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    Threaten campuses, shut down debate: that’s what free speech looks like under Trump | Owen Jones

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    For those who fear Donald Trump is a despot in the making, don’t worry: he has an answer. “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he triumphantly declared in his State of the Union address. “It’s back!” JD Vance scolded Europe in his speech at the Munich security conference last month, declaring that “free speech is in retreat” across the continent.Like all authoritarian creeds, Trumpism turns reality on its head and empties words of their meaning in an effort to sow confusion and disarray among its critics. On the same day Trump announced the revival of free speech in Congress, he posted on Truth Social that federal funding for educational institutions that allow “illegal protests” will be ceased. Notably, illegality was not defined, but the issue Trump is referring to, of course, is Palestine. “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came,” he declared. “American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS!”Trump’s first target: Columbia University, which has had $400m of federal funding slashed because of what the government says is “continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students”. At least nine other campuses – including Harvard and the University of California – could be next. All were the sites of overwhelmingly peaceful encampments protesting over Israel’s genocidal attack against the Palestinian people. They weren’t simply opposing their government’s facilitation of this atrocity, through weapons, aid and diplomatic support, but demanding their colleges divest from companies linked to Israel.Just as Trumpism is no guarantor of free speech, nor is it a vanguard of anti-racism: it is, in fact, the opposite. The very real menace of antisemitism has been systematically conflated with any critique of crimes committed by the state of Israel. This is what is meant by “anti-Israel hate”, as Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick as new ambassador to the UN puts it, who became a rightwing icon after facing down university presidents over Israel. The president’s most powerful ally is Elon Musk, a man who in 2023 expressed his agreement with a tweet claiming Jewish communities were pushing “hatred against whites”, and recently performed Nazi salutes at a Trump rally.Trump himself declared that Jewish Americans who support the Democrats – that is, the vast majority – “hate their religion”, “hate everything about Israel” and “should be ashamed of themselves”, and menacingly said they would have a “lot” of blame if he lost the presidential election. The university protests, on the other hand, had a large Jewish presence, and hundreds of Jewish students signed a letter rejecting “the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic”.Indeed, Columbia in particular victimised its own students. The university banned Jewish Voice for Peace before the encampment began, ordered police raids which led to more than 100 students being arrested, disciplined and expelled, and targeted sympathetic academics.One was Katherine Franke, a professor who was publicly denounced by Stefanik and forced into retirement. Far from protecting Jewish students, Franke claims, this is about “radical advocates for Israel” lying about the campus protests. “This university has bent a knee and coddled bullies,” she says of Columbia’s repression of students’ free speech – and still it had its funding slashed.It gets more sinister. The Department of Homeland Security arrested one of the lead negotiators of Columbia’s encampment: Mahmoud Khalil, a US green card holder of Palestinian origin, married to a US citizen who is eight months pregnant. Unknown to his wife, he was sent more than 1,000 miles away to a notorious detention centre in Louisiana. The department’s claim: that “he led activities aligned to Hamas”, a blatant attempt to conflate Palestinian solidarity with the militant group responsible for war crimes on 7 October.Far from restoring free speech, Trump’s administration is incinerating the first amendment. When it comes to Palestine, free speech simply does not exist. Surely there is one man who will be particularly incensed by this outrage. After all, just last week he grandly proclaimed: “We have to ask ourselves the question as leaders: ‘Are we willing to defend people even if we disagree with what they say?’ If you’re not willing to do that, I don’t think you’re fit to lead Europe or the United States.” That was the vice-president, JD Vance.But the truth is, the US right never actually cared about free speech. It was simply a ruse, intended to stigmatise any attempt to rebut its bigotry against largely voiceless minorities. The Trump administration has escalated the biggest onslaught against free speech since McCarthyism: even before its assumption of power, those opposed to Israel’s genocide have faced being deplatformed, victimised and indeed targeted by institutions like Columbia.Yet it was not just the hardcore right who defamed these protests. Many self-described “liberals” and “centrists” joined in, smearing those opposed to some of the worst atrocities of the 21st century as hateful, dangerous extremists – Jewish Americans among them. In doing so, they helped legitimise the inevitable authoritarian crackdown that is now under way. Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of Jewish American campaign group IfNotNow, told me we are now seeing “the terrifying logical conclusion of smearing anyone calling for Palestinian freedom as an antisemite: a white nationalist administration carrying out its war on civil rights and free speech under the banner of ‘fighting antisemitism’. We are all endangered by this blatant assault on our democracy.”It would be deeply naive to believe this repression will end with the attacks on people expressing solidarity with Palestine. A precedent that is established can swiftly be expanded. As it is, the US media are increasingly menaced by – among other things – Trump’s libel actions, the threat of vexatious investigations and plutocrats like Jeff Bezos bending the knee to the would-be king. Free speech is being pummelled by those who claim to be its greatest advocates.

    Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist

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      Trump calls arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil ‘first of many to come’

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      Donald Trump said on Monday that the arrest of a prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s pro-Palestinian protests last year, was the “first arrest of many to come”.“We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” the US president wrote in a post on Truth Social.He added: “Many are not students, they are paid agitators. We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country – never to return again. If you support terrorism, including the slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children, your presence is contrary to our national and foreign policy interests, and you are not welcome here. We expect every one of America’s Colleges and Universities to comply.”The White House amplified Trump’s comments in a post on X reading “Shalom, Mahmoud”, using a Hebrew word for goodbye.Trump’s remarks come as over the weekend federal immigration authorities arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent US resident with a green card who is a recent Columbia graduate, and took him into custody, reportedly acting on a state department order to revoke his green card.In his statement on Monday, Trump said that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) took Khalil into custody after his executive order and claimed, without evidence, that similar activists on college campuses are paid agitators, not students.Khalil, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, served as a lead negotiator for the Gaza solidarity encampment at Columbia University last year, mediating between protesters and university administrators.Khalil’s attorney said this weekend that the arrest took place on Saturday night, when Khalil was in his university-owned apartment building, just a few blocks from Columbia’s main campus in New York. Several Ice agents entered the building and took him into custody.According to emails obtained by Zeteo, Khalil appealed in an email to Columbia for protection one day before Ice entered his apartment, telling the university’s interim president that he was being subjected to a “dehumanizing doxxing campaign” led by Columbia affiliates.“I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that Ice or a dangerous individual might come to my home,” he wrote to Katrina Armstrong on 7 March, according to Zeteo. “I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm.”In a letter posted online Monday, Armstrong said that “rumors suggesting that any member of Columbia leadership requested the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on or near campus are false”.At first, it was reported that Khalil was taken to an immigration detention facility in New Jersey, but his wife said she could not locate him there.As of Monday morning, it appeared that he was now listed as being in Ice custody at La Salle detention facility in Louisiana.Free speech organizations, first amendment advocates and some New York City leaders expressed outrage in response to the unprecedented arrest and ongoing detainment of Khalil, calling it unconstitutional, “an egregious violation of the first amendment” and a “frightening weaponization of immigration law”.On Monday, a judge set a hearing for Wednesday in Manhattan federal court to consider Khalil’s challenge to his detention. More

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      Ice arrests Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia protests, lawyer says

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      A prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s student encampment movement was arrested on Saturday night by federal immigration authorities who claimed they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card, according to his attorney.Mahmoud Khalil was at his university-owned apartment, blocks from the private Ivy League university’s main campus in New York when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entered the building and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told the Associated Press.One of the agents told Greer by phone that they were executing a state department order to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil, who graduated last December, was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that too, according to the lawyer.The arrest comes as Donald Trump vows to deport foreign students and imprison “agitators” involved in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.The administration has placed particular scrutiny on Columbia, announcing Friday that it would be cutting $400m in grants and contracts because of what the government describes as the elite school’s failure to squelch antisemitism on campus.The authorities declined to tell Khalil’s wife, who is eight months pregnant, why he was being detained, Greer said. Khalil has since been transferred to an immigration detention facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey.“We have not been able to get any more details about why he is being detained,” Greer told the AP. “This is a clear escalation. The administration is following through on its threats.”A spokesperson for Columbia said law enforcement agents must produce a warrant before entering university property. The spokesperson declined to say if the school had received a warrant for Khalil’s arrest.Messages seeking comment were left with the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Ice.Khalil had become one of the most visible faces of the pro-Palestinian movement at Columbia. As students erected tents on campus last spring, Khalil was picked to serve as a negotiator on behalf of students and met frequently with university administrators.When classes resumed in September, he told the Associated Press that the protests would continue: “As long as Columbia continues to invest and to benefit from Israeli apartheid, the students will continue to resist.”An immigration court can revoke a green card but government departments do not have that power.Last week it was reported by Axios that Secretary of State Marco Rubio intends to revoke visas from foreign nationals who are deemed to support Hamas or other terrorist groups, using artificial intelligence (AI) to pick out individuals.Khalil was among several investigated by a newly-created university disciplinary committee – the Office of Institutional Equity – looking into students at the institution who have expressed criticism of Israel, according to records shared with the AP.In recent weeks, the committee has sent notices to dozens of students for activities ranging from sharing social media posts in support of Palestinian people to joining “unauthorized” protests.“I have around 13 allegations against me, most of them are social media posts that I had nothing to do with,” Khalil said last week.After refusing to sign a non-disclosure agreement, Khalil said the university threatened to block him from graduating. But when he appealed the decision through a lawyer, they eventually backed down, Khalil said.“They just want to show Congress and rightwing politicians that they’re doing something, regardless of the stakes for students,” Khalil said. “It’s mainly an office to chill pro-Palestine speech.”Columbia students kick-started the tent encampment protests at their Manhattan campus last spring, with the idea catching on at dozens of campuses across the US. At Columbia and many other colleges, their academic administrations called in the relevant local police department and hundreds of students were arrested.“Targeting a student activist is an affront to the rights of Mahmoud Khalil and his family. This blatantly unconstitutional act sends a deplorable message that freedom of speech is no longer protected in America. Furthermore, Khalil and all people living in the United States are afforded due process. A green card can only be revoked by an immigration judge, showing once again that the Trump administration is willing to ignore the law in order to instill fear and further its racist agenda,” Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of New York Immigration, Coalition said in a statement on Sunday afternoon.“DHS must immediately release Khalil,” he said. More

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      What is this era of calamity we’re in? Some say ‘polycrisis’ captures it

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      Two months into 2025, the sense of dread is palpable. In the US, the year began with a terrorist attack; then came the fires that ravaged a city, destroying lives, homes and livelihoods. An extremist billionaire came to power and began proudly dismantling the government with a chainsaw. Once-in-a-century disasters are happening more like once a month, all amid devastating wars and on the heels of a pandemic.The word “unprecedented” has become ironically routine. It feels like we’re stuck in a relentless cycle of calamity, with no time to recover from one before the next begins.How do we make sense of any of this – let alone all of it, all at once?A number of terms have cropped up in the past decade to help us describe our moment. We’re living in the anthropocene – the era in which humanity’s impact is comparable to that of geology itself. Or we’re in the “post-truth” era, in which we no longer share the same sense of reality. We’re facing a permacrisis, an endless state of catastrophe.But perhaps the word that best describes this moment is one that emerged at the turn of the millennium, picked up steam in the 2010s and has recently been making the global rounds again: polycrisis.Not to be confused with a “perfect storm” or the perhaps less scientific “clusterfuck”, “polycrisis” – a term coined by the authors Edgar Morin and Anne Brigitte Kern – refers to the idea that not only are we facing one disaster after another, but those messes are all linked, making things even worse. Or, as Adam Tooze, a Columbia University history professor and public intellectual who has championed the term, put it: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”Our globalized world is built on interconnecting systems, and when one gets rattled, the others do too – a heating climate, for instance, increases the risk of pandemics, pandemics undermine economies, shaky economies fuel political upheaval. “There’s a kind of larger instability, or a larger system disequilibrium,” the researcher Thomas Homer-Dixon says. To illustrate the situation, Homer-Dixon uses a video of metronomes on a soft surface. Though they’re all started at different times, they end up synchronized, as each device’s beat subtly affects the rest. When people see it for the first time, “they don’t actually see what’s happening properly. They don’t realize the forces that are operating to cause the metronomes to actually synchronize with each other,” Homer-Dixon says.In much the same way, it’s often unclear even to experts how global systems interact because they are siloed in their disciplines. That limits our ability to confront intersecting problems: the climate crisis forces migration; xenophobia fuels the rise of the far right in receiving countries; far-right governments undermine environmental protections; natural disasters are more destructive. Yet migration experts may not be experts on the climate crisis, and climate experts may have limited knowledge of geopolitics.That’s why Homer-Dixon thinks better communication is essential – not just to create consensus around what we call our current predicament but also how to address it. He runs the Cascade Institute, which is fostering “a community of scholars and experts and scientists and policy makers around the world who are using this concept [of polycrisis] in constructive ways”.“Constructive” is a key word here. “You’ve got to get the diagnosis right before you can go to the prescription,” he says. Finding that diagnosis means looking at how stresses on various systems – climate, geopolitics, transportation, information, etc – intersect and identifying what his team calls “high leverage intervention points”: “places where you can go in and have a really big impact for a relatively low investment”.The Cascade Institute’s proposals target what they have identified as key drivers of the polycrisis, such as polarization and climate change, by, for instance, improving school curricula to bolster students’ understanding of disinformation and expanding the use of deep geothermal power.In addition to bringing people with disparate expertise together, the Cascade Institute, part of Royal Roads University in British Columbia, has developed an analytical framework for understanding the polycrisis, and it operates a website, polycrisis.org, which serves as a hub for the latest thinking on the issue – including critiques of the concept, Homer-Dixon says. The site contains a compendium of resources from academia to blogposts that explore the polycrisis, reflecting, for instance, on what’s already happened in 2025 (a tenuous ceasefire in Gaza, California wildfires, Trump upending the global order, an AI-bubble selloff, and the outbreak of bird flu).View image in fullscreenThere has been some backlash to the idea of the polycrisis. The historian Niall Ferguson has described it as “just history happening”. The political scientist Daniel Drezner says its proponents “assume the existence of powerful negative feedback effects that may not actually exist” – in other words, when crises overlap, the outcome might not always be bad (for instance, the pandemic lockdowns might have had some short-lived environmental benefits). Some point to past crises as evidence that what we are experiencing is not new.Homer-Dixon disagrees. “We’ve moved so far and so fast outside our species’ previous experience that many elites don’t have the cognitive frame to grasp our situation, even were they inclined to do so,” he wrote in 2023, when the term was the talk of Davos.It’s all a bit overwhelming, as Homer-Dixon acknowledges. “If you’re not really scared by what’s going on in the world, you’re braindead,” he says.On the other hand, “t​​he crisis can actually be a moment for really significant change,” he says, “because it kind of delegitimizes the existing way of doing stuff, the existing vested-interest stakeholders who are who are hunkered down and don’t want anything to change”. For instance, while Homer-Dixon sees Donald Trump as an “abominable” figure, he also notes that, “like an acid”, the president dissolves norms around him. That creates the risk of disaster but also offers opportunities to change the world for the better.“This really is a critical moment in human history and things can be done,” Homer-Dixon says. “We don’t know enough about how these systems are operating to know that it’s game over.”And the term itself, as terrifying as it is, can also be a strange comfort. “I think that’s useful, giving the sense a name. It’s therapeutic,” Tooze told Radio Davos. When the world feels like a nightmare, identifying the condition gives us something to hold on to – a kind of understanding amid the chaos. More

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      The Guardian view on Israel’s aid blockade: pushing Palestinians toward catastrophe | Editorial

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      Israel’s decision to block aid to Gaza, as ceasefire talks falter, is a devastating blow to 2 million hungry, vulnerable civilians in the shattered territory. As the occupying power, Israel is legally bound to allow relief into Gaza under the Geneva convention. Denying it isn’t just inhumane – it’s a war crime. But Benjamin Netanyahu already faces an international criminal court arrest warrant for “starvation as a method of warfare” and “crimes against humanity”.Mr Netanyahu’s ability to flout international law is thanks to Donald Trump, who remains firmly in his corner. Washington now appears to accept starvation as an Israeli bargaining chip to pressure Hamas into accepting a US-devised truce extension – one that secures hostage exchanges while ensuring Israeli forces remain in Gaza. Hamas, which sparked the war with its 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians, insists Israel honour its commitment to a second phase of Gaza ceasefire negotiations – ending the fighting and withdrawing troops.Palestinians in Gaza are on the brink. Food is running out, hospitals are unable to function and families scavenge for clean water. Any further aid restrictions will turn desperation into catastrophe. It would be far better for a negotiated peace to be worked out that would see the Palestinians stay to rebuild their lives and for the remaining Israeli hostages to return home.After 15 months of war, and having achieved many of its declared objectives, Israel is no closer to peace in Gaza. That view is echoed by Scott Atran of Paris’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, who polled civilians in Gaza in January, shortly before the ceasefire came into effect. Prof Atran correctly argues that Israel lacks a political strategy for Palestine’s future and is only fuelling Palestinian anger.From the outset, the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive, unilateral approach to Gaza, aligning firmly with Israeli interests while disregarding Palestinian concerns. According to Nabeel Khoury, a former US state department official, the Abraham accords – Mr Trump’s flagship Middle East initiative – remain central to Washington’s evolving strategy, one that envisions Israeli territorial consolidation and unchallenged regional dominance.Mr Khoury has noted the US’s immediate priority is the wholesale removal of Palestinians from Gaza, followed, if conditions permit, by a gradual takeover of the West Bank. That vision coincides with the Washington visit of Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a pro-annexationist who has warned Mr Netanyahu that he would collapse the government if Israeli troops withdrew from Gaza under a truce.An Arab-led plan for Gaza’s post-war reconstruction – allowing its 2 million residents to remain – was rebuffed by the US and Israel. Yet it marked an important show of force: a pan-Arab coalition pushing back against the visible Netanyahu-Trump effort to erase Palestinian self-determination. In contrast, reports suggest the Trump administration is in direct talks with Hamas.If true, this would be a striking reversal of US policy. Engaging Hamas – once deemed untouchable – as a US negotiating partner might be pragmatic realism, an example of Trumpian transactional diplomacy or both. The UN estimated in 2019 that oil and natural gas resources in the occupied Palestinian territories could generate hundreds of billions of dollars for development. But Palestinian national aspirations are impossible under occupation.

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      Trump invites freed Israeli hostage to White House

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      Freed Israeli hostage Eli Sharabi has been invited to Washington to meet Donald Trump this week, his brother told Israeli media on Sunday.Sharabi, who was released from Gaza after 16 months in captivity, expects to meet Trump with other freed hostages on Tuesday, after the US president watched him describe the severe hunger and violence he endured on Israeli television.Excerpts from Sharabi’s moving interview on Israel’s Channel 12 “were shown to Trump, with English subtitles, and he was shocked once again, but also expressed great sympathy for those who survived captivity”, his brother Sharon said, according to a translation from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.Israeli advocacy groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), have posted subtitled versions of the interview online.When Sharabi and two other hostages, Or Levy and Ohad Ben Ami, were released on 8 February alongside after nearly 500 days in captivity, their physical condition outraged Israelis, and Trump. Sharabi was at home in Be’eri kibbutz with his British-born wife and their two teenage daughters when Hamas attacked on 7 October 2023.In the Israeli television interview , Sharabi recalled being tied up, losing consciousness and experiencing extreme hunger.“I remember not being able to fall asleep because of the pain,” he said. “The ropes are already digging into your flesh, and every movement makes you want to scream.”Sharabi’s brother said the freed hostage is flying to the US aboard a plane provided by Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and a major Trump donor.“Tomorrow morning, we’re boarding the plane with Mrs Adelson’s kind help. We’ll arrive to see Trump and explain to him up close the urgency of continuing the first stage or beginning the second stage – it doesn’t really matter,” Sharon Sharabi said, referring to the tenuous ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas.During the 7 October attack, after the armed group kidnapped Sharabi from his home, they shot the family dog, locked his wife Lianne and their daughters in a safe room, and set it on fire, according to Lianne’s parents, who spoke to the BBC. Sharabi only learned that his wife and daughters had been killed that day after his release.Sharabi’s other brother, Yossi, was also taken hostage that day. He died early last year in Gaza, Israel’s military said, when the Israeli army bombed a building near where he was being held.The Trump administration continues to support Israel amid the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On Friday, it approved a nearly $3bn arms sale to Israel, bypassing congressional review to supply more 2,000lb bombs used in the war against Hamas.Following Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement of a blockade on humanitarian aid to Gaza on Sunday, the White House said it “supports” Israel’s decision.At a demonstration in Tel Aviv on Sunday, the families of Israelis still being held in Gaza urged their government to stop violating the ceasefire/hostage deal that puts the lives of their loved ones at further risk. More

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      Even rightwingers are mocking the ‘Epstein files’ as a lot of redacted nothing

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      The Epstein files fiascoDrum roll, please: the “most transparent administration in American history” is declassifying shocking new information about Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. After years of speculation that powerful people have been concealing information related to the late financier and convicted sex offender, the Trump administration said earlier this week that it would release unseen details about the case.“Breaking news right now, you’re going to see some Epstein information being released by my office,” Pam Bondi, the attorney general, told Fox News on Wednesday night. “This will make you sick.”Apparently intent on treating this “new” Epstein information like an album drop rather than a horrific sex-trafficking case involving the abuse of young girls, the White House gave a bunch of influencers a first look at the information. On Thursday, Bondi’s team handed out big white binders labelled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “The Most Transparent Administration in History” to a group of 15 rightwing activists and self-styled “citizen journalists” visiting the White House. Grinning gleefully, these influencers proceeded to pose for the press with the binders like they were trophies from a school sports day.So what was in those binders? A whole lot of heavily redacted nothing, basically. A bunch of people at Bondi’s office appear to have hastily printed out Epstein’s contact book, which was published by the (now shuttered) website Gawker a decade ago, along with other information that has been in the public domain for years. They then shoved 200 pages of printouts into binders and gave them to a handpicked collection of useful idiots. Being as they’re the most transparent administration in American history, the justice department also made the information available on its website later that day – along with a note acknowledging that there wasn’t actually much to see. “The first phase of declassified files largely contains documents that have been previously leaked but never released in a formal capacity by the U.S. Government,” the note said.“This isn’t a news story, it’s a publicity stunt,” the Palm Beach lawyer Spencer Kuvin, who has worked on the case since 2005, representing nine victims, told the Miami Herald. He added that he feared that the Trump administration was using Epstein’s victims for political purposes. But then what do you expect from Trump – a guy who, in 2002 said of Epstein: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It’s even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do. And many of them are on the younger side.”In short, this whole big “reveal” was an embarrassing flop – so much so that it was mocked by people on the right. Even Laura Loomer, a white nationalist conspiracy theorist, thought the stunt was distasteful.“I hate to say it, but the American people can’t trust the validity of the Epstein files released today. It was released in an unprofessional manner with paid, partisan social media influencers to curate their binders for us,” Loomer tweeted on Thursday. She later added: “Sorry I won’t celebrate dancing like a school girl with a binder full of pedophile names.” When even Loomer thinks you’ve gone low, you’ve gone very low indeed.Ultimately, however, while nothing new may have been revealed in Bondi’s “Epstein files”, this grotesque stunt was very revealing. It was yet another reminder that there is nothing – not even the sex trafficking of minors – that Donald Trump and his associates won’t cynically turn into a self-serving photo opportunity. Or, I should add, an opportunity to “Rickroll” people: midday Thursday, while people were waiting for the documents to be published online, the House judiciary GOP account on X posted in all-caps: “#BREAKING: EPSTEIN FILES RELEASED.” This then redirected users to the YouTube music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Classy.Also revealing was who the White House thought should get a first look at documents involving sex trafficking. Among the influencers assembled was Mike Cernovich. Who is he? Just a rightwing manosphere influencer who has said things like “rape via an alpha male is different from other forms of rape” and told men that women exist “for your sexual pleasure”.The reaction to the backlash over the Epstein files fiasco also shows how, when anything goes wrong, people in Trump’s orbit are quick to point fingers and turn on each other rather than take responsibility. Bondi, for example, responded to all the criticism by accusing the FBI of withholding information from her. Meanwhile, some of the conservative influencers who got the binders full of nothing accused the southern district of New York of hiding information.“These swamp creatures at SDNY deceived Bondi, Kash, and YOU,” the conservative media personality Liz Wheeler tweeted. “Be outraged that the binder is boring. You should be. Because the evil deep state LIED TO YOUR FACE.”Perhaps what is most revealing about this fiasco, however, is that it is a stark reminder of how justice still hasn’t been served when it comes to Epstein’s many victims. Apart from Ghislaine Maxwell, none of Epstein’s many enablers and associates have faced any real consequences. A lot of rich and powerful people have got away with disgraceful things. And that’s not a conspiracy theory; that’s just our legal system.Andrew Tate and brother land in US from Romania after travel ban liftedSpeaking of predators evading accountability, the Tate brothers, who are charged with human trafficking in Romania, landed in the US on Thursday. This comes after it was reported last week that the Trump administration had asked Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on the pair.View image in fullscreen‘Pro-lifers’ are demanding women face the death penaltySelf-described “abortion abolitionists” – who oppose all abortions without any exceptions and want to criminalize the procedure and ban IVF – used to be at the fringes of the anti-abortion movement. Now, people who believe that the death penalty should be considered for women who have abortions are slowly moving into the US mainstream. Mother Jones looks at how some of these abolitionist men have turned on women in the anti-abortion movement. “We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion, not feminist women,” one of those “TheoBros” recently wrote.At least six children die of hypothermia amid freezing conditions in GazaI haven’t heard any pro-lifers get upset about this.Jeff Bezos is sending Katy Perry to spaceLast year, Perry came out with Woman’s World, her first solo single in three years and, she said, “the first contribution I have given since becoming a mother and since feeling really connected to my feminine divine”. Unfortunately, her contribution was panned so mercilessly that Perry is now taking her feminine divine as far away from the world as possible: the singer will fly to space during Blue Origin’s next (all-female) crewed mission, the Jeff Bezos-owned space company has announced. Rumour has it that if you work at the Washington Post and have any opinions that have the temerity to clash with Bezos’s, then you’ll get shot into space, too.The pill hasn’t been improved in years – no wonder women are giving up on itMisinformation from wellness influencers along with a conservative backlash against birth control is causing more people to stop taking the pill. “But there’s another, underlying problem when it comes to contraception,” writes Martha Gill. “It needs to improve … It’s common for women to be using the same methods as their mothers – or even their grandmothers. Why aren’t contraceptives getting better?”The week in porktriarchyBig news for anyone with a small child: Peppa Pig’s mother (Mummy Pig) is having a new little piglet. Not sure how they can afford three children in this day and age but maybe Mummy Pig has been trading meme coins. While I’m sure Elon “have more babies” Musk is thrilled by the baby announcement, it is not clear how Cardi B feels. The rapper has been in a feud with Peppa since 2020, ever since her daughter started ruining her Uggs by jumping in muddy puddles. More

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      America must not surrender its Democratic values | Bernie Sanders

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      For 250 years, the United States has held itself up as a symbol of democracy – an example of freedom and self-governance to which the rest of the world could aspire. People have long looked to our declaration of independence and constitution as blueprints for how to guarantee those human rights and freedoms.Tragically, all of that is changing. As Donald Trump moves this country towards authoritarianism, he is aligning himself with dictators and despots who share his disdain for democracy and the rule of law.This week, in a radical departure from longstanding US policy, the Trump administration voted against a United Nations resolution which clearly stated that Russia began the horrific war with Ukraine. That resolution also called on Russia to withdraw its forces from occupied Ukraine, in line with international law. The resolution was brought forward by our closest allies, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and dozens more democratic nations. And 93 countries voted “yes”.Rather than side with our longstanding allies to preserve democracy and uphold international law, the president voted with authoritarian countries such as Russia, North Korea, Iran and Belarus to oppose the resolution. Many of the other opponents of that resolution are undemocratic nations propped up by Russian military aid.Let’s be clear: this was not just another UN vote. This was the president of the United States turning his back on 250 years of our history and openly aligning himself with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. This was the president of the United States undermining the independence of Ukraine.And let us not forget who Putin is. He is the man who crushed Russia’s movement towards democracy after the end of the cold war. He steals elections, murders political dissidents and crushes freedom of the press. He has maintained control in Russia by offering the oligarchs there a simple deal: if you give me absolute power, I will let you steal as much as you want from the Russian people. He sparked the bloodiest war in Europe since the second world war.It has been three years since Russia’s brutal, unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More than 1 million people have been killed or injured because of Putin’s aggression. Every single day, Russia rains down hundreds of missiles and drones on Ukrainian cities. Putin’s forces have massacred civilians and kidnapped thousands of Ukrainian children, bringing them back to Russian “re-education” camps. These atrocities led the international criminal court to issue an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023 as a war criminal.Not only is Trump aligning himself with Putin’s Russia, he is prepared to extort Ukraine for its natural resources. While a proud nation desperately fights for its life, Trump is focused on helping his billionaire friends make a fortune excavating rare earths and other minerals.But Trump’s turn toward authoritarianism and rejection of international law goes well beyond Ukraine.The president sees the world’s dictators as his friends, our democratic allies as his enemies and the use of military force as the way to achieve his goals. Disgracefully, he wants to push 2.2 million Palestinians out of their homeland in order to build a billionaire’s playground in Gaza. He talks openly about annexing Greenland from Denmark. He says the United States should take back the Panama canal. And he ruptures our friendship with our Canadian neighbors by telling them they should become the 51st state in the union.Alongside his fellow oligarchs in Russia, Saudi Arabia and around the globe, Trump wants a world ruled by authoritarians in which might makes right, and where democracy and moral values cease to exist.Just over a century ago, a handful of monarchs, emperors and tsars ruled most of the world. Sitting in extreme opulence, they claimed that absolute power was their “divine right”. But ordinary people disagreed.Slowly and painfully, in countries throughout the world, they clawed their way toward democracy and rejected colonialism.At our best, the US has played a key role in the movement toward freedom. From Gettysburg to Normandy, millions of Americans have fought – and many have died – to defend democracy, often alongside brave men and women from other nations.This is a turning point – a moment of enormous consequence in world history. Do we go forward toward a more democratic, just and humane world? Or do we retreat back into oligarchy, authoritarianism, colonialism and the rejection of international law?As Americans, we cannot stay quiet as Trump abandons centuries of our commitment to democracy. Together, we must fight for our long-held values and work with people around the world who share them.

      Bernie Sanders is a US senator and a ranking member of the health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More

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      The ugly truth of American violence has never been plainer

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      View image in fullscreenAmong my hazier memories of early adolescence in Qatar is a screening, at a friend’s home, of an obviously pirated Betamax copy of Red Dawn. My friend’s father – most everyone’s father or mother or uncle, whoever – would, while on business trips overseas, visit the occasional video store or flea market and return with whatever films or books or albums they happened to find. It’s a haphazard, incomplete thing to consume the culture of a faraway place in this manner, like trying to divine the contours of a mouth from the texture of spittle.Red Dawn is a bad movie. Bad in a special, sincere kind of way. It’s about a bunch of teenagers who fight back against a Soviet invasion of the United States. Released in the early 80s, it belongs to a large fraternity of films in which scrappy underdog Americans fight back against the seemingly insurmountable but of course ultimately very surmountable power of the Soviet empire. In a couple of decades, the Russians would pass the baton of villainy to people who look like me, though in our case there was no real empire to speak of, and so we were mostly small-batch insidious, our specialty less tank-and-jet and more suicide-bomb-level violence. It didn’t much matter; Red Dawn with Arabs instead of Soviets for villains would have still been shit.In 2012, almost 30 years after I first watched the original, someone decided to remake Red Dawn. This time, there was no Soviet empire to invade the mainland, and so instead the Chinese would have to do. Again, it didn’t much matter – the point isn’t geopolitical fidelity, the point is 90 minutes of rah-rahing American tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds. Never back down, never surrender, that sort of thing.Problem is, China is a big market for movies. And so, at the last minute, for fear of missing out on millions in potential box office returns, the producers decided to change the villain. In the final cut of the Red Dawn remake, it’s North Korea that invades the United States. It’s always the sign of a well-crafted movie when you can change a central narrative beam in post-production and it doesn’t make any difference at all. I’m reminded of a guy in one of my old writing groups who, fearing his story didn’t have enough female representation, did a find-and-replace and changed every instance of “Sam” to “Samantha”, then went through and changed the pronouns accordingly, leaving everything else the same.View image in fullscreenAgain, it didn’t much matter. Except that it does, over time – this glaring disconnect between cultural self-image and pragmatic reality. In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire.A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. The first being the belief that one’s nation behaves in keeping with the scrappy righteousness of the underdog. The second being an unspoken understanding that, in reality, the most powerful nation in human history is no underdog, cannot possibly be one, but at least the immense violence implicit in the contradiction will always be inflicted on someone else.I’ve seen this person many times – they occupy a hallowed place in American culture, catered to by so many of the nation’s dominant cultural forces, from Monday Night Football to the Country Music Awards to the entirety of AM radio. It’s the person who in self-image professes to be a rule-breaker, untamable, wild – and in the next breath sides unquestioningly with every facet of state power. I’ve seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there’s no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn’t conformity or nonconformity – it’s self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them. The man in the action movie looks one way, the man the cops just shot in a traffic stop another.View image in fullscreenToward the end of December 2023, the South African government brings charges of genocide against Israel at the international court of justice. The case rests on Israel’s wholesale destruction of health facilities and the blocking of aid as evidence that what is being destroyed here isn’t a single terror organization, but a whole people. Much of the initial South African brief relies on the words of Israeli officials themselves, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s referencing of the complete destruction of Amalek in the Bible.Among those who have been calling for an end to the relentless killing, the development inspires a set of conflicting emotions. First, there is the basic relief of watching some official entity – any entity – do something. Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of whom have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the wellbeing of the Palestinian people demands this continue – it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.Second, there is the realization that of course it would be a country like South Africa that would take this step – a country deeply versed in the ugly mechanics of apartheid, for whose citizens checkpoints and forcefully sealed-off towns are not abstractions, but the very recent past that, from the safety of the present, everyone now claims they always opposed.Beyond relief and recognition, there is a more complicated thing – an understanding that the machinery of the west has never had much of a capacity for self-diagnosis. Who does? Who that achieves power of this scale ever does?Waiting on a western judicial institution to cast judgment on a killing spree financed and endorsed by the west means, inevitably, watching a disjointed ballet of impossible reconciling. The narrative – as enshrined in countless constitutions and declarations and charters which are so often held up as the differentiating marker of superiority of this world over the other – demands moral purity, opposition to injustice, adherence to the principle that all innocent lives are equal and deserving of dignity. The reality is that an ally of the west is killing civilians by the tens of thousands and it would be politically inconvenient to call this wrong now when for months, years, decades it has been deemed perfectly fine.View image in fullscreenAnd so we must watch the impotent pantomime of a Canadian prime minister declaring that while his government absolutely supports the international court of justice, it doesn’t support the premise of the South African case, whatever that tortured rhetorical construction is supposed to mean. We must watch the German government – whose police forces, in the name of fighting antisemitism, arrested Jewish protesters calling for a ceasefire – come to Israel’s defense at the court.In time there will be findings of genocide. There will be warrants issued, even. The structures of international law, undermined at every turn, will nonetheless attempt to operate as if law were an evenly allotted thing. As though criminality remains criminal even when the powerful support, bankroll, or commit the crime.It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest. To say: these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day; to repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they’ll come for next. But this appeal cannot, in matter of fact, work. If the people well served by a system that condones such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they’d tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.In the summer of 2014, I began writing the first draft of my debut novel, American War. It’s a piece of speculative fiction set in the 2070s and covers the aftermath of a second civil war. I never thought of it as a particularly American book, but rather an attempt to superimpose stories from the other side of the planet onto the heart of the empire. It didn’t seem like a particularly clever narrative trick on my part.Three weeks or so after I finished the first draft, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president. The novel would end up being published in April 2017 and come to be almost universally read as an exclusively American story, a literal prediction of where this country might be headed. A bidding war breaks out for the film rights. Time and again, various production company executives tell me how perfectly the novel has managed to capture this moment in American life, and I can’t help but think that the exact opposite is true. Something of American life has captured the novel. The word “dangerous” is used quite often, always as a compliment.Then, in January 2024, I receive an email from the director who was set to work on the American War adaptation, letting me know he and the production company are stepping away from the project. “Prudence suggests this is not the time for making movies about freedom fighters or terrorists (no matter which side of that argument one is on),” he writes.A few weeks earlier, a novelist I know tells me her appearance at a small book club has been canceled – the organizer tells her it’s because they “stand with Israel”. My friend is an American of half-Egyptian, half-Scottish descent. A Palestinian artist’s retrospective at the University of Indiana is shuttered. People who call for a ceasefire are demoted, fired, called antisemites and terrorist-supporters.View image in fullscreenIt all feels so petty, the stakes so low. On the other side of the planet entire bloodlines are being wiped out and here in the sheltered world we are subject to relatively pathetic indignities – loss of income, disinvitations, cold shoulders from people who in a different time might have been quite proud of themselves for having a Brown friend. Every now and then we hear about those instances when the stakes turned out not to be so low, when this passive punishment transformed into something much more active, sometimes deadly. But for the most part it’s just a constant trickle of reminders of one’s place in the hierarchy – and it is precisely because of this that it becomes so tempting to just shut up, let what’s going to happen happen to those people over there and then, when it’s done, ease into whatever opinion the people whose approval matters deem acceptable.I start to see this more often, as the body count climbs – this malleability of opinion. At a residency on the coast of Oregon, I read the prologue to this book; a couple of days later, one of the other writers decides to strike up a conversation.“I’m not a Zionist,” she says. “But you know, I’m not anti-Zionist either. It’s all just so complicated.”I have no idea what to say. I feel like an audience at a dress rehearsal.There’s a convenience to having modular opinions; it’s why so many liberal American politicians slip an occasional reference of concern about Palestinian civilians into their statements of unconditional support for Israel. Should the violence become politically burdensome, they can simply expand that part of the statement as necessary, like one of those dinner tables you lengthen to accommodate more guests than you expected. And it is important, too, that this amoral calculus rise and fall in proportion to the scale of the killing, so that one might always be able to say, “Well, we could never have known it would get this bad, but now, now everything has changed.”It’s almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die. And whatever disgust this equation, laid bare, might inspire, many know it to be true. This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest countries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.How long can the fabric of a pleasing story hold? Presented the facts of the situation without label, without real-world anchor, like actors asked to read the screenplay and pick a role, how many Americans would instinctively choose that of the Palestinian calling for an end to occupation? The South African calling for an end to apartheid? The Haitian calling for self-rule? How many would want to believe, as so much of the culture here has always strained to believe, that they side with the underdog, the downtrodden who refuses to give up, the rebel in the face of empire? And then, should the scenes be transposed back to the unforgiving reality of the world as it is, how many, knowing the limitations of the stories we tell ourselves, would just as instinctively retreat into the comforting fold of empire?One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is out now in the UK published by Canongate. It will be released tomorrow, 25 February, in the United States by Knopf, and in Canada by McClelland & Stewart.

      Spot illustrations by Ben Hickey More