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      They were teacher and student in exile. Now this Democrat and Republican face off in Ohio

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      Almost 32 years ago, in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal, children sat cross-legged around a small blackboard propped on the dirt, repeating the alphabet in sing-song rhythm. Among them was Bhuwan Pyakurel, a fourth-grader, and his teacher, Kamal Subedi, barely 18.“He was tall, thin and very talkative,” Subedi said, now 52. “We didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. So we went hut to hut, gathering kids to learn.” In the early 1990s, thousands of Bhutanese refugees had arrived across seven camps in the region, each day bringing more families, more children and more uncertainty.Three decades later, the former teacher and student live a few miles apart in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, and on opposite sides of a US political divide. Pyakurel is now a Democratic city councilman and the first Bhutanese refugee elected to public office in the United States. Subedi, his former teacher, is running for another seat on the council as a Republican on 4 November.Their race has split the small but influential Bhutanese community in suburban Columbus. But the debate over Subedi’s candidacy has spread far beyond Reynoldsburg. Across Facebook and WhatsApp groups from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, members of the Bhutanese diaspora are weighing in – posting hundreds of comments, endorsements and rejections.Some see Subedi’s candidacy as a sign of maturity, proof that refugees can belong to and shape either party. Others, including Pyakurel, see it as a betrayal, aligning their story of exile with a party that, in recent years, deported dozens of Bhutanese refugees and cut social programs many families rely on.“When people with refugee backgrounds like Subedi run on the Republican platform, I see it as them standing against me, my children, my community, and my values,” Pyakurel said. “It feels like they’re rejecting the ideals this country was built on. If you support that kind of politics, you should be ashamed.”Subedi argues that change comes from participation. “If we never join the Republican Party, we’ll always be isolated from it,” he said. “If we take part, we can help shape the narrative to include us.”Pyakurel was nine when Bhutan carried out the mass expulsions of its Nepali-speaking minority, forcing his family into the Goldhap refugee camp in eastern Nepal. Life there was defined by restrictions, no legal work, little movement and constant uncertainty. “You feel that otherness every day,” he said. “It plants a question in you: why don’t I get the same chance everyone else does?”That chance came in 2009, when his family resettled in Colorado. There, through the Family Leadership Training Institute at Colorado State University, he learned the mechanics of civic participation.“It was the first course that made me think about running for local office,” he said.Then in 2014, Pyakurel, then 35, and his family moved to Reynoldsburg, joining hundreds of other Bhutanese families. Two years later, he became a US citizen. “When I took the oath, the judge said, ‘You have two duties: vote and consider running for office.’ I walked out in tears.”In 2019, when longtime Republican councilman Marshall Spalding sought re-election, Pyakurel decided to challenge him.View image in fullscreen“When he decided to run for office, I just thought that was great,” said Steve Walker, 80, a longtime colleague and adviser. “To have the potential of a Bhutanese representative on the Reynoldsburg city council – that meant a lot. There’s a significant Bhutanese population here.”Once a predominantly white and Republican suburb, Reynoldsburg’s population of roughly 40,000 people is now far more mixed politically and ethnically. Census data show the Black population rising from 10% in 2000 to 26% in 2020. Approximately 8,000 Bhutanese refugees have made their home there, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the city’s population.On the night Pyakurel announced his candidacy he felt his chest tighten as he climbed the steps to the microphone. “I don’t remember exactly what I said,” he recalled, laughing. “But people started clapping before I’d even finished.”Pyakurel threw himself into the campaign the same way he had rebuilt his life as a refugee, one door at a time. “When I told them I was a refugee and why I wanted to serve, most people listened,” he said. “But sometimes they said things that were cruel or racist.”His story still resonated with neighbors, with local Democratic leaders, and especially within the Bhutanese community.That year, Pyakurel made history as the first Bhutanese refugee in the United States to be elected to public office. He won the ward three seat on the Reynoldsburg city council, defeating Spalding by a comfortable margin – proof, he says, that “refugees don’t just find a home in America, they help shape it for the better.”Among Pyakurel’s earliest supporters was one of his former fourth-grade teachers from the Goldhap refugee camp, the soft-spoken Subedi. “I was so proud of him and everything he’d accomplished.”After Nepal, Subedi’s family had resettled in Dallas, Texas, in 2008. “The first year was very rough,” he said. “We arrived in the middle of the recession. There were no jobs. I had a young son and my parents to take care of.”He worked briefly for Catholic Charities in Dallas, then received a full scholarship to attend graduate school at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where he completed a master’s in computational science in 2014. That same year, Subedi and his family migrated to Reynoldsburg, where he teaches physics as an adjunct professor at Columbus State Community College and runs a few small businesses.Unlike his former student Pyakurel, who found his values aligned with the Democratic party, Subedi says he chose the Republican party because of his refugee background, not despite it.“When I finally had to choose a party, I felt Republican principles matched the values I grew up with, Hindu faith, family, discipline, preserving language and culture,” he said. “We left Bhutan to protect those things.“It’s a mistake to assume refugees and immigrants automatically support Democrats. Many of us don’t,” he added.In 2024, Subedi and a group of Bhutanese residents campaigned for Donald Trump in Ohio – a key swing state that Trump carried with 55% of the vote. Now, Subedi is running for city council as a Republican even as the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has led to the deportation of dozens of Bhutanese refugees, including several from Columbus.“I’ve already said deporting Bhutanese refugees is wrong. It’s one part of my party I don’t agree with,” Subedi said. “But when I compare that with open borders – where desperate migrants and even criminals cross without screening – I think both are serious problems.”His candidacy has exposed deep divisions within the Bhutanese community in Reynoldsburg.Charan Chamlagai, 42, who once canvassed for Pyakurel, sees Subedi’s Republican run as a positive step. “Subedi brings a different perspective,” he said. “He wants to change things from within and help our community understand the policies that affect us. Some Republican ideas align with our cultural and religious values. We should give him a chance.”Others, though, see Subedi’s campaign as a betrayal.“He’s supporting the Trump administration that deported our people,” said Harry Adhikari, 45. “By running as a Republican, he’s supporting the same system that would deport his own brothers and sisters. He’s not fixing potholes in our community – he’s creating them.”Subedi acknowledged that the deportation of Bhutanese refugees was fundamentally un-American. At the same time, he argues that deportations are not unique to the Trump administration.“Deportations didn’t start with President Trump,” he said. “President Obama deported more than three million people. This is a federal system.”When pressed on the fact that no known Bhutanese refugees were deported under previous administrations, Subedi hesitated. “Deporting Bhutanese refugees is wrong,” he finally said. “I don’t like it.”Decades after he was his student, Pyakurel has been outspoken about Subedi’s campaign.“He’s a Democrat, and in politics it’s fair to challenge your opposition,” Subedi said. “But I think Bhuwan and others have mischaracterized me. They blame me for deportations I had nothing to do with. They treat me like an enemy. Bhuwan won’t even shake my hand any more.”When asked what might change his view, Pyakurel paused before answering. “If Subedi publicly denounced Trump, I’d support him.”But Subedi hesitated when asked if he would take that stand.“I don’t think it would be wise to denounce him openly,” he said. “He’s our commander-in-chief. And there are things Trump has done that I believe are good for this country – to protect it, to save it.” More

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      CDC employees on chaos of being fired, rehired and fired again: ‘stuck in limbo’

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      As layoff notices swept through the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on 10 October, Aryn Melton Backus thought she would be safe this time.Then she received the email: she was part of a major reduction in force (RIF) during the US government shutdown. It wasn’t the first time she’d been fired from the CDC by email, nor the second.Backus has been terminated and then reinstated three times this year.Her experience demonstrates the inefficiencies and tumult at US health agencies as leaders continue cutting into the workforce and ending programs vital for Americans’ health.The latest round of shutdown RIFs is illegal, according to the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which is among the unions representing federal workers that are suing the government to stop the layoffs. A quarter of the CDC has now been cut by multiple rounds of layoffs.Some employees who had to work without pay through the shutdown received RIF notices; others who were furloughed learned they would never return to their jobs. Employees who were supposed to be protected from RIFs by an ongoing lawsuit received them anyway. The human resources department at CDC was brought back from unpaid furlough in order to process about 1,300 layoffs – and then their own, as the entire HR department was eliminated.Some of the gutted departments are required by law to continue their work, despite having no employees. The ethics office and the institutional review board (IRB) were also ended, which means the CDC will no longer have oversight on ethical violations and research protocols.The entire library staff at the CDC, an integral part of research and recommendations, was terminated. The Washington office, which developed policy briefings and provided information to Congress members, was eliminated as well.The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, the national health and nutrition examination survey, and the staff focused on suicide prevention also suffered layoffs.The multiple cuts across the agency mean the CDC is not able to carry out much of its work, even as some employees remain, said Karen Remley, who previously ran the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities and was a state health official in Virginia.In April, for instance, the entire team behind the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (Prams) was cut, which means a critical tool for understanding maternal and child health is now missing.“You can’t take out Prams and keep the registry and have all that work happen,” Remley said. “This artificial separating and splitting really means the work on the local level stops.”Meanwhile, CDC employees have endured attacks and harassment.On 8 August, a gunman fired 500 rounds of ammunition at the CDC headquarters, killing David Rose, an officer, and traumatizing agency employees and their families.Health agency employees have been doxed, with their identities and personal information revealed. Matthew Buckham, Kennedy’s acting chief of staff, was co-founder of the group that maintains a “DEI Watch List” targeting HHS employees. The agency has also been roiled by high-profile departures.“At the highest level of leadership in the CDC, there are no public health or medical professionals left to help guide CDC recommendations,” said Abigail Tighe, a former CDC employee and founding member of the National Public Health Coalition, which held a recent press conference where Backus and other former CDC employees spoke.“Billions in contracts and direct funding to state and local public health agencies has been canceled or clawed back, and the American people are cued up to suffer. It is hard to succinctly put into words what the decimation of the CDC means for everyday Americans.”The first round of layoffs at CDC came on Valentine’s day. Probationary employees – who were in the first year or two of their jobs, either because they had been recently hired or had moved to new positions – along with established senior employees received notices.A judge ruled in September that the probationary terminations went too far and some of the employees were reinstated and placed on administrative leave.In the meantime, RIF notices went out on 1 April, eliminating entire offices such as the office on smoking and health, where Backus worked. She didn’t even receive the notice at first because her access to the CDC network, including email, had been cut off.The lawsuit specifically prevents employees like Backus from being reorganized into new offices or terminated from the agency, she said. That’s why she thought she would be safe this time – but she still received a third layoff notice. That notice was rescinded after less than 24 hours. About 700 employees were reinstated, while 600 remain terminated.“I still remain on administrative leave, unable to do my job,” Backus said. “My situation just highlights the chaos and confusion that federal employees have experienced over the past year. I’m stuck in limbo, following court cases, gathering information, and trying to figure out what my next steps should be.”Charlotte Kent, former editor-in-chief of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), said: “We have so many people who, if they’ve been [un-RIFed], have been on administrative leave. We have the inefficiency of so many government resources, our taxpayer dollars, going to fight the illegal activities that have been done by the administration.”The MMWR was among the departments completely gutted and then reinstated – which was particularly surprising, because the highly regarded scientific journal was specifically included in the president’s budget request for the first time this year.“To have it cut at this point is just shocking,” Kent said.“It’s like being in a strange game where there’s no rules,” said one former CDC employee who was RIFed on 10 October and spoke anonymously to avoid reprisal from the Trump administration. “It’s honestly like Squid Games – we don’t know what’s going to happen next.”John Brooks, who retired last year from the CDC after 26 years and served as the chief medical officer for several emergency responses, said the RIFs demonstrated a “stunning level of incompetency”. Firing the CDC Washington staff means “Congress no longer has a means of direct access to the agency it funds when it needs information or briefings”.The Trump administration reportedly says about 700 of the terminations were a coding error.“It is clear to us that this was not a coding error,” said Tighe. “This RIF was carried out just as all the other ones have been, where they fire as many people as they think they can get away with, there’s public outcry, there’s outcry from congressional members and then they bring back the things that they think people cannot get over.”She called the firings “an intentional attack on the American people and the public’s health”.“Our country is on an uncertain and frankly frightening path,” Tighe said. “We would love to see Congress step in.” 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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      Trump is toying with a third term. Don’t expect the constitution to stop him | Moira Donegan

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      The news cycle has continued in a predictable arc. Last week, Steve Bannon, the far-right provocateur and one-time Donald Trump adviser, said in an interview with the Economist that the president would seek an unconstitutional third term. “Trump is going to be president in 28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that,” Bannon said. (He seemed to be referring to Trump winning the presidential election in 2028 – Trump’s current term will last through 20 January 2029.) “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”Like clockwork, Trump commented on the idea soon after, telling reporters following him on Air Force One as he flew from Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo: “I would love to do it.”Initially, he said: “I haven’t really thought about it. But I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.” (This is not true; Trump’s approval has sunk considerably, with a new poll released this week showing him at a net -19 point approval rating, the lowest of his second term.) Still, Trump said he would be legally able to run again in a scheme in which he was placed on the ticket as a vice-presidential nominee, only for the puppet placed in the presidential slot to resign once taking office, thereby granting him the presidency. But he suggested that he would prefer to run himself, casting aspersion on the vice-presidential campaign option. “I don’t think people would like that,” he said. “It would be too cute, it wouldn’t be right.” In fact, it would also be unconstitutional, violating the 12th amendment’s prohibition on anyone ineligible for the presidency to be elected as vice-president.In a notable departure from his being loath to disagree with the president about anything at all, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, on Tuesday seemed to pour water on the idea of a third Trump term, noting, correctly, that such an outcome is barred by the constitution. “Well, there’s the 22nd amendment,” he noted. Johnson said that Trump was “trolling” his political enemies; analysis at CNN and the New York Times suggests that Trump is using the third-term comments in part to mute awareness of his own lame-duck status.Johnson is correct that the plain language of the constitution prevents Trump from getting what he says he wants in a third term. But we are in a moment when the plain language of the constitution is being subverted, ignored and read with shocking bad faith by the rightwing legal establishment, from law professors to justices of the supreme court, who have seemed eager to nullify parts of the constitution in order to expand Trump’s prerogatives and indulge his whims. How else but as an attack on the constitutional order are we supposed to understand, to cite just one example, the supreme court’s decision to allow Trump to proceed with his dismantling of the Department of Education – a body created by Congress, which only Congress has the power to dissolve? The prohibition posed by the constitution against a third Trump term does not seem like an especially robust defense in an era when the constitution is effectively being rewritten to grant Trump ever more power, with ever fewer opportunities for accountability. The constitution, after all, is just a piece of paper. And of the nine jurists tasked with settling on its authoritative interpretation, six of them are in the tank for a man hostile to its principles.If obviating the plain and obvious language of the 22nd amendment seems like too embarrassing a move even for this degraded and servile supreme court, consider what the court is already looking to do to the 14th amendment. The plain reading of the amendment, which has been understood and implemented in exactly one way for the past 157 years, is that the constitution confers citizenship to all persons born within the United States – what is called birthright citizenship. But after the Trump administration issued an executive order purporting to nullify this constitutional provision, the supreme court intervened to allow the order to go into effect, and made an unprecedented move to prevent lower courts from easily blocking it.The justices were provided cover, and a degree of plausible deniability, by right-leaning law professors, who had responded to the Maga movement’s calls to end birthright citizenship by assembling a legal literature that claims – through strained, misstated, far-fetched and outright wrong readings of the historical and legal record – that there is a longstanding controversy about the meaning of the 14th amendment’s citizenship clause. There is not. But their papers have created a veneer of intellectual credibility and a pretext for the Trump administration to do what it wants to do anyway: ignore the constitution. (In a briefing filed to the supreme court, asking it to sanction Trump’s attack on citizenship, the Trump administration alludes to “[a] growing body of modern scholarship”, and cites Trump-aligned scholars whose work claiming to limit birthright citizenship the administration’s own actions had provoked.) When the supreme court finally rules on the constitutionality of Trump’s order and the future of birthright citizenship is determined, what these law professors say may well matter more than what the constitution does.And this is why the notion that Trump “can’t” run for a third term, merely because such a thing is unconstitutional, may be a bit naive, or insufficiently alert to the degree to which the American constitutional order has already collapsed. What is and is not constitutional is determined, in effect, by Trump loyalists on the court; they already have an infrastructure of bad-faith enablers who will help them launder their efforts to empower him with flimsy pretenses of legal justifiability. And we already know, too, what happens when the law says that Trump must leave office, but he doesn’t want to. Events have long since made clear that the law is no check on Trump’s power. He’ll have to be stopped by the people instead: not with a lawsuit, but with a movement.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      The ex-CIA scientist brothers perfecting Halloween

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      Crowley Place is a sleepy street in the Waynewood area of south Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb 30 minutes from DC. The unassuming homes are well-tended, and it’s a quick walk to six different churches.But each year at Halloween the police shut down the street as thousands of visitors flock to the area. It’s all due to two ageing brothers who spent 40 years working together in secret at a laboratory in the CIA.For six weeks, no matter what was going on in the world, the Park brothers would take leave from the agency – using vacation, sick days and anything else they could think of – and construct an elaborate front-yard Halloween display, often using CIA-inspired technology.View image in fullscreenThe espionage careers of Jeff and Brian Park spanned the cold war, the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan’s war to topple the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Gulf war, and the global “war on terror”.Among the true insiders in the intelligence community, they were something of a legend. Among their specialties in the CIA office of technical services was to help to sabotage Russian systems. It is an obscure discipline even for intelligence services – sabotaging weapons can mean anything from secretly ruining rifle ammunition to hacking the guidance systems for an anti-aircraft missile.Still, their CIA work was just one part of their lives. Their obsession and delight was Halloween.It was three years ago that I first heard of the duo. My sources, veterans of the CIA, just called them the “Park brothers” – and spelled out their unusual expertise, claiming they didn’t remember their first names. It was difficult to track them down because Park was such a common name, but this year I used public records databases, keying in what their ages must be, and scanning through hundreds of names to find adjacent homes, and finally got their address.Outside the two adjacent homes on Crowley last week – the brothers own both – there was an absolute mess of black tents and graveyards, dotted with skeletons, robots, pirates and gory monsters. Lines overhead guide the flying witch and giant spider.Once I showed up on their lawn, the Park brothers were happy to talk.Jeff Park, 78, was pondering a jumble of electronics underneath a witch and near some skulls. He wore a brown T-shirt tucked neatly into tactical grey pants.View image in fullscreen“It takes six weeks to put this together and six weeks to take it apart,” he told me. He said he and his brother Brian, who strolled by lugging some equipment in a handcart, had started their display in 1977, and have been enlarging it ever since.“When I retired in ’14 I was the senior scientist at the CIA,” Jeff said, “so we got to do a lot of cool things. Things that you would go to jail for anywhere else.”Jeff confirmed what sources had said – that they used to sabotage Russian missiles. “We basically specialized in doing in – my brother and I, in our careers – doing in‬ weapon systems. Not just that, lots of other things too. But that was what we did. We did a lot of sabotage on‬ ‭weapon systems to stop the bad guys from doing stuff that we didn’t want them to do.”Brian Park, 75, has longer hair and a big smile. He said getting hired at the office of technical services in the 1970s was “like marrying into an extended Italian family”. Jeff added: “A mafiosa family.”But before talking about the CIA, they wanted to discuss Halloween. Jeff speaks fast, like an enthusiastic professor or Doc Brown of Back to the Future. He pointed out where the displays were going. “There will be Igor, there,” he pointed, “and the Gremlin and Ninja Turtle and ET and Yoda goes over there.” All of them, he says, are animatronic.The hi-tech displays are everywhere – all made by the Parks out of raw materials or discarded electronic devices, rescued parts, or remnants of some CIA experiments. There are elaborate cameras with radar and sonar sensors and a home-engineered 12-channel digital surround sound system threaded through the yard. There’s a giant cauldron – inspired by Disney’s Fantasia – with a computer and a smoke machine inside that emits different colors of smoke. Put your face too close and there’s a sensor to launch a surprise.A couple of graveyards, and one tombstone that flickers with a name changed at will.Jeff collects gargoyle statues; he’s got 210 of them so far. The gargoyles aren’t really part of the Halloween display, however, so they are just piled in the backyard for the winter.The living room of one Park home has what appears to be an old and worn-down La-Z-Boy chair, and the faded wall-to-wall carpet is littered with robots they built for bomb-disposal operations many years ago. On the walls are Christmas ornaments the Parks’ mother used to make.One house has all the electrical engineering supplies, with walls crammed with industrial shelving for resistors and capacitors and electrical connectors. There’s a massive specialized machine for making circuit boards.The other house has a metalworking shop, where the lathe is still littered with brass shavings.View image in fullscreenJeff has been setting up the animatronic gremlin they built. “We wrote software to modify his personality,” Jeff said, “as a function of your body movement. So you have a series of doppler shift radars that measure your body motion and it modifies how he reacts. So if you’re very calm and collected, he will look at you, OK? And then if you get hyper, then he pays no attention to you whatsoever.”Jeff said the exhibit is the most interactive. “Little kids, even four-year-old kids, know there is something special about him. Like, one year we had to cut his head open to repair something and they cried because they thought we were hurting him.”Close by is the alien rocket ship, with blue windows through which the alien is visible. It’s abandoned radio frequency testing equipment. “The throttle is from a B-1 bomber prototype,” Jeff said, pointing inside. It emits huge clouds of smoke for Halloween.In one back shed is a virtual reality device they first engineered in the 1970s for the CIA. Now it’s used to control a handmade, four-legged Star Wars Imperial Walker about five feet tall. “It’s got a 3,000-watt second strobe,” Jeff said. “You can feel it on the back of your neck at 20 feet.”The Parks joined the CIA in 1973. Brian Park was first, part of a fellowship program, and he convinced his bosses to meet with Jeff. Jeff insisted his first CIA interview – just to informally screen him – was at a downtown DC strip club that’s gone out of business.Brian said one early assignment was designing a specialized camera for a now well-known Russian spy for the CIA. “We had to build him a super tiny camera that would digitally store all this stuff so he wouldn’t have to put himself at risk. And so the first technology we used in the camera, the only way you could store digital, non-mechanically, was magnetic bubble memory.”It was the early days of digital memory. “We did something audacious. We shoveled four chips into one coil set and spent millions of dollars.”Whatever they did couldn’t protect the spy, whom the Russians executed in 1985. The story is the subject of a 2015 book and an upcoming movie starring Russell Crowe. And the technology they used – “bubble memory” – soon vanished from memory, obsolete.The CIA stories are never far away. Brian was lugging some Halloween display parts in a cleverly made cart, a one-handed wheelbarrow fashioned to distribute weight laterally.Jeff claimed the cart’s deck, fashioned out of a honeycombed aluminum material, used to reinforce the deck of racing boats he said were sent to the Contras, rigged with machine guns with massive recoil. He pointed at the cart. “That’s what’s left over!”Speedboats were indeed deployed to the region and provided to US proxies. Some speedboats were used in 1984 in CIA efforts to mine Nicaraguan harbors, an operation the international court of justice at The Hague declared illegal. It’s unclear if the specific boats the Park brothers refitted were used for that operation.Most of the year Brian and Jeff also have a railroad track made of aircraft-grade aluminum that encircles their property, over hills and bridges. It is for a miniature working steam engine that they handcrafted, with a seat so kids can ride it. Jeff said they built it using aircraft-grade aluminum. Unprompted, that launched him on a story about working on the track helped him as he engineered an early drone program in 1990, targeting Iraq.View image in fullscreenHe said the agency developed and deployed 25 of the unmanned aerial systems, with 7ft wingspans, prop driven gas engines – for reconnaissance, distributing propaganda leaflets, and finally for kamikaze bombing runs – and he boasted that earned him a promotion to the senior intelligence service level.It’s unusual to find people willing to chat about intelligence technology, even outdated gear. The CIA declined to comment on the Park brothers’ revelations.One of the things they’re proud of – “the coolest thing we ever did” – was an ambitious plan to destroy Scud missiles deployed by Russian client states.Earlier sources had referenced this when explaining the genius of the Park brothers, so hearing the details directly from them was like watching a movie where I’d only seen the trailer.View image in fullscreenBy engineering one key part, the brothers believed that deployed Scud missiles would make a U-turn and hit their own launching sites.“At the time the Soviet Union had come apart and so they were selling off to the black market a lot of the components that are used in Russian missiles,” Jeff said. “And so we basically went out, bought a bunch of them, brought them back to our contractors, modified them with my circuit.”In the end, the operation never moved forward. He said it was canceled because of resistance from the state department, worried about blowblack.Jeff boasted of another invention that he says he designed for US special operations. “It was the thing that probably put my name on the map. I had this crazy, wild-ass idea about how to build an infra-red beacon that you could see 10 miles away with night-vision glasses, and if you were two inches away from it you couldn’t see anything, using light-emitting diodes.”To convince the Navy Seals it worked, the brothers said, they invited the special operations forces to the Halloween festivities, and hid a beacon in a hedge a couple of streets over.After that, “for five years, I personally made all the night-vision beacons for the entire US military, including the Seals, Delta Forces, the Rangers. And that made me world famous.”View image in fullscreenJeff described one of their final plots – sabotaging Russian-made batteries, intercepted by the CIA, that Iran planned to install as an underground power back-up system for a nuclear facility.On this mission, the way he describes it, they went somewhat rogue. “Since it was two days after Christmas, all the bosses were on leave. And so there was just us in there. And so a whole bunch of us got together and we said, ‘Let’s screw the bad guys.’ So I trained a group of 10 people to drill holes randomly in the batteries, the diameter of a sewing machine needle.”The undetectable holes would slowly leak out the hydrogen and oxygen, to raise the internal resistance, and heat, of the battery to an explosive level.The brothers retired before they ever found out if the plan worked.View image in fullscreenCertainly their CIA, the one they talk about, is an agency where the notorious baggage and failures and scandal don’t play a leading role.This version of the CIA is not necessarily troubled by the old enhanced interrogation program, the “salt pit” death in Afghanistan, or “renditions”, or involvement in the mistaken shooting down of a plane carrying an American missionary family.Jeff said about two-thirds of all he did at the CIA never came to fruition, rejected by higher-ups or unsuccessful.But the Park brothers’ huge Halloween spectacle is at least a successful mission for them – where kids can be tricked and still be happy, where covert technology and deception actually work.View image in fullscreen More

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      What would you do if democracy was being dismantled before your eyes? Whatever you’re doing right now | Andy Beckett

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      How would you behave if your democracy was being dismantled? In most western countries, that used to be an academic question. Societies where this process had happened, such as Germany in the 1930s, seemed increasingly distant. The contrasting ways that people reacted to authoritarianism and autocracy, both politically and in their everyday lives, while darkly fascinating and important to study and remember, seemed of diminishing relevance to now.Not any more. Illiberal populism has spread across the world, either challenging for power or entrenching itself in office, from Argentina to Italy, France to Indonesia, Hungary to Britain. But probably the most significant example of a relatively free, pluralist society and political system turning into something very different remains the US, now nine months into Donald Trump’s second term.As it often does, the US is demonstrating what the future could be for much of the world. Trump’s purges of immigrants, centralisation of power, suppression of dissent, rewarding of loyal oligarchs and contempt for truth and the law are not unique. Even governments which present themselves as alternatives to populism, such as Keir Starmer’s, increasingly share some of its features, such as a performative severity towards asylum seekers. Yet with over three years left of Trump’s frenetic presidency, and possibly more – were he to overcome the constitutional and electoral obstacles to a third term – life under him already provides the most unsettling picture of democracy under siege so far.Partly because populism is divisive – setting “the people” against their supposed enemies – and partly because Trump is so volatile, the domestic impact of his regime is very uneven. And so is how different groups and individuals respond to its actions. These complex, often disturbing patterns are particularly clear in California, one of the places he most dislikes, for its liberal values and multiculturalism, and where his regime has most aggressively intervened.In Los Angeles, where US marines, national guard troops and armed officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have been controversially deployed by the federal government on and off since June, some largely Latino neighbourhoods remain eerily quiet. In Boyle Heights last Wednesday morning, two of the usual hubs for shopping and socialising, Cesar Chavez Avenue and Mariachi Plaza, were almost deserted, bakeries and cafes empty, only a few of the square’s outdoor seats taken, despite a mellow autumn sun. Fear of sudden arrest, detention and deportation has kept many people indoors and away from public spaces for months.Yet in the neighbouring arts district of downtown LA, a gentrified grid of former warehouses and factories, the bakeries and cafes were busy as usual. Over pricey iced coffees and fat, artisanal sandwiches, fashionably dressed clusters of largely white people chatted about their latest cultural projects. The fact that Trump and his supporters would probably hate the whole scene, or that something approaching martial law had been imposed just up the road, did not appear to be affecting these ambitious millennials. In the US, as in other countries that are becoming or have become authoritarian, for those spared by the state, careers, social lives, leisure and consumerism carry on – and sometimes with a new intensity, as a form of escape.However, avoiding and engaging with politics are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Often, both impulses coexist in people, especially when faced with something as simultaneously provocative and exhausting as hard-right populism. Periods of passivity, of apparent acceptance of the status quo, alternate with an urge to act.View image in fullscreenA fortnight ago, I went to a No Kings protest in Beverly Hills, a Californian city much less associated with activism than deep wealth. I expected a small gathering of elite liberals; instead, there were a couple of thousand boisterous people, of all ages, marching back and forth for hours along the edge of a park, carrying witty anti-Trump placards and chanting, to the accompaniment of drummers and constant passing car horns. The chants were not that fluent, which suggested that the participants did not protest often, and so did their gleeful smiles, as if they were doing something unexpectedly enjoyable and naughty. The whole event was uplifting: politics coming alive for people, perhaps for the first time.But authoritarianism can provoke more jaded reactions as well. In San Francisco, traditionally a more political place, while there have been big No Kings protests, I also encountered a contempt towards Trump and his circle, for their blatant self-interest, cartoonish bullying and vast exaggerations, which risked becoming an angry apathy: a belief that the regime was a malign fact of life, like a government in a totally corrupt state or the Soviet bloc. This response, like refusing to rise to Trump’s attention-seeking, can be understood and justified as a form of conscious disengagement and as a coping mechanism. Yet while liberals and leftists brood, his regime relentlessly moves on.While I was in San Francisco, it was rumoured that he was about to send troops or federal agents to what he claimed was a failing city. Some people I spoke to there ridiculed the idea. They gestured towards the many beautiful streets, successful businesses, picturesque green spaces and extensive public transport – a quality of life which, while increasingly unaffordable for some, exceeds that of many Trump-supporting places.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHowever, in countries dominated by autocratic populism and digital media, propaganda often defeats facts. Trump called off his San Francisco invasion, but the possibility of it remains, like a crude but effective TV cliffhanger. Creating a politics which can stand up to rightwing populism’s showmanship and drama in a sustained way is a project which has so far defeated Trump’s opponents, with the exception of isolated leftwingers such as Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders.If Reform UK wins power, as seems increasingly possible, then British liberals and leftists will face the same challenge. Nigel Farage could launch endless eye-catching policies from Downing Street, such as the Trump-style deconstruction and politicisation of Whitehall, which Reform promised this week. These policies may fail or disappoint, as Trump’s often have, but make the political weather nevertheless. Unless populism’s opponents create an equally relentless and compelling movement, and draw in more of those whom populism victimises and scares into silence, then this age of autocrats will carry on. As the US shows, sporadic resistance, contempt and avoidance are not enough.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Why is Trump talking about nuclear weapons? – podcast

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      Archive: NBC News, BBC News, WHAS11, Sky News, The White House, NewsNation, NPR, ABC News
      Listen to Science Weekly’s three-part series, all about how science solved a tea mystery.
      Buy Jonathan Freedland’s new book, The Traitors Circle, here.
      Send your questions and feedback to politicsweeklyamerica@theguardian.com
      Support the Guardian. Go to theguardian.com/politicspodus More

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      More than half of Americans disapprove of Trump demolishing East Wing – poll

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      More than half of Americans disapprove of Trump’s demolition of the White House’s East Wing and the construction of a new ballroom, according to a new poll from the Washington Post, ABC News and Ipsos.The survey was conducted between 24 and 28 October and indicates 56% of the respondents disagree with Trump’s recent move while 28% are in favor of it. Most of the survey’s respondents were white, one-third of them voted for Donald Trump and another third for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.By 24 October, the East Wing, historically the home base for the first lady and her staff, had been reduced to rubble to make way for a $300m ballroom that Donald Trump says is being paid for through his funds and private donations.The East Wing was first known as the East Terrace and was built in 1902 during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. In 1942, Franklin Roosevelt created the East Wing in its current form to add working space during the war, and conceal an underground bunker that had been constructed for the president and staff.Its demolition marks a reversal of the president’s earlier promise in July that none of the White House’s existing infrastructure would be torn down during construction of the ballroom.“It will be beautiful. It won’t interfere with the current building. It won’t be – it will be near it, but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of. It’s my favorite,” Trump said at the time.The ballroom, which is set to be 90,000 sq ft, nearly twice the size of the White House, will accommodate nearly 1,000 people, according to Trump.The White House has said the ballroom will be ready for use well before Trump’s term ends in January 2029.Thursday’s poll echoes a Yahoo/YouGov poll that was released earlier this week which found 61% of respondents saying they did not support Trump’s ballroom plan while 25% backed the move.Reactions to the ballroom have stretched far and wide and escalated since demolition began. Elaine Kamarck, a former official who worked in the building from 1993 to 1997, told the Guardian earlier this month that it’s “an abomination”.“It’s typical Trump and it’s going to look awful. They’re knocking down the entire East Wing of the White House. It’s not the end of the world but it’s just one more reason that Americans are getting sick of King Trump,” she said. More