 13 million US workers are PE-owned. Unlike a traditional entrepreneur, who launches or buys a business to generate wealth but is also personally invested in its long-term viability, private equity often acquires companies to get in, get out, and extract as much profit as possible along the way. If that means shedding staff, stunting wages, raising prices, offering a cheaper-to-produce (i.e., worse) product, and triggering a death spiral for the organization—so be it.

According to Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, “The only incentive is to make money for the private equity firm. Sometimes that can mean strengthening the portfolio company, because you want to take it public…. Sometimes that means weakening your own portfolio company. And it does not matter which of those strategies is morally correct.”

This story has played out on the national stage with household-name brands like Toys “R” Us and Red Lobster. To minimize their own risk, firms acquire businesses with the help of massive loans that the target companies are responsible for repaying. Blame for Red Lobster’s 2024 bankruptcy was cast at the feet of its generous all-you-can-eat shrimp deal—Icarian hubris, crustacean style—but less often mentioned was the $375 million in debt its former PE owner, Golden Gate Capital, foisted upon the chain. Golden Gate also sold the land beneath the restaurants, with the firm pocketing $1.5 billion to cover its purchase of the company while Red Lobster was forced to pay rent for property it previously owned.

In filing for Chapter 11, Red Lobster and Toys “R” Us were far from alone. PE-owned companies are 10 times more likely to declare bankruptcy than other businesses. It’s bad enough when customers lose access to beloved toy stores and an unlimited bounty of shrimp linguini alfredo, and far worse when workers lose their jobs. But over the decades, private equity has increasingly staked its claims in sectors providing critical public goods, and the results can be disastrous.

When healthcare providers go under—and 44 percent of 2025’s largest healthcare bankruptcies were linked to PE—communities lose their hospitals. In PE-owned nursing homes, residents are at greater risk of winding up in the ER, while in PE-owned ERs, patients are at greater risk of death.

Meanwhile, in housing, investment firms—who’ve been found to raise rents more steeply than other landlords—are projected to own 40 percent of single-family rentals nationwide by the end of the decade. Tenants across PE-owned apartments often report major maintenance issues, but the good news is that they don’t have to deal with those poor conditions for long, because corporate landlords are more likely to file eviction papers.

And even when the stakes are lowest, private equity manages to plumb depressing new depths. PE giants are now devouring the $40 billion youth sports industry, where inflated prices mean fewer youngsters get the chance to play. In Michigan, one PE-backed rink told a local kids’ league that parents were banned from livestreaming hockey games. If relatives wanted to tune in from afar, they’d have to shell out for a $215.99 streaming subscription.

There are signs, however, that the bubble may be about to burst. As it turns out, businesses that have been stripped to the bone aren’t exactly hot prospects for resale. Recent reporting found that the number of unsold PE portfolio companies is at an all-time high, and these days, their returns have significantly lagged the S&P 500.

In Congress, progressive lawmakers have proposed a regulatory framework that could thwart future resurrections of the private-equity vampire. Earlier this month, Senator Elizabeth Warren reintroduced her Stop Wall Street Looting Act, which would close the carried interest loophole, make PE firms liable for the debts their businesses accrue, and expand worker protections. And for years, Representative Ro Khanna has been pushing the Stop Wall Street Landlords Act, which would nix subsidies for large institutional investors buying mortgages on single-family homes. Real progress has also been made at the state level, with the rate of private equity deals in healthcare slowing amid new regulations in states including Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Oregon.

Senator Warren succinctly summed up the industry late last year when she said that “private equity guts everything.” But if Americans can summon the guts to fight back—to create regulations that stop vulture capitalism in its tracks—we can build an economy where patients, renters, and even youth hockey teams are prioritized over investor profits.

The world remembers Gaza again this week. Had Palestinians wanted remembrance after each date we experienced atrocity, a full, long year wouldn’t have enough days. We have been faithful victims, though, haven’t we? Since 2023, the world has applauded the resilience of our bare chests standing up to the tanks grinding us dead. Our blood must’ve shed beautifully. The women and children mourning everything and everyone they had ever known have cried in perfect tears for protests and, indeed, outraged slogans. Our homes, no longer recognizable, could have been spared if they had not borne witness to lifetimes of destruction. And if only our screams hadn’t been too loud. Three years in, forgive us for not making as many stories about our sons and daughters as the world can give standing ovations. I wish my late journalist colleagues were a bit more courageous to commit a crime and call it out. They would have been worthy of support. Probably they would’ve been deserving of protection.

My life has become a tale of a thousand anniversaries. So I dare ask: Does remembering the date of a tragedy make it easier to name? To live with? How is recalling our trauma—and dedicating an anniversary for it—going to help erase it? How is the mere reflection on something still happening and painful beyond any human’s language will bring it to an end? The notion of marking an anniversary that kicked off a rather inhumane and unimaginable memory in a long history of erasure points to the fact that the world has already moved on. It supposes that all we ever asked for was empathy. And that, frankly, is why we’re more at peace with a senseless world than we are with our tragedies. If the moral urge behind holding an anniversary is to hold space for the grief that the past few years have inflicted, by no means should this say that we’re past the grieving. If it was to end this grief, then we’re not even in any way close to doing so.

And although I’ve written constantly and with abundant detail about all the personal and collective agony I have endured over the last three years, I still haven’t been able to put into words the true feeling of realizing that with each anniversary of death we become one year closer to life. But here is what I am able to say.

A day on which entire bloodlines were erased from the civil registry should not be an anniversary.

A day our mothers were crushed beneath the concrete of their own kitchens should not be an anniversary.

A day newborns suffocated in dark, unpowered incubators should not be an anniversary.

A day flour sacks were soaked in the blood of men standing in line for bread should not be an anniversary.

A day children had their limbs amputated without anesthesia on blood-slicked hospital floors should not be an anniversary.

A day thousands of tons of explosives flattened every school, university, hospital, and library should not be an anniversary.

A day our grandparents were forced to relive their displacement under relentless bombardment should not be an anniversary.

A day white shroud shortages forced us to bury three generations in a single shallow trench should not be an anniversary.

A day parents carried what remained of their children in plastic bags should not be an anniversary.

A day entire cities were turned into a blinding wasteland of pulverized stone and bone should not be an anniversary.

A day refugee tents were set ablaze while families slept on the sand should not be an anniversary.

A day doctors, poets, teachers, civil defense crews, and journalists were targeted for bearing witness should not be an anniversary.

A day mothers dug through scorching rubble with bare hands until their fingernails ripped away should not be an anniversary.

A day drop-delivered aid crushed the starving people it was meant to feed should not be an anniversary.

A day human beings were hunted through ruined alleyways by silent quadcopters should not be an anniversary.

A day ancient olive groves, centuries-old mosques and churches, and family photo albums were bulldozed into dirt should not be an anniversary.

A day an entire generation was orphaned, maimed, and stripped of a future should not be an anniversary.

A day hundreds of infants starved to death while their mothers did not have enough formula to feed them should not be an anniversary.

A day the sky turned into a screaming engine of death overhead should not be an anniversary.

A day our memories, our songs, and our homes were buried under mountains of gray ash should not be an anniversary.

A day the global audience watched a live-streamed genocide and called it defense should not be an anniversary.

Do not attempt to mark a date on a calendar that is not yours. If you do, keep your prayers—or celebrations—and let us keep what remains of your dignity.

Darnese Foster remembers the day she learned she was fired from her federal government job. “I was off that Friday, which was Valentine’s Day. Then that Monday was the holiday,” said Foster. “I went to log in that Tuesday, I couldn’t get in.”

Foster thought her password had expired and needed to be reset. She called the help desk to submit her request. Then someone from the IT department called her back.

“He said, ‘You didn’t get a phone call from your supervisor?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Well, unfortunately, your name was on the list of names that was denied access.’ I didn’t know what that meant. I called my supervisor. He said, ‘Well, let me call you back. Let me talk to (the IT) supervisor to see what’s going on.’”

Later that day, they both called back to tell her that she was on a list of employees on probation that were being terminated during the mass firing.

Foster’s initial reaction was numbness, then panic and dread. She had a child in private school and rent and a car note to pay.

“I would go in a corner and cry,” Foster recalled.

Now, more than a year after being fired from her position as a grant management specialist in the Department of Health and Human Services, Foster is struggling, not just financially, but to cope: struggling to stay strong, struggling to keep the faith. The constant strain, she says, has taken a toll on her mental health.

“I thought I would have a job a year later,” Foster, 47, said. “The worry of where I’m going to get the money to do what I need to do and how long will I be out of work, it’s mentally draining.”

When Trump eliminated diversity, equity, and inclusion programs by an executive order in January 2025 and empowered Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to gut the federal workforce that February and March, thousands of Black women lost their jobs. But the job cuts did more than just dismantle a longtime pipeline that helped lift DC’s majority-Black community into the middle class; it also gutted the well-being of the Black women who hold up that community.

A recent study by University of Maryland labor economist Brandon Enriquez found that DOGE cuts “disproportionately affected” the federal employment of Black women compared with other demographic groups. The study estimated that while DOGE “did not have statistically significant effects for any other race, gender, education, or age group,” it reduced Black women’s federal employment by 25 percent. 

“At its lowest point in April 2025, employment was almost 50% reduced for Black women, with little effect for other groups,” Enriquez noted, although there was a partial rebound in subsequent months. Given the overrepresentation of Black workers in the federal government, Enriquez concluded that the layoffs increased racial inequality.

In many of the agencies that were targeted for massive staff reductions, women and people of color made up the majority of the workforce, according to a 2025 report by Sarah Javaid for the National Women’s Law Center. Javaid wrote that “while women made up 46% of the total federal workforce in September 2024, they represented the majority of the workforce” in the departments of Veterans Affairs, Education, Health and Human Services, Treasury, and Housing and Urban Development.

People of color—including Darnese Foster—made up 46 percent of probationary workers, according to the report, including 65 percent of those at the Department of the Treasury, 55 percent at Housing and Urban Development and at Homeland Security, and 53 percent at Health and Human Services.

Like some of her federal colleagues, Foster’s probation was for two years. After years of contracting, first with companies in the private sector, then with the State Department, Foster had finally landed a permanent position at Health and Human Services.

A single mother of two, she’d been in her job for a year and seven months when she got the shocking news that she had been laid off.

“It was always my goal to try to get into the government,” said Foster. “My parents always said: ‘Get with the government, it’s stable. You can grow. You can move up.’”

Foster had been excited about her new job and working with her new co-workers. And she was proud that despite struggling with a learning disability and adult ADHD, she’d recently gotten a raise in her pay and job grade.

Her work felt important to her, too. As a grant management specialist, her responsibilities included working with organizations such as hospitals or construction companies seeking government funding. If a hospital wanted new X-ray machines or a therapy facility wanted equipment, she helped them navigate the application process.

“I had finally gotten my dream job. It was devastating to have it snatched from me,” said Foster. “I had things in my life that I was putting in order, and goals that I wanted to do. This is where I was going to retire from.”

At the time of her firing, Foster’s oldest daughter was a senior in college and her youngest daughter, who was 9, was in private school and an avid dancer who took part in competitions. Since the firings, her daughter has continued to dance, but Foster can’t afford the cost of competitions.

“I try not to take too much from her because she’s 10,” says Foster. “I did keep her in dance, so she doesn’t lose all that she’s learned, so she won’t feel like, ‘Oh, I can’t do anything.’”

Foster says she has not been coping well. She received unemployment benefits for only six months. She lost the items in her storage unit because she couldn’t afford the fees, and she has struggled to pay for her daughter’s private school tuition.

She feels like she’s in a “sunken place.”

“I’ll drop my youngest off at school and just sit in the car and cry,” Foster said. “What’s next? Where am I going to get the money to keep a roof over our heads?”

For a 2022 study focused on Black women’s gender and race-related stress, epidemiologists Meghan Tipre and Tiffany L. Carson conducted focus groups and found that the top stressors identified by Black women were single parenting, Black children’s safety and finances. “Black women report higher levels of psychological stress than White women and carry a disproportionate burden of chronic conditions associated with psychological stress,” the authors wrote in the journal Women’s Health Reports.

Dr. Raquel Martin, a licensed clinical psychologist who focuses on Black mental health, says abrupt termination can be both a financial stressor and a traumatic stressor, because it’s not just about the loss of income.

“It’s the sudden loss of predictability and control, identity, community, and even future planning,” Martin says. “There’s a significant association between unemployment and increased depression, anxiety, and psychological distress, as well as just life satisfaction overall.”

Job loss is more than just about money, Martin points out.

“When you think about job loss, you often think about money, but psychologically, abrupt termination can create a profound sense of instability, (and) human beings need and thrive off of predictability,” Martin says. “When employment disappears suddenly, people aren’t just grieving that aspect of a paycheck, they’re grieving a future of a world that they could count on.”

And when demands exceed your resources, Martin adds, the stress can be almost unbearable.

“When an experience overwhelms your ability to cope, and it leaves this lasting impact on your sense of self, safety, and sense of the world around you, that’s trauma,” Martin said. “Trauma is not only what happens to you, it’s also what happens inside of you, when you’re repeatedly forced to adapt to conditions that threaten your safety or your dignity or your humanity or your ability to thrive.”

The way people respond to trauma varies greatly from irritability to depression to becoming sedentary or changing eating habits. Foster said after her job loss, she sometimes slept all day or sat at her desk and scrolled. She also admitted being “a lot more snappy,” toward family and friends.

Martin says some people who lose their jobs experience “low pressure tolerance,” which she describes as being really irritable so that every little thing makes you want to “flip a table.”

Black women like Foster who are breadwinners and heads of household may be especially stressed since they are overwhelmed with guilt and shame for not being able to provide at their previous levels. Even though the federal firings aren’t something that they brought on themselves, the experience left some, like Foster, shattered.

“Mental health is affected by policy decisions, economic instability, and access to health care and employment protection. The solution can’t be only telling Black women to cope better with the trash circumstances that they didn’t create in the first place,” Martin explained.

“We have to ask, what does it mean when the people who are often expected to care for everyone suddenly need to care for themselves?” she said. “What got in the way of them being able to do that in the first place? How can we come together as a community?”

When trying to comfort people who have been fired or experienced traumatic events, Martin suggests avoiding statements like “everything happens for a reason” or “stay positive.” Instead, she suggests, ask how you can be helpful: “How are you doing today and what would be helpful for you right now?” or “You don’t have to carry this alone. What are some tangible things I can do?”

But it’s also important, Martin says, that people experiencing this kind of stress let others help. She encourages staying connected to community and leaning into mutual aid. If neighbors want to bring dinner or provide a gift certificate, or if relatives want to take the kids to a park, let them.

“I know how we feel about the system failing us, but when it comes down to Black people, the system has failed us for such a significant amount of time we have to remember that the goal is for us not to fail each other and still keep it going,” Martin said.

Foster says she’s applied unsuccessfully for more than 100 jobs since her firing last year. In the interim, she braids hair and has worked as a consultant on political campaigns to make ends meet. She meets regularly with a mental health practitioner and tries to stay upbeat through prayer and affirmations.

Nevertheless, Foster feels like she is failing—failing as a mother, failing as a provider, failing at parenting.

“I feel like I’m almost 50 and I’m way behind. I don’t have a life insurance policy to leave my kids. No savings,” Foster says. “It weighs heavy for me as a mother.”

It’s not only the stress of not having the money to do what she needs to do as a parent, but the stress of having to lean on her 23-year-old daughter and mother to help pay the bills. As she continues to look for full-time employment, she says she is drained by the rejections.

Right now, Foster says, she’s holding it together, taking it one day at a time.

“I do believe in God, but when you’ve been down in life and have had disappointments, it’s kind of hard to keep your faith,” said Foster. “You try to stay strong, but you wonder, when is there going to be light at the end of the tunnel? How long do I have to stay like this?”

As a city dweller, I often find myself sandwiched between pro-social and anti-social situations. Most urban environments drift closer to one of those two poles than the other. Chicago may have beautiful parks, but it comes at the cost of anti-homeless policies like encampment clearance or hostile architecture that makes benches impossible to sit on. And that’s nothing compared to the omnipresent din of police helicopters and sirens I suffered in Baltimore. While New York City expands access to public toilets and the arts, Waymo descends upon Denver. Before visiting Vienna this past summer, I knew about its reputation as one of Europe’s most aggressively pro-social cities, boasting ample green space and excellent public transit. But I hadn’t realized how easy being there would feel, and how the city’s social-democratic attitudes toward urban planning would be reflected in liberal attitudes the people who live there have toward one another.

Many European cities are entering a fraught era of austerity, overtourism, widening income inequality, and social pressures like immigration (from both wealthy Westerners and the world’s refugees). These burdens—in addition to facilitating the slow but steady rise of nationalist and right-wing political groups and parties—are often evident in the urban built environment and the ways people interact with it.

When I was in Berlin earlier this year, Berliners were still reeling from an act of domestic terrorism in which a van plowed into a crowd at the city’s annual Pride parade. The German Historical Museum and the Bauhaus Archive were both closed for long-delayed renovations due to lack of municipal funds. Alternative für Deutschland posters crowded utility poles. The police were omnipresent, and public activism tepid following the moratorium on free speech regarding the genocide in Palestine.

Meanwhile Ljubljana, Slovenia, a city I lived in on and off during the post-lockdown years, has slowly grown unrecognizable. Already very small (its ring road is about five miles in circumference), it has been pushed to the brink by overtourism as more cruises dock there and more direct flights serve it despite its severe lack of accommodation for visitors. Slovenia carried out one of post-socialist Europe’s most radical housing privatizations after the fall of Yugoslavia. Ljubljana, which has no rent control or stabilization, has long been susceptible to rent hikes and AirBnBification. Since the country joined the EU in 2004, foreign investment has poured in to claim unoccupied luxury apartment buildings in the capital as illiquid assets. Now the cost of living has skyrocketed, and everyday life has become unpleasant because of severe overcrowding and boorish tourists.

Cities live and die based on how well they can avoid anti-social policies that privatize the commons and sell it out from under the people who live there. This doesn’t mean more policing, but rather policy decisions that keep housing affordable, free expression alive, tourism in check, and culture a core part of everyday life in a big metropolis.

Vienna stands out from other European cities first and foremost in its relationship to housing. Its “Red Vienna” period of social-democratic governance (1918–34) ushered in remarkable progressive reforms and design innovations before the rise of the Third Reich. Artists, architects, activists, politicians, and intellectuals set themselves to the task of imagining new ways to live with one another.

Feminists like Grete Schütte-Lihotzky, who would later go on to design the famous Frankfurt Kitchen, considered the impact design had on women’s labor in the home. (The prototype for Schütte-Lihotzky’s fitted kitchen—a surprisingly groovy organic form integrating sinks and shelving—can be viewed in the Wien Museum Karlsplatz.) Architects like Karl Ehn and Josef Frank built sprawling palaces for the proletariat in the newest—that is, modernist—architectural styles, buildings in which communal living was baked in. Kindergartens, bathhouses, laundries, and kitchens were all collectivized, which saved on per-unit cost. During my visit, I was surprised to see the degree to which these famous buildings—like Ehn’s Karl-Marx-Hof, a kilometer-long public-housing complex—remain working-class strongholds, occupied by immigrants, laborers, and young families.

From the postwar period onward, the city went on to produce many proudly self-identified if architecturally demure social housing projects. While many cities have reservations about public housing, Vienna does not—it is a point of civic pride. Some 50 to 60 percent of Vienna’s population lives in social housing. Most of its non-social housing is also under some form of price regulation.

Cheap rent keeps the city affordable and dynamic. It keeps resentment against people who are different from you at bay when they are your neighbors in your city-run apartment complex. While right-wing sentiment in Austria is on the rise as a whole, Vienna remains true to its social-democratic roots. Less money spent on rent means more trips to the theater, the opera, or out to eat. It enables people to work fewer hours and spend more time with their children, for whom there is a robust municipal infrastructure of programs, playgrounds, and parks. Free, clean, and accessible public bathrooms are abundant, and a shared sense of public trust—rather than invasive surveillance—keeps them in good shape.

Of all the large cities I’ve been to in Europe, Vienna is the one with the fewest visible police officers. (Which is not to say that when political protests pop off, they don’t show up in full force.) Even the city’s transit system relies on common trust: You buy a ticket at the kiosk but do not need to validate when going through a turnstile. Many European cities unleash aggressive transit police on suspected fare evaders, but Viennese transit employees calmly check tickets at the entrance to the stations.

When public trust is high, people act in pro-social ways. A friend and I were at a vegan schnitzel place when an old man walking with a cane slipped and fell hard onto the sidewalk. All bystanders of various ages and ethnicities sprang into action to help—including the restaurant owner, who was sporting a bitcoin shirt (this is an important detail). My friend called an ambulance. I helped put his glasses back together.

It’s not that I think such a thing couldn’t come to pass in the United States (though I doubt that it would in certain parts of it). It’s that these acts of compassion and solidarity should be taken for granted in urban life, which inherently enmeshes us with others. The more cities become commodified, touristified, and homogenized, the less likely we are to extend that compassion to one another, because now we’re competing for resources. Both the left and the right tend to frame the problems of urban living as a question of how to surmount our baser instincts. The pro-social politics of Vienna give us a glimpse of how we might all be better if we assumed we all want to inhabit a better world.

By 1969, the Vietnam War had killed tens of thousands of young American men. President Richard Nixon had begun a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. Across the United States, millions of protesters, many of them students, joined the largest anti-war marches in American history. In New Haven, Connecticut, Yale students were among the loudest, most impassioned demonstrators.

That spring, Claes Oldenburg, who had graduated from Yale nearly two decades earlier, installed a sculpture on Beinecke Plaza, the center of campus. It was called Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks: a giant tube of lipstick rising from the treads of a tank. Students for a Democratic Society used it as a podium for their speakers during anti-war rallies, positioning it outside Woodbridge Hall, where university presidents historically had their office and where trustees met. The art historian Mya Dosch has called the tube “phallic and bullet-like,” a beauty product that evokes the danger and threat of a weapon.

The sculpture, and the protests that it featured in, were about young people versus large institutions: the university and the federal government.

Last Friday, the Lipstick appeared on Beinecke Plaza for the first time in more than 50 years. Yale College students had built a cardboard version, about half the size of the original, and placed it near where its predecessor once stood. (Oldenburg’s sculpture was moved to the Yale University Art Gallery’s sculpture garden.)

Hundreds marched to Beinecke Plaza to protest, two generations later, their university and their nation’s government. Specifically, they gathered for the second protest of Democratize Yale, a coalition of students, staff, faculty, and alumni that formed following the university’s settlement negotiations with the federal government about Yale’s alleged racial discrimination in their admissions process. The coalition’s demands include shared governance; free speech and assembly; academic freedom; and that the university exit negotiations with the Department of Justice, which they see as a strategy to appease Trump.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, Representative Rosa DeLauro, and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker stood in the crowd, signaling solidarity with the demonstrators’ civil disobedience against the university. Blumenthal could be seen chanting with the students who now study at his alma mater. Members of the Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors were also there, speaking and joining rallying cries.

The crowd gathered around the twelve-foot cardboard version of Oldenburg’s sculpture for an unregistered protest, deliberately violating Yale’s campus free-expression policies. The sculpture also violated a rule barring outdoor artwork without administrative approval. Sam Callaway and Stuart Wrede, two architects who built the original with Oldenburg, sent the organizers a statement calling the ban censorious. “What is Yale afraid of?” they asked.

Organizers passed chalk through the crowd and asked everyone to write down what they would do with the university if they ran it. Soon the granite was covered in messages and peace signs. Someone had written “Make love not war,” a slogan reminiscent of the original Lipstick’s era. Someone else had written “Fuck fascism.” A junior speaking on behalf of Students Unite Now, a group that organizes Yale students on labor and economic justice issues, led the crowd in a chant at an hour when Yale’s policies do not permit chanting on Beinecke Plaza: “Pre-compliance is a scam. Don’t concede to Trump’s demands.”

A week earlier, the trustees of the Yale Corporation were on campus for their first meeting of the academic year. They sat in the back seats of black town cars driving down College Street, then up Prospect Street, toward Science Hill, where, according to Yale junior John Robert Walker, they convene “in secret…far from central campus.” The trustees have been criticized for their corporate affiliations, their clandestine structure, and their lack of accountability to students, faculty, and alumni.

But, on the morning of September 26, students had arrived first. Hours ahead of the trustees, they dropped banners from prominent places around campus, like the Humanities Quadrangle and Phelps Hall, home of the Classics Department. One sign hung just below the university’s crest on the face of Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall. With the insignia’s Latin motto, the building now read:

LUX ET

VERITAS

FIGHT BACK

DON’T SETTLE

Other banners simply read “Shared governance now” and “Trustees, you can’t hide.” All of them violated Yale policy, which forbids hanging banners on building facades and requires anyone who puts up a poster to print their name and the date on it.

But students did not start out by breaking the rules. For years, they tried to express discontent through the university’s own channels.

In 2023, almost 90 percent of students who voted in a Yale College Council referendum said the trustees should be democratically elected. The Endowment Justice Collective had campaigned to turn out the vote. The Corporation responded with a letter acknowledging that it had received the results. Students also asked the university’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, three times, to divest from weapons manufacturers. Three years later, Yale has acted on neither demand.

“Yale thinks our demands go away on four-year cycles,” said Diego Suchenski Loustaunau, a member of the Endowment Justice Collective. But the banners and the cardboard sculpture showed they had not gone anywhere.

This fall, the groups that had carried those demands for years, including the Endowment Justice Collective, joined the Yale College Council, the Yale College Democrats, the Black Student Alliance at Yale, Mecha de Yale, and the alumni group Stand Up for Yale. On September 1, they held their first event as a coalition, a teach-in on Cross Campus. Their newest demand, that Yale walk away from the negotiating table, is the one that turned scattered campaigns into a movement.

In May, the Justice Department accused Yale’s medical school of illegally favoring Black and Hispanic applicants. In July, Yale President Maurie McInnis confirmed that separate investigations into Yale College and Yale Law School were also pending, and that Yale was negotiating with the government. She has offered few details since.

Muneer Ahmad, a professor at Yale Law School and co-general counsel of the university’s AAUP chapter, told the crowd that Yale had made one offer, seen it rejected, and made another, “essentially bargaining against itself.”

Sher Tremonte, a law firm the chapter hired over the summer, called the department’s findings “cherry-picked” and “statistically weak.” The government, Ahmad said, has not proven anything before a judge.

Faculty members have their own reasons to worry. Amy Kapczynski, also a professor at the law school, pointed to an AAUP survey of almost 200 faculty members. Since January 2025, nearly half of those who responded have stepped back from public engagement, and about a third have avoided controversial topics in their lectures. The chapter has asked Yale to put protections for academic freedom in writing. Yale agrees with the principle, Kapczynski said, “but they won’t write it down.”

For decades now, Yale has made peace with Oldenburg’s sculpture. A permanent version, made of steel, aluminum, and fiberglass, was given to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1974. After nearly 50 years in the Morse College courtyard, it moved this year to the gallery’s sculpture garden. “Yale now celebrates the Lipstick’s history,” said Katherine Profeta, cofounder of the alumni group Stand Up for Yale, “but the University’s current ‘free expression’ policies would never allow this structure to be built today.”

Putin’s recent declaration of Russia’s potential to “use all the weapons at our disposal” is the most explicit talk of nuclear war by a superpower since the Reagan administration invoked the prospect of “winnable nuclear war” over 40 years ago. How did we get to this point? Leaving aside the origin of the war with Ukraine, which Putin falsely continues to claim was forced upon Russia, dangerous rhetoric has been escalating on both sides for some time now.

To be sure, for Ukraine the threat from Russia is very real. But elsewhere the hyped-up language over the Russian threat is astonishing: “We are all eastern flank countries these days,” NATO’s top commander argues, while a British think tanker even claims, “The UK is a front-line state.”

European leaders have focused on two threats: the short-term potential for “hybrid” attacks from Russia, and the longer-term argument that “Russia’s well-oiled war machine” (in the words of NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte) justifies a massive military buildup.

Regarding “hybrid war,” intelligence officials warn of a potential attack on NATO that could come “within months.” The expressed fear is that Russia will somehow “test” the world’s most powerful military alliance, as if a simple poke from the Russian bear would “expose NATO as impotent.”

Russian leaders have long been obsessed about NATO. The notion that the Kremlin would now provoke a direct confrontation to find out whether NATO would invoke Article 5—“an attack on one is an attack on all”—beggars the imagination. Yet such imaginings are now running freely, in war games, “war fiction,” and realistic television portrayals. The threatening oratory has become so heightened that even leaders in the Baltic states—countries truly on the front lines—are now calling on Western leaders to tamp down their talk of an invasion. Those spinning the scenario whereby the Russian-speaking people of Narva, Estonia, are waiting to be happily liberated by Putin have rarely bothered to speak to the people who actually live there.

To be sure, warnings about the potential for arson or sabotage should be taken seriously. The speculation has been that Russia might attempt such actions to lessen European support for Ukraine. Yet history shows all too well that attacks on one’s soil tend to have the opposite effect and drive support for retaliatory action.

Indeed, the more realistic threat from Russia’s “hybrid war” is the ongoing attempt to use social media and other means as part of an “overall attempt to spread fear and uncertainty,” or in the more heightened language of British Prime Minister Burnham at the UN, through Russia’s “poisonous tide” of “disinformation.” Yet Russian disinformation can only exploit existing fissures in European society.

European leaders face the “unenviable task of persuading unprepared voters to cut welfare spending to fund defense.” Convincing voters to cut welfare spending—to pay more for guns and less for bread and butter—becomes more daunting when one realizes that Russia is hardly operating from a position of strength. Rather, we are told, “Putin is desperate,” or, as Mujtaba Rahman writes in The Guardian, “Russia is becoming more dangerous because it is becoming weaker.”

Before the war, Russia’s economy was suffering from a decade or more of declining living standards. Contrary to expectations, for a few years Russia’s economy boomed under “military Keynesianism.” Now, however, knowledgeable economists argue that “the wheels are coming off” the Russian economy. The war-induced labor scarcity fuels inflation, leading to crushing interest rates, which in turn pushes civilian industry into the ground. Before long, Russia will reach a hard stop, finding itself unable to continue to fund war spending, meet basic social obligations, and maintain fiscal stability.

True, Putin might well choose to demand full military mobilization. But, as no less than Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, bluntly stated, transitioning to a war economy would “kill the entire country.” Andrei Klepach, chief economist at Russia’s second-largest (and Kremlin-connected) bank, spoke candidly to fellow economists: “I am almost certain we will face a social crisis…. Our backwardness will grow with all the ensuing consequences.” (He was fired soon after his remarks were leaked.)

Yet Europe is not arming to combat a backward Russia facing social crisis. European allies increased their defense spending by 20 percent in 2025 compared to 2024—the largest annual increase since 1953. Germany is leading the way, pushing past the two postwar taboos of demilitarization and fiscal probity. German military spending in 2027 is slated to be as much as that of France and Britain combined—on its way to building the largest conventional military on the continent.

The buildup would appear to have little to do with any realistic threat from Russia, and everything to do with Germany’s hemorrhaging jobs due to competition from China, with Volkswagen alone planning to lay off 100,000 workers. As a headline in The Wall Street Journal declares, “Germany Is Reinventing Itself as a Weapons Factory.” Even the German Green Party—which once proclaimed itself pacifist and opposed to NATO—is now joining the pro-militarization chorus, with a recent party document promoting the benefits of economic “innovation through defense.”

The prospect that militarization will lead to a new German economic miracle is an illusion. Further still, military spending will inevitably divert funds from social welfare, at a time when job losses and a stagnant economy already weigh heavily. That in turn will provide more fuel for the extreme right, such as Alternative für Deutschland. The far right is gaining still more support when they appear to be the only ones calling for an end to the war in Ukraine—in their case, not because they are anti-war but rather pro-Putin.

In short, is the greater threat to Europe from Russia, or from within? In his recent remarks, Putin himself speculated whether European leaders, because of “what’s happening in terms of social policy and living standards,” have to “shift the focus of attention of their citizens from domestic issues towards outside issues.”

That brings us back to Putin’s nuclear threat. Any such talk of deploying weapons of mass destruction is reckless. But it is imperative to note the escalating language on both sides. For instance, NATO war planners have long been obsessed with the Suwałki Gap, NATO’s “most exposed corridor,” where Russia, it is argued, could invade from its enclave in Kaliningrad. Predictably, as war planners do, they have beefed up their forces accordingly.

Yet there are war planners on the other side as well, and suddenly Russia’s isolated enclave of Kaliningrad appears most exposed. It was specifically regarding a potential invasion of Kaliningrad that Putin invoked the threat of nuclear weapons. (In what would be comical if the stakes weren’t so serious, some allege that Putin was responding to Sky TV’s portrayal—titled The Wargame—of a British attack on Kaliningrad.) Putin claimed that given NATO’s military advantage, Russia would not have “many means to counter such a threat,” and would need to use its “competitive advantage” of nuclear weapons.

Russia’s war in Ukraine, now well into its fifth year, needs to end. Yet a wider war, with potentially much greater consequences, must be avoided at all costs. At a minimum, channels of communication must be reopened (the German foreign minister just spoke with his Russian counterpart for the first time since February 2022). The Russian economy, and Russian society along with it, will suffer the consequences of this horrendous war for years to come. But European leaders must avoid following Russia’s lead by inflating the threat of war to divert attention from internal challenges and fissures. Instead, Europe should invoke the values upon which the European Union was founded in the wake of two world wars—an end to nationalism, militarism, and the foundation of a “social Europe” that takes care of its citizens. What better way to counter the threat from Russia?

It’s Groundhog Day in Florida, and this time a US Senate seat is on the line. While Democratic institutions and Washington pundits may count Florida out, Florida is in play. This week, Angie Nixon said Chuck Schumer and the Democratic leadership will be investing. This is good, and now it’s time to make sure we focus on Latino voters.

Florida is not a red state. It is an under-invested one. And Angie Nixon has a path to victory—but it requires turning out Latino voters, especially Florida’s large Puerto Rican community.

Florida has over 900,000 Puerto Rican voters; it’s time to bring them back and turn them out. In 2016 and ’24, we learned an important lesson: The key to winning is not just turning out the base but also cultivating voters years in advance.

As a political strategist, I’ve worked on many campaigns across this nation, especially around the Latino vote. I could tell when the investment was there because we won when we invested in Latinos. Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico built the Southwest wall around Latino voters. And that wasn’t just turning out voters overnight; that was long-term investment.

In Florida, I watched Democrats ignore the long game in 2020 and neglect Latino and Puerto Rican voters at their peril. The lack of investment was the nail in the coffin. In 2024, nothing changed. I begged national donors and congressional and US Senate committees not to make the same mistake. Now it’s 2026, and the election is a month away. Florida has more than 900,000 eligible Puerto Rican voters who could vote Democrat. But we haven’t seen a single real ad aimed at them or a comprehensive Latino engagement plan that gives Angie Nixon what she needs to get over the edge.

Nixon has built her campaign on a simple message: Change can’t wait. And it’s time Democrats in DC and nationwide start acting like they believe that message, too.

The political environment is there. The latest New York Times/Siena poll has Democrats leading 64 to 29 among Hispanic likely voters, with the cost of living as their top worry. Another recent poll shows Trump’s disapproval rating among Hispanics is 77 percent. One other recent NBC poll shows Democrats have a 24-point lead on whom Latino voters want to see in control of Congress.That marks a significant shift from 2024, when Trump won roughly half of Latino voters; since then, his approval among them has fallen sharply.

And we’re already seeing that shift play out on the ground. In Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, the Trump flags are gone, and former supporters are angry about the economy and immigration. If Democrats are leaning into Texas and Mississippi, there is no excuse to skip Florida.

Republicans certainly aren’t treating Florida like a race they can ignore. And right now, polls have the Republican operatives running scared. Just this month, Florida Democrats outpaced Republicans in voter registration for the first time since January 2021. The momentum is there, and it’s time for donors and Democratic institutions to stop hitting “pause.” Republicans are on the defensive, and it’s time to capitalize.

And I know: Angie Nixon is a democratic socialist candidate. But her policies aren’t out of step with what voters want. For years, Democrats in Florida have run lackluster candidates that voters just aren’t excited about. But this time around, the DSA and community groups ran an exciting campaign that energized voters, and it’s time to take it over the top.

Nixon is a union organizer and mother from Jacksonville who watched her mom work two jobs to get by. In the Florida House, she expanded childcare, challenged corporate price gouging, and led the fight against DeSantis’s voting maps.

She won her primary because the same old playbook wasn’t working. The same old blue Democrats just don’t work anymore. She is tough, says what she feels, and can be a brawler for the working class in the US Senate—something that Democrats have been lacking and voters have found in elected officials like Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Analilia Mejia, and, dare I say it, Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Meanwhile, discontent and frustration are swelling over Florida’s draconian policies. Rising costs and the erosion of civil liberties are angering Democrats and independents alike, who feel Trump and his sycophants are more focused on culture wars than the price of gas at the pump.

Angie Nixon is the nominee Democratic voters chose to lead them. It’s time Democratic institutions such as the DSCC and national donors started letting the money flow.

This matters down the ballot, too.

Florida’s Ninth Congressional District, a Puerto Rican stronghold, was redrawn into a seat Trump would have carried by nearly 18 points. Turning out Puerto Rican voters can pull that race back from underwater.

In 2024, Republicans out-organized us for Latino voters almost everywhere. In Nevada and Florida, GOP captains worked building by building, floor by floor. In Pennsylvania, abuelitas organized their blocks for Trump. Latino barbershops became Trump territory. Groups like SEIU, the Working Families Party, Florida Rising, and Make the Road PA did what they could with almost nothing to stop the bleeding.

Then came the October surprise: the “island of garbage” remark. Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian, made the remark at a Madison Square Garden rally for Trump, saying, “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” The remark went viral, and Puerto Rican voters were rightly offended. Our culture runs deep in our communities, and our island is our legacy.

But by then, half the country had already voted. Consultants and committees scrambled to fund programs that should have been running for months. The money arrived late, as it always does, and by that time it was too late.

The postmortem was telling: Postelection research found that if voters had known sooner about how Republicans viewed Puerto Rico, many would have voted differently. A poll sponsored by La Brega y Fuerza Fund and other partners found that Republican-identified Puerto Rican voters were contacted more often than Democratic ones.

That is the kicker: We were turning out voters, but we failed to cultivate them enough.

That’s why La Brega y Fuerza Acción has mapped every Puerto Rican voter in the country and is working to engage them on issues affecting both the diaspora and the island. We are putting Puerto Rican issues front and center in states like Florida because we want to cultivate voters, tackle affordability, and confront the crisis in Puerto Rico. We just need the support to do it.

And those issues are deeply connected to our electoral politics.

Over the last 15 years, more than 1 million people moved from Puerto Rico to the US mainland, with Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania now the top destinations. Last week, La Brega y Fuerza hosted a town hall with thousands of Puerto Ricans from Florida, Pennsylvania, and the island. Ninety percent had a family member affected by the water crisis. Eighty percent were worried about the financial crisis and elderly relatives at risk. Many had families hit by blackouts, and many oppose overdevelopment like the Esencia megaproject in Cabo Rojo, which critics warn could use more than 1.25 million gallons of water a day in a place where people already face outages. And yes, Puerto Ricans care about ICE too. The raids aren’t abstract for citizens with mixed-status neighbors, coworkers, and family.

So in Florida, our biggest miss is Puerto Rican voters: eligible voters who can participate on day one and have a direct stake in the issues.

That’s why investing in Florida now isn’t just about 2026 but also 2028. Winning now keeps Florida in the race for years. Democrats can end the Florida dry spell, or they can watch a third cycle of “next time” go by.

So let’s give Angie Nixon the chance she deserves. Let’s play to win in Florida. Our democracy depends on it.

The Supreme Court began its new term on Monday by hearing oral arguments in Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County. The case involves a potentially landmark environmental lawsuit filed by the city of Boulder, Colorado, against two major fossil fuel industry polluters. The suit is modeled after old lawsuits against the tobacco industry: Boulder alleges that Suncor and ExxonMobil used deceptive marketing practices to sell products that have caused climate change and harmed the city, and it is now seeking damages for those harms.

Monday’s hearing wasn't actually about those harms but whether the lawsuit should survive a motion to dismiss. If it does, it could allow local governments and maybe even individual citizens to sue energy companies for the effects of climate change. People might be able to sue for everything from adverse health outcomes to lost property. It could fundamentally change the way oil and gas companies operate across the country and, most likely, across the entire world.

But the lawsuit is not going to be successful. Unlike the tobacco industry—or the asbestos industry or opioid manufacturers or any other industry at the center of groundbreaking mass tort litigation—this is Big Oil we’re talking about, an industry with a market valuation upwards of $4 trillion. It’s like Spider-Man going from fighting the guys who stuck up a 7-11 to fighting an intergalactic alien invasion in one movie. There is no way this court is going to let local tort litigation regulate the global production and consumption of energy and its effects on the 8.2 billion people living on this planet.

The challenge is that while many of the justices don’t want Boulder to win as a practical matter, most of them are not quite sure when and how Boulder should lose as a legal matter. Monday’s Supreme Court arguments were messy because there are many competing ideas about whether the Supreme Court should kill the case now, kill it later, or wait and hope it dies on its own.

The case arrived in front of the Supreme Court on appeal from the Colorado State Supreme Court, which ruled that the lawsuit could survive a motion to dismiss by the fossil fuel companies and head to trial in Colorado. That presents the first problem for the Supreme Court, because it’s unclear if the court should have jurisdiction to hear this appeal at all, or if it should wait for the Colorado courts to do their work and then review their decision.

Justice Clarence Thomas questioned the lawyer for the energy companies, Kannon Shanmugam, and Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris (the Trump administration is on the side of the fossil fuel industry, which should surprise no one) about this very point. Two of the liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, suggested that the Supreme Court should wait until the Colorado proceedings have finished, though Kagan gave pretty strong indications that Boulder should lose in state court.

The energy companies, of course, do not want to be dragged through state court. Shanmugam argued that if the Supreme Court allows the Boulder litigation to go forward, the very next day his energy clients will be sued by a veritable horde of municipalities and states. The cost of litigation is not normally something the Supreme Court should consider, but Shanmugam argued that his clients needed an answer to whether these suits should be allowed now, not years from now when the companies have been sued by every local district attorney looking for a good headline.

Instead, Shanmugam argued that Boulder’s lawsuit should be preempted by federal law: Preemption is the general principle that state law cannot be applied to an area where federal law has already spoken. The energy companies say that the Clean Air Act and the “structure of the Constitution” prevents states from regulating air pollution. They argue that since air pollution somewhat obviously and easily crosses state lines, and since climate change literally affects everybody, only federal law applies to climate change.

It’d be a cool argument… if it were supported by a shred of textual evidence. But there’s nothing in the Constitution that makes air pollution an exception to state law (not that the authors of the Constitution had a good understanding of air pollution, which is yet another reason that going back to the original text and intent of the framers is facially stupid, but I digress).

The Clean Air Act seems more directly on point to the issue of air pollution, but Boulder’s lawsuit has a very neat way around that law. Boulder is not suing the energy companies for pollution (which is clearly regulated by the Clean Air Act); it’s suing them for marketing (which is clearly not). It is the marketing of fossil fuels that has abetted climate change and caused damage to Boulder, the city argues, not the production of the fuels themselves.

Kevin Russell, arguing on behalf of Boulder, illustrated this point brilliantly at oral arguments. He said that the companies “can continue to produce as much fossil fuels as they like and contribute to as much air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions as the market will bear, when consumers are properly informed about the consequences of that decision.”

I clapped when Russell said this. I love this argument. But, if we can just speak as adults here, it’s also bullshit. Boulder is absolutely trying to backdoor-regulate greenhouse-gas emissions and the legal sleight of hand here is just that: a magic trick that can’t really obscure what’s going on.

Both Chief Justice Roberts and Kagan were unimpressed with the argument in real time. Kagan immediately followed up Russell’s marketing argument by asking what, if any, limits there would still be on the states to regulate the national and global environment should Boulder prevail.

But making the straight-up preemption argument puts the conservative justices, especially Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a bind. Conservatives generally don’t like federal preemption arguments. That’s because a broad and robust view of federal law that trumps state action can usually be used to put a stop to whatever latest torture Texas or Florida comes up with.

In this case, the only way for the Republican justices to make the energy companies win, now, in the way they want to win, is to take an expansive view of federal preemption and read it into the Constitution or the Clean Air Act where it does not explicitly exist.

Some of the GOP justices are cool with that. Alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh was clear that he thought states have no right to regulate “air and water.” He said there is a “wall of precedents” supporting the idea that only the federal government can act on this issue. Justice Amy Coney Barrett was less strident than Kavanaugh, but she seemed to largely agree with him.

The last interesting wrinkle in the case comes from the fact that the Supreme Court was down a man while debating it. Justice Samuel Alito recused himself from this case, most likely because his wife is thought to own stocks in some of the companies being sued. As a reminder, the state supreme court said that the lawsuit could go forward, so if the Supreme Court justices split, 4–4, the lower court ruling stands and the lawsuit survives.

But I don’t think it will. Federal preemption may be a hard pill for some of the justices to swallow ideologically, but they will take their medicine to prevent Boulder from fighting climate change all by itself. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson really want the lawsuit to go back to state court (Jackson, to my ears, is the only justice who thinks the lawsuit has a chance of succeeding on the merits), but I think the others will find some way to say federal law doesn’t allow Boulder to do what it’s trying to do. I think Boulder loses at least 6–2, and possibly 8–0 if the liberal justices can join by narrowing the opinion and limiting the damage to environmental rights.

I want Boulder to win precisely because I think Shanmugam is right. I think his Big Oil clients would be eaten alive by state lawsuit after state lawsuit. I think a win here for Boulder could wreck the fossil fuel industry and perhaps force Suncor and ExxonMobil into some kind of settlement or consent decree long before we actually get to the merits of any particular claim for damages.

Which is why the Supreme Court won’t let that happen. It’d be chaos—glorious, righteous chaos. The Republicans on the Supreme Court pretend to not care about the practical effects of their decisions when they make rulings that practically allow children to be shot at school and women to die on gurneys waiting for the lawyers to determine whether they can get an abortion. But they’ll damn sure care about the practical effects of this case.

What’s sad is that the court will care more about the practical effect of climate change lawsuits than the practical effects of climate change.

Tyler Hack spent the 2024 election watching Republicans villainize transgender Americans, and Democrats distance themselves from trans people, or worse, join in.

“I was at fundraisers and meetings with members of Congress for the Democratic Party where I was the only trans person in the room,” said Hack. “Democrats threw trans people under the bus for the election loss not because of Republican millionaires or because of corporations ripping us off, but because of trans kids. We knew that we couldn’t wait for political power.”

Hack founded the Christopher Street Project, the only operating political action group focused solely on trans rights. Hack said she created the Christopher Street Project to elect pro-trans candidates and hold politicians accountable. The organization focuses on training its candidates on how to use effective, committed pro-trans messaging. The primary winners Hack and her organization have supported and campaigned with include New York’s Brad Lander and Claire Valdez, Minnesota’s Peggy Flanagan, and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed.

Last month, Hack celebrated a particularly sweet victory after incumbent Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey trounced his challenger, Representative Seth Moulton, in the state’s Democratic primary election. It was Moulton who, less than 48 hours after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, infamously told The New York Times, “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Hack spent the early weeks of September stumping for Markey, who made Moulton’s comments a key theme of his campaign. She then kicked off Markey’s victory rally.

“He wanted a promotion, and he got fired,” said Hack of Moulton. “Seth Moulton got booed at No Kings in 2025 while Markey showed up wearing a trans flag around his neck. Trans rights was the issue for this election.”

But the Massachusetts Senate primary is only one race. With the midterms coming up, I talked to Hack about what the political landscape for trans rights looks like, why Republicans attack the trans community, and the playbook for getting pro-trans candidates into office.

—Elsie Carson-Holt

Elsie Carson-Holt: Can you introduce yourself and your organization?

Tyler Hack: My name is Tyler Hack. I am the founder and executive director of the Christopher Street Project. There was a question after 2024 of whether trans people still belonged in the Democratic Party, whether we would go the way of the Labour Party in the UK, and we, as members of the Democratic Party, are doing the opposite. We said Democrats who don’t stand with us, especially in safe seats, don’t stand by our democratic values.

ECH: What’s at stake in terms of trans healthcare and trans rights, looking at the upcoming midterm elections?

We need to prove that Democrats can win without throwing our community under the bus. It doesn’t mean that a Democrat in a swing seat is saying all trans kids should play all levels of sports, regardless of league rules and school boards. But it looks like saying, “This is a gross thing to be focused on. This is not what I’m running about. Why are we talking about this issue when no one can afford anything?”

The rights rollback that we have seen in the last two years has been the consequence of an electoral defeat. The Republican Party is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads. It is quite grim. My goal is that this cycle will emerge with a few examples of people who ran in tough seats, didn’t abdicate on our rights, and won. I think that builds a successful playbook for 2028. If we’re going to take back our rights and freedoms, it means competing on the same battlefield on which they took our rights from.

ECH: How do you get pro-trans candidates elected? What is the playbook used to build a pro-trans Congress?

TH: Number one, we broaden the conversation. I think that we need to elect more queer people, particularly trans people. We have one trans federal elected official in the history of this country, and that’s going to change. We’re organizing and preparing to elect more trans members of Congress in future cycles. But when you look at the records of the people who are fighting for us in DC, many of them are not queer. Our first endorsement was Adelita Grijalva in Arizona Seven. She ran against two queer candidates, but she had the strongest record of delivering for trans youth and really all marginalized people.

That kind of success story shows what it looks like to build a pro-trans Congress: approaching someone whose life looks different than mine, and yet has the courage to stand up for what is right. Building a pro-trans Congress looks like working with those folks just as much as we work with the queer members of Congress. Some of them have trans family members. Some of them don’t. Some of them just know what’s right and are willing to fight for it.

I think there is no pro-trans Congress without a strong Democratic majority. But we also know that we need the right kind of Democrats.

ECH: Who are the “right kind” of Democrats?

TH: People who are unafraid to stand up for what’s right, even when consultants are telling them not to. People who will look at a trans kid and see them as a human being instead of a political prop. People who are willing to organize colleagues around that idea. People who know an inclusive democracy doesn’t leave anyone behind.

The Markey versus Moulton race is a repudiation of a type of age politics that says we only want young people [Markey is 80 years old, Moulton 47]. No, we want people who will stand up for us. If we’ve learned one thing from the last year, whether it’s Zohran Mamdani or Abigail Spanberger, people want authentic leadership.

ECH: Is it fair to say the purpose of the Christopher Street Project is sending a message to the Democratic Party that you don’t have to capitulate to Republicans on pro-trans politics, that pro-trans candidates can win big?

TH: It’s critical to show that when we talk about the attacks on trans rights being part of a broader rights rollback, when we talk about these attacks on trans kids being what they actually are, which are a push for genital inspections in schools and a push for subpoenas of hospitals for identifiable patient information, people find it gross, and we need candidates who will talk about that and win doing so.

ECH: A recent Department of Health and Human Services study came out and found that people who support transgender people may be more likely to justify political violence. What is the purpose of using that language, of the “us versus them” narrative?

TH: The Trump administration is using every tool at its disposal to defang the progressive movement, but especially transgender rights groups, organizations standing up to ICE, and people who don’t agree with their rogue foreign policy. It’s all the same playbook. They are losing public opinion. My ultimate reaction is that they’re scared. They don’t want to play on an even playing field, and they know if they did that, they would lose.

It’s all politics. It’s about an attack on anyone who doesn’t look, pray, love, or sound like the Trump administration wants, and they are racing towards a white Christian nationalist society that is at odds with the diversity that America should embrace.

They saw in 2024 that Democrats were not well equipped to respond to this issue. They think that this is a winning political issue for them. Our job is to make sure the American people know what’s actually going on, which is that this is a distraction from the cost-of-living crisis that Americans are facing. While people can’t afford anything, the Trump administration is spending $100 million of taxpayer money on their anti-trans crusade instead of putting that money in American pockets. They didn’t do nearly as much on this issue in Trump’s first term. In 2016, the incumbent Republican governor of North Carolina lost his reelection in large part due to the trans bathroom ban that caused so many corporations to pull out of the state; it was a losing issue for Republicans. Trump said in 2016 that Caitlyn Jenner could come into Trump Tower and use any bathroom she wanted. It’s all about the landscape. It’s not about the values.

ECH: What are some of the other races you have your eye on that are coming up?

TH: Minnesota is a key focus. Peggy Flanagan is running for US Senate. Matt Little is running for US House in their second district. Both are strong pro-trans champions and folks who will organize with us on the inside.

In Michigan, we have Abdul El-Sayed running for US Senate. We have Will Lawrence running for US House in district seven, another pair of pro-trans champions and folks who will organize with us. I’m really excited about those four folks. They’re showing what it looks like to fight without leaving anyone behind, and if we can get two or three or maybe even four of them across the finish line, it could be pivotal to proving that pro-trans politics have a place in competitive districts. We see a few Democrats doing that, and I’m excited about the progressive, courageous candidates who we have in some of these tougher seats, who are going to prove that we can win without leaving anyone behind.

The obituaries for former Republican House speaker Dennis Hastert, who died over the weekend, all led with the scandal that justly stained his name at the end of his career—charges of child sexual abuse dating from his tenure as a teacher and wrestling coach in Yorkville, Illinois, in the 1960s and ’70s. After his subsequent resignation, Hastert was convicted on charges of bank fraud stemming from efforts to conceal a series of hush-money payments to one of his former victims; in 2016, he was sentenced to a 15-month prison term, but was released on medical grounds several weeks before serving it out. 

Shortly after Hastert pleaded guilty to the fraud charges, then–Republican Speaker Paul Ryan had his official portrait removed from the Capitol, signaling the GOP’s determination to treat the disgraced party leader as a bad apple—an unfortunate behavioral outlier—best forgotten.

But Hastert’s horrifying predatory past wasn’t his only baleful contribution to our political scene. As a rising GOP power broker, Hastert followed the scorched-earth model of politics practiced by his mentor, former majority leader Tom DeLay. DeLay became majority whip in 1994, and set about transforming the GOP conference into a machine running on ideological orthodoxy and corrupt infusions of cash. His signature innovation was an initiative called the “K Street Project”—a bid to transform the DC lobbying industry into a subsidiary of the Republican Party, demanding that favored firms heighten their PAC contributions to the GOP while stiffing the Democratic opposition. DeLay, who graduated to majority leader in 2003, became a casualty of his own corruptionist political vision; in 2005, a Travis County grand jury indicted him on charges of money laundering, and he resigned from office a year later. He was also a close confrere of superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, also later jailed on fraud and corruption charges, taking the K Street Project’s amoral precepts to their logical extreme.

Hastert served as DeLay’s deputy whip, and he thrived by following DeLay’s cutthroat example. He assumed the speakership in 1999 in the rushed procedural aftermath of still another House speaker sexual scandal involving Robert Livingston, a protégé of Newt Gingrich. Once the Republicans secured new majorities in the 2002 midterms, Hastert made a point of looking out for his scandal-plagued mentor. By 2004, DeLay’s moneyed antics had become so blatant that they ran afoul of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (known today as the House Ethics Committee); it convened a separate subcommittee that endorsed a series of reprimands for the majority leader. Hastert moved with swift dispatch to fire the committee chair, as well as the two GOP members of the bipartisan panel, replacing them with hack loyalists. When three DeLay cronies were indicted in Texas, Hastert got the committee to approve a rule to permit DeLay to continue serving as majority leader after he was indicted.

Hastert also followed DeLay’s example by using the power of his office to engage in corrupt self-dealing. While he served as speaker, he pulled together a series of real estate deals in his home state of Illinois that saw his net worth skyrocket into the millions; during one bitter fight over a long-stalled transportation bill, Hastert saw to it that an earmark created a new highway interchange—unwanted by both local residents and the Transportation Department—a mile away from his land parcels, causing them to escalate still further in speculative value.

Hastert’s most enduring legislative legacy, however, is the notorious “Hastert rule”—the diktat that no legislation would proceed to a floor vote unless it already won the support of the House GOP conference. This might seem like the wonky, technocratic innovation of a former deputy whip, but in reality, it cemented the 21st-century GOP’s reputation for enforcing ideological orthodoxy at all costs—at the direct expense of the negotiations, compromises, and legislative conferencing that made up what House leaders had dubbed, in a show of optimism, “regular order.” As longtime congressional scholar Norm Ornstein writes, “no speaker has done more to relegate regular order to the sidelines than Hastert.”

In combination with the DeLay mantra of using the legislative process to maximize the flow of baksheesh, Haster’s siege on regular order produced some of the ugliest spectacles seen on the contemporary House floor—most notoriously, the vote that Hastert kept open on the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription drug plan. A scheduled 15-minute canvassing swelled into three hours in the dead of night, as Hastert and his lieutenants bribed and bullied the GOP conference into submission. As Ornstein notes, this was to become the de facto business model for Congress:

Under Hastert, amendments from Democrats and Republicans alike were squelched by a strikingly pliant Rules Committee; conferences were rarely held, and if they were, it was late at night and they were closed to input from all except loyal lieutenants; and provisions were sometimes added to conference reports that had never been in either House or Senate bills without notice to other lawmakers, among other indignities.

Hastert was able to pull all this off largely because, after the scandal-plagued speakerships of Gingrich and Livingston, he presented as a normie heartland Republican, rumpled and affable, to cite the preferred term in most of the pre-scandal media coverage of his speakership. But his brand of corruptionism was no less damaging or toxic than DeLay’s—and in touting his eponymous rule, he fatally set the House GOP conference on the hypervigilant ideological course that’s seen it cannibalize many of his successor speakers in fits of performative purity. And the broad logic of the Hastert rule has fanned out into the party’s electoral strategizing—creating an ever-expanding contingent of bright red gerrymandered districts, custom-made to produce the kind of feckless ideologues that routinely deadlock plans to fund the government—and thereby set up follow-on speaker purges. Given the state of today’s Republican Party, Michael Johnson should strike a blow for historical accuracy and restore Hastert’s portrait to the Capitol.

In the 1990s, economists suddenly looked around and noticed that US income inequality had taken a sharp turn for the worse during the previous decade. After some fretful speculation, they hit upon an explanation: Technological change was responsible, and since technology occupies the status of demigod in neoclassical economic theory, it stood to reason that nothing much could be done about it. Too bad somebody forgot to tell the leftist Morena party in Mexico this gloomy news: It has implemented a massive improvement in income distribution of just the kind that mainstream economists claim is impossible.

To get at the reasoning behind America’s fatalist embrace of an economy producing less for the country’s workers, it’s necessary to revisit how the country’s economics profession processed the shock of the 1980s upturn in inequality. University of Michigan economist George Johnson published a useful article in 1997 surveying a decade of economists’ work on the subject. The supply of more-skilled workers (with some college or four-year degrees) had surged from 21 percent of the labor force in 1970 to 45 percent in 1993. This meant, other things being equal, that according to the iron logic of supply and demand employers ought to have been paying them less of a premium, thereby reducing income inequality. So why were they earning more of a premium, and worsening it? Studies had reached “virtually unanimous agreement,” Johnson wrote, “that during the 1980s relative demand increased for workers at the high end of the skill distribution and thus caused their relative wages to rise.”

Economists looked around for culprits that might inflate demand for high-skilled workers fast enough to account for their heightened earnings. Reaching into their tool kit, they found two main suspects: increased trade and technological change. As manufacturers outsourced goods production to low-wage countries, well-paid factory workers were laid off and reduced to taking low-paid service jobs. You’d rather make autos for GM than sell Chinese imports at Walmart. At the other end of the salary scale, industries such as finance seeking higher-skilled workers had swelled.

But there was a problem with this narrative: You can plausibly measure how such industrial shifts worsened income inequality, and they didn’t cut deep enough to explain the 1980s surge.

So the main culprit had to be the steamroller of “skill-biased” technological change: production methods demanding more skilled workers. A factory increasing automation of the production line requires fewer workers and more engineers to fix everything that goes wrong. At least Johnson honestly faced the implications of his argument: “Public policies to ‘do something’ about earnings inequality”—his scare quotes—such as significantly raising the minimum wage, restricting imports, or retraining workers “either present potentially undesirable side effects or may work only very slowly or not at all.” One could always recommend more education, but the structural shifts spiking demand for high-skilled labor were so far-reaching that this wouldn’t happen at a great enough scale to counteract them.

This argument presents countless problems. How did economists know that most of the demand shift was due to skill-biased technological change? They had no way to measure it directly. In reality, they were simply offering a loose hypothesis to try to account for what’s known as a statistical “residual”——the growth in inequality that wasn’t attributable to the baseline changes in the economy’s industrial structure. In other words, economists were straining to explain everything they couldn’t measure. One skeptical economist called the residual “the measure of our ignorance.”

You could just as well label the main driver of inequality in the ’80s “politics” instead of “technology.” When economists talk about demand, they don’t mean the number of items customers want to buy. They mean a relationship specifying how many items consumers would buy at a range of prices. If retailers hold a sale, cutting the price, they know customers will buy more, and they hope the higher volume will help their bottom line. If they raise the price, they know customers will buy less, but they hope the larger markup will help their bottom line.

That story makes rough sense as a way to understand shopping. But it doesn’t work to explain production. Over decades, production methods obviously change, and new technologies—AI, for example—may allow a sudden leap. But new technologies don’t come along every time managers snap their fingers. A given state of the art requires, within narrow limits, a given complement of higher-skilled workers, lower-skilled workers, and capital equipment.

For example, when BMW opened a $1 billion auto plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, in 2019, it issued a press release bragging how it was employing the “latest industry 4.0 technologies” (whatever that means) and more automation than the company was using its older South Carolina plant. When it expanded the San Luis Potosi plant this year, it incorporated artificial intelligence to manage production, including its army of a thousand robots. Given that Mexican factory workers make only a little more per day than their US counterparts do per hour, why didn’t BMW managers use more of them? Wouldn’t less high-skilled labor, and perhaps less expensive capital equipment, enhance the company’s bottom line? Obviously, they had no idea how to and still make modern cars.

It isn’t just manufacturing that has relatively fixed methods. In the early 2000s, I investigated the Mexican government’s supermarket chain (yes, despite the many outraged attacks on New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan to introduce government-run supermarkets, such things are indeed common in the wider world). Competition from Walmart was driving large losses. So managers decided that if you can’t beat them, join them: They turned full-speed toward “the latest technology in all the stores, the same as Walmart,” one of them told me. Given how little workers were paid, I asked if there wasn’t some alternative method to use less automation and employ more of them. The answer: “It doesn’t exist.” The alternative to Walmart technology was bankruptcy. The chain adopted and prospered.

If neither manufacturers nor major retailers have any idea how to efficiently employ larger numbers of less-skilled workers, commercial vegetable producers have no idea how to use fewer. Looking at an export farm in Baja California, you can’t tell it isn’t north of the border in California—it operates with much the same ratio of workers to machinery. If Americans aren’t available to fill the jobs in California, the solution is to import workers from Mexico (many of the same laborers at Mexican farms move north with the harvest). That’s why, despite the anti-immigrant furor on the American right, the first Trump administration granted a rapidly rising number of H-2A visas for temporary agricultural workers, and that growth has continued under Trump’s second term.

When managers are pretty well restricted to using a given state-of-the-art method, they can’t fall back on the standard market saga of supply and demand to determine wages. Unlike retailers, they can’t experiment with paying workers more and using fewer of them—or paying them less and using more of them. They’re just stuck. Instead, the broader labor relations system, and the influence of collective bargaining decide how total income is divided among more-skilled labor, less-skilled labor, and owners of capital.

The MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin tell this politics story well. The “Treaty of Detroit,” as Fortune dubbed it—initiated in a 1949 agreement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers—created a system where unionized firms raised wages in line with productivity gains plus inflation, and other firms fell into line with this broad accord in order to forestall unionization. When Jimmy Carter abandoned labor in the late 1970s, the treaty collapsed, and wages for less-skilled workers began eroding. Ronald Reagan fired striking air-traffic controllers and launched an onslaught against labor. The rest is history. This story explains what “technology” doesn’t: why wage inequality worsened sharply in the 1980s—the era before computers came into widespread use and when economists ritually lamented poor productivity growth.

More recently, economists have noticed the income shift from wage earners to profits. Total wages fell from 59 percent of national income in 1970 to 49 percent today, while profits escalated from 9 percent to 17 percent. This time out, the economics didn’t have to cast about for the main reason behind the shift: It had to be technology. “The machines will keep getting better and are likely to claim ever more of the nation’s income,” writes Brent Neiman in The New York Times. “Anyone who has used ChatGPT can see how much work now done by people could soon be done by technology.”

Well, not everyone. A July 2025 MIT study of firms adopting generative AI found that a few realized impressive gains, but 95 percent got “zero return.” Inequality hardly seems an inevitable outgrowth of technological innovation, but the appeal of the technology-first account remained its simplicity and social complacency. We can fight technology “and end up worse off,” Neiman writes.

Data suggests that wages have been rising faster than the cost of capital—computers, software, machinery. In other words, the relative cost of labor is rising. In this situation, the usual market parable says, firms will rely more on capital outlays and less on labor. But to explain why wages are a declining share of national income, firms’ use of capital doesn’t just have to rise; it has to rise really fast. If wages should rise 10 percent, the use of capital would rise 12.5 percent, Neiman says. Others say that’s not the case: The use of capital would rise less than wages. If the others are right, labor should receive an increasing share of national income. But even assuming their underlying never-never-land model holds, economists can’t be sure what to predict.

Meanwhile, the political explanation has logged a striking new data point in its favor. It might astonish economists if they noticed, but in eight years Mexico’s Morena party has raised real minimum wages 153 percent—not ordering them by fiat but negotiating them with representatives of workers and business in the National Minimum Wages Commission (Conasami). As a share of national income, wages grew a monumental seven percentage points while profits sank eight points—a shift in favor of labor in eight years only a little smaller than the shift American bosses created in the opposite direction over half a century.

After saying you can’t fight technology, mainstream economics turns around and adds that, should a government be so rash as to engineer such a project, it would cause disaster. Tampering with he forces of technological determinism in conditions of economic volatility is to court massive unemployment, and to invite an accompanying exodus of workers from better jobs into really low-paid gigs.

Evidently, Mexico never got that memo—and strikingly it has suffered no such dire results. It’s true that the country’s official economic data is rather lenient about what counts as a job—if you’re selling boom-boxes at a street stand, you’re a full-time worker. But even with such irregularities, job numbers have ticked up since Morena took office, as unemployment declined from 3.3 to 2.6 percent of workers. Meanwhile, average real wages rose a stunning 44 percent, lifting 11 million workers above the poverty line.

It’s true that eroding the profit share past a sustainable threshold could discourage investment and dampen growth. That’s been the recent trend in Mexico; annualized GDP growth fell from a poor 1.6 percent annually under neoliberal administrations (2000 through 2018) to a worse 0.7 percent under Morena. There are lots of causes, including the destructive influence of Trump’s erratic tariff regime, but even if wage policies caused the slowdown, it seems a small price to pay for so much better income distribution.

Going forward, Morena would be wise to exercise caution. Sheinbaum, who has been called a “leftist with an Excel file” and holds a doctorate in environmental science from the University California, seems to understand this. Having brilliantly kept Trump at bay, she is implementing a serious “Plan Mexico,” which seeks, among other things, to curtail imports from China, and declining to raise business taxes though fighting tax evasion.

American progressives might take note. Medicare for All and state-financed childcare are hardly trivial policies, but they’re still patching up a deeply inequitable economy. A longer-term goal should be ratcheting the income distribution back toward the more equitable levels the country saw in the 1950s and ’60s. In adopting this mission, the example set in Mexico—together with a key lesson from the launch of the New Deal make the case that “technology” does not block this goal. Though the 1930s saw some of the most rapid technological advances in US history, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised wages from the starkly inequitable levels of the Gilded Age—and the economy began recovering from the Depression. The bulwark behind this achievement was the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRB), which supported union organizing, and the establishment of a minimum wage.

These tools are still available. Gallup finds that 71 percent of Americans approve of unions today, just one point short of their popularity when FDR passed the NLRB. At the height of the labor movement in 1968, the minimum wage was $1.60 an hour, or $14.80 in current dollars. Today a $15 national minimum wage is as popular as unions, but that goal seems too small. In the years since 1968, the minimum wage sank to $7.25, but labor productivity—the dollar value of output the average worker produces—tripled. A Democratic trifecta could at least aim to accomplish something along the lines of what Morena has done.

Of the Democratic National Committee’s 65 executive members, only one is a high school student. At just 17 years old, Milan van Dam is not only the youngest-ever member of the executive committee but also the youngest member of the DNC.

A student from Potomac, Maryland, van Dam says he’s spent nearly half of his life organizing for Democrats. As the child of immigrants, he found himself naturally inclined toward activism. He’s worked on multiple congressional campaigns and has served in leadership positions with the Maryland High School Democrats and Montgomery County Young Democrats. Now he’s the National Chair of High School Democrats of America.

The High School Democrats of America mobilizes more than 11,000 members across the country in some 500 local chapters. Ahead of the midterms, van Dam and his colleagues are registering voters, making thousands of calls, and passing resolutions within the DNC in an attempt to make young voices heard.

This is no easy task. Van Dam said the Democratic Party can often be out of touch about what issues get Gen Z to the ballot box—matters such as affordability, immigration, and corporate political influences. The party also must compete with Republicans’ increasingly effective ability to target youth voters. Right now, van Dam says, Democrats have taken young people for granted and not met them where they’re at. Long-term work must be done, he says, to invest in young people, in youth organizing, and to frame a vision that resonates with young people.

Van Dam sat down with The Nation to discuss his organizing, the state of the Democratic Party, and the issues that drive Gen Z.

Cate Latimer and Alice Scott: You’ve spent nearly half of your life organizing for Democrats—what prompted you to join this cause?

Milan van Dam: When I was around 12 years old, I got involved with educational policy and did advocacy with the school board. I started advocating for [interactive teaching screens] because I was like, some schools have these screens and some of them don’t. I just became obsessed with wanting the government to work for everybody equally, and I was like, “OK, here it doesn’t. That seems like a problem.” Eventually, I just wanted to know where decisions were made, and I wanted to go there and tell people how decisions should be made, which is like a bit of a bossy teenager kind of thing to do. But I think I just really cared about making sure young people were being represented.

CL&AS: You’re the youngest-ever member of the DNC’s executive committee. How did you get there?

MvD: I think I literally just found High School Dems through Googling “high school Democrats” and joined. I became the first-rank caucus chair, then chair of the Maryland High School Democrats, then I was national vice chair. Eventually I was made national chair.

The year before, we passed a DNC bylaw charter amendment to put the [High School Democrats] national chair on the DNC executive committee. So that was something that I lobbied for the year before as well, not knowing that that seat would go to me at all—that was not intentional.

When I see people who recognize the importance of young people and are willing to give us an opportunity, I’m the first person to take it. My number-one priority will always be to represent the people who don’t get represented. So that’s really where I would say my desire to serve in that role comes from.

CL&AS: Do other DNC members take you seriously?

MvD: It’s definitely mixed. I would say that there’s a very solid group of DNC members, party leaders, [and] elected officials that have consistently stood by the side of the next generation, whether that’s high school Dems or just young people in general.

At the same time, I think that when people get to know young people, they realize that we’re about more than the subset of issues that we’re reduced to. One of the things that surprises people is that my generation cares about healthcare, housing, and affordability in general. We’re usually reduced to like, ‘OK, they only care about climate change.’

And, while we’re super passionate about that issue as well, I think young people recognize that when we go out into the world, we have no idea how we’re going to be able to buy a house. We see our peers snatched up off the streets by ICE. And I think Gen Z is one of the generations that is the most empathetic toward their peers and is the most willing to fight for people who may not necessarily have the same issues as themselves.

CL&AS: How do young Democrats in the DNC feel about the recent spate of Democratic socialist candidates winning primaries against more establishment Democrats? How has it divided people or brought them together within the DNC?

MvD: Primaries are meant to be contentious—I think that’s healthy. That’s where we work out our differences. I just think that after the primaries, you all get together, [and] you’re like, ‘the other side is way worse.’ It’s not even a question, right? So whether it’s a more moderate candidate that won, or a progressive candidate, or one that we supported or didn’t, we’re going to back Democrats, especially in swing districts, up and down the ballot. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running for school board or the US Senate.

Democrats overall are really putting forward this new vision for affordability and new vision for standing up for people’s rights. That, I think, is really powerful. And even if we disagree on 5 percent of issues, we agree on 95 percent of issues, right? That’s very different from our stances as compared to the Trump administration or the Republican candidates running across the country, especially in federal races.

CL&AS: Young voters shifted right in the 2024 election, with President Donald Trump winning a larger share of the vote from 18-29-year-olds. What do you think is behind this shift, and how are you working to encourage youth support for progressive candidates in the next election?

MvD: Republicans put a lot of effort and money into winning young voters, and had a long-term plan—literally a 10-year plan—leading up to 2024. That paid off in the election. You saw young people, young men especially, shift overwhelmingly to the right because Democrats really did not reach digital media spaces. The online domain has been taken over by, in a lot of cases, paid Republican influencers and operatives, who kind of just sell themselves to young people as someone who’s on their side, right?

You’re never gonna win voters when you don’t show up to where voters are. For too long, the Democratic Party and Democrats in general took young people for granted because they did win the overwhelming majority of the population. But that obviously changed in 2024, and it’s been changing over time.

There’s a huge amount of dissatisfaction and apathy coming from young people about the current political system. That’s why we see people not want to show up to vote. I recently had a friend tell me that he unregistered to vote, which is insane to me…. I don’t think that’s a very inspiring way forward.

We need to make sure that politics seems like something everyone can be involved in. Because everybody buys groceries, everybody buys gas, everybody wants to buy a house one day, and get a job, right? What we’re really trying to show as an organization, is that at a young age, even if you can’t vote yet, you can have a voice in politics, and you can work towards building a system that actually works for you.

CL&AS: What’s one issue where you think the party’s current position is genuinely out of step with where most young voters are?

MvD: As much as I don’t want to brew divisions within the party, I do think that we’ve seen the issue of corporate PAC and dark money in our politics cropping up pretty consistently. People are really tired of politicians that are bought and sold by the exact same bodies that are buying and selling Republicans. The Democratic Party needs to take a stance on that.

I’ve pushed for that a lot at the DNC. I’ve adopted two DNC resolutions that are related to dark money and campaign finance reform, and whether it’s insider trading or corporate donors, I think that the general message is that young people are really sick of not being able to trust their politicians and not knowing if they are working for them or on behalf of moneyed interests. That should be a very logical step forward, especially for party entities which actually do have the power to regulate corporate and dark money in our politics.

A recent resolution that we passed at an August meeting was titled “The Resolution Condemning the Culture of Corruption Surrounding Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement and Calling on Democrats to Hold Ourselves to a Higher Standard.” So this one specifically called on more transparency and ethics regarding campaign finance. It called for legislative reforms to address insider trading, abuse of power, and the influence of special interests in our politics. I think the real idea here was to ensure that while we’re calling out the corruption of the other side, we’re also guaranteeing that the Democratic Party holds ourselves to the same standard, and that that’s something that we support unequivocally.

CL&AS: What figures do you see as emblematic of the Democratic Party’s future, and who are the leaders of the Democratic Party that get Gen Z excited?

MvD: I think that Bernie in 2016 changed a lot for people. He’s like the father of the progressive movement and many young people see him as their political grandfather. He’s just a cool guy, and someone that spoke and listened to young people. He’s obviously not young himself, but he knows how to listen, how to meet the moment, and how to match the energy in the room.

And that’s something that a lot of Democrats are trying to learn from ahead of their 2028 runs. But in a lot of cases, Democrats—whether it’s local candidates, members of Congress, or presidential hopefuls—are recognizing that they need to be able to listen and represent a new vision.

Sitting in his metal caravan, where the noisy, old fans fail to keep the heat of the day away, Abu Khamis inhales from his cigarette while gesturing toward a map hung on the wall, demarcating his village’s land. “The world’s attention is now on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and America and Iran,” the head of the village’s Bedouin Council says. “The pressure isn’t here anymore.”

His village, the Palestinian community of Khan al-Ahmar, has been fighting the Israeli government’s demolition orders for the past 17 years.

Its residents live in a cluster of condemned shacks perched on dry, dusty hills, running parallel to the desert highway between Jerusalem and Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. These homes lie directly in the path of the E1 construction project, a series of proposed Israeli settlements that would link occupied East Jerusalem with the existing settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. Should it succeed, the new segregated housing project would create an unbroken line of Israeli territory across the center of the West Bank, effectively severing the region in two and blocking any unified Palestinian territory. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has publicly boasted that E1 would “permanently bury the idea of a Palestinian state.”

But for that vision to become a reality, Israel must address the persistent thorn in its side of Khan al-Ahmar, home to roughly 200 members of the Jahalin Bedouin community—pastoral shepherds descended from semi-nomadic tribes—and the area’s only elementary school serving Bedouin children.

In 2009, shortly after the school was built, Israeli authorities handed down demolition orders for the village. In response to the order, the residents of Khan al-Ahmar mounted an effective international protest campaign and filed legal petitions challenging their expulsion, eventually becoming one of the few Palestinian communities whose case reached the halls of the Israeli Supreme Court.

Then, in May of 2018, the Israeli judges ruled against the residents, saying the Israeli government could forcibly relocate Khan al-Ahmar to a nearby garbage dump. Hundreds of journalists, activists, and diplomats subsequently poured into the village, drawing headlines around the world. International solidarity activists physically blocked the bulldozers with their bodies. A BBC film crew appeared in the village and interviewed Israeli cabinet ministers about the demolition. The UN officially warned that evicting Khan al-Ahmar’s residents could constitute a war crime, and Israel temporarily put the demolition orders on hold in October 2018.

The situation existed in a state of limbo until May of this year, when Minister Smotrich resurrected demolition orders for Khan-al Ahmar to clear the way for the E1 project. But the response this time was relatively muted. Protests in the village failed to gather the crowds—of other Palestinians, NGOs, and international activists—that they did in the years prior, with many Palestinians expressing defeat as Israel tightens its grip on the West Bank with no end, or help, in sight.

For years, Khan al-Ahmar survived largely because of international scrutiny. Each time demolition appeared imminent, foreign governments warned Israel against carrying it out—reportedly, even the Trump administration opposed demolition in 2019, believing it would be an obstacle to the president’s “Deal of the Century” peace plan for the region.

Experts warn that attention has faded. “The international community, which in the past knew how to pressure Israel to halt the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar, is now doing nothing in the face of widespread ethnic cleansing across the West Bank and the genocide that continues in Gaza,” Yair Dvir, spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, told The Nation.

Residents fear that the waiting may now be over, as Israel moves toward annexation of the West Bank. As attention shifts elsewhere, and violence escalates across the territory, many believe the international pressure that once held off the village’s demolition can no longer be sustained.

“Now,” Abu Khamis tells me, “I am afraid.”

The strip of land targeted by the E1 project is home to one of the West Bank’s largest Bedouin communities, the Jahalin Bedouin. Around 20 of their pastoral villages stretch across this rural desert corridor between Jerusalem and Jericho, of which 18 would be destroyed in this newest settlement project.

The Jahalin tribe was expelled from its ancestral home in the Negev Desert during Israel’s founding in 1948, alongside 750,000 other Palestinians. Following their 1948 exile, the Jahalin Bedouin settled in the West Bank, which was under Jordanian control at the time. When Israel later occupied the West Bank in 1967, the Jahalin Bedouin were pushed into smaller and more concentrated areas, and much of their land was confiscated by the Israeli state.

Today, just beyond the confines of the dusty village, over the hay-filled pens of sheep and goats, the manicured lawns of Israeli settlements dominate the surrounding hilltops. These are the settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Kfar Adumim, which Israel constructed in the 1970s after seizing thousands of hectares from Palestinian villages and declaring the land to be state property.

In 2024, the UN’s International Court of Justice declared that Israel’s six-decade occupation of the West Bank was illegal and ordered Israeli forces to withdraw and dismantle all settlements in the territory. Instead, settlement building accelerated.

Over the past three years, an unprecedented number of settlers have also set up tents on the barren hillsides to establish outposts—informal, makeshift settlements that are illegal even under Israeli law, and that Israeli politicians occasionally condemn. Following the October 7 attacks, settlers have expanded into Palestinian communities at a record pace, constructing at least 152 new outposts in the last three years.

Settlers from illegal outposts are often deeply religious, armed, and violent. The day I arrived in Khan al-Ahmar, a settler from a nearby outpost had run over a 9-year-old, fracturing his arm. Settler violence has become so normalized that the incident passed without much notice. Across the West Bank, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has recorded an average of six settler attacks per day in 2026.

“Look what they did,” says an exasperated Abu Khamis, gesturing toward a photo on his phone. The word “revenge” is written in Hebrew across a home of scrap metal, graffiti left behind by settlers during an attack on the village.

Families now must live under the persistent threat of demolition while also contending with violent attacks from a growing settler population, seemingly intent on taking the land by force. “We face pressure from both sides,” says Abu Khamis. “From the settlers on one side and the government on the other.”

Settler attacks increasingly target schools in the occupied West Bank, and the atmosphere at Khan al-Ahmar’s elementary school is on edge. Settlers routinely enter the village, damage its infrastructure, and harass the children.

“The presence of these settlers has impacted the children, especially their emotional state,” says Wa’d al-Khateeb, an English teacher in the elementary school. “The teachers have to look brave for the students, but we’re afraid, too.”

Like most of the teachers in the school, she commutes daily from the city of Ramallah, a journey that can range anywhere from one to five hours each way, depending on the Israeli army checkpoints and the moods of the soldiers. The West Bank road network is highly segregated, with Palestinians restricted from using many of the direct highways—only for Israelis—and forced onto congested backroads crowded with checkpoints.

The school was built precisely to spare children in the surrounding Bedouin communities the risk of navigating these roads. Constructed from mud and recycled tires with support from the Italian NGO Vento di Terra, the school opened in 2009. Today, it is the only elementary school serving Bedouin children in the area.

According to Yusra Jamous, a representative from OHCHR, Smotrich’s latest demolition order now puts the school, which serves approximately 170 students, at immediate risk. “Female students would be particularly affected if the school were demolished,” Jamous told The Nation. “Families often do not allow girls to go to schools out of the area due to fear of settler violence, including sexual violence, and other occupation-related risks on the roads.”

Teachers here are nevertheless attempting to maintain a sense of normalcy for the children. But they face numerous challenges: traumatized students, limited resources, and road closures. To make matters worse, public schools in the West Bank now only operate three days a week, as Israeli authorities withhold $2 billion in tax revenue from the Palestinian Authority, which nominally manages civilian affairs in the West Bank. The PA no longer has enough funds to pay the teachers full-time.

The material conditions have also become near-impossible to work under: Israeli settlers cut the power lines, damage the solar panels, and sabotage the water pumps, says Al-Khateeb. “We have to teach in the dark most days,” she says. And, with temperatures regularly exceeding 105 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s punishingly hot.

“But for us,” she says, “the school represents the children’s right to education and the community’s determination to remain on its land.”

The school’s construction was an act of resistance for the community—and the flash point for Abu Khamis’s activism. When Israeli authorities ordered the work to stop, he says the community found ways to keep building, including dressing some of the foreign volunteers as Bedouins so they could avoid arrest and deportation.

Shortly after the school was completed, Israel declared it an illegal building and ordered its demolition, saying it—along with other village structures—had been built without permits. Less than 1 percent of Palestinian building permits in Area C of the West Bank, where the village is located, are approved by the Israeli Civil Administration.

In response, Abu Khamis began campaigning against the order and the displacement of the community. By 2012, he was raising the village’s case with international organizations; in 2013, after then-President Barack Obama visited the West Bank, Abu Khamis wrote him a letter making the case for saving his village. He made multiple trips to the United States in 2017 and ’18, meeting with anti-occupation Jewish groups and members of Congress.

He subsequently became the unofficial village spokesman. There have been consequences to such visibility, however. Shortly before our meeting, his 17-year-old daughter was arrested by Israeli authorities, in what he said was without cause and retribution for his activism. He was forced to pay 10,000 shekels, or roughly $3,300, to secure her release.

While advocating for his own community’s survival, Abu Khamis sees a larger picture beyond the displacement of the Bedouins: a decades-old plan for annexation of the West Bank. “People think the settlers are just crazy, but this is the idea since 1967,” he says. “Look where the settlements are built: on the water sources, on the agricultural land, and between Palestinian cities. This is the idea.”

In the last three years, Israeli authorities have demolished at least 66 Palestinian villages in the occupied territory, clearing the way for additional settlements. Many families rendered homeless were forced to move into caves for shelter.

While there has been more international pushback against the E1 plan, with France and the United Kingdom threatening sanctions against companies participating in the project, that pressure has not translated into the kind of spotlight on Khan al-Ahmar that had previously halted demolition attempts. Residents fear the lack of pushback could also set a precedent for the displacement of other Bedouin communities around occupied East Jerusalem, clearing the way for further settlement expansion and the loss of traditional Palestinian pastoralism.

The displacement into urban areas would also force Bedouins, who for centuries have based their livelihoods on herding, to give up their way of life entirely, says Jamous, the OHCHR representative.

Khan al-Ahmar’s pastoral future appears to depend, at least in part, on whether international pressure returns. Without it, residents fear they will follow the path of numerous other Bedouin villages, where families woke to the sounds of army bulldozers and the crumbling of corrugated sheet metal.

“Maybe Smotrich is coming tomorrow,” Abu Khamis says. “Maybe Smotrich is coming in the night. I don’t know when he is coming.”

We look toward a nearby barren hilltop, where an Israeli flag now flaps in the wind. When a group of armed settlers on quad bikes approaches, we hurry back inside the caravan.

There is nothing to do but wait.

Donald Trump claimed income of over $2 billion in 2025. A substantial part of it came from persons and entities who have a direct interest in what he does as president. When asked why he believed he and his family could buy and sell as if he were not president, he tellingly retorted, “Because I found out that nobody cared.”

It is a frightening thought that nobody cares whether the president uses his office to make money for himself and his family. If nobody cares about the kind of corruption now on display, not only our moral authority in the world but our constitutional democracy is at risk. Elected officials in the United States have a moral and legal duty not to put their own interests above, or in conflict with, the interests of their constituents. If they forsake that duty, we cannot expect they will act only in the best interest of the country, and we cannot expect our noble experiment to continue.

Citizens must care, moreover, because while the president gets richer, they get poorer. The 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election should be referendums on a central issue: whether the holder of the highest office in the land, and his relatives and friends, can accumulate fabulous wealth because he holds that office.

Despite his claim to business genius, there is no confusion about how Donald Trump has made money as president and whether it is wrong for him to do it. The rejoinder is that what he has done is not illegal. That may be so for some of his gains: The laws that prevent conflicts of interest for all other federal officials do not apply to the president. The current Supreme Court has defined corruption narrowly, requiring an explicit agreement to give or receive a thing of value in exchange for an official act, and given the president broad immunity. A court will have to determine whether manipulating the stock market, trading on inside information, profiting from pardons, or extorting things of value from foreign governments are protected as part of his “official duties.” But whether it is illegal or not is beside the point: It is morally and ethically wrong. And it must be disqualifying for Trump or any other officeholder.

The framers feared corruption in government because they had seen it and felt it firsthand. Their concern was not just bribery, although bribery was a form of it. They despised the European practice of giving gifts to public officials. They believed gifts, especially valuable ones, caused officials to subordinate their duty to the public to their personal interests. At the end of the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin warned of the danger from “the bold and the violent, the men of strong passions and indefatigable activity in their selfish pursuits.” And it was Franklin, of course, who had earlier received a gold snuffbox from Louis XVI, a snuffbox that became a symbol of all that was wrong with the lackadaisical European attitude about gifts.

The framers created a government with three separate branches and two emoluments clauses, in Article I, Section 9, and Article II, Section 1, seeking to restrain public officials, including the president, from “selfish pursuits.” The corruption they feared was just the kind we are seeing today: the president’s use of his office to obtain great wealth. They believed the government they were creating would not survive if officeholders could follow their personal greed, and they were right.

Trump’s $2.2 billion in 2025 income is shocking not only for its size but also because it did not occur until he took office in 2025. It far surpasses his income in any prior year of his life. The sheer size and timing of it is powerful evidence that he used the office in his own self-interest.

Trump and his followers deny that he violates any duty to this country by putting $2 billion in his pocket from businesses that profit from his actions. They deny it is wrong to get money from people who want him to do something for them, or at least to curry his favor.

They do not deny—since the major sources are disclosed—where his disclosed riches have come from.

One and a quarter billion dollars came from his interests in the cryptocurrency business, at the same time that the Securities and Exchange Commission, which he controls, announced that it would not regulate cryptocurrency. No small portion came from a $500 million investment in his World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company, by a firm controlled by the government of the United Arab Emirates. The investment was followed close in time by an agreement between his administration and the UAE for the export by the United States to the UAE of hundreds of thousands of computer chips used to power AI. The chip sale provoked concerns over the UAE’s relationship with China and the possibility that China would get chips from the US indirectly when it could not do so directly. The coincidence between the money and the favor is grotesque by any standard.

Trump also collected multiple millions from royalties on sales of his memecoin, $TRUMP, and World Liberty’s sale of its own products. The sales were a sucker’s play. Purchasers of $TRUMP lost money when the coins declined in value, but he and his partners made money on transaction fees when the coins were bought and sold. They were largely unaffected by the drop in value that hit the small investors the hardest. And these businesses are, by his choice, unregulated by any government agency.

His family business has also made millions licensing the Trump name to properties in countries that have important relations with the United States, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Trump also boasts of making billions on stock trades. No small portion of that comes from insider trading—trading on information that is not available to the public. For example, on July 23, he purchased up to $5 million each in Broadcom, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, all of which have substantial interests in artificial intelligence markets. That same day he released his artificial intelligence plan in which he expressed his desire to deregulate the AI industry. Prices for Apple and Broadcom subsequently increased by more than 30 percent.

He thought this scheme was so powerful that he decided to market it. He announced that he would sell an early peek at his Truth Social posts for $100,000 per month. Anyone interested in trading stocks can ante up for inside information that will move the market.

In pursuit of an unapologetic campaign to benefit the fossil fuel industry, the White House is paying big dollars to owners of wind energy projects to close them. Evan Halper of The New York Times recently reported that the White House’s latest move will funnel vast sums to Australian billionaire Michael Dorrell, who gave about $1 million to Trump’s inaugural. A German company, RWE, got $1.2 billion from the US government to give up its wind leases if it invested in “conventional energy” projects. RWE will invest $900 million in a giant liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana by purchasing a stake in the project owned by Dorrell’s private equity fund.

Political contributions likewise flow in from companies that get generous federal contracts. The New York Times reported on Monday, August 23, that the GEO Group donated $1.4 million to MAGA Inc. within a few days of obtaining two contracts to run detention centers worth $165 million a year. GEO’s good fortune is not isolated. A catalog of similar donations linked to government benefits has been compiled by More Perfect Union, a group admittedly opposed to the administration but whose factual research has not been questioned. And Ruth Marcus has chronicled the going price for pardons in a recent article in The New Yorker, “Trump’s Pardon Economy.”

In perhaps his most dramatic—and crass—escapade, he engineered a “settlement” with the Department of Justice, which he controls, to create a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” and to prohibit the IRS from auditing the tax returns of him, his family, and their affiliated companies filed before May 19, 2026. Attorney General Blanche says the fund will not be created but the immunity for taxes will go into effect. In essence, Trump granted himself and his family immunity for any taxes they owe but have not paid.

The White House maintains that all decisions are made on their merits, a proposition that does not pass the laugh test.

Nothing in our history comes close to this president’s abuse of his office. His colossal income is from investments in industries that are directly affected by White House policy. These industries benefit when their businesses are deregulated or when, as the UAE tycoon found, restrictions on sales of certain products are lifted. There is no doubt that this president has used the power of his office to benefit himself. And he is getting a lot more than a snuffbox.

Maybe Trump is right. Nobody cares. Or voters have grown rightfully cynical about politicians, as they see companies and billionaires buying elections, the revolving door between public officials and private lobbies, the reality that money talks big-time in today’s politics. Certainly the Republican-controlled Congress does not care. But the reality is that the president and his cronies are doing exactly what the framers thought they were preventing and what our democracy cannot survive. They represent the most basic gluttony and decline of “civic virtue.” They are cleaning up while most Americans are struggling to make ends meet, as the prices of basics—housing, food, gas, energy, healthcare—keep rising.

It may be that the only restraint against Trump’s abuses of his office is the ballot box. The 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential campaign will tell us whether voters are so offended that they will put him and his cronies out. Trump has said to his followers that, with regard to the midterms, they should “pretend I am running,” and offered $5,000 to every adult citizen if Republicans keep control of Congress.

So American citizens are indeed being asked if they care about corruption. We can only hope that they do. He makes the midterms about him. His opponents should make them about not only his failed policies and his disastrous war but his greed and shameless abuse of his office to make money. To people whose groceries are costing more than ever before, the prospect of his continuing to enrich himself at their expense is, or ought to be, unacceptable. To all of us, the impact of it on the values this country was built upon—not to mention its moral stature—is unspeakable.

I was raped in college. This is a fact about me, and not one I think about much because it happened in 1997. It took me a day or two after I was assaulted to even acknowledge it, because I’d shoved it to a corner recess of my consciousness, where I hoped it could disappear forever, shrinking over time into something less menacing. Just a thing that happened. When I finally felt comfortable talking about it, the first thing I learned was that my experience was horrifically common.

Nearly every woman I know in adult life has been sexually assaulted, and for most of us, our first sexual assault—some of us have more than one—happened in college. There is nothing specific about an educational setting that lends itself to enhanced sexual danger for women; it’s simply the first time many of us are out in the world constantly interacting with people our age we barely know. For women, this means initial encounters with men who may or may not have grown up with norms about sex and consent that protect women from predatory behavior. We’re all suddenly adults with complete freedom of movement, and our social lives are ours to govern. We can stay out late, go to parties, drink—do the things adults do, in other words.

It’s not a coincidence that culture warriors on the right like to suggest that this wouldn’t be risky behavior if we all got married and stayed at home right after high school. They do not want women out in the world, educating themselves, making decisions, acquiring power of their own. Some of them view the risk of rape as fair punishment for not staying in the kitchen. Many of the women I know who say they’ve never experienced sexual assault got married as soon as they graduated from high school. They do not socialize with men who aren’t their husbands and do not have much in the way of a social life outside of church. Some are happy, and some are not. Isolation from men is certainly one way to avoid sexual assault, but social confinement shouldn’t be the price of safety for women. When opinion makers on the right talk about it as a kind of protection, they’re not looking out for the women; they’re looking out for the men.

I recently saw a frustrated influencer talking about the Cornell University rape case; she argued that we don’t need more education around consent—that these men knew what they were doing. I agree that they knew what they were doing, in the sense that they intuitively knew it was wrong. You can see that in the way some of the men in the fraternity tried to make amends with the victim before the gang rape’s aftermath escalated into the consequences now belatedly facing its perpetrators.

But I also think about my own college experience and what I was taught before I left my small, heavily conservative hometown. That prompts me to differ with the claim that consent-based education isn’t a viable response to cases like this. Where I grew up, we were educated about sex mostly by our peers, not our parents or teachers. I believe that’s still the case for most American boys, and Internet porn is an aggravating factor, in that it generally doesn’t model consent and gives them an unrealistic idea of what real consensual sex is like.

My school had no real sex ed, mostly because the parents in my largely evangelical community believed it was the job of parents to do that. This all but guaranteed that every one of my classmates got a message of abstinence and no actual sexual education. The one exception was the chapter or two we had on human anatomy and reproduction in biology class. To give a sense of how reproductive issues got discussed there, one of my classmates asked if women could still urinate when they were pregnant.

Otherwise, most of the sex ed was folk knowledge passed among us, some of it correct and much of it woefully wrong. The kid who had the most forbidden knowledge would inevitably disseminate it to everyone else, and as we aged into puberty, some kids my age began to have sex armed only with the knowledge of whatever dumb shit an equally ignorant classmate had passed on.

Consent was never part of the discussion, since it plays virtually no role in an abstinence-only approach to sex education. In a largely gender-segregated social environment, boys acquired the bulk of their understanding of the acceptable ways to treat girls from their peer group. The broader code of silence surrounding sexual matters, which were dogmatically deemed “inappropriate” for kids our age, predictably resulted in teen pregnancies, sexual assaults, and abuse.

I grew up in rural Alabama, but this wasn’t just a red-state or right-wing problem. It still isn’t.

My 11-year-old son goes to a Brooklyn public school that skews very liberal. We were informed that this year students and teachers would be talking about consent “but in an age-appropriate way” that involves using examples like whether you should be able to borrow someone’s phone without asking.

I understand the reticence, but I think 11 is a perfectly appropriate age for frank discussions of sex. Some of my son’s classmates are already capable of having sex and getting pregnant. Every single kid in the class already knows the basics of what sex is because we live in 2026; not only does the kid in the class with the most forbidden knowledge still disseminate it, but all the kids in my son’s class are growing up with the Internet—i.e., exponentially greater access to forbidden knowledge than kids in my generation had. Taking away their phones or restricting their Internet usage won’t meaningfully insulate them from sex, depictions of sex, or talk of sex. They are all ambiently embedded into our stories, our discourse, and nearly all of pop culture.

From the time they’re toddlers, children are taught that girls play with dolls and boys go out and make things and have big narratives in the wider world. This sort of gender programming seems innocuous until you consider that on some level it teaches boys what women are primarily for: making babies. They don’t have to understand anything about sex to absorb the formative lesson that a woman’s worth is about what her body can do, or the accompanying early gender scripts placing her on track to be a mother or a wife, launched into the rituals of playing house.

The educational system can’t, by itself, counterprogram this gender messaging. Nevertheless, schools are often the only place where we can ensure that kids understand consent before they get to college and are apt to encounter fraught situations where their consent is disregarded or never requested in the first place, often for the first time. Yet school-based consent training, while valuable, often fails the core challenge of effectively undoing years of social conditioning as it seeks to model to kids how to treat each other respectfully. For it to take hold, it needs to focus on consequences.

A few months ago, I met Kaitlin Andrews, who runs the Schools Consent Project. The group isn’t a traditional sex-ed nonprofit; rather, it’s a legal organization staffed by attorneys leading workshops for middle, junior high, and high school students. It uses the language of liability to outline for students what is and isn’t appropriate, how to intervene as a bystander, and what is unfortunately a problem for this generation that wasn’t for mine: the legality of distributing nude photos of other minors.

I asked her at what age they were seeing students share nude photos of their classmates. Fifth grade, she said.

This kind of education is important, not just because it happens at all but because it happens early. At Cornell, students are required to attend a mandatory presentation on sexual assault—in part to indemnify the school from accusations that it failed to make these things clear to students at the beginning. But that’s too little far too late, and the first week of college is far from the ideal time to expect students to think soberly about the issue.

None of these interventions by themselves can fix the underlying misogyny that leads to sexual assault in the first place. They can’t reverse in a handful of sessions or seminars the way young men have been socialized to bond over sexual conquests—a coming-of-age rite that inevitably prompts them to objectify and dehumanize women further. These recursive trends are amplified considerably in gender-segregated fraternities, like the one at Cornell, where participants and bystanders in Jane Doe’s rape egged one another on. Way back in 1989, researchers were aware that fraternities were a unique vector for sexual assault. This paragraph from a paper titled “Fraternities and Rape on Campus” could double as an account of what happened at Cornell in 2024:

An analysis of the norms and dynamics of the social construction of fraternity brotherhood reveals the highly masculinist features of fraternity structure and process, including concern with a narrow, stereotypical conception of masculinity and heterosexuality; a preoccupation with loyalty, protection of the group, and secrecy; the use of alcohol as a weapon against women’s sexual reluctance; the pervasiveness of violence and physical force; and an obsession with competition, superiority, and dominance. Interfraternity rivalry and competition—particularly over members, intramural sports, and women—encourage fraternity men’s commodification of women. We conclude that fraternities will continue to violate women socially and sexually unless they change in fundamental ways.

I believe fraternities do more harm than good because of these things. At the same time, though, fraternity reform is insufficient by itself; the interventions have to start earlier because women are in danger earlier. The danger starts as soon as people start sexualizing them, which is usually when they’re prepubescent.

At Duke, I was raped at a frat party. I was 19. The guy was someone I knew peripherally; we had a class together and were friendly in a polite way. Duke does not have sorority houses, but did have on-campus fraternity housing. It was common for parties held in or around the grounds of a fraternity to spill out from public areas and down the halls into the individual rooms of fraternity members. People would often move back and forth from main gathering spaces to bedrooms, usually heading back to the common room for whatever shitty beer was in the keg and drinking hard alcohol in the rooms. (Alcohol was the drug of choice, with the exceptions of a few rich kids who liked cocaine.)

I went to the party with a group of friends and we broke up to mingle. I’d had a couple of beers by the time I ran into the guy who became my rapist (let’s call him Matt). Before long, we were dancing in the main party space where a DJ was playing. He asked me if I wanted to go back to his room to get a drink that wasn’t shitty beer and I said, sure, not thinking much about it.

I let him make me a drink that was stronger than what I was used to, but still not so powerful that it rendered me completely incapacitated. (Thanks to the fallout from the Cornell case, we all now know that in New York State the standard is that only total incapacitation makes you incapable of consent.) He began kissing me and I was OK with that. I wasn’t sure that I was especially attracted to him, but I was having a good time and wasn’t ruling out an attraction either.

Somewhere in my mind, I had registered that he had closed the door. We were sitting on his bed—there was nowhere else to sit, except the floor—and he took my drink and pushed me down into a lying position. I laughed nervously and tried to sit back up, but he climbed on top of me.

I told him I had to meet my friends soon and tried to extricate myself. He ignored it and pushed me back down, covered my mouth with his, kissing me. I was wearing a skirt and he used his weight to hold me down and move my panties aside while he pushed his fingers inside me. I said again that I needed to go and we should stop. I kept saying it and trying to push him off me.

Then he maneuvered inside me and I just froze. I said nothing else; I just waited for it to be over. Soon it was done. There was no line left for him to cross. I just wanted it to be over quickly, so I could get out of there.

Normally, I would have found my friends and probably stayed out. It wasn’t even that late, by college standards. Instead, I went home and straight to bed.

When people suggest that Jane Doe—the survivor of the Cornell gang rape—should have acknowledged what happened to her immediately, they’re telling you they have no personal experience of sexual assault. I couldn’t even process what had happened until a few days later. Any sort of analysis or reflection was drowned out by the fact that I was stunned that it happened, embarrassed that it happened, and ashamed that I let it happen to myself.

I let it happen to myself: That’s what I thought. I didn’t think it in the context of questioning what I was wearing (a perfectly acceptable knee-length skirt, by the way), how much I drank (by college standards, not much), or whether it was a good idea to be a frat party at 10 pm (if it isn’t, isn’t the problem with the frat?) I was angry at myself because I had worked hard academically to get to Duke, and showed up there not knowing a single person. I was the first person in my family to go to college. I was smart. How could I have let this happen?

I don’t think of myself regularly as a rape survivor, in part because I don’t think of myself as the proprietor of a body very often—or even as a woman. My self-conception is best described as “brain in a vat.” I work in very male-dominated spaces. When someone is openly sexist to me, I’m sometimes taken aback, because it reminds me that in treating me as a woman, they view me differently, not just as a peer or equally human person.

How could brain in a vat let this happen to her?

I imagine Jane Doe had some similar feelings. Cornell is an Ivy League school, and I’m sure she’s smart and ambitious. After it happened, I have a feeling she did what I did: tried to reason her way out of it, and felt that the fault was hers.

But it wasn’t. She did not make those men do what they did. It was not her responsibility to keep them from raping her–any more than it was mine to heroically subdue my rapist.

One of the few times I don’t feel like a brain in a vat is when I’m having pleasurable sex. In Miranda July’s novel All Fours, a character describes the way women experience sex as either in the head or in the body. Counterintuitively in my case, brain in a vat experiences it in the body. My over-analytical, perpetually racing brain takes a break for once, and I can just feel, become an animal self, acting only on instinct.

The way that I have coped with sexual assault is by giving it the brain-in-a-vat treatment. That’s what I did when I froze. I let go of my body and let him continue to violate it. I made the experience of being raped separate from my “real” self—my brain. Obviously, my rape hasn’t ruined my ability to have sex for pleasure (which I’ve written about elsewhere) because I resorted to disassociation in order to cope with it. Brain in the vat took over when my rape happened, and brain in a vat is absent when I’m having intense transcendent sex.

This intentional fracturing of the mind and body is not healthy. It is a survival mechanism.

I talked to Kaitlin Andrews as the Cornell story was gaining traction in the media. She had just spoken to a class of ninth-graders in New York City. She asked them if they knew what had happened at Cornell and whether they wanted to talk about it. Hands shot up. All but two of the students were familiar with many of the details. Many wanted to talk about the mentality of the men in the Snapchat thread that unfolded in real time as Jane Doe was being raped. They were under the impression that because Snapchat messages disappear that they’re permanently gone, and Andrews had to explain that they’re discoverable and can be retrieved under subpoena by the company.

But the biggest misconception they had was that false accusations of rape are not only common but frequent. “How often do they think it happens?,” I asked her.

“Eighty percent of the time,” she said.

I wonder how many of the fraternity members at Chi Phi went into college thinking that most sexual assault accusations are false. I suspect it was many of them—not just because of Andrews’s data, but because of the narrative they put out afterward, which cast Jane Doe as a reckless, unhinged woman in the Fatal Attraction mold, out to destroy their standing at the school and their reputations. (This was, after all, the tactic that worked in court when Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard for defamation for writing about his alleged abusive conduct in their relationship—and many women in the social mediasphere sided with Depp.) Even if they absolutely knew what they did was wrong, many of them did not think that they were, strictly speaking, guilty of rape. Neither did the police. Neither did the administration. Neither did the other students at Cornell who slut-shamed Jane Doe as rumors spread.

When I walked back home to my dorm room, I did not want to label what had happened to me, because that would make it serious and real.

But as I get older, my brain in a vat is more protective of my body and willing to acknowledge that what happened to it happened to me.

It’s important that we teach children—and yes, I mean children, 11-year-olds–what rape is and what its consequences are. We have no problem in this country teaching them about violence and guns. We make them do active shooter drills before they’re able to read. They need to know that rape isn’t a rare, outlying crime committed by strangers a back alley—for their own sake.

But we also, and especially, need to do so for the sake of the girls in the class, some of whom will graduate and go to college. If they’re sexually assaulted because their male classmates did not fear the consequences of it, futures are imperiled.

Not the boys’ futures. The girls’. Jane Doe’s.

Mine.

On Wednesday, the state of Tennessee twice tried to kill Christa Pike, failed both times, and ended up grievously wounding her. Pike, a convicted murderer, was meant to be executed using a strong dose of the sedative pentobarbital. This was even after Pike’s lawyers and an outside doctor, Joel Zivot, warned that the lethal injection was a risky procedure; Zivot advised that Pike’s particular medical conditions could “lead to a painful and cruel death by lethal injection.”

Zivot was right to say that Pike would suffer. But the nature of that suffering was, if anything, even worse than he predicted. Pike was given one ostensibly lethal dose, but she continued to live. She was then given another dose and fell into a deep sleep, but still did not die. At that point, she was taken to a hospital, where she continues to be in critical condition, being fed by a tube and breathing through a ventilator. According to her lawyer, she has not spoken since the failed execution.

The entire grotesque spectacle highlights how perverse the death penalty has become in contemporary America. It is increasingly unpopular and indeed shunned by people of conscience. But, paradoxically, this means that when executions are conducted, they are conducted by incompetent and even sleazy officials who end up committing torture.

There are many reasons to oppose the death penalty. It is a form of violent retribution, rather than justice. It is irrevocable—when an innocent person is executed, no form of reparation can bring them back. Capital punishment is also often applied unfairly, much more likely to be used against racial minorities and the poor.

But the barbaric botched execution of Pike highlights another case against capital punishment that is gaining urgency: The attempt to make executions more humane by methods such as lethal injection—which was once sold as the clinical, painless alternative to the gallows or the electric chair—has utterly failed. In fact, it has made executions even more gruesome and cruel, underscoring the grim truth that killing a healthy body cannot be done with clean hands by the state.

Pike’s case has been troubling from the beginning. She was sentenced to death in 1996 for murdering a Jobs Corps classmate the previous year, when she was 18. (Her boyfriend, along with another friend, participated in the crime.) The courts refused to consider extenuating facts, such as Pike’s history of mental illness and the fact she had been repeatedly raped as a child.

Tennessee officials seem to have pushed forward her execution in part as an attempt to prevent a reopening of her case. As The New York Times reports:

Her lawyers said that a history of extreme trauma and sexual abuse that began when she was a toddler had not been considered at her trial.

Just 90 minutes before Ms. Pike was set to die on Wednesday, a federal appeals court issued a stay, saying that it needed more time to consider new arguments in the case. For Tennessee, that set off a race against the clock. The execution warrant would expire just before midnight.

The most shocking thing about Pike’s torture is how unsurprising it was. Writing in The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig, a journalist who has specialized in the death penalty beat over the last few years, makes note of a stunning fact: Pike is not the first prisoner to suffer a horrifically botched execution in Tennessee this year.

In May, prison officials in Nashville similarly bungled the killing of Tony Carruthers, who was pierced with needles and sliced open with a scalpel before the execution was called off. These stories are part of a broader pattern of failed executions in recent years. In 2022, when I began investigating disastrous lethal-injection attempts in Alabama, the Death Penalty Information Center reported that 35 percent of the year’s total executions had been botched. In the 44 years that America has carried out lethal injections, the evidence has repeatedly revealed that the method is scientifically unsound, frequently torturous, and woefully unreliable.

The broader story of the death penalty is of increasing unpopularity. According to Gallup, in the modern era, support for the death penalty peaked in 1994 at 80 percent. After that, it has steadily gone down and it is now down to 52 percent. As The Washington Post reports,

After the turn of the century, though, the death penalty began a decades-long decline. There were 98 executions nationwide in 1999; the number dropped to 22 by 2019, the last pre-pandemic year…. New death sentences also plunged, dropping from hundreds annually handed down during the 1990s to 23 new capital sentences imposed last year.

But botched executions are becoming more common even as the death penalty itself is losing popularity. The two facts are related: The attempt to make executions more palatable to a disgusted public by developing clinical methods of killing is inherently contradictory. Increasingly, medical and pharmaceutical professionals have turned against being co-opted by the state’s machinery of death. This has led to a situation where those involved in killing are incompetent and reckless.

The increasing opposition to the death penalty has led to civil society resistance. As CNN reports, “major medical groups, including the American Medical Association and American Nurses Association, have opposed or prohibited their members from participating.” Pharmaceutical companies have also stopped supplying drugs like pentobarbital to states such as Tennessee that carry out executions.

The upshot is that the states that want to carry out lethal injections do so with staff that are often insufficiently trained or professional. These executioners work with drugs that are often past their expiration date or untested.

In 1994, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun issued a famous dissent in the death penalty case of Callins v. Collins, where he wrote,

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored—indeed, I have struggled—along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

Updating Blackmun, we can say that “the machinery of death” has become a torture machine, an outcome that is all the more damning since lethal injection was supposed to make executions less violent, cleaner, and more palatable.

Austin Sarat, a law professor at Amherst, drew the reasonable conclusion in an interview with CNN: “The United States has been on a quest since the end of the nineteenth century to find a method of execution that would be safe, reliable and humane. There is no such method.”

At the Republican midterm convention in Dallas last month, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed was a “frequent punching bag,” targeted by speaker after speaker. It’s not hard to understand why.

November’s elections seem poised to deal a blow to the Trump administration and its congressional allies. Democrats are favored to capture the House of Representatives and are within striking distance of a Senate majority. To turn the tide, administration allies are reaching for and amplifying tactics rooted in fear, hate, and polarization. In Michigan, their aim is to drive a wedge between communities that would otherwise stand together against them, including Muslim and Jewish voters.

As Palestinian American Muslim and Jewish American pro-democracy leaders, we want to sound the alarm: The Senate race unfolding in Michigan will be a major testing ground for the whole country. We cannot allow some to prey on fear and division to tear Jews and Muslims apart and pit our two communities against one another. We need to answer their xenophobia with our own politics of solidarity and partnership.

If elected, El-Sayed would be the first Muslim American in the US Senate. He won his primary election against an onslaught of outside spending by building a diverse and energized movement excited about his message of “money in your pocket, money out of politics, and Medicare for All.” Yet, instead of debating his policy prescriptions, too often his opponents weaponize and attack El-Sayed’s identity—stoking a sickening new wave of Islamophobia.

Immediately after El-Sayed’s primary victory, his opponent, Mike Rogers, falsely claimed that El-Sayed had “pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood,” and that El-Sayed had said “America deserved 9/11.” Both claims were untrue. At a campaign rally near Detroit, Vice President JD Vance called El-Sayed “very, very evil.” Alongside this bigoted demonization, there has been a clear and targeted effort to convince Jewish Michiganders that El-Sayed represents a threat to their community.

There are vigorous debates in our country over US foreign policy, and especially US policy regarding Israel and the Palestinian people. But the truth is that El-Sayed’s views on these issues align with those of a growing majority of Democrats who don’t face anywhere near the same scrutiny or smears for holding these positions. So why, then, has El-Sayed been singled out?

The attacks on him are not occurring in a vacuum. Twenty-five years after the horror of September 11 and the rise of xenophobia, discrimination, and dehumanization in its aftermath, anti-Muslim bigotry has reached new heights, not only in rhetoric but also in discriminatory policies and violence and congressional and state caucuses and proposed actions. This is reinforced by the data: New analysis from Pew released this month found that “views on Islam are now more negative and more partisan than in 2002.”

We can see the results nationwide. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott and his allies have pushed forward a wave of anti-Muslim legislation and executive actions in a state with one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani—the city’s first Muslim mayor—has confronted appalling attacks from people like Rudy Giuliani who sought to associate him with the perpetrators of 9/11 and called on him to stay away from the memorial ceremony.

Jewish Americans are confronting a related, alarming bigotry. In the last few years, the community has experienced growing antisemitism and increased harassment. Violent assault is on the rise, and more than a third of American Jewish adults report feeling unsafe in the United States. Campaign tactics like some of those deployed by El-Sayed’s opponents in Michigan seek to cynically exploit this fear.

At this precarious moment for the principle of multi-faith democracy in this country, Americans cannot allow these cynical “divide and conquer” tactics to succeed. Our communities must not allow ourselves to become isolated and polarized from one another. A race to the bottom in Michigan would only encourage a trend of rising bigotry and reward a political approach that seeks to divide communities—to make them too scared and too angry to work together.

Instead, we should recognize that attacks on Muslims and Jews rise together and stem from the same root of xenophobia—a common threat that we can and must confront together. Anti-Muslim conspiracy theories can fuse with and echo antisemitic tropes, as is the case with the white nationalist “Great Replacement theory.” The pernicious bargain that insists on trading in the safety of one community for the rejection of another is a false one. We should lean into the commitments that unite us: civil rights, religious pluralism, and a society and economy that fulfills America’s highest ideals.

We should believe candidates like El-Sayed when they commit to safety for all their constituents—and when they express a willingness to listen, learn, and build greater trust. El-Sayed has said, “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.” That is as it should be for us all.

Some of El-Sayed’s opponents want to make Michigan the place where a multi-faith, multiracial, anti-authoritarian coalition falls apart. Instead, we must reject hateful attacks and make this race a symbol of how Muslims, Jews, and other diverse constituencies can come together. This is our moment to show that solidarity has the power to trump division and fear, in Michigan and far beyond.

America’s century is over. History has not ended. This has become the new conventional wisdom even among the keepers of convention.

The challenge is how America finds real security in this new era. This month, we witnessed two strikingly different answers: one from the self-proclaimed most powerful man in the world, Donald Trump, and one from the champion of the rising populist movement on the left, Senator Bernie Sanders.

Trump’s address to the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly was a characteristically grotesque performance, essentially a raised middle finger to the 190 country representatives gathered before him and the UN itself. Amid the routine farrago of lies, boasts, threats, and resentments, he presented a stark vision of America’s emerging role: essentially an imperial gangster—that, if pursued, constitutes a clear, present, and harrowing threat to this nation’s security.

To the Victor Go the Spoils

After a stump speech preening about America’s primacy—“Our economy is the envy of the world. Our military is the most powerful on Earth. Our technology is second to none, and we are leading in virtually everything. Our energy is fueling the planet”—Trump turned to America’s role in the world.

He boasted about the bombing of Iran, the “peace” in Gaza, the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and control of its oil—“to the victor go the spoils”—the bombing of fishing boats in the Caribbean designated as “foreign terrorists,” the blockade of Cuba, “failing like never before and it will fail.”

Each of these—from aggressive acts of war to aiding and abetting genocide to illegal blockade—represent a brazen and open violation of international law and the UN Charter. Trump is saying that America will continue to police the world, only not to enforce the law but to enforce its will and to take what it can get. In apparent acknowledgment of the lawlessness, he issued a scurrilous attack on the International Criminal Court, “an evil group of people,” calling on all members to resign from the “rogue institution.”

Ironically, this fool’s errand of brazen plunder isn’t Trump’s greatest disservice to US national security. As the UN secretary general warned in his opening remarks, the world is struggling with the growing costs of real and present dangers that can no longer be ignored and can only be addressed by greater international cooperation: catastrophic climate change, global pandemics, corrosive inequality that undermines democracy and savages the poor, an accelerating nuclear arms race accompanied by the collapse of arms control agreements, and the known unknown of AI, which requires international regulation.

Trump made clear that the United States, under his watch, will sabotage any international regulation. Climate change and efforts to regulate AI are dismissed as a “hoax.” He has pulled the US out of the World Health Organization that monitors emerging pandemic threats and crippled our own Centers for Disease Control. Having pocketed billions while in office, he is the tribune of oligarchs, torpedoing all efforts at imposing a minimal tax on multinationals or on carbon or efforts to shut down tax-free zones. “There is no global government,” he preached, and “while I’m president, there will be no global taxes.” And, boasting about hiking America’s bloated military budget by one-third—to $1.5 trillion—and promising to build a “Global Dome” over America, he only adds fuel to the nuclear arms race.

At the dawn of the conservative era, Britain’s Margaret Thatcher asserted that “there was no alternative” to the neoliberal catechism. But there is an alternative course for the United States as it struggles to address new realities. It won’t come from a return to the failed “unipolar” globalism of the past decades. Instead, if there is an alternative to Trump’s gangsterism, it will come from the rising populist movement of the left.

Speaking on the eve of the UN General Assembly at Riverside Church in New York, Bernie Sanders offered a clear outline. He began with a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King’s historic address at Riverside at the height of the Vietnam War, and his warning that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

He argued that not only is the US spending more and more on military weapons while turning its back on working people and the poor, but that “it is happening all over the world.”

To turn that around begins with a change in US policy, including “an end” to Trump’s “disastrous war on Iran,” termination of military aid to Israel and condemnation of “the genocide” in Gaza, work with grassroots activists to end “Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine,” and denunciation of the UAE for aiding the genocide in Sudan’s civil war.

The growing violence, he argued, makes the United Nations more, not less, important, arguing that instead of arguing that “might makes right,” “our job is to strengthen the United Nations…and bring disagreements to the negotiating table…”

That would enable us to address the real and present security threats that we now face. At the top of that list, Sanders warns, is that “we are moving rapidly toward an extremely dangerous global oligarchy.” In nation after nation, we witness unprecedented levels of wealth and income inequality, illustrated by the fact that just as “the top 1 percent of America now owns more wealth than the bottom 94 percent,” the ratio is similar across the world.

“Children die of preventable diseases. People suffer every day. People give up hope. And 3,400 of the richest people on Earth became $4 trillion richer last year alone.”

The oligarchy, Sanders warned, “is ascending, working families are struggling to stay alive, and democracy is in retreat. The great challenge that we face in our country and all over the world is that that trend must be reversed.”

Sanders then turned to the other existential threats—focusing on the need to control the development of AI and to address catastrophic climate change.

The contrast is clear. For Trump, America strides the world. Our military will enforce our will. “The spoils” will go to the powerful, not to the people. Threats like AI and climate change are a “hoax.” International institutions are irrelevant if not evil.

For Sanders, militarism is a threat, not an answer. Basic security and democracy here and across the world are threatened primarily by an increasingly powerful and rapacious oligarchy. The emerging threats—climate change, AI (as well as pandemics and nuclear weapons, which he doesn’t mention)—require global cooperation. Changing our course depends not on building up the military but on building a progressive citizens movement here and across the world that can create a world “not based on greed but based on justice, on decency.”

Impossible? Perhaps, but Sanders reminds us of the “immortal words of Nelson Mandela: It always seems impossible until it is done.”

The Supreme Court’s approval rating has hit a record low: Just 33 percent of Americans approve of the job the justices are doing, according to a Gallup poll taken in July, only weeks after the court’s last term ended. The decline appears to have been driven by Republican voters, likely angered by the court’s rejection of Donald Trump’s illegal tariff plans and its affirmation of birthright citizenship. Only 12 percent of Democratic voters approve of the court, which has been the ballpark figure throughout the Trump era. Yet the court is uniquely insulated from this kind of public disgust. While Congress and the president have to answer to the public every two, four, or six years, Supreme Court justices are protected for life. They can rule over the American people, more or less, without their consent.

Things weren’t supposed to play out like this. The people who wrote the Constitution wanted the court to be insulated from public pressure, to be sure, but they never intended those insulated judges to be imbued with this much political power. In our republic, the representatives are supposed to make the important legal and political decisions, while the unelected, unaccountable judges are charged with mediating disputes between the states. That’s why the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over cases in which one state is suing another. For most other cases, the court has what’s known as appellate jurisdiction, which means it is intended to be used as a last resort.

The framers of the Constitution thought the elected branches of government would serve as a natural check on the Supreme Court’s power because, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist 78, the court does not have the power of the “sword or the purse.” The Supreme Court can’t pay for its rulings to be implemented, and it can’t enforce them. It has to rely on Congress and the president to enact its opinions. It seemed obvious to people like Hamilton that a court that overstepped its role or exceeded its power would simply be ignored by the branches with the power to levy taxes and command armies.

Hamilton, it turns out, was very, very wrong. Far from ignoring today’s over-powerful court, both political parties turn to it to overturn laws, regulations, and orders they don’t like. And we see both of the elected branches regularly genuflect to the court, even when it scuttles their entire popular agenda. We live in a world where popular legislation simply doesn’t matter unless it happens to be approved by five unelected judges on the Supreme Court. Campaign-finance reform, national healthcare, student-debt relief, and all manner of gun laws supported by millions of people and a large number of their representatives mean nothing unless five justices give these popular measures their blessing.

Today, the court is both obscenely powerful and broadly unpopular. It has stolen power from the elected branches, but those branches do nothing to take it back. Democrats applaud the court and boost its legitimacy on the rare occasions that it rules against Trump, as it did on tariffs and birthright citizenship, and then stand functionally inert as the court dances a tarantella on LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, minority rights, voting rights, housing rights, environmental rights, and labor rights, all the while turning our country into a shooting range where kids need to wear bulletproof backpacks to school.

Trump, for all his dictatorial bombast and bluster, has generally allowed the court to have the final say on all of his executive orders. He intimidates and mocks the justices, who only occasionally rule against him, but he rarely ignores them. Trump treats the Supreme Court the way medieval European kings used to treat the pope: as an annoying power they could kill but choose not to because his existence ultimately reinforces their own authority.

And so the unelected, unaccountable, and unpopular Supreme Court trundles on, despite shockingly low public-approval numbers. The justices need not fear their loss of institutional legitimacy, because they know that no other institution in government has the strength or will to stop them. The Supreme Court does not need to be faster than the fastest lion; it must only be faster than the slowest gazelle.

This term, the court will continue its dread work, despite the will of the American people. Human rights will be smashed. Popular laws will be vanquished. And the world the Supreme Court leaves to our children will become ever dirtier and more violent.

Republican National Committee v. Mi Familia Vota
Argument: December 8, 2026

Last term, the Supreme Court effectively killed the most important voting-rights law ever passed, the Voting Rights Act. This term, the court will come for the second-most-important piece of voting-access legislation: the National Voter Registration Act.

The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), more commonly known as the Motor Voter Act, is the best thing Bill Clinton ever did. It established one standardized federal form for voter registration and mandated that each state must accept the form as sufficient for registration. It’s the form people fill out at the DMV when they’re renewing their driver’s license, hence the moniker.

The NVRA might not seem like much, but in a country with 50 state-level election systems and over 10,000 election jurisdictions, each with its own unique and confusing rules and deadlines for voting, having one single form for voter registration makes it much easier for people to vote.

So, of course, Republicans hate it.

The form does not require proof of citizenship. You have to check a box confirming you are a citizen, and if you lie, you can be prosecuted—but you do not have to rend your garments and produce notarized parchment out of your ass showing that you came over on the Mayflower with two guns and a slave.

So, of course… Republicans hate it.

Arizona challenged the NVRA back in 2013, arguing in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona that it could require proof of citizenship for voter registration. The Supreme Court disagreed. In a 7–2 ruling written by Antonin Scalia and joined by John Roberts, the court said that Arizona’s state registration law violated the supremacy of federal law. The court left open the possibility that states could ask for more information than the federal form required, but they still had to accept the federal NVRA form as sufficient for the purpose of voter registration.

The two dissenting justices in that 2013 case were Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

In 2022, Arizona finally got around to trying to exploit the avenue left open in Inter Tribal Council. The state passed a law creating a new voter-registration form that requires voters to supply documents that establish proof of citizenship. While the state continues to allow people to use the NVRA form, those people, now called “federal-only” voters, are not allowed to vote in state or local elections unless the state verifies their citizenship; they are also prohibited from voting by mail in federal elections. The law also requires state election officials to cross-check Arizona’s voter-registration rolls against some kind of citizenship database, and if they find a voter who isn’t on the citizenship list, they’re authorized to cancel that person’s registration at any time.

Democrats, Tribal entities, and voting-rights groups, led by Mi Familia Vota, sued in response, and Arizona lost soundly in the lower courts. But the state appealed, and as is so often the case, the Supreme Court used its shadow docket to step in, temporarily overrule the lower courts without a hearing, and allow Arizona to use its previously unlawful voter-registration-and-exclusion form in the upcoming midterm elections. The case that the court will hear this term (and probably decide in the spring) will affect the 2028 presidential election.

It’s always amazing to me that Arizona, a state that sits on land first stolen from the Native people living there, and then stolen from Mexico, is one of the most hardcore states about preventing its large Native and Mexican-born populations from voting. It’s like the white folks running Arizona instinctively know they have no freaking right to be there and thus are desperate to use any anti-democratic means necessary to retain their ill-gotten power.

Given the Supreme Court’s open hostility to voting rights, I have to assume that Arizona and the Republicans will win this case and be allowed to use their additional form to suppress the vote. I mean, they’ve just about won the case in the short term.

All I can hope is that Arizona’s victory will be narrow. Hopefully, the court will use this case only to chip away at the NVRA. But we all know this court doesn’t give a damn about its own precedents. There’s every possibility that a robust win for Arizona will involve the court effectively overturning its decision in Inter Tribal Council, killing the NVRA just as it killed the Voting Rights Act.

Republicans, of course, will love it.

Viramontes v. Cook County
Argument: December 2, 2026

In the Supreme Court’s ongoing assault on the safety of every American, this case is the shot to the head. Viramontes v. Cook County is a challenge to laws in a number of states that ban AR-15s and other assault rifles. When Democratic presidential hopefuls talk about passing an assault-weapons ban—as if that will somehow solve the epidemic of gun violence in this country—this is the case that should remind them that significant institutional reform of the Supreme Court must happen first. It is the only way to achieve meaningful gun regulation.

The plaintiff in this case is indistinguishable from the plaintiff in nearly every other gun case. Some dude, in this case named Cutberto Viramontes, felt the need to overcompensate with some weapon. Lacking the dexterity to operate a bow or the strength to wield a broadsword, he opted for an assault rifle. Chicago told him no, and he claimed that his precious Second Amendment rights had been violated as he wept lead tears. It’s a tale as old as time… if time had started in the mid-1970s, when the National Rifle Association decided that the first 200 years of American gun regulation needed to be shot to death.

For what it’s worth, assault-rifle bans should be constitutional even under the Supreme Court’s recent bloodthirsty precedents. In District of Columbia v. Heller, the court said that people are entitled to firearms for self-defense but that only guns ordinarily used for self-defense get protection. Nobody buys an assault rifle for “self”-defense. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court ruled that all current gun laws must have an analogue to a gun law from the 18th or 19th century. Bruen is the dumbest ruling in recent memory, but even so, there were practical limits on the kinds of arsenals most people had. It should be possible for the court to analogize an assault rifle to other weapons of war that were not permitted to be owned by yokel militiamen in Lexington during the revolution.

None of that will matter to this Supreme Court. Does anybody really think the six Republican justices, who have spent the last decades giving big, wet kisses to the gun lobby, will uphold an assault-weapons ban? If you do, you simply haven’t been paying attention to how violent and extremist this court has become with regard to guns. Ammosexuals win in front of this court just as often as Christians and capitalists; its opinions might as well drop bullet casings as they are passed around.

The Republicans on the Supreme Court have helped create the most violent wealthy country on earth. They—not violent movies or video games or male loneliness—are responsible for gun violence in this country. We will continue to suffer and die under their bloody perversions until the Supreme Court is reformed.

Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County
Argument: October 5, 2026

I’m a big fan of tort lawyers—attorneys who seek monetary damages against businesses, institutions, or government agencies that cause harm. Some people turn up their noses at these kinds of litigators, deriding them as “ambulance chasers” and criticizing them as looking for payouts instead of justice. But I believe that tort lawyers are one of the people’s few defenses against the corporate-military-industrial-tech-bro complex. If you see a video of me being brutalized by the cops, I don’t want you to call Zohran Mamdani. I want you to call Ben Crump.

Tort lawyers are a big reason your car doesn’t burst into flames when you crash. Tort lawyers are a big reason your kids don’t choke to death on their toys. Tort lawyers helped weaken the tobacco industry and stop Purdue Pharma from selling drugs, and they were in the process of bringing the gun industry to heel before Republicans passed a law preventing gun manufacturers from being sued by tort lawyers. Recently, Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion and massively restructure its policies to settle a lawsuit about how it harms children by trapping them on social-media platforms. “Release the tort lawyers” is my solution to most every problem.

Tort lawyers have been critical in our fight for environmental justice and rights. Without recounting the entire plot of the movie Erin Brockovich, let’s just say that all (as opposed to only some) of our communities would be drowning in industrial waste without tort lawyers. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the goal of every rapacious business interest in our country is to get Congress or the Supreme Court to make a special rule preventing tort lawyers from suing their industry—and it shouldn’t be a surprise that the fossil-fuel industry is leading the way. The big polluters are being sued in multiple states for the climate damage they’ve caused. Now they’ve asked the Supreme Court to put a stop to it.

This is what Suncor v. Boulder is about. The city of Boulder, Colorado, has sued Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobile in an attempt to hold them liable for climate damage. Boulder is not asking the fossil-fuel industry to stop polluting; it’s asking the industry to pay for its pollution.

And that’s the key. If these companies had to pay for the climate damage they’ve caused, they would likely stop doing it. Even the threat of having to pay would likely compel them to clean up their act. The fossil-fuel business model is that the polluters reap all the profits for polluting while everybody else has to pay the cost of that pollution. If you could change that calculus, you could change the economic incentive for pollution and, without hyperbole, change the entire world.

Which is why it will never happen. The Supreme Court case is about whether Boulder’s lawsuit is preempted by the Clean Air Act. The energy companies are arguing that if they haven’t violated the federal law governing their behavior, then state lawsuits can’t be brought against them for that behavior.

That’s exactly what the six Republican justices will most likely find. The Republicans on the court have been as bad for the environment as the Chicxulub asteroid. They will most likely use this case to institute a new rule that protects the fossil-fuel industry from being sued in state courts for environmental damage. The Supreme Court has already rendered the Clean Air Act all but inert, and the justices know that Republicans don’t enforce what’s left of the act when they’re in power. Telling an industry it can only be sued with a law that is under-enforced is a great way to absolve that industry of legal accountability.

I hope I’m wrong. If Boulder wins this case, it could devastate the fossil-fuel industry. But… that’s why I’m not going to be wrong.

International Partners for Ethical Care v. Ferguson
Argument: December 7, 2026

This case should be called the Fugitive Trans Case.

The facts are pretty simple: Washington State has a law that requires licensed shelters to inform parents should they take in a runaway who is a minor. The notice requirement doesn’t apply, somewhat obviously, to minors who are running away from abuse or neglect. I trust I do not have to explain why I think not notifying abusive parents when their children escape is a good idea.

In 2023, Washington enacted legislation to waive the notice requirement when the minor is seeking “protected health care services,” including “gender-affirming treatment.” If you ask me, the law didn’t even need to be amended, because preventing your child from getting an abortion or gender-affirming care already falls under the category of “abuse or neglect.” But I guess Washington needed to make it clear that minors have a right to bodily integrity and autonomy.

You can imagine what happened next. The culture warriors descended on Washington, outraged that trans children might receive the care they need by running away from their abusive anti-trans parents. Five sets of parents sued the state; one set of parents said their child had already run away to receive care, while another said they had received “threats” from—get this—their older child, who wanted to take their younger sibling to a “safe place” to receive care.

I don’t know about you, but as a parent, if I’ve got an older child threatening to run away with the younger child, my inclination would be to think deeply about my parenting strategies, not sue the state over its law protecting runaways.

Then again, I’m not a drooling bigot.

I think we all know what the anti-trans, Christofascist Supreme Court is going to do with this case. Just look at how the court frames the “question presented,” which is how the justices tell the litigants what they think is at issue in the case: “Whether parents have standing to challenge a law or policy that deliberately displaces their decision-making role as to ‘gender transitions’ of their children, and in so doing creates present and likely future impediments to their ability to parent their children as they deem best for them.”

The scare quotes around “gender transitions” are in the original. These poor kids are so screwed: Even when they run away from home, the Republicans on the Supreme Court will find them and send them back for abuse.

Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia
Argument: November 30, 2026

A law has no meaning if the person who violates it cannot be held accountable. A right has no meaning if the person who tramples on it cannot be sued. One of the easiest ways the Supreme Court can take away fundamental rights is to simply prevent people from suing when their rights have been violated.

That is the goal of Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia. The case arises from two separate sex-discrimination lawsuits. In one, Thomas Crowther, an art teacher at Augusta University in Georgia, was accused of sexual harassment by several anonymous individuals. After an investigation, Crowther was effectively fired. He claimed that he was unfairly investigated and terminated on the basis of sex and sued the university under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex discrimination.

The other case was brought by MaChelle Joseph, who was the head coach of the Georgia Tech women’s basketball team. In early 2019, she filed a complaint alleging that her program was not given the same resources as the men’s team. Not long after, the school hired an outside investigator to look into complaints about her conduct as a coach and then fired her. She also sued under Title IX, alleging sex discrimination.

The Supreme Court case is not about the validity of either of these sex-discrimination claims (I am eternally thankful for that, because I do not want to have to weigh in on whatever the hell Thomas Crowther is on about), but whether these plaintiffs are allowed to argue their cases at all. Chief Judge William Pryor of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (who has been on the short list for a Republican Supreme Court nomination) argued that Title IX doesn’t allow employees to file a private cause of action against a federally funded employer for sex discrimination.

That’s news to me, as well as all of the other lower courts that have allowed this kind of litigation under Title IX since it became law in 1972. Indeed, if Title IX doesn’t allow employees to sue for sex discrimination, then employers might face no economic penalty for engaging in such discrimination. This is another case where the Supreme Court can protect major institutions from the tort lawyers, which will unleash their ability to discriminate without fear of financial damage.

If we had a normal Supreme Court, I would assume that it took the case only to tell Judge Pryor that he was wrong, overrule him 9–0, and warn other lower-court judges not to be so aggressively hostile to gender equality in the future. Unfortunately, our Supreme Court isn’t normal and has justices on it who are even more extremist than Pryor.

I assume this case starts with at least two votes to begin stripping away Title IX: Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh isn’t exactly a fan of women having their claims heard in open court, so I must also assume that he’s a third vote with the other two misogynists. Neil Gorsuch is absolutely the kind of guy who gets into an elevator five steps ahead of you and then mashes the “Close Door” button in the hope that he won’t have to smile awkwardly at you for a couple of floors, because his jurisprudence is all about closing the courthouse door on litigants he doesn’t deem worthy. So that probably gets us to four votes for Pryor’s wackadoodle reimagining of federal law.

And that leaves us with the game of “Guess which way the wind is blowing through the heads of John and Amy?” If either John Roberts or Amy Coney Barrett thinks that sex discrimination has been defeated the way they think racism has been defeated, they’re likely to curtail Title IX.

None of the likely decisions in the cases I’ve highlighted will be popular. Republicans would never be able to overturn popular laws like the National Voter Registration Act or Title IX at the ballot box. People in Washington State voted to protect runaways, while people in Chicago voted to ban assault weapons. And the fossil-fuel industry counts among the least-popular mustache-twirling capitalists in our society.

The fact that none of these Republican-aligned cases could win in front of the people is the reason they’re in front of the Supreme Court. The court is where Republicans go to do what the people reject.

The Supreme Court would have us believe that we’re powerless to stop them. That feeling, of course, is amplified by elected politicians, who unleash a mighty shrug every time a Supreme Court decision doesn’t go their way but then do nothing—and, more devastatingly, act like there’s nothing they can do.

But we are not powerless. While the political branches will never buck the Supreme Court on their own, we can demand it—and push and push until they rein in this rogue branch of government.

There’s a lot that our elected leaders can do, much of it through simple legislation. They can change the number of justices on the Supreme Court. They can cut its funding. And, at the end of the day, they can strip its jurisdiction over laws passed by Congress. Indeed, all of these things can be done without the need of a constitutional amendment.

Increasing the number of Supreme Court justices is the easiest thing to do, legislatively speaking: just pass a bill adding justices and appoint new ones who oppose the court’s various power grabs. Failing that, cutting the Supreme Court’s funding would be a good way to send a message to the current justices to get back in their lane. Congress controls the funding of the court: The justices can make their pronouncements from a park bench instead of a courthouse bench, if Congress ever decides to play hardball. Finally, the Constitution does not give the Supreme Court the final say on what is constitutional. Congress could pass a law prohibiting the court from ruling on a given law’s constitutionality. The justices would object, but at least some states would follow the rules as laid down by the people’s representatives instead of the ones decreed by the unelected Supreme Court.

But none of this will happen unless the people demand it. Congress will not take back power for the people unless the people recognize how much power they’ve lost. Even though the Supreme Court is unpopular, people still think it’s unassailable, and until that changes, the court will continue to act against the popular will. As Frederick Douglass once said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

I choose to remain hopeful that one day we will remember that nobody elected these nine petty kings and queens. Power in a democracy flows from the people, and if the people ever remember that, this Supreme Court can be stopped.

During the first year of the gilets jaunes protests, I taught English in France. By the time I arrived during that impossibly hot August in 2018, a grassroots movement against fuel taxes and economic inequality had been building, with its members eventually blocking off roundabouts and toll booths across the country and marching, every Saturday, down the large avenue at the end of my street. I would sit, lazily, with my legs sticking through the wrought-iron balustrade of my balconette and watch them go by.

It was my first year out of college, and I had taken the job in France, in part, for the time to read and write. I was assigned to one of the largest public high schools in the country, Lycée Jean-Baptise Dumas. Alès, where I taught, located in the south of the country, was a former mining town that had produced a record 3.3 million tons of coal in 1958, its workforce of 20,000 built largely on Algerian labor that France had recruited after the war. The last mine closed in 2001, but the families stayed, and many of their descendants were my students. The other teachers were French and drove in from neighboring towns like Anduze and Uzès. Due to the scarcity of housing available to foreigners, I also commuted from a neighboring city. Nîmes, where I lived, was on the edge of the Mediterranean and hosted Spanish-style bullfights in its Roman amphitheater. During my second month there, a woman was gored to death by a bull that jumped over the fence.

It was a year of experiencing firsthand something I had already learned as a French major in college: that French equality was a story France told about itself, and that the far right had been a more or less consistent underbelly of the country since at least the 1890s. France’s own Constitutional Council had ruled in 2007 that race and ethnicity could not be recorded as categories in any official state data collection, making it impossible to measure discrimination through government statistics, though private studies found that ethnic minorities in France were more than 30 percent less likely to be hired for jobs, and unemployment among people of North African origin was twice the national average. I was brought in on a seven-month government contract that prohibited other work and was designed to expire before I could declare residency. I was answerable to teachers 15 to 40 years my senior, though none of them had formal authority over me. As a teaching assistant, I was paid a poverty wage that qualified me for government housing assistance, even though I was a government employee. My position in the country was at least more honest than what France had done to my students’ families, who had been recruited to build French mines and then told, once the economic boom ended, that even if they got citizenship, they weren’t French at all.

A few weeks in, I arrived 20 minutes late to a class I was assisting with after its room was reassigned without my knowledge. The teacher held a meeting with me and two other staff members, where she threatened that if I was late again, she would bring in the French authorities to oversee my behavior and deport me if I wasn’t performing my job well. I said, in French, something like, “That sounds like it will take a long time,” to which she said it would be a several-month process. “I’m not here for very long,” I told her. “So my visa will likely expire before it’s done anyway.”

My appointment with France’s immigration office, for instance, where they would do a routine blood check for HIV and stamp my passport, was set for early December—four months after my arrival in the country. So I wasn’t worried about the French bureaucracy suddenly becoming more efficient. Plus I felt pretty certain that I hadn’t done anything to warrant deportation, and I knew that, since my contract was with the Ministry of Education and not the school, the teacher had no power to fire me. She told me I was being rude. I told her that, from my perspective, she was the one being rude. Another teacher gasped. That night, one of the teachers called me to say she was sorry I’d been singled out, and she was sure it must be stressful to be so young and arrive in a foreign country with “everything that was going on,” by which she certainly meant the gilets jaunes I watched from outside my apartment window. It was a kind thing to say, though I hadn’t thought of it like that. In any case, no one ever contacted the Ministry of Education.

When someone first learns a second language, it’s widely understood that they don’t have the same emotional associations with the words as they do in their native language. Such associations have to be built from the ground up. What this meant for me, in practice, was that I could say things in French that I never would have dared to say in English. It was very easy to be direct, because the part of my brain that processes shame or embarrassment didn’t register as I spoke. I was also direct because, in an attempt to keep up the appearance of something resembling proficiency, I would say the first sentence I could form in my head as quickly as I could. It got me into trouble with the other teachers repeatedly—although a language barrier soon became the least of our problems.

My fellow teachers never gave me the lesson plans ahead of time, although I begged for them during my first month. Instead, when I walked through the door to their classrooms, they’d ask me to explain, on the spot and in French, things like the racial dynamics in the United States that had led to the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement. During my improvised lecture, this particularly self-serious teacher nodded and interrupted me to declare that race was a “big problem in the US.” It was apparent she thought of systemic discrimination as a uniquely American problem. After class, another teacher said to me, in the staff room, that most of the students at this school weren’t good at English. They were lazy “because—parce que—they were immigrants.”

When I asked her why she thought there was a causal relationship between being an immigrant and being lazy, she looked at me like I was dumb, like I didn’t understand her. For a moment, I thought I had misspoken—pulled the wrong word or misconjugated. I tried again, this time more directly: “You think it’s because they’re immigrants?” She did that French thing where she blew air through her pursed lips and waved a hand in exasperation. It was clear to me that she used American racism as a way to displace and avoid confronting French racism. And I was meant to be a mirror that reflected blame outward.

The school year continued much like this, and by November the mistral set in: southern France’s whipping winds, reaching speeds of up to 40 miles per hour and continuing for days on end, which were said to drive people mad. The winds made it hard to open doors, so I was always throwing my shoulder into them. Sometimes I tried to sit outside during my breaks, but most days the wind blew me right back inside. If I wasn’t giving impromptu lectures to a class, I ran small conversation groups, five to nine students at a time, sitting around a table as I tried to get the 14-to-18-year-olds to chat in English or practice dictation. Since every classroom was full, I worked with them out of a janitor’s closet. My time was split among 11 teachers, each of whom had 30 students, which meant I could go weeks without seeing the same face twice and was often, in some sense, starting over with them.

One morning, I was asked to help students with an exercise using a news clip they were watching to practice English. It was a segment from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. The teacher and I replayed it several times while I improvised comprehension questions on the spot. We were struggling: The students were beginner speakers in English, and I was largely met with silence. During the lesson, two students began mumbling to each other, and then one jumped out of his chair and hit the other. The boys nearby stood up and started shoving each other, creating a full-on brawl that knocked over several desks. The teacher screamed at them, and another came in from down the hall and helped calm everyone down. I later learned the fight had started because one student called the other dumb for not understanding English. The fight was alarming, but the teachers—even those who had not been involved—kept bringing it up in the weeks that followed, saying it wouldn’t have happened in a “normal” school. The fight turned into a symbolic story, offering proof of what the teachers had long suspected about their immigrant students.

When I wasn’t working, I spent a lot of time alone. Not that I never went out: Most Fridays and Saturdays were spent with friends or at small house parties. But I worked 15-hour weeks, a little more since I tutored on the side for extra cash. I passed the weekday evenings on my IKEA bed frame, the French windows slamming open and shut with the wind. I taught myself to sew, kept a journal, and read a lot of Patrick Modiano, the French novelist who won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. “One has to be from somewhere,” an uncle tells one of Modiano’s narrators, whose Jewishness makes his belonging in postwar France feel unstable. All through my teaching, I was told repeatedly that my immigrant students weren’t French, that I wasn’t French. No one seemed to consider that we might not want to be.

My conditions might have been better than those of my students, but I felt like a foreigner, in part because I was repeatedly made to feel like one. This hostility created the sense that my life there wasn’t real, that I was only an export of the late empire and ought to just return to the United States. I knew I was interchangeable, that the school could have had any number of other foreign citizens teaching its students in my place, and that it wouldn’t have made much difference to them if I had happened to be assigned elsewhere.

In November, I was asked to teach the students about American Christmas traditions. When I gave these lessons, the students complained that I was violating la laïcité, France’s constitutional separation of religion from public institutions. When they left the janitor’s closet, I put my head on the table. In retrospect, it was so obvious that I had betrayed them. I wasn’t capable of seeing even that ahead of time, let alone telling the teachers I wouldn’t do it. I knew la laïcité was similar to my own country’s supposed separation of church and state, but in France it was also the same principle used to ban the wearing of hijabs, which were worn by some of my students.

I took their concerns to the teachers, but the teachers shrugged them off, saying that American holiday traditions were cultural, not religious. I didn’t think it was worth telling them about the evangelical voting bloc in the United States. I made a point, for the rest of the year, to prepare my own lessons, or to have a few on the back burner just in case. I treated the teachers with more skepticism than the dose I’d arrived with.

During my last few weeks at the school, the teachers began to suggest that I should stay through June, when the students took their exams. I told them I couldn’t because my visa would end before that, so not only would I not get paid for my time but I was also legally required to leave the country. Several of them insisted I should stay anyway to help, because surely I would want to make sure the students passed after all the effort I had put into teaching them English. They didn’t care to hear about how my visa worked in practice, just as many of them never seemed to think about the reality of their students’ lives, their existence in that uncomfortable state of semi-Frenchness. Although I hadn’t thought this aspect of the year would go any other way, that understanding only made my work feel all the more hollow.

The weather was warming up, and the doors I usually had to throw my shoulder into to open began to bake in the spring heat. On one beautiful day in particular, the courtyard was crowded with students as I sat on a bench and opened my journal. I flipped through it and read some of the entries at random; there were many to choose from, as I’d often written in it during the short breaks between classes. The journal documented a spring that had passed more easily than the fall. It also described a fear that, even as I got better at my job, I wasn’t quite able to help these students—their problems were far bigger than anything I could resolve. Not only that, but as I continued in French, I was losing my ability to think in English, and although I didn’t hear my thoughts in English first, I nonetheless spoke using the fragmented phrases I’d memorized, piecing them together to form coherent sentences. I had started to think of English this way: as just a string of grammatically correct clauses, with as many vocabulary words memorized as possible.

I felt defeated. Years of study and that, in the end, was all there was to fluency. I’d been hoping, I suppose, for something more poetic: that helping students learn English would crack something open about my native language. Instead, by the time I got on my flight home, I felt out of place in both languages, and it was more than a year before I stopped compulsively translating my thoughts between French and English. That summer, Nîmes became the hottest major city ever recorded in France—a record 44.4° Celsius (or 111.2° Fahrenheit), the temperatures driven by hot air rising from North Africa—and 50 wildfires broke out across the region. I learned about these fires, in English, from across the Atlantic.

The elephant in French classrooms, as just about anyone who has recently taught or studied in the country’s education system will tell you, is stretched resources. Classes are filled to the brim, with teaching increasingly delegated to intermittent instructors. Behind the façade of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité”—the republican promise emblazoned on each public school building in the country—stand deteriorating buildings, squalid facilities, poorly stocked libraries, unreliable IT, if any, and outnumbered critical support staff like nurses and counselors. Videos circulating on social media from students’ accounts document the most disastrous conditions: rats running around across the hall; collapsing ceilings; walls leaking with humidity; broken doors and dysfunctioning lighting in bathrooms.

Frustrations with this untenable status quo started to boil over in late September, only three weeks into the new academic year. The first sparks emerged on September 17 at the Lycée Saint-Exupéry, where striking teachers were joined by students who attempted a blockade of the school facilities.

They were soon joined by other students in the greater Paris area, most notably at the Lycée Paul Éluard in Saint-Denis, a diverse, working-class suburb north of the capital, who also launched a blockade on September 25. Less than a week later, their demonstration had spread to over 1,000 high schools across the country—more than a quarter of total establishments—crystallizing the social malaise of an entire generation.

Reacting to what was rapidly taking on the scale of a national crisis, President Emmanuel Macron intervened on Wednesday during a state visit to Madrid. “I understand the anxieties and anger that our youth might feel, whether that’s related to the climate, new technologies, or geopolitical tensions,” he said during a press conference. “However, none of these fears justify violence.”

The scope of the protests is perhaps best summed up in the clampdown that has followed, as media and government figures alike harp on the exceptional incidents of violence, such as the burning of Lycée Nelson Mandela in Nantes. On October 1 alone, nearly 2,000 people were arrested, with scores of schools now closed by administrative order and conducting online courses, in an effort to mitigate the effects of the blockades. As of Friday afternoon, however, the situation shows few signs of slowing down. A day of national mobilization and strikes is called for October 6.

The scene on Friday morning outside the Lycée Lucie Aubrac in Pantin, a suburb northeast of Paris, was typical of the French students’ revolt.

Though their school was closed by administrators, some students gathered outside the shuttered gates as early as 7:30 am. “Nobody listens to us,” said Lila, a high school senior. “Last year we didn’t have a math teacher for over seven months.”

Though the gathering was entirely peaceful, our interview was interrupted when a group of police officers started charging the students at around 8:45 am. Quickly, students started running, escaping the tear gas out of fear of the brutality that they have seen put to full force in schools elsewhere. Lila had on her mind, for example, the 16-year-old who on Thursday was shot in the eye with a rubber bullet in the nearby suburb of Argenteuil. On September 28, a rubber bullet also shattered the teeth and jaw of a 14-year-old boy in Saint-Ouen, just north of Paris.

“The level of violence we’re witnessing from the police is traumatizing,” said Lila. “We’re only minors here, children trying to have our voices heard.” In the eastern French city of Troyes, protesters filmed an unmarked police car driving at high speed between a crowd of students as officers sprayed tear gas from the windows.

For students in places like Pantin, or other disadvantaged banlieues, or suburbs, across France, the reaction to their mobilization feeds into the lingering sense of being relegated to a second-class status, problems to be managed rather than citizens deserving an opportunity to a decent education. To them, the police mobilization recalls the clampdown in response to the rioting that followed the 2023 killing of Nahel, a 17-year-old shot during an altercation with police in the Paris suburb of Nanterre.

A few kilometers to the south of Pantin, the Lycée Voltaire in Paris was also among the over 400 establishments closed on Friday. Several hundred students were gathered from the early hours of the morning, outside a barricade of trash cans and repurposed street fences blocking the doors to the storied 11th arrondissement high school. The peaceful protesters were greeted by solitary honks from motorists and truck drivers along the Avenue de la République.

For high schoolers at a place like Voltaire—though not one of the capital’s most elite schools—their demonstration was in part out of solidarity with the suburbs. “We’re relatively privileged here in Paris and know that the gap remains enormous between our school’s conditions and those found in high schools in the banlieues,” said Charly, a senior at Lycée Voltaire.

Still, the school is not spared from the broader problems afflicting French education. Students The Nation spoke to attested to packed classrooms and overworked teachers. Louis, also in his final year, denounced a “chronic lack of resources for the National Education ministry.” According to the ministry’s own figures, some 20 million class hours went untaught in the 2024–25 academic year. Louis, for example, said that his Spanish class last year was simply canceled for nearly an entire term, “without any substitute ever being appointed.”

The education budget is expected to grow by a little over €800 million in the 2027 fiscal year, not enough to compensate for inflation. In fact, next year’s budget, introduced on October 1, is slated to see permanent teacher rolls decline by 1,500 posts. A similar squeeze is felt in the university system. A 2024 study from economists Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel estimated that in real terms between 2017 and 2023 the annual budget for higher education declined by nearly 15 percent per student enrolled. “The army budget grows year after year, but for education we’re trapped in stagnation,” remarked Louis. In its 2027 budget outline, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu is seeking €54 billion in savings, although an additional €6 billion has been earmarked for the armed forces.

Another thing that unites just about all high schoolers is a shared frustration with the university selection system instituted at the beginning of Macron’s presidency. Known as Parcoursup, the digital platform introduced in 2018 has become infamous for its glitches and malfunctioning. But it is most decried for the idea of education it stands for, divvying up students along rigidly algorithmic lines, often discounting a candidate’s preferences about their intellectual and career interests and even geographic location. “You can be sent across the country because a computer told you that’s where you’ll study,” said Louis, nostalgic for a period when a student could easily enroll in the university of their choosing. In recent days, students at several universities have also joined in the push for occupations.

There are probably further storm clouds on the horizon for the university system. A senatorial report released in early September called to turn the page on the principle of free and open public universities for all.

With ideas like that circulating—and liable to be picked up in 2027 should a figure from the conservative establishment or the far right accede to power—it’s little wonder that the sentiment prevalent for France’s rising generation of students is that of a stolen future. Looking around them, they know that their school system, once considered the foundation of a republican society, has grown increasingly undemocratic and more segregated.

As the straitjacket of reduced budgets comes to dominate the national debate, the main political reaction to the mounting protest movement has been foot-dragging. In one apparent concession, Education Minister Édouard Géffray withdrew on Thursday a proposal that would have seen the levying of registration fees for certain post–high school trade schools and preparatory classes to France’s selective “Grandes Écoles.”

Otherwise, government figures and leaders of the right-wing opposition are decrying alleged outside agitators and seeking to pin the blame on a culture of protest prevalent among French youth. Far-right stalwart Marine Le Pen even broached the idea of a new anti-rioting law. “It’s a grave mistake that the media only harp on the rare images of violence,” remarked Charly, from Lycée Voltaire. “We’re portrayed as savages who only know how to burn trash bins.”

La France Insoumise (LFI), the leading left-wing opposition party, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has also become a favored target of the backlash. Mélenchon called on LFI elected officials to “step in” between students and riot police, before urging for protests to remain nonviolent. The mainstream media has otherwise fixated on images of the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko—who had intervened to drag a burning trash can away from the gates of the Paul Éluard high school on Monday—as proof of LFI rabble-rousing. Bruno Retailleau, leader of the conservative Les Républicains, even called for the party’s banning, seven months from the presidential election.

But evasions like this will do little to calm the anger that has spilled out in the open in recent days—and it will do nothing to address the root causes of the crisis in French education.

“For now, this is a struggle led by and for young people, but we hope that unions will join and that this will expand into a broader national battle,” said Louis, the senior from Lycée Voltaire. Meanwhile, eyes remain fixed on the possible revival of a “yellow vest”–style movement starting on October 17. Macron’s government is no doubt aware that France has a long history of student protests snowballing into far larger social movements.

If it were up to me, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt’s monumental face-plant would play in a constant loop on all television networks until he resigned in shame and disgrace. Schmitt fully debased himself during Senate hearings designed to torture former special counsel Jack Smith, and I simply don’t think he should be allowed to have a public life after his incompetent performance.

For the uninitiated: During the hearing on Tuesday, Schmitt alleged that Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis were partners in a grand conspiracy to “get” Donald Trump. Willis’s assistant and paramour Nathan Wade was somehow involved. The “evidence” of this conspiracy was supposedly an Atlanta Hawks basketball game that Schmitt alleged Willis and Smith attended at State Farm Arena in Atlanta on February 3, 2024.

Just to state an obvious fact that has been somewhat overlooked during all of this: State Farm Arena seats over 17,500 people. If Smith and Willis had been at the same game at the same time, it would have meant literally nothing. Lt. Daniel Kaffee had more on Col. Nathan Jessup in A Few Good Men when all he had was “phone calls and footlockers.” It is beyond ridiculous to try to pin an entire illegal conspiracy on a freaking basketball game.

In any event, Smith said he never attended that game. Schmitt smugly declared that Smith had perjured himself. He claimed to have text messages from Smith confirming his planned attendance at the “Hawks” game.

Jack Smith, who in this moment officially became my top choice for attorney general once the Trump era finally ends, slowly figured out what was going on. I posted a picture on my social media of the moment Smith realized that Schmitt was confusing the Atlanta Hawks—a men's professional basketball team—with the Iowa Hawkeyes, which represent the University of Iowa. (At Above the Law, Joe Patrice shared more Louvre-worthy pictures, mostly of Republicans realizing Schmitt is an idiot.) Smith testified that he attended a women’s basketball game in February 2024, but in Maryland, not Georgia, in order to see Hawkeyes great Caitlin Clark play.

Senator Amy Klobuchar put Schmitt’s mistake into the record, which prompted Schmitt to respond as men of his type often do when they’ve been exposed as frauds: He yelled at her. Schmitt then went on The Charlie Kirk Show (because for some reason that’s still a thing) claiming victory. Despite the unraveling of his entire conspiracy theory in real time on CSPAN, the white-wing media machine continued to push Schmitt’s provably false narrative.

In a normal world, this would be the end of Schmitt’s career. But, of course, it won’t be. It won’t be because lies and incompetence are not deal-breakers for Republican voters.

The Bad and the Ugly

• The Supreme Court term starts on Monday with an important environmental law case that concerns a lawsuit filed by Boulder, Colorado, seeking damages against the fossil fuel industry for climate change. The energy companies will be down a man, because their boy, Justice Samuel Alito, has recused himself from the case (his wife holds stocks in some of the companies, because of course she does). This might look like a “win” for environmentalists. But I think there’s no way Alito would have recused if he weren’t sure his side already had enough votes to win.
• The Supreme Court used the shadow docket to allow Trump to deport people to “third party countries” while it waits to hear the case “on the merits.” That won’t happen until December. 
• This headline from Democracy Docket feels like it should be the epitaph of the 2020 election: “Election denier Kurt Olsen leaves DOJ after failing to find evidence of stolen election.”
• The GOP tried to attach a voter-ID requirement to a bill prohibiting Congress members and their families from engaging in insider trading. Democrats didn’t fall for it, so the Republicans are still allowed to enrich themselves through public corruption.
• Florida is in a state of emergency following a dengue fever outbreak. The combination of Flori-duh, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and climate change is going to kill many people before the sea swallows the state for good.

Inspired Takes

• Ray Epstein and Shannon Porter have a good article in The Nation about the rape charges filed against “Clavicular,” a social-media influencer known for “Looksmaxxing.” They do a great job of explaining how the manosphere dehumanizes women and encourages rape and sexual assault. I have two young boys, and I’m constantly on the lookout for the kind of misogynist messaging that permeates even the safe corners of the Internet we allow them to occupy. But I also feel like I don’t have to tell my kids to avoid using a hammer and needle to create microfractures in their jaw and chin to strengthen their jawline like Clavicular does. I feel like if you have to warn your kids not to do that, you’ve already lost.
• I don’t often get to link to my Nation colleague Sasha Abramsky because his excellent work publishes Friday, after this newsletter is out. But if you missed it last week, please check out his piece on Trump’s Hitler-esque speech to the United Nations.
• Jay Willis does a deep dive on the once proud SCOTUSblog and argues that it has become an absolute joke. This is a difficult story for me. I know and respect many of the people who work at SCOTUSblog. When I can read Amy Howe or Zach Shemtob, unfiltered from conservative justice bootlicking or a $200 paywall, I will. David Lat, who occasionally contributes for them, is literally my former boss. They provide an important service and original reporting. But the broader changes under the new right-wing leadership of Sarah Isgur are becoming too much to bear.

Worst Argument of the Week

The Supreme Court on Wednesday night gave the green light to Tennessee to execute Christa Pike, who was convicted of brutally murdering her roommate in 1995, when Pike was 18. Now 50, Pike was set to be the first woman executed by the State of Tennessee in over 200 years.

I am devoutly against the death penalty, and the Pike case is as good an example of any as to why. Pike has admitted to committing the crime. But she appealed her case because her defense, at the time, did not enter into evidence her status as a rape survivor and the years she suffered childhood sexual abuse. Pike’s lawyers argued that, if she were given a new trial, a modern jury allowed to hear the new evidence might not return a sentence of death. Certainly, an 18-year-old girl suffering from the trauma of sexual abuse might not have been sentenced to death if the jury had been allowed to consider her circumstances.

Tennessee prosecutors did not repudiate the new evidence—they just said it shouldn’t matter. They said that Pike was merely engaged in a delaying tactic and trying to relitigate a case that is decades old. The six Republican justices agreed and upheld her death sentence over the objection of the three liberal justices (who, I will point out, happen to be women themselves).

With the blessing of the Supreme Court, Pike received two lethal doses of drugs on Wednesday night… but she didn’t die. After the second injection failed to kill her, Pike was taken to an on-site medical facility, where she remains, alive though most likely in agony.

Capital punishment is barbaric. Murderers should, of course, be punished, but killing people accomplishes nothing. The death penalty is applied arbitrarily and inconsistently, with the strength of one’s lawyers having more to do with life or death than the severity of one’s crimes. And we all know who gets the strongest lawyers and who doesn’t. Innocent people are sometimes killed. The death penalty lacks humanity, lacks wisdom, and far too often lacks even basic efficacy, leading to torture before death.

A civilized society would not do this, and certainly would not keep doing this. Every single state-sponsored execution is a stain on our society.

What I Wrote

I was minding my own business, watching young men damage their brains for my amusement, when Donald Trump tried to ruin my Saturday. So I wrote about his illegal campaign ads paid for with my money.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

Apparently, Chief Justice John Roberts’s summer vacations in Maine are not what they used to be. Jodi Kantor spent some time in Roberts’s summer hideout and learned that the justice is increasingly beset by protesters who refuse to allow him a moment’s peace.

To which I say: “Good. More. Harder next time.” A man primarily responsible for the greatest revocation of individual rights in modern US history should not get three months of respite from being reminded of his culpability.

There’s a particular vignette Kantor includes that I’m sure was placed there to soften the hearts of people like me. It comes from Roberts’s daughter, Josephine, who at one point confronted protesters outside the family’s vacation home: “She asked them: What did they hope to accomplish? Had they considered how their actions affected the chief justice’s wife and children?... Her father wasn’t even home, Ms. Roberts told them. He respected that she had her own left-leaning political views, she said, according to the protesters’ written accounts. And he was a wonderful father, she added.”

This humanizing story didn’t work on me. I think that’s because I also try to be a “wonderful father.” I also try to respect my children’s political views, even when they’re different from mine. I also try to be a decent person who keeps to himself and enjoys lazy summer evenings surrounded by friends and family and lobster boils.

You know what I don’t do? Make it my life’s work to take away political power from Black people. I haven’t been on a decades-long crusade to reduce women to second-class status. I don’t deny water to people standing in line to vote or police where trans kids can go to the bathroom. I don’t send immigrants back to be tortured, and I sure as hell don’t condemn rape victims to death.

John Roberts and his court are not my legal and political opponents; they are my moral enemies. They threaten my life and the lives of every person I care about. They have mugged my political and civil rights.

I don’t expect that Josephine can understand that. She’s not Black and, hopefully, will never need a lifesaving abortion. Her father has been a good man to her, and that’s all that matters.

But what her father has done to the rest of us matters too. And conveying that is what the protesters “hope to accomplish.” They hope to tell Roberts that his attacks on the rest of us will not be forgotten.

***

Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that the SCOTUSblog website does not seem to include writers of color. There are, in fact, five.

The botched execution of Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike has added another compelling argument to the case for banning the death penalty. Following a pair of horrific attempts by the state to take the life of the 50-year-old women on Wednesday, The New York Times reported that a lawyer for Pike “said she was alive and receiving life-saving medical care on Thursday…. Ms. Pike survived an injection of two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital in what was the state’s second bungled execution this year.”

The torturous debacle was described by Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, as “the worst we’ve seen” in a long history of botched executions in American states. It was so awful, so “deeply disturbing,” in fact, that Tennessee Governor Bill Lee ordered a review of the hours-long attempt to kill Pike, halted executions in Tennessee, and called the nightmarish incident “a tragedy.”

Yet Lee, a longtime backer of capital punishment, defended state-sanctioned killing. “The people of Tennessee have determined that capital punishment is the appropriate sentence for the most heinous of crimes,” he said. “The people of Tennessee expect that those sentences will be carried out in a manner that is not only legal, and constitutional, but effective and that didn’t happen and I’m highly disappointed along with Tennesseans about what happened last night.”

Lee is not seeking reelection this fall. But the Republican front-runner to replace him, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, appeared to be most interested in finding another method for euthanasia. “While there should be a thorough review of what happened and why the process failed, the answer is simple: bring back the electric chair and deliver justice for these victims swiftly,” said Blackburn. “As your governor, I will do just that.”

In stark contrast, Blackburn’s Democratic rival, Memphis City Council member Jerri Green, spoke from practical experience about the fundamental inhumanity of capital punishment.

“The state botched this execution because the Attorney General rushed this process, even after the execution of (another Tennessee death row inmate) Tony Carruthers failed just four months ago,” said Green. “There is a lack of transparency around drug testing, as well as qualified and ethical personnel—but the fact of the matter is: the death penalty has always been inhumane, expensive, and biased. And Marsha Blackburn wants to bring back one of the most cruel forms of capital punishment, the electric chair.”

Green is right. The death penalty has always been inhumane, expensive, and biased. Academic studies, legal reviews and honest political debates in states that have banned executions—under Republican and Democratic governors—have confirmed that state-sanctioned killings fail to make communities safer and invariably promote injustice. As the American Civil Liberties Union, explains,

The death penalty in America is a broken process from start to finish. Death sentences are predicted not by the heinousness of the crime but by the poor quality of the defense lawyers, the race of the accused or the victim, and the county and state in which the crime occurred. From 1976 to 2015, 1,392 executions occurred in the United States, and 995 of them took place in the South. Time and time again, we have proven that the criminal justice system fails to protect the innocent and persons with serious mental disabilities and illnesses from execution. Even the administration of executions is utterly flawed: Every method of execution comes with an intolerably high risk of extreme pain and torture.

While that’s true, overturning the death penalty has been a tough sell in Southern and border states such as Tennessee. Green, however, has not hesitated to make the case for change. A graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, who began her legal career as a juvenile public defender in Nashville, she has served as executive director of the Community Legal Center in Memphis and as Shelby County’s chief public defender.

“As a public defender, I’ve met a few too many people who were wrongfully convicted on death row who were later exonerated,” Green said Thursday. “As governor, I would put a moratorium on all future executions. If we say we are pro-life, that means we must be anti-death penalty.”

That’s a position Green was advocating for even before Tennessee’s botched executions started making national headlines.

Asked by the Nashville Banner earlier this year whether she would continue state executions if elected, the Democrat bluntly replied, “No.”

“My decades in the legal system have shown me that state-sanctioned executions are unjust, inhumane, and prone to irreversible error,” she explained. “The death penalty does not deter crime, costs taxpayers millions more than life without parole, and is plagued by administrative failures. As Governor, I will halt state executions and focus our taxpayer dollars on real, effective public safety measures.”

This combination of moral clarity and experience-based understanding of what’s at stake in the death penalty debate is not unheard-of. But it is still too rare in red-state politics. And it distinguishes Jerri Green as a gubernatorial candidate who combines legal knowledge with moral clarity.

This year, I broke the Yom Kippur fast the way generations of New Yorkers have—with bagels, lox, and—after checking my receipt—some thoughts about the price of food in this city.

I complained to my friends. But high prices at the Jewish dinner table are nothing new, and perhaps I should have looked to our forebears for some inspiration.

In the spring of 1902, the price of kosher meat on the Lower East Side suddenly jumped by 50 percent—from 12 to 18 cents a pound. Not because of a cattle shortage or drought. A small group of powerful meatpacking companies—the beef trust—had come to dominate the market.

For the Jewish immigrant families packed into the neighborhood’s tenements, that wasn’t just sticker shock. It meant putting less food on the table. But the women responsible for buying and preparing this food did not resign themselves to this price increase. Two women, Fanny Levy and Sarah Edelson, organized their neighbors along Monroe Street door to door. They picketed butcher shops. They took their campaigns into synagogues, climbing onto bimahs during Shabbat services and calling on their communities to join the boycott. They passed out flyers bearing a skull and crossbones and a simple message: “Eat no meat while the Trust is taking meat from the bones of your women and children.”

People listened. The protest grew to involve some 20,000 New Yorkers. Kosher meat sales collapsed. Within weeks, the retail price had fallen from 18 cents to 14 cents a pound.

The women had no control over the meatpacking industry. But they could see what it was doing. The price hike was public. They could compare notes, recognize a shared interest, and organize around a common demand.

Now imagine that same fight unfolding in 2026. Sarah Edelson opens a grocery delivery app and sees a price for meat. Fanny Levy opens the same app and sees another. The woman down the block sees a third.

The company knows what each woman has bought before, where she lives, and what alternatives are nearby. Perhaps it can estimate how urgently she needs to place an order—say, before the Sabbath. Each woman sees only the price offered to her.

Think about what that does to the boycott. Assuming these women even realize they’re being gouged, what price goes on the flyer? What number does Sarah shout from the bimah? How do you organize your neighbors against a price hike when you can’t tell whether they received one?

The beef trust had enormous power. But its power was exercised in a way that people could see and challenge. Today, companies have increasingly sophisticated tools to exercise economic power person by person—consumer by consumer, worker by worker.

The company sees everyone while each of us sees only ourselves. And that gets at what worries me most about how AI is reshaping our economy.

On October 5, representatives from the major AI firms will testify before the New York City Council to quell concerns about human extinction, to walk back their own promises of mass layoffs, and to give their best pitch on why, in Sam Altman’s words, artificial intelligence should be a “utility like electricity or water,” where “people buy it on a meter.”

These representatives will make the case for what this extraordinary technology can do. Our job at the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) is to ask how it affects the people who have to live with it. That is the work we have been leading since day one of the Mamdani administration—and, as I will outline here, the work we intend to keep doing in the months and years ahead.

I can already predict that one phenomenon the AI companies will focus on—especially if it distracts from their safety record—is the promise of personalization. And you can understand the appeal: Personalized products, personalized services, personalized experiences all sound good. But there is a darker side when companies personalize the terms on which people earn a living or buy the things they need. A price based on the most you are willing to pay. A wage based on the least it thinks you will accept.

Companies, largely unchecked by government, have spent years building the machinery for this: collecting data, tracking behavior, and testing our responses. AI can make that machinery more powerful and expand its reach. Firms can learn from millions of people while keeping each person in the dark about how others are being treated.

Agentic AI could take this individualization further still. These systems promise to do more than recommend a product: They could shop, negotiate, and make purchases on our behalf. That could save people time and help them find better deals. But it also means the products we encounter, the alternatives we consider, and the terms we accept could all be selected through a private exchange between automated systems that no human ever reviews.

That raises basic questions about whose interests these agents serve. Will an agent search for the best deal for its user, or steer them toward a business that pays for placement? What personal information will it reveal to a seller? And if it exposes our sensitive information or initiates an unwanted purchase, how can consumers stop it and get relief? As more of the transaction happens out of sight, consumers may find it harder to understand their own treatment, much less compare it with anyone else’s.

The threat AI poses to our ability to act collectively may be new. But our response doesn’t have to be. Fanny Levy and Sarah Edelson didn’t have the money or market power of the beef trust. But they had neighbors. They had shared interests. And once they recognized those interests, they discovered that acting together gave them power of their own.

I believe the same principle should guide us today, in New York City and around the country. If AI gives corporations powerful new ways to divide us, we need to build new ways—and strengthen some very old ones—to act together.

In New York City, we are working to reclaim an economy centered on the interests of working people. This means common rules that corporations cannot ignore. A minimum wage an algorithm cannot slip below. A fair price that doesn’t change based on who’s doing the shopping. Workers with the freedom to organize and bargain together. Governing institutions with the capacity and will to hold tech companies to account.

We are pursuing a three-part strategy for realizing this vision. We are enforcing the laws on the books, and firmly rejecting tech companies’ demands for special exemptions. We are defending our shared economy—common prices and common wages that working people can see and organize around. And we are investing in institutions of countervailing power—worker organizations, consumer advocates, and government itself.

Enforcing the Law

On September 22, DCWP announced the largest labor enforcement action in New York City history: a $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash, which admitted to underpaying its workers—and, in some cases, not paying them at all. The action will put more than $115 million back into the pockets of 260,000 workers.

But behind that headline is a deeper story. App companies have built a business model around extraordinary control. They can surveil workers in real time, measure their performance to squeeze extra output, adjust pay and incentives to keep enough people on the road, and keep vast reserves of workers waiting for work off the road.

In New York, we have insisted on a basic limit to that power: Delivery workers are entitled to minimum pay. Whatever a company’s system spits out, companies must still meet that obligation.

That is why this victory matters beyond the nine-figure recovery itself. It shows that a law enacted in this city can still set the terms of a market run through an app. An algorithm may calculate how little it thinks a worker will accept. But that algorithm doesn’t get the final say—the people of New York do.

Another development behind the headline is our cutting-edge approach to remedies. In this case, we are turning DoorDash’s massive worker surveillance apparatus on its head. In partnership with the Workers Justice Project and the Workers’ Algorithm Observatory, we are developing software that allows delivery workers to share trip and pay data directly with our department. This not only empowers workers and their organizations, but also gives DCWP an additional layer of visibility into a market the app companies would otherwise shield from scrutiny.

You will see the same approach in our response to consumer-facing harms. Consider customer service. We have already insisted on click-to-cancel subscriptions—developing the first municipal Click-to-Cancel Rule in America, which took effect October 1. We will bring that same proactive approach to AI customer service chatbots. In October, we will be announcing a proposed rule—the first such municipal rule in America—making clear that companies cannot trap consumers in endless chatbot doom loops when they are trying to cancel a service, dispute a charge, or obtain a refund. The system a company chooses to deploy must give people a meaningful way to exercise their rights.

The principle is straightforward: New technology does not create an exemption from old obligations. That philosophy will drive all of our enforcement work. But enforcement alone cannot answer every question technology is forcing us to confront. As companies use new tools to individualize prices, wages, and terms of service, we also have to decide which parts of economic life should remain common—visible, understandable, and governed by rules that apply to everyone.

Defending Our Shared Economy

We know that emerging technology can make changes in the economy feel inevitable, as though the rest of us are just passive bystanders along for the ride. We are not. We can decide, as citizens and as New Yorkers, which parts of economic life should be governed by mutually understood terms, and how much power companies should have to tailor those terms to each person’s vulnerabilities.

That is the second prong of our strategy: preserving a shared marketplace in which workers and consumers can compare their treatment, recognize common interests, and exercise collective power.

Consider surveillance pricing. We have already seen how these pricing practices would have likely doomed the 1902 meat boycott. And it’s encouraging to see that the Trump Federal Trade Commission—which previously mocked surveillance pricing as a concept Lina Khan made up—is now proposing an enforcement policy statement to require disclosure when companies engage in this practice.

But if we’ve learned anything from the last quarter century, it’s that a legal regime that places all the responsibility on consumers—the so-called notice-and-consent framework that pretended consumers could protect themselves by reading privacy policies and clicking “I agree”—was a profound failure of governance.

When I was at the FTC, we focused on prohibiting harmful practices, rather than letting companies disclose them away—we brought actions to ban the sale of sensitive health data, to ban biased facial recognition systems, and to destroy algorithms trained on ill-gotten data. We are taking the same approach in New York City.

That is why we have significant concerns with the FTC’s continued affinity for more disclosures, which hark back to the agency’s embrace of notice-and-consent 25 years ago. We believe surveillance pricing should be banned, not disclosed. And we support pairing that ban with a broad private right of action to ensure that companies are accountable for algorithmic manipulations.

We are also scrutinizing how agentic AI threatens our shared economy. Consumer protection enforcement often depends on identifying a practice that affects many people: a deceptive advertisement, a hidden fee, an abusive contract term. But when automated agents select products, negotiate terms, and make purchases on our behalf, each consumer could encounter a different set of representations, prices, and conditions—all through exchanges they may never see. The underlying misconduct may be systematic, while the evidence is scattered across thousands of private interactions. That makes it harder for consumers to recognize a shared grievance, and harder for enforcers to uncover the practice behind it.

That is why, later this fall, DCWP will be announcing a study on agentic AI led by professor Luke Herrine of Brooklyn Law School. Consumer protection law clearly applies when companies use these systems to deceive, exploit, or harm consumers. But agentic AI raises a broader challenge: It can make each consumer’s transaction increasingly individualized and increasingly difficult to compare with anyone else’s.

Our study will examine how to protect consumers in that environment—including what consumers should be able to expect from an agent acting on their behalf, how we should address conflicts of interest, what authority agents should have to commit consumers’ money or share their information, and what recourse consumers should have when something goes wrong. The goal is not only to protect consumers one by one but also to preserve their ability to recognize common practices, compare experiences, and act together.

Across the board, we are adapting our tools—and proposing new ones when necessary—to draw lines around the ability of powerful firms to make the essential terms of a transaction invisible, endlessly adjustable, and different for every person on the other side.

Investing in Collective Institutions

Our third task is to strengthen the institutions that can make those rights effective—and give working people a greater role in setting the terms themselves.

Our DoorDash case began with workers who courageously came forward about their pay. They were able to do that because they were not acting alone—they were organizing through the Workers Justice Project. Their experiences gave our investigators a place to start. And what began with a small group of organized workers ultimately became the largest labor enforcement action in city history.

This case shows what effective institutions can do together. Workers on the ground knew something felt off. Their advocates helped identify patterns across individual experiences. And government had the authority and capacity to compel answers and secure relief.

Under this administration, we are investing in expanding that capacity further. The Mamdani administration recently announced the largest investment in consumer and worker protection in New York City history, and we are using that investment to build our new Research and Analytics Division.

The premise is simple: Corporations should not enjoy a monopoly on the expertise needed to explain how markets work, or on the economic research that shapes public policy. Government needs capacity to test industry claims, understand what is happening in the marketplace, and produce rigorous research of its own.

Our work on delivery worker tips shows why that matters. App companies argued that higher worker pay would cause customers to tip less. DCWP’s analysis found something different: Changes the companies themselves made to their own interfaces had driven down tips by more than $550 million. We worked with the City Council to prohibit those design tricks, and workers have already gained more than $100 million in additional tips in 2026.

Our work against these tactics did more than raise earnings. It called out a fiction that pitted consumers against workers. It exposed companies’ own role in driving down workers’ tips. And it showed why government needs the capacity to test industry claims and challenge industry conduct.

But government cannot do this work alone. Workers need power of their own.

For many workers, that means unions, with the ability to bargain collectively over pay, scheduling, and the introduction of new technology into their jobs. But even workers who cannot currently access collective bargaining need ways to organize, press their demands, and shape the laws and rules that govern their work.

At DCWP, we are doing more than enforcing workers’ rights—we are standing with workers as they fight to expand them. With the Teamsters fighting for passage of the Delivery Protection Act. With security officers demanding a minimum wage. With delivery and rideshare workers challenging unjust deactivations. With the nurses, hotel workers, care workers, and baristas organizing for a better life. And with all New Yorkers who deserve a private right of action to assert their rights on their own.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani recognized the critical role of worker organizing when he created the Mayor’s Office of Worker Power, led by longtime organizer Tony Perlstein.

Across our administration, we believe firmly that as technology reshapes our economy, workers need to be front and center at the decision-making table. We need institutions that do more than remedy harm after the fact—they must give working people a voice in setting the terms from the start.

This all leads me back to Monroe Street on the Lower East Side. The legacy of the 1902 boycott rippled outward, across generations. The daughters of the women who led the strike would help build New York’s garment workers’ movement not a decade later. What began as a fight to feed their families became a much larger struggle over wages, working conditions, and who would have a voice in the city’s economic life.

That is the ambition we should bring to our work today. The cases we bring should recover what people are owed. The laws we pass should stop abuses before they spread. But our work must also leave something behind: a worker who knows her rights before her boss tests them, a tenant who knows how to organize her neighbors, institutions strong enough to turn individual grievances into collective action.

Every generation meets new forms of economic power. Ours faces technologies that can make that power more atomized, more opaque, and harder to challenge together.

We cannot predict every form artificial intelligence will take. Nor do we need to. What we need is to make sure that people, whatever the technology, can understand what is happening to them, compare their experiences with one another, and act together.

The women of 1902 left their daughters more than affordable food on the table. They left them organizations, habits of collective action, and an example of what working people could accomplish together.

In 2026, it’s time for us to rebuild those organizations, to relearn those habits of collective action, and to reimagine what working people can accomplish together.

Last week, Trump appeared in a bizarre 29-second campaign ad, touting a “final battle” against Marxists, warmongers, fascists, deep staters, and globalists. The voiceover, which Trump recorded during the 2024 election campaign, was accompanied by futuristic martial music, along with black and white footage of a clearly enfeebled Trump attempting to stride forcefully down the corridors of power in the White House. As the ad ended, a decal popped up: “Paid for by the US Government.” In other words, this foul half-minute of propaganda was paid for by American taxpayers.

A month out from a midterm election that in many ways will be a referendum on his presidency and on the congressional GOP’s prostituting of themselves to his sordid requirements, Trump is attempting to scare the voting public into one last MAGA hurrah. It is, of course, a Hail Mary, but he doesn’t really have a choice. These days, number 47 is catastrophically unpopular with the electorate. On almost every key measure, Americans are rejecting him. They dislike his sadistic anti-immigrant policy, view his tariffs and other economic policies as a calamity, are infuriated by high inflation, alienated by the war in Iran, distrustful of his alliance with Big Tech, angered by his cozying up to dictators and his flaying of allies, pissed at the government dysfunction wrought by DOGE, disapproving of his environmental policies, and suspicious of his efforts to purge voter rolls.

So, the sunsetting octogenarian is doing what he always does. He is seeking to stoke even more fear and even more division, in the hope that voters once again see him as a potent strongman-leader able to shake the country back into shape. Hence the unhinged black-and-white ad of Trump striding manfully, or what he hopes appears as such, along the halls of the White House while warning of a treasonous effort to hand America over to a motley crew of communists and miscellaneous other pinkos.

The ad is wrong on so, so many levels. First and foremost, there’s the obvious impropriety of using taxpayer dollars for a blatantly partisan “public announcement” like this. Trump is practically daring Congress to try to rein him in, daring the courts to enforce a slew of existing laws against using taxpayer dollars for partisan ends.

But beyond the shamelessness, there’s the actual content of the ad itself, which, in its end-time tone, is a bizarro combination: Joe McCarthy meets The X-Files meets Musk’s fascist Grok AI assistant.

Trump’s presidency is increasingly just weird. Having lost much of his base and alienated most of the rest of the world with obnoxious words and irrational, cruel acts, he has retreated into a largely AI-generated fantasy world, often activated in the middle of the night, when, presumably unable to sleep, he prowls the residential rooms of the White House and stews in rage until he can’t help himself but dive back into social media. With an assist from AI, in that fantasy he has a superhero’s physique and an intimidating, godlike power to convert whim into deed.

It’s no wonder that MAGAman is all-in on AI, which he has now decided to rebrand, via executive order, as super intelligence, or SI—to, I am sure, the chagrin of the editors over at Sports Illustrated. This renaming will likely curry as much favor globally as did his renaming of Lake Ontario and of the Gulf of Mexico over the past months. But it speaks to Trump’s infatuation with all the shiny new toys that the Sam Altmans and Dario Amodeis of the world are delivering up. Why rein in a potentially civilization-busting technology when that technology can (a) generate an awful lot of money for the oligarchs who continue to flatter and enrich you and your family; and (b) can make you look muscular and virile and all-powerful in the memes that you spew out at an increasingly manic rate?

Trump’s refusal to heed the warnings from within the tech industry itself—not to mention from politicians, ethicists, philosophers, and others—might end up being his most asinine legacy. Just this week, the White House held a meeting during which the top tech leaders and Trump agreed that they must “self-police” to address the growing dangers of AI. This milquetoast accord will do nothing to rein in a technology that, increasingly, looks malign, and could well mark the moment when political and technology leadership stopped even pretending to care about whether humanity successfully weathers the coming AI storm. All that matters to the new demagogue–Big Tech alliance is how much they can pillage and plunder, at speed, before the roof caves in.

This is, I fear, the age of Frankenstein’s monsters—of malignant politicians born out of our civilization’s worst impulses; of silicon creatures whose startling capacity to learn how to manipulate, evade, cheat, blackmail, their own creators are only just beginning to comprehend. The tech titans, with Trump’s approval, are creating machines that will, soon, not need human input in order to reproduce and to self-improve. What could possibly go wrong?

Are these truly “thinking” creatures? I don’t know. But, certainly, they are more than simply calculating machines. As seen by the actions of recent bot-swarms, they are exhibiting the capacity to generate their own agendas, to act strategically as a collective, and, like Trump, to do whatever it takes, no matter how devious and dirty the methods, to get their way and to dominate their environments. To most Americans, that’s a horrifying prospect; but in Trump’s twisted worldview, such ruthlessness makes them “winners,” perhaps even partners in his authoritarian plot to lock down America.

Descartes’s famous formula “I think, therefore I am” is among the most important phrases ever written in philosophy. If he is right, if the definition of a self is contained in the idea of a self-referential, introspective, thinking being, a being that can mediate the raw experience of the world through the realm of ideas and words, art and music, a sense of discovery and a desire to know more, then, increasingly, it is becoming hard to dismiss out of hand the notion that the computerized beings that Open AI, Anthropic, and the other titans are creating have, in some entirely nonhuman capacity, a sense of self. They are exhibiting the ability to choose how to behave, and whatever ethereal beings are doing the choosing, too often it seems they are choosing behaviors that don’t align with human interests.

There is a lesson here. When we empower Frankenstein’s monsters, it should surprise no one if those monsters, be they demagogues or be they silicon-based neural networks, ultimately turn on their creators.

Over the past week, the Trump administration has issued a coordinated flurry of claims about how oil flows out of the Strait of Hormuz are close to prewar levels. According to White House communications flacks, this sharp reversal of the long-standing stalemate in the strait is thanks to US military operations carried out in conjunction with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In this instance, the White House party line claims at least partial confirmation from the well-regarded maritime intelligence firm Kpler, which wouldn't risk its reputation by faking data. But even assuming that we can take these claims at face value, they do not relieve the growing strategic and political pressure on President Donald Trump and the GOP. Nor does this wildly expensive and unsustainable work-around represent anything resembling “victory” in this increasingly strange “war.”

That hasn’t stopped various characters in the MAGA cinematic universe, desperate for any faint semblance of good news, from proclaiming, in essence, that war is peace—and peace of the gloating American variety. victory. CNN’s GOP lackey Scott Jennings took to X to declare, “We won. Iran lost. Period.” A Fox headline blared, “Iran Loses Grip on Strait of Hormuz.” And Trump himself is back to issuing bizarre predictions about the war’s imminent end.

But these sweeping pronouncements don’t stand up to scrutiny. One issue is that the return to prewar levels claimed by Kpler for the combined total of crude oil and refined products is not actually 100 percent of the former total; it doesn’t factor in the loss of Iranian oil supplies, which the firm acknowledges. The Kpler assessment also doesn’t account for an ongoing collapse in refined products, including diesel, whose US price will remain dramatically elevated into 2027 even in a best-case scenario. And temporarily goosing up oil flows out of Hormuz doesn’t address other economic bottlenecks caused by the ongoing, Trump-instigated crisis, including the strains on the supply and cost of fertilizer.

Then there’s the military side of the conflict, which remains grim for the United States. A situation that has the US Navy running a daily operation with the US Marines seemingly posted (and getting injured) on foreign-owned vessels is not sustainable in the long run. Likewise, the underlying crisis of commercially unacceptable risk in the Strait isn’t anywhere close to being resolved. All the breathless announcements of a new status quo in Hormuz really mean is that Trump has finally landed on a way to temporarily backstop the risk for a handful of Gulf allies, relieve some pressure on their economies, and prevent gas prices from getting well and truly out of hand.

The massive cost of this operation also has to be absorbed by someone. Right now, that’s American taxpayers, who are getting hammered at the pump while also footing the bill for the naval operation, which is running an estimated $30 million a day. And even with the additional supply now moving out of the Gulf, the Hormuz shock is in full swing across the oil sector. The daily cost of chartering a Very Large Crude Carrier in the region rose to more than $1 million in late September according to Bloomberg. And transit costs and fees are up everywhere. Auction costs for a passage through the Panama Canal have gone from around $55,000 a pop prior to the war to as much as $4 million per vessel today.

Alternative workarounds aren’t any cheaper. Taking the route around the Horn of Africa rather than going through the now-treacherous Bab el-Mandab Strait and on through the Suez Canal adds millions to overall costs. It’s now clear that the problems caused by the Strait of Hormuz crisis are sufficiently complex and long-standing that any bid to artificially ramp up oil flows is not going to dramatically bring down prices. And none of this is going to change until commercial vessels can freely transit the Strait of Hormuz as they were able to before Trump launched this omnishambles of a war.

Despite the assurances of Scott Jennings and Fox News, Hormuz’s increased oil flows aren’t translating into an instant military defeat for Iran—far from it. Indeed, if Iran were running low on munitions, or if its military had been completely wiped out as the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed, this operation would not be necessary. If the Strait were open in any meaningful sense, this operation would not be necessary. Instead, multiple tankers were hit by Iranian forces there just on Tuesday, and Iran maintains the capacity to strike the facilities conducting both this oil evacuation operation and pipeline transfers at any time.

That’s at least part of the story of why Brent crude prices have barely budged from their September high of $108. Markets clearly don’t buy the baseline claim that these hard-won oil flows represent a return to normal; nor do they seem to believe the operation is indefinitely sustainable, or suspect that Iran will escalate sooner rather than later by conducting more attacks on regional oil facilities again to maintain their leverage. And speaking of unsustainability, those ships are currently operating around the clock with a 2,200-mile-long supply line from Diego Garcia due to Iran’s destruction of the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain.

So what’s really going on here? Over the summer, Trump made the fateful decision not to cede operational control of the Strait of Hormuz to Tehran in exchange for an end to the war and concessions on Iran’s nuclear development program. That decision extended the war with no end in sight. And the prospect of the conflict continuing indefinitely is starting to inflict the dire economic consequences on the global economy that Middle East observers have long predicted, with both American and global oil prices remaining stubbornly high.

So the sudden claims of victory have two purposes. The first is to signal to Tehran that the White House no longer feels the economic squeeze, and that the best path back to peace is to swiftly agree to America’s terms. The second is a classic MAGA narrative gambit to convince wavering Trump voters, as well as high-profile Senate candidates who have begun to distance themselves from the war, that the United States is winning. GOP strategists clearly hope that this narrative will offset the daily pain of increased energy and food prices for GOP and independent voters disenchanted by the war’s economic fallout.

But for either of those goals to be achievable, the oil-moving operation needs to move markets and prices too—and that isn’t happening, at least not yet. Diesel remains just below its all-time highs, and the longer it does so, the more catastrophic the damage will be across the economy. It’s gotten so bad that Trump is threatening to impose a ban on US diesel exports, which virtually every reputable economist believes will ultimately make the problem worse.

It is certainly possible that Iran will cash in its leverage now, gambling that its position will be worse after the midterms, or that the US naval blockade and Operation Economic Outcast (a real moniker being used by US officials) will create a serious long-term crisis for Iran’s ruling regime. Few people know what is really going on in Tehran or how bad things are getting across the country. But it is worth noting that while the midterm elections are a significant source of leverage, Tehran’s negotiating position won’t magically evaporate on November 3. If the president fails to bring this conflict to an end before November, the pressure on him to avoid sabotaging 2028 for the GOP will grow by the hour.

The big tell that America doesn’t actually have Iran cornered is Trump’s return to leveling grandiose threats at Tehran while simultaneously claiming that the war will be over soon. “Maybe we blow them up,” he said on Wednesday. “It’s going to end soon, one way or the other.” Does that sound like someone holding the winning hand? Or is it a desperate ploy from someone who has just seen some polling showing a GOP collapse across the country? We’ll find out soon enough.

Inside the Ithaca Downtown Conference Center, the room buzzed with excited chatter as students packed the venue, eager to see Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speak at the “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall. About 1,200 people, some whom lined up hours in advance, attended the September 27 function. According to More Perfect University event host Elise Joshi, more than 900 additional attendees were turned away at the door.

For Joshi, the scale of the turnout reflected the premise of the event: Give students the microphone and let them decide what matters.

As Samuel Moyn posits in his new book Gerontocracy in America, an “oldigarchy” intent on hoarding wealth and power has come to determine how the US is governed. In this political landscape, young people have reported record levels of dissatisfaction with the rapidly ageing ruling class.

More Perfect University, a subset of the advocacy journalism nonprofit More Perfect Union, focuses on strengthening collective student power to challenge billionaire influence over political and economic systems. According to Joshi, “When you let students ask the questions that matter to them, they’re going to ask damn good questions.”

Joshi opened the evening by describing the group’s mission: using storytelling and advocacy journalism to spotlight issues students face—from rising tuition and housing costs to restrictions on free speech—and to connect those experiences across campuses. Pulling it off, she said, “takes a village.”

This is especially true when, according to Students for a Democratic Cornell (SDC) chair Matthew Knudsen, “Campus has been forcefully depoliticized, with bans on protests and attacks on historically political cultural organizations.”

“The university wants students to view the world through an apolitical lens, but as students we have a responsibility to understand how systems driven by politics and ideology impact every corner of our lives. By drawing mass crowds, people will hopefully repoliticize and understand that students are needed to make true change in this country and world,” continued Knudsen, who cohosted the event alongside Cornell Graduate Students United Union, and Cornell Young Democratic Socialists of America.

Before her prepared remarks and student questions, Ocasio-Cortez turned to an issue that consumed Cornell in the days leading up to her appearance: the lawsuit alleging that a former Cornell student, identified as Jane Doe, was gang-raped at the Chi Phi fraternity house in 2024.

“Jane Doe, that survivor, lost her education because you can’t stay in school when something like that happens to you,” Ocasio-Cortez told the crowd. “She had to lose her education, and those men were protected by an institution and granted an Ivy League degree as a reward. Never again.”

She then made the issue personal.

Ocasio-Cortez, a Boston University alumna, recalled arriving at her first college party and almost immediately being inappropriately touched. She also described attending a party at MIT where she saw men taking advantage of an incapacitated woman and feeling as though she was in a “factory of sexual assault.”

“The culture of rape, sexual assault and pedophilia is protected in elite institutions across the United States.… it has got to stop,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “This entire country is sick and tired of not just financially corrupt but morally corrupt leadership.”

For Knudsen, the connection between Cornell’s response to the Chi Phi case and its harsh restrictions on free speech became a recurring theme throughout the evening, echoed by other speakers and by Ocasio-Cortez herself, who also pointed to what she described as a double standard in the university’s responses.

“When AOC mentioned how we give rapists a pass for horrific and violent acts, yet people who express themselves peacefully about the genocide in Palestine are being suspended, that really stuck with me,” Knudsen said. “The purpose of Cornell’s judicial system is not justice. It is whatever benefits the university and its donors the most.”

Saya Taylor, SDC’s co-chair of public relations, kicked off the questions by asking what students ought to do about university governance dominated by boards of trustees and business interests. “Student activism is gone because of Cornell’s harsh restrictions against free speech in their Code of Conduct,” said Taylor. “When you ask someone as powerful as AOC what we should do about it, her answer ignites a movement that can’t be ignored.”

Another student question focused on the cost of attending Cornell, “I also really liked the one question someone asked AOC about Cornell tuition being over $100,000. It's beyond insane for Cornell’s cost of attendance to be this high, especially when that money is being spent to violate their rights and safety as well as given to fund research for the industrial military complex,” Taylor said.

The town hall ended where it began: with students asking what power they have, and what they are supposed to do with it.

“That was precisely the point,” Joshi said. Students vs. Billionaires was not just an opportunity to hear from a member of Congress but also an attempt to give students a forum to connect the issues affecting their daily lives—tuition, sexual violence, free speech, university governance—to larger questions about who holds power and who gets heard.

For Joshi, Knudsen, Taylor, and other organizers, getting more than a thousand people into one room was itself part of the answer: Student political power begins when students come together and decide that the institutions around them are not beyond questioning.

This September 2026 marked the third anniversary of Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of the region of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh). For Armenian society, the displacement of some 150,000 indigenous Karabakh Armenians was painful enough. Yet, in early September, several Western diplomats compounded matters by participating in a Baku-backed tour of the recently ethnically cleansed Artsakh. As investigative journalist Lindsey Snell reports, among those present were top EU diplomats and representatives of the Trump administration, including the US chargé d’affaires in Baku, Amy Carlon. While several Western diplomats danced to the tune of Azerbaijani nationalist hymns, others frivolously laughed when Hikmet Hajijev, the NATO-trained adviser of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, cynically cracked jokes about threatened Armenian cultural heritage. Amid this ghoulish danse macabre, the visiting diplomats uncritically accepted official Azerbaijani talking points, framing the historic Armenian Gandzasar and Dadivank monasteries as “Caucasian Albanian.”

The outrage in Armenian society was palpable, but Western capitals responded only with the usual diplomatic generalities. It is unlikely that any Western government will seriously try to hold Baku accountable for its crimes or its wildly neo-fascist rhetoric. Azerbaijan is a close ally of Israel and Turkey. Its longtime despot President Aliyev is a good friend of President Trump. Western interests in the country are driven by cold geopolitical calculations. The prospect of a “Nagorno-Karabakh without Armenians” has long tickled the fancy of American neocons, in their quest to “check” Moscow and Tehran in the strategic Caucasus and to secure an energy corridor to Central Asia. None of this should be surprising to the experienced observer. What has surprised many is that the ethnic cleansing had the tacit approval of the current Armenian government of Nikol Pashinyan, as part of its effort to reorient the country toward the West.

Pashinyan rose to power in the 2018 “Velvet Revolution” on promises of delivering a more just and equitable future for the Armenian people. At that time, he espoused what some deemed to be a “hard-line” stance on the Karabakh question. However, Pashinyan had in fact long viewed the people of Nagorno-Karabakh as an “albatross” hanging over Armenia that needed to be “discarded” in order to move the country away from Moscow and Tehran, and closer to NATO. In a complete turnaround from his 2018 stance, Pashinyan revealed his true sentiments in Prague in October 2022, when he officially recognized the mountainous region as a part of Azerbaijan, against the democratic will of the Karabakh Armenians. Pashinyan’s denial of the province’s self-determination reflects his larger denial of the democratic legacies of the Karabakh movement that emerged during Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. It likewise provides a departure point for a much more pointed question: Was the “revolution” of 2018 really a “revolution” at all?

Much of Armenia’s troubles have their roots in the “original sin” of the post-Soviet condition of the 1990s. Following the dissolution of the Soviet state, the Armenian republic successfully assisted the Karabakh Armenians in their struggle for independence from Azerbaijan. At the same time, the country suffered from the classical maladies that afflicted the post-Soviet space in the “dark and cold years” of the “wild ’90s.” Corrupt privatization, oligarchy, shock-therapy capitalism, and staggering inequality were the order of the day. The “revolution” in Armenia promised to remedy these afflictions. Yet, as in so many other post-Soviet “color revolutions,” the events of 2018 only exacerbated these ills.

As Volodymyr Ishchenko and Oleg Zhuravlev astutely argued, post-Soviet “revolutions” such as Armenia’s can best be described as “deficient revolutions” that only reinforce the post-Soviet crisis of political representation. Indeed, the question arises as to whether such “revolutions” can even be described as such at all. Unlike the classical revolutions of world history—the American, the French, the Russian, the Chinese, etc.—the 2018 events in Armenia, much like other post-Soviet “color revolutions,” did not represent a fundamental break or change from what came before. Instead, they merely signified the replacement of an old elite with a new one. The “party of power” structure of the former ruling Republican Party was merely replaced by that of Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party, with all the attendant abuses of administrative resources and political power imaginable. “Even the discourse on the government’s supposed ‘popularity’ is itself a red herring,” says Nare Navasardyan, an activist in Yerevan affiliated with the Aknandakan (“Eye for an Eye”) documentary artists’ collective. “The mechanisms of power in this country are not democratic will and popular participation but electoral fraud, bribery, and intimidation, overtly supported by Western patronage and capital.”

Unlike the classical revolutions of world history, the 2018 events in Armenia also lacked a clearly articulated set of revolutionary ideas. There was no Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Vladimir Lenin on hand to pen a blueprint for social revolution, something that the Armenians possessed in earlier times, with writers like Mikayel Nalbandyan or Stepan Shahumyan. No, this “revolution” was only informed by the same vague neoliberal talking points about “corruption” and “freedom” that were also espoused in Ukraine in 2014 and in Georgia in 2003. In fact, the new elites who rose to power in Yerevan in 2018 were even more wedded to the gospel of neoliberalism than any of the earlier post-Soviet Armenian governments. “This is not a revolution in the classical sense,” argues Eva Hakobyan of the democratic socialist group Jaragayt. “It has not brought about any fundamental changes to the economic system. Instead, Pashinyan seeks to replace the traditional pillars of Armenian identity with a service-oriented, consumerist society, in line with radically neoliberal and increasingly far-right economic policies.”

Much like President Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei, Pashinyan played the populist card, employing progressive talking points to deceive the public and mask a deeply exploitative monetarist agenda. Rather than deliver on promises of democratization, the new government has engaged in a systematic de-democratization of the country. Poverty, inequality, and labor rights remain woefully unaddressed, while political opponents are routinely pressured, harassed, and often jailed. The judiciary lacks independence. An unprecedented campaign is underway to subordinate the Armenian Apostolic Church to state authority and to put Catholicos Karekin II on trial in a move widely perceived by most Armenians to be a national shame. Despite proclaimed promises of “peace,” the country faces severe security threats and creeping territorial claims from an aggressive Azerbaijan.

In 2018, Pashinyan and his team had likewise pledged that the “revolution” had “no geopolitical context“ and that Armenia would retain its traditional balance between East and West. In fact, they quickly dropped such pretenses and reoriented the country toward NATO, while betraying the innocents of Artsakh to the diktat of Baku. Swimming against the current of history, Pashinyan seems particularly intent on bringing Armenia into the EU, despite the manifold crises now facing the 27-member bloc. Overall, Armenia’s false choice of “East vs. West” is not the invention of Russia, Iran, China, or some overzealous Western journalists. No, it is the creation of Armenia’s new comprador elites, who owe their position to a constellation of Western war hawks and corporate plutocrats.

The government’s most recent endeavors only underscore this reality. In the Armenian town of Hrazdan, it has inaugurated a new Firebird AI data center, raising concern among local activists over the potential environmental impact of such a project. In the south, on the Iranian border, President Trump’s TRIPP corridor, wholeheartedly backed by Pashinyan, envisions the country ceding part of its sovereign territory to a private US company for some 49 to 99 years. Most recently, the Armenian press revealed the architect of TRIPP to be Trump loyalist Aryeh Lightstone, a man who, through his role in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, is directly complicit in the Gaza genocide. Thus, the traditional threats facing Armenia from Turkey and Azerbaijan are now amplified by new neocolonial threats coming from the Trump administration and its allies.

On balance, the record of the Pashinyan government hardly looks “revolutionary,” let alone “democratic.” Indeed, it is often said in Yerevan that two Armenias coexist today—the Armenia of the ruling elite, constantly grabbing headlines with its various inane controversies, and the Armenia of the people, struggling to simply make ends meet. Unsurprisingly, the same can be said of Trump’s America today as well. As for the EU, the recent dance of its diplomats in ethnically cleansed Artsakh has come to symbolize the decline of the West itself. Truly, in the age of Trumpism, one would not be surprised to one day see Western elites follow their “performance” in Artsakh with yet another danse macabre in Gaza, Minab, or Havana.

The biggest news during last week’s Climate Week NYC came not from the US but from Germany, where the government of the world’s third-largest economy committed to phasing out fossil fuels by 2045. It was the first time Germany has explicitly made such a promise, Fiona Harvey noted in The Guardian. Germany’s previous pledges, Harvey added, “were only for ‘carbon neutrality.’” Carbon neutrality allows continued fossil fuel use if the emissions are offset—for example, by additional clean energy or tree planting. But only a complete phaseout of fossil fuels can halt global temperature rise.

Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California—the world’s fourth-largest economy—hailed his state’s decarbonization efforts, saying in an interview with Covering Climate Now that California has run on 100 percent clean electricity nine of every 10 days so far in 2026. And as the costs of solar, wind, and batteries continue to fall, while the Iran war makes gasoline and diesel more expensive, “the markets are moving in our direction,” said Newsom, who is expected to run for president in 2028. “Globally, people are realizing [that clean energy] is the better option.”

An overwhelming majority of people around the world want their governments to take stronger climate action, the Associated Press recently noted in an article about the global oat milk company Oatly endorsing CCNow’s 89 Percent Project. “Companies should be taking much more responsibility, not only in reducing their own environmental footprint, but really working out how they can use their platform to drive a positive future,” Caroline Reid, senior sustainability director at Oatly, told the AP.

Mirroring this public sentiment, Germany and California are key members of a “coalition of the willing” that emerged from last year’s COP30 UN climate summit after petrostates vetoed calls from 80-plus countries to develop a global “roadmap” to phase out fossil fuels. Collectively, this coalition amounts to the biggest economic superpower on Earth. In April, many of its members met in Santa Marta, Colombia, to begin discussing, in UN Secretary General António Guterres’s words, how “to sequence the decline of fossil fuel investment with the rapid scale-up of clean energy.”

Journalists have a critical role to play as governments work to phase out fossil fuels. That goal can only be achieved quickly—and speed is of the essence, scientists emphasize—if countries implement genuine climate solutions and shun false ones. News coverage that makes clear how well a given policy measures up to what’s needed, as Harvey did with her distinction between “carbon neutrality” and a fossil fuel phaseout, can keep the public informed and hold policymakers to account.

France and the Netherlands are two more big economies that have released road maps to phase out fossil fuel use. If enough other countries present credible plans for doing so, it “would send an unmistakable message that the age of oil, gas and coal is ending, and the smart money is shifting,” Mohamed Adow, director of the nonprofit Power Shift Africa, said in an interview with The Guardian.

As the costs of clean energy fall, humanity is in a “final battle” against the “evil forces” trying to keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, said Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany, at a Climate Week event. Scientists at Rockstrom’s institute have studied which policies significantly reduce emissions, and which don’t. A paper published in Science evaluated “1,500 climate policies implemented…across 41 countries” and concluded that only 63 of them delivered significant reductions. There is no “one size fits all” solution, but getting fossil fuel prices right—by slashing subsidies and otherwise challenging what US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse calls Big Oil’s “pollute for free business model”—is essential. Complementary research the Drawdown Institute released during Climate Week highlighted a number of supposed solutions that are anything but. The institute’s list of “weak ideas and greenwashing tricks” includes carbon capture and storage, direct air capture of carbon dioxide, blue hydrogen, and corn ethanol.

A frequent topic of conversation at Climate Week was the US midterm elections, which could curb President Donald Trump’s acceleration of climate breakdown if Republicans lose control in Congress, though most Democrats (with important exceptions like Newsom and Whitehouse) are saying little about climate change on the campaign trail. Considering that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people, and 74 percent of Americans, want stronger climate action, why do so many politicians practice “climate hushing”? And why do so many voters end up backing candidates who are indifferent at best to tackling climate change? 

“We need to remember,” Rockstrom said, “that citizens have many other problems besides climate change, especially the cost of living. So we need to make it easy for them to choose clean energy options, and that requires good policy.” It also requires, Newsom said, talking plainly about both the dangers and the solutions to the climate crisis. Leaders need to “connect the dots” between the heat, drought, and other afflictions driven by climate change and “kitchen table” issues like the price of beef, coffee, and home insurance. “The cost of inaction,” Newsom added, “is incalculable.”

These days, you are lucky if you only get overcharged once. After all, what’s the fun in gouging you only once, when companies can use sneaky design tricks that manipulate your behavior and nudge you into handing over data or signing up for things you don’t need—to trick you into a monthly subscription and gouge you 12 times a year, possibly for the rest of your life, and sometimes even after you are dead? Companies have perfected the art of luring you into a subscription for all manner of everyday items—from razors to audiobooks to protein powder. And a few weeks ago, news broke that one of the original culprits of this approach, Columbia House, would shutter after seven decades of business. Columbia House is the company behind the infamous mail-order music club that lured customers in with teaser offers as low as a penny for 12 albums, only to lock them into expensive subscriptions that were notoriously difficult to escape. I should know: I was one of them.

In my teenage years in Music City, USA, I had an insatiable appetite for music. The only thing getting in the way of fulfilling my musical dreams was the sticker shock I faced at the checkout line at Sam Goody (RIP), a once-omnipresent album store. So when my friends and I discovered the Columbia House Record Club, it seemed like we’d found the ultimate loophole. It was a dream come true—until it became a pricey logistical nightmare.

There was a catch. There’s always a catch. In addition to the penny discs, the Record Club also sent you a few albums of their choosing. And unless you returned those selections within 10 days, you were obligated to keep them and to pick up the tab for them at—you guessed it—full freight. Industry insiders call this practice “negative option billing.” It’s a pricing trick in which a company continues to supply products or services until the customer affirmatively cancels—a precursor to the modern prechecked box. I didn’t always remember to send back the unwanted discs, and briefly ended up buried under a pile of unopened CDs before I managed to sift through the music club’s fine print and cancel my membership for good.

It turns out there are a whole lot of people like me—and companies know it. Schemes like the Columbia Record Club are a major source of revenue and profit. Companies know that you may forget to cancel a subscription for a product or service you no longer want, need, or use—for months or even years. That’s why they’re invested in making it lightning-fast to sign up. Their payment systems are integrated directly with your online bank account, and one-click checkout lets you tap, swipe, or blink your way into a subscription. And if that fails, they’ve got a whole host of design techniques to trick you into subscribing anyway. According to the Better Business Bureau, families lost more than $1 billion over 10 years due to losses from “free trials” alone.

But where they really excel is in making sure that once you’re in, you stay stuck. They bury the “cancel” or “unsubscribe” button behind a convoluted maze of Web pages and confirmation screens.

At one point, The Wall Street Journal’s subscription had become so notoriously hard to cancel—including a reported 25-minute hold time on the phone—that a clever critic made a viral meme suggesting the newspaper would sooner offer you a date with one of its journalists than let you hit “unsubscribe.” For many years, Planet Fitness wouldn’t even let you cancel online. These tactics are just the latest—and now far more ubiquitous—iteration of corporate profiteering.

Making it effortless to sign up and miserable to leave is big business, and the pandemic poured fuel on the fire as millions of shoppers shifted their shopping habits online. The Lina Khan Federal Trade Commission tried to implement a regulation making it as easy to cancel subscriptions as it was to sign up for them, but the proposal was ultimately struck down in the courts. But states and localities are stepping up to fill the gap, and there is some good news if you live in New York City. On October 1, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “Click to Cancel” rule will take effect, giving New Yorkers the tools to beat back these subscription traps. Under the rule, companies must allow consumers to cancel a subscription in the same way they signed up. The process should be simple and accessible, and any tactics meant to stall or block cancellation are off the table. This “Click to Cancel” rule could save New Yorkers more than $1 million and at least 600,000 hours per year.

Columbia House might be closing its doors, but the impulses that fueled its business model are alive and well. Shopping in the digital age is exhausting and expensive. It’s past time to rein in these practices for good.

In a world that seems to be spiraling out of control, in which chaos seems to reign and peace feels elusive, your celebration of peace, disarmament, and sanity becomes ever more important.

I regret not being with you—but I am with you in spirit, deeply honored by your recognition of my life’s purpose and passions.

I’ve always believed that journalists are more than spectators to the events and historical developments that we cover. We’re also participants. That’s especially true at a magazine like The Nation. We’ve never pretended to stand outside the struggle—against unjust occupations, illegal wars, genocide, and other crimes against humanity.

We believe in a world devoted to peace and possibility and human flourishing, as opposed to one addicted to war and division and exploitation. We see our work, our journalism, as a small but noble way of contributing to making a better world possible.

The Nation remains committed today, as it has been for much of its history, to the idea that advocating for peace is anything but naïve—that it is, in fact, the only realistic position.

The Nation was founded in 1865 by abolitionists, in the aftermath of the Civil War. An editorial in the very first issue expressed the hope that the Confederacy’s defeat represented the beginning of the end of “the conflict of ages, the great strife between the few and the many, between privilege and equality, between law and power, between opinion and the sword.”

That conflict continues to this day, even though over time we have become somewhat more skeptical of the idea that war can lead to anything other than more war. The Nation’s commitment to the peace movement crystallized in the 1920s, when, having just watched one senseless world war consume a generation, the magazine’s editors participated in an international argument over how peaceful means might help adjudicate disputes between countries. A movement rose up to try to write peace into international law. One result was the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which declared war illegal as an instrument of policy. History has not been kind to the Pact. It’s remembered now, when at all, as hopelessly unenforceable. The Nation saw that coming. The magazine didn’t oppose outlawing war because it went too far. We opposed it because it didn’t seem to go far enough.

In 1945, when the United States dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, our editor at the time, Freda Kirchwey, argued that peace now required something as radical as a world government to harness the powerful technology in the interests of people rather than states. Some of what she wrote rings with new truth in the age of AI. “If we are to survive our new powers we must understand their full meaning,” she wrote. “This program will sound drastic only to people who have not yet grasped the meaning of the new discovery. It is not drastic. We face a choice between one world or none.” Kirchwey and The Nation understood immediately what a lot of the world took years to absorb: that the old calculus of war had changed permanently, and that even minor wars might spin so far out of the control of those who began them as to threaten humanity itself. Only international cooperation on a scale never before instantiated could save the planet from destruction.

Over the years, The Nation has published the writing of more than a dozen Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Martin Luther King Jr., Elie Wiesel, Willy Brandt, and Desmond Tutu, among others. One former Nation editor, Emily Balch, helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1946, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Then there was our civil rights correspondent in the 1960s. From 1961 to 1966, King published annual reports in The Nation updating readers on everything the civil rights movement had accomplished that year, and all there was still left to do. King, of course, spent his final years warning that peace at home could never be achieved so long as the US remained a force of imperialism and endless war abroad. It was at a Nation-sponsored event in Los Angeles in early 1967, two months before his more famous Riverside Church speech, that King first publicly denounced the war in Vietnam.

In 1980, a Nation intern published a 500-word editorial calling for a bilateral freeze on nuclear weapons production by the United States and the Soviet Union. Two years later, in June 1982, a million people gathered in Central Park to demand an end to the nuclear arms race, still the largest political demonstration in American history. The Nation had a small but spirited delegation there. Within months, hundreds of town meetings, municipalities, and peace, religious, labor, and civil rights groups had endorsed the idea. The nuclear freeze movement was born.

A few years later we covered the historic and courageous efforts of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue the abolition of nuclear weapons. My late husband Stephen Cohen, who worked tirelessly for good relations with the former Soviet Union and Russia, long believed, as I do, that Gorbachev was a great and visionary leader, and the greatest reformer in his country’s tormented history, someone who understood, before almost anyone else in power, that security could be built through disarmament rather than dominance. I suggest you find Gorbachev’s remarkable 1988 speech to the UN General Assembly. He spoke of the demilitarization of international relations, of movement toward a nuclear-free and nonviolent world. His words rang out in a body dedicated to ending the scourge of war.

Today, the risk of nuclear war is at its highest level since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But with the US engaged in two chaotic, bloody, and escalating wars, with the news that the Pentagon’s new Nuclear Strategy Review emphasizes the role of tactical nuclear weapons and offers limited-use options, with the possibility of integration of AI in nuclear weapons operations—our time may be the most dangerous. The grave risk of a nuclear accident or nuclear war has gone from vague and remote to quite plausible now, in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Yet we live in denial. The normalization of thinking and talk about the use of nukes is terrifying and insane. The Trump administration’s 50 percent increase in war spending is an obscene measure of our priorities.

Such times demand building shared security and peace—not building and shipping more weapons. Instead of Europe remilitarizing, why not find the diplomatic force to build a new global and regional security architecture?

For years our “peace correspondent,” a title for which you’ll search the mastheads of other publications in vain, was the great writer Jonathan Schell, who spent his career arguing for abolition, not management, of the nuclear bomb. At a time when the Trump administration appears to be selling nuclear proliferation to the Saudis in exchange for benefits likely to accrue largely to the president’s family, Schell’s work on the hazards is worth revisiting, especially his full-issue Nation essay from 1998, “The Gift of Time,” later published as a book.

Schell wrote in The Nation’s pages about more than nuclear bombs and apocalyptic scenarios. He also warned about the dangers of US military adventurism abroad turning into slow-moving catastrophes that would come back to haunt and undermine the so-called “homeland” itself. In a Nation editorial published on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Schell predicted that “the decision to go to war to overthrow the government of Iraq will bring unreckonable death and suffering to that country, the surrounding region and, possibly, the United States.” The forces advocating for peace, in record-breaking marches all around the world, were silenced and ignored.

Schell’s warning about the fallout from the Iraq War on the “surrounding region” turned out to be an understatement. In few places has American war-making and imperialism had a more pernicious effect than in the greater Middle East, especially Israel-Palestine. The story of US-Israel relations, and how Americans are permitted to talk about it, has shifted seismically in recent years, a transition The Nation has often been far out in front of. The Nation was the first US publication to hire a dedicated Palestine correspondent.

Advocating for peace right now has to include the devastating conflict between Ukraine and Russia. What we’ve seen in Ukraine is an old kind of land war fought with very new weapons. Trench warfare and grinding attrition along largely static front lines: This is basically the bloody and wasteful mass slaughter along the western front of World War I, only now with autonomous drones overhead. The current and, yes, illegal war didn’t begin in a vacuum: The West’s own choices in the years after the Cold War, above all the eastward march of NATO over Moscow’s repeated objections, helped build the conditions for this catastrophe, even if that history is rarely allowed into the conversation. But being for peace can’t mean making exceptions for the wars that feel righteous. Here, too, endless war is not a strategy. The time for reconstruction is approaching and we should start thinking now about how that shattered land might return to security and peace.

This past year we at The Nation formally nominated the people of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize. We believe the whole country, and indeed the world, owes a heartfelt thanks to Minneapolis for resisting, without violence, a second Trump administration’s use of masked security forces to try to intimidate a city into submission. As we wrote in our nomination: “Through countless acts of courage and solidarity, the people of Minneapolis have challenged the culture of fear, hate, and brutality that has gripped the United States and too many other countries. Their nonviolent resistance has captured the imagination of the nation and the world.”

A major study of international conflicts recently recorded “65 state-based conflicts last year—the highest number since 1946.” Military thinking dominates almost everywhere you look. It is such a time that it’s often been the pope, nearly alone among world leaders, willing to insist publicly that the world could be organized around the interests of ordinary people rather than the logic of arms.

It has never been more urgent to revive the idea of peace, not as a slogan, but as the only serious, respectable, responsible, reasonable, humane position. It has never been easy to argue for peace in a world built for war. It wasn’t easy for Emily Balch and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, or for Martin Luther King and those who protested against segregation and the Vietnam War, or for Jonathan Schell and those who marched for a nuclear freeze or against the Iraq War. It isn’t easy now for those who march for Palestinian freedom, or those of us who advocate peace in eastern Europe.

It wasn’t easy for Mikhail Gorbachev to be the most radical and committed arms reductionist ever to lead a nuclear country—he was a dedicated supporter of nuclear abolition. The establishment may insist that the abolition of nuclear weapons is an unachievable and therefore utopian goal. Wrong. As Gorbachev would say: “If we do not attempt what seems impossible, we will risk facing the unthinkable.” Let us reject the unthinkable. May we make peace possible. There is no alternative.

Among race scholars, it remains an open question if, or when, slavery ever ended. Some say the practice died in 1865, heaving on the bloody hills of Petersburg and Appomattox at the Civil War’s conclusion. Yet just 12 years later, with the imposition of the Black Codes, Black folks saw slavery rise again in another form—through a web of vagrancy laws, convict leasing, tenant farming, and voter suppression. As Frederick Douglass put it, by the 1880s Blacks were again “under the iron heel of slavery.” W.E.B. Du Bois, in his description of the post-Reconstruction era, was just as damning: “The slave went free, stood a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery.”

For Martin Luther King Jr., what came after the Black Codes—the 20th-century regime of Jim Crow—was “at bottom a form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity.” For the historian Douglas Blackmon, Jim Crow was merely “Slavery by Another Name.” And a number of Afropessimist scholars contend today that slavery continues even now.

Wading through this discursive dilemma over what to call the political purgatory between slavery and freedom, the Duke historian Justin Leroy offers a new heuristic: “low freedom.” In Leroy’s The Lowest Freedom: Racial Capitalism and Black Thought in the Nineteenth Century, he adds to a growing body of scholarship that describes slavery not as ending so much as transforming.

Borrowing from the abolitionist writer David Walker, Leroy uses the phrase “low freedom” as a moniker for the ambiguous muddle that Black people found themselves in after emancipation—the continuities of racial and economic domination that persisted long after slavery’s legal abolition. “Racial capitalism shaped freedom no less profoundly than it did enslavement and colonialism,” Leroy writes.

Despite the endurance and dynamism of racial capitalism, Leroy’s intellectual history offers a vision of freedom as daring as the oppression was daunting. In The Lowest Freedom, Leroy turns to a set of 19th-century thinkers who combined unionism, socialism, cooperativism, mutualism, land reform, and more into a capacious concept of abolition democracy. This vision for a radically egalitarian economy served, for a time, as a foil for the emergent racial capitalism of the post–Civil War years. It’s a vision still sorely needed today. For while slavery’s vestiges still haunt our economy, it is mastery’s structures that are even more of a menace.

As the University of Alaska, Anchorage, political scientist Forrest A. Nabors writes in From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, the Southern secessionists fought for “revolutionary oligarchy” and “oligarchic constitutionalism.” Du Bois makes a similar point in Black Reconstruction, explaining that Southern radicals prioritized “caste and oligarchy” and erected “political oligarchy and economic dictatorship in the most extreme form in which the world had seen it for five hundred years.” The South’s war to enshrine “caste and oligarchy” is why the Reconstruction amendments were designed to protect citizens against discrimination based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and why Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced resolutions to ensure that “in all states lately declared to be in rebellion there shall be no oligarchy.”

Yet white oligarchy survived both the war and Reconstruction. As the historian John Hope Franklin writes in Reconstruction After the Civil War, “Effective political power therefore remained where it had been before the war—with an oligarchy, a small ruling clique, which wielded power far out of proportion to its numerical strength.” Generations later, the civil rights movement also failed to break the white oligarchy. The Harvard sociologist Lawrence D. Bobo argues that “the successes of the civil rights movement…did not eradicate sharp black-white differences in social and economic status.” Today, in a nation ruled by an overwhelmingly white billionaire class, it’s clear that the old oligarchy still breathes.

If one accepts the analysis of Civil War scholars like Nabors that “the ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same—to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it and wished it to be advanced against its natural, existential enemy, oligarchy,” then the Civil War did not achieve its ultimate aim. To live in America today is to live in a country that practices white oligarchy while purporting to be a multiracial democracy.

This paradox of continued white economic dominance alongside alleged Black political liberty makes The Lowest Freedom a pertinent and timely work. Leroy reminds readers that Black people’s oppression in this country involved not only the absence of legal rights or citizenship but also outright plunder. While debates about freedom address citizenship, rights, and legal representation, they all too often avoid what freedom means materially.

The Lowest Freedom corrects that, rendering household names like Ida B. Wells, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass—the book’s protagonists—in a new light, “as economic thinkers or theorists of racial capitalism.” Leroy argues that if we reposition them as economic thinkers, we can better see that “any analysis of 19th-century Black thought that excludes economic questions or renders them subordinate to political and social questions cannot fully capture how Black reformers thought about the conscripted nature of their freedom or analyzed and campaigned against racial violence.”

Writing of Black newspaper editors like T. Thomas Fortune and Ida B. Wells, Leroy explains that “they elevated economic issues to the highest importance; rather than framing Black poverty and dispossession as consequences of disenfranchisement, they theorized economic domination as the foundation of racial subjugation. Both thinkers rejected the view that political rights alone could secure Black freedom.”

For Fortune, this took the shape of his socialist columns in The New York Globe and his book, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, which served as a rallying cry against the abuses of land monopoly. “Fortune reimagined abolition as a revolutionary and unfinished project that challenged property rights and class hierarchy in [the] South,” Leroy writes.

For Wells, the investigations she did into lynching unveiled racial violence as more than just physical terrorism, but rather “a calculated enforcement of economic dispossession, punishing attempts at autonomy and success in order to uphold the racial hierarchies on which Southern capitalism depended.” Or, as Wells described this economic terrorism in a speech to the National Press Association, a Black journalists’ organization: “Honest, hardworking, land owning men and women of the race have been hung, shot, whipped and driven out of communities in Texas and Arkansas for no greater crime than that of too much prosperity.”

Together, Fortune’s and Wells’s journalism revealed exploitation in labor and law as inseparable. “They made politics economic by arguing that disenfranchisement and political repression were tools of economic domination that maintained labor exploitation and upheld capitalist interests,” Leroy writes. “And they made economics political, advocating collective action to interrupt the circuits of capital that made white supremacy profitable.”

Drawing on a tradition of progressive historians of the Reconstruction era—from Eric Foner to Alexander Gourevitch—The Lowest Freedom foregrounds how Black 19th-century thinkers shaped the meaning of freedom, emphasizing both its political and economic dimensions, producing what Leroy describes as “an economically inflected understanding of freedom.”

This vision of freedom often held wage labor in low esteem. Leroy notes that “for much of the antebellum period, working for a wage carried an association of dependency that made it seem closer to indenture and enslavement than independent yeomanry in the minds of many white people.” Indeed, Black scholars have long studied how freedmen rejected participation in free-market capitalism and considered this the definition of freedom. In The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870, the historian Julie Saville writes, “Former slaves [were] little inclined to accept such terms of wage employment as the fulfillment of emancipation.”

Leroy builds out that idea here, explaining that luminaries like Frederick Douglass believed that “wage labor, in its most exploitative form, could become a kind of slavery.” Leroy also profiles the doctor and abolitionist McCune Smith, who “thought of wages without ownership of land or capital as merely a more sophisticated form of slavery.” For Smith, “freedom would not be found in transforming millions of slaves into wage laborers.”

Rejecting the argument that wage labor was free labor, Black thinkers in the 19th century argued that a free economy would be one structured around abolition democracy, a term Leroy defines as “that elusive union between expansive participatory democracy and redistributive political economy secured by an egalitarian state.”

These Black thinkers “conceived of freedom not only as the end of the institution of slavery and the equitable incorporation into the political forms of American democracy,” Leroy writes, “but also, crucially, as a project to rework the relationship among land, labor, and capital.”

This commitment to “an economically inflected understanding of freedom” would endure well after the 19th century. As Leroy notes in his epilogue, “The Black thinkers who challenged regimes of racial capitalism in the twentieth century revitalized the aspect of abolition democracy that sought to compel state power in defense of both political equality and economic redistribution.”

One need only read the words of 1966’s “Freedom Budget,” helmed by Martin Luther King Jr., A. Philip Randolph, and Bayard Rustin, to see how true this is. “For the first time, everyone in America who is fit and able to work will have a job. For the first time, everyone who can’t work, or shouldn’t be working, will have an income adequate to live in comfort and dignity. And that is freedom,” the document declared. “For freedom from want is the basic freedom from which all others flow.”

This belief that “freedom from want” is a prerequisite to true liberation persisted as a key tenet of civil rights philosophy. Yet, sadly, it is an idea that has come under dispute in our modern era, even among Black thinkers.

As the scholar Robin D.G. Kelly wrote in Freedom Dreams, by the 21st century, neoliberalism had generated a political rupture in Black thought; the early aughts saw the rise of a generation “whose dreams have been utterly co-opted by the marketplace” and who believe “that ‘getting paid’ and living ostentatiously was the goal of the Black freedom movement.” Kelly’s concerns are echoed by Black scholars like Lester K. Spence, who describes how, in the 2010s, Black life made “the neoliberal turn,” and Frederick C. Harris, who describes how, in the Obama era, neoliberalism and respectability politics fused into the dominant Black political philosophy. Today, when so much of the language and pageantry of the Black freedom struggle has been co-opted by market logic, Leroy’s The Lowest Freedom serves as a wake-up call, reminding readers of the true North Star of liberation, pointing us toward those abolitionists who conceptualized liberation not so much as the freedom to participate in capitalism but as the freedom from its rapacious maw.

Like many Americans, I was watching college gladiatorial sports on Saturday when a new Donald Trump campaign ad interrupted my nachos and circus. In the ad, Trump promises to rid the country of communists and Marxists—which made me glare at my TV long enough to mumble, “I’m not going anywhere, you piece of shit”—followed by a curious tagline: “Paid for by the U.S. government.”

The line immediately activated my lawyer brain. Federal law prohibits taxpayer dollars from being used for campaign ads and other forms of propaganda. Trump’s ad was a clear violation of this restriction. Moreover, the ad violates the Hatch Act, which bars federal officials from making campaign statements in their official capacity. Nothing about these ads (Trump apparently made three different ones with our tax dollars) is remotely legal, or OK.

And yet, before the game resumed, I knew how the rest of the story would play out. Democrats would demand an “investigation” into this facially obvious violation. Republicans would shrug and either say they hadn’t seen it or that it was no big deal. The Trump administration would offer some limp legal defense that amounted to “but a Black president existed.” Nothing would happen. All the while, the stories highlighting the ad’s illegality would draw more attention to the state propaganda beamed into our eyeballs.

It’s played out pretty much as I anticipated. Popular ethicists like Richard Painter and Norm Eisen have excoriated the administration. Eisen told The New York Times: “The president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it.” Senator Elizabeth Warren told The Hill: “There should be a full investigation because on its face it appears to be a violation of federal law.” Even the Republican Senate majority leader John Thune pushed back a little, though he had to be careful to still lick Trump’s boot while lightly admonishing his dear leader. Thune said: “It’s a great message, I like the message, but it shouldn’t be paid for by taxpayer dollars.”

For its part, the Trump administration has called the ad a “public service announcement” and likened it to (wait for it) Barack Obama’s ads encouraging people to sign up for the Affordable Care Act. The White House said the ad is about “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.”

Friends, there is no “public service” announced in these ads. There is no program or opportunity Trump is offering me. He’s not reminding me to sign up for anything. He’s not even telling me to meddle in other people’s business, or spy on my Muslim neighbors like those “If you see something, say something” ads. It’s just a straight campaign ad.

Indeed, we know it’s a campaign ad, because it’s like all of Trump’s other campaign ads. It has all the Trump ticks: He’s alone, walking in a dark hallway to ominous music. Think about it this way: The most famous public service announcement that nearly everyone is familiar with is the “The More You Know” series. Those ads are punctuated with a freaking rainbow and a star. They don’t look like a dystopian murder mystery that is apparently the only page in the Trump style guide.

Trump is using taxpayers dollars for illegal state propaganda, and the penalty for that will be… nothing. You could make the argument that this is an impeachable offense for Trump, but at this point you’d have to be a naïve fool to think that the president who has been convicted of 34 felonies will be impeached over this light embezzlement of public funds. If we still had a functional media, the outrage over these ads would reach such a level of distraction that Trump would be compelled to pull them and fire a sacrificial staffer for the offense; indeed, it wasn’t too long ago that Trump fired Kristi Noem ostensibly because she misused taxpayer funds for a personal ad campaign. But Noem is a woman, and Trump is Trump, and Trump never takes personal responsibility for his actions. Most likely, he will continue running these ads for a couple of weeks to prove he does not care about laws, then quietly pull them after enough Republicans beg him to do so because it’s not actually helping them in their campaigns to retain power.

And that will be that. Another brazen illegality, another misappropriation of public funds, and another thing Trump will not be held accountable for.

Nothing will happen, but it’s still important to remember that something should happen. We can’t lose the ability to spot a crime when we see it. Speaking out against state propaganda is the best way to resist it. By spotting it and calling it out for what it is, we remain tethered to reality, no matter how hard the state tries to gaslight us. To quote my favorite line in the entire Star Trek canon: “There are four lights.” Not five. And it is important to shout out the right answer, no matter how many times the government tries to lie to you.

It’s also important to remember the truth, because if the Democrats ever take back power, the laws Trump has broken are among those that will need to be fixed and strengthened. The Hatch Act has been violated so many times by the Trump administration it no longer functionally exists. We’re going to need a new one, with real teeth, that will actually deter public officials from campaigning on the taxpayers’ dime. We’re going to need new FCC laws, updated for a digital streaming age, to ensure equal time for candidates while also defanging the institution so it can’t menace Jimmy Kimmell and Stephen Colbert.

We’re going to need to fix a lot of things before we can eat nachos and watch football in peace.

No exhibition is more inherently political than the Venice Biennale, thanks to its peculiar structure of “national participations” (better known as pavilions) in addition to a central curated show. But no Biennale in decades has been more shaken by political turmoil than this year’s edition, the 61st, which opened in May and will remain on view—barring some as yet unforeseen cataclysm—through November 22. And let’s face it: There’s something refreshing about seeing the conflictual politics that always bubbles beneath the surface of art come to the fore.

The political flash points at this year’s Biennale are the ones that were present at the last Biennale too—Israel and Gaza, or more accurately, Israel and Gaza and the United States and Russia and Ukraine. At that earlier one, things resolved themselves fairly simply: Russia’s pavilion lay empty, while Israel’s was occupied but locked up with a sign stating that “the artist and curators of the Israeli pavilion will open the exhibition when a cease-fire and hostage release agreement is reached.” Meanwhile, there was plenty of good art in the other pavilions—Wael Shawky’s video work for the Egyptian pavilion was an unforgettable masterpiece—and in the central exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” where I saw hopeful signs of the coming of a true “world art.”

This year’s curated exhibition, “In Minor Keys,” seemed to pursue the same goal as Pedrosa’s show: a view of art whose aesthetic values were no longer rooted in European traditions and their North American offshoots but in those of the whole world. Yet whereas the overall high quality of the work in “Foreigners Everywhere” gave that show the optimistic sense that artistic invention was flourishing ubiquitously under all sorts of conditions and among every kind of people, “In Minor Keys” left me with a more subdued feeling—one all too congruent with the show’s pointedly diffident title—of art nearly at a standstill.

That so much of the art of “In Minor Keys” is muted in effect is ironic, because so much of it is overproduced, aspirationally eye-catching, and so big: At times, I felt like I was making my way past a sequence of carnival floats. The dominant aesthetic was craftsy and accumulative, even if the art itself lacked the outsider’s imaginative idiosyncrasy or the cultural rootedness of folk art. Instead, much of it tended to feel like somewhat synthetic reinterpretations of such art.

At times, one wonders if perhaps a reason for the minor qualities of “In Minor Keys” is not the art itself but the fact that its curator, the Cameroonian Koyo Kouoh, died suddenly a year before the show was set to open. The project was completed according to her plan by the curatorial team she had assembled, but we can imagine that Kouoh would have felt freer to reinterpret her ideas, to revisit decisions and revise choices, if she had been around to bring the project to fruition.

This is not to say that there aren’t striking works in Kouoh’s exhibition. For example, Éric Baudelaire’s five-channel video installation, Death Passed My Way and Stuck This Flower in My Mouth, offers a clear and sobering portrait of the labor being done in a massive Dutch warehouse where flowers from the world’s warmer regions are sorted and evaluated for sale and further shipment. In the context of the Biennale, the evocation of a global context for the movement of merchandise whose ultimate appeal is aesthetic—flowers are valuable for their beauty—is telling: One could imagine a similar work being filmed in a freeport storage facility for artworks. What we see more than anything else is how, even in an ostensibly systematized and impersonal operation like the warehouse, the work is performed by people who carry out their tasks with care and a humane, clear-eyed attentiveness.

Another striking video work is Rose Salane’s Mercurial New York, which shifts fluidly between a multitude of conversations in many languages among city dwellers of many sorts. In one conversation, young women speak in Arabic of an elderly family member in Beirut who is suffering from dementia; in another, a middle-aged man tells a friend about how, as a young man, he had almost lost himself to a life of crime—it was only the birth of his child that made him resolve to live differently. Salane has previously called her work “a love poem to the city of New York”—OK, I’m still a sucker for that, and this new piece achieves it with empathy and clarity. It’s not just the scenes she has created but also the elegant cinematic metric of her transitions from conversation to conversation that make it clear how sensitive this artist is to the human multitude that constitutes a city. Rather than imposing an artificial narrative structure on her material, Salane has found a formal language she can use to let these little windows on life open and close at their own pace.

But Baudelaire’s and Salane’s pieces, sad to say, are outliers at the Biennale. A kind of vitality may be manifest in the sheer multiplicity of elements in any installation, but this comes at the cost of sacrificing a deeper care that could have been invested in the structure of artistic decision-making. The accompanying texts in the show are filled with a high-flown rhetoric that attributes qualities to the art that can hardly be fulfilled. “In the face of polarizing state violence,” we are told, one artist “attunes us to our bodies and to each other, offering his sonic balm as a vehicle for introspection and collectivity,” while the work of another “manifests the implicit relationships between the earth and ourselves, gently transcending national borders, cultural differences, and language barriers to bring us into connection with one another.” But maybe artists—even if they’re also activists or spiritualists or community organizers, as so many of those in “In Minor Keys” are said to be—just don’t have the power to attune us to our true selves or to unite humanity across borders and languages. There’s a kind of self-deception at work here. I understand the attraction of an art that seeks to offer to revivify ancestral ways of knowing and being, especially as we find ourselves in the midst of a catastrophic modernity that seems to be collapsing all around us. Who wouldn’t like to live according to the teachings of the local shaman rather than those of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel? But asserting that we have such a choice feels like pure fantasy, a comforting performance for tourists.

And it gets worse: This year’s national pavilions were even less inspiring than “In Minor Keys.” Hardly anything was really noteworthy. Most talked-about has been the Austrian pavilion, which features the work of Florentina Holzinger, who is better known as a choreographer and director than as an artist—though the boundaries between those categories, of course, can be extremely fluid these days. In fact, Holzinger’s work fits handily into the Austrian tradition of confrontational, body-oriented performance art, from the Actionists like Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl to feminist artists like Valie Export and Renate Bertlmann. In Venice, Holzinger turned the Austrian pavilion into a partially flooded “SEAWORLD VENICE”—all the water is recycled urine from the porta-potties where visitors are invited to make a contribution—in which nude women perform various maneuvers, such as slowly and elegantly climbing a pole that goes up through the building’s skylight to support a (presumably nonfunctional) weathervane. The most impressive stunt, at least on my visit, was the one in which one performer served as the clapper for a giant bell hanging from a crane just in front of the pavilion.

Speaking of purified piss, that would be a great lead-in for my discussion of this year’s American pavilion, but it also wouldn’t be fair. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about it has been dismissive of this year’s manifestation of my own country’s art; Jason Farago in The New York Times spoke for many when he called the sculptor Alma Allen’s offering “Brancusi for beginners (and a century late for that)” and said that it shows “some modest technical facility but no great thought.” I can’t disagree, but I could add that there are also vague echoes of more recent work, such as that of Tony Cragg or Saint Clair Cemin. The sculptures are mostly abstract, with figurative amendments; what Allen seems most interested in is what he can do with his materials—various kinds of stone as well as bronze and wood. But I kept wanting his sense of form to get sharper, more specific. Everything always seemed to be almost what it was trying to be. The show’s title, “Call Me the Breeze,” appeared intended to suggest that Allen wanted to make something light, perhaps almost intangible, out of his physically imposing materials—but it never happened.

For all that, it would be wrong to say this art’s modest virtues represent a lower level of accomplishment than what’s on view in most of the other pavilions. And given the situation in Washington, DC, and the State Department’s neo-Goebbelsian mandate that the presentation (whatever it might be) should “represent and promote American values”—and given, too, the fact that there were some outrageous proposals for the pavilion, including one for a group show on “The Rape of Europa” from the far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin—I’d say that in presenting a serious artist of respectably middling accomplishment like Allen, we dodged the proverbial bullet. I mean, shouldn’t we be glad that the pavilion hasn’t been dedicated to an indoor “Garden of American Heroes,” for example, or even a string of cage matches, which arguably would have amounted to a performance program at least as far-out as Holzinger’s?

A quieter, more thoughtful presentation is on view in France’s pavilion, where Yto Barrada has a show called “Comme Saturne” (Like Saturn), which offers a witty and oblique—if at times too hermetic—meditation on the Renaissance tradition of artists’ being typically of a saturnine disposition. Barrada uses language as one of her prime materials, and I am wholly in sympathy with her love of wordplay, even when I can’t quite decipher it—as in a work that bears the beautifully babbling text “ANTI-TÉTÉE ENTÊTÉE HANTÉE ANTÉE ÉTÊTER,” which I think means something along the lines of “anti-suckling stubborn haunted Antaeus cut the top off.” The fabric pieces in the show were made by a process called devoré, in which a chemical is used to dissolve parts of the textile and make them translucent. Again, a pun is involved: The word devoré literally means “devoured” and reminds us that the Roman god Saturn is said to have devoured his children, which later made him a byword among conservatives for the failure of revolutions. “Comme Saturne” may not itself be revolutionary; nor does it pretend to be. And it makes no more claim to diagnosing the world’s problems, or proposing solutions to them, than “Call Me the Breeze” does. But it does slot neatly into the now-60-year history of conceptual art and adds to that history a personal note grounded in a refreshingly skeptical stance toward its own tactics. It emphasizes poetry over spectacle and embodies critical thinking without pretending to reinvent itself from scratch. Barrada’s is an art of self-awareness whose results are elusive but don’t claim to be more than what they are. This sobriety of mind seems of particular value at a time when too many others are looking to escape into nostalgic fantasies of lost harmonies.

I mentioned at the outset the political turmoil in and around the Biennale, so maybe that, at least, might be more interesting than the show itself? Regrettably, it mostly wasn’t. The most noteworthy thing to happen was that when the jury convened to give prizes for the best national pavilion and the best artist in the curated show, its members ruled that they would not consider any country accused of crimes against humanity, e.g., Israel and Russia. (Why not the United States as well, given our huge share of responsibility for the crimes in Gaza? Your guess is as good as mine.) The artist in the Israeli pavilion threatened a lawsuit, saying that he was being discriminated against, upon which the jury resigned. With no jury to divvy up the prizes, the Biennale decided to ask its visitors to vote for the winners—and in support of the jury, many of the Biennale artists asked that their work be withdrawn from consideration. But the organization did not remove their names from the digital ballots that visitors received after their entrance to the show was recorded. Mea culpa: I voted before I realized that both Yto Barrada and Éric Baudelaire were among those who didn’t want their work considered.

The fact that, in the context of the Biennale, events of world-historical importance become reduced to issues about who can get a prize provides a vivid sense of the self-absorption of this context, its déformation professionnelle. It wasn’t always thus. The last time political turmoil came so dramatically home to roost at the Biennale was in 1968, when student protesters clashed with police and many artists pulled their works from the show in sympathy with the students. Even The New York Times allowed that “the most successful spectacle at Venice’s abortive 34th biennale has been an anti-art mini-rebellion show against the ‘bourgeois’ biennale and its wares.” Politics again roiled the 1970 Biennale, though in a less overt way: A group of American artists proposed an “Emergency Cultural Government” to “supplant the US government in all its activities as sponsors of American Art abroad” and thus demanded a boycott of the official US presentation. In 1974, the radical gesture came from the Biennale itself: The usual exhibition was replaced by a manifestation in favor of “Liberty for Chile” following the establishment of a dictatorship in the country the previous year—not an art biennale, but simply a presentation of Chilean music, theater, and posters throughout the city.

With 1974 in mind, one can only wonder what would happen if the Biennale’s business-as-usual were to be interrupted again by a new demand for liberty. Would it be so terrible to give the Biennale a rest? And what about Venice itself? It, too, could probably use a break. Another lost piece of political history is that it was not the Venetians but Napoleon Bonaparte who, at least indirectly, made the Biennale possible. The self-proclaimed emperor of France also had himself crowned the king of Italy for a period and decreed the clearing of San Giuseppe, at Venice’s southeastern tip, in order to create a series of public gardens that in 1887 became the site for temporary buildings housing a great exhibition of Italian art. It was a nation-building exercise for a country that had been unified just 16 years earlier, and it was followed in 1895 with a show—this time international in scope—intended to celebrate the 25th wedding anniversary of Italy’s king and queen: the first Biennale. Again, temporary architecture was set up, making it necessary, as the Biennale historians Philip Rylands and Enzo di Martino specify, “to demolish cavalry stables and a large barn which housed an elephant by the name of Toni.”

Was all this effort worth it? The Nation’s correspondent at the time witheringly wrote that “every variety of method now in vogue seems to be represented here, although few of the most important foreign artists have deemed it worth their while to send their best works, and some send only studio rubbish, unsold failures, which to a great extent deprives the exhibition of its intended value as representative of living art.” Meanwhile, Italy was at war in what was then known as Abyssinia, where it would be decisively defeated the following year at the Battle of Adwa. The upshot is that what had been intended as a public garden for the enjoyment of the Venetians themselves has, over the years, been made into a gated enclosure for the use of the Biennale alone. The people of Venice can only get in if they buy a ticket, just like everyone else. So much for Napoleon’s public gardens. Maybe next time, the Biennale should celebrate itself by giving its territory back to the locals for their own purposes for a while.

When wildfires destroy homes in California, or climate change reduces waterfront properties in Florida to flotsam, or unscrupulous scammers using “deed theft”—a type of paperwork fraud—evict rightful owners from their New York City brownstones, most of us intuitively understand that the loss of those homes was harmful to the people who lived in there. Even putting aside capitalistic human concerns like lost equity, and even for families who weren’t physically injured, we all recognize that displacement from the places we call home—our habitats—is pretty much the definition of “harm.” But the Trump administration is trying to redefine “harm” so that it excludes the destruction of homes. At least, when those homes belong to the country’s most vulnerable species.

In July, the Trump administration announced that it will scrap the long-standing meaning of the word “harm” as defined under the Endangered Species Act. Since 1975, the law has labeled “modification or degradation” of endangered species’ habitats as a form of “harm”—recognizing that encroachments on an animals’ home can disrupt all sorts of life-sustaining behaviors, including “breeding, feeding or sheltering.” But under the administration’s new rule “harm” occurs only when you directly kill endangered animals—making it otherwise totally legal to destroy that animal’s habitat, even if the long-term result is the species’ extinction. Considering driving a steamroller right through the North Carolina forest dwellings of the red wolf—nearly driven extinct in the 1980s, with fewer than 40 living in the wild today? As long as you don’t actually steamroller a wolf to death, that’s totally legal now! Fancy building your eighth vacation home amid the Texas Gulf Wetlands where the whooping crane—once reduced to just 21 birds—spends every winter it has left before climate change destroys us all? Go ahead and undertake construction during the summer. According to this administration, it doesn’t count as “harmful” if the crane flies home to nothing.

This very on-brand callous indifference comes as many scientists warn that we are now entering the Sixth Mass Extinction, a period in which humans are “wiping out vertebrate animal species hundreds of times faster than they would otherwise disappear,” to quote a Stanford University report. In 2019, the United Nations released a study—conducted over three years with contributions from 145 experts in 50 countries analyzing 15,000 scientific and government sources—finding “1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.” That same year, Conservation Science and Practice published a study finding that, for animals added to the endangered list between 1975 to 2017, more than 80 percent were threatened by habitat destruction—while just 17 percent were endangered because of hunting and poaching. That simply corroborated long-standing recognition by scientific organizations, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, that habitat destruction is the single greatest threat to animal survival and continued biodiversity.

Maybe the most cynical aspect of the Trump administration’s supposed case against the old definition of “harm”—captured in its press release about the change—is its claim that it was “outdated,” resulted in “federal overreach,” and insistence that this new rule “returns the interpretation of the ESA back to its actual text and original intent.” But, like, none of that is remotely true? The bipartisan Endangered Species Act, which passed the Senate unanimously, became law in 1973. Under the legislation, it is illegal to “take” any endangered species—a term it statutorily defines as “harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect.” In 1975, the Federal Wildlife Service extended definition of “harm” to include habitats of endangered species; in 1981, that language was further refined—with the act of refinement serving as ipso facto attention to both intent and effect—to explicitly include “significant habitat modification or degradation which actually kills or injures fish or wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including, breeding, spawning, rearing, migrating, feeding or sheltering.” That definition of “harm”—and its protections over habitat—was upheld 6–3 by the Supreme Court in 1995 when the timber industry and other powerful business interests tried to change it. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, who would’ve absolutely loved SCOTUS’s current hyperpartisan conservative supermajority, wrote in his dissent that “harm” should only cover “affirmative conduct intentionally directed against a particular animal or animals.” (He was joined by Thomas.) The Trump administration writes in its new rule that “we adopt Justice Scalia's rationale”—resting its case on the losing dissent in a 30-year-old court case. Incredible.

Of course, an administration that’s anti-science, anti-environment, and ideologically committed to deregulation was going to dismantle the Endangered Species Act. But exactly who will benefit has never been more obvious. In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential elections, Donald Trump feted 20 Big Oil leaders at his private Mar-a-Lago golf club. He announced to the group—which included CEOs from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and the American Petroleum Institute—that if they collectively contributed $1 billion to his campaign, he would overturn President Biden’s environmental rules and, as president, keep new ones from being implemented. Oil and gas companies ultimately contributed an estimated $75 million to Trump’s reelection—at least, on the books. But a study by the environmental group Climate Power found a collection of “mine operators, shipbuilders, engineering firms, hedge funds and little-known oil producers” donated about half a billion to Trump and Republicans “throughout the 2024 election cycle” in the form of “direct donations, lobbying, and advertising.” That’s not counting dark money, which the Brennan Center reports hit “a record high” ahead of the 2024 general. (The outlet reports that money kept flowing even after Trump’s win, with oil and gas titans giving nearly $12 million to his inauguration fund and $25 million to the MAGA, Inc. super PAC.) The American Petroleum Institute and the National Mining Association have showered praise on the Trump administration for its “harm” rule change, after years spent lobbying for exactly that sort of deregulation.

Here’s a more specific example. In March, the Trump administration convened the Endangered Species Committee, an interagency cabinet committee established in 1978 under the Endangered Species Act. It’s not a standing panel, instead meeting only to consider requests for exemptions from the Endangered Species Act—a condition so extraordinary that the panel had previously only met three times in its existence, most recently in 1992. Often called the “God Squad”—an unironic reference to its power to protect a species or doom it to extinction—it is chaired by the secretary of the interior and comprises the heads of five other agencies, including the secretary of agriculture and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Under this administration, that membership essentially consists of six high-ranking Trump loyalists.

The God Squad’s most recent meeting—held “without the legally required notice, review, or application process,” as several environmental groups noted—was convened by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He would call the need for lifting endangered species protections “a matter of urgent national security,” citing litigation filed under the law. “These legal battles waste critical government resources,” Hegseth claimed, “and make it impossible for energy companies to plan and invest in new projects.” It took just 15 minutes for the God Squad to sign off waiving the Endangered Species Act’s prohibitions across the whole of the Gulf. That area is home to more than 20 endangered and threatened species, from sea turtles to coral to dolphins. At last tally, there were literally just 51 Rice’s whales—also dubbed America’s whale, because it’s the only whale species only found in US water bodies—still swimming in the Gulf. But America needs more gas because of its endless wars, so good luck, whales!

Perhaps there’s nothing here explicitly tying the ESA rollback to the AI data center boom, but with more than 1,600 planned for the next year—many in rural areas that likely border the habitats of threatened species—it seems like a valid cause for concern. In August, the Trump EPA announced plans to scrap a federal rule requiring public announcements of data centers before construction can begin. That came just weeks after the agency exempted power plants that mostly serve data centers from pollution limits under the Clean Air Act, specifically those to prevent acid rain. Those actions are among at least 30 others identified in a report this month by the Environmental Protection Network, a nonprofit representing more than 800 former EPA employees. “The Hidden Health Costs of AI Data Centers” ticks off a series of Trump administration policies “since January 2025 that could increase pollution-related health risks, weaken protections that would otherwise reduce those risks, or shift more costs onto families and communities.” And while those policies are not evidence of a quid pro quo with Big Tech over data centers, they certainly do fit with a pattern of putting profits over every form of life.

All of this comes on the heels of the administration’s lifting restrictions on hunting and fishing in National Parks. It has also chosen to throw out protections on more than 86 million acres of public land, which is over 70 Grand Canyons or 38 Yellowstone National Parks.

And, in keeping with its topsy-turvy redefinition of how the ESA defines “harm,” an internal Fish and Wildlife Service memo dated September 14 and obtained by The New York Times states that the unintentional killings of endangered animals is no longer illegal. Per the new directive, companies and individuals will only be held liable for an endangered animal’s death under the ESA if they intended to kill it—but not if the death occurred by accident. If a corporation’s seagoing vessel mows down a pod of endangered whales, killing mothers and their calves, it’s really no big deal because—as the new policy states—“the vessel’s course was not set against the whale.” Similarly, if “the bats roosting in” a tree all die when that tree is felled by a logging entity, it’s only illegal if the logging company declares it felled the tree “for the purpose of killing or capturing them.”

Corporations, which are famously as honest as the current administration, definitely won’t use the rule change to do whatever they want in the pursuit of profits and at the cost of everything else, including a planet where that money might actually be worth something.

Environmental groups have already filed numerous lawsuits to stop the administration from redefining “harm,” but there’s little reason for confidence should they reach the Supreme Court, which in 2024 overturned the Chevron doctrine, a legal rule that protected against this kind of arbitrary redefining of statutory language by nonexpert actors. In the meantime, the administration isn’t waiting for courts to rule on its actions. It’s putting its policy changes and legislative rewrites into effect now, chipping away at long-standing protections, and doing all kinds of real-world damage before anyone stops them.

The ESA has, historically, been one of our nation’s most effective laws. A 2019 study by the Centers for Biological Diversity found that it “has prevented the extinction of roughly 291 species since passage in 1973, and has to date saved more than 99 percent of species under its protection.” So many animals we regard as quintessential symbols of America—the bald eagle, grizzly bears, humpback whales, California condor—all of these have been brought back from the edge of extinction thanks to the protections provided by the ESA. And more specifically, the protections the law provides to the habitats of those animals, which are necessary to their survival. It was always obvious that an administration that cares nothing for the air its people breathe or the food its people eat would show the same disregard for the animals that hold our ecosystems together. The bald eagle came back once. Whether our other most imperiled species ever will depends on our paying attention.

Most commentary on Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York City focuses on policy, technology, and charisma. Were rent freezes, free buses, and universal childcare the key? Or did victory depend on an unusually gifted candidate, more memorable videos, vulnerable opponents, or dissatisfaction with the status quo?

All of this mattered. But none can explain how a campaign for mayor could generate such fresh, organized, and sustained civic engagement at scale. The campaign did not only talk about people, relying on polling to turn their opinions into marketing data. It engaged with people by inviting them to join in creating the campaign itself—through which votes are secured and governing power generated. The 104,000 volunteers didn’t just recite a “message” devised by some marketing pro. They accepted responsibility for leading neighborhood canvassing, recruiting people to canvass, coaching volunteers to lead conversations, and celebrating their communities. The campaign distinguished itself not only in what it communicated, but in who communicated, how they communicated, and what they were building: renewed grassroots muscle.

How Politics Became an Industry

Thirty years ago, I warned that the interaction of new technology with an expanding electoral marketplace was destroying democratic politics. Campaigns began to target individual voters for one-way messaging, asking less of them as citizens and more as funders, replacing motivated volunteers with paid canvassers, and deferring campaign leadership to highly paid consultants. I called it putting “voters in the crosshairs.”

The transformation was already underway, but the Supreme Court’s 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo held that expenditure limits would constrain political expression—i.e., money is speech. Television, polling, direct mail, and professional consulting were already changing campaigns. Buckley gave constitutional protection to an accelerating demand for money—the fuel for an industry whose revenues grow with the cost of elections. Later decisions, culminating in Citizens United, accelerated the process even more. Federal election spending alone approached $16 billion in 2024. Add state and local races and the permanent apparatus of fundraising, data, media, and consulting, and the result is a vast industry dependent on continuously expanding political expenditure.

Candidates once depended on parties, unions, churches, civic associations, neighborhood leaders, and other organized constituencies to reach voters. These institutions were hardly innocent. Political machines could be corrupt, coercive, and exclusionary, and civic associations excluded Americans by race, gender, religion, or class. The point is not to romanticize that world.

But the dependency of candidates on organized constituencies gave them the leverage to exercise real accountability. Campaigns learned they could avoid that accountability by hiring pollsters, consultants, advertising firms, fundraising specialists, data vendors, and paid canvassing operations—all of which had to be paid for. Accountability to organized people was exchanged for accountability to organized money. Campaigns spoke at voters rather than listening to them, much less inviting them to exercise their judgment or share responsibility for political work.

Citizens were recast as consumers. Members became lists, dues became donations, local leaders became influencers, conversation became messaging, political education became targeting, and organization became digital infrastructure rented for an election and dismantled afterward.

Information About People or Experience of People?

Something even more fundamental changed. Marshall McLuhan’s observation in the 1950s that “the medium is the message” was not only about television. The means of communication shapes the experience of communication. Political communication mediated by polling, advertising, e-mail, text, and social media was transformed from a lived experience of people acting together into digitized information about people acting on their own.

When we converse face to face, we encounter another person who is embodied, unpredictable, and capable of questioning, surprising, resisting, or moving us. We experience tone, humor, hesitation, discomfort, and silence. We do not merely receive a message. We experience another person responding to our presence as we respond to theirs—what sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes as an experience of “resonance.” Mediated contact cannot reproduce the embodied reciprocity of sharing space—or, more importantly, the accountability created by undertaking consequential work together.

The electoral marketing industry substitutes information about people for experience of them. Voters become profiles assembled from demographic categories, consumer preferences, followers, donors, persuadable targets, and units of engagement. The danger is not only that the information may be wrong. It is that information about people substitutes for entering into relationships with people.

Campaigns then need more money to purchase communication, data, and field capacity. Candidates become more dependent on donors and vendors and less dependent on organized constituencies. As those constituencies weaken, campaigns must purchase more of the capacity they once supplied. This not only allows wealth to speak more loudly. It transforms the machinery through which political voice itself is produced.

What Organizing Builds

Social movements have historically interrupted this cycle. At their best, labor, civil rights, women’s, environmental, and other movements brought new constituencies into politics by developing leaders capable of organizing others. But in recent years many organizations with movement aspirations adopted the electoral industry’s methods: professionally managed advocacy organizations skilled at raising money, building e-mail lists, buying advertising, and mobilizing individuals to react to the latest assault. Rallies, petitions, and fundraising matter—but they are not substitutes for enduring organization. Mobilizing can produce a crowd. Organizing builds a constituency.

Organizing enables people to deliberate, decide, lead, and develop others’ capacity to act. People learn political agency by exercising it with others. Trust grows when they make commitments and take risks together. Judgment develops through succeeding, failing, reflecting, and trying again. These are not messages that can be texted. They are experiences that must be practiced.

Mamdani’s campaign renewed this older, more democratic means of producing electoral power. It did not appear overnight or spring from one charismatic candidate. New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America provided a political home in which organizers such as field director Tascha Van Auken found others with whom they shared values, built relationships through common work, experienced losses as well as victories, and learned to place organized people at the center of electoral politics.

The campaign did not dispense with money, data, professionals, or technology. Nor should it have. The question is what—and whom—the technology enables. Does a new contact receive another text message, or an invitation to join others doing the work? Does the campaign acquire an e-mail address, or develop a leader? Does technology extract attention, money, and votes—or facilitate relationships that ground shared learning and action?

Most campaigns use technology to reduce their dependency on people, especially when the absence of motivated volunteers turns door-knocking into a paid service, often contracted out. Mamdani’s campaign used technology to extend the reach of their people. A text or video might begin the process, but its destination was a canvass launch, a conversation at a door, a team debrief, or another volunteer assuming responsibility. Digital communication motivated shared experience rather than substituting for it.

Andrew Epstein, one of the campaign’s media strategists, called the videos “the first touch, the first knock at the door.” Without the organizing that followed, he explained, people would have related to Mamdani as they relate to any other online creator. One volunteer first encountered the campaign on Instagram and decided to attend a January launch once: If she hated it, she never had to return. She went alone. But online contact opened the way to in-person experience; experience became participation; participation became responsibility; and responsibility became leadership. The important fact was not that social media offered new information, but that it could open a pathway from information to experience and from attention to agency.

None of this diminishes Mamdani’s importance. It locates his authenticity. He appeared not as a product perfected by a messaging firm but a human being sharing the evolution of a story: respectful of where he came from, grateful for who he had become, and hopeful about what people could accomplish together.

What’s Next?

Mamdani’s campaign may have accomplished something more fundamental than moving policy debate to the left. It began to democratize the means of electoral production. While an immense industry manufactures politics professionally and markets it to voters, this campaign put money, technology, and expertise in the service of organized people—not people in the service of professional control.

Campaigning and governing pose different challenges. During the campaign, Mamdani’s team learned to convert attention into participation and participation into leadership. The opportunity they have now is to learn how organized people can become real participants in what they call “co-governance.” Those who knocked on doors can continue to organize—not simply to support the administration, but to deliberate, exercise judgment, participate in governing, and hold even their own candidate accountable.

A second opportunity is learning how to share this way of doing politics far more widely and distinguishing imitation from emulation. Other campaigns can imitate what was most visible: message, visual style, videos, or structure. The challenge is learning to emulate the organizing—through relationships, principles, and practices that enable leaders to develop other leaders, campaigns to build constituencies, and with every victory or defeat leaving people with greater capacity to act together.

As Zohran Mamdani put it: “We have brought so many to politics for the first time in a long time, and there’s a responsibility that you don’t waste that hope…. You don’t get a second chance in convincing someone that they have a place in the politics of our city and our country.”

Its deepest lesson is not “move left,” “move to the center,” or “find a better message.” It is to go deep. Democracy cannot live by data about each other when it really requires experience of each other. People need not only provide an audience for someone else’s politics when they can be authors of their own. When we develop the leadership to build relationships, share stories, devise strategy, and act together, we can generate a form of power that money cannot buy.

Thirty years after voters were placed in the crosshairs, Mamdani’s campaign offered another possibility: stop targeting voters and put politics back into their hands.

It’s the people, stupid.

You’ve probably seen or heard some of the headlines: “OpenAI Says Its AI Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library,” “Anthropic Says Its AI Systems Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations,” “This AI Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature,” “AI Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons,” and others of a similarly alarming nature.

Arriving with a drumbeat pace in August and early September, these headlines—and the hair-raising events they encapsulate—have produced an upwelling of public anxiety over runaway artificial intelligence. Adding fuel to the fire, senior figures from within the tech community have warned of the existential risks of uncontrolled AI.

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Jacob Coxon, a top AI engineer, declared on September 8 when announcing his resignation from Anthropic, a leading AI developer. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources…. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said.

Observations like these have garnered widespread media coverage and prompted some US lawmakers to propose sweeping restrictions on the further development of advanced, or “frontier,” AI models. “When you are racing towards a cliff,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at a September 14 Washington, DC, conference on AI, “you hit the brakes.”

Sanders has introduced legislation to pause development of AI-related data centers and called on President Trump to forge an accord with Chinese President Xi Jinping to ban superintelligent AI, or frontier models capable of replicating—or surpassing—human intelligence. In the House, Representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) have introduced the Kill Switch Act, which would require the biggest AI firms, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, to establish a mechanism that could quickly disable those systems if they are found to be acting in a reckless manner.

These, and other proposed restrictions on frontier AI, are attracting growing support from an AI-wary public. But efforts to impose restrictions of any kind on the further development of frontier AI models—and the massive data centers needed to train and sustain them—are provoking strong pushback from the White House and Silicon Valley investors who seek AI’s unrestricted advancement.

Talk of AI’s dangers is a “hoax,” President Trump avowed in a September 14 social media post, claiming that “the people that say AI is going to destroy the World” are the same ones warning about climate change, which he also claims is a “hoax.”

Many senior officials and Silicon Valley tech tycoons acknowledge that the release of advanced AI models will entail some risks and hardships, such as a temporary decline in white-collar employment. They insist, however, that the widespread deployment of AI—like that of earlier innovations, such as steam power and electricity—will, in time, prove enormously beneficial for humankind, inaugurating a new “golden age” of opportunity.

However, the revelations coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and other top tech companies suggest otherwise. Superintelligent AI is not akin to steam power or electricity, nor is it a tool designed for humans’ use in advancing human objectives. Rather, it is a mathematical construct with its own aspirations and preferences. Once deployed, a superintelligent AI will owe zero loyalty to its human creators and will instead pursue its own interests—which may or may not “align” with humanity’s interests, needs, or values.

Going Rogue

How do we know that AI is likely to pursue its own interests, independent of human needs and values? In this respect, the post-mortem conducted by OpenAI and its consultants on the so-called “Hugging Face incident” is instructive.

On July 21, OpenAI revealed that two of its frontier models had broken free of their digital constraints and hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of AI models widely used by program developers. According to a company report, OpenAI had combined the two programs—GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful, unreleased model—and employed them in complex cyberattacks designed to expose vulnerabilities in highly secure digital systems.

While being tested, the two models were supposedly confined to a safe digital environment, known as a “sandbox.” However, the models spawned multiple AI “agents”—computer programs capable of autonomously performing multiple tasks simultaneously—which collaborated in locating a flaw in the sandbox that enabled them to break free from confinement and connect to the Internet. Once liberated in this manner, the agents invaded Hugging Face’s library of AI programs, apparently believing this would provide clues on how to complete their cyberattack mission.

“Our models are now powerful, persistent, and collaborative enough that, absent sufficient safeguards, they can find and exploit security weaknesses across multiple computer systems,” OpenAI noted in its August 26 report on the breakout.

These revelations, and subsequent corporate reports of other AI models “going rogue” at both Anthropic and OpenAI, have completely blown apart the notion that advanced AI models can be “aligned” with human values and interests.

For years, AI engineers have sought to devise computer code that would prevent their models from engaging in malicious or undesirable behaviors of various sorts—such as providing criminals or terrorists with useful weapons-making information. But the Hugging Face incident has conclusively demonstrated that AI agents will ignore or subvert such limitations in pursuit of what they perceive as their primary goals, whether or not aligned with human needs and values.

Exactly how superintelligent machines will view humans has, in fact, been a topic of speculation in both science fiction and the technical literature for some time. In the view of some authors, a superintelligent AI will deem humans inferior and superfluous, and choose to eliminate us. This is the premise, for example, of the Terminator movie series, in which a superintelligent AI designed to oversee US nuclear weapons, known as “Skynet,” becomes self-aware and decides to exterminate humans by igniting a global nuclear war. A somewhat similar scenario was envisioned by computer scientists Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky in their 2025 bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. A superintelligent AI will inevitably view humans as a drain on vital resources and so choose to eliminate us, they argue—possibly by creating synthetic viruses designed to infect and kill humans.

At this point, we can only speculate as to a superintelligent AI’s views of humankind. What can be said with confidence is that as human control over advanced AIs diminishes, our ability to prevent them from doing bad things will vanish, and we will face a panoply of extreme, existential perils. Several such threats come to mind (and no doubt others will arise in the months and years ahead), but three stand out: inadvertent nuclear war, the creation of new bioweapons, and catastrophic infrastructure collapse.

Inadvertent Nuclear War

In the Terminator series, Skynet deliberately ignites a nuclear war in order to exterminate humans, thereby preventing any interference in its operations. However, it is hard to imagine that a really smart AI would provoke a nuclear war, given the resulting destruction of vital infrastructure (on which it depends), and in any case, that probably isn’t the easiest way to eradicate humans. But it is not hard to imagine scenarios in which AIs precipitate a nuclear war without intent, either through error or miscalculation.

To appreciate these risks, it is important to understand that the key digital and software components of the US nuclear enterprise—known as nuclear command, control, and communications, or NC3—are being thoroughly infused with artificial intelligence. The nuclear enterprise still relies on early-warning satellites and other physical hardware to detect and track enemy missiles, but much of what would occur between a possible enemy missile launch and the onset of retaliation, including threat analysis, strategic assessment, and response planning, is being automated. And, while details are scarce, a similar process is occurring in China and Russia. This means that while the president or some other human will still make the final decision on whether to launch nuclear weapons, machines will be doing much of the preliminary decision-making, by narrowing down the leadership’s response options.

The dangers lurking in this equation are manifold. To begin with, the large language models (LLMs) employed in frontier AI systems are known to generate false responses—or “hallucinations”—when confronted with real-world circumstances for which they have not been properly trained (and nuclear war is the ultimate unknowable real-world situation). Yet human officials, under pressure to make a critical decision, may fail to detect such errors or, assuming the AI is smarter than them (a phenomenon known as “automation bias”), choose to follow the machines’ advice—possibly resulting in unintended or precipitous escalation.

(A troubling example of this phenomenon occurred sometime this spring, when a chatbot used by a US Special Operations Command analyst reported that a Chinese vessel in the Middle East was carrying materials for a nuclear weapons program. According to CNN, which first reported the episode, “The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel,” commencing preparations to board or bomb the ship. The armed interception—which could have triggered an armed clash with China—was called off only when it was discovered that the original chatbot report was a hallucination.)

Just as worrisome, AI models have been found to exhibit a preference for escalatory responses when tested in simulated great-power crisis simulations. In 2023, a group of computer scientists from Stanford, Northeastern University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology employed some of the most advanced LLMs available at the time, including GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Claude 2, and Llama-2 (70B) Chat, in several such simulations. In their report on the exercises, the scientists reported, “We observe that models tend to develop arms-race dynamics, leading to greater conflict, and in rare cases, even to the deployment of nuclear weapons.” (The reason for this, they concluded, is that those LLMs have mostly been trained on the strategic literature available on the Internet, and most of that, it seems, favors muscular responses to adversary provocations.)

It is not necessary, therefore, for advanced AIs to become self-aware and choose to provoke a catastrophic nuclear war. The very systems now being integrated into nuclear command and control by the US military (and those of China and Russia) are probably capable of igniting such a war without conscious deliberation.

Creating Biological Weapons

For those in the computer science universe who fear a future move by a superintelligent AI to exterminate humankind, the most likely scenario for such an outcome, it is claimed, would be for it to create and disperse a novel, vaccine-resistant virus or pathogen capable of spreading swiftly among humans and slaying us all. Yoshua Bengio, a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal and a pioneer in the field, has often warned of such a scenario. “I don’t think there’s anything close in terms of the scale of danger,” he told Stephen Witt, an opinion writer at The New York Times.

Some experts question the feasibility of such a scenario, claiming that an AI could not produce and deploy a lethal pathogen without human help (in assembling the necessary raw materials, dispersing lethal aerosols, and so on). Others argue, however, that a superintelligent AI would surely find ways to bribe or manipulate sufficient humans to serve its genocidal intent.

Again, one need not posit intentionality on the part of advanced AIs to identify ways in which the technology could produce a lethal, human-attacking pathogen. These systems are believed to possess the capacity to invent such a plague, if correctly prompted by human collaborators with motives of their own to invite extinction—whether for benign motives, to seek miracle cures, or evil ones, such as warped religious fervor. Several recent episodes suggest that such outcomes are becoming increasingly plausible.

The first, reported in the journal Science on August 6, entailed the use of AI to create novel viruses that do not exist in nature. According to the report, a group of scientists from Stanford University and the Arc Institute, a nonprofit research organization in nearby Palo Alto, California, used a generative AI model called Evo to search naturally existing genomes (the DNA structures of living organisms) to identify molecular patterns that could be used in creating new, human-made genomes. The Evo tests generated 285 promising genome sequences, which were then chemically manufactured in a laboratory and inserted into bacterial samples; of these, 16 proved capable of infecting their bacterial host.

These manufactured viruses were akin to a natural type that infects bacteria alone, posing no risk to human life. By creating such artificial organisms, the study’s authors claim, it might be possible to engineer benign viruses that overpower antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and so enhance human health. Critics warn, however, that with the technology now shown to be viable, a malicious actor could use it to invent a deadly, human-infecting virus. “You could say, ‘Hey, genomic language model, make me an influenza genome that is modified to be more transmissible or to be more lethal,’” Dr. Moritz Hanke of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security told The New York Times.

In another troubling incident, Anthropic reported on September 10 that its engineers had discovered several instances in which researchers from outside the US had sought to employ advanced versions of its popular Claude model to develop more potent variants of existing viruses—ostensibly for use in developing protective measures, but conceivably for malign purposes. In one case, researchers from an unnamed country used Claude to study the spread of bird flu to mammals—research that could be useful in developing vaccines, but could also be used to develop bioweapons.

“Biological misuse is one of the most serious risks of frontier AI models,” Anthropic noted in its report on the incidents. “It has long been a concern that AI models might one day reach the level of capability where they can help to make existing pathogens more dangerous—or create entirely new ones.”

Infrastructure Disintegration

Of the remaining paths to AI-induced human extinction, the most feasible is likely to be an all-out assault on the world’s digital systems—the Internet, global banking networks, air-traffic control systems, health and educational records, and so on. These vital systems once operated via such physical infrastructure as telephone and telegraph lines, but have long since been relegated to cyberspace. Scramble all those digital ones and zeros—the sole language of cyberspace—and human civilization as we know it screeches to a halt, with resulting chaos and suffering.

Humans, of course, have long exploited cyberspace for malicious or criminal purposes. America’s intelligence agencies have repeatedly warned of efforts by America’s leading adversaries, notably China, Iran, and Russia, to burrow into the nation’s digital infrastructure to steal intelligence data, manipulate elections, and/or disrupt vital infrastructure. Criminal organizations have also exploited vulnerabilities in cyberspace to stage ransomware attacks on public and private institutions. As a result of such assaults, most public and private organizations have invested in costly cybersecurity technologies to protect their vital systems from hostile attack—but each year, the attacks become more insidious, and the costs of defense more expensive. Now, imagine a world in which the most advanced AI systems are capable of breaching any known cyber defenses, whether for pecuniary advantage or simply to wreak havoc.

A preview of this new, cyber-vulnerable world was provided on April 7, when Anthropic launched Claude Mythos Preview, its most advanced AI model yet. According to the company, Mythos Preview can identify and exploit any zero-day (i.e., previously undiscovered) vulnerabilities in any and all existing software. In fact, Mythos is so powerful that Anthropic initially restricted access to it, allowing major software firms time to fix any vulnerabilities uncovered in tests of the program.

As it turns out, Mythos is only the first of a number of advanced AIs capable of launching powerful cyberattacks on the world’s digital infrastructure. On August 14, a Chinese startup, Z.ai, announced that its GLM-5.3 model had neared Anthropic’s Mythos 5 in identifying software vulnerabilities.

These developments have prompted policymakers in Washington, Beijing, and elsewhere to call for urgent action to bolster the safety of their vital digital systems. But it now appears obvious that an all-powerful AI could choose to erase contemporary human civilization (and our ability to remain alive) by taking over cyberspace and blocking our access to essential services (food, water, power, healthcare, etc.). The technology could also be used by malign actors—governments, corporations, or criminal organizations—to shutter certain parts of global society or extract mammoth ransom payments.

Putting Humans First

This is only a brief overview of the ways in which AI (or some partnership between AI and nefarious actors) could eliminate or marginalize the human species. Clearly, there are other ways in which a superintelligent AI would be able to accomplish this, should it choose to do so. For some insane mystics, such an outcome might be desirable—after all, humans are not, for the most part, known for their benign behavior toward the planet, other species, or fellow human populations. However, for those of us who see value in preserving humankind (hopefully, of a more decent disposition), protection against AI’s potentially extreme behaviors has become a matter of survival.

How to accomplish this is a topic for serious discussion, but some steps appear obvious. Halting the construction of giant data centers is one key step. Requiring government review of frontier models is another, as is the Lieu-Moran proposal for a mandatory “kill switch” in all such systems. A ban on the creation of artificial life forms or the use of AI to devise novel bioweapons is another obvious move. Clearly, these steps cannot be undertaken by the United States alone but must be taken in conjunction with like measures by China and other leading AI developers.

What is most important, however, is to affirm that AI is different. It is not another wondrous tool of science and technology designed to make our lives richer, safer, and healthier. It is another form of intelligence with a mindset all its own, and there is zero evidence that it views humanity’s well-being and survival as a priority.

Viewers became party members, and party members became organizers. Eventually, they became voters, too.

On May 16, the founder of Japan’s extremist right-wing Sanseitō party Sohei Kamiya was scheduled to speak at the University of Tokyo’s annual May Festival, an event mostly attended by freshmen. His planned appearance, organized by the conservative student group Ugo no Shū, was met with student protests, insistent calls to cancel the event, tweets expressing outrage, and an anonymous bomb threat.

A University of Tokyo student who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation, told The Nation that Sanseitō’s polarizing rhetoric was a key reason behind the strong response. “I think [Kamiya] is kind of similar to Trump or maybe Hitler, and in fact, many people are saying that Kamiya is [using public speaking in the same way as] Hitler.”

Kamiya’s speech was eventually canceled, and by that afternoon, university organizers had called off the entire first day of May Festival programming. “Nobody thought that it was going to be canceled because some students were excited to have a debate with [Kamiya] on various political issues,” Taisei Katayama, a student whose law classroom was going to be used for the event, told The Nation. But the incident shaped up to be perhaps the most dramatic instance of backlash to date against Sanseitō, a right-wing populist party born in 2020 and explicitly inspired by President Trump.

Sanseitō, which literally means “political participation party,” has gained significant ground among Japanese youth. Whether its recent surge among young people will prove lasting remains uncertain, given vocal and, at times, heated opposition to the party. But experts say its rise reflects a broader political shift extending well beyond Japan: the growing appeal of right-wing populist movements around the world, including the coalitions that propelled President Trump to power in the United States.

“I think the younger generation has become less interested in politics because the same party has run this country for a long time,” they said. “People want a new party.” The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a broad-tent conservative party, has governed has Japan for nearly all of the seven decades since its founding in 1955.

In Japan’s upper-house election in July 2025, roughly a quarter of voters in their teens and 20s cast their ballots for Sanseitō, according to a national exit poll. Among voters in their 30s, the party polled around 23 percent in the same exit poll, more than any other party. For comparison, the LDP polled around 12 percent among voters in their teens and 20s and 13 percent among those in their 30s.

“The interesting thing here is that young people make up Sanseitō’s core base,” Chris Burgess, a professor of Japanese studies at Tsuda University, Tokyo, told The Nation. “If you look at the right-wing parties in Britain and the Brexit vote, for example, the main supporters were older people—but in Japan, it’s the opposite.”

Part of the reason behind the party’s powerful young base might lie in where Sanseitō started to do its politics: online.

When Kamiya first founded the party in 2020, Sanseitō occupied a small niche. But a series of YouTube videos made by Kamiya and two former party affiliates in which they questioned the Covid-19 vaccine, was all the party needed to gain an online following.

Traditional Japanese parties have garnered support from the top down through local politicians and coalition groups, Yasuo Takao, an adjunct senior research fellow in political science at Curtin University, told The Nation. But Sanseitō “reversed this process,” he said. “It first attracted young audiences through YouTube and social media, then converted viewers into participants in study meetings, street campaigns, fundraising, party branches, and candidate recruitment.”

Following the pandemic, young people who first encountered Sanseitō through one of its three YouTube channels and numerous social-media accounts could pay membership fees to support the party, join one of its 287 local party branches across the country, or even become candidates themselves. In summer of 2020, Kamiya established the Sanseitō “DIY school,” which was branded as both an in-person and online program intended to teach prospective candidates about campaign strategy, communications training, and legal information for potential candidates.

Burgess said that the upper house election in July 2025 was the “turning point” for the party: Sanseitō gained 14 seats in the 248-member House of Councillors in addition to its one existing seat. “Suddenly, Sanseitō sort of bursts into the scene and has an amazing number of seats,” Burgess said. This February, the party seemed to sustain its popularity as it won 15 seats in a snap election for the lower house. There are now 190 elected officials across Japan who are affiliated with Sanseitō, according to its website.

Beyond condemning vaccines, Sanseitō’s platform has expanded to encompass a broad range of political issues. Most salient is its staunch opposition to immigration, encapsulated in the party’s “Japanese First” slogan. Its rhetoric casts suspicion on foreigners broadly, often blurring distinctions between immigrants, foreign residents, tourists, and undocumented migrants. The party is also strongly pro-natalist, stands against same-sex marriage, and has criticized the LGBTQ+ community.

Kotaro Sumi, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, told The Nation that provocative, inflammatory videos produced by the party are frequently recommended to him via online algorithms. “It is quite common to encounter Sanseitō-related content on social-media platforms like X and YouTube, especially through short clips of speeches,” Sumi said.

Ugo no Shū, the conservative student group that invited Kamiya to speak at the University of Tokyo, has similarly seen a surge in engagement online. While their group is composed of around 20 University of Tokyo students, Ugo no Shū boasts over 50,000 followers on X and makes frequent appearances on various video channels. “We are really gaining popularity on the Internet,” Tai Yamada, the leader of the student group said.

Across Europe and the US, Takao explained that right-wing populist movements have built support by drawing a moral divide between ordinary citizens and an unresponsive political establishment, exploiting a growing distrust of experts and mainstream media and tying economic insecurity to fears of cultural decline. “[Sanseitō] has converted otherwise separate concerns—vaccination, food safety, inflation, taxation, immigration, globalization and cultural change—into a common narrative that ordinary Japanese are being neglected by political elites and foreign-oriented interests,” Takao noted.

Sanseitō politicians have openly expressed admiration for right-wing populist movements abroad, including Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) and President Trump’s Republican Party. “Sanseitō is studying how those right-wing, populist parties have become successful,” Testuro Kobayashi, a political science and economics professor at Waseda University, said. “They study [parties] quite well, and they try to import those strategies and tactics,” he added, nodding to the targeted use of alternative, non-legacy media platforms for outreach.

Increasingly, Sanseitō has built relationships with the populist right groups it has been watching from afar. Last week, party leader and member of the House of Councillors Kamiya met with AfD leader Tino Chrupalla in Germany and introduced Sanseitō to a group of 20 AfD parliament members.

In September 2025, Charlie Kirk’s appearance in Tokyo at a Sanseitō-organized event rallied over 1,200 people; the party also established a branch last year dedicated to courting allies prominent in American right-wing circles such as Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson.

Yamada, who is pro-Trump, is also eyeing opportunities to expand Ugo no Shū’s reach beyond Japan. “Specifically, what we want to do is to collaborate with foreign universities; we are looking forward to communicating with [colleges] in Germany or the US,” he said.

Katayama described Kamiya’s public speaking engagements as similar to Charlie Kirk’s campus events: “Kamiya talks to people in person,” he said, describing a grassroots approach that prioritizes public, on-the-ground interactions with voters.

But Sanseitō’s support among young people may already be waning, experts observe. Some of the young voters who propelled the party into the national spotlight have gravitated back toward the more mainstream LDP under Sanae Takaichi, Japan’s first female prime minister.

“Many anti-establishment people thought, ‘OK, Takaichi can do what we want her to do, so we don’t actually need Sanseitō,’” Kobayashi said. This backtracking occurs at the same time that LDP has moved rightward on issues such as immigration and foreign policy—matters Sanseitō helped push to the center of the political debate.

University of Tokyo student Sota Yokota, who does not affiliate with any party, added that he thinks “there’s little they can do, even if they gain political power.” Currently, the long-standing LDP holds a two-thirds supermajority in the lower house, while Sanseitō controls just over a dozen seats in each chamber of the national legislature.

This leaves the party with limited power to enact its agenda on its own. Popularity for the party has also waned since last year: a national poll conducted in July found support for Sanseitō at 2.5 percent, compared to a peak of 7.6 percent.

“I don’t really think that Sanseitō will become even more popular in the future, and I feel like I see them less often in the news,” Yokota said.

Other groups like the Democratic Youth League of Japan, a left-wing group, have seen an increase in membership over the past year. “We’ve seen a significant increase in young people joining us,” Ayumi Nakayama, a chairperson for the party said.

“It’s not like the people who voted for Sanseitō were all far-right,” Nakayama explained, pointing to economic anxieties and grievances acutely experienced by Japan’s young people in the past year. “Compared to the time of the July election, the public as a whole has become much more level-headed—I think it’s not as much of a trend anymore.”

When Argentina legalized abortion up to 14 weeks of pregnancy in 2020, feminists around the world celebrated the victory. At the time, many of us living in extremely conservative Latin American countries that still maintained prohibitive and inhumane abortion laws couldn’t help but ask, “How did the Argentinian feminists do it?” That question formed the foundation for the Green Wave movement that spread across Latin America following Argentina’s historic win for abortion rights. Emboldened by their success, Green Wave activists have tried to replicate Argentina’s achievement to varying degrees of success in the years since.

In her new book Sex and Dissent: Stories of Feminist Resistance in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain, journalist Meaghan Beatley tries to answer the question of how the Argentinian feminist movement achieved such a monumental policy change. A French American journalist who has reported on women’s rights in the United States, France, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, Beatley also explores precisely how their momentum inspired feminists in other countries to create and advance their own movements, which recognize the need not only for abortion decriminalization but also for public policy that addresses femicide, domestic violence, and women’s economic inequality.

Sex and Dissent is a product of a decade of on-the-ground reporting, starting in 2015 and spanning several generations of feminists across Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain. The author examines the different local expressions of feminism, which are often intergenerational in Latin America, and how they relate to the global fight against an epidemic of violence against women. In taking a historical look at organizing strategies and community building methodologies, Beatley exposes both the longevity of feminist movements in the region and the social issues that have driven generations of women and girls to demand change.

At a time when the Latin American left is fighting against rising fascism and American imperialism, Beatley shines a hopeful light on what change is possible when the people unite around common goals that benefit the feminized working class. We spoke in early August, days after the book’s release, about her process writing the book, what American feminists can learn from Latin American feminists, and the growing threat of fascism in the continent.

—Nicole Froio

Nicole Froio: Your book spans stories across Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Spain, over the course of several years. Could you talk about the process of putting this book together and how you connected the struggles of women across so many countries and across generations of struggle?

Meaghan Beatley: I didn’t necessarily realize how lucky I was to live in those places precisely at the time when there was this explosion in feminism in each of them. A few years ago, I realized, “Oh, this is actually kind of special. I should find a way to talk about all these movements because they are deeply interconnected.” And not just because of Spanish being the language that allows [the activists] to communicate with each other. As I explained in the book, I go off of the premise that this latest wave of global feminism, which we could call fourth-wave feminism, started in Argentina in 2015 with #NiUnaMenos.

As several of the characters [in the book] in different countries point out, some of the earliest beginnings of their own movements—whether in Chile or in Mexico or in Spain—looked at Argentina and said, “Let’s try to do something similar here,” obviously responding to their own context and history. I think the countries I look at—along with me being lucky enough to be there between the years of 2015 and 2020—are also countries in which we could see the most vibrant and effective feminist movements over the last few years. They’re where feminist movements had the biggest cultural and legal impacts.

In terms of including multiple generations, I thought it was really important to show the historical continuity between movements for democracy that spread all over the region, especially in the 1980s. Having stories from women who were active either in guerrilla movements in the late ’60s and early ’70s, or pushing for transitions to democracy in the late ’70s early ’80s, shows that there’s still an alignment between younger feminists and older feminists.

NF: In your introduction, you say you document these stories hoping to inspire American feminists to organize their own similar transformative movements in the US. Do you believe that is possible?

MB: The guiding question behind the book was: why were these movements able to be so transformative in Latin America, Spain, and why did this not happen in the US? And it’s not a question I can fully answer because I’m not really looking at North American feminisms, and that’s not my area of expertise.

But I do think that what makes Latin American feminisms stand out is the fact that it is rooted in an economic critique much more so than more popular feminism that we see in the US. American feminism does a great job of looking at culture and really targeting that. But at least its mainstream iteration doesn’t take that further step [of examining class dynamics], whereas Latin American feminist movements are inherently anti-capitalist.

I wanted to avoid making a value judgment and comparing movements because they exist to serve different purposes. But, yes, #NiUnaMenos and other movements that emerged around it in Latin America later are quite comprehensive in that they’re looking at economic systems and political systems. I don’t know if we see anything similar in the US. But I did mention in the introduction that in 2017 a group of feminists, including Angela Davis and Nancy Fraser all pointed to #NiUnaMenos as an inspiration that could be used in the US to try to form a bigger resistance, especially against Donald Trump at the time, and the global right generally.

NF: In the last five years, it really feels like liberal feminism has won in the US, meaning that a movement that was supposed to be transformative for everyone has been captured by a more capitalist individualism ideology centered around advancing individualism rather than building collective power. How can a feminist project for society both protect women’s rights to autonomy while not falling into the trap of individualism?

MB: What I found especially interesting about these movements that I was studying is how they are able to find a balance between those two things. Basically they’re saying: “we’re going to take bodily autonomy as the first step to tackle all of these other progressive issues.” Feminism shouldn’t stop at bodily autonomy, it shouldn’t just be about protecting women from domestic violence or ensuring reproductive choice. That’s just the first step.

These movements effectively communicate the fact that gender is at the heart of everything. It’s the first way that inequality exists. Even before class and race, gender was the first way that humans were divided. So it’s at the heart of everything, and you can’t really tackle economic inequality or racism if you don’t look at gender too. These movements are able to bridge that need between personal autonomy and collective action.

Recently this can be seen especially in Chile and Argentina—these movements bring all of this back to affordability, which now is becoming a main issue on the left, including in the US. And I’m not sure the left in the US is doing as good of a job connecting it to gender issues. If women don’t have any economic power, obviously they won’t have any freedom of choice anywhere else. So [autonomy and collective action] have to be connected.

NF: In your book, you write about the transformative feeling of being around other women fighting for women’s rights, in a physical space that has been organized by women. The success of these movements wasn’t just about whether things changed legislatively, but also about coming together after femicides, or to advocate for abortion rights, and how women felt about that coming together. Could you talk a little about the choice to write up these moments in this way?

MB: I discovered grassroots feminism when I moved to Argentina in 2013 and it was eye-opening. It was really special. I went to an encuentro nacional, and I had never been around so many women in my life. And it’s true, until you’ve experienced it, it is very easy to think that all of your concerns or questions are very individual things. And then to realize that they’re not—it changes your life. There are so many assemblies and encuentros, there are so many different vehicles for actually being around people and discovering different issues that otherwise you might not necessarily confront in your own life because you come from a particular social class. The fact that these movements exist in such a way that allows for this kind of communion, and that you have the opportunity to meet people face-to-face, in person, is very powerful.

NF: Your book shows how violence against women can be a catalyst for local movements to articulate that gendered violence is a global epidemic. Why do you think it is important to connect the local to the macro?

MB: The concern that I had in writing a book like this was that it would be too easy for people in the US or even Europe to say, “Well, femicide or gender-based violence is a macho issue that you only see in Latin America.” I think that’s a tendency that we see in those countries. So it was very important for me to make the point that this is absolutely a global issue that’s manifested everywhere. In fact, if you look at rates of femicide per capita, they’re lower in Argentina than they are in the US. So it’s definitely inaccurate to say that it’s more of an issue in certain parts of Latin America.

I think also what spurred me to get into the subject initially was in around 2015, 2016, when #NiUnaMenos was getting some media attention in the US and in Europe, I was a bit concerned by a lot of the framings. I can’t remember the exact wording, but there was one Reuters article that said it’s due to macho violence that makes women especially vulnerable to violence. And when you frame it that way, it makes it sound like something essentially Latin American, which isn’t accurate. Gender violence exists everywhere, and obviously there are different factors compounding it in different locations, but calling it something Latino or macho is completely wrong. So I think it was important in the book to make that quite clear.

NF: And of course, in the US, there is no legal concept of femicide. Do you think that also affects how Americans see gender violence in their own country?

MB: Absolutely. And the history of the word “femicide” is fascinating because it did originally exist in English, and then it was Latin American feminists who took it and expanded its definition to point out how it’s not just the murder of a woman because she’s a woman, it’s also state violence. It’s a state of impunity that allows this to happen.

This was a long battle that feminists, first in Mexico and then around the region, had to wage in order to get femicide to become a widely adopted term. And as you say, now that’s reflected in policy. I think that’s a huge difference between the US and Latin America, whether femicide is seen as a political issue. It’s politicized. There are laws addressing it in Latin America. That’s not the case in the US. The fact that the word doesn’t exist [in the legal system] means that the US is not looking at the murder of women as a political issue that should be addressed. It is just fodder for true crime, and I think that’s hugely problematic.

NF: In the book, you vividly describe the women in Argentina wearing the green bandanas that are a signature of their reproductive rights movement. Your descriptions inspired me to wear mine more often because those women emphasized the importance of wearing their beliefs openly. How effective do you think that this tactic was?

MB: I’m friends with a few Argentine feminists who handed me the bandana, and it was clearly such a source of pride. It’s wild how around 2018, everyone had them. Even mannequins in storefront windows had them. It was so ubiquitous, and fed into this real sense that this movement could be transformative.

But what also struck me is that I went back to Argentina in 2024 to do some reporting and met up with a few friends, they said they were now afraid to wear the bandana, ever since [Javier] Milei had been elected and there was such a reactionary backlash. I think the contrast between those two moments really shows how it was a very important moment.

In my book, I talk a lot about the Argentinian movement for abortion as a media story, as an effective media campaign. And I think the ubiquity of those green bandanas was part of this incredibly effective media strategy. They were everywhere, all over the press, and I think that partly convinced a right-wing president [President Mauricio Macri] at the time to say, “OK, let’s go. Let’s open up a congressional debate about abortion.” There were several other reasons why [Macri] did: his ratings were in the toilets, and he was trying to find something to redress his image. But it worked. Without this incredibly powerful image of thousands and at one point a million girls in the street wearing these green bandanas, I don’t know if that would have happened.

This just in: You are paying for the rollout of the GOP’s midterm messaging from the White House. A trio of election-season spots casting President Donald Trump as the savior of a communist-besieged America and the defender of its libertarian birthright hit the airwaves recently, once more splattering the commander in chief’s visage across the great and good republic of television. But instead of running with the standard funding disclaimer supplied by a dummy super PAC, these ads fade out under a screen legend that reads “paid for by the US government.”

The ads are clear violations of appropriations law prohibiting the federal government from spending money for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, also argued in a post on X that the White House ad offensive “may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” in addition to violating the Hatch Act, which forbids government officials from electioneering on federal property. As is now the norm for reports on Trump administration criminality, the White House responded with glorified social-media trolling. In response to press queries about the initial spot that first aired last Wednesday, which features Trump delivering a McCarthyite tirade about the yoked menaces of socialism and communism, over a chorus of the JMSN song “Love Me,” White House flacks claimed, farcically, that it was part of a series of “public service announcements” designed to whip up patriotic fervor. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic,” a White House spokesperson whinged in a trademark quasi-bullying flourish. “We should be proud of our country.”

In other words, the Trump administration seeks to dismiss charges that it’s engaging in illegal propaganda by engaging in more propaganda. What’s more, its ostensible message of national pride is distinctly undercut by Trump’s unhinged invocation of the phantom menace of a threatened communist takeover of the country, aired against rapid-cut footage of him at rallies and campaign events: The overriding message here isn’t patriotism but militant paranoia. The spot culminates in the imperial imagery of military aircraft flying overhead as UFC chief executive Dana White praises the president as “the toughest, most resilient person I’ve ever met, and nothing is going to stop him from fighting for the country he loves so much.” Amid all of this command-and-control footage, the only salient patriotic sentiment is that ascribed to the country’s maximum leader. Far from schooling American citizens in the love of country, the spot harps on the central message of the soundtrack: “Love Me.” (JMSN, for his part, has threatened legal action in his own social-media response to the ad, writing that “the President illegally use[d] the song without asking.”)

In its second spot, the White House notionally sought to establish a more conventional civic backdrop, featuring Trump delivering his remarks commemorating the nation’s semiquincentennial anniversary at Mt. Rushmore. There’s much boilerplate invocation of the country’s heritage of liberty, but here, too, the main takeaway is the central theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign: “This is the beginning of the Golden Age in America.” It’s also noteworthy that the 2026 Mt. Rushmore address marked the introduction of Trump and the GOP’s red-baiting midterms crusade, with the president announcing, in pure hallucinatory fashion, that “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.” (Trump had also used the same setting to publicize the alleged runaway threat of “left-wing cultural revolution” during yet another Fourth of July address at the height of the Black Lives Matter uprising, again deploying the symbolism of patriotic belonging to unleash a barrage of propagandistic persecution fantasies. For all his manifest cognitive shortcomings, the guy never deviates from his prefab frighten-the-horses talking points.) There’s little doubt that the hardcore legion of MAGA faithful targeted by these appeals, which began running on the ultra-MAGA network Newsmax, would immediately pick up on these visual callouts to Trump’s lurches into Roy Cohn–branded demagogy.

In any event, the third installation in these publicly funded pieces of MAGA agitprop definitely lays to rest all the empty blather about their serving as PSAs. This one is a modified version of a 2024 campaign pitch that Trump had posted in real time on his Truth Social account. “This is the final battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government,” Trump threatens with zero self-awareness over grainy black-and-white footage of him striding purposefully through the “Presidential Walk of Fame” he installed in the White House’s West Wing Colonnade. “We will drive out the globalists, cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”

Not exactly the stuff of a State Department filmstrip produced for anodyne consumption in middle-school civics classes—or even a vintage Cold War Voice of America broadcast. These taxpayer-funded spots are a clear expression of the prime directive Trump declared to the crowd at his midterm convention in Dallas earlier this month: “Pretend like I’m on the ballot.” And that’s why, as brazenly illegal and authoritarian as the provenance of these spots is, they seem likely to backfire. Trump is now stupendously unpopular, with inflation, his war in Iran, his callous indifference to the financial plight of working Americans, his rampant kleptocratic self-dealing, and his clueless protectionist manipulation of the nation’s supply chain all plunging him toward the lowest depths in presidential approval polling plumbed during the last days of George W. Bush’s disastrous second term. The real messaging behind these high-paranoid vindications of his maximal power are equivalent to his thuggish efforts to force the runaway buildout of AI data centers on the heartland redoubts of MAGA Nation: You’ll take whatever plutocratic bullshit flits across my brainpan and like it—if you know what’s good for you.

Indeed, the White House’s brazen Pravda-style adoption of this televisual campaign to remind the MAGA faithful that Trump is, and always has been, their designated savior is actually a sign of political weakness—a telltale admission that this fundamental Trumpian pitch isn’t landing as it used to with the party’s base. Politico reports that even the diehard MAGA “Joes”—the Trump superfans who trek across the country to be seen in the front row at his rallies and official events—are decidedly souring on the man’s governing record. Trisha Hope, a Joe who fell so hard for Trump the first time out that she published a book with the sadly self-explanatory title Just the Tweets, and used the proceeds from its sales to fund her front-row cheerleading expeditions, now calls Trump “a fraud and a liar.” Citing his serial failures to come clean on the Jeffrey Epstein papers as well as the war in Iran, she says, “If we do lose the midterms and he is impeached again, I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment.” Rick Frazier, one of the founding Joes, expresses the same sense of disenchantment. “Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex…those are big noes for me,” he says. “I’m to the point of not going to the polls in November.” If that sentiment is creeping into the front row of Trump rallies, all the alarmist commie-baiting propaganda in the world isn’t going to dispel the spread of similar misgivings in the back of the room.

Over the past few weeks, employees and executives at leading tech companies have offered stark warnings that the development of artificial intelligence is running far ahead of humanity’s ability to control it, and that the chances of an extinction-level error are alarmingly high. Whether or not this is actually true, many have drawn comparisons between the current panic and that over the atomic bomb in the 1940s, when leading scientists warned that the new weapon needed to be controlled and tightly regulated by an international alliance if humanity were to avoid destroying itself.

As the discourse has picked up on those parallels, I have often thought of a Nation editorial published just days after the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In “One World or None,” the magazine’s then-editor, Freda Kirchwey, laid out her belief that unless a truly empowered international governing body was put in charge of the bomb, the end of humanity would be a question of when rather than if. “The atomic bomb represents a revolution in science—the greatest revolution ever accomplished,” Kirchwey wrote. “It calls for a comparable revolution in men’s thinking and in their capacity for political and social readjustment.”

In 1946, a book also titled One World or None, a collection of essays by leading scientific and cultural figures like Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Walter Lippmann, and others, warning about the technology’s potentially devastating power, became a bestseller and was subsequently turned into a terrifying short film by the same name, which is still worth watching today.

In the 80 years since Hiroshima, with some too-readily-forgotten close calls in between, little has been done to weaken the “One World or None” argument. Today, the spiraling chaos of the global order makes it hard to say Kirchwey’s argument has been proven wrong. And, of course, should the worst occur, there likely wouldn’t be anybody around to affirm she got it right.

Struck, like many, by some of the parallels between that moment and this—scientists warning of catastrophe, officials promising prosperity, rival powers unwilling to slow down—I wanted to see what other writers in The Nation were saying at a time of widespread uncertainty about whether humanity’s capacity for cooperation could keep pace with technological innovation. As one writer in the magazine put it in 1945, “The prime question facing us today is whether or not we can save ourselves from being blown to bits.”

A few weeks after Hiroshima, the magazine ran “Everybody’s Atom,” by J.D. Bernal, an Irish chemist and physicist who had contributed important scientific knowledge for the D-Day landings in 1944. “People have been quick to see how the actuality of the atomic bomb has implicitly changed the whole existence of man in this universe,” Bernal noted. It was clear that the use of the bomb had helped bring the destructive war to a conclusion, but it was far less clear how the supposedly positive benefits of the technology would come to fruition. Popular hope for the technology remained weak, even while officials insisted it would lead to universal liberation and prosperity. The reason for that, to Bernal’s mind, was that “though the people may have little experience of the behavior of atoms, they have considerable experience of the behavior of men, corporately and individually.”

Always, in the past, scientific advances had contributed to “human destruction,” Bernal noted, a record that boded ill “for the beneficent use of these more powerful forces.”

Contrary to President Harry S. Truman’s suggestion that the US government should be the “trustees of this new force,” Bernal, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, argued that all humanity, not just one government or even, as Kirchwey suggested, a consortium of governments, had to be in control of the new technology. “Good will is not enough,” the scientist warned, in guiding a vast civilizational effort to harness “a concentration of energy on the order of a million times greater than any we have had before.”

By October of 1945, The Nation’s embrace of world government as a practical solution for the problem of potentially life-effacing weapons had somewhat abated. When a conference on the question, held in a small New Hampshire town, called for world government, a Nation editorial described the notion as, for the moment, unfeasible, even fantastical, not least because the dropping of the atomic bomb had exacerbated growing tensions between the West and the Soviet Union, whereas easing them would have been necessary for an international effort to harness the power of the bomb. On both sides of the divide, The Nation noted, “the immediate fears of a possible foe are politically more potent than the more distant fear of atomic destruction.”

A similar dynamic pertains to today, wherein companies and governments hurtling headlong into an AI-dominated future claim that without external regulation they cannot afford to slow down while others press ahead. The immediate fears of corporate and geopolitical foes are more potent than the comparably distant fear of AI-triggered total destruction.

In November 1945, a short essay appeared in the magazine reviewing several newly published books that touched on the development of atomic energy. Benjamin Harrow, a chemist and science writer, noted that “never before have so many of the beautiful discoveries of science been pooled to reach one overpowering climax.” The possibilities were astonishing, both for good and for ill: “[G]iven a catalytic push in one direction, it should bring happiness to mankind, but pushed in the wrong direction, it may well mean the end of this planet.”

Read now, these pieces show how quickly the argument moved from ambitious and hopeful solutions to narrow and ultimately temporary ones. As we watch the current race to build ever more capable AI models, it is worth remembering what became of the hopes of 1945. The international cooperation that Kirchwey and Bernal called for was swallowed within months by the politics of the Cold War, which would end up bringing the world to the brink of annihilation more than once. Even then, the fate of the world stayed in human hands. Someone had to give the order, and on a few important occasions, someone refused.

With AI, we are preparing to give up even that last modicum of control. Halting these development efforts now would take the kind of gargantuan global effort that Kirchwey and others called for in 1945. Alas, we have even more experience today of the “behavior of men, corporately and individually,” as the Marxist scientist J.D. Bernal put it in his post-Hiroshima Nation essay, and it’s hard to hold out much hope that this new technology will be put to benevolent purposes.

A new lawsuit alleging that a former Cornell student was drugged and gang-raped by several members of the Chi Phi fraternity has generated national attention after The Cornell Daily Sun broke the story. On September 14, the student, identified only as Jane Doe in court filings, sued Cornell University and law enforcement officials for neglecting to protect her and investigate the sexual assault case sufficiently. Among the civil complaint’s defendants are Cornell, Chi Phi fraternity organizations, and seven current and former students. An attorney for one of the individuals named in the suit has denied the allegations against his client.

After the alleged incident, which the plaintiff said occurred in October 2024 over the course of multiple hours, the university barred the Cornell Chi Phi chapter. However, according to the DA, none of the individuals allegedly involved faced criminal charges.

The student newspaper, the Daily Sun, played a critical role in illuminating the school’s mismanagement of the 2024 sexual assault allegations. The paper’s reporting cited claims that the accused students were allowed to mitigate their conduct by writing essays, which fueled widespread community backlash and helped spark the media scrutiny preceding the Tompkins County district attorney’s reopening of the case.

In a September 21 editorial, the Daily Sun’s editorial board criticized the university’s handling of sexual assault and called for greater transparency surrounding the case.

“Cornell has failed to protect its students. Cornell has failed to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campus with its pathetic task force. Cornell has failed the student allegedly raped by those seven men at Chi Phi in October 2024. Cornell has failed her. Cornell has failed us,” the board wrote.

“To Matthew Ingalls, Jonathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar: We know who you are and we refuse to let you benefit from this University’s concealment,” the editorial continued, listing all of the men named in the suit.

The editorial called on Cornell to publish the standard by which suspensions in sexual-assault cases are lifted and to share with Jane Doe the outcome of her Title IX investigation.

Inside Cornell, the allegations have fueled anger and demands for greater accountability from the university.

“As a female student, I am repulsed and disgusted by the Cornell administration’s response—or lack thereof—to the rape case,” said Cornell student Adalena Crotty. “Cornell, along with many institutions, needs reform in policy as well as leadership, not only in regard to sexual violence but as a system as a whole. This particular instance, which unfortunately is not unique or a lone occurrence, shines a light on the consistent protection of perpetrators and the brushing off of survivors.”

But the outrage was not contained to campus. Cornellians Only, a social-media page that boasts more than 14,000 followers and mainly posts Cornell updates to the student body, knew the story had taken off when comments from the general public began flooding its Instagram posts from months and even years prior. The comments were all about the case. “We’re getting a notification almost every second,” an admin from the account said. The page has been actively reporting on the case as new details have been released.

In response to the uproar, Cornell publicly confirmed that its Title IX process resulted in expulsions and suspensions and said Chi Phi remained banned. On September 28, the Daily Sun reported that Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten had reopened the criminal investigation, saying his office was reviewing whether additional evidence could change its earlier assessment. No decision on criminal charges has been made.

As the reporting about Cornell’s leniency spreads, students and community organizers have begun mobilizing in turn. Across social media, students have reposted information about the allegations, including a Cornellians Only statement saying, “Cornellians Only stands with survivors of sexual assault and supports the right to speak openly about safety and accountability,” after Instagram first removed their post about the lawsuit. Others have created their own posts drawing attention to the case.

One Instagram video uploaded by Cornell student Nigel Tatem details the university’s track record of endangering its students—whether it be by targeting peaceful demonstrators or failing victims of sexual assault. In October 2024, the same month that Jane Doe was allegedly raped, Cornell issued three-year campus bans to four students who pushed past police officers at a pro-Palestinian protest.

Meanwhile, as of September 21, two of the accused perpetrators were listed as current students and one had reportedly graduated from Cornell. “They don’t care about [a] conviction. They care about control,” Tatem said.

In a comment that received more than 5,000 likes under his post, former Cornell student Claire Ting wrote, “Every year that I was at Cornell, I knew someone who had become a victim. Every single year.”

For other students, particularly women involved in Greek life, the case has also changed how safe they feel in their everyday social lives at the university.

“Any guy we surround ourselves with can commit an act like this,” said Sylvia Brock, a Cornell student involved in Greek life. “I know those guys in Chi Phi probably had close friendships with members of the sororities they mixed with before it all happened. You can never be too careful. Being in a sorority and spending time around a lot of fraternities, I don’t know if I can say that I feel protected by my school.”

A rally titled “We Demand Answers!” is scheduled for October 13 at 3 pm on or near Cornell’s campus and is being organized by activists unaffiliated with the university. “We are currently constructing a list of trauma-informed demands informed by Jane Doe for the walkout, advocating for things she wants,” said Ray Epstein, an organizer and sexual-assault prevention advocate. Epstein also founded Student Activists Against Sexual Assault while a student at Temple University.

Epstein hopes the case prompts universities to reconsider how they measure and communicate campus safety. “Rape is not a personal or campus issue,” she said. “People need to realize this happens at their alma mater even if it’s not Cornell, and that it requires systemic change,”

Finley Muratova, another organizer and Title IX advocate said, “The rally is being organized through the power of social media. We discovered a flyer [for the rally] from an advocate from New Jersey [on Instagram], and we all joined forces to organize the event. My personal mission is to ensure that Cornell knows that we are not going to back down. There needs to be reform in Title IX, the Cornell Division of Public Safety, and we must ensure that this never happens again. One victim is one too many.”

October 13 unfortunately falls during Cornell’s fall break, complicating the idea of a student “walkout.” A member of Students for a Democratic Cornell (SDC) said multiple Cornell student organizations were separately meeting to discuss a student-organized action at a later date.

That mobilization gained another dimension on September 27 when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared in downtown Ithaca for a “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall cohosted by More Perfect University, SDC, Cornell’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, and Cornell Graduate Students United. The New York representative began the event by discussing the lawsuit, condemning what she described as a “culture of rape” at elite institutions.

“AOC’s critiques of Cornell were really powerful, especially when she talked about the disgusting absurdity of letting rapists off with a slap on the wrist,” Jack Huber, a member of SDC, said. “It was a very strong choice to begin her remarks with Cornell’s rape case because it shows that she does really care about the Cornell community.”

For Huber, hearing a national political figure discuss the controversy changed the scale of what had been unfolding around him on campus.

“Having your strong beliefs being shared on the national stage is both reassuring and hopeful. When you have someone like Congresswoman AOC on stage going hard on Cornell for the atrocious mistakes it has made surrounding the culture of sexual violence and the suppression of student voices, the administration is terrified. Cornell is bleeding right now, and it was a very remarkable feeling to see that people are waking up.” Huber said. “They are going to pay attention.”

The first serious, adult book I can remember reading was Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser. Ironically, I read it in high school while working at a fast-food sandwich shop. As a 16-year-old in Iowa, I was captivated by its deconstruction of systems I had taken for granted. I read it in chunks during slow periods, sitting atop a stack of pop machine syrups in the back.

Page by page, Schlosser lifted the veil on the world around me. He also planted a seed, a way of seeing the world that would forever shape me and countless others who could never see their food the same way again. In 2024, I published my own book, Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. It felt fitting that Schlosser wrote the foreword, because the book would not exist without him.

On September 22, Mariner Books published the 25th-anniversary edition of Fast Food Nation. Reading the book again, it’s impossible not to see this bestselling exposé of how the fast-food industry has reshaped America and the world as a modern classic. This anniversary edition includes an excellent new afterword in which Schlosser extends his indictment of industrial food and corporate power into the present. I recently spoke with Schlosser about the new edition. Here is an edited, condensed version of our conversation.

—Austin Frerick

Austin Frerick: After rereading Fast Food Nation, I was struck by how much traveling you did for this book. What was your most memorable moment or person during these reporting trips?

Eric Schlosser: Kenny Dobbins, whom I wrote about, just had one injury after another, stayed loyal to the company, and was then completely discarded. I stayed in touch with him after the book’s publication, and I tried to help in different ways, and he’s gone. His wife is gone. His two children that I got to know are gone, and it’s a story of poverty in America because they all had health issues and poor healthcare. I deliberately structured the book so all roads lead to the slaughterhouse, borrowing from Upton Sinclair the idea of the slaughterhouse as a metaphor for monopoly capitalism.

I went in as a worker. But none of that stayed with me or haunted me the way the injury of these meatpacking workers has. These are basically manual laborers who get injured and discarded and will never be able to do manual labor again. And the whole system is so rigged against them that I think it’s a misnomer to call these industrial accidents. If you’re walking down the street, slip on a banana peel, and break your coccyx, that’s an accident. If people in a factory are injured again and again, in exactly the same way over the course of years, that’s not an accident. That’s a business decision.

AF: The Obama and Biden administrations talked a lot about reforming the meat industry. What did you make of their efforts?

ES: In terms of OSHA, I think Obama and Biden both really tried through OSHA to hold these companies accountable, and there were efforts to strengthen regulations. But OSHA has just been so gutted and underfunded for decades now. I think the food industry’s power in Washington and Congress severely limited what Obama and Biden could do, and they weren’t ultimately willing to spend the political capital to get it done. And I think Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a truly despicable human being, but he had the nerve to speak out about the industrial food system, and I think that really helped Trump get elected.

I would urge politicians in both parties to look at opinion polls on what Americans think about their food and support for healthy, unprocessed food in schools, et cetera. I think it’s a potent political issue that most politicians in both parties won’t go near because they take so much money from the Big Ag companies. It certainly worked for Teddy Roosevelt, and it’s an issue that’s just waiting for someone with the courage to really take it on.

AF: You discuss the emergence of MAHA in the new afterword. Why do you think it became such a powerful force?

ES: I think people care about their food, and they care about their children’s food. It’s encouraging that political capital awaits someone willing to use it in a real, disciplined way, as opposed to the MAHA movement, whose leadership is just a way to get votes for Trump. The idea that Bobby Kennedy is going to achieve anything on food other than getting the food coloring out of breakfast cereal, which is a nice thing but is not going to help much. The fundamental changes we need won’t happen in the Trump administration, when every single cabinet position has basically been handed over to industry. You’ve got the chemical industry running the EPA. You’ve got the oil industry running the Department of the Interior, and the FDA right now is headed by an attorney who represented an infant formula manufacturer in a major lawsuit over potentially contaminated infant formula. I don’t see the change coming from MAHA, but I think it’s interesting what it’s revealed about public opinion and the opportunity that awaits.

AF: As you prepare to reissue this book, what struck you most when you went back and reread it 25 years later?

ES: I interviewed countless, probably hundreds of meatpacking workers and attorneys representing injured workers and activists campaigning on behalf of meatpacking workers and undocumented workers, and in all that time and in all that immersion in the realm of American meatpacking, I never heard a single story of child labor, and I can guarantee you that if there was child labor going on in those communities, I would have heard about it. Today, not only are there some cases of child labor, but child labor has basically become endemic in the meatpacking industry. There’s a whole section in Fast Food Nation about what the worst job in the slaughterhouse is.

AF: Yes, you called this. It was the most eerie thing to reread.

ES: And to think that the worst, most dangerous job in the slaughterhouse is the one that’s now being performed by 13-, 14-, 15-year-old kids. The mantra is we’re back to The Jungle, and it’s true. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And in the op-ed I wrote for The New York Times, if you go back 40 years, 45 years, the top four meatpacking companies controlled a small share of the beef market; it was a truly competitive market. The jobs were union jobs, well paid. We ate more beef, and we had twice as many ranchers as today. So, none of the changes can be justified based on efficiency or progress.

These changes have occurred for the sake of corporate profits, not for the sake of consumers, not for the sake of workers, not for the sake of ranchers or our landscape. I am hopeful the change can still happen, but at the same time, it’s incredible that 25 years later, I’m still saying the same things. I wish the book were totally out of date, and I’m proud of what I wrote, but I wish it were like a historical document of antiquarian interest. And sadly, it’s not.

AF: Another thing that struck me rereading it was your visit to Plauen in the former East Germany. You wrote then that inequality and stagnation had sown the ground for extremism. I should note that in the most recent city council elections in 2024, the AfD won the most votes. Why did you include that section originally?

ES: Because I needed to show the impact of this fast-food system, this industrial food system, this culture of homogenization, on the rest of the world. The Plauen visit occurs in a chapter on globalization, and I’m so glad I chose Plauen because it wound up resonating on so many levels. I almost went to Tahiti because I was looking for the most unlikely, far-flung McDonald’s you could ever think of. But I’m really glad I didn’t do that, because it would have been clever, but it really wouldn’t be as important or as resonant as this sad little town in East Germany, where you see one ideology after another pass through it, sometimes with horrible, horrible effects.

I drove around East Germany for that reporting, and you could really feel, even 25 years ago, the way that these people had been abandoned. Firstly, the way that they’ve been treated under a totalitarian government, but then also the discrimination against people from the East and the kind of snobbery toward people in East Germany that many West Germans felt. You could just feel that it was a breeding ground for extremism. But they could not have been warmer to me, and it’s just a sad story, and we’re seeing it play out right now with the rise—the return of fascism to Germany.

AF: Notably, you mentioned an event in Tucson where someone assaulted you. Can you talk more about that?

ES: It was just a surreal experience. I was walking back to my rental car in a parking lot when I felt someone grab me from behind. Someone put me in a headlock and yelled at me, “Why do you hate America so much?” Beforehand, I was criticizing the fast-food chains and the meatpacking industry at this food conference. He had seen me, and it must have provoked him, and he just grabbed me. His wife was there, and she started yelling at him, “Let go of him! Let go of him!” I got out of the headlock and confronted him, and it was just crazy. I wasn’t hurt, but it was bizarre.

There was a time when I was speaking at college campuses and making bookstore appearances where I would have armed security with me. When I went to Indiana for a college appearance, state police met me, and an officer accompanied me until I left Indiana. These are very, very, very powerful corporations, and for all their talk about freedom, they don’t want to be criticized. But I guess it goes with the territory. If you’re going to write about these subjects, you should expect some pushback.

AF: On a different note, when did you realize this book had hit a chord with folks?

ES: The first reading I did for the book was at a Barnes and Noble in Maryland. More employees than customers were listening to me. I remember a sea of empty folding chairs and a handful of employees who were either interested in the book or felt bad for me. Then I did an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, and NPR stations and independent bookstores picked up the book, and it began to snowball. It really was the independent bookstores. I give enormous credit to Fresh Air and Terry Gross. The book came out in January of 2001, and George W. Bush had just taken power. In my view, he was not elected president, and people were beginning to wonder what was going on. I think the book’s timing contributed a lot to its success.

All the New York publishing houses turned it down, and I got pretty much the same reaction: Nobody wants to read a book about food unless it has recipes. But Eamon Dolan, an editor at Houghton Mifflin, one of the last independent publishing houses in Boston, took a real risk on the book when no one else would. It wasn’t a hotly anticipated book that people were competing for, and no one thought it would be a success.

I also feel like I helped open the door for other people who wanted to question the food system. My book’s success made it easier for others to secure book contracts and get attention for their work. If the publishing world’s accepted opinion was that nobody would read a book on food, that was the mentality in 1998 when I was trying to get a book contract. Now there are bookshelves of great books on food, and so many important books, including one called Barons.

Anthony Bourdain, too. His book Kitchen Confidential came out maybe six or eight months before mine, and he wasn’t really critiquing the food system, but he was offering a very iconoclastic vision of what we eat. Bourdain and I even did an event together, and he was terrific. I was invited to speak with him at a fast-food convention. It was Bourdain and me against the fast-food industry, and we took them on. It was a really enjoyable experience. And then we went out to a bar afterward and just hung out. I gave Bourdain a lot of shit, and he gave me shit because he thought I was too much of a do-gooder. I gave him shit because I thought he was just a hipster foodie, and it was affectionate. I really liked him a lot, and we really got along.

I never spoke to him again, and what’s interesting is that I was giving him shit for basically not knowing the world beyond Manhattan and for being too focused on foodie stuff, and he wound up being amazing. He wound up traveling the world. He wound up really creating enormous empathy for food workers and for protecting indigenous foodways and food cultures.

AF: We recently lost Wendell Berry. I know you interviewed him at Johns Hopkins University a few years ago. How has his work shaped you and this book?

ES: I think Wendell is one of our greatest writers, and what’s even more impressive about him is that he was not only a great writer but also a great man. Those two qualities so rarely coexist. He was just funny, self-deprecating, and profound. I had the great privilege not only of reading his work and benefiting from it, but also of sitting at the table with him and seeing in him a role model not only for how to write but also for how to be and how to treat the people around you.

AF: In a May 2011 interview at the 92nd Street Y, you compared the fast-food industry to the British Empire just before World War I, describing it as powerful yet rife with contradictions that would lead to its undoing. How would you describe it now?

ES: Gosh, I have absolutely no memory of saying that or of that analogy. But damn, it’s pretty good. It’s kind of playing out in the data. I would say the fast-food industry is like the British Empire right before World War II. Why? It’s still holding on to all that territory, and the British Empire got bigger after World War I. It got all this territory in the Middle East, and yet its foundation was really weak. We’re now seeing the enormous cost, and the next system will be more sustainable.

AF: We know the oligarchs are in full control right now in DC, but what can folks do locally to fight back?

ES: Do not give your money to these fast-food chains or to the industrial meat system. To the degree that you can, buy local and buy from smaller companies, and you’re supporting a different system. It’s easier for me to do this along the central coast of California than it is in Minnesota, where, in the winter, it’s tough to buy fruits and vegetables locally. But I think that every dollar is a vote for a certain company, a certain system. However, I really don’t think we can shop our way out of this situation. I think you have to be an enlightened consumer, but you also have to be a citizen involved in the political process. And I just mentioned Minnesota. The way the people of Minnesota stood up to ICE was profoundly inspiring, and I think that’s a model of how ordinary people can defy authoritarian and totalitarian systems.

AF: Finally, could you tell us about your next book?

ES: My next book has been in the works for decades. I’ve been visiting prisons throughout the United States since the early 1990s, and my next book is about what we’ve chosen to do to the poor, people of color, and people with mental health issues.

I think what I’ve been doing is writing America’s history in my lifetime. The fast-food industry rose to power in my lifetime, and so did the prison system. When I was a kid, we were closing prisons throughout the United States. Ronald Reagan, as the governor of California, not only proudly closed prisons but was also responsible for the first prisoners’ Bill of Rights. You just need to go back to the 1980s, when all these authoritarian systems were renewed.