I think this is a useful insight, both from Theroux and from Harris, and it sheds light both on the appeal of the Manosphere and of what seems to be the opposite of the Manosphere, which is the resurgence in traditional Christian morality among young and youngish men.

But me being me, the main point is going to be about antinomianism.

1.

Antinomianism, which I’ve spent the better part of my academic career researching, is the view that, for one reason or another, it is better to disobey the law than to obey it. Antinomianism may be religious, as when Martin Luther taught that salvation is a matter of faith and grace, not righteous works; or secular, as when civil rights protesters break unjust laws separating the races (though this was often justified religiously as well); or even anti-religious, as when Nietzsche argued that ethics do not apply to the ubermenschen who have transcended conventional good or evil.

While the term originated in a specific context, in debates between Luther and his opponents in the 16th century, the phenomenon occurs throughout human history, including in early Christianity, where Paul taught that “the letter of the law kills, but the spirit of the law gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). This led to fierce debates among Gnostics, Christianizing Jews, and non-Jewish Christians. Paul castigates those who maintain Jewish dietary laws and the rite of circumcision, but what about moral law? Is all permitted now that Christ has died for our sins?

Eventually, the Church Fathers decided that while salvation didn’t depend on obeying the law, any good Christian would be filled with love, and love dictates moral conduct — with the law as a guide.

Such workarounds and balancing acts happen all the time. Human beings—particularly in a Judeo-Christian moral and cultural frame, but not exclusively—are constantly oscillating between the letter and spirit of the law. On the one hand, we rail against legalism, from the terms of the Apple user agreement, which no one reads, to the intricate vagaries of religious doctrine that seem to miss the heart of the matter. (I wrote the first draft of this post while getting ready for Passover, a perfect example of extreme legalism, with a million rules and little relationship to common sense.)

On the other hand, it is not the case that to love another person dictates one’s moral responsibilities to that person. This is not an abstract question. For centuries, Christian missionaries and crusaders have spread “Christian love” at the edge of a sword. And more recently, in my own queer community, many Christians say that because they love us, they don’t want us to sin and spend the rest of eternity in hell. Therefore, anything they feel is best for us is morally justified. Just this week, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s ban on so-called conversion therapy, which is now essentially a legal form of child abuse, in which discredited forms of therapy and self-hatred are forcibly imposed on teenagers sent to re-education camps by their parents. Out of “love.”

Share

It’s not just traditionalists who do this. Think of hippie spiritual teachers sleeping with their students, despite the obvious power imbalances and impossibility of consent in such a context. Or of boomer-era men crossing the line between flirtation to sexual harassment. All out of love! Or at least lust. The human heart may be necessary for ethical action, but it is not sufficient.

Neither extreme — all law or all love — can function as an ethical foundation. Inevitably, lines must be drawn on the slippery slope, even if they aren’t really grounded in anything stable.

Which brings us to from Andrew Tate, Theo Von, Clavicular, and the rest.

Read more

And yet, he is, apparently, galactically stupid when it comes to subjects outside his areas of expertise.

If you haven’t watched this yet, here is a 90-second clip of an interview he did with journalist David Senra, in which he says that introspection is a bad thing:

So you can really sink into it, here’s some of the transcript:

Senra: You don’t have any levels of introspection?

Andreessen: Yes. Zero. As little as possible.

Senra: Why?

Andreessen: I’ve just found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past, get stuck in the past. It’s just, it’s a real problem. And it’s a problem at work and it’s a problem at home… If you go back, like, 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like, it’s the whole idea — I mean, just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are, you know, kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s…

Great men of history didn’t sit around doing this stuff at any prior point, right? It’s all a new construct. It was, you know, well, first Western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual, which was like a new concept, you know, several hundred years ago. And then, you know, for a long time, it was already the individual runs, right, and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology and does all these things.

And then, you know, kind of this kind of guilt-based whammy kind of showed up from Europe, a lot of it from Vienna, you know, 1910s, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement and kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to like, you know, basically second-guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self-criticize, right? The individual needs to feel guilt, and needs to look backwards, needs to, you know, dwell on the past. It never resonated with me.

The internet has had a field day with these remarks (which, to be fair, were off the cuff) and I won’t spend long on their obvious falsity and amorality here. Many commentator have noted that the great men people of history, including generations of entrepreneurs, did, in fact, practice a great deal of introspection: Thomas Edison, Marcus Aurelius, Charles Darwin, Nelson Mandela, Jane Goodall, Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffett, Sojourner Truth, Steve Jobs, Sun Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Lao Tzu, Queen Elizabeth (I and II), Socrates, not to mention the progenitors of Andreessen’s own philosophy, including Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Very bad but impactful men did too — Mein Kampf is full of introspection, for example, as are the writings of Henry Ford. It’s just an absurd claim, historically.

Share

Nor was introspection invented by Freud, for God’s sake. It’s central to to ancient Greek philosophy, the Bible (cf. Solomon, Moses, the Psalmist, Ecclesiastes), Augustine, Aquinas, Montaigne, Luther. It is the foundation of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur and its emphasis on tshuvah (repentance, return), the Catholic rite of confession, and centuries of Protestant reflections on the consciousness of sin and seeking of grace. It’s hard to take any of this seriously — it’s below high school level.

Andreessen also seems to confuse introspection with rumination, guilt, and regret. All of those may, at times, be appropriate, but they’re not the same thing, and in any event, reviewing one’s choices is what mature adults ought to do — not to endlessly self-criticize, but to ponder where one’s thoughts and deeds may have gone awry so that we can do better in the future.

Tech titans were divided on the interview. Many, including Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, were critical if not dismissive. Yet others affirmed. Elon Musk posted on X: “Reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy or introspection is a recipe for misery. Don’t cut a rut in the road.”

That is astonishingly bad, unscientific, and telling advice from the world’s richest man, who is clearly profoundly unhappy, judging from his correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, his apparently-drug-fueled misadventures in government, his multiple divorces and alienations from friends and family members, and his endless desire for more to fill a seemingly unfillable longing within.

Now, I am not a fair umpire here, because I definitely introspect too much. But somewhere between my penchant for over-analysis and the blithe, dismissive ignorance of an amoral narcissist there is a Golden Mean. And Andreessen is nowhere near it.

What matters here isn’t just that some billionaire said something dumb on the internet; that happens all the time. What matters is that Andreessen isn’t just a random tech VC; he’s often regarded as one of the intellectual leaders of the tech world, especially the segment of the industry that has, of late, embraced right-wing, quasi-libertarian, and sometimes quasi-fascist politics. Andreessen has written influential yet intellectually careless manifestos in the past, including the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” which has fully and persuasively demolished here. His politics affect our lives, and so where he goes awry, and why, merits our attention. It’s a non-trivial cause of what sucks about our country right now.

Subscribe now

2.

In The Nation, David Futrelle wrote a spot-on critique of Andreessen’s remarks aptly titled “Marc Andreessen’s Dangerously Unexamined Life” which links his move-fast-and-break-things, techno-optimist worldview with the depredations of Big Tech, the industry’s lack of accountability for countless ills. This is obviously correct.

For example, it might be worthwhile to reflect on how the technology industry’s incentive structures have led to a profound loss of privacy; radicalization and rage-bait; algorithms that promote hate without any responsibility on the part of the platforms; and the overall enshittification of the Internet. The Internet has degraded from a utopian network that would bring us all together and make knowledge available to everyone, into a significant cause of why we are so divided, angry, and deluded. Perhaps worth some introspection?

I’d also reflect on the existential threats AI poses to the American socio-economic order and the environment, and whether the techno-optimistic bet that AI will, itself, solve these problems is coherent. Must we really build the Doomsday Machine before the Chinese do? Is there no other way forward? Must we hurtle inexorably toward a future that very few people seem to actually want?

It would also be worth introspecting into Andreessen’s motivations for supporting the Trump regime, which has eroded democratic norms to an extent never before seen in history. Might those motivations be unduly selfish? How might a billionaire best balance his own economic self-interests against the existence of American democracy itself? Food for thought.

I might even introspect about how Palantir, OpenAI, and others have not only kowtowed to authoritarians but are actively helping them surveil and oppress vulnerable populations with the thinnest of rationales.

I could go on and on here. What I’m most interested in, though, is the way in which Andreessen’s comments reflect a blindingly obvious yet apparently not obvious fact about some Tech Right titans: they don’t know what they don’t know about.

This is a bizarre anomaly. Everyone in VC (or business in general?) knows that people and companies optimize for different things. (I once worked in tech myself — I co-founded an open source software company back in the first dot-com wave in 2000 which did alright.) Companies can optimize for immediate revenues or long-term growth, for seizing market share or turning a profit, for specializing or generalizing, and for dozens of other goals. And individuals can optimize for various goals as well: physical health or getting ahead in business, artistic achievement or putting food on the table, knowing a great deal about venture capital or knowing something about philosophy, ethics, and spirituality.

Subscribe now

This is all so obvious that I hesitate to write it. So why don’t Andreessen, Musk, and Peter Thiel get it? These are men who, by birth and by choice, have optimized for certain kinds of success. They are like football players or basketball players: they have genetic abilities, talents, educational backgrounds, preferences, and choices that have led them to great success. But a football player is not necessarily a great chef, and Marc Andreessen is not necessarily a good futurist, ethicist, or philosopher. Isn’t that obvious?

Especially because he clearly hasn’t even done the reading. It would be one thing if he’d put in the time — if he took philosophy as seriously as he took computer science. But he clearly hasn’t. I mean, I programmed in BASIC in the 1980s, built websites in the 1990s, and co-ran my company in the 2000s. But Andreessen would never invest in a company in which I was the technologist. Isn’t that obvious?

So why is it not obvious to him?

3.

Well, the answer is obvious too: because he’s rich and people listen to him, for a variety of reasons.

Some listen out of purely self-interested motivations; if I do a fawning interview with Marc Andreessen, now I’m a big deal, and maybe he’ll invite me to some elite conference, or to do stuff for a16z. Even sitting in an audience, there’s a frisson of getting close to someone so famous and important.

Some listen because they, too, confuse financial success with wisdom in other areas. After all, Andreesen is super-rich and I’m not; he must know something I don’t know. Which he does, obviously — just not about some subjects on which he opines. But especially if wealth is one’s main metric for evaluating human excellence in general, it makes sense to listen to the wealthiest people. They’re the winners, right?

Others probably listen because Andreessen confirms their priors. Yes! I can imagine some tech bros saying, that is exactly right! To hell with accountability! Let’s move forward!

And a lot listen, I think, because Andreessen, Thiel, et al, just seem smart. They are smart, in their fields of expertise. They’re also articulate, wealthy, powerful white dudes who make big decisions that impact society and make history. They talk smart, act smart, and have the behavioral indicia of smartness. They have the confidence that comes with power.

And of course, there are endless echo chambers. Oligarchs also love to convene symposia, conferences, and meetings in Aspen or Davos where they say smart-sounding things to one another, or listen to carefully curated experts say smart-sounding things to them. Peter Thiel’s Hereticons is one prominent example; so are the countless junkets to which some of my colleagues have been invited. Once in a while, a dissenting voice gets through — Anand Giridharadas comes to mind — but, as Giridharadas has himself observed, more often than not the fundamentals of the oligarchical economy and value system remain unquestioned. That’s especially true for the supposedly ‘maverick’ conservatives who don’t do a lot of philanthropy, make a virtue of selfishness, and convene gatherings where these virtues are extolled. As Meryl Streep might say, Groundbreaking.

All these self-reinforcing circuits of delusion have even led to a neo-eugenicist view in which financial success is an indicator of whether one will be part of the elite who soon will actually run everything: Homo Deus, in Yuval Noah Harari’s term; the Founder Class; the citizens of the Network State; the Cognitive Elite. To these oligarch-intellectuals, becoming a captain of industry means one is qualified to effectively rule the human race, as if excellence along one vector of optimization implies excellence in all of them.

And what is the “useless class” (Harari again) supposed to do in an AI-driven future in which all our needs are met and most jobs are useless? Whatever; they’re just NPCs anyway; no one really cares.

To be clear, the technologies which Andreessen built and funded have greatly improved many aspects of our lives, including mine. I am not a Luddite by predilection or pragmatism: I’m writing these words on a laptop, Google Chrome, and a Substack UI. I used Claude to look up synonyms for the Tech Elite. I’m not putting out a paper zine. Technology, itself, is not the problem. Nor are technologists or venture capitalists.

The problem is that the Great Men of Capitalism once believed that, as Ben Parker and Andrew Carnegie put it, with great power comes great responsibility. Yet over and over again, tech elites like Andreessen have disclaimed responsibility for the social and political hellscapes they have helped to create, and are actively funding and arming a nationalist regime which, this week, is trying to stop millions of Americans from voting in the next election and conducting an increasingly unwinnable-seeming war.

And, it turns out, some of them are not only wildly uninformed about stuff, they don’t even know that they don’t know — on the contrary, they are proud of their ignorance, their impulsiveness, their lack of introspection. That has caused a lot of harm already, and depending on how the AI future turns out, it may cause even more harm yet to come. I mean, imagine if John Galt were just an idiot.

Thanks for reading and thanks to my paid subscribers for enabling this newsletter to exist. I promise, once I make $1.9 billion, I will pay you back somehow.

There’s been some great stuff on Substack this past week:

• wrote a fascinating (if sometimes florid) essay on the Meaning Crisis as, itself, a kind of mass ritual of semiotic indeterminacy. A sample: “ None of this is to say that brainrot is good. What this is to say is that an age of mass ritual may be upon us. Not because we have returned to an extant religion. Not because we are exhuming Latin phrases. But because: THE MEANING CRISIS ITSELF WAS OUR SIGNAL THAT A MASS RITUAL WAS UPON US.” I’m going to think about this one some more.

• The redoubtable did another amazing piece, this time a great screed on the manosphere called “Capitalism makes women of us all.”

• Here are some encouraging updates on judicial review of Trumpian authoritarianism from .

• And here’s a very smart retort, by Irwin Kula, to a very poor essay on Zionism by Alana Newhouse.

Regards from Emory University, where I just gave a talk on our work studying experiences of and attitudes toward psychedelics in religious communities. Here’s hoping I can fly out of Atlanta tomorrow. See you next week.

Share Both/And with Jay Michaelson

I conceived of the two articles as a pair, and am combining them here into one, for my readers and subscribers. If you’re one of them, thank you for enabling this work to continue and please consider upgrading if you can.

Subscribe now

An Institutional Failure

America’s antisemitism watchdogs are committing institutional malpractice.

While antisemitism explodes on the right, including throughout the Donald Trump administration and popular right-wing online spaces, anti-antisemitism organizations are disproportionally focusing on left-wing anti-Zionists and Muslim politicians, minimizing if not ignoring white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and Christian nationalists — many of whom are active in Republican political circles.

And now, with the release of the latest batch of Epstein files and the start of the Iran war, what was already an epidemic has become a plague. As the Forward’s Arno Rosenfeld has discussed at length, the incoherent rationales for the war have led many to the conclusion (mostly incorrect, in my view, though not without some basis) that America has been pushed into fighting Israel’s war — a view that slides quickly into antisemitic conspiracy theories on both the right and the left, as well as antisemitic ”revenge” attacks by Islamists, Muslims and other Arabs, like the attempted murders at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, last week.

Our communal institutions are failing us. Antisemitism can be found all across the political spectrum, yet as the ADL convenes its annual “Never is Now” conference today, its agenda and newsfeed are disproportionately focused on the left. Our community needs to engage in some serious soul-searching. And change course.

Almost two-thirds of young conservatives hold antisemitic views

It is shocking to learn how pervasive antisemitic views are among young conservatives, including many working for the government.

A November 2025 study by the conservative Manhattan Institute (not some left-wing organization) found that “nearly 4 in 10 in the current GOP (2024 Trump voters plus registered Republicans) believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe. Younger men are especially likely to hold this view (54% of men under 50 vs. 39% of women under 50).” (Interestingly, 77% of Hispanic GOP voters held this view, compared with 30% of white GOP voters.)

In another poll, 64% of young conservatives aged 18-34 agreed with at least one antisemitic statement in a survey. That is absolutely astonishing.

Share

Here’s an even more chilling story. Also last November, Rod Dreher, the post-liberal, far-right conservative thinker, reported on a trip to Washington, D.C. (meeting with Viktor Orban and JD Vance, discussing “the survival of Christianity in Europe”), in his Substack newsletter. After meeting with a number of conservatives in the Trump administration, Dreher wrote:

The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world…. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in antisemitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.

Dreher speculated that a number of factors caused this phenomenon, including the losses of economic opportunity, trust in institutions and “common culture.” He continued:

The issue of antisemitism on the young right is much deeper than I had guessed… [A] lot of this is reaction to how Jewish organizations like the ADL have policed speech critical of Israel, and of anything to do with Jews, so heavily over the decades that they have caused intense resentment among the Gentile Zoomercons. One man told me that for as long as he has been in politics, any criticism of Israel got you tagged as an antisemite, and that was a potential career-killer. So his generation has come to hate that, and to cease caring about the opinions of Jews.

Again, Dreher is not hostile to the right; he is part of it. But what he sees within his own movement shocks him. And this was before the Iran war. Dreher concludes:

The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree…. Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil.

I encourage you to read the whole post. I disagree with almost all of Dreher’s ideological positions, but his serious confrontation with this crisis is a model of honest reflection. I would also recommend reading the work of journalist John Ganz, who has written powerfully of the nihilistic, antisemitic Groyper phenomenon and its significance within the GOP.

To be sure, there is antisemitism on the left as well. But there is absolutely no analogue to the scope of right-wing antisemitism and its proximity to power. Here are a few specific examples.

• Kingsley Wilson has served as the Department of Defense press secretary since May 2025. Less than a year prior, she replied to an ADL post commemorating the lynching of Leo Frank that “Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl,” a noxious lie that circulates in the antisemitic underbelly of the internet — strong evidence that she spends a lot of time in such spaces. Last March, Rep. Ritchie Torres wrote to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth demanding Wilson’s firing, describing her social media posts as a “minefield of antisemitic rhetoric, white nationalist conspiracies, and pro-Kremlin propaganda.” Instead, Hegseth promoted her.

• Paul Ingrassia, currently acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, had been tapped to lead the Office of General Counsel until Politico exposed comments he made in a group chat, including “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” On the social platform X (the post has since been deleted), Ingrassia called Fuentes “a real dissident of authoritarianism.”

• Other examples are the often-nameless staffers running the social media accounts of the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and other departments. As has now been well documented, these accounts routinely post images and slogans taken from neo-Nazi and white supremacist communities like “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” posted by the Department of Justice, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” posted by DHS, variations of “Which Way Western Man?” (referring to a 1978 book claiming a conspiracy by “World Jewry” against the “Western Man”) and many posts (too many to be coincidence) exactly 14 words long, a probable reference to David Lane’s white supremacist “Fourteen Words” slogan. (The ADL has a database of such references online.) These are both dog whistles to the extreme right and evidence that these staffers are swimming in the ultranationalist swamp.

• And then there are the Young Republican group chats, which somehow keep turning up across the country filled with abject racism, sexism, homophobia and antisemitism. For example, a pile of Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders in New York, Kansas, Arizona and Vermont (once again obtained by Politico) included, among hundreds of lines of abject racism, posts like “I was about to say you’re giving national [leaders] to [sic] much credit and expecting the Jew to be honest” and various jokes about gas chambers.

And that’s not even including Elon Musk, whatever his statements or hand gestures may mean.

To be clear, there are many Jewish voices on the right who have spoken out, including Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro. So has Trump, who after all has many Jews in his family (even as he often traffics in antisemitic stereotypes about money). But they haven’t made the problem go away, and it’s not at all clear that they even represent the Republican majority anymore. What happens after Trump leaves the political stage?

Meanwhile, other Republican leaders have explicitly rejected calls to isolate or condemn the antisemites. Shapiro, for example, has called out Megyn Kelly for refusing to condemn Fuentes and Owens. And when conservative pundit Scott Jennings asked Vance, “Does the conservative movement need to warehouse anybody out there espousing antisemitism in any way?” he replied, “No it doesn’t, Scott.” While Vance did also say, “I think we need to reject all forms of ethnic hatred, whether it’s antisemitism, anti-Black hatred, anti-white hatred,” that is a toothless statement if he refuses to take any action against those who express it.

So, they remain in office. Carlson, meanwhile, remains welcome at leading conservative institutions like Turning Point USA and the Heritage Foundation, despite a long torrent of antisemitic rhetoric, most recently blaming Chabad Lubavitch for the Iran war, which would be merely ludicrous were it not also exceedingly dangerous. (For good measure, Carlson has recently platformed not only Holocaust deniers but 9/11 “Truthers” who say that Israel was behind the terrorist attacks.)

Antisemitism is intrinsic to right-wing nationalism and culture

This isn’t just a matter of a few bad apples. This is a massive, systemic trend. It is part of the rise of ethno-nationalism, Christian nationalism, National Conservatism and the triumph of Pat Buchanan-style America First politics. Despite the efforts of people like Loomer and Shapiro, and prominent Jewish NatCons like Yoram Hazony, it is impossible to somehow surgically remove antisemitism from that politics while leaving the anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, and racist strands in place — as Hazony appears to have recently found out. (“I’ve been pretty amazed by the depth of the slander of Jews as a people that there’s been online the last year and a half,” he said at this year’s NatCon conference. “I didn’t think it would happen on the right. I was mistaken.”)

Antisemitism is not incidental to the nationalistic worldview that is ascendent in the Republican Party; it is essential to it. As Ilya Somin recently wrote in :

Nationalism doesn’t just historically correlate with bigotry — it consistently drives antisemitism and other racial and ethnic prejudices. Indeed, nationalism intensifies preexisting antisemitic impulses. To the degree that today’s conservatives decide to embrace — or even just make peace with — nationalism and dispense with the universalist liberal principles of the American Founding, they will find it difficult to impossible to stem the spread of antisemitism in their midst.

Antisemitism is also an integral part of the right-wing internet. The most popular podcaster of all, Joe Rogan, recently hosted conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll, a vicious antisemite who, according to reporting in this publication, “wrote last year that the U.S. was ‘controlled by an international criminal organization that grew out of the Jewish mob and now hides in modern Zionism behind cries of “antisemitism”‘; claimed Jews control the media; and said that Israel had manipulated the Holocaust for its own gain.” (He also platformed Jake Shields, an MMA fighter-turned-far-right commentator who had said the previous month when he was on the show that Jews control America.)

And Rogan is just the tip of the spear. Andrew Tate routinely spouts antisemitic rhetoric with no corollary anywhere on the left. Influencer Nick Shirley just posted supportively of an antisemitic video by fellow influencer Tyler Oliveira. Right-wing conspiratorial antisemitism is taken for granted in the looksmaxxing and incel worlds. The great replacement theory (“Jews will not replace us!”) is routinely embraced on right-wing news media channels. Unambiguous, full-throated right-wing antisemitism is just part of the vibe.

But the ADL has been too busy worrying about Zohran Mamdani’s wife’s political views.

Why is this happening?

Why, with an entire Jewish communal infrastructure dedicated to fighting antisemitism, are we failing to focus on the most troubling manifestations of the crisis? Why are our legacy organizations getting it so wrong?

There are several answers to those questions.

The first is obvious: Hard-line pro-Israel donors have distorted organizational priorities, directing resources and attention to what offends them personally, rather than what poses the greatest threat to Jewish safety. Their motivations may be sincere; clearly many organizational leaders are sincerely dismayed by anti-Zionism, and due to their own emotional connections to Israel and Zionism, they may sincerely experience it as antisemitism. But now, much of the Jewish establishment has concluded that harsh criticisms of Israel, and certainly anti-Zionist ones, are not wrongheaded political views but expressions of antisemitic bigotry. And that has warped organizational priorities and resource allocation decisions.

Again, it’s not that antisemitism does not exist on the anti-Zionist left; it does, as we’ll explore in a moment. And of course, there is antisemitic violence perpetrated by anti-Zionists motivated by animus toward the State of Israel; we have seen that this week. But the overwhelming majority of that violence is committed by Islamists and terrorists, not campus protesters or obnoxious writers, artists and publishers. Yet the Jewish establishment continues to paint with a broad brush, lumping together activists with principled objections to Zionism (as they understand or misunderstand it) with murderers and bigots targeting Jews with violence. There is no left-wing equivalent of the world Dreher describes, or the candidacy of James Fishback in Florida, or the popularity of Joe Rogan. And, love him or hate him, Mayor Zohran Mamdani repeatedly, vociferously condemns antisemitism even as he holds views on Israel that are well to the left of many American Jews.

Second, obviously, many of the leading donors to Jewish establishment organizations are either Republicans themselves, or so strongly supportive of the Netanyahu government that they would prefer to trade the American Jewish birthright for the porridge of Greater Israel. Yes, they might concede, right-wing antisemitism is a problem, but plenty of Republicans are against it and the benefits of aligning with the Trump regime — for Israel, for their conservative moral values, or for their own pocketbooks — outweigh the costs.

Whether that is correct or not is impossible to say. But I would suggest, broadly speaking, that ethno-nationalism rarely turns out well for the Jews. The neocons and fiscal conservatives are not in charge anymore, and the MAGA movement’s nationalist-antisemitic monster cannot be contained once it is unleashed. I fear that today’s coddlers of the party’s antisemitic wing will, one day, look as misguided as those who minimized the threat of nationalists in the past.

It’s also clear that some Jewish leaders (mostly Boomers or Generation Xers) are often simply clueless about online culture. They seem not to even know the language. They may now know what a groyper is. But how about goyslop? Agartha? “Noticing”? 14:88? Have these donors ever been on Discord? Scrolled through TikTok? Watched Joe Rogan? Seen what happens to your YouTube feed when you watch a single video featuring conspiratorial content or a manosphere influencer?

Antisemitism is everywhere online, abetted by social media algorithms that are somehow immune to regulation. And if you don’t believe that matters, consider how Gamergate, Pepe the Frog, QAnon, and other online content moved into the mainstream and helped put Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Now imagine that happening with a figure who is closer to Fuentes or Fishback than Trump.

Of course, the ADL as an organization is aware of these phenomena; I’ve cited their own work several times in this article. But if you browse through the speakers at “Never is Now,” or peruse the ADL’s recent press releases, you will quickly see that the threat from the right is given far less prominence than the threat (real and perceived) from the left. The institutional knowledge is there, but the institutional priorities are disordered.

Worst of all, not only is the Antisemitism Industrial Complex failing to focus on the most dangerous forms of antisemitism, many of its efforts are making matters worse — including in the last few weeks.

First, by counting all anti-Zionist protests as antisemitic incidents, the ADL has destroyed its credibility as an objective monitor of antisemitism, making it much harder to track; we no longer have reliable data.

Second, by terrifying thousands, perhaps millions, of Jewish people — including many friends of mine — this emphasis on left-wing antisemitism obscures the more serious threats from white nationalists, Islamists, terrorists, and others who commit acts of violence.

And third, the Jewish establishment has imposed a hyperwoke regime of censorship in which statements in support of Palestinians, or in opposition to Israel, or in opposition to Israel’s role in the Iran war, are deemed to be bigotry that merits permanent cancellation. (I have experienced this myself as well.) As Dreher noted, this only makes matters worse, as both conservatives and progressives can see that political speech is being censored by Jewish elites with significant political power — which is exactly what their antisemitic conspiracy theories tell them.

Obviously, it is not the case that if the Jewish community were to do or say a certain thing, antisemitism would disappear. Bigotry never disappears. But the question is not a binary one of existence or non-existence, but one of scope, size and proximity to power. By way of analogy, racism will also probably never disappear, but when abject racism is espoused by government officials and leading cultural figures, that is measurably worse than when it is consigned to the margins. And that is precisely what has happened with antisemitism.

Share

The anti-antisemitism world has become an echo chamber obsessed with left-wing anti-Zionism, while nationalist antisemitism is now widespread among young Republican activists and online influencers. I only hope our leaders change course before it is too late.

Rejecting Both Antisemitism and the Weaponization of Antisemitism

In light of all the above, it is understandable that progressives’ reflexive response to accusations of antisemitism is to dismiss them. But to do so would be a mistake. Antisemitism does exist on the left; ask any Jewish person active in progressive spaces. Moreover, the failure to condemn and root out real antisemitism strengthens nationalists, racists, and fascists: first by enabling them to defame and delegitimize progressive movements, and second by advancing their own nativist, antisemitic agenda. It is also a betrayal of progressive values.

What is needed is both a rejection of the Antisemitism Industrial Complex’s weaponization of antisemitism and of antisemitism itself.

This is easy enough in obvious cases—violence against innocent Jewish people, overtly antisemitic rhetoric, and so on. Last week’s attempted mass murder at a synagogue outside Detroit might have been politically motivated by the perpetrator’s own sense of personal loss—but targeting innocent Jewish people is still obviously antisemitic.

But often it’s not so easy. Is it antisemitic to protest a political (or semi-political) event at a synagogue? When do sharp, legitimate criticisms of Israel and Zionism cross the line into bigotry and bias?

Having written and worked on this subject for nearly 30 years, I intend to offer some provisional answers to these questions. I speak as a rabbi, journalist, American Jew, and longtime LGBTQ+ activist. I also still believe in what I call “pragmatic Zionism” based on the fact that two peoples occupy the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean and that the most realistic, imperfect solution is two states for two peoples, equal rights for all Israeli citizens regardless of nationality, and a just peace recognizing the rights of all 16 million people in Israel/Palestine to self-determination, safety, and human dignity.

I also speak as someone witnessing profound mental health crisis within the American Jewish community. Nearly every American Jew I know, on every point along the ideological spectrum, is afraid, burned out, and deeply unsettled by the rise of antisemitism in America. Close friends of mine are afraid to “look Jewish” on the streets of New York City. I have personally faced antisemitic attacks since October 2023. None of this excuses the use of antisemitism to deflect criticism or attack others. But it is the emotional reality that underlies this conversation—and if you have Jewish friends, I promise you most are feeling it. We can do better.

When Anti-Zionism Becomes Antisemitic

AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Republican Party, and the Antisemitism Industrial Complex claim that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They claim that to oppose Zionism is to say that, alone among all the nations in the world, only Jews should not have a state of their own. This, they say, is inherently antisemitic.

This is clearly false. Many anti-Zionists are non-bigoted—in fact, it’s their commitments to human dignity that underlie their anti-Zionism. Moreover, it is reasonable to evaluate Zionism by what it has wrought for Palestinians, not merely what it means in the abstract.

That said, it is worth understanding that most American Jews do indeed define “Zionism” as the movement for Jewish self-determination, not settler-colonialism or Jewish domination. They do not define it as requiring that Palestinian society be eradicated, hospitals in Gaza bombed, or settler thugs allowed to conduct pogroms in the West Bank. Of course, it is the official policy of the current Israeli government to do all of these. But to many American Jews that is the result of the Netanyahu regime, not “Zionism” itself. As such, many liberal Zionists and anti-Zionists are talking past one another.

One way forward has been proposed by the Nexus Project, an initiative which seeks to clarify when anti-Zionism crosses into antisemitism. I will address two of their conclusions here.

First, anti-Zionist rhetoric becomes antisemitic when it makes use of antisemitic motifs. Sometimes these are obvious, like these antisemitic caricatures at a pro-Palestine rally in Toronto this past weekend.

Source: B’nai Brith Canada

Other times, the motifs can be more subtle: for example, as the Nexus Project describes it, “characterizing Israel as being part of a sinister world conspiracy of Jewish control of the media, economy, government, or other financial, cultural, or societal institutions.”

To take a recent example, observing that Benjamin Netanyahu and his American supporters have been pushing for war against Iran for decades is factually accurate. Claiming that America is merely his puppet, pushed into war by the “Israel Lobby” or a powerful Jewish conspiracy, is conspiratorial antisemitism.

Here is another example. Jeffrey Epstein well may have been working with the Mossad, though there are more signs he was working with Russia, and probably was working all sides. But this image (reposted by the Nexus Project) of Epstein and Netanyahu drinking the blood of dead children is antisemitic and draws directly from the Medieval blood libel.

This and other such images are no more neutral than racist caricatures; they exist in a lineage and have been used for centuries to attack Jews.

Here is a third example. When Trump invaded Venezuela, some on the left said Israel and Zionists were behind it, despite no non-circumstantial evidence and ample evidence of other motives. This is antisemitic conspiracy-mongering.

In all these cases, the process for avoiding antisemitic rhetoric and imagery is the same as that for avoiding racist stereotypes: learning what the offensive themes and images are and their history—and checking oneself before reaching for a particular metaphor, image, or symbol.

Share Both/And with Jay Michaelson

If nothing else, all of these uses of antisemitic motifs harm Palestinians as well as Jews, because they validate the worst claims of the right. As WBAI radio host and podcaster Rafael Shimunov put it: “Progressives claiming Israel’s behind Trump crimes in Venezuela seem to have little understanding of Western imperialism, are hitching a ride with the far right, and are handing right-wing Zionists clear examples of actual antisemitism that will be used against Palestinians.”

Targeting Jews

A second set of elements within the Nexus definition of antisemitism deals with the targeting of individual Jews. The definition defines as antisemitic:

holding individuals or institutions, because they are Jewish … culpable of real or imagined wrongdoing committed by Israel; us[ing] symbols and images that present all Jews as collectively guilty for the actions of the State of Israel; attack[ing] and/or physically harm[ing] a Jew because of her/his relationship to Israel; and convey[ing] intense hostility toward Jews who are connected to Israel in a way that intentionally or irresponsibly … provokes antisemitic violence.

Put another way: any time Jews are targeted as Jews, that is antisemitic. Individual Jews cannot be blamed for the actions of the state of Israel, even if the government of Israel asserts that it is acting on behalf of them. It is antisemitic to terrify, intimidate, or threaten Jewish people (who may or may not support the actions of the Israeli state), to vandalize their homes, or spit on them on college campuses. It is antisemitic to use the Jewish star as a symbol for Israel—the entire Israeli flag must be represented. It is antisemitic to unleash violence against Jews as revenge for the hideous acts of violence committed by Israel.

There are many “easy” cases of such targeting: a “Bring Them Home Now” vigil in Boulder firebombed because it was perceived to be pro-Israel (though in Israel, that slogan is used by anti-government protesters); multiple synagogue shootings in Toronto; the blockade of Jewish students in the Cooper Union library in New York, with protesters banging on doors.

But there are more subtle cases, too: Jews presumed to be Zionists and being driven out of arts organizations, or being required to not only disavow Zionism but dutifully raise their hands to acknowledge the genocide—a requirement not imposed on members of other groups (such as Christians who may be Christian Zionists, for example).

And then there are the harder cases. For example, synagogues often host real estate fairs for congregants considering retiring or buying second homes in Israel. These fairs often, but not always, include settlements across the Green Line, areas that all but Israeli hardliners believe would legitimately belong in a future Palestinian state. Lately they have become a favorite target of protest: Are they political events meriting protest, or is protesting outside synagogues always antisemitic?

Perhaps the answer really depends on what is meant by “protest.” At a recent protest outside a synagogue in Queens, antisemitic slurs were shouted and attendees were verbally and physically harassed. The protest also included pro-Hamas shouts (the real kind, not the imagined right-wing variety). Was this protest really a targeted action against the real estate fair at the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills, or was it, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) suggested, an act of intimidation against the entire local community? Is there no meaningful distinction between opposing the sale of apartments in Efrat and chanting “we support Hamas”?

That STFU in the above post, by the way, comes not from some troll but Mohammed El-Kurd, one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2021 and Palestine editor of The Nation.

For the record, January’s protest in Queens was met by a vicious, racist, Islamophobic, genocidal counter-protest by far-right Jews, which received far less media coverage. And while the anti-Zionists may have frightened some Jewish people in Queens, far-right Israeli Jews are committing horrifying acts of violence against Palestinians throughout the West Bank. Arguably, that should be de-normalized but when I am personally afraid to wear a kippa while walking down the street in Brooklyn—just as I’m afraid to hold my husband’s hand when we vacation in Florida—perhaps progressives should check themselves. Do we not see who we resemble, with whom we are “hitching a ride”? Do we really think that targeting Jewish people and Jewish institutions with ugly iconography, even when their actions are problematic, is the way to advance justice and liberation?

Jews are not even the right constituency to target. First, Christian Zionists and Christian nationalists are more numerous, more influential, and more extreme than are Jewish Zionists. Second, most Jews opposed Israel’s war in Gaza: according to a Washington Post poll conducted last October, 61% of American Jews said Israel has committed war crimes and about 4 in 10 said the country is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians. Yet we have been shunned by the coalitions of which we were once a part, thanks to the maximalist stance against Zionism as such, rather than against the subset of Zionists who support Israeli war crimes, the majority of whom are Christian. Even if it were appropriate to target Jews and Jewish institutions—which it is not—it is simply inaccurate to assume that all Jews are Zionists or that all Zionists support the war crimes in Gaza, the Occupation, or the Netanyahu regime. And it is unconscionable to tolerate the overt, unambiguous antisemitism present at many pro-Palestine actions.

I even wonder if the relentless targeting of Jews as Jews might call for a reexamination of some of the ambiguous rhetoric used in pro-Palestine circles. Clearly, for example, the phrase “Globalize the Intifada” can be interpreted to mean both “globalize the nonviolent struggle for Palestinian liberation” and “enact violence against Jews.” Might the actual targeting of Jews counsel more hesitation? I’m not saying the phrase is intentional dog whistling, like the right’s anti-immigrant and anti-trans rhetoric that has inspired stochastic terrorism against immigrants. I’m saying it is irresponsible—and disclaiming that responsibility is a form of disregard for the lives of Jewish people who are harmed by those acting on the “wrong” interpretation of ambiguous words.

A Dark Mirror

In my view, the destruction of Gaza ought to provoke rage in any human being who witnesses it. Anger is not only justified, but I would argue a necessary part of any moral response. Yet the same rage that motivates the moral conscience can also harm others if not wielded with care. Progressives know this about anger: how it energizes and how it destroys.

When we choose the strongest rhetoric, the most confrontational acts of protest, the most concentrated expressions of rage, and when the target of that hate is a vulnerable population already under attack from the right, this is not a wise use of anger. On the contrary, it betrays progressive commitments to protect the persecuted and the powerless.

For hundreds of years, antisemitism has been the handmaiden of ethnonationalism. And as ethnonationalism rises in a MAGAfied Republican Party and elsewhere in the world, Jews are once again being accused of engaging in global conspiracy, ritual murder, corrupting racial purity, and manipulating finance and the media. And when progressives start sounding like the Right, they are only helping the Right.

Progressive Jews, including Zionist ones, have long been part of coalitions working for social justice, from protesting ICE and marching with Black Lives Matter to a previous generation’s support for civil rights and LGBTQ equality. Most of us care deeply about the plight of Palestinians, and are outraged both by the Netanyahu government’s actions and the right’s weaponization of antisemitism to vilify the left. But we are trying to tell our allies something about the hostility, hatred, and condemnation we are experiencing. I hope that they can hear us.

The case in point, obviously, is the Iran War, which has multiple causes and motivations, some of which are at odds with one another:

• Impulse. Trump has been pushing to confront Iran militarily since 1980. He has long seen our tolerance of its regime as a sign of weakness, and this was a time to just do it.

• And he probably sincerely (in his way) believes that regime change in Iran will bring peace, by which he means American dominance. Which might be true if it were possible to maintain, which it probably is not (cf. Afghanistan).

• And now is the moment, before the 2026 election, which, if it is fair (a big “if”) will surely go against Trump. Now or never.

• Oil, also. Which is not only a matter of craven greed but of “energy dominance” – which, again, is true in a limited way.

• Israel, also. Netanyahu, too, is facing an uncertain election, as well as a potentially less friendly US Congress next year. Iran is a murderous, theocratic regime that has waged proxy wars on Israel for decades. Time and again, Netanyahu has opposed negotiations with Iran (“appeasement”) and now the political stars align. Note that this is a different set of motivations from most of Trump’s, but they overlap enough to make the collaboration work. More on this below.

• Epstein, also. More on this in a moment, but of course this is one of the motivations. Is it sufficient for Trump to declare war and kill thousands of people? I have no idea. But, and this is part of the point, it’s one motivation among many; one more straw on the camel’s back.

• The Economy, maybe. has written the war is to deflect attention from the lack of affordability. I dunno.

• China. There’s a reasonable interpretation that the real adversary here is China, which until very recently got most of its oil from Venezuela and Iran. Ironically, hobbling China’s oil supply may only accelerate its energy dominance — i.e., of post-fossil-fuel energy. But that will be a bumpy road for years and these campaigns could kneecap America’s primary rival.

• And there is evidence that China had sold Iran missiles that could be used against the United States Navy. If the Middle East evolved into prolonged conflict between proxies of China and the US (much as it was between the Soviet Union and the US for decades), that would be bad for American interests (and Israel).

• And Russia. Trump has now gone after Russian-allied authoritarians in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, weakening Putin, who now has to contend with another superpower without scruples or respect for international law. (Arguably the damage Trump has done to our European alliances outweighs the benefit of this ‘dominance’, but that’s a different question.)

• Perhaps not a motivation, but the rhetoric of Christian Nationalist messianism — that a war with Iran/Persia/Babylon (not the same thing, but whatever) is part of the unfolding End Times — was preached by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in perhaps the most astonishing governmental embrace of End Times theology in American history. It is also widespread on the Christian Right. I don’t know to what extent this belief and/or derangement played into the decision to go to war, but around a quarter of the country may believe it.

• Definitely not the motivation, but Iran did just murder thousands of pro-democracy activists and innocent bystanders, though this fact is barely ever mentioned.

My point is not to argue which of these factors are the most important ones; plenty of pundits have done that. It is, to risk the cliché, to argue for “both/and” or in this case, both/and/and/and/and.

In a way, this should be obvious, because it is how we all (or at least I) make decisions all the time. Just this week, I was debating whether to take a particular trip in two months, and I listed out five or six reasons on each side. I realize that most people are, lucky for them, more decisive and less analytical than I am, but still, obviously we do this in our ordinary lives.

Share

Yet when it comes to politics, there’s this desire to have one answer, one cause, one motivation that explains everything, and usually does so in a way that confirms our priors.

For anti-Zionists and antisemites, that means blaming Israel: this is Bibi’s War, and America is just a puppet. Notice how this view slides easily into antisemitic conspiracy-theorizing. Is it really plausible that Israel, which depends on the United States for aid, is actually pulling the strings? Yes, AIPAC is a strong lobbying organization, but they’re losing clout on both the Left and the Right — is this really within their power? That Netanyahu wanted this war is clearly true. That he persuaded Donald Trump and the entire administration to do his bidding (at a gigantic political, financial, and human cost) is clearly preposterous. No surprise that Tucker Carlson has now moved on from blaming Netanyahu to, I kid you not, blaming the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic sect.

Likewise, for conspiracy-spotters on the Left and Right, it’s purely a distraction from the Epstein Files, which obviously has a lot of resonance, not to mention a blockbuster film to back it up (Wag the Dog). But is it really that linear? Is everything else merely a pretext? I do think the metastasizing Epstein crisis plays some role in Trump’s calculus, but a simple cause-and-effect relationship is too simplistic. There is no one wag. And besides, if it were simply a gigantic plan to distract, it isn’t going to work:

More broadly, this is not how Trump works. It’s never linear with Trump; he didn’t start the war to distract from the rising costs of living, or Epstein, or any one particular thing. It’s all distraction, all the time. This is the Roy Cohn method: always attack, always punch, never stop, never let up. Along with Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” maxim – which arguably overlaps in this case – it’s Roy Cohn’s Cassius-Clay-inspired pugilism that governs. This is why Trump so often says he’ll have a proposal in “about two weeks”; he knows that by then, he will have put out a dozen distractions to change the subject. It’s one battle after another.

Share

And then, of course, is the war’s highly questionable morality and legality.

On the Right, everyone has simply contradicted themselves, as has been amply displayed on the Internet. Here’s Pete Hegseth talking about why America should stop trying to engineer regime change. Here’s Trump saying Obama would go to war with Iran because he couldn’t make a deal. Here’s JD Vance endorsing Trump because he won’t start more wars. Here’s Mike Johnson saying that, in fact, everything was totally legal here because this is a limited operation with an immediate need (what, exactly?) to attack Iran by surprise. (Bookmark that one.) There is no complexity here: everything is extraordinarily simple, even if it is diametrically opposed to what has been said in the past. Opportunistic or not, this is totalitarian thinking — Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

One would think we would’ve learned from Iraq that a powerpoint presentation about the balance of power in the Middle East is different from, you know, destroying a country’s government and then rebuilding it from scratch. One might even hope that the price of thousands of innocent Iranian lives is too high to pay for these unlikely strategic objectives.

But of course one would be wrong.

Add to that the fact that this bilateral war comes at a moment when, unlike the Iraq wars, the United States has completely alienated all of its allies:

And yet — as true as that all is, it still isn’t that simple. Here’s a post from Rep. Yassamin Ansari (who is Iranian-American) that deservedly went viral:

That seems exactly right to me. This was a horrible regime that repressed its own people and spread extremism and death throughout the region. And also, this war is likely to do more harm than good, killing thousands of civilians and bringing chaos to the region (though who knows). Two bad things can be true at the same time.

The point is this: there’s not one motivation, not one wag, not one objection, not one good or bad guy in a given situation. And this point matters not only analytically, but for how we understand complex, multi-causal systems (oppression, systemic racism, climate disaster, sexism, capitalism) and what we ought to do about them, which I’ll be writing about next week unless another mega-crisis arises. There is a simple, emotive appeal to “It’s Just About The Oil” or “This is Israel’s War” or “Wag the Dog.” Simplicity feels strong; it’s a little angry, firm, decisive. But it’s almost always wrong.

And, finally, it is the kind of bad thinking that leads to extremism, fascism, scapegoating, conspiracy theorizing, and extremely self-defeating choices like Brexit, Trump, and other marches of folly. Oversimplification is a species of anti-intellectualism, and anti-intellectualism is the handmaiden of dogmatism — usually from the Right, but sometimes from the Left as well. It’s a lot simpler to blame the immigrants, the Jews, the corporations, Israel, or the Woke Mob than to say, yet again, that the causes of a crisis are complex and interrelated. For all the truth about the ‘Epstein Class,’ there’s also the falsehood that our entire economic and political miasma is due to a shadowy cabal of elite pedophiles. That is too simple, and oversimplification leads to conspiracy theories. Indeed, even the most baroque, outrageous conspiracy theory is, in a sense, simpler than accommodating the multiple array of causes for a phenomenon and the biggest complexity of all: that there is no one minding the store.

I want to resist this urge to simplify. Were I still working as an activist, or a pundit with thirty seconds to make my point, I would, no doubt, still do so as a matter of necessity. But the better way is to accommodate ourselves to complexity, nuance, and uncertainty. These are our allies in the fight against the mob.

Some stuff I’ve been reading this week:

• Of the many solid explainers of why the war is probably illegal (but Democrats have been just as careless as Trump), I like this one by .

• Another excellent roundup: ’s comprehensive takedown of all things RFK Jr.

• I will hopefully be writing about this soon — I’m a bit backed up on pieces at the moment — but for now, please know that everything Jesse Singal said in his New York Times op-ed about trans people is based on garbage pseudo-science and bullshit. Singal is a real piece of work: whining about being attacked by the big, bad trans people while knowingly, obviously twisting the facts. The guy is a fucking liar, okay? He knows what he’s doing and he keeps doing it, to bigger and bigger audiences — and then he plays the victim when people call him out for it. Thank you for keeping the receipts. It takes a lot of time to refute this crap. Shame on the Times fact-checkers for letting him wildly misstate the facts.

And here’s some of my recent stuff:

• At Religion News Service, I wrote a piece on the very Purim-like irony of the Jewish holiday of Purim coming just as a mad king attacks Persia.

• I went back on the State of Belief podcast to talk about all things Epstein. Let’s not forget that story, please, and let’s center the victims and remember that over a thousand women were trafficked (we think) and have received almost no justice. Here’s the podcast:

Have a good weekend.

And then I realized that is the post. That sense of a dozen swirling crises; as if there were twelve small notes written to oneself, items on a to-do list in a dream, constantly fragmenting and rearranging themselves.

That was several crises ago; it was posted before the latest saber-rattling near Iran, the DHS shutdown (only, not ICE, because that’s funded separately), and twenty more OMGs from the Epstein dump. Here’s the song:

So, as I am sometimes wont to provide, here’s a listicle. To put things in order. To provide a concise precis of this moment. To survey the fragments.

1. The Billionaire Politic

just did a great piece on billionaire spending and influence in American politics, which, as you may have noticed, has reached new heights of spending and new extremes of ideology. It’s not only money — it’s also control of information. Larry Ellison may now take over CNN as well as CBS, Jeff Bezos has purged the Washington Post of many of its best journalists, and Elon Musk has created the largest pro-white-supremacy platform in the history of the world. (If you haven’t checked on Elon lately, he posted about race almost every single day last month.)

A recent example? As many of you know, last week, CBS nixed an interview by Stephen Colbert with Texas Senate candidate James Talerico, under pressure from the FCC, led by political appointee Brendan Carr. (I love CBS’s official line, which was that the FCC merely “provided advice on the law” — right, just like a bully provides “protection services” to wimpy junior high kids.) This has been good for Talerico (5.3 million views, $ 2.5 million raised) who is beloved by many Democrats (and me) but not nationally known. But the censorship is chilling nonetheless. Here’s Colbert:

This move is, once again, straight out of the Orban playbook for authoritarianism. Hold elections, but make it impossible for opposition figures to campaign effectively — and then audit the results if they win nonetheless. Of all the stories I’m worried about, I’m most worried that the 2026 election will not be fair: that media will be weaponized, that ICE will be weaponized, and that votes will be thrown out by state or local election officials.

Subscribe now

2. The Billionaire Erotic (a/k/a Epstein Depredations)

Since my summary of Epstein files revelations, much more has come to light.

First, conspiratorial thinking is now taking over parts of the online world, both right and left — which is fair enough, since there really are conspiracies out there and the Epstein Files prove it. But things have gotten weird, in a bad way. Antisemitic speculation is metastasizing, connecting a handful of isolated dots together. Fantastical hyperbole is becoming commonplace (e.g. claims that Epstein & Co. didn’t just traffic girls and women for sex, but engaged in cannibalism — all based on a single statement by one non-credible source to the FBI.) And commentators have moved from the possibly-true fact that Epstein may have helped initiate the launch of /pol/, the 4Chan channel that launched QAnon, Pizzagate, Gamergate, and much of the other right-wing conspiratorial insanity, to a much wider conspiracy theory that he’s behind the entire culture wars.

Yep, it’s a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. I actually did have this on my 2026 bingo card, and here it is. But it’s bad:

And Yet, there have also been some real zingers to emerge in the last couple of weeks:

• Here’s a really strong, disturbing summary of the evidence in the latest files release that Donald Trump committed sex crimes during his years of friendship with Epstein.

• Steve Bannon sought Epstein’s help in taking down Pope Francis. did a great deep dive into this, especially the anti-gay parts. Also, Bannon-Epstein-Bolsonaro.

• The FBI’s “prominent names” list:

  

  Meanwhile, here’s a good summary of the suspicious circumstances around Epstein’s death:

  But, hey, it’s all in good fun, right? So says Fox News, where Greg Gutfeld called Epstein a “sex rabbi.” What a POS.

3. ICE Horrors Continue Unabated

Check out ’s excellent analysis from last month of “life under a clicktatorship” where, as Ryan Broderick put it on Panic World recently, for ICE, we’re all just content. As in, the whole thing is, in part, a photo op, designed to generate rage-bait for the MAGA base. Speaking of which, here is a good summary of the white supremacist imagery and slogans in ICE/DHS social media posts:

Wired also did some amazing work tracking ICE’s expansion across the United States. Please rewatch Star Wars Episode Two if you need a refresher on how this works.

And as you’re probably aware, the administration is now targeting ICE protesters and even people (like me) who have posted comments critical of ICE online. did a sobering review of these anti-democratic actions here

Finally, with the ICE operations in Minnesota winding down, it’s now time to survey all the glorious progress that has been made:

Great.

4. Lawfare is Working

Did you know that over 600 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law and the constitutional order? The Times did a great analysis of this, and of their track record, which is mixed but actually pretty strong. Here’s (no pollyanna!) on three strong opinions that came down from the DC Circuit last week. Please also check out Chris’s reporting on the astonishing statements made in a Minnesota court by a lawyer in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Please also read up on the equally astonishing non-indictment handed down by a DC grand jury against Democratic lawmakers that Trump (and his latest right-wing-media-trained lapdog, Jeanine Pirro) had sought to intimidate. Speaking as a sometimes-law-professor here, this almost never happens; it’s huge. As the Times coverage puts it, “Time and again, prosecutors have been caught between the president’s insistence that they undertake weak or baseless cases and the necessity of having to go to court to push those cases past the justice system’s institutional guardrails.”

It’s not all good news in the courts, but I would say that on balance, it mostly is. The wheels of justice grind too slowly to stop every unconstitutional and destructive act of this administration, but I remain cautiously, moderately optimistic that the judiciary will stop many of the worst. posted a similar take on America’s democratic resilience here.

Share

5. How Are You Doing?

Meanwhile, I’ve been talking a lot about how to stay afloat right now. Here are two conversations I had with the folks at 10% with Dan Harris, where I’ve been teaching this month:

There are no seat cushions you can use as flotation advices. There aren’t oxygen masks you can put on first, before helping your kids. There are only practices of momentary buoyancy, momentary air.

6. Finally, this happened

But I’ll end on a lighter note. This week, RFK and Kid Rock posted an unlikely and weirdly homoerotic joint workout video, complete with drippy-liquid-style font on the phrase “whole milk.”

Best summary I’ve seen? My Facebook friend Chris Papadapoulos called it “Cokeback Mountain.”

See you next week.

Why? Because, as I’ve written twice before, while ICE, authoritarianism, and the threats against the 2026 elections are probably the most important substantive stories of the moment (if not the decade), the Epstein Files may be more lethal to Trump as a leader and MAGA as a movement. It is not a sideshow: it is a total betrayal of the trust that millions of people placed in Donald Trump, and that is important. It is realigning American politics, and reaffirming that the cleavage of top/down is more important than left/right. I’ve talked about this in my earlier pieces and won’t repeat the analysis here — but it would be a real mistake to trivialize or skip over this episode in American history.

It is also an important ethical story, as we are learning more and more about how many of our society’s elites either tolerated or participated in the brutal exploitation and trafficking of teenage girls. It is a story of profound moral and spiritual decline that spans ideological boundaries. And if you think you know all you need or want to know — just you wait.

At its heart, this is about the years-long (perhaps decades-long) organized rape of teenage girls by some of the most powerful people in the world, girls who were systematically exploited, mocked, disbelieved, ignored, and never given the justice they deserve. The women are the moral center of this story. And unbelievably (or not), they were again victimized by Trump’s DOJ last week, which, while redacting hundreds of names of abusers, unconscionably and unforgivably released hundreds of names and un-redacted images of victims. More on that below.

Now, it’s easy to be cynical about all of this and simply write it off. “What did you expect,” one might rhetorically ask. Well, scroll through this post and see if you hold that view by the end. See if you’re not as shocked as I’ve been — not because you and I are naive, but precisely because we aren’t naive and this is still shocking.

Finally, before we begin, one word of caution: there is a wide mix of stuff out there on the Epstein files, and a lot of it is extremely speculative. (Some is wacko, and some, as I’ll discuss below, is antisemitic.) Remember, the best argument against releasing the files is that nothing in these files is proven. Some of the emails do speak for themselves, but in general, files like these contain everything law enforcement agencies gathered about a person of interest, and that means they are intentionally over-inclusive. As it should be — we want law enforcement to chase down any lead they have, even if many (or most) of them turn out to be false. But that’s also why files like this are not usually released; many innocent people and unprovable theories get included as well.

Share

Don’t worry, though: there’s plenty of guilt to go around. Beginning with this guy:

1. Trump Trump Trump

Donald Trump is all over the new release of files — and those are the ones that the DOJ didn’t exclude or censor. One statistic that’s been making the rounds is that Jesus’s name appears in the Bible around 1,200 times, Harry is mentioned 18,956 times in the Harry Potter series, but Trump’s name shows up over 38,000 times in the Epstein files. Now, admittedly, the Bible is not three million pages long, but it’s not just mentions: it’s incriminating, worrisome stuff. To recap from some of the earlier releases, here’s an email from Ghislane Maxwell to Epstein:

and this one from Epstein to Larry Summers:

In the new batch, there are excerpts from the journal of a sixteen-year-old girl who was abused by (and apparently impregnated by) Epstein, clearly implicating Donald Trump as well. Here’s a video about them:

Now, that’s not been established in a court of law — it’s a kid’s journal. But it surely warrants more exploration, no?

(Incidentally, there’s a supposed screenshot of an Epstein email floating around that says Trump was repulsed by black women and called them ‘boogers.’ This has been shown to be fake.)

Trump is all over these files.

2. Continuing to Betray and Exploit Women

The DOJ’s releases have included the names of over 100 of Epstein’s victims, and many uncensored, nude photographs of young women (or possibly girls), as well as many more of young-looking women apparently gagged and bound. I’m not linking to that shit, because those are real people. But here’s a summary from Molly Jong-Fast about the continued betrayal of these women:

As Jong-Fast also explains, this should never have happened; had there been serious attention paid to these files (including by previous administrations), there could have been a responsible evaluation of the evidence and investigations into alleged criminal activity. This file dump was a last resort, after years of failure. And now it was botched, either deliberately or incompetently, with the effect of somehow managing to make like even worse for Epstein’s former victims. For shame. Even if there were no underlying scandal, just this one act is deserving of the harshest condemnation.

3. The Cover-Up is On

As we all expected, the Trump administration is in full “nothing to see here, hurry up, time to move on” mode. The release of the files has been rife with illegalities, improprieties, and outrages:

• Names of abusers were redacted, while names and even pictures of victims were released. (I’ve decided not to post those images, one of which also includes the former Prince Andrew.) In a previous batch, some of the redactions were done so incompetently that folks online un-redacted them — lo and behold, most were of Trump and his associates. But we don’t know who some of these people are. Here’s one example of a name that should surely not have been redacted:

• Only half the files have been released, but Trump’s former personal lawyer and now DOJ official (as if there is a difference, at this point) Todd Blanche says that’s all we’re going to get. This is in direct violation of the law Congress passed.

• FBI Director Kash Patel says no one is going to be charged and it’s time to move on. Continue reading here and see if you think that makes any sense at all.

Here’s what they’re basically saying now:

4. Yes, it was a trafficking operation

There have been repeated claims that Epstein only trafficked girls for his own abuse, or that, well, they were teenagers, so not exactly girls, right? Several emails in the new release contradict that preposterous claim, including this one possibly discussing a nine-year old [Edit: Some say the = sign is a formatting error and this was discussing a 19-year-old. Still possibly trafficking, depending what ‘just arrived’ means, but obviously very different.]:

Bonus questions: Why was this sender’s name redacted? Why, given that this [event] took place in 2019, is there not an ongoing investigation of him?

[Edit: Legally, sex trafficking is the trafficking of people involving force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of sex act. That is an intentionally broad definition, and flying young women to Little St. James Island, or “providing” them to friends, with promises of access or money or power, qualifies. There is ample evidence of that in the new release, though not legal proof.]

5. Lying Elites

In the last week alone, the list of elites newly revealed to have lied about their relationship, with Epstein now includes Donald Trump (again), Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Deepak Chopra, Peter Attia, J.K. Rowling, Noam Chomsky, Howard Lutnick, Richard Branson, New York Giants co-owner Stephen Tisch (with smoking-gun emails offering to connect Tisch with a ‘Ukrainian girl’ among others), private equity billionaire Leon Black, Brad Karp (the chairman of Paul, Weiss who led the firm’s capitulation to Trump), and members of the royal courts of the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Norway. Here’s Bill Maher running through some of the people caught in a lie:

Just to look at a few of these:

Noam Chomsky. Sorry, Chomsky fans. Well after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, the famous activist/linguist remained in close, repeated contact with him. One recently released email from 2019, only six months before Epstein’s death in prison, records Epstein forwarding “thoughts from Chomsky” to an attorney and publicist; the forwarded note was signed “Noam” and read: “I’ve watched the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public. It’s painful to say but I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it.” Chomsky described the climate in 2019 as “a hysteria that has developed about abuse of women. It’s best I think not to react unless directly questioned, particularly in the current mood – which, I presume, will fade away, even if not in time to prevent much torture and distress.”

Deepak Chopra. Chopra and Epstein met at least 12 times between 2016 and 2019 for “meditation and funding meetings.” Here’s a lovely exchange between the famous ‘consciousness explorer’ and the infamous sex criminal:

Interestingly, I wrote about this exact phenomenon — nondualist philosophy being used as an excuse for unethical conduct — back in 2009, so it is exceedingly nauseating to see it manifested in this way.

This week, Chopra apologized, though he never actually uses the word:

So, no, he still doesn’t get it. Here’s a great video:

Elon Musk. As has been well-reported, Elon Musk has claimed that he was invited to the Epstein island but declined to go — but now we learn that he was trying to get invited and apparently never did. Which, by the way, did I ever tell you how I was invited to go to that cool underground party with all those hipster fashionistas in Brooklyn last week? They’re poseurs; I told them no way.

Here’s one of the exchanges:

Look, someone has printed out one of Musk’s more pathetic emails and put it on a bus stop near Tesla’s London headquarters:

Meanwhile, here’s Jon Stewart on another hilarious-until-it-turns-disgusting email exchange between Musk and Epstein:

6. Down the Rabbit Hole

Finally, if you’ve read this far, I can’t resist giving some space to the more outre theories out there.

First, there are a lot of Russian assets who appear in the latest batch of files — one appears to have been spying on and possibly blackmailing members of one of the most powerful VC firms in Silicon Valley, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And this week, Poland has opened an investigation into the possibility that Epstein was working for the KGB to set a ‘honey trap’ for American and European elites. I don’t have much to say about that; I’m also not the prime minister of Poland.

Meanwhile, the extremely-online Internet is having a field day with a hitherto-unknown connection between Jeffrey Epstein and the founder of 4chan, Christopher Poole, better known online as moot. The facts are provocative: Epstein and moot met in October 23, 2011, right when moot was creating the /pol/ channel on 4chan, which was the original site promulgating not only of the QAnon conspiracy theory, but also of much of the right-wing culture-war insanity that has come defines the last two years.

Share

Now, kindly don your tin hat for this next part. There is an intriguing meta-conspiracy-theory now making the rounds that Epstein worked with moot to establish /pol/ and that the QAnon conspiracy theory was developed to make talking about the actual elite pedophilia conspiracy seem ridiculous.

It does make a certain kind of sense. How better to discredit discussion of Epstein’s elite pedophile ring than by associating it with wacko details of Pizzagate, Adenochrome Harvesting, and bored housewives ‘doing their research’ on the internet. (The scholar Diana Pasulka has interviewed several UFO experts making a similar claim about the government’s promulgation of idiotic UFO sightings and theories to make credible ones seem non-credible by association.)

Here’s an explication of the theory:

Or, as this guy puts it, Epstein is the ‘pedo Geppetto’ — the puppetmaster:

Do I believe this? Not really. There’s a lot here that is extremely speculative. Other than the moot-Epstein meeting, which did apparently happen, there’s no evidence that Epstein had any role in the launch of /pol/ or the dissemination of Q drops. It does connect the dots, but so do all conspiracy theories.

But this is an earthquake on the Right, which is once again splitting into competing camps. Some buy Trump’s preposterous claims that all this stuff is fake. But more, it seems, sense that they’ve been duped and are furious. As I wrote about last November, the heart of QAnon was true — except the hero was actually one of the villains.

7. Conspiracies and Antisemitism

Finally, a cautionary note. It’s been said that all conspiracy theories end in antisemitism, and alas, the partly-true, partly-false, partly-who-knows conspiracy theories inspired by the Epstein Files are no exception. Here’s an excellent summary from the Forward.

Far Left and Far Right agree. “They might as well call it the Israel files,” said the popular far-left streamer Hasan Piker.

“Blood libel hits a lot different after reading the Epstein files. The goyim know,” said the far-right internet personality and former MMA star Jake Shields.

Not to be outdone, Tucker Carlson hosted the nominally-left-wing Cenk Uygur on his podcast in which they agreed Israel was behind Epstein, the JFK assassination, and 9/11. “There’s just no question about it. He is definitely intelligence, and in every turn, he’s looking to help one country and it’s Israel,” Uygur said of Epstein.

“You get the sense that it reveals the superstructure beneath. It gives you a glimpse into how power is exercised globally,” Carlson replied.

And never to be outdone, Candace Owens went on Russell Brand’s podcast to link Sabbatean Kabbalah with Zionism, stating “they believe that evil is okay, the doctrine of evil. You must lower yourself and commit the most depraved acts of evil to prove that evil doesn't exist- then you can ascend in society. This seems to be the guiding philosophy of people in Israel.” On her own podcast, according to the Forward, Owens referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies” and repeated the neo-Nazi conspiracy that B’nai Brith was behind the “ritualistic murder” of Mary Phagan, whose killing sparked the antisemitic lynching of Leo Frank in 1915. Owens posted on X, “Yes, we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” adding “This is the synagogue of Satan we are up against.”

This is not some gray area anti-Zionism — this is the heart of conspiratorial antisemitism. And the latest files release — in which Epstein does use the word “goy” a lot and makes all kinds of offensive comments — just gave it a huge shot in the arm.

For the record, there is no evidence in the latest file dump that Epstein was working for Israel; if anything, there’s stronger evidence that he was in cahoots with Russia. Indeed — to return to an earlier guest star in the files — when Deepak Chopra (sleazily) invited Epstein to join him in Israel, Epstein replied

Which doesn’t seem very Zionist.

Now, maybe he was just saying that to avoid going to Israel and raising suspicion that he was, in fact, working for the Mossad, but at a certain point, the Mossad conspiracy theory fails the test of non-falsifiability. Nor does it square with the fact that Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak — who was clearly a frequent member of Epstein’s orbit — solicited his help in opposing Netanyahu in the 2019 elections. That is not something you’d ask a Mossad agent to do.

Further to the right, rabid antisemites are alleging that Epstein is typical of all Jews and calling for mass murder. Here’s the Nexus project, tracking it:

I won’t review all of this trash and have nothing to add to Nexus’s reportage. I close with it only to note that when you go down a rabbit hole, you find not only rabbits but a whole lot of shit as well.

8. One final story

I want to close, though, by re-centering the stories of the women Epstein and his network abused and this story that completely surprised me, because I hadn’t heard about it at all until I came across it on Instagram, and then it broke my heart — both for what Epstein did and, in this case, even more what supposedly responsible journalists did when she came forward in 2007. How many dozens (hundreds?) of girls might have been spared had she been taken seriously, instead of demeaned and defamed? And how many of her defamers were, like some other journalists, part of Epstein’s web themselves?

Through all the political intrigue, let’s remember to keep our hearts and minds focused on the real stories at the center of this scandal: those of the women who survived this hell, spoke up about it for years, and are still awaiting accountability.

As this was a long post with dozens of links, I’m going to skip the “things I’m reading” list this week, apart from noting my extremely accurate prediction that AIPAC’s duplicitous intervention in a New Jersey congressional primary would benefit an anti-Israel progressive — who may, as of this writing, have won the race as a result of their chicanery. Nice job, AIPAC.

Thank you for reading, for sharing this post, and for subscribing to Both/And. It enables work like this to happen.

1.

When I was an undergraduate at Columbia, the introductory writing course was called “Logic & Rhetoric.” One of the assignments was a variation of a classic logic problem involving necessary and sufficient causation. There’s a homicidal maniac on the loose, but a resident of Town A stays too long in Town B to get home before dark, a Town B resident won’t allow them to stay over, and so on. So the person walks home and gets killed. Who is responsible?

A friend of mine insisted the maniac was the only responsible party, and spent most of his 800 words attacking the question itself. Pre-law student that I was, I remember arguing that “maniac” implies a lack of moral responsibility and thus places a burden on everyone else to act responsibly. The maniac is ethically more like a wild animal than a human being; the question is how moral agents must prevent him from harming others.

This post is about Greenland, obviously.

2.

This week, we entered a new phase of Trumpist terror, one marked by the great Freudian sin of the Biblical Ham: seeing the nakedness of the father — the mad king Trump, revealed in all his psychological nudity to a gaping, shocked world.

It’s been clear for some time that the president of the United States is — in addition to being ignorant, narcissistic, prejudiced, corrupt, and shockingly unintelligent — not of sound mind. Various medical professionals have opined that he is showing signs of dementia, and maybe they’re right; that’s out of my lane of expertise. But mythically, spiritually, psychologically, and politically, it is obvious that the American autocrat is now as mad as King George, or Caligula, or You-Know-Who.

It’s been clear for some time, really. Probably my least-predictive post of 2024 was this one, which I wrote after Trump danced silently at a campaign rally for 38 minutes. I predicted, wrongly, that this deranged performance would be Trump’s version of Biden’s debate: the act that showed everyone that he was unfit to be president.

Share

That turned out not to be true, of course. His loyal voters didn’t care, and the swing voters who determined the outcome of the election on the basis of economic concerns weren’t watching. But in retrospect, it was one of many signs that Trump’s mind was deteriorating, a list that now includes falling asleep at meetings, weird digressions and verbal meanderings, and confusions of dates and names. These incidents aren’t just Trump being Trump. They’re signs of mental decline.

But the threatened invasion of Greenland — and the letter Trump just sent Norway’s prime minister — is on a new level. If you haven’t read it yet, the letter reads, in full:

Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.

Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.

I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT

We don’t have to spend long on the factual absurdity of this letter. The Nobel Prizes are administered by a committee in Norway, not the prime minister. Denmark, not Norway, controls Greenland. Trump did not stop eight wars. There are no threats to Greenland from Russia or China, and America already has a military base and missile defense system installed there. Right or wrong, there are centuries of written documents establishing Denmark’s claims to the island. And finally, threatening war for not getting a peace prize is a wonderfully auto-executing oxymoron, as this popular meme summarizes:

Perhaps most importantly, invading Greenland would blow up NATO, threaten the international order as we know it (especially for places like Taiwan), and permanently damage America’s standing in the world. Indeed, much of this erosion has already taken place, as Trump has threatened punitive tariffs on most of our allies in Europe, who have now realized the United States is too fragile an ally to be relied upon and who may have finally reached a breaking point, as this speech from Canada’s prime minister eloquently sets forth If a madman can gain control of our country this easily, how can America ever be counted on again?

Subscribe now

There have been some rationales for the invasion offered by commentators trying to make sense of the madness: maybe the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ of America First necessitates throwing America’s weight around, maybe Greenland’s natural resources would enrich America’s oligarchs and hedge against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, maybe America’s ‘Golden Dome’ defense shield requires the territory, or maybe Trump really is a Russian asset.

But even if these explanations are partially true, the costs so wildly outweigh the benefits that one would have to be out of one’s mind to actually do this. We have no claim to Greenland whatsoever, we have no strategic interests that are not already being met. And anyway, Trump himself said why he wants to invade in his January 8 interview with the New York Times:

When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”

This is nuts, right? Psychologically needed for success? Basically, he wants it — he feels a psychological need for it. It seems, unbelievably, that a lot has to do with Mercator Projection: Greenland looks much bigger on maps than it is in reality, and so Trump wants it. And there is no one in his lunatic administration of sycophants who is willing to stand up to him.

3.

Since, like all autocrats, Trump has surrounded himself with lackeys, the moral burden now rests on Congress. It would be easy for Congress to stop this catastrophe from happening, simply by expressly forbidding the proposed tariffs and forbid the use or threat of the military to seize the territory.

Now, wouldn’t Trump just defy Congress? I’m not so sure.

Last Spring, as the lawlessness of the Trump regime began to come into focus, I wrote that we were “waiting for midnight” — for the moment when the White House explicitly defied a court or congressional order and officially declared the end of the separation of powers. That would be a clear constitutional crisis. The Rubicon would be crossed.

This has still not happened. To be sure, there have been acts of defiance: the Department of Justice has released only 1% of the Epstein Files, the regime has attacked lawyers and used the government to punish political enemies, and the White House has dithered on several lower court orders.

But they haven’t openly, flagrantly, and without justification defied a judicial or constitutional order. They’ve not yet said, as President Andrew Jackson probably never said either, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” Most of the administration’s lawlessness has taken place in legal grey areas: defining non-existent crises as national emergencies that justify the exercise of vast military or police power, for example, or seizing the president of Venezuela so he could face criminal charges, or propounding preposterous legal theories to end Birthright Citizenship or institute the ‘unitary executive’ with complete control over the executive branch.

To be clear, these power grabs are outrageous, and the Supreme Court has acted both reprehensibly and far too slowly in failing to stop them. And Trump has said many outrageous things, most recently in the same New York Times interview in which he claimed he is not constrained by any law other than his own “internal morality.” But despite all the depredations of ICE, DOGE, the DOJ and the rest, the line in the sand has still not been crossed.

Which means Congress could still act clearly and decisively.

Which means it is outrageous that they have not done so.

Which means that Greenland should be added to the list of conditions the Democrats require before continuing to fund the government past January 31: cut ICE’s budget, protect healthcare, and stop the nonsensical invasion of Greenland.

4.

This being Both/And, I want to step back from the geopolitical catastrophe of this moment and reflect on its psychological and spiritual elements.

In the wake of the shooting of Renee Good, many people posted this quote from George Orwell’s 1984:

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Turns out, this has also happened already. It happened last Spring, when Trump insisted that clearly photoshopped “translations” of Kilmar Albrego Garcia’s finger tattoos were actually tattooed on his fingers. At the time, I called this “the age of semiotic infinity.” As I wrote then:

The traumas and dislocations of contemporary life — not just the last few months, but the last few decades of technological change, globalization, demographic change, economic dislocation, world-shifting crises of 2001 and 2008 and 2020 — have caused us to look for signs everywhere. Our country is in what Robert Anton Wilson called “Chapel Perilous,” where everything seems to mean something and secrets are nested in secrets.

I want to suggest that, in this light, the Good shooting and the Greenland operation are mirror images of one another. Both invite us to disregard what is obviously true — the president is mad, the mom was innocent — and somehow believe the preposterous instead.

What Orwell could not have anticipated was the omnipresent overwhelm of our age of semiotic infinity: his world had a single telescreen, ours has infinite ones. But it turns out totalitarian propaganda thrives just as much in abundance as in privation.

Of course, Trump has lucid moments, to be sure, but then, so do all parents and grandparents who succumb to dementia or Alzheimer’s. (Trump’s boasting that he recently passed an “IQ Test” which appears to have actually been a test of mental competency was yet another indicator that the man is profoundly unwell.) And now, with Greenland, this incompetence is having catastrophic effects on the global stage. It’s not just verbal gaffes; it’s a (threatened) military attack against our closest allies, for God’s sake. We can see this with our own eyes.

And Congress can too. Over the last year, there have been numerous reports that many members of Congress understand that Trump is both severely mentally impaired and an authoritarian — a terrifying combination, if you think about it. So, we know that they know. And yet, for reasons of political expediency, ideological agreement, or cowardice, most of them — excluding Rep. Thomas Massie, ex-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and a few others — have still, still refused to stand up to him. Ditto Trump’s fawning admirers on Fox News, CBS (where we ‘go to see BS’ - thank you, Nikki Glaser), Newsmax, OAN, and even, in Scott Jennings’s case, CNN.

I don’t have any hope that these self-interested sycophants will suddenly grow a moral conscience. But I can hope that, at some point soon, they will see that it’s in their own interests to wake up from the collective psychosis they have co-created. Paraphrasing Omar El Akkad’s book about the destruction of Gaza, someday, everyone will have always been against this — and when that happens, when this reign of terror is seen clearly by history, a future generation will wonder what the “journalists” and “leaders” who are still backing the Mad King could possibly have been thinking.

I mean, Joe Rogan has done it. Anything is possible.

And the tide is turning. The siege of Minneapolis has enraged moderates and even many conservatives. Some of the largest protests in American history have taken place over the last months. And while Venezuela’s dictator was a legitimately bad dude, there is no bad guy in Greenland.

Some people will never doubt what Trump says. He is their messiah, their grievances are profound and unsolvable, and given enough motivated reasoning, human beings will believe literally anything. But they are not in the majority, and never have been. And so alongside the fears we should all have about Greenland (and Minneapolis), I again find reasons for tentative hope. This is not normal. You are not wrong to doubt your sanity in moments like this; semiotic infinity means the ground is endlessly giving way.

But rest assured — you are not going mad. This is madness.

Thanks for reading. Some more stuff to read:

• The Grey Lady has made many questionable decisions of late, but the Times has run some exceptional investigations lately, including this one of the $1.8 billion Trump’s family has made off his presidency and this one of the specific ways he has expanded presidential power.

• Of the many (other) takes on Greenland, I liked this one by the best.

• Desmog did a great expose of the role of Paul Singer planting fake “experts” on Venezuela on right-wing media to drum up support for the Maduro operation that he somehow knew was about to happen.

• This is an excellent longish-form piece by on “life under a clicktatorship.” Garbage Day came to similar conclusions after spending four days in Minneapolis.

• Rebecca Solnit strikes a defiant and cautiously optimistic note. And has a good overview of what people are doing to fight back against ICE and Trump.

• Please don’t read this depressing, thorough analysis by about how the Trump regime has eviscerated the Department of Justice.

Finally, in my “other” line of work, I'll be part of a conversation on the meaning crisis with my dharma bud Dave Smith next week — click the image below for registration info. And I’ll be the Teacher of the Month over at 10% with Dan Harris — we’ll be doing some live meditations for paying subscribers and I’ll have a bunch of new meditation material up at danharris.com.

See you next week.

Share Both/And with Jay Michaelson

I will go into the details of that encounter below, because they are important. But mostly, I want to write about what needs to be done in response — including what you can do.

Now, when someone tells me ‘what I can do’ about a crisis, often what follows is some admixture of delusion and scolding. But I want to suggest that, amid the tragedy, this is a moment of opportunity. Even before the shooting, Pew research showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of the excessive tactics of Trump, Miller, Noem, Lewandowski, Homan, and ICE. Not only liberals: Joe Rogan has recently complained that the administration is going after “easy pickings” rather than the violent criminals they said they’d deport. Once again, as they have done before, the Trump regime has gotten out over their skis, and they seem congenitally unable to rebalance.

In other words, this moment calls for accommodating conflicting emotions and perceptions at the same time. I am speaking from experience: I’ve felt despair, rage, grief, and plenty of other strong emotions over the last few days. But as I prepared to write this post, as I thought and reflected and gamed out the road ahead, I felt an increasing sense of hope — not dewy-eyed optimism, not minimization of the horror and the danger, but a reality-grounded understanding that the bad guys have once again gone too far, and that this is a moment for resolve.

1. Get Clear on the Facts

Nothing is as disturbing as the events on that Minneapolis street, but the response from the administration and its apologists and propagandists comes close. Before Renee Good’s blood was even wiped from the seats of her SUV, JD Vance was on television calling her a domestic terrorist and lying (since he knows he’s wrong about this) about “absolute immunity” for police officers.

Of course, there was and is no evidence for this, and there never will be. No one can define what “terrorist” means in this context or how it applies to an innocent bystander, even if Good had also been part of an ‘ICE Watch’ group. Activism is not terrorism.

Share

But like it or not, the facts are in dispute, and are more complicated that some progressives have made them out to be. So the first thing that you can and ought to do is watch the videos and come to your own conclusions.

So let’s do it. You can start with this video, from ICE Agent Jonathan Ross’s cellphone, recording the run-up to the shooting. As you can see below, Good is calm, though perhaps scared; her last audible words are “That’s fine, dude — I’m not mad at you.” Her wife is out of the car and antagonistic, though non-violent, non-threatening, and keeping her distance. From this angle, you can see Good cut the wheel to the right, i.e., away from the agents, but it does seem that the car came close to Ross, which some non-partisan analysts have said provided a reasonable belief that his life was in danger. And if this were the only video you see, which is true for many people, you might agree with them. (It’s worth noting that this video was first shared with a conservative news outlet, Alpha News.)

But now, watch the below compilation of videos from four bystanders and Ross, together with analysis by The Minnesota Star Tribune. Here the situation gets much more complicated — and this video isn’t being aired on conservative media. Here, you can see that it is only after the other ICE agent approaches the vehicle and tries to force his way inside that Good’s wife says anxiously, “Drive, baby, drive!” and Good turns the wheel to the right and tries to escape. It is clear that they are trying to escape.

Then, Ross, now a few feet away from the vehicle, fires one shot that hits the windshield but two more shots that go through the driver’s side window, which is inconsistent with him still being in any danger. Ross is heard saying “Fuckin’ bitch” as Good’s SUV careens into a parked car. He later says “Call 911” as the ICE agents leave the scene. No one provides medical care.

Now, here are a few conclusions I draw from this — but again, please do watch the videos for yourself. To me:

• This whole situation should never have happened. There is no reason why the ICE agent had to try to force Good’s car door open. There was no warrant or probable cause. They were not under suspicion of being “illegals” even under Justice Kavanaugh’s race-based analysis. It is true that Good was not complying with the order to exit the car, but that order had no basis in any case (and none was provided), and if Good is part of an ‘ICE Watch’ she knows exactly what would happen if she got out: violence, perhaps a beating, perhaps an arrest and detention in an ICE hellhole. These people were not looking for a fight — they’d just dropped Good’s kid off at school and the dog is in the backseat. They’re looking to get out of there. There was simply no justification for the first agent getting that close to the vehicle and attempting to force his way in.

• It is only when the other agent gets close to the vehicle that Good steps on the gas. She cuts the wheel to the right and takes off. This is inconsistent with an attempt to harm the agents; it’s the opposite. Ross was a yard or two in front of the vehicle, but not directly in front of it. It is not clear whether he jumped back from the SUV or was grazed by it. Obviously he was not injured, or run over (which Trump alleged) or rammed (which Noem alleged). Those are simply lies.

• It may not be a lie that Ross felt himself to be threatened, and under the law, that is the question. And arguably, the first bullet was fired in the heat of the moment. Yet the second and third shots came after any credible threat had passed. There is no justification for using lethal force in that moment. That is not covered by the qualified immunity extended to police officers (and ICE agents are not police officers anyway) which covers judgment calls under duress. By the second shot, the car was turned away from Ross and trying to speed away. But he shot Good in the face.

Do I think this act was “murder”? Section 609.195 of the Minnesota State Statutes states, inter alia, that “Whoever, without intent to effect the death of any person, causes the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life, is guilty of murder in the third degree and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than 25 years.” Obviously the shots are eminently dangerous, but it’s a close question whether they evince “a depraved mind” and a disregard for human life, and it’s a debatable question how far qualified immunity, if it applies, should go. This would be a close case for a jury to decide.

It might be better to set aside this legal question, and return to the basic facts. Even if Ross did subjectively feel threatened, there were alternatives available to him, and the second and third shots were fired after the threat had passed. At the very least, this was a terrible lapse in judgment. And, again, this situation should never have arisen in the first place. ICE agents should not be trying to drag civilians out of cars without cause. ICE should not be terrorizing innocent people and catching them in their insane dragnet. ICE agents should receive much better training (do they receive any?) in conflict de-escalation. This wasn’t one rogue agent; this was a system designed to inflict terror and maximize arrests at all costs.

Why is all this relevant? Because of the next action item.

2. Share the Facts, Spread the Word

I don’t advise you to spend much time on right-wing/state media, but rest assured that if you do, you’ll get a whole lot of false propaganda about both the incident in question and Renee Good’s character. This needs to be combated, actively, and social media is the battlefield.

Now, I admit, I’ve personally cleansed my personal social media (as opposed to my Instagram, which I use for work) of anyone whose attitudes I find annoying. But you don’t need MAGA in your feeds in order to make a difference here. I’m sure you have plenty of family and friends who are less engaged with the news — including for quite defensible mental health reasons — and aren’t following the story closely. Put the information in front of them. Whether they choose to consume it or not is their choice, but you’re ensuring that the facts are out there and you’re countering the right-wing narratives that Agent Ross did nothing wrong and that Renee Good was a terrorist who tried to run him over. That is all clearly, demonstrably false.

In doing so, my invitation is to consider messages that might appeal to a more moderate audience, rather than the rage-bait generated by ‘our side’ for clicks or dollars. That includes, in my view, incendiary rhetoric about murder and personally attacking this individual agent; he is not the primary villain of this story. Additionally, while I agree with the slogan ‘Abolish ICE’ — there is too much power centralized in one barely-accountable agency — consider that, to some, that slogan may sound like ‘open borders’ or ‘chaos and lawlessness.’ This isn’t about self-censorship; it’s about putting the needs of other people ahead of your own, and spreading the truth in ways that are likely to be more persuasive to those not already persuaded.

We need to keep this story in the news cycle. As we should all know by now, this regime operates on the Roy Cohn/Steve Bannon theory that the more you flood the zone with shit, the more you punch back immediately and often, the more bamboozled and overwhelmed people will be. I mean, for God’s sake, this is the same two-week period in which Trump kidnapped a foreign leader and said he intends to ‘run’ Venezuela for the foreseeable future – a violation of international law, America First principles, and common sense. It is hard to keep focus on anything.

But keep the focus on Renee Good. It’s right morally and it’s right politically. Remember, mainstream America is not with Trump on this. You have the power to influence people in your circle — not your racist MAGA uncle, but people you might not even know are on the fence. Share wisely, but share and keep sharing.

Share

3. Demand Congress Act with Resolve

I’m not usually a fan of writing letters to Congress or showing up at protests and demonstrations. But these kinds of actions can be helpful at times, and this is one of those times. First, visible protests keep the issue alive and urgent. Second, protests and calls and emails do motivate legislators under the right circumstances, and these are the right circumstances, because there are things Democrats (and the one or two moderate Republicans they need to peel off) can actually do.

Believe it or not, there is yet another Government Shutdown Deadline looming at the end of the month. Right now, Democrats are staying on-message about healthcare and affordability, and with good reason – those are winning issues. And as of now, Chuck Schumer has taken a shutdown off the table.

But the shooting has changed everything. This is absolutely an issue worth going to the mat for, both morally and politically. Had the Trump administration, Fox, and CBS done anything other than dig in and defame Renee Good, then maybe there’d be some room for moderation. But Americans don’t want militias arresting veterans, moms, and construction workers at Home Depot, even if they are here illegally – let alone if they aren’t. This is a moment of opportunity.

Moreover, it’s wrong to think this is either/or. If Democrats have a clear, articulate list of demands, that list can have more than one item on it. This has happened before. You young’uns won’t remember, but Newt Gingrich swept the contemporary GOP to power in 1994 with something called the ‘Contract with America,’ which was a ten-point plan of the New Right. I’ll write more about this in a future issue, but part of the (dark) genius of the Contract was that different constituencies each found something to like.

Democrats should do something similar now. It’s insane to fund DHS at current levels, given the complete lack of discipline, training, and respect for the rule of law that ICE has shown. Remember – we didn’t get to this point all of a sudden and Ross isn’t a bad apple. This is the system working as Miller, Lewandowski, and Homan designed it to work. (ICE Barbie is just a figurehead.)

Democrats need to pull the plug on this madness. Again, not with ‘Abolish ICE’ messaging – that won’t win over a single Republican – but with specific demands:

• Roll back 2026 ICE funding to 2025 levels. (More on this below.)

• End the practice of making arrests without judicial warrants

• Allow congressional visits to ICE facilities without red tape

• Set standards of conduct regarding threats and use of violence that result in disciplinary action if they are violated

• Demand better training and screening of officers

• Ban masks during enforcement operations

• Require Border Patrol to… patrol the border, not city streets

• End arrest quotas

• Conduct a third-party investigation into Good’s death

• Allow Minnesota to conduct its own investigations and possible prosecutions free from federal interference

Axios reports that Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn) is preparing a bill with several of these items on it. Great; that’s a start. Set out the conditions, negotiate, fight.

But it’s up to voters to show Democratic leadership that this issue matters, and two ways to do that are public protests and private phone calls to your representatives. [Thanks to a reader for suggesting 5 Calls as an easy way to do that.] It’s easy to hate on people like Jeffries and Schumer, but their job is, in part, to flip seats and regain the majority; they need to be persuaded that this issue will help, not hurt, those efforts.

And Jeffries, at least, seems to believe that already, telling PBS that “what took place in Minnesota is a complete and total disgrace… And in the next few days, we will be having conversations about a strong and forceful and appropriate response by House Democrats.”

Oh, and if you live in a blue state like mine, which now looks set to pass a strong set of citizen protections, call and email your state legislators too. New York state senator Pat Fahy, who sponsored bills to prohibit ICE agents from wearing masks and create a dashboard tracking immigration officials’ activity, told Politico that “momentum is on our side… To me, this goes beyond immigration. People understand now that masked, armed men in our city and suburban streets [are] seriously eroding any form of public trust in law enforcement. Some of these issues are having more universal appeal.”

Subscribe now

4. Remember the Stakes

Here is the most important part, which I’ve saved for last.

Remember that Congress voted to triple ICE’s budget starting this year, appropriating more than $170 billion over four years, more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States. As bad as things are, they are about to get much, much worse. This is all just the prologue.

Democrats should go to the mat on this issue, because if Trump, Vance, and Miller create this vast militia that now has a mandate to go after “domestic terrorists” like you and me, how the hell will we even have a fair election in ten months?

This dark period in American history has to end. A majority of Americans wants it to end. No majority ever voted for it; Trump’s victory was based on the economy, not immigration. But it won’t end if we don’t have a fair congressional election this year, and we won’t have a fair election if ICE is patrolling the streets in swing districts.

That is the stakes: not only the offenses against democracy represented by this incident and many others like it, but the practicality of waking up from this nightmare. As averse as I am to optimism, I am even more averse to hyperbolic pessimism, but if “domestic terrorists” include everyone who writes or reads an article like this one, plus everyone Muslim, transgender, Latino, or critical of ICE; and if ICE is super-charged to maintain order everywhere in the country, accountable only to Trump and his minions; I don’t see how the 2026 election proceeds in a way that is truly democratic.

No, America won’t look like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. It will look like Orban’s Hungary, where a lot of life goes on just fine, as long as you don’t question the leader, defend the Roma, or report objectively on the news. Democracy doesn’t need thunderous applause to die; only the slow erasure of truth, bit by bit, until the regime doesn’t even bother to lie convincingly anymore, because they know they no longer need to. Mon Mothma, of course, was right.

Keep Renee Good’s memory alive. Understand the facts, share the story, keep the focus on ICE’s overreach, and don’t allow lies to go unchallenged. This is how the nightmare can end.

Thanks for reading. For folks new to this newsletter, welcome — it is entirely subscriber-funded. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber by clicking this link:

Subscribe now

Some more reading on the Renee Good story:

• JD Vance, least charismatic politician in Washington, dug himself a big hole by saying a lot of stuff about Renee Good. has the receipts and the videos here.

• wrote a stirring essay on the phrase “I don’t care,” shouted by an ICE agent refusing a physician’s offer to help Renee Good.

• If you are feeling personally panicked, afraid, or debilitated, has some advice on how to “take a beat and reclaim our own personal timelines.”

• Zeteo is on the ground in Minneapolis, riding along with civilian protectors.

Finally, here is another solid analysis of the video by a retired police officer. It is essentially the same analysis of mine, but adds that even the first shot contravenes standard rules of engagement:

For subscribers: I look forward to returning to the mix of spiritual, political, and cultural writing that is what this newsletter is about. At the moment, this is the only story on my mind and in my heart so that’s what I chose to focus on. Thanks for sharing this piece with your networks and for being part of the Both/And community.

Now it’s fourteen months later. The first year of this parodically dystopian administration has come to a close, and I was curious what I’d gotten right and wrong.

That’s particularly true because, on the Left in particular, there is a tendency to catastrophize. For example, I had several friends certain that Donald Trump was set to invoke the Insurrection Act last April and effectively suspend the constitution, and that there would be tanks on the streets of major cities by now. That didn’t happen. Many, many other terrible things did happen, of course, but that didn’t. I think it’s worth seeing where we feared too little and where we feared too much, both for our own epistemic humility (which can bring at least a little peace of mind) and for evaluating the threats and opportunities before us.

So I took a fresh look. To my surprise, I got much more right than I got wrong. Plenty of things took me by surprise — I don’t think anyone had the sudden and illegal demolition of the East Wing of the White House on their 2025 bingo card, for example. But weirdly, a lot of this year has turned out roughly as I thought it might.

On the one hand, democracy is fragile, norms have been eroded, the media discourse is worse than it was, many many many people have been harmed, and America’s standing in the world has been severely damaged.

On the other hand, especially after the 2025 election, it’s now possible to see some (though not all) of the past year’s horrors as potentially correctable. Trump’s worst policies are deeply unpopular. The supposed disarray of the Democratic Party has been greatly exaggerated. There are causes for tentative hope, and mostly, as I’ve written before, for epistemic humility in the face of entirely justified fear and rage. That is what I hope Both/And is about: the nexus between spirituality and politics, the mind and the world.

So, here are those fourteen concerns, and how right or wrong they’ve proven to be.

Share

1. Malevolence. In the first Trump administration, I noted that “Trump’s incompetence saved us from his malevolence.” But, I said, that wouldn’t happen this time. “Project 2025’s hiring process for the next administration has already been going on for months, and Trump will be able to reclassify thousands of civil service jobs, fire competent people who know what they’re doing, and replace them with thousands of dedicated ideologues, theocrats, nationalists, tech-libertarians, and plutocrats.”

This turned out to be true, and worse than I had predicted. I did not predict that DOGE would march into town, dismantle congressionally-mandated agencies, and wreak general havoc (all while completely failing to save money or increase efficiency, if those were ever the goals, which they clearly were not). But I was correct in predicting that Trump’s second administration would not repeat the chaos of the first.

And yet — there has still been more incompetence than I had predicted, which has been a saving grace. Trump’s DOJ has bungled the concealment of the Epstein Files in the most ludicrous ways (e.g. using an easily-undone Adobe blackout feature). Trump’s own worst instincts have cost him support, as when he attempted to dance on Rob Reiner’s still-undug grave. Trump’s approval ratings are in the toilet, and if the 2026 election were held today, Democrats would retake the House and perhaps the Senate. Turns out, incompetence has once again been a strong bulwark against malevolence.

2. Putinland, in which, in the words of Peter Pomerantsev, “nothing is true and everything is possible.” Turned out almost exactly as predicted. The zone is flooded with shit, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, Fox News won’t report on ICE or Trump in the Epstein Files, and Americans live in different cognitive universes. There is a never-ending torrent of absolute lies dominating the discourse.

3. Ecological disaster. Exactly as predicted: a complete evisceration of climate policies, essential environmental regulations, economically smart investments in renewable energy, and science as we know it. It’s so bad, no one’s even talking about it anymore. Just as I wrote, “it’s like species-wide suicide.”

4. Vulgarity and stupidity. “Americans are increasingly mean and increasingly dumb… and MAGA is like revenge of the high school bullies— a movement led by the worst, dumbest, most brutish people you went to school with.” Worse than predicted. I wouldn’t have expected Dr. Oz, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth to be wielding actual power. I didn’t predict MAGA face. Just, really, the worst and most transparently mediocre people have the most power. This wasn’t the case under Reagan or the Bushes. We are being governed by sycophants, morons, and a handful of truly sinister villains (Vought, Miller, etc). I try not to dwell on this too much.

5. Democracy. “I do think there will be a 2028 election, but I don’t know if it will be possible for a Democrat to win it because of widespread manipulation of the electoral process; it may look more like a Soviet election.” I still believe this, as I wrote about here. So far, tracking predictions.

6. Courts. Slightly worse than expected. As I wrote about in March, I thought the Supreme Court would step in as certain red lines (e.g. open defiance of judicial orders) were crossed. And they have done so at times. But not at others.

7. Theocracy. Tracking expectations. Quote, “Forget anything trans-affirming; I expect national bans on all transgender protections and medical interventions, and a declaration that trans people are mentally ill.” People said I was exaggerating about this, and I got ridiculed for saying so on CNN. Well, it’s happened. There have also been a lot of quieter steps, often on the state level.

Subscribe now

8. Mass deportations and xenophobia. “Which also entails mass human rights abuses, family separations, and federal agents going house to house in places where illegal/undocumented/unauthorized migrants are ‘suspected’ of hiding.” This has unfolded exactly as I predicted: not more, not less. There was never any way to conduct these deportations without a massive dragnet snaring many innocent people. And while I could not have predicted CECOT, or deportations to African countries, or the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, the contours of what this would look like were clear a year ago.

I didn’t predict how many Americans would cheer it on, however. Not a majority — most reasonable centrists are horrified by the ICE militia’s activities. But most Americans don’t even see them, thanks to MSM under-reporting and RWM de facto censorship. Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes debacle is just the most visible example; Fox News never, ever reports on ICE raids or innocent people imprisoned for weeks in inhumane conditions. It is quite ironic that “conservative” media is now Soviet-style media.

9. Ethno-nationalism. “We’ve had globalization, huge technological change, and mass migration over the last few decades, and “human nature” is fighting back.” This certainly seems true.

10. White nationalism and racism. I was kind of off on this one. I thought that with the J6 rioters released, we’d see more anti-Black racism – “The Overton Window will continue to shift to the Right, with genetic theories of race differences reappearing (they already have), holocaust denial and conspiracy theorizing being mainstreamed (they already have too), and people with ties to white nationalists being included in Trump’s orbit (ditto).” We definitely have seen some of that, but so far it’s been garbed in anti-DEI or anti-Woke rhetoric, not as overt as right-wing antisemitism, which now seems more pervasive and prevalent than ever.

11. Increased Inequality. “Trump’s populist rhetoric is bullshit, because it is accompanied by economic policies that are radically anti-populist, that enrich the very richest.” Totally borne out in 2025, with the Big Beautiful Bill’s gigantic tax break for the top 1% and shredding of healthcare coverage for the bottom 50%. The one thing I hadn’t expected was for this to percolate through as much as it has. People hate the BBB, and “affordability” is now seen as a core Democratic talking point. Meanwhile, there’s a socialist mayor-elect in New York who won on kitchen-table economic issues. There may be some hope yet on this front.

12. Tech Dystopia. In October 2024, I wrote “I’m neither an expert on AI nor a doomsayer about it, and I have no informed opinion about Crypto, but I can say that empowering Big Tech to ‘move fast and break things’ seems particularly unwise at this juncture.” Well, I’m still no expert but I have done a few deep dives on these subjects and am more concerned than before. I had not anticipated the tech industry’s embrace of Trump (though I should have), or how quickly it would generate ROI in the form of a complete abdication of regulation of AI, Crypto, hate speech on social media, etc. (On the contrary, the Trump family is rapidly cashing in.) And I still think that, oh, around half of America has no f---ing idea what AI is about to do to their jobs.

13. Jewish Stuff. This was worse than expected. The Gaza War went on even longer than expected, the intra-Jewish discourse is disgusting, and the antisemitism paranoia is almost as bad as antisemitism is. I was right but not pessimistic enough.

14. The Next Catastrophe. Hasn’t happened yet. Yet.

What did I leave off the list? Plenty.

• Absurd manifestations of authoritarianism, from military parades to barbarian takeover of the Kennedy Center, overtly racist Homeland Security messaging to the demolition of the East Wing. I don’t think anyone believed, in October 2024, that there would really be no grownups in the room to counter Trump’s infantile impulses.

• The shredding of America’s scientific and academic infrastructures. As much as the Right hates evolution, Covid science, vaccines, and wokeness, I didn’t think they’d actually cause the country to commit intellectual seppuku on this scale.

• The right-wing media takeover, first at CBS and now potentially at CNN/Time Warner.

• The stratospheric level of the Trump family’s corruption and kleptocracy.

• The extent of the war on trans people. This is happening despite its failure to swing any elections; it’s not even a political winner anymore. It seems to be purely a paroxysm of hate and ignorance (and many of my centrist friends are in the ignorant camp).

• RFK’s lethal know-nothingism has gone on far longer than I expected, with devastating consequences. I thought he’d be fired by now.

• The attacks on healthcare in particular. Largely subsumed in #11 but still much more extreme than I had imagined.

• The rapid decline in America’s status in the world; we are no longer seen as a reliable ally and are basically a rogue superpower. I really thought there’d be some capitalist grownups in the room, but there aren’t. Xi and Putin couldn’t have hoped for more.

• Nihilism. I’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks but it feels like the growth and prevalence of nihilism is rapidly becoming a national crisis.

I’ve taken a lot from this exercise — I encourage you to give it a try. If you journaled or otherwise recorded what you were most worried about a year ago, how much of it came to pass? And what happened that you never would have predicted?

For me, the point is not to evaluate whether things are worse or better than expected, but to notice that they diverged from expectations in ways that are interesting, revealing, and grounding. In a zone flooded with excrement, it’s almost a kind of raft.

If you haven’t watched the 60 Minutes piece on CECOT, it’s all over the internet — here’s one place to watch the whole thing. Relatedly, did a great take on the Streisand Effect in these contexts: how trying to bury the CECOT story, and the Epstein story, has backfired.

I’ll be writing on the trans issue more next year; in the meantime, did an excellent summary of the recent anti-trans actions by Trump and RFK.

Thanks to all of my paying subscribers for enabling this enterprise to be sustainable. If you’ve been reading for a while but haven’t upgraded to paid yet, maybe you’ll consider doing so! In the meantime, have a happy new year, whatever that means for you!

I realize that for most of you, the preceding sentence may be incoherent. This is because I have studied antinomianism on and off for nearly thirty years now, and have on occasion used the word in conversation, forgetting that almost no one knows what it means, or can even pronounce it.

Then a strange thing happened. At Harvard Law School last semester, I taught a quirky seminar on the subject, worried that few students would sign up. But it filled up, and nearly every source we read, from Anne Hutchinson to Charles Reich, Jacob Frank to Justice Potter Stewart, seemed to be presaging the second Trump administration. It was eerie. I had assigned texts about left-hand Tantra and William Blake, but they seemed to be describing the oval office.

So here is what I mean.

1.

“Antinomianism” is a term coined by Martin Luther in 1537. In its original, narrow usage, Luther used it to describe reformers more radical than he was who taught that Christians were fully released by grace from obeying Biblical law. Even the notion of ‘obedience to the law’ was seen as overly legalistic; rather, the antinomians taught, if one truly aligned oneself with the Holy Spirit, one would automatically do the right thing.

Arguably, some version of this view is already present in the New Testament (“the letter kills, but the spirit gives life,” preaches Paul) as well as in Luther’s own writings. And few antinomians really have no room for law whatsoever; often the term is more of an accusation. But the concept stuck: the bad kind of religion — Judaism, Catholicism, even insufficiently radical Puritanism — deals in laws, bodies, and obligations. The good kind inspires people with love and spirit.

What’s most interesting about antinomianism is that it exists outside of religion as well – or, to be more precise, in secular realms that are understood theologically. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a wave of right-wing American antinomianism. A litigation explosion was destroying America, we were told, causing people to sue one another rather than work out problems. There was a death of common sense, killed by regulations and fine print. Bill Clinton’s lawyerly evasions (“it depends on what the meaning of is is”) were undermining the rule of law — how quaint that seems today. Lawyers were so widely reviled that in the film The Devil’s Advocate, Keanu Reeves played a young lawyer whose boss, played by Al Pacino, turned out to be Ol’ Nick himself. “The law puts us in everything!” he crowed.

Share

Those are mostly conservative examples, but antinomianism is found on the left as well as the right. When Dr. King wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail, arguing that one is obligated to defy an unjust law, that, too, is antinomianism. Same with Thoreau a century earlier. And Occupy a half-century later.

Antinomianism says: the written law says one thing, but often the conscience, the soul, the spirit says something else. And to honor that calling is, itself, the sacred act. Breaking the law can be holy.

Antinomianism is not merely a theological or philosophical position; it is a prophetic experience. The transgression of the law can convey an ontological shock; the nomic world collapses, and with it, one’s prior sense of oneself. This is why antinomianism is often found in apocalyptic movements or ‘cults.’ When a ritual, ethical, or sexual more is transgressed, a new society – a new human being – is born out of that rejection of previously held norms. We are shocked into a new reality, for better (Burning Man, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Hasidic ecstatic prayer, Occupy) or for worse (Heaven’s Gate, DOGE).

The act in question need not even be that dramatic. For a pious Jew, it can be eating a bite of pork, or even praying at the non-appointed time, or bowing to a statue of the Buddha. For a conservative white American, it can be uttering the N-word, boldly transgressing a norm one believes to be unjust and repressive.

Which brings us, of course, to Trump.

2.

MAGA, as a movement, revels in the transgression of norms. At Trump rallies, and now at official events like his ludicrous Trump Kennedy Center Awards last week, the vulgarity is the point – or rather, the frisson of transgression. What is powerful is that I can honor KISS at my arts center, and no one can stop me. I can call Somali immigrants “garbage.” And my followers know in their hearts that I’m right, as Barry Goldwater’s ads once put it. Decency is the enemy; transgression, vulgarity, grievance, and rage define this movement of anti-elite, anti-norm upheaval.

(Of course, the anti-elitism is selective: Trump rails against educational, media, and cultural elites but lavishly rewards the richest members of our society, the tech moguls now in his inner circle, and overseas dealmakers. But the rhetoric remains.)

This transgression is quintessentially antinomian. By defying the rule of law, Trump saves America. By defying rules of discourse, Trump tells the truth that elites had forbidden us to express. The letter kills, the spirit gives life.

Jeff Sharlet has written brilliantly about this transgressive aspect lying at the core of fascism, though at this point the word ‘fascism’ – like the words genocide, terrorism, diversity, and racism – has now been reduced to a marker of ideology devoid of analytical usefulness. So, call it what you will: demagoguery, national conservatism, right-wing populism, whatever. We know it when we see it: the dark spiritual power of authoritarian strongmen like Trump, Mussolini, Orban, Franco, Putin, Pinochet, and You Know Who. Antinomianism is of its essence.

Seen through the lens of antinomianism, Trump’s outrageous acts (antinomians like Jacob Frank or Chogyam Trungpa might call them “strange acts”) begin to look less like aberrations and more like a pattern of transgression that is at once instinctual and ideological. For example:

• Bulldozing the East Wing of the White House after saying he wouldn’t

• Bombing Venezuelan fishing boats in clear violation of the laws of war (which the Defense Secretary has said should be disobeyed)

• Unleashing masked ICE militias on American citizens, channeling the anti-immigrant rage into wildly illegal, crowd-pleasing acts of vengeance

• Flagrantly pardoning cronies and criminals at a rate never before seen in presidential history

• Using language that, prior to Trump, would have been unheard-of among presidential utterances (at least in public)

• Renaming the Gulf of Mexico by fiat

• Dismantling congressionally-mandated departments

• Saying ‘I Hate my Enemies’ at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk

• Boldly defying laws on corruption, shamelessly cashing in to enrich crypto and real estate holdings

• Not only unilaterally destroying USAID (and causing, so far, 600,000 deaths) in violation of federal law but physically destroying its offices and prying its signs off the face of buildings

• And, of course, the January 6 insurrection, perhaps the greatest single antinomian act in recent American history.

  

As Robert Cover wrote forty years ago, “to inhabit a nomos” — a normative world constructed by law — “is to know how to live in it.” Now, the American nomos that has been in place since the end of the Civil War is in ruins. We have returned to a nationalist self-conception of a race defined by blood and soil. We are led by a strongman who governs by fiat. Anyone who opposes him is bad; anyone who supports him is good.

Share

Thus, perhaps paradoxically, antinomianism often coexists with hypernomianism. At the same time as the Trump regime, citing the need for law and order, sends masked militias and the National Guard into peaceful American cities, the same regime deconstructs the norms of American politics to break what they perceive to be a broken system and replace it with something new. The hypernomian rhetoric of Trump’s manifestly idiotic underlings – Patel, Hegseth, et al – sits alongside their antinomian defiance of international law or the protocols of the FBI. Even the rule of law is subject to the chaotic nihilism of Putinesque post-meaningfulness. Even in enforcing the law, the authoritarian breaks it. As Hannah Arendt said:

If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

3.

Now, it has been well observed of late that only a minority of Americans support Trumpian antinomianism. Trump won the 2024 election not because of his ideological program but because swing voters believed he would help their economic woes. This has obviously not come to pass, and those voters have abandoned the GOP, especially the ones who are also aware of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts for billionaires and health insurance premium increases for everyone else. Moreover, Trump’s own base has fractured over the Epstein Files and other issues.

My fear, though – other than concerns about how fair the 2026 elections will be – is that the chaos of antinomianism is often hard to wind back. In the most optimistic scenario, after Trump passes from the scene, “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This,” as Omar El-Akkad wrote of the bombardment of Gaza. But that seems extremely unlikely. There is a global shift toward traditionalism, populism, and nationalism, a reaction to globalization, migration, economic insecurity, changes in social norms, and anger at ‘elites’ of any type. Capital has figured this out, and has bet on the Right. Ultra-rich billionaires and corporations control increasing shares of media and technology platforms. Christian nationalists are emboldened and entrenched in all three branches of government. It’s hard to see America turning back the clock.

Most of all, norms, once unraveled, can be extremely hard to sew back together. Antinomian eruptions in Christian history permanently weakened the power of the Catholic church. Smaller ones in Jewish history permanently weakened the power of the rabbinic elite. The messianic, pneumatic power of the antinomian rupture is, by its nature, more destructive than constructive. Like Nietzsche’s lion, it slays the dragon but does not build anything durable in its place.

Then again, who knows.

Thanks for supporting Both/And. This past week I published my longest-yet exploration of psychedelics and spirituality over at Arc magazine. Folks interested in that side of my work, I hope you’ll take a look.

Meanwhile, here’s some of what I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week:

• published a superb “Prayer to the Algorithms” on his Free Will Astrology newsletter. I still don’t know why we’ve accepted these for-profit algorithms’ invincibility as they immiserate our society. Rob nails it more poetically and tragicomically than I can.

• Will CNN become the next right-wing disinformation system? did a great investigation into how Jared Kushner is trying to make it happen.

• suggests we tax corporations with outrageous CEO pay packages.

• lifts a Tom Cotton interview out of absurdity and into infamy, where it belons.

Also, the latest video from the Harvard conference on psychedelics and religion that I co-hosted last spring has just been published. It’s a remarkable hourlong conversation with Jewish psychedelic practitioners:

And finally, if you like to make plans at the last minute, consider joining me at the Adamah Meditation retreat starting in less than two weeks:

Now it’s finally time, not just because of the seasonally appropriate pumpkin-carving reference, but because it could change the world, if only 100 million Americans would appreciate it.

The first thing to note is that is not some rando on the internet. Her Substack is much bigger than this one, and has a whole lot of brilliant writing on it that you should read. She’s a perceptive, young critic and memoirist. Her tweet from October 19, 2024, is mildly internet-famous.

Why do I love it? Because to me, it expresses my primary frustration with, well, almost every non-pluralistic political and cultural idea: the universalizing of subjective experience. Fisher-Quann (facetiously) ponders a philosophical reflection on the decline of pumpkin carving in America, and then realizes that, oh right, this is just her subjective experience, in this case as someone who is no longer a kid and doesn’t have kids of her own. The decline in pumpkin carving is not something happening to society; it’s something happening to her.

Now let’s contrast Fisher-Quann with Vice President J.D. Vance.

Read more

The video is even more shocking: here, a few minutes before the photo was taken, ICE officers stand on the roof and shoot Pastor Black with a pepper ball gun which knocks him to his feet. You can also hear them laughing afterward. Not only is this in clear violation of any legitimate rules of engagement, it’s even against the instructions of the gun manufacturer.

For the record, ICE claims that Black and his group were obstructing a vehicle from leaving the facility, but there isn’t evidence of that in the video. Of course, even if that were true, there would clearly be more appropriate ways to arrest them than this. Clergy friends of mine have been at protests like this one; it’s a common tactic for clergy to use their unique role in society to call attention to something morally wrong, and it spans the ideological spectrum from Dr. King to Operation Rescue. These protesters were vocal and loud, but they were obviously not posing any physical threat to the ICE officers or facility.

Yet the officers responded with (non-lethal) force, and with contemptuous laughter as well.

How did we get here? How did we arrive at the point where untrained, masked government agents, accountable to no one but the president and his henchmen, pepper spray a priest with impunity? How, in less than a year, has America been so utterly transformed?

I actually want to answer this question, in reverse chronological order.

1.

How could ICE agents have shot at and pepper-sprayed a pastor who was not physically threatening them? There are at least three reasons.

First, it’s been widely reported that ICE officers receive a bare minimum of training, and require almost no qualifications to get a job. Moreover, ICE has been using overt white supremacist messaging in its recruitment materials, not to mention incendiary rhetoric that immediately became the subject of parody.

Now, I’m sure a lot of ICE agents are just doing it for the paycheck — ICE is the only employment program that Trump has put forward. But many others are drawn from the ranks of the Oath Keepers and other far-right organizations, and the culture of ICE is clearly one of violence, callousness, dehumanization, and brute force. They don’t give a shit about some liberal pastor.

Second, those ICE officers’ violence has been empowered by the Supreme Court, which has sunk to its lowest moral and reputational level since the Dred Scott decision. The Court has specifically allowed racial profiling to be used by ICE, has not reined in any of ICE’s clearly unlawful activities (such as lying about having warrants or boasting that they don’t need them), has allowed the regime to exploit loopholes to deport people without due process, has given Trump immunity from prosecution for anything he does as president, has indicated that they will endorse a once-radical theory called the ‘unitary executive’ that allows Trump to fire anyone in the government for any reason at all, and has even scolded lower court judges bewildered by this shocking cave to authoritarianism. (Chris Geidner at has been an invaluable resource in tracking this shameful period; I reported on the Supreme Court for several years at the Daily Beast and am really grateful I’m not on that beat anymore.)

Amazingly, Justice Amy Coney Barrett – who, together with Justice Kavanaugh and the Chief Justice, now represent the ‘moderate’ wing of this stacked Court – had the temerity to go on Fox News, of all places, to lash out at the court’s critics (which include over three dozen federal judges). Justice Barrett was right, of course, that a lot of the Court’s recent decisions are interim ones, produced under time pressure; the Court has not finally ruled on most of the issues I just listed. But she was quite wrong that this is all just the ordinary course of business. As Justice Sotomayor’s dissents have made perfectly clear, most of the cases above (and many others) clearly warrant a temporary injunction, not blanket permission, while the Court takes its time to decide the issues. It’s hard to un-fire people, un-starve the former recipients of food aid, and un-deport people unlawfully deported. Much of the damage cannot be undone.

Share

Third, the ICE officers’ violence is a part of the right-wing rage ecosystem, which has lied about and dehumanized immigrants for at least a decade now. Migrants are not “criminals and predators”; immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens. Tren de Aragua is not everywhere. Most migrants are here for economic opportunity or to flee violence, not some sinister Great Replacement or Migrant Caravan. And most “illegals” are only illegal because the immigration system is broken and a legal path to residency is almost impossible to get, in part because Trump himself ordered Republicans to kill the bipartisan immigration reform bill last year. Which they did.

I’m not sure how seriously people take this third account. We roll our eyes at the latest idiocy from Jesse Watters and we move on. But there are consequences to slandering a group of people, night after night, using them for rage-bait and ratings. And not just the immigrants of course, but liberals, Democrats (who Stephen Miller says are domestic extremists), ‘woke’ people, trans people. The unique, toxic brew of the Internet and its algorithms; the end of the Fairness Doctrine and rise of right-wing big media (which now includes CBS News); and audience capture have led to a massive incentivization of rage.

Not everyone who stews in right-wing media shoots a priest with a pepper gun. But I’ll wager that everyone who shoots a priest with a pepper gun has been stewing in right-wing media.

3.

And how did that happen? How did we get to a point in which an administration hires far-right goons to shoot priests and kidnap children without a warrant, a court allows them to do it, and at least a quarter of the nation cheers them on?

In a way, this is the most painful chapter of the story, because it’s largely a matter of luck.

Remember that only a third of the country voted for this – “this” being the ICE raids, the anti-immigrant rage, and the rest of the MAGA nationalist package. But another quarter of the country voted for Trump for other reasons: economic insecurity, inflation, dislike of the Democrats, and so on, and that was enough to swing the election.

Of course, plenty of pundits with platforms far larger than mine tried desperately to warn them – both that Trump would not help them economically and that he would threaten America as we know it. But these voters didn’t listen. They didn’t believe or care about the threats Trump posed to democracy, and they thought he’d help the economy. And, remember, Kamala Harris was an incumbent, and incumbents lost in almost every national election held in 2024, everywhere in the world.

Shortly after the election, I wrote what is one of my most-read Substack posts, urging us to see Trump as his voters saw him — as someone who could help fix an economy that does not work for working people. That is still true. But it’s also true that, as I said in that piece, what we’re going to get is something very different. Trump won on the price of eggs, but he’s delivering – well, if you don’t like the word ‘fascism’, then let’s just say strongman authoritarian rule that rallies the masses against minorities and erodes liberal democracy, education, culture, and the rule of law.

I struggle with frustration, even rage, at these voters. Of course, it’s not entirely their fault; the failure lies with our education system, with right-wing media, and with politicians who take advantage of ignorance and fear. But it has to be partly their fault, getting conned by the most obvious con man in America, disbelieving all the clear signs that he was going to do exactly what he has done.

And now many of them — Latinos for Trump, government workers for Trump, Asians for Trump — are themselves the targets of Trump’s rage. The better angels of my nature want to welcome them to the opposition. The lesser angels want to say we told you so. The face-eating leopards did, in fact, eat your faces.

Meanwhile, the intellectual leaders on the Right know that they got lucky. Whether it’s theocratic post-liberals like Russell Vought, fossil fuel executives, or Christian Nationalists, they are well aware that Trump may be their best chance to foist their policies on a nation that doesn’t actually want them. They know full well that this is a unique opportunity, that Trump — a bit like Reagan and George W Bush before him, but even more so — is a unique leader who can wave the flag while our systems of government and society are undone.

They also know that time is running out; they may only have a year left, if the 2026 election is fair (which I still think it will not be).

And many of them believe it isn’t luck; they think it’s providence. Which, I have to admit, has a certain logic to it. Of all people, Donald Trump — the insurrectionist, the convicted felon, someone who was very nearly assassinated — is somehow back in charge, rechristianizing and re-whitening America. You couldn’t write this in a screenplay. So, sure, it seems plausible that God is pulling the strings. And more comforting, maybe, than this being a giant historical accident, that a demagogue takes power because of the price of eggs, only to do everything other than lower the price of eggs.

So maybe that’s how we got here.

4.

In one way, I agree with the theocrats. The agents who pepper sprayed Pastor Black are morally responsible for their actions, but causally, they are just ripples on an ocean of causes and conditions. In their minds are ideas planted there by our culture, watered and fertilized by media that gets rich off of them, exploited by politicians. Their bodies are kept safe by a militarized state and a complicit court system. They’ve been handed weapons and power by an administration that itself came to power for wholly unrelated reasons. And at the receiving end of their violence, someone with different ideas, drawn from Scripture and experience and his own cultural causes and conditions.

Paraphrasing J.D. Salinger’s Teddy, those agents are God spraying God onto God.

This theology offers no comfort; evil unfolds with no promise of its lessening. Yet it does evoke a certain equanimity, which oscillates with rage and concern and love, and intermingles with it, and offers at least an interruption in the misery. In a way, we got here because we had to get here, because everything has unfolded in just this way — not by design, I don’t think, and largely due to luck. But also much larger than the proximate factors above.

But of course I don’t agree with the theocrats. “God” didn’t will any of this into existence, and just because something happened doesn’t mean it should happen. Justice depends on human actions, not those of a cosmic puppetmaster. We may have gotten here by an unknowably complex set of causes and conditions, but if we’re ever going to get out of here, that will be up to us.

Thanks for reading and, to subscribers, thanks for your support.

Here are some things I’ve been up to, or am about to be up to:

• In my “other career” as a psychedelics researcher, I wrote for Emory’s Canopy Forum about the problematic use of the term ‘mysticism’ in psychedelic science and law. I’ll also be part of an online seminar on the newly-recognized psychedelic religion called ‘Singularism’ on Wednesday, October 15.

• Amid the relief that many in the Jewish community are deservedly feeling as the Gaza ceasefire takes hold, I wrote about the Trump regime’s crusade against left-wing organizations, including two Jewish ones.

• I’ll be offering a dharma talk online and in person for the New York Insight Meditation Center on “working skillfully with queer rage,” Monday, October 27. Details are here.

And here are some great posts I’ve read this week on this platform:

• shares good news: JD Vance is a terrible liar.

• has more good news about how soybeans may prove to be the GOP’s undoing.

• on how some Democrats are able to effectively question Trump’s physical and mental health.

Finally, another parody ICE ad:

Share

I am fascinated and repulsed by conspiracy theories.

For years, I had an unhealthy fixation on the anti-vaxx movement, long before it metastasized during Covid to become the institutionalized insanity it is today. Admittedly, it was always as much repulsion as fascination; as the parent of a young child, I was enraged by the lies, the opportunists, the extremely bad pseudo-science, and the way the phrase “do your research” became an auto-oxymoronic invitation to defame scientists and listen to cranks on the internet.

But repulsion and fascination often go together, don’t they?

And not only conspiracies: I’ve always loved, and often written about, ‘weird religion’: cults (though in the academy, we tend to avoid that term), messianic movements, and ostensibly secular theories that become quasi-religions of their own. But also weird religion more broadly, as Noah Feldman and I talked about in this conversation a couple of years ago, which many of us practice: ways of imagining, being, and storytelling that invoke the non-rational, the magical, and the strange.

The baroque nature of today’s conspiracy theories is similarly bizarre, and thus, to me at least, endlessly interesting. Conspiratorial thinking reveals a variety of bugs in human nature: how we form opinions socially, mistake correlation for causation, engage in verification bias, and have a yearning for coherence and meaning that enables us to believe just about anything, no matter how preposterous. This is true for mainstream religion too, of course, including my own. The absurdity of a belief has no bearing on its success: what matters is how well it capitalizes on the flaws in the human mind, how well it explains away what is impossible to accept.

Chief among these: that most of our lives are shaped by random causes and conditions that have no particular reason for being. And others: that we won’t really die, that there is justice and order to the universe, that other people are either like us or are are bad people.

And so on. If there’s enough cognitive dissonance in the fact that a majority of American voters rejected Donald Trump in 2020, then any preposterous account of the election becomes preferable to the truth. Sure, mail-in ballots were all fraudulent and ballots were burned in Philadelphia. Whatever. A lie becomes true when it protects an important enough belief.

Thus autism isn’t a feature of neurodiversity (with increased rates due to increased diagnosis); it is due to human error, and thus correctable. Thus your failure to attain wealth and status isn’t a feature of macroeconomics, changing social mores, and and socio-economic systems; it’s due to a conspiracy of bad guys (often Jews).

I’ve had tangential encounters with conspiracy theories over the years. I wrote a book about a failed messianic leader in 18^th century Poland, only to have that figure – Jacob Frank (1726-1791) – emerge as a central hub in Candace Owens’ antisemitic counter-history, which itself derived from the work of a Jewish militant named Marvin Antelman as morphed by the lizard-people antisemite David Icke and transmitted to Owens, Kanye West, and others. Talk about a dark, twisted fantasy.

Share

I even played a cameo role in the “Chemtrails” conspiracy, which alleges that the government (or other malefactors) are keeping us all docile by planting chemicals in airplane contrails: in 1998 I wrote a law review article discussing proposals for geoengineering to mitigate climate change, one of which was allowing airplanes to fly a bit dirtier and scatter more dust in the atmosphere. That was close enough to merit a mention on some Chemtrails message boards.

But it’s not really fun anymore.

Not when the president of the United States, spreads the Big Lie about the 2020 election, puts violent insurrectionists in government posts, and weaponizes the government to go after his perceived enemies. Not when RFK Jr. makes anti-vaxx nonsense into government policy, which will harm tens of thousands of people. Not when QAnon — which on its face is hilarious, really — drives families apart and leads to violence.

And not when, as the saying goes, every conspiracy theory eventually ends in antisemitism, which, in the case of the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, inspired the murder of Jews praying at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

And now, the Trump regime is using the military to occupy American cities (as Kamala Harris told us he would, and was derided for saying so) on the basis of conspiracy theories straight out of 1984: that there are ‘radical left’ ‘antifa’ conspiracies against America.

Which ironically, has turned me into a conspiracy theorist.

2.

My personal red pill was the series of text messages allegedly sent by Tyler Robinson, who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, to his roommate/partner, who may be gay or trans or both or neither.

At first, there were signs suggesting that Robinson was an extremely-online nihilist or perhaps a ‘Groyper,’ a far-right follower of Nick Fuentes. But then the FBI made public this series of text messages. Below is a scan of the charging documents themselves, posted by a Washington Post journalist Evan Hill on TwitterX:

Then, a bit later:

The first thing I want to say about this is that I asked a friend of mine who works for a well-known, left-leaning news outlet whether anyone in the mainstream media was doubting the veracity of these texts. He said no. For the messages to be fake, even in part, the FBI and probably the Utah Police would have had to forge evidence in the highest-profile murder case of the decade, basically in broad daylight. No one respectable believed this, he said.

Meanwhile, here is a CNN debunker of a variety of other conspiracy theories about the Kirk assassination: that he was shot from behind, that there were multiple shooters, that (of course) Israel was behind it, and so on. It’s obvious that there’s a lot of misinformation, guesswork, and speculation swirling around.

Okay, but some of these text exchanges make no sense.

First, what 22-year-old — let alone one conversant enough with online culture to use a well-known troll phrase — texts like this? I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out. This from the same person who engraved a joke on a bullet casing saying ‘if you read this you gay’ and referenced a video game on another? The casings and the texts don’t match at all: the first suggests the writer is a ironic gamer, the second suggests he is a sincere crusader against discrimination. As one Twitter user put it, “It’s basically ‘hey honey, i just want to let you know that i admit the murder’ ‘omg why did you do it?’ ‘for whatever reason the prosecution wants to hear.’

These messages read as if someone asked ChatGPT to write a series of self-incriminating texts.

Are the messages fake? I have no idea. All I can tell you is that they seem fake to me.

And that is disorienting enough. I feel like the Trump takeover of the government and much of the media apparatus (now including CBS News) has happened so quickly, it’s hard to know who to trust. All I need is a tin hat.

After all, it’s obvious that I’m in the same position as a MAGA election denier. For someone with my politics, it really sucks that the murderer may have killed Kirk because of Kirk’s hateful statements about trans and gay people. And so, of course, my own cognitive dissonance is impelling me to doubt this incriminating evidence.

And look at the company I’m keeping. On his frequently-conspiratorial podcast, Steve Bannon said it was ridiculous that someone who just murdered a celebrity would be texting that his dad would be upset about the rifle:

You just murdered the most important young person in the conservative movement, you shot him down like a dog, and you’re telling me you’re texting, ‘Dad’s going to be very upset I lost grandpa’s rifle.‘ Are you kidding me? You expect me to believe that?... How did the guy have time to write a sonnet? How did he worry about ‘Dad’s really going to be upset about grandpa’s rifle‘? Dude, I think your father may be upset that you shot a man in cold blood in front of the world.

Bannon also said:

I’m particularly not buying those text messages, it just seems too stilted, too much like a script – actually, like a bad script. So we got to get to the bottom of it.

I hate to say it, but Bannon makes some good points here. (The video is here.) Are these really the text messages of a kid running for his life, having just shot a major political figure in front of three thousand people?

To be clear, Bannon also alleged the government’s own conspiracy theory: that Robinson was part of some vast left-wing terror network — and, for good measure, that Utah Governor Spencer Cox was “part of the problem.” So, respectable journalists, the government, and the police are saying these messages are real, and crazy people say they are not. I get it.

Meanwhile, my head hurts to be agreeing with Steve Bannon.

Share

3.

Please allow me to step back from the brink here, because I wonder if any of this is really “believing in a conspiracy theory” as opposed to having a healthy skepticism of evidence presented by a far-right government stacked with loyalists, “patriots” and lackeys who are themselves conspiracy mongers.

First, saying that cops tampered with evidence is not the same as a conspiracy theory. In fact, police misconduct is responsible for around half of wrongful convictions that were later overturned. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.

Second, these “cops” are FBI agents supervised by Kash Patel who was, himself, a conspiracy theorist podcaster who proudly says that he answers to Trump and to the MAGA agenda, and who has no clue about the basics of criminal procedure.

Third, these text messages are themselves part of a conspiracy theory: the absolutely baseless claim, repeated by JD Vance and Stephen Miller on a “guest-hosted” posthumous episode of Charlie Kirk’s radio show, that Robinson was part of, or at least radicalized by, a left wing “NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.” That is the real conspiracy theory and it has already begun dictating government policy, thanks to NSPM-7, the soon-to-be-infamous Trump memo targeting political activity.

Finally, the leading actor in this drama is himself a conspiracy-monger who has lied many times in the past. For God’s sake, Donald Trump used a sharpie to modify a National Weather Service map so that he wouldn’t look like he made a mistake about the path of a hurricane. Years earlier, Trump impersonated a non-existent publicist on phone interviews in the 1980s — the guy actually disguised his voice and said he was “John Baron” or “John Miller” when it was obviously Donald Trump. Here, listen:

And just a few months ago, Trump insisted that Kilmar Albrego Garcia had “MS 15” tattooed on his fingers, when that was obviously an annotation added in photoshop. And the election denial — which, let’s recall, court documents have shown that Trump knew to be false — and all the rest, right down to the Haitian immigrants who were not eating pets and never were. The guy lies all the time, and he is surrounded by obedient yes-men. It seems entirely plausible that the cops would mess with evidence to tell the political narrative directed by the White House. This is hardly QAnon.

So maybe I’m not a conspiracy theorist. Maybe I’m just a little paranoid. Which honestly feels pretty justified, as tanks are rolling into Portland, which is not yet a warzone, and Chicago, which is also not yet a warzone, and children who are not in any way connected to Tren de Aragua, are being ripped out of their beds and thrown naked into ICE vans:

I began this post talking about weird religion, and end it by reposting videos of naked children being abducted by government agents. Ironic, isn’t it, that QAnon and the endless conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking are fake, but here the government is literally kidnapping children from their homes, right on video. Ironic that the National uard is being sent in to control a fake warzone that only exists in conspiracy theories, but will now create a real warzone where none had before existed.

This is the disorientation of 2025, in which, to coin a cliché, truth is stranger than conspiracy theory.

Welcome to the rabbit hole! It’s cozy in here.

Here’s some good stuff I’ve read lately:

• Rebecca Solnit ( ) has written the definitive analysis of Hegseth’s and Trump’s unbelievably stupid, bizarre, fascistic, and yet also quite scary speech to military generals. Please read that.

• DeSmog did a great summary of actual climate scientists debunking the Trump administration’s “climate report.”

• predicts the shutdown will end when the air traffic controllers strike.

• is up to his old tricks, in a good way, helping to maybe out an anti-gay gay member of Congress. I won’t say who, since I don’t want to get sued, but Mike does and he brings the receipts. Decide for yourself. (It’s not Lindsay Graham.)

• has a two-fer in his newsletter: what CEOs really think about Trump, and the transmogrification yet again of San Francisco.

• Finally, a lovely essay by on “the cult of certainty.”

Lastly, I want to recommend this video by Jon Favreau of Crooked Media, who does a really excellent job of summarizing the worst of the Trump offenses, explaining how they do get lost in the blur for non-political-junkies, and arguing that Democrats should make the shutdown about more than just a policy disagreement on healthcare. If you have relatively-not-plugged-in friends, this is a great, easy thing to watch:

Thanks as always for your support. Thanks to several of you who upped from free to paid subscriber this week — this newsletter depends on your support!

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on… you may have to meet the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

- Thomas Merton

1.

We are living in a strange moment of radical uncertainty.

It is entirely possible that the United States will descend into Orwellian nationalist authoritarianism, with unwinnable elections and a media environment permeated by falsehoods. Then again, it’s possible that the Trump bubble might pop (some say it is already popping) and we could return to the before-times within a few years.

It’s also entirely possible that AGI will arise within the next few years, changing all of civilization — or that will AI merely cause some economic shifts but not be that big of deal. It’s also possible that global climate disruption will become an existential risk to civilization — or that it will be merely very bad, and possibly solvable by geoengineering.

People have strong opinions about all of these questions, but there’s no agreement as to what the future really holds. Nor do we know how the horrors in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the world will resolve, or whether we’ll ever learn the truth about Donald Trump’s participation in a pedophiliac sex ring. We don’t even know the factors that will likely determine any of these things.

And that means we don’t know if anything we are doing will matter.

Sure, there are voices telling us to keep hope alive; to persist, resist, and insist on a better world. I appreciate all of that. But some days, I admit, it feels like nothing we are doing is making a difference. For God’s sake, this year’s elections are again mostly about kitchen-table economic issues, as if, I don’t know, defending the American constitutional order is irrelevant. Meanwhile life goes on normally for many of us, even as our institutions crumble around us. Once again, we are these guys:

2.

In 1966, the young Catholic peace activist Jim Forest wrote an anguished letter to the famous monk, theologian, and religious progressive Thomas Merton. Forest, who had co-founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, wrote that with the Vietnam War still raging, “I am in a rather bleak mood.” He was set to write yet another essay about the injustice of the war, but wondered if anyone was listening. Meanwhile, he wrote,

murder goes on without interruption. This appalls me to such a degree that I get weary writing it down. Bomb after bomb after bomb slides away from the bomb bays. For every sentence in this letter, a dozen innocents will have died today in Vietnam. The end of the war is beyond imagination.

Obviously, this might sound familiar.

The entire correspondence is worth reading: though Forest died in 2022, his and his wife’s website has his full letter to Merton, and Merton’s full reply online. Merton responded first by noting that Forest was likely exhausted and in need of rest, and next by making the point above: that the value of justice work, whatever it is, must be in the rightness of the work itself, rather than its success at stopping injustice. Merton also confessed that he agreed with Forest: “You are fed up with words, and I don’t blame you. I am nauseated by them sometimes. I am also, to tell the truth, nauseated with ideals and with causes.” Then, prophetically, he wrote:

This country is SICK, man. It is one of the sickest things that has happened. People are fed on myths, they are stuffed up to the eyes with illusions. They CAN’T think straight. They have a modicum of good will, and some of them have a whole lot of it, but with the mental bombardment everybody lives under, it is just not possible to see straight, no matter where you are looking.

In a way, I find this comforting: very smart people felt this way even in 1966. Then again, I wonder what Thomas Merton would write if he saw us today, when our “mental bombardment” is beyond anything he could have imagined. Is it comforting that people have always felt their society to be “sick,” or have we in fact just grown sicker and sicker? It does seem true that for several thousand years, the worst people have often held the most power -- perhaps more often than not. So perhaps this moment is the norm rather than the aberration from the norm.

Share

I find myself going back and forth about Merton’s letter. At first, I wrote an entire version of this post praising it. It gives me enormous comfort. Merton is saying something similar to the Buddhist teaching that one must act without attachment to results: one still must act, even though it’s quite possible they’ll have no results at all. This is similar to the Jewish teaching, attributed to Rabbi Tarfon in Ethics of the Fathers 2:16, that it is not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.

This is largely where I end up most days. Sometimes, I still have hope that my writing is playing a tiny part in a larger discourse that will ultimately help restore this country to sanity. I saw that happen in the first Trump administration: I felt hopeless at times then, too, and that my work at The Daily Beast (where I was writing twice a week on Trump, the Supreme Court, and related issues) was merely preaching to the choir. But then, in 2020, the choir showed up at the polls and voted that guy out of office. I read Eric Swalwell talking about a Truth & Reconciliation style period after the Trump regime ends, or Rebecca Solnit reminding us that Trump is actually quite weak and we shouldn’t give him our fear, or a dozen pundits proclaiming that the restoration of Jimmy Kimmel is a sign that Trump’s grip is loosening, and I think, well maybe they’re right.

Sometimes, though, I’m not so hopeful.

I’ve gamed out the 2026 election myself and I still don’t see enough evidence that it will be a fair one. I hear Trump’s insanely incendiary rhetoric at the Charlie Kirk memorial — all the while decrying incendiary rhetoric — and I wonder what might be left of consensus reality. I read the executive order cracking down on “Antifa,” which is not an organization that exists, and I wonder what George Orwell would think.

Meanwhile, Larry Ellison — newly-minted media mogul, new owner of Paramount and CBS, new bidder for Warner Bros. Discovery (which owns CNN and HBO) — is also set to be a new part-owner of American TikTok. This is the same Larry Ellison who recently said “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on.” What could go wrong?

Even in the narrower context of the Jimmy Kimmel story, the FCC’s Brendan Carr says he will continue to go after Wrongspeech, Trump says he will “test out ABC,” and CBS News is about to become the next Fox News. Incidentally, here’s Carr just a couple of years ago:

So, there are plenty of justifications for non-hope. And I think it’s at least worth contemplating the possibility that things will not get better.

At those times, Merton’s words are like a spiritual life-raft. Ultimately, the meaning of our political actions must reside in the rightness of the actions themselves. We may lose these battles, but we’ve searched our souls and listened to our consciences, and this is what we believe to be true, and that gives us solace, whether we believe there is a God in heaven or not. Some days I hope that my essays are messages in a server-farm bottle, sent to the future from the last years of the present era. Some of us knew what was happening, I want to say, I’m sorry we couldn’t stop it. I’m not even sure we did our best. A lot of the spiritual practice of caring about both spirituality and politics is about humility, oscillation, and not-knowing, and Merton’s words ring true.

3.

But, I thought right before hitting “publish” on this piece, doesn’t Merton’s point of view lead to actions which may be more performative than transformative?

After all, it could be said that despite this prolific public output and engagement with the civil rights and antiwar movements, Merton himself leaned toward the spirituality side of the spirituality/activism dyad; after all, he was a monk. So it could be self-justifying for him to say that it is the goodness of the work, rather than its effectiveness, that matters. And anyway, couldn’t such a philosophy lead to an un-pragmatic and ineffectual politics of purity, as we see in some corners of the Left today? Doesn’t it lead to supporting causes and candidates who have no chance of winning, over imperfect ones who might? Have we not learned from 2000 (when in some states, Nader’s vote count was greater than George W. Bush’s margin of victory), 2016 (when angry ‘Bernie Bros’ refused to vote for Hillary Clinton), and 2024?

This is not a question distant from Merton himself. Only two years after he wrote that letter to Jim Forest, progressives backed Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 Democratic primary and never embraced the establishment nominee, Hubert Humphrey. Richard Nixon ended up winning the election.

But it’s not only voting. It’s boycotts (which sometimes work and sometimes don’t), protests that sometimes speak only to the left and not to the center, individual actions to reduce one’s carbon footprint but not collective actions to enact changes that would actually make a difference — it’s a whole way of being. Many times, reflecting on feel-good actions that don’t actually move the needle, I’ve thought of this Onion article from September 2001:

Somewhere in here is a line, I suppose, between ineffectual actions that may still have moral value and actions that can actually make things worse. But I don’t know what that line is. Thoreau in Civil Disobedience argues that even to vote in a corrupt system is to be complicit in that system’s oppression of others (slavery, in his case). Many Israeli Palestinians agree, refusing to vote in Israeli elections. And maybe they are right politically as well as morally — after all, in Merton’s case, despite the results of the 1968 election, the Vietnam War did eventually end, and America learned certain hard lessons about the limits of its power. (Our mistakes today are different ones.)

For me personally, the ‘Both/And’ synthesis has to do with using one set of tools to ascertain which interventions can be effective, and a different set of tools to assess the spiritual and emotional worth of those actions.

For assessing interventions, I turn to boring, left-brain tools of political science, neo-pragmatist Rortian philosophy, and data-driven analysis. I vote for imperfect candidates, I don’t fret much about personal carbon emissions, and I will continue beating the drum about the Epstein Files because data shows that a ton of Americans really care about it.

Share

Of course, I don’t think it’s possible to really know what interventions lead most predictably to the best results. But we all have our unique contributions to make, and I think mine are in the work I’m doing now: both the short-term journalism on politics and religion, and the longer-term scholarship on psychedelics and religion. It’s a bit that well-trodden pseudo-Ikigai Venn diagram of finding the intersection of what you love, what the world needs, what you get paid for, and what you’re good at. There’s a lot in there that’s problematic, but much that’s useful.

But later at night, when I’m wondering if any of this stuff matters, I find comfort in Merton’s (and the Buddha’s, and Rabbi Tarfon’s) wisdom. Merton created enduring works of contemplative wisdom and prophetic justice that have outlived him. Despite being a Trappist monk and theologian, he was engaged in the intellectual and political issues of his day, chiefly the civil rights movement. He spoke to the times and to the timeless in ways that have long been a role model for me. And informed in some amount by his contributions, the inscrutable dialectic of human history plodded onward, in ways that were neither catastrophic nor entirely for the best.

That is how I understand hope.

Things I’ve been reading this week on this platform:

• Two excellent investigations this week: one on Sinclair Broadcasting’s role in the Kimmel scandal (including a great survey of their track record overall) and the Larry Ellison/TikTok piece mentioned above.

• I generally loathe Lists Of Wise Things I Want To Say, but wrote a truly beautiful and insightful list of ‘45 Things I learned by age 45.’ Read this.

• hit a home run with this call-out to members of the “consciousness community” for their political apathy and inaction.

• If you believe something democratic will happen after Trump, Jordan Weissman at lays out an excellent agenda for what we should do when that happens.

Finally, here is some excellent advice from George Harrison, by way of Marianne Faithfull:

But the rumored ascendancy of Weiss to be editorial director of CBS News is all that’s on my journalistic mind right now. So I’m going to write about it.

Why do I care about this? First, I have many close friends and colleagues who think that Weiss really is who she says she is —an aggrieved centrist-liberal who finds herself “politically homeless” — instead of who she actually is, which is a lifelong conservative whose heavily-subsidized endeavors push a consistently right-wing, anti-liberal line. They trust someone who has consistently betrayed that trust.

Second, as I wrote about a year ago, I have seen firsthand how the rage and hyperbole that Weiss promulgates drives people apart and contributes to the Putinesque free-for-all that has come to dominate our culture. Her publication is degrading our public discourse: exaggerating, misleading, and enraging. She really is doing harm. And she is soon, it seems, to have an even larger platform to do so.

I’m still not going to write a hit piece. Rather, I’m going to focus on three core features of the journalistic charlatanism that has propelled Weiss’s career to the zenith of our profession:

1. Presenting herself as a disillusioned liberal when she is not in fact one, and maintaining a myopic, obsessive focus on the excesses of the Left to the exclusion of anything bad that happens on the Right — all the while taking large amounts of money from conservative mega-donors who have an obvious ideological interest in her doing so.

2. Depicting herself as an anti-establishment outsider, martyr, and independent when, in fact, she is an establishment insider with unparalleled access to right-wing figures, and

3. Holding extremely sloppy journalistic standards that turn rumors into facts, marginal figures into representatives of the great evil, minor incidents into major scandals. In a society struggling to tell truth from bullshit, the “Free Press” is part of the problem, degrading our public discourse and stoking rage for clicks.

Okay, let’s go.

Share

1.

Once upon a time, Bari Weiss was a mere pundit, like yours truly. She first gained prominence, in an incident now drenched in irony, back in 2004, when as a student at Columbia University, she campaigned to get three professors fired for allegedly making anti-Israel and/or antisemitic comments in class. It’s almost like we’ve come full circle — only now the moral panic Weiss helped create is threatening the entire university.

In fact, there were no substantiated accounts of the incidents happening – only a 20-minute quasi-documentary about the incident, Columbia Unbecoming, featuring the kind of snowflake-safe-space stuff that, when it comes from the Left, Weiss would later excoriate. According to the documentary, students saying they felt attacked and unsafe in class because Professor Joseph Massad and others said disturbing (to them) things about Israel. Which maybe he did or maybe he didn’t: Massad has strong anti-Israel views, to be sure, and has made statements that I, too, find troubling. An ad hoc committee convened by Columbia found the account credible, though not proven true.

Still, for someone who would later claim to be fighting for academic freedom, this is the exact opposite of it: campaigning to get professors fired for things they say in the classroom. But this hypocrisy would become Weiss’s signature move for the two decades to come. When conservative speech is at stake, she campaigns for free expression and derides cancel culture. When liberal or radical speech is at stake, she campaigns for censorship and cancellation.

For the next ten years, Weiss gradually worked her way up in the field. As a university student, she spent a summer in Israel working for the right-wing Shalem Center and did a variety of pro-Israel programming. Weiss then worked as a book reviews editor, opinions editor, and writer (I have a pitch email I sent her in 2014 when she was at the Wall Street Journal) and eventually reaches a pinnacle of the field in 2017, as an opinion editor and columnist for the New York Times, whose new opinion editor, James Bennett, was seeking to hire more conservative voices.

This resume may surprise readers who have read Weiss’s self-presentation as a liberal who is disturbed, shocked, and surprised by the excesses of the left. But that is because Weiss has never been a liberal. For over two decades, her perspectives and editorial choices reflect a garden-variety moderate-conservative who hates the welfare state, supports Israeli policies no matter what, and has no patience for uppity minorities seeking anything more than color-blindness. There has never been anything heterodox about these views — people who hold them currently control all three branches of the federal government. The views are just conservative. It’s misleading to call them otherwise, or to pretend that one has commitments one does not in fact possess.

Weiss’s schtick — some would call it a grift — made its first major mark in August, 2017, when shortly after taking her perch at the Times Weiss wrote a piece about the Women’s March entitled “When Progressives Embrace Hate,” focusing on objectionable statements made (not at the March) by four of its organizers. Weiss first claims that “The Women’s March moved me,” and forgives some missteps because “Trump had campaigned on attacking the weakest and most vulnerable in our society. Now was the time to put aside petty differences and secondary issues to oppose his presidency.”

But Weiss apparently reconsidered that position, and the bulk of the piece is focused on a handful of comments by Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and others which, Weiss claims, reflects a hateful cancer combining extreme politics and outright bigotry. More than that; these isolated comments show how the Democratic Party has

fall[en] prey to movements that are, at base, anti-American. That is true of the populist, racist alt-right that helped deliver Mr. Trump the White House and are now hollowing out the Republican Party. And it can be true of the progressive “resistance” — regardless of how chic, Instagrammable and celebrity-laden the movement may seem.

This is, factually speaking, nuts. A half-dozen posts from four women, read in the worst possible light, shows that an entire party has fallen prey to an anti-American movement? That “progressives” embrace “hate”? Weiss writes so well that her elisions in logic can get lost in the prose. But this is totally insane, right? This is a few posts by a few radical people who don’t represent the Democratic Party, or even the march itself, anymore than Richard Spencer represents all Republicans. It’s a ludicrous generalization to move from one to the other.

The Women’s March piece set the tone for the next eight years: Yes, both sides are bad, but I’m going to focus all of my attention, firepower, and rhetoric on the Left. Thus began eight years of harping on every woke excess on college campuses while ignoring, I don’t know, the January 2021 insurrection against the United States, the Big Lie that animated it, and the multiple convictions of Donald Trump. Her primary enemies are, not coincidentally, the same as the Trump administration’s: universities, the media, the woke elite. It’s almost too easy, yet Weiss’s secret ability is to make these basic, conservative talking points while still persuading people that she’s a reasonable centrist-liberal.

But that is bunk. Just look at The Free Press today, September 4, 2025. In the past two months, an autocratic administration has sent the military into US cities; mandated patriotic ideological conformity at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, and other institutions; sent masked agents to kidnap legal residents and throw them in inhuman jails for a week; used fake “emergencies” to violate all kinds of legal and constitutional rules; and illegally fired government employees whose jobs are protected by law. Yet here’s the front page of the Free Press:

A story criticizing an association critical of Israel, three pieces criticizing Zohran Mamdani (and a fourth cheering his opponents), and a random piece on Silicon Valley. Is this liberal, maverick, independent, heterodox, or in any way balanced? It has a different vibe from Fox News, but the ideology is the same.

Which would be fine if the Free Press were simply honest that they are a conservative outlet. But they’re not honest; they claim to be centrist or independent or whatever, but that is not reflected by their editorial choices. Lately, for example, the Free Press has published articles like “Things Worth Remembering: The Empathy of J.K. Rowling”, “Daniel Penny’s Innocence—and the Shame of Alvin Bragg,” “Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella,” and “The Secret Service Failed. What’s That Have to Do With DEI?” But hardly anything on creeping authoritarianism in our midst. On today’s site, I scrolled down: there was only one piece on the front page critical of Trump, and it was about litter in Yosemite National Park. Why the deception?

2.

Together with Weiss’s self-presentation as an aggrieved moderate-liberal, Weiss has styled herself as an independent, politically homeless, anti-establishment martyr even as she became one of the most successful insider-journalists of the century, taking millions of dollars from right-wing donors and gaining unparalleled access to right-wing political figures. Whether this outsider pose is self-delusion or just a marketing ploy, I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t the truth.

After Weiss’s departures from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times (those scrappy outsider publications) Weiss raised several million dollars from investors who, to this day, remain largely anonymous and unknown, and was given untold incentives by Substack to set up shop on this platform. All the while, Weiss spun herself as a martyr for free speech, posting a 1500-word resignation letter online that complained about online discourse while declining to take any responsibility for her editorial missteps, which I’ll discuss in the next section.

Now, one must admire Weiss’s business acumen. There are a lot of centrist pundits out there who do the same thing she does — Matt Taibbi, Yascha Mounk, Michael Shellenberger, the staffs of Quillette and Persuasion — but she alone built an entire media organization. She is clearly a unique, brilliant self-marketer and entrepreneur. As Peter Shamshiri put it on the podcast If Books Could Kill, “All I know is that for ten years, every columnist on Earth was writing the same article about cancel culture. And Bari’s the only one to turn it into $100 million.”

But none of this is outsider behavior, and none of this is “heterodox.” William F. Buckley did the same thing when he founded the The National Review in 1955, except that his main funder was his dad. Rich people pay thought leaders all the time and gain handsome returns on their investment. After all, who would have thought that Buckley’s intellectual descendants would convince a majority of working-class and middle-class Americans to accept “trickle-down economics” in the name of freedom and the American way? Whoever is funding Weiss has obviously learned from history.

These days, of course, Weiss is on the inside of the inside. She was hand-picked by Elon Musk to review the so-called “Twitter Files,” her reporters have an inside track at the White House, and the Free Press has run interviews with, or first-person pieces by, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Robert Iger, Marco Rubio, and other conservative figures (almost no liberal ones). She hobnobs with Trump-supporting billionaires like Dan Loeb, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Bobby Kotick. And she parrots nearly every establishment talking point that comes down the conservative pike, from vaccine skepticism to lies about immigrant crime to insinuations about Joe Biden’s cognitive capacities. This is the least outsider figure in America.

But there’s still that pose. Jia Tolentino wrote in her book Trick Mirror that

at times it seems that Weiss’s main strategy is to make an argument that’s bad enough to attract criticism, and then to cherry-pick the worst of that criticism into the foundation for another bad argument. Her worldview requires the specter of a vast, angry, inferior mob.

Like the billionaire president of the United States still claiming that he is the target of sinister elites, the soon-to-be billionaire pundit of the ‘center’ still claims that she is an outsider who dares to speak the truth, rather than an insider who speaks exactly what her donors and readers want to hear.

And her newest coup is perhaps the greatest of all. Just look at the story: a nationalist strongman wants to suppress the news media and a right-wing billionaire says he’ll do it if the strongman lets him buy a media company. Voila, the strongman approves the purchase. And lo and behold, in comes Bari Weiss, that independent heterodox maverick outsider, to end CBS News as we know it. Because that’s definitely what liberal-minded maverick outsiders do.

Weiss has also conferred this outlandish faux-outsider pose on an entire sector of the journalistic world. In a viral 2018 op-ed, Weiss elevated an entire cadre of thinkers — the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web,” a term coined by one of its members — who turn out to be, like Weiss herself, just plain conservatives, along with several nuts. Joe Rogan has platformed numerous conspiracy theories, puffed up Trump (he has since expressed regret), and may have helped swing the 2024 election. Dave Rubin went MAGA and has abandoned his former calls for civility and now calls any woman he dislikes a “cunt” – though some of his colleagues have now turned on him, since he and his husband have had a baby through surrogacy. The moralistic scold turned drug addict Jordan Peterson now alleges globalist conspiracies to decrease world population by means of climate regulations, but is still praised by The Free Press. Candace Owens became, or revealed herself to be, a raging antisemitic conspiracy-spouting lunatic. Bret Weinstein spreads anti-vax lies on right-wing media.

Ironically, the only members of Weiss’s frieze of IDW heroes who haven’t descended into madness are Sam Harris, who broke with the crowd over their embrace of pseudo-science, and Ben Shapiro, who alone among the group was a self-described conservative from the start. (Other figures listed in Weiss’s initial piece have also retained their sanity, but their work was not described in any detail.) Harris and Shapiro, in other words, have been honest and consistent about who they are. But the other people Weiss lifted up have revealed themselves to be ultra-nationalists, kooks, or people who give a platform to them and claim to be just asking questions.

And throughout, there’s the pose of being something other than who they are. As Anthony Fisher put it in a recent podcast episode,

These people claim to be lifelong Democrats, some of them say that they were Bernie Sanders supporters and they’ve not had a nice thing to say about a single Democratic politician or liberal commentator or liberal idea in the last six years… A lot of these people are anti-left, all the things they see on the left are things that are ‘threatening Western civilization,’ which is why they latch onto people like Tulsi Gabbard, somebody who’s nominally a Democrat… but for the most part seems to be playing toward the MAGA right audience.

Now, obviously, Weiss doesn’t control any of these people and isn’t responsible for what they say. But it is telling that the “outsider” intellectual avant garde she praised and elevated has, by and large, revealed itself to be either reactionary, loopy, or happy to promote reactionary loopiness. What does this say about the people she will champion at the new CBS News?

Share

3.

Finally, there are the details. Weiss and The Free Press are incredibly sloppy, frequently bending the truth, distorting sources, and engaging in irresponsible hyperbole. And since Weiss is clearly intelligent and capable, that sloppiness has to be by design. I’ll start with one example into which I took a deep dive last year: an alleged stabbing of a pro-Israel activist at Yale University.

What actually happened, as captured on video, was that a conservative student journalist, Sahar Tartak, decided to ‘cover’ an anti-Israel rally at Yale which was, as such protests are wont to do, ‘occupying’ a square in front of Beinecke Library. Tartak antagonized the protesters, yelling “I have freedom of movement!” as if clearing the plaza were her job description. And then, as you can see in the video, she was standing quite close to a group of student protesters who were marching in Beinecke Plaza, when one of them grazed Tartak with a flag he was waving.

Having watched the video many times, it looks to me as if this was accidental. The protester was waving a flag, and she was standing practically on top of them. She may even have walked into the path of the marchers; I can’t be sure.

The Free Press ran an article by Tartak headlined “I Was Stabbed in the Eye at Yale.” Worse, in the piece, Tartak proclaimed “I was stabbed in the eye last night on Yale University’s campus because I am a Jew.”

Again, none of that is accurate. She wasn’t stabbed and whatever happened wasn’t because she was a Jew (it didn’t look intentional at all). Why did the Free Press not fact-check any of these allegations? Did they even watch the video?

This, of course, reminds one of Weiss’s hyperbole back in 2004, only this time, Weiss has a huge megaphone, and the Free Press’s story was repeated, multiple times, on Fox News and in right-wing newspapers. Eventually, a sincerely worried member of my Jewish community asked me about it in distress. The word “stabbed” was a lie, but to traumatized Jewish ears, reeling from October 7 and from actual antisemitism that was in fact on the increase, it sure sounded like truth.

This is but one example of hundreds of such exaggerations, distortions, and incitements that Weiss and the Free Press have run. The Free Press has elevated pseudoscience about gender identity so frequently that it now seems like actual science. It published a piece claiming that Derek Chauvin didn’t kill George Floyd that was completely rebutted by an expert, but never retracted or even annotated by the newspaper. Far from being a beacon of truth, The Free Press has contributed to our culture of omnipresent falsity.

Moreover, the whole convenient tornado around wokeness, ‘safe spaces’ on campus, ‘cancel culture,’ and rampant antisemitism on campus is built on these distortions. They aren’t lies: radical college students can indeed be doctrinaire, intolerant, and, well, a little foolish. And sometimes, university administrators have been too afraid of them; the chilling effect was real, and I have felt it myself. But they are massive distortions, often of minor events — like when a single student complaining about Banh Mi at Oberlin turned into national right-wing hysteria about wokeness, cancel culture, and political correctness. Again: It was all based on bullshit.

And of course, there’s Israel. In the Free Press anyone who shouts “Free Palestine” at some rally is deemed to be saying “Destroy Israel and Kill All the Jews” while any Israeli extremist who shouts “Destroy Gaza” on television is either ignored by the Free Press or deemed to be merely making comments in the fog of war. Weiss has relentlessly exploited Jewish fears about antisemitism, fanning every possible ember of rage into a firestorm of misinformation and exaggeration — except when those embers are found among administration staff members who have close ties to antisemitic extremists, of course.

All this negligent sloppiness has long been part of Weiss’s M.O. — and then, when mistakes are called out, she blames the woke mob. For example, when The New York Times published a now-prescient but then-shocking op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton suggesting that troops be sent in to repress Black Lives Matter protests, over a thousand staff members protested and the Times issued an apology with specific examples of how “the editing process was rushed and flawed…. For example, the published piece presents as facts assertions about the role of ‘cadres of left-wing radicals like antifa’; in fact, those allegations have not been substantiated and have been widely questioned… The assertion that police officers “bore the brunt” of the violence is an overstatement that should have been challenged.”

But when Weiss resigned a month later, after opinion editor James Bennet was fired in the wake of the controversy, she didn’t address these facts in her 1,500 word resignation letter, instead claiming that the Times had a double standard when it comes to conservatives. “If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome,” she wrote. The glaring errors in the piece went unmentioned.

If Bari Weiss were some kind of inexperienced rookie, these might be excused as incompetent rookie mistakes. But she is an veteran editor and writer. She knows better. This is deliberate irresponsibility.

4.

No one can predict what will happen in the billionaire phase of Bari Weiss’s career. She has defied her haters many times already, and will probably do so again. But what that means is anyone’s guess.

Will Weiss awaken to the fact that, in the context of militarized cities and the total abdication of American leadership abroad, Zohran Mamdani’s plan for free buses is not the most worrisome issue of the day? I don’t know. Lately, as Trump 2.0 has unfurled itself, Weiss has occasionally criticized some on the Right. For example, in a speech given in February of this year, Weiss called out Tucker Carlson’s holocaust revisionism, albeit by claiming he’s a bit like the Left:

While the left, long sympathetic with Stalin, today sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—this new right eulogizes the original ones. And in rehabilitating Hitler they are not merely demonizing Jews, but demonizing America, Britain, and the millions who fought and died to preserve our freedoms.

Indeed, in the same speech, she seemed to worry that the tables have now been turned. Speaking of the MAGA movement’s power grabs, Weiss said

If that continues without being challenged, we may wind up spending the next few years watching the same story we just lived through on the other side, as the far-right… devours what remains of the center-right.

Such comments can inspire some degree of hope. (They certainly enraged Carlson, who shot back that Weiss was just shilling for Israel.) First, if Weiss would simply come out as a longtime center-right believer herself, that would clear up much of the misrepresentation I’ve discussed in this post. And second, perhaps with the excesses of MAGA authoritarianism now quite apparent — and quite personal, as they are threatening Weiss’s and my families — some kind of balance might emerge in Weiss’s editorial decisionmaking.

And yet, in the same breath as these statements, Weiss shows that she has not changed her schtick at all. Notice the preposterous claims about “the Left”: that they sympathize with Stalin (which literally no one on the Left does) and Hamas, conflating people opposed to the starvation of Gaza with people who support terrorists murdering, raping, and shooting rockets at Israelis. Those are obviously totally different viewpoints, but this is Weiss’s usual sleight-of-hand: pick the worst possible example of extreme left-wing behavior, then ascribe it to the entire Left, and then to the entire Democratic party. It’s no Weissian exaggeration to say that this kind of incendiary hyperbole has played a significant role in the degradation of our political discourse.

And there’s that reversal of victim and oppressor — as if some misguided collegiate protesters are somehow equivalent in threat to the theocrats, ethno-nationalists, and religious fundamentalists in the White House, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. In a sense, it’s hilarious: Weiss is warning us that the entirety of the federal government could end up being as dangerous as Students for Justice in Palestine. But of course it isn’t hilarious when it legitimizes the regime’s attacks on higher education, which endanger thousands of livelihoods and threaten American leadership in technology and medicine. So forgive me if I’m not feeling optimistic yet.

And now? Will a Weiss-led CBS News challenge voter intimidation that threatens to undermine the 2026 midterms or complain about pronouns? Will it address the scrubbing of the Epstein files or focus on Zohran’s city groceries? Will it bring scientific experts to discuss climate change or will it “balance” them out with junk science and fossil-fuel propaganda? I have no idea. But I’ve already seen how Weiss’s combination of concerned-liberal cosplay, outsider-chic, and sloppy journalistic standards has had an impact on society. I’ve seen it firsthand in my communities.

At least with Fox News, you know where you stand.

Note: The initial version of this post speculated that Weiss may have been involved in editing the Tom Cotton op-ed for the Times. Though it was hedged, this speculation could be incorrect and misleading, and I have removed it. I also added a sentence clarifying that university administrators, not only students, were sometimes involved in campus controversies.

Thanks to my paying subscribers for your support of this work. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading lately:

• Speaking of The New York Times, the Times did a great, comprehensive rebuttal of the vaccine-autism myth a couple of weeks ago and a great long-form on how the Far Right has thoroughly been integrated into the Trump administration.

• Here’s some actual antisemitic stuff and some more actual antisemitic nationalist stuff that I wish Bari Weiss would cover.

• on William F. Buckley is great reading.

• Finally, please learn about the Posse Comitatus Act.

See you next week.

But you should care about the Epstein files too. After a short recap of the scandal, I’ll go through three reasons why.

1. A Very Short Recap of a Very Gross Scandal

Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) made his money and reputation as a shady financier, first working at Bear Stearns but later as a self-described “bounty hunter” recovering embezzled funds for ultra-wealthy people (while also apparently helping others do the embezzling), then as a corporate raider involved in a massive Ponzi scheme, and then as a financial manager for high-net-worth individuals, including billionaire Leslie Wexner. Meanwhile, it appears, Epstein was also working for US intelligence services. He was a rich, highly connected member of America’s cultural elite. He socialized with everyone from Bill Clinton to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Richard Branson to Lawrence Summers, Prince Andrew to Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen to Ehud Barak — and, as evidenced in several photos, Donald Trump.

Epstein was also a pedophile and a convicted sex offender. With his sidekick Ghislane Maxwell, he trafficked teenage girls for sex over a period of many years. He was first investigated in 2005, after parents of a 14-year-old girl said he paid her to give him a massage and sexually assaulted her. Eventually, federal officials identified 36 girls, ranging in age from 14 to 18, who he had allegedly sexually abused and in some cases even raped. Yet astonishingly, in 2008, Epstein got a sweetheart plea deal from the feds, pleading guilty to state prostitution charges but getting a “non-prosecution agreement” (NPA) from the federal government, which was kept secret from Epstein’s victims. He served less than 13 months in jail, most of it in a cozy low-security facility with twelve hours of supervised release every day.

To be clear, most of the people who knew or met Epstein are not implicated in his conduct, though some have had their own sex scandals. But who did know? Were any of his famous friends also co-offenders? We may never know the answers to these questions, but over the next ten years, the scandal only grew. Numerous civil lawsuits were filed and settled. The NPA deal was exposed by the Miami Herald in 2018, leading to the resignation of Trump Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta, who as U.S. Attorney had cut that deal. In the wake of mounting evidence, Epstein was arrested again in July, 2019, but on August 10, he died in a New York jail, his death ruled a suicide.

For fifteen years, Trump and his minions — including people now working for the regime, like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino — have insisted that there had been a massive cover-up of Epstein’s life, his crimes, and his death. Endlessly, obsessively, and usually baselessly, they blared on podcasts, Fox News and Newsmax, and everywhere else they could get a microphone that the convicted sex offender had a “client list” that included the most powerful members of our society. They said that Epstein didn’t die by suicide but was executed by someone in this vast conspiracy. There were, Trump’s base was told, Epstein Files” which made all of this clear.

But in the middle of this year: Poof! All gone! Suddenly, say Trump and his loyalists, there are no Epstein files, or if there are, Trump’s name isn’t in it (even though Pam Bondi told him that it was), or even if Trump’s name is in it, he couldn’t possibly be a pedophile because that’s just not his character (despite numerous vulgar comments about adolescent girls and a conviction for sexual assault). After fanning the conspiratorial flames for nearly two decades, Trump now suddenly says there’s nothing to see here, let’s all move on. Here’s John Oliver on the patent absurdity of this:

I want to come clean here: as someone who regularly studies conspiracy theories and is extremely skeptical of them, I might believe in some version of this one. Epstein abuses for years, in what amounts to a kind of open secret, and then less than one month after he is finally arrested for real, one day after 2,000 pages of previously sealed documents are released, he dies alone in a jail cell, complete with mysteriously malfunctioning cameras and prison guards who falsified records? Meanwhile, it appears to be true that Epstein’s homes in New York, Palm Beach, and on a private island were all filled with video cameras that recorded his guests, whether for Epstein’s personal enjoyment or for blackmail. I don’t know what I believe, but I can’t say that I don’t believe this stuff is weird.

But the last few months have been the weirdest of all, as Trump has pivoted from demanding the “Epstein Files” be released (presumably to the detriment of the Clintons and the rest of the ‘Deep State’) to insisting that they don’t even exist and acting like a caricature of someone very, very guilty.

First, the Trump administration released a supposedly unedited video footage from the jail where Epstein died – only then it came out that the tape was missing two minutes and fifty three seconds and showed signs of being edited. Just last week, DOJ officials met with Maxwell, who left the meeting with a mysterious box whose contents we do not know, and who was promptly transferred to a minimum-security prison nicknamed “Club Fed.” All the while, Donald Trump continues to transparently lie about his past friendship with Epstein, while insisting there’s nothing to see here and we should all move on.

At the very least, this is the dumbest, clumsiest cover-up in recent memory.

2. We Should Care About What Voters Care About

Here’s why we should care about all this.

First, unlike most of Trump’s tricks, this one hasn’t worked. Trump’s own base is furious, and divided. Yes, some of those who only six months ago were shouting about massive conspiracies – Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck –now say there’s nothing to see here. But a lot of MAGA hasn’t. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer, Tucker Carlson, Roseanne Barr, and Mike Flynn publicly broken with Trump over the matter. Even the QAnon Shaman, Jacob Angeli-Chansley, has thrown Trump under the bus, despite being pardoned by him:

This should matter to anyone focused on resisting the Trump administration’s countless assaults on our country. If, like me, you believe this administration to be a profound threat to the American democratic order, then your top priority should be resisting it. And that means using whatever tools are effective, not just the ones that make us feel good. And that means keeping this story alive, because it might actually swing the congressional election next year (if it takes place in a winnable way) and limit Trump’s omnipotence over his political party.

Share

Admittedly, this may not be fun. For many people, it’s more fulfilling to march in the streets about issues that affect millions of people. For others, it feels more fulfilling to talk with friends and neighbors, or post on social media, or show up at a town hall – all of which can be impactful. And for others still, it may be more fulfilling and impactful to give up on this broken system and try to bring about more radical change. Also fine, though as John Lennon sang in 1968, we’d all love to see the plan. Let a thousand flowers bloom, when it comes to resisting authoritarianism; we all have roles to play.

But the Epstein Files issue might actually do the job. The more congressional Republicans aid in this cover-up, the more they are vulnerable. And Trump himself is vulnerable, probably not to impeachment (and certainly not to investigation, since his “Department of Justice” is the least independent and honest in American history) but to plummeting approval ratings and loss of influence over his base and his party. Because as you probably know, Trump’s own base is furious about his about-face, and about the obvious cover-up taking place right in front of our eyes.

Subscribe now

Now, I would like to live in a world in which Trump’s base was more concerned about, I don’t know, tax breaks for billionaires, the shredding of our nation’s scientific establishment, and masked goons on the street. But we don’t live in that world. And haven’t we learned from the 2024 election that Democrats need to talk about what voters care about, not what you and I care about? Kamala Harris faced perhaps insurmountable headwinds in her campaign, but it certainly didn’t help that she talked about democratic values when millions of Americans were having trouble putting food on the table, or that she preached joy when Americans were feeling anger and despair.

Honestly, this is how democracy is supposed to work, isn’t it? Politicians should lead, and also they should be responsive to what voters care about. Moreover, I don’t think it’s wrong for Americans to care that Donald Trump lied to them, even if I think there are more consequential lies than this one. Which brings me to my next point.

3. What if the Trust Dominoes Fall?

Two things have been transparently obvious to anyone not in the MAGA cult: first, that Donald Trump is a con man; and second, that because he speaks so effectively to the emotional grievances of his most ardent admirers, they are completely duped.

Until they aren’t.

For many of Trump’s voters, the trust dominoes have already begun to fall. The swing voters that won him the election were primarily motivated by economic concerns, and polling suggests they are pissed off as those concerns have not been addressed. But those voters were really just transactional voters anyway; they weren’t Trumpers through and through, they just voted for the guy they thought might help.

MAGA is a different story. This is the 20-30% of the American population that really believes all the fake crises that MAGA is built upon: immigrant crime, liberal hatred of America, radical “gender ideology”, DEI, Woke, the whole white-bread enchilada of right-wing nationalism (and, though they howl in protest, racism).

These beliefs aren’t intellectual propositions: they are affective ones, even spiritual ones. America has changed, that is true. It is more multicultural, the economic rules have changed, and social beliefs are changing too. The literally messianic belief that much of MAGA has in Trump is religious in nature. And if the messiah turns out to be a liar and a pedophile, the disillusionment could be profound.

What if — and I admit, this is some uncharacteristically optimistic speculation — these cracks in the MAGA foundation widen? What if Trump’s followers begin to doubt more and more ingredients of the nationalist enchilada? Might they also doubt that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats, that trans women are really male sexual predators, and that immigrants are criminals destroying America, rather than hard-working people who came here in search of a better life and who are trapped in a broken immigration system. What if, once (some) MAGA voters see who Donald Trump is, they might start to doubt everything he says, including all of these lies?

What if, most optimistically, they see that they’ve been taken in, that their fears of a changing America have been weaponized by a demagogue? What if the spell could actually be broken?

I admit, I’m waxing a bit here. But I think it’s not impossible. This is a massive breach of trust on Trump’s part, and we need to keep it in the news, in our conversations, and in the public eye.

4. Let’s Remember the Victims

Finally, stepping back from all the politics for a moment, let’s remember what this scandal is fundamentally about: rich, powerful men sexually abusing teenage girls and using their power to insulate themselves from accountability. And in a moment of backlash against MeToo, this is a moment which could unite progressives and conservatives in believing the women who bravely come forward to share their stories. In fact, let’s listen to some of them right now, in statements given under oath at the August 27, 2019 court hearing shortly after Epstein’s death, at which the charges against him were dismissed:

Courtney Wild: “Jeffrey Epstein sexually abused me for years, robbing me of my innocence and mental health. Jeffrey Epstein has done nothing but manipulate our justice system, where he has never been held accountable for his actions, even to this day."

Jane Doe #4: “I met Jeffrey Epstein at a very vulnerable place in my life, and whatever the outcome is with everything, I just wanted to express that we, the victims, we will always carry irreparable damage and pain throughout our lives after this. It's something that's never going to go away. You know, whoever we marry in our life, whatever future we have in our life, it's always going to be something that's always there for us. And I'm very nervous right now. And Jeffrey Epstein, he took away the chance I had at having the future I had envisioned for myself as a young girl, and I think many of us here today will never fully heal from that pain and the heartache that we'll continue carrying with us. So I just wanted to say that. It's something that, it’s irreparable.”

Chauntae Davies (2019): “I began my massage, trying not to let him smell my fear and obvious discomfort, but before I knew what was happening, he grabbed onto my wrist and tugged me towards the bed. I tried to pull away, but he was unbuttoning my shorts and pulling my body onto his already naked body faster than I could think. I was searching for words but all I could say was meek, ‘No, please stop,’ but that just seemed to excite him more. He continued to rape me, and when he was finished, he hopped off and went to the shower... I cried myself to sleep that night. I spent two weeks vomiting, almost to death, in a Los Angeles hospital after that first encounter.”

This isn’t some gossipy pulp story; this is a horrifying tale of a powerful man abusing vulnerable women and girls. Even apart from the political consequences, these are real people and real stories that progressives should not dismiss. We don’t get to choose our moments of public reckoning, and those moments are rarely ideal. But this one is here. Let’s not let it wither on the vine of short attention spans.

You should care about the Epstein scandal for political reasons, patriotic reasons, ethical reasons, and feminist reasons. There’s no need to apologize for it or hold your nose; for all these reasons and more, this is a real story that progressives should care about. I don’t know what Donald Trump is so feverishly trying to hide here. But I do know he desperately wants us to forget about it and move on.

Don’t let that happen.

Thanks to all my subscribers for enabling this enterprise to thrive. If you’ve benefited from these newsletters, I invite you to become a paying subscriber — it enables this work to happen.

Subscribe now

Some things I’ve been reading this week:

• There’s a great, viral post about those endless spam texts being sent on behalf of Democratic candidates. Did you know they are a scam? Read this thorough investigation/debunking by Adam Bonica on the ‘Mothership’ consulting outfit that’s responsible for those annoying text messages, and how only 1.6% of the money they get goes to candidates.

• Meanwhile, Daniel W. Drezner did a great, depressing summary of Trump depredations

  known and unknown. I find these things very helpful.

• On Epstein, here’s a handy timeline from NPR, here’s survivor Sarah Ransome talking about the abuse she experienced, and here’s a useful BBC primer on what we know about the ‘Epstein Files.’

• Finally, here’s yet another mind-blowing post by on people believing their AI companions are sentient. If, like me, your first response is to dismiss those claims as ridiculous, read on. Just this flow chart has given me a lot to chew on:

  

My answer has been the same for six months now: Yes, but they will be almost impossible for Democrats to win enough of them.

This is the pattern in other countries led by right-wing strongmen. There are elections in India, Hungary, even Russia and China. But autocrats make it difficult, if not impossible, for their opponents to win them, through a combination of intimidation, legal machinations, and corrupt loyalists in positions of power. In this way, the appearance of democracy is retained, but underneath that façade, the structure which makes it possible has been hollowed out.

Only in extreme cases are elections formally “rigged” or, as in the United States and Brazil, met with insurrectionist violence when the demagogue actually loses. Usually, the simulacra of civil society are maintained, legitimizing and normalizing autocracy even after it has long since come to resemble an open secret. Democracy becomes a kind of glass closet: everyone knows the secret, but if the show can go on, we can imagine that we don’t.

This is true even in extreme cases. In 1936 Germany, for example, there was a “parliamentary election” which was actually a single-issue referendum on whether the Nazi party should take over the entire Reichstag. The Nazis won with, they said, 98% voting in favor — obviously falsified results. Yet even then, the Nazis made a show of the nation turning out to vote, with publicity stunts and celebratory headlines in Fox News, The Daily Wire, CBS News, Der Stürmer. Likewise in the Soviet Union and in totalitarian regimes across the world.

I’ll return to the fascinating psychological, political, and even spiritual reasons for this curious pattern at the end of this post. For now, the point to take in is that authoritarianism sits easily alongside elections, judicial review, and other superficial indicia of democracy. Absolutism is rarely absolute.

Which brings us to 2026 and 2028. It’s highly unlikely that the president will issue some sort of edict canceling the election outright. There will be voting booths, ballots, and elections. Instead, as in later-stage autocracies, the Trump administration has already rolled out an array of tactics that will make it very hard for Democrats to regain control of Congress – which, polls tell us, they would likely do today if a free and fair election were held. Trump is very unpopular.

Some of these tactics are new, some are old. But their plurality is important: in addition to its “belt and suspenders” prudential value, the sheer number of actions makes it harder to say that Republicans stole the election. It’s the death of a thousand blows. And, of course, since MAGA Republicans have been claiming stolen elections for eight years, the charge is now empty of meaning. They have cried wolf so many times, that now crying wolf itself is meaningless. In retrospect, it looks quite brilliant.

What are some of those “thousand blows”? Here is a provisional list, in order of severity.

1. ICE Intimidation. We’ve seen this already: due to ICE’s random arrest and detention of anyone who looks Latino (or, increasingly, Asian), entire neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles have fallen silent, legally-documented construction and agricultural workers are afraid to go to work, and kids are being harassed at baseball practice. What happens when ICE shows up (or threatens to show up) near a polling place next November? Does anyone imagine that Latino voters won’t be intimidated? And why wouldn’t ICE (which, remember, will be three times larger in 2026 than it is now) expand its harassment campaign to anyone they deem to be suspicious, including you and me? Are you prepared to spend four days in an ICE detention facility simply to cast a vote? It’s unclear what, if anything, can prevent this from happening, unless state governments are willing to risk armed clashes with heavily-militarized federal officers. And if you feel safe from this threat, you are either (a) deluded or (b) part of the problem. Any suggestions?

2. Election Certifications. An extensive New York Times investigation published in October, 2024, found that in four battleground states, 2020 Election Deniers had taken over county and state boards that oversee elections. That same investigation found that many of those Deniers had an almost religious, patriotic belief that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 election was in danger. It’s hard to repeat, time and time again, that there is absolutely no evidence for this, but that’s like saying there’s no evidence for Noah’s Ark. And given that core belief, any confirmatory evidence, no matter how insignificant (e.g., a single typo on a single mail-in ballot address) counts as proof that the fundamental myth is true, as does any far-fetched conspiracy involving Serbia, Venezuela, or any number of other foreign malefactors. As the Times’ Jim Rutenberg put it in his report,

although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.

And thus empowered, these local officials have the ability to deny certifying elections — which was, until the 2010s, a simple administrative function — or delay doing so for weeks or months, sowing chaos and confusion. I remember, in the runup to the 2024 election, expecting widespread chaos as these processes unfolded in every swing state in the country. Funny how those profound concerns about election integrity evaporated when the Deniers’ favored candidate won, isn’t it? But in 2026, there are over a hundred swing districts. Imagine what is going to happen.

3. Replacing Civil Servants with MAGA Loyalists. Does this sound familiar? It was a core plank of Project 2025, which DOGE has now accomplished using the bogus goal of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Really, the goal was always to fire dedicated civil servants and replace them with political loyalists – again, straight out of the authoritarian model. This is also taking place on the local level, as professional and volunteer election officials – meaning not the certification boards and state committees but the pollworkers and local election officials that are on the front line of democracy – are being hounded, harassed, and dismissed, only to be replaced by MAGA hacks. Here’s Rutenberg again:

Tens of millions of dollars flooded into “election integrity” groups, and a new strategy came into view: purge the party of those Republicans who resisted Trump’s 2020 scheme, find true believers who would do what needed to be done and put them in control of the administrative machinery well in advance of the next election.

Recently, a newly noxious form of this effort has taken shape: Trump’s loyalist enforcers at the Justice Department are exploring bringing criminal charges against state or local election officials who have been deemed not to have sufficiently safeguarded their voting systems. Once again, think about it: would you willingly risk doxxing, violence, harassment from law enforcement, malicious libel (like that endured by the Georgia election workers smeared by Rudy Giuliani) and now the possibility of criminal penalties just to do your job? Or would you find another job? Between MAGA-loyalist review boards and MAGA-loyalist pollworkers, there are going to be districts where only a MAGA victory will be regarded as a valid result.

4. Lawfare. And if somehow a Democratic (or sorry, Democrat – it’s amazing how Republicans just cannot call people by their names) candidate prevails, there are enough ‘Trump Judges’ in the system to entertain substantively frivolous challenges to various elections. This was unthinkable only ago, but we have returned to the era of Jim Crow judges who rule out of misbegotten patriotism rather than impartiality. Am I exaggerating? Just imagine if Aileen Cannon (the judge who unconscionably tipped the scales for Trump in the Classified-Documents-in-the-Mar-A-Lago-Bathroom case) is tapped to review the results of an election. I’m old enough to remember the scandal of Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court’s “states rights” conservatives voted to stop Florida’s legally-mandated recount of its votes in 2000 and install a Republican in the White House. I expect a dozen such cases in lower courts in 2026.

5. Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression. Admittedly, this is an old one, which I personally have been writing about for over a decade. But newly empowered by the Supreme Court, such tactics have grown increasingly bold, with Trump saying overtly that the GOP would pick up five seats by redistricting in Texas. And let’s remember that North Carolina’s gerrymander in 2024 swung the balance of power in the House of Representatives. Here, at least, Governor Gavin Newsom has threatened retaliatory gerrymandering in California to counteract anything Texas does — kind of a dreadful response, but better than doing nothing. And in terms of voter suppression, Republicans are doing the same stuff as always – eliminating early voting and mail-in ballots, setting up roadblocks to voting that affect likely Democratic voters disproportionately, and continuing to spread the entire Big Lie that our elections are unreliable.

6. Culture, Media, Religion, Distraction. Finally, we have already seen the regime’s shocking (though perhaps not unexpected) attack on core institutions of liberal democracy: the press, media companies in general, law firms, and institutions of higher education. To get the government to approve its merger with Skydance, Paramount has promised to install an “ombudsman” to review allegations of bias at CBS news — rumored to be the professional grifter Bari Weiss, who takes millions of dollars of right-wing billionaire money and pumps out right-wing agit-prop, all the while continuing to cosplay as a concerned liberal centrist. (Paramount has also agreed to run millions of dollars of Trump-aligned ‘public service announcements’ on the network.) And now universities will be pressured to follow my alma mater Columbia’s example and pay off the government and sacrifice their independence to avoid being functionally bankrupted — just like Viktor Orban did to once-proud universities in Hungary, which have now been diminished into agents of state patriotism.

All of these attacks create conditions wherein, even if an election is technically ‘fair’, it is impossible for opposition voices to be heard clearly. The Putinesque propaganda and lies of MAGA will be omnipresent, transmitted not via Orwellian Telescreen but by corporate media that has sold itself out to the regime. This has already happened: right-win hysteria about immigration has led to the construction of concentration camps and children having to defend themselves in courtrooms — despite, yet again, the complete absence of evidence. (Immigrant crime rates are lower than citizen crime rates.) And despite Fox News having to pay $787 million in its defamation settlement, media lies about “election integrity” persist.

And finally, there’s the rest of us: exhausted people who want to distract ourselves and ignore the news. I’m this person sometimes, as I’ve written about in these pages, and to be honest, I’m feeling that way right now. I’m not judging it. But as M. Gessen discussed in this Times interview, this is exactly how we accommodate ourselves to the new authoritarian normal, bit by bit, until the way we used to live is extinguished.

As long as it is, this is, of course, a partial list. (Please post any additions you’d make in the comments.) But it is my answer to the question I posed at the top. Yes, there will be an election, but I can’t imagine it will be a fair one, if by “fair” we mean the choices of voters determining the election of members of Congress. (In the case of gerrymandering, fairness is more structural than individual.) You will have the opportunity to cast a vote next November. But whether it counts depends on where you live, and what you’re willing to risk.

Upon reflection, it's strange that authoritarians do all of this. It’s remarkable that the desire for the appearance of legitimacy endures even when power has been completely consolidated. Why go through the performance of electoral democracy at all? Perhaps the illusion of elections provide complicit elite collaborators with at least a pretext, even a flimsy one, of legitimacy and order. (The Senate met during the Empire for a while.) The performance of democracy is a kind of counterpoint to the authoritarian reality. Apparently a glass closet is better than none at all.

Or perhaps it creates an alternative reality. Even a fake election can create a consensus that “everyone” supports the leader: scholars of Soviet authoritarianism, for example, have suggested that Stalin held sham elections to buttress his cult of personality. The sham election acts as a kind of terror; the leader’s power is absolute that he can say black is white, Eurasia has always been at war with East Asia, there are five lights in the torture chamber. The strongman has power even over reality.

Or maybe the reasons are more internal: perhaps the real audience for sham elections are the supporters of the strongman. They are, after all, true believers. They believe that the Fatherland is in danger, and deep in their hearts, they know that they will do whatever they can to save it. Chatter about the rule of law or democratic norms pales in comparison to this profound patriotic imperative. That is the core of their faith; elections are just another doctrine. So, again as with religious doctrine, who cares if the details are preposterous; the faithful mind is ready to accept — no, unconsciously desperate to accept — that elections are happening, that the courts and legislature are operating, that the country is in good hands.

And with enough state influence of media, the construction of a consensus reality is relatively easy to accomplish. The actual fraud ceases to be fraud; the purported fraud, though devoid of evidence, is now accepted as fraud; “election integrity” now means what it says. Faith triumphs over fact; the denial is complete; the facsimile of democracy has come to seem as real as it needs to be for the believers who prop up the autocracy. Only later, often decades later, do historians look back and realize that it was all a facade.

And then when the next dictator arises, he tells us not to pay attention to historians.

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading.

This has been a difficult week, between the multiple fronts of horrifying news and my continuing recovery from my injury. To paid subscribers: thank you for making this work possible. I do still feel the “optimism” I described last week, only of course it isn’t really optimism but a reframing of the tragedy.

There’s been a lot of insightful work done this week on our current crises.

On Israel/Palestine, has done a profound job not only digesting the recent (also profound) commentaries by Omer Bartov and Yuval Noah Harari, but taking them a step further. His disturbing and thought-provoking essay is here. I also commend to your attention Rabbi Jill Jacobs’ ringing demand that Jewish organizations and leaders loudly protest the horrifying situation in Gaza. My own newest article in this area is about the exploitation of antisemitism by American anti-liberal authoritarians.

I also think the Epstein saga is important for progressives to amplify. Not only is it politically important, it also represents a profound moment of recognition within the MAGA base that Trump is indeed a con man — and perhaps guilty of (more) sexual crimes himself. This is important. wrote a fascinating piece on the problem of ‘sticking the ending’ of conspiratorial narratives like the Epstein files. It also has a helpful conglomeration of quotes from MAGA folks insisting that this is the most important thing that must be revealed and we will reveal it — until we won’t. also provided an excellent catch-up on the current state of affairs in the Epstein saga — really helpful reading. I’ll be on the State of Belief Podcast this coming week talking about this.

On fascism, I recently had occasion to revisit the New York Times’ Fall 2024 interview with legendary fascism scholar Robert Paxton. I highly commend it to your attention, principally for the clarity Paxton brings to historical and contemporary fascism. Like the word genocide, the word fascism may bring more heat than light to public discourse, but both describe real situations in ways that are important to conceptualize.

Finally, I am marking the passage and celebrating the life of dharma-poetry-ecological pioneer Joanna Macy, who died this past week at age 96. Here is a beautiful and comprehensive obituary by Joan Duncan Oliver in Tricycle magazine. I leave you with some of Macy’s words:

Share

My family always plays the “good news/bad news” game, and we usually mix it up. Sometimes my daughter (now 7 ½) wants the good news first, sometimes the bad news. I do too. I like the brief moment of discernment the game involves: taking a quick emotional temperature before making the decision. And I like the low stakes.

This week, I had planned to focus on the bad news, which is how the Republicans will steal the 2026 election, using a combination of ICE intimidation at the polls, governmental intimidation of opposition candidates, biased “election integrity” committees, and sympathetic judges and state legislatures. Well, I guess I just did the bad news first. But I won’t go into it this week. I took a quick emotional temperature reading, and just didn’t want to do it.

Instead, I want to present my best version of the “good news”: a quasi-optimistic interpretation of the Trumpian authoritarian police state. Spoiler alert: it’s not really that optimistic, at least not in the short term. But if you’re a regular Both/And reader, you probably knew that already.

Rather, I want to share the narrative that sometimes gives me solace, because I know that a lot of us really need that right now. So here goes.

1.

I begin with a point I’ve made before in this newsletter, which is the case for epistemic humility. Life is unpredictable, as I’ve recently had occasion to relearn, and politics is particularly unpredictable.

In the short term, while the 2026 election is but fifteen months away, that’s still an eternity in political time. We have no idea what combination of economic developments, global events, or Acts of God will take place over the next five quarters. Right now, Trump’s signature policies on immigration, the budget, and cuts to governmental services are mind-bogglingly unpopular, thank God, and if the economy goes south, that will hurt Republicans no matter how much the police state scares brown people away from the polls. On the other hand, we’re only one terrorist attack from the strongman being popular again, and Fox News can spin anything. We really don’t know.

Zooming back to the mid-to long term, we know even less. Many times over the past few weeks, I have fantasized about the MAGA period being regarded by history as a horrible moral and tactical mistake. I hope Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, and the rest of these police state nationalists are someday brought to trial, or at least condemned by the votes of history. It also seems the damage to American standing in the world may be irreversible, and Trump and his congressional and judicial enablers will own it for all time. As I’ve written before, I often feel like my essays are written for an audience thirty years from now. We knew, I want to say, and I’m sorry we couldn’t stop it.

It’s also possible to imagine far darker futures, but I’ll get to those next week.

Share

There are existential uncertainties on a planetary level. What AI will do to the economy and to culture is still utterly unknown. And that’s just scratching the surface; maybe Peter Thiel and the transhumanists are right that AGI will arise soon, that we can upload ourselves to It, and that this human form will be largely irrelevant by the end of the century. Seems unlikely to me, but what do I know.

Nor do we have any idea how and when the climate crisis will manifest, or whether enough people will care even when it does. Or the economy, or global nationalisms, or war, or what the world will look like when the century comes to a close. Some days, I think the future looks like a dystopian film — more Elysium than Mad Max, but who knows — but other days, I think it might look a lot like today, only worse. It’s hot, rich people are basically fine, poor people suffer, and a lot of people don’t care.

Point is, we really don’t know about any of this. I have no idea what kind of world my daughter will inhabit. Which, given the world we’re currently inhabiting, seems like good news.

2.

On better days, I conceive of Trumpism, and the global rise in nationalist authoritarianism, as an inevitable counter-movement in the dialectic of world history. For most of the last hundred years, human societies have grown more interconnected and mostly more liberal. Women have more power and rights now than any other time in human history (unless you believe the myths of a primordial matriarchy, that is). I can access more information in the next thirty seconds than anyone who lived on Planet Earth before 1995 could access in their lifetimes. Technology has utterly transformed how we live, and information technology has transformed how we relate to one another, how we consume, and how we understand the world — and most of these changes have led toward more globalization, technologization, and erosion of traditional norms.

So of course there has to be a reaction. MAGA’s dominant myth is that we can somehow turn back the clock to, well, at least the 1980s, before feminism, gay rights and immigration transformed the social order and somewhat displaced white male hegemony; before America lost its manufacturing and rural jobs; and before technology and the internet changed the inner and outer geographies of our country. Obviously, this is mostly impossible, but so are most myths.

Anyway, Donald Trump is more of a nihilistic Fuck You to contemporary society (as his base conceives it) than a real program for change. The theocrats love it, the white nationalists love it, the plutocrats love it, and perversely, even the tech-libertarians love it since it gets Big Government off their backs.

Subscribe now

But this effort will fail, right? It’s not going to work. Inflation has increased and is set to increase more. Manufacturing jobs aren’t going to come back via import substitution, and few native-born Americans are willing to do the work that migrants do in construction, agriculture, and other fields have done for decades. Yes, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and especially trans rights will be rolled back or erased, just as human rights have been by nationalist conservatives like Xi, Putin, Pinochet, Orban, Mussolini, and You Know Who in Germany. But at some point either this fever dream comes to an end, because it can’t deliver the goods, or it becomes so totalitarian that even the electorate can’t take it down anymore.

Meanwhile, Democrats across the ideological spectrum are learning how to talk to real people, whether they’re moderates like Gavin Newsom or socialists like Zohran Mamdani. Young people are not more socially liberal than other generations, but they are more economically liberal; they know they’ve been shafted by traditional politicians and economics, which many MAGA people know as well. So far, only Bernie Sanders has been able to attract many working class, conservative-ish white voters to an economically progressive platform that would actually address their concerns. But is it hopelessly optimistic to imagine that a future progressive might as well?

I want to zoom back a bit further, though.

It is clear that two things happened to neo-liberalism in the last few decades: the economics failed, and the pace of social and technological change left many people feeling alienated and angry. These are macro-scale historical currents that are more impactful than what Kamala did or didn’t say last October. No incumbent party won in 2024, and the far right is rising everywhere in the West. Economic dislocation, migration, fear/anger about social change — these are all the necessary ingredients for fascism (or ‘national conservatism’ or whatever you want to call it). These movements are not inevitable, but they do seem larger and more fundamental than the vicissitudes of day-to-day politics.

Of course, the details still matter. Some figureheads are better than others: Trump embodies faux-populist rage more effectively than do Nigel Farage or Marine LePen, for example. And small actions are still important, like the outrageous Republican gerrymandering which enabled Republicans to maintain their majority in the House of Representatives.

It is, of course, both/and.

3.

I hesitate to write this concluding section, because it’s a little weird, and I don’t know if I believe it or not. But if we zoom out even farther, there are times in which I feel a synthesis of all of what I’ve been discussing thus far: epistemic humility, a sense of dialectical regression, and, for the lack of a better term, a kind of faith.

Hinei El Yeshuati, Eftach v’Lo Efchad is a verse from the Psalms to which I’ve returned many times this year. Literally, it means “Behold, God is my salvation; I shall trust and not fear.” But I see it less theistically; for me, it means that I obviously don’t know what’s happening on a societal, planetary, or cosmic level, but there are moments at which I feel trust in this unfolding, even as it brings so much suffering and pain. I’m not enough of a theist to say that God has a plan for us, and I don’t think everything happens for a reason. But I am enough of a panentheist to relate to this bizarre, surreal, and often cruel moment as part of the unfolding of the mystery, the great I Don’t Know.

My mind rushes with caveats. Obviously, even if the dialectic is resolving itself somehow and this is all some phrase in a vast symphony of Being, still suffering is real and it is horrible and we should try to have less of it. There’s still cancer, Auschwitz, the Black Plague, the many massacres of the innocents. If God exists and is indeed making an omelet, She certainly breaks a lot of eggs to do so, and who gets broken is random. Equally obvious, we humans are also in the kitchen, and have some limited agency, and so we should fight against police states, ethnic cleansing, environmental suicide, inequality, bigotry, and the rest. Both/And again.

But caveats aside, I glimpse, in quieter moments brought on by meditation or medicine work or reflection on this very strange period in my life, some convergence of epistemic humility and the trust expressed by the Psalmist. Who knows, maybe there is some inscrutable, transcendent-immanent consciousness unfolding itself within this matrix-like manifest world. Maybe there is a dual-aspect monism of consciousness and materiality, emptiness and form. Or maybe there isn’t, and none of it matters anyway apart from cruelty and compassion.

It could be an opiate for which I’m reaching, some false consolation that there is some consciousness at the wheel that doesn’t belong to powerful men. But at least this is a negative theology, one that pretends no knowledge — only faith itself.

Thanks for reading the “good news.” I’m curious for what gives you faith, in this sense of the word — maybe post in the comments.

The ever-psychedelic Madison Margolin interviewed me recently on the subject of Judaism and Psychedelics that just got published here.

I also wrote an article for the Forward about my continued amazement at how a lot of America is tolerating vicious police-state tactics being used against not only immigrants but anyone who dares to Walk Around While Brown in America. Are we the “Good Germans” now? I wonder.

Some things I’ve been reading this week:

On the ‘damage to American standing in the world,’ I loved this piece by Martin Wolf which aptly summarized Trump’s assault on American greatness.

Memo to New York voters: non- ‘law and order’ approaches to policing actually work better. Here’s on Baltimore’s success story.

did a great report on the fringe, anti-vax quasi-scientists now running the NIH. This does not count as good news.

Thanks to subscribers for your support — I hope you’ll spread the word.

But there is some good news: people hate it, and the more they learn about it, the more their hatred grows. And so, dear reader, I make this request: talk about it.

1.

American electoral politics is stupid. Only a minority of people follow politics closely, which makes the things that politically-minded people should and do care about — due process, democratic norms, foreign policy, federal judges — practically irrelevant for national elections.

And so, as we saw last year, Americans will elect a felonious insurrectionist madman to the White House if they think he can handle the economy better than a qualified but elite-seeming black woman would. This drives progressives crazy, of course, but then again, New Yorkers just elected a 33-year-old socialist with no government experience to be the Democratic mayoral candidate for the same reasons. So this isn’t partisan. For better or for worse, people vote based on their pocketbooks, not on the ideological issues that political junkies care about.

Nor is this a new phenomenon. “It’s the Economy, Stupid,” James Carville told the Clinton campaign in 1992. “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” promised the Republican Party in 1928, on the eve of the Great Depression.

But live by the economy, die by the economy — and Trump is dying. His public approval ratings are dismal, and while we might think that’s because of, I don’t know, ICE arresting brown-skinned people who are here legally and have committed no crime, in large part it’s because of the economy.

Share

Enter the Big, Beautiful Bill.

The topline, non-political-junkie take on the BBB is accurate: tax cuts for the rich, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. And people hate it. As CNN’s Harry Enten showed, the bill’s net approval ratings range from -19 to -29, depending on the poll. Miraculously, the depredations of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ are poking through the seas of apathy, TikTok nihilism, and right-wing agitprop.

The thing is, as pointed out in his column today, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are popular. Yes, even Medicaid, which benefits poor people, because the percentage of Americans who use it has grown from 14% in 2008 to 21% today. That’s a lot of people, and a lot of people know those people and know they aren’t lazy scammers leeching off the system. On the contrary, as Krugman notes, large majorities of Americans have a positive view of the program:

So, our job is clear: talk about the Big Beautiful Bill, and keep talking about it even when Trump tries to change the subject.

2.

Obviously, progressives should all be focused on the 2026 midterms and taking back at least one house of Congress from Republicans. But talking about the BBB has longer term benefits too, because this bill is the same bullshit Republicans have been selling for forty-five years: trickle-down economics (which does not work), tax cuts overwhelmingly favoring the ultra-rich, and fake populist rhetoric about freedom, opportunity, and small government. Meanwhile, in every Republican administration since Reagan, the wealth gap has ballooned, the debt has grown, economic opportunities for the working and middle class have evaporated, and the social safety net has been shredded. The only people who come out ahead under Republican budgets are the ones who were ahead to begin with.

Since Reagan, the strategy has been simple: combine fake-populist “Free Enterprise” rhetoric (fake because Republican policies only benefit the richest individuals and largest corporate entities) with a flavor-of-the-month approach to social conservatism: whether it’s immigration, fighting ‘terrorism’, anti-wokeness, low-key racism (welfare queens, Willie Horton, DEI hires), the pledge of allegiance, flag-burning, abortion, gay rights, trans rights… whatever Fox News viewers get the most angry about.

I’m guessing younger readers haven’t even heard of some of those issues, but I’m old enough to remember them. It’s always the same bait-and-switch, and it’s amazing that Republicans keep getting away with it. Enrage and terrify the masses about communism, Muslim terrorists, immigrant gangs, or whatever, and then sell them a bag of economic horseshit that sounds good but actually makes their lives worse. The great innovation of Reagan was getting the white working class to vote against their economic interests. And so they have done, time and time again.

In this larger context, the Big Beautiful Bill is, economically speaking, more of the same, while at the same time being unprecedented from a social-political point of view.

Currently clocking in at 940 pages long (though who knows how the House and Senate versions will be reconciled), here are some of the highlights, some of which you’ve doubtless heard about and some of which you may not have:

• Extend the 2007 ‘temporary’ tax cut for ultra-rich taxpayers, at a cost of $2 trillion (i.e. two thousand thousand million).

• Pass other tax cuts (including limiting the estate tax, which only affects the top 0.1% of taxpayers), costing another $4 trillion

• Cut Medicaid and Medicare in a variety of ways (increasing copays, imposing work requirements, end expanded Medicaid), saves about $1 trillion. Estimates are that 16 million people will lose their health coverage.

• Cut food stamps (used by 40 million people)

• Roll back credits for solar and wind energy and impose a tax (!) on clean energy projects

• Claw back Inflation Reduction Act funds for greener buildings, airplanes, etc.

• Cut student loan relief, making it harder for students to repay loans

• Increase defense spending by $200 billion

• But ICE spending on steroids, with $45 billion for new prisons, $45 billion for the border wall, $31 billion for ICE personnel, $12 billion for homeland security

• Cut funds to National Park Service, NOAA, and FEMA (which is functionally eliminated by the BBB).

• And last and least, the ridiculous, shameful bribe to Sen. Lisa Murkowski that gives special tax deductions to whaling and fishing villages in Western Alaska, in exchange for her support of the bill. Really impressive, that one.

This is just a restaurant-napkin sketch of the bill, of course, but even from this you can see that the savings don’t add up to the costs. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office concluded the Big Beautiful Bill would add $4 trillion to the national debt. So much for budget hawks.

And so much for any pretense that Trump’s Republican Party is any different from Reagan’s or Nixon’s. This has long been the great GOP con: appeal to the working class with social issues and talk of free enterprise, but kneecap them when it comes to tax policy. God, those oligarchs must be laughing. They probably can’t believe that, once again, they put one over on those dumb MAGA crackers.

Subscribe now

3.

Obviously, talking about the Big Beautiful Bill at your family dinner table is not going to convince your racist MAGA uncle to change teams. But he’s not your audience, and neither is anyone who hates Trump already. The audience for BBB messaging is people who could just as easily vote Republican as Democratic, and the point is to speak to their real concerns, not the concerns that you or I think they should have.

Again, I think this whole situation is lousy. We should have an educational system and a media ecosystem that inculcates values of civic responsibility and the common good. Trump’s attacks on the rule of law should be dispositive. But we don’t have those things, and people have the priorities they have.

So talk about the billionaire tax cuts. And while you’re at it, mention that grocery prices have continued to rise — Trump hasn’t done a thing to stop that. He’s done a lot of stupid crap – a military parade on his birthday that turned out to be a big bust, renaming the Gulf of Mexico, and spending $53 million of taxpayer money (and counting) on his golf trips. But when it’s come to real policies that would make a difference for people who are hurting, he’s done bupkes.

Again, I know that the BBB may not seem like the central human rights issue of this moment. Overwhelmingly innocent people are being grabbed off the street by ICE or paid bounty-hunters. The core institutions of civil society — higher education, the media, the law — are under ultra-nationalist attack. The merciless annihilation of Gaza continues.

But if the polling data is correct, this horrifying mass transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest might be Trump’s biggest mistake yet, in terms of political consequences. And best of all, it’s shared by nearly every Republican in Congress — many of whom are up for re-election in little over a year.

For me, it creates a kind of cognitive dissonance to focus on the BBB when there are so many egregious attacks on what makes America truly great. But then I ask myself: Do I want to feel better, or do I want to stem the tide of fascism in America?

Spread the word. The Big, Beautiful Bill is a Big Billionaire Bailout, and a Brutal Budget of Betrayal. I call Bullshit.

Other light reading:

• on — here’s a phrase I never imagined writing — Florida’s new concentration camp and Trump’s new line of cologne.

• has all the receipts of the moral atrocity of the BBB.

• Headline of the week goes to : “John Roberts puts off deciding where he stands on fascism”

Finally, my little attempt at alliteration has nothing on this gem by longtime internet grammar nerd Elle Cordova:

At this point, we’re used to a lot of stupid shit.

The president reposts a conspiracy theory thatJoe Biden is a robot, and around twenty million people believe it. The same president insists that an obviously photoshopped image is not photoshopped, and we roll our eyes. His K-addled sidekick spreads lies about USAID, illegally shreds the agency mandated by Congress to exist, and causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and most Americans yawn.

But there’s one thing I am not inured to, and you shouldn’t be either: the torrent of incendiary lies about the rule of law.

Four months ago, I wrote that “We are currently in Phase One of a three-phase constitutional crisis: Trump and Musk are doing illegal stuff, and they’re getting sued.” Today, we are at Phase Two, “courts decide these cases, Trump loses, and eventually this goes to the Supreme Court.” This has happened. Over 180 judicial rulings have paused Trump’s actions, because so many of them are wildly unconstitutional. And some of these are now headed to the Court.

“Phase Three,” I wrote, is the real constitutional crisis. That’s when Trump tells the Supreme Court to go to hell — which Trump and his lackeys have already been saying in regard to lower courts, like this little gem:

2.

Let’s take this rhetoric seriously, and look at one example of how flat-out wrong, and un-American, this kind of rhetoric is in practice.

On May 29, the U.S. Court of International Trade, which has specific jurisdiction over tariffs, found most of Trump’s tariffs unconstitutional. In response, White House spokesperson Kush Desai, said, “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency.”

Wrong. It is exactly the job of unelected judges to do that. And the whole point in that case was whether there is a “national emergency” regarding trade in the first place. Which the judges unanimously held that there is not.

And since there is no such emergency, the power to levy tariffs remains with Congress, as specified in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

Others in the White House were less nuanced, and more, well, fascistic.

Stephen Miller — who now that Elon Musk is gone should be the most unpopular unelected human being in America — turned the tables on the whole tyranny thing and said that “we are living under a judicial tyranny.” Even though judicial review is what prevents tyranny. And even though Miller then immediately undermined his own point by posting photographs of the three judges in the case, obviously inviting the MAGA mob to harass and threaten them. Which is what tyrants do.

And then there’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. In a May 29 press briefing following the court’s decision, she attacked the constitutional order (with the help of a right-wing non-journalist toady who fed her softball questions) in ways that are unprecedented and utterly authoritarian in nature. Here is some of what she said (the complete transcript is here):

The president's rationale for imposing these powerful tariffs was legally sound and grounded in common sense. President Trump correctly believes that America cannot function safely long-term if we are unable to scale advanced domestic manufacturing capacity, have our own secure critical supply chains and our defense industrial base is dependent on foreign adversaries.

Three judges of the US Court of International Trade disagreed and brazenly abused their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him…

These judges failed to acknowledge that the president of the United States has core foreign affairs powers and authority given to him by Congress to protect the United States economy and national security…

The courts should have no role here. There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision-making process. America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges.

That statement is a perfect distillation of authoritarianism: filled with falsehoods and a willful ignorance of the constitutional order.

Who decides if an action is “legally sound”? The president? His press secretary? No, obviously: courts do that. That’s their job, according to the Constitution. That’s why they do have a role here. Their whole purpose is to review the presidential decision-making process.

They are unelected precisely because to insulate them (in an ideal world) from the vicissitudes of popular opinion. They didn’t “disagree” with Trump’s tariffs — that is a brazen lie. They found that the tariffs exceeded his authority under the constitution.

Oh and incidentally, two of the three judges were appointed by Republican presidents, one of them by Trump himself. These are not “activist judges,” a slur up there with DEI, CRT, Woke, and other once-meaningful terms rendered meaningless by abuse.

Share

Yes, the American people gave Donald Trump a mandate to be president and use the powers available to him to address America’s economic crisis. But that mandate does not and cannot extend to doing absolutely anything he wants to do, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution says. On the contrary, on Inauguration Day, Trump swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, not ignore it in the name of what he believes to be his popular mandate.

This is what authoritarians always say: the people demand it, the hour demands it. For example, one well-known dictator once said:

Furthermore, I expect the German legal profession to understand that the nation is not here for them, but that they are here for the nation; that is, the world, which includes Germany, must not decline in order that former laws may live, but that Germany must live, irrespective of the contradictions of formal justice. . .

From now on, I shall intervene in these cases, and remove from office those judges who evidently do not understand the demands of the hour.

Yes, the person who said this (and the quote is authentic) was Adolf Hitler.

3.

This is serious shit, not bullshit. It’s treason against the constitution.

Without judicial review of executive and legislative actions, America is not a constitutional republic anymore. We can debate how to describe what it is: ‘fascism’ and ‘dictatorship’ seems hyperbolic, but ‘authoritarian state’ seems too mild. But let’s not get hung up on terminology. Without judicial review, we are no different, governmentally speaking, from China, Russia, Hungary, North Korea, and other strongman regimes where what the Leader says, goes.

It’s been clear for a decade that this is what Trump, and many of his supporters, want. Trump has openly praised dictators and seems not to understand that presidents are still subject to rules, even if they don’t like them. For Trump, you’re either with him or against him; it’s that simple.

Ironically, Trump’s behavior regarding tariffs is a perfect illustration of why checks and balances are important. His unconstitutional fiat was accompanied by ludicrously incorrect statistics. His strategy is to individually negotiate trade deals, but at the same time, he is engaged in massive personal corruption, from his meme coin to the Qatari jet. And the uncertainties he has injected into international trade has grievously harmed the reputation of the United States, which may have devastating economic consequences, as wrote about this week. This is exactly the kind of tyrannical behavior the Framers sought to prevent, because they witnessed it firsthand from England’s deluded king. It is the Madness of King Don.

This is not a partisan issue. This week, the National Review issued a scathing rebuke to Trump entitled “Sorry, Mr. President: If You Want Tariffs, You Need Congress.” And there are credible reports of conservative judges staying on the bench so that Trump doesn’t replace them with ideologues like Emil Bove, possibly the least suitable judicial nominee to be proposed in the last hundred years.

And obviously, the tariffs case is but one example. There are many others. DOGE cannot close agencies established by Congress. The government cannot punish law firms or universities for their perceived political activities; that violates the First Amendment. And all “persons” in the United States — not just citizens — may not be deprived of liberty without due process of law. Indeed, the deportation of Kilmar Albrego Garcia — and the refusal to implement a court order to “facilitate” his return — is, so far, the most brazen of the administration’s scofflaw actions.

And now, packed into the preposterously unserious “Big, Beautiful Bill Act” is a provision that would strip courts of their power to find government officials in contempt. That provision probably won’t get through the Senate, but if it somehow becomes law, it, too, is the end of American constitutional democracy as we know it, at least for now.

And for every egregious statement by Miller or Leavitt, there have been half a dozen by J.D. Vance, who surely knows better, unless he slept through every Con Law class at our shared alma mater. The moral shallowness of this man is so profound, it becomes a kind of depth.

Two months ago, I wrote that in terms of constitutional crisis, it was still a few minutes before midnight. I still believe that to be the case. Midnight comes at Phase Three, when the administration openly defies a decision of the Supreme Court, or flagrantly violates a court order. That hasn’t really happened yet — even in the Garcia case, they’re still weaseling around (witness Marco Rubio referring to the case as “a matter of foreign policy,” which is traditionally beyond judicial review, even though it only because ‘foreign’ when Garcia was deported without a hearing), rather than openly defying the order.

But it does seem like it will happen soon. Maybe on birthright citizenship, maybe on immigration, maybe even on tariffs. At some point, it seems likely that midnight will come. And while no one knows how our system will react, I know what the judgment of history will be.

My advice: Don’t be distracted by the latest Trump absurdities, and don’t confuse them with the seriousness of undermining democracy. Don’t be f—ing inured.

First, thanks to my editor friends Larry Yudelson, David Wilensky, Rachel Kahan, and Dan Friedman for opining as to how best to spell “f—ing.”

My article on Israel/Palestine and the antisemitic attack in Boulder is here.

The excellent Paul Krugman piece referenced above is here.

to Elon Musk: Go the f—k to therapy.

Amid much horrible environmental news, here is a small bit of good news.

Share Both/And with Jay Michaelson