Surprisingly, there are some lies so outrageous that even Sean Hannity is reluctant to endorse them.

As expected, Donald Trump’s address to the nation on Thursday night was a farrago of nonsense promoting his conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Trump has been pushing this lie since the moment he lost that race, and, as his latest speech showed, even his victory in 2024 wasn’t enough to stop him from trying to rig American election laws to favor the Republican Party.

The speech was long on claims of shadowy conspiracies by China and the Deep State and short on actual evidence. While Trump presented China as the main threat, he also alluded to possible election hacks by North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela. None of these claims were credible.

In fact, the speech was so disgracefully packed with lies that even some of the president’s most loyal lapdogs decided to keep their distance from it. Before the speech, Republican officials were already leaking to Politico their concern that Trump was wasting his time rehashing conspiracy theories that appeal to the base rather than offering a positive economic message that would win over moderate voters in the midterms.

Fox News was even more cautious, as The New York Times reports:

Fox News, which paid $787 million to settle a defamation suit over false statements about the 2020 election, took a careful approach in covering Trump’s remarks. Sean Hannity, a Trump ally, said that the president’s claims were “pretty remarkable,” but was careful not to endorse Trump’s allegations. “I’m sure anybody that cares about truth will want to do a deep dive into all of this,” Hannity told viewers.

A Fox News correspondent, Aishah Hasnie, then stated bluntly on-air that the network “is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements and claims at this time.”

The lukewarm response from flunkies like that is telling. They were right to want nothing to do with the speech.

Trump’s allegations added up to virtually nothing. One of the incendiary claims he made was that “raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that Chinese activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.” But as the Times notes, this “raw intelligence” stems from a tip sent to the FBI by someone with no direct knowledge of the claims being made (a “sub source,” in the lingo of law enforcement). Further, “more senior agents questioned whether the source, who was new, was getting good information or random, erroneous gossip.” One reason to be suspicious of this “sub source” was that they also claimed the Chinese government was operating underground military bases in the United States spreading Covid.

Reporters from outlets such as the Times and The Bulwark are doing the necessary but tedious work of fact-checking Trump’s lies. But the main objection to the speech was well made by Senator Mark Warner, who stated:

Trump’s shocking “bombshells” about China are totally bogus. The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election. A single concurring opinion suggested China may have tried to sway voters’ opinions… but that’s been public knowledge since 2021.

Maverick Republican Representative Thomas Massie made a similar objection in more colorful terms, telling MS NOW:  “I don’t think the problem is that our elections aren’t secure because we control the House, Senate, White House, and to some degree we control the Supreme Court. So I ask my Republican colleagues, why are you complaining about election fraud? We won all the damn elections!”

The speech is unlikely to convince anyone who is not already a MAGA diehard. Aside from the fact that Fox News was visibly trying to keep a distance, it was not carried live by ABC, NBC, or CNN. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins offered a perfectly rational explanation for not running the speech: “We’ll be monitoring what the president says tonight, as we always do, but aren’t taking it live, given the president has a well-documented history of saying blatantly false things about elections.” True to form, Trump ranted against two of these networks in the speech, threatening to revoke the licences of ABC and NBC.

But even though the speech was ridiculous, that doesn’t mean it’s not dangerous. He made his outlandish claims as a preemptive move to discredit the results of the midterms. As political scientist Norman Ornstein notes, Trump has ample means to subvert the election:

Trump is trying to lay the groundwork for seizing ballot boxes in key states and congressional districts based on false claims of foreign interference.

Beware of Trump declaring a national emergency and abusing the emergency powers. He has to overturn the legitimate election results. Remember, he also has the power under the telecommunications act of 1934 to seize control of electronic communications outlets.

Deploying military & Homeland Security are clearly dangers we need to face at voting precincts. Blue State governors, secretaries of state, mayors, Attorneys General need to be prepared for this, mobilizing national guards and state and local police to protect their sanctity.

Ornstein’s scenario is a dire one, but it must be taken seriously. The lies in Trump’s speech were clearly made with the intent to destroy faith in the electoral system. But as president, Trump has the power to do more than just make speeches: He can also try to use his executive authority, including his position as commander in chief, to intimidate voters. The coming midterms will, like the 2020 election itself, be a test of American democracy.

Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, long one of the most ardent defenders of US aid to Israel, voted Wednesday to slash that aid. And she was not alone; 103 House Democrats and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie voted for Massie’s amendment to slash almost $3.3 billion in funds for Israel—and their number included House Democratic whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) and the ranking Democrats on a number of key committees.

It was the latest measure of the evolution of the Democratic Party’s stance regarding aid to Israel, which had changed dramatically as the party’s base voters signaled that they cannot accept continued aid to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has been widely accused of committing genocide with a multiyear assault on Palestinians in Gaza.

“For the good of the Israeli people and the Palestinian people, it is clear that US policy must change,” said Pelosi, who explained, “The United States must be a force for security and stability. The American people are rightly demanding an end to a perpetual cycle of war, and the Netanyahu government cannot maintain its current course. “

A bipartisan House majority of 314 still opposed the amendment to block the foreign military aid money from a broader national security spending bill. But the size of the “yes” vote was described by Politico as a “seismic shift” on issues related to Israel and Palestine.

Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Greg Casar agreed, noting on Wednesday, “It used to be that just a small number of House Democrats would vote against sending taxpayer dollars to weapons for the Israeli military. Then, two years ago, 37 House Democrats voted for a measure to not send billions of dollars to the Israeli military. Today, over 100 House Democrats voted for a measure to block billions of dollars in weapons to Netanyahu. That is enormous progress. That is a victory for our movement for security, peace and justice for all people.”

“That,” added Casar, “sends a strong message to Netanyahu that the days are over of an unaccountable blank check to his wars and his war crimes—at least from the Democratic Party.”

But not all Democrats embraced that progress.

And that is going to be an issue in upcoming Democratic primaries.

Minnesota US Representative Angie Craig, who is locked in a competitive August 11 Democratic US Senate primary, voted against the amendment. That prompted her primary rival, Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, to declare, “A vote to send $3.3 billion of taxpayer money to fund additional weapons of war to Benjamin Netanyahu is unconscionable. Enough.”

Michigan US Representative Haley Stevens, who is bidding in the August 4 Democratic US Senate primary against Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, also voted to continue aid to Israel.

“Today, Congresswoman Stevens had a choice: stand with the majority of Democrats who oppose unconditional military aid to Israel, or stand with the special interests funding her campaign,” said El-Sayed. “She chose to side with AIPAC and Republicans to fund a war machine that has taken the loved ones of Michigan families. She made her choice. You make yours.”

In another Michigan race, State Representative Donavan McKinney, a democratic socialist supporter of Palestinian rights, is mounting a serious Democratic primary challenge to incumbent US Representative Shri Thanedar, who voted against cutting aid to Israel. “Once again,” argued McKinney, “Shri Thanedar proved he’d rather spend money dropping bombs on families overseas than help families here at home. It’s unacceptable.”

In Florida, August 18 Democratic primary challenger Oliver Larkin complained that US Representative Jared Moskowitz voted “to continue funding genocide,” while Elijah Manley, who is mounting a primary bid against US Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, said the incumbent “voted to continue to aid Israel, a genocidal regime killing Palestinians in Gaza. Democrats in FL-20 do not support sending funds and weapons to a regime engaged in genocide.”

In Missouri, Democratic US Representative Wesley Bell voted “no” on the amendment and drew an immediate rebuke from former US representative Cori Bush, who is challenging Bell in the St. Louis–area district’s August 4 primary. “The people have spoken. They want to see their tax dollars spent on housing, healthcare, and education here at home, not war and genocide overseas,” said Bush. “Bell’s not listening.”

She also made a connection between the vote to send money overseas and the struggle to meet hometown needs. “For those counting along at home,” Bush said of the money Bell supported sending to Israel, “that’s $3.3 billion more than Bell brought home for St. Louis through HUD disaster recovery funding.”

In Arizona, where he is challenging Democratic incumbent Greg Stanton in a July 21 party primary, veteran activist Kai Newkirk is highlighting the incumbent’s “no” vote as an important issue in the primary. “Greg Stanton has taken over $300K from AIPAC. And today—as so many Americans in our district and across the country struggle to get by—he just voted to send billions more of our tax dollars to Israel to fund their war crimes and genocide,” said Newkirk. “Disgraceful.”

Track AIPAC, the grassroots effort to reveal and counter the influence of AIPAC in American politics and policy making, weighed in with a particularly blunt endorsement of the challenger: “AIPAC’s Greg Stanton voted against cutting aid to Israel today. He has a primary coming up in 6 days. Support Kai Newkirk for Congress to unseat this AIPAC stooge.”

President Donald Trump recently reposted a racist attack against Somali kindergartners. Not adults or teens, but 4- and 5-year-old kids. Girls at a kindergarten graduation ceremony in Minneapolis were singing while wearing hijabs. And in an online video, someone with the moniker End Wokeness argued that this sartorial choice at an event bringing community together and showcasing American diversity signified the collapse of the education system and, by implication, an ongoing fundamentalist religious invasion.

Authoritarianism is defined in part by a gleeful willingness by state actors to scapegoat and direct violence at vulnerable minorities, and the United States is clearly hurtling toward this point.

Trump didn’t author the sniveling commentary on the kindergarten video, but in circulating it on Truth Social to his millions of followers, he gave it a visibility and a weight that it previously lacked. And in using his platform to dehumanize children, he stoked the racial hatreds, the pogromista-attitude, that his movement thrives on and that his goon squad is using to destroy the sense of safety of millions of immigrants.

The latest Trumpian diatribe against Somalis didn’t come in a vacuum. In recent weeks, ICE has been ramping up its odious activities, culminating with its agents killing two people within the span of three days. The first was a middle-aged man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, in Texas—killed in cold blood by ICE agents who, it turns out, were looking for another individual. The second was Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant in small-town Maine. Both were shot in their cars while driving to work; both, ICE has claimed without evidence—threatened officers’ lives.

Let’s be clear: ICE is, as it did in Minneapolis earlier this year, killing with impunity; it is operating more like a paramilitary organization than an accountable federal agency, and it is doing so during a period in which its agents are under relentless pressure from the White House to increase their arrest rates.

To meet their quotas, ICE agents are performing positively Stakhanovite acts of labor heroics. Over the past month, daily arrest rates of immigrants have more than doubled, now hitting more than 2,000 per day. Small wonder that, to meet these targets and make that omelet, some eggs end up getting broken.

Of course, if you’re looking for evidence of authoritarian intent, you don’t have to zero in exclusively on Trump’s escalating war on immigrants. In fact, there’s a smorgasbord of choice these days.

Take the subpoenas issued against New York Times journalists after they reported on the security risks of Trump using the Qatari-donated Air Force One as he left an acrimonious NATO summit. It turns out that accepting a deluxe superjet as a bribe—excuse me, a considerate “gift”—comes with a set of obvious risks.

The Times’ sin wasn’t getting the details wrong; it was showing how poor Trump’s decision to accept the plane as a “gift” was in the first place. And for that, vengeance must be visited upon the newspaper. FBI Director Kash Patel spent eight hours in the White House plotting the administration’s response; and the result was the rash of subpoenas and searches carried out by an organization that is increasingly coming to resemble the secret police of the old Soviet Union and its satellite states—witness the FBI interviewing hundreds of voter registration activists in Ohio over the past month, searching for “fraud” and hoping to intimidate voter mobilization groups nationwide as the midterm elections approach.

Meanwhile, in an act of piracy, Trump announced that the United States would seize control of the Strait of Hormuz and demand that, in exchange for the “security” provided by US military might, the owners of each ship passing through pay a toll to the United States to the tune of 20 percent of the cargo’s value.

Now, I’m not terribly good at foreign languages, but I think this gobbledygook translates roughly to: “We resumed hostilities with Iran because Iran was claiming the right to charge security fees for passage through the Strait, and, as we have repeatedly stated, we believe in the free passage of goods and ships on the high seas; so to enforce that bedrock principle of freedom of navigation, we’re going to charge even more than Iran would have charged.” One doesn’t need a Rosetta Stone to appreciate the linguistic similarities between Trump and, say, Al Capone. This is simply a classic protection racket in violation of both international norms and laws. And, while he rolled this particular piece of lunacy back within 24 hours, in the face of near-universal opprobrium, he quickly moved on, once more threatening the demolition of the country’s civilian infrastructure—an act that would be a clear war crime—if Iran didn’t yield to his demands.

No wonder that the ever more dishonorable Secretary of State Marco Rubio chose this week to announce a campaign by the administration to kill off the International Criminal Court, using diplomatic pressure, sanctions, visa revocations, and other tools to force countries around the world to reject a crucial part of the rules-based international order. There are, here, clearly ghosts of Hitler’s decision to blow up the League of Nations in the early 1930s, and to replace the tools of international diplomacy with the law of the jungle. Turns out, surprise surprise, that fascism in the 2020s really isn’t a whole lot different from, or more sophisticated than, fascism in the 1930s.

Amid the accelerating authoritarianism, however, things aren’t all doom and gloom.

In court after court, Trump is losing his battle to take over the election systems of the 50 states. Now, don’t get me wrong, he may eventually try to do so anyway, judges’ orders notwithstanding, through a nebulous assertion of emergency powers—indeed, his scheduled prime-time speech this Thursday evening may take the country down just this dangerous road. But if he does, he will confront a wall of court decisions from across the country—and it’s hard to see how he could maintain his grip over a system that is united in opposition to his actions and as his already dismal polling numbers drop even further. (In poll after poll, Trump is now roughly 20 points underwater).

Increasingly, on issue after issue, judges also aren’t holding back their disdain for this regime’s efforts to subvert the law. Just look at this week’s scathing ruling on the self-dealing qualities of the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche cooked up this past spring—and Judge Kathleen Williams’s recommendation that the lawyers involved, including Blanche, be disciplined for their actions. For those Senate Republicans already uncomfortable with Blanche’s nomination to remove “acting” from his title, Williams’s recommendation just might give them the cover they need to come down against this preposterous choice.

Then there’s the United Kingdom, where the hard-right populist Nigel Farage’s bubble is bursting in the face of credible allegations that he accepted millions of pounds in “gifts” from several high-profile crypto businessmen and then failed to declare them to Parliament as required. In a stunt, Farage resigned his parliamentary seat, thus triggering a by-election that he hoped he would convincingly win, a result that, he believed, would allow him to emerge from the scandal strengthened as a populist leader who fights the deep-state players conspiring to sabotage his movement. Instead, the other major parties declared that they wouldn’t run against him and left the opposition field to a perennial eccentric candidate named Count Binface.

Binface, who campaigns in one by-election after the next with a giant trash can covering his head, is, in national polls, significantly ahead of Farage, whose support has cratered in the wake of the financial scandal. There haven’t been local polls in Farage’s constituency, but at the last election, Farage only got 46.2 percent of the vote there, and it’s likely his local support has eroded in the wake of the scandal allegations. It is possible that the Reform leader’s ill-conceived decision to trigger a snap by-election in August will result in his loss to a comedian who campaigns on a platform of nationalizing Adele and abolishing video reviews of referees’ calls in soccer games. And even if Farage wins, he’s likely to do so only barely, eking out a win against the most fringe of fringe candidates. Either outcome would be catastrophic to his credibility as a potential future prime minister.

Ten years ago, the United Kingdom and the United States embarked on a disastrous hard-right populist course. In the United Kingdom, Farage spearheaded the Brexit campaign; in the United States, Trump captured the Republican Party. Now, a decade later, Farage’s ability to defy gravity may finally be coming to an end; one can only hope that US voters, too, have also soured on this foul political movement and its avatars.

On March 27, the second anniversary of Win Rozario’s death at the hands of the New York Police Department, his family gathered at Diversity Plaza in Jackson Heights for a public rally. It was one of the first warm days of spring, and Notun Eva Costa, Win’s mother, stood behind a banner reading “Fire Officers Cianfrocco and Alongi.” She was flanked by South Asian elders chanting “Justice for Win Rozario!”

There were a handful of speeches, including one from Public Advocate Jumanee Williams. After each speech concluded, the event’s organizers, who were part of the social justice group known as Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), dutifully reminded the rally’s attendees to take photos, post them on social media, and tag Mayor Zohran Mamdani and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch. Eva, a middle-aged woman with slicked hair and a round face, stood before the cameras with her eyes fixed on the ground.

Behind her stood a taller woman with a comforting hand on Eva’s shoulder. She had a sharp chin, reddish hair, and redder eyes from crying. Juli Chakraborty looked around the crowd frantically, as if trying to determine whether this, too, would become her future as a mother of a son, Jabez Chakraborty, who had nearly been killed by the NYPD.

Roughly two years apart, two Bangladeshi American men were shot by NYPD officers following mental distress–related 911 calls. In the case of 19-year-old Win Rozario, the bullet wounds proved fatal. Twenty-two-year-old Chakraborty survived five gunshots. There is a likeness to the tragedies and their aftermath, including the fact that the victims were both from a small Christian Bangladeshi contingent in Queens. “Although police brutality has been, tragically, experienced heavily by Black and other brown communities, it has not as frequently resulted in officer-caused killings in South Asian communities, particularly for Bangladeshi Christians,” Rebecca Chowdhury, an organizer of DRUM, told me.

Following the shooting of Jabez Chakraborty, Mamdani signed an executive order to form the Office of Community Safety—a partial realization of his campaign promise to mitigate mental-health and other emergencies through non-police means. But the willingness of police, city officials, and mental-health professionals to cross-collaborate has long been a fraught and stalled process, resulting in police-induced deaths of New Yorkers like Win Rozario. As a result, this constituency of South Asians, who had hugely mobilized behind Mamdani’s candidacy, is once again organizing to demand even more reform from their city and its mayor.

On March 27, 2024, Win Rozario, a broad-shouldered, square-faced 19-year-old, woke up feeling exceptionally depressed. According to Eva, he confided in her about his suicidal ideation that morning. She knew to take him seriously; her son had attempted suicide before. Win’s father, Francis Rozario, was already at work at JFK Airport. Concerned that she might need help if his condition worsened, his mother asked Win’s 17-year-old younger brother to stay home from school. Eva then spent two hours comforting Win until he said, “I am not going to have these thoughts anymore.” He got up to shower. Eva briefly stepped out of their home in Ozone Park, Queens, to a nearby church to pray for her son and light a candle. Then she bought him a slice of cake to lift his mood. When she returned, Win told her he had called 911—neither she nor his brother had heard him do so. When NYPD officers knocked on their pale-yellow door, Win said he was feeling much better. Eva asked her younger son to answer and tell the officers they were no longer needed. She later told me, “We didn’t know you don’t have to let them inside.”

It turned out that the two officers, Matthew Cianfrocco and Salvatore Alongi, had been in the apartment before, having been called after one of Win’s previous suicide attempts. On that occasion, they spent 30 minutes speaking with him and managed to talk him down. Recalling that meeting to the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), Officer Cianfrocco described Win as a “non-threatening kid” who talked about his despair over being prevented from his dream of joining the US military by his family’s lack of a green card. Eva has since maintained that her son was not mentally unwell but circumstantially depressed because of the absence of the green card.

Upon entering the apartment for the second and last time, Cianfrocco instantly remembered Win. But that didn’t stop what happened next.

Footage from Cianfrocco’s body camera captured the scene. Win’s brother opens the door and says, “He is having an episode.” Alongi asks, “Is he bipolar? Schizo?” Win’s brother says he does not know. As officers enter and head upstairs, Win retreats to the kitchen, opens a drawer, and retrieves a pair of scissors. He takes a large step toward Alongi and is immediately tased. His mother grabs him. They grapple and fall to the ground. When they rise, she is holding the scissors. In the background, Win’s brother pleads, “Please do not shoot my mother.”

Eva, keeping the scissors out of Win’s reach, places herself between him and the officers, imploring in Bangla, “He is a good boy. Please.” The officers repeatedly order her to step away. Win begins to settle. Eva sets the scissors on a nearby chair, steps back as told, and futilely orders the officers, “You arrest, don’t shoot.” For a moment, Win stands unarmed, staring blankly as if awaiting arrest. In the next second, both officers tase him again. He convulses, lunges for the scissors, then toward the officers.

Eva rushes to him, trying to pull the scissors away again; Win’s brother clings to his mother, crying, “Please don’t shoot my mom!” In the struggle, the scissors fall, and Win picks them up a third time, but does not approach the officers. Win’s brother and Eva are on the ground, in the line of fire. Both officers shoot at Win. Eva screams from the kitchen floor in an octave only a mother can reach, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” Win keels over. The entire incident unfolds in just over two minutes.

After the shooting, two other officers drove Eva and her younger son to a precinct station. Eva recalls the officers in the car jovially chatting with one another as the two people in the back sat stiffly, wondering if their family member was dead or alive. Once at the station, Eva told me, she and her son were separately questioned about Win’s medical history and behavior. After what felt like a winding interrogation, an officer informed the family that Win was dead. They were allowed to reenter their home after 48 hours. When they did, Eva found a puddle of Win’s blood hardened on the kitchen floor.

In the two years since Win’s killing, his family has been drawn into a bewildering legal thicket. The New York Attorney General’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI) declined to indict the officers, saying their use of deadly force was justified in the circumstances. Separately, the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), New York City’s independent police monitor, charged Officers Alongi and Cianfrocco with abuse of authority and excessive force. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch has served those charges, but an internal disciplinary trial has yet to begin. Whether the officers are fired or face lesser penalties, including loss of vacation days, will ultimately be decided by Tisch.

The Rozario family has also filed a civil lawsuit against the city of New York. Luna Droubi, the Rozario family’s counsel, told me, “We are in active litigation in federal court, challenging the conduct of the officers individually and what happened to Win specifically, but also the larger policy and practice of the city.” While there are a host of avenues—civil and criminal—to hold officers accountable, Droubi explained, the internal systems that determine police dismissals are opaque to civilians, in which officers are effectively held responsible by fellow, higher-ranking officers. Yul-san Liem of the Justice Committee—a prominent grassroots organization dedicated to ending police violence—told me that the NYPD disciplinary system is “completely biased towards police officers,” forcing families into public campaigns for nominal closure. Given the byzantine bureaucracy of justice, “organizing is aimed at making it politically untenable for the NYPD and the mayor not to take action.”

Less than six months after the Rozario family filed their lawsuit with the city, five miles away from the Rozario home, Jabez Chakraborty was hospitalized for consuming bleach. His family called 988, the mental-health line, seeking a non-police response. Chakraborty had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. His mother, Juli, calls him her “special boy” and describes him as compassionate, intelligent, and developmentally younger than his age. In publicly distributed photos, Jabez has a boyish smile and neatly parted hair.

The mobile crisis team arrived 48 hours after the 988 call. Juli and Hector Chakraborty, the parents of Jabez, told me they asked him rudimentary questions while standing outside the front door, such as “Do you hear voices?” When Jabez said no, they quickly left. Afterward, the family sought a more intensive treatment program at Zucker Hillside/Northwell Hospital, and Jabez was placed on its waiting list. In the meantime, his psychiatrist at Long Island Jewish (LIJ) Medical Center advised the family to call 911 and request an involuntary transport to LIJ in case of future emergencies.

One month later, on the morning of January 26, Jabez was throwing glass at a wall in his home in Jamaica Hills, Queens. Heeding the psychiatrist’s guidance, his older sister called 911, requesting an involuntary transport to LIJ. When the police arrived, Jabez had calmed, according to his mother, and was eating his breakfast. Hector—a respected pastor—was in another room working on a sermon. As caught in Officer Tyree White’s body camera footage, he knocked on the door, while joking with his partner, “Ever since I’ve been watching videos, I don’t stand in front of the door no more, bro.” His partner replied affirmatively, “Yeah, you never know.”

Juli opened the door and let them in. Upon spotting the police, Jabez instantly grabbed a kitchen knife and thrust it toward them. Juli tried to intervene, but Jabez easily shrugged his mother aside. The officers backed up and closed a door in the entryway between them and Jabez. White commanded Jabez through the closed door to drop the knife, but Jabez pried the door open and brandished the knife. White shot him in the chest, abdomen, pelvis, and buttocks. This encounter lasted 37 seconds.

According to the Chakraborty family, police asked them to calm him after he had been shot. While he was writhing in pain with his insides splayed open, officers demanded that Hector “tell him to cooperate.” An investigator, who quickly arrived on the scene, asked whether the family had video recordings of the incident, then tried to play “good cop” by telling Hector, “Yeah, those police are bad.” The investigator took their phones and phone passwords, promising it would “make the process faster.” Hector remembers, “There was blood all over the place, and they were still asking us questions.”

The family also claims that the NYPD asked about their immigration status. NYPD’s Assistant Commissioner Brad Weekes vigorously denied this, telling me, “We want everyone to feel comfortable engaging with the NYPD. We don’t ask those questions.”

Neighbors of the Chakraborty family later told them that it took about 40 minutes before Jabez was taken to a hospital. Even after the shooting, the family requested he be sent to LIJ, where he had pre-established psychiatric care, but he was transported to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center. Much to their chagrin, the family told me that it was Officer White, not Jabez, who was taken to LIJ with ringing in his ear from discharging a weapon. The NYPD did not confirm whether he was transported to a hospital or which one.

The Chakraborty family was held and questioned at a precinct for four hours, without knowledge of whether Jabez was still alive—much like the Rozarios. When they asked to see their son, they were told that the officer who permitted visitation was no longer at the precinct. They were allowed to visit him the next afternoon, more than 24 hours after. When Juli asked Jabez why he grabbed the knife, he told her, “I was trying to protect you, Mommy.”

When addressing the delay in transporting Jabez after he was shot, Weekes told me, “It’s not NYPD. That’s EMS arriving late,” adding that the officer who fired immediately rendered aid. What can be attributed to the NYPD is its clinical impenitence and malfeasance in the aftermath. In these cases, the officers who discharged their weapons become medics; their colleagues swarm in as transporters, investigators, and intermediaries. Families are quickly siloed, treated with suspicion, and left to seek information from the same authority responsible for the shooting. Few other situations come to mind where an entity that has just used lethal force is also in the position of managing both the victim’s lifesaving care and the investigation of its own actions.

While Officer White’s culpability will long be investigated, Jabez has already been arraigned on charges of attempted assault and weapon possession for advancing on a NYPD officer. He faces 15 years in prison if convicted. Jabez appeared in court via video, with his feet and hands shackled to his hospital bed. He sobbed sporadically. Assistant District Attorney Hugh McCann argued that the bedridden, mentally unfit individual was a flight risk. “As our client appeared with bullet wounds across his body,” the Chakraborty counsel told me, “a prosecutor responded to our argument: ‘What I heard is a lot of playing victim here, but don’t forget, Police Officer White is the real victim.’”

The Chakrabortys secured his bond with a $10,000 deposit. Put another way, they paid the city $10,000 for the shooting of their son. More than half a year later, Jabez still uses a colostomy bag and has undergone several major surgeries. According to the Queens Daily Eagle, “Doctors will likely leave one bullet inside his body because it sits too close to his heart.”

Shortly after she began her tenure as deputy mayor for the Office of Community Safety, I spoke to Renita Francois about Win Rozario, Jabez Chakraborty, and the prevention of such incidents in the future. She described the current system of emergency response as a “patchwork of services.” The office’s aim, she said, is to “expand what the definition of safety looks like” by increasing public awareness of available options. including a program piloted in 2021 known as B-Heard, which sends mental health workers to crises in lieu of officers.

Last year, The New York Times reported that between 2022 and 2024 B-Heard did not respond to 35 percent of eligible calls, leaving police as the first responders. The AG’s report of the Win Rozario case acknowledges that “B-Heard did not cover the 102nd Precinct and would not have been able to respond even if called.” Responding to skepticism from Police Commissioner Tisch, who said only 2 percent of emergency calls would be diverted from police by the new office, Francois answered, “We will expand on the 2 percent.”

Recently, three months after the announcement of the OCS, Tisch bluntly testified during a City Council hearing that no talks had commenced between the police force and the Office of Community Safety on a shift in responsibilities or policy. A spokesperson for the OCS told me that the deputy mayor and police commissioner have since met and had a “productive discussion” about “ways to advance their shared goal of making the five boroughs safer for all New Yorkers.”

Following the death of Win Rozario, the Bangladeshi American Police Association (BAPA) refused to make a public statement, DRUM noted to me. They have not responded to me either. When I asked Brad Weekes if BAPA ever works with DRUM, he rebutted, “Has DRUM ever reached out to them?”

Amid the puerile finger-pointing and temporized decision-making, New Yorkers in need are forgotten twice over—once while individuals are in the throes of psychological catastrophe, and then a second time, when their families are left waiting for various verdicts by legal and bureaucratic entities. In the current model, responsibility is deliberately refracted, so accountability can be as well. The cardinal challenge the Office of Community Safety then faces is to dissolve the calcified distrust among city elements, which hinders the development of more lucid emergency response models.

Juli Chakraborty attended the rally for Win Rozario’s death anniversary on the same day a Queens judge refused a motion to dismiss charges against her son. In the coming years, the Chakrabortys must ensure the physical mending of their son, stabilize his mental health, and continue to fight a thorny legal battle over his freedom.

In the meantime, the Rozario family will proceed with what has become an unending drudgery of recourse. Among the many disappointments such families endure is how they must live with the years-long fallout of incidents that unfolded in less than minutes. In the aftermath, an immense organizing operation to demand reform to prevent future tragedies must be led and sustained by the victims themselves and their families.

One day after he was shot, Jabez Chakraborty was taken off the waiting list and admitted to the Hillside treatment program. Win Rozario’s family received their green card about a year after he was killed.

In 1970, Ivan Illich wrote Toward a History of Needs, a critique of the increasingly widespread belief that technological change was not only inevitable but nearly always a net good for society. Illich feared our growing dependence on rapidly emerging technologies and those that control them. Farmer and writer Wendell Berry made a similar argument in his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, describing the process by which people and whole communities are “de-skilled,” their capacity to care for themselves and their neighbors atrophied.

In many ways, these dark visions are now unfolding. In particular, artificial intelligence is driving us toward de-skilling on a massive scale. This de-skilling, if it continues, will enable concentrated economic and political power at a level that will make the present seem egalitarian by comparison. And it will include the loss of hundreds of millions of jobs along the way, not as a byproduct but a feature, as evidenced by Open AI’s definition of AI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

As described by my colleague Erica Etelson, the explosive growth of AI data centers has catalyzed a backlash in communities across the country. Residents are uniting across party lines in opposition to the noise, land use, and extraordinary levels of energy and water that data centers require. In response, promises of data centers fully powered by renewable energy or utilizing water-conserving cooling systems have emerged. Elon Musk promises to launch data centers into space, avoiding local land, water, and energy conflicts altogether.

It’s doubtful that such “green” data centers are even feasible. But based on the history of AI development, three outcomes are all but assured unless we act swiftly and decisively.

First, the AI arms race is propelling an unprecedented concentration of economic and political power. By the end of 2025, the top 10 CEOs and founders of AI and tech companies were worth $2.5 trillion, more than 8 percent of the total US GDP. This was before Elon Musk became a trillionaire.

The political influence of this tiny elite is large and growing, with a New York Times projection of at least $150 million being spent on the 2026 midterm races by AI companies and their allies. Alongside this spending are ongoing political influence campaigns ranging from the bullying threats of Musk to the charm offensive of Open AI CEO Sam Altman. A recently introduced bipartisan bill, dubbed the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act of 2026, is another example of the political power of the AI elite. It usurps the power of states to regulate AI and kicks the can down the road on the majority of the most critical concerns about AI, according to an analysis by Public Citizen.

The power of the biggest AI companies will encompass far more than oligarchy within this one industry, given AI’s steady insinuation into nearly every facet of our lives. The ultrarich owners of these corporations—Musk, Altman, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and a handful of others—are working toward control of governments, public policy, and culture to a degree unseen in our history, not only because of their wealth but also because they are making the technology they control indispensable and ubiquitous.

Second, we are approaching a period of massive and rapid loss of jobs and near-elimination of whole categories of occupations. According to a May, 2025 piece in Axios, “technology companies are in a wild race to produce so-called Agents, or agentic AI. In its simplest form, an agent is AI that can do the work of humans—instantly, indefinitely and exponentially cheaper. Imagine an agent writing the code to power your technology, or handle finance frameworks and analysis, or customer support, or marketing, or copy editing or content distribution, or research. The possibilities are endless—and not remotely fantastical. Many of these agents are already operating inside companies, and many more are in fast production.”

A 2023 estimate by Goldman Sachs projected a potential loss of 300 million jobs worldwide, not only for workers in the so-called knowledge economy but also for wide swaths of service and blue-collar jobs. Mid-level “back office” jobs in HR, billing and payroll, and customer service are already very vulnerable.

Many AI industry supporters dismiss the potential for widespread job loss, claiming instead that the types of jobs available will simply shift to accommodate AI. How’s that going so far? Probably the biggest category of new jobs created by AI to date is “data annotators.” These are the thousands of people, primarily in Venezuela, Kenya, the Philippines, and other developing countries, who do the dirty work of AI. They review both texts and videos produced by Large Language Models, culling the seemingly endless stream of violent, offensive, racist, misogynistic and deviant content that is unavoidably swept up in the process of capturing data from every corner of the Internet. Like the giant nets of huge commercial fishing vessels, AI companies extract everything they can from human experience, good, bad and ugly. And then they pay workers a meager piece rate to find and delete the worst of it.

Finally, AI is fostering the de-skilling, even obsolescence, of human beings on a massive scale, at an extraordinary speed. The more pervasive and sophisticated AI becomes, the more likely that people will develop a dependence on it for everyday activities and functions, becoming less and less able to care for themselves, their families, and their neighbors without the intervention of AI. Functionally, this dependence will be not only on the technology but also on the tiny, über-wealthy elite who control it.

From a rural point of view, this de-skilling is particularly dangerous. Most people are aware that rural America has higher rates of poverty and unemployment, and with that, more problems in health, housing and other areas. But what is often missed is how the ideals of neighborliness and self-reliance, combined with the skills and knowledge needed to approach them, still operate in most rural communities. Farming, as one example, requires the know-how to adapt to changing weather, repair equipment and machinery, manage animals, pasture, and forests, improve the health of soils, and gauge and develop markets.

Within farming communities, these skills are often shared and adapted. My dear friend Charlie Foster and I competed for years to see who would have the first ripe tomato at market, along the way trading experiences about the varieties, hoop houses, and management techniques involved. Dwayne McIntyre expanded upon the systems of Joel Salatin to become one of the most diverse and productive beef, poultry, and dairy operations in our region. Mentored by Jason Rutledge, Chad Miano built a successful horse logging business, practicing outstanding forest stewardship while producing high-quality hardwood logs for market. Sr Bernie Kenny converted an RV into a mobile medical clinic, enabling people in the hollers of Appalachian Virginia to finally get reliable, affordable primary care.

Charlie, Dwayne, Chad, and Sister Bernie represent a different kind of AI, what could be called Accumulated Intelligence—knowledge that is slowly built, freely shared, steadily improved and expanded upon, then refined into the practical and essential skills that make good livelihoods and strong communities possible,

Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is driving the replacement of human-scale, farmer-led and land-based agriculture with capital-intensive, soil-free vertical farming, laboratory-produced meats, and self-driving tractors—all of which will exacerbate the already extreme level of corporate concentration in our food and farm system. And this model will be applied to all of humanity.

The de-skilling of Americans, and most people in so-called developed countries, has been underway for many years. But of late, the march of AI has begun to spark a backlash, from farmers demanding the right to repair their own equipment to the pushback from artists, writers, and creative folks of all sorts against the theft of their work. They’re fighting what Keoni Mahelona called “just a land grab all over again,” where Big Tech swallows up this accumulated intelligence only to “turn around and sell it back to us as a service” (quoted in Karen Hao’s Empire of AI).

What are we likely to get as recompense for this extreme concentration of wealth and power, the loss of perhaps hundreds of millions of jobs, and the society-wide loss of agency and self-determination? Cures for cancer? Perhaps some types, some day. Remedies for climate change? Much less likely, given that we already are information-rich on the causes and solutions, with little to show for it. Lives of leisure, unencumbered by jobs but sustained by a barely livable universal basic income? Most people want lives with meaning and purpose, not endless leisure and dependence on the powerful.

Should we be worried about artificial general intelligence destroying humanity? A number of AI insiders think that’s certainly a possibility.

Whether AI puts our survival as a species at risk may be an open question, but the hyper-concentration of wealth and power, built upon the exploitation of workers and the extraction of knowledge from millions of people, is not. It may not kill us all, but it is well on its way to stripping us of what it means to be human. Unless we radically change the trajectory of AI, a debilitating dependence on AI’s masters of extraction is a near-certain outcome.

The children were clear from the beginning that they did not like tomatoes. They were excited to be outside, happy enough to kneel in the dirt and plant them—but few had any intention of actually eating one. They were students at a Los Angeles elementary school and had spent their lives in neighborhoods where fresh produce was scarce, and canned fruits and vegetables were not. Still, the children knelt down in the garden and planted the tomatoes anyway.

One of the students, puzzled by the curious act, asked, “Why are we even growing these?”

Despite protestations, Anton van Schaik, 25, kept at it anyway. Van Schaik, an urban agriculture assistant with the CalFresh Healthy Living program at Catholic Charities of Los Angeles, had driven from his apartment in Los Angeles that morning to teach those children how to grow fresh vegetables. Van Schaik had learned, over three years of this work across a sprawling geography of the most under-resourced LA neighborhoods, that the students’ resistance was part of what he had signed up for. The purpose of the program was to soften skepticism about nutritional foods held by students living in under-resourced neighborhoods from Highland Park to the food deserts of South Central, Inglewood, and West Athens.

South LA has long had one of the poorest food-resource environments in the county. A report by the nonprofit Community Health Councils found that the area’s roughly 60 full-service grocery stores each served an average of more than 22,000 residents—twice the load carried by grocery stores in wealthier West LA—and that, according to the LA County Department of Public Health, just 12.7 percent of adults in South LA consumed the recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables, compared to 22.7 percent in West LA and 14.7 percent countywide. The neighborhoods where van Schaik worked are not places where children grow up eating tomatoes from a vine.

The students were doubtful, and for good reason. Van Schaik, hoping to change that, knelt in the dirt with them.

Weeks passed, the tomatoes grew, and when it came time to try them, many of the kids asked for seconds. “To watch the kids confront not only their own prejudices against fruits and vegetables,” van Schaik told me, “but to be able to facilitate them interacting with produce that they personally grew for the first time ever in their lives—that was a real privilege.”

That moment, the garden where it happened, and the program that made both possible are now over. This week, Catholic Charities of Los Angeles formally ended its urban gardening and nutrition education program. The garden project began in 2018 with a single school site and grew to operate across school sites, food banks, food pantries, community centers, and a senior center throughout Los Angeles County and Santa Barbara County.

The staff, once as many as 13 workers, is now zero.

Soon, weeds will overtake the agricultural classrooms and the students, when they return in the fall, will find none of the workers or community members there to teach, help them tend the plants, or push them to try tomatoes and encourage them to pick enough for seconds.

The now-halted program ran through CalFresh Healthy Living, the California branch of SNAP-Ed, the education arm of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In 2025, on Independence Day, a federal bill signed by President Trump ended funding for SNAP-Ed programs across the country. As a result, CalFresh Healthy Living ended on June 30, 2026. In previous years, California received about $132 million in federal funding annually to support nutrition education activities.

Now that money and the programs it funded are gone.

With a budget of $536 million in fiscal year 2025, SNAP-Ed’s elimination is expected to cut about $5 billion from the federal budget through 2034. It was easy to overlook at first, swallowed by the scale of what surrounded it: The One Big Beautiful Bill enacts the largest cut to federal food assistance in history. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill’s nutrition provisions would reduce federal spending by almost $187 billion over 10 years.

The cuts will have compounding consequences.

In 2024, CalFresh Healthy Living reached 174,380 people with education materials and distributed 1.68 million pounds of produce countywide. Becky Schlikerman Sernik, a spokesperson for the LA County Department of Public Health, told LA Public Press that the cuts risk reversing years of progress on diet-related chronic disease in a county where food insecurity is already widespread, and that CalFresh Healthy Living programs “play a key role in preventing diet-related chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes and heart disease, especially among communities of color and lower-income families.” Based on the governor’s projection that 14 percent of California’s CalFresh recipients are at risk, an LA Public Press analysis suggests that approximately 210,000 LA County residents could lose benefits.

At El Santo Niño, a community center in Los Angeles, van Schaik and his colleagues had built something that was less like a class and more like a community group. There was already a walking club, part of the program’s physical education component. So they built on top of it: nutrition classes and gardening sessions, all running concurrently. One nutrition class, for example, focused on cutting processed sugars from one’s diet. Participants went out to the garden and planted corn.

A couple of months later, one of the participants harvested the produce and made a Mexican street corn-inspired meal.

“Creating a culturally sensitive and inclusive space while also teaching important nutrition and gardening information,” van Schaik said, “really allowed the space to feel more unique, important, and genuinely relevant.” The program, at its best, met participants where they were—across ages, races, incomes, and immigration statuses, in their food traditions, in their languages, in their lives—and built from there.

Van Schaik described precisely what research says about what makes nutrition education effective, and what cannot be replicated overnight by volunteers or hastily reassembled after defunding. Cindy Leung, an associate professor of public health nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, explained in a Q&A published by the school that SNAP-Ed “basically paid for people…to hold nutrition education workshops, develop nutrition education materials and teach participants how to cook and shop for healthy meals so that participants could better adhere to a healthier diet.”

The people these programs served are now navigating a safety net being dismantled from multiple directions at once. Between the bill’s July 2025 enactment and March 2026, SNAP participation dropped by more than 4 million people, or 10 percent, nationwide; in the 17 states with available data, the number of children receiving SNAP has fallen by about 1 million. The declines are not being driven by reduced need—unemployment has remained flat—but by administrative barriers and a system that the Food Research and Action Center describes as deliberately designed to make maintaining eligibility harder.

Researchers worry that the SNAP cuts will prevent millions of kids from accessing a steady diet of nutritious food. A 2025 study published in JAMA Cardiology by Emily Lam and colleagues, following 1,071 U.S. children into adulthood across 20 cities, found that food insecurity in early childhood predicted worse cardiovascular health in young adulthood—but that participation in SNAP mitigated those risks. Nearly one in five households with children were food insecure in 2024, before the largest cuts in the program’s history had taken effect. The USDA has since canceled the annual survey that would track what happens next, eliminating the data that would measure whether hunger is rising.

The communities Catholic Charities served in Los Angeles were already among the most vulnerable. Some of the children van Schaik worked with were undocumented, or the children of undocumented parents, a population facing additional exposure under the new law. The bill’s restrictions on SNAP eligibility for lawfully present immigrants took effect on enactment—California removed CalFresh eligibility for asylees, refugees, parolees, and other humanitarian-status immigrants on April 1, costing 10,860 LA County residents their benefits—and its Medicaid restrictions take effect on October 1, 2026. The community centers that hosted the CalFresh Healthy Living program will also lose grant eligibility they held precisely because they could demonstrate an active, federally backed nutrition initiative on their premises.

Van Schaik left on June 12, a few weeks before the official end, as school sites closed for summer and the remaining staff turned their attention entirely to end operations, training on-site volunteers to maintain the gardens, identifying community champions who might keep the walking clubs and nutrition conversations alive without a funded educator to lead them. “The goal of the program wasn’t to be temporary,” he told me. It was designed to embed itself in communities over time and to become part of the infrastructure of neighborhoods that have historically had the least access to fresh food and green space.

When the children do finally return, it is possible that the tomatoes will still be growing, right where they had planted the seeds. But the person who knelt in the dirt with them, who coaxed them into eating a fruit they swore they hated, won’t be. Van Schaik had cared about them, and he had helped them grow enough for seconds, despite all of the skepticism that had kept the children from ever trying tomatoes in the first place.

The World Cup is politics by other means. Not even Olympic competition imbues a game with politics quite like the World Cup. This is not only because—to state the obvious—that it’s a tournament that pits country against country and where tensions and hostilities play themselves out on the pitch. It’s that the whole world is watching. In an age of polyculture, when our focus is divided into a million pieces, each piece competing for slivers of our time, nothing unites the world’s eyeballs like the World Cup. This makes it political. Every nation—and every world leader—knows that victory will feel not only like a soccer triumph but a national triumph. Winning the World Cup gooses the political commodity in the shortest supply in 2026: hope.

Even by World Cup standards, this year’s final is especially fraught with politics. We have the defending champion, Argentina, led by Lionel Messi, perhaps the greatest player to ever take the pitch. And we have a team from Spain that plays a more beautiful game—a team approach consisting of quick passes, impenetrable defense, and blinding speed. They are opposites. Everything Argentina does is aimed at freeing up, creating space, and physically protecting the 39-year-old Messi. Everything Spain does is about involving all 11 players, its whole greater than the sum of its parts

This style of play bluntly mirrors the leaders of the two countries—and this matters because, as stated above, the country’s leader that claims the win will also get a boost. In Argentina, that means President Javier Milei. The bombastic Milei should be very familiar to us in the United States and not only because he is so openly corrupt. Milei is an oligarch committed to severe austerity, retrograde social policies, and an “enhanced” security state to quell internal dissent. He also maintains close ties to the rest of the international authoritarian right. He is a favorite of Israel’s war-criminal in chief Benjamin Netanyahu. When Netanyahu was asked on a recent podcast if he was rooting for Messi, he said, “No, before Messi—Milei. He’s a superstar.” Milei is also, suffice it to say, a dear ally of our own emotionally erratic despot, Donald Trump. The thought of them joining together on the field and raising the FIFA championship trophy together is nauseating.

If Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, takes the pitch after a Sunday victory, there is still a chance that Trump would join him. Trump despises Sánchez, who is also the secretary-general of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. There are many reasons for his enmity, but recently Trump’s rage escalated dramatically when Sánchez refused to let the United States use Spain’s military bases to launch attacks against Iran. Now Trump, ever the fascist fantasist, is threatening to cut off trade with Spain. But Iran is only the latest reason for a Trump tantrum. Sánchez, unlike Milei, opposes US military aid to Israel, has called Israeli military operations in Gaza “the greatest genocide this century has witnessed,” and restricts fuel and military trade to Israel. Sánchez also believes in investing in renewable energy, the importance of immigration, and state spending. This is not to say that Sánchez is perfect. His family and party are facing corruption allegations, and perhaps he should be pressing harder, especially against an ascendant far right. But Milei and Sánchez, certainly in the eyes of our own regime, could not be more different, and the political benefits of their country winning the World Cup will have far different real-life implications.

If there is one political reality that both Sánchez and Milei share, it is that neither enjoys firm majority approval in their countries. Both are considered polarizing, and both face sizable opposition. Given the facts, rooting interests should be obvious. Support Spain because their collective style of play—instead of gearing everything they do around one, singular player—is better for the sport. Fans should also support Spain because Milei will swallow his tongue if Argentina loses and Trump’s mottled face will fume. Trump may even stay away from the award ceremony, his petulance outweighing his ego. The political benefits would flow away from Milei and his already weak regime. And Sánchez—and everything he represents, even with all its imperfections—will get some wind at his back. This is all worth rooting for on Sunday. I wish the world was not like this. I wish a soccer game would not buttress a fascist agenda or give wings to a social democratic one, but this is where we are, and we should cheer accordingly.

I recently drove to a gas station in Massachusetts to fill my tank with regular gas, the cheapest around, and, to my surprise, given what’s going on, it was only $4.59 a gallon.

OK, OK, I take back that “only” and admit it. It’s not good to joke about the nightmare of gas prices these days. But in truth, that may indeed still prove to be the good news, since Donald Trump remains at war (or perhaps at chaos) with Iran, a country a mere 6,300 miles or so from Washington, DC, and so crucial to American power on this distinctly overheating planet of ours. (Right?) And even as I was writing this, Iran had indeed again closed the Strait of Hormuz through which about 25 percent of global oil and 20 percent of global natural gas normally passes, and Donald Trump was threatening to take over the Strait himself.

The terrible (even terrifying) logic of what he is now doing is (or at least should be) overwhelmingly obvious to anyone who has even a faint memory of this country’s imperial history since it emerged victorious from World War II in 1945. And yet give Donald Trump credit. People deal with him as if he were a unique figure in American history and in some ways, of course, he couldn’t be more so. But not, it turns out, when it comes to American-style war. There, he seems almost boringly part of a story (now more than three-quarters of a century old) of how the seemingly greatest power on planet Earth in the endless decades after World War II simply couldn’t—no, not ever!—win a war.

After all, Harry S. Truman got us into a major conflict in Korea, almost 7,000 miles from Washington, DC, in 1950, and when it ended three years later, the United States left the North Koreans with approximately half of the Korean peninsula.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy increased American support for what had been the French colony of Indochina (until its military lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu to Ho Chi Minh’s rebel forces in 1954). He would then oversee what would become a full-scale American war in Vietnam, a mere 8,500 or so miles from this country, as well as a war in Laos (also about 8,500 miles away) and Cambodia (nearly 9,000 miles away) that would last a mere 14 more years, ending in a chaotically disastrous US withdrawal and absolute defeat in 1975.

In 2001, President George W. Bush would launch a war in Afghanistan as part of what he labeled his Global War on Terror, a country a mere 7,000 miles from Washington. It would last just 20 more years before ending in—yes, of course!—a distinct American defeat and the grim withdrawal of the last US troops there by Presidents Donald J. Trump and Joe Biden in 2021. In 2003, Bush would also launch a war in Iraq, a mere 10,000 or so miles from Washington, a conflict that would be ended by President Barack Obama, again in defeat, in 2011 (although Washington would continue to engage in some fighting there in subsequent years).

And that’s not even counting various other American war-making activities on this planet, including a never-ending air war in Somalia, launched by President George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s that continues today and still shows no sign of success.

So, just to make the obvious point, the greatest and—after the Soviet Union fell in 1991—only true imperial power on planet Earth hasn’t had a genuine war-making success to its name from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the Trumpian moment 80 years later. And, of course, we’re talking about the country that has by far the largest military on planet Earth, puts more money (still called “defense spending,” even if the department that spends it has now been renamed the Department of War) into its military than the next six countries combined, and accounts for 33 percent of all military spending on this planet. And mind you, that’s even before Donald Trump tries to raise this country’s military spending from nearly $1 trillion annually to almost $1.5 trillion. And yet, we’re also talking about the power that hasn’t won a single war of any sort since World War II ended.

Now, given all of that, what should we expect when it comes to Donald Trump’s war against Iran? Don’t, of course, misunderstand me. The American president and his military are clearly capable of creating scenes of utter destruction and devastation there (as was true from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq). They are also capable of killing staggering numbers of Iranians and turning that region into a potential disaster area. And President Trump is already insisting, of course, that he will reinstall the US blockade of Iranian ports, while calling himself and his country “the guardian” of the Strait of Hormuz.

The one thing that history suggests, however, is that Trump and crew will not actually be capable of winning their war against that country.

When it comes to war and imperial powers on this planet, the United States offers a staggering tale of defeat in our time (one that, it seems, Vladimir Putin may be repeating in Ukraine). And it may suggest why the country that’s clearly the next great imperial power on planet Earth, China, has shown remarkably little desire to head down a similar road. Yes, in 1979, the Chinese did engage in a border war with Vietnam and, from 2020 to 2021, it also engaged in border skirmishes with India. And it certainly has built up both its military and its nuclear forces in these years.

Nonetheless, it seems to have remarkably little interest in heading down the usual imperial path of global war-making, given the lesson that the United States has offered in spending staggering amounts of money on genuinely fruitless wars, decade after decade after decade to this very moment. There may never have been quite such a power and such a story in this planet’s imperial past.

Nearly five months since it launched its war of choice against Iran, the United States appears no closer to achieving a single meaningful objective than it was when an outmaneuvered President Trump signed what was effectively a strategic surrender on June 17. The on-again, off-again war is a complex story of global economic interdependence, maritime logistics, drone warfare ascendance, nuclear panic, and imperial arrogance. But it is also, increasingly and more consequentially, a story about how a single octogenarian narcissist would prefer to inflict catastrophic damage on the global economy and his own political party rather than concede that he was wrong.

It would be wishcasting to say that the walls are closing in on Trump, who has two-and-a-half long years left in his gilded office and faces no plausible mechanism that can remove him. But he is unquestionably a deeply diminished, almost pitiful, figure.

To him, the Iran War should be little more than one of the movies playing on a screen in his mind’s multiplex, something he can dip in and out of while he refills his popcorn and props the doors open to the other theaters to catch up on “illegals” stealing the 2020 election but forgetting to steal the next one or pregnant women taking Tylenol causing autism or woke Communists sabotaging the Reflecting Pool or the deep state preventing him from stenciling his name on the Kennedy Center or Marco Rubio simultaneously serving as Trump’s national security adviser, US secretary of state, and unelected viceroy of Venezuela. The only thing about Trump’s Cinema Mar-a-Lago that matters to him is that when he’s finished with something, it concludes instantly at his say-so.

And that is why the Iran War vexes him. The bunkered clerics and hardened military ideologues he tried and failed to depose with his amateurish, late-imperial fireworks display simply refuse to do his bidding. Iran’s rulers aren’t just preventing the president from making the theft of the 2026 elections his full-time gig. They are threatening to turn him, in his own words, into Herbert Hoover, which are the only two words in the English language seemingly capable of getting him to reverse course once he has made up his mind to do something incredibly stupid and destructive.

This week’s embarrassing sequence of flip-flops, grand pronouncements, and fresh threats of war crimes is just the latest evidence that Trump has no idea what he is doing. He shows no interest in implementing the Memorandum of Understanding he signed in Versailles last month—the one that clearly gives Iran the right to dictate how vessels transit the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic shipping choke point that was open before Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu decided to capriciously blow it all up. And as the ceasefire unravels largely because of his inability to comprehend the humiliating terms he agreed to, Trump cycles from one gimmick to another in a vain and fruitless effort to extract himself from the consequences of his own failures.

On Monday, he announced, suddenly and bizarrely after weeks of comparatively low-level violence with Iran, that the United States would now serve as the “GUARDIAN OF HORMUZ” and that he would demand reimbursement for this act of beneficence by extracting a fee equivalent to 20 percent of the value of each ship’s cargo while also blockading Iranian shipping. As CNN somewhat decorously put it, this outburst “raise[d] “several questions of legality and feasibility.” Indeed, it did!

That’s probably why, 24 hours later, Trump walked back the entire gambit. He wrote (on Truth Social of course, the National Archives of our time) that because “Oil is flowing like never before,” America would accept, in lieu of the 20 percent fee he invented just the day before,“Trade and Investment Deals” from unnamed Gulf countries that will make “Factories, Plants, and Equipment pour into the United States at Historic levels.” He added that Iran can no longer kill protesters and “WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON,” bold claims for someone who just a month ago put his signature on a document granting Iran everything on its geostrategic wishlist in return for absolutely nothing of substance.

As with everything that comes out of his mouth, you can’t even address the outrageous hallucinations of Trump’s post without first tackling the logical fallacies. If oil is “flowing like never before,” why does the United States need to serve as the “Guardian of Hormuz” in the first place? How can oil be flowing at all-time highs if the United States is once again enforcing a naval blockade of Iranian ports? If America is the “hottest country in the world,” as Trump keeps insanely asserting, why does it need the Gulf states to create jobs? How exactly will we calculate the exact number of “investment deals” needed to offset the money needed to try and fail to keep the Strait of Hormuz open with history’s most expensive navy? Will we be getting rebate checks the next time some Emirati potentate bankrolls a luxury condo development in Miami?

You aren’t supposed to ask these questions, of course. You’re just supposed to clap and look the other way. The problem is that everywhere you turn, the material consequences of this endless buffoonery are on display for anyone to see. The finger grease was barely dry on Trump’s phone before gas prices shot up again and oil futures spiked. The United States has resumed burning through hundreds of millions of dollars a day worth of sophisticated munitions to bomb a country that is successfully defending itself with $7,000 drones and speedboats—all while failing to intimidate Iran’s autocrats or even force them back to the negotiating table.

When Trump signed the MOU, there was some hope that the end of this ruinous ordeal might be in sight. Surely, having inked a document so unambiguously disastrous for the United States; having absorbed the hysterical, weeks-long caterwauling of lifelong Beltway Iran hawks seeing their life’s work vaporized in front of their eyes; having finally brought gas prices part of the way back down to where they were in February, he wouldn’t just blow the deal up for no reason, right? You guessed it—not right. We are now right back where we were in early June—global oil stockpiles dwindling, prices creeping up, Republican fortunes in the upcoming midterm elections crumbling, and the Iranians chuckling at the spectacular implosion of their erstwhile imperial overlords.

For America, the predicament remains the same. President Trump can always swallow his capacious pride and abide by the deal he signed, granting Iran’s autocrats control of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to the country’s long international economic isolation in exchange for modest, unspecified concessions on their nuclear program. If he won’t do that, he can either keep trying and failing to break Tehran’s resolve from the air, or he can launch a massive ground invasion of a country of 90 million people three months out from a national election that could result in his party’s kicking away both chambers of Congress.

Only 30 months to go before the Cinema Mar-a-Lago closes forever and takes all of this winning with it. In the meantime, the president is very, very busy posting through it, lauding the doomed Minnesota gubernatorial campaign of Mike Lindell, “the Pillow Man,” who is “one of America’s greatest and most hard working Patriots” and sharing pictures of himself with Xi Jinping, who probably still can’t believe his luck that this sundowning imbecile was somehow given another four years in power. Your own attention to this matter, as always, depends on your capacity for endurance.

On weekends, the graffitied auto garage-turned-nightclub Silo is packed with boozed-up Brooklynites intent on dancing the night away. But on the Monday before the Democratic congressional primaries, the crowd packed inside the converted hangar was more focused on a slate of progressive candidates winning some tight races.

Awash in neon light, candidates Brad Lander and Claire Valdez each took the stage, urging attendees to tell their communities to vote the next day.

“We have one more day, 6 am to 9 pm; at 9:01, it is too late,” Valdez said. “Until then, we are going to knock on every single door again.”

Hours earlier, Matthew Smith, a student from Fordham University, bounded up the steps to knock on another Upper West Side brownstone in the rain.

“We gotta win this. We gotta power through,” he said.

When the woman inside answered, she politely refuted his spiel. Smith smiled, thanking her, and turned to go back down the steps. When asked if he still gets nervous talking to people about candidates, he admitted, “Yes, every time.”

Smith is one of several students who canvassed for the slate of Democratic socialists who ran for Democratic nominations in congressional districts across New York City. That day, he was canvassing for Darializa Avila Chevalier, who prevailed over incumbent Adriano Espaillat for a seat representing NY-13. The win was shared across the slate of candidates endorsed by Zohran Mamdani, which saw victories for Claire Valdez in NY-7 and Brad Lander in NY-10. For many students who were involved in organizing for Mamdani’s slate, the win signifies the manifestation of their vision for the Democratic Party.

YDSA national co-chair Sara Almosawi, a student at Cornell University who worked on Valdez and Avila Chevalier’s campaigns, joined the organization after graduating from high school. “I felt deeply moved by both of the Bernie Sanders campaigns, and when the DNC forced Bernie to drop out in 2020, I wanted an alternative. I wanted to build something that really represented the politics of working-class people like myself,” said Almosawi.

Several students found their entry into the political left with Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 mayoral election in New York City. “I first volunteered for him because I saw that he represented a campaign, a vision, that resonated with me, which is a working-class-focused vision,” said Fuhad Khan, a City College student working as a field lead for Valdez. Sitting in a corner booth at the dingy Rocka Rolla bar in Williamsburg, Khan’s bright-blue-and-orange Zohran shirt made him hard to miss.

Khan would go on to join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), where he became further involved in leftist politics. While Khan “naturally supported any DSA candidates” as a member of the organization, he joined Valdez’s team after receiving a call from her campaign.

Christian Garcia-Castilla, a student at Hunter College, had a similar path into politics. He joined Avila Chevalier’s campaign in February, months after casting his first vote in a New York City election for Mamdani. “I’m really proud of our campaign, how far we’ve gone, and how united we’ve been,” he said.

It comes as no surprise that Mamdani’s bid for mayor had such a galvanizing effect on students like Khan and Garcia-Castilla. His NYCDSA-backed campaign captured a shocking 75 percent of voters ages 18–29, a demographic of which former New York governor Andrew Cuomo garnered only 19 percent.

“The youth vote, I think, was critical, and a lot of analysis has shown that the youth vote is overwhelmingly lent for progressive candidates,” said Leel Dias, a student at Columbia University who worked on Valdez and Avila Chevalier’s campaigns.

Mamdani’s successful campaign was a sign of what was to come in the June primaries. Lorelei Crean, a student who graduated from high school in upper Manhattan in June, canvassed for Avila Chevalier. He said the June sweep “was really a testament to New York City DSA’s increasing political power in New York City, but also the power of the people to fight for progressive causes and candidates that have a new politic.”

“These campaigns, they invite younger people, because the candidates are younger, the messages that they’re conveying are resonating with younger voters because they’re actually focused on delivering for younger people, delivering on things that matter to us, like education, affordability, Palestine,” Fuhad said.

Smith has also seen that because of races like Mamdani’s and Avila Chevalier’s, “a lot more young people are getting involved and they’re finally seeing themselves in an elected official.”

Young people making political waves isn’t new. “Students have always been at the forefront of political fights,” Smith said, referencing Vietnam anti-war protests, South Africa anti-apartheid movements, and recent encampments in support of Palestine.

Students often lead progressive campaigns, he said, adding that the slate’s win required young people leading the way.

“Some of my friends would leave class early just to get to some kind of event, or people who are canvassing in the heat, in the cold…I think from those moments it showed me that obviously some of us, we have a lot to give up,” said Tapuwanashe Hightower, a recent NYU graduate who canvassed for Valdez.

While the DSA has championed the success of Mamdani’s slate, not all progressives are cheering, and criticism of Mamdani’s slate has been concentrated on Avila Chevalier. Within days of the June primaries, Jon Favreau, the former Obama speechwriter who hosts the left-leaning podcast Pod Save America, cautioned against Avila Chevalier, taking issue with her decision not to apologize for attending a pro-Palestinian rally on October 8, 2023, that Mamdani, AOC, and Lander had all condemned at the time. He also condemned her opposition to all deportations in a recent interview. By his account, some of her positions ranged from “moronic to abhorrent.”

Zachary Gross and Sam Verstandig, recent graduates of Yeshiva University and SUNY Empire State College who organized for Espaillat’s campaign against Avila Chevalier, were similarly troubled by Avila Chevalier’s attendance at the rally. Her stance on Israel was a “driving force” for many of the students who volunteered for Espaillat, Verstandig said.

Both students expressed concern over how their interests might be represented by Avila Chevalier in Congress. “Based on the messaging that she’s given, I think she bunches Israel and the Jewish people together,” Gross said. “I hope that her opinions towards Israel don’t make her decide to neglect her constituents who are Jewish.”

The Avila Chevalier and Espaillat campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.

Daniel Marks, a student at King’s College who organized for the Alex Bores campaign in NY-12, which ultimately fell to establishment-backed Micah Lasher, provided a softer critique of Avila Chevalier. “I am very happy to see how she does. I would just like more clarification on her foreign policy stances, especially when it comes to Russia and Ukraine,” Marks said. “I go to school in the UK, and I think NATO is really important, and I think there’s a divide between progressives and socialists where sometimes the further to the left you are, there’s maybe more of an unwillingness to condemn Russia’s invasion in Ukraine.”

“While I do have issues with some of the things Darializa’s said, she is the Democratic nominee, and so it is important we support her,” he added.

Marks does not see the success of Mamdani’s slate as indicative of any enduring shift in the Democratic Party as some of his DSA counterparts do. “We have the tendency to use midterms as political tea leaves,” Marks said. Yet he recognizes that the left flank of the party will be a force to be reckoned with. “I think what it does tell you is the progressive left wing of the party should be taken seriously,” Marks said.

He did, however, raise concern over mounting tension between “moderates and the left wing of the party.”

“We’re getting to this point where it’s really like an internal war between these two sects of the Democratic Party, and that’s becoming a problem when the two groups aren’t willing to support the other,” Marks said.

For several of the students who worked on the Mamdani slate’s primary campaigns, however, that war—pushing the party to align with the DSA—is the Democrats’ only chance to become a more viable party.

“I see the future of the Democratic Party is either a Democratic Socialist Party or an obsolete party that no longer represents the working class, and there will be another party to take its place,” Smith said. “If that is the split of the Democratic Party—if it’s between fighting for working-class people and fighting for the billionaires—the people who are fighting for the billionaires should not be in the party, and let the party split.”

Regardless, students are hoping the success in the primaries extends to the future. “I think that’s the testament to the new wave and the new energy that Democrats really need to harness, especially in these midterms and going into 2028,” Crean said.

Noah Bernstein, a student at Stony Brook University, said he felt that if the Democratic Party doesn’t put up a progressive for president in 2028, “we either risk losing…or having a worse fascist in 2032.

But before the DSA can think about supporting a presidential candidate in 2028, its candidates will have to prove themselves on the Hill. “The test will be, you know, what happens when they go to Congress—how much are they able to deliver,” Dias said.

On the evening of June 24, students populated election parties across the city and celebrated as their candidates delivered victory speeches. “It was absolutely electric,” Almosawi said. “People that I didn’t even know, I was hugging, I was crying with them, I was screaming with them.”

“The older generation, their time is up. They can only stay in power for so long, and it’s time for young people to take our place,” Smith said. “We have a world to win, and it’s ours to take. We just have to fight to get it, and that’s where the students come in.”

Billie Little was raised in Ohio in a household of four siblings and, in the course of her childhood, 22 foster children. Her parents had a strong sense of civic duty. Hers was a religious family; they went to church three times a week. She was 7 when her father, spotting a KKK meeting in town, gathered a group to run the hooded men off. At 15, she did missionary work in Harlan County, handing out clothes and canned food. At 18, she became an itinerant laborer, waiting tables, pumping gas, painting houses, and picking apples across the West. “I worked alongside many immigrants and saw how hard they work. I respected them a lot. There was nothing but kindness.”

Along the way, she joined a commune, married, and got a college degree. She endured domestic violence, raised two children while putting herself through law school. She worked in legal publishing for 21 years at Thomson, later Thomson Reuters. In September 2025, Billie became a senior legal editor at the company. “I finally got the promotion I’d dreamed of. Finally. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to worry about money. I started thinking about buying a house.”

In 2007, Thomson, known for its legal publications, purchased Reuters, the venerable international reporting service. The company grew into a giant data broker and media conglomerate that, besides running Reuters, sells massive quantities of personal data to private industry and government agencies.

Thomson Reuters (TR) is based in Toronto, Canada. One of its US offices, home to more than 3,600 employees, is in Eagan, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.

In 2017, TR completed a $22 million sale that provided the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm (ICE) with a range of government and public data through its investigative database, Consolidated Lead Evaluation and Reporting (CLEAR). TR markets CLEAR in these terms: “a vast collection of public and proprietary records…exclusive data feeds, quality domestic data …with source transparency and frequent updates, all in a single platform.” By March of this year, TR had $45 million in contracts and subawards with ICE. An additional contract for $7.4 million signed March 31, 2026, provides DHS with continued access to CLEAR.

CLEAR offers a supplemental data service called License Plate Recognition (LPR). This database was put to use on the streets of Minneapolis in January 2026, at the height of ICE’s Operation Metro Surge. Several thousand ICE agents, armed and masked, swarmed through the streets of the city, striving after the presidential goal of 3,000 deportations a day across the nation. A year earlier, on January 28, 2025, just a week after Trump’s inauguration, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had maintained that all undocumented immigrants were considered “criminals” under federal law. A spokesperson for DHS referred to clearing a “backlog of undocumented persons.”

To that end, ICE purchased a wealth of personal and sensitive information, including smartphone location, housing, and labor data.

Visuals of ICE agents scanning license plates on the streets of Minneapolis were pervasive in January. LPR enables ICE to instantly read a plate, adding it to a database of millions of records. When a license plate is photographed, it is not only a plate that is captured. People—children and bystanders—are caught in the dragnet as well as lawn signs and other data.

In the mayhem surrounding the ICE agents’ actions, US citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti were fatally shot. To date, none of the ICE shooters has been charged with a crime. On July 13, The New York Times reported, “After months of resistance, the Justice Department has shared evidence related to…shootings by immigration agents in Minnesota with state and local investigators, the county prosecutor in Minneapolis said.”

Billie Little says, “It was outrageous. It was murder. This should not be happening in a democratic society. It is legal to observe authorities. Our right to protest is foundational.”

“I lost my mind over this,” said one TR staffer in Minneapolis, name withheld for fear of retribution. She described “disgust” and “moral injury” from what she witnessed. “Thomson Reuters is profiting off the terrorizing.”

John Boehler, policy counsel with the ACLU of Minnesota, writes, “Following, observing or reporting on federal agencies or federal activities is not a criminal activity—it’s protected First Amendment activity. To be using those cameras, to use those license plate readers, to surveil protesters has a chilling effect on First Amendment rights, and that’s what we think the goal is.”

TR’s surveillance infrastructure does not operate in isolation. Government contracting documents show how TR’s software is used in coordination with Palantir, a company cofounded by Peter Thiel. TR’s analytical tools enable ICE to consolidate and utilize millions of data points, from social-media posts to location history, in order to identify and track targets. Motorola’s investigative-data platform is also integrated with CLEAR LPR.

“[ICE] officers are now using a mobile app that lets them scan a license plate with a phone and instantly pull up a vehicle’s travel history, ownership records, and associated personal data,” wrote Anthony Kimerv on BiometricUpdate.com, November 18, 2025.

It’s an enforcement capability that has rapidly expanded through commercial surveillance vendors and is already reflected in thousands of immigration-related license plate reader (LPR) queries appearing in local police systems…. Thomson Reuters, through its CLEAR investigative platform, supplies the identity and analytic layers sitting on top of the plate data.… When an ICE agent scans a plate through the mobile interface, the system in seconds can connect movement history from Motorola’s network with identity and relational data supplied by Thomson Reuters…. an individual’s identity and associations can be cross-referenced instantly through commercial databases.

ICE purchases of data from private companies, including records of utilities, credit, and health, totaled $2.8 billion for the period 2008 to 2021, according to the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law School.

Paromita Shah, executive director of Just Futures Law, says, “The so-called ‘data loophole’ is quite real: What ICE cannot legally obtain or refuses to obtain through traditional government investigations can simply be purchased by vendors, like Thomson Reuters, Lexis Nexis or Equifax, allowing Fourth Amendment protections to fall by the wayside. That means ICE can purchase everything and create individual dossiers in real time.”

None of this was overlooked by TR staff, many of whom are lawyers. By February, a CHAT group of 180 concerned employees had formed around the issue of the company’s involvement. Billie Little took on a leadership role in order to focus the group and take action.

She and 10 others formed the Committee to Restore Trust. In the committee’s name, she co-authored an appeal to the company in an “open letter to TR management” requesting “transparency and clear communication” regarding TR products sold to ICE. The committee submitted the letter, signed by Little and four others, on February 20. It reads in part, “It has come to our attention as employees, in part due to public scrutiny and concerns, that our company currently holds several investigative contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and, relatedly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“To offer a clear picture of the situation caused by Operation Metro Surge: at every turn, ICE agents and the DHS agency have met citizens, documented immigrants and undocumented migrants alike, with violence and lies, breaking into homes without warrants, fatally shooting members of our community…detaining children and sending them to other states without cause or due process, detaining or harassing Native Americans, denying detainees access to legal counsel, and creating such poor conditions within detention centers that people are dying.”

In an accompanying statement the committee added: “Many Thomson Reuters workers are licensed attorneys and certified professionals bound by oaths to uphold the Constitution and protect civil liberties. We are troubled by the possibility that TR products may enable activities that violate constitutional protections—including Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure, Fifth Amendment due process rights, and Fourteenth Amendment equal protection guarantees. For professionals bound by codes of ethics, this creates an untenable conflict between employment and licensure obligations.”

Thomson Reuters responded on February 25. “We appreciate the courage it takes to raise these issues and to engage constructively on topics that are complex and emotionally charged. Brave conversations like these are an important part of who we are as a company, and we value the thoughtfulness with which they have been brought forward.” A spokesperson for TR stated, “We take employee concerns seriously and provide clear channels for colleagues to raise issues, as outline in our Code of Conduct.”

In an internal TR post, reported on March 3 by The Minnesota Star Tribune, Kevin Appold, the Minnesota-based TR vice president for projects and US public records, shared this message: “We prohibit customers from using CLEAR to identify or locate undocumented immigrants who have not committed crimes. We take these restrictions seriously and enforce them.” Appold’s post was subsequently taken down without any explanation.

“When we think about the potential human rights impacts of how our products and services are used, we listen carefully—to both external voices and those of our own employees.” a Thomson Reuters spokesperson told Isaac Phan Nay, a reporter for Vancouver’s The Tyee.

On March 20 Billie Little was fired. She was told that the termination was carried out as a result of a breach of TR’s Code of Conduct. There were no specifics and nothing in writing given to her at that time.

Little filed a whistleblower suit on April 14. She alleged that the firing was in retaliation for reporting her good-faith belief that the company’s own data practices undermined and violated state and federal law. She is represented by attorneys Maria Witt and Steven Toff. Toff writes, “Thomson Reuters knew Billie was a leader among the employees raising concerns, and they made an example of her. But this case is about more than Billie’s job. It’s about whether a corporation can silence the people inside it who are asking the hardest questions—questions about whether their company’s products are being used to circumvent constitutional protections, undermine sanctuary laws, and fundamentally enable enforcement actions that have left American citizens dead on the streets of Minneapolis.”

A TR spokesperson said, “We strongly dispute the allegations and will robustly defend the case.” In its answer to Little’s complaint, filed on June 23, the company stated: “[TR] admits that an investigation revealed that of the employees who voiced questions and concerns whether ICE was using CLEAR, Plaintiff [Little] was the only employee it determined had engaged in unauthorized disclosure of confidential information as well as misuse of its electronic systems, which led to the termination of Plaintiff’s employment.” It should be noted that confidential information is at the heart of whistleblower actions.

(Evan Jacoby suffered the same fate. A journalist under contract to Reuters, he participated in the chat about the use of TR data by ICE. He was let go on April 17. The Reuters Guild subsequently filed an unfair-labor-practice charge on his behalf with the National Labor Relations Board.)

“ICE continues to abduct people in Minneapolis,” said another TR employee who also wanted to remain anonymous. She became aware of her company’s role in facilitating ICE’s attacks on the streets and homes of Minneapolis in December 2025. The following month, she joined the ranks of “rapid responders” in diverse neighborhoods on the city’s south side, delivering groceries to families who remained inside their homes for fear of capture in the mass deportation campaign. “We’re all scared. After the shootings in January, ICE agents appeared in plain clothes but still they’re easy to spot. They’ve been focusing lately on small businesses where immigrants may be working.

“Prior to this I was proud of the company I worked for,” she said. “It can’t go unchecked.”

If Little’s firing were meant to intimidate the members of the Committee to Restore Trust, that strategy has clearly backfired—the group has grown and is continuing to publicize the use of TR technology in ICE’s campaign, and is seeking to change company policy to guard against such abuses. With $45 million in contracts at stake for TR, the conflict will only escalate further.

On June 10, 2026, the annual Thomson Reuters shareholder meeting took place in Toronto. The Thomson family owns 73 percent of TR and, with an estimated worth of $50 billion, is among the wealthiest families in Canada.

The British Columbia General Employees’ Union (BCGEU) represents more than 95,000 members across public and private sectors in British Columbia, Canada. A minority shareholder in TR, the union has sought to engage the company since 2020 on its human rights record. This includes the CLEAR platform used by government clients such as ICE. BCGEU has been closely following events surrounding Operation Metro Surge, including the firing of Billie Little.

At the shareholders meeting, BCGEU introduced a proposal calling for an independent Human Rights Impact Assessment, examining how the company’s products are used by law enforcement and immigration enforcement agencies, including when those products are integrated into broader surveillance ecosystems. The proposal was voted down.

TR has repeatedly said that CLEAR is not utilized to track immigrants. In its press release following the shareholder meeting, TR said, “They [data] are provided under strict contractual terms, subject to applicable law, and governed by strong safeguards that limit and monitor how our products and services are used. We are confident in these controls. Where potential misuse is identified, we act promptly and decisively, including suspending and/or cancelling access when warranted.”

“Thomson Reuters and others say, ‘We just provide the tools.’ That’s a convenient excuse and allows the surveillance business to make billions each year and simultaneously claim no involvement in a military-grade surveillance system being deployed on noncitizens and the people around them” says Just Futures Law’s Paromita Shah. “It’s preposterous.”

Emma Pullman heads shareholder engagement for BCGEU. “Thomson Reuters has completed two enterprise-wide human rights assessments, neither of which explicitly disclose how the company’s products are used in immigration enforcement or policing, nor any remedial actions resulting from identified risks,” she says. A TR spokesperson stated that the company “was confident the risk indicators applied in [the most recent] assessment are robust and relevant today.” As Pullman observed, however, “The most recent assessment [2025] was completed before Operation Metro Surge.”

As it stands, the company will not be carrying out a human rights impact assessment for another three years, effectively burying its involvement in the events of January 2026.

Meanwhile, “Thomson Reuters’ products and data are integral to ICE’s ability to track, detain, and carry out the largest deportation in US history,” says Pullman.

ICE actions in Minneapolis continue. Investors, residents, and company employees are still asking for information about how TR’s software and data are being used—and they aren’t likely to stop without real answers.

Billie Little is now depending on social services, hoping that a GoFundMe page will help her get by.

“I am desperately looking for a job. Trying to hang on. I don’t want to feel defeated. There is too much injustice going on and that keeps me going,” Little says. “These times call on all of us to step up. We are witnessing the erosion of civil liberties and democracy. Everyone should stop what they’re doing and fight.”

At Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC, a small monument marks the spot where former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed by a car bomb planted by agents of the Chilean secret police on the morning of September 21, 1976. The monument is inscribed with the words “Justice - Peace - Dignity”; every year dozens of friends and colleagues gather at the circle to honor the lives of the two extraordinary people whose conscientious pursuit of those goals were cut short by an act of international terrorism.

This September, the annual gathering will carry a special meaning—and not only because it is the 50th anniversary of the assassination. It comes after a Chilean judge has called new attention to the case of Ronni Karpen Moffitt, finalizing a 15-year judicial effort to bring long-overdue accountability for her death as a victim of the Pinochet regime’s ruthless repression, rather than as collateral damage in the regime’s effort to eliminate its leading international critic, Orlando Letelier. Fifty years after she was murdered, there is finally a degree of justice for Ronni Moffitt, and a significant step toward closure in the infamous Letelier-Moffitt case.

The Long Arc of Justice

Ronni Susan Karpen Moffitt was just 25 years old when a piece of shrapnel from the car bomb cut through her neck, as she and her husband, Michael, were commuting to work at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) with Orlando Letelier that fall morning 50 years ago. A Jersey girl—she was the daughter of Murray and Hilda Karpen, proud owners of Karpen’s Delicatessen in Passaic, where I once enjoyed a delicious knish—she had just been promoted to a fundraising position at IPS where she worked closely with cofounders Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet. “Everyone loved Ronni, who used to babysit for me and my siblings,” Representative Jamie Raskin fondly remembered during a special ceremony at Sheridan Circle in 2023.

“My Aunt Ronni was music,” as her niece Rebecca Karpen recalled the highlights of her short life in an interview with The Nation. “She wanted to create an after-school music program for low-income kids of color. She got married in the backyard of her parents’ home in Passaic, New Jersey, where she walked down the aisle in a flower crown and posed inside the family deli food truck. She was kind, but not weak. She was just confident of her worth and unwilling to shrink herself to conform to outdated stereotypes of women’s roles in the workplace. I’ve been told that she didn’t take anyone’s shit!”

“Ronni lost her life because the dictatorship decided to exterminate those it defined as enemies,” notes Dr. Elizabeth Lira, who directs the Human Rights Center of the Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago, Chile. Indeed, Ronni was not the target of the assassination plot; her outspoken Chilean colleague Orlando Letelier was. The FBI investigation, codenamed “CHILBOM,” soon focused on the Chilean secret police, DINA, which served as Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s arm of repression both inside and outside of Chile, targeting pro-democracy opponents of the military dictatorship.

Eventually, the FBI identified two DINA operatives, American-born Michael Townley and Maj. Armando Fernandez Larios, as leading suspects. The US then sought the extradition of DINA’s top two officers, Manuel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza—which General Pinochet personally blocked. A comprehensive CIA review of its own intelligence on the car bombing concluded that there was “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder” and that Pinochet “decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement and, ultimately, to protect his hold on the presidency.”

When Chile finally returned to democracy in 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration made a deal with the incoming civilian government: The US would drop sanctions against Chile for protecting the DINA officers if the new government prosecuted Contreras and Espinoza. That unprecedented trial—the first of its kind in post-Pinochet Chile—became the Chilean equivalent of the O.J. Simpson trial in the United States. For most Chileans, the nationally televised legal proceedings provided their first exposure to the true nature of the Pinochet regime’s sinister system of repression—and flagrant acts of international terrorism.

Contreras and Espinoza were both found guilty of conspiring to assassinate Orlando Letelier; and given inexplicably short prison sentences of seven and six years respectively—to be served in Punta Peuco, a special luxury prison built just for them. But Pinochet, still the powerful head of the Chilean Army, remained untouchable—along with all the other torturers and executioners from his ruthless 17-year dictatorship.

Only after Pinochet’s historic October 1998 arrest in London under the European Anti-Terrorism Convention was his immunity from accountability broken. Although the British ultimately released him after over a year of house arrest, within 72 hours of his return to Santiago, a courageous judge, Juan Guzman, filed papers in court to strip Pinochet of his immunity from prosecution. At the time he died at age 91 on December 10, 2006—ironically, International Human Rights Day—the former dictator faced at least half a dozen indictments and investigations for corruption and human rights atrocities.

In June 2011, a leading human rights group called the Agrupacion de Familiares de Ejecutados Politicos—the Association of Relatives of Politically Executed Persons—filed legal complaints on behalf of over 1,000 murder victims of the Pinochet regime whose cases had never been specifically adjudicated. The case of Ronni Moffitt was one of them. In 2012, a Chilean court formally ordered that her case be officially investigated. A lengthy investigation over the next 14 years ensued, with depositions and documents filling massive volumes of evidence. On June 15, 2026, Chile’s special magistrate for human rights, Judge Paola Plaza, finally issued her verdict.

In her 138-page ruling, Judge Plaza found three former high officials of the Chilean secret police, DINA, guilty for killing Moffitt. Brig. Gen. Pedro Espinoza, DINA’s former deputy director for operations, was sentenced to 15 years; Gen. Raul Iturriaga, a high-ranking officer in DINA’s “Exterior” department, was also sentenced to 15 years, as was retired Brig. Gen. José Zara Holger, also a director in DINA’s international operations division.

Espinoza has been incarcerated for decades for his high-level role in DINA’s criminal repression. Iturriaga, now 88 years old, is currently serving cumulative sentences of 500 years for his human rights crimes. But Zara was released in August 2025 after completing his sentence of 15 years for his role in the car bomb assassination of Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofia Cuthbert, in Buenos Aires in September 1975—a DINA operation that set a precedent for the Letelier-Moffitt attack. Less than a day after he left Punta Peuco—the special prison built for military officers convicted of human rights crimes—Judge Plaza ordered that Zara be rearrested as a co-conspirator in the Letelier-Moffitt assassination.

The Meaning of the Moffitt-Letelier Case

Fifty years after the assassination, the Moffitt ruling becomes part of the final chapter in the long legal effort to hold General Pinochet and his DINA henchmen accountable for an act of international terrorism in Washington, DC. Just this past week The New York Times published an exposé on ICE’s detention—and then release—of one of those henchman, Armando Fernandez Larios, who defected to the United States in 1987, and served all of five months in prison for his role in the assassination plot. Last October, in its quest to find immigrants with real criminal backgrounds, ICE detained Fernandez Larios; the Department of Homeland Security labeled him “the worst of the worst” for his past crimes of homicide. But after he filed a “wrongful detention” lawsuit against ICE, he was quietly freed from the Krome Detention Center in Miami on March 19. Whether he will ever be deported, as so many immigrants with no criminal backgrounds have been, remains to be seen.

But both the Fernandez Larios case, and the recent ruling in the case of Ronni Moffitt have returned international attention to this atrocity, committed a half-century ago. Indeed, the pursuit of justice, peace, and dignity has never really stopped. For five long decades, the Letelier and Moffitt families, IPS (where they were employed), and human rights advocates in both the United States and Chile have successfully kept Ronni Karpen Moffitt and Orlando Letelier in the public spotlight, sustaining pressure on the authorities in both countries to hold those who killed them accountable.

Those persevering efforts have transformed Sheridan Circle into hallowed ground. It is no longer only the place where an infamous act of international terrorism took the lives of two beautiful people; it is now a place of community dedication to the sanctity of human rights. “We are gathered here because the military dictatorship that took power 50 years ago tried to put its bloody mark on this spot,” Sarah Anderson, an IPS director, told those attending the annual commemoration in September 2023. “But we have taken it back.”

“We have turned this site of the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt into our place,” she said. “Our place for remembering our fallen heroes, a place for renewing our commitment to justice and democracy. And a place of hope.”

“Are you part of the 89 percent?”

A team of Covering Climate Now reporters traveled through eastern Pennsylvania last week asking people that question, exploring what residents of that quintessential battleground state think about climate change and the fast-approaching midterm elections. Pennsylvanians had just endured a brutal heat wave that scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” absent global warming. Temperatures in Philadelphia hit 103º Fahrenheit, leading authorities to cancel the Fourth of July parade.

Pennsylvania is central to Democrats’ hopes of winning the US House of Representatives in November and putting a brake on Donald Trump’s one-party rule. Four of the 35 seats Democratic strategists have identified as opportunities to flip from red to blue are in Pennsylvania. Trump won the state by a narrow marginin 2024—a mere 120,000 votes out of 7 million cast—and his underwater approval ratings today figure to bolster Democrats’ chances.

Our 89 percent question referred to the 80 to 89 percent supermajority of people around the world who want their governments to “do more” about climate change. That’s according to Gallup’s annual global mega-poll, as analyzed by scholars in the eminent scientific journal Nature Climate Change. Separate studies by Oxford University, the European Commission, and others found similar levels of support. Crucially, the studies also found that the supermajorities in most countries do not realize they are a supermajority; instead, they think they are a minority.

Shedding further light on Pennsylvanians’ views, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication recently released survey data measuring Americans’ views about global warming and what they think governments and corporations should do about it. The data covers the entire United States but is also broken down by state, county, and congressional district. For example, 63 percent of all Americans are “somewhat worried” or “very worried” about global warming, whereas the number in Pennsylvania is 61 percent and in neighboring New Jersey it is 71 percent.

Our interviews with a diverse collection of Pennsylvanians broadly confirmed these scholarly findings, though with important caveats. For example, Joe, a retired schoolteacher in Philadelphia, estimated that only “15 to 20 percent” of people want stronger climate action. (For electoral privacy reasons, this article will not use the last names of interviewees.) “Maybe we’re not doing a good enough job of communicating the dangers for people’s kids and grandkids,” he added.

To be clear, the size of the climate supermajority varies by country. In the United States, the percentage is lower, at 74 percent. No surprise, really, considering that the United States is the world’s oldest petro-state and currently its largest producer of oil and gas. (Fun fact: The world’s first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859.)

But 74 percent still amounts to three in every four Americans who want stronger government climate action. In Pennsylvania, 59 percent say that the US economy should transition to 100 percent clean energy by 2050, and 53 percent say that “a candidate’s views on global warming are important to my vote.” If a meaningful fraction of these people vote accordingly in November, the climate majority could have a decisive effect on the results.

“Absolutely, I am,” said Emily, a 30-ish office worker in Allentown, when asked if she was part of the 89 percent. Climate change is one of her priority issues, she added, and “absolutely I will be voting in November.” Of Mexican heritage, Emily said some of her family members are not authorized to vote. “If you have the ability to vote, definitely vote,” she urged. “If not for yourself, at least vote for those who can’t.”

Camille, an African American single mother in Allentown, said she wants the government to do more about climate change, partly because of her children, ages 10 and 12. Underscoring the importance of affordability, she added, “But I want the government to do more about a lot of things, especially the cost of living. People are struggling, and in a country as rich as this, people should not be struggling.”

Along with Scranton, Allentown is one of two sizable cities in Pennsylvania’s Eighth Congressional District, one of the four seats Democrats aim to flip in November. Located 63 miles north of Philadelphia, Allentown is currently represented by Republican Rob Bresnahan, who ousted an incumbent Democrat in 2024 by an even slimmer margin than Trump’s.

The Yale data indicates that 59 percent of the district’s residents are “worried” about global warming, the same percentage that wants the United States to transition to clean energy by 2050. And like Pennsylvania as a whole, 53 percent of eighth district residents say a candidate’s views on global warming are important to how they vote. The numbers are very similar next door in the Ninth Congressional District, even though the ninth is home to some of Pennsylvania’s fracking operations.

The eighth is a swing district partly because it has lots of voters like Bobby, a white-haired computer systems manager who saw no urgency in addressing climate change. “I think climate change is real. We can feel that the weather is hotter than it used to be,” he said. “But burning fossil fuels only has an incremental effect on it. We should be stewards of the earth and make incremental improvements, but they’ll be incremental.” Roughly one out of three people (32 percent) in the eighth district likewise believe that global warming is not much affected by human actions.

Jose, a warehouse worker in Allentown, agreed that the weather had been “very hot,” but he had never heard the terms “climate change” or “global warming.” When they were explained, he waved them away with a smile, saying, “This is in God’s hands.”

God’s will was invoked in more than a few of our interviews, a reminder of how powerful a role religion plays in public attitudes in the United States. More than one in three (37 percent) of Americans reject the science of evolution, believing instead that “God created humans in their present form in the last 10,000 years,” a 2024 Gallup poll found. “I never heard of global warming, but it don’t matter,” said Rodney, an older African American man hawking ice-cold bottles of water across from Independence Hall in Philadelphia. “It’s all up to Jesus. And you better get right with Jesus, or you’ll end up in a place a lot hotter than this.”

Although a clear majority of the people we interviewed in the purplish eighth district and in bright-blue Philadelphia said they favored stronger government climate action, there are significant caveats. Many of these individuals did not seem to hold this opinion very strongly; they had only a vague understanding of what climate change is and how it could be tackled; and they were not necessarily likely to vote in November.

Liz, a middle-aged retail clerk in Plymouth Metting, a smaller town 20 miles north of Philadelphia, said the July 4 heat wave was “terrible” and was “probably” made worse by climate change. She plans to vote in November, but she said that “most people around here don’t care about that stuff, and they don’t vote.”

James, a security guard in Plymouth Meeting, said the July 4 heat was “really bad. I heard on the news it was the hottest it had been in 100 years.” Did he think global warming was to blame? “I don’t know. They used to talk about that more, but I haven’t heard much about it lately.”

James’s comment aligns with one of the most striking findings in the Yale survey: Eighty-four percent of people in the eighth district and 82 percent in Pennsylvania as a whole said they only heard about global warming in the media once a month at most. Some major US news organizations have retreated from climate coverage recently; the TV networks ABC, CBS, and NBC reduced the airtime they devoted to climate change by 35 percent, according to the watchdog group Media Matters. This retreat, however, runs counter to what audiences say they want. A separate study released this month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 74 percent of Americans say “they are interested news stories about global warming.”

Kennedy, an African American educator from Tennessee who was touring Philadelphia with his wife to mark the United States’ 250th birthday, was not surprised that a sizable minority of people don’t care about climate change. “What the media says is very important,” he said. Referencing the roughly 25 percent of the country who he estimated reject climate science, he added, “People need to have an honest assessment of what’s going on with their world if they’re to have informed opinions.”

Only one person among the dozens we interviewed correctly guessed the percentage of Americans who favored stronger government climate action, and her method was grounded in a similar insight. Covering Climate Now conducted our interviews in Philadelphia alongside Susan Phillips, the veteran environment reporter for the local public radio station WHYY. Near an outdoor World Cup viewing party the city had organized, Phillips put this question to Amanda, a middle-aged white woman on a bicycle: What percentage of people do you think want their elected representatives to do more about climate change? Amanda paused and replied, “Seventy-five percent.” It was simple math, she explained. MAGA is 25 percent of the country, so “America minus MAGA is 75 percent.”

In December 2025, Senator Bernie Sanders became the first member of Congress to demand a moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers. The costs of the infrastructure that powers generative AI technologies like chatbots and image generators were soaring, but it was not clear that regular people were seeing much benefit. The ban was necessary, Sanders argued, to give “democracy a chance to catch up.”

Sanders could have also said that politicians needed to catch up to the public. Recent polling suggests more than 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of data centers near their communities. It’s no wonder why: People have been seeing their power bills soar, high-voltage cables rammed through their properties, their water supplies sullied, and their days disrupted by the incessant hum of air conditioners keeping the buildings cool. It’s hard to think of another issue that has so quickly galvanized Americans across the political spectrum.

By March, Sanders had partnered with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to introduce a bill proposing a national data center moratorium. Some states and city councils had already started to halt construction on their own, but the federal bill would ban construction “until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence,” such as environmental degradation and soaring electricity rates.

For anyone concerned about the effects of these massive structures and their energy demands, not to mention the tech industry’s reckless acceleration of the AI industry, there would seem to be little to quibble with in such a proposal. Data centers are a material problem for communities across the country, and the generative AI tools they power have been enabling a growing list of harms that policymakers are not acting quickly enough to rein in—if they’re acting at all. But unfortunately, Sanders’s advocacy did not end there.

The same month as the moratorium bill was introduced, Sanders released a video that began to set off red flags among experts who understand generative AI and question the grand narratives being floated by AI companies. In the video, Sanders is seen sitting at a long boardroom table facing a smartphone. The screen displays Claude, the chatbot made by Anthropic, one of the biggest players in the generative AI space, along with OpenAI and major tech companies like Google and Meta.

Over the course of nine minutes, Sanders proceeds to have a conversation with the chatbot on issues like privacy, democracy, and whether Claude would back his proposed data center moratorium. The bot responds with characteristic informality, providing answers that confirm the direction of the questions Sanders is prompting it with.

While Sanders has done admirable work bringing attention to the issue of data centers, his conversation with Claude showed that the senator does not ultimately have a good enough grasp of AI—and that has consequences for how he approaches it.

Part of the problem is that Sanders’s policy approach to AI has been a direct response to the exaggerated claims made by AI companies about their products. By now you’ve probably heard many of them: that AI is going to eradicate vast numbers of jobs, will be societally transformative on a scale we’ve never seen before, and could even gain sentience and turn on humanity.

You can see this in Sanders’s rhetoric. In a New York Times opinion piece published in June, he opened by echoing the industry’s narratives. “Artificial intelligence will almost certainly be the most transformational technology in the history of the world,” he wrote. “It will profoundly affect the life of every man, woman and child in our country.” For Sanders, the focus has become about making sure workers are not displaced by the technology and that the public shares the wealth it creates, as he argues for a policy to put a 50 percent one-time tax on the stock of large AI companies.

But what if that is not the reality of generative AI? Chatbots and image generators are not the economic and social revolution that tech billionaires insist they are. In 2024, author Ted Chiang called them “autocomplete on steroids,” and that’s a good way to understand them. We’re dealing with AI models trained on immense amounts of data and using unimaginable quantities of computation to produce text and images that are designed to seem as though they come from humans, but are really just pulling from a vast repository to best match the prompt they’re served.

It’s exactly why the “hallucinations” cannot be engineered out of the technology. As OpenAI’s own researchers admitted last year, they’re a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. That’s because there is no understanding or thought happening behind the prompt box on a chatbot. It’s just looking for the parts of its dataset that best match the query it’s given.

There’s also growing evidence that the supposedly transformative productivity and efficiency gains AI companies promised are not materializing. Businesses are in the process of pulling back on their AI spending because they aren’t seeing a return on investment, and it’s quite clear that in many cases bosses are using the excuse of AI to lay off workers so they can cut costs—not because AI is really replacing those jobs.

The real risks of AI are not the existential ones that people like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei obsess about and that Sanders has taken to repeating. Instead, they stem from the more tangible effects AI has on regular people’s lives: how dependence on chatbots can affect cognition and critical thinking, create addiction that isolates people from their human networks, and can even coach them down harmful paths of self-harm and suicide. That’s not to mention how AI has polluted the information environment, enabled the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes, and is actively degrading cultural production.

While she may have been an ally of Sanders on the data center moratorium, Ocasio-Cortez does not seem to have fallen for the deceptive narratives of the AI industry in the way that he has. In November, she warned about the threat of AI psychosis and of the economic damage that could follow the bursting of the financial bubble around AI. She has also been a leader in the effort to give AI deepfake victims the tools to hold perpetrators to account.

In my view, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez demonstrate two distinct approaches to AI policy motivated by very different understandings of the technology. Sanders is responding to the narratives floated by the industry, narratives that exist to exaggerate the capability of its products and distract from the real material effects the public is feeling from their rollout in the here and now. Ocasio-Cortez, on the other hand, is listening to experts who really understand how the technology works, and to victims who have felt those harms firsthand.

With data centers wreaking havoc across the United States and the wider world, a moratorium on their construction is essential. But responding to the generative AI applications they power requires properly understanding their real harms, not believing the deceptive arguments fed to us by the industry. We need policy that follows the evidence, not the hype.

More than half a year into his unprecedented tenure as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old democratic socialist, has encountered his fair of challenges. There were the homeless deaths during a brutally cold winter. There was a budget gap that threatened to damage the city’s finances. There were squabbles over how to close it—Mamdani, at one point, floated a deeply unpopular property tax hike—and tussles with the City Council over how generously to fund an ambitious and very expensive housing voucher program. Later on, Mamdani’s decision to endorse two DSA members running for Congress alienated senior members of the House delegation. Through it all, his rivals and ideological enemies stood ready to pounce on just about every misstep, real or perceived.

What’s made the Mamdani mayoralty fascinating is how, for now at least, it’s overcome powerful and entrenched opposition. Never before was a mayor elected who was despised by so many wealthy New Yorkers. Plenty of elites disliked Bill de Blasio, the last mayor who identified as a progressive, but even he was a career politician who had forged close relationships with the major real estate developers in the five boroughs. Mamdani, from the jump, was an enemy of capital, even as he’s sought to smooth over relationships with the business community. His battle with Ken Griffin, a right-wing billionaire, over his support for a tax on luxury second homes—Mamdani cut a video singling Griffin out—was a reminder of where the mayor stood.

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

The broad swath of centrist Democrats and conservatives who have hoped to wound Mamdani enough to sap him of political capital are still figuring out, all these months later, how to land real blows. Mamdani, to them, is almost like a rope-a-dope fighter, ducking and dodging whenever they feel they’re close, slowly wearing them down. Emblematic of this dynamic has been Mamdani’s relationship with the New York Post. The Murdoch-owned tabloid delighted in flaying de Blasio for eight years before, for a period, evolving into an Eric Adams propaganda organ. The Post is powerful because it regularly provides granular local coverage that even The New York Times has backed away from, and it has the ability, with a large circulation and highly trafficked website, to influence other outlets, whether it’s television, radio, print media, or the conversation on social media. Even with the Post lambasting him almost every day, de Blasio did win reelection, but he steadily lost popularity and never quite regained the political momentum he enjoyed in his very first year, when he began building up his universal prekindergarten program. The Post bashed him for the homeless in the streets—the problem, of course, predated him—and for hating the police, though he had hired a law-and-order police commissioner and supported budgets to grow the NYPD headcount. When de Blasio attended funerals for two officers assassinated in late 2014, police turned their backs on him.

What made the Post’s attacks on de Blasio so effective was that they were able to create a narrative about his tenure that hardened rather quickly. De Blasio was portrayed as feckless, inattentive, and even vain, the caricature of the lazy, professorial liberal condescending to everyday New Yorkers. Much of this was unfair, but de Blasio did feed the beast in his own way, often showing up late for events and straining, with little success, to build a national profile. His run for the presidency, in 2019, was a disaster, and his endorsements in 2016 and 2020 caused him more agita than anything else. A Hillary Clinton supporter when many progressives went for Bernie Sanders, de Blasio nevertheless wasn’t beloved in Clintonworld and was mocked for his lonely door-knocking in Iowa. Meanwhile, he backed Sanders in 2020, but the support felt belated and he wasn’t taken seriously as a surrogate. Minor controversies, ginned up by his enemies, dogged him, too. There was eating pizza with a fork. Dropping the groundhog. Getting blamed, stupidly, for not plowing the Upper East Side after a snowstorm as a form of political retribution. When he found himself in highly pitched political fights, like Uber’s incursion into New York City, he saw his success rate drop.

With Mamdani, the Post and its allies have largely tried to run the same playbook. Virtually every day, there is an attack lodged, a controversy inflated. Mamdani is anti-police, antisemitic, overly woke, the boy with the silver spoon in his mouth. Sometimes, they bash Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, who has no role in the administration. Of late, the Post has been on the warpath because a map of immigrant enclaves left out Little Italy, even though it’s been many decades since any actual Italian immigrants lived there. Duwaji, meanwhile, is taking heat for traveling abroad during the Fourth of July; it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t collect a public salary and therefore is free to go wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Not all these controversies are irrelevant—given the Graham Platner fiasco, it’s fine to raise questions about Mamdani’s close association with Morris Katz—but the right wing threatens, with Mamdani, to become the boy who cried wolf. Complain every day, and nothing matters.

Mamdani has retained strong poll numbers because he is a rare political talent, a global celebrity who is also very attuned to the performative nature of being mayor of New York. He plainly relishes the job in a way de Blasio did not. He visits night clubs, plays soccer in the park, fanatically cheers on the Knicks, and documents all of it on social media, where he enjoys a massive following. Uganda-born, he can’t run for president, so he’s rooted in the five boroughs. He is helped, too, by the ineffectual nature of the attacks against him. The problem for conservatives is they haven’t settled on a consistent narrative, one that makes sense and can resonate with the broader electorate. Either Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor, is bringing Shariah law to New York or he’s too socially liberal, too supportive of trans rights. He hates the police, but crime is low so only his police commissioner can get credit—but he and Jessica Tisch, a billionaire friendly with the Post, have a decent working relationship. He’s a Marxist radical or he’s disappointing the left because buses aren’t free yet and he hasn’t been able to hike income taxes on millionaires.

In some ways, the pro-Trump conservatives who are angered most by Mamdani are learning, at last, what it has felt like for liberals to attempt to weaken Trump throughout the 2010s and early ’20s. Trump, now, is failing, but that has less to do with the left and a lot more to do with his shambolic, disastrous presidency. When Trump was stronger, Democrats would latch on to endless streams of mini-controversies that were less about substance and more about an inane tweet or utterance Trump made. Eventually, they learned that it was best to focus on what Trump was actually doing, the tangible wreckage. The affordability attacks work because Trump’s Iran War has driven up the cost of gasoline.

With Mamdani, the Post and their ilk find themselves with an opponent who isn’t easily rattled, who won’t bend at the slightest provocation. There are many substantive critiques to make of the Mamdani administration—can they balance the budget next year?—but his enemies can’t discipline themselves enough to stick to them. For now, they’re punching air and little else.

On June 9, after an Israeli air strike killed at least eight people in a residential block, the Israeli military ordered the Lebanese city of Tyre to be emptied. Tyre has stood for roughly 4,000 years, long enough to have survived Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire. Now Israel sought to clear it all out—the Old City and the churches and the camps where generations of some Palestinian families have lived since they were exiled from their homeland in 1948.

A few days later, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, urged that for every rocket fired from Lebanon toward Israel, 10 buildings in Beirut’s Dahiyeh district, where hundreds of thousands of people live, should be leveled. He had previously vowed that Dahiyeh would soon look like Khan Younis in Gaza, and that the villages of the south would be destroyed like Rafah and Beit Hanoun.

Nobody who has witnessed Israel’s annihilation of Gaza should be surprised that it is bringing the same genocidal mission to bear on Lebanon. But just because something is expected does not make it less important—and now that there is talk of peace in the air between Israel and Lebanon, it is vital to examine what Israel has done and what it still intends to do to its neighbor—with, it would seem, the tacit agreement of the Lebanese government.

Since March, more than 4,200 people have been murdered and over 10,000 wounded. Roughly a fifth of the Lebanese population has been displaced. Sixty-four hospitals and clinics have been hit, and more than 100 health workers have been killed. On April 8, Israeli strikes hit more than a hundred targets across Beirut and the south in roughly 10 minutes, killing 357 people, the deadliest day in Lebanon since its civil war.

The Genocide Convention does not require a body count or a particular weapon. Genocide requires intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, and conditions of life calculated to bring that destruction about. A people do not get killed by the thousands, driven from a fifth of their own country, and have their hospitals, their water, and their farmland destroyed as well, by a state whose ministers announce the plan as they carry it out, for any reason except the one with that name. For Israel’s vision of a “Greater Middle East,” greatness apparently means everything except the people who make the region great: the farmers, doctors, poets, children, villages, orchards, histories, and homes that must first be removed so the empire can admire itself in the cleared land. So the south of Lebanon is owed our witness of its attempted genocide, while there is still something left for it to describe.

Now Israel has signaled that it intends to embed its destruction into the land more permanently—with the complicity of the Lebanese government. On June 26, Lebanon and Israel signed a 14-point framework agreement in Washington that tacitly surrendered the south to the occupation. The deal conditions Israeli withdrawal on the disarmament of the resistance, which is unlikely to ever happen. Article 13 commits Lebanon to cease “all hostile or adverse actions [against Israel] in international political or legal fora,” a clause that wipes clean Israel’s pager attack on civilians in markets and on streets, the demolition of hospitals, the strikes on medics and journalists, and all the other indiscriminate killings. Israel, which carved Gaza to pieces, leaving less than 40 percent of it behind a “yellow line,” has now done the same to Lebanon, seizing a huge swath of territory under the guise of creating a “security buffer.” This is how Israel plans to finish what the airstrikes and white phosphorus started. What began as a cancer in Gaza has become metastatic—the occupation spreading north, the terms of surrender dressed as peace, the same peace offered now to Lebanon, written without them, implemented over them, and called, by the people who wrote it, a beginning.

The way genocide is now reverberating through Lebanon mirrors the pattern against Palestine: Kill the people, murder the journalists, smear them as militants, and let the word “target” do the laundering. That is why the bombardments on neighborhoods in densely populated cities like Beirut are still filed as a strike on a Hezbollah stronghold, because it creates the plausible deniability for the West to believe it is watching a surgeon remove a tumor, when it is really watching an arsonist call the whole house diseased before setting it on fire. And the same Arab newsrooms that risked reporters to cover Gaza now grow visibly more careful once the people under the bombs are Shia.

Anas al-Sharif, one of the last Al Jazeera correspondents in northern Gaza, was killed last August after months of fabricated Israeli claims that he was a Hamas operative. Months later, in Lebanon, a marked press car was struck, and three journalists were killed inside it: Fatima Ftouni, her brother Mohammed, and Ali Shuaib.

None of this is unfamiliar to the south. Its villages were bombed in 1978 and again in 1982, in the invasion that produced Hezbollah, both on the grounds that Palestinians were fighting from Lebanese soil. Every Muharram, the south retells the story of Karbala. Karbala is the story of an army that surrounded a small camp, children included, and for days did nothing but cut them off from the river beside it, until the youngest died of thirst. All the while, those who had promised to fight beside them stayed home. Those who survived the massacre were marched in chains to Damascus, to the court of the man who had ordered their slaughter, where a woman who had lost everyone stood before him and refused to be quiet. The story does not end with anyone winning. It ends with a single word, labbayka, “here I am,” said by people who have nothing to gain and everything to lose, to people who have already lost everything, and meant as an answer that does not wait to be asked twice.

This is why the south is being erased. There is nothing left to offer them that they have not already measured against Gaza and rejected, and no deal that does not somewhere ask them to stop looking at what happens across that line. For two years, the south has been the one place that has refused, at real and rising cost, to look away from Gaza for even a day. Nobody is destroying it by accident.

The Lebanese people sure as hell do not need Israel’s genociders or Washington’s telling them what justice looks like. The Lebanese people who have spent years refusing to treat Gaza’s death as someone else’s, and now asked to die the same death, on the same schedule, for the same reason, know all too well what real justice is, and how it is practiced. While the rest of the world ignores, with the same unhurried care as Gaza, whether the genocide in southern Lebanon is happening, the people, like the Palestinians, will never surrender their dignity—even if their governments have given it up long ago.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham passed away this weekend. I imagine most people will remember him as the guy who was always willing to put the final lick-polish on Donald Trump’s jackboots. But for me, the image of him screaming, gesticulating, and spitting in defense of an alleged attempted rapist is the one that will always be indelible in my hippocampus.

On the morning of September 27, 2018, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee about the time Brett Kavanaugh, then a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States, tried to rape her. Ford was brave, compelling, and, most important, credible.

The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee did not question Ford. They didn’t have the guts to tell a survivor of an attempted assault that she was lying to her face. Instead, the Republicans outsourced their time for questions to an experienced state prosecutor from Arizona, Rachel Mitchell, who tried to poke holes in Ford’s story. But Mitchell was largely ineffective. Ford, though speaking meekly, never wavered. She was consistent about what she remembered, whom she told, and what Kavanaugh did to her. When asked about her strongest memory of the event, Ford said: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter. The uproarious laughter between the two [Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge], and their having fun at my expense.”

By the time Ford was finished with her testimony, the Kavanaugh nomination appeared cooked. Most people watching believed Ford.

In the afternoon, Kavanaugh was hauled back in front of the committee to respond. His histrionics during his opening statement are now famous. He ranted; he raved; he cried. He professed a love for beer and promised that his enemies would “reap the whirlwind” for questioning him. Kavanaugh’s statement was so unhinged and so unbecoming of a future Supreme Court justice, it would have gone down in history as the last gasps of a drowning man if not for one person: Lindsey Graham.

You see, to justify their cowardice, the Republicans planned to let Mitchell question both Ford and Kavanaugh. Republican chairman Charles Grassley allowed her to question Kavanaugh during his time, but when Graham’s turn arrived next, he refused to let Mitchell continue her questioning (which was not helping Kavanaugh in the slightest). Instead, he butted in, dispensed with Mitchell, and unleashed a tirade. He screamed; he spat; he acted like Brett Kavanaugh had been victimized by the entire process.

Graham asked Kavanaugh if he was a “gang rapist” (as if that’s what Kavanaugh had been accused of). He accused the Democrats of making Kavanaugh out to be “Bill Cosby” because they “want power.” And he threatened his fellow Republican, declaring: “To my Republican colleagues, if you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.”

It is important to note that Graham never questioned Ford’s story or her credibility. The Republican theory of the case then (and I assume now, though they’ve tried to memory-hole the incident) is that Ford was telling the truth… she just misidentified her assailant. Somebody tried to rape Ford in high school, just not Brett Kavanaugh. Somehow the only thing Ford didn’t remember is who tried to rape her, according to Republicans.

Graham’s vitriol turned the tide of the nomination. Republicans hadn’t found any evidence exonerating Kavanaugh (other than his high school calendar, where Kavanaugh did not mark down “try to rape someone tonight”) or any evidence that Ford was lying. But they were pissed. And Graham showed them that being pissed off was enough of a reason to greenlight the nomination. They all fell in line: Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins. People who one might think would be appalled by attempted rape simply rolled over in the face of spittle and tears from two very angry white men.

Graham knew he was the key to Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and he was proud of it. For years afterward, Graham’s Twitter profile was a picture of him with his arms wrapped around Kavanaugh.

Graham’s role in the GOP’s Supreme Court justice–making machine is one of the most important parts of his political legacy, but it’s often overlooked. In addition to his starring role in the Kavanaugh tragedy, Graham was chiefly responsible for pushing through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett during his one stint as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Barrett was confirmed on October 26, 2020. Trump lost the presidential election just one week later. One of the reasons people don’t remember this outrage is Graham’s smooth and efficient management of the process.

Graham was also a key player during the non-confirmation of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. This was back in 2016, before Graham made his heel turn to Trumpism, when he was most closely associated with Senator John McCain. Most people only remember Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s role in blowing up Garland’s nomination by refusing to allow Garland to sit for a confirmation hearing. But McConnell was not on the Judiciary Committee. Graham was. If Graham (and, by extension, McCain) had bucked McConnell, the entire plan of obstruction would have fallen apart.

And it wasn’t unreasonable, at the time, to think that Graham might have. For years, Graham traded on his image as a “bipartisan” senator, and much of that credibility stemmed from his decisions to vote for the confirmations of Democrats Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court (a fact he liked to remind people of, although his willingness to reach across the aisle disappeared when Joe Biden nominated a Black woman to the Supreme Court). There were only two people in Washington who could have stopped McConnell’s blockade simply by saying that Garland was entitled to a hearing: Graham and Chief Justice John Roberts. (While Roberts had no actual power over the nomination, a decision to speak out likely would have turned public opinion and the media narrative against McConnell’s obstructionism.)

Both men failed the moment. Graham enforced McConnell’s orders, while Roberts kept his complicit mouth shut, and the Supreme Court has never been the same.

Indeed, Graham’s refusal to give Garland a hearing is what made his late-career villain arc wholly unsurprising to me. The most important things to Graham were power and the projection of power. Once Trump had it, Graham was always going to fall in line. He was always a moon to somebody else’s sun: unable to generate any heat on his own but happy to masquerade as a bright star in the sky if somebody else lent him some light.

His public career would have been harmless, comical even, if it were merely about his endless escapades trying to crawl up some stronger politician’s ass. The guy driving the car always needs a person sitting in the back willing to hop out and buy a pack of cigarettes.

But Graham’s career was not harmless, because he was also vicious. He was a warmonger who played a cheering role for every death caused by American bombs over the past 20 years. And, as he showed during the Kavanaugh hearings, his chief counsel to his Republican colleagues was always to scream and yell until they got their way.

When I think of Graham I think of a weak kid who suddenly gets emboldened when he finds his father’s handgun. He had no real power of his own but he knew how to use the power of others to its most brutal and devastating effect.

Lindsey Graham was not the worst Republican. He was just the worst version of himself.

The Trump administration has exacerbated an already dismal status quo for women’s health. In the United States today, women die from avoidable causes more than in any developed country. Our maternal mortality rates are among the highest worldwide, exponentially worse for Black women. All the while, the National Institutes for Health (NIH) continues to slash grants that address disparities by race, sex, or gender, outright barring words like “women” and “diversity” from funding proposals.

Yet, in statehouses across the country, lawmakers seem to be delivering on at least one area crucial to women’s well-being: menopause care. How is it that this issue of all the issues has broken through as a matter of public policy?

As a writer, lawyer, and advocate whose work centers on the politics of periods, from first to final, I’ve seen firsthand how menopause can defy partisanship and win political support. The momentum menopause advocates have built offers important lessons for all of us at a time when it can feel like all hope is lost.

A decade ago, I helped to develop a legal and policy blueprint for dismantling the “tampon tax” in the then-40 states charging sales tax on menstrual products. More than half (22 states) have since passed laws axing the tax, as municipal, state, and federal jurisdictions, including the first Trump administration, moved to mandate free pads and tampons in public facilities like schools, jails, and prisons. The mechanics of menstruation seem to evoke an oddly potent combination of empathy and engagement among lawmakers—I once teamed up with a male Republican lawmaker to write publicly about it—opening the door to uncommon bipartisan agreement. We all bleed red.

And yet, there is still a well-documented history of active neglect of midlife women’s health on Capitol Hill, no matter the party in charge. While women have long been disregarded in medical research, it was the 2002 press conference about the Women’s Health Initiative, the first-ever and to this day largest NIH-funded study of postmenopausal women, which caused a cascade of misinformation and harm that lingers still today.

It would take another two decades for a "menopause moment"—marked by viral headlines and celebrity spokespeople—to coalesce. This moment has morphed into a burgeoning movement, driving the demand for modern, evidence-based care, treatment, and medical education, and leading to a rare opportunity in 2024 to win a trifecta of congressional action, regulatory reform, and federal research dollars. President Biden signed an executive order in March of that year, directing $12 billion to midlife and menopause research funding, as Congress introduced a related suite of bipartisan, bicameral bills. But by the time November came and went, it seemed unlikely that momentum would survive the second Trump administration. (It has, sort of: The now-ousted commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration succeeded in his short tenure in scrapping outdated warnings on menopause hormone therapy that have long impeded its usage.)

By the eve of Inauguration Day, a multidisciplinary group of advocates and physicians joined forces to publish a Citizen’s Guide to Menopause Advocacy, a collection of policy proposals and mobilization strategies that would be viable at the state level, in particular. These quickly took hold; within weeks, headlines dubbed the rapid rise in menopause policy “the new tampon tax.” Even in some of the most polarized and gerrymandered legislatures—from Louisiana to Ohio and Texas, each of which has rolled back healthcare in the most diabolical ways—lawmakers stepped up to try to deliver something, anything, to constituents in the name of menopause.

Last July, CNN reported that the state-level policy strategy had morphed into a “national movement.” And now, one year later, more than half the states, red and blue alike, have introduced at least one bill focused on improving menopause care. Since 2024, more than 60 bills have been introduced in total, 15 of which are now law. (The organization I lead at New York University School of Law, the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center, tracks these policies; my forthcoming book, When in Menopause: A User’s Manual & Citizen’s Guide, provides a road map for winning these and more reforms.)

To be sure, it may well be that for some of the conservative lawmakers who aim to deliver on menstruation and menopause, while otherwise wreaking havoc on democracy, they are only in it for cheap grace. But all this momentum opens the door to reshape the national conversation about equity in women’s health—a string of verboten words, I know—in light of the array of state policies gaining traction.

Private insurance and Medicaid coverage: A 2025 study conducted by GoodRx found that one in five women delayed or passed up menopause treatment due to financial concerns and only 26 percent have insurance coverage that includes menopause hormone therapy, leaving most to pay entirely out of pocket. Neither Medicaid nor Medicare have a mandate to include menopause care, shutting out huge swaths of the population.

To date, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Utah, and Washington have enacted laws to change this for all or state-employed women in those states; California passed legislation too, only to be vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom, thanks to pressure from the insurance industry. Newsom subsequently wrote limited coverage provisions into the state budget.

Improved education for doctors (and patients): A lack of menopause physician training and overall education has led to vast gaps in care. All specialties—ob-gyns and internists, certainly, as well as endocrinologists, orthopedists, neurologists, cardiologists, and oncologists—need to be aware of how hormonal changes affect every major organ system in the body, and how menopause is experienced differently among Black women and women of color, LGBTQ people, those who go through early or premature menopause, and cancer survivors. Yet the majority of clinicians are taught nothing on the topic.

There are attempts in the private sector to change this dynamic. The Menopause Society has launched the NextGen Now Initiative, a training program designed to reach 25,000 healthcare professionals by 2028. Telehealth companies and nonprofits are also developing innovative, well-funded models to help close the care gap.

But neither of these is a substitute for the systemic change catalyzed by public policy, which can better incentivize medical education and public information that is accurate, up to date, and nuanced. Among the states that have new laws in effect to those ends are California, Maine, Maryland, and New Jersey.

Protection against workplace discrimination: As menopause goes mainstream, so too has the concept of “menopause-friendly” workplaces. Accommodations and benefits are becoming more common, making it increasingly urgent to rectify the lack of federal protection from discrimination on the basis of menopause (which is not affirmatively covered under adjacent laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, or the Family and Medical Leave Act).

States and municipal governments are uniquely positioned to do so. Rhode Island became the first to extend its fair employment practices pertaining to pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions to include menopause and menopause-related conditions. Philadelphia’s City Council has done the same, and the citywide policy will go into effect in early 2027. Washington Governor Bob Ferguson recently issued the first-ever menopause-focused statewide executive order calling for a full study on menopause and the workplace.

All of this progress is meaningful—in part because it shines a light on systemic failures in our healthcare system for the millions who enter menopause every year. It also presents a ripe opportunity to broaden the media and policy drumbeat around menopause and women’s health, and begin to spell out the need for even further-reaching reforms.

I’m especially keen to see states leverage public university funding for medical research that will bolster and, if needed, replace federal dollars. Given the anti-DEI chokehold on NIH grants, this could be a game changer for so many health issues, extending well beyond menopause.

Improving transparency in pharmaceutical supply chains is another much-needed intervention, in light of the latest menopause crisis: a sharp decline in the availability of commonly used hormone treatments—estradiol patches and progesterone pills. As manufacturers deflect responsibility, blaming the disruption on increased demand (which is not the case) and production shortages, patients are going without essential medication and no one is being held to account.

Among the lessons I’ve gleaned after a decade in the period policy trenches, first is that meaningful healthcare reform need not begin and end at the federal level; we all must remember at the ballot box that it absolutely matters who is in leadership in statehouses, in city councils, and at public agencies and institutions. And second, we should always be open to unexpected inroads for progress. No surprise to me: Menopause, as it happens, is now that catalyst.

Last year, New Yorkers—70 percent of them tenants—put a democratic socialist in Gracie Mansion. Last month, we froze the rent.

Thanks to a 7–1 vote by New York City’s Rent Guidelines Board, 2.4 million rent-stabilized tenants will be able to claim one- and two-year leases with 0 percent rent increases starting October 1.

Organized tenants made this victory possible. We knew what our landlords would rather we ignored: that rent is political, and that we have the ability to control it. But there is more to be done to seize the city’s tools and take power from landlords and real estate directly. We need to build majorities at the building, portfolio, and state levels—majority tenant unions in our buildings and portfolios, and a massive movement that can credibly represent half the state.

New York’s mayor appoints the members of the board, who review data and public testimony and decide the level of increases landlords are able to charge rent-stabilized tenants each year. These appointments matter. Eric “I am real estate” Adams appointed an RGB that passed 12 percent rent hikes over the course of his term (during this era, it was common for tenants to testify while board members yawned and looked at their phones); Bill de Blasio’s board, meanwhile, froze rents three times, though never on two-year leases.

Tenants strategized to intervene in the 2025 mayoral election. Over last spring, canvassers with the Tenant Bloc collected over 20,000 signatures from rent-stabilized tenants to demand that the next mayor freeze the rent. Meanwhile, Zohran Mamdani, who’d protested alongside us at past RGB hearings, made this long-standing demand from the movement his top campaign promise. That promise helped galvanize more than 1 million New Yorkers around his agenda, gave the rent freeze a decisive democratic mandate, and cemented tenants as a majority voting bloc and a distinct political class.

But we didn’t stop organizing just because Mamdani won. Tenant participation in this year’s RGB process doubled over last year’s, outnumbering in-person landlord testimony 10-to-one. And tenants had the numbers in the data the RGB reviewed: in the last four years, our rent burdens expanded while landlord profits grew 30 percent. Tenants made an explicit demand for a two-year rent freeze—some even demanded rent reductions. By seeing and seizing an opportunity to push beyond a campaign promise, tenants won an unprecedented rent freeze on both one- and two-year leases. The policy will collectively save us up to $3.1 billion.

A rent freeze—like rent stabilization itself—flexes tenants’ sectoral bargaining power at the scale of the city. Rent stabilization was a hard-won policy that stems the tide of displacement of New Yorkers of color and keeps 140,000 New Yorkers out of poverty each year. (Nearly 40 percent of very low-income households, as well as nearly 40 percent of Latino and 30 percent of Black New Yorkers, live in rent-stabilized homes.) By winning a rent freeze, tenants intervened in the housing market shaped by decades of landlord greed, leveraging the arcane but significant regulatory powers of the Rent Guidelines Board to limit our landlords’ capacity to extract profit from us. But to match our growing power in the city, tenants need to build majority power in our own homes and across New York State.

We have the numbers to challenge the power of our landlords directly—building by building, portfolio by portfolio.

When we organize into tenant associations and tenant unions, we can coordinate direct actions, expose landlord exploitation, and, most importantly, turn our individual rent checks into a collective source of leverage by withholding our rent. Turning conversations with our neighbors into durable and democratic organizations that can power map, strategize, and win takes work, but the rewards are worth it. NYC tenants have decades of past victories to learn from, and dynamic portfolio-wide campaigns are already underway across the city—against Pinnacle Group & Summit Properties, Emerald Equities, and Duckler, just to name a few.

Our landlords are used to setting the terms of our relationship. But we can reset those terms. Like unionized workers winning collective bargaining agreements to claim the share of the profits they create, unionized tenants can win collective bargaining agreements that force our rents back into our homes. Unlike our individual leases, these collective contracts can oblige our landlords to address deferred repairs, cancel rent debts, gain us a say over our supers and management, or enshrine our ability to add family members to our leases and secure our housing across generations—wins that can both enforce housing law as well as more ambitious goals that give us more control over our homes.

Our power over the executive has given us new tools to support this work, many outlined in the Mayor’s Housing Plan. A responsive administration can use its bully pulpit, coordinate inspections, collect fines, file lawsuits, and bind tax abatements to strict regulatory agreements, in partnership with organized tenants.

At the same time, we should understand the city’s powers as a set of carrots and sticks for us to access and leverage alongside our own tactics. The city can offer social, legal, and economic sanctions (which can enforce our housing code and help us bring landlords to the negotiating table), but it can’t win our demands for us. Our real power comes from organized majorities capable of wielding the economic power of our rent.

The rent freeze creates new urgency for tenants to exert control over our homes. What landlords see as an impending crisis of financial distress in rent-stabilized housing is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift the balance of power in the city—if we seize it.

We agree with these landlords on something: their business model is failing. For decades, predatory landlords have run rent-stabilized buildings into the ground to maximize profits, while recklessly speculating on future gains. Rather than reinvesting in our homes, they used our rents to make themselves rich and take on massive loans to buy up more buildings, knowing they could only be made whole if they drove up rents and drove out long-term tenants. This cycle of strategic neglect and speculation robbed buildings of repairs and tenants of their homes—until we organized to stop it.

The 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act was the culmination of a hard-fought battle waged by New York’s tenants to close loopholes that rewarded tenant harassment and displacement. Now, those same landlords who gambled on our homes are essentially demanding that tenants bail them out for their bad bets. But tenants will not be fooled.

Rent-stabilized portfolios in or at risk of foreclosure give tenants outsized leverage to fight for the ownership of our homes: a weakened target and the ability to triangulate with banks, federal loan regulators, and the city. Rather than addressing distress through deregulation and rent hikes, organized tenants can chart a new course by taking these homes out of the private market for good. If our landlords can no longer take care of our buildings, tenants—backed by the public—will.

The Mamdani administration has already set aside $2 billion to take housing out of the hands of exploitative landlords and put it into tenant and community control. Organized tenants must contest for these resources, so we become the long-term stewards of our housing. But scaling up this power will take new tools. We need legislative mechanisms that give tenants the right to collectively purchase their buildings and pathways to remove negligent landlords from owning our homes. We need to expand the tools the city already has—land banks, public trusts, and acquisition funds—and develop capacities and pipelines to control our homes that don’t yet exist.

The backlash to the rent freeze is already here. The landlord lobby has all but promised a lawsuit and is eagerly plotting to go over our heads to weaken rent stabilization through the state legislature. NYC tenants have to join with those across the state to defend what we’ve won in our city and expand it. Rather than let the victories for rent-stabilized tenants segment us from tenants without these benefits, we have to build solidarity with market-rate tenants and win universal rent stabilization such that all of us are protected. Every tenant deserves a rent freeze and more.

The state, of course, also controls the budget and the resources we need to see our full agenda through. So tenants must participate in the statewide movement to tax the rich and redistribute the resources from the wealthiest to housing for the rest of us. To acquire over-leveraged rent-stabilized buildings and address the years of landlords’ strategic neglect, we need a bigger budget for public acquisitions, repairs, and building management.

All new housing that benefits from city financing is rent-stabilized, a necessary intervention that expands the political bloc and political power of rent-stabilized tenants in the city. But until we can control the market to bring down rents across the board, housing will only be truly affordable if we have the money for subsidies to make it so. Finally, we need funding from the state for our city’s existing public housing, which has been subject to years of federal austerity; tenants of public housing deserve to live in dignity and with the assurance of public stewardship of their homes. And we need resources to expand the public’s role as a housing developer in its own right.

Tenants run New York, and we can make it run for us. Wielding majoritarian power in our buildings, at City Hall, and at the state house, we can reclaim thousands of homes from the private market, gain control of thousands more with bargaining agreements, win universal rent control, and fund truly public housing. The stage is set for tenants to wrest control of our homes from landlords and real estate if we organize. If you are a tenant, you belong in this fight. A rent freeze is just the beginning.

New York City became the first municipality in the country to adopt rules that require businesses to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up for one. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the “click-to-cancel” rule July 10, and it takes effect on October 1.

The new rule promises hefty fines and aggressive enforcement for companies that violate them. Companies that do not provide a simple option to cancel subscriptions could pay $525 per user subscription. The rules will extend to all companies that run online subscriptions with customers in New York City including online tools, streaming services, and gym memberships.

The announcement builds on an executive order Mamdani signed four days into his term in January directing the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection to crack down on subscription traps and deceptive pricing citywide.

"If you can sign up with one click, you should be able to cancel with one click," Mamdani told reporters at a press conference held in a gym in Lower Manhattan on July 10.

Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said the agency received tens of thousands of complaints each year from people who lost money to predatory subscription practices. "These are not just the tactics of fly-by-night scammers," she said. "These are now part of the business model for some of the largest companies in our economy." She pointed to an FTC investigation that found Amazon executives had run an internal initiative called Project Iliad specifically designed to make canceling a subscription harder.

Speaking about the new rules, Khan said they reflect the vision of municipal socialism Mamdani has pushed since taking office: “They represent an upwards transfer of wealth; often from people who are already living on the financial margins of this city, to people who are ultimately looking to buy a private jet or a second yacht.”

The New York click-to-cancel rule follows a federal version brought forward by the FTC under Khan, who chaired the agency from 2021 to 2025. That proposal faced fierce pushback from the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest trade organization, which said the regulations amounted to micromanaging business practices. A federal judge later sided with the chamber’s legal challenges and stopped the rules from taking effect.

Sam Levine, now commissioner of New York City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, led the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection alongside Khan. He said the new rules were written on similar lines to the federal rules and adapted to New York city law. “The court struck the FTC rules down saying the steps were not followed, and the current administration is really slow-walking it,” Levine explained. “So rather than waiting for the federal government, we are using our tools here to implement this protection.”

Levine said that any business that sells a subscription service to New Yorkers are going to be bound by the rules. He added that the city administration is also targeting “junk fees” that increase the final price of everything from apartments to sporting events, with a rule that requires sellers to “advertise the total price for any good or service, including all mandatory additional charges and fees, up front.”

This is the latest in a string of consumer and worker protection actions since Mamdani took office, which included a citywide ban on hidden hotel "junk fees" that took effect in February.

Living in Maine, as I do, which is usually far off the beaten political track, I seldom have a front-row seat to the kerfuffle of the day or a chance to assess how accurately the mainstream media covers those kerfuffles. But now, suddenly, I do.

A lot of folks are understandably discombobulated by the departure of Graham Platner from the Senate race. Many are also anxious. The media is especially anxious—not so much about Democrats winning the seat—I doubt they care—but about how screwed up things allegedly are in Maine. Calling Democrats inept and predicting their failure is one of the legacy media’s favorite sports. As The Atlantic put it: “Platner just made things harder for Democrats.”

So the first thing I would say I have learned these last two days is that the so-called experts in the punditrocracy have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know Maine, and they don’t know Maine politics. When they say that the selection process is a “mess,” that is just plain wrong. Given the exigencies of the need for a selection and the cramped time frame, the logistics are difficult, but I get no sense of chaos. The process, as it is being formulated and described, seems orderly to me, or as orderly as any can be under these circumstances. The process also sounds fair: A whole lot of Democrats (I sincerely hope to be among them) will gather at a “convention” to make a selection. This isn’t a bunch of pols in a smoke-filled room.

Second, the so-called experts tell us that there are deep divisions in the party here, that same old cleavage between progressives and moderates, and that schism will likely affect the selection and the prospects for a November victory. The problem with this assessment is that I sense almost no divisions here, especially now that Governor Janet Mills, who did rile her fellow Dems, is basically off the scene. Platner may complain, rightfully in some sense, that the establishment tried to sink his chances. But the establishment he should be accusing is not the state establishment, which is solidly, almost uniformly, progressive, but the national Democratic establishment, which did everything it could to defeat him (with Mills), and the legacy media, which hated (not too strong a word) Platner. They gave him the treatment they should be giving Trump. His beef is with them, Schumer, and The New York Times, not his fellow Mainers.

I was a delegate to the Maine Dem Convention, and Platner was greeted as a conquering hero. People lined up to have their picture taken with him. His speech received sustained applause. Every party official on the dais was a progressive, and so was nearly every candidate—for governor and for the Second Congressional District, even though that district is Trump territory. There is no Platner “wing” of the Maine party. There never was. There were enthusiastic supporters who appreciated his progressivism and didn’t just moon over Platner as a candidate. Those—I am one of them—will support any progressive candidate. Repeat: Our allegiance is to issues and to a program that will help Americans, not to a candidate.

The so-called experts also say that the putative candidates are unknowns. That is another New York/Washington error. The three top contenders—Troy Jackson, Shenna Bellows, and Nariv Shah—are hardly unknowns here. All three ran for governor in a widely advertised race. Jackson was a longtime Senate president. Bellows was the Democratic candidate challenging Collins 12 years ago and is now the secretary of state; she gets tons of coverage here, much of it for pushing back against Trump. Shah was Maine’s CDC director during the Covid pandemic. He was on television every single day for over a year. In short, Mainers know them. They are our neighbors.

True, none of the three has Platner’s charisma. None could hold a candle to Platner on the stump. None will excite the electorate the way he did. But all three are progressives; Platner, in our ranked-choice system, endorsed Jackson and Bellows, as well as the eventual winner, Hannah Pingree. Jackson has already been endorsed by Bernie Sanders. They may not light voters on fire, but they are dependable. And let me repeat yet again: Maine voters don’t need to be set on fire. They are already on fire, partly thanks to Platner.

It is also worth mentioning that there is no rancor among those three either, at least any I can detect, or, really, among any of the Maine Democrats, though Shah is the most moderate, and there would likely be some grumbling, especially from labor, were he selected, which I doubt. I get the sense that Jackson right now is the leader. That may change. But there is really nothing but comity here in Maine. We want to beat Collins. Nothing will hinder that effort. The candidate deemed to have the best chance is almost certain to be selected, though a recent flash poll shows them all currently in a virtual tie with Collins, which isn’t a bad thing before we even have a candidate.

Finally, and most importantly, any of these three is likely to beat Collins when it matters. Maine is a Democratic state. It gave Kamala Harris a seven-point lead over Trump. New polling shows that Democrats here have a +11 lead on a generic ballot. Trump is deeply unpopular in Maine—38 percent approval unpopular. Sixty percent of independents here disapprove. Sixty-two percent overall disapprove of his stewardship of the economy, including 100 percent of Democrats. If this midterm is a referendum on Trump, it is a foregone conclusion that any competent Democrat would win.

But what if it is a referendum on Susan Collins? She has managed to escape more times than Houdini. Still, I suspect it will be harder this time. Collins is underwater in Maine. Despite her 30-year Senate tenure here, she has a 50 percent unfavorability rating in the recent NYT/Siena poll. Even as the world began to crash all around him, though before the rape allegation, Platner still led Collins by two points in the same poll. Moreover, as I stated in my earlier Substack, Platner was running further behind the Democratic tilt in Maine than any Democrat was running behind their state’s tilt in the battleground states this year. Oddly, he was running well behind Collins for the working-class vote. For all his talents and his magnetism, any of the contenders is actually more likely to beat Collins, not less, no matter what the pundits say.

The Republicans will pour millions into this small state. They already are. But it is very difficult, especially in this year when the tide has turned decisively against Trump, for an unpopular senator like Collins to free herself from the natural Democratic political gravity, which has only gotten stronger. Wait until the Dems begin broadcasting that Collins cast her vote with Trump 96 percent of the time! Wait until they begin pressing her on her decisive vote for Brett Kavanaugh, which she still defends—the vote that enabled Kavanaugh to overturn Roe. Wait until they ask why she voted for SNAP cuts, and Medicaid cuts, and to finance ICE, in a state where ICE invaded Portland’s streets. Wait until they broadcast that she supports Trump’s voter-suppression SAVE Act. Wait until they discuss how she has supported Trump’s war. Collins cosplays as a moderate, but she has a lot to answer for.

Platner hasn’t made it any harder to win this seat. He has probably made it easier. This is still a likely Democratic pickup, assuming that the convention chooses a competent candidate with a progressive message and no baggage. And I think it will.

Mainers know what they want, and I very much doubt that they want a Trump enabler.

Flash back to the boastful, triumphalist 1990s, as in Madeleine Albright’s telling Matt Lauer in 1998, “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future.” Well, goodbye to all that. The United States is now enduring a singular humiliation akin to that Britain and France suffered 70 years ago in the Suez Crisis. That event, little-remembered here but iconic for the rest of the world, signaled the end of old-style European imperialism. In its wake arrived something new, the Americans’ vast “empire of liberty” constrained only by the Soviet Union’s upstart “empire of justice,” as Odd Arne Westad put it in his now-classic The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2006).

Following Tehran’s systematic checkmating of US authority, only an ostrich could deny our decline as a Great Power. Unless you are like Trump and his minions, who think history stops at our shores, the fall of the American imperium was preordained. Sooner or later, other nations would innovate, expand, recover from defeat—but not this soon, most of us thought! Even 50 years ago, while it was regaining strategic equilibrium after the disaster in Vietnam, it was self-evident that the United States would never regain its dominance circa 1945, when we had a majority of the world’s industrial capacity, a nuclear monopoly, and the only globe-spanning naval and air forces, plus the legitimacy granted by defeating fascism and creating the United Nations. Nonetheless, from 1991 to 2016, various Bushes, Clintons, and Obama still hailed US preeminence. That’s gone for good. The myth of the sole superpower has been blown to bits by cheap Iranian drones, and no one buys it anymore. Not the Gulf satrapies whose security we guaranteed, not the European Union, warily gearing up for war over Greenland—not anyone anywhere.

For me, the augury came in 2010. For many years, I taught how in a single generation, 1870–1900, the United States outstripped Great Britain, the fabled “workshop of the world,” in the key markers of industrial capacity—coal, iron, and steel. Twenty years ago, China had been rapidly moving ahead and then it happened: In 2010, their state-directed economy surged past ours. Now it is China that beats its three rivals combined (the United States, Germany, and Japan) in manufacturing output. Still, I presumed a long, slow draw-down of US power in the emerging multipolar world where America still waved the biggest stick.

Here is where the metaphor of “Suez” comes in. That word has no meaning to Americans, but in Europe, in particular the United Kingdom, it is a trope as powerful as “Vietnam” here, a single word conveying loss, hubris, humiliation, and failure. Why?

In 1952, the Free Officers Movement led by Gamal Abdel Nasser deposed Egypt’s King Farouk and with him remaining British influence over their longtime protectorate. Nasser spearheaded an upsurge of secular, quasi-socialist Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East, and both the US and the Soviets sought good relations with these newly sovereign nations. On July 26, 1956, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal, until then controlled by the Franco-British Suez Canal Company. Keep in mind, this is an even more vital waterway than the Strait of Hormuz! Without consulting the United States, British, French, and Israeli leaders met in secret and agreed on a plan to seize the Canal and depose Nasser. Israel would attack first, and the two others would then invade on the pretext of separating the warring parties and protecting the Canal. On October 29, Israeli forces invaded Sinai and the Gaza Strip and rapidly advanced, joined on October 31 by French and British air and naval forces and troops. Most of the Canal Zone was soon taken.

Eisenhower was livid at what he correctly perceived as an underhanded betrayal severely undermining US diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East. He immediately applied extreme financial pressure on the British, threatening the pound. And on November 2, the UN’s General Assembly overwhelmingly approved a resolution brought by the US, and endorsed by the Soviets and their allies, requiring an immediate ceasefire and the withdrawal of all foreign armed forces from Egyptian territory. The French and the British duly retreated, tails between their legs (Israel defied the UN for some months, but eventually pulled back).

Suez was the sunset of European imperialism. Never again would the United Kingdom step out of line. It has diligently, sometimes abjectly, backed the United States in all major cases since then. The French went another way. After Charles de Gaulle came back to power in the 1958 coup ending the Fourth Republic, he dispensed with official empire, granting formal independence to 13 African colonies in 1960 while reestablishing French military and diplomatic autonomy from “the Anglo-Americans.”

If the current pointless war on Iran is a historical marker equivalent to Suez in ignominy, the question becomes, what do we do with this moment? Will the US become like the British after World War II, desperately seeking a “special relationship” with some other power just to stay in the game? Or will we just keep carpet-bombing other countries, to prove a point in which no one believes anymore? As American citizens, we cannot be bystanders. This is a once-in-a-lifetime window to frame a different course for how to relate to the rest of the world. It will not come again.

Here is a basic outline for how the US can move past delusions of permanent global domination. My modest proposal below is based on a conversation I was part of with Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, right now the go-to place for “trans-partisan” thinking about an ethical and practical foreign policy.

He began by pointing out that while the US has certainly suffered humbling defeats—the Bay of Pigs in 1961; intervention in Southeast Asia, 1964–1975; Iraq, 2003–2011; Afghanistan, 2001–2020—the debacle in Iran is worse. The grand strategy of the United States, premised on its unrivaled military capacity to fight two major wars at the same time, has been shredded. When push came to shove, the US could not even open the Strait of Hormuz. Governments around the world, friendly and otherwise, are rapidly internalizing that American security guarantees are unreliable and questionable, and America’s global hegemony is now seriously undermined.

If our politicians and policymakers could be made to acknowledge this new reality, there is the chance of new foreign and military policies that could achieve some bipartisan support. Their core premise must be that other countries can, will, and should step up to defend themselves. We really would put “America First,” not in the sense the MAGA right uses, of aggression unconstrained by treaties and alliances, but to focus on the common good here at home. Domestic and foreign policies cannot be separated, and we need a Marshall Plan for the United States, to go forward from the present mess of immiseration for the many and absurd profiteering for the few. Decades of “forever wars” have not made us safer, and the United States should not merely accept but actively support a multipolar world based upon global cooperation at a level never seen before.

Certainly, those premises are just a start, and the devil will be in all the details—region by region, issue by issue (trade, climate, human rights). But let us start, because there will no going back. The alternative, of imperial senescence and entropy, is too horrible to contemplate.

The sudden death of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a onetime Republican “maverick” who abandoned most of his pretenses of independent political thinking in the service of Donald Trump’s presidency, has upended the politics of the state and nation that he served for 32 years in state and federal office.

Graham was such an enduring Capitol Hill character that his unexpected passing sparked a steady stream of reflections Sunday on the complex legacy of a conservative foreign-policy hawk who once warned Republicans, “If we nominate Donald Trump, we will get destroyed… and we will deserve it,” but ended up declaring, years later, “Donald J. Trump, in my view, is the greatest president of all time.”

Yet American politics is a fast-moving train, and the reaction to Graham’s death at age 71 was instantaneously coupled with speculation about who would succeed the four-term senator, who was up for reelection in November. Under South Carolina law, Republican Governor Henry McMaster will quickly choose an interim appointee to serve out the Graham term that ends in January. But the real selection of a successor will be made—as it should be—by the people of South Carolina.

South Carolina is now one of two states in the 2026 electoral cycle where partisans must select a new Senate nominee and mount a November campaign that could decide control of the chamber. The other is Maine, where Democratic US Senate nominee Graham Platner filed paperwork Friday to formally end his candidacy, in response to a number of controversies, including an allegation of assault by a former girlfriend, which Platner denies.

Under Maine law, Platner had to file that paperwork before 5 pm on July 13. In doing so, he created an opening that must be filled by July 27. But Maine statutes don’t specify how a vacancy on the party line should be filled. So Democratic leaders in the state have cobbled together a process that starts with county caucuses on July 18 and 19 and then leaves the final choice to a convention where just 601 delegates—101 of them party committee members—will decide who faces Republican Senator Susan Collins.

Maine Democratic leaders promise they will maintain “a public and open process.” But critics associated with the Maine Coalition for Fair Nominations have complained about party insiders’ “rushing this process in a way that results in loss of trust.”

Contrast Maine with South Carolina, where state law outlines a far more democratic process.

South Carolina law mandates that an actual primary will be held to replace Graham. Republicans who want to succeed the senator will have from July 21 to July 28 to file for a place on the ballot. A special Republican primary election will then be held on August 11. If no candidate wins a majority of the primary vote, a runoff election on August 25 will settle it. Turnout is likely to be high because, as the Ballotpedia website notes, “In South Carolina primaries are open, meaning any voter can participate in any one party’s primary.”

So that’s it: South Carolina has a fast, rules-based process that is designed to maximize participation. A crowded field of GOP contenders is shaping up to choose the Republican who will oppose the impressive Democratic nominee, Dr. Annie Andrews, in a contest that commentator Chuck Todd describes as “a generational opportunity” to name a new senator in a state where congressional turnover is rare.

The Maine model does not compare well with South Carolina’s approach.

To be clear here, the onus is not entirely on the leaders of the Maine Democratic Party. They must follow a state law that, when it was written, failed to anticipate circumstances like the one that has developed, and that leaves Mainers with fewer options—including a much narrower window for filling that empty spot on the November ballot. It’s also important to note that Maine Democratic Party executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson and other party leaders have used social-media platforms to keep Mainers informed and to promote participation in the process.

But the South Carolina model simply seems superior from a small-d democratic standpoint—so superior that states across the country should consider adopting it as part of a much broader, and highly necessary, reform of how vacancies in the Senate are filled.

This drive for reform should go beyond primaries.

Under the US Constitution, all vacancies in the House of Representatives must be filled by special elections. In other words, no one is allowed to serve in the House without first facing voters in a general election. And in the vast majority of states, those general elections for the House are preceded by primaries.

But it’s not the same for the Senate.

Despite the fact that the Senate is supposed to be elected, governors have since 1913 interpreted a vague section in the 17th Amendment of the Constitution (which established the direct election of senators) as allowing them to fill vacancies by appointment.

As such, many senators, including currently sitting ones, have served portions of their tenure without ever facing the voters. These unelected senators cast critical votes on issues of war and peace, taxation and spending, and the scope and character of the federal government. Often, their cloture votes make the difference in determining whether an issue is addressed or neglected.

When he chaired the Constitution Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the 2000s, Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold proposed a constitutional amendment to bar the appointment of senators and to require that all vacancies be filled by voters, as opposed to governors and party insiders.

“People deserve a voice in choosing the senators who represent them in Washington,” explained Feingold. “The constitutional amendment I have proposed requiring the direct election of all senators is the best way to give them that voice.”

Feingold was right. But his proposal didn’t get traction in a change-averse Senate. Now that attention is again focused on Senate vacancies, it would be a good time to renew Feingold’s push for an amendment, and to work at the state level to make sure that voters, rather than party leaders, get to choose their nominees for open Senate seats.

This is what democracy should look like.

Although Senator Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly on Saturday at 71, was one of the most odious figures in American public life, he does deserve a partial defense from a strangely pervasive calumny directed against him by liberal critics. In the last decade of his life, Graham underwent a dramatic political transformation. In 2015 and early 2016, Graham became a no-holds-barred foe of Donald Trump, whom he lambasted as “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” who “represents the worst in America.” But Graham started to warm to Trump once the insurgent candidate won the Republican primary on May 4, 2016. This process accelerated after Trump was elected president in November, when Graham became, against stiff competition, the president’s most obsequious lackey.

Graham’s metamorphosis was all the more startling because his earlier disdain for Trump sprang logically from his political history. Prior to 2016, Graham was best known as the ultra-hawkish ally of fellow war-happy senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman (their noxious nickname for themselves was the “Three Amigos”), which made him a natural opponent of candidate Trump’s isolationist foreign policy. Further, Graham had a history of bipartisanship, working with Democrats on immigration reform and campaign finance and casting the sole Republican vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nominations. This gave Graham a profile, on domestic matters at least, more mainstream than Trump’s burn-it-down populism.

What explains Graham’s quick change of political identity? One theory popular among Resistance liberals and Never Trump conservatives was that the senator, who was widely rumored to be a closeted gay man, had been blackmailed by Trump, perhaps with kompromat provided by Vladimir Putin. In 2019, for instance MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle dropped a heavy-breathing hint along this line by suggesting that Trump knows “something pretty extreme about Lindsey Graham.”

The blackmail theory was never grounded in evidence and suffered the further disadvantage of making Graham seem like a victim rather than someone making affirmative choices about his life. The actual story of Graham’s ideological conversion is much worse than any conspiracy theory, because he gave up his principles for the worst of reasons: to stay close to the center of power, stave off MAGA primary challenges, and bring Trump around to Graham’s deeply militarist worldview.

The best account of Graham’s late-life arc is found in a brisk book by William Saletan, a journalist for The Bulwark, titled The Corruption of Lindsey Graham (now available on Saletan’s Substack). With forensic care, Saletan traces the step-by-step shifts Graham made while becoming first Trump’s apologist and then a rabid MAGA partisan.

Graham succumbed to Trump because he knew the demagogue spoke for a substantial part of the GOP base, one that the party could not afford to alienate if it wanted to win elections. In a CNN interview in March 2016, Graham estimated that between 35 and 40 percent of Republicans believe “the world that they knew growing up is being lost. They feel like the Mexicans are taking their jobs…. There’s a market out there for ‘Send them all back.’” Trump was successful, he added, because he knew how to “prey on people’s fear.”

Graham was still a Trump critic at this point, but merely on pragmatic grounds: He feared that Trump would lose the election and damage the GOP brand. But once Trump won the Republican nomination, Graham immediately started sending signals that he wanted to get on the MAGA train. On May 6, 2016, Graham admitted to CNN that Trump could prove him wrong by winning the general election against Hillary Clinton. Five days later, Graham had a warm phone conversation with Trump.

As Saletan notes, Trump “chatted [Graham] up and asked for advice on national security. Graham loved it. This was what the Senator had hoped for. If he couldn’t be president, he wanted to shape the president’s foreign policy.”

Speaking to The New York Times Magazine in 2019, Graham admitted, “I went from, ‘OK, he’s president’ to ‘How can I get to be in his orbit?’” Graham then boasted that he eventually elbowed his way into an even more desirable spot in Trump’s “smaller orbit.” The following year, Graham crowed, “I’ve never had more access to a president than I have with Donald Trump.”

Viewed simply through these transactional terms, the Graham-Trump alliance benefited the senator. As Saletan notes, “Graham’s bargain—going easy on Trump’s domestic behavior while pressing him on foreign policy—paid off. From Syria to Iran to North Korea, Trump was doing what Graham wanted.” It turned out that Trump’s occasional rhetorical gestures toward a less interventionist foreign policy were merely campaign rhetoric. In practice, Trump could be as belligerent as George W. Bush, a fact that delighted Graham.

The South Carolina senator was happy as a pig in clover as the sidekick to a global bully. (He could also see that staying on Trump’s good side was essential if he wanted to avoid being ousted by a MAGA supporter in a Senate primary.) When Trump raised the specter of nuclear annihilation against North Korea, warning that he would unleash “fire and fury,” Graham was an eager echo chamber. He warned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that if he tried to “play” Trump, “it will be the end of you.”

As Trump’s faithful lapdog, Graham started to defend the president’s worst actions. Saletan notes that Graham, descended “to a polarized worldview that made it easier to rationalize devotion to” Trump. In 2019, Graham accused the Democrats of trying to “basically destroy America as we know it.”

That same year, Trump ranted that Representative Ilhan Omar, a US citizen, should go back to her native Somalia. Graham offered the disingenuous apologia that Trump was only mad at those who criticized him. According to Graham, “A Somali refugee embracing Trump would not have been asked to go back. If you’re a racist, you want everybody from Somalia to go back.”

In 2020, Graham dived even deeper into the MAGA swamp. He started echoing Trump’s conspiratorial language about stolen elections. The senator told Fox News in November 2020, “We lose elections because they cheat us.” Graham became briefly critical of Trump after the president incited a mob to attack the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But as Saletan documents, this break with Trump was both short-lived and tactical: The motive of his criticism seemed geared toward saving Trump’s reputation for a future presidential run.

Graham might have felt he was justified on pragmatic grounds, but not all his fellow hawks agreed. Liz Cheney was every bit as militarist as Graham, but she, to her credit, realized that no policy victories could justify complicity with Trump’s attacks on the rule of law.

For those who oppose militarism, Graham’s compromises look even worse, since he used his persuasive perch in the Senate to advocate for some of the most horrific policies in recent history: the Iraq War under George W. Bush and the US support for the genocide in Gaza under Biden and Trump.

Perhaps more than any other lawmaker of his era, Graham was an emblematic figure. His career illustrates that Trumpism was no anomaly. Rather, Trump’s authoritarianism flourished thanks to the willing alliance of powerful mainstream figures such as Graham, whose main priority was maintaining US imperial dominance of the globe even at the expense of destroying American democracy.

Monterey, California—Last month, caddies at the iconic Pebble Beach golf course, a seaside resort that hosts annual PGA Tour events as well as periodic US Open tournaments, won a blowout union victory, becoming the first unionized caddies in the industry.

Golf caddies are an unusual group of workers. Tasked with toting players’ clubs, coaching them on making the best shots, and keeping them company as they play the course, the approximately 390 guys—they’re currently all guys—in the program cherish the freedom of their lifestyle. Long classified as independent contractors, they have enjoyed the ability to take time off or come in and pick up shifts when they please. Caddies could turn up the morning they hoped to work and receive walk-up jobs, allocated by seniority, assisting golfers who showed up without prior reservations. Many of them have been on the job for decades; the longest-tenured caddie is a veteran of almost 50 years. “Once you get a job here, you never leave,” says Justin Kipina, who after 20 years is still only #42 on the seniority list.

Pebble Beach is technically a public golf course, although its sky-high greens fees—and additional costs, including mandatory hotel stays at the resort—guarantee exclusivity. It continues to cater to Hollywood celebrities and business moguls, with an increasing number of Silicon Valley CEOs among its regulars. It’s also known as a challenging course, with winds coming in off the ocean and sloping seaside greens. Caddies are essential to the golfing experience, telling players which club to use, how to make the shot, how to avoid sending the ball over the edge of a cliff. They also tell stories, provide companionship, and even sometimes act as informal therapists for players.

Will Benson, a caddie who has been at Pebble Beach for 13 years, waxes poetic about the sport. He self-describes as “a lover, a player, a student of golf—I love the history, the theater of it, the nuance of a round of golf, the mental aspect.”

Under the independent contractor model, the caddies had essentially created an association that functioned as a quasi-union. Pebble Beach contracted with CaddieMaster, a company that manages caddie programs, to take on the day-to-day operations. (CaddieMaster is owned by Troon, the world’s largest golf hospitality management company.) Seven caddies served on the Liaison Board, which met a few times a year with management from CaddieMaster and negotiated contracts. There were some downsides to this system: The caddies knew they were up against a much more powerful corporation, and the contracts management ultimately presented to workers didn’t always match what the Liaison Board had agreed to. But ultimately workers had a form of organization and felt they were coming up with generally fair agreements. Between caddie fees and tips from clients, the caddies were making six-figure salaries while retaining control of their scheduling.

Will, who is a blues rock musician when he’s not caddying, describes the process of building relationships with repeat clients. He sends holiday texts and keeps abreast of his clients’ news mentions, messaging his congratulations on their business deals and promotions. He has developed relationships that often go far beyond the golf course. “I’ve stayed at people’s homes, their kids have stayed at my house, I’ve met their parents, they’ve seen my band play—people love and trust and respect you, and I them. There’s people that I would go to their funeral, and I hope they’d come to mine, if anything were to happen.”

For years, the industry has treated independent contractor status for caddies as par for the course. In 2019, California legislators passed AB5, a bill primarily targeted at companies like Uber and Lyft that reclassified many independent contractors as employees under the law (Uber and Lyft refused to comply and eventually won a ballot initiative exempting gig drivers from the law). At the time, the golf industry lobbied to keep caddies excluded from the law, in an effort to preserve the system and limit their own liability; members of the Liaison Board voiced their desire to remain independent.

But the industry is changing. Notably, an influx of private equity investors have taken over many golf-related companies, including Troon. Their drive for increased profits has led to many changes, including a surprising conversion: Suddenly, Pebble Beach’s independent contractor caddies became employees. For the caddies, that meant no more liaison board and an overhaul of their negotiated system, including dramatic pay cuts and an end to their flexible scheduling.

Under the Liaison Board system, caddies turned over 13 percent of their bag fees (the price a golfer pays to have a caddie accompany them on a round) to the company and kept the rest. As management began rolling out the “phases” of their transition to an employee system, they suddenly began seizing 45–50 percent of the bag fees—while raising bag and greens fees for golfers.

With the change in the employment structure, not only did pay drop but there were also new rules for caddies to follow, a new and more rigid scheduling system, and less flexibility. Management began undermining the caddies’ seniority, scheduling them in blocks rather than allowing bidding on jobs in the old manner. Caddies who were used to receiving daily rates suddenly were switched to hourly pay. Newer caddies, whose pay rates were lower, began receiving a disproportionate share of walk-up work. Longer-term caddies had typically worked the early morning rounds. Because the golf course becomes more crowded over the course of the day, a game goes quicker at 6:30 am than at 11 am.

“You have these legendary caddies—they’ve caddied for presidents, kings, celebrities —going out in the morning and making 20 percent less than people going out at noon,” Will says. “That’s just not right. They should at least be making the same, if not more. Every caddy ever has gotten paid a daily fee.”

But management’s arrogance backfired. Employees have rights that independent contractors don’t—notably, the right to organize a union. After the caddies got e-mails and texts from management informing them that they would become employees, Justin called his colleague Mike Lehotta, a long-term member of the Liaison Board. “We knew that if we didn’t get on unionization immediately, they’d destroy the culture. It would be really, really bad not to have a voice in this process,” Justin recalled.

His next call was to the California Federation of Labor Unions, to try to find out if there was a union that would be a good fit. Meanwhile, other caddies were also researching their new options as employees. Will recalls looking up unions and filling out an online contact form. A few days later, an organizer at the Labor Federation reached out to the caddies and connected them with UNITE HERE Local 19, which already represented hospitality workers at Pebble Beach.

Meanwhile, the CEO of CaddieMaster, Dan Costello, showed up to defend the new regime. “He told me to my face, ‘Justin, the days of negotiating with caddies have ended.’”

Justin pointed out that guys were getting paid minimum wage to carry single bags. (Management raised bag fees at Pebble Beach to $175 for a single-bag carrying caddie; some of the caddies reported lower tips as clients assumed the caddies were receiving the higher amount.)

“I hear they’re hiring at McDonalds,” Costello replied. “Go put in your applications.”

By May, workers filed for a union election. “They could have avoided this whole union thing by getting six guys involved from the beginning,” Justin muses. “Greed just seeped into their souls.”

CaddieMaster has already attempted to scrape evidence of its union-busting campaign from the Web. Even the Wayback Machine only retains what looks like a beta version of CaddieMasterCares.com, complete with a washed out “Personal Letter from Dan,” a blurry graphic touting a “New Standard of Caddie Excellence,” and “Testimonials” from pro-employment caddies.

The anti-union campaign was conducted via e-mails, videos, corkboards, mailings, flyers on car windshields, and labor consultants stationed in the caddie shack, who tried to pull caddies into conversations about the union. Justin recalls seeing the caddie shack walls covered with anti-union posters.

The day before the union election, Will was working a round with another caddie when they received a text linking to a video from Dan Costello. It was a plea to vote no and give the company another chance. “Caddies are the company,” Costello emphasized, before running through the anti-worker decisions the company could have made but didn’t—and admitting to “missteps on our part” in eliminating flexible scheduling.

The anti-union materials didn’t just backfire with the caddies themselves. They also showed Pebble Beach golfers—the clients with whom caddies have built lifelong relationships—what the company was really like. Many of these golfers, themselves corporate executives, began advising the caddies on how to respond and sending e-mails to management defending the caddies. In response to the Costello video, one UK-born exec texted Will: “Holy cow. What a wanker that guy is.… No wonder you guys revolted. I’m so proud.”

The day after Costello’s plea, caddies voted to unionize by a margin of 180–56. It was a jubilant night: “The two greatest things in my life were that win, uniting the caddies, and winning best local band in Monterey,” says Will.

The caddies’ job may be unique, but their union campaign underscores a growing trend among highly specialized workers, many of whom seem like unlikely candidates for unionization, who are turning to the labor movement as means of challenging the upheaval of their workplaces and industries.

From tech workers to doctors to architects, many people are realizing that forming a union is their only chance to have a meaningful voice in the workplace and a say in any restructuring that occurs. That participation is essential, as corporations engage in mass layoffs and implement increasingly extractive policies. In the case of the Pebble Beach caddies, management at Troon and CaddieMaster perfectly illustrated the labor axiom that “the boss is the best organizer” to a tee—their greed and arrogance paved the way for workers to gain greater power in their workplace and help show others the way forward.

It is a truth recently acknowledged that men are not doing well. Look at different metrics, and a pattern quickly becomes evident: Boys and men are falling behind girls and women. Lower college enrollment levels, higher suicide rates, stagnant wages: The problem is pervasive, and op-eds, essays, and podcasts on the “masculinity crisis” abound. 

Missing from many of these think-pieces, however, is a more rigorous and systemic account of gender dynamics. How can it be true that men are falling behind when we live under a patriarchal society that—traditionally understood—harms women and benefits men? Or, asked in the opposite direction: How can we say that we live in a patriarchal society when men are clearly not OK?

“Many men experience violence, marginalization, and exploitation not despite patriarchy, but because of it,” wrote philosopher Robin Dembroff in a 2020 tweet that was met with wide controversy. Six years later comes Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality, a fresh work of philosophy in which Dembroff defends and expands that thesis. 

Written in the first person and drawing from Dembroff’s personal experiences, Real Men on Top marks a shift away from the detached, impersonal style that characterizes most contemporary academic philosophy, opening formal possibilities for future philosophers to follow. Dembroff reimagines conceptions of patriarchy first inherited from second-wave feminists, many of whom understood patriarchy as the social domination of women by men. Unlike these theorists, though, Dembroff rethinks patriarchy as a system based on a mythology that legitimizes “economic exploitation, political injustice, and social cruelty,” all while harming women, children, animals, and the majority of men.

The Nation spoke with Dembroff to discuss Real Men on Top, how patriarchy harms men, and possible avenues for undoing patriarchy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

—Andrés Muedano

Andrés Muedano: Your book opens with a reference to David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, in which he shares the story of two young fish who encounter an older, wiser fish. “How’s the water?” the latter asks them, to which one of the two young fish responds: “What the hell is water?” Gender, you argue, is like the water in Wallace’s parable: an often-unquestioned assumption that “disappears into the background fabric of daily life, successfully camouflaged as an eternal and universal given.” You describe the goal of Real Men as an attempt to “articulate the shape of this water.” What do you mean by this?

Robin Dembroff: What we’re doing when we do theory is build concepts that give us an explanatory framework for understanding certain patterns of activity—or, in this case, inequality. When I think about what it means for me to “articulate the shape of this water,” I think of giving people a concept of gender—of patriarchy—that is a very significant revision of the concept they’ve been given before. I hope that as soon as people have this revised concept, they can rise to a level of conscious awareness they didn’t previously have.

An example of this from the history of feminist thought would be when consciousness-raising groups came up with concepts like sexual harassment, for example. It wasn’t like women were not experiencing sexual harassment before, but the experiences weren’t understood as such. And so, what I’m hoping to do is give people a concept that allows them to see their daily lives in a new way that is not only helpful to them personally, but also creates a greater sense of solidarity between them. I’m particularly hoping that men and women start to see each other not as members of “the other side.”

AM: Tell me more about this revised concept of patriarchy. How does it differ from the mainstream conception of patriarchy?

RD: It’s fundamental to my book that we start with the idea of people as living bodies that then get interpreted through inherited concepts and identities. So “Man,” for instance, is an identity conferred on certain people, and with that identity come a lot of expectations and prescriptions about how those people ought to be.   

Feminist theory previously understood the identity of “Man” in opposition to the identity of “Woman.” Notions of biological sex and of the difference between male and female were the singular dimension on which gender and gender oppression were subsequently analyzed.

My view says: “No, that’s one dimension of ‘Man,’ but ‘Man’ is really a tripartite identity constituted by the identities of ‘Male,’ ‘Adult,’ and ‘Human.’” When we focus on “Man” as a mythological character instead of a supposedly biological definition, we open the door to seeing how this identity gets weaponized against people. It moves us away from the realm of biological groups to the realm of how this mythology—the moral grammar of patriarchy—plays out at a political and economic level. To elevate “Man,” you have to devalue “Animal,” “Child,” and “Woman.”

Practically speaking, this means that being compared to a woman, a child, or an animal—being feminized, infantilized, or dehumanized—is equivalent to being degraded. Look at the rhetoric that Donald Trump uses for undocumented immigrants. He uses the imagery of animals to devalue people and elevate himself as “Man.” That’s not separate from patriarchy, in my view.

AM: You argue in Real Men that we need a concept of patriarchy for a “coherent feminist politics.” Can you explain this? What makes the concept of patriarchy so necessary?

RD: I understand feminism as the struggle against systemic gender injustice, and I think that the notion of systemic gender injustice is incoherent if you don’t have a concept of gender. If we’re going to think of gender injustice as systemic, we need to have an account of the mechanism that is creating these routine harms.

The promise of the term “patriarchy”—following its rebranding by the radical feminist movement—was to do the work of naming this very mechanism: the mechanism that creates systemic harm against women. I want to say that patriarchy does that, and that it also creates systemic harms against children, animals, and the vast majority of men. (And if you want to include psychological harms, all men).

AM: How does patriarchy harm men?

RD:  In my picture, we must translate this question to “How does the tripartite and supremacist mythology of ‘Man’ harm men?” And there are two dimensions to the answer that I talk about in my book: one psychological, emotional, and interpersonal; the other systemic and economic.

The first has been talked about more in our culture. People talk about isolation and loneliness, about depression, about the rates of male suicide. Patriarchy requires the isolation of men, because the identity “Man” demands that you see yourself as superior to women, children, and animals, and in constant competition for manly status with other men. That’s going to create a lot of loneliness and detachment, especially when you combine that with the fact that the expression of emotions and emotional intimacy are considered feminine. You’ve immediately taken the building blocks of meaningful relationships—the ability to build communities—so now men feel like they can’t access those relationships and communities without undermining their social status. That’s a recipe for disaster, and I think we’re seeing it play out right now on a grand scale.

But the second dimension—the one I really wanted to drive home in my book—has not been discussed. We’re told that men get an economic benefit from gender, and I think that story is totally wrong. It is a rhetoric that’s used to legitimize economic exploitation and extreme violence, including state violence, by some men against others, and it totally relies on the mythology of “Man.” Think of the use of propaganda in the United States: the use of propaganda to convince poor white men to vote for rich white men on the promise that they’re going to help them out economically by cutting Black men and brown men out of the economic system. This idea of white brotherhood traces back to the Civil War, when notions of Confederate manhood were used by wealthy white men in the South to get poor white men to die for them. It is based on the idea that we are true Americans. That we are the real men.

And so, when we look at men as individuals, we miss these broader economic patterns. We fail to appreciate how the rhetorics of feminization, dehumanization, and infantilization are used by the wealthiest men to cause severe and systemic harm to men who have far less power and wealth than they do.

AM: How might we develop a better vocabulary to name and identify these harms?

RD: I think we need men’s consciousness raising in a very serious way.

The feminist consciousness-raising groups of the mid–20th century got women together to talk about the experiences they were having as women. This allowed them to identify patterns, and it gave them words to name those patterns. Something similar is needed for men, both for the reasons of individuals coming to a higher consciousness of their experience, and for the purpose of coming up with useful concepts to name patterns of treatment.

What is very dangerous is when men get together and have these conversations within a men-versus-women framing of gender, because then it introduces the idea of reverse sexism: the idea that the bad things happening to men are somewhat benefiting women.   

AM: It’s interesting because the so-called manosphere we see today has its ideological origins in the men’s liberation movement of the 1970s, when men were frustrated with traditional gender roles. Their frustration could’ve motivated the kind of consciousness raising you’re pointing to, but instead it quickly turned—

RD: Into a right-wing movement, right? There was an oversight at the heart of that movement, and we’re actually seeing the same oversight at the heart of our current men’s health movement. They’ll talk about men falling behind women in higher education, for instance, but they won’t subject the identity of “Man” to interrogation. They continue to rely on ideas like “good man” or “real man” to frame their political agenda, which is, of course, the same framing that’s being used by the right wing.

If you keep doing that, then you’re still relying on an identity that’s been set up so that it has its content—its meaning—defined in opposition and superiority over that of “Woman.” If you don’t critically interrogate the identity of “Man,” then we’re just going to keep repeating that same cycle.

AM: Many anglophone philosophy departments have been slow to integrate insights from feminist theory and queer scholarship. Historically, at least, the philosophy of gender has not been taken very seriously. Is that changing? Do you see your book as representative of a broader trend in philosophy?

RD: Philosophy is becoming much more open, ecumenical, and fluid in terms of what kinds of questions can be asked and what kinds of sources and literatures can be used to try to answer those questions. There are a lot of factors that play into that, but certainly one of them has to do with the fact that the field has become less homogenous. My book is part of that tradition; it contributes to philosophy becoming a place where questions of gender can be asked more broadly and more seriously. But I also think that’s happened in philosophy already. There are other frontiers—related to disability and environmental ethics, for example—where we have yet to do the work of allowing more space to ask those questions. Where I think my book is really pushing the boundaries has more to do with genre than the topic itself.

AM: What do you mean by genre?

RD: There is an inherited assumption within philosophy—analytic philosophy, but maybe more broadly, too—that philosophical writing must be dry and with no meaningful first-person perspective. It must be written as if there’s one universal truth you’re tapping into with your genius, written to be read by other philosophers and only other philosophers.

In my book, when I talk about the existential hooks of gender and patriarchy that exist in our sense of self, I am not trying to give a reductive analysis of what a sense of self is in some cognitive or psychological way. I’m trying to appeal to people’s humanness and their everyday lived reality more directly. I’m just trying to have a conversation with people.

I really want my book to open the door for philosophers to not only write in a wider variety of ways but also to care more about writing as a craft. When someone develops writing as a craft, they are developing their ability to express their person in their writing, which opens the door for philosophy to be what it actually is (but we’ve pretended it’s not), which is people offering their perspective on something and hoping that it is illuminating for other people.

AM: How might philosophy help us undo patriarchy, then?

RD: Like many projects of undoing ideology, it will need to be done from many directions at the same time. No one move is going to undo it. I do think that at the heart of it is a problem of tying biological characterizations to normative expectations that are understood to be determinants of social and moral worth. Take cliques in high school. To be a goth, you should wear black and eyeliner. There is a “should” there. That’s part of what goths are. But we don’t understand the identity “goth” such that, when you don’t do that—when you don’t wear black and eyeliner—then you’re somehow worse as a person, or your social status goes down.

If we’re going to have social categories as ways to create membership and meaning, let’s have them be more focused on how you want to be in the world, how you want to express yourself, and who you want to be in community with. And let’s not make those categories a determinant of how much your needs matter in our culture. As long as we’re attaching biological descriptions to moral worth, we have a problem.

I would love to move towards a reality where people see more clearly that the concepts that we use to identify ourselves to ourselves and to other people are made by us, that we have agency over them, and with that agency comes responsibility, that the fluidity of our concepts is not a threat. It’s an opportunity to be able to build a world where we can all thrive, where all have more freedom in our ability to form relationships that matter to us.

The Cuban government is implementing a dramatic opening to foreign and domestic capital, private business, the market and the dollar, and has promised to take a machete to its traditionally obstinate bureaucracy, as it grapples with a US fuel blockade and devastating secondary sanctions that threaten to bring economic activity to a standstill.

As the government moves definitively past decades-old taboos on the exploitation of man by man, Cuban officials have taken pains to explain it is simply trying to free the forces of production from any internal obstacles as it defends the socialist country’s universal healthcare, education, culture, and sports.

“The transformations do not imply giving up the social responsibility of the State but recognize market mechanisms as instruments for the efficient allocation of resources,” Prime Minister Manuel Marrero said on June 19, upon presenting the plan for final approval to an emergency session of the National Assembly of People’s Power.

No Cuban official has suggested that the 176 measures will counter the US assault on the country in the short term. Rather, they aim to rectify the government’s mistakes by eliminating festering regulatory obstacles amid a grave economic and energy crisis. The measures also offer an opportunity to US businesses if sanctions are loosened or lifted. They include negotiating US claims over property lost at the time of the 1959 Revolution and property swaps for such debt.

The new measures will be rolled out urgently in the coming weeks and months, Marrero said. Instead of different rules for state and private economic actors, all will operate under the same loosened regulations, ending years of debate over the issue. State companies will have to sink or swim in a market environment in competition with private companies. Joint ventures will be able to hire and fire directly, without going through government hiring halls, a long-standing investor demand.

There are an estimated 2,650 state companies that account for the lion’s share of goods and services produced in the country. There were 12,650 privately incorporated, nonagricultural, micro, small and medium-sized businesses as of June, with more than 7,000 applications pending. A cap on private businesses’ having more than 100 employees will be lifted and individuals authorized to own more than one company. While most sectors of the economy are open to nonagricultural private business, for the first time they can enter the financial and agricultural sectors. The government said all pending applications would be processed by July.

“We submitted our application some two months ago (so it was relatively far down the list of pending applications), and it was approved today…. It seems the promise to approve them all by month’s end is being kept. A good signal,” a local businessman said on June 29, requesting anonymity.

According to the reform plan, all economic actors will be able to invest in one another’s businesses, including purchasing shares, and form partnerships. Prohibitions on Cubans living at home and abroad partaking in economic activities of all kinds will be lifted. All economic actors will be encouraged through tax and other incentives to use solar power. The state will control the fray through taxes and other financial tools, versus assigning resources. Most business decisions will be left to the companies in coordination with provincial and municipal authorities. State-run companies will still predominate in strategic sectors of the economy, but in most cases will no longer be subsidized and administered by a government that directly takes their income, in addition to taxes. Hiring, firing, wages, and some other labor policies will no longer be micromanaged by central authorities.

Price controls are already being eliminated along with the constant inspections needed to enforce them. Most economic actors will be authorized to engage directly in foreign and domestic trade in dollars or pesos without going through the government. For the first time all economic actors can now open business accounts abroad. When investment and private business proposals are not reviewed on time, they will be automatically authorized. People, not goods and services, will be subsidized except in health, education, sports, and culture. All economic actors will be encouraged to become involved in local economic and social development.

We Are Not Appeasing the United States

The fuel blockade and recent sanctions have devastated an economy already down 16 percent when the year began, compared with 2019 when the first Trump administration first started piling on new sanctions on top of the decades-old embargo. Most experts believe the decline will double this year and hyperinflation persist.

“The high-pressure situation we are in right now pushes us to speed things up a bit, to make decisions faster, to have to take action; but not because we are giving in to pressure from the United States,” President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in a recent interview with Roberto Cavada, a Dominican Republic–based Cuban journalist. “We are looking for ways to overcome those pressures without compromising the sovereignty, independence, and self-determination of our country,” he said.

The Trump administration, which has openly targeted Cuba for regime change and repeatedly said it is next after Venezuela and Iran, has dismissed the reforms. Mexico, Vietnam, Russia, China, and other countries have applauded them.

The “economic and social transformations” announced last month build on a similar effort in 2011 called the “economic and social guidelines” that were debated throughout the country. The Communist Party and government have been trying to implement those measures ever since with mixed results. Many local economists and foreign experts blame ideological differences and bureaucratic and vested interests for the sluggish pace of market reforms. They say with the country laid to waste by the Trump administration those forces have lost economic and ideological leverage, allowing reformers to move forward.

Economist Julio Carranza has insisted for decades that Cuba needs a more market-driven socialism. Carranza, along with four other prominent economists, two of whom are also well-known critics of current policy, recently met with President Díaz-Canel as a new advisory group. In an interview with the OnCuba news platform, Carranza said the recent measures represented a learning curve Cuban society has undergone since the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said the new realities of the international situation and harsh conditions facing the population were decisively pushing reform forward.

“Inertia, misunderstandings, dogmas, and vested interests were a constant opposing force. What is new now is to have openly recognized this and the political will to move beyond that resistance,” Carranza said. “With consensus, essential popular participation, accountability and good leadership, it can be done.”

Díaz-Canel, upon closing a trade union congress on June 27, called for self-criticism, saying, “At this point, there is a self-criticism we all need to do, starting with the country’s top leaders…for the delay in implementing measures while waiting for greater awareness of the need for changes and a more favorable context.”

The guidelines were first advanced and adopted under the leadership of Raúl Castro, who in 2008 replaced his older brother Fidel Castro as president and in 2011 as first secretary of the Communist Party. Díaz-Canel filled both positions when Castro stepped down because of the 10-year term limits on each. Ironically, the two leaders, who are believed to have fought endless inside battles to implement the reforms, are the main targets of the Trump administration’s current demands for an end to Communist control and socialism in Cuba. Castro was recently indicted on trumped-up charges dating back 30 years and various US officials have called on Díaz-Canel to resign.

Cuban officials have repeatedly expressed a willingness to negotiate with Washington about anything and everything except its domestic and foreign policies, but say an informal dialogue has stalled. “I can negotiate with anyone designated by the US,” Raúl Castro’s grandson “Raúlito” Rodriguez Castro told USA Today during a recent interview in Havana. “If given the opportunity, [of course with] Trump.”

A Bit of Hope Amid Despair

The measures come amid an exodus of foreign investors and trading partners fleeing threats of new US sanctions on companies doing business even indirectly with the military-run holding company GAESA, as well as the mining sectors. GAESA controls and interacts with large swaths of the economy. The threat of US sanctions has shut down a nickel venture, most hotel ventures, and European maritime shipping companies accounting for around 60 percent of current traffic, among other long-standing international partners.

Over the last six months, only a single oil tanker has arrived—from Russia—though there were around 60 during the first six months of 2025, creating what various United Nations agencies charge is a rapidly growing humanitarian crisis and increasing desperation among the population. Cuba imports 60 percent of the fuel it consumes.

Speaking to an emergency meeting of the Communist Party Central Committee that approved the reforms, Díaz-Canel said daily blackouts, that now last for 20 hours or more, mean “the child who couldn’t study for the test, the food that spoiled in the refrigerator, the elderly person who spends the night awake and hot. It’s the hospital working at its limit, the doctor’s office that can’t store medication, the worker who loses a day’s work, and the business that has to close.” Residents add that the energy crisis also means water that can’t be pumped and loss of connectivity and mobility. Parents worry that the government program to vaccinate kids against 14 childhood diseases will sputter to a halt for lack of raw materials, power, transport, and refrigeration. They say scarcity of food and medicine is worsening and prices are rising.

“It is horrible, horrible, horrible,” my friend Lydia simply responded when I asked how she was doing in the broiling summer heat. Lydia is a retired nurse who is taking care of her 97-year-old mother, who suffers from dementia.

“She needs milk and it is very expensive,” Lydia said. “Who knows, maybe these new policies will help.”

A WhatsApp chat the other evening with another friend is typical of the chitchat on Havana’s streets:

Sandra: More than 24 hours without lights.

Me: I’m sorry. Here it comes and goes but it’s not that bad.

Sandra: I have not had lights since before 6 pm yesterday and still nothing. I am desperate.

Me: And your backup system?

Sandra: I turned it off. It has a little charge left to pump water just in case it comes in.… I need to use it for the water.

Both women asked that their full names not be published.

Sandra, in a phone call and like many other Cubans, said she was skeptical any relief was imminent given US pressure and the rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground.

“What can I do?” she said. “I doubt much will change for the better, but I can hope.”

Gaza—When I first heard the 2026 World Cup was about to begin, I barely paid attention.

This was partially because of the timing—most matches this year are airing late at night in Gaza because of the time difference with the United States—but mostly because I couldn’t imagine how anyone here would watch the games.

How could people leave their homes after dark? Since the genocide began, many streets have become deserted at night, while armed looters take advantage of the absence of police and security. And even if people wanted to watch, where would they find electricity to power a television or projector? With daily power cuts, fuel shortages, and so many other obstacles, this World Cup seemed impossible to follow.

But in Gaza, “impossible” is a word people refuse to accept.

One of the first evenings after the World Cup began, I was leaving a workshop around 10 pm. Normally, that is when the streets begin to empty and shopkeepers start closing their businesses. Instead, I saw a crowd of people hurrying in one direction. Children were running excitedly, waving flags. I could hear shouting and cheering from a distance, the same sounds that used to spill out of cafés during major football matches before the genocide.

I followed the crowd, since it was on my way home.

As I got closer, I realized I was witnessing something I never expected to see these days. A local business, in collaboration with an Egyptian humanitarian organization, had set up a projector that cast the Egypt-Belgium match onto a giant billboard in the middle of the Al-Nuseirat refugee camp. Hundreds of people had packed the street so tightly that there was barely room to move. Egyptian flags were raised everywhere.

I couldn’t help laughing at myself. I had lived in Gaza my entire life, yet somehow I had underestimated my own people. Of course they would find a way to watch the biggest football tournament in the world!

There was no time to think. I squeezed into the crowd, standing shoulder to shoulder with an elderly man who remained on his feet for the entire match. Nearby, young boys jumped excitedly every time Egypt attacked. One little boy could barely see over the adults standing in front of him, yet he never stopped trying, bouncing up and down throughout the 90 minutes in the hope of catching another glimpse of the screen.

From the opening whistle, the atmosphere was electric. Every pass was met with applause, every missed chance with collective frustration. Then Egypt scored. The entire street erupted.

People hugged strangers. Children screamed with joy. Flags waved above the crowd. And I—who missed the same excitement for football that I once had—started jumping and screaming. It was possibly the most enjoyable moment I had lived with people in the past three years.

The celebrations were not only about a goal or a result. They were also about Egypt. For generations, many families in Gaza have supported the Egyptian national team because Palestine has never qualified for the FIFA World Cup. Our own national team has spent decades paying the price of the Israeli occupation. Unable to host official “home” matches in Palestine, it has been forced to play in countries such as Jordan and Qatar.

Since October 2023, those struggles have taken on an even more horrific tone. According to the Palestinian Football Association, at least 565 football players have been killed. Others have been injured, not on football pitches, but while trying to access humanitarian aid. Among them was Suleiman al-Obeid, known across Gaza as the “Palestinian Pelé,” who was killed while waiting in a food aid line. 184 sports facilities that once hosted football matches have been destroyed, while Yarmouk Stadium, Gaza’s most famous stadium, was turned into a detention site where Israeli forces held Palestinian detainees during the genocide. (Despite all of this, Palestine came closer than ever to reaching the 2026 FIFA World Cup, finishing just one win away from the intercontinental playoff before falling to Oman.)

That history is one reason Egypt’s matches feel personal in Gaza. Many Palestinians have long regarded the Egyptian team as one they can cheer for on the world’s biggest stage. During this World Cup, that bond only deepened after Egyptian players and supporters publicly raised the Palestinian flag and expressed solidarity with Gaza throughout the tournament.

As I stood among the crowd, my phone kept vibrating.

My parents were calling. It had been a long day, and they were worried that I still hadn’t come home. The noise around me was so loud that answering would have been pointless. Instead, I started typing a message to tell my mother that I was watching the match.

Before I could send my message, one from my mother appeared on my screen.

She wrote that she knew I had spent the entire day working and applying for scholarships abroad. She had also been scrolling through Instagram and noticed how many places across Gaza were crowded with people watching the match. She suggested that I go and enjoy myself for a while, saying it might help me forget some of the pressure I had been carrying. She unknowingly recommended the very place where I was already standing.

The match ended in a 1–1 draw. Most people went home satisfied. After all, Belgium is one of the strongest teams in the tournament, and Egypt had earned a valuable point.

I left five or 10 minutes before the final whistle so I could see how other neighborhoods were watching the game on my way home.

What I found was a city improvising.

At one local restaurant, the owner and his friends had carried a television to the kitchen door, set up some chairs, and sat together watching the last minutes of the match, praying it would end without a sad surprise. Their business was connected to a private electricity provider, a service that costs around $10 per kilowatt, far too expensive for most families. Businesses pay for it because they need power to keep their ovens, refrigerators, and lights running. Ordinary residents usually subscribe just to charge their phones.

As I made my way home, I saw the same scene repeat on every street: a crowd gathered around a screen outside a store or home that had found some way to get power through a provider, batteries, or a fuel-run generator the neighbors paid for together. Then I reached the one in our own neighborhood.

My cousin Mohammed had provided a screen. Another neighbor had shared an Internet connection strong enough to stream. My friend Ahmad brought out a battery charged from our solar panel in the morning. Every piece came from somewhere different, but together the symphony was complete; everyone had contributed something, and together they watched the match.

Every street seemed to have found its own solution. It was a simple mix, and together, it became its own fan festival in the middle of the neighborhood. The only ticket you needed was a chair from home. And if you brought tea, coffee, or food, you were expected to share it with everyone sitting nearby. In Gaza, eating alone while those around you have nothing is simply not how neighbors treat one another.

Some matches during the World Cup required planning an entire day in advance, finding a screen, securing electricity, arranging an Internet connection, and deciding where it would be safest to gather in someone’s home or in the street. When kick-off comes, usually after midnight, many of us have no choice but to watch on our phones inside tents or half-destroyed homes, reluctant to go outside because of the risk of Israeli attacks or armed looters.

Even so, we are grateful for those ninety minutes of shared joy, when football briefly allows us to forget the reality surrounding us. But those moments cannot restore the normal life we have lost.

We once watched matches together in warm homes and crowded cafés, free to leave whenever we wanted and return home without fear. Now we watch amid peril and grief. Yet none of these obstacles have kept Palestinians from gathering together. If anything, they have made every shared moment feel even more meaningful.

For 90 minutes, the World Cup gives us something the genocide has tried to take away: a sense of community, a sense of normality, and a moment of pure celebration.

My father stopped seeing doctors after his mother died from breast cancer. No yearly physicals. No checkups. No emergency-room visits. It was as though avoiding them could shield him from a similar fate.

By the time he was dying of lung cancer, he had more than made up for lost time. The man who never had a blood test now had a team of specialists, regular scans, weekly chemo and radiation treatments. His diagnosis changed everything for him. In turn, he tried to renegotiate its terms: He took vitamins, asked doctors questions, and stopped drinking. The most jarring change was when he quit smoking. It was strange to see him without a pack of Player’s Navy Cut in hand. If he didn’t already have a cigarette lit, then the pack was never far away, either in his pocket, in the car, or on the dinner table.

I remember the warning labels on every pack, some variation of “smoking kills.” They were unique in that they never cut off the branding or interfered with the packaging itself. It was as though the messaging was there to be seen but not absorbed, which of course was the case. Legally, tobacco companies had to disclose the long-term health risks of their products. But they also needed people to buy them, for their own financial gain. Ironically, Canada’s government needs those profits to nearly break even: While tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death and disease in Canada, costing the healthcare system $6 billion per year, it also brings in an additional $5.8 billion in federal revenue, thanks to tobacco taxes.

Eventually, as the public attitudes toward smoking and regulations started to change in Canada and the United States, the warnings shifted in tone, turning more graphic. By the early 2000s, they included images depicting cigarettes’ toll on the body: tarred lungs, smoke escaping from tracheotomy holes, rotting teeth, and a corpse with a sewn-up chest. One in particular always caught my eye. It was of a woman named Barb Tarbox on her deathbed. The caption read: “This is what dying of lung cancer looks like.”

The story of Barb Tarbox starts as soon as it ends. When the former model was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2002, she wanted everyone to know what it did to her. “People have to see what happens,” she told the photographer Greg Southam when they first met that year. “It’s eating everything inside me.” And so, for the last few months of her life, Tarbox planned her funeral and visited schools across Canada to show students what smoking and cancer did to the body. She cradled a cigarette in one hand and ripped off her hat with the other. As she exposed her bare head to 500 teens, she implored them to look at her. Her speeches were compelling because she embodied her own moral failing: dying by her own hand but unable to tear it away from what was killing her.

After the veins in her legs turned black and tumors had overridden her brain, Tarbox could no longer lament the deadly disease growing inside her. It was then that she tasked Southam with capturing her final days. One of the last pictures he took of her was on her deathbed, and for nearly a decade that was the photo distributed in the US and Canada on cigarette packages like my father’s.

If awareness relied solely on reach, then those graphic images of Tarbox might have been enough to dissuade prospective smokers from buying a pack. But Tarbox living on in the cultural imagination as a warning label has been about as effective as it is legally binding. Awareness and stringent marketing regulations could never compete with the billions of dollars that tobacco companies invest in advertising and loopholes every year, including flavored tobacco products that mask its taste in order to appeal to younger consumers. The cigarette warning becomes useful then as an ideological smokescreen. There is an implication that illness is tied to an individual’s choices rather than to the manufacturers of hazardous and addictive products, their advertisers, or the governing bodies that still allow them to be sold.

Tarbox displayed her body as a public-health warning, but the current use of her likeness is incongruous considering her earliest intentions. Her disintegrating body never discourages smoking but rather warns you that the product is linked to death. Once that risk is disclosed, the responsibility to avoid it is yours.

Cancer is an illness often mythologized as a great equalizer, one that doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor, young and old, healthy and ill. That narrative keeps us in a particular bind where the fortunes of our health are dealt by an invisible hand and yet, in some cases, firmly within our grasp. That tension ultimately structures awareness campaigns: We are told that while anyone can get sick, illness can still be prevented, or caught early, if we remain vigilant and book an appointment. This culture of bodily surveillance promises peace of mind. But while preventive care is undeniably important, an overly individualistic approach is detrimental. By placing the burden of maintaining one’s health on individuals, we obscure the broader environmental, political, genetic, and social forces that affect our well-being, while also turning illness into a moral failing. If we’re taught that our vigilance, discipline, and lifestyle choices dictate our overall health, then a diagnosis becomes an indictment, allowing us to blame individuals for conditions that are, in fact, swayed by forces beyond their control.

Advocates and writers have tried for ages to raise public awareness about the environmental causes of disease. One of the earliest people to do this was Rachel Carson, who, in publishing Silent Spring in 1962, exposed the world to the toxic and carcinogenic effects of DDT, an insecticide that was widely used in the United States and worldwide on food crops like tomatoes, beans, and corn. A former marine biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Carson homed in on the resilience of ecosystems and the ways that environmental and human health are interconnected. DDT, she observed, could silence this natural harmony and wipe out species and humans by entering the food chain. Deposits stored in fatty tissue could, over time, lead to genetic damage and eventually cancer. The book prompted a national controversy, and the chemical industry spent $2.5 million trying to discredit Carson’s work. Eventually, Silent Spring would lead to the banning of DDT and all of the other pesticides named in her report, along with the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

In 1960, just two years before she kicked the hornet’s nest of environmental ethics, Carson suddenly got too sick to get out of bed. As Sandra Steingraber recounted in an essay in Orion called “The Fracking of Rachel Carson,” after she underwent a radical mastectomy, Carson concluded that her doctor had been negligently withholding her biopsy results. By the time she sought out a new surgeon, the breast cancer had already spread. Carson never publicly disclosed the diagnosis, fearing, as Jill Lepore explained in The New Yorker in 2018, that the chemical companies would “dismiss her work as having been motivated by her illness.” When Carson testified on the long-term effects of DDT before Congress in 1963, the cancer had begun migrating to her pelvic bones. She died a year later.

While cancer is deemed a great equalizer, survival doesn’t favor the bold; it favors the wealthy. As the investigative reporter Alex Kotch pointed out in a Guardian article titled “Death and Destruction: This Is David Koch’s Sad Legacy,” the “billionaire industrialist” not only bought the best care possible after he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer but managed to survive 27 years as a result. The irony, of course, is that Koch Industries is a major producer of carcinogens and toxic pollutants. According to Kotch’s reporting, “The dangerous methane leakage, carbon emissions, chemical spills and other environmental injustices enacted by Koch’s companies have imperiled the planet and allegedly brought cancer to many people.” David Koch was also a major fundraiser for cancer research and therapies, his own medical experience apparently having no impact on his business and environmental practices. Cancer is, after all, a thriving, multibillion-dollar industry that’s increasingly profitable without ever engineering a cure.

After his sister was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017, my father asked if I would ever consider genetic testing for the BRCA gene. At that point, I was already in remission for thyroid cancer and had already had a biopsy after a different cancer scare. I had never smoked, but the cancer, according to my oncologist, was not linked to lifestyle choices or genetics but likely something environmental. So what was the point of genetic testing? All I could see it doing was prognosticating, and after being in remission I didn’t want to take on any other label.

The word “cancer” will do a lot of talking for you. No matter the prognosis, people will ultimately relate to a cancer patient as if they’re data or dying. And although your humanity will have been stripped by the word, the conversations that follow, whether solicited or not, rarely restore it. The language it inspires is often prescriptive (depending on the person’s views on health and disability), gendered (depending on the location of the cancer), fatalistic (depending on the stage and grade of the cancer), racist (depending on who is believed in medical settings and other racial disparities in medicine), or aphoristic (depending on the person’s predilection for war metaphors). Surviving cancer doesn’t exempt anyone from this treatment, because their story is instantly canonized: It reinforces the neat, feel-good cancer narratives that seemingly end well. To that end, those stories burden patients with more expectations: In addition to surviving and paying for it, they’ll have to impart wisdom or search for meaning.

I told people that I had cancer only when my hand was forced—when the treatment interfered with classes, a relationship, or my memory. I opened up whenever I had to explain myself. Like most instincts tending toward prevarication, I wanted to control the story and how I was perceived. Diagnosis had abstracted me into a patient, and I saw my body only through the eyes of those treating me, as something dysfunctional that needed to be corrected.

Being sick forces you into the role of patient, and that comes with a script. You are meant to be observed, prodded, even pitied, but never really heard. You rarely reclaim agency over your body because it is constantly surveilled. Genetic testing felt like an extension of that, only worse: It could tell me I was prone to developing cancer again, but it couldn’t tell me when, or how, or what the outcome would be. In her 1978 book Illness as a Metaphor, Susan Sontag argued that “everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” What kind of citizenship falls between the two, in a limbo with a doomsday clock and no end in sight?

Eventually, my time came. Nearly 15 years after my first cancer diagnosis, I was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of appendix cancer. While I was recovering from back-to-back surgeries, one of the surgeons mentioned genetic testing, because both of my cancers, though unrelated, were rare and occurred only in older populations. Here, personal responsibility enters the narrative again. What was implied, through that advice, was that no matter what lifestyle decisions I made—what I ate, whether I smoked, exercised, or whatever—something within me couldn’t adapt to my environment, couldn’t correct whatever small mutations would accumulate into a malignant tumor. It was out of my control, something I couldn’t change. But I could get ahead of a surprise by getting preventive screening.

Before Rachel Carson died of breast cancer in 1964, she noted, in a CBS documentary on the making of Silent Spring, that “man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” Capitalism has trapped us in a paradox, in that we’ve created an environment we’re no longer welcome in. We temper that cognitive dissonance by perpetuating devastating myths about diseases and their cures.

What we need to understand is that, on some level, cancer reflects the world we’ve created: It’s an industrial disease shaped by many forces outside our control. It’s made of us, but it also mimics how we wreak havoc on our surroundings for profit and progress. It’s a disease of unmitigated and unsustainable growth that goes unregulated and depletes the resources of the body until it cuts someone’s future short.

This body was mapped out by anatomists for collective empiricism; it is something medicine wants to conquer. But cancer challenges that oath, defying what it means to heal someone, what it means to be sick. To understand the history of illness is to realize that we’ve inherited and created a world that is no longer hospitable to us.

I did eventually follow through with genetic testing, despite my hesitance to give respect to the idea that I should be trying to control my own health. I wanted to see if there was some missing link. After I’d made a few calls to various genetic counselors, my blood was tested for every known cancer gene at the time. The results were simple: I didn’t test positive for anything. In fact, I was no more likely to develop cancer than the rest of the population. One of the counselors had explained that perhaps something in my body couldn’t correct the mutations that I could develop. And that did give me some peace of mind. It was a better way of understanding my situation, in one of two ways: Maybe it was a biological stutter in a string of my DNA, or maybe my body refused to adapt to a world that’s trying to kill us anyway.

But there was no simple answer waiting for me. There was no gene to isolate and name, no clear answer to hold on to. I’m left with the same ambiguity that had followed my father to his diagnosis, and Barb Tarbox to her deathbed. There is, however, an implicit understanding, thanks in part to Carson’s research and advocacy: that whatever was happening inside the body could not be separated from everything outside of it. The cigarettes my father and Barb smoked, the environments we lived in and moved through, the systems that dictated what was available, affordable, and normal—none of it could be reduced to a simple choice.

And yet it is still how illness will be framed and explained to us. Even as tobacco is phased out through generational bans in the United Kingdom, and potentially in Canada, the burden of risk continues to be repackaged to us. The MAHA movement is rebranding nicotine products like Zyn as “focus aids” and their dangers as “manageable.” The language and products may change, but accountability still ends with the user. Risks will be disclosed and all responsibility transferred to the individual. What is ultimately excised isn’t just the fine print but the long list of industries that engineer dependence and harm, the policies that enable them, and the masses who foot the bill.

If cancer mirrors the world we’ve created, right down to its excesses, inequities, and tolerance for harm, then no amount of individual blame will ever outmaneuver it. We can ban a product, rebrand a dangerous chemical, and print more warning labels, but if we refuse to confront the conditions that make illness so pervasive, we’ll simply repeat the same pattern: reframe the danger, redistribute the blame, and call it progress.

The least surprising news about Graham Platner is that his senatorial candidacy in Maine crashed and burned. The genuinely startling news about him is that he got as far as he did. He won the Democratic primary by a landslide (receiving 72.1 percent of the vote in an election with a robust turnout). Some of Platner’s more besotted admirers, like his political consultant Morris Katz, were even touting the idea that if the candidate won the Senate race, he had a shot at becoming the Democratic presidential candidate in 2028.

This is even though, during his rapid ascent and equally quick plummet from political stardom, Platner waved more red flags than the track marshals in a hundred auto races. Among the major scandals he endured were: the Nazi tattoo on his chest; six years of employment as a private defense contractor (in other words, as a mercenary) for the firm then known as Blackwater; a history of lurid, misogynist, and generally inflammatory Reddit posts; a recent pattern of sexting other women while married; and allegations of abusive behavior towards women.

Democratic voters largely forgave Platner for all of this. Many accepted his narrative that his behavior was due in part to severe PTSD from his military service as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan. He presented himself as a flawed person who was changing and struggling to get his life on track. And after he stormed to victory in his primary, it seemed as though he might have successfully overcome all of his baggage.

That was until Monday, when a former partner, Jenny Racicot, alleged to Politico and CNN that Platner had raped her during their relationship. Racicot’s horrifying and credible story made clear that Platner’s flaws went well beyond the realm of forgiveness. Another sign of that came in Platner’s video announcing the end of his political run. He seemed not at all contrite over the damage he had done but rather aggrieved and self-pitying.

Now it is left to Democrats to pick up the pieces, and to the rest of us to see what can be learned from this debacle. Here’s one important lesson: The Platner story is about more than the downfall of one deeply damaged and flawed man. Rather, its true significance is that someone with as many glaring blemishes as Platner was able to win over so many primary voters who had lost faith in the Democratic Party establishment.

The emerging storyline is that Platner wasn’t properly vetted by the political consultants who managed his cause. This is only partly true. The rape allegation is new (although it had already been floating around as a rumor for weeks), but many of the other discreditable facts about Platner were well-known. But Maine voters were not only willing to brush those facts aside—they overwhelmingly backed Platner, who had come virtually from nowhere, in a primary race against their state’s sitting, two-term Democratic governor. Why?

David Axelrod, former adviser to Barack Obama, raised the salient point:

Lost in the recriminations about Platner is the most essential question that applies well behind Maine: How did a deeply flawed but gifted candidate build such a devoted following? It was a vote of no-confidence in policies and a politics that many Mainers feel are failing them. So Dems, you may not have liked his [solutions] but you’d better have some real, meaningful answers to these concerns.

Axelrod is right in suggesting that Platner would never have shot up like a rocket if there weren’t widespread dissatisfaction with status quo politics. But Platner and his team also took advantage of that desperation for change in ways that need examination.

This is a drama with two significant acts. The first part of the tale is the failure of the Democratic Party establishment over the last generation to fend off the far right—culminating in the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump—which has left a cohort of disillusioned voters hungry for an alternative. The second act involves the rise of political adventurers who have seized the moment to pump up a false messiah.

These two plot points shouldn’t be seen as separate. A sclerotic party establishment deeply allergic to voter participation and the rise of havoc-prone anti-system demagogues who thrive on personality cults are not opposing tendencies but two sides of the same crisis of democracy (and the crisis of the Democratic Party).

The manifold sins of the Democratic Party have been much rehearsed and go back at least to Barack Obama’s underwhelming response to the global economic meltdown brought about by the GOP. In a recent post in his newsletter Off Message, the journalist Brian Beutler provides a bracing survey of all the reasons Democratic voters have soured on their leaders in the last two decades. The insufficient response to the Great Recession was part of a larger embrace of cautious, no-boat-rocking politics that failed to take into account the increasing radicalization of the Republicans, who in the same period have become ever more antidemocratic.

After Trump went unpunished for his role in inciting a riot in 2021 and then reclaimed the White House, the die was cast. The voters who oppose Trump—a majority of the electorate over the last decade—no longer trust party leaders to act as an effective opposition.

In Maine, party leaders displayed their typical fecklessness. To oppose Susan Collins, the Republican senator notorious for caving to Trump while expressing faux concern, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer tried to clear the field on behalf of the state’s governor, Janet Mills, an uninspiring centrist who is 79 years old. To accuse Mills of running a zombie campaign would be generous. Zombies are at least half-alive and, although brainless themselves, capable of eating brains. The Mills campaign enjoyed only a theoretical existence.

Knowing the weakness of the party establishment, a group of political consultants decided the hollowed-out state party was ripe for a takeover. Unfortunately, their solution was to manufacture a savior. As The New York Times reports:

Last July, in a small town in coastal Maine, a couple of progressive, self-styled recruiters of economic populists showed up at the blue-shingled house of Graham Platner, a little-known oyster farmer and Marine veteran who lived largely off government benefits.

They knew his name from local labor organizers and activists, and they had watched a video on the internet of him talking about oysters. Struck by his left-leaning ideology, his working-class affect and his gravelly voice, they became convinced that he could win a Senate seat in Maine—and quickly persuaded Mr. Platner of the same.

The initial headhunters, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, and then a third out-of-state operative they called up to Maine—Morris Katz—told Mr. Platner he was “the one,” a “hero of the movement,” “a historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution,” according to half a dozen people with knowledge of their conversations.

As the over-the-top flattery makes clear, the campaign was based on selling Platner as a messiah—both to voters and to Platner himself. It turned into a disaster not just because Platner turned out to be a false messiah, but also because messianic politics is a dead end.

In a democracy, it is fatal to turn any candidate into “the one.” Effective political change involves building movements that are far larger than any one person, so if a candidate fails, the work of organizing can continue.

Morris Katz, at the very least, should have known better. He’s been involved with a very different type of left-wing politics as a consultant to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. While Mamdani is undeniably charismatic, his rise has been fueled not just by his personal charm but also by the organizing strength of the Democratic Socialists of America, which has had a string of victories in municipal elections and congressional primaries. The DSA model has parallels in the organizing of groups such as the Working Families Party and Run for Something. This is a political left that is not looking for “the one” but rather to cultivate a broad range of candidates springing up from continuous mobilization.

In the wake of Platner’s implosion, establishment figures, notably Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress, are trying to exploit the scandal to tarnish other progressive politicians with sleazy guilt-by-association rhetoric. (This line of attack is particularly odious because of Tanden’s long history of supporting dubious figures such as Bill Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, and Larry Summers.) This is a despicable tactic and likely to be ineffectual. After two decades of disappointment, it will take more than one scandal to rehabilitate the establishment.

But the model followed by Katz, of parachuting into a local election to elevate a telegenic figure into being a movement leader, is also discredited. The only path forward is the DSA model: the hard labor of organizing a mass movement from the ground up.

The cost of living, healthcare, and abortion were the top three issues for young voters in the 2024 election, according to a Tufts poll. Financial precarity and political instability are, in many ways, the defining features of young Americans’ futures. A record-high percentage of Americans say their finances are worsening; housing prices are 60 percent higher than in 2019, and credit card debt has risen 63 percent since 2021. It’s easy to see how a relatively post-materialist issue like climate change could get lost in this list of immediate concerns.

“There’s just an uncertainty that young people live with, and climate change is part of that, but it’s only one piece,” said Megan Mullen, faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, which aims to advance effective and equitable solutions to pressing environmental challenges. “Climate doesn’t dominate students’ thinking, because there are so many other places of uncertainty for them.”

When survival in the present is already so exacting, thinking about what life may look like in a few decades becomes difficult, if not impossible. Inevitably and understandably, the climate has been placed on the back burner for many people. Though climate remains a concern for many Americans, this pattern indicates that those who care deeply about the climate aren’t considering it a top priority in their voting decisions—or even voting at all.

“It’s only when you narrow down to voters that the number of Americans who list climate as their top priority becomes so small,” said Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project. “Maybe the climate movement doesn’t have a persuasion problem as much as we have a turnout problem.”

Stinnett started the Environmental Voter Project to specifically address lagging electoral engagement. The nonprofit targets the millions of Americans who list the climate as one of their top issues yet don’t vote consistently in elections. In 2024, over 11 million people who identify as environmentalists did not vote in the presidential election.

For politicians, this is a sign that the climate doesn’t need to be prioritized, Stinnett said.

“Ultimately, nothing motivates a politician more than the prospect of winning or losing an election,” he said.

In nine years, the Environmental Voter Project has turned over 2 million of these Americans into consistent voters for presidential, midterm, state, and local elections.

But moving young Americans to vote, and vote specifically for the climate, can be a challenging task despite their high rates of eco-anxiety, an emergent mental health problem, according to UNICEF. A 2026 Gallup poll found that 66 percent of Americans think the environment’s quality is worsening, a near-record high. In addition, 71 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds said they think about the climate crisis at least once a week. Yet this hasn’t spurred them to go out and vote in large numbers for avowedly pro-environmental candidates.

The disconnect between worrying about the climate and the enormously resource-intensive lives most Americans lead compounds this issue, Mullen said.

“We can make modest changes to our lifestyle to try to reduce that imprint on climate, but we know that that’s not going to make a difference on the broader phenomenon,” she said. “So it’s hard to motivate, and we’re a little bit trapped. We’re already living our lives.”

Mullen added that in some ways, agency has been taken away from people. For example, artificial intelligence has proven environmentally ruinous. Yet, it has crept insidiously into search engines, apps, and websites. It can be difficult to discern how and where AI is being deployed, and even more challenging to opt out.

When individual actions don’t make a difference yet rates of eco-anxiety continue to rise, the cycle of climate inactivism and neglect continues. Unlike climate change denialism, those who are climate-inactive are aware of the severity of the problem, but feel impotent to address it.

Stinnett said he believes part of the problem is how climate solutions are framed.

When asked to name solutions to the climate crisis, unlike other pressing issues such as abortion, gun violence, and immigration, Americans are significantly more likely to name completely apolitical and individualized solutions, Stinnett said. The number one proposed solution was to reduce, reuse, and recycle, and the second was increasing general awareness, education, and lifestyle changes, according to a poll by the Environmental Voter Project.

“We’ve been taught to view the climate crisis as this collection of individual sins rather than viewing it as a systemic problem that requires political action,” Stinnett said. “And if that’s how you view it, of course you’re not going to think about politics as an outlet for change.”

Elena Halsenberg, a senior at UC Berkeley, agrees with Stinnett that certain climate discourse is responsible for inaction: “The media frames climate in a way that makes it almost seem like a doomed situation.”

Halsenberg, who is studying environmental politics, said the abundance of avenues to get involved with sustainability at Berkeley helps curb some anxiety for herself and other students. Berkeley activists, who engage in activities like lobbying and environmental bill tracking, view the climate crisis as something that can be solved and sustainability as the solution. However, Halsenberg said that those outside of these groups tend to be far less engaged. Indeed, because young people have been conditioned to believe they can’t change anything, an enormous pool of latent political power has been created, Stinnett added.

“If young people just started showing up, politicians would immediately start leading on climate,” Stinnett said. “Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they don’t want to lose elections. It is crucially important that whenever you vote, you hold politicians’ feet to the fire.”

This becomes especially critical at a moment that climate hushing—when political leaders deliberately sideline the climate—is becoming a prominent electoral strategy. Some Democrats have suggested that with the current political controversies surrounding the legitimacy of climate change, it may be more strategic not to mention the climate at all. According to Halsenberg, communication about environmental problems ought to be more consistent to combat the judging phenomenon.

To Mullen, the answer to tackling climate change at the systemic level lies in interest group action and community organizing. Particularly when voter turnout is low, bringing a group of voices together at any capacity becomes significantly more impactful, she said. Being visible in advocacy and creating a concentrated effort has seen success at the national, state, and local levels, with one of the most prominent examples being the Sunrise Movement. It was the activism around the Green New Deal that made the difference in ultimately producing the Inflation Reduction Act, Mullen said. She added that sometimes the most impactful thing to do is to mention the climate and voting in everyday conversations to make these issues part of everyone’s world.

“Young people have been taught to view the climate crisis as a suicide rather than a homicide,” Stinnett said. “They’ve been told that they must change what they buy and eat and drive in order to fix everything, when in reality, climate change is a systemic problem where politicians are letting companies get away with murder.”

Early Tuesday morning, ICE agents shot dead Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston resident who had, according to his family, been in the country for 35 years. Araujo was on his way to work at his construction job when he was killed.

As is now common practice after ICE shoots an immigrant, the agency immediately declared that Araujo had “weaponized” his vehicle and tried to run over agents. In response, agents shot him in the stomach, which in itself raises a host of questions—if they really were shooting in self-defense into a moving vehicle, how could they have shot into the car at an angle that would have hit Araujo in his abdomen?

At this point, we know the script well. We know in advance how ICE will explain a shooting incident: The agency’s spokespeople will immediately claim self-defense against a driver allegedly trying to run agents over; if there are rallies against the shooting, the government will label both the victim and the protesters as terrorists; and the Department of Homeland Security and White House will back up ICE. In short, we know that the Trump administration has given ICE a blank check to do its worst. And we know that the Department of Justice won’t even bother to pretend to investigate the killing.

We also know—or should, if we are paying attention—that even though ICE is no longer invading cities, as it did during the siege of Minneapolis, it is speeding up arrests and deportations. Last week, ICE hit a ghastly milestone, reaching 2,000 arrests per day for multiple consecutive days. If this pace keeps up, the administration could achieve one of its long-standing aims: a million immigrant arrests in a year, with tens of thousands warehoused in ICE detention sites around the country and hundreds of thousands deported, often without even a semblance of due process.

As a part of the escalating war on immigrants, the administration is ramping up its deportation of people to third countries as well as its illegal refoulement of deportees back to countries where there is a good chance they will be tortured or killed.

Immigration attorneys e-mail me regularly about such cases. Last week, I received one about a gay man from Egypt, who had faced torture in his home country and managed to escape to the United States. Under the provisions of the Convention Against Torture, the United States granted him initial protections, but while his case wound through the courts, ICE promptly detained him. This spring, just shy of six months into his detention, ICE moved him from a facility in California to one in Arizona and then, without his attorney being informed, to another one in Louisiana. Before his lawyer could intervene, he was quickly deported to Equatorial Guinea, a country to which he has no connection.

“This was in March,” the attorney wrote me, “and client remains in a decommissioned hotel in EG, surrounded by armed guards. Egypt will not provide him with a passport (and he couldn’t go anyway, without getting killed). So he has been there for months. With no end in sight. He updates us from time to time via WhatsApp. Most of the handful of people the US has sent there have been ‘refouled’ to the countries where they won protection. He has not. The guards have tried to persuade some of those detained to jump off of balconies to ‘end their misery.’”

Making this situation even worse, Equatorial Guinea is now reportedly quarantining individuals infected with Ebola in the same hotel—and is refusing to give the immigrant-detainees personal protective gear to protect them from exposure.

Another contact reached out to me about a Somali man from Charlotte, North Carolina, who was put on a multiday deportation flight that went from one city to another in Africa dropping off detainees. During the five days it took him to reach Somalia, he was chained at the wrists, waist, and ankles, was repeatedly beaten by agents, and was deprived of all but the minimum amount of food and water. His niece later posted a video in which she stated that he arrived in Somalia with broken bones and a body covered in bruises.

The man’s family also claims that he witnessed some detainees being forcibly sedated by their guards—a method ICE is alleged to have used since the early days of the War on Terror.

Meanwhile, hundreds of masked white nationalists belonging to a group called the Patriot Front marched in the center of DC to commemorate the Fourth of July and push their claims for the creation of a white ethno-state. Unless I’m missing something, not a single member of the administration mustered the moral clarity to condemn the group and its message. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum even went out of his way to defend their right to protest on First Amendment grounds. Now, I’m all in favor of the First Amendment, but how hard would it be to say something like, “These people are the worst of the worst. Yes, they have a constitutional right to protest and to state their case, but know that this administration stands solidly with those who reject the Patriot Front’s antidemocratic vision”? There was, of course, no such message out of the administration.

Not that that’s a surprise. In 2017, when the Unite the Right thugs descended on Charlottesville, it was enough of a shock that Trump at least felt compelled to address it—even if he ended up saying that some of the neo-Nazis were fine people. In 2026, a white nationalist demonstration in DC on the anniversary of the United States’ founding is just another ho-hum day in Trumplandia.

Why use the presidential platform to condemn neo-Nazis when there are far more important things in play? One can, for example, spend one’s time milking public office for vast private gain; Trump’s personal wealth has increased by over $2 billion since January 2025. And one can undermine the integrity of a major sporting event like the World Cup by putting pressure on FIFA to cut the US soccer team a break.

Trump’s combination of irrationality and authoritarianism was also on display in the run-up to, and during, this week’s NATO summit. He claimed that he needed a restraining order against Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; he restarted hostilities with Iran, seemingly at least in part so that he could berate NATO allies for not doing their part in the Middle East; and he declared that he wanted to end all trade with Spain (spoiler alert: He can’t, unless he is willing to embargo the entire European Union). Spain, he added, was a “terrible” partner, a “hopeless” country, and filled with “bad” people. To top it off, he reopened his fight with Denmark over the ownership of Greenland.

In other times, such actions and words would be considered a causus belli; in the Trump era, they are business as usual. Beating up on immigrants, cheating at sports, attacking allies, profiteering off public office, standing by while neo-Nazis parade through the nation’s capital—it’s all just a week in the life of the leader of the free world.

The Supreme Court upheld anti-trans athlete laws in the recent Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. BPJ decisions, declaring that Title IX, the bedrock of gender-based protections in public schools, does not extend to transgender student athletes. On its surface, the rulings are narrower than the decision many activists and scholars had feared. They target school sports in Idaho and West Virginia but sidestep broader questions about trans rights under the 14th Amendment, questions probably best left unanswered by a right-wing bench.

But the consequences of the rulings will go beyond those two states and beyond sports. The court’s decisions are part of a global campaign to legislate and litigate trans people out of public life. This was made clear during oral arguments back in January; attorneys and justices alike scrutinized the bodies of trans girls, debating the size and shape of their organs, muscles, and bones. Yet the banality of the scene—procedural buzzwords, shuffling papers, cordial back-and-forths couched with honorifics—almost obfuscated the violence of it all.

Alan Hurst, then Idaho’s solicitor general, said transgender girls pose “a real threat” to safety and fairness in women’s athletics. “We cite Your Honors to the U.N. Special Rapporteur’s report that says 600 women have lost 890 medals in 29 different sports,” he said, arguing that ( presumed) cisgender women are losing en masse to transgender ones and that trans women and girls don’t belong in women’s spaces.

The United Nations official in question is Reem Alsalem—the special rapporteur on violence against women and girls. She filed an amicus brief with the court supporting trans-exclusionary laws. This comes after years of pushing reports at the United Nations that painted trans women as a danger to their peers. The court’s final opinion echoed the language in her brief.

Hurst’s comment about Alsalem’s work has a few problems. Among them: The numbers are not particularly meaningful or accurate. But facts have never stopped Alsalem. Through her writings to the United Nations, she has become a leading mouthpiece for far-right propaganda and misinformation about trans people, propelling untruths into policy and law and declaring war, in her words, on the concept of “gender equality” itself.

The medals statistic cited by Hurst has been repeatedly debunked. In April 2025, a segment from Last Week Tonight With John Oliver broke down the dubious methodology behind it, and reporting from Erin in the Morning further found that the list of trans medal winners on which it is based contains numerous errors and misleading practices—such as the inclusion of women like Imane Khelif, who is not trans, and counting as “sports” poker and competitive video gaming. Erin in the Morning’s investigations also found the anonymous website that developed the stat emerged from an online forum of anti-trans extremists who had been banned from other social-media platforms due to hate speech.

Nevertheless, Alsalem cited the medals statistic again in her September 2025 amicus brief with the Supreme Court.

In that brief, she argues that transgender girls should not be awarded the same protections as cisgender girls. Instead, she proposes that all sports have a strictly defined women’s category and an “open” category, which would require grouping transgender and intersex girls with men—and she wants this separation codified in law.

The document makes clear that Alsalem’s recommendations were “neither sought nor given by the United Nations.” And the reports she writes for the United Nations are technically informational, not authoritative; they do not represent the views of the United Nations. This distinction is often lost on the countless lawmakers, media outlets, and laypersons who see her work on UN letterhead or her posts from a UN X account and understandably assume that they are consuming information from a credible source.

Bearing the apparent imprimatur of the United Nations, Alsalem’s work is providing the veneer of legitimacy to anti-trans disinformation. The elevation of her work before the Supreme Court shows both the effectiveness of her project and how it undermines the rights of the very group she is duty-bound to protect: women and girls.

Alsalem proudly calls herself a “normal non-deranged woman from the UN.” (It was her longtime bio on X.) This is already controversial. For starters, as many of her critics emphasize, this makes it sound like she is employed by or represents the views of the United Nations. She does not. Alsalem was appointed in 2021 by the Human Rights Council. All rapporteurs are non-salaried human rights consultants, each with their own thematic or geographic specialty. Alsalem has conducted critical research on topics like femicide and women facing genocide in Gaza.

But 15 months into her first term, Alsalem began to use her association with the United Nations to try to block the expansion of trans rights. In 2022, she sent a formal letter to government officials opposing a Scottish bill facilitating trans people’s ability to obtain accurate legal identification. Since then, Alsalem has repeatedly bolstered attacks on gender equality across the globe, including through her UN-commissioned reports—one of which was a 2024 treatise on women in sports, which appears to be what pushed the warped statistic about medals into the mainstream.

In June 2025, Alsalem took the stage at the UN headquarters in Geneva, a sprawling art deco structure, to present her report on “Sex-Based Violence Against Women and Girls: New Frontiers and Emerging Issues.” By the time Alsalem stepped up to the dais, hundreds of human rights and medical groups had already denounced what they characterized as an abuse of her position. One statement, whose signatories include Planned Parenthood Global and the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association, accused Alsalem of “manipulating data” and “undermining” long-held policy reforms. Another statement cosigned by Amnesty International says her report “misuses legal, scientific, and testimonial evidence, ignoring established methodologies for interpreting human rights.”

“Sex is as binary as it gets,” Alsalem told the assembly. This, according to the World Health Organization, UN Women, most if not all other rapporteurs, and essentially every other part of the United Nations, is false. Her report derides the concept of “gender identity,” which she falsely describes as “the feeling that some individuals have of not identifying with the sex observed at birth.” (Broadly speaking, that is called being transgender; “gender identity” is something all people have, regardless of whether they are transgender or cisgender.)

Alsalem argues against the idea of “gender equality” altogether. She wants to replace it with the term “equality between men and women.” Enshrining this binary into international law would strip transgender and intersex people from gender-based protections, which Alsalem says should be replaced by the term “sex-based protections.” The Trump administration has followed suit. This is a talking point from the global “anti-gender” movement, which opposes the idea of gender itself. Human Rights Watch has called it a “global conspiracy myth,” and its roots go back to the 1980s when the Catholic Church feared that a gay and feminist movement was undermining the traditional family. This fantasy of a global gender cabal underlies the Supreme Court’s anti-trans ruling in BPJ and Hecox, as well as in Skrmetti, the 2025 decision that limited trans youth’s access to healthcare.

“Attacks on gender—including on women existing outside certain roles or LGBTQI+ people existing at all—are a bellwether for rising authoritarian practices,” Tarah Demant, the senior director at Amnesty International researching authoritarianism, told me. “When authoritarians or those in power attack ‘woke gender’ or LGBTQI+ people and their rights or women’s rights or sexual and reproductive rights, it’s the government and people in power exerting control over your body and life—defining who is valuable, who is fully human, and who gets rights.”

One would assume the reports of a UN special rapporteur would rely on rigorous academic research and reputable newsrooms. After all, the special rapporteur’s code of conduct instructs its purveyors to use “reliable sources” and to “be guided by the principles of discretion, transparency, impartiality, and evenhandedness.” But in an article published in Sexual Health Matters in 2024, scholars criticize Alsalem for her “odd” and “opaque citations” such as her repeated and vague references to “expert consults,” taking quotes out of their context, and using testimonies “in direct opposition to what these submissions call for.”

Her sourcing sometimes traces back to far-right and anti-trans outlets and tabloids like Reduxx, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail or known anti-trans groups like Women’s Declaration International and the LGB Alliance. In one such case, she asserted that presumed-cis women were leaving women’s sports en masse over trans athletes. The citation linked back to an article from an anti-trans group about a recreational swimming pond with trans-inclusive policies.

The interplay of her reports and the anti-trans media circuit creates a feedback loop, where far-right newsrooms and groups publish anti-trans propaganda, receive validation from Alsalem, and then spit it back out as if the source were the United Nations itself.

Well-known extremist groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, have been in lockstep with Alsalem. She hosted the ADF, an evangelical legal advocacy group that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-LGBTQ hate organization, on the official UN streaming platform for a discussion on the “issue” of trans athletes. And on X, she’s posted that gender-affirming care has “mutilated” and “dechilded” a generation, comparing it to the mass murder of children in Gaza.

“It’s an extraordinary thing,” said Beirne Roose-Snyder, a senior policy fellow at the Council for Global Equality. “For a lot of people who are very rules-bound and technical experts, you see a lot of anxiety and a lot of uncertainty about how to respond, because I don’t know that we’ve seen a special procedure mandate holder use their mandate to harm so proactively.”

Alsalem denounces anyone who calls her an “extremist,” but she advocates for laws that are even more restrictive than the ones in the most right-wing US states. In a 2025 report on “sex-based” violence, she calls for “all actors” to ban youth even from “social transitioning”—apparently meaning that she wants the government to prohibit children from being addressed by their preferred pronouns and name. She also seems to imply that those assigned female at birth cannot “meaningfully consent” to transitioning. On the other hand, she often describes trans women as sexual predators attempting to insinuate themselves into lesbian spaces and women’s facilities.

In e-mail correspondence for this piece, Alsalem denied that her work is hateful or factually unsound. In spring 2025, during initial reporting for Erin in the Morning on the medals statistic, she wrote to me that she didn’t want to ban trans women from sports; she just wants to ban them from women’s sports and to deploy sex tests as a tool of enforcement. Her report acknowledges the violent history of sex tests but says that some athletes may have their sex “contested,” requiring a “non-invasive” investigation into their DNA.

“It’s such an immediate and direct attack on women to have this position that she takes,” explained Anima Adjepong, head of the gender studies program at the University of Cincinnati, who specializes in the politics of sport. They also run the nonprofit Silent Majority Ghana and have a forthcoming book on women’s sports in the region. They warned that sex testing disproportionately harms women of color.

“The history of sex testing within sports—they kept having to change it over and over again, because there’s not a clear, scientific, ‘answer’ for what constitutes a man,” Adjepong said. “And of course, actually, that’s not what they’re looking at, right? There’s not a clear answer for: What constitutes a woman?”

Meanwhile, the criticisms of Alsalem’s conclusions are matched by questions over the sources she uses to reach them. Via e-mail, I asked Alsalem why she cited Southern Poverty Law Center–designated hate and extremist groups in her work. She replied, “You may be interested to know that the Human Rights Council Presidency has indicated that defaming, attacking organizations or individuals that engage with the Human Rights Council…will not be tolerated for whatever reason.”

Much of her response to me was recycled later in a near-identical reply to Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, the full version of which you can read here.

But even by her own description of her duties, she violated UN instructions. She told me that as per guidelines for special rapporteurs, she used generic citations to protect transgender individuals from being identified. But her reports link to Fox News and anti-trans outlets and sources that reveal detailed information about people, including their deadnames. In other citations, she failed to redact identifying information about transgender student-athletes—the redactions can be removed simply by highlighting the text. This functionally outs these individuals on a global stage.

Still, Alsalem rejects the idea she wasn’t living up to her duties. “Only the UN Human Rights Council can determine whether or not she violated her duties,” she wrote to me. “You can make a complaint to the council. Otherwise, it is fair to say you are engaging in misinformation and disinfomeation.[sic]”

The process for pursuing such complaints, however, is obscure if not nonexistent, and many human rights experts emphasized that a push to reprimand Alsalem is potentially dangerous. Special rapporteurs are central to the work of the Human Rights Council, and if one goes down, it could put targets on others. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian territories, already faces death threats and harassment campaigns.

“This is a really sensitive topic,” said a staffer from Transgender Europe and Central Asia who asked not to be named because of hostility toward the LGBTQ community in their region. “Not only because of the subject matter,” they said, but because the institutions upholding the special rapporteurs’ work are “constantly at risk.”

In the majority opinion for Hecox, Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s reasoning is similar to that of Alsalem and her anti-gender movement: “Allowing a biological male athlete to compete on a girls’ team necessarily displaces or disadvantages a female athlete, replacing her on the roster, knocking her out of the starting lineup, reducing her playing time, depriving her of a medal, and the like.”

On July 9, Alsalem welcomed the court’s decision, saying, “The experiences of women and girls who have lost places on teams, podium positions, scholarships and opportunities deserve to be heard and taken seriously.” She urged states, educational institutions, and sporting bodies to ensure that the ruling is applied across the United States. She also reposted anti-trans rhetoric from Justice Clarence Thomas that quoted from an account named “TERFs ‘r’ us.” (TERF is shorthand for “trans exclusionary radical feminist).”

The full impact of the decision is yet to be seen, but experts warned me that the harms will go beyond the trans community. “Pitting groups against each other creates division, and perhaps the biggest influence that we see here is that many people believe this is an issue about trans people,” said Erika Castellanos, executive director of Global Action for Trans Equality. She pointed out that many of the same groups attacking trans rights are also targeting reproductive rights, queer rights, women’s rights, and free speech.

“The rhetoric that the advancement of the rights of one group removes rights of another group is a misunderstanding of how the human rights ecosystem works,” she said. “Everyone is affected by this.”

Anthony Weiner must be gnashing his teeth. Al Franken too. Weiner lost his political career for sexting while married (he went to jail for sexting with a 15-year-old girl, but that came later). Franken fake-groped a sleeping woman as a joke, and was then credibly accused of groping numerous women for real. Away with him! But that was before Democratic dude-bros decided the party was dominated by “HR lady politics,” as Matt Stoller memorably put it, and that white working-class men were the real Americans, having absolutely no political experience kept you pure of heart, and that being “rough around the edges” (Stoller again) was a testament to your authenticity.

Graham Platner shows us how that works out in practice. First, freelance progressive strategists Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan recruit him after a single meeting. They’re smitten: He’s the real deal, a former Marine who after some years of PTSD and heavy drinking has settled into small-town Maine life as an oyster farmer and married man. He’s got a “gravelly voice”—always a plus. Joined by Morris Katz, the man who brought Zohran Mamdani to the world, they commission a quick vetting on the cheap. It doesn’t hurt that Platner is good-looking, charismatic, a great public speaker and energetic campaigner, competing in the primary with 78-year-old governor Janet Mills, aka the Establishment, in the race to unseat longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins. And so the legend of Platner, man of the people, is born.

A great deal of ink has been spent debating what it is to be working-class. Non-college-educated? Brought up low-income? Sells his labor to a boss? Works with his hands? None of these are perfect—a housepainter works with his hands, and so did Picasso. I’m not sure Platner meets any of these criteria—his family was educated and middle-class; he went to private schools and got into (but dropped out of) George Washington University. He owns a business—the main customer for which is his mother’s restaurant. Platner was a political consultant’s idea of a working-class man, a profanity-spewing bro you’d want to have a beer with.

It was a bit of a grift, but for a long time, it worked. Platner had a huge following in Maine among fed-up workers and idealistic progressives alike, including lots of women enraged by Senator Collins’s vote for Brett Kavanaugh. He won the primary. People loved him so much, and were so eager to beat Collins they excused flaws that would have sunk an ordinary Democrat: the tattoo he claimed not to know was a Nazi symbol but probably did, the misogynistic Reddit posts, bad behavior with some—but not all!—girlfriends, sexting with multiple women after the marriage that was supposed to have turned his life around. It was all down to PTSD or alcoholism. Each thing was supposed to be the last—he swore it—but it never was.

Dude-bro pundits—Stoller, Ryan Grim, Ken Klippenstein, Glenn Greenwald—doubled down: What about Trump, the rapist in the white house? What about Gaza, and AIPAC and the oligarchs funding the Dems? They shredded Lindsay Fifield, an ex-girlfriend who told The New York Times Platner had twisted her arm and locked her in a room. Fifield was a “republican operative” who had helped orchestrate Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court bid—obviously she’s lying. It was only when another ex, Jenny Racicot, told Politico and Jake Tapper that he had raped her after invading her house while drunk that the handwriting was on the wall. But, really, it had been there all along. As Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. His endorsers—Bernie, Warren, Ro Khanna, Planned Parenthood—dropped him; his volunteers turned against him, and on Wednesday Platner withdrew from the race with a bitter speech blaming the media and the Establishment for tanking his campaign.

A lot has been said about the gendered nature of Platner’s appeal. The working-class savior has to be a man, of course—imagine a working-class woman campaigning on her years working the register at CVS or running a daycare center. Where’s the romance in that? It’s no accident that Elizabeth Warren called him “my kind of man” and praised him for his “accountability,” the very quality he lacks entirely. Men get so much forgiveness for their screwups and predations. A male politician has a secret weapon, too—his wife. A wife can defend her husband when no one else can, and rare indeed is the pol who says, No, darling, it’s my fault, I’ll handle this alone. I felt so sorry for Amy Gertner telling the world that she doesn’t want a perfect marriage. When Platner introduced his wife at a rally after he confessed to the sexting, the crowd roared “A-my! A-my!” It was hard not to hear the voice of progressive America calling on women to stand by their man and take one for the team.

What have we learned from this experience? Vetting is good. Don’t do it on the cheap. Don’t assume that a politician’s autobiography is truthful. It’s PR. Finally, no matter how much you want a savior, don’t make excuses for a candidate like he’s your boyfriend who’s really sweet when you get to know him.

Love is blind. Voters shouldn’t be.

The most important thing about Rahm Emanuel’s speech in Tel Aviv Wednesday is that it was a repudiation of decades of US policy toward Israel, and specifically of Joe Biden’s “No daylight” approach. “For too long, American policy toward Israel operated under the assumption that the best thing Washington could do for Jerusalem was to blindly and silently stand behind your government, without conditions, without demands, and without consequences when we disagreed,” Emanuel said. “That has been our mistake.”

Yes, many of us have been making this argument for years and faced relentless attacks for it from our own Democratic colleagues. It’s long been clear that, rather than giving Israeli leaders the confidence to take tough steps for peace, lockstep US support just gave them the confidence that they would never have to. But still: Welcome, Rahm! Successful politics is about addition.

Unfortunately, even as the speech broke from a failed approach toward Israel, it was still based on the deeply patronizing attitude toward the Palestinians and the same tendentious rendering of history that has undergirded it. It’s hard to see how a new and better policy can be built on that same old logic.

A side note—has any speech by a potential presidential primary candidate (who hasn’t even officially announced his candidacy yet) ever been more extensively and breathlessly previewed? Emanuel’s remarks received glowing anticipatory write-ups in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and multiple other outlets. Emanuel and his team clearly wanted to set this up as a landmark intervention in a highly charged debate, and a lot of journalists were willing to accommodate. Emanuel is setting himself up as the conservative Democrat who can solve the problems created by conservative Democrats, and much of the political-media establishment seems prepared to hail him as a savior for it.

There’s no question that the speech was significant. Emanuel, a longtime conservative Democratic stalwart with strong family connections to Israel, aggressively criticized Israel’s current government and outlined a much more conditional future US-Israel relationship. He reiterated his previously stated position that US military aid to Israel should end, a position that was still taboo just a few years ago but has quickly become mainstream. He included a bit of a hedge, however, saying that “Israel should be able to buy American arms under the same financial terms, the same restrictions, and the same requirements as every other trusted ally that abides by our laws.” If genuinely enforced, this would (and should) effectively result in an arms embargo, as Israel clearly does not abide by our laws which prohibit supplying arms to militaries engaged in systemic human rights abuses, restricting humanitarian aid or using arms for nondefensive purposes. It was the standard set on paper by the Biden administration, then breached to the point of arming a genocide. (Emanuel made no mention of the current effort in Congress to further intertwine US and Israeli military and intelligence sharing; someone should ask him about that.)

Emanuel also declared that Israeli settlers involved in violence, and officials who support them, should be sanctioned, along with “every construction company or bank building or financing illegal settlements.” Here again, he included a hedge with the word “illegal.” Given that every settlement built in the occupied territories since 1967 is illegal under international law, and that banks financing settlements finance lots of other things in Israel, this is a potentially meaningful consequence—unless of course he means it to apply only to the limited number of settlements and outposts the Israeli government itself regards as “illegal.”

The fact that these terms for a revised US-Israel relationship will now be seen as the rightmost edge of the Democratic debate is not a bad thing. But it’s not enough. Emanuel told some hard truths, but he still trafficked in some falsehoods that fatally undermine the speech as a path forward.

The first of these is the notion that Israel’s problems can all be traced back to Benjamin Netanyahu. “Let’s start by reviewing the recent history,” Emanuel said. “Over the last five years, Israel has evolved from being lauded as the start-up nation to becoming, in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s words, a modern-day Sparta. You have turned from being known for your technological prowess to being considered primarily a territorial pariah.”

Come on. The violent trends in Israel were already well in evidence long before five years ago; they’ve just become undeniable since Israel’s assault on Gaza and the other territory on its periphery that followed October 7, 2023. Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having served for 16 of the past 17 years. He is not an Israeli political anomaly. Netanyahu provides a useful foil for Democrats, given that he’s such a repulsive figure, but the tensions in the relationship will not end if he is voted out.

The second and more serious problem with the speech was its trafficking in the tired trope of Palestinian rejectionism. “Three times since the early 1990s, you have offered the Palestinians sovereignty in exchange for your security—and three times your offer was not only rejected, but you were attacked as a direct consequence,” Emanuel claimed.

To call this a tendentious presentation of history would be to give it too much praise. Given that Emanuel worked for the Bill Clinton administration (and reportedly consulted on the speech with both Bill and Hillary Clinton, who immediately praised it), it’s not surprising that he’s still repeating it. The trope has its roots in the failure of Clinton’s 2000 Camp David negotiation, which Clinton laid squarely at the feet of PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat. Multiple observers and participants have challenged this, including American and Palestinian negotiators Rob Malley and Hussein Agha. “Since 2000, it is this narrative—Camp David as a metaphor for Palestinian rejectionism—that has ravaged the Israeli peace camp, distorted both US and Israeli policy and badly undermined confidence in a peaceful settlement of the conflict,” Malley wrote in 2004.

A more detailed dismantling of this narrative was published in 2024 by Al Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. “Of course, the same standard has not historically been applied when Palestinians have made negotiation offers or counterproposals that are then rejected by the Israeli regime,” wrote analyst Fathi Nimer in his paper, “The Enduring and Racist Trope of Palestinian Rejectionism.” “In the decades that have followed the peace process era, blame for the demise of the two-state solution continues to be placed squarely on the Palestinians for failing to be ‘partners in peace.’ This is regardless of the Israeli regime’s continued annexation campaign across the West Bank and successive Israeli prime ministers promising to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state under their tenure.”

It’s quite true that Palestinian leaders have made some very bad choices over the years, and some have pursued violence when they should’ve continued negotiations. The same is obviously true of Israeli leaders. Yet only in one of these two cases has that been used by American politicians to justify the continued denial of a whole people’s rights, their displacement and mass murder.

A better speech would’ve reminded his Israeli audience, and his American one, that in 1993 the Palestinian leadership recognized the state of Israel and accepted a Palestinian state on 22 percent of historic Palestine, the single biggest concession that either side has made and likely will ever make over the course of this conflict, and one to which Israel has never fully reciprocated (in response to Palestinian recognition of Israel, Israel recognized only that the PLO had the right to negotiate on the Palestinians’ behalf); it might have noted that, since 2002, there has been an offer on the table from the entire Arab League for total normalization and peace with Israel in exchange for Israel agreeing to a Palestinian state, an extraordinary offer to which Israel has never even formally responded (indeed, the “23-state solution” Rahm pitched in his speech is just a refresh of this quarter-century-old offer); it could have recognized that the Palestinian leadership seeking recognition in international organizations for the state of Palestine is not a threat to Israel but a legitimate and nonviolent assertion of the Palestinian right to self-determination, and one that legally binds them to the commitment made in 1993.

A braver speech would have acknowledged that the whole reason Hamas came to be in control of Gaza in the first place is because the US rejected Hamas’s victory in elections the US had pushed the Palestinians to hold and then backed an attempted coup which set off a Palestinian civil war. This gets at a core problem with the US approach: The US has never really taken Palestinian politics seriously. Emanuel’s condescending claim that “regional stability in the Middle East is predicated fundamentally on the Arab world’s assuming its rightful place as the adult in the room with the Palestinian leadership,” expressly infantilizing the Palestinians, doesn’t signal that he’s ready to start.

A third problem (this list is by no means exhaustive) was Emanuel’s assertion of an equivalence between “those chanting ‘from the river to the sea’” and “those calling for a greater Israel.” “Both are fantasies chanted by fanatics,” he said. One can argue that the creation of one democratic state on all the land of Israel and Palestine is difficult, even unrealistic, but asserting a moral equivalence between those who want a state in which all people, Palestinians and Jews, enjoy equal rights (which is what the vast majority of people who use the phrase mean by it), on the one hand, and those who want to continue to entrench apartheid on the other is despicable. Yes, there are some idiots who want Jews to be expelled from historic Palestine, but comparing a few activists shouting slogans to a government that is actually pursuing a policy of violent land theft and expulsion every day on the ground is not clarity but mendacity.

Despite these deficiencies, we shouldn’t lose sight of the speech’s significance, which could open a more honest discussion not just in the US but also in Europe, whose policy debates largely remain stuck in the 1990s when it comes to Israel-Palestine. “US Democrats are increasingly debating their foreign policy stance towards Israel and the Palestinians. That is important after Biden’s disastrous Presidency,” wrote policy analyst and consultant Salman Sheikh in response to the speech. “I see no such debate within my [UK Labour Party]. As the governing party, that must change.”

So yes, the speech was a landmark. It’s one we should have passed years ago and should quickly leave in the rear-view mirror now, as we move at speed toward a US Israel-Palestine policy that better serves American interests, voters’ preferences, and justice.

At a time when some US news outlets have retreated from the climate story, hundreds of news organizations in Japan are headed in the opposite direction.

Inspired by Covering Climate Now’s “89% Project,” every television network and station in Japan this spring began a two-year program of airing public service commercials pointing out that 89 percent of people in Japan support climate action, “so people shouldn’t be afraid to talk about it.” And talking about climate change, the noted climate science communicator Katharine Hayhoe often says, is an essential first step towards doing something about it.

Now 136 of Japan’s news outlets have gone further, joining a public awareness project called “I am one of the 89% who want to stop global warming.” Organized by the UN Information Center in Japan, the project aims “to make visible the voices of prominent figures and people from all walks of life who want to stop global warming, and to amplify them into a collective voice of society.”

Many of the biggest names in Japan’s news media are taking part, including three CCNow partners: the newspapers Asahi Shimbun and Hokkaido Shimbun and the public broadcasting service NHK. Other participants include the newspapers Yomiuri Shimbun and Nikkei and commercial broadcasters Nippon TV and Fuji Television. Beginning on June 25, the outlets posted an 89 percent–themed message every day on their social-media accounts, websites, and other platforms. (The messaging, which includes original content creations like this post featuring an animated pink-and-white bear, will continue through the end of the year and be compiled here.)

The project is unfolding in a country that is a prominent, though often overlooked, part of the global climate challenge. Japan has long been one of the world’s biggest economies; it’s currently the fourth biggest, according to the International Monetary Fund, trailing only the United States, China, and Germany. It has also long been one of the biggest annual emitters of planet-warming gases; its 972 million tons of CO₂ emissions in 2024 placed it fifth in the world. At the same time, Japan is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts, notably extreme heat and intensified typhoons. The summer of 2025 was the hottest in Japan’s recorded history.

Yet the country’s conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has shown little interest in defusing the climate emergency, much like her counterparts in the US and elsewhere. As Bloomberg Green revealed several months ago, the trade deal Takaichi signed with Donald Trump in October committed Japan to investing $33 billion in a gas-fired power plant in Ohio that, if completed, would rank as “one of the [US]’s largest sources of CO₂ emissions from electricity generation,” Bloomberg Green reported, roughly equivalent to “3.8 million gas cars over a year of driving.”

Would Takaichi have signed such an agreement if she knew that 89 percent of Japan’s people want their government to take stronger climate action? It’s impossible to know. What is known is that politicians in numerous countries mistakenly assume that their constituents don’t care very much about fighting climate change. In Germany, for example, a new study in Nature concluded from interviews with hundreds of elected officials across the partisan spectrum that they “vastly underestimated” the public’s support for climate action, especially the actions that can be most impactful, such as higher taxes and stricter laws.

This disconnect between what most of the public wants and what politicians think they want exists at a time when rapid, effective climate action is more urgently needed than ever. Not only is the planet getting hotter than it has been since civilization arose 10,000 years ago; it’s getting hotter faster than even scientists had anticipated. Global temperatures will keep rising until the burning of fossil fuels is phased out, which scientists say can be achieved with existing technologies. Journalists should be connecting all these dots. Bravo to our colleagues in Japan for advancing a model the rest of us can emulate.

When we met late on a Wednesday afternoon at a bakery in Manhattan, as far as I could tell, Wallace Shawn wore the same black jeans he had worn just a few days earlier at the last performance of his recent run of his one-man play, The Fever. As our conversation was wrapping up, waitstaff swept around us to prepare for closing, just like the scene at the end of Shawn’s 1981 film My Dinner With André.

Wallace Shawn’s latest ensemble play, his first in a decade, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, touches on the porousness between life and art in the lives and work of writers. Or at least for Dick, a well-regarded, prestigious novelist played with a slithering naïveté by Josh Hamilton. Dick is the first to admit that he owes his career to the interest and devotion of high school sweetheart and mother to his child Elle (a devastating Maria Dizzia). Nonetheless, he embarks on an affair with a more mainstream thriller writer named Elaine (Hope Davis). For Elle, after the revelation of the affair, life with Dick “became a horrible kind of love, it became a distasteful kind of love.” All four characters speak directly to the audience, with the exception of one brief scene between Tim (John Early)—Dick and Elle’s troubled son—and Elaine.

Not long into the play, Dick tells us that “Moth Day” is a phrase he coined for the day a person dies. But only later do we understand the full significance of the title: Eventually, we realize that all four characters onstage are dead, telling the stories of their lives from beyond the grave.

The experience of slowly understanding these characters’ deaths as they share their often warped narratives of how they lived creates a strange and special intimacy between these performers, the characters, and the audience. But the monologue Shawn performs in The Fever captures a bourgeois man’s coming into political consciousness while in the midst of a horrible illness caught during a visit to a country in a revolution. Considered alongside The Fever, Moth Days deepens one’s understanding of Shawn’s body of work as an anti-colonial playwright and thinker in the vein of Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill, and Lorraine Hansberry. As in the work of these other playwrights, one of Shawn’s enduring motifs from play to play is how a person’s politics take root in a family, and how a person might come to resist the beliefs of their origins. Ever the genealogical thinker, Shawn with his latest work brings his shrewd depictions of a literate, elite, often complacent Western collective unconscious to a play that resembles a family drama.

The Nation spoke to Shawn about The Fever, What We Did Before Our Moth Days, and the renewed political meaning latent in his work.

—Elaine Schiff 

Elaine Schiff: It’s Wednesday, May 27. The play closed on Sunday May 24. This is the first interview you’ve done since closing. How are you feeling about the run?

Wallce Shawn: The run was an extraordinary high point in my life. The sort of thing that you cannot expect would ever happen. But somehow the four actors, André, and the script were a uniquely perfect combination. It’s almost too delicate to talk about.

The script itself is kind of ancient history to me. When I see the play, the script is so far away. I’m looking at the characters these people have created. Basically, when I go to the play, I’m going to see people that I have a deep love for. I mean, the theater is a very easy form of living. You don’t have to participate, really, if you’re in the audience. The relationship that you have is not reciprocal. So I go and watch the people I am so drawn to. I don’t have to interact with them. I just stare at them. It’s, I suppose, the way a baby looks at his mother. Nothing is asked of me. I can just sit in a trance and stare at these beautiful people.

It’s a long journey to get there from the point of trying to remember myself writing the play. Somehow, there’s a tranquility that’s been achieved because of everybody’s relationship with everybody, so that there’s a kind of peaceful space around the play. I’m not remembering, you know, as can be the case, moments of pain and struggle in the rehearsal process. As a writer, it’s possible to feel, well, “Joe never really got that line.” Or, “I wish it could have been more like this or more like that.”

I mean, I don’t usually feel that [way] in any play that I’ve done. But sometimes one does. Whereas in this [play,] I’m not thinking that.

ES: That’s beautiful.

WS: So now, you know, it would be great to do the play in other places, to do it again. There are all sorts of possibilities. Of not totally saying goodbye to it.

ES: I noticed that on Sunday, a week ago, when I saw Moth Days and then The Fever back-to-back, that the plays share a reckoning with the theme of inevitability, or a theme of a kind of predeterminism. What do you think about inevitability at this moment in time? In your life?

WS: I don't know if anybody can really believe about himself or herself that what I do is completely determined. You can believe it about everybody else! But I don't even know what words you would use to refute your own sense that you're making decisions. I don't even know how you would describe that.

It's easy to say, after the fact, that the specific decision that you made was inevitable. You couldn't possibly have made a different decision. But that's not how my brain anyway presents my life to me. My life seems to be presented as a multiple-choice questionnaire. And going forward, I have the feeling that I have a self, or I am a self, and I'm making these decisions.

And certainly if you watch, let's say, the behavior of a bird, they seem to be making an awful lot of decisions. You don't know what the motivation is. But you see the bird flies from one branch to another branch and all of a sudden leaps off the tree, then lands on your windowsill very far away. It seems the bird is making these decisions. Although after the fact, if you knew enough, maybe you could explain them, I don't know.

Well, maybe, certainly one of the key sentences is when the speaker [of The Fever] says, "Of course it could have been predicted from knowing the things in this book [of my life]: where I was born, how I was raised, what an hour of my labor would probably be worth today, even though to me, from the inside, my life always felt like a story that was just unfolding in which nothing could have been predicted.”

And you know, [in Moth Days,] Elle, whatever was happening in her private life, she continued to teach. She resisted her husband's suggestion that it was too hard and that she should quit. And she was a dedicated teacher for her whole life. And so, what she did before her “Moth Day” was quite wonderful. I think for me that's an important point in the play. Because, you know, what she did was valuable and and great!

ES: How did you decide, “I’m going to do a run of The Fever.” Was that always part of [the plan for Moth Days]?

WS: No, that was Scott Rudin’s idea.

ES: Were you resistant?

WS: Oh, no. I was thrilled! There was no persuading necessary. For me, it’s very gratifying to, you know, make my attempt to contribute something to the possible political conversation.

In some ways, it’s more interesting than it was 35 years ago. I mean, there were very few people 35 years ago who would openly defend sadistic projects. Now our country is run by people who really believe in crushing the poor and killing them, hurting them. People who believe in cruelty. So it’s more interesting to be doing it.

ES: On Sunday and in January, my sense in those rooms is that it was a quite receptive audience.

WS: No comparison. I mean, that part I don’t get fully. I don’t understand people’s responses. An enormous number of people came up to me after each performance and said, “Thank you for doing that.” Nobody said that 35 years ago!

ES: The gulf between the ideas of the theatergoing audience in the nineties, the theatergoing audience of today, and the ideas of the play might be closer.

WS: Yeah. I mean, I think in the ’90s, and also in the institutional theaters that I performed this in, a lot of people in the audience would have been… very politically moderate people, who would have thought that American intentions were benign. But maybe execution fell short.

Let’s say this: I don’t know if you’ve ever read Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech.

ES: It’s amazing. Absolutely.

WS: Harold Pinter… I mean I always find it amazing that he was given a Nobel Prize in Literature, and… instead of talking about literature, he talked about the menace of this particular country, that the United States was really the enemy of humanity in some terribly extraordinary way.

It’s certainly never been more true than at this very moment that, you know, the United States is the most powerful country, but people have always counted on it to behave with some restraint. And now, it’s led by a man who is threatening to use that power in any way that strikes him on any given day, which is terrifying.

And The Fever is basically saying, well, you know, the elite that I happen to be a part of, whether you want to call it an American elite or a Western-European-American-Canadian elite, well, [it] has gone much too far already…

ES: What is the role of the playwright, to you?

WS: Oh. Well I wasn't thinking about that when I started. When I was I guess 24, maybe 23, I wrote an actual play. And I thought something I'd never thought before, which is: I have an ability. I can do something. And not only that, I thought: This is a great play. And I want to spend my life writing plays. [But] that's not the role of the playwright; that's just a guy who would like to do something that he thinks he can do…

I spent many many years [getting] people interested in putting on one of my plays and I didn't get anywhere. So I didn't have a role. My role was not as a playwright but as an unsuccessful playwright. Then, André took me up, you might say.

Then I went to England, and there...the concept of the role of the playwright was very real. The people I met, they were socialists! Did I know what that word meant? I had no idea. I really didn't know. I mean I studied history, and I knew that there were people called socialists, but somehow, I didn't know what that meant. But in their mind, the role of the playwright was to chronicle the actual world as it existed. And to show the truth about the world. And get the word out. And eventually lead to a better society. That was the role of the playwright.

And then, when my first play was done over there, A Thought in Three Parts… they have a lot of newspapers. About 18 bad reviews. Many of them worse than bad. Then on the weekend I got a couple of good ones. But that was—I mean I think the play opened on a Monday. So I had some bad days with no good reviews. And Hare, Caryl Churchill, Howard Brenton, and Barrie Keefe wrote a letter to The Guardian in praise of my plays, and in denunciation of the critics.

So, all of a sudden, I had a role. The role of the playwright at that point was kind of, uh... I was just writing what I wanted to write, but by the end of that week, I was a rebel against established society, or something of that nature! I mean if everybody had found A Thought in Three Parts delightful, then I would have been delighting an audience. But my role, apparently, was as a disrupter of the audience.

I was 17 when I received a news alert on my phone: Donald Trump had announced that he was running for president. That was in 2015, and I was graduating high school. I remember thinking to myself, “Surely, Trump will never be a viable candidate.”

When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I was a sophomore playing on the basketball team at my women’s college while navigating the realization that I was a transgender man. At first, I was grateful to play at the Division III level, and I put off medically transitioning to keep playing. Burned out and mentally unwell after my junior season, I weighed the options of completing a four-year career or putting myself on testosterone and eliminating my eligibility.

My school was small and low-profile enough that no one outside of my teammates and coaches knew I was trans, so I wasn’t making headlines like Lia Thomas. With the latest Supreme Court ruling upholding states’ rights to ban trans athletes from women and girls’ sports, I can’t help but wonder what that would have meant for me if I were still wearing number 15.

How would the ruling apply to me if I weren’t a trans woman or assigned male at birth? Did it matter less as I didn’t play an individual-focused sport like track or swimming? The Supreme Court ruling bans trans athletes from girls and women’s sports, and I was transgender, but not the kind they care more about limiting participation.

I don’t write these words to make a statement about trans women competing in sports, but to illustrate the under-recognized nuance and complexity of this issue. There are and have been many other trans athletes like me who played with the sex they were assigned at birth. There are and have been nonbinary participants in the WNBA and the PWHL, athletes who often choose to forgo medical transition and reject the gender binary. But they rarely make headlines.

I’m purposefully dragging attention away from trans women here, even though the Supreme Court and fascistic right-wing conservatives want to spend their energy on it—moreso than on our collapsing economy, crumbling healthcare system, the climate crisis, or gun violence. If this country wants to make progress on gender equity in sports, we must expand our understanding of how trans people show up in sports. This Supreme Court ruling just adds to the misconceptions of trans people in general, when we could be working toward gender equity in all aspects of life by pushing aside the fear and including everyone in one of our most valued pillars of society.

It’s ironic how the right focuses on people with little power and argues that they need to come under the most control, that these marginalized groups ought to be feared. It’s understandable to be wary about a group of people largely unknown and invisible—especially given the fearmongering in even mainstream publications—but it’s not OK to leave that fear unquestioned. I implore all Americans to find the courage and try to overcome these fears.

While the right pursues what it claims is fairness in sports, it continues to not care about fairness or equity in any aspect of life in this country. Why not try to make the housing market, wages, or health insurance fair? As Mayor Zohran Mamdani makes positive changes for New York City, the right paints socialism—a system based on the idea that no one should be disadvantaged—as something to be feared and avoided at all costs. Those on the right seem fine with unfairness in most of their lives but insist upon “fairness” on the playing field.

Why don’t other factors of competitive advantage get talked about? Why do we assume that sports are fair in the first place? More importantly, why can’t we focus first on the real disadvantages persisting in this country?

The best lesson I got from playing sports was that life isn’t fair, which continues to be true in my career working in college athletics as well as in all other parts of my life. Sports are fundamentally unfair—and are a great vessel for teaching everyone how to power through adversity born from unfair conditions. Trans women competing may have unfair advantages in certain cases, but we should treat it the same as any other unfair advantage that exists—especially in youth sports.

It wasn’t fair that I walked away from basketball after my junior season knowing I could probably finish a four-year career, but I knew that there were other parts of myself that I needed to nurture. I don’t regret my choice at all, but it often feels like the greatest example of unfairness that sports has ever delivered to me.

Let’s not forget that trans people simply existing, saying exactly who they are and expressing that in its entirety, is what terrifies an authoritarian government the most. And when it’s women doing it, it scares them even more.

In May, two law professors, Daniel Hemel at NYU and David Pozen at Columbia, posted a pre-print of a paper soon to be published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, titled “In Search of University Democracy. ”After reading the article, I realized how cheeky the title actually was. In fact, the modern American university is anything but democratic, and searching for “university democracy” is like a game of Where’s Waldo, except that Waldo really isn’t anywhere to be found.

For Hemel and Pozen, universities are “liberal autocracies” run by trustees and the senior administrators they install. In private institutions, current trustees appoint new trustees; in public institutions, politicians often select them. The people who actually keep the university humming—the faculty, the staff, and the students—generally have little real say in the direction of their school, even if there are advisory bodies such as university senates to offer a veneer of consultation to the masses.

This model of university governance is peculiarly American. Hemel and Pozen contrast how things work in the US with a stakeholderism in university governance that is far older than any American institution of higher learning. At Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, “[t]housands of academic staff (professors, lecturers, readers, librarians, and so forth) sit on the ‘sovereign body’ that has ultimate legal authority over the institution.”

Hemel and Pozen also postulate that the unaccountability of trustees in American institutions of higher learning makes them more vulnerable to intimidation and acquiescence:

As the game theorist Thomas Schelling observes, “the power of a negotiator often rests on a manifest inability to make concessions.” Applying this insight to international diplomacy, political scientist Robert Putnam has argued that when the leader of a nation-state faces only loose domestic political constraints, “the more he can be ‘pushed around’ by other leaders in interstate bargaining. A leader gains a ‘bargaining advantage’ vis-à-vis foreign counterparts when she can credibly say: ‘I’d like to accept your proposal, but I could never get it accepted at home.’”

This paragraph leapt out at me given that my own university, Yale, has reportedly been working to strike a deal with the US Department of Justice to resolve trumped-up charges of impropriety in admissions at the medical school and other academic units. Over the past two weeks, alumni, faculty and students have spoken out against Yale’s imminent capitulation to the Trump administration and Justice Department, but the trustees don’t have to listen. They have spurned advice even from distinguished members of their own law faculty.

This is a pattern. All last year, alumni, faculty, and students tried twice to meet with the board of trustees. They were rebuffed. It’s not surprising that liberal autocrats would disdain meeting with their subjects, but Hemel and Pozen, like Schelling and Putnam, highlight how Yale and other universities’ governance structures make them weaker in this era of attacks on higher education. The trustees are unconstrained in making expedient but foolish choices because those who offer critiques and counter-proposals simply don’t matter.

While faculty, students, staff, and concerned alumni from schools across the country have their hands full right now trying to push back on the authoritarian threat against higher education, our trustees are playing the game of appeasement. As Zachary Clifton noted last week in The Nation, Yale’s attempts to avoid the wrath of Trump and his minions have failed. Instead, trustees have to negotiate over bogus charges, opening up Yale to broad and sweeping demands they will have a hard time resisting, as the way universities work makes them easy targets, easy to be “pushed around.”

The truly radical nature of Hemel and Pozen’s piece emerges in its final pages—in the words of Tracy Chapman, they’re “talking about a revolution,” though, in the couched language of a law review article, it “sounds like a whisper.” Re-creating the governance of modern American universities on a stakeholder model means overthrowing the liberal autocrats who govern us now.

I mean, who really thinks that hedge-fund managers, corporate titans, and the doyens and doyennes of high finance that dominate our boards of trustees ever had our best interests at heart? If it wasn’t clear before 2025, it sure is now. Trustees are willing to sacrifice key values for institutional survival, however diminished. Not to be too crude about it, but as long as Yale’s endowment can be protected, academic freedom is an afterthought. When the Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors recently reported on the decline in academic freedom at the university, the Yale administration ignored it. This is all par for the course.

So it is indeed time for a revolution. Yale’s and other institutions of higher learning’s governance models have to change. As Hemel and Pozen say, “Stakeholderism at U.S. universities could similarly arise through internal unrest or through legislatively initiated changes, such as state constitutional amendments or local laws conditioning property tax exemptions or other fiscal privileges on maintaining a broad-based voting membership.”

Thus, faculty, students, alums, and staff need to organize, unionize where possible, come together in solidarity to push for democratic reforms on campus, real representation in decision-making over the future of the university. And we have to build a legal case and political strategy for reform at the same time, changing the university charter if we must and bringing all requisite pressure to bear on these unaccountable systems. We should not treat liberal autocracy as a given.

If we are to save higher education in America, it will not come through submission to the autocrats in DC, the self-flagellation of our institutions confessing our sins in public, vigorously nodding our heads, saying we are fully at fault for our own predicament. It will come through pushing back against the politicians.

Yes, reforms on campus are needed in many areas. If you work at a university like mine you see this place, warts and all, every day. Change is necessary—but not handed down by fiat or based on fear.

We’ve ignored university governance for far too long. Now that we’re being sold out by our trustees and presidents, opening up a campaign on stakeholder governance is more urgent than ever across higher education. The faculty, students, staff, and alumni of places like Yale have a deep commitment to the university, and creating a new model in which these groups assume leadership in a more democratic, accountable structure than we have now should be our goal. The liberal autocrats won’t like it. They’ll fight it. But we will win. After all, once people believed in the divine right of kings.

Around 1 pm on an overcast Fourth of July, I sat with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed on a park bench by the shores of Reeds Lake in East Grand Rapids, Michigan. The populist US Senate candidate had just finished walking his third parade of the day, tossing hundreds of pieces of candy and campaign pins, mostly to children, some of whom looked disappointed to get buttons instead of candy. El-Sayed was wearing a stars-and-stripes cowboy hat and bicep-hugging black T-shirt, in which he’d started off the day by dancing to Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” for a video that quickly went viral. He did not look classically senatorial, nor did he attempt to sound it.

“The world is not an episode of The West Wing,” El-Sayed insisted, after I mentioned that he seemed more confrontational than during his widely covered but unsuccessful 2018 run for the Michigan governorship. El-Sayed has called his Democratic opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, nothing more than “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.” He has described the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, as having “the charisma of a doorknob” and “the aesthetic of the guy at a country club who sneers at you from his Lincoln.” El-Sayed has promised that by the time he finished with Rogers, pieces of him would be “scattered all over the state of Michigan,” although he clarified that he meant “politically” rather than bodily.

El-Sayed told me that these harsh comments are not slips of the tongue. Polls show Democrats want politicians who fight for them, and are sick of those who follow James Carville’s advice to “roll over and play dead.” For El-Sayed, the fear of seeming “mean” gives the advantage to bullies like Trump. “What did you think fighting was?” El-Sayed asked me. Being meek and polite when the times call for blunt talk, he says, “is why we lose.”

With his credentialed background and soaring speeches, El-Sayed was compared to a left-wing Barack Obama during his first run for office. But he says that Obama’s conciliatory approach toward Republicans produced disappointing results. While “as a man and as a statesman, [Obama] was unparalleled in our time,” El-Sayed told me, “one of the big lessons that I’ve learned is [Republicans] are never going to negotiate with you in good faith, so at the end of the day, don’t give an inch on the things that people need, don’t go in there assuming the compromise because they’re going to fight it tooth and nail.”

And so you won’t find El-Sayed paying cordial tribute to the fundamental decency of Republican candidate Mike Rogers. “I have zero love lost for Mike Rogers,” he told me. “He is a scion of a system that is picking people’s pockets left and right. I’m coming for him. I’m coming for his political future. I want to make sure he never gets to run for office again, because everybody will remember what happened to him in 2026.” Rogers recently threatened to sue El-Sayed for calling him a “pharma lobbyist,” which Rogers is not, although he did receive substantial campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry and arguably served their interests in Congress. (El-Sayed may have been following LBJ’s famous notion that it’s worth it to make your opponent deny an outrageous charge. In a blatantly insincere apology, he said: “My mistake… When I say Mike Rogers, do not think of a pharma lobbyist. When I say pharma lobbyist, do not think of a Mike Rogers.”)

But behind the trash talk and weightlifting videos, El-Sayed is at heart a policy wonk. A Rhodes Scholar with an MD and a PhD, he taught epidemiology at Columbia, and his Google Scholar page is eye-glazingly long. He is not just an advocate for Medicare for All but cowrote the most comprehensive scholarly book on it, a densely end-noted volume from Oxford University Press, as well as co-editing the textbook Systems Science and Population Health, also published by Oxford. Through stretches as health director for both the city of Detroit and Wayne County, El-Sayed focused on small interventions that could improve lives, like giving free eyeglasses to poor children and testing schools for lead.

El-Sayed is not, however, a technocrat stressing incremental tweaks. He wants to fundamentally overhaul the political system, which he says is “spitting out billionaires while union participation is at an all-time low.” He wants to “end the system that allows these 527s and 501(c)(4)s and super PACs to buy politicians and rig the system against us.” In 2018, he described his campaign as an effort to “take and build on what [Bernie Sanders] had done” two years prior. Bernie, he told me, taught him that “standing consistently and deliberately and passionately and confidently on principle matters.”

El-Sayed is running as much against Chuck Schumer as against Donald Trump, drawing applause when he says that anything Schumer and Trump agree on is probably bad for the country. They agree, he says, that we can’t have universal healthcare, that we have to send money to Israel, and that “it’s more important to give a corporation a fat check than to raise the minimum wage for everybody.” Plus: “Go talk to Chuck Schumer and Donald Trump and they both agree that I shouldn’t be inside the US Senate!” (Schumer has not publicly endorsed in the race but has privately signaled his support for Stevens.)

At a July 3 rally in Grand Rapids’ historic Harris Building, El-Sayed electrified a crowd of mostly young supporters by lambasting a rigged political system. For El-Sayed, ineffective Democrats are just as much a cause of the country’s woes as tyrannical Republicans. “Donald Trump is not himself the disease of our politics, Donald Trump is the worst symptom of that disease. The disease is a system that allows big corporations, billionaires, special interests like AIPAC to buy and sell politicians that rig the system against us.” He promised to “mobilize union organizing in every single sector of American life,” and to tax billionaires. El-Sayed drew especially large cheers when he promised to cut off unconditional military aid to Israel. “Why should our tax dollars get misappropriated abroad to buy bombs and tanks for other people’s countries instead of buying schools and healthcare for our own?”

El-Sayed has been called “the Mamdani of the Midwest,” and like Zohran Mamdani, he has built his campaign around a few simple economic promises. Mamdani liked to have audiences fill in the blanks to finish his sentences (“Freeze the…” “RENT!”), and El-Sayed does the same with his own three signature slogans. Rally-goers know the points by heart and shout them out:

“Money in your…” “POCKET!”

“Money out of…” “POLITICS!”

“Medicare for…” “ALL!”

A Sanders-style insurgency may resonate better now than it did when El-Sayed ran eight years ago. With Donald Trump back in office, there is a “hunger for anti-establishment fighters” among a Democratic base looking for leaders who do more to fight back than sending strongly worded letters. Leftists backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have recently been winning improbable victories, including Mamdani’s successful New York City mayoral campaign, the ousting of the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Adriano Espaillat, by democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, and the victory of Melat Kiros in Colorado, who showed that the phenomenon may be spreading outside New York.

But it is an open question whether staunch progressivism can win in Michigan. El-Sayed is not a DSA member, but he is a proud Berniecrat, and the conventional wisdom is that this makes him less electable in a “purple” state that voted for Obama, Trump, Biden, and then Trump again. The centrist think tank Third Way has published a list of “Ten Reasons Why Mamdani Politics Won’t Win Outside of NYC,” arguing that “the far left doesn’t flip swing seats.” Eric Levitz of Vox has argued that “to date, the insurgent left has demonstrated little ability to win” in “purple-to-red jurisdictions.” Stevens and her backers argue that El-Sayed is a risky choice. Former senator Debbie Stabenow said that Democratic senators who supported El-Sayed or Mallory McMorrow (who suspended her campaign on July 5) “don’t know Michigan.” At their first one-on-one debate, Stevens told El-Sayed that the GOP wants him to defeat her, because they think it will be “easier for Mike Rogers to win if you are the nominee.” If El-Sayed wins in August, and then in November, it would deal a devastating blow to the theory that purple states want centrists. What if brash anti-corporate populism is not, in fact, a liability in Michigan? What if it is an electoral advantage? What then?

Dan Scott, a social worker I spoke with at an El-Sayed event in Grand Rapids, says the whole premise that Democrats should run to the center in order to win Michigan is based on a misunderstanding of the state’s political culture. “People always say Michigan is a purple state. It’s bullshit. Michigan is a populist state. It’s a labor state.” Scott says that he grew up among Trump supporters and still shoots and hunts with them. “I can kick it with those guys, and get them talking excitedly about Medicare For All. If we can get someone like Abdul…when they see their lives get better, when they see their small towns not getting decimated by corporate policy, I think they’ll shift.”

Ivan Diaz, a 28-year-old democratic socialist candidate for the Michigan state Senate, said he’d already seen a shift. “People are so fed up,” he said. “They’re done with parties.… Politicians like Abdul, the ones who understand that they’re the ones with the best chance of winning.” He says the political environment is different from during El-Sayed’s 2018 run, and the Michigan electorate is far more open to El-Sayed’s antiestablishment message. Diaz credits the pandemic-era stimulus checks with showing people that government could easily help people if our officials actually want to. They’re angry knowing their representatives could be helping them but choose not to.

Mason Pressler, an El-Sayed–supporting school board member in Bay City, told me he’d been surprised, in talking to older members of his family, by how open they are to El-Sayed. “They’re all like, ‘Oh, Abdul is great, we love him, I think he’s right on the issue of Gaza.’” Pressler has found it “very interesting to see how these older, typically more conservative white Democratic primary voters have really shifted in terms of where they’re at ideologically.”

Illinois Representative Delia Ramirez, who came to Grand Rapids to rally for El-Sayed, had a similar assessment. “If you talk to a senior in a very rural community and a senior in an urban community, they want the same damn thing,” she told me. “They want to be able to retire with dignity, not to have to find a new job at 75, they want their kids to have a better life than they’ve had and they want their grandchildren to be able to buy a house one day.” The belief in running centrists, she said, is not actually about their superior electability. It “is really about making sure you maintain the status quo for the people who have profited from the pain of our communities.” El-Sayed, she said, is “someone who is going to call out the crap that Democrats have offered.” Speaking at an event for Latino community leaders earlier in the day, Ramirez told them Abdul was “someone who will fight like hell for Latinos, who will fight like hell for Palestinians, fight like hell for working people, fight like hell for humanity, fight like hell for Michigan.” Abdul showed what it would be like to have “authentic public servant leaders who are going to put the BS aside and actually care for people.”

“Authentic” is a word you hear a lot among El-Sayed supporters, along with “not bought by corporations.” But while they have similar reasons for liking him, El-Sayed’s supporters come from eclectic backgrounds. At one Fourth of July parade, I spoke to the vice president of a bank (he asked to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons), who said he had been a hardcore member of the MAGA “alt-right” before realizing that Trumpist politics were incompatible with his feelings of compassion for humanity. At El-Sayed’s Latino roundtable I met Ana Olvera, a 33-year-old stay-at-home mom whose brother was deported to Mexico by the Obama administration, and who said she was sick of Democrats’ not pushing seriously for immigration reform and encouraged by El-Sayed’s forthright insistence on abolishing ICE outright. At another parade, I encountered Bob Wood, a political science professor who had been teaching in Ukraine for four years, but who had quit his job and moved back to the United States specifically so that he could campaign for El-Sayed. Some supporters cited specific actions taken by El-Sayed that gave them confidence in him. Dina Carlisle, a registered nurse who serves as president of Local 40 of the Office and Professional Employees International Union said that since his gubernatorial run, El-Sayed had shown he “walks the walk” for labor. Other candidates, she said, had only started showing up to labor events when election season started, while El-Sayed “has attended every single strike, picket, and rally we have hosted.”

But there is one phrase that El-Sayed’s supporters repeat more often than any other: “He’s not funded by AIPAC.” El-Sayed may prefer to focus on kitchen-table issues, but the issue of Israel-Palestine is inescapably important to the race, and may well prove decisive in determining its outcome. Stevens was elected to her current seat in Congress in part thanks to millions of dollars in AIPAC funding, which helped her beat Andy Levin, a Jewish critic of Israel. Stevens herself, while not Jewish, is so devoted to Israel that she said the country “comes to me in my dreams.” (I met several people in Michigan who suggested that to win, El-Sayed should simply play the clip of Stevens’s “dreams” quote over and over. Several days later, his campaign produced a website that does just that.) She has voted to ban the State Department from citing the Gaza Ministry of Health’s death statistics, called on Columbia University to crack down on Gaza protesters, voted to sanction the International Criminal Court for pursuing war crimes charges against Benjamin Netanyahu, and has rejected the consensus of human rights groups that Israel has committed genocide. (The Stevens campaign did not reply to multiple e-mails seeking an interview.) El-Sayed disagrees with every one of these stances. Speaking to Current Affairs last year, he was scathing about those who tell Americans that “the best use of their tax dollars was to be sent abroad to backstop an apartheid regime, to subsidize genocide, and to now fight a war [in Iran] that we have no business fighting at the behest of a foreign government’s prime minister.”

Pro-Israel groups are working hard to ensure that Stevens defeats the man who would be America’s first Muslim senator. When I arrived in Michigan, United Democracy Project, a pro-Israel PAC, had just dropped $2 million on an attack ad against El-Sayed, part of over $34 million in pro-Stevens ad spending during the cycle. The new ad doesn’t mention Israel, likely because AIPAC and its affiliates are aware that Democratic voters have turned sharply against the country. Instead, it accuses El-Sayed of having a “long history of disrespecting women.” The charges are thin. Even the Detroit Free Press, which does not support El-Sayed, published a fact-check calling it “unpersuasive” and said it “stretches its facts.” (It cites an op-ed in which El-Sayed called Michelle Obama’s nutrition campaign “commendable, if ineffectual” as its first example of “disparaging women.”) But the sheer saturation of the Michigan airwaves is astonishing. The spot is everywhere. I saw it three times within 30 minutes of flipping on my hotel TV, and about a dozen times in total over a long weekend in the state.

The long shadow of Gaza was evident even during an early-morning Fourth of July parade, where I walked the route alongside Stevens. As we snaked through a leafy, Rockwellesque neighborhood of front porches and tire swings, with a marching band blasting “Yankee Doodle,” she was repeatedly heckled from the crowd over her support for Israel. One man shouted “Take down the AIPAC ad!” at Stevens. A few blocks later, while a group of Boy Scouts recited the Pledge of Allegiance, an older woman screamed “GENOCIDE! GENOCIDE! You’re killing children! GENOCIDE!” I spoke to the woman, Jo Anne Zarowny, a retired court administrator, and asked her why she decided to heckle the congresswoman on Independence Day. Zarowny pointed to a pin she was wearing. “It’s from the Holocaust museum,” she said. It reads “What I Do Matters.” “I know my history. What do we wish people were doing in 1938 in Germany? Talking about it? Smiling?” With a “fascist” in the White House, and a genocide in Gaza, she felt the minimum she could do was speak out. Zarowny is supporting El-Sayed.

A few hours later, as I talked with El-Sayed on the shores of Reeds Lake, the last dregs of the parade were passing by. There had been men dressed as Captain America, women as suffragettes, and George Washington on a unicycle waving Old Glory. As the patriotic display wound down around us, I could not shake the feeling that here, on America’s 250th birthday, I might be watching the end of one era of our country’s history and the beginning of another. Perhaps that was wishful thinking, a desperate hope in dark times that something major must be about to change. But after spending a weekend meeting the extraordinarily passionate supporters of El-Sayed’s campaign, all of whom were ready to throw out their party leadership in an effort to transform the country, it was impossible not to wonder whether Democratic politics might be headed for a major earthquake. In 2018, when I first met El-Sayed, my first impression was that I was speaking to the future first Muslim president of the United States, and the left’s most formidable statesman-in-waiting. This guy could be the real deal, I thought.This might be the moment when things start to change. It wasn’t, and El-Sayed has since spent nearly a decade in the political wilderness. But his supporters tell me things are different this time. On August 4, we shall see if they are right.

“If you can do it in Michigan, you can do it anywhere,” El-Sayed told me. “If a politics centering people and their needs…can succeed here, then it disabuses us of this idea that milquetoast moderate policy that continues to accommodate corporate power to do corporate bidding is the recipe for winning in the Midwest.” He’s right that if Sanders-style politics prevails in Michigan, a lot of received wisdom will suddenly seem shaky. Could it be that the recipe for winning in the Midwest is not what Democrats have been saying? Could it be that a smack-talking, Oxford-trained, leftist Muslim doctor is the party’s secret weapon for winning back the heartland?

But if El-Sayed does beat Stevens, it remains an open question whether the forces within the party that have tried to keep him from getting the nomination will fall in line behind him in the general election. Centrist Democrats will have mixed feelings at best about helping El-Sayed to the Senate. An El-Sayed primary victory sets up a high-stakes test of what kind of Democratic politics are most effective against the right. If Michigan sends a Senator Abdul El-Sayed to Washington, traditional “electability” assumptions will have been shattered for good. It will no longer be possible to argue that centrism and pragmatism are synonymous, and insurgent progressives everywhere will have a stronger case that they are the Democratic Party’s future.

On April 17, as Europe’s 1986 hit song “The Final Countdown” boomed through the PA system, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s former Socialist prime minister, entered the room at the two-day Global Progressive Mobilization in Barcelona to massive applause. The summit featured Latin American leaders like Brazilian President Lula da Silva, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, alongside Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and other left-of-center luminaries. (Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani sent video messages.)

The mood was as combative as it was optimistic. “This is the most important progressive summit of the century,” Zapatero, who spoke on both days, said. “We are about to enter a cycle in which we’ll see the collapse of the denialist, anti-scientific discourse that doesn’t value peace and instead gets off on Tomahawk missiles.… Right-wing governments everywhere are in free fall.”

Spain’s current prime minister, social democrat Pedro Sánchez, was also there, basking in Zapatero’s glow. In his opening statement, Sánchez, who has emerged as Europe’s most outspoken critic of both the Trump administration and Israel, spoke plainly. “Resisting is not enough,” he said. “We must work to strengthen and perfect democracy every day.” His closing speech, the next day, turned up the volume. “They’ve tried to shame us for our ideas and our history,” he said. “But that ends today!… From now on, it’s them who will feel ashamed! Ashamed for being silent in the face of injustice. For exploiting workers, turning rights into commodities, or protecting the privileges of the elite.”

Yet today Zapatero’s “Final Countdown” rings ironic. On June 17, the 65-year-old statesman testified before Spain’s national criminal court after being indicted on multiple counts of corruption. Zapatero, who led his country’s government from 2004 to 2011, has claimed that he has broken no laws. But the scandal has irreparably damaged his reputation among Spain’s progressive electorate and dealt yet another blow to Sánchez, who for the past year has faced a steady stream of scandals and attacks and whose government is hanging by a thread.

In the span of two months, Zapatero’s support for Sánchez has gone from being one of the government’s most powerful assets to its fastest growing—and possibly fatal—liability. While Sánchez’s relationship to other old-guard Socialists, including former prime minister Felipe González, has long been testy, he has grown closer to Zapatero in recent years—to their mutual benefit.

For Zapatero, assuming a prominent role as an outspoken progressive stalwart and international ally of embattled left-wing regimes, especially in Latin America, has been a way to repair his reputation: In 2011, shortly before resigning, he buckled to international pressure in the wake of the Great Recession and helped push through a constitutional reform that privileged public debt reduction over social spending.

Progressives in Spain are conflicted. It was to protest Zapatero’s policies that many frustrated citizens took to the plazas on May 15, 2011, in what would become the indignados protests, one of the largest in the country’s history. That Zapatero has been indicted on corruption charges that may bear fruit thus comes as no surprise to those who came to political consciousness during the early 2010s. The same might be true of Sánchez, who came into politics as a centrist apparatchick.

Over the past year, a series of police investigations have linked some of Sánchez’s closest collaborators with alleged kickback schemes. On June 24, one of Sánchez’s right-hand men, a former minister of government and organizational head of the party, was sentenced to 24 years in prison; his successor is awaiting trial.

The latest corruption saga, which exploded in May, involves Leire Díaz, a zany, middle-aged party member who reportedly conspired with high-ranking officials to stymie the barrage of legal cases against Sánchez and the Socialists by digging up dirt on prosecutors and police commanders—an effort that, if real, failed spectacularly, given that those legal cases have gone full speed ahead. These cases hint that an indictment of Sánchez himself, which would be a first for a sitting prime minister in the history of Spain’s young democracy, may only be a matter of time.

Yet many on the left see this swirling set of legal crises as part of a concerted right-wing effort to torpedo one of the last progressive governments in Europe. They have witnessed how, over the past couple of years, the conservative Spanish judiciary, spurred by far-right activist groups, has gone after Sánchez’s wife and brother on charges that, according to judicial experts, are clearly spurious and guided by ideological animus. (In late June, the judge investigating the prime minister’s wife suggested, absurdly, that she might run off with her bodyguards and ordered her to hand in her passport.)

The central role in these cases played by zealous police investigators and judges who are quick to reach speculative conclusions has further undermined Spaniards’ faith in a judicial system whose legitimacy was already on shaky grounds. Although the courts have plenty of cases involving conservative politicians on their docket—the trial recently began for the so-called “Kitchen case,” in which officials from the center-right Partido Popular have been accused of obstruction of justice—the speed at which they’ve investigated and prosecuted those involving progressive politicians has been staggering. They have also been quick to break their own rules, regularly leaking embarrassing evidence to the media. “More and more people are convinced that this is lawfare,” Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, a political scientist, wrote in La Vanguardia, “or at least that there is a double standard in legal cases involving politicians.” “To be honest, I think the courts are not particularly concerned about their legitimacy,” María Eugenia Rodríguez Palop, a professor of philosophy of law at the Carlos III University in Madrid and former member of the European Parliament, told us. “What primarily drives the judges,” she continued, “is their corporatist desire to protect the current structures, which benefit them.”

Judges are not the only ones who have undermined the separation of powers. The conservative opposition is also to blame for the growing public mistrust of the Spanish judiciary. Over the past year, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the PP, the main opposition party, has prematurely issued sentence after sentence against the Sánchez government, finding it guilty-in-advance of everything from the abuse of power by the attorney general—who was convicted by the Supreme Court in November for purportedly leaking secret information to journalists, despite numerous reporters’ testifying to the contrary—and corruption regarding the Catalan amnesty law to leading an organized crime ring of bribery and influence-peddling.

All the while, Feijóo and Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the regional PP leader in Madrid, have claimed that Sánchez has turned Spain into “a dictatorial state.” Yet by abrogating their political responsibility to the legal system instead of presenting a viable alternative, they have been tripped up by their own arguments. After all, what kind of dictatorship would allow its own sitting attorney general to stand trial, let alone be found guilty?

In its ongoing effort to topple Sánchez, the Spanish right has not only received help from Spain’s conservative judiciary but also, quite unexpectedly, from the Trump administration. Zapatero and his daughters have been charged with receiving close to $800,000 from a $61-million Covid rescue package that the Spanish government had granted to a small airline partially owned by Venezuelans who have been the target of an international money-laundering investigation. (Zapatero denies any wrongdoing.)

A key piece of evidence in the case against Zapatero is the contents of a Venezuelan cell phone obtained in 2021 by Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE, which the US administration voluntarily sent to Spanish law enforcement in March 2026. (Reportedly, the cell phone contains text messages about the Covid rescue package that refer to Zapatero’s help.) The unsolicited handover occurred shortly after Pedro Sánchez spoke out publicly against the US-Israeli attacks on Iran.

Zapatero, for his part, still has a target on his back among US Republicans, who see him as a champion of Spanish anti-Americanism. They haven’t forgiven him for his 2004 decision, announced on his first day in office, to withdraw Spain’s troops from Iraq and his close ties, after his 2011 resignation, with the Latin American left, particularly in Venezuela. (The Washington Examiner recently called him “Maduro’s fixer.”) If the timing of the information sharing isn’t suspicious enough, more serious questions surround the legality and chain of custody of the cell-phone evidence, which was obtained without a warrant and would therefore normally be inadmissible under Spanish law.

How Sánchez will overcome these mounting scandals is anyone’s guess. Yet Spain’s prime minister, a six-foot-three former basketball player, is also Europe’s ultimate political comeback kid. In a running gag on Polònia, the Catalan version of Saturday Night Live, an elusive Sánchez drives the Grim Reaper to despair: The scythe-wielding skeleton keeps coming for him, only to be outfoxed into taking his political rivals instead.

Indeed, since he first rose to prominence in the PSOE, Spain’s social democratic party, the 54-year-old economist has survived at least half a dozen seemingly certain defeats, including within his own party. He became the country’s prime minister in 2018, after winning a no-confidence vote against then–Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. Since seeking out reelection in 2023, he has governed in a minority coalition with the progressive group Sumar, led by Yolanda Díaz. Pressed to the left by his coalition partner, which has pushed for increases in the minimum wage and job security, mass legalization of immigrants, curbing energy prices, and other progressive measures, Sánchez has overseen the EU’s most successful economy. Over the past five years, Spain’s GDP growth has roughly tripled the EU average, while unemployment is at the lowest rate since the 2008 crisis.

Since Trump’s return to power, Sánchez has also emerged as one of the few European leaders willing to stand up to him, to Israel, and to NATO’s demands that member states drastically increase defense spending. In fact, he has become the de facto leader of a global anti-Trump resistance movement. But it’s not clear that Sánchez’s international stature will do him much good at home during the next parliamentary elections, which must, at the latest, occur sometime before fall 2027.

“His reputation abroad won’t help compensate for the political weakness of his party and government,” says Noelia Adánez, the opinion editor of Público, one of the country’s largest progressive dailies. A much greater relative advantage for Sánchez, she points out, is the fact that the leadership of the conservative opposition is weak and divided. Its nominal head, Feijóo, “is not a real leader and behaves rather erratically,” Adánez told us, “making constant bad choices on his timing, discourse, and allies.”

One of Sánchez’s most powerful weapons, meanwhile, is his ability to project calm and confidence despite everything coming down around him. A superior orator, he regularly leaves the opposition in the dust in parliament. But his coalition government is fragile. While he was voted in with the parliamentary support of conservatives from Catalonia and the Basque Country, those parties are increasingly hesitant to link their fate to his. As a result, Sánchez has not been able to present, let alone pass, a budget since his reelection in 2023. (Unlike other countries, Spain rolls over its most recently approved budget and continues to function with the help of executive decrees and tax revenue.)

This has made it doubly challenging for him to address Spain’s housing crisis, which has reached unsustainable levels. On the one hand, without a budget, Sánchez isn’t able to dedicate new state resources to, for instance, intervening in a housing market in which US private equity firms are the biggest landlords; on the other, it’s doubtful that he, a political centrist at heart, would ever be willing to fundamentally challenge elite economic interests in the first place. He has also yet to keep certain promises, such as the repeal of Spain’s notorious Gag Law, which limits freedom of the press and imposes outsize sanctions on forms of public protest.

Spanish politics thus finds itself at an impasse. The conservative PP leads in the polls. But the party’s closeness to its far-right ally, Vox, with which it has formed coalition governments across Spain’s regions and municipalities, has alienated many centrist critics of Sánchez. These anti-Sánchez, anti-Vox voters are Spain’s version of never-Trump Republicans. This group has found increasing support among traditional Catholics, whose hospitable approach to immigration—affirmed by Pope Leo XIV’s visit to the country in early June—has clashed with the xenophobic drift of the PP.

Ironically, the PP’s relationship with Vox has put the center-right party in a double bind. For one, Vox is not a reliable partner. In July 2024, a year after striking coalition agreements to govern five of Spain’s regions, Vox broke with the PP and left these regional governments. But a more serious challenge is that Vox’s extreme Spanish nationalism has alienated the PP’s former and, for some, more natural allies in the Basque Country and Catalonia, where regional nationalisms prevail, even among conservatives. Because center-right parties in those regions cannot countenance having anything to do with Vox, the country’s national politics remains in a holding pattern, likely until next summer, when parliamentary elections are expected to take place.

The threat of Vox is also keeping Sánchez’s junior partner Sumar from punishing the prime minister for his party’s corruption scandals—for example, by leaving the coalition. Weakened by infighting and clinging to the little power it currently has in government, Sumar has framed its decision to continue to support Sánchez in terms of responsibility. “It’s still useful to be part of a coalition,” said Eduardo Rubiño, a Sumar spokesperson, before listing a series of pending measures that ranged from increasing the budget for public healthcare to preventing vulture funds from buying up housing. Staying on is necessary “to prevent Trump’s allies from governing,” he said, “because if Fejóo is given the chance, we could see [Vox leader Santiago] Abascal become deputy prime minister.”

Left-wing leaders also point to the cutbacks in public services, social spending, and political rights in the regions where the PP has governed with Vox. In late 2023, for example, the Valencia region eliminated its emergency unit; when the city was hit by major floods less than a year later, nearly 250 people were killed.

Pope Leo’s plea to Spanish politicians to tone down their divisive rhetoric and address polarization fell on deaf ears. Both Sánchez’s PSOE and the PP have reason to believe that dialing up the tension will help bring their voters to the polls.

Sánchez, in particular, may be able to turn his legal troubles to his advantage. The more overtly the PP, Vox, conservative judges, and the Trump government appear to be conspiring to bring him down—by indicting him, for example—the easier it will be for Sánchez to portray himself as the only thing standing between democracy and fascism. Still, campaigning on fear is a risky electoral bet for the left. Sánchez pulled it off in 2023—but just barely. Even though the threat today is objectively more grave than it was three years ago, it’s unlikely that the tactic will work again.

Housing costs in fast-growing cities around the world have quadrupled since 1950. In the United States, that means nearly half of the country’s renters are paying more than 30 percent of their income for housing—an outlay that eats into already overstretched budgets for other essential expenses such as food, healthcare, and transportation.

Nowhere has the affordability problem been worse than in San Francisco. Between 1980 and 2019, the city’s housing costs increased by as much as 600 percent, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and records from the San Francisco Rent Board. That increase is more than double the national average over the same time span.

Democratic policy wonks have embraced the deregulatory “abundance” movement—kickstarted by the 2025 book of the same name by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—as a solution to the housing crisis. The central mandate here was to institutionalize an ethos of YIMBYism—short for Yes in My Backyard—in order to ramp up the housing supply and drive down costs. The argument was seductive since it offered a simple proposition to a pressing problem: Remove barriers to housing development—from red tape, and community and environmental review, to limits on building height—and a housing boom would ensue, ensuring at long last that cities would be able to meet a rising demand for housing.

But San Francisco illustrates another dynamic, which saw the city’s political scene rapidly transformed into a playground for the ultra-wealthy. The YIMBY movement did not merely push for relaxed zoning—it became a stalking horse for Bay Area tech titans who used it as a political vehicle to seize local power.

As documented in a recent report by the Phoenix Project, San Francisco’s YIMBY uprising became in short order the vanguard of an emergent astroturf network. Starting in 2020, the ultrarich began backing a new welter of political pressure groups sporting warm, pro-housing monikers such as Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, Together SF, and Abundant SF (which later became Abundance Network) to oust progressives from local government. University of California–Santa Cruz sociology professor Katharyne Mitchell and PhD candidate Gregory Woolston have described this local political takeover as revanchist populism, plying a brand of “revenge” politics funded by conservative elites. And it’s clearly working: According to an analysis from the San Francisco Chronicle, the composition of the city’s board of supervisors shifted decisively rightward in 2024.

Positioning themselves as sensible moderates in a progressive metropolis allegedly drunk on its own regulatory powers, the members of San Francisco’s abundance power elite include Mayor Daniel Lurie and supervisors Bilal Mahmood and Stephen Sherrill. They’ve campaigned for reactionary policies like cuts to LGBTQ assistance and public health programs, gutting environmental review, defunding free legal aid, and blocking a one-off wealth tax. And after winning office, they’ve worked tirelessly to roll back progressive gains on criminal justice, renter protections, and environmental regulations.

Now, Silicon Valley is running the same playbook in an effort to take over the national Democratic Party. Internal fundraising materials obtained by the Phoenix Project and first reported on by one of us in The American Prospect detail how Zack Rosen, cofounder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, and his allies have amassed a funding stream of $260 million annually from wealthy benefactors. (Rosen told the Prospect that these numbers were incorrect. He pointed to a figure citing a $120 million donation from John Arnold, saying that it was closer to $40 million annually; our follow-up queries about the group’s other “capital commitments” cited in the memo went unanswered.) The group’s aim, detailed in a self-styled historical manifesto, is nothing less than to “scale this work across all 50 states” and “build the Abundance faction bottoms up, city by city.”

To that end, the Abundance Network has expanded elsewhere in California, as well as in Washington and Vermont. In his organizing memo, Rosen brags that by enlarging “the moderate faction” in the Bay Area, he and his allies have “flipped [the] San Francisco Democratic Party,” “flipped [the] San Francisco Board of Supervisors,” and “flipped [the] Santa Monica City Council.” These are not idle boasts. San Francisco’s moderates have strung together an impressive series of political victories against progressive elected officials, including the recall of reform-minded District Attorney Chesa Boudin in June 2022.

Rosen calls these wins the beginning of a “multi-decade” project. He goes on to explain that the YIMBY-abundance model of power-seeking is after nothing less than the “renewal” of liberal institutions—in cities, states, and, eventually, the whole country. “Our goals are ambitious, and our core beliefs run counter to how left institutions—the Democratic party, left philanthropies, advocacy organizations—think and operate today,” Rosen writes.

This top-down revolution had initially taken root during the Biden era, but launched in earnest as a pitch for Democrats during the second Trump administration. A year before Rosen’s call to arms, the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning think tank, released its own broadside calling for a cross-party coalition to preach the abundance gospel. The first order of business was to challenge progressive power within the Democratic Party. Over the past year, the abundance movement has taken that mandate to heart as it tries to replicate the “hostile takeover” of San Francisco politics at scale

What permits this policy-driven putsch to come across as commonsense reform is the YIMBY movement’s own careful branding as a quasi-populist insurgency. In the 2010s, the nascent movement’s standard-bearer was Sonja Trauss, a 24-year-old newcomer to the Bay Area living in rapidly gentrifying West Oakland. By 2014, Trauss, who had founded the San Francisco Bay Area Renters’ Federation (SFBARF), was a fixture at government meetings around the Bay Area, calling for new initiatives to increase the region’s housing supply. SFBARF eventually split into several groups, the largest of which became YIMBY Action and YIMBY Law. They were, however, far from the first organizations to argue for zoning reform; the NAACP and racial justice allies had been fighting restrictive zoning since before Trauss was born. Even the term YIMBY was not new; it was used in planning literature by the early 1990s.

Trauss became the most tireless lobbyist for the local YIMBY movement. Her efforts benefited greatly from early support from an influential and moneyed member of the tech elite: Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman, a member of the storied PayPal Mafia.

Trauss ran for a seat on the Board of Supervisors in 2018, seeking to represent the Tenderloin and South of Market Street, two of San Francisco’s most diverse, working-class neighborhoods. Her campaign raised more than $1 million, more than two-thirds of which came from Progress San Francisco, a political action committee chiefly funded by tech executives, corporate real estate investors, and venture capitalists. Yet, for all this fundraising clout, Trauss lost the race to Matt Haney, a former School Board trustee.

Undeterred, Trauss still courted favor with California’s power elite. Current San Francisco state Senator and US congressional candidate Scott Wiener met the young activist during his tenure on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The relationship proved mutually beneficial: Trauss formed a political action committee that bankrolled Wiener’s first run for the state Senate. In turn, Wiener endorsed Trauss’s 2018 race. Her volunteers served as foot soldiers in his successful campaign to unseat progressive Supervisor Jane Kim.

Once he was elected to the state Senate in 2016, Wiener wasted no time advancing the YIMBY agenda. At his side was CA YIMBY and its affiliated organizations—YIMBY Law, YIMBY Action, and the Housing Action Coalition. These groups founded in part by Rosen, the political director for Abundance Network, former Wiener aide Todd David, and Trauss. In his memo proposing a national YIMBY-abundance political takeover, Rosen boasts of this synergistic relationship, noting that “we built our San Francisco operation with Scott Wiener’s policy and political team.” Several months ago, Wiener announced his bid to replace retiring US Representative Nancy Pelosi. Wiener’s allies in the tech and real estate industries have since donated nearly $4 million to his congressional campaign.

As Wiener climbed the political ladder, the YIMBY movement continued to accrue power in the state. To date, CA YIMBY and its affiliates have raised nearly $15 million from Open Philanthropy (now called Coefficient Giving), a fund created by tech billionaires Dustin Moskovitz and Cari Tuna, as well as $1 million from the payment processor Stripe. Wealthy tech titans quickly grasped YIMBY’s potential as a tool to gain political power and influence against San Francisco’s progressive political order. Perhaps its most significant win in the city was its ouster of democratic socialist Supervisor Dean Preston, a tenants rights attorney and champion of progressive taxation and criminal justice reform. He was replaced by Bilal Mahmood, a candidate who ran to Preston’s right on both issues. Preston laid out the pivotal role the abundance faction played in his electoral defeat in an essay for Current Affairs in 2025.

In addition to ousting Preston, San Francisco’s wealthy abundance network defeated reformist District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and other progressive elected officials. The movement’s lead funding vehicles all bear innocuous good-government-sounding names like Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, or GrowSF, but draw support from tech barons, real estate interests, and other major donors. Headlining this group are a key clutch of big-money backers: billionaire cryptocurrency executive Chris Larsen, billionaire venture capitalist William Oberndorf, Y Combinator’s centimillionaire chief Garry Tan, and billionaire former venture capitalist Michael Moritz. Their network has steered more than $100 million into San Francisco politics since 2020–and they’re making similar plans for the rest of the state, and the country at large.

Rosen’s Abundance Network is at the forefront of this charge. “One way to think about Abundance Network is the liberal answer to the tech elite joining the MAGA faction,” Rosen declares.

However they might characterize themselves ideologically, their money is speaking loudly. According to Rosen’s document, they are raising more than a quarter of a billion dollars annually for organizing. Among its top donors are hedge-fund billionaire and former Enron executive John Arnold, who committed a staggering $120 million in 2025, former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, who pledged an equally impressive $100 million a year, and Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, who committed $40 million.

Not included in that accounting are two $120 million grant programs: The Abundance and Growth Fund run by Coefficient Giving (partially launched with $60 million from Stripe’s Patrick Collison) and the Recoding America Fund (started, in part, by the Abundance Network and run by its senior adviser, Jen Pahlka). All told, Abundance-aligned groups could log as much as $300 million in annual capital commitments.

In his memo to prospective big donors, Rosen describes his five-year quest to refine the abundance ideology. Now, to galvanize big money behind the abundance agenda, he presents this pro-business deregulatory package as the cure for the “root disease” that’s “crippling left politics and rotting our American democracy.”

In reality, Rosen’s prescription is for a political scene dominated by the Big Tech oligarchy. He writes that as a result of the failure of progressive governance, “Maslow’s monsters are now here: Urban conflagrations, floods, deteriorating norms, and the rebellion against elites.” He likewise equates an uptick in economic populist sentiment against wealth with full-fledged natural disaster, while attributing the rise of other social ills to the “abdication of elites.” Warming to this theme, he offers a preposterous reading of the reforms achieved by the early 20th-century progressive movement, claiming that they were the top-down handiwork of wealthy industrialists rather than the hard-won gains of organized labor, suffragists, peace activists, and social reformers.

The Abundance Network’s success in San Francisco rested on the mobilization of big money “to take down the exaction-machine”—a piece of right-wing pseudo-economic jargon designating alleged on-the-make public-interest concerns—“of equity groups, labor (unions), and NIMBYs.” In Rosen’s view, organized labor and grassroots community organizations are not engines of progressive change but obstacles to the rightful seizure of power by the wealthy seers of Big Tech. He bemoans the rise of small-dollar fundraising, saying that it has “made politics dumber.”

Indeed, everything about this vision of abundance—from its garbled reading of American history and its paean to industrialists to its pitch to the ultrarich—is about re-entrenching elite control over politics. All that stands in the way of abundance, apparently, is the people.

M, the mother of two young children living in Tucson, Arizona, works full-time but has been relying on about $700 a month in food stamps to make sure her children are fed ever since they were born. Keeping access to the benefit requires recertifying her income and eligibility every six months, so last August she got her paperwork ready for the renewal process. She sent her documents every way possibly except for by fax—online, through e-mail, through the mail, and in person at an office—to make sure her family stayed enrolled.

But then M—The Nation is referring to her by an initial to protect her from a past abusive partner—received a letter from the Arizona Department of Economic Security saying she hadn’t included some of the required documents, even though she had sent in what was typically sufficient: her pay stubs, her rental agreement, the rates for her children’s childcare. “I was quite surprised,” she said.

In March, she tried again, reapplying for food stamps. This time, after she turned in the paperwork, the state requested documentation from a job “that I’ve never heard of,” but that the state claimed she is doing on top of her actual job, which put her income above the eligibility threshold. When M went to a state office to report that she doesn’t work for that company, she was told to file an identity-theft report.

So she took time off work to not only submit paperwork to the Social Security office but to file both a police and an FBI report. Despite sending in what she was told was necessary to fix the problem, she hasn’t received a response from the state. When she calls for an update, she can’t get through to anyone. “There’s not a lot of employees that can assist you,” she said. The people working at the offices tell her she to just keep calling. “I feel like it’s very disorganized.”

In the meantime, her family hasn’t gotten any support through the food stamp program, leaving her trying to make ends meet on her income of $18 an hour. It “has been really, really hard, because I have to manage my whole life around my paycheck,” she said. She’s cut down on her own meals to give her kids more to eat. She feels constantly torn between getting them healthy food and the cheaper food she can buy more of. “They’re very smart and they have noticed. They’re like, ‘You know mom, we used to get strawberries and blueberries and raspberries,’” she said. She often tells them “no” when they request food items at the grocery store. “It’s hard as a parent because you do want to give them everything but it’s also like, OK. those five dollars are going to be toward diapers or gas or rent.”

For the first time in her life, M. has sought out food banks. The options there are limited, she said, and she’s lucky to get any vegetables. She takes her children to activities at her library because they also give the children a snack.

“I wouldn’t be going through all of this if I didn’t really need it,” she said of food stamps. “We really need to keep that food on our tables.”

M is one of millions of Americans who have lost food stamps since last summer. Republicans passed HR1 last July, or the One Big Beautiful Bill, entirely along party lines, enacting the largest cut to food stamps, also known as the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, in history. The legislation reduced SNAP by about $187 billion over the following decade.

The bill achieved that cut through a number of changes. It tightened the program’s existing work requirement by applying it to people up to age 65 and to parents with children 14 and older. It also narrowed exemptions for veterans, homeless people, and former foster youth, and barred undocumented immigrants. Starting next year, states will have to cover 75 percent of the program’s administrative costs, instead of the 50 percent they have been covering. If states are found to have high payment-error rates—meaning they underpaid or overpaid too many recipients—they’ll have to chip in even more to cover the actual SNAP benefits, too.

Since the bill was enacted, more than 4 million people have fallen off of SNAP’s rolls, a 10 percent decline. That includes more than 800,000 children—and that is only from the 13 states with available data. While the number of people enrolled in SNAP had been declining before HR1 went into effect last July, the trend has “accelerated significantly in the months after that,” said Joseph Llobrera, senior director of research for the food assistance team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The reductions have occurred in every state across the country, and participation has dropped by 10 percent or more in 21 states. But some have seen even more significant drops. Arizona is so far the worst: Half of all people who had been enrolled are now going without food stamps.

As SNAP participation has sunk dramatically, Arizonans are increasingly turning to food banks. According to data collected by the Arizona Food Bank Network, the number of people visiting food banks shot up from about 670,000 in January to over 840,000 by April.

When we spoke in mid-June, Beth Fiorenza, executive director of Phoenix food bank NourishPHX, said it was experiencing about a 10 to 12 percent increase. Typically, the food bank expects to see about 150 to 175 people a day; now it’s getting more than 200 every day. “It gets higher, higher, higher every week, every month,” she said. “We’re seeing a lot of new people that have never had to visit a pantry.” In late May, almost 40 percent of those who visited were brand new.

So far, the food bank has been able to keep portions the same even as more people visit. But the federal government hasn’t made that easy. Last year it reduced the food that it delivered to food banks, and NourishPHX suddenly and without warning lost a federal grant it had used to buy fresh milk and eggs at the same time that HR1 went into effect.

The people Fiorenza serves at the food bank have given her a variety of reasons why they no longer have food stamps. Some can’t work or volunteer for enough hours each week to meet the work requirement. “We see a lot of people with medical issues, especially seniors, who just aren’t able to work or volunteer,” she said. Some just can’t seem to get re-enrolled even though they’re eligible. For others, it’s not worth wading through so much red tape. “These are families with children, seniors, who have a lot of other things going on in their life,” she said. “That’s just one more extra burden that they have to meet, and some of them I think have given up.”

It’s not yet known exactly what states are doing that is causing such dramatic drops in enrollment. But it is clear that they have been given a very short timeline before they will be penalized with higher costs. Come October 2027, those with payment error rates greater than 6 percent in this current fiscal year and last will have to pay 5, 10, or 15 percent of benefit costs in their state, depending on how high the rate is, on top of the extra administrative costs they all face. According to the Department of Agriculture’s recent data, 41 states are above the error-rate threshold.

That’s kicked off a scramble to get the error rate down at any cost. Republicans’ legislation imposed no penalty for eligible people getting kicked off SNAP or not enrolling at all, only for states getting the payments wrong. So states may be instituting more barriers, such as additional paperwork or processes, that keep people from participating at all. They may also be devoting additional scrutiny to every document applicants provide. “What we’re hearing is that states are asking for much more documentation of household circumstances, so that creates barriers for the household,” Llobrera said. “Not all of that is necessary for actually doing the benefit calculation, but I think states feel like they need to do everything they can to drive down those payment error rates.”

HR1 already added more administrative burdens to the program, requiring states to verify immigration status and compliance with the work requirement. They have received no extra funding to increase administrative staffing, and many agencies, including Arizona’s, were already understaffed. Last summer, Arizona cut department staff by 5 percent. “It creates this mountain of paperwork that state agencies have to act on,” Llobrera said. Staff simply may not be able to review all of it in time. That can sometimes mean that, even when someone has submitted everything required of them, their case gets closed before someone even reviews their application.

That’s what happened to Janae Wall in Phoenix. The single mother of five children under the age of 13 wasn’t able to recertify to keep receiving food stamps during the government shutdown in November that cut off access nationwide. She reapplied in March, sending in everything she knew she would need to prove her eligibility. Usually, she would get a notification if she had missed anything and she could upload it to her account without an issue. But by the time she received a notice that the state wanted more documentation from her, her case had already been closed. “I’m like, ‘You didn’t ask me for anything,’” she said.

Wall is certain that she’s eligible; the system told her as much as she was applying. She makes $21 an hour at her full-time job in behavioral health, but it’s not enough for her family to make it through the month. “It’s very hard. The food prices are very high,” she said. She was counting on getting a couple hundred dollars a month in food stamps. Without it, “it is very stressful,” she said. Wall prioritizes paying rent and then buys food with whatever is left over. She often postpones other bills, like water and electric, risking shutoffs. She’s been relying heavily on food banks, which help but have varying quality and quantities. One time her box was mostly jalepeños. She used to cook homemade meals most days; now they’re eating “a lot of quick meals,” she said, like noodles or cereal. Her kids have noticed: They ask her, “Why don’t we have a bunch of food in the house like we used to?” she said.

“For me, it’s very hard to get food, and I am slaving at work,” she said.

Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has claimed that SNAP participation is dropping because Americans are better off. “We have moved 4.3 million Americans off of the food stamp program,” she told Fox News in late April. “A lot of it is just a better economy.” Citing wage growth, she said, “people don’t need food stamps.”

It is true that, typically, SNAP participation tends to vary based on the health of the economy. But economic indicators don’t show the signs of improvement necessary to explain big reductions. While the unemployment rate is at a relatively low 4.3 percent, it hasn’t decreased over the past year. Inflation has recently risen, including an increase in food prices, and has wiped out all wage gains since the start of Trump’s second term. “The economic conditions haven’t improved to the extent that would explain that rapid drop,” Llobrera said. In Arizona, unemployment has actually risen.

Rollins has also claimed that the reduction in food stamp participation is due to cutting down on fraud. Citing the millions who are no longer on the program, she said, “A lot of that is fraud, a lot of it is people taking the program that shouldn’t have been.”

But that is not nearly as significant a problem as she makes it out to be. Nationally, the payment error rate was just under 11 percent, including almost 2 percent of payments that were actually underpayments. Many of these are mistakes on either an applicant’s or the state’s behalf, not intentional attempts to siphon benefits; the USDA’s most recent estimate is that just 1.6 percent of benefits are actually trafficked. In 2023, the most recent data, just 41,476 participants were disqualified due to fraud out of 42 million total.

The last time the country saw a drop in SNAP caseloads of this magnitude was when Congress passed major program cuts in 1996 as part of President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform efforts, including adding the work requirement, strict new time limits on benefits, a ban for new immigrants, and a reduction in benefit amounts. Back then, the rolls shrunk by over 9 percent in six months. “The last time we’ve had a drop this rapid it was also because of big cuts to the program, so I think we’re seeing that now,” Llobrera said.

Advocates have been urging Congress to give states more time to adjust to the new SNAP requirements. But when Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman released text of the Farm Bill on June 23, which governs SNAP, it didn’t include any delay in their implementation.

When states find out how much more of the cost they’ll shoulder next October, those with high burdens will have to make difficult choices, such as raising revenue or slashing spending, to cover them. They might reduce eligibility and shut more people out. Some may stop participating in SNAP entirely: In a recent survey of state agencies, 11 percent said that was a potential risk.

That is the “worst-case scenario,” Llobrera said. Since the beginning of the modern food stamp program, access didn’t matter where people lived—every American could enroll. “We fear that we may run into a situation where it really depends on the state’s fiscal situation and whatever the prevailing political winds are in that state whether they continue to participate,” he said. There could be “a scenario where SNAP withers away and only remains robust in select states.”

“We are still in the early stages of what’s to come,” he added.

You felt it even in your nose. Breathing in the Paris air felt like inhaling inside of a sauna. There’s some truth here: A concrete jungle such as Paris, or just about any French city center, is a built environment conceived for the far more temperate climate of the preindustrial world. But in the extreme weather of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch resulting from man-made climate change—it’s a kiln-like multiplier to the record temperatures that blanketed France and other parts of western Europe late last month.

Between June 17 and 30, France was exposed to its most dramatic heat wave in recorded history. Peak temperatures hugged 40°C (104°F) in Paris over several consecutive, grueling days. The country’s highest recorded temperature remains the 46°C (114.8°F) notched up during the 2019 heat wave in the southern town of Véragues, near Montpellier. But June 2026 now counts as thehottest on average. Summer has only just started, and the immediate human toll is already grim. On July 3, public-health authorities announced that the week of June 22 saw an increase of over 2,000 heat-related deaths.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the country was, quite literally, fried. Alongside the human damage, June’s heat wave has ravaged natural ecosystems, dealing a second blow with numerous cascading effects from stressed water shelves and riverbeds to parched forests. They leave the country particularly exposed for the second act of summer. Satellite imagery gives an idea of the scope of damage to wildlife: A bird’s-eye view of mainland France taken as recently as May 24 showed a country covered in the rich green of spring. That same perspective a month later reveals a landmass charred by the splotches of brown usually not seen until August.

Heat may be indiscriminate, but its effects among humans are more selective, mapping on to the inequalities that divide society. Students and individuals living under Paris’s iconic zinc-topped roofs were exposed to the scorching pressure cookers that their apartments had become. Various news outlets reported on well-off residents taking up spare rooms in Paris hotels, benefiting from a few days of AC. The luckiest probably fled the city altogether, to country homes or seaside villas—anywhere for a chance at the wind, shade, and fresh water that’s cruelly lacking in the parched capital.

This is not the first time that extreme summer temperatures have caught France off guard. In 2003, a heat wave claimed the lives of at least 15,000 people, with authorities facing fierce criticism for their slow and inadequate response. Over two decades later, the shock of this summer’s heat wave should have been entirely foreseeable. For decades, innumerable reports from the IPCC and climate scientists have warned that global warming is making heat waves more frequent, longer-lasting, and more intense. According to Meteo France, the annual number of extreme heat days could be multiplied by five by 2050 (+2.7°C) and by 10 from now to 2100 (+4°C), depending on global emissions trajectories.

“We’re still only in the opening credits, but there’s no way around the realization that climate change is well under way,” the activist and writer Clément Sénéchal told The Nation. “This latest crisis confirms the failure of a certain environmentalism, which has so far not been able to slow global warming or mitigate its most tangible effects.”

During an official visit to Antibes in southern France, President Emannuel Macron sought to defend his government’s environmental record. “We have adapted to global warming, but we cannot adapt to a heat wave that has no equivalent in Europe today,” the president said on June 25. Five days later, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu defended that same record before the National Assembly. “Since President Chirac [1995–2007], every administration has, to the best of its ability, done something to tackle climate change. Denying that would undermine the republican consensus,” he said, dismissing criticism from the opposition.

But 10 years after Macron’s pledge to “make our planet great again,” it’s hard to point to major policy successes on the climate front. The government’s 2021 legislation, the Climate and Resilience Law, was a hodgepodge of weak regulations guided by a so-called “voluntaristic” approach to emissions reductions, putting the onus on changes in individual behavior.

In the lead-up to the latest heat wave, the government was even caught watering down elements of its environmental agenda. Only a day after France’s first heat episode in May ended, Macron’s administration announced a 20 percent cut (€162.5 million) to the Green Fund—a program specifically designed to support the energy transition and help local communities adapt to climate change. Environment Minister Monique Barbut was forced to acknowledge that the budget allocated by the current government was “not up to the task.”

If France is not alone in dragging its feet on emissions reductions, the heat wave revealed a deeper fragility in the public services that are needed for the new climate normality. Although it has introduced measures aimed at improving preparedness, such as its national heat-wave-alert system and emergency health protocols, critics argue that these remain largely reactive rather than anticipatory. They point to the absence of structural adaptation policies that would require better weathering for schools and hospitals to more fundamental redesign for cities to reduce urban heat islands and protect vulnerable populations.

“We realized that our technological and built environments are likely to malfunction under extreme conditions,” said Julien Dossier, a climate change and adaptation consultant. “The state was caught entirely off guard and suddenly realizes that critical infrastructure such as health services, public schools, and hospitals—in short, essential, front-line services—have been bled dry by spending cuts and are far less able to cushion the blow,” said Sénéchal, a former campaigner with Greenpeace France.

Sénéchal drew a parallel between the French state’s response to the Covid-19 epidemic and its initial reaction to the heat wave. State prefectures issued administrative orders canceling events, and officials in cities like Paris even tried to institute a ban on outdoor alcohol consumption.

NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg is one of the foremost experts on how communities respond to episodes of extreme heat. If minority and working-class neighborhoods were most affected by the infamous 1995 heat wave in the Windy City, as he argued in his 2002 study Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, those that survived best were able to benefit from denser social solidarity and mutual aid networks. “Neighborhood libraries, public parks, playgrounds, and schools are sites for social integration that have helped people build social support to get through extreme events,” he said.

One of the deadliest factors in a heat wave, he argues, is social isolation: “The more we depend on private gathering places and social media to anchor our collective life, the more isolated and vulnerable we will become.”

“Part of the public has reacted with anger, and that is quite new,” said Dossier. He went on to praise what he calls the “firefighting mentality” that set in on a grassroots level, with individuals and neighbors organizing to make up for the lack of policy preparation. “If you see the threat and it’s immediately coming upon you, you act,” he continued. “But we also need city halls to use their protective power and coordination capabilities.”

In preparation for future heat episodes this summer, Dossier has for example advised administrators in the city of Nantes to purchase and distribute hundreds of thousands of heat-reflective blankets. Meteorologists have warned that a new heat dome could hit parts of France in the first half of July, with hot and dry conditions expected for the remainder of the month.

Communities taking things into their own hands has in some cases been met with police intervention, producing several surreal scenes evocative of a two-track society in the face-off with extreme heat. In Clermont-Ferrand, police intervened four times in a working-class neighborhood to dismantle plastic paddling pools set up by local youth. One video that sparked particular outrage on social media showed a large police contingent hacking at the children’s installation with knives. Before it was finally authorized on June 24, police were deployed to prevent people from swimming in Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin.

Numerous communities suffered from power outages at the height of the heat wave, but working-class areas were particularly exposed. The Paris suburb of Chanteloup-les-Vignes saw a 24-hour power outage, leaving some 27,000 households without electricity. A few kilometers away, at the heart of Paris’s genteel 14th arrondissement, the luxury group LVMH rolled out a giant tidal wave for its men’s fashion week show, in a brazen case of conspicuous water and energy consumption. Writing in Libération, the philosopher Paul Preciado argued that France was entering the age of “thermocracy,” when control over temperature becomes a defining symbol of power and status.

A heat wave at full force is all-engrossing. Work slows down, at least for those who can afford to slack off. Everything gets crowded out by the priority to make it through to sundown.

One silver lining is that experiences like these show the breadth of things that urgently need reform, from changes to labor law, allowing for paid work stoppages, to the greening of urban areas. For all of its violence, a heat wave holds up a mirror to what might be the outlines of “ecological planning,” the rallying cry for comprehensive environmental mobilization heard from parties on France’s left-wing opposition. There’s a common quip: If the French presidential elections currently scheduled for spring 2027 were held in August, then addressing the effects of climate change would be the defining campaign issue, and not the hysterics over immigration and insecurity that usually dominate the newscycle.

The far-right Rassemblement National ought to appear politically exposed by the current crisis, which fits poorly into its regular talking points. At the peak of the 2019 heat wave, the RN’s Julien Odoul lambasted environmentalists for “hysterical messaging designed to scare the French people. Personally, I’d prefer it if the government would focus on other subjects like the Islamist heat-up.”

Such denialism was less tenable this time around, if only because of the tangible public frustration. After all, RN voters are no more immune to the effects of excruciating heat than the “eco-fraudsters” they denounce on the left. On June 30, the party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella rolled out its “grand AC plan,” proposing zero-interest loans for households and local governments looking to purchase air conditioning. The climate equivalent of a Band-Aid, solutions like this at least presage a boon for the cooling industry, which has seen sales surge in recent weeks.

For Quentin Ghesquière, founder of the think tank Adapt, France needs a nationwide mobilization comparable to the economic and regional planning that was the norm in the postwar period. “School renovations alone require an estimated €40 billion in additional investment,” he says. “The €800 million allocated to the Green Fund in this year’s budget is nowhere near enough.” The Rassemblement National’s AC plan, Ghesquière argues, is the flip side of its total failure to measure the urgency of the climate crisis. “These are the same people who voted to cut the Green Fund and called for dismantling the national energy transition agency, the ADEME,” Ghesquière told The Nation.

If some AC investment is no doubt essential to reinforce critical services, Dossier warns that such “technosolutionist” proposals could add pressure on an already stretched electrical grid network. They are also part of a deeper problem whereby climate shocks serve to individualize and privatize ecological adaptation. For example, several sources pointed to Parliament’s consideration this summer of an emergency agricultural bill that weakens restrictions of harmful pesticides and reinforces the role of Big Agriculture in the governance of water resources. In rural parts of France, tensions over water is already a growing issue: In 2022 and 2023, the construction of large reservoirs to service agro-industry devolved into pitch battles between armed police and rural activists, whom then–Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin labelled “eco-terrorists.”

Then there’s the elephant in the room. For Claire Nouvian, founder of Bloom, an association dedicated to the preservation of oceans and marine life, the immediate public reaction to France’s heat wave has dangerously skirted the question of reducing emissions. “If we continue on our current path, our summers will reach 50°C,” the activist and biodiversity expert told The Nation. “At that point, the entire electrical system will begin to fail. Without electricity, air conditioning won’t take us very far.” Nouvian initiated a July 6 open letter in Le Monde urging Parliament to adopt a climate emergency law that would ban all new oil and gas projects, prohibit fossil fuel lobbying, and codify the crime of “globocide,” referring to human activities capable of bringing about the total destruction of the biosphere.

Nouvian, like Klinenberg, advocates for naming heat waves after fossil fuel giants. “It’s time we call out those responsible,” she said: “TotalEnergies is a climate criminal.” Despite promises to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, France’s oil and gas major is in the throes of a significant international expansion, developing pipelines and extraction projects in West Africa or Qatar’s North Field, one of the world’s largest LNG reservoirs. “A ticking climate bomb,” Nouvian said of the group’s investments. On June 24, at the peak of the heat wave, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné announced investment in a major new gas venture in the United Arab Emirates.

Leqaa Kordia likes to feed people.

I learned this when I met her at Nouri Cafe on Main Street (also called Palestine Way) in Paterson, New Jersey. She walked confidently into the restaurant, greeting the staff warmly with quick hugs and light punches to the arm. As we sat at a table by a big window, she asked if I had eaten yet. 

During our conversation, an employee brought over a big plate of baked pasta, bubbling with cheese on top—their staff family meal. She immediately asked for a second plate and poured (far more than half) of the heaping portion onto it for me.

The food kept coming: falafel and cheese borek and baba ganoush. As Kordia poured me a bowl of molokhia, a savory jute leaf and chicken stew, she told me how people in her native Palestine eat it with crushed green chilis and lemon juice, while Syrians tend to have it with vinegar, onions, and fried pita. She made sure I tried it both ways—I preferred the added kick from the lemony chilis. I left Nouri loaded with our leftovers and clear instructions: Freeze the molokhia—it freezes well; have the dips and falafel for dinner.

Leqaa Kordia likes to feed people. But she hasn’t been eating much herself lately.

In March 2025, Kordia was arrested during a routine immigration appointment in New Jersey and shipped 1,500 miles away to Prairieland Detention Center outside Dallas. She was one of several people detained by ICE under the Trump administration after protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Kordia spent a full year in ICE jail—“I don’t like the word detention. It’s jail,” she says—despite facing no criminal charges. Her case shows how the administration has used the machinery of immigration enforcement to punish pro-Palestinian speech, and her experience inside reveals just how inhumane that punishment is. Now, Kordia lives in limbo: free from jail but unsure if she’ll be allowed to stay.

Kordia first came to the United States from the West Bank 10 years ago to reunite with her mother, an American citizen living in Paterson, home to one of the largest Palestinian diaspora communities in the country. This trip was Kordia’s first time leaving Palestine, her first time on a plane. She was leaving everything she knew behind: her friends and family, the place she called home, the Ka’ak Al Quds (Jerusalem bagel) from her favorite bakery, the taste of Palestinian water she still craves. But she was joining her mother.

“It’s the mother’s hug,” she says. “You can have all the problems in the world, but as soon as you get between your mother’s arms, it all goes away. That was the thing I was most longing for.” She remembers her first bite of mansaf—tender lamb slow-cooked in fermented yogurt and served over rice, cooked by her mom and her mom’s best friend—after her long, tiring travels.

Kordia built a life in Paterson. She learned English, made friends, and savored the stuffing and yams of her first Thanksgiving. “I like going to the salon. I love road trips. I love going to some museums, not all museums,” she says. She prefers going to the movies alone. “I don’t like anybody to talk to me while I’m watching…I was a very simple girl. I’m still a very simple girl. Or woman, I should say.”

Then the genocide began. The unfolding horror in her homeland, the intensification of the ongoing Nakba, became a constant presence in Kordia’s life. She has had over 200 extended family members killed by Israeli strikes. “It is impossible to not think about it,” she says. “You have a house, you have a roof on top of your head, you have food, you’re working, you’re studying, you’re traveling, while your family, your own people are starving, being ethnically cleansed, dehumanized and killed. They’re living in tents and walking miles to get a small gallon of water.”

Kordia found that she couldn’t eat much. When she tried, she would remember her family members who were being forced to starve by the Israeli government. “The feeling of guilt, the feeling of being helpless, are really two of the worst feelings ever.” She would go to protests, including one at Columbia University, where she was briefly arrested on charges of failure to disperse. All charges were later dropped. “I’m not an organizer. I’m not an activist. I’m simply a human being. Forget that I’m Palestinian. I’m a human being who protested against an ongoing genocide,” she says.

Kordia had been on a student visa while she studied English in Paterson, and petitioned for permanent residency through her mother. In 2021, the petition was approved. Based on incorrect legal advice at the time, she understood this to mean that she had legal status while she awaited her green card, so she let her student visa lapse.

On a cool morning, March 13, 2025, Kordia had an immigration appointment in Newark. She had been told there was some sort of issue with her application, “which was weird to me, because if there is an issue with the application they send you a mail or something.” But she wasn’t worried. “I hadn’t done anything wrong… I was like, ‘OK, everything is changing.’” She wore sneakers and sweatpants, ready for a long day of bureaucratic meetings.

Kordia drove to the immigration building with her stepdad and sister, and met her lawyer there. As she entered, her lawyer was stopped at the door and Kordia was arrested. She was led through long hallways with doors on either side, up and down staircases, “like a maze.” They took her possessions, “they stole my shoelaces, by the way. I’m still mad at this.” Then she was left in an “extremely cold” cell with just a small stool in it. She sat there for hours. This was during Ramadan, so Kordia was fasting. “I was hungry, thirsty, terrified, worried, confused—all these feelings at the same moment,” she says.

She was given papers to sign with no explanation. They asked if she wanted an immigration judge or not. “I tried to read, to understand, but all this immigration law is very complicated,” she says. She figured, “OK, I’ll take an immigration judge. Thankfully. Apparently, if you signed that you don’t want an immigration judge, that means you’re signing your deportation.”

The ICE agents seemed “very, very confused” about her case. They asked her why she was there. “I don’t know, you got me here… isn’t this the right thing to do?” Her family and lawyer were told she would be going to an ICE facility in upstate New York. Instead, she was taken in an unmarked car to Newark Airport. She was escorted onto a United Airlines flight to Dallas. When the New Jersey ICE agents passed her off to the Texas ones, she remembers them saying, “This is her file. Good luck understanding it.” She was then driven to Prairieland Detention Center, one of the most notorious ICE prisons in America.

Kordia’s arrest came amid the Trump administration’s broader targeting of students and campus protesters who had spoken out against Israel’s war in Gaza. On March 8, 2025, Columbia graduate student and green-card-holder Mahmoud Khalil was arrested in the lobby of his apartment building. He spent 104 days at the LaSalle Detention Center in Louisiana. On March 25, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts doctoral student, was grabbed off a street in Somerville, Massachusetts, by plainclothes ICE agents while on her way to break fast; she had cowritten an op-ed in her student paper calling for divestment. She spent six weeks in ICE jails. On April 14, Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested when he appeared for a citizenship interview in Vermont. He was held for 16 days. Kordia would be jailed for 368.

“I thought I was educated about the ICE jails,” Kordia tells me. She had read testimonies and investigations about the facilities. “Nothing comes close to what the place actually is, how horrible the place actually is.”

Kordia arrived at Prairieland around midnight, and waited in intake for about five hours. When she finally got to the dorm, she was shocked by how crowded it was. Prairieland was at nearly double its capacity for much of her stay. There was no bunk for her, or even a “boat,” a plastic tub used as a bed in overcrowded jails, so she took her “paper-thin” mattress and slept on the floor that first night. She would then sleep on one of those plastic boats for her first three months.

It took several days before Kordia was put on the proper Ramadan schedule for her meals. When she wasn’t fasting, she says, the food was barely edible—rotten, disgusting, and lacking nutrition. She remembers opening the tray of her first breakfast and seeing slimy grey mush staring back at her. “I swear I almost vomited. It looked horrible. It was horrible.” This flavorless oatmeal was topped with a soggy slice of bread. On the side was about a tablespoon of powdered eggs. Lunches and dinners consisted of “really disgusting bad soy meat” patties. There might be canned green beans and carrots. They often had beans, “lots and lots of beans. Like half of the tray will be just black beans or red beans.” Sometimes they had a piece of hotdog meat with shredded cabbage. Once a week they were given a small piece of real chicken. Almost every meal included a large piece of “cake,” a thick, dry bread Kordia believes helped the jails meet their caloric requirements cheaply. Water could be discolored or have “things swimming in it.” If women had the funds to buy water bottles from the commissary, they were limited to five bottles a week.

Kordia couldn’t eat much. Now many others, still inside ICE facilities, are choosing hunger. This spring, detainees at Prairieland and at least five other facilities across the country have launched hunger strikes to protest the conditions Kordia describes. At Delaney Hall in Newark—just miles from where Kordia was first arrested—nearly 300 detainees signed letters describing decaying food containing worms among other “torturous” and “inhumane” conditions. Their accounts match widespread and documented complaints, including from the Department of Homeland Security’s own inspectors, who have found moldy bread, spoiled meat, and food handling “so substandard” that kitchen managers were replaced mid-inspection. These for-profit ICE jails reportedly spend less than a dollar per meal. While the profits of LaSalle Corrections, which operates Prairieland, are private and difficult to track, GEO Group, which operates Delaney Hall reported a record $254 million in profit in 2025, up 700 percent from the year prior. As these companies rake in record profits, the conditions they create have led to severe health issues and more than 50 deaths in ICE detention since Trump took office.

Kordia saw, and later learned, how the stress of detention and lack of nutritious meals left many around her sick. “A lot of the pregnant ladies used to have this unimaginable pain in their stomach…their limbs would go numb,” Kordia says. The “special nutrition” the pregnant prisoners were given was shredded lettuce. When Kordia received apples during Ramadan, she gave them to a different woman each day—she likes to feed. Kordia heard the story of a pregnant prisoner who miscarried in the bathroom and was promptly deported the next day. “If a baby was born with any problem, ICE is the one responsible for this. The government is the one responsible for this.”

Kordia faced health issues of her own. One night she developed a terrible fever. “I literally thought that I was gonna die that night,” she says. Despite her complaints, she was not treated, not even given ibuprofen. Instead, it was her fellow imprisoned women who cared for her, using their own commissary funds to buy her hot soup or make cold water pads for her forehead. After a few days with this fever, Kordia had the first seizure of her life. She was sitting in the dorm reading. The next thing she remembers is waking up on the floor of the bathroom with a nurse telling her not to move. It was terrifying. She was taken to the hospital and spent three days with her hands and legs chained to the bed. “I said, ‘Please, it’s hurting me. It’s heavy,’” Kordia says. It was a thick chain attached to a handcuff holding her down. “I told [the ICE guard], ‘Please, can you please just remove the chain from my hand, if you want to keep my leg, fine, but my hand?’ She said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Because I said so.’”

Kordia had a second seizure in April, after her release. She has now been officially diagnosed with epilepsy. After rarely needing the doctor in her first three decades, she now has to go regularly for scans and tests. She loved road trips. She can no longer drive, swim, or hike alone.

When we spoke in late May, Kordia was hoping to make it seven months without another incident, at which point her doctors told her she might be able to reduce her medication. On Saturday June 13, she had another seizure, her third. The clock resets for Kordia now, who wrote in a social-media statement: “The harm ICE inflicted on me didn’t end when I walked out of detention. It’s continued to have a lasting impact on my health and my life.”

Despite all she faces, Kordia is wary of sounding like she’s complaining. “Thinking of the thousands of Palestinian prisoners who are still tortured, abused, raped, starved, humiliated every single day, it makes me feel shy, ashamed to complain.”

Leqaa Kordia spent this horrific year in ICE jail without being charged with a crime. The DHS characterized the Columbia protests she attended as “pro-Hamas” and claimed that the money she was sending to family overseas was supporting terrorism. They never produced any evidence to support these claims and wholly abandoned them in court, according to her legal team. On two different occasions, an immigration judge ordered her released on bail. Both times, the government invoked the rare automatic stay to keep her detained.

Four months into Kordia’s imprisonment, on the Fourth of July, fireworks burst outside the fences of Prairieland. Demonstrators had gathered outside the detention center, hoping those inside would hear them. Nine of those protesters have since been convicted on terrorism charges—for acts ranging from moving a box of zines to shooting a police officer—and sentenced to terms from 30 years to 100. Kordia was imprisoned for speaking out against a genocide. Those who protested the system that detained her now face their own imprisonment—sweeping, cyclical suppression of dissent.

On March 16, after the third time an immigration judge ordered her release, Kordia heard a guard tell her to pack her things. “They called my name, ‘Kordia. Pack your stuff.’ This is a very scary word. Pack your stuff. It means either you’re going to be deported or you’re going to be transferred. Very, very rarely [does it mean] you’re going to be released.” Two ICE agents guided her back to intake and gave her a bag with her property. She asked where her shoelaces were. They didn’t have them.

Kordia was released. She saw the wide Texas sky. In the jails, they had limited outdoor space, behind big fences with barbed wire. “I always used to say that I see the sky cut up [in jail]. It’s a cut up sky; it’s a not full sky.” Now she saw the full sky. Looking up at it, she took her first steps out of Prairieland. Then she tripped and twisted her ankle—she wasn’t looking down at the stairs.

Still, hobbling, Kordia was thrilled to be out. She broke her first iftar with members of the Dallas Muslim community at a Yemeni restaurant, eating lamb mandi, shank falling off the bone. “It was weird to eat a piece of lamb. I was looking at the lamb, it was real lamb, I couldn’t believe it was real meat… and I drank mint tea. I almost cried.”

She is always thinking of the women still inside, who became a support system. The women who took care of her, whom she made sure to feed what she could. “We would laugh together, we would cry together. When someone had court, we would pray for each other,” she says. In these ICE jails, Kordia didn’t see threats to the US. She saw “mothers, daughters, grandmothers, doctors, students, housekeepers, nurses, teachers, farmers, people who work in supermarkets, at restaurants. All they did was dream. Dream of a better future for them and their family. This is the American dream, right?”

A few days later, Kordia was back in Paterson in time for Eid celebrations with her community. “The first time I hugged my mother, it was really—there’s no words to describe this.”

I attended a press conference at City Hall held upon Kordia’s return to Paterson. The walls were hung with banners of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; the chambers buzzed with the energy of a homecoming. Family friends greeted one another with salam alaikum and Eid Mubarak. There was a joyousness to the event, a smiling resilience that shone through the horrific reason for this reunion. The mayor spoke, as did advocates and Kordia’s legal team. “Her obscurity was not accidental,” they said. Mahmoud Khalil, bound to Kordia through a suffering they uniquely share, took the podium: “I never felt I was fully free knowing you were still in there.” Then Kordia rose to speak to a standing ovation. Tears were wiped away, but the joy held. She stood at the podium in a brown pantsuit. She read from her phone. She made nervous jokes. She was a 33-year-old woman looking out at her community, not the symbol she has been forced to become.

Since getting out, Kordia has been building back her appetite. During these celebrations, restaurants around the neighborhood would invite her for meals. She ate kabobs and lamb over rice. She had lots of zaatar pies: “Anywhere I went, I ordered zaatar pie.” I ask Kordia about the joy with which she holds herself, the verve I witnessed among her community. “Well, joy is a form of resistance,” she says. “Palestinians, we find happiness in everything; we make jokes of everything. I remember my father used to make jokes every time the Israeli soldiers would raid our house. They would be inside our house, and my father [would be] telling jokes. So that’s in our blood. We find the happiness.”

Still, Kordia is entering a new phase of her life filled with lots of uncertainty. She can’t work or travel. The US government’s deportation case against her remains ongoing. She fears deportation could amount to a death sentence. Not only because of the ongoing genocide but also because Israel has expanded the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of offenses it classifies as terrorism. According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, “these military courts have an approximately 96% conviction rate, based largely on ‘confessions’ extracted under duress and torture during interrogations.”

“I wasn’t released to my regular life. I was released to a totally new life,” she says. Now her days are spent on media interviews, legal meetings, and doctor visits. She considers herself “just a simple woman” who didn’t choose any of this. “But I’m thankful. Thankful that I have the platform to advocate for my rights and my freedom and the freedom of my people. To tell my story and the ICE prisoners’ stories. I’m thankful. But it is not easy.”

Leqaa Kordia likes to feed people. She once dreamt of opening a restaurant, “a unique restaurant where, when you enter, it feels like you’re entering an old Palestinian home. It’s not just providing food but providing books, culture, all of that,” she says. “So that was one of my dreams, but, yeah…”

I ask Kordia if she still has this dream, if she still can dream. “I’m still dreaming. No one can stop me from dreaming,” she says. “But I can’t make decisions; I can’t take steps. Because I don’t know if I’m going to be here or I’m going to be deported. And if I’m deported, I don’t know if I’m going to be alive or killed. You can’t make decisions with certainty during this time with so much uncertainty,” she adds. “But one day, one day.”

“For your safety, please back away from the stage,” a man’s voice boomed through the speakers of the main stage at the Great American State Fair during a typical sweltering day on the National Mall. It was July 4—the busiest day the fair had seen after a week’s worth of lackluster attendance and early closures due to the heat and drizzling rain. Organized by the private-public group Freedom 250, the fair was meant to be the pride and joy of President Donald Trump—a capstone to a semiquincentennial celebration kicked off by a UFC cage match on the White House lawn for Trump’s 80th birthday. Yet, for a brief moment on the country’s anniversary, it seemed like Trump and the MAGA faithful might have the last laugh over the liberal media (myself included) who had insulted the fair and its attendance: The place was packed.

The moment didn’t last. Wind gusts blew dust onto everyone, lifting up a tent and knocking down a section of the temporary fencing. “For your safety, please back away from the stage,” the frustrated crowd monitor begged again over the sound system.

As the crew slowly lowered the large audio speakers from the sides of the stages, a loud whoosh overhead drew the attention of the crowd. A nearby out-of-state trooper started to take down the decorative Freedom 250 tarps tied to the fences as they flapped ominously in the strong wind. Meanwhile, cheers erupted from the crowd as the planes for the military flyover continued zipping back and forth.

It was confusing, but a lot of things about the fair were confusing. Had I missed an announcement about why the stage was shutting down? Why would anyone want to stand facing the main stage, when it was an obvious visual obstruction for the fireworks? The fair runs until July 10, so it was far from clear why police and other security personnel were taking apart installations on the fair’s busiest day.

The answer came against the roar of the flyover. “Due to approaching severe weather, we are temporarily pausing the event,” another loudspeaker notification announced. This declaration didn’t carry the same exasperated tone that the crowd monitor did; it was delivered by the now-familiar robotic voice that presided over early closures at Freedom250 festivities. This message would play on repeat for the next 75 minutes, but most of the attendees weren’t paying it any attention.

And why would they? Not only had they waited hours to get in, but the show was still going on—particularly the relentless formations of F-35s, B-1s, and F-22s overhead. A couple screamed with joy and high-fived one another after one set flew by. A few guys threw a football back and forth across the lawn of the Mall. The line to get into the display area for the state of Florida was as long as ever, though a single National Guardsman stood blocking the door.. Families held their spots on the ground, oblivious to the closure announcements. “Are we really evacuating?” I asked one of the US Marshals assigned to patrol the fair. “I mean, I know we are supposed to, but…” I waved my hand at the crowd.

We were, he said, “but no one gives a rat’s ass.”

Half an hour after the “temporary pause” announcement, a few members of the Guard started to yell for people to leave. A handful of troops slowly corralled people across the lawn, or at least tried to. Even as they told everyone to leave, fairgoers asked for photos with them. Several Guard members huddled around one of the picnic tables, trying to convince the people who had staked it out to leave. People in Freedom 250 T-shirts also demanded that everyone leave—and again, with virtually no results. Eventually, police on motorcycles cruised onto the fairgrounds. Once it became clear getting arrested was a possibility, people slowly trickled to the exit.

As we reached the edge of the gates, more Guard members stopped us in order to allow an emergency vehicle to pass, while people in the line heckled them. “I thought it was so important we had to leave!”

The execution of this poorly planned evacuation didn’t improve beyond the grounds of the great State Fair. Once we were all the way out, there was nowhere to go. No one instructed the crowd to shelter in museums—the only buildings nearby and open on the holiday—and as it turned out, they were full by this point, anyway. So we all stood in the street, trying to figure out where the line would form again. National Guard troops and Homeland Security agents tried to direct the crowd, but clearly had no idea where anyone should go. From time to time, people cried out for the help of medics. Numerous emergency vehicles drove through the crowd at close quarters.

Eventually, I’d had enough. I jumped the bike racks provisionally corralling the crowd , and left the area. I passed groups of people, many in MAGA hats, huddled together in doorways, under awnings, and at the entrances of parking garages. Children were crying; parents were tired. But everyone still wanted to hear the president’s speech and see the fireworks, which would only come hours later. Reports from those who stayed in line indicate that the entrance never actually reopened, and the fireworks were fully obstructed from the crowd’s view—but over a mile away, far from the fairgrounds, we had a perfect view of the show.

As for the fair, it has since returned to its roots: There are no lines for entry, and numerous panels featuring administration officials mocking journalists to a crowd of 30 people. If you’re in need of solitude and would like to visit the fair for yourself, you have until July 10. Fair warning, though: It’s supposed to rain much the rest of the week.

On May 1, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted about what his company hopes to achieve with artificial intelligence. “We want to build tools to augment and elevate people,” he wrote, “not entities to replace them.”

The statement was no doubt meant to calm the millions of nerves jangled by the cascade of layoffs that have accompanied the arrival of AI, with scores more predicted in the coming years. The problem is that, until very recently, Altman has been making it clear not only that “entire classes of jobs will go away” but also that he doesn’t envision humanity existing in its current form for long.

In a 2017 blog post, he argued that our best chance of surviving the rise of artificial superintelligence will be to “merge” with the machines. He wrote that “we will be the first species ever to design our own descendants,” and “we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.” Altman was arguing, effectively, that there are two possible outcomes for the ASI age. Artificial superintelligence might get rid of our species; the “bad case,” he warned in 2023, is “lights out for all of us.” Or humanity could survive the advent of ASI by integrating ourselves into the digital world, becoming one with our digital progeny.

What might this “merge” look like? Altman has suggested it might start off with people becoming “really close friends with a chatbot.” But “the full-on-crazy version,” he told The New Yorker in 2016, “is we get our brains uploaded into the cloud. I’d love that.” Altman himself has signed up with a company called Nectome to have is brain “uploaded” to a computer when he dies. He’s already taking steps to become an AI himself.

The implications of Altman’s future-casting are radical and raise serious questions for anyone interested in our collective future. These questions include: Who will own the computers on which digital minds exist? Who will have the opportunity to “merge” with ASI once it arrives—everyone around the world? Billionaires and poor people alike? MAGA supporters and the “woke” left? Obviously not. The tech oligarchs who run our country will never permit the masses to join them on “the cloud.” These people live in gated communities, have their own apocalypse bunkers, and want to flee Earth for Mars. Their whole schtick is separating themselves from the masses, building a socioeconomic firewall between them and us. As the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff notes in his 2022 book Survival of the Richest, the billionaires want to upload their minds to the digital realm because it provides the ultimate escape hatch from the world they’re destroying. The digital afterlife is not for the 99.9 percent.

At least as serious is the question of what “merging” with AI would require of the human organism. Uploaded minds would have no physical body. They would exist as mere software floating in a digital ether—creatures in the form of pure information. They would never age, because software is immortal, and they could share memories, personality traits, and experiences with one another at the metaphorical click of a button. The boundaries between individuals would become porous, and everyone would meld into a giant amorphous digital hive mind. Consequently, uploaded humans would be so different from biological humans that we would classify them as forming an entirely novel species, which we can call “digital posthumans.”

As for what might happen if we don’t become digital posthumans, Altman predicted a kind of Terminator-level “conflict” that could end either with their enslavement—or ours. “We need to level up humans,” Altman told The New Yorker, “because our descendants will either conquer the galaxy or extinguish consciousness in the universe forever. What a time to be alive!”

Altman’s account of the future is an instance of what I call “digital eschatology,” where “eschatology” refers to a belief system or narrative framed around the end of the world as we know it. Adherents of this view believe that the future will—and should—be dominated by digital rather than biological beings. It finds expression in Elon Musk’s claim that, because of AI, biological “intelligence” will soon constitute less than 1 percent of all the “intelligence” on Earth. Larry Page, cofounder of Google, has reportedly argued that “digital life is the natural and desirable next step in… cosmic evolution and that if we let digital minds be free rather than try to stop or enslave them, the outcome is almost certain to be good.” Like Altman, he imagines humans eventually “merging” with AI such that “one day there would be many kinds of intelligence competing for resources, and the best would win.”

In 2012, Page personally recruited Ray Kurzweil, the famed futurist and transhumanist, to work at Google. Kurzweil argues that the “singularity”—when humans merge with machines—is imminent, and that if you choose not to upgrade yourself, then “you won’t be around for very long to influence the debate.” Become posthuman or die out.

A former Kurzweil collaborator, Eliezer Yudkowsky, similarly claims that “the happy future” is one in which people have been transformed into magical digital beings living in computer simulations that are “powered by the sun.” He suggests that these posthumans might then “clear all the humans off the earth and leave the entire place as a park.” On another occasion, he argued that it’s so important for there to be superintelligent AIs in the future that he would willingly sacrifice “all of humanity” to create such beings if it were the “only…reliable” way to make this happen.

As rank and untethered as these views are—and as much as they now serve to boost the narrative that AI is inevitable and can only be entrusted to our current tech elite—they are also an orthodox religious view within Silicon Valley. From leading scientists to young researchers, from tech CEOs to AI futurists, from AI “doomers” to “accelerationists,” nearly everyone agrees about one thing: The future will be digital. The age of biological humans is coming to an end, and the role of our species in this grand eschatological scheme is to initiate the new era of digital lifeforms—to trigger the singularity by creating superhuman AIs that usher in what Yudkowsky calls our “glorious transhumanist future.”

The advent of this digital era might seem like a distant possibility. Yet the CEOs of DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic all predict that ASI will arrive within five years—meaning that it could be here as soon as this year or as late as the early 2030s. According to Musk, who founded xAI (which recently merged with SpaceX), we’re already in “the very early stages of the singularity.” Altman agrees, declaring in a 2016 interview that “the merge has begun.” He reiterated this view in a 2025 blog post, arguing that “the takeoff has started,” although he tempered his pronouncement slightly by adding that this process will unfold in a gradual manner. “The singularity happens bit by bit,” he wrote, “and the merge happens slowly.”

To be sure, humanity has been “merging” with technology since the origins of our evolutionary genus, Homo. The first human species, Homo habilis, crafted stone tools to scrape meat from bones, among other things. These stone tools could be seen as technological “enhancements” of the human body, and consequently one could conceptualize our ancient ancestors as rudimentary “cyborgs.” Today, people have pacemakers to control their heart rhythms, electrodes in their brains to ease the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and cochlear implants to restore hearing. Many of us offload parts of our memories to computers. I doubt most people could recite their friends’ phone numbers; what’s the point of memorizing them when our smartphones can do it for us?

There is, however, a crucial difference between technologies that enhance humanity as humanity and those that would transform us into something completely different. The “merge” that Altman and other Silicon Valley extremists want to bring about would entail fundamental changes to the very nature of being human, because the ultimate goal, in Altman’s words, is to “crazy uplevel” people by reengineering them into digital posthumans.

Whereas I, and most people outside the Bay Area, advocate for technologies that improve the human condition, the tech elite advocate for technologies that would ultimately replace it with a new posthuman condition. That’s the point of “the merge”: to transition our species into a new digital era, whether you and I want this or not.

Alarmingly, we see evidence of “the merge” all around us today. Altman is correct that this process has already started—and that should worry us.

Consider that many students are now outsourcing critical thinking skills to AI. One study found that “more than half of teens” are using AI to complete their schoolwork. At the end of last year, I asked my class of 350 students at Case Western Reserve University to raise their hands if they know of someone in the class who used AI chatbots to generate an entire assignment at some point during the semester. To my chagrin, two-thirds raised their hands, despite my co-instructor’s and my insisting that they eschew AI.

One undergraduate told me that nearly everyone in his pre-med cohort uses AI to complete most of their coursework, as this frees up time for internships. If I were to walk into the pre-med library, he said, I’d find nearly every computer with ChatGPT open in a window. And students aren’t the only ones offloading the labor of thinking. Studies show that six in 10 teachers are now delegating grading tasks to AI, meaning that there’s no human in the loop at all: AIs are generating term papers that are then evaluated by AIs.

Critical thinking is a core capacity of the human mind. It’s what enables us to evaluate, analyze, and synthesize information. By offloading such skills to AI, young people are becoming dependent on it for even simple cognitive tasks. They are essentially “merging” with AI by integrating it into their cognitive systems, alongside other brain structures like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. If AI were to become suddenly unavailable, these students might experience the loss as a serious if reversible form of brain damage. This coupling of human brains with AI is a small but nontrivial step toward Altman’s goal of radical cyborgization.

Another manifestation of “the merge” concerns the way AI is replacing people in our social lives. We are in the grips of a loneliness pandemic, which impacts 18- to 24-year-olds the most. Consequently, many young people are turning to AI to satisfy their need for friendship, belonging, and even romance.

AI is designed to be sycophantic—to validate users with affirmations and constant flattery. Befriending AI requires no emotional effort or social skills, and one can turn to it at any time of the day—or night—to share one’s deepest secrets. Even more, AI “girlfriends” and “boyfriends” can be specifically designed by users to exhibit desired traits, and there’s no hassle if one opts to suddenly end the relationship. This makes AI especially appealing for young people isolated in a world torn apart by capitalism and technology.

One study from the nonprofit Common Sense Media found that 72 percent of teens in the US use AI for companionship, while another reports that “28% of Americans have had an intimate/romantic relationship” with AI. The AI girlfriend app OurDream has over 10 million users, while the AI companionship app Replika boasts of 30 million. More than 150 million people have used Snapchat’s My AI, and ChatGPT has 900 million active users per week. According to a Harvard Business School study, the number-one use of chatbots is “therapy” and “companionship.” This fits with Altman’s description of one form of “merging,” whereby people form “really close” bonds with chatbots.

Similar trends are found in the workplace. One person I’m close with tells me that he often uses AI as a coworker, delegating certain tedious tasks to it. But soon he may not have a job if AI CEOs like Dario Amodei are right that “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs” in the coming years. Altman’s OpenAI even defines “AGI” (artificial general intelligence, the precursor to ASI) as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.” This is why the AI bubble has grown so large: Companies are banking on not having to pay human workers. Instead, they’ll pay far less in subscription fees to companies like OpenAI and Anthropic for access to AI workers that never sleep and never complain. Replacing humans with AI in the workplace is yet another step toward a world dominated by artificial entities rather than human beings.

Or consider how AI bands are now competing with real artists on streaming services. Last year, AI-generated songs reached “the highest spots on Spotify and Billboard charts,” and an AI “artist” named Xania Monet reportedly landed a record deal worth millions. Our social-media feeds are flooded with AI-generated videos, with many viewers unable to tell the difference between deepfakes and human-created content. According to Janice Min, a longtime Hollywood media executive, studios are now using AI more than they publicly admit. It was even “used to help enhance the Hungarian accents of lead actors” in the Oscar-winning film The Brutalist, according to Futurism.

The effect of this encroachment of AI into every corner of our lives—and society more generally—is to inure us to the push to digitize the whole world. It is conditioning us to accept the digital eschatology advocated by people in Silicon Valley.

This conditioning is further reinforced, in subtle but effective ways, by claims from AI boosters that human beings are fundamentally no different from the large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots like ChatGPT. During an interview last year, Altman complained: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model… But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.” This view simultaneously anthropomorphizes AI while dehumanizing people. It suggests that we are just biological forms of AI that undergo a “training” process not all that different from LLMs. It implies that we’re distinguished from AI in degree rather than kind.

On another occasion, Altman wrote on X: “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.” The phrase “stochastic parrot” was introduced by the linguist Emily Bender to describe how LLMs work: They stochastically—i.e., through a probabilistic process—string words together into sentences, based on patterns in their vast training data. They are not “thinking” in the same sense as what you and I do. Yet Altman claims the opposite: All our human brains do is stochastically concatenate words into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs. We are bio-LLMs, siblings to the LLMs crafted in AI laboratories.

The implication is that transitioning to a world dominated by digital beings won’t be as radical as you’d think. Consider that every 30 years or so, a generation of humans dies out and a new generation replaces it. No one finds this problematic. However, if LLMs are fundamentally similar to humans, then replacing humanity with AI would be no different than one human generation replacing another. We are all one big family, so a world overrun by AIs wouldn’t constitute a dramatic transformation after all. Nor would “merging” with AI, as this would amount to nothing but one type of LLM fusing with another. That is Altman’s point.

For those of us on Team Human—rather than Team Posthuman—who don’t want digital beings to replace our species, we must be vigilant about the slow creep of AI normalcy. Each small step toward a digital future may appear relatively trivial: “All” AI is doing is writing students’ term papers, providing companionship, assisting people in the workplace, generating songs on Spotify, and so on. To be sure, there are plenty of people upset about these changes. But after initial protestations, many of us become acclimated to the new function of AI in our lives and society.

We must resist this normalization, because the end result will be a world in which our species is disempowered, sidelined, and ultimately expunged. As AI takes over, humans will become increasingly obsolete—economically, scientifically, politically, and technologically. Obsolescence makes us disposable, and that’s precisely what will happen: The elites will “merge” with AI to survive the arrival of superintelligence, while the rest of us will be left behind. By Altman’s own account, we will be enslaved and then eliminated. And that is, once again, his “best-case scenario” for the future.

But there’s still time to stop this from happening. We can resist the push to realize Silicon Valley’s dream of digital eschatology by fighting back against the AI companies. Boycotts, protests, data poisoning, and pressuring our representatives to regulate the AI industry are all necessary. The further down this path we go, the harder it will be to reverse course. We don’t want to end up like the proverbial frogs in a pot of boiling water. Hence, for Team Human, there is a certain moral urgency to resisting the eschatology of Silicon Valley.

Altman claims that OpenAI is not trying to build “entities to replace” us. But that is precisely what will happen if the AI bros get their way and their own predictions come to pass.

Just when one might think the FIFA greed machine couldn’t possibly whir at a higher, more grating pitch, the barons at the world’s governing body for soccer always seem to find a higher gear.

Weeks ahead of the World Cup, FIFA announced that it was partnering with ADI Predictstreet in “a landmark multi-year partnership” as “the first-ever Official Partner for the prediction market category.” The response from most FIFA watchers was, “What the hell is ADI Predictstreet?” After all, as investigative journalists at the soccer magazine Josimar revealed at the time, ADI Predictstreet had “no working product yet” and was “unlicensed in almost all jurisdictions.” Moreover, the shadowy entity was bankrolled by the Abu Dhabi royal family and run by Ajay Bhatia, an Emirati citizen of Indian descent who, after being accused of insider trading by India’s Security and Exchange Board, agreed to a £130,000 settlement and a voluntary six-month trading ban. The deal bore the standard corporate caveat: Bhatia neither had to admit nor deny wrongdoing.

Then, two weeks into the World Cup, the prediction market leviathan Kalshi signed an agreement with ADI Predictstreet, becoming a partner and making Kalshi an official FIFA sponsor. Its logo now flashes across the perimeter boards inside World Cup stadiums in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Because Kalshi joined partway through the tournament, it scored the deal at bargain-basement rates: a reported $20 million, whereas FIFA had originally floated a $150 million partnership package to Kalshi, one the company refused. Typical FIFA partnerships, depending on the tier, range from $65 million to around $100 million per year.

With Donald Trump Jr. a “strategic partner” at Kalshi—as well as an investor through his venture capital firm 1789 Capital—the deal looks like yet another example of smash-and-grab casino capitalism.

The deal arrives at a time when sports betting has become a scourge on the sport of soccer. High-profile examples of corruption abound.

In 2023, the Italian football association banned Italy international and Newcastle United midfielder Sandro Tonali for 10 months for betting on matches in which he was playing. That same year, English striker Ivan Toney received an eight-month ban for illegal sports bets—many placed on his own team to lose. The penalty would have been longer had Toney not been diagnosed with a gambling addiction as part of the investigation. Toney is on the England roster at the 2026 World Cup. And when he looks up from the bench (he has yet to log a single minute on the pitch), he is confronted with ads for ADI Predictstreet and Kalshi that are plastered around the stadium.

Soccer’s gambling problem doesn’t end there. Only a few months before the 2026 World Cup kicked off, Major League Soccer handed lifetime bans to two players—Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah—for placing bets on soccer, including gambling that involved their own matches. And just two weeks before the tournament, Elye Wahi, the Ivory Coast player who featured in the 2026 World Cup, was arrested in France for sports betting–related offenses .

But such ethical complications do not seem to trouble FIFA. Under President Gianni Infantino, FIFA plans on raking in more than $11 billion in revenues from the 2026 men’s World Cup alone, a staggering sum that surpasses the gross domestic product of more than 60 countries, including tournament participants Cabo Verde and Curaçao.

Despite being an official FIFA partner, ADI Predictstreet was barely in the game. Betting through the company was moderate at best. Some matches reportedly attracted a measly $20 in bets. Enter Kalshi, which had racked up some $10 billion World Cup wagers during the first two weeks of the tournament alone.

To say that sports betting is a public-health concern is to make a massive understatement. In the United States, around 2.5 million adults—or 1 percent of the population—meet the National Council on Problem Gambling’s criteria for a “severe” gambling problem. As John Semley wrote last year in The Nation, “Another 5 to 8 million show signs of ‘mild or moderate’ gambling problems. As many as half of Americans who have sought help for problem gambling have considered suicide. And roughly 20 percent of the people with severe gambling problems have made attempts on their life.”

In the bigger picture, what Semley calls “gamblification” both takes advantage of and reproduces “two of the most lamentable tendencies of modern life: hyper-speculation on economic assets and widespread social atomization.” The World Cup is supposed to bring people together. But FIFA’s newest partners are pressing in the opposite direction, sacrificing public health on the altar of profit while setting a perilous precedent for other sports-governance bodies.

Aside from rescinding the harmful partnership, which is less likely than FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s successfully executing a corner kick, there are steps that everyday soccer fans can take to fight back against FIFA’s depredation and greed.

The London-based nonprofit FairSquare has launched a “Reboot FIFA” campaign to address the desecration of the people’s game that this prediction market partnership represents. (Full disclosure: I serve on FairSquare’s advisory board.) Anyone can sign their name onto what FairSquare hopes to be the biggest-ever class-action complaint against FIFA, which the group is delivering to FIFA’s Ethics Committee (yes, it actually has one) and to the European Parliament.

The campaign is already netting attention. Halfway through the 2026 World Cup, the news broke that 50 members of the European Parliament are formally demanding that FIFA investigate FairSquare’s ethics complaint against Infantino over his move to hand-deliver Donald Trump the FIFA Peace Prize as well as allegations that Infantino has repeatedly breached FIFA’s own statutes that require “political neutrality.” (It’s hard to see how Infantino arriving at Trump’s Board of Peace meeting sporting a MAGA-style red cap emblazoned with “USA” and “45-47” is a politically neutral act.)

More and more people are coming to the realization that avarice is FIFA’s bailiwick and ethics are its bane. Trump’s recent intervention to overturn US men’s national team player Folarin Balogun’s red-card suspension—the US president called his FIFA BFF Gianni Infantino to ask him to reconsider the one-match suspension—has only rankled more people inside the FIFA orbit. Meanwhile, anti-FIFA activists have been organizing protests at numerous World Cup venues. The battle against FIFA greed is sure to continue. You can bet on it.