Evelyn Reynolds

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    I’ve got the message: security leaks are no laughing matter | Stewart Lee

    During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s MTV Europe presenters’ accents and Russia Today op-eds.I began to bait the bots by inserting deliberately incomprehensible, but also somehow provocative, sentences into my pieces, culminating in the following paragraph, from the summer of 2016, after which point the Russian provocateurs left me alone:“One may as well give the kosovorotka-marinading wazzocks something incomprehensible to feed their bewildered brainstems. To me, then, Vladimir Putin is a giant, prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes. Let’s see what crunchy, expansionist lavatory honey this notion causes the parthenogenic Russian wendigos to inflate for us this week, in the shadow of Paul McGann and his art gnome.”But nature abhors a vacuum, and soon the comment space the Russians vacated was filled by Tories and Brexiters, like rats entering a vacant building, or unseated Tory MPs getting their own reality TV shows. Between 2020 and the fall of the last government these columns were the subject of complaints and criticisms on the right, many with their own newspaper columns in the Daily Mail or the Telegraph, and their own House of Commons notepaper and/or links to opaquely-funded Tufton Street outlets.But although Kemi Badenoch just took a £14,000 freebie from Neil Record – whose tentacular connections include Tufton Street’s climate change denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, its Truss-grooming charity the Institute of Economic Affairs, and its monomaniacal astro-turfed anti-National Trust outfit Restore Trust – the background noise has lessened since the election. Perhaps because the US government are now doing Tufton Street’s job of normalising rightwing talking points more effectively than just getting the former IEA staffer Kate Andrews on to the BBC’s Question Time for the 14th time. That’s what I call a special relationship!But, as I enter my 15th year of satirising the news for money here at the Observer, the quality of complaint has changed again. These past few weeks it has been helpful readers that have been writing in to correct my factual errors and my “jokes”, although admittedly last week’s column on the Trump government’s attitude to its Navajo citizens was a hot mess for which I, like Trump’s national securty adviser Mike Waltz, take full responsibility.I accept the point that Trump did acknowledge the Navajo veterans by inviting them to the White House in 2017, but at the same event he did then make a joke about Pocahontas while standing in front of a portrait of president Andrew Jackson, author of the Indian Removal Act, which relocated Indigenous peoples and saw their lands seized, which probably soured the celebration for the Indigenous wartime heroes.As usual with Trump, it’s difficult to know if the crass behaviour was calculated to play to his base, or whether it was just evidence of the ongoing tone deaf stupidity and systemic incompetence of his team. As a rule, one should hesitate before ascribing motive to a landslide, for example, or to a prolapse. Like Trump perhaps, they just happen.Which is where the worst western military security failure of the century so far comes in. On 15 March the Trump team used the Signal messaging service to discuss their forthcoming attack on the Houthi pirates, and accidentally invited a Democrat-supporting magazine editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to join their discussion. If it was a sitcom plot you’d reject it as being too on-the-nose.Goldberg could have revealed the bombing plans and a CIA operative’s identity. And now everyone knows the depth of the current American administration’s ideologically-driven contempt for European democracy, and the fact that Mike Waltz, a 51-year-old man in a position of some responsibility, uses emojis to celebrate airstrikes. Like a baby with its own bombs.Does Keir Starmer still think he can salvage the special relationship, an abused husband watching his furious wife throw all of his jazz vinyl out of the bedroom window? The whole world saw America’s Uncle Sam mask slip. But when Trump was questioned about the incident by a journalist on Tuesday, he claimed to know nothing about it, as if he had just been roused from a 24-hour KFC coma and thrust before the cameras without being briefed on a story that was global front page news. Maybe, like in the classic Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads episode where Bob and Terry don’t want to know the football result, Trump was trying to savour the moment of discovery.Clearly, we can no longer share intelligence with Trump’s US, and no future defence or foreign policy plans can rely on the cooperation of a country that wishes Europe material harm. But more importantly, is it worth me writing jokes about Trump’s US? A paranoid reading of recent events makes it look as if they are targeting even their mildest visa-carrying critics, recently denying entry to a French scientist and three-quarters of punk veterans UK Subs. Although to be fair, five years ago the drummer from the offensively apolitical stoner metal band Orange Goblin was also denied entry, like some kind of innocent shrimp-like bycatch.First they came for a French scientist. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a French scientist.Then they came for UK Subs. And I did not speak out. Because I was not a member of UK Subs.And then they came for the drummer from Orange Goblin. And I did not speak out. Because I prefer Electric Wizard.And then they came for me. More

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    Visions of America: 25 films to help understand the US today

    This is a dire moment in the US. It’s a moment where there’s an opportunity for people with a lot of money to rip apart all of the guidelines enacted by the Roosevelt administration, way back in the day, to guard against the brutality of unfettered capitalism. Capitalists like to have all the power that they want, whenever they want it. They’re not much interested in democracy either, it turns out. Nor, apparently, the rule of law. The government is not the solution – it’s the problem. And now a vengeful president who just wanted a get-out-of-jail-free card is going to punish his enemies and show us all how to destroy the American administrative state by using the big stick of Elon Musk’s chequebook.It reminds me of that moment in Once Upon a Time in the West, when Henry Fonda sits behind the rail tycoon’s desk and says: “It’s almost like holding a gun, only much more powerful.” The US has always been about money. That’s been our blessing and our curse. It’s the land of great opportunity, but that obsession with money over everything else has now taken us to a very bad place. We’ve reached the dark side of the American dream.As a film-maker at this moment, I feel defeated in one sense: you always look in the rear-view mirror and wish your films had had a more lasting impact. Yet the fight for liberty and democracy is a never-ending one, so I’m still very much engaged. I’m reminded of what Salman Rushdie said at the Pen America World Voices festival in 2022: “A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars.”Art can always have an impact, but it isn’t Pavlovian. It isn’t a vending machine. A film won’t make someone go out tomorrow and pass a law. What you hope for is that it will be a kind of a slow-motion timebomb in the psyche of the audience, where they begin to reckon with essential human values. When I made The Crime of the Century, my documentary about the opioid crisis, I wasn’t thinking to instigate a particular kind of change. That wasn’t the purpose of the film. I was concerned that people tended to look at the crisis as something that just “happened”, like a hurricane. I wanted to emphasise that it was an intentional crime, in which people were literally killing people for money. It wasn’t something to be endured, but to be reckoned with. I wanted the film to help reorient the vision of the viewers.I’ve got a diptych of films coming out next month called The Dark Money Game, all about the power of dark money and how that’s become part of the American system. It’s about how white-collar crime is now almost legal: so long as rich people are stealing, it’s OK. And I’ve also been working for two years on a film about Elon Musk, to get at some deeper understanding of not only who this man is and why he’s doing what he’s doing, but also why we’re letting him. A lot of my films are crime films, in a way. It was Chekhov who said that if there’s a gun on the mantel in the first act, it had better go off in the third act. So very often I’m faced with the spectacle of a gun going off. My job is to look back to find the guns on the mantels.I’m naturally drawn to the film-makers who explore the dark side: the Scorseses of this world. And at a time such as this, you want to engage the darkness of the moment – but you also want films that reaffirm your sense of humanity. It’s not an American film, but I was deeply inspired recently by Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here, about surviving a military dictatorship: it was so finely observed and so deeply human. There’s always a way out. This is a pendulum and it swings back and forth. But, you know, if we don’t wake up, then it’s going to be a very long, dark period. Alex Gibney (as told to Guy Lodge)American Factory(Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, 2019)Best for: a look at what the American workforce faces in a globalised economy.View image in fullscreenAn Oscar winner for best documentary feature and the first film acquired by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground production company, this perceptive, humane film examines the initial promise of a modified, modernised American dream, as an abandoned General Motors plant in Ohio is reopened by a Chinese company, only for the new owners’ labour practices and values to clash sourly with those of their working-class American employees. Shot between 2015 and 2017, it captures a country’s growing insularity at the outset of the Trump era.The Apprentice(Ali Abbasi, 2024)Best for: a primer on how the Trump mythos began.View image in fullscreenFew were especially looking forward to a Donald Trump biopic from Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi when it premiered at Cannes last year: don’t we see enough of him as it is? But this period-perfect, video-grainy portrayal of his rise to celebrity in the 1980s is caustically gripping and insightful, as Sebastian Stan’s dead-on performance captures the chronic insecurity behind his bluster, while Jeremy Strong’s venal lawyer Roy Cohn models the behaviour of a toxic sociopath. A stark, shattering scene of Trump raping his former wife Ivana, meanwhile, was a gutsy inclusion.Bisbee ’17(Robert Greene, 2018)Best for: understanding how the US confronts its history, or doesn’t.View image in fullscreenIn 1917, in the small Arizona mining town of Bisbee, more than 1,200 immigrant mine workers were kidnapped and illegally deported to the New Mexico desert 200 miles away. Robert Greene’s highly original hybrid documentary studies how the Bisbee of the 21st century processes this shameful history, as local people mark the centenary of the event by staging a grand-scale re-enactment that raises debate and dissent in the general community. It’s a wise, eerie reflection on how Americans can compartmentalise or rationalise the past – but also acts as a mirror for anti-immigrant sentiment in the present day. History is never fully over.Bowling for Columbine(Michael Moore, 2002)Best for: fuelling rage against US gun laws.View image in fullscreenThe obnoxiously hectoring documentary style of Michael Moore might now seem of a previous era, but in the 22 years since this ferocious polemic won an Oscar, the frank absurdity of the US gun crisis hasn’t been more vigorously addressed on screen. By now, mass school shootings such as the Columbine massacre are distressingly commonplace stateside; Moore’s restless, roving examination of its causes and effects still hits hard, and bitterly underlines just how little has been done to prevent such occurrences in the intervening decades.The Brutalist(Brady Corbet, 2024)Best for: a timeless dissection of the soured American dream.View image in fullscreenBrady Corbet’s Oscar-winning, three-and-a-half-hour-plus epic might be set between the 1940s and the 1980s, but it has plenty to say to the 2020s, as it unfolds the plight of a Hungarian immigrant architect whose personal fortunes and creative ideals are gradually stymied by the Faustian allure of American capitalism. As a miserable east coast mogul seeking to own not just art but the artist, by dint of sheer wealth, Guy Pearce unnervingly encapsulates the ruinous entitlement of the 1%.The Crime of the Century(Alex Gibney, 2021)Best for: a journalistic exploration of the continuing US opioid crisis.View image in fullscreenWeighing in at nearly four hours overall, Gibney’s two-part documentary is as comprehensive a film as has been made on the opioid epidemic plaguing the US today, beginning with a look at how the Sackler family got OxyContin approved by the Food and Drug Administration, before getting into the mass marketing of fentanyl – taking on all manner of corporate corruption and human devastation along the way. If you can handle more rage against big pharma after watching it, pair it with Laura Poitras’s more emotive, award-winning All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.Don’t Look Up(Adam McKay, 2021)Best for: summing up the divided US stance on the climate crisis.View image in fullscreenAdam McKay’s brash, broad social satire split critical opinion a few years ago, but there’s resonance in even the silliest aspects of its farce, as it captures the grating, oppressive cacophony of a population at war with itself, even in the face of universally impending disaster. The environmental crisis isn’t directly addressed, but the metaphor couldn’t be clearer: a planet-destroying comet is headed towards Earth, but scientists can’t make Americans take heed over a din of debate, denial and political spin.Election(Alexander Payne, 1999)Best for: American electoral politics brought down to brass tacks.View image in fullscreenAny number of films have been made about the complex vagaries of American electoral campaigns, but have they ever been summarised as simply and cruelly as they are in Alexander Payne’s lethally dark high school comedy? The stakes might be comparatively low in this anatomy of a midwestern student body vote, but try telling that to Reese Witherspoon’s indelible overachiever Tracy Flick – an analogue for every ambitious, capable woman ever deemed too unlikable to succeed by dominant male mediocrity.A Face in the Crowd(Elia Kazan, 1957)Best for: a prescient vision of the US media landscape at its most cynical.View image in fullscreenNot a great success upon its release in 1957, Elia Kazan’s nearly 70-year-old media satire has enjoyed quite a revival in recent years – even being adapted into a stage musical at the Young Vic last year. That’s because, its mid-century milieu notwithstanding, it speaks directly to the modern era of faux-populist celebrity construction and public manipulation. Its protagonist, Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes, a drifting Arkansas hayseed discovered by a New York radio producer and turned into a merchant of increasingly hypocritical homespun wisdom, is an idiot savant monster whose popular touch calls Joe Rogan to mind.The Florida Project(Sean Baker, 2017)Best for: a slice of life on the poverty line.View image in fullscreenSeveral years before he stormed the Oscars with his sex worker story Anora, Sean Baker received less than his due for one of the definitive modern portraits of poor white America, turning an attentive and compassionate gaze to a demographic often dismissed with cruel stereotypes. Playing out largely through the eyes of Moonee, the six-year-old daughter of an unemployed stripper barely surviving day to day in an Orlando fleapit motel, it avoids condescension as it shows us the wonder that the young girl routinely finds in squalor.Hale County This Morning, This Evening(RaMell Ross, 2018)Best for: an immersive, unsensationalised view of everyday life in the south.View image in fullscreenBefore switching to fiction with his recent, radical adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross made his name with this exquisite, Oscar-nominated mosaic of daily routines and rhythms among the predominantly Black residents of Hale County, Alabama. Interspersing carefully observed vignettes with more lateral poetic meditations, it was described by Ross as an “epic banal” work, aiming to “bring elation to the experience of blackness”. The film’s calm lyricism and granular detail stand out against other, more vocally political modern docs on that experience.Here(Robert Zemeckis, 2024)Best for: a telling boomer viewpoint on the US past and present, for better or worse.View image in fullscreenRobert Zemeckis’s kitschy, AI-assisted graphic novel adaptation about centuries of American life playing out on one patch of land bombed in cinemas, and not undeservedly so – but I’m not sure I’ve seen a film recently that captures the stiflingly conservative family values of the modern US with more inadvertent accuracy, or the political overreach of white liberal worldview. (Its passages on Indigenous trauma and the Black Lives Matter movement are a veritable time capsule of cringe.)I Am Not Your Negro(Raoul Peck, 2016)Best for: bringing a fresh context to the history of US racism.View image in fullscreenThis Bafta-winning documentary from Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck is based on Remember This House, an unfinished manuscript by trailblazing Black writer and activist James Baldwin, and brings vital visual information to his literary examination of racism in the US. Told via Peck’s own experiences and through reflections on the work and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, among others, it’s a fascinating history lesson bristling with modern relevance.In Jackson Heights(Frederick Wiseman, 2015)Best for: a celebration of American diversity.View image in fullscreenVeteran documentarian Frederick Wiseman is the foremost US chronicler of the country’s institutions and communities, whether in his midwest portrait Monrovia, Indiana or his exhaustive administrative study City Hall. But his most vital recent work is this vast cinematic patchwork of life in the teemingly diverse New York City neighbourhood of Jackson Heights, as its gaze takes in everything from a Muslim school to an LGBTQ support meeting to a Jewish community centre – adding up to a compelling study of how the US, at its best, can evolve to meet the needs of a changing population.Joker(Todd Phillips, 2019)Best for: a popular touchstone of current American masculinity.View image in fullscreenWhen Todd Phillips’s unexpectedly artsy, ambitious superhero spinoff movie premiered at Venice, scooping up the Golden Lion, the heated critical debates began: had he made the ultimate “incel” manifesto, or a snarling critique thereof? Six years and one flop sequel later and there’s still no consensus, not least because some audiences adopted Joaquin Phoenix’s downtrodden, mentally ill, ultimately murderous Arthur Fleck as an anti-woke icon and others recoiled from his toxic villainy. Phoenix’s Oscar-winning performance makes him disturbingly sympathetic in either light.RoboCop(Paul Verhoeven, 1987)Best for: a not-so-futuristic projection of where the American police state is heading.View image in fullscreenForget the various meat-headed sequels and increasingly kid-targeted cartoon violence. Verhoeven’s original action blockbuster was an ice-cold, viciously satirical vision of American capitalism and militarisation heading towards an unholy worst-case scenario: a privatised corporate police force staffed by ruthless droids, with predictably dire consequences for humanity. Nearly 40 years later, it’s ageing horribly well: under Trump, its dystopian world-building seems only slightly far-fetched.Shy Boys IRL(Sara Gardephe, 2011)Best for: a snapshot of the origins of incel culture.View image in fullscreenGardephe’s viral short is scrappily shot and only half an hour long, but remains a definitive visual text in our understanding of what, in 2011, had not yet been popularly named “incel culture” – an online community of young men, frustrated by their failure to meet and date women, whose involuntary celibacy seeds an increasingly toxic view. Gardephe’s film, which has recently enjoyed a resurgence on TikTok, treated incels as a subculture then, but today looks prescient in identifying a far broader social phenomenon.Sound of Freedom(Alejandro Monteverde, 2023)Best for: an insight into rightwing blockbuster heroism.View image in fullscreenOn the face of it, Alejandro Monteverde’s sentimental search-and-rescue thriller is straightforwardly gung-ho stuff, following an intrepid homeland security agent (played by The Passion of the Christ star Jim Caviezel) as he sets out to crack a child sex-trafficking ring in Colombia. But as produced and marketed by conservative faith-based entertainment company Angel Studios, the film became laden, intentionally or otherwise, with intricately coded QAnon conspiracy theories, and was championed by the right as a rejoinder to the supposedly reprobate output of leftist mainstream Hollywood. Sure enough, it was a sleeper hit, and there’s a lot to be learned from watching it.Stillwater(Tom McCarthy, 2021)Best for: a canny distillation of the culture gap between the US and Europe.View image in fullscreenPlainly inspired by the Amanda Knox case, Tom McCarthy’s quietly potent culture-clash thriller was unfairly written off by many critics, but there’s some acute wisdom in its portrayal of a gun-loving, blue-collar Oklahoma dad navigating the intricacies of the French legal system – and eventually taking his own roughneck revenge – to save his imprisoned daughter. It’s a criminal melodrama with blunt contrivances softened and complicated by Matt Damon’s knotty, humane portrayal of a character who would be easier to demonise.Strong Island(Yance Ford, 2017)Best for: a searingly personal account of the struggles of social integration.View image in fullscreenIn 1992, Yance Ford’s brother William, a young, unarmed Black man, was shot dead by a white 19-year-old who claimed self-defence and was subsequently acquitted by an all-white jury. That might have been more than 30 years ago, but Ford’s pained, unflinching documentary points to enduring unequal treatment in its first-hand portrait of a Black family who anticipated a better life on moving to the suburbs of Long Island, only to find, ultimately, they were unwelcome outsiders. Ford, a trans film-maker, has a sharply intersectional understanding of minority identity; his film is both an elegy and a plea for change.Support the Girls(Andrew Bujalski, 2018)Best for: A snapshot of labour politics with a side of lively feminism.View image in fullscreenThere may be no brand more absurdly and quintessentially American than the lurid, unabashedly chauvinist “breastaurant” Hooters, and it gets a wicked send-up in this breezy but bittersweet workplace comedy, starring a wonderful Regina Hall as the world-weary manager of one such institution. Following her across her last two days of employment, and glancing upon the various crises of its female staff members, it’s a casually piquant skewering of unjust labour practices in a still-patriarchal society, and a warm valentine to the women who endure them.13th(Ava DuVernay, 2016)Best for: a thorough breakdown of the US prison-industrial complex.View image in fullscreenThe title refers to the 13th amendment to the US constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude – except as punishment for convicted criminals. In her first documentary, Ava DuVernay uses this caveat as the basis for a compelling argument that slavery continues to this day in the US prison system, further challenging the corporations that profit from it. With interview subjects ranging from activist Angela Davis to politician Newt Gingrich, it’s the most expansive and searching work of DuVernay’s career.Time(Garrett Bradley, 2020)Best for: an unromantic, long-view take on fighting the power.View image in fullscreenIf 13th offers an essayistic takedown of the prison-industrial complex, Garrett Bradley’s heart-wrenching documentary takes a more personal view of the subject, portraying Black abolitionist Fox Rich, AKA Sibil Fox Richardson, and her 20-year campaign for the release of her husband, Robert, sentenced to 60 years in prison for his role in an armed bank robbery. It’s a powerful study of systemic dysfunction and the lives caught up in it, but also a hard, realistic view of the exhausting grind of long-term activism.Us(Jordan Peele, 2019)Best for: an allegory for the class divide in the Black US.View image in fullscreenJordan Peele’s 2017 smash, Get Out, immediately established him as a leading Hollywood merchant of political commentary as entertainment, as it probed the threat posed to the Black population even by supposed white liberals. But this even better follow-up film got into thornier, more nuanced territory with its ingenious examination of American privilege, classism and gentrification, alongside its ramifications as visited upon a bourgeois Black family terrorised by their “tethered” underclass doppelgangers. It’s witty, frightening and rings violently true.White Noise(Daniel Lombroso, 2020)Best for: explaining the rise of the far right.View image in fullscreenIt’s cold comfort that the three principal subjects of Daniel Lombroso’s upsetting documentary on the surge of the “alt-right” movement in the US – Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern – are no longer as prominent in the news as they were when the film was made five years ago: they’ve simply been surpassed by other toxic celebrities as white supremacy has expanded from the fringes to the mainstream. Produced by news publisher the Atlantic, the film works as an excavation of the movement’s roots, and is suitably pessimistic about where it’s heading. More

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    Is Trump’s authoritarian lurch following the playbook of Iran’s Ahmadinejad?

    It reads like an inventory of Donald Trump’s first two months back in the White House.A newly elected demagogic president, renowned for his rabble-rousing rallies and provocative stunts, makes a whirlwind start on taking office.He upends the country’s international relations in a series of undiplomatic demarches.State institutions are gutted or closed in an outburst of radicalism aimed at transforming government.Law enforcement authorities stage performative public roundups of those deemed, accurately or not, to be violent criminals.Critics complain of statutes being routinely broken. Universities and media are targeted in a clampdown on free expression.A widely revered cultural institution undergoes a government takeover and is given a conservative makeover.Wrongfooted opposition politicians try to recover ground by highlighting the rising cost of dietary staples and the failure to address the kitchen-table issues that voters elected the president to solve.Fitting as all this might be as a summary of the helter-skelter opening phase of Trump’s second presidency, it also describes events that followed the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran 20 years ago.Ahmadinejad emerged as an arch-nemesis of the west after rising to power from obscurity in 2005. His offensive diatribes against Israel – which he suggested should be erased from the map – and repeated denials of the Holocaust were the stuff of cartoon villainy, sharpened further by his hawkish championing of Iran’s nuclear programme.He was also an electoral populist in the Trump mould, as adept at drawing vast crowds with his message of championing the left-behinds and dispossessed as he was at riling his opponents.View image in fullscreenIranians have noticed the matching personas. “There was a joke in Iran during Trump’s first term that when he became president, Iran finally managed to export its revolution,” said Vali Nasr, an Iranian-born international affairs scholar at Johns Hopkins University. “Trump was basically Ahmadinejad in the US.”In a striking twist, Ahmadinejad even addressed Columbia University – an institution now threatened with grant cuts by the Trump administration over an alleged failure to combat campus antisemitism by tolerating pro-Palestinian protesters – in a 2007 visit to New York. The university’s then president, Lee Bollinger, assailed him to his face for his Holocaust denial and called him a “cruel and petty dictator”, a description that seemed to presage the criticisms of many of Trump’s opponents.The parallels, however, are superficial – and the differences just as significant.Ahmadinejad, remembered for his trademark man-of-the-people white jacket, defined himself by his frugality and surrounded himself with like types; Trump flaunts his wealth and seems to have space in his inner circle for billionaires, for whom he favours huge tax cuts.Moreover, any comparison between Iran and the US must come with a health warning.Iran, under the stifling religious regime that seized power after the 1979 revolution that toppled the country’s former pro-western monarch, Shah Mohammad Pahlavi, was hardly a flourishing democracy before Ahmadinejad’s presidency – even after a period of relatively liberal reform under his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami.“He came to power in an already deeply authoritarian regime,” said Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was in Iran when Ahmadinejad became president. “He took what was already a seven on the repression scale and made it a nine.”Yet the fact that any analogy can be drawn at all attests to the uncharted territory the US has entered under Trump.In recent weeks, as the president and his allies have assailed judges and hinted that they could flout court rulings, commentators and experts have warned of a looming constitutional crisis and lurch towards authoritarianism and even dictatorship.Scholars have touted a variety of global precedents in a quest for a parallel that might act as a guide for where US democracy is headed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenCommonly cited examples are Hungary and its strongman prime minister, Viktor Orbán; Turkey, whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has held power for 22 years and has purged the judges and military general who upheld the secular state structure created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; and Russia and its leader, Vladimir Putin. The ascents of all three are often viewed as instances of democracies and once-independent institutions being emasculated and elections gamed to sustain the incumbent.More encouraging portents are seen in Poland and the Czech Republic, where rightwing populist nationalist forces lost power in the most recent elections to parties or presidential candidates committed to the liberal democratic mainstream and to international institutions such as the EU and Nato.Yet none seem to rival the sheer ferocity with which Trump has eviscerated federal agencies, denounced judges and churned out landscape-changing executive orders.The problem was summed up by Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of books on democracy’s decline and autocracy’s rise, who told the New York Times that he had seen nothing like Trump’s assault on democratic institutions.The first two months under Trump had been “much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding”, he said. “Erdoğan, [Venezuelan leader Hugo] Chávez, Orbán – they hid it.”Other observers agree that Trump’s moves are of greater magnitude than those seen in other democracies turned autocracies.“The best parallel that I can see is the collapse of the Soviet Union,” said Nader Hashemi, professor of Middle East and Islamic studies at Georgetown University and another academic of Iranian origin.“A political order that everyone thought had a long shelf life rapidly collapses, is completely disorienting, and people are trying to figure out what comes next.“We don’t really have precedents similar to this moment where you have a longstanding existing democracy that’s a major power that collapses so rapidly and quickly and is moving in the direction of authoritarianism. I think its impact will also be felt globally.”View image in fullscreenNasr said Trump confounded comparisons with previous democracy-subverting authoritarians, likening the current White House to the court of King Henry VIII, the 16th-century monarch recalled for his six wives and for triggering the English reformation.“The way he’s setting up authority in the White House looks more like a Tudor monarchy than modern authoritarianism,” he said. “The White House looks more like an imperial court.”Trump, argued Nasr, “has a theory of rapid, massive change” that recalled the approach of military coup leaders in the third world who judged that their agenda was incompatible with democracy.The common bond between Trump and Ahmadinejad may be the forces that brought them to power.“One could say that the very first kind of backlash in our era against what economic liberalisation can do to a society happened in Iran,” said Nasr.Under Ahmadinejad’s two presidential predecessors, Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, liberal economic reforms intended to generate prosperity after years of post-revolutionary austerity produced an affluent, consumerist middle class – but left behind a disaffected population group that felt it had lost out.“It created a class in Iran much like the people who voted for Brexit [in Britain] or people who voted for Trump,” Nasr said. “So [Ahmadinejad] was anti-establishment in the way Boris Johnson was during Brexit, or Trump was during his two campaigns. There is definitely a parallel there.”Hashemi saw another parallel in Trump’s attacks on universities and the media – a trend which Iran witnessed (accompanied with much greater repression) even before Ahmadinejad took power, as hardliners tried to snuff out the freedoms that reformists had introduced.“Then Ahmadinejad comes and continues in an authoritarian direction,” he said. “The parallel between that period and now in the United States is that authoritarian regimes hate independent institutions, the press and particularly universities, because they foster free thinking, they hold power to account. That’s why we’re seeing this attack on Columbia University and other universities.”Ahmadinejad, having stoked inflation with populist cash handouts and facilitated the Revolutionary Guards’ takeover of the economy, was ultimately thwarted by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader and most powerful cleric, who marginalised him while using Ahmadinejad’s authoritarian impulses to accrue more autocratic powers to himself.Trump – having subjugated the Republican-ruled Congress, and who is now limited only by a constitutional bar on seeking a third term that some of his supporters are already clamouring to amend – is subject to no such constraints.“In a way, Trump’s conduct is more sinister because he’s trying to turn a democracy into an autocracy,” said Sadjadpour. Given the odium in which Ahmadinejad’s detractors once held him, it seems a particularly ominous verdict. More

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    Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets | Kenan Malik

    ‘Gold, mister, is worth what it is because of the human labor that goes into the finding and getting of it.” It’s a line spoken by Walter Huston in the 1948 film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a story about greed and moral corruption directed by his son, John Huston. That line was to have appeared on screen at the beginning of the film. It didn’t, on orders from the studio, Warner Bros. “It was all on account of the word ‘labor’,” John Huston later reflected. “That word looks dangerous in print, I guess.”It was a relatively insignificant moment in the drama of America’s postwar red scare. McCarthyism proper had still to take flight. Yet, so deep ran the fear already that a single, everyday word could create consternation in Hollywood.McCarthyism, the historian Ellen Schrecker has observed, “was a peculiarly American style of repression – nonviolent and consensual. Only two people were killed; only a few hundred went to jail.” Yet it constituted “one of the most severe episodes of political repression the United States ever experienced”.Sackings and legal sanctions created such fear that, in the words of the political philosopher Corey Robin, society was put “on lockdown”, with people so “petrified of being punished for their political beliefs” that “they drew in their political limbs”.It was not just communists who were silenced. “If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is an inequality of wealth,” claimed the chair of one state committee on un-American activities, “there is every reason to believe that person is a communist.” This at a time when Jim Crow still held the south in its grip. The red scare paused the civil rights movement for more than a decade and drew the teeth of union radicalism.Fear has always been a means of enforcing social order, most obviously in authoritarian states, from China to Saudi Arabia, Turkey to Russia, where repression becomes the foundation of political rule. In liberal democracies, order rests more on consensus than overt brutality. But here, too, fear plays its role. The worker’s fear of being sacked, the claimant’s of being sanctioned, the renter’s of being made homeless, the fear of the working-class mother facing a social worker or of the black teenager walking past a policeman – relations of power are also relations of fear, but fears usually so sublimated that we simply accept that that’s the way the system works.It is when consensus ruptures, when social conflict erupts, or when the authorities need to assert their power, that liberal democracies begin wielding fear more overtly as a political tool to quieten dissent or impose authority. Think of how the British state treated Irish people in the 1970s and 1980s, or miners during the great strike of 1984/85.Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students, including Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal and Yunseo Chung, for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Donald Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared”, as one observer put it.Institutions such as universities, Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it”, not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing”, thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400m (£310m) in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands of Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponised” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech”. Last week, Columbia capitulated.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMichael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, one of the few academic leaders willing to speak out, decries “the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy era”, describing “anticipatory obedience” as “a form of cowardice”. Cowardice, though, has become the defining trait, most university leaders “just happy that Columbia is the whipping boy”. Columbia may be the first university in Trump’s crosshairs, but it won’t be the last. Keeping silent won’t save them.In his incendiary speech in Munich in February, the US vice-president, JD Vance, harangued European leaders to worry less about Russia than “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”, especially free speech. The same, it would seem, applies to America, too. Many of those who previously so vigorously upheld the importance of free speech have suddenly lost their voice or now believe that speech should be free only for those with the right kinds of views. The brazen hypocrisy of Vance, and of the fair-weather supporters of free speech, should nevertheless not lead us to ignore the fact that, from more intrusive policing of social media to greater restrictions on our ability to protest to the disciplining, even sacking, of workers holding “gender-critical views”, these are issues to which we urgently need to attend.“I live in an age of fear,” lamented the essayist and author EB White in 1947, after the New York Herald had suggested that all employees be forced to declare their political beliefs to retain their jobs. He was, he insisted, less worried “that there were communists in Hollywood” than to “read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control”. It is a perspective as vital now as it was then, and as necessary on this side of the Atlantic as in America. More

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    The Observer view on JD Vance: spurned in Greenland and humiliated at home, the vice-president should resign

    Not for the first time, JD Vance, America’s outspoken vice-president, has made a public fool of himself. He insisted on visiting Greenland despite unequivocal statements by the territory’s leaders and Denmark’s government that he was not invited and not welcome. Vance’s trip was confined to a remote Arctic base, where he briefly spoke to a few Americans. Plans to make a wider tour and speak to Greenlanders were cancelled – because Greenlanders did not want to speak to him.Such hostility is entirely understandable, given the repeated, provocative and disrespectful declarations by Vance’s boss, Donald Trump, that the US plans to annex Greenland and may do so illegally and by force. Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory within the kingdom of Denmark. Election results this month showed the vast majority of local people back expanded self-rule or outright independence. They do not want to be Americans.In a feeble attempt to justify what is, in effect, a Putin-style bid to seize another country’s sovereign territory, Vance claimed Denmark had failed to protect Greenland from Chinese and Russian threats – but did not produce any evidence. He also failed to explain why, if such dangers exist, the US, which like Denmark is a Nato member, has not honoured its legal obligation to develop a “collective capacity to resist armed attack” under the 1951 US-Denmark “Defence of Greenland” treaty.Trump, too, has been prating about Greenland’s importance for “world peace”. It’s true the Arctic region is seeing increased great power competition, partly because climate change renders it more accessible. Yet Trump, in another echo of Ukraine, appears more motivated by desire to control Greenland’s untapped mineral wealth. As in Gaza and Panama, his main interest is not security and justice but geopolitical, financial and commercial advantage. Insulting plans to enrol Canada as the 51st state reflect another Trump preoccupation: a return to an earlier age of aggressive US territorial expansionism.Vance in Greenland may have preferred a woolly hat to a pith helmet, but his imperialist intentions were unmistakable. Yet despite his frosty reception, he was perhaps glad to escape Washington, where he and his travelling companion, US national security adviser Mike Waltz, are feeling the heat for another scandalous piece of foolishness: the Signal message group security breach. This concerns the inadvertent inclusion of a leading journalist in an online discussion by Vance, Waltz and senior officials of real-time US bombing attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen.This breach, by itself, is bad enough. It might have endangered US pilots and wrecked the Houthi operation. The discussion, on an insecure platform, could have been, and probably was overheard by the Russians and others. Yet its contents, which have now been published in full, also include rude and mocking comments by Vance and Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, about European allies. Their shaming, ignorant exchanges dramatically and damagingly highlight the rapid deterioration in transatlantic ties since Trump took office.Like the Greenland incursion, the official response to the Signal scandal speaks volumes about the true nature of the Trump administration. Trump’s shabby instinct was to deny all responsibility, minimise its importance, denigrate the journalist and dismiss the whole thing as a hoax. Hegseth’s claim that no classified information was released is an obvious, stupid lie, as the transcript demonstrates. There is huge hypocrisy in the refusal of Waltz, Vance and Hegseth to even contemplate resignation, when such a blunder by a lower-ranking official would certainly have led to the sack.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbove all, the hubris, arrogance, amateurishness and irresponsibility revealed by both episodes is truly shocking – and a chilling warning to the world. More

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    Trump news at a glance: anti-Musk protesters target Tesla showrooms around the world

    People around the world joined protests against Elon Musk and his attempts to dismantle the US federal government on Saturday, gathering outside Tesla showrooms from Australia to Switzerland and California.Protest organizers asked people to do three things: don’t buy a Tesla, sell off Tesla stock and join the “Tesla Takedown” movement. “Hurting Tesla is stopping Musk,” reads one of the group’s taglines. “Stopping Musk will help save lives and our democracy.”Musk, the world’s richest person, heads Donald Trump’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), which he’s tasked with slashing federal budgets in the US, including laying off tens of thousands of workers.Thousands join anti-Musk protests around the worldWith more than 200 events planned worldwide, protests kicked off midday in front of Tesla showrooms in Australia and New Zealand and then rippled across Europe in countries including Finland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK.Each rally was locally organized with original themes. In Ireland, it was “Smash the Fash”, and Switzerland had “Down with Doge”.Read the full storySenior FDA official resigns citing RFK Jr’s ‘misinformation and lies’A senior health official in the US, who was seen as a guardrail against any future politicisation of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of life-saving vaccines, has resigned abruptly, citing the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “misinformation and lies”.Multiple media outlets, citing people familiar with the matter, reported late on Friday that Dr Peter Marks had been given the choice to resign or be fired by a Health and Human Services (HHS) department official. He chose to resign.Read the full storyMost employees of US Institute of Peace fired en masseMost employees at the US Institute of Peace, a congressionally created and funded thinktank now taken over by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, received email notices of their mass firing late Friday, the latest step in the Trump administration’s government downsizing.Read the full storyLeaders of Harvard’s Middle Eastern Studies center step downThe leaders of Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies are leaving their positions after the center faced accusations of anti-Israel bias. Faculty members who spoke to the New York Times anonymously said they believed that Cemal Kafadar and Rosie Bsheer were forced out of their roles.The departures come as the Trump administration scrutinizes institutions that have had pro-Palestinian protests over the last year.Read the full storyPeter Hegseth’s wife attended sensitive meetings with foreign officials – reportThe wife of the US defense secretary Pete Hegseth attended two meetings with foreign defense officials during which sensitive information was discussed, according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal. Jennifer Hegseth has been present at two meetings where sensitive information was discussed, one with the UK secretary of defense, John Healey, and one in Brussels at Nato headquarters, the WSJ reported.Read the full storyTrump grants clemency to media executive convicted of fraudFormer talkshow host and Ozy Media co-founder Carlos Watson received clemency from Donald Trump, sparing him a 10-year jail sentence. Watson was traveling to the Lompoc, California, federal correctional institution when he learned of the presidential commutation afforded to him, as CNBC reported. He published a statement that thanked the president and insulted the Trump-appointed federal judge who sentenced him, Eric Komitee, as “conflicted and unethical”.Read the full storyJob cuts at health department will pave way for private sector takeover, experts warnMassive job cuts planned for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will pave the way for takeover of crucial services by the private sector, imperiling the US in future health emergencies, health experts and Democratic politicians warn.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

    The New College of Florida has fired a Chinese language professor under a state law that restricts Florida’s public universities from hiring individuals they deem to be from “countries of concern”.

    US President Donald Trump said on Saturday he did not warn car industry executives against raising prices as tariffs on foreign-made autos come into force, telling NBC News he “couldn’t care less” if they do.

    The Trump administration has ordered some French companies with US government contracts to comply with his executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes, highlighting the extraterritorial reach of US policies and their potential impact on European corporate practices.
    Catching up? Here’s what happened on 28 March. More

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    Most employees at US Institute of Peace mass-fired via late-night email

    Most employees at the US Institute of Peace, a congressionally created and funded thinktank now taken over by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, received email notices of their mass firing late Friday, the latest step in the Trump administration’s government downsizing.The emails, sent to personal accounts because most staff members had lost access to the organization’s system, began going out about 9pm, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal.One former senior official at the institute said that among those spared were several in the human resources department and a handful of overseas staffers who had until 9 April to return to the United States. The organization employs about 300 people.Others retained for now are regional vice-presidents who will be working with the staff in their areas to return to the US, according to one employee who was affected.An executive order last month from Donald Trump targeted the institute, which seeks to prevent and resolve conflicts, and three other agencies for closure. Board members, who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, and the institute’s president were fired. Later, there was a standoff as employees blocked Doge members from entering . Doge staff gained access in part with the help of the Washington police.A lawsuit ensued, and the US district judge Beryl Howell chastised Doge representatives for their behavior but did not reinstate the board members or allow employees to return to the workspace.A White House spokesperson, Anna Kelly, said in an email Saturday that the institute “has failed to deliver peace” and that Trump “is carrying out his mandate to eliminate bloat and save taxpayer dollars”.The letter to employees said that as of Friday, “your employment with us will conclude”, according to one longtime employee who shared part of the communication. A second email, obtained by the AP, said the terminations were at the direction of the president.Workers were given until 7 April to clear out their desks.Mary Glantz, a former foreign service officer who was working as a senior adviser at the institute, said she was not surprised by the late-night firings, calling it part of Doge’s playbook.Glantz studied how Russia has fomented conflicts around the world and analyzed options for resolving them. She hoped her research could be continued and used elsewhere. She said the institute plays a unique role because of its narrow focus on conflict resolution.“We are the other tool in the tool box,” she said. ”We do this work so American soldiers don’t have to fight these wars.”George Foote, a former institute lawyer fired this month who is with one of the firms providing counsel in the current lawsuit, said lawyers were consulting Saturday to discuss possible next steps. He said employees are not part of the pending lawsuit, so they would have to file separate cases. More

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    How Indigenous basketball teams are preserving culture: ‘This is a healing process’

    Long before Michael Jordan changed the sport of basketball, another Jordon transformed the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) history by breaking the league’s racial barrier as its first Native American player.In 1956, Phil “the Flash” Jordon, a descendant of the Wailaki and Nomlaki tribes, was drafted by the New York Knicks and played 10 seasons in the league. Though he may not carry the same cultural cache as other hoopers throughout professional basketball’s century-plus existence, Jordon embodies a longstanding Native American fixation on the sport – especially at the community level. Throughout the years, Native Americans have embraced basketball and made it their own. One way they’re doing so today is with “rez ball”, a lightning-fast style of basketball associated with Native American teams.Although the notion of Native Americans in basketball hasn’t fully permeated the mainstream sports consciousness (basketball gyms on reservations are still among the most overlooked in the country by talent scouts), the NBA, Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) and other basketball entities have begun to acknowledge native hoopers and their rich legacy more fully.Rez Ball, a LeBron James-produced film currently streaming on Netflix, is based on Canyon Dreams, an acclaimed book about a Navajo high school team in northern Arizona. The Toronto Raptors unveiled an alternate team logo designed by Native American artist Luke Swinson in honor of the franchise’s annual Indigenous Heritage Day; the illustration depicts two long-haired, brown-skinned hoopers flowing inside of a basketball silhouette, which doubles as an amber sunrise. And earlier this season, NBA superstar Kyrie Irving – whose family belongs to the Lakota tribe of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota – went viral for meeting with a group of Native American fans after a Dallas Mavericks game. The eight-time All-Star also debuted Chief Hélà, his pair of Indigenous-inspired sneakers, during the 2024 NBA finals last June.View image in fullscreenAs for the WNBA, the league boasts the only professional sports franchise owned by a Native American tribe. The Mohegan Tribe purchased the Connecticut Sun (formerly the Orlando Miracle) in 2003 and relocated the team to the Mohegan Sun arena in Uncasville, Connecticut.Still, there’s much left to be desired for Native American representation and their conservation of traditions and identity at large, both on and off the court. It’s something Native basketball players and coaches are hustling to retain and defend.“Imagine not being able to speak your language, that’s having your identity stolen,” says Adam Strom, a member of the Yakama tribe in Washington state. “I’m not fluent in Ichiskíin [a Yakama dialect]. I only know a few words. But there’s a big push in Indian country to preserve and hold on to your language. Basketball is a conduit for that.”For Strom and others invested in the Native American basketball community, the sport offers a chance to celebrate Native American history, retain Indigenous languages and provide an inviting, accessible space for intergenerational exchange.Strom is the head coach of the women’s basketball team at Haskell Indian Nations University – the only Native American institution in the country that offers a sanctioned four-year athletic program for Native Americans, and which Strom compares to an HBCU equivalent for Indigenous students. For that reason, it’s unlike any other campus in the nation.But Strom’s role – along with various staff positions at Haskell – have come under fire by the Trump administration’s budget cuts. The recent executive order has put the Native American institution directly at risk. After slashing tribal funds and attempting to revoke Native American birthright – a draconian move which a federal judge has deemed as “unconstitutional” – it’s an especially precarious moment for Haskell and its students. That hasn’t stopped Strom or his basketball program from trying to instill a winning mindset imbued with cultural awareness in the next generation of Native American community members. Despite formally losing his job, Strom – a 24-year veteran and son of the late basketball coach, Ted Strom – is leveraging his basketball prowess to proverbially level the playing field. Or, in his case, the hardwood court.“At Haskell, we play for Indian country,” Strom says, who is now working without pay as a volunteer due to Trump’s unprecedented firings. “Any time my players step on the court, they represent Native Americans throughout the United States. My recruiting pool is a sliver compared to those other universities we participate against. Players have to meet that bloodline. There’s a lot of pride in that.”View image in fullscreenAccording to the NCAA, only 544 student athletes out of 520,000 are Native Americans competing in Division I sports. As the least represented ethnic group in all of college sports, it speaks volumes that Native American women account for roughly 19% of all Native Americans in Division I competition. Players such as Jude and Shoni Schimmel, two Indigenous sisters who were raised on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon, are examples. The sisters went on to have successful careers at the University of Louisville, with Shoni becoming an All-American first-round draft pick of the Atlanta Dream in 2014.In a New York Timesarticle about the Schimmels, Jude referenced basketball as “‘medicine’ that ‘helps and heals’ Native Americans”. Shoni (who pleaded guilty to abusing her domestic partner in 2023) has since retired from the WNBA, while Jude, after playing overseas in Spain, is currently signed to Athletes Unlimited Pro Basketball.More than any institutional accolades or professional achievements, though, the Native American spirit for basketball is most visible at the grassroots level, where significant assists are being made to carry forth a vibrant legacy. For basketballers in Indian country, it’s a way to stay interconnected by passing generational knowledge on to the next player.“Without language you lose culture; without culture you lose your people. Kids from this community, their great-great-great-grandparents spoke [Indigenous] languages. So how do you count, pass, catch, run in that language?” says Mitch Thompson, co-founder of Bilingual Basketball and an assistant coach with the Seattle Storm.The program is designed to support marginalized communities by providing free basketball camps that utilize bilingualism and sociolinguistics as part of their core mission to reclaim historically overlooked spaces through basketball.Thompson, a basketball coach with experience working for NBA and WNBA organizations in the United States and Mexico, is a passionate advocate for social equity and cultural empowerment through the sport. Having grown up in northeastern Oregon, Thompson became familiar with rez ball through the nearby Yakama, Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla reservations.View image in fullscreenHis vision for Bilingual Basketball came to life in 2021 after Adrian Romero, a Mexican American basketball player he had formerly coached, and their friend, Irma Solis, decided to offer the program to local youth. At the time, that meant serving a predominantly immigrant, Spanish-speaking demographic. To date, they’ve served around 2,000 participants, mostly in the Pacific north-west.Everything changed in 2024 when Thompson teamed up with his former colleague, Strom, to bring the program to Native American reservations for the first time – starting with the Yakama in White Swan, Washington.“Adam and I worked closely with the Yakama language department. I believe it was the first ever basketball camp offered in Ichiskíin,” says Thompson. “There are only around 100 conversational speakers of this language on earth. Everything needs to be approved by tribal elders. But if you can combine that identity and those nuanced cultural aspects with basketball, that’s powerful.”The weekend-long camp mixed English with Ichiskíin. The program offered Indigenous prayers, a “basketball powwow” (dances and songs used to pass down Native American traditions), and dribbling routines led by ceremonial drummers. It may be the first and only basketball camp of its kind, according to Thompson, who has extensive experience working with non-traditional basketball communities around North America.“This is culturally sensitive. These communities had boarding schools and the kids were stolen from their families and forced into spaces where only English was spoken,” says Thompson. “They had to practice Christianity [and] cut their hair. This is the opposite of that. We’re celebrating language. This is a healing process.”Bilingual Basketball followed up their Yakama camp by working with the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation (PBPN) in Kansas – a tribe with even higher linguistic preservation needs. In 2019, the PBPN language and cultural department coordinator, Dawn LeClere, declared the Potawatomi language as nearly extinct, with only five known fluent speakers, a dwindling fraction of the estimated 10,000 that once flourished in the 1700s.Language preservation – outside of basketball – is a lifeline for North American tribes. To be sure, translating modern basketball jargon into an ancient language that isn’t fluently spoken isn’t easy. It requires tremendous creativity, and the phrases often don’t match on a 1:1 basis.There is no word in Ichiskíin for “basketball”, for example, so professional linguists and community members teamed up to invent a literal translation that combines the native words for basket and ball. For participants and coaches alike, it’s all a new experience.View image in fullscreen“We have learned so much working with the Yakama and Potawatomi nations,” says Romero, one of the program’s co-founders and directors. “The involvement from the language programs has been huge by providing translation of basketball terminology and everyday phrases. There have also been many volunteers to help teach the language throughout the duration of the camp. The kids got a chance to enhance their language skills and also learn cheers and cultural dances like Native American hoop dance.”As a bilingual speaker in English and Spanish, Romero learned new phrases including “kgiwigesēm” (“you all did good”) and “tuctu” (“let’s go”). If you try Googling those words, nothing appears. And that’s exactly the kind of gap that Strom and Bilingual Basketball are trying to bridge – rather than destroy – with basketball as their tool. While these native communities face persecution in other arenas outside of basketball, the 134-year-old recreational sport has offered an unlikely pathway towards cultural preservation. It’s something that Strom and the founders of Bilingual Basketball are committed to passing forward in real time.“There’s a sense of amnesia in American culture that [Indigenous] communities and people don’t exist anymore. They absolutely do,” says Thompson. “Their language and culture has persevered through genocide, boarding schools, and other intentional ways to keep them impoverished. Most Americans don’t have any real, interpersonal connection to tribal communities. Really connecting to the communities, going into the spaces. But they’re still there. It’s important for non-Indigenous Americans to realize it’s not just something of the past.” More