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    Who can tame Trump? An unlikely candidate is emerging: the Catholic church | Simon Tisdall

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    The supreme court can’t do it – it’s packed with conservatives who owe him their jobs. Congress won’t do it – Republicans slavishly follow his orders, Democrats are ill-led and divided. For today’s White House, the concept of constitutional limits on executive power is a quaint relic. The news media, or sections of it, does its best amid constant legal threats. But, too often, they pay him off. Brave reporters who insist on asking awkward questions are insulted or silenced: “Quiet, piggy.”So who will tame Donald Trump? Who will halt his rolling constitutional coup – his ongoing evisceration of US democracy, civil rights, living standards, global reputation and moral integrity? Voters may try to indirectly rein him back in next November’s midterms (as they did recently in New York and elsewhere). But those elections are a year away. The emergency is today.What the US urgently needs now, metaphorically speaking, is a national champion, a sort of modern-day Saint George to slay the dragon, save the people and ensure the triumph of good over evil. Who, in reality, might fill this role of moral saviour?Step forward Leo XIV, the “American pope”, backed by the US conference of Catholic bishops and the clergy and grassroots activists of the Catholic church – unexpected, newly emerging standard-bearers for country-wide resistance to the Trumpist scourge. The bishops threw down the gauntlet in a “special message” this month. Inequality, immigration and civil rights are the battlegrounds on which the church, and some other Christian denominations, have begun to fight.“We oppose the indiscriminate mass deportation of people. We pray for an end to dehumanising rhetoric and violence,” the statement said. Citing the brutal tactics of immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) agents, the bishops deplored the “climate of fear” created by Trump’s policies, the profiling of vulnerable citizens, shocking conditions in detention centres and lack of access to pastoral care.Expressing a view, rooted in scripture, that Britain’s Labour government and other western countries would do well to heed, they went on: “We recognise that nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good.” But creating safe and legal pathways for migrants was the preferable, ethical solution. Human dignity and national security were not in conflict, they said.Chicago-born Leo, increasingly outspoken in opposing Trump’s “inhuman” policies since his election in May, now stands at the head of this clerical revolt. Earlier this month, he demanded ICE rethink its demonisation of migrants – more than 2 million “illegal aliens” have been involuntarily removed this year and record numbers detained, official figures indicate. He criticised lethal US strikes on suspected drug smugglers off Venezuela, warning violence would fail. And he has challenged Trump’s climate-crisis denial, telling Cop30 that God’s creation is “crying out” for action.Organised opposition to Trump among Catholic and other faith groups on the “Christian left” is spreading at grassroots level. From New Jersey to California, parish priests and pastors have led local protests, boycotts and initiatives to counter ICE’s depredations. “Catholics are particularly well positioned to lead such a movement,” wrote Maria J Stephan, a specialist in non-violent civil resistance.About 22% of US adults identify as Catholic and more than four in 10 are immigrants or children of immigrants. “Many Catholics are likely among those now living in fear of masked agents abducting them in unmarked cars to detention centres … Meanwhile, close to three million black Catholics are experiencing attacks on the voting rights act and the weakening of civil rights protections,” Stephan wrote.The church has also launched assaults on Trump’s signature fiscal legislation, accusing him of “unconscionable” cuts in healthcare and food assistance, and unjustifiable tax breaks for the better-off. “Catholic teaching compels the faithful to uphold human dignity. It is hard to conceive of the law as promoting the sanctity of every life when it cuts key programs for the needy and expands tax cuts to the wealthy,” wrote Wheaton College professor of public theology Esau McCaulley.Catholics, like other US religious groups, are far from united in opposing Trump. He won 55% of Catholic votes last year, although support has since dropped sharply. Conservative critics have lampooned Leo as the “woke pope” – a reminder that on abortion and other issues, the Catholic hierarchy often takes an anti-progressive, reactionary stance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore broadly, Christian nationalists and fundamentalists have allied with Trump and authoritarian rightwing populists in Britain and Europe to co-opt, politicise and weaponise religious belief. As in the secular sphere, the divide is stark. “Christian nationalism is particular rather than universal. It is about protecting ‘us’ against ‘them’ – the native versus the immigrant. It is about power more than love. It is about threat more than hope,” wrote commentator David Brooks. He could have been talking about Maga – or Reform UK.Increasingly erratic dictatorial behaviour, violent nihilism, exploitative religious hypocrisy and blatant corruption: this is the challenge facing the US and the world. Is Leo, speaking up for human dignity, decency and faith, the leader whose hour has come? He’s 70. He has the job for life. Trump has three years left in office. If he chooses to use it, Leo has the moral authority, political savvy and international standing to confront Trump, to positive effect, on poverty, inequality, migrants, civil rights, Russia, Palestine and other pressing issues.The American pope could do what others manifestly cannot: shame and tame the monster. To do so, he needs what Trump’s nemesis, the late Pope Francis, prayed for: the support not only of Catholics, but of “all men and women of good will”. That, and maybe a small miracle, too. After all, brave Saint George was martyred.

    Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator More

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      ‘Trump is inconsistent with Christian principles’: why the Democratic party is seeing a rise of white clergy candidates

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      He grew up on a farm in Indiana, the son of a factory worker and eldest of five children. He studied at Liberty, a Christian university founded by the conservative pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell, and recalls wearing a T-shirt expressing opposition to Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.Two decades later, Justin Douglas is running for the US Congress – as a Democrat.He is among around 30 Christian white clergy – pastors, seminary students and other faith leaders – known to be potential Democratic candidates in next year’s midterm elections, including a dozen who are already in the race. While stressing the separation of church and state, many say that on a personal level their faith is calling them into the political arena.The trend marks a break from a traditional racial divide. Whereas Black pastors who run for office are typically Democrats, their white counterparts are usually Republicans, reflecting the strength of the religious right and the party’s dominance among evangelical voters.Douglas, 41, based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is among a new generation of the Christian left aiming to change that narrative by ensuring that the Democratic brand is not associated with only college-educated urbanites, but can also connect with white working-class churchgoers.“We’ve seen Democrats time and time again sell out working-class people and we’ve seen Democrats time and time again look like liberal elitists who are looking down on people who think going to church on Sunday is a core part of their life,” said Douglas, who has been in ministry for more than 20 years. “Some people might feel judged for that.“But I also think the stereotypes of Republicans being pro-faith are bullshit too. We’re seeing a current administration bastardise faith almost every day. They used the Lord’s Prayer in a propaganda video for what they’re now calling the Department of War. That should have had every single evangelical’s bells and whistles and alarms going off in their head: this is sacrilegious.“But unfortunately, sometimes, when you’re in it, you can’t see it and it takes somebody who has an ability to communicate to that audience, to help show that you’re being manipulated.”For decades, many white Christians were not partisan and often voted Democratic, especially in the south. But by the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Democratic party’s identity was shifting toward civil rights, feminism and secular liberalism. Many white conservative Christians felt increasingly alienated from the party they had long inhabited.The racial divide can in part be traced to the mid-1970s when the Internal Revenue Service began removing tax-exempt status from private schools that discriminated by race. Conservative Christian leaders such as Jerry Falwell saw this as federal overreach and seized on abortion as an issue that could be framed in religious and political terms.Falwell’s organisation the Moral Majority used abortion as a broader symbol of moral decline alongside feminism, sex education and gay rights. His followers then felt betrayed when Jimmy Carter, the first evangelical Christian to occupy the White House, failed to pursue their priorities.View image in fullscreenThey defected to Republican Ronald Reagan, and, by the end of the 1980s, white evangelicals had become one of the most consistently Republican voting blocs, even as Black churchgoers remained loyal to Democrats. That has persisted over the past decade under Donald Trump, seen by critics as vulgar and unchristian but by supporters as a blunt instrument to defend a church under siege by a godless liberal culture.Whereas Carter earned 60% of the white evangelical vote in 1976, fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton gained only a 16% share in 2016. It was a troubling realignment that caught the eye of Doug Pagitt, a pastor and executive director of the progressive Christian group Vote Common Good.He said: “That’s not natural. That’s not just a policy change. There was something more significant going on. It’s been a two-sided effort. Republicans have oriented themselves primarily around religious voter identity and Democrats have set aside religious voter identity, including the fact that in 1992 Democrats removed from the voter access file the category of religious identity.”Pagitt said Charlie Kirk’s organisation Turning Point USA was vital in turning out young Christian voters for Trump last year: “The difference couldn’t be more stark, which is why white clergy running for office is such a big deal when they’re running as Democrats in Iowa, in Arkansas, in Pennsylvania, in California.”Trump’s first election was the trigger for a new wave of white clergy to overcome fears of being seen as partisan and run for elected office. Pagitt added: “After 2016 and 2018, a whole lot of people started thinking: ‘Hey, maybe running for office is something we should actually do.’“Few people are surprised when Raphael Warnock says: ‘I’m a working pastor at Ebenezer Baptist church.’ He comes from the Martin Luther King tradition, from that pulpit, and it made sense: people are like: ‘Yeah, of course a Black clergyman’s going to run as a Democrat.’ But when a white woman pastor in Iowa says, ‘I’m going to run as a Democrat,’ it’s a real statement. It’s taken some of these people a little while to get comfortable with the fact that they are going to be partisan.”Vote Common Good was founded in response to a schism created by the election of Trump, which left many religious people feeling “politically homeless”. The group operates as a “dating service”, connecting these voters with Democrats and non-Maga Republicans. The group will spend time in 50 congressional districts this year helping candidates meet faith voters and leaders in their districts.Douglas is a county commissioner looking to unseat Republican Scott Perry in Pennsylvania’s 10th district. But he was previously the lead pastor of a growing church that allowed LGBTQ+ individuals to participate fully in its community; over the course of a year, this developed into a huge bone of contention and in 2019 Douglas eventually lost his licence. He had to find a new house and go from one job to three jobs including driving an Uber and CrossFit coaching. He started a new church that is still operating today.Douglas recalls: “I paid the price for standing with the LGBTQ+ people. I would do it again. It taught me that doing what’s right is often costly but always necessary, and everyone deserves to be safe, respected and fully included. That’s not a religious belief. It’s a human belief that I have.”James Talarico, a Texas state representative and a 36-year-old part-time seminary student who has amassed a sizable social media following – has become an unlikely standard-bearer in the Democrats’ 2026 Senate primary.In a series of social media posts, he deploys scripture to champion the poor and vulnerable while castigating Republicans for what he casts as their drift towards Christian nationalism and corporate interests. He asked in one: “Instead of posting the Ten Commandments in every classroom, why don’t they post, ‘Money is the root of all evil’ in every boardroom?”View image in fullscreenIn Iowa, state representative Sarah Trone Garriott, an Evangelical Lutheran pastor, is seeking her party’s nod to challenge Republican incumbent Zach Nunn in what is already billed as one of the nation’s marquee congressional races.In Arkansas, Robb Ryerse, a Christian pastor and former Republican, is mounting a challenge to representative Steve Womack, adopting the slogan “Faith, Family & Freedom” – rhetoric more commonly found in Republican campaign literature.Ryerse, 50, from Springdale, Arkansas, said: “I joke sometimes that the two people who have changed my life more than any others are Jesus and Donald Trump, for very different reasons. Donald Trump is absolutely inconsistent with Christian principles of love and compassion, justice, looking out for the poor, meeting the needs of the marginalised.“But Donald Trump has also used and been used by so many evangelical leaders who want political power. He has used them to validate him to their followers and they have used him to further their agenda, which has been a Christian nationalist culture war on the United States, which I think is bad for both the church and for the country.”White clergy are deciding to run for office, Ryerse believes, in part as a response to the rise of Christian nationalism and the reality that, according to a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) survey, Trump won 85% of the white evangelical vote in last year’s presidential election.Ryerse said: “We realise, hey, our churches and the people in our churches have been duped by this guy and so rather than hope someone else will clean up the problem, what we’ve seen is a lot of pastors respond with, you know what, I’m going to jump in and I’m going to be a part of the solution.“On a more positive note, there’s also that notion we need to do something for the common good. There’s so much alignment between what I believe personally is good for my neighbour, what it means to love my neighbour, and how that aligns with what public policy ought to be.” More

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      Mamdani’s mayoral race was marred by unhinged Islamophobia. It’s not going away soon | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Pack your bags and flee, infidels: New York City has fallen to a cabal of socialist jihadists. With Zohran Mamdani to become the city’s first Muslim mayor, many are celebrating the democratic socialist’s historic win. Billionaires, Islamophobes and Republicans, however, are in the throes of hysteria. But what’s new? The New York mayoral race has been marred by bigotry so unhinged it’s almost impossible to parody.Far-right activist and unofficial Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X, for example, that “there will be another 9/11 in NYC” under Mamdani. New York City councilmember Vickie Paladino called the 34-year-old a “known jihadist terrorist”. Actor Debra Messing, meanwhile, has been having a Mamdani-induced meltdown on Instagram, posting story after story about how the puppy-eyed politician is a threat to civilization. She recently posted: “In Judaism and Christianity, we are commanded to speak the truth. In Islam, they are commanded to lie if it means spreading Islam … Now, take a look at Mamdani … He’s revealing their goal: mass conversion.”Mamdani’s goal, as he has made almost comically clear, is actually affordable mass transit and housing. One of the reasons his campaign was so successful is that it stayed laser-focused on affordability. However, Mamdani has addressed the attacks against him on a number of occasions, noting how common it is for Muslims to be branded as terrorists. And, it’s not just Muslims, I should note. Islamophobes don’t tend to differentiate between a Muslim of Indian descent who was born in Uganda, like Mamdani, and a Palestinian atheist like me. They don’t care if you’re a Christian Arab or even a Sikh. We’re all the same to them: brown barbarians.The incoming mayor has also called out how just how normalized Islamophobia is on both sides of the aisle. A couple of weeks ago Mamdani released a six-minute video addressed to Muslim New Yorkers in which he talked about how Andrew Cuomo “laughed and agreed when a radio show host said that I would cheer another 9/11”. He talked about how outgoing mayor Eric Adams said Mamdani and his followers wanted to “burn churches”. And he stated: “To be Muslim in New York is to expect indignity. But indignity does not make us distinct – there are many New Yorkers who face it. It is the tolerance of that indignity that does. In an era of ever-diminishing bipartisanship, Islamophobia has emerged as one of the few areas of agreement.”Amen to that. Islamophobia is so normalized that’s it’s not even seen as bigotry by many but, as conservative commentator and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly recently put it, “a sensible position”. It’s so normalized that trafficking in Islamophobia is not career-ending, but often career-elevating. Making breathtakingly racist comments about Muslims certainly didn’t stop Randy Fine from winning a special election earlier this year to represent Florida’s sixth district in Congress. Fine, by the way, is now leading a push to investigate Mamdani’s path to US citizenship in an attempt to denaturalize and deport him.And Islamophobia hasn’t hurt the career of Shaun Maguire, a partner at the influential venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. In July, Maguire, who has a well-documented history of making inflammatory statements, posted on X that Mamdani “comes from a culture that lies about everything. It’s literally a virtue to lie if it advances his Islamist agenda. The West will learn this lesson the hard way.” Sequoia didn’t take action against him, citing a policy of “institutional neutrality”. In the end, the only person to lose their job was Sequoia’s female COO. Sumaiya Balbale, a practising Muslim quit after Maguire’s comments; the Financial Times reported that she felt her position was untenable.In the US, Muslims make up only about 1% of the adult population. Media coverage, therefore, disproportionately affects people’s views of Muslims and support for anti-Muslim policies. And there is a huge body of research demonstrating the extent to which the mainstream media in the US has dehumanized Muslims. One 2018 study by Middlebury researchers, for example, found that Muslims were the most negatively portrayed minority in America, “principally due to reporting on foreign conflict zones”.The reason that someone like Cuomo was so comfortable insinuating that Mamdani was a terrorist sympathizer throughout the election is because the media has embedded the idea that all Muslims are terrorists. A 2019 analysis media coverage found that between 2008 and 2015 terror attacks carried out by Muslims received more than 350% more coverage in the US media than terror attacks committed by non-Muslims. That’s even though attacks by non-Muslims (largely white supremacists) were more prevalent during that timeframe.The mainstream media’s peddling of Islamophobia doesn’t just help politicians run racist campaigns; it helps them pass racist policies. There’s a direct link between the dehumanization of Muslims in the mainstream media and Trump’s Muslim ban. A direct link between decades of the media portraying Muslims as terrorists and US complicity in the genocide in Gaza. While it’s easy to call out the Laura Loomers of the world and their crass Islamophobia, it’s respectable Islamophobia that’s more insidious. The framing of newspaper headlines; the choice of which stories to cover; the way in which prestigious Wall Street Journal and New York Times columnists will casually compare Arabs to bugs and insects.The New York mayoral election may be over now, but the racism and Islamophobia underpinning it aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. However, Mamdani’s victory does provide a glimmer of hope. The first step in solving a problem is addressing it. And Mamdani has been steadfast in calling out Islamophobia and forcing people to confront it. During his victory speech, Mamdani mentioned the Islamophobic attacks against him once again, and rejected the cynical attempts by his detractors to pit Jews against Muslims.“[W]e will build a city hall that stands steadfast alongside Jewish New Yorkers and does not waver in the fight against the scourge of antisemitism,” Mamdani said. “Where the more than 1 million Muslims know that they belong – not just in the five boroughs of this city, but in the halls of power. No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election.”Inshallah. More

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      Why is Donald Trump threatening military intervention in Nigeria?

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      Donald Trump has threatened to launch a “guns-a-blazing” US military intervention in Nigeria, claiming that the west African country’s government has failed to prevent attacks on Christians.Here’s what we know so far about the unfolding situation.What did Trump claim and what was the US political context?In a post on his Truth Social account at the weekend, Trump said: “Radical Islamists are responsible for this mass slaughter” and warned that if the Nigerian government failed to stop the killings, Washington would “immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria” and could “go into that now disgraced country, guns-a-blazing”.Trump’s remarks came after weeks of lobbying by US lawmakers and conservative Christian groups urging him to designate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” (CPC) for alleged religious persecution – a list that also includes Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China.His statement reflected renewed domestic political pressure to appear tough on the marginalisation or persecution of Christians abroad, a theme that resonates strongly with parts of his rightwing, evangelical base.Do Christians face a particular security threat in Nigeria?Nigeria is officially secular but almost evenly divided between Muslims (53%) and Christians (45%), with the remaining population practising African traditional religions. Violence against Christians has drawn significant international attention, and is often framed as religious persecution. However, most analysts argue the situation is more complex.In parts of central Nigeria, deadly clashes between itinerant Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farming communities are rooted in competition over land and water but exacerbated by religious and ethnic differences. The herders often claim reprisals for the killing of their people and cattle, while local communities see the attacks as ethnic cleansing targeting their settlements.Priests and pastors have increasingly been kidnapped for ransom, as they are viewed as influential figures whose worshippers or organisations can mobilise funds quickly. Some analysts say this may be a trend driven more by criminal economics than religious discrimination.What is the wider security situation in Nigeria?In the north-east, Boko Haram and its splinter groups such as Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have waged an insurgency since 2009, killing tens of thousands and displacing millions.In the north-west, heavily armed criminal gangs – often labelled “bandits” – carry out mass kidnappings and raids that affect both Muslim and Christian communities. These groups have expanded operations into north-central Nigeria, exploiting weak state presence and local grievances.“Christians are being killed, we can’t deny the fact that Muslims are [also] being killed,” Danjuma Dickson Auta, a Christian and community leader from Plateau state in the Middle Belt, told Agence France-Presse.Meanwhile, in the south-east, separatists seeking to revive the defunct state of Biafra have been linked to violence against government institutions and civilians, with most victims being Christians. In all, thousands have been killed across multiple fronts, creating overlapping humanitarian and governance crises.How has Nigeria responded to its security crises?Successive Nigerian governments have struggled to contain these threats and security forces are stretched thin across multiple fronts. They are also often accused of human rights abuses that previously halted US support – most notably under the Leahy Law, which restricts arms sales to forces accused of violations.In the absence of state police and proper intelligence collaborations at all levels of the security hierarchy, many communities remain unprotected, and vigilante groups have filled the vacuum in some states.How has Nigeria responded to Trump?In a statement on Sunday, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not name Trump directly but emphasised that Nigeria “is a democracy with constitutional guarantees of religious liberty”. He said characterising the country as religiously intolerant “does not reflect our national reality”.Meanwhile, his presidential spokesperson, Daniel Bwala, described Trump’s post as “a miscommunication” and expressed hope that both leaders would “iron out” their differences if they meet. He insisted that “a data-driven assessment” rather than “isolated reports and social media videos” should guide international conclusions.Bwala added that any military action “would only happen if it is a joint action with the Nigerian government”, reaffirming Nigeria’s sovereignty.Still, concerns are mounting that Trump’s remarks could affect bilateral relations, particularly aid and sales of arms, or be exploited by secessionist groups such as the Biafra Republic Government in Exile, which is already lobbying in Washington. More

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      JD Vance repeats comments he wants wife Usha to convert to Christianity

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      JD Vance is doubling down on comments he made about wanting his wife, Usha Vance, to convert to Christianity – remarks that drew political backlash from some quarters.At an event with Turning Point USA at the University of Mississippi to honor the conservative group’s slain founder Charlie Kirk, an audience member questioned the US vice-president about how he sees the links between American patriotism and Christianity.“Why are we making Christianity one of the major things that you have to have in common to be one of you guys? To show that I love America just as much as you do?” the audience member asked, after pointing out that Vance’s wife, Usha, is Hindu and they are raising their children in an interfaith marriage.Vance said that his wife grew up in a Hindu household “but not a particularly religious family” – and noted that when he met his wife they would have both considered themselves agnostic or atheist.Vance converted to Catholicism in his 30s after being raised in a loosely evangelical family. He was baptized into the church in 2019 just as he started to become a prominent supporter of Donald Trump, who chose Vance as his running mate when he successfully ran for a second presidency in 2024.“My views on public policy and what the optimal state should look like are pretty aligned with Catholic social teaching,” Vance, a former US senator for Ohio, said at the time of his baptism. “I saw a real overlap between what I would like to see and what the Catholic church would like to see.”At the Turning Point USA event, Vance said that he and his wife eventually decided to raise their kids as Christians.“Our two kids go to Christian school. Our eight-year-old just did his first communion a year ago. That’s how we decided to come to our arrangement,” Vance said, to roaring applause. “As I’ve told her, and as I’ve said publicly, and as I’ll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends: do I hope, eventually, that she is somehow moved by the same thing I was moved by in church? Yes. I honestly do wish that, because I believe in the Christian gospel and I hope that eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.“But if she doesn’t,” Vance went on to say, “God says that everybody has free will, so that doesn’t cause a problem with me. That’s something that you work out with your friends, your family, the person you most love.”Usha Vance has publicly stated that she doesn’t intend to convert to Christianity. In June, she told conservative blogger Meghan McCain that while the family has made church “a family experience … the kids know that I’m not Catholic”.“They have plenty of access to the Hindu tradition, from books that we give them to things that we show them to visit recently to India, and some religious elements of that visit,” Usha Vance said.The executive director of the Hindu American Foundation was critical of Vance’s remarks, telling the New York Times that the vice-president was “basically saying that … this aspect of [Usha] is just not enough”.“That’s a lot of uncertainty in the community,” Suhag Shukla said to the outlet. “This just added kind of fuel to those fears.”After his comments Wednesday, Vance replied to a social media post – which has since been taken down – that said “it’s weird to throw your wife’s religion under the bus, in public, for a moment’s acceptance by groypers”, a term for certain far-right extremists.Vance called the comment “disgusting” and an example of “anti-Christian bigotry”. He said that his Christian faith “tells me the Gospel is true and is good for human beings”.“[Usha] herself encouraged me to re-engage with my faith many years ago. She is not a Christian and has no plans to convert, but like many people in an interfaith marriage – or any interfaith relationship – I hope she may one day see things as I do,” he wrote.“Regardless, I’ll continue to love and support her and talk to her about faith and life and everything else, because she’s my wife.“Yes, Christians have beliefs. And yes, those beliefs have many consequences, one of which is that we want to share them with other people. That is a completely normal thing, and anyone who’s telling you otherwise has an agenda.” More

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      Move over, gender studies: the conservative tide coming for US universities

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      A small conservative revolution has swept the humanities at some US colleges and universities. Its vanguard are new programs, called centers or institutes, that have begun cropping up at schools in recent years. Often funded by outside donors or earmarks from state governments, the programs tend to bear names featuring words such as “civic”, “freedom” or “classical”.These centers do credible teaching and research, and are usually not explicitly political. But their goal, to counter what conservatives see as hegemonically leftwing teaching, arguably is.Their rise has created a peculiar irony: just as the economic utility of the humanities is being questioned, and academic departments are gutted on budgetary or ideological grounds, some schools have found money for heady, old-fashioned curricula emphasizing the “great books” of western civilization and the literature of what used to be called the western canon.While students arriving at some universities this fall may have thought Ancient Greek to be dead and French lit struggling for survival, students at these new centers are discussing the philosophical ideas of the ancient world, Christian thought, the Enlightenment and the founding of the American republic, and reading the literature of William Shakespeare and John Milton.Students at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, for example, can choose this semester from courses such as “What Is the Common Good?”, “Just War”, “Great Books of the Ancient World”, “Liberty and Order” and “The Rule of Law”.View image in fullscreenAs the Trump administration attempts to bend major universities to its will, and many Republican politicians accuse higher education of being a hotbed of leftwing ideological indoctrination, schools are feeling pressure to demonstrate that their faculty and curricula are hospitable to conservatives.William Inboden, a conservative academic and the executive vice-president of the University of Texas at Austin, argued in a recent essay that the American people have lost trust in US higher education, in part because of “a sense that American universities as institutions have deviated from, or even turned against, the fundamental values of the nation and what was once quaintly known as ‘the American way of life’”.University administrators and state governments have embraced these centers as an end-run strategy, said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin who until recently taught in the US. Academic departments tend to resist outside reforms, Faggioli said, and freestanding “centers” are a way for university administrations to add conservative-coded spaces to their schools while avoiding messy confrontations with existing departments.Some of the best known of these programs are Stanford’s Civics Initiative, conceived in 2017 and expanded in 2021, and the University of Texas’s School of Civic Leadership and Civitas Institute, founded in 2023. The University of Arizona’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom dates to 2008, but recently hired several new faculty members.Earlier this year, the government of Utah went even further – not only establishing by state law a Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State University, but giving that center statutory control over the university’s entire general education curriculum. Students there will take new required courses on the “foundational primary texts” that “continue to shape society’s self-understanding, the American experience and the modern world”.According to the legislation, they will study the most famous of the dead male Europeans – such as Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville – as well as Virginia Woolf and Chinua Achebe.View image in fullscreenAnd last month the National Endowment for the Humanities announced a $10.4m grant, the largest in its history, to the Tikvah Fund, a conservative Jewish organization, for a project that will include the “development of university courses … to be offered in partnership with new western civilization BA programs at various major academic centers”.For some academics whose research interests or views have not been in vogue, the changing winds may come as welcome news – at least by the relative, and still mostly bleak, standards of the academic job market.Musa al-Gharbi is the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, and a sociologist who studies politics, culture and institutions. He noted that these centers are hiring people “who do decent work, who do serious scholarship for the most part”, but in some cases “probably wouldn’t have a job in academia were it not for this”, because their work is too conservative, too interdisciplinary or too “outside the lines” to appeal to typical academic departments at mainstream universities.The Hamilton school’s faculty at the University of Florida include a scholar working on a “history of conservative critics of higher education”. The Civitas Institute’s fellows include economists, law professors and philosophers of a conservative, libertarian or pro-market bent – including John Yoo, the lawyer who, while a White House official under George W Bush, famously wrote a series of legal memos justifying the use of torture to extract information from suspected terrorists.In some cases, these new centers have been pressed on unwitting or resistant universities; some faculty at Utah State University have sharply criticized the new center there and accompanying curricular reforms as a kind of hostile takeover of the internal affairs of the university. Similarly, the University of Florida has said that it did not ask for the Hamilton school, according to reporting by Inside Higher Ed.View image in fullscreenThese centers bear some resemblance to the “para-educational” institutes that began springing up at some prominent universities starting about 10 years ago: independent centers funded by conservative donors and sited near universities, but not affiliated with them, to provide extracurricular courses and events about conservative, classical or Christian ideas. They include the Morningside Institute at Columbia, the Abigail Adams Institute at Harvard and the Zephyr Institute at Stanford. This month, the Morningside Institute is holding discussions on Dante’s Inferno, St Francis of Assisi and Roger Scruton, the conservative British philosopher.Unlike those programs, these new centers are formally part of universities; like them, however, they tend to reflect an implicit view that the American humanities – allegedly consumed by ideas from critical theory, Marxism, postcolonial thought and the like – have drifted too far left, suffer from ideological conformity and promote an excessively negative view of the US’s history and place in the world.In an email, Josiah Ober, a professor of political science and classics who co-directs Stanford’s Civics Initiative, noted that state governments have directly established some of these new centers and that it would be mostly “fair to say that the motives of the legislators in question … include a concern for viewpoint diversity in university faculties perceived as being overwhelmingly more progressive than conservative”.Al-Gharbi, the sociologist, believes that ideological conformity and a lack of conservative views are a genuine problem in higher education, but that the “reception” of these centers is complicated by the fact that the right is elsewhere engaged in attacking academic programs, such as women’s, ethnic and area studies, whose ideas they find objectionable.That makes conservatives’ enthusiasm for plurality of thought feel hypocritical, he said – and also risks making these centers more isolated from their broader universities “than might be ideal for them to achieve their actual goals”. He added: “One of the dangers of these centers is that you could end up with the same kind of groupthink that they were concerned about, just going in the other direction.”Yet he and other academics also said that it would be wrong to assume that the revival of interest in the western tradition will only attract people who are politically conservative.“We have all types,” said Charles McNamara, a professor of classics at the University of Minnesota. Some “classics undergraduates wear Oxford shirts, some of them wear cutoff shorts”.View image in fullscreenSimilarly, Dhananjay Jagannathan, a professor of philosophy at Hunter College, said that he knows someone “who was hired by a small, private institution for one of these rightwing-coded ‘great books’ programs, and he is a socialist, and I don’t think he hides that about himself”. Jagannathan is “cautiously optimistic” about the programs; at the end of the day, he said, “it’s good if more talented young classicists have jobs”.Zena Hitz is a tutor at St John’s College, a school in Annapolis and Santa Fe that has taught a strict “great books” curriculum since 1937, and the founder of the Catherine Project, a non-profit that organizes discussion groups on the great books for members of the public. She sees the new centers appearing at universities as embodying an unusual mixture of goals – both functioning as “a kind of beachhead within the university where conservative ideas are welcome”, she said, and representing a “strategic move” to protect old-fashioned humanities fields, especially at public universities in conservative states “that would normally just be slashing the crap out of that stuff”.Although the great books curriculum may be perceived as conservative or elitist in the current context, Hitz noted that it springs from a historical movement that possessed a “radical egalitarianism”. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, miners and other blue-collar workers raised funds for libraries where they could read and discuss works of literature and political theory.Similarly, the great books curriculum has historically enjoyed unusual bipartisan support, she said. “Conservatives like it because it’s the western canon, and it’s old, but liberals and progressives like it because the style of education is open-ended and honors the individual’s development.”A few years ago, she co-taught a course on the Bible; as is not unusual at St John’s, about a third of her students were devout Christians, many from homeschooled backgrounds, and another third were gender-nonconforming students with generally activist leftwing politics. Despite some tense moments, it was an “amazing” experience, she said.Al-Gharbi said that even if these centers actually wanted to exclusively hire conservatives, that might be difficult. “I’ve talked to some people who have set up these schools and run them,” he said, and they acknowledged that the recruiting pool for right-of-center scholars is small. Conservatives, in recent decades, have tended to self-select out of academia.“They hope that over time, the pipeline could get a bit wider,” he said, “than is the case at present.”Similarly, even the small bump in academic hiring that these centers may bring will not mean a major sea change, McNamara said, for classics and similar fields. “We have not had a good job market in the humanities since the 2008 financial crisis. And if there happen to be two extra jobs at an institute that’s appeared at one state university somewhere, I don’t think that really quite qualifies as a particularly robust job market.”Quoting Aristotle, he added: “One swallow does not make a summer.” More

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      Jewish New York’s reckoning with Zohran Mamdani: ‘He’s become a vehicle for our tensions’

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      Securing Jewish votes was never going to be a straightforward ride for Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral hopeful who is on track to become the most prominent Palestine supporter to assume elected office in the US – in the most Jewish city outside Israel, no less.The notion that he could sparks outright panic in some quarters.“To be clear, unequivocal, and on the record: I believe Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the New York Jewish community,” Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of the Conservative Upper East Side Park Avenue Synagogue said in a sermon last weekend, a line endorsed by more than 1,000 American rabbis and echoed in the op-ed pages of some of the US’s biggest papers.Cosgrove called on his listeners to band together to persuade other Jews to prioritize their Jewish selves and “love of Israel” in the election. His proposed targets? “The undecided, the proudly Jewish yet unabashedly progressive, the affordability-anxious, Netanyahu-weary, Brooklyn-dwelling, and social media-influenced – who need to be engaged.”What Cosgrove overlooked, however, is that many of them already are engaged. In fact, Mamdani is engaging them.View image in fullscreenMamdani’s outreach comes at a moment of flux. Over the summer, as the campaign was heating up, famine was spreading through the Gaza Strip and photos of children starving to death dominated the news. Hundreds of rabbis signed letters urging Israel to let more aid into the besieged territory. Clergy who call themselves Zionists were arrested protesting outside the Israeli consulate in New York; others spoke in increasingly forceful terms from the pulpit in their weekly sermons. In a rare collaboration, Jewish groups that usually avoid tarring themselves by association with one another overlooked longstanding divisions on Israel when they staged a Midtown Manhattan protest calling for an end to the war.As the tenor of the Jewish American conversation on Israel was shifting, a July poll came out showing that 43% of Jewish New York planned to support Mamdani – signaling a level of enthusiasm so high as to portend a transformation in its commitment to pro-Israel politics. Among Jewish voters under 44, support rose to 67%.Mamdani, the 34-year-old Democratic socialist, has been advocating for Palestinian rights since his university days, including through boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel. Israel is not the primary predictor of American Jewish politics; many Jewish voters are drawn to Mamdani, or repelled by him, by the affordability agenda at the center of his vision. But most American Jews continue to report an attachment to Israel, which today is still deeply embedded in religious practice and communal life.Mamdani has proved deft at deploying his youthful charisma and an earnest desire to build bridges to tough crowds – like New York City’s capitalist class, which is rankled by his commitment to a rent freeze and tax increases, and the New York police department, which he once called to defund (a position he says he no longer holds).View image in fullscreenHe is trying with hesitant Jewish voters, too. Fortified by a Jewish left that includes the many young Jews active in the movement for Palestinian rights, Mamdani has stepped up his outreach to more mainstream Jewish spaces through a series of meetings, often under strict conditions of privacy imposed by community leaders nervous about blowback. He has listened to anguished accounts of social isolation, antisemitism and attachment to Israel; committed to a large increase in anti-hate crime programming; and tried to explain where his politics come from.It has not always been smooth – rabbis who have invited him to their synagogues have faced criticism; others have made clear he is not welcome. But it has also offered opportunity for respectful and nuanced discussion on a topic that flares nerves. One Brooklyn resident who heard Mamdani speak at his synagogue was disappointed that Mamdani did not more forcefully repudiate pro-Palestinian rhetoric he finds hateful. He also reported being impressed by Mamdani’s intelligence and plans to improve the city. “I need to decide which self I will raise to the ballot when voting,” he said.Phylisa Wisdom directs the New York Jewish Agenda. Her group advocates for the values of “liberal Zionist” Jews who believe in Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and who she says represents the majority of Jewish New Yorkers. It is a group that, she says, is going through an identity crisis, prompted by the horrors in Gaza and the recognition that the two-state solution, a value of totemic importance to them, has largely receded into the realm of fiction.“There are a lot of people who couldn’t ever imagine voting for an anti-Zionist mayor and who also could never have imagined their own feelings about Israel and the Israeli government that they are having right now,” she said. “They agree [with Mamdani], for example, that Benjamin Netanyahu should be behind bars.”Of the roughly 1 million Jews living in and around New York City, nearly one-fifth are either ultra-Orthodox, who are concentrated in Brooklyn and tend to vote Republican, or Modern Orthodox, who are more integrated into secular life and tend to divide their votes between the two major parties. Other Jewish voters – Conservative, Reform, nondenominational and secular – tend to overwhelmingly support Democrats.Mamdani may not be able to depend on those traditional voting patterns. The July poll was a high-water mark for Jewish support; an October Fox News poll found that a plurality of Jews – 42% – may vote for Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor running as an independent after being trounced by Mamdani in June’s Democratic party primary. (The Fox poll found 38% of Jewish New Yorkers plan to vote for Mamdani.)Cuomo has made a forceful play for Jewish voters. He has declared his “hyperaggressive support” for Israel, regularly proclaimed that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism” and called Mamdani a “terrorist sympathizer”, going so far as to suggest he would celebrate another 9/11. (Cuomo later claimed he didn’t intend to suggest as much.) He also joined Netanyahu’s legal team in the international criminal court, a decision he recently tried to qualify around the time that a New York Times poll found voters prefer Mamdani’s approach to Israel and Palestine.Cuomo’s messaging is eagerly fanned by Donald Trump and his acolytes who have unleashed all manner of Islamophobia. Elise Stefanik, the Republican member of Congress, regularly attacks Mamdani, recently calling him “a full-blown jihadist who has called for the genocide of Jews” after he gave an indirect answer in a Fox News interview to a question on whether Hamas should disarm. Laura Gillen, a Democratic member of Congress from Long Island, said Mamdani was “pro-Hamas” and “unfit to hold any office in the United States”. (Mamdani has neither called for the genocide of Jews nor defended Hamas, and responded to the wave of hateful rhetoric in an emotional speech on Friday.)View image in fullscreenMore progressive congregations and Jewish activist groups have rejected both the attacks against Mamdani and the vision of Judaism put forward by more conservative voices, such as Cosgrove, who view support for the Israeli state as a central tenet of the religion.“I’ve been surprised by rabbis who are fighters for justice and willing to be arrested while protesting ICE – more of them than expected are fearful of a Mamdani mayoralty. I fear that might have to do with him being Muslim,” said Ellen Lippmann, the founder of Kolot Chayeinu, a Brooklyn congregation that has hosted Mamdani.Mamdani, whose campaign did not respond to questions for this story, does not need a majority of the Jewish vote, estimated to comprise about 15% of the city’s electorate, to win on 4 November. But Jewish support will be symbolically significant given the level of vitriol from high places. Moreover, Mamdani’s ability to make inroads with the broad middle of Jewish voters distressed by the carnage in Gaza inflicted by the Israeli state will signal whether a real political realignment – certainly in Jewish politics, but with implications for the Democratic party broadly – is truly under way.Interviews with nearly two dozen people who have had some involvement in Mamdani’s Jewish outreach – including undecided voters, rabbis who have hosted him in their synagogues (along with others who would never), and community leaders who have brokered outreach – reveal that his candidacy is forcing Jewish voters to grapple meaningfully with positions on Israel and Palestine that once disqualified candidates from major office but are now moving squarely into the mainstream.Last month, a who’s who of the Jewish left gathered on a Brooklyn rooftop for the Mazals, an annual fundraising event benefiting Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ). Colorful blazers framed “Jews for Zohran” T-shirts; keffiyehs dotted the multigenerational crowd. A number of honorees – among them M Gessen and the New York State Tenant Bloc – spoke, interspersed with music from the Moroccan Jewish singer Laura Elkeslassy and a klezmer-infused house band. The crowd erupted at every mention of an arms embargo on Israel, a free Palestine, and Zohran Mamdani.New York City’s Jewish left – organized by groups including JFREJ, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and IfNotNow – spent years on the margins warning that the Jewish establishment’s support for an increasingly oppressive state was paving the road for catastrophe and perverting the religion. Now, there was a sense that the Jewish left had finally arrived.JFREJ, which counts 6,000 members, mostly organizes on local issues; Madmani’s agenda aligns naturally with the group’s focus on such issues as housing and immigrant rights, as does the way he links justice for vulnerable New Yorkers to justice for Palestinians. Audrey Sasson, JFREJ’s executive director, does not contain her excitement over his success. Primary night, she said, “was hands down one of the biggest wins I’ve experienced as an organizer in my life, in terms of its potential material impact, potential transformative impact, and the way in which it brought together a massive coalition of organizations and individuals across the city”.View image in fullscreenAlong with JVP and others canvassing under the Jews for Zohran banner, JFREJ volunteers have phoned or knocked on the doors of tens of thousands of Jewish New Yorkers’ homes to campaign for Mamdani, focusing on terrain where they see potential, like Manhattan’s Upper West Side or Riverdale in the Bronx. Alicia Singham Goodwin, JFREJ’s political director, said the shift in his direction has been dramatic over time: “We’re routinely seeing 50% or higher Zohran support whether we’re at the doors or on the phones.”At the Mazals, Mamdani was honored with Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and his former rival in the mayoral race – and spoke in soaring terms of his partnership with the activists present:
      I look at this room and I see so many faces that have not only been a part of this campaign from the start. We hold a common belief in the shared dignity of every person on this planet, without exception, and a refusal to draw a line in the sand, as it so often is done when it comes to Palestinian lives.
      Lander, a longtime JFREJ member, is a self-described liberal Zionist and sort of spiritual lay-leader for liberal Jewish New Yorkers anguished over their relationship to Israel. He recently described the war on Gaza as a genocide for the first time.He is also a wingman for Mamdani’s efforts to earn their support. He, too, ran in the primary, in a rank-choiced system that incentivized collaboration between candidates. Toward the end of the race, the two cross-endorsed each another before embarking on a kind of buddy road trip across the city, putting forward sunny vignettes of Jewish-Muslim partnership that were celebrated by voters as a burst of light in an otherwise dark political landscape.Over a coffee in Brooklyn last month, multiple constituents interrupted our interview to express tearful gratitude for the role he played in Mamdani’s primary victory.“It speaks to a hunger for something different in our politics,” said Lander, an affable and warm conversationalist – “an archetypal Jewish dad”, as comedian Ilana Glazer described him when she called him on stage at the Mazals.View image in fullscreenHis support for Mamdani has created a permission structure for some.“I think I’ve played a useful role for families where the kids ranked Zohran first and me second in the primary, and the parents ranked me first and Zohran fifth, or maybe weren’t initially comfortable ranking him at all,” he said. “Our cross-endorsement created an opportunity for kids and parents to talk to each other, without it feeling so desperately zero sum.”Lander’s current mission is manifold. He has called on his fellow Jews to reckon with war crimes committed in their names. He wants to get Mamdani elected with as much Jewish support as possible. And as “Zionist” increasingly becomes a slur on the broader pro-Palestinian left, he wants to see a movement that is more welcoming to people just starting to question previous commitments to Israel.“In the same way that I tried for many years to get liberal Zionists to be open to anti-Zionists in their institutions and midst, I want to get anti-Zionists to not treat everyone who does believe in two states like a racist.”Many of the attacks on Mamdani exacerbate the definitional war that marks this issue in political discourse – a rhetorical swamp where words are so contested that they lose all meaning. In writing, I try to avoid use of the word “Zionist” outside quotes because it’s hard to know what people mean when they say it. The prevailing view on the left is that being a Zionist implies support for ethnic cleansing or unequal rights; others insist it speaks broadly to the belief in flourishing Jewish life in the Holy Land. “Antisemitism” opens another can of toxic worms; a decades-long, organized effort to conflate hatred of Jews with opposition to the Jewish state is now fueling the Trump administration’s dismantling of American universities. On the pro-Palestinian side, “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea” are just two protest slogans that engender responses that speak as much to the anxieties and projections of the people who hear them as they do to the intentions of those who shout them (which also are not always clear).Perhaps recognizing such vocabulary poses a barrier to meaningful coalition building, Mamdani has attempted to bring more careful nuance to his positions.He has said he will discourage use of the intifada protest slogan, explaining he has come to understand why some Jews hear it as a call to violence. He repeatedly invokes international law to back up his positions – in characterizing Israel’s war as a genocide; in justifying his intention to seek Netanyahu’s arrest should he travel to New York, in compliance with an ICC arrest warrant; and in condemning Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023.View image in fullscreenWhen asked – and he is asked with great frequency – whether he supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, he responds by summoning a framework that seems designed to be hard for liberals to argue with. “I would not recognize any state’s right to exist with a system of hierarchy on the basis of race or religion,” he said in the first mayoral debate when, on cue, Cuomo trotted out the “right to exist” line. “And part of that is because I’m an American who believes in the importance of equal rights being enshrined in every single country.” He has also said he does not support the right of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan to exist as countries that prioritize Muslim citizens. (The “right to exist” construction does not really come up in contexts outside Israel; Edward Said called it “a formula hitherto unknown in international or customary law”.)It is an ideologically consistent view that is out of the bounds of old politics in New York City, whose mayors have long been expected to pay official visits to Israel. (Mamdani’s refusal to commit to visiting the country was previously its own line of attack. He has noted that even if he wanted to visit, he likely would not be allowed in given an Israeli law banning entry to boycott supporters.)“He’s very clearly not a Zionist” in a country where elected officials are expected to be, Sasson said. That his politics are no longer viewed as radical “is a real shift. That is a reckoning that is complicated for people.”Lander echoed the idea as we discussed a concern, expressed by a number of people interviewed for this story, that Mamdani will refuse to hire Zionists for his administration. “There hasn’t been a bar on Zionists in the New York City government, nor should there be,” Lander said. “There has been a bar on anti-Zionists, and there’s not going to be. That’s hard for people.”In fact, at a recent synagogue Q&A, Mamdani explicitly said Zionists would not be banned from his administration. This, along with his characterization of the Hamas attack of 7 October as a war crime rather than an act of legitimate resistance, has caused anger among some voices on the pro-Palestinian left, including some who have gone as far as to denounce Mamdani as a Zionist.In August, Lander accompanied Mamdani to a private event in the Brooklyn home of documentary film-maker Sandi DuBowski, where more than 80 Jewish New Yorkers came to hear the candidate’s answers to questions submitted in advance. Only truly undecided voters attended, many of them Modern Orthodox Jews well to the left of their staunchly pro-Israel – and increasingly Republican – communities. “It felt like an incredibly rare moment for people who really came with a lot of hesitation and a lot of reservations,” Dubowski said.Several attenders, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of damaging personal and professional relationships, found Mamdani intelligent and personable. They said they do not believe him to be antisemitic, and are horrified by the rampant Islamophobia directed at him.“I want to apologize to you for what my community’s been putting you through,” one woman reportedly said at the start of the event. “It’s not acceptable.”They also described an acute sense of isolation and a sense of abandonment by a progressive movement they once felt a part of but now feel has spit them out over their commitments to Israel.For much of their demographic, emotional identification with Israel is fundamental to what it means to be Jewish – a complex symbiosis between the state and American Jewry that rapidly accelerated after 1967, snuffing out what were once prominent Jewish voices of dissent from Zionism. Today, US synagogues that feature Israeli flags on their pulpit and incorporate prayers for the state and its soldiers into their liturgy are the norm.“Every part of my life is embroidered with that place,” one woman who was at the event told me. She wanted Mamdani to validate that relationship and was disappointed.View image in fullscreen“I want him to understand that that brand makes me feel not welcome, because it calls me a Nazi,” she added, referring to elements of the pro-Palestinian movement she believes support violence against Israelis and their supporters. She said she still does not know how she will vote.“I hate Netanyahu, I hate this war, and I’m appalled every single day at what is being done in Gaza and in the West Bank,” another attender said. “And yet, when someone tells me that Israel shouldn’t exist, or that it’s a settler colonial state from the beginning, or that people should go back to Europe, or that I shouldn’t wear a Star of David because it’s a symbol of a fascist state – that makes me absolutely bonkers.”The attenders I spoke to expressed concern about the practical implications of Mamdani’s support for BDS in a city with extensive institutional and economic ties with Israel. Since the mayor has some authority over the City University of New York, they fear Mamdani may appoint trustees who will end students’ option to study abroad in Israel or cut other academic exchanges. “The same way that you can’t really do junior year abroad in Iran or North Korea – we could add Israel to that list of nations,” a third attender fretted.Mamdani did not allay those concerns, they said, saying he has not given thought to whom he will appoint to the CUNY board.“I think that a lot of people in the camp that he’s in think that American Jews are simply privileged white people who like to whine about something that happened 75 years ago,” the second attender said. “That’s not what is happening. People are triggered and terrified.”When I asked her what they are terrified of, she responded: “People are terrified that the 50-year golden age for Jews in America is over, that it is becoming OK, both on the left and on the right, to dislike Jews, that it no longer has any stigma attached to it, that Israel behaving the way it’s behaved has given people an excuse to say, ‘look, Jews are terrible.’ without feeling like they’re bigoted.”Despite those misgivings, she plans to vote for Mamdani: “You gotta vote for the Democrat in the general,” she said. Her husband will write in Lander.Efforts to bring Mamdani into Jewish spaces have seen some bumps. At least one Conservative synagogue pushed back forcefully against speculation he would visit on Yom Kippur. When he attended services in Tribeca led by Lab/Shul, a broadly progressive community with wide-ranging views on Israel, he got a huge ovation – eclipsing the welcome for Lander and congressman Jerry Nadler, both of whom flanked him in the front row – but one that was followed by a more tortured, private response from a less vocal minority.“Some people said: ‘It destroyed my day,’” said Rabbi Amichai Lau Lavie, the leader of Lab/Shul. “The word against him on the street and from people I know is that ‘he won’t see us.’ I can see how on some levels that’s misguided, and I can also see where it comes from.”Elsewhere, Mamdani has been increasingly welcomed with open arms – in spaces more politically aligned, like the progressive, nondenominational Brooklyn synagogue he attended on Rosh Hashannah, and an Israelis for Peace vigil on the 7 October anniversary, but also in more outside-the-box campaign stops, like a Sukkot sit-down with Hassidic Satmars. He also recently published a full-page ad in Yiddish-language newspapers read by many ultra-Orthodox voters, outlining his plans to combat antisemitism and make childcare free – both issues of concern to these voters.A 12 October event at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, in the leafy neighborhood of Park Slope, seemed a particular win for civility. The Reform synagogue is one of Brooklyn’s largest, and among the more mainstream stops on Mamdani’s Jewish outreach tour. Senior Rabbi Rachel Timoner had invited Mamdani to sit for a private Q&A with congregants and almost 400 showed up. Several dozen angry protesters, some in Maga hats, gathered outside. (Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa met with congregants last week; Cuomo will do the same on Tuesday.)View image in fullscreenThe congregation – like most others – has been roiled with division since 7 October. It counts among its members Senate minority leader and pro-Israel stalwart Chuck Schumer, who has enraged progressives by not endorsing the nominee of his own party for mayor. The congregation displays Israeli flags but includes anti-Zionist members – people who are “really upset” by Mamdani’s stance on Israel and others who have canvassed for him, according to Timoner, who by many accounts works overtime to keep irate congregants praying under the same roof.Multiple attenders said the event was calm and substantive. Mamdani heard from congregants upset about the intifada slogan and listened to accounts from members about antisemitism in their kids’ schools. Half the time was spent on local issues having nothing to do with Israel.Two people who were in attendance said they felt Mamdani dodged questions about antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian movement, pivoting to generalities about universal rights and safety. They also said he spoke with inspiring passion about improving New York City.“It was deeply respectful on all sides,” Timoner said of the discussion. “I think that people felt heard and that people also listened.”In his sermon, Cosgrove, the Upper East Side rabbi, envisioned a revival of the “Great Schlep” – that 2008 effort led by the comedian Sarah Silverman to send young Jews to Florida to get their “bubbies and zaydes” to vote for Barack Obama – but in generational reverse. Now, said Cosgrove, it is incumbent on older Jews to sound the alarm about Mamdani to their children and grandchildren.To some, his exhortation exhibits a misread of Mamdani’s message and his appeal. “In your sermon you suggest that Jews need to prioritize the safety of other Jews over non-Jews, to prioritize the safety of Israeli Jews over Palestinians,” Mik Moore, one of the creators of the original Great Schlep who now runs a similar effort called Mensches for Mamdani, said in a statement addressed to Cosgrove.“Maybe this is why you are struggling to understand how Mamdani, as a Muslim anti-Zionist, could ever care as much about Jewish New Yorkers as Muslim New Yorkers. You have projected your value system on to him, and don’t trust him to act on behalf of those outside his own group.”Ultimately, the anguish over Mamdani’s candidacy – the anguish that Cosgrove is attempting to redirect to fear – is not really about him. It is a reflection of an American Jewish population in crisis, scarred by the intracommunal psychodramas that have raged since 7 October and contending with what it means to associate with a state that has fallen so far down the world’s moral ladder.“It plays out like the Jewish education of Zohran Mamdani,” said one person involved in efforts to broker his outreach events, describing the displays of grievance often directed his way. By many accounts, Mamdani has listened patiently.“He’s become a vehicle for our tensions and conflicts,” said Lander. “It’s fair to ask him, as the person is going to be our mayor, to reflect that he’s going to represent everyone, even people who he strongly disagrees with, on some important issues. It’s not fair to ask him to heal our collective wounds and traumas.”View image in fullscreenA mainstream Jewish shift on Israel is not likely to make a material difference to Palestinians anytime soon. Netanyahu has spent the last decade throwing his lot in with Republicans and Christian Zionists, forsaking the liberal Jews who once provided Israel’s backbone of support. A tenuous ceasefire is formally in effect in Gaza, but largely on Israeli terms that do not impose real requirements on it to stop killing Palestinians – as long as it does so at a lower intensity – let alone ensure Palestinian freedom.But shifts in US public opinion might, over time, put an end to the so-called “Palestine exception”: the idea that support for liberal and progressive causes can exclude the cause of equality for Palestinians. If the US continues to hold fair elections and continues to exert leverage over Israel, that will make a difference – eventually.“There’s definitely a sea change in the Jewish community, and it’s being mapped along the sea change in the wider electorate,” Sasson of JFREJ said.“We’re building a multiracial, multifaith coalition across the city to address the most pressing issues around economic and racial justice that affect all of us, Jews included. But the thing is, you can’t fight for those things and ignore what’s happening in Gaza.” More

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      From scapegoats to city hall: how New York Muslims built power and shaped Zohran Mamdani

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      Life was never the same for New Yorkers after the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, with every resident coping with the trauma and devastation of that day.But for Muslim New Yorkers there was an added burden: the suspicion and sometimes physical harm now lurking around every corner.Vigilante violence against Arabs and Muslims exploded across the city and around the country. In what feels very much like a precursor to today’s ruthless ICE raids, mass arrests swept up Muslims on flimsy immigration pretexts, with many of them being held under extremely abusive conditions. The contemporary national security state was born atop the vestiges of Muslim civil rights.Twenty-four years later, the situation in New York appears completely different. The country’s largest city is now poised to elect its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist who won the Democratic slot on the ranked-choice primary earlier this summer. What accounts for this profound change?The practically unstoppable rise of the man with a smile as wide as the West Side Highway can certainly be explained by his oratorical gifts and political skills. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others, has described him as a “once-in-a-generation leader”. But Mamdani’s success is also part of a larger story of how young Muslim New Yorkers have been organizing themselves after the dangerous situations they were in after 9/11.Spurred by the necessity to counter a rising tide of Islamophobia, young Muslim New Yorkers have spent years developing political power in the city, building local political institutions, and leaning into a different kind of politics, one that embraces identity yet also moves beyond its sometimes shallow appeal. That movement has been growing quietly and steadily for years. Mamdani is now its best and most accomplished expression.View image in fullscreenAs the Muslims of New York have been organizing, their numbers have also been steadily growing, making it impossible to ignore Muslim voters for anyone who wants to run for office and win. The city probably has about 1 million Muslims (there are no official numbers tallied for religious groups), which is about the same number as Jews in New York City.The Council on American-Islamic Relations estimates more than 350,000 Muslim New Yorkers of that million are registered to vote, though only about 12% voted in the 2021 mayoral election. That is also now changing. Muslim and south Asian voter turnout in the mayoral primary this summer was up 60% compared with the 2021 primary, according to the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. And despite what rival Andrew Cuomo claims when he stated last month that “the Muslim community are not socialists,” it is clear that Muslims are a growing political force pushing the Democratic party to the left on fundamental issues.“People are looking at Zohran as being a very unique candidate, and he is,” said Saman Waquad, president of the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. “But his prominence in this election is built on the work of Muslims over the past decades, in the post-9/11 era.”That work began immediately after the 2001 attacks. Within days, the government began using federal immigration law to arrest anyone it suspected of having a connection with terrorism, which often meant little more than being an immigrant and having a Muslim name. Hundreds of people were detained, and the justice department refused to release their names, leaving families scrambling to look for those who had in effect been disappeared into jails around the country.Fahd Ahmed, executive director of Desis Rising Up and Moving (Drum), a community-based social justice organization of working-class south Asians and Indian Caribbeans, recalled the moment. His organization, he said, was doing “the work of finding people in jails, organizing them on the inside, organizing their families on the outside, and warning community leaders about working with the FBI and the NYPD”.View image in fullscreenMost efforts in the years after 2001 were often reacting to crises rather than building alternatives. And the crises were many. The Bush administration began requiring all adult males from two dozen Muslim-majority countries to register with the government. The FBI interviewed Muslim community members as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began. Spies and informants infiltrated mosques and community organizations across the city and around the nation. The Obama administration’s Terrorism Screening Database ballooned to more than 680,000 names. Through the whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA was revealed to by spying on ordinary Americans, including Muslim Americans. Working with a CIA officer, the NYPD engaged in a years-long campaign of warrantless surveillance of Muslims Americans across the city.Muslim New Yorkers had little influence in city politics during those years. The only Muslim elected to city council was Robert Jackson, who won his seat in 2001 and who subsequently became a trailblazer for politically minded young Muslims. (In 2018, Jackson became the first Muslim elected to the state senate.)But Jackson’s victory was unique at the time, and by the time the 2013 mayoral election season rolled around, Muslim New Yorkers were still searching for more structural solutions to battle government repression targeted at them and fight for political recognition.The Muslim Democratic Club of New York was formed that year, and the club co-sponsored its first mayoral forum, where all the major Democratic candidates, including Bill de Blasio and Christine Quinn, showed up. Each candidate was asked about incorporating Muslim holidays into the public school calendar (a campaign some Muslim New Yorkers began in 2006, when a state regents exam was held on the same day as a major Muslim holiday) and if they believed warrantless surveillance of Muslims was unconstitutional. Only two of the seven candidates found the spying unconstitutional.Mamdani’s rise to the top of New York city politics began with the Muslim Democratic Club of New York. Ali Najmi, its co-founder, is a lawyer who specializes in election law. In 2015, he attempted a run for city council. Najmi’s childhood friend, the rapper Heems, had endorsed him in the race, which was enough to inspire Heems fan Mamdani to trek to Queens to volunteer for Najmi’s campaign. In 2017, the Palestinian American Lutheran pastor (and Democratic Socialists of America member) Khader El-Yateem ran for a seat on the council. Mamdani, who joined the DSA around this time, was his canvassing director. And in 2018, Mamdani managed the left-leaning political journalist Ross Barkan’s run for state senate.Najmi, El-Yateem and Barkan all lost their races, but as Najmi told the newspaper amNewYork: “Zohran’s ascension is the culmination of a bunch of people losing, myself included. And you learn lessons, you learn as you go. There’s institutional knowledge that was passed.” In 2021, Shahana Hanif became the first Muslim woman elected to city council.Mamdani served on the board of the Muslim Democratic Club between 2018 and 2019, shortly before winning his own seat as a state assembly member in 2020. Soon after assuming office, he joined a 15-day hunger strike organized by the Taxi Workers Alliance to win debt relief for taxi drivers who, out of an exploitative system, owed enormous amounts of money on the medallions which authorized them to drive their cabs.View image in fullscreen“In a city where a large number of taxi drivers are south Asian, there’s a natural affinity between Zohran and taxi drivers,” said Fahd Ahmed of Drum. “And Zohran used that to cultivate a relationship with the Taxi Workers Alliance. Similarly, with us. After he was elected to the state assembly, he reached out to us to say: ‘I know you all have historically worked on [the issue] of [warrantless] surveillance of Muslim communities. What can my office do?’”It would be a mistake, however, to assume Mamdani bases his politics on identity over values. “Other candidates have been south Asian or Muslim, but they’ve not succeeded in capturing the community’s vote the way that Zohran has,” Ahmed said. “He instead uses identity as a way to get to people’s issues.”Asad Dandia, a community organizer and friend of Mamdani’s, echoed Ahmed. “Zohran and I both came of age when 9/11, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street and NYPD surveillance of Muslims all occurred before we turned 20,” Dandia wrote in an email. “We were only a year or two out of college when Trump won the 2016 election. These are the events that shaped us.”View image in fullscreenDandia has personal experience with the NYPD spying on his life. When he was 19 – years – old, Dandia co-founded a charity in New York, Muslims Giving Back, to aid poor families throughout the city. The charity was soon infiltrated by a paid informer for the NYPD, Shamiur Rahman, who later admitted that he had been recruited by the police to spy on Muslims, for which he was cleared of a drug arrest and paid first $1,000 a month and then $1,500 a month. He was to “create and capture” opportunities for Muslims to say suspicious things about terrorism and report them to the police. He never saw anyone he “spied on do anything illegal, not even littering”, he later wrote.In retrospect, Dandia said, he should have seen this coming. Rahman’s behavior was odd. He would arrive late to meetings and photograph the sign-on sheet. He would take pictures of food being placed in cars to get license plates in the photos. He began posing strange questions, asking if killing innocent people is justified. Dandia eventually joined and won a lawsuit against the NYPD, which in 2017 established a new office of civilian oversight over the police force. He began thinking of the connections between surveillance capitalism and Islamophobia and, in 2020, he co-founded a Muslim caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America.“We could not hide the fact [from the world] that we are Muslim,” Dandia said, referring to himself and Mamdani. “Yet we do not anchor our politics strictly on these identitarian terms. Adequate housing is a ‘Muslim issue’, public transit is a ‘Muslim issue’, and universal childcare is a ‘Muslim issue’. Zohran fights for these issues because they advance the common good for all of us, Muslim or not, and align with both democratic socialist principles and Islamic values.”Campaign fundraising statistics bear out how Mamdani’s affordability message is resonating beyond the confines of the Muslim community. According to Open Secrets, a non-partisan group tracking money in US politics, the Mamdani campaign has raised $16.8m, with about 90% of Mamdani’s donors contributing less than $250. The average contribution is $98. By contrast, the average contribution to the Cuomo campaign is $615, yet Cuomo has raised only $12.6m. Cuomo-supporting Super Pacs, on the other hand, have received 11 times as much money – including millions from Airbnb ($10m), former mayor Michael Bloomberg ($8.3m) and DoorDash ($1.8m) – than the Super Pacs that support Mamdani or oppose Cuomo.But the most powerful political action committee of the season is arguably the city of 87,000 volunteers for Mamdani who are knocking on voter doors across the five boroughs talking about building an affordable New York City with the Muslim democratic socialist nominee.View image in fullscreenOver the last decade, there has been a rising number of Muslim American politicians who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America or lean very deliberately left: Mamdani, Rashida Tlaib, Omar Fateh, Zaynab Mohamed, Shahana Hanif, Ilhan Omar, Abdul El-Sayed. It is not the first time a religious minority in the US played an outsized role in the left. For decades, the American Communist party was made up of a disproportionate number of Jewish Americans.“The left has been one of the only places that has been generally open, receptive and supportive of Muslim communities since 9/11,” said Ahmed. “In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and then in the anti-war movement around Iraq and Afghanistan, there was nobody else standing with us against our repression. Many of us grew into our organizing at that nexus.”Waquad is a member of the DSA and president of the Muslim Democratic Club. For Muslims, she explained, the DSA is “an alternative to the mainstream Democratic party”. The general election “showed how disenfranchised a lot of voters felt. Muslim voters felt pretty much ignored.“The feeling that I had submitting my ballot for the general election was one of sadness. There [wasn’t] much of a choice in what we could vote for,” said Waquad.“Whereas when I submitted my ballot for the primary for the mayoral race, I cried,” she said. “I’m not just voting for somebody who is Muslim. I’m voting for somebody that I truly believe is the best candidate right now for the city and its people.” More

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      Peter Thiel’s off-the-record antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon

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      Peter Thiel famously isn’t into academia. And yet, in four recent off-the-record lectures on the antichrist in San Francisco, the billionaire venture capitalist has made a good case for credentialing.In these meandering talks, Thiel is clearly aiming for the kind of syncretic thinking he so relished in the books and lectures of the philosopher and professor René Girard, whom he knew at Stanford University and whose work he has long admired. Unfortunately, more often than not, Thiel ends up with something that reads like Dan Brown.Thiel has previously workshopped his talks on Armageddon at Oxford and Harvard, at various theology departments, and with a few unfortunate podcasters. For a man so vocal in his disdain of our institutions of higher education, he seems to spend an awful lot of time in them.Overall, the picture of Thiel that emerges in these lectures is someone desperately trying to disidentify from their own power. “You realize,” he tells his audience when interpreting a particular Japanese manga, “in my interpretation … who runs the world is something like the antichrist.” Here’s a man who, together with a couple of fellow Silicon Valley freaks, helped return a sundowning caudillo to a presidency he is obviously unsuited for, and who uses the awesome might of the US government to remake society and the world. A man who funds the companies that harness your data and determine who gets doxed, deported, drone struck. Who funds far-right movements that seek to remake the very face of liberal democracy.Immanentizing the KatechonTo be fair, Thiel has blazed a successful path outside of the ivory tower. Ungodly rich by age 30, the founder and investor has since spread the gospel of not going to college. He believes that higher education is a bubble. In his first book, co-authored with his Sancho Panza, David Sacks, he attacked US universities as bastions of diversity group-think, with slipping standards. He has evidently stuck to this diagnosis, even though admissions rates, scholarly output and Nobel prize recognition would seem to contradict it. To Thiel, even then, Jerusalem was definitely not build’d here, among these dark Satanic diploma mills.In September, Falter in Austria published a long profile about the theologian Wolfgang Palaver, who is one of those academics Thiel used as beta testers on his antichrist material. Palaver says it makes sense to him that Thiel is seeking out academics: “It’s really difficult in his environment: who tells him the truth to his face?”There is something deeply funny imagining a rapt audience, cowed by Thiel’s legend and wealth, following the billionaire into the autodidact’s private cosmos, in lectures whose bullet points were certainly more robust at the start of lecture one than at the close of lecture three. Thiel is lost in a bizarre thicket of his own references and preoccupations. You picture the theological faculty at the University of Innsbruck sitting politely through disquisitions about the manga One Piece, Alan Moore’s Watchmen, or gripes with specific effective altruists in Silicon Valley. In one lecture, Thiel identifies “the legionnaires of the antichrist”, such as the researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky and former Oxford professor Nick Bostrom. In another, he considers Bill Gates as an antichrist candidate. With enemies like these, who needs friends?But such is Thiel’s odd relationship to academia. For someone who dislikes universities and researchers, he has a hard time staying away. Thiel, who received a bachelor’s degree from Stanford in 1989 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992, was deeply impressed with the thinking of Girard, his Stanford professor. He has spent decades promoting Girard’s “mimetic theory”, including attributing his famous investment in Facebook to “betting on mimesis”. His current “Whore of Babylon” tour started with a presentation at a Paris conference devoted to Girard’s work.Thiel clearly admired Girard not just for his arguments but for his style of argumentation. These lectures don’t so much feel inspired by Girard’s ideas. They feel like his attempt to do Girard.Mimetic style over substanceGirard’s books were breathtaking in their range. They were deeply eclectic, but managed to be a mad dash through the western canon. The connections the philosopher made could seem to come out of left field, but at times the absurd swerves were held together by the sheer force of his erudition. Most importantly, Girard was always having a conversation all his own: his work could look like theology, but it wasn’t ultimately that religious; his work could look like philosophy, but wasn’t really in dialogue with academic philosophy. In San Francisco, Thiel appeared to be cosplaying this kind of performance.One of the things he replicates is the airtight and airless insularity of Girard’s thought. Thiel seems to take on board objections only to then barrel ahead with his initial instinct. Palaver is quoted in Falter as saying that he is “no longer the professor, and he’s no longer the graduate student”. It’s a funny remark because watching Thiel take feedback makes him seem exactly like a graduate student about to crash out of his comprehensive exam.In his telling, Thiel is already a part of an intellectual community. He loves telling his audience what he “always” says, he refers to standard answers and even a “spiel” that he gives. He seems a little bored with himself. Based at least on the recording, the actual audience in San Francisco seemed puzzled by Thiel’s disquisitions.Like his inspiration Girard, Thiel is prone to speaking in absolutes that, in order to make any sense at all, have to be quite a bit less than absolute. “In all times and all places, people want to always scapegoat the Christian God for our problems,” he said in his second lecture. Big if true, as they say.What is Thiel actually arguing? He suggests that we live in an age obsessed with apocalyptic thinking (keep that “we” in mind, it’ll become important later). “It’s AI, of course, it’s climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war,” “maybe fertility collapse”, he says.His overall point is that the current fixation on the apocalypse gets it wrong in two different directions: we’re too apocalyptic and “not apocalyptic enough”. Not apocalyptic enough because we tend to think of the various plausibly forecast ends of days as mutually exclusive: either climate change will get us, or nuclear war. The antichrist is Thiel’s attempt to think about the end of the world holistically.But we’re also too apocalyptic: in each lecture, Thiel comes back to the idea that “the Antichrist will come to power by talking about Armageddon nonstop.” Or, as he puts it in the second lecture, “the Antichrist might present himself or itself or herself as the Katechon”, meaning that withholding element that forestalls the apocalypse. This lecture is more or less a gloss on Carl Schmitt’s assertion in Nomos of the Earth, that the Katechon was what allowed for the identification of Christianity with the Roman empire. The doubleness of Thiel’s apocalypse – that what halts the apocalypse might in fact bring about the apocalypse – allows the billionaire to tilt boldly at any number of big questions: empire, Christianity, progress, and Silicon Valley’s dominance. Each of these, to Thiel, is ambiguous, might stymie or accelerate Armageddon.Warring with windmills, confusion and contradictionSo who or what is the antichrist? Thiel is admirably and uncharacteristically specific on this matter in a scattershot sort of way. The antichrist wants to erect a one-world state, which largely seems to mean any kind of global regulatory regime. Longtime Thiel watchers will recall his preoccupation with sovereignty and seasteading. The antichrist appears to be any force opposing that. The antichrist also is people who are against AI, especially those who seek to regulate it. If you were hoping for Al Pacino chewing scenery, this might be a bit of a letdown. It does lead, however, to the insight that the antichrist is “someone like Greta”, as in Thunberg, the climate activist, but “not Andreessen”, as in Marc, the venture capitalist.“I think Andreessen is not the antichrist. Because, you know, the antichrist is popular.” Respect where it’s due: that is a good line.But let me return to Thiel’s list of possible apocalypses: artificial intelligence, climate change, bioweapons, nuclear war, fertility collapse. The list is unintentionally revealing. Thiel is probably not wrong to say that people are pretty worried about the climate crisis. But the examples of AI, bioweapons and fertility collapse in particular suggest that Thiel has confused the world’s worries for those of a very recherché set of aging tech entrepreneurs he hobnobs with. And the antichrist, too, seems very Silicon Valley-coded. This suggests, I think, that in Thiel’s mind there are two cosmic forces warring over creation itself, and they both consist of Peter and his friends.Thiel thinks that by both increasing knowledge and particularizing knowledge, modernity has made thinking of the totality more difficult. He has observed there is “this sort of incredible fragmentation of knowledge”. We do more science than ever but without true insight. In the “post-modern multiversity”, “science continues to grow like a colony of rabbits”, but since the inputs, in terms of people, degrees awarded, investment, etc, keep increasing, “you have to suspect that there are diminishing returns,” he says.So for those playing along at home: Thiel is both a “classical liberal” who just thinks in terms of inputs and outputs and wants the university to be as efficient as it can possibly be. And he is a fire-breathing theologian who thinks that the university is failing at its job of considering the totality, venerating at the altar of hyperspecialization and postmodern deathworks. He is the libertarian offended at researchers “stealing money” and “not doing anything”, he says in one lecture. And he is the campus critic he was during his Stanford days, the one who refers to former Harvard University president Claudine Gay as “the DEI person”.How any of that mishmash fits together isn’t as important as why it goes together: it serves as a justification for Thiel’s own autodidactism.What does it all mean? Anything?It’s important to note that he holds himself to a vastly different standard than just about anyone else: he thinks just raising some questions about the antichrist might be useful in its own right – which may be true for all I know. But then he wants to quantify what everyone else contributes to knowledge in a way I can only describe as Doge-like. It would be difficult to count the monetary value of theorizing about Armageddon, as he is doing while pontificating about the cost-ineffective academic from the other side of his mouth. The rules appear to be different for Thiel, at least in his own mind. And such is Thiel’s odd relationship to power.One is reminded of the scene in Apocalypse Now where Martin Sheen’s character comes across a platoon and asks who’s in charge here. “Ain’t you?” Ain’t you running the world, Peter? If it isn’t you, who is?If we want to look at Thiel as something he can’t seem to see himself as – as, in the end, a pretty standard specimen of homo siliconvalliensis – then what is interesting in these lectures is not the amateurish breadth and ambition. It’s the narrowness. Thiel’s vision of the antichrist may not be holistic enough. In the first lecture, where Thiel proposes that the catastrophes we see in the various end-of-days narratives in the Bible are threatening to play out literally in our day. He says we shouldn’t think of “the apocalyptic prophecies in the Bible … in a mystical way”, but almost as “rational scientific calculations of what people will be able to do to themselves in a world in which human nature is not changed or improved”.But that is surely not what Revelation is about: the end of days in the Bible is in there because it attests to a view of the cosmos, its alpha and omega, its entire meaningful constitution. Otherwise, it is just a bunch of trumpets and locusts and people who give suspiciously good speeches. In the end, it isn’t clear how meaningful these four lectures make the antichrist or indeed the apocalypse.It’s not even clear how they make meaning. During the Q&A after the second lecture, someone in the audience asked Thiel whether he was moving away from his erstwhile teacher Girard – which is the central question, though perhaps not for the reason the questioner thinks. It gets at what Thiel is aiming at with these lectures. Perhaps some of their surface strangeness is explained by the fact that Thiel is ultimately engaging in some kind of Girardian play with doubles, mirrors and imitation. Not least among those would be the fact that the description he gives of the antichrist might also apply to one Peter Thiel.So maybe getting stuck on the details means we are missing the hidden, esoteric meaning within? But in that case, what’s the point of these lectures? As he warns in his third lecture, “excessive esotericism means you don’t really think coherently enough about your ideas; they get lost and you communicate them too subtly”. It feels like Thiel is keeping both options open. He gets to tap dance between “I said what I said” and “you don’t understand what I’m doing here”. He seems to want to stand apart from his own immense power – apart from his own positions, apart from his own attempts to make himself understood – in something like bemused contemplation.body{–primary-text-color: #121212;–secondary-text-color: #707070;–tertiary-text-color: #707070;–primary-bg-color: #ffffff;–secondary-bg-color: #f3f3f3;–tertiary-bg-color: #f6f6f6;–primary-line-color: #333333;–secondary-line-color: #dcdcdc;–border-divider-color: #dcdcdc;–axis-color: #bababa;–primary-button-color: #121212;–primary-button-text-color: #ffffff;–primary-button-highlight-color: #333333;–highlight-color: #ffe500;–highlighted-text-color: #121212;–info-color: #00b2ff;–news-grey-01: #121212;–news-grey-02: #707070;–news-grey-03: #a1a1a1;–news-grey-04: #bababa;–news-grey-05: #dcdcdc;–news-grey-06: #f3f3f3;–news-core-01: #005689;–news-core-02: #0094da;–news-core-03: #c70000;–news-core-04: #23b4a9;–news-core-05: #494949;–news-core-06: #cca36e}@media (prefers-color-scheme: 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