Dear Organization Coordinator
I hope this message finds you well. I’m reaching out to invite your organization to consider co-sponsoring a regional proposal to implement Free Public Transit throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
This initiative directly supports low-income families, working people, seniors, youth, and others who rely on public transportation. It would eliminate fare barriers while helping to address climate justice, congestion, and air pollution—issues that disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities.
We believe your organization’s mission and values align strongly with this proposal. We are seeking endorsements, co-sponsorship, and coalition-building with groups that advocate for economic and racial equity.
I would love the opportunity to share a brief proposal or speak further if you're interested. Please let me know if there’s a staff member or program director I should connect with.
A description of our proposal is below:
sharethemoneyinstitute@gmail.com
Opinion: San Francisco Bay Area Should Provide Free Public Transportation
The San Francisco Bay Area is beautiful, with fantastic weather, food, diversity and culture. We’re also internationally famous for our progressiveness, creativity, and innovation.
I believe the next amazing world-leading feature we can add to our cornucopia of attractions is Free Public Transportation. Imagine how wonderful it would be if Muni, BART, Caltrain, AC Transit, SamTrans, SF Bay Ferries, and all the other transportation services were absolutely free?
Providing this convenience would deliver enormous, varied benefits to the 7.6 million SF Bay Area residents, and would make us a lovable destination for tourists.
This goal - Free Public Transportation - is ambitious, but it isn’t impossible, or even original. Truth is, many people world-wide already enjoy free rides in their smart municipalities.
New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is promoting free transit, with a plan that’s gained the endorsement of economists from Chile, United Kingdom, Greece, and the USA.
The entire nation of Luxembourg has offered free public transportation to both its citizens and visitors since 2020. Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, has given free transit to its residents since 2013. In France, thirty-five cities provide free public transportation. Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, offers free rides to seniors, disabled, and students. In Maricá (Brazil) – the entire municipal bus system is free. Delhi (India) – offers free metro and bus travel for women. Madrid & Barcelona (Spain) offer free (or heavily discounted) passes to youth and seniors.
Even in the USA, free public transit is already here. Kansas City, Missouri, has enjoyed a free bus system free since 2020. Olympia, Washington, has fully fare-free intercity transit. Missoula, Montana, is free for all riders. Columbia, South Carolina, has free buses, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has enjoyed free transit for over a decade. Ithaca, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin, offer free transit to students.
But if the San Francisco Bay Area offered free transit, we’d be the LARGEST municipality in the world to offer universal Free Transit to everyone, resident and visitor alike. (Population of Luxembourg is 666,430. Kansas City 510,704. Population of San Francisco Bay Area is 7.6 million in the nine-county area)
Providing free transit would be tremendously beneficial to millions of people, for three major reasons:
1. Combat Climate Change - increased public ridership would reduce harmful CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Estimates from Kansas City and Tallinn Estonia’s suggest an increase in ridership of 15 percent. Another estimate from a pilot project in New York City suggests a ridership increase of 30 percent. These increases in people taking public transportation instead of driving their own cars indicates a total reduction of 5.4 - 10.8 tons of emissions would be eliminated, leading to better air quality, improved public health, and long-term climate gains.
2. Reduce Traffic Congestion & Parking Difficulty - Estimates suggest public transit would decrease traffic congestion in dense urban areas and choke points like the Bay Bridge by up to 15 percent. Car ownership would also be reduced. Traffic in San Francisco is the second-slowest in the USA (NYC is #1) and getting worse every year. Parking costs in San Francisco are also the second-worst in the USA (NYC #1), and again, it is continually getting worse.
3. Promote Social Equity - Free transit removes a financial cost that hits low-income residents hard. Transportation is the second-biggest expense after housing for many Americans. In the Bay Area, a monthly Clipper pass can cost $86–$98 per system, and much more for multi-agency commuters. For people living paycheck-to-paycheck, this is a significant cost. People of color, immigrants, youth, seniors, and people with disabilities rely more heavily on public transit. 55–70% of frequent transit riders in the Bay Area are from low-to moderate-income households, but these riders usually pay more per mile of transit than wealthy drivers. Free fares equalize access regardless of income or geography.
Free transit would help people 1) take jobs they couldn’t otherwise afford to commute to, thus improving the economy, 2) Stay in school without worrying about bus fare, 3) Get to appointments, child care, or grocery stores without skipping meals to afford transit.
To conclude: Free Public Transit should be seen as a civil rights and economic justice intervention.
The Cost? How can San Francisco Bay Area pay for Free Transit throughout our large region?
ShareTheMoney.Institute estimates the cost as $1.5 billion annually. This sum can acquired via multiple strategies. Corvallis, Oregon, has had free public bus service since 2011, paid for by a $3.63 monthly fee added to each utility bill. Missoula, Montana, funds their fare-free Mountain Line transit system, via a property tax mill levy. Madison, Wisconsin’s transit is supported by general fund revenues, state and federal grants, and partnerships/sponsorships from local businesses and organizations.
Ideally, we’d like the funds to be obtained from the 37 local billionaires who, combined, have an approximate wealth of $885 billion. The $1.5 billion for free transit is only 0.17% of the local billionaire's wealth. Sponsorship from the ultra-wealthy would be ideal. Billionaires can view the “fair transit donation” they are asked to contribute not as punishment or an “envy tax”, but as their investment to create a municipality that is better for everyone, themselves included. They can pride themselves on instigating a world-leading, legacy-defining reform that will etch their names in history as leaders of a bold utopian reform.
Our motto: “we want to move freely around our beautiful bay”
——
Hank Pellissier - Share The Money Institute
Reverend Gregory Stevens - Unitarian Universalist EcoSocialist Network
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Following FBI Raid in San Jose, We Say Anti-War Activism Is Not a Crime! Sign Onto the Call Now
>>> Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
In April 2025, San Jose anti-war activist Alex Dillard was subjected to the execution of a federal search warrant. FBI agents raided his home and seized his personal electronic devices, seeking evidence of alleged ties to Russia and implying that he may have been acting as a foreign agent.
We, as the broad progressive people's movements in the U.S. and around the world, as well as members of the San Jose community, stand in solidarity with Alex against these attacks. We assert that these accusations are entirely baseless. They constitute a clear act of political retaliation against Alex's First Amendment-protected beliefs, activities, and associations.
This incident is not isolated. It reflects a broader pattern of repression by federal agencies against activists, journalists, and organizers who speak out against U.S. imperialism, war, and systemic injustice. From the surveillance and harassment of the Black liberation movement to the targeting of Palestinian solidarity organizers, the U.S. government has repeatedly sought to silence dissent through intimidation and legal persecution.
We condemn this latest act of FBI repression in the strongest terms. Such tactics are designed to instill fear, disrupt organizing efforts, and criminalize activism. But we refuse to be intimidated. Our community stands united in defense of the right to dissent and to challenge U.S. militarism, corporate greed, and state violence—no matter how aggressively the government attempts to suppress these voices.
We call on all allies, activists, and organizations committed to justice to sign onto this solidarity statement and to remain vigilant and to push back against these escalating attacks. The government’s efforts to conflate activism with "foreign influence" are a transparent attempt to justify repression—but we will not allow these tactics to silence us. We will continue to speak out, organize, and resist. Solidarity, not silence, is our answer to repression.
Activism is not a crime. Opposing war and genocide is not a crime. Hands off our movements!
Sign onto the statement here: tinyurl.com/handsoffantiwar
Copyright © 2025 Committee to Stop FBI Repression, All rights reserved.
Thanks for your ongoing interest in the fight against FBI repression of anti-war and international solidarity activists!
Our mailing address is:
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We need a united, independent, democratically organized mass movement for peace, justice and equality in solidarity with similar movements worldwide if we are to survive the death agony of capitalism and its inevitable descent into fascism and barbarism before it destroys the world altogether!
—Bonnie Weinstein
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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 Kagarlitsky
We, 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 authorities of the Russian Federation to reverse their growing repression of dissent and respect their citizens' freedom of speech and right to protest.
Sign to Demand the Release of Boris Kagarlitsky
https://freeboris.info
The petition is also available on Change.org
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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.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
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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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
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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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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1) Israel’s Military Appears Poised to Expand Into Gaza City Amid Cease-Fire Calls
President Trump urged Israel and Hamas to “make the deal,” but it was unclear if any significant progress has been made toward an agreement.
By Isabel Kershner, Reporting from Jerusalem, June 29, 2025
The Israeli military issued broad evacuation orders on Sunday for neighborhoods of Gaza City, amid growing calls for a cease-fire deal from President Trump.
The notifications for people to leave parts of Gaza City, where Israeli troops have refrained from operating for months, as well as other areas in northern Gaza, came as the Israeli military warned that it would intensify operations that would expand west toward the city center. Residents were instructed to move south.
It was not clear if the military’s evacuation orders heralded a new phase in its offensive, a return to areas that were partly destroyed in previous rounds of fighting, or if they could be a pressure tactic to try to get Hamas to concede to Israel’s terms for ending the war.
Attention in Israel and Washington has refocused on Gaza since Israel’s 12-day war with Iran ended on Tuesday. The military campaign in Gaza — which was ignited by the Hamas-led October 2023 attack on Israel — has lasted more than 630 days and is one of Israel’s most protracted and deadliest wars.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing increasing pressure at home to end the conflict by agreeing to a cease-fire deal that would see Hamas release the hostages still being held in the enclave. Those hostages include up to 20 people who were taken captive in the October 2023 attack and are believed to still be alive, along with the remains of about 30 others.
Mr. Trump on Sunday publicly pressed for a deal. “MAKE THE DEAL IN GAZA. GET THE HOSTAGES BACK!!! DJT,” he wrote on social media, hours after arguing that Mr. Netanyahu’s long-running corruption trial be canceled since it would interfere with “the process of negotiating a deal with Hamas.”
In an unusual move, a panel of three Israeli judges agreed on Sunday to delay Mr. Netanyahu’s scheduled testimony by a week. The move was announced after the prime minister attended a special court hearing, behind closed doors and accompanied by two of Israel’s security chiefs, to press for a postponement of his upcoming court appearances.
The court has been cross-examining Mr. Netanyahu this month in two scheduled court appearances each week. Mr. Netanyahu has argued for a delay in his cross-examination based on national security imperatives, the details of which he has not publicly disclosed.
In recent days, the judicial authorities had rejected Mr. Netanyahu’s requests for a two-week postponement, saying the reasons he had provided were too general and unconvincing. It was not immediately clear what changed their minds. In the decision on Sunday, the judges said they would also consider Mr. Netanyahu’s request to delay his testimony for a second week, based on developments.
Mr. Trump had suggested on Friday that there could be an agreement between Israel and Hamas within a week. But Mr. Trump has offered no details on what may have changed, and analysts said it was unclear what his claim was based on.
There has been no advancement in the cease-fire talks, according to an Israeli official and another person familiar with the matter.
Israel and Hamas do not negotiate directly. But no Israeli negotiating teams have been dispatched to mediating countries, such as Qatar and Egypt — a sign that the two sides remain far apart, at least on the contours of the type of two-phased deal that has been discussed so far through the traditional channels. Still, it is possible that higher level discussions might be happening separately and in secrecy.
It was not immediately clear how many people might be affected by Sunday’s evacuation orders from the Israeli military. Gaza City and other areas in the northern part of the enclave were largely emptied earlier in the war following previous evacuation orders. But hundreds of thousands of residents of northern Gaza returned home during a two-month cease-fire, which collapsed when Israel resumed fighting in mid-March.
Negotiations since then for a renewed cease-fire have been at an impasse. Israel says it has accepted various versions of a proposal put forward by Steve Witkoff, the White House special envoy, which calls for a roughly two-month cease-fire and the release of about half the living hostages, along with the remains of some others. Talks for a permanent cease-fire would take place during that period, but the longstanding sticking points appear to remain unresolved.
Hamas says it will only release all the hostages in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and an internationally guaranteed end of the war.
Israel has said the war can only end if Hamas’s surrenders and disarms, and it has demanded that the group’s leaders go into exile. Hamas has rejected those conditions.
The Hamas-led attack on Israel in October 2023 killed about 1,200 people, the majority of them civilians, according to the Israeli authorities. Israel’s counter offensive has killed more than 56,000 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza health ministry, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its data but has said more than half of the dead are women and children.
Aaron Boxerman contributed reporting.
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2) After War With Israel and U.S., Iran Rests on a Knife Edge
The Islamic Republic limps on after the 12-day conflict. Where will the nation go from here?
By Roger Cohen, Reporting from Dubai, June 29, 2025
In Tehran on Tuesday, the morning of a cease-fire with Israel. Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Roxana Saberi felt like she was back behind bars in Tehran. As she watched Israel’s bombing of Evin prison, the notorious detention facility at the core of Iran’s political repression, she shuddered at memories of solitary confinement, relentless interrogation, fabricated espionage charges and a sham trial during her 100-day incarceration in 2009.
Like many Iranians in the diaspora and at home, Ms. Saberi wavered, torn between her dreams of a government collapse that would free the country’s immense potential and her concern for family and friends as the civilian death toll mounted. Longings for liberation and for a cease-fire vied with each other.
“For a moment, I imagined seeing Iran again in my lifetime,” said Ms. Saberi, 48, a dual Iranian and American citizen and author who has taken a break from her journalistic career. “I also thought how ridiculous it was that the Islamic Republic wasted decades accusing thousands of women’s rights advocates, dissidents and others of being spies, when they couldn’t catch the real spies.”
Those spies, mainly from Israel’s Mossad foreign intelligence service, penetrated Iran’s highest political and military echelons. The question now is what a shaken Islamic Republic in dire economic straits will do with what President Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate, has called “a golden opportunity for change.” That moment is also one of extreme, even existential, risk brought on by the 12-day Israeli-Iranian war that the United States briefly joined.
The military campaign flirted with dislodging the clerical autocracy that has made uranium enrichment the symbol of Iran’s national pride, but stopped short of killing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 86-year-old supreme leader, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had said that the ayatollah’s death would “end the conflict.” The 46-year-old Islamic Republic limps on.
It does so despite the collapse of its “axis of resistance” that was formed through the funding, at vast expense, of anti-Western proxies from Lebanon to Yemen; despite the devastating bombing of its equally exorbitant nuclear facilities that never produced a bomb and scarcely lit a lightbulb; and despite the humiliation of surrendering the skies above Iran to its enemies.
Yet Mr. Khamenei, as the guardian of the theocratic anti-Western revolution that triumphed in 1979, sees himself as the victor. “The Islamic Republic won,” he said in a video broadcast on Thursday from a secret location, laying to rest rumors of his demise.
His is a survival game dosed with prudence that now faces the greatest test of his 36 years in power.
“To understand Iran and Khamenei and the people around him is to understand that the Islamic Republic’s survival is always a victory,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, a London think tank.
Revolution at a Crossroads
Already, tensions over how to address the crisis brought on by the war are evident.
President Pezeshkian appears to favor a liberalizing makeover, repairing relations with the West through a possible nuclear deal. He has spoken in recent days of “an opportunity to change our views on governance.”
It was not clear what he meant, but many in Iran favor strengthening elected institutions and making the supreme leader more of a figurehead than the ultimate font of authority. They seek an Islamic Republic that is more of a republic, where women are empowered and a younger generation no longer feels oppressed by a gerontocratic theological system.
Mr. Khamenei insisted that the Israeli and American attack on nuclear facilities had failed “to achieve anything significant.” But Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi seemed to question that judgment, saying on Thursday that the country’s nuclear facilities had sustained “significant and serious damage.”
Hardliners see any disunity as a danger signal. They believe concessions presage collapse. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 69 years after its formation, and the “color revolutions” that brought Western democracy to post-Soviet states, deeply affected Mr. Khamenei and his entourage.
They are suspicious of any nuclear deal, and adamant that Iran must retain the right to enrich uranium on its soil, which Israel and the United States have said is unacceptable. They are also strongly represented in the country’s single most powerful institution, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
The Guards number 150,000 to 190,000 members, Ms. Vakil said. With control over vast swaths of the economy, they have a deep vested interest in the government’s survival. They are the kind of large institutional buffer that President Bashar al-Assad in Syria lacked before his downfall last year.
Already, as it did in 2009 when a large-scale uprising threatened the toppling of the Islamic Republic, Iran has embarked on a crackdown involving hundreds of arrests, at least three executions, and the deployment of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia in Kurdish and other restive areas.
Iranians have seen this movie before. Some wonder what the war was for if they are to face another bludgeoning. “The people want to know who is to blame for multiple defeats, but there is no leader to take on the regime,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist in the United Arab Emirates. “A weak Islamic Republic could hang on four or five years.”
This weakness appears deep. The “victory” claimed by Mr. Khamenei cannot disguise the fact that Iran is now a nation with near zero deterrence.
“I would imagine that deep in his bunker, Khamenei’s priority must be how to rebuild a deterrence that was based on the nuclear program, the missile program and armed proxies, all now in shreds,” said Jeffrey Feltman, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and, as United Nations under secretary-general for political affairs in 2012, one of the few Americans to have met the supreme leader.
“Khamenei was obsessed with the mendacity and belligerence of the United States,” Mr. Feltman recalled. “His eyes were benevolent, but his words, expressed in a quiet, dull monotone, were anything but benevolent.”
Paranoia, Institutionalized
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mr. Khamenei’s predecessor, promised freedom when he came to power in the 1979 revolution that threw out a shah seen as a pawn of the secular and decadent West. It was not to be. Tensions soon erupted between those who had fought for democracy and those for whom theocratic rule was more important.
The Islamic Republic’s first president, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, was impeached and ousted after a little more than a year in office, for challenging the rule of the clerics. He fled to France. Thousands were executed as the government consolidated its power.
War engulfed the revolutionary country in 1980, when Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, ordered an invasion. The fighting would go on for eight years, leaving an estimated 500,000 people dead, most of them on the Iranian side, before Ayatollah Khomeini drank from “the poison chalice,” as he put it, and accepted an end to the war.
The generation that fought that war, now largely forgotten in the West, forms much of the political and military elite in Iran today. They came away from the war convinced of American perfidy in light of U.S. military support for Iraq, persuaded of Iranian resilience and viscerally dedicated to the revolution for which they had seen so many fall.
“The war, in many cases, embedded a paranoid worldview, a sense of victimization that has led the elite, and particularly Khamenei, to be unaware of how the world is evolving around them,” Ms. Vakil said.
All of this has shaped the nazam, or system. It is now thoroughly institutionalized. Change has proved difficult and conflict has festered. In the more than four decades since the revolution, the century-long Iranian quest for some workable compromise between clericalism and secularism, one that denies neither the country’s profound Islamic faith nor its broad attraction to liberal values, has endured.
At times, the tension has flared into violent confrontation, as when more than two million people took to the streets in 2009 to protest what they saw as a stolen election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
The vote had been preceded by weeks of vigorous televised presidential debates, watched by tens of millions of people, and the rapid rise of Mir-Hossein Moussavi’s liberalizing Green Movement. All that evaporated as the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia clubbed protesters into submission over the days after the vote.
Seldom, if ever, had the two faces of the Islamic Republic been so evident, one vibrant and freedom-seeking, the other harsh and closed, succeeding each other at hallucinogenic speed.
More recently, in 2022, a wave of protests erupted after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of Iran’s morality police soon after her arrest for failing to cover her hair with a hijab. The movement reflected deep exasperation at the notion that aging clerics should tell women how to dress, and it led to some change. Many more women now go without hijabs; reprimands have become rarer and milder.
The government’s ability to suppress challenges, through repression and adaptation, reflects its strong survival instincts, and complicates assessments of its possible durability even as a clear majority of Iranians oppose it.
So, too, does popular weariness after a century of upheavals that have left Iranians with little taste for further turmoil and bloodshed.
“The people of Iran are fed up with being pariahs, and some were more saddened by the cease-fire than the war itself,” said Dherar Belhoul al-Falasi, a former member of the United Arab Emirates’ Federal National Council who now heads a consultancy focused on risk management.
“But we here in the Gulf are status quo powers that favor stability,” he added.
A toppling of the Islamic Republic would likely have little support among Gulf States, which include Saudi Arabia, not out of any love for Mr. Khamenei, but out a desire to remain havens of peace and prosperity.
“For now, I don’t see any forces gelling to go up against the regime,” said Mr. Feltman. “But Israel will strike again if it sees any redevelopment of Iran’s nuclear or ballistic programs.”
Iran at an Impasse
Ms. Saberi’s hopes rose and fell during the recent fighting as she sat in her parents’ home in North Dakota. Against her better instincts, she found herself digging out her Iranian passport as the 12 days passed, and considering renewing it.
She has not visited Iran in the 16 years since her release, knowing that return, as she put it, “would be a one-way ticket.” But the tug of her second home, Iran, where she lived for six years, endures.
“Iran’s in our heart, it’s in our blood, there is nowhere in the world like it, and I know so many Iranians in the diaspora who would go back and contribute if the regime falls,” she said. “My dad, in his 80s, spends his time translating Persian poetry.”
That diaspora is scattered in many places, not least Dubai, where during the fighting I spent time with another Iranian family who yearn to go home to Tehran but are afraid to do so right now. One evening, we watched a powerful movie, directed by Bahman Kiarostami, the son of the legendary Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, and by Rahi Rabani.
The 2024 movie, denied release by the authorities in Iran, is a vivid depiction of the ravages within a single Iranian family brought on by differences over the theocratic government. An authoritarian and religious father cannot accept his daughter’s decision to reject the hijab, and she cannot accept the way he sees her as a bad person merely for doing so.
“We want an Islamic Republic,” says the father.
“We don’t want an Islamic Republic, so there’s no solution,” says the daughter, who is in her 30s.
Another member of the family, a young girl in hijab, is the most relaxed, convinced that the best solution is to live and let live: “If they don’t wear hijab and go to hell, it’s on them,” she says with a smile.
The title of the movie is “Impasse.”
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3) We Know Exactly Where the Supreme Court’s Change of Heart Has Come From
By Jamelle Bouie, Opinion Columnist, June 28, 2025
Will Matsuda for The New York Times
The heart of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in Trump v. CASA is that the Constitution does not permit the exercise of arbitrary power and is certainly not a document that gives to any single individual the authority to rewrite the law.
This may seem to be a strange dissent to issue in a case that deals narrowly with the legality of nationwide injunctions, the practice by which federal courts block the application of laws and executive orders for the entire nation as a way of issuing temporary relief pending further appeal. But this particular case regarding nationwide injunctions had to do with the Trump administration’s order overturning birthright citizenship, a right established in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment and reaffirmed in subsequent legislation and jurisprudence.
In 1898, the Supreme Court held that birthright citizenship applies to every person born in the United States. The only exceptions are those people who do not fall under the jurisdiction — which is to say, the laws — of the United States. In 1868, at the time the amendment was ratified, that meant foreign diplomats and members of Native tribes.
The children of everyone else are citizens if they are born on American soil. Driven by his nativist vision for the United States, President Trump sought to subvert this, with an executive order limiting birthright citizenship to only those with at least one parent who is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order, issued on the president’s first day back in office, was set to take effect on Feb. 19.
This was an outright attack on the Constitution. However much Donald Trump and Stephen Miller might want it to be otherwise, undocumented immigrants are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States — they can be arrested and tried in criminal courts, for instance — and thus their children, who are also subject to that jurisdiction, are American citizens if born on American soil.
The blatant illegality of the president’s executive order meant immediate legal backlash. Several states and parties filed lawsuits and a federal court quickly held that the executive order was plainly unconstitutional, freezing it nationwide.
Now, even skeptics of the nationwide injunction — such as myself! — would have to admit that this is a case where, given the stakes and the circumstances, it would be wise to prevent the president’s order from taking effect pending further litigation and review. Not so the Supreme Court.
In a decision written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a six-justice majority held that a nationwide injunction was not an appropriate method of relief, and that those affected by the executive order would have to either file suit themselves or join a class action. The court issued a 30-day hold for the president’s executive order, so that plaintiffs would have time to file in court. In her opinion, she also affirmed that courts can grant “complete relief” that affects third parties. It is possible, then, that plaintiffs can achieve the results of a nationwide injunction without use of the practice itself.
And yet, it still should be said here that this is a strange vehicle for the conservative majority to tackle the question of nationwide injunctions. There were ample opportunities under President Biden to do so, and the Biden White House even asked the court to consider the issue. It said no.
As far as I can tell from the outside, none of the nationwide injunctions issued under Biden seemed to test the court’s patience. The conservative majority seemed content to allow district courts to operate as normal. It is only now, under President Trump, that the conservatives have had a change of mind. And they’ve done so in the context of an executive order that exemplifies this president’s lawlessness and open contempt for the Constitution.
It is generally not polite, in writing about the court, to note thepartisan affiliations of the justices. But here I think it’s appropriate, since for as much as there are real merits to ending nationwide injunctions, it is also difficult to escape the conclusion that a Republican-appointed majority with an expansive view of executive power is working, again, to give as much freedom of action to a Republican president, in this case, the Republican president who secured their supermajority.
To return to Justice Jackson’s dissent, she notes that by ending the practice of nationwide injunctions in this particular circumstance, the majority has empowered a lawless president to violate the rights of American citizens, who then have no particular relief other than what they can get in a slow-moving judicial process. The majority, Jackson argues, is missing the forest for the trees. The nature of the Constitution, from the original document to its amendments, is that it is a brief against the exercise of arbitrary power. And here is the Supreme Court blessing a president’s exercise of arbitrary power as if the executive were the sovereign lord of the nation and not a mere servant of the Constitution.
It’s worth quoting at length from Jackson’s dissent:
The majority’s ruling thus not only diverges from first principles, it is also profoundly dangerous, since it gives the executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate.
“The Founders of the United States of America,” she continues, “squarely rejected a governing system in which the King ruled all and all others, including the courts, were his subordinates. In our Constitution-centered system, the People are the rulers and we have rule of law.”
The majority, Jackson argues, has created a law-free zone of arbitrary power which is “unlikely to impact the public in a randomly distributed manner.”
“Those in the good graces of the Executive,” she writes,
have nothing to fear; the new prerogative that the Executive has to act unlawfully will not be exercised with respect to them. Those who accede to the Executive’s demands, too, will be in the clear. The wealthy and the well-connected will have little difficulty securing legal representation, going to court, and obtaining injunctive relief in their own name if the Executive violates their rights. Consequently, the zone of lawlessness the majority has now authorized will disproportionately impact the poor, the uneducated, and the unpopular — i.e., those who may not have the wherewithal to lawyer up, and will all too often find themselves beholden to the Executive’s whims.
It is hard to know for certain whether the Republican majority understands the legal world it’s building and the power it has given to the president. My view, like Jackson’s, is that it is laying the groundwork for the exercise of arbitrary power, unaccountable save for the next election — an American-style presidential dictatorship.
What I Wrote
I wrote my column this week on masked ICE officers and how their assertion of the right to anonymity is an extension of the president’s belief in his own impunity:
As a federal agent, an ICE officer is a public servant whose ultimate responsibility lies with the people. And the people have the right to know who is operating in their government. If an ICE officer does not want to risk identification — if he does not want the public he serves to hold him accountable for his actions — then he can choose another line of work.
In the latest episode of my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1997 political thriller “The Assignment.” And I joined my colleagues David French and Carlos Lozada to discuss President Trump’s foreign policy on The Opinions podcast.
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4) Catholic Bishops Try to Rally Opposition to Trump’s Immigration Agenda
Leading prelates are expressing outrage at the drive toward mass deportation.
By Elizabeth Dias, June 29, 2025
Bishop Michael M. Pham of San Diego, center right, was the first bishop named by Pope Leo in the United States. He recently went to a courthouse to support migrants waiting for hearings. Credit...Gregory Bull/Associated Press
As the Trump administration escalates its aggressive deportation campaign, Roman Catholic bishops across the United States are raising objections to the treatment of migrants and challenging the president’s policy.
For years many bishops focused their most vocal political engagement on ending abortion, rarely putting as much capital behind any other issue. Many supported President Trump’s actions to overturn Roe v. Wade, and targeted Democratic Catholic politicians who supported abortion access.
But now they are increasingly invoking Pope Leo XIV’s leadership and Pope Francis’s legacy against Mr. Trump’s immigration actions, and prioritizing humane treatment of immigrants as a top public issue. They are protesting the president’s current domestic policy bill in Congress, showing up at court hearings to deter Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and urging Catholics and non-Catholics alike to put compassion for humans ahead of political allegiances.
The image in Los Angeles and elsewhere of ICE agents seizing people in Costco parking lots and carwashes “rips the illusion that’s being portrayed, that this is an effort which is focused on those who have committed significant crimes,” said Cardinal Robert W. McElroy of Washington, in an interview from Rome.
“The realities are becoming more ominous,” he said. “It is becoming clearer that this is a wholesale, indiscriminate deportation effort aimed at all those who came to the country without papers.”
Cardinal McElroy, who has frequently spoken against Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, was named the archbishop of Washington as one of Pope Francis’s final major actions in the United States, reflecting the Vatican’s desire to counter the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Immigration arrests are rising sharply, and ICE has a goal of apprehending 3,000 people a day.
“A very large number of Catholic bishops, and religious leaders in general, are outraged by the steps which the administration is taking to expel mostly hardworking, good people from the United States,” Cardinal McElroy said.
President Trump campaigned on aggressive immigration tactics, and polls before his inauguration captured broad support among Americans for deportations. Since then, Americans have “mixed to negative views” of the administration’s immigration actions, according to an early June survey by the Pew Research Center.
The Trump administration has said the aggressive immigration tactics are necessary to protect public safety because some illegal immigrants are violent criminals.
Vice President JD Vance, who converted to Catholicism six years ago, articulated his personal views in an interview last month, saying that immigration “at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years” was destructive to the common good.
“I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly,” he added.
“That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation.”
It is not clear how much influence the bishops will have on the issue. In Congress, there has been little debate between the two chambers over the immigration portion of the policy bill. The bishops expressing concern stand in opposition to the voices of key Catholics in executive leadership, including Mr. Vance.
“We as a church unfortunately don’t have the kind of megaphone that the administration does,” said Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso. “It’s a real challenge to reach even Catholics, especially when maybe one out of five who identify as Catholic make it to Mass on Sunday.”
Pope Leo XIV, an American and Peruvian citizen, has from the beginning of his papacy called for the need to respect the dignity of every person, “citizens and immigrants alike.” After his election in May, his brother John Prevost said that Leo was “not happy with what’s going on with immigration. I know that for a fact.” But so far the new pope has not directly weighed in publicly on Mr. Trump’s deportation campaign.
On Thursday, Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, implored Congress to “make drastic changes” to Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill, despite its anti-abortion provisions.
He wrote that the bill failed to protect families including “by promoting an enforcement-only approach to immigration and eroding access to legal protections.”
Leading Catholic prelates including Cardinal McElroy and Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark went even further in an interfaith letter to Senate leadership on Thursday night, strongly urging them to vote against the bill entirely.
In their letter they claimed that the bill, which calls for billions of dollars to bolster ICE, would spur immigration raids, harm hard-working families and fund a border wall that would heighten peril for migrants.
“Its passage would be a moral failure for American society as a whole,” the letter states.
The letter was organized by Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, N.M., who attended an ecumenical protest against the bill last week.
“This draconian, heavy-handed, meanspirited way that the country is dealing with immigrants today, it is not fair, it is not humane, it is not moral,” he said. “It’s something we have to really be earnest about, and do everything we can within the law to make our voices heard.”
Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Mexico, has long supported immigration reform and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a program that shields from deportation people who were brought into the United States as children and did not have citizenship or legal residency. But as the recent raids were executed in Los Angeles, his criticism of the Trump administration became more direct.
“This is not policy, it is punishment, and it can only result in cruel and arbitrary outcomes,” he wrote in a recent column.
In an interview, he pointed to the example of Bishop Michael M. Pham of San Diego, the first bishop named by Pope Leo in the United States. Bishop Pham, who fled to America from Vietnam as a child, recently went to a courthouse to support migrants waiting for hearings.
“We may have to do that,” Archbishop Gomez said.
More than a third of the Catholic church in the United States is Hispanic. In recent weeks, priests have increasingly reported that families are not leaving their homes to come to Mass, because they are afraid.
Still, many Catholics support Mr. Trump. The president increased his share of Catholic voters in 2024, receiving the majority of their support unlike in 2020, and his support from Hispanic Catholic voters also grew, to 41 percent from 31 percent, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center.
Progressive and moderate Christians have expressed concern over Mr. Trump’s immigration plans for years, particularly fearing the consequences of his re-election. At his inaugural prayer service, Episcopal Bishop Mariann E. Budde pleaded with the president to “have mercy” on vulnerable people, particularly immigrants and children who were afraid. Mr. Trump lashed out, and a Republican member of Congress called for her deportation.
At a private retreat in San Diego this month, bishops discussed the crisis at length over meals.
“No person of good will can remain silent,” Archbishop Broglio, the bishops’ conference president, said in an opening reflection that was made public for churches, to reach immigrant families. “Count on the commitment of all of us to stand with you in this challenging hour.”
Bishops still oppose abortion, in alignment with church teaching. But immigration “has become more and more a serious situation” that must be addressed, said Bishop Seitz, who chairs the bishops’ committee on migration.
In his area, auxiliary bishops and religious sisters in El Paso have been showing up at immigration court to stand alongside migrants who are appearing at required hearings. Some of the migrants have been seized by ICE agents.
Cardinal McElroy and several other top prelates have had private conversations with senior members of the Trump administration on this issue this month. They are also working with their priests to address pastoral needs on the ground.
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5) Glastonbury ‘Appalled’ by Band’s Chant Against Israel’s Military
The band Bob Vylan led a crowd in a chant of “Death, death to the I.D.F.” while performing at Glastonbury, Britain’s biggest music festival.
By Ali Watkins and Alex Marshall, June 29, 2025
Alex Marshall reported from the Glastonbury Festival, in Pilton, England.
Bobby Vylan of the band Bob Vylan crowdsurfing during the Glastonbury music festival on Saturday. Credit...Leon Neal/Getty Images
The organizers of Glastonbury music festival said on Sunday that they were “appalled” by statements made onstage during a performance by the British punk duo Bob Vylan, in which the lead singer led the crowd in chants of “Death, death to the I.D.F.,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
Glastonbury, Britain’s biggest music festival, had already been facing criticism for its decision to allow Kneecap, an Irish-language rap group, to perform on Saturday, despite pressure from broadcasters and politicians to cut the act after the band voiced anti-Israel statements and one member faced a terrorism charge.
Kneecap’s performance was such a draw at the festival that the arena was already full for Bob Vylan’s set an hour beforehand.
The chants by Bob Vylan’s singer, which were broadcast live on the BBC, drew immediate condemnation from politicians in the United Kingdom.
Israel’s embassy in the United Kingdom, as well as some Jewish groups, accused Glastonbury of promoting hate. Avon and Somerset police said on Saturday that they were reviewing video footage from the stage to determine if any criminal offenses had been committed.
“With almost 4,000 performances at Glastonbury 2025, there will inevitably be artists and speakers appearing on our stages whose views we do not share, and a performer’s presence here should never be seen as a tacit endorsement of their opinions and beliefs,” said a statement on the Instagram accounts of the Glastonbury Festival and Emily Eavis, one of the festival’s organizers, on Sunday. “However, we are appalled by the statements made from the West Holts stage by Bob Vylan yesterday.”
The statement added: “Their chants very much crossed a line and we are urgently reminding everyone involved in the production of the Festival that there is no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech or incitement to violence.”
The band members could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
On Instagram on Saturday night, the band’s lead singer, Bobby Vylan, posted a selfie with a cup of ice cream, captioned: “While zionists are crying on socials, I’ve just had late night (vegan) ice cream.”
In April, Kneecap lost its U.S. visa sponsor after making anti-Israel statements at Coachella.
The next month, the police in Britain charged Mo Chara, one of the band’s rappers, with a terrorism offense for displaying the flag of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, onstage at a London show last November.
Several festivals and venues dropped the band from their lineups.
The BBC had said previously that it would cut off its traditional Glastonbury livestreaming for Kneecap’s performance on Saturday. But it did broadcast Bob Vylan’s performance live. During the show, dozens in the crowd waved Palestinian flags.
“You know this is live on the BBC so we have to be careful what we say,” Mr. Vylan said during the set on Saturday.
The punk duo is known for political songs with lyrics that touch on issues including racism, poverty and toxic masculinity.
He went on to chant several pro-Palestinian messages and voiced support for “our mates Kneecap.” He led the crowd in a chant of “Free, free Palestine!” before pivoting into a separate phrase.
“Aye, but have you heard this one though,” the singer said. “Death, death to the I.D.F.!”
Comments in support of Palestinians are common from Glastonbury stages, but the chant was unusual and fewer fans chanted along than to other declarations.
The band is scheduled to go on a U.S. tour this fall, with dates scheduled across the country. As of Sunday, those dates remained on the band’s website.
“I think the BBC and Glastonbury have got questions to be answered about how we saw such a spectacle on our screens,” Wes Streeting, Britain’s health secretary, told Sky News on Sunday.
He called the comments a “shameless publicity stunt.”
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6) How to Wreck the Nation’s Health, by the Numbers
By Steven H. Woolf Graphics by Taylor Maggiacomo, June 30, 2025
Dr. Woolf is a physician and a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“Diseases that are preventable and rare in modern countries may now pose a threat in the United States. The measles outbreak is our first warning. Other vaccine-preventable diseases will increase if politicians like Mr. Kennedy continue to cast experts aside, roll back immunization guidelines and sow doubt about their safety. All this under the banner of ‘Make America Healthy Again.’ In a dangerous sleight of hand, Mr. Kennedy goes before cameras to make a big deal about food dyes and bizarre claims about autism while his department erases programs to address the nation’s leading chronic diseases. For example, smoking is the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States. If this administration’s goal is truly to make America healthier, why has it effectively shuttered the nation’s top office on smoking? Mr. Kennedy rightly promotes the importance of healthy eating, but the administration is cutting funding for food assistance. He warns about the dangers of pesticides, but the administration is reportedly reconsidering a ban on asbestos and is moving quickly to relax other regulations meant to protect Americans from toxins.”
Illustration by Javier Jaén
After decades as a physician studying the factors that determine our risks of getting sick and how long we live, I am convinced that the actions of the Trump administration will cost lives. Researchers like me know the data. For years we have warned that Americans have shorter life expectancies and higher disease rates than people in other high-income countries.
Now, the poor health of Americans is about to get worse.
While Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s health secretary, makes a spectacle of his plans to make America healthier (a laudable goal), in actuality, the administration is kneecapping the very infrastructure that would make that feasible and is instead enacting policies that will compromise health.
The Department of Health and Human Services has terminated thousands of grants, including funding for pandemic prevention, and research grants related to cancer, vaccines and chronic diseases. The loss of research funding will delay medical discoveries. Though the agency publishes a weekly list of terminated grants, the full scope of funding cancellations has been obscured, especially at the National Institutes of Health, the major funder of medical research. A database created by Harvard researchers, Grant Watch, has helped to fill in the gaps.
Since President Trump has taken office, H.H.S. has cut over $9.5 billion in grant funding that had been approved but not yet distributed to programs and researchers.
The largest grant cuts were at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation's nerve center for tracking diseases and preventing premature deaths. The administration also gave out pink slips to some of the country's top epidemiologists and effectively ended C.D.C. programs on core issues ranging from chronic diseases and lead poisoning to reducing deaths from drug overdoses, maternal deaths, childhood injuries, smoking and more.
The administration cut over $4.6 billion in grants related to pandemic response, both for Covid and future pandemics. It laid off experts on imminent health threats, such as widespread transmission of bird flu to humans, leaving the country dangerously unprepared for the next emergency.
Mr. Kennedy fired all 17 members of the panel that produces the nation's vaccination guidelines, replaced them with multiple vaccine critics and cut $1.1 billion in funding for vaccinations, including support for a program that helps provide free shots for low-income children. High levels of vaccine coverage are important to maintain herd immunity, and making it harder to get vaccines could lead to a resurgence in vaccine-preventable diseases.
Over 2,600 grants were terminated at the N.I.H., eliminating $3.3 billion in promised funds and threatening the nation's position as the world leader in biomedical research.
The administration claimed it was cutting N.I.H. funding to target research tied to "diversity, equity and inclusion" and "radical gender ideology." This included studies on reducing health disparities among people of color and L.G.B.T.Q.+ communities and efforts to lower pregnancy complications among minority women. (Mr. Trump's policy was recently ruled illegal by the courts.) But research in these targeted areas only accounts for around 7 percent of the total cuts.
Around $170 million in cuts were for studies of cancer, which remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives each year. Cuts in cancer research will cost lives by delaying the discovery of cures and better methods to slow cancer progression.
Over 170 grants were cut for research into H.I.V. prevention and treatments, threatening the 1.2 million Americans and almost 40 million people worldwide who are living with H.I.V.
Mr. Kennedy has promised to tackle the burden of chronic disease, but around 390 cut grants were for studies of the most prevalent chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and obesity.
The administration is cutting funding for training programs for the next generation of doctors and scientists by over $578 million, forcing many young people either to abandon their careers or pursue them overseas.
Other grants were caught in the terminations as well, including cuts to basic science research to understand the causes of diseases. Many researchers whose work has been terminated say they still don't know why their studies were targeted. (The N.I.H. has been directed not to cancel more research projects for now.)
Although approximately 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, the administration canceled 129 grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Seven grants, including those to research how to better protect food and drug safety, were cut from the F.D.A.
The Trump administration made massive staffing cuts to the Administration for Children and Families and has closed down several offices that oversee Head Start, which since 1965 has been the government's flagship program to help low-income children. Head Start-funded preschools have reported delays in getting grant funding.
The damage done by slashing the nation’s research infrastructure — the loss of knowledge to save lives and the loss of scientific talent to other countries — will have lasting consequences. But torpedoing research is only one way the administration is putting our health at risk.
The administration has upended the operation of almost every agency that deals with our health and medical care, leaving behind fewer staff members and programs to address critical needs, and changing policies in ways that could endanger us all. Regulations to protect health and safety are being lifted. Experts who monitor health threats have been fired. Medical schools are threatened. Congress is poised to make huge cuts to Medicaid, which would leave millions of Americans without health care coverage and force closures of health clinics, many in rural areas.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending the status quo. There is plenty of waste and inefficiency to fix in health care and research, and fresh approaches can help. But dismembering health agencies won’t improve efficiency. Real change comes from streamlining programs to better serve the public, not from closing programs and walking away.
The ripple effects of the havoc at health agencies will eventually reach you. The air you breathe could become more polluted because the administration is permitting factories to resume emitting toxins. Your drinking water could contain lead because the administration is closing lead abatement programs. Bacterial contamination of your food may increase since food safety workers have been fired. There may be fewer primary care doctors in your community because the administration is cutting funding for training programs. Cutting-edge treatments may be unavailable because the N.I.H. has terminated clinical trials.
The logic is baffling. Even though the United States faces a mental health crisis, especially among youth, the Trump administration is slashing funding for programs on mental illness, addiction, domestic violence and suicide prevention. It’s no longer offering specialized support to L.G.B.T.Q. callers to the national suicide prevention hotline, and it’s cutting nearly 600 contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs. It canceled funding for a desperately needed program that expanded the number of mental health professionals in our children’s schools, which had won bipartisan support in Congress after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death in children, but the administration has all but eliminated the injury prevention center working on efforts to prevent deaths from poisoning, car accidents and drownings.
Diseases that are preventable and rare in modern countries may now pose a threat in the United States. The measles outbreak is our first warning. Other vaccine-preventable diseases will increase if politicians like Mr. Kennedy continue to cast experts aside, roll back immunization guidelines and sow doubt about their safety.
All this under the banner of “Make America Healthy Again.” In a dangerous sleight of hand, Mr. Kennedy goes before cameras to make a big deal about food dyes and bizarre claims about autism while his department erases programs to address the nation’s leading chronic diseases. For example, smoking is the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States. If this administration’s goal is truly to make America healthier, why has it effectively shuttered the nation’s top office on smoking? Mr. Kennedy rightly promotes the importance of healthy eating, but the administration is cutting funding for food assistance. He warns about the dangers of pesticides, but the administration is reportedly reconsidering a ban on asbestos and is moving quickly to relax other regulations meant to protect Americans from toxins.
Organizations like the American Medical Association are beginning to speak out, but their comments are largely restricted to specific issues such as Medicaid or immunization guidelines. The threat to the health of Americans is larger than one issue. It’s about more than Medicaid. It’s about more than vaccines. It’s about the totality of the administration’s agenda. It’s the cumulative effects of the entire basket of policies that put Americans at greatest risk.
Physicians like me know from the data that lives will be lost as a consequence. More than 6,000 health professionals (myself included) have warned the public about their concerns in an open letter. Yet institutions of all kinds seem to be cowering to Mr. Trump, afraid of being punished or prosecuted for questioning his wishes. The administration has defied the courts and gone after law firms and universities, and is unlikely to spare medicine. Just as it has pressured the media to alter the news, the government is now challenging medical journals to alter what they publish.
Times like these call on us to speak the truth. On matters of life and death, physicians like me have an added duty to warn patients and the public. People may feel that a shakeup in Washington is long overdue. But too many Americans, including our leaders, take their health for granted, assuming that the infrastructure to prevent disease and save their lives will always be there, that America will always lead the world in science and that systems to keep their children safe will always exist. None of this can be counted on, especially now.
About this data
For this analysis, The New York Times used data from the lists of terminated grants provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, as well as a crowdsourced list of grant terminations by Grant Watch. In cases where grants could be included under several categories, grants are listed under the category corresponding to the central focus of the research.
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7) ‘Completely Disrupted’: Fear Upends Life for Latinos in L.A.
Anxiety over federal immigration detentions has gripped thousands of residents in the area and led many to limit the time they spend in public.
By Jesus Jiménez, Jill Cowan, Hamed Aleaziz, Ana Facio-Krajcer and Gabriela Bhaskar, Photographs by Gabriela Bhaskar, June 30, 2025
Jason’s Tacos in East Los Angeles was the site of an immigration raid where an employee and a patron were detained by federal agents.
Some carry passports to travel to the corner store. Others do not venture out at all, too afraid of the consequences. Bus ridership has dropped. So has business at taco trucks and fruit stands.
Fear and anxiety have gripped Latinos in Los Angeles to an extraordinary degree, upending the lives of thousands of residents. Increased immigration raids and patrols by masked officers have stifled one of the largest and most established Latino communities in America, causing what residents and officials describe as a Covid-style shutdown of public events, street life and commerce.
It has affected not only undocumented immigrants and mixed-status families but also many U.S. citizens who have lived in California for decades and who say that they are fearful of being swept up in the raids. Interviews with more than two dozen Latino residents, elected officials and community leaders in the Los Angeles area revealed the cultural, financial and psychological toll the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is having on a county where nearly half of the population traces their ancestry to Mexico and other parts of Latin America.
“People don’t feel safe,” said Mark González, a state lawmaker whose district includes part of downtown Los Angeles and the city of Montebello, a majority-Hispanic working-class suburb where a number of people have been detained by federal agents. “Normal everyday life is completely disrupted as a result of these raids.”
An immigration raid on June 6, when dozens of people were detained at a clothing wholesaler in downtown Los Angeles, set off a series of clashes among protesters, federal agents and police officers. President Trump then sent National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles. The clashes have largely ended, and a downtown curfew has been lifted. But federal raids have continued in the Los Angeles area.
Since June 6, agents from several federal agencies have arrested about 2,000 immigrants in the Los Angeles region, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. The speed and scale of the operation — with hundreds of immigrants arrested in a three-week period — has been one of the reasons so many are on edge. Another has been the operation’s visibility: Numerous encounters of agents questioning and apprehending men and women have been captured by bystanders and activists on video and posted on social media.
Federal officials have said they are prioritizing undocumented immigrants with violent criminal records. Agency officials point to immigrants they have arrested with serious criminal convictions since June 6, like attempted murder. But the viral videos of people being picked up off streets, many seemingly at random, have heightened worry among Latinos. Many residents and local officials have said they are fearful and angry because they believe federal agents are racially profiling Hispanic people, questioning their citizenship status in public places on the assumption that they are undocumented.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, dismissed assertions about racial profiling. “Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically false,” she said in a statement.
To federal officials, the L.A. raids have been a success, are ridding the streets of criminal migrants and are being carried out by highly trained officers who are being demonized by Democratic politicians and activists.
To many Hispanic residents, the raids they have seen on social media appear to show agents pulling up to auto shops, carwashes and shopping-center parking lots questioning anyone who is Latino. One viral encounter in Montebello showed a Border Patrol agent asking a 29-year-old Hispanic man who’s a U.S. citizen an unusual question to prove his status: “What hospital were you born at?”
State Senator Sasha Renée Pérez was born in the United States, but she has been carrying around her passport after her parents begged her to do so. Tony Marquez, 72, a retired Verizon worker born in San Diego, used to take only his phone with him on his neighborhood walks. Lately, he has been bringing his driver’s license, too.
“Just in case,” Mr. Marquez said. “I’m a boring senior that lives in Boyle Heights that likes to go for walks, and for the first time in history, I don’t feel safe.”
Hector Mata, 22, an American citizen, has been avoiding taking the bus, worried that immigration agents may target public transportation in Los Angeles. “I’m brown,” Mr. Mata said of federal agents, “and that’s all they need.”
The Los Angeles County public transit system has seen a 10 to 15 percent decline in ridership on buses and trains since the raids began this month. Latinos make up the majority of the system’s ridership. Transit officials declined to speculate about the reasons ridership has dropped since the raids, noting that some riders may have decided to work remotely during the height of protests earlier this month.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, blamed politicians for the spread of fear regarding immigration enforcement, adding that the agency had been regularly operating in the Los Angeles area well before June.
“They were doing their law enforcement mission before the incidents of June 6 even occurred, and yet it’s being spun as a way that ICE has created all this mayhem and chaos, which is farthest from the truth,” Mr. Lyons said in an interview. “It’s the elected officials out there that are spreading this rhetoric, and they’re the ones that are putting the fear in.” He added: “The men and women of ICE get tainted this way and disparaged in this way for just doing the actual law enforcement mission.”
Gregory Bovino, the head of Border Patrol’s El Centro region, has defended his agency’s work in Los Angeles. “Many millions of illegal aliens have passed across that border over the past several years,” he told reporters at a news conference on June 12. “It’s our job to get them out, and that’s what we are going to do, and that’s what we’re doing right now.”
Days later, Mr. Bovino assumed control of the federal immigration-enforcement operation in the Los Angeles area. A memo obtained by The Times from Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, announced that she was putting him in charge as the operation’s tactical commander. The presence of Border Patrol agents, who had rarely conducted high-profile raid operations in the Los Angeles area in the past, has added to the alarm for many Hispanic residents, and as a result they are limiting the time they spend in public or going to extremes to change their daily routines.
Catholic leaders said people are staying home from Mass on Sundays. One worker at a cemetery in a Latino neighborhood said fewer people have been visiting the graves of loved ones because of the heat and the raids. Officials in Pasadena canceled swim lessons at a park after reports of federal agents in the area. Bell Gardens, a city southeast of downtown Los Angeles that is 96 percent Latino, canceled its Fourth of July celebration over concerns about federal raids.
In downtown Los Angeles, one historic landmark and tourist site — a Mexican marketplace on Olvera Street — has been quiet. Normally, it would be easy to find an antojito, Spanish for small snack, on Olvera. But on a recent afternoon, many of the shops were shuttered and only a few people were walking around.
For landscapers, nannies, housekeepers and day laborers who are undocumented, the chilling effect of the raids has been paralyzing. Some have stopped showing up to work. Others travel only to and from their employers’ homes.
One undocumented woman who has been in the United States for more than 20 years and who works as a nanny said her anxiety about getting stopped by federal agents kept her from attending her daughter’s high school graduation. The woman asked to be identified only by her first name, Ana; she feared retaliation because of her immigration status. She agonized for days about whether to attend the ceremony but finally told her daughter: “I prefer to be home when you come back.”
Ana moved to the United States when she was 17, in part to flee a volatile home life in Oaxaca, Mexico, and was in the process of applying for a green card, for which she was eligible through her U.S.-born children. She said the life she built in America has never felt more precarious. “Everything has changed,” she said.
She and her daughter have spent days mostly holed up at home, rarely leaving other than to go to work. They have skipped sushi dates at their favorite Japanese restaurant. They love hiking together on popular trails, but they have instead stayed inside, scrolling on their phones or watching Netflix. She said they have felt stuck, the nation’s second-largest city suddenly only as big as their apartment.
“Trapped,” she said.
Another undocumented woman whose husband was one of those detained at the June 6 raid on the clothing wholesaler stopped going to her job as a taco-stand worker the day after the incident.
The woman, who asked to be identified by her first name, Susana, because of her immigration status and her husband’s case, has four children, all born in the United States, and she fears that federal agents will show up at her workplace and take her away from them. One of the few times she left home was to take her 9-month-old boy to the hospital because he had a high fever.
“The morning they took my husband, I wanted to go see him at his work — I couldn’t go,” she said, adding, “I was afraid they would take me. And who would take care of my children? Now, I’ve had to accept what happened, but I am terrified of what could happen to me.”
Tito Rodriguez, the executive leader of the Local Hearts Foundation, typically helps organize back-to-school events and Thanksgiving canned-food drives in and around Long Beach and South Central Los Angeles. He pivoted to helping deliver food to undocumented families who are too afraid to leave their homes and go grocery shopping.
In recent weeks, he said he has received text messages from families across Southern California, from Long Beach near southern Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley farther north. “There’s so many, I can’t keep up,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “They’re afraid. They’re scared to come outside.”
On Friday alone, Local Hearts distributed groceries for more than 270 families who have been afraid to go shopping, Mr. Rodriguez said.
Christian Medina, 27, a grocery delivery driver who lives in Whittier, said that even as an American citizen, he has held back on unnecessary trips outside. “Many people are afraid of getting taken,” he said, “for simply walking outside their house.”
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8) A Year After ‘Loveless Landslide,’ U.K. Leader Is Even Less Popular
With scores of Labour Party lawmakers in open revolt and voters signaling their distaste, some are urging Prime Minister Keir Starmer to abandon caution and pivot left.
By Mark Landler, Reporting from London, June 30, 2025
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain in March. Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
A year ago this week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain swept into 10 Downing Street with a landslide majority of 172 seats. As his first anniversary approached, more than 120 of those Labour Party members of Parliament threatened to vote down their leader’s signature welfare legislation.
It has been that kind of year for Mr. Starmer. Though he made hasty concessions last week to keep the bill on track, the mutiny makes clear what a reversal of fortune the prime minister has suffered.
Stung by political missteps, sapped by a weak economy, and distracted by foreign crises that have put a heavy strain on public finances, Mr. Starmer’s government has yet to get off the ground. Labour now consistently trails Reform U.K., an insurgent, anti-immigrant party, in the polls. While he is under no immediate threat to his leadership, and the next election is not expected until 2029, Mr. Starmer’s personal approval rating has collapsed, even among Labour voters.
There is no shortage of people with ideas about how Mr. Starmer can turn things around, from sharper messaging to savvier management of his M.P.’s. But some are coalescing around a deceptively simple argument: his cautious, workmanlike centrist government needs to pivot to the left.
“They have to do something,” said Stanley B. Greenberg, a prominent American pollster and Democratic strategist who advised Bill Clinton, as well as Tony Blair and a host of other politicians in Britain and the United States. “I see them only stagnating or losing ground with their current vision.”
Mr. Greenberg, who is not advising this government, commissioned a poll of 2,048 adults in Britain earlier this month by YouGov Blue, a market-research firm that works with Democratic candidates in the United States. He said the results showed that Labour’s best chance to repair its position was to attract voters from the left-of-center Liberal Democrat and Green parties.
To do that, Mr. Greenberg said, that the government should embrace more left-wing economic policies like a wealth tax, deepen trade ties with the European Union, and redouble its investment in green-energy projects (the poll was cosponsored by Climate Policy and Strategy, an advocacy group).
Nearly 15 percent of Liberal Democrat voters and 10 percent of Greens said they would consider voting for Labour, the poll found. In contrast, only 1 percent of Reform voters and 3 percent of Conservative Party voters said they would.
“Labour faced steady defections because they did not seem to care about the issues important to liberal-left voters in these times,” Mr. Greenberg said. The polarized nature of British politics, which was accelerated by the election of President Trump in the United States, had given the government an opening to win back some of these disaffected voters, he said.
Mr. Starmer came into office determined to govern as a responsible fiscal steward. But the revolt over the welfare bill illustrates the difficult politics of that. He hoped to save 5 billion pounds — $6.8 billion — a year by 2030 by tightening rules for people to receive disability and sickness benefits. Lawmakers complained that the changes were unfair, coming on top of an unpopular decision to cut a universal subsidy that helps older people pay their heating bills in winter (the government backed down on that as well).
Mr. Starmer told lawmakers he wanted to see “reform implemented with Labour values and fairness.” But he antagonized many of them by initially dismissing the rebellion on the welfare bill as “noises off.”
“To have a third of your M.P.’s saying they’re going to vote against you in the first year of a government is a political failure on an extraordinary scale,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.
Mr. Starmer’s woes, he said, can be traced in part to the attenuated nature of his victory. Although Labour won a huge majority, it did so with only 33.8 percent of the vote, fewer votes than in 2017, when it lost to the Conservatives. A “loveless landslide,” commentators called it, less a mandate for Labour than a rebuke of the Tories.
Voters were dyspeptic, giving Mr. Starmer no honeymoon and turning against him when the economy continued to stagnate after the election. The cut in the fuel subsidy, as well as a lingering scandal over freebies accepted by Mr. Starmer and some of his aides, added to the perception of a government out of touch.
The Labour Party now wins the support of only 23 percent of voters, according to a poll published last week by YouGov. Reform U.K. polls at 26 percent, the Conservatives at 18 percent, the Liberal Democrats at 15 percent and the Greens at 10 percent. The poll, which extrapolated the national data to individual parliamentary districts, projected that Reform would emerge from an election with the most seats, though not enough to form a government by itself.
The swift rise of Reform and its media-savvy right-wing populist leader, Nigel Farage, an ally of President Trump, has alarmed Mr. Starmer’s advisers. Pro-Tory newspapers routinely refer to Mr. Farage as a prime minister in waiting. To fend off a challenge from the right, the government has adopted tougher immigration policies. Mr. Starmer has also moved gingerly on one of his most significant promises during the campaign — to mend trade relations with the European Union after the rancor of the post-Brexit years.
That caution, analysts said, is driven by a fear of alienating voters in the “red wall,” Labour’s stronghold in the industrial Midlands and north, many of whom favored Brexit and returned to Labour in 2024 after abandoning it in the 2019 election. But Mr. Greenberg said that even in the “red wall,” support for closer ties with Europe had risen, out of a belief that it would help the economy.
Professor Ford said that while he understood the appeal of a more progressive agenda, there were risks in veering too far left. “We had a recent experience of a government that had a strong set of ideological principles, and it didn’t work out so well,” he said, referring to Liz Truss, a free-market, tax-cutting evangelist, whose government was ousted after 44 days of economic turmoil.
Still, analysts said, the risk of sticking with the status quo now outweighs that of a change in course. Already, Mr. Starmer has announced major new investments in housing and green energy projects. Most analysts expect the government will have no choice but to raise taxes in its next budget this fall.
“The penny is dropping on this,” said Steven Fielding, emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “We haven’t had a politician who is able to conceptualize, let alone enact, a coherent Labour strategy.”
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9) We Shouldn’t Have Billionaires, Mamdani Says
Appearing on “Meet the Press” days after the mayoral primary, Zohran Mamdani defended his proposals to make New York City more affordable and to increase taxes on the wealthy.
By Chelsia Rose Marcius, June 29, 2025
Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has been the target of attacks from the right, including from President Trump. Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times
Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned for mayor on the theme of making New York City more affordable, said in a major national television interview that during a time of rising inequality, “I don’t think we should have billionaires.”
Mr. Mamdani, the likely winner of the Democratic primary for mayor of New York, said in an appearance on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that more equality is needed across the city, state and country, and that he looked forward to working “with everyone, including billionaires, to make a city that is fairer for all of them.”
At the same time, Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, asserted that he is not a communist, a response to an attack from President Trump.
“I have already had to start to get used to the fact that the president will talk about how I look, how I sound, where I’m from, who I am — ultimately because he wants to distract from what I’m fighting for,” Mr. Mamdani said.
But one question he continued to sidestep was whether he would denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada,” after he declined to condemn it during a podcast interview before the primary.
The slogan is a rallying cry for liberation among Palestinians and their supporters, but many Jews consider it a call to violence invoking resistance movements of the 1980s and 2000s.
“Do you condemn that phrase, “globalize the intifada?’” Kristen Welker, the moderator of the show, asked Mr. Mamdani.
“That’s not language that I use,” he said.
When pressed, he said that many Jewish New Yorkers had shared concerns with him about antisemitism. “And I’ve heard those fears, and I’ve had those conversations, and ultimately, they are part and parcel of why in my campaign, I’ve put forward a commitment to increase funding for anti-hate-crime programming by 800 percent,” he said.
But, Mr. Mamdani added, “I don’t believe that the role of the mayor is to police speech.”
Mr. Mamdani, 33, won 43.5 percent of the primary vote in the first round of counting on June 24, besting former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who received 36.4 percent. He benefited from a surge in young voters, immigrants and people who had rarely voted before.
His victory is likely to become official on Tuesday, when the second round of ranked-choice votes are tabulated, and he is expected to then face a bruising general election in November. Mr. Cuomo will remain on the ballot after petitioning for a third-party line, though it is not clear if he will campaign, and Mayor Eric Adams is running as an independent. Also running are Curtis Sliwa, the Republican founder of the Guardian Angels, and Jim Walden, a lawyer also running as an independent.
Mr. Mamdani said on “Meet the Press” that he was committed to keeping New York’s sanctuary city status. He also defended his proposals for a rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, free buses, a $30 minimum wage and a city-owned grocery store in each borough.
He noted that the five grocery stores would cost $60 million in a city budget of nearly $116 billion, and said that his vision was “in line with the scale of the crisis in the city.”
To see his plans through, Mr. Mamdani has proposed a 2 percent tax on New Yorkers who earn $1 million or more. But he would need the support of Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who has said she would not sign off on tax increases.
Since the primary, Mr. Mamdani has been consolidating endorsements from high-profile Democrats and organizations that previously backed his opponents. The powerful hotel workers’ union and the union that represents doormen and other building workers, which had supported Mr. Cuomo, have switched their endorsements to Mr. Mamdani. Both organizations, along with a third union, the New York State Nurses Association, promised to fund efforts to help him win in November.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, also endorsed Mr. Mamdani. But many leading Democrats, while congratulating him on his stunning primary showing, have not yet done so. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat who is the House minority leader, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that he did not know Mr. Mamdani well and had never had a substantive conversation with him.
He said he would be sitting down with him for such a discussion but added, with regard to Mr. Mamdani’s affordability proposals, “This country is far too expensive for working-class Americans, for middle-class Americans, for all those who aspire to be part of the middle class.”
But Mr. Jeffries said that “globalize the intifada” was “not an acceptable phrase, and he’s going to have to clarify his position on that as he moves forward.”
The night before the interview, Mr. Mamdani made a surprise appearance at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, where the comedian Ramy Youssef was appearing. He joined Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student who was recently released from ICE detention in Louisiana and who was also a surprise guest.
Mr. Khalil told Mr. Mamdani that he wanted his infant son to grow up in a city where a man like Mr. Mamdani could be mayor.
“My hope is that your son will grow up in a city where he is free to speak,” the candidate said.
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10) California Rolls Back Its Landmark Environmental Law
Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers scaled back a law that was vilified for its role in California’s housing shortage and homelessness crisis.
By Laurel RosenhallSoumya Karlamangla and Adam Nagourney
Laurel Rosenhall reported from Sacramento, Soumya Karlamangla from San Francisco and Adam Nagourney from Los Angeles, Published June 30, 2025, Updated July 1, 2025
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California on Monday signed two bills to scale back environmental restrictions as the state faces a severe housing shortage. Credit...John G Mabanglo/EPA, via Shutterstock
California leaders on Monday rolled back a landmark law that was a national symbol of environmental protection before it came to be vilified as a primary reason for the state’s severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis.
For more than half a century, the law, the California Environmental Quality Act, has allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth as well as given neighbors and disaffected parties a powerful tool to stop projects they found objectionable.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills, which were written by Democrats but had rare bipartisan support in California’s divided State Capitol, that will allow many development projects to avoid rigorous environmental review and, potentially, the delaying and cost-inflating lawsuits that have discouraged construction in the state.
Democrats have long been reluctant to weaken the law, known as CEQA, which they considered an environmental bedrock in a state that has prided itself on reducing pollution and protecting waterways. And environmentalists took them to task for the vote.
But the majority party also recognized that California’s bureaucratic hurdles had made it almost impossible to build enough housing for nearly 40 million residents, resulting in soaring costs and persistent homelessness. In a collision between environmental values and everyday concerns, Democrats chose the latter on Monday.
“If we can’t address this issue, we’re going to lose trust, and that’s just the truth,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said in a news conference. “And so this is so much bigger in many ways than the issue itself. It is about the reputation of not just Sacramento and the legislative leadership and executive leadership, but the reputation of the state of California.”
Discussions about changing the environmental law have repeatedly surfaced at the State Capitol over the past decade, only to be thwarted by opposition from environmentalists and local governments. This year was different.
Mr. Newsom threatened to reject the state budget unless lawmakers rolled back CEQA, which is pronounced SEE-kwa. Democrats were also aware that voters nationwide had blamed the party last year for rising prices.
“This has created a different political environment,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director for the Public Policy Institute of California. “Voters have been telling us in our polling for quite a while that the cost of housing is a big problem, but maybe for the elected officials the election itself was a wake-up call.”
Mr. Newsom is nearing the end of his second and final term in office having made little progress on housing and homelessness, which were central to his first campaign in 2018. He has been skewered for the prevalence of homeless encampments throughout California and for a dip in population, driven in part by people seeking lower-priced homes in other states.
The governor, who may run for president in 2028, recognized that Democrats had to shift course on pocketbook issues.
“We’ve got to get out of our own damn way,” he said last week.
The changes are, by any measure, a pivotal moment for the environmental movement, and they may have implications beyond the borders of the nation’s most populous state. California has long been at the vanguard of pioneering environmental measures, and other Democratic-run states could similarly look for ways to encourage more housing construction.
Environmentalists flooded a legislative hearing room on Monday, saying the sweeping changes could hurt sensitive ecosystems and make it too easy to build manufacturing sites that could cause more pollution. Some Democratic lawmakers expressed concern that the legislation could threaten habitat for certain species of butterflies, bears and bighorn sheep.
“Jeopardizing those whole ecosystems, I think, is a risk that we don’t want to take,” said State Senator Catherine Blakespear, a Democrat.
With its requirements for extensive review and public disclosure of potential environmental ramifications, CEQA was viewed as the strictest measure of its kind in the nation.
As governor, Ronald Reagan, a Republican, signed the environmental act into law in 1970 at a time when his party was much more aligned with environmental protections than it is today. It reflected a consensus among the state’s leaders over the need to protect a vast array of wildlife and natural resources — forests, mountains and coastline — from being spoiled by rising smog, polluted waterways, congestion and suburban sprawl.
But CEQA has been described even by some environmentalists as a good law that produced unintended consequences. The law was initially written to apply principally to government projects; a 1972 court decision expanded it to apply to many private projects as well.
One of the bills signed on Monday will exempt from CEQA high-density projects as long as they are not on environmentally sensitive or hazardous sites. The other bill will create sweeping changes that are aimed at accelerating legal review and that will exempt numerous types of development projects, from farmworker housing to child care centers. The legislation will also make it easier to rezone areas to allow for more housing in some cities.
The changes could, for instance, make it easier to convert a vacant shopping center into condos and apartments by reducing government hurdles.
Republicans have long blamed CEQA for California’s problems, arguing that it was bad for the state’s business climate. It was notable that Democrats, led by Mr. Newsom, moved the party away from the kind of measure that has long been central to Democratic thought.
“It is so critically important for California to show that we can get things done to make people’s lives better and more affordable,” said State Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat who wrote the bill to exempt several types of projects from environmental review.
California legislators have become increasingly motivated to combat the state’s housing shortage as homelessness and the cost of living have become serious concerns for residents. In recent years, the Legislature has passed hundreds of bills to expedite housing production, and has tried to push cities to build more homes, usually tinkering around the edges of the environmental act.
“The crisis has metastasized to such a level that our constituents are demanding it,” said Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, a Bay Area Democrat who wrote the bill to encourage more high-density housing projects.
Christopher S. Elmendorf, a property law professor at the University of California, Davis, who has closely followed the CEQA battles in the State Capitol, said the reforms were “huge,” the biggest since the mid-1970s.
Mr. Elmendorf said he viewed Mr. Newsom’s shift partly as a testament to how much housing has risen as a priority for California voters. But it also reflects a broader reckoning for Democrats nationwide after Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024. Democrats are re-evaluating whether they are aligned with the needs of the electorate, he said, which has opened the door for considering positions that were once off-limits.
Opponents of construction projects — neighborhood groups, rival businesses, unions — frequently seized on CEQA provisions to delay or, in some cases, kill all kinds of projects, including housing, office buildings and homeless shelters.
Recent cases have come to symbolize what critics of the environmental law saw as its unintended consequences. In San Francisco, it was used to delay, but ultimately not derail, a bike path. In Berkeley, a neighborhood group used it to block the University of California from expanding the size of its student population, contending it would lead to noise, trash and traffic; the Legislature stepped in and passed a bill overriding a court decision. Another group in Berkeley won a court order blocking construction of a new dorm because students would create “social noise” pollution; the Legislature again passed an overriding law.
As in Berkeley, previous efforts to change CEQA had largely been piecemeal, responding to the crisis of the moment and often with the backing of powerful labor unions. When the Sacramento Kings threatened to move out of the state, the Legislature granted an exemption for the construction of a new arena. Similar exemptions were given for stadiums in San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as for a major renovation of the State Capitol.
Matt Lewis, spokesman for California YIMBY, which supports the new legislation, said a law that had initially been intended to prevent projects like new freeways from plowing through neighborhoods had over the years been “Frankensteined” into a tool to block housing development. And the act, ultimately, has harmed the environment by limiting denser housing, which reduces pollution, he said.
But Kim Delfino, a lobbyist for several environmental groups, said the law would allow the destruction of coastal habitats, forests, deserts and grasslands, and called it the “worst bill” for declining species that she had seen in 25 years of advocacy.
“It blows a hole in our efforts to protect habitat,” she told lawmakers on Monday. “Make no mistake, this will be devastating.”
Still, Robert Rivas, the speaker of the State Assembly, framed the vote as a social issue for Democrats during a news conference after the vote.
“Affordable housing is the civil rights struggle of our time here in California,” he said, “and today we take a transformative step forward in that fight.”
Ben Metcalf, managing director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, said the changes will speed up the building process because projects in the urban core will be able to skip environmental review, which can take several months. He said it remained unclear how much that will increase total housing production, especially given the inflated costs of construction, insurance and interest rates.
“It’s probably not the full solution,” he said of the changes.
In 2016, Gov. Jerry Brown also proposed exempting urban housing from CEQA. But that attempt failed under opposition from unions, environmental groups and other organizations. Mr. Metcalf, who at the time was leading California’s housing department under Mr. Brown, said that the political winds had shifted in the past nine years.
He said that California’s moves could inspire other Democratic-led states to weaken their environmental regulations to address their housing shortages. Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota and several other left-leaning states have laws much like CEQA.
“I could certainly see it emboldening other governors: ‘If they can do it in California, we can do it, too,’” he said.
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11) Trump’s Deportation Program Is About Control. Even if You Are a U.S. Citizen.
By Chandran Kukathas, July 1, 2025
Mr. Kukathas is the author of “Dialogues on Immigration and the Open Society” and “Immigration and Freedom.”
Andres Gonzalez and Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos
The tactics of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda have shifted from time to time, but the broader objective has remained consistent: to deport as many people as possible and, more broadly, to transform the restrictions and reach of America’s immigration system.
President Trump and members of his administration believe they have a democratic mandate to do this. Their ultimate fear is that outsiders pose a danger to American values — the threat of not just taking our jobs or becoming welfare scroungers but also transforming our society into something different. “America First” means not so much putting Americans first as putting a distinct idea of America and American values first.
Yet the danger to those American values comes not from immigration itself but from immigration control. You cannot control outsiders (immigrants or would-be immigrants) without controlling insiders (citizens). The more vigorously you try to control immigration, the more you end up limiting the freedom of your citizens and violating equality and the rule of law.
This isn’t hypothetical. As Hiroshi Motomura and others have noted, during the Great Depression and in the years following World War II, an estimated two million people were forced to leave the United States. Astonishingly, more than half were American citizens, mostly people who were (or were suspected of being) Mexican. They were blamed for taking jobs and public resources and were deported or self-deported under intense pressure from authorities after targeted raids on neighborhoods.
This number does not include the many others who were wrongfully arrested, detained or incarcerated, often for days and weeks and sometimes for months or years, by the U.S. government. Nor does it include the many immigrants who were legal residents and were wrongly deported.
These statistics do not tell the whole story. To understand how immigration control undermines freedom — and the fundamental values not just of America but of most Western democracies — we need to look deeper.
The popular image of immigration control is border security, but there is more to immigration control than that. Governments everywhere encourage people to cross their borders and enter their countries. The U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office strategy aims to have 90 million annual international visitors — tourists, students, athletes, business travelers, transport workers — by 2027.
Immigration control is not necessarily about restricting entry but about controlling what those who enter do: determining whether they can work, study, reside, buy property, open bank accounts, set up businesses or marry. This is a challenge because many citizens are all too ready to employ outsiders, admit them to schools and universities, sell to them, buy from them or fall in love with them — in short, welcome them.
The only way for a government to prevent this from happening is to control its citizens by limiting their freedom to live as they choose. This means citizens must be controlled with penalties or punishments: fines, imprisonment or violence. They must be inspected, monitored, scolded, threatened and made to be fearful of finding themselves in violation of the law and at risk of being punished.
Citizens will challenge the laws, find ways around them or even violate them if the law limits their freedom to hire, teach, befriend or welcome whomever they choose.
To overpower citizens, governments will have to spend more money — on courts, judges, lawyers, prisons, the police and compensation payments — or find ways around their laws (or both).
In 2016 Denmark criminalized any act that could be viewed as helping asylum seekers, leading to hundreds of Danes being prosecuted for giving strangers a lift or buying them a cup of coffee.
The British government decided over a decade ago that to control movement, it needed to create a hostile environment for immigrants. But what this did was create a climate of fear for citizens, most notably for those who might be mistaken for immigrants. When “Go home” vans began touring selected places in Britain in 2013, many citizens had to ask themselves: How do I prove I am a citizen in my own country?
The question applies to everyone: To control immigration, how much control over our lives should we be ready to accept?
The evidence we have suggests that the number of people affected by such controls is not trivial. For example, British law required any citizen wanting to sponsor a spouse or partner to immigrate to have a minimum annual income of 18,600 pounds, or about $25,000. In 2015 roughly 40 percent of employed British citizens did not earn enough to reunite with their families.
Initially, somewhere around 15,000 citizens might have been unable to reunite with their families each year. The law was changed in 2024, raising the threshold to $39,000, probably making it even harder for poorer citizens who want to come home or bring in their spouses. In only a decade, at least 150,000 citizens were burdened by just this one regulation aimed at curbing immigration.
In the European Union, billions of euros are spent each year on immigration enforcement and the detention of suspected violators in more than 200 centers. And each year thousands of European citizens are caught and detained, some for days and many for longer, including those who struggle to establish their credentials.
Citizens are affected by immigration controls because of the costs they must bear not just in the taxes they have to pay but also in the services that they must forgo as government funds are redirected. Already, the U.S. immigration and border enforcement budget is several times higher than all other law enforcement budgets for the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and similar agencies combined.
The “big, beautiful bill” under consideration by Republicans in Congress would add $175 billion to immigration enforcement. Mr. Trump’s deportation efforts have moved thousands of law enforcement staff members at the Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I., the D.E.A. and the U.S. Marshals Service from investigating violent (and other) crime and toward immigration enforcement.
The more determined governments are to control immigration, the more they will have to abandon due process and act as if the corruption of the rule of law were justified. Or turn a blind eye to the misuse of power by its agents.
We have to consider what these measures do to a society. They affect America’s core values, particularly liberty and equality. Liberty, because Americans see freedom to live as they choose as central to their way of life. Equality, because liberty is the natural endowment of all, not just some. Americans are not alone in thinking this, but they have said it more loudly and clearly than anyone else.
Proponents of such control will have to persuade at least some citizens that this violation of liberty is warranted and even normal. As the use of power by immigration authorities to stop and search citizens becomes routine and the voices of dissent are suppressed, citizens will even come to accept the militarization of society.
But the efforts at control will be divisive among citizens: Some will accept them as necessary, but others will resist them. So as governments try to normalize the violation of liberty, those who buy this story will look at those who object or resist not as fellow countrymen but as enemies. This is what we are seeing now unfolding on the streets across the United States.
Immigration control will transform America. The more vigorously it is pursued, the more it will turn us into people who do not care about the liberty of others. Worse still, it may turn us into people who do not care about our own.
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12) Taking From the Poor and Giving to the Rich Is Not Populism
By Thomas B. Edsall, July 1, 2025
Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.
“According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ calculation of the annual dollar change in household income in 2026, the top 1 percent would gain $25,500, the top 20 percent $500; the fourth-highest quintile would lose $1,410 per household; the middle quintile would lose $1,610; the second-lowest quintile would lose $1,720 and the bottom quintile $2,270.”
Mario Tama/Getty Images
“I love the poorly educated,” President Trump declared during the 2016 campaign. His intense support for the “big, beautiful” $4.5 trillion tax-and-spending bill now before Congress shows that he has a unique way of demonstrating his affection.
Republicans are on the verge of enacting Trump’s upwardly distributive fiscal policy measure, which has become an extreme test of the loyalty of his more downscale MAGA supporters, who not only oppose the bill but stand to bear the brunt of its negative consequences.
In its current form, which is changing by the hour, the measure, known popularly as B.B.B., would provide the upper classes, including Trump’s allies and donor base — corporations and the rich — with tax cuts worth approximately $4.45 trillion over 10 years. The measure would offset the cost with the largest reductions in safety net programs in recent decades, if not all time, for those on the lower tiers of the income distribution.
This pared-back social spending would adversely affect a large bloc of rural and exurban Republicans who played a crucial role in putting their party in control of the House and Senate, and Trump in the White House.
“You can very safely say,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the liberal Center for American Progress, told The Washington Post, that “this is the biggest cut to programs for low-income Americans ever.”
Many of the details of the legislation remain in flux as the Senate continues to vote on amendments. If the Senate approves the legislation, the House and the Senate will still have to come to agreement on a final version for the measure to become law.
The Trump tax-and-spending bill comes in the wake of one of the most significant developments in American politics over the past quarter century: The Republican Party, once the representative of Wall Street and Main Street, has become the party of low-income white America while remaining committed to the trickle-down economic policies of the 1980s.
“The ongoing shift of the class profile of the two parties has radically changed the character of Republican and Democratic areas of the country,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, wrote by email. “Districts represented by Republican members of Congress — as well as counties that supported Trump in the last election — are poorer, more rural, less dense, have fewer college graduates and are more likely to be in areas scarred by deindustrialization.”
The effect of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, Hacker argued,
will be to throw millions of Americans off Medicaid and greatly worsen the rural health crisis. The effects will be most devastating for older Americans in areas where Medicaid is the main health insurance lifeline for working families — that is, for Republicans’ base supporters.
Both Steve Bannon and Josh Hawley have made clear that Medicaid is now a core part of the social contract on which needy Republicans rely. The number of Republican-majority counties disproportionally dependent on just the federal programs Trump and fellow Republicans plan to cut has grown by leaps and bounds.
The economic transformation of the Republican electorate is perhaps best illustrated in a September 2024 Wall Street Journal article based in part on data compiled by the Economic Innovation Group, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes policies spurring economic growth.
The article documents that the number of Republican-majority counties dependent on the federal government for at least 25 percent of local government expenditures increased from 186 in 2000 to 1,746 in 2020 (an uptick of 838.7 percent). In contrast, the number of Democratic-majority counties dependent on federal payments for 25 percent of their budgets over the same period grew from 131 to 240 (an uptick of 83.2 percent).
In a June 12 report to Democratic House congressional leaders, “Distributional Effects of H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the Congressional Budget Office found that Americans falling into the bottom 30 percent of the income distribution — which now includes many white Republicans — will experience a net loss of income if the bill passes.
The loss would be most severe for those at the very bottom, according to the report:
Resources for households in the lowest decile of the income distribution would decrease by about $1,600 per year (in 2025 dollars) compared with their projected income in C.B.O.’s base line projections. That amounts to 3.9 percent of their income. Those projected decreases are mainly attributable to reductions in in-kind transfers, such as Medicaid and SNAP (food stamps).
Michael Shepherd, a professor in the health management and policy department of the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan, wrote by email: “I think it is fair to say the ‘big, beautiful bill’ will in multiple ways be a massive blow to the working-class and rural voters who have become core to Trump’s base.”
Rural Americans, Shepherd wrote,
are several percentage points more likely to be enrolled in Medicaid than nonrural Americans. And older rural Americans are much more likely to be “dual eligible” recipients of both Medicaid and Medicare. As a result, the cuts are more likely to enact harm on Trump voters.
Overall, it is rural communities in states won by Trump, like Kentucky, North Carolina and Ohio (all of which also have two Republican senators), and Trump-majority rural communities nationwide, that will suffer the most from these cuts.
In addition, Shepherd continued,
Nearly 300 rural hospitals face closure in the next couple of years even without the cuts. In Texas, for example, nearly 70 hospitals are on the brink. In Georgia, nearly two dozen in the same boat. Nearly all of these are in Trump-majority counties and Republican congressional districts.
As it stands, over 20 percent of the typical rural hospital budget comes from Medicaid. Cuts of the size included in the B.B.B. will lead to closures in the coming years at alarmingly high rates. About 80 percent of rural hospital closures over the last decade have been in the states that did not expand Medicaid.
With the attacks on expansion states in the B.B.B., it is reasonable to assume that rural hospitals in expansion states will face the problems currently being faced in non-expansion states. In other words, the problem facing rural communities in the 10 states that didn’t expand will become a nationwide problem.
Shepherd’s conclusion: “Everywhere one looks in this bill, you can find provisions that will make life considerably harder and more expensive for the rural and working-class voters and communities who have recently joined the Republican fold.”
In the view of some experts, the adverse distributional consequences of the bill are emblematic of broader policies adopted by Trump and congressional Republicans.
Noam Lupu, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, wrote by email: “I think there’s a more general puzzle here: that Republican policies seem disproportionately to hurt smaller communities and Democratic policies seem disproportionately to help them — even though majorities in these communities vote for Republicans.”
To support his case, Lupu cited an April 17 Center on Budget and Policy Priorities study by Brendan Duke and Gbenga Ajilore, “Republican Agenda’s ‘Triple Threat’ to Low- and Moderate-Income-Family Well-Being.”
“The Trump administration and Republican majorities in both houses of Congress,” Duke and Ajilore write, “are advancing a policy agenda that deeply threatens millions of families’ ability to afford the basics by making it harder for them to secure health coverage, buy groceries or afford everyday goods — all while pursuing expensive tax cuts that are skewed toward the wealthy.”
In addition to the Trump tax and spending measure, Duke and Ajilore write, the overall Trump agenda
includes an executive action agenda that unlawfully stops funding for public services and investments, hollows out and politicizes the civil service and undermines basic governance. It also includes sweeping tariffs — the highest in more than a century and eight times higher than they were last year — that will cost low- and moderate-income families hundreds if not thousands of dollars, more than offsetting whatever modest tax cuts they may receive from tax legislation.
Expanding the analysis to include the executive action agenda and tariffs, Duke and Ajilore contend, shows a much larger share of the population losing income than the studies that focused on the Big Beautiful Bill alone. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ calculation of the annual dollar change in household income in 2026, the top 1 percent would gain $25,500, the top 20 percent $500; the fourth-highest quintile would lose $1,410 per household; the middle quintile would lose $1,610; the second-lowest quintile would lose $1,720 and the bottom quintile $2,270.
A separate Jan. 30 study published by the budget center, “President Trump, Congressional Republican Proposals Would Shift Large Costs to States, Inflict Widespread Harm,” by Wesley Tharpe and Meg Wiehe, found that of the 10 states most dependent on federal money in their budgets, eight were red states and two were blue.
What explains this disregard?
Lupu wrote that he generally agrees with the thesis offered in a chapter written by Hacker, Paul Pierson and Sam Zacher in the book “Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality.”
“They have what I think is a very convincing argument about the institutional and party organizational explanations for this phenomenon,” Lupu wrote, adding:
They would say that there are organized interests with very strong preferences about budget cutting that are part of the Republican coalition, and then there are voters in the coalition who stand to lose from these cuts. But with American party politics having become so nationalized and polarized, the party organization became more likely to listen to the intense organized interests because the voters don’t really have anywhere else to go.
That’s effectively what we’re seeing with this bill.
Lupu argued that the current Republican policies on taxes, spending and tariffs represent a dangerous gamble.
“Parties that take their voters for granted eventually do get punished,” Lupu wrote. “I do think a party that consistently hurts its own supporters will eventually lose them.”
KFF, formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation, has been closely tracking provisions of the bill. In an email, Drew Altman, president and chief executive of KFF, noted that “the Medicaid and A.C.A. (Obamacare) cuts will disproportionately affect MAGA supporters,” adding:
It looks like Republicans are handing Democrats their golden issue but it’s not a slam dunk. Whether MAGA supporters blame Trump and Republicans for the cuts, however, will depend a lot on whether Democrats succeed in holding them responsible. Many of the cuts are wonky and clothed as popular measures like promoting work. They will be implemented piecemeal over time, and many could look to voters like they are coming at them from their governor, their marketplace or insurance plan.
Altman drew my attention to two of his recent analyses published on the KFF website.
On June 10, he wrote:
Nearly half (45 percent) of the people who get their health coverage in the A.C.A. marketplaces and in the individual market — about 10 million Americans — are MAGA supporters or non-MAGA Republicans. What that means is that the policy changes and cuts being made by Republicans to the marketplaces will directly affect their own voters.
However, Altman continued,
The biggest change will actually come from inaction: If Republicans don’t extend the enhanced A.C.A. tax credits this year, the premiums people pay will increase by more than 75 percent on average and result in an additional four million people losing coverage.
All told, the combined impact of the reconciliation changes and the tax credits expiring would result in at least a one-third reduction in marketplace enrollment. Red states that didn’t expand Medicaid will be hit especially hard. For example, 2.2 million people in Florida are expected to lose health coverage from the changes to the A.C.A. and 1.7 million in Texas.
In a separate June 18 report, Altman cited KFF polling showing that many voters are unaware of the effects of the Trump legislation. When they are told of the consequences, the already weak support drops precipitously:
We asked respondents if they had a favorable or unfavorable view of the B.B.B. and then asked two “what if you knew” follow-up questions. Public support for the legislation drops 14 percentage points from 35 percent favorable/64 percent unfavorable to 21 percent favorable/79 percent unfavorable after hearing that the legislation would decrease funding for local hospitals, and three-fourths of the public (74 percent) hold an unfavorable view of the legislation after hearing that the bill would increase the number of people without health insurance by about 10 million.
One of the driving forces behind the growth of the downscale Republican constituency and the emerging economic division between red and blue America is the polarization of voters by education that began in the 1990s as college-educated voters became more liberal and Democratic, while non-college voters, especially whites, became more conservative and Republican.
This process rapidly accelerated in the wake of the 2008-9 Great Recession as blue counties across the nation recovered and returned to steady growth while red counties on average stagnated or declined.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has documented this process in a series of articles.
In a 2019 report, “America Has Two Economies — and They’re Diverging Fast,” Muro and Jacob Whiton showed that in 2008 median household income in congressional districts represented by Republicans ($55,000) was still higher than it was in Democratic districts ($54,000). By 2017, however, income in blue districts rose to $61,000 while in red districts it fell to $53,000.
The same divergent trends could be seen on virtually every measure including G.D.P. growth, educational attainment and population increase.
“Democratic districts,” Muro wrote,
have grown significantly more dynamic in the last decade. Overall, “blue” territories have seen their productivity climb from $118,000 per worker in 2008 to $139,000 in 2018 as recent demographic changes and electoral sorting ensured they became better educated and more urban. Republican-district productivity, by contrast, remains stuck at about $110,000.
In July 2024, the Economic Innovation Group reported a similar sharp acceleration in the economic gap between red and blue counties, beginning in 2008. That year, according to the group’s report, 67 percent of the nation’s “left-behind counties” — defined as “counties that experienced less than half the national population and median household income growth rate” — voted Republican and 33 percent voted Democratic.
By 2020, counties that voted Republican made up 83 percent of the left-behind, while 13 percent of Democratic voting counties qualified as left behind.
By 2024, Muro and his Brookings colleagues found that “President Donald Trump’s winning base in 2,633 counties represents 86 percent of the nation’s total counties but just 38 percent of the nation’s G.D.P. Conversely, Vice President Kamala Harris’s losing base of 427 much-higher-output counties represents 62 percent of the G.D.P.”
Trump is fully aware of the public hostility to the measure. His own pollster, Tony Fabrizio, conducted a survey for the Modern Medicaid Alliance that found “voters overwhelmingly oppose cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts — an unpopular move with swing voters, Republican base.”
In their report to the alliance, Fabrizio and his two partners, Bob and John Ward, wrote:
There is no appetite across the political spectrum for cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts. Medicaid is well liked by most voters, in large part due to the broad impact it has across the electorate and the high level of importance voters place on as many Americans as possible having health insurance. Opposition is high to cutting the program generally and is especially high for cutting funding for CHIP [Children’s Health Insurance Program] and the help Medicaid provides seniors.
This once again raises the question of why Trump is so determined to thwart and deprive the men and women who elected him to the presidency not once but twice.
The answer is that the Big Beautiful Bill reveals Trump’s true colors. He is more committed to surreptitiously gambling on lavish tax cuts for the rich, including himself and his friends, than he is in cementing a populist coalition that could carry the Republican Party to victory in 2026, 2028 and beyond.
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13) In an Attack at Sunset, Israelis Set a Palestinian Village Ablaze
The violence last week in Kafr Malik, in the West Bank, comes amid a surge in assaults by Israeli settlers. It also set off a chain of violence in the area.
By Fatima AbdulKarim, Photographs by Daniel Berehulak, July 1, 2025
Fatima AbdulKarim and Daniel Berehulak reported from Kafr Malik in the occupied West Bank.
Dusk was settling over Kafr Malik, a quiet Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. At the Afeef family’s home on the outskirts, a mother was putting her newborn to sleep in a ground-floor bedroom. Another relative was pulling up outside with her four young children in the car.
That calm was shattered soon afterward when scores of Israelis, many masked, descended on the village by foot and in vehicles, according to witnesses and local officials.
The attackers hurled Molotov cocktails and set homes and cars on fire, the witnesses and local officials said. The Israeli military said in a statement that dozens of Israeli civilians had set Palestinian property ablaze.
The violence in Kafr Malik, northeast of Ramallah, last week comes amid a sharp rise in settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, where about half a million Israelis live among three million Palestinians. Settler attacks injured more than 220 Palestinians during the first five months of 2025, the highest rate in years, according to the United Nations. Settlers killed a Palestinian man on June 19, the U.N. says.
The violence in Kafr Malik set off a chain of confrontations between settlers and Israeli security forces in the area. Soldiers shot and wounded an Israeli youth on Friday, prompting hard-right Israelis to clash with troops outside a military base and burn down a nearby security installation on Sunday, the military said.
Tensions had been building in Kafr Malik for days before the attack. Residents had been grieving for a boy, Ammar Hamayel, 14, whom Israeli soldiers shot and killed in olive groves on the edge of the village two days previously, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The Israeli military said troops fired at “terrorists” who had thrown stones at an Israeli car and at them, hitting one.
One of the first houses to come under attack on Wednesday was that of the Afeefs, home to Afee Afeef, his wife, Nariman, their six children and other relatives.
As Taghreed Jodeh, Mr. Afeef’s sister-in-law, was pulling up in her car with her own children, her nieces and nephews ran out to greet them. By the time Ms. Jodeh had climbed the stairs, the youngsters’ laughter had turned to screams and her car was in flames, she said in an interview. She and her sister raced down to grab the children and barely made it back upstairs as the attackers hurled firebombs in their direction, she recalled.
The attackers threw another firebomb into the bedroom where Mr. Afeef’s newborn nephew was being lulled to sleep, scorching furniture and leaving blackened marks on the floor and walls, the family said. The damage was visible when Times reporters visited on Friday. The baby and his mother were unharmed.
Soon after, Israeli forces arrived and opened fired at Palestinians instead of stopping the rioters, according to multiple witnesses.
The soldiers killed three people, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Their relatives identified them as Murshid Hamayel, 35; Lutfi Baeirat, 18; and Muhammad Naji, 15. Nine others were injured, some gravely, according to the ministry.
In its statement, the Israeli military said clashes broke out during the assault by Israeli civilians and that Israelis and Palestinians had hurled stones at each other. The military said that Palestinians had opened fire at soldiers, prompting return fire and resulting in several dead and wounded. Five Israeli civilians were detained, the statement added.
More than a dozen Kafr Malik residents said that they had not heard shots before soldiers opened fire.
What provoked the initial violence is unclear.
Violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank is not unusual, and settlers had also just marked the second anniversary of a deadly shooting attack nearby in which four Israeli civilians were killed. Graffiti outside Mr. Afeef’s home seen on Friday included the Hebrew words for “vengeance” and “two years,” and partially named two victims of the shooting.
At the core of the violence lies the decades-old competition over land as Jewish settlers who consider the West Bank part of their biblical birthright take territory that much of the world views as the heartland of a future Palestinian state. Most countries consider all Israeli settlement in the occupied territory a violation of international law.
At least seven settler outposts have gone up around Kafr Malik in recent months, Najeh Rustom, the mayor, said. The newest are creeping closer to the village’s land, he added.
The outposts are illegal even by Israeli standards but the government turns a blind eye to many and has retroactively authorized others.
Amjad Shayeb, the deputy mayor, said settler violence was not random: “It’s meant to make people afraid to live in their homes, to step onto their own land.”
Another resident, Shireen Said, said attackers had thrown firebombs at her home and tried to break in. She said soldiers had provided cover for the assault.
The village outskirts, where families once grazed sheep, planted crops or took evening walks, have become dangerous, residents said.
“We don’t know how much more we will have to pay in blood,” Mr. Afeef said. “Still, we will not leave our homes.”
Isabel Kershner contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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14) The U.S. Sends Lots of Plastic Trash Overseas. Malaysia Just Said No Thanks.
No country receives more discarded plastic from wealthy countries, but shipments from the United States are no longer welcome.
By Hiroko Tabuchi and Zunaira Saieed, July 1, 2025
A Malaysian inspector examined a shipment of plastic waste in 2019. Credit...Mohd Rasfan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the shadow of President Trump’s tariff fights, a different kind of trade war is playing out involving candy wrappers and plastic bottles.
On Tuesday, Malaysia, which received more discarded plastic from rich nations than any other developing country last year, effectively banned all shipments of plastic waste from the United States.
That might not seem like a big deal. But the United States has increasingly relied on countries like Malaysia to deal with plastic trash. American scrap brokers sent more than 35,000 tons of plastic waste to Malaysia last year, according to trade data analyzed by the Basel Action Network, a nonprofit group that tracks plastic waste issues.
Last year, after seizing more than 100 shipping containers of hazardous materials sent from Los Angeles that had been improperly labeled as raw materials, the Malaysian environment minister, Nik Nazmi, told reporters that “we do not want Malaysia to be the world’s rubbish bin.” The country’s Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
Turmoil in the little-known trade in plastic waste has its roots in a decision by China in 2018, for the same reasons as Malaysia, to ban imports of wastepaper and plastic. Before that, China had for years accepted as much as half of the globe’s discarded plastic and paper.
Western nations have since struggled with a buildup of plastic trash. The United States recycles less than 10 percent of the plastic it discards. (Food and other contamination in plastic waste hinders recycling, and a significant portion of plastic, like chip bags that contain layers of different plastics and other materials, simply can’t be recycled economically.)
The rest ends up in landfills, is burned or is shipped overseas. And while new overseas destinations have emerged, a growing number of countries are starting to say no to trash. This year, Thailand and Indonesia also announced bans on plastic-waste imports.
The world produces nearly a half-billion tons of plastic each year, more than double the amount from two decades ago, and a growing amount of plastic waste is turning up on coastlines and river banks, as well as in whales, birds and other animals that ingest them. Researchers have estimated that one garbage truck’s worth of plastic enters the ocean every minute.
China’s ban “sent shock waves through the global plastic waste trade,” said Tony R. Walker, a professor at the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who researches the global flow of plastic waste. The countries that started to accept that discarded plastic “quickly became overwhelmed,” he said. Much of that plastic trash ends up dumped in landfills or is burned, which releases harmful air pollution, or is simply released into the environment.
People in rich countries may assume the plastic they diligently separate is being recycled, he said, something he termed “wish cycling.” However, instead of going into a recycling stream, “a lot of it gets redirected to waste,” he said.
Malaysia’s amended Customs Act bans all plastic waste shipments from countries that have not signed the Basel Convention, a global agreement that regulates hazardous waste including plastic. That puts the United States, the only major country that is not a party to the agreement, in a particularly tricky spot.
The amended law also sets stringent restrictions on plastic waste imports from other countries, saying they must contain only one type of plastic, with at most 2 percent contamination, to ensure that the imported plastics are recycled and not discarded. That level would be challenging to meet for any plastic waste collected from consumers.
In an email to clients sent on June 20 and shared with The New York Times, Steve Wong, chief executive of the global plastic waste broker Fukutomi, said shipments of scrap plastic to Malaysia had already “come to a virtual standstill.”
Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers, an industry group, said the effects of Malaysia’s import policy on plastic waste remained unclear. Nevertheless, “Our industry remains focused on scaling up the use of recycled plastics in new products,” he said. “These efforts support American jobs and drive economic growth, while conserving our natural resources and helping to prevent plastic pollution.”
Malaysia’s ban on plastic waste imports from the United States was prompted by the discovery of hundreds of containers filled with hazardous electronic and plastic waste that had been falsely declared as raw materials in order to bypass the country’s trade control laws, said Wong Pui Yi, a researcher at the Basel Action Network.
But local industry associations have urged the government to lift the ban on clean, recyclable plastic imports, arguing that the imports are necessary to help manufacturers meet their recycled-content targets. Brands like Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi have committed to using more recycled material in their products, said C.C. Cheah, the president of Malaysian Plastics Manufacturers Association, and the Malaysian recycling industry could still play a role.
Kate O’Neill, a professor of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley, said Malaysia’s ban could mean that plastic waste starts flowing to other countries that are less able to handle the waste. Monitoring will be important, she said. “The recycling industry still hasn’t caught up with the disruption, so these exports are still needed.”
That’s why experts increasingly say that, on top of investing in recycling infrastructure, policies are needed to help rein in plastic production itself, for example by curbing demand for single-use plastics. Some countries negotiating a new treaty aimed at curbing plastic pollution have also called for caps on plastic production.
That could come from packaging designs that cut down on plastic use, measures like plastic bag bans and overall policies that make manufacturers more responsible for the waste their products generate.
Those policies have been spreading across the United States as well as globally. On Tuesday, a law went into effect in Illinois that prohibits large hotels from providing small, single-use plastic bottles for toiletries like shampoo and conditioner. (Smaller hotels have until 2026 to comply.)
Also on Tuesday, Delaware began prohibiting restaurants from providing foam food containers, plastic beverage stirrers and plastic cocktail and sandwich picks, and requires that single-use plastic straws are only given out at the customer’s request.
Yan Zhuangcontributed reporting from Seoul.
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