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      The America I loved is gone

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      View image in fullscreenThe first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.You felt the meaning of America the moment you entered. In Canada, wilderness is wilderness. The northern forests I come from resist interpretation; that is their power. But when you cross the border from, say, Quebec into Maine, you can feel myth accruing around the bark of the trees. You are in the haunted forests of New England, redolent with burned witches and ghost stories. Further south, the foggy murderous oaks loom gothically. Out west, the deserts beg for cowboys to cross them. Canada is a country that disillusions you. America is one illusion after another, some magnificent, others treacherous or vicious.Every landscape in America is setting, and you have to pose inside them. In my 20s, I drove Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. An older and wiser friend told me to rent a convertible, and I laughed the suggestion off, since it felt like something you would do in the movies. Huge mistake. That drive down the California coast – cows by the big-wave Pacific, condors in the clefts of Big Sur – demands an open roof.I learned then: when you go to America, always pick the option that feels like what you would do in the movies.In San Francisco, right by the Yahoo offices on Mission Street, was a small homeless encampment. I could just see inside one of the tents through an open flap, where a boy – he would have been about 10 years old – was playing with little treasures on a small tray – a ring, a toy car, a key chain. Even the tents of the homeless were little bubbles.In Malibu, at a sushi bar, elegant Japanese surf bums lounged between orders, watching Game 7 of the World Series, languidly curling out cucumber spirals the chefs used instead of seaweed. That was their thing – cucumber-based rolls. That restaurant is ash now.View image in fullscreenSometimes, you can see the bubbles better from the air. Flying into Palm Springs, the desert circumscribed, encroaching, revealed the furious machinery working to push it away. Palm Springs is pure delight on the ground: the misted pools, the cocktails filled with the exactly the right ice shapes, the street names hanging on to the faded glamour of the tacky talkshow guests from half a century ago.The airport has no roof; that’s how crazy a city it is. A glistening shivering bubble, effortless once inside.The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.It was more than money and grandeur, though. The openness, the generosity of ordinary people, floated free over the country.When I was researching my book The Next Civil War, the far-right people I met, the militia folks, in Oklahoma and in Ohio, at gun shows and Trump rallies and prepper conventions, were, without exception, polite in person – no doubt because I’m white, with blond hair and blue eyes, so I can pretend to be a good ol’ boy when required. They lived in dark bubbles, bubbles of serpentine paranoia and weird loathings and strange fantasies of breakdown.They welcomed me into their bubbles as equably as concierges. Militia pie is delicious; the crusts are richer, flakier. I think they use lard. Anyway, they talked to me about their hopes for the destruction of their government cheerfully and frankly, because they were living the movies playing in their minds and they wanted me to witness the projection.At one prepper convention I remember, a vendor was selling gluten-free rations for bunker survival. That was America in a bucket to me: even at the end of the world, don’t let a gluten allergy interfere with your active lifestyle.View image in fullscreenMuch later, for another publication, I attended a human-fairy congress in rural Washington state. Both humans and fairies were welcome to attend but only humans could enroll in the courses on fairy gardening and fairy marriages. They were the residue of the hippies, I suppose. The final event was a big dance where the fairies joined them and parlayed a message from the spirit realm. A young man dressed in Tibetan shaman robes ran into the luscious meadow set between ponderosa pines shouting “I! Feel! Better!” He was a definitive American type – a seeker who just went with his seeking.In America, one bubble was as good as another: the next week, many of the human-fairy enthusiasts were headed to a cosmic Sasquatch festival.On the other side of the state, in the Olympia forest, I interviewed illegal lumber poachers who cut a cord of firewood a day from the dead trees on public lands for meth and food and gas money, a primitive existence not that far from stone age tribes or medieval peasants. As I approached their compound, a coagulation of wrecked cars and rotten RVs and driftwood lean-tos with hanging tarps, a turkey strutted out to defend their ad hoc architecture of detritus. They had a guard turkey. The guard turkey was the shine of their bubble, like something in a dream.The American dream. For technocrats, a dying breed in the US, the term was shorthand for each generation doing better than the one before, for generally upward social mobility. There was more to it than that. There was an idea, an assumption really, that if you had enough talent and worked hard and did the smart thing, with a little luck you could live life just as you wanted. The country’s founding promise, after all, is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.That promise is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss. The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract. They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off.The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.Another bubble: when I was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, at the City College of New York, I had a homeless student who slept in his car and never missed my seminar on revenge tragedy. You can only live that way if you live in a bubble buoyed by dreams.I, too, have floated in American bubbles. I have inhabited its intoxication. If it were not for America, I would be working part-time in a coffee shop.In the early 2010s, I was a writer stuck between Toronto and New York, and I had written my attempt at the great Canadian novel, about Alberta and Quebec and the unspoken fascination between them – between Montreal, with its wild heart, and the wild prairies filled with longing for a distant recognition. Nationalism was completely out of fashion then. No one in Canada would even look at the manuscript. My friends at small presses stopped accepting my invitations for drinks. You can be a loser and you can be a nag, but nobody wants both at the same time – even in Canada.View image in fullscreenI had been sitting on the book for a year when David Granger, my editor at Esquire, invited me down to New York, rented out a room at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, and threw a party for me, just to give a speech to the gathered editors of Hearst about what a great writer I was. I returned to Canada, asked myself what the hell was I thinking trying to tell the stories of people who didn’t care if their stories were told, rewrote the novel so it was set in New York, and sold it in a few weeks for six figures.People used to say, about New York: “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of New York was that it was the city that wanted you to make it. David Granger blew a bubble around me, and the David Grangers on this planet are all American; that’s the fact of the matter.You work hard, you play hard. So many Americans will do whatever it takes to prevent their bubbles from bursting. The second Trump administration has clarified this national trait. As the authoritarian impulse strips America of any motivating ideals, the only -ism surviving is careerism.The past decade has demonstrated that there is nothing that will cause an American politician to resign. There is no line they won’t cross. To keep the bubble from popping, they will drink their own blood until there’s nothing left but a husk. There are currently people in America who are racist, not because they actually think other races are inferior, but because they think it will advance their careers, just as there were people pretending to be civil rights activists when they thought it looked good on a résumé.At the same time as there can be a terrible indifference to those outside the bubbles, there is no other group of people, in the world, happier to see others succeed than Americans. In Florida, there was a private poker room I used to go to, under a dog track in Sarasota, where you could meet the full spectrum of the Floridian population – grill-fronted southern bubbas, Jewish grandmothers, tweakers.They were just so much fun to sit playing cards with, discussing whether life had any purpose or discernible order. I remember, cancer had struck one of the dealers, who was in her mid-20s, and, to help with the medical bills, the house gave all the profits from a night over to her. It wasn’t just the rake, either. They held a silent auction, old customers forked over fistfuls of dollars straight up, and it was magnificent, a sheer festival of generosity.View image in fullscreenBut my little Canadian heart reserved an obvious thought: “You don’t have to do all this.” You don’t have to live this way. No other industrialized country in the world has to throw parties to raise money for its sick people. They could not see their own strangeness. Their bubbles reflect themselves back to them as the world.But it was a hell of a fun night.Fun. America was fun.Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonalds conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”Everyone drinks the drink of bubbles, the fun drink.The bubbles by which they lived were the subject of their greatest works of art. In the great one-hit wonder paintings, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth or Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, you can feel the souls pressed up against their bubbles or sinking back in them. This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and obviously it is the great American novel, the novel of the careless people who smash up the world and retreat into their money and their supreme indifference, the novel of bubbles.But the definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby; it’s the roadrunner cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls.In Judaism, it is forbidden to throw out sacred books. They keep the shreds of exhausted texts in a storage room called a genizah.View image in fullscreenThe American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Modrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.Countries fall out of the free world. They fall back in, too. These memories are not yet dead. They are only closed.But for now, a great foam is lifting, drifting, blowing through unsettled air, and all I can hear, in the distance, is the sound of bubbles popping.View image in fullscreen

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      Trump’s political bullying of Harvard will do nothing to foster diversity of thought | Kenan Malik

      by

      Few people want to live in an echo chamber. Many have no problem being friends with those who vote differently to the way they do. And many would probably agree with John Stuart Mill that “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that” – that to truly know one’s own argument, one must also know the arguments of those who disagree.How to create a culture that encourages more fruitful engagement between those of differing political views has become a key question in contemporary public debate. Nowhere more so than in universities, where there has been much debate about “viewpoint diversity”, the aspiration to nurture differing and conflicting perspectives within an institution or group as a means of sharpening arguments and teasing out truths.Universities have in recent decades become recognised as predominantly liberal institutions in which the range of debates can be constrained, both by the fact that most people share a similar perspective and by a culture wary of ideas deemed offensive or hurtful. Hence the growing calls for greater viewpoint diversity. The desire to create a richer culture of intellectual engagement and debate has also, however, been turned into a political cudgel, as in the current standoff between Donald Trump and Harvard University. The Trump administration sent to Harvard, as to many other elite colleges, a series of demands for the reorganisation of its governance and procedures, and for the reform of myriad departments deemed too radical.It is part of an attempt to impose political authority over academic life. One key demand is that any department “lacking viewpoint diversity” must hire new faculty members to transform its political complexion. University authorities must “audit” political views and only hire staff whose politics would ensure greater diversity of opinion.To engage with conservative perspectives is vital. This, though, is identity politics of a particularly pernicious kind packaged as a challenge to “woke” beliefs, a form of social engineering that conservatives normally denounce. Whatever happened to their insistence that the person best qualified for a job should get it?Nor is it easy to see what political balance might mean. How many conservatives should there be? How many Marxists? Should there be a quota for Jews supporting the Palestinian struggle? Or for Hamas-hating Muslims?At the same time as demanding viewpoint diversity, the White House insists that “Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences and practices … throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests”. How then can the university collect data on the political views of potential hires, even were that acceptable practice, to refashion every department’s ideological complexion as Trump demands?These are not merely problems and contradictions within Maga world but reflect conundrums within much of the discussion around viewpoint diversity. The lack of viewpoint diversity can be a real issue. The solutions proffered, though, often threaten to make the problem worse. Trump’s demand is in essence for universities to introduce affirmative action for conservatives while abolishing diversity policies in every other sphere. Similar ideas have long percolated through liberal arguments for viewpoint diversity.In an address to the American Psychological Association in 2001, psychologist and legal scholar Richard Redding argued for “affirmative-action-like practices” to increase the numbers of conservatives in academia. Many others, such as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who helped establish the Heterodox Academy as an academic forum for diverse views, and Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut and a fierce critic of Trump’s assault on universities, have followed suit, arguing, in Roth’s words, for “an affirmative-action program for the full range of conservative ideas and traditions”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPolitical scientist Eric Kauffman, director of Buckingham University’s Centre for Heterodox Social Science, argues that he is “not advocating affirmative action”, but insists, too, that what “a university decides to do on gender and race in terms of equity and diversity and inclusion … should be matched by equal action on ideological and political equity, diversity and inclusion”.Fostering diversity of opinion, nurturing a richer culture of debate and encouraging freedom of expression are all vital aims. But, in advocating affirmative action for certain political viewpoints, institutionalising individuals’ political identities, and making political beliefs legitimate criteria for admission and recruitment, the proposed solution, cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder observes, “embraces the very problem it diagnoses”.In defining academics by their political views, the traditional vision of scholarly objectivity, as another anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz notes, becomes subverted. Max Weber, perhaps the most influential of 20th-century sociologists, proposed a “value-neutral approach” by which one aimed to be objective irrespective of one’s politics. Many now view Weber’s approach as naive, given that “nobody has found a way to eradicate confirmation bias in individuals”, as Haidt and his colleagues have argued. All that is possible, they suggest, is to “diversify the field to the point where individual viewpoint biases begin to cancel each other out”. In other words, ensure that liberal bias in research becomes countervailed by conservative bias. This may work in many circumstances but, in others, it may make the search for answers more difficult.In many disciplines within the social sciences or the humanities, the political stance of the scholar can be vital to the argument – for instance, in the difference between conservative, liberal and Marxist views of globalisation. Here, robust debate is essential but there may be no “neutral” position to be arrived at by washing out the “biases”.I began by suggesting that few people want to live in an echo chamber. Nevertheless, societies have also become more fragmented and the politics of identity have helped create a more Balkanised world. It is a culture particularly entrenched in universities, where, as Shweder observes, “exposure to arguments and evidence that challenges one’s convictions” can often be experienced “as trauma or as the creation of a hostile work environment”.These are not issues confined to universities, nor to one side of the Atlantic. These are cultural changes we all need to confront. They are also cultural shifts that cannot be remedied through state mandates or bureaucratic procedures.What we need, rather, is to rethink what is meant by social and political engagement and, in particular, to encourage and celebrate, in place of Balkanised intellectual silos, what Shweder calls “the capacity of the human mind to stay on the move between different points of view”. More

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      Trump news at a glance: Mass anti-Trump protests sweep nation; supreme court issues midnight order

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      Protesters poured into the streets across the country again on Saturday in the second wave of demonstrations this month, as organizers seek to turn discontent with Donald Trump’s presidency into a mass movement that will eventually translate into ballot box action.Large protests took place from east coast to west, in major cities like Washington, New York and Chicago, as well as Rhode Island, Maryland, Wisconsin, Tennessee, South Carolina, among many others. Americans abroad also signalled their opposition to the Trump agenda in the Irish capital of Dublin and other cities.In San Francisco, protesters formed a human chain to spell out the words, “Impeach Remove!” while holding the American flag upside down.Protests cut across party lines, organizers sayThe 50501 movement behind the “Hands Off” protests said it was seeking to send a message to opposition politicians and ordinary voters that vocal resistance to Trump’s policies was essential. It also said that demonstrators were supporters of different parties.“We have registered Democrats, registered independents and registered Republicans all marching because they all believe in America, because they all believe in a fair government that puts people before profits,” said organizer Heather Dunn.Read the full storySupreme court orders temporary halt to deportationThe US supreme court ordered the Trump administration to halt the deportation of Venezuelan men in immigration custody in Texas, after their lawyers said they were at imminent risk of removal without a judicial review.The order came just minutes after midnight on Saturday and puts into question the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law.Read the full storyIndonesian student detained by Ice after visa revokedAn Indonesian father of an infant with special needs will remain in custody after an immigration judge ruled on Thursday that his case can proceed.Judge Sarah Mazzie denied a motion to dismiss the case against Aditya Wahyu Harsono on humanitarian grounds, according to his attorney. Harsono, 33, was detained by federal agents at his hospital workplace in Minnesota after his student visa was secretly revoked. He was arrested four days later without notice and is scheduled for another hearing on 1 May.Read the full storyBarbara Lee, trailblazing former US Congress member, elected Oakland mayorBarbara Lee, a trailblazing former member of Congress, has been elected as the next mayor of Oakland, California, after fending off an insurgent challenge from the center at a critical moment for the Bay Area city.Lee defeated the former city council member Loren Taylor after nine rounds of ranked-choice voting gave her more than 52% of the vote to Taylor’s 47%, according to the Alameda county registrar of voters.Read the full storyJD Vance visits Vatican amid immigration policy criticism The vice-president, JD Vance, had “an exchange of opinions” with the Vatican’s secretary of state over current international conflicts and immigration, the Vatican has said.The Vatican issued a statement after Vance, a Catholic convert, met Cardinal Pietro Parolin and the foreign minister, Archbishop Paul Gallagher. The Holy See has responded cautiously to the Trump administration, in keeping with its tradition of diplomatic neutrality but has expressed alarm over its crackdown on immigration and cuts in international aid.Read the full storyDay by day: the Harvard-White House showdownIt took Harvard University less than 72 hours to reject a series of demands put forth by the Trump administration, setting up a high-stakes showdown between the US’s wealthiest and oldest university and the White House.The swift rebuke on Monday came after weeks of mounting pressure from Harvard faculty, students and alumni and the city of Cambridge, all urging the university to defend itself, and higher education as a whole, against what they saw as an unprecedented attack from Washington. Here’s how it all unfolded, day by day.Read the full storyOutrage as Trump’s coal expansion coupled with health cuts: ‘There won’t be anyone to work in the mines’The Trump administration’s efforts to expand coal mining while simultaneously imposing deep cuts to agencies tasked with ensuring miner health and safety has left some advocates “dumbfounded”.Agencies that protect coalminers from serious occupational hazards, including the condition best known as “black lung”, have been among those affected by major government cuts.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      US chocolate prices surge amid soaring cocoa costs and tariffs right as many Americans celebrate Easter.

      Bill Clinton called on Americans to put aside “whose resentments matter most” at commemorations for the Oklahoma City bombing 30 years ago.

      Associating with Elon Musk and misusing artificial intelligence are among the most surefire ways for companies to damage their brands, a new survey shows.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 18 April 2025. More

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      Sci-fi Musk is brainstorming ways to breed his ‘legion’ more efficiently | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Elon Musk’s never-ending daddy issuesI regret to inform you that, once again, we are all being forced to think about Elon Musk’s gonads. Musk, who has had at least 14 children with four women, hasn’t officially launched a new mini-Musk for a while, but the Wall Street Journal has just dropped some disturbing details about the billionaire’s well-publicized breeding fetish.You’ll be familiar with some of these details already. By now we all know that Musk seems to think that the only way to save western civilization is if people like him have as many children as possible. And you’ve probably read the New York Times report which alleges that Musk, who likes preaching what he practices in regards to populating the world, has a habit of wandering around offering his sperm to strangers.What you might not know, however, is that Musk is so committed to this idea of himself as a superhero saving the universe that, even in private conversations, he apparently speaks like he is a character in a poorly written sci-fi novel. According to the Journal, Musk reportedly refers to his children as a “legion” and has been brainstorming ways to breed more efficiently.“To reach legion-level before the apocalypse we will need to use surrogates,” he reportedly said to Ashley St Clair, the mother of one of his children, in a text message seen by the newspaper.Surrogacy can often be a complex ethical issue. Not in this case. Musk appears to view women as nothing more than walking wombs he can use to further his own narcissistic agenda. Ethics aside for a moment, one has to wonder why a man who styles himself as a tech guru can’t figure out a faster way to pop out offspring than surrogacy. At the very least, I’m surprised that Musk hasn’t yet followed the lead of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who reportedly had visions of using his ranch in New Mexico as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and give birth to his babies. But that may come later I suppose. All the money that Doge, Musk’s pet government project, has cut from libraries and medical research might, at this very moment, be getting funneled into an Official Institute of Accelerated Insemination.While Musk may not have a birthing ranch (yet), he does own a very expensive social network which, according to the Journal, he’s been using to solicit more baby mamas. Musk has apparently been engaging with the cryptocurrency influencer Tiffany Fong on X, sending so many followers her way that she earned $21,000 over a two-week period from the revenue-sharing programs for creators on the platform. Once she was enjoying how lucrative it was to be on his good side, the billionaire asked Fong if she was interested in birthing his child. You know, as you do. Fong politely declined and Musk swiftly unfollowed her, causing her X-related income to drop.We all know that Musk has very thin skin. How has he responded to the Journal’s embarrassing reporting? Honestly, in an unusually restrained fashion. Nobody has been sent to El Salvador (yet), no reporters have been doxed. Musk has just dismissed the piece as scurrilous gossip. On Tuesday he tweeted “TMZ > > WSJ”. And, in normal circumstances, Musk would be correct that, as long as all parties involved are consenting adults, his private life is no one else’s business. But Musk is not your run-of-the-mill rich guy, is he? I don’t think Donald Trump or JD Vance believe in very much other than their own advancement. But Musk is an ideologue: he’s inserted himself into the top levels of government and is busy rearranging the US according to his worldview. Understanding all the ins and outs of this worldview is now very much a matter of public interest.It’s also illuminating, I think, to look at the sort of coverage Musk’s shenanigans get, particularly in the conservative press. While people love gawking at Musk, he’s still widely seen as an eccentric genius. Even the headline of the Wall Street Journal piece: “The tactics Elon Musk uses to manage his ‘Legion’ of babies – and their mothers”, seemed to suggest admiration for his multitasking. I’ve offered up this thought experiment before, but just humor me again and imagine a world where a woman acted like Musk. You can’t, can you? She’d be eviscerated on Fox News. There’d be a million thought pieces about what a terrible mother she was. Absolutely nobody would consider her a genius and she certainly wouldn’t be advising the president. There is perhaps no better embodiment of gendered double standards than Musk. And now he’s set on exporting those double standards to Mars.Give Fatima Hassouna a ‘loud death’Being a journalist in Gaza is a death sentence, with Israel apparently set on ensuring a complete media blackout of the ongoing genocide. On Wednesday, days before her wedding, Fatima Hassouna, a young photojournalist who is the subject of a new documentary, became one of the latest journalists to be killed by Israel. A strike on her home killed her along with 10 members of her family, including her pregnant sister. “If I die, I want a loud death,” Hassouna had written on social media. “I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear.”This is what it means to be Palestinian: to have to beg the world to care about you. To have cowards avert your eyes as you are massacred. To have the architects of your annihilation trot around the world being treated as VIPs by countries that once pretended to care about human rights.Self-identifying ‘hot girls’ are mobilizing to elect a progressive as New York City mayorI fully endorse this.Young women now binge drink more than young menWhile gen Z may drink less than previous generations, the gender gap in risky drinking has been narrowing. A new study finds that women aged 18-25 are now actually drinking slightly more than men the same age.Sudan: two years of war and shameful international neglect“Last week, Amnesty International released a new investigation finding the Rapid Support Forces committed widespread sexual violence, including rape, gang rape and sexual slavery, amounting to possible crimes against humanity,” Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara Rosas said in a statement marking the two-year anniversary of the outbreak of Sudan’s civil war. “Despite these atrocities, the world has largely chosen to remain passive. Alarmingly, the UN Security Council has failed to implement a comprehensive arms embargo on Sudan to halt the constant flow of weapons fueling these heinous crimes.”A crack in the manosphere: Joe Rogan’s guests are revoltingI chuckled a lot at this headline.Everyone is making fun of Katy Perry for her little space trip, even Wendy’sThe fast-food chain is refusing to apologize to the singer for a tweet suggesting she should be sent back to space. The Blue Origin flight has been widely panned, with the model and actor Emily Ratajkowski saying she was “disgusted” by the 11-minute space flight. “That’s end time shit,” Ratajkowski said. “Like, this is beyond parody.”The week in pawtriarchyRemember when Trump got attacked by an angry bald eagle during a photoshoot in 2015? Unfortunately, the bird kingdom did not properly organize to stop his presidency back then but it seems that some of our feathered friends have decided to fight the Maga powers that be. Last Friday a pigeon landed on Fox News’s Peter Doocy’s head while the White House correspondent was wrapping up a segment on tariffs. Not the first time that a Fox News correspondent has looked bird-brained.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      US philanthropists warn against capitulating to Trump: ‘We need to step up’

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      John Palfrey will not be obeying in advance.At a moment when leaders of tech companies, law firms, media corporations and academic institutions have bent the knee to Donald Trump, the president of the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation insists that charitable organisations choose resistance over capitulation.“We have an opportunity to unite and advance,” Palfrey said last week. “There’s a chance here for us to stand together on a series of very important bedrock principles, and do so with linked arms, and do so in such a way that allows us to serve every community in America in a way that will ensure a strong republic for years to come.”Trump’s return to power has been described as an authoritarian power grab, rewarding compliance and punishing dissent. The Facebook chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, ABC News and Columbia University ceded ground or surrendered. Several major law firms offered almost $1bn in pro bono work to curry favour.But this week Harvard, the oldest and wealthiest university in America, pushed back after the Trump administration cut $2bn of its federal grants, earning praise from the former president Barack Obama. Sixty current and former university presidents co-signed an editorial in Fortune offering support.Philanthropic organisations could be next in the firing line. The MacArthur Foundation, founded in 1978, funds work in fields including social justice, climate change, criminal justice reform, journalism and media, community development and international peace and security. It has assets of about $7bn and is known for bestowing annual “genius” grants on artists, actors and other creative people.Palfrey recently authored a joint article with Tonya Allen of the McKnight Foundation and Deepak Bhargava of the Freedom Together Foundation warning that charitable organisations could be the next institutions under attack, and announcing a public solidarity campaign to support philanthropy’s freedom to give. More than 300 organisations have already signed on.The trio wrote: “We’ve seen this before in American history and across the globe. Weaponized oversight. Intimidation dressed up as transparency. It is not new. But our response must be: we in the philanthropic community must not wait like sitting ducks.”Speaking via Zoom from the MacArthur Foundation’s headquarters in Chicago, Palfrey, 52, explained that he felt it important to clearly state the need to preserve freedom of speech, freedom to give and freedom to invest – core to the work of a philanthropic foundation.“It’s important to draw some bright lines at this point and say these are lines that need not to be crossed,” he said. “For me, the first amendment is a very good guide to that. I like to think about American history and 1776. That’s a point in our history when we decided as a country that we didn’t want kings and we decided to fight a revolution on that.“We decided we wanted the rule of law, not the rule of one man, and we decided, as we set up our constitution, that the first thing we would enshrine is the right of free expression. All of those are bedrock principles of what it means to be in the American republic, and I think it’s important for us to state those things clearly and plainly at this moment.”After three months back in office, Trump has invited comparisons with the “electoral autocracy” that is Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. With bewildering speed, he has cowed Congress, attacked judges and defied their orders, deported immigrants without due process, sought to intimidate the free press and attempted to impose his will on universities and cultural institutions such as the Kennedy Center.Palfrey, a student of history, warned: “If where we are headed is on the model of Hungary, we are going to see a repression of civil society that will not be good for communities across America. I don’t think we should go in that direction as a country.“We have the opportunity to adjust our course. I hope very much that our leaders will decide not to repress civil society in a way that constrains freedom of speech, and this is a good time to say that’s not the direction that makes sense for America.”Does he worry that the US is sliding into authoritarianism? “I’d rather not find out.”The country still has a powerful story to tell, he insists. “I very much hope that those of us who have the right to speak freely, as we do in America, will do so. It’s one of those things: you have to use it or lose it. Communicating who we are as a people and continue to be as a people is very important as a message to ourselves and to the rest of the world.”The MacArthur Foundation has supported organisations that work in 117 countries and has offices in India and Nigeria. Meanwhile, Trump’s ally Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has denied food and medicine to the world’s poorest people by gutting the development agency USAID.Palfrey said: “We’re a funder that is predominantly giving money in the United States, but we do have work outside the US. There are, of course, questions about [if] the rest of the world [can] count on the United States as a charitable partner – and that question is up in the air at the moment.”In the meantime, Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” have slashed and burned through federal departments, firing thousands of workers with little rhyme or reason. The pain is being felt in international development, scientific research and struggling communities. It has made charitable foundations’ work all the more urgent.Palfrey describes such work as fundamentally non-partisan, helping people in every district in the country. He said: “There is so much need in communities right now. Some of it does of course have to do with cuts to federal funding.“Let’s imagine for a second that you’re a cancer researcher and you’re saving the lives of small children who are getting cancer and your funding has just been cut. If you are an organisation that funds cancer research, your money is needed more than ever, so we need to step up.”The MacArthur Foundation will increase its giving by more than 20% for 2025 and 2026. “I don’t believe that private philanthropy can make up for all of the cuts that are under way in the United States and around the world, for that matter, but I do feel like we can and should do more, and this is what we’re called upon to do in this moment.”Palfrey’s joint article warns that philanthropy is often slow by design, but time is a luxury it cannot afford. He urges organisations to speak in plain language, not the “philanthropy speak” for which they are notorious, and hold the line. He hopes that other sectors will join in demonstrating that courage is contagious.“I’d love to see the business community say: this is what’s super-important to us, and this is how we’re going to come together around it. I’d love to see universities and colleges do the same and say: this is the essential bedrock that we need to be able to maintain. That is available to every group in America and very much in the spirit of our country. [It] is how we come together around shared ideals.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: Maryland senator says Ábrego García moved from notorious El Salvador prison

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      Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen revealed that Kilmar Ábrego García had been moved from El Salvador’s notorious Cecot prison – where he was sharing a cell with 25 other inmates – to a detention center with better conditions.Van Hollen met with Ábrego García, whom the Trump administration admits it mistakenly deported, and said that he had been left “traumatized” after facing threats in the Cecot facility.Van Hollen also accused El Salvador’s government of planting two margarita glasses between him and Ábrego García for the meeting to make it appear as if they were enjoying a leisurely cocktail.Wife of Ábrego García speaks as Trump defiant over US returnJennifer Vasquez Sura, Ábrego García’s wife, expressed relief to learn her husband is alive after Van Hollen’s trip. Trump said on social media the senator “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador”.Read the full storyUS ready to abandon Ukraine peace deal if no progressTrump said the US would “pass” on brokering a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia unless there were signs a settlement could be reached “very shortly”, while Kyiv said it had signed a memorandum with the US over a controversial minerals deal.Read the full storyTrump ousts IRS chief days after appointmentDonald Trump is replacing the acting commissioner of the US Internal Revenue Service after the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, reportedly complained to the president that the agency head had been appointed without his knowledge and under the instruction of the Doge leader, Elon Musk.Read the full story White House replaces Covid website with ‘lab leak’ theoryThe Trump administration has replaced Covid.gov – a website that once provided Americans with access to information about free tests, vaccines, treatment and secondary conditions such as long Covid – with a treatise on the “lab leak” theory.Read the full storyDoJ division to shift focus away from civil rights, new messages showThe justice department’s civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups and will instead pivot towards Trump’s priorities, including hunting for non-citizen voters and protecting white people from discrimination, according to new internal mission statements seen by the Guardian.Read the full storyJudge blocks Doge effort to shutter top consumer agencyA federal court has blocked the sweeping termination of staff at the top US consumer protection agency, a day after the Trump administration moved to axe about 1,500 of the agency’s 1,700 workforce, while officials investigate whether the action violated existing judicial orders.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The American Civil Liberties Union asked the US supreme court to block the deportation of a new group of Venezuelan men detained in Texas.

      A US-born American citizen who was detained in Florida has been released.

      Republicans in nearly half of state legislatures have proposed bills to require documentary proof of citizenship to vote.

      The Trump administration has spared the jobs of federal employees who provide services for Elon Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Starlink, raising a new round of conflict of interest questions around Doge.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 17 April 2025. More

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      Trump to reclassify wide swaths of federal workers to allow for more firings

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      Donald Trump on Friday said his administration is implementing a move that will allow far more firings of federal employees and will make significantly more roles into politically appointed positions beholden to the president.The office of personnel management (OPM) on Friday published a new rule that invokes “Schedule F”, a prior attempt to reclassify wide swaths of federal workers not as civic service roles with protections regardless of who’s in power – but as political appointees who can be hired or fired based on their allegiances to the president.“If these government workers refuse to advance the policy interests of the President, or are engaging in corrupt behavior, they should no longer have a job,” Trump wrote on Friday on his Truth Social platform. “This is common sense, and will allow the federal government to finally be ‘run like a business.’”The president previously issued an executive order on his first day in office that reclassified a host of federal workers.The policy unveiled on Friday is one Trump first sought late in his first presidency. But Joe Biden overturned it after defeating him in the 2020 election. The idea aligns with a major plank of Project 2025, the conservative policy manifesto, which calls for a federal government more beholden to the executive branch to drive out a supposed “deep state” that stood in Trump’s way before he won his second presidency.Most federal government employees serve in roles that are not politically appointed. About 4,000 employees are in roles appointed based on who is in power. Friday’s move would expand that by about 50,000 people, prior estimates have shown.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe latest rule comes on top of the Trump administration’s ongoing quest to root out of the federal government all priorities, and the personnel who carried them out, with which Trump disagrees. More

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      Trump ally pushes DoJ unit to shift civil rights focus, new messages show

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      The justice department’s civil rights division is shifting its focus away from its longstanding work protecting the rights of marginalized groups and will instead pivot towards Donald Trump’s priorities including hunting for noncitizen voters and protecting white people from discrimination, according to new internal mission statements seen by the Guardian.The new priorities were sent to several sections of the civil rights division this week by Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally who was confirmed a little more than two weeks ago to lead the division. Several of them only give glancing mention to the statutes and kinds of discrimination that have long been the focus of the division, which dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Several of the mission statements point to Trump’s executive orders as priorities for the section.The mission statement for the voting section, for example, barely mentions the Voting Rights Act and instead says the section will focus on preventing voter fraud – which is exceedingly rare – and helping states find for noncitizens on their voter rolls (non-citizen voting is also exceedingly rare). The guidance for the Housing and Civil Enforcement section does not make a single mention of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark 1968 civil rights law that has long been a central part of the department’s work.“It’s absolutely astonishing,” said Sasha Samberg-Champion, a former appellate lawyer in the justice department’s civil rights division. “This reflects the complete abdication of the core responsibilities of each of these sections.”The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The decision to send new mission statements to the sections is itself unusual. While the priorities of the sections often change from administration to administration, the core work often remains the same and the department’s career attorneys are expected to be apolitical. Trump has moved to end the independence of the justice department and use it as a tool to further his political goals and punish rivals.“To me, these new mission statements signal a significant change in the priorities that each of these sections will be expected to pursue,” said Jocelyn Samuels, who led the civil rights division from 2013 to 2014. “Some of this is explicit – where, for example, the new statements specifically call out enforcement of some of the president’s executive orders as the guide for the section’s work. Some of it is a matter of omission.“I suspect that the descriptions don’t themselves dictate what the sections will do, but they certainly manifest the expectations that leadership of the division will impose,” added Samuels, who is currently suing the Trump administration for firing her from her position on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.The justice department has already begun to pull back on its civil rights cases. It has withdrawn from several of the voting cases filed under Joe Biden’s administration, terminated an environmental justice settlement on behalf of Black residents in Alabama, and dropped a pay discrimination lawsuit on behalf of a Black lawyer against the Mississippi senate.The primary focus of the department’s voting section has long been ensuring that voting laws and practices aren’t tainted with discrimination. The new guidance this week shifts that focus and echoes Trump’s rhetoric around fraud.“The mission of the Voting Rights Section of the DOJ Civil Rights Division is to ensure free, fair, and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors, or suspicion,” the new mission statement says. “The Section will work to ensure that only American citizens vote in US federal elections and do so securely. Other section priorities include preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error. All attorneys within the Voting Section will advocate with zeal on behalf of the United States of America in furtherance of all objectives as tasked.”It also says the voting section will work with the Department of Homeland Security to help states access citizenship data so that they can remove noncitizens from their voter rolls. The section will also “vigorously enforce the statutes, orders, and priorities” in a recent Trump executive order that requires states to require proof of citizenship to vote and to decertify voting machines. Several civil rights groups are already challenging that order in court and say it is illegal.“What’s missing from here is the idea that we’re going to protect the right to vote on a nondiscriminatory basis,” Samberg-Champion said. “Silly me, I always thought was the core purpose of the voting section and the core purpose of the Voting Rights Act.”Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and a top official in the civil rights division during the Obama administration, noted that federal law puts certain restrictions in place “before anybody in the federal government, civil rights division included, can lawfully touch state database information”.Noting that much of the language in the mission statement was broad, Levitt said he would be watching to see how it was implemented.“Read through the lens of all of the rest that the administration is doing, this is a further example of how off-course the administration is. This isn’t the statement that any administration in the last 68 years would have written,” he said in an email. “But the way this gets cashed out is far more important.”The new mission statement for the Housing and Civil Enforcement section says the section will focus on protecting the rights of members of the military and enforcing the Religious Land Use And Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which prevents zoning discrimination. “The aggressive and even-handed deployment of RLUIPA to restore religious liberty will be a top priority,” the document says.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe guidance also says the section will “focus on challenges to racially discriminatory lending programs”. Samberg-Champion said that was a “code red”.“They’re going to look for opportunities to challenge special purpose credit programs and other lending programs that are meant to enhance credit opportunities for people who have been starved of credit historically,” said Samberg-Champion, who served as deputy general counsel for enforcement and fair housing during the Biden administration. “It’s just astonishing that what they’re trying to do is actually diminish the availability of credit for people and go after banks, go after lenders who presumably are trying to make their credit availability fairer.”Guidance for the educational opportunities section focuses on preventing discrimination against white applicants and cites the supreme court’s 2023 ruling saying that affirmative action programs are unconstitutional. It also says the department will focus on anti-transgender issues.“This mandate includes protecting the rights of women and girls to unfettered access to programs, facilities, extracurricular activities, and sports or athletic opportunities that exclude males from presence or participation,” the statement reads. “The mandate also includes preventing racial discrimination in school admissions policies and preventing antisemitism in education wherever it is found.”The new mission statement for the disability rights section appears to have nothing to do with disability. “The zealous and faithful pursuit of this section’s mission requires dedication of the section’s resources, actions, attention, and energy to the priorities and objectives of the President,” the guidance says. It then goes on to list a series of executive orders that target transgender Americans.Eve Hill, who served as a top lawyer in the civil rights division under the Obama administration, said she wasn’t “overly alarmed” by the message to the disability rights section.“It’s hard to tell what effect it will have other than preventing [the disability rights section] from working for people with the disability of gender dysphoria. Which is important, but they hadn’t done much work in that space anyway,” she said.Several of the mission statements include a similar line that says attorneys are expected to enforce the law “faithfully and zealously”.That language is significant, Samberg-Champion said.“They’re anticipating – and I think correctly – that they’re going to get considerable pushback from the career staff as to what they’re being asked to do,” he said. “This reflects their understanding that they are radically changing what each of these sections historically has understood its mission to be. And that this is not going to go over well with the people who have made it their life’s work to enforce these important laws.” More