Conor Friedersdorf | The Atlantic

The Lesson of Tulsi Gabbard’s Flip-Flop

2026-03-18T18:44:00-04:00

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After ordering the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani killed in 2020, Donald Trump claimed that the military officer had been “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel.” But that justification didn’t pass muster with then–Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard.

Gabbard had long been explicit in her insistence that a president cannot unilaterally decide to attack another country in anticipatory self-defense. She’d even co-sponsored the No More Presidential Wars Act in 2018, which stated that the president must “seek congressional authorization prior to any engagement of the U.S. Armed Forces against Syria, Iran, or Russia.” It was not surprising when, in spite of Trump’s determination that Soleimani had posed an imminent threat, Gabbard insisted that the president had “committed an illegal and unconstitutional act.” Gabbard also warned that a war against Iran in particular would be “so costly and devastating” that it would make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “look like a picnic.”

Yet now that Gabbard serves as director of national intelligence to a president waging war on Iran, she is using her position to defend Trump’s unilateral intervention. The president’s recent determination of an imminent threat in Iran seems to be enough for her: Posting to social media yesterday from her official government X account, she wrote, “Donald Trump was overwhelmingly elected by the American people” and “as our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country.” Gabbard repeated this argument in a Senate hearing on worldwide threats today.

Lots of Trump supporters, inside and outside the government, have walked back their concerns about the legality or wisdom of waging war with Iran. But Gabbard’s prior critique and her current advocacy for Trump are irreconcilable—and instructive. Trump won the 2024 election in part by signaling to a war-weary country that he would be a “president of peace” who put “America First”––a message that some skeptics of foreign intervention found credible because he was giving leadership roles to anti-interventionist politicians such as Gabbard and J. D. Vance. As it turns out, Gabbard not only failed to influence the Trump administration in a way that prevented war with Iran; she is now giving the president cover for it.

The larger lesson, for those who oppose unilateral and unlawful wars, is that neither a president’s anti-war rhetoric nor his appointments of foreign-intervention skeptics are valuable indicators of how he will act. Members of the executive branch cannot be trusted to leave the war power in the hands of Congress, as the Constitution and the rule of law demand. When people serve at the pleasure of the president, the incentives to empower him are simply too strong. What’s more, even if they take the unusual step of resigning in protest, as Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, just did over Iran, the president remains the boss. (It’s telling that even in resigning, Kent did not break from the president, and instead relied on conspiracy theories to argue that Trump is not to blame for the war that he started.)

The Obama era teaches this same lesson. Candidate Barack Obama, a constitutional-law professor and early opponent of the Iraq War, said all of the things about executive power that anti-interventionists wanted to hear. Then President Obama waged new wars unilaterally while asserting extraordinary powers for the executive branch. And he was often assisted not by Dick Cheney–esque avatars of extreme presidential power, but by erstwhile skeptics of executive power such as Harold Koh. The Republican-led House rejected a resolution to support U.S. action in Libya, but members of Congress declined to stop Obama by cutting off funds or to punish him with impeachment.

More recently, a faction of anti-war populists who have complained about the “establishment” interventions of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations came to believe that elevating people such as Trump, Vance, and Gabbard was the solution. Instead, Trump is governing as a hawkish interventionist; as a result, the 2028 primaries are likely to feature anti-war candidates in both parties.

Voters who are skeptical of foreign intervention should stop investing their hopes in presidents and shift their time, energy, and focus to House and Senate contests. Congress is big and messy; the average voter may worry that the makeup of seats is harder to change than the outcome of one presidential race. But Congress alone can mete out consequences to presidents who pursue unlawful wars. And doing so is core to its duties, even though the legislators now in office have failed to discharge them.

In a bygone generation, Grover Norquist became famous for coercing hundreds of legislators into signing a pledge that they wouldn’t raise taxes. Perhaps a congressional majority will one day have pledged, “I swear to vote for the prompt impeachment and removal of any president who attacks another country without a declaration of war, unless Congress judges that he or she preempted an imminent attack on America.”

Presently, the majority of Congress is focused on pleasing the president. But the only way to stop presidents from unilaterally starting new wars is to elect a Congress that threatens to oust them if they do—and means it.

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Senator Markwayne Mullin testified today during his confirmation hearing to be the new homeland-security secretary. Questions about “classified” travel he took as a House member threatened to complicate a vote on his appointment.
Israel struck the infrastructure of Iran’s South Pars gas field, which sent oil and natural-gas prices higher. Israel also killed Iran’s intelligence minister; the U.S. intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, said that Iran’s leadership has been “largely degraded” but that the government “appears to be intact.”
Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton won Illinois’s Democratic Senate primary last night, a victory that also marked a win for Governor J. B. Pritzker, who endorsed her.

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Illustration by Lucy Naland. Source: Getty.

Friendship, on Demand

By Julie Beck

The robots befriended us remarkably fast.

Over the past year or two, AI has become not just a utilitarian tool but a technology that many people are turning to for connection and emotional support. One survey last year found that 16 percent of American adults had used AI for companionship, and a quarter of adults under 30 had. Social AI use seems to be growing rapidly around the world, according to several recent reports on the state of artificial intelligence. Raffaele Ciriello, who studies emerging technologies at the University of Sydney, told me that he once assumed AI companions would remain “niche”; he has been “surprised by how quickly that took over” …

This is a major transformation, a sudden and dramatic shift in which millions of people are seeking companionship from machines that they formerly could have gotten only from other humans.

Read the full article.

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Independents of America Unite!

2026-03-14T08:00:00-04:00

Forty-five percent of American adults identify as a political independent. I am among them. There are now more of us independents than there are adults who identify as Republican or Democrat: Just 27 percent each choose one of those affiliations. The share of independents has grown steadily for the past three decades, and is now larger than at any time in the years that Gallup polls have tracked the political group. Yet despite our swelling numbers, independent candidates have zero chance of winning big in the 2026 midterms and no expectation of a viable independent bid for the presidency.

To me, being an independent means that I want the best versions of both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and I am open to a candidate from either in a given election, but neither coalition, even at its best, is a good-enough fit to satisfy me on all of the issues that I care about. Other self-proclaimed independents vary in what they mean by the term, though in certain elections, such as the 2008 general election and the 2010 midterms, many coalesce around punishing the party in power.

The cohort does not agree on any champion, or even a short list of potential champions, for 2028, and even if it did, third-party bids are fraught (they risk throwing the election to a worse major-party candidate) and hard to organize. The combination of closed primaries in many jurisdictions and the “pox on both your houses” comportment of many independents also means that we sit out primary elections at higher rates than Republicans and Democrats do; this yields general-election candidates from those parties who are less acceptable to us than would be the case if we had participated.

These circumstances seem to demand a change in strategy—except that independents have never had a unified strategy. To be a Republican or a Democrat is to opt into a structure with mechanisms for making collective decisions. To be an independent is to survey the results, feel revulsion, and prefer “none of the above,” even if some of us later hold our nose and vote for the least bad option in general elections.

Obviously, coordinating a group of people distinguished by their aversion to affiliation is hard. But independents’ passive, uncoordinated approach is self-defeating. And with younger cohorts identifying as independent at much higher rates than older cohorts do—more than half of Gen Z identify as independent—the problem is going to only get worse with time. Indeed, a CNN poll from September suggests that the variability in views among people who self-describe as independent is increasing rather than decreasing.

So what is it that this group has in common, whether we lean liberal, conservative, progressive, or libertarian? We share a desire for a politics less dominated by a binary choice between Republicans and Democrats. Independents can adopt several strategies to try to alter that system.

First, independents are most structurally disadvantaged when Republicans and Democrats each carve up congressional districts for their own benefit. Independents can mitigate this by pushing for nonpartisan redistricting commissions that aim to encourage competitive general elections.

Second, independents should push for open primaries. Starting this year, New Mexico will allow voters with no party affiliation to vote in primary elections. But in 2024, voters rejected ballot measures in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and South Dakota (a combination of red, blue, and purple states) that would have enabled ranked-choice voting, open primaries, or a combination of both.

Still, the push for such reforms at least indicates growing scrutiny of closed primaries. Independents should educate themselves about the issue and keep pushing for open primaries in all states. (Meanwhile, given the reality of closed primaries, we should hold our nose, register as Republican or Democrat, and vote for whomever we think is the least bad option.)

[Read: The Republican Party continues eating its own]

Third, independents should champion a Congress where all members are empowered to represent their constituents. When voting for elected leaders, we should recall the critique of former Representative Justin Amash, who has pointed out that the speaker of the House was not meant to function like the leader of only the majority party, manipulating House rules to advantage the partisan agenda of leadership. Speakers as conservative as the Republican Paul Ryan and as progressive as the Democrat Nancy Pelosi have done the job that way, but the role should be that of an official working on behalf of the entire House to ensure smooth, equitable procedures. One measure of whether Congress is functioning as it should––and one matter that independents as a group should track––is whether all House members, regardless of seniority or party affiliation, are empowered to bring bills or amendments to the House floor for an up or down vote.

Of course, most independents have frustrations about the status quo that aren’t addressed by the three-prong agenda that I just proposed. Those frustrations can curdle into a self-defeating withdrawal from politics. And no agenda for independents is likely to gain wide purchase until many are aired and debated. The trick is to understand that more strategic political engagement can yield less frustrating results.

In the meantime, independents would do well to avoid the temptation to isolate themselves based on polarizing issues such as inflation, health care, and immigration and to instead focus on what unites most independents: frustration with the two-party system’s long-standing failure to deliver results that are good for the country, and a desire to end the duopoly on power that persists because Republicans and Democrats have skewed the rules of the game.

Who Is the U.S. Actually at War With Right Now?

2026-03-05T18:46:00-05:00

Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that electing him was the best way to avoid wars. He has referred to himself as the “peace president,” going so far as to complain that he hadn’t won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet Trump has governed as a hawkish interventionist whose approach better aligns with his neoconservative secretary of state, Marco Rubio, than with the anti-interventionists in his administration, such as J. D. Vance and Tulsi Gabbard. The United States is now enmeshed in so many conflicts that its foreign policy is closer to “world police” than “America First.”

The newly launched war against Iran is the most significant. Operation Epic Fury begins less than a year after the United States and Israel partnered to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. At the time, Trump declared that operation a success, and Vance defended it by stating, “I certainly empathize with Americans who are exhausted after 25 years of foreign entanglements … But the difference is that back then, we had dumb presidents and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national-security objectives. So this is not gonna be some long, drawn-out thing.”

The Trump administration has now launched a “long, drawn-out thing” in Iran with no end in sight. U.S. military personnel have already been imperiled at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Ali Al-Salem Air Base in Kuwait, Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. Navy headquarters in Bahrain, and facilities in Iraq. American interests around the world are at risk of Iranian retaliation.

All alone, this war would make a mockery of MAGA claims that Trump is an anti-interventionist. But it is one in an extensive list of Trump-era entanglements.

Even as America’s military expands its focus in Iran, it launched a new operation this week against drug cartels in Ecuador. “Together, we are taking decisive action to confront narco-terrorists who have long inflicted terror, violence, and corruption on citizens throughout the hemisphere,” U.S. Southern Command announced in a press release.

U.S. forces in Africa have been carrying out air strikes over Somalia against the Sunni Islamist terrorist organization al-Shabaab. As recently as last month, U.S. forces carried out multiple strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria, according to U.S. Central Command.

Earlier this year, the United States launched Operation Absolute Resolve, a military campaign that successfully removed the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power. After the operation, Trump said that the U.S. would run Venezuela at least temporarily. This week, Reuters reported that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum traveled to Venezuela and met with its acting president, Delcy Rodríguez.The United States is both negotiating contracts with Rodríguez and threatening to indict her.

The Trump administration concluded last year with a Christmas Day attack on Islamist militants in Nigeria. Earlier in 2025, the United States carried out air strikes in Iraq, waged a roughly seven-week offensive against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and carried out the aforementioned attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. This year and last, the Trump administration has been blowing up boats in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, many off the coast of Venezuela, that it suspects of drug smuggling. The boat strikes have killed at least 150 people.

Ukraine is the one place where the Trump administration appears to be trying to draw down U.S. involvement, though the United States has supplied the country with intelligence as it resists Russian aggression.

During the run-up to the 2016 election, I wrote that “if you’re a voter who believes that Donald Trump is against foreign wars and regime change, unlike the globalist elites in Washington, D.C., you have been misled.” At the time, I noted that Trump released a video in 2011 that sought to pressure President Obama to invade Libya. Trump also argued that George H. W. Bush should have ousted Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and wrote in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, “We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons.” He added, “Am I being contradictory here, by presenting myself as a deal-maker and then recommending preemptive strikes? I don’t think so.” In 2011, he urged the Navy to wage war on Somali pirates.

Now Trump has proved his proclivity for interventionism, without congressional approval or the support of the public. And there’s no evidence to suggest that he will stop here. If Congress continues allowing him to deploy force unilaterally, he may pursue land strikes on drug cartels in Mexico, a prospect that he raised early this year in an interview with Fox News; regime change in Cuba, a longtime dream of Rubio’s; and God knows what else. He is an impulsive man who gambles, especially when the most significant risks are borne by others. There is no way to know how exactly he will surprise Americans next.

Trump could even make the United States a pariah among its Western allies by revisiting his on-again, off-again threats to take Greenland by force, a move that parts of his base have been urging ever since Trump first raised the possibility, or by seizing the Panama Canal, as he has also threatened to do.

Had Americans known that Trump was going to undertake wars of choice and assorted military strikes all around the world, they may not have elected him. At this point, with a majority of voters opposed to Trump’s interventions, congressional action is the only way to disentangle the country from these conflicts. Until then, the list is likely to only grow longer.

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Don’t Call It ‘Intelligence’

By Charles Yu

I am occasionally asked by colleges to give a version of a talk on how I became a writer. The easy thing to do is to give a sort of guided tour through the woods of literary self-formation: a string of anecdotes designed to elicit a few chuckles, a moment or two of reflection about the inevitable bends in the road, things that felt momentous but turned out not to matter, or things that didn’t seem significant at the time but with hindsight turned out to be the most important of all.

Typically, these tours end in the same place: The author has found a path through the wilderness, and discovered a voice along the way. Voice is what leads us out of the woods.

The trouble, at least for me, is that this kind of speech is mostly fiction; the path is only a path in retrospect.

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The Right Is Becoming What It Hates

2026-02-27T15:20:00-05:00

On Sunday, California Governor Gavin Newsom was falsely accused of racism in the sort of frenzied social-media pile-on that many have long associated with the left. But this week, it was the populist right launching a frivolous controversy.

The story begins in Atlanta, where Mayor Andre Dickens, who is Black, was interviewing Newsom, who is white, about his newly released book, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery. Newsom wrote, among many other things, about his struggles with dyslexia. “What would you like for the reader to know more intimately about you?” Dickens asked. “Even growing up with dyslexia and all that, what do you want us to take from that?”

“That, like so many folks, I put a mask on,” Newsom answered. “I wasn’t who I am … So it’s a story about resilience, redemption. It’s a story about humility and grace,” he said. “I just want to put it all out there. You know, I’m not trying to impress you. I’m just trying to impress upon you: I’m like you; I’m no better than you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. And I’m not trying to offend anyone, trying to act ‘all there’ if you got 940. You’ve never seen me read a speech, because I cannot read a speech.” He added: “You know, my dyslexia, I haven’t overcome dyslexia. I’m living with it.”

There was nothing racially offensive––or even racially tinged––in the exchange (as is clear when watching this one-minute, 51-second clip of it). So how did it become a racial issue? Enter an anonymous X account called End Wokeness that has 3.9 million followers––more followers than the governor of California. Whoever runs it posted a 38-second clip from the longer exchange alongside an inaccurate and highly misleading teaser: “Gov. Newsom to a black crowd in GA: ‘I am like you. I’m a 960 SAT guy. I can’t read.’”

In fact, the crowd in Georgia seemed to be racially diverse, and possibly mostly white (as other photos and videos taken at the event suggest). Newsom was answering a question about his message to readers of his book, not to that particular audience, let alone to Black people. And the X account misleadingly shortens his quote so that Newsom appears to say something that he didn’t.

An anonymous account posting false engagement bait on X is very common. The platform encourages this behavior. Such posts are usually best ignored. But in this case, the people who amplified the accusations are hard to ignore. They include Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X; Donald Trump Jr., one of the president’s sons (“I honestly thought this had to be a deepfake or something because it’s so insane and racist beyond belief”); Republican Senators Ted Cruz (“He’s like the perfect Democrat, made in a laboratory, dripping with racist condescension”), Tim Scott, and Rick Scott; GOP Representative Randy Fine of Florida; the rapper Nicki Minaj (“His way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can’t read”); the broadcaster Megyn Kelly; the podcasters Adam Carolla, Dave Rubin, and Steven Crowder; the TV host Batya Ungar-Sargon (“Here is Gavin Newsom literally presenting himself as dumb to appeal to Blacks”); and the talk-radio host Mark Levin.

A few notable figures on the right risked the ire of the mob by challenging its false narrative. “The accusation against Newsom is that he was condescending to black voters,” the activist Chris Rufo wrote on X. “But from the video, the crowd appears to be heavily, if not mostly, white.”

The right-leaning journalist Brad Polumbo wrote that if Newsom had really told a Black audience that he was just like them because he couldn’t read, that kind of remark would justify “some degree of this viral backlash.” He added, “I come at this entire story as a longtime critic of Newsom, who has bashed him for everything from his horrific and hypocritical pandemic policies to his failed liberal economic agenda to his insane embrace of transgender activism.” Polumbo concluded that “the claim that he engaged in any kind of racism in this viral clip falls apart under even the most cursory scrutiny.”

Nevertheless, as in the Covington Catholic incident, when the Twitter left irresponsibly seized on an out-of-context video clip of Nick Sandmann and his classmates as if it proved them bigots, the absurd allegations against Newsom spread from social-media users and their credulous followers to publications that elevated the story. The New York Post wrote, “Gavin Newsom Ripped for Telling Black Mayor ‘I’m Like You’ Before Quoting His Low SAT Score: ‘Liberal Racism on Display.’” Fox News reported, “Newsom Ripped Over ‘Racist’ Viral Clip Telling Black Mayor ‘I’m Like You’ Before Touting Poor SAT Score.”

Nearly all of the prominent figures who mistreated Newsom here are people who once seethed at what they saw—in many cases accurately—as the left’s manufacturing of racial controversy. In this way, the populist right has started to become what it hates.

Five Basic Truths About America’s Most Polarizing Policy Debate

2026-02-11T13:43:00-05:00

“If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”

So warned my colleague David Frum in the headline of an April 2019 article about America’s failure to control mass immigration. “Demagogues rise by talking about issues that matter to people, and that more conventional leaders appear unwilling or unable to address,” he wrote. “If difficult issues go unaddressed by responsible leaders, they will be exploited by irresponsible ones.”

That thesis looked shaky in 2020. Voters declined to reelect Donald Trump; for the first time in more than 50 years, Gallup found that Americans who wanted immigration to increase outnumbered those who wanted it to decrease––a seeming rebuke of Trump’s cruel family-separation policy and attacks on Mexicans and Muslims––and that 77 percent said immigration is a good thing for the United States. Then Joe Biden failed to control the southern border and presided over record surges in unlawful entries. By 2024, a majority wanted less immigration, Trump won the presidency while promising the biggest mass deportation in U.S. history, and an analysis of why voters rejected Kamala Harris found that “too many immigrants crossed the border” was nearly tied for the top reason.

Today, Frum’s warning seems prescient: The Trump administration has deployed a force of aggressive masked officers onto American streets while promising “retribution.” They’ve detained, pepper-sprayed, assaulted, shot, and killed Americans. And high-ranking officials have repeatedly gotten caught lying about events captured by citizen video footage.

A majority now disapproves of Trump’s handling of immigration. Perhaps Democrats will prevail in their current efforts to force ICE officers to take off their masks and get warrants, or even win back Congress as a result––the MAGA coalition is no less vulnerable than the left to voter backlash. But a Democratic victory in 2026 is not likely to end this cycle, in which majorities hate how both parties handle immigration and ping-pong unhappily between them.

I have covered immigration politics and policy for 25 years; here’s my sense of five basic truths that lawmakers need to acknowledge if they want to implement immigration policy that is both popular and in the nation’s best interest.

1. Even many of those Americans who say that they want to deport all immigrants who are here illegally would likely not stand by that position in practice.

Lots of MAGA supporters insist that deporting all immigrants in the U.S. illegally is a prudent goal. Some argue that conserving the rule of law requires doing so. “I don’t care if it’s a grandma who’s been here for 23 years and sits quietly on her porch all day long,” the populist-right pundit Walter Curt wrote. “We either have laws or we don’t, we either have borders or we don’t, there is no middle ground.”

Although superficially seductive, that logic is monomaniacal. In the real world, federal laws are enforced by presidents in a manner that predictably fails to catch anything close to 100 percent of lawbreakers, because resources are scarce, trade-offs are real, and maximalist outcomes are simply incompatible with limited government.

Consider the example of tax law. Most Americans abhor tax cheats. But they, and especially most conservatives, would oppose deploying thousands of masked, armed IRS agents into whatever American neighborhoods the president fancies and allowing them to search houses, workplaces, and private papers to catch all the tax cheats.

Yes, lots of Americans tell pollsters that they want every immigrant who came here illegally deported, but how many would stick to that position if told that it would require house-to-house raids, or that the federal government must choose between spending limited funds on apprehending undocumented grandmothers who stayed after their work visas and spending on other societal needs, such as finding a cure for cancer or paying down the national debt?

2. A majority of Americans support some level of immigration enforcement, particularly for unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crimes.

If excessive immigration enforcement is incompatible with liberty, insufficient immigration enforcement is incompatible with representative democracy––Republicans are correct that our immigration laws were duly enacted, and every plausible read of election results and polling data confirms that Americans favor some meaningful level of immigration enforcement.

Americans’ preferences are clearest on the question of immigrants in the country illegally who have been convicted of violent crimes: According to an Associated Press poll, 83 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat favor deporting them, a position that is also held by 79 percent of Democrats. The persistence of contrary policies in some Democrat-controlled jurisdictions is harmful to public safety and the political interests of that coalition.

I support sanctuary cities insofar as that means that local police don’t enforce immigration law, because they want residents to cooperate with law enforcement. But it doesn’t follow that jailers should refuse all cooperation with deportations. If you favor any immigration enforcement at all, who better to focus on than incarcerated bad actors, who can be found without spending any money on searches or deploying federal officers among the public?

3. Refugee crises will happen––and every response likely to satisfy the public requires prior planning.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge on immigration is what to do with large, sudden surges of people. The future will bring wars, natural disasters, regime collapses, famines, and more. Barring entry to desperate refugees seems cruel, but letting in large, unanticipated flows of foreigners can cause voters in democracies to feel overwhelmed and empower authoritarians. Escaping this dysfunctional cycle is in the interests of restrictionists and inclusionists alike. All potential solutions come with challenges, but none is more formidable than the status quo. The future will confront us with many such crises. We need a plan.

4. Even many Americans who argue for a stricter immigration policy find the demonization of immigrants concerning.

It is one thing to deport people and another thing to vilify them while doing so. In my youth, the Republican Party was explicit about the goodness and humanity of most immigrants––see, for example, the way that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush talked about the issue in 1980. Bush noted that “honorable, decent, family-loving people” were in violation of the law.

Today, in an America where there are many more immigrants, lawful and not, and where violent crime is lower than it was for the entire 1980s and ’90s, data suggest that unauthorized immigrants commit felonies at lower rates than U.S. citizens and immigrants who are authorized to be here. Obviously, some do commit murders and other serious crimes, but it is misleading and incendiary to talk about the entire class as if a large share are violent criminals, or to treat particular ethnic groups as scapegoats for citizens’ financial struggles. Many Americans find such talk unnerving and distasteful.

That is not mere political correctness. It is rooted in the fact that U.S. history is rife with examples of the demonization of ethnic-minority groups preceding mob violence against them. I hope America is beyond atrocities like the Los Angeles Chinese massacre, the World War I–era lynching of ethnic Germans, and the Zoot Suit Riots. But humans today are no more evolved than the perpetrators of those atrocities. Insofar as we’re less likely to participate in mob attacks, it’s because of the existence of cultural guardrails—the very ones that the MAGA coalition is dismantling.

5. Every high-immigration country has citizens who fear immigration and immigrants. They are least likely to sow dysfunction when their predispositions are understood and to some degree accommodated.

The United States has no choice but to tolerate people who fear immigration and immigrants. Although many humans enjoy diversity, a percentage of people in all countries and racial and demographic groups are psychologically uncomfortable with difference. Their discomfort may be to some degree innate, and they are either unable or unwilling to change.

America should never allow its xenophobes to persecute immigrants or violate their rights. But people who hold anti-immigrant views are fellow citizens who influence our culture, politics, and public policy––and we can influence whether they do so in ways that are better or worse for immigrants.

In The Authoritarian Dynamic, the social psychologist Karen Stenner explains how people with a latent predisposition to authoritarianism get triggered, and how best to respond to preserve a pluralistic society. Her work suggests that liberals should stop framing immigration as a celebration of multicultural difference and instead emphasize ways in which immigrants are just like the rest of us: people who seek safety, opportunity, and a better future for their family. These framings can better assuage the fears of those with xenophobic tendencies, she argues. Stenner suggests that countries implement practical assimilationist policies, such as encouraging and assisting with English fluency. She argues that immigration is most sustainable—and backlash against it least likely to succeed—when inflows of new immigrants are controlled, and subject to known limits rather than unlimited in a way that feels unpredictable.

As she puts it in her book, insisting on unconstrained diversity “pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.” And once a society’s authoritarians are activated, the outcome depends in part on how its conservatives react. If they side with authoritarians, repressive policies follow. But under the right conditions, conservatives can be counted on to rally behind pluralism and tolerance. One condition is that they feel reassured “regarding established brakes on the pace of change, and the settled rules of the game,” Stenner writes.

If Democrats or Republicans hope to create sustainable immigration policy, that policy must roughly reflect the public will. Instead of efforts to alter public opinion through persuasion, we’ve seen a succession of fringe factions forcing extremist positions on majorities that hate them. Politicians from both parties should moderate according to what voters actually want. Otherwise, endless political failures risk causing many to lose faith in all politics––which is an existential danger to our democracy.

Colleges Are Stuck Between Bad Options for Fighting Hateful Ideas

2026-01-26T08:00:00-05:00

Pity Chris Summerlin, the dean of students at the University of Florida. He’s being sued by an anti-Semite, and that’s not the worst of his predicament. So far, judges who have ruled on the case have given mixed verdicts on whether he is likely to win or lose at trial. Summerlin deserves to lose on the merits: He expelled a law-school student for speech that, while morally degenerate, is properly protected by the First Amendment. And––this is the pitiable part––it’s easy to see how he might have concluded that giving a bigot grounds to win a civil-rights lawsuit was his best option.

College deans and administrators keep confronting the same dilemma: They face intense pressure to punish speech that elicits fear or moral disgust on campus. They also have legal obligations—and face countervailing pressure—to refrain from violating the free-speech rights of students. They cannot always do both. The result is cases such as Damsky v. Summerlin—cases that might be avoided under a better approach to fighting anti-Semitism and other hateful ideas.

Preston Damsky was a law student at the University of Florida who was open about his belief that America was founded by and for the white race and that its racial character should be preserved, by force if necessary. According to court documents, he wrote in one assignment that “the founding generations” fought, killed, and died for their sovereignty, and argued, “We are not yet so outnumbered and so neutered that we cannot seize back what is rightfully ours.” To survive “as masters in the ancestral lands of their ancestors,” he wrote in another paper, “the People” must exercise “their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow” the government, “a process which no deskbound jurist can gleefully look forward to; for it will be a controversy decided not by the careful balance of Justitia’s scales, but by the gruesome slashing of her sword.”

Neither passage was initially deemed to violate school rules, however much they upset Damsky’s peers. But they informed the way that administrators reacted when Damsky went on X on March 21 and posted the following:

My position on Jews is simple: whatever Harvard professor Noel Ignatiev meant by his call to “abolish the White race by any means necessary” is what I think must be done with Jews. Jews must be abolished by any means necessary.

Ignatiev, who died in 2019, was a factory worker who entered academia late in life as a Marxist and gained minor notoriety with his 1995 book, How the Irish Became White. A few years prior, he co-founded a journal called Race Traitor. He believed that whiteness and white privilege were social constructs that impeded working-class solidarity and that people ought to renounce their privilege and become “unwhite,” thus abolishing whiteness. “Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and white skin would have no more social significance than big feet,” he once said.

After Damsky invoked Ignatiev in his X post, a Jewish law professor replied, “Are you saying you would murder me and my family? Is that your position?” To which Damsky retorted, “Did Ignatiev want Whites murdered? If so, were his words as objectionable as mine? If Ignatiev sought genocide, then surely a genocide of all Whites would be an even greater outrage than a genocide of all Jews, given the far greater number of Whites.”

The exchange troubled many observers inside and outside the university, though they differed on what to make of it. Should Damsky’s statement that “Jews must be abolished by any means necessary” be received as a portent of murderous violence? Was it the hateful rhetoric of a contemptible but presumably nonmurderous anti-Semite? Or, given the reference to a leftist academic who wanted to abolish whiteness, was it the snide trolling of a shitposter mocking a double standard? No one knew for sure. Even the closest readers of the post could trouble themselves wondering if Damsky’s words implied something more than a call for members of that group to voluntarily abjure their own identity.

Soon, Damsky was suspended, then expelled. In suspending Damsky, the school asserted that he’d “created a material and substantial disruption to the academic operation of the UF College of Law.” When it expelled him, it cited provisions in its student code that prohibit “disruptive conduct” and “harassment”––but both provisions state that whatever they prohibit does not include “conduct protected by the First Amendment.”

In subsequent legal proceedings, the University of Florida would defend the expulsion of the student, arguing that Damsky’s words constituted “true threats,” which are not protected by the First Amendment, and were disruptive. Though public schools can prohibit some speech that is “substantially disruptive to learning,” even if, outside of schooling, the same speech would be protected, there is disagreement about whether and how that precedent applies to higher education. “UF cannot hold its adult students to a standard created for students as young as five years old,” the ACLU stated in an amicus brief supporting Damsky as he sought a preliminary injunction to reverse his expulsion. “That is especially true when the adult is engaging in speech off-campus.”

To win at that preliminary stage, Damsky had to show a substantial likelihood that he would prevail in the case overall. He cleared that high hurdle, according to Judge Allen Winsor. “Some may assume that anyone uttering such commentary is more likely to act violently than someone who does not,” he wrote in his U.S. District Court opinion, but “the test is whether Damsky’s posts constituted a ‘serious expression’ that he meant ‘to commit an act of unlawful violence.’” Acknowledging that “many would not love the idea of attending school with someone who burns crosses, marches in Nazi parades, or engages in countless other forms of offensive expression,” Winsor noted—quoting Justice William Brennan’s landmark First Amendment ruling in Texas v. Johnson—it is still the case that “the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” Nor, the judge ruled, did the university meet the burden for showing the speech to be disruptive in a way that rendered it unprotected.

But the judge’s order to reinstate Damsky was paused pending appeal. And the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that in its estimation, the University of Florida was likely to prevail, because under the precedent set in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, “the First Amendment does not protect speech that ‘materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.’” The trial court, and perhaps future appeals-court judges and the Supreme Court, will decide if they agree with the panel’s ruling that “UF students, faculty, and staff could reasonably interpret Damsky’s posts as threatening violence on UF’s campus,” and that the community “could reasonably interpret Damsky’s posts as promoting extralegal violence, and schools can regulate at least some speech that calls for illegal conduct.” (I hope other judges disagree: Such a precedent would suggest that college students can be expelled for political speech as common as “abolish whiteness,” “globalize the intifada,” and “no justice, no peace.”)

When a college decisively loses at any stage of free-speech litigation, civil libertarians typically point to the loss as a powerful case for honoring the First Amendment if only out of self-interest: Don’t expel a student like that dean did, or your school will get sued and lose too. But colleges are caught between conflicting incentives right now. Few in higher education have forgotten the 2023 congressional hearings in which Representative Elise Stefanik questioned the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania about anti-Semitism on campus. Each leader was asked, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your rules, conduct codes, or harassment policies?” All attempted nuanced answers. For example, was the call for genocide targeted at an individual, thus amounting to harassing conduct, or was it mere vile speech?

Their answers, though legally sound, elicited a furious backlash. Stefanik called on the presidents to resign. The House passed a resolution calling the presidents “evasive and dismissive” and condemning “their failure to clearly state that calls for the genocide of Jews constitute harassment and violate their institutions’ codes of conduct.” Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, wrote a letter to college presidents asserting that calls for genocide violate New York’s Human Rights Law, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and SUNY’s code of conduct; she threatened “enforcement action” if colleges and universities were found not in compliance. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis said that he wanted the college presidents to lose their jobs (the fate that befell Liz Magill, who resigned as Penn’s president because of that viral congressional hearing on anti-Semitism). Donald Trump and his administration would later target those same universities with anti-Semitism probes and regulatory actions that threatened billions of dollars in federal funding while severely constraining their autonomy.

For administrators at the University of Florida, who declined to comment while this litigation is ongoing, the message was presumably clear: If a student calls for the genocide of Jews, deciding whether to punish them based on whether the First Amendment technically protected the speech would be seen as suspect by federal and state officials––and might, if history repeated itself, result in job loss and significant funding losses.

Then along came Damsky with a social-media post that concluded, “Jews must be abolished by any means necessary.”

“Confronting the fact pattern in his case, an institution might well ask their legal advisers if they could justify punishing the speech,” Jackie Gharapour Wernz, an attorney who advises educational institutions about complying with nondiscrimination laws such as Title VI and Title IX, told me. And she could imagine a legal adviser signing off on a punishment, despite its risks. “If they act, they may get sued for violating free-speech rights,” she explained. “If they don’t act, they may face complaints or lawsuits from students or employees claiming they’re ignoring or contributing to a hostile environment. In a very real sense, the institution is choosing which lawsuit it wants.” Institutions may decide to consider a range of risks, she said, “including political pressure, federal attention, and backlash from different parts of the community, and sometimes those pressures drive decisions as much as the legal merits.” An institution might even want to lose in court, she said, “because that gives them cover later to say, We actually can’t punish this speech.”

Damsky’s lawyer, Anthony Sabatini, believes that the political climate is affecting what would normally be a simple case about unambiguously protected speech. “UF clearly tried to use heightened political concerns about antisemitism (or what gets called antisemitism) to pressure the district judge, as you’ll see in their pleadings,” he told me via email. “The Trump administration is clearly using Title VI to unlawfully attempt to stop lawful criticism of Israel by equating it with antisemitism and will lose in court on that.”

Of course, college administrators might also punish speech of the sort Damsky deployed out of a desire to oppose anti-Semitism or to protect the educational experience of Jews. Kenneth L. Marcus, the founder and leader of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, a legal organization focused on fighting anti-Semitism, argues that anti-discrimination law is a vital tool for protecting the rights of Jewish students and any others targeted on the basis of their race, color, or national origin. “Whenever we take seriously our civil-rights laws, there will be questions about conduct that falls in a gray area between protected speech and unprotected activity,” he told me. “Just because there are some tough cases doesn’t mean that we should throw out the rules altogether.”

It is dangerous, he argued, “to minimize threats and to assume that persons involved in threatening communications don’t mean what they’re saying seriously.” In the Damsky case, “administrators simply cannot wait for apparently violent threats to turn lethal before they take action,” he argued. “Can you imagine if the university had done nothing and then the speaker actually followed up on his apparent threat by making an actual effort to abolish Jews by any means necessary? The university would at a minimum be held liable for its failure to exercise due care, and it should be.”

While I agree with Marcus that “the world that we’re living in since October 7, 2023, is one in which Jewish Americans and others face continuing and real threats,” and that anti-Semitism must be fought in any healthy and morally decent society, there is no simple correlation between acts of violence and rhetoric of the sort Damsky spewed. His words clearly don’t meet the long-standing Supreme Court threshold for “true threats,” and insofar as a student is secretly planning violence, expulsion presumably wouldn’t stop them. I also doubt that compelling colleges to punish students like Damsky, despite the lack of a strong legal case, is an effective way to fight anti-Semitism.

While no one, least of all Jews, deserves to live in a world with anti-Semites, nonviolent ones included, we do live in such a world. In a country where Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens expose massive audiences to the most nonsensical conspiracy theories, and as vile an anti-Semite as Nick Fuentes has more than 1 million followers on X, insulating schools from anti-Semitism is impossible. Administrators cannot make it disappear. They can, however, help students improve at countering bad ideas.

The academic philosopher Dan Williams recently argued that establishment institutions “have clung to a set of habits and norms—most fundamentally, an aversion to engaging with illiberal ideas to avoid ‘platforming’ and ‘normalising’ them—adapted to a world that no longer exists.” From his perspective, which I find persuasive, the modern internet makes this sort of aversion unwise: Gatekeepers don’t exist in the digital era, and “once established institutions lost the privilege to control the public conversation, they acquired an obligation to participate within it.” I’d feel more hopeful about the ability of American institutions to adapt if universities prepared the rising generation to rebut history’s worst ideas rather than trying to suppress them.

If Damsky returns to law school, some classmates will treat him as a social pariah who deserves scorn. Some will fear for his everlasting soul as he transgresses morality by indulging hatred. To forbear bigots is no easy thing, and it is not for me to judge how others do it. But I hope some of his classmates would use the presence of an anti-Semitic white nationalist to hone the strongest and most persuasive arguments against his views. I hope some would study the example of Daryl Davis, the Black musician who has successfully talked multiple members of the Klu Klux Klan into giving up their hoods, and that others would follow the example of the New College of Florida students who converted a white-nationalist classmate into an anti-racist activist.

Anti-discrimination laws have a role to play in academia: College administrators have an obligation to ensure that no student is denied educational opportunities on the basis of their race, religion, ethnicity, or national origin, and that, insofar as their student bodies include bigots, they don’t harass or bully Jews or anyone else. But the policing of speech that is protected by the First Amendment is both unlawful and insufficient. Perhaps, in a world where hateful speech can be distributed to mass audiences more easily than ever before, it’s even counterproductive.

For Trump, Everything Is an Existential Threat

2026-01-15T18:11:00-05:00

Today, Donald Trump announced that he is considering using the Insurrection Act to send the U.S. military to Minneapolis if state officials do not quell anti-ICE protests there. Deploying federal troops on American soil against the objections of state and local officials is an extreme measure––and seems likelier to inflame than to extinguish unrest there, given that needlessly provocative actions by ICE officers helped create conditions on the ground. Yet the president seems eager to suppress the actions of people he calls “professional agitators and insurrectionists.” For months, members of his administration have laid the rhetorical groundwork for a martial crackdown.

Insurrections are rare in U.S. history, but according to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, we’ve had lots of them just since 2024. In his telling, the perpetrators of recent insurrections against the United States include Joe Biden; the Colorado Supreme Court; U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani; U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston; Democrats; protesters in Los Angeles; protesters in Paramount, California; protesters in Compton, California; the city of Los Angeles; U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong; various “radical communist judges”; the Chicago Police Department; a crowd that the Chicago police didn’t stop; an Oregon judge; and “Democrat lawmakers.” (Miller has never called the MAGA movement’s storming of the Capitol an insurrection.)

The rhetorical abuse of insurrection is part of a larger pattern. The president and his allies constantly engage in what we might call threat inflation, giving Americans the impression that they face catastrophe on all sides and that the government therefore must respond maximally. In the administration’s telling, drugs enter America via not smugglers, but “narco-terrorists.” Immigrants never sneak into America; they “invade.” And anti-ICE protesters are “domestic terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” These designations rarely match the reality on the ground. Instead, they stoke fear beyond what reality justifies.

A particularly extreme example occurred just last month: Trump issued an executive order that declared fentanyl “a weapon of mass destruction,” a dubious turn in the history of that term. The phrase weapons of mass destruction was coined by Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang after the 1937 bombing of Guernica to anticipate the massively damaging aerial bombings of future conflicts. “Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean,” he wrote, “waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction?”

The term grew only more apt with the advent of the atom bomb, and has been used in recent decades to refer to existential threats to cities or even nations. It had not typically been used to refer to any of the voluntarily ingested substances that kill lots of Americans, such as alcohol, cigarettes, and cocaine—until the Trump administration sought to justify the extrajudicial killing of drug smugglers and perhaps to prepare the public to accept military escalation against various drug cartels.

Nor does the logic of the new use stand up to scrutiny. If the CIA discovered a plot to smuggle a weapon of mass destruction, as that term is understood by most Americans, into the Port of Long Beach, no president would hesitate to shut down the whole West Coast supply chain and search every container until the nerve agent, biological weapon, dirty bomb, or nuclear device was found. Yet if a kilogram of fentanyl, theoretically enough for 500,000 overdoses, were in a container ship, the U.S. government would not shut down a major port to find it. Tens of thousands of pounds of fentanyl are smuggled into the U.S. every year.

Clear thinking requires us to distinguish between the existential emergency posed by weapons of mass murder and substances that cause many deaths accumulated slowly over time, as more and more people use them. And the Trump administration would most likely reject applying its own logic consistently. For example, if a news organization waited for fentanyl shipments to arrive in a bunch of U.S. cities and then led a prime-time broadcast with the storyline Trump and his national-security team failed to stop WMD attacks on at least 20 American cities last month, the White House would rightly argue that the outlet was misleading and manipulating its viewers.

The American public is similarly misled each time Trump or members of his team erroneously assert that the country confronts a superlative threat. Terrorism is another word the administration likes to throw around—a particularly ironic threat to exaggerate, in that the intention is to stoke more public fear to achieve political goals. After the ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, Americans spent days watching and arguing about videos of the incident. Reasonable people disagreed about how to apportion blame. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem could have waited for an investigation before commenting; if she chose to speak, she could simply have argued that the woman who was killed gave the officer in front of her car reason to fear for his life. Instead, she not only presumed to know the motive of the woman who was killed; she also attributed to her the most malign motive possible. “What happened in Minneapolis was an act of domestic terrorism,” Noem declared. Vice President Vance has bizarrely called the incident “classic terrorism.”

The absurdity of Vance’s designation is most evident if, as David French suggested in the The New York Times recently, you compare videos from Minneapolis with actual terrorist attacks. “Many of us have seen footage, for example, of the horrific ramming attack in Nice, France, in 2016 that killed 86 people—or of the domestic terror attack in Charlottesville, Va., the following year, where a white supremacist drove directly into a crowd of ‘Unite the Right’ counterprotesters, killing a woman, Heather D. Heyer, and injuring dozens of others,” French wrote. “In both cases, the murderous intentions of the men driving the vehicles—deploying them as weapons—were unmistakable.”

Trump does not lack the capacity for understatement. In February 2020, at the beginning of a pandemic that would kill more than 1 million Americans, he said, “One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear. And from our shores, we—you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows.” That’s how Trump talks when he wants the country to keep its cool.

Confronted with far less deadly threats in his second term, Trump and his allies inflate them daily. They do so to push policies that overreact to the country’s challenges rather than carefully calibrated responses. In the process, their rhetoric fuels the polarization that makes political violence and civic instability more likely. There is less to fear from reality than from the administration’s fearmongering itself.

Related:

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Today’s News

The Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado visited the White House to urge President Trump to back democratic elections in Venezuela. She said that she presented her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump during the visit; it is not yet clear whether he accepted the award.
Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy U.S. troops to Minneapolis if Minnesota officials fail to quell protests that erupted following two shootings, one fatal, by two federal officers.
Trump said yesterday that he would hold off on attacking Iran for now, after being told by “very important sources on the other side” that the government had stopped killing protesters. He said that he would continue to monitor the situation and warned that he would be “very upset” if the crackdown resumed.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: Published 250 years ago, Common Sense is perhaps the most consequential piece of political writing in American history—and maybe its ideas are what we need now, Jake Lundberg writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

Will Google Ever Have to Pay for Its Sins?

By Gilad Edelman

If the story of journalism’s 21st-century decline were purely a tale of technological disruption—of print dinosaurs failing to adapt to the internet—that would be painful enough for those of us who believe in the importance of a robust free press. The truth hurts even more. Big Tech platforms didn’t just out-compete media organizations for the bulk of the advertising-revenue pie. They also cheated them out of much of what was left over, and got away with it.

Read the full article.

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Dick DiMarsico / Library of Congress; The New York Public Library.

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Trump’s Risky War in Venezuela

2026-01-03T07:57:00-05:00

Updated at 8:44 a.m. ET on January 3, 2026

This morning, President Trump unilaterally launched a regime-change war against Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, ordering strikes on multiple military targets in the country and seizing its leader and his wife. They were “captured and flown out of the country,” Trump stated on Truth Social. “They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Attorney General Pam Bondi stated, in something like an inversion of the notion that justice should be blind and impartial.

After Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress and asked it to declare war on Japan. Prior to waging regime-change wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, George W. Bush sought and secured authorizations to use military force. Those presidents asked for permission to conduct hostilities because the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, unambiguously vests the war power in Congress. And Congress voted to authorize force in part because a majority of Americans favored war.

Trump says he will speak to the nation at 11 a.m. eastern time and address his rationale for the attack. The president may point to the fact that the State Department has branded Maduro the head of a “narcoterrorist” state, and that in 2020 Maduro was indicted in the United States on charges that he oversaw a violent drug cartel. For months Trump has been seeking the ouster of Maduro, and aligning the United States with opposition figures who contest the legitimacy of his presidency.

But these accusations and the indictment wouldn’t seem to constitute legal justification. Overnight, multiple members of Congress pointed out that Trump’s new war is illegal because he received no permission to wage it, and it was not an emergency response to an attack on our homeland or the imminent threat of one.

The probable illegality of Trump’s actions does not foreclose the possibility that his approach will improve life for Venezuelans. Like too many world leaders, Maduro is a brutal thug, and opposition figures have good reason to insist he isn’t the country’s legitimate leader. I hope and pray his ouster yields peace and prosperity, not blood-soaked anarchy or years of grinding factional violence.

But “toppling Maduro is the easy part,” Orlando J. Pérez, the author of Civil-Military Relations in Post-Conflict Societies, warned in November. “What follows is the hard strategic slog of policing a sprawling, heavily armed society where state services have collapsed and regime loyalists, criminal syndicates, and colectivos—pro-government armed groups that police neighborhoods and terrorize dissidents—all compete for turf.” Two groups of Colombian militants “operate openly from Venezuelan safe havens, running mining and smuggling routes,” he added. “They would not go quietly.”

If those challenges are overcome, Trump may lack the leadership qualities necessary for long-term success. Now that the United States has involved itself this way, its leaders are implicated in securing a stable postwar Venezuela and in staving off chaos that could destabilize the region. Yet Trump is best suited to military operations that are quick and discrete, like the strikes on the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani or Iran’s nuclear sites, as they do not require sustained focus or resolve. He is most ill-suited, I think, to a regime-change war against a country with lucrative natural resources. I fear Trump will try to enrich himself, his family, or his allies, consistent with his lifelong pattern of self-interested behavior; I doubt he will be a fair-minded, trusted steward of Venezuelan oil. If he indulges in self-dealing, he could fuel anti-American resentment among Venezuelans and intensify opposition to any regime friendly to the United States and its interests.

Another problem confronting Trump as he goes to war is that his political coalition, and indeed his Cabinet, is divided between interventionists and noninterventionists. “The United States needs to stay out of Venezuela,” Tulsi Gabbard, his director of national intelligence, declared in 2019. “Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don't want other countries to choose our leaders—so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”

Whether the outcome is ultimately good for Venezuelans, as I hope, or bad, Trump has betrayed Americans. He could have tried to persuade Congress or the public to give him permission to use force. He didn’t bother. He chose war despite polls that found a large majority of Americans opposed it. Perhaps, like me, they fear America is about to repeat the mistakes of its interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, where brutal regimes were ousted, then ruinous power vacuums followed.

“I look forward to learning what, if anything, might constitutionally justify this action in the absence of a declaration of war or authorization for the use of military force,” Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, posted. After a phone call with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, he posted again: Rubio had informed him that Maduro “has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant,” he said. “This action likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.” But surely the president can’t invade any country where a national has an outstanding arrest warrant.

The real question isn’t whether this action was legal; it is what to do about its illegality. Ignoring the law and the people’s will in this fashion is a high crime. Any Congress inclined to impeach and remove Trump from office over Venezuela would be within their rights. That outcome is unlikely unless Democrats win the midterms. But Congress should enforce its war power. Otherwise, presidents of both parties will keep launching wars of choice with no regard for the will of people or our representatives. And anti-war voters will be radicalized by the dearth of democratic means to effect change.

War-weary voters who thought it was enough to elect a president who called the Iraq War “a stupid thing” and promised an “America First” foreign policy can now see for themselves that they were wrong. In 2026, as ever, only Congress can stop endless wars of choice. And if Trump faces no consequences for this one, he may well start another.

Is MAGA Becoming Pro-War?

2025-12-05T10:51:00-05:00

This summer, President Donald Trump told my colleague Michael Scherer that “America First” means whatever he decides it means. Now—as he blows up boats near Venezuela, amasses military assets near its coast, calls for the closure of its airspace, and tries to oust its leader—he is testing the limits of the term.

Trump took over the GOP promising an “America First” foreign policy to a war-weary nation that had soured on attempts to police and reshape the world. Doing so distinguished him from rivals aligned with George W. Bush and the Iraq War. But Trump was never ideologically committed to restraint. The most outspoken critic of the president’s latest hawkish turn is Senator Rand Paul, who has blamed the influence of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Senator Lindsey Graham. If Trump invades Venezuela, the Republican from Kentucky told Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine, “his movement will dissolve.” Trump says land strikes inside Venezuela are coming soon and dismisses Paul as “a sick Wacko, who refuses to vote for our great Republican Party, MAGA, or America First.”

Casting Paul, of all people, as a foe of “America First” is a hard sell. His father, Ron Paul, ran for president three times as an anti-war libertarian. When the GOP was still enamored of Bush, Dick Cheney, and their most hawkish allies, Rand Paul was already a stalwart antagonist of the foreign-policy establishment, critiquing wars launched by Bush and Barack Obama and urging Congress to stop new wars. Campaigning for Trump in 2020, Paul told the Republican National Convention, “He believes, as I do, that a strong America cannot fight endless wars.”

Trump and Paul have shared skepticism of some wars, but for different reasons. Trump trusts his gut and feels entitled to act on it, untethered from any principles or the rule of law. Paul’s positions, meanwhile, are rooted in constitutional conservatism: He is not just consistently skeptical of wars of choice and averse to most foreign interventions; he believes wars detrimental to America are best avoided by adhering to a Constitution that gives the war power to Congress, rather than allowing the president to unilaterally decide the nation’s fate. “As James Madison wrote, ‘No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.’ Which is one reason why,” Paul argued in 2016, “the Constitution clearly puts war-making powers overwhelming in the hands of the legislature.”

So far, Trump’s base supports his pivot to hawkish interventionism in Venezuela: 66 percent of MAGA Republicans would favor the United States taking military action in the country, according to a recent poll by CBS News and YouGov. “It’s not just that Trump is a warmonger,” former Representative Justin Amash complained on Tuesday in a post on X. “It’s that he has convinced a large segment of Republicans who said they were done with warmongering to embrace warmongering again.” This seems to include Republicans in the administration: For example, after years of publicly espousing anti-interventionist beliefs, Vice President J. D. Vance called one of the administration’s strikes on a suspected drug boat off the Venezuelan coast “the highest and best use of our military.”

Non-MAGA Republicans seem more skeptical of war in Venezuela: 47 percent favor military action and 53 percent oppose it, according to the CBS/YouGov poll. And some prominent MAGA figures are opposed too, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer, and Steve Bannon. Loomer, who previously supported Trump’s targeted strike in Iran (and lambasted Tucker Carlson for his criticism of the bombing), is now speaking out against Republican members of Congress who support intervention in Venezuela. Some anti-immigration advocates on the right have also argued that war would undercut Trump’s broader immigration goals.

Among Americans as a whole, fully 70 percent oppose a war with Venezuela. But assuming Trump does not usurp the constitutional order by trying for a third term, he will never again face voters, so if there are political consequences for a failed war in Venezuela, as there were for the war in Iraq, other politicians––perhaps Rubio or Vance––will suffer them. Maybe that’s why Trump, who has yet to make a forthright case for his Venezuela policy to Congress or the public, acts as though the will of American voters is the last thing on his mind.

Trump’s behavior toward Venezuela illustrates the folly of relying on any president to eschew risky interventions abroad. Though American-led regime change could prove costly, bloody, destabilizing, or counterproductive to American interests in the region, and though it appears less necessary to national security at the outset than did the Iraq War (no one is looking for weapons of mass destruction in Venezuela), Trump talks as if acts of war are imminent––and as if his orders alone matter. Never mind the voters who took his “America First” promises to mean something different.

What the Deported Venezuelans Went Through in El Salvador

2025-11-23T14:04:00-05:00

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Earlier this year, the United States deported 252 Venezuelans to El Salvador and paid its government to imprison them, despite clear evidence of human-rights abuses in the country’s prison system and forceful warnings that the men would suffer cruel and unusual treatment. Now two human-rights organizations, Human Rights Watch and the Central America–based Cristosal, have found that all of those men were physically abused.

Citing prisoner testimony, their report claims that the men were held in filthy cells, psychologically tortured, and given fetid water to drink, and that guards sexually violated at least three of them. Titled “‘You Have Arrived in Hell’: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison,” the report draws on interviews with 40 of the Venezuelans who were held at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, and echoes the findings of New York Times interviews with former prisoners. The researchers who produced the report vetted the detainees’ accounts with corroborating information from fellow prisoners, as well as with lawyers, relatives, and forensic experts who examined photographs of their injuries (including a crooked nose, a missing front tooth, and two enduring marks left by rubber-coated bullets). If even a fraction of the allegations are true, the U.S. is complicit in sadistic acts that our own laws forbid.

The Trump administration has characterized the CECOT prisoners as gang members, but the report finds that many of them were noncriminal migrants and people who’d fled Venezuela because of political persecution or poverty. In the men’s telling, the abuses inflicted on them began before they even saw their cells. “Meters before the entrance, riot police and guards forced the new arrivals to run a gauntlet of prison guards, who beat them with batons, fists, and kicks as they entered,” the report states. One detainee, sharing a representative account, said, “My ribs hurt, they beat me in the abdomen, on the elbows, on the ankles, in the back.” For roughly four months, all of the former prisoners who were interviewed suffered “serious physical and psychological abuse on a virtually daily basis,” the report states, until they were released in a prisoner exchange with Venezuela. (El Salvador’s government and the White House did not respond to a request for comment from Human Rights Watch. A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, told the Times in response to its reporting: “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”)

The details ought to haunt every Trump-administration official who consigned these men to a place unfit for humans. A man identified as Julián G. described the facility: “There was mold, the floor was black and sticky, the toilets were filthy, it smelled of urine, and the water we had in the tanks—used both for bathing and for drinking—was yellow and had worms.” A man identified as Mario J., one of three detainees who claims to have been sexually violated, said that four guards stuck batons between his legs and rubbed them against his genitals, then “forced him to perform oral sex on one of the guards, groped him, and called him ‘faggot.’”

Other detainees recounted being beaten for seeking medical care. One man, identified as Carlos J., reportedly complained for days of severe pain in his ears. Taken to the infirmary, he was told by staff that he had “an infection and pus in both ears” but was given no antibiotics, he said. When he kept asking for medication, “four guards took him out of the cell, brought him to the hallway and beat him for several minutes in the back, stomach, and legs,” according to J.’s testimony. He told interviewers that “they beat me until I vomited blood” and then locked him in a punishment cell for days.

Meanwhile, both the Trump administration and Salvadoran authorities refused to release information on the detainees, needlessly subjecting their loved ones to fears that they were dead. The United States government did not merely transfer the prisoners to this fate. Its secretive arrangement with El Salvador included a payment of $4.76 million from the State Department, the report says. In that respect, what the regime of Nayib Bukele—who has referred to himself as “the coolest dictator in the world”—predictably did to the prisoners was underwritten by U.S. taxpayers.

At the very least, a congressional inquiry is warranted to corroborate or disprove claims that taxpayer dollars underwrote beatings, psychological torture, and sexual assault. But the GOP-led Congress has so far been unwilling to conduct adequate oversight of Donald Trump on morally urgent matters. In the 2026 midterms, in primaries, and in general-election contests, candidates should prove to voters that they are willing to probe the following questions:

How many people sent to El Salvador by the U.S. government were tortured, sexually assaulted, or physically abused?
Who within the White House and the Department of Homeland Security green-lighted the transfer of detainees to El Salvador? What did they know about human-rights abuses in El Salvador’s prison system, and when did they know it?
Did the Trump administration violate the Leahy Law, statutory provisions “prohibiting the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights”?
What are the details of the financial arrangement between the Trump administration and the Bukele regime?

This needn’t be a partisan matter. The Republicans who control Congress could investigate all of these questions now. But most GOP members of Congress fear crossing Trump. Politically, they are probably right to fear the president more than the electorate on this, because alleged human-rights abuses of foreign nationals don’t factor into most voters’ decisions. But if enough voters insist that this is unacceptable, perhaps leaders will get the message that this depravity is un-American.

Voters Who Oppose Wars of Choice Have Nowhere to Turn

2025-11-06T17:26:00-05:00

Barack Obama and Donald Trump have this in common: Both owe their political ascents in part to blunt attacks on leaders who sent America to war. Obama dubbed Iraq “a dumb war” before it began; by the time he defeated Hillary Clinton and John McCain in 2008, the war they had voted to authorize as senators had become unpopular. Eight years later, when Trump was first seeking the presidency, many Republicans continued to defend George W. Bush’s foreign policy. He broke with GOP orthodoxy, declaring that “the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake” and advocating for an “America First” foreign policy.

Yet both presidents took a different approach in office. After denigrating the judgment of Iraq War hawks, Obama appointed Clinton as his first secretary of state, and she became the top official urging him to wage the 2011 war in Libya that yielded regime change. Trump chose the Iraq War supporter John Bolton as one of his first-term national security advisers, failed to end the war in Afghanistan, and picked Marco Rubio, a hawkish interventionist, as his second-term secretary of state. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, Rubio is “the top official” behind a pressure campaign against the Nicolás Maduro regime in Venezuela. (The White House has denied that Rubio is driving Venezuela policy.) And last Saturday, Trump himself said that the United States is preparing for possible military action in Nigeria because, in his telling, the government of the religiously divided nation of 232.7 million is not doing enough to prevent Islamist militias from killing Christians.

American voters are in no mood for new wars of choice. Although majorities don’t seem bothered by the administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela, a full-blown war is another story: In polling on Venezuela, YouGov found that 55 percent of Americans “would oppose the U.S. invading Venezuela,” while just 15 percent would support it (the rest were unsure); 46 percent “would oppose a military overthrow of Maduro,” while only 18 percent would support it.

But for more than two decades, voters who oppose wars of choice have had nowhere to turn. In post-2004 presidential races, anti-war Americans keep rejecting establishment hawks, only to see the supposed alternatives empower hawkish advisers and deploy force unilaterally. Congress shares the blame: Legislators committed to protecting and defending their enumerated powers could have impeached several post–World War II presidents for usurping Article I and the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was designed to limit the president’s ability to initiate war unilaterally. Instead, presidents face no consequences for doing so. Obama took military action in Libya without congressional authorization. Trump unilaterally ordered strikes against Syria in his first term and Iran in his second. And congressional inaction may enable yet more risky wars started by Trump, public opinion be damned.

Trump has authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela. He has suggested that Maduro’s days are numbered and has a $50 million bounty out for his arrest. And although the administration reportedly told Congress yesterday that it currently doesn’t have legal justification for land strikes, it hasn’t ruled out future operations. The hawkish faction that Trump is empowering has also floated the possibility of land operations in multiple Latin American countries. “I think President Trump’s made a decision that Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, is an indicted drug trafficker, that it’s time for him to go, that Venezuela and Colombia have been safe havens for narco-terrorists for too long,” Senator Lindsey Graham told Face the Nation late last month. The Pentagon has moved warships, an attack submarine, fighter jets, drones, and Special Forces teams into the region; ground operations against drug cartels in Mexico are reportedly being considered too.

Trump and other administration officials seem to believe that Maduro’s ouster could be good for America, reasoning that it could improve American access to the country’s oil and weaken its drug gangs. But the foreign-policy analysts Evan Cooper and Alessandro Perri of the Stimson Center, an international-security think tank, argue that “the Trump administration’s approach is strategically unsound, risking increased regional instability and hostility towards the United States.” A direct attack on Venezuela would fuel anti-American sentiment throughout the region, they say, advantaging China as it vies with the U.S. for influence there. Armed groups would initiate guerrilla attacks to resist any attempt at removing Maduro, they warn, and if regime change succeeds, chaos would likely threaten peace and anti-drug efforts in neighboring countries. War, they say, would exacerbate the dire economic conditions that “have led 7.7 million to leave the country since 2014.”

Trump, of course, is prone to changing his mind and contradicting himself: He told 60 Minutes recently that a full-out war against Venezuela was unlikely, even as he appeared to threaten Maduro. Whatever Trump may decide, he should not be able to initiate war unilaterally. No one person should. These sorts of wars of choice, which have uncertain outcomes and huge potential downsides, are precisely the kinds of conflicts Congress was created to study, debate, and vote on. Even in the case of Iraq, when congressional deliberation led to the approval of a war most Americans came to regret, the House and Senate votes at least gave citizens a chance to hold their representatives accountable.

As a second-term president, Trump doesn’t have to face voters again. But just as Obama’s hawkishness fueled the anti-establishment populism that helped Trump get elected, a Trump-administration invasion of Venezuela or Nigeria could further incense and radicalize America’s anti-interventionist voters, who keep backing politicians they perceive as opposing wars of choice only to see them wage new ones.

Related:

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Today’s News

The Federal Aviation Administration is preparing to implement nationwide air-traffic reductions starting tomorrow, potentially affecting up to 40 major airports as air traffic controllers continue to be short-staffed. The cuts could cause widespread flight delays and cancellations.
President Donald Trump announced a deal with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to cut prices for GLP-1 drugs such as Wegovy and Zepbound to as little as $149 a month, and to expand Medicare and Medicaid coverage of them.
The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to keep in place, for now, a rule requiring passports to list sex as shown on a person’s birth certificate.

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Time-Travel Thursdays: Mariana Labbate digs through The Atlantic’s archives to explore how marathons have united people for more than a century.

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America Is Great When America Is Good

By Nancy Pelosi

As America approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, I have returned again and again to the words of Thomas Paine, who advanced the cause of American freedom with a memorable call to action: The times have found us.

The times had indeed found Paine, and the rest of our Founders, who summoned the courage to declare independence from a king; to win a war against the strongest empire in the world; and to write our Constitution (thank goodness they made it amendable). In the century that followed, the times found Abraham Lincoln, who saved our union by winning the Civil War. And now the times have found us once again.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Sergio Mendoza Hochmann / Getty; Pierre Michaud / Gamma-Rapho / Getty.

Explore. America is rapidly becoming the manosphere, but sure, let’s go after the “feminization” of culture, Sophie Gilbert writes.

Read. “Maybe it was easier to say everything like this, with a crowd at your feet and a rope around your neck.” Read a short story by George Packer from The Atlantic’s December issue.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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What Won’t Congress Let Trump Get Away With?

2025-10-17T09:30:00-04:00

On President Donald Trump’s orders, the U.S. military last month began carrying out a series of strikes in the Caribbean, blowing up boats suspected of moving drugs and killing a total of at least 27 people so far. (Multiple news outlets reported that a strike yesterday was believed to be the first one to leave survivors.) Although Trump has called the dead “narcoterrorists,” his administration has not provided good evidence to support that characterization. Even pundits who defended extrajudicial killings during the War on Terror years—including Lawfare’s Ben Wittes, National Review’s Andy McCarthy, and John Yoo, the author of the so-called torture memos—have deemed these strikes illegal or legally suspect.

Yet the American people don’t seem particularly concerned. A recent Harris survey found that 71 percent of registered voters support “destroying boats bringing drugs into the United States,” and the strikes have prompted little public outcry. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama meted out death without due process even outside the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, inuring Americans to the practice. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the Obama administration carried out 563 strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, killing 384 to 807 civilians, in addition to militants. If, as Trump repeatedly asserts, “narcoterrorists” from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua pose a threat to national security, simply killing them without due process might seem to many casual observers like continuity. This is what the United States did to men like Ayman al-Zawahiri. Why not do it to men like Pablo Escobar?

That thinking is dangerous. To kill needlessly, when you could easily detain and prosecute, is morally wrong. Ongoing lethal strikes will inflict carnage on innocents. It will also sow hatred of the United States in our hemisphere as surely as War on Terror drone strikes did in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And if Americans become desensitized to these killings as a routine tactic in the War on Drugs, the threat to civil liberties at home and abroad is profound. Drug trafficking is endemic, and will always be endemic, in free societies. Every plane in the sky, every boat in the ocean, and every truck on the highway could plausibly be smuggling drugs on behalf of a dangerous cartel. If the president is permitted to blow up modes of transport on his suspicion of drug running alone, and without having to provide proof even after the fact about the identity of the people he killed, the War on Drugs will have rendered the Bill of Rights void. No one will be safe from a president’s dictatorial power to kill without evidence, arrest, or trial.

Trump is almost certainly misleading the public about whom he is killing. There has been no definitive accounting of the identity or even the nationality of the people who have been struck. (“Evidence suggests that the last boat bombed was Colombian with Colombian citizens,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro posted on social media last week.) But drug boats are most often driven by impoverished fishermen, not dangerous drug kingpins, three Ohio State University professors found in a May 2025 analysis of federal punishments handed out to the hundreds of people arrested each year for transporting drugs by boat. A typical crew might include a fisherman recruited for knowledge of the ocean, a mechanic, and an unskilled laborer, and only rarely are they armed. Many are motivated by “economic desperation,” the professors write, or describe “being forced to join smuggling crews” under threat. Trump wants the public to believe that his lethal new tactic will eliminate dangerous knights in a geopolitical chess game against drug cartels. But the tactic is likelier to kill hapless pawns.

[Read: The boat strikes are just the beginning]

Secretary of State Marco Rubio argues that “the president has a right to eliminate immediate threats to the United States.” But the targeted boats were all in international waters, many miles from America’s coast. They posed no threat at all, in that the Coast Guard could easily have done an interdiction, and certainly no “immediate” threat: Some of the boats didn’t even have enough fuel to reach the U.S. mainland, my Atlantic colleagues recently reported.

At times, Trump defends the strikes by arguing that the ends justify the means. “You know, it’s a pretty tough thing we’ve been doing, but you have to think of it this way: Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25,000 American people and the destruction of families,” he said in a speech earlier this month. “So when you think of it that way, what we’re doing is actually an act of kindness.” He added, “We’re so good at it that there are no boats––in fact, even fishing boats, no one wants to go into the water anymore.” In this telling, killing drug runners is such a good deterrent that no one wants to move drugs by boat in the Caribbean anymore, or even do their daily fishing. And the deaths, as well as the unintended consequence of fishing villages being afraid to seek food, are worth it to stop drug fatalities in the United States.

But the idea that these strikes will save tens of thousands of American lives is dubious. As my colleague Nick Miroff recently wrote, fentanyl isn’t reaching America via drug boats in the Caribbean, which mostly traffic in cocaine and marijuana. And even most cocaine reaches America by land, via organizations based in Colombia and Mexico, rather than the Venezuelans the United States is now targeting.

If Trump is trying to stop the flow of drugs, blowing up rather than interdicting boats might also be counterproductive. Typically, U.S. Coast Guard patrol planes, cutters, and helicopters identify and intercept vessels suspected of carrying drugs––most commonly small, open fishing boats with outboard motors. When drugs are found, they are seized, and those on board are arrested. Intelligence collected during such interdictions offers insights into transnational criminal organizations, a 2025 Department of Homeland Security inspector-general report noted. Officers search “cellular phones, radios, thumb drives, computers, global positioning systems, electronic navigation systems, and encryption devices,” accumulating intelligence and clues “such as drop off locations, call records, or phone numbers to further the investigation.” Detainees not only share valuable details about the organizations that hired them, but also establish links to higher-level narcotraffickers that enable future extraditions––information the state finds so valuable that prosecutors frequently give lighter sentences in return for cooperation. Even to a ruthless utilitarian, killing rather than capturing alleged drug traffickers has big downsides.

If the official reasons offered for these strikes don’t check out, is there a different agenda at work? The New York Times and the Miami Herald have suggested that Trump’s policy is really about undermining the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who already has a $50 million U.S. State Department bounty on his head. The goal is “cutting off the drug revenue that sustains loyalty among Venezuela’s senior military and police commanders,” the Herald wrote. NBC News reported on September 26, based on four sources, that “U.S. military officials are drawing up options to target drug traffickers inside Venezuela, and strikes within that country’s borders could potentially begin in a matter of weeks.” Trump recently acknowledged that his administration had authorized the CIA to carry out covert actions in Venezuela and said, “We are certainly looking at land now.” The Spanish newspaper El País reported that “Venezuela is training its civilian population” in case the United States attacks.

[Read: Fentanyl doesn’t come through the Caribbean]

Regardless of what is motivating Trump, these killings are a civil-liberties nightmare. If he is fighting the drug war, he is doing so in the manner of a Latin American strongman, not a president. When prosecuted under the laws that Congress has established and sentenced by judges and juries, no individual, let alone a low-level mariner or mechanic, has received the death penalty for mere drug smuggling without any related homicide. American courts regularly distinguish between leaders on drug runs and mere crew members with little knowledge of or involvement in what’s on board, giving longer sentences to higher-level traffickers and repeat offenders. Differentiating a poor fisherman whose wife is being held hostage by a cartel from a narcoterrorist who chose a life of violent crime would seem to be morally obligatory when deciding what punishment to give in any system of justice––but is impossible if you blow them all up, subverting the role of the judiciary in crime and punishment.

And if Trump is, in fact, pursuing regime change in Venezuela, he is doing it in a way that subverts the Constitution, which vests Congress with the power to declare war, even when a foreign regime is as appalling and abusive as the one that holds power in Venezuela. The precedent that Trump is setting threatens the rule of law and everyone’s rights. And while the average American can be forgiven for becoming inured to extrajudicial killings, and for not knowing who actually pilots drug boats in the Caribbean, Congress is responsible for stopping the president from violating the laws that it passes, transgressing against the Constitution, and wantonly killing civilians.

Whether Trump himself could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue without losing any voters, as he suggested in 2016, remains an unsettled question. But so far, he has blown up more than 20 times as many civilians on the high seas. What won’t Congress let him get away with?

What Republicans Can Do If They Really Want to Protect Free Speech

2025-09-25T14:05:00-04:00

While out of power, the American right was unified in complaining about the left’s speech policing. Now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, free-speech rights and values are dividing the coalition. One camp thinks Republicans should refrain from policing speech; the other favors policing the left’s speech. The second camp seems ascendant, unfortunately, while the first has failed to turn its beliefs into policy.

The Jimmy Kimmel controversy illustrates the fissure. After the late-night host made misleading comments about the ideology of the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr urged ABC to “take action” to address the matter, or else “there’s going to be additional work” for his agency. Senator Ted Cruz, who often sides with the Trump administration, objected on free-speech grounds. “That’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it,’” he said on his podcast, warning, “There will come a time when a Democrat wins again” and “they will use this power.” Other Republicans, including Senators Mitch McConnell, Dave McCormick, Rand Paul, and Todd Young, also objected.

In contrast, the activist Christopher Rufo argued that the right must police speech when in power to avoid being dominated by the left. “Turnabout is fair play,” he wrote. “We cannot accept the idea that history started in 2025 or that only the Left can legitimately use state institutions. The only way to get to a good equilibrium is an effective, strategic tit-for-tat.” This “tit-for-tat” approach seems to be part of the Trump administration’s strategy. The Department of Education is policing speech on campus. The secretary of state is policing the speech of leftists with green cards and student visas. Attorney General Pam Bondi recently threatened to “go after” hate speech. President Donald Trump himself said that TV networks that employ hosts who criticize him too much should lose their license.

Yet the idea that “turnabout is fair play” is the best policy to protect speech, let alone the only way to spare the right from future abuse, is nonsense. The best method to secure free speech, for all Americans, is to pass laws that safeguard expressive rights—both now, under Trump, and in the future, regardless of who inhabits the White House. If Republicans are serious about protecting speech, they could pass such laws. And all of the Democrats who have criticized Carr’s comments as an attack on speech could help.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The attorney general’s attack on free speech]

I recently reached out to the most principled, nonpartisan free-speech organization that I know of, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, to ask what legislative changes it would suggest to bolster free-speech rights. FIRE responded with five suggestions, emphasizing that it had supported the changes long before the current presidential administration. These ideas are best thought of “not as a response to the current moment,” Carolyn Iodice, the organization’s legislative and policy director, told me, “but as options for removing powers that have been abused by both parties, and which no government official should have had in the first place.”

One item on its wish list concerns the FCC itself: Congress could simply eliminate the FCC rules that regulate content on broadcast television and radio. This would make clear that the agency’s regulators have no role policing the substance of TV and radio programming, as is the case with cable, streaming services, and satellite radio.

A second idea would target “jawboning,” a term for when an official informally pressures a private party, such as a social-media platform, to censor speech that is protected by the Constitution. Doing so can be a First Amendment violation. But when it occurs behind closed doors, critics can’t object. The jawboning that happened during the Biden era, when officials pressured tech companies to take down COVID-related content that they didn’t like, still enrages the right. “Congress should require federal officials to report any communications they have with social media companies about third-party content,” FIRE argues. It has drafted legislative language that would effect the change.

A third item pertains to what happens when the state breaks the law. When federal officials infringe on free speech, the conduct is illegal, but the victims often have insufficient remedies to vindicate their rights. “Federal officials can only be sued to get First Amendment violations enjoined; damages are never available,” Iodice explained. FIRE argues that Congress should pass legislation to let people sue federal officials for damages in these cases.

A fourth suggestion would better protect Americans from frivolous lawsuits filed to retaliate against them for speech that is protected by the Constitution. “The idea is not to win on the merits, but to punish the defendant by dragging them through the court process or getting them to settle (and retract their speech) in order to avoid needing to spend money on a lawyer to defend them,” Iodice said. Most states have passed laws to deter this behavior (they are typically called anti-SLAPP laws) by speeding up the judicial process and requiring people who file frivolous suits to pay the other side’s legal fees. But there’s no federal law of that sort, “so the state laws can often be avoided by filing in federal court,” Iodice said.

[Adam Serwer: The Constitution protects Jimmy Kimmel’s mistake]

A fifth proposal is the passage of the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act. The bill, introduced by then-Representative Brandon Williams, a Republican, in the previous Congress, would codify First Amendment protections in public schools. The bill’s provisions include putting an end to “free-speech zones,” which imply that expression is restricted elsewhere on campus, and prohibiting onerous security fees that colleges sometimes impose on organizers of events with controversial speakers. FIRE also believes that Title VI, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, is often interpreted by the federal bureaucracy and colleges in ways that are unduly restrictive of campus speech. The organization wants Congress to adopt a standard, articulated in the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court case Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, that speech rises to a Title VI violation only if it is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” and “so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”

Other people and organizations with sincere commitments to free-speech rights and values might draft a different wish list. Regardless, the point is that any majority that truly wants to better protect free-speech rights could propose and pass any number of laws that would improve on the status quo. The Democrats suffering under the Trump administration’s policing of speech today failed to act when they were last in the majority, in ways that would have better protected everyone’s ability to speak freely now.

The Republican majorities that now control the House and Senate are not without individual legislators who want to pass laws that would better protect speech. When I contacted Rand Paul’s office, a spokesperson highlighted The Free Speech Protection Act, a bill that Paul has sponsored “to prohibit Federal employees and contractors from directing online platforms to censor any speech that is protected by the First Amendment,” among other provisions. (I reached out to Cruz, too, to find out if he was pushing any of his own free-speech legislation. His office didn’t respond.)

But the Republican leadership has failed to pass legislation that sufficiently addresses the concerns voiced by Paul and others. I reached out to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise earlier this week and asked whether they’d support the FIRE proposals or other efforts to better protect free speech, but neither replied.

Many politically engaged people on the right still spend a lot of time online complaining that their speech rights, and those of their allies, were violated by the left in recent years. Instead of merely airing grievances, they might consider doing something useful, such as pressuring allied lawmakers to better protect speech going forward. But my fear is that the MAGA coalition cares far more about punishing the left than about better securing even their own rights.

The Attorney General’s Attack on Free Speech

2025-09-16T14:49:00-04:00

Attorney General Pam Bondi, America’s highest-ranking law-enforcement official, declared in an interview posted to YouTube yesterday that federal law enforcement will “go after” Americans for hate speech. “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” she said. In fact, there is no hate-speech exception to the First Amendment.

In a post on X this morning, Bondi tried to qualify her comments. But the fact that the attorney general of the United States publicly misrepresented long-standing American speech law is ominous, especially in the context of threats made by other Trump-administration officials, their allies, and President Donald Trump himself to target “left-wing” organizations that the administration says promote violence. When ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked the president this morning what he made of Bondi’s hate-speech comments, Trump responded, “She’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart.” Let’s be clear about what’s happening: At a moment of polarization and political violence, the president and his attorney general are attacking a constitutional right that protects all Americans from abusive majorities.

Bondi issued her original warning on The Katie Miller Podcast, whose host is a former Trump-administration official and the wife of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. The episode focused on Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Several minutes into the conversation, Katie Miller claimed that universities are complicit in Kirk’s death because they allow conservatives to be harassed on campus. Bondi agreed, and added that anti-Semitism on college campuses is “disgusting.” She went on, “We’ve been fighting these universities left and right, and we’re not going to stop. There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech. And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society.”

Miller then asked, “Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech and putting cuffs on people so we show them that some action is better than no action?” Bondi replied, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, anything. And that’s across the aisle.” Federal agents handcuffing people for hate speech would be a flagrant violation of the Constitution. Confusingly, Bondi then added, “Think about Josh Shapiro,” referring to the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. “They firebombed his house while his wife and children were sleeping upstairs.” That attack was arson and perhaps attempted murder, not hate speech.

[Elaine Godfrey and Russell Berman: What if this is a turning point?]

Later in the interview, Bondi said, “We’ve got to unite this country against violence. And I have no tolerance––it’s not free speech when you come out and you say it’s okay what happened to Charlie. We’re firing people. We’re seeing people online who are posting hate speech. They should be shut down. They should be stopped from doing this. And they should know there are consequences for your actions.”

Although the statement “It’s okay what happened to Charlie” is abhorrent and warrants social stigma, it is also—undoubtedly—protected speech. Bondi, in her capacity as a federal official, is compelled to tolerate it and prohibited from shutting it down. “The attorney general would be wise to read the words of the Supreme Court,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression said in a statement, “which has repeatedly held that the ‘proudest boast’ of America’s free speech tradition is ‘freedom for the thought that we hate.’”

In her post this morning, Bondi was more careful. “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime,” she wrote. “For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.” Bondi is correct that true threats and incitement are not protected, but her comments to Miller did not make such a distinction. In that interview, and in another, Bondi seemed ignorant of constitutional law in a way that would be striking for any lawyer and is unacceptable in a U.S. attorney general.

This muddying of distinctions between lawful and unlawful speech is dangerous and chilling. That is why figures as varied as the anti-Trump independent Justin Amash and the MAGA-aligned culture warrior Matt Walsh are calling for Bondi to resign or be fired. “I have LOTS of conservatives on my X feed, and every single one that has commented on Pam Bondi’s vow to prosecute ‘hate speech’ has unequivocally denounced it. As do I,” the conservative writer Rod Dreher posted. “It was a moronic thing to say, and she must retract or resign.” Brit Hume, the chief political analyst for Fox News, wrote: “Someone needs to explain to Ms. Bondi that so-called ‘hate speech,’ repulsive though it may be, is protected by the First Amendment. She should know this.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Europe’s free-speech problem]

The political right has long rejected and even mocked calls from the left to criminalize hate speech. Last year, plenty of observers—myself included—criticized Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate, after he said that there was “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation and or hate speech.” Last month, I reported on the criminalization of hate speech in much of Europe, a trend that Vice President J. D. Vance has criticized. Vance has also said that the Department of Government Efficiency should rehire a staff member who resigned after reports that he’d posted “Normalize Indian hate” and other racist drivel on social media. “I don’t think stupid social-media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Vance declared.

Presidents swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Having an attorney general who either doesn’t understand the First Amendment or is willfully promising to violate it is at odds with that oath. Should Bondi follow through on her ill-considered pledge to “target” and “go after” Americans for hate speech, she would deserve to be impeached. Doing so in a misguided effort to avenge Kirk’s death, or to celebrate his life’s work, would be especially perverse, because Kirk himself rejected Bondi’s stated views.

“Hate speech does not exist legally in America,” Kirk declared in a 2024 post on X. “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”

A U.S. Citizen Detained by ICE for Three Days Tells His Story

2025-09-10T12:00:00-04:00

George Retes is a 25-year-old U.S. Army veteran who served a tour in Iraq. On July 10, while on his way to work as a security guard at a Southern California cannabis farm, he was detained by federal immigration agents, despite telling them that he is an American citizen and that his wallet and identification were in his nearby car, Retes told me. While arresting him, the agents knelt on his back and his neck, he said, making it difficult for him to breathe. Held in a jail cell for three days and nights, he was not allowed to make a phone call, see an attorney, appear before a judge, or take a shower to wash off pepper spray and tear gas that the agents had used, according to the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm that is representing Retes. He worried about his two young children and missed his daughter’s birthday.

Mistreatment of American citizens by immigration authorities is not new. According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report, the best available data indicate that Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 674 “potential” U.S. citizens, detained 121, and removed 70 during a five-year, six-month period that ended in 2020. We don’t yet know if detentions of U.S. citizens are becoming more common in President Donald Trump’s second term, but news outlets have documented more than a dozen such cases. And the Trump administration has ramped up immigration raids, rolled back due-process protections, and secured funding to quickly hire 10,000 additional ICE officers, all of which creates the conditions for more erroneous detentions—and raises the question of whether ICE can violate the rights of citizens with impunity.

“There must be some avenue to hold the federal government or its officers liable for violating George’s constitutional rights,” Marie Miller, one of Retes’s attorneys, told me.

Her strategy is to seek relief for Retes under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a law that allows private parties to sue for negligent or wrongful acts committed by federal employees acting within their job. The government has six months to resolve a claim, after which the claimant can sue. The hope is that the case “will chart a path to holding federal officers or their employer accountable,” Miller explained, “and that blazing the path to accountability will discourage this kind of treatment.” She said that ICE has acknowledged receiving Retes’s claim but has not yet responded.

[Listen: How ICE became Trump’s secret army]

ICE did not respond to my request for comment about the claim. But a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security put out a statement after the raid in which Retes was swept up, saying that the “US Attorney’s Office is reviewing his case, along with dozens of others, for potential federal charges related to the execution of the federal search warrant in Camarillo.” Retes was one of more than 360 people who were detained in the operation—“a mix of workers, family members of workers, protesters and passersby,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Late last month, I spoke with Retes, who detailed his story, starting with the day that his employer, Glass House Farms, one of California’s largest legal-cannabis companies, was raided. What follows has been edited for length and clarity.

You were driving to your job as a security guard when you encountered a bunch of men, some with ICE vests on, blocking the road. You’ve described the scene as chaotic. Can you tell me what you saw?

Cars bumper to bumper, people getting out walking down the street to try to see what’s happening, really a logjam. Making my way through was a task, and eventually I drove up to where a line of agents was just in the middle of the street keeping everyone away and blocking the road.

They were raiding your workplace. Were there signs or instructions on what to do?

Nothing. So I pull up a good distance away. I put my car in park. I get out. I say, I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m just trying to get to work. I have a job just like you guys. I have a family to feed. I got bills to pay. I’m not here to fight you guys. I’m not part of the protest. I’m literally just trying to get to work. They didn’t care and immediately got hostile. No one seemed to be in charge. Just all of them yelling at once.

Yelling what?

They were all yelling different things: Work is closed. You’re not going to work today. Get the fuck out of here. Leave, get back in your car. Pull over to the side. And then they started walking toward me in a line. I didn’t want to escalate. I wasn’t there to argue or to fight them. So I decided to get back in my car. I didn’t want any conflict. They surrounded my car. I’m telling them, “I’m leaving.” I’m trying to leave. And agents are banging on my driver’s- and passenger’s-side windows. Agents in front are telling me to reverse, pull over to the side, while other agents are trying to open my door and telling me to do something completely different, contradicting each other. I reversed out of the lane I was in to get out of the way. Then they let a bunch of their vehicles pass by.

How did the arrest happen?

They re-approached my car. I don’t know why they decided to re-approach, but they end up throwing tear gas behind my car. Now I’m kinda just trapped there, with tear gas filling up my car, choking. They’re banging on my window, telling me to reverse again, and I’m trying to tell them, How do you expect me to reverse when I can’t see? You hear me coughing. They just weren’t listening; they were still telling me to reverse, still trying to pull my car door open, still contradicting each other. Then one of the agents shatters my driver’s-side window, and another agent sticks his arm through it and immediately pepper-sprays me in the face. They dragged me out of the car. They threw me on the ground. An agent kneels on my back; another kneels on my neck. Others stand around and watch, as if I’m resisting or whatnot, but I wasn’t. I was trying to comply.

What were you thinking and feeling as this happened?

I knew the situation I was in. People in uniform abuse their power sometimes. It happens. I’ve seen it on the news. I always know: hands on the steering wheel; don’t fight. It’s just what I’ve been taught. Because I don’t want exactly what happened to me to happen. And so it was just crazy. I didn’t know what to do. They were just all so contradictory, and none of them was in charge. What to do was confusing. Then I didn’t know what was going to happen. When you have agents on your neck and back, and you’re telling them you can’t breathe and they don’t care, it’s scary.

You presumably faced chaotic situations while in the military. Do you think that helped you?

Yeah, I think it helped a lot. Just going through basic training, going through the bullshit together, being in the Army––you gotta keep your military bearing. So I’m pretty good in tense situations.

How long were you on the ground with a knee on your back and your neck?

It felt like forever, if I’m being honest with you. But I couldn’t give you a time. I remember them lifting me up and feeling like it was finally over. They walked me down to the Glass House, where I work, and the whole time they’re questioning each other, like, why was I arrested? Who arrested me? What were they going to do with me? Who would take me? They were unsure themselves. I’m just sitting in the dirt for maybe four hours.

After that, they put us [detainees] in an unmarked SUV and take us to a Navy base with this big open field. Every agency you could think of is there: FBI, people from the Navy, National Guard, Homeland Security, ICE. They take our fingerprints, they take our picture, they put real handcuffs on me, they handcuff my wrists and my ankles, and they put us back into the SUVs. Then they take us to downtown Los Angeles to the detention center.

Once you’re in the cell, what were you thinking?

It was just me and one other person in a cell, a professor who also got arrested that day. I was in disbelief. Why was I treated this way? Why am I even here to begin with? What did I do wrong?

And the entire time, my hands and body were burning from the tear gas. It felt like my hands were on fire. And they never let me wash it off. It was bad, and I thought it was never gonna end. They gave us these sandwiches when we first got in there. I took the sandwich out, and I filled up the sandwich bag with water. All night, I was alternating my hands trying to relieve the heat.

That next morning, they finished doing our intake. They do, like, a medical screening and ask how we’re doing. Then they sent me to see the psychiatric lady, and based off the answers I gave her, she said it was best that I get put on suicide watch. So until the point I was released, I was alone in a cell with a concrete block and a thin mattress on top. They never turn off the lights there. So it’s bright 24 hours a day. And there’s always a guard outside the room. It was terrible, feeling so confined, not being able to do anything, and not knowing what was going to happen.

Was there something in particular you were worried about, or just the overall uncertainty?

All I knew is that I was fucking taken. No one told me what I was there for. I thought no one knew––that I was literally gonna just disappear in there and never see my fucking kids again. You hear stories like that, when they take someone, and they just get lost in the system. It happens. It happens a lot. I didn’t want that to happen to me. I mean, I never did anything wrong.

[Read: The terrible optics of ICE enforcement are fueling a Trump immigration backlash]

Did anyone ever offer any explanation of why you were being arrested or how long you would be held?

No.

Were you worried about anyone in particular on the outside wondering what happened to you?

My kids. I told them that I’d be back later that day. I never showed up. That thought was in back of my head. My son is 8, and my daughter just turned 3––I missed her birthday while I was there. And not knowing if I was going to see them again and just—that’s so scary to think about.

Eventually, they released you without any charges. How did your kids react when you got home?

They’re super happy. The biggest smiles, calling for Dad, just a hug. It was the best feeling ever. Literally the best feeling.

And at some point, you decided to pursue legal action against the government. Talk me through that decision.

Because I know what they did wasn’t warranted. I know for an absolute fact I did nothing wrong. They were the aggressors the entire time. They were looking for a reason to do something. And I missed my daughter’s birthday. Then you just release me and say, No charges have been filed. I ask, So I was locked in here, and missed my daughter’s birthday for no reason, and you guys just stay silent? It’s so shitty and disrespectful. No “sorry,” not acknowledging that anything went wrong.

I want change. No one deserves to be treated like this. 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. If they feel like it, they can just take you. No. Someone has to be held accountable. I hope change happens in the way that ICE goes about their business. I hope they get proper training. I hope that they’re just not able to racially profile people and just take people off the streets. I hope the government acknowledges that they could do wrong. I hope they take accountability. My case is a perfect chance for the government to say, Okay, we fucked up. You’re right. This isn’t right. And we’re not gonna try to hide it. We acknowledge what we did was wrong.

Show Me the Person, and I’ll Show You the Crime

2025-08-29T17:00:00-04:00

How many members of Congress, federal judges, governors, attorneys general, and other federal and state leaders have submitted home-loan applications with falsehoods in them?

Too many, I think, to make felons of them all.

The question arises as the Trump administration threatens charges against three prominent Democrats who have angered the president: U.S. Senator Adam Schiff of California, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. All stand accused of submitting an application for a home loan stating that the property would be their primary residence, then treating another property as their primary residence. (Schiff and James have denied wrongdoing. Cook is suing Donald Trump for attempting to fire her, a move her lawyer has said “lacks any factual or legal basis.”)

The alleged offense might sound minor, but it’s a felony that can yield multiple years in prison. In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal argued that Bill Pulte, the Trump appointee who referred all three cases to the Department of Justice, seems preoccupied with using his power as a housing regulator against Trump’s opponents. The Journal called the administration’s actions “an ominous turn in political lawfare.”

[Jonathan Chait: MAGA has a new favorite slogan]

Pulte denies that he is fishing for wrongdoers. “If you commit mortgage fraud in America,” he wrote on X on Monday, “we will come after you, no matter who you are.” But so long as his actions and statements are focused on prominent enemies of Trump, no fair observer can trust his word. If the administration prosecutes these cases, it will cause many Americans to deem its actions illegitimate. And Democrats, whenever they return to power, could succumb to the temptation to prosecute Republicans for mortgage fraud, continuing a dysfunctional cycle of revenge.

No one should want federal bureaucrats poring over loan documents and consistently prosecuting all falsehoods. There are, of course, some mortgage-fraud cases in which perpetrators knowingly commit a serious transgression, and the cost to lenders can be high. In a 2023 research paper, Ronel Elul of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that some real-estate investors use occupancy fraud—misrepresenting themselves as owner-occupants—to obtain lower mortgage rates than they otherwise could get, and that they default at a higher rate than other investors. Such fraud “is broad-based,” Elul and two co-authors write: They find that these fraudulent borrowers make up one-third of the population of investors seeking mortgages. Few fraudulent borrowers are charged. In fiscal year 2024, the federal government filed fewer than 20 total cases of mortgage fraud, according to the U.S. Attorneys’ annual statistical report.

Prosecuting the kind of fraud that Elul documented, however, is far different from making a felon of, say, a low-risk borrower who puts incorrect information on a form when purchasing a vacation house. Loan paperwork is confusing. Confronted with hundreds of pages and dozens of places to sign and initial, many borrowers simply trust a loan officer or adviser when they say something like, You always check this box. It’s fine.

Regularly prosecuting cases like the ones the Trump administration is grandstanding about would enmesh many unwitting wrongdoers in legal nightmares, just as the civil-libertarian attorney Harvey Silverglate warned in his 2009 book, Three Felonies a Day. In it, he distinguishes between common-law crimes such as theft, assault, and murder, which all perpetrators know to be serious transgressions, and the many federal laws that make felons out of people who don’t even realize that they are doing something wrong. “Trump’s pursuit of these mortgage fraud cases is precisely what I warned about,” Silverglate wrote to me when I reached him by email earlier this week. “This system paves the way to tyranny—a system in which, alas, I fear we find ourselves.”

Of course, there is no way that the Trump administration would agree to review the home loans of its own political appointees and fire, let alone prosecute, anyone who claimed more than one primary residence. There is no way Republicans in Congress would agree to a third-party review of their home-loan applications. The Associated Press, citing a review of public documents, reported in July that two Republican officials, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, Angela, a state senator in Texas, had signed mortgages that “contained inaccurate statements declaring that each of those three houses was their primary residence, enabling the now-estranged couple to improperly lock in low interest rates.” (Neither Ken nor Angela Paxton responded to the AP’s requests for comment.) Trump officials are treating their political enemies in a way that they’d never treat political allies, a far more serious and corrosive betrayal of the rule of law than what they are alleging that Schiff, James, and Cook have done.

And Trump himself is guilty of an especially flagrant double standard. When he said he was firing Cook—who is among the Federal Reserve governors who has voted to keep interest rates steady, against Trump’s wishes—he sent her a letter that cited the mortgage-fraud allegations and stated that Americans “must be able to have full confidence in the honesty of the members entrusted with setting policy and overseeing the Federal Reserve.” But Trump, who oversees the whole executive branch, was found liable last year for greatly inflating his assets to get better rates on bank loans. “A discrepancy of this order of magnitude, by a real estate developer sizing up his own living space of decades, can only be considered fraud,” the judge in the case wrote. Trump appealed; a higher court reversed the financial penalty the judge had imposed, but the ruling so far stands.

[Lev Menand: The Supreme Court made a bad bet]

Targeting political enemies for prosecution is corrosive. Asking Americans to believe that you find their alleged behavior disqualifying when you were found guilty of similar behavior on a much bigger scale insults the intelligence of the public. The inevitable effect is to amplify outrage and inspire others to seek revenge.

As the Wall Street Journal editorial board notes, “Misstating information on mortgage applications doesn’t appear to be uncommon.” Perhaps that’s cause for reform of some sort—or maybe banks often don’t care about the “primary residence” distinction for good reason, such as if they can determine that the buyer in question is low-risk. But there is every reason to surmise that, given enough time to dig through loan applications, the Trump administration––or the Newsom or Ocasio-Cortez administration––could selectively prosecute enough people to intimidate the opposition, or hold the prospect of felony prosecutions over political opponents to silence them.

Détente is the only sane course. But we have as president a 79-year-old lame duck who won’t have to deal with the long-term consequences of his actions, so insanity may prevail.

Europe’s Free-Speech Problem

2025-08-19T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 1:54 p.m. ET on August 20, 2025

American officials are waging a multifront attack on Europe’s approach to free speech. This month, a congressional delegation traveled to Dublin, Brussels, and London to probe and decry European regulations on digital speech. A State Department human-rights assessment issued last week pointed to objectionable “restrictions on freedom of expression” in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. All of this follows Vice President J. D. Vance’s speech in February at the Munich Security Conference, where he accused European leaders of retreating from the continent’s “most fundamental values,” including free expression.

These assessments might seem untrustworthy, given the flagrant transgressions against free-speech principles from the Trump administration and its allies. But the fact is that European leaders are corroding the right to free expression, and show every sign of sliding further down a slippery slope into illiberalism.

Europe and the United States have always had different free-speech cultures. In the postwar era, both confronted the question of how tolerant societies should treat intolerant factions. Much of Europe concluded that, although free speech is important, views that threaten democracy itself are different and can be criminalized; see laws in various European states against Nazi propaganda. In contrast, the American system protected expression as vile as neo-Nazis marching through a town of Holocaust survivors because, by First Amendment logic, fascist speech poses less of a danger than enabling the state itself to engage in viewpoint discrimination. Despite these differences, both Europe and America mostly expanded speech protections in the 20th century and pulled back from censorship, seeming to converge on liberal values by the time the Iron Curtain fell and the internet spread.

Now Europe and the United States are diverging. Never mind enduring disagreements about how to treat Nazis and other would-be totalitarians. Europe today, in both its individual countries and its shared continental governance, is criminalizing more and more speech that doesn’t come close to American thresholds for incitement or harassment.

[James Kirchick: What happens where free speech is unprotected]

The shift has been gradual, emerging in landmark cases at the European Court of Human Rights, as well as in legislation at the national level. But the new reality is stark. Last year, Amnesty International (hardly a Trump-administration ally) published a report about what the organization’s secretary-general, Agnès Callamard, called a “Europe-wide onslaught against the right to protest”; the report documented examples of restrictive laws, use of excessive police force, and arbitrary arrest. It’s not just protests. European judges have signed off on the criminalization of the kinds of hate speech that, while easy to revile, pose nothing like Hitlerite peril. When a middle-aged mother lashes out at asylum seekers in a social-media post (later deleted), or a pro-Palestinian marcher chants a slogan that some but not all see as genocidal, or a flyer calls gays “deviants,” a tolerant society can exercise forbearance and respond with counterspeech. European states are often deploying handcuffs instead. And European leaders are pushing to expand the speech that can get a person thrown in prison.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration is so hypocritical on free expression, so unpopular in Europe, and so undiplomatic that it and its supporters are poorly positioned to persuade Europeans to reverse course. But at a time when freedom of expression is under attack across the globe, fighting for the expressive rights of Europeans is still worthwhile.

The American system, of course, isn’t absolutist about freedom of expression or permissive of all hate speech. Speech can be punished if it is a “true threat” that intentionally or recklessly makes its target fear violence, or if it constitutes harassment, libel, or incitement. But the U.S. has a very clear, very high threshold for incitement: Per the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio, the speech must be directed toward “producing imminent lawless action” and “likely to incite or produce such action.”

In Europe, the picture is more complicated. The member states of the Council of Europe all have their own laws and are bound by the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” including freedom “to receive and impart information and ideas without interference.” But the same treaty notes that member states can restrict that right to advance national security, territorial integrity, or public safety; to prevent disorder or crime; to protect health or morals; and more.

Since shortly after its inception in 1959, the European Court of Human Rights, also known as the Strasbourg Court, has heard cases of alleged violations of the 1953 convention. The court’s strongest precedent affirming liberal free-speech values was articulated in a 1976 case called Handyside v. United Kingdom. In it, the court actually ruled in favor of the British government’s censorship of a book, for schoolchildren, whose content was deemed obscene. Yet its judgment stated that, in general, freedom of expression is “applicable not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably” or indifferently received, “but also to those that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population.” That ethos would be a powerful bulwark for expressive rights, if enforced. Yet in a series of rulings that began in the aughts, the court betrayed that ethos until it was all but abandoned.

One influential case, in 2009, concerned Daniel Féret, a Belgian politician who founded a far-right political party. He published campaign leaflets that included statements such as “stop the Islamization of Belgium” and “save our people from the risk posed by Islam, the conqueror.” A Belgian court convicted Féret of inciting discrimination, hatred, or violence, and punished him with a suspended prison sentence, 250 hours of community service, and 10 years of ineligibility for office. His punishment “had the legitimate aims of preventing disorder,” the court ruled, stating that “incitation to hatred” need not involve calls “for specific acts of violence.” Rather, “insults, ridicule or defamation aimed at specific population groups or incitation to discrimination, as in this case, sufficed.” Punishing insults that could lead to discrimination is a much lower standard than punishing calls for imminent violence that are also likely to lead to it.

In a 2012 case, Vejdeland and Others v. Sweden, four Swedes challenged their conviction for distributing to high schoolers leaflets that called homosexuality a “deviant sexual proclivity” and argued that promiscuous gays were responsible for spreading HIV. The court ruled that discrimination based on sexual orientation is as serious as racial discrimination, and that although the four Swedes might have been trying to initiate debate on “a question of public interest,” they had a duty to avoid “as far as possible” statements that are “unwarrantably offensive,” such as disparaging homosexuals as a group. How far such a duty to avoid offense might extend was unclear. In 2015, the court concluded that European states could be justified in punishing speech that is contrary to the “underlying values” or “spirit” of the European Convention on Human Rights, “namely justice and peace,” but didn’t clearly define those values or set forth a test for what violates them.

With online speech offering national authorities more occasions to launch prosecutions, the court set another speech-chilling precedent in 2015: An online news portal in Estonia could be punished for failing to remove hateful comments posted beneath a news article that itself was unobjectionable, the court found. In a similar case, in 2023, the court ruled against a far-right politician from France, Julien Sanchez, who had been punished for failing to delete hateful comments left beneath a Facebook post he wrote, even though he apparently hadn’t seen the comments. That ruling included the sweeping statement that because “tolerance and respect for the equal dignity of all” are foundational in a pluralistic democracy, “it may be considered necessary in certain democratic societies to penalise or even prevent all forms of expression that propagate, encourage, promote or justify hatred based on intolerance.” Not only must wrongthink be banned, the court suggested; justifying the wrongthink of others, or failing to adequately monitor and censor it, can be penalized, too.

All of those precedents come from the judicial body charged with protecting free-speech rights. Natalie Alkiviadou, the author of Hate Speech and the European Court of Human Rights, observed recently that although the court has long invoked the necessity of protecting democracy in restricting speech, its reasoning “has drifted far from those original aims.” Now that the court has justified criminalizing so many other forms of speech, no European citizen can trust that the court retains its bygone commitment to protecting ideas that “offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population.”

By repeatedly prioritizing other goods above expressive rights, the European court helped create the conditions for the free-speech crackdowns now seen in numerous countries.

Germany has a unique history that informs its speech restrictions, which are motivated in part by a desire to prevent anything like the Holocaust from happening again. But Iris Hefets, an Israeli-born activist, believed that she was trying to stop a human-rights atrocity when she was arrested at a protest in Berlin for holding a sign that said As a Jew and Israeli, stop the genocide in Gaza. Although she was not criminally charged in that incident, she has been arrested on two other occasions for nonviolent pro-Palestinian protests. A German court convicted another activist for leading a “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” chant in Berlin. Jacob Mchangama, an academic who researches freedom of expression in Europe, reported earlier this year that German police investigations of online speech “happen to literally thousands of people,” including climate activists, pro-Palestinian activists, and ordinary people. “Even posting a book cover on X that features a barely visible swastika on a facemask—intended to draw sarcastic parallels between COVID policies and Nazi-era policies—can lead to a criminal conviction for displaying prohibited symbols,” he wrote.

[Simon Cottee: A flawed European ruling on free speech]

Denmark has criminalized the inappropriate treatment of holy texts. In Switzerland, a man was fined and sent to prison for 40 days, a sentence upheld last year on appeal, for calling a journalist a “fat activist lesbian” and saying that queer means “degenerate.” After police in Austria raided the home of a Muslim academic at gunpoint, a regional court cited his work on Islamophobia as justification. A court sentenced a Czech teacher to a prison term (which was suspended), probation, and the loss of her ability to teach for three years for denying Russian war crimes.

In Britain, Lucy Connolly, a middle-aged British mother, is serving a 31-month prison sentence for “distributing material with the intention of stirring up racial hatred.” After hearing inaccurate rumors that an asylum seeker had committed a crime, she posted on social media the vile message, “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them.” She soon deleted the message. The length of Connolly’s sentence has sparked widespread backlash in the country; critics point to criminals who have received lesser punishments for perpetrating actual violence. Just this month, in London, NPR reported, 532 people were arrested when supporters of a pro-Palestinian group recently banned as a terrorist organization gathered to protest.

As important are Britons who have broken no laws but have been harassed by police. In 2023, for example, Julian Foulkes, a retired police officer, implied that a pro-Palestinian social-media post was anti-Semitic, writing that the person who posted it was “one step away from storming Heathrow looking for Jewish arrivals.” The police, who perhaps misunderstood the post, handcuffed him and seized his electronic devices. Later, they “apologised to Mr Foulkes, removed a caution from his record and would hold a review,” the BBC reported. When citizens know that speech cops might show up at their door with handcuffs for an unremarkable post, even speech that censorious laws permit gets chilled.

European leaders are pushing for even more sweeping restrictions. In part, they seek to expand the categories of persons that, according to the Council of Europe, are protected from incitement to hatred or discrimination to include gender, disability, sexual orientation, language, and age, in addition to already protected categories (race, color, religion, and descent or national or ethnic origin). Many are pushing to expand what counts as hate speech, too. In a 2022 strategy paper on how to better combat hate speech, the Council of Europe defined it as “all types of expression that incite, promote, spread or justify violence, hatred or discrimination against a person or group of persons”––note that justifying hatred is a lower standard than advocating it. The European Commission has been pushing a proposal to require that all European Union states make hate speech a crime. And in 2024, the European Parliament urged the European Commission to adopt an open-ended approach to the sorts of discrimination that are banned, rather than a closed list, so that authorities “can adapt to changing social dynamics.”

Criminalizing more and more expansive conceptions of hate speech and applying them to more and more classes of Europeans doesn’t just infringe on individual rights. It risks a number of social ills, including beyond Europe.

Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has argued that humans tend to have “censorship envy”: Once my neighbor gets to ban speech that offends him, I feel entitled to ban speech that I revile. This begets efforts to criminalize more speech over time, and can radicalize those who feel they must stand by as others censor. Former ACLU President Nadine Strossen has pointed out that when censorship succeeds in causing hateful people to express their ideas in private but never in public, others lose “the opportunity to dissuade them and to monitor their conduct.” And Greg Lukianoff, the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has argued that censorship is ineffective. “Since the widespread passage of hate speech codes in Europe, religious and ethnic intolerance there has gone up,” he wrote in 2021.

Europeans might retort that the American system, too, has failed to stop threats to freedom of expression. The Trump administration has sued news outlets, used anti-discrimination law to crack down on student protesters, and more, in some instances targeting European citizens. After Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish national studying at Tufts University, wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper that criticized campus administrators for their response to the war in Gaza, the administration suspended her visa and put her in immigration detention.

[David A. Graham: The free-speech phonies]

But a First Amendment lawsuit helped free Öztürk. And First Amendment protections constrain Donald Trump from detaining American citizens in the same fashion, while some citizens of Europe find themselves jailed in their own countries for political speech. Under the approach that many European leaders favor, Trump could indict half of Bluesky. And if internet companies all begin censoring speech globally by suppressing everything that could conceivably be illegal in Europe, Americans, including Trump critics, will be stifled.

For many with liberal values, or who are averse to criminalizing viewpoints, the kinds of prohibitions that the United States puts on speech go far enough—and Europe’s promiscuous prohibitions go too far. Should the right gain more power on the continent (as it has done in Hungary, with dire consequences for free speech), more centrist European leaders could soon realize the risks of the infrastructure they are building to surveil and punish hate speech. Any authoritarian could exploit that infrastructure to disastrous effects. Already, European leaders do more illiberal chilling of speech than Trump, who is doing enough of it himself to prevent America from leading by example.

This article originally stated that a court sentenced a Czech teacher for telling her class that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was justified. In fact, she was sentenced for denying Russian war crimes.

The Choice Between Cheap Groceries and Everything Else

2025-07-19T08:00:00-04:00

Can the city of New York sell groceries more cheaply than the private sector? The mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani thinks so. He wants to start five city-owned stores that will be “focused on keeping prices low” rather than making a profit—what he calls a “public option” for groceries. His proposal calls for opening stores on city land so that they can forgo paying rent or property taxes.

Skeptics have focused on economic obstacles to the plan. Grocers have industry expertise that New York City lacks; they benefit from scale; and they run on thin profit margins, estimated at just 1 to 3 percent, leaving little room for additional savings. Less discussed, though no less formidable, is a political obstacle for Mamdani: The self-described democratic socialist’s promise to lower grocery prices and, more generally, “lower the cost of living for working class New Yorkers” will be undermined by other policies that he or his coalition favors that would raise costs. No one should trust that “there’s far more efficiency to be had in our public sector,” as he says of his grocery-store proposal, until he explains how he would resolve those conflicts.

Mamdani’s desire to reduce grocery prices for New Yorkers is undercut most glaringly by the labor policies that he champions. Labor is the largest fixed cost for grocery stores. Right now grocery-store chains with lots of New York locations, such as Stop & Shop and Key Food, advertise entry-level positions at or near the city’s minimum wage of $16.50 an hour. Mamdani has proposed to almost double the minimum wage in New York City to $30 an hour by 2030; after that, additional increases would be indexed to inflation or productivity growth, whichever is higher. Perhaps existing grocery workers are underpaid; perhaps workers at city-run stores should make $30 an hour too. Yet a wage increase would all but guarantee more expensive groceries. Voters deserve to know whether he’ll prioritize cheaper groceries or better-paid workers. (I wrote to Mamdani’s campaign about this trade-off, and others noted below, but got no reply.)

[Read: New York is hungry for a big grocery experiment]

In the New York State assembly, Mamdani has co-sponsored legislation to expand family-leave benefits so that they extend to workers who have an abortion, a miscarriage, or a stillbirth. The official platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Mamdani, calls for “a four-day, 32-hour work week with no reduction in wages or beneﬁts” for all workers. Unions, another source of Mamdani support, regularly lobby for more generous worker benefits. Extending such benefits to grocery-store employees would raise costs that, again, usually get passed on to consumers. Perhaps Mamdani intends to break with his own past stances and members of his coalition, in keeping with his goal of focusing on low prices. But if that’s a path that he intends to take, he hasn’t said so.

City-run grocery stores would purchase massive amounts of food and other consumer goods from wholesalers. New York City already prioritizes goals other than cost-cutting when it procures food for municipal purposes; it signed a pledge in 2021 to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions associated with food that it serves, and Mayor Eric Adams signed executive orders in 2022 that committed the city to considering “local economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition” in its food procurement. Such initiatives inevitably raise costs.

Mamdani could favor exempting city-run groceries from these kinds of obligations. But would he? Batul Hassan, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America steering committee and a supporter of Mamdani, co-authored an article arguing that city-run stores should procure food from vendors that prioritize a whole host of goods: “worker dignity and safety, animal welfare, community economic benefit and local sourcing, impacts to the environment, and health and nutrition, including emphasizing culturally appropriate, well-balanced and plant-based diets,” in addition to “suppliers from marginalized backgrounds and non-corporate supply chains, including small, diversified family farms, immigrants and people of color, new and emerging consumer brands, and farmer and employee owned cooperatives.” If one milk brand is cheaper but has much bigger environmental externalities or is owned by a large corporation, will a city-run store carry it or a pricier but greener, smaller brand?

Mamdani has said in the past that he supports the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement, which advocates for boycotting products from Israel. That probably wouldn’t raise costs much by itself. And Mamdani told Politico in April that BDS wouldn’t be his focus as mayor. But a general practice of avoiding goods because of their national origin, or a labor dispute between a supplier and its workers, or any number of other controversies, could raise costs. When asked about BDS in the Politico interview, Mamdani also said, “We have to use every tool that is at people’s disposal to ensure that equality is not simply a hope, but a reality.” Would Mamdani prioritize low prices in all cases or sometimes prioritize the power of boycotts or related pressure tactics to effect social change? Again, he should clarify how he would resolve such trade-offs.

Finally, shoplifting has surged in New York in recent years. Many privately owned grocery stores hire security guards, use video surveillance, call police on shoplifters, and urge that shoplifters be prosecuted. Democratic socialists generally favor less policing and surveilling. If the security strategy that’s best for the bottom line comes into conflict with progressive values, what will Mamdani prioritize?

[Read: Shoplifters gone wild]

This problem isn’t unique to Mamdani. Officials in progressive jurisdictions across the country have added to the cost of public-sector initiatives by imposing what The New York Times’ Ezra Klein has characterized as an “avalanche of well-meaning rules and standards.” For example, many progressives say they want to fund affordable housing, but rather than focus on minimizing costs per unit to house as many people as possible, they mandate other goals, such as giving locals a lengthy process for comment, prioritizing bids from small or minority-owned businesses, requiring union labor, and instituting project reviews to meet the needs of people with disabilities. Each extra step relates to a real good. But once you add them up, affordability is no longer possible, and fewer people end up housed.

Policies that raise costs are not necessarily morally or practically inferior to policies that lower costs; low prices are one good among many. But if the whole point of city-owned grocery stores is to offer lower prices, Mamdani will likely need to jettison other goods that he and his supporters value, and be willing to withstand political pressure from allies. Voters deserve to know how Mamdani will resolve the conflicts that will inevitably arise. So far, he isn’t saying.

What the Right Learned From the Left About Policing Colleges

2025-06-29T07:30:00-04:00

Updated at 8:20 p.m. ET on June 29, 2025

Progressives have long wished that the federal government would more aggressively enforce civil-rights law in higher education. Did they wish upon a monkey’s paw? Since Donald Trump retook the White House, his administration has used the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to trap dozens of colleges in the federal equivalent of a headlock, forcing them to submit to sweeping demands or else have their federal funds frozen or foreign students banned.

According to Team Trump, it is targeting academics who violate civil-rights laws—by discriminating against Asian Americans in admissions, allowing biological males to compete with females in athletics, tolerating a hostile climate for Jews, or sponsoring DEI programs that malign straight, white, and male students. Critics of Trump’s approach counter that he has ulterior motives. “I consider the Trump administration’s recent use of civil rights law either a pretext or a sick joke—or both,” Richard Delgado, a Seattle University law professor and pioneer of critical race theory, emailed me. “The Administration’s real objective is to intimidate institutions of higher education into doing their bidding.”

Whatever the intentions, these moves represent a clear shift. Not long ago, it was Democrats who stood accused of overzealous and punitive enforcement. The Department of Education under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden put forth sweeping new interpretations of decades-old civil-rights laws, particularly Title IX. At the time, classical liberals on the left and right (myself among them) warned that, although no one ought to face discrimination, the government’s expansive approach had serious costs: for academic freedom, free speech, free association, the ability of private colleges to self-govern, and the maintenance of a limited federal government. Nevertheless, colleges all over the country began to police the speech of professors and students as never before. Even a tiny, unintentional slight could trigger a months-long ordeal.

[Read: The end of college life]

Now Trump-administration officials are repurposing the illiberal playbook that progressives long deployed. Having seized control of the civil-rights-enforcement apparatus, they are aiming it at parts of civil society that are hostile to the MAGA agenda—including universities. “Civil-rights laws have always been a weapon,” an architect of the new strategy, the activist Christopher Rufo, recently wrote in The Free Press. “Conservatives have finally decided to wield them.”

Protecting basic civil rights is truly important, and many of the prejudices and civil-rights violations that Obama, Biden, and Trump have variously cited are real. For that reason, many Americans are reflexively averse to the idea that there is such a thing as too much civil-rights enforcement. But the aggressive style born under Obama and plied with steroids by Trump is excessive. It serves fringe zealots eager to destroy academia’s independence better than majorities who hope to improve higher education.

If anything good comes from this moment, perhaps it will be that the left learns to recognize the need for new limits on the administrative state. To enact such a reform, lots of Republicans will need to go back to their former position on limiting bureaucratic coercion.

The current era of aggressive civil-rights enforcement began in 2011. At the time, many progressives thought that colleges did not know how to handle sexual violence on campus and that they were responding to complaints in a way that was calculated to protect their image rather than students’ safety. Title IX was seen as a solution. The 1972 law states that no person shall, “on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity.”

On April 4, 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights published a “Dear Colleague” letter meant to clarify colleges’ legal obligations under Title IX. The letter said that every college receiving federal funds had to appoint a Title IX coordinator. And most had to restructure how they treated allegations of sexual violence: College administrators were told to conduct independent investigations of sexual-assault allegations rather than relying on local police; to limit accused students’ ability to cross-examine their accusers; to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard to find accused students responsible, rather than the higher “clear and convincing evidence” burden of proof; to eschew mediation; and more.

The Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague” letters are supposed to be nonbinding guidance on what existing law requires, not new policy making. Yet the Obama administration was claiming that, to comply with the law, every institution had to adopt new policies that no institution had previously thought were required. The administration went on to investigate dozens of schools for departing from its novel interpretation of Title IX. Behind each probe was a threat: Comply or lose federal funding.

The pressure tactic worked. Colleges throughout the United States hired new administrators and lawyers. Many of those expanded campus bureaucracies went on to engage in illiberal excesses. A punitive apparatus “was being built, expanded, and deployed” to regulate conduct “further and further from the core cases of sexual assault than most people imagined,” the Harvard law professors Jeannie Suk Gersen and Jacob E. Gersen later wrote in a law-review article. To stay out of trouble, the Gersens argued, many schools forbade “conduct that the vast majority of students commonly engaged in during consensual sexual interactions.”

The new regime put colleges in a double bind: Complying with Title IX exposed them to lawsuits from students claiming that their due-process rights had been violated. Courts later ruled that many colleges did, in fact, deny students due process. Faculty members suffered unjustly, too, as when Northwestern University investigated Laura Kipnis on the premise that she had violated Title IX by writing critically about the new Title IX enforcement.

In 2017, the Trump administration took over, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos mandated new protections for accused students. But campus Title IX bureaucracies remained intact, and colleges were still adjudicating complaints without knowing what the next U.S. president would demand. Indeed, when Biden was elected, his Office of Civil Rights reimposed much of the Obama-era approach, until a judge blocked the policy in a nationwide injunction. Trump’s return to office effectively ended that legal fight, but there’s no telling what the next president will do.

Under the new Trump administration, campus-civil-rights enforcement has focused on Title VI, the 1964 law that says no person shall, “on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under” any program that gets federal funds. The administration contends that universities have violated the Title VI rights of Jewish students by responding inadequately to anti-Semitic campus activism. Beyond that, Trump’s team insists that highly specific changes are required as a remedy if colleges want to keep their federal funding.

[Greg Lukianoff: Trump’s attacks threaten much more than Harvard]

Trump’s team was not the first to apply Obama’s Title IX enforcement model to Title VI. After Hamas launched its attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Palestine-aligned protests erupted on many campuses, political appointees at Biden’s Department of Education issued a letter to clarify colleges’ obligation to protect the rights of both Jewish and Arab students. The letter noted that protected speech wasn’t unlawful. But it also said that some protected speech could contribute to a hostile environment that violates the Title VI rights of students, obligating a response from administrators.

Once again, colleges were in a double bind: Cracking down on protected speech would create legal liability, but so would failing to respond to speech that the state deemed anti-Semitic. Scores of investigations for alleged failures to protect the rights of Jewish students quickly followed. The Knight First Amendment Institute published an article by two scholars arguing that there was good reason to believe that the Biden team was “leveraging its power to regulate discrimination” to force crackdowns on “protected student and faculty speech.” The Gersens felt that history was repeating itself. Their aforementioned paper goes on to show how the Office of Civil Rights under Biden once again created incentives for colleges to “over-police and over-punish” students and faculty, this time relying on Title VI. Driving out discrimination “is a laudable goal,” the Gersens write, but pursuing it “may also produce far ranging negative consequences that go to the heart of the academic mission.”

The new Trump administration has policed Title VI even more fervently, with initiatives from the White House and multiple federal agencies. In statements and executive orders, Trump has put colleges on notice, vowing to combat anti-Semitism and to treat all DEI initiatives as suspect (though guidance from the Department of Education seems to have softened that position). Trump has suggested that colleges should “monitor” foreign students and staffers for anti-Semitism and “report” their activities to the feds in case the students are eligible to be deported. Another executive order pressures college accreditors to strip the accreditation status of institutions accused of wrongdoing by civil-rights bureaucrats.

The Department of Education has launched various kinds of Title VI probes of more than 50 institutions and sent letters to 60 institutions warning of potential enforcement unless they act “to protect Jewish students.” At the Department of Justice, the civil-rights attorney Leo Terrell is leading a Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism; at the end of February, he announced visits to 10 campuses, and on March 7, the administration announced that Columbia would lose at least $400 million in federal grants “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” According to The New York Times, the Justice Department also recently demanded that the University of Virginia push out its president to “help resolve a Justice Department investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion efforts”; the president resigned on Friday.

As a critic of DEI and anti-Semitism, I understand the impulse to crack down on both, much as I understood the impulse to crack down on sexual violence. But the administration’s approach guarantees the same bureaucratic bloat and illiberal excesses that characterized Title IX enforcement.

Two of the administration’s primary targets have already been subjected to treatment that wildly exceeds reasonable and lawful oversight. In a March 25 letter to Columbia, the Trump administration demanded not only that the university “complete disciplinary proceedings” related to campus encampments, but that it impose a minimum penalty of expulsion or multiyear suspensions. But what if, in a given case, a one-year suspension is most just? The administration told Columbia to “centralize all disciplinary processes under the Office of the President.” What statute empowers it to dictate how administrators and faculty divide power? It demanded that the institution “formalize, adopt, and promulgate” a definition of anti-Semitism, as if institutional neutrality about that topic of debate is somehow at odds with Title VI. Most strikingly, it ordered Columbia to begin “placing the Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies department under academic receivership” for five years, a flagrant intrusion on faculty governance and academic freedom.

In an April 11 letter to Harvard, the Trump administration made at least one legitimate demand––that the university comply with the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling that its admissions office cannot discriminate on the basis of race. But the administration also made demands that ought to be beyond the state’s purview. Harvard was ordered to reduce “the power held by students and untenured faculty” in its governance. It was told to pay for an external anti-Semitism audit that would list faculty members who discriminate against Jews so that they can be punished. Yet the next paragraph of the letter demanded that Harvard shut down all DEI initiatives. The letter even seeks to micromanage student groups; funding decisions “must be made exclusively by a body of University faculty,” it states.

Harvard has rejected these demands in court filings, and it is suing the administration to stop it from enforcing the letter’s terms. Still, the overall effect of the administration’s enforcement is aptly summed up by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. In an amicus brief supporting Harvard’s lawsuit, the organization declared that the state’s “coercion of Harvard violates longstanding First Amendment principles and will destroy universities nationwide if left unchecked.”

An aggressive regime of civil-rights enforcement is easy to defend in theory. Without bureaucrats focused on the obligations that colleges have under Title IX and Title VI, institutions can neglect the statutory rights of students. Federally dictated policies and procedures can enhance consistency and impartiality. Investment in the Office of Civil Rights and campus-compliance structures can reduce sexual assaults and bigoted harassment. And penalties can be meted out justly to particularly bad actors. But that isn’t how the civil-rights regime that arose in 2011 has worked in practice.

[Listen: Why Trump wants to control universities]

The new Title IX bureaucracy cost colleges hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, from 2011 to 2016. And for all the bureaucracy’s illiberal excesses, colleges ultimately reported an overall increase in forcible sex offenses during the same period. Meanwhile, policy making through the bureaucracy rather than Congress sowed dysfunction, with appointees of different presidents imposing wildly different, sometimes contradictory, accounts of what the law required, such that satisfying one administration got you in trouble with the next.

Similarly dismal results are likely as the Trump administration applies the Title IX playbook to Title VI. There is no reason to assume that Jewish students will be better off if colleges comply with every Trump-administration dictate. As Republican administrations used to understand, intense bureaucratic attention to a problem doesn’t automatically improve it. And often, state coercion can invite state abuses, yield unintended consequences (see the Israeli students who will have to leave Harvard if Trump succeeds in banning foreign students), and crowd out better solutions.

Returning to pre-2011 norms would be better than the status quo. But at this point, an act of Congress might be the only way to stop what one attorney has called the “regulation by intimidation” that threatens higher education. Congress could clarify what Title IX and Title VI require of colleges, in particular establishing that colleges can never be punished by the administrative state for allowing speech protected by the First Amendment or extending due-process rights to accused students that they would enjoy in a court of law. It could raise the bar for launching an investigation. It could afford colleges more due process before penalties are imposed. And it could silo penalties, so that violations in one part of a university, such as the law school, do not threaten another part, such as a cancer-research center. Many kinds of reform are possible.

It is, in any case, unsustainable for colleges to be micromanaged by rival factions of coercive ideologues. Yet many Trump critics are still focusing on his administration’s glaring procedural violations, rather than the enforcement model that underlies them. Even if Trump’s team were as procedurally diligent as its predecessors (a low bar), the overly aggressive approach to civil-rights enforcement that began in 2011 and persists today would serve academia ill. Civil-rights enforcement on campuses has mutated into something with costs that outweigh its benefits.

This article has been updated to clarify that an assessment of the Biden administration's enforcement of Title VI published by the Knight First Amendment Institute was written by two outside scholars. The article also has been updated to correct a description of the burden of proof that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said colleges should use for accused students.

Attacking Iran Without Congress’s Blessing Leaves Citizens With No Recourse

2025-06-22T10:24:42-04:00

Before Donald Trump ordered the bombing of nuclear sites in Iran, he was warned that, to quote Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the Constitution does not permit the president “to unilaterally commit an act of war” against a nation that hasn’t first struck America. After the attack, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland declared Trump’s actions “a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York stated, “It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”

The judgment that neither the Constitution; nor the War Powers Resolution, a 1973 law meant to clarify and limit when the president can wage war; nor any bygone authorization to use military force, such as the one passed after 9/11, permitted the attack is one I share. But I don’t just lament the dearth of a congressional vote out of concern for constitutional law. I also fear that bypassing Congress weakens American democracy.

Recall the last time that the United States began a war this consequential: George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Prior to invading, on October 10, 2002, Bush secured an authorization to use military force from Congress by wide margins in both chambers.

Even though the Iraq invasion was a mistake—something I have long believed—American democracy was better off for those votes, and not just because the Constitution assigns the war power to Congress. Debating the matter in the House and Senate helped educate lawmakers and the public about the arguments for and against the war, and left a record of who made claims that later proved incorrect. Prior to the vote, citizens could lobby their representatives, allowing for more participation in the process. And afterward, citizens could hold members of Congress accountable for their choices, not only in the next election but for the rest of the careers of everyone who cast a vote.

Government by the people demands opportunities to mete out such consequences. And as voters soured on Iraq, the ability to vote out members of Congress who approved the war provided a civic outlet for dissent. Just prior to the 2006 midterms, the Pew Research Center reported that “Iraq has become the central issue of the midterm elections. There is more dismay about how the U.S. military effort in Iraq is going than at any point since the war began more than three years ago. And the war is the dominant concern among the majority of voters who say they will be thinking about national issues, rather than local issues, when they cast their ballot for Congress this fall.” Pro–Iraq War senators including Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and George Allen of Virginia lost races to anti–Iraq War challengers.

In 2008, Hillary Clinton likely would have defeated Barack Obama, who spoke out against the invasion as an Illinois state senator, in the Democratic presidential primary but for her Senate vote for the Iraq War. And John McCain’s vote for the war hung over him in that general election. Later, Senator Bernie Sanders’s star would rise in part because he could point back to the vote he cast against the war. All told, voters in hundreds of electoral contests spanning years, if not decades, cast ballots in part based on information gleaned from that 2002 vote.

Yesterday, in contrast, a lame-duck president who will never again be accountable at the ballot box went to war with Iran. There was no deliberation and no ability for voters to lobby their congressional representatives, and voters will be unable to credit or blame members of Congress for the outcome, or at least not as fully as if all were on the record voting yea or nay.

Despite the early majorities that supported the Iraq War, the war’s long-term effect on American politics includes growing popular aversion to wars of choice and foreign interventions. Even so, though Obama and Trump aligned themselves with popular opinion and campaigned on promises to avoid such engagements, they have now both unilaterally launched wars of choice, in Libya and Iran, respectively, once they were in office.

Their unilateral actions deprived Americans of representation and the ability to hold their representatives accountable after the fact. And the trend of denying the public democratic channels to oppose war isn’t merely anathema to a self-governing republic; it is dangerous. In the long run, removing official channels for citizens to effect change can be radicalizing.

Perhaps it won’t prove so in this case, if all goes well. But if a large cohort of Americans comes to regard the attack on Iran as a blunder, how will that popular anger be channeled? The ideal answer would be the next election. Trump has made that less possible.

Averting a Worst-Case Scenario in Los Angeles

2025-06-08T12:40:00-04:00

In Los Angeles, federal agents carrying out deportations on behalf of the Trump administration are clashing with protesters, some lawful, others unlawfully disruptive and even violent. The Trump administration has ordered in the National Guard and threatened to send in the Marines. Governor Gavin Newsom calls this willful escalation. Trump-administration officials say they must protect federal agents engaged in lawful immigration actions––enforcement that some protesters regard as cruel and immoral, regardless of legality.

Anytime that American citizens clash in the streets with armed agents of the state, something has gone wrong. Today’s civil unrest risks expanding into the sort of violence that kills lots of people and strains civic bonds for decades. And every time looting and rioting occur in Los Angeles, the city’s poorest neighborhoods suffer the aftereffects for years. Stepping back from the brink is in America’s interest, regardless of where one attributes blame. As a Californian, I am especially dismayed to see this happen in L.A., a city I adore, where I long lived and where I have many friends and loved ones. For all Angelenos, so recently traumatized by this year’s devastating wildfires, and for the many Americans who feel dismay when watching their fellow citizens clash, I pray the turmoil ends without loss of life.

My fear that it may instead intensify is informed by several background conditions.

Among them are President Donald Trump’s incentives. On X, many of his supporters are gleeful about the prospect of a clash that ends in bloodied leftists wearing handcuffs and facing felonies. Even setting aside the most negatively polarized segment of the Republican base, Trump has a strong incentive to redirect public attention away from his feud with Elon Musk, his underwater approval rating on the economy, and the fight over a spending bill that divides his coalition, and toward immigration enforcement, an issue on which his approval rating is still positive. What’s more, this clash concerns deportation actions that are apparently lawful, as opposed to Trump’s unconstitutional deportations of foreigners to a Salvadoran prison.

Newsom has urged nonviolence, but California officials also have incentives to focus on opposing Trump rather than restoring calm to protect innocents. Golden State polls show not only that Trump is more unpopular in the state than he is in the nation, but that immigration is a bad issue for him locally. Regarding undocumented immigrants, the Public Policy Institute of California finds that “overwhelming majorities of adults (73%) and likely voters (71%) say that there should be a way for them to stay in the country legally, if certain requirements are met”; that “eight in ten adults (79%) and likely voters (80%) favor the protections given by DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—to undocumented immigrants brought into the US as children”; and that “about six in ten adults (63%) and likely voters (62%) favor the California state and local governments making their own policies and taking actions, separate from the federal government, to protect the legal rights of undocumented immigrants in California.”

Sentiments in Los Angeles are surely even more antagonistic to Trump’s position, and the stakes for Angelenos with family members and friends who live there without legal status are high––in protesting, within or outside of the law, many seek to preserve their communities or perhaps their very families. And Trump, by his own unlawful actions, has made many fear that their intimates may not be simply deported back to their home country but instead disappeared into the prison system of an authoritarian regime.

Federal and local cops have cause to feel threatened, too. More than 900 suffered injuries during the 2020 unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd. Multiple federal, state, and local agencies trying to keep order, while federal, state, and local officials fight rather than coordinate, only raises the probability of bad outcomes. And today’s social-media environment facilitates the rapid communication of where deportation raids are occurring, enabling not just peaceful protesters but also, potentially, nihilistic inciters of chaos to rush to the scene.

Immigration-enforcement raids will continue so long as Trump is president and the law of the land is unchanged. Opponents of such actions, even those that are entirely lawful, have every right under the Constitution to peaceably assemble to protest them.

Farsighted protest leaders should do everything in their power to keep those demonstrations law-abiding. Under the Trump administration, the rule of law is among the most precious safeguards Americans possess. Appealing to it, Trump critics have repeatedly prevailed in courtrooms, where Trump is least likely to succeed with his most dangerous gambits. In contrast, street violence gives Trump the ability to fight his enemies with the law on his side and with trained, armed personnel to enforce it.

In such a fight, Trump may well prevail in the court of public opinion. But if he is seen as needlessly escalating the dispute, and bloodshed follows, more Americans may come to reflect that the same man was president during the civil unrest of summer 2020; the civil unrest of January 6, 2021; and the civil unrest of today. Whether one attributes blame to Trump himself or to so-called Trump derangement syndrome, the sad and dangerous spectacle of Americans fighting one another happens alarmingly often when Trump is in the White House. A president attuned to America’s long-term interests and the many global challenges our nation confronts would try to lower the temperature, rather than inflame a clash that could have deadly results.

An Appeal to My Alma Mater

2025-06-08T09:30:00-04:00

When Maggie Li Zhang enrolled in a college class where students were told to take notes and read on paper rather than on a screen, she felt anxious and alienated. Zhang and her peers had spent part of high school distance learning during the pandemic. During her first year at Pomona College, in Southern California, she had felt most engaged in a philosophy course where the professor treated a shared Google Doc as the focus of every class, transcribing discussions in real time on-screen and enabling students to post comments.

So the “tech-free” class that she took the following semester disoriented her. “When someone writes something you think: Should I be taking notes too?” she told me in an email. But gradually, she realized that exercising her own judgments about what to write down, and annotating course readings with ink, helped her think more deeply and connect with the most difficult material. “I like to get my finger oil on the pages,” she told me. Only then does a text “become ripe enough for me to enter.” Now, she said, she feels “far more alienated” in classes that allow screens.

Zhang, who will be a senior in the fall, is among a growing cohort of students at Pomona College who are trying to alter how technology affects campus life. I attended Pomona from 1998 to 2002; I wanted to learn more about these efforts and the students’ outlook on technology, so I recently emailed or spoke with 10 of them. One student wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper calling for more classes where electronic devices are banned. Another co-founded a “Luddite Club” that holds a weekly tech-free hangout. Another now carries a flip phone rather than a smartphone on campus. Some Pomona professors with similar concerns are limiting or banning electronic devices in their classes and trying to curtail student use of ChatGPT. It all adds up to more concern over technology than I have ever seen at the college.

These Pomona students and professors are hardly unique in reacting to a new reality. A generation ago, the prevailing assumption among college-bound teenagers was that their undergraduate education would only benefit from cutting-edge technology. Campus tour guides touted high-speed internet in every dorm as a selling point. Now that cheap laptops, smartphones, Wi-Fi, and ChatGPT are all ubiquitous—and now that more people have come to see technology as detrimental to students’ academic and social life—countermeasures are emerging on various campuses. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that sales of old-fashioned blue books for written exams had increased over the past year by more than 30 percent at Texas A&M University and nearly 50 percent at the University of Florida, while rising 80 percent at UC Berkeley over the past two years. And professors at schools such as the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland are banning laptops in class.

The pervasiveness of technology on campuses poses a distinct threat to small residential liberal-arts colleges. Pomona, like its closest peer institutions, spends lots of time, money, and effort to house nearly 95 percent of 1,600 students on campus, feed them in dining halls, and teach them in tiny groups, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 8 to 1. That costly model is worth it, boosters insist, because young people are best educated in a closely knit community where everyone learns from one another in and outside the classroom. Such a model ceases to work if many of the people physically present in common spaces absent their minds to cyberspace (a topic that the psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explored in the high-school context).

At the same time, Pomona is better suited than most institutions to scale back technology’s place in campus life. With a $3 billion endowment, a small campus, and lots of administrators paid to shape campus culture, it has ample resources and a natural setting to formalize experiments as varied as, say, nudging students during orientation to get flip phones, forging a tech-free culture at one of its dining halls, creating tech-free dorms akin to its substance-free options––something that tiny St. John’s College in Maryland is attempting––and publicizing and studying the tech-free classes of faculty members who choose that approach.

Doing so would differentiate Pomona from competitors. Aside from outliers such as Deep Springs College and some small religious institutions—Wyoming Catholic College has banned phones since 2007, and Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio launched a scholarship for students who give up smartphones until they earn their degree—vanishingly few colleges have committed to thoughtful limits on technology.

[Jonathan Haidt: Get phones out of schools now]

My hope is that Pomona or another liberal-arts college recasts itself from a place that brags about how much tech its incoming students will be able to access––“there are over 160 technology enhanced learning spaces at Pomona,” the school website states––to a place that also brags about spaces that it has created as tech refuges. “In a time of fierce competition for students, this might be something for a daring and visionary college president to propose,” Susan McWilliams Barndt, a Pomona politics professor, told me. McWilliams has never allowed laptops or other devices in her classes; she has also won Pomona’s most prestigious teaching prize every time she’s been eligible. “There may not be a million college-bound teens across this country who want to attend such a school,” she said, “but I bet there are enough to sustain a vibrant campus or two.”

So far, Pomona’s leadership has not aligned itself with the professors and students who see the status quo as worse than what came before it. “I have done a little asking around today and I was not able to find any initiative around limiting technology,” the college’s new chief communications officer, Katharine Laidlaw, wrote to me. “But let’s keep in touch. I could absolutely see how this could become a values-based experiment at Pomona.”

Pomona would face a number of obstacles in trying to make itself less tech-dependent. The Americans With Disabilities Act requires allowing eligible students to use tools such as note-taking software, closed captioning, and other apps that live on devices. But Oona Eisenstadt, a religious-studies professor at Pomona who has taught tech-free classes for 21 years, told me that, although she is eager to follow the law (and even go beyond it) to accommodate her students, students who require devices in class are rare. If a student really needed a laptop to take notes, she added, she would consider banning the entire class from taking notes, rather than allowing the computer. “That would feel tough at the beginning,” she said, but it “might force us into even more presence.”

Ensuring access to course materials is another concern. Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a professor of politics and law, told me that she is thinking of returning to in-class exams because of “a distinct change” in the essays her students submit. “It depressed me to see how often students went first to AI just to see what it spit out, and how so much of its logic and claims still made their way into their essays,” she said. She wants to ban laptops in class too––but her students use digital course materials, which she provides to spare them from spending money on pricey physical texts. “I don’t know how to balance equity and access with the benefits of a tech-free classroom,” she lamented. Subsidies for professors struggling with that trade-off is the sort of experiment the college could fund.

Students will, of course, need to be conversant in recent technological advances to excel in many fields, and some courses will always require tech in the classroom. But just as my generation has made good use of technology, including the iPhone and ChatGPT, without having been exposed to it in college, today’s students, if taught to think critically for four years, can surely teach themselves how to use chatbots and more on their own time. In fact, I expect that in the very near future, if not this coming fall, most students will arrive at Pomona already adept at using AI; they will benefit even more from the college teaching them how to think deeply without it.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of all is that so many students who don’t need tech in a given course want to use it. “In any given class I can look around and see LinkedIn pages, emails, chess games,” Kaitlyn Ulalisa, a sophomore who grew up near Milwaukee, wrote to me. In high school, Ulalisa herself used to spend hours every day scrolling on Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Without them, she felt that she “had no idea what was going on” with her peers. At Pomona, a place small enough to walk around campus and see what’s going on, she deleted the apps from her phone again. Inspired by a New York Times article about a Luddite Club started by a group of teens in Brooklyn, she and a friend created a campus chapter. They meet every Friday to socialize without technology. Still, she said, for many college students, going off TikTok and Instagram seems like social death, because their main source of social capital is online.

[From the September 2017 issue: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?]

Accounts like hers suggest that students might benefit from being forced off of their devices, at least in particular campus spaces. But Michael Steinberger, a Pomona economics professor, told me he worries that an overly heavy-handed approach might deprive students of the chance to learn for themselves. “What I hope that we can teach our students is why they should choose not to open their phone in the dining hall,” he said. “Why they might choose to forgo technology and write notes by hand. Why they should practice cutting off technology and lean in to in-person networking to support their own mental health, and why they should practice the discipline of choosing this for themselves. If we limit the tech, but don’t teach the why, then we don’t prepare our students as robustly as we might.”

Philosophically, I usually prefer the sort of hands-off approach that Steinberger is advocating. But I wonder if, having never experienced what it’s like to, say, break bread in a dining hall where no one is looking at a device, students possess enough data to make informed decisions. Perhaps heavy-handed limits on tech, at least early in college, would leave them better informed about trade-offs and better equipped to make their own choices in the future.

What else would it mean for a college-wide experiment in limited tech to succeed? Administrators would ideally measure academic outcomes, effects on social life, even the standing of the college and its ability to attract excellent students. Improvements along all metrics would be ideal. But failures needn’t mean wasted effort if the college publicly shares what works and what doesn’t. A successful college-wide initiative should also take care to avoid undermining the academic freedom of professors, who must retain all the flexibility they currently enjoy to make their own decisions about how to teach their classes. Some will no doubt continue with tech-heavy teaching methods.

Others will keep trying alternatives. Elijah Quetin, a visiting instructor in physics and astronomy at Pomona, told me about a creative low-tech experiment that he already has planned. Over the summer, Quetin and six students (three of them from the Luddite Club) will spend a few weeks on a ranch near the American River; during the day, they will perform physical labor—repairing fencing, laying irrigation pipes, tending to sheep and goats—and in the evening, they’ll undertake an advanced course in applied mathematics inside a barn. “We’re trying to see if we can do a whole-semester course in just two weeks with no infrastructure,” he said. He called the trip “an answer to a growing demand I’m hearing directly from students” to spend more time in the real world. It is also, he said, part of a larger challenge to “the mass-production model of higher ed,” managed by digital tools “instead of human labor and care.”

Even in a best-case scenario, where administrators and professors discover new ways to offer students a better education, Pomona is just one tiny college. It could easily succeed as academia writ large keeps struggling. “My fear,” Gary Smith, an economics professor, wrote to me, “is that education will become even more skewed with some students at elite schools with small classes learning critical thinking and communication skills, while most students at schools with large classes will cheat themselves by using LLMs”—large language models—“to cheat their way through school.”

But successful experiments at prominent liberal-arts colleges are better, for everyone, than nothing. While I, too, would lament a growing gap among college graduates, I fear a worse outcome: that all colleges will fail to teach critical thinking and communication as well as they once did, and that a decline in those skills will degrade society as a whole. If any school provides proof of concept for a better way, it might scale. Peer institutions might follow; the rest of academia might slowly adopt better practices. Some early beneficiaries of the better approach would meanwhile fulfill the charge long etched in Pomona’s concrete gates: to bear their added riches in trust for mankind.

Striking Down Trump’s Tariffs Isn’t a Judicial Coup

2025-05-29T10:09:45-04:00

The debate over President Donald Trump’s tariffs often focuses on whether they are prudent. Defenders insist that Trump’s tariffs will help make America great again and boost national security. Critics counter that they’ll wreck the economy. But the strongest argument against the tariffs is actually that they are unlawful. Neither the Constitution nor any statute authorizes Trump to impose what he ordered.

Now, months after sticklers for the rule of law began making that argument, it has finally been vindicated: Yesterday, the United States Court of International Trade, the federal court with jurisdiction over civil actions related to tariffs, struck down almost all of Trump’s tariffs in a 49-page ruling. The decision includes a detailed discussion of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the 1977 law delegating increased power over trade to the president during national emergencies, which the White House had cited to support its moves. It concludes that the law does not authorize any of Trump’s tariff orders.

Administration officials quickly challenged the ruling’s legitimacy. “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement. “The judicial coup is out of control,” Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller posted on social media. But their objections are dubious, not because the judiciary never overreaches, but because at least three features of this dispute make the argument for judicial overreach here especially weak.

[David Frum: The ultimate bait and switch of Trump’s tariffs]

First, the Constitution is clear: Article I delegates the tariff power to Congress, and Article II fails to vest that power in the presidency. So the Trump administration begins from a weak position. And the court’s ruling did not arrogate the tariff power to the judiciary, which might have warranted describing it as “a judicial coup.” It merely affirmed Congress’s power over tariffs. Americans need not fear a judicial dictatorship here. Congress can do whatever it likes. Indeed, it could pass a law reinstating all of Trump’s tariffs today without violating the court’s ruling. But Congress is extremely unlikely to do so, in part because Trump’s tariff policy clearly lacks public support; for example, a recent poll found that 63 percent of Americans disapprove of it.

Second, the plaintiffs in this particular lawsuit include the states of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, and Vermont––all democratically accountable entities in a federal system where states are meant to act as a check on unlawful exercises of federal power. All of those states asked the court to rule in this manner to vindicate their rights under the law. As Oregon’s attorney general put it, “We brought this case because the Constitution doesn’t give any president unchecked authority to upend the economy.” States controlled by both Republicans and Democrats routinely file lawsuits asking the judiciary to strike down purportedly unlawful actions by the president. There is bipartisan consensus that such judicial review is legitimate, not couplike, and such rulings have constrained presidents from both parties.

[Rogé Karma: The impossible plight of the pro-tariff liberals]

Third, when Congress created the Court of International Trade and later defined its jurisdiction, its precise intent was to create an arm of the judiciary that would exercise authority over trade disputes. Congress made a deliberate choice to alter an earlier law vesting that power in the Treasury Department, under the executive branch, and deliberately vested it in a court instead. To quote from the 1980 law that defined its powers, “The Court of International Trade shall have exclusive jurisdiction of any civil action commenced against the United States, its agencies, or its officers, that arises out of any law of the United States providing for tariffs.” Policing whether or not a tariff complies with the law and the Constitution is central, not peripheral, to the court’s ambit.

If the Trump administration kept its criticism of the judiciary to edge cases, where there is real doubt about how the Constitution separates powers, it could plausibly claim to be engaged in the sort of dispute that is inevitable when branches of the federal government are checking one another as intended. That it seeks to delegitimize even this ruling suggests contempt for any check on the power of the presidency, not principled opposition to judicial overreach.

The Constitution explicitly vests the tariff power in Congress, and wisely so: Empowering one person to impose taxes and pick economic winners and losers tends toward corruption and dictatorship. Going forward, Congress should set tariff policy itself, and impeach any president who tries to usurp its authority.

In Defense of Academic Freedom

2025-05-22T16:18:00-04:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Why defend academic freedom even when the ideas in question are wrongheaded or harmful? “It is precisely because any kind of purge opens the gate to all kinds of purge, that freedom of thought necessarily means the freedom to think bad thoughts as well as good.”

Those words, written in 1953 by Joseph Alsop, an alumnus of Harvard who later served on its Board of Overseers, are relevant today, as the Trump administration cancels the visas of foreign students for viewpoints that it deems “bad.” And they were relevant in recent years as institutions of higher education investigated and disciplined members of their communities for expressing views that ran afoul of various progressive social-justice orthodoxies. But Alsop wrote them in response to the McCarthy era’s efforts to identify and punish Communists who were working in academia. Hundreds of professors were summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, forced to appear as witnesses, and pressured to name names––that is, to identify fellow academics with ties to the Communist Party. Many were then censured or fired and blacklisted by their employers.

“I have been profoundly and actively anti-Communist all my life,” Alsop declared in a letter to the president and fellows of Harvard, published in The Atlantic. “Unfortunately, however, the question that confronts us is not how we feel about Communists and ex-Communists. The question is, rather, how we feel about the three great principles which have run, like threads of gold, through the long, proud Harvard story.”

The first principle he listed was the freedom to make personal choices within the limits of the law. The second principle was “unrestricted freedom of thought.” And the third principle was one’s right to due process when accused of breaking the law. “A member of our faculty is not to be penalized for any legal choice he may make, however eccentric or controversial,” Alsop wrote. “He may become a nudist or a Zoroastrian, imitate Origen or adopt the Pythagorean rules of diet. If called before a Congressional investigating committee, he may seek the protection of the Fifth Amendment, and refuse to testify on grounds of possible self-incrimination. However much we disapprove, we may not interfere.”

By standing for “unrestricted free trade in ideas,” Alsop sought to conserve the university’s ability to extend the frontiers of human thought and knowledge at a moment that has long been regarded as one of the darkest in the history of American academia. But as Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), documented in a 2023 Atlantic article, the threat to academic freedom today arguably surpasses the threat that existed in the 1950s. “According to the largest study at the time, about 100 professors were fired over a 10-year period during the second Red Scare for their political beliefs or communist ties,” he wrote. “We found that, in the past nine years, the number of professors fired for their beliefs was closer to 200.” More recently, FIRE has objected to the Trump administration’s infringements on academic freedom, including the unprecedented demands that it sent to Harvard last month.

Supporters of academic freedom have every reason to fear that more colleges will be similarly targeted in coming months. One defense should involve consulting similar situations from bygone eras. Doing so can help identify principles and arguments that have stood the test of time—and it can be a source of hope. After all, the authoritarian excesses of McCarthyism, which intimidated so many, did not long endure. “From the perspective of the sixties, the whole period has an air of unreality” for many students, a 1965 Harvard Crimson article—written in an era of “sit-ins, summer projects, and full page ads criticizing U.S. foreign policy placed in the Times by hundreds of academics”—declared. But just several years prior, it pointed out, “tenured professors thought long and hard before risking a statement on public issues; teaching fellows, fearful of antagonizing Governing Boards, were politically inert; and students retreated into silence and inactivity.”

I hope that, circa 2030, incoming college students will have trouble understanding the mounting attacks on academic freedom that began about a decade ago. Perhaps this period, echoing the Red Scare’s aftermath, may yet be followed by a new flourishing of academic freedom. A renaissance of that sort will require defending people’s rights—no matter how abhorrent one may find a given opinion. As Alsop put it, “In these cases the individuals are nothing and the principles are everything.”

Donald Trump’s Cruel and Unusual Innovations

2025-05-03T10:00:00-04:00

As the Trump administration rounds up people it alleges to be illegal aliens and gang members, deports them to El Salvador, and pays to imprison them there without convicting them of any crime, constitutional challenges have focused on the Fifth Amendment; the administration appears to have deprived many deportees of liberty without due process. Scarce attention has been paid to another relevant part of the Bill of Rights: the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on inflicting “cruel and unusual punishment,” a limit on state power that applies regardless of whether the target is a citizen.

Intuitively, an Eighth Amendment challenge seems promising. El Salvador’s prison system is notoriously cruel: Dozens of inmates have died “as a result of torture, beatings, mechanical suffocation via strangulation or wounds,” according to a 2023 report from the human-rights group Cristosal, and Human Rights Watch says that it has documented “torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention,” and more. Sending deportees to a country other than their own and paying for them to be imprisoned among violent criminals, with no fixed sentence or release date, is highly unusual, if not novel, in American history. High-ranking U.S. officials have explicitly stated that their intent is to inflict punishment for illegal entry and other alleged crimes. After visiting El Salvador, Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, said that she wants to incarcerate even more deportees in the country so that they “pay the consequences for their actions of violence.”

Yet when I recently consulted roughly a dozen legal experts, including Eighth Amendment scholars and defense litigators, even those who agreed with me that the deportees’ Eighth Amendment rights are being violated said that focusing on due-process claims is a safer legal strategy.

[Read: El Salvador’s exceptional prison state]

Partly, El Salvador’s de facto control of the prisoners raises complicated jurisdiction issues. But there’s another, more fundamental reason. Under long-established Supreme Court precedent, mere deportation is not considered a punishment for Eighth Amendment purposes. And though the Trump administration is not merely deporting people—it is paying El Salvador to incarcerate them—the Supreme Court has been reluctant to recognize cruel and unusual treatment as punishment, even when that treatment is inflicted by an agent of the state, unless the treatment was imposed as a penalty after a criminal conviction. For example, the Court has held that corporal punishment in school settings does not constitute punishment, nor does the detention of severely mentally ill people in rehabilitative institutions.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia captured this distinction in a 2008 interview with the 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl. When Stahl asked Scalia whether the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment would apply to a prisoner at Abu Ghraib who was brutalized by American law-enforcement officials, Scalia replied, “To the contrary. Has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.” Torture is intended to extract facts, not to punish, he argued, so the Eighth Amendment would not apply.

This notion that “Eighth Amendment scrutiny is appropriate only after the State has secured a formal adjudication of guilt,” as a 1983 Supreme Court case put it, creates a perverse incentive for the government. If the state deprives purported criminals of their due-process rights and imprisons them without charging or convicting them, as the Trump administration is now doing, that makes it easier to deprive those individuals of their Eighth Amendment rights, too; any cruel and unusual treatment that the government inflicts isn’t technically considered punishment. As a result, under the status quo, people convicted of no crime at all have less Eighth Amendment protection than criminals convicted of the most heinous acts.

To remedy that unjust and despotic disparity, the Supreme Court should clarify that the government cannot subvert any part of the Bill of Rights by skipping trials and sentences. Given a claim by a deportee, it should rule to protect their Eighth Amendment rights.

Both the original meaning of “cruel and unusual punishment” and some of the most frequently cited modern Eighth Amendment jurisprudence would bolster a claim by the deportees, according to several of the experts I spoke with.

The Constitution’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment has its roots in a British common-law tradition: Judges were understood not to make law, but rather to discover it by identifying customs and precedents that gained legitimacy through enduring acceptance. In an essay titled “Originalism and the Eighth Amendment,” the University of Florida law professor John F. Stinneford explains that in the 17th and 18th centuries, cruel was understood to mean “unjustly harsh,” and unusual meant “contrary to long usage.”

When adopting the same language, early American lawmakers were expressing the view that “because the common law was presumptively reasonable, governmental efforts to ‘ratchet up’ punishment beyond what was permitted by longstanding prior practice were presumptively contrary to reason,” Stinneford writes. The death penalty, for instance, was seen as reasonable due to its long usage in England and the colonies. But new “significantly harsher” varieties of punishment were not, especially when they were seen as disproportionate to the offense; the examples Stinneford cites from England and America include whipping and pillorying as a punishment for perjury and excessive floggings as a punishment for illegal gambling.

By those standards, originalists should find the Trump administration’s actions highly suspect. Being transferred to a brutal prison system where one has no recourse or rights, no matter how badly one is treated, with no apparent limit on how long one might be held, is a fate significantly harsher than what has long been customary for, say, a Venezuelan who enters the United States illegally and joins a gang. President Donald Trump’s policy is precisely to ratchet up the effective punishment.

Turning to case law, Trop v. Dulles, an influential Eighth Amendment case decided in 1958, offers a highly relevant precedent. Albert Trop was a private in the U.S. Army during World War II. In May of 1944, while serving in Casablanca, Morocco, he was confined to a stockade for a breach of discipline, escaped, and wandered, cold and hungry, until the next day, when he decided to turn himself in. Convicted of desertion, he was sentenced to three years of hard labor. Years later, when he was back in the United States and applying for a passport, he was told that, per a provision in the Nationality Act of 1940, his desertion in wartime had triggered the loss of his citizenship.

[David A. Graham: Due process for me, not for thee]

Ultimately, the Supreme Court restored his citizenship, finding that “denationalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment.” Although Trop hadn’t suffered “physical mistreatment” or “primitive torture,” denationalization inflicted the “total destruction” of his political existence, leaving him stateless and without rights in whatever country he might find himself. “In short, the expatriate has lost the right to have rights,” the Court reasoned, and is subject to “a fate of ever-increasing fear and distress. He knows not what discriminations may be established against him, what proscriptions may be directed against him, and when and for what cause his existence in his native land may be terminated.”

Notice that Trop was never forcibly expatriated. Fear and distress at the mere possibility of being “without rights in whatever country he might find himself” were sufficient to meet the threshold for cruel and unusual punishment. Today, the bulk of the deportees to El Salvador, most of whom are Venezuelans, are already at the mercy of a country not their own. President Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele have claimed that, once the United States transfers a prisoner to Salvadoran custody, neither president can grant his release. To echo the Court’s Trop ruling, the deportees know not what abuses may be directed against them. The majority of the Court in Trop also objected that “the punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community,” which is arguably the case for the Venezuelan nationals imprisoned in El Salvador.

A large body of more recent Eighth Amendment case law has focused on prison conditions. And although those rulings also seem to be highly relevant to the harsh prison system in El Salvador, they might be trickier to apply, because U.S. courts lack the ability to investigate or issue orders abroad. Eric Berger, a law professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, told me that although the Eighth Amendment ordinarily wouldn’t apply to a prison in another country, it “very well could” apply to the situation in El Salvador. “The Trump administration has said that it is paying El Salvador to detain these men; it is, for all intents and purposes, a joint U.S.-El Salvadoran incarceration program,” Berger wrote by email.

Publicly available information about the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT—the prison where the deportees from the United States first arrived and where most of them are presumed to be incarcerated—is limited, because outside visitors are closely monitored, and inmates are rarely if ever released and able to tell their stories. Regardless, Salvadoran officials may transfer any prisoner anywhere at any time; they have already transferred the deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a different prison. So long as that is possible, conditions in the Salvadoran prison system overall—about which more is known—are relevant to the fate of the deportees.

In recent decades, the Supreme Court has ruled that deliberate indifference to a prisoner’s serious illness constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. In El Salvador’s prison system, “former detainees often describe filthy and disease-ridden prisons,” Human Rights Watch reports. “Doctors who visited detention sites told us that tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive issues were common.” And in the 2011 case Brown v. Plata, the Supreme Court ruled that California had to release duly convicted inmates to alleviate overcrowding in state prisons. Overcrowding in El Salvador is reportedly worse than in California, with past detainees telling human-rights workers of cells so packed that inmates had to sleep standing up. Transferring people from the United States into El Salvador’s prison system shows, at best, deliberate indifference to harmful conditions, as documented by multiple organizations.

Some of the Supreme Court watchers I spoke with noted that the current right-leaning justices have tended to interpret the Eighth Amendment more narrowly since Plata, showing more reluctance to grant relief to inmates. In recent years, Eighth Amendment doctrine has been “so stripped down” that “even egregious, morally indefensible treatment can easily pass constitutional muster,” Sharon Dolovich, a law professor at UCLA, told me by email, “and recent cases indicate those protections may well shrink even further, so that only prisoners subjected to intentionally brutal treatment (i.e. treatment that ‘superadds terror, pain and disgrace’) would even have a chance of prevailing.” (That language comes from a majority opinion that Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a death-penalty case.) Still, in Dolovich’s estimation, El Salvador’s prison system “would most certainly” meet even that high threshold of superadding terror, pain, and disgrace.

What if, in the near future, Trump decides to act on his repeatedly expressed desire to send Americans who commit especially heinous crimes to prisons in El Salvador? He has speculated that he could fill five prisons with such Americans. “If they’re criminals,” Trump said during a meeting with Bukele in the Oval Office, “if they hit people with baseball bats over the head that happen to be 90 years old, and if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn—yeah, yeah, that includes them.”

[Read: A loophole that would swallow the Constitution]

Several of the scholars and litigators I consulted said that they believe an Eighth Amendment challenge to that policy would arise. “If Trump really meant what he said about sending American citizens convicted of crimes to prisons in El Salvador as part of their punishment,” the Harvard law professor Carol Steiker wrote to me, “that clearly would be subject to Eighth Amendment limitations.” That is so not because the people involved would be citizens, but because when the state convicts a person and then orders them imprisoned, the Supreme Court already recognizes that that constitutes “punishment.”

That conclusion is reassuring—even an Eighth Amendment that’s been interpreted more narrowly than I would prefer still confers some protection against cruel innovations in punishment. But it also highlights a core injustice of the prevailing jurisprudential approach: Administration officials would be subjecting convicted Americans and unconvicted aliens to the same treatment. The same president with the same motives might even pay for them to be locked up in the same prison cell. And yet, absurdly, the Eighth Amendment would protect the heinous criminals while offering no protection to their cellmates who were never convicted of anything.

Treating every deportation as a form of punishment would go too far. But so does presuming that no deportation can qualify as punishment, even when it includes transfer to a cruel and unusual prison system. Reasonable people can and do disagree about the best test for what constitutes a punishment. But any reasonable threshold is met when federal officials justify imprisoning people by alleging criminality, imprison them alongside a foreign country’s most dangerous criminals, and make public statements that convey a punitive intent.

I hope that an Eighth Amendment claim on behalf of deportees coaxes the Supreme Court to reconsider its precedents on what constitutes punishment. If the Trump administration responds by arguing that it is not acting with punitive intent, as the scholars I spoke with predict, the Court should probe the publicly available facts rather than deferring to whatever the administration might claim. Meanwhile, the rest of us should understand that, even if the fate of deportees to El Salvador is never found to violate the Eighth Amendment, that isn’t because they are being spared cruel and unusual treatment, but because the judiciary declines to classify much that is clearly cruel and unusual as a “punishment.” The El Salvador policy, however it is classified, is unusually and needlessly cruel, rendering it evil, an affront to human dignity, and beneath America.