Michal Huniewicz says in Fez, Morocco, where he took the photograph above, he met a young man named Rachid and had the following exchange:

Michal: What do you do, do you have a job?
Rachid: No, I don’t have a job. I have education but no job.
Michal: Why not?
Rachid: It’s the government, they don’t do anything.
Michal: What is the ruling party?
Rachid: The Islamic party.
Michal: Who did you vote for?
Rachid: The Islamic party.
Michal: What other parties are there?
Rachid: I don’t know.

The Obituary

My favorite story about the philosopher Jürgen Habermas is the time he got punched in the face for not knowing about the Beatles. It was 1970, and after breaking out only six years before, the Fab Four had made it big in the States, shifted from surface pop to reflective rock, dropped what many still consider the greatest album of all time, and were already in their White Album late period. There wasn’t a man, woman, or child left in the Western world who didn’t know the names of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Except, of course, Habermas. It was absurd because the Beatles were the greatest force in mass culture and Habermas was the greatest philosopher of mass culture. The man had written half a million words on the public sphere yet somehow managed to miss the biggest thing in it.

The guy who punched him was Peter Handke, an avant-garde writer who won acclaim for Offending the Audience, an “anti-play” so experimental it ate its own tail, forgot to be about anything, and ended up being about the fact that it’s a play. A little later, Handke lost all that acclaim when he expressed public support for Slobodan Milošević, and even spoke at the genocidal dictator’s funeral in 2006. The Nobel Committee, to its credit, waited a full 13 years before awarding Handke the Prize in Literature. It became the most controversial decision they ever made. Not even Elfriede Jelinek, with all her unreadable poetry, comes close. Salman Rushdie said at the time Handke was “complicit with evil on a grand scale” (and Rushdie taught at Cambridge). But when I think of Handke, I think of a pretentious cheerleader for genocide who clocked someone because he didn’t have the “correct” opinion, and damn if that doesn’t feel like a glimpse of the coming world.

Germany today, and much of Europe for that matter, has become the world of Handke when it should have become the world of Habermas. Habermas wasn’t the kind of person who would pretend to read a book he hadn’t read in order to sound smart. Or know the most famous band in the world. Habermas did not virtue-signal. My other favorite story about him is that, as a journalist in 1953, Habermas wrote a savage attack to the editors of the right-wing daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, expressing outrage at their decision to publish philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1935 lectures Introduction to Metaphysics, in which Heidegger talked about the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism. I disagree with Habermas on wanting the lectures unpublished, but he deserves credit for standing by his principles and going against Heidegger, who was still at the time greatly revered in German academia.

Habermas also wins my respect for defending a complete separation between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics, meaning he was good faith enough to recognize that even his moral enemies, men he regarded as evil, might be worth listening to when it came to certain topics. That kind of epistemic charity is fundamental to being a serious intellectual, but it’s also a damn rare thing. In fact, Habermas himself felt this only applied when someone was, by his own estimation, correct. When they were wrong, as Heidegger was about politics, he believed their views on such matters could safely be censored. So despite his good-faith analysis, he was basically mad that Frankfurter Allgemeine had platformed a Nazi. Still, the principle Habermas was working from was a good one, namely that philosophy has to confront moral responsibility, not just abstract thought, and that it matters who you are, not just what you say — and not what you say you are either.

This is a radical proposition de hominem that says we should take people as they truly are, if not demand it, just as one insists upon the laws of chess as a prerequisite for any game. His devotion to authentic expression is why he had no energy for pretending to care what other people think is cool, whether it was a trending band, a trending ideology, or a trending identity. Nor did he have any energy for the illiberal left with all its endless purity testing and virtue-signaling. In fact, Habermas was early to identify the authoritarian streak in campus activism, especially their moral absolutism and intolerance toward dissent. He alienated student protesters by calling out their Linksfaschismus, or “left-fascism,” most famously during a debate he had with the communist writer and student activist Rudi Dutschke, who said they were living in the ideal time for students to engage in “direct action.”

But Habermas cautioned Dutschke to consider the consequences and pressed Dutschke to clarify whether he supported the use of violence. When Dutschke refused, Habermas accused him of Linksfaschismus. But consider, how often do we see leftist professors today condemn radical student activists for failing to stand against political violence? How often, on the contrary, do we see leftist professors call for political violence themselves, as we saw in the wake of October 7 or the killing of Charlie Kirk? Habermas single-handedly tilted German intellectualism in the direction of open discourse, and one has to wonder how much worse things would be there today if not for his legacy.

Last month, on March 14, Habermas died in southern Germany at the age of 96. The 2011 winter edition of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy described Habermas “as one of the most influential philosophers in the world.” And he was. The past century has given us some incredible voices in philosophy. People like John Rawls on justice, Michel Foucault on power, and Ludwig Wittgenstein on language. Surely, we must add to the list Habermas on communication. Here was, it seemed, the last man in Europe who still believed we can talk things out. Here too was one of the last intellectuals from an era in European history when speaking more freely was still possible. And so, in a way, he was perhaps also Europe’s last public intellectual.

Working through the past

Remember the CBS 60 Minutes segment about Germany’s online speech police, the one from February 2025, in which three German prosecutors practically bragged about door-smashing raids over internet trolling? One of the prosecutors matter-of-factly said even reposting fake quotes is now a crime in Germany. The segment went viral, I think, largely thanks to the comical look of disbelief on correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi’s face and the way it contrasted with the smiles these three creepy Germans, totally oblivious to how slimy they come off, especially to an American audience, or how off-putting it was to see Germans gloat about being the internet Nazis.

But it wasn’t off-putting for the simple and obvious reason, which is that the same country that gave us literal Nazis is now giving us digital ones. Rather, it was the irony that they ended up in this farcical position precisely because they are bending over backwards trying not to be Nazis, passing laws to prevent hate speech in the mistaken belief that if they censor name-calling and online bullying that they can prevent another Holocaust. But this is a dangerous misunderstanding of censorship. And of Nazism. How have Germans forgotten the Weimar fallacy? That’s the false belief that the Nazis rose to power because people were too tolerant of extremist speech, as if censorship could have stopped Nazi rule when in fact the Weimar Republic censored speech, banned newspapers, and prosecuted Nazis. But not only did this tactic fail, it blew up in their faces, making the Nazis look like underdogs that the regime didn’t want you to know about, which only gave them propaganda power.

Another reason it’s so unfortunate to see Germans behaving this way is not because of their dark history, but rather because of their noble history as free speech defenders. Just consider the journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, who exposed illegal German rearmament, was prosecuted, imprisoned, and later received the Nobel Peace Prize for his “defense of freedom of speech.” Or the White Rose group, whose members literally risked death to distribute anti-Nazi leaflets in Munich. Or the 1949 Basic Law, Article 5, which says every person has the right to freely express their opinions and adds, “There shall be no censorship.”

Or the famous Spiegel affair of 1962, when Der Spiegel published a story about the nation’s defense forces and several Spiegel staffers were detained on charges of treason. In the end, they were released without trial and Franz Josef Strauss, the federal minister of defense, lost his job. It was post-war West German democracy’s first test of press freedom, and they passed. Or the scandal involving Kommune 1. Or, at long last, the great Habermas himself, philosopher of communication and champion of public debate.

But again, Germany today is not the Germany of Habermas. It is the Germany of Handke. The country’s longstanding laws against “insult” (Beleidigung) are in stark contrast to the freedoms we enjoy in the United States, and have resulted in a litany of scandalous news reports, including a police investigation for saying a politician looks like Pinocchio, a pre-dawn raid for calling a politician a “dick,” a home search for calling a politician an “idiot,” a total of 45 home raids in a single month for sexist comments online, and a seven-month suspended sentence for a journalist posting a cartoon of a politician. I have interviewed CJ Hopkins about his experiences with this censorship regime, and in a recent edition of the FIREwire, a weekly digest in which I summarize news and events related to free speech, we included this item:

Germany probes historian for criticizing … Hitler

German writer Rainer Zitelmann is under criminal investigation in Berlin after retweeting a Ukrainian post comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler.

But it wasn’t the Putin attack that got him into trouble — it was the fact that the post included a swastika, even though he used it as an insult, because it potentially violates Section 86a of Germany’s criminal code, which bans Nazi symbols.

Germans have a word — Vergangenheitsbewältigung — for coming to terms with their Nazi history. It means “working through the past.” But the irony is that they “work through the past” by avoiding and silencing commentary on the topic. So they’re not actually working through much at all. And, in trying to avoid repeating the same sins, Germany has struck a Faustian bargain, hoping to achieve something noble (the end of racism, apparently), but ultimately doing terrible things along the way. Maybe this is the result of a totalizing tendency in German culture, a desire for specificity that lends itself to building comprehensive systems, which is why the Germans and the Japanese both excel at the precision manufacturing of cutlery and camera lenses, but also why they both have histories of totalitarianism. And you see this totalizing streak in German philosophy too. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, even Habermas in his way, all sought to capture the entire universe in the folds of their thinking. British philosophers, by contrast, like Wittgenstein or Russell, tend to be suspicious of grand towers of abstraction. And this tendency produces a wrinkle in the culture, in that Germans think big but act small.

Hegel believed history itself is rational and moving toward perfection, or what he called Gesamtstaat, a perfected whole society. Marx thought we could aim for perfection too. That’s the German tendency to think big. But to get there, Germans like to meticulously nitpick people into line rather than pull back and let bygones be bygones. That’s the tendency to act small. The Nazis used to call this Gleichschaltung, or “coordination,” which meant bringing everything into alignment with the regime’s ideology. Every institution, organization, and aspect of life had to be “coordinated” into the totalizing system. And this fundamental impulse survives today in the form of the German state micromanaging the shit out of people.

And so you have this tension between the rebel and the hall monitor, between the Nietzschean spirit of radical individualism and the Hegelian desire to police one’s way to Valhalla. Two souls, alas, reside in Germany’s breast. But I think Habermas came closest to reconciling these two, because it’s really only in the public sphere of debate where one finds reward for both the boldness of the Self and the precision of the State, where both the Übermensch and the pedant get to shoot their shot.

Between facts and norms

In the end, the old professor’s real gift, if you ask me, wasn’t his defense of open argument. It was his faith in mankind. Habermas came out of the Frankfurt School, that postwar German tradition of cultural Marxists who saw that the global communist revolution wasn’t coming, so they blamed culture for pacifying the people and sought to subvert it. But Habermas rejected the pessimism of his mentors, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who believed modern mass society was bleakly, perhaps permanently, defeated by capitalist manipulation. As Herbert Marcuse would later write, people had become one-dimensional men who could only think in consumerist terms. Habermas agreed, but he believed free and equal persons might still talk their way to a more legitimate social order. And that’s where he has my attention, even if he is a Marxist.

In 1962, Habermas shook the academic world with his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which made the term “public sphere” academic lingua franca. His argument was simple. In early modern Europe, a new kind of space had emerged with salons and coffeehouses, where private individuals of all classes came together where they shared stories, told jokes, and hashed out matters of common concern. Habermas believed this “public sphere” carried a democratizing promise. He also believed this promise had already rotted under the pressures of mass media and money. That’s where he and Marcuse were on the same page. But whereas Marcuse, much like Vladimir Lenin, had no faith in the people’s ability to choose what was best for themselves and so wanted to manipulate and subvert the culture, Habermas instead wanted to openly and transparently debate his way to a better society. So he was a utopian thinker but there, again, you also see his faith in humanity. He argued that speech matters because, in the end, reason is our only way out — and because democracy requires public justification. Free speech, in other words, is not just the right to say what you think. It’s the right to participate in forming what the public thinks.

In his 1981 work The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas argued that there are two ways to use speech. One is to get what you want, or strategic action. The other is to reach mutual understanding with another person, or communicative action. The whole point of free speech, for Habermas, was to protect the second kind because that kind of mutual understanding was how you obtained the consent of the governed. In his 1992 book Between Facts and Norms, he argued that even societal norms only hold legitimacy if the people they affect can agree to them through open argument. In his view, communicative action was the very engine of democracy.

It’s true that he saw little value in speech that did not further a political goal. I disagree with him there. It’s also true that he parted with the American understanding of freedom of expression because he looked at speech through a Marxist lens and saw anything oppressive as illegitimate. I definitely disagree with him there. But in general, he believed that democracy thrives in the space between two present and fully engaged people, debating in good faith. And I think that’s a beautiful way to look at it. I also think what drew me to his work was always his humanity rather than his logic. He had a radical faith in the people and in what we can accomplish if we just sit together and connect. In the end, perhaps the real tragedy is that he had more faith in us than we seem to have in ourselves.

The No Kings 3 protest on Saturday drew an estimated 9 million protesters at more than 3,300 events in all 50 states for what was the largest single-day nationwide demonstration in American history. There were people dressed up as Revolutionary War soldiers, Handmaids, posters depicting Trump as a Nazi, depicting him as a pig, depicting him with a penis for a face and the words “Small DICKtator Energy,” Ukrainian flags, trans flags, Mark Twain’s proposed flag for American-controlled Philippines, a guy on stilts with his face painted orange and a “TRAITOR” sign around his neck. It was all so absurdly stupid. And I absolutely loved it.

Subscribe now

The movement, which began with earlier No Kings demonstrations in June and October 2025, recently gained momentum in response to ICE operations — notably the killings of Renée Good, Keith Porter, and Alex Pretti — as well as the Iran war. The flagship rally took place in Minneapolis–St. Paul, ground zero for those ICE shootings, where Bruce Springsteen sang and Bernie Sanders, Joan Baez, and Jane Fonda made appearances. It was a party as much as a protest. But what distinguished this round from its predecessors was its geographic penetration into conservative America. Organizers reported two-thirds of RSVPs came from outside major urban centers, including conservative-leaning states like Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Utah, as well as swing states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.

Putting aside the silly ways many protesters chose to get their point across, or failing to do so, the whole thing also felt kind of pointless to me. Was this movement really going to translate into durable political power manifested through voter registration, candidate recruitment, and sustained institutional pressure? Or was it going to dissipate into the episodic catharsis of our drinking-from-a-firehose weekly news cycle? You know, exactly like its two predecessors did.

That said, sure, No Kings is constitutionally sound in the abstract. America fought a revolution to reject the power of kings, and at the lowest level of resolution, this protest is a rejection of monarchy. But another low-res characterization, just as fair, is that this is simply an anti-Trump protest. Most importantly, the coalition deploying it is riddled with a selective authoritarianism that undermines any moral seriousness it can ever hope to claim. Many of its loudest voices have spent decades offering apologetics, or at minimum studied silence, for regimes that make Trump’s executive overreach look more constitutionally scrupulous than Madison. The Bolivarian catastrophe in Venezuela — where Maduro presided over a hell of his own making until America ripped him out of his reality — drew no mass protests against his regime. Nor measured considerations about how to maintain international law when international law failed to stop Maduro in the first place, but would stand in the way of removing him. But we did see calls of support for Maduro. Just as they cheered for Hamas after October 7, for Cuba more recently, and even Iran.

Iran hangs gay citizens from cranes and guns down its own protesters, yet segments of this movement treat opposition to Tehran as inherently imperialist rather than pro-human. The reflex to frame every American assertion of power as uniquely evil, colonial, or white supremacist while treating genocidal anti-American psychopaths as complex figures deserving nuance is, shall we say, not a coherent philosophy of liberty. It’s an aesthetic. And to be clear, the aesthetic is “America bad.” And let’s also be clear: Trump is not a king. He’s a norm-breaking populist president operating within, and stress-testing, a constitutional system that still has courts, legislatures, a free press, and 9 million people in the streets on a single day proving that the system works. Calling him a king while lionizing actual dictators is not brave, it’s just stupid, and it hands Trump’s defenders the easiest rebuttal in politics: these people don’t actually oppose tyranny — they just oppose you.

And yet, I recently met a young man in his 20s who’d been a protester in Hong Kong during the worst of it. Running from police, dodging tear gas, watching his city’s freedoms get crushed in front of his eyes. I had covered those kids, in Hong Kong and in Seoul, and they were my heroes. These were young people who put their bodies on the line for democratic ideals. It was inspiring to hear his stories. But it also reminds one of the true face of tyranny. Xi Jinping is a tyrant. Kim Jong-un is a tyrant. Putin, Maduro, Khamenei, Akhundzada. But Trump is not a tyrant because he is not an absolute ruler. He is not a king of any kind. Or a dictator. Or a Nazi. Or even the worst U.S. president (that dishonor probably goes to Buchanan or Harding).

Then on Saturday, an old friend from Chengdu visited. We hadn’t seen each other in eight years, and it was heartwarming to catch up. We talked about his work, his efforts to transfer from a student to a work visa. I asked him whether he ever worries about possibly being deported in the current climate. He said, “No, what can I do about it?” But then he acknowledged that things are so wild now, so unpredictable, that no matter how sure he felt, and however certainly he knew he had followed all the rules, there was a little fear that could creep in, if he let it. We had a few drinks. We talked about Chinese politics, and I expressed my admiration for China’s tiered electoral system, its “meritocratic democracy,” even if it was so corrupt and submissive to a dictator’s will that it meant nothing in the end. But the idea seemed nice. My friend laughed. I explained that things can be so perfect on paper, but if you don’t have the culture for it, it won’t really work because the laws of society emanate from the values and norms of the people, not the other way around. Then we talked about the No Kings protests and both agreed that these lovable weirdos were not going to affect anything. “If they think they are,” I said, “they’re a bunch of fools.”

Then we walked through the No Kings protest on the National Mall. My friend stopped and looked around, marveling. “You can just do this,” he said. I was beaming. “This is it,” I said, “this is the thing itself.” He told me police would be all over this if it were China, and I nodded, already well aware. I had seen it myself. I told him I could walk over to a group of nearby officers we spotted and chat them up, and they would probably be very friendly. I told him I could stand right in front of those officers and shout, “Trump is a bastard who doesn’t deserve to live!” And what would happen, he asked. Probably nothing, I said. Then I added, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

I explained that this is the reason you can never convince Americans that the Chinese way is better. He gave me a look and said, “But I thought you told me these people are fools.” But they were also a symbol of peaceful protest, even if in places like Portland and Los Angeles, shit got real. “I don’t agree with all of it,” I said. “Or most of it. In ways, they are fools. But they’re fools for democracy. And those are my kind of fools.”

“There was much in it that I did not understand … but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

– George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Subscribe now

A beautiful young woman named Noelia Castillo Ramos has become the face of one of Spain’s most bitter moral arguments. After a long and painful legal battle, her request for euthanasia was formally approved in Catalonia in 2024. The Spanish government executed her today. This is not the nation’s first euthanasia case, but what turned hers into a national drama was her father’s repeated and desperate pleas to prevent her execution, arguing that she had mental health issues — depression, autism, and borderline personality disorder — that undermined her ability to make such a decision. Borderline personality disorder can indeed cause suicidal thoughts, but the standard treatment is close monitoring and therapy, not killing the person if they ask.

Nevertheless, courts rejected the father’s pleas again and again, and today the state put Noelia out of her misery. For many, this story is one about the morality of euthanasia. But for others, it’s a story about the horrors of European immigration. Noelia’s troubles began when she was brutally gang-raped in a state-run center for vulnerable youth. As a result, in 2022, she stepped out of a fifth-floor window. She survived, but fractured her spine and was left unable to walk and in constant physical agony thereafter. We don’t know who her rapists were because Spain does not report the ethnicity or country of origin for such perpetrators, fearing that this will lead to racial tensions. But we can make an educated guess. Using Spain’s Justice Ministry data, reports that in Catalonia, where she was raped, 91% of rapists in prison are foreigners, despite making up only 17% of the region’s population.

In 2018, NPR reported on the fact that African women migrants to Spain were arriving with horrific experiences of rape. NPR being NPR, they didn’t report on African men raping Spanish women, or African men raping African women, or even Spanish rape victims, but by reporting on African rape victims, you got a glimpse into the world from which they were fleeing — the world Spain has decided to import. In its November 2025 report, “Demography of Crime in Spain,” researchers at the conservative think tank CEU-CEFAS warn about “imported crime” due to mass immigration. They note that foreigners, who make up only 31% of Spain’s prisoners, commit 500% more rapes and 414% more murders than Spanish citizens.

The report also notes that, given Spain’s aging population, there should have been a steep decline in murders and rapes over recent years, but that the influx of migrants from Latin American and African countries — places with some of the world’s highest murder and rape rates — has led to a different outcome. Nor is this at all restricted to Catalonia. An internal police document from Navarre showed that foreign nationals accounted for nearly 63% of sexual offense arrests and over 73% of homicide arrests in the region, with Morocco and Algeria being the most frequently represented countries of origin among suspects.

But whenever I share such information with left-leaning friends, the response is invariably the same. Rape is illegal, so rape will be punished. Instead of discriminating against migrants, why not simply punish rapists, regardless of their background? Putting aside the strain this places on police, courts, and prisons in countries across Europe and North America, this line of reasoning also assumes that rape is, in fact, being punished. In 2019, for example, five men were acquitted in Barcelona after gang raping a young woman. The court ruled it was not rape because she was unconscious. The court added that the men did not use violence to rape her. But of course, they didn’t use violence because she wasn’t awake and therefore she didn’t resist. This is not an isolated case either. Far from it. But maybe you’re thinking this is confined to the squalid parts of certain cities. A problem, sure, but an avoidable one. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case either.

In 2024, Spaniard David Lledo saw three Moroccan migrants raping a 15-year-old girl outside his home in the posh village of Gata de Gorgos. The migrants had been squatting in a nearby vacation home. When David rushed to save the young girl, the migrants beat him to death with a baseball bat. David left behind five children. Nor has the problem improved. Just last month, a Senegalese migrant who raped a 14-year-old Spanish girl was ordered to pay a fine instead of going to prison, even though he openly admitted in court to raping the girl. This past February, in the exclusive Retiro area of Madrid, a 22-year-old Colombian, living illegally in Madrid and with a prior criminal record, was arrested after allegedly raping, beating, and robbing a 20-year-old woman. And this month, in the upscale district of Chamartín near the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, five minors of Spanish, Dominican, and Honduran nationality were arrested for stabbing a 14-year-old boy.

One of the largest rape scandals in Spanish history is known as caso de La Manada, or “the Wolf Pack case.” It involved the 2016 gang rape of an 18-year-old woman during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona. Five men led the young girl into a building, raped her, beat her, filmed it all, and took her phone so she couldn’t call for help after. The case sparked national outrage. The BBC reported that it “galvanized Spain’s feminists” because the initial ruling treated the rape as a lesser sexual-abuse offense rather than rape. Thankfully, Spain’s Supreme Court later reversed that and sentenced the five men to 15 years. Feminists ranted about Spain’s “rape culture.” But the men were Spanish, not foreigners. So then what happens when nonwhite foreign men rape Spanish girls at levels never before seen? When the justice system fails to punish them? Do feminist activists flood the streets over incidents like these? Does the BBC report the story? Or do we get a mixture of leftists telling us why we really need to open the doors to more immigration along with a dose of media silence?

And despite it all, Spain recently announced it will give half a million undocumented migrants legal status. At the same time, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the government will deploy an AI hate tracker, so as Spain brings more murderers and rapists into the country, and refuses to report their race, ethnicity, or religion, and refuses to punish them for raping young girls, it will also now likely punish anyone who speaks up about it, especially if they mention the perpetrator’s race or religion. Anyone who hops online to express frustration or anger over the latest MENA rape scandal will likely be fined or arrested for “spreading hate.” The United Kingdom is the blueprint.

In Barcelona, the arrival of spring is signaled each year by the pink petals of Judas trees and the fragrance of bitter orange blossoms. This year, after the government executed Noelia earlier today, the symbolic significance of those Judas trees and those bitter blossoms takes on a new meaning.

Two ISIS-inspired Muslims threw bombs at peaceful protesters in New York City outside Mayor Mamdani’s residence last week. The protesters were voicing their opposition to the threat of Islam in the city — and they clearly had a point — when a much larger, pro-Islam counter-protest formed nearby featuring a man in a Palestinian keffiyeh waving the red flag of Shia martyrs and comedian Walter Masterson shouting into a bullhorn, “I’m born and raised in New York and we want everyone to stay in New York! You don’t get to come from outside and then tell everyone else—” But he was cut off when, in a chef’s kiss of poetic irony, one of the terrorists shoved him aside and screamed Allahu Akbar! as he threw his bomb right over Masterson’s head.

Being a good woke, Masterson later ran to X where he condemned … white supremacy. Specifically, the leader of the anti-Islam protest Jacob Lang, who stormed the Capitol on January 6 and ended up spending four years behind bars for 11 counts, including attacking Capitol officers with a baseball bat. The next day, Mamdani held a press conference to comfort the people of New York, in which he made perfectly clear that such a disgusting attack against New Yorkers would not be tolerated, and in no uncertain terms, he condemned radical Islam. Nah, just kidding. Mamdani condemned white supremacy:

Good morning. On Saturday, a protest was held outside Gracie Mansion, where I live with my wife, Rama. Neither of us were home at the time. This was a vile protest rooted in white supremacy entitled, “Stop the Islamic takeover of New York City.” I’m the first Muslim mayor of our city. Anti-Muslim bigotry is nothing new to me, nor is it anything new for the 1 million or so Muslim New Yorkers who know this city as our home.

I really hate how white supremacists always go around blowing people up in the name of Allah. That passage, by the way, was the only reference Mamdani made to Islam in his speech, framing Muslims as victims in the wake of this Muslim attack and echoing his remarks in October when he said, “I want to speak to the memory of my aunt who stopped taking the subway after September 11 because she did not feel safe in her hijab.” He did not speak to the memory of the 2,977 people who stopped taking the subway after September 11 because they were incinerated by radical Muslims.

The two terrorists were brown young men of Afghan and Turkish origin, and because of the talking point about white supremacy, it’s important to note that they were brown and not white. According to the federal criminal complaint filed by the Justice Department on Monday, when an NYPD officer asked the terrorist Ibrahim Kayumi why he threw the bomb at peaceful protesters, he replied, “ISIS.” His co-jihadist Emir Balat pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on paper and said the goal had been to carry out a bigger terrorist attack than the Boston Marathon bombing. Specifically, he said, what he meant by this was more death and suffering. So they packed their bombs with nails, screws, and bolts in order to shred and mutilate anyone they failed to kill.

Thankfully, the bombs fizzled rather than detonated and police officers rushed in with the kind of muscular reflex that is the stuff of NYPD legend.

Mainstream news did what mainstream news reliably does by warping the facts beyond recognition in the most grotesque manner. CNN initially described the horrific attack on X as if the two terrorists were just a couple of regular American teens trying to enjoy the warm weather. Separately, CNN news anchor Abby Phillip initially described the event as an attack against Mamdani, rather than against the anti-Islam protesters. The X post was later deleted and Phillip later apologized, saying she made an “error.” But never mind that there was clear footage of the event and it went viral immediately. Never mind that Phillip is not some Disney-brained TikTok influencer, but a CNN anchor and former White House reporter from whom we should expect better. All that aside, these “errors” always go in the same direction.

The New York Times didn’t perform any better. After Mamdani blamed white supremacy, the Times ran a story headlined “Mamdani Chooses His Words Carefully After Alleged Terror Attack.” Aside from the offensive claim that blaming white supremacy was a carefully thought-out choice — hell, maybe it was, maybe Mamdani knows exactly what he’s doing — there’s also the fact that this story ran on March 9, two days after the attack and long since half the internet had already seen the footage of the terrorists literally throwing the bombs. So why in the world are they saying alleged terror attack? Generally, you use that term when a crime has not yet been adjudicated in court because guilt is undetermined. But that rule doesn’t apply when you have footage of the crime. But the Grey Lady didn’t stop there. Behold:

Accused of bringing a bomb? As the journalist Melissa Chen wrote, “Bro is literally holding a looney toons ass bomb with a lit fuse and it’s SMOKING.”

The real story here isn’t just that two radical Muslims tried to slaughter a crowd of peaceful protesters in the heart of New York City. It’s that the city’s own political leadership as well as the institutions responsible for telling us the truth about such events — and keeping us informed and safe as a consequence — seem almost pathologically incapable of doing their jobs. When brown Muslims shout Allahu Akbar! while throwing nail-packed bombs as peaceful protesters, and the political and media reflex is to go digging for white supremacy under the couch cushions, we’ve got a real problem. Especially because this is deliberate misdirection. Especially because none of this would happen if the attackers had been white.

If you check the Wikipedia article for this story, Jacob Lang — who, whatever you think about the man, was a victim here — is mentioned by name. But the two attackers are not. There are no details about the bombs. No mention of Mamdani’s speech or the egregious media missteps. The article says the attackers “allegedly” tried to detonate bombs and refers to them as “suspects.” But again, we have them on film carrying out the attack. We know their names. We know they did it. Wikipedia’s leftist bias has been obvious, and studied, for some time now, but it’s been getting worse as of late. It used to be that for incidents like this, Wikipedia was a rich mine of data, often more comprehensive than any news article. But now that woke editors have largely taken over, it is often barely worth glancing at anymore.

The impulse to misdirect blame, conceal facts, and outright lie in the name of not drawing negative attention to nonwhites or Muslims is not a good one. That instinct doesn’t make New Yorkers safer. What it does is erode public trust by signaling that some forms of extreme violence will always be minimized, misreported, or reframed to fit a racist ideological script. What it does is batter already-crippled public trust in political leadership and the media at a time when we dearly need both. That’s frighteningly dangerous because when the people tasked with naming threats refuse to name them, the public eventually stops believing anything else they say. Rightfully so. But as Mamdani and these outlets apparently fail to understand, or simply do not care, that puts us all in danger. Including Muslims.

From the feed

The 79th British Academy Film Awards were interrupted last week when a man in the audience shouted “nigger” as actors Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan stood on stage presenting an award, yet incredibly, the situation managed to get even worse when we all found out that the man who shouted “nigger” was John Davidson, whose life story inspired the film I Swear about his struggle with severe Tourette’s syndrome, and instead of showing him some measure of compassion and understanding, people accused Davidson of racism and demanded that he apologize, then SNL mocked him for good measure, specifically making fun of his condition, even calling the skit “Tourette’s” and comparing him to the likes of Bill Cosby. At this point, even if he had actually shouted “nigger” in pure racist hatred, it would not have been as bad as this because one racist in the audience is not remotely as serious a moral concern as the fact that we have created a situation where hundreds if not thousands of people are perfectly willing to bully an innocent disabled man over a misunderstanding.

Subscribe now

Of course, we’ve been doing this to innocent people for years, and the favorite tactic of attack has always been to pretend someone is racist so you can tear them down. Now it’s happening to a man with a disability that, until last week, everyone with a room-temperature IQ understood makes you say things beyond your control. People are even claiming that if you defend Davidson, you’re a white supremacist. The Sinners actress Wunmi Mosaku said she’s “not sure” if she can forgive BAFTA and that the traumatic experience “kept me awake at night.” People have begun using the term “black fragility” to describe such clownish reactions, a term the always insightful has been using since at least 2021 when he wrote about the preposterous sensitivity to “nigger” among black Americans:

Law professor Jason Kilborn cited the N-word (and the B-word) on an exam thusly: n****, b****. It was in a question about an employment discrimination case. He has done so for years previously to no comment — as all reading this but a sliver would expect. But this year, a group of black students initiated a protest against him for harming them in exposing them to this expurgated rendition of the N-word. That is, in a class training them in litigation in the real world. One black student claimed that they experienced heart palpitations upon reading the words.

Heart palpitations. Upon reading a word on the page. Not even the word “nigger,” but merely a hint of the word as “n****.” Kilborn then attended an hours-long Zoom talk with a black student representing the protesters who wanted him gone for his heinous crime, in an attempt to clear up any misunderstanding, after which the student reported to the dean that Kilborn might even be a “homicidal maniac.” By the time McWhorter was writing his essay, Kilborn was no longer teaching the class, was relieved of his administrative duties, and because of the possible physical threat he posed to black students as a “homicidal maniac,” was even barred from campus. Sadly, that is how sensitive many black Americans have become to this word. That is the black fragility McWhorter references in the title of his essay. But while “white fragility” essentially refers to having a healthy sense of self-respect, such that one will speak up in order to reject racist guilt-tripping — that’s basically how the term is defined by Robin DiAngelo, who coined it — “black fragility” instead refers to having a profoundly unhealthy sense of self, to the point of narcissism, and is synonymous with narcissistic injury, meaning the grossly disproportionate psychological wound that a narcissist feels when they perceive themselves to be disrespected.

Consider, for instance, what other black entertainers said about the BAFTA scandal: that this proves “we still don’t understand what inclusion means,” that the experience was “painful,” that in the future any white men with Tourette’s in the audience when a black person is speaking “better double up” on their meds, and even that “he shouldn’t have been in the room.” That’s right, we should start prohibiting people with disabilities from attending public events in order to avoid hurting black people’s feelings. News reports cannot even bring themselves to repeat the word “nigger,” not even in print, as if merely citing what happened, which is why the news exists, would be seen as furthering the imaginary harm done, or perpetuating the racism that never actually took place. So instead, news reports talk about “a racial slur” or, if they’re feeling brave enough to inch a little closer to the facts, they might say he uttered “the N-word.” People are even complaining that BBC didn’t edit it out, as if merely hearing the word on TV, even though we know it was the result of a motor disorder, might cause devastating harm. As if black people are constitutionally so fragile that the psychic shock of those two syllables might cause them literal trauma, perhaps bringing back all the horrific memories of slavery that neither they nor their grandparents suffered.

Later at the NAACP Image Awards, Lindo opened by saying, “We appreciate all of the support and love we have been shown in the aftermath of what happened last weekend.” Give me a break. “All the love and support”? Did Lindo just recover from a life-threatening bout of cancer? Did he just come out recovery from meth addiction? “In the aftermath of what happened”? Wait, what happened exactly? I must be completely lost because I was convinced that what happened was that absolutely nobody did absolutely anything wrong, that nobody hurt Jordan or Lindo in any way, but that at the back of the room, one man was struggling with a disability. Others assumed malicious intent despite knowing Davidson has Tourette’s. Jamie Foxx, who has said he loves killing white people in movies, decided to wade in by saying, “Out of all the words, you could’ve said Tourette’s makes you say that?” and “Nah he meant that shit.” Well, Jamie, it’s 2026 so I can say this now: Stop being a retard.

Tourette’s is best understood not as a disorder of speech or personality, but as a disorder of neural inhibition. It involves dysfunction in the brain circuits responsible for selecting and regulating motor output. The most important of these circuits is the cortico–striato–thalamo–cortical (CSTC) loop (yes, I had to look that up and don’t ask me to remember it later), a feedback system linking the prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, basal ganglia, and thalamus. When this loop functions smoothly, it allows desired actions to proceed while preventing unwanted ones from breaking into conscious behavior. In Tourette’s, that gating system is unstable. Fragments of motor programs “leak” through. Many individuals with Tourette’s describe a rising internal tension, or pressure, that’s temporarily relieved when the tic occurs.

Also, only about 10% of people with Tourette’s have coprolalia, which is what makes you say offensive things. Emotionally charged language — especially taboo words — activates limbic structures more strongly. These words carry high emotional weight and are tightly regulated by social norms. It’s precisely because of this that they are heavily “tagged” by inhibitory systems. It’s a survival mechanism. The brain marks these words as powerful and potentially dangerous in social contexts. So in a way, you could say Davidson had that tic not because he’s racist, as some have foolishly claimed, but because he’s not, and therefore in his mind flagged that word as extremely taboo. You could also say this happened because leftist black Americans and their woke allies have decided to make the word the most taboo word in the English language, investing it with so much social power that it becomes the most likely word to get tagged in a way that would turn it into a tic.

I truly feel for Davidson. This latest chapter in the culture war is so frustratingly stupid it’s like a really bad episode of The Jerry Springer Show. And yet this is a painful but needed reminder for our nation that the absurd hypersensitivity Americans have around the word “nigger” is actually really unhealthy and will inevitably lead to situations in which innocent people are trampled over pretend harms, which is precisely what happened here. We should be ashamed of ourselves for becoming so profoundly unkind in the name of kindness. In the end, that’s the real takeaway. But I have two personal stories I’d like to share about this word before I go.

One is that I remember sitting with my cousin Anthony one time when someone used the word “nigger” nearby. My mother’s side of the family is Bahamian and most of my relatives down there are black, including Anthony. I grew up with him, have taken great pride in watching him mature into manhood, brag about him all the time to anyone who will listen, and love him very much. At the time, we were out at a bar drinking Hennessy and talking about life. He was beginning to show an interest in electrical engineering, an interest that only blossomed since, and he was telling me about building circuit boards and how he was using them with electromagnets when someone in the crowd shouted the word in anger and it sliced the air.

Although the person wasn’t directing it at Anthony, I noticed a subtle shift in his expression, a kind of flinch like he’d been jabbed with a small needle, and even though I know that unconscious pain is something society has helped shape in him by convincing him the word has such power, nevertheless he has been convinced, and now that he has, it does hold that power for him, and so while I want the word to lose that power, I also don’t want him or others to suffer hearing such hateful terms and then feel that twinge of pain. Nobody wants those they love to feel hurt. But also, Anthony is much younger than me, and as such, I have always looked on him as a kid brother. Maybe it’s the protective big brother in me, but I don’t want him to harbor that pain either. I want him to outgrow it. I want him to be someone who, if a racist spat that word in his face, wouldn’t tremble and run home to nurse his injured soul. Instead, I want him to be someone who’d shrug and think to himself, What a piece of shit, but otherwise feel nothing. And if hearing the word more often means it loses its sting and hurts him less in the long run, I think that’s the better path.

The other story I want to share is that when I was teaching in China, a student named Hang once asked me if there were any words he should know to avoid using when he visited America. Naturally, the first one that came to my mind was “nigger.” That, above all words in America, is the one you don’t want to say. And I knew that he was a fan of rap music, so there was a risk. I wrote “nigger” on the board along with a few other words to avoid. Also, in Mandarin Chinese, the filler word used when you’re thinking what to say next, where you would say “um” in English, is neige, literally meaning “that.” But it can sound like “nigga,” depending on one’s accent. I told him to be careful about that too. A teacher who worked in the same building as me, an American woman, saw what was on the board and became livid. Even though I explained to her what I had been doing, she didn’t care. There was no reasoning with her. I thought she had nearly lost her sanity. This was long before “woke” existed in a pejorative sense, and I had been living in Asia at this point for nearly 20 years so I was out of touch with American society. I had no earthly idea back then that so many of my fellow citizens would take her side, given half the chance.

Clearly, when we are attacking disabled individuals for having a disability, things have gone horribly wrong. And when it comes to this word, things went wrong a long time ago. We should’ve never pretended that any single word can be so powerful, and we should’ve never taken anyone seriously who claimed to be so mortally wounded by the word that its speaker ought to pay some price. We should’ve never stopped reading Huck Finn out loud. We should’ve never fired any professors who did. We should’ve never stopped singing our favorite rap lyrics. There was a girl who got in trouble in the UK because she posted her dead friend’s favorite rap lyrics on Instagram in memory of him, and that should’ve never happened. There was a professor who got in trouble for teaching Mandarin grammar by explaining the filler I mentioned above, and that too should’ve never happened. This is all absolutely insane, but it’s also the direct consequence of our sensitivity around this word and around racism in general. Yes, kids, racism is bad. It’s evil. But words are not evil. Not even really, really hateful words. However, if you make a word taboo, you won’t have to wait very long before somebody gets hurt because they used it.

Because of this, we should all stop using “the N-word” as a replacement because this suggests that “nigger” is so incredibly harmful that it cannot even be uttered or reproduced in print, not even in reference to the word itself. So maybe we should just go one step further and remove it from the dictionary. I’m kidding, of course. That would be the height of pearl-clutching buffoonery. Except guess what, it’s already happened. That is how you invest a word with such power that we end up with situations like Davidson being crucified as a shitty person simply because he has a disability. But while we’re on the topic, where did “the N-word” come from? Here’s Wikipedia:

One of the first uses of the N-word euphemism by a major public figure came during the racially contentious O.J. Simpson murder case in 1995. Key prosecution witness Detective Mark Fuhrman, of the Los Angeles Police Department—who denied using racist language on duty—impeached himself with his prolific use of nigger in tape recordings about his police work. Co-prosecutor Christopher Darden refused to say the actual word, calling it “the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language.” Media personnel who reported on Fuhrman’s testimony substituted the N-word for nigger.

The tapes became one of the most explosive moments of the trial and were devastating to the prosecution. Darden, himself a black man, did not defend the language. But in court, he made a show of describing it as the worst word in history and refused to repeat it. Did he really mean every bit of that, or was some small share of his rhetoric merely courtroom theatrics? I leave that to you to decide, but imagine for a moment if the entire country went down this insane path simply because one lawyer wanted to make a rhetorical point in court and played it up a little too much.

Not to mention, why is this the only word we cannot say? Why are blacks the only people in existence whose slur you cannot speak? Jews suffered slavery for twice as long as black Americans and genocide, yet we don’t go around saying “the K-word” as a replacement for “kike.” Nor should we. But one thing I will say for SNL is that although I thought their joke was in poor taste, I appreciate that they are free enough to make it. But even if I opposed them making it, I still wouldn’t want to censor the skit because I know that’s a sure-fire way to amplify it. If we really want to drain this dirty term of its racist potency, we should consider permanently retiring “the N-word” and teaching new generations of children the old rhyme about sticks and stones.

From the feed

“You are hated across the world! If you don’t know this, you should! The people burn your flag! The Islamic peoples all over the world chant, Death to America!”

– Ali Khamenei in response to President Obama’s diplomatic outreach in 2009.

Khamenei is dead. Death to Khamenei.

It’s hard to know the pleasure Edward R. Murrow must’ve felt when he became the first journalist, reporting for CBS News from London in 1945, to announce the death of Adolf Hitler. I am certainly not the first to report Khamenei’s death. But I imagine the feeling was not terribly different. When I heard the news, like many Iranians, I felt relief. I thought of my Iranian loved ones and their families. But also, like many Iranians, I understood this victory could come at such a devastating cost it may be the same as losing. We could end up in a protracted war. Iranian society could collapse into even darker chaos. We could see economic shocks and regional instability ripple across Gulf economies. Domestic conflict could fracture along ethnic and tribal lines. If Tehran blocks or disrupts the Strait of Hormuz, global oil prices will spike and stock markets will fall. And, for all this, the regime may still be standing when the dust settles. But on the other hand, Khamenei, who ruled from 1989 until his assassination on Saturday, and who was the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East and the longest-serving Iranian leader since the Shah, had become one of the most evil dictators on the planet. Eliminating him may come at great cost, but leaving him in power was hardly a peaceful alternative.

Subscribe now

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln spoke of slavery as a grave moral wrong and of the Civil War as perhaps a form of divine judgment against both sides for tolerating the practice. His point was that if justice demands a terrible cost, then we must recognize that cost as just. Not to celebrate it, but to accept and solemnly pay the price. Truly, there are only a few genuine slave states in the world today, by which I mean places where every living person is effectively a slave. North Korea is such a place. The entire country is essentially one massive concentration camp. Eritrea, Syria, and Iran too. But the list is short because few countries in the world are so unfree. Nothing in China or even Russia comes close. However, while North Korea and Syria are too crippled by their own dysfunction to have any meaningful impact beyond their own borders, Iran is quite powerful by comparison, earning significant revenue from crude oil and petroleum products, despite international sanctions. It uses the profits to tighten the screws on its people and terrorize the world by funding terrorist groups in half a dozen countries. Iran has also tried for decades to develop nuclear weapons and its leaders, especially Khamenei, have repeatedly said they want to destroy Israel. Now Iranians, who have suffered in hell for half a century, might finally be free. It’s too early to say, but should this end with elections, it will be America’s greatest victory in the name of democracy since we defeated the Nazis.

But what makes Khamenei so uniquely bad? Being a brutal dictator who kills thousands of his own people is not enough to stand out in the Muslim world, sadly. Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurdish civilians of Iraq and carried out mass executions, torture, and political purges. In Syria, Hafez al-Assad ordered the Hama massacre. In Sudan, Omar al-Bashir carried out the Darfur genocide. In Iran, Khamenei’s predecessor Ruhollah Khomeini oversaw extensive political purges and executions. But Khamenei did something that would set him apart from every other Muslim dictator in history. Simply put, he became the father of Islamofascism, and he did this by fusing theocratic authority with state bureaucratic power. Other Muslim dictators — monarchs in Saudi Arabia or secular military strongmen in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq — have ruled through state institutions or personal command, but Khamenei institutionalized clerical authority itself into the core organs of state power. His office became an administrative and executive nerve center that controlled the military, courts, media, everything. Such constitutionalized clerical supremacy is unique in the Muslim world. He then made the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) the brutal spine of his regime, using it like an Iranian Schutzstaffel (SS) to enforce control and literally kill reform movements.

Khamenei was no less bloodthirsty than his counterparts in Syria or Sudan, but he possessed an apparatus of surveillance and police violence that allowed him to execute his will with greater severity and precision than Assad or Bashir could ever imagine. Khamenei regularly executed dissidents and violently repressed protests in 1999, 2009, 2019, and 2022. He never carried out an industrial genocide comparable to Hussein’s campaign in Anfal or Bashir’s campaign in Darfur, but the domestic brutalization of his people was more systematic and universal. His security forces and militias carried out systematic campaigns of torture, rape, and murder against the people of Iran. To give just one example, when the 22-year-old Masha Amini didn’t wear her headscarf properly, police murdered her in September 2022. When people protested, security forces arrested almost 20,000 citizens, killed over 500, held public trials for over 1,000, and executed several. Protests broke out more recently after the collapse of the Iranian rial, which plunged to historic lows in late December 2025, putting unbearable pressure on shop keepers and merchants in Tehran. The protests soon expanded to include broader political discontent. The government responded by throwing the nation into an internet blackout and slaughtering up to 30,000 people in the darkness. Men and women protesters, including minors, are currently being gang raped in custody before being killed.

Iran also visits hell upon the rest of the world by supporting various terrorist groups with funding, weapons, and training. This includes Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthi movement in Yemen. In Gaza and the West Bank, Iran supports Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hamas. Iran supports Al-Ashtar Brigades in Bahrain, Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada in Iraq and Syria, Fatemiyoun Division in Syria and Afghanistan, Zeinabiyoun Brigade in Syria and Pakistan — as well as Harakat al-Nujaba, Harakat Ansar Allah al-Awfiya, Kata’ib al-Imam Ali, and Al-Mukhtar Brigades in Iraq. On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants crossed into southern Israel, attacked kibbutzim and towns, shot civilians in their homes and at a music festival, set houses on fire, killed families at close range, and abducted more than 200 people, including children and the elderly, dragging them back into dark tunnels under Gaza as hostages. Hamas and multiple other groups were directly responsible, but Iran was the puppet master. Hezbollah’s long record includes suicide bombings such as the 1983 Beirut barracks attack, which killed 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers, as well as rocket campaigns deliberately aimed at civilian population centers in northern Israel during the 2006 war, forcing mass evacuations and killing non-combatants. In Syria, Hezbollah units and Iran-organized militias fought alongside the Assad regime, which used sarin and chlorine gas against its own people in Ghouta in 2013 and Khan Shaykhun in 2017, which makes breathing painful, fills your lungs with fluid, and drowns you in your own phlegm. And yes, Iran helped Syria develop those chemical weapons too.

In his address announcing Khamenei’s assassination, President Trump said:

From Lebanon to Yemen and Syria to Iraq, the regime has armed, trained and funded terrorist militias that have soaked the earth with blood and guts. And it was Iran’s proxy, Hamas, that launched the monstrous Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, slaughtering more than 1,000 innocent people, including 46 Americans, while taking 12 of our citizens hostage. … Iran is the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, and just recently killed tens of thousands of its own citizens on the street as they protested. … They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore. … For these reasons, the United States military is undertaking a massive and ongoing operation to prevent this very wicked, radical dictatorship from threatening America and our core national security interests. We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally obliterated. We’re going to annihilate their navy. We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces … To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and all of the police, I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. … Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations. For many years, you have asked for America’s help. But you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny, and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.

Prediction markets tend to have some interesting takes on geopolitical events and the major ones are currently trying to forecast Khamenei’s successor. On Polymarket, 36% of forecasters say the next supreme leader of Iran will be Alireza Arafi, the hardliner cleric who has served as head of Iran’s seminaries since 2016, while only 13% say it will be Hassan Khomeini, Ruhollah’s grandson, and only 9% say Mojtaba Khamenei, the second eldest child of Ali Khamenei. On Kalshi, 37% say it will be Arafi while only 14% name Mojtaba. But only 43% of forecasters on Polymarket say the regime will fall by June 30 and only 20% on Metaculus say the U.S. will control Tehran within one year. So the crowdsourced betting is basically saying the successor gets named pretty quickly, but there’s real uncertainty about whether the system holds together or the whole thing crumbles.

It will be interesting to see how this impacts Iran’s allies. China and Russia have both got huge investments in Iran’s oil and infrastructure, but they’re not gonna ride in and save Khamenei’s regime militarily. Also, what of Khamenei’s whole strategy with the “Axis of Resistance” network made up of terrorist groups? With him gone, all those proxy relationships get wobbly. This could end up being the terrorist version of the Soviet collapse in 1991, after which all the states propped up by Soviet cashflows rapidly shriveled. But one thing is certain, Israel has truly had a remarkable run. They decimated Hamas leadership in Gaza through sustained airstrikes and ground operations, took out Hezbollah’s command structure with that staggering pager operation that killed thousands with a Thanos snap, and now they’ve just eliminated Iran’s supreme leader in a joint operation with the United States. Israel has fundamentally reshaped the regional balance of power in its favor in just a few months.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ The Israel Century is dawning.

Now we get to watch who fills the power vacuum. Will it be reformers or hardliners? Will the IRGC consolidate power around a single leader and maintain business as usual? Or will we see a prolonged power struggle between factions that last months and makes energy markets unpriceable? Or will one of the most destabilizing and horrific places in the world become a liberal democracy? Will Iranians overseas now be able to visit their homeland before they die? Unfortunately, I am not as hopeful as I would like to be. History suggests that killing a long-entrenched leader often hardens political rule and can escalate conflict, especially when their loyalists fill the halls of power and number in the thousands. This may prove to be a momentary tactical triumph that only propels decades of even more instability. In the end, I fear the only way theocracy will ever leave Iran is the same way it came in. Namely, through violent popular revolution. So maybe killing Khamenei doesn’t give Iran its freedom back. But it sure as hell kicks down the door. Besides, a moral victory is only a loss to a cynic.

The Apple Music Super Bowl LX halftime show opened in a sugar cane field with Bad Bunny singing in Spanish about girls sucking his dick, featuring guest appearances by Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, some rapping about fucking girls with big tits in his car with his erect penis, then the dancers waved the flags of various Latin American countries with a sign that read, “Together, we are America,” and Bunny listed the countries of the Americas. At least it was entertaining. The political message was about as subtle as anything else Bad Bunny writes. We are all American. All Latinos are American. All the illegal immigrants coming to America from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras are American. Love defeats hate. Oppose ICE. Or something like that. The guy’s not exactly a philosopher.

Subscribe now

When Bad Bunny was announced as the Super Bowl halftime headliner, the reaction was immediate. For some, the choice felt inevitable. The Puerto Rican rapper is the most streamed artist in the world, as he was in 2020, 2021, and 2022. The Swifties defeated the Bunnies in 2023 and 2024, but Benito Martínez, the “King of Latin Trap,” was next to the top both years. Not to mention, he’s a global pop figure whose reach extends far beyond the U.S. music industry, and quite a force within that industry too, having won multiple Grammys, including Album of the Year for an all-Spanish album.

Está pegao.

But for others, the halftime show felt like a provocation. Less an entertainment booking than a cultural statement about language, identity, and who the Super Bowl is for, actually. It also comes at a time when America is debating who America is for, which is also a debate about illegal immigration and ICE tactics, about Trump and his over-correction to woke ideology, and about what we want America to be and who we want to be a part of it. There’s more talk these days about Christian values, Christian nationalism is on the rise, and white conservatives, who have been shamed on the basis of their race for years, are now more openly advocating for white conservative values. Thanks to half a decade of woke politics, they are also no longer cowed by accusations of racism for expressing group self-interest just as blacks, Asians, and Latinos have always done. The immigration crisis has only crystallized those concerns. President Biden allowed in crisis levels of illegal immigrants and efforts to clean up the mess have led not only to ICE abuses of fundamental American rights, but protesters who compare ICE to the Gestapo while trying to prevent immigration officials from deporting child rapists. Meanwhile, President Trump consistently turns the temperature up rather than assuring the public that violations of civil liberties will not be tolerated.

Bad Bunny chose to insert himself into the center of all this. Wisely perhaps, given the attention it has earned him. In the weeks before the Super Bowl, he used his platform at the 2026 Grammys to call for abolishing ICE. During his speech, he said, “Before I say thanks to God, I gotta say, ICE out! We’re not savages. We’re not animals. We are humans and we are Americans. The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” At the halftime show, he expanded on the idea that “we are Americans,” meaning everyone in the Americas. I’ve encountered this before, this sensitivity to the word “American” being used by Americans to mean someone from the United States. Certain Latino social justice warriors will even correct you if you introduce yourself as American. It’s a stupid argument because the name “United States of America” clearly lends itself to only one reasonable demonym — “American” — as opposed to whatever country the Latino complaining about this comes from.

Also, you never hear such people critique the fact that they call themselves “Latino,” even though this does not come from Spanish being a Romance language, but from the fact that France wanted to be able to lay claim to the New World and compete with Spain for territory. So France popularized “Latin America” as an alternative to “Spanish America” so that Spanish-speaking people of the New World could be reframed as belonging not simply to a Spanish family, but a Latin one that also included France. In other words, Latinos calling themselves Latino has more direct colonial roots than Americans calling themselves American. But also, Latinos calling themselves Latinos — but not French, Italian, Spanish, or other members of the Latin World — is an exclusionary synecdoche. It’s the same as when Americans call themselves American but not other people from the Americas. In other words, Latinos who complain about this, yet refer to themselves as Latino, are doing a worse version of the same thing they are complaining about.

And that’s to say nothing of ICE’s legitimate law enforcement efforts. Or the optics of having an outspoken anti-ICE Latino rap about blowjobs in Spanish while lecturing Americans on diversity. The media loved it, of course. In fact, their applause was almost orgiastic. Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Daniel Fienberg called it “the most impressively conceived and executed Super Bowl halftime production I’ve ever seen,” adding that it was “vital in every imaginable definition of the word.” Vital in every imaginable definition of the word? You can almost hear Fienberg weeping for the Puerto Rican sugarcane workers as he writes. Also, is it just me or is “vital” giving off the same energy as calling Caitlyn Jenner “brave”? Nor does giving the quote in context make it sound any less 2020 woke:

Am I sure there were nuances to the cultural specificity being articulated that there’s no way a 40-something white guy could possibly get? Absolutely.

Do I hope some publications have Puerto Rican writers exploring and decoding those nuances? I surely do.

But here’s the thing I know with certainty: When I don’t understand something, I can either attempt to do a little research and follow a few links and learn about the things I couldn’t process in the moment, or I can complain. And, honestly, why would anybody in their right mind complain? Because I understood that the halftime show was about life and humanity and telling a story in a way that’s nearly without Super Bowl precedent. It was vital in every imaginable definition of the word. It was necessary and it was alive and it was musical, well beyond a simple set list.

Obviously, anyone decoding the nuances of a Bad Bunny halftime show would have to be Puerto Rican, right? Give me a break. Imagine the caucasity of being white and looking things up. What I like about this article is that Fienberg openly admits the show flew right over his head — and even hints that it might be racist to do some googling to educate oneself — while nevertheless giddily clapping for it all. He reminds one of a gay pro-Hamas protester or one of those Minnesota anti-ICE protesters who end up defending a child rapist from deportation. Basically, a useful idiot for an ostensibly noble cause, at least once you’ve pressure-washed all the nuance from its surface. Here, I suppose, that cause is diversity.

You see, Bad Bunny’s halftime performance signals the mainstreaming of Latin culture in America at a time when Latinos make up 20% of the population. The problem is, this abrasive performance was also totally unnecessary. It comes off like a celebration of Latino diversity, as if America has finally reached a moment when Latinos can be themselves. We’re here — deal with it. Except Latinos don’t need any mainstreaming. Shakira and J. Lo already did the halftime. Despacito was the No. 1 song in the United States and everybody loved it. Coco is one of the biggest Disney movies of all time. Chipotle is everywhere. Americans love Latin culture. Bad Bunny is declaring victory in a war that no longer exists. That’s because the subtext here is Trump, ICE, and immigration. And I’m sorry, but if that’s the conversation we’re having, then we are not all Americans.

I love Latin america. I have lived in many parts, including Puerto Rico. I am married to a Latina and we have a Latina daughter. I speak Spanish, I cook Latin food, and I dance salsa. Latin culture is a permanent part of my everyday life. Saying that we are not all Americans is not in any way disrespectful to Latinos. It’s just a fact. I also lived in Japan, speak Japanese, and adore its culture. But Japanese are not Americans either. And Bad Bunny framing the message in terms of love doesn’t make this any less true. Nor should we fall so easily for his oafish political stunt. In Puerto Rico, Bad Bunny has another nickname in addition to “King of Trap”—Benito el Comunista. That’s because his far-left politics are well-known to his fellow Boricuas. Notice how he chants the names of Latin American countries when he can use them to shame the United States for enforcing its own immigration laws, but where were his calls of solidarity all these years as Venezuela suffered under Maduro? Or as Nicaraguans suffered under Ortega? Where were his calls for the people of Cuba, Bolivia, Colombia? Nowhere, that’s where. Because when has he ever cared about anything taking place outside his own pants? Like pro-Palestinian protesters who are more animated by hatred of Israel than concern for the children of Gaza, Bad Bunny only pretends to care about his fellow Latinos because that gives him moral cover to attack the United States in the name of the oppressed.

Writing for The Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli described it as “close to art” and “a cultural moment, a paradigm shift.” Time characterized the show as “a fierce act of resistance” and “a sharp cultural and history lesson.” I could go on, but I’ll spare you. What I won’t spare you, however, are his lyrics. Yes, I’m exactly the kind of white-privileged male that Fienberg is taking about. One who looks things up. Here are some selected lyrics from the song “Safaera,” which Bad Bunny sang during the show:

Pussy with dick, dick with ass (push it in)
Pussy with dick, dick with ass, yes (push it in)
Pussy with dick, dick with ass (push it in)
Your tits rubbing my nipples (push it in) …

Really big tits like Lourdes Chacón
Really big ass like Iris Chacón
I don't know why I haven’t seen the pussy
But let’s go to bed to fuck you in panties …

I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt
To see what is hidden in your pants
I want to grind on you and grind on you and grind on you (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and grind on you and grind (hard, hard)
I want to grind on you and smoke a blunt, a blunt (hard, hard)
The ecstasy is already kicking in …

My dick is being chased and I want you to hide it
Grab it like a bonga
She took a pill that made her horny
She fucks in the Audi, not in the Honda, ayy
If I give it to you, don’t call me
Cause this is not to make you love me, ayy
If your boyfriend doesn’t eat your ass
He better fuck off

Come down to my house, I’ll lick it all up
Mami, I’ll lick it all up
Come down to my house, I’ll wear you out, ayy
I’ll wear you out
Come down to my house, I’ll lick it all up (papi, keep going!)
Mami, I’ll lick it all up (papi, keep going!)
Tell me, servant (papi, keep going)
If you smoke weed (papi, pa-papi) …

The dealer is twerking (hard!)
It seems like she fucks well while high
I want to take a selfie with that huge ass (wow)
Erect, erect, I’m erect, and it shows (whoa, whoa)
What are we gonna do with that huge ass?
In university they’re all A, A, A
But those tits are C
You are super horny, mami, I already know
I’m also horny, what are we gonna do?
With that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
Go crazy with that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
If you have that bum-bum, go crazy, bum-bum
If you have that bum-bum, go crazy, buoh!

You can decide whether you think the Super Bowl should be family-friendly or whether that ship has sailed. But I don’t think the English equivalent of this song would be allowed. So then what’s going on here? That’s the part that bothers me most about this latest flashpoint in our culture wars. I couldn’t care less whether Bad Bunny performed. I don’t watch the Super Bowl. But it’s the attempt to bullshit me, to gaslight me, to get away with something as if I wouldn’t notice, that rubs the wrong way. For example, to sing about girls sucking you off in front of millions of Americans and then pretend that people are objecting simply because they don’t like the sound of Spanish. Oh, because xenophobia is the problem, is it? Or as if Americans have a serious anti-Latino issue that needs addressing.

Or that, because I want immigration law enforcement, I am therefore anti-diversity. Or that I am racist because I feel no personal guilt over historical colonialism and have no desire to be lectured on tolerance by people who come from cultures that are staggeringly more racist, sexist, and homophobic than modern American culture is by any measure. And here’s a pro-tip. While I do like some of his songs, “DtMF” especially, a Puerto Rican lapdog who humps everyone’s leg is not exactly the MLK of the anti-ICE movement you were looking for.

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

– Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

On Saturday, 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti was walking down the middle of Nicollet Avenue during an immigration enforcement operation, four miles from where Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. He was filming Border Patrol agents with his phone when one of them pepper sprayed a nearby woman to force her off the road. Pretti tried to help her. When the agent sprayed Pretti and began pushing him off the road too, he resisted. The agent threw Pretti to the ground and other agents came to help subdue him. There was a scuffle. One agent yelled that Pretti had a gun. Another agent removed a SIG Sauer 9mm from Pretti’s belt and walked away with it. That particular gun model is notorious for easily misfiring, and it may have gone off as the agent walked away with it, though it’s hard to say. Suddenly, with his arms pinned near his head, Pretti was shot 10 times in five seconds.

Hours earlier, 50,000 people had taken to the streets of Minneapolis in minus 20-degree weather to block immigration enforcement and demand that ICE leave the state. Minnesota is now the burning focal point of our national immigration debate and will likely become the greatest organizing center for leftists since Gaza or George Floyd. The Trump administration’s posture toward the crisis appears to be fuck around and find out. Powder keg, match.

Subscribe now

Only weeks earlier, and mere blocks away, an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three, during an enforcement action. After blocking agents with her car, Good’s wife Becca taunted them to fight then told Good, “Drive, baby, drive!” Agents rushed the car and told Good to get out. Instead, she gunned it, appearing either to flee the scene or attempt to murder the agent with her car, depending on who you voted for in the last presidential election. It was yet another case of one screen, two films. Was she simply trying to drive away? Should she have put it in park when the agent told her to get out? Was she trying to run the agent over? Is it relevant that she and her wife were members of Minnesota ICE Watch, a local chapter focused on resisting lawful ICE operations? Is it relevant that Agent Ross, the man who shot her, had recently been dragged by a vehicle? These questions were debated for days, but the answers were mostly predetermined. Again, I can predict what you think about Good’s death by asking whether you think a trans woman is a woman, whether you think vaccines cause autism, or how you choose to pronounce the name Kamala. And that should disturb us all.

Ironically, left-wing protesters who oppose ICE as authoritarian are often the same ones who support the Iranian regime, the Russian regime, the Maduro regime, and the “liberation” of Palestine. Of course, a similar point can be made in the other direction. When it comes to political hypocrisy, clean hands are few in the crowd.

Nor are these deaths isolated in the broader context of President Trump’s expansion of ICE operations, under which federal agents have now killed a total of five people nationwide. One was a man who tried to flee. One was a man who fired a rifle at an agent. One was a man who tried to drag an agent to death with his car. One was Good. One was Pretti. For the sake of argument, let’s shove aside all nuance and say two of these deaths were self-defense while the other three were psychopathic public executions, even though the circumstances around Good and Pretti’s deaths are still fiercely debated. Let’s also ignore the fact that Pretti wasn’t killed by ICE, but by Border Patrol, and add his death to the tally. That means over the past 12 months, ICE and officials working with them have killed three innocent people in the process of making 328,000 arrests. Even one death is too many, but that’s actually a very low rate for law enforcement. Even if we count all five deaths, that’s one per 65,600 arrests. By comparison, the New York Police Department made 189,774 arrests and fatally shot 13 people in 2022, which pencils out to one death per 14,598 arrests. This means ICE efforts are more than four times safer, so why isn’t Mamdani calling for the abolition of the NYPD?

Obviously, this is not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison, nor is it meant to be. I’m simply highlighting the prevalence of lethal force as a ratio of arrests in order to illustrate how dangerous immigration agents are, or are not. But we should also acknowledge that though these numbers are relevant, they are not what people are reacting to when they oppose ICE. They are reacting to masked men roaming the streets, or drive-by macing people, or throwing bags over people’s heads for no reason but expressing a constitutionally protected opinion, as recently unsealed documents show. They feel, as communities, they are under attack. And Trump’s rhetoric does nothing to ease those fears. But if agents are being compared to Nazis, and if that is encouraging already fearful people to take violent action, then it’s also important to point out that despite their often thuggish and brutish behavior, these agents are not actually going around killing people. Quite the opposite. That said, a friend of mine is an immigration lawyer who has worked in the field for many years and to hear him tell it, this new batch is indeed distinct in their behavior. “They were always a bit surly, confrontational, high school caricatures, but bearable, ultimately bare-minimum professional,” he tells me. “The same cannot be said of the new goons.”

But as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently observed:

It’s a complicated political thing because you’ll see polls now where voters will say, “I don’t approve of Trump’s immigration policy, maybe I even support defunding ICE.” But then you’re asked, “Who do you trust more on immigration, Republicans or Democrats?” And they still say Republicans, right? But I think the basic challenge for the Trump administration is, they see themselves, I think reasonably, as having been elected on a promise to conduct mass deportations. I think you can make a case, and I would make a case, that with better training and different hiring practices and so on, you could reduce abuses and reduce, you know, some of the things that show up in everybody’s social media feed right now. At the same time, there is a way in which ICE has always done raids in immigrant neighborhoods that, you know, arrest sympathetic-seeming people or, you know, pick up people who don’t have infractions while going after someone who does have infractions. Like, what we’re seeing right now is just what ICE normally does, but times three, or times four, or times five. And a lot of Americans are uncomfortable with it. But it’s not clear to me that there’s some other way that the Trump administration can say to themselves, “We’re pursuing this policy,” that would be vastly more popular. Maybe somewhat more popular. But I don’t know.

He later went on to add:

But there is a larger sense among conservatives, basically, that the Biden era was a kind of revelation of what liberals and Democrats, or at least the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, really wants to do, right? That, for a long time, you had liberals who were favorably disposed to immigration but always said, “Well, of course, we’re not for open borders.” But finally, they got the chance, and it effectively was open borders for two or three years. And then they sort of felt like they needed to, I mean, you can say it’s not open borders. We can have the debate. But if you just look at a chart of the sheer number of people who came in in the first three years of the Biden administration, it was an unprecedented wave of immigration, unlike any basically in my lifetime. You don’t have to call it “open borders,” but imagine yourself as a conservative skeptic of immigration watching this happen. And then you basically decide that if you, when your party is in power, can’t conduct substantial deportation, then you’re in a kind of sucker’s game where the Democrats are in power, they let 5 million people in, the Republicans take power, they secure the borders for a while, don’t do anything about immigration, then the Democrats come into power and do it all over again. So behind Stephen Miller is this sense that we can’t let the Democrats get away with that. And again, the fact that Republicans still are slightly more trusted than Democrats suggests that this is not just a kind of hard-right concern. And the other thing to note is that it is, in fact, true what the Department of Homeland Security keeps saying, that a policy that’s focused just on deporting people in jails and people with criminal records does yield some kind of conflict with sanctuary city laws and rules in liberal jurisdictions. They’re not making that up.

You may be wondering why agents are walking around Minneapolis in the first place. The reason is, they’re carrying out their assigned duties under the ongoing Operation Metro Surge. That means they are actively patrolling public streets looking for individuals believed to be in the country unlawfully. But they’re not just eyeballing people and asking to see their papers. Instead, ICE typically operates off pre-existing information such as target lists with names, photos, and criminal records. This is why operations often happen outside businesses, on sidewalks, in parking lots, and near apartment buildings. They’re positioning themselves where a known target is expected to appear. And some of the people they’re going after are truly evil—rapists, pedophiles, drug traffickers. Last month, a dozen men were arrested in Minneapolis. One was a pedophile. One was convicted of robbery, fraud, and domestic assault. One was convicted of domestic abuse and assaulting a peace officer. One was allegedly a gang member with a long list of criminal convictions. Of course, this requires us to take federal authorities at their word, to some degree, and that’s a tall order these days. But I have found no evidence to suggest ICE arrest records are falsified. Or that they are going after Mexican housemaids and Somali truck drivers. And as you can see below, they’re getting a lot more criminals than Biden did. But I don’t remember anti-ICE protests under him.

Speaking of hypocrisy, what of the fact that there were also no ICE protests under President Obama? On the contrary, his ICE chief received an award for 920,000 removals while Trump’s ICE chief was called a Nazi—even though they’re the same person: Tom Homan. It gets worse. In 2012, Obama deported 409,000 people. In 2025, Trump only deported 290,000 people. And yes, innocent people were killed under Obama’s ICE efforts too. There was Anastasio Hernández-Rojas, who was killed after repeated taser and beating by U.S. Border Patrol officers during an immigration detention dispute. There was José Rodríguez, a young boy killed when an agent fired 16 shots at him—and was later acquitted of murder. Indeed, an investigative project found that between 2015 and 2021, ICE officers were involved in 59 shootings across 26 states, resulting in injuries and deaths. But no anti-ICE protests. Obama was not compared to Hitler. People in Minneapolis did not view ICE agents as Gestapo.

One of my own family members, on the Latino side, is a woman I simply refer to as Tía, which means “aunt” in Spanish, even though she’s not actually my aunt. Tía once had her own experience with U.S. immigration under the Obama administration. At the time, she was a 59-year-old woman who barely spoke English and had lived illegally in the United States for 10 years. She worked as a nanny and was deeply beloved by the families who employed her. With the money she made, Tía was able to help feed and support her family back home in Peru. She helped her sons and daughters, her grandchildren, helped pay for their school, their hospital bills, and was a raft for nearly two dozen people.

One year for Thanksgiving, she took a Greyhound to visit family down in Florida. Immigration officials commonly run Greyhound operations, and will wait for the buses to come to a stop and then arrest everybody because they know most illegals can’t fly. So they were at the bus station when she got to Miami. It was midnight when they got there, and ICE came onto the bus and started arresting everybody. She was an old woman, thin as paper, on the edge of 60, and couldn’t communicate well. They started grabbing people, violently, dragging them off the bus without explaining to them who they were or what was happening. They didn’t punch her or anything. But they yanked her by her arm, dragged her down the aisle, and shoved her down the steps. The detention facility was horrible. The conditions were filthy and cold. There were people inside with terrible wounds to their faces and bodies, inflicted by ICE agents. They gave people $1 a day for food. In detention, she met an old woman from Poland who had been racing to the hospital because her husband was dying. That’s how she got caught. Pulled over for speeding. When they arrested her, they didn’t arrest her American husband, of course, but she had no idea what happened to him. She asked my family to visit different hospitals looking for him because no officials would help her or even talk to her. My family tried to find him, visiting every hospital in the area, but found nothing. To this day, it’s a mystery. But we know that the woman got deported back to Poland.

There are three reasons for the crisis. First, Trump is being aggressive. He should have better messaging, more concern for harm done to innocent people, and a zero-tolerance policy any time agents hurt innocent people or violate their constitutional rights in any way. That is not happening and it’s a national disgrace. Moreover, he and his administration should be held to a higher standard when it comes to such things because they have more authority, both legal and moral, than either Walz or Frey. Second, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States reached an all-time high of 14 million in 2023, thanks to Biden’s refusal to address the problem. Critics claim this was intentional because seats in the U.S. House are apportioned based on the number of people, not citizens. Third, Democratic leaders have encouraged resistance to Trump’s immigration efforts. Over 77 million Americans voted Trump into office, and immigration was one of the primary reasons why. Yet Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has refused to cooperate with Trump’s immigration efforts. He has called Trump a fascist. More recently, he referred to ICE as Nazi forces. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has said he will not cooperate with the federal government. He has told ICE to “get the fuck out of our city.” Meanwhile, I have seen half a dozen or more Instagram videos of leftists saying, “Kill ICE,” “Shoot them in the face,” “This is fucking war.” And I have seen footage of protests that looked like war zones. Is it any surprise that if you rile people up in this way, convince them they are literally fighting Nazis, and support them in trying to obstruct justice, that someone might get hurt?

Walz and Frey should be cooperating with federal agents while also working to turn the temperature down. They have done the exact opposite. In Tennessee, three out of every four ICE arrests occurred at a local jail or other lockup—quiet, controlled, no bystanders, no confrontations. It could have been this way in Minnesota too. Instead, violent encounters with ICE are 590 times more likely to take place in just nine non-cooperating counties than in the country’s remaining 3,134 counties. Minneapolis is one of them. Good and Pretti’s blood is on Walz and Frey’s hands too.

Ultimately, none of this negates the core principle that no violation of civil liberties can be tolerated. Federal authority does not excuse excessive force, nor does political opposition justify violence against law-enforcement officers. Americans did vote for stricter immigration enforcement when they elected Trump, who ran explicitly on that issue, and federal agencies are executing laws enacted by Congress and upheld by the courts. But at the same time, the legitimacy of law enforcement rests on restraint, accountability, and adherence to constitutional standards. For an excellent analysis of the laws surrounding protester rights, the shooting of Alex Pretti, and relevant First Amendment concerns, I recommend the essay below.

Expression

The Alex Pretti shooting and the growing strain on the First Amendment

On Saturday, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse named Alex Pretti was shot and killed by United States Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis. The tragic loss of life, and the Trump administration’s response, de…

Read more

3 months ago · 39 likes · 8 comments · Aaron Terr

Only a thorough, independent examination grounded in evidence can determine what went wrong this past weekend, who bears responsibility, and how similar tragedies might be prevented in the future. But Pretti’s tragic death stands as a reminder that unresolved conflicts between lawful police mandates and political opposition carry real human costs. The deaths in Minnesota represent a profound failure of policy, political rhetoric, and human judgment. They demand sober investigation rather than reflexive justification or blanket condemnation. But those answers are slow-coming, and the fear in people’s hearts is palpable. It is a dark day in America when enforcement of the law and preservation of liberty appear to be in direct conflict, and when lives are lost in the space between political absolutism and institutional responsibility. But the fact is, Alex Pretti would be alive today if he’d been standing on a street in Nashville instead of Minneapolis. That is not a defense of ICE abuses. But Democratic politicians who willfully turned Minnesota into a theater of confrontation don’t get to act surprised when the curtain comes down on someone.

From the feed

About a year ago, I attended a beautiful party and ended up standing at the back of the room talking to a beautiful woman. As she listened, she gave her full attention. When she spoke, she did not raise her voice. There was a kind of restraint in her presence that communicated power, and wisdom, but with a playful flicker in her eyes. I could tell she probably had a good sense of humor. She was small of stature and elegant of poise, carrying herself with quiet authority, the way confidence settles upon some people who have seen enough of the world or lived long enough that they no longer need to prove a single thing to anyone. In her case, both things were true. I want to say she was maybe in her late 60s, and had made the long journey to the West from Iran, created a new life for herself, and raised a beautiful young son as a single mother. I remember thinking, one doesn’t often get to meet a woman like this. And, though I’ve only met a few women from Iran, they all had this aspect about them, this resolute strength, though I’ve never seen it as clearly as I did that night. In Persian, such a woman is sometimes called shir-zan (شیرزن). Lioness.

Subscribe now

As an undergraduate, I minored in gender studies. I almost majored in anthropology instead of literature because I had such an abiding interest in people and populations—as a grad student, I studied human behavior—and I took particular interest in Les Misérables. The poor, the suffering, the oppressed. I carried this focus with me into journalism many years later, covering authoritarian regimes and the innocents they brutally governed. Again and again in my studies, and in my reporting, I have found myself looking into the eyes of women. The women of Tigray, Ukraine, Xinjiang, India, the Andes. Jewish women, black women, Rohingya women, Somali women. Their stories haunt me most. Their strength leaves me floored. But the long suffering of Iranian women is almost mythic at this point. They are, for all practical purposes, a nation of slaves wrapped in the black cloak of their death cult, brutalized and tortured in ways most Western women cannot even imagine, often by their own loved ones.

Christopher Hitchens once remarked that the only cure for world poverty is the empowerment of women. But it does far more than that. A nation whose women are enslaved cannot have any moral center. A boy who grows up seeing his mother and sisters treated like dogs, and who comes to embrace the system that treats them so, can never fully be a good man. The horror of it breaks women’s minds, but poisons the souls of the men who maintain it. In the end, no one is truly free. Women and men alike, and children too, are chewed up by it, mauled by savagery. When I was an undergrad, one of the textbooks we studied was the anthology Reconstructing Gender by Estelle Disch, which still sits on my shelf. In it, in an essay titled “Fighting Gender Apartheid Under the Taliban,” author Genevieve Howe describes not just a “gender apartheid,” but “a virtual ban on women.” In a 1998 report, Physicians for Human Rights went further, calling it a “war on women.” And that’s exactly what it is.

The final battle

Iran has entered the new year facing the most serious internal challenge to clerical rule in my lifetime. What began as protests over economic collapse—rampant inflation, currency depreciation, and unemployment—has rapidly evolved into a nationwide political uprising. The protests have spread across all provinces, with their chants no longer confined to economic grievances. Now the most common slogans are “This is the final battle” and “Death to the dictator.” Inshallah.

The state’s response was predictably swift and brutal. Security forces, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have used live ammunition, mass arrests, and intimidation to suppress demonstrations. “I saw it with my own eyes,” said one man. “They fired directly into lines of protesters, and people fell where they stood.” A young woman from Tehran said, “Security forces only killed and killed and killed.” She added, “In war, both sides have weapons. Here, people only chant and get killed.” CBS News reports that sources inside the country say “at least 12,000, and possibly as many as 20,000 people have been killed.”

One of the victims was Hessam Khodayarifard, 22, who was shot dead in the city of Kuhdasht on New Year’s Eve. Authorities initially refused to hand over his body, and when mourners at his funeral began chanting anti-government slogans, troops moved in on the grieving family with force. Another victim was Shayan Asadollahi, 28, a barber in the town of Azna who was returning home from a demonstration when several Revolutionary Guard pickup trucks pulled up on them and opened fire. Shayan was hit in the gut and bled out. He was his family’s sole provider. Three hours south in the city of Lordegan, Sajjad Valamanesh, 20, was shot during a protest. Then the Revolutionary Guard called the family and forced the boy’s father to give an interview on state media in which he called for an official crackdown on “rioters,” which he only did because officials said otherwise they wouldn’t release Sajjad’s body for burial. This is the horror of life in Iran. But how did it come to this?

A brief history

Modern Iranian politics is best understood not as a series of disconnected crises, but as a single arc shaped by three figures—the Shah, the revolutionary cleric who replaced him, and the man who still rules today.

Iran’s current leader, Ali Khamenei, has served as Supreme Leader since 1989. Under his rule, the Islamic Republic evolved from a fervent ideological state into a hardened security regime. Power rests with clerical institutions, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and an extensive surveillance and repression apparatus. The protests of 2009, 2019, 2022–23, and 2025–26 have made clear that the system survives not through consent of the governed, but by force.

Khamenei inherited a state created by Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and Iran’s first Supreme Leader. Khomeini returned from exile amid mass demonstrations against the monarchy and rapidly transformed a broad, ideologically diverse uprising into a clerical dictatorship. His defining contribution was the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih—the “Guardianship of the Jurist”—which placed ultimate authority in the hands of Islamic jurists rather than the electorate. Under his watch, liberals, leftists, monarchists, journalists, and religious minorities were arrested, tortured, and executed. The 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy and the ensuing hostage crisis hardened Iran’s posture toward the West. By the time he died in 1989, the revolution had devoured its rivals and institutionalized Islamofascism.

The man overthrown in 1979 was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s last Shah. His reign, beginning in 1941, combined rapid modernization with authoritarianism. The Shah pursued ambitious reforms such as land redistribution, expanded education, women’s legal rights, and industrialization—while suppressing opposition through a powerful security service known as SAVAK. To supporters, he was a modernizer dragging Iran into the twentieth century. To critics, he was a corrupt autocrat ruling at the pleasure of foreign powers. He modernized Iran’s economy and society, but refused to liberalize its politics, creating a growing class of educated citizens with no lawful avenue for dissent.

The United States became entangled in Iran’s fate in 1953, when it helped engineer the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. That intervention crushed Iran’s most promising experiment with parliamentary democracy and restored the Shah as a dominant ruler. In the short term, the coup secured Western access to oil and ensured a friendly government during the Cold War. In the long term, it poisoned Iranian political culture. The Shah came to be seen as an American-backed dictator. The very language of democracy was discredited as a foreign instrument. The ultimate result was that the people became revolutionaries who rallied behind Khomeini largely because he was vocally anti-American. He called America the Great Satan and became known for his slogan, which pro-Palestinians often chant: Marg bar Amrika. Death to America.

A global poison

In addition to brutalizing the people of Iran, the regime destabilizes the entire region and, in certain ways, the world. Since the 1980s, Tehran has pursued regional influence through proxy warfare, funding and arming militant groups across the Middle East. It is Iran that supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen.

In 1979, Iranian students, backed by the post-revolutionary regime, seized the American embassy and held 52 U.S. diplomats and citizens hostage for 444 days. In 1983, Hezbollah carried out a suicide truck bombing on the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, killing hundreds, all with IRGC support. In 1984, a Hezbollah car bomb, supported and directed by Iran, killed 23 people outside the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut. In 1985, Hezbollah carried out a series of coordinated bombings in Paris, again sponsored by Iran.

In 1992, a truck bomb exploded at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people and injuring 240. The blast was claimed by an Islamic Jihad faction linked to Hezbollah. Argentine courts and investigators identified Iranian involvement through proxy operatives. In 1994, a massive car bomb destroyed the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds. Argentine prosecutors formally accused the Iranian government of directing the attack through Hezbollah operatives. In 1996, Hamas suicide bombings on buses along Jaffa Road killed dozens. The operatives had been trained, armed, or funded by Iran. Also that year, a truck bomb exploded near a housing complex used by U.S. Air Force personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. servicemembers and injuring hundreds. A U.S. federal court later found that Iran financed and directed the attack through the Hezbollah al-Hejaz group.

And that’s just the highlight reel for two decades. The violence has never stopped. In addition to backing Hamas and therefore having blood on its hands for October 7, Iran also organized and carried out at least two terrorist attacks within Australia in 2024. The first occurred on October 20, when arsonists attacked a kosher restaurant in Sydney. The second took place on December 6, when arsonists firebombed the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne. To top it all off, Iran maintains a Hezbollah presence in Latin America through Venezuela, terrorizing people there too, though the capture of Maduro might weaken this network. Suffice it to say, the end of this evil regime would be a blessing to the world. So then why isn’t it the biggest news story of the day?

Media betrayal

The people of Iran are fighting a truly vile enemy, one that is a global poison to us all, and they have been fighting for longer than I’ve been alive. Finally, however, it seems they could be breaking through. Maybe this really will be their final battle. Even if they do win, that doesn’t guarantee democracy will follow. But if Iran does move toward elections, it could be one of the greatest political shifts in our lifetime. So you’d think the media would be all over the story. Well, not exactly. Writing for Honest Reporting, Rachel O’Donoghue reports on how the protests “have exposed the dishonesty, laziness, and moral cowardice of much of the Western media.” She adds:

For nearly two weeks, the Western media either buried the story or, worse, reframed it using the regime’s own talking points . . .

From The New York Times to the BBC, coverage was sparse and evasive. When the protests were mentioned at all, their explicitly anti-regime nature was often omitted. Demonstrations were reframed as vague cost-of-living protests, despite protesters chanting openly for the end of clerical rule . . .

Worse still, when journalists were challenged about their lack of coverage, several offered excuses that bordered on the absurd.

BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson claimed that social media footage must be carefully verified before reputable outlets could use it—a striking assertion given the same outlets’ willingness to publish unverified material from Gaza for months.

Channel 4 International Editor Lindsey Hilsum echoed the line, arguing that Iran is objectively difficult to cover because foreign journalists cannot enter the country.

We were expected to forget that these same journalists spent years publishing casualty figures, video footage, and testimony from a Hamas-run enclave, often without meaningful verification, attribution, or editorial caution.

When criticism became impossible to ignore, coverage did finally increase.

But instead of centering Iranian protesters and the regime’s brutality, many outlets simply pivoted to laundering Tehran’s propaganda.

The BBC and NBC News ran headlines amplifying Khamenei’s claim that protesters were vandals trying to please Trump.

Sky News led with Iranian state media allegations blaming Israel and the United States for the violence.

CNN, even while acknowledging deaths, repeatedly emphasized its inability to independently verify activist reports—a caveat that might carry weight if the network had not spent the past two years publishing Hamas-run casualty figures from Gaza with minimal skepticism or attribution.

In short: when Islamists speak, they are treated as sources. When Iranians speak, they are reduced to claims.

How Iran saved civilization

On December 14, 1959, the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi held a luncheon in honor of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who thanked the Shah by raising a toast to him and to the Iranian people, in which he said:

The American people have the greatest respect and admiration for the Iranian people. Your kings, from Cyrus and Darius, are known among those famous monarchs who have advanced the cause of humanity. Your scientists have contributed to the foundations on which we have built our industrial society. Your philosophers and poets have enriched the culture of the West. The fortitude of the Iranian people in the face of invaders, and their resoluteness in maintaining their nation through the centuries, have won admiration throughout the world.

Therefore, I propose a toast to the Shahinshah. May he continue to give wise leadership to his people. May God prosper him and them in their work of peace.

Your Majesty, your good health.

Iran is one of the greatest civilizations in human history. Cyrus the Great and his successors created the first true world empire, governing diverse peoples under a policy of religious tolerance and an administrative template that influenced every subsequent empire from Alexander to Rome. Iran is also home to the first major monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism, which introduced concepts such as the cosmic struggle between good and evil, individual moral choice, final judgment, heaven and hell, and a coming savior. These ideas profoundly shaped Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and became foundational to Western religious thought.

Persian architecture has left its mark on the world too. The Persian walled garden, known as pairidaeza, is the origin of the word “paradise,” and Persian architecture, from Persepolis to Isfahan’s mosques, established principles of symmetry and the integration of water that influenced buildings from the Taj Mahal in India to the Alhambra in Spain. The blessed people of Iran have done no less than shape the way humanity governs, believes, and dreams.

When I was 15 years old, I read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization, which makes a specific claim. Namely, that Irish monks preserved Latin texts during the chaos following Rome’s fall, then reintroduced classical learning to continental Europe. It’s a charming thesis, though medievalists often note it overstates Irish uniqueness. Byzantium, for instance, never lost the Greek classics. But the Persian claim rests on broader and more consequential ground. When the Abbasid Caliphate established Baghdad in the eighth century, it was Persian scholars, along with Syriac Christians, who undertook a systematic effort to translate Greek philosophical and scientific texts into Arabic. This wasn’t haphazard monastic copying, like in Ireland, but a state-sponsored intellectual project. And it changed everything.

Works by Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Euclid, and Ptolemy that had been lost or neglected in the Latin West were not only translated, but commented upon, and synthesized. While the Irish project was essentially curatorial, the Persian contribution went further. Avicenna didn’t merely preserve Aristotle. He developed Aristotelian philosophy in ways that later shaped Aquinas. Al-Khwarizmi didn’t just translate Indian mathematics. He needed a method to resolve inheritance disputes and land surveying. The Quran specifies precise fractional shares for various heirs, and when multiple heirs with competing claims existed, he calculated each share by developing and solving linear and quadratic equations. Existing arithmetic wasn’t up to the task, so he simply created algebra.

When 12th century European scholars began translating Arabic texts into Latin, primarily in Toledo and Sicily, they were recovering Greek knowledge filtered through Persian and Arab commentary. Avicenna’s Canon and Averroes’s Aristotelian commentaries became curriculum staples in European universities. The Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity depended substantially on this Arabic-Persian bridge. The Irish contribution, though valuable, was geographically limited and lasted a few centuries while the Persian contribution sustained itself for over a millennium and extended from Spain to India.

That’s not all. The Persian polymath Avicenna (Ibn Sina) compiled his thoughts on medical science in the year 1025 in his Canon of Medicine, which remained the standard medical textbook in European universities until the 1700s. His philosophical synthesis of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic thought shaped both Islamic and Christian scholasticism, where his most influential contribution was his distinction between essence and existence. In Aristotelian thought, things have essences—what makes a horse a horse, a triangle a triangle. But Aristotle didn’t really address why things exist. Avicenna argued that for everything except God, essence and existence are separate. You can understand what a horse, or a unicorn, is without knowing whether any horses or unicorns actually exist. This led to his proof for God’s existence, in which he said things can exist or not, but God must exist because God is existence, or wajib al-wujud, the Necessary Being whose essence is existence itself. If this sounds simple to you, you are failing to understand it. But that’s an essay for another time.

Enter Trump

President Donald Trump has responded publicly and unusually forcefully to events in Iran. He seems to uniquely recognize the scale of the threat we face. He has warned the Iranian regime against massacring protesters and suggested that violent repression could provoke severe consequences, including military or economic escalation. Reporting indicates that Trump-aligned policymakers have discussed a range of options from symbolic support for protesters to direct coercive measures.

He’s not bluffing either. In his first term, Trump eliminated Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds force. In his second term, he ordered the attack on the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear facilities. The ominously named Operation Midnight Hammer was a U.S. overnight strike in late June aimed at crippling Iran’s nuclear program at its most hardened points, notably the deeply buried Fordow facility, along with Natanz and infrastructure near Isfahan, using long-range B-2 stealth bombers flying nonstop from the United States.

The operation was historically significant for the first-ever combat use of the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a bunker-buster designed to destroy underground facilities previously considered unreachable by conventional weapons. The GBU-57 slams into the earth with incredible velocity and burrows deep before detonating. It doesn’t explode its target, but causes it to collapse and implode on itself. At the same time, U.S. Navy submarines launched Tomahawk cruise missiles at surface targets. Israeli President Isaac Herzog thanked America and said the mission advanced security for “the free world,” which is undoubtedly true. Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said it was “clearly grounds for impeachment.”

Sometimes they laugh

That reaction by AOC is perhaps predictable. But if we’re looking around the room at reactions to what’s happening in Iran, or what the United States has done to address this threat, the story gets darker still. The Western media isn’t the only one being silent. In The Wall Street Journal, editor-at-large Gerard Baker writes in his essay “Iran Cracks Down. Where Are the Western Protests?”:

Where are the protests in the West? Specifically, where are all those defenders of persecuted Muslims who have been so active on the streets of New York, London, Sydney, Rome and elsewhere the past two years? Where are the demands for justice and freedom for the downtrodden victims of a brutally repressive state?

What is so different about the cause they have been espousing in their demonstrations over Gaza and the cause of the millions of innocent coreligionists 1,000 miles to their east? Those kaffiyeh-wearing, banner-waving, slogan-chanting activists say they were moved to protest, sometimes violently and unlawfully, by the plight of Muslims dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods, immiserated, starved, beaten and murdered by a savage regime.

In Iran, this has been happening for decades. More than three million Iranians have been driven from their homeland in the 47 years of the mullahs’ rule. People have been forced into prisons (literal ones—not the metaphorical “open-air prison” of Gaza) or into exile in foreign lands, their homes and property stolen, their loved ones punished and frequently murdered.

Where, indeed? Maybe they’d find the time to hit the street if their brutal oppressors wore yarmulkes instead of turbans. But their soulless silence isn’t even the half of it. Leftists, the same ones who would be first on the chopping block—literally—are the same to chant “Death to America” and “Hands off Iran.” These depraved psychopaths do not chant, “Hands off Iranian women.” The head of the Democratic Socialists of America’s international committee posted, “Long live Ayatollah Khomeini & the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The socialist influencer Hasan Piker has mocked the dead and, laughing, called their murder “poetry.”

The fight is far from over. Many in Iran still support the current regime. The protesters face an uphill battle. And even if they do succeed, there’s no guarantee that what comes next will be liberation. Many of the fighters themselves are just another flavor of radical Islam. But I pray for the people, for the women, for all the lions of Iran, and for their noble cause. And I listen for silence and laughter, and make a promise to myself to never forget where it came from.

In William F. Buckley Jr.’s Guide to Friendship in a Polarized Era: Lessons in Civility from a Catholic Conservative Icon, author Josh Cohen explores how meaningful friendships can be sustained even in times of intense political division. Drawing on the life and example of Buckley, who famously engaged people across ideological lines, the book argues that sharp disagreement doesn’t have to mean hostility and that principles such as civility, Christian ethics, and open dialogue can be restored to public life.

Cohen is a writer and editor based in Minnesota. He hosts the blog Eyewitness History, where every week he shows listeners a passage from history through the eyes of the people that watched the events that shaped our world.

Late last night, and early today, at my direction, the United States Armed Forces conducted an extraordinary military operation in the capital of Venezuela. Overwhelming American military power—air, land, and sea—was used to launch a spectacular assault.

Subscribe now

These were Trump’s opening words during yesterday’s press conference announcing the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. A few concerns here. Forcibly seizing a sitting head of state within his own country is potentially a violation of international law. Specifically, the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force. Exceptions are narrowly limited to self-defense against an armed attack and UN approval. Not to mention, using our military to enforce U.S. criminal charges abroad dangerously blurs the line between law enforcement and war. Imagine China trying to enforce its laws on U.S. soil, which they already do, or snatching a head of state as we just did. We should want countries to go through multilateral, diplomatic channels of action. This is how we foster international stability. On the other hand, Maduro was an evil man who enslaved an entire nation and we just cut their chains. China, if it did something similar, would be acting in the opposite direction of liberty. And yes, there is a difference between breaking the law to free people and breaking it to enslave them. This is also where Christopher Hitchens would lean in to say intervention can be justified if it removes a murderous tyranny and advances universal human rights, and taking out Maduro easily passes that test.

Indeed, there have been only a handful of dictators worse than Maduro in the entire history of Latin America. Trujillo in the Dominican Republic stands apart as the worst of all, followed by Pinochet and his empire of torture in Chile. The strongman Batista, so brutal a figure he helped radicalize Cuba into the arms of a communist apocalypse, is third on that list. But Maduro is not far behind, and worse than many more. Worse than Hugo Chávez, for example, who rewrote Venezuela’s constitution to weaken checks and balances, packed courts and electoral bodies with loyalists, expropriated private industry and oil revenues, crushed independent media, empowered the military and colectivos, hollowed out democratic institutions, presided over extrajudicial killings by security forces, and tortured detainees—activists, protesters, officers who weren’t dirty—with beatings, prolonged isolation, agonizing stress positions, asphyxiation, and electric shock. All of which, naturally, directly enabled Maduro’s rule and the nation’s economic collapse. All of which, inarguably, pales in comparison to what came after. Maduro was also worse than Noriega. Worse even than Castro with all his firing squads, show trials, mass executions, gulags for dissidents, gays, and Christians, worse than all of that.

Leftists, the same ones who will look you in the face and defend the slaughter of infants in their cribs using farm tools during Nat Turner’s Rebellion, or the genocidal executions under Lenin, or Hamas butchering teenagers at a concert, or Pakistani immigrants in England gang raping little girls, all because it furthers the Cause, will tell you it’s wrong to capture Maduro. “Hands off Venezuela!” they’re already chanting as they march in Los Angeles, Toronto, and hundreds of other cities. But for added context, you should know that Hands Off Venezuela isn’t just a slogan, it’s an organization founded by the International Marxist Tendency, formerly known as the Revolutionary Communist International. What’s more, the guy who founded Hands Off Venezuela, Ted Grant, was a huge admirer of Chávez and personally met with him many times over the years, leading to speculation that he was one of the dictator’s close political advisers. But Grant spent most of his adult life living among the Victorian and Edwardian terraced house of Islington in north London, not in the Caracas slums of Cota 905 or La Silsa, where murderous gangs run by Maduro turn the ghetto streets into war zones that make East St. Louis look like the suburbs of Chesterfield. So Grant can kindly shut the fuck up.

But Maduro’s capture presents yet another problem. Trump cannot initiate an act of war, or something functionally equivalent, without congressional authorization. A unilateral capture risks violating the War Powers Resolution and bypassing Congress’s exclusive authority to authorize force. Then again, President Obama authorized a unilateral Navy SEAL raid deep inside Pakistan, killing Osama bin Laden without Pakistan’s consent or prior congressional approval, and justifying it under the 2001 AUMF and inherent Article II powers as a limited counterterrorism operation rather than an act of war. Stephen Colbert opened his show that week by leading the studio audience in a chorus of U-S-A! U-S-A! before opening, “Suck my giant American balls, Al-Qaeda! Folks, I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl who just shot bin Laden in the eye.” Jon Stewart was no less thrilled. On The Daily Show, he famously declared, “Last night was a good night for me. And not just for New York or D.C. or America, but for human people … Al Qaeda’s opportunity is gone … Can they still do damage? I’m sure. But we’re back, baby.” He added:

I just want details. What look did he give when bin Laden realized the helicopters overhead were not giving traffic and weather updates? You think he pulled a Culkin? Maybe he gave a little more dramatic chipmunk? ... Believe me, he wasn’t expecting it. You know, he was living in some staid and upscale Pakistani suburb for some time when we got him. You know this guy’s out there preaching suicide bombing and jihad, pretending he’s Gandalf wandering the frontier, all the while he’s living like one of the housewives of Orange County.

Rachel Maddow also weighed in:

This is the day they got bin Laden. This is the Situation Room. And that is probably as much as any of us need to know about what exactly the president of the United States was thinking while it happened. … I think it’s just incredible.

But after Trump’s capture of Maduro this week, Maddow’s reaction was not celebratory at all. Rather, she troubled the news with concerns about Trump’s real motives, what this means, and the impact it might have. She looked deeply troubled. Funny how that works. But for all her concerns, which are not unreasonable—it’s her unprincipled hypocrisy I disdain—and the ones I’ve already listed here myself, but also as someone who knows the horrors of what Maduro wrought, I have to confess, Trump’s opening words struck a patriotic chord in my heart. Maduro was an evil man who plagued millions. But Trump didn’t execute him. He captured Maduro, who will now face justice in court. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann was abducted in Argentina by Mossad agents and secretly flown to Israel, where he was tried and executed. Even then, the scales were not balanced. But who thinks it was wrong to take him? If Mossad had put two .32 ACPs between Eichmann’s eyes, it would have been too good for the bastard. Maduro is no Eichmann, but he is the worst living dictator in the entire Western Hemisphere.

It was an assault like people have not seen since World War II. It was a force against a heavily fortified military fortress in the heart of Caracas. To bring outlawed dictator Nicolás Maduro to justice. This was one of the most stunning, effective, and powerful displays of American military might and competence in American history. And if you think about it, we’ve done some other good ones, like the attack on Soleimani, the attack on al-Baghdadi, and the obliteration and decimation of the Iran nuclear sites, just recently, in an operation known as Midnight Hammer. All perfectly executed and done. No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday or, frankly, in just a short period of time.

Trump later added:

If you would have seen what I saw last night, you would have been very impressed. I’m not sure that you’ll ever get to see it. But it was an incredible thing to see. Not a single American service member was killed. And not a single piece of American equipment was lost. We had many helicopters, many planes, many, many people involved in that fight. But think of that. Not one piece of military equipment was lost. Not one service member was, more importantly, killed. The United States military is the strongest and most fearsome military on the planet by far, with capabilities and skills, our enemies can scarcely begin to imagine.

Trump then explained that Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, have both been indicted in the Southern District of New York, “For their campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens.” I’ll be damned, I said to myself. Donald Trump just pulled a Batman. In The Dark Knight, the mob accountant Lau flees to Hong Kong, thinking himself safe. The Joker shows up to a meeting of Gotham’s crime bosses and says of Lau, “As for his so-called plan, Batman has no jurisdiction. He’ll find him and make him squeal. I can tell the squealers every time.” One wonders if Maduro squealed. Batman slips into Hong Kong in at night and rips Lau out of the window of a skyscraper, extracting him midair, proving no one is beyond justice under his watch. But Batman is a vigilante. Not a president. Still, the story Trump narrated earlier today sounded like it fell from the pages of a comic about Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos. Silent insertion, flawless capture, exfiltration, no U.S. fatalities. And with every word, my mind fell back to the millions upon millions of Venezuelans who now weep for joy that America has returned to them their cherished freedom. I am not blind to the problems with how this went down, but thinking of all those people, it makes me proud to be an American. In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols writes:

President Donald Trump has launched not a splendid little war, but perhaps a splendid little operation in Venezuela. He has captured a dictator and removed him from power. So far, Trump seems to have executed a bad idea well: The military operation, dubbed “Operation Absolute Resolve,” seems to have been flawless. The strategic wisdom, however, is deeply questionable. And the legal basis, as offered by the president and his team, is absurd. Some Americans, and some U.S. allies, are appalled.

Russia and China claim to be appalled, too, but to use a classic diplomatic expression, the leaders in Beijing and Moscow should be invited, with all due respect, to shut their traps.

No kidding. Putin and Xi ought to pray we don’t turn our attention their way next. If Trump captured Putin in a similarly flawless mission and dropped him off, gift-wrapped on the steps of the National Police in Kyiv, ending the war overnight and possibly leading to the recovery of the 20,000 children who were torn from their parents and deported into the dark heart of Russia, would we look back on that moment in history decades later as a gross example of American imperialism? Or would we regard it, like Eichmann’s capture, as a rare but glorious moment when dictatorial monsters were not only defeated, but defeated in the courts rather than shot in their beds? More importantly, what would Ukrainians think? What would Russians think, whose sons would no longer be fed into the meat grinder of Putin’s psychopathic war? What do Venezuelans think today?

We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. We don’t wanna be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. It has to be judicious. Because that’s what we’re all about. We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela. And that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country. It’s their homeland. We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind. We’ve had decades of that. We’re not going to let that happen. … We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.

This addresses concerns about a power vacuum, or one of Maduro’s henchmen taking over, or the failure of the economy to restart, thus leading to systemic collapse and eventually state failure once again. Of course, we wouldn’t have stepped in if there was nothing in it for us. We do not actually purely out of selfless Christian virtue, nor should we take any such rhetoric seriously. But if we can liberate 30 million slaves, give them back the democracy that was stolen from them, rebuild their economy so that they and their children may flourish, and serve justice to their former master, how much moral discount should we factor into our analysis that we make a pretty penny in the process? We must not, however, seize Venezuela’s oil for ourselves. That is their wealth. But also, that is not what Trump describes when he talks about spending billions to fix a broken infrastructure. We spent lavishly to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II, $13 billion on Germany alone under the Marshall Plan, all of which was to our profound benefit—but even so, it was still the right and noble thing to do.

I think it can be colorably argued that there is no other way to have done this. Sanctions have done nothing to change Maduro’s behavior, much less his tyrannical regime, though they did make life harder for the people. So you either leave Maduro to murder and rape millions for the next few decades, and who knows, maybe a full century if the man who comes after him is as bad or even worse, or you stop him, and if you stop him, now having involved yourself, you have a duty to the people. But to leftist critics, of course, all this will look like colonialism. The problem they are going to have with that argument is that Venezuelans couldn’t possibly be happier.

Besides, American interests in Venezuela are not exclusively altruistic. Maduro was responsible for harming our own citizens too.

The illegitimate dictator Maduro was the kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs into the United States, as alleged in the indictment. He personally oversaw the vicious cartel known as Cartel de las Solis, which flooded our nation with lethal poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans. Many, many Americans, hundreds of thousands over the years, of Americans, died because of him. … Maduro remained in power and waged a ceaseless campaign of violence, terror, and subversion against the United States of America, threatening not only our people but the stability of the entire region. And you also saw, in addition to trafficking gigantic amounts of illegal drugs, that he inflicted untold suffering and human destruction all over the country. All over. In particular, in the United States. Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities nationwide. And he did indeed. They were in Colorado. They took over apartment complexes. They cut the fingers off people if they called the police. They were brutal. But they’re not so brutal now. … The gangs that they sent raped, tortured, and murdered American women and children. They were in all of the cities I mentioned, Tren de Aragua. And they were sent by Maduro to terrorize our people and now Maduro will never again be able to threaten an American citizen or anybody from Venezuela.

People may be wondering whether this is good intelligence or Trump playing fast and loose with the facts, as he so often does. Did Maduro actually send Tren de Aragua to terrorize foreign citizens in their own countries, including in the United States? If so, that would potentially be an act of war. The UN Charter’s Article 2 says a state may not use force against another state’s territory or people, but that isn’t limited to a formal military invasion. Sending armed killers counts too. In April, the Human Rights Foundation reported, “Venezuela’s Maduro continues to use Tren de Aragua for transnational repression, kidnapping, assassination.” The report said:

On Feb. 21, 2024, Ronald Ojeda — a 32-year-old former Venezuelan army lieutenant living in exile in Chile — was abducted from his home in Santiago by individuals posing as police officers. Days later, his dismembered body was discovered inside a concrete-encased suitcase. Ojeda had fled Venezuela in 2017 after facing persecution for his anti-regime activities and was granted political asylum in Chile in 2023. Chilean authorities quickly identified the perpetrators as members of Tren de Aragua, Venezuela’s largest criminal network.

Chilean investigators suspected the assassination was ordered by Maduro as retaliation for Ojeda’s activism, and formally classified the case as a state-ordered political assassination. Attorney General Ángel Valencia agreed. The report adds:

For years, the Maduro regime has harbored and enabled Tren de Aragua. Born within Venezuela’s prison system, the gang expanded under the protection of Maduro’s inner circle. Until a raid in late 2023, Tren de Aragua operated openly from Tocorón prison in Aragua state — a facility transformed into a fortified criminal compound complete with pools, nightclubs, and armories, functioning as a “liberated territory” with government acquiescence. Security experts have long noted that the regime co-opted criminal groups like Tren de Aragua as enforcers, deploying them to attack pro-democracy protesters and eliminate political opponents. Operatives have effectively acted as an extension of the regime’s repressive apparatus, shielded by official impunity and alleged financial ties to state officials.

If Tren de Aragua takes orders from Maduro then its theft, drug trafficking, extortion, sex trafficking, and murders in Chicago, New York City, parts of Colorado, El Paso, Salt Lake City, and other U.S. cities are acts of war, no different than if Maduro had sent black ops forces into U.S. territory. It’s important to understand that Tren de Aragua is best documented in the United States not as a major drug cartel, but as possibly the largest network in the country for sex slavery and human trafficking. And where are Western feminists to raise a placard for this? Sadly, hiding in the same place as when the conversation turns round to the fact that Pakistani immigrants are raping little girls or that Somalis butcher their women as a common practice. Namely, on their hands and knees combing through the grass for another opportunity to blame white Western men.

Early last year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee announced a federal indictment charging eight Venezuelans tied to a multi-state human trafficking and sex slavery conspiracy centered in Nashville. Prosecutors say the defendants worked together to recruit poor, young, vulnerable girls from Central and South America, mostly Venezuelans, under false promises of a better life, then got them to Tennessee—as well as New York, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Denver, Nashville, Miami—told them they now owed massive debts with massive interest piling up, and sexually enslaved them to be repeatedly raped on a daily basis by men who contacted Tren de Aragua using WhatsApp and other messaging platforms, specifying what they wanted to do to the girls, and paying a higher price for more “exotic” pleasures. Let your mind sit with that for a minute or two. Recall it when you see people chanting, “Hands off Venezuela,” because what they really mean is “Hands off Maduro.” And the natural reply should be, “Hands off Venezuelans.”

America can project our will anywhere, anytime. The coordination, the stealth, the lethality, the precision, the very long arm of American justice, all on full display in the middle of the night. Nicolás Maduro had his chance. Just like Iran had their chance. Until they didn’t, and until he didn’t. He effed around. And he found out.

In Lima, you have to open your taxi door carefully because a motorbike could be ripping by. The bikes cut through traffic, tearing past dented, unmarked taxis, overcrowded combis, and Mitsubishi Coaster buses painted with images of saints and skulls. A bus lurches to a sudden stop mid-lane to scoop up passengers and a man steps out of his Toyota Corolla behind it to scream that the bus driver is a cholo. “La puta que te parió,” he says, and gets back in his car. Another bike rips past—a Rappi deliveryman in his dusty orange company jacket, riding a 110cc with the big orange insulated delivery box on the back. But sometimes, one of them pulls up on you as you’re stuck in traffic, right alongside your window, and lingers. If they stick a gun in your window, you’ve got maybe two seconds to realize what’s happening and hand over everything you’ve got—and if you flinch, they’ll shoot you in the face.

Subscribe now

The motero crime wave began in early 2018, with locals in Lima noting well over a thousand of these assault robberies in just the first months of that year. It wasn’t a mystery where it came from either. Most of the moteros were Venezuelans. The year before, a large wave of Venezuelans had entered Peru. In 2016, there were about 8,000 of them in the country. By the end of 2017, there were around 110,000. Estimates suggest from 2017 to 2019, 800,000 more flooded into the country. And they weren’t just motero muggers. A friend of mine told me a story about an old woman who owned a simple bodega, selling mostly soft drinks and crackers and fruit. She’d been there for decades. But some Venezuelans decided they were going to open a rival bodega nearby, and they didn’t want competition, so they told the old woman to shut her business down. The old woman refused, because she had no other way to survive. So they shot her son in front of her.

Long before the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua began making national headlines in the United States, I had come to know the name during my years in Lima. I suppose there was some early mention of the group around 2021, when U.S. federal law enforcement and Latin America specialists began noticing the group’s expansion through South America, and so if you were looking for it, the gang’s name did occasionally appear in specialist reports and court documents. But it was not yet a household name. The gang broke into mainstream U.S. media in 2023, when police and prosecutors in New York City, Chicago, and parts of Texas publicly linked specific violent crimes—robberies, sex trafficking, organized theft rings—to Tren de Aragua–affiliated suspects. This coincided with a broader national debate over immigration, crime, and border enforcement. Then in 2024, a series of high-profile arrests, law-enforcement briefings, and congressional rhetoric turned the gang, along with MS-13, into a shorthand for transnational crime.

The spread of Venezuelan criminal groups abroad—especially Tren de Aragua—is often mistakenly blamed on Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro allegedly emptying the prisons. I had heard this story during my time in Lima, and I’ve heard it repeated since. But the reality is more complex, and more structural. Venezuela’s utter collapse over the past decade led to a prison system that effectively disintegrated, with several major facilities becoming inmate-run spaces where gangs organized freely, accumulated weapons, controlled territory, and developed transnational ambitions. It was like Haiti, but behind bars. There is no documented nationwide decree ordering the mass release of ordinary criminals, but that’s not to say Maduro is innocent. His ruinous, and frankly evil, regime has resulted in porous borders, corruption, and administrative chaos that made it easy for people—including gang members—to move in and out of the country. When millions of Venezuelans fled between roughly 2017 and 2019, overwhelmingly for economic and humanitarian reasons, organized gang members traveled along the same migration routes, blending in with refugees and later rebuilding cells, even entire criminal networks, in destination countries such as Peru and the United States. Maduro didn’t open the prisons, per se, but he created the hell that gave birth to these groups, and tore his own country apart to the point that the prisons no longer functioned and the borders were no longer secure.

Cañas

There’s a bar in Miraflores, downtown Lima, down a side street off Avenida José Pardo. The name of the bar is Cañas, meaning sugarcane. Or sometimes, cane liquor. It was directly next to my apartment building, close enough that I could get there in a torrential downpour, walking hugged against the building, without getting wet. I came to think of it as an extension of my living room.

I went there for the pisco sours. I had made a study of the pisco sour by then. I’d gone to the Morris Bar on the old Jirón de la Unión in central Lima, where the drink was invented. I’d been to Hotel Maury, where they refined the recipe by adding egg white and bitters, and to Hotel B, my favorite bar in the city. Eventually, I’d gotten so good at making them myself, I couldn’t find a place that satisfied me. It’s not an easy drink, and some part of the recipe is always in flux, uncontrollable, but given enough experience, mostly predictable. The limes, for example, vary in sweetness from one to the next. And the egg always adds a variable to the mix. But I had become obsessed, and had nearly touched perfection once or twice along the way. I knew my work was good when Peruvians at parties began asking me, the gringo, to make their Pisco sours.

It’s a lovely drink too. Heavy, bright, refreshing. Apparently, it was created at the Morris by an American bartender who, lacking whiskey, had improvised with the local brandy. Now, that might suggest that this is actually an American drink at heart. But here’s the twist. The whiskey sour he was trying to replicate had itself been invented by a Peruvian in San Francisco decades earlier. The cocktail had crossed the border twice. But it was at Cañas, where a Venezuelan named Luis made the best pisco sour in the city. Other than my own, of course. I think his secret was that he beat the egg white to silk. Luis and I used to talk long, as I’d watch him make my pisco sours, in the slow hours of the evening. He told me about growing up in Venezuela. How beautiful the country was. How much he missed it. And how he would never go back.

The government had destroyed his home, he said. Not his house, but his home, the country itself, and he was lucky to be alive. Once, I came in and found he was drinking himself, which he never did. I ordered a pisco sour, and then another, and we began to talk, and he began to tell me the story of how he walked to Lima. The whole way. He had traveled with his little sister, though he didn’t tell me her name. She liked to pick flowers along the way, he said. Roadside flowers. She’d pick a few, and act like she was going to keep them forever, like they were her new friends. A little later, once they’d wilted, she would place them down on the side of the road. This struck him, because back in Venezuela, flowers on the side of the road were usually placed to remember the dead, often someone who had died in a car accident in that exact spot. People called them flores de muerto. Flowers of death. She liked to sing songs at night, to keep herself from being afraid of the dark. There were a lot of other people on the path, fleeing Venezuela, and not all of them were good people. A beautiful girl like her, and so young too, she could be an easy target. He never told me exactly what happened to her, only that she didn’t make it to Peru.

It was at Cañas that I asked my wife’s father for permission to marry his daughter. My Spanish was still rough, but I made sure to do it in Spanish, and he gave me a talking-to about taking care of her, and I listened to every word. Then Luis brought us pisco sours and we drank until the evening blurred. Not long after that, COVID hit. Peru had the highest per capita death rate in the world at one point, and subsequently, the strictest lockdown in the world. The lockdown was so strict that a man I knew got arrested for stepping outside without a mask to put his trash on the corner. A woman I knew would fill a backpack with groceries and walk around the block, pretending she was coming home from shopping, just to breathe fresh air. For eight months, I didn’t leave my apartment a single time. When the lockdown finally lifted and Cañas reopened, I went back. The bar looked the same. But Luis was gone. I never learned what happened to him, and never heard from him again.

El Burro

The man who might have pointed a rifle at me in traffic and the man who made my drinks came from the same country, and fled the same regime. One was a product of the hell Maduro created, the other a product of the economy he collapsed. Maduro inherited power in 2013 with a thin electoral mandate and a deteriorating economy. When opposition victories and economic contraction threatened his position, he chose survival over reform. What emerged was not simply an inefficient state, but a repurposed one. The security apparatus became an instrument of political control. Venezuela’s Special Action Forces, the FAES, carried out lethal raids in poor neighborhoods under the guise of anti-crime operations. They became death squads. United Nations investigators documented a consistent pattern: victims shot at close range, evidence staged to simulate confrontations, families threatened into silence. The UN concluded that the killings were not aberrations, but policy. It recommended that FAES be dissolved. Earlier reporting by then–UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet attributed thousands of deaths to security operations.

Opposition leaders, protesters, journalists, and suspected dissident officers were arrested and held in facilities like El Helicoide, a former shopping center converted into a political prison. Testimony collected by UN investigators describes electric shocks, asphyxiation, prolonged stress positions, beatings, and rape used to extract confessions and intimidate networks. There were, of course, protests. In 2014, 2017, and 2019. There were elections too. And then, after all that, Maduro threw thousands of people, especially anyone he could pinpoint as having taken part in those protests, into a dungeon. Protest itself was criminalized. Demonstrations were met with live ammunition and armored vehicles. Armed pro-government colectivos attacked protesters alongside police, providing plausible deniability while chilling dissent. The press was systematically targeted. Independent outlets were closed or blocked, reporters arrested or forced into exile. The state oil company PDVSA was transformed into a patronage machine as billions were siphoned through inflated contracts, shell companies, and opaque oil-for-cash swaps. Meanwhile, purges of technical staff accelerated the collapse of production long before heavy sanctions took effect—despite what the vile Marxists at the Grayzone or Jacobin, who carry water for this psychopath, would argue. Even The Nation has downplayed his evils. Even programs designed to alleviate suffering became vehicles for theft. The CLAP food program routed contracts through offshore firms tied to insiders, not to mention boxes were overpriced and poor in nutrition, turning mass hunger into a revenue stream.

Of course, as the economic pressure mounted, Maduro’s regime built sanctions-evasion networks, selling oil at steep discounts through intermediaries and moving payments via front companies, gold shipments, and cryptocurrencies to secure elite liquidity rather than national recovery. U.S. prosecutors charged Maduro and senior officials with narco-terrorism, alleging coordination with Colombia’s FARC to traffic cocaine and corrupt state institutions. The consequences spilled across borders. Venezuela’s collapse produced nearly 8 million refugees—the largest displacement crisis in the Western Hemisphere—placing heavy strain on Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and beyond. The violence and oppression created by Maduro—known as El Burro, “The Donkey”—have torn Venezuela apart and rippled across all of Latin America, and into the United States. Those millions of refugees are forever changed, most of them for the worse. They walked the same roads Luis and his sister walked. Some of them, like Luis, found work and rebuilt. Some of them died along the way, left behind along the road like so many flores de muerto. Others ended up in strange new lands, impoverished, too old to start again, broken by the family lost along the way. And some ended up on motorbikes in Lima traffic with rifles in their hands.

La Patria

This morning, I woke up to the news that President Trump claims to have captured El Burro. He plans to have a news conference at 11am today at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, where he’s spending New Year’s week. Naturally, there will be conversations, and debates, about U.S. foreign policy. There will be outrage from the Marxists at Jacobin. I am sure we will be treated to young leftists in the streets protesting U.S. power and defending Maduro. But among so many homeless and broken Venezuelans, there will be cheers. The faces of so many abuelas from La Patria will be covered in tears. So many brothers and sons will be utterly overwhelmed, thinking of a possible reunion on the horizon. And what of Venezuela? Will it descend into chaos? Will Maduro’s bootprint remain fixed on the face of the nation? Will gangs take over and turn the country into something like Haiti? Maduro is the most economically destructive dictator in world history, not including destruction by war. He inherited oil wealth, functioning institutions, and regional power—and managed to destroy all three. Will Venezuela rise again once he’s out of the way? Imagine what that could do for its 30 million inhabitants, its 8 million people overseas, or the 126 million in Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, whose countries have been made poorer, and markedly less safe, all because of one Marxist dictator.

I’m not especially interested in providing a sweeping, big-picture analysis of how the Maduro regime emerged, how Venezuela’s economy unraveled, what role the United States or sanctions may have played, or in parsing the statistics of collapse that have already been endlessly litigated elsewhere. I just wanted to share with you my very small window on a country that was once great, now that some glimmer of light possibly promises to return. Before El Burro, the cities worked. Caracas had congestion and crime, yes, but also reliable electricity, stocked supermarkets, universities that still drew regional talent, and a middle class that planned vacations as opposed to exits. Cafés were full, bookstores open, and bars loud late into the night. The oil economy distorted things, but it also propped the nation up. Salaries meant something. Savings existed. You could imagine a future for yourself and your kids.

The country itself felt open and generous. Beaches were clean and accessible, not overrun or rationed. Clear water, white sand, families relaxing all day long with coolers and radios playing salsa. The Andes were green, the plains expansive, the coast like something from a postcard. It was heaven. Domestic tourism was normal, people traveled within their own country because they could afford to, because roads functioned, because hotels operated without generators. Venezuelans were proud, and rightfully so. Most of all, there was social ease. Business disputes didn’t require political loyalty. Police were not universally feared. The state was inefficient, sometimes corrupt, but it was not a weapon turned against its own people. Venezuela before Maduro was no utopia. But it was something greater. It was a home, a home to many who have long hoped to return, and some who never can. Venezuelans have a lot of street smarts. Viveza criolla, they call it. Let the people have their country back, and I am sure they will do wonderful things. And to all my Venezolano friends, pa’lante.

It’s been a wild year. Much of my writing this year revolved around race, as I kept returning to the ways in which elite institutions denounce racism while practicing a subtler version of it themselves. I explored this in “The banal provocation of Doreen St. Felix’s racism,” and at greater length in “Every racist writer at the New Yorker, in their own words,” where I simply let these racists speak for themselves. Sometimes, the most devastating critique is a mirror.

Subscribe now

During these past 12 months, a lot has rightfully been said about the damage President Trump is doing to our democracy, some of it by yours truly. But I part ways with friends who insist nothing on the left compares. Trump changed the Republican Party. But what I’ve been documenting this year is a harm that may prove more durable. Namely, a transformation of American institutions themselves—our schools, newspapers, publishing houses, and scientific outlets. One is a political threat, confined to an admittedly dominant but potentially transient faction within one party. The other is structural, making America more racist, sexist, religiously bigoted, more intolerant of opposing viewpoints, and less capable of parsing basic scientific facts about reality—all in ways that will likely be with us for decades to come.

Then there was violence. Not just the metaphorical kind, but the real thing. I wrote about Antifa—not to pretend it’s a centralized organization, but to push back against those who pretend it isn’t really a thing at all. In September, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, shot in the neck for the crime of having an opinion. In the aftermath, I discussed how publications and colleagues that would have canonized a slain activist on their own side, or even a criminal like George Floyd, literally laugh out loud at his execution or rushed to present him as morally repugnant using misleading clips, distortions, and lies. I also wrote about what Kirk represented, and about why the left has produced no equivalent figure willing to sit in a chair on a hostile campus and say, “Prove me wrong.” In addition to pretending Antifa isn’t real, or that Kirk was a Nazi, other stories were simply ignored when they didn’t feed certain racist, anti-white narratives. When a deranged black man murdered an innocent white Ukrainian refugee, the lack of coverage was instructive, and I tried to make that lesson plain in “The racist silence over Iryna Zarutska.”

Share

On gender, I’ve tried to hold a position that shouldn’t be controversial. Trans individuals deserve dignity and compassion, but dignity doesn’t require us to abandon the category of biological sex, or to pretend that a policy question is settled science. I debated this, and watched my interlocutor deny making arguments even as I quoted them back to him in real time. Thankfully, we can all breathe a deep sigh of relief that strong cultural signals indicate this stupid, and often evil, movement is coming to an end, as I covered in the essay “America detransitions.” I also wrote about the crisis facing young men. As a former Big Brother mentor and schoolteacher, I’ve watched this problem simmer for years. What’s new is the open contempt from progressive women who can barely bring themselves to care, and who blame men for seeking support from the people who love them, which I lamented in “How feminists are weaponizing love.” I also wrote about another troubling issue that threatens our way of life in the West, and which the left refuses to acknowledge as such—immigration—by covering topics ranging from Pakistani rape gangs in the UK and the Manchester synagogue attack to the Somali fraud scandal in Minnesota, and more.

I continued to write about Gaza, too. About the absurdity of the genocide claim, the moral failures within Palestinian culture, and their predictably violent refusal to let the Europeans who welcomed them as refugees celebrate Christmas in peace. Turning my eye back to U.S. politics, I followed the political rise of Zohran Mamdani, the new Marxist mayor of New York, who I profiled in a two-part essay on the man and his politics. The damage he’ll do will likely be limited. But it will last.

Finally, I tried to write about what’s worth preserving. Why blue-collar culture matters. An unexpected, if superficial, example in civility from Trump and Mamdani. I also praised Ben Shapiro’s TPUSA speech, in which he showed the courage to attack antisemitism and conspiracy thinking on his own side.

Subscribe now

This wasn’t a year for comfort. It was a year for noticing—a practice that has fallen out of fashion in some corners. If this work accomplished anything, I hope it served as a record, written while the arguments were still hot and before memory could be revised. That, at least, is what a year in review ought to be. Next year, I’ll be doing more of it. Long-form investigations, original reporting, and essays that take time to get right. If you’ve found value in this work, a paid subscription is the best way to keep it going. Please share my work with friends and family too. Thank you.

Happy New Year,
David

“The future of this country relies on truth.”
– Ben Shapiro

In the 1930s, a necrotic tumor of antisemitism, isolationism, and conspiracism threatened to destroy the credibility of the Republican Party. Figures like “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin, Henry Ford, and the isolationist America First movement forced the party to choose between populist currents and a principled stand against prejudice and misinformation. The Party made the right decision then, and the consequences were profound, but the past has a way of returning. Nearly a hundred years on, Republicans now face the same question.

For much of American history before those days, the Republican Party enjoyed a reputation of moral purpose and popular reform. While the Democrats favored states’ rights and slavery, Republicans believed America meant something. Founded in 1854 in opposition to the expansion of slavery, the Grand Old Party fought for the Union, its Constitution, and freedom from aristocratic slavers. That reputation did not survive the Great Depression, but it was real. Democrats flipped this perspective under President Roosevelt, whose New Deal provided the public of the 1930s some measure of recovery and relief. In the process, they rebranded public provision and the expansion of state power as the will of the people and cast Republicans as the very elites they had always opposed. But it was in those crucial years that Republican leaders, particularly men like President Hoover and Senator Joseph I. France, who demonstrated true moral leadership by condemning the growing bigotry and ignorance on their side of the line. Externally, Republicans clarified their image as a sane and centrist alternative to the Democrats. Internally, the purge reinforced the boundaries of acceptable discourse within party ranks. Last week, history repeated.

In a fiery speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest Conference, Ben Shapiro went scorched earth on Candace Owens and the rot of antisemitism and conspiracy thinking that has eaten its way into Republican politics. He did not mince his words.

Today, I want to talk about the future of the country—this amazing country. It relies on what we need to find as our core mission. Most of all, the future of this country relies on truth. This country relies on truth because victory cannot be achieved without truth. Victory without truth is victory for a lie. That is no victory at all. Unity without truth is no unity. It is merely solidarity in falsehood . . .

I want to talk about something even more important: how to discern those attempting to speak truth from frauds and grifters. Because something is new: an informational environment rife with opportunity and chaos. Opportunity because the legacy media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what we see and hear. Chaos because an anarchic informational environment means we actually have to be smart in how we assess the information and arguments that we hear. Why does that matter? Today, the conservative movement is in serious danger—not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder. The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in dishonesty, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism. These people do not deserve your time. They are something worse than that: a danger to the movement . . .

We owe you the truth. That means we should not mislead you. We should not hide the ball. We should not be deliberately obscure about what we are telling you. We have an obligation to clarity and honesty. We have to be clear in the language we use. We should not traffic in generality. We should not say things like “they” shot Charlie without saying who we mean. The person who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk—who, from all the evidence, points to being a gay, trans-loving furry. If we are going to target ideological people, the radical trans movement treats those who oppose it as threats. We should talk about that. Those are specific problems. They require specific responses. There is increased hatred. There is despair and rage that makes things worse. We must be honest about what people say and do. It is the job of politicians to build coalitions. It is the job of those of us who shape public opinion to hold politicians to account and hold them accountable to our values. We must not let fear of audience deter us from telling the truth. We must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth.

If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here with him every single day—his best friends—to cast aspersions at them and at Erika Kirk, and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over his murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA, we with microphones have a moral obligation to call that out by name. Erika Kirk and TPUSA never should have been put in the position to have to defend themselves against such specious and evil attacks, particularly at a time of mourning. The people who refuse to condemn these vicious attacks while speaking here are guilty of cowardice. Yes, cowardice . . .

Because we have a duty to truth, we also have a duty to provide you with evidence of the claims that we make. Emotive accusations, conspiracy theories, and “just asking questions” is lazy, stupid, and misleading. None of them are a substitute for truth or evidence. When Candace Owens says, “I don’t know, but I know,” that is retarded, and we are all more retarded for having heard it. When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign-policy opponents of loyalty to another country, he is not actually making an argument based in evidence. He is simply maligning people that he disagrees with. Our duty to provide you evidence means we actually have to do much more than “just ask questions.” Just asking questions is something my five-year-old does, and it’s really cute when it comes from my five-year-old. But when grown men and women spend their days “just asking questions” without seeking answers, they are lying to you. In fact, they are doing something even worse. They are seeding distrust in the world around you and enervating you . . .

Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying to you, and they are making your life worse in the process. That lie may feel good in the moment. It may excuse us from taking the corrective action we can take on a personal level to fix our lives. It might give us someone else to blame for our own failures. But in the end, the lie kills not just your future but the country we have been given. For those of us who talk for a living, that is our job: to discuss America’s problems with truth and evidence, to provide possible solutions, and to encourage Americans to succeed and make great decisions. We who speak to people on a regular basis, who have a microphone and audience—we have duties to you.

As a high school student in 2008, Owens sued the Board of Education in Stamford, Connecticut for failing to protect her from students who left three death threats and racist and sexual slurs on her voicemail. With the help of the NAACP, she got a $37,500 settlement from the case. Yet she later claimed, “Obama did a lot to tear the country apart. I do not remember, growing up, having all of these race issues. I really don’t remember it.” She attended the University of Rhode Island where she majored in journalism, but later dropped out. In 2015, Owens was CEO of the marketing agency Degree180, which also ran a political blog, in which she once wrote about “the bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party,” adding “The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope), and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY,” and cited at the top of her list of needed social changes the end of the “gay-transgendered-bi-straight-anything-else conversation.” After a few years as a woke blogger, she reinvented herself as a MAGA activist. In 2018, Owens began working as comms director for TPUSA, but resigned less than one year later after a video surfaced of her at the launch of the group’s UK branch saying:

I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word “nationalism.” I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want, so when you think about whenever we say “nationalism” the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a National Socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay fine. Problem is, is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German, everybody to look a different way. That’s not, to me, that’s not nationalism. So in thinking about how we could go bad down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism. I really don’t. I think that it’s okay. It’s important to retain your country’s identity.

Other than neglecting to mention that genocide was also one of the problems with Hitler, I have no problem with someone arguing in favor of a nationalism. We need only cast our glance toward Britain, where Owens was speaking, to see what happens when a nation exchanges its sense of national identity for diversity—which is fine if you like it, as I do, but it’s an aesthetic preference that should not come at the cost of culture, tradition, or unity. We can talk about the moral gap between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism, but even ethnic nationalism is not inherently wrong. Consider Japan, Poland, Israel, or South Korea. These are beautiful places that do not need ethnic diversity in order to improve. Imagine, for example, claiming that Nigeria is inferior because it doesn’t have enough white people. Nevertheless, Owens was out, but she soon joined The Daily Wire, where Shapiro was a co-founder and its ideological anchor. As a result, Owens became one of the most visible black conservative commentators in America, frequently collaborating with Shapiro’s media network and benefiting from its institutional reach. But that relationship began to unravel dramatically in 2023, largely over disagreements surrounding foreign policy, especially U.S. support for Israel and the Israel-Gaza war.

Owens increasingly framed the conflict in ways that Shapiro and others at The Daily Wire viewed as conspiratorial or even potentially antisemitic. Maybe that comment in the UK wasn’t just an innocent remark about identity and unity, after all. Shapiro publicly condemned her rhetoric, and tensions escalated to the point where Owens left The Daily Wire in March 2024, framing her exit as liberation from institutional constraints while critics saw it more as a rupture caused by her refusal to moderate her increasingly batshit claims. But that’s where the money was, and in the following months, Owens built a large independent platform, increasingly emphasizing narratives that positioned her against The Establishment. The situation escalated dramatically after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Owens, now knee-deep in the shit of at least half a dozen conspiracy theories, was eager to feed the speculation and paranoia surrounding his murder. She questioned the investigation, suggested cover-ups, foreign involvement, and internal betrayal, all without evidence. Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow and the new CEO of TPUSA, publicly urged Owens to stop and accused her of exploiting the tragedy for personal gain. But Owens simply doubled-down. This month, she urged her audience to read the antisemitic book The Talmudic Jew, by August Rohling, which inspired the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

To be clear, calling out the right’s conspiratorial tendencies is not an exercise in political bias. A healthy two-party democracy requires both wings of the system to be grounded in truth and mutual recognition of reality. You don’t need to support the other party to want it to be sane, coherent, and responsible. This applies on both sides. There should be a healthy version of the left without the excesses of woke culture, just as there should be a healthy version of the right that rejects bigotry and conspiratorial lunacy. But if Democrats honestly want healthier Republican politics, if all those years of lamenting post-truth narratives, the inaccuracy of Fox News reporting, and reality-rejection on the other side really meant anything, then they have to give credit where credit is due—and Shapiro deserves a standing ovation.

But predictably, his words have not been entirely well-received. Megyn Kelly, also mentioned in his speech for making excuses as to why she wouldn’t call Owens out, described his remarks as a “betrayal.” Leftist podcaster Angie Sullivan said, “Ben Shapiro is not the magic Jew. They are not going to stop being white supremacists and antisemitic over at Turning Point, and in MAGA. They are not going to take down their swastika flags, they’re not going to take off their white supremacy tattoos, because of Ben Shapiro.” God help us, if she’s right. But if you think MAGA is infested with hatred and distortion, then Shapiro’s full-throated condemnation of bigotry and conspiracy theories should resonate across the aisle, for he is articulating precisely the sort of commitment to truth that liberals have long claimed to represent. That rhetorical alignment, however partial, should earn recognition from Democrats who genuinely care about the factual integrity of our national discourse.

If you can’t clap when the right says something you support simply because it also says other things that you don’t, you might just be in favor of a one-party state. What the nation urgently needs now is not reflexive praise or dismissal of voices across the aisle, but a willingness to affirm truth wherever it is championed. As our father Abraham once said in his speech at Peoria in 1854, the year his party was founded, “Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.” As such, Shapiro’s message is one worth applauding from any quarter that values truth over faction and facts over fiction. And it is exactly what this moment in American political life needs, not just for Christmas and Hanukkah, but for the future of our republic.

From the feed

You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives! You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like “honor,” “code,” “loyalty.” We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline! I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it! I would rather you just said “thank you” and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to!

– Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, A Few Good Men

Subscribe now

In Rob Reiner’s classic 1992 courtroom drama A Few Good Men, the villain—played by Jack Nicholson—is Col. Jessup, the commanding officer at Guantánamo Bay who orders an illegal Code Red that leads to the death of Private William Santiago. Jessup justifies his actions as necessary to maintain discipline and national security, but the film exposes how that mindset crosses into abuse of power and moral corruption. The famous courtroom climax, quoted above, makes this explicit. Jessup did order the Code Red, he finally reveals to Tom Cruise’s character, and while he sees himself as a protector doing what civilians can’t, the law—and the film—judge him accountable.

Last night at his Brentwood home in Los Angeles, Reiner and his wife Michele were found stabbed to death by their daughter Romy. As someone who grew up on Reiner’s films, this hits home. And as a father to a daughter myself, that scene is devastating to imagine. But also, as background for the argument I’m about to make, it’s important to note that in addition to making some of the greatest movies of all time—Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally…—Reiner was also very politically outspoken. In fact, he was arguably the most outspoken anti-Trump critic in all of Hollywood, which is quite an accomplishment given the stiff competition in that category. He has said Trump is “mentally unfit” to be president. He has referred to the president as “dictator Trump.” He has called Trump a “fascist.” He has compared Trump to “Hitler, David Koresh, Jim Jones.” And so, upon hearing the horrific news today, Trump responded with all the grace and tact of a snuff film.

When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, some conservatives became so outraged that they tried to get people fired over private social media posts. They tried to destroy people’s lives over jokes, or simply because they had reposted Kirk’s own words. And suddenly, we got a taste of cancel culture in the other direction. It was gross to see, but it’s worth noting that the moral valence is not entirely even here. In one case, people were demanding respect for a man who had been slaughtered for having an opinion. The gross leftist laughter and justification was utterly despicable and an affront to the most essential of American values—the idea that you can say what you want you think without being murdered for it. But back when the tables were reversed, people’s lives were cracked open or destroyed because they’d mispronounced a name, used an inappropriate term, or argued a point that offended the left. It’s the difference between not wanting to work next to someone who is biologically literate enough to know the difference between men and women, and not wanting to work next to someone who laughs when people are slaughtered for that literacy.

And yes, in Kirk’s case, the left bears distal moral responsibility for creating the permission structure to punch a Nazi. Or kill one. By normalizing the language of calling everyone you dislike a Nazi, then shrugging or even laughing when those alleged Nazis are murdered, you help create an environment in which murder becomes an acceptable solution to political disagreement. You also become a disgusting person in the process. Now, this is not to say that you shouldn’t have the right to call people Nazis. But having the right doesn’t therefore mean you should actually do it. One reason for this is because if you call everyone a Nazi, and everything racist, these words lose power. And we do not want these words, of all words, to lose power. But also, because as you water these words down, more and more people are going to openly embrace them, one example being Nick Fuentes. And then you get people who will go out and literally gun down innocent individuals because now they believe the rhetoric you’ve been spreading, which often includes some lie about a fabricated genocide at the hands of these so-called “Nazis.” There’s the imaginary trans genocide, the imaginary black genocide, the imaginary Gazan genocide. It’s funny, because the left tells us all the time that words have power, “impact over intent,” even “silence is violence,” and so on. How soon they “forget.”

What this ultimately boils down to is rather simple. If you oppose political violence only when it targets people who share your views, but excuse or rationalize it when it’s aimed at people you dislike, you are not a principled person. You’re just tribal. If you think Charlie Kirk should not have been murdered merely because you don’t want conservatives to be killed, but you believe it’s acceptable to kill progressives, you are a moral fraud. No one should be killed for holding an opinion. That’s the only defensible position here. And this brings us back to Trump, publicly taking pathetic and petty shots at Reiner less than 24 hours after his death. Not praising the death outright. Not saying he “deserved it.” But refusing to show even basic restraint or human decency in the moment. And making that moment, as Trump always does, about himself and his petty grievances rather than Reiner, his work, or his family.

What’s striking is how familiar this is. If anyone on the left had said the same thing about Kirk—this exact tone, this exact level of contempt—it would have triggered a firestorm on the right. In fact, people were punished for far less. Yet many of the same people who found remarks about Kirk utterly repulsive will come to Trump’s defense here. This should be clarifying for the rest of us. You may support Trump because he opposes policies you find destructive, or because you see him as a blunt but necessary instrument against the abuses of the left, despite his flaws. But let this be a reminder of what those flaws actually are.

Yes, the right is correct to criticize the left’s pearl-clutching, woke authoritarianism, and Stalinistic policing of speech. But the over-correction to this has been to embrace offensive speech as a pushback. This is a problem because the left was not entirely wrong to react with disgust to Trump’s locker-room talk when he ran for president the first time. Nor to recoil at his casual cruelty. Dismissing that reaction as mere fragility, or “being a snowflake,” misses something real. The truth the left gets right, however selectively, is that Trump speaks about people with such easy contempt, seemingly indifferent to the harm he causes, that it necessarily says something about the kind of person he is, and the kind of leader he can be. When someone dies and this is how he responds, it’s a stark reminder of that unavoidable fact.

Trump is no Leonidas. He is not a statesman, an intellectual, or a moral exemplar. He is petty, incurious, and governed by grievance. If he possesses intelligence, it is of a nature that seems most gifted in its ability to hide itself. If you count yourself a fan not just of his politics but of his character, yet you were outraged when people laughed at Kirk’s death, then simply ask yourself how you might’ve felt to hear AOC write something like what Trump wrote above, but about Kirk. Many of his supporters will still defend him even here, even on these terms, and that should trouble us. Too many have forgotten what true decency looks like in public life. But it ain’t this.

In A Few Good Men, the title comes from the notion that a small number of disciplined, morally serious people are entrusted with guarding everyone else. I believe in this, even though it’s the principle by which Jessup defends his actions. What Jessup misses is the moral asymmetry between responsibility and impunity, and the central role that decency toward others plays in this. Jessup believes that because he bears the burden of guarding the wall, ordinary moral obligations no longer apply to him. But the entire legitimacy of entrusting a few good men with extraordinary power rests not just on their effectiveness, but on how they treat those beneath them. Decency isn’t a luxury, but proof that the power we bestow hasn’t curdled into cruelty.

Subscribe now

A system survives only if those few men remain capable of seeing others—especially the weak, the subordinate, the accused—not as obstacles or abstractions, the way a fascist or Stalinist might, but as human beings owed basic respect. The wall matters, and we must hold it strong, but so does the refusal to become the kind of person who thinks cruelty is the price of order. Because it only takes a few bad men, armed with power and stripped of decency, to bring that wall down. I am not saying we cannot be ferocious killers. But as Reiner understood, the blade of justice must be properly sheathed within a righteous order and basic sense of human decency, otherwise you’re just a six-fingered freak who likes to bully people.

From the feed

A snake entered the hollow innards
of a she-camel’s slaughtered carcass
but a thorn lay beneath the surface
and the coward refused to be shamed
while the brave one exposes his neck
and the horse gives up its noble worth
in exchange for beauty
limitless arrogance arrives
laughter becomes contempt
what was unfinished remains as it was.

— “The Killing of the She-Camel” by Maxamed Ibraahin Warsame, aka “Hadraawi”

There’s a dark American alchemy that turns obscure nationalities into demonic forces overnight. Last year, that burden fell on Haitians living in Springfield, Ohio, who suddenly found themselves accused of eating their neighbors’ pets. On September 9, the attention whore Laura Loomer posted on X, “The Biden-Harris regime imported over 20,000 cannibalistic Haitians who are now killing people’s pets.” Within hours, then-Senator JD Vance wrote, “People have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.” Later that day, Senator Ted Cruz shared a meme that said, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” The next day, during his debate with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump said, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.” None of these claims—none—were supported by police reports, animal shelters, or any fact-checking outlets. But as a result, Haitian immigrant mothers and their children faced racist intimidation and even bomb threats. One Haitian American said, “They hate us. I take my kids to the park usually. I cannot do that anymore. You know, I have to just stay home and just don’t go out. We used to just go for a walk in the neighborhood, but we cannot do that anymore.”

Instead of soul searching and penitent reflection, we got a catchy phonk remix of Trump’s comment with animated dancing cats. I grew up in the Bahamas, where Haitians are the largest immigrant community. My mother worked in real estate and hired Haitians often, so I got to know them better than most Bahamians. My family also had a place on Abaco Island, and more than once, I visited the Haitian shantytown known as the Mudd, which Hurricane Dorian demolished in 2019. In my estimation, Haitians are an industrious, devoutly Christian, and warmly communal people. Yes, criminal gangs run Port-au-Prince, but this doesn’t mean Haitians are not a law-abiding people. On the contrary, they are deeply rule-oriented, though the rules they value most are tied to Christian faith, community honor, and the authority of elders. One day, while visiting my aunt in Lyford Cay—one of the wealthiest, most exclusive neighborhoods in the world—I decided to walk to into town. But Nassau was 12 miles away and I don’t think I made it more than four before I grabbed the No. 12 jitney (bus) instead. The driver nodded and said, Mahnin, bossman.

Subscribe now

Morning, I replied, paid the $1.50 fare, and took the only free seat. After a few minutes, I struck up a conversation with the older man beside me. His name was Jean-Louis, he looked about 70, and his hands were rougher than chewed-up boot leather. He’d been out on a painting job for some wealthy family and was headed back to Carmichael Road, where there’s a major Haitian community. His skin was black as coal, and his accent was almost incomprehensibly thick. Me ah go Kaa-mike-el Woad, oké? He’d barely told me his name when he began sharing his love of God. Me, ah kretyen, wi. Every day, me priye. Me love Jesus, anpil anpil. He eagerly wanted to know if I was Christian too. There was a penetrating kindness in his eyes, as if he was looking at me with genuine love, the way a grandfather looks upon his grandson. He won me over instantly and we spent the ride sitting at the back, like two naughty schoolboys, laughing loudly. At one point, he told me about his wife and his son, back in rural Haiti. His bright, boyish eyes got dark. He paused. Tried to fake a smile. Your family sounds beautiful, I said. His smile returned, and soon we were laughing again. Mostly, though, he wanted to know about me. And he genuinely, deeply cared when I told him. To this day, when I think of Haiti and its people, I think of Jean-Louis.

This is the value of getting to know people individually rather than judging them as a group. The Haitian government has estimated there are 12,000 armed gang members in the country—out of a total of 12 million people. That means gang members in Haiti are one-third as common as identical twins in America. But to hear MAGA politicians tell it, you’d think every single person on the west end of Hispaniola was monozygotic. My own people faced a similar fate, and I’m not even talking about my Jewish or Russian ancestry. Bahamians in South Florida, especially Miami and Palm Beach County, were routinely blamed for disproportionately causing crime during the War on Drugs. Many Bahamians came to Florida for seasonal work in fishing, agriculture, or tourism. A tiny number became involved in maritime smuggling routes. But sensationalist “journalists” framed Bahamian boat workers as cocaine couriers, even though the vast majority were hard-working, law-abiding, legal residents or citizens. But we have made our way. Affluent Americans have flooded our beautiful beaches, and we have revolutionized American cinema and music. Nowadays, when I tell Americans I grew up there, they smile and think of a tropical paradise.

This year, the spotlight of political scrutiny and viral claims has swung to Somali communities in Minnesota and Columbus, Ohio, who find themselves cast as the newest avatars of everything wrong with immigration, despite the inconvenient fact that 91.5% of them are U.S. citizens. Somali migration to the United States represents what scholars call compressed modernity, a population moving in a single generation from rural, often pastoral, and in this case war-torn contexts into advanced service and knowledge economies. Think of it as a stress test for whether American institutions can actually handle rapid, refugee-driven demographic change. But at the same time, the question of Somali immigration confronts us with some ugly realities.

Death of a nation

Somalia is not just a failed state. It’s the most failed state on Earth, topping the annual Fragile States Index for six consecutive years from 2008 through 2013. In fact, the term “failed state” itself was coined in the 1990s to describe Somalia’s civil war. How did things come to this? In 1969, General Siad Barre seized power and turned Somalia into a one-party Marxist-Leninist communist state. Under his horrific dictatorship, Somalia descended into a pattern of state violence so severe that it not only brutalized the population but ultimately destroyed the nation itself. Barre is without question one of the most evil dictators in human history. The horrors he carried out are too numerous to list here, but among them, a few stand out as the moral and political breaking points of the Somali state. There was the Isaaq genocide, also known as the Hargeisa Holocaust. The Isaaq people of northern Somalia were not so eager to live under a communist dictatorship. In response to their insurgency, the Barre regime rounded up and executed innocent Isaaq people, women were raped as a weapon of war, and entire communities were erased. As many as 200,000 people were buried in mass graves. To put that in perspective, that is more than twice the number of Palestinians killed during the war in Gaza. Barre also ordered the Somali Air Force to bomb his own cities, especially Hargeisa and Burao, leveling neighborhoods, hospitals, markets, and schools. Meanwhile, he constructed a nationwide torture and surveillance state that would’ve made Stalin blush with pride. Political opponents, journalists, clan elders, even suspected critics were imprisoned without trial, beaten with rifle butts, whipped with electric cables, electrocuted by their ears and genitals, burned, crushed to death, and often simply disappeared. Barre slaughtered entire families for the alleged crimes of individuals, women and children included.

One refugee from the country is Ilhan Omar, the U.S. representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district since 2019, who loves to trash the very America that welcomed her family and saved their lives, and who recently said of Americans:

These people are just idiots. I really, I’m at the point where it’s become really hard to have an intellectual debate with any of these people because the level of stupidity that they are displaying every single day is frankly embarrassing. Not just in Congress, but as Americans.

But here’s the twist. Her family didn’t come as refugees from Barre’s evil regime. Her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, was a colonel under Barre. She was raised by her father and grandfather Abukar, who was the director of Somalia’s National Marine Transport, also under Barre. In other words, her family didn’t flee persecution in Somalia. They fled justice. And now Omar herself is a powerful political voice in America, where she pushes a socialist agenda. Just imagine if the Nazi minister of transport’s grandson, and the son of a Nazi colonel, fled justice in postwar Germany and came to America only to talk about how stupid Americans are for not embracing a more fascistic form of government.

In any event, Barre’s sadistic torture state eliminated any peaceful channels for reform, making armed rebellion the only remaining path. By the time he was overthrown in 1991, the violence he unleashed had already shattered the nation and ensured that the fall of his regime would not bring peace, but total state collapse and decades of sickening civil war. No functioning central government followed. Warlords and rival clans fought for territory while law, food systems, and public services vanished. The violence destroyed agriculture and trade. Combined with drought, this caused a devastating famine between 1991 and 1993, in which upwards of 300,000 people died. The “stupid” United States, along with the United Nations, intervened with food and peacekeepers, but the mission collapsed after the infamous Black Hawk Down incident in 1993. Eventually, out of the chaos and ruin emerged al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda–linked terrorist group that now controls rural territory, bombs cities, forces children into combat, executes dissenters, and blocks humanitarian aid. Making matters worse, repeated mega-droughts through the 2010s and 2020s have caused crop failures and livestock deaths. By the 2020s, over 5 million Somalis were internally displaced and over 1 million were living as refugees outside the country.

Bad facts

Between 2012 and 2022, the United States resettled about 46,796 refugees from Somalia, making Somalis the fifth-largest refugee-origin group in that decade—after refugees from Myanmar, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Bhutan. But the Somali diaspora in America is not particularly large. The 2023 American Community Survey estimates there were about 169,799 people with Somali ancestry in the United States, plus or minus 20,798, including roughly 92,400 who were actually born in Somalia. But that number rose to 259,000 by 2024, with 108,000 in Minnesota alone. An increase of more than 50% in a single year is alarming. But let’s also keep in mind, we’re talking about a total population smaller than the number of Americans who own ferrets. And again, only 8.5% are non-citizens. But almost half of them are under the age of 18, and the median household income for Somalis in Minnesota sits at $43,600, which is roughly half the state median. The educational statistics bear out the challenge of compressed modernity. For Somali Minnesotans age 25 and older, over 40% have less than a high school education, while only about 16% have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to roughly 39% of Minnesotans overall. Be warned, if you dump a ton of poor, war-torn young men in a region of Scandinavian-derived prosperity without a lot of paths to success, this is a recipe for frustration that often leads to resentment and high crime rates.

Somali communities have strong internal networks, high levels of entrepreneurship, but relatively weak access to formal financial institutions, homeownership, and elite credentials. This can make them look like a “burden” in certain datasets, even as they play substantial roles in local economies. For instance, Somalis have built dense commercial districts in places like Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside, also known as “Little Mogadishu,” as well as Columbus’ Northland area, and parts of Seattle. By the mid-2000s, researchers estimated there were about 600 Somali-owned businesses in Minnesota alone, up from essentially zero one decade before. At the same time, much of this economic activity flows through informal channels. Research on Somali entrepreneurs describes heavy reliance on informal savings circles known as hagbad to finance businesses. A household that saves and invests informally may look “poor” in U.S. data if little passes through taxable or reported accounts, and they may struggle to qualify for mortgages or business expansion loans, but that is often misleading. It’s also, however, a major problem because keeping money off the books allows for criminal behavior.

Over the past several years, a series of large-scale public-benefit fraud cases in Minnesota—especially Minneapolis—has drawn national attention because many of the defendants are Somali-American. The most famous of these cases involves a nonprofit called Feeding Our Future, which federal prosecutors say orchestrated one of the largest pandemic-relief fraud schemes in U.S. history. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government rapidly expanded emergency food programs for low-income children who had lost access to school meals. Feeding Our Future was authorized to oversee meal distribution through small local food vendors. Prosecutors claim the organization and its partners submitted massively inflated claims, falsified meal counts, and created fake invoices for food that was never served. According to federal indictments, dozens of shell companies were created as “meal sites,” many reporting impossibly high numbers—sometimes thousands of meals per day per location with no physical capacity to deliver them. As a result, the group reportedly stole hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. Dozens of defendants have been indicted, and multiple guilty pleas have already been entered for wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy. These sick freaks spent the money—meant for starving children—on luxury homes and high-end vehicles. There are even claims that stolen funds were being routed to al-Shabaab, the Islamist terrorist group and al-Qaeda ally.

In addition, Minnesota has prosecuted Somali-Americans in Medicaid fraud, autism-services fraud, housing assistance abuse, and childcare billing schemes. It’s difficult to put into words how common fraud and scamming is in Somali culture. Ilhan Omar has been repeatedly accused of committing fraud herself, by marrying her own brother to help get him into the country. Naturally, if we find that certain Somali individuals are committing fraud, it does not follow that Somalis as a group are unusually fraudulent. That said, none of these scandals should be surprising, given that Somalia is the most corrupt nation in the entire world, second only to South Sudan. It may be a difficult pill for some people to swallow, but not all cultures are created equal. Some cultures are more corrupt. Some are primitive and vile. Yet at the same time, its people may be victimized in ways that should make us want to help them if we can. Not all Germans were evil. Not all white Southerners supported slavery. We must stress, each and every time, that we are not talking about all members of a group. Unless it is, actually, all members. Not all Somalis are dishonest. Not all Palestinians are antisemitic. But the way we solve for this is by anchoring our perception to statistical truths, and this can lead to uncomfortable places, such as when we know for a fact that the overwhelming majority of a population supports, or practices, some heinous act that would normally cause us to label any person doing such a thing as evil. Because when that’s the case, the generalization is not fallacious, but statistically supported—and justified.

Again, we must stamp out any trace of unfair generalization. That way leads to all sorts of hateful thinking, such as racism. But it is nevertheless true that Somalia is the second-most corrupt place in the world, and having imported a couple hundred thousand Somalis, we shouldn’t be clutching our pearls when we read that Somalis have scammed the U.S. taxpayer, and needy children, out of hundreds of millions of dollars. If it were Japanese, I’d be shocked. Venezuelans, less so. And when it comes to Somalis, corruption isn’t the only statistic worth chewing on. There’s also the fact that over 40% of married Somali women were wed as minors—almost one-quarter before they were 15. The simple fact is, men marrying children is common practice in Somali culture, and yes, they consummate them—around 65% of first childbirths occur among women ages 15-24. Some, much younger still. Do with this information what you will, but it does suggest that a staggering number of Somali men are pedophiles.

Here’s another fact. Over 99% of Somali women aged 15-49 have undergone Type III female genital mutilation. This type, also known as infibulation, is the most severe kind of female genital mutilation in existence. It involves using unsterilized razor blades or broken glass to slice off the labia minora, labia majora, and sometimes also the clitoris, then sewing the vagina shut while leaving a small opening for the passage of urine and menstrual blood. This leads to lifelong and excruciating pain, chronic urinary and menstrual problems, agonizing sexual intercourse, childbirth complications, depression, PTSD, and more. In case you are wondering, they cut them open to let them give birth and sew them back up after. And the practice has absolutely zero health benefits, despite what Somali men may claim. Let me repeat, over 99%. What portion of Somali men do you suppose fully supports this practice, given that more than 99% of women aged 15-49 have had it done? I mean support it enough to approve it being done to his own mother, his own wife, his own daughter. Of course, some progressives will mount defenses for these men based on cultural norms, ignorance, or what have you. I am not going to counter-argue any of that here. But if you happen to be someone who thinks anyone who supports this being done to his own wife or daughter is evil, that puts you in a place of extreme moral tension with regard to most Somali men, if not virtually all of them.

I am not making any arguments about what you ought to think on the matter, but I will say two things. First, it is grossly immoral to turn on anyone pointing these facts out and call them racist rather than directing one’s attention to the female victims. Second, there are at least half a dozen other statistics, just as dark, that I could point to with regard to Somali culture. And so, while individual Somalis should be judged individually, it is not unfair for any nation to ask itself how much of this they want to import. Many Europeans countries have refused to even consider the question for fear of seeming bigoted, and the results of this are becoming plainer every day.

Enter Trump

The Somali immigration story has been simmering for a while, but it blew up again last week thanks to President Trump. While speaking in the Oval Office last Wednesday, a reporter told Trump, “The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, he’s saying that he’s actually proud to have the largest Somali community in the country, and his police chief—”

Trump cut her off:

Well then he’s a fool. I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian—look at their nation. Look how bad their nation, it’s not even a nation. It’s just, people walking around killing each other. Look, these Somalians have taken billions of dollars out of our country. They’ve taken billions and billions of dollars. They have a representative, Ilhan Omar, who they say married her brother. It’s a fraud. She tries to deny it now, but you can’t really deny it because it just happened. She shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman. And I’m sure people are looking at that. And she should be thrown the hell out of our country. And most of those people, they have destroyed Minnesota, okay? Minnesota, you have an incompetent governor, you have a crooked governor, he’s crooked as hell, but he’s incompetent. Walz is, he should be ashamed. That beautiful land, that beautiful state. It’s a hellhole right now, and the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country, and all they do is complain, complain, complain. You have her. She’s always talking about “the Constitution provides me with…,” uh, go back to your own country, figure out your own constitution. All she does is complain about this country, and without this country, she would not be in very good shape. She probably wouldn’t be alive right now. So, Somalia is considered by many to be the worst country on Earth. I don’t know. I’ve never, I haven’t been there. I won’t be there anytime soon. I hope. But, what Somalia and what the Somalian people have done to Minnesota, is not even believable. It’s not even believable. And a lot of it starts with the governor. And a lot of it starts with Barack Hussein Obama, because that’s when people started coming in, and you have to have people come in that are gonna love our country, cherish our country. They want to kiss our country good night. They talk about our country. We want them to pray for our country. This is not the people living in Minnesota, and she’s a disaster. She should not be, and her friends shouldn’t be allowed, frankly, they shouldn’t even be allowed to be congresspeople, okay? They shouldn’t even be allowed to be congresspeople because they don’t represent the interests of our country.

Much of this is hyperbolic, as is customary with Trump, but some of it is fair. Yes, Somalia is in certain regards arguably “the worst country on Earth.” Somalis have allegedly taken hundreds of millions, if not up to $1 billion, though I am not aware of any evidence to suggest it was “billions and billions.” That sounds more like Trump being Trump. Nor is Minnesota currently a “hellhole.” Quite the opposite. It ranks among the top five U.S. states for quality of life, and top 10 for education, and No. 1 for health care. Also, no, Obama is not responsible for when large numbers of Somali immigrants entered the United States. Somali refugees began arriving in Minnesota in the early 1990s, following the 1991 collapse of the Somali government—nearly two decades before Obama took office. And no, immigrants should not only be allowed in if they love our country. You can come here, hate America, and want to make it better. You can come here, hate America, not want to make it better, but still contribute to our economy. If the guy who serves me a pita wrap thinks America is the Great Satan, so what. Allah yahdik, buddy. I know white Christian citizens who would agree. But I don’t want people to have to take a loyalty test to step inside. That flies in the face of exactly what makes this country great—though, yes, to become a citizen you do have to take one. This also means that our very liberalism is, in some contexts, a vulnerability. Yes, being principled does come at a certain cost. Some people, definitely being one, think we should therefore abandon our principles. I disagree. But Trump is great at one thing: identifying a real problem that has been long ignored, or even worsened, by failed leadership on the left. What he is often less great at is offering reasonable policy solutions.

This is America

I do not believe in whitewashing ugly facts to avoid the risk of racist morons weaponizing them. America is long past needing to have a frank and open discussion about immigration, about the fact that not all cultures are equally good, and that we may want to be selective about which populations we welcome with open arms, and which ones we look at more critically. We must not be frightened off the topic by woke midwits twitching to call anyone racist. And yeah, there are a lot of bad facts about Somali people that we need to confront if we’re going to welcome them into our nation. But despite the grim statistics shared above, Somalia’s catastrophe did not arise from the inherent character of its people. Rather, in my view, it came from practicing a morally polluted faith and the system of communist rule, along with the designs of a dictator whose brutality hollowed out a functioning society and scattered millions to the wind.

America is great because we are strong enough to hold out a hand in the storm and welcome people like this onto our raft. The United States—out of humanitarian duty, geopolitical calculation, and base moral instinct—absorbed hundreds of thousands of these people, at some cost to our society. What followed was never going to be neat. Compressed modernity strains both the institutions that receive refugees and the communities built by those refugees as they try to translate clan-based, informal, survival-oriented social structures into the rules-driven world of a wealthy democracy. Let’s be brutally frank, this is a civilizing mission. Somalis come from a land of savages, if ever there was one. Many presumably arrive here as such, particularly the men, I imagine. But we must not turn immigrant groups into existential villains. This is a political reflex that recurs across American history—from the Irish and Italians to Cubans, Vietnamese, Hmong, Jews, Haitians, Bahamians, and now Somalis.

Subscribe now

If American democracy is to remain confident rather than brittle, it must be capable of holding two ideas at once. One, that individuals and networks should be held accountable for crimes while gross cultural practices must be openly rejected. Two, that entire communities should not be cast as civilizational threats because of those crimes or practices. Somalia’s story is one of national disintegration. The American story need not echo this. The real test is not whether the United States can absorb people from failed states, or whose cultural practices we find repulsive, but whether it can do so without adopting the same zero-sum, clan-driven thinking that doomed those states in the first place.

From the feed

“Christmas market in Brussels turns into an Islamic hell,” Dutch politician Geert Wilders recently said on social media, sharing a video of Palestinian protesters storming through the local Christmas market, screaming pro-Hamas slogans in Arabic, beating drums, waving torches, throwing smoke bombs, and intimidating families amid an otherwise tranquil evening. Palestinians have the right to protest under Article 26 of the Belgian Constitution, but disrupting a public event like this is not included in that right. As I wrote in response to someone else posting the video:

What narcissists. No one can celebrate anything, even in their home country, without this lot making it about themselves. The Dublin Regulation, which says asylums must stay in the first EU country they reach, is dead. But also, Belgians very much brought this on themselves.

Moreover, beneath Wilders’ inflammatory rhetoric lies a genuine question Western nations have yet to answer honestly: What happens when, out of suicidal empathy, you welcome populations shaped by generations of violence and racist hatred?

Predictably, when The Brussels Times reported the story, they framed it as “far-right politician targets Gaza protest,” rather than Hamas supporters target peaceful Christmas market, and made a point of adding that Wilders is “well-known for racist rhetoric,” without saying what Palestinians, or even Hamas, are well-known for doing. And then they ended the article there. They did not include that Wilders has said, “I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam.” Nor did they make any mention of the fact that in 2016, an Islamist extremist drove his truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring dozens. Or that in 2018, an Islamist extremist opened fire and stabbed people at the Christmas market in Strasbourg. Or that last year, an ex-Muslim from Saudi Arabia killed six people and injured 323 others when he drove his SUV into a crowd at the Christmas market in Magdeburg.

Nor, if we look only at Belgium, did the paper mention anything about the 2016 Brussels airport and subway bombings, which left 32 dead and over 300 injured. Or the 2016 Charleroi attack, in which a man stabbed two police officers and screamed “Allahu Akbar” before being shot dead. Or the 2016 Brussels attack, in which a man stabbed two officers, in the throat and in the stomach. The Guardian described the attacker—a Senegalese man with alleged ties to jihadists in Syria, who ran for election in Belgium with an Islamist party, and whose brother is also a terrorist—as “a 43-year-old Belgian man.” Nor did the paper mention the 2017 Brussels knife attack on two soldiers by an Islamist terrorist. Nor the 2023 attack in Brussels in which an Islamist terrorist opened fire on Swedish football fans, killing two. No, all you need to know, apparently, is that the person who shared the video is known as a racist.

Ironic, given Belgian public opinion regarding the war in Gaza. Multiple surveys conducted in 2024 and 2025 show widespread criticism of Israeli military policy and strong support for Palestinian human rights. An International Solidarity Barometer survey found over 70% of Belgians supported an immediate ceasefire, while a majority favored stronger EU actions to end what they consider Israel’s illegal occupation. Additionally, recent data from the Asylum Information Database (AIDA) and the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) highlights a major development in Belgium’s 2024 asylum landscape: Palestinians became the largest single nationality in terms of asylum applications and accepted refugees. Belgians want to be the good guys who open their arms to refugees, and this is a noble thing. Truly. But they clearly haven’t done their homework. This isn’t going to end well, and Europe as a whole seems determined to learn this simple lesson in the hardest and most painful way possible. Let’s consider the historical record.

Jordan, poor thing, made the mistake of imagining it could play host to a revolutionary movement without eventually becoming its hostage. After 1948, and again after 1967, Jordan absorbed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. King Hussein, like a well-meaning and good-hearted Belgian, opened his borders to fellow Arabs in crisis, a decision rooted in both humanitarian impulse and pan-Arab solidarity. But within two decades, the relationship had fractured catastrophically. By the late 1960s, the PLO had metastasized inside Jordan’s refugee camps like a tumor. Its factions ran checkpoints, taxed commerce, and behaved as if Amman were merely a suburb of their future state, with Hussein reduced to some hapless landlord too polite to evict these parasites. Hijackings, extortion, and street battles escalated. Palestinians roved the city, slaughtering innocents, including children. In September 1970, as the massacring continued and Palestinians even tried to overthrow the government outright, Hussein finally stepped in. In what came to be known as Black September, the Jordanian Army smashed the insurgency and the PLO’s roving terrorist bands were expelled to Lebanon.

Lebanon’s tragedy followed the same script but with more sects, more guns, and far less state capacity. Palestinian refugees had lived there since 1948, but after their expulsion from Jordan, the PLO arrived as a ready-made parallel government, complete with its own army and foreign policy goals. Namely, the eradication of Israel and murder of all Jews worldwide. From the early 1970s on, Palestinian terrorists used southern Lebanon as artillery range against Israel, effectively inviting retaliation that the Lebanese state was too weak to prevent or deter. The PLO entrenched itself in West Beirut and in the camps, behaving less like guests and more like colonial administrators of a collapsing state. Their militias—with their kidnappings, shellings, and massacres—became a major catalyst for what would become the Lebanese Civil War. By 1982, Israel’s invasion forced the PLO to evacuate to Tunis, but Lebanon was already broken and burning. The war would rage on for 15 years.

Kuwait’s experience is the simplest and most brutal illustration of what happens when hospitality meets political romanticism. For decades, Palestinians had enjoyed privileged positions in Kuwait—professional jobs, good salaries, broad public trust—until Saddam Hussein invaded the country in 1990, visiting unspeakable evil upon the locals, and yet the traitorous Palestinians, led by Yasser Arafat, publicly backed the invader against the people who had been so kind as to give Palestinians a home. When Kuwait was liberated in 1991, the reaction was predictable. The emirate expelled the vast majority of its Palestinian residents. You supported the monster who slaughtered our people, was the logic, so you have no future here.

In Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Palestinians were treated as honored political mascots, propaganda pieces for the Ba’ath Party’s pan-Arab dreams. They received subsidized housing, salaries, and a protected status denied to many actual Iraqis. They were first-class citizens while the native-born of the land were treated as lesser. This built a reservoir of resentment among ordinary Iraqis who saw Palestinians as pampered outsiders. When the U.S. toppled Saddam in 2003 and the Iraqi state collapsed into sectarian score-settling, Palestinians paid for decades of Ba’athist special treatment. Militia groups, mostly Shi’a, targeted Palestinian neighborhoods with kidnappings, torture, and killings for collaborating with the murderous old regime. Thousands fled to the Syrian and Jordanian borders, where they languished in desert camps because by then, almost no Arab state wanted them.

Now turn the page to Egypt. Cairo has spent decades proclaiming eternal solidarity with Palestine while simultaneously enforcing one of the harshest border regimes in the region. And why is it that they want no Palestinians anywhere near them? Because they know the Palestinians better than anyone. After 1948, Gaza came under Egyptian military administration. But Egypt pointedly refused to grant its Palestinian inhabitants citizenship, rights, or meaningful integration. The Palestinians remained a convenient political symbol, sure, but never a population to absorb. After Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and Hamas seized control in 2007, Egypt hardened further. Cairo viewed Hamas, rightly, as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, its own domestic existential enemy. The Rafah border opened and closed according to Egyptian security priorities, not humanitarian appeals. Egypt’s treatment of Palestinians has nothing to do with compassion or cruelty. It is simply the reflex of a sovereign state that refuses to inject ideological poison into its political bloodstream.

The Gulf states perfected a uniquely antiseptic model of Palestinian management. Allow them in as workers—engineers, teachers, accountants—pay them well, and make absolutely certain none of them become citizens or political actors. In Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain, Palestinians have enjoyed relative prosperity but zero permanence. They are a people without a home, and for this they blame Israel, but it is largely by their own hand, specifically their pathological violence. The Kuwaiti expulsion of 1991—triggered by the PLO’s suicidal support for Saddam’s invasion—became the Gulf’s cautionary tale. Jordan nearly died learning this lesson. Lebanon took the lesson even harder, and paid with 15 years of civil war. The Gulf states looked at Jordan and Lebanon and drew the simplest possible conclusion: Absolutely not.

Things are no better among Palestinians today. Recent polling by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) paints a profoundly dark, and tragic, picture of public opinion. In the months after the October 7 attack on Israel, early polls showed overwhelming support for the assault. By mid-2024, attitudes began to shift, especially in Gaza, while in the West Bank a majority continued to call the racist slaughter “correct.” According to the most recent PSR survey, conducted in late October, about 53% of Palestinians overall still consider the attack justified.

Meanwhile, international reviews of textbooks used by the Palestinian Authority (PA) have repeatedly identified deeply antisemitic content and the glorification of violence. According to watchdog analyses by IMPACT-se, antisemitic material remains pervasive across school grades — and new “abridged curricula” in Gaza replicate previous problems rather than reform them. In other words, they continue to brainwash their children with their particular brand of hyper-violent racist hatred, and no degree of military defeat seems capable of pushing them off this path.

None of these issues are served by sweeping generalizations or stigmatization of all Palestinians. I myself have Palestinian friends. Individuals must be judged individually. Nevertheless, European nations welcoming them in with open arms are now reaping the predictable consequences, then doing mental gymnastics to convince themselves these things are not related, and that anyone saying otherwise is a bigot.

Europe cannot continue to ignore the lessons of Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Israel, and half a dozen other countries while expecting different results. Its people need an honest reckoning rather than wishful thinking. And the alternative is clear: continued attacks, growing far-right movements, collapsing social trust, and perhaps ultimately violence at a much larger scale than Europe has seen thus far. Belgium and its neighbors can do better than both naive welcoming and xenophobic rejection. But only if they’re willing to learn from history and invest seriously in solutions that protect both refugee rights and public safety. So far, I don’t see that happening.

Again, the Palestinian protesters at the Christmas market had every right to demonstrate for Gaza. But they had no right to disrupt a public gathering or intimidate families. The Belgian families that were frightened and fled, as well as any Palestinians seeking a better life in Europe, both deserve better than political leaders who pretend difficult questions don’t exist. And Belgians have every right to welcome refugees while also demanding integration, security, and that people seeking to destroy their culture be eliminated from it. Those are not contradictory impulses, but necessary complements.

If the United States feels increasingly like two countries sharing a flag, nowhere is that divide clearer than in the media. We now live within two incompatible realities, each with its own heroes and villains, its own moral universes, even its own scientific truths. Understanding this requires seeing not just what these institutions publish, but the psychological worlds they invite readers and viewers to inhabit. On one side sits The New York Times, our paper of record, the Grey Lady of respectable liberalism. On the other, Fox News, the country’s most powerful conservative megaphone, and the last line of defense against liberal consensus. Or so they regard themselves. But these outlets don’t just report the news. They construct rival realities for two kinds of Americans that increasingly struggle to see each other as fellow countrymen. Last month, Syracuse University research writer Diane Sterling wrote:

Americans increasingly see the country as more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Pew Research Center polling reveals a sharp rise in partisan hostility: in 2022, 72% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats viewed the opposing party as more immoral than other Americans—up dramatically from 47% and 35% in 2016.

Trump’s rise triggered a shift in mainstream journalism toward a more open advocacy style. In 2013, the publisher and chairman of the Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., led the push to remake the International New York Times, which included traveling to sister papers abroad during the rebrand and rollout. He visited the Times’ sister paper in Seoul, where I was the head editor of the national news desk, and told me that the rebrand would result in an expanded and more opinionated paper, explicitly saying opinion pieces would now appear on the front page. After all, he said, no one waited for the paper to land on the front doorstep to get breaking news anymore, not when we’ve all got computers in our pockets. Instead, folks wanted to know what things meant, why they mattered, and what they should think of it all.

It sounded sensible enough, but the Times wasn’t merely interested in telling people what the news meant or why it mattered. It began to push a progressive political narrative. In 2014, the Times adopted language that leaned heavily into the “Hands up, don’t shoot” Ferguson coverage, which later Department of Justice reports concluded was not supported by the evidence. But The New York Times had grabbed the wolf of racial-justice framing by both ears, and could not let go. Since then, the paper has leaned in, ignoring all nuance in favor of progressive orthodoxy when it comes to an incredible range of issues. Again, they got there by framing Trump not simply as a political actor but as a democratic threat, a framing that gave editors moral permission to loosen traditional norms of neutrality, and though I am sympathetic the underlying argument about Trump, what emerged was a new journalistic posture that, in the name of defending our democracy, has trashed public trust in the media and left us even more divided than we ever were before.

In the years since, American politics has become such a hysterical post-truth circus, such an over-caffeinated mess, so permanently dialed to 11, that nothing seems capable of shocking us anymore. But then Americans elected a reality TV star as president, a socialist theater kid as the mayor of New York, and the two men, who have spent months calling each other fascists and communists with all the subtlety of a professional wrestling feud, got together this week and did something startling. They acted like adults. Was it performative? Assuredly. But a political spectacle can be contrived and still convey deeper meaning. And this oddly warm, faintly screwball encounter in the Oval Office, though it felt like something half-remembered from an Ayahuasca trip, also felt like a tiny yet desperately needed breach in the country’s permanent thunderstorm. How did the Times and Fox report the event? Shawn McCreesh, White House correspondent at The New York Times, wrote:

There was one moment in particular when Zohran Mamdani seemed like he might have bit off a little more than he could chew by making his lonely pilgrimage down to the lion’s den that is President Trump’s blinged-out Oval Office.

The 34-year-old mayor-elect of New York was pressed by a reporter if he thought his host, who was sitting about four inches away, was really “a fascist.”

How terribly awkward.

But before Mr. Mamdani could even get out one of his slick and diplomatic answers, the president jumped in to throw him a lifeline.

“That’s OK, you could just say, ‘Yes,’” Mr. Trump said, looking highly amused by the whole thing. He waved his hand, as if being called the worst term in the political dictionary was no big deal.

“OK, all right,” Mr. Mamdani said with a smile.

“It’s easier,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s easier than explaining it.” Chuckling good-naturedly, he reached up and gave Mr. Mamdani a pat on the arm. “I don’t mind,” he added.

It was like the oddest screwball buddy comedy in American politics. The “fascist” and the “communist.” The president and the mayor. The old man and the Young Turk.

Were these really the same two guys who had spent the last many months flicking acid darts at one another?

[…]

But if there is one thing Mr. Trump respects, it’s a winner. He made it clear Friday that he was impressed Mr. Mamdani had triumphed as an underdog against the political establishment. “He came out of nowhere,” the president said. “What’d you start off at, one or two? I watched, I said, ‘Who is this guy?’”

Mr. Trump also appreciates a good media spectacle, and he was keenly aware that he had one on his hands. “The press has eaten this thing up,” he marveled to the phalanx of cameras crowded into the Oval Office. “I’ve had a lot of meetings with the heads of major countries, nobody cared. This meeting — you people have gone crazy.”

[…]

“By the way, being the mayor of New York City is a big deal,” the president of the United States said. “I always said, you know, one of the things I would have loved to be some day is the mayor of New York City.”

This is well-written, and funny, but for all his comedic color, McCreesh ultimately couldn’t resist taking constant jabs—small barbs that cumulatively tilt the entire narrative against both men, but especially against Trump. Even when McCreesh is describing cordiality, he keeps tilting the camera to make Trump—and, secondarily, Mamdani—look ridiculous or suspect. He opens by staging Mamdani as a naïf walking into Trump’s lair. “Lonely pilgrimage down to the lion’s den” isn’t neutral scene-setting. Then there’s the class-coded mockery in the description of Trump’s office, making the setting feel vulgar and tacky. And again, I tend to agree, but I’m not sure this moment is the place for those remarks. It subtly reminds the reader that Trump is gauche, unserious, nouveau-riche, and out of place in the White House.

The writer then frames the exchange as a “gotcha” scene where Mamdani is trapped and Trump theatrically magnanimous. Mamdani, “pressed” on whether Trump is a fascist, “bit off more than he could chew,” and is about to deliver a “slick and diplomatic answer.” The tone is, look at this faker squirming. And look, for the third time, I don’t really disagree. But I do think McCreesh gets it wrong when he depicts Trump’s moment of humor, framing his surprisingly magnanimous response to being called a “fascist” to his face as “as a moral failing. Trump waves off “the worst term in the political dictionary,” and the writer’s gloss is, Trump is unserious about serious accusations. The “buddy comedy” framing makes the meeting feel cheap and grotesque. “Oddest screwball buddy comedy.” “The fascist and the communist.” “The old man and the Young Turk.” These aren’t analytical frames. They exist to make you smirk, not think. Put simply, the Times can’t resist editorializing in adjectives and metaphors, documenting a moment of unexpected—and, it bears repeating, needed—cordiality through a lens of Trump-as-tacky-predator and Mamdani-as-glib-kid-in-over-his-head. The civic significance is swallowed by tone.

Share

Now let’s turn the page and look at how Fox News columnist David Marcus, writing from the opposite ideological shore, saw the moment and what he wrote:

For almost an hour on Friday, President Donald Trump and mayor-elect of New York City Zohran Mamdani, who have spent months slinging mud and calling each other names, exhibited perfect Thanksgiving dinner decorum, and maybe we can all learn from it.

Going into the meeting, expectations ran high that tempers might flare. Would we see a repeat of the angry confab Trump had with Vlodymyr Zalenskyy months ago, full of fiery recriminations? But it turns out, that was never really in the cards.

[…]

The most telling moment came when Mamdani was pressed on whether he still believes that Trump is a fascist. Mamdani froze in the headlights, until Trump jumped in and said, “Just say yes,” adding that it was easier than explaining it.

Trump was acknowledging that in the hardball of politics, people throw names at each other, but also, that once the votes are counted, the winners have to work together, no matter if they slung epithets like fascist and communist quite freely.

[…]

For Mamdani’s part, he played the son-in-law very well, lots of smiling, standing deferentially alongside Trump, he was calm and reserved, almost like the 20-something cousins who suddenly decide to “take a walk,” a half hour before dinner.

There will be little to no backlash against Mamdani on the left for “humanizing” Trump during his visit, because his acolytes know he was just playing the game, like when former President Barack Obama pretended to oppose gay marriage based on his “deeply held” Christian beliefs.

But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a humanizing moment for Trump, at least for those who don’t already put his picture on dart boards. By foregoing Archie Bunker and channeling Mike Brady, Trump pulled off a “President Knows Best” holiday special.

[…]

Perhaps, as we enter the season of Advent next week, this is exactly what Americans needed to see: two men who could not be more polar opposites in the political imagination of their nation, nonetheless treating each other with dignity and respect.

And somewhere, I could almost sense First Lady Melania Trump, mirroring so many mothers and grandmothers this Turkey Day, whispering “Thank God,” when the fireworks never started, and the family made nice all the way through the pumpkin pie.

Unlike McCreesh, Marcus explicitly situates the meeting as a model for ordinary Americans. “Perfect Thanksgiving dinner decorum, and maybe we can all learn from it” is not a wink—it’s a thesis. He casts reporters, not politicians, as the troublemakers, “like teenagers trying to pick fights.” In his hands, the story becomes about adults refusing to perform hatred on cue. Trump’s “just say yes” moment is interpreted as democratic realism—winners have to work together—not as evidence of moral unseriousness. Even when Marcus needles Mamdani, it supports the coexistence theme. Namely, you don’t have to like each other to be decent. And his closing is overtly reconciliatory, arguing that this was “exactly what Americans needed to see.”

Even if it is performative, Sulzberger was right about one thing. The public does look to the news to understand what to think. And if Fox is telling its readers to see this and think, despite our political differences we are fellow Americans, while the Times uses it to tell its readers, this is a joke, who is the problem here? In a season defined by maximalism and mutual suspicion, Trump and Mamdani accidentally modeled something like civic coexistence. Not authentic agreement. Not true transformation. But even just the simple act of treating an opponent as a human being long enough to get through a photo op is something. For a country that’s forgotten what normal looks like, even a flicker of adulthood can serve as a plot twist.

Subscribe now

The article begins by observing that America faces a demographic collapse, even though many couples would like to have children:

The United States is reaching its lowest birth rate in history, but that alarming outcome isn’t necessarily intentional. Pew Research Center data show that the majority of young Americans today still want to have children: More than 7 out of 10 people in their 20s and 30s have or plan to have at least one child, and the majority of nonparents between ages 18 and 34 say they want to be parents someday.

The problem isn’t a lack of desire, but a lack of opportunity. Economic insecurity and the cost of raising children is consistently the strongest driver of the declining U.S. birthrate. Housing costs in desirable metro areas have outpaced wages for decades. One recent study found that rising housing costs since 1990 were responsible for about 51% of the fertility-rate drop between the 2000s and 2010s. Childcare costs have become the equivalent of a second rent or mortgage payment in many cities. In fact, the price of childcare for two children exceeds the average housing cost in three out of four U.S. regions, and across the 100 largest metro areas, the average monthly cost of full-time, pre-K childcare is 39.4% higher than the average monthly rent.

Additionally, American social patterns have shifted dramatically. People now marry much later—on average, at around 30 years of age—as more time is spent on careers and individual fulfillment. As I have argued before, we have slipped into a narcissistic society where our friendships have become funships, our careers are decided by what we’d most like to do, and our success in marriages is measured by how happy we are. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence have exacerbated the problem, offering us shallow pleasure in exchange for deeper meaning, and many young people are unthinkingly making that trade.

But this is not the analysis that the Post provides. The author explains that in their search for the best place to raise one’s kids, they gathered data for every county in the United States across four metrics: affordability, education, safety, and liberty. On their face, these seem like sensible metrics. And it turns out, the highest-ranked places cluster in Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, and New Jersey. But here’s the wrinkle:

Though Maine, Massachusetts, and Maryland might offer the best locations to raise a child, they are not among the top 10 states with the highest concentration of young parent households. There is almost no relationship between how high the states score on average and whether families with young children live there. The highest shares of households with children younger than 18 are in Utah, Texas, and Idaho.

The author then puzzles over why parents are not choosing the “right” places to raise their children, noting that “One reason behind this gap is that across the nation parents focus a good amount on affordability and education quality, but not as much on crime risks or state policies when it comes to where to raise children.”

It’s rather hard to believe that parents don’t much care about high crime rates when looking for a place to raise their kids. And it should be, because it’s untrue. Parents value safety extremely highly, but what the Post failed to consider is that not all parents can afford to live in the safest neighborhoods, which tend to be the costliest. But another factor is that poor parents tend to have more kids, and if poor people are having more kids then you’re going to find more households with children under 18 in poor areas. But it’s not very smart to therefore conclude that this is because those parents want to live in those areas.

That said, let’s take a closer look at our three outliers—Utah, Texas, and Idaho—and ask ourselves what, if anything, these states have in common. And the answer is that a simple glance at their demographic profiles reveals a set of shared characteristics that do offer some answers. The most striking commonality is that all three states have younger populations than the national average. In fact, they are among the youngest states of all, which means more adults in those states are in their prime child-bearing years, and that alone tilts the household structure toward families with children. But in addition to these factors, culture also plays a role. In Utah, the influence of the LDS Church (Mormons) plays an important and measurable role in shaping attitudes toward child-rearing. Idaho’s intermountain-west culture reflects rural, tight-knit, and often religious communities that historically favor family-centered life. Texas blends cultural conservatism with large Evangelical and Catholic populations, both of which correlate with higher fertility and an emphasis on family stability. Across all three states, socio-religious norms tend to reward child-rearing.

A final factor worth considering is that Texas and Idaho have become major destinations for young families leaving California and other high-cost states in search of affordability, schools, safety, and room to grow. These newcomers tend to be younger, poorer, and more likely to have children, reinforcing the demographics listed above that are already present. But the problem for the Post is that these three states are very conservative. Rather than consider the factors above, this leaves the Post wondering why families seem to prefer red counties:

Our analyses show that affordable places that offer better education have a positive correlation with where young parents live, but state policies for parental support and personal liberties have little to do with locations of families.

This strongly suggests young parents do not value “parental support” or “personal liberties” very highly, which is a staggering finding, if true. But glossing their methodology, we quickly see that this is not at all the case, and that they are heavily weighing these otherwise reasonable metrics as measurements of progressive politics.

Some of the problems you may notice include mismatched units of analysis, arbitrary weighting schemes, the blending of unrelated indicators, and the use of questionable proxies, all of which create a ranking that reflects editorial assumptions about one’s politics rather than a useful index based on empirical reality.

One of the most fundamental problems arises from the decision to score counties while using data derived from school districts, two administrative units that rarely align neatly given that many counties contain multiple districts with drastically different performance levels. The methodology also relies on a series of weighting decisions that appear to be normative rather than empirical. For instance, in the education category, student test performance and graduation rates each receive 30% weight, while teacher-to-student ratio and district diversity account for 20% each. No justification is offered for this configuration. A rigorous statistical approach would test whether these components actually measure the same underlying construct and would derive weights using techniques such as factor analysis or regression modeling. Instead, the weights reflect subjective judgments, such as pretending that diversity is almost as important as graduation rates, rather than demonstrated statistical relationships. And as someone who lived in East Asia for almost 20 years, working in both journalism and education, I can tell you that East Asians are the best-performing students on the planet, and their classrooms are among the least diverse of all.

Diversity is fine if you happen to like diversity, but it is false to claim that diversity is objectively a strength over unity, particularly when diversity is defined according to variety in race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity as opposed to viewpoint diversity, which is the only kind that objectively contributes to a better education. Put another way, to rate diversity as being almost as important to a child’s education as graduating is not a measure of “quality of education,” but of being woke.

But it gets worse. Skip down to the section on liberty. All rational parents should seek to live in a place where they have liberty. You only have to imagine raising your children in a communist regime such as Venezuela or North Korea to immediately grasp why this is so, and how it ties deeply into the metric of safety. Think of Jeff Younger, who lost custody of his son because he did not enable the boy’s belief that he was a girl. That is the kind of liberty that every parent should fear losing. But that is decidedly not what the Post has in mind. Indeed, its metric is closer to the opposite of this, giving 60% weight to abortion access, 30% to support for gender ideology, and 10% to family leave. In other words, if a county gives generous maternal and paternal leave so that parents can stay home and spend those first precious months or years with their children, that’s all well and good, but it is three times more important for counties to support trans ideology, possibly by teaching impressionable young children that such delusions are actually healthy, possibly by removing children from their fathers because their father is, say, a Republican. Or a biologist. And is it truly six times more important for raising a family that one have access to abortion?

Now, one can choose to value these things. One may want to live in an area with abortion access, for example, because that puts more of the decision-making around reproduction in the hands of the mother, and some potential mothers who face fewer legal penalties may then be more likely to have kids. Or you may be the parent of a child who identifies as transgender. If the Post wants to give such people metrics to find places to live, that’s one thing. But to package those metrics as “good for the family,” then to puzzle over why so many families do not seem to value these things, is a particularly gross manipulation.

In the end, the Post isn’t telling parents where to raise their kids. It’s telling them what kind of parents they should be. No thanks. As a journalist myself, let me give you a tip, WaPo. Parents don’t need journalists to tell them what their values should be. They need data that respects the values they already have.

Many are the paths one could trace back in trying to explain the history of how we ended up with a republic that occasionally snags, but my mind casts back to two starting points, both in London: the Gunpowder plot and the second marriage of Henry VIII. Growing up in the Bahamas as a bastard child of the British Commonwealth, we celebrated Guy Fawkes Night every fifth of November. Alongside Halloween and Christmas, it was my favorite holiday. Every year, my brother and I gathered old clothes, stuffed them with newspaper, and fashioned life-sized Guy Fawkes dolls on our beds. Then we carried them outside on our shoulders, tossed them onto the wild bonfire in the yard, and danced around the flames as the sparks lifted into the sky. Only later did I come to understand that we were reenacting our near annihilation, a single moment in time when the West peered over the edge and almost didn’t walk back. A civilizational point of no return.

Subscribe now

A colorable argument can be made that Henry VIII’s penis did what no army could and tore London from Rome, that his libido was a political force, that his inability to keep his breeches buttoned, combined with his possible infertility, gave birth to democracy as we know it today. It began in 1527, when Henry petitioned Pope Clement VII for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, his late brother’s widow, after she failed to produce a surviving male heir. Henry argued that God was unhappy that she had been his brother’s wife, indeed that this violated divine law, and therefore God had denied them a male heir. But when the Roman Catholic Church said no to his annulment request, Henry rejected papal authority, broke from the Church, and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England.

In 1534, Parliament recognized his right to supremacy, giving him the right to his marriage to one of Catherine’s ladies-in-waiting, the bewitching Anne Boleyn. Catholics who refused to recognize Henry as their new religious leader were branded traitors. Anyone who did not attend Anglican services had to pay heavy fines. Harboring a Catholic priest was punishable by death. Catholics were barred from universities and public office. Within a few decades, priests were executed simply for performing Mass. In his 1605 play Measure for Measure—an eerily prescient critique of surveillance states guided by censorial virtue signaling—Shakespeare commented on state oppression in a line that became one of the great Renaissance aphorisms on the abuse of power, writing in Act II, Scene 2, “It is excellent to have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”

That same year, a group of Catholic terrorists rented a cellar beneath the House of Lords and packed it with 36 barrels of gunpowder. They were sick of the way Catholics had been brutally persecuted, all so that the Heretic and the King’s Whore could have a romp. They left Guy Fawkes, an English soldier and explosives expert, to ignite the fuse during the opening of Parliament—when the king, his family, and the entire political elite would be present. But an anonymous letter betrayed them, Fawkes was discovered, confessed under torture, and the plotters were hunted down and executed. Over the years, the symbolism of Guy Fawkes has evolved from that of a terrorist burned in effigy to a folk hero of resistance against tyranny, celebrated most famously in Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta. But however you see him, villain or hero, the ritual reminds us that the state can die suddenly, and must be guarded vigilantly. But also, that when it “becomes destructive,” as Thomas Jefferson later wrote, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.”

In those lines of American scripture, Jefferson drew heavily from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, written in 1689, which held that government is a social contract that exists only by consent of the governed, that people possess natural rights to life, liberty, and property, that when government breaks this contract by violating those rights then rebellion is not chaos, but the restoration of moral order. Locke composed the Two Treatises of Government during the Glorious Revolution, which was the culmination of decades of tension between monarchy and Parliament, Catholicism and Protestantism, absolute and constitutional power. Parliament overthrew James II, who had claimed that divine right trumps parliamentary consent, and Locke’s purpose was to justify the overthrow of a tyrannical monarch, rejecting the divine rights of kings and laying out a new political philosophy for legitimate government. As he said:

Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it. This any number of men may do, because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are left as they were in the liberty of the state of nature. When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest.

The idea was not entirely new. Locke pulled from Aristotle, who had anciently argued that governments exist to achieve the good life and that when rulers govern for their own benefit, regimes become perversions—tyrannous—and lose legitimacy. In De Legibus and De Re Publica, Cicero taught that unjust law is no law at all. In the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas said rebellion could be justified against a tyrant who acted “against the common good.” But when Locke wrote that rulers who break natural law “put themselves into a state of war with the people,” he was invoking more immediate influences. We all remember that in his 1651 book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that outside the gates of government and law, we find “the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” But few of us remember what he was getting at here. His bigger point was that since life outside the law was hell, rebellion was irrational because peace under any ruler was better than the chaos of war.

Locke’s Second Treatise was in many ways a rebuttal to Hobbes. But Locke’s philosophical innovation was to make rebellion a logical consequence of contract theory rather than a theological exception. He turned centuries of moral and religious debate into a blueprint for constitutional democracy, writing, “When government violates natural rights, it dissolves itself—and sovereignty returns to the people.” That philosophical chess move is what made Locke revolutionary—and why Jefferson, Madison, and the American founders saw him as the intellectual godfather of liberty.

England, and the Bahamas, mark each November 5 with bonfires and effigies, burning Fawkes and his co-conspirators and dancing in the long shadows of memory of how close the kingdom had come to destruction. In response to Fawkes, Parliament tightened laws, demanded more oversight, and emphasized the king’s accountability to the realm. The idea took hold that “faith and government alike must be held in public trust.” A generation later, that belief hardened into confrontation when Charles I, who had inherited his father’s belief that he ruled by God’s will, not parliamentary consent, demanded taxes for wars against Spain and France—and Parliament, which had inherited a sense of its own power after decades of asserting oversight in the wake of the Gunpowder plot, refused.

In a fury, the White King dissolved the legislature and proceeded to rule alone in what the British call the period of Personal Rule, or the Eleven Years’ Tyranny. But unlike a modern dictator, he ruled oppressively, not murderously. In fact, he ordered the killing of no more than probably a dozen people, if that. One was Alexander Leighton, the Puritan writer who criticized bishops. The Star Chamber ordered him whipped, branded, his nose slit, and his ears cut off. Another was the Puritan lawyer and writer William Prynne, who in his massive tract Histriomastix condemned stage plays, actresses, and public entertainment as immoral. As fate would have it, Queen Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s wife, happened to be performing in a court masque at the time, and so his attack was seen as an insult to the queen herself. The Star Chamber sentenced him to life imprisonment, disbarred from the legal profession, pilloried, branded “S.L.” for seditious libeller, and his ears cut off.

But reading this, I am reminded of Henry VIII, who similarly refused to acknowledge a power other than his own because it said no to something he wanted to do, and how that set the stage upon which these later players all strut and fret their hour, as Shakespeare would say. And so began the struggle for power, and the emergence of a system to keep it in check.

Remember, Remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!

The attempt of Charles to govern alone did not go well, and eventually resulted in the English Civil War. The memory of that period haunted later generations. When James II—the one Locke saw overthrown—later tried to assert royal authority, Parliament tried to limit his absolutism by tightening the purse strings. He refused to compromise, was ousted, and the result was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (so named because it was relatively bloodless). The silver lining was, Parliament then forced William and Mary to accept the Bill of Rights in 1689, establishing that the monarch could not levy taxes or suspend laws without Parliament’s consent. In other words, it fixed parliament’s supremacy over finance. It also established “freedom of speech and debates”—within Parliament, that is. But hey, it was a start. It also established other familiar rights: The right to petition, the right to fair trial, even the right to bear arms—for Protestants. It was the first time individual rights and parliamentary supremacy were formally enshrined in law, creating the constitutional model that contrasted sharply with absolute monarchy on the Continent.

The American colonists were British subjects. Their arguments were built directly on English constitutional precedent. They saw George III’s actions—taxation without representation, arbitrary laws—as violations of the rights of Englishmen, as secured since the signing of the Bill of Rights of 1689. Indeed, colonial pamphleteers repeatedly cited the English Bill of Rights as proof that kings must obey the law and that citizens have inalienable liberties. The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) drew upon this Anglo-constitutional tradition, but the radical innovation here was that it expanded the concept to assert that rights were natural, and not merely granted by Parliament. So the American Revolution was, in one sense, a rebellion in defense of the English constitution—until it became something new, a radical republic grounded in universal rights. What had begun as a defense of tradition became a revolution.

This, in turn, inspired the French. French officers who fought in the American Revolution, most famously the Marquis de Lafayette, carried those ideas home. In 1788, when France’s Estates-General refused to approve new taxes unless reforms were made, the government was left literally unable to pay its bills—soldiers went unpaid, public works halted, credit collapsed—leading to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Once again, the inability for crown and parliament to come together had resulted in civil conflict. The following year, Lafayette helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, explicitly modeling it on both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. American revolutionary texts circulated widely in Paris, and Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, consulted on early drafts. The Declaration extended English constitutional liberty into a universal human creed, and a through line could be traced from this universal new creed all the way back to Henry VIII.

Here’s a final example. In 49 BC, Julius Caesar, the governor of Cisalpine Gaul, led his 13th Legion over the Rubicon River, which marked the legal boundary between his province and Italy proper. This was a flagrant violation of Roman law, which strictly forbade any general from bringing his army into Italy. Doing so was considered treason. So once he crossed the Rubicon, there was no going back. He had effectively declared war on the Roman Republic and could not return to the Senate without being tried and executed for treason. The historian Suetonius records that, as he crossed, Caesar uttered the words, Alea iacta est. The die is cast. He was now in that liminal moment between having thrown the die and waiting for it to tumble to a stop and show a number. The good Greeks have a word for moments like this, inflection points when time seems to freeze and fates are decided. They call it kairos, which just literally means time, and we get another famous expression from this particular kairos—when people today say someone is “crossing the Rubicon,” they mean taking a decisive and irreversible step.

Wisely, Shakespeare used anachronistic allegory to comment on topics of the day without tempting the wrath of the throne. His Roman plays, such as Julius Caesar or Coriolanus, are often said to hold up a mirror to Elizabethan or Jacobean politics by interrogating questions of tyranny and republicanism under the guise of history. When he wrote, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,” Queen Elizabeth I was elderly, childless, had not named an heir, and England lived in quiet terror of a power vacuum—with haunting but undeniable parallels to Rome after Caesar’s assassination. In Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, the English historian Tom Holland holds a Roman mirror up to America. Indeed, Holland once said in an interview, “When I wrote Rubicon, I pitched it to publishers as being a mirror held up to the present.” Holland makes the case that this kairos wasn’t just an inflection point for Caesar, but that for all of Rome, the die was now cast. This violation was the beginning of the breakdown of Roman constitutional norms, with Caesar being inspired by how Lucius Cornelius Sulla marched his legions on Rome because he refused to admit political defeat.

You wouldn’t be crazy, by the way, for thinking Holland is holding a mirror up to America with a specific nod toward January 6, except that the book was published in 2005 and was actually about learning to take internal threats to liberty seriously. As he wrote in the preface, “The story of the Republic is, in essence, the story of how a civilization committed to liberty and the rule of law came to destroy both.”

And how does that happen? As we have seen, in recent history, it tends to happen when rulers seek to take too much power for themselves, parliaments stand in their way, and governments grind to a halt. So although our current government shutdown is, as I said at the top, something like what folks call a first-world problem, it is nevertheless an extremely dangerous situation. But as for Holland’s take on Rome, I disagree. I think the Rubicon moment for Rome was not, in fact, the literal Rubicon itself. By then, the state was already hollowed out, the Senate had ceased to function as a deliberative body (and was instead a battlefield between senatorial elites and Roman generals), and constitutional norms had already eroded significantly. The moment the die was truly cast, in my view, was during the Senate deadlocks of that same year, between the senatorial elite and Roman generals, resulting in institutional paralysis. Here, repeated stalemates over land reform, debt relief, and citizenship drove both populares and optimates to violence. Every aspect of society, even the justice system itself, became a weapon used by political factions. Once that took place, Rome’s constitution stopped being adaptive. They were a people mighty but divided. Cicero himself lamented that the Republic was “a name without substance.”

From the Gunpowder plot and Henry VIII’s defiance of Rome to Charles I’s war with Parliament, from Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon to Congress’s shutdown, the story is always the same. When rulers and assemblies clash, this represents the living tension on which democracy depends, and which keeps tyranny at bay. Our government shutdowns are massively destructive, but they are also the faint crackle of that electric line, a reminder that we live not under the dominion of one will, but in the fragile, dangerous, necessary balance between many.