Saturday, March 28
11:30 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.
Embarcadero Plaza
Market and Steuart Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
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Since Inauguration Day, the radical pages of Project 2025 and the fever dreams of America’s corporate billionaires have come to life with a relentless assault on America’s workers.
America wasn’t built by greedy billionaires and corporations, it was built by hardworking people all across the country. And labor unions are taking action, speaking up and fighting back!
The labor movement will be in the streets on Saturday, March 28, for No Kings Day to powerfully say that our government doesn’t answer to a king—it answers to working people.
Our solidarity is more important than ever. Please join us Tuesday, March 24, for our #NoKings labor activist call to mobilize our movement before Saturday’s events.
WHAT: AFL-CIO No Kings Labor Activist Call
WHEN: Tuesday, March 24, at 7 p.m. ET
WHERE: Zoom:
https://events.zoom.us/ev/AhfntEDd3A6WigV8sDEo0UQFWnSGDmcgfG_dKiz7A7xOHhk7-1wd~AmXj963Ovz7D_AqVbqIEcfngPhfUVq4XdkdCcDTJGDH3HZylNMDHbB7XKw?link_id=3&can_id=a01528c390a5ad806523652f147b0074&source=email-join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&email_referrer=email_3154161&email_subject=join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&&
(on any internet-connected device or via call-in)
The Trump administration has committed the single biggest act of union-busting in history, attacked good jobs across the country, launched a brutal assault on immigrants, ripped health care from millions, jeopardized the essential services that working families rely on and threatened our fundamental freedoms. Enough is enough.
On the call, you’ll hear from union leaders, learn about your rights, how to take action safely, and how to host or join a #NoKings event and mobilize others to attend.
JOIN THE CALL:
https://events.zoom.us/ev/AhfntEDd3A6WigV8sDEo0UQFWnSGDmcgfG_dKiz7A7xOHhk7-1wd~AmXj963Ovz7D_AqVbqIEcfngPhfUVq4XdkdCcDTJGDH3HZylNMDHbB7XKw?link_id=3&can_id=a01528c390a5ad806523652f147b0074&source=email-join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&email_referrer=email_3154161&email_subject=join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&&
HOST AN EVENT:
https://www.mobilize.us/aflcio/c/no-kings-march-28/event/create/?link_id=7&can_id=a01528c390a5ad806523652f147b0074&source=email-join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&email_referrer=email_3154161&email_subject=join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&&
FIND AN EVENT:
https://www.mobilize.us/?q=No+Kings+AFLCIO&link_id=9&can_id=a01528c390a5ad806523652f147b0074&source=email-join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&email_referrer=email_3154161&email_subject=join-or-host-a-no-kings-day-event-on-march-28&&
Will you join us on Tuesday as we take back our power?
When working people peacefully come together and fight for each other, we can stand up to the wealthiest bosses and the most powerful politicians.
In solidarity,
Team AFL-CIO
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Veterans For Peace Condemns
U.S. Attack on Iran
Military Members and Civilians:
Resist Illegal Wars!
Veterans For Peace condemns the U.S./Israeli attack on Iran in the strongest possible terms. We call on our members, friends, and allies to resist this dangerous and illegal war. We offer our support to members of the military who decide to refuse illegal orders and resist an illegal war.
A War Based on Lies
The Trump administration’s ever-changing rationales for going to war against Iran are lies. Iran posed no threat to the United States. This military operation is not a defensive war, but rather a war of choice by Israel and the U.S., a war of aggression, a war for regime change – very much like the disastrous U.S. wars that killed millions of people in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan – wars that many veterans remember with horror and regret.
Contrary to President Trump’s oft-repeated lie, Iran has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons. Rather, the United States, the only country to attack another nation with nuclear weapons, has unilaterally abrogated multiple arms control treaties, and is investing Two Trillion Dollars in a new generation of nuclear weapons. It was the U.S., not Iran, that violated and withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. Israel also has nuclear weapons – undeclared and uninspected. Two nuclear powers attacking Iran, claiming to stop it from pursuing a nuclear program, is the height of hypocrisy.
The aggression against Iran follows by less than two months the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the unlawful abduction of its president and wife. It comes amid the ongoing war threats and oil blockade of Cuba. This complete disregard and abuse of the process of negotiations only encourages nuclear proliferation around the world.
Illegal and Unconstitutional
The U.S. war on Iran is illegal in multiple ways. It is a violation of the UN Charter, a treaty which is the “supreme law of the land” under Article VI of the U.S. Constitution. Article 2(4) of the UN Charter states, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
The unilateral war of aggression against Iran is a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, which explicitly grants Congress the sole authority to declare war. This power was intentionally given to the legislative branch to prevent unilateral military action by a single executive.
These legal and constitutional issues may seem quaint to those of us who have seen them routinely violated by president after president with the complicity of a supine Congress. Nonetheless, they constitute both international and domestic law. They are the legal codification of a moral framework for international peace and cooperation. Peace-loving people must struggle to ensure that these laws are followed. We must hold our government officials accountable when they are not.
Refuse Illegal Orders – Resist Illegal Wars
Veterans For Peace reminds our sisters and brothers, children, and grandchildren in the U.S. military that an order to participate in an illegal war is, by extension, an illegal order. You have the right and even the duty to refuse illegal orders. Veterans For Peace and many others will stand with you when you do, and provide helpful information and resources. Whatever legal consequences you may endure pale compared to risking your life in an illegal war or living with Post Traumatic Stress and Moral Injury.
Veterans and civilians also have the right and the responsibility to resist the illegal actions of our government at home and abroad. This attack is a very critical moment in the history of the United States and the world. We must be in the streets protesting. We must be on our phones telling our representatives to Vote Yes on the Iran War Powers resolution. We must be on our keyboards, writing letters to the editors. Tell them to:
IMMEDIATELY HALT U.S. MILITARY ATTACKS ON IRAN!
· End U.S. Support for Israel and Genocide in Palestine!
· End Economic Warfare against Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba!
· End ICE and Authoritarian Repression in U.S. Cities!
· Abolish Nuclear Weapons and War!
PEACE AT HOME, PEACE ABROAD!
https://prod.cdn.everyaction.com/emails/van/EA/EA015/1/94223/Alqa3p0mdFGQOfwCaEOYO6dpWCJEn2qC1GPoEaid_7O_archive?emci=6196a802-9415-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&emdi=d3c0d4a7-a515-f111-a69a-000d3a57593f&ceid=10474381
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Hands Off Rick Toledo, Pro-Palestine Grad Student at Cal Poly Humboldt! Give Him His Electronics Back!
Don't forget to sign this sign-on letter for Toledo here:
https://stopfbi.org/news/hands-off-rick-toledo-pro-palestine-grad-student-at-cal-poly-humboldt-give-him-his-electronics-back/
Please email any statements of solidarity to:
stopfbi@gmail.com
On the night of March 19, 2026, University Police Department returned with a warrant to the apartment of Rick Toledo, Students for a Democratic Society organizer at Cal Poly Tech Humboldt, and seized his laptop, phone, and other electronics such as a camera. They attempted to force him to give up his passcodes, and he told them no. He did the right thing.
This violation of his privacy comes as part of their effort to charge him with four bogus felonies - false imprisonment, conspiracy, battery, and assault - related to the student protest on Feb 27. This is the latest in their string of acts to suppress any campus free speech for Palestine and divestment from Israel, along with suspending and firing him from his university teaching job.
We should be perfectly clear about it: there is nothing wrong with supporting any student action, including building occupations, that is taken to make demands of a university. Our rights to free speech and freedom of assembly are protected by the First Amendment, enshrined in the constitution. College protest is a long-time tradition, and it continues on today. Toledo committed no crime in supporting the student protest, and the university is determined to create lie after lie in order to demonize him.
In our view, what they really want to do is punish Toledo not for the one-day building occupation last month, but for the 9-day building occupation during the encampment movement in spring of 2024. That display of courage by the students in the name of ending university support for a genocide made it to millions of TV screens, and the state of California and university want someone to pay. Toledo is their target of choice, years later.
We demand that he not be charged of any crime, because he didn't do anything wrong. We demand that his devices be returned ASAP. Activists should learn from his example of not telling the police a single thing, including a passcode. The university and police are the criminals here for trying to scare activists out of speaking out against the university's continued financial support to Israeli apartheid. Now is not the time to suffer in silence; it’s the time to speak out. We need to condemn political repression, stand with Rick Toledo, and defend our rights to speak out for Palestine.
Don’t Charge Rick Toledo!
Give Him His Property Back!
Protesting for Palestine Is Not a Crime!
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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Petition to Force Amazon to Cut ICE Contracts!
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
Amazon Labor Union
Over 600,000 messages have already been sent directly to Amazon board members demanding one thing: Amazon must stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE and DHS rely on the data infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services. Their campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon.
But workers and communities have real power when we act collectively. That’s why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine. Help us reach 1 million messages and force Amazon to act by signing our petition with The Labor Force today:
Tell Amazon: End contracts with ICE!
On Cyber Monday 2025, Amazon workers rallied outside of Amazon’s NYC headquarters to demand that Amazon stop fueling mass deportations through Amazon Web Services’ contracts with ICE and DHS.
ICE cannot operate without corporate backing; its campaign against immigrants and those who stand with them depends on the logistical, financial, and political support of companies like Amazon. Mega-corporations may appear untouchable, but they are not. Anti-authoritarian movements have long understood that repression is sustained by a network of institutional enablers and when those enablers are disrupted, state violence weakens. Workers and communities have real power when they act collectively. That is why we must expose Amazon’s role in the deportation machine.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its most commonly used cloud platform. DHS and ICE cannot wage their attack on immigrants without the critical data infrastructure that Amazon Web Services provide, allowing the agencies to collect, analyze, and store the massive amounts of data they need to do their dirty work. Without the power of AWS, ICE would not be able to track and target people at its current scale.
ICE and DHS use Amazon Web Services to collect and store massive amounts of purchased data on immigrants and their friends and family–everything from biometric data, DMV data, cellphone records, and more. And through its contracts with Palantir, DHS is able to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases and analyze and store this data on AWS. All of this information is ultimately used to target immigrants and other members of our communities.
No corporation should profit from oppression and abuse. Yet Amazon is raking in tens of millions of dollars to fuel DHS and ICE, while grossly exploiting its own workers. Can you sign our petition today, demanding that Amazon stop fueling deportations by ending its contracts with DHS and ICE, now?
https://actionnetwork.org/letters/tell-amazon-end-contracts-with-ice/?source=group-amazon-labor-union&referrer=group-amazon-labor-
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End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Atler Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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 Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Israeli army tortures a Palestinian toddler in Gaza in front of his father, family says
An 18-month-old toddler in Gaza was returned by the Israeli army to his family with burn marks and puncture wounds on his legs. Doctors say the wounds are clearly the result of torture while the child was detained with his father.
By Tareq S. Hajjaj, March 26, 2026
https://mondoweiss.net/2026/03/israeli-army-tortures-a-palestinian-toddler-in-gaza-in-front-of-his-father-family-
18-month-old Jawad Abu Nassar was returned by the Israeli army top his family with burn marks and puncture wounds, in what the family says was the result of torture, according to doctors, March 24, 2026. (Photo: Ramzi Abu Amer/APA Images)
The marks on the child’s legs appear unmistakable. Round burn marks, as if from cigarette butts, as well as puncture wounds. His pants have the same two holes, and they are stained with blood. This was the state in which 18-month-old Jawad Abu Nasser was returned to his family in Gaza by the Israeli army.
In video testimony for Mondoweiss, Waad al-Shafi, 19, from the Maghazi area in central Gaza, holds her son and lifts his legs and feet toward the camera. According to the family, the toddler was subjected to severe torture by the Israeli army. They say that the Israelis had put out cigarettes on his legs and punctured them with sharp objects.
“Here is where his foot was pierced, and here is where cigarettes were put out on him,” Jawad’s mother says, holding his feet as she points to each injury. “And here’s another wound. And another.”
The family says they suspect that Jawad’s torture could have been an attempt to pressure his father into providing information, and they also believe that he was likely there while the soldiers carried out the abuse of his son.
‘Both of them were being tortured together’
Waad al-Shafi says Osama Abu Nassar, her husband and Jawad’s father, left home carrying their son to buy him sweets from a nearby shop. Instead, he mistakenly headed east toward the “Yellow Line,” the invisible border cutting the Gaza Strip roughly in half as part of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The family lost contact with him at around 10 a.m. and heard nothing until 8 p.m. that same day, March 19.
She adds that her husband had been experiencing severe psychological distress in recent weeks and was not in stable condition.
According to accounts from residents who saw Osama from a distance, Israeli soldiers opened fire in his direction when he entered the area. A quadcopter drone ordered him to put down his son, who had been sitting on his shoulders, and to remove his clothes and those of his son, despite the cold. Witnesses who saw what happened tell the family that after he complied, four soldiers approached and restrained him, while a fifth took the child.
At around 8 p.m., staff from the International Committee of the Red Cross contacted al-Shafi and told her they had her son. Accompanied by her father and father-in-law, al-Shafi headed toward al-Maghazi market, where she received her child wrapped in a space blanket.
When she first saw him, she says, his face was pale and yellow, and he looked exhausted. “I thought it was just from the long day he’d been through,” she recalls. “I never imagined Israeli soldiers would just torture a child who’s barely older than a year and a half.”
At that point, the family didn’t know the full extent of what Jawad had been through. His mother held him tightly the minute she saw him, but he immediately began to scream in pain. Something was wrong, al-Shafi recounts. She began examining his body, starting with his head, then moving down to his chest, shoulders, abdomen, and then to his back and hands. Finally, she reached his feet and saw the burns.
The family was unable to take the child to the hospital that night due to difficulties traveling at such a late hour; most of Gaza does not have access to electricity, plunging the Strip into darkness and making nighttime travel dangerous.
The next morning, they took him to the hospital. It was the first day of Eid, March 20. “After they examined him, the doctors concluded that the marks on his legs were clearly the result of torture,” Jawad’s grandfather, Muhammad Abu Nassar, tells Mondoweiss.
Al-Shafi says doctors immediately identified the wounds as consistent with a sharp object being inserted into and removed from the child’s feet.
Holding the child, Jawad’s grandfather points to the toddler’s small trousers, which are stained with blood and punctured with holes.
“The Red Cross team told us the blood on his trousers came from his father, who was shot in the shoulder in front of him,” he says.
Muhammad Abu Nasser says the family does not know how Osama’s blood got on his son’s clothes, but they suspect that the child’s torture took place while he was with his father.
“That would mean that Osama was clearly bleeding next to his son, and both of them were being tortured together,” Muhammad added.
Mondoweiss contacted the hospital staff who treated Jawad, but they could not immediately be reached for comment.
The grandfather says his son Osama had recently been suffering from severe psychological distress and bouts of uncontrollable anger. On the day of the incident, he asked to go out with a friend. His father encouraged him, hoping it would help improve his mood, but less than half an hour later, neighbors informed the family that instead of heading west toward a grocery store to buy sweets for his child, Osama had gone east toward the Yellow Line, just five minutes away on foot.
That was when the soldiers opened fire on him and his child before being detained. The neighbors who witnessed the incident told the family that the quadcopter drone on the scene ordered Osama and Jawad to move 100 meters forward before being instructed to remove their clothes. That was the last thing they saw before both were detained.
When Osama was returned to them in such a state, the family was shocked. The child’s grandfather describes it as a far worse crime than the regular shelling and missile fire to which Palestinians in Gaza continue to be subjected. “Shelling is random,” he says. “It kills men, women, and children alike. But this was deliberate.”
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2) Florida’s Immigration Crackdown Is Showing Cracks: ‘We’re Hurting People’
Some conservative sheriffs have raised concerns about the aggressive enforcement tactics that Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has embraced.
By Patricia Mazzei and Eric Adelson, March 27, 2026
Patricia Mazzei reported from Miami, Fort Myers and Ochopee, Fla., and Eric Adelson from Orlando, Fla.
Florida made more immigration arrests in 2025 than any state but Texas. Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
A year after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida pledged to make his state one of the toughest in the nation on immigration enforcement, he has largely succeeded: More immigration arrests were made in Florida in 2025 than any state but Texas, and there have been few signs of the crackdown easing.
Yet the enforcement machine that the Republican governor hastily built to support the federal crackdown he welcomed is starting to show cracks, weighed down by a crush of detainees crowding some jails and a set of growing concerns, even among some law enforcement officials, about aggressive enforcement tactics in a midterm election year.
At a meeting of the State Immigration Enforcement Council last week, several Republican sheriffs expressed concern about unauthorized immigrants who have not committed any crimes being detained and deported.
“There are those here that are working hard,” said Sheriff Grady Judd of Polk County, the chairman of the new council, which advises the governor and cabinet members on immigration enforcement. “They have kids in college or in school. They’re going to church on Sunday. They’re not violating the law, and they’re living the American dream.”
The comments from the elected sheriffs signaled a shift in tone among a small but influential group of Florida Republicans who have helped carry out President Trump’s and Mr. DeSantis’s immigration policies.
“It’s too wide a net,” Chief Ciro M. Dominguez of the Naples Police Department, another member of the council, said during its quarterly meeting on March 16. “And we’re hurting people who are not the target of this.”
Elsewhere in the country, immigration arrests have fallen as federal law enforcement agencies have moved away from militarized raids that have resulted in violent clashes with protesters, including the fatal shootings of two American citizens in Minneapolis in January.
House Republicans acknowledged at a meeting in Doral, Fla., this month that the immigration crackdown had alienated some voters. Party officials have advised lawmakers to refrain from discussing “mass deportations” ahead of the midterms. And at his confirmation hearing last week, Markwayne Mullin, the new homeland security secretary, committed to working with senators in both parties to address their concerns about Mr. Trump’s immigration policy.
But in Florida, immigration arrests have continued at an aggressive pace up to now. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Miami, which covers all of Florida, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, has reported almost 10,000 arrests so far this year, more than any other ICE field office.
The state has not seen large militarized raids, in part because the DeSantis administration required state and county law enforcement agencies to sign formal cooperation agreements with federal authorities. That led to about 20,000 immigration arrests made by state and local agencies in 2025, Mr. DeSantis said in January. The Florida Highway Patrol had made just over half of those arrests.
The sheriffs who raised concerns at the recent meeting were quick to say they backed Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and the deportations of unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes. But they also floated the idea of asking Congress to consider providing those who are not criminals with a path to legalize their immigration status — an idea that Mr. DeSantis promptly rejected.
“This idea that unless you’re an ax murderer you’re able to stay, that is not consistent with our laws, and it’s also not good policy,” Mr. DeSantis said last week.
Last year, Florida opened two state-run detention centers, one in the Everglades and another west of Jacksonville, to house federal immigration detainees. But many of the detainees were held in local jails until federal immigration agents could transport them to the centers, a process that slowed as the number of immigration arrests grew. Detainees with no criminal charges were sometimes held in cramped jails for more than a week, violating Immigration and Customs Enforcement guidelines that limit such stays to three days.
In Orange County, home to Orlando, the county mayor and immigration lawyers said that federal authorities had been picking up jailed detainees and driving them not to immigrant detention centers, but around town for a few hours. Federal authorities would then rebook the detainees into the jail the same day, in order to restart the three-day clock, the mayor and lawyers said.
So many immigration detainees were being held in the jail for extended periods last year that federal judges in Orlando started freeing some of them.
In one dramatic hearing last month, a federal prosecutor declined to argue the government’s position that the county jail should keep holding a Venezuelan detainee with a brain tumor. The detainee, Johnny Rondón RodrÃguez, had been in the jail for 25 days.
His lawyer, Phillip Arroyo, said Mr. Rondón had been pulled over on Interstate 75 and detained despite having a pending asylum case and not being charged with any wrongdoing. Mr. Rondón said he was not receiving his medication to treat the tumor while in jail.
Yohance Pettis, an assistant U.S. attorney, said that if the court believed it should release Mr. Rondón, “then I am willing to do the right thing.” The judge, John Antoon II of the Federal District Court, called the prosecutor’s position “refreshing” and granted Mr. Rondón an immediate release.
Spending has been another sore point, with Republican state lawmakers pushing back against Mr. DeSantis’s immigration enforcement budget. This month, they renewed an emergency fund that the governor had used to build and operate the Everglades detention center — but only after creating new guardrails, including requiring regular reports to the Legislature on how the money is being spent. The Florida Tributary, an online news outlet, recently reported that the DeSantis administration was spending more than $1 million a day to run the center, known as Alligator Alcatraz.
When Florida opened the center last summer, Mr. DeSantis said the federal government would reimburse the state for its operating costs. But Florida has yet to receive the $608 million federal reimbursement it requested. The money has been held up, first pending the completion of an environmental review, and later by the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
In September, a federal appeals court reversed a judge’s order to shut down the Everglades detention center and allowed it to remain open. Environmentalists had challenged the legality of opening the center on protected land; oral arguments in the case are scheduled for next month.
The center held about 1,500 detainees as of Jan. 26, according to evidence presented in a federal court hearing that month in Fort Myers, Fla. It was the only time in months that the facility’s detainee population had been made public.
One Sunday last month, more than 100 activists gathered outside the detention center to demand its closure. The weekly vigils, organized by the Workers Circle, a Jewish social justice organization, have been held for more than 30 consecutive weeks.
Among those present was Arianne Betancourt, 33, whose father, Justo Betancourt, a 54-year-old Cuban national, was detained in South Florida in October. He was ultimately transported to the Mexican border to present himself for deportation, according to a petition his lawyer filed in federal court. But the Mexican authorities rejected him, citing his health problems, which include diabetes. Mr. Betancourt was then returned to Alligator Alcatraz.
Holding a microphone, Ms. Betancourt described how her father had grown increasingly frail and dispirited as his detention dragged on.
“I need my dad,” she said. “I need him more than ever.”
Allison McCann contributed reporting.
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3) A D.H.S. funding package that excludes ICE goes to the House after an early morning Senate vote.
Michael Gold and John Yoon, Michael Gold reported from Washington, March 27, 2026
The Senate voted early Friday to fund the Department of Homeland Security except for its immigration enforcement and deportation operations, raising the prospect of an end to a weekslong partial shutdown that has strained federal workers and caused long waits at airports.
The measure does not include funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Border Patrol, nor does it contain provisions that Democrats had demanded for weeks to rein in President Trump’s immigration crackdown as a condition of funding the department.
After weeks of haggling over such restrictions and failed efforts by lawmakers in both parties to pass legislation that would reopen the Homeland Security Department, the measure was quietly approved before dawn in Washington by a voice vote. It came hours after Mr. Trump said he would go around Congress to pay Transportation Security Administration agents, who have worked without pay since funding for the department lapsed on Feb. 14.
The bill must still be considered by the House, which could vote on it as soon as Friday. It was unclear whether the measure would pass that chamber, where Speaker Mike Johnson holds a narrow Republican majority. A number of hard-right Republicans have criticized the Senate’s approach and oppose a funding bill that does not include new money for immigration enforcement, arguing that they should not give in to Democrats who have refused to provide any.
Should the House approve the measure and Mr. Trump sign it, the deal would end a negotiating standoff that has caused the longest partial government shutdown on record.
Though several agencies have gone without funding, the shutdown has most visibly affected airport security workers and passengers. Hundreds of T.S.A. agents quit or called out of work, leading to staggeringly long lines at some of the busiest airports in the country. The growing crisis increased pressure on senators to try to find a deal, especially before a scheduled two-week recess.
Even after Mr. Trump’s announcement on Thursday, senators had suggested that their negotiations were ongoing. But his intervention appeared to sap what little will there had been to find a deal that would fund the department while including new curbs on immigration agents that would be agreeable to both Senate Democrats and the White House.
The measure that the Senate approved around 2:20 a.m. contains modest provisions that lawmakers in both parties had already agreed to in January, including money for body cameras for immigration enforcement officers — but no requirement that they be worn.
It omits entirely the other restrictions that Democrats demanded after federal immigration officers killed two American citizens in Minneapolis in January, including barring ICE agents from wearing masks and requiring that they obtain judicial warrants to enter private homes.
And the deal does not reflect narrow concessions that the White House agreed to in talks with Democrats last week, including requirements that officers display visible identification and limits on immigration enforcement at “sensitive areas” like hospitals and schools.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said that Democrats would continue to push for those changes. But it will be all but impossible to win them without broad G.O.P. support, and Senate Republicans said this week that Democrats could not expect to impose restrictions on an agency that they were not funding.
Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, on Friday criticized what he called a “piecemeal” approach to funding.
“We could be standing here right now passing a funding bill with a list of reforms if Democrats had made the smallest effort to actually reach an agreement,” he said. “But they didn’t.”
Still, Mr. Schumer contended that the resolution vindicated his party’s strategy during the weekslong fight.
“Senate Democrats were clear: no blank check for a lawless ICE and Border Patrol,” Mr. Schumer said after it passed.
Senate Republicans, who had presented the proposal that passed early Friday to Mr. Trump earlier in the week, have said that ICE and the Border Patrol can continue to operate using the billions of dollars that the G.O.P. gave both agencies as part of their sweeping tax and domestic policy bill. (Mr. Trump had also been expected to use funds from that legislation to pay T.S.A. agents, though it was unclear why he waited more than five weeks after the shutdown began to direct that the money be used to do so.)
Republicans also said that they planned to draft a separate bill that would address new funding for immigration enforcement and would include the president’s long-sought restrictions on voting. They are hoping to push that bill through Congress without Democratic support using a process called budget reconciliation.
But that effort would require near-unanimous support, and many Republican lawmakers are worried that the party would not be able to unite behind that legislation, particularly in an election year.
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4) There’s a Good Reason Why You Can’t Concentrate
By Cal Newport, March 27, 2026
Mr. Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of “Deep Work.”
Christoph Niemann
Today, we take for granted that diet and exercise are vitally important for our health and well-being. But we didn’t always think this way. Much of this awareness emerged in a remarkably short span of time during the middle of the last century.
In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack after playing golf in Denver. This event shocked the nation. The president was just 64 years old and projected American strength and vitality. The surgeon general at the time said that hearing the news about the heart attack was like learning about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Instead of retreating into secrecy, the White House flew in Dr. Paul Dudley White, a leading cardiologist who helped found the American Heart Association. Dr. White set a new standard for transparency. When he spoke to the press, he went beyond explaining the president’s condition and sought to educate the public about cardiac events more generally.
“Heart attacks became less mysterious and less frightening to millions of Americans that day,” explains a New England Journal of Medicine article, “and White gave them the message that they could take steps to reduce their risk.” The idea that diet played a large role in mortality soon entered the national consciousness.
Some 10 years later, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a military doctor who conducted fitness research for NASA, published a book titled “Aerobics.” Dr. Cooper promoted a novel argument: Cardiovascular exercise was critical for health. In an era when people increasingly had sedentary jobs and lived a car-based lifestyle in the suburbs, Dr. Cooper emphasized the need to specifically put aside time to exercise as a key component of longevity.
This was a radical idea in a culture in which voluntary exercise was associated primarily with the Army or sports. “Aerobics” became a best seller, and millions of people began exercising. According to Dr. Cooper, when his book was first published, less than 24 percent of the adult population engaged in regular physical activity and there were fewer than 100,000 joggers. Within 16 years, close to 60 percent of the population exercised, including 34 million joggers.
The larger point is that transformations in understanding can unfold quickly. Just decades after President Eisenhower and Dr. Cooper, we got the food pyramid, the term “low fat,” the running craze and Jane Fonda videos. Americans would never think about food and exercise the same way again.
In our current moment we face a new crisis, one that affects our minds more than our bodies: the negative impact of digital technology on our ability to think.
Is it time for a new revolution?
When I published my book “Deep Work” 10 years ago, I argued that email and instant messages were degrading our ability to concentrate on hard mental tasks. I recommended putting aside long stretches of time for uninterrupted thinking and to treat this cognitive activity like a skill that you can improve through practice. The term “deep work” quickly entered the vernacular, and I started to hear people and companies use it without even realizing its source.
But the problems I focused on in “Deep Work,” and in my writing since, have been getting steadily worse. In 2016, my main concern was helping people find enough free time for deep work. Today, I think we’re rapidly losing the ability to think deeply at all, regardless of how much space we can find in our schedules for these efforts.
The data backs up this claim. Research from Dr. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, indicates that our attention spans have decreased by more than a factor of three since 2004, with the biggest drops happening around 2012. Long-running surveys reveal that the share of U.S. adults who struggle with basic reading or math has risen markedly over the past decade, while the percentage of 18-year-olds who report difficulty thinking and concentrating jumped in this same period. A Financial Times article about these findings proposed a shocking but relevant question: “Have humans passed peak brain power?”
Many of these declines in cognitive skills became notable starting in the mid-2010s, exactly the same period in which smartphones became ubiquitous and the digital attention economy exploded in size. An increasing amount of research implies that this timing is no coincidence. A meta-analysis released last fall showed that consuming short-form video content, as delivered by apps like TikTok and Instagram, is associated with poorer cognition and reduced attention, while the results of a clever experiment from 2023 found that the mere presence of participants’ smartphones in a room significantly reduced their ability to concentrate.
The growth of A.I. has brought new cognitive concerns. A study from January, based on surveys and interviews with more than 600 participants, revealed a “significant negative correlation between frequent A.I. tool usage and critical thinking abilities.” Another recent study, which tracked the brain activity of research subjects who were writing with the help of large language models, found that “brain connectivity systematically scaled down with the amount of external support.”
The loss of our ability to think is a big deal. Close to 40 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product comes from so-called knowledge and technology-intensive industries, from aerospace manufacturing to software development to financial and information services. Companies in these fields alchemize advanced human thought into revenue; as we weaken our brains, we also threaten to weaken our economy. It is notable that productivity growth in the private business sector stagnated during the same 2010s period when technology became measurably more distracting.
A diminished ability to use our brains also has concerning personal impacts. Thinking is what lets us make sense of information in a complicated world. As president, Abraham Lincoln used to regularly retreat to his cottage, on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home in the heights above Washington, to find the solitude needed to think intensively about the decisions facing him as commander in chief. A contemporaneous letter from a Treasury employee visiting Lincoln at the cottage during these years describes finding the president “reposed in a broad chair, one leg hanging over its arm. He seemed to be in deep thought.”
Thinking is also an engine for making sense of our lives and cultivating our moral imaginations. In 1956, as the Montgomery bus boycott careened into national prominence, Martin Luther King Jr. clarified his life’s purpose through a long session of quiet self-reflection one memorable night at his kitchen table, when he remembers his thoughts finally forming into a clear directive: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth.”
In an era when technologies relentlessly disrupt our lives, it can seem like this cognition crisis is a fait accompli — a side effect of innovations that cannot be stopped. But do we really have to accept this steady loss of our thinking ability as inevitable? In a short span of time, we transformed the way we thought about health. I’ve come to believe that a similarly rapid revolution is possible in how we respond to our diminishing ability to think.
What would such a revolution look like? In the world of physical health, we now know we should largely avoid ultraprocessed snacks like Doritos and Oreos, which are Frankenfoods made by reconstituting stock ingredients like corn and soy with hyperpalatable ratios of salt, sugar and fat. Much of the digital content that ensnares our attention in the current moment is also ultraprocessed, in that it’s the result of vast databases of user-generated content that are sifted, broken down and recombined by algorithms into personalized streams designed to be irresistible. What is a TikTok video if not a digital Dorito?
We should consider taking as strong a stance against ultraprocessed content as we already do against ultraprocessed food. Which is to say: Most people should avoid these diversions most of the time. In the same way that you’re unlikely to eat Twinkies as a regular snack, or still believe that Pop-Tarts provide a balanced breakfast, stop consuming ultraprocessed content. Don’t use TikTok. Don’t use Instagram. Don’t use X. Their sugar-high benefits aren’t worth the costs.
There was a time when such a suggestion would have been considered eccentric and unworkable. (I certainly received my share of pushback when I first suggested that social media wasn’t actually as important as people claimed.) But just like how our understanding of diet changed, I think we’re ready to accept that the metaphorical nutritional value of scrolling through outrage-tinged posts and short-form videos is minimal.
Governments can assist efforts to improve digital nutrition. In a move reminiscent of the Food and Drug Administration’s banning trans fats, Australia recently enacted legislation banning social media use for kids under the age of 16. In both cases, regulators looked at the evidence and concluded that the potential harms (whether it’s heart attack risk or damaged mental health) far outweighed the benefits.
The United States should follow Australia’s lead in this regard. Will some kids find their way around any safeguards that are put in place? Of course; such evasion is already happening in Australia. But the larger message sent by such laws is important. They reframe social media as something that should be closely monitored, similar to such age-gated vices as alcohol and tobacco — substances we’ve learned to approach with caution.
Continuing to unfold the physical health analogy, let’s consider exercise. The cognitive equivalent of aerobic activity is contemplation — the intentional focusing of your mind’s eye on a singular topic with the goal of increased understanding. Just as the sedentary lifestyles that emerged in the mid-20th century degraded our bodies, our current lack of contemplation is degrading our brains.
What’s the equivalent of this cardio for our ailing brains? A good candidate is reading. Making sense of written text exercises our minds in important ways. We develop what the cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf calls “deep reading processes” that rewire and retrain neuronal regions in ways that increase the complexity and nuance of what we’re able to understand. “Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought,” she writes. Perhaps consuming a few dozen book pages a day should become the new 10,000 daily steps — a basic foundation of activity to maintain cognitive fitness.
Another way to exercise our brains is to reject the constant companion model of phone use, in which we keep smartphones on our persons at all times. This places us in an untenable mental environment in which bundles of neurons in our short-term motivational systems, trained through experience to expect a quick reward from looking at our phones, are constantly firing, creating an insistent urge to pick up the device. This makes any act of sustained contemplation a battle of willpower — a battle we all too often lose. In this way, having constant access to our phones becomes a serious impediment to cognitive exercise.
One solution to this constant companion problem: Spend more time with your phone out of easy reach. If it’s not nearby, it won’t be as likely to trigger your motivational neurons, helping clear your brain to focus on other activities with less distraction. Let’s boil this down into a simple rule: When you’re at home, keep your phone charging in your kitchen instead of in your pocket. If you need to check your messages or look something up, do it in the kitchen. If you’re waiting for a call, turn on the phone’s ringer. This strategy allows you to participate in activities such as eating meals, watching a shared show or talking with your family, without the distraction of constantly wanting to glance at a secondary screen.
Our institutions have a role to play here as well, as rules and regulations that reduce distraction in group settings can help support the strengthening of cognitive abilities. In the wake of the success of the N.Y.U. psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book, “The Anxious Generation,” many school districts around the country began banning smartphones from classrooms. These efforts have proved to be exceptionally fruitful. A 2025 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that school phone bans were followed by “significant improvements” in student test scores; similarly, three-quarters of the 317 high schools surveyed by a Dutch research team reported that phone bans improved focus, and two-thirds reported that they improved the “social climate” in their school.
Such interventions can be expanded beyond the classroom. Before the pandemic, a business media company named Skift experimented with a ban on bringing laptops and phones to internal meetings. In an interview with CNN, Rafat Ali, the company’s chief executive, said the rule increased communication among his employees. “If you don’t have rules about laptops, people hide behind them,” he said. Such reforms might have been hard to sustain during the Covid years, but now is a good time to start exploring them again. In August, the brand strategist Adam Hanft wrote an opinion essay suggesting that employees should put their smartphones in a lockbox before entering a meeting room. “Developing minds need focus,” he wrote, citing the success of school phone bans, “but so do supposedly developed ones.”
In an office setting, the incessant demands of digital inboxes and instant messages present an even bigger obstacle to fully using our brains. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Report found that the office workers it studied were interrupted once every two minutes on average. In 2021, I published a book titled “A World Without Email” that argued we should aggressively transform collaboration strategies so we’re no longer dependent on a steady stream of back-and-forth messaging to accomplish work. (Looking at you, Slack.) The title of my book struck some as far-fetched — I used to joke that booksellers were shelving it in the fantasy section — but I was being serious. If we value our brains, we have to be ready to pursue profound changes to workplace culture.
Generative A.I. introduces its own set of challenges, especially when the technology intersects with our professional lives. In September, a splashy article in the Harvard Business Review reported on the rapid rise of “workslop,” which the authors defined to be “A.I.-generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” The result is a contradiction: “While workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value.” Another recent study, conducted by researchers at the Boston Consulting Group, found that offloading difficult tasks to A.I. led to increased mental exhaustion — a state they called “brain fry” — because of the constant context switching required to monitor and manage the A.I.’s behavior.
Why would we use A.I. in ways that ultimately make work more draining? My suspicion is that we often deploy these tools not because they make us better at our jobs but because they help us to avoid moments of sustained concentration. It’s hard to confront a blank page, so why not coax a mediocre draft of that planning document out of a chatbot? Gathering and analyzing sources for a marketing report is demanding, so why not release a swarm of A.I. agents to tackle the task instead? The problem here is self-reinforcing. Existing brain drains like social media and email had already reduced our ability to think before generative A.I. arrived, making us more willing to use this new tool to avoid mentally demanding tasks once we had access to it. At the same time, the more we use A.I. in this manner, the more our cognitive fitness will continue to degrade.
Both managers and employees need to map out when it’s best to use A.I. If the technology creates significant time savings, such as when a user prompts an L.L.M. to sift through a large collection of documents or asks an A.I.-powered agent to fix formatting errors in a data set, then those are obvious wins. Indeed, the authors of the “brain fry” article found that using these tools to automate “routine or repetitive” tasks decreased burnout. But any use of A.I. that mainly serves to make core business tasks cognitively less demanding should be treated with caution. Here’s a simple rule that reinforces this idea: Your writing should be your own. The strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the mental equivalent of a gym workout by an athlete — it’s not an annoyance to be eliminated but a key element of your craft.
The problems I describe here are only going to get worse. To stave off disaster, we need a full revolution in defense of thinking, launched against the digital forces seeking to degrade it. No more shoulder-shrugging (“What can you do? Kids these days just love their devices!”) or halfhearted experiments with minor tips (“Turn off notifications!”) or passive acquiescence to the latest tools (“If I don’t embrace A.I., I’ll be replaced by someone who does!”).
The key to this transformation is action. In the half-century that followed Eisenhower’s heart attack, age-adjusted death rates from cardiovascular disease fell by 60 percent, creating what one academic study called “one of the most important public health achievements of the 20th century.” Meanwhile, exercising has become so common as to become unremarkable. There are now more than 55,000 gyms and fitness studios in the United States alone — a reality that would have been unthinkable during the sedentary age before the publication of “Aerobics.” But Dr. Paul Dudley White’s briefings and Dr. Kenneth Cooper’s book were not enough on their own to create this transformation. It was the collective action that followed in the wake of these events that ultimately mattered more.
In this period, the government got more heavily involved in studying and communicating new guidelines about diet and exercise, as did major nonprofit organizations, like Dr. White’s American Heart Association. Individuals and communities started actively experimenting as well, leading, for example, to an explosion in varieties of recreational exercise, and best-selling books, like Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which opened people’s eyes to more grounded relationships with food. Individual interest, in turn, led to business responses, such as the rapid expansion of fitness club and gym options, or countless new health food brands. We still have a long way to go to fully address our country’s health problems, but by working together we’ve made a large amount of progress.
I think we’re finally ready for a similar burst of self-reinforcing action in defense of our cognitive fitness. What I’ve laid out here is not a complete program to reclaim our heritage as contemplative beings but instead a useful starting point. My intention is to spur a shift in understanding that can build into a larger revolution. I’m done ceding my brain — the core of all that makes me who I am — to the financial interests of a small number of technology billionaires or the shortsighted conveniences of hyperactive communication styles. It’s time to move past fretting about our slide into the cognitive shallows and decide to actually do something about it.
We’ve done it before. We can do it again.
The real historical moment here is realizing that schools around the country are enabling addiction and mental degradation by requiring elementary-age children to get on laptops and iPads. It’s akin to giving them a carton of cigarettes…
Even though I love reading books, I saw that I wasn't, in fact, reading books anymore. I want to be Someone Who Reads and made the decision to resume the habit. My attention span was shot and it was a challenge at first to read for more than a few minutes at a time. But, it did not take long to build back up. In fact, the recovery of my attention span was fast. If you think you lost your attention for reading, I encourage you to get it back. It's worth it.p.s. Library books are free.
Thanks for this. I have a no-distraction device policy in my classes and, sadly, at least ten percent of students drop out because they are addicted to their devices. They cannot stand to be disconnected for even 50 minutes.It would help if my institution supported me in this but there appears to be little appetite for common sense. When I look into other classes many students are distracted by both their laptop and their "phone". We wrongly assume that when someone turns 18 they become an adult and so it would be paternalistic to prohibit digital distraction device use in higher education. Yet we don't permit alcohol or cannabis consumption in class or leave it to individual professors to set their own policies on this matter.Finally, and ironically, many of the people who would benefit from reading this article do not have either the inclination or ability to focus long enough to do so.
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5) What We Know About Saturday’s ‘No Kings’ Protests
Thousands of demonstrations against the Trump administration are scheduled to take place in cities and towns across the country on Saturday.
By Pooja Salhotra, March 27, 2026
Protesters at a No Kings protest in Washington, D.C., in October. Caroline Gutman for The New York Times
More than 3,000 “No Kings” demonstrations are scheduled across the country on Saturday to condemn an array of President Trump’s policies and to express general discontent toward the president, whom the protesters view as acting like a monarch.
“Trump wants to rule over us as a tyrant,” the No Kings website says. “But this is America, and power belongs to the people — not to wannabe kings or their billionaire cronies.”
A spokeswoman for the White House, Abigail Jackson, said in a statement that “the only people who care about these Trump derangement therapy sessions are the reporters who are paid to cover them.”
The events come as Mr. Trump’s approval ratings hover around 40 percent, and Democrats are hopeful to make inroads in the midterm elections.
It’s the third such protest organized nationwide over the past year. Here’s what to know.
Who organizes the No Kings Protests?
The events on Saturday have been organized by national and local groups, including well-known progressive coalitions such as Indivisible, 50501 and MoveOn.
Following a similar playbook as the two protests last year, the events are supposed to be peaceful gatherings open to people of all ages and backgrounds. Anyone can sign up to host an event, and the organizers have offered online trainings on safety, security and de-escalation.
What is the goal of No Kings?
Like the earlier ones, the protests are not focused on any particular issue. Instead, they are meant to unite people who have various grievances about the federal government. In the past, that has included aggressive immigration enforcement, voting rights and the costs of health care. On Saturday, the actions are likely to feature people speaking out about the war in Iran.
When was the first No Kings protest?
In June 2025, on the same day that Mr. Trump scheduled a military parade in Washington for the Army’s 250th anniversary — which also coincided with his 79th birthday — planned protests took place in cities across the country, and internationally in countries including Britain, Mexico and Germany. The event was branded as a “day of defiance” against a perceived overreach by Mr. Trump and his allies.
Four months later, more than seven million people attended No Kings Day demonstrations on Oct. 18 in cities in all 50 states, according to organizers. Although The New York Times could not confirm that count, large crowds were evident in cities across the country, with people waving American flags and chanting “No more Trump” as they gathered to demonstrate outrage over immigration raids, the deployment of federal troops in cities, government layoffs and the rollback of vaccine requirements, among other measures.
In New York City, officials said that more than 100,000 people had attended, ranging from children to older adults.
Where are No Kings protests taking place?
The upcoming protests are collectively expected to see larger turnout than the previous two events. Organizers have asked participants to avoid confrontations and to not bring any weapons.
Organizers have created an online map of local events, with new events being continuously added.
Most of the protests are scheduled to run for about two hours in the late morning or early afternoon. They will be held in public parks, downtown streets and other public spaces.
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6) Europeans Are Angry at Trump, but Often Forgiving of Americans
A generation ago, foreign fury over the Iraq invasion often blurred into anti-Americanism. Now, some Europeans seem ready to distinguish between the president and the American people.
By Jason Horowitz, Reporting from Granada, Spain, March 27, 2026
President Trump in Washington this month. Pete Marovich for The New York Times
A retired psychiatrist sipped his morning café con leche in a corner bar in Granada, Spain, a city teeming with American tourists and students, as he followed a debate this week in the Spanish Parliament over the economic consequences of President Trump’s war in Iran.
He shook his head.
“Trump is beyond the pale,” said Jesús Tello, 75, a conservative voter who diagnosed the U.S. president as a “pathological narcissist” who did not care about the consequences of his actions and only saw enemies. But his dim view of the American president did not, Mr. Tello said, extend to all the Americans who had the “bad luck” of living with Mr. Trump.
“Americans are always welcome,” he said.
In 2003, the buildup to the United States-led invasion of Iraq prompted a groundswell of anti-American sentiment among Europeans who resented President George W. Bush for trying to drag their nations into a quagmire. Across Europe, mass antiwar demonstrations directed anger at Mr. Bush that at times seeped into a broader rage at America.
This time, there is a different, less hostile, mood, on the Continent’s streets — even if some Americans have expressed fears of a backlash. Demonstrations have been few and small. While polls across Europe show deep disapproval for Mr. Trump and for a war that risks destabilizing Europe’s economy and security, Europeans, at least for now, are often distinguishing between the American leader and the American people in their bistros, shops, cathedrals and tourist attractions.
“It’s good to separate the two,” said Alessandro Zanuso, 29, a graphic designer in Paris.
Unlike Mr. Trump, the Bush administration spent months making a case, misleading though it was, to bring Congress, the American people and world leaders aboard before going to war. Mr. Trump did not seek approval from Congress or the United Nations, or even consult in advance with U.S. lawmakers or European allies. He brazenly broke his “no new wars” promises, and upset much of his own base by joining Israel’s attack on Iran.
As a result, people across the Continent said this week, Europeans don’t have the feeling that Mr. Trump has his country behind him. That distance, they said, removed some of the stain of war from the visitors on their shores. Instead of the jingoism of the Iraq War era and talk of American exceptionalism, they saw chastened American visitors keeping their politics, and in some cases nationalities, on the down low.
“I met a lot of Americans who said they were from Canada,” said Robert Lewis, 65, from Cardiff, Wales, as he stood beside Granada’s cathedral. “They don’t want to own up to it.”
Cyril Pasteyer, 24, headwaiter at a Paris restaurant, said he had noticed that Americans were reticent to talk about the situation back home.
In Brussels, David Sastre, 45, who drives tourists around in a carriage, said that sometimes Americans apologized to him for being American. He assured them, he said, that Europeans like “99.999 percent of Americans.” For him, Mr. Trump seemed to fall in the 0.001 percent. “It’s the head of state that is the problem,” he said.
That feeling may even be spreading to Mr. Trump’s nominal allies in Europe, like Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy. This week, Ms. Meloni lost a referendum on her plan to overhaul Italy’s judiciary. As the race tightened in the days before the vote, she was hardly helped, some experts said, by her closeness to Mr. Trump, who is increasingly unpopular for his tariffs, his anti-European bombast and the rising energy prices brought on by the war.
Some supporters of Mr. Trump in Europe are standing by him. Yves Souvenir, 57, a member of the American Club of Brussels, proposed that the club organize a social event called “Epic Fury,” named for the military mission in Iran, “to celebrate the administration.” Mr. Souvenir has not yet received a response from the club leadership, he said this week.
But other Trump fans in Europe feel disoriented by his administration’s unexpected adventurism.
“Crazy people,” said Sergio Urquiza, 19, a supporter of Spain’s far-right party Vox and, until the war in Iran, of Mr. Trump.
Mr. Urquiza wore a NASA backpack decorated with an American flag as he walked in Granada to a children’s religious procession in advance of Holy Week. Mr. Urquiza worried about the war raising gas prices, and causing needless suffering in Iran and the world. Still, he said he didn’t hold that against the American students who came to his town.
“We distinguish,” Mr. Urquiza said.
Some American tourists who had girded for a chilly welcome instead appreciated Europe’s warm embrace.
John Martin, 46, said that if he could have predicted the war in Iran, which he didn’t think was a good idea, he probably wouldn’t have brought his family from Arkansas to Spain.
But as Mr. Martin and his family descended Granada’s Alhambra, the walled fortress housing magnificent late medieval Moorish palaces and gardens, he joked that everyone seemed “happy to accept our money.”
His wife, Allison, said the couple and their two children had not felt “any animosity at all,” as they toured the country. Spaniards seemed to understand, they said, that many Americans were as vexed by Mr. Trump as they were.
“It’s a temporary moment in time,” said Mr. Martin, traditionally a Republican voter, but with strong doubts about Mr. Trump. “Hopefully.”
American expats said they had received empathy more than condemnation. Katherine Wilson, a writer and actress living in Rome, said she was experiencing less anti-American sentiment than during the Iraq war. Italy has a long history of questionable leadership, going back to at least the Roman Empire, and Italians “would be really in bad shape” if judged by their leaders, she said. Italians now have a message, she said, of “oh man, we know what it’s like to have a leader who does things we don’t agree with.”
Not everyone was so understanding.
“I am upset with both Trump and the American people,” said Selvi Kilicarslan, 55, who lives in southern Turkey, which has come under sporadic missile fire from Iran. The nearby Incirlik air base hosts American forces.
Ute Gervink, 55, a goldsmith in Berlin, feared the consequences of Mr. Trump’s war and felt Americans should “share the blame because, of course, they elected a man who is completely unpredictable. And they knew that.”
Up on the Alhambra, Ana Maria Valdivieso, 33, struck a similar note about American voters.
“Did they really think Trump was not going to start a war?” she said. “I can’t understand why they believed him.”
Reporting was contributed by Carlos Barragán from Granada, Spain; Tatiana Firsova from Berlin; Koba Ryckewaert from Brussels; Ana Castelain from Paris; Nimet Kirac from Adana, Turkey; and Josephine de La Bruyère in Rome.
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7) Resurgent Inflation Tests Faith in Fed’s Willingness to Tame It
The war in the Middle East risks worsening an inflation problem that the Federal Reserve has struggled for years to subdue.
By Colby Smith and Ben Casselman, March 27, 2026
Colby Smith covers the Federal Reserve. Ben Casselman writes about the U.S. economy.
Progress on lowering inflation had stalled even before the war with Iran, as tariffs caused higher prices on imported goods, and solid consumer spending led to increased cost for services. Vincent Alban/The New York Times
Throughout a series of economic shocks that pushed up consumer prices in the past five years, Americans maintained faith that the Federal Reserve would eventually get inflation under control.
They did not waver as inflation soared to a four-decade high in the aftermath of the pandemic, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine upended energy markets and as President Trump’s tariffs heaped higher costs on consumers. Surveys of consumer sentiment showed that Americans were angry about high prices and pessimistic about the economy. But when it came to inflation, consumers said they still believed it would return to normal within a few years. Investors were similarly hopeful.
The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran is testing that conviction, putting heightened pressure on the central bank as it debates whether to lower interest rates this year.
Progress on getting inflation down to the Fed’s 2 percent target had already stalled before the war in the Middle East began. In fact, officials have missed their goal since 2021. In the past year, tariffs raised the price of imported goods, while solid consumer spending enabled businesses to raise prices for services, such as transportation or personal care.
Spiking energy prices, which have already filtered into higher airfares, fertilizer costs and shipping fees, will worsen the Fed’s inflation problem to some extent. Already, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development expects U.S. inflation to rise to 4.2 percent this year, up from 2.6 percent in 2025.
That is on the high side of year-end estimates, but it aligns directionally where most economists see inflation going. According to Goldman Sachs, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index is forecast to accelerate to 3.1 percent by the end of year, up from 2.8 percent in January. Annual inflation could peak at 4.6 percent this spring before falling back to 3.6 percent by December, the economists warned, if oil prices eclipse their previous 2008 record of $147 per barrel and get stuck around $100 through the final three months of the year.
How bad the inflation problem gets depends on how long the war lasts and how widely price increases spread. The biggest fear for policymakers is a situation in which Americans suddenly turn skeptical about where inflation is headed, setting off a self-fulfilling cycle in which workers, expecting higher prices, demand higher wages to cover those added expenses. Businesses, facing the prospects of higher costs themselves, might then be prompted to raise their own prices to stay afloat.
Once that happens — or as economists say, inflation expectations become “de-anchored” — it becomes much harder for the Fed to bring inflation under control.
In the short run, both investors and consumers expect inflation to jump as the surge in energy prices ripples through the economy. But most measures of inflation expectations indicate little alarm about the trajectory beyond the next 12 months. Measures that are based on financial market activity, which Fed officials watch especially closely, show that medium- and longer-run expectations remain slightly above 2 percent, continuing to convey confidence that the Fed will eventually close back in on its target.
A long-running survey from the University of Michigan on Friday showed that consumers’ expectations for inflation over the next 12 months jumped to 3.8 percent in March from 3.4 percent in February — the largest one-month increase since April, when Mr. Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on U.S. trading partners. But consumers’ expectations for inflation over the longer run actually inched down slightly, though they are somewhat higher than before the pandemic.
Consumer surveys from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Conference Board and other groups have shown similar patterns in recent years, with short-run expectations rising and falling, but with Americans generally reporting confidence that inflation would ultimately return to normal.
But policymakers know they cannot afford to take this confidence for granted, especially as they contend with mounting concerns about their ability to set rates free of political meddling amid a relentless pressure campaign from the White House. The central bank is also on the cusp of a major transition, with Jerome H. Powell slated to step down as chair in May. His planned successor, Kevin M. Warsh, a former Fed governor, has called for the institution to be overhauled.
“There’s going to be more skittishness from policymakers about just assuming that expectations are going to remain well anchored,” said Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
“If we’re in a geopolitically much more turbulent era where we keep getting supply shocks, it could affect long-run expectations, and that makes the Fed nervous.”
Lessons From the Past
To some observers, the current situation has uncomfortable echoes of an earlier period of rapidly rising prices, in the 1960s and ’70s.
The 1960s began with an extended period of low inflation and falling unemployment. But inflation began to creep up in the latter part of the decade, as the federal government ran large deficits to fund both the social programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” agenda and the Vietnam War. The Fed, wanting to support the economy, initially did little to rein in prices.
Policymakers eventually raised rates, but reversed course when the economy entered a recession at the end of 1969. Inflation cooled but never fully retreated before rising once again. The Fed was slow to respond, partly because President Richard M. Nixon put pressure on Arthur F. Burns, then the chair, to keep rates low heading into the 1972 presidential election.
That meant inflation was already elevated by the time Arab states imposed an oil embargo in 1973, which sent energy prices soaring. Inflation spiked and then eased when the embargo ended roughly five months later. But it did not fully subside before another oil crisis struck. This time, inflation hit a record of nearly 15 percent in 1980 before being brought to a heel by a devastating recession caused by a far more aggressive Fed led by Paul A. Volcker.
There are important differences between those periods and what’s happening now. The 1970s crisis coincided with the end of the gold standard, a globally disruptive event that left central banks without a clear road map for how to set policy. The Nixon administration imposed temporary limits on wages and prices, resulting in a surge in inflation once the policy ended. And today’s Fed has been more consistently focused on keeping inflation under control than in the past.
Still, there are some unnerving parallels: elevated deficit spending, political pressure on the Fed and now an oil shock. The risk, economists say, is a repeat of the earlier pattern, where inflation stays high for long enough that consumers and businesses stop expecting it to return to the Fed’s target.
The central bank managed to avoid this pitfall in the aftermath of the pandemic, when prices began rapidly rising as constrained supply collided with strong demand. Consumers began to expect that inflation would remain high in the short term, but they quickly became confident that it would return to a more normal range within a few years.
“Once it sort of seemed as though the Fed was waking up and actual inflation was falling somewhat, long-term expectations quickly reverted to about 2 percent, even though actual inflation was still well above that,” said Laurence M. Ball, an economist at Johns Hopkins University who studied inflation during the period.
That confidence in the Fed was crucial to the central bank’s success at bringing down inflation without causing a recession — a so-called soft landing that surprised many economists, including Mr. Ball.
“You were bringing inflation back down to the expected level rather than pushing down inflation and expected inflation by bashing the economy on the head,” he said.
Keeping Options Open
At the Fed’s latest policy meeting in March, Mr. Powell made clear that the central bank was highly attuned to the risk of resurgent inflation in light of the war in Iran. He repeatedly stressed that consumer prices were likely to rise, at least temporarily, and affirmed that the Fed was “strongly committed to doing what it takes to keep inflation expectations anchored at 2 percent.”
While Mr. Powell indicated that the central bank would not lower rates unless it saw evidence that inflation was coming back down, he stopped short of providing a specific policy prescription.
For Ricardo Reis, an economist at the London School of Economics, that kind of flexibility is crucial for the Fed to preserve when confronted by an energy shock.
“It would be dangerous to commit to a very strong policy right now,” he said. “Lots of things can happen in the next few months, and some of them involve cutting rates, some involve keeping them steady, and some involve hiking.”
Those who make the case for cuts point to the fact that higher energy prices often crimp demand as consumers are forced to offset higher expenses by pulling back on other purchases. The latest shock also comes at a time when the labor market is noticeably more vulnerable. The unemployment rate is still historically low at around 4.4 percent, but hiring has essentially ground to a halt.
A rate increase appears far-fetched against this backdrop, but the possibility cannot be ruled out entirely. More likely, the Fed will hold rates steady for an extended period as it assesses the economic fallout.
One plausible rationale for raising rates would be if energy-related price pressures bled into measures of “core” inflation, which strip out food and energy items, said Ellen Meade, who was a senior adviser to the Fed’s board of governors until 2021 and is now at Duke University. Further signs that inflation expectations may not be as contained as market measures currently indicate are also likely to prompt a more aggressive stance, she said.
Andrew Schneider, senior U.S. Economist at BNP Paribas, soon expects officials to signal that the next policy move is “ambiguous,” meaning it is equally likely to be a cut as an increase. Without the right response to the ongoing energy shock, Mr. Schneider warned, the Fed could inadvertently undermine its own credibility on inflation.
“If the Fed doesn’t respond to this year after year of overshoot and allows whatever next supply shock to accelerate inflation, then there could be a latent reconsideration of the inflation target, and people in the market could think the Fed is OK with inflation closer to 3 percent,” he said. “That’s a risk right now.”
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8) Where Might the Iran War Hit Your Grocery Bill? Start With Raspberries.
It takes a lot of fuel to produce this delicate fruit, which can be a sensitive barometer as oil costs rise.
By Kim Severson, March 27, 2026
Raspberry prices can be a harbinger for other food costs. The wholesale price of fresh berries has doubled since January. Vincent Alban/The New York Times
Raspberries are the divas of fresh produce. They die if the soil is too wet. They prefer to be handpicked. Travel isn’t easy. They do best stacked lightly in refrigerated trucks cooled and powered with diesel fuel. Even on a plane, the berries must be refrigerated.
All this makes them one of the most fuel-intensive items in the produce aisle. And they bear a message from the near future: The Iran war is likely to grow your grocery bill.
Raspberries were already expensive, but the wholesale price of fresh berries has doubled since January, according to federal Agricultural Marketing Service reports. At a Whole Foods Market in Atlanta on Tuesday, a six-ounce plastic container of organic raspberries cost nearly $8. That’s about 20 cents a berry.
“That price is ridiculous,” said Catessia McGee, a mother and regular berry shopper who opted instead for a 16-ounce container of organic strawberries for $4.99.
The war has choked the flow of oil and gas worldwide, sending diesel prices up 35 percent in the United States from a month ago, said Siobhan May of the International Fresh Produce Association.
“Berries are often the first category where consumers notice fuel inflation,” she said. “When fuel prices rise, those costs move through the supply chain almost immediately.”
Before the war began on Feb. 28, the Department of Agriculture projected that food would be only moderately more expensive in 2026 than last year. Restaurant prices would rise a little higher than grocery prices, but overall, consumers would see prices jump only about 3 percent. The agency’s revised March report warned that food bills could climb as much as 6.1 percent this year.
Prices of perishable produce and many kitchen staples are expected to increase more than 6 percent, according to government and industry forecasts. Bread and cereal could jump 10 percent. Ground beef could rise 7 or 8 percent by June, with premium blends topping $9 a pound.
There are plenty of unknowns, like how much the rise in crude oil prices will add to the cost of petroleum-based plastic packaging, or when ships might once again navigate the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a third of the world’s supply of synthetic fertilizers normally passes.
But the war can’t take all the blame.
“Raspberries are a really nice microcosm of several different economic layers threaded together that were in place before the conflict in Iran,” said Chris Barrett, a professor of agricultural economics at Cornell.
As anyone who has struggled with a grocery budget or paid a restaurant check recently can tell you, food prices have been mounting for some time. And because most berries are imported, trade policies, including tariffs, have added to the cost. The dollar has lost value, so everything purchased overseas costs more.
Insurance rates have increased, and so have labor costs. Food harvested and processed in America relies overwhelmingly on foreign-born labor, which continues to shrink under U.S. immigration policies.
The raspberry story is the same for most fresh produce. Consider the pineapple. It takes lots of oil and gas to farm Del Monte pineapples in Central America, and fuel to truck them to a port. Fuel feeds the ships that carry them to distribution centers and the trucks that take them to the grocery store. All along the way, they need to be kept cold, requiring more fuel.
“We are seeing increases in fuel and other input costs that we have been absorbing for some time,” said Danny Dumas, a senior vice president at Fresh Del Monte. But “if current conditions do not improve, customers and consumers will likely begin to feel those cost pressures, too.”
Raspberries have other complications to contend with. The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued a market alert this month signaling that the demand for the fruit had greatly outstripped supply. Intense heat and heavy rain have been factors, and there are supply gaps as the season in Mexico is beginning to wind down and the Southern California season is ramping up.
The threat of cartel violence and bottlenecks at border crossings have some growers holding back shipments. Berries are delicate and ephemeral, and people in the produce business say it might be easier to sell melting ice cubes. Why risk losing fruit and wasting fuel while idling at the border?
That’s why the selection of raspberries at some groceries is thin, and the price and quality fluctuate from day to day and from store to store. The gamble for the shopper is how soon the berries will turn to mush in the refrigerator.
“The only advice I can give anybody,” said Ms. McGee, “is to buy on sale and make your dollar last and just don’t buy raspberries when the price is crazy.”
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9) Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed
Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.
By Noam Scheiber, March 27, 2026
Noam Scheiber covers white-collar workers. This article has been adapted from his forthcoming book, “Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class.”
“Polling by the Pew Research Center showed that the portion of college graduates with positive views of socialism roughly doubled during the 2010s, to over 40 percent.”
Political observers on the left and right had very different views on whether Zohran Mamdani would be a good mayor of New York City. But one thing they agreed on was why so many young college graduates supported the self-proclaimed democratic socialist.
As Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and Trump backer, put it in an interview with The Free Press after last fall’s election: Too many people graduate from college with useless degrees, sky-high debt and long odds of owning a home. The graduates saw Mamdani as a solution to these problems. “If you proletarianize the young people,” Mr. Thiel said, “you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”
He’s not wrong, at least about the economic challenges facing recent college graduates. Student debt has escalated over the past few decades, while housing is increasingly inaccessible for young Americans, especially in high-priced areas like New York and San Francisco.
Perhaps most alarmingly, recent college graduates are having a harder time finding work. Between 1990 and 2018, it was almost unheard-of for the unemployment rate of recent college graduates to exceed the country’s overall rate. But that has been the case for five straight years now.
It appears that the white-collar job market will continue to soften this year. And almost all of these problems precede the impact of artificial intelligence, which is still in the early stages of cannibalizing human labor.
As a result, poll after poll shows that college graduates are unusually dour. In surveys by the University of Michigan dating back to the 1960s, the college educated had never been more downbeat about economic conditions than over the past four years. Gallup recently found that the portion of college graduates who thought it was a good time to find a “quality job” was a mere 19 percent, down from over 70 percent in 2022.
Of course, the economic turmoil of the last decade or two has taken a toll on millions of Americans. Most of them lacked degrees, and many fared even worse financially than the college educated.
But for young college graduates, extended bouts of unemployment, or long periods stuck in a low-paying job that didn’t make use of their degrees, upended the entire picture of adulthood they had been taught to expect. In effect, a gap has opened up between the life that many graduates believed they had been promised and their actual prospects. And they’re seething about it.
The College Admissions Arms Race
For people in their 20s and early 30s, those expectations were forged as early as elementary school, when “college for all” became a national obsession — the way every American could achieve middle-class affluence.
One of the country’s largest charter school networks, KIPP, helped popularize the mantra “College starts in kindergarten” after it was founded in 1994, not long before this cohort was in fact entering kindergarten.
Presidents reminded families that “the return on a college investment” was nearly double that of the stock market (Bill Clinton) and that college was no longer a luxury but an “economic imperative” (Barack Obama).
With an eye toward future college enrollment, students slogged through longer school days and labored over more homework. One scholar found that the average amount of time that younger children in elementary school spent studying at home increased roughly threefold between 1981 and 2003.
In high school, when it was time for actual college prep, as opposed to just the preparation for the prep, they stuffed their résumés full of university-level classes. The number of students taking Advanced Placement courses grew tenfold from the 1980s to the early 2010s, as the author Malcolm Harris has noted. At Edina High School, in an upper-middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, the now-34-year-old Teddy Hoffman took more than half a dozen A.P. classes before being admitted to Grinnell College in Iowa. It was a fairly common course load for someone who aspired to attend a competitive college.
And it wasn’t just affluent white students who became foot soldiers in the college admissions arms race. At the Baltimore County high school that Chaya Barrett, now 32, attended, students were tracked into classes where they studied vocabulary words and took practice SATs so that no manner of test question would faze them.
“It was: ‘We want you to get to college,’” said Ms. Barrett, who later graduated from Towson University in Maryland. “‘We’re a mostly Black school. And we have high college acceptance rates, and we want to keep that up.’”
In this relentless race to the college quad, money was no object. Dylan Burton, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, already had a lot of college credit when they enrolled in the video game design program at the University of Texas at Dallas in 2017. It would still cost them nearly $70,000 over two and a half years to earn their bachelor’s degree, after room and board. But they had wanted to make video games since childhood, and the industry was exploding in popularity and revenue.
So millions of people like Mr. Hoffman and Ms. Barrett and Mx. Burton applied for scholarships and part-time jobs, and took out loans to cover the difference. Mx. Burton borrowed the full amount. For several years these students juggled finals and term papers and the night shift at the dining hall or the weekend shift at the mall.
And then, once they graduated, many found themselves with tens of thousands of dollars in loans, and no path to a job in line with their credentials.
The Baristas With Degrees
While this generation was focused on earning degrees, the job market was worsening — slowly at first, then all at once. According to a paper by the Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein, recent graduates started doing significantly worse than older graduates around 2005, then fell much further behind during the Great Recession. The employment rate for recent graduates had yet to fully recover by the Covid-19 pandemic, which upended the job market all over again.
At the highest altitude, the problem was that the economy was producing more graduates but not as many of the jobs they traditionally held. Some economists argue that software had begun to eliminate jobs in fields like financial services and merchandise planning well before the rise of generative A.I.
On average, college graduates still earned a large premium over people with only a high school diploma. But the averages concealed the fact that some graduates were doing very well — like people who worked on Wall Street and in Big Tech — while many others were falling behind.
For decades, many young graduates had earned good money even if their jobs didn’t require a degree, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But many of those roles — like insurance agent and human resource worker — appeared to start paying less or disappearing in the 2000s and never recovered. A larger portion of these overqualified graduates ended up in jobs that didn’t pay well.
After earning his degree from Grinnell in 2014 and spending a year abroad on a prestigious Watson Fellowship, Mr. Hoffman became a barista at Starbucks. The idea was to buy time while he settled on a career path. (He had studied English and theater.) But seven years later, he was still at Starbucks — partly because the pandemic had delayed his professional plans. With a child on the way and money getting tight, he and his wife applied for temporary public assistance. The state rejected their application.
Mx. Burton, who in college had led a team that made a playable video game called KaiJr, struggled to find work as a designer after graduating in 2019. It turned out that designing video games, notwithstanding the university’s optimistic marketing material, was more akin to becoming a Hollywood actor than a computer programmer: The field could support only a small fraction of the millions of people eager to enter it. Mx. Burton eventually took a much more tedious job testing video games for glitches, for $15 an hour.
“My student loans were about to kick in, and I don’t have a job yet,” Mx. Burton said. “You have to not be picky anymore.”
As Ms. Barrett prepared to graduate with a degree in communications from Towson in 2018, she applied for dozens of jobs in fields like marketing and professional training at the likes of Accenture, Amazon and Stanley Black & Decker. After getting no bites, and with roughly $50,000 in debt, she went full time at the Apple Store where she had worked in college. The store often seduced college graduates with job titles like “Genius” and “Expert,” along with its generous benefits, but Ms. Barrett had still hoped for more.
Class Confidence
In his 2000 book, “Bobos in Paradise,” David Brooks identified a new upper class of bourgeois bohemians — a demographic of techies, financiers and tenured professors who had the earning power and ideology of the bourgeois but the tastes and habits of bohemians. They favored balanced budgets and free trade. They went on expensive ski vacations and kept second homes. But they decorated them with reclaimed-wood furniture and grew heirloom produce in the backyard.
By the early 2020s, young college-educated adults were in some sense the mirror image of Mr. Brooks’s Bobos. They were often bourgeois in their tastes. They cradled sleek smartphones and watched prestige TV on demand. But the previous decade and a half had bequeathed them the bank accounts — and the politics — of the proletariat.
Polling by the Pew Research Center showed that the portion of college graduates with positive views of socialism roughly doubled during the 2010s, to over 40 percent. The shift helped fuel the rise of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — left-wing figures who built mass appeal.
The ideology of these disaffected college graduates didn’t end with economics. At the most fundamental level, their politics elevated the underdog. They were more likely than non-graduates to call out the harassers of women and gay and transgender people. They worried about racism and climate change, were growing skeptical of law enforcement and believed the Iraq war had been a mistake.
Perhaps the most visible expression of this ideology came at work, where many college graduates increasingly saw themselves as the underdog. They began to unionize at previously nonunion workplaces, like video game studios, architecture firms and banks. In 2023, hundreds of doctors in Minnesota and Wisconsin, fed up with mergers and acquisitions that had made them feel like cogs in the medical-industrial complex, formed what was the largest union of private-sector physicians in the country.
And it was the college graduates stuck in jobs that didn’t require a degree who seemed most determined to take on their employers. College had taught them to question. It had instilled in them what the sociologist Ruth Milkman called “class confidence” — a sense of agency that comes from knowing how to work the system, a broader perspective than the day-to-day grind.
But at the cash register, with the manager looking on, they had to smile and take whatever the customer gave them.
“I have been pretty hard on myself thinking the exhaustion was just me having an attitude problem,” Mr. Hoffman wrote to a friend during his second year at Starbucks. “But there are just too many human interactions in which you aren’t recognized as a human.” He was darkly amused by a customer who, referring to the name displayed on his apron, remarked: “I didn’t know you guys had names!”
Mr. Hoffman helped organize his store in Chicago, one of more than 600 that would unionize beginning in 2021, after years of perceived indignities.
“If you’re going to be disrespected like this,” he told me, “you have to have a bigger piece of the pie.”
The Vanishing Diploma Divide?
Since President Trump’s first term, and especially since his re-election, political analysts have pointed to the gap between college-educated voters and those without degrees as one of the most significant fissures in American politics.
In 2024, Mr. Trump won non-college voters by almost 15 points, while losing the college educated by a similar margin. By contrast, non-college voters had narrowly backed a Democrat, Mr. Obama, as recently as 2012.
To explain the growing divide, commentators typically emphasize how the college educated are more liberal on social and cultural issues than those without degrees, and how these issues have played a bigger role in deciding elections over the past generation.
But that analysis tells only half the story of how American politics has shifted. Critically, it misses how the views of college-educated voters on economic questions have come to resemble those of voters without degrees.
A 2023 paper by the political scientist William Marble found that college graduates were well to the right of voters without a degree on economic issues during the 1980s and 1990s. But they began drifting leftward around 2004, and by 2020 college graduates were somewhat to the left of non-graduates on these issues.
More strikingly, the entire outlook of college graduates appears to have changed. During the Reagan and Clinton eras, many college-educated workers saw themselves as management-adjacent — as future executives and aspiring professionals being groomed for a life of affluence. They did not believe they had much in common with the working class. In the late 1990s, only slightly more than half supported labor unions, according to Gallup.
But by this decade, college graduates often identified more with rank-and-file workers than with employers. According to Gallup, about three-quarters of college graduates supported autoworkers and Hollywood writers in standoffs with their employers in 2023, when both groups went on strike. That matches their support for labor unions overall.
Matt Hoffman, one of the doctors who recently unionized in Minnesota (and no relation to Teddy), told me that he took his children to a United Automobile Workers picket line in 2023. “In our society, the sides are workers versus management,” he said. “I wanted them to understand that.”
In a high-wattage presidential election, when the country was primarily focused on cultural issues, college graduates and those without a degree often appeared to have little in common. But when it came to how they felt about their bosses or their bank accounts, it was suddenly harder to tell them apart. They were no longer on opposite teams.
How this will all play out is still up in the air, but Mr. Hoffman’s store in Chicago may offer an early clue. The staff was a mix of college graduates, college students and employees who didn’t aspire to a four-year degree. One employee earned a welding certificate while at Starbucks and later became an apprentice pipe fitter. But regardless of their educational backgrounds, they almost all voted to unionize the store in 2022. The final tally was 20 to 3.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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10) Japan and the U.S. Agree to Team Up on Seabed Mining
The arrangement could signal a fracture in the decades-long effort among nations to reach consensus on how to mine the ocean floor while protecting ecosystems.
By Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, March 27, 2026
A Japanese seabed mining research vessel in Shimizu, Japan, in January. Yuka Obayashi/Reuters
The United States has spent nearly a year pursuing deep sea mining without cooperation from the rest of the world. Now, Japan has said it will help out.
In memo signed by officials of both countries last week, Japan and the United States agreed to share research and insights from their forays into the fledgling industry. It was an extraordinary public show of support for recent U.S. efforts to jump-start the deep sea mining industry, according to diplomats and officials who work on seabed issues.
Vast areas of the ocean floor are rich with valuable minerals, but mining them would be technically challenging and critics say it could damage marine ecosystems. In addition, issuing permits to mine in international waters, which the United States has said it intends to do, raises diplomatic questions given that international waters, by definition, aren’t the domain of any one country.
The document, known as a memorandum of cooperation, lays out the countries’ intentions but is not legally binding. It was signed along with a number of other economic and resource-focused partnership agreements after President Trump and Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, met in Washington.
It was then circulated at a semiannual meeting of the International Seabed Authority, an independent organization created under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to regulate the ocean floor in international waters. The 170 nations that agreed to follow that law have spent a decade locked in debate over potential rules for mining international waters for metals and minerals.
At a recent meeting they again failed to reach a consensus.
Some 40 countries have called for a moratorium or ban on the practice.
The lack of an international agreement on rules has agitated the industry and countries interested in it. In a recent statement during the meeting, the Japanese delegation said it was concerned about further delays.
Without global rules, the industry’s pace will be set by those willing to take action, whether unilaterally, like the United States, or via partnership like the one Japan and the United States have announced, said Marie Bourrel-McKinnon, an expert on seabed governance who served as the authority’s chief of staff until last year.
It took 12 years for the Law of the Sea Convention to enter into force after it was initially adopted in 1982 because countries couldn’t agree on how to approach deep sea mining, Ms. Bourrel-McKinnon said, and the final text was designed to carefully balance the competing priorities of the time. Now, as the world changes, the “system may need to adjust again,” she said.
The United States never agreed to the Law of the Sea and is not required to abide by the authority, but it had long followed the international customs and participated in the meetings. That changed last year, when President Trump ordered U.S. regulators to begin issue permits for deep sea mining.
Now the United States seems set to apply domestic laws to enable the fledgling industry in international waters. Last month, the Metals Company, a front-runner in the effort to mine the ocean, said it had applied for a commercial mining permit under a new U.S. law that fast-tracks applications by reducing environmental assessment requirements.
The new memorandum states that Japan and the United States will create a working group to share information on deep sea science and mining projects, including insights from a recent effort by Japan to begin mining within its national waters. Japan wants to harvest deep ocean mud to counterbalance China’s dominance in rare earths metals.
In some ways, the partnership is no surprise and comes in the context of a larger critical-minerals partnership with the United States.
The new document did not specify whether Japan would help the United States in national waters or international ones. Because Japan has agreed to follow the Law of the Sea, the latter could put it at risk of breaching the international agreement.
Japan verbally reaffirmed its commitment to the international process during the seabed authority’s meetings, but experts worry the new partnership may be a sign of a coming geopolitical shake-up if other countries decide to follow suit.
It is possible for countries, like Japan or China, to withdraw from the convention, said Donald Rothwell, a professor of international law at the Australia National University’s School of Law who specializes in ocean geopolitics. Back in the 1980s, he said, Japan was among a handful of countries that was cautious about joining the Law of the Sea without the United States and was exploring the possibility of an alternative seabed mining agreement.
“That Japan would appear to be reviving this type of interest and seeking to work alongside the Trump Administration in deep sea mining would trigger concern and interest from a number of major ocean players, especially China,” he said.
Before this year’s meeting, Leticia Carvalho, who is leading the discussions as head of the authority, said in an interview with The New York Times that America’s unilateral push to mine the ocean risked fracturing international standards.
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11) Judge Agrees to Drop Charges Against Officers in Breonna Taylor’s Death
The Trump administration had asked the court to dismiss the charges, describing them as an example of “weaponized federal overreach” by the Biden administration.
By Chris Cameron, Reporting from Washington, March 27, 2026
A federal judge agreed to drop the remaining criminal charges against two Louisville, Ky., police officers who were involved in drafting the no-knock search warrant that led to the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor by police officers in 2020.
Judge Charles R. Simpson III of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky approved a request by the Justice Department to dismiss the charges with prejudice — meaning that the two officers, Kyle Meany and Joshua Jaynes, cannot be charged in the same case later. He made the ruling in a one-page order, without explanation.
Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black emergency room worker, was watching movies in the apartment she shared with her boyfriend when plainclothes officers battered down the door looking for illegal drugs. Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, believing the intruders were robbers, fired a single shot at them with his licensed handgun, and the unarmed Ms. Taylor was killed in the hail of return fire from the officers.
In an interview with ABC News this week, Ms. Taylor’s mother, Tamika Palmer, denounced the move to drop the charges against the officers, saying that her daughter “was killed because of their lies and negligence, and somebody should be held accountable for that.”
Federal prosecutors accused Mr. Jaynes and Mr. Meany of falsifying records to make it appear as if Ms. Taylor had a connection to criminal activity, charges that might have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence. Neither was present at the shooting.
No drugs were found in the no-knock raid on Ms. Taylor’s home. Three police officers fired more than 30 bullets into the apartment. Ms. Taylor was struck six times. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Last week, the Trump administration asked the court to dismiss the charges “in the interest of justice.” A Justice Department spokesman described the charges as an example of “weaponized federal overreach” by the Biden administration.
It was the latest effort by the Trump administration to intervene in support of the officers charged in Ms. Taylor’s death. Last year, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division, asked a federal judge to sentence a Louisville police officer convicted in the 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor to just one day in prison. The judge sentenced the officer to nearly three years in prison, but he was released on bail pending an appeal.
The Trump administration also abandoned a consent decree with the police department in Louisville, one of many agreements intended to rein in departments accused of civil rights violations — primarily police violence against Black people.
The death of Ms. Taylor was one of the main drivers of wide-scale protests that erupted in 2020 over police violence and racial injustice.
Under the Biden administration, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland charged four members of the Louisville Metro Police, accusing them of taking actions that led to Ms. Taylor’s killing during the botched search for a drug dealer she once dated.
The Justice Department under President Trump, however, has sought to rein in or abandon many civil rights cases begun under earlier administrations. The motion to drop the charges against the two officers, Mr. Meany and Mr. Jaynes, was signed by Harmeet K. Dhillon, the head of the department’s civil rights division. Ms. Dhillon has abandoned the unit’s historical mission of addressing discrimination against minorities and violence rooted in race.
At the direction of Mr. Trump and his subordinates, the federal government has focused instead on investigating claims of discrimination against white people — particularly white men.
The case against the two officers had already been significantly weakened before the charges were dropped.
Last August, Judge Simpson threw out some of the most serious charges against the two officers, including accusations that they had committed violations of federal civil rights laws.
In that ruling, the judge acknowledged that he was “troubled” by the officers’ potential falsification of the warrant, but said the government could not prove that their actions had directly led to Ms. Taylor’s death in a hail of police bullets.
He left in place several other lesser charges, including misdemeanor civil rights violations, falsified records and conspiracy to conceal the officers’ actions.
Three officers were fired in the aftermath of the killing, including Mr. Jaynes; Myles Cosgrove, who fired the fatal shot; and Brett Hankison, who was also present at the raid.
State prosecutors charged Mr. Hankison with wanton endangerment for firing 10 bullets through a covered window and glass door, although none of the rounds hit anyone. He was acquitted, prompting widespread calls for federal charges. In 2025, a federal jury found Mr. Hankison guilty on one count of violating Ms. Taylor’s civil rights by using excessive force.
In 2022, Kelly Goodlett, who worked closely with Mr. Meany and Mr. Jaynes, pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges for falsifying an affidavit to obtain the warrant and for lying to criminal investigators. She has yet to be sentenced, according to court records.
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12) Wild Ultimatums and ‘Bombing Our Little Hearts Out’: A Portrait of Trump at War
President Trump has vacillated between boasting about U.S. military superiority and deep frustration that his war of choice is not always having the desired effects.
By Erica L. Green, March 28, 2026
Erica L. Green is a White House correspondent. She reported from Washington.
The president’s allies have always said that his unpredictability is his superpower, and that it keeps his enemies guessing. Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times
President Trump was fresh off the golf course, and his fury was building.
It was March 21, and as he settled back into his Mar-a-Lago estate for the evening, he was reading another news account about how, for all the military success the United States had in Iran, he had yet to achieve his political objectives.
At 7:44 p.m., the president made his frustration known with an extraordinary ultimatum: If Iran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours and allow much of the world’s oil and gas to flow through, he would bomb Iran’s civilian electric power plants. It was the kind of attack that could constitute a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
But just hours before the Monday deadline expired, Mr. Trump delayed his threat by five days, easing fears of an imminent escalation with profound military, diplomatic and economic implications.
Still, he warned that “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out” if Iran would not make a deal, and as the week progressed he made new threats that left allies off balance and spooked the markets. So on Thursday afternoon, after stocks on Wall Street suffered their largest daily decline since the start of the war, he added another 10 days to the clock, again seeking to ease the fears ignited by his own hard-line positions.
It is too soon to know whether the extra time will result in productive diplomacy. But it is already clear that Mr. Trump’s wild swings — from optimism to frustration and anger, from de-escalation to escalation — have combined to give his management of the war an erratic, make-it-up-as-it goes feel.
Ever since the United States, alongside Israel, launched the war on Feb. 28, Mr. Trump has vacillated between chest-thumping about U.S. military superiority and deep frustration that the tactical achievements on the battlefield did not seem to be producing the strategic outcome he predicted.
Although the supreme leader and many top military and intelligence leaders have been killed, the regime in Tehran remains in control. Iran’s leaders have all but sealed off the Strait of Hormuz, sending gas prices skyrocketing and rattling investors. And Iran retains control of the material it would need to produce a nuclear weapon, the main threat cited by Mr. Trump in taking the nation into the war in the first place.
Mr. Trump has said he understands there will be short-term pain from the war, which he accepts as a necessary price to ensure that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. And the president’s allies have always said that his unpredictability is his superpower, and that it keeps his enemies guessing.
But it also suggests an inconsistency of purpose that has led the president to keep shifting his goals, even as the risks of the war grow bigger by the day.
Mr. Trump spends his days immersed in the war, receiving several briefings a day either in the Oval Office or the Situation Room. Some of the briefings include a short montage video of less than a minute, White House officials say, primarily raw footage of military strikes that the U.S. Central Command also shares on X. When Mr. Trump is deliberating a decision, he goes around the room and asks his advisers what they think.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said the president makes every decision with the same goal: victory.
“He understands that these sorts of things throughout history are ultimately judged by the outcome,” Ms. Leavitt said, “and the president knows that at the end of this, when we are able to declare that the Iranian terrorist regime no longer poses a threat to the United States militarily, that is going to be a legacy-making, history-marking moment.”
Mr. Trump gets military advice from two main sources: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mr. Hegseth is the president’s go-to when it comes to publicly defending military policies, U.S. officials say. But General Caine, a former Air Force F-16 fighter pilot and Pentagon liaison to the C.I.A., is the military’s Trump whisperer — its main interlocutor with the president on operational matters.
Pentagon and White House officials say Mr. Trump has developed a good rapport and strong personal trust with the low-key General Caine, whom he plucked from retirement to be chairman after Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. was fired in early 2025.
Before the war started, General Caine briefed Mr. Trump on an array of options, including some that he said could strain U.S. munitions stocks and risk American casualties. General Caine does not advocate one option or another in Situation Room discussions, U.S. officials say. Instead, he lays out the risks, benefits and consequences.
That occasionally puts General Caine in a difficult position.
Late last month, in the run-up to the war, Mr. Trump said General Caine believed that any eventual military action ordered against Iran would be “something easily won.” But that is not what General Caine had told Mr. Trump and other senior advisers.
The disconnect underscores just how much the Iran war is testing Mr. Trump’s usual strategy for dealing with crises: imposing his own reality and disregarding inconvenient truths.
“He thinks everything is transactional, he can deal with the deal one step at a time and see how things unfold, but war is fast, uncontrollable, unpredictable and deadly,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor and the editor of a book of essays about Mr. Trump’s first term.
“He’s doing the same techniques he always does — threatening people, insulting people, seizing attention to what he wants to say — he’s learning that it doesn’t always work,” he added. “He’s doing the art of the deal in a way that’s just creating chaos.”
Embracing Military Power
During his first term, Mr. Trump seemed more hesitant to use the force of the U.S. military. In 2019, he approved military strikes against Iran only to call the operation off with minutes to spare, citing the possibility of Iranian casualties.
John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser who has supported aggressive military aggression against Iran, including regime change, recalled that Mr. Trump had seemed uncomfortable in his first term with the idea of striking Syria, which was using chemical weapons on its own people.
“He wanted it to look like it was a strong response, but not really be that strong,” said Mr. Bolton, who has become one of the president’s most vocal critics.
Now, after campaigning on a promise to keep America out of foreign entanglements, Mr. Trump is embracing American military might. And with the war in Iran at least, he has been far more matter-of-fact about the possibility that there could be American casualties.
He dispatched B-2 bombers to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in June; he launched a raid in January that resulted in the capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela; and U.S. forces have blown dozens of boats out of the water in the Caribbean, killing more than 160 people, in what the Trump administration says is an operation to combat drug smuggling.
His operation in Iran is far more complex, less popular and deadlier for American forces than those operations. So far, 13 U.S. service members have died. Mr. Trump has attended two dignified transfers, and Ms. Leavitt has said that Mr. Trump considers it the most important, yet the hardest part of his job as commander in chief. The father of one fallen soldier recently recounted the “pleasant surprise” of Mr. Trump’s emotion and “humanity” during a meeting.
At the same time, Mr. Trump insists that he is doing what no other president before him had the courage to do.
“We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time — Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today,” he wrote in a Truth Social post this month. “They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!”
Mr. Trump’s cavalier attitude has shown cracks. When he was pressed about the deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school on the opening day of the war, Mr. Trump first blamed Iran and then claimed he did not “know enough about it.”
A preliminary inquiry has determined that the United States was responsible.
The president, who was granted five deferments from being drafted to fight in Vietnam, including for a diagnosis of bone spurs, has often mused that he would be a “good general.” Earlier this month, he posted an old picture of himself in uniform at the New York Military Academy, a notable choice as he launched a war.
As the weeks have gone by, the goals and objectives that Mr. Trump laid out at the start of the war have changed. Last week, as he said he was considering “winding down” military operations in Iran, Mr. Trump no longer mentioned the purpose of supporting regime change through a popular uprising, an objective he had set at the start.
“The war, like everything else that comes out of the White House, is a reflection of Donald Trump’s very unique personality and leadership style,” said Steven M. Gillon, a historian and the author of “Presidents at War: How World War II Shaped a Generation of Presidents.” “It’s focused on him as a great man. It is vague. It’s undisciplined. It’s unfocused.”
Mr. Trump has explained some of his back-and-forth decisions in the war by referring to the lessons he learned before he entered into politics, back when he was a real estate developer in New York.
“You have to understand,” Mr. Trump told an audience in Memphis earlier this week, “my whole life has been a negotiation.”
‘Presidents Don’t Need Permission.’
But Mr. Trump’s allies see his decision to go to war as his duty as commander in chief.
“President Trump is acting like a wartime president should — decisive, unafraid to use his constitutional authority and focused on protecting Americans rather than getting bogged down in the kind of endless and rudderless conflicts we saw under his predecessors,” said Mike Davis, who leads the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group, and was an early supporter of Mr. Trump’s war.
“Presidents don’t need permission to defend the country, and the media and Democrats will do anything to delegitimize Operation Epic Fury,” he said. “President Trump’s legacy won’t be judged on process or polls, but on whether he succeeds in neutralizing the Iran threat and making Americans safer.”
Still, the conflict is deeply unpopular with a majority of Americans. The president chose to launch the war without first making the case to the American public or Congress, which perhaps contributed to the absence of a “rally around the flag” moment that many wartime presidents see. (He has acknowledged that he has been advised against calling it a “war” because he did not seek congressional approval, so he prefers to call it an “excursion.”)
Aside from the question of congressional approval, Mr. Trump has failed to provide any evidence that Iran posed an “imminent threat” to the United States. And he has repeatedly moved the goal posts for success — even declaring victory while at the same time arguing that the mission was incomplete. He said he would accept nothing less than an end with the “unconditional surrender” of Iran, a condition that his aides have said is up to his discretion.
Mr. Trump is not the first president to put forth a lofty yet elusive goal. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for the “unconditional surrender” during World War II. It is one of the few similarities between how the two approached war.
“When Roosevelt announced the unconditional surrender goal in World War II, it was not well thought through, and not fully coordinated with his team or his allies,” said Peter Feaver, an adviser to President George W. Bush on national security strategy and now a professor at Duke University who has studied how presidents lead in wartime. “I would not be surprised if President Trump’s announcement of unconditional surrender matched Roosevelt’s in that regard.”
But Roosevelt cultivated something that has eluded Mr. Trump: powerful allies, namely Winston Churchill, with whom he coordinated his aggressive military strategy.
Mr. Trump has instead alienated and threatened his allies for not joining the war effort. He has targeted most of his ire at Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, declaring that Mr. Starmer is “no Winston Churchill.”
“We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!” Mr. Trump wrote on March 7.
But now, with yet another deadline looming for Iran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz to shipping or face devastating strikes on its power plants, Mr. Trump has a decision to make about the next steps in a war that he estimated, at the outset, would last “four to five weeks.” The war has now been going on for nearly a month.
Mr. Trump is ratcheting up pressure on Iran to accept a U.S. proposal to end the war, even as he sends more troops to the Middle East and warns Iranians that “we’ll just keep blowing them away” if they don’t make a deal.
Iran has publicly rejected the overtures, though it has privately signaled some willingness.
“They’ll tell you, ‘We’re not negotiating,’” Mr. Trump said. “Of course, they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated.”
On Friday evening, during remarks at a finance conference in Miami Beach for Saudi Arabia’s sovereign investment fund, Mr. Trump boasted how Iran was “begging to make a deal” and how the United States’ operation was helping ensure that the very “powerful” nation of Saudi Arabia would be safe.
While he was speaking, U.S. officials confirmed that Iran had struck a naval base in Saudi Arabia where U.S. service members were stationed. Twelve Americans were injured in the attack, which amounted to one of the most serious breaches of American air defenses in the course of the war.
Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington.
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13) With Cuba Under Pressure, the Castro Dynasty Is Making a Comeback
As Trump officials demand changes, Castro family members are suddenly popping up across Cuba’s political scene. Some even ask: Could one be the “Cuban Delcy?”
By Simon Romero and David C. Adams, March 28, 2026
Simon Romero reported from Mexico City, and David C. Adams from Miami.
When President Miguel DÃaz-Canel of Cuba acknowledged this month that his government was engaged in secret talks with the Trump administration, he revealed that the person guiding the negotiations was the “historical leader of the revolution.”
That honorific is reserved for Raúl Castro, 94, who succeeded his brother Fidel Castro as Cuba’s president from 2008 to 2018, before retreating from the public eye to project an image of a civilian transition under Mr. DÃaz-Canel.
But with Cuba on the brink of economic collapse from a U.S. oil blockade and gripped by a worsening humanitarian crisis, other members of the Castro family have emerged from the shadows.
One has spoken directly with Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state. Another is taking part in the negotiations with the Trump administration. Yet another is the public face of Cuba’s groundbreaking (and tantalizing) decision to allow Cuban exiles to invest in the island.
The family’s new profile reflects a dynasty that never really exited the political scene, but instead evolved.
Even as Trump officials increase pressure for sweeping economic changes in Cuba and press for the removal of Mr. DÃaz-Canel, Raúl Castro’s handpicked successor as president, a family long vilified by U.S. leaders is positioning new generations of Castros as the nation’s ultimate power brokers.
“This could produce an absurd case of de-Castrofication where the family creates an illusion of change when the real power in Cuba still resides with them and other members of the post-1959 elite,” said Andrés Pertierra, a historian of Cuba at the University of Wisconsin.
The Castros have shaped Cuba’s fortunes since 1959, when Fidel and Rául Castro, the sons of a wealthy sugar plantation owner, led the revolution that toppled an old order aligned with the United States. They moved Cuba into the Soviet orbit, turning the Caribbean island into a central player in the Cold War.
Fidel Castro, who died in 2016, was the Cuban Revolution’s charismatic “Maximum Leader.” Raúl Castro long maintained a low profile, acting as the main liaison with Moscow and the revolution’s organizational architect, prioritizing bureaucracy, clear hierarchies and administrative efficiency.
The Castro brothers faced many challenges to their rule, including C.I.A. assassination plots, a decades-long U.S. embargo and the collapse of the Soviet Union, once Cuba’s main benefactor. Venezuela had replaced the Soviets, becoming Cuba’s top oil supplier, until U.S. forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January.
Now, with the U.S. ordering Venezuela to halt oil shipments to Cuba, the family faces what may be its greatest challenge: a fuel shortage that has Cuba’s economy teetering, raising questions about the survival of the island’s repressive Communist government.
The U.S. fuel blockade is intended to produce a regime pliant to U.S. demands, similar to the way Venezuela shifted from adversary to client state with the removal of Mr. Maduro.
Mr. Rubio, referring to Cuba, said this month that “the people in charge, they don’t know how to fix it, so they need to get new people in charge.”
Replacing the Castros, if that is what the United States desires, is a tall order.
Raúl Castro, who is said to remain lucid and in relatively good health for a man his age, presides over the family. Since stepping down in 2018, his prestige and power remain rooted in his status as Cuba’s most powerful military figure. As defense minister under Fidel Castro, he oversaw the creation of GAESA, a sprawling military-run business conglomerate that is Cuba’s most important economic force.
Raúl’s children and grandchildren have more prominent official roles in today’s Cuba than Fidel’s descendants, one of whom is an Instagram celebrity known for flaunting a life of luxury in Havana.
One of Raúl Castro’s grandsons, Raúl Guillermo RodrÃguez Castro, 41, has emerged as a new player in the crisis. Known as Raúlito, he is also called “El Cangrejo” — the Crab — a reference to being born with six fingers on one of his hands.
Mr. Guillermo RodrÃguez has been part of his grandfather’s security detail, but these days mostly serves as his personal aide. He was once a fixture in Cuba’s elite social circles, hanging out with popular musicians such as the Charanga Habanera, who attended his 2008 wedding at an elite military club.
Now Raúlito also has a role as a messenger in the negotiations with the Trump administration, meeting with Mr. Rubio’s team at a recent event in St. Kitts and Nevis where Caribbean nations had convened.
Stunning those who had grown accustomed to his operating behind the scenes, Raúlito appeared this month on state television sitting alongside the regime’s highest-ranking members when Mr. DÃaz-Canel disclosed the talks with Washington.
Raúl’s only son, Alejandro Castro EspÃn, 60, is also resurfacing after largely disappearing from public life when his father stepped down as president. An engineer educated and trained in Cuba and the Soviet Union, and a brigadier general in Cuba’s army, he has held leadership roles in Cuba’s intelligence apparatus and has written books critical of the United States such as “The Empire of Terror.”
Now General Castro EspÃn is also taking a leading part in the talks with U.S. officials, according to news media reports.Such a role is not new for him; in 2014 he led Cuba’s side in secret talks with the Obama administration that produced a brief thaw in relations with the United States.
Another Castro family member suddenly rising in prominence is Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, 54, a soft-spoken engineer and grandnephew of Raúl and Fidel Castro. He is currently Cuba’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign trade and foreign investment.
Mr. Pérez-Oliva leaped into the spotlight this month after announcing potentially one of the biggest policy shifts since the Castros seized power in 1959: allowing Cuban exiles to own businesses and invest in Cuba.
That showcased Mr. Pérez-Oliva as a public face of the regime’s survival strategy. It also ignited talk about whether he could be the Cuban version of Venezuela’s new Trump-friendly leader, Delcy RodrÃguez, a younger insider more amenable to the United States who can speak the language of international business and yield to Washington’s demands.
Those attributes, along with not having “Castro” in his name, could make him palatable to an administration in Washington that prizes regime compliance over regime collapse, some political analysts say.
At the same time, his family ties could allow him to shore up political support among those within Cuba’s power structures who view the Castros as a source of stability and revolutionary legitimacy.
Mr. Pérez-Oliva Fraga’s recent appointment as a deputy in Cuba’s National Assembly is also viewed as a calculated move, since under Cuban law only deputies can be president, some experts said.
“Maybe he has a future,” said Brian Latell, a former C.I.A. analyst and Cuba expert, said of Mr. Pérez-Oliva. “The Cubans are not without leverage. Trump doesn’t want a societal breakdown on his watch.”
The involvement of so many Castros in the regime’s survival strategy underscores one of the Cuban Revolution’s contradictions: While its Communist leaders sought to create a classless, egalitarian society, many of them become members of an elite class.
Castro offspring were among the most privileged members of this new ruling class, whose members often studied at high schools like the Lenin Vocational Institute, once the crown jewel of Cuba’s revolutionary educational system, or socialized at venues like the Club Habana, originally the pre-revolutionary Havana Biltmore and Country Club.
Still, the possibility of the family at the helm of Cuba’s authoritarian political system retaining its power would disillusion many Cuban exiles in the United States. Some have been pushing for decades for the Castros to be completely sidelined, along with erasing any Communist influence in Cuba.
The Castros are known as shrewd negotiators, extricating themselves from tough spots in the past, said Ricardo Zúniga, a former U.S. official who helped broker former President Barack Obama’s opening with Cuba and also served under President Trump.
The Obama talks took 18 months, partly because the meetings were held in secret, mostly in Canada, and the negotiating teams were tiny.
Those expecting a Venezuela-style outcome in Cuba could also be surprised. Venezuela’s political elite, divided into camps with different economic objectives, was relatively fractious before the capture of Mr. Maduro, making it easier for Trump officials to settle on someone like Ms. RodrÃguez, a technocrat who had already introduced market-oriented reforms aimed at improving Venezuela’s economy.
Cuba’s elite, in contrast, is far more cohesive after decades of purges and counterintelligence operations that detected even the smallest signs of dissent. Members of the Castro family have consistently benefited from this system.
“There’s no opposition waiting on the wings and no one like Delcy,” Mr. Zúniga said. Even amid so many challenges, that crucial difference could strengthen the Castros’ hand as they explore ways to hold onto power.
“The elements are in place,” he said, “where you could imagine them trying to transition from a revolutionary oligarchy to a capitalist oligarchy.”
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14) A Challenge for ‘No Kings’ Protests, the Third Time Around
Organizers want this to be largest protest yet. But is hitting a number enough to deliver an effective political movement?
By Jeremy W. Peters, March 28, 2026
Jeremy Peters has covered influential American political movements, including the Tea Party.
Demonstrators gather at Grant Park during the “No Kings Day” protest last October in Chicago. Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Millions of Americans are expected to turn out on Saturday for mass demonstrations against President Trump, the latest organized display of anger led by the coalition of progressive groups known as No Kings.
Organizers are aiming to make it the largest such protest yet, which would mean exceeding the seven million people they said showed up at the “No Kings” rallies in October and the millions of people they said turned out in June. (The Times has not verified those numbers, which encompass thousands of rallies.)
Those two protests gave the administration’s most ardent opponents an outlet for their discontent at a time when Democrats were deflated from their losses in 2024 and reassessing their missteps.
But as the third “No Kings” demonstration gets started, it’s an open question whether posting another big number will be enough to influence the course of the nation’s politics. Can the protests harness that energy and turn it into victories in the November midterm elections? How can they avoid a primal scream that fades into a whimper?
The phrase “No Kings” is a nod to the anti-authoritarian, democratic principles the country was founded on — which the protesters say Mr. Trump has ignored.
Otherwise, organizers said, “No Kings” protests intentionally lack a single, specific demand, reflecting the diffuse nature of the anti-Trump effort. Promotional fliers and emails highlight a range of issues, including immigration patrols, election interference, the White House ballroom, Ukraine and affordable housing.
Nor has a high-profile leader or public face emerged, in the way that Tom Hayden did during the 1960s antiwar protests or Jerry Falwell in the 1980s for Christian evangelicals. Luminaries of today’s left like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez act as champions of progressive causes rather than only as foils to Mr. Trump.
Organizers say the idea is to attract as many opponents of the administration as possible — especially the disaffected.
“You might think his consolidation of power is inevitable, but it isn’t,” said Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, a progressive group that is organizing “No Kings” events.
Protesters have planned events in more than 3,000 places, from Alaska to Florida, in liberal big cities and Republican strongholds. And beyond urging the faithful to turn out in big numbers and remain nonviolent, organizers have been hands-off about what they expect from attendees.
Bob Norberg, 70, from Gainesville, Fla., has been involved in all three “No Kings” events. On Saturday, he planned to be at a local park, he said, hoping “to invigorate the community to get involved, get motivated and help build momentum.”
Mr. Norberg said he believed the lack of focus in the “No Kings” message might have been less energizing for some. But, he said, he also believes the ambiguity is intentional and effective: The pro-democracy message can appeal to people on many levels.
He said, “It’s become apparent that ‘No Kings’ means ‘all of the above.’”
Videos of the peaceful demonstrations, whether taking up several city blocks or a small-town street corner, are meant to rev up the politically weary, organizers said. So are the whimsical costumes and homemade placards, with cheeky sayings like “Make Orwell Fiction Again.”
But skeptics of such events say that during Mr. Trump’s first term, progressives mistakenly thought that mass protests were a sign of the movement’s widespread popular support, without mastering the harder work of organizing.
“These large-scale protest events make people feel like they’re not alone — it’s like collective therapy,” said Dana R. Fisher, a professor at American University who studies civic engagement.
She has surveyed “No Kings” participants in her research and supports their work. But, she added, collective catharsis and hitting what she called “a magical number” of participants is not enough to sustain an effective political movement. “What we really need to do is the work of defending democracy in our communities,” she said. “It’s not about inflatable costumes. It’s not about clever signs.”
Some anti-Trump organizers have cited the conservative Tea Party movement as inspiration. Its combative, no-compromise spirit became an effective rallying cry for Republicans as they stymied President Barack Obama’s agenda — just as Democrats would like to do to Mr. Trump.
But the Tea Party thwarted Mr. Obama with the help of an expansive political infrastructure and wealthy donors willing to pay for it.
“No Kings” protesters do share one thing with their Republican counterparts: a belief that the country is being led to a precipice by a reckless president. In the Tea Party’s case, that was Mr. Obama.
“What really motivated the Tea Party was a deep, philosophical disagreement with Obama about what government should be — and the sense that his policies represented such an unprecedented overreach,” said Tim Phillips, a conservative activist and former president of the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity.
“People wanted to stop that,” he said. “The people opposing Trump today see their fight the same way.”
Mr. Trump’s approval rating has fallen to 36 percent as of March 23, from 45 percent around the time he took office last year, according to Reuters/Ipsos.
That kind of drop should help activists, but the “No Kings” rallies have forced progressives to assess whether their messaging is simple and direct enough to reach most voters.
Ms. Fisher of American University and a team of researchers surveyed participants at more than 300 “No Kings” events last summer and found them to be predominantly female, college educated and middle-aged. Close to 90 percent were white, the surveys found.
They were also deeply engaged politically, with more than two-thirds saying they had participated in a political boycott in the last year.
The organized opposition to Mr. Trump has had little difficulty summoning the nation’s outrage at opportune moments. Quantifying the impact of those protests is much harder.
Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies political protest movements, said the recent level of activity inside the Trump opposition has been striking. In Pennsylvania, for instance, she said that she had found 80 different “No Kings” events across the state last October. That compared with 27 events on the day of the Women’s March in 2017, a mass demonstration against President Trump during his first term.
Because of social media, “it is much easier to get people in the same place,” Ms. Putnam said. “But it doesn’t necessarily make the other pieces needed for building a political movement.”
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