In the fall of 2021, Gabriel Arias felt like his body was “rotting from the inside.” He was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a form of blood cancer so aggressive that doctors had him hospitalized the day of his biopsy. In cases like his, the ideal treatment is a transplant. Arias’s cancer-prone blood cells needed to be destroyed and replaced with healthy ones taken from the bone marrow or blood of a donor who matched him biologically. Fortunately, doctors found him a match in the volunteer-donor registries—a man in Poland. Unfortunately, Arias’s single match in the entire world was no longer available to donate.
In the past, the road to transplant might have ended here, but a medical advance had dramatically expanded the pool of donors for patients such as Arias. With the right drug, Arias could now get a transplant from his brother, a partial match, or, as he ultimately chose, he could join a clinical trial in which his donor would be a stranger who shared just eight of 10 markers used in bone-marrow transplants. Under this looser standard, Arias’s registry matches multiplied from one to more than 200. “It really is a game changer,” says Steve Devine, the chief medical officer of NMDP, a nonprofit that runs a donor registry. Today, agonizing searches for a matched donor are largely a thing of the past.
The drug powering this breakthrough is actually very old. Cyclophosphamide was first developed in the 1950s for chemotherapy. Fifty years later, researchers at Johns Hopkins began studying whether it could be repurposed to prevent a common and sometimes deadly complication of bone-marrow transplants called graft-versus-host disease, where the donor’s white blood cells—which form the recipient’s new immune system—attack the rest of the body as foreign. The bigger the mismatch between donor and recipient, the more likely this was to happen. Cyclophosphamide worked stunningly well against graft-versus-host disease: The drug cut rates of acute and severe complications by upwards of 80 percent.
Cyclophosphamide has now enabled more patients than ever to get bone-marrow transplants —more than 7,000 last year, according to NMDP. (Bone-marrow transplant is still used as an umbrella term, though many of these procedures now use cells collected from the blood rather than bone marrow, which can be done without surgery. Both versions are also known, more accurately, as hematopoietic or blood stem-cell transplants.) The field has essentially surmounted the problem of matching donors, a major barrier to transplants, Ephraim Fuchs, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Fuchs couldn’t remember the last time a patient failed to get a blood stem-cell transplant because they couldn’t find a donor.
It wasn’t obvious that cyclophosphamide would work so well. “I’m just going to come clean,” Devine told me. “Back in 2003 and 2005, I thought it was crazy.” Derived from a relative of mustard gas, the drug is known to be highly toxic to a variety of blood cells; in fact, doctors had long used it to kill the diseased bone marrow in patients before transplant. Why would you want to give such a drug after transplant, when the new donor cells are still precious and few? It defied a certain logic.
But as far back as the 1960s, researchers also noticed that high doses of post-transplant cyclophosphamide could prevent graft-versus-host disease in mice, even if they did not know why. Over the next few decades, scientists working away in labs learned that cyclophosphamide isn’t quite carpet-bombing the blood. It actually spares the stem cells most important to successful transplant. (Blood stem cells differentiate into all the types of red and white blood cells that a patient will need.) Why cyclophosphamide works so well against graft-versus-host disease is still unclear, but the drug also seems to selectively kill white blood cells active in the disease while sparing those that quell the immune system.
By the late ’90s, doctors saw a clear need to expand the search for donors. Bone-marrow transplants are most successful when donor and recipient share the same markers, known as HLA, which are protein tags our cells use to distinguish self from nonself. We inherit HLA markers from our parents, so siblings have about a one-in-four chance of being perfectly matched. As families got smaller in the 20th century, though, the likelihood of a sibling match fell. Donor registries such as NMDP were created to fill the gap, however imperfectly.
Doctors soon began coalescing around the idea of using family members who were only haploidentical, or half matched, meaning they shared at least five out of 10 HLA markers. Every child is a half match to their parents, and every parent to their child; siblings also have a 50 percent chance of being half matches. But when doctors first tried these transplants, the “outcomes were horrible,” Leo Luznik, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins, told me. Patients had frighteningly high rates of graft-versus-host disease, and more than half died within three years.
Based on the lab findings, Luznik, Fuchs, and other colleagues at Johns Hopkins wondered if post-transplant cyclophosphamide could help. The pharmaceutical companies that made it were uninterested in funding any research, Luznik said, because “it was an old, very cheap drug.” With government grants, however, the team was able to prove that cyclophosphamide got the rate of graft-versus-disease as low as in matched sibling transplants. By the late 2000s, transplants with half-matched family members were becoming routine.
Still, not every patient will have a sibling or parent or child who can donate. Doctors began wondering if cyclophosphamide could work for unrelated donors too. If only eight of the 10 markers have to be matched, then almost everyone would find a donor, even multiple donors. This was especially important for patients of mixed or non-European ancestry, who have a harder time finding unrelated donors, because people of those backgrounds make up a smaller proportion of registry donors and because they can carry a more diverse set of HLA markers. Two-thirds of white people can find a fully matched registry donor, but that number drops to 23 percent for Black Americans and 41 percent for Asians or Pacific Islanders.
Amelia Johnson, who is half Indian and half Black, was one of the first children to get a transplant from a mismatched unrelated donor in a clinical trial in 2022. Her mom, Salome Sookdieopersad, remembers being told, “You guys need to start recruiting bone-marrow donors to help increase your chances.” When that still didn’t turn up an ideal match, Sookdieopersad prepared to donate to her daughter as a half match. But then Amelia was offered a spot in the clinical trial, and they decided to take it. Transplants with mismatched unrelated donors had already been tried in adults—that was Arias’s trial—and they offered other potential benefits. A younger donor, for example, has younger cells, which fare noticeably better than older ones. Amelia did end up with a bout of graft-versus-host disease; cyclophosphamide lowers the risk but not to zero. Still, the transplant was necessary to save her life, and her mom pointed out that some risk was unavoidable, no matter the type of donor: A friend of Amelia’s got graft-versus-host even with a perfectly matched one. Doctors were able to treat Amelia’s complications, and she returned to school last August. The pediatric trial she was part of is ongoing.
In adults, where more data are available, doctors are already moving ahead with mismatched, unrelated donors. Between this and half-matched family members, patients who once might have had zero donors are now finding themselves with multiple possibilities. Doctors can be choosier too: They can select the youngest donor, for example, or match on characteristics such as blood type. The larger pool of donors also prevents situations like Arias’s, in which a single matched donor who signed up years ago is no longer available, which happens with some regularity. Cyclophosphamide is now routinely used in matched transplants too, because it lowers the risk of graft-versus-host disease even further.
Arias’s mismatched unrelated donor in the trial was an anonymous 22-year-old man who lives somewhere in the United States. When Arias and I spoke last month, it had been almost exactly two years since his transplant. He’s cancer free. He and his wife just welcomed a baby girl. None of this would have likely been possible without the transplant, without the donor, without a 70-year-old drug that had been smartly repurposed.
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Updated at 6:17 p.m. ET on April 16, 2024
Donald Trump is among the most famous and most polarizing people alive. The task of selecting 12 impartial jurors who can render a fair verdict in the criminal trial of a former president is a first for America’s court system.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Yesterday, jury selection began in Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, and today, seven jurors were selected. The New York trial, centered on accusations that Trump falsified business records to conceal a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels, may be the only of Trump’s various legal cases to wrap up before the November election. Many Americans are set on their hopes for the trial’s outcome before it begins, which makes finding impartial jurors a real challenge. Ninety-six potential jurors were called into the courtroom yesterday—an unusually large number—and more than half of them quickly raised their hand to say they couldn’t be impartial and thus needed to be dismissed. Some prospective jurors who had indicated yesterday that they could be impartial changed their mind today.
The task of the judge is not necessarily to select people who have no feelings about Trump—that’s near-impossible. Rather, the point is to select people who can be impartial (about both Trump and other potential witnesses), listen to evidence, and follow the law and the rules given by the court, Sharon Fairley, a professor from practice at the University of Chicago Law School, told me. The jurors selected so far, whose names haven’t been released, reportedly include a young corporate lawyer, a man originally from Ireland who works in sales, and a young Black woman who said that some of her friends have strong opinions about the former president but that she is not a political person.
Criminal convictions, Fairley reminded me, require a unanimous decision from the jury. So Trump’s lawyers are likely hoping for even a single holdout—a person who is independent in their thinking and perhaps not a stickler for following rules. The government’s lawyers, for their part, are likely looking for people who are intelligent and discerning, who believe in the rule of law, and who are able to see through the “smoke and mirrors” that the Trump defense may introduce to the courtroom, Fairley said. Lawyers from either side can dismiss 10 potential jurors for any reason (so far, both Trump’s lawyers and the prosecution have done this with six potential jurors). Beyond that, Fairley explained, the judge has discretion in selecting people who he feels could credibly set aside personal feelings to render a fair judgment.
Trump has held tight to his narrative that this trial is a politically motivated “witch hunt,” a tactic that will only add to the court’s unique challenges here. Usually, the prosecution is more likely to generate publicity about criminal trials than the defense, Valerie Hans, a law professor at Cornell University, told me in an email—most defendants do not “have the public microphone of Donald Trump.” Already, Hans noted, one prosecutor, Joshua Steinglass, has been trying to draw a distinction for prospective jurors between what they have seen about the trial in the news and the actual evidence that they will go on to see.
Part of the court’s challenge is weeding out people who are actually able to be impartial versus those who say they are because they want to get on the jury for their own reasons, James J. Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University, told me in an email. Ideological jurors could come from either side, Sample noted: “Yes, Manhattan is mostly blue. But might there be one true believer who wants to cement themselves as a MAGA hero? Absolutely.”
How each prospective juror voted will be of interest to lawyers on either side, but it likely won’t be the deciding factor in who gets placed on the jury—and lawyers aren’t allowed to ask that question directly. Justice Juan M. Merchan’s 42 questions for would-be jurors, including ones about whether they are part of advocacy groups or have attended campaign events for Trump (or anti-Trump groups), “suggest an attempt to find a reasonable middle ground here—not ruling out anyone who has some views on Trump or disqualifying them based on their vote in 2020 or 2016, but also making sure they’re not rah-rah activists either for or against,” my colleague David Graham told me.
There’s also a simple irony at the core of this whole process: The type of person best suited to be a thoughtful and credible juror in this case will almost by definition know something about Donald Trump. “A hypothetical juror who had never heard of Mr. Trump at all,” Sample acknowledged, “would be such an uninformed citizen as to be of suspect legitimacy from the jump.”
The trial is expected to last about six weeks (though it could take longer). After the rest of the jury is chosen, the trial proceedings will kick off in earnest, with former Trump-world figures including Michael Cohen and possibly even Stormy Daniels herself expected to testify. But in the meantime, the public and the defendant (who seemed to nod off on the first day) will need to sit through more of the same. As David told me, “Monday’s start to the trial was both huge in historic terms and mostly very boring in substance.”
The U.S. Supreme Court justices considered whether the Justice Department can charge January 6 defendants with violating an obstruction statute—a decision that could affect the election-interference case against Donald Trump.
Israel’s military chief said yesterday that Iran’s recent strike “will be met with a response” but did not specify a timeline or the scale of a retaliatory attack.
A federal appeals court ruled that a West Virginia law, which bans transgender girls and women from playing on certain sports teams, violates the Title IX rights of a teen athlete.
Evening Read
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
What Happens When You’ve Been on Ozempic for 20 Years?
By Gary Taubes
Of all the wonder drugs in the history of medicine, insulin may be the closest parallel, in both function and purpose, to this century’s miracle of a metabolic drug: the GLP-1 agonist. Sold under now-familiar brand names including Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro, these new medications for diabetes and obesity have been hailed as a generational breakthrough that may one day stand with insulin therapy among “the greatest advances in the annals of chronic disease,” as The New Yorker put it in December.
But if that analogy is apt—and the correspondences are many—then a more complicated legacy for GLP-1 drugs could be in the works. Insulin, for its part, may have changed the world of medicine, but it also brought along a raft of profound, unintended consequences …
With the sudden rise of GLP-1 drugs in this decade, I worry that a similar set of transformations could occur.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of the author; FPG / Getty; Tom Kelley / Getty.
Care for a loved one. With the right amount of self-awareness, you can learn parenting lessons from raising a dog, Kate Cray writes.
Watch.Recent prestige TV shows have featured difficult men: heroes who are resolutely alienated, driven to acts of violence they don’t want to inflict and can’t enjoy, Sophie Gilbert writes.
Last year was widely hailed as a breakthrough for the American worker. Amid a historically hot labor market, the United Auto Workers and Hollywood writers’ and actors’ guilds launched high-profile strikes that made front-page news and resulted in significant victories. Strikes, organizing efforts, and public support for unions reached heights not seen since the 1960s. Two in three Americans support unions, and 59 percent say they would be in favor of unionizing their own workplace. And Joe Biden supports organized labor more vocally than any other president in recent memory. You could look at all this and say that the U.S. labor movement is stronger than it has been in decades.
But you could just as easily say that worker powerin America is as low as it has been in nearly a century. Despite all the headlines and good feeling, a mere 10 percent of American workers belong to unions. In the private sector, the share is just 6 percent. After years of intense media attention and dogged organizing efforts, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s still don’t have a contract, or even the start of negotiations to get one. Union membership is associated with higher earnings, better benefits, stable hours, protection from arbitrary discipline, and more—but most Americans haven’t had the chance to experience these advantages firsthand. In 2023, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, 60 million working people in this country wanted a union but couldn’t get one.
How can this be? The answer, as I learned during my 25 years working for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, is that the story of organized labor in America is really two stories. On the one hand, established unions—especially those that emerged in the 1930s, when labor protections were at their most robust and expansive—are thriving. On the other hand, workers who want to unionize for the first time can’t get their efforts off the ground.
This is because the legal and policy shifts that hobbled the American labor movement were not primarily aimed at dismantling existing unions, at least not right away. Rather, they were designed to make it difficult to form new ones. Those efforts worked. In 1954, 16 million working people belonged to a union, and they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, nearly as many people are in unions—about 14 million—but they make up only 10 percent of the workforce. In other words, the numerator of unionized workers has held steady even as the denominator of overall jobs in the economy has grown dramatically. And all the support from the public and even the president can’t do much to change that. As hopeful as today’s moment might seem for workers, those hopes will not be realized without reversing the changes that laid unions low in the first place.
A century ago, an even smaller portion of the workforce belonged to a union than does today, and it showed. Then, as now, income inequality had reached staggering heights. Industrial workplaces of the 1920s were police states, with corporate spy agencies, private armies, and company stores.
The tide shifted in workers’ favor during the Great Depression. In 1935, responding to years of rising labor militancy, Congress passed the Wagner Act, an integral part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. The law gave working people robust rights to form and join labor unions and to take collective action, such as strikes. It created the National Labor Relations Board, tasked with ensuring that employers didn’t violate these rights. And it declared that protecting “the free flow of commerce” also meant protecting the “full freedom” of working people to organize. Overall union membership rose from just 11 percent of the workforce in 1934 to 34 percent in 1945.
Then the tide shifted back. After the Congress of Industrial Organizations began organizing multiracial unions in the South, segregationist Southern Democrats, whose votes had been crucial for passing the Wagner Act, joined forces with pro-corporate Republicans to stymie the New Deal labor agenda. This effort culminated in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which stripped key labor protections from the Wagner Act. President Harry Truman denounced the bill as “a shocking piece of legislation” that would “take fundamental rights away from our working people.” But the Senate overrode his veto.
Taft-Hartley marked the beginning of the end of America’s short-lived period of strong organized-labor rights. It allowed states to pass “right to work” laws that let workers free-ride on union benefits without paying dues, which would help keep southern states low-wage and non-union. Taft-Hartley made it a crime for workers to join together across employers in “sympathy strikes” (unlike in Sweden, where postal workers refused last year to deliver license plates as a show of support for striking Tesla workers), or even across workplaces in the same industry. It also included anti-communist provisions that led to a purge of many of the labor movement’s most effective organizers, especially those most successful in promoting multiracial organizing. Taken together, these changes choked off the growth of working-class solidarity that was flourishing in other Western democracies at the time.
Taft-Hartley did not immediately doom the labor movement, however. It was more like a time bomb. Established unions remained strong and popular for decades, boosted by the conventional wisdom that a careful balance between labor and capital was the goose laying the postwar golden eggs. As Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his brother in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”
The time bomb finally began to go off in the 1970s, when a confluence of factors—the stagflation crisis, the rise of Milton Friedman–style economic theory, the fracturing of the Democratic coalition—made anti-union policy much more politically viable. And corruption in some unions, laid bare by high-profile congressional hearings, cast doubt on the integrity of unions generally. Richard Nixon appointed pro-corporate justices to the Supreme Court who over the following decades would dilute labor protections even further than Taft-Hartley had. And in 1981, Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic-controller strike, signaling that the federal government would tolerate aggressive union-busting actions by employers. This in turn gave birth to a new “union avoidance” consulting business that taught bosses how to exploit the vulnerabilities that had been injected into labor law. Those vulnerabilities turned out to be extensive.
During the period between the passage of the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley, union organizing was relatively straightforward. Organizers would typically distribute cards to rank-and-file activists, who would collect signatures and return them to the organizers, who would file the signed cards with the NLRB. If a majority of a workplace signed the cards, the NLRB would certify the union. During bargaining, if the company and the union couldn’t reach agreement, the workers had various ways of exerting leverage, including calling a sit-down strike or blocking the employer’s goods from being accepted at other workplaces.
Today, even if a majority of workers sign union cards, the union has to win an NLRB election to be recognized. This process does not much resemble the free and fair elections we vote in every other November. The company can hire anti-union consultants, who will advise doing everything possible to delay that election, giving management time to intensify its lobbying efforts to scare employees out of voting yes. Thanks to Taft-Hartley’s so-called free-speech clause, employers have a broad range of tactics to choose from. For instance, although they are not technically allowed to threaten to close a warehouse if workers unionize, they can “predict” that the warehouse will have to close if the union goes through. They can make employees attend anti-union propaganda meetings during work hours, and they don’t have to let union organizers set foot in the parking lot to respond.
If a union overcomes these obstacles to win majority support, corporate higher-ups, though technically obligated to bargain in good faith, can drag their heels on contract negotiations with few repercussions. This helps explain why the Amazon Labor Union—which was founded in Staten Island in April 2021 and recognized by the NLRB in April 2022— still doesn’t appear close to having a contract. Labor might be regaining its cultural cachet, but after the triumphant vote is complete and the news cameras go away, employers hold almost all the cards.
This dynamic, rather than economic or technological shifts, is the key reason workers in more recently established industries are not organized. If Uber and Lyft had been invented in the 1930s, there would be a large, powerful Rideshare Drivers’ Union. If movies had been invented in the 2020s, the notion of an actors’ guild or a screenwriters’ union would seem absurd to most people. There is nothing more inherently “unionizable” about one job versus another.
Organized labor could still make a true comeback, one reflected not just in public goodwill but in actual union jobs. The Protecting the Rights to Organize Act, first introduced in 2019, is a comprehensive effort to restore the balance of power in the workplace—repealing much of the Taft-Hartley Act, including its so-called right-to-work provisions and its ban on solidarity actions. The PRO Act passed the House, but stalled in the Senate when a few Democratic senators refused to back filibuster-reform efforts in 2021.
The PRO Act is a strong bill, and I fought for it during my time as political director of the AFL-CIO. But one of the lessons of the American labor movement is that legal change tends to follow cultural change. Recent trends are encouraging. Biden brags about being the first president to visit a picket line, and Trump, despite having pursued anti-labor policies while president, at least feels the need to try to appear pro-union. At the same time, with less fanfare, the strategic effort to dilute worker power continues apace: Red-state legislatures are rolling back basic labor laws, including those that protect children, and Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s have asked the the Supreme Court to declare the NLRB unconstitutional.
The paradox is that it’s hard for labor law to become a top-tier political issue precisely because so few Americans have firsthand experience with union membership, or recognize what they have to gain from resetting the balance of power between workers and corporations. Overcoming that challenge requires recovering the wisdom that created the modern labor movement: that the fate of working people anywhere is the fate of working people everywhere. It happened once, nearly a century ago. The country was a very different place back then. But, for better and for worse, it was also much the same.
Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?
The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Laterresearch found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.
Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts.
This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”
The president has chosen which end of the bargain he’s willing to take. The Biden administration has left in place a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese vehicles (a measure initiated by Donald Trump), which has kept most Chinese EVs out of the U.S. even as they are selling like crazy in Europe. That probably won’t hold off Chinese EVs forever, which is why the administration is contemplating furtherrestrictions. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” Biden said in a statement in February. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”
One view of this approach is that Biden is choosing to sabotage his own climate goals by cynically pandering to a tiny group of swing voters. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has observed, less than 1 percent of Americans work directly in the auto industry, whereas more than 90 percent of American households have a car.
The Biden administration, unsurprisingly, sees the situation differently. Biden’s team starts from the premise that decarbonizing the U.S. economy will be a decades-long effort requiring sustained political buy-in from the public. Chinese EVs might lower emissions in the short term, but the resulting backlash could help elect Trump and other Republicans intent on rolling back the Biden administration’s hard-won climate achievements. Keeping out Chinese EVs now, in other words, may be necessary to save the planet later.
“We ran this experiment before,” Jennifer Harris, who served as the senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, told me, referring to the first China shock. “We saw whole industries shift overseas, and Trump rode those grievances right to the White House. And last time I checked, he didn’t do much decarbonizing.” Already, Trump is trying to turn Chinese EVs into a wedge issue in the 2024 election; his recent “bloodbath” comments were a reference to what would happen to America if Chinese cars were allowed into the country.
That doesn’t mean the Biden administration is giving up on an electric-vehicle future; it just means that future will need to be built at home instead of imported from abroad. Threading that needle won’t be easy. Apart from Tesla, American automakers still make the bulk of their profits selling gas-powered pickup trucks and SUVs while bleeding money on EVs. (Last year, GM lost $1.7 billion on its EV business; Ford lost $4.7 billion.) Although the generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to speed up the pivot to electric vehicles, U.S. companies—including Tesla—aren’t close to profitably producing EVs nearly as cheaply as China can today.
The most straightforward way to buy time is by imposing further trade restrictions. But doing so effectively requires careful calibration: Expose American automakers to Chinese competition too quickly and they could whither and die, but protect them for too long and they might remain complacent selling expensive gas-guzzling cars instead of transitioning toward cheaper EVs. “The sweet spot is where you prevent a rapid shift of production to China while also holding the auto industry’s feet to the fire,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me.
Separating technocratic analysis of policy objectives from the vicissitudes of politics, however, is easier said than done. Trump recently called for a 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars; Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri recently proposed legislation to raise that to 125 percent. Even congressional Democrats—many of whom are facing close elections in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin—have recently begun pressuring the Biden administration to raise tariffs further.
That isn’t the only way political currents could undermine the transition to electric vehicles. In order to compete with Chinese EVs, American companies must, paradoxically, learn from Chinese battery makers, who have spent decades developing the best EV batteries in the world. The U.S. auto industry knows this, which is why in February of last year Ford announced a partnership with China’s leading battery maker, CATL, to open a factory in Michigan. Ford would pay CATL to, in the words of Ford’s chairman, “help us get up to speed so that we can build these batteries ourselves” and create 2,500 new manufacturing jobs in the process. (Such partnerships are common in the EV industry; Tesla, for instance, partnered with the Japanese company Panasonic to develop its batteries.) Everybody would win: Ford, CATL, American workers, the planet.
But the backlash was swift. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia called the Ford-CATL partnership a “Trojan-horse relationship with the Chinese Communist Party” and vowed to keep similar projects out of his state. House Republicans launched multiple investigations into the deal, claiming that it could pose a national-security risk. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was instrumental in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, has balked at the notion that a partnership with a Chinese company could qualify for the subsidies that that law provides.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Biden administration eventually announced new guidelines that could disqualify the deal, and others like it, from being eligible for some of the IRA’s tax credits and grants—a move that would make it much harder for American car companies to gain the expertise they need to produce better, cheaper EVs. “It’s ironic, really,” Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Our efforts to cut China out from every part of the supply chain might actually be what prevents us from competing with their EVs.”
Herein lies the Biden administration’s deeper dilemma. Decarbonizing the U.S. while retaining a thriving auto industry requires a delicate balance between tariffs and subsidies, between protection and competition, between beating the Chinese and learning from them. The prevailing sentiment toward China in Washington, however, is neither delicate nor balanced. That America’s leaders are committed to preventing another China shock is commendable. But going too far in the other direction could produce a different kind of avoidable disaster.
This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.”
More and more colleges started requiring faculty to submit these statements in recent years, until legislatures in red states began to outlaw them. They remain common at private institutions and in blue states. Kennedy lamented that at Harvard and elsewhere, aspiring professors are required to “profess and flaunt” their faith in DEI in a process that “leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism.” He concluded that DEI statements “ought to be abandoned.”
But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.” Edward J. Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor, acknowledged flaws in the way DEI statements are currently used, going so far as to declare, “I share my colleague professor Randall L. Kennedy’s anger.” However, he continued, “we should direct that anger at its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather the horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain.”
The headline of his op-ed, “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” seemed to endorse a reformist position on DEI statements that I’ve begun to encounter often in my reporting. Lots of liberal-minded academics feel favorably toward diversity and inclusion as values, but they also dislike dogmatism and coercion, qualities that they see in today’s DEI statements. If only there were a way for a hiring process to advance DEI without straying into illiberalism.
But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.
In Kennedy’s case against DEI statements, he provides an example: a job opening for an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where applicants are required to submit a statement of teaching philosophy that includes “a description of their ‘orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.’”
Notice what is implied: that there is a set of known DEI practices professors can deploy to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, if they possess the desire to do so. In reality, however, there are robust scholarly debates about how best to advance or even define diversity, equity, and inclusion, let alone a bundle of all three values. One cannot reliably distinguish among applicants by their “orientation to DEI practices” without advantaging one side in such debates, infringing on academic freedom and contributing to an ideological monoculture.
I am not a neutral observer here. In 2023, I published “The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements,” in which I argued that forcing all who seek faculty jobs to pledge fealty to the same values will make colleges less diverse. I interviewed a math professor who grew up in the Soviet Union about why he abhors diversity. I documented how California’s community colleges are violating the First Amendment rights of their faculty by enforcing conformity with DEI ideology. And I endorsed Utah’s decision to eliminate diversity statements in public institutions.
Still, each time I encounter a new proposal for a reformed diversity-statement regime, I try to evaluate it on the merits. Frustratingly, Hall’s op-ed stopped short of offering details about what an improved system for DEI statements would look like. In a best-case scenario, what specific prompt would applicants be compelled to write on? How would the answers be evaluated? When pressed, Hall was up for wrestling with my skeptical questions. And his answers were illuminating. To my surprise, he and I barely disagree.
Although Hall’s op-ed was titled “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” the position he actually wants to stake out is better summed up this way: Critics should be clear about what makes today’s DEI statements flawed, because otherwise the understandable and necessary backlash against them could go too far. It could convey the conclusion that there is no legitimate reason a faculty hiring process would be concerned with diversity, inclusion, or belonging. He believes an applicant’s orientation to diversity, if defined in the right way, is useful to probe.
“Students should come out of a liberal-arts education vastly more skilled at diagnosing, combating, and guarding against ignorance,” Hall said. “I don’t mean mere lack of knowledge but the kind of ignorance that is akin to having a blind spot.” He recounted the old riddle about the father and son who get in a car accident. Both are rushed to the hospital, where the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son.” How can that be? Those confounded by the riddle have a blind spot: They assume the surgeon is a man, when, of course, the surgeon is the boy’s mother.
“You don’t produce knowledge without well-structured inquiry. You don’t have well-structured, healthy inquiry if it’s infected by this kind of ignorance,” Hall said. “A good liberal-arts education should provide the kind of flexibility of mind and social skills needed to identify, guard against, and combat ignorance. And if this kind of vaccination against ignorance is a core part of what we’re trying to give our students, it’s essential that students learn how and why to disagree with each other and with us.”
And “disagreement requires diversity,” he said. “So now you’ve got a rationale for valuing diversity. You’ve got a rationale for valuing inclusion and belonging, understood the right way.” He sees belonging as classrooms where all students have “equal standing to have their voices taken up, responded to, and engaged with,” so their diverse viewpoints can work to combat ignorance.
I followed his logic. But in this example, why not ask prospective hires how they’d teach students to combat ignorance rather than about their perspective on diversity?
He agreed, noting that there is no shared understanding of what diversity means today, and that lots of applicants try to guess at what those evaluating DEI statements want to hear. “The language has been corrupted,” he said. To yield useful information, better to avoid the word diversity. Then he offered what he’d consider an improved prompt: “What do you do to foster a culture in the classroom in which students can engage in serious, good-faith, curiosity-driven disagreement? That’s a question I would like to see.”
I asked how he would evaluate different answers to that prompt.
Say one applicant writes, Having delved deeply into research literature on authoritarian personality types, I feel the best way to minimize racial animus in classroom culture is to treat members of every racial group in a color-blind manner, because who we consider “other” is malleable and raising the salience of race could foster a climate that resulted in more minority students being othered.
Meanwhile, a competing job candidate writes, Having delved deeply into critical race theory, explicitly race-conscious approaches to classroom management strike me as vital for students of color to participate as equals in curiosity-driven disagreement.
Both applicants are earnestly and cogently propounding theories that are plausibly derived from peer-reviewed scholarship and utterly in conflict. Who scores more highly?
“They both can’t be right, but they could both be excellent candidates, and they’ve signaled that by the seriousness with which they took the question,” Hall said. “I would probe for signs that they try to evaluate whether their approach is actually working. Are they absolutely convinced of the soundness of their theory, which would be worrying, or are they empirical about it and open to adjustments if it isn’t working? But on the content, I would judge them equally strong.” In a university, he argued, “you shouldn’t take for granted that something as complex as teaching is an area where we should all agree there’s one right way to do it. I’m happy with a kind of pluralism.”
The information that Hall wants to elicit from job candidates, and his pluralistic attitude toward evaluating their answers, strikes me as defensible and even sensible.
But his approach is wildly different from every actual DEI-statement process I’ve seen. “Wouldn’t most supporters of today’s DEI statements hate the approach you’re proposing?” I asked.
“What I’m proposing is absolutely a different thing,” he said. “My vision would be viewed as hostile by many who are ardent supporters of DEI in its current incarnation.”
Hall told me that “given the current climate, it’s really not possible to get useful information from diversity statements.” In fact, “we probably should just get rid of them,” he clarified soon after. “There is not any kind of useful purpose that they’re serving, and there’s a pretty destructive purpose that they can serve.” As a result of all the signaling around DEI in academia, “we need to do some counter-signaling,” he added, to make clear that hiring committees are open to diverse perspectives from job seekers––otherwise, the effect is “perceived pressure to align with politicized concepts” that “narrows the range of perspectives we get in our applicant pools.”
After talking with Hall, I want to slightly amend my position in this debate: Colleges should fully abolish diversity statements in hiring––while noting that by doing so, they aren’t in any way implying that diversity, inclusion, or any other value is irrelevant to good teaching.
In fact, my ideal college press release announcing the end of mandatory DEI statements would clarify that lots of values, including DEI, can bear on research and teaching––and that healthy universities allow faculty members to contest how best to define and prioritize such values. The alternative, where the DEI bundle is treated as so important as to justify coercion, is anti-diversity and authoritarian.
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Are you feeling a little guilty about reading this article? Not because of the content, of course—nothing scandalous here!—but rather because of the time it takes away from something else you feel you should be doing. Perhaps you are taking a break from work but feel that you shouldn’t because deadlines and obligations are nipping at your ankles this very minute.
If so, that’s because you’re probably too busy. Not that this is some amazing diagnosis: Most people are too busy. According to surveys conducted in recent years by the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of Americans are usually trying to do more than one thing at a time, and 60 percent sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life. When it comes to parents with children under the age of 18, a full 74 percent said that they sometimes feel too busy to enjoy life.
The solution to excessive busyness might seem simple: do less. But that is easier said than done, isn’t it? After all, the overstuffed schedule we have today was built on trying to meet the expectations of others. But we do have research on busyness, which indicates that the real reasons you’re so overbooked might be much more complicated than this. So if you can understand why you end up with too little time and too much to do, that can point you toward strategies for tackling the problem, lowering your stress, and getting happier.
Researchers have learned that well-being involves a “sweet spot” of busyness. As you surely know from experience, having too little discretionary time lowers happiness. But you can also have too much free time, which reduces life satisfaction due to idleness.
Think of a time when a class was way too easy, or when a job left you with too little to do. Being able to goof off might have been fun for a while, but before long, you probably started to lose your mind. In 2021, scholars at the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA calculated the well-being levels of people with different amounts of time to use at their own discretion; the researchers found that the optimal number of free-time hours in a working day was 9.5—more than half of people’s time awake.
Nine and a half hours is probably a lot more than you usually get or ever could get, between staying employed and living up to family obligations. In fact, the average number of discretionary hours found in the data is 1.8. But even if 9.5 hours is unrealistic, this huge difference is probably reflected in your stress levels and may have longer-term health consequences. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimate that worldwide, in 2016, as a result of working at least 55 hours a week, some 398,000 people died of a stroke and a further 347,000 died from heart disease. So even if you never get near 9.5 hours, increasing discretionary time is the right health and well-being strategy for most people—and probably for you too. So why aren’t more Americans demanding better work-life balance?
One answer is that for most of us, too much discretionary time is scarier than too little, and we overcorrect to avoid it. If we don’t know how to use it, free time can become idleness, which leads to boredom—and humans hate boredom. Typically, when we are under-occupied, a set of brain structures known as the Default Mode Network is activated, with behavioral effects that can be associated with rumination and self-preoccupation.
The pattern of thought when that network is involved can be merely trivial (How did my fingernails get so dirty?) or speculatively terrifying (What could my teenager be up to?). To avoid activating this unproductively ruminative state, we look for ways to force ourselves to be busy, such as scrolling through social media and staying busy with some goal-oriented task. In other words, the crazy calendar that doesn’t even give you time to use the bathroom might be—at least in part—a self-imposed creation, after you said “yes” to too many things as an insurance policy against going into that default mode.
Besides having a dread of anxiously pensive boredom, we respond to two other factors when we make ourselves overly busy. First, in American culture, busyness tends to confer social status. Researchers in 2017 demonstrated this with a series of experiments, such as one in which subjects were asked to rate the status of a person based on their Facebook posts. According to their findings, posts that publicized an overworked lifestyle were rated more highly. Second, work performance and busyness tend to be positively correlated.
Research from 2016 also showed that busier people had faster processing speed, better memory, better reasoning, and more knowledge than less busy people. Noteworthy, though, is that the direction of causation is unclear: High performers at work may simply be people who make themselves busier, and they would be just as effective and able if they thinned out their schedule in an effort to be happier.
For most people, the trouble with busyness is that they are far below the sweet spot of discretionary time in their average workday. This may be unavoidable in part, and some people have a lot less control than others over their schedule. But as the research suggests, many people seem to be inflicting greater busyness on themselves than is necessary because of a fear of idleness.
The solution starts with knowledge of this tendency and a willingness to confront it. Carefully monitor your work patterns and commitments for a week. If you have a hole in your schedule, do you jam it with a low-priority meeting or tasks you would ordinarily avoid? When you unexpectedly find yourself with a free hour because of a cancellation, do you fill it with make-work such as calls and emails that aren’t immediately necessary? These are telltale signs of idleness aversion.
One remedy is to create a list of discretionary tasks that are creative and attractive to you but do not involve a deadline. For me, this means sketching out book ideas in a notebook I carry around with me. When I have unfilled time, I pull out the notebook and start brainstorming. This inevitably induces a pleasurable “flow state,” which gives me energy and refreshes me—and creates an incentive to block out more discretionary time. At one point in my career, when I was running a large organization, this observation led me to ring-fence two hours a day in the morning, when I know that my brain chemistry is best for idea work.
Beyond being fun, such a practice can be revolutionary for your career. Google reserves 20 percent of engineers’ time for projects of their own choosing—literally whatever they want to work on. This free fifth of their time has generated more than half of the company’s highest-revenue-generating products, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Earth. If your employer doesn’t go in for a similar program, see if you can do it for yourself by being very strict about getting your official work done within specific time limits, leaving you time for your creativity and passion.
Perhaps you try to follow this advice and still find yourself hopelessly busy. I have one other technique, which I learned some years ago from an efficiency expert. She told me to make a list of the 20 things I felt I had to get done the next day, in order of priority. Then she instructed me to take the top 10 items and list them according to how much I looked forward to doing each one. Finally, with that order, she told me to take my pencil and cross out the bottom 15 items. The top five would be my actual to-do list.
“What about the others?” I asked, dumbfounded. Her response: “You won’t do them, and no one will really notice or care, because everything else will be so good.” Obviously, there are limits to this strategy: If an emergency appendectomy isn’t in your top five because you’re not looking forward to it, you should definitely still get it done. For the most part, though, she was right—and my life improved as a result.
Interstate 81, southbound, you can’t miss it: Exit 185PRESIDENT BIDEN EXPRESSWAY. The three-quarter-mile road leads into downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden. Keep going straight and you’ll eventually end up—where else?—on Biden Street. That these namesake roads exist while the president is still alive, let alone still in office, feels odd. But this exact strangeness—forced nostalgia, preemptive memorialization—is the essence of Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign.
Yesterday afternoon, inside the Scranton Cultural Center, Biden sought to remind a few hundred supporters of his lifelong Scranton values. His address coincided with the release of a new campaign ad, titled—wait for it—“Scranton.” The president’s event took place just down the road from his childhood home. Of course he popped by the old place to say hello, with his traveling press corps in tow. Subtlety has never been a Biden virtue.
The hometown crowd wasn’t treated to the booming, bombastic State of the Union version of Biden, but the president still managed to land a few genuine laughs during his 30-minute speech. His savviest moment was a fake-out. Biden appeared to be unspooling one of his trademark failed American-dream stories about a poor man drowning in debt, but it was a setup for a punch line: “I said, ‘I’m sorry, Donald. I can’t help you.’” Mentioning Trump’s name at all, as Biden repeatedly did yesterday, was a notable departure from an earlier period of this campaign season, when both Biden and his allies treated his opponent like Voldemort.
Still, an overwhelming sense of safety and caution defined the day—perhaps a fear of messing something up. Biden’s gathering wasn’t a rally so much as a town hall without the questions. He didn’t wax on about the Middle East, or Ukraine, or abortion, or other polarizing issues. He was laser-focused on taxes. Just a few hundred chairs were arranged in a semicircle, and the small-scale optics did not help him. Before Biden took the stage, a misleading image of many empty seats began going viral on social media. In reality, they were all eventually occupied, but there was no arguing that this campaign stop was a fraction of the size of the average Trump event. Yesterday’s energy was tame. It felt more like an early primary event for a minor candidate than a rally by the sitting president.
Many versions of Joe Biden exist, and they often compete against one another. There’s the doddering old man, there’s Dark Brandon, there’s the bighearted consoler, there’s the guy who uses variations of the word fuck under his breath. Biden’s campaign seems to hope that voters will come back around to good old Scranton Joe. This is the Biden who talks about faith, families, factories, and fairness. Millions of voters pine for this Norman Rockwell version of Biden—and of America, in general. Millions of others are demanding that the president plunge into the present moment and engage with Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. Specifically, a significant portion of Democrats and liberals want Biden to call for a cease-fire and reduce (or eliminate) military aid to Israel. Biden knows this. Yet his campaign is doubling down on kitchen-table issues, such as the tax code.
He seemed most comfortable when operating squarely within the realm of the classic and the domestic. “I am a capitalist,” Biden proclaimed. Still, he occasionally sounded like his old Democratic rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher!” he yelled at one point. He scoffed at trickle-down economics and preached about the long-term effects of the child tax credit. All the while, he peppered in sayings from his grandpa, sayings the elder Biden may or may not have ever said.
Many voters don’t want to believe that it’s really going to be Biden and Trump again. And some people still seem surprised that Biden, in particular, is officially seeking a second term. A swath of Democrats dream of him withdrawing before the party’s convention. There is perpetual talk of a younger candidate—namely a governor such as Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, or Josh Shapiro, who yesterday served as Biden’s opening act—stepping up to be the Democratic nominee in Biden’s place. All of this seems like West Wing fan fiction. The race is set, and it’s a rematch. (With wild cards like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to make trouble.)
Biden long ago realized the stakes. Now he has to figure out how much to talk about himself and his accomplishments versus warn voters about Trump. “Listen to what he says, because you know he means it,” Biden said. Though he didn’t opt for the 30,000-foot “democracy is on the ballot” message in Scranton, he drew stark comparisons between himself and his rival. “He’s coming for your money, your health care, and your social security,” Biden warned.
Successful political campaigns are also movements. Trump and RFK Jr., for all their flaws, long ago internalized that simple truth. Until recently, Biden has more or less run what his allies referred to as a “Rose Garden campaign.” This week, he’s changing that. Scranton marked Biden’s first of three stops across Pennsylvania; he’s off to Pittsburgh and Philadelphia next. By no accident, the president is traversing a swing state while his Republican rival is glowering inside a Manhattan courtroom. But yesterday’s crowd struck me as a bunch of polite, well-behaved people who knew when to sit quietly with their hands folded, when to laugh, and when to cheer. It did not feel organic.
Just outside the venue’s security perimeter, I spoke with three University of Scranton students who had tried to see Biden and were turned away. One of them, Neveah Wall, a 19-year-old sophomore, told me that this would be her first time voting, and that she was torn between going Democrat or independent. She said she was passionate about prison reform, and that she liked where Kennedy stood on the issue. Her family members would likely vote for Biden. “I think I am pretty much leaning towards RFK,” she said.
It may seem surprising that the Biden campaign would put on an event within walking distance of a university and not try to welcome in as many students as possible. (A 20-something attendee inside the room told me he had been personally invited by a local politician.) Incumbents often go to great lengths to avoid disruptions and control the narrative. In a statement last night, a Biden campaign spokesperson told me, “Members of the public are invited through various methods including local groups and organizations, mass emails to subscribers to the campaign’s email list, and by utilizing the voter file, which allows the campaign to target the voters we need to reach.” But new, younger, or first-time voters, such as Neveah Wall, may not even have voter files yet—and, like her, they may end up drawn to another candidate after being denied entry to a Biden event.
Perhaps Biden’s campaign was worried about young people bringing some of the present-day challenges into the room. When the crowd spilled back outside into the street, attendees were met by pro-Palestine protesters chanting “Genocide Joe!” One person held a sign that read I’M VOTIN UNCOMMITTED!
Biden can keep leaning into his roots as an antidote to Trumpism, but it may not be enough. Near the end of his speech, he brought up Trump’s infamous “losers” and “suckers” remark about veterans. “Who the hell does he think he is?” Biden shouted. He could have used more of this. Scranton Joe—a harmless, affable character—doesn’t necessarily inspire unwavering devotion. Biden has just over six months to find a message that can simultaneously ground him in the present and point toward the future. He can only sell so many tickets as a tribute act playing old hits.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed the border into Israel and massacred more than 1,100 Israelis. The depths of Hamas’s sadism are almost too sickening to comprehend. Babies and children butchered. Parents murdered in front of their children. Families bound together and then burned alive. Others were tortured, and their bodies mutilated while both alive and dead.
Even the harshest opponents of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza acknowledge, albeit often half-heartedly, that Hamas acted with brutality on October 7 in killing innocents. But many of those same critics refuse to acknowledge the widespread sexual assaults against Israeli women that day.
Since allegations of sexual violence first appeared in the fall, a contingent of anti-Israel activists have sought to disprove them. “Believe women” and “Silence is violence” have been rallying cries of progressive feminist organizations for decades. But the same empathy and support have not been shown for Israeli victims.
Many prominent feminist and human-rights groups—including Amnesty International and the National Organization for Women—said little about the sexual-violence allegations. International organizations tasked with protecting women in wartime kept their powder dry. UN Women waited until December 1, nearly two months after the Hamas attack, to issue a perfunctory statement of condemnation.
Israel’s critics have insisted that a lack of firsthand accounts from rape survivors or forensic evidence undercut Israel’s accusations—and have dismissed claims that systematic sexual violence occurred as “unsubstantiated.” Others have accused the Israeli government of “weaponizing” accusations of rape to justify Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, as an open letter from dozens of feminist activists put it in February. The letter has since been signed by more than 1,000 others.
News outlets that reported on the violence were fiercely attacked. For example, in late December, The New York Times published an investigation that thoroughly detailed the evidence of mass, systematic sexual violence. The story drew an immediate response from Hamas, in language echoing that used by Western activists. “We categorically deny such allegations,” Basem Naim, a Hamas leader, said in a statement, “and consider it as part of the Israeli attempt to demonize and dehumanize the Palestinian people and resistance, and to justify the Israeli army war crimes and crimes of genocide against the Palestinian people.”
Stridently anti-Israel independent journalists and activists immediately tried to pick apart the Times story, which culminated in late February with the publication of a more-than-6,000-word exposé by the left-wing outlet The Intercept that accused the Times of flawed reporting. The left-wing magazine The Nationaccused the Times of “the biggest failure of journalism” since the paper’s reporting in the run-up to the Iraq War; the leftist YES! magazine claimed, “There is no evidence mass rape occurred.”
Considering the vitriolic attacks against Israel since October 7, none of this should come as a surprise. The bloodied and dismembered bodies of dead Israelis had barely been collected before accusations of genocide were being levied by anti-Israel activists. Six months later, such denouncements are routine.
Across the United States and Western Europe, criticism of Israel’s actions quickly and predictably veered into rank anti-Semitism, with Jewish organizations, cultural institutions, artists, and individual Jews targeted by pro-Palestine activists because of Israel’s actions.
But rape denialism falls into its own separate and bewildering category. Why have so many of Israel’s critics—and pro-Palestine activists—chosen to fight on this hill?
Many insist, like the feminists who signed the open letter, that they are questioning claims used to justify a war they oppose. But there is also a disquieting sense that pro-Palestine activists believe they must defend Hamas. Accusations of systematic rape and sadistic sexual violence not only tarnish the terrorist group, but also undermine the notion that October 7 was legitimate “armed resistance” against Israeli occupation.
Instead of believing women, these activists have chosen to take the word of a terrorist organization that is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians and that has constantly denied that any sexual assaults occurred on October 7.
Six months into the war in Gaza, many pro-Palestine activists in the United States are so fully invested in the cause of Palestinian liberation, for which Hamas claims to be fighting—and so steeped in their hatred of Israel—that they are casting aside the progressive ideals that they regularly invoke when castigating Israel. In doing so, they are exposing themselves as hypocrites whose ideology is not forged in a set of universal values but rather is situational and dependent on ethnicity or skin color.
Rape denialism also feeds the widely held belief among Israelis that non-Jews refuse to acknowledge the horrors of October 7—and that the world is hopelessly biased against them. At the same time, it excuses Hamas’s actions and perpetuates the notion that Palestinians have little agency or responsibility for the continuation of a 75-year-old conflict with no end in sight. It pushes both sides to retreat to their respective corners, unwilling to see the humanity in the other, and makes the long-term goal of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians that much more difficult to achieve.
Orit Sulitzeanu is the director of the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an NGO that serves as a coordinating body for the country’s nine rape-crisis centers. As she tells every reporter who calls her, ARCCI does not work for or receive money from the Israeli government.
In the days and weeks after October 7, ARCCI began getting “trickles of information” from doctors and therapists who were encountering survivors of sexual violence. “Everyone talks to us, and the community of therapists in Israel is small,” Sulitzeanu told me. The calls were intended not to alert ARCCI but rather to ask, “What do we do?”
As Sulitzeanu told me, Israel has virtually no experience with rape during wartime: “No one could imagine what happened, actually happened.” Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, the former vice chair of the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and a law professor at Bar-Ilan University, told me that Israel was so unprepared for the onslaught of sexual-abuse cases on October 7 that during the intake process in Israeli hospitals, women who survived the Hamas massacre were not even asked if they had been sexually assaulted.
Quickly, ARCCI began holding webinars to help therapists understand the special characteristics of sexual violence in wartime. And as time went on, Sulitzeanu and her staff noticed that the stories they were hearing were remarkably consistent.
The group put together a report combining the information it was receiving (mainly from eyewitnesses and first responders) with media reporting in Israel and around the world. “Hamas’s attack on October 7th included brutal sexual assaults carried out systematically and deliberately against Israeli civilians,” it concluded. “Hamas terrorists employed sadistic practices aimed at intensifying the degree of humiliation and terror inherent in sexual violence.”
The report’s section titles tell the story in even more vivid and disturbing detail:
“Systematic Use of Brutal Violence to Commit Rape”
“Multiple Abusers/Gang Rape”
“Rape in the Presence of Family/Community Members”
“Sexual Offenses of Males”
“Execution During or After the Rape”
“Binding and Tying”
“Mutilation and Destruction of Genital Organs”
“Insertion of Weapons in Intimate Areas”
“Destruction and Mutilation of the Body”
The next month, the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict reached similar conclusions, although without using the word systematic. After a two-and-a-half-week mission to Israel, the UN body concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks.”
The UN report does not ascribe responsibility to Hamas and relies on careful, qualified, legalistic language. But Halperin-Kaddari believes the UN report should be applauded. It is, she says, the “most accurate and comprehensive” accounting of the sexual violence that took place that day—and she praised it, in particular, for verifying accounts when possible but also debunking allegations that were not true.
Halperin-Kaddari noted that investigators “found the same pattern of violence and sexual assault combined with an extreme degree of cruelty and humiliation, and it occurred in several locations in a relatively short period of time.”
This systematic nature of the abuse is obvious from both reports. For example, ARCCI recounts the eyewitness testimony of one survivor who said that the Nova music festival was an “apocalypse of bodies, girls without clothes.” In addition, it notes that “several survivors of the massacre provided eyewitness testimony of gang rape” as well as accounts from first responders of bodies unclothed and bleeding heavily from the pelvic area, and genital mutilation.
The UN report draws a similar conclusion, finding “reasonable grounds to believe” that rape, gang rape, and the sexual abuse of female corpses occurred at the Nova festival.
At Kibbutz Kfar Aza and Kibbutz Be’eri, the UN found evidence that female victims had been undressed, bound, and killed (though the mission team “was unable to establish whether sexual violence occurred in kibbutz Be’eri”). In its investigation at Kibbutz Re’em, the UN said there were “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred … including rape.” On Road 232, a key escape route from the music festival, the UN found “reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence occurred,” including “the rape of two women.” In addition, “along this road, several bodies were found with genital injuries, along with injuries to other body parts.”
At an Israel Defense Forces base overrun by Hamas terrorists, there were, according to media stories cited in the ARCCI report, dead soldiers shot in the genitals and as many as 10 female soldiers with clear evidence of sexual assault. The UN report is more circumspect on this issue, saying that reports of genital mutilation are “inconclusive.” But Halperin-Kaddari told me that she saw documentation showing that victims had had weapons fired into their sexual organs.
Both reports also agree that hostages released from Hamas’s captivity had been, in the words of the UN special representative, subjected to “sexual violence, including rape, sexualized torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.” The UN report also concluded that violence may be “ongoing” against the approximately 100 hostages, including young women, still held in Gaza. In its response to the Times story, Hamas pointed to the treatment of Israeli hostages, whom they insisted were being well cared for: “If the Hamas resistance fighters held such ideas of sex violence, they would mistreat those who were in their captivity,” a Hamas representative wrote in a lengthy Telegram post at the time. Recently, however, The New York Times published a firsthand account of sexual assault and torture from an Israeli hostage released from Hamas captivity in November.
For Shelly Tal Meron, a member of the Israeli Knesset for the opposition Yesh Atid party, the indifference of once-former feminist allies to the sexual violence on October 7 has been acutely painful. “I sent letters to UN Women, as well as #MeToo and human-rights organizations,” she told me. The response was “complete silence. I was astonished.”
“Before the war,” she said, “I was a member of the Knesset’s women’s-rights movement. I would fight for gender equality and I would work with international organizations. Whenever [attacks on women] happened in other countries like Ukraine or Syria, I felt solidarity.” In the aftermath of October 7, she said, “I felt completely betrayed.”
What is most galling about the pushback on allegations of mass rape is that it is precisely the lack of firsthand accounts and forensic evidence—as well as the initial fog of war—that has opened the door to rape denialists. As Dahlia Lithwick, the senior legal correspondent at Slate, told me, denialists are “capitalizing on the stigma and shame of sexual assault—and often frustrating lack of evidence in these situations.”
That, according to the feminist author Jill Filipovic, is hardly an unusual circumstance. “Sexual violence in conflict is virtually never documented the way sexual violence might be documented on the cop shows you’ve seen,” Filipovic wrote on her Substack last December. “The Israeli recovery and medical teams treated the places where people were attacked on Oct. 7 as war zones and the aftermath of terror attacks, not as standard crime scenes in which a primary goal is to identify a perpetrator.”
Complicating matters further is the particular emphasis in Jewish law on expeditious burial. Sulitzeanu told me that those at the army base who were preparing bodies for burial had “no capacity to keep the evidence from those killed.” The “first priority,” she said, “was to save living people. Second, to collect bodies. Third, identify them and prepare for burial.” Everything else, including proving that widespread rapes had taken place, was secondary.
There is also the distressing reality that so few of Hamas’s rape victims survived. Some were dispatched with a bullet to the head after they’d been assaulted.
The handful of survivors of rape during the attacks on October 7 have, so far, been unwilling to speak publicly. ARCCI has been so adamant in safeguarding them that Sulitzeanu refused to confirm that her association had spoken with them or that their stories were included in the group’s report. The survivors refused multiple requests to meet with the UN mission team, which the UN report chalked up in part to “the national and international media scrutiny of those who made their accounts public.”
The latter fear is almost certainly a direct by-product of the response to the New York Times story—headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” Buttressed by interviews with more than 150 “witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers, and rape counselors,” as well as “video footage, photographs,” and “GPS data from mobile phones,” the story features allegations of sexual violence, including eyewitness accounts. It was the most authoritative investigation by a major American news outlet and should have dealt a major blow to the efforts at denialism and deflection.
But as soon as the Times article appeared, so, too, did the pushback. Much of it came from journalists with a long track record of animosity toward Israel, but it reached a crescendo in late February when The Interceptpublished its story.
What is most striking about the exhaustive Intercept article is the apparent dearth of original reporting. There is little indication that the authors made any serious effort to contact Israeli government officials, the leaders of Israeli NGOs, or—with three exceptions—even the specific individuals who are named in their story and whose credibility they malign. Instead, The Intercept focuses its inquiry on a freelance Israeli journalist who helped report the story, Anat Schwartz, scrutinizing her social-media activity and parsing a Hebrew-language podcast interview to attack her credibility and, by extension, the credibility of the story as a whole.
TheIntercept also sought to chip away at the Times article by focusing on alleged inconsistencies—a process that is easier than it seems when it comes to reporting on sexual violence. After a terrorist attack that killed more than 1,100 Israelis over multiple locations, misinformation ran rampant. False stories, one infamously alleging that multiple babies had been beheaded and another claiming that babies had been strung up on a clothesline, proliferated. In cases of sexual violence, Halperin-Kadderi told me, “it’s not unusual for misinformation to spread,” and beyond trauma-related inaccuracies and memory failures, there could be a tendency “to exaggerate and amplify,” which she links to the high levels of trauma associated with sexual violence—both for survivors and for eyewitnesses. She also noted that exaggerated accounts of sexual violence can be “instrumentalized by leaders to portray their enemy in the darkest way possible.” Even Jeremy Scahill, one of the co-authors of the Intercept article, noted in an interview that inconsistencies in eyewitness accounts do “not necessarily mean that they didn’t witness something.”
But TheIntercept, in its effort to undermine the credibility of witnesses to sexual violence on October 7, painted with a broad brush, creating an inaccurate picture. The flaws in its approach are perhaps best illustrated by the complicated case of Shari Mendes, an IDF reservist who served in the army unit responsible for preparing female bodies for burial and whose testimony Schwartz said helped convince her that there had been widespread sexual violence on October 7.
In the weeks after the attack, Mendes worked 12-hour shifts cleaning and preparing bodies for burial. In an emotional and graphic speech delivered at the United Nations on December 4, Mendes related what she and her team saw: women shot so many times in the head, sometimes after death, that their faces were practically obliterated; multiple women with gunshots in their vagina and breasts; faces permanently cast in distress and anguish.
In an interview in October, though, Mendes told the Daily Mail that “a baby was cut out of a pregnant woman and beheaded, and then the mother was beheaded.” That was not true. However, Mendes was neither the first person nor the only person to make this allegation. A video falsely claiming to show such an atrocity had made the rounds on social media in the days before the interview was published, and similar claims were promoted by a first responder.
Ryan Grim, another co-author of the Intercept article, told me that such “demonstrable fabrications” had “thoroughly discredited” Mendes, and the article notes that “she has no medical or forensic credentials to legally determine rape” (a point that Mendes has publicly acknowledged). The Intercept story questions why the Times would “rely on Mendes’s testimony,” and in an interview last month, Scahill suggested that Mendes is among the Times’ “premiere witnesses.” But in fact, Mendes is quoted a single time in “Screams Without Words,” relaying her account of having seen four women “with signs of sexual violence, including some with ‘a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.’” Mendes’s claims are backed up by a second witness, an army captain working at the same facility, who added the horrifying detail that “she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood.”
The Intercept story fails to mention any of this, and it provides no indication that its reporters attempted to speak with Mendes. (I reached out to Mendes, who declined to comment.) Instead, it criticizes the Times for quoting “witnesses with track records of making unreliable claims and lacking forensic credentials.”
The Intercept has applied useful scrutiny to some specific claims within the Times story. One of the accounts of apparent sexual assault relayed by the Times came from a paramedic in an Israeli commando unit who said he had discovered the bodies of two teenagers at Kibbutz Be’eri. A March 4 article in The Intercept concluded that two victims “specifically singled out by the New York Times … were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” and the Times has since updated its story to note that a video of the scene appears to contradict the paramedic’s account.
But that skepticism is not limited to individual witnesses or accounts. TheIntercept concedes that “individual acts of sexual assault may have occurred” but is quick to add that “rape is not uncommon in war.” It raises doubts about the extent to which Hamas members were responsible for attacks, noting that “there were also several hundred civilians who poured into Israel from Gaza that day.” (It is not usually the left that tries to blur the distinction between Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian civilians.) The central question, TheIntercept contends, is whether the Times “presented solid evidence” to back the claim that, as the newspaper put it, “the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” And it devotes more than 6,000 words to calling into doubt that it did.
Yet The Intercept made no mention of independent efforts to answer this question. There is no reference to the ARCCI report—published a week before The Intercept’s story—which relied on 26 separate media reports from the Israeli press, The Guardian, the BBC, The Times of London, and other outlets, as well as confidential sources, eyewitnesses, and interviews with first responders. Neither does it mention a November 2023 report by Physicians for Human Rights, which concluded that “widespread sexual and gender-based crimes” had taken place on October 7. (Asked for comment, Grim dismissed these reports as “derivative of Western news reports and based on the same sources.”)
The Times published a follow-up story on January 29, addressing many of the questions raised by critics of its article. Even in light of criticisms of the piece, the Times said in a recent statement that it continues to stand by its coverage “and the revelations of sexual violence and abuse following the attack by Hamas.”
The UN mission team similarly concluded that the existence of a few false allegations did not undermine the other evidence of sexual violence in “at least three locations” on October 7. Nor did it limit its inquiry to searching for inconsistencies, paying attention only to those claims it had some reason to doubt. Instead, the investigators took pains to carefully review the scenes, to talk to eyewitnesses and first responders, and to assess the evidence in its totality before presenting the conclusion that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred.”
Semafor’s Max Tani recently reported that The Intercept “is running out of cash,” and that Grim and Scahill had suggested that its board resign and turn operations over to them and the remaining staff. But the publication’s skeptical coverage of the war has apparently been a bright spot for its financial health. “The Intercept’s unapologetically hostile view of Israel’s post-Oct. 7 military operation in Gaza has galvanized its readers and supporters,” Tani wrote, “who have responded by helping the publication set internal records for small-dollar donations.”
Grim refused to say whether he believes that Israeli women were raped on October 7 and, if so, whether any of these assaults were committed by Hamas members. (His two co-authors did not respond to any questions.) Instead, he said he had “addressed these questions repeatedly” and pointed to an interview in which he had said that “the idea that there would be no sexual assault is not taken seriously by pretty much anybody who understands war and violence.”
Considering the overwhelming evidence that sexual assault took place, despite the inherent challenges in collecting such evidence in wartime, it’s difficult to fathom why so many on the anti-Israel left continue to deny that it occurred or cast doubt on its significance.
The most obvious explanation is that by questioning what happened on October 7, activists hope to undercut the rationale for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Showing that systematic sexual abuse didn’t happen would, they believe, demonstrate that Israel is engaged in a mass public deception to justify killing Palestinians.
But some experts I spoke with see other factors at play.
The charge that Jews have exaggerated and weaponized their suffering has long been the basis for Holocaust denialism, said Amy Elman, a professor of political science and Jewish studies at Kalamazoo College who has written extensively on anti-Semitism and women’s rights. Now that same claim is being used by anti-Semites to portray efforts at justice for October 7 as “part of a larger nefarious scheme to harm Palestinians.” “Rape denialism is absolutely consistent with Holocaust denialism,” Elman said, and “this rape denialism is another form of anti-Semitism.”
One of the more troubling aspects of the left’s response to October 7 has been to cast the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians in simplistic terms: Palestinians are the oppressed, dark-skinned minority population; Israelis are the white oppressors. Never mind that Israel is a diverse, multiethnic society. (Most American Jews trace their origins to immigrants from Europe, but the majority of Israeli Jews descend from those who came, most often as refugees, from the Middle East and North Africa.) This reductionist binary has also made it easier to explain the conflict to a younger generation unfamiliar with Arab-Israeli history but well versed in the American civil-rights movement.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a historian at the New School, says that this black-and-white framing has led to a distorted view of what happened on October 7—one that is informed by a reductive view of modern feminism. “There is a very powerful and understandable resistance on the left,” she told me, “to centering ‘white feminism’ or white womanhood in understanding the experiences of women and the purpose of feminism, domestically and internationally.” By this logic, white feminism is inherently “problematic”—and because many on the left see Israelis as white, she says, they “see any defense of Israeli women as some sort of capitulation to ‘white feminism.’”
Moreover, claims of sexual assault against white women have historically been used to justify racial violence, which has, according to Elman and Petrzela, led somepro-Palestine activists to compare Hamas to Emmett Till, who was accused of whistling at a white woman in the Jim Crow South before his brutal murder. It’s “unhinged,” Petrzela said, “but in some ways totally predictable.”
Jonathan Freedland, a columnist for The Guardian, suggested to me that left-wing rape denialism is, in effect, a refusal to believe that Hamas could stoop so low as to engage in sexual violence. On the surface, this sounds bizarre. Hamas massacred more than 1,100 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, and has a long history of massacring Jewish civilians, including children. How could any crime be considered worse than murder? But Freedland says that there are leftists who are prepared to countenance “armed resistance” but cannot do the same for sexual violence. “You can see why it would be essential for them to say that Hamas was ‘only’ guilty of killing and not guilty of rape.”
Freedland noted that Hamas itself has consistently denied that its fighters committed sexual crimes, perhaps in an effort to retain its standing among devout Muslims. “Hamas would be nervous of being seen not as warriors for Palestine but as a bunch of rapists who bring shame on Islam,” he said. Indeed, as Sulitzeanu pointed out to me, some Israeli Arabs who have stood in solidarity with the victims of October 7 have also refused to accept that their Palestinian brethren could commit such heinous, un-Islamic crimes.
Frankly, none of these efforts to whitewash the carnage of October 7 makes much sense. You can acknowledge Hamas’s barbarism while still condemning Israel’s military response or criticizing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Indeed, many have done precisely that, including the Biden administration and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. You can raise questions about specific rape allegations—as the UN report did—while still accepting the overall weight of the evidence.
Instead, many on the left seem determined to justify what happened on October 7 as a legitimate act of Palestinian resistance. “The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating,” one American professor recently wrote. But acknowledging Hamas’s atrocities doesn’t invalidate Palestinian demands for self-determination. You can still embrace Palestinian nationalism and, unlike Hamas, advocate for a two-state solution while also acknowledging that Hamas’s actions on October 7—including the systematic rape of Israeli women and girls—are simply not defensible. Leftists who genuinely support Palestinian statehood do that cause, and themselves, no favor by denying the overwhelming evidence of sexual violence.
The rape denialists might think they are winning a near-term public-relations battle against Israel, but denying Palestinians agency, and accusing Israel of fabricating allegations of mass rape, does far more harm than good.
Above all, it denies reality, perpetuates misinformation, and feeds the empathy gap that separates the two sides. When Israelis and Palestinians look beyond the walls—both real and metaphorical—that separate them, few see fully formed individuals with legitimate grievances and fears that are worthy of their sympathy. Instead, they glimpse caricatures.
As pro-Palestinian activists rightly demand that Israel come to grips with how its policies breed humiliation and desperation among Palestinians, so too must supporters of the Palestinian cause face the reality that rejectionism and terrorism have contributed to Israeli fears that peaceful coexistence is not possible.
When such activists surrender their ideals and dismiss the evidence that sexual violence took place on October 7, they feed the already overwhelming belief among Israelis and Diaspora Jews that those who advocate for the Palestinians and witheringly criticize Israel’s actions are simply not interested in their humanity.
Any solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict must start by recognizing not just the lived reality of Jews and Palestinians, but the abundant feelings of trauma and fear that have made reconciliation so difficult to achieve. Rape denialism pushes Israelis and Palestinians further apart. It isn’t just wrong; it doesn’t just diminish the trauma experienced by Israeli women on October 7—it makes the pursuit of peace and genuine reconciliation impossible.
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Israel’s response to Iran’s attack this past weekend signals an “astonishing win,” my colleague Graeme Wood wrote yesterday. With help from several allies, Israel managed to fend off what could have been a mass-casualty event (though one 7-year-old girl sustained life-threatening injuries). But the attack was also “a gift to the hapless Benjamin Netanyahu,” Graeme argues. I called Graeme in Tel Aviv yesterday to talk about how the prime minister could use this moment as an opportunity to revitalize Gaza negotiations—and why he’s not likely to do so.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Isabel Fattal: You wrote yesterday that Israel’s response to Iran’s attack signals an operational and strategic win. How so?
Graeme Wood: For the past two weeks, since it struck Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing multiple officers and senior officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Israel has been on anxious footing waiting to figure out how Iran was going to attack. There was some doubt, I think, in ordinary people’s minds about how Israel would handle whatever Iran was going to do next. What Iran eventually decided to do was to send more than 300 drones and missiles toward Israel. And Israel not only survived that, but by dawn the next day, the country was up and running as if nothing had happened. The ability for Israel to weather the attack was beyond anyone’s expectations—both as a matter of technical ability and also as a kind of moral ability, to have life go on after what Iran promised was going to be a serious challenge.
Isabel: You write that this could be the moment for Netanyahu to tell his more militaristic right flank to stand down.
Graeme: The way that a lot of people naturally understand these types of attacks is as a matter of tit for tat. Of course there are many in Israel who think, We need to respond in kind. That is the view from Netanyahu’s right. But it is not the most productive way that the aftermath of this attack can be used.
Whenever something big like this happens, it’s almost impossible to put oneself into the mindset of 24 hours ago. But 24 hours ago, many of us would have said, Israel’s in a horrible muddle because it has waged an absolutely brutal war in Gaza. It has not succeeded in dislodging Hamas. It has not gotten its hostages back. There is a humanitarian catastrophe. And there is no negotiation that’s anywhere near happening that could redeem Israel from this pickle that it’s partially put itself in.
Now there is this kind of realignment of the security paradigm. Could a creative, thoughtful, competent government use that realignment to move forward from what seemed like an intractable position in Gaza? Yes. There are angles that a government could take so that tomorrow is not like yesterday. Part of that includes just acknowledging, where did this success come from? The success came in part because Israel, over the past several years, has created what turns out to be a pretty durable and effective alliance with the governments of Arab states in the region. We’re talking about Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Without those states, the prospects for having only one casualty in Israel from the Iranian attack would have been nil. That means that there’s gratitude to be doled out to those states, and there are compromises that can be made as part of that expression of gratitude.
Isabel: So you think that now there could be an opening for negotiation that didn’t exist before the attacks?
Graeme: Yes, exactly. The reason that opening didn’t exist previously is that Netanyahu has consistently tried to mollify those to his right who have maximalist views of the post-Gaza situation—maximalist views meaning that, at the end of the day, there’s not just no Hamas, but no Palestinian government or security force whatsoever in Gaza, and no Arab security force whatsoever. That’s not a reasonable hope for the future, and it has prevented Netanyahu and his government from considering any reasonable future at all.
Among the things that they could have considered are creative solutions that would have involved these Arab allies who have populations, as well as governments, who are not thrilled by what they’re seeing in Gaza. And in the past 24 hours, Israel’s need for those countries has been demonstrated. It’s a moment where a trusted, courageous leader could step in and perhaps create some kind of change in policy that would allow the Gaza war to, if not conclude, then come closer to its conclusion.
Isabel: What’s Netanyahu’s window to do something like this?
Graeme: If you see what’s being spoken about in Israel, it’s Netanyahu being pressured to retaliate. This is not an incomprehensible command. If there were 300 drones sent toward any country, the population of that country would say, We have to do something material to cause those who sent them to regret having done so. It’s unclear whether Netanyahu is going to take that bait, or do what a great politician has to do sometimes, which is to say to people, You’re not going to get what you want; you’re going to get what you need.And what we need as a country is something other than this. That’s what the situation really calls for, and it’s a call that would probably have to be answered in, I would say, the next week.
Isabel: What else should readers keep in mind as they’re following this story?
Graeme: One thing that I think will be a nagging question for a lot of people is, What did the Iranians want to happen? Even if they didn’t want massive death and destruction, what they did was an unambiguous act of aggression. But another possibility, which is reasonable to consider, is that they didn’t expect most of those drones and missiles to get through. They needed to retaliate, and as soon as they did so they said, Okay, we’re done here. Even before the missiles and drones would’ve reached their targets, they said that. So we have to consider the possibility that this was a half-hearted attack.
Isabel: This attack is also unprecedented in a few ways, isn’t it?
Graeme: They’re attacking from Iranian territory. And if you attack from Iranian territory, you invite retaliation on Iranian territory, which is a huge change from the status quo ante. This really is a before-and-after moment. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander said this publicly, which means it’s probably an official statement of doctrine now: From now on, if Israel attacks Iranian interests, figures, and citizens anywhere, we will retaliate from Iran. If that’s what they’re going to do, that’s a new disposition.
Jury selection is under way on the first day of Donald Trump’s hush-money trial in Manhattan; it marks the first time a former president has been on trial for criminal charges.
The civil war in Sudan has now reached the end of its first year. More than 14,000 people have been killed, according to some estimates; last month, the UN warned that nearly 5 million people could soon suffer a “catastrophic” level of hunger.
The FBI opened a criminal probe into the recent collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge. The investigation will cover, in part, whether the ship’s crew knew their vessel had “serious system problems” before leaving port, according to The Washington Post.
Dispatches
The Wonder Reader: Savor your favorites while you can—the ongoing cocoa shortage may change the future of chocolate forever, Isabel Fattal writes.
Philip Shribman, in a college photo from around 1940; behind it, an excerpt from a wartime letter he sent to the sociology professor George F. Theriault Sources: Courtesy of David Shribman; Wieland Teixeira / Getty
The Man Who Died for the Liberal Arts
By David M. Shribman
Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthday, was not worldly but understood that he had been thrust into a world conflict that was more than a contest of arms. At stake were the life, customs, and values that he knew. He was a quiet young man, taciturn in the old New England way, but he had much to say in this letter, written from the precipice of battle to a brother on the precipice of adulthood …
He acknowledged from the start that “this letter won’t do much good”—a letter that, in the eight decades since it was written, has been read by three generations of my family. In it, Phil Shribman set out the virtues and values of the liberal arts at a time when universities from coast to coast were transitioning into training grounds for America’s armed forces.
“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.”
Li, who calls himself an “indie journalist” and subsequently posted another video blaming Israel for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, got more than 160,000 views for his TikTok theory—and the video was one of the poorer-performing entries making similar claims on the platform.
What prompted this outburst? On March 13, Congress advanced a bill that would give TikTok’s Chinese parent company six months to sell it or be banned from American app stores. The legislation passed 352–65, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and the rational observer will have no trouble understanding why.
The United States has a long history of preventing foreign adversaries from controlling important communications infrastructure. Washington spent more thana decade, under Democratic and Republican presidents, leading a successfulinternational campaign to block the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from Western markets. Donald Trump attempted to force a TikTok sale back in 2020. The reasons are straightforward: The app has access to the data of some 150 million American users—nearly half the population—but it is owned and controlled by the Chinese company ByteDance. Like all companies in the country, ByteDance is effectively under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly punishes and even disappears business leaders who displease it. A former ByteDance executive has said that the CCP had “supreme access” to the company’s data, and used the info to track protesters in Hong Kong, for example.
Recentpolls show robust public support for TikTok’s ban or sale, and for years, Gallup has found that Americans see China as the country’s greatest enemy. In short, Congress has strong electoral and political incentives to act against TikTok. But spend some time on the platform itself, and you’ll discover a very different culprit behind all this: Jews.
“We were all thinking it: Israel is trying to buy TikTok,” the influencer Ian Carroll told his 1.5 million followers last month. The evidence: Steven Mnuchin, the former Trump Treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs executive, has sought investors to purchase the app. “He’s not Israel, right?” continued Carroll. “Well, let’s peel this onion back one layer at a time, starting with just the fact that he’s Jewish.”
Carroll’s TikTok bio says “do your own research,” and he certainly had research to share. “The censorship is not about China on TikTok,” he explained. Rather, “as a TikTok creator who gets censored all the frickin’ time, I can tell you that the things you get censored about are the CIA and Israel.” Carroll did not address why Israel would go through so much trouble to acquire TikTok if it already controlled the platform, or why the Semitic censors somehow missed his video and its more than 1 million views, not to mention the several similarly viral follow-ups he posted.
In truth, far from suppressing such content, TikTok’s algorithm happily promotes it. I purposely viewed the videos for this piece while logged out of the platform, and it nonetheless began suggesting to me more material along these lines through its sidebar recommendations.
Characteristic of anti-Semitic online discourse, these videos and others like them interchangeably reference individual American Jews, American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, American pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC, and the state of Israel, as though they are all part of one single-minded international conspiracy to take down TikTok. When a commenter asked Carroll to “look into universal studios pulling their music from TikTok,” a reference to the Universal Music conglomerate’s dispute with TikTok over royalties, Carroll replied, “Universal CEO is a Jewish man.”
“A foreign government is influencing the 2024 election,” the leftist podcaster and former Bernie Sanders Press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray declared on X in March. “I’m not talking about China, but Israel. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a ‘TikTok problem.’ Suddenly, a divided Congress agrees on one thing: A social media ban.” Greenblatt is an American Jew, the ADL is an American organization, the bill isn’t a ban, and the push for a forced sale predated the Gaza war, but other than that, Gray was on the money.
“Banning TikTok became a crucial emergency because what they saw was a bunch of young individuals, essentially people that are going to be the future leaders of America, who were not pro-Israel,” the far-right commentator Candace Owens claimed in March on her popular show at The Daily Wire. She then issued an implied threat: “If TikTok is in fact banned, there is no question that Israel will be blamed, AIPAC will be blamed, the ADL will be blamed, Jews are going to be blamed … You can see that sentiment building.” (Owens left The Daily Wire a week later following a string of anti-Semitic incidents, which included claims that Jews were doing “horrific things” and “controlling people with blackmail,” as well as her favoriting a social-media post that accused a rabbi of being “drunk on Christian blood.”)
At this point, it’s not uncommon to find videos about the TikTok legislation that do not even mention Jews or Israel—like this one with 1.5 million views—yet are flooded with hundreds of comments, garnering tens of thousands of likes, accusing “Zionists,” “Jews,” or AIPAC of being behind it, despite years of national-security reporting on concerns over the platform’s Chinese owners. That alleged Jewish malefactors are being assailed on TikTok even when they are not invoked explicitly in a video illustrates how widely the meme has spread.
Like many conspiracy theories, the notion that Jews are out to ban TikTok contains a grain of truth. Jewish and pro-Israel groups have raised concerns about TikTok’s failure to moderate anti-Semitic content for years, including when it pertains to Israel, but they have never called for the app to be shut down. After the TikTok sale legislation was proposed, the Jewish Federations of North America said it “appropriately balances free speech and individual rights with regulatory action” while asserting that “our community understands that social media is a major driver of the rise in antisemitism, and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.” (Presumably, the organization arrived at this conclusion by spending 10 minutes on the app.) Researchers have found that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs pro-Israel content on TikTok, likely reflecting the platform’s young and international demographic.
But no conspiracy theories or appeals to recent geopolitical developments are necessary to understand why U.S. politicians wouldn’t want one of the most-trafficked social-media networks in America to be run by Communist China via a black-box algorithm. Just this past December, researchers at Rutgers found that anti-China posts on topics like the Hong Kong protests or the regime’s brutal repression of Uyghur Muslims were dramatically underrepresented on TikTok compared with Instagram.
TikTok’s response to allegations that it could function as a foreign influence operation have not exactly allayed concerns. Shortly after the Rutgers study was published, the app restricted access to the tool used by academics to track its content. Last month, it sent multiplealerts to its American users falsely warning that Congress was about to ban TikTok and urging them to contact their representatives. In fact, the bill seeks to force a sale to new ownership, much as congressional scrutiny over data privacy led the dating app Grindr to be sold to non-Chinese owners in 2020.
Simply put, none of what is happening to the social-media platform is new. Neither is the tendency to blame Jews for the world’s problems—but that doesn’t make the impulse any less dangerous. Many understand anti-Semitism as a personal prejudice that singles out Jewish people for their difference, much like other minorities experience racism. But anti-Semitism also manifests as a conspiracy theory about how the world works, alleging that sinister string-pulling Jews are the source of social, political, and economic problems—and this is the sort of anti-Semitism that tends to get people killed.
Consider recent American history: In 2018, a far-right gunman who blamed Jews for mass immigration murdered 11 people in Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. In 2019, assailants tied to the Black Hebrew Israelite movement attacked a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, killing three; one of the shooters had written on social media about Jews controlling the government. In 2022, an Islamic extremist took an entire congregation hostage in Colleyville, Texas, and demanded that a rabbi get a convict released from a nearby prison. These perpetrators—white supremacist, Black extremist, radical Islamist—had essentially nothing in common other than their belief that a Jewish cabal governed world affairs and was the cause of their problems.
The reality is the reverse: Jews constitute just 2 percent of the American population, and although they exercise influence like any other minority, they frequently disagree among themselves and do not dictate the destiny of the majority. Politicians voting against TikTok are pursuing their conception of the national interest, not being suborned to serve some nebulous Jewish interest. Remove the Jews from the equation, and the situation will be the same.
Conspiracy theorists typically claim to be combatting concealed power structures. But as in this case, their delusions make them unable to perceive the way power actually works. Thus, conspiratorial anti-Semitism hobbles its adherents, preventing them from rationally organizing to advance their own causes by distracting them with fantastical Jewish plots.
“Anti-Semitism isn’t just bigotry toward the Jewish community,” the Black civil-rights activist Eric Ward once told me. “It is actually utilizing bigotry toward the Jewish community in order to deconstruct democratic practices, and it does so by framing democracy as a conspiracy rather than a tool of empowerment or a functional tool of governance.”
Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories won’t safeguard TikTok from the bill that’s currently moving through the U.S. legislature. But the more people buy into them, the more they will imperil not only American Jews but American democracy as well.
