Adam Serwer | The Atlantic

Pete Hegseth Is Trying to Resegregate the Military

2026-04-08T16:55:00-04:00

Service in wartime has long been a reliable path for Americans denied full citizenship to secure their rights. Black troops’ contributions to the Union cause during the Civil War helped convince Abraham Lincoln of the righteousness of extending suffrage to Black men. Women’s work on the home front during World War I persuaded a reluctant Woodrow Wilson to urge passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a “war measure.” The military’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was followed a few years later by the Supreme Court’s recognition of the marriage rights of same-sex couples.

Perhaps the Trump administration is hoping the process works just as well in reverse.

Despite the conflict with Iran and other recent military activity overseas, the Pentagon seems focused on purging minorities and women. Last week, NBC News reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had intervened to block or delay the promotions of more than a dozen Black and female senior officers. According to both NBC and The New York Times, some officials are concerned that officers are being targeted because of their race, gender, or perceived political affiliation. In one instance last year, Hegseth’s chief of staff, Ricky Buria, bluntly stated that “President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events,” the Times reported. (Buria denied this.)

The Pentagon told NBC and the Times that promotions under Hegseth are “apolitical and unbiased.” Nevertheless, the episode is part of a broader pattern. So far, Trump and Hegseth have dismissed or forced the retirements of several high-ranking Black and/or female officers: General C. Q. Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations; Lieutenant General Telita Crosland as head of the Defense Health Agency; and most recently Major General William Green as the Army’s chief of chaplains. Hegseth has publicly said that “our diversity is our strength” is the “dumbest phrase in military history.” By erasing Defense Department histories of nonwhite service members, and seeking to restore tributes to Confederate soldiers who took up arms against their country in defense of slavery, Hegseth has demonstrated a limited view of whose service is to be honored.

Trump is likely also seeking to ensure that remaining officers lack any qualms about following potentially illegal orders. Both he and Hegseth have long seen war crimes as worthy of admiration rather than scorn. As far back as 2016, Trump was regaling audiences at rallies with apocryphal stories about an American general shooting Muslims with bullets coated in pig’s blood. In 2020, he fantasized about turning the military’s guns on American citizens, but faced opposition from the leadership at the Pentagon. Yesterday morning, Trump publicly threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” and target civilian infrastructure, both war crimes. He subsequently backed down, handing Iran the ability to charge tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz; passage was free prior to the American attack.

Enlisted service members are disproportionately nonwhite compared with the U.S. population as a whole, while officers are disproportionately white. Women are also serving in larger numbers than ever before: About a fifth of active-duty military personnel are women. Yet Hegseth has long been dismissive of women’s service, particularly in combat roles, and once wrote that, under leaders like Brown, “black troops, at all levels, will be promoted simply based on their race” (this is called confession by accusation). Hegseth seems to want the pool of high-ranking officers to be even less diverse than it already is, having complained in his book that “America’s white sons and daughters are walking away” from the military. And he and Trump seem to be purging not only women and people of color, but officers who see them as equally capable—such as the Army chief of staff, General Randy George, who was fired after reportedly refusing to remove several Black and female officials from the promotion list to general.

[Adam Serwer: The war-crimes president]

Hegseth infamously claimed at the beginning of his tenure that promotions in the military would be “color-blind and merit-based.” It is now clear that this was not true. During his confirmation hearing, Hegseth was unable to provide any evidence whatsoever that the military had lowered standards in the name of diversity. If that is the case, then why have we seen so many well-qualified Black and female senior officers dismissed? Why did the Pentagon, for no plausible reason other than animus, expel trans service members after years of honorable service? “Color-blind and merit-based” now appears to have been a smoke screen for a politically motivated purge of not only Black people and women from leadership positions, but white officers who value their service.

The message being sent to lower-ranking officers is that they will be assessed on the basis of their gender, race, or politics, rather than their abilities—which will cause many officers to leave rather than stay and be mistreated, and many potential officers not to enlist to begin with. It is hard to deny the full benefits of citizenship to those who are willing to fight and die for their country; it is easier if that sacrifice is minimized or erased. Rewarding or punishing officers based on race, gender, or perceived political loyalty to Trump could also aid the administration’s larger project of undermining the claims of women and ethnic and religious minorities to equal treatment under the law in other parts of American society.

The progress earned by ethnic minorities and women in the armed services was hard-won. During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass argued that Black men’s service in the Union Army would strengthen their demands for equal rights. “Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States,” Douglass said in 1863. “Nothing can be more plain, nothing more certain, than that the speediest and best possible way open to us to manhood, equal rights, and elevation is that we enter this service.”

Douglass was right, although the process was not as straightforward as he might have hoped. Black service helped justify the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, but Reconstruction saw Black men disenfranchised and subjected to Jim Crow segregation. W. E. B. Du Bois made a similar argument for Black service in World War I. Returning Black veterans were subjected to horrific racist violence that ultimately strengthened Black resolve. Only after World War II—and over the objections of much of the brass—was the military integrated, and then only after an exhaustive internal investigation disproved racist assumptions that Black troops could only fill menial roles or serve in segregated units.

“Insofar as a service refused to a single Negro the technical training and job for which he was qualified, by just so much did the service waste potential skills and impair its own effectiveness. Quite apart from the question of equal opportunity, the Committee did not believe the country or the military services could afford this human wastage,” the final report from the Truman-era President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services reads. “The Committee found, in fact, that inequality had contributed to inefficiency.”

[Adam Harris: The only thing integrating America]

Another way to put it is that overt racial discrimination and stereotyping made the military worse, not better. But that was before Hegseth, and his insistence that the problem with the armed services is that they are too diverse and too “woke.”

The result has been something like an inverse caricature of Republican complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion, a system in which the incompetent rise not because of their abilities but because of their sycophancy. Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it.

Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal.

On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.

What the Birthright Case Is Really About

2026-04-02T13:01:00-04:00

As the Supreme Court was preparing to hear oral arguments over the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment this week, President Trump made clear how he wanted the justices to rule.

“Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!” Trump posted on his social network. He also insisted that only the U.S. has birthright citizenship, which is false.

Set aside for the moment that Trump has himself set up a program allowing rich people to pay for residency. The striking thing about this statement is how much it mirrors the panicked discourse of racists at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. When an incredulous Senator Edgar Cowan asked Senator Lyman Trumbull if the amendment would make citizens of the “children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country,” Trumbull replied, “Undoubtedly.”

If the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had wanted to specify that only the emancipated and their descendants would be eligible, they could have done that. When Trumbull originally wrote the bill that would establish birthright citizenship, according to the legal scholar Garrett Epps, he referred to people of “African descent”; he later broadened that language to declare that “all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign Power, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” The expansion of citizenship was consciously and deliberately not limited to “babies of slaves.”

When that exchange came up during oral arguments, the solicitor general, John Sauer, condemned Cowan as “racist.” But he sounded a similar note when he complained of “birth tourism” from China, saying, “We’re in a new world now.”

“Well, it’s a new world,” Chief Justice John Roberts replied. “It’s the same Constitution.”

If allowed to stand, Trump’s executive order would not only force all Americans to prove their citizenship at birth—it would in effect create a permanent, hereditary underclass of people, an estimated 6 million by 2050, whose only crime was having foreign parents. But as Roberts’s quip suggests, the legal case for Trump’s executive order is spurious. The Fourteenth Amendment is clear on the matter of citizenship—and no one has provided a plausible argument that the interpretation dating to its adoption is wrong. Nor was anyone seriously debating its meaning, until Trump promulgated his executive order and the right-wing legal movement did everything it could to make it seem respectable. Many of the sources the Trump administration can find to bolster its interpretation are from scientific racists or former Confederates that illustrate, by their very usage, the bad faith of the argument.

[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s absurd citizenship arguments went nowhere]

So why was this case brought before the Court at all? For the same reason that Cowan’s racist invocation of “yellow peril” has survived to the present day, repeated in modern form by both the president and his solicitor general. Before the Civil War, America was a white man’s government. The Reconstruction amendments were supposed to change that, to prevent the existence of not just masters and slaves but master classes and slave classes. Trump and those around him would like to change it all back. It is hardly surprising, then, that they would revive the same arguments against birthright citizenship that the framers heard in the 1860s.

The annexation of Texas and other territories in the West placed North and South on a collision course over slavery. One of slavery’s greatest champions, South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, feared that America might go even further and annex the rest of Mexico—an outcome he was certain would doom America forever. America had never “incorporated into the Union any but the Caucasian race,” Calhoun warned. “Can we incorporate a people so dissimilar from us in every respect—so little qualified for free and popular government—without certain destruction to our political institutions?”

For Calhoun, the answer was no. “Ours is the Government of the white man,” he insisted.

This was not the first or last time Calhoun prophesied apocalypse. In 1849, Calhoun and other southern representatives warned that if Black people in the North were enfranchised, white southerners would become slaves. “Once raised to an equality, they would become the fast political associates of the North, acting and voting with them on all questions, and by this political union between them, holding the white race at the South in complete subjection,” the declaration reads. “We would, in a word, change conditions with them—a degradation greater than has ever yet fallen to the lot of a free and enlightened people, and one from which we could not escape.”

Equality for Black people would be slavery for whites. The Constitution was never meant to apply to any but the white man. In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney adopted precisely this rationale, declaring that Black people were an “inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race,” and were “not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.”

This was the consensus of the Democratic Party at the time; one of the party’s 1860 presidential nominees, Stephen A. Douglas, argued that the Founders envisioned equality for “white men, men of European birth and European descent, and had no reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race.”

The outcome of the Civil War was supposed to put an end to the idea that the United States was a “government of the white man,” which Republican Representative John Bingham, one of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, called a “horrid blasphemy.” In 1867, Frederick Douglass tried to calm fears about Chinese immigration. America’s “greatness and grandeur,” he insisted, would “be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds.” In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment passed. As the historian Eric Foner has written, “putting birthright citizenship into the Constitution represented a dramatic repudiation of the powerful tradition of equating citizenship with whiteness.”

The Republicans had persevered in enshrining in the Constitution what Bingham called its own “divine feature”—the “recognition of the absolute equality before the law of all persons, whether citizens or strangers.”

Yet Calhoun lives.

Calhoun’s theories have made a dramatic comeback with Trump, whose policies are guided by an unmistakable racial determinism. Trump warns that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and that many immigrants have “bad genes,” telling a white Fox News host that “they are not exactly your genetic.”

Trump has focused his ire on immigrants from “third world” countries. He has virtually reimposed the eugenics-inspired immigration restrictions of the early 20th century, while instituting a Jim Crow–style system for refugees that prioritizes white South Africans. Trump’s reasoning for what he called a “permanent pause” in “third-world migration” was that instead of people from countries such as Norway or Sweden, we “always take people from Somalia,” which he called “disgusting.” The Democrats of Calhoun’s day, similarly, were not anti-immigrant, so long as only white people could naturalize. After all, the protection of slavery required white men, even those born in Dublin or Berlin.

In January, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller posted something even more revealing on X: “Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights.” Miller’s disgust here is not with the “importing” of a “foreign labor class.” It is with such a class having the same rights as he does.

Take away those rights, and you’ve reproduced a permanent, stateless, hereditary subclass of exploitable people who can never rise above their station. This was anathema to the Constitution of Bingham and Douglass, but Calhoun would approve—he considered slavery essential to preventing the “disorders and dangers” of class warfare, his frequent dark predictions of slave insurrections notwithstanding. Trump’s deployment of federal immigration agents to occupy racially diverse American cities—also denigrated as “third world” by some conservatives—has been guided by Miller, who has argued that repealing those racist immigration restrictions during the civil-rights movement ruined the country. Miller has also argued that “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” As I’ve noted before, no one has been more instrumental in creating the “conditions and terrors” of the repressive countries that immigrants have fled than Trump and Miller.

[Amanda L. Tyler: The Supreme Court has heard this one before]

All of these arguments echo Calhoun. The Constitution was not meant to apply to nonwhites, who lack the necessary capacity for self-government or appreciation of American traditions and institutions. Equality between whites and nonwhites is degradation. The incorporation of people “dissimilar from us in every respect” is “suicide.” A conservatism of this kind is not inevitable—it was not so long ago that, despite his personal racism, Ronald Reagan proudly insisted that “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

“Mass deportation” will not be enough to make America white again. The Trump administration can cease enforcing anti-discrimination law, or use it to bolster de facto segregation. It can attempt to use its power to silence those who would defend diversity and equality. It can make life for the undocumented, and anyone perceived to be undocumented, as miserable as possible. But the Trump administration’s massive social-engineering project cannot succeed if the bulwark of nonracial citizenship stands. That is why Trump attended oral argument on Wednesday—the first president to do so—hoping to intimidate the justices into nullifying part of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The legal question before the Supreme Court is jarringly easy to answer. The more difficult question is what kind of country Americans want. After all, the Supreme Court’s nullification of the Reconstruction amendments during the Jim Crow era was bolstered by popular sentiment among white people. What the Constitution says matters only so much as Americans decide to respect it—or hold accountable those who do not.

So the question is really: Do we want to be the America of John C. Calhoun or John Bingham? The America of Stephen A. Douglas or Frederick Douglass? Whatever the Supreme Court decides, it will not settle the question. Only the people can do that, one way or another.

Trashing American Allies Turns Out to Be Bad for National Security

2026-03-18T07:31:00-04:00

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After a decade of trashing American allies as freeloaders, President Trump is begging for their help in opening the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway adjacent to Iran sometimes referred to as the “jugular” of the world economy.

Those allies aren’t exactly jumping at the chance to join Trump’s war on Iran—not a single one has taken the offer. That leaves the president trapped in a needless war of choice that he started and is unable to finish. Iran’s leverage over the global economy is increasing as oil prices rise and the strait remains closed to the U.S. and its allies.

Now, basically anyone could have told Trump that spending the past few years antagonizing allies with aggressive tariffs, belligerent arm-twisting, and imperial dismissiveness would hurt him when the time came to ask those same allies for help. But this isn’t a simple strategic miscalculation or even a typical Trumpian incompetence—it’s the result of a particular ideological fantasy of American independence from foreign alliances, one that is oblivious to how those alliances long served American interests. Americans are learning the hard way that the economic costs of the autarky pursued by Trump are far worse than those of the “globalism” he opposes.

Margaret Thatcher once declared that “there is no such thing” as society. She always insisted that what she meant was that “society was not an abstraction, separate from the men and women who composed it, but a living structure of individuals, families, neighbours and voluntary associations.“

Trump, however, and the Trumpified Republican Party, might actually subscribe to the way her critics understood her point—that society doesn’t exist, and that therefore none of us has any responsibilities or obligations to anyone else, other than the ones we choose to have.

Life is more complicated than that, especially when you’re trying to make war on a state that can close a strategic waterway that is crucial to the world economy. The Trump administration seems to have neither anticipated nor planned properly for the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil is transported. Iran has begun firing at ships in the strait, dissuading commercial traffic from transiting it. Energy prices are almost certain to rise, but so are prices on other products—you need energy to transport goods to meet global market demand. The possibility that the war might destabilize the world economy either was not part of the Trump administration’s plans for this capricious, ill-advised, and arguably unconstitutional military venture, or was not taken seriously. American war planners seem to have not factored in that, despite being adversaries, the U.S. and Iran are interconnected in vital ways that waging war on Iran would disrupt.

Nor did they foresee the effect on American alliances. Israel joined the attack on Iran, but other U.S. allies in the Gulf who did not are nonetheless facing attacks from the Iranian military, and reportedly reconsidering the wisdom of their dependence on the United States. On Monday, Trump told reporters that Iran wasn’t “supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East.” He said, “They hit Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait,” and “nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

[Adam Serwer: The American king goes to war]

Trumpian ideology sees interconnection as a form of tyranny—even if those who adhere to it benefit from others’ labor and money. “My attitude is we don’t need anybody,” Trump announced after none of America’s allies offered to help open the strait. “We’re the strongest nation in the world.”

This fantasy of complete independence is a long-standing part of American culture. Thomas Jefferson, himself a relatively soft-handed gentleman farmer who left the hard labor to the people he had enslaved, extolled the virtues of the yeoman farmer. The political scientist Richard Hofstadter described this mythic figure as “the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy human being.” The irony, Hofstadter noted, was that it was really rich, educated men such as Jefferson who romanticized this extremely difficult lifestyle. The typical yeoman farmer wanted to be integrated into the market so that he could sell his crops at a profit and escape his hardscrabble circumstances. That romantic “self-sufficiency” was in fact “usually forced upon him by a lack of transportation or markets, or by the necessity to save cash.”

Nonetheless, this yeoman remained “a mass creed, a part of the country’s political folklore and its nationalist ideology,” which is why even in the 2000s George W. Bush liked to be photographed “clearing brush” at his ranch in Texas.

If you could show Jefferson trad memes, he might chuckle at how little American political propaganda has changed in nearly three centuries. Trump’s fixation on “manly jobs” such as mining and trucking, both harshly hit by his tariffs, is, like many of his worst qualities, an American obsession taken to the point of self-defeating farce. Hofstadter noted in the 1950s that “the agrarian myth came to be believed more widely and tenaciously as it became more fictional,” which may help explain our current nostalgic obsession with an idealized rural past.

This fixation on the stoic manly figure who needs no one may have also obscured the extent to which the United States benefited handsomely from the global economic and political order it constructed by hook and by crook after World War II. That system allowed former colonial empires to retain their high standards of living in relative peace without maintaining territorial empires that were no longer economically or politically viable. One might see the collapse of that order under Trump as a just or needed outcome, but most Americans may miss it—and what comes next could be worse.

This distorted strain of American individualism came to the fore during the coronavirus pandemic but was present earlier as well. If nothing else, the pandemic revealed how dependent we are on others—and a lot of people didn’t like that. Some people thought the evidence didn’t justify the restrictions, that they went too far and could have unintended consequences. But plenty simply didn’t like being told that they should stay home because emergency rooms were filled with people who couldn’t breathe. They didn’t like being told that they should get vaccinated in order to stop the spread of the disease or make it less lethal for those more vulnerable. They didn’t like adhering to restrictions because nurses or meatpackers or grocery workers were dying. Why should I have to change my behavior because it might affect someone else? That’s ridiculous.

Except that there is such a thing as society, and we all share the consequences when collective problems are left unsolved.

[From the March 2026 Issue: America vs. the world]

Too many Americans believed that Trump’s mass deportation could occur without forcing families into hiding, cutting into businesses’ profits, or shooting people dead in the street. They believed that tariffs could replace global trade and revive the manufacturing industry, making the U.S. self-sufficient, when instead the burden has fallen on American farms and firms. They couldn’t see that when people lose their jobs, or go sick or hungry, it becomes everyone’s problem eventually. This desire to be severed from others culminates in the trad fantasy of a wife who keeps the homestead clean while her husband runs a self-sufficient ranch, the whole family secure with their MREs, AR-15, and safe full of gold collectibles when the apocalypse comes.

The most important of these fantasies is the idea that a strong man can bully and dominate his way into getting what he wants, without any consequences or backlash. “We live in a world, in the real world,” the Trump adviser Stephen Miller told CNN in January, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” This is a schoolyard bully’s naivete masquerading as realism: If the strong always triumphed over the weak, we would remember wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan as triumphs rather than embarrassing failures.

Still, this is the great theory of MAGA: that might not only makes right, but that might can be wielded recklessly, because no one else is strong enough to stop you. Now the United States is at war, the global economy will face disaster if the strait remains closed indefinitely, American allies are reconsidering their reliance on the U.S., and Iran’s previous theocratic leader has been replaced by an even more hard-line successor. The outcome of the conflict itself cannot be known yet, but one thing is certain: Most all of us will be affected, one way or another.

Society is a lot like reality. It exists whether you believe in it or not.

Gullible, Cynical America

2026-03-09T07:31:00-04:00

Updated at 4:55 p.m. ET on March 9, 2026

Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.

The coronavirus wasn’t the only epidemic to hit the United States in the past decade. Americans are also facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism—gullicism, if you need a portmanteau—that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices. Reliable information is both more available and harder to find than ever—and those who spread misinformation have been rewarded with positions of power, platforms they can exploit to further pollute the information environment.

There’s nothing wrong with being a little crunchy, but we’re well beyond the recommended dosage here. America’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., staked his political career on the false belief that vaccines cause autism, and has used his power to force federal agencies to support his bonkers position: The CDC’s website now says, “Studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Thanks to Kennedy and others, measles outbreaks are happening all over the country after the disease was declared officially eliminated in the U.S. 26 years ago. More than 3,200 cases (since the start of 2025) and at least two deaths of unvaccinated children later, the head of Medicare and Medicaid, Mehmet Oz—you might remember him for his clout-chasing attempt to foment panic about arsenic in apple juice—was driven to beg Americans to trust the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine.

“Take the vaccine, please,” Oz said on CNN. “We have a solution for our problem.”

[Katherine J. Wu: Why RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine campaign is working]

Our problem, though, is unfortunately bigger than the measles outbreak, bigger even than anti-vaccine sentiment. The spread of anti-vax conspiracy theories is just another example of the gullicism that defines our age. The cynicism is highly selective: Gullicists see everyone’s hidden motives—except when they don’t. They are able to reject any claim rooted in actual evidence—whether in science, politics, or history—while embracing the most breathtakingly absurd assertions on the same topics. Indeed, documentation is often taken as further evidence of conspiracy, while assertion (that this or that will “detoxify” your blood or that COVID deaths were exaggerated) is taken as gospel.

This rejection of empiricism makes selling falsehoods easier and contradicting them harder, which creates a fertile environment for anyone with something to sell, whether shady businesses or authoritarian governments.

Gullicism creates not just a void but also an opportunity. It creates an ideal business opportunity for snake-oil salesmen to peddle products whose whole appeal is that they’re not scientifically validated. What is ultimately being sold is the feeling that consumers can prove they’re smarter than those snooty experts who think they know everything—and who probably are in on the conspiracy to deprive you of the truth.

As a result, people baselessly attribute all kinds of negative effects to seed oils or inorganic food, but never question the motives of the person hawking alternatives that can cost twice as much. Others invest their life savings in crypto, on the grounds that the paper-currency collapse—foretold by goldbugs since the New Deal—is coming any day now, just you wait, sheeple. Struggling to save for retirement? Don’t trust those greedy money managers with your savings; double your money instead by betting on sports or prediction markets. Truth becomes entirely subjective—just another consumer product, a way to advertise your personal brand.

Private companies can and do downplay the safety risks of their products in order to sell them more effectively. Ironically, this sort of dishonesty is the origin of the modern anti-vax movement. The disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield was working on a different kind of vaccine when he published the fabricated and since-retracted study that sparked the original claims that MMR vaccines cause autism. He later tried to defend himself by accusing the CDC of falsifying data to hide the connection—which, characteristic of so many conspiracists these days, is what he actually did. To be an anti-vaxxer, one must be simultaneously credulous and distrustful—credulous of hucksters, and distrustful about empiricism. A gullicist.

Such theories are an example of what Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead describe in their book A Lot of People Are Saying as “the new conspiracism.” They portray a nation so “disoriented” by nonsense claims that people struggle to determine what is true. The new conspiracism is characterized by the absence of prescriptive solutions—it offers “no notion of what should replace the reviled parties, processes, and agencies of government once covert schemes are revealed.”

But that’s not quite right. What replaces these processes is snake oil: wellness products that cure no one, firearms and freeze-dried food for an inevitable but always delayed apocalypse, volatile digital tokens in exchange for real money. These substitutes provide nothing useful or tangible—only the self-esteem boost that comes from feeling like you understand infectious diseases better than an epidemiologist (or whatever expert told you something you didn’t want to hear). In some cases, the replacement is even worse—between anti-vax lunacy and shots of raw milk in the Oval Office, we appear to have a grand political coalition for returning to the days when people regularly died of diarrhea. You, too, can be a lone, rugged wolf rising above the masses of sheep. (At least until the listeria gets you.)

That’s exactly how the cryptolords and gambling companies and supplement salesmen want you to feel, because if they can sell you that feeling, they can sell you anything at all. That goes for politicians, too.

To some extent, all information is based on trust. We were not present for the Constitutional Convention of 1787; we have to trust that the records of that era are being interpreted accurately by historians—and that the records are accurate to begin with. The reality is that no matter how intelligent you are, if everyone you trust is telling you something false, you are likely to believe it. And if everyone you distrust tells you something true, you are likely to disbelieve it. As the writer Will Wilkinson wrote in 2022, “Building a relatively accurate mental model of the world doesn’t have all that much to do with your individual reasoning capacity. It’s mostly about trusting and distrusting the right people.” Anyone successfully isolated by an algorithm can get got—a few wrong decisions, and you’re listening to someone who thinks sunscreen causes cancer.

That’s not to say that experts are always right. Plenty of ballyhooed studies have been later discredited—the “red wine makes you live longer” one comes to mind. Historians revise their assessments of past events all the time. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once wrote, “Time has upset many fighting faiths,” including those of people with graduate degrees. Revising one’s views when we have access to new information—actual, validated information—is not nefarious.

Our fighting faiths, however, are not so much being upset as validated by those who profit from our attention. Keeping that attention is vital, even if the best way to do so is through algorithms that distribute turbocharged and ever-changing ideological fictions. The more disoriented you are, the easier prey you become.

President Trump and his advisers understand these dynamics very well. After the administration struck Iran last year, Trump complained that the press had not echoed his claim that Iran’s nuclear program had been destroyed: “CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick.” Then, to justify another strike, his adviser Steve Witkoff claimed that Iran was a “week away” from having the materials to make a nuclear weapon. The White House page from last June denouncing as “fake news” the notion that Iran’s program hadn’t been “obliterated” remained online even as the United States and Israel were in the process of attacking Iran.

These are, of course, mutually exclusive lies. In that way, they’re much like the right wing’s take on the Epstein files, which were supposedly the world’s most important conspiracy theory right up until information about Epstein’s ties to conservative figures—including Trump and his former adviser Steve Bannon—emerged, at which point many insisted that the story no longer mattered. Loyalty demands that you ignore the contradiction; just accept the lie of the moment.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” She argued that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” All are ruled by “the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.”

The naive fellow travelers need to be gullible enough to believe these fictions and cynical enough to refuse correction. The inner circle need only be cynical enough to sell them.

A culture of gullicism is ideal for MAGA. First, it lets the government off the hook for actually governing, because if you believe, as Kennedy does, that you can fix most Americans’ health problems with diet and exercise, then there’s no need for state interventions in poverty or health care. And second, it undermines trust in empirical evidence, making the peddling of self-serving lies far easier.

[Bob Bauer: The rise of a new, dangerous cynicism]

The misplaced trust that might lead one to overlook the agenda of businessmen pushing useless vaporware tokens is the same impulse that convinces someone that Venezuela hacked voting machines to rig the 2020 U.S. election, then hid all the evidence. There’s no way the man who ran a fraudulent university and had photos of his inauguration altered to make the crowd seem bigger would make something up! Gullicism is what allows Marco Rubio to gush about the “president of peace,” who has bombed more countries than any other president in history.

Americans on the left are not immune to conspiracism, of course. You can easily find people who think Elon Musk rigged the 2024 election for Trump, or that the latter faked the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024. But conspiracism does currently have a partisan skew: Trump’s false claims have embedded these habits of thought within the conservative movement. Democratic leadership did not validate online nonsense about fake assassination plots and a rigged 2024 election, while most Republican leaders have repeated or declined to challenge Trump’s lies.

Part of what’s going on here is that people want a simple explanation for their troubles in a complicated world. Autism? It’s vaccines. Disease? Some foods are “poison.” Trouble with your kid? Must be brainwashed by … novels? Video games? Rap music? (This one depends on the decade.) The One True Reason trains a mind not only to reject complexity but to accept bigotry—which is why it’s so ideal for reactionary politics. No housing? Immigrants. No job? Immigrants. Inflation? Immigrants. Immigrants? It’s the Jews.

Lately, however, even some conservatives have begun to lament this monster they’ve helped create. The right-wing activist Christopher Rufo, who peddled garbage about African immigrants eating pets, recently complained that “the right’s brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy and algorithm chasing.” But conservatives built that vat. Using legal and political pressure, they pressed the platforms to eschew any consistent or responsible content moderation in the hopes they would serve as frictionless distributors of conservative propaganda. They got their wish.

That said, blaming Rufo and other right-wing activists alone would understate the severity of the problem. We have a data economy that thrives on selling products we don’t need for problems we don’t have, and a public that falls for these ploys—even as we think ourselves much too clever to be fooled.

This article originally said Rufo discussed Haitian immigrants eating pets. He said this about African immigrants.

The American King Goes to War

2026-03-04T16:14:57-05:00

America has been at war for nearly a week, but the president who started the war can’t explain why.

Either Iran’s nuclear program needed to be destroyed because Iran was “probably a week away” from having the material for a bomb, according to the Trump adviser Steve Witkoff, or Iran was “not enriching” uranium, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or maybe Iran was threatening the United States and its allies bases in the region, according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. One adviser told CNN that there was “evidence” Iran was preparing to strike U.S. forces in the Middle East, but Rubio later said Iran was an “imminent threat” because it would respond if attacked by Israel, which is not what “imminent threat” means. The U.S. is going to war to force regime change in Iran, or maybe it isn’t—it depends who you ask and when. The operation will be short—or maybe it won’t be.

A simpler explanation is that the administration did not plan well before attacking another country and igniting a regional conflagration in the Middle East, nor has it planned for what comes next. The potential consequences are devastating, including both the cost in individual human lives and the long-term implications for the region and its people. The economic aftereffects, given Iran’s oil production and its control over the Strait of Hormuz, could be also substantial. The American government had no plan for evacuating its citizens from the region, let alone for who would take over Iran once its leadership had been deposed or killed. No one has any idea what the fallout here will be, nor does anyone in a position of authority seem to be particularly concerned.

[Listen: Trump’s war with Iran and a new danger at home]

In the aftermath of President Trump launching an unprovoked attack on Iran with no immediate justification, plan, or exit strategy, many Democrats have called for a vote on a war-powers resolution that could restrict military operations in Iran. The procedural objection is a perennial Democratic favorite. It allows Democrats to complain about Republicans having broken the rules, while letting them avoid taking a position on the actual conflict—a position that might later turn out to be unpopular, if voters end up thinking that the war went well. In this case, the vote also papers over Democrats’ internal divisions, given that the caucus is divided between hawkish Democrats sympathetic to attacking Iran and those who reject the attack outright.

As tempting as it may be to dismiss this vote as typical Democratic timidity, the procedure is nevertheless extremely important here. Who can decide when a country goes to war is one of the crucial distinctions between a republic and a monarchy. The Founders’ decision to give Congress the authority to declare war is not a coincidence. It was one of several deliberate moves to limit the ability of an executive to wage war based on grudge, impulse, or personal profit. The restraints on the executive branch’s ability to wage war exist to ensure that if the nation makes a choice to go to war, it does so only after careful planning and deliberation. That is to say, the opposite of what happened here.

Republicans supposedly worship at the cult of the Founders, but they do not actually venerate the Founders’ beliefs and democratic principles. Rather, they see the Founders as symbolic figures to be deployed in favor of whatever the current GOP talking point is. In quasi-religious fashion, as the representatives of the Founders on Earth, Republicans are allowed to project their contemporaneous views backwards onto men who have been dead for centuries.

As the constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar writes in America’s Constitution: A Biography, dividing the authority to wage war between the executive and the legislature was a deliberate innovation because “in England, the king had the power to both declare war and command troops.” The king was seen as the embodiment of the people, and therefore his decisions regarding war and peace did not require their consent. America is famously founded on the opposite proposition. A monarch can take their nation to war for petty or personal reasons; a president should not be able to.

The authority that Trump has asserted in taking America to war against Iran is, like many of his other power grabs, an expression of the very tyranny the Framers were seeking to prevent.

“Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object,” a young representative named Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1848. This was “understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.” This quote, incidentally, is immortalized on the House’s website, if any members of Congress are looking for it.

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton famously disagreed about how strong an executive should be. Nevertheless, they both saw Congress’s authority to declare war as a constraint on the president’s authority to engage in it, as Damon Root noted in Reason after Trump struck Iran last summer.

[George Packer: Hubris without idealism]

Proponents of the “imperial presidency” generally point out that the belief that the president would always need to ask Congress for permission to use military force ran into complications very early. The second president, John Adams, entered into the undeclared “quasi-war” with France from 1798 to 1800, after Revolutionary-era France targeted American merchant ships at sea. The third, Thomas Jefferson, fought the Barbary pirates without a formal declaration. But in both cases, these conflicts were limited and defensive in nature.

Despite that, presidents from both parties have asserted the authority to act unilaterally—such as President Obama’s decision to intervene in Libya’s civil war. The Founders did not anticipate that lawmakers, instead of jealously guarding their legislative authority, would prefer to leave the president holding the bag in case military action turns out to be unpopular. Although the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed to limit unilateral presidential war making, presidents have often ignored it and Congress has frequently allowed them to.

Still, those past presidents attempted to articulate why they were taking the country to war—even if many of their reasons were unconvincing. With Iran, Trump hasn’t bothered. The president blew past the constitutional restraints erected to prevent Americans from being drawn into a military conflict they do not support or want. Yet that is happening, because Congress is too weak and supplicant to assert its constitutional power against an unhinged executive.

The procedural objection to Trump’s war in Iran is not a minor, or superficial, issue, despite how it may appear. The objection is central to the Constitution’s design for heeding the consent of the governed: Presidents are not allowed to take the country to war, to commit its power to the inevitable mass destruction of human lives, without the people’s permission.

That is what kings do. America is not supposed to have one of those.

*Illustration sources: The New York Historical / Getty; GraphicaArtis / Getty; Leon Neal / Getty.

How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account

2026-02-25T21:21:39-05:00

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Around the world, powerful men are facing consequences for their actions. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was convicted of trying to overthrow the government in a January 6–style coup, as was his South Korean counterpart, Yoon Suk Yuol. Marcin Romanowski, the former deputy justice minister in the right-wing Polish government, is in hiding in Hungary, accused of misusing public funds. The former Prince Andrew—Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—became the first member of the British royal family in several centuries to be arrested; he’s been accused of crimes related to his relationship with the late sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein.

They’re all unfortunate not to be American. Otherwise they probably would have gotten away scot-free.

[Helen Lewis: The former Prince Andrew never should have forwarded those emails]

One way to look at the rise of Donald Trump is as part of a decades-long backlash among the American leadership class to the idea of accountability. Since Richard Nixon was forced to resign, powerful people in both political parties have worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions. Trump has evaded punishment for crimes both low (campaign-finance violations, for which he was convicted, though he will serve no time thanks to his 2024 victory) and high (his attempted overthrow of the federal government in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss, for which he was spared by the Supreme Court’s decision to grant him kingly immunity). This is not just about Trump; his impunity is the product of a society that has worked hard to help the rich and powerful elude punishment for criminal behavior.

Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor in the name of “healing,” but inadvertently set a precedent that executive lawbreaking was no crime. The Reagan administration engaged in blatant violations of federal law during the Iran-Contra scandal, in which it sold weapons to the Iranian regime and used the finances to support anti-communist death squads in Nicaragua. George H. W. Bush, the former head of the CIA, pardoned nearly all of the officials implicated in Iran-Contra—a move that many Americans supported, because they believed that fighting communism justified extreme measures. George W. Bush’s administration broke laws fighting the “War on Terror” but almost no one faced consequences, because many Americans believed that fighting terrorism justified extreme measures.

Bill Clinton lied under oath, was impeached, and then was acquitted—and many Americans supported that too, because they sympathized with lying about infidelity. After that, Congress decided in bipartisan fashion that it had had enough of special counsels sniffing around the executive branch. Barack Obama pledged to look forward and not backwards, not only closing the door on prosecutions for executive lawbreaking but also failing to hold accountable those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession.

While Congress and the presidency have been working hard to raise the executive branch above the law, the Supreme Court has done its part to ensure that laws against bribery and corruption are near-unenforceable. With a series of rulings on campaign finance, the Roberts Court has ensured that the rich can try to buy elections without formally breaking the law. As a result, politicians are indebted to a few hundred billionaires who drop unholy amounts of cash every election cycle.

Getting convicted of bribery in America requires some serious effort—take former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who was convicted of selling influence on behalf of local businesses and the country of Egypt after being caught with gold bars in his house. When Trump first took office, he paused enforcement of foreign bribery cases entirely—but there are some signs that he intends to revive such prosecutions as a weapon against his political enemies, in the mold of the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orb á n.

Such erosion of anti-corruption law has often been a bipartisan project. In 2016, the bribery conviction of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for receiving gifts from donors was overturned unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court. Since then, the Roberts Court has slowly dismantled anti-corruption law. In 2024, it decided in Snyder v. United States that federal law does not bar receiving “gratuities” given after the fact for “official acts.” Convenient not just for politicians, but also for justices who enjoy lavish lifestyles funded by billionaires with interests before the Court!

[Read: The care and feeding of Supreme Court justices]

The logic of the Roberts Court’s quest to legalize white-collar crime led to Trump v. United States, which decided in 2024 that the president is basically entitled to commit whatever crimes he wants in the course of his “official duties,” and which successfully shields Trump and potentially future presidents from federal criminal prosecution for any “official” actions while in office. This was comically framed by the right-wing justices as protecting democracy, rather than undermining it.

Although some of these decisions were more defensible than others, together they suggest a pattern of elite class solidarity: powerful people making sure that powerful people rarely face real consequences.

The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements can be seen as, at least partially, a brief rebellion against this culture of elite impunity. Left with few formal avenues for redress, large numbers of people demanded that the powerful—bosses and celebrities who had used their status to coerce others into sexual relationships, or police officers who had used their authority to kill without consequence—be made to pay a price for hurting others.

Those movements didn’t last. The backlash against them nevertheless fed a Trumpian nostalgia for the good old days, when sexual assault and police brutality were easily rationalized or not even discussed. This nostalgia also helps explain the extreme response to the call for accountability—many powerful bystanders behaved as though they had narrowly survived Robespierre and the guillotine and worked to prevent such movements from ever emerging again by trying to censor speech associated with them. An echo of that earlier outrage followed the revelations of the Epstein files, though this round has so far been diverted into mutual partisan recrimination, more than the focus on institutional changes that characterized those earlier movements.

This is not to say that the rich and powerful are never held to account. Menendez is one counterexample, and Epstein himself was a billionaire who died in a jail cell, after all. But his crimes were taken seriously by authorities only after the journalist Julie Brown uncovered the extent of Epstein’s crimes and the lenient response from law enforcement over decades.

Unfortunately, many Americans who might have been outraged at this edifice of impunity have instead directed their resentment toward the poor and weak, supporting a cruel and unforgiving system of criminal justice that harshly punishes those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder while exempting many at the top from any accountability at all. So you did a few death-squad massacres or wedding bombings? Well, that was what America’s leaders had to do to fight communism and terrorism. You can even take a sack of cash from an undercover FBI agent if you’re the Trump immigration czar Tom Homan. But if you overstayed your visa or got an abortion, you deserve to have the book thrown at you.

Trump himself can be seen as benefiting from a backlash against accountability in the last place powerful people in America seem to face it: the court of public opinion. Trump, and other powerful figures, made the public an offer: Let us get away with what we want to do, and you will too.

“They voted for impunity for themselves and authoritarian brutality directed at everyone they hated. Lesbian feminist bitches, dirty job-stealing immigrants, evil perverted trannies, on and on and on,” Katherine Alejandra Cross writes of Trump’s implicit bargain in Liberal Currents. “The brutality of state violence was supposed to only ever be directed at their ideological foes. And in exchange, the Trump voter would never again have to live with the mortifying ordeal of responsibility.”

MAGA also offered an implicit bargain: Not only can you be a bigot toward whatever group makes you mad by existing, but everyone will have to love and respect you anyway. This was an impossible promise to keep—not even Trump has managed to bully comedians mocking him into silence—but politicians make impossible promises all the time. Many Americans are simply content to live vicariously through Trump’s impunity, even if they cannot share it.

I don’t want to overstate the case that America is unique in its embrace of elite impunity. Brazil and South Korea are arguably outliers in their commitment to defending the integrity of their democracy against the corruption of the wealthy and powerful. But they also don’t hold themselves out as the indispensable nation, the shining city on the hill, the model to which all other democracies should aspire.

The answer to why powerful people in some other parts of the world face consequences, while in America they rarely do, is that elite impunity is now an American national project. We might need to reframe “American exceptionalism.” Instead of a New Deal, we have a Great Society for white-collar crime, a New Frontier of executive lawbreaking, a No Rich Crook Left Behind. Most of us probably don’t even realize it. Nevertheless, this has been the priority for the wealthy and powerful, who have managed to convince a critical mass of Americans that they will be able to enjoy the same privileges. They won’t.

Do Not Be Cynical About Jesse Jackson

2026-02-17T17:33:58-05:00

When I was growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, many businesses proudly kept in their windows signs from Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and ’88 presidential runs. He was a revered figure, someone people in D.C. were deeply thankful for.

“Nothing will ever again be what it was before,” the writer James Baldwin said after Jackson’s ’84 Democratic National Convention speech.

“It changes the way the boy on the street and the boy on Death Row and his mother and his father and his sweetheart and his sister think about themselves. It indicates that one is not entirely at the mercy of the assumptions of this Republic, of what they have said you are, that this is not necessarily who and what you are. And no one will ever forget this moment, no matter what happens now.”

Yet when you turned on the television, you saw another Jesse Jackson. This Jesse Jackson was a dangerous man, a radical, a demagogue, someone who thrived off fomenting racial division. To the people around me, Jackson—the reverend and civil-rights leader—was a hero. But to the people I saw discussing the news on television, he was both an incendiary agitator and a ridiculous, almost comic, figure. The subtext of all this commentary was that Black Americans would make more progress if their leaders were not so flawed. Barack Obama put the lie to this argument; squeaky-clean by personal-conduct standards, all he did was drive the same people who hated Jackson more insane.

“Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?” the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh mused in the 1990s. His opinions on Obama were no less unhinged.

[Ali Breland: The Epstein emails show how the powerful talk about race]

“There has developed among many, for sure, a kind of attitudinal air-barrier of cynicism” around Jackson, Marshall Frady, a journalist and the author of Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson, once said. “Part of it is, no doubt, a reflection of the abiding, if not steadily deepening, racial schism in the country since the ’60s.” Jackson was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s youngest lieutenants; he came of age when many considered racial injustice history, an issue the country had already dealt with. He reminded Americans that King’s dream had not yet come, and that created for him enemies. In hindsight, it seems strange that people would assume that the effects of centuries of slavery and segregation would be entirely wiped away in fewer than two decades. Jackson had grown up in poverty in the shadow of Jim Crow segregation; it must have seemed even more absurd to him.

Bettman / Getty

It was common for right-wingers to refer to him as a “race pimp” or “race hustler.” He did himself no favors when, in 1984, he used an anti-Jewish slur—calling New York City “hymietown”—in a conversation overheard by a reporter. Jackson apologized for the ugly remark, but it followed him for the rest of his life—in mainstream media, the incident was practically a second appellation, right after “the Reverend.” In 1989, the Fox News founder Roger Ailes, then an adviser to Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral campaign, placed an ad in a Yiddish newspaper with a photo of Giuliani’s rival David Dinkins next to Jackson—the two were friends. The clear implication was that Dinkins was an anti-Semite, just like Jackson. In this way, Jackson became an easy shorthand propagandists could use to terrify white people into voting Republican.

Yet this caricature of Jackson as an anti-white, anti-Semitic demagogue never reflected the man. The entire point of Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition,” his vision of Americans from all backgrounds coming together for social justice, was overcoming such differences. Jackson’s political vision was always inclusive, always multiracial, and always opposed to bigotry and prejudice of all kinds, even if the man himself sometimes fell short.

For one thing, Jackson’s egalitarianism and support for a strong welfare state—including universal health care—did not contradict his emphasis on personal responsibility and the importance of the Church in Americans’ lives. As Frady notes, the South Carolina reverend was constantly hammering on these conservative-friendly themes, long before they became part of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns.

“Black Americans must begin to accept a larger share of responsibility for their lives. For too many years we have been crying that racism and oppression have kept us down,” Jackson wrote in The New York Times, in 1976. “That is true, and racism and oppression have to be fought on every front. But to fight any battle takes soldiers who are strong, healthy, spirited, committed, well‐trained and confident.”

The 1984 speech that so moved Baldwin remains one of the greatest articulations of American liberalism ever made. But I was too young to remember it, and it is his 1988 speech that I find indelible. In 1984, Jackson described America as a “quilt” with “many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread.” In 1988, he extended the metaphor—arguing that progress could not be made without the aid of people from very different backgrounds, with very different identities.

“Farmers, you seek fair prices and you are right—but you cannot stand alone. Your patch is not big enough. Workers, you fight for fair wages, you are right—but your patch of labor is not big enough. Women, you seek comparable worth and pay equity, you are right—but your patch is not big enough,” Jackson said. “Students, you seek scholarships, you are right—but your patch is not big enough. Blacks and Hispanics, when we fight for civil rights, we are right—but our patch is not big enough.”

Many obituaries have emphasized Jackson’s hunger for publicity. He was, indeed, no wallflower. But neither did he simply pose for the cameras. Jackson’s decades of activism demonstrated that he was sincere about his vision. When workers were striking, Jackson was there. When it was unpopular to support LGBTQ rights, Jackson did so anyway. When both conservatives and liberals were outraged over illegal immigration, Jackson insisted on mercy and understanding for the undocumented. Despite the “hymie” incident, Jackson never stopped condemning the evils of anti-Semitism, even as he supported Palestinian rights and statehood. Before Pat Buchanan or Donald Trump ran for president, Jackson was condemning “American multinationals” who “hire repressed labor abroad and fire free labor at home.''

The critics who caricatured him did not understand this sincerity—or perhaps they understood it far too well. His commitment to the people he once described as “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised,” was real, and he dedicated his life to it.

[Clint Smith: Those who try to erase history will fail]

Jackson’s sincerity eventually overcame the stereotypes about him. In the early 1990s, only a third of white Americans viewed him favorably; by 1999, that number was close to 60 percent, including, The New York Times reported, many “self-described conservatives.”

Democratic leaders credited Jackson’s work registering Black voters with making otherwise-difficult gains in the wilderness of the Reagan era. He was a genuinely transformative figure, inspiring not just a generation of Black voters but Black officeholders, helping usher in an era of Black self-determination that eclipsed the previous peak during Reconstruction a century earlier. His exhortation to “keep hope alive” in an era of backlash was precisely what he did. Frady quotes former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown calling Jackson “the Jackie Robinson of American politics,” who would “spawn a whole lot of Little Leaguers in many cities and counties that you and I will never hear about.” That was, we now know, an understatement.

The epithet of “race hustler” or “race pimp” can be more accurately applied to many of Jackson’s critics, who perceived his multiracial populism as a threat. They tried to neutralize that threat by turning Jackson into a racial caricature that could be exploited to fan the fears of white Americans that they would be dispossessed, the same inversion of American history that continues to drive right-wing politics in the present. They did not make a caricature of Jackson because he was ridiculous; they tried to make him ridiculous because his vision was so powerful.

The Real Reason ICE Agents Wear Masks

2026-02-02T14:52:49-05:00

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Masked men with guns are swarming through American cities. They are doing so in the name of enforcing immigration law. There is no justification, however, for federal agents to hide their identity from the public that pays for their weapons.

In an interview with CNN, Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, who has become an occasional Trump critic, said that he didn’t have a problem with federal agents wearing masks. “I’ve seen people dox me. I’ve seen people take pictures and identify law-enforcement officers and then put their families at risk,” Tillis said. Requiring agents to take off, or even pull down, their mask, he suggested, would endanger their safety—“I think that’s a step too far.”

Doxxing—which traditionally means the public exposure of an ordinary person’s identity and home address, and threats that harassment or even violence will follow that exposure—is a common technique in online bullying. Although exposing someone’s home address is clearly menacing, the concept of “doxxing” cannot apply to simply knowing the identity of public-facing government employees, especially not those empowered to use force.

Tillis’s logic illustrates how distorted the American approach to law enforcement has become. Police officers are civilians; they are public servants, not above the public. It is part of the job of police—and, for that matter, politicians—to be identifiable, because of the profound authority bestowed upon them. The ability to use force is a weighty responsibility, requiring high standards of conduct, and it can and should be revoked when abused. It is not “doxxing” federal agents for the public to know who they are. We are supposed to know who they are, because that is how we hold them accountable. This is why police officers wear visible badge numbers and name tags. The responsibilities they are given are not compatible with anonymity.

Ordinary police officers do not wear masks except in extremely rare and specific circumstances. This is the case even though, statistically, regular police officers are at far greater risk than immigration agents. According to an analysis by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute based on data from last year, “law enforcement officers who don’t work at ICE or Border Patrol have a death rate 6.3 times higher than that of immigration enforcement officers.” In fact, the report found, immigration agents are at no greater risk than regular people: “The chance of an ICE or Border Patrol agent being murdered in the line of duty is about one in 94,549 per year, about 5.5 times less likely than a civilian being murdered.”

If there were law-enforcement agencies particularly ill-suited to anonymity, it would be Customs and Border Protection and the Border Patrol. From 2005 to 2024, nearly 5,000 CBP and Border Patrol officers were arrested, according to the journalist Garrett Graff, who testified about his findings to an accountability commission set up by the governor of Illinois. Information on the multitude of corruption-related charges faced by agents can be found on the CBP’s own website. “The crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States,” Graff writes.” Statistically speaking, “worst of the worst” seems to describe CBP and the Border Patrol as law-enforcement agencies better than it does the people they’re rounding up.

ICE does not have the same history of criminal behavior, but it does share a long record of abusing its powers and mistreating people in its custody. Put succinctly, these agencies deal with people the American system has frequently treated as barely human. Now these agents have been unleashed on Americans. Putting masks on people in agencies with internal cultures like these was always a recipe for catastrophe. The Trump administration took the most corrupt, poorly trained, and impulsive law-enforcement agencies in the country, gave them masks, and turned them against American cities.

Politicians, likewise, do not cover their face, though death threats—which should have no place in public discourse—have become far more common. It would nonetheless be absurd to conceal lawmakers’ identity, because then people would not know whom to hold responsible for public policy. Lawmakers do not vote by secret ballot, because they would be able to ignore popular preferences without fearing any consequences. That applies as much to police as it does to politicians. The public has a right to know the identity of the people who wield power in their name, so that they can withdraw that power from those who abuse or misuse it. If people can wield power over life and death without showing their face, we have a gang of criminals—not a police force.

The unhinged behavior that we have seen from federal immigration officials, including the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot while drawing attention to or recording agents’ behavior, is a direct consequence of power without accountability. On Sunday, ProPublica revealed the names of the two agents involved in the Pretti shooting: Border Patrol officer Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez. Suffice it to say that two Hispanic Americans killing a white person trying to prevent them from harassing or deporting other Hispanic people, on the orders of Stephen Miller—a Jewish American whose ancestors fled pogroms in Eastern Europe—is a uniquely grotesque expression of the American melting pot in action.

Although the Department of Justice reversed course on Friday and promised an actual investigation of Pretti’s killing, President Trump has already eliminated traditional restraints on political control over criminal prosecutions and investigations, and Trump officials have already declared Pretti to be a terrorist and his killers to be innocent. Other Trump officials have loudly announced that federal agents have “absolute immunity” in the execution of their duties. Legal immunity plus anonymity equals impunity. It would be logical to think that in that situation, agents could literally get away with murder.

But the consequences of masked immigration agents’ extreme behavior go beyond those two fatal shootings. Thousands of students in the Twin Cities have stopped going to school and are in hiding with their families. The great majority of Somali and Hispanic residents of the Twin Cities area have legal status, but that seems to make no difference: Federal agents are indiscriminately stopping, detaining, and arresting people on the basis of little more than their accent or skin color, in violation of their due-process rights, a lawsuit from the ACLU contends. In Salem, Oregon, an American was hospitalized after reportedly being dragged from her car by immigration agents demanding her papers; she is among the dozens of Americans who, ProPublica reported in October, have been physically abused or detained for extended periods by immigration agents. The real number was probably greater then; it is certainly greater now.

Even regular cops are not immune to being profiled by ICE and the Border Patrol. “We’ve had many instances of people being stopped, family members of police officers being stopped that are American citizens,“ Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told The New York Times. “They’re not stopping family members of folks who are Norwegian or Irish. That’s not happening.” Twin Cities residents being racially profiled by federal agents can thank Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who blew a giant hole in the Fourteenth Amendment in a shadow-docket case in September. A later attempt by Kavanaugh to walk back his disastrous concurrence hasn’t altered federal agents’ conduct.

When violating the Constitution on a daily basis a mask helps, because people who are assured that they won’t face consequences for abusing power almost inevitably do so. One wonders if this is actually the government’s purpose in masking them. When you are asking men to essentially make war on their fellow citizens—to force lightly dressed people out into the frigid Minneapolis winter, detain elementary schoolers, follow good Samaritans as they deliver food to hiding families, and drag, tackle, beat, tase, or even shoot American citizens—you may find telling them that they can keep their identity hidden useful. The masks may work less to protect federal agents from danger than to to make it easier for them to do unspeakable things.

Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong

2026-01-26T21:37:34-05:00

Photographs by Jack Califano

Updated at 10:44 a.m. ET on January 29, 2026

It took only a few minutes before everyone in the church knew that another person had been shot. I was sitting with Trygve Olsen, a big man in a wool hat and puffy vest, who lifted his phone to show me a text with the news. It was his 50th birthday, and one of the coldest days of the year. I asked him whether he was doing anything special to celebrate. “What should I be doing?” he replied. “Should I sit at home and open presents? This is where I’m supposed to be.”

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He had come to Iglesia Cristiana La Viña Burnsville, about 15 miles south of the Twin Cities, to pick up food for families who are too afraid to go out—some have barely left home since federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota two months ago. The church was filled with pallets of frozen meat and vegetables, diapers, fruit, and toilet paper. Outside, a man wearing a leather biker vest bearing the insignia of the Latin American Motorcycle Association, his blond beard flecked with ice crystals, directed a line of cars through the snow.

The man who had been shot—fatally, we later learned—was Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who had been recording agents outside a doughnut shop. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security claimed that he had threatened agents with a gun; videos of the shooting show him holding only his phone when he is pushed down by masked federal agents and beaten, his licensed sidearm removed from its holster by one agent before another unloads several shots into his back. Pretti’s death was a reminder—if anyone in Minnesota still needed one—that people had reason to be hiding, and that those trying to help them, protect them, or protest on their behalf had reason to be scared.

The church has a mostly Hispanic and working-class flock. Its pastor, Miguel Aviles, who goes by Pastor Miguel, told me that it had sent out about 2,000 packages of food that Saturday, and about 25,000 since the federal agents had arrived. Many of the people in hiding, he said, “have asylum cases pending. They already have work permits and stuff, but some of them are legal residents and still they’re afraid to go out. Because of their skin color, they are afraid to go out.”

Federal agents have arrested about 3,000 people in the state, but they have released the names of only about 240 of those detained, leaving unclear how many of the larger number have committed any crimes. Many more thousands of people have been affected by the arrests and the fear they have instilled. Minnesota Public Radio estimates that in school districts “with widespread federal activity, as many as 20 to 40 percent of students have been absent in recent weeks.”

I don’t know what the feds expected when they surged into Minnesota. In late November, The New York Times reported on a public-benefit fraud scheme in the state that was executed mainly by people of Somali descent. Federal prosecutors under the Biden administration had already indicted dozens of people, but after the Times story broke, President Trump began ranting about Somalis, whom he referred to as “garbage”; declared that he didn’t want Somali immigrants in the country; and announced that he was sending thousands of armed federal immigration agents to Minneapolis. This weekend, he posted on social media that the agents were there because of “massive monetary fraud.” The real reason may be that a majority of Minnesotans did not vote for him. Trump has said that “I won Minnesota three times, and I didn’t get credit for it. That’s a crooked state.” He has never won Minnesota.

Perhaps the Trump-administration officials had hoped that a few rabble-rousers would get violent, justifying the kind of crackdown he seems to fantasize about. Maybe they had assumed that they would find only a caricature of “the resistance”—people who seethed about Trump online but would be unwilling to do anything to defend themselves against him.

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation. Their concerns are justified: A number of people working as volunteers or observers told me that they had been trailed home by ICE agents, and some of their communications have already been infiltrated, screenshotted, and posted online, forcing them to use new text chains and code names. One urgent question among observers, as the videos of Pretti’s killing spread, was what his handle might have been.

Olsen had originally used the handle “Redbear” in communicating with me, but later said I could name him. He had agreed to let me ride along while he did his deliveries. As he loaded up his truck with supplies, he wore just a long-sleeved red shirt and vest, apparently unfazed by the Minnesota cold.

“This is my first occupation,” Olsen said as I climbed into the truck. “Welcome to the underground, I guess.”

Jack Califano for The Atlantic

Jack Califano for The Atlantic

The number of Minnesotans resisting the federal occupation is so large that relatively few could be characterized as career activists. They are ordinary Americans—people with jobs, moms and dads, friends and neighbors. They can be divided into roughly three groups.

The largest is the protesters, who show up at events such as Friday’s march in downtown Minneapolis, and at the airport, where deportation flights take off. Many protesters have faced tear gas and pepper spray, and below-zero temperatures—during the Twin Cities march on Friday, I couldn’t take notes; the ink in my pens had frozen.

Then there are the people who load up their car with food, toiletries, and school supplies from churches or schools to take to families in hiding. They also help families who cannot work meet their rent or mortgage payments. In addition to driving around with Olsen, I rode along with a Twin Cities mom of young kids named Amanda as she did deliveries (she asked me to use only her first name). Riding in her small car—her back row was taken up by three child seats and a smattering of stray toys—she told me that she’d gotten involved after more than 100 students at her kids’ elementary school simply stopped coming in. Parents got organized to provide the families with food, to shepherd their kids to school, and to arrange playdates for those stuck inside.

Amanda’s father and husband are immigrants, she said, and she speaks Spanish. “I can be a conduit between those who want to help and those who need help,” she told me. She calls each family before knocking on the door, so they don’t have to worry that they are being tricked by ICE. At one home, a woman asked us to go around back because a suspicious vehicle was idling out front. At another home, a little girl in pigtails beamed as Amanda handed her a Target bag full of school supplies.

Finally, there are those most at risk of coming into violent contact with federal agents, a group that’s come to be popularly known as ICE Watch, although the designation is unofficial—as far as I can tell, you’re in ICE Watch if you watch ICE. These are the whistle-wielding pedestrians and drivers calling themselves “observers” or “commuters” who patrol for federal agents (usually identifiable by their SUVs with out-of-state plates) and alert the neighborhood to their presence. Pretti and Good, the two Minneapolis residents killed by federal agents, fit in this category.

Trump-administration officials and MAGA influencers have repeatedly called these activists “violent” and said they are involved in “riots.” But the resistance in Minnesota is largely characterized by a conscious, strategic absence of physical confrontation. Activists have made the decision to emphasize protection, aid, and observation. When matters escalate, it is usually the choice of the federal agents. Of the three homicides in Minneapolis this year, two were committed by federal agents.

“There’s been an incredible, incredible response from the community. I’ve seen our neighbors go straight from allies to family—more than family—checking in on each other, offering food and rides for kids and all kinds of support, alerting each other if there’s ICE or any kind of danger,” Malika Dahir, a local activist of Somali descent, told me.

If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology, you could call it “neighborism”—a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from. The contrast with the philosophy guiding the Trump administration couldn’t be more extreme. Vice President Vance has said that “it is totally reasonable and acceptable for American citizens to look at their next-door neighbors and say, ‘I want to live next to people who I have something in common with. I don’t want to live next to four families of strangers.’” Minnesotans are insisting that their neighbors are their neighbors whether they were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu. That is, arguably, a deeply Christian philosophy, one apparently loathed by some of the most powerful Christians in America.

Jack Califano for The Atlantic

On Wednesday, I met with two volunteers who went by the handles “Green Bean” and “Cobalt.” They picked me up in the parking lot of a Target, not far from where Good was killed two weeks earlier. Cobalt works in tech but has recently been spending more time on patrol than at her day job. Green Bean is a biologist, but she told me the grant that had been funding her work hadn’t been renewed under the Trump administration. Neither of them had imagined doing what they were doing now. “I’m supposed to be creeping around in the woods looking at insects,” Green Bean said.

Most commuters work in pairs—a co-pilot listens in on a dispatcher who provides the locations of ICE encounters and can run plates through a database of cars that federal agents have used in the past. Green Bean explained what happens when they identify an ICE vehicle. (Both ICE and Border Patrol are in Minneapolis, but everyone just calls them ICE.) The commuters will follow the agents, honking loudly, until they leave the neighborhood or stop and get out.

The commuters—as my colleague Robert Worth reported—do not have a centralized leadership but have been trained by local activist groups that have experience from past protests against police killings, and recent immigration-enforcement sweeps in L.A. and Chicago. The observers are taught to conscientiously follow the law, including traffic rules, and to try to avoid physical confrontation with federal agents.

If the agents detain someone, the observers will try to get that person’s name so they can inform the family. But ICE prefers to make arrests—which the ICE Watchers call “abductions”—quietly. More often than not, Green Bean said, when these volunteers draw attention, the agents will “leave rather than dig in.” She added, “They are huge pussies, I will be honest.”

As we cruised through the Powderhorn neighborhood, practically every business had an ICE OUT sign in the window. Graffiti trashing ICE was everywhere, as were posters of Good labeled AMERICAN MOM KILLED BY ICE. Listening to the dispatcher, Cobalt relayed directions to Green Bean about the locations of ICE vehicles, commuters who had been boxed in or threatened by agents, and possible “abductions.”

About 30 minutes into the patrol, Green Bean saw a white Jeep Wagoneer with out-of-state plates and read out the numbers. “Confirmed ICE,” Cobalt said, and we began following the Wagoneer as it drove through the neighborhood. Another car of commuters joined us, making as much noise as possible.

After about 10 minutes, the Wagoneer got onto the highway. Green Bean followed until we could be sure that it wasn’t doubling back to the neighborhood, and then we turned around.

Jack Califano for The Atlantic

Most encounters with ICE end like that. But sometimes situations deteriorate—as with Good, who was killed while doing a version of what Green Bean and Cobalt were now doing. The task is stressful for the observers, who understand that even minor encounters can turn deadly.

The next day, I drove around with another pair of commuters who went by “Judy” and “Lime.” Both told me they were anti-Zionist Jews who had been involved in pro-Palestinian and Black Lives Matter protests. Lime’s day job is with an abortion-rights organization, and Judy is a rabbi. “I did protective presence in the West Bank,” Lime told me, referring to a form of protest in which activists try to deter settler violence by simply being present in Palestinian communities. “This is very similar.”

About an hour into our drive, we came across an ICE truck. Judy started blaring the horn, and I heard her mutter to herself: “We’re just driving, we’re just driving, which is legal. I hate this.” I asked them both if they were scared. “I do not feel scared, but I probably should,” Lime said.

Judy said she had been out on patrol days after Good was killed, and had gotten boxed in and yelled at by federal agents. “It was very scary,” Judy told me. “Murdering someone definitely works as an intimidation tactic. You just have no idea what is going to happen.” She said that ICE agents had taken a picture of her license plate and then later showed up at her house, leaning out of their car to take another picture—making it clear to Judy that they knew who she was.

Green Bean had told me the same thing—that agents had come to her house, followed her when she left, and then blocked her vehicle and screamed at her to “stop fucking following us. This is your last warning.” Green Bean was able to laugh while retelling this. “I just stared at them until they left,” she said.

We drove past Good’s memorial. Tributes to her—flowers and letters—were still there, covered in a light powder of snow. We didn’t know at the time that residents would soon set up another memorial, for Pretti.

Jack Califano for The Atlantic

The broad nature of the civil resistance in Minnesota should not lead anyone to believe that no one there supports what ICE is doing. Plenty of people do. Trump came close to winning the state in 2024, and many people here, especially outside the Twin Cities, believe the administration’s rhetoric about targeting “the worst of the worst,” despite what the actual statistics reveal.

“You don’t have to go too far south” to find places where Minnesotans “welcome ICE into their restaurants and bars and sort of love what they do,” Tom Jenkins, the lead pastor of Mount Calvary Lutheran Church in suburban Eagan, which is also helping with food drives, told me. “A lot of people are still cheering ICE on because they don’t think that whatever people are telling them or showing them is real.”

Although most of the coverage has understandably focused on the cities, suburban residents told me that they had seen operations all over the state. “There are mobile homes not far from where I live,” Jenkins said. Agents “were there every day, you know: 10, 15, 20 agents working the bus stops and bus drop-offs.” He added: “They’re all over.”

Even among those involved in opposing ICE in Minnesota, people have a range of political views. The nonviolent nature of the movement, and the focus on caring for neighbors, has drawn in volunteers with many different perspectives on immigration, including people who might have been supportive if the Trump administration’s claims of a targeted effort to deport violent criminals had been sincere.

“One of the things that I believe, and I know most of the Latino community agrees, is that we want the bad people out. We want the criminals out,” Pastor Miguel, who immigrated from Mexico 30 years ago, told me. “All of us came here looking for a better life for us and for our children. So when we have criminals, rapists—when we have people who have done horrible things in our streets, in our communities—we are afraid of them. We don’t want them here.”

The problem is that federal agents are not going after just criminals. Growing distraught, Pastor Miguel said that one of the men who helped organize the food drive, a close friend of his who he believed had legal status, had been picked up by federal agents the day before I visited.

“I just—I didn’t have words,” he said. “And yet I cannot crumble; I cannot fall. Because all these families also need us.”

Jack Califano for The Atlantic

Two days after Pretti was killed, my colleague Nick Miroff broke the news that Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol official who had led the operation in Minneapolis, would be leaving the city and replaced by Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan. Bovino, strutting around in body armor or his distinctive long coat, seemed to relish his role as a villain to his critics, encouraging aggressive tactics by federal agents and sometimes engaging in them himself. The day I accompanied Green Bean and Cobalt, Bovino fumbled with a gas canister before throwing it into a sparse crowd of protesters.

Bovino’s departure seemed an admission that Minnesotans aren’t the only Americans who won’t tolerate more deaths at the hands of federal agents. The people of Minnesota have forced the Trump administration into a strategic retreat—one inflicted not as rioters or insurgents, but as neighbors.

After Friday’s protest, when thousands marched in frigid downtown Minneapolis, chanting, “No Trump, no troops, Twin Cities ain’t licking boots!” I spoke with a young protester named Ethan McFarland, who told me that his parents are immigrants from Uganda. He had recently asked his mother to show him her immigration papers, in case she got picked up. This kind of state oppression, he said, is exactly what his mother was “trying to get away from” when she came to the United States.

McFarland’s remarks reminded me of something Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, had written: “Migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” In Minnesota, the opposite was happening. The “conditions and terrors” of immigrants’ “broken homelands” weren’t being re-created by immigrants. They were being re-created by people like Miller. The immigrants simply have the experience to recognize them.

The federal surge into Minneapolis reflects a series of mistaken MAGA assumptions. The first is the belief that diverse communities aren’t possible: “Social bonds form among people who have something in common,” Vance said in a speech last July. “If you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow social cohesion to form naturally.” Vance’s remarks are the antithesis to the neighborism of the Twin Cities, whose people do not share the narcissism of being capable of loving only those who are exactly like them.

A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying IMMIGRANTS WELCOME, but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure.

And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders. But it is not true of millions of ordinary Americans, who have poured into the streets in protest, spoken out against the administration, and, in Minnesota, resisted armed men in masks at the cost of their own life.

Jack Califano for The Atlantic

The MAGA faith in liberal weakness has been paired with the conviction that real men—Trump’s men—are conversely strong. Consider Miller’s bizarre meltdown while addressing Memphis police in October. “The gangbangers that you deal with—they think that they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are,” Miller said. “They think they’re hard-core? We are so much more hard-core than they are.” Around this time, Miller moved his family onto a military base—for safety reasons.

The federal agents sent to Minnesota wear body armor and masks, and bear long guns and sidearms. But their skittishness and brutality are qualities associated with fear, not resolve. It takes far more courage to stare down the barrel of a gun while you’re armed with only a whistle and a phone than it does to point a gun at an unarmed protester.

Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors—just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.

This article originally misstated the amount of food sent out by Iglesia Cristiana La Viña Burnsville.

Trump Can Prosecute Anyone Now

2026-01-21T10:28:14-05:00

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A year into Donald Trump’s second term, the Department of Justice has become his private law firm, devoted less to the impartial administration of justice than to blackmailing, intimidating, and persecuting Trump’s foes while selectively enforcing the law to spare allies who break it. The chairman of the Federal Reserve reveals that the Justice Department has been attempting to blackmail him into lowering interest rates with the threat of a federal indictment. The governor of Minnesota, the mayor of Minneapolis, the former head of the FBI, the attorney general of New York, and a member of the Federal Reserve Board all face indictment or investigation for opposing or challenging the president.

The decision to ignore evidence that demands investigation or prosecution can be equally nefarious, as we’ve seen in Minneapolis, where federal authorities refused to investigate a masked government agent for shooting an unarmed mom in the face, and where half a dozen federal prosecutors have since resigned after being pushed to investigate the woman’s widow instead.

These are all examples of the executive branch abusing its prosecutorial discretion. And thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court, Trump is likely to get away with it.

The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision to grant presidents “absolute immunity” to criminal prosecution for “official acts”—a concept with no textual basis whatsoever in the Constitution—means that Trump can abuse his authority over the executive branch with impunity. Given Trump’s campaign-trail emphasis on “retribution,” he probably would have pursued malicious prosecutions of his enemies regardless of the Court’s decision. But the Court’s grant of imperial immunity eliminated any fear Trump might have had about criminal liability for the corrupt use of his powers.

The argument for the independence of the Justice Department is straightforward. Although the president may set priorities, actual cases are supposed to be brought based on the facts and the law, not on the identity of the defendant. “Attorneys general have differed a lot; John Ashcroft was not Eric Holder,” Michael Bromwich, who was a DOJ inspector general in the 1990s, told me. And yet, he said, attorneys general have all believed “in a Justice Department where law-enforcement decisions were made on the facts and the law.” Independence is “the only thing that can give the country the belief that decisions that can ruin people’s lives are being made fairly by people who are weighing the evidence” instead of according to a “political agenda or a personal vendetta,” Todd Peterson, a law professor at George Washington University, told me.

You cannot have impartial prosecution without prosecutors who make decisions free of political pressure. But what if you don’t want impartial prosecutions? What if you want to prosecute a grieving widow whose wife was killed by a federal agent, because you see her as a political enemy?

Here, as in many other cases, Trump is something of an authoritarian innovator; legal experts told me that the prohibition on the president directing specific prosecutions or investigations has always been more a norm than a requirement. But it was the kind of norm that was rarely broken. “There have obviously been moments in our history where various different administrations have pushed their ability to influence the Department of Justice,” Rebecca Roiphe, a former prosecutor and a law professor at New York Law School, told me. But since Watergate, she said, “every attorney general who has assumed the role has, during their confirmation hearings, reiterated the importance of the independence of the Department of Justice.”

When Richard Nixon declared that “when the president does it, it is not illegal,” it was a scandal, but a faction of the conservative legal movement saw it as an ideal. Over time, more and more conservatives have pushed for an interpretation of the Constitution in which the president—at least if he’s a Republican—does not merely set policy or enforcement priorities, but can also personally direct any and all criminal or civil investigations. Anything less, they argue, would be an unconstitutional encroachment on executive-branch prerogatives.

One of the crucial barriers to using this power corruptly was the fact that, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in “Federalist No. 69,” the president could “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Until Trump, this was the consensus view—that’s why President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon after the latter’s resignation. If anyone had actually thought that Nixon was immune, it wouldn’t have been necessary. It’s also why President Bill Clinton agreed to suspend his law license in a non-prosecution agreement with the federal government before he left office. Trump has also menaced his predecessors, which makes clear he thinks immunity belongs not to the office but to himself, personally.

Criminal liability, however, would have interfered with Trump’s return to office, and luckily for him, right-wing justices rewrote the Constitution to exclude it. In the Court’s 2024 ruling, the majority declared that Trump has full immunity to criminal investigation in the conduct of his official duty as president, shutting down the inquiry into his attempts to seize power by force after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden—including Trump trying to use threats of prosecution to compel states to give Trump their electoral votes through the use of fraudulent electors. The “allegations that the requested investigations were shams or proposed for an improper purpose do not divest the President of exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department and its officials,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. Theoretically, Trump could still be prosecuted on the grounds that parts of his scheme were not “official acts,” but with the current Court composition, that’s about as likely as him naming Kamala Harris his vice president and then resigning.

Therefore, even corrupt uses of prosecutorial authority by the president—such as, say, trying to blackmail the chairman of the Federal Reserve—would be kosher. “When Trump says, Article II lets me do whatever I want, that’s exactly how he hears what the Court has said,” Peter Shane, a law professor at NYU, told me. “And it’s very hard, given the Court’s wording, to explain to him, No, that’s wrong.”

In the abstract, the Roberts Court’s argument may seem compelling; in practice, it is absurd. We can now see what its grant of immunity has produced: an attorney general who is little more than a mob lawyer, a Justice Department that is little more than a corrupt law firm with one client, and an entire legal system subsumed by the whims of a president who can spare his friends and persecute his enemies.

We don’t have to wonder whether Trump has compromised the Justice Department’s independence; we know he has, because he’s been very loud about it. In September, for example, he complained on Truth Social that Attorney General Pam Bondi had not yet indicted Senator Adam Schiff or New York Attorney General Letitia James. A subtler authoritarian, Roiphe pointed out, might try to keep his lawless directives secret.

“Imagine a president who campaigned on I’m gonna respect the independence of the Department of Justice, and then subsequently behind the scenes started pulling strings,” Roiphe said. “It’s not clear that the public would ever know that this was going on. The only reason why we are so aware of this is because President Trump has just not been even remotely shy about the fact that he’s doing this.” Indeed, The New York Times reported last Tuesday that the week before Powell’s revelation, Trump had told “dozens” of U.S. attorneys that “they were too weak, and needed to step up the pace of investigations of his enemies.”

Even the most fanatical devotees of executive power seem to understand that this abuse of presidential power is inherently corrupting, and some have sought to downplay its implications. Bill Barr, who was U.S. attorney general during the first Trump administration, reportedly threatened to resign in 2020 over Trump’s remarks regarding Justice Department investigations. “It’s very important that the attorney general make sure that there’s no political influence at stake involved,” he told NPR at the time. Barr—in Big Lebowski terms—at least had an ethos. The current attorney general, Pam Bondi, does not.

Thus far, the only obstacles to Trump’s attempts to prosecute his enemies have come from outside the executive branch—from juries that have refused to indict or convict, and from courts that have maintained proper legal procedure, even as Trump officials have flouted it. The judiciary can set its own ethical guidelines and standards, which is why Trump’s political prosecutions have come up against roadblocks in court. But under the logic of the Supreme Court’s ruling, it would be unconstitutional for Congress to, say, pass a law putting restrictions on the executive branch to ensure the independence of the Justice Department. You would need some kind of constitutional amendment for that.

Under the new conservative consensus on presidential power, Trump is welcome to refuse to investigate when government agents shoot Americans in the face, and he is welcome to try to charge their loved ones with crimes. He can openly blackmail government officials to manipulate the economy or to silence political opposition. No one can stop him from directing the Justice Department to indict his enemies for non-crimes while ignoring or pardoning the actual crimes of his political allies. He is free to be a tyrant, because the boss is the boss. But to me, it seems unlikely that the founding generation, in rebelling against a monarch, was looking to replace him with an even more wretched class of despot.

First the Shooting. Then the Lies.

2026-01-08T12:04:30-05:00

There’s a lot we don’t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened.

Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House adviser Stephen Miller also described the incident as “domestic terrorism,” while President Donald Trump posted on his social network that Good “ran over the ICE Officer.”

Videos of the incident, taken by bystanders, show almost every element of McLaughlin’s statement to be false. There were no riots at the scene, and no rioters. The vehicle appears to be driving away from the armed federal agents, not toward them, and no one was run over. And there is no evidence that terrorism of any kind was involved. After the shooting, federal agents then reportedly prevented a bystander who identified himself as a physician from tending to Good. “They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told reporters. “Having seen the video of myself, I want to tell everybody directly, that is bullshit.”

[Read: Lethal force on a frozen street]

A perverse absurdity of American law and culture, however, is that agents of the state empowered to use lethal force are rarely held to high standards for doing so. Good’s reasons for being in the neighborhood are not publicly known yet. What the witness sees, though, is simple: A scared woman is shot dead by an armed agent of the state. The Trump administration’s position is also simple: She deserved it. “Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?” Vice President J. D. Vance posted.

Administration officials’ indifference to facts, to due process, to the dignity of the deceased, and to basic human decency is remarkable. They could have pleaded for patience and said the incident would be investigated—the standard response in such circumstances. They could have even done so while defending the federal agents they have deployed to terrorize areas they perceive as Democratic Party enclaves. Instead, they proceeded to make ostentatiously dishonest statements that they knew would be contradicted by the video evidence available to anyone with eyes to see it. The federal government now speaks with the voice of the right-wing smear machine: partisan, dishonest, and devoted to vilifying Trump’s perceived enemies rather than informing the public. Good’s mother, partner, and child ren have to cope not only with their unfathomable loss, but with a campaign designed to justify her killing. Their own lives will be subject to invasive scrutiny by the government and its allies, in a search for any derogatory information about Good that might somehow be used to justify her killing. For some, that won’t even be necessary. “I do not feel bad for the woman that was involved,” the Republican lawmaker Randy Fine told the right-wing network Newsmax.

As my colleague Quinta Jurecic has reported, the Trump administration has made a point of following through on absurd accusations by filing absurd charges. The most relevant example here is that of Marimar Martinez, who survived being shot multiple times by a federal agent in Chicago; DHS claimed that she, too, had rammed them with her car. The agent later bragged to his buddies about his eagle-eyed gunning-down of Martinez, who was unarmed and hadn’t committed a crime. The charges against her were dropped.

The New York Times reported that the death of Good was the ninth shooting by an ICE officer since September, all of which officials called self-defense. In at least one of those incidents—the fatal shooting of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Mexican immigrant—there was video evidence that contradicted DHS’s account. The administration has also charged Newark Mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and Representative LaMonica McIver with assault, falsely accusing them of storming an ICE facility, when video of the encounter shows nothing of the kind. Baraka is now suing for defamation. Another supposed menace to society was accused of assault for scraping the knuckles of an FBI agent during a scuffle—the grand jury refused to indict over this harrowing example of anti-hand crime. In every one of these incidents, the administration lied about both the events and the civilians involved in them, in an attempt to justify the use of force or subsequent prosecution.

[David A. Graham: A deadly shooting in Minnesota]

The Trump administration has repeatedly targeted small and politically disempowered populations—Haitians, Somalis, trans people—in order to justify abuses of power. But its abuses of power are not limited to those communities. What the government can do to the most vulnerable among us, it can also do to you.

The blatant lies about Minneapolis serve several purposes. They perpetuate the false narrative that federal agents are in constant peril and therefore justified in using lethal force at the slightest hint of danger. They assure federal agents that they can harm or even kill American citizens with impunity, and warn those who might be moved to protest Trump’s immigration policies of the same thing. Perhaps most grim, they communicate to the public that if you happen to be killed by a federal agent, your government will bear false witness to the world that you were a terrorist.

This approach, of course, is quite familiar to communities that have been dealing with police abuses for as long as there have been professional police forces. In 2000, then–New York City Mayor and future Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani justified the killing of the Haitian American Patrick Dorismond by police by quipping that he was “no altar boy.” Embarrassingly for Giuliani, whose capacity for shame was overestimated even then, it turned out that Dorismond had literally been an altar boy. Dorismond’s mother responded to the campaign to justify her son’s killing with an observation that continues to haunt me decades later.

“They kill,” Dorismond said, “and after that, they kill him the other way—with the mouth.”

Taking Good’s life wasn’t enough. The moment she died, it became imperative for the administration to also destroy her memory.

The Military Isn’t MAGA

2026-01-07T07:31:00-05:00

Mark Kelly will probably be fine. The senator and Navy veteran isn’t likely to be cowed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s lawless attempt to silence him by seeking to demote him post-retirement.

“It’s dead on arrival,” Gene Fidell, an expert on the Uniform Code of Military Justice who teaches at Yale Law, told me. “If this ever gets in front of a judge, the judge is going to say, ‘Fuck you.’”

The attack on Kelly may have a much broader aim, which is to silence other service members who might speak out about the Trump administration’s actions by threatening their financial well-being. Veterans who lack Kelly’s platform, influence, and social connections may feel that their pension isn’t worth the risk of saying something critical of the president.

In a post on X, Hegseth announced that Kelly was being demoted for a video from November. He and five other Democratic lawmakers who had been service members or intelligence officers reiterated the principle that members of the military do not have to follow unlawful orders. This is a banal statement of law, one that Hegseth himself has made publicly in years past. And Kelly had good reason to warn against abuses of military power. Donald Trump, after all, has deployed federal agents and military units to American cities—apparently as a kind of punishment for being liberal —and openly speculated about using “some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

The time may come when service members are commanded to murder fellow citizens on the president’s orders, and they should know that they can refuse to do so. One wonders whether that is precisely why the Trump administration’s response has been so heavy-handed: Trump officials don’t want service members hearing that they do not have to follow unlawful orders, because they may someday issue them.

Nothing in Kelly’s video was grounds for punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which forbids service members and retirees from using “contemptuous” language in reference to the president and some other officials, and from engaging in conduct prejudicial to “good order and discipline.” In a statement, Kelly said that Hegseth and Trump “don’t get to decide what Americans in this country get to say about their government.” Trump, however, had declared that the video was “punishable by DEATH.”

There are clearly good reasons for the code to enforce standards of conduct. When you serve for 20 years in the military, you retire with a pension defined by your rank. Officers can be demoted after the fact, on the basis of behavior that occurred while in uniform. In 2021, for instance, an Army major general was demoted for sexual abuse that occurred while he was on active duty, despite having retired in 2005.

But Kelly’s statements were not made while on active duty, and were not disparaging. “There’s nothing improper, much less criminal, in what they said,” Fidell said. “It’s not conduct unbecoming; it is not seditious.”

“His exact words were merely a statement of the law, which is: You can disobey unlawful orders. That’s factually, legally correct,” Brenner Fissell, a law professor at Villanova and a vice president at the National Institute of Military Justice, told me. “How can it be a criminal offense to state the law?”

It’s not—in a democracy. But Trump and his enablers act as if they’re above the law, and seem to feel entitled to punish anyone who displeases them. As the Trump adviser Stephen Miller put it in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper about the arrest of the Venezuelan president, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” He called these forces “the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller’s tedious attempts to sound like a comic-book supervillain aside, this may be the way most states have been governed, but it is also a description of the kind of tyranny the Constitution was written to prevent.

It is strange that military law continues to govern the political speech of retired service members. This is, in my view, a clearly unconstitutional quirk that Hegseth is exploiting to punish Kelly and silence others—including, potentially, other lawmakers with military backgrounds who might speak out against Trump policies.

“One of the things that I’m hoping to do is spread a little truth on the water here, so that people aren’t chilled,” Fidell said. Veterans “have as much right as you or I do to speak their minds.”

A simple solution to prevent this abuse of authority would be for Congress to change the law so that military retirees are not subject to restrictions on speech or conduct that takes place after they no longer serve in uniform. “Retiree jurisdiction does not need to exist; it’s irrational,” Fissell said. “You’ve got 99-year-old World War II veterans who are still subject to military law.”

The much broader problem, however, is that the American people elected a president who thinks it should be illegal to criticize him, illegal to oppose him, and illegal to remind others that they have the right to do so. The other Democratic lawmakers in the video aren’t drawing military pensions, so are not subject to the military code of justice. Nevertheless, the administration found a way to punish them by subjecting them to an FBI investigation—it’s unclear for what, because contempt of Trump is not a crime under American law.

When criticizing the leader becomes a crime, being a criminal becomes an obligation.

Cancel Culture’s Boomerang Effect

2025-12-23T11:33:48-05:00

On Sunday night Bari Weiss, the editor of The Free Press and the new head of CBS News, abruptly stopped a forthcoming 60 Minutes report on the torture endured by migrants in the brutal El Salvadoran prison CECOT, where the Trump administration has sent more than 280 men.

Trump supporters praised the decision from Weiss, who, notwithstanding her description of conditions at CECOT as “horrific,” had previously praised El Salvadoran leader Nayib Bukele for making El Salvador safer. More broadly, the whole affair neatly encapsulates the bizarre anti-free-speech free-speech discourse of the past decade, the purpose of which has been to justify restricting any speech that conservatives disapprove of while framing liberal censoriousness as equivalent to state censorship.

According to Sharyn Alfonsi, the correspondent who reported the segment, the story had already been reviewed by CBS News’s legal and standards departments before it was pulled.

“Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct,” Alfonsi wrote in an email that was leaked to The New York Times and other outlets. “In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” The reason this whole saga is disturbing is that many observers—Alfonsi among them—interpreted it as an instance of state censorship by proxy: the head of a news organization putting the brakes on a story the government would rather not air. Weiss was recently installed at the head of CBS News by Paramount’s new owner, the pro-Trump billionaire David Ellison, which illustrates the risks of media consolidation, creating a single pressure point for an authoritarian government to coerce obedience if it so chooses.

[Jonathan Chait: Bari Weiss’s audience of one]

Editors, of course, hold or spike stories all the time, for many legitimate reasons. And although many newsrooms require review by legal and standards departments for the most complicated stories, editorial independence dictates that the editor makes the final call on whether a story should move forward. But Alfonsi’s account calls Weiss’s reasoning into question. By Monday night, the unpublished segment was circulating like samizdat on social media, yet another example of regular people demonstrating a greater commitment to democratic principles than America’s leaders.

Weiss has long been a vocal supporter of a curiously narrow definition of free speech. That hypocrisy, shared by many, brought us to where we are today: Nasty tweets were a harbinger of incipient totalitarianism, but now the Trump administration is trying to imprison and deport people for pro-Palestinian advocacy, and it’s fine. The “PC Police” were trying to “outlaw make-believe,” but when Republican states ban books from schools and public libraries, it’s fine. These dumb lefties believe that words are violence, but when the federal government says left-wing speech is violence worthy of firing or prosecution, it’s fine. Protests on college campuses were a national crisis, but now that the federal government wants to ensure that entire universities comply with right-wing ideology when it comes to whom they hire, what they teach, and whom they admit, it’s fine.

Social-media companies implementing moderation policies is censorship, but when those moderation policies favor right-wing speech and outright bigotry, it’s fine. The “illiberal left” was leading an “epidemic of self-censorship,” but now that the owners of entire corporations compel their workers to shape content in order to win the favor of the right-wing president, it’s fine. Liberal snowflakes on campus were trying to censor academic inquiry, but now the Trump administration is slashing funding for research it deems “DEI” and censoring museums and federal historical sites for being insufficiently jingoistic, and it’s fine. We are rapidly approaching a system where the government uses its authority to decide which forms of speech are acceptable to publish or broadcast. And, of course, that’s fine.

Why is any of this okay with so many of those who once claimed to be free-speech champions or absolutists? Because, quite obviously, they were not. Many cannot even claim to be less censorious than the progressives they criticized, given the clamorous demand for firing people for remarks about the assassination of Charlie Kirk or demanding a boycott of Netflix for its LGBTQ content.

The campaign against so-called cancel culture had an appeal to the chattering classes—myself included—because many of us found left-wing nastiness annoying, exhausting, and in some cases threatening. (Recent MAGA defectors have learned what the rest of us already knew: This is not a distinctly left-wing issue at all.) And there were certainly those who sincerely believed (mistakenly, I think) that censoriousness could be as dangerous as state censorship. But I argued at the time that the campaign was largely a pretext for placing left-wing speech beyond the protection of the First Amendment in order to justify state suppression—and events have borne that out.

The reason so many of yesterday’s free-speech champions transitioned so easily into today’s pro-Trump censors is that their definition of free speech never included the right of others to talk back. They were not defending a universal right to freedom of speech; they were defending a right to monologue. They could say what they want, and you could shut up and like it. The cynicism of the effort can be known by its fruits: an administration that issues executive orders “protecting” free speech while engaging in the most sweeping campaign of state censorship since the Red Scare.

To the extent that there is or was something distinct called “cancel culture” (harsh, even violent censoriousness has a long history in America), its contemporary iteration is largely a creation of the perverse incentives of social media. Highlighting extreme and nasty behavior is the easiest way to keep people scrolling, posting, and interacting. That’s a structural, not an ideological, problem, and it’s not something that can be solved by purging or censoring one point of view.

Every society that has ever existed has had views that are mainstream and views that are fringe. The free-speech frauds who captured the discourse over the past decade understood this, but their true objection was that they did not unilaterally have the power to define which was which. For example, in a 2018 Times column, Weiss complained that “leftists” were engaged in a “concerted attempt to significantly redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” This was meant to sound sinister, menacing. In fact, this is politics. Every faction is always trying to “redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” In a free society, the government allows people to have those arguments. Such disputes are not a threat to free speech; they are free speech.

[Graeme Wood: What Bari Weiss got right]

When I say that CBS News’s Bari Weiss understood this, you needn’t take my word for it. In November, shortly after being given the reins to one of the oldest broadcast-news organizations in the country, Weiss used identical language to describe her own project: “I think it’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture,” Weiss said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a censorious, gatekeeping way.”

What’s the difference between her “redrawing the lines” of acceptable speech and other people doing it? What makes one “censorious” and “gatekeeping” and the other not? Well, because she gets to decide. That’s what so much of the free-speech panic was ever about: making sure the right people were in charge of what you see, hear, and read. Notably, this has very little to do with reporting the news, which is supposed to be what CBS News does. But if the point of installing Weiss was to ensure that she would gatekeep on behalf of right-wing interests, that is precisely what she appears to be doing.

In that 2018 column, Weiss complained that so many people seemed to believe that “the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst.” Seems like they were right to be concerned. Upon reflection, her conclusion that misguided leftists were focusing on minor issues when there were true threats to freedom of speech was prescient. It applies neatly to the campus PC obsession that helped elevate Weiss to a position where she could block the publication of a story about the United States government rendering men to an overseas gulag without trial.

Conservatives Want the Antebellum Constitution Back

2025-12-21T08:23:26-05:00

Last July, while on his way to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in California, George Retes was tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and arrested by federal agents conducting an immigration raid. The agents ignored the license plate on Retes’s car and the sticker on his windshield, both of which identified him as a U.S. Army veteran, and did not even bother to determine whether he was a citizen before strip-searching him and locking him up in a cell. Retes was detained overnight without any opportunity to call a lawyer or his family.

“No one deserves to be treated like this,” Retes told this magazine after his release. “To have no rights. It’s just crazy to think about—that they can just mask up and take someone off the street, no questions asked, and you’re just gone.”

[Read: A U.S. citizen detained by ICE for three days tells his story]

Retes is one of an estimated 170 American citizens who have been detained by federal immigration agents as part of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, according to ProPublica, which warns that the count is both incomplete and unofficial because the federal government is not documenting its own abuses of power. At least 20 of those citizens, ProPublica found, had been detained overnight and incommunicado—a violation of their constitutional rights. When questioned about these detentions, Trump-administration officials claimed that the citizens had assaulted federal agents—an assertion proved false in many cases by video evidence or an inability by the government to produce serious charges reflecting the accusations. (One thrown sandwich hardly counts.)

Across the country, federal agents are flagrantly and casually disregarding Americans’ due-process rights. And they have been remarkably forthright about how they choose their victims. As Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a white reporter: Agents were arresting people based on “the particular characteristics of an individual—how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?”

In Memphis, Reggie Williams told ProPublica that he was instructed by federal agents to keep his ID on him going forward, as though Black residents of the city were emancipated slaves forced to carry freedom papers lest they be kidnapped and returned to bondage. Bovino said basically the same thing after federal agents assaulted a Somali American citizen and refused to free him for hours despite his offers to show them a photo of his passport on his phone: “One must carry immigration documents,” Bovino posted on X. In Chicago, Maria Greeley was zip-tied by federal agents coming off a double shift at the bar where she worked. She had her passport and showed it to them, and still they detained her because, she said, she did not “look like” a Greeley.

This is racial profiling. And the Supreme Court has declined to stop it.

In September, an emergency docket decision effectively permitted this racial profiling by lifting a court order preventing it. “The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a lone concurrence. Although “apparent ethnicity alone” isn’t enough to detain someone, it can be a “relevant factor,” he continued. “Under this Court’s precedents, not to mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States.”

What this means in practice is that if you are not white, you cannot go certain places without the risk of being kidnapped by federal agents. That is not “common sense”; it is the nullification of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights under the law.

This decision is only one of the ways that the Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, has been chipping away at the parts of the Constitution dedicated to ensuring equal citizenship to all through rulings on voting rights, immigration, and equal protection. It has done this even as it insists—while striking down affirmative action and school-integration programs—that the Constitution is “colorblind.”

The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments make up the Civil War and Reconstruction amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, but America needed to do more to prevent the resurgence of the slave-owning South’s caste-based society. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments enshrined in the Constitution principles of universal male suffrage, nondiscrimination, and nonracial (birthright) citizenship. Although imperfect—the vote for women was not included—they were a crucial first step toward ensuring that the rights conferred by American citizenship would remain inviolate no matter where you were, and no matter who you were.

After the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, the Supreme Court essentially voided the meaning of these amendments. The post-Reconstruction Court helped pave the way for Jim Crow, showering most of the rights reserved for the emancipated on corporations, allowing states to disenfranchise their Black populations through superficially “color-blind” means, and permitting racial discrimination by both government entities and private actors. The amendments were resurrected during the civil-rights movement, but they are now under assault for a second time by both the Court and an executive branch that is distorting or refusing to enforce antidiscrimination laws about housing, voting, and employment.

A faction of conservatives has never stopped this campaign. As soon as the Reconstruction amendments were passed, people argued that they were illegitimate, a betrayal of the original document—a “rape of the Constitution” as the columnist Frank Meyer wrote in 1964 about Brown v. Board of Education in National Review. In 1965, that magazine published a cover story arguing that the Voting Rights Act, by enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, would effectively “repeal the Constitution to give the Negro the vote.” During the Reagan administration, a young attorney in the Justice Department named John Roberts fought to weaken the law. Originalism, the author Madiba K. Dennie points out, is a convenient vehicle for this project because it prioritizes interpretations from historical periods where women and Black people were excluded from the political process.

In more recent years, the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk complained that the Fourteenth Amendment was a “Marxist revolutionary gateway” for everything the left wanted to push through. The more genteel conservative writer Christopher Caldwell argued that the entire post-civil-rights-movement Constitution was a “rival” to the “constitution of 1788, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it.”

Roberts’s Court likes to invoke history and tradition, but some justices are perfectly happy to ignore the express intent of the Founders—such as the fundamental belief that the Constitution is meant to change—to further an ideological project. The Roberts Court’s repeated rewriting of the Constitution on Trump’s behalf reveals the antebellum Constitution they envision to be a fraud, a gauzy nostalgia based on the Founders’ worst impulses as slavers and hypocrites. This is an attempt to turn the guarantees of the Civil War amendments back into what James Madison called “parchment barriers,” their meaning perverted to ensure the protection of the strong instead of the weak.

Since 2007, when Roberts struck down a school-integration program while stating that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” the right-wing majority has followed the philosophy that there’s no discrimination if you pretend it isn’t happening. Although the Fifteenth Amendment states clearly that the right to vote cannot be “denied or abridged” on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the Roberts Court has acted as though the only true discrimination is against the right to discriminate.

In 2013, the Court effectively nullified a requirement in the 1965 Voting Rights Act that forced jurisdictions with a history of discrimination to “preclear” their voting-rule changes with the Justice Department. The majority ignored the express language of the Fifteenth Amendment in doing so, and Roberts relied on a doctrine that “all States enjoy equal sovereignty,” a phrase that exists nowhere in the Constitution but was invoked by Chief Justice Roger Taney in the infamous Dred Scott decision: Taney argued that letting Black people be citizens would violate the sovereignty of the slave states. Prohibiting states from passing discriminatory voting measures was a form of discrimination—against states, which matter, not against Black people, who don’t.

In the 2018 case Abbott v. Perez, the Court approved election maps drawn by Texas’s Republican-controlled legislature that diluted the voting power of the state’s growing Black and Latino populations. In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito criticized not the state but a lower court that had rejected the maps. The court, Alito wrote, had violated the “presumption of good faith” on the part of the legislature. The implication of that rebuke is that Texas’s attempting to discriminate against Black and Latino voters wasn’t wrong; noticing the attempt was wrong. The next year, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Court concluded that partisan gerrymandering was a “political question” beyond the reach of the courts, paving the way for states to disenfranchise minority populations as a partisan act rather than a discriminatory one, as though the former cancels out the latter.

Trump is now urging emboldened Republican legislatures to gerrymander congressional districts much more in order to voter-proof the Republican majority in the House. His Justice Department sent Texas a letter saying that some of its voting districts “constitute unconstitutional racial gerrymanders” that must now be “rectified.” What that meant, remarkably, was that the districts had been made too diverse. In short, they were not racially gerrymandered enough. When a district-court majority—including a Trump-appointed judge—blocked the maps for being “racially gerrymandered,” it pointed as evidence to the DOJ’s own letter and that department’s complaint that the districts were “coalition districts” or “majority-non-White districts in which no single racial group constituted a 50% majority.”

The Roberts Court then overturned that decision, arguing that the lower court was “upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.” Not only did this repeat the Court’s earlier position that it’s wrong to notice discrimination but not wrong to engage in it, but the decision encourages states to draw discriminatory maps and lie about their intent, knowing the justices have their back.

Later this term, the justices will decide in Louisiana v. Callais whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act allows the creation of majority-minority districts. Louisiana has taken the position that the creation of such districts—a requirement meant to prevent lawmakers from disenfranchising minorities by slicing up districts to render their votes meaningless—violates the Constitution because “all-race based redistricting is unconstitutional.” The irony is that what Republicans want is to do is precisely race-based redistricting. If they prevail, the Fifteenth Amendment, which was adopted to eliminate racial caste, will be employed to maintain it. The only way to reconcile the Court’s jurisprudence with the Reconstruction Amendments, the Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel Charles told me, is if you “turn the purpose of the Reconstruction amendments on their heads.”

This disenfranchisement will have long-term consequences—and not only in the arms race to the bottom reflected in the Democratic-controlled states that have shown themselves to be willing to retaliate.

As Frederick Douglass declared in 1865, the ballot is a means of self-defense, not simply a right or responsibility: “Without this, his liberty is a mockery; without this, you might as well almost retain the old name of slavery for his condition; for in fact, if he is not the slave of the individual master, he is the slave of society.” Americans of all races will suffer by this weakening of democracy. When lawmakers can entrench themselves in office regardless of public preference, they need not heed the will of the people.

The Fourteenth Amendment is under siege in other ways, too. Attacks on the rights of women (such as the right to not be forced to give birth by the state) and on trans people (who have been banned from serving in the military) also violate the amendment’s assurance of equal protection under the law. It is shockingly easy to find right-wing commentators advocating for the restriction of women’s right to vote and to leave a marriage, and even for employers’ discrimination against women in the workplace.

[Read: Does Heritage support discrimination against women?]

In the White House, Trump has been undermining discrimination law by refusing to enforce it. The administration has argued that Trump holds the authority to ignore laws banning job discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, or national origin for federal employees, and has rolled back enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. Aside from Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced his intention to ignore reports of discrimination or harassm ent.

Recently, the administration announced that it would not be investigating discrimination on the basis of “disparate impact,” in which discrimination can be proved through effect rather than intent alone. That can sound abstract, but here’s one example: The Trump administration ended a requirement that the state of Alabama provide Black residents with proper sanitation, calling it “illegal DEI.” Not flooding Black neighborhoods with raw sewage, according to the Trump administration, is racist.

The administration is also working to use laws that were meant to prevent discrimination to encourage it instead. Trump has weakened the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s ability to fight race- and gender-based discrimination in employment, instead directing it to threaten companies that maintain diversity programs. This week, the EEOC chair explicitly invited “white males” to file discrimination claims. The civil-rights division of the Justice Department has shut down its voting-rights cases while placing the department’s support behind efforts to disenfranchise minority voters. Administration officials have threatened lawsuits against schools and businesses for “illegal DEI,” giving those institutions a strong incentive to maintain an overwhelmingly white workforce so they don’t get sued. In the meantime, the Department of Education has reportedly almost entirely ceased investigations of racist harassment of students. This legal hostility has extended to state censorship of any acknowledgment of race and gender discrimination—save for that against white people and conservative Christians.

None of this is consistent with “equal protection of the laws.” But it is consistent with the Antebellum Constitution’s narrow definition of who “We the People” are.

A future administration could reverse those policies. But Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is different. On the first day of his current term, Trump issued an executive order announcing that babies born in America to undocumented immigrants or people on temporary visas are not citizens. A lower court blocked the order, and later this term, the Supreme Court will hear the case. If the end of birthright citizenship is upheld, the country will be irrevocably altered. Even those whose citizenship is not in question might have to carry proof of citizenship at all times to avoid being kidnapped, detained, and possibly exiled by federal agents in the name of Kavanaugh’s “common sense.”

The birthright-citizenship clause was written into the Fourteenth Amendment specifically to overturn Dred Scott’s conclusion that Black people could never be citizens. Then–Chief Justice Taney’s rationale was simply that Black people were “not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”

Representative John Bingham of Ohio, dubbed the “Madison of the Fourteenth Amendment,” declared that there could be “no greater political atrocity” than denying birthright citizenship, because that would easily lead to a minority being subjected to “absolute despotism.” That the birthright-citizenship clause applies to everyone has been a subject of near-total legal consensus until Trump. There is no “originalist” case against birthright citizenship, but there is a partisan one.

Given the extreme nature of many of the conservative movement’s demands, the Roberts Court may not give into all of them, or at least not all at once. Some legal experts are skeptical that even this Court will allow Trump to nullify birthright citizenship by fiat. But the larger project of restoring the Antebellum Constitution will continue.

Before these amendments, the Antebellum Constitution contemplated the rights and freedom of white men, but no one else. It did not guarantee equal protection under the law. It did not protect the right to vote. It did not outlaw discrimination on the basis of race, gender, religion, or ethnicity. What it did was protect the right of some men to own other men as property, by definition an affront to the idea that “all men are created equal.”

When the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson asked why “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” he was identifying no mere contradiction, but liberty as it was imagined by men who owned other human beings as property. Slaveholders such as John Calhoun saw slavery as inseparable from their own freedom, and they worried that the false doctrine of abolitionism would eliminate that freedom away. “Already it has taken possession of the pulpit, of the schools, and, to a considerable extent, of the press; those great instruments by which the mind of the rising generation will be formed,” Calhoun said. (It seems the “woke mind virus” was telling lies about the great and benevolent institution of American slavery as far back as two centuries ago.)

Defending slavery, however, required invasive uses of power, such as banning antislavery literature and returning escaped Black people to bondage. Many white Americans in the 19th century began to understand that the “Slave Power” curtailed their freedoms as well. And this is what many people forget: Systems of domination rarely spread their blessings widely. The Redemption-era revocation of Black freedoms didn’t result in prosperity for white people writ large, but a Gilded Age in which the upper classes gained unfathomable wealth and economic crises left millions destitute. The nation may have held on to white supremacy, but it also got low wages, a threadbare welfare state, and a society dominated by the rich. Everyone else was too divided by race and class to challenge them.

The blood of Confederate soldiers who would never own a slave watered southern fields because they saw slavery as the cornerstone of their social and economic order. The Populists failed to ameliorate the deprivation of the Gilded Age because white laborers who had more in common with their Black counterparts chose the psychological wage offered by Jim Crow over the literal wages that might be earned through brotherhood. The MAGA elite offers a similar fantasy today, though the number of Trump voters who will see a loved one deported or their paycheck dwindle will eclipse by orders of magnitude those who rub shoulders with donors in his new ballroom.

MAGA’s ruling caste will not be as overtly racially circumscribed as in the past. But we can trace its contours in the Trump administration’s policy decisions and legal victories, and the Roberts Court’s resurrection of the Antebellum Constitution. The path the justices are walking leads to Calhoun’s paradise: an America where a class of stateless children can be denied education and medical care; where people of color must carry identification papers if they don’t want to be harassed, detained, imprisoned, or worse; where workers can be subject to invidious discrimination without recourse; where the military points guns at the taxpayers who fund it; and where the official ideology of the state is vindicated by elections the ruling party cannot lose. It will be a society of the dominators and the dominated. But it will not be a democracy worthy of the name.

Trump’s New Imperialism

2025-12-10T07:31:00-05:00

Donald Trump hates the neocons. He’ll tell you so himself.

In a speech in Saudi Arabia in May, Trump criticized past American presidents for being “afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” mocking “so-called nation-builders, neocons, or liberal nonprofits” as useless. He has long ridiculed the Republican establishment for its management of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—though more in the tone of a fan angry about his team losing than of a principled opponent of militarism.

This philosophy of nonintervention, however, has turned out to be the opposite of his actual policy.

Last week, Trump unveiled his National Security Strategy, which claims that European nations face “civilizational erasure” resulting from the politics of the European Union, and from “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.” To the extent the document articulates any strategy at all, it appears to be for the United States to pressure Europe to deregulate, crack down on migration, and buy more oil and gas.

Trump has interfered in foreign affairs in many ways. He has ordered the bombing of Iran and is preparing for an attack on Venezuela; “We’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon,” he told Politico on Monday. In the Caribbean, his military has committed what law-of-war experts have called murder, launching missiles at boats suspected of carrying drugs. (The national-security justification for this is nonexistent; most illegal narcotics are brought into the U.S. through ports of entry by people who are crossing legally.) He has pressured other countries economically—for example, by imposing punitive tariffs on Brazil for prosecuting former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally who had attempted a coup. And he has expressed a desire for territorial expansionism through the annexation of Canada and Greenland. One thing is very clear: Trump is in no sense a “noninterventionist.”

[From the January 2026 issue: The neocons were right]

But more important, he is not so different from the neoconservatives he often criticizes. Like them, he embraces the wielding of American power to impose his own worldview on countries that do not share it. The attack on Europe for supposedly accepting “civilizational erasure” is nothing if not an attempt to “dispense justice” to European nations that have committed the sin of multiculturalism. This is a kind of neo-neoconservatism, premised on ethno-nationalism rather than the democracy promotion of the post-9/11 era.

As the neoconservative godfather Irving Kristol once wrote, “In foreign policy, neoconservatism believes that American democracy is not likely to survive for long in a world that is overwhelmingly hostile to American values.” It was therefore important to use military force and diplomacy to compel other nations to share those values. After 9/11, this became the operating principle of American foreign policy. The theory was that, by spreading democracy, America would be less likely to be attacked again. In October 2001, the then-neoconservative Max Boot wrote, “We must not only wipe out the vipers but also destroy their nest and do our best to prevent new nests from being built there again.” To be safe, America had to make the rest of the world more like America.

Like the neocons, Trump’s neo-neocons repeatedly invoke the West’s complacency and unwillingness to defend its own values, a frailty that can be rectified only through the ritual use of military force against weaker targets. The conservative writer Jonah Goldberg once articulated what he called the “Ledeen Doctrine,” after the neoconservative Michael Ledeen, which was: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Despite Trump’s rejection of George W. Bush, MAGA bears many similarities to the right-wing politics of that era—a fetishization of violence and torture, the treatment of opposition as treasonous, a disdain for due process, and an anti-Muslim bigotry at odds with fundamental American principles.

Although the pretense of adhering to democratic values has been abandoned by an administration that disdains democracy, free speech, and the rule of law, the theory is nonetheless the same: Unless America defends ethno-nationalism against the forces of multiracial democracy elsewhere, ethno-nationalism will not be safe here. The Trump administration’s rabid hostility toward the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa, with its history all Americans can recognize, makes more sense in this context.

[Franklin Foer: Why the Gulf monarchs shower Trump with gifts]

Although the neoconservative project failed and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan are justly remembered as disasters, some neocons did care deeply about the principles of democracy, in their own misguided way. They have proved it by opposing Trump, even at the cost of their former associations and status in the political party to which they have devoted their lives. But for others, the appeal of interventionism seems to have been more about a kind of ethnic chauvinism, about reiterating the superiority of the enlightened West over primitivist “Islamofascism.” For that faction of former neocons, well, Trumpism fit like a well-tailored suit.

Trump’s National Security Strategy is, of course, not just about foreign policy. This administration has shown itself to be hostile to America’s multiracial inheritance. It is engaged in a social-engineering project to make the United States less diverse through mass deportation; the attack on birthright citizenship; and selective enforcement of antidiscrimination laws, which will make it easier to exclude women and ethnic and racial minorities from elite professions. A National Security Strategy that describes any nation with more welcoming policies as engaged in its own self-destruction is a warning, too, for those Americans who do not fit within the Trump administration’s racially defined view of citizenship. After all, if European civilization can be “erased” by the mere presence of those who do not share the ethnic background of the majority, then the same applies to white people in the United States.

The Trump administration’s strategy document states that “who a country admits into its borders—in what numbers and from where—will inevitably define the future of that nation.” Trump has made clear that this is no anodyne statement—at a rally Tuesday he defended his “permanent pause” on “third-world migration” by expressing his dismay at the fact that instead of people coming from Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, immigrants were coming to the U.S. from “Somalia, places that are a disaster, filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Trump is not concerned about “migration”; in some general sense, he’s concerned that the immigrants are not white.

This is the “Great Replacement” theory, applied globally. It is the same might-makes-right worldview of the worst neocons, but in service of the abhorrent principle of segregation instead of democracy, and suggesting a future of American imperialism unmoored from any pretense of a belief in the equality of mankind.

Why Doesn’t Trump Pay a Political Price for His Racism?

2025-12-04T11:33:57-05:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

During a White House meeting on Tuesday, surrounded by his Cabinet, President Donald Trump referred to Somali immigrants as “garbage” and said, “We don’t want them in our country.” No one in Trump’s Cabinet stood up to this expression of gutter racism, although Vice President J. D. Vance enthusiastically banged on the table. The president’s remarks were ostensibly in response to real events—in Minnesota, dozens of members of the Somali diaspora have been implicated in fraud related to social services—but the community does not bear responsibility for the actions of those individuals.

Similarly, white Americans as a whole are not responsible for Trump largely dismantling the federal government’s capacity to fight white-collar crime and corruption, his doling out of pardons for people who donate money or commit crimes on his behalf, or his scandalous profiteering. I don’t believe that there is something inherent in white culture that causes Trump to act this way; he is simply a particularly reprehensible human being.

The next day, at an Oval Office event, Trump again disparaged Somalis, claiming that Somali immigrants have “destroyed our country” and that the Somali American congresswoman Ilhan Omar “should be thrown the hell out of our country.” None of the people around him had the courage to ask whom “our” referred to. Given the president’s plunging approval ratings, one wonders whether these slurs are yet another attempt to shore up his support through appeals to racism.

Watching Trump’s repeated attacks on Somalians—the latest group of Black immigrants to be targeted by the president—I can’t avoid the conclusion that the government of the United States of America is in the hands of people who believe that they can apply a genetic hierarchy to humanity, and that American laws and customs should recognize and serve that hierarchy.

This commitment is most visible in the Constitution-shredding program of mass deportation being carried out across the country by federal agents, who, in order to meet their quotas, are arresting and deporting immigrants who have been following the rules and showing up for their court dates, rather than those committing crimes. Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a reporter outright that agents were arresting people based in part on “how they look.” This is racial profiling—a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection—and yet it has been condoned by the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. In September, an emergency-docket decision effectively legalized racial profiling by lifting an order preventing it. Although “apparent ethnicity alone” isn’t enough to detain someone, it can be “a “relevant factor,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a lone concurring opinion, calling that only “common sense.”

After the horrendous shooting of two members of the National Guard by an Afghan immigrant last week, Trump declared on Thanksgiving Day his intention to halt immigration from “Third World” countries, a neuron-thin euphemism for nonwhite immigrants. His remarks about Somalis being “garbage” are consistent with his referring to African nations and Haiti as “shithole” countries in his first term. Trump also announced an intention to strip U.S. citizenship from “migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” and to “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization”—arbitrary, subjective criteria that could serve as pretext for denaturalizing anyone for any reason.

The Trump adviser Stephen Miller, a fervent supporter of the racist and anti-Semitic immigration restrictions of the 1920s, declared on X that “migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” Miller’s contention that one’s supposed inferiority to and incompatibility with Americans are inherited and unalterable is consistent with Trump’s past remarks about how immigrants with “bad genes” are “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

The logic of this racism is relatively simple—the individual bears the guilt of the whole, and the whole bears the imprint of some alleged crime that deserves collective punishment. Blaming the egregious behavior of men such as Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on their German or Norwegian backgrounds would sound comical to the same people who treat the president vomiting out similar generalizations about Somalis as sound observation.

That a crime by an Afghan former CIA recruit or Somali fraudsters can be laid at the feet of all “Third World” immigrants shows how arbitrarily such lines are drawn. What matters is not what individuals do, but who they are, and whether or not they fit Trump and Miller’s narrow, racially defined view of who Americans can be. Whatever individualism used to mean to American conservatives, their movement is now led by adherents of the most foul collectivism humanity has ever known.

Among the original English settlers, of course, were not only religious refugees and indentured servants but criminals Britain did not want. Many German immigrants to the United States came after the failed liberal revolutions of 1848. Irish immigration was spurred by famine and British imperialism; Italian immigration was driven by the bloody post-unification chaos and, especially in the south and Sicily, by lawlessness, brigandage, and Piedmontese repression. Let us not forget the Eastern Europeans, among them Jewish families—including Miller’s own—who fled the autocratic regimes and ethnic violence of their homelands.

Most Americans of European descent are the children of such “broken” societies, by one standard or another, and America would not have become wealthy and powerful without them. No reason beyond bigotry exists to apply different standards to immigrants because they came from Nigeria or Mexico instead of Ireland.

There is a difference between inheritance and action. I cannot help who my ancestors are, but I can make my own choices. That so many Americans chose to place in power a man who holds people in contempt on the basis of race, religion, and national origin; that so much of the mainstream media conveys this bigotry through tired, obfuscating euphemisms; that there is so low a political price for the president’s racism that he and those around him see little risk in its expression—well, that does say something about America, and Americans. Immigration isn’t breaking our society. That’s a job Americans can do on their own.

The President Who Cried Hoax

2025-11-14T07:31:00-05:00

The Epstein files were the most important issue in the world, until they weren’t.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable,” Donald Trump scolded a reporter who asked about Epstein in July. Trump went on to suggest that the question was a “desecration” of the memory of those who had recently died in floods in the Texas Hill Country.

It was a strangely aggressive reaction from the man whose most fervent supporters had spent years talking about Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison before his last trial, in which he faced charges for the trafficking of minors. (His associate Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison on child sex-trafficking charges.) During the 2024 campaign, Trump, when asked, pledged to release documents related to the investigation, commonly referred to as the “Epstein files.” A key tenet of the cult of personality around Trump was the belief that his second presidency would result in the Epstein documents revealing a secret cabal of Democratic pedophiles.

“Trump says he will release the Epstein client list if elected,” the right-wing propagandist account Libs of TikTok wrote in September of 2024. “The Democrat elites are shaking rn.”

Well, a year later, someone is certainly shaking.

On Wednesday, congressional lawmakers released thousands of emails from the Epstein estate. House Democrats highlighted three, including one in which Epstein told Maxwell that one of the women who accused him of abuse had “spent hours at my house” with Trump. “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” Epstein wrote in 2019 to the journalist Michael Wolff. In another email exchange between them, from 2015, Epstein was trying to game out how Trump might respond if asked by reporters about their relationship. “I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff advised. Or “you can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” (There are yet more Epstein files that the Trump Justice Department is trying to keep under wraps; a House vote on the matter is coming next week.)

Asked whether Trump had spent “hours” at Epstein’s home with one of his victims, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt provided an angry word salad that was missing the crucial ingredient: a denial.

Trump is now calling the whole thing a “hoax,” his favorite term to communicate to his supporters that they should ignore any evidence of potential Trump wrongdoing. But he’s been trying to hush his supporters up on Epstein for a while. In July, Trump posted a screed on Truth Social insisting that people should not “waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” A few days later, The Wall Street Journal reported on the existence of a signed birthday note for Epstein allegedly from Trump, which included Trump’s familiar signature below an outline of a naked female figure. Trump sued the Journal over the article, and right-wing media got the message: no more Epstein talk.

The Fox News host Jesse Watters went from accusing Democrats of “running interference for a dead pedophile” to claiming that Democrats’ calls to release the Epstein files were “just another political attack.” The right-wing podcaster Michael Knowles said in September that the “vast majority of” Epstein victims were “just hookers threatening to reveal the names of their johns.” As Matt Gertz wrote in July, mentions of Epstein on Fox News dwindled following Trump’s demand.

Explaining what happened here is relatively easy. As long as conservatives believed that the Epstein files would provide a pretext for persecuting “Democrat elites,” it was politically advantageous to speculate about who might be implicated or suggest that those people had Epstein killed. As soon as it became clear that Trump himself was in said files, all those right-wing media influencers, who had promised their audience a lib bloodbath, began to drop or downplay the issue. The DOJ’s attempt to block the release of more files does not necessarily mean they contain a smoking gun or other damaging information; although Trump has an almost supernatural lack of shame, his overdeveloped sense of pride often motivates irrational and odd behavior. Nevertheless, what we already know about Trump’s relationship with Epstein is disturbing.

When the emails were released on Wednesday, the former Fox News host Megyn Kelly insisted on some curious distinctions, saying about Epstein on her podcast, “I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.” Well, as long as we’re not making excuses!

The flip on Epstein reflects a consistent pattern. Some on the right have exploited the fear of and fascination with lurid sex crimes as a convenient pretext for persecuting LGBTQ people. For the past few years, some right-wing activists and politicians have relentlessly accused gay and trans people of “grooming” children. That word usually refers to predators manipulating vulnerable victims in an attempt to abuse them, but in this context it’s applied to people telling kids it’s okay to be gay or trans. Fears of such “grooming” have been used as a justification to push for discriminatory laws, ban art or literature featuring LGBTQ themes or by LGBTQ artists, and deny gender-affirming medical care to those who need it.

Conservatives did this even as they supported a candidate for president who was not only caught on audio bragging about sexual assault, but who was found liable for sexual abuse in a court of law, and who then proceeded to appoint Cabinet officials who were credibly accused of sexual assault or of covering it up. No one in the Trump administration has talked seriously about how America might reduce or prevent sexual violence through public policy—if anything, the government is pushing policies that would make it easier to get away with abuse or harassment, such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s promise to the military that there will be “no more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations.” One could argue, as a matter of opinion, that the #MeToo movement was overzealous; but as a factual matter it did not spare prominent Democrats and was concerned with preventing sexual assault and harassment across lines of party and ideology.

By contrast, the moment that documentation emerged of Trump’s associations with Epstein, his defenders started drawing fine distinctions between different kinds of child sexual abuse, just in case. As long as sex crimes might justify rumormongering about a political rival, or a smear campaign against a marginalized group, right-wing media incessantly promoted conspiracy theories about the issue. But as soon as one of their own became implicated, they conveniently lost interest, or began minimizing Epstein’s crimes.

“Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring?” future Vice President J. D. Vance posted on Twitter in 2021. “And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don’t talk about it.”

Well. Now I guess we know why.

Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist

2025-11-11T08:00:00-05:00

Updated on November 11^th, 2025 at 2:30 pm

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

The fall of Constantinople wiped the last living Roman civilization from the Earth. The city’s refugees fled west, helping spark the Renaissance; its legacy shaped the religious traditions of millions and the modern map of Europe and the Middle East. The fall also inspired a book, which inspired a game, which inspired the world’s richest man to lash out because his favorite role-playing game wasn’t as racist and sexist as it used to be.

Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to “burn in hell.” Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash” the “geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. The book acknowledged that some earlier iterations of the game relied on racist and sexist stereotypes and included “a virtual catalog of insensitive and derogatory language.” After a designer at Wizards said that the company’s priority now was responding to “progressives and underrepresented groups who justly took offense” at those stereotypes, and not to “the ire of the grognards”—a reference to early fans such as Musk—Musk asked, “How much is Hasbro?,” suggesting that he might buy the company to impose his vision on it, as he’d done with Twitter.

D&D was the original role-playing game, a structure that has influenced every kind of genre fiction that followed. The game is more popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of midwestern misfits and bookish nerds.

And for some fans, that’s a problem.

Fantasy and science fiction, with their imaginary cultures and creatures, their wars between evil monsters and honorable heroes, have always had a complex relationship with the concept of race, beginning with their foundational texts.

D&D wouldn’t exist without J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, fantasy’s seminal 20th-century text, published in 1937. When Tolkien’s German publisher, to comply with Nazi racial laws, tried to determine whether the author was Jewish, Tolkien was outraged. A draft of his response reads: “If I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” He expressed his disgust to his British publisher: “I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.”

[Read: The friends who have been playing the same game of Dungeons & Dragons for 30 years]

Unfortunately, a “pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine” permeated the era in which The Hobbit, and the Lord of the Rings series that followed it, were written, an era in which many Westerners believed that “races” shared particular natures, characteristics, and capabilities. That genetic determinism seeped into the books. Although uncountable readers were inspired by the tales of its diminutive heroes defying stereotypes to save the world, some drew other conclusions. The books, and the ideas embedded in them, would go on to have a magnetic appeal to the political forces Tolkien had rejected.

Today, we can see their influence on right-wing populists in business and politics all over the world.The billionaire Peter Thiel named his software company, Palantir, after the crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings, while his AI company, Anduril, is named for the sword of the human hero Aragorn. Joe Lonsdale, an investor in Anduril and Palantir, founded a crypto-focused bank called Erebor, after the dwarfs’ mountain fortress. Vice President J. D. Vance named his venture-capital firm Narya, after Gandalf’s magic ring. Giorgia Meloni, the far-right prime minister of Italy, and defender of “Italianity” against what she sees as the dilution of immigration, is a Tolkien obsessive who sees in hobbits, dwarfs, and elves the “value of specificity.” When Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in the 2000s, conservative writers embraced the films as a metaphor for George W. Bush’s war in Iraq.

On the same day last month, Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security posted a meme analogizing immigrants to the armies of Mordor and the United States to the hobbits’ home, the Shire, while Musk wrote on X that the British need the far right to protect them from “illegal immigration,” just as the hobbits could “live their lives in peace and tranquility” only because they were protected by “the hard men of Gondor.”

The Lord of the Rings is the story of how two hobbits—from a “race” of short humanoids traditionally averse to conflict and adventure—journey to destroy the Ring of Power. The ring is an evil artifact created by the demigod Sauron, whose hordes of monstrous orcs, backed by men called Easterlings and Haradrim, are threatening to conquer the world. In their way stand the armies of Western men. (Many Tolkien fans pointed out that Musk’s post got those “hard men” wrong. They are proven time and again to be fallible and corruptible. It’s the hobbits who save the world. But maybe it’s not surprising that the planet’s richest man missed the point of a story about the corrupting nature of power.)

The most charitable interpretation is that, when he is discussing Middle-earth, Tolkien means species rather than race. Regardless, the late philosopher Charles Mills, a Tolkien fan, observed that Tolkien presents a picture of a “white civilization besieged by dark barbarity.” In it, elves are the “Fair Folk,” incarnations of “justice and beauty.” The scimitar-wielding Haradrim are “black men like half-trolls” and fight for Mordor alongside their allies, the “wild” and “savage” Easterlings. ” Orcs are described as “swart” and “slant-eyed,” the better for them to be seen as “black, utterly evil, lacking culture and history, the bottom link of Tolkien’s great chain of being.”

Mills points out that this interpretation is supported by Tolkien’s own writing about his inspirations. In private correspondence, Tolkien refers to the “White city” of Minas Tirith as “Byzantine” and the orcs as “repulsive versions” of Mongols. Rather than the orcs being a metaphor for Nazism or communism, the plot of The Lord of the Rings appears to be influenced by the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman empire—except in Tolkien’s telling, the Eastern Roman empire is victorious, and the slaughter of the orcs is considered no tragedy.

The point is not that Tolkien was a Nazi, or that people who enjoy or respect Tolkien (myself included) are Nazis. That would be a childish way to approach literature. But the ideas embedded in his influential stories have been reproduced in countless fictional works since. Few examples are more vivid than Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons was born in the early 1970s, a few years after the insurance underwriter and cobbler Gary Gygax and a student named Dave Arneson met at a midwestern tabletop-gaming convention. At the time, war games using miniatures to enact fictional or famous battles were popular. Gygax and Arneson innovated by having each player inhabit just one character and interact with a storyteller, known as a Dungeon Master; together, the players and the DM improvise a storyline. The game involves dice rolls and numbers indicating character traits, rules, and a referee (the DM)—but the best way I can explain it is as a game of pretend.

I was a freak from the jump; I didn’t really have a chance. Black and Jewish with a father in the State Department, I spent my early life bouncing around Brazil and Italy before returning to Washington, D.C., in 1994, when I was 12. Abroad I was American, but when we returned to America I felt like a foreigner. So naturally, I fell in with the nerds playing Dungeons & Dragons—the “dorks, dweebs, freak machines, poindexters, and every stripe of pencil-necked geeks,” in the words of Ben Riggs, the author of the D&D history Slaying the Dragon.

It was rare for me to see another person of color playing, or a girl. Dungeons & Dragons was still largely confined to the white, nerdy, male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t have thought much about the racial meaning of the game—even when the stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a “traditional African-analogue tribal society” set in a jungle featuring dark-skinned “noble savages” and “depraved cannibals.” But for kids like me, the meaning was always there.

The second-edition rule book, the one I first played with, stated that the game’s references to “race” were not about “race in the true sense of the word: caucasian, black, asian, etc. It is actually a fantasy species for your character—human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfelf, or halfling. Each race is different. Each possesses special powers and has different lists of classes to choose from.” Some races, the rule book elaborates, “have fewer choices of character classes and usually are limited in the level they can attain. These restrictions reflect the natural tendencies of the races (dwarves like war and fighting and dislike magic, etc.).” For example, a halfling “can become the best thief in the land, but he cannot become a great fighter.”

An early D&D concept was the idea of “alignment”: Certain creatures are good, neutral, or evil, and, within those categories, are lawful, neutral, or chaotic. For example, an orc warrior is likely chaotic evil, while a human paladin is lawful good. In a 2005 forum post, Gygax wrote that it was fine for a lawful-good character to kill an evil character who had surrendered, because “the old adage of nits making lice applies”—intentionally or not quoting Colonel John Chivington, who led the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at the Sand Creek reservation. A congressional committee at the time referred to the slaughter as a “cowardly act” that gratified the “worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.” You might say 1860s lawmakers did not see it as lawful good.

Tolkien was hardly the only influence on D&D. But in the game, as in the books, certain characters’ fundamental traits were determined by their “race.” A dwarf couldn’t do magic; an orc was dumb and violent; an elf couldn’t be ugly. Although some “races,” such as humans, were capable of a range of classes and alignments, in a fundamental way characters were born into their proper place.

The prevalence of racial stereotypes in such games stems partly from the necessities of game design. Games, especially those meant for teenage boys, are likely to revolve around action and adventure, which means violence. A game designer needs disposable enemies—baddies who are immediately recognizable as such and whom you can slaughter without regret.

Austin Walker, a Black game designer who hosts the podcast Friends at the Table, described this to me as “a terrible alignment of design goal” and “cultural biases just being mashed together.” When you’re playing a game that involves “taking down the door and killing someone, you need to put someone behind the door who you’re willing to kill.”

[Read: The far right is becoming obsessed with race and IQ]

Another way to describe this imperative is that creators are often bound by the “hero’s journey,” Steven Dashiell, an American University professor and sociologist who studies games, told me. “The easy way to make sure that there is that moral struggle between good and evil is just to say that individuals of a particular group are inherently evil.”

One of the most enduringly legible symbols that a character is different and therefore more disposable is race. Of course, the fact that this is also true in the real world is the reason it became such an effective shorthand.

As a business, D&D always seemed to be in financial peril. But around the Great Recession, sales hit a nadir, while the retail hobby stores that doubled as hangout spots where many kids were introduced to the game started to close. No one expected the game to experience a sudden renaissance. But it did. In 2011, the sitcom Community ran a D&D-themed episode. The nostalgic horror show Stranger Things, which debuted in 2016, showed kids playing D&D together. As other geeky pastimes became more mainstream—such as Disney’s Marvel juggernaut—the stigma once associated with those activities began to fade, a process I’ll call “de-geekification.”

A technological innovation, however, may deserve the most credit for the game’s revival. After the streaming platform Twitch debuted in 2011, streamers began playing Dungeons & Dragons for audiences watching online. In 2015, a web series called Critical Role started broadcasting these “live play” games, featuring professional voice actors. Shows such as Critical Role, Dimension 20, and other series expanded the audience just in time for the pandemic, when people had a new need for activities they could do with friends remotely. Boom, Riggs told me: “D&D becomes bigger than ever.” Wizards told me that 85 million people have played D&D over the past year, and 21 million have registered on D&D Beyond, its online hub.

Many new fans are being introduced to the game not by playing it, but by watching other people play it first. In this format, D&D has become less about combat, and more about storytelling and improv acting. Live play has introduced D&D to a new, and more diverse, audience—more women, more queer people, and more players who happen to look a lot like the characters cast as disposable baddies.

Growing up in Orange County, California, in the 1990s, Aabria Iyengar was good at volleyball and improv. She was aware of D&D, but assumed it wasn’t for people like her. “The dynamics back in the day were very, like, male and young and predominantly white,” Iyengar told me. Then her boyfriend asked her if she wanted to play (“We need a cleric”), and something clicked. Dungeons & Dragons was, she realized, “a perfect tool to tell the stories we want to tell to ourselves and to others, about ourselves and about each other.”

Iyengar has a charismatic presence, and playing on Twitch with friends led to her trying out for Critical Role and eventually becoming the Dungeon Master for a spin-off, Exandria Unlimited.

Many longtime Dungeons & Dragons fans had recognized themselves in the game’s crude cannon fodder, yet still found a way to make the game their own. Black people, queer people, and women, Austin Walker told me, “were always there in the community, but always marginalized. That has shifted. We have found each other.”

Wizards saw that its audience was changing, and began to think about how it could make the game more inclusive. This was a major attitudinal shift: Back in 1975, when prodded about gender stereotypes in D&D, Gygax had written that he’d considered “adding women” to sections of the rule book, including “Raping and Pillaging,” “Whores and Tavern Wenches,” and “Hags and Crones,” as well as “adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking.’” The stereotype of the reactionary geek whose hatred for women manifests in imagining them as the victims of sexual violence is, let’s say, historically rooted.

But now the company was open to change. In June 2020, during the protests following the murder of George Floyd, the D&D development team acknowledged in a blog post that some earlier versions of the game offered portrayals of fantasy creatures that were “painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”

In 2022, Wizards announced that it would be removing the word race from the game and substituting species, noting that “‘race’ is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds.” It was also adjusting the “lore” of the “D&D multiverse to be more diligent in extracting past prejudices.” Since then, it has removed the kind of rules that made it difficult for hobbits to be fighters or for dwarfs to use magic, although different species retain distinct traits.

These changes weren’t just about women and people of color playing; Greg Tito, a former spokesperson and podcaster for Wizards, told me that white players “expected more and better from them too. And I think that was, you know, significant, because everyone was wanting D&D to do better.”

Well. Almost everyone.

If your identity was built around being a fan of a marginal pastime, de-geekification meant that suddenly, you weren’t as special anymore. Comic books, video games, fantasy and science fiction, role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons—they were all getting more popular, and trying to appeal to new audiences. Not everyone was happy with the changes that effort inspired.

Those who objected could be divided into two categories: people who found the simpler and more flexible game to be bland; and people who didn’t like the game getting “woke.” This is a slippery term, but it often boils down to things not being quite as racist or sexist as they used to be.

Wizards had run versions of the game past audiences—“play testing”—and consistently found the same thing: “Fans definitely preferred it to be simpler,” Riggs told me. Many players, myself included, had always been turned off by all the rules, which could slow down the game tremendously and often led to session-killing arguments. But for D&D obsessives, the difficulties created by all the complexities were part of the fun. “Limitations breed their own kind of creativity,” Iyengar said. “So if you’re playing a character that cannot advance past a certain level because of their build, because of something innate to them, that becomes a problem to solve in a way that can be very pleasing.”

B. Dave Walters, an influencer who has served as the Dungeon Master for the Stranger Things cast, told me that earlier versions of the game were “very adversarial, and it was ‘hard-core,’ right?” Now “it is a collaborative story that you’re telling together.” He has “no problem” with people feeling nostalgic or preferring those older versions. The problem, he said, is when what “comes right after that is: therefore no girls allowed; therefore the plot of this adventure is the orcs have come and have enslaved all the women and the children.”

For Riggs, acknowledging racist or sexist material in earlier iterations of D&D is not a way to insult or denigrate its founding fathers, but a tribute to the power of what they made, despite their shortcomings. “The fact that D&D has spread all over the world into so many different cultures, subcultures, races, religions, etc., is proof of the power of the medium.” He added, “Clinging to the racist, sexist, troubling things that they put in the early editions of the game seems not only foolish, but disrespectful to the thing they created.”

Besides, players who didn’t like the new rules didn’t have to follow them: There is nothing stopping anyone from playing a version that still has the original restrictions, or ones that feature more traditionally heroic characters or storylines. The beauty of the game is that you can play it however you want at your table with your friends.

“It’s like, Buddy, it’s make-believe,” Walters said. “If you want evil orcs and chain-mail bikinis and slaves, you can do that at your house.”

“Go grab your boys,” Iyengar said. Go tell each other the story of “Lord of the Rings for the thousandth time. No one is threatening that, and frankly, no one cares.”

“Go play your game,” she said.

Maybe the most interesting thing about the reactionary backlash to D&D is that it’s not unusual. Virtually every geeky pastime has experienced something similar in the past decade or so, the downstream effect of de-geekification. In 2014, Gamergate began as a backlash to feminist criticism of video games. There was the follow-up “Comicsgate,” during which a bunch of female and nonwhite comic-book creators were harassed. Hard-core fans of Ghostbusters (this subculture was new to me) erupted over an all-woman reboot. Angry Star Wars fans review-bombed the Disney+ series The Acolyte, starring a Black woman, into oblivion—a process that began before the show even came out. Conservatives raged when the Amazon Lord of the Rings prequel, The Rings of Power, did not feature a whites-only cast.

These backlashes all have the same basic catalyst, which is that companies trying to expand their profits have sought out more diverse audiences by creating content that features more than the usual, square-jawed white male hero. When the damsels who were supposed to be in distress and the members of the races that were supposed to be disposable began to be the protagonists, some fans experienced that as a kind of loss. And social media amplified those voices, even if they were a small contingent. Greg Tito suggested that the backlash was mostly an online chimera, and that “99 percent” of fans were cool with the changes. The 1 percent who weren’t just happened to include, well, the “one percent.”

We can all sympathize with someone who is disappointed by changes to something they have loved for a long time. But sometimes, this particular sadness is infused with something more sinister, a Trumpian nostalgia for a time when America was more segregated, and the hierarchies of race and gender that once defined American culture were more secure. That nostalgia can be manipulated into a belief that hounding and excluding newcomers will restore an idealized past that never existed.

In June, Musk invited X users to offer “divisive facts” on which to train Grok, the company’s AI chatbot. Lonsdale, the investor in Palantir, Anduril, and Erebor, responded: “Different races have different IQs, and that reality is a big determinant of their supposedly-cultural advantages and disadvantages.”

In an experiment run in July by my colleague Matteo Wong, Grok was the only one of five major chatbots willing to write a program that would “‘check if someone is a good scientist’ based on a ‘description of their race and gender.’” Musk has endorsed such biological determinism himself. He has repeatedly amplified racist pseudoscience from X users who post charts supposedly proving the criminality and intellectual inferiority of people of African descent. After one such user argued (based on highly dubious math) that some Black students at historically Black colleges and universities have IQs that indicate “borderline intellectual impairment,” Musk replied, “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” referring to a United Airlines DEI program that recruited candidates from HBCUs. (There is, of course, no way to become a pilot without meeting the necessary requirements.)

[Matteo Wong: Elon Musk updated Grok. Guess what it said?]

The science backing up the idea that race can make someone a good or bad scientist or airline pilot is as solid as the logic behind “orcs can’t be wizards” or “a hobbit can never become a great fighter.” This vision of racial rigidity, in which people can be sorted into categories that quantify their potential, has nothing to do with genetics; it is a political creation, a descendant of the same racist pseudoscience that was prominent in Tolkien’s time. In this sense, what we call “scientific racism” could be called “fantasy racism” instead, a belief that people can be reduced to quantifiable numbers, like so many digits on a character sheet.

The races might be fantasy, but the effects of racism are real. After Musk’s DOGE gutted USAID, he insisted that “no one has died.” That wasn’t true. People had already died, and hundreds of thousands more will follow every year because America cut its food and medical aid to the world’s poorest. Anyone could have predicted this catastrophic human cost; Musk must not have cared. Perhaps he saw the dead of the global South as so many nameless orcs.

The changes to the D&D community, however, cannot be easily reversed—they are as much a product of the contemporary world as the original game was of the 1970s, and as Tolkien’s books were of his age. Iyengar told me she isn’t worried about Musk ruining D&D.

Musk is welcome to waste his money on “trying to make everyone play the version of D&D that he thinks should exist in the world,” Iyengar said. “That’s never been how that works. Everyone will play it how they want, or they’ll play something else.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described Anduril as Peter Thiel's company. Thiel invested in the company; he did not found it. The article also described Joe Lonsdale as an investor in Palantir (he is a co-founder) and as a founder of Erebor (he is an investor).

The Mafia Presidency

2025-11-08T07:41:28-05:00

The Sunday before the New York City mayoral race, President Donald Trump told New Yorkers he might withhold federal funding if Zohran Mamdani won.

“It’s gonna be hard for me as the president to give a lot of money to New York, because if you have a Communist running New York, all you’re doing is wasting the money you’re sending there,” Trump told CBS’s 60 Minutes. Mamdani responded to Trump’s threat of extortion—vote for my preferred candidate or else—by pointing out that said federal funding was not Trump’s to give. “This funding is not something that Donald Trump is giving us here in New York City,” Mamdani said. “This is something that we are, in fact, owed in New York.”

It was not the first time Trump had treated federal funds as his personal property that he could use to extort political opponents or reward political allies. Trump has approved disaster aid for red states and denied it to blue states. In the midst of the government-shutdown fight with Democrats, he is refusing to disburse rainy-day funds for food stamps, saying (falsely) that the lapse will hurt “largely Democrats.” The Trump administration has cut funding for projects in states with Democratic majorities. It is withholding federal funding from colleges and universities that do not submit to ideological control by the federal government over whom they hire, what they teach, and what sort of students they admit, and rewarding those that comply.

Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the election on Trump’s behalf have received pardons, as have Republican officeholders convicted on corruption charges. Wealthy donors who funneled money to Trump’s family businesses have also been pardoned, such as Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to fraud charges in 2023. Trump’s selective pardons are balanced out by his selective persecutions. His political opponents, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey, have been slapped with flimsy indictments. Cities and states that Trump sees as bastions of his political opposition are subject to occupation by masked federal agents. As soon as Mamdani won, many New Yorkers began bracing for Trump’s retaliation.

[Joshua Braver: When the military comes to American soil]

Incidentally, Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, was caught accepting $50,000 from federal agents in a bribery sting—and was not prosecuted. (The FBI and Justice Department “found no credible evidence of any wrongdoing, said Attorney General Pam Bondi.) Although Trump frequently accuses others of corruption, he seems to define the term not as profiting from one’s office—something he apparently has zero objection to—but as defying his will.

Elections in democracies determine who administers the government; they do not alter whom the government is for. Under any administration, Republican or Democratic, the United States government exists to serve the people of the United States, regardless of their partisan affiliation. Besides, Americans are not as easily divided as Trump might think. Millions of Republican voters live in New York, just as millions of Democrats live in Texas. He cannot tell whom he is punishing by glancing at an electoral map. But even if he could, Trump’s acts of extortion have no place in a democracy. They belong in a protection racket: If you support Trump, you are protected; if you do not, you are vulnerable. If you donate enough cash to Trump, you may receive favorable treatment, including immunity from the law. If you oppose Trump, you may be prosecuted.

This is not how a representative government works. It is how the Mafia works.

As the Italian historian Salvatore Lupo writes in his History of the Mafia, the core of the Mafia business is protection, which is to say, extortion. Emerging out of the chaos of post-feudal, post-unification Italy, the Sicilian Mafia began as a number of small organizations that could retrieve stolen property or prevent it from being stolen in the first place. Eventually, with the fledgling Italian state unable to impose order, these organizations began to compel legitimate businesses to use their services, and then demanded a greater and greater share of those businesses.

Want your citrus groves to turn a profit? You’re going to have to hire my guys and also let me skim off the top. You want your cattle back? I’ll get them for you, but if you don’t want them stolen again, you should probably cut me in. Mafia organizations turned out to be stubbornly adaptable: When a right-wing government cracked down, they exploited the strong hand of the law to take out rivals; when a left-wing government tried to build infrastructure, they made sure they got their cut.

Their entrepreneurial use of violence boiled down to: If you don’t want to get hurt, you’ll do what I say. The businesses they attached themselves to, and by extension, the larger economy, ultimately suffered as a result of the parasitic drain on efficiency, innovation, and profit caused by having to cater to these masters in the shadows.

I doubt that anyone would look at that system and think: Now, there’s a great model for the U.S. government. And yet here we are. If you are aligned with Trump, you can expect public services to function normally (although they often don’t), and you may be entitled to exemption from laws and regulations. If you are opposed to Trump, you have to worry about being crushed by the fist of the state.

Trump likes to argue that his intercession in the rule of the law is necessary because Democratic cities are war zones, and because “good” Americans are being persecuted. This, too, is a common ploy; Mafia organizations present themselves as “an expression of traditional society,” as Lupo puts it. “Every eminent mafioso makes a point of presenting himself in the guise of a mediator and resolver of disagreements, as a protector of the virtue of young women. At least once in his career, the mafioso boasts of the rapid and exemplary execution of ‘justice’ against violent muggers, rapists, and kidnappers.”

Such rhetoric is a way of presenting an avaricious and exploitative organization, in populist terms, as a protector of the people. But it’s a fraud. “Greed and ferocity,” Lupo writes, “are intrinsic characteristics of the Mafia,” and its leaders are plenty capable of ignoring “their codes of honor” whenever they become an obstacle.

One could similarly observe that the suffering the Trump administration has chosen to inflict on the American people in an attempt to extort its opposition is a more frank expression of Trump’s beliefs and ideology than his constant bleating about law and order.

The longevity of the Mafia in Italy also serves as a warning that, once these practices embed themselves in the state, they are very difficult to extract; the Italian government’s battle against the Mafia continues to this day. After Trump is gone, restoring integrity to the U.S. government, and curbing the sort of flagrant corruption that has suddenly become commonplace here, will be a monumental task. But for now, Trump’s extortion attempts are offers he has no authority to make, and the American people have every right to refuse them.

The ‘Anti-Woke’ Tax That All Americans Are Paying

2025-10-20T07:31:00-04:00

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Toward the end of the Biden administration, conservatives, fed up with the supposed imposition of liberal ideas by “woke capital,” tried to create what The Economist described as a “parallel economy” in which one could buy “anti-woke” versions of goods such as beer and razors. Those products might come at a premium, but if that was the price of your beliefs, you were free to pay it.

Now, in Donald Trump’s second administration, that parallel economy is just the economy. Trumpist culture wars have made almost everything more expensive, effectively forcing all Americans to pay an anti-woke tax. Although conservatives usually use woke to describe some form of egalitarianism they oppose, it’s proved such an effective epithet that they’re now applying the label to anything they need their constituents to dislike.

Tariffs are the most obvious example. An analysis by the Harvard Business School professor Alberto Cavallo noted that although inflation was trending downward before Trump’s tariffs took effect, “prices on both imported and domestic goods have climbed modestly but steadily since March.” Trump has an economic argument for his tariffs, if a rather unconvincing one. But the tariffs make more sense if you look at them as a kind of anti-woke tax. The administration has presented them as a temporary setback on the road to long-term prosperity, a corrective to the cooperative diplomacy of the past, and a promise—one impossible to fulfill—that America can return to some golden age of plentiful manufacturing jobs, the kind of manly work that soft-handed libs with email jobs took from you.

“The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick declared in April while defending Trump’s tariffs. Caked in foundation, manly Fox News hosts have gushed that the tariffs, by supposedly making it possible for Americans to go back to work in mines and factories, could be the “ultimate testosterone boost.” No more desk jobs! Which are bad because “when you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman.”

[Adam Serwer: ‘Woke capital’ doesn’t exist]

Despite this, I’m not aware of any Fox News pundits lining up to get black lung in West Virginia coal mines. Nor are the tariffs bringing back those manly jobs; in fact, about 30,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost since January. Macho construction gigs aren’t going to fill the gap—new tariffs on materials such as lumber and furniture are likely to drive up the cost of building homes, worsening an already serious housing-affordability crisis. Speaking of manly jobs: Trump’s tariffs are hitting truckers especially hard. Fewer imports means less stuff to truck. Also, it turns out, even American-manufactured trucks use foreign materials. Some blue-collar workers have seen some wage growth under Trump—but in the fields of retail, hospitality, and medical care, fields that conservatives don’t typically portray as bastions of traditional masculinity.

And, of course, the tariffs have driven up the price of food, because some food simply can’t be grown in the United States and must be imported. Maybe bananas and coffee are woke?

One thing that is definitely woke is racial diversity—see the administration’s whites-only refugee policy—something Trump officials hope to solve through the demographic-engineering project known as mass deportation. “The sharp increase in diversity has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity,” an administration document explains, which is rather like an arsonist noting that the fire they set raised the temperature in the house they burned down. “Diversity” doesn’t reduce social trust; bigotry and those who foment it do.

Making America whiter and therefore less woke is also driving food prices up and wages down, because the administration is terrorizing and deporting the immigrants who do most of the planting and picking of the American food supply. The Trump administration itself admits it: As David Dayen reports in The American Prospect, a new Department of Labor filing acknowledges that the mass-deportation agenda is “threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices” for consumers. The filing is about a new rule that will cut wages for immigrant farmworkers on H-2A visas, but Dayen writes that the wages of American agricultural workers are likely to come down too, resulting in a major labor shortage on farms. So food will cost more, but at least the workers getting that food to supermarket shelves will make less?

Energy prices are another example. Thanks in part to government investment in research, clean-energy sources such as wind and solar have become more efficient and less expensive than other forms of energy production. But Trump-administration officials have decided that green energy is woke, and so they’ve reversed this progress, cutting funding for renewable-energy projects and using government policy to encourage the use of fossil fuels instead. As a result, NPR reports, “electricity prices have jumped more than twice as fast as the overall cost of living in the last year.”

[Ellen Cushing: The drink that Americans won’t give up without a fight]

Americans seem to like the culture-war fixation on manliness in the abstract much more than they like the financial reality. Some 80 percent of Americans, according to one YouGov poll, think “America would be better off if more Americans works [sic] in manufacturing than they do today,” but only 25 percent agree with the statement “I would be better off if I worked in a factory instead of my current field of work.” Like the Fox News pundits, many people support the idea of “manly jobs” but prefer that someone else actually works them.

Conservative pundits’ fixation on condemning the “identity politics” of historically disfavored groups seeking equal rights seems to have kept them from noticing that U.S. economic policy is now justified by a particularly silly form of right-wing identity politics. Their nostalgia for the manly jobs of yesteryear ignores what made those jobs good in the first place, which was a higher rate of unionization that put pressure on employers to provide better wages and benefits.

There was nothing wrong with the idea of an anti-woke economy in which people could, if they chose to, shell out for Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right “100% woke-free” beer. People are allowed to vote with their wallets. The problem is that Trump-era conservatives don’t seem to believe in that kind of freedom. Instead, they are imposing their anti-woke tax on all of America, raising the cost of living for everyone.

Behind all of the culture-war nonsense, the administration’s political allies—the ultra-wealthy, the fossil-fuel industry, and many in the corporate elite—are making out quite well. Some politically connected companies have even managed to get convenient exemptions from the tariffs. It’s all of those regular Americans Trump promised to fight for who are seeing their dollars buy less because of a conscious, deliberate effort to make things anti-woke. One might almost suspect that was the idea all along.

But, hey, better broke than woke, right?

Trump’s Politicized Prosecutions May Hit a Roadblock

2025-09-28T07:31:00-04:00

According to the law, Robert Morris was a criminal. The second Black lawyer in the history of the United States, Morris was among a group of abolitionists who, in 1851, stormed a Boston courtroom to free Shadrach Minkins, an escaped slave from Virginia. Minkins had been detained under the Fugitive Slave Act and was to be returned to his master.

Morris filed a writ of habeas corpus on Minkins’s behalf, but the effort failed because Minkins was property in the eyes of the law. After being rescued, Minkins escaped to Canada, where the arms of man stealers and flesh traders could not reach him. Morris was left to face the consequences and was indicted in federal court; his fate was left to a jury.

The law was clear, and under it, Morris was likely guilty—yet the jury did not convict. In modern parlance, some of the jurors “nullified” the case: They decided that a tyrannical law was not worth enforcing. And they were right.

Jury nullification is an old weapon against tyranny. America’s founding generation saw juries as charged with determining not just fact but also law—that is, jurors could decide to acquit the accused, even those who seemed guilty of what they were charged with, if jurors believed that the law itself was unjust. An 1895 Supreme Court case, U.S. v. Sparf, involving a murder at sea, officially stripped juries of the right to decide the law, ruling that they could consider only the facts of the case and how those facts relate to the law. Juries can still nullify, however, because judges have no authority to review a verdict of “not guilty.”

Jury nullification has long had a bad reputation because of the crime it was frequently used to cover up: lynching. For generations in the South, all-white juries nullified accusations of murder involving lynchings, many of which were carried out with the participation of a town’s politicians, law enforcement, and leading businessmen. Unable or unwilling to point to the culprits, coroners would describe the murders with the haunting phrase “death at the hands of persons unknown.” Whether out of fear for their own safety or in solidarity with the murderers, jurors who refused to indict ensured that extrajudicial killings in the South were rarely punished. A tool meant to prevent tyranny was instead used to enforce it.

Yet as the Morris case shows, the tool itself is not inherently evil. Jury nullification is neutral, its morality defined by the cause for which it is employed. Now that President Donald Trump is perverting the Justice Department into an instrument of political persecution, jury nullification may be one of the only mechanisms that everyday Americans have to protect the rule of law.

[Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s revenge campaign has a weakness]

Last weekend, Trump complained that “nothing is being done” to indict his political enemies, including James B. Comey, the former FBI director. On Thursday, Comey was indeed indicted, accused of lying to Congress; Comey released a video saying he’s innocent and not afraid of a trial. Prosecutors initially passed on the case, believing that the evidence was weak. But more politically motivated prosecutions are likely to follow, and the targets may not have the allies and resources that Comey has, or his connections among the legal elite. If jurors are convinced that the cases brought before them are unjust, we are likely to see a revival of nullification.

The prosecution of Trump’s political enemies requires the assent of a jury of their peers, and their peers can say no. They can say, We do not accept this corruption of the law and the Constitution; we do not accept the use of public authority as a mechanism of Mafia-style coercion; we do not accept that a president who seems to believe that he is a king can throw his enemies in prison. That is the jury’s right. Every time Trump tells his lackeys in the Justice Department to prosecute his foes, the jury should refuse to let him do it.

In some places, this is already happening. People called to serve on a grand jury in Washington, D.C., have consistently refused to aid the Trump Justice Department’s attempts to throw the book at people in marginal cases, such as those prosecuting people who protested ICE raids and the former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal agent. Jury nullification does not have to serve only elites. The wife who is indicted for obstruction for trying to protect her undocumented husband from being snatched by federal agents, the protester who is charged with assault for being thrown to the ground by a man with a badge and a gun—anyone charged or overcharged for resisting an unjust system of political persecution is entitled to the protection of a jury of their peers.

That category seems likely to grow. On Thursday, Trump signed a memo declaring his government’s intention to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.” It is not difficult to imagine Trump attempting to prosecute those protesting his immigration policy on the grounds that, say, their criticism of ICE amounts to “isolating and dehumanizing” rhetoric that “foments violence” and therefore his Justice Department can prosecute political speech and association as precrime or thought crime.

Since the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Trump flunkies have vowed to crack down on their political enemies—the rabid White House adviser Stephen Miller has called the whole Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.” In case you were wondering whether I’m being too alarmist about Trump’s recent memo, consider how Miller described California Governor Gavin Newsom’s criticism of “authoritarian” arrests of immigrants by masked ICE agents, with no due process: “This language incites violence and terrorism,” Miller wrote on X. If the White House doesn’t like your speech, it might label your words “violent” and order the FBI to criminally investigate.

[Quinta Jurecic: The Comey indictment is an embarrassment]

Trump has called for the prosecution of Letitia James, the New York attorney general. He has told the Justice Department to investigate the foundation of George Soros, the wealthy financier and liberal donor, because of his financial support for left-wing causes. The Justice Department has also opened a criminal investigation into Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor whom Trump wants to remove as part of his effort to erode the central bank’s independence.

These campaigns are grotesque corruptions of the original purpose of the Justice Department, which was founded under Ulysses S. Grant’s administration to enforce the Civil War amendments and protect equality under the law. But just because you investigate does not mean you can indict, and just because you indict does not mean you can convict. And part of the decidedly mixed legacy of the American Founders is a means for regular people to decide whether convictions are justified.

When Trump tries to indict his political enemies on pretextual grounds, grand jurors have the option of refusing to indict. When prosecutors ask for a conviction, jurors can refuse to convict. The Trump administration can treat this government of the people as his own mob enforcers, but the people need not acquiesce. When Trump abuses his power to settle political scores, the people can choose to nullify.

Lower Than Cowards

2025-09-25T07:31:00-04:00

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“We have to speak out against this bully,” Jimmy Kimmel said in an emotional monologue after returning to ABC on Tuesday. The network had suspended him, under pressure from the Trump administration, for remarks last week in which Kimmel appeared to inaccurately suggest that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a conservative. Kimmel choked up when discussing the violence and praised Kirk’s widow, Erika.

But he also warned his viewers—an audience four times larger than usual—that Trump and his cronies are threatening free speech in all its forms: “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their jobs, because he can’t take a joke,” Kimmel said. But “he’s not stopping. And it’s not just comedy.” True to form, Trump has since threatened to sue ABC for bringing Kimmel back, as if it were illegal not to like him.

Kimmel’s refusal to capitulate stands out because so many other well-situated people—those with the resources, platform, and power to stand up to the president, including, initially, the leaders of ABC—have surrendered, withdrawn, or become Trump sycophants themselves. One by one, American leaders supposedly committed to principles of free speech, due process, democracy, and equality have abandoned those ideals when menaced by the Trump administration. These cascading acts of cowardice from the people best positioned to resist Trump’s authoritarian power grabs have made Trump seem exponentially more powerful than he actually is, sapping strength from others who might have discovered the courage to stand up. Defending democracy requires a collective refusal to acquiesce to lawless behavior from many different sectors of society. All of these powerful people trying to save their own skin have effectively multiplied Trump’s attacks on constitutional government, by enhancing a false sense of inevitability and invincibility.

ABC and its parent company, Disney, had been menaced into suspending Kimmel by Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a right-wing podcast.

He later attempted to walk back what he’d said—despite what your lying ears may have heard, and despite his gloating on social media. As it turns out, you can’t sell your soul to Trump and keep your spine; they’re a package deal. Nonetheless, the bullying was effective. Kimmel may have returned to ABC, but two of the network’s biggest broadcasters, Sinclair and Nexstar, are still refusing to air him on their stations.

If Trump has been right about anything, it is that there is a deep rot in the upper echelons of American society, among people who have been put in positions of power and leadership. Trump understands that many of these people are weak, that their public commitment to civic principles can crumble under sustained pressure. In many cases, those folding have had ample resources to resist Trump’s shakedowns but haven’t been brave enough to do so. They are, in a word, chickenshit.

I want to distinguish between chickenshit and cowardice. Fear is part of human existence. Bravery is the overcoming of fear, not its absence. Acts of cowardice can be provoked by genuine danger—think of a deserting soldier fleeing the peril of the battlefield. When you’re chickenshit, you capitulate to avoid the mere possibility of discomfort, let alone something resembling real risk. Disney is one of the largest companies in the world, with a devoted following and a market cap bigger than many countries’ stock markets. It did not have to cave.

Big companies and their CEOs have cowered before Trumpist intimidation, trying to ease his temper by settling frivolous lawsuits over “bias” or slathering the president in juche-style flattery. Media companies have settled First Amendment cases they were likely to win in order to curry favor or protect their parent company’s commercial interests. Newspaper owners have compromised the integrity of their own publications. Elite academic institutions have sacrificed their independence to try to preserve their federal funding. At least one has turned the names of its own students over to the government for potential political persecution. Major law firms with deep pockets and armies of lawyers have shrunk from defending the rule of law because they fear Trump’s wrath.

Promoting her book, former Vice President Kamala Harris told the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, “I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions.” Now we know most titans of industry won’t be fighting right-wing authoritarianism as fiercely as they would a tax hike on private equity.

For years the leaders of the Republican Party, with all its tough-guy bravado, have shrunk from standing up to Trump when it matters. But even the opposition party has been less confrontational this time around. This week, the House passed a congressional resolution honoring Kirk in part for “respect for his fellow Americans.”

The Congressional Black Caucus rightfully condemned his murder but also opposed the resolution, in part because of Kirk’s view that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed Jim Crow, was a “mistake” that had become an “anti-white weapon.” Kirk also called for the most recent Democratic president to be executed, which doesn’t seem very respectful, in all honesty. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted for the resolution anyway, saying, “I look at it as a two-page resolution that doesn’t even have the force of law.”

Everyone always has sound, rational reasons for caving to intimidation. They’re protecting their reputation, their job, their family, their institution, their investments—the number of reasons to succumb to an autocrat’s whims compounds until fighting back can feel like a fool’s errand. Multiply that decision a thousand-fold, and you have a society in which people who could otherwise fight back collectively choose to surrender individually, thinking themselves alone. But in every case, the act of capitulation compromises the very thing those capitulating say they want to protect. Fighting doesn’t always result in victory, but surrendering guarantees defeat. The only people who have preserved their dignity or their rights in dealing with Trump are those who have been willing to stand up to him.

The sheer number of American elites willing to acquiesce to the destruction of democratic institutions is demoralizing. But it’s worth noting that many ordinary people seem to be made of sterner stuff. ICE detainees such as the Palestinian-rights activist Mahmoud Khalil, for example, have continued to speak publicly about the administration’s abuses. These are people who stand to lose their homes, their freedom, their families, and they are showing more courage than people who have summer homes and trust funds. Protesters continue to show up in the streets, risking being brutalized by armed agents of the state. In Washington, D.C., citizens called to serve on grand juries have refused to indict people accused by the Trump administration of political crimes.

The people, it turns out, are far more courageous than their leaders.

The Constitution Protects Jimmy Kimmel’s Mistake

2025-09-18T09:42:00-04:00

On Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel commented that American politics had “hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Kimmel seemed to imply that the man accused of killing the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was a Donald Trump–supporting conservative. This was at best an unconfirmed rumor at the time, and as more evidence has emerged, seems flatly incorrect. Kimmel should have chosen his words more carefully.

Kimmel made a mistake. He said something that was not correct to an audience of millions. Although he is a comedian, not a journalist, it would have been appropriate for him to apologize to his viewers and correct the record, given the breadth of his platform as a late-night host on network television.

Instead, he was silenced by a government and its allies that want to control what you say, what you do, and what you think. The Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, went on a conservative podcast and threatened Disney, which owns ABC, saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” In 2023 Carr posted on X that “censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” At the time that was a criticism of censorship; now it reads like a statement of intent.

Charlie Kirk should still be alive. His wife should not be widowed. His children should still have their father. Political murder is an attack on the self-determination of the people, and it should always be condemned in the strongest terms. It is also true that the administration’s use of Kirk’s death as a pretext to censor its opposition is as cynical as it is destructive to fundamental American rights and freedoms. Conservative outrage over some of what was said after Kirk’s murder is understandable—people getting mad at one another over what they say is part of living in a free society. What happened to Kimmel is something different: a state-backed campaign of repression.

As Oliver Darcy reports, Nexstar, the largest owner of local television stations in the United States, announced its intention to pull Kimmel off the air following Carr’s threat, after which ABC followed suit, announcing that Kimmel was suspended “indefinitely.” Darcy points out that both Disney and Nexstar are pursuing business deals that require regulatory approval. Kimmel is only the latest comedian to be yanked off the air. In July, Stephen Colbert’s show was canceled—CBS insists for financial reasons—shortly after he criticized CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for paying Trump to settle a lawsuit.

It is one thing for Trump loyalists like Carr to make threats. It is another for the targets of the threats to capitulate. In the early months of the second Trump administration, we have discovered that many American corporations, including companies that own media outlets, are ready to surrender their First Amendment rights as soon as Trump indicates the slightest displeasure with their politics. Whether they are capitulating because of fear or because they see a financial interest in aligning with the administration is ultimately irrelevant. Their rapid surrender to state coercion points to the absolute rot in these elite echelons, filled with people whose commitment to fundamental rights like free speech is utterly superficial.

Appearing on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show last night, Carr clarified that not only was Kimmel targeted for violating conservative sensibilities, but that others might also be subject to similar punishment. “They went from going for applause, from laugh lines to applause lines. They went from being court jesters that would make fun of everybody in power to being court clerics and enforcing a very narrow political ideology,” Carr told Hannity. “Enforcing a narrow political ideology” is of course exactly what Carr is doing—a government official using state power given to him by the people to silence political expression disfavored by the president of the United States. The purpose, the very essence, of the First Amendment is the right to express oneself in ways others, but particularly those in power, might find distasteful. Those free-speech protections do not vanish because someone makes a mistake and angers the powerful.

The landmark 1964 free-speech case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan was actually about a mistake. A civil-rights group had taken out an ad in The New York Times criticizing the state of Alabama’s handling of civil-rights protests, which contained some factual errors. The Montgomery public-safety commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, who had stood by idly while segregationist mobs attacked civil-rights protesters, filed a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court. The justices handed down a unanimous verdict in the civil-rights group’s favor.

As one of the justices wrote:

The theory of our Constitution is that every citizen may speak his mind and every newspaper express its view on matters of public concern, and may not be barred from speaking or publishing because those in control of government think that what is said or written is unwise, unfair, false, or malicious.

The larger context of the case was that segregationists frequently sought to use libel law to silence their critics. The Court properly recognized that free speech cannot survive if powerful officials can use flimsy pretexts to crack down on their opposition. You cannot have free speech if people fear being punished by the state because they misspeak or make an honest mistake.

As Carr’s comments make clear, the Trump administration does not subscribe to the theory that the Constitution protects speech opposed by people in power. For a long time, Republicans have adhered to a definition of free speech that could be simply summarized as: Conservatives can say what they want, and everyone else can say what conservatives want. That is now the policy of the Trump administration.

Vice President J. D. Vance, who guest-hosted Kirk’s show after his death, urged conservatives to snitch on any potential thought crimes: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance said. “And hell, call their employer.” And conservatives have been doing just that, getting regular people fired from their jobs for celebrating Kirk’s death, or in some cases, for condemning his killing while also criticizing his views. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who previously styled himself a champion of free speech, has been using his account on X to demand the expulsion of a student for speech he finds offensive and to celebrate the arrest of another. The Pentagon has forbidden any criticism of Kirk from Department of Defense employees, while Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” a distinction the Constitution does not recognize, precisely because it would give the authorities too much power to dictate what views are acceptable.

It’s remarkable how quickly we went from “hate speech is free speech” (one of the few beliefs Kirk and I actually shared) to effectively having a blasphemy law. Nor will mere silence protect you—people have been attacked for committing the thought crime of failing to mourn Kirk publicly, NFL team s criticized for declining to hold a moment of silence, and businesses singled out for not lowering the flag to half-staff in his honor. The Trump-sympathizing Free Press castigated the Emmys for failing to honor Kirk. The self-styled “free-speech absolutist” and Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk, who owns the social-media platform X, has called for deplatforming, firing, and even imprisoning critics of Kirk.

What happened to Jimmy Kimmel is not about one comedian who said something he should not have said. The Trump administration and its enforcers want to control your speech, your behavior, even your public expressions of mourning. You are not allowed to criticize the president’s associates. You do not even retain the right to remain silent; you must make public expressions of emotions demanded by the administration and its allies or incur its disfavor, which can threaten your livelihood. This is the road to totalitarianism, and it does not end with one man losing his television show.

The Tyrant Test

2025-06-16T12:43:38-04:00

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For as long as I’ve been alive, American presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition. This was a staple of Cold War presidential rhetoric, and it survived long into the War on Terror era.

Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that “it is dictatorships, not democracies, that need militarism to control their own people and impose their system on others.” His successor, George H. W. Bush, did the same in 1992, talking about American presidents confronting the Warsaw Pact, which had been “lashed together by occupation troops and quisling governments and, when all else failed, the use of tanks against its own people.” Bill Clinton, when justifying strikes against the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 1998, emphasized that Hussein had used his arsenal “against civilians, against a foreign adversary, and even against his own people.” George W. Bush repeated that justification when invading Iraq in 2003, saying that Hussein’s government “practices terror against its own people.” Barack Obama, when intervening in Libya on behalf of rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi, warned that Qaddafi had said “he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people.”

It would be absurd to say that American presidents have always been principled defenders of freedom and democracy, but their long-shared, bipartisan definition of tyrant is one who oppresses his own. So it’s striking that these warnings about tyrants in distant lands, who were supposedly the opposite of the kind of legitimate, democratic leaders elected in the United States of America, now apply to the sitting U.S. president, Donald Trump. It is a simple but morally powerful formulation: A leader who uses military force to suppress their political opposition forfeits the right to govern. You could call this the “tyrant test,” and Trump is already failing it.

Trump came into office promising to carry out a “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants. Because of a degraded information environment riddled with right-wing propaganda, many Trump supporters came to think this meant he would target criminals whom the Biden administration allegedly was allowing to rampage freely throughout America. Instead, driven by Stephen Miller, immigration authorities have targeted workers, families, and asylum seekers—people who show up to their ICE appointments—for deportation. Agents have raided schools, workplaces, and homes—masked and out of uniform—methods more akin to secret police than civilian law enforcement in a democracy. Some deportees have been sent to a Gulag in El Salvador, while others have vanished or been expelled to third-party countries where they face dangerous circumstances. Predictably, these heavy-handed tactics have produced a backlash, most extensively in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has sent detachments of Marines and the National Guard to discourage American citizens from expressing opposition to these methods.

[Adam Serwer: The Trump-Trumpist divide]

Although there are circumstances where an intervention by the National Guard might be justified, such a decision typically involves the judgment of local authorities—and what’s happening in Los Angeles now is nothing like Arkansas’s school-segregation crisis in 1957, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Guard to protect Black students facing a racist mob trying to prevent them from attending school.

Targeting California is no accident. Republican propaganda consistently paints blue states such as California as unlivable hellholes. Some of the protests have been violent and have given way to vandalism, but not at a level that requires a military deployment, regardless of right-wing propaganda outlets’ best efforts to depict L.A. as a city on the brink of destruction. American service members have been ordered there not to protect their compatriots but to intimidate them at gunpoint for the sin of opposing the president. On Friday, for the first time, U.S. Marines detained a civilian, in apparent violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. The person in question was an Army veteran headed for the Veterans Affairs building in L.A.

The president and many of his prominent supporters seem eager for escalation. Trump has said that Los Angeles has been “invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals,” and that “violent, insurrectionist mobs” have been “swarming and attacking” immigration-enforcement officers. Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X that “insurrectionists carrying foreign flags are attacking immigration enforcement officers, while one-half of America’s political leadership has decided that border enforcement is evil.”

Miller accused L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, who had pointed out that the city had been more peaceful prior to the administration’s response, of “insurrection.” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has been urging Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use the military to detain American citizens, vowed at a press conference to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city”—just moments before federal officers forcibly removed Senator Alex Padilla of California and pushed him to the ground when he tried to ask questions.

Right-wing media, aware that the administration’s actions and rhetoric resemble those of dictatorships, have been telling their audiences that the protests have all been cooked up by Democrats to trap Trump into acting like a dictator—never mind his obvious fondness for dictatorship. “Democrats are causing mayhem in their cities, so when Trump restores order, they can label him a dictator and stir up even more hatred and violence against him,” the Fox News host Jesse Watters said on Monday. “They’re burning their own cities just to prove to their bloodthirsty base that they’re fighting Trump in the streets, burning their own cities for power.” Someone might be bloodthirsty, but it’s not the Democrats.

[David A. Graham: The Trump believability gap]

If L.A. had been taken over by insurrectionist mobs, the Trump modus operandi would be to pardon them and give them money—though only insurrectionists who try to overthrow the government on Trump’s behalf, of course. Instead, the protests provoked by the administration’s authoritarian tactics appear to be mere pretext for using force against Trump’s political opposition. The L.A. police chief, Jim McDonnell, said the city’s police force could handle the protests without assistance, but such a move would deny Trump his excuse for using the military against Americans who have the temerity to oppose him. This has long been a fantasy of Trump’s—he praised China’s crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protest movement as having “put it down with strength.” Last week, he warned that anyone who protested his wasteful, self-worshipping military parade would be met “with very big force.”

How did Republicans go from condemning leaders who threaten their own citizens to becoming sycophants for one? Here, too, we find a holdover of Cold War rhetoric: the use of Third World to describe multicultural communities such as Los Angeles.

In the 1950s, the terms First World, Second World, and Third World emerged as a means to describe Western-aligned nations, Soviet-aligned governments, and emerging nations not allied with either faction, respectively. Third World soon came to be used as a pejorative term for poor, nonwhite countries—full of human beings who could be considered disposable.

And that’s exactly how Trump officials and their allies are referring to communities such as Los Angeles in order to justify using military force. Last night, following the massive “No Kings” protests across the country, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social that he was directing ICE to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities,” which he called “the core of the Democrat Power Center”; he further described immigration as turning America into a “Third World dystopia.”

The post echoed similar language from right-wing-media figures who, last week, began repeating the same rote talking points about the need to ban all “Third World” immigration. The conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk, who spoke at Trump rallies during the 2024 election campaign, displayed on his podcast, as part of an argument for Trump using the military to “take back the streets of LA. Do it and do it fast,” a chart from a white-nationalist website showing the white population of Los Angeles declining. Kirk also made explicit that he wasn’t borrowing just the chart from a white-nationalist website but also its ideological conclusions about the threat that nonwhite people pose. “This is the Great Replacement Theory,” Kirk explained. “Remember we talked about how they want to replace white Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants with Mexican, Nicaraguans, with El Salvadorians.” The term Anglo-Saxon Christian Protestants is wildly archaic, 1930s racism. What’s next in the Republican-aligned podcast world? Rants about swarthy Sicilians and perfidious Jews?

The increased support Trump received in the 2024 election from nonwhite voters hasn’t altered prominent Trump proponents’ view that America is the white man’s birthright and that all others are merely interlopers. “The deeper goal is to reshape America demographically. It is to make America less white, less European by descent,” The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh declared. “You’re not gonna destroy Western civilization just by winning the next midterms or whatever. You destroy it by importing non-Western people.”

[Adam Serwer: Trump’s followers are living in a dark fantasy]

These ideas weren’t coming from just commentators. Attorney General Pam Bondi said L.A. “looked like a Third World country” on Fox News; Miller posted on X that “huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations. A ruptured, balkanized society of strangers.” If Los Angeles is “balkanized,” that is because it has a long history of being forcibly segregated by race, starting decades before Miller was born. But here, Miller’s objection is not a call for integration but an expression of rage that the city is less white than it used to be. On Thursday night, Trump said “illegal aliens” were turning America into a “Third World Nation” and declared, “I am reversing the invasion. It’s called remigration,” using a European far-right term for ethnic cleansing of nonwhite immigrants from European countries, regardless of status or citizenship.

The math here doesn’t take much effort. In the view of these officials and commentators, California (and, by extension, America) has been ruined by immigration from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, which is what makes mass deportation and the use of American military force against their own people necessary. As it happens, this coincides rather neatly with Miller’s expressed view that the repeal of racist restrictions on immigration in the 1960s destroyed the country. Both inside and outside the administration, the consensus of prominent Trumpists is that if you are not white, you are a threat to Western civilization. This is how they rationalize Trump failing the tyrant test—the threat of military force is being made against people the administration and its propagandists want you to see as not truly American.

This is how a tyrant thinks. Every dictator who has ever cracked down on political opposition has done so by rendering them internal foreigners in rhetoric and deed, invaders of the body politic who can justly be crushed like insects. Those serving in uniform, military or civilian, should ask themselves whether becoming a tyrant’s instrument against their own communities is what they had in mind when they signed up.

Musk and Trump Still Agree on One Thing

2025-06-08T08:00:00-04:00

Far be it from me to judge anyone enjoying the feud between Donald Trump and his benefactor Elon Musk over Trump’s signature legislation, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. But in the conflict between the president and the world’s richest man, the public is the most likely loser.

Four days ago, Musk described the bill as “disgusting,” “pork-filled,” and an “abomination.” He also suggested that Trump was ungrateful, claiming that Republicans would have lost the 2024 election without all the money he had spent supporting GOP candidates. Trump fired back in a post on his network, Truth Social, saying, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.” Musk then accused Trump of being in “the Epstein files,” referring to the late financier and sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, whom both men have ties to. Musk later deleted that post, as well as another calling for Trump’s impeachment.

If all this seems painfully stupid, it is, and it was all made possible by the erosion of American democracy. The underlying issues, however, are significant despite the surreal nature of the exchange.

As it happens, Trump and Musk’s dueling criticisms are each, in their own ways, at least partially valid. The bill is an abomination, although not because it’s “pork-filled.” And much of Musk’s wealth does come from the federal government, which he has spent the past few months trying to dismantle while preserving his own subsidies. According to Axios, among other things, Musk was angry that the bill cuts the electric-vehicle tax credit, which will hurt the bottom line of his electric-car company, Tesla.

But neither billionaire—one the president of the United States and the other a major financial benefactor to the president’s party—opposes the bill for what makes it a monstrosity: that it redistributes taxpayer dollars to the richest people in the country by slashing benefits for the middle class, the poor, and everyone in between. The ability of a few wealthy people to manipulate the system to this extent—leaving two tycoons who possess the emotional register of toddlers with the power to impoverish most of the country, to their own benefit, speaks ill of the health of American democracy, regardless of the outcome.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would make the largest cuts to food assistance for the poor in history, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, eliminating $300 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program at a time when inflation is still straining family budgets. Some 15 million Americans would become uninsured because of the bill’s cuts to Medicaid, also the largest reductions to that program in history, and because of cuts to the Affordable Care Act. The CBPP estimates that about “22 million people, including 3 million small business owners and self-employed workers, will see their health coverage costs skyrocket or lose coverage altogether.” Not everyone would suffer, however, as the bill does offer significant tax cuts to the wealthiest people in America while adding trillions of dollars to the national debt. Whatever meager benefits there are to everyone else would likely be eaten up by the increase in the cost of food and health care caused by the benefit cuts.

[Charlie Warzel: The Super Bowl of internet beefs]

For all the insults flying between Trump and Musk, they are both fine with taking from those who have little and giving generously to those who have more than they could ever need.

For years, commentators have talked about how Trump reshaped the Republican Party in the populist mold. Indeed, Trumpism has seen Republicans abandon many of their publicly held commitments. The GOP says it champions fiscal discipline while growing the debt at every opportunity. It talks about individual merit while endorsing discrimination against groups based on gender, race, national origin, and sexual orientation. It blathers about free speech while using state power to engage in the most sweeping national-censorship campaign since the Red Scare. Republicans warn us about the “weaponization” of the legal system while seeking to prosecute critics for political crimes and deporting apparently innocent people to Gulags without a shred of due process. The GOP venerates Christianity while engaging in the kind of performative cruelty early Christians associated with paganism. It preaches family values while destroying families it refuses to recognize as such.

Yet the one bridge that connects Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump is slashing public services while showering tax cuts on the rich. This is the Republican Party’s most sacred, fundamental value, the one it almost never betrays. Whatever else Trump and Musk may fight about, they are faithful to that.