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If you have teenagers in your life, they’ll probably have heard of the PSL scale. Or at least the language associated with it. Chad. Stacy. Normie. Subhuman.

The PSL scale is a pseudoscientific attractiveness rating system used by looksmaxxers, men in a part of the manosphere who sometimes use extreme methods to change their appearance. The scale purports to rank people into different categories based on their physical appearance, with looksmaxxers deeming that the higher up the scale a man is, the more attractive he will be to women.

The roots of this rating system lie in misogynistic online forums used by incels or involuntarily celibates, but now it’s all over social media, where teenage boys post photos of themselves, asking to be ranked. PSL apps are also available which will rate a person’s photograph, and give them AI-powered advice, sometimes for a fee, on how to “move up” the scale.

So how did the language of incels, and this one way of quantifying attractiveness and beauty, become so mainstream?

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to Jordan Foster, an associate professor of sociology at MacEwan University in Alberta, Canada, who researches social media, beauty and masculinity. He explains the origins of the PSL scale, where it fits into the manosphere, and how some looksmaxxing influencers are making money off it.

PSL is an abbreviation of three, now defunct, online incel forums. Foster says that a precise dialogue emerged from discussions on these forums about what features constitute attractiveness and beauty, which turned into a pseudoscientific rating system. “So there might be notions, for example, that a strong brow bone or a stronger jawline is going to communicate a certain amount of testosterone and that this is going to suggest something about your virility or your fitness.”

Foster suggests the idea that beauty can be quantifiable in this way emerged as some men came to terms with “a topic that has historically been taboo and feminised”. He says looksmaxxers realised that if they wanted to have a discussion about beauty, they needed to communicate it in a language that is traditionally more palatable for men. “How do you do that? Wrap it in the guise of science.”

Listen to the interview with Jordan Foster on The Conversation Weekly podcast and read an article he wrote with his colleague Jillian Sunderland at the University of Toronto . This episode was written and produced by Katie Flood and Gemma Ware. Mixing by Eleanor Brezzi and theme music by Neeta Sarl.

Newsclips in this episode from NBC News, The Social CTV, CTV News, Tamron Hall Show, Saturday Night Live, BrettMaverick and PrestigeClipper via TikTok.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.

Gemma Ware, Host, The Conversation Weekly Podcast, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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New Lenox Police have reported a bomb threat at the home of Pope Leo’s brother. With Trump seemingly war with the Pope and the Pope steadfastly responding in kind the question is whether more threats of violence — or actually violence — occurs.

The report:

(NewsNation) — A bomb threat occurred at the home of the brother of Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday night, police in Illinois confirmed.

The New Lenox Police Department issued a statement acknowledging the threat at the home, but after a comprehensive search, it was determined to be unsubstantiated.

No injuries were reported and residents in the area have been allowed to return to their homes after evacuating, per police requests. Bomb-sniffing K-9s were used in the search.

“The incident remains under investigation as authorities work to determine the origin of the report,” police said. “Making false reports of this nature is a serious offense and may result in criminal charges.”

NEWS: The Pope’s brother just received a bomb threat at his home.

This comes after Donald Trump publicly attacked Pope Leo XIV.

Trump attacked the Pope.

Then someone threatened to bomb the Pope’s family.

The same pattern as MTG — whose children received death threats after…

— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) April 16, 2026

? Pope Leo XIV's brother's home was searched by police after he received BOMB threats yesterday

It follows an increasingly hysterical week of anti Catholicism from Donald Trump and JD Vance, with Vance even saying that the pope 'should be careful when talking about theology' pic.twitter.com/GESxZCtbeb

— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) April 16, 2026

NEW: After President Trump attacked Pope Leo XIV, a bomb threat was sent to the pontiff's older brother at his home in suburban Chicago.

John Prevost is a quiet Catholic school administrator.

Trump, in his initial post attacking Leo, singled out Leo’s other brother, Louis, as…

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) April 16, 2026

Pope Leo's MAGA Brother Receives Bomb Threat Amid Trump's Attacks on the Pontiff https://t.co/VmieAF7OZQ

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) April 16, 2026

In the post attacking Leo XIV, Trump singled out the pope’s other brother, Louis Prevost of Port Charlotte, Florida, writing:

“I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA.”

The president of the United States named the pope’s family members…

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) April 16, 2026

? Pope Leo XIV's brother's home was searched by police after he received BOMB threats yesterday

It follows an increasingly hysterical week of anti Catholicism from Donald Trump and JD Vance, with Vance even saying that the pope 'should be careful when talking about theology' pic.twitter.com/GESxZCtbeb

— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) April 16, 2026

Great job, Trump

Now MAGA is trying to kill the Pope's familyhttps://t.co/cbKt6BFg3Z

— Morgan J. Freeman (@mjfree) April 16, 2026

So, these MAGAs who threatened him don't even know their own? Pope Leo's brother is a MAGA. https://t.co/QmdLX3obdX

— Micheline S ?????????????? (@allarebananas) April 16, 2026

The post BOMB THREAT AT HOME OF POPE LEO’S BROTHER appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

Our Quote of the Day is this response from the Pope:

“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” — Pope Leo XIV, April 16, 2026

The post QUOTE OF THE DAY POPE LEO XIV appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

Before Donald Trump posted the ridiculous AI image of him as Jesus healing the sick, he attacked Pope Leo in a lengthy tirade on Truth Social.

Trump wrote, “Pope Leo is WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy. He talks about ‘fear’ of the Trump Administration, but doesn’t mention the FEAR that the Catholic Church, and all other Christian Organizations, had during COVID when they were arresting priests, ministers, and everybody else, for holding Church Services, even when going outside. I like his brother Louis much better than I like him, because Louis is all MAGA.”

Keep in mind, this is a week after he had shared a profanity list post on Easter Sunday, which said, “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

Trump also wrote, “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s terrible that America attacked Venezuela, a Country that was sending massive amounts of Drugs into the United States and, even worse, emptying their prisons, including murderers, drug dealers, and killers, into our Country.”

Apparently, Trump had just watched something on 60 Minutes about the Catholic Church, and it got him all riled up.

Trump also took credit for Pope Leo, becoming Pope, writing, “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump. If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

When Leo was elected last May, Trump called it “such a great honor for our country to have an American pope.” Before the conclave convened last year, Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself wearing white papal vestments and a headdress, which the White House then reshared on its official X account.

When MAGAts discover my Facebook page, they crap AI-generated memes all over it, which is exactly what Trump does.

After posting the image of himself as Jesus, Trump deleted it and claimed it was him as a doctor, not Jesus. Who hasn’t had a doctor give them a medical exam while wearing a robe?

JD Vance, who is a Catholic, said on Fox News on Monday that the picture was meant as a joke and that “it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality.” Seriously. Again, Trump does something extremely offensive, even blasphemous, and MAGA World blames people for being offended. And how can any member of the Trump regime talk about morality?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also Catholic, and was at a UFC fight with Trump in Miami instead of the failed peace negotiations in Pakistan with JD, a realtor, and an investor, had nothing to say about Trump’s blasphemy.

Steve Bannon said, “It is good in that it gets more of his conservative Catholic base energized. President Trump is smart politically to do this.” Oh, really?

Current polls have Donald Trump at around 40% approval and 57% disapproval. The pope, on the other hand, is currently polling at 57% approval, and he’s not a politician. Trump’s approval is only coming from his base, as the rest of the nation is disgusted with the guy.

I turned on Fox News for a minute yesterday afternoon, and people on that network were saying that the Pope needs to stay out of politics. That’s the same thing a lot of MAGAts are saying at GoComics and on this cartoon today at my Facebook page. But noticed that none of them say that maybe Donald Trump shouldn’t be attacking the Pope or posting images of himself as Jesus. As usual, they blame everyone else.

GO HERE TO READ THE REST.

Visit Clay Jones’ website and email him at clayjonz@gmail.com.

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At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest check as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement Bartz v. Anthropic.

In 2025, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, best known for creating the chatbot Claude, agreed to pay up to US$1.5 billion to thousands of authors after a judge ruled that the company had infringed upon their copyrights.

When I first learned about the settlement, I assumed that Anthropic was primarily interested in teaching Claude about the subject of my stolen work, former socialist activist, British Labour politician and feminist Ellen Wilkinson.

It did not initially occur to me that Claude might also be learning about how I, Laura Beers, political historian, craft my sentences and translate my voice to the page.

Yet there is increasing evidence that chatbots like Claude can be trained not only to regurgitate an author’s content, but also to mimic their voice. In March 2026, journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action suit against the owners of Grammarly, alleging that the company misappropriated her and other writers’ identities to build its “Expert Review” AI tool, which offers to give editorial feedback in the voices of various authors, living and dead.

That a machine might use my writing not only to learn about my subject matter, but also to analyze and ultimately mimic my authorial voice, points to a future that George Orwell envisioned with eerie prescience. In his 1949 dystopian novel “1984,” Orwell imagined “novel-writing machines” capable of mass-producing literature, employing programmed mechanical “kaleidoscopes” as substitutes for individual artistic process.

‘In place of a human mind, a statistical average’

To what extent, I wondered, could Claude mimic my own voice?

I prompted the chatbot to write an essay “in the style of Laura Beers” about an early 20th-century politician. I struggled to recognize myself in the resulting prose. But maybe Claude, having only consumed one of my books, didn’t have enough to go on to really nail my tone.

I decided to try again. This time, I would ask it to write a brief essay in the style of Orwell. The subject of my book “Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century,” Orwell is one of the most distinctive literary essayists and prose stylists of the 20th century.

Most of Orwell’s work is in the public domain, meaning it could have legally been used to train Claude.

I prompted Claude to write an essay “in the style of George Orwell about the threat to individual identity and freedom of thought posed by AI and particularly by the ability of ‘novel writing machines’ to produce literature.”

Primed with ample source material, the AI did a passable job:

“Here is a type of comfort, familiar to anyone who has ever been slowly dispossessed of something, that consists not in denying the loss but in not yet noticing it. The frog does not leap from the gradually heated water. The citizen does not protest the gradual narrowing of the permitted thought. And the reader, it seems, does not mourn the novel until the novel has already been replaced by something that resembles it in every outward particular – same chapters, same characters, same approximate sequence of feeling – yet contains, in place of a human mind, a statistical average of all the human minds that came before it.”

The final sentence about the statistical average rings false. But Orwell would, I suspect, have liked the image of the slowly boiling frog. “Here is a type of comfort” is also a phrase that Orwell might well have written.

I am skeptical that anyone would classify Claude’s efforts as indistinguishable from Orwell’s prose. But when it comes to machine-produced “literature,” perhaps it doesn’t really matter whether it can fully approximate original art, as long as it’s good enough to function as entertainment and distraction for the masses.

Jam, bootlaces and books

This was Orwell’s own dispirited suggestion in “1984.

With the help of “novel-writing machines,” the employees of the Ministry of Truth – the government department responsible for controlling information and rewriting history – are able to mass-produce not only novels, but also “newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes [and] plays.” They churn out “rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes” and “films oozing with sex,” along with cheap pornography intended for the “proles,” as the uneducated working classes of Big Brother’s Oceania were known.

The technology disgusts Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who pointedly decides to purchase a diary and pen to write down his own independent thoughts. But to Julia, Winston’s nymphomaniac, anti-intellectual lover who works as a mechanic servicing the machines, “Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.”

‘Full-Length Novels in Seconds’

According to estimates, thousands of books for sale on Amazon have been written in whole or in part using AI.

In other words, today’s AI is also being used to mass-produce literature like jam or bootlaces.

Many of these works are not fully machine-written. Instead, they’ve been, as the AI writing tool Sudowrite advertises, “polished by AI.” With its “Rewrite” function, the company promises to give users an opportunity to “refine your prose while staying true to your style, with multiple AI-suggested revisions to choose from.” The service is akin to the “touching up” provided by the Ministry of Truth’s Rewrite Squad in “1984.”

Other books for sale on Amazon are, however, entirely machine-generated. The AI writing tool Squibler promises that if you give it an overarching prompt, it can produce “Full-Length Novels in Seconds.”

The potential of AI-generated “literature” to turn a quick-and-easy profit ensures that readers will continue to encounter more of this content in the future, especially as AI’s large language models become more refined. Already, studies have shown that readers cannot easily distinguish AI-generated forgeries from original prose.

Last year, I had lunch with a screenwriter friend in Los Angeles. He told me that his colleagues are particularly nervous about the use of AI to produce sequels. Once you have an established cast of characters for a movie franchise like, say, “Fast & Furious,” audiences will likely see the next installment whether it’s written by man or machine.

Yet my own brief experiments with Claude give me at least some hope for the future of literary art. A chatbot like Claude might be able to absorb and analyze “a statistical average of all the human minds that came before it,” but without the input of actual human experience and sensibility, it is hard to envisage them ever producing true art.

Whether AI can produce the next George Orwell novel or essay remains to be seen. That it can and will churn out an increasing volume of popular fiction and screenplays like “Fast & Furious 25” seems less in doubt.

Laura Beers, Professor of History, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The recent resignations of Reps. Eric Swalwell of California and Tony Gonzales of Texas in the wake of sordid sexual-misconduct allegations have titillated the political establishment.

Swalwell’s political career and California gubernatorial campaign began to implode after the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the account of a former staffer, who said he had sexually assaulted her. Others have since come forward.

Gonzales, a Texas Republican and former Navy veteran, reluctantly admitted to engaging in an extramarital affair with a staffer named Regina Ann Santos-Aviles, who later died by suicide.

In both cases, it was the right decision to step down. There is no way either man could have effectively represented their constituents, let alone seek higher office, while entangled in such dark and sordid drama. While both Republican and Democrat men can be considered morally deficient, Swalwell, who unabashedly embraced the #MeTwo movement for much of his political career, comes across as the epitome of hypocrisy.

House Democrats quickly dropped their support for Swalwell, who had long been a favorite of progressives due to his fierce party policies and intense hostility toward President Trump. But most Republicans stopped short of calling for Gonzales’ resignation or expulsion until the Swalwell allegations catapulted the issue of sexual misconduct to the forefront of debate.

It took diligent and sustained pressure from female Republican House members — including Anna Paulina Luna, Lauren Bobert, and Nancy Mace — to kept the heat on Gonzales, and on their conference’s leaders, until the congressman, who originally denied the affair, felt compelled to admit it and end his re-election campaign.

In the end, Republicans and Democrats were provided the opportunity to expel one member from each party without upsetting the partisan makeup of a narrowly divided House.

Talk about bipartisan cooperation!

The atrocious behavior of Swalwell and Gonzales certainly does not personify the majority of male lawmakers as monsters or sexual predators. But far too often, when revelations of sinister and derelict behavior are inflicted upon subordinates, it often draws a less-than-dramatic response among congressional politicians. Instead, the routine response is confirmation of hearing rumors and whispers and discussions about which politician is likely to be the next to have their career implode from such news.

Over the past decade, Democrats have typically taken a firm stance on monitoring members of their own ranks for sexual-misconduct allegations. Remember the eventual party groundswell resulting in the ouster of former Sen. Al Franken in 2018 after accusations of misconduct surfaced among multiple women?

When the Swalwell allegations hit the public late last week, Democratic allies wasted no time in calling their colleague out and engineering the drumbeat culminating in his eventual departure. Democrats, while far from perfect by any means, do make a diligent effort to implement a code of morality among their members.

On the contrary, for the most part, MAGA Republicans are so deeply wedded to parochialism they will defend, excuse, or ignore any and all morally reductive behavior committed by their debased party leader.

It appears for the MAGA conservative right the ability to wield, consolidate, and maintain power is the ultimate goal. Sad to say, given the outcome of the most recent presidential elections, they are largely correct. Hopefully, this will change.

Copyright 2026 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

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Alarm over the war of words between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV has escalated with remarkable speed, from The New York Times to the Daily Beast and local television.

The pope has repeatedly called for peace in the Middle East since the start of the Iran war, insisting that “God does not bless any conflict” and warning against the “delusion of omnipotence.”

On April 12, in a lengthy social media post, Trump derided Leo as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,” telling him to “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician.” His Truth Social account posted, then deleted, a Christ-like image of Trump appearing to heal a man.

At stake in this public feud is an old question: Can a religious leader challenge political power, especially a ruler of one of the most powerful countries in the world?

As a medieval historian and lead editor of “The Cambridge History of the Papacy,” I cannot help but see a familiar pattern.

For many people, Trump’s rant against the pope was shocking. But conflicts between popes and rulers are not an aberration; they’re a durable feature of Western history. Whenever political leaders cloak power in sacred language, or religious leaders publicly denounce political violence, they reenact debates that stretch back more than a millennium. These struggles are not symbolic: They concern who holds ultimate authority over people, souls – and in the end, history itself.

Two powers, intertwined

From its earliest centuries, Christianity was bound up with politics. Roman Emperor Constantine legalized the religion in 313. He later presided over the Council of Nicaea, an important theological assembly, blurring the line between political rule and spiritual authority.

In the fifth century, Pope Gelasius I articulated a rival vision: that the world was governed by two powers, priestly and royal. Ultimately, he argued, spiritual authority outweighed political power, because it promised eternal salvation. Gelasius’ theory did not resolve the tension between the two, but it established a lasting framework for Christian political thought.

The relationship between these two powers shifted decisively in the year 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, a Frankish king, emperor on Christmas Day. This act was not merely ceremonial. It implied that imperial authority in the West came from the church and that political legitimacy required papal sanction.

The coronation followed years of political instability in Rome and the papacy’s increasing reliance on the Franks for military protection. After Leo was elected pope in 795, opponents attacked him, and he found shelter at the court of Charlemagne. The king returned to Rome with Leo and asserted his legitimacy. In turn, Leo crowned Charlemagne. Doing so asserted his own role as a maker of emperors, while Charlemagne gained a sacred aura.

This moment reshaped medieval political theology. It encouraged rulers to see themselves as guardians of both political order and religious orthodoxy, while popes moved from spiritual counselors to active participants in secular governance. The result was a paradox: Kings invoked God to sanctify conquest, as Charlemagne did in his brutal wars against the Saxons. Meanwhile, churchmen claimed the authority to restrain violence, encouraged just wars and threatened violent behaviors with spiritual sanctions.

Battle over bishops

By the 11th century, however, the papacy increasingly sought to free itself from secular dominance. In particular, popes wanted to select the church’s bishops rather than allowing nobility or a king to do so.

That struggle exploded into the Investiture Controversy, one of the most consequential conflicts of the Middle Ages, and lay crucial groundwork for the Magna Carta, the first document to hold royalty subject to the law. Both events addressed the same fundamental question: Who has the right to grant authority, and what limits exist on political power?

At stake was not merely church administration but sovereignty itself. Bishops were major landholders and political figures; controlling their selection meant controlling wealth, loyalty and governance.

In the push to appoint bishops, popes were insisting that spiritual authority came from the church alone, challenging the idea that kings ruled by unchecked power. It was a decisive attempt to separate spiritual legitimacy from royal control and to place moral constraints on rulers who claimed divine authority.

The Investiture Controversy dragged on for several decades. Finally, in 1122, Pope Calixtus II and Emperor Henry V signed the Concordat of Worms. The agreement granted the pope the right to name bishops and to install their spiritual authority. The emperor, meanwhile, would “invest” them with their “temporalities”: that is, the worldly powers attached to their office, such as land, revenue, jurisdiction and coercion.

Reining in the king

A century later, the Magna Carta pursued a parallel objective.

Its immediate background lay in the conflict over the new archbishop of Canterbury, whom Pope Innocent III had appointed in 1207. King John opposed his choice, prompting Innocent to excommunicate the king and place England under interdict, meaning the English could not participate in church sacraments.

To appease tensions, John surrendered England to the pope in 1213, turning the kingdom into a papal fief. In return, he received Innocent’s approval for a war against France.

But the arrangement deeply angered English barons, who now found themselves subject not only to their king but also to papal authority. After England’s decisive defeat, John was forced to confront rebellious barons at home.

The result was the Magna Carta, the “Great Charter.” Forced on the king by armed resistance, the document asserted that the king himself was subject to law. It limited royal authority over taxation, justice and punishment, and it famously declared that no free person could be imprisoned or deprived of rights without lawful judgment.

John appealed to the pope, however, who annulled the charter shortly after its issue. Despite this setback, the Magna Carta survived: John’s son Henry III reissued it several times, with its definitive version implemented in 1225.

Taking the long view

Seen in this long perspective, the Trump–Leo confrontation appears less surprising. When a president invokes sacred language or imagery to justify violence, and a pope replies by denying divine sanction, they are reenacting a struggle as old as medieval Christendom: who may speak in God’s name, and who may set limits on power.

The medieval world did not resolve this tension, but it learned to live with it by fracturing authority: first between church and crown, later between rulers and law. What is unsettling today is how easily modern leaders still reach for religious language to evade restraint, and how fragile the institutions meant to check them can appear.

Joëlle Rollo-Koster, Professor of Medieval History, University of Rhode Island

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Donald Trump has now opened a war on another front: with the Pope.

Every day Trump seemingly aims a political broadside at Pope Leo in response to Leo…a Pope…saying that he’s against war, bombs and death. Trump accuses him of being “weak on crime,” as if the Pope is one the Democrats he rails against. He says Leo “wasn’t on any list to be Pope” and was put there because Trump was President.

At any moment you expect Trump to say the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost’s selection as Pope on May 8, 2025 was rigged.

“Why is Trump mad at Leo?” asks The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols: “For the same reason that Trump ever gets mad at anyone: The Holy Father dared to criticize him. Last week, the president of the United States posted an expletive-filled threat—on Easter Sunday, no less—to destroy the ancient civilization of Iran. His supporters wrote this off as a clever gambit to bring an end to the war (which it has not). Leo called the threat ‘unacceptable,”’ blasted the “’delusion of omnipotence’ that led to the war, and said: “’nough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!'”

Vice President JD Vance basically said the morality-conscious Leo should stay out of U.S. politics. Trump has issued a slew of interview and Truth Social slams on the Pope. Then Pope outraged many supporters, non-supporters and world leaders by posting an AI that showed him as Jesus Christ. Trump later took it down and insisted he thought it was him as a doctor, sparking many mocking memes on social media. The latest explanation from the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is that Trump feels the video was “doctored.’

The New York Times’ Ross Douthat said Trump’s response “emphatically does not belong to a normal push and pull between church and state, pope and empire. Nor is it even a normal kind of Trumpian abnormality. Instead we have outright profanation and sacrilege, in a pattern that began with his social media post on Easter Sunday, cursing and threatening violence and sarcastically praising Allah, and then escalated through a post attacking Leo and finally a post of A.I. slop depicting himself as Jesus Christ.”

There is precedent for political leaders clashing with popes—but not quite like this.

In the United States, tensions between presidents and the Vatican have typically been restrained, even when disagreements were real. John F. Kennedy had to reassure voters he wouldn’t take orders from Rome, while Joe Biden has navigated policy differences with Pope Francis over issues like abortion. Even Donald Trump previously sparred with Francis over immigration. Bill Clinton had big differences over reproductive rights and population policy. George W. Bush faced Pope John Paul II vehemently opposing the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Richard Nixon had tense meetings with Pope Paul VI regarding the Vietnam War. Woodrow Wilson had an awkward interaction where he expressed disinterest in being blessed by Pope Benedict XV.

These moments were largely about policy, not personal or theological one-upmanship.

It’s one thing to debate policy. it’s another to take on a man whose résumé includes “Vicar of Christ.” Historically, picking a fight with the pope hasn’t been great for one’s eternal polling numbers.

If you go further back, the clashes become far more dramatic—and consequential. Medieval rulers didn’t just trade barbs with popes. They risked excommunication, political collapse, and worse. Henry IV was forced into a humiliating public penance after defying Pope Gregory VII. Philip IV of France went so far as to have Pope Boniface VIII seized during a power struggle. And Napoleon Bonaparte made a point of crowning himself in front of Pope Pius VII, signaling that his authority didn’t come from the Church. World leaders have tangled with popes before—though usually with a little more fear of lightning bolts, if not voters. There’s a long tradition of rulers clashing with the papacy. It rarely ends with the pope updating his position.

That’s what makes the current moment feel different. Modern presidents don’t derive legitimacy from the pope, and the pope doesn’t command armies. Today’s conflicts are symbolic, rhetorical, and rooted in values rather than raw power.

But there’s still a line between disagreeing with a religious leader and implicitly placing yourself on comparable spiritual footing.

Arguing with the pope is not unprecedented. Doing so while sounding like you’re auditioning for a sequel to the New Testament is something else entirely.

Presidents come and go. Popes do too—but the institution they represent has outlasted empires. It’s not a great track record for anyone looking to win a long-term argument.

Footnote: One poll puts Pope Leo’s approval at 84% and Trump’s at 38%.

The post THE MOST UNPOPULAR AMERICAN PRESIDENT TAKES ON A POPULAR AMERICAN POPE appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

Farah N. Jan, University of Pennsylvania

Twenty-one hours of direct negotiations. The highest-level face-to-face engagement between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

And yet, U.S. Vice President JD Vance boarded Air Force Two in Islamabad on the morning of April 12, 2026, with no deal to end the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran, including an understanding over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

The U.S. has since begun what it says is a blockade of any and all ships originating in Iranian ports and would interdict every vessel that has paid a toll to Iran.

The collapse of the talks wasn’t the fault of bad faith or clumsy diplomacy. Rather, the talks failed because of structural obstacles that no amount of negotiating skill can overcome in a single weekend.

I and other exponents of international relations theory predicted this outcome. Understanding why matters enormously for what comes next.

The commitment barrier

The meeting in Islamabad wasn’t the first time representatives from the United States and Iran have sat around a table. In 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action agreed to by Iran, the U.S. and five other nations showed that a formal agreement with nuclear inspections and verification is possible.

But that deal, which saw sanctions on Iran relaxed in return for limits over Tehran’s nuclear program, collapsed because the first Trump administration unilaterally walked away from the deal in 2018. In fact, the International Atomic Energy Agency had consistently certified Tehran was holding up its end of the bargain.

Then came the June 2025 strikes by Israel and the U.S. on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Successive rounds of indirect talks between the U.S. and Iran followed in early 2026. But despite an Omani mediator telling the world that a breakthrough was within reach, the U.S. bombed Iran on Feb. 28, 2026.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s parliamentary speaker who led Iran’s delegation in Islamabad, cited recent U.S. military action as a barrier to successful negotiations: “Due to the experiences of the previous two wars, we have no trust in the other side.”

Rather than an Iranian negotiating position, however, that was merely a description of a structural reality. Iran cannot be confident that any agreement it signs will be honored by this or subsequent American or Israeli administrations. And Washington isn’t sure Iran will not quietly rebuild what was destroyed once pressure lifts.

Moreover, while verification mechanisms on Iran’s nuclear program solve a technical problem, they do not solve the ongoing political one, in which both states are effectively still at war. Trust, once comprehensively destroyed, cannot be rebuilt in a hotel in Islamabad over 21 hours.

The scope of the problem

“The simple fact is that we need to see an affirmative commitment that (Iran) will not seek a nuclear weapon, and they will not seek the tools that would enable them to quickly achieve a nuclear weapon,” Vance said amid the Islamabad talks.

Iran’s enrichment knowledge is one of those tools. But the knowledge of how to enrich uranium to weapons-grade purity does not disappear when centrifuges are destroyed.

In this way, nuclear expertise is not like territory, equipment or sanctions relief. Centrifuges can be dismantled, and sanctions can be lifted in stages – both lend themselves to phased, verifiable agreements.

What the U.S. is demanding – a verifiable, permanent end to Iran’s breakout potential – requires Iran to surrender something that cannot be given back once conceded. Tehran and Washington both know this.

The problem is compounded by the extraordinary breadth of American demands on nonnuclear issues. Tehran’s demands included the release of frozen assets, guarantees around its nuclear program, the right to charge ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, an end to Israeli attacks on Hezbollah and war reparations.

Washington’s 15-point proposal reportedly demanded a 20-year moratorium on enrichment, ballistic missile suspension, reopening of Hormuz, recognition of Israel’s right to exist and an end to Iran’s support for its regional proxy network, including Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas.

These are not two sides haggling over price. They are two sides who cannot even agree on what the negotiation is about.

Israel veto

Iran has also made ending Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon a condition of any comprehensive settlement, conditions which Washington and Jerusalem have both rejected.

The result is a structural deadlock that has nothing to do with Iranian or American negotiating skill. Moreover, even if the two parties in Islamabad found common ground on the nuclear question, Israel could always torpedo any deal through a continuation of its military action in Lebanon and Iran.

And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not need to be in Islamabad to shape what happened there. While Vance and Ghalibaf were negotiating, Netanyahu was on television, telling the world: “Israel under my leadership will continue to fight Iran’s terror regime and its proxies.” He made no mention of the talks at all – and has since come out strongly in support of the U.S. blockade.

What happens next?

Where does this leave the 14-day ceasefire, and what happens after that?

While the Trump administration immediately ramped up pressure on Tehran after the failure of talks, such escalation has thus far failed to bring about Iran’s capitulation in the current conflict.

Iran has declared the blockade an act of “piracy” and placed the country on “maximum combat alert,” with the country’s Revolutionary Guard warning that any military vessels approaching Hormuz would receive a “firm response.”

But like the nuclear negotiations, the blockade runs into the same wall. Iran controls the strait through mines, drones and geography. The U.S. can interdict ships but cannot reopen the strait without Iran’s cooperation – absent an unlikely military occupation.

As such, the blockade is largely a pressure tactic without a clear path for how it would resolve, which is exactly the problem that produced the Islamabad failure in the first place. The blockade also holds the risk of pulling in more countries. Trump’s interdiction order – “it’s going to be all or none” – in theory means the U.S. Navy would be prepared to interdict a Chinese tanker that has done business with Iran, risking a direct maritime confrontation with a nuclear power.

The alternative would be to let Chinese tankers through to avoid confrontation, but in so doing expose the blockade as a hollow strategy.

In either case, Beijing has become an active stakeholder in Iran’s leverage.

Same old problems … and a new one to boot

The structural obstacles that broke the Islamabad meetings will not dissolve before April 22, when the current ceasefire is due to expire.

The difficulty of convincing either side that any agreement will actually be honored will not be resolved by more talks, but is rather a product of what happened before the current negotiations. The nature of the nuclear question itself will not be negotiated away – it is a feature of physics and knowledge, not of political will. Moreover, Israel’s veto over any regional settlement will not disappear because Washington wants a deal.

Signs suggest that talks are still alive, and both Iran and the U.S. have shown a willingness to change previous red lines on the nuclear question even since the failure in Islamabad. Absent a larger shift in the status quo, however, the next round will face the same structural obstacles as before. But this time, there will be the added complication of a naval blockade that narrows, rather than expands, the diplomatic space.

Farah N. Jan, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, University of Pennsylvania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Featured image: iStock / PeterHermesFurian

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Eric Swalwell has plummeted to earth faster than Artemis II.

If you weren’t familiar with Swalwell, you’ve missed your chance. Mere days ago he was a rising national Democratic star, vocal U.S. congressman, cable TV fixture, and aspiring California governor. Today he is toast, having been outed by the press as a serial sexual harasser and credibly accused rapist.

After the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN shared damning cringy details, he pledged to stay in the gubernatorial race and fight the “false” allegations. Naturally, his statement had the life span of a Tsetse fly because that’s always what happens when pervs vow to tough it out.

Such is the fate of Democratic pervs.

What’s noteworthy is how quickly the blue party bailed on the guy and ran for the hills. The chairman and co-chairman of his campaign both quit, all 21 members of the House who’d endorsed him speedily rescinded, and the head of California’s Democratic party backed away. So did the House leadership team, the California Labor Federation, two major unions, and Nancy Pelosi. To top things off, Swalwell’s senior campaign and congressional staffers said in a stunning joint statement they’re “horrified” by the allegations, that the boss’ “behavior in these reports is abhorrent,” and everyone should stand with the multiple women who’ve come forward.

One key element was missing. It would’ve been nice – maybe a paragraph or two – if somebody had reminded readers how asymmetric the two parties are on the issue of sexual harassment.

Swalwell was basically told to hit the road with all deliberate speed, and to that I say “good riddance.” But we still have a serial pervert in the White House.

Trump was found liable by a jury of sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, and the judge subsequently said that his actions met the New York definition of rape. He’s also been accused of groping and worse by at least 16 women, and he’s been exposed in the Epstein files as the accused rapist of an underage girl. Yet MAGA Republicans to this day utter nary a peep, so he gets away with it all.

I’ve been pondering this asymmetry since early 2018 when Al Franken was compelled to exit the Senate – 30 fellow Democrats wanted him gone – amidst reports he’d done some inappropriate touching a decade earlier. Trump’ was halfway through his first term and his piggy past was common knowledge, but of course he got a pass. And while Franken was being forced out, Trump was busy endorsing Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race. You may remember Moore was a credibly accused serial child molester who’d been banned from entering a local mall because he’d been seen preying on girls.

One party polices itself on the high road, while the other party (or cult, if you prefer) hews to the low. As legal commentator Dahlia Lithwick noted when Franken was first in peril, Democrats play “a game of righteous ball, in which the object is pride and purity, and Dems are the only ones playing.”

That was a busy time for Democrats. Michigan congressman John Conyers was compelled to quit after several aides accused him of harassment. In New York, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was told by fellow Democrats that he was a goner when four women told The New Yorker that he’d physically assaulted them. Meanwhile, care to guess what Trump was doing that year, besides endorsing Roy Moore? He insisted that the voice on the Access Hollywood tape (“When you’re a star they let you do it, you can do anything”) was not him.

Democrats, flawed as they are, at least try to enforce some moral standards. And yes, I know that Democrats protected Bill Clinton back in the day. But I’m talking here about the 21st century.

By contrast, MAGA Republicans are so hooked on mindless tribalism they will defend or excuse or ignore any and all sins past and present committed by their degenerate leader. The sole standard that matters is the acquisition and retention of power. Democrats can try to be good by ousting someone like Swalwell for behavior that should sicken everyone on a non-partisan basis, but the MAGAts in power are only too happy to break bad. And why shouldn’t they, given how well they’ve been rewarded at the ballot box. Trump even won the majority of votes among white women in 2024, just as he did in 2020.

However – dare we dream? – there are some intimations of doom in his realm. Swing voters and the small percentage of persuadable Republicans won’t use the midterm elections to punish Trump for his dirtbag behavior toward women – we’re long past the point where he’ll be held politically accountable for that – but everything else, from his mental deterioration to his warlord buffoonery, is on the table. And the electoral downfall of Hungary’s Viktor Orban, one of his authoritarian role models, is proof people en masse can cast off oppression.

Orban discovered on Sunday that even when you’re a star, they don’t let you grab ‘em by the throat. May his crushing loss portend the end of MAGA.

Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com

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Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections

In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters.

They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden. 

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat. 

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job. 

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House. 

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms. 

“I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.”

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified after Barr was gone. Although rioters inspired by Trump managed to delay the certification of his defeat by storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.

But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found. 

ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.

Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr. 

The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.

These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.

ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.

ProPublica’s reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials familiar with the work of Trump loyalists installed in election roles. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, including those knowledgeable about the December 2020 Barr meeting. 

The Trump administration maintains its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so.

“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”

Spokespeople for the DOJ and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.

A few guardrails have endured, preventing Trump from fully realizing his agenda for elections. Judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order in which Trump attempted to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought back against Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls. 

Late last month, Trump issued another executive order on elections that attempts to exert unparalleled federal control over mail-in voting and voter eligibility, which Democrats and voting rights groups are challenging in court.

Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.   

“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”

The Dismantling

Barr has said that in the high-stakes days following the 2020 election, he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole with Trump’s “avalanche” of false election claims.

The investigators at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency supplied intelligence that disproved many of them, not just those involving Antrim County.

CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. It soon came to provide crucial expertise and support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks. 

After the 2020 election, it also played a crucial part in puncturing fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. And it partnered with state officials and technology vendors to release a statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.” Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, but Krebs’ defense of the election’s soundness reverberated widely in the media and on Capitol Hill.

Among Trump’s first actions upon returning to the Oval Office was eviscerating CISA. 

Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The leadership also froze the agency’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks, and disseminating sensitive intelligence information on threats. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas. 

“It took years of dedicated, bipartisan, cross-sector partnership to build the security infrastructure we’ve had, and dismantling CISA leaves a gaping hole,” said Kathy Boockvar, an elections security expert who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from 2019 to 2021. “We are making the job of securing our democracy exponentially harder.”

A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” The spokesperson said that CISA’s mission is still to coordinate protection of critical infrastructure, including by supporting local partners against cyber threats.

It isn’t just CISA that’s been gutted. 

The Trump administration has discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference. While many of these actions have been reported, together they reveal the full sweep of the changes. 

First, the administration got rid of the National Security Council’s election security group, which convened departmental leaders to coordinate federal actions related to voting. Then in August, the administration dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election. 

A spokesperson for ODNI said the center was redundant and that its functions were folded into other parts of the office’s intelligence apparatus in ways that “arguably makes our ability to monitor and address threats from foreign adversaries stronger, more efficient and more effective.”

However, former national security officials, including one who had worked at the center, told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased. Caitlin Durkovich, who led the NSC’s election security work during the Biden administration, said that under Trump the federal government has “abandoned” its traditional role in preserving election integrity and security.

“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” she said. “Heading into the midterms, this leaves states and localities exposed, without the intelligence support or federal coordination they need to detect and respond to threats in real time — precisely when the stakes are highest.”

The early months of the second Trump administration also brought seismic changes to three parts of federal law enforcement with central roles in elections.

Kash Patel, the FBI’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded. (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

Furthermore, the Justice Department substantially reduced the role of its Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics. 

After the 2020 election, senior lawyers in the section warned against having the FBI investigate fraud claims raised by Trump allies, saying that the agency’s involvement could damage its reputation and appear motivated by partisanship. In this instance, they were overruled by Barr and his deputies, but former officials said this was a rare case in which their guidance was ignored. The need to directly overrule the unit, they said, made it a roadblock — one that no longer exists.

A month after Trump returned to the Oval Office, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned later or were transferred. The 36-person section was reduced to two. The administration no longer mandates that it review politically sensitive cases, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Another key DOJ office, the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. In December 2020, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Rights Division was one of the many department leaders who said they would resign if Trump promoted Jeffrey Clark, a leader who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, to head the department after Barr’s resignation. This mass threat of resignation ultimately led Trump to not promote Clark.

But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. This largely started last spring after Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, put out a memo saying their mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections.

The Trump administration then filled the section with conservative lawyers who are now litigating against the lawyers they replaced. At least four of those newly appointed lawyers participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

“It’s just a shocking and depressing reversal of the federal government’s role in making real the promise of nondiscrimination in voting and racial equality,” said Anna Baldwin, an appellate attorney for the Civil Rights Division who resigned last year and is now one of those litigating against the Justice Department in a new role at Campaign Legal Center.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to specific questions about the dismantling of the Public Integrity Section or the change in mission for the Civil Rights Division.

In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, DOJ and other departments have left or been fired, ProPublica found.

Team America

Late last summer, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees began convening at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters. 

The group — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — looked for federal levers it could pull to make Trump’s March executive order about elections a reality, an effort that has not been previously reported. 

They represented the new type of people running the show.

Its core members included David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz had co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about Antrim County.

Despite the setbacks the executive order had met with in court, there “was not a whole lot of discussion or disagreement” about acting on the directive from Harvilicz or one of his deputies, said a former federal official who interacted with group members. “It was just us saluting to do it.” 

This small group was part of a wider team at DHS, DOJ and the White House seeking to push forward the president’s agenda. Some of Trump’s new guard are well known: After the 2020 election, Patel pressured military officials to help investigate a conspiracy theory about voting machines, according to a former Justice Department official. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment but claimed in congressional testimony that he did not recall the event.) Others, like Harvilicz, are more obscure but still wield consequential powers.

These newcomers are seeking to carry out Trump’s executive orders and are unlikely to push back against his false claims that American elections are rife with fraud. 

Team America members have echoed or spread such material themselves. 

Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, falsely asserted that there were more ballots cast in Pennsylvania than voters in the 2020 presidential election. Trump cited this claim, which has been traced back to her, while exhorting his followers to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization seeking to transform American elections. It is led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Gineen Bresso, who holds a top job in the White House counsel’s office, coordinated with the network’s leadership in 2024 as the Republican National Committee’s election integrity chair, ProPublica has reported. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings. 

Experts say these former activists who helped forge a movement built on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump are seeking to make sure that does not happen again.

“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government, and they are working together toward a shared goal of reshaping elections” in ways that undermine the freedom to vote, said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy legal organization. “It’s not just last-minute slapdash attempts to overturn the results” as in 2020, “but more systematic efforts to influence how elections are run months ahead of time.”

In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump, writing that its employees “are focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free” and working to “implement the President’s policies.” In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”

Mitchell did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica. The White House answered questions sent to Bresso about her connection to Mitchell’s network by reiterating its commitment to making American elections secure. 

Through the fall and winter, as the Justice Department demanded that states turn over confidential voter roll information, Team America worked to solve problems hindering the use of digital tools to comb the lists for noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote. Honey and others ironed out the technical details of merging information from different agencies and crafted data-sharing contracts. When Honey or others hit roadblocks, they’d go to the White House or senior DHS leaders who “would come in hot” to clear her path, said officials who interacted with them. 

Initially, the plan was to run voter information obtained by DOJ through a Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. 

More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them. 

While DHS told ProPublica that SAVE has identified more than 21,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in the past year, officials who have checked those results in detail have found vast inaccuracies, as ProPublica has reported. Most states — including those with millions of voters — have eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential noncitizens as registered to vote, and far less have ever voted. The DHS spokesperson also called SAVE “secure and reliable.”

As the election approaches, current and former officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Harvilicz and Honey, who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections, are in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness. 

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Red Flags

Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden. 

In December 2020, just days after Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.

But the lawyer whom Trump hired in 2025 as his director of election security and integrity, Kurt Olsen, had worked to overturn Trump’s loss in court in 2020 and was later sanctioned by judges, including for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections.

Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.

“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”

In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair. 

When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.

Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.

Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica. 

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed. 

With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement. 

Trump administration officials also took another step to keep control of the investigation. 

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Thomas Albus, whom Trump had appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to prosecute the case even though it fell far outside his usual regional jurisdiction. Albus had been meeting with Olsen since around the time the White House lawyer was hired, ProPublica has reported. (Albus declined a request for comment.)

In late January, the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid in Fulton County — and the agency’s affidavit, put together by Albus and Brown’s replacement, cited a version of the report Olsen gave to Brown as evidence supporting the seizure. ProPublica was part of a news coalition that sued to unseal the affidavit.

An FBI spokesperson said that its agents “followed all procedure to ensure everything was in proper order, and FBI evidence team had the necessary court-authorized search warrant before they arrived on site.” 

Ryan Crosswell, who worked in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section for around half a decade, handling a number of election cases, called Brown’s replacement and Albus’ involvement a “red flag” because of the unusual circumstances of their appointments. 

“They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” Crosswell said.

The Justice Department did not respond to a question about Crosswell’s comment.  

The extraordinary raid was also enabled in a previously unreported way by the destruction of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.

Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.” 

Crosswell said, “Based on everything we know, if PIN was still there, we’d say no.”

John Keller was principal deputy chief of the Public Integrity Section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.  

“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.

“Dismantling the Brain”

The week the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots, about half of the nation’s secretaries of state converged on Washington, D.C., for their winter conference. 

They had urgent questions about elections for Bondi, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other luminaries who had promised to appear at the event. But none of the headline names showed, leaving conference attendees staring at an empty podium, until the session was abruptly canceled.

The breakdown was emblematic of a widening chasm between state officials and the parts of the federal government that had, until recently, worked with them to secure American elections.

Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview that the trust between the Trump administration and states is “absolutely demolished.” 

This loss of trust reflects that election deniers have assumed so many top roles at federal agencies. Honey sometimes represents DHS on cross-departmental conference calls with state election chiefs, an unsettling reality for those who spent years countering the false claims she made from outside the government. 

On a February call, state officials expressed confusion about whether the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would still assess their election systems for physical and cyber vulnerabilities. Honey said it would, but Bellows said she’d been told it wouldn’t. 

Two DHS officials told ProPublica CISA’s remaining staff avoids election work, afraid they could lose their jobs if they engage with state and local officials. “In CISA, elections are a toxic poison,” one said. 

A DHS spokesperson said state and federal officials are still working together “every single day” to protect elections and that “The claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”

The cuts to career election specialists and their divisions have eliminated information channels that spotlighted threats as voting took place, including Election Day command posts run by the Justice Department and FBI. Another information channel, which DHS used to fund, will still operate but will be available only to state and local election offices, not the federal government.

Jessica Cadigan, a former FBI intelligence analyst who investigated Election Day threats, said FBI headquarters’ command post was critical to her cases.

“That is dismantling the brain, if you will,” she said. “They are the ones that piece the whole thing together.”

An FBI spokesperson said the agency will still have capabilities to monitor the situation on the ground through designated election crimes coordinator experts in all its field offices.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, has come to see the federal government as adversarial to elections and election administration, rather than a partner. 

Colorado is one of around 30 states the Justice Department has sued for confidential voter roll information. At least four courts that have fully considered those cases so far have dismissed them, although the Justice Department has appealed most of the decisions. (The others are pending.) Griswold told ProPublica she has added another lawyer to her staff to fight whatever comes next from the Trump administration.

“Donald Trump,” she said, “has made American elections less safe.”

Image: DonkeyHotey/Flickr Republished from ProPublica.

The post Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

Matthew Sussex, Australian National University

Hungary’s most consequential election in decades has just delivered an important victory for democracy and accountability.

For Hungarians, opposition leader Péter Magyar’s emphatic defeat of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his ruling Fidesz Party ends 16 years of corruption and quasi-authoritarianism.

The outcome will also be felt widely, from Moscow to Washington and beyond.

In a contest characterised as a referendum on whether Hungary should pivot west or continue its authoritarian drift, Magyar’s victory is a stern rebuke to the dark, transnational forces of nativism, division and the politics of resentment that have become part of mainstream political discourse.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the election was not the turnout (more than 74%, shattering previous records), or even the result (a two-thirds supermajority for Magyar’s Tisza party, winning at least 138 of 199 parliamentary seats).

Both had been predicted for some time, and Orbán’s soft authoritarianism had always left the door ajar for a possible opposition victory at the polls.

Rather, the biggest surprise might have been Orbán’s immediate concession. He didn’t try to manufacture a crisis or use his security services to hold onto power. Given the strength of anti-government sentiment in Hungary, such a move could have led to a “colour revolution” – the type of massive street protests seen previously in Ukraine, Georgia and other countries.

This could have turned bloody. Liberal Hungarians, and the European Union more broadly, will be heaving a collective sigh of relief.

Why Orbán was suddenly vulnerable

Having won office, Magyar will need to move quickly but also carefully to bring change, so as not to alienate too many former Fidesz voters.

He has already asked President Tama? Sulyok to resign, along with other Orbán loyalists. The Tisza supermajority in parliament is important here. It will be required for constitutional amendments to dismantle the architecture of Orbán’s authoritarian state.

Fortunately, this will be easier in Hungary than fully fledged autocratic systems. Indeed, Orbán’s longevity can somewhat be attributed to the fact that his brand of authoritarianism was only partial.

Certainly, it had the structural elements of an autocracy. That included widespread, government-controlled gerrymandering to ensure Fidesz victories, and the cynical diversion of state funds to cities and provinces controlled by Orbán’s political allies.

In addition, the nationalised media ecosystem was heavily supportive of the government, although alternative voices kept debate alive via foreign-owned news organisations.

But Orbán’s success also came from facing weak and easily fragmented or coopted oppositions. Magyar – a former Orbán ally – ran a disciplined campaign that nullified the electoral advantage for Fidesz.

Ultimately, though, when voters have a choice – even a constrained one – they will eventually reject governments that rely on blame and victimhood to mask their inability to offer people a better future.

Under Orbán, Hungary was consistently ranked the most corrupt nation in Europe. In 2025, it ranked last in the EU on relative household wealth. It had also suffered rampant inflation and economic stagnation after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Video footage of country estates built by Hungary’s elites, complete with zebras roaming the grounds, perfectly symbolised the popular outrage with wealth inequality.

A setback for Putin, Trump and right-wing populism

Hungary’s new start also sends a powerful message to other nations. Clearly the biggest loser from the election is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which had hastily tapped Kremlin powerbroker Sergey Kiriyenko and a team of “political technologists” to assist Orbán.

Under Orbán, Hungary was the strongest pro-Kremlin voice in the EU. It regularly stymied aid packages for Ukraine, tied up decision-making on the war in bureaucratic processes, and held the European Commission to ransom by threatening hold-out votes.

In fact, just days before the election, Bloomberg published a transcript of a phone call between Orbán and Putin from October 2025, in which Orbán compared himself to a mouse helping free the caged Russian lion.

This came on the back of revelations that Orbán’s foreign minister, Péter Szijjártó, and other Hungarian officials had regularly been leaking confidential EU discussions to Moscow.

Another loser from the Hungarian election is the Trump White House.

The pre-election Budapest visit by US Vice President JD Vance to shore up support for Orbán was breathtakingly hypocritical. Vance farcically demanded an end to foreign election meddling, while engaging in precisely that. The White House then doubled down, with Trump promising on Truth Social to aid Orbán with the “full Economic Might of the United States”.

Now, though, Trump is very publicly on the losing side. And like the debacle of his Iran war, he tends to chafe at losing.

The election also shows that US foreign interference campaigns are not invulnerable, though the White House will doubtless continue excoriating Europe. The Trump administration’s view that Europe is heading for “civilisational erasure”, necessitating US efforts to “cultivate resistance” and “help Europe correct its current trajectory” is documented in its 2025 National Security Strategy.

But the broader movements representing what Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar calls the “Putinisation of global politics” have been repudiated by Hungary’s election result.

Under Orbán, Hungary was a hub for ultraconservative voices. Think tanks like the MAGA-boosting US Heritage Foundation and Hungary’s Danube Institute regularly held prominent dialogues bemoaning Europe’s capitulation to wokeism.

The Hungarian iteration of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), sponsored by the American Conservative Union, was a key calendar for Western right-wing politicians and commentators, including former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

China will also be keenly watching Magyar’s new government, especially since it has viewed Hungary as a soft entry point to the EU. The large-scale investment in electric vehicle manufacturing, especially battery production, are part of a growing Chinese business footprint in the country.

For Beijing, the question will be whether Magyar seeks to sacrifice this lucrative investment to burnish his European credentials.

What about the winners?

In addition to Hungarians outside Orbán’s orbit of elites, the EU will welcome the news that it remains an attractive force.

Ukraine, too, may find it easier to secure European assistance. At the very least, smaller Ukraine detractors like Slovakia will have to choose between acquiescing quietly or thrusting themselves uncomfortably into the open.

Yet, although Hungary’s result is promising, the world is still trending towards illiberalism.

And with the US midterm elections fast approaching, far-right American politicians, including Trump himself, will be studying Hungary’s lessons closely. If they conclude that Orbán’s brand of authoritarianism was too soft, a more hardline path looms as an ominous alternative.

Matthew Sussex, Associate Professor (Adj), Griffith Asia Institute; and Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

ID 283674112 ©
Gints Ivuskans | Dreamstime.com

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Several days ago, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted a 28% drop in the city’s murder rate. That narrative was abruptly challenged Saturday morning when a chaotic scene of terror erupted at Grand Central Terminal. A man claiming to be “Lucifer” went on a machete rampage, targeting elderly commuters before being fatally shot by the NYPD.

The nightmare began at approximately 9:40 AM on the Manhattan-bound 7 train platform. The suspect, identified as 44-year-old Anthony Griffin, arrived at Grand Central and attempted to murder multiple civilians with a machete. After the initial attack, the violence extended upward to the 4/5/6 platforms, where Griffin proceeded to target two more victims.

The Standoff
Police intercepted Griffin on the uptown platform minutes after the first emergency calls. According to NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, Griffin was acting erratically and referred to himself as “Lucifer” several times during the confrontation.

Officers reportedly pleaded with Griffin to drop the weapon more than 20 times, promising him that “we are going to get you help.” These de-escalation attempts failed to persuade him, as he continued to advance with the machete raised. Officers then fired several shots, striking him. Despite on-site CPR efforts, Griffin was later pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital.

The Victims
In a grim twist, the three victims were treated at the same facility where their attacker would later be pronounced dead. All are currently reported to be in stable condition:

An 84-year-old male who suffered significant head and facial lacerations.

An 81-year-old male who sustained an open skull fracture and head lacerations.

A 70-year-old female who suffered a deep shoulder wound.

Political Aftermath
The incident has forced a rare moment of public alignment between Mayor Mamdani and the NYPD. Despite his history of supporting the “Defund the Police” movement, despite a recent public power struggle with Commissioner Tisch just days earlier over departmental control, the mayor released a statement thanking officers for their “quick response and for preventing additional violence.”

Mamdani also confirmed that body-worn camera footage of the shooting would be released. Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul called the rampage a “senseless act of violence,” adding that “New Yorkers deserve to feel safe every time they step onto a train platform.”

For many, the incident underscores the city’s continued reliance on a visible police presence to maintain safety in the transit system. One key component of reform efforts has been the proposal to shift certain responsibilities away from law enforcement and toward mental health professionals or crisis responders. In many situations, particularly those involving non-violent crises, that approach may be both appropriate and effective. To put it bluntly, this was no place for a Frasier.

Many advocates of police reform argue that they are not calling for mental health professionals to replace officers in active violent situations like this one. But the broader push to reduce police presence in public spaces raises difficult questions about how quickly situations like this can escalate, and what kind of authority is present when they do.

This incident challenges the belief that it is safer to rely less on police presence in public spaces. No single event can resolve a broader policy debate. But extreme cases are exactly where public safety systems are most tested and where their limits become most visible.

What rarely makes headlines are the moments when potential violence is prevented before it begins: when an attacker sees uniformed officers and thinks twice, when police intervene early after noticing erratic behavior, when a civilian reports suspicious behavior, or in incidents where an attacker armed with a knife (rather than a machete) is apprehended before they have the chance to use it. It is difficult to assess how many incidents are prevented by that visible presence, but deterrence is a factor in the equation that many choose to ignore.

De-escalation is a powerful tool, but it is not a substitute for armed protection. It requires a subject who is capable of processing verbal commands. When an attacker is in a state of delusion, rage, or seeing themselves as something beyond reality, standard psychological training is not enough to overcome the immediate physical threat to bystanders. While we should absolutely invest in mental health resources for non-violent, behavioral crises, suggesting that an unarmed clinician could diffuse an active attacker in a New York City subway station is a dangerous pipe dream. When the safety of the public is at immediate risk, the first duty is to neutralize the threat, not to debate the clinical state of the assailant.

Many police critics in New York are apprehensive about the mere presence of officers. Advocates of the “Defund the Police” movement often claim to differentiate themselves from this purely anti-police mentality, framing their platform as an evidence-based policy shift as opposed to an emotional reaction. However, the majority of the time that line is imaginary; other times, it is easily dissolved. The horror that took place at Grand Central proves the tangible security that a uniformed presence provides and renders the distinction irrelevant. In the end, the debate is simple: some are apprehensive about the presence of police; the rest of us are more apprehensive about killers with machetes.

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By Dorothea Shefer-Vanson in Mevaseret Zion, Israel

What are we supposed to think? There’s a temporary ceasefire, the terms of which are still under discussion. And anyway, it’s only set to last for two weeks, and what happens after that? People in Israel are happy, thinking that normal life can return, children can go back to school, adults can go to work and shops and businesses can once again function normally.

But what if it’s all an illusion? Or, rather, a delusion? Without wanting to be a wet blanket, it all seems to be uncertain at best, and an inevitable misconception at worst. Last night Netanyahu gave one of his usual addresses to the nation on TV, proclaiming success and victory in all areas when in fact anyone with half a brain can see that this is far from the case.

The extremist regime in Iran has not been toppled, and while their offensive capacities may have been diminished, they have not been completely obliterated. Up until the very last moment they were still firing ballistic missiles at us, forcing us to get out of our beds at 3 a.m. and go to the bomb shelter. Those missiles were causing damage and casualties right up to the very end. And Hezbollah in Lebanon still constitutes a constant threat to the towns and villages in the north of Israel.

Most of the Israelis that I associate with have long since ceased believing any statement made by Netanyahu, and now even the IDF’s official spokesman is regarded with suspicion. After all, he is merely a mouthpiece of the establishment that has brought us to this sorry point in our lives. It’s true that the IDF has had some admirable achievements, and the fact that Israel is still here is largely due to the ingenuity, courage and strength of our fighting forces, but these are not in infinite supply.

Bad decisions, miscalculations and hubris have caused Israel’s current government to lead the country along a path that seems to bring only more death and destruction. No attempt ever seems to be made to seek peace by negotiation or any diplomatic means of settling disputes. Admittedly, countries that openly proclaim their desire to eradicate Israel and all Jews everywhere should be regarded as a threat, but Israelis should be given an alternative to living by the sword alone.

The fact that U.S. President Trump is aligned with Netanyahu in battling Iran has given Israel a certain advantage on the battlefield, or rather in the air, which is currently the main arena of war. However, looking back at the events of the last month we wonder what has really been achieved. Iran’s extremist regime is still in place, some damage has been inflicted on its defensive abilities, but it is still firing ballistic missiles, inflicting considerable damage in the process. Our defensive forces are stretched to the maximum and may even be seriously depleted if this situation continues. Israel’s reputation in the world is at its lowest level ever, and Jews everywhere are being subjected to criticism and attacks as a result.

There were times in Israel when life seemed to proceed at some semblance of normality, but in the three years since the current government took office our situation has deteriorated, whether through its aspiration to undermine the country’s legal system, its focus on its own abhorrent agenda, or its oblivion to the real threat on our borders.

Israel came into existence despite the odds against it and managed to endure by withstanding those who opposed it. The population has grown and has managed to flourish, meanwhile overcoming internal divisions and external threats. But it’s not clear how long this situation can continue without deep-seated change in the way the country is run, and above all, in the composition of the current government.

Dorothea Shefer-Vanson is an author and freelance writer based in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion, Israel.

Caricature: DonkeyHokey/Flickr This is republished from San Diego Jewish World which, along with The Moderate Voice, is a member of the San Diego Online News Association.

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